On Friday SecDef Lloyd Austin Called Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu

Barrons |  The US and Russian defense chiefs spoke Friday for the first time in months but Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he saw no interest from Moscow for broader talks to end the Ukraine war.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin "emphasized the importance of maintaining lines of communication amid the ongoing war against Ukraine" during the call with his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu, said a US spokesman, Brigadier General Pat Ryder.

Russia's defense ministry confirmed the call and said the two discussed Ukraine without further details.

The defense chiefs last spoke on May 13 when Austin urged Moscow to implement an "immediate ceasefire" in Ukraine.

Russia did not do so, and Kyiv's forces have since regained swathes of territory from Moscow's troops in the east and south of the country with the United States and other Western powers sending in billions of dollars in weapons.

Austin separately spoke with his Ukrainian counterpart Oleksiy Reznikov "to reiterate the unwavering US commitment to supporting Ukraine's ability to counter Russia's aggression," Ryder said.

Blinken said the United States would keep contacts with Russia but said that any broader diplomacy depended on President Vladimir Putin showing an interest "in stopping the aggression."

"We have seen no evidence of that in this moment. On the contrary, we see Russia doubling and tripling down on its aggression," Blinken told a joint news conference with French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna.

Blinken pointed to Russia's recent attacks on power stations and other civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and the mobilization of troops who Blinken called "horrifically, cannon fodder that Putin is trying to throw into the war."

"The fundamental difference is that Ukrainians are fighting for their country, their land, their future. Russia is not and the sooner President Putin understands that and comes to that conclusion, the sooner we will be able to end this war," Blinken said.

 

Israel Can't Sell Ukraine What Israel Doesn't Have An Effective Defense Against Drones

thecradle  |  A senior Israeli official revealed to the New York Times (NYT) on 12 October that Tel Aviv is providing Ukraine with “basic intelligence” on Iranian drones used by Russia on the battlefield.

The unnamed official also revealed that a private Israeli firm was giving Ukraine satellite imagery of Russian troop positions.

In September, western media reported that Kiev had asked Israel to share intelligence on “any support” Iran has been giving to Russia. “The Israelis gave us some intelligence, but we need much more,” a senior Ukrainian official who spoke with Axios was quoted as saying.

Hebrew media revealed earlier that an Israeli defense contractor is supplying anti-drone systems to the Ukrainian military by way of Poland, in order to circumvent Israel’s official stance of not selling advanced arms to Kiev.

The unofficial sales are likely a stopgap measure to make up for the refusal of Israeli officials to sell Ukraine their Iron Dome missile defense system, reportedly in a bid to maintain strategic relations with Russia in Syria.

The Israeli defense and foreign ministries on Wednesday declined to comment on long-standing requests from the government in Kiev and its western backers to acquire the Iron Dome system, including pleas made since this week’s Russian missile barrage.

“Israel has great experience with air defense and Iron Dome, and we need exactly the same system in our city,” Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in an interview 11 October. “We have been talking with them a long time about it. Those discussions have not been successful,” he added.

The reluctance by Tel Aviv to aid its US-sponsored analogue has not changed much since the war erupted in February, drawing the ire of Ukrainian officials.

“Everybody knows that your missile defense systems are the best,” President Volodomyr Zelensky said while pleading with the Israeli parliament in the spring.

“I don’t know what happened to Israel,” he said in an interview with French TV5 channel on 23 September. “I am in shock, because I don’t understand why they couldn’t give us air defenses.”

DefenseNews |  Israel said its Iron Dome defense system has been a great success, with a 90% interception rate against incoming rocket fire. But officials say the system is expensive to deploy. Bennett has said someone in Gaza can fire a rocket toward Israel for a few hundred dollars, but it costs tens of thousands of dollars for the Iron Dome to intercept it.

The Defense Ministry released a short video showing what it said were the new system’s successful interceptions of rockets, mortars and an unmanned aerial vehicle. The video, which was highly edited and set to music, appeared to show a laser beam coming out of a ground station, hitting the targets and smashing them into small pieces.

Bennett said in February that Israel would begin using the system within a year.

Israel has already developed or deployed a series of systems meant to intercept everything from long-range missiles to rockets launched from just a few kilometers (miles) away. It has also outfitted its tanks with a missile-defense system.

Talks on restoring Iran’s tattered nuclear deal with world powers have stalled. Israel opposes the deal, saying it does not do enough to curb Iran’s nuclear program or its military activities across the region, and Israeli officials have said they will unilaterally do what’s necessary to protect the country.

Betcha $1.00 Russia Doesn't Suffer A Monkeypox Epidemic

• No documented community transmission until 6th May 2022 
• Outbreak mainly (96%) been in homosexual and bisexual men (without history of travel to endemic countries) 
• Cases, history of a sexually transmitted infection (STI) in the last year (54.2%), and 10 or more sexual partners in the last 3 months (31.8%) 
• Monkeypox is being transmitted in interconnected sexual networks that sustain STI transmission
  

nakedcapitalism  |  From IM Doc at the start of the week:

Today a gay patient in his 30s showed up in the office. He is healthy and very athletic. He is a “boy” to another older gay man.

They travel the world and are into serious gay fetish play. Spanking, bondage, discipline etc.

Patient has had fever and chills and horrible headache for 3 days. A reticulonodular rash has developed but no vesicles yet. They have been playing in clubs, parties, and orgies in 4 major cities the past 2 weeks.

There are so many things in that diagnostic differential but of course monkeypox is right up there.

And of course NO TESTING IS AVAILABLE. I called all levels of health department and even CDC today. The CDC is voice mail hell. Never talked to a human. It took several hours for a health dept human but by then the patient was already gone potentially spreading the wealth everywhere. They are acting as if I was talking about the Martian Flu. Again, we have known about this two months now, and it was like I was asking for the Holy Grail. Testing? “I need to call so and so……not sure…..but I’ll get right back to you……..”. And don’t get me started about their handling of the quarantine.

I have no idea if he is really a case. Multiple tests are pending. But not monkeypox. There is apparently no blood test for that. You have to swab the vesicles. But what if we do not have vesicles yet? Or if a patient may be past the vesicular stage? Crickets.

I would like to think there is a baseline competence. But that is too much an ask right now.

Again two months all over the news and this is what we have.

We are a completely unserious nation.

Remember that IM Doc is in a wealthy destination in Flyover. Apparently the local public health officials not only think that monkeypox is exclusively a gay STD, but also that they can’t have it locally because there are no gay men in their part of the world. Did they miss Brokeback Mountain? Or the private jet landing schedule?

On top of that, the local public health officials appear unable to use a search engine. In fact, there are monkeypox tests, but as IM Doc did correctly infer, they can’t be used before the vesicles stage, which is 2-4+ days after lesions start forming. Oh, and monkeypox patients are contagious as soon as they start having lesions and potentially also during the prodome period, before rash starts.

Police Protection For Cowardly Uvalde IQ-75 LARPS In Uniform?

dailybeast  |  As families in this rural town prepare to bury the 19 children and two adults gunned down in a brutal school massacre this week, they are left shell-shocked by not only the devastation the gunman wrought, but by the revelation that, as they see it, those who were sworn to protect and serve them did just the opposite.

“While those babies were in there dying, they stood there with their thumbs in their asses trying to figure out what to do,” said Roger Garza, a friend of the family of teacher Irma Garcia, who was killed by the gunman as she tried to shield her fourth-grade students.

“I mean don’t we pay them to rush in and protect people? Somebody needs to be held accountable for this,” Garza told The Daily Beast.

“We were waiting outside and yelling about how we wanted to go in and storm the classroom,” said Javier Cazares, whose fourth-grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack. “I came running and the police were in a panic trying to figure out what to do. Now we know children, including my daughter, were dying in there. That is what hurts. Knowing they could have maybe protected her and those other kids.”

Cazares wants to know why they didn’t do anything; it is a question that everyone here is asking.

“While those children sat in there with this madman, as many as 19 officers had to think about what to do,” said Ignacio Perez, who was doing his best to comfort Cazares. “I promise you these parents had a plan and were ready to act on it. Where was the bravery? In those kids. That is where it was.”

Amid the growing outrage over the botched police response, authorities in Uvalde have reportedly called in reinforcements from around the state to protect the local officers from potential threats.

The additional cops, from various agencies in other jurisdictions, will supplement Uvalde’s ranks for an unspecified period, and will also provide security for the mayor, officials with the Texas Police Chiefs Association told CBS DFW.

In the immediate aftermath of the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary, Gov. Greg Abbott lauded the police response, insisting that officers had acted heroically and saved numerous lives. But he lashed out angrily when a different narrative later emerged, saying he was “livid” over having been “misled.” Federal agents on the scene said no one seemed to be in charge, and at one point, agonized parents waiting outside considered rushing the school themselves.

One Uvalde cop claimed there “was almost a mutiny,” telling People magazine that he and his colleagues “felt like cowards” for not storming the building earlier.

 

 

Whole Burrows Full Of Uselessly Eating Oxygen Thieves And Their Nubile Labile Wymyn...,

nypost |  When the going gets tough, the rich get going … to luxurious underground bunkers. Suddenly, heading six feet under doesn’t sound so bad, especially when the new digs often include pre-stocked food and blast-proof doors.

Helicopters are on standby “if that moment comes,” says one bunker specialist, to whisk elites into subterranean palaces with below-ground swimming pools, tennis courts and gourmet food rations in spaces you’d never know were originally designed for the military, both American and Soviet.

If you’re not in the 1 percent, no problem, there are modest bunkers available, as well, and even some reasonably-priced getaways above ground.

Fast-talking entrepreneurs, boutique hotel owners and survivalists are hoping to profit from the coronavirus pandemic by giving people a route out of despair — and boredom — with varying degrees of success.

Real estate salesman Robert Vicino is literally sitting pretty when it comes to his business — selling underground bunkers from the Black Hills of South Dakota to a remote underground city in Rothenstein, Germany. Unlike the millennial owner of a Manhattan startup who had to pull the plug on his luxe, mask-free spa last week, Vicino says business is booming in what survivalists call the “bug-out” business.

His company, Vivos, also sells bunkers in Indiana and is planning new bunkers in Asia and Marbella, Spain. He said sales are up 400% this year although his cheaper properties (35,000 euros for a big bunker in South Dakota) are selling faster than the 2 million euros, five-star Vivos Europa One underground apartments carved into a German mountain, part of a facility originally used by the Soviets to store munitions in case they invaded western Europe.

Vicino has been at the doomsday game since 2007 and it’s paying off after a slight blip when a Mayan-predicted apocalypse in 2012 never materialized and he had to dump plans for a 5,000-person bunker in Atchison, Kansas.

SARS-CoV2 Situation Report From Italy

Two Pathetic Asses Say A Whole Lotta Nothing To The Masses

kansascity |  Given the futility of lobbying, James said, he would consider trying to mobilize on a large scale, with numbers that showed “some mass behind the ass.”

Bernice Brown, 43, was killed Wednesday afternoon while trying to break up fight involving her son. Later that afternoon Xindong Hao, 38, was killed when a man police say was on PCP killed him with a shotgun. Tyrone Standifer, 54, was found fatally shot Thursday in a vehicle with a wounded man. Two women, not yet identified, were found dead in separate crime scenes early Sunday morning brought the death toll to five.

But then, Monday afternoon, police announced that a man shot late Saturday night near 39th Street and Chelsea Avenue had succumbed to his wounds, bringing the toll to six.

chicagotribune |   “All of us know that this is not Chicago, what we saw,” an emotional Emanuel, sounding a familiar refrain as he seeks re-election to a third term, told reporters. “We are better than what we saw.”

At least 74 people were shot, 12 fatally, between 3 p.m. Friday and 6 a.m. Monday. The victims ranged in age from 11 to 62.

According to Tribune data, it marked the worst violence of any single weekend in Chicago since at least before 2016, the year in which homicides hit records unseen for two decades.

And Sunday saw more victims shot in a single day since at least September 2011 when the Tribune began tracking every shooting in Chicago. For the entire day, 47 people were shot, including a stunning 40 during a seven-hour period early Sunday.

At a late-morning news conference at the Gresham District station on the South Side, Johnson acknowledged in answer to a reporter’s question that no arrests had been made in any of the dozens of shootings over the weekend.

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article216167055.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article216167055.html#storylink=cpy

But How Will We Pay For It?

truth-out |  One of the theoretical forerunners and bases of MMT is chartalism, an economic theory which argues that money is a creature of the state designed to direct economic activity. The theory has recently been popularized by David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a wide-ranging work that touches upon issues ranging from gift economies, the linkage between quantification and violence, and the relationship between debt and conceptions of sin. In charting out the history of money, Graeber notes that, despite anthropological evidence to the contrary, economists have long clung to the myth of barter. 

However, money does not emerge from barter-based economic activities, but rather from the sovereign's desire to organize economic activity. The state issues currency and then imposes taxes. Because citizens are forced to use the state's currency to pay their taxes, they can trust that the currency will carry value in day-to-day economic activities. Governments with their own currency and a floating exchange rate (sovereign currency issuers like the United States) do not have to borrow from "bond vigilantes" to spend. They themselves first spend the money into existence and then collect it through taxation to enforce its usage. The state can spend unlimited amounts of money. It is only constrained by biophysical resources, and if the state spends beyond the availability of resources, the result is inflation, which can be mitigated by taxation. 

These simple facts carry radical policy implications. Taxes are not being used to fund spending, but rather to control inflation and redistribute income (and Trump's tax plan is certainly continuing the redistribution of income upward). Thus, we can make the case for progressive taxation from a moral standpoint concerned with social justice: We should tax rich people because their wealth is the product of exploitation and an affront to any truly democratic society, not because our transitional political program depends upon it. Congress can simply authorize the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to spend the money necessary for single-payer health care.

If we apply MMT to Medicare for All, the aforementioned "viability" debate and ungrounded fears about "printing money" fades into the background. Rather, our concerns shift toward examining our available resources and thinking about how to best provision them in such a way to as to advance social justice. This means training doctors, nurses and other medical practitioners. And it also means medical facilities being supplied with the necessary instruments, tools and technologies to provide care and treatment to patients and their communities. 

This carries implications for policymaking beyond Medicare for All. If money belongs to the public, then questions about who and what the public is will arise. By extension, money, financing and investment should be subject to popular control through directly democratic participatory processes.

The Grand Canyon Wide Narrative Divide

Counterpunch |  Much of this turn toward no authority beyond one’s own opinion, truth as a narrative, alternative facts, and reality and reason as self-designed came to fruition cataclysmically with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and his election, most stupefying for some and exhilarating for others. I refer to a cataclysm because regardless of what Trump narrative you are in, his election is an event both surprising and momentous. The narrative divide here is not over policy but personality as those on both the Democrat and Republican side wonder how such a man can be president and what kind of people would vote for him as president. Although there have been countless armchair psychiatric exams of Trump, he yet remains outside an established political frame of understanding. You have to switch jump into another story frame to make him real, a jump to the spinscape of Reality TV and the hyperreal of celebrity and enormous wealth that infects the American cultural imaginary.

This is a jump every Trump supporter made; into a world narrated in the same way they narrate the world. It is not a jump that all those who voted for Hillary were able to make, not by choice but because they were already living elsewhere. Both narrative realms are variously plotted and valued but the grounding force separating them seems clearly to be an enormous wealth divide and the long term consequences of that. In a simplified and also over generalized way, we have a meritocratic, professionalized, dividend recipient story/reality frame over here and over there we have a narrative world we’ve not been inclined to narrate until Trump won the election.

The disinclination or disinterest has of course been on the side of those who have been before the advent of The Web in a gatekeeper position to narrate the world we are all in from their perspective. What that has meant in terms of the politics of narrative is that a good deal of frustration was built up in those whose stories of the world were impeded by not being disseminated. At the same time it meant that the Impeding Gatekeepers had encased themselves in a bubble of their own selective narrating, confining themselves to a selective vision of things which excluded, as we now know, those 78% who live on wages that have remained flat forever.

The fact that Donald J. Trump is now president of the United States is astounding and troubling to this rarefied zone faction unacquainted with the lines of the story he seems to be following. They are, however, more unacquainted with those who are loyal to Trump and remain so. These Trumpians live in a life-world that remains opaque and unknown to those whose own life-world distinguishes itself by excluding such recognition and such knowledge.

Those who are not drawn to the slogan “Make America Great Again” are already enjoying the present America. And if they live in gated communities, one of the reasons they do so is avoid contact with those unhappy, disgruntled by their present status in America. In a politics of narrative world, this unacquaintance signals surprise if this unhappy faction reaches visibility on the national stage. More accurately, they have reached that visibility via both Trump and The Web of cyberspace. Trump continues to communicate with his followers on Twitter because he did not reach the presidency and they did not reach visibility by the paths of “governing principles” already cordoned off to them.

Internet: Subverting Democracy? Nah.., Subverting Status Quo Hegemony? Maybe...,

TheNewYorker |  On the night of November 7, 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes’s wife, Lucy, took to her bed with a headache. The returns from the Presidential election were trickling in, and the Hayeses, who had been spending the evening in their parlor, in Columbus, Ohio, were dismayed. Hayes himself remained up until midnight; then he, too, retired, convinced that his Democratic opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, would become the next President.

Hayes had indeed lost the popular vote, by more than two hundred and fifty thousand ballots. And he might have lost the Electoral College as well had it not been for the machinations of journalists working in the shady corners of what’s been called “the Victorian Internet.”

Chief among the plotters was an Ohioan named William Henry Smith. Smith ran the western arm of the Associated Press, and in this way controlled the bulk of the copy that ran in many small-town newspapers. The Western A.P. operated in tight affiliation—some would say collusion—with Western Union, which exercised a near-monopoly over the nation’s telegraph lines. Early in the campaign, Smith decided that he would employ any means necessary to assure a victory for Hayes, who, at the time, was serving a third term as Ohio’s governor. In the run-up to the Republican National Convention, Smith orchestrated the release of damaging information about the Governor’s rivals. Then he had the Western A.P. blare Hayes’s campaign statements and mute Tilden’s. At one point, an unflattering piece about Hayes appeared in the Chicago Times, a Democratic paper. (The piece claimed that Hayes, who had been a general in the Union Army, had accepted money from a soldier to give to the man’s family, but had failed to pass it on when the soldier died.) The A.P. flooded the wires with articles discrediting the story.

Once the votes had been counted, attention shifted to South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—states where the results were disputed. Both parties dispatched emissaries to the three states to try to influence the Electoral College outcome. Telegrams sent by Tilden’s representatives were passed on to Smith, courtesy of Western Union. Smith, in turn, shared the contents of these dispatches with the Hayes forces. This proto-hack of the Democrats’ private communications gave the Republicans an obvious edge. Meanwhile, the A.P. sought and distributed legal opinions supporting Hayes. (Outraged Tilden supporters took to calling it the “Hayesociated Press.”) As Democrats watched what they considered to be the theft of the election, they fell into a funk.

“They are full of passion and want to do something desperate but hardly know how to,” one observer noted. Two days before Hayes was inaugurated, on March 5, 1877, the New York Sun appeared with a black border on the front page. “These are days of humiliation, shame and mourning for every patriotic American,” the paper’s editor wrote.

History, Mark Twain is supposed to have said, doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Once again, the President of the United States is a Republican who lost the popular vote. Once again, he was abetted by shadowy agents who manipulated the news. And once again Democrats are in a finger-pointing funk.

Journalists, congressional committees, and a special counsel are probing the details of what happened last fall. But two new books contend that the large lines of the problem are already clear. As in the eighteen-seventies, we are in the midst of a technological revolution that has altered the flow of information. Now, as then, just a few companies have taken control, and this concentration of power—which Americans have acquiesced to without ever really intending to, simply by clicking away—is subverting our democracy.

Thirty years ago, almost no one used the Internet for anything. Today, just about everybody uses it for everything. Even as the Web has grown, however, it has narrowed. Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales. Such dominance, Jonathan Taplin argues, in “Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy” (Little, Brown), is essentially monopolistic. In his account, the new monopolies are even more powerful than the old ones, which tended to be limited to a single product or service. Carnegie, Taplin suggests, would have been envious of the reach of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

Deep State Openly Threatening the President-Elect

WaPo |  Trump, if he keeps this up, is heading for a collision with both sides of the aisle in Congress and constant political fencing with the intelligence agencies. If Cabinet nominees support Trump’s pro-Russian stance, they run the risk of getting blocked. And worse, if and when a national security crisis hits, the intelligence community will have every reason to let it be known that the president was out to lunch.

Trump seems determined to prove his critics right — he is not temperamentally or intellectually up to the job. His family and closest advisers had better tell him to get a grip, or his presidency will have a rocky start and may never fully recover.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will begin a hearing on Thursday looking into the Russian attacks on democratic elections. Witnesses will include James R. Clapper Jr., director of national intelligence; Marcel J. Lettre II, undersecretary of defense for intelligence; and Admiral Michael S. Rogers, commander of the U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency. When sober, experienced officials begin laying out the case against Russia, the public may fully appreciate just how absurd Trump is being. His reflexive defense of Russia will rightly be seen as anything but “America First.” 

Has the Internet Become a Failed State?

Guardian |  This blended universe is a strange place, simultaneously wonderful and terrifying. It provides its users – ordinary citizens – with services, delights and opportunities that were once the prerogative only of the rich and powerful. Wikipedia, the greatest store of knowledge the world has ever seen, is available at the click of a mouse. Google has become the memory prosthesis for humanity. Services such as Skype and FaceTime shrink intercontinental distances for families and lovers. And so on.

But at the same time, everything we do on the network is monitored and surveilled by both governments and the huge corporations that now dominate cyberspace. (If you want to see the commercial side of this in action, install Ghostery in your browser and see who’s snooping on you as you surf.) Internet users are assailed by spam, phishing, malware, fraud and identity theft. Corporate and government databases are routinely hacked and huge troves of personal data, credit card and bank account details are stolen and offered for sale in the shadows of the so-called “dark web”. Companies – and public institutions such as hospitals – are increasingly blackmailed by ransomware attacks, which make their essential IT systems unusable unless they pay a ransom. Cybercrime has already reached alarming levels and, because it largely goes unpunished, will continue to grow – which is why in some societies old-style physical crime is reducing as practitioners move to the much safer and more lucrative online variety.

“All human life is there” was once the advertising slogan for the now-defunct News of the World. It was never true of that particular organ, which specialised mostly in tales of randy vicars, celebrity love triangles, the foolishness of lottery winners and similar dross. But it is definitely true of the internet, which caters for every imaginable human interest, taste and obsession. One way of thinking about the net is as a mirror held up to human nature. Some of what appears in the mirror is inspiring and heart-warming. Much of what goes on online is enjoyable, harmless, frivolous, fun. But some of it is truly repellent: social media, in particular, facilitate firestorms of cruelty, racism, hatred and hypocrisy – as liberals who oppose the Trump campaign in the US have recently discovered. For a crash course in this darker side of human nature, read Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and weep.

S o we find ourselves living in this paradoxical world, which is both wonderful and frightening. Social historians will say that there’s nothing new here: the world was always like this. The only difference is that we now experience it 24/7 and on a global scale. But as we thrash around looking for a way to understand it, our public discourse is depressingly Manichean: tech boosters and evangelists at one extreme; angry technophobes at the other; and most of us somewhere in between. Small wonder that Manuel Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace, once described our condition as that of “informed bewilderment”.

the outgroup intolerance hypothesis for schizophrenia

rpsych |  This article proposes a reformulation of the social brain theory of schizophrenia. Contrary to those who consider schizophrenia to be an inherently human condition, we suggest that it is a relatively recent phenomenon, and that the vulnerability to it remained hidden among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Hence, we contend that schizophrenia is the result of a mismatch between the post-Neolithic human social environment and the design of the social brain. We review the evidence from human evolutionary history of the importance of the distinction between ingroup and out-group membership that lies at the heart of intergroup conflict, violence, and xenophobia. We then review the evidence for the disparities in schizophrenia incidence around the world and for the higher risk of this condition among immigrants and city dwellers. Our hypothesis explains a range of epidemiological findings on schizophrenia related to the risk of migration and urbanization, the improved prognosis in underdeveloped countries, and variations in the prevalence of the disorder. However, although this hypothesis may identify the ultimate causation of schizophrenia, it does not specify the proximate mechanisms that lead to it. We conclude with a number of testable and refutable predictions for future research.

architects of mass incarceration now pretending at criminal justice reform...,

democracynow |  AMY GOODMAN: Ava DuVernay’s new documentary, called 13th, is being released by Netflix on Friday. It premiered at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center here in New York. Part of the documentary looks at how ALEC, the America Legislative Exchange Council, has played a central role in the expansion of the U.S. prison system—ALEC’s work with states to write legislation promoting the privatization of prisons, in addition to pushing for harsher, longer sentences.

Joining us now is Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, who is also featured in 13th.

Talk about the thesis of the film 13th. It’s not just about the 13th Amendment, but the clause within the 13th Amendment that goes from slavery in the amendment of 1865 to mass incarceration today, and then how private corporations play a role in this.

LISA GRAVES: Well, this film is a magnificent, incredible meditation about race and crime in America, and it really tells new stories. One of the stories it tells is about how that amendment, where it says that you can’t be enslaved or you can’t be put in involuntary servitude unless you’re convicted of a crime, except as punishment, has really manifested in the 21st century and the 20th century through a lot of criminal justice policies.

And one of the things that Ava DuVernay brilliantly shows is the role of corporations in joining in this effort, this very racialized criminal justice system, how corporations, through ALEC, have helped advance their own bottom line. And one of the things that she helps document is the role of the Corrections Corporation of America within ALEC. It was a member of ALEC for a number of years, as we’ve written about. It was the chair of ALEC’s crime task force for a number of years, and ultimately it left ALEC after it was disclosed that CCA was in the room when corporations were voting on the SB 1070 legislation in Arizona that would have put—that was designed to put more immigrants in detention facilities and jails for immigrants. And CCA is just one of the many corporations that has been part of ALEC as it has pushed forward both for privatization of prisons, as well as measures to make people go to jail for longer—longer sentences.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain how ALEC works. You’ve got the private corporations, like CCA, and then you’ve got the legislators, who introduce the legislation written by the—or co-written by the corporations.

Obama Warns of "Mass Migrations" If Climate Change Is Not Confronted

scientificamerican |  President Obama used his final address to the U.N. General Assembly yesterday to warn that climate change would worsen the kind of unrest and inequality that has spurred a global refugee crisis.

Speaking before a high-level summit on migrants he convened at U.N. headquarters, Obama told the assembly of world leaders and foreign ministers that the problems they are seeing would only worsen in a warming world.

“If we don’t act boldly, the bill that could come due will be mass migrations, and cities submerged and nations displaced, and food supplies decimated, and conflicts born of despair,” he said.

The president, as he has in the past, pleaded for a “sense of urgency” from countries to help bring last year’s landmark Paris climate agreement into force this year. The United States ratified the deal with China early this month, and 31 more countries have done so today.

Obama also acknowledged the need for countries to do more than they promised in the French capital last year if the world is to avoid the worst impacts of warming.

“The Paris Agreement gives us a framework to act, but only if we scale up our ambition,” he said.

The president also alluded to what is likely to be a particular area of focus at a round of U.N. climate talks that opens in Marrakech, Morocco, in six weeks time: money. He said the $10 billion Green Climate Fund (GCF) to help poor nations address warming “should only be the beginning” of the wealthy world’s commitment.

“We need to invest in research and provide market incentives to develop new technologies, and then make these technologies accessible and affordable for poorer countries,” Obama said, adding that these investments would help developing countries “leapfrog” directly to lower-carbon solutions. 

“And only then can we continue lifting all people up from poverty without condemning our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair.”

gutless political theatre opts for pearl clutching and vapor catching instead of dealing with fundamental issues...,

counterpunch |  It’s the robots, stupid.

The rabid anti-immigrant campaign of Donald Trump mirrors the racist vitriol of right-wing politicians across much of the developed world. But totally absent from what passes for political debate in the U.S. and abroad is what’s really driving those ever more incendiary movements.

They are fueled by fear. There’s the dread of terrorist attacks, to be sure. But much more pervasive is the unremitting, anxiety of hundreds of millions in the developed world that they are threatened by change, by dark forces they neither understand nor control—by rampant unemployment, a diminished standard of living. They have been brought up to believe that hard work and sacrifice would bring a better life. No longer.

Donald Trump tells them hordes of immigrants, illegal aliens and disastrous trade pacts are to blame. But Trump—as well as those excoriating him–are totally missing the point.

The major force impacting our society is the spectacular advance of technologies —robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. The dizzying pace of change is only going to accelerate: a chain reaction as we hurtle to warp speed.   (See my previous blog)

Why is this phenomenon not the urgent focus of our political debates? Why are we instead obsessed with illegal aliens and Hillary’s emails?

It used to be that we welcomed advances in technology. We were assured they ultimately create more jobs than they destroy. No longer.

Estimates are that close to half the jobs in the United States are likely to be wiped out or seriously diminished by technological change within the near future. These are not just factory workers, receptionists, secretaries, telephone operators and bank tellers. Sophisticated algorithms will soon replace some 140 million full-time “knowledge workers” worldwide. Those threatened range from computer programmers, to graphic artists to lawyers, to financial analysts and journalists.

relieved to know that sharif clarke and gov. walker will collaborate on fixing the ghetto...,

WSJ  |  Residents in Sherman Park and other African-Americans in Milwaukee blamed the city’s extremely segregated communities for the eruption of tensions over the weekend, said their neighborhoods are seeing social services being cut and residents moving away. Sherman Park and areas immediately surrounding it have few commercial businesses except for liquor stores and fast food restaurants, and residents here say they have little by way of opportunity. Foreclosed homes dot the street, and almost every other car is badly dented.

The Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, described Milwaukee earlier this year as “the most segregated metro area in the United States,” with 260 of its 296 census tracts having one demographic group account for 60% of the population. Nearly a fifth of the tax base is in 3% of the city’s land area. While a new office tower is rising downtown here, slated to be the city’s second tallest, homes here in Sherman Park are crumbling.

“The only thing we can hope for after something as shocking as this is that there will be a new sense of togetherness and a realization that we must do better,” said Mr. Southerland. “We have to move forward.”

america is being divided and conquered...,

libertyblitzkrieg |   If there is to be any hope of reclaiming our government and restoring our freedoms, it will require a different kind of coup: nonviolent, strategic and grassroots, starting locally and trickling upwards. Such revolutions are slow and painstaking. They are political, in part, but not through any established parties or politicians.

Most of all, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, for any chance of success, such a revolution will require more than a change of politics: it will require a change of heart among the American people, a reawakening of the American spirit, and a citizenry that cares more about their freedoms than their fantasy games.

You may read the above and think he’s being overly negative, but as someone who spends all his time analyzing what’s happening, I think his assessment of the situation is 100% accurate. The American public is by and large being successfully manipulated into cheering on its own slavery, as it remains focused on why other Americans are the enemy instead of seeing the status quo system as the rightful problem.

To hammer the point home, let’s revisit a passage from my recent post, If Senseless Violence Continues, America Will Be a Total Police State in No Time:

While we don’t know who the police murderers in Dallas were, or their motivations, we do know one thing. Their actions will unquestionably have several very counterproductive and dangerous outcomes.

1. Further divide the country in general.
2. Further the already wide distrust between the police and the general public.
3. Increase the likelihood of more violence, and the eventual imposition of a total police state in America.

Either the people who committed the murders had the above goals in mind, or they were just stupid, violent criminals who didn’t have the meager sophistication necessary to understand the extremely negative implications of their actions.

Unfortunately for us, the horrible massacres that occurred in Dallas are exactly the sort of thing that the status quo wants to see. It further divides the public and it creates a justification for more militarization of the police, more surveillance and less civil liberties. Guess who’s going to be most negatively impacted by all of that? Black people, poor people, and the disenfranchised generally.

Anyone who thinks senseless violence will solve the issues of oppression in America doesn’t understand America or the status quo. Executing police in a premeditated manner gives the establishment credibility, and solidifies its support amongst the silent majority as well as the upper classes. The marginalized cannot win a battle if that’s the case. Period, end of story. If you think otherwise, you’re in for a rude awakening.

It’s been eight years since the financial crisis and look at our choices for President. An ego-maniac with authoritarian tendencies and zero respect for civil liberties/the Constitution and a neocon, war criminal, Wall Street-owned corporatist in liberal sheep’s clothing. Unfortunately, this is how far we’ve progressed politically in the near decade since the status quo bailed out the privileged and crushed everyone else.

So what does this mean? It means we are in for a very real struggle in the near-term. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are unabashed authoritarians who worship at the altar of state power and centralization. If I’m right and the real battle of our time is between decentralization/ liberty and centralization/authoritarianism, neither one of these candidates offer anything for us in the freedom camp. Unless some sort of miracle occurs, the next President will be someone who strongly believes in the centralization of power and will push with all of his or her might to further aggregate power in the office of the executive and in themselves. The negative macro trends will continue.

when the cost of living is too high, wombs are closed for business...,

NYTimes |  A shrinking population creates ripples that are felt from the economy to politics.

With one of the lowest birthrates in the world and little immigration, Japan has seen this milestone coming for years, if not decades. Yet efforts by the government to encourage women to have more children have had little effect, and there is little public support for opening the doors to mass immigration.

“These numbers are like losing an entire prefecture,” Shigeru Ishiba, a cabinet minister in charge of efforts to revitalize Japan’s especially depopulated rural areas, said at a news conference. A handful of Japan’s 47 prefectures, administrative districts similar to provinces or states, have populations of less than a million.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe responded to the census report by reiterating a long-term goal of keeping the population from falling below 100 million. Projections by the government and international bodies like the United Nations suggest that will be difficult, however. The latest United Nations estimates suggest that Japan’s population will fall to 83 million by the end of the century, down 40 percent from its peak.

Mr. Abe’s goal depends on raising the birthrate to 1.8 children per woman, up from 1.4 now and higher than it has been since the early 1980s. Rates have, in fact, risen slightly compared with a decade ago. But with women marrying later — in part, demographers say, to avoid pressure to give up their careers — a more decisive turnaround looks far off.

Japan will not necessarily suffer just because it is smaller. Many countries with fewer people are just as prosperous, and in a country known for jam-packed rush-hour trains, there may even be benefits. Japan’s economic output has been stagnant for years, but the picture looks less dire, economists say, once a shrinking work force is taken into account.

hundreds of thousands to lose SNAP benefits...,

cbpp |  Across the country, food banks and other organizations that serve the needy are preparing for long lines as childless adults begin losing SNAP (formerly food stamps) benefits due to the return in over 20 states of a three-month time limit for able-bodied adults.  Federal law limits adults aged 18-49 who aren’t raising minor children to three months of SNAP out of every three years unless they’re working at least 20 hours a week or participating in a job training program at least 20 hours a week.  More than half a million people will lose SNAP over the course of the year due to the time limit.

The time limit is “going to increase hunger among some of the most vulnerable Mississippians,” says Matt Williams of the Mississippi Center for Justice.  “I think it will further stress service providers who are already trying to fill a gap in the available food assistance programs, and I think we will see their resources stretched to the max with increased demand.”  In Mississippi alone, 50,000 people may lose benefits this year due to the time limit, the state estimates.

In New York State, Erica Santiago of the Food Bank for Westchester predicts, “We're not going to run out of food, but it may mean that people get three days’ worth instead of seven days’ worth. . . .  This will also impact people who aren't losing their benefits — there's a trickle down effect.”

Under the time limit, people can lose benefits even if they are looking for and can’t find work, or if no spots are available in a job training program.  The time limit “was based on the assumption that there are work programs to help these people and there are no programs. They cost too much,” Lucy Potter of Greater Hartford Legal Aid in Connecticut says.

The time limit is especially difficult for people with barriers to work, such as limited education and skills.  Most childless adults aren’t eligible for other forms of government assistance, and their incomes while receiving SNAP average less than one-third of the poverty line.