Have You Noticed How “Terrorism” NEVER Disrupts The Lives Of Those In Power?

.@joerogan is deeply concerned by the dehumanizing rhetoric emanating from both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict and genuinely fearful that escalating tensions in the Middle East could lead to Global Thermonuclear War.

"When you look at what's happened now, oh, my god, the… pic.twitter.com/I8k2zltt0k

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) October 20, 2023

MOA  |  Israel is a colonial settler state in permanent conflict with the suppressed natives.

It thought it could survive in that state, or even extend its settlements, by deterring opposing forces with its superior military.

Hamas has breached that deterrence myth by inflicting, in one day, more casualties in Israel than it had experienced in any previous wars.

Natanyahoo is under pressure to restore the deterrence, to again provide the Zionists with a feeling of superiority.

He can not do that.

Any land attack in Gaza means urban warfare in an already destroyed city with large underground facilities. During the taking of Bakhmut the Wagener forces had in total some 40,000 casualties (dead and wounded). The other side had more than 70,000. What price would the IDF have to pay to 'destroy Hamas'?

The other factor is of course Hizbullah and other resistance groups, which may well attack Israel from the north and various other directions. Hizbullah has loudly said it would do so should the IDF enter Gaza. It has some 100,000 missiles - more than enough to exhaust Israel's air defenses. Its longest reach missiles can attack any major city within Israel. There have already been daily fire exchanges at the norther border.

The 2006 war in Lebanon has shown that Hizbullah is dug in and very able to defend itself. It has since gained more experience by fighting ISIS in Syria. Neither U.S. air force attacks nor a land force invasion can hinder Hizbullah from firing its missiles.

(Syria, as well as Iran, will not intervene in the war unless they are directly attacked.)

Netanyahoo must attack Gaza to restore deterrence. He can not attack Gaza because the urban warfare would cause large Israeli casualties. He can not attack Gaza because Hizbullah would then destroy the myth of the superior settler state even more than Hamas has done so far.

Israel, with the help of the U.S., has tried to push the population of Gaza into Egypt. From Egypt's standpoint that would be a humanitarian solution, at least as long as others pay for it. But it would cause a serious strategic problem. Resistance by Hamas and others against Israel would continue indefinitely, but Egypt would be held responsible for it. It can not and will not take on that burden.

Netanyahoo's next idea was to starve Gaza. But the world will not let him do that. At least not beyond a certain point. Even the UN Secretary General has visited the Rafah crossing. Other global organizations, like the WHO and ASEAN, have spoken up. Pictures of starving people will make it impossible for the west to support that 'solution'.

Meanwhile Hamas fighters will continue to sit in their tunnels, ready to defend their land, and likely with enough provisions to hold out for months.

Israeli settlers, with the support of the IDF, are rampaging through the West Bank. They are killing more Palestinians and further enrage the global public against their deeds. This will escalate.

Israel's decision making is paralyzed. It will for now continue to talk of a ground invasion but will not launch one. It will also continue to starve Gaza.

But something will soon break. At any minute there might be a new large atrocity in Gaza or a pogrom in the West Bank. Any miscalculation in the north could launch that front into a hot war. Hizbullah could start to 'preemptively' invade Israeli proper.

But Israel's Jewish public is still demanding a war of revenge. It still needs the restoration of its deterrence and superiority.

But what if that turns out to be impossible to achieve?

Well. Then something else must change.

As Adam Shatz summarizes in the London Review of Books:

Vengeful Pathologies (archived)

The inescapable truth is that Israel cannot extinguish Palestinian resistance by violence, any more than the Palestinians can win an Algerian-style liberation war: Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are stuck with each other, unless Israel, the far stronger party, drives the Palestinians into exile for good. The only thing that can save the people of Israel and Palestine, and prevent another Nakba – a real possibility, while another Holocaust remains a traumatic hallucination – is a political solution that recognises both as equal citizens, and allows them to live in peace and freedom, whether in a single democratic state, two states, or a federation. So long as this solution is avoided, a continuing degradation, and an even greater catastrophe, are all but guaranteed.

Real Revolutionary Thinking Focuses On Social Infrastructure And The Neighborhood Effect

chronicle |  Jacqueline lived in one of the most toxic environments in urban America. If you’ve seen The Wire, HBO’s series about crime and punishment in Baltimore, you can picture daily life in her neighborhood on that city’s West Side. Drug dealers. Junkies. Shootings. Her high-rise housing project felt like a concrete cell. Jacqueline, a single mother with a sick child, was desperate to escape.

Then she got a ticket out. In the mid-1990s, Jacqueline volunteered to participate in a far-reaching social experiment that would shed new light on urban poverty. The federal government gave her and many others housing vouchers to move out of ghettos—with a condition. Jacqueline (a pseudonym used by researchers to protect her privacy) had to use the voucher in an area where at least 90 percent of the residents lived above the federal poverty line.

It’s unlikely that Jacqueline had heard of William Julius Wilson, but the experiment that would change her life traces its intellectual roots in part to the Harvard sociologist’s 1987 book, The Truly Disadvantaged. Wilson upended urban research with his ideas about how cities had transformed in the post-civil-rights period. Writing to explain the rise of concentrated poverty in black inner-city neighborhoods after 1970, he focused on the loss of manufacturing jobs and the flight of black working- and middle-class families, which left ghettos with a greater proportion of poor people. And he examined the effects of extreme poverty and “social isolation” on their lives. The program that transplanted Jacqueline, Moving to Opportunity, was framed as a test of his arguments about “whether neighborhoods matter” in poor people’s lives.

Twenty-five years after its publication, The Truly Disadvantaged is back in the spotlight, thanks to a flurry of high-profile publications and events that address its ideas.

Researchers who have followed families like Jacqueline’s over 15 years are now reporting the long-term results of the mobility experiment. The mixed picture emerging from the project—"one of the nation’s largest attempts to eradicate concentrated poverty,” in the words of the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson—is feeding a broader discussion about how to help the urban underclass.

Families that moved to safer and better-off areas “improved their health in ways that were quite profound,” including reductions in obesity and diabetes, says Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who is principal investigator of the project’s long-run study. They showed less depression, Katz says, and “very large increases in happiness.” Yet the program failed to improve other key measures, like the earnings and employment rate of adults and the educational achievement of children.

At the same time, two sociologists influenced by Wilson are publishing important new books that mine extensive data to demonstrate the lasting impact of place on people’s lives. The first, published in February by the University of Chicago Press, is Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Among his many findings, Sampson shows that exposure to severely disadvantaged areas hampers children’s verbal skills, an effect that persists even if they move to better-off places. That handicap is “roughly equivalent to missing a year of schooling,” according to research he conducted with Stephen Raudenbush and Patrick Sharkey.

The second book, Sharkey’s Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality, forthcoming in January from Chicago, explores how neighborhood inequality spans generations. Sharkey, an associate professor of sociology at New York University, writes that “over 70 percent of African-Americans who live in today’s poorest, most racially segregated neighborhoods are from the same families that lived in the ghettos of the 1970s.” In other words, “the American ghetto appears to be inherited"—a finding with implications for policy.

But as scholars break new ground, is anybody listening? Not since the early 1960s has poverty received so little attention, says Christopher Jencks, a Harvard professor of public policy. Among sociologists, he says, optimism that they will make a political impact has waned.

Farming The Poor: The Homeless Industrial Complex

hotair |  This story is duplicated countless times and in countless ways and tells you everything you need to know about how corrupt our welfare state actually is. We often focus on the occasional incidences of welfare fraud committed by recipients, but those incidents pale in comparison to the amount of money that is simply skimmed off the top by the people who run the programs.

It’s not the poor people who are benefiting, but the people who are claiming to help them. Those people are getting rich, cushy government jobs with great pay and benefits, and in many cases kickbacks.

Here in Minnesota, we have an enormous scandal centered on an Ilhan Omar-associated group that stole hundreds of millions of pandemic relief money that was supposed to be spent on providing a substitute for the school lunch program during the school closures. A nonprofit that was essentially a Somali gang set up fake feeding centers that served almost nobody but collected hundreds of millions from the Minnesota government.

The government officials did almost nothing. It took the FBI to shut the scam down. Our Department of Education knew of the graft but was concerned with appearing racist and ticking off our Congresswoman.

This is how the government-to-nonprofit complex works. Politically connected people conspire to use the suffering of others as an excuse to fleece the taxpayers of what is collectively billions of dollars. It is estimated that total fraud from pandemic relief funds alone amounts to hundreds of billions to over a trillion dollars in just 3 years.

And that doesn’t include the billions in yearly payments to nonprofits that accomplish little to nothing.

I call this process “farming the poor,” where poor people are the soil used to grow the billions of dollars that pop out of the ground every time you appeal to people’s compassion or desire for a better quality of life.

Poverty is an industry, not run by or for the poor people themselves, but for the benefit of those whose job it is to solve the problems.

 

 

Not Big Lots!! EBT/SNAP Cuts Fitna Hurt One Of My Favorite Stores...,

businessinsider |  Discount chains like Dollar General and Big Lots are warning that cuts to food stamps and lower-than-usual tax refunds this year could start hurting sales. 

This month, 32 states ended the federal increase to food stamps, known as SNAP benefits, that began during the early weeks of the pandemic. At the same time, certain beefed-up tax credits are no longer available, which means many taxpayers are preparing for smaller tax refunds this year. 

Both changes are the result of a wind-down of pandemic-era policies, and it's the combination of factors that has retailers worried — they're coming at a time when inflation has kept prices for everyday goods unusually high, straining the budgets of lower-income consumers in particular. 

Now, the retailers that serve those consumers are preparing for a possible slowdown in spending. 

"In particular, we remain concerned about the lower-income customer, our core customer," Michael O'Sullivan, CEO of off-price department store Burlington, said during a call with investors this month. "In 2022, this customer group bore the brunt of the impact of inflation on real household incomes. We think the impact of inflation will moderate this year, but there are other factors that could hurt this customer, such as a rise in unemployment and the ending of expanded SNAP benefits." 

At value chain Big Lots, where nearly 80% of shoppers have a household income under $100,000, "customers are pinched," CEO Bruce Thorn said during a recent investor call.

"At this point, 30% of that lower household income customer, their expenses today are greater than their income coming in. And 70% of them have curbed spending as a result of that," he said. 

Thorn estimated that the tax refunds, though arriving earlier this year, are about 10% to 15% lower than last year, and when combined with the reduced SNAP benefits, it "further deteriorates lower household income spend." Those shoppers, he said, are "going through a tough time right now." 

 

The Atlantic Scapegoats The Internet For Elite Overproduction And Popular Immiseration

theatlantic  |  The internet gives groups the ability not just to express and bond over misery but to inflict it on others—in effect, to transfer their own misery onto those they resent. The most extreme examples come in the form of racist or misogynist harassment campaigns—many led by young white men—such as Gamergate or the hashtag campaigns against Black feminists.

Misery trickles down in subtler ways too. Though the field is still young, studies on social media suggest that emotions are highly contagious on the web. In a review of the science, Harvard’s Amit Goldenberg and Stanford’s James J. Gross note that people “share their personal emotions online in a way that affects not only their own well-being, but also the well-being of others who are connected to them.” Some studies found that positive posts could drive engagement as much as, if not more than, negative ones, but of all the emotions expressed, anger seems to spread furthest and fastest. It tends to “cascade to more users by shares and retweets, enabling quicker distribution to a larger audience.”

Tech executives thought that connecting the world would be an unmitigated good. Widespread internet access and social media have made it far easier for the average person to hear and be heard by many more of his fellow citizens.

But it also means that miserable people, who were previously alienated and isolated, can find one another, says Kevin Munger, an assistant professor at Penn State who studies how platforms shape political and cultural opinions. This may offer them some short-term succor, but it’s not at all clear that weak online connections provide much meaningful emotional support. At the same time, those miserable people can reach the rest of us too. As a result, the average internet user, Munger told me in a recent interview, has more exposure than previous generations to people who, for any number of reasons, are hurting. Are they bringing all of us down?

In an essay titled “Facebook Is Other People,” Munger uses one of his relatives as an example. The relative is in his 60s and has a cognitive disability. Munger describes him as “an embittered, lonely man, the perfect target for information fraudsters who will claim to explain that the source of his pain is some despised group (immigrants, the deep state).” The relative has expressed an interest in getting online, and Munger sees only downsides: “His presence as a consumer of online news will have negative consequences, both for himself and for the wider information environment.”

It may sound obvious to say that our digital spaces are not okay because people are not okay. But too many conversations about the problems in online communities elide this fact. They frame the information crisis as solely a technological issue. When Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow tech CEOs come before Congress for their bipartisan grillings, the subtext is that if the companies could only implement the proper moderation policies, remove a few of the most toxic personalities, and change the way content is recommended (according to their desired politics), the problem would go away.

Shellenberger Says Progressives Ruin Cities

michaelshellenberger |  In my new book, San Fransicko, I describe why progressives create and defend what European researchers call “open drug scenes,” which are places in cities where drug dealers and buyers meet, and many addicts live in tents. Progressives call these scenes “homeless encampments,” and not only defend them but have encouraged their growth, which is why the homeless population in California grew 31 percent since 2000. This was mostly a West Coast phenomenon until recently. But now, the newly elected progressive mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, has decided to keep open a drug scene at Mass and Cass avenues, even though it has resulted in several deaths from drug overdoses and homicides.

Progressives defend their approach as compassionate. Not everybody who is homeless is an addict, they say. Many are just down on their luck. Others turn to drugs after living on the street. What they need is our help. We should not ask people living in homeless encampments to go somewhere else. Homeless shelters are often more dangerous than living on the street. We should provide the people living in tents with money, food, clean needles, and whatever else they need to stay alive and comfortable. And we should provide everyone with their own apartment unit if that’s what they want.

But this “harm reduction” approach is obviously failing. Cities already do a good job taking care of temporarily homeless people not addicted to drugs. Drug dealers stab and sometimes murder addicts who don’t pay. Women forced into prostitution to support their addictions are raped. Addicts are dying from overdose and poisoning. The addicts living in the open drug scenes commit many crimes including open drug use, sleeping on sidewalks, and defecating in public. Many steal to maintain their habits. The hands-off approach has meant that addicts do not spend any amount of time in jail or hospital where they can be off of drugs, and seek recovery.

Now, even a growing number of people who have worked or still work within the homeless services sector are speaking out. A longtime San Francisco homeless service provider who read San Fransicko, and said they mostly agreed with it, reached out to me to share their views. At first this person said they wanted to speak on the record. But as the interview went on, and the person criticized their colleagues, they asked to remain anonymous, fearing retribution.

The main progressive approach for addressing homelessness, not just in San Francisco but in progressive cities around the nation, is “Housing First,” which is the notion that taxpayers should give, no questions asked, apartment units to anyone who says they are homeless, and asks for one. What actually works to reduce the addiction that forces many people onto the streets is making housing contingent on abstinence. But Housing First advocates oppose “contingency management,” as it’s called, because, they say, “Housing is a right,” and it should not be conditioned upon behavior change.

But such a policy is absurdly unrealistic, said the San Francisco homeless expert. “To pretend that this city could build enough permanent supportive housing for every homeless person who needs it is ludicrous,” the person said. “I wish it weren’t. I wish I lived in a land where there was plenty of housing. But now people are dying on our streets and it feels like we’re not doing very much about it.”

The underlying problem with Housing First is that it enables addiction. “The National Academies of Sciences review [which showed that giving people apartments did not improve health or other life outcomes] you cited shows that. San Francisco has more permanent supportive housing units per capita than any other city, and we doubled spending on homelessness, but the homeless population rose 13%, even as it went down in the US. And so we doubled our spending and the problem got worse. But if you say that, you get attacked.”

 

Shellenberger Says Crack Down Hard On Addicts And The Homeless

michaelshellenberger |   Drug decriminalization and “Housing First” advocates say that all we should do to help Diane is to give her a free apartment, needles for shooting and foil for smoking fentanyl, and a place where she can safely use fentanyl. That’s the progressive thing to do, according to San Francisco’s Mayor and Supervisors, who are advocating for a place for addicts to smoke and inject fentanyl. But does that seem like the moral thing to do? Of course it’s not. In fact, it could kill her, in the same way that decriminalization and Housing First policies have contributed to the deaths of 712 people in San Francisco last year. 

 The moral thing to do is to arrest Diane. Does that sound mean to you? If it does, then you don’t understand addiction, or you’re in denial about its hold over people. In the comments on Twitter to Adam’s video, Jacqui Berlinn, the mother of a fentanyl street addict in San Francisco, said, “She deserves love and compassion mental care and counseling — not needles and foil.” Someone responded, “She has to chose to do that herself. Nobody can force her.” It’s true that Diane has to decide whether to quit fentanyl. But by enforcing our laws against public drug use, we can give Diane the choice of rehab or jail.

Why don’t we? In a word, victimology. That’s the three part idea that a) Diane is a victim; b) victimhood is not a stage on the road to heroism but rather a permanent state; and c) everything should be given and nothing required of victims. According to the progressive victimologists who run San Francisco, and other progressive cities, the laws against public drug use, public defecation, and shoplifting, should not be enforced against Diane because she’s an addict. As a victim, Diane is sacred, and the system is sinful. As such, it is better to let her die from fentanyl than to enforce the law. It’s part of the Woke religion. 

It is Woke religion, a.k.a., victimology, which leads progressives to grossly misrepresent Diane’s situation. Progressives insist, against what they say are our lying eyes, that Diane is homeless not because she is addicted to fentanyl but rather because rents in San Francisco are too high. Progressives insist that the homeless on the streets are locals who couldn’t afford the rent, not people who moved to San Francisco because they knew the city would allow them to maintain their addiction at low cost without risk of arrest. And progressives insist that the only moral approach is to help Diane maintain her addiction, and not enforce the laws when she breaks them.

In San Fransicko, I debunk the myths that homelessness is a result of high rents, show that Europe saved lives being lost to addiction by arresting addicts and closing open drug scenes, and explain why victimology leads progressives to maintain what is plainly an immoral situation. The title of the book has two meanings. The sickness I describe is the sickness of untreated mental illness and addiction. But the other sickness, San Fransickness, is the sickness of those in the grip of victimology. It is a sickness unto death, one that leads them to deny the fact that the normalization and liberalization of drugs is killing 100,000 of our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, every year.

 

Serving As Daytime Homeless Shelters Has Hollowed Out America's Public Libraries...,

truthout |  “This library is full of losers,” an HR person said to me as I signed my letter of resignation from my public library job. “A bunch of losers who just take, take, take. Good for you for moving up in the world.” I was truly shocked by her disdain for my coworkers.

The HR person approved of my resignation because I was leaving an assistant position to take a professional one at another library, joining the ranks of other degreed librarians after graduating from library school. But her comment dripped with scorn toward all the people who simply showed up to work each day, collecting their modest paychecks and serving the public. Indeed, her comment reflected a more widespread attitude that I’ve found among administrators (members of the professional managerial class) within the public sector: Many are capitalist groupies who see unionized employees working for the government as leeches. This anti-worker sentiment within the administrative ranks of many public libraries has made it easier for one of the most nefarious grifts in the U.S. economic system to take hold: the public-private partnership, a Reagan-era arrangement in which private industry “partners” with the public sector, claiming to be able to deliver more for less in service to the public.

Just the name makes me sick — the slick, corporate double-speak of it and the way partnership implies that these arrangements aren’t an insidious attack on public institutions. Perhaps the most nauseating of these assaults on the commons is one that has been silently infiltrating one of our most cherished public spaces: public libraries.

Library Systems and Services (LS&S) is a for-profit, private company that has been quietly infiltrating public libraries since 1997 when it successfully negotiated a contract to privatize the county library system in Riverside County, California. In the ‘90s and through the first decade of the 2000s, LS&S operated using a business model that will be familiar to anyone who follows local government issues in the U.S.: a private company descends on a municipal or county government that is in financially poor shape, and offers to take over (or “outsource”) management of a public service, like a library, for a fraction of the cost. This business model changed slightly, and alarmingly, about a decade ago.

In 2010, LS&S made headlines by securing contracts to privatize public libraries in affluent, economically healthy municipalities, rather than in struggling, economically marginalized communities. Flexing into a new type of market, the sky is apparently the limit for LS&S, which according to its own website has shockingly morphed into “the 3rd largest library system in the United States.”

 

Kwestin The Corporate World Food System And You Might Be A Terrorist...,

gpenewsdocs  |  FRIES: Pat, from farmers and fishers groups, to cooperatives and unions, the Long Food Movement calls on civil society and social movements to unite and collaborate. This as a forceful counter position to an agribusiness-led transformation of the food systems. Your report Transforming Food Systems by 2045 maps out what this kind of ground up collaboration could achieve. So, as the title suggests you are looking decades ahead. What was the impetus behind that?

Joe Biden’s new anti-terrorism initiative classifies “anarchist violent extremists” that “oppose all forms of capitalism, corporate globalization, and governing institutions, which are perceived as harmful to society” as “domestic violent extremists.” pic.twitter.com/GKmsQsGBaA

— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) June 18, 2021

MOONEY: Well we back in 2016, in fact, we began to talk about the need for a strategy that was not so short-term as it has always been. That it can’t just be are two or three years of thinking. We need to be thinking further down the road. And we were expressing our general frustration, many of us in civil society, that we’re always trapped into these cycles of funding which is so short that we really can’t do the horizon scanning that’s important. So we talked about, well, let’s build something different.

Let’s try to see if we can imagine not just what we would like to have down the road but how we would get to it. We all have the same kind of dreams of the way we’d like to see the world be. But can we really get there? Can we politically practically do it? So the exercise of the Long Food Movement was to not just dream of what we want but really do the politics of it. You know, what’s really viable in terms of moving institutions, moving money around to get where we want to be.

FRIES: The Long Food Movement is for decentralizing control and democratizing food systems as the key to feeding the world as well as (re)generating ecological and other systems vital to people and planet. You say achieving that will require policy frameworks at every level of governance – from local law to international agreements –that support and empower small holder and peasant farmers all over the world. Talk about policy frameworks that have moved in the opposite direction by supporting and empowering agribusiness. And the role of agribusiness in getting governments to make those policy choices. For example, what did agribusiness want and get from government say back in the days when biotechnology was the then new technology?

MOONEY: Back in the even the late seventies and the eighties agribusiness was saying, we have a technology here biotechnology, genetically modified crops, which will feed the 500 million, at that time there are 500 million malnourished people in the world. That would solve that problem. They would take care of that and that they had the only tools that would actually be able to do it. They said that they needed some help to do it though.

They needed three things basically. They needed government regulators to get out of the way; give them the freedom to act as they wanted to. Secondly, they needed to be able to be given regulation, a certain kind of regulation, intellectual property rights over life, over plants and livestock so that they would own it. And so no bad regulations but the regulations they wanted which give them more corporate power. And then thirdly, they needed to turn the public sector researchers in agriculture into basically servants for the private sector. So do the basic work for us and we’ll do the rest.

FRIES: Just to clarify the third point about what agribusiness wanted was to turn public sector agricultural researchers into servants for the private sector, so this was to get the sort of research they wanted. In other words, research that advanced the interests of high-input, chemical intensive agriculture and that eventually will feed into profits for the main agribusiness players. So, pro-GMO research.

MOONEY: The Green Revolution sort of research we’ve been hearing about for ever. And all the developments coming out of universities and government research stations around the world for agriculture as well. The research money in the public sector goes into again support services for the private sector, basic research for the private sector.

FRIES: What were some real world consequences of this policy framework that agribusiness wanted and got? Take one example, I am thinking here of corporate concentration in food systems. What happened there?

MOONEY: Well, we went from roughly 7,000 private sector seed companies in the world when I first got into this work in the seventies, to where we now have really what, five or six at the most. In many ways, it’s really only three or four companies that really control all of commercial production of seeds and pesticides together. So it’s vastly concentrated compared to what it was.

FRIES: So there’s been a lot of corporate takeover and buyout activity.

MOONEY: Yeah. On a massive scale. I mean, it’s been a huge convergence. Really it started in the seventies and it’s kept on going. It hasn’t stopped. It’s transforming itself. Who’s doing the converging has been changing over time. When I was first dealing with this, the biggest seed company in the world was Royal Dutch Shell. They bought more than a hundred seed companies and they thought they were going to be big in the market. They decided they couldn’t do it after awhile. Then they got out of it and more conventional crop chemical companies took over and bought the seed companies. Now, of course, we’re seeing a new development where it’s the big data companies that are moving in and taking over large sectors of the food system.

FRIES: And you think there is more to come. That this trend shows no signs of slowing down.

MOONEY: It’s coming because again the industrial food chain is changing. It’s no longer the chain with all the links in it that we used to have. Seeds used to be sold and owned separately from pesticides and from fertilizers. And farm machinery companies were stuck in the business of producing tractors. The traders and the Cargills of the world and the processors and the retailers were all different folks. With big data management and the ability to manipulate, not just digital information but also to manipulate digital DNA to actually adjust, technologically computer-wise adjust living materials makes it possible for the biggest companies with the biggest computers to step in and really try to govern the large chunks of the food chain.

So seeds and pesticides have become one basically with the farm machinery companies and the fertilizer companies. They could actually just become one big input sector. The grain trading companies are kind of lost in this whole exercise. They’re not quite sure that they’ve got anything that anyone else wants anymore. The processors and the retailers are coming together more. And the big data managers behind all of that, the Amazons and the Alibabas of the world, the Googles and Tencents of the world, whether it’s China or Germany or the United States are saying: well, we can actually manage that better than anybody else can. So you get Alibaba advising peasant producers in China on how to grow pigs and gardens as well as how to market their products, as well as setting them up for retail sales in the stores.

Davos Is Dead And I Have Embraced Islam...,

FT  |   Felix Marquardt, a former global schmoozer and current author of The New Nomads, explains why attempting to solve the world’s problems up a Magic Mountain in Switzerland over the course of a few short days, is a quick fix that does more harm than good. 

 A few weeks ago, the World Economic Forum (WEF) pulled the plug on its gathering in Singapore in August. The reasons invoked by the organisers for this third cancellation (plans for an alternative, exceptional meeting in Lucerne in May were also scrapped earlier this year) centred around health concerns and logistics. The truth is more complex and the malaise runs deeper. 

The pandemic has exposed the contradictions of the WEF as a project and its terminal lack of legitimacy and credibility in the post-Covid era. My inkling as an addict in recovery, is that the organisers are unable to come to terms with this because, just like others in the throes of active addiction, they are in denial. 

 I used to be a senior adviser to a number of global leaders and a Davos cheerleader. I also used to do a lot of drugs. I had my last drink and drug seven years ago. At the height of my substance abuse, I thought I couldn’t possibly be an alcoholic or an addict. Addicts were people shooting up on park benches or sucking on glass pipes in crack houses. I was flying around the world in business class, living in five star palaces, working for heads of state (including dictators), people running for office (including aspiring dictators) and CEOs of some of the world’s largest multinationals. 

A few years into recovery, I came to a different realisation: I had flourished in Davos and in other global circles of power not in spite of my being an addict, but in no small part because I was one. The high which proximity with power, fame and wealth fuelled in me wasn’t that different from the high I felt when I did drugs. So what do my experiences say about others in the WEF circus? 

The pandemic has sparked a global existential crisis in many of us, including pillars of the Davos establishment. It has been about recognising, belatedly, that what we’ve been calling “normal” is a form of civilisational suicide. Many of us are coming to terms with the fact that we don’t know how to decorrelate greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth and that the phrase green growth is, for now and the foreseeable future, an oxymoron. In a world where about 50 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions are produced by the 10 per cent wealthiest humans — those of us who earned not millions but $38,000 or more in 2015 — the climate crisis is fundamentally an inequality crisis. 

Yet from its inception, the WEF has hence been engaged in an exercise of contortion to not have a meaningful conversation on growth. It has since then been paid hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars (governed by Swiss law, the finances of the WEF are frighteningly opaque) by entities whose shareholders are eager to avoid it. If we have indeed become addicted to carbon, growth and extraction, the techno-utopian verbiage which has become the lingua franca of Davos has become a liability. 

The author Lewis Hyde once wrote that the spread of alcoholism happens when a culture is dying. A healthy, functioning culture turns its children into grown-ups. Addicts in contrast are defined by Jung’s characterisation of the puer aeternus. That prism of addiction helps explain our culture’s childish “solutionism”. Like addicts in recovery who get a daily reprieve but are never “cured”, what we are dealing with are predicaments not problems. Problems, like the equations schoolchildren are asked to solve, have solutions. In contrast, you can respond to predicaments in a more or less constructive and healthy way but they cannot be solved. You have to live with them. 

The current, dominant, “feelgood” approach mirrors that of an addict, in recovery but secretly hoping that they will one day be able to “manage” their substance use. The Davos crowd seek quick fixes, takeaways, action points and deliverables, rather than dwelling on the thoroughly uncomfortable reality of our condition, for fear of going into depression or becoming paralysed by inertia. The sooner that is ditched, the better. “The highest form of hope,” the French author George Bernanos once wrote, “is despair overcome.” But to overcome it, you first need to go through the despair. You need to hit rock bottom.

The American Economy Runs On Poverty And Precarity

NYTimes |  This is the conversation about poverty that we don’t like to have: We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. We typically frame those reasons as questions of fairness (“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s laziness?”) or tough-minded paternalism (“Work is good for people, and if they can live on the dole, they would”). But there’s more to it than that.

It is true, of course, that some might use a guaranteed income to play video games or melt into Netflix. But why are they the center of this conversation? We know full well that America is full of hardworking people who are kept poor by very low wages and harsh circumstance. We know many who want a job can’t find one, and many of the jobs people can find are cruel in ways that would appall anyone sitting comfortably behind a desk. We know the absence of child care and affordable housing and decent public transit makes work, to say nothing of advancement, impossible for many. We know people lose jobs they value because of mental illness or physical disability or other factors beyond their control. We are not so naïve as to believe near-poverty and joblessness to be a comfortable condition or an attractive choice.

Most Americans don’t think of themselves as benefiting from the poverty of others, and I don’t think objections to a guaranteed income would manifest as arguments in favor of impoverishment. Instead, we would see much of what we’re seeing now, only magnified: Fears of inflation, lectures about how the government is subsidizing indolence, paeans to the character-building qualities of low-wage labor, worries that the economy will be strangled by taxes or deficits, anger that Uber and Lyft rides have gotten more expensive, sympathy for the struggling employers who can’t fill open roles rather than for the workers who had good reason not to take those jobs. These would reflect not America’s love of poverty but opposition to the inconveniences that would accompany its elimination.

Nor would these costs be merely imagined. Inflation would be a real risk, as prices often rise when wages rise, and some small businesses would shutter if they had to pay their workers more. There are services many of us enjoy now that would become rarer or costlier if workers had more bargaining power. We’d see more investments in automation and possibly in outsourcing. The truth of our politics lies in the risks we refuse to accept, and it is rising worker power, not continued poverty, that we treat as intolerable. You can see it happening right now, driven by policies far smaller and with effects far more modest than a guaranteed income.

Why Does A 92 Year Old Man "Serve" As Gatekeeper Of The Left Or Talk To Ana Kasparian?

jacobin | In 1967, Noam Chomsky emerged as a leading critic of the Vietnam War with a New York Review of Books essay critiquing US foreign policy’s ivory tower establishment. As many academics rationalized genocide, Chomsky defended a simple principle: “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”

A groundbreaking linguist, Chomsky has done more to live up to this maxim than almost any other contemporary intellectual. His political writings have laid bare the horrors of neoliberalism, the injustices of endless war, and the propaganda of the corporate media, earning him a place on Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List” and in the surveillance files of the CIA. At ninety-two, Chomsky remains an essential voice in the anti-capitalist movements his ideas helped inspire.

Ana Kasparian and Nando Vila interviewed Chomsky for Jacobin’s Weekends YouTube show earlier this year. In their conversation, Chomsky reminds us that history is a process of continuous struggle, and that the working-class politics needed to secure universal health care, climate justice, and denuclearization are out there — if we’re willing to fight for them.

AK  Let’s start with a big question — why does Congress continuously tell the American people that it will not deliver on policies that have overwhelming public support?

NC Well, one place to look always is: “Where’s the money? Who funds Congress?” Actually, there’s a very fine, careful study of this by the leading scholar who deals with funding issues and politics, Thomas Ferguson. He and his colleagues did a study in which they investigated a simple question: “What’s the correlation over many years between campaign funding and electability to Congress?” The correlation is almost a straight line. That’s the kind of close correlation that you rarely get in the social sciences: greater the funding, higher the electability.

And in fact, we all know what happens when a congressional representative gets elected. Their first day in office, they start making phone calls to the potential donors for their next election. Meanwhile, hordes of corporate lobbyists descend on their offices. Their staff are often young kids, totally overwhelmed by the resources, the wealth, the power, of the massive lobbyists who pour in. Out of that comes legislation, which the representative later signs — maybe even looks at occasionally, when he can get off the phone with the donors. What kind of system do you expect to emerge from this?

One recent study found that for about 90 percent of the population, there’s essentially no correlation between their income and decisions by their representatives — that is, they’re fundamentally unrepresented. This extends earlier work by Martin Gilens, Benjamin Page, and others who found pretty similar results, and the general picture is clear: the working class and most of the middle class are basically unrepresented.

 

The People Who Control "AI" Are The Worst Humans Alive

caitlinjohnstone |   Learn enough about what’s happening in the world and you realize that most people in your society have worldviews that are completely and utterly wrong. This can seem bold, perhaps even arrogant, but if most people weren’t deluded about the world, the world wouldn’t be so fucked.

And it’s not that people are dumb; intelligence has little to do with it. Some of the most intelligent people on earth promote the same deluded worldviews as everyone else. The problem isn’t intellect, it’s manipulation, and anyone can be manipulated no matter how smart they are. This mass-scale manipulation is the result of wealthy people buying up narrative influence in the form of media, political influence, think tanks, lobbying, NGOs, etc, in conjunction with the mass-scale manipulations of the powerful government agencies which are allied with them.

The powerful work to manipulate the way the general public thinks, acts and votes to ensure that they remain in power. They pay special attention to who the most influential people in our society are, which is why the most prominent voices are so often the most delusional. There are filters in place designed to keep anyone from rising to positions of influence if they don’t support the consensus worldview promoted by the oligarchic empire, and once they do rise to influence they are actively herded into echo chambers which reinforce that worldview.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that the most influential voices in a virulently capitalist society will be those who have profited and benefited from the status quo. Of course they’re going to believe the system is working fine; it treats them like royalty.

This is why you can’t defer to recognized authorities when it comes to understanding your world; the system which selects and installs those authorities is designed to serve the powerful, not to tell the truth. The responsibility for understanding your world is yours, and yours alone.

Why Don't Police Have To Get Public Approval Before Getting Expensive New "Public Safety" Toys?

gothamist |  Thanks to FEMA cash the NYPD has a bulletproof boat, but that isn't close to the only toy in the Department's nautical arsenal. A story in today's Times takes a look at the NYPD Harbor Unit, which has become increasingly important to counterterrorism in the past few years. All of which is to say, the NYPD's six remote-controlled submarines will put those flimsy (banned) motorized model boats in Central Park to shame!

Seriously, these are some fancy and expensive toys (four of them, bought in 2007, cost $75,000 each and the other two, bought in 2008, cost $120,000 a pop!) that are crucial, along with the 34 vessels in the department's fleet, in helping the NYPD look around under boats and bridges in our expansive waterways for potential bombs (and drugs, contraband and criminals). So far the drone submarines haven't actually found a bomb, but when they do, the Harbor Unit is ready...to call in the Navy to deal with the bomb ("We mark the location, get out of the water and call them," a detective explains). 

dnainfo |   The NYPD’s International Liaison Program that posts detectives in nearly a dozen foreign cities is a waste of money that has not prevented any attacks, say sources who have dealt with the officials overseas.

Former NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly systematically began assigning NYPD personnel in foreign port-of-calls — using money from a charity to pay for it — not long after taking office in post-9/11 New York. He was eager to get information quickly and directly from his own personnel rather than rely on the feds.

But former federal officials who served overseas told “On The Inside” the NYPD detectives are ineffective, often angering and confusing the foreign law enforcement officials they are trying to work with, and are usually relegated to the sidelines because they lack national security clearance.

nypost |  The NYPD will part ways with “Digidog,” the robotic police dog that earned Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s wrath and became the subject of a City Council subpoena after images of it went viral.

The department told The Post on Wednesday that it ended a contract with Boston Dynamics to lease the four-legged robo-cop.

“The contract has been terminated and the dog will be returned,” a spokesperson said.

The sudden termination comes after a clip of the machine patrolling a Manhattan housing project went viral, sparking backlash and drawing comparisons to the dystopic TV series “Black Mirror.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio then urged the NYPD to “rethink” its use of the robot. Eventually, City Council leaders agreed and decided to subpoena the NYPD to find out its cost.

Spreading Of Disaffection Against The Government

Not like Modi's HinduNazi white-shirts with their big ass-whopping sticks and his policy of doing away with government purchase of produce at guaranteed rates - might engender any "disaffection" against his preposterous naked predatory imperial government?

NYPost |  Greta Thunberg accidentally shared a message showing she was getting told what to write on Twitter about the ongoing violent farmers’ revolt in India — sparking a police investigation and a political firestorm, according to reports.

The 18-year-old left-wing eco-activist shared — and then quickly deleted — a message that detailed a list of “suggested posts” about the ongoing protests, according to the posts that were saved by Breaking 911.

The list gave a series of tips on what to post, asking her to also repost and tag other celebrities tweeting about it, including pop star Rihanna.

Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg posted a document to Twitter containing tweets that she was told to post and actions she should take regarding the current protests in India. She quickly deleted the tweet. pic.twitter.com/ruEfp4Ypg1

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 3, 2021

As well as the Twitter storm, the “toolkit” she shared also suggested highlighting planned demonstrations at Indian embassies.

The campaign material and social media template was created by Canada’s Poetic Justice Foundation, which claims to be a grassroots group creating “events to provoke, challenge and disrupt systemic inequities and biases,” Times Now said. The group’s website confirms it is “most actively involved in the #FarmersProtest.”

The group then shared to Facebook a series of screenshots of the posts it appears to have gotten celebrities to share.

After deleting the list, Thunberg then shared a supposedly newer “toolkit” and a message saying, “We stand in solidarity with the #FarmersProtest in India.”

India’s foreign ministry issued a rare statement accusing “foreign individuals” and celebrities of “sensationalism” and “trying to enforce their agenda.”

Delhi police on Thursday confirmed that it had launched “a criminal case against the creators of the ‘Toolkit document'” that Thunberg shared.

“The call was to wage economic, social, cultural and regional war against India,” police said of the plot supposedly taken up by the celebs.

The force filed a First Information Report (FIR) — a preliminary formal investigation — with a specialist cyber-crimes squad leading the investigation, according to NDTV.