nature | Who founded genetics? The line-up usually numbers four. William
Bateson and Wilhelm Johannsen coined the terms genetics and gene,
respectively, at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1910, Thomas Hunt
Morgan began showing genetics at work in fruit flies (see E. Callaway Nature516, 169; 2014).
The runaway favourite is generally Gregor Mendel, who, in the
mid-nineteenth century, crossbred pea plants to discover the basic rules
of heredity.
Bosh, says historian Theodore Porter. These works
are not the fount of genetics, but a rill distracting us from a much
darker source: the statistical study of heredity in asylums for people
with mental illnesses in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century
Britain, wider Europe and the United States. There, “amid the moans,
stench, and unruly despair of mostly hidden places where data were
recorded, combined, and grouped into tables and graphs”, the first
systematic theory of mental illness as hereditary emerged.
For more than 200 years, Porter argues in Genetics in the Madhouse,
we have failed to recognize this wellspring of genetics — and thus to
fully understand this discipline, which still dominates many individual
and societal responses to mental illness and diversity.
The study
of heredity emerged, Porter argues, not as a science drawn to
statistics, but as an international endeavour to mine data for
associations to explain mental illness. Few recall most of the
discipline’s early leaders, such as French psychiatrist, or ‘alienist’,
Étienne Esquirol; and physician John Thurnam, who made the York Retreat
in England a “model of statistical recording”. Better-known figures,
such as statistician Karl Pearson and zoologist Charles Davenport — both
ardent eugenicists — come later.
Inevitably, study methods
changed over time. The early handwritten correlation tables and
pedigrees of patients gave way to more elaborate statistical tools,
genetic theory and today’s massive gene-association studies. Yet the
imperatives and assumptions of that scattered early network of alienists
remain intact in the big-data genomics of precision medicine, asserts
Porter. And whether applied in 1820 or 2018, this approach too readily
elevates biology over culture and statistics over context — and opens
the door to eugenics.
sciencedaily | According to a new paper published in Science, there is a
quantifiable answer: Roughly 25% of people need to take a stand before
large-scale social change occurs. This idea of a social tipping point
applies to standards in the workplace and any type of movement or
initiative.
Online, people develop norms about everything from what type of
content is acceptable to post on social media, to how civil or uncivil
to be in their language. We have recently seen how public attitudes can
and do shift on issues like gay marriage, gun laws, or race and gender
equality, as well as what beliefs are or aren't publicly acceptable to
voice.
During the past 50 years, many studies of organizations and community
change have attempted to identify the critical size needed for a
tipping point, purely based on observation. These studies have
speculated that tipping points can range anywhere between 10 and 40%.
The problem for scientists has been that real-world social dynamics
are complicated, and it isn't possible to replay history in precisely
the same way to accurately measure how outcomes would have been
different if an activist group had been larger or smaller.
"What we were able to do in this study was to develop a theoretical
model that would predict the size of the critical mass needed to shift
group norms, and then test it experimentally," says lead author Damon
Centola, Ph.D., associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania's
Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Engineering and
Applied Science.
Drawing on more than a decade of experimental work, Centola has
developed an online method to test how large-scale social dynamics can
be changed.
In this study, "Experimental Evidence for Tipping Points in Social
Convention," co-authored by Joshua Becker, Ph.D., Devon Brackbill,
Ph.D., and Andrea Baronchelli, Ph.D., 10 groups of 20 participants each
were given a financial incentive to agree on a linguistic norm. Once a
norm had been established, a group of confederates -- a coalition of
activists that varied in size -- then pushed for a change to the norm.
When a minority group pushing change was below 25% of the total
group, its efforts failed. But when the committed minority reached 25%,
there was an abrupt change in the group dynamic, and very quickly the
majority of the population adopted the new norm. In one trial, a single
person accounted for the difference between success and failure.
WSWS |The Democratic Party has made a strategic
decision to bypass candidates from its progressive wing and recruit
former members of the military and intelligence agencies to compete with
Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections. The shift away from
liberal politicians to center-right government agents and military
personnel is part of a broader plan to rebuild the party so it better
serves the interests of its core constituents, Wall Street, big
business, and the foreign policy establishment. Democrat leaders want
to eliminate left-leaning candidates who think the party should promote
issues that are important to working people and replace them with
career bureaucrats who will be more responsive to the needs of business.
The ultimate objective of this organization-remake is to create a
center-right superparty comprised almost entirely of trusted allies from
the national security state who can be depended on to implement the
regressive policies required by their wealthy contributors.
The busiest primary day of the US congressional election season saw
incumbent Democrats and Republicans winning renomination easily, while
in contests for open congressional seats the Democratic Party continued
its push to select first-time candidates drawn from the
national-security apparatus.
On the ballot Tuesday were the nominations for 85 congressional
seats—one-fifth of the US House of Representatives—together with five
state governorships and five US Senate seats.
Of the five Senate seats, only one is thought competitive, in
Montana, where incumbent two-term Democrat Jon Tester will face
Republican State Auditor Matt Rosendale, who has the support of the
national party, President Trump and most ultra-right groups. Trump
carried Montana by a sizeable margin in 2016.
Republican Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi won renomination and
faces only a token Democratic opponent, while three Democratic
incumbents, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico
and Diane Feinstein of California, won their primaries Tuesday and are
expected to win reelection easily.
Among the five governorships where nominations were decided Tuesday,
Republicans are heavily favored in Alabama and South Dakota and
Democrats in California and New Mexico, with only Iowa considered a
somewhat competitive race. Republican Kim Reynolds, the lieutenant
governor who succeeded Terry Branstad after Trump appointed him US
ambassador to China, will face millionaire businessman Fred Hubbell, who
defeated a Bernie Sanders-backed candidate, nurses’ union leader Cathy
Glasson, to win the Democratic nomination.
The most significant results on Tuesday came in the congressional
contests, particularly in the 20 or so seats that are either open due to
a retirement or closely contested, based on past results.
Perhaps most revealing was the outcome in New Jersey, where the
Democratic Party is seriously contesting all five Republican-held seats.
The five Democratic candidates selected in Tuesday’s primary include
four whose background lies in the national-security apparatus and a
fifth, State Senator Jeff Van Drew, who is a fiscal and cultural
conservative. Van Drew opposed gay marriage in the state legislature and
has good relations with the National Rifle Association.
usatoday | 'We came, we saw, he died,' she joked. But
overthrowing Gadhafi was a humanitarian and strategic debacle that now
limits our options on North Korea.
Black Africans are being sold in
open-air slave markets, and it’s Hillary Clinton’s fault. But you won’t
hear much about that from the news media or the foreign-policy pundits,
so let me explain.
Footage from Libya, released recently by CNN, showed young men from sub-Saharan Africa being auctioned off as farm workers in slave markets.
And how did we get to this point? As the BBC reported back in May, “Libya has been beset by chaos since NATO-backed forces overthrew long-serving ruler Col. Moammar Gadhafi in October 2011.”
And who was behind that overthrow? None other than then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Under President George W. Bush in 2003, the United States negotiated an agreement with Libyan strongman Gadhafi. The deal: He would give up his weapons of mass destruction peacefully, and we wouldn’t try to depose him.
That
seemed a good deal at the time, but the Obama administration didn’t
stick to it. Instead, in an operation spearheaded by Clinton, the United States went ahead and toppled him anyway.
The
overthrow turned out to be a debacle. Libya exploded into chaos and
civil war, and refugees flooded Europe, destabilizing governments there.
But at the time, Clinton thought it was a great triumph — "We came, we saw, he died,” she joked about Gadhafi’s overthrow — and adviser Sidney Blumenthal encouraged her to tout her "successful strategy" as evidence of her fitness for the highest office in the land.
It’s
surprising the extent to which Clinton has gotten a pass for this
debacle, which represents a humanitarian and strategic failure of the
first order. (And, of course, the damage is still compounding: How
likely is North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to give up his nuclear weapons after
seeing the worthlessness of U.S. promises to Gadhafi?)
NewYorker | Barack Obama was a writer before he became a politician, and he saw
his Presidency as a struggle over narrative. “We’re telling a story
about who we are,” he instructed his aide Ben Rhodes early in the first
year of his first term. He said it again in his last months in office,
on a trip to Asia—“I mean, that’s our job. To tell a really good story
about who we are”—adding that the book he happened to be reading argued
for storytelling as the trait that distinguishes us from other primates.
Obama’s audience was both the American public and the rest of the
world. His characteristic rhetorical mode was to describe and understand
both sides of a divide—black and white, liberal and conservative,
Muslim and non-Muslim—before synthesizing them into a unifying story
that seemed to originate in and affirm his own.
At the heart of
Obama’s narrative was a belief that progress, in the larger scheme of
things, was inevitable, and this belief underscored his position on
every issue from marriage equality to climate change. His idea of
progress was neither the rigid millennial faith of Woodrow Wilson nor
Bush’s shallow God-blessed optimism. It was human-scale and incremental.
Temperamentally the opposite of zealous, he always acknowledged our
human imperfection—his Nobel Peace Prize lecture was a Niebuhrian
meditation on the tragic necessity of force in affairs of state. But,
whatever the setbacks of the moment, he had faith that the future
belonged to his expansive vision and not to the narrow,
backward-pointing lens of his opponents.
This progressive story emerged in Obama’s account of his own life, in
his policies, and in his speeches. Many of them were written by Rhodes,
who joined the campaign as a foreign-policy speechwriter in mid-2007,
when he was twenty-nine; rose to become a deputy national-security
adviser; accompanied Obama on every trip overseas but one; stayed to the
last day of the Presidency; and even joined the Obamas on the flight to
their first post-Presidential vacation, in Palm Springs, wanting to
ease the loneliness of their sudden return to private life. Today,
Rhodes still works alongside Obama.
Counterpunch | A New York Times article on May 30 entitled “How Trump’s Election Shook Obama: ‘What if We Were Wrong?’”
provided an opportunity to indulge in this sordid pastime. According to
one of his aides, after the election Obama speculated that the
cosmopolitan internationalism of enlightened intellectuals like him had
been responsible for the stunning outcome. “Maybe we pushed too far,” he
said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.” In other
words, we were too noble and forward-thinking for the benighted masses,
who want nothing more than to remain submerged in their comforting
provincial identities. We were too ambitious and idealistic for our
flawed compatriots.
“Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” Obama
sighed. The country hadn’t been ready for the first black president and
his lofty post-racial vision.
These quotations are all the evidence one needs to understand what goes on in the mind of someone like Barack Obama.
In fact, the last quotation is revealing enough in itself: it alone
suggests the stupefying dimensions of Obama’s megalomania. It is hardly
news that Obama is a megalomaniac, but what is moderately more
interesting is the contemptible and deluded nature of his megalomania.
(In some cases, after all, egomania might be justified. I could forgive
Noam Chomsky for being an egomaniac—if he were one, which his
self-effacing humility shows is far from the case.) Obama clearly sees
himself as the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement—he who
participated in no sit-ins, no Freedom Rides, no boycotts or harrowing
marches in the Deep South, who suffered no police brutality or nights in
jail, who attended Harvard Law and has enjoyed an easy and privileged
adulthood near or in the corridors of power. This man who has apparently
never taken a courageous and unpopular moral stand in his life decided
long ago that it was his historic role to bring the struggles of SNCC
and the SCLC, of Ella Baker and Bob Moses, of A. Philip Randolph and
Martin Luther King, Jr. to their fruition—by sailing into the Oval
Office on the wave of millions of idealistic supporters, tireless and
selfless organizers. With his accession to power, and that of such moral
visionaries as Lawrence Summers, Hillary Clinton, Timothy Geithner,
Eric Holder, Arne Duncan, Robert Gates, and Samantha Power, MLK’s dream
was at last realized.
Obama was continuing in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionists when his administration deported more than three million undocumented immigrants and broke up tens of thousands of immigrant families. He was being an inspiring idealist when he permittedarms shipments to Israel in July and August 2014 in the midst of the Gaza slaughter—because, as he said
with characteristic eloquence and moral insight, “Israel has a right to
defend itself” (against children and families consigned to desperate
poverty in an open-air prison).
He was being far ahead of his time, a hero of both civil rights and enlightened globalism, when he presided over
“the greatest disintegration of black wealth in recent memory” by doing
nothing to halt the foreclosure crisis or hold anyone accountable for
the damage it caused. Surely it was only irrational traditions of
tribalism that got Trump elected, and not, say, the fact that Obama’s
administration was far more friendly to the banking sector than George H. W. Bush’s was, as shown for instance by the (blatantly corrupt) hiring of financial firms’ representatives to top positions in the Justice Department.
mediaite | Former President Bill Clinton appeared on the Today
show Monday for an interview about his upcoming novel, and he faced the
type of questioning that has become common practice in the aftermath of
the Me Too movement: a challenge of his treatment of Monica Lewinsky, the woman with which he had his infamous West Wing affair.
NBC News’s Craig Melvin kicked things off by asking
Clinton how he would have approached the accusations lobbed against him
if he were president in 2018, noting some have recently said he
should’ve resigned in the 1998.
“I don’t think it would be an issue because people would be using the
facts instead of the imagined facts,” Clinton said. “If the facts were
the same today, I wouldn’t [resign].”
“A lot of the facts have been conveniently omitted to make the story
work, I think partly because they are frustrated that they got all these
serious allegations against the current occupant of the Oval Office,
and his voters don’t seem to care,” Clinton said. “I think I did the
right thing, I defended the Constitution.”
“You think this president’s been given a pass, with regards to the
women who have come forward and accused him of sexual misconduct?”
Melvin asked.
“No. But it hasn’t gotten anything like the coverage you would expect,” Clinton said.
The former president continued that he likes the Me Too movement,
saying “it’s way overdue.” He added, “That doesn’t mean I agree with
everything.”
Melvin confronted Clinton with a line from the former White House intern’s op-ed in Vanity Fair in which she accused the president of taking advantage of her.
“Looking back on what happened then, through the lens of Me Too now,
do you think differently, or feel more responsibility?” Melvin pressed.
“No, I felt terrible then, and I came to grips with it,” Clinton said.
“Did you ever apologize to her?” Melvin asked.'
“Yes,” Clinton said. “And nobody believes that I got out of that for
free. I left the White House $16 million in debt. But you, typically,
have ignored gaping facts in describing this and I bet you don’t even
know them. This was litigated 20 years ago. Two-thirds of the American
people sided with me. They were not insensitive to that.”
steemit | MSNBC host Joy Reid still has a job. Despite blatantly lying about time-traveling hackers bearing responsibility for bigoted posts a decade ago in her then-barely-known blog, despite her reportedly sparking an FBI investigation on false pretenses, despite her colleagues at MSNBC being completely fed up
with how the network is handling the controversy surrounding her, her
career just keeps trundling forward like a bullet-riddled zombie.
To be clear, I do not particularly care that Joy Reid has done any of
these things. I write about war, nuclear escalations and the sociopathy
of US government agencies which kill millions of people; I don't care
that Joy Reid is or was a homophobe, and I don't care that she lied to
cover it up. The war agendas that MSNBC itself promotes on a daily basis
are infinitely worse than either of these things, and if that isn't
obvious to you it's because military propaganda has caused you to compartmentalize yourself out of an intellectually honest understanding of what war is.
What is interesting to me, however, is the fact that Reid's bosses are protecting her career so adamantly. Both by refusing to fire her, and by steering the conversation
into being about her controversial blog posts rather than the fact that
she told a spectacular lie in an attempt to cover them up, Reid is
being propped up despite this story constantly re-emerging and making
new headlines with new embarrassing details, and despite her lack of any
discernible talent or redeeming personal characteristics. This tells us
something important about what is going on in the world.
It is not difficult to find someone to read from a teleprompter for large amounts of money. What absolutely is
difficult is finding someone who is willing to deceive and manipulate
to advance the agendas of the privileged few day after day. Who else
would be willing to spend all day on Twitter smearing everyone to the
left of Hillary Clinton while still claiming to stand on the political
left?
Who else would advance the point-blank lie
about "17 intelligence agencies" having declared Russia guilty in US
election meddling months after that claim had been famously and virally debunked? Who else would publicly claim that Edward Snowden's NSA leaks did not benefit anyone besides Russia? Who else could oligarchs like Comcast CEO Brian L Roberts, whose company controls MSNBC, count on to consistently advance his agendas?
While it's easy to find someone you can count on to advance one
particular lie at one particular time, it is difficult to find someone
you can be absolutely certain will lie for you day after day, year after
year, through election cycles and administration changes and new war
agendas and changing political climates. A lot of the people who used to
advance perspectives which ran against the grain of the political
orthodoxy at MSNBC like Phil Donahue, Ed Schultz and Dylan Ratigan
have vanished from the airwaves never to return, while reporters who
consistently keep their heads down and toe the line for the Democratic
establishment like Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Joy Reid are richly
rewarded and encouraged to remain.
economicnoise | Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t
settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that
elections are how you decide who’s in charge. That’s the basic issue
here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but
accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting
election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.
The Mueller investigation is about removing President Trump from
office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that. But
it’s not the first time they’ve done this. The first time a Republican
president was elected this century, they said he didn’t really win. The
Supreme Court gave him the election. There’s a pattern here.
What do sure odds of the Democrats rejecting the next Republican
president really mean? It means they don’t accept the results of any
election that they don’t win. It means they don’t believe that transfers
of power in this country are determined by elections.
That’s a civil war.
There’s no shooting. At least not unless you count the attempt to
kill a bunch of Republicans at a charity baseball game practice. But the
Democrats have rejected our system of government.
This isn’t dissent. It’s not disagreement. You can hate the other
party. You can think they’re the worst thing that ever happened to the
country. But then you work harder to win the next election. When you
consistently reject the results of elections that you don’t win, what
you want is a dictatorship.
Your very own dictatorship.
The only legitimate exercise of power in this country, according to
Democrats, is its own. Whenever Republicans exercise power, it’s
inherently illegitimate. The Democrats lost Congress. They lost the
White House. So what did they do? They began trying to run the country
through Federal judges and bureaucrats. Every time that a Federal judge
issues an order saying that the President of the United States can’t
scratch his own back without his say so, that’s the civil war.
straightlinelogic | Offices and 8,000 stores were closed for an afternoon so that
employees could discuss how to make Starbucks a more welcoming place.
Judging by its success, Starbucks has already made millions of customers
of all races, ethnicities, genders, and sexual persuasions feel
welcome. You have to wonder what the employees responsible for doing so,
probably 99 percent of Starbucks’ workforce, feel about this pointless
waste of time, which could have been, in a company-wide email, condensed
down to: Treat everyone who walks into Starbucks like you’d like to be treated.
Why did Schultz make a mountain out of this molehill? Nobody has
questioned his or his company’s commitment to treating everyone walking
into a Starbucks equally. This was simply an instance when employees may
have failed to live up to the commitment. Schultz is a member in good
standing of the establishment, and professes to believe all the things
members are supposed to believe in. Why couldn’t he have handled the
matter in the same way Robert Iger, CEO and Chairman of the Walt Disney
Company, and another member in good standing, handled the Roseanne Barr
matter?
He could have. That he didn’t speaks to an insidious issue and its
even more insidious corollary. There is less and less in the realm of
private behavior, action, and thoughts that remains private, that is not
subject to public scrutiny and demands, demands which are implicitly or
explicitly backed by recourse to the government. For the government
itself, on the other hand, more and more of what it does is shielded
from publicity and disclosure.
For CEOs of large companies, virtually everything they and their
companies do is fair game for public comment, media attention, lawsuits,
and regulatory, legislative, and judicial redress. Schultz probably
thought his over-the-top public atonement would preempt the kind of
media—including social media—and government crucification that’s meted
out to the defiant and the insufficiently contrite.
Guardian |Niall Ferguson,
the conservative British historian and political commentator, has
resigned from a key position on a US university free speech programme
after leaked emails revealed that he urged a group of Republican
students to conduct “opposition research” on a leftwing student.
Ferguson had been serving in a senior leadership role on the Cardinal
Conversations, a Stanford University programme that has given a
platform to contentious speakers including Charles Murray, the
controversial social scientist who has claimed that black and Latino
genetics are linked to intellectual inferiority.
The leaked emails, which first appeared in the Stanford Daily
newspaper, revealed that, following a backlash against Murray’s
appearance, the Sunday Times columnist urged conservative students to
conduct “some opposition research on Mr O” – a reference to a leftwing
activist student at Stanford, Michael Ocon.
After the emails were published last Thursday, Ferguson said
he regretted his actions but explained that he had been “deeply
concerned” that Stanford’s student steering committee was in danger of
“being taken over by elements that were fundamentally hostile to free
speech”.
In one email sent to various conservative students, including John Rice-Cameron, the president of Stanford College Republicans
and the son of Susan Rice, a former national security adviser to Barack
Obama, Ferguson confides: “Now we turn to the more subtle game of
grinding them down on the committee. The price of liberty is eternal
vigilance.
“Unite against the [social justice warriors],” he instructed students
in another email, urging them “to bury whatever past differences they
may have for the common good”.
Rice-Cameron replies: “Slowly, we will continue to crush the left’s will to resist, as they will crack under pressure.”
Murray spoke on 22 February after students had complained to the
university’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, and expressed their
disapproval at his inclusion in the debate series.
“Murray’s history of racism and using pseudo-science to further
racist ideas is deeply disturbing,” read the letter from Students for a
Sustainable Stanford.
swprs | Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top
journalists of almost all major US news outlets have long been members
of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Established in 1921 as a private, bipartisan organization to “awaken America to its worldwide responsibilities”,
the CFR and its close to 5000 elite members have for decades shaped
U.S. foreign policy and public discourse about it. As a well-known
Council member once explained, the goal has indeed been to establish a global Empire, albeit a “benevolent” one.
Based on official membership rosters, the following illustration for
the first time depicts the extensive media network of the CFR and its
two main international affiliate organizations: the Bilderberg Group (covering mainly the U.S. and Europe) and the Trilateral Commission (covering North America, Europe and East Asia), both established by Council leaders to foster elite cooperation at the international level.
In a column entitled “Ruling Class Journalists”, former Washington Post
senior editor and ombudsman Richard Harwood once described the Council
and its members approvingly as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling
establishment in the United States”.
sciencefriday |Giant jellyfish and mussels. Pallid
shrimp, fish, and sea cucumbers. Never-before-seen octopus species. All
these and more dwell in the deep sea, 200 meters (over 650 feet) and
deeper beneath the ocean surface. It’s the largest habitat on Earth, but
it’s also one of the least understood.
As mining companies eye the mineral
resources of the deep sea—from oil and gas, to metal deposits—marine
biologists like London’s Natural History Museum’s Diva Amon
are working to discover and describe as much of the deep sea as they
can. Amon has been on dozens of expeditions to sea, where she’s helped
characterize ecosystems and discover new species all over the world. And
she says we still don’t know enough about deep sea ecology to know how
to protect these species, the ones we’ve found and the ones we haven’t
yet, from mining.
But accessing the deep ocean is
expensive; it can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 a day to run a
research ship. So roboticists and artificial intelligence designers are
developing underwater drones to map and sniff out the secrets of the
deep with the help of sophisticated chemical sensors. These robotic
explorers could someday hunt down sunken ships or planes, hydrothermal
vents, and biological spectacles such as rare species or a whale fall,
at a cost significantly cheaper than today. Nine teams of roboticists
designing these underwater crafts are now in a race to win the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE.
In this segment, Amon and XPRIZE’s
Jyotika Virmani join Ira to talk about the future of deep ocean
exploration—and what we might find there. And Martin Brooke, team leader
of Blue Devil Ocean Engineering at Duke University, will discuss his
team’s plan for mapping the deep ocean: aerial drones that drop
sonar-sounding pods into the seas, then reel them up and move them to
the next target.
tomdispatch | For almost 20 years, U.S. drone warfare was largely
one-sided. Unlike Afghans and Yemenis, Iraqis and Somalis, Americans
never had to worry about lethal robots hovering overhead and raining
down missiles. Until, that is, one appeared in the skies above Florida.
But that’s a story for later. For now, let’s focus on a 2017 executive order issued by President Trump, part of his second attempt
at a travel ban directed primarily at citizens of Muslim-majority
nations. It begins: “It is the policy of the United States to protect
its citizens from terrorist attacks.”
That sentence would be repeated in a January report from
the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS), “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the
United States.” Meant to strengthen the president’s case for the travel
ban, it was panned for its methodological flaws, pilloried for its inaccuracies,
and would even spur a lawsuit by the civil rights organization, Muslim
Advocates, and the watchdog group, Democracy Forward Foundation. In
their complaint,
those groups contend that the report was “biased, misleading, and
incomplete” and “manipulates information to support its anti-immigrant
and anti-Muslim conclusions.”
To bolster the president’s arguments for restricting the entry of
foreigners into the United States, the DOJ/DHS analysis contained a
collection of case summaries. Examples included: the Sudanese national
who, in 2016, “pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support
to ISIS”; the Uzbek who “posted a threat on an Uzbek-language website to
kill President Obama in an act of martyrdom on behalf of ISIS”; the
Syrian who, in a plea agreement, “admitted that he knew a member of ISIS
and that while in Syria he participated in a battle against the Syrian
regime, including shooting at others, in coordination with Al Nusrah,”
an al-Qaeda offshoot.
Such cases cited in the report, hardly spectacular terror incidents,
were evidently calculated to sow fears by offering a list of convicted
suspects with Muslim-sounding names. But the authors of the report
simply looked in the wrong places. They could have found startling
summaries of truly audacious attacks against the homeland in a
collection of U.S. military documents from 2016 obtained by TomDispatch via
the Freedom of Information Act. Those files detail a plethora of
shocking acts of terrorism across the United States including mass
poisonings, the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and that
“People’s Armed Liberation (PAL) attack on U.S. Central Command
(USCENTCOM) headquarters in Tampa, Florida, [by] a drone-launched
missile.”
That’s right! A drone-launched missile attack! On CENTCOM’s Florida headquarters! By a terrorist group known as PAL!
Wondering how you missed the resulting 24/7 media bonanza, the screaming front page headlines in the New York Times, the hysterics on Fox & Friends, the president’s hurricane of tweets?
Well, there’s a simple explanation. That attack doesn’t actually
happen until May 2020. Or so says the summary of the 33rd annual Joint
Land, Air, and Sea Strategic Special Program (JLASS-SP), an elaborate
war game carried out in 2016 by students and faculty from the U.S.
military’s war colleges, the training grounds for its future generals
and admirals.
consortiumnews |With
the news that a Cambridge academic-cum-spy named Stefan Halper
infiltrated the Trump campaign, the role of the intelligence agencies in
shaping the great Russiagate saga is at last coming into focus.
It’s
looking more and more massive. The intelligence agencies initiated
reports that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia, they nurtured them
and helped them grow, and then they spread the word to the press and key
government officials. Reportedly, they even tried to use these reports
to force Trump to step down prior to his inauguration. Although the
corporate press accuses Trump of conspiring with Russia to stop Hillary
Clinton, the reverse now seems to be the case: the Obama administration
intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block “Siberian candidate” Trump.
The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove, Halper’s friend and business partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London’s venerable Garrick Club, according toThe Washington Post, Dearlove told fellow
MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous “golden showers”
opposition research dossier, that Trump “reminded him of
a predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station
for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US authorities to
British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in
communication with the Kremlin.”
Apparently,
one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question
step down. When that didn’t work with Trump, Dearlove and his
colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make him see the light. A major
scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable scandal.
Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as “The Walrus” for his impressive girth, other participants include:
Robert Hannigan, former director Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA.
Alexander Downer, top Australian diplomat.
Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow.
Joseph Mifsud, Maltese academic.
James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence.
John Brennan, former CIA Director (and now NBC News analyst).
In-Bred
A
few things stand out about this august group. One is its in-bred
quality. After helping to run an annual confab known as the Cambridge
Intelligence Seminar, Dearlove and Halper are now partners in a private
venture calling itself “The Cambridge Security Initiative.” Both are
connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt
& Co. Halper is also connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt
representative Jonathan Clarke and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another MI6 vet. Alexander Downer served a
half-dozen years on Hakluyt’s international advisory board, while
Andrew Wood is linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the
private research firm that Steele helped found, and which produced the
anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an unpaidadvisor.
NationalReview | Gowdy’s fire truck pulled into Fox News Tuesday night for an interview by Martha MacCallum.
An able lawyer, the congressman is suddenly on a mission to protect the
Justice Department and the FBI from further criticism. So, when Ms.
MacCallum posed the question about the FBI spying on the Trump campaign,
Gowdy deftly changed the subject: Rather than address the campaign, he repeatedly insisted that Donald Trump personally was never the “target” of the FBI’s investigation. The only “target,” Gowdy maintains, was Russia.
This is a dodge on at least two levels.
First, to repeat, the question raised by the FBI’s use of an informant is whether the bureau was investigating the Trump campaign.
We’ll come momentarily to the closely connected question of whether
Trump can be airbrushed out of his own campaign — I suspect the
impossibility of this feat is why Gowdy is resistant to discussing the
Trump campaign at all.
It is a diversion for Gowdy to prattle on about how Trump himself was
not a “target” of the Russia investigation. As we’ve repeatedly
observed (and as Gowdy acknowledged in the interview), the Trump-Russia
probe is a counterintelligence investigation. An accomplished prosecutor, Gowdy well knows that “target” is a term of art in criminal investigations,
denoting a suspect who is likely to be indicted. The term is inapposite
to counterintelligence investigations, which are not about building
criminal cases but about divining and thwarting the provocative schemes
of hostile foreign powers. In that sense, and in no other, the foreign
power at issue — here, Russia — is always the “target” of a
counterintelligence probe; but it is never a “target” in the technical
criminal-investigation sense in which Gowdy used the term . . . unless
you think we are going to indict a country.
Moreover, even if we stick to the criminal-investigation sense of
“target,” Gowdy knows it is misleading to emphasize that Trump is not
one. Just a few short weeks ago, Gowdy was heard pooh-poohing as “meaningless”
media reporting that Trump had been advised he was not a “target” of
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe (which is the current iteration
of the Russia investigation). As the congressman quite correctly pointed
out, if Trump is a subject of the investigation — another
criminal-law term of art, denoting a person whose conduct is under
scrutiny, but who may or may not be indicted — it should be of little
comfort that he is not a “target”; depending on how the evidence shakes
out, a subject can become a target in the blink of an eye.
So, apart from the fact that Gowdy is dodging the question about
whether the Trump campaign was being investigated, his digression about
“targets” is gibberish. Since the Obama administration was using its
counterintelligence powers (FISA surveillance, national-security
letters, unmasking identities in intelligence reporting, all bolstered
by the use of at least one covert informant), the political-spying issue
boils down to whether the Trump campaign was being monitored.
Whether Trump himself was apt to be indicted, and whether threats posed
by Russia were the FBI’s focus, are beside the point; in a
counterintelligence case, an indictment is never the objective, and a
foreign power is always the focus.
medium | Valerie Jarrett will never be stopped or profiled, she will never be
seen as a Black woman and I’m sure she’s traded on that most of her
life, if not all of it. However, her blending in and out of colorism
when it suits her is not her real crime but the exploitation and robbing
of poor Black people in Chicago is. It was insulting when Jarrett was
chosen as the face of all things Black by Obama, between she and Al
Sharpton, that should have signaled to all Black people his lack of
seriousness in dealing with Black issues. So before you all start
marching in support of Valerie Jarrett, you may want to at least ask the
people of Chicago, since clearly doing any form of research about her
corrupt history, evades you.
Grove
Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by
Obama’s close friends and political supporters. Those people profited
from the subsidies even as many of Obama’s constituents suffered.
Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.
Some
of the residents of Grove Parc say they are angry that Obama did not
notice their plight. The development straddles the boundary of Obama’s
state Senate district. Many of the tenants have been his constituents
for more than a decade. “No
one should have to live like this, and no one did anything about it,”
said Cynthia Ashley, who has lived at Grove Parc since 1994.
Valerie
Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama’s presidential campaign and a member
of his finance committee. Jarrett is the chief executive of Habitat
Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter and
co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized
by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found
widespread problems.
Jarrett’s
involvement in Chicago real estate development between 1992 and 2009
was marred with controversy, much of which centered on Habitat’s role as
the sole developer for “family public housing,” a status granted under a
district court ruling in 1987.
Under
Jarrett’s leadership, Habitat oversaw the development of a number of
public housing projects, one of which, in the Cabrini Green
neighborhood, was dubbed a “national symbol of urban despair.” Others became so run-down the city had to ask the federal government to intervene.
A 2003 Harvard Law Review article
cited the decline of the Cabrini Green development as an embodiment of
the negative consequence associated with the “privatization of public
housing.”
Valerie Jarrett and her construction company have overseen the complete decimation and gentrification all over Chicago (many labeling her Slum Queen),
no Black person should be shedding a tear for her. As for Roseanne
Barr, ABC and everyone else knew who she was before they chose to reboot
her show. One of the issues ABC was having, is that a show that caters
to poor Whites and the alt-right, had somehow surpassed all of the
ratings of shows like those of Shonda Rhimes and others they were
lauding to be the face of liberal television viewership. The other issue
is that, the Obama’s were not going to allow their friend Jarrett to be
insulted, no different than when Obama, broke his neck to defend Henry
Louis Gates, his old elitist Harvard professor and friend. Black people
were quick to praise and laud Channing Dungey, the Black woman and CEO
of ABC’s parent company, Disney. However, Channing was the same woman
who refused to air a show on Blackish that protested police
violence/murders and discussed why Colin Kaepernick kneeled. However, we
should already know by Obama’s fecklessness and inaction in going
against the police that Neolibs have no desire of ever changing a system
that works so well for them…until of course, someone like Roseanne
reminds them that they’re still seen as a n*gga, or in this case an ape,
or like Henry Louis Gates was profiled at his own home.
NationalReview | If I might be permitted to address the would-be benefactors of the
white underclass from the southerly side of the class line: Ain’t nobody
asked you to speak for us.
One of the intellectual failings of conservative social critics is
our tendency to take external forces, economic and otherwsie, into
greater account in the case of struggling rural and small-town whites
than in the case of struggling urban blacks.
Of course there are external forces, economic and otherwise, that act
on poor people and poor communities, and one of the intellectual
failings of conservative social critics is our tendency to take those
into considerably greater account in the case of struggling rural and
small-town whites than in the case of struggling urban blacks. “Get off
welfare and get a job!” has been replaced by solicitous talk about
“globalization.” Likewise, the reaction to the crack-cocaine plague of
the 1980s and 1990s was very different from the reaction to the opioid
epidemic of the moment, in part because of who is involved — or
perceived to be involved. And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a
rash of deaths from opioid overdoses. As Dr. Peter DeBlieux of
University Medical Center in New Orleans put it, heroin addiction was,
for a long time, treated in the same way AIDS was in its early days: as a
problem for deviants. Nobody cared about AIDS when it was a problem for
prostitutes, drug addicts, and those with excessively adventurous sex
lives. The previous big epidemic of heroin overdoses involved largely
non-white drug users. The current fentanyl-driven heroin episode and the
growth of prescription-killer abuse involve more white users and more
middle-class users.
But there are internal forces as well. People really do make
decisions, and, whether they intend it or not, they contribute to the
sometimes difficult conditions in which those decisions have to be made.
Consider the case of how I became homeless.
I wasn’t homeless in the sense of sleeping in the park — most of the
people we’re talking about when we’re talking about homelessness aren’t.
The people who are sleeping on the streets are mainly addicts and
people with other severe mental-health issues. I was homeless in the way
the Department of Health and Human Services means:
in “an unstable or non-permanent situation . . . forced to stay with a
series of friends and/or extended family members.” (As a matter of
policy, these two kinds of homelessness should not be conflated, which
they intentionally are by those who wish for political reasons to
pretend that our mental-health crisis is an economic problem.) Like many
underclass families, mine lived very much paycheck-to-paycheck, and was
always one setback away from economic catastrophe. That came when my
mother, who for various reasons had a weakened immune system, got
scratched by her poodle, Pepe, and nearly lost her right arm to the
subsequent infection. A long hospitalization combined with fairly
radical surgery and a series of skin grafts left her right arm and hand
partially paralyzed, a serious problem for a woman who typed for a
living. (She’d later learn to type well over 100 words per minute with
only partial use of her right hand; she was a Rachmaninoff of the IBM
Selectric.) I am sure that there were severe financial stresses
associated with her illness, but I ended up being shuffled around
between various neighbors — strangers to me — for mainly non-economic
reasons. My parents had two houses between them, but at that time had
just gone through a very ugly divorce. My mother was living with a
mentally disturbed alcoholic who’d had a hard time in Vietnam (and well
before that, I am certain; his grandfather had once shot him in the ass
with a load of rock-salt for making unauthorized use of a watermelon
from the family farm) and it was decided that it would be unsafe to
leave children alone in his care, which it certainly would have been. He
was very precise, in funny ways, and would stack his Coors Lite cans in
perfect silver pyramids until he ran out of beer, at which point he
would start drinking shots of Mexican vanilla, which is about 70 proof.
Lubbock was a dry city then, and buying more booze would have meant a
trip past the city limits, hence the resort to baking ingredients and,
occasionally, to mouthwash. I am afraid the old realtors’ trick of
filling the house with the aroma of baked cookies has the opposite of
the desired effect on me.
Our mortgage then was $285 a month, which was a little less than my
father paid in child support, so housing was, in effect, paid for. And
thus I found myself in the strange position of being temporarily without
a home while rotating between neighbors within sight, about 60 feet
away, of the paid-up house to which I could not safely return. I was in
kindergarten at the time.
Capitalism didn’t do that, and neither did illegal immigrants or
Chinese competition to the Texas Instruments factory on the other side
of town. Culture didn’t do it, either, and neither did poverty: We had
enough money to secure comfortable housing in a nice neighborhood with
good schools. In the last years of her life, my mother asked me to help
her sort out some financial issues, and I was shocked to learn how much
money she and her fourth and final husband were earning: They’d both
ended their careers as government employees, and had pretty decent
pensions and excellent health benefits. They were, in fact, making about
as much in retirement in Lubbock as I was making editing newspapers in
Philadelphia. Of course they were almost dead broke — their bingo and
cigarette outlays alone were crushing, and they’d bought a Cadillac and
paid for it with a credit card.
KAKE | A 14-year-old boy says he was arrested at the Warren Theatre in east Wichita because his pants were sagging.
Alonzo Taylor Jr says he went to the East Warren 20 with a group of friends when the manager approached him about his pants.
"A couple
of seconds after leaving the concessions counter, the manager walked up
and said to pull up your pants or you'll be escorted," Taylor said.
He says he couldn't find a belt to wear and his pants began sagging while he was carrying a drink and popcorn.
"I was by the counter and he said that, 'You're going to have to leave. I don't care what you did. You're trespassing.'"
Taylor says
he followed all of the manager's commands but was still
arrested. He believes the manager targeted him because he is black.
Taylor's
mother, Ruth Dennis, says her son is a good kid who never gets into
trouble. She's not mad at police for handcuffing her son. She's mad at
the theater.
"I just don't want my son's record to be messed up over sagging and to be labeled as a trespasser," she said.
Taylor is still shocked by what happened and now doesn't feel welcome at the East Warren 20.
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