mockpaperscissors |Talking Points Memo pulls out the four most telling paragraphs from the NYTimes (paywall) story about the convoluted Patraeus affair story:
Ms. Kelley, a volunteer with wounded veterans and military families, brought her complaint to a rank-and-file agent she knew from a previous encounter with the F.B.I. office, the official also said. That agent, who had previously pursued a friendship with Ms. Kelley and had earlier sent her shirtless photographs of himself, was “just a conduit” for the complaint, he said. He had no training in cybercrime, was not part of the cyber squad handling the case and was never assigned to the investigation.
But the agent, who was not identified, continued to “nose around”
about the case, and eventually his superiors “told him to stay the hell
away from it, and he was not invited to briefings,” the official said.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on Monday night that the agent
had been barred from the case.
Later, the agent became convinced — incorrectly, the official said — that the case had stalled. Because of his “worldview,” as the official put it, he suspected a politically motivated cover-up to protect President Obama.
The agent alerted Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who called
the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, on Oct. 31 to tell him of
the agent’s concerns.
The official said the agent’s self-described “whistle-blowing” was “a
little embarrassing” but had no effect on the investigation.
So… the shirtless FBI Agent–who’s advances were spurned by the ingenue Jill Kelley went to the GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor to tip him that a scandal was brewing that could help the GOP, you know, because of his world view.
The little factoid that kept confusing me as this stupid story unfolded was why Cantor was briefed and the President wasn’t, and now we know: Teabagging. This sad and stupid story now officially has no legs. I hope that Mrs. Petraeus gets a good settlement and that miserable little rat-fucker General gets what he deserves.
aljazeera | Defence Secretary Robert Gates referred to him as "the pre-eminent soldier-scholar-statesman of his generation".
But his critics say, the legacy of his career is not that stellar and
deserves far more scrutiny than the US media and politicians are
willing to give it.
Earlier this year, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis released a whistleblower report on conditions in Afghanistan.
He said that Petraeus consistently gave glowing and inaccurate
accounts of US military progress and that Petraeus built a so-called
"cult of personality" around himself.
"A message had been learned by the leading politicians of our
country, by the vast majority of our uniformed service members, and the
population at large [that] David Petraeus is a real war hero - maybe
even on the same plane as Patton, MacArthur, and Eisenhower .... But the
most important lesson everyone learned [was to] never, ever question
General Petraeus or you'll be made to look a fool!"
In his report, Davis was scathing in his assessment of US military commanders:
"Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when
communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to
conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become
unrecognisable.
"This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our
allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political
solution to the war in Afghanistan."
globalresearch | The man behind the image was fake. He’s a shadow of how he and spin doctors portrayed him publicly.
Competence didn’t earn him four stars. Former peers accused him of
brown-nosing his way to the top. It made him a brand as much as general.
Talk about him being presidential material surfaced.
In 2007, Time magazine made him runner-up as Person of the Year. The
designation is as meaningless and unworthy as Nobel Peace awards.
So is current and previous praise. John McCain once called him “one
of (our) greatest generals.” His judgment leaves much to be desired.
He’s not the best and brightest on Capitol Hill. He once admitted to graduating near the bottom of his Naval Academy class.
White House and media spin praised Petraeus’ performance as Iraq
commander and CENTCOM head. It was falsified hype. Performance
contradicted facts. Iraq was more disaster than success. His Afghanistan
surge failed. Syria on his CIA watch didn’t fare better.
Before he fell from grace, he was called aggressive in nature, an
innovative thinker on counterinsurgency warfare, a talisman, a white
knight, a do-or-die competitive legend, and a man able to turn defeat
into victory.
In 2008, James Petras described him well in an article titled “General Petraeus: Zionism’s Military Poodle. From Surge to Purge to Dirge.”
He explained what spin doctors concealed. He quoted Petraeus’ former
commander, Admiral William Fallon, calling him “a piece of brown-nosing
chicken shit.” Petras added: “In theory and strategy, in pursuit of defeating the Iraqi
resistance, General Petraeus was a disastrous failure, an outcome
predictable form the very nature of his appointment and his flawed
wartime reputation.”
The generalissimo is more myth than man. He shamelessly supported
Israel “in northern Iraq and the Bush ‘Know Nothings’ in charge of Iraq
and Iran policy planning.”
Petraeus had few competitors to head CENTCOM. It was because other
candidates wouldn’t stoop as low as he did. He shamelessly flacked for
Israel and supported Bush administration belligerence. Petras criticized his “slavish adherence to….confrontation with Iran.
Blaming Iran for his failed military policies served a double purpose –
it covered up his incompetence and it secured the support of” uberhawk
Senator Joe Lieberman.
Doing so also served his unstated presidential ambitions. He climbed
the ladder of success by being super-hawkish, brown-nosing the right
superiors, lying to Congress, surviving the scorn of some peers, hiding
his failures, hyping a fake Iranian threat, supporting Israel,
unjustifiably claiming Iraq success, and boasting how he’d do it
throughout the region.
In other words, he hoped to rise to the top by manufacturing
successes and concealing failures. Manipulated media hype made a hero
out of what Petras called “a disastrous failure” with a record to prove
it.
NYTimes | Along with a steady diet of books on
leadership and management, the reading list at military “charm schools”
that groom officers for ascending to general or admiral includes an
essay, “The Bathsheba Syndrome: The Ethical Failure of Successful
Leaders,” that recalls the moral failure of the Old Testament’s King
David, who ordered a soldier on a mission of certain death — solely for
the chance to take his wife, Bathsheba.
The not-so-subtle message: Be careful out there, and act better.
Despite the warnings, a worrisomely large number of senior officers have
been investigated and even fired for poor judgment, malfeasance and
sexual improprieties or sexual violence — and that is just in the last
year.
Gen. William Ward of the Army, known as Kip, the first officer to open
the new Africa Command, came under scrutiny for allegations of misusing
tens of thousands of government dollars for travel and lodging.
Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair, a former deputy commander of the 82nd
Airborne Division in Afghanistan, is confronting the military equivalent
of a grand jury to decide whether he should stand trial for adultery, sexual misconduct and forcible sodomy, stemming from relationships with five women.
James H. Johnson III, a former commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade,
was expelled from the Army, fined and reduced in rank to lieutenant
colonel from colonel after being convicted of bigamy and fraud stemming from an improper relationship with an Iraqi woman and business dealings with her family.
The Air Force is struggling to recover from a scandal
at its basic training center at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, where
six male instructors were charged with crimes including rape and
adultery after female recruits told of sexual harassment and sexual
assault.
In the Navy, Rear Adm. Charles M. Gaouette was relieved of command
of the Stennis aircraft carrier strike group — remarkably while the
task force was deployed in the Middle East. Officials said that the move
was ordered after “inappropriate leadership judgment.” No other details
were given.
While there is no evidence that David H. Petraeus
had an extramarital affair while serving as one of the nation’s most
celebrated generals, his resignation last week as director of the Central Intelligence Agency
— a job President Obama said he could take only if he left the Army —
was the latest sobering reminder of the kind of inappropriate behavior
that has cast a shadow over the military’s highest ranks.
The episodes have prompted concern that something may be broken, or at
least fractured, across the military’s culture of leadership. Some
wonder whether its top officers have forgotten the lessons of Bathsheba:
The crown of command should not be worn with arrogance, and while rank
has its privileges, remember that infallibility and entitlement are not
among them.
wired | When it came out that CIA Director David Petraeus had an affair with his hagiographer, I got punked. “It seems so obvious in retrospect. How could you @attackerman?”
tweeted @bitteranagram, complete with a link to a florid piece I wrote
for this blog when Petraeus retired from the Army last year. (“The gold standard for wartime command” is one of the harsher
judgments in the piece.) I was so blind to Petraeus, and my role in the
mythmaking that surrounded his career, that I initially missed
@bitteranagram’s joke.
But it’s a good burn. Like many in the press, nearly every national
politician, and lots of members of Petraeus’ brain trust over the years,
I played a role in the creation of the legend around David Petraeus.
Yes, Paula Broadwell wrote the ultimate Petraeus hagiography, the
now-unfortunately titled All In.
But she was hardly alone (except maybe for the sleeping-with-Petraeus
part). The biggest irony surrounding Petraeus’ unexpected downfall is
that he became a casualty of the very publicity machine he cultivated to
portray him as superhuman. I have some insight into how that machine
worked.
The first time I met Petraeus, he was in what I thought of as a
backwater: the Combined Armed Center at Fort Leavenworth. It’s one of
the Army’s in-house academic institutions, and it’s in Kansas, far from
the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2005, Petraeus ran the
place, and accepted an interview request about his tenure training the
Iraqi military, which didn’t go well.
Petraeus didn’t speak for the record in that interview, but over the
course of an hour, he impressed me greatly with his intelligence and his
willingness to entertain a lot of questions that boiled down to isn’t Iraq an irredeemable shitshow. Back then, most generals would dismiss that line of inquiry out of hand, and that would be the end of the interview.
One of Petraeus’ aides underscored a line that several other members
of the Petraeus brain trust would reiterate for years: “He’s an academic
at heart,” as Pete Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served as
Petraeus’ executive officer during the Iraq surge, puts it. There was a
purpose to that line: It implied Petraeus wasn’t particularly ambitious,
suggesting he was content at Fort Leavenworth and wasn’t angling for a
bigger job. I bought into it, especially after I found Petraeus to be
the rare general who didn’t mind responding to the occasional follow-up
request.
So when Petraeus got command of the Iraq war in 2007, I blogged that
it was all a tragic shame that President Bush would use Petraeus, “the
wisest general in the U.S. Army,” as a “human shield” for the
irredeemability of the war. And whatever anyone thought about the war,
they should “believe the hype” about Petraeus.
abcnews | Fury is an inadequate description for the former-CIA director's wife,
Holly Petraeus' reaction after she learned that her husband had an
affair with Broadwell, a former spokesman for David Petraeus told ABC
News.
"Well, as you can imagine, she's not exactly pleased right now," retired
U.S. Army Col. Steve Boylan said. "In a conversation with David
Petraeus this weekend, he said that, 'Furious would be an
understatement.' And I think anyone that's been put in that situation
would probably agree. He deeply hurt the family."
As for Petraeus, the retired Army general who resigned as CIA director
last week after admitting the extramarital relationship, he, "first of
all, deeply regrets and knows how much pain this has caused his family,"
Boylan added.
"He had a huge job and he felt he was doing great work and that is all gone now."
Petraeus knows "this was poor judgment on his part. It was a colossal mistake. ... He's acknowledged that," Boylan said.
One result is that Petraeus could possibly face military prosecution
for adultery if officials turn up any evidence to counter his apparent
claims that the affair began after he left the military.
But Boylan says the affair between Petraeus and his biographer, Paula
Broadwell, both of whom are married, began several months after his
retirement from the Army in August 2011 and ended four months ago.
Broadwell, 40, had extraordinary access to the 60-year-old general
during six trips she took to Afghanistan as his official biographer, a
plum assignment for a novice writer.
"For him to allow the very first biography to be written about him, to
be written by someone who had never written a book before, seemed very
odd to me," former Petraeus aide Peter Mansoor told ABC News.
The timeline of the relationship, according to Petraeus, would mean that
he was carrying on the affair for the majority of his tenure at the
CIA, where he began as director Sept. 6, 2011. If he carried on the
affair while serving in the Army, however, Petraeus could face charges,
according to Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which
reprimands conduct "of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed
forces."
Whether the military would pursue such action, whatever evidence it accumulates, is unclear.
kunstler | The Birchers retailed all kinds of ideological nonsense that made
them the butt of ridicule during the Camelot days of John F. Kennedy and
the heady Civil Rights years of his successor Lyndon B. Johnson. (Bob
Dylan wrote a song about them in 1962: "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid
Blues.") Everything perceived to be a threat in a changing society was
sold by the Birchers as a communist plot - water fluoridation,
de-segregation, even, by a kind of tortured logic, the US strategy in
the Vietnam War. Since a Democratic president and congress passed the
civil rights legislation of 1964-5, the traditionally Democratic "solid
South" revolted almost overnight and eventually turned solidly
Republican. (It was also good for business.)
Something
else was going on in Dixieland from the late 1950s on. The region boomed
economically, partly from luring northern industry down with cheap
labor, and partly because so many large military bases were located
there - hence the hyperbolic, militant patriotism of a region that had
lately staged a violent insurrection against the national government.
The region also went through an explosion of air-conditioned suburban
sprawl because the southern states were geographically huge and the
climate was unbearable half the year. The sprawl industry itself
generated vast fortunes and widespread prosperity in a part of the
country that had been a depressed agricultural backwater since the Civil
War.
Consequently, a population of poor, ignorant
crackers crawled out of the mud and dust to find themselves wealthy car
dealers and strip-mall magnates in barely one turn of a generation. The
transition being so abrupt, their cracker culture of xenophobia,
"primitive" religion, and romance with violence came through intact.
They were the perfect client group for a political party that styled
itself "conservative," as in maintaining the old timey ways. Toward the
end of the 20th century, as the old northern states' economies withered,
and Yankee culture lost both footing and meaning, and poor white folks
all over America looked with envy on the glitz of country music and
Nascar, and gravitated toward the Dixieland culture of belligerent,
aggressive suburbanization, religiosity, and militarism. This cartoon of
the old timey ways swept the "flyover" precincts of the nation. Along
in the baggage compartment was all the old John Birch Society cargo of
quasi-supernatural ideology that appealed so deeply to people perplexed
by the mystifying operations of reality. That perplexity was supposedly
resolved in a Bush II White House aide famously stating, "We make our
own reality." The results of the 2012 election now conclusively
demonstrate the shortcomings of that world-view.
And so
the news last week was that a different version of America outvoted the
John Birch Dixiecrat coalition by roughly two million ballots. Meaning,
of course, that there are still a lot of dangerous morons out there, but
also that the times they are yet a'changin' again. Fist tap Dale.
NYTimes | IT makes sense that Mitt Romney and his advisers are still gobsmacked by
the fact that they’re not commandeering the West Wing.
(Though, as “The Daily Show” correspondent John Oliver jested, the White
House might have been one of the smaller houses Romney ever lived in.)
Team Romney has every reason to be shellshocked. Its candidate, after
all, resoundingly won the election of the country he was wooing.
Mitt Romney is the president of white male America.
Maybe the group can retreat to a man cave in a Whiter House, with
mahogany paneling, brown leather Chesterfields, a moose head over the
fireplace, an elevator for the presidential limo, and one of those men’s
club signs on the phone that reads: “Telephone Tips: ‘Just Left,’ 25
cents; ‘On His Way,’ 50 cents; ‘Not here,’ $1; ‘Who?’ $5.”
In its delusional death spiral, the white male patriarchy was so hard
core, so redolent of country clubs and Cadillacs, it made little effort
not to alienate women. The election had the largest gender gap in the
history of the Gallup poll, with Obama winning the vote of single women
by 36 percentage points.
As W.’s former aide Karen Hughes put it in Politico on Friday, “If
another Republican man says anything about rape other than it is a
horrific, violent crime, I want to personally cut out his tongue.”
Some Republicans conceded they were “a ‘Mad Men’ party in a ‘Modern
Family’ world” (although “Mad Men” seems too louche for a candidate who
doesn’t drink or smoke and who apparently dated only one woman). They
also acknowledged that Romney’s strategists ran a 20th-century campaign
against David Plouffe’s 21st-century one.
But the truth is, Romney was an unpalatable candidate. And shocking as
it may seem, his strategists weren’t blowing smoke when they said they
were going to win; they were just clueless.
Until now, Republicans and Fox News have excelled at conjuring alternate
realities. But this time, they made the mistake of believing their fake
world actually existed. As Fox’s Megyn Kelly said to Karl Rove on
election night, when he argued against calling Ohio for Obama: “Is this
just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better?”
Romney and Tea Party loonies dismissed half the country as chattel and
moochers who did not belong in their “traditional” America. But the more
they insulted the president with birther cracks, the more they tried to
force chastity belts on women, and the more they made Hispanics, blacks
and gays feel like the help, the more these groups burned to prove
that, knitted together, they could give the dead-enders of white male
domination the boot.
The election about the economy also sounded the death knell for the Republican culture wars.
Romney was still running in an illusory country where husbands told
wives how to vote, and the wives who worked had better get home in time
to cook dinner. But in the real country, many wives were urging husbands
not to vote for a Brylcreemed boss out of a ’50s boardroom whose party
was helping to revive a 50-year-old debate over contraception.
theatlantic | The day after Barack Obama won a second term as president of the United States, the blog Jezebel published a slideshow. The gallery displayed a collection of screen-capped tweets.
There were, both shockingly and unsurprisingly, many more where that
came from. And many of those tweets were geocoded: Embedded in them were
data about where in the U.S. they were sent from.
Floating Sheep, a group of geography academics, took advantage of that fact
to turn hatred -- and, just as often, stupidity -- into information.
The team searched Twitter for racism-revealing terms that appeared in
the context of tweets that mentioned "Obama," "re-elected," or "won."
That search resulted in (a shockingly high and surprisingly low) 395
tweets. The team then sorted the tweets according to the state they were
sent from, comparing the racist tweets to the total number of geocoded
tweets coming from that state during the same time period (November 1 -
7). To normalize states across population levels, the team then used a location quotient-inspired measure --
an economic derivation used to analyze norms across geographical
locations -- to compare a state's racist tweets to the national average
of racist tweets.
So, per the team's model, a score of 1.0
indicates that the state's proportion of racist tweets to non-racist
tweets is the same as the overall national proportion. A score above 1.0
indicates that the proportion of racist tweets to non-racist tweets is
higher than the national proportion.
Here's the LQ formula the team used:
Their findings?
Alabama and Mississippi have the highest LQ measures: They have
scores of 8.1 and 7.4, respectively. And the states surrounding these
two core states -- Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee -- also have very
high LQ scores and form a fairly distinctive cluster in the southeast. Fist tap Dale.
skepticblog | Hearing the speakers at the GOP convention spout their ideas this
week, I’m again reminded that an entire American political party is
proudly and openly espousing views that are demonstrably contrary to
reality, from claiming that rape does not cause pregnancy, to claiming
that global climate change is a hoax, to even weirder idea, like the
bizarre notion that the President of the United States is a Kenyan
Muslim. For years, I’ve puzzled over why people can believe such weird
things as creationism or other kinds of pseudoscience and science
denials. In my 2007 book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters,
I devoted an entire chapter to asking why creationists can so
confidently believe patently false ideas, and refuse to look at any
evidence placed in front of them. I’ve compared it to Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass,
where Alice steps through the mirror and finds that the objects and the
landscape look vaguely familiar—but all the rules of logic are reversed
or turned inside out. How can people continue to believe things that
are clearly wrong, and refuse to change their ideas or look at evidence?
It turns out that human brains are constructed very differently than
what we would like to believe. As described by Chris Mooney (2012) in The Republican Brain: The Science of Why they Deny Science—and Reality,
our brains are not logical computers or non-emotional Vulcans like Dr.
Spock, but organs in emotional animals who navigate the factual world to
fit our beliefs and biases. Mooney explains this by starting with an
anecdote about the Marquis de Condorcet, an important figure in the
French Enlightenment (he helped develop both integral calculus and also
wrote many important works on politics and philosophy). Condorcet
believed in the Enlightenment ideal that humans would always be rational
and guided by reason, and persuaded if logic and evidence were
considered—and lost his life in 1794 during the irrational, emotional,
highly political Reign of Terror. Even though Enlightenment philosophy
and political science long argued that humans are rational animals,
modern psychology and neurobiology have shown this is not the case.
Humans filter the world to see what fits their emotional and cultural
biases, and easily neglect evidence and information that does not fit
(confirmation bias). Even more to the point, we are prone to what
psychologists now call motivated reasoning—confirmation bias, reduction of cognitive dissonance, shifting the goalposts, ad hoc
rationalization to salvage falsified beliefs, plus other mental tricks
cause us to constantly filter the world. Our minds do not behave by
objectively weighing all the evidence and listening to reason, but
instead acts as if we were lawyers seeking evidence to bolster our
pre-existing beliefs. Instead of the Enlightenment ideal that humans
would change their minds when the facts go against them, motivated
reasoning explains why humans are adept at bending or ignoring facts to
fit the world as we want to see it.
wikipedia | Neofeudalism is made possible by the commodification of policing, and signifies the end of shared citizenship, says Ian Loader:
The commodification of policing ... also has to do
with the ways in which private policing and security can assist in the
creation of commercial or residential spaces in which an exclusive,
particularistic order comes to be defined and enforced. The warm,
sanitised, consumer-friendly realm offered by shopping malls represents
an important instance of the former. In contradistinction to the
unpredictable, democratic ‘messiness’ of urban streets, malls make
systematic use of private patrols and camera surveillance to create what
Coleman and Sim call a moral order of consumption; something which
entails the exclusion (on grounds of property, rather than criminal,
law) of those ‘flawed consumers’ who are unwilling or unable to be
seduced by the market. In respect of the latter, walled, gated,
privately policed enclaves — currently most evident in Southern
California and elsewhere in the United States, though also apparent (in
embryonic forms) in parts of Britain — serve as a means of physical
protection, and a vehicle for protecting the value of economic capital;
both of which are predicated on the essential ‘unliveability’ of civil
society beyond the walls. As such, the commodification of policing and
security operates to cement (sometimes literally) and exacerbate social
and spatial inequalities generated elsewhere; serving to project,
anticipate and bring forth a tribalised, 'neo-feudal’ world of private
orders in which social cohesion and common citizenship have collapsed.
wikipedia | The Sinaloa Cartel (Spanish: Cártel de Sinaloa or CDS)[5] is a drug-trafficking and organized crime syndicate based in the city of Culiacán, Sinaloa,[6] with operations in the Mexican states of Baja California, Durango, Sonora and Chihuahua.[7][8] The cartel is also known as the Guzmán-Loera Organization and the Pacific Cartel, the latter due to the coast of Mexico from which it originated. The cartel has also been called the Federation and the Blood Alliance.[7][9][10][11] The 'Federation' was partially splintered when the Beltrán-Leyva brothers broke apart from the Sinaloa Cartel.[12]
The Sinaloa Cartel is associated with the label "Golden Triangle", which refers to the states of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua. The region is a major producer of Mexican opium and marijuana.[12] According to the U.S. Attorney General, the Sinaloa Cartel is responsible for importing into the United States and distributing nearly 200 tons of cocaine and large amounts of heroin between 1990 and 2008.[15]
wikipedia | Los Zetas is a powerful and violent criminal syndicate in Mexico, and is considered by the U.S. government to be the "most technologically advanced, sophisticated, and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico."[7][8] The origins of Los Zetas date back to 1999, when commandos of the Mexican Army's elite forces deserted their ranks and decided to work as the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel, a powerful drug trafficking organization.[9] In February 2010, Los Zetas broke away from their former employer and formed their own criminal organization.[10][11]
Los Zetas are well armed and equipped, and unlike other traditional
criminal organizations in Mexico, drug trafficking makes up at least 50%
of their revenue, while a large portion of the income comes from other
activities directed against both rival drug cartels and civilians;[9]
their brutal tactics, which include beheadings, torture and
indiscriminate slaughter, show that they often prefer brutality over
bribery.[9] Los Zetas are also Mexico's largest drug cartel in terms of geographical presence, overtaking its bitter rival, the Sinaloa Cartel.[12] Besides drug trafficking, Los Zetas operate through protection rackets, assassinations, extortion, kidnappings, and other criminal activities.[13] The organization is based in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, directly across the border from Laredo, Texas.[14][15]
pnas | Human ethnocentrism—the tendency to view one's group as centrally
important and superior to other groups—creates intergroup
bias that fuels prejudice, xenophobia, and
intergroup violence. Grounded in the idea that ethnocentrism also
facilitates within-group
trust, cooperation, and coordination, we conjecture
that ethnocentrism may be modulated by brain oxytocin, a peptide shown
to promote cooperation among in-group members. In
double-blind, placebo-controlled designs, males self-administered
oxytocin
or placebo and privately performed computer-guided
tasks to gauge different manifestations of ethnocentric in-group
favoritism
as well as out-group derogation. Experiments 1 and 2
used the Implicit Association Test to assess in-group favoritism and
out-group derogation. Experiment 3 used the
infrahumanization task to assess the extent to which humans ascribe
secondary,
uniquely human emotions to their in-group and to an
out-group. Experiments 4 and 5 confronted participants with the option
to save the life of a larger collective by
sacrificing one individual, nominated as in-group or as out-group.
Results show
that oxytocin creates intergroup bias because
oxytocin motivates in-group favoritism and, to a lesser extent,
out-group derogation.
These findings call into question the view of
oxytocin as an indiscriminate “love drug” or “cuddle chemical” and
suggest that
oxytocin has a role in the emergence of intergroup
conflict and violence.
WaPo | With Tuesday’s election results, President Obama and Congress should
take steps to end “the warfare state” instituted by the George W. Bush
White House.
No one can deny that threats to U.S. security exist around the
world. But the Defense Department needs continued reform to meet those
varied threats and to cut the most costly elements in the core Pentagon
budget that were developed for past wars.
Starting in 2003, the
United States for the first time fought wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan,
without a tax to pay for them. Ironically, the core Defense budget
during the Bush administration was supposed to include funds for such
events.
The September 2001 quadrennial review, which laid the
policy foundation for the Bush fiscal 2003 Pentagon budget, called for
forces that could “swiftly defeat aggression in overlapping major
conflicts while preserving for the president the option to call for a
decisive victory in one of those conflicts — including the possibility
of regime change or occupation.” That sounds a lot like foreseeing the
invasion of Iraq that came 18 months later. The plan said the military
also could, within the proposed budget, “Conduct a limited number of
smaller-scale contingency operations.”
Still, supplemental budgets were sought for the two wars, putting the costs, now near $1.5 trillion, on a credit card.
NYTimes | They might have been the Hinterpfanns. Apart from the ancient priestly
names of Cohen and Levin, Jews in Europe were called by patronymics (as
''Isaac ben Elchanan'' -- ''Isaac, son of Elchanan'') until little more
than 200 years ago, when they began to acquire, often at the caprice of
officials, what we think of as ''Jewish names'' like Bernstein or
Rosenthal. But in the Judengasse, the squalid Frankfurt ghetto, the
downtrodden inhabitants were known by their addresses. One family had
lived in a house with a red shield hanging outside, ''zum roten
Schild,'' before moving to another, ''zur Hinterpfann'' (''the warming
pan'').
The red shield name stuck nonetheless, and Mayer Amschel Rothschild,
born probably in 1744, was the first member of his family known by what
would become one of the most famous names in Europe. By his death in
1812, he had risen from obscure coin dealer to international financier,
establishing his sons in London, Paris, Vienna and Naples, as well as in
Frankfurt. And his tightknit family firm grew into what Niall Ferguson
calls ''for most of the century between 1815 and 1914 . . . easily the
biggest bank in the world.''
Their enthralling story has often been told before, but never in such
authoritative detail. Ferguson is a young Oxford don of remarkable
energy and prolificity, who has previously written a learned book on
German financial history and has just published in England a long book
on World War I, as well as this Rothschild history in its 1,300-page
entirety. The American publishers have taken pity on their readers'
wrists and split it into two volumes: ''The House of Rothschild: Money's
Prophets, 1798-1848'' will be followed in the fall of 1999 by ''The
House of Rothschild: The World's Banker, 1848-1997.'' The study marks
the bicentenary of Nathan Rothschild's arrival in London, where N. M.
Rothschild & Sons of New Court was to become the most famous of all
the branches of the great cousinage and whose archives were opened to
the author.
Why the explosive Jewish success in finance during the 19th century? The
simplest explanation is that, as the Jews began to emerge from the
heaviest restrictions of the ancien regime, money-dealing was at first
the only avenue open to them. The Rothschilds' particular rise to
greatness is a complex story, but the outlines are clear enough: the
coincidence of the opening of the ghetto doors, the French Revolution,
the ensuing two decades of war across Europe and the burgeoning
Industrial Revolution in England. Thus the family progressed rapidly
from coin dealing and money-changing to trading in Lancashire textiles
and transmitting the funds for the Duke of Wellington's armies.
There were eminent Victorians, notably the great English financial
writer Walter Bagehot, who argued that the House of Rothschild wasn't
really a bank at all, in the sense of a place where one could deposit
and withdraw money. The crucial Rothschild role in high finance wasn't
through deposit banking but through the development of an international
market for transferable, interest-paying government bonds.
The career of Mayer Amschel Rothschild saw an intimate partnership with
Landgrave William IX of Hesse-Kassel, a libidinous and avaricious prince
whose begetting 12 illegitimate children still left him time for
speculating with a large inheritance (partly acquired a generation
earlier when the Hessian Army was hired out to the highest bidder, which
was to say the King of England fighting his war in America). In this
relationship, Rothschild remained in some ways the junior partner, the
''Hofjude'' or court Jew of tradition.
Soon the Rothschilds were floating government bonds on a much larger
scale -- and then speculating in them. They shrewdly got out of British
consols in 1817, but England was the nation where the family flourished
above all. They acquired opulent houses in London and the country, and
in 1850 Lionel Rothschild was finally accepted as an M.P. when the
parliamentary oath ''on the faith of a true Christian'' was dropped.
The family moved from Tory to Whig, but they were never democratic
egalitarians, and their story isn't necessarily evidence for the
comforting notion that capitalism is the midwife of freedom. There was
nevertheless a political reason for their affinity with England: a
constitutional country with responsible government was quite simply a
better bet. Whatever else the British Government did, it was not going
to repudiate its debts in the manner of Continental autocrats. And so,
as Ferguson shows, from Nathan's time ''relations with the Bank of
England were close and mutually beneficial.''
In this period, England was also a better bet than the United States.
The Rothschilds never became big American players. They liked to lend to
the government of a country before they did commercial business there,
but this was difficult when the United States was a genuinely loose
federation, some of whose states were ''among the least reliable'' of
all borrowers in the 19th century, and especially when Andrew Jackson
was conducting his war against the Bank of the United States.
slate | In Sunset Park, a predominantly Mexican and Chinese neighborhood in
South Brooklyn, St. Jacobi’s Church was one of the go-to hubs for people
who wanted to donate food, clothing, and warm blankets or volunteer
help other New Yorkers who were still suffering in the aftermath of
Hurricane Sandy. On Saturday, Ethan Murphy, one of the people heading
the kitchen operation, estimated they would prepare and send out 10,000
meals to people in need. Thousands and thousands of pounds of clothes
were being sorted, labeled, and distributed, and valuable supplies like
heaters and generators were being loaded up in cars to be taken out to
the Rockaways, Staten Island and other places in need. However, this
well-oiled operation wasn’t organized by the Red Cross, New York Cares,
or some other well-established volunteer group. This massive effort was
the handiwork of none other than Occupy Wall Street—the effort is known
as Occupy Sandy.
The scene at St. Jacobis on Saturday was friendly, orderly chaos.
Unlike other shelters that had stopped collecting donations or were
looking for volunteers with special skills such as medical training,
Occupy Sandy was ready to take anyone willing to help. A wide range of
people pitched in, including a few small children making peanut butter
sandwiches, but most volunteers were in their 20s and 30s. A large
basement rec room had become a hive of vegetable chopping and clothes
bagging. They held orientations throughout the day for new volunteers.
One of the orientation leaders, Ian Horst, who has been involved with a
local group called Occupy Sunset Park for the past year, says he was
“totally blown away by the response” and the sheer numbers of people who
showed up and wanted to help. He estimated that he’d given an
orientation to 200 people in the previous hour.
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