business as usual in the war on drugs

So last August, I posted the then breaking news about a SWAT drug-raid gone terribly, terribly wrong. (frankly the idea of mustering para-military levels of deadly force pursuant to drug interdiction is inherently wrong, stupid, and doomed to unintended consequences)

Yesterday's Washington Post Magazine dedicated its cover story and a small novel's worth of print space to recounting this quintessentially American tragedy of errors that led to the fatal shooting of Payton and Chase and the reckless endangerment of the lives of their owners along with catastrophic disruption of their lives. The seven or more pages of this story details the moment by moment events leading up to the raid, abuses during, the raid, and to an extent, the aftermath of this raid on the mayor of Berwyn Heights, his spouse and mother-in-law who were innocent victims caught up in an unnecessary and wholly contrived skirmish in the so-called War on Drugs. The money shot comes at the conclusion of the story;

They were also determined to hold the police accountable. Through a lawyer, Cheye, Trinity and Georgia have filed a notice of intent to sue the Prince George's County Police Department and the Sheriff's Office.

Cheye likes to sit near the chest on winter nights, Marshall at his feet, as he reads. Often, he sits up late researching Supreme Court rulings on police searches and seizures.

He's read the court's decision in one 2006 case, Hudson v. Michigan, more than once. In Hudson, the court found that even when police make a clearly illegal no-knock raid, the evidence they seize can still be used against a defendant at trial.

"In other words, police can do what they did to us with impunity" Cheye concluded. "There are no consequences, not for them."

When a SWAT team raided the Prince George's County home of Cheye Calvo and Trinity Tomsic on a mistaken drug trafficking suspicion, the couple's two dogs weren't the only ones whose lives were shattered.

Cheye Calvo, mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland and Washington Post Magazine staff writer April Witt will be online Monday, February 2 at 12 noon ET to discuss Witt's cover story, "Deadly Force."

DELIBERATE LIE #3. People are “rational utility maximizers”

Warsocialism | Although even economists admit this is a lie, [7] it is still boilerplate economic theory. Economists MUST lie about this because if people are being manipulated by marketing, then the so-called “free market” obviously requires government intervention.

In a Liberal Democracy, tax payers are ultimately responsible for an individual if that individual becomes destitute or a criminal. Economists use the “rational utility maximizer” lie to prevent government intervention in markets when intervention would serve the common good. For example, a rational government would intervene in markets to prevent con artists from peddling their worthless shit to an unsuspecting public. (We have all seen those suckers dumping their last dollar in a slot machine.)

Economists argue that government can not possibly know what an individual “needs”. If people are manipulated by advertisers, flashing lights, and sex symbols, then government has a good reason to intervene in the market for an individual’s welfare because these causalities are dumped on government to care for after the con artists have cleaned them out. For example, a federal law could be passed that would limit legalized gambling to high net worth individuals (it’s now done with options and futures trading).

By having university-trained liars (economists) convince the victims that they alone are responsible for their own actions (instead of a team of best-professionals-money-can-buy who were hired to exploit the public), the rich evade responsibility for their actions. Thus, “the market” repeats the basic motif of American politics and illustrates what makes it so clever: the rich manipulate unsuspecting citizens for fun and profit, deplete common resources, externalize social costs onto the tax payer, and blame the victims themselves or the elected screw-ups and their cronies for social problems. It’s brilliant!!!

DELIBERATE LIE #2. “Wants” are identical to “needs”

Warsocialism | This is the second-most-important lie in economic theory. This lie sets one up to swallow the rest of the lies. Right wingers (it is boilerplate economic theory) deliberately lie about this because they want you to believe that Donald Trump “needs” another million dollar painting on the wall of one of his mansions just as badly as a welfare mother “needs” health care for her children. This amounts to a license for the rich to hog limited resources (on a spherical planet, all resources are “limited”) and serves as the Vaseline for the rest of the lies.

DELIBERATE LIE #1. The market is “efficient”

Warsocialism | This is the founding lie (actually an “idiosyncratic redefinition” of terms) which is designed to prevent engineers and scientists from investigating our money-based political system objectively. Economists know that people who do not have economic training are going to assume that “efficient” is used in the same way that engineers use the word: acting or producing effectively with a minimum of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort.

But for economists, “efficient” is always about “money" and means either “efficient distribution” of profits or “efficient production” ("cheapest production" as measured by money) of products – not the “efficient use of materials.” Since the market economizes “money” (that which is in limitless supply [4] ), the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The reason economists use idiosyncratic redefinitions instead of coining new terms (like every other discipline) is to make them better liars!

Idiosyncratic redefinition allows economists to stand in front of your local Rotary Club and appear to HONESTLY use words that mean one thing to them, while Club members think they mean something completely different. This is how economists evade our innate ability to spot liars.

Far from being “efficient”, the so-called “market system” is probably the MOST INEFFICIENT social organization possible! The overhead (commuting to work, banks, insurance companies, advertising agencies, etc.) associated with our present way of organizing consumes the largest fraction BY FAR of our natural resources – something like 2 billion tonnes of oil equivalent per year! [5]

khyber rifles

it’s theirs and they’re not apologizing

NYTimes | Getting between a broker and his bonus is like getting between a schnauzer and his lunch bowl. He may not bite you, but you are going to smell his breath.

“People come here because they want to work hard and get paid a lot for working hard,” one investment banker said Friday as he wended his way, lunch bag in hand, through the World Financial Center. “I think there’s a disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street.”

That certainly was the case this week when Main Street learned that, despite the craters of a down economy, Wall Street bonuses were more than $18 billion last year — roughly what they were in the fatty, solvent days of 2004. The media hollered, the president scolded, and ordinary people checked their wallets. But downtown, in the caverns of finance, the moneymakers shrugged and took it on the chin.

It is a complicated thing, they said, to apportion compensation in a bear market. First of all, profits do not stop; they often ebb. Second of all, losses move unequally, so the law of the jungle should still apply: you eat what you can kill.

simply pathetic.....,

intertribal tensions test eu rules...,

Washington Post | Workers carrying placards that said "British jobs for British workers" staged demonstrations at more than a dozen refineries and power stations in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The workers are protesting a decision by Total, the French oil company, to award a $280 million contract to an Italian firm, IREM, for work at a plant in Lincolnshire, England. The project will involve about 400 foreign workers.

Nearly 2 million Britons are jobless, the highest unemployment level since 1997. As job losses mount, officials are reporting increasing antagonism toward foreign workers.

European Union rules require a free flow of labor among member nations. And officials have cautioned that such an important pillar of European unity should not be undermined by an economic downturn.

Hundreds of thousands of Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians and other newer members of the European Union flocked to Britain in recent years as the country's economy boomed. But as recession hit, and the buying power of Britain's pound has fallen sharply, increasing numbers of immigrants are returning home. Those who remain are competing with local workers for a far smaller pool of jobs.

serotonin hegemony?

Big Don shares science news;

LATimes | The normally solitary insects cluster when the brain chemical serotonin is high. The finding may be a step toward preventing crop damage, an expert says.

Desert locusts are normally solitary individuals who eke out a meager subsistence while avoiding others of their species. But when food sources become abundant, such as after a rain, they transform into ravening packs of billions of insects that can strip a landscape bare.

The key to the transformation, researchers said Friday, is the brain chemical serotonin, the chemical that in humans modulates anger, aggression, mood, appetite, sexuality and a host of other behaviors.

The locusts swarm when contact with one another triples their serotonin levels, British and Australian researchers reported in the journal Science.

I woke up this morning to find a message in my inbox from BD titled "serotonin hegemony". While the political implications of the animal model in question give pause - evoking as they do a serotonin re-uptake inhibited rave, the summer of love, godless communism, and biblical plagues - I have to give him props for the ergodic sweep of his gesture.

mexico city rationing water

LATimes | Already-scarce water gets even scarcer this weekend for millions of Mexicans.

One of the world's largest cities is launching a rationing plan in a drastic -- and some say overdue -- effort to conserve water after rampant development, mismanagement and reduced rainfall caused supplies to drop to dangerously low levels.

Starting Saturday, water will be cut or reduced to homes in at least 10 boroughs in Mexico City plus 11 other municipalities in the state of Mexico, which surrounds the capital. The action affects an estimated 5.5 million people and includes neighborhoods ranging from affluent Lomas de Chapultepec on the western edge of the city to poor, densely populated Iztapalapa in the southeast.

Full service is expected to be returned sometime Tuesday. Similar cuts will be carried out every month until the rainy season begins, usually around May.

"We are running out of water," Jorge Efren Villalon, a senior official with the National Water Commission, told Mexican radio Thursday.

The level at the main reservoir from which this urban area of nearly 20 million people gets its water for drinking and washing has dipped below 60% of capacity, Villalon said, the lowest in 16 years.

Water management is one of the most daunting chronic problems, like trash disposal and traffic flow, plaguing sprawling cities across the world. Experts say Mexico has failed to take actions needed to upgrade aqueducts, pipes and treatment plants and has allowed construction projects in areas that should be used for catching runoff and replenishing aquifers.

california's historic drought

Reuters | A new survey of California winter snows on Thursday showed the most populous state is facing one of the worst droughts in its history, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said.

The state, which produces about half the United States' vegetables and fruit, is in its third year of drought and its main system supplying water to cities and farms may only be able to fulfill 15 percent of requests, scientists said.

The snowpack on California's mountains is carrying only 61 percent of the water of normal years, according to the survey by the state Department of Water Resources. Last year the snowpack held 111 percent of the normal amount of water, but spring was the driest ever recorded.

"California is headed toward one of the worst water crises in its history, underscoring the need to upgrade our water infrastructure by increasing water storage, improving conveyance, protecting the (Sacramento) Delta's ecosystem and promoting greater water conservation," Schwarzenegger said in a statement.

"We may be at the start of the worst California drought in modern history," added Water Resources Director Lester Snow in a separate statement.

oh lawd.....,

The Republican National Committee has elected former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele the first black Republican National Committee chairman. Steele was the most moderate candidate in the field and was considered an outsider because he's not an RNC member. He beat back four challengers, including incumbent Mike Duncan, who was forced to withdraw from the field midway through the balloting in the face of a lack of support.

Comes now the new fangled face of the GOP's anti-Black propaganda.

ay, yai,yai,yai,yai,yai.....,

tightening-up on pakistan

Washington Post | Inside a chandeliered ballroom Thursday, Indian diplomats and business leaders and American officials held forth about a new "Cooperation Triangle" for the United States, China and India. But little mention was made at the Asia Foundation's conference on Indo-U.S. relations of the Indian government's recent diplomatic slam-dunk.

India managed to prune the portfolio of the Obama administration's top envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard C. Holbrooke -- basically eliminating the contested region of Kashmir from his job description. The deletion is seen as a significant diplomatic concession to India that reflects increasingly warm ties between the country and the United States, according to South Asia analysts.

Pakistan and Afghanistan have yet to comment on the Kashmir decision. But other South Asia experts say that taking Kashmir out of Holbrooke's hands may upset Pakistan and that there may be back-channel negotiations anyway.

u.s. blamed for global financial crisis

Times Online | The premiers of China and Russia accused America of sparking the economic crisis as the Davos political and business summit made a gloomy start.

Wen Jiabao and Vladimir Putin both blamed "capitalist excesses" for the global downturn, as one followed the other to the podium at the opening of the World Economic Forum last night.

The Chinese premier began with a speech asserting that the worst recession since the Great Depression had been caused by blind pursuit of profit.

In a thinly veiled attack on America, Mr Wen blamed “inappropriate macroeconomic policies of some economies” and “prolonged low savings and high consumption”.

He blasted the “excessive expansion of financial institutions in blind pursuit of profit and the lack of self-discipline among financial institutions and ratings agencies”, while the “failure” of regulators had allowed the spread of toxic derivatives.

The Chinese leader called for faster reform of international financial institutions and for a “new world order” for the economy.

putin q&a after davos keynote address

Dallas News | After Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin gave a speech this week at the Davos summit on a variety of topics, Michael Dell (who knows something about building computers) asked in an open forum how the IT industry could help expand information technology in Russia.

Apparently that was the equivalent of insulting Putin's mother, as Fortune reports:

Russia has been allergic to offers of aid from the West ever since hundreds of overpaid consultants arrived in Moscow after the collapse of Communism, in 1991, and proceeded to hand out an array of advice that proved, at times, useless or dangerous.

Putin's withering reply to Dell: "We don't need help. We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity." The slapdown took many of the people in the audience by surprise. Putin then went on to outline some of the steps the Russian government has taken to wire up the country, including remote villages in Siberia. And, in a final dig at Dell, he talked about how Russian scientists were rightly respected not for their hardware, but for their software. The implication: Any old fool can build a PC outfit.

Here's a video of the exchange (it happens right at the beginning). It's hard to tell from the video how much of the insult was intended and how much was just lost in translation, but Putin clearly isn't inviting Dell to open a factory in Volgograd.

putin's speech at davos

Russian Federation | The current situation is often compared to the Great Depression of the late 1920s and the early 1930s, and it is true that there are some similarities.

However, there are also some basic differences. The crisis has affected everyone in this era of globalisation. Regardless of their political or economic system, all nations have found themselves in the same boat.

There is a certain concept, called the perfect storm, which denotes a situation when Nature's forces converge in one point of the ocean and increase their destructive potential many times over. It appears that the present-day crisis resembles such a perfect storm.

Responsible and knowledgeable economists and politicians must prepare for it. Nevertheless, it always flares up unexpectedly-just like the Russian winter. We always make painstaking preparations for the cold season, yet it always arrives in an unexpected flash. The current situation is no exception, either. Although the crisis was simply hanging in the air, the majority did not want to notice the rising wave.

In the last few months, virtually every speech on this subject started with criticism of the United States. This time, however, I will do nothing of the kind.

I just want to remind you that, just a year ago, American delegates speaking from this rostrum emphasised the U.S. economy's fundamental stability and its cloudless prospects. Today, investment banks, the pride of Wall Street, have virtually ceased to exist. In just 12 months, they have posted losses exceeding the profits they made in the last 25 years-an unprecedented scope! This example alone reflects the real situation better than any criticism.

The time for enlightenment has come. We must calmly, and without gloating, without going into excessive details, assess the root causes of this situation and try to peek into the future.

In our opinion, the crisis was brought about by a combination of several factors.

the old ones return....,

Telegraph | The Turritopsis Nutricula is able to revert back to a juvenile form once it mates after becoming sexually mature.

Marine biologists say the jellyfish numbers are rocketing because they need not die.

Dr Maria Miglietta of the Smithsonian Tropical Marine Institute said: "We are looking at a worldwide silent invasion."

While the talking apes pursue their self-destructive antics worldwide, the immortal spawn of the elder gods is awakening from its ancient slumber.

The nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh ... was built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults . . . until the end.
—H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

frozen in indifference....,

Detroit News | Inside the abandoned Roosevelt Warehouse in Detroit, a body lies frozen in a block of ice. "Yeah, he's been down there since last month at least."

He was asked if he called the police.

"No, I thought it was a dummy myself," he said unconvincingly. Besides, Williams said, there were more pressing issues like keeping warm and finding something to eat.

"You got a couple bucks?" he asked.

Waiting for a response
There are at least 19,000 homeless people in Detroit, by some estimates. Put another way, more than 1 in 50 people here are homeless.

The human problem is so bad, and the beds so few, that some shelters in the city provide only a chair. The chair is yours as long as you sit in it. Once you leave, the chair is reassigned.

Thousands of down-on-their-luck adults do nothing more with their day than clutch onto a chair. This passes for normal in some quarters of the city.

"I hate that musical chair game," Ruben said. He said he'd rather live next to a corpse.

Zimbabwe abandons its currency

BBC News | The country is in the grip of world-record hyperinflation which has left the Zimbabwean dollar virtually worthless - 231m% in July 2008, the most recent figure released. Teachers, doctors and civil servants have gone on strike complaining that their salaries - which equal trillions of Zimbabwean dollars - are not even enough to catch the bus to work each day.

Worthless
A 40-year-old Zimbabwean primary school teacher from the capital Harare, told the BBC news website earlier this week it cost nearly US$2 a day to travel to work, but inflation had reduced the average teacher's wage to the equivalent of US$1 a month.

He said he now made a living reselling maize to families in high density areas, as it made more money than teaching. Before the announcement, shops in Zimbabwe were increasingly demanding payment in US dollars - a reality acknowledged by Mr Chinamasa.

"In the hyper-inflationary environment characterising the economy, our people are now using multiple currencies alongside the Zimbabwean dollar. These include the [South African] rand, US dollar, Botswana pula, euro and British pound among others."

Correspondents say that although the local currency will still be printed, all prices will be set in US dollars, making the Zimbabwe dollar irrelevant.

consequences of regional scale nuclear conflict

Abstract. We assess the potential damage and smoke production associated with the detonation of small nuclear weapons in modern megacities. While the number of nuclear warheads in the world has fallen by about a factor of three since its peak in 1986, the number of nuclear weapons states is increasing and the potential exists for numerous regional nuclear arms races. Eight countries are known to have nuclear weapons, 2 are constructing them, and an additional 32 nations already have the fissile material needed to build substantial arsenals of low-yield (Hiroshima-sized) explosives.

Population and economic activity worldwide are congregated to an increasing extent in megacities, which might be targeted in a nuclear conflict. We find that low yield weapons, which new nuclear powers are likely to construct, can produce 100 times as many fatalities and 100 times as much smoke from fires per kt yield as previously estimated in analyses for full scale nuclear wars using high-yield weapons, if the small weapons are targeted at city centers. A single “small” nuclear detonation in an urban center could lead to more fatalities, in some cases by orders of magnitude, than have occurred in the major historical conflicts of many countries.

We analyze the likely outcome of a regional nuclear exchange involving 100 15-kt explosions (less than 0.1% of the explosive yield of the current global nuclear arsenal). We find that such an exchange could produce direct fatalities comparable to all of those worldwide in World War II, or to those once estimated for a “counterforce” nuclear war between the superpowers.