American gladiator...

sfist | At a news conference today, Public Defender Jeff Adachi alleged that San Francisco sheriff's deputies have been forcing county jail inmates to fight one another while the duties gamble on the outcomes of the gladiatorial-style matches.

The Chronicle reports that revelations of the illegal behavior were going to wait until the informing inmates were out of jail, but according to Adachi, another fight was planned for next week and they chose to act now.

According to the Examiner, four deputies at one SoMa jail have been threatening violence to inmates if they refuse to fight each other. Three inmates represented by the public defender’s office spoke up, saying that they were scared for their lives and threatened with handcuffs, pepper spray, and beatings for non-participation.

One deputy reportedly selected an overweight inmate to be his "prize fighter," forcing him to work out in front of his fellows who would be punished if he didn't complete tasks.

According to Adachi, the ringleader was Deputy Scott Neu, accused in 2006 of forcing inmates to engage in sexual acts with him in a case settled out of court. The Public Defender’s Office hired a private investigator to corroborate the claims.

I, for one, welcome our cytobot overlords...

Nature Scientific Reports | The nanoarchitecture and micromachinery of a cell can be leveraged to fabricate sophisticated cell-driven devices. This requires a coherent strategy to derive cell's mechanistic abilities, microconstruct, and chemical-texture towards such microtechnologies. For example, a microorganism's hydrophobic membrane encapsulating hygroscopic constituents allows it to sustainably withhold a high aquatic pressure. Further, it provides a rich surface chemistry available for nano-interfacing and a strong mechanical response to humidity. Here we demonstrate a route to incorporate a complex cellular structure into microelectromechanics by interfacing compatible graphene quantum dots (GQDs) with a highly responsive single spore microstructure. A sensitive and reproducible electron-tunneling width modulation of 1.63 nm within a network of GQDs chemically-secured on a spore was achieved via sporal hydraulics with a driving force of 299.75 Torrs (21.7% water at GQD junctions). The electron-transport activation energy and the Coulomb blockade threshold for the GQD network were 35 meV and 31 meV, respectively; while the inter-GQD capacitance increased by 1.12 folds at maximum hydraulic force. This is the first example of nano/bio interfacing with spores and will lead to the evolution of next-generation bio-derived microarchitectures, probes for cellular/biochemical processes, biomicrorobotic-mechanisms, and membranes for micromechanical actuation.

dominance/prestige: our nature our future...,

cluborlov |  Once upon a time—and a fairly long time it was—most of the thickly settled parts of the world had something called feudalism. It was a way of organizing society hierarchically. Typically, at the very top there was a sovereign (king, prince, emperor, pharaoh, along with some high priests). Below the sovereign were several ranks of noblemen, with hereditary titles. Below the noblemen were commoners, who likewise inherited their stations in life, be it by being bound to a piece of land upon which they toiled, or by being granted the right to engage in a certain type of production or trade, in case of craftsmen and merchants. Everybody was locked into position through permanent relationships of allegiance, tribute and customary duties: tribute and customary duties flowed up through the ranks, while favors, privileges and protection flowed down.

It was a remarkably resilient, self-perpetuating system, based largely on the use of land and other renewable resources, all ultimately powered by sunlight. Wealth was primarily derived from land and the various uses of land. Here is a simplified org chart showing the pecking order of a medieval society.

Feudalism was essentially a steady-state system. Population pressures were relieved primarily through emigration, war, pestilence and, failing all of the above, periodic famine. Wars of conquest sometimes opened up temporary new venues for economic growth, but since land and sunlight are finite, this amounted to a zero-sum game.

But all of that changed when feudalism was replaced with capitalism. What made the change possible was the exploitation of nonrenewable resources, the most important of which was energy from burning fossilized hydrocarbons: first peat and coal, then oil and natural gas. Suddenly, productive capacity was decoupled from the availability of land and sunlight, and could be ramped up almost, but not quite, ad infinitum, simply by burning more hydrocarbons. Energy use, industry and population all started going up exponentially. A new system of economic relations was brought into being, based on money that could be generated at will, in the form of debt, which could be repaid with interest using the products of ever-increasing future production. Compared with the previous, steady-state system, the change amounted to a new assumption: that the future will always be bigger and richer—rich enough to afford to pay back both principal and interest.
 

let that co-pilot have been named ahmed and this would already be called terrorism

nbcnews |  The co-pilot of the crashed Germanwings plane appears to have "intentionally" brought the plane down while his captain was locked out of the cockpit and banging to be let back in, prosecutors said Thursday. 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the revelations added a "new, simply incomprehensible dimension" to the tragedy, adding that "something like this goes beyond anything we can imagine."

First Officer Andreas Lubitz, 27, was alone at the controls of the Airbus A320 as it began its rapid descent, Marseille Prosecutor Brice Robin told a news conference. 

Passengers' cries were heard on the plane's cockpit voice recorder in the moments just before the plane slammed into the French Alps, Brice said. 

"Banging" sounds also were audible, he said, suggesting the captain was trying to force his way back into the cockpit. However, the reinforced cockpit door was locked from the inside and could not be overridden, even with a coded entry panel. 

"If he had been able to open this door, the captain would have done it," Brice said. 

Lubitz, a German national from the town of Montabaur, "didn't say a word" during the descent, according to Brice, who said no distress signal or radio call was made. 

"There was no reason to put the plane into a descent, nor to not respond to… air traffic controllers," he said. "Was it suicide? I'm not using the word, I don't know. Given the information I have at this time … I can tell you that he deliberately made possible the loss of altitude of the aircraft."

it's harder to change a man's diet than to change his religion...,

commondreams |  The bold headline of a recent Los Angeles Times editorial by the hydrologist Jay Famiglietti starkly warned: “California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?” The write-up quickly made the social media rounds, prompting both panic and the usual blame game: It’s because of the meat eaters or the vegan almond-milk drinkers or the bottled-water guzzlers or the Southern California lawn soakers.

California’s water loss has been terrifying. But people everywhere should be scared, not just Californians, because this story goes far beyond state lines. It is a story of global climate change and industrial agriculture. It is also a saga that began many decades ago—with the early water wars of the 1930s immortalized in the 1974 Roman Polanski film “Chinatown.”

When my family first moved to the Los Angeles area, we spent years adjusting our lifestyle to be more in line with our values. Ten years ago, we stopped watering our lawn and eventually replaced the lawn with plants that were drought-tolerant or native to California. Three years ago, we installed solar panels on our roofs. Last year, we diverted our laundry runoff to our vegetable garden and fruit trees through a graywater system. We have replaced all our toilets with dual-flush systems to take advantage of local rebates, and we practice responsible flushing. We almost never wash our cars, and we shower less often in the winter. We are investigating rainwater barrels in our latest effort to be responsible stewards of our water. Yet none of our efforts to be an example to others have done anything other than make us feel morally self-righteous enough to wag our fingers at water wasters.

California’s water resources are being mismanaged, according to Janet Redman, director of the Climate Policy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank. “The management of water from California’s historic aquifer and snow and rivers and lakes doesn’t match the use right now,” Redman told me in an interview on my show, “Uprising.” It’s a big understatement.

Even though Gov. Jerry Brown just imposed a series of mandatory water-conservation measures in response to the emergency, most of those measures are aimed at individual users and restaurants. While it is crucial for residents to stop wasting water on the utterly useless tasks of car washing and lawn watering, “residential use in California is about 4 percent,” Redman told me. “Eighty percent is for agriculture.”

The truth is that California’s Central Valley, which is where the vast majority of the state’s farming businesses are located, is a desert. That desert is irrigated with enough precious water to artificially sustain the growing of one-third of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, a $40 billion industry.

FAIL: you know when you read "thought leaders" isht bout to be FUBAR'd....,

LATimes |  Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.

In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis.

Several steps need be taken right now. First, immediate mandatory water rationing should be authorized across all of the state's water sectors, from domestic and municipal through agricultural and industrial. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is already considering water rationing by the summer unless conditions improve. There is no need for the rest of the state to hesitate. The public is ready. A recent Field Poll showed that 94% of Californians surveyed believe that the drought is serious, and that one-third support mandatory rationing.

Second, the implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 should be accelerated. The law requires the formation of numerous, regional groundwater sustainability agencies by 2017. Then each agency must adopt a plan by 2022 and “achieve sustainability” 20 years after that. At that pace, it will be nearly 30 years before we even know what is working. By then, there may be no groundwater left to sustain.

Third, the state needs a task force of thought leaders that starts, right now, brainstorming to lay the groundwork for long-term water management strategies. Although several state task forces have been formed in response to the drought, none is focused on solving the long-term needs of a drought-prone, perennially water-stressed California.

Our state's water management is complex, but the technology and expertise exist to handle this harrowing future. It will require major changes in policy and infrastructure that could take decades to identify and act upon. Today, not tomorrow, is the time to begin.

Finally, the public must take ownership of this issue. This crisis belongs to all of us — not just to a handful of decision-makers. Water is our most important, commonly owned resource, but the public remains detached from discussions and decisions.

california farmers skip planting and sell their fresh water to thirsty cities instead...,

shtf |  The water crisis in California is reaching epic proportions.

And it’s going to cost everyone, big time.

After a sustained drought, NASA has reported that the state has less than one year of water reserves remaining, with no back up plan if things go wrong.

Now, there is so much demand for water in Southern Californian cities, that many farmers are opting to sell their water rights to urban dwellers – not just at a premium, but at an unbelievable and unprecedented rate.

CBS News profiled some rice farmers with historic rights to the Yuba River who are being offered so much for water, they have decided to forego planting their crops altogether and sell the new “cash crop” – liquid gold.  Fist tap Big Don.

A trip on tripping

RawStory | Magic mushrooms (psilocbye cubensis) can provoke hallucinations, spiritual insights, and serious hilarity, but just what do they do to your brain?

They’re illegal under federal law–a Schedule I controlled substance, like heroin, LSD, and marijuana–but scientists say they can have thereapeutic uses for people suffering from disorders such as PTSD and depression. And a widely-cited 2010 British study  found magic mushrooms to be the least dangerous of any of the 20 drugs evaluated, both for users and for society at large.

Those science sleuths at ASAPScience have a nifty little three-minute animated video that explains just what psilocybin, the active ingredient in ‘shrooms, does in and to your brain as your mind melts. The science is firm and the viewpoint is balanced–they don’t shy away from the possibility of unhappy experiences–but in the end they come out for loosening up the laws in light of what we know now.

storm clouds approaching...

Oilprice.com | Oil companies continue to get burned by low oil prices, but the pain is bleeding over into the financial industry. Major banks are suffering huge losses from both directly backing some struggling oil companies, but also from buying high-yield debt that is now going sour.

The Wall Street Journal reported that tens of millions of dollars have gone up in smoke on loans made to the energy industry by Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and UBS. Loans issued to oil and gas companies have looked increasingly unappetizing, making it difficult for the banks to sell them on the market.

To make matters worse, much of the credit issued by the big banks have been tied to oil field services firms, rather than drillers themselves – companies that provide equipment, housing, well completions, trucks, and much more. These companies sprung up during the boom, but they are the first to feel the pain when drilling activity cuts back. With those firms running out of cash to pay back lenders, Wall Street is having a lot of trouble getting rid of its pile of bad loans.

Robert Cohen, a loan-portfolio manager at DoubleLine Capital, told the Wall Street Journal that he declined to purchase energy loans from Citibank. “We’ve been pretty shy about dipping back into the energy names,” he said. “We’re taking a wait-and-see attitude.”

But some big investors jumped back into the high-yield debt markets in February as it appeared that oil prices stabilized and were even rebounding. However, since March 4 when oil prices began to fall again, an estimated $7 billion in high-yield debt from distressed energy companies was wiped out, according to Bloomberg.

The high-yield debt market is being overrun by the energy industry. High-yield energy debt has swelled from just $65.6 billion in 2007 up to $201 billion today. That is a result of shaky drillers turning to debt markets more and more to stay afloat, as well as once-stable companies getting downgraded into junk territory. Yields on junk energy debt have hit 7.44 percent over government bonds, more than double the rate from June 2014.

nuttinyahoo gone learn that segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever talk has consequences...,

NYTimes |  The president’s harsh words have been deemed by some to be patronizing and disrespectful not only to Mr. Netanyahu but also to the voters who rewarded his uncompromising stances with a resounding mandate for a fourth term.

Several Israeli analysts said the administration’s criticism of Mr. Netanyahu seemed like a pretext for a longstanding plan to change the United States’ policy of protecting Israel in international forums, which the administration has said it will reassess. Others suspect a ploy to undermine Israel’s lobbying efforts against the American negotiations for a nuclear accord with Iran.

The rift widened further on Tuesday with a Wall Street Journal report in which administration officials accused Israeli officials of spying on the closed-door negotiations with Iran and sharing secret details about them with Congress and journalists. Three top Israeli ministers vehemently denied the report. Several congressional Republicans said they had received no such information, and those in Mr. Netanyahu’s close circle said it seemed like more poisoning of dirty waters.

“Sometimes you have these unfortunate patterns that occur when you have tensions in the relationship,” said Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. “Stories based on anonymous sources pop up, and their purpose seems to be to undermine the alliance between the two countries.”

In contrast with the White House, leading Israeli voices seem to have accepted Mr. Netanyahu’s post-election clarification that current circumstances make it impossible to imagine meeting his longstanding conditions for supporting a Palestinian state. While Israel’s Arab politicians rejected Mr. Netanyahu’s apology on Monday for an election-day video in which he warned about Arab citizens’ descending in “droves” to the polls, several of his most virulent Jewish critics praised it.

u.s. heightens military presence in the gulf unrelated to iran nuclear deal...,

sputniknews |  Eagle Resolve will involve tactical exercises from the US Army, Marines, and various other military branches to test readiness in air defense, border security, counterterrorism, as well as "consequence management." These include amphibious landing exercises and ship-based search and seizure operations.

Officials insist that the exercise has been in the planning stages for the last 14 months, and has nothing to do with the Iranian nuclear negotiations.

"The exercise is not intended as a signal to Iran," a CENTCOM official said, according to the Free Beacon. "If there’s any message at all, it’s that all participants have a common interest in regional security."

"It’s important to point out that this is a recurring exercise, with planning for this year’s exercise beginning over a year ago," the official added. "The focus of the exercise is on bolstering capabilities useful in a wide range of scenarios to help preserve and bolster regional security, with simulated portions of the exercise based on a fictional adversary."

Still, it’s hard to ignore which nation that “fictional adversary” may be in reference to. On Saturday, former CIA Director General David Petraeus called Iran the greatest long-term threat to stability in the region.

"I would argue that the foremost threat to Iraq’s long-term stability and the broader regional equilibrium is not the Islamic State; rather, it is Shiite militias, many backed by – and some guided by – Iran," he told the Washington Post.

It’s a view echoed by many US lawmakers and military officials. Given that the deadline for a framework deal on the controversial nuclear negotiations is fast approaching, it’s hard to ignore the potential message of a large-scale military exercise.

dangerous scary-as-phuk thought-crime-space daily since 2007....,

NYTimes |  The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said.

Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material.

Some people trace safe spaces back to the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s, others to the gay and lesbian movement of the early 1990s. In most cases, safe spaces are innocuous gatherings of like-minded people who agree to refrain from ridicule, criticism or what they term microaggressions — subtle displays of racial or sexual bias — so that everyone can relax enough to explore the nuances of, say, a fluid gender identity. As long as all parties consent to such restrictions, these little islands of self-restraint seem like a perfectly fine idea.

 But the notion that ticklish conversations must be scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer.

This logic clearly informed a campaign undertaken this fall by a Columbia University student group called Everyone Allied Against Homophobia that consisted of slipping a flier under the door of every dorm room on campus. The headline of the flier stated, “I want this space to be a safer space.” The text below instructed students to tape the fliers to their windows. The group’s vice president then had the flier published in the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, along with an editorial asserting that “making spaces safer is about learning how to be kind to each other.”

A junior named Adam Shapiro decided he didn’t want his room to be a safer space. He printed up his own flier calling it a dangerous space and had that, too, published in the Columbia Daily Spectator. “Kindness alone won’t allow us to gain more insight into truth,” he wrote. In an interview, Mr. Shapiro said, “If the point of a safe space is therapy for people who feel victimized by traumatization, that sounds like a great mission.” But a safe-space mentality has begun infiltrating classrooms, he said, making both professors and students loath to say anything that might hurt someone’s feelings. “I don’t see how you can have a therapeutic space that’s also an intellectual space,” he said.

when their back is to the wall, don't forget they have NUKES....,

zerohedge |  With allies migrating en masse to China's new infrastructure bank (and even the US having to admit it will 'cooperate'), it appears America has fallen back on what has worked for it in the past to ensure the world's largest creditor remains the world's reserve currency ad inifinitum - rattle its nuclear missile sabre... As the following clip shows, The US Air Force just test-fired a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from California, providing a "visual to the world."

necropolitics: a family business of perpetual war

consortiumnews |  But don’t think that this unlocking of the U.S. taxpayers’ wallets is just about this one couple. There will be plenty of money to be made by other neocon think-tankers all around Washington, including Frederick Kagan, who works for the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, and his wife, Kimberly, who runs her own think tank, the Institute for the Study of War [ISW].

According to ISW’s annual reports, its original supporters were mostly right-wing foundations, such as the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, but it was later backed by a host of national security contractors, including major ones like General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and CACI, as well as lesser-known firms such as DynCorp International, which provided training for Afghan police, and Palantir, a technology company founded with the backing of the CIA’s venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir supplied software to U.S. military intelligence in Afghanistan.

Since its founding in 2007, ISW has focused mostly on wars in the Middle East, especially Iraq and Afghanistan, including closely cooperating with Gen. David Petraeus when he commanded U.S. forces in those countries. However, more recently, ISW has begun reporting extensively on the civil war in Ukraine. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons Guided Petraeus on Afghan War.”]

In other words, the Family Kagan has almost a self-perpetuating, circular business model – working the inside-corridors of government power to stimulate wars while simultaneously influencing the public debate through think-tank reports and op-ed columns in favor of more military spending – and then collecting grants and other funding from thankful military contractors.

To be fair, the Nuland-Kagan mom-and-pop shop is really only a microcosm of how the Military-Industrial Complex has worked for decades: think-tank analysts generate the reasons for military spending, the government bureaucrats implement the necessary war policies, and the military contractors make lots of money before kicking back some to the think tanks — so the bloody but profitable cycle can spin again.

The only thing that makes the Nuland-Kagan operation special perhaps is that the whole process is all in the family.

with a special friend like this one, who needs enemies?

fp |  The nuclear mess in Parks could hold clues to yet another mystery in this Pennsylvania community, one that has bedeviled nuclear analysts for decades. Beginning in the early 1960s, investigators from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the agency that regulated U.S. nuclear facilities at the time, began to question how large amounts of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium had gone missing from NUMEC. Any nuclear site had a certain amount of loss, from seepage into walls and floors, for instance. In fact, between 1952 and 1968, lax standards at 20 of the country’s commercial nuclear sites resulted in an apparent loss of 995 kilograms (2,194 pounds) of uranium-235. But investigators found that at NUMEC, hundreds of pounds went missing, more than at any other plant.

NUMEC’s founder, Zalman Shapiro, an accomplished American chemist, addressed the concern in 1978, telling Arizona Congressman Morris Udall that the uranium simply escaped through the facility’s air ducts, cement, and wastewater. Others, such as the late Glenn Seaborg, the AEC’s chairman in the 1960s—who had previously helped discover plutonium and made key contributions to the Manhattan Project—have suggested that the sloppy accounting and government regulations of the mid-20th century meant that keeping track of losses in America’s newborn nuclear industry was well near impossible. Today, some people in Apollo think that at least a portion of the uranium might be buried in Parks, contaminating the earth and, ultimately, human beings.

But a number of nuclear experts and intelligence officials propose another theory straight out of an espionage thriller: that the uranium was diverted—stolen by spies working for the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. In the 1960s, to secure nuclear technology and materials, Israel mounted covert operations around the world, including at least one alleged open-ocean transfer of hundreds of pounds of uranium. Some experts have also raised questions about Shapiro himself. He had contacts deep within Israel’s defense and intelligence establishments when he ran NUMEC; several of them even turned up at his facility over time and concealed their professional identities while there.

Fifty years after investigations began—they have involved, at various times, the AEC and its successors, Congress, the FBI, the CIA, and other government agencies—NUMEC remains one of the most confounding puzzles of the nuclear era. “It is one of the most interesting and important Cold War mysteries out there,” said Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “Mainly as a story of clandestine nuclear proliferation, intelligence, security bungling, and the limits of intelligence.” The questions about Shapiro, meanwhile, linger: Is he a great American innovator, a traitor, or both? (Shapiro, now 94, has never been charged with a crime or convicted of one, and he has steadfastly proclaimed his innocence.)

Answers could emerge, once and for all, during the upcoming cleanup in Parks. Residents of this corner of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, could finally be told that the missing uranium has been beneath and around them all along—that large amounts of dangerous and volatile radioactive waste have been festering in the soil for more than half a century. Or they could learn that the material was indeed at the center of international intrigue. Either way, the small town of Apollo may long for boring anonymity.

what becomes of israeli prestige when not backed by american dominance?

theatlantic |  Here's something else Obama said in that interview last year: "I have not yet heard ... a persuasive vision of how Israel survives as a democracy and a Jewish state at peace with its neighbors in the absence of a peace deal with the Palestinians and a two-state solution. Nobody has presented me a credible scenario."

He went on, "The only thing that I’ve heard is, 'We’ll just keep on doing what we’re doing, and deal with problems as they arise. And we'll build settlements where we can. And where there are problems in the West Bank, we will deal with them forcefully. We’ll cooperate or co-opt the Palestinian Authority.' And yet, at no point do you ever see an actual resolution to the problem. ... And my assessment, which is shared by a number of Israeli observers, I think, is there comes a point where you can’t manage this anymore, and then you start having to make very difficult choices."

Over the past couple of days I've had several conversations with American Jewish leaders—those who are located in the broad middle, between the J Street/Sheldon Adelson ends of the spectrum—and they are uniformly, and deeply, anxious. The message was the same: Netanyahu's next, even-more-right-wing-than-usual government, they fear, will only take steps to further Israel's isolation, from America and from the world, and the Obama administration, which feels such deep, emotional anger toward Israel, will only make the situation worse, by misunderstanding, and downplaying, Israel's anxieties. (Sad but true: Some Israelis voted for Netanyahu because they're frightened of Obama.) 

nothing less than voluntary deference to the prestige of the rule of law hangs in the balance...,

theatlantic |  Ken White's sardonic response is about right:

Something unnatural is happening in Portland, and Police Union President Daryl Turner isn't going to put up with it. The proper order of things is upended. Black is white and white is black, cats and dogs cohabit. Madness! A judge has disbelieved a cop.

Last week Circuit Judge Diana Stuart acquitted teenager Thai Gurule on juvenile charges of assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, and attempted assault on a cop. She acquitted him even though the cops said he did it. Is Judge Stuart some sort of pro-criminal agitator? Apparently. In an extensive written order she weighed the testimony of sworn police officers against irrelevant trifles like actual videorecordings of their encounter with Gurule. Even though the cops swore that Gurule threw punches at them, Judge Stuart disbelieved them simply because she could not see any punches on the cell phone videos. Is she some sort of video-fisticuffs expert? Worse than that, she specifically stated that she didn't find some of their testimony credible.

As if they weren't cops.

There's a final aspect of this case that warrants a mention. In the video of this 16-year-old being stopped illegally, his older brother, who knew he was doing nothing wrong, can be heard shouting at police that the youngster played football for his high school, didn't drink, and didn't do marijuana. He was pleading with them and increasingly distraught as they punched the kid, threw him to the ground, and Tased him. What he's doing off camera isn't evident in the videos, though it is apparent that an increasingly hostile crowd was gathering. The end of the Oregonian story notes, "Gurule's brother went to trial in adult court in January. Judge Cheryl Albrecht found him guilty of misdemeanor interfering with a police officer and resisting arrest, but acquitted him of disorderly conduct. Albrecht sentenced him to 64 hours of community service and two years of probation." I don't know if the brother got a bogus conviction or if he really did criminally interfere with police by doing something stupid off camera.

Either way, he is a young black man who wouldn't have this criminal conviction, two years probation, and 64 hours of community service but for the fact that Portland police illegally stopped his brother, needlessly escalated the encounter, and meted out what has now been judged excessive force in the course of taking him into custody.

overseers punitively confiscate uppity arctic negress' belongings...,

adn | Anchorage police served a search warrant on the Alaska Cannabis Club's downtown clubhouse on Friday afternoon, taking boxes of evidence from the residence as club owner Charlo Greene watched.

Anchorage Police Department spokesperson Jennifer Castro told reporters on scene later Friday afternoon that police had received reports of illegal marijuana sales occurring at the clubhouse. No charges had been filed Friday, Castro said.

Police arrived about 1 p.m., Greene said. Greene, whose legal name is Charlene Egbe, is a former television news reporter who achieved national notoriety in September when she quit on-air after announcing she was the owner of the club.

A copy of the search warrant provided by Greene specified police were searching for evidence of "misconduct involving a controlled substance."

According to Greene, there were nine marijuana plants in one duplex and 14 in another. Five medical-marijuana cardholders live at the residence, Greene said. She said 10 to 12 medical marijuana cardholders were in the residence when the search warrant was served.

"I'm not surprised but I am disappointed," Greene said of the raid.

Two marked police cars were outside the residence on Friday afternoon, with a few more arriving as the search wore on. Greene said about seven officers were boxing up marijuana plants, computers, papers and other materials in the clubhouse. Greene said she was free to go but chose to wait while police took evidence from the home.

An officer on scene confirmed no arrests were being made Friday afternoon.

At 3:10 p.m., police began to load evidence in paper bags and cardboard boxes into a white van from the back door of the clubhouse. At about 3:15 p.m., a red pickup and black Jeep were towed away from the house.

Greene and boyfriend, Peter LoMonaco, watched as the vehicles were towed away.

Greene said the club would “open tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. and give free weed to all our members who come through.”

Greene said she would be hiring an attorney and was “gonna sue the s--- out of the city.”

read this and reflect on our own political situation...,

economic-undertow |  Many of the places that are suffering unrest and war were components of- or client states of the USSR during its heyday: Libya (client), Egypt (a Soviet client before becoming an American client), Somalia (client), Eritrea (client), Afghanistan (client) Yemen (client), Syria (long-term client), Iraq (client); Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, Dagestan, Nagorno-Karabakh (all components of USSR); also Vietnam, Laos, Angola and North Korea (all Soviet clients but wars have ended in these countries) … also Russia itself. Seen from a long-term perspective, the end of the Soviet Union government turns out not to be the bloodless event as was advertised, the rotting empire still has some collapse left in it. 

One of the duties of the Economic Undertow is to turn conventional historic narratives on their heads, to where they begin make sense. What Americans have been fed about the demise of the Soviet Union is a self-serving, political/ideological fairy tale: that the United States under the direction of Ronald Reagan’s brilliant conservative leadership outspent the USSR in an arms race that eventually — along with collapsing oil prices caused by new oil on the markets from Prudhoe Bay and the North Sea — bankrupted the Communist government. Once the economic and ideological fault lines were revealed, the various client/satellite states that made up the Soviet empire peaceably went their own way without interference from Moscow. All of this ‘revealing’ and ‘peaceable-ness’ took place over a remarkably short period of time in the early 1990s: here today, gone the next. 

The more realistic narrative has Soviet intelligence agencies — perhaps collaborating with those of the West along with Western interests (banks) — gaining control over Russian assets, shifting them to well-connected insiders, with the decrepit- and ossified Communist government powerless to do anything about it. This process began before- or during the Brezhnev period with matters well underway by the time of Gorbachev … Perestroika being a (feeble) attempt on the part of the Communist establishment to regain both credibility and some measure of control. What happened in Russia was not reform and the end of communism was an accident: what actually took place was the greatest crime of the modern era, the theft of an empire by the country’s intelligence services and criminal associates.

This outcome was a natural consequence of the Soviet Union as a regimented national security state with outsized spy agencies … as well as the slow commercial opening with the West beginning during the Khrushchev era. Within the immense ganglia of the Soviet intelligence- and internal security apparatus there was a kind of singularity or dawning self-awareness … the managers grasped in an instant they had access to the levers of control outside the reach of the Party, the Politburo and the Red Army. The rise of the agencies’ power was a consequence of Stalin’s paranoia; the Stalinist Russia was built on a foundation of intrusive spying and control/liquidation of potential internal enemies. Stalin held the agencies in check by way of periodic purges, no group of operatives could become too comfortable or entrenched, they had to constantly look over their own shoulders. Once ‘Uncle Joe’ was gone there were no further checks on spy agency power, they could act with impunity and did: what occurred was a silent coup d’etat with the KGB state first emerging publicly under Yuri Andropov. Once the looting and undermining was well-established in the center it spread out and took hold among the clients with consequences that can be seen clearly today. 

At the same time, contact with the West, as tentative as it was, informed the Russian intelligence elite what was possible … that the Western standards for wealth and success were both qualitatively- and qualitatively superior to what was available under egalitarian communism. In 1975, to be wealthy and successful as a Swiss or Londoner far exceeded what was possible in Leningrad or Kiev.

Under this scenario, ‘Nemtsov the reformer’ was either a co-conspirator — or, more likely a tool of intelligence services and/or Western business interests; an operative within the looting scheme along with Gaidar, Chubais and others. Instead of being the heir to Stalin’s strongman legacy, Putin recedes to become the technocratic figurehead who serves to distract public attention as the Russian Mario Monti or Antonis Samaras … meanwhile, the stealing takes place in the background.

psychopaths nucleate fraternities, gangs, mafias, churches, wherever weak cats give it up...,

hirhome |  This paper advances an ``information goods'' theory that explains prestige processes as an emergent product of psychological adaptations that evolved to improve the quality of information acquired via cultural transmission. Natural selection favored social learners who could evaluate potential models and copy the most successful among them. In order to improve the fidelity and comprehensiveness of such ranked-biased copying, social learners further evolved dispositions to sycophantically ingratiate themselves with their chosen models, so as to gain close proximity to, and prolonged interaction with, these models. Once common, these dispositions created, at the group level, distributions of deference that new entrants may adaptively exploit to decide who to begin copying. This generated a preference for models who seem generally ``popular.'' Building on social exchange theories, we argue that a wider range of phenomena associated with prestige processes can more plausibly be explained by this simple theory than by others, and we test its predictions with data from throughout the social sciences. In addition, we distinguish carefully between dominance (force or force threat) and prestige (freely conferred deference).

racism is an artifact of system 1 - work is transmutation of system 1 by system 2 - everything else is conversation...,

archive |  The distinction between fast and slow thinking has been explored by many psychologists over the last twenty-five years. For reasons that I explain more fully in the next chapter, I describe mental life by the metaphor of two agents, called System 1 and System 2, which respectively produce fast and slow thinking. I speak of the features of intuitive and deliberate thought as if they were traits and dispositions of two characters in your mind. In the picture that emerges from recent research, the intuitive System 1 is more influential than your experience tells you, and it is the secret author of many of the choices and judgments you make. Most of this book is about the workings of System 1 and the mutual influences between it and System 2.

The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 presents the basic elements of a two-systems approach to judgment and choice. It elaborates the distinction between the automatic operations of System 1 and the controlled operations of System 2, and shows how associative memory, the core of System 1, continually constructs a coherent interpretation of what is going on in our world at any instant. I attempt to give a sense of the complexity and richness of the automatic and often unconscious processes that underlie intuitive thinking, and of how these automatic processes explain the heuristics of judgment. A goal is to introduce a language for thinking and talking about the mind.

Part 2 updates the study of judgment heuristics and explores a major puzzle: Why is it so difficult for us to think statistically? We easily think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think causally, but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that System 1 is not designed to do.

The difficulties of statistical thinking contribute to the main theme of Part 3, which describes a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight. My views on this topic have been influenced by Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan. I hope for watercooler conversations that intelligently explore the lessons that can be learned from the past while resisting the lure of hindsight and the illusion of certainty.

The focus of part 4 is a conversation with the discipline of economics on the nature of decision making and on the assumption that economic agents are rational. This section of the book provides a current view, informed by the two-system model, of the key concepts of prospect theory, the model of choice that Amos and I published in 1979. Subsequent chapters address several ways human choices deviate from the rules of rationality. I deal with the unfortunate tendency to treat problems in isolation, and with framing effects, where decisions are shaped by inconsequential features of choice problems. These observations, which are readily explained by the features of System 1, present a deep challenge to the rationality assumption favored in standard economics.

Part 5 describes recent research that has introduced a distinction between two selves, the experiencing self and the remembering self, which do not have the same interests. For example, we can expose people to two painful experiences. One of these experiences is strictly worse than the other, because it is longer. But the automatic formation of memories—a feature of System 1—has its rules, which we can exploit so that the worse episode leaves a better memory. When people later choose which episode to repeat, they are, naturally, guided by their remembering self and expose themselves (their experiencing self) to unnecessary pain.

The distinction between two selves is applied to the measurement of wellbeing, where we find again that what makes the experiencing self happy is not quite the same as what satisfies the remembering self. How two selves within a single body can pursue happiness raises some difficult questions, both for individuals and for societies that view the well-being of the population as a policy objective.

A concluding chapter explores, in reverse order, the implications of three distinctions drawn in the book: between the experiencing and the remembering selves, between the conception of agents in classical economics and in behavioral economics (which borrows from psychology), and between the automatic System 1 and the effortful System 2. I return to the virtues of educating gossip and to what organizations might do to improve the quality of judgments and decisions that are made on their behalf.

how conformism creates ethnicity creates conformism - there's no solving stupid

hirhome |  In this essay I will explore the important connection between conformism as an adaptive psychological strategy, and the emergence of the phenomenon of ethnicity. My argument will be that it makes sense that nature made us conformists. And once humans acquired this adaptive strategy, I will argue further, the development of ethnic organization was inevitable. Understanding the adaptive origins of conformism, as we shall see, is perhaps the most useful way to shed light on what ethnicity is—at least when examined from the functional point of view, which is to say from the point of view of the adaptive problems that ethnicity solves. I shall begin with a few words about our final destination.

Ethnicity is a phenomenon that rightly occupies much attention in lay and scholarly circles alike, because it is relevant to almost everything that humans do. What is it? From the descriptive point of view, ethnicity is normative culture. That is to say, an ethnie is a collection of human beings who more or less agree on how a human life should be lived: which foods should be avoided, which eaten, and how the latter should be prepared; what sorts of behaviors are funny, shameful, offensive (and which aren't); by what specific ritual displays should politeness be expressed in a million different contexts; what forms of dress and cosmetic enhancement are appropriate for members of either sex; etc. Ethnicity is a collection of 'oughts' and 'ought nots' that get passed down more or less as a package along with the associated social label inherited from one's parents; "I am an X." In some academic circles, the question "Which ethnie has figured out the right way to live?" will immediately be met with the following retort:

"Why, the premise is absurd! Why should there be one best way to live a human life?" Perhaps. But this cosmopolitan multiculturalist complaint belongs to a clear minority. To the same question, most human beings all around the world have a ready answer, and it is always the same; "My ethnie lives life the way a human should." Consequently, members of ethnie A can easily amuse, offend, or shock members of ethnie B merely in the act of conforming to the 'oughts' and 'ought nots' that As feel obligated to pass down from one generation to the next.

Such haughty or offended reactions are usually labeled 'ethnocentrism', or, depending on their intensity and negativity, 'prejudice' and 'racism'. Many academics consider ethnocentrism a "bad" thing in any of its forms. But is it? Yes, it is a bad thing, very much so. The values of science require that we root out from our observational methods any source of consistent, distorting bias; and believing that cultural difference implies error makes it well-nigh impossible for the social scientist to make much progress in the study of cultural variation. Even more important, by my lights at least, is that so long as we are not cosmopolitan and therefore tolerant and compassionate with respect to the ways of our neighbors, we are still moral failures.

Norm-conformism is an adaptive strategy that maximizes the number of potential interactants in the conformist's local population. It makes sense to lament and oppose specific outcomes of particular conformist processes, such as some silent majorities, and ethnic prejudice. But to treat "conformism" and its consequences as a generalized evil in the abstract would spill a narrowly applicable moral evaluation into domains where not only does morality not apply, but where even a non-moral interpretation of the negative judgment "bad" will also not fit, given that norm-conformism does a lot of useful work helping humans navigate their social world. As always, it is best to put our moral goals in charge of conduct directed towards our fellow human beings. If we turn them instead into axiomatic priors of a scientific analysis, we saddle our attempt to understand human perception and behavior with epistemological baggage that makes it harder to understand why people do the things they do. Such ignorance can lead us to hurt people when we meant to help, and it follows directly that this is ethically undesirable. Therefore, if we have a compassion-based obligation to, first, do no harm, then we have a moral imperative to be honest about what causes human behavior, even if we would prefer to have been designed differently. Wishful thinking will not heal a troubled world, but an improved understanding of it just may.

ethnic groups are biological species to low-functioning, primitive brains...,

hirhome |  If ethnic actors represent ethnic groups as essentialized “natural” groups despite the fact that ethnic essences do not exist, we must understand why. This article presents a hypothesis and evidence that humans process ethnic groups (and a few other related social categories) as if they were “species” because their surface similarities to species make them inputs to the “living kinds” mental module that initially evolved to process species level categories. The main similarities responsible are (1) category-based endogamy and (2) descent-based membership. Evolution encouraged this because processing ethnic groups as species—at least in the ancestral environment—solved adaptive problems having to do with interactional discriminations and behavioral prediction. Coethnics (like conspecifics) share many strongly intercorrelated “properties” that are not obvious on first inspection. Since interaction with out-group members is costly because of coordination failure due to different norms between ethnic groups, thinking of ethnic groups as species adaptively promotes interactional discriminations towards the in-group (including endogamy). It also promotes inductive generalizations, which allow acquisition of reliable knowledge for behavioral prediction without too much costly interaction with out-group members. The relevant cognitive-science literature is reviewed, and cognitive field-experiment and ethnographic evidence from Mongolia is advanced to support the hypothesis.

The evidence from Mongolia supports the hypothesis that humans process ethnies as natural living kinds (theoretical considerations suggest that they do so at the “species” level). My Torguud subjects have a blood-based model for assigning individuals to ethnies. Beyond this, they consider such assignment to carry implications for ethnic category-based behavior even without any exposure to other members of their ethnic category, and they seem to believe that the ineffable “something” responsible for this is carried somehow “inside.” All of these parallel essentialist thinking in natural living kinds, suggesting that my subjects’ thinking about ethnies is not only primordialist but essentialist and that there is no difference between an ethnic group and a species from the point of view of the schemas that are primed to process them. Processing endogamous norm groups as species, I have argued, was adaptive in the ancestral environment because (1) it allowed us to learn a lot about out-groups in a very inexpensive way, in particular by making inductive inferences about nonobvious properties, and (2) it made possible processes of discrimination that prevented us from incurring the costs of coordination failure. The reason these benefits have been obtained specifically by processing these groups as species results from the fact that ethnies exhibit the most diagnostic features of species: group-based endogamy and descent-based membership. This made it easy for a blind evolutionary process to exapt a preexisting architecture by simply failing to discourage the priming by ethnies of the living-kinds module. This is not, I think, how we think of social categories in general but only how we think of those categories which, as in ethnies, exhibit the strongly diagnostic features of biological species, such as feudal classes and castes.

pookie in the log cabin playing with hard balls when he gets abruptly taken to the woodshed...,

alternet |  In his desire to placate white folks and appear reasonable, Jonathan Capehart lets Wilson off the hook. The implication of Capehart’s argument is that Michael Brown is an acceptable, justifiable casualty in this decades-long police war on a small Midwestern community. But if you believe that All Black lives matter, that is an unconscionable conclusion, one that “offends my sense of right and wrong.” As “respectable” Blacks are wont to do, the Capeharts of the world need to believe that if Black people would just “act right” and “do right,” we would be all right. But in a system of white supremacy, there isn’t that much act right in the world.

Jonathan, surely you know a suit and tie won’t protect you. So we’re going to keep on marching, as you said. And we will keep holding aloft the banner of Michael Brown. We will do so, because Black folks have already tested out your theory of respectability. We’ve been trying to save our lives by dressing right, talking right and never, ever fucking up since about 1877. That shit has not worked.

In an ideal world of crime and punishment, the officer would have had the legal leeway and good sense to pick these boys up, take them back down to the convenience store, make them apologize and work out an arrangement to work off the cigarillos they stole. That is one example of restorative justice and of the world we are fighting for. We are trying to get free, and that means we bring everybody with us, whether your suit is tailored or your pants sag. When the revolution comes, we will leave no one behind.

chomsky speaks truth - kahneman explains why many notsee it...,

NYTimes |  The neoliberal reaction that set in from the late ‘70s, escalating under Reagan and his successors, hit the poorest and most oppressed sectors of society even more than the large majority, who have suffered relative stagnation or decline while wealth accumulates in very few hands. Reagan’s drug war, deeply racist in conception and execution, initiated a new Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s apt term for the revived criminalization of black life, evident in the shocking incarceration rates and the devastating impact on black society.

Reality is of course more complex than any simple recapitulation, but this is, unfortunately, a reasonably accurate first approximation to one of the two founding crimes of American society, alongside of the expulsion or extermination of the indigenous nations and destruction of their complex and rich civilizations.

    ‘Intentional ignorance’ regarding inconvenient truths about the suffering of African- Americans can also be used to frame the genocide of Native Americans.

G.Y.: While Jefferson may have understood the moral turpitude upon which slavery was based, in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he says that black people are dull in imagination, inferior in reasoning to whites, and that the male orangutans even prefer black women over their own. These myths, along with the black codes following the civil war, functioned to continue to oppress and police black people. What would you say are the contemporary myths and codes that are enacted to continue to oppress and police black people today?

N.C.: Unfortunately, Jefferson was far from alone. No need to review the shocking racism in otherwise enlightened circles until all too recently. On “contemporary myths and codes,” I would rather defer to the many eloquent voices of those who observe and often experience these bitter residues of a disgraceful past.

Perhaps the most appalling contemporary myth is that none of this happened. The title of Baptist’s book is all too apt, and the aftermath is much too little known and understood.

There is also a common variant of what has sometimes been called “intentional ignorance” of what it is inconvenient to know: “Yes, bad things happened in the past, but let us put all of that behind us and march on to a glorious future, all sharing equally in the rights and opportunities of citizenry.” The appalling statistics of today’s circumstances of African-American life can be confronted by other bitter residues of a shameful past, laments about black cultural inferiority, or worse, forgetting how our wealth and privilege was created in no small part by the centuries of torture and degradation of which we are the beneficiaries and they remain the victims. As for the very partial and hopelessly inadequate compensation that decency would require — that lies somewhere between the memory hole and anathema.

Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which he participated was “the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.” And the Jefferson Memorial in Washington displays his words that “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Words that should stand in our consciousness alongside of John Quincy Adams’s reflections on the parallel founding crime over centuries, the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty…among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgment.”

What matters is our judgment, too long and too deeply suppressed, and the just reaction to it that is as yet barely contemplated.

10 things that black people fear that white people don't...,

alternet |  The following is the latest in a new series of articles on AlterNet called Fear in America that launched this March. Read the introduction to the series.

When black people wake up and begin the day, we have a wide range of issues we have to think about before leaving our homes. Will a police officer kill us today? Or, will some George Zimmerman vigilante see us as a threat in our own neighborhoods and kill us? We brace ourselves for those white colleagues who are pissed Barack Obama won both elections and take out their racist rage on us. When we drive our cars, we have to wonder if we’ll be pulled over because our cars look too expensive for a black person to be driving. If we’re poor and sick, we wonder if we'll be able to be treated for our illness. We have a lot on our minds, and sometimes it’s overwhelming.

Here are a few examples of things we have to be afraid of that white people don’t (or not nearly as much).

well-intended thought-leaders and diversity window-dressers need to read some kahneman...,

NYTimes |  Scrawled on Starbucks cups, the words “Race Together” were intended to stimulate conversations about race relations in America, beginning just days before the company’s annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday. But the coffee company’s campaign has instead unleashed widespread vitriol and derision.

The company effort, which began this week, lit up social media, drawing criticism and skepticism. The attacks grew so hostile that Corey duBrowa, the senior vice president for global communications at Starbucks, temporarily deleted his Twitter account on Monday. “Last night I felt personally attacked in a cascade of negativity,” Mr. duBrowa wrote in a post on Medium on Tuesday.

The fury and confusion boiled down to a simple question: What was Starbucks thinking?

Reactions have ranged from video parodies of customer interactions with baristas to some hostile online attacks aimed at corporate executives. Many have pointed out that the company’s leadership is predominantly white, while many of its baristas are members of minorities.

Others pleaded for a more traditional relationship with the businesses they patronize.

Gwen Ifill, the co-anchor of “PBS NewsHour,” wrote in a tweet on Tuesday: “Honest to God, if you start to engage me in a race conversation before I’ve had my morning coffee, it will not end well.”

At the Wednesday gathering in Seattle, Howard D. Schultz, the chief executive of Starbucks, addressed the nascent public relations campaign accompanied by the stagecraft of African-American guest speakers like the Academy Award winner Common and ending with Jennifer Hudson’s rousing rendition of “Hallelujah” at the close of the presentation.

“Race is an unorthodox and even uncomfortable topic for an annual meeting,” he acknowledged. “Where others see costs, risks, excuses and hopelessness, we see and create pathways of opportunity — that is the role and responsibility of a for-profit, public company.”  Fist tap Arnach (for instigating me to read Thinking Fast and Slow)

smdh at "leaders" like rev. johnson in ferguson...,

kcur |  There have been two Department of Justice Reports, two police officers shot, and several high-level resignations since our last conversation about the whirlwind of events in Ferguson, Missouri. A reporter, a professor and a reverend give us their perspectives on the latest news.

Guests:

• Reverend Willis Johnson, pastor, Well Springs Church
• Clarence Lang, professor, department of African and African-American Studies, The University of Kansas
• Emanuelle Berry, reporter, St. Louis Public Radio