did covington lie on a $35.4 million grant application?

democracy-tree |  Michigan’s Superintendent of Public Education Michael Flanagan announced today that he plans to move more schools into the Education Achievement Authority starting in January. Approximately ten academically struggling schools are to join the current 15 that were vacuumed-up last year from Detroit Public Schools. The announcement comes amidst growing criticism over the state-run district’s efficacy and fiscal health.

Senate Democrats took issue with the EAA last week pointing to its inability to prove their worth. Sen. Bert Johnson (D-2) put it this way:

“The shortcomings of the EAA are well documented. From flawed accounting practices to a lack of results in the classroom, the EAA has made many promises of getting better, but has failed to deliver.”

Pressure from educators across the state and faculty members at Eastern Michigan University spurred the resignation of EAA board member Jann Joseph last week. Joseph is the dean of the college of education at EMU. Faculty cited concerns about the affiliation with the EAA:

“These negative impacts on our reputation, our local relationships, our students and programs, the clear effect on enrollments and thus revenue to the university are a repudiation of EMU’s legacy as a champion of public education and a leader in the preparation of educational professionals. We implore you to remedy this situation as quickly as possible by unanimously voting to withdraw from the contract creating the EAA.”

The EAA has yet to demonstrate its value, and has a history of shady revenue deals. Last year they borrowed $12 million from DPS in a hush-hush contract, and through a freedom of information request it was discovered that EAA Chancellor, John Covington, lied on an application for a $35.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

hood disease...,

cbslocal |  In the inner city, a health problem is making it harder for young people to learn. The Centers for Disease Control said 30 percent of inner city kids suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The CDC said these children often live in virtual war zones. Doctors at Harvard said they actually suffer from a more complex form of PTSD that some call “hood disease.”

Unlike soldiers, children in the inner city never leave the combat zone. They often experience trauma, repeatedly.

“You could take anyone who is experiencing the symptoms of PTSD, and the things we are currently emphasizing in school will fall off their radar. Because frankly it does not matter in our biology if we don’t survive the walk home,” said Jeff Duncan-Andrade, Ph.D. of San Francisco State University.

In Oakland, about two thirds of the murders last year were actually clustered in East Oakland, 59 people killed.

Teachers and administrators who graduated from Fremont High School in East Oakland and have gone back to work there spoke with KPIX 5.

“These cards that (students) are suddenly wearing around their neck that say ‘Rest in peace.’ You have some kids that are walking around with six of them. Laminated cards that are tributes to their slain friends,” said teacher Jasmene Miranda.

Jaliza Collins, also a teacher at Fremont, said, “It’s depression, it’s stress, it’s withdrawal, it’s denial. It’s so many things that is encompassed and embodied in them. And when somebody pushes that one button where it can be like, ‘please go have a seat,’ and that can be the one thing that just sets them off.”

In 2013, there were 47 recorded lockdowns in Oakland public schools – again, almost all in East and West Oakland.

Students at Fremont High showed where one classmate was shot.

“If someone got shot that they knew or that they cared about…they’re going to be numb,” one student said. “If someone else in their family got shot and killed they will be sad, they will be isolated because I have been through that.”

Gun violence is only one of the traumas or stressors in concentrated areas of deep poverty.

“Its kids are unsafe, they’re not well fed,” Duncan-Andrade said. “And when you start stacking those kids of stressors on top of each other, that’s when you get these kinds of negative health outcomes that seriously disrupt school performance.”

maybe it's fava beans and chianti that puts rolls on your neck....,

wsws | The revelations regarding Covington, far from being an aberration, provide an insight into the outlook of those, like Covington, who seek to exploit the miserable condition of the public education system to further their own mercenary aspirations. The actual purpose of the EAA is to privatize primary and secondary education. Covington was initially offered $225,000 to take the job of EAA Chancellor, with a $175,000 signing bonus to boot, but even this lavish salary was increased to $425,000 in short order. He was appointed to this position despite the fact that the Kansas City school district, his former employer, saw half of its schools shut down and its test scores drop precipitously under his watch.

While some Democrats are using the scandal to make political hay, the EAA is itself an outcrop of legislation initiated under Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm. In 2009, Granholm, with the assistance of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), created the State School Reform/Redesign District (SSRRD) to represent the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools in Detroit. In the same year, Granholm named Robert Bobb the first statewide emergency manager to run the Detroit public schools. Under Bobb, over 100 Detroit Public Schools (DPS) have been closed—further facilitating the process of school charterization.

In 2011, under Snyder, the contract to oversee the schools in the SSRRD was awarded to the EAA. Then, in 2012, the EAA was named the only Michigan finalist in Obama’s Race to the Top competition.

Additionally, the Obama administration has thrown its full backing behind the privatization of public schools and the attacks on teachers. Last May, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went on a public campaign with Governor Snyder to promote “education reform,” specifically choosing to “shine the spotlight of success” on the EAA. Duncan referred to Detroit as “ground zero” for Obama’s education agenda, stating that in a few years Detroit could surpass New Orleans, which currently leads the nation in percentage of children—79 percent—in charter schools. Detroit is currently second in the nation, with 51 percent of children attending charter schools.

The unions, operating as an appendage of the Democratic party, have not raised a finger to oppose the privatization of public schools or the attacks on teachers. The primary concern of the union bureaucracy is to secure a place for itself in order to maintain its privileges. In line with this, the unions have participated in the process of privatization. During Granholm’s term the AFT proudly noted its role in creating the “failing district”—the SSRRD—saying the union had worked “fast and furiously” to enact legislation “allowing more high performing charter schools.”

monsters get fat cannibalizing tender young black children - and afrodemia is silent...,

Monster leans in to bite hapless children

michigancitizen |  A “waste and abuse of power,” is what Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lon Johnson called spending done by officials at the Educational Achievement Authority

Following a May 12, Detroit News report on Gov. Snyder’s state-created experimental district exposing excess spending by the cash-strapped district, Johnson said, “Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on things like personal chauffeurs and new IKEA furniture, while kids go to schools without heat or air conditioning, shows Republican Gov. Rick Snyder’s risky school takeover district is continuing to fail our kids.”

The report revealed the EAA staff spent nearly $240,000 on travel, gas for Chancellor John Covington’s personal chauffeur and IKEA furniture, since 2010.

“This waste and abuse of power is exactly why the EAA is opposed by members of the state Board of Education, current and former teachers in the district, and professional educators all over our state and country,” Johnson said in a recently released statement. “Michigan schools need more leaders in Lansing who will once again invest in our public schools, not force a school takeover meant to enrich Gov. Snyder’s friends and allies.”

Among the findings: $178,000 was spent on hotel and airfare traveling to 36 cities from April 2012 to February, while another $10,000 was spent on gas for Covington’s chauffeured car, $25,000 for IKEA furniture for Covington’s office and $8,000 combined at Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Meijer, Home Depot and Lowe’s, according to the report.

The EAA came under criticism last week when a video went viral showing a teacher using a broom to beat back one student fighting with another at Pershing High. The EAA promptly fired the teacher, although, as reported here exclusively, (“EAA teacher is collateral damage.”)   the student initiating the fight had been improperly readmitted to school by the principal, who came from Seattle after being dismissed there. The teacher has since been reinstated.

Detroit parents and community have battled against the EAA since it was created with 15 DPS buildings and contents by former Emergency Manager Roy Roberts.

EAA enrollment fell this year as parents took children out of the failing district. In February, it was revealed through MEAP scores students in the EAA were performing at lower levels than when they entered the district.

When EAA Chancellor John Covington was superintendent of Kansas City Schools, the district lost its accreditation.

why do scientifically repudiated classifications continue to have force in the media, politics, and even science?

The garbage man pseudo-science propagandist Nicholas Wade was subsidized, promoted, and given a huge platform for 30 years as the "science" editor at the NYTimes. This is so strange when we consider just how awful and anti-scientific his core beliefs really are. A book length exposition of this nonsense should get him laughed off the mainstream stage. 

shara dev has done a wonderful job of succinctly dismantling race - yet his take down doesn't receive consideration beyond an infinitesimal scale...,

why does the establishment continue to promote pseudo-scientific classifications?

aaanet |  Dr. Agustín Fuentes takes establishment garbageman Nicholas Wade apart. Wade asserts that humans are divided into 5 genetically identified continentally divided races and that there are significant differences in the genetically-based social behavior of these races. Wade gets both the data and his interpretations very wrong. 

If you're making a scientific argument about genetic variation, you have to focus on population and be very clear about your definitions. Wade uses the invented and reified classifications that are the antithesis of clarity and precision.

What does human genetic variation actually look like. Humans share 100% of all their genes, and about 99.9% of variations. The .1% of all variation we're interested in is not in the genes themselves, and is not shaped by natural selection as Wade asserts. 

What we know about human variation does not support dividing populations into the races that Wade is working to substantiate.  Fist tap Bro. Makheru.

internet bully stopped and frisked in tahnussy's comment section

So, feeling "in the know" about this particular subject, I opted to stick my toe into the supremely shallow and very heavily policed waters over at what passes for black public intellectual output over at the atlantic. It didn't take long for me to piss off the extremely partisan toddlers and get put in check. My question, did I "argue" in bad faith - as I was accused of doing by the hyperactive moderator Sandy - who also happens to profess to be a "master teacher" in various and sundry of the humanities and whose primary instrumentality is chalk?

In my estimation, the severe and excessive levels of thought policing that take place in the cathedral's "safe places" has nothing whatsoever to do with trolling, but are instead hallmarks of the profound discursive and political weakness of feminized progressive politics. Emotions prevail in these contexts, and if your position is unpopular - no matter how it's presented - you will be ostracized because they are incapable of a fact-based or reasoned counter-argument.  You're either with us, or you're against us - is.all.they've.got.  This is why I believe nobody will step up and overcome the malicious narrative mischief being worked by Nicholas Wade and amplified by the Establishment.

trickydonut KlugerRD • 2 days ago

I actually don't think tenure is the biggest issue, I think supervision is. In most schools, the principal or other administrator might only stop by a classroom 4 or 5 times a year, with maybe only two of those being actual evaluations. What rarely happens: observation, identification of issues teachers need help with (#1: classroom management), and then sustained support until the issue is resolved. Yes, there are bad teachers out there, but usually problems just fester because no one knows about them or takes the time to fix them.

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  AptiDude trickydonut • 2 days ago

  
  

  Yes, and how many inner-city high administrators actually could advise a French teacher, music teacher, art teacher, special education teacher or an AP physics teacher effectively about how best to instruct their students? All they can do is make sure the teacher is in the room and the students are mostly paying attention and order is being maintained.

  
  
  
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  CNu trickydonut • 2 days ago

  
  

  Bingo!!! Education is not rocket science. Take attendance, perform instruction, issue grades. Supervise for consistency and quality in all of the above. Simple.
  Parental priorities in high-performing public school districts:
  1. Safety
  2. Children have fun in school
  3. Children served good food that they enjoy.
  4. Academics
  5. College/Vocational preparation
  In that order
  If you take care of the first three, four and five have a marvelous way of taking care of themselves. The first three are of course bellweathers of a competently managed school environment.
  The invisible 800lb gorilla that no one EVER explicitly articulates - is that the past three generations of urban public school graduates / attendees - a majority have had such an atrocious experience in school, such an abject failure and deviation from priorities one through three - that they not only have zero warm and fuzzy feelings about the enterprise, they actually have a deeply imprinted and visceral aversion to contact with the school of any kind.
  These are generations whose compulsory attendance at schools stripped of cultural enrichment and starved for resources at the business-end of education delivery - was miserable. Their experience was rendered miserable because bloated, overpaid, incompetent administrations were engaged in various and sundry modes of parasitic extraction and self-aggrandizement that had nothing whatsoever to do with the needs and wants of their core constituents.
  Until the 19th century education model is fully reformed (and it can't be due to deeply conflicting institutional interests) and urban public schools are remade predominantly safe, fun, and nourishing - then the problem of failed performance will persist.
  Off the top, somewhere between 50-70% of the existing teacher cadres have got to go. In addition, 10-12% of students who are irretrievably pre-jail and make life miserable for the other kids, teachers, and school leadership - they've also got to go. I believe they used to call it "reform" school.
  Finally, parents and grandparents have to be brought back into active communal engagement with the institution despite the ill-will they may bear toward it because of their own miserable experiences therein. Cultural enrichment activities are the path down which this bridge and community rebuilding can be achieved. Again, those programs require reallocation of resources away from the central office and out to the locations where education and community are delivered.
  The political will and audacity to effect these kinds of institutional changes is not present in sufficient quantity to make anything like this happen anywhere in the U.S.

  
  
  
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    Bruce S CNu • 2 days ago

    
    

    Yes, firing 50-70% of people who do the work is clearly the place to start if we want to improve education outcomes. Why didn't I think of that?

    
    
    

    
    
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      CNu Bruce S • 2 days ago

      
      

      Teachers get certified at the age of 21-22, and don't have to update that at regular intervals like most professionals. Consequently, we have 48 year old teachers who haven't updated their pedagogical methods since prior to the advent of the world wide web, facing kids with Googol in their pockets and the answer to nearly any question those kids want to pose. It's a grotesque understatement to call such an obsolete and out of touch skill set "doing the work". More like "occupying the position", "waiting on a pension" and "categorically failing to manage the classroom".
      There's a reason that kids don't want to listen to these out of date and irrelevant throwbacks.

      
      
      
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        monknomo CNu • 2 days ago

        
        

        It varies by state, but even in backwater Alaska teachers have to take a couple credits of continuing education courses every year to maintain their credentials. The courses general cover new pedagogical methods and is not dissimilar from what lawyers and other professionals with a certificate do.

        
        
        

        
        
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          CNu monknomo • 2 days ago

          
          

          They seem to have missed that in Missouri http://dese.mo.gov/governmenta...

          
          
          
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            Sandy Young (Corkingiron) Mod CNu • 2 days ago

            
            

            None of what you've posted contradicts the comment you are responding to - nor does it support your generalization that teachers aren't motivated and often required to update their credentials.
            You are simply not arguing in good faith. Don't post again.

            
            
            
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        Bruce S CNu • 2 days ago

        
        

        I'm not at all sure you know what your are talking about. I doubt that anyone has taught a quarter of a century without "updating" their pedagogical methods - at least not in any major school district. Teachers have been forced to cope with and adapt to curriculum changes. And I don't believe that their resistance is always because they are incompetent, but might be because they have experience that outside consultants and "reformers" don't value.

        
        
        
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          CNu Bruce S • 2 days ago

          
          

          I've watched it first hand for five years now and have been absolutely shocked and appalled at the lack of professional development, the lack of self-motivated continuing education, and the profound lack of basic operational technology skills. Technology is now a primary content and curriculum delivery modality in the classroom, part and parcel of what you do to boost both individual and collaborative student engagement - but an overwhelming percentage of teachers are technology illiterate.
          Concrete examples; in the large urban district it's been my privilege to observe, we rolled out a new student information system. Fewer than 15% of teachers participated in mandatory training for the SIS - with the consequent failures of basic data entry in the non rocket science aspects of school business, i.e., entering attendance and issuing grades.
          So also for training in the use of the short-throw projector systems and blue-tooth pens and controls for using these systems to interactively display their lessons.
          Finally, the actual computer classes for children have suffered from a 9 year old pathetic excuse for a curriculum focused on "digital citizenship" rather than actual functional skills.
          On their own, the children tend to be exponentially more technology literate and technology aware than the adults purported to function as their instructors.

          
          
          
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            Bruce S CNu • 2 days ago

            
            

            I don't believe that your experience with issues like short throw projectors comes close to supporting the suggestion that 2/3 or so of teachers are incompetent and should be terminated. Sorry. You come off like a wack job full of extreme opinions based on a pocket full of anecdotes.

            
            
            
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              CNu Bruce S • 2 days ago

              
              

              lol, the writing on the wall has you petrified. That's a very good thing indeed!

lectures aren't just boring they're ineffective...,

sciencemag |  Are your lectures droning on? Change it up every 10 minutes with more active teaching techniques and more students will succeed, researchers say. A new study finds that undergraduate students in classes with traditional stand-and-deliver lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that use more stimulating, so-called active learning methods.

“Universities were founded in Western Europe in 1050 and lecturing has been the predominant form of teaching ever since,” says biologist Scott Freeman of the University of Washington, Seattle. But many scholars have challenged the “sage on a stage” approach to teaching science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses, arguing that engaging students with questions or group activities is more effective.

To weigh the evidence, Freeman and a group of colleagues analyzed 225 studies of undergraduate STEM teaching methods. The meta-analysis, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that teaching approaches that turned students into active participants rather than passive listeners reduced failure rates and boosted scores on exams by almost one-half a standard deviation. “The change in the failure rates is whopping,” Freeman says. And the exam improvement—about 6%—could, for example, “bump [a student’s] grades from a B– to a B.”

“This is a really important article—the impression I get is that it’s almost unethical to be lecturing if you have this data,” says Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard University who has campaigned against stale lecturing techniques for 27 years and was not involved in the work. “It’s good to see such a cohesive picture emerge from their meta-analysis—an abundance of proof that lecturing is outmoded, outdated, and inefficient.”

Although there is no single definition of active learning approaches, they include asking students to answer questions by using handheld clickers, calling on individuals or groups randomly, or having students clarify concepts to each other and reach a consensus on an issue.

Freeman says he’s started using such techniques even in large classes. “My introductory biology course has gotten up to 700 students,” he says. “For the ultimate class session—I don’t say lecture—I’m showing PowerPoint slides, but everything is a question and I use clickers and random calling. Somebody droning on for 15 minutes at a time and then doing cookbook labs isn’t interesting.” Freeman estimates that scaling up such active learning approaches could enable success for tens of thousands of students who might otherwise drop or fail STEM courses. Fist tap Dale.

genetic passports

vice | Are you scared of getting nuked? If you asked me that now, I'd say, “Not hugely.” But if you had asked me that when I was around ten, I would have been sobbing before you even finished the question. 

I don't know what kids are afraid of these days—if it's just kidnappers and internet pedophiles or they still think Al-Qaeda is going to blow up a middle school in Evansville for some reason. When I was a tyke in the early-90s, though, the big three were killer bees (hand at knee), drive-by shootings (hand at collarbone), and nuclear annihilation (hand way the fuck up here). Didn't matter that the Cold War was effectively over and all those hydrogen bombs, which had been trained at my head since birth, were still out there and possibly in less reputable hands than even the Russians. Besides, I had an entire back catalog of prime nuclear-proliferation cinema to learn my fate from. As soon as the NORAD computer would freeze up during chess and mutually assure the destruction of Omaha, my friends and I would see a flash brighter than a thousand suns, and those of us who weren't turned into disintegrating skeletons would swell up like Akira monsters and slosh like chili across the windshield of the first car that hit us. That's how we were going to go out. Provided, of course, we hadn't already died from AIDS. 

It didn't help learning that the actual results of a for-real nuclear explosion are way worse than Hollywood has the special effects to depict. A lot of mainstream accounts of Japan's bombings, like those in John Hersey's Hiroshima, sort of soft-pedal the body horror that acute radiation poisoning causes, but they are nevertheless full of preteen nightmare fodder. Melty-faced Jason Robards doesn't hold a candle to trying to guess what it feels like turning into a shadow, a permanent shadow, tattooed on the side of a building. 

Once you dig a little deeper, you realize the human shadows were the lucky ones.

peasant, your mission is to be a gunner on the lookout for threats from below...,

medialens | There are always convenient news-hooks on which corporate journalists can hang their power-friendly prejudices about the West being 'the good guys' in world affairs. Channel 4 News is not immune from this chauvinism. For example, Matt Frei introduced a report about last month's elections in Iraq with this propaganda bullet:

'Now, America once invaded Iraq so that, in large part, Iraqis could do what they did today – go to the polls.' (Channel 4 News, April 30, 2014)

Frei was, in fact, diligently reading out the first line of a blog piece by his colleague Jonathan Rugman, C4 News foreign affairs correspondent. The actual overriding reason for the West's war of aggression – strategic geopolitical dominance, including control of valuable hydrocarbon resources in the Middle East – was simply brushed aside. As ever, 'we' must be seen to be acting out of benign intent and pure desire to bring democracy to people around the globe. The reality is that 'we' must stifle other countries' independent development and, if required, bomb them into submission to Western state-corporate hegemony.

Frei acting as a mouthpiece to Rugman's bizarrely skewed perspective on the Iraq War was yet another case of sticking to the editorial line from the C4 News 'team you know and trust'. When we asked C4 News correspondent Alex Thomson whether he agreed with this particular editorial monstrosity from his team he ducked out:

'whoah - I'm surfing right now and staying well out of this one!'

To be fair to Thomson, that was his jovial way of not defending his colleagues. He knows we know, and we know he knows we know, where his sympathies lie on that one.

Whereas Thomson has enough savvy to see behind much US-UK government rhetoric, he is aware that he must rein in any expressed scepticism to hang on to his job. As a general rule, journalists in the public eye are constrained to direct scepticism in one direction only: towards the propaganda output of officially declared enemies.

Thus, BBC Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg was free to make this observation via Twitter:

'Dominating the Russian airwaves, Moscow's lexicon for the Ukraine conflict: "junta", "fascists", "Banderovtsy", "genocide", "extremists"'

That's fine. But when has Rosenberg, or any of his colleagues, ever highlighted how 'our' airwaves are dominated by 'London's lexicon' and 'Washington's lexicon'? Why is it the job of a supposedly impartial BBC journalist to expose 'Moscow's lexicon', but not that emanating from London or Washington? Rosenberg ignored us when we asked him those questions on Twitter.

military say "climate change" (not bankster food commodity speculation) a growing security threat

NYTimes |  The accelerating rate of climate change poses a severe risk to national security and acts as a catalyst for global political conflict, a report published Tuesday by a leading government-funded military research organization concluded.

The Center for Naval Analyses Military Advisory Board found that climate change-induced drought in the Middle East and Africa is leading to conflicts over food and water and escalating longstanding regional and ethnic tensions into violent clashes. The report also found that rising sea levels are putting people and food supplies in vulnerable coastal regions like eastern India, Bangladesh and the Mekong Delta in Vietnam at risk and could lead to a new wave of refugees.

In addition, the report predicted that an increase in catastrophic weather events around the world will create more demand for American troops, even as flooding and extreme weather events at home could damage naval ports and military bases.

In an interview, Secretary of State John Kerry signaled that the report’s findings would influence American foreign policy.

“Tribes are killing each other over water today,” Mr. Kerry said. “Think of what happens if you have massive dislocation, or the drying up of the waters of the Nile, of the major rivers in China and India. The intelligence community takes it seriously, and it’s translated into action.”

Mr. Kerry, who plans to deliver a major speech this summer on the links between climate change and national security, said his remarks would also be aimed at building political support for President Obama’s climate change agenda, including a new regulation to cut pollution from coal-fired power plants that the administration will introduce in June.

“We’re going to try to lay out to people legitimate options for action that are not bank-breaking or negative,” Mr. Kerry said.

Pentagon officials said the report would affect military policy. “The department certainly agrees that climate change is having an impact on national security, whether by increasing global instability, by opening the Arctic or by increasing sea level and storm surge near our coastal installations,” John Conger, the Pentagon’s deputy under secretary of defense for installations and environment, said in a statement. “We are actively integrating climate considerations across the full spectrum of our activities to ensure a ready and resilient force.”

The report on Tuesday follows a recent string of scientific studies that warn that the effects of climate change are already occurring and that flooding, droughts, extreme storms, food and water shortages and damage to infrastructure will occur in the near future.

In March, the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, the agency’s main public document describing the current doctrine of the United States military, drew a direct link between the effects of global warming — like rising sea levels and extreme weather patterns — and terrorism.

“These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad, such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability and social tensions — conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence,” the review said.

the 1914 war was called ‘the war to end all wars.’ the 2014 war will be that...,

commondreams | And here comes World War I, wrapped in World War II, wrapped in the Cold War: tremors on one of Planet Earth’s human fault lines.

We have enough angry, manipulable people on this planet to carry out the game plan of the political ideologues and war profiteers, who are always on the lookout for the next war, the one that’s too volatile and “inevitable” to stop. As David Swanson, author of War Is a Lie, put it: “The search for a good war is beginning to look as futile as the search for the mythical city of El Dorado. And yet that search remains our top public project.”

And the searchlight stops at Ukraine, full of neo-Nazis, corrupt oligarchs, nuclear reactors, an unelected government, a wrecked economy, a simmering civil war. God help us. Old animosities and ideological divisions come back to life. The United States and NATO stand off against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Thirty-one people — maybe more — die in a burning building in Odessa. This kind of thing could be the pretext for a world war. Sanity is up in flames.

“The crisis in Ukraine is serious,” Floyd Rudmin writes at Common Dreams. “At some point soon, reality needs to become the priority. No more name-calling. No more blaming. If there are any adults in the room, they need to stand up. The crisis in Ukraine is going critical, and that is a fact.”

What if one of the adults were an elected official, specifically, the president of the United States? In an open letter, a group calledVeteranIntelligence Professionals for Sanity has urged Barack Obama to look beyond John Kerry and Washington’s neocon consensus for advice and direction on Ukraine — as, it turns out, he ultimately did with Syria — and “schedule a meeting, one-on-one, with President Putin as quickly as possible.”

There are numerous acts of geopolitical rationality and goodwill — e.g., rescind Ukraine’s invitation to join NATO — that could avert the crisis. That’s all that matters.

“In 2014, on the one century anniversary of World War I, European nations are again mobilizing for war,” Rudmin writes. “As in 1914, so in 2014, war is not for repelling an attack, but for loyalty to an alliance, even when some members of the alliance are belligerent. The 1914 war was supposed to be over by Christmas, but went on and on and on for years, killing 9 million people. The 2014 war, if its starts in earnest, will be over in one week, maybe less, and could kill a 100 million people depending on how many nuclear reactors break open and how many nuclear missiles are launched.”

He adds: “The 1914 war was called ‘the war to end all wars.’ The 2014 war will be that.”

the secret back story to russia and ukraine that americans never learned in school

zerohedge | America Launched the Cold War Even Before World War II Had Ended 

Joseph Stalin and the Soviets were key in helping the U.S. to defeat the Nazis.  20 million Russians died fighting the Nazis in World War II.

And yet the U.S. started competing against Stalin – and treating him like an enemy – before WWII had even ended.

Specifically, dropping atomic bombs on Japan had a duel purpose: defeating the Japanese, and sending a message to Stalin that the U.S. was in charge.

History.com notes:

In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective …. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S. President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War.

New Scientist reports:

The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.

Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.

[The conventional explanation of using the bombs to end the war and save lives] is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US.

New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman’s main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.

According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was “looking for peace”. Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.

“Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan,” says Selden.

John Pilger points out:

The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.”

University of Maryland professor of political economy – and former Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and Special Assistant in the Department of State – Gar Alperovitz says:

Increasing numbers of historians now recognize the United States did not need to use the atomic bomb to end the war against Japan in 1945. Moreover, this essential judgment was expressed by the vast majority of top American military leaders in all three services in the years after the war ended: Army, Navy and Army Air Force. Nor was this the judgment of “liberals,” as is sometimes thought today. In fact, leading conservatives were far more outspoken in challenging the decision as unjustified and immoral than American liberals in the years following World War II.

Instead [of allowing other options to end the war, such as letting the Soviets attack Japan with ground forces], the United States rushed to use two atomic bombs at almost exactly the time that an August 8 Soviet attack had originally been scheduled: Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. The timing itself has obviously raised questions among many historians. The available evidence, though not conclusive, strongly suggests that the atomic bombs may well have been used in part because American leaders “preferred”—as Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Martin Sherwin has put it—to end the war with the bombs rather than the Soviet attack. Impressing the Soviets during the early diplomatic sparring that ultimately became the Cold War also appears likely to have been a significant factor.

The most illuminating perspective, however, comes from top World War II American military leaders. The conventional wisdom that the atomic bomb saved a million lives is so widespread that … most Americans haven’t paused to ponder something rather striking to anyone seriously concerned with the issue: Not only did most top U.S. military leaders think the bombings were unnecessary and unjustified, many were morally offended by what they regarded as the unnecessary destruction of Japanese cities and what were essentially noncombat populations. Moreover, they spoke about it quite openly and publicly.

Shortly before his death General George C. Marshall quietly defended the decision, but for the most part he is on record as repeatedly saying that it was not a military decision, but rather a political one.

General Dwight Eisenhower said, “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary” and “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

nah, just what nicholas wade says about race...,

slate |  Wade’s argument has three parts: First, along with the divergence of physical traits such as skin color and types of earwax, racial groups have genetically evolved to differ in cognitive traits such as intelligence and creativity. Second, Wade argues that “minor differences, for the most part invisible in an individual, have major consequences at the level of a society.” Third, he writes that his views are uncomfortable truths that have been suppressed by a left-wing social-science establishment.

The word “inequality” does not appear in the book’s index, but what Wade is offering is essentially a theory of economic and social inequality, explaining systematic racial differences in prosperity based on a combination of innate traits (“the disinclination to save in tribal societies is linked to a strong propensity for immediate consumption”) and genetic adaptation to political and social institutions (arguing, for example, that generations of centralized rule have effected a selection pressure for Chinese to be accepting of authority).

Wade is clearly intelligent and thoughtful, and his book is informed by the latest research in genetics. His explanations seem to me simultaneously plausible and preposterous: plausible in that they snap into place to explain the world as it currently is, preposterous in that I think if he were writing in other time periods, he could come up with similarly plausible, but completely different, stories.

As a statistician and political scientist, I see naivete in Wade’s quickness to assume a genetic association for any change in social behavior. For example, he writes that declining interest rates in England from the years 1400 to 1850 “indicate that people were becoming less impulsive, more patient, and more willing to save” and attributes this to “the far-reaching genetic consequences” of rich people having more children, on average, than poor people, so that “the values of the upper middle class” were “infused into lower economic classes and throughout society.”

Similarly, he claims a genetic basis for the declining levels of everyday violence in Europe over the past 500 years and even for “a society-wide shift ... toward greater sensibility and more delicate manners.” All this is possible, but it seems to me that these sorts of stories explain too much. The trouble is that any change in attitudes or behavior can be imagined to be genetic—as long as the time scale is right. For example, the United States and other countries have seen a dramatic shift in attitudes toward gay rights in the past 20 years, a change that certainly can’t be attributed to genes. Given that we can see this sort of change in attitudes so quickly (and, indeed, see large changes in behavior during such time scales; consider for example the changes in the murder rate in New York City during the past 100 years), I am skeptical of Wade’s inclination to come up with a story of genetics and selection pressure whenever a trend happens to be measured over a period of hundreds of years.

Wade’s attitudes toward economics also seem a bit simplistic, for example when he writes, “Capital and information flow fairly freely, so what is it that prevents poor countries from taking out a loan, copying every Scandinavian institution, and becoming as rich and peaceful as Denmark?” The implication is that the answer is racial differences. But one might just as well ask why can’t Buffalo, New York, take out a loan and become as rich (per capita) as New York City. Or, for that matter, why can’t Portugal become as rich as Denmark? After all, Portuguese are Caucasians too! One could of course invoke a racial explanation for Portugal’s relative poverty, but Wade in his book generally refers to Europe or “the West” as a single unit. My point here is not that Haitians, Portuguese, and Danes are equivalent—obviously they differ in wealth, infrastructure, human capital, and so forth—but that it is not at all clear that genetic differences have much of anything to do with their different economic positions.

what science says about race?

Time |  A longstanding orthodoxy among social scientists holds that human races are a social construct and have no biological basis. A related assumption is that human evolution halted in the distant past, so long ago that evolutionary explanations need never be considered by historians or economists.

In the decade since the decoding of the human genome, a growing wealth of data has made clear that these two positions, never at all likely to begin with, are simply incorrect. There is indeed a biological basis for race. And it is now beyond doubt that human evolution is a continuous process that has proceeded vigorously within the last 30,000 years and almost certainly — though very recent evolution is hard to measure — throughout the historical period and up until the present day.

New analyses of the human genome have established that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional. Biologists scanning the genome for evidence of natural selection have detected signals of many genes that have been favored by natural selection in the recent evolutionary past. No less than 14% of the human genome, according to one estimate, has changed under this recent evolutionary pressure.

Analysis of genomes from around the world establishes that there is a biological basis for race, despite the official statements to the contrary of leading social science organizations. An illustration of the point is the fact that with mixed race populations, such as African Americans, geneticists can now track along an individual’s genome, and assign each segment to an African or European ancestor, an exercise that would be impossible if race did not have some basis in biological reality.

Racism and discrimination are wrong as a matter of principle, not of science. That said, it is hard to see anything in the new understanding of race that gives ammunition to racists. The reverse is the case. Exploration of the genome has shown that all humans, whatever their race, share the same set of genes. Each gene exists in a variety of alternative forms known as alleles, so one might suppose that races have distinguishing alleles, but even this is not the case. A few alleles have highly skewed distributions but these do not suffice to explain the difference between races. The difference between races seems to rest on the subtle matter of relative allele frequencies. The overwhelming verdict of the genome is to declare the basic unity of humankind.

clown fest

theoildrum | We evolved to favor the ‘in group’ over the ‘out group’, for resource, defensive, and ultimately reproductive advantages. The internet has spawned millions of ‘in-groups’ – peak oilers, tea-party evangelizers, deflationistas, gold-bugs, Austrian economics followers, anti-abortion activists, and myriad less controversial groups such as ‘Claremount High School Boosters", "Kerr Jar Enthusiasts", “Earthworm Snack Creators” and the like. People gravitate towards groups they identify with. And they usually stay there. (After all, a room full of clowns feels a lot less clown-like).

Achieving status is a primary driver in the biological kingdom and remains a key driver in our human social groups. But today, for the first time in our species history, the same ‘feelings’ we get from moving up in a real life social hierarchy can be attained cheaply and easily online. Being the most vocal, most persuasive or most interesting in a small group of dedicated/interested followers engenders the same neural reward as being the head of a small business, or a Mayor, or a high school basketball star. Our brains don’t really know that being the head of the “Morel Foraging Society” or “Nudists for Nader 2012” with several hundred members online is different than being County Treasurer in real life – we receive respect, positive feedback, deference etc. from the people in our ‘in-group’ (the fact they might be just anonymous mushroom pickers or passionate nude people is not relevant to our brains).

Human ethologists liken this phenomenon to 'dispersal phenotype' prevalent in nature:

Dispersal is important in biology. Often a species will produce two forms:
1) a maintenance phenotype (the outcome of genes and the structures they produce interacting with a specific environment) that is adapted to the environment in which it is born, and (2) a dispersal phenotype that is programmed to move to a new area and that often has the capacity to adapt to a new environment.

According to the present theory, humans have developed two dispersal phenotypes in the forms of the prophet and the follower. The coordinated action of these two phenotypes would serve to disperse us over the available habitat. This dispersal must have been aided by the major climatic changes over the past few million years in which vast areas of potential human habitat have repeatedly become available because of melting of ice sheets.

The dispersal phenotypes might have evolved through selection at the individual level, since the reproductive advantage of colonizing a new habitat would have been enormous. They would also promote selection between groups. Factors that promote selection at the group level are rapid splitting of groups, small size of daughter groups, heterogeneity (differences) of culture between groups, and reduction in gene flow between groups. These factors are all promoted by the breaking away of prophet-led groups with new belief systems.

Cult followers have been studied and found to be high on schizotypal traits, such as abnormal experiences and beliefs. They have not yet been tested for the sort of selfish attitudes and behavior that characterize free-riders. If a large cohort of people were tested for some measure of selfishness, it is predicted that those who subsequently joined cults would be low on such a measure. Predictions could also be made about future cult leaders. They would be likely to be ambitious males who were not at the top of the social hierarchy of their original group. If part of why human groups split in general is to give more reproductive opportunities to males in the new group, it can also be predicted that leaders of new religious movements would be males of reproductive age. Female cult leaders are not likely to be more fertile as a result of having many sexual partners, but their sons might be in an advantageous position for increased reproduction.

From THE BIOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BEHAVIOR, Edited by Jay R. Feierman (bold added my me)
[pp. 184-186] DISPERSAL

Most people are both reasonable, and passive. Some people are either unreasonable or assertive (or both). In a free form forum one unreasonable or assertive person will drown out 10 or more who are either reasonable or passive. Especially for those whose assertion or unreasonableness in real life leads to fewer social opportunities, the internet has been a godsend. Either anonymous or in their own name, they can easily accumulate a following by articulating what people already believe or like to hear. Given the self-selected audience, there doesn’t exist the normal social checks and balances. As such, due to the myriad different categories, those assertive and/or social acceptance seeking souls who find their niches online dig in hard and ‘feel’ as if they are true celebrities. Combine that with the iterations and scale that come from long time periods, little or no barriers to entry and an apathy/lack of interest from those not spending time on the internet and these folks have become ensconced at all sorts of cyber guideposts on topics that cover the map. Dispersal phenotypes.

Basically, since people believe in authority figures, and nominate their own authority figures based on their own belief systems, it is no wonder that time and numbers has by circa 2010 amassed an internet army of 'clowns'. We see increasingly hysterical caricatures emerge on the internet/media that undergo some perceived status/ego boost that they wouldn't/couldn't have gotten in normal situations. The feedback from the true believers (of whatever tribe they communicate to), then locks these personalities into an utterly confident belief in their own position as an expert, and their actions become considerably (and understandably) clownlike over time to people not in their sub-group, especially magnified in those cases of borderline mental illness (which I suspect are not few). I notice this dynamic in numerous areas of discourse but its particularly prevalent in the the peak oil, finance and climate change circles where I have spent alot of time.

$84,000 means that's-era, that's-era, that's ALL folks!!!

pbs |  Walter Bianco has had hepatitis-C for 40 years, and his time is running out.

“The liver is at the stage next to becoming cirrhotic,” the 65-year-old Arizona contractor says. Cirrhosis is severe scarring, whether from alcoholism or a chronic viral infection. It’s a fateful step closer to liver failure or liver cancer.

If he develops one of these complications, the only possible solution would be a hard-to-get liver transplant. “The alternative,” Bianco says, “is death.”

Previous drug treatments didn’t clear the virus from Bianco’s system. But it’s almost certain that potent new drugs for hep-C could cure him.

However, the private insurer that handles his medication coverage for the federal Medicare program has twice refused to pay for the drugs his doctor has prescribed.

Doctors are seeing more and more patients approaching the end-stage of hep-C infection. “There isn’t day that goes by when I don’t have a story very similar to Mr. Bianco’s,” says Dr. Hugo Vargas of Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, AZ, his liver specialist.

Researchers estimate that 3 to 5 million Americans carry the insidious hep-C virus. The biggest concentration is among those born between 1945 and 1965.

Many, like Bianco, got hep-C from injecting street drugs in their youth. He says he’s been drug- and alcohol-free for 32 years, but the infection was permanent.

Other baby boomers got the virus from transfusions before 1992, a period when blood wasn’t screened. Some got it from sharing razors or toothbrushes, or from contaminated tattoo needles or hospital equipment. For some, transmission was sexual, although fortunately this isn’t the highest-risk route.

The timing of these infections spells trouble for Medicare, which insures Americans over 65.