uptight chickenshits playing soldier the most dangerous drug of all...,

Just look at that face - any more puckered and he'd burst a vein!

WaPo |  The American Civil Liberties Union has released the results of its year-long study of police militarization. The study looked at 800 deployments of SWAT teams among 20 local, state and federal police agencies in 2011-2012. Among the notable findings:

• 62 percent of the SWAT raids surveyed were to conduct searches for drugs.
• Just under 80 percent were to serve a search warrant, meaning eight in 10 SWAT raids were not initiated to apprehend a school shooter, hostage taker, or escaped felon (the common justification for these tactics), but to investigate someone still only suspected of committing a crime.
• In fact, just 7 percent of SWAT raids were “for hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.”
• In at least 36 percent of the SWAT raids studies, no contraband of any kind was found. The report notes that due to incomplete police reports on these raids this figure could be as high as 65 percent.
• SWAT tactics are disproportionately used on people of color.
• 65 percent of SWAT deployments resulted in some sort of forced entry into a private home, by way of a battering ram, boot, or some sort of explosive device. In over half those raids, the police failed to find any sort of weapon, the presence of which was cited as the reason for the violent tactics.
• Ironically (or perhaps not), searches to serve warrants on people suspected of drug crimes were more likely to result in forced entry than raids conducted for other purposes.
• Though often justified for rare incidents like school shootings or terrorist situations, the armored personnel vehicles police departments are getting from the Pentagon and through grants from the Department of Homeland Security are commonly used on drug raids.

In other words, where violent, volatile SWAT tactics were once used only in limited situations where someone was in the process of or about to commit a violent crime — where the police were using violence only to defuse an already violent situation — SWAT teams today are overwhelmingly used to investigate people who are still only suspected of committing nonviolent consensual crimes. And because these raids often involve forced entry into homes, often at night, they’re actually creating violence and confrontation where there was none before.

When SWAT teams are used in a way that’s consistent with their original purpose, they’re used carefully and cautiously. The ACLU report finds that, “In nearly every deployment involving a barricade, hostage, or active shooter, the SWAT report provided specific facts that gave the SWAT team reason to believe there was an armed and often dangerous suspect.” By contrast . . .

 . . . incident reports for search warrant executions, especially in drug investigations, often contained no information about why the SWAT team was being sent in, other than to note that the warrant was “high risk,” or else provided otherwise unsubstantiated information such as “suspect is believed to be armed.” In case after case that the ACLU examined, when a SWAT team was deployed to search a person’s home for drugs, officers determined that a person was “likely to be armed” on the basis of suspected but unfounded gang affiliations, past weapons convictions, or some other factor that did not truly indicate a basis for believing that the person in question was likely to be armed at the moment of the SWAT deployment. Of course, a reasonable belief that weapons are present should not by itself justify a SWAT deployment. Given that almost half of American households have guns, use of a SWAT team could almost always be justified if this were the sole factor.

But we’ve already seen cases in which the mere factor that the resident of a home was a legal gun owner — in some cases by virtue of the fact that the owner had obtained some sort of state license — was used as an excuse to execute a full-on SWAT raid to serve a warrant for an otherwise nonviolent crime.

the secret plan to close social security's offices and outsource its work

commondreams |  For months there have been rumors that the Social Security Administration has a “secret plan” to close all of its field offices. Is it true? A little-known report commissioned by the SSA the request of Congress seems to hold the answer. The summary document outlining the plan, which is labeled “for internal use only,” is unavailable from the SSA but can be found here.

Does the document, entitled “Long Term Strategic Vision and Vision Elements,” really propose shuttering all field offices? The answer, buried beneath a barrage of obfuscatory consultantese, clearly seems to be “yes.” Worse, the report also suggests that many of the SSA’s critical functions could soon be outsourced to private-sector partners and contractors.

Here are five insights from this austerity-minded outline.

the mysterious history of marijuana (raises more kwestins than it answers)

npr | Marijuana has been intertwined with race and ethnicity in America since well before the word "marijuana" was coined. The drug, , has a disturbing case of multiple personality disorder: It's a go-to pop culture punch line. It's the foundation of a growing recreational and medicinal industry. , it's also the reason for more than half of the drug arrests in the U.S. A deeply disproportionate number of marijuana arrests (the vast majority of which are for possession) befall African-Americans, despite similar rates of usage among whites and blacks, the ACLU says.

Throughout the 19th century, news reports and medical journal articles almost always use the plant's formal name, cannabis. Numerous accounts say that "marijuana" came into popular usage in the U.S. in the early 20th century because anti-cannabis factions wanted to underscore the drug's "Mexican-ness." It was meant to play off of anti-immigrant sentiments.

A common version of the story of the criminalization of pot goes like this: Cannabis was outlawed because various powerful interests (some of which have economic motives to suppress hemp production) were able to craft it into a bogeyman in the popular imagination, by spreading tales of homicidal mania touched off by consumption of the dreaded Mexican "locoweed." Fear of brown people combined with fear of nightmare drugs used by brown people to produce a wave of public action against the "marijuana menace." That combo led to restrictions in state after state, ultimately resulting in federal prohibition.

But this version of the story starts to prompt more questions than answers when you take a close look at the history of the drug in the U.S.: What role did race actually play in the perception of the drug? Are historical accounts of pot usage — including references to Mexican "locoweed" — even talking about the same drug we know as marijuana today? How did the plant and its offshoots get so many darn names (reefer, pot, weed, hashish, dope, ganja, bud, and on and on and on) anyway? And while we're on the subject, how did it come to be called "marijuana"?

Let's start with the race question. Eric Schlosser recounts some of the racially charged history of marijuana in (some of the source material for the best-selling book):

"The political upheaval in Mexico that culminated in the Revolution of 1910 led to a wave of Mexican immigration to states throughout the American Southwest. The prejudices and fears that greeted these peasant immigrants also extended to their traditional means of intoxication: smoking marijuana. Police officers in Texas claimed that marijuana incited violent crimes, aroused a "lust for blood," and gave its users "superhuman strength." Rumors spread that Mexicans were distributing this "killer weed" to unsuspecting American schoolchildren. Sailors and West Indian immigrants brought the practice of smoking marijuana to port cities along the Gulf of Mexico. In New Orleans newspaper articles associated the drug with African-Americans, jazz musicians, prostitutes, and underworld whites. "The Marijuana Menace," as sketched by anti-drug campaigners, was personified by inferior races and social deviants."

In 1937, U.S. Narcotics Commissioner Henry Anslinger testified before Congress in the hearings that would result in the introduction of federal restrictions on marijuana. , Anslinger's testimony included a letter from Floyd Baskette, the city editor of the Alamosa (Colo.) Daily Courier, which said in part, "I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigaret can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents. That's why our problem is so great; the greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons, most of who [sic! such an enthusiastic sic!] are low mentally, because of social and racial conditions."

Folks weren't just worrying about Mexicans and jazz musicians, either. "Within the last year we in California have been getting a large influx of Hindoos and they have in turn started quite a demand for cannabis indica," wrote Henry J. Finger, a powerful member of California's State Board of Pharmacy, (page 18). "They are a very undesirable lot and the habit is growing in California very fast; the fear is now that it is not being confined to the Hindoos alone but that they are initiating our whites into this habit."

the emperor wears no clothes

READ THE BOOK ONLINE

the elkhorn manifesto: what do hemp and hitler have in common?

archive | Before the Gatewood Galbraith for Governor Campaign in 1991, few Kentuckians knew that the plant that the federal government had demonized for over 50 years as "Marijuana - Assassin of Youth," was, in fact, Cannabis Hemp, the most traded commodity in the world until the mid-1800s, and our state's number one crop, industry, and most important source of revenue, for over 150 years. 

Today, thanks to the efforts of pioneer hemp researchers and public advocates such as Galbraith, Jack Fraizer, Jack Herer, Chris Conrad, Ed Rosenthal, Don Wirtshafter and others, the federal government's unjustifiable suppression of our state's right to develop our most valuable and versatile natural resource, is facing increasing opposition from an informed public. Hemp is now recognized as the number one agriculturally renewable raw material in the world, and perhaps the only crop / industry which can guarantee us industrial and economic independence from the trans-national corporations.

"Shadow of the Swastika" is a follow-up to my earlier work, "Cannabis Hemp: the Invisible Prohibition Revealed," which I wrote and published in support of the Galbraith Campaign. Since publication of that booklet, there has been growing public acceptance of the evidence that Marijuana Prohibition was created in 1937, not to protect society from the "evils of the drug Marijuana," as the Federal government claimed, but as an act of deliberate economic and industrial sabotage against the re-emerging Industrial Hemp Industry.

Previous investigations by hemp researchers have been limited to the suppression of free-market competition from the hemp industry, and focused on the activities of three prominent members of America's corporate, industrial and banking establishment during the mid- to late-1930s:

WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST, the newspaper and magazine tycoon.

The expected rebirth of cannabis hemp as a less expensive source of pulp for paper meant his millions of acres of prime timberland, and investment in wood pulp papermaking equipment, would soon be worth much less. In the 1920s, about the same time as the equipment was developed to economically mass-produce raw hemp into pulp and fiber for paper, he began the "Reefer Madness" hoax in his newspaper and magazine publications.

ANDREW MELLON, founder of the Gulf Oil Corporation.

He knew that cannabis hemp was an alternative industrial raw material for the production of thousands of products, including fuel and plastics, which, if allowed to compete in the free-market, would threaten the future profits of the oil companies. As Secretary of the Treasury he created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and appointed his own future nephew-in-law, Harry Anslinger, as director. Anslinger would later use the sensational, and totally fabricated, articles published by Hearst, to push the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 through Congress, which successfully destroyed the rebirth of the cannabis hemp industry. A prominent member of one Congressional subcommittee who voted in favor of this bill was Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania, an oil tycoon and former business partner of Andrew Mellon in the Spindletop oil fields in Texas.

THE DU PONT CHEMICAL CORPORATION,

which owned the patents on synthetic petrochemicals and industrial processes that promised billions of dollars in future profits from the sale of wood pulp paper, lead additives for gasoline, synthetic fibers and plastics, if hemp could be suppressed. At the time, du Pont family influence in both government and the private sector was unmatched, according to historians and journalists.

This publication, however, reveals documented historical evidence that the suppression of the hemp industry was only one key part of a much larger conspiracy in the 1930s, not only by the three corporate interests named above, but by many others, as well. 

Congressional records, FBI reports and investigations by the Justice Department, during the 1930s and 1940s, have already documented evidence of this wider plot. A list of the corporations named include Du Pont, Standard Oil, and General Motors, all of which were proven to be conspiring with Nazi industrial cartels to eliminate competition world-wide and divide among themselves the Earth's industrial resources and commercial markets, for profitable exploitation.

This conspiracy succeeded. It is now obvious that this lack of serious competition in the industrial raw materials market caused our present - and totally contrived - addiction to petrochemicals. Its success is directly responsible for the most troubling problems we now face in the 1990s; serious damage to our environment, concentration of economic and political power into fewer and fewer hands, and the weakening of the rights of individuals and states to determine their own futures.

It is more and more evident that, given the historical record, the structure of the New World Order is being built upon the Foundation of Marijuana Prohibition, and only the relegalization of free-market hemp competition can save us.

R. William Davis
July 4, 1996
Louisville, Kentucky

the fascinating endocannabinoidal system

stanford |  A new study led by investigators at the Stanford University School of Medicine has implicated the blocking of endocannabinoids — signaling substances that are the brain’s internal versions of the psychoactive chemicals in marijuana and hashish — in the early pathology of Alzheimer’s disease.

A substance called A-beta — strongly suspected to play a key role in Alzheimer’s because it’s the chief constituent of the hallmark clumps dotting the brains of people with Alzheimer’s — may, in the disease’s earliest stages, impair learning and memory by blocking the natural, beneficial action of endocannabinoids in the brain, the study demonstrates. The Stanford group is now trying to figure out the molecular details of how and where this interference occurs. Pinning down those details could pave the path to new drugs to stave off the defects in learning ability and memory that characterize Alzheimer’s.

In the study, published June 18 in Neuron, researchers analyzed A-beta’s effects on a brain structure known as the hippocampus. In all mammals, this midbrain structure serves as a combination GPS system and memory-filing assistant, along with other duties.

“The hippocampus tells us where we are in space at any given time,” said Daniel Madison, PhD, associate professor of molecular and cellular physiology and the study’s senior author. “It also processes new experiences so that our memories of them can be stored in other parts of the brain. It’s the filing secretary, not the filing cabinet.” Fist tap Dale.

mysteries of morality

pdescioli |  Evolutionary theories of morality, beginning with Darwin, have focused on explanations for altruism. More generally, these accounts have concentrated on conscience (self-regulatory mechanisms) to the neglect of condemnation (mechanisms for punishing others). As a result, few theoretical tools are available for understanding the rapidly accumulating data surrounding third-party judgment and punishment. Here we consider the strategic interactions among actors, victims, and third-parties to help illuminate condemnation. Weargue that basic differences between the adaptive problems faced by actors and third-parties indicate that actor conscience and third-party condemnation are likely performed by different cognitive mechanisms. Further, we argue that current theories of conscience do not easily explain its experimentally demonstrated insensitivity to consequences. However, these results might be explicable if conscience functions, in part, as a defense system for avoiding third-party punishment. If conscience serves defensive functions, then its computational structure should be closely tailored to the details of condemnation mechanisms. This possibility underscores the need for a better understanding of condemnation, which is important not only in itself but also for explaining the nature of conscience. We outline three evolutionary mysteries of condemnation that require further attention: third-party judgment, moralistic punishment, and moral impartiality

the game theory of life

guardian | In what appears to be the first study of its kind, computer scientists report that an algorithm discovered more than 50 years ago in game theory and now widely used in machine learning is mathematically identical to the equations used to describe the distribution of genes within a population of organisms. Researchers may be able to use the algorithm, which is surprisingly simple and powerful, to better understand how natural selection works and how populations maintain their genetic diversity.

By viewing evolution as a repeated game, in which individual players, in this case genes, try to find a strategy that creates the fittest population, researchers found that evolution values both diversity and fitness.

Some biologists say that the findings are too new and theoretical to be of use; researchers don't yet know how to test the ideas in living organisms. Others say the surprising connection, published Monday in the advance online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help scientists understand a puzzling feature of natural selection: The fittest organisms don't always wipe out their weaker competition. Indeed, as evidenced by the menagerie of life on Earth, genetic diversity reigns.

"It's a very different way to look at selection," said Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University who was not involved in the study. "I always find radically different ways of looking at a problem interesting."

the maximum power principle traps you humans in an evolutionary loop...,

jayhanson |  Since natural selection occurs under thermodynamic laws, individual and group behaviors are biased by the MPP to generate maximum power, which requires over-reproduction and/or over-consumption of resources[3] whenever system constraints allow it. Individuals and families will form social groups to generate more power by degrading more energy. Differential power generation and accumulation result in a hierarchical group structure.

Overshoot eventually leads to decreasing power attainable for the group with lower-ranking members suffering first. Low-rank members will form subgroups and coalitions to demand a greater share of power from higher-ranking individuals who will resist by forming their own coalitions to maintain it. Meanwhile, social conflict will intensify as available power continues to fall.

Eventually, members of the weakest group (high or low rank) are forced to “disperse.”[4] Those members of the weak group who do not disperse are killed,[5] enslaved, or in modern times imprisoned. By most estimates, 10 to 20 percent of Stone-Age people died at the hands of other humans. The process of overshoot, followed by forced dispersal, may be seen as a sort of repetitive pumping action—a collective behavioral loop—that drove humans into every inhabitable niche.

Here is a synopsis of the behavioral loop described above:

Step 1. Individual and group behaviors are biased by the MPP to generate maximum power, which requires over-reproduction and/or over-consumption of natural resources (overshoot), whenever systemic constraints allow it. Individuals and families will form social groups to generate more power by degrading more energy. Differential power generation and accumulation result in a hierarchical group structure.

Step 2. Energy is always limited, so overshoot eventually leads to decreasing power available to the group, with lower-ranking members suffering first.

Step 3. Diminishing power availability creates divisive subgroups within the original group. Low-rank members will form subgroups and coalitions to demand a greater share of power from higher-ranking individuals, who will resist by forming their own coalitions to maintain power.

Step 4. Violent social strife eventually occurs among subgroups who demand a greater share of the remaining power.

Step 5. The weakest subgroups (high or low rank) are either forced to disperse to a new territory, are killed, enslaved, or imprisoned.

Step 6. Go back to step 1.

The above loop was repeated countless thousands of times during the millions of years that we were evolving[6]. This behavior is entrained in our genetic material and will be repeated until we go extinct. Carrying capacity will decline [7] with each future iteration of the overshoot loop, and this will cause human numbers to decline until they reach levels not seen since the Pleistocene.

Current models used to predict the end of the biosphere suggest that sometime between 0.5 billion to 1.5 billion years from now, land life as we know it will end on Earth due to the combination of CO₂ starvation and increasing heat. It is this decisive end that biologists and planetary geologists have targeted for attention. However, all of their graphs reveal an equally disturbing finding: that global productivity will plummet from our time onward, and indeed, it already has been doing so for the last 300 million years.[8]

It’s impossible to know the details of how our rush to extinction will play itself out, but we do know that it is going to be hell for those who are unlucky to be alive at the time.

the principal of hierarchical coincidence is conspicuously obvious to the casual observer...,

theatlantic | The arrangement of positions along the left-right axis—progressive to reactionary, or conservative to liberal, communist to fascist, socialist to capitalist, or Democrat to Republican—is conceptually confused, ideologically tendentious, and historically contingent. And any position anywhere along it is infested by contradictions.

Transcending partisanship is going to require what seems beyond the capacities of either side: thinking about the left-right spectrum rather than from it. The terminology arose in revolutionary France in 1789, where it referred to the seating of royalists and anti-royalists in the Assembly. It is plausible to think of the concept (if not the vocabulary) as emerging in pre-revolutionary figures such as Rousseau and Burke. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation of “left” and “right” used in the political sense in English is in Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution in 1837, but the idea only crystallized fully with the emergence and under the aegis of Marxism, in the middle of the 19th century. It was not fully current in English-speaking countries until early in the 20th.

Before that, and outside of the West, there have been many intellectual structures for defining and arranging political positions. To take one example, the radical and egalitarian reform movements of the early and mid-19th century in the U.S.—such as abolitionism, feminism, and pacifism—were by and large evangelical Christian, and were radically individualist and anti-statist. I have in mind such figures as Lucretia Mott, Henry David Thoreau, and William Lloyd Garrison, who articulated perfectly coherent positions that cannot possibly be characterized as on the left or the right.

The most common way that the left-right spectrum is conceived—and the basic way it is characterized in the Pew survey—is as state against capital.* Democrats insist that government makes many positive contributions to our lives, while Republicans argue that it is a barrier to the prosperity created by free markets. On the outer ends we might pit Chairman Mao against Ayn Rand in a cage match of state communism against laissez-faire capitalism.

The basic set of distinctions on both sides rests on the idea that state and corporation, or political and economic power, can be pulled apart and set against each other. This is, I propose, obviously false, because hierarchies tend to coincide. Let's call that PHC, or Principle of Hierarchical Coincidence. A corollary of PHC is that resources flow toward political power, and political power flows toward resources; or, the power of state and of capital typically appear in conjunction and are mutually reinforcing. 

I'd say it's obvious that PHC is true, and that everyone knows it to be true. A white-supremacist polity in which black people were wealthier than white people, for example, would be extremely surprising. It would be no less surprising if regulatory capture were not pervasive. You could keep trying to institute reforms to pull economic and political power apart, but this would be counter-productive, because when you beef up the state to control capital, you only succeed in making capital more monolithic, more concentrated, and more able to exercise a wider variety of powers. (Consider the relation of Goldman Sachs to the Treasury Department over the last several decades, or Halliburton and the Pentagon, or various communications and Internet concerns and NSA. The distinction between "public" and "private" is rather abstract in relation to the on-the-ground overlap.)

world refugees top 50 million in 2013 - worse than in WW-II

RT |  The number of people who fled their homes across the globe in 2013 is over 50 million for the first time since World War II, a new UN report says. Amnesty International blamed the UN for ineffective or delayed responses to ongoing conflicts.

In total, there were registered 51.2 million refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people last year. On average, 32,200 people fled their homes each day, according to the report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, titled “War’s Human Cost.” 

"We are witnessing a quantum leap in forced displacement in the world," António Guterres, head of the UN's refugee agency, told The Guardian. 

A total of 16.7 million people are refugees. Apart from 5 million Palestinians, Afghans, Syrians and Somalis are 50 percent, with the main host countries Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.

Then, about 1.2 million people sought asylum to mostly developed countries, and Germany was the largest recipient. Most of the asylum seekers were from Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo and Myanmar. 

Finally, internally displaced people were a historic 33.3 million people – forced to flee their homes, but staying within their country’s borders. 

Over 50 percent of the refugees are children, with many of them traveling alone and some falling into the hands of human traffickers – that’s according to the UNHCR annual global trends report, issued Friday. 

More than 25,000 children asked for asylum in 77 countries last year, and according to the document, it’s just a small percentage of the number of displaced children around the world. 

The main causes for the jump in figures are climate change, population growth, urbanization, food insecurity and water scarcity. In many cases, the causes are combined with each other.

TISA vs Public Services

digitaljournal |  Wikileaks today released secret draft text from the Trades in Services Agreement negotiations that confirms the concerns first raised by the global trade union Public Services International in the recent ground-breaking report 'TISA versus Public Services.'

Fronting themselves as the 'Really Good Friends of Services,' a group of 50 countries-representing an estimated 70 per cent share of the world's trade in services-are secretly negotiating the TISA. This deal will open up a wide range of public services to be sold permanently for private profit.

This massive trade deal will put public health care, child care, postal, broadcasting, water, power, transport and other services at risk. The TISA will lock in the privatisations of services-even in cases where private service delivery has failed-meaning governments can never return water, energy, health, education or other services to public hands.

The TISA will also restrict a government's right to regulate stronger standards in the public's interest. For example, it will affect environmental regulations, licensing of health facilities and laboratories, waste disposal centres, power plants, school and university accreditation and broadcast licenses. The proposed deal will also restrict a government's ability to regulate key sectors including financial, energy, telecommunications and cross-border data flows.

The TISA will limit the ability of governments to regulate the financial services industry at exactly the time when the global economy is still recovering from a crisis caused by financial deregulation.

Responding to today's leak, Public Services International General Secretary Rosa Pavanelli says, "This agreement is all about making it easier for corporations to make profits and operate with impunity across borders. The aim of public services should not be to make profits for large multinational corporations. Ensuring that failed privatisations can never be reversed is free market ideology gone mad.

"The secrecy surrounding these negotiations to extend controversial GATS arrangements into a wide range of areas previously rejected is anti-democratic in the extreme. If our governments are doing nothing wrong - why are they hiding these texts?

trade in services agreement

wikileaks |  Today, WikiLeaks released the secret draft text for the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) Financial Services Annex, which covers 50 countries and 68.2%¹ of world trade in services. The US and the EU are the main proponents of the agreement, and the authors of most joint changes, which also covers cross-border data flow. In a significant anti-transparency manoeuvre by the parties, the draft has been classified to keep it secret not just during the negotiations but for five years after the TISA enters into force.

Despite the failures in financial regulation evident during the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis and calls for improvement of relevant regulatory structures², proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets. The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt – into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. The leaked draft also shows that the US is particularly keen on boosting cross-border data flow, which would allow uninhibited exchange of personal and financial data.

TISA negotiations are currently taking place outside of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) framework. However, the Agreement is being crafted to be compatible with GATS so that a critical mass of participants will be able to pressure remaining WTO members to sign on in the future. Conspicuously absent from the 50 countries covered by the negotiations are the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The exclusive nature of TISA will weaken their position in future services negotiations. 

The draft text comes from the April 2014 negotiation round - the sixth round since the first held in April 2013. The next round of negotiations will take place on 23-27 June in Geneva, Switzerland.

Current WTO parties negotiating TISA are: Australia, Canada, Chile, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), Colombia, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Korea, Switzerland, Turkey, the United States, and the European Union, which includes its 28 member states Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

China and Uruguay have expressed interest in joining the negotiations but so far are not included.

[1] Swiss National Center for Competence in Research: A Plurilateral Agenda for Services?: Assessing the Case for a Trade in Services Agreement, Working Paper No. 2013/29, May 2013, p. 10.

[2] For example, in June 2012 Ecuador tabled a discussion on re-thinking regulation and GATS rules; in September 2009 the Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, convened by the President of the United Nations and chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, released its final report, stating that "All trade agreements need to be reviewed to ensure that they are consistent with the need for an inclusive and comprehensive international regulatory framework which is conducive to crisis prevention and management, counter-cyclical and prudential safeguards, development, and inclusive finance."

Read the Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) - Financial Services Annex

Read the Analysis Article - Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) - Financial Services Annex

Recommended reading

• On the Wrong Side of Globalization, by Joseph E. Stiglitz, March 15, 2014.
• U.S. Foreign Trade in Services: Trends and Policy Challenges, by the Congressional Research Service, May 15, 2014.
• TISA versus Public Services, a Public Services International study by Scott Sinclair and Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, April 28, 2014.
• Public Citizen's Finance Regulation Factsheet
• Our World is Not for Sale Factsheet on TISA

wikileaks cables confirm new ukrainian president has been working for the u.s. government since 2006

rsn | here's not much point in staging a coup if you don't influence who is placed in power in the aftermath. Of course in order for a puppet government to be effective, they can't be perceived as such. You wouldn't want the natives to get restless would you?

The evidence that the U.S. was behind the toppling of the Ukrainian government early this year is so overwhelming at this point that the subject really isn't up for debate, however initially it was unclear how the election of Petro Poroshenko fit in. The ecstatic response by Washington when he was declared the winner, and their unbending support in spite of his ongoing military assault against civilians in the east, made it clear that he was the chosen one, but the paper trail wasn't immediately obvious.

As it turns out, the evidence that Poroshenko is in the pocket of the U.S. State Department has been available all this time, you just had to know where to find it. In a classified diplomatic cable from 2006 released by Wikileaks.org, U.S. officials refer to Poroshenko as "Our Ukraine (OU) insider Petro Poroshenko".

A separate cable also released by Wikileaks makes it clear that the U.S. government was considered Poroshenko corrupt.

"Poroshenko was tainted by credible corruption allegations, but wielded significant influence within OU; Poroshenko's price had to be paid."

The U.S. government knew Poroshenko was dirty, but he was influential, and arguably their most dependable mole.

Perhaps the most interesting revelation comes from a 2009 cable where Poroshenko told then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton he supported "the opening of a U.S. diplomatic presence in Crimea" and "He emphasized the importance of Crimea, and said that having U.S. representation there would be useful for Ukraine." Poroshenko's role as an informant for the U.S. government continued in cables in 2010 as well.

is open-ended chaos the aim?

counterpunch |  During the last week we have seen Sunni militias take control of ever-greater swathes of eastern Syria and western Iraq. In the mainstream media, the analysis of this emerging reality has been predictably idiotic, basically centering on whether:

    a) Obama is to blame for this for having removed US troops in compliance with the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) negotiated and signed by Bush.

    b) Obama is “man enough” to putatively resolve the problem by going back into the country and killing more people and destroying whatever remains of the country’s infrastructure.

This cynically manufactured discussion has generated a number of intelligent rejoinders on the margins of the mainstream media system. These essays, written by people such as Juan Cole, Robert Parry, Robert Fisk and Gary Leupp, do a fine job of explaining the US decisions that led to the present crisis, while simultaneously reminding us how everything occurring  today was readily foreseeable as far back as 2002.

What none of them do, however, is consider whether the chaos now enveloping the region might, in fact, be the desired aim of policy planners in Washington and Tel Aviv.

Rather, each of these analysts presumes that the events unfolding in Syria and Iraq are undesired outcomes engendered by short-sighted decision-making at the highest levels of the US government over the last 12 years.

Looking at the Bush and Obama foreign policy teams—no doubt the most shallow and intellectually lazy members of that guild to occupy White House in the years since World War II—it is easy to see how they might arrive at this conclusion.

But perhaps an even more compelling reason for adopting this analytical posture is that it allows these men of clear progressive tendencies to maintain one of the more hallowed, if oft-unstated, beliefs of the Anglo-Saxon world view.

What is that?

It is the idea that our engagements with the world outside our borders—unlike those of, say, the Russians and the Chinese—are motivated by a strongly felt, albeit often corrupted, desire to better the lives of those whose countries we invade.

While this belief seems logical, if not downright self-evident within our own cultural system, it is frankly laughable to many, if not most, of the billions who have grown up outside of our moralizing echo chamber.

What do they know that most of us do not know, or perhaps more accurately, do not care to admit?

First, that we are an empire, and that all empires are, without exception, brutally and programmatically self-seeking.

Second, that one of the prime goals of every empire is to foment ongoing internecine conflict in the territories whose resources and/or strategic outposts they covet.

Third, that the most efficient way of sparking such open-ended internecine conflict is to brutally smash the target country’s social matrix and physical infrastructure.

Fourth, that ongoing unrest has the additional perk of justifying the maintenance and expansion of the military machine that feeds the financial and political fortunes of the metropolitan elite.

In short, what of the most of the world understands (and what even the most “prestigious” Anglo-Saxon analysts cannot seem to admit) is that divide and rule is about as close as it gets to a universal recourse the imperial game and that it is, therefore, as important to bear it in mind today as it was in the times of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, the Spanish Conquistadors and the British Raj.

the "new" map of the middle-east

theatlantic |  Almost seven years ago, I wrote a cover story for this magazine about the coming collapse of the post-World War I Middle East map. I conducted the reporting for the story, which we eventually called “After Iraq: What Will the Middle East Look Like,” in the fall of 2007—pre-Obama, pre-Arab Spring, pre-a lot of things—but even back then, it was fairly obvious that the age of Middle East stability (relatively speaking) was coming to an end.

The map you see above, and also embedded below, was the main illustration for the piece, which appeared in the January/February 2008 issue. I introduced the conceit of the story this way:

As America approaches the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the list of the war’s unintended consequences is without end (as opposed to the list of intended consequences, which is, so far, vanishingly brief). The list includes, notably, the likelihood that the Kurds will achieve their independence and that Iraq will go the way of Gaul and be divided into three parts—but it also includes much more than that. Across the Middle East, and into south-central Asia, the intrinsically artificial qualities of several states have been brought into focus by the omnivorous American response to the attacks of 9/11; it is not just Iraq and Afghanistan that appear to be incoherent amalgamations of disparate tribes and territories. The precariousness of such states as Lebanon and Pakistan, of course, predates the invasion of Iraq. But the wars against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and especially Saddam Hussein have made the durability of the modern Middle East state system an open question in ways that it wasn’t a mere seven years ago.

It used to be that the most far-reaching and inventive question one could ask about the Middle East was this: How many states, one or two—Israel or a Palestinian state, or both—will one day exist on the slip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River?

Today, that question seems trivial when compared with this one: How many states will there one day be between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates River? Three? Four? Five? Six? And why stop at the western bank of the Euphrates? Why not go all the way to the Indus River? Between the Mediterranean and the Indus today lie Israel and the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Long-term instability could lead to the breakup of many of these states.

I also made a couple of predictions, informed by various experts:

The most important first-order consequence of the Iraq invasion, envisioned by many of those I spoke to is the possibility of a regional conflict between Sunnis and Shiites for theological and political supremacy in the Middle East. This is a war that could be fought by proxies of Saudi Arabia, the Sunni flag-bearer, against Iran—or perhaps by Iran and Saudi Arabia themselves—on battlefields across Iraq, in Lebanon and Syria, and in Saudi Arabia’s largely Shiite Eastern Province, under which most of the kingdom’s oil lies.

One of the reasons I don’t find myself overly exercised by the apparent collapse of Iraq (and one of the reasons I don’t think it would be wise for the U.S. to rush into Iraq in order to “fix” it) is that I’ve believed for a while that no glue could possibly hold the place together.

suggest the bets and they will come...,

bloomberg |  The global economy faces a new threat from an old enemy: oil. 

A spike in the price of crude foreshadowed economic slumps in each of the last four decades and economists are worrying anew after Brent touched its highest price in nine months above $113 a barrel amid fresh violence in Iraq, OPEC’s second biggest producer. Brent started the year about $6 cheaper. 

The rule of thumb favored by many economists is that every $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil ends up cutting global growth by about 0.2 percentage point. That’s not an inconsequential amount for an already lackluster expansion. The World Bank last week cut its outlook for 2014 global growth to 2.8 percent.

fast approaching neutron-bomb time?

RT | The last seven years have seen a rapid deterioration in world peace and the cost of global violence was put at $1,350 per person, according to an index measuring world peace as several countries slid down the index into civil war and violence.

The economic cost of dealing with world violence stood at $9.8 trillion, or 11.3 percent of total global economic output – as much as the economies of Britain, France, Germany and Italy combined, according to new research by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP). 

The pattern reversed the 60-year trend in more peace after the end of World War II. 

The index was measured gauging conflict, unrest, safety and security as well as militarization and defense spending. 

“Given the deteriorating global situation we cannot be complacent about the institutional bedrocks for peace,” said Steve Killelea, the IEP’s executive chairman, Reuters reported. 

“This is a wakeup call to governments, development agencies, investors and the wider international community that building peace is the prerequisite for economic development,” he added. 

The decline in world peace is not being felt round the world evenly. While 51 countries had improved levels of peace since 2008, 111 had deteriorated.

red-haired sufi devil putting in the work...,

telegraph |  Defying the odds after a dozen years as Iraq’s most wanted man, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam Hussein’s former deputy, has emerged as a key figure in the Sunni advances in the north of the country. 

The septagenarian ex-regime hardman has been reported to have joined fighters near his home town Tikrit and even to have paid a visit to the grave of the former dictator in a symbolic moment of return.

The last surviving top ranked member of the US deck of cards of former Ba’athist leaders, Douri is believed to have fled to neighbouring Syria after the US invasion. His death from kidney failure or leukemia has been rumoured several times.

US officials have however insisted that the deck’s King of Spades has played a key role in the insurgency since at least 2004 and offered a $10 million (£5.9m) bounty for his capture or killing.

The former regime loyalists have regrouped into the Naqshabandi Army, whose fighters are believed to have played just as important role as Isis in the blitz on Mosul and other Sunni areas.

Douri surfaced in a video posting at the start of last year that confirmed his continued survival. Using the vivid language that was well known in Saddam’s Iraq, he vowed to destroyed the “Persian” government of Nouri al-Malaki.

It was a key sectarian message that now demonstrates his common cause with the jihadists of Isis.
But the red-headed, dapper Douri was never one to shy away from stark language.

In a confrontation with the Kuwaiti foreign minister just weeks before the 2003 war, he branded the diplomat a “monkey”, adding “I curse your moustache” - a grave insult in the Arab world

army of the men of the naqshbandi

wikipedia |  The group operates in Kirkuk and other parts of northern Iraq, and is linked to Saddam Hussein's former aide Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who was himself an adherent of the Naqshbandi order and is thought to be the largest militant group that consists of former Baathists .^[9] Outside of Kirkuk, the group has carried out operations in Baghdad, al-Anbar, Ninawa, Diyala and Salah al-Din provinces.^[5]

The Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order frequently film and distribute footage of themselves via their websites attacking American depots and ambushing Iraqi and American forces using mortar strikes and homemade missiles as well as using light machine guns and sniper rifles.^[5]

The group avoided direct confrontation with US Forces in Iraq, relying instead on guerrilla tactics. The groups main focus was on a two-pronged strategy. The first phase is focused on defense, where the group attacks soft targeting while focusing builds up its power whilst training and cooperating with other groups to widen the armed opposition.^[5] Local Emirs, each responsible for 7-10 fighters, were set up in every province. The Emirs were in turn led by an Emir al-Jihad; a grand Sheikh of al-Naqshbandia.^[5] The group is dedicated to secrecy in the carrying out of operations.^[5]

As of 2009 it was believed al-Douri was leading the group from Syria, although the groups leadership was believed to move between Syria and Iraq.

The JRTN was originally composed mainly of groups wishing to restore the old order under the Ba'athist ideology. The JRTN is predominantly composed of Iraqi Sunnis trying to force foreign troops out of Iraq. It is a Sufi Islamic organization with Iraqi and Arab nationalist tendencies. Since the JRTN is led by Saddam's former deputy Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, and contains many former Ba'athists, Arab Nationalism, Arab Socialism, Ba'athism as well as Sufi Islamism and Sunni Islamism have all become an important part of its ideology. The JRTN often emphasises and appeals to different ideologies in different circumstances, appealing to ideals such traditional Arab socialism as well as Islamic unity in order to achieve its goals.^[10]

The group's links to both Sufism and its embrace of violence is controversial as many Sufi followers believe Sufism to be strongly opposed to violence.^[5] Sufism had been tolerated under the Ba'athist government of Saddam Hussein due to its peaceful and relatively apolitical nature. Government tolerance for Sufism even resulted in its adoption by several members of the ruling Ba'ath party.^[5] 

However, despite its roots in a desire to protect Sufis, the group has declared itself to be fighting to maintain Iraq's unity, along with its Arab and Islamic character. As such, the group can be seen as pursuing a nationalistic, as opposed to religious, line.^[5] The group's main desire is to return the former Ba'ath party to power, in part due to the many freedoms Naqashbandi's enjoyed under the Ba'ath party.^[5] Others have accused the group of merely acquiring the Naqashbandi name in order to increase its popularity.^[1] Although the group recognises a direct return to Baathist control is impossible, the group instead focuses on infiltrating former Baathists into positions of power to try to dominate a future nationalist government.^[10] The group then wishes to portray itself, and the wider Baath party, as a technocratic alternative to a currently incompetent Islamist government that is incapable of delivering services. Maintaining chaos in Iraq is a key part of this plan, as the JRTN must ensure living standards do not improve under the current government, so as to make the group appear more attractive.^[10]

The group is strongly anti-Coalition^[1] and supports the targeting of Coalition forces in Iraq, believing that coalition forces including individuals, equipment and supplies, are legitimate targets at any time or place in Iraq. Iraqis are not considered valid targets, unless fighting with Coalition forces. The group is opposed to fighting other insurgent groups, and will cooperate if they are committed to the same agenda.^[5]

People such as Ibrahim al-Sumadaie of the Iraqi Constitutional Party fear that JRNT could become increasingly attractive to Sunnis aggrieved by a Shiite dominated government or those who had previously left the insurgency and switched sides to the Coalition forces to fight al Qaeda, such as the Awakening Councils, who now feel abandoned. Security officials contend that thousands of Sunni insurgents who are upset by Maliki's failure to absorb them into the military are being recruited by JRTN and will pose a threat to stability. This is in turn helped by the fact that JRTN survived as the popularity of more fundamentalist groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq waned, leaving them as one of the last few major opposition groups.^[1] The JRTN platform is attractive to Sunnis, due less to attraction to an explicitly Baathist or Arab nationalist socialist platform, as much as it is an attraction to the idea of the creation of an area where Sunnis can be Sunnis.^[5]

According to a US intelligence officer,^[who?] members of JRTN can often be respected figures within local government, or influential figures within their communities. These figures don't necessarily act violently, allowing them to blend in and making it difficult to obtain warrants issued by the Iraqi court to arrest them. JRTN cells have also been characterized as being similar to a familial organization, with members often being part of the same family, or being tied to the Sheikh Maqsud sub-tribe of the Al-Douris, meaning that at its most fundamental level, JRTN is an Al-Douri family business.^[5] The group also relies on tribal loyalties of Sunni Arabs for support in Kirkuk province, where many Sunni Arabs were located to from Tikrit during Saddam Hussein's tenure.^[1]

naqshbandi

wikipedia |  Naqshbandi (an-Naqshbandiyyah, Nakşibendi, Naksibendi, Naksbandi) is a major spiritual order of Sunni Islam Sufism. It is the only Sufi way that traces its spiritual lineage to the Islamic prophet Muhammad, through Abu Bakr, the first Caliph and Muhammad's companion. Some Naqshbandi orders trace their lineage through Ali,^[1] Muhammad's cousin, son-in-law and the fourth Caliph, in keeping with most other Sufi paths.^[2][3]

Spiritual lineage criteria

In Sufism, as in any serious Islamic discipline such as jurisprudence (fiqh), Quranic recital (tajwid), and hadith, a disciple must have a master or sheikh from whom to take the knowledge, one who has himself taken it from a master, and so on, in a continuous chain of masters back to Muhammad. According to Carl W. Ernst:^[4]

Within the Sufi tradition, the formation of the orders did not immediately produce lineages of master and disciple. There are few examples before the eleventh century of complete lineages going back to the Prophet Muhammad. Yet the symbolic im­portance of these lineages was immense: they provided a channel to divine author­ity through master-disciple chains. It was through such chains of masters and disciples that spiritual power and blessings were transmitted to both general and spe­cial devotees.

This means that a Sufi master has met and taken the way from a master, and that during his life­time he has explicitly and verifiably invested the disciple—whether in writing or in front of a number of witnesses—as a fully authorized master (murshid ma’dhun) of the spiritual path to succeeding generations of disciples.

Such spiritual transmission from an unbroken line of masters is one criterion that distinguishes a true or ‘con­nected’ Sufi path (tariqa muttasila), from an inauthentic or "dissevered" path, (tariqa munqati‘a). The leader of a dissevered path may claim to be a Sufi master on the basis of an authorization given by a master in private or other unverifi­able circumstance, or by a figure already passed from this world, such as one of the righteous person or Muhammad, or in a dream, or so on.

These practices only “warm the heart” (yusta’nasu biha) but none meets Sufism’s condition that a Sufi master must have a clear authorization connecting him with Muhammad, one that is verified by others than himself. Without such publicly verifiable authorizations, the Sufi path would be com­promised by the whims of the people.

The chain of spiritual transmission is not tied to a country, family or political appointment, but is a direct heart to heart transmission, at or after the time of death or burial. It is also considered that the appointed sheikhs will be in some communication with past sheikhs. All are joined by their common spiritual allegiance to the master of spiritual lineages, Muhammad.

Syria and Palestine

The Naqshbandiyya was introduced into Syria at the end of the 17th century by Murad Ali al-Bukhari, who was initiated in India. Later, he established himself in Damascus, but traveled throughout Arabia. His branch became known as the Muradiyya. After his death in 1720, his descendents formed the Muradi family of scholars and sheikhs who continued to head the Muradiyya. In 1820 and onward, Khalid Shahrazuri rose as the prominent Naqshbandi leader in the Ottoman world. After the death of Khalid in 1827, his order became known as the Khalidiyya, which continued to spread for at least two decades. In Syria and Lebanon, the leaders of every active Naqshbandiyya group acknowledged its spiritual lineage, which had retained the original Naqshbandiyya way.

why the .000001% is failing you humans, all-the-time, everytime....,

Forbes |  Across the board, the more CEOs get paid, the worse their companies do over the next three years, according to extensive new research. This is true whether they’re CEOs at the highest end of the pay spectrum or the lowest. “The more CEOs are paid, the worse the firm does over the next three years, as far as stock performance and even accounting performance,” says one of the authors of the study, Michael Cooper of the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business.

The conventional wisdom among executive pay consultants, boards of directors and investors is that CEOs make the best decisions for their companies when they have the most skin in the game. That’s why big chunks of the compensation packages for the highest-paid CEOs come in the form of stock and stock options. Case in point: The world’s top-earning CEO, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, took in $77 million worth of stock-based compensation last year, according to The New York Times, after refusing his performance bonus and accepting only $1 in salary (he made a stunning total of $96 million in 2012). But does all that stock motivate Ellison to make the best calls for his company?

The empirical evidence before fell on both sides of that question, but those studies used small sample sizes. Now Cooper and two professors, one at Purdue and the other at the University of Cambridge, have studied a large data set of the 1,500 companies with the biggest market caps, supplied by a firm called Execucomp. They also looked at pay and company performance in three-year periods over a relatively long time span, from 1994-2013, and compared what are known as firms’ “abnormal” performance, meaning a company’s revenues and profits as compared with like companies in their fields. They were startled to find that the more CEOs got paid, the worse their companies did.

Another counter-intuitive conclusion: The negative effect was most pronounced in the 150 firms with the highest-paid CEOs. The finding is especially surprising given the widespread notion that it’s worth it to pay a premium to superstar CEOs like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase (who earned $20 million in 2013) or Lloyd Blankfein ($28 million) of Goldman Sachs. (The study doesn’t reveal individual results for them.) Though Cooper concedes that there could be exceptions at specific companies (the study didn’t measure individual firms), the study shows that as a group, the companies run by the CEOS who were paid at the top 10% of the scale, had the worst performance. 

How much worse? The firms returned 10% less to their shareholders than did their industry peers. 

The study also clearly shows that at the high end, the more CEOs were paid, the worse their companies did; it looked at the very top, the 5% of CEOs who were the highest paid, and found that their companies did 15% worse, on average, than their peers.

How could this be? In a word, overconfidence. CEOs who get paid huge amounts tend to think less critically about their decisions. “They ignore dis-confirming information and just think that they’re right,” says Cooper. Fist tap Dale.

the .000001% away game...,

thenation | Charles and David Koch wrapped up their annual summer seminar on June 16 in Dana Point, California, at the St. Regis Monarch Bay resort—a fitting location for two men whose combined net worth is more than $100 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The highly secretive mega-donor conference, called “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society,” featured a who’s who of Republican political elites. According to conference documents obtained through a source who was in attendance, Representatives Tom Cotton (AR), Cory Gardner (CO) and Jim Jordan (OH) were present, as were Senators Mitch McConnell (KY) and Marco Rubio (FL). Cotton, Gardner and McConnell are all running for the Senate this year; Jordan for re-election in the House. Rubio is widely considered a major contender for a 2016 presidential run. According to the documents, the conference attendees discussed strategy on campaign finance, climate change, healthcare, higher education and opportunities for taking control of the Senate. (The draft agenda is available for viewing here.)

According to another source who also attended the conference, 300 individuals—worth at least a billion each—were present. This source said that the explicit goal was to raise $500 million to take the Senate in the 2014 midterms and another $500 million “to make sure Hillary Clinton is never president.” Three hundred billionaires in attendance is likely an exaggeration; to put that figure in perspective, there are 492 total billionaires in the United States by Forbes’s count. The Koch network raised an estimated $407 million in the 2012 presidential election, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and the Center for Responsive Politics.

The official conference lasted two days, Sunday and Monday, but several events for top donors occurred on Saturday. According to conference documents, Representatives Tom Cotton and Jim Jordan were to join a group of top donors for a post-golf lunch discussion. A special dinner was scheduled at La Casa Pacifica—the former home of President Richard Nixon that has come to be known as “The Western White House”—with Rich DeVos, the Amway co-founder, owner of the Orlando Magic and frequent Koch collaborator. The menu offered “oven roasted Angus natural filet mignon served in a fresh green peppercorn sauce served with braised fennel with truffle, asparagus tips, vegetable and mint quinoa” among other dishes prepared by Master Chef Maurice Brazier.

La Casa Pacifica is currently owned by Gavin Herbert, the founder of the pharmaceutical company Allergan and a Republican heavyweight. Herbert is a GOP donor and Nixon confidant, and Allergan is a major funder of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative powerhouse behind model legislation that would bust unions, repeal environmental protections, require voter ID and increase access to guns and justify their use in Stand Your Ground cases.

the .000001% at home...,

NYTimes |  In national politics, playing in Charles Koch’s arena can mean saturation advertising against vulnerable Democrats, calls for tax cuts, demands to roll back government regulation and bitter clashes over climate change.

Here in the windswept hometown of the Koch family and Koch Industries, playing in Charles Koch Arena means something else entirely.

“I would be hard-pressed to find two things that are more important to this community than Koch Industries and Shocker basketball,” said Gregg Marshall, coach of the Wichita State University men’s team, which packs the arena, a house that Mr. Koch restored with his donations. “They put a nice chunk of change into this building.”

Welcome to Kochville, where the family name conjures up something decidedly different from the specter raised by Democrats of secretive political operations funded by tens of millions of dollars in anonymous campaign money. For many living here in Wichita along the Arkansas River, it stands instead for well-paying jobs, extensive philanthropy like the $6 million for the arena renovation, and Kansas pride in being the headquarters of Koch Industries, the nation’s second-largest privately held company, which produces oil, fertilizer and common household items.

Outside of Kochville, the brothers Charles and David Koch, whose worth is estimated at more than $50 billion each, are ready villains. Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader, regularly skewers them on the Senate floor. Others have proposed a constitutional amendment aimed at diluting their influence. The two are even the subject of an updated documentary titled “Koch Brothers Exposed: 2014 Edition.”

But the charged atmosphere surrounding the Kochs elsewhere dissipates markedly in the city where their father, Fred Koch, started his business in 1925, even though the positive sentiment toward the Kochs is hardly universally shared.

no time for rhetoric, adu bakr al-baghdadi closes in on his namesake...,

CNN |  As Islamic militants continue their murderous advance across Iraq, they have a new target in their sights: the city of Baquba, less than 40 miles north of Baghdad. 

Gun battles erupted in the city, only a 45-minute drive from the capital, on Tuesday as fighters and Iraqi government forces clashed.

Civilians are fleeing violence there and elsewhere in Iraq even as the United States bolsters its manpower in the region while it mulls what action to take.

According to a Baquba police official and an official in the Baquba governor's office, militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, have "made a great advance on Baquba" and are pushing very hard to take it, but the city has not fallen.

The Baquba officials told CNN that ISIS is moving in on the western side of Baquba and that villages just west of the city, as well as some areas in western Baquba, are under ISIS control.

Some families, mainly Shiite, are fleeing that side of the city, the officials said. They are moving deeper into Baquba or leaving the city altogether to escape the looming violence.

The ISIS push started late Monday with a large-scale attack on the Al Wahda police station on the western edge of Baquba.

Heavy clashes between Iraqi security forces and ISIS militants ensued, leaving at least one Iraqi security force member, nine militants and 44 prisoners dead, according to the Baquba officials. Iraqi state television reported that 52 prisoners were killed after ISIS militants threw hand grenades into the local prison.