is there a case for treason?

rsn |  So yes, war is on the table, and innocent people die as a result of the ongoing Natural Resource Procurement Wars every day – including Americans.

Against that backdrop comes the effort by the Obama administration, in concert with Congressional Republicans, to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, and its deeply troubling Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system provisions.

What is specifically of interest to the investors whose interests are central to the TPP agreement is natural resources. Not production, of course. Goods can now be produced anywhere. As long as workers are willing or compelled to accept ruthless exploitation, the international investor class has plenty of “jobs” available for them. Will American workers see more jobs? Yes – if they are on their knees.

From old-growth forests to agricultural products, to fracked natural gas, to Arctic oil, to bobcat pelts, the international investor class will pay, and pay well. This is where the betrayal begins.

Enforcing a global agreement of this scope requires muscle, military muscle. That is where the Global Force for Good, as the U.S. military likes to market itself, comes in. Effectively, the U.S. military, which routinely channels and directs the efforts of young Americans who have enlisted to serve America, is into protecting not U.S. national security but the interests of the international investor class.

For the record, peace leads to stability, which in turn leads to security. But not to profit. Therein lies the motivation for perpetual war.

What makes the TPP treasonous is its betrayal of America’s natural resources, vital economic interests, military service members, and national security as a whole.

The TPP seeks to directly subjugate and invalidate American law, granting to multinational investors and to the agreement itself and its dispute resolution process ultimate authority, literally, over American home rule. All while American service members fight and die to protect the interests of whoever the investors are.

american house and senate rife with corruption

guardian |  Fast-tracking the TPP, meaning its passage through Congress without having its contents available for debate or amendments, was only possible after lots of corporate money exchanged hands with senators. The US Senate passed Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) – the fast-tracking bill – by a 65-33 margin on 14 May. Last Thursday, the Senate voted 62-38 to bring the debate on TPA to a close.

Those impressive majorities follow months of behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing by the world’s most well-heeled multinational corporations with just a handful of holdouts. 

Using data from the Federal Election Commission, this chart shows all donations that corporate members of the US Business Coalition for TPP made to US Senate campaigns between January and March 2015, when fast-tracking the TPP was being debated in the Senate:

• Out of the total $1,148,971 given, an average of $17,676.48 was donated to each of the 65 “yea” votes.
• The average Republican member received $19,673.28 from corporate TPP supporters.
• The average Democrat received $9,689.23 from those same donors.

The amounts given rise dramatically when looking at how much each senator running for re-election received.

Two days before the fast-track vote, Obama was a few votes shy of having the filibuster-proof majority he needed. Ron Wyden and seven other Senate Democrats announced they were on the fence on 12 May, distinguishing themselves from the Senate’s 54 Republicans and handful of Democrats as the votes to sway.

• In just 24 hours, Wyden and five of those Democratic holdouts – Michael Bennet of Colorado, Dianne Feinstein of California, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Patty Murray of Washington, and Bill Nelson of Florida – caved and voted for fast-track.
• Bennet, Murray, and Wyden – all running for re-election in 2016 – received $105,900 between the three of them. Bennet, who comes from the more purple state of Colorado, got $53,700 in corporate campaign donations between January and March 2015, according to Channing’s research.

mexican military, federal, state, and municipal police rife with corruption

HuffPo |  I’ve been reading your book Narcoland, and your vision of Mexico’s drug war caught my attention -- it’s very different from what we’re accustomed to reading in the U.S. press. What are the biggest misconceptions that you see in the media about the drug war?

When I started to work on that book about Chapo Guzmán back in 2005, I had the same misconceptions that most of the media and journalists had in Mexico, the U.S. and the rest of the world. I had swallowed the story that Chapo Guzmán was just a brilliant criminal -- a man so intelligent that he was capable of subjecting the governments of Mexico and the United States to his will. The Mexican government constantly said they couldn’t catch him because he lived in a cave in a mountain in the Sierra Sinaloa surrounded by people who protected him. 

And those of us in the media had only concentrated on the legend of Chapo Guzmán, based on his violence, on the tons of drugs he trafficked, without asking ourselves, “How does he do it? How can this man be so powerful?" And the only way of explaining how the Sinaloa cartel and Chapo Guzmán became so powerful is with the complicity of the government. 

It was that way, reporting on the story of Chapo Guzmán and the power he was accumulating during the Felipe Calderón administration, that I found that this so-called drug war was completely false. When I started investigating, I began receiving information in documents and testimony in the U.S. courts and interviews I did with drug traffickers that the Sinaloa cartel enjoyed government protection since the Vicente Fox administration, and that protection continued through the government of Felipe Calderón. [editor's note: Former Mexican President Vicente Fox was in office from 2000 to 2006. Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón served from 2006 to 2012.]

I starting doing public information requests in Mexico to see if these things being said in [the U.S.] courts were true. What I found was that during Felipe Calderón’s so-called drug war, the cartel that was attacked the least, that had the fewest arrests, was the Sinaloa cartel. And in government statistics, throughout the Felipe Calderón administration’s six years, there were increases in marijuana production, increases in opium production, increases in amphetamine production, increases in drug consumption in Mexico. What kind of drug war is this where a cartel gets stronger, becomes the most powerful cartel in the world, and on the other hand, drug production reaches historic levels in Mexico?

cheating and incompetent overseers messed up the simple task of confirming gang affiliation...,

NYTimes |  In Stanislaus County, as in many counties in California and across the United States, law-enforcement officers keep a database of individuals that they have identified as gang members. From their point of view, these lists are vital and necessary, but activists argue that they can be discriminatory. Researchers have found that white gang membership tends to be underestimated and undercounted, while the opposite is true for black and Latino youth. In 1997, California created a statewide database, called CalGang, and by 2012, according to documents obtained by the Youth Justice Coalition, there were more than 200,000 individuals named in it (roughly the same number as the population of Modesto), including some as young as 10. Statewide, 66 percent were Latino, and one in 10 of all African-Americans in Los Angeles County between the ages of 20 and 24 were on the list.

When the STEP Act became law, there were dissenting voices, some of them unsurprising, like the American Civil Liberties Union. But there were others you might not expect: Among law-enforcement authorities, for example, there were concerns that the STEP Act could be applied too broadly. Wes McBride, a retired sergeant of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the executive director of the California Gang Investigators Association, told me that although he has come to see the law as valuable, he was initially skeptical. “We thought the original writing of that bill was bad,” he said. “It made being a gang member a crime, and that flies in the face of the Constitution, in my mind. What’s to stop the Boy Scouts from being considered a gang?” Shortly after the STEP Act went into effect, The Los Angeles Times quoted an anonymous law-enforcement official expressing concern: “I realize that we have to do something, but when you have carte blanche, it’s difficult not to abuse it.”

A quarter of a century later, this point is still being raised. Manohar Raju, a lawyer who manages the felony unit at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, told me he has seen prosecutors’ use of gang enhancements go up in recent years. Young men and women are bundled into the broad category of “gang member” all the time, based on photos like the ones shown at Sebourn’s trial; based on their wearing this color or that one; based, essentially, on a misunderstanding of how difficult these neighborhoods really are for youth. “Posing in a picture, acting cool or acting tough can be a navigation strategy,” Raju said. “That may not mean they want problems; in fact, it may mean the opposite.”

According to Raju, weak cases can seem stronger when prosecutors introduce gang enhancements. Instead of concrete evidence related to the criminal charge, gang allegations permit prosecutors to introduce potentially inflammatory information that might otherwise be legally irrelevant. “Now we’re looking at: what did some other person do six months earlier or six years earlier,” Raju said. “Your client may not have anything to do with them, but they both have some connection to some name or symbol.” In other cases, the very threat of the gang enhancement can often be enough to persuade a defendant to accept a plea bargain. Given the lengthy sentences that can result, a trial might not be worth the risk.

Roughly 7 percent of California’s prison population, around 115,000 people, is serving extra time because of gang enhancements; given that the state has been ordered by the Supreme Court to reduce its prison overcrowding, this is hardly an insignificant figure. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, nearly half of those convicted with gang enhancements are serving an additional 10 years or more. Black and Latino inmates account for more than 90 percent of inmates with gang enhancements; fewer than 3 percent are white.

evolutionary criminology: towards a comprehensive explanation of crime

physorg |  "If we want to understand why men are much more likely to perpetrate crimes than women, why offending peaks during late adolescence and early adulthood, and why crime is often related to the experience of social and economic disadvantage, then we need to consider the selection pressures faced by our species in ancestral environments," says Dr Durrant. 

"Around 90 percent of homicides are perpetrated by males and most of those are directed against other males. We argue that humans largely follow a pattern of sexual selection similar to what we see in other mammalian species." He says this includes males competing for access to status and resources which in evolutionary terms would have led to increased reproductive success. 

"It is important to recognise, however, that there is nothing inevitable about male violence—although risk-taking and fighting is one way that males obtain status, there are alternative routes that separate us from other mammals, such as demonstrating skills, valuable knowledge and prosocial behaviour," says Dr Durrant. "It would make sense, then, to focus on policies and programmes that enable males to pursue status through non-violent means."

Early social environments have a strong impact too, he says. Young children who are exposed to dangerous and unpredictable environments will adapt their behaviour rapidly in anticipation of an unsafe future. "This is a period where individuals will shift their behavioural strategy to one that involves more risk taking and competition," says Dr Durrant. "This makes early intervention crucial, in order to shift individuals along more pro-social pathways."

Although frequent media coverage of crime can tend to make us think that violent and antisocial behaviours are rife in society, humans are actually a remarkably cooperative and prosocial species, says Dr Durrant. This reflects a long evolutionary history of living in small groups where antisocial behaviour is punished by group members.

thoughts on ross

hoskinsoncharles |  From time to time, I enjoy investing an afternoon considering politics and the state of affairs here in the United States. Our country is the first hyperpower forcing all other nations to consider us in whatever policy happens to be the day's grock. This reality is divorced from ethical or moral metrics and the war on drugs is no different.

For whatever reason (religious, practical, dystopian, etc), policymakers in the United States have continuously decided to label a behavior or substance as dangerous to the social fabric™ of our society. Prohibition is the standard example and its spectacular failure is somehow forgotten. We saw and acknowledge the rise of the modern mafia. We saw the decentralized nature of resistance through bootleggers (some say one who's kid become president) and the FBI form to stop the bootleggers empowering J. Edgar Hoover to terrorize two generations of Americans via illegal spying and blackmail (including Martin Luther King). Yet why have no lessons been learned?

The war of drugs is a leviathan that has imprisoned millions of Americans (vastly disportionate for minorities), formed massive bureaucracies such as the DEA and their state equivalents, and like Hoover's FBI slowly transformed society to both militarize the police and make their actions somehow ok. Where in this process have we asked what the goal exactly is? Why are we as a country destroying families, imprisoning millions and treating addicts as hardened criminals? Why have we created an industry that robs us of our constitutional rights and turns our police force into something resembling the Stasi?          

I honestly don't have a good answer. There is perhaps an historical context that could be explored and used to synthetically explain why we are somehow comfortable as a nation using a plato like ideal social fabric™ to justify incarcerating millions for non-violent crimes. Yet this leaves a putrid taste in my mouth. 

renew patriot act with blanket application to all politicians, judges, flag officers and members of the senior executive service...,

firstlook |  Even in the security-über alles climate that followed 9/11, the Patriot Act was recognized as an extreme and radical expansion of government surveillance powers. That’s why “sunset provisions” were attached to several of its key provisions: meaning they would expire automatically unless Congress renewed them every five years. But in 2005 and then again in 2010, the Bush and Obama administrations demanded their renewal, and Congress overwhelmingly complied with only token opposition from civil libertarians.

That has all changed in the post-Snowden era. The most controversial provisions of the Patriot Act are scheduled to “sunset” on June 1, and there is almost no chance for a straight-up, reform-free authorization. The Obama White House has endorsed the so-called “reform” bill called the USA Freedom Act, which passed the House by an overwhelming majority. Yet the bill fell three votes short in the Senate last week, rendering it very unclear what will happen as the deadline rapidly approaches.

Unlike many privacy and civil liberties groups, the ACLU has refrained from endorsing the USA Freedom Act and instead is advocating for allowing the Patriot Act provisions to sunset — i.e., to die a long overdue death rather than being “reformed.” Meanwhile, almost all of the 86 “no” votes in the House were based on the argument that the USA Freedom Act either does not go far enough in limiting the NSA or that it actually makes things worse.

I spoke yesterday with the ACLU’s Deputy Legal Director, Jameel Jaffer, about what is likely going to happen as the June 1 deadline approaches, whether the USA Freedom Act is a net positive for privacy supporters, and what all of this reform means for Edward Snowden’s status. The discussion is roughly 20 minutes and can be heard on the player below; a transcript is also provided.

is genocide human nature?

yourdosage |  To some extent, a bias to favor the self, where the self could be people who look like me, people who act like me, people who have the same taste as me, is a very strong human bias. It’s what one would expect from a creature like us who evolved from natural selection, but it has terrible consequences (3).

So, is the human’s inclination to form irrational biases an unavoidable biological characteristic of the human race? We are born with an innate ability to discriminate, and genocide is, it can logically be argued, a consequence of such biological predispositions. We identify a difference, say the varying width of a nose, and cling to those similar to ourselves while alienating the other group. In Rwanda, when Europeans introduced differing Rwandan “ethnicities” based on barely differing physical characteristics, the Rwandans were receptive. Why would a nation of people allow outsiders to introduce ideas that divide their society? It seems strange and a bit too simplistic to blame it solely on conformist values. Rwandans’ conformity played a large role in causing the genocide, but I also believe that it is human nature to discriminate. It is undeniable because as time goes on, genocide has not disappeared from society’s landscape. If there were not some biological cause, all types of discrimination would have disappeared years ago, as we would learn from our mistakes. Genocide’s continual occurrence in history can be attributed to the human desire to distinguish between “us and them” and an innate need to punish the different.

In Zistel’s “Remembering to Forget” she identifies “chosen amnesia” as a result of the Rwandan genocide. Chosen amnesia is the conscious decision of Rwandans, both Hutu and Tutsi, to forget the causes of the genocide. All too recent memories of war and genocide ware on the minds of all Rwandans, many of whom were soldiers and victims themselves; therefore, chosen amnesia seems to be the only “strategy to cope with living in proximity to ‘killers’ or ‘traitors’”(132). They must rely on each other regardless of Hutu of Tutsi affiliation because their home has been destroyed by war. In the wake of mass destruction and widespread death, it has become extremely difficult for any Rwandan to access necessary resources, such as food and water. Rwandans have indicated through their ability to conveniently “forget” the many crimes committed against humanity that their will to survive is stronger than the hatred contained in their hearts. The lingering problems plaguing Rwanda, such as trauma, depression, and HIV/AIDS, affect all Rwandans, not one specific group. As a result, putting differences aside is a necessary measure for the recovery and survival of Rwanda. Thus, the tensions leading up to the genocide were forgotten in hopes for peaceful coexistence. Although the intentions are ultimately good, chosen amnesia impairs Rwanda’s chances for full recovery and enables similar situations to arise in the future.

almost half of all people released from the prison system become homeless...,

physorg |  According to a longitudinal study following more than 1,000 homeless Australians and those at risk of homelessness, 42 percent of people released from prison, juvenile detention or remand in the past 6 months were found to be homeless.

The findings are presented in the Journeys Home Research Report No. 6, written by the Melbourne Institute and commissioned by the Department of Social Services.

Contributing report author Dr Julie Moschion from the University of Melbourne said that the study found that the longer the time spent in prison the longer the individual was likely to be homeless.

"The connections between prison time and homelessness suggest that there is a further role for policy makers to prevent the cycle between crime and homelessness," said Dr Moschion.

"We also found that rates of homelessness were higher for those who experienced physical and sexual violence."

Risky drinkers and those using illegal drugs like marijuana are more likely to be homeless and stay homeless for longer periods of time.

"Over the 30 month survey period, of those experiencing homelessness, 44 percent are in this situation for less than 6 months," said Dr Moschion.

Multiple spells of homelessness are also relatively common with 40 percent of those experiencing homelessness cycling in and out of homelessness.

On average, males were homeless for a larger proportion of the survey period (23%) than females were (13%). Family contact was also found to be important factor in preventing homelessness as well as assisting individuals out of homelessness.

The report found that rates of homelessness are also higher in areas with higher housing costs. Those who moved to areas with cheaper housing are more likely to exit homelessness.

The report includes three types of homelessness: those without conventional accommodation; those moving frequently between temporary accommodation and people staying in boarding houses on a medium to long-term basis.

hbd cats shame Bro.Feed the devil and swing for the fences..,

westhunt |  Humans exhibit a diversity of strategy “choices” that are solutions to the allocation problem between mating and parenting. Males can devote most of their effort to mating effort, usually involving competition with other males. Male commitment to parenting effort is not common in mammals but there are familiar examples like beavers, coyotes, gibbons, and some humans. In the jargon the polar strategies of male mammals are called “cad” and “dad” strategies.

Females have a more restricted set of strategy choices because of their engineered commitment to parenting. At one extreme a human female can seek a dadly male who provides resources like food and protection to their joint offspring. At the other extreme, a human female can pay little or no attention to her mate choice, instead letting the guys work things out. In the jargon these female alternatives are called “coy” and “fast”.

You can find a more detailed account of this game between the human sexes works in a chapter of our book (that the editor discarded as “too academic”) on our website here. Briefly we are likely to find dad males/coy females in ecological situations where male labor and resources are critical for successful reproduction. Think of labor-intensive agriculture, European peasants and Asian farmers, as examples. In the United States in the past, “working class” meant stable mated pairs who together provisioned and cared for children. An archetype of working class in American television was Archie Bunker.

Social organization with cad males and fast females is found prominently among tropical gardeners where women provide most of the food for themselves and their children as well as for the men, who are often just parasites on the women. The euphemism in economics for these societies is “female farming systems”. These share many characteristics with our industrial “underclass” in which women have no ecological force pushing them into long term stable pair bonds.

Notice that in each of the above descriptions there are two hands clapping: in cad/fast social systems neither a coy female nor a dad male does very well while in dad/coy systems neither a fast females nor a cad male does very well. The two polar social types are deeply rooted in contemporary politics. The zany feminism of the 1980s (“a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”) precisely advocated the cad/fast setup. Our religious right with its chatter about “the natural family” and “stable marriages” and the like pushes hard for a dad/coy world.

Back to our social engineers who know biology. They share a goal of a society in which dad males mate with coy females because children enjoy the care and security of a stable home and streets safe from gunfire. The new policy is simple: welfare payments are to be given only to males.

This policy would mimic, they think, the ecology of most dad/coy societies. How would this work out? In a new post we can imagine how the new policy can be modified when the engineers are given a sense of human decency and responsibility for human well being.

overseers bound and determined to be unseen...,

HuffPo |  Without the video from the cases of Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Walter Scott, these cases and many others would have gone uninvestigated and unnoticed; with many holding staunchly to the belief that whatever is written in a police report is fact. Still, even with these cases, large public outcry, and overwhelming evidence, there is still mistrust and demonization of the people decrying their treatment by law enforcement. The bias is so bad, in fact, that as opposed to doing further investigation into the claims of misconduct on a larger, more comprehensive scale, such as those seen in our video above, local law makers and states have attempted to curtail the filming of law enforcement that bolsters the claims.

That's right. Instead of admitting that the state of policing in this country is hugely problematic and working with communities to fully uncover depths of the problem, many are systematically working to cover up any trace that a problem exists. Some of the more notable attempts as of late:

· Just this March, Texas State Rep. Jason Villalba(R) tried to pass a law in Texas that would make it a class B misdemeanor to film police within 100 feet if they have their handgun out.

· In Missouri, State Senator Doug Libla opposed a bill that required police to wear body cameras. Instead, he proposed his own bill, that not only didn't require body cameras, but would have exempted all footage of police encounters from state open records laws.

 

· Twelve states have adopted what is known as a two party consent eavesdropping law that police have successfully used to confiscate and arrest anyone filming them on duty. These laws simply mean that if someone, including police, has "a reasonable expectation of privacy" when they are filmed, they have to give their consent to be recorded.

The problem, of course, is that public servants, such as police, should NOT have a reasonable expectation of privacy while performing their public duties, in public spaces, amongst the public. It IS punishable to interfere with an arrest or their work, as it should be. But if all protocol is being followed, filming should not be considered interference.

Luckily, the Supreme Court seems to agree that outlawing citizens' right to film is not constitutional. The First, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeal and New Jersey have determined that forbidding the video and audio recording of police officers and public servants IS ILLEGAL under the First Amendment. SCOTUS refuses to hear the cases because they have ceded to these precedents set by the lower courts.

So why is this still an issue? Why are we still arguing and attempting to legislate something that has already been proven unconstitutional? Why was the man who filmed the arrest of Freddie Gray in Baltimore arrested, with no probable cause, along with countless others over the years?

We know that even if arrested and convicted of an eavesdropping law, few cases would ever hold up in appellate court. But that's not the point. The point is the mere THREAT of being put through the legal system is enough of an intimidation tactic to dissuade people from being brave and doing this civic duty. Not to mention that the legal process takes a ton of time. If in that time, the footage of police brutality can be inadmissible in, say, a homicide case, it was well worth the loss on appeal for that city government.

All of these tactics are tools in the politics of oppression; ways to keep control and disempower the average citizen. These are not laws about protecting the public or creating a more just society.

inside the complex legal infrastructure that encourages — and covers up — overseer violence

rollingstone |  Broken Windows has left a major footprint on modern American society, primarily on the 65 million or so people who have criminal records in this country. That's a population roughly the size of France.

You can easily find the collateral damage from this vast illegal war on crime just by walking into certain neighborhoods and asking. From bad arrests to beatings to broken bones, there are enough horror stories to fill a thousand Ken Burns documentaries. But good luck finding any of that misconduct and abuse on an official record. What you mostly find when you search are a lot of convictions and a whole lot of statistical noise. The dirt, as it often is in this country, is mostly hidden away.

The real problem with Broken Windows is that it brings the same attitude to neighborhoods that corrections officers bring to prisons. "You have guys locked up for serious crimes, you're supposed to be controlling them," says Anthony Miranda. "But in neighborhoods, you're not supposed to be controlling people. You're supposed to be working with them. You're supposed to be serving them. And that attitude is what's missing."

As a former minority officer, Miranda says he and others like him are especially motivated to find solutions: "We're on both sides. We're in the force, but we also live in these neighborhoods. So we need to find an answer."

But the numbers game has rotted the police system to the point where it can't see the forest for the trees. "They don't see it," says Miranda. "They're too ignorant, and it's a shame."

looking for the kill switch...,

nature |  Groups of humans have always slaughtered those who belong to other groups. The twentieth century was shot through with numerous examples, from the genocides of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey and of Jews in Nazi Europe to the massacres of ethnic rivals in civil wars in Rwanda and Bosnia during the 1990s. Today, the fundamentalist group ISIS is spooking the world with its willingness to butcher others who do not adhere to its extremist form of Islam.

Attempts to understand such events tend to focus on political reasons. But a conference in Paris last month dared to ask a different question: how, biologically speaking, do normally non-violent and psychologically stable people overcome the instinctive human aversion to killing when faced with circumstances of war or extremism? What drives them to participate in acts of genocide? This is arguably the biggest challenge for interdisciplinary dialogue across the fields that consider brain and behaviour.

All human behaviours originate in the brain, which computes cognitive and emotional information to decide what to do. So what, precisely, happens in that organ at the moment that a person’s natural abhorrence of harming others is computed out of the equation?

The organizers of last month’s conference at the Paris Institute of Advanced Studies — ‘The Brains that Pull the Triggers’ — deserve credit for even posing this question. It goes against another human instinct: to consider evil in moral rather than biological terms, as if identifying a biological signature in the brain might somehow be exploited as an excuse to absolve a person of his or her responsibility.

Neuroscientists have studied the abnormal condition of psychopathy in addition to components of normal cognition — such as the recognition of emotions in the faces of others — that may have a bearing on the problem. And psychologists and sociologists have looked at the behaviour of ordinary individuals who identify themselves with particular groups and align their behaviour with that group.

in a state of nature a strong man always eats first...,

thinkprogress |  Murray has written a terrible book. It is at once credulous of fringe thinkers and contemptuous of American democracy. Yet he has also written a deeply revealing book about the nature of conservatism in the age of Obama. When President Ronald Reagan was in office, he spoke with the confidence of a man who believed that the American people were on his side. Reagan pledged to appoint judges who support “judicial restraint,” a testament to Reagan’s belief that he did not need the unelected judiciary to enact conservative policies, and his administration’s understanding of the Constitution was decidedly moderate when compared to the ideas of men such as Barnett, Epstein and Greve.

Since then, however, the Republican Party has lost Reagan’s self-confidence. Instead, they reflexively turn to the judiciary when they are unable to win battles on health care, immigration, the environment, or a myriad of other issues. Democracy, as McConnell said in 2011, no longer works to give conservatives what they want.

Yet this strategy has yielded only mixed success. The Supreme Court rendered a key prong of Obamacare optional, but they kept the bulk of the law in place. Religious objectors enjoy a right to opt-out of federal birth control rules, but the rules still bind most employers. A high-profile Supreme Court attack on the Environmental Protection Agency barely ended with a whimper. Republicans dominate the Supreme Court, but these justices do sometimes temper their Republicanism with obedience to the law and the Constitution.

By The People, by contrast, bypasses the law entirely. It abandons even the trappings of a legitimate constitutional process, and instead places government in the hands of billionaires loyal only to an anti-government agenda. It is, in many ways, the perfection of post-Obama conservatism, barely even bothering to pay lip service to the notion that the American people should be governed by the people they elect.

But By The People is also more than an unintentional indictment of conservatism, it’s also a warning for liberals. In a 1993 tribute to the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, future Justice Elena Kagan wrote about a case, Torres v. Oakland Scavenger Co., that came before the Court during her year clerking for the legendary civil rights advocate. The case involved whether an employment discrimination suit would fail because a lawyer’s secretary accidentally omitted the name of one of the plaintiffs from a court filing. Kagan and her fellow clerks pleaded with Marshall to say that this accident was not fatal, but Marshall refused, citing the essential role that obedience to legal rules play in protecting the least fortunate:

The Justice referred in our conversation to his own years of trying civil rights claims. All you could hope for, he remarked, was that a court didn’t rule against you for illegitimate reasons; you couldn’t hope, and you had no right to expect, that a court would bend the rules in your favor. Indeed, the Justice continued, it was the very existence of rules — along with the judiciary’s felt obligation to adhere to them — that best protected unpopular parties. Contrary to some conservative critiques, Justice Marshall believed devoutly — believed in a near-mystical sense — in the rule of law. He had no trouble writing the Torres opinion.

Men and women who seek to lift up the poor and the downtrodden, in other words, must rely on the law to do so. And this very enterprise depends on the law itself being afforded deference and legitimacy by officials who would rather disregard it. Meanwhile, men and women such as Murray, who wish to shield the already powerful from the forces of government, may do so either by making the law more favorable to the most fortunate or by tearing down the institution of law itself. In a state of nature, the strong man always eats first.

This is why liberalism is an inherently more challenging project than conservatism. Liberals must constantly fight a two-front war — supporting laws that extend opportunity broadly while simultaneously recognizing the legitimacy of many laws that undermine this goal. Charles Murray, meanwhile, can work within the edifices of government or he can simply decide to tear the entire edifice down.

teleb an'em fitna school pinker...,

historynewsnetwork |  It has a dreary name: "On the tail risk of violent conflict and its underestimation." But this new paper by social scientists Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb could rewrite the history of violence. 

It takes direct aim at the thesis of Harvard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker in the 2011 bestseller, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.  The paper's already making waves.  On his Twitter page Harvard's Niall Ferguson calls it "hugely important."

In the paper Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, the blockbuster book that alerted economists to the importance of unexpected events, argues that "Violence is much more severe than it seems from conventional analyses and the prevailing 'long peace' theory which claims that violence has declined." 

Contrary to current discussions, all statistical pictures thus obtained show that 1) the risk of violent conflict has not been decreasing, but is rather underestimated by techniques relying on naive year-on-year changes in the mean, or using sample mean as an estimator of the true mean of an extremely fat-tailed phenomenon; 2) armed conflicts have memoryless inter-arrival times, thus incompatible with the idea of a time trend. Our analysis uses 1) raw data, as recorded and estimated by historians; 2) a naive transformation, used by certain historians and sociologists, which rescales past conflicts and casualties with respect to the actual population; 3) more importantly, a log transformation to account for the fact that the number of casualties in a conflict cannot be larger than the world population.

The authors base their article on the methods of extreme value theory.

rotflmbao..., wattles and their "family research" council...,

alternet |  Mega-family superstar, Josh Duggar, has resigned his position as lobbyist for the Family Research Council after In Touch Magazine published a police report confirming that JimBob and Michelle Duggar of TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting” fame’s oldest son confessed to molesting several female minors in 2002 - 2003.

According to the 2006 police report, Duggar family patriarch, JimBob actively covered up Josh’s confession and neglected to notify authorities or provide professional help for Josh and/or his victims. To make matters worse, Josh’s pregnant wife, Anna Duggar, believes her husband is a changed man and continues - along with the couple’s three young children - to live with an admitted child sex offender. And to top it all off, the Duggar family publicly declared that God used the tragic situation to draw their family closer to Him.

Jesus Friggin’ Christ, what a mess! As a former Quiverfull believer, I recognize in this Duggar family debacle several essential beliefs which are widely held amongst fundamentalist Christians which shackle True Believer’s™ common sense to an outdated and irrelevant god-myth and seriously impair their ability to make sound moral choices.

JimBob and Michelle Duggar live in a fantasy world of their own making, and they believe that, just like in the fairy tales, they all will live happily ever after. While confessing to not being a perfect family, and admitting their family faces challenges and struggles every day, the Duggars are convinced “that dark and difficult time caused [the family] to seek God like never before,” which in their minds, means the molestation really wasn’t so bad, and in fact, has turned out to be a kind of blessing in disguise since each one of them “drew closer to God,” as a result of “something so terrible.”

According to the “eternally happy ending” story which the Duggars are telling themselves, the little girls whom Josh allegedly groped and fondled are not victims or even survivors of sexual abuse, but are instead equated with the “highly favored” Old Testament Joseph whose brothers sold him into slavery: What Satan meant for evil, God used for good.

Suffering in this life is insignificant - even trifling - compared to the faith-strengthening and soul-saving purpose of trials which will be richly rewarded with eternal life in Heaven … so praise the fucking Lord for whatever misery He sends to you and your children.

who stands to profit from gunning down omgs in waco?

agingrebel |   The unnamed Cossack’s account is layered with and given the same credibility as ludicrous statements made by Waco police spokesman W. Patrick Swanton. The Post also has discovered the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives report, “OMGs and the Military 2014,” which was published last July 1 and first reported here last July 11. The Bandidos are mentioned 26 times in the report. The Cossacks are not mentioned once. The Iron Order, the “law abiding motorcycle club” is mentioned eight times. The Post uses the ATF report to substantiate a claim by the Waco police that “the Bandidos, the most notorious biker gang in Texas,” are arming themselves “with grenades and C4 explosives.” Not some Bandidos but “the Bandidos.”

The Post’s story raises at least as many questions as it answers.

For example, the Post states that two large packs of outlaw bikers travelled to Waco. The Post says there were 70 Cossacks and 100 Bandidos but it neglects to mention how many Texas Highway Patrol cruisers and how many Texas Department of Public Safety helicopters followed the packs. Anyone who has ever ridden in a large pack probably has the same question. Where were the helicopters? Where were the police who followed the big packs into the Central Texas Market Place shopping center?

According to the Post, the Bandidos made a disturbance at and shot up their own event. Whether the Bandidos is the preeminent club in Texas or not, the club thinks it is. The COCI meeting had at least the tacit approval of the Bandidos and most one percenter motorcycle clubs in the world, when placed in a similar situation, would assume responsibility for keeping the event violence free.

According to the Post: “A Bandido with a patch identifying him as sergeant-at-arms of the same chapter threw a punch at Richard Matthew Jordan II, 31, known as ‘Richie,’ who was from Pasadena, Tex. Jordan punched the guy back. ‘“At that point in time, the sergeant in arms shot Richie point-blank,’ the Cossack said.”

Really? In front of at least 22 sworn peace officers? In broad daylight? In a location that was obviously well-surveilled by video cameras?

“Then all the Bandidos standing in the parking lot started pulling guns and shooting at us,” the Cossack chapter president told the Post. Really? Without a thought to what their legal defense would be? In broad daylight in front of numerous police?

The anonymous Cossack told the Post, “Three of our guys went down instantly. They caught a couple more that tripped and fell, and Bandidos were shooting at them.” In other words, the police stood and watched as Bandidos executed five Cossacks? Does that pass the smell test?

Talk

Presumably, the Post verified that its anonymous source was actually a Cossack club officer and an eyewitness. But it is unclear how he escaped and it is equally unclear how and why he started talking to a freelance writer named Tim Madigan.

The Post’s story reads like a federal racketeering indictment so the biggest question of all is whether the source is working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Has he been debriefed by the ATF? Is he under arrest now? Is he working for the government now? Was he working for the government eight days ago? Why is this man talking?

america cannot lock its poor people problem away

guardian |  Every day, indigent Americans are ripped from their homes and their communities and forced into jails of varying degrees of dysfunction and decay. The US supreme court ruled three decades ago that it is unconstitutional to imprison people because they cannot afford to pay debts. The ruling, however, hasn’t ended the practice of jailing people for unpaid government fees and fines. 

In 2010, the ACLU found that courts across the nation regularly deny Americans proper consideration of their financial position and throw them into jail over fines they could never hope to pay. As a result, local jails nationwide have transformed into modern-day “debtors’ prisons” overcrowded with indigent people whose only punishable offense is being poor. The effects are devastating. 

This growing phenomenon funnels poor Americans into the criminal justice system with sentences that disrupt their lives, too often trapping them in a damning cycle of poverty and incarceration that far outlasts their initial conviction. These practices have a disparate impact on communities of color in the United States. 

Consider 19-year-old Kevin Thompson, a black teenager in DeKalb County, Georgia, who was jailed simply because he was unable to pay $838 in fines and fees associated with a routine traffic citation. Though only half of DeKalb County’s residents are black, nearly all probationers jailed for failure to pay by its recorders court, which handles minor offenses like traffic misdemeanors, are black. The ACLU filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Mr Thompson and reached a settlement with the county that included a number of new reform measures aimed at preventing others from facing the same unconstitutional treatment. 

Jail sentences like those imposed on Mr Thompson and Mr Staten aren’t just unjust – they’re also costly. The ACLU’s 2010 report In for a Penny found that individuals incarcerated for failure to pay often cost the state more than they owe. The report identifies one individual whose incarceration in New Orleans cost more than six times his $498 debt. So why are we stuck with this senseless system?

pensions and politics in illinois

NYTimes |  Illinois is facing one of the worst fiscal crises of any state in recent decades, largely because it has mismanaged its pension system.

The shortfalls could potentially mean sharply higher taxes and cuts in spending. And even though the state’s highest court just this month threw out a landmark plan to cut worker and retiree benefits, some lawmakers say they may have to find another way to make those reductions as well.

Illinois’s problems resonate well beyond its borders. Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Kentucky are among the states confronting similar problems, and to them, Illinois is a model of what can go wrong — with political intransigence, mounting costs and a complicated legal terrain.

The state faces a range of problems. Illinois has one of the worst-funded pension systems in the nation. Chicago also has a pension crisis, leading Moody’s Investors Service to downgrade its credit rating to junk status on May 12, potentially threatening the city’s ability to borrow.

And the state faces an expected budget deficit of $6 billion, which it needs to address quickly. With just days before a legislative deadline, the new Republican governor, who ran on cutting costs and holding down taxes, is at odds with Democrats who hold a veto-proof supermajority in the legislature.

“Really, it’s not a clear road map at this point,” the governor, Bruce Rauner, said of solving the pension crisis.

“We have to make big decisions,” Mr. Rauner told reporters. “The state is in dire financial straits. Chicago is in big, big challenges. And everybody’s a little bit on edge.”

Courts in other states, including Colorado and Minnesota, have sometimes approved measured pension cuts for public workers, especially for the benefits that current workers have not yet earned. And in Detroit and Stockton, Calif., federal judges have said pensions could be cut in a bankruptcy.

john nash dead

reuters |  Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1994 for his work on game theory and the mathematics of decision-making.

The film "A Beautiful Mind" was loosely based on his battle with schizophrenia.

Nash received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1950 and spent much of his career there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He began experiencing what he described as "mental disturbances" in 1959 after marrying Alicia, a MIT physics major who was then pregnant, according to his biography on the Nobel Prize website.

"I was disturbed in this way for a very long period of time, like 25 years," Nash said in a 2004 video interview on the Nobel website.

He stressed that his was an unusual case, as he was able eventually stop taking medication and return to normal activities and his research.

The 2001 movie represented an "artistic" take on his experience, giving insight into mental illness but not accurately portraying the nature of his delusions, Nash said in the interview.

"John's remarkable achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists who were influenced by his brilliant, groundbreaking work in game theory," Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber said in a statement.

"The story of his life with Alicia moved millions of readers and moviegoers who marveled at their courage in the face of daunting challenges," he added.

Nash and his wife were living in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, New Jersey police said.