Poverty Not a Priority for Politicians Pushing Perversion

NYTimes |  The golden main dome of a new Russian Orthodox cathedral now under construction on the banks of the Seine shimmers in the sun, towering over a Paris neighborhood studded with government buildings and foreign embassies. Most sensitive of all, it is being built beside a 19th-century palace that has been used to conceal some of the French presidency’s most closely guarded secrets.

The prime location, secured by the Russian state after years of lobbying by the Kremlin, is so close to so many snoop-worthy places that when Moscow first proposed a $100 million “spiritual and cultural center” there, France’s security services fretted that Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer, might have more than just religious outreach in mind.

Anxiety over whether the spiritual center might serve as a listening post, however, has obscured its principal and perhaps more intrusive role: an outsize display in the heart of Paris, the capital of the insistently secular French Republic, of Russia’s might as a religious power, not just a military one.

While tanks and artillery have been Russia’s weapons of choice to project its power into neighboring Ukraine and Georgia, Mr. Putin has also mobilized faith to expand the country’s reach and influence. A fervent foe of homosexuality and any attempt to put individual rights above those of family, community or nation, the Russian Orthodox Church helps project Russia as the natural ally of all those who pine for a more secure, illiberal world free from the tradition-crushing rush of globalization, multiculturalism and women’s and gay rights.

Only Broke-Assed Losers With Nothing of Their Own Cry Over Cultural Appropriation

WaPo |  “I am hopeful that the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is a passing fad: people with different backgrounds rubbing up against each other and exchanging ideas and practices is self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life,” Shriver said during her speech, a statement that reminds us “cultural appropriation” is just another way of saying “culture.” Except for the isolated tribes of the deserts and the rainforests cut off from outside contact, all human cultures borrow from other human cultures. Some traits are absorbed, others rejected. What remains is, simply, “culture.”

Unfortunately, the debate is likely here to stay, as evidenced by the outraged walkouts during Shriver’s speech and the Brisbane Writers Festival’s hasty efforts to arrange a new event: a “right of reply” designed to counter Shriver’s devastatingly hurtful opinions.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied seemed to speak for many of the aggrieved when she denounced Shriver on the Guardian’s website. Indeed, she was so flummoxed by Shriver’s opinions that she doesn’t quite seem to recognize the irony of this passage in an essay penned after the triggering episode:

The fact Shriver was given such a prominent platform from which to spew such vitriol shows that we as a society still value this type of rhetoric enough to deem it worthy of a keynote address. The opening of a city’s writers festival could have been graced by any of the brilliant writers and thinkers who challenge us to be more. To be uncomfortable. To progress. [emphasis added]

It seems clear that Abdel-Magied wasn’t looking for a challenge or to be made uncomfortable, but for someone willing to reinforce her preconceptions.

That the Brisbane Writers Festival was not a safe space for Magied is neither here nor there. Far more troubling is the mind-set behind her meltdown, the suggestion that writers should write only about their own experiences, that characters from different backgrounds should be treated with kid gloves. As Shriver noted in her remarks, authors currently face a Catch-22: They are required to include a smattering of non-white characters lest they face accusations of erasure or whitewashing, yet not delve into them too deeply or make them leads, lest they be accused of appropriation.

Mr. Miracle HAS BEEN Talking About Poverty - Granny Goodness Been Talking About Deplorables...,

NYTimes |  Poverty in the United States is deeper than in all other wealthy nations. Yet neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump has a specific anti-poverty agenda.

Mr. Trump has said that more jobs will help cure poverty — which no one disagrees with. His promises to create jobs, however, are hollow. Historical evidence and economic analysis indicate that his agenda — less trade, less immigration and huge tax cuts for the wealthy — would harm job growth. Even his recent attempts at a middle-class agenda, including subsidies for child care, and paid maternity leave have been fatally flawed. The former skews toward high-income earners and the latter relies on states to come up with the money.

The failure to talk frankly about poverty is especially regrettable in light of this week’s Census Bureau report.

U.S. Won't Provide For Its Own Veterans, But Makes Historic Provisions For Israel

reuters |  The United States and Israel have reached final agreement on a record new package of at least $38 billion in U.S. military aid and the 10-year pact is expected to be signed this week, sources close to the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.

The deal will represent the biggest pledge of U.S. military assistance made to any country but also involves major concessions granted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to officials on both sides.

Those include Israel’s agreement not to seek additional funds from Congress beyond what will be guaranteed annually in the new package, and also to phase out a special arrangement that has allowed Israel to spend part of its U.S. aid on its own defense industry instead of on American-made weapons, the officials said.

Israel’s chief negotiator, Jacob Nagel, acting head of Netanyahu’s national security council, arrived in Washington overnight in preparation for a signing ceremony with U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice, according to one source familiar with the matter.

Nearly 10 months of drawn-out aid negotiations have underscored continuing friction between U.S. President Barack Obama and Netanyahu over last year's U.S.-led nuclear deal with Iran, Israel's arch-foe. The United States and Israel have also been at odds over the Palestinians.

But the right-wing Israeli leader decided it would be best to forge a new arrangement with Obama, who leaves office in January, rather than hoping for better terms from the next U.S. administration, according to officials on both sides.

Hillary Clinton: Boycotting North Carolina Is Noble and Just; Boycotting Israel Is Bigoted and Hateful

theintercept |  Could someone explain why it’s noble, enlightened, justifiable, and progressive to boycott an American state, but hateful, bigoted, retrograde, and evil to support a boycott of a foreign country that has been imposing a brutal, discriminatory, and illegal occupation for many decades, a boycott that is led by people with virtually no political rights? How did that happen? Hillary Clinton is far from the only person espousing this bizarre distinction — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, as but one example, is punishing companies that support a boycott of Israel while forcing state employees to honor the boycott of North Carolina — but what could possibly justify U.S. politicians drawing the moral and ethical lines about boycotts in this manner?

 

why are people poor?

newyorker |  At least since the Moynihan Report, in 1965, Americans have tended to answer the question “Why are people poor?” by choosing one of two responses: they can either point to economic forces (globalization, immigration) or blame cultural factors (decaying families, lack of “grit”). These seem like two social-science theories about poverty—two hypotheses, which might be tested empirically—but, in practice, they are more like political fairy tales. As Kelefa Sanneh wrote earlier this year, the choice between these two explanations has long been racialized. Working-class whites are said to be poor because of outsourcing; inner-city blacks are imagined to be holding themselves back with hip-hop. The implicit theory is that culture comes from within, and so can be controlled by individuals and communities, whereas economic structures exert pressures from without, and so are beyond the control of those they affect.

This theory is useful to politicians, because political ideologies function by identifying some people as powerless and others as powerful. The truth, though, is that the “culture vs. economics” dyad is largely a fantasy. We are neither prisoners of our economic circumstances nor lords of our cultures, able to reshape them at will. It would be more accurate to say that cultural and economic forces act, with entwined and equal power, on and through all of us—and that we all have an ability, limited but real, to harness or resist them. When we pursue education, we improve ourselves both “economically” and “culturally” (and in other ways); conversely, there’s nothing distinctly and intrinsically “economic” or “cultural” about the problems that afflict poor communities, such as widespread drug addiction or divorce. (If you lose your job, get divorced, and become an addict, is your addiction “economic” or “cultural” in nature?) When we debate whether such problems have a fundamentally “economic” or “cultural” cause, we aren’t saying anything meaningful about the problems. We’re just arguing—incoherently—about whether or not people who suffer from them deserve to be blamed for them. (We know, meanwhile, that the solutions—many, partial, and overlapping—aren’t going to be exclusively “economic” or “cultural” in nature, either.)

It’s odd, when you think about it, that a question a son might ask about his mother—“Where does blame stop and sympathy begin?”—is at the center of our collective political life. And yet, as American inequality has grown, that question has come to be increasingly important. When Rod Dreher asked Vance to explain the appeal of Trump to poor whites, Vance cited the fact that Trump “criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas” while energetically defending white, working-class culture against “the condescenders” who hold it in contempt. Another way of putting this is that, for the past eight years, the mere existence of Barack Obama—a thriving African-American family man and a successful product of the urban meritocracy—has implied that the problems of poor white Americans are “cultural”; Trump has shifted their afflictions into the “economic” column. For his supporters, that is enough.

Vance is frustrated not just by this latest turn of the wheel but by the fact that the wheel keeps turning. It’s true that, by criticizing “hillbilly culture,” “Hillbilly Elegy” reverses the racial polarity in our debate about poverty; it’s also true that, by arguing that the problems of the white working class are partly “cultural,” the book strikes a blow against Trumpism. And yet it would be wrong to see Vance’s book as yet another entry in our endless argument about whether this or that group’s poverty is caused by “economic” or “cultural” factors. “Hillbilly Elegy” sees the “economics vs. culture” divide as a dead metaphor—a form of manipulation rather than explanation more likely to conceal the truth than to reveal it. The book is an understated howl of protest against the racialized blame game that has, for decades, powered American politics and confounded our attempts to talk about poverty.

Often, after a way of talking has obviously outlived its usefulness, a period of inarticulateness ensues; it’s not yet clear how we should talk going forward. “Hillbilly Elegy” doesn’t provide us with a new way of talking about poverty in post-globalization America. It does, however, suggest that it’s our collective job to figure one out. As individuals, we must stop thinking about American poverty in an imaginary way; we must abandon the terms of the argument we’ve been having—terms designed to harness our feelings of blame and resentment for political ends, and to make us feel either falsely blameless or absurdly self-determining. “I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better,” Vance writes. “We hillbillies need to wake the hell up.” As do the rest of us.

Global Beta Test: Who Supplies the Slums with Grenades, Guns, and a Soundtrack?

weforum |   Latin America and the Caribbean, for example, is home to just 8% of the world’s population, but registers 33% of its homicides. At the city scale, residents of cities in Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela are most at risk. An astonishing 47 of the 50 most homicidal cities in the world are located in Latin America.

So what are some of the wider implications of this morbid retreat into the data of violent death? At the outset, it is a reminder that a comparatively modest number of countries (and cities) are dramatically more at risk of terrorist and homicidal violence than others. Clearly, greater investment in diplomacy, crisis management and conflict prevention is urgently needed, alongside improved intelligence sharing within and between cities. This would certainly be more cost-effective – both economically and in terms of live saved – than hardening potential targets from asymmetric attacks in Western cities.

Perhaps even more important, the data shows that homicidal violence is a much larger problem than terrorism. What is more, it is just a handful of cities – most of them in Latin America, the Caribbean and parts of Africa – that account for the lion’s share of murders globally. If lethal violence is to be reduced in these areas, the issue must be prioritized by national and municipal authorities, with a focus on driving down inequality, concentrated poverty, youth unemployment and of course corruption and political and criminal impunity. Doubling down on the world’s most violent cities could do much to drive down the global burden of violent death.

In the end, it is important to recall that the threats of urban fragility are broader than a narrow focus on the prevalence of lethal violence. If cities are to become more resilient – to cope, adapt and rebound in the face of shocks and stresses – they will need to contend with a wide range of threats, not just terrorism and homicide. This is as much about promoting good governance as reducing structural social and economic risks in cities that give rise to extremism and murder. At the very least, it implies rethinking the role of cities as not just a site of violence but a primary driver of security in our time.

the first monday in may

thetimes |  It’s the most exclusive party in the world — the Oscars of the fashion industry and the red carpet with the highest stakes — but what actually happens beyond the velvet rope at Anna Wintour’s Met Gala has remained a mystery to the likes of you and me.

Until now. A new documentary, The First Monday in May, follows the Vogue editor along with the fashion curator Andrew Bolton as they plan the Metropolitan Museum’s 2015 costume exhibition and the party to end all parties that will launch it to the rest of the world.

“There’s something surreal about the spectacle of all those people in such a heightened atmosphere,” says Rossi. “One of the theses of the film is that celebrity and haute couture combine to transcend their individual parts and become something even more powerful together.” Therein lies the event’s allure for the rest of us plebs: its mystique and its sheer stardust quota. Does it live up to the hype?

The first rule of the Met Gala has always been that you don’t talk about the Met Gala — or rather, you do, but only in suitably glowing terms. The few celebrities who have offered any other opinion of the annual bash haven’t been invited back.

Gwyneth Paltrow once described it as “hot, crowded and un-fun”; the comedian Tina Fey called it a “jerk parade” full of “all the people you would punch in the whole world”. For the rebel comic Amy Schumer, it was “people doing an impression of having a conversation, dressed like a bunch of f***ing assholes”.

Police Unions Blocking Reform and Undermining the Rule of Law

NewYorker |  Police unions emerged later than many other public-service unions, but they’ve made up for lost time. Thanks to the bargains they’ve struck on wages and benefits, police officers are among the best-paid civil servants. More important, they’ve been extraordinarily effective in establishing control over working conditions. All unions seek to insure that their members have due-process rights and aren’t subject to arbitrary discipline, but police unions have defined working conditions in the broadest possible terms. This position has made it hard to investigate misconduct claims, and to get rid of officers who break the rules. A study of collective bargaining by big-city police unions, published this summer by the reform group Campaign Zero, found that agreements routinely guarantee that officers aren’t interrogated immediately after use-of-force incidents and often insure that disciplinary records are purged after three to five years.

Furthermore, thanks to union contracts, even officers who are fired can frequently get their jobs back. Perhaps the most egregious example was Hector Jimenez, an Oakland police officer who was dismissed in 2009, after killing two unarmed men, but who then successfully appealed and, two years later, was reinstated, with full back pay. The protection that unions have secured has helped create what Samuel Walker, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and an expert on police accountability, calls a “culture of impunity.” Citing a recent Justice Department investigation of Baltimore’s police department, which found a systemic pattern of “serious violations of the U.S. Constitution and federal law,” he told me, “Knowing that it’s hard to be punished for misconduct fosters an attitude where you think you don’t have to answer for your behavior.”

For the past fifty years, police unions have done their best to block policing reforms of all kinds. In the seventies, they opposed officers’ having to wear name tags. More recently, they’ve opposed the use of body cameras and have protested proposals to document racial profiling and to track excessive-force complaints. They have lobbied to keep disciplinary histories sealed. If a doctor commits malpractice, it’s a matter of public record, but, in much of the country, a police officer’s use of excessive force is not. Across the nation, unions have led the battle to limit the power of civilian-review boards, generally by arguing that civilians are in no position to judge the split-second decisions that police officers make. Earlier this year, Newark created a civilian-review board that was acclaimed as a model of oversight. The city’s police union immediately announced that it would sue to shut it down.

Cities don’t have to concede so much power to police unions. So why do they? Big-city unions have large membership bases and are generous when it comes to campaign contributions. Neither liberals nor conservatives have been keen to challenge the unions’ power. Liberals are generally supportive of public-sector unions; some of the worst police departments in the country are in cities, like Baltimore and Oakland, run by liberal mayors. And though conservatives regularly castigate public-sector unions as parasites, they typically exempt the police. Perhaps most crucial, Walker says, “police unions can make life very difficult for mayors, attacking them as soft on crime and warning that, unless they get their way, it will go up. The fear of crime—which is often a code word for race—still has a powerful political impact.” As a result, while most unions in the U.S. have grown weaker since the seventies, police unions have grown stronger.

Global Beta Test: Philippines Entering Poster-Child Narrative Status

NYTimes |  When people begin to see the justice system as thoroughly corrupt and broken, they feel unprotected from crime. That sense of threat makes them willing to support vigilante violence, which feels like the best option for restoring order and protecting their personal safety.

Gema Santamaria, a professor at the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology in Mexico City who studies lynchings and other forms of vigilante killings, and José Miguel Cruz, the research director at Florida International University’s Latin American and Caribbean Center, used survey data from across Latin America to test what leads people to support extrajudicial violence.

The data told a very similar story across all of the countries in their sample. People who didn’t have faith in their country’s institutions were more likely to say vigilante violence was justified. By contrast, in states with stronger institutions, people were more likely to reject extrajudicial violence.

People turn to vigilante violence as a replacement for the formal justice system, Ms. Santamaria said. That can take multiple forms — lynch mobs in Mexico, for instance, or paramilitary “self-defense” forces in Colombia — but the core impulse is the same.

“When you have a system that doesn’t deliver, you are creating, over a period of time, a certain culture of punishment,” she said. “Regardless of what the police are going to do, you want justice, and it will be rough justice.”

Surprisingly, that includes increased support for the use of harsh extralegal tactics by the police themselves. “This seems counterintuitive,” Ms. Santamaria said. “If you don’t trust the police to prosecute criminals, why would you trust them with bending the law?”

But to people desperate for security, she said, the unmediated punishment of police violence seems far more effective than waiting for a corrupt system to take action.

And so, over time, frustration with state institutions, coupled with fear of crime and insecurity, leads to demand for authoritarian violence — even if that means empowering the same corrupt, flawed institutions that failed to provide security in the first place.

The Secret History of Colombia’s Paramilitaries and the U.S. War on Drugs

NYTimes |  Once the paramilitary Colombians — several dozen, all told — have completed their American prison terms, they will have served on average seven and a half years, The Times found. The leaders extradited en masse will have served an average of 10 years, at most, for drug conspiracies that involved tons of cocaine.

By comparison, federal inmates convicted of crack cocaine trafficking — mostly street-level dealers who sold less than an ounce — serve on average just over 12 years in prison.

What’s more, for some, there is a special dividend at the end of their incarceration. Though wanted by the Colombian authorities, two have won permission to stay in the United States, and their families have joined them. Three more are seeking the same haven, and still others are expected to follow suit.

“In the days of Pablo Escobar, they used to say they preferred a tomb in Colombia to a prison in the United States,” said Alirio Uribe Muñoz, a member of the Colombian Congress. “But maybe now extradition is a good deal.”

For 52 years, with abundant American support, the Colombian government has been locked in a ferocious armed conflict with leftist insurgents. Though it initially empowered paramilitary forces as military proxies, the government withdrew official sanction decades later, long after landowners and cartels had co-opted them. Before their demobilization in the mid-2000s, the militiamen came to rival the guerrillas as drug traffickers and outdo them as human rights abusers.

Now, eight years after the paramilitaries were extradited, Colombia has reached a peace deal with their mortal enemies, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the FARC). Facing an Oct. 2 vote on the accord, the country is in the midst of a polarizing debate about crime and punishment for the FARC, informed by what went wrong during the paramilitary peace process. Nobody is advocating that justice be abdicated to the United States this time.

But the paramilitary chapter of the country’s history is not closed, and remains “totally full of blanks,” said María Teresa Ronderos, the author of “Recycled Wars,” a Spanish-language history of Colombian paramilitarism. “Nobody knows what happened to those guys.”

For years, the Justice Department shrouded the militiamen’s cases in secrecy, not only sealing sensitive documents but also hiding basic information and sometimes even erasing defendants like Mr. Giraldo from the public docket.

murder rates rose in a quarter of the nation's one hundred largest cities

NYTimes |  In 2015, Baltimore’s murder rate not only increased the most among the 100 top cities, it also reached a historic high of 55 homicides per 100,000 residents. Its previous record high was in 1993, when the rate was 48.

Some experts attribute the sudden spike in violence largely to a flood of black-market opiates looted from pharmacies during riots in April 2015. The death of Freddie Gray, a young black man who sustained a fatal spinal cord injury in police custody, had set off the city’s worst riots since the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

During the riots, nearly 315,000 doses of drugs were stolen from 27 pharmacies and two methadone clinics, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, a number much higher than the 175,000 doses the agency initially estimated.

Most of the homicides in Baltimore were connected to the drug trade, and what happened in 2015 was a result of more people “getting into the game of selling drugs,” said Jeffrey Ian Ross, a criminologist at the University of Baltimore.

Police commanders have said that an oversupply of inventory from looting resulted in a violent battle for customers among drug gangs.

“This would have caused a disruption in drug markets, with more people trying to maintain or increase their market share,” Dr. Ross said. “You have new entrants coming into the field, altering the supply and demand of illegal drugs in those neighborhoods,” often leading to increased violence.

If the drug theory holds true, the killings in Baltimore should subside this year. A midyear violent crime survey by theMajor Cities Chiefs Police Association showed that while killings were up among 60 large cities, they were slightly down in Baltimore.

“I’m not going to say they’re going to return to historic lows, but we hit a peak last year and things are settling themselves out,” Dr. Ross said.

unemployed vets find a niche in the legalized marijuana industry

nwaonline |  No industry is immune to thievery. But the owners of Colorado's 978 marijuana shop licenses and 1,393 marijuana grow licenses are particularly vulnerable. Because the federal government considers marijuana illegal, many banks won't work with cannabis businesses, forcing them to deal in mountains of cash.

Perhaps more significant, their product is also lucrative for criminals: A pound of marijuana worth $2,000 in Colorado can be sold for $4,000 or $6,000 across state lines. Stores and grow houses are often soft targets in darkened parts of town. And unlike cash, marijuana is untraceable, easily sold on Craigslist or driven to dealers in Chicago and New York.

"The black market is still booming," said Cmdr. James Henning of the Denver Police Department. Contrary to the popular narrative, marijuana is a burglar's typical prize. "They don't get cash," the commander said. "That's usually in the big old safe, and they can't get into that. Usually, it's plants and finished product."

The department said it believes that the city's marijuana businesses have been targeted by organized groups, though it has no evidence that the groups are linked to foreign cartels.

Surveillance videos of some burglaries show thieves sawing through the roofs of businesses, tracking law enforcement with police scanners, and tying up employees. In one case, in southern Colorado, a pair of guards spotted four men in tactical gear carrying AR-15 rifles through a field. The watchmen, former Marine snipers wearing night-vision goggles, scared them away with warning shots.

Denver, one of the few jurisdictions compiling data on crimes at marijuana businesses, has 421 pot-growing houses and shops. It recorded 192 burglaries and thefts at such businesses in 2015. In Aurora, a suburb with 19 operating pot shops, 18 burglaries and robberies have occurred since 2014.

But some business owners do not report break-ins, because they worry that they will be seen as targets or attract inspectors who will find a violation.

Criminals have netted anything from a few marijuana-laced sodas to a quarter-million dollars in plants. In June, much worse occurred: Two armed men entered a pot shop in Aurora, called Green Heart, and killed a guard, Travis Mason. The police called it a botched robbery.

Mason, 24, a former Marine and father of three, was believed to be the first cannabis employee to die on the job in Colorado, and the episode alarmed the industry. Some security businesses reported a rush of requests for armed guards.

"Thieves in this industry are getting much more brazen, much more aggressive," said Ryan Tracy, 38, general manager at the Herbal Cure, which now has a guard on duty every night.

the road to jail is paved with good intentions...,

chicagomag |  JAMES MONTGOMERY VIVIDLY RECALLS THE first time he met Jeff Fort. The year was 1971. Richard Nixon was in the White House and the U.S. attorney for northern Illinois was a young, ambitious Republican named James R. Thompson. The War on Poverty was over; the war on the Left was in full swing. Just two years earlier, Senator Charles Percy had praised Jeff Fort as a bright young man who should enter politics and had invited him to Nixon’s inauguration. (Fort sent two lieutenants in his place.) But by 1971, the party was over.

Montgomery would later serve as Mayor Harold Washington’s corporation counsel, but in 1971 he was a young lawyer in what he calls his “black rage” days, defending Black Panthers and civil rights leaders. One day, Montgomery recalls, he held an impromptu press conference on the courthouse steps, lashing out at the white Establishment. Afterwards, he was approached by two young black men.

“Jim, you hate those motherfuckers as much as we do,"]eff Fort said. “Why don’t you represent us?”

Fort needed a good lawyer. The TWO job training program had turned into a scandal, and in March, Jim Thompson had indicted Fort and 23 Stones on conspiring to defraud the U.S. Government. Montgomery was intrigued by the government’s case. It read like a blueprint for a right-wing counterattack on the liberalism of the 1960s: Destroy one of the last vestiges of the War on Poverty and put away a young man who posed a threat to Mayor Daley’s tight rein on black Chicago—all in one neat, orderly showcase of a trial.

THE TWO PROGRAM WAS IN TROUBLE FROM the start. Mayor Daley, reportedly furious that the Feds had bypassed City Hall and funded TWO directly, refused to approve the organization’s choice of a director.

“Daley knew how gangs operated. He had been in one himself,” says Kenneth Addison, an associate professor of education at Northeastern Illinois University and an expert on Chicago gangs. “Fort had circumvented the Machine. Daley knew the threat Fort and his followers represented, so he stayed on their asses.”

Daley’s strategy was to harass the gangs at every turn and jail their leaders. The Gang Intelligence Unit staged repeated raids on TWO’s training centers. Fort was arrested for murder and kept in jail for five months, until March 1968, when the charges against him were dropped.

More important, in December 1967, the Chicago Tribune, acting on a police tip, charged TWO with mismanagement and the Blackstone Rangers with extortion. The stories scared off corporations that had pledged to hire the program’s trainees, its supporters say.

In the summer of 1968, Senator John McClellan (D-Arkansas) held dramatic hearings on the TWO program. When Fort was called as a witness, his attorney, Marshall Patner, advised him not to testify. Fort rose, clenched his fist, and stalked out of the room. He was cited for contempt of Congress, and later convicted.

Criminal charges seemed imminent. But in fact it took nearly four years and a Republican administration to indict anybody. And then the grand jury brought charges only against Blackstone Rangers. Some of the East Side Disciples became key witnesses for the prosecution.

NO ONE REALLY DISPUTED THE ALLEGATION that the Rangers had been pocketing government money. That was the point of the program, Montgomery argued. Gang bangers were being paid to stay off the streets and to stop killing one another, he said at the trial. How can you charge the gangs with extortion when the program intended all along to transfer money from the Feds to the gang? Assistant U.S. attorney Samuel K. Skinner, a protégé of Jim Thompson, argued otherwise. He produced evidence that gang members had falsified attendance sheets and turned over stipend l checks to their leaders. Little if any learning had taken place in TWO’s training centers, Skinner said. In fact, many gang members were placed in decent jobs, and many more would have i been helped if the city had not been so hellbent on discrediting TWO, says Anthony Gibbs who served as TWO’s acting director of the training program. (He is now an aide to Acting Mayor Eugene Sawyer.)

“We knew what we were dealing with,” Gibbs says. “This was no Sunday-school class. The way to destroy the gang was to wean the members away from the gang. That was my philosophy. And the way to do that was to provide them with another alternative. Not say, ‘Be a nice little boy and go back to high school and get your GED.’ No, we’re gonna get you a J-O-B, ’cause this little training stipend I’m giving you, $45 a week, ain’t shit. I’m going to get you a job that makes you $150 a week and will buy you a new pair of shoes, sweater, everything. You’l1 get used to that, and you won’t have time for no gang.”

Others say the flood of grant money overwhelmed the gang.

“The money was coming so fast and so rapidly, the Rangers couldn’t sort out the good offers from the bad,” says Dan Swope, the former Boys Club director. “Ultimately, by not having that kind of guidance, they began to make their own choices, and they obviously made bad ones.

“People were fighting over them for grants. Jeff Fort and his group became ‘tough guys’ for hire. People made all kinds of offers, and they learned how to get everything they wanted. That’s what corrupted them, so much money being available. Everyone wanted to save the poor. Everyone had the perfect answer.”

In the Historical Vacuum of BeeDee-ism - Chicago is "BLM Consequences"

Hot off the BD brainpan this morning:

Excerpt near the bottom:

"Every cop saw that video," O'Connor said. "One big difference is that now, on the street, there is no fear. Even in the '90s, with all the killing, the gangs feared the police. When we'd show up, they'd run. But now? Now they don't run. Now, there is no fear."

Until recently, the ability of cops, to freely delete an occasional low-life extreme street scum, has been necessary to preserve polite society.  Now, (BodyCams, Dashcams, BLM, big settlement$$$) nobody is safe....

chicagotribune |  Manpower shortages combined with too much overtime lead to exhaustion. And loss of morale from the mayor's botched handling of the Laquan McDonald fiasco have wreaked havoc with command, with street stops down markedly. Yet taxpayers don't have a true picture of how thin that thin blue line has become.

All these problems have deep roots. Daley was at war with his Police Department and demanded a thorough house cleaning. There was a purge of district commanders and other leaders under former police Superintendent Jody Weis, and that created havoc throughout the command structure.

Earlier, the large gang crimes units — south, west and north — which provided valuable human intelligence and interaction with the gangs, were disbanded and remade.

A common theme recently is that people in the most violent neighborhoods don't cooperate with police, but the fact is they won't talk to cops they don't know. And they won't talk with others listening.

The gang members, and their families, knew officers in the old gang crimes units.

"They'd catch a two-time loser with a gun, put the cuffs on, and he'd know what to do," said Bob Angone, who spent 30 years as a street cop, as a tactical lieutenant and commander of the hostage barricade team.

"That loser will say, I know who shot victim so-and-so. They'll give you information, but they'll only tell the police they trust, the specialists, because they know they'll get their break in court, that the specialists would keep your word. That's how it's done. And the city lost a lot when we lost the gang crimes units."

There is another thing to consider about the differences between August 1991 and now. It isn't quantifiable; it won't fit on a mayoral white paper, there are no numbers to it.

But it was reported, with a video, by Tribune journalists Megan Crepeau and Erin Hooley a few days ago under the headline: "Heckling and gunfire as police investigate shooting: 'We're just playing.'"

Police were investigating reports of a shooting in bloody Englewood when about 10 young men confronted them, harassed them, mocked them on the street, hurling epithets, angry, defiant.

nah, just go straight to the purge...,

abcnews |  Two men are still on the loose in Chicago today after robbing and shooting a senior citizen in broad daylight as the man was watering his front lawn.

A recording of the incident caught by a neighbor's security camera shows two men riding bicycles past 71-year-old Federico LaGuardia as he watered the lawn of his Marquette Park neighborhood home police said. 

Shortly after the men pass, one of them turns around, wrestles LaGuardia to the ground and shoots him once in the abdomen after he fell to the ground. The man then rifles through LaGuardia’s pockets and takes his wallet before fleeing on his bike. 

Despite his injuries, LaGuardia was able to stagger to his neighbor’s door and call for help. He was taken to Holy Cross Hospital and then transferred to Mount Sinai Hospital where he underwent surgery. Police said he is in fair condition but remains in intensive care. 

"I heard the gunshot and I ran out here and he was, like, dazed in the street," said neighbor Lois Walker. 

This is the latest attack in Chicago's deadliest summer in two decades, and community activists and members of the public are outraged. 

"It's just absolutely ridiculous, you're not even safe in your own yard," said neighbor Teryeyah Griggs.

target hood extremists with this in parallel with stockpiling body bags for the purge...,

theintercept |  A Google-incubated program that has been targeting potential ISIS members with deradicalizing content will soon be used to target violent right-wing extremists in North America, a designer of the program said at an event at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday.

Using research and targeted advertising, the initiative by London-based startup Moonshot CVE and Google’s Jigsaw technology incubator targets potentially violent jihadis and directs them to a YouTube channel with videos that refute ISIS propaganda.

In the pilot program countering ISIS, the so-called Redirect Method collected the metadata of 320,000 individuals over the course of eight weeks, using 1,700 keywords, and served them advertisements that led them to the videos. Collectively, the targets watched more than half a million minutes of videos.

The event at Brookings was primarily about the existing program aimed to undermine ISIS recruiting. “I think this is an extremely promising method,” said Richard Stengel, U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs.

Ross Frenett, co-founder of Moonshot, said his company and Jigsaw are now working with funding from private groups, including the Gen Next Foundation, to target other violent extremists, including on the hard right.

“We are very conscious as our own organization and I know Jigsaw are that this [violent extremism] is not solely the problem of one particular group,” Frenett said.

“Our efforts during phase two, when we’re going to focus on the violent far right in America, will be very much focused on the small element of those that are violent. The interesting thing about how they behave is they’re a little bit more brazen online these days than ISIS fan boys,” Frenett said.

He noted that this new target demographic is more visible online.

the climate crisis is a reproductive crisis...,

npr |  As we just discussed, Zika is a serious concern for expectant mothers living in places where they might be exposed. But there's another threat that's making some people think hard about starting a family, and that's the changing climate. NPR's Jennifer Ludden has this story.

JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: In Keene, N.H, a dozen people have scooched folding chairs into a circle in the spare office of an environmental group. The meeting's organized by a nonprofit called Conceivable Future, one of more than a dozen such meetings across the country. The topic? It's not melting ice sheets or solar power. It's something deeply personal. This group has gathered to ask - with a climate crisis looming, is it a good idea to have children?

MEGHAN KALLMAN: I've probably been thinking about it as long as I've been thinking seriously about having a family.

LUDDEN: Meghan Kallman is 32. A year and a half ago, she co-founded this group with Josephine Ferorelli, 33. Both are in committed relationships. Both worry that any children they have would live long enough to see devastating climate impacts from flooding coastal cities to more intense super storms to shortages of fresh water.

JOSEPHINE FERORELLI: If you're in your 20s or 30s, thinking about maybe having a kid, digging into the science and understanding what we're looking at - like, it's not an intellectual problem at that point. It's really a life problem, like a heart problem.

LUDDEN: Though not a problem likely to come up in casual conversation or one that many with pressing daily struggles may feel able to focus on. But for those here steeped in scary science, passionate about the environment, it's a relief to know they're not alone.

MEGHAN HOSKINS: It's kind of, you know, emotionally difficult to deal with.

a world unprepared...,

post-gazette |  While countries across Europe and East Asia grapple with declining birthrates and aging populations, societies across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia face youth booms of staggering proportions: More than half of Egypt’s labor force is younger than age 30. Half of Nigeria’s population of 167 million is between the ages of 15 and 34. In Afghanistan, Angola, Chad, East Timor, Niger, Somalia and Uganda, more than two-thirds of the population is under the age of 25.

How well these young people transition to adulthood — and how well their governments integrate them economically, politically and socially — will influence whether their countries thrive or implode. Surging populations of young people will drive political and social norms, influence modes of governance and the role of women in society, and embrace or discredit extremist ideologies. They are the fulcrum on which the future rests.

These young people could transform entire regions, making them more prosperous, more just and more secure. Or they could unleash a flood of instability and violence. Or both. And if their countries are unable to accommodate their needs and aspirations, they could generate waves of migration for decades.

In the face of this deluge of young people, world leaders should be steering us all toward the former and away from the latter. But as serial acts of global terrorism, large-scale humanitarian disasters, perplexing political trends in Europe such as Brexit and persistent economic fragility demand urgent attention, the question emerges:

Is anyone even paying attention?

Consider India. More than 300 million Indians are under the age of 15, making India home to more children than any country, at any time, in all of human history. If these children formed a country, it would be the fourth-largest in the world.

Every month until 2030, one million Indians will turn 18 years old, observes Somini Sengupta, the author of a compelling new book, “The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young.” These young people will need education and jobs in a global economy that will feature more automation and fewer of the semi-skilled manufacturing jobs that absorbed earlier youth surges in Asia. India’s demographic bonanza nevertheless holds the potential to create unprecedented economic growth — or it could rock the world’s largest democracy and second-largest population with sustained instability.

Africa’s population of 200 million young people is set to double by 2045. In the Middle East, a region of some 400 million people, nearly 65 percent of the population is younger than 30 — the highest proportion of youth to adults in the region’s history.

In Pakistan, two-thirds of the population is under 30. Many of these young people will grow up in a Pakistan that appears to be growing more democratic but that also is rife with corruption, extremist violence and dire shortages of energy and water.

In Iran, two-thirds of the population is under 35. These young people are educated, tech savvy and full of potential. Whereas the Islamic revolution will be something they learned about in school, many will remember Iranians pouring into the streets during the Green Movement or to celebrate the nuclear deal with the United States. And they will watch to see whether engagement with the West benefits them or not.

Will young Iranians and Pakistanis uplift or splinter the politics, economies, cultures and security of their countries? Will they engage the world productively and peacefully, turn inward or pick fights with neighbors? Given the size, strategic position and military capabilities of these two geopolitical heavweights, the answers will determine whether they export vitality or violence.

Unfortunately, the countries with most of the world’s young people are the ones most ill-equipped to grapple with their needs, ambitions, expectations and inevitable frustrations — let alone capitalize on their potential. Developing countries are home to 89 percent of the world’s 10- to 24-year-olds; by 2020, they will be home to nine out of every 10 people globally.

Given these conditions, it is easy to conjure a dystopic future, a Hollywood caricature of lawless developing countries dominated by gangs of young men brandishing firearms.

But what if the world invests in these young people? These countries are capable of pulling themselves out of poverty and instability within a generation — the way China did, the way India might. But if the international community fails to act now, we will all suffer the consequences.

why young men become terrorists and join _______________? (to get laid)

socialethology |  There is a hypothesis according to which the lack of accessible women for sexual relationships and marriage in Moslem polygamous societies would be one of the causes of the spread of suicidal terrorism’s phenomenon in our times.

A lot of young men who have an insufficiently high status to get women chose the path of suicidal terrorism, because they have the conviction that, after their death, according to the Quran, they would get into Heaven, where they would enjoy the company of 72 virgins. Given the fact that a lot of men are practically excluded from the reproductive process, even a vague promise regarding the access to women, as that from the Islamic precepts is, is pretty persuasive.

Our brains are designed to work after the same principles as they were 100.000 years ago, when there were only real things; today, when we have to face abstract or artificial things, our brains keep perceiving them as being real and touchable. This is why the abstract promise of the life to come is perceived as being realistic and those 72 virgins are seen as an authentic war trophy that is offered to the bravest martyrs [ibid., p. 12].

It is curios the fact that the terrorist organization Al Qaeda has had the greatest support in the most polygamous countries: Afganistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, but not in Turkey, where polygamy is forbidden since 1920. It is considered that one way to diminish the support for terrorism in those countries is to emancipate the women and to gradually liquidate polygamy, in order to reduce the number of men who are excluded from the reproductive process [4].

The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, made once an eccentric comment, is his unique way, as regarding the factors that motivate young men to become terrorists. Referring to the fighters for the Islamic State (ISIS), Johnson said that, if one were to study carefully the psychological profile of jihadis (presented in a report from British secret service MI5), one would notice that they are obsessed with pornography.

Johnson said: “If you look at all the psychological profiling about bombers, they typically will look at porn. They are literally wankers. Severe onanists”. He continued: “They are just young men in desperate need of self-esteem who do not have a particular mission in life, who feel that they are losers and this thing makes them feel strong – like winners.” [5].

In general, the role of sexual frustration in the genesis of terrorist behavior is intensely analyzed in the writings of evolutionary psychology and they will produce a change of perspective in assessing the phenomenon of terrorism [Thayer, Hudson, 2010; Caluya, 2013].