The President's Speech

indiana |  What was going on? A roar of laughter from the aphasia ward, just as the President's speech was coming on, and they had all been so eager to hear the President speaking. ..

There he was, the old Charmer, the Actor, with his practised rhetoric, his histrionisms, his emotional appeal --and all the patients were convulsed with laughter. Well, not all: some looked bewildered, some looked outraged, one or two looked apprehensive, but most looked amused. The President was, as always, moving --but he was moving them, apparently, mainly to laughter. What could they be thinking? Were they failing to understand him? Or did they, perhaps, understand him all too well?

It was often said of these patients, who though intelligent had the severest receptive or global aphasia, rendering them incapable of understanding words as such, that they none the less understood most of what was said to them. Their friends, their relatives, the nurses who knew them well, could hardly believe, sometimes, that they were aphasic.

This was because, when addressed naturally, they grasped some or most of the meaning. And one does speak 'naturally', naturally.

Thus, to demonstrate their aphasia, one had to go to extraordinary lengths, as a neurologist, to speak and behave unnaturally, to remove all the extraverbal cues-tone of voice, intonation, suggestive emphasis or inflection, as well as all visual cues (one's expressions, one's gestures, one's entire, largely unconscious, personal repertoire and posture): one had to remove all of this (which might involve total concealment of one's person, and total depersonalisation of one's voice, even to using a computerised voice synthesiser) in order to reduce speech to pure words, speech totally devoid of what Frege called 'tone-colour' (Klangenfarben) or 'evocation'. With the most sensitive patients, it was only with such a grossly artificial, mechanical speech --somewhat like that of the computers in Star Trek-- that one could be wholly sure of their aphasia.

Why all this? Because speech-natural speech --does not consist of words alone, nor (as Hughlings Jackson thought) 'propositions' alone. It consists of utterance --an uttering-forth of one's whole meaning with one's whole being-- the understanding of which involves infinitely more than mere word-recognition. And this was the clue to aphasiacs' understanding, even when they might be wholly uncomprehending of words as such. For though the words, the verbal constructions, per se, might convey nothing, spoken language is normally suffused with 'tone', embedded in an expressiveness which transcends the verbal-and it is precisely this expressiveness, so deep, so various, so complex, so subtle, which is perfectly preserved in aphasia, though understanding of words be destroyed. Preserved-and often more: preternaturally enhanced ...

This too becomes clear-often in the most striking, or comic, or dramatic way-to all those who work or live closely with aphasiacs: their families or friends or nurses or doctors. At first, perhaps, we see nothing much the matter; and then we see that there has been a great change, almost an inversion, in their understanding of speech. Something has gone, has been devastated, it is true --but something has come, in its stead, has been immensely enhanced, so that-at least with emotionally-laden utterance-the meaning may be fully grasped even when every word is missed. This, in our species Homo loquens, seems almost an inversion of the usual order of things: an inversion, and perhaps a reversion too, to something more primitive and elemental. And this perhaps is why Hughlings Jackson compared aphasiacs to dogs (a comparison that might outrage both!) though when he did this he was chiefly thinking of their linguistic incompetences, rather than their remarkable, and almost infallible, sensitivity to 'tone' and feeling. Henry Head, more sensitive in this regard, speaks of 'feeling-tone' in his ( 1926) treatise on aphasia, and stresses how it is preserved, and often enhanced, in aphasiacs. *

Thus the feeling I sometimes have-which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have-that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, that total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, all too easily. ..

We recognise this with dogs, and often use them for this purpose-to pick up falsehood, or malice, or equivocal intentions, to tell us who can be trusted, who is integral, who makes sense, when we --so susceptible to words-- cannot trust our own instincts.

And what dogs can do here, aphasiacs do too, and at a human and immeasurably superior level. 'One can lie with the mouth,' Nietzsche writes, 'but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.' To such a grimace, to any falsity or impropriety in bodily appearance or posture, aphasiacs are preternaturally sensitive. And if they cannot see one-this is especially true of our blind aphasiacs-they have an infallible ear for every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations, which can give --or remove-- verisimilitude to or from a man's voice.

In this, then, lies their power of understanding-understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for these wordless but immensely sensitive patients. It was to these (for them) most glaring, even grotesque, incongruities and improprieties that my aphasic patients responded, undeceived and undeceivable by words.

This is why they laughed at the President's speech.

Bezos-Post Meditation On the Evils of Wealth

WaPo |  How did we lose sight of the ancient wisdom about wealth, especially given its ample evidencing in recent studies? 

Some will say that we have not entirely forgotten it and that we do complain about wealth today, at least occasionally. Think, they’ll say, about Occupy Wall Street; the blowback after Mitt Romney’s comment about the “47 percent”; how George W. Bush painted John Kerry as out of touch. But think again: By and large, those complaints were not about wealth per se but about corrupt wealth — about wealth “gone wrong” and about unfairness. The idea that there is no way for the vast accumulation of money to “go right” is hardly anywhere to be seen. 

Getting here wasn’t straightforward. Wealth has arguably been seen as less threatening to one’s moral health since the Reformation, after which material success was sometimes taken as evidence of divine election. But extreme wealth remained morally suspect, with the rich bearing particular scrutiny and stigmatization during periods like the Gilded Age. This stigma persisted until relatively recently; only in the 1970s did political shifts cause executive salaries to skyrocket, and the current effectively unprecedented inequality in income (and wealth) begin to appear, without any significant public complaint or lament.

The story of how a stigma fades is always murky, but contributing factors are not hard to identify. For one, think tanks have become increasingly partisan over the past several decades, particularly on the right: Certain conservative institutions, enjoying the backing of billionaires such as the Koch brothers, have thrown a ton of money at pseudo-academics and “thought leaders” to normalize and legitimate obscene piles of lucre. They produced arguments that suggest that high salaries naturally flowed from extreme talent and merit, thus baptizing wealth as simply some excellent people’s wholly legitimate rewards. These arguments were happily regurgitated by conservative media figures and politicians, eventually seeping into the broader public and replacing the folk wisdom of yore. But it is hard to argue that a company’s top earners are literally hundreds of times more talented than the lowest-paid employees.

As stratospheric salaries became increasingly common, and as the stigma of wildly disproportionate pay faded, the moral hazards of wealth were largely forgotten. But it’s time to put the apologists for plutocracy back on the defensive, where they belong — not least for their own sake. After all, the Buddha, Aristotle, Jesus, the Koran, Jimmy Stewart, Pope Francis and now even science all agree: If you are wealthy and are reading this, give away your money as fast as you can.

The Success Sequence: Tard Bidnis Masquerading as Public Policy

nakedcapitalism |  Normally, I would treat this sort of right wing effort at cultural engineering as noise, but upon reflection, that might not be so smart. Not paying attention to persistent right wing messaging was what allowed the intellectually incoherent “free markets” ideology to become ascendant. 

The Success Sequence is back! The ad-hoc anti-poverty process first endorsed by Isabell Sawhill and Ron Haskins at the Brookings Institute has been picked up by Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang at AEI. George Will also recently mailed in a column on the topic by doing a rewrite of the AEI product. I’ve written before about some of the problems with this particular framework, but in light of this new push, it is worth rehashing them here.

The Curious Case of the Different Success Sequences
If you are a long-time observer of the Success Sequence community (like I am), you may have noticed something a little strange about it. Though everyone in this community claims they are interested in the same anti-poverty process, in reality, each publication defines the Success Sequence somewhat differently. And those differences tell you a lot about what actually motivates the folks who push this concept.

For Sawhill and Haskins, the Success Sequence consists of the following five rules (they express them as three rules, but their third rule is a compound rule that I prefer to break up):

1. Graduate high school.
2. Get a full-time job.
3. Get married before having children.
4. Wait until at least age 21 to get married.
5. Wait until at least age 21 to have children.

In their AEI paper, Wilcox and Wang claim to be using the Sawhill and Haskins Success Sequence and even cite to their work. But they aren’t actually. The Wilcox and Wang Success Sequence has only three rules:

1. Graduate high school.
2. Get a full-time job.
3. Get married before having children.

Rules four and five, the delay-marriage and delay-parenting rules, are gone! What happened to them? How could such an oversight have been made?

The answer is pretty obvious. Wilcox dropped the delay-marriage and delay-parenting rules because they do not mesh with his particular conservative worldview. His cultural and religious commitments make him uncomfortable advocating for the delay of marriage and childbirth. So he doesn’t.

What we have in the Success Sequence is not some kind of time-immemorial wisdom about how to live a virtuous life. Indeed, if the Success Sequence were applied backward in time, it would conclude that almost everyone who has ever lived in the world is an immoral wreck.

Instead of providing generalizable guidance about the good life, what the Success Sequence does is offer up a totally ad-hoc set of rules that are plausible enough within the context of contemporary lifestyles to allow conservatives to say personal failures are the cause of poverty in society. When contemporary lifestyles change, the Success Sequence will have to be rewritten because it will sound just as absurd as the current Success Sequence would sound to Americans in the middle of the last century.

Fifty years from now, conservatives will write op-eds saying the real trick to staying out of poverty is a college degree, cohabitation, and delaying child birth to age 30. No Success Sequence will stay around if it stops describing most middle class lives or if it begins to describe too many poor lives. The goalposts will shift constantly but the conclusion will always remain the same: the poor did this to themselves and the rich should be spared from higher taxes.

Is Wasserman-Schultz's Brother in Charge of the Awan Investigation?

squawker |  In what may be one of the most remarkable conflicts of interest that we have seen in a long time, it appears that Steven Wasserman, Assistant Attorney for the District of Columbia who is the brother of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has been tasked with overseeing the investigation of DNC IT employee Imran Awan, who was arrested earlier this week while attempting to flee the US and charged with bank fraud.

Maybe @HouseCracka is on to something:

The #AwanBrothers controlled the BLACKBERRY ENTERPRISE SERVER so they could monitor ALL communications! #SpyRing inside Congress! @potus pic.twitter.com/Gd0gYWjTev

— General Deplorable (@HouseCracka) July 27, 2017

Meanwhile, the attorneys for Imran Awan have released the following statement blaming their clients legal troubles on “anti-Muslim bigotry”. It’s a pretty good read:

This is pretty wild stuff, and I would like to know what the heck AG Jeff Sessions is going to do about this.

The swamp is very, very deep, my friends.

Biggest Espionage Case in U.S. History - GTFOH "Ethnic and Religious Profiling"

rollcall |   Rep. Ron DeSantis told “Fox & Friends” Monday  said Congress should investigate Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s employment of a man charged with submitting a fraudulent loan application and potentially scamming his House employers. 

Asked if Wasserman Schultz should be forced to testify DeSantis responded, “I think it's questionable what they were doing during that time,” referring to Imran Awan and other members of his family. “We would have to investigate that. Of course, they had access to intelligence and House Foreign Affairs Committee members’ personal email and IT accounts. There is some very sensitive information on there. This could be a significant security breach.”

Around February, unnamed lawmakers alleged Awan and other family members, who were employed since 2004 by more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers to provide IT services, were running some kind of scam, the details of which have not been revealed. Awan’s lawyer and congressional staff described the work as fairly low level, including setting up computers, phones, and passwords.

Lawmakers who contracted with Awan cut ties as the investigation went on. Wasserman Schultz was the last to do so, after Awan was arrested last week. She said that until the arrest she had been provided “no evidence to indicate that laws had been broken,” and was concerned about “ethnic and religious profiling” in the case.

President Donald Trump added his support to the story, retweeting an article last week accusing media outlets of “bury[ing]” the “IT scandal engulfing” Wasserman Schultz’s office.

Seymour Hersh: FBI Knows It Was Seth Rich, Not Russians, Who Gave DNC Files To Wikileaks

washingtonsblog |  We’ve noted for many months that the DNC emails were leaked by an insider, not hacked by the Russians.

Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh – who revealed in 1974 that the CIA was spying on Americans, who broke the story of the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Iraq prison torture scandal – said in a recent phone interview linked by WikiLeaks:

[The DC police took Seth Rich’s computer, but couldn’t get past his password.] So they call the FBI cyber unit.
***
The Feds get through [the password-protection on Rich’s computer], and this is what they find. This is accoring to the FBI report.
***
What the report says is that – some time in late spring or early summer – he [Rich] makes contact with WikiLeaks. That’s in his computer.
***
They [the FBI] found what he [Rich] had done was he had submitted a series of documents – of emails, of juicy emails – from the DNC.
By the way, all this shit about the DNC, where the hack, it wasn’t hacked …
He offered a sample, an extensive sample, I’m sure dozens of emails, and said I want money. [Remember, WikiLeaks often pays whistleblowers.]
Later, WikiLeaks did get the password. He [Rich] had a dropbox, a protected dropbox, which isn’t hard to do.
***
They got access to the dropbox. That’s in the FBI report.

He [Rich] also let people know with whom he was dealing … the word was passed, according to the FBI report, “I also shared this box with a couple of friends, so if anything happens to me, it’s not going to solve your problem”.
***
But WikiLeaks got access, before he was killed.
***
I have a narrative of how that whole fucking thing began.   It’s a [former CIA director John] Brennan operation. It was an American disinformation [campaign].

My Only Job Was to Keep My Baby Off the Pole...,

Getting ahead of myself here, but fitna jump full back into the turd-frosting that took place on the breakfast club in the Janet Mock interview. Every degenerate and its cousin seeks mimetic cover in the historic respectable negroe quest for civil rights in America.

On a black program that often advocates for the safety and lives of black people, its hosts laughed as their guest advocated for the murder of black trans women who are black people, too!

Nah, not gonna fly. The whole Janet Mock interview flew off the rails when Angela Yee started normalizing stripper culture.  What is wrong with this picture?  

There are tons of reasons why people shouldn't be strippers or prostitutes.  Yet, the breakfast club is having a conversation about the flawed logic of fathers not wanting their daughters to become sex workers with a transsexual former teenaged prostitute and stripper during the commute time for school children?!?!?!?! 

Is the goal to literally induce more young black girls into being prostitutes and strippers? Who benefits from increasing tolerance of our youth being turned into prostitutes, strippers, and drug-dealers because of economics and limited educational and economic access? 

Yvette Carnell told you that Charlemagne the God is a social engineering sock puppet.  I'm surprised Yee didn't say that twerking on the pole is "empowering".  Let me guess... the next interview is going to be Amber Rose explaining why taking money for oral sex makes you an entrepreneur? Just like so many other nefarious social-engineering props deployed to distract, dismay, and confuse black minds addicted to celebrity, who do we find sitting on her fat-ass behind the curtain? Who gave the turd-frosting Janet Mock her initial foot up onto the public stage? Of course you know it was none other than Oprah Winfrey. 

Speech as Violence: Celebrity Peddling Degeneracy to Black Folks is SUCH HARD WORK...,

allure |  Yet I was hopeful that I could use the show’s vast platform to speak directly to their predominantly black and Latinx listeners, who are often excluded from the conversations held in mainstream LGBT spaces (which are largely white, moneyed, and concerned with the centering of cis folk). I hoped I could make listeners aware of the lived realities of their trans sisters, and let them know that we deserve to be seen, heard, and acknowledged without the threat of harassment, exclusion, and violence.

My ultimate goal was to be accessible — to not judge, to call in rather than call out, and, above all, to exercise patience as the (straight cis male) hosts processed my existence. It’s rare that I do Trans 101 lecturing anymore, because I’ve already done that work with my first book, Redefining Realness, which was filled with plain speak and explanatory commas about definitions, statistics, and context.

In fact, I’ve turned down thousands from colleges and corporations because I refuse to engage in Trans 101. Trans folk, especially of color, should not be obligated to help cis folk play catch-up on our experiences. The effort can detract from our work to protect and liberate ourselves. Yet I also know that black and Latina trans women often live in communities of color, so outreach to viewers of color, from The Wendy Williams Show and Essence to Desus & Mero, was vital as I set out on my book tour.

I was invited to “The Breakfast Club” because cohost Yee chose my second memoir, Surpassing Certainty, for her book club. It was my last scheduled media appearance after a long, grueling tour in support of Surpassing Certainty, which is about the years in my life I decided to keep my trans-ness private — largely in order to gain access and maintain my safety. These years coincided with my 20s, when I navigated college, graduate school, and my early media career. The interview aired on radio stations across the country (edited and condensed) and in its entirety on YouTube a week later.

Though I have not been able to watch the video of my interview (I have already experienced it and won’t be doing so again), I’m proud of the labor I put forth, and I’m grateful to Yee for her preparation and effort to steer the conversation away from the particulars of my body and instead toward my work. The interview was what it was, and I refuse to re-experience being asked about my vagina in such blatant, irrelevant, and sensational ways. Again, if I am not fucking you, why do you care?

Theft of Palestine Taking Mimetic Cover in Janet Mock's Messy Draws...?

thedailybeast |  Instead, the group of students thwarting Mock’s scheduled lecture—those belonging to SJP—do, in fact, pressure people to conform to their mind-set on the Middle East and quash intellectual diversity.

Sadly, Mock caved to the pressure. Though the petition drew just 160 signatures, Mock canceled days before she was expected to speak on March 21 because, “We feel the focus of Janet’s work was lost leading up to the proposed event,” her representative reportedly told the Moral Voices organizers.

Way to go, student activists at Brown! You succeeded in creating a hostile environment that led to a trans woman of color being discouraged from sharing her voice and opinions. This all helped the Palestinian people how, exactly?

Brown President Christina Paxson expressed disappointment. “I respect her decision to avoid having her talk be overshadowed by an issue unrelated to her work. However, I am disappointed that a valuable learning opportunity was lost,” she said in a Sunday email to the student body.

In that same email, Paxson also referred to campus housing facilities that had been defaced. According to the Brown Daily Herald, “Gay will die” and “Holocaust 2.0” were written on hallway walls.

“I want to emphasize that there is absolutely no evidence that the cancellation of the Mock event is related to the homophobic and anti-Semitic graffiti that appeared,” Paxson wrote. “However, taken together, these two events are deeply troubling. They come at a time when the nation and colleges across the country are grappling with concerns about injustice against individuals based on religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender expression.”

In their op-ed, SJP members defended their group’s “my way or the highway approach” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the initial the petition stressed, the students’ objections were not over Mock but rather her willingness to take part in an event even slightly tied to Hillel. In other words, they wanted Mock to speak—but only as long as she agreed to the terms they dictated. It’s hardly the stuff of international diplomacy; has digging in your heels and refusing to let people share their opinions ever brought about peace or stability?

When Speech is Violence - Weapons Are Meant To Be Felt - Not Seen...,

I'm an aggressor. I have a knife. Knives are never meant to be seen, only felt. Not only can I model my desired aggression toward you in pictures, words, and even movements, I can engage in active deception so that you never see that knife attack coming. I don't believe there are any animals capable of that complex mix of behaviors. Sure there's deception, sure there's aggressive play and practice, but nothing even remotely approaching the complex systematic, formal and premeditated instrumental behavior I'm describing above.

Now if I were blessedly more naive about how such things go, I might model in my mind's eye displaying the knife like a poor simple creature instinctively engaging in threat displays in hopes of scaring you off, which threat displays mask its underlying real instinctual aversion to lethal violence.

Fourteen years ago on the afrofuturism list, I offered the ancient anecdote about Sack's aphasic patients sitting in the common lounge watching Ronald Reagan deliver a speech. To a person, these language-disordered patients were amazed by the paradox of the actor's facial expressions and body language conveying a message totally at odds with what was coming out of his mouth. They could directly observe both the unspoken intention and the contrasting spoken deceptions. We all have this capability to varying degrees. My own liminal acuity (perception of facial or body language contradiction) is off the chart.

So it is with longstanding, consistent, and finely-honed trepidation that I spy out the corner of my eye the most recent speech as violence perpetrations emanating from a longtime, consistent, and influential source the NYTimes: When the political scientist Charles Murray argues that genetic factors help account for racial disparities in I.Q. scores, you might find his view to be repugnant and misguided, but it’s only offensive. It is offered as a scholarly hypothesis to be debated, not thrown like a grenade. 

Milo Yiannopoulos is compared and contrasted in the same article as a genuine perpetrator of "speech as violence". That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.

With regard to Milo Yiannopoulos and the alt-right - there are few better example of the use of words as "virtue-signal" for collective violence. It's a very good thing that this cohort is demographically composed of untermensch. The alt-right is busily wallowing in the joys of formerly forbidden memetic signification within its demography. Keyboard warriors, one-and-all, these gamma males are living a bronetic Weimar Germany/MS-13 fantasy from the safety of their mothers' basements. Anonymous bad-talk through keyboards is not the same thing as MS-13 face tattoos.

Within MS-13, serial killers openly signify within their community of interest exactly what they're on about. A better example of "speech" as violence with an underlying ethological analog would be pretty hard to find. I would equate that signification to a brightly colored poisonous reptile advertising its venom, with the difference being that the gang-member has agency over its advert while the venomous reptile does not.

Yiannopoulos and Murray are each mentioned in the article, with the former given as an example of an intentional provocateur and the latter as an example of a public intellectual. From the perspective of "speech as violence" the now ruined and discredited Yiannopoulos was never anything more than a D-list gadfly. Murray, on the other hand, falls somewhere between professional political propagandist and un-indicted war criminal - imnsho.

Calling Charles Murray "merely a political scientist" when in fact he was an anthropologist studying, developing, and implementing large-scale counter-insurgency methods in Vietnam, which methods he turned around - and with substantial political backing - promoted aggressively in the U.S. - is more than a little disingenuous. Charles Murray has always both intended and practiced severe rhetorical violence against both real and imagined enemies. The fact that his pseudo-academic deceptions are even more refined and subtle than Ronald Reagan's thespian deceptions - (wonder what the aphasics who saw through Reagan's talk/expression contradictions would make of Murray?) doesn't make them any the less premeditated, systematic, or violent.

Murray has always known full-well that a knife is never meant to be seen, only felt. So did President Reagan or at least his speech writers and handlers...,

When is Speech Violence?

NYTimes |  What’s bad for your nervous system, in contrast, are long stretches of simmering stress. If you spend a lot of time in a harsh environment worrying about your safety, that’s the kind of stress that brings on illness and remodels your brain. That’s also true of a political climate in which groups of people endlessly hurl hateful words at one another, and of rampant bullying in school or on social media. A culture of constant, casual brutality is toxic to the body, and we suffer for it. 

That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering. 

On the other hand, when the political scientist Charles Murray argues that genetic factors help account for racial disparities in I.Q. scores, you might find his view to be repugnant and misguided, but it’s only offensive. It is offered as a scholarly hypothesis to be debated, not thrown like a grenade. There is a difference between permitting a culture of casual brutality and entertaining an opinion you strongly oppose. The former is a danger to a civil society (and to our health); the latter is the lifeblood of democracy. 

By all means, we should have open conversations and vigorous debate about controversial or offensive topics. But we must also halt speech that bullies and torments. From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of violence.

Dangerous Propagandist Deconstruction (REDUX Originally Posted 3/27/13)

shameproject | Author of The Bell Curve; Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

Charles Murray is one of the most influential right-wing ideological architects of the post-Reagan era. His career began in a secret Pentagon counterinsurgency operation in rural Thailand during the Vietnam War, a program whose stated purpose included applying counter-insurgency strategies learned in rural Thailand on America's own restive inner cities and minority populations. By the late 1970s, Charles Murray was drawing up plans for the US Justice Department that called for massively increasing incarceration rates. In the 1980s, backed by an unprecedented marketing campaign, Murray suddenly emerged as the nation's most powerful advocate for abolishing welfare programs for single mothers. Since then, Murray revived discredited racist eugenics theories "proving" that blacks and Latinos are genetically inferior to whites, and today argues that the lower classes are inferior to the upper classes due to breeding differences.

Why Black Families Struggle to Build Wealth

theatlantic | There’s little disagreement about the fact that economic inequality is problematic. But arguments persist over its origins, solutions, and which economic gaps are ultimately the most pernicious.

In his new book, Toxic Inequality: How America's Wealth Gap Destroys Mobility, Deepens the Racial Divide, and Threatens Our Future, Tom Shapiro, a professor of law and sociology at Brandeis University, lays out how government policy and systemic racism has created vast gaps in wealth between white and black Americans. Shapiro and his colleagues followed 187 families from Boston, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. Half of the families were black and half white. They interviewed them in 1998 and then again in 2010, to see what had changed: how were their kids faring, how had they weathered the recession—were they any better off in 2010 than they had been in 1998?

I spoke with Shapiro about his new book, how policy impacts racial wealth, and what he makes of current conversations about race and economic pain.

The interview below has been lightly edited for clarity.

Requiem for the American Dream

penguin |  In his first major book on the subject of income inequality, Noam Chomsky skewers the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism and casts a clear, cold, patient eye on the economic facts of life. What are the ten principles of concentration of wealth and power at work in America today? They’re simple enough: reduce democracy, shape ideology, redesign the economy, shift the burden onto the poor and middle classes, attack the solidarity of the people, let special interests run the regulators, engineer election results, use fear and the power of the state to keep the rabble in line, manufacture consent, marginalize the population. In Requiem for the American Dream, Chomsky devotes a chapter to each of these ten principles, and adds readings from some of the core texts that have influenced his thinking to bolster his argument.

The High Costs of Being Poor in America

voxeu  |  Divisions in the US go well beyond the income arena, and in ways that are particularly worrisome. In a new book, I document trends in inequality from the perspective of well-being, starting with standard metrics but also exploring how these relate to non-economic aspects of welfare, such as happiness, stress, anger, and, most importantly, hope (Graham 2017).

Hope is an important channel driving people’s willingness to invest in the future. My early research on well-being work highlights its particular importance for people with less means, for whom making such investments requires a greater sacrifice of current consumption than it does for the rich (Graham et al. 2004). In addition to widening gaps in opportunity, the prosperity gap in the US has led to rising inequality in beliefs, hopes, and aspirations, with those who are left behind economically the least hopeful and the least likely to invest in their futures.

There are, indeed, two Americas. Those at the top of the income distribution (including the top of the middle class) increasingly lead separate lives, with barriers to reaching the upper class being very real, if not explicit (Reeves 2017). Those at the top have high levels of hope for the future and make investments in themselves and in their children’s health, education, and knowledge more generally. Those at the bottom have much lower levels of hope and they tend to live day by day, consumed with daily struggles, high levels of stress, and poor health.

There are many markers of the differences across these two Americas, ranging from education levels and job quality to marriage and incarceration rates to life expectancy. Indeed, the starkest evidence of this lack of faith in the future is the marked increase in premature deaths – driven largely but not only by an increase in preventable deaths (such as via suicide and drug over-dose) among middle-aged uneducated whites, as described by Case and Deaton (2017).

There are even differences in the words that these two Americas use. Common words in wealthy America reflect investments in health, knowledge acquisition, and the future: iPads and Baby Bjorns, foam rollers and baby joggers, cameras, and exotic travel destinations such as Machu Picchu. The words that are common in poor America – such as hell, stress, diabetes, guns, video games, and fad diets – reflect short-time horizons, struggles, and lack of hope (Leonhardt 2015).

Based on detailed Gallup data, we find stark differences across people, races, and places in the US. Remarkably, poor minorities – and blacks in particular – are much more hopeful than poor whites. Poor blacks are three times as likely to be a point higher on the ten-point optimism scale than are poor whites, while Hispanics are about one and a half times more likely than poor whites. Poor blacks are also half as likely to experience stress – a significant marker of ill-being – on a daily basis as are poor whites, while poor Hispanics are about two-thirds as likely.

What Kind of Gamma Cuckold Accepts Murray Rothbard's Lies About Inequality?

alternet |  In the long term, the indirect effect of the Pay ­Machine—​the increase in income inequality—is economically more injurious than the erosion of company earnings or a stock market downturn.

Income inequality in America has risen sharply since 1976. Economists and pundits point to multiple causes—globalization and competition from low-wage​ countries; growing educational disparities that particularly affect men and minorities; technological changes that reward the highly skilled; decline of labor unions; changes in corporate culture that place stock price and earnings above employees; free market philosophy and the rise of winner-take-all economics; households with high-income couples; lower rates of marriage and of intact families; high incarceration levels; immigration of low­-skilled individuals; income tax and capital gains tax cuts and other conservative economic and tax policies; deregulation; and decreased welfare and antipoverty spending coupled with redistribution programs that disproportionately benefit the elderly.

All of the above may contribute to inequality. However, the proximate cause is quite simple. The jump in inequality is due to a small number of people, mostly business executives, who make huge amounts of money. They are the Mega Rich, the top .1 percent in income, who averaged $6.1 million in income in 2014. The Merely Rich are the rest of the 1 percent. It’s the Mega Rich, not the Merely Rich, who drive inequality. (I’m a member of the Merely Rich, so don’t blame me.) Between 1980 and 2014 the average real income of the Mega Rich has nearly quadrupled, increasing by 381 percent. Over the same period, the Merely Rich doubled their income while the bottom 90 percent lost ground, suffering a 3 percent decline.

Children Internalize The Darndest Things...,

theatlantic |  “If you’re in an advantaged position in society, believing the system is fair and that everyone could just get ahead if they just tried hard enough doesn’t create any conflict for you … [you] can feel good about how [you] made it,” said Erin Godfrey, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School. But for those marginalized by the system—economically, racially, and ethnically—believing the system is fair puts them in conflict with themselves and can have negative consequences.

“If the system is fair, why am I seeing that everybody who has brown skin is in this kind of job? You’re having to think about that … like you’re not as good, or your social group isn’t as good,” Godfrey said. “That’s the piece … that I was trying to really get at [by studying] these kids.”

The findings build upon a body of literature on “system justification”—a social-psychology theory that believes humans tend to defend, bolster, or rationalize the status quo and see overarching social, economic, and political systems as good, fair, and legitimate. System justification is a distinctively American notion, Godfrey said, built on myths used to justify inequities, like “If you just work hard enough you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps … it’s just a matter of motivation and talent and grit.” Yet, as she and her colleagues discovered, these beliefs can be a liability for disadvantaged adolescents once their identity as a member of a marginalized group begins to gel—and once they become keenly aware of how institutional discrimination disadvantages them and their group.

“I do think that there’s this element of people think of me this way anyway, so this must be who I am,” Godfrey said, adding that the behaviors—things like stealing and sneaking out—reflect stereotypes perpetuated about youth of color. “If you’re [inclined] to believe that things are the way they should be, and [that] the system is fair, then you’re maybe going to accept stereotypes about you more easily.”

While the sample was relatively small, Godfrey said the findings are informative and mirror prior research. Indeed, previous analyses have found that system-justifying beliefs are associated with lower self-esteem in black adults and lower grade-point averages for Latino college students—though the same beliefs predicted better grades and less distress for “high status” youth.

“I was really interested in trying to think of [early adolescents] as active agents in their world,” Godfrey said, “and as people who can understand and interpret their social world in a way that a lot of research doesn’t recognize.”

Signalling Back At These Untermensch

WaPo |  Growing up, guns were a thing to be feared. They intersected with my life only as characters in narratives of pain: the reason the boy from gym class was in the hospital, the thing that stole the life of a friend’s cousin or father. My life has known no fear greater than in the handful of times my eyes have found the opening of a gun’s barrel.

It’s a fear that is present for many black Americans. That same Pew poll found that 49 percent of us see gun violence as a “very big” problem in our local communities, compared with 29 percent of Hispanics and a fraction of as many whites — 11 percent. While 20 percent of whites and 24 percent of Hispanics say they — or someone in their family — have been personally threatened with a gun, that number jumps to 32 percent for black Americans. And while 43 percent of whites and 42 percent of Hispanics say they know someone who’s been shot, it’s 57 percent among black Americans.

It was a similar fear that in 2015 prompted Stephen Yorkman to launch the Robert F. Williams Gun Club in Prince George’s County, Md., which is named for a civil rights activist who advocated armed self-defense and now has about 150 members.

“For me, it started with the shooting of Tamir Rice,” Yorkman, 48, explained, referencing the 12-year-old Cleveland boy shot by police while playing with a toy gun at the playground of a public park. “We need to create a different, better perception of black people with guns so that in an open-carry state the image of a black person with a gun doesn’t so alarm a police officer. And we need to make it so it’s no longer a sin in the black community to be a gun owner, but that it’s more accepted.”

This new crop of black gun clubs aims to educate members on the history of black gun ownership and the centuries of attempts to suppress it and to host pragmatic conversations about the way their members will be perceived, and the dangers they will assume, as black people who chose to be armed — services often abdicated by the leaders of mainstream gun culture.

Can Pro-Social Institutions Come Into Being In America's Dystopian Now?

evonomics |  The above says: how people in the present value rewards they expect to receive (say) 10 years into the future, is pretty similar across the world — although small differences can make a big difference in the long term through compounding. But the degree to which people want things right now, as opposed to tomorrow, varies quite dramatically.

By the way, Russia’s β is 0.21 !!! If that has nothing to do with low investment rates or insecure property rights for foreign companies, then I will eat my shorts !

The role of patience in cooperation is relevant to the “commitment problem” of the state in solving collective action problems. In theorising about the origins of the state, Mancur Olson gave a famous answer with his dichotomy of roving bandits and stationary bandits. In the world of political anarchy, roving bandits fight one another for opportunities to pillage the productive peasants. But sometimes one of them defeats all the others and establishes himself as a “stationary bandit”. He then acquires a strong intrinsic interest in restraining his plunder — his ‘taxation’ — in order to let the economy grow. It’s the “fatten the goose that lays the golden eggs” principle.

But that depends! If the stationary bandit is impulsive and impatient, he can remain a predator for a very long time.

Political scientist Carles Boix in a recent book pointed out that the reciprocity of stateless foraging societies cannot be sustained when the distribution of resources is too unequal. But even his model depends on ‘patience’, with the implication that uncoordinated cooperation is still possible with more inequality as long as people are patient enough. This is actually true of models using prisoner’s dilemma and stag hunt in general. Even Acemoglu‘s ruling elite with vested interests in maintaining “extractive institutions” would have incentives for “inclusive institutions” if they were only patient enough.

So to answer the question at the head of this post, “where do pro-social institutions come from?” — if ‘bad’ institutions represent coordination failures, then intelligence and patience must be a big part of the answer. This need not have the same relevance for social evolution from 100,000 BCE to 1500 CE. But for the emergence of ‘modern’, advanced societies, intelligence and patience matter.

It’s not that people’s norms and values do not or cannot change. They do. But that does not seem enough. Solving complex coordination failures and collective action problems requires a lot more than just ‘good’ culture.

I am not saying intelligence and patience explain ‘everything‘, just that they seem to be an important part of how ‘good’ institutions happen. Nor am I saying that intelligence and patience are immutable quantities. Pinker argued in The Better Angels of Our Nature that the long-run secular decline in violence may be due to the Flynn Effect:

…the pacifying effects of reason, and the Flynn Effect. We have several grounds for supposing that enhanced powers of reason—specifically, the ability to set aside immediate experience, detach oneself from a parochial vantage point, and frame one’s ideas in abstract, universal terms—would lead to better moral commitments, including an avoidance of violence.

What is the above describing, other than the increasing ability of people to empathise with a wider group of people than friends and family? Intelligence and patience allow you to understand, and weigh, the intuitive risks and the counterintuitive benefits from collaborating with perfect strangers. With less intelligence and less patience you stick to what you know — intuit the benefits from relationships cultivated over a long time through blood ties or other intimate affiliations.

Your “moral circle” is wider with intelligence and patience than without.

Mind Control By Rhythmic Sound

scientificamerican |  You walk into a bar and music is thumping. All heads are bobbing and feet tapping in synchrony. Somehow the rhythmic sound grabs control of the brains of everyone in the room forcing them to operate simultaneously and perform the same behaviors in synchrony. How is this possible? Is this unconscious mind control by rhythmic sound only driving our bodily motions, or could it be affecting deeper mental processes?

The mystery runs deeper than previously thought, according to psychologist Annett Schirmer reporting new findings today at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans. Rhythmic sound “not only coordinates the behavior of people in a group, it also coordinates their thinking—the mental processes of individuals in the group become synchronized.”

This finding extends the well-known power of music to tap into brain circuits controlling emotion and movement, to actually control the brain circuitry of sensory perception. This discovery helps explain how drums unite tribes in ceremony, why armies march to bugle and drum into battle, why worship and ceremonies are infused by song, why speech is rhythmic, punctuated by rhythms of emphasis on particular syllables and words, and perhaps why we dance.

Schirmer and her graduate student Nicolas Escoffier from the University of Singapore first tested subjects by flashing a series of images on a video monitor and asked them to quickly identify when an image was flipped upside down. While participants focused on this task, a synthetic drumbeat gently tapped out a simple four-beat rhythm in the background, syncopated by skipping the fourth beat of each measure.

Codes of the Untermensch

theburningplatform |  Signalling is a basic human trait. We all do it to one degree or another. Walk into a prison and you will see an array of tattoos on the inmates. These will signal gang affiliations, time served in the system, facilities in which the inmate has served and the individual’s violence capital. That last part is an important part of keeping the peace. To civilians, a face tattoo is always scary, but in jail, the right neck tattoo can tell other inmates that they are in the presence of an accomplished killer for a particular prison gang.

Virtue signalling and danger signalling are the easiest to understand, but people also use verbal and non-verbal signals to indicate trust or test the trustworthiness of others. A criminal organization, for example, will have a new member commit a pointless crime to demonstrate their trustworthiness. This is not just to sort out police informants, as is portrayed on television. It’s mostly to ascertain the willingness of the person to commit to the life of the organization. It’s hard to be a criminal if you will not commit crimes.

Outlaw biker culture is a good example of the use of signalling to establish trust relationships. Bikers have always, for example, adopted Nazi symbols as part of their display items. Bikers are not sitting around reading Julius Evola. What they are doing is signalling their complete rejection of the prevailing morality. By adopting taboo symbols and clothing, the outlaw biker is letting other bikers know his status, as much as he is letting the squares know he is a dangerous guy, who should be avoided.

This type of signalling is also defensive. Someone who is not serious or unprepared for life in a motorcycle club will try hard to hide this from himself and the club he is trying to impress. When those club members all have visible tattoos and swastikas on their vests, no one can kid themselves about what is expected from members. The visual presentation of the outlaw biker does more to chase away posers and trouble makers than character tests and initiation rituals. A biker is a walking entrance exam for prospects.

It’s not just an in-group/out-group thing. When you start prospecting for a biker club, you are routinely forced to choose between the moral framework of society and the morality of the club. The same process works in cults, interestingly enough. The prospect is always in a position where he must either divorce himself emotionally from his old life and the old world, or leave the club. It’s why one percenter clubs take their time patching in new members. It takes time to leave the old world and fully commit to the lifestyle.

That’s the way to read the alt-right and the stuff they say and do on-line with respect to non-whites, Jews and women. They don’t actually spend a lot of time talking and writing about these groups. They spend most of their time talking about how to organize themselves, the issues that face white identity movements and the philosophical points of their thing. The offensive memes and the racists language are mostly signalling. If you freak out over Hitler themed twitter avatars, then you are never going to be in their thing.

Apostles of Non-Violence and Racial Harmony Viewed As Political Enemies?

maebrussell |   Why were Hippies such a threat, from the President on down to local levels, objects for surveillance and disruptions?

Many of the musicians had the potential to become political. There were racial overtones to the black-white sounds, the harmony between people like Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, and Jimi Hendrix. Black music was the impetus that got the Rolling Stones into composing and performing.

The war in Vietnam was escalating. What if they stopped protesting the war in Southeast Asia and turned to expose domestic policies at home with the same energy? One of the Byrds stopped singing at Monterey Pop to question the official Warren Report conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a "lone assassin."
  

Bob Dylan's "Bringing it All Back Home" album has a picture of Lyndon Johnson on the cover of Time.
    

By 1966, LBJ had ordered all writers and critics of his Commission Report on the JFK murder to be under surveillance.
    

That research was hurting him. Rock concerts and Oswald. What next?

While preacher preach of evil fates
teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
to stand naked.

Bob Dylan
"It's Alright Ma"
Bringing it All Back Home album

John and Yoko Lennon were protesting the Vietnam war. The State Department wrote documents describing them as "highly political and unfavorable to the administration." It was recommended their citizenship be denied, and they be put under surveillance.
   

Mick Jagger, before he was offered Hollywood's choicest women and heavy drugs, was concerned about the youth protests in Paris, 1968, and the anti-war demonstrations at the London Embassy.

"War stems from power-mad politicians and patriots. Some new master plan would end all these mindless men from seats of power and replace them with real people, people of compassion."

Mick Jagger

July, 1968, the FBI's counterintelligence operations attacked law abiding American individual's and groups.
    

The stated purpose of these assaults was to disrupt large gatherings, expose and discredit the enemy, and neutralize their selected targets.
    

Neutralization included killing the leaders,if necessary. Preferably, turn two opposing segments of society against each other to do the dirty work for them.
   

Remember that among these dangers to the security of the United States were persons with "different lifestyles" and also "apostles of non-violence and racial harmony."
    

CIA Director Richard Helms warned National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Feb. 18, 1969, that their study on "Restless youth" was "extremely sensitive" and "would prove most embarrassing for all concerned if word got out the CIA was involved in domestic matters."
    

The FBI sent out a list of suggestions on how to achieve their goals. They can all be applied to what happened to musicians, youngsters at folk rock festivals, and hippies along the highway.

Gather information on their immorality. Show them as scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their habits and living conditions. Explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and sex, break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges. Investigate personal conflicts or animosities between them. Send articles to the newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt. Get records of their bank accounts. Obtain specimens of handwriting. Provoke target groups into rivalries that may result in death.

"Intelligence Activities and Rights of Americans"
Book II, April 26, 1976
Senate Committee Study with Respect to Intelligence

Huge CIA Operation Reported in US Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years

NYTimes |  Mr. Colby refused comment on the domestic spying issue. But one clue to the depth of his feelings emerged during an off‐the‐record talk he gave Monday night at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

The C.I.A. chief, who had been informed the previous week of the inquiry by The Times, said at the meeting that be had ordered a complete investigation of the agency's domestic activities and had found some improprieties.

But he is known to have added, “I think family skeletons are best left where they are—in the closet.”

He then said that the “good thing about all of this was the red flag” was raised by a group of junior employes inside the agency.

It was because of the prodding from below, some sources have reported, that Mr. Colby decided last year to inform the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Oversight Committees of the domestic activities.

Mr. Schlesinger, who became Secretary of Defense after serving less than six months at the C.I.A., similarly refused to discuss the domestic spying activities.

Anguish Reported

But he was'described by an associate as extremely concerned and disturbed by what he discovered at the C.I.A. upon replacing Mr. Helms.

“He found himself in a cesspool,” the associate said. “He was having a grenade blowing up in his face every time he turned around.”

Mr. Schlesinger was at the C.I.A. when the first word of the agency's involvement in the September, 1971, burglary of the office of Dr. Daniel Ellsberg's former psychiatrist by the White House security force known as the “plumbers” became known.

It was Mr. Schlesinger who also discovered and turned over to the Justice Department a series of letters written to a Mr. Helms by James W. McCord Jr., one of the original Watergate defendants and a former C.I.A. security official. The letters, which told of White House involvement in the Watergate burglary, had been deposited in an agency office.

The associate said one result of Mr. Schlesinger's inquiries into Watergate and the domestic of the C.I.A. operations was his executive edict ordering a halt to all questionable counterintelligence operations inside the United States.

During his short stay at the C.I.A., Mr. Schlesinger also initiated a 10 per cent employe cutback. Because of his actions, the associate said, security officials at the agency decided to increase the number of his personal bodyguards. It could not be learned whether that action was taken after a threat.

Many past and present C.I.A. men acknowledged that Mr. Schlesinger's reforms were harder to bear because he was an outsider.

Mr. Colby, these men said, while continuing the same basic programs initiated by his predecessor, was viewed by some as “the saving force” at the agency because as a former high‐ranking official himself in the C.I.A.'s clandestine services, he had the respect and power. to ensure that the alleged illegal domestic programs would cease.

Some sources also reported that there was widespread paper shredding at the agency shortly after Mr. Schlesinger began to crack down on the C.I.A.'s operations.

Asked about that, however, Government officials said that they could “guarantee” that the domestic intelligence files were still intact.

“There's certainly been no order to destroy them,” one official said:

When confronted with the Times's Information about the C.I.A.'s domestic operations earlier this week, high‐ranking American intelligence officials confirmed its basic accuracy, but cautioned against drawing “unwarranted conclusions.”

Espionage Feared

Those officials, who insisted on not being quoted by name, contended that all of the C.I.A.'s domestic activities against American citizens were initiated in the belief that foreign governments and foreign espionage may have been involved.

“Anything that we did was In the context of foreign counterintelligence and it was focused at foreign intelligence and foreign intelligence problems,” one official said.

The official also said that the requirement to maintain files on American citizens emanated, in part, from the so‐called Huston plan. That plan, named for its author, Tom Charles Huston, a Presidential aide, was a White House project in 1970 calling for the use of such, illegal activities as burglaries and wiretapping to combat antiwait activities, and student turmoil that the White House believed was being “fomented” —as the Huston plan stated—by black extremists.

Operation CHAOS - CIA Started 60's Riots

wikipedia |  Operation CHAOS or Operation MHCHAOS was the code name for an American domestic espionage project conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency from 1967 to 1974, established by President Johnson and expanded under President Nixon, whose mission was to uncover possible foreign influence on domestic race, anti-war and other protest movements. The operation was launched under Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Helms, by chief of counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, and headed by Richard Ober. ^[1][2] The "MH" designation is to signify the program had a worldwide area of operations.^[3]

The CIA began domestic recruiting operations in 1959 in the process of finding Cuban exiles they could use in the campaign against communist Cuba and Fidel Castro. As these operations expanded, the CIA formed a Domestic Operations Division in 1964. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson requested that the CIA begin its own investigation into domestic dissent—independent of the FBI's ongoing COINTELPRO.^[4]

The CIA developed numerous operations targeting domestic dissent, many operating under the CIA's Office of Security. These included:^[2]

• HTLINGUAL – Directed at letters passing between the United States and the then Soviet Union, the program involved the examination of correspondence to and from individuals or organizations placed on a watchlist.
• Project 2 – Directed at infiltration of foreign intelligence targets by agents posing as dissident sympathizers and which, like CHAOS, had placed agents within domestic radical organizations for the purposes of training and establishment of dissident credentials.
• Project MERRIMAC – Designed to infiltrate domestic antiwar and radical organizations thought to pose a threat to security of CIA property and personnel.
• Project RESISTANCE – Worked with college administrators, campus security and local police to identify anti-war activists and political dissidents without any infiltration taking place
• Domestic Contact Service – Focused on collecting foreign intelligence from willing Americans.

When President Nixon came to office in 1969, existing domestic surveillance activities were consolidated into Operation CHAOS.^[5] Operation CHAOS first used CIA stations abroad to report on antiwar activities of United States citizens traveling abroad, employing methods such as physical surveillance and electronic eavesdropping, utilizing "liaison services" in maintaining such surveillance. The operations were later expanded to include 60 officers.^[3] In 1969, following the expansion, the operation began developing its own network of informants for the purposes of infiltrating various foreign antiwar groups located in foreign countries that might have ties to domestic groups.^[2] Eventually, CIA officers expanded the program to include other leftist or counter-cultural groups with no discernible connection to Vietnam, such as groups operating within the women's liberation movement.^[1] The domestic spying of Operation CHAOS also targeted the Israeli embassy, and domestic Jewish groups such as the B'nai B'rith. In order to gather intelligence on the embassy and B'nai B'rith, the CIA purchased a garbage collection company to collect documents that were to be destroyed.^[6]

Targets of Operation CHAOS within the antiwar movement included:^[5]

• Students for a Democratic Society
• Black Panther Party
• Young Lords
• Women Strike for Peace
• Ramparts Magazine^[7]

Officially, reports were to be compiled on "illegal and subversive" contacts between United States civilian protesters and "foreign elements" which "might range from casual contacts based merely on mutual interest to closely controlled channels for party directives." At its finality, Operation CHAOS contained files on 7,200 Americans, and a computer index totaling 300,000 civilians and approximately 1,000 groups.^[8] The initial result of investigations lead DCI Richard Helms to advise then President Johnson on November 15, 1967, that the agency had uncovered "no evidence of any contact between the most prominent peace movement leaders and foreign embassies in the U.S. or abroad." Helms repeated this assessment in 1969.^[1] In total 6 reports were compiled for the White House and 34 for cabinet level officials.^[2]