racial profiling, quotas, and secret "conviction bonuses"

alternet |  In the late afternoon of Jan. 3, Robin Dean, a 50-year-old county employee, pulled into a Durham, N.C., Burger King parking lot to give a friend a package of frozen chitlins that she had cooked over the holidays. After the transfer was complete, the pair said goodbye and parted ways. Both were subsequently pulled over by Durham Police.

Dean says an officer told her that there was evidence that she had just engaged in an illegal drug transaction, searched her car without her consent, and called for backup. When Dean worried aloud that she had been racially profiled, she says the white officer called her an “idiot,” although the nearly hour-long stop revealed nothing illegal apart from a window-tinting violation that was later dismissed.

In recent years, stories like this have come to epitomize heightened concerns that, as Durham becomes a regional center for sophisticated culture and cuisine, the drug enforcement strategies of its police increasingly assign second-class status to the city’s minority communities. Over the past several months, protesters alleging police misconduct have pummeled the city’s police headquarters with rocks and met tear gas along the usually amiable streets of this city of 240,000.

In seeking to understand the roots of the city’s divisive policing, lawyers at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice were astonished by what a recent round of public records requests produced. Not only was a federal grant subsidizing what they regarded as the most perniciously targeted drug enforcement operations of the department, but the grant — with a key “performance measure” emphasizing police report their sheer volume of arrests — also appeared to be incentivizing the department to raise its overall number of drug arrests, which overwhelmingly affect the city’s black community. SCSJ attorneys add that recently revealed evidence also indicates that the federally funded program included an illegal system of secret payments law enforcement made to witnesses who delivered successful drug prosecutions — another sign, they say, that the city’s policing has flown off the rails.

In a national context, such a discovery is not new. Groups like the ACLU have argued for over a decade that the performance measures of America’s largest federal policing grant, known as Byrne JAG, fuels racially biased, quota-driven policing in thousands of jurisdictions across the country. In this view, the hundreds of millions of dollars that the Justice Department doles out annually under JAG acts as a quiet bureaucratic buttress for policing policies like New York’s “stop-and-frisk” that have become intolerable to the communities they target and that have risen to the center of a heated national debate.

"We know that, intentionally or not, the JAG funding sets a tone, highlights priorities and guides the culture of policing in ways that impact what happens on the ground all around the country,” says Vanita Gupta, deputy legal director of the ACLU. Most pressingly, says Gupta, is JAG’s emphasis on police departments reporting their volume of drug arrests as “performance measure” of the grant. As the ACLU documented in a report [3] last year, although there is little racial difference in the national rate of marijuana use, black people are nearly four times more likely than whites to be arrested for using pot — a major contributor to the disproportionately high numbers of African-Americans imprisoned within the United States’ exceptionally large prison population.

silicon valley could force NSA reform tomorrow...,

rsn | With Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras triumphantly returning to the US to accept the Polk Award with Barton Gellman and Ewan MacAskill yesterday, maybe it's time we revisit one of their first and most important stories: how much are internet companies like Facebook and Google helping the National Security Agency, and why aren't they doing more to stop it?

The CEOs of the major tech companies came out of the gate swinging 10 months ago, complaining loudly about how NSA surveillance has been destroying privacy and ruining their business. They still are. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently called the US a "threat" to the Internet, and Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, called some of the NSA tactics "outrageous" and potentially "illegal". They and their fellow Silicon Valley powerhouses – from Yahoo to Dropbox and Microsoft to Apple and more – formed a coalition calling for surveillance reform and had conversations with the White House.

But for all their talk, the public has come away empty handed. The USA Freedom Act, the only major new bill promising real reform, has been stalled in the Judiciary Committee. The House Intelligence bill may be worse than the status quo. Politico reported on Thursday that companies like Facebook and are now "holding fire" on the hill when it comes to pushing for legislative reform.

The keepers of the everyday internet seem to care more about PR than helping their users. The truth is, if the major tech companies really wanted to force meanginful surveillance reform, they could do so tomorrow. Just follow the example of OKCupid from last week.

Mozilla, the maker of the popular Firefox browser, was under fire for hiring Brendan Eich as CEO because of his $1,000 donation in support of Prop 8 six years ago, and OKCupid decided to make a political statement of its own by splashing a message criticizing Mozilla before would-be daters could get to OKCupid's front page. The site even encouraged users to switch to another browser. The move made the already smoldering situation explode. Two days later, Mozilla's CEO was out of a job, and OKCupid got partial credit for the reversal.

The leading internet companies could easily force Congress' hand by pulling an OKCupid: at the top of your News Feed all next week, in place of Monday's Google doodle, a mobile push alert, an email newsletter: CALL YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS. Tell them to SUPPORT THE USA FREEDOM ACT and tell the NSA to stop breaking common encryption.

nevada standoff has nothing to do with freedom, sovreignty, tyranny or cows...,

dailykos |  To appreciate how churning the media wurlitzer on this suddenly "newsworthy" controversy benefits the Kochs, one only has to go back to 2012 when the Utah legislature passed something called the Transfer of Public Lands Act, legislation vetted and inspired by none other than the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose chief funders include--you guessed it--David and Charles Koch.

The Transfer of Public Lands Act (TPLA), passed in 2012 and signed by Gov. Gary Herbert, an enthusiastic backer, mandates that the Forest Service, with 15 percent of Utah land, and the Bureau of Land Management, with about 42 percent, relinquish their domain to the statehouse no later than 2015.

"Relinquish their domain to the statehouse" means that the lands would go from Federal to state stewardship.  As pointed out by David Garbett, a lawyer with the nonprofit Southern Utah Western Alliance:

“The only way the Utah legislature can generate money from the public lands is to ramp up development and hold a fire sale to clear inventory. That means that the places the public has come to know and love will be sold to the highest bidder and barricaded with ‘No Trespassing’ signs.” Similar bills are proliferating in other Western states where most of the land is managed by a federal agency.

The "Transfer of Public Lands" bills produced by ALEC are then hawked by industry-friendly local politicians and sold to the public as providing additional funding for non-industry purposes such as funding education, health and infrastructure improvements through "unleashing the energy" of public lands.

In other words, by selling them to mining, shale and oil interests, run by (among others) Charles and David Koch.

Utah’s Transfer of Public Lands Act is an updating of that old land-grabbing con game that has characterized the West. And it has powerful corporate backers. The legislation first made an appearance in a 2011 meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, which works with state lawmakers to draft “model legislation.” Lisa Graves, the executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which runs an ALEC watchdog unit, describes the group as a “corporate and partisan lobby masquerading as a charity, allowing some of the most powerful corporations and richest CEOs to get their legislative wish lists in the hands of politicians eager to please special interests.” ALEC’s agenda, befitting the concerns of its chief funders, the archconservative energy magnates Charles and David Koch, is to bolster corporations’ interests without publicly disclosing those corporations’ influence on the bills ALEC task forces produce. Graves describes this as “legislation laundering.”

Nevada has followed a similar course.

On June 4, 2013, Governor Brian Sandoval signed into law AB227 Nevada Land Management Task Force, making Nevada the fifth western state to actively explore the transfer of public lands to western states.  

Legal scholars have largely concluded that these laws are unconstitutional. But with a fanatical, Federalist-society indoctrinated Supreme Court Majority bending over backwards to accommodate corporate interests in every conceivable manner, the Constitution has proved to be a flimsy protection against virulent greed. By milking and stoking the controversy, the Kochs seek to galvanize public opinion against the federal government, delegitimize the Bureau of Land Management that oversees public lands, and thereby impugn its stewardship of lands that Koch-run industries want to get their hands on. These include lands in Nevada, Utah and pretty much anywhere else they can dig, frack or mine. This isn't about some silly rancher's "grazing fees," to the Kochs and their business pals. It's about their desire to exploit, despoil and pollute lands that we, the public, own by virtue of our citizenship. That's not "freedom." It's greed.

In fact, it's almost tragic to see how the "militia groups" that pride themselves on their purported "independence" and "freedom" so willingly allow themselves to be duped by people whose only interest is to exploit the land for their own purposes. Whose self-serving greed wouldn't hesitate to gin up an armed confrontation in which people could conceivably die, simply for the purpose of lining their own pockets.

Did I sound like I feel sorry for the militia groups? I don't. If they were truly patriots I might feel sorry for them, but they aren't.  Because true patriots would realize that the federal lands the Kochs, the oil, mining and energy industries are attempting to claim for themselves are:  

[O]wned by every American – all 300-plus million of us. It is a peculiar property right we each have to this commons, as we acquire it simply by dint of citizenship, and what we own is spectacular. The marvel of the federal public-lands system is that it exists at all. During the 19th century and into the early 20th, much of the land was leased and sold off in a frenzy of corrupt dealings. Railroads, corporations, land speculators, mining interests, and livestock barons gorged on the public domain, helped along by the spectacularly pliable General Land Office, which from 1812 until its closure in 1946 privatized more than one billion acres, roughly half the landmass of the nation. The corruption was such that by 1885, The New York Times’ editorial page had denounced the “land pirates” whose “fraud and force” had excluded the citizen settler—the farmer, the homesteader, the cowboy—from “enormous areas of public domain” and “robb[ed] him of the heritage to which he was entitled.”

That's what this controversy is really about.

when elderly IQ-75 L00ZERS go wrong..., (I'm guessing that solves the random highway shootings too)

WaPo | The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a respected activist organization that tracks hate crimes and racist activities, said the man arrested and identified by police as Frazier Glenn Cross is actually Frazier Glenn Miller. Miller, the SPLC said, founded and ran the Carolina Klan before he was sued by the SPLC “for operating an illegal paramilitary organization and using intimidation tactics against African Americans.”

He later founded another Klan outfit, the White Patriot Party, which put him in violation of the terms that settled the suit brought by the SPLC. He was found in criminal contempt in 1986 and served six months in prison. He moved underground while out on bond and was caught in Missouri with other Klansmen with a reserve of weapons, the SPLC stated.

The next year, he pleaded guilty to a weapons charge. He was indicted for plotting to obtain stolen military weapons, and for planning robberies and the assassination of the SPLC founder Morris Dees. As part of a plea deal, he testified against other Klan leaders and received a five-year sentence. He served only three years, the SPLC stated.

In 2010, Miller ran for the U.S. Senate, and in 2006, he ran for the U.S. House, inciting fear among voters when his ads urged whites to “take the country back” from Jews and “mud people,” according to news reports.

Frazier Glenn Cross was booked into the Johnson County jail after 8:30 p.m. Sunday on suspicion of premeditated first-degree murder, according to the booking report.

A public records search shows he has used both names. And in a statement released Sunday night, the SPLC said it was able to identify Cross as Miller after a telephone conversation with his wife, Marge. She told the SPLC Miller had gone to a local casino Saturday afternoon. He called Sunday to tell her his winnings were up.

Police went to her home Sunday night to tell her Miller was arrested for the shootings.

Miller is a longtime anti-Semite. His Web site, with the headline, “Hey Whitey, Why Don’t You And Your Friends Build Your Own White Club? It’s Not Against The Law To Be White, Yet,” features photos of “white power” marches and radio interviews.

During a segment on an African American radio talk show, he told the host: “I just started [Carolina Knights] with three men … and by the time they threw me in prison six years later, I had built the largest white activist organization in the United States with over 5,000 strong.”

According to the SPLC, Miller claimed he read his first racist newspaper, called The Thunderbolt, in the 1970s. According to Miller, within two minutes, he knew he “had found a home within the American White Movement. I was ecstatic,” the SPLC reported.

last gasp struggles of the black public-intellectual...,

msnbc |  New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait responded on Sunday’s Melissa Harris-Perry to criticisms of his new essay about race in the Obama era –including several from the host herself.

Chait’s essay, “The Color of his Presidency,” makes the argument that race not only “has been the real story of the Obama presidency all along,” but that it “has now become the primal grievance in our politics, the source of a narrative of persecution each side uses to make sense of the world.” Chait insists in the essay that both liberals and conservatives use justifiable paranoia about race for their own political purposes. In a portion excerpted Sunday by host Melissa Harris-Perry, he elaborates:

And even when the red and blue tribes are not waging their endless war of mutual victimization, the subject of race courses through everything else: debt, health care, unemployment. Whereas the great themes of the Bush years revolved around foreign policy and a cultural divide over what or who constituted “real” America, the Obama years have been defined by a bitter disagreement over the size of government, which quickly reduces to an argument over whether the recipients of big-government largesse deserve it. There is no separating this discussion from one’s sympathies or prejudices toward, and identification with, black America.

Critics like Slate’s Jamelle Bouie posited that Chait’s essay omitted the realities of racism and discrimination throughout America, treating race ”as an intellectual exercise—a low-stakes cocktail party argument between white liberals and white conservatives over their respective racial innocence.” More negative reviews came from Salon, where writers offered that it was “poorly argued” and that it embodies “everything that’s wrong with view from nowhere-styled journalism.”

Host Melissa Harris-Perry detailed some criticisms of her own prior to introducing Chait on Sunday’s show. The host, a political science professor, said:

“To describe American racial politics as an ‘endless war of mutual victimization’ suggests that there are no actual victims of continuing racial policies, only that there are discursive points to be scored by equally matched sides.”

Chait, who attracted attention recently for an online debate about race and poverty with The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, began Sunday’s conversation with a sarcastic remark. 

“Thanks for introducing your audience with such an open mind,” he said. “I’ve never really seen a television show with a host who berates and rebuts the person they’re having on the show for several minutes before they’re invited on.”

and the government is supposed to do exactly what to address this trend?

NYTimes | This week, four presidents journeyed to Austin, Tex., to address the Civil Rights Summit and remark on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s legacy on the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

That landmark act brought an end to legal racial segregation in public places.

But now we are facing another, worsening kind of segregation, one not codified but cultural: We are self-sorting, not only along racial lines but also along educational and income ones, particularly in our big cities.

Our cities are increasingly becoming vast outposts of homogeneity and advantage, arcing ever upward, interspersed by deserts of despair, all of which produces in them some of the highest levels of income inequality ever seen in this country.

Some call this progress; I call it a perversion, at least of the concept of diversity — of race, culture, identity and class — that dynamic engine that built urban identities and that is now being erased out of them.

As a report by Kendra Bischoff of Cornell and Sean F. Reardon of Stanford pointed out last year: “The proportion of families living in affluent neighborhoods more than doubled from 7 percent in 1970 to 15 percent in 2009. Likewise, the proportion of families in poor neighborhoods doubled from 8 percent to 18 percent over the same period.”

This is consistent with a 2012 Pew Research Center report that found, “Residential segregation by income has increased during the past three decades across the United States and in 27 of the nation’s 30 largest major metropolitan areas, according to a new analysis of census tract and household income data.”

The report added, “The analysis finds that 28 percent of lower-income households in 2010 were located in a majority lower-income census tract, up from 23 percent in 1980, and that 18 percent of upper-income households were located in a majority upper-income census tract, up from 9 percent in 1980.”

As Richard Florida wrote in The Atlantic last month, “The poor face higher levels of segregation in larger, denser metros.” In affluent cities, he said, “The segregation of poverty is more pronounced,” adding, “The poor also face greater levels of segregation in more advanced, knowledge-based metros.”

According to a study published last year in the journal Education and Urban Society, “Students are more racially segregated in schools today than they were in the late 1960s and prior to the enforcement of court-ordered desegregation in school districts across the country.”

In fact, a report last month by researchers at the Civil Rights Project of the University of California, Los Angeles, found, “New York has the most segregated schools in the country.”

Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream about the coming together of children of different races seems, in some ways, to grow more faint.

perceptronium...,

arvix |  We examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. We explore ve basic principles that maydistinguish conscious matter from other physical systems such as solids, liquids and gases: the information, integration, independence, dynamics and utility principles. If such principles can identify conscious entities, then they can help solve the quantum factorization problem : why do conscious observers like us perceive the particular Hilbert space factorization corresponding to classical space (rather than Fourier space, say), and more generally, why do we perceive the world around us as a dynamic hierarchy of objects that are strongly integrated and relatively independent? Tensor factorization of matrices is found to play a central role, and our technical results include a theorem about Hamiltonian separability (de ned using Hilbert-Schmidt superoperators) being maximized in the energy eigenbasis. Our approach generalizes Giulio Tononi's integrated information framework for neural-network-based consciousness to arbitrary qtuanum systems, and we nd interesting links to error-correcting codes, condensed matter criticality, and the Quantum Darwinism program, as well as an interesting connection between the emergence of consciousness and the emergence of time.

is consciousness a state of matter?

mysteriousuniverse |  When it comes to theories of human consciousness, there are basically two schools of thought. The first says that the hard questions of consciousness have been answered: that what we have historically thought of as consciousness doesn’t exist because we can trace various components of personality and memory to brain tissue, and that all that’s left is to explicate how all of this works.

This point of view is generally called reductive physicalism.

The second school of thought says that we haven’t answered the hard questions of consciousness— that there’s something else to it all that we haven’t found yet. Into this general category fall the non-reductive physicalists, the interactionists, the panpsychists, and so on, all trying to figure out what the reductive physicalist model of consciousness is missing and where we might find it.

Citing the quantum observer effect as reason enough to believe that consciousness is a unique condition, Tegmark argues that consciousness is, in fact, a state of matter—that consciousness is, in his words, “the way information feels when processed in certain complex ways.” He aligns himself with Giulio Tononi’s integrated-information theory, which is (like most theories of its kind) both valid and impossible to test.

reality is a mathematical structure

vice |  Max Tegmark has a theory about reality. According to Max, who is a cosmologist and professor of physics at MIT, all that exists, all this familiar stuff—that ergonomic chair you are sitting on, your body and your brain, even the space surrounding you— is math and we are merely “self-aware parts of a giant mathematical object.”

 It’s a heady concept, but what does it even mean? In his new book Our Mathematical Universe, Max calls this idea the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, wherein the universe is envisaged as a mathematical structure. A mathematical structure is “an abstract set of entities with relations between them,” expounds Max in his book, and these relations do not just describe all that is, but actually are all that is.

Reading Our Mathematical Universe, which is part mind-bending scientific treatise and part autobiography, is no casual jaunt. While the book offers a lot to readers, it also asks a lot in return. When I had the opportunity to chat with Max just before the holidays, I felt obligated to preface our conversation with the fact that although I had read the entirety of the book, I experienced difficulties in understanding chunks of it. To him, this presented no problem at all.

“You have to remember, Lex, that if you don’t feel you understand 100 percent about our Universe, nobody else does either!”

Fortunately for me, and anyone else interested in the possible realities of reality, Max is open to having his brain probed, which is what I hoped to achieve in our conversation. What I got from him was not just a deeper understanding of the details and implications of the contentious Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, but also how thinking about such grand ideas could assist you next time you find a parking ticket wedged under your windshield wiper.

hey, hey, lbj, my-oh-my we could use you today...,

historyplace |  The bill I am presenting to you will be known as a civil rights bill. But in a larger sense, most of the program I am recommending is a civil rights program. Its object is to open the city of hope to all people of all races, because all Americans just must have the right to vote, and we are going to give them that right.

All Americans must have the privileges of citizenship, regardless of race, and they are going to have those privileges of citizenship regardless of race.

But I would like to caution you and remind you that to exercise these privileges takes much more than just legal rights. It requires a trained mind and a healthy body. It requires a decent home and the chance to find a job and the opportunity to escape from the clutches of poverty.

Of course people cannot contribute to the nation if they are never taught to read or write; if their bodies are stunted from hunger; if their sickness goes untended; if their life is spent in hopeless poverty, just drawing a welfare check.

So we want to open the gates to opportunity. But we're also going to give all our people, black and white, the help that they need to walk through those gates. My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican-American school. Few of them could speak English and I couldn't speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast and hungry. And they knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them, but they knew it was so because I saw it in their eyes.

I often walked home late in the afternoon after the classes were finished wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew, hoping that I might help them against the hardships that lay ahead. And somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.

I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students, and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance.

And I'll let you in on a secret--I mean to use it. And I hope that you will use it with me.

This is the richest, most powerful country which ever occupied this globe. The might of past empires is little compared to ours. But I do not want to be the president who built empires, or sought grandeur, or extended dominion.

I want to be the president who educated young children to the wonders of their world. I want to be the President who helped to feed the hungry and to prepare them to be taxpayers instead of tax eaters. I want to be the President who helped the poor to find their own way and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election. I want to be the President who helped to end hatred among his fellow men and who promoted love among the people of all races, all regions and all parties. I want to be the President who helped to end war among the brothers of this earth.

And so, at the request of your beloved Speaker and the Senator from Montana, the Majority Leader, the Senator from Illinois, the Minority Leader, Mr. McCullock and other members of both parties, I came here tonight, not as President Roosevelt came down one time in person to veto a bonus bill; not as President Truman came down one time to urge passage of a railroad bill, but I came down here to ask you to share this task with me. And to share it with the people that we both work for.

I want this to be the Congress--Republicans and Democrats alike--which did all these things for all these people. Beyond this great chamber--out yonder--in fifty states are the people that we serve. Who can tell what deep and unspoken hopes are in their hearts tonight as they sit there and listen? We all can guess, from our own lives, how difficult they often find their own pursuit of happiness, how many problems each little family has. They look most of all to themselves for their future, but I think that they also look to each of us.

Above the pyramid on the Great Seal of the United States it says in latin, "God has favored our undertaking." God will not favor everything that we do. It is rather our duty to divine His will. But I cannot help but believe that He truly understands and that He really favors the undertaking that we begin here tonight.

President Lyndon B. Johnson - March 15, 1965

charles murray asking for universal welfare while do-nothing, big-headed jaw-jackers square off with rhetorical straight razors...,

rollingout |  Over the past several months, Dr. Cornel West has been vocal in his disapproval of President Barack Obama, as well as Dr. West’s fellow intellectuals and cultural commentators; Dr. Michael Eric Dyson and Rev. Al Sharpton.  Speaking last year in regard to President Obama’s 2013  inauguration. Dr. West stated, “We saw, of course, the coronation of the bonafide house Negro of the Obama plantation, our dear brother Al Sharpton, supported by the Michael Dysons and others who’ve really prostituted themselves intellectually in a very ugly and vicious way.”

As he spoke about the state of black intellectualism at Rev. Sharpton’s National Action Network Conference yesterday (April 10th), Dr. Dyson addressed Dr. West’s criticisms.

“The prophetic temptation is to believe your voice is the only voice,” said Dr. Dyson. “[You think that] your vision is the only vision. That’s what makes you a genius at a certain level. That’s the nature of genius — but you’re tripping, because you’re not the only one.”

“I don’t see [humility] in a lot of Negroes talking. They act like it’s ‘my way or the highway’ — you ain’t Frank Sinatra!” he continued. “Howard Thurman said, ‘You can go to the Atlantic Ocean, you can dip your glass into the Atlantic Ocean and it may be full of the Atlantic Ocean — but it ain’t all of the Atlantic Ocean. So stop thinking that your way is the only way. It may be a great way, it may be a powerful way that works for you, but one size don’t [sic] fit all. So be honest and humble in genuine terms — not the public performance of humility masquerading a huge ego. No amount of hair can cover that.”

After insinuating that he was referring to Dr. West, Dr. Dyson spoke about his contemporary directly.

“I’ve probably known him longer than anybody on this panel. Hung out with him,” Dyson said. “I’ve been a victim of his vicious assaults in public. I’ve held my powder. That ain’t my usual nature. [Dr. Farah Griffin] called me up and I listened to Farah. Because she loves us both [and was] trying to negotiate a cease of hostilities. But I’m not going to pretend that it doesn’t hurt for you to call me a sellout because I disagree with you. You can be ‘ride-or-die,’ but while you’re riding — see who your vehicle is rolling over.”

the struggle just passed real: charles murray now whining about guaranteed income...,

NPR | Paul Solman: What’s the case for a minimum income?

Charles Murray: From a libertarian’s point of view, we’re going to be spending a lot of money on income transfers, no matter what.

Paul Solman: Why?

Charles Murray: The society is too rich to stand aside and say, “We aren’t going to do anything for people in need.” I understand that; I accept that; I sympathize with it.

What I want is a grand compromise between the left and the right. We on the right say, “We will give you huge government, in terms of the amount of money we spend. You give us small government, in terms of the ability of government to mess around with people’s lives.”

So you have a system whereby every month, a check goes into an electronic bank account for everybody over the age of 21, which they can use as they see fit. They can get together with other people and then combine their resources. But they live their own lives. We put their lives back in their hands.

Paul Solman: So this has similarities with the voucher movement; that is, give the money to people because they will know better how to spend it.

Charles Murray: In that sense, it’s similar to a voucher program, but my real goal with all of this is to revive civil society. Here’s what I mean by that: You have a guy who gets a check every month, alright. He is dissolute; he drinks it up and he’s got 10 days to go before the next check comes in and he’s destitute. He now has to go to friends, relatives, neighbors or the Salvation Army, and say, “I really need to survive.” He will get help.

But under a guaranteed basic income, he can no longer portray himself as a victim who’s helpless to do anything about it. And you’ve got to set up feedback loops where people say, “Okay, we’re not going to let you starve on the streets, but it’s time for you to get your act together. And don’t tell us that you can’t do it because we know you’ve got another check coming in in a couple of days.”

A guaranteed basic income has the potential for making civic organizations, families and neighborhoods much more vital, helpful and responsive than they have been in decades.

Paul Solman: And that’s because it shifts the blame? Because it doesn’t give people an excuse?

Charles Murray: Yeah. It doesn’t give people the excuse of being helpless. Right now, people can say, “What am I going to do? There’s no job out there. There’s this or that.” If you’re getting a check every month, you are not without resources, and that opens up a whole new dialogue between you and the other people around you.

America’s always been very good at providing help to people in need. It hasn’t been perfect, but they’ve been very good at it. Those relationships have been undercut in recent years by a welfare state that has, in my view, denuded the civic culture.

And a basic guaranteed income has the potential for making a big, positive difference in American life.

the herd is too preoccupied to recognize or comprehend the slaughterhouse...,

personalliberty |  Speaking to the Sharpton crowd On Wednesday, the Attorney General charged that the lawmakers’ actions had nothing to do with the Justice Department he presides over stymieing a Congressional investigation into the fatally-flawed Fast and Furious gun program.

Here is an off-the-record portion of Holder’s speech which didn’t appear in the transcript released by the DOJ:

I’m pleased to note that the last five years have been defined by significant strides and by lasting reforms even in the face, even in the face, of unprecedented, unwarranted, ugly, and divisive adversity. If you don’t believe that, if you look at the way, forget about me, forget about me, if you look at the way the attorney general of the United States was treated yesterday by a House Committee, it had nothing to do with me, forget that, what attorney general has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?

To be exceedingly fair, Holder didn’t actually use the words “racists,” “racism” or any other variations thereof. But considering his audience, it doesn’t take an imaginative stretch to understand what was implied: Gohmert, Farenthold— and presumably anyone else who asked him a tough question or went there by mentioning contempt— are clearly racists.

And if that’s not what Holder meant, efforts to elucidate his remarks to a different end provide even more worrisome possibilities than the U.S. Attorney General mistaking oversight mandated by the Constitutional balance of powers for outright racism. (That inference, by the way, isn’t difficult to make because it’s completely plausible, likely even, that Holder views the Constitution as a fundamentally racist document better scrapped and re-written than amended.)

If Holder wasn’t calling the House lawmakers racists without using the word, it means that “it had nothing to do with me, forget that” is the most important thing he said. Was it an admission that the withholding of the Fast and Furious documents that precipitated his contempt charge was ordered from higher up? That the AG is the fall guy? Or does it mean Holder really believes that he holds absolutely no responsibility for the agencies which he presides over?

The answer is probably in the unreleased documents. But, of course, efforts to have them released are, well, you know… racist.

What a powerful tool the race card has become.

what was the legal issue again? dickishness takes on a life of its own...,

theblaze |  During a contentious congressional hearing on Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder disdainfully told Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) “good luck with your asparagus.”

Many, including TheBlaze, assumed Holder was mocking Gohmert for seemingly fumbling his words back in 2013 when he said, “The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus!”

Gohmert was ridiculed at the time by Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” the Washington Post, the U.K. Guardian and more for the “famously embarrassing” moment.

But Gohmert told Glenn Beck on Wednesday that he did not fumble his words back in 2013, and was in fact using a quote that goes back decades.

“Percy Foreman was a very, very liberal criminal defense attorney, but he was incredible in the courtroom,” Gohmert said on Beck’s radio show. “When somebody started attacking his integrity, he stood up and said, ‘I object, he’s casting aspersions on my asparagus!’ And people would scratch their heads, but it brought down the level of the rancor. I was using a Percy Foreman line from criminal trials back probably 50 years ago.”

Other research confirms that the line was used in decades past. A 1973 book by John Dos Passos includes a letter where an individual says, “don’t think that I’m ‘casting asparagus’…”

parliamentary theatrical dickishness signifying nothing...,

theblaze |  Last year, Holder and Gohmert went head-to-head following the Boston Marathon bombings. That exchange ended with the Texas representative tripping over his words and declaring: “The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus!”

Gohmert’s critics quickly seized on his bungled statement and it became the butt end of jokes in certain corners.

Now, fast-forward to April 2014, and Holder and Gohmert are at it again. This time, however, instead of arguing about the Boston terror attacks, the two argued over Gohmert’s claim that the DOJ has ignored requests to turn over certain documents to congressional investigators.

“I think what we promised to do is to provide you and your staff with,” Holder began to say in the hearing.

“Sir, I’ve read you what your department promised and it is inadequate, and I realize that contempt is not a big deal to our attorney general, but it is important that we have proper oversight,” Gohmert interjected.

“You don’t want to go there, okay?” an angry Holder said.

“I don’t want to go there? About the contempt?” Gohmert asked.

“You should not assume that is not a big deal to me. I think that it was inappropriate, I think it was unjust. But never think that was not a big deal to me. Don’t ever think that,” Holder said.

prologue...,

Our clip begins after Attorney General Eric Holder addresses Rep. Louie Gohmert in a House Judiciary hearing. Holder says something like 'You don't know what you're talking about.' Quote:

"You don't know what the FBI did. You don't know what the FBI's interaction was with the Russians. You don't know what questions were put to the Russians, whether those questions were responded to. You simply do not know that. And you have characterized the FBI as being not thorough, or taken exception to my characterization of them as being thorough. I know what the FBI did. You cannot know what I know. That is all."

With that, Louie grows furious. This is where the clip starts, as Louie has literally turned red. He wants the AG's head but -- NO! -- Louie's time has expired. So he attempts to counter-attack Holder using a parliamentary procedure, the "Point of Personal Privilege." Unfortunately the "Privilege" can't be used to act a Texas derpass. But Louie doesn't know it, or doesn't care, so on he blindly rants while the committee members ask him repeatedly to shut it. Finally, after growing fully crimson and unhinged, he blurts out the most magnificent defense of a dumb-dog congressman ever:

"HE TURN AND CAST ASPERSIONS ON MY ASPARAGUS."

without femtoaggressions to give it value, purpose, and meaning, the cathedral will implode

theatlantic | The study that might have put to rest much of the recent agitation about microaggressions has unfortunately never been published. Microaggressions, for those who are not up on the recent twists and turns of American public discourse, are the subtle prejudices found even in the most liberal parts of our polity. They are revealed when a lecturer cites mainly male sources and no gay ones, when we use terms such as “mankind,” or when we discuss what Michelle Obama wore when she visited pandas in China, something we would not note about a man. In short, they are the current obsession of political correctness squads.

The study that I believe could have helped a great deal was conducted by a research assistant of mine at Columbia University who disappeared before she completed her Ph.D. Carolyn (I am withholding her last name in order to acknowledge her without embarrassing her) asked members of 80 groups in New York City what they felt about other such groups. She avoided broad strokes and asked not about divisions between black and white, but what African Americans felt about Africans from Nigeria and blacks from the West Indies. She asked Hispanics about Dominicans, Haitians, Mexicans, and Cubans, and so on.

What Carolyn found was that there was little love lost between any two groups. Members of all the 80 groups she studied attached all kind of unflattering labels to members of other groups, even if they were of the same race or ethnic group. When she interviewed members of subgroups, they were unsparing about each other. German Jews felt that Jews of Polish origin were very uncouth (and surely would not want their daughter to marry one or to share a synagogue with them). The Polish Jews, in turn, felt that those of German background were stuck up and “assimilated,” and hence one was best off crossing to the other side of the street if they neared. Iraqis from Basra considered those from Baghdad to be too modern, and those from Baghdad considered their brothers and sisters from Basra as provincial—and so on and so on. Today they would all be called at least microaggressive.

None of this is surprising to sociologists, who have long held that one major way community cohesion is promoted is by defining it against out-groups—and that there is a strong psychological tendency to attribute positive adjectives to an in-group and negatives on to the outsiders. In short, it’s part—not a pretty part—of human nature, or at least social nature. Choose any group and you will find its members griping about all the others.

I hence urge those who are troubled by the ways others talk about them to use Carolyn’s findings as a baseline. That is, not to ignore slurs and insults, and most certainly not racial, ethnic, or any other kind of prejudices, but merely to “deduct” from them what seems to be standard noise, the normal sounds of human rambling. We may wish for a world in which people say only kind things about each other, but until we get there, we should not take umbrage at every negative note or adjective that is employed. For now, that is something most of us do—yes, I suspect even those who rail against microaggression.

der Narzißmus der kleinen Differenzen

wikipedia | The narcissism of small differences is a term that describes 'the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other' - 'such sensitiveness [...] to just these details of differentiation'.^[1]

 

The term was coined by Sigmund Freud in 1917, based on the earlier work of British anthropologist Ernest Crawley: 'Crawley, in language which differs only slightly from the current terminology of psychoanalysis, declares that each individual is separated from others by a "taboo of personal isolation"...this "narcissism of minor differences"'.^[2]

The term appeared in Civilization and Its Discontents (1929–1930) in relation to the application of the inborn aggression in man to ethnic (and other) conflicts - a process still considered by Freud, at that point, as 'a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression'.^[3]

For Lacanians, the concept clearly related to the sphere of the Imaginary: 'the narcissism of small differences, which situates envy as the decisive element...in issues that involve narcissistic image'.^[4]

Glen O. Gabbard, M.D. suggested Freud's "Narcissism of Small Difference" provides a framework within which to understand that, in a love relationship, there can be a need to find, and even exaggerate, differences in order to preserve a feeling of separateness and self.^[5]

In terms of postmodernity, consumer culture has been seen as predicated on 'the "narcissism of small differences"...to achieve a superficial sense of one's own uniqueness, an ersatz sense of otherness which is only a mask for an underlying uniformity and sameness'.^[6]

college coach pay...,

slate | Perhaps nobody has profited quite so handsomely from the college sports arms race as the top coaches in NCAA football and basketball, who routinely pull down seven-figure paydays.

But who knew that these were boom times for golf and tennis coaches too?

The American Association of University Professors is out with its latest annual report on the economic health of its members' profession. Executive summary: It’s pretty weak. But this year, the AAUP has added a fun little wrinkle by comparing the growth of academic and sports spending. Particularly intriguing is this chart contrasting pay growth for faculty and head coaches. In the top football and basketball divisions, the median inflation-adjusted pay for head coaches roughly doubled between 2005-06 and 2011-12. But coaches in minor sports didn’t do so badly either: In D1-AA golf and tennis, pay packages grew by 79 and 53 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, even at doctoral institutions (shown here as category I), professors only managed a 4 percent real raise over that time.

that's why you steal nutella out the cafeteria and keep you some hot pockets...,

HuffPo |  His on-court skills have generated a lot of money, but University of Connecticut basketball player Shabazz Napier says there are nights he can't afford food.

Speaking to reporters late last month, the point guard reflected on the relationship between student athletes and the schools they attend. He then offered up a startling example of disconnect between the two.

"We're definitely blessed to get scholarships to our universities, but at the end of the day, that doesn't cover everything," Napier told a group of reporters, adding later in the conversation, "I don't think student athletes should get hundreds of thousands of dollars, but ... there are hungry nights that I go to bed and I'm starving."

In an email to The Huffington Post, a University of Connecticut spokesman said all of the school's scholarship athletes, including Napier, receive the maximum meal plan allowed under NCAA rules.

"UConn does not have a cafeteria devoted specifically to student-athletes," he added, "but they have access to the same cafeterias which are available to all our students."

Napier's comments come shortly after the National Labor Relations Board endorsed Northwestern University football players looking to unionize.

“The players spend 50 to 60 hours per week on their football duties during a one-month training camp prior to the start of the academic year and an additional 40 to 50 hours per week on those duties during the three or four month football season,” a copy of the NLRB ruling explains. “Not only is this more hours than many undisputed full-time employees work at their jobs, it is also many more hours than the players spend on their studies.”

On Sunday, NCAA president Mark Emmert called the effort "a grossly inappropriate solution to the problems" that exist in intercollegiate athletics. He said a "union-employee model" would "throw away the entire collegiate model for athletics."

the myth of working your way through college...,

theatlantic |  A lot of Internet ink has been spilled over how lazy and entitled Millennials are, but when it comes to paying for a college education, work ethic isn't the limiting factor. The economic cards are stacked such that today’s average college student, without support from financial aid and family resources, would need to complete 48 hours of minimum-wage work a week to pay for his courses—a feat that would require superhuman endurance, or maybe a time machine.

To take a close look at the tuition history of almost any institution of higher education in America is to confront an unfair reality: Each year’s crop of college seniors paid a little bit more than the class that graduated before. The tuition crunch never fails to provide new fodder for ongoing analysis of the myths and realities of The American Dream. Last week, a graduate student named Randy Olson listened to his grandfather extol the virtues of putting oneself through college without family support. But paying for college without family support is a totally different proposition these days, Olson thought. It may have been feasible 30 years ago, or even 15 years ago, but it's much harder now. 

He later found some validation for these sentiments on Reddit, where one user had started a thread about the increasing cost per course at Michigan State University. MSU calculates tuition by the "credit hour," the term for the number of hours spent in a classroom per week. By this metric, which is used at many U.S. colleges and universities, a course that's worth three credit hours is a course that meets for three hours each week during the semester. If the semester is 15 weeks long, that adds up to 45 total hours of a student's time. The Reddit user quantified the rising cost of tuition by cost per credit hour:

This is interesting. A credit hour in 1979 at MSU was 24.50, adjusted for inflation that is 79.23 in today dollars. One credit hour today costs 428.75.

if college is only exploratory and family connections ensure future job prospects...,

theatlantic | There is a widespread belief that humanities Ph.D.s have limited job prospects. The story goes that since tenure-track professorships are increasingly being replaced by contingent faculty, the vast majority of English and history Ph.D.s now roam the earth as poorly-paid adjuncts or, if they leave academia, as baristas and bookstore cashiers. As English professor William Pannapacker put it in Slate a few years back, “a humanities Ph.D. will place you at a disadvantage competing against 22-year-olds for entry-level jobs that barely require a high-school diploma.” His advice to would-be graduate students was simple: Recognize that a humanities Ph.D is now a worthless degree and avoid getting one at all cost.

Since most doctoral programs have never systematically tracked the employment outcomes of their Ph.D.s, it was hard to argue with Pannapacker when his article came out. Indeed, all anecdotal evidence bade ill for humanities doctorates. In 2012, the Chronicle of Higher Education profiled several humanities Ph.D.s who were subsisting on food stamps. Last year, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette eulogized Margaret Mary Vojtko, an 83-year-old French adjunct who died in abject poverty after teaching for more than two decades at Dusquesne University, scraping by on $25,000 a year before being unceremoniously fired without severance or retirement pay.

Recent studies suggest that these tragedies do not tell the whole story about humanities Ph.D.s. It is true that the plate tectonics of academia have been shifting since the 1970s, reducing the number of good jobs available in the field: “The profession has been significantly hollowed out by the twin phenomena of delayed retirements of tenure-track faculty and the continued ‘adjunctification’ of the academy,” Andrew Green, associate director at the Career Center at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. In the wake of these changes, there is no question that humanities doctorates have struggled with their employment prospects, but what is less widely known is between a fifth and a quarter of them go on to work in well-paying jobs in media, corporate America, non-profits, and government. Humanities Ph.D.s are all around us— and they are not serving coffee.

Bro.Feed Not Scurred, Politically Correct, or Intellectually Consti(err...., nevermind.)

whatever you think of cultural non-judgementalism in the abstract, what it has meant in reality is that the pathologies of lower-class black culture have been played out on other black folks and on non-black neighbors.

THROW OUT DAMNED "NON-JUDGMENTALISM"!!!!!! (Subjective Opinions)

REPLACE IT WITH MEASUREMENT!!!!!

GIVE The "Black Racial Services Machine" and the "Post-Racial Progressive Fundamentalist Alliance" - both of whom have FUSED The "Americanized Negro's "Black Agenda" with PROGRESSIVE POLITICAL (Only) Expression THESE MANDATES!!!!

1) INCREASE the Black graduation rate to the point at which the new market of TECHNICALLY EDUCATED BLACKS can be a DISRUPTIVE MARKET FORCE in the key areas within the Black Community Marketplace (Health Care, Business Management, etc)

2) LOWER THE BLACK HOMICIDE VICTIMIZATION RATE from 47% down to 25% IN 5 YEARS, moving it closer to our 14% POPULATION PROPORTION

3) GROW THE LOCAL BLACK ECONOMY BY 50% IN 5 YEARS, where its ability to CREATE JOBS, maintain LOCAL TAX BASE, service the retail and service needs of the people in a 4 mile radius

4) REDUCE THE NUMBER OF 'OUT OF RESIDENCE BLACK FATHERS' DOWN TO 20% - as the Black Community acknowledges the critical importance of having a BLACK MAN AND WOMAN working collaboratively to care for their children.   RECHRISTINE "The Black Church" from its claim to having been created in response to WHITE SUPREMACY (what Rev Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Church in Atlanta said) OVER TO the CENTERPIECE OF THE BLACK COMMUNITY SOCIAL SERVICES STRUCTURE

CNu - IF the AMERICANIZED NEGRO'S "Struggle Motion" is not REMOVED FROM STRAIGHT UP POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM these CORRUPT NEGROES on MSNBC will be allowed to retain their platform and MOLEST THE AMERICANIZED NEGRO'S AGENDA - for ONLY the benefit of PROGRESSIVISM - the condition of the Negro BE DAMNED. 

In the absence of Jim Crow, America has organically resegregated itself with a vengeance - with managerial and professional class blacks spatially and socially distancing themselves from lower-class black cultural pathology.

WHO SAYS that the MOST ACTIVE VOICES representing the Americanized Negro's interests BELIEVES THAT "JIM CROW IS DEAD TODAY"?

Do YOU believe that Michelle Alexander believes that the presence of AG Eric Holder, his boss Barack Obama and a DISTRICT ATTORNEY and SHERIFF (jailer) and POLICE CHIEF who was appointed by a MAYOR - ALL OF WHOM BLACK VOTED FOR means that THE NEW JIM CROW IS DEAD?

The one thing that I learn from:
* Reading "The Final Call"
* Listening to "Black Progressive Radical Radio"
* Watching Videos ...................IS..............

THERE IS NO CORRELATION between the PRESENCE OF ESTABLISHMENT FORCES THAT THE AMERICANIZED NEGRO VOTED FOR BEING IN POWER and the RHETORIC that the RADICAL REVOLUTIONARY NEGROES will tell their CONGREGATION is still out there LURKING, hoping to cut every Black person's throats IF we don't remain UNIFIED.

The final irony is - that Ras Baraka - son of  Amari Baraka is poised to become Mayor Of Newark.
Amari Baraka told of the day that the last White mayor of Newark pulled him out of jail and brought him to the mayors OFFICE where he was BEATEN-UP ON THE FLOOR.

The REVOLUTIONARY /RADICALS have ultimately become POLITICAL CANDIDATES (see Cheway Lumumba).

And now the biggest threat facing Ras Baraka is that HIS CAMPAIGN BUS WAS BURNED by an operative from his BLACK DEMOCRATIC opponent. 

UNTIL BLACK PEOPLE REGULATE THE ACCESS THAT POLITICS HAVE TO THEIR "CONSCIOUSNESS ABOUT THEMSELVES" - THE TRUTH THAT "YOU DON'T HAVE TO DEVELOP THE NEGRO THROUGH POLITICS" - YOU ONLY NEED TO KEEP HIS ATTENTION ALIGNED WITH 'YOUR TEAM' IS ALL THAT MATTERS FOR YOU TO HAVE SUCCESS AT HIS EXPENSE.

the answers ARE knowable, but not if you consult the politically correct and intellectually constipated academy

Coates’ primary purpose is to defend lower-class black culture as one norm among others; Chait’s purpose originally was to make a pro-Obama point, but then became more ‘yes things have changed since slavery actually’ (a practical political position) Other commentators, taking their cue from Charles Murray, look to de-racialize the conversation so as to make it about the relationship between poverty and dysfunction, yet another practical political position.

What I am getting from Coates’ argument (and I don’t think Chait is picking up on) is that he believes that white middle class norms and poor black norms are different but equal cultural norms. Assuming that middle class norms are superior to black lower-class norms is therefore a value judgement. Suggesting that lower-class black people throw aside the norms that are ‘theirs’ to take up white middle class norms is therefore an act of white supremacy, an imposition of ‘foreign’ norms on the weaker party.

This is a novel argument but not really a politically practical one. Come to think of it, it's not only impractical, I’d say it was politically self destructive since whatever you think of cultural non-judgementalism in the abstract, what it has meant in reality is that the pathologies of lower-class black culture have been played out on other black folks and on non-black neighbors. In the absence of Jim Crow, America has organically resegregated itself with a vengeance - with managerial and professional class blacks spatially and socially distancing themselves from lower-class black cultural pathology.

The turd in the "can't we all just get along" punch bowl is, that, no one with common sense is able to ignore the very high rate at which lower-class blacks victimize themselves and others. It's not simply a matter of rudeness, incivility, and lack of regard for the commons. If one wanted to be generous about pathological lower class black culture, one could say that the "warrior spirit" has the ratchets "going for theirs". One might say that about the lower class ratchets. One might even romanticize the ratchets as 21st century pirates. But then, with regard to pirates and pirate culture, the answers to those questions are historically knowable. As we now know, pirates had far more common sense and practical good judgement when it came to committing acts of irrational violence and incivility within their own ranks...,

irrational violence of individuals against each other is detrimental to the profitable enterprise

scientificamerican | From countless films and books we all know that, historically, pirates  were criminally insane, traitorous thieves, torturers and terrorists. Anarchy was the rule, and the rule of law was nonexistent.

Not so, dissents George Mason University economist Peter T. Leeson in his myth-busting book, The Invisible Hook (Princeton University Press, 2009), which shows how the unseen hand of economic exchange produces social cohesion even among pirates. Piratical mythology can’t be true, in fact, because no community of people could possibly be successful at anything for any length of time if their society were utterly anarchistic. Thus, Leeson says, pirate life was “orderly and honest” and had to be to meet buccaneers’ economic goal of turning a profit. “To cooperate for mutual gain—indeed, to advance their criminal organization at all—pirates needed to prevent their outlaw society from degenerating into bedlam.” There is honor among thieves, as Adam Smith noted in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: “Society cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another.... If there is any society among robbers and murderers, they must at least ... abstain from robbing and murdering one another.”

Pirate societies, in fact, provide evidence for Smith’s theory that economies are the result of bottom-up spontaneous self-organized order that naturally arises from social interactions, as opposed to top-down bureaucratic design. Just as historians have demonstrated that the “Wild West” of 19th-century America was a relatively ordered society in which ranchers, farmers and miners concocted their own rules and institutions for conflict resolution way before the long arm of federal law reached them, Leeson shows how pirate communities democratically elected their captains and constructed constitutions. Those documents commonly outlined rules about drinking, smoking, gambling, sex (no boys or women allowed onboard), use of fire and candles, fighting and disorderly conduct, desertion and shirking one’s duties during battle. (The last could lead to the “free rider” problem in which the even division of loot among uneven efforts leads to resentment, retaliation and economic chaos.) Enforcement was key. Just as civil courts required witnesses to swear on the Bible, pirate crews had to consent to the captain’s codes before sailing. In the words of one observer: “All swore to ’em, upon a Hatchet for want of a Bible. When ever any enter on board of these Ships voluntarily, they are obliged to sign all their Articles of Agreement ... to prevent Disputes and Ranglings afterwards.” Thus, the pirate code “emerged from piratical interactions and information sharing, not from a pirate king who centrally designed and imposed a common code on all current and future sea bandits.”

the steadily increasing probability of death camps...,

antipope |  the success of a social system can be measured by how well it supports those at the bottom of the pile—the poor, the unlucky, the non-neurotypical—rather than by how it pampers its billionaires and aristocrats. By that rule of thumb, western capitalism did really well throughout the middle of the 20th century, especially in the hybrid social democratic form: but it's now failing, increasingly clearly, as the focus of the large capital aggregates at the top (mostly corporate hive entities rather than individuals) becomes wealth concentration rather than wealth production. And a huge part of the reason it's failing is because our social system is set up to provide validation and rewards on the basis of an extrinsic attribute (what people do) which is subject to external pressures and manipulation: and for the winners it creates incentives to perpetuate and extend this system rather than to dismantle it and replace it with something more humane.

Meanwhile, jobs: the likes of George Osborne (mentioned above), the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer, don't have "jobs". Osborne is a multi-millionaire trust-fund kid, a graduate of Eton College and Oxford, heir to a Baronetcy, and in his entire career spent a few working weeks in McJobs between university and full-time employment in politics. I'm fairly sure that George Osborne has no fucking idea what "work" means to most people, because it's glaringly obvious that he's got exactly where he wanted to be: right to the top of his nation's political culture, at an early enough age to make the most of it. Like me, he has the privilege of a job that passes test (a): it's good for him. Unlike me ... well, when SF writers get it wrong, they don't cause human misery and suffering on an epic scale; people don't starve to death or kill themselves if I emit a novel that isn't very good. 

When he prescribes full employment for the population, what he's actually asking for is that the proles get out of his hair; that one of his peers' corporations finds a use for idle hands that would otherwise be subsisting on Jobseekers Allowance but which can now be coopted, via the miracle of workfare, into producing something for very little at all. And by using the threat of workfare, real world wages can be negotiated down and down and down, until labour is cheap enough that any taskmaster who cares to crack the whip can afford as much as they need. These aren't jobs that past test (a); for the most part they don't pass test (b) either. But until we come up with a better way of allocating resources so that all may eat, or until we throw off the shackles of Orwellian Crimestop and teach ourselves to think directly about the implications of wasting a third of our waking lives on occupations that harm ourselves and others, this is what we're stuck with ...

the cultural cognition project

culturalcognition |  “Cultural cognition"refers to the tendency of individuals to form beliefs about societal dangers that reflect and reinforce their commitments to particular visions of the ideal society. Cultural cognition is one of a variety of approaches developed for empirical testing of the "cultural theory of risk" associated with Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky. This chapter (from the Handbook of Risk Theory, Springer Pub.) discusses the distinctive features of cultural cognition as a conception of cultural theory, including its cultural worldview measures; its emphasis on social psychological mechanisms that connect individuals' risk perceptions to their cultural outlooks; and its practical goal of enabling self-conscious management of popular risk perceptions in the interest of promoting scientifically sound public policies that are congenial to persons of diverse outlooks.

Related video: lecture on the cultural cognition of risk

Great Debate Transcending Our Origins: Violence, Humanity, and the Future

Video streaming by Ustream

asu |  Celebrate five years of intellectual stimulation and excitement with the Origins Project at Great Debate Transcending Our Origins: Violence, Humanity, and the Future. Saturday, April 5, 2014 - 7:00pm

The first panel of the evening, The Origins of Violence, will feature scholars and writers Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham, Erica Chenoweth, Adrian Raine, John Mueller and Sarah Mathew discussing the development of violence from the brain to world wars. 

The second panel, The Future: From Medicine and Synthetic Biology to Machine Intelligence, will feature scientists and notable experts Richard Dawkins, Craig Venter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Esther Dyson, Eric Horvitz, George Poste and Randolph Nesse discussing the future of new biomedical and robotic technologies and their impact on humanity. The evening will be moderated by Lawrence Krauss.