globe's most egregious gluttons attempt transition

theatlantic | Saudi Arabia produces much of its electricity by burning oil, a practice that most countries abandoned long ago, reasoning that they could use coal and natural gas instead and save oil for transportation, an application for which there is no mainstream alternative. Most of Saudi Arabia’s power plants are colossally inefficient, as are its air conditioners, which consumed 70 percent of the kingdom’s electricity in 2013. Although the kingdom has just 30 million people, it is the world’s sixth-largest consumer of oil.

Now, Saudi rulers say, things must change. Their motivation isn’t concern about global warming; the last thing they want is an end to the fossil-fuel era. Quite the contrary: they see investing in solar energy as a way to remain a global oil power.

The Saudis burn about a quarter of the oil they produce—and their domestic consumption has been rising at an alarming 7 percent a year, nearly three times the rate of population growth. According to a widely read December 2011 report by Chatham House, a British think tank, if this trend continues, domestic consumption could eat into Saudi oil exports by 2021 and render the kingdom a net oil importer by 2038.

That outcome would be cataclysmic for Saudi Arabia. The kingdom’s political stability has long rested on the “ruling bargain,” whereby the royal family provides citizens, who pay no personal income taxes, with extensive social services funded by oil exports. Left unchecked, domestic consumption could also limit the nation’s ability to moderate global oil prices through its swing reserve—the extra petroleum it can pump to meet spikes in global demand. If Saudi rulers want to maintain control at home and preserve their power on the world stage, they must find a way to use less oil.

Solar, they have decided, is an obvious alternative. In addition to having some of the world’s richest oil fields, Saudi Arabia also has some of the world’s most intense sunlight. (On a map showing levels of solar radiation, with the sunniest areas colored deep red, the kingdom is as blood-red as a raw steak.) Saudi Arabia also has vast expanses of open desert seemingly tailor-made for solar-panel arrays.

Solar-energy prices have fallen by about 80 percent in the past few years, due to a rapid increase in the number of Chinese factories cranking out inexpensive solar panels, more-efficient solar technology, and mounting interest by large investors in bankrolling solar projects. Three years ago, Saudi Arabia announced a goal of building, by 2032, 41 gigawatts of solar capacity, slightly more than the world leader, Germany, has today. According to one estimate, that would be enough to meet about 20 percent of the kingdom’s projected electricity needs—an aggressive target, given that solar today supplies virtually none of Saudi Arabia’s energy and, as of 2012, less than 1 percent of the world’s.

super majors eager to get between the sheets with iran

HuffPo |  Western companies including Shell and BP have already shown interest to re-enter Iran's oil market as soon as a final nuclear deal is reached and issues of economic and banking hurdles are resolved.

After several decades, this is the first time that Western super-major oil and gas corporations are openly and publicly expressing their interest to access Iran which enjoys the world's second-largest natural-gas and fourth-biggest oil reserves.

Iranian leaders will attempt to use the short term nuclear deal as a platform to seal long term oil contracts, which will institutionalize the profits for many years to come. This will make it more difficult for sanctions to snap back in case Iran defied the terms of nuclear deal. Iran's oil ministry is looking for roughly $200 billion investment in order to revive and rehabilitate its oil industry. Iran has been publicizing and circulating its oil and business contracts. As Zanganeh stated, the new contracts are "long-term, with better situations, rather than the previous framework that we have."

In closing, unprecedentedly, both Western oil and gas companies and Iran hardliners are openly expressing interest in cooperating with each other, as Iran will gain legitimacy from the final nuclear deal.

This suggests two crucial issues. First of all, OPEC members ought to be prepared and chart ways for Iran's full return to the oil market. As an Iranian delegate pointed out "Iran is telling other OPEC members to get ready for its return". Iran is planning to boost exports by one million barrels a day after sanction are lifted. Currently, Iran's oil production is roughly 2.7 million barrels a day and it oil exports is approximately 1 million barrels a day. Secondly, the international community. and particularly the US, needs to have a strategy pre-planned for Iran's economic return, which will boost Tehran's geopolitics and the IRGC's influence in the region. So far, the Obama administration does not appear to have any particular strategy to rein Iran's economic return.

transition, conversion, musical chairs among hegemons...,

bloomberg |  Not content with the blow it’s dealt to U.S. oil drillers, Saudi Arabia is set to escalate the battle for market share by raising production to maximum levels.

The world’s largest oil exporter has already increased output to a 30-year high of 10.3 million barrels a day in a bid to check growth from nations including the U.S., Canada and Brazil. It will add even more to the global glut, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Citigroup Inc. predicts the kingdom will push toward its maximum daily capacity, which the bank estimates at about 11 million barrels, in the second half of 2015.

Saudi Arabia steered the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in November to protect its market share in the face of swelling U.S. crude output, rather than cut supplies to shore up prices as it did in the past. Having abandoned the role of swing supplier -- adjusting production in line with demand -- the kingdom will maximize sales to increase pressure on producers outside the group, the banks said.

“If you are Saudi Arabia and you’re looking at the new oil order we live in, you would go to full capacity,” Jeff Currie, head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs in New York, said by e-mail on June 15. “The world has come around to the realization that the U.S. shale barrel is the swing barrel.”

the mantra, white genocide and N-1 racetard terrorism as self-defense

theatlantic |  “It’s no longer OK to be an open racist and an anti-Semite,” she said. Instead, many members of these groups have adopted a claim first popularized by Robert Whitaker, an elderly segregationist from South Carolina, who in 2006 posted on his website a warning about “the third world pour[ing] into EVERY white country and ONLY into white countries.” The tract, known as The Mantra, helped promote the term “White Genocide,” which has since become a watchword among white supremacists for immigration and fertility trends that could lead to whites losing their majority status in U.S. and European populations in the coming decades. Beirich said it’s less that there is a coordinated global white-supremacist movement than that the rhetoric its adherents use has congealed around an issue that many “white countries” are perceived to be facing.

And that rhetoric is distinctly international in scope. Whitaker’s mantra suggests the existence of a double standard, in which whites are denied privileges that others enjoy—“ASIA FOR THE ASIANS, AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS, WHITE COUNTRIES FOR EVERYBODY.” It claims that only whites are being forced to accept “multiculturalism.” A petition to the White House posted last month, calling on the Obama administration to “stop White Genocide in our country!”, encourages the president to turn to Liberia, of all places, for lessons on racial purity. It quotes approvingly from the Liberian constitution of 1986, which says that “in order to preserve, foster and maintain the positive Liberian culture, values and character, only persons who are Negro or of Negro descent shall qualify by birth or by naturalization to be citizens of Liberia.”

A group called the White Genocide Project, which drew notice earlier this year for posting billboards in Alabama displaying Mantra quotes such as “Anti-racist is a code word for anti-White,” cites international law to establish the existence of white genocide, specifically Article II, subsection (c) of the United Nations Genocide Convention. The definition of genocide offered there includes “deliberately inflicting on the group”—which can be a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group”—“conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Under that definition, the White Genocide Project’s website states that a “combination of mass immigration (of different groups of people) plus forced assimilation would qualify as genocide.” The authors compare the trend to Han Chinese migration into Tibet—which Tibetans have complained dilutes their culture—with the only difference being that “White Genocide is taking place across many countries, and it is being done to the majority, rather than a minority.”

exploring the N-1 racetardism in which BD (and other lastrhodesians) center their life and thoughts...,

theapricity |  The present book is a textbook designed for the use of college students who have had or are taking a preliminary course in anthropology. Enough of it is, however, written in a non-technical way, so that students of allied disciplines may use it for reference. The subject matter to be studied consists of the body of statistical material collected by the world's physical anthropologists which concern the somatic character of peoples belonging to the white race. This material may be divided into (A), skeletons; and (B), metrical data and observations on the living..

By the use of this material we propose to follow the history of the white race from its Pleistocene1 beginnings to the present, and to provide a classification of sub-races which will be fully in accord with the facts as we now know them. We submit the thesis that man, as a domestic animal, is extremely variable; and that he has subjected himself, in his wanderings, to all of the environments of the earth, and hence is subject to environmental modification in a way unequalled by any other species. We further suggest that man, through his development of human cultures, has modi-fled his bodily form by his own devices.

During the Pleistocene period there were several species of primates which had attained some degree of human culture, by the acquisition of stone implements, of fire, and of speech. In the present post-glacial or interglacial period, in conformity with the general reduction in faunal varieties, man has been reduced to a single species, unique in a single genus. During the Pleistocene one species, at least, had developed in the manner of a foetalized terrestrial ape, and it is that species which carries today the main stem of Homo sapiens. Other species, including the fossil men of Java, of Peking, and Homo neanderthalensis, had developed at the same time into a heavier, hypermasculine endocrine form, with a luxuriance of jaws, teeth, and bony crests.

We propose to demonstrate that these non-foetalized species did not wholly die out, but that at least one of them was absorbed into the main human stem, at some time during the Middle, or the initial part of the Late, Pleistocene. From this amalgamation was produced the large, rugged, and relatively un-foetalized group of Upper Palaeolithic men in Europe, North Africa, and northern Asia. This type of man passed over Bering Straits in early post-glacial times, if not earlier, to provide the basic ge-netic stock from which the American Indian developed, in combination with later arrivals. From a branch of this hyperborean group there evolved, in northern Asia, the ancestral strain of the entire specialized mongoloid family.

We suggest that the ancestors of the whites in their major form developed during pluvial periods of the Pleistocene in parts of what is now the arid zone reaching from the Sahara to northern India; that in post-glacial times many were forced out of these homes by desiccation, and that some of them originated agriculture and animal husbandry in northeastern Africa and southwestern Asia. From these centers agricultural pioneers followed post-glacial zones of climate into Europe, gradually encroaching upon the lands formerly glaciated. In most of the regions which they occupied they greatly outnumbered the descendants of the hunters and fishers whose ancestors had clung on since glacial times, and many of whom had followed the retreating ice toward its last melting nuclei.

The occupation of all arable lands, and those suitable for grazing, was not completed in a century. or in a millennium; the process was a gradual one, and the withdrawal of the earlier inhabitants into environmentally protected fastnesses equally gradual. The entry of food-producers from Asia and Africa did not take a single route or involve a single people; it was a complex sequence of migrations through several ports of entry. The various strains of food-producers mixed with the food-gatherers whom they encountered, and with each other, until, in our own time, not a single group of complete food-gatherers has remained in white man's territory.

The food-producers seem to have been variants on one central racial theme, the basic Mediterranean. This basic Mediterranean stock varied in many respects, especially in stature and in pigmentation, but in its essential qualities, which segregated it from non-whites, it was remarkably uniform. We do not know that the survivors of the food-gatherers whom the Mediterranean food-producers absorbed were white in soft-part morphology, and there is some evidence that some had begun to evolve in a mongoloid, others perhaps in a negroid, direction. Such variations may be seen within the present composite white racial amalgam.

At any rate, the main conclusion of this study will be that the present races of Europe are derived from a blend of (A), food-producing peoples from Asia and Africa, of basically Mediterranean racial form, with (B), the descendants of interglacial and glacial food-gatherers, produced in turn by a blending of basic Homo sapiens, related to the remote ancestor of the Mediterraneans, with some non-sapiens species of general Neanderthaloid form. The actions and interactions of environment, selection, migration, and human culture upon the various entities within this amalgam, have produced the white race in its present complexity.

In view of these circumstances, the exact classification of living whites into sub-races, such as Nordics, Alpines, Dinaric, and so on, need not be made at this point, but can await (A) the historical study of the white race which will follow in Chapters II to VII; and (B) the survey of the living as a whole which will be made in Chapter VIII. In Chapters IX m XII, inclusive, we will make a more detailed regional survey of the living peoples of Europe to supplement the preceding sections.

fact-resistant canonical BD'ism the root of most domestic terrorism

NYTimes |  In the 14 years since Al Qaeda carried out attacks on New York and the Pentagon, extremists have regularly executed smaller lethal assaults in the United States, explaining their motives in online manifestoes or social media rants.

But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.

The slaying of nine African-Americans in a Charleston church last week, with an avowed white supremacist charged with their murders, was a particularly savage case.

But it is only the latest in a string of lethal attacks by people espousing racial hatred, hostility to government and theories such as those of the “sovereign citizen” movement, which denies the legitimacy of most statutory law. The assaults have taken the lives of police officers, members of racial or religious minorities and random civilians.

Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America program associate, and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By comparison, seven lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in the same period.

If such numbers are new to the public, they are familiar to police officers. A survey to be published this week asked 382 police and sheriff’s departments nationwide to rank the three biggest threats from violent extremism in their jurisdiction. About 74 percent listed antigovernment violence, while 39 percent listed “Al Qaeda-inspired” violence, according to the researchers, Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina and David Schanzer of Duke University. Fist tap John.

fact-resistant deuterostems face some facts...,

newyorker |  Criminal-justice reformers like to say that if a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who has served time. Nolan did not emerge from prison any less conservative, but he says he experienced a profound disillusionment, which has led him to play a central role in a cause that is only now finding its moment. These days, it is hard to ignore a rising conservative clamor to rehabilitate the criminal-justice system. Conservatives are as quick as liberals to note that the United States, a country with less than five per cent of the world’s population, houses nearly twenty-five per cent of the world’s prisoners. Some 2.2 million Americans are now incarcerated—about triple the number locked up in the nineteen-eighties, when, in a panic over drugs and urban crime, conservative legislators demanded tougher policies, and liberals who feared being portrayed as weak went along with them. African-Americans are nearly six times as likely as whites to be incarcerated, and Latinos are more than twice as likely. More than forty per cent of released offenders return to prison within three years.

Several Republican Presidential candidates—Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, and Ted Cruz—have been embraced by Right on Crime, a campaign to promote “successful, conservative solutions” to the punitive excesses of American law and order. In February, the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference, which serves as an audition for right-wing Presidential aspirants, featured three panels on criminal-justice reform, including one called Prosecutors Gone Wild. Bernard Kerik, who was Rudolph Giuliani’s police commissioner and served three years in prison for tax fraud and other crimes, now promotes an agenda of reforms, including voting rights for ex-felons. The libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch are donating money to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, to help insure that indigent defendants get competent legal representation, and they are co-sponsoring conferences on judicial reform with the American Civil Liberties Union.

In Congress and the states, conservatives and liberals have found common ground on such issues as cutting back mandatory-minimum sentences; using probation, treatment, and community service as alternatives to prison for low-level crimes; raising the age of juvenile-court jurisdictions; limiting solitary confinement; curtailing the practice of confiscating assets; rewriting the rules of probation and parole to avoid sending offenders back to jail on technicalities; restoring education and job training in prisons; allowing prisoners time off for rehabilitation; and easing the reëntry of those who have served time by expunging some criminal records and by lowering barriers to employment, education, and housing. As David Dagan and Steven M. Teles write, in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, “Retrenching the carceral state is becoming as orthodox on the Right as building it was just a few short years ago.” They conclude that this has created a “Nixon goes to China” opportunity to reverse decades of overkill.

This conservative transformation is often portrayed in the media as a novelty, and some progressives regard it as a ploy to cut taxes and turn prisons over to the private corrections industry. Yet it has deep roots and a tangle of motives, one of which is indeed a belief that downsizing prisons promises taxpayers some relief. (Locking up an inmate for a year can cost as much as tuition at a good college.) But for many conservatives, Nolan says, reducing spending is “ancillary.” “It’s human dignity that really motivates us.”

the worship of markets and the acceptance of greed are moral problems..,

WaPo |  “Is it realistic to hope that those who are obsessed with maximizing profits will stop to reflect on the environmental damage which they will leave behind for future generations? Where profits alone count, there can be no thinking about the rhythms of nature.” 

The pope condemns the current global economy “where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain, which fail to take the context into account, let alone the effects on human dignity and the natural environment. Here we see how environmental deterioration and human and ethical degradation are closely linked.” 

Wall Street comes under particular criticism: “Finance overwhelms the real economy. The lessons of the global financial crisis have not been assimilated.” As a result, “whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of the deified market, which become the only rule.” 

For Pope Francis, the market and the economy must be bound by rules that serve “basic and inalienable rights.” At the center of these is work: “We were created with a vocation to work.” Work is the setting for “rich personal growth . . . creativity, planning for the future, developing our talents, living out our values . . . giving glory to God.” Therefore, priority should be given to “the goal of access to steady employment for everyone, no matter the limited interests of business and dubious economic reasoning.” 

But instead of the common good, we have constructed an economy built on private interest and unrestrained appetite, an economy that excludes the poorest and most vulnerable. For Pope Francis, “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” derive from the same distorted global market economy.

.........

Pope Francis is seeking a far more profound change: economic policy grounded in moral values, measured not by how much money the few make but the respect accorded the rights of all and the health of the environment. Conservatives say he should stick to theology. But he already is sticking to theology, understanding that the worship of markets and the acceptance of unrestrained appetites are moral problems, not technical ones. If this statement on climate is most welcome, his teachings on the economy offer a critique necessary to finding the way out of these problems.

the crash of 2015 - on track, behind schedule...,

dailyimpact |  The dominoes are toppling, just as we have been expecting for nearly a year now, but slower than we thought. The fact-resistant strain of humans (Thank you, Borowitz Report) now in charge of the world are trying to use vast amounts of money to counteract gravity, and, counterintuitively, succeeded in slowing the dominoes’ fall. But not for long.

To review our expectations of last summer: the hideous decline rate of fracking wells (of up to 90% in three years) was forcing frackers to borrow huge amounts of money to put up large numbers of new wells at a breakneck pace in order to preserve the illusion (it was always an illusion) of a revolution in American oil leading to prosperity and “energy independence.” On average, it cost the frackers over $4 to get $1 of revenue in the door during the first quarter of this year. A year ago, with oil commanding $100 a barrel, they were still spending $2. As the old joke goes, the only way to make any money when you’re losing on every transaction is to make up for it with volume. But since most of the money spent was capital expenditure — i.e. new wells — their operating statements showed profits and nobody looked at the balance sheets.

We ran this scenario on our abacus and concluded that these guys were going to go broke. And that when they did, not only would U.S. oil production resume its long slide toward zero, begun in 1970, but they would blow up the junk-bond market, almost certainly the bond market, and probably the stock market. These expectations were in place before the price of oil tanked last fall, and set the expectations in concrete.

Now, let’s review the state of play:

why have the fact-resistant deuterostems taken aim at poor women?

NYTimes |  One would imagine that congressional Republicans, almost all of whom are on record as adamantly opposing abortion, would be eager to fund programs that help reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.

That would be the common sense approach, anyway.

And yet since they took over the House in 2011, Republicans have been trying to obliterate the highly effective federal family-planning program known as Title X, which gives millions of lower-income and rural women access to contraception, counseling, lifesaving cancer screenings, and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

They tried and failed in 2011, when the Senate was under Democratic control — although they still managed to extract significant cuts from an already underfunded program. Now that Republicans run the show, opponents of sensible and effective family planning are back to kill it off for good. Last Tuesday, a House subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services proposed to eliminate all Title X funding — about $300 million — from a 2016 spending bill.

The bill would also slash funding by up to 90 percent for sex education, specifically President Obama’s teen-pregnancy prevention initiative. The only winner was abstinence-only education, whose funding the subcommittee voted to double, despite the fact that it has basically no effect on abstinence and has been associated with higher rates of teen pregnancy.

Meanwhile, Title X, which was enacted by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in Congress in 1970, is caught up once again in the nation’s abortion wars — even though like all federal programs, it is barred from providing any funding for abortions.

oily pharisees and saducees continue their assault on laudato si

NYTimes |  Hardest to accept, though, is the moral premise implied throughout the encyclical: that the only legitimate human relationships are based on compassion, harmony and love, and that arrangements based on self-interest and competition are inherently destructive.

The pope has a section on work in the encyclical. The section’s heroes are St. Francis of Assisi and monks — emblems of selfless love who seek to return, the pope says, to a state of “original innocence.”

He is relentlessly negative, on the other hand, when describing institutions in which people compete for political power or economic gain. At one point he links self-interest with violence. He comes out against technological advances that will improve productivity by replacing human work. He specifically condemns market-based mechanisms to solve environmental problems, even though these cap-and-trade programs are up and running in places like California.

Moral realists, including Catholic ones, should be able to worship and emulate a God of perfect love and still appreciate systems, like democracy and capitalism, that harness self-interest. But Francis doesn’t seem to have practical strategies for a fallen world. He neglects the obvious truth that the qualities that do harm can often, when carefully directed, do enormous good. Within marriage, lust can lead to childbearing. Within a regulated market, greed can lead to entrepreneurship and economic innovation. Within a constitution, the desire for fame can lead to political greatness.

You would never know from the encyclical that we are living through the greatest reduction in poverty in human history. A raw and rugged capitalism in Asia has led, ironically, to a great expansion of the middle class and great gains in human dignity.

You would never know that in many parts of the world, like the United States, the rivers and skies are getting cleaner. The race for riches, ironically, produces the wealth that can be used to clean the environment.

A few years ago, a team of researchers led by Daniel Esty of Yale looked at the environmental health of 150 countries. The nations with higher income per capita had better environmental ratings. As countries get richer they invest to tackle environmental problems that directly kill human beings (though they don’t necessarily tackle problems that despoil the natural commons).

You would never suspect, from this encyclical, that over the last decade, one of the most castigated industries has, ironically, produced some of the most important economic and environmental gains. I’m talking of course about fracking.

There was recently a vogue for polemical antifracking documentaries like “Gasland” that purport to show that fracking is causing flammable tap water and other horrors.

mccain promises to supply oil and gas to ukraine while shale industry gets swallowed by its own debt...,

bloomberg |  The debt that fueled the U.S. shale boom now threatens to be its undoing.

Drillers are devoting more revenue than ever to interest payments. In one example, Continental Resources Inc., the company credited with making North Dakota’s Bakken Shale one of the biggest oil-producing regions in the world, spent almost as much as Exxon Mobil Corp., a company 20 times its size.

The burden is becoming heavier after oil prices fell 43 percent in the past year. Interest payments are eating up more than 10 percent of revenue for 27 of the 62 drillers in the Bloomberg Intelligence North America Independent Exploration and Production Index, up from a dozen a year ago. Drillers’ debt ballooned to $235 billion at the end of the first quarter, a 16 percent increase in the past year, even as revenue shrank.

“The question is, how long do they have that they can get away with this,” said Thomas Watters, an oil and gas credit analyst at Standard & Poor’s in New York. The companies with the lowest credit ratings “are in survival mode,” he said.

The problem for shale drillers is that they’ve consistently spent money faster than they’ve made it, even when oil was $100 a barrel. The companies in the Bloomberg index spent $4.15 for every dollar earned selling oil and gas in the first quarter, up from $2.25 a year earlier, while pushing U.S. oil production to the highest in more than 30 years.

“There’s a liquidity issue, and you start looking at the cash burn,” Watters said.

Mccain promising things the U.S. flatly doesn't have....,

charleston attack was terrorism, straight up simple and plain...,

         

theatlantic |  By demanding that the Charleston church attack be dubbed terrorism even before key details were known, observers meant to assert some mix of other claims, including that even the earliest details of the attack very strongly suggested that it was rooted in racial hatred against blacks and white-supremacism; that the killer acted every bit as abhorrently as, say, the men who attacked the Boston marathon; that the black lives lost to this and other acts of white supremacist terrorism matter every bit as much as the lives lost on, say, September 11, 2001; that the press, the police, and politicians would’ve responded differently to this attack had it been perpetrated by a Muslim gunman; or that Charleston warrants a response in keeping with what follows attacks by Muslim terrorists.

Years ago, after an attack on a Sikh temple that’s mostly forgotten because it wasn't regarded as terrorism, I argued that the reluctance to apply the label to acts carried out by white people is partly due to an awareness of what might happen next. When terrorism is invoked, many Americans––Republicans especially––have assented to indefinite detention; the criminalization of gifts to certain charities; secret, extrajudicial assassinations; ethnicity-based surveillance; and the torture even of people who might know about a future attack. Having undermined so many civil-liberties protections in pursuit of terrorists, the white majority and Republicans especially are alarmed at the idea of the homeland-security bureaucracy treating them as they’ve treated Muslim Americans.

priests hold pope infallible on reproductive rights, on the environment - not so much....,

NYTimes |  On the first Sunday after Pope Francis issued a landmark document on the environment, Roman Catholics attending Mass in Kenya, France, Mexico, Peru and the United States said they were thankful that he was using his pulpit to address climate change, pollution and global inequality.

But few priests or bishops — other than in parts of Latin America — used their own pulpits on Sunday to pass on the pope’s message, according to parish visits, interviews with Catholic leaders and reports from Catholics after Mass. Despite the urgent call to action in Francis’ document and the international attention it received, it will take some time to know whether Catholic clergy are familiar or comfortable enough with its themes to preach them to the faithful.

It traditionally takes months for papal teaching documents, known as encyclicals, to be read, understood and disseminated. And this one, “Laudato Si’,” or “Praise Be to You: On Care for Our Common Home,” is long, nearly 200 pages, and intricately weaves spiritual and moral teachings with economic, scientific and political analysis. It includes a forceful denunciation of a global economic system that the pope says plunders the resources of the poor for the benefit of the rich, leaving the poor to disproportionately suffer the consequences, including the effects of climate change.

“There has not been that much awareness among parish priests of climate change,” said the Rev. Aris Sison, a spokesman for the Diocese of Cubao in Manila, the Philippines capital. “The Holy Father has now made a clear connection between the environment and morality. He has given us a whole new way of thinking about the environment.”

visualizing the world's ten biggest oil and gas companies

Visual Capitalist

why angry negresses still stuck on rachel discrimination...,

radical extremism underlying domestic terrorism in the u.s.

splc |  In 2013, Josh Doggrell took the stage at the national conference for the neo-Confederate League of the South(LOS). In a non-descript suit-and-tie, he spoke about gun rights, county supremacy, the state of law enforcement in Alabama and his loyalty to the League.

“It’s wonderful to be around sanity,” the founder and chairman of the League’s John C. Calhoun chapter in a video of the event posted to YouTube.

It was a common speech for a League conference. But Doggrell wasn’t quite a common southern nationalist. He was a police officer, a lieutenant in the Anniston Police Department, and he wasn’t the only one. A second officer from his department, Lieutenant Wayne Brown, joined Doggrell at the convention, and they had come with good news –– good news for any self-respecting southern nationalist at least.

“The vast majority of men in uniform are aware that they’re southerners,” Doggrell said, touching on gun rights and the perennial fear among extremist groups that the Second Amendment is under attack. “And kith and kin comes before illegal national mandates.”

Doggrell knows a little bit about kith and kin. He joined the LOS in 1995 after meeting its presidentMichael Hill at the University of Alabama while Doggrell was a student, serving as the secretary vice chairman and chairman of the school’s LOS chapter before founding his own chapter in 2009.

Kith and kin is part of an explicitly racist ideology called “kinism” that Hill has long promoted through the LOS. The Kinist Institute, an organization that promotes kinism, has called for laws against racial intermarriage, an end to non-white immigration, expelling all “aliens” (“to include all Jews and Arabs”), and restricting the right to vote to white, landholding men over the age of 21. In the past, LOS websites have referred to kinism as “a biblical solution for all races” that will save the South by preventing “white genocide.”

It was an odd thing for a police officer to say, especially one from Anniston. Fifty years earlier, Klansmen firebombed several buses carrying civil rights workers, known as Freedom Riders, coming to the South to test a U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordering that buses be desegregated. On May 14, 1961, in Anniston, a mob of Klansmen, some reportedly still wearing their Sunday church clothes, attacked and firebombed the riders. Police did nothing.

But Doggrell has never hidden his extremist ties, not from his family – in 2013, his two-year-old was already a League member – and definitely not from his employer. As Doggrell boasts elsewhere in the video, his superiors are well aware of his associations.

“It’s always wonderful to go back and show my bosses all the radicals that I cavort with on the weekends,” he boasts.

The video was posted on YouTube two years ago by the Southern Nationalist Network and has only recently came to the attention of Hatewatch, which immediately sought to bring Doggrell’s associations to the city’s attention.

confederate flag head-fake from the inconvenient truth of domestic terrorism....,

politicalusa |  FBI Director James Comey determined that the mass murder of nine black people in their place of worship, including a Democratic state Senator who was working to get police to use body cameras after the shooting of an unarmed Walter Scott, is not terrorism.

Comey explained his thinking that alleged shooter Dylann Roof is not a domestic terrorist because he had no political motive:

“Terrorism is act of violence done or threatens to in order to try to influence a public body or citizenry so it’s more of a political act and again based on what I know so more I don’t see it as a political act. Doesn’t make it any less horrific the label but terrorism has a definition under federal law,” he said during a visit to Baltimore.

The FBI is investigating the shooting as a hate crime, as is the Charleston police department. 

On Friday, Department of Justice spokeswoman Emily Pierce said the DOJ was investigating the massacre as both a hate crime and an act of terrorism, “The department is looking at this crime from all angles, including as a hate crime and as an act of domestic terrorism.”

Terrorism is “the use of violence to physically and psychologically terrorize a population by an individual or a group in order to draw attention to a cause, enact political change, or gain political power.” Dylann Roof claimed blacks were taking over. He clearly had a right wing agenda to “preserve traditional social orders,” which is a form of terrorism. “Right Wing terrorism is commonly characterized by militias and gangs; many times these groups are racially motivated and aim to marginalize minorities within a state.”

Racially motivated to marginalize minorities. 

So the FBI thinks this isn’t terrorism because somehow they don’t see the political agenda behind the alleged shooter’s motives to get rid of black people and start a race war, or his obsession with Trayvon Martin’s murder. 

That is sort of like saying the Civil Rights Movement didn’t have a political agenda. There is nothing more political than attacking southern blacks in their place of worship to intimidate them and make a political statement.

last rhodesian canonical big donism...,

lastrhodesian |  I was not raised in a racist home or environment. Living in the South, almost every White person has a small amount of racial awareness, simply beause of the numbers of negroes in this part of the country. But it is a superficial awareness. Growing up, in school, the White and black kids would make racial jokes toward each other, but all they were were jokes. Me and White friends would sometimes would watch things that would make us think that “blacks were the real racists” and other elementary thoughts like this, but there was no real understanding behind it.

The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored? 

From this point I researched deeper and found out what was happening in Europe. I saw that the same things were happening in England and France, and in all the other Western European countries. Again I found myself in disbelief. As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there. From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.

anti-intellectualism

wikipedia |  In The Powring Out of the Seven Vials (1642), the Puritan John Cotton wrote that 'the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee. ... Take off the fond doting ... upon the learning of the Jesuits, and the glorie of the Episcopacy, and the brave estates of the Prelates. I say bee not deceived by these pompes, empty shewes, and faire representations of goodly condition before the eyes of flesh and blood, bee not taken with the applause of these persons.'^[15] Not every Puritan concurred with Cotton's contempt for secular education; some founded universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth.

Economist Thomas Sowell^[16] argues that American anti-intellectualism can be traced to the early Colonial era, and that wariness of the educated upper-classes is understandable given that America was built, in large part, by people fleeing persecution and brutality at the hands of the educated upper classes. Additionally, rather few intellectuals possessed the practical hands-on skills required to survive in the New World, leading to a deeply rooted suspicion of those who may appear to specialize in "verbal virtuosity" rather than tangible, measurable products or services:

From its colonial beginnings, American society was a "decapitated" society—largely lacking the topmost social layers of European society. The highest elites and the titled aristocracies had little reason to risk their lives crossing the Atlantic and then face the perils of pioneering. Most of the white population of colonial America arrived as indentured servants and the black population as slaves. Later waves of immigrants were disproportionately peasants and proletarians, even when they came from Western Europe [...] The rise of American society to pre-eminence as an economic, political and military power was thus the triumph of the common man and a slap across the face to the presumptions of the arrogant, whether an elite of blood or books.

The source, Thomas Sowell, describes the effect the American Revolution had on the development of American government, as established by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In his opinion, the tendency to "disregard" the impartiality of the law depending upon "who you are" rather than what the author describes as the impartiality of the "supremacy of the law" conflicts with the American creed of the common man. According to Sowell, this fundamental right uniquely distinguishes the American character, forged by "the beaten men of beaten races," from that of the arrogant and privileged elites of the European aristocracy.^[17]

19th century

In the history of American anti-intellectualism, modern scholars^{[citation needed]} suggest that 19th-century popular culture is important, because, when most of the populace lived a rural life of manual labour and agricultural work, a 'bookish' education, concerned with the Græco-Roman classics, was perceived as of impractical value, ergo unprofitable—yet Americans, generally, were literate and read Shakespeare for pleasure—thus, the ideal "American" man was technically skilled and successful in his trade, ergo a productive member of society.^{[citation needed]} Culturally, the ideal American was a self-made man whose knowledge derived from life-experience, not an intellectual man, whose knowledge derived from books, formal education, and academic study; thus, in The New Purchase, or Seven and a Half Years in the Far West (1843), the Reverend Bayard R. Hall, A.M., said about frontier Indiana:

"We always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one, and, hence, attempts were usually made to ruin the moral character of a smart candidate; since, unhappily, smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled, and [like-wise] incompetence and goodness."^[15]

Yet, the egghead's worldly redemption was possible if he embraced mainstream mores; thus, in the fiction of O. Henry, a character noted that once an East Coast university graduate 'gets over' his intellectual vanity—no longer thinks himself better than others—he makes just as good a cowboy as any other young man, despite his counterpart being the slow-witted naïf of good heart, a pop culture stereotype from stage shows.

we will all perish because the poor want to become rich and the rich want to stay that way

declineoftheempire |  Pope Francis issued an encyclical on climate change and human responsibility for the poor and the environment. I'll quote from The Guardian's report on the document.

Pope Francis has called on the world’s rich nations to begin paying their “grave social debt” to the poor and take concrete steps on climate change, saying failure to do so presents an undeniable risk to a “common home” that is beginning to resemble a “pile of filth”.

The pope’s 180-page encyclical on the environment, released on Thursday, is at its core a moral call for action on phasing out the use of fossil fuels.

But it is also a document infused with an activist anger and concern for the poor, casting blame on the indifference of the powerful in the face of certain evidence that humanity is at risk following 200 years of misuse of resources.

Hmmm... We have a "moral call for action on phasing out ... fossil fuels" and the "indifference of the powerful" to the risks posed by 200 years of "misuse" of resources, especially (I'm assuming) energy resources.

I do not want to get into this here, but I need to mention it—without fossil fuels, our precious global civilization would not exist. Let me repeat that—would not exist. Are we clear? At bottom, the rich nations do not want to phase out fossil fuels because without them, they wouldn't be rich anymore.

jeffrey sterling took on the cia and lost everything...,

firstlook |  Sterling’s case has drawn attention primarily for two reasons: it was part of the Obama Administration’s controversial crackdown on leakers and whistleblowers, and prosecutors had tried to force the Times reporter, James Risen, to divulge the name of his source, whom the government believed was Sterling. The case, known as United States of America v. Jeffrey Alexander Sterling, was treated mainly as a freedom-of-the-press issue, with Risen as the heroic centerpiece. Lost in the judicial briefs about the First Amendment was the black man in the middle. 

This is Sterling's story.

evangelicals centered in belief reject authentic christians and everyone else on global warming....,

WaPo |  Black Protestants were more than twice as likely to describe climate change as a serious problem, at 55 percent, than the 24 percent of their white evangelical peers who agreed. White, mainline Protestants fell somewhere between the two other groups on the question of how serious a threat global warming represents. A full 41 percent agreed that it is a "very serious problem."

The Pew poll also revealed signs that while Catholics as a group are more likely than Protestants to describe global warming as a real, man-made and very serious problem, Latino Catholics might be driving that difference. A full 82 percent of Latinos told pollsters that global warming is real, 60 percent said the problem was caused by human beings and 63 percent agreed that climate change represents a serious threat. By comparison,  just 64 percent of whites agreed that global warming is real, and 39 percent told pollsters that it is both man-made and a serious problem.

Another divide: Protestants who attended church least often were the most likely to view global warming as a real and serious problem of human origins, while the Catholics who attended Mass most frequently were most likely to agree.

In fact, environmental concerns do not begin to even out across the Protestant-Catholic split until pollsters also gathered data on just how people identify themselves politically. The results are clear. In fact, they have been clear for some time. Politics override everything.

Catholic Republicans were only slightly more likely, at 51 percent, to describe global warming as real and happening, than were the 45 percent of Republican Protestants who agreed. And the opinions of Democrats and independents nearly aligned across the Protestant, Catholic break.

That pattern suggests that faith might not influence the way that Americans view environmental matters nearly as deeply as do the long-standing partisan differences and allegiances that have become a defining part of membership in some groups.

An overwhelming number of white Protestant evangelicals, for instance, are Republicans. And the party's platform appears to have maintained deep influence in the way that white evangelicals respond to political questions about the environment. Of course, the relationship between the pope and the Catholic faithful is, by definition, considerably different from that of Protestant leadership organizations to the nation's many Protestant churches. But, guidance on environmental matters has been issued by many of the evangelical world's biggest voices and it's been out there for some time. That so few Protestants -- and particularly white evangelicals -- seem to describe climate change as a concern, much less as a problem to which they contribute, seems worth noting.

authentic christendom united on ecumenism, ecology, economy...,

time |  How can one not be moved by the criticism of our “culture of waste” or the emphasis on “the common good” and “the common destination of goods”? And what of the vital importance attributed to the global problem of clean water, which we have underlined for over two decades as we assembled scientists, politicians and activists to explore the challenges of the Mediterranean Sea (1995), the Black Sea (1997), the Danube River (1999), the Adriatic Sea (2002), the Baltic Sea (2003), the Amazon River (2006), the Arctic Sea (2007) and the Mississippi River (2009)? Water is arguably the most divine symbol in the world’s religions and, at the same time, the most divisive element of our planet’s resources.

In the final analysis, however, any dissent over land or water inevitably results in what the Pope’s statement calls “a decline in the quality of human life and a breakdown of society.” How could it possibly be otherwise? After all, concern for the natural environment is directly related to concern for issues of social justice, and particularly of world hunger. A church that neglects to pray for the natural environment is a church that refuses to offer food and drink to a suffering humanity. At the same time, a society that ignores the mandate to care for all human beings is a society that mistreats the very creation of God.

Therefore, the Pope’s diagnosis is on the mark: “We are not faced with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.” Indeed, as he continues to advance, we require “an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the underprivileged, and at the same time protecting nature.” It is also no surprise, then, that the Pope is concerned about and committed to issues like employment and housing.

Invoking the inspiring words of Scripture and the classics of Christian spirituality of East and West (particularly such saints as Basil the Great and Francis of Assisi), while at the same time evoking the precious works of Roman Catholic conferences of bishops throughout the world (especially in regions where the plunder of the earth is identified with the plight of the poor), Pope Francis proposes new paradigms and new policies in contrast to those of “determinism,” “disregard” and “domination.”

In 1997, we humbly submitted that harming God’s creation was tantamount to sin. We are especially grateful to Pope Francis for recognizing our insistence on the need to broaden our narrow and individualistic concept of sin; and we welcome his stress on “ecological conversion” and “reconciliation with creation.” Moreover, we applaud the priority that the papal encyclical places on “the celebration of rest.” The virtue of contemplation or silence reflects the quality of waiting and depending on God’s grace; and by the same token, the discipline of fasting or frugality reveals the power of not-wanting or wanting less. Both qualities are critical in a culture that stresses the need to hurry, the preeminence of individual “wants” over global “needs.”

In the third year of our brother Pope Francis’s blessed ministry, we count it as a true blessing that we are able to share a common concern and a common vision for God’s creation. As we stated in our joint declaration during our pilgrimage to Jerusalem last year:

“It is our profound conviction that the future of the human family depends also on how we safeguard – both prudently and compassionately, with justice and fairness – the gift of creation that our Creator has entrusted to us … Together, we pledge our commitment to raising awareness about the stewardship of creation; we appeal to all people of goodwill to consider ways of living less wastefully and more frugally, manifesting less greed and more generosity for the protection of God’s world and the benefit of His people.

blackest woman on the planet triggered rahowa...,

guardian |  Race is a big issue in the US. Always was, and seems like it always will be. And this week has been no exception.

Overnight, a young white man, Dylann Roof, walked into an iconic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and allegedly opened fire, killing nine people.

Fox News’s response was to reject any suggestion the shooting was a “hate crime”, before bringing on that time-honoured icon of white American dialogue – the Uncle Tom.

Bishop E W Jackson, from Chesepeake in Virginia (a mere 500km away), appeared on a morning Fox news program to explain, to nods of approval from the three white Fox news anchors, that the violence wasn’t about race. It was about Christianity.

Never mind the fact the shooter – pictured on his Facebook page wearing a shirt bearing the flag of apartheid South Africa – told the church gathering he had to kill the people who were “raping and killing” children in his neighbourhood.

If it was about Christianity – and obviously it wasn’t – but if it was, it begs the question why Fox News has refused to brand the attack an act of terrorism?

Of course, this shooting is just the latest race debate to grip the US.

Amid growing attention at the number of black men killed by white cops, the US media took a breather last week to focus its white-hot gaze on Rachel Dolezal, the president of the Spokane chapter for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who was recently outed as a white woman.