the psychopathologizing of anti-authoritarian behavior?

zerohedge  |  This post is about an issue that is by now a bit dated (though the topic as such certainly isn’t), but we have only just become aware of it and it seemed to us worth rescuing it from the memory hole. In late 2013, the then newest issue of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM for short) defined a new mental illness, the so-called “oppositional defiant disorder” or ODD.

As TheMindUnleashed.org informs us, the definition of this new mental illness essentially amounts to declaring any non-conformity and questioning of authority as a form of insanity. According to the manual, ODD is defined as:

[…] an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, hostile and defiant behavior,” symptoms include questioning authority, negativity, defiance, argumentativeness, and being easily annoyed.

Note: I believe this article strongly misrepresents the childhood diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder  - but - it is consistent with a Gurdjieffian account of human psychology as well as very amusing.  A couple of the comments appended at zerohedge are priceless.

tune in to what I'm try'na say to you...,

hoaxland been crippling minds that want to believe for generations now...,

bibliotecapleyades | My friend and colleague Mike Bara and I are going to attempt the impossible in the next few hundred pages: we’re going to try to describe, and then carefully document, exactly what’s been going with NASA in terms of that classified data and information. It won’t be an easy task. The predisposition of most Americans - even after the Challenger and Columbia disasters and a host of other “missing” spacecraft - is to place NASA somewhere on par with Mother Teresa n terms of public confidence and credibility. This is, in major part, due to the average American’s (to say nothing of the media’s) inability to figure out a reason why NASA - ostensibly a purely scientific Agency - would actually lie. NASA is, after all, holding high the beacon of our last true heroes, the astronauts. I mean, what’s to hide regarding moon rocks, craters and space radiation?

If we’re right, a lot.

However, even a hint that NASA - or, more precisely, its leadership - has been carrying out any kind of hidden agenda for over 50 years is, at best, met with disbelief. The vast majority of NASA’s nearly 18,000 full-time employees are, in our analysis, innocent of the wrongdoing of the few that we are going to describe.

To even begin to understand the extraordinary case we are presenting in this book, to fully appreciate what NASA has been quite consciously, deliberately and methodically concealing from the American people and the world for all these years, you have to begin with NASA’s turbulent past - specifically an account of its origins in the increasingly dangerous geopolitical environment Americans were thrust into in the wake of World War II. The governmental institution known as NASA is a department of the Executive Branch, ultimately answerable solely to the President of the United States, an Agency created through the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958.

NASA ostensibly is,

“a civilian agency exercising control over aeronautical and space activities sponsored by the United States.”

But contrary to common public and media perception that NASA is an open, strictly civilian scientific institution, is the legal fact that the Space Agency was quietly founded as a direct adjunct to the Department of Defense, tasked with specifically assisting the national security of the United States in the midst of a deepening Cold War with its major geopolitical adversary, the Soviet Union. It says so right in the original NASA Charter:

“Sec. 305... (i) The [National Aeronautics and Space] Administration shall be considered a defense agency of the United States for the purpose of Chapter 17, Title 35 of the United States Code...”

In another section of the act, this seldom-discussed defense responsibility - the ultimate undercutting of NASA’s continuing public façade as a strictly civilian, scientific agency - is blatantly spelled out:

“Sec. 205... (d) No [NASA] information which has been classified for reasons of national security shall be included in any report made under this section [of the Act]...”

Clearly, from this and the other security provisions incorporated in the Act, what the Congress, the press and the American taxpayers get to see of NASA’s ultimate activities - including untouched images and data regarding what’s really on the Moon, on Mars or anywhere else across the solar system - is totally dependent on whether the President of the United States (and/or his legal surrogates in the Department of Defense and the “intelligence community”) has already secretly classified that data. This is directly contrary to everything we’ve been led to believe regarding NASA for over 50 years now. After NASA was formed, almost before the ink was dry on the Bill that brought it into being (which, among many other detailed objectives, called for “the establishment of long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for and the problems involved in the use of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes”), NASA commissioned a formal “futures study” into the projected effects on American society of its many planned activities (including covert ones). Carried out as a formal NASA contract to the Brookings Institution - a well-known Washington, D.C.-based think tank - the 1959 study was officially titled “Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs.”

The results of this multi-disciplinary investigation were officially submitted to the administrator of NASA in late 1960, and after the Kennedy Administration was elected, to Congress in April 1961. One area of unusual interest covered in the report - easily overlooked amid mountains of interminable statistics and analyses  - was a quiet assessment of the near-certainty of a NASA discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life:

“While face-to-face meetings with it [extra-terrestrial life] will not occur within the next 20 years (unless its technology is more advanced than ours, qualifying it to visit Earth), artifacts left at some point in time by these life forms might possibly be discovered through our [NASA’s] space activities on the Moon, Mars, or Venus.”

This quietly inserted sub-section of Brookings is revealing on many levels, and it forms the documented basis of our case - that the NASA “you thought you knew” doesn’t actually exist, and that NASA has been deliberately concealing and classifying its most significant discoveries because of “national security” rationales.

Brookings officially affirmed NASA’s expectations that the Agency would fly to nearby planets in the solar system, and would thus be physically capable, for the first time, of confronting “extraterrestrials” right in their backyard. Did any skeptics even know this official document existed, before we made it public in 1996?

staggering levels of randomness stirred into a mass-hypnotic stew...,

wikipedia |  Project Camelot was a social science research project of the United States Army that started in 1964 and was cancelled after congressional hearings in 1965.^[1] The goal of the project was to assess the causes of conflict between national groups, to anticipate social breakdown and provide eventual solutions. The proposal caused much controversy among social scientists, many of whom voiced concerns that such a study was in conflict with their professional ethics.^[2]

Chile was to be the test case for the project, but Claudio Bunster was alerted almost immediately to its possible military nature when Johan Galtung showed him a letter from the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) inviting him to a seminar to discuss the project in 1966 at the American University in Washington DC. The seminar was actually held in the summer of 1965 but by then the initial exploratory mission to study the feasibility of running such a project was being phased out and the project itself was officially cancelled on July 8, 1965.^[2]

The project's purpose was described by the army as follows:

“

Success in such tasks as equipping and training indigenous forces for an internal security mission, civic action, psychological warfare, or other counterinsurgency action depends on a thorough understanding of the indigenous social structure, upon the accuracy with which changes within the indigenous culture, particularly violent changes, are anticipated, and the effects of various courses of action available to the military and other agencies of government upon the indigenous process of change.[3]

the documentation shows the phenomenon of long-term mass hypnosis is durable and real

nbcnews |  A UFO enthusiast has gathered more than 100,000 pages of government documents related to reports of flying saucers and other unexplained aerial phenomena -- and posted them online for amateur Men in Black and professional conspiracy theorists alike. 

The U.S. Air Force declassified the massive trove of files over the years covering more than 10,000 cases from the secret government Project Blue Book, which investigated sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) from 1947 until the project was closed in 1969. 

But until last week, people could only view the full collection by visiting the National Archives in person. 

Now these hints of little green men are online thanks to John Greenewald, the UFO enthusiast who collected and digitized the files on a free online archive, the Project Blue Book Collection, through his web site The Black Vault. 

His goal was to "give the public the easiest way possible to access these things," Greenewald said. "People are coming out of nowhere to look at this thing and it has definitely surprised me quite a bit."

the american dream and the quickening jobpocalypse...,

WaPo |  Mercedes-Benz wants to develop a driverless car. Google already has one. This is exceedingly bad news for auto body shops, ambulance-chasing lawyers and others. Soon, truck drivers might be replaced by driverless trucks. What then will happen to the nation’s 3.5 million truck drivers, not to mention truck stops, of which there are 276 in Texas alone? (You can Google anything.)

The conventional answer is retraining. Truck drivers will become something else, maybe teachers or dental hygienists, which is, of course, possible. It’s also likely that many of them will sink into the funk that is the loyal companion of unemployment. Family life will shred, and possibly an army of former truck drivers will enlist with others of the digitally ditched and wreak political havoc. Shippers will sing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” For truckers it will be, “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?”

It’s clear by now that the fruits of automation, computerization and outsourcing are being reaped by the top 1 percent — in this case, shipping companies and not drivers. The old bell curve with the middle class bloating comfy in the middle is being replaced by what’s called the power curve, in which something called the 80/20 rule applies: 20 percent of the participants in an online venture get 80 percent of the rewards. Think Uber. It’s not the drivers who are getting rich. Something new and possibly awful is happening.

Many books have been written about this phenomenon, and in 2012, the Aspen Institute convened a meeting on this topic, with the resulting report bearing the jaunty title of “Power-Curve Society: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Emerging Networked Economy.” One participant was Kim Taipale, a leading thinker in this field. I quote from the Aspen report on its summary of Taipale’s thesis: “The era of bell curve distributions that supported a bulging social middle class is over. . . . Education per se is not going to make up the difference.”

rule of law: neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted..,

truthdig |  Prisons employ and exploit the ideal worker. Prisoners do not receive benefits or pensions. They are not paid overtime. They are forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot formally complain about working conditions or safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest their pitiful wages, they lose their jobs and can be sent to isolation cells. The roughly 1 million prisoners who work for corporations and government industries in the American prison system are models for what the corporate state expects us all to become. And corporations have no intention of permitting prison reforms that would reduce the size of their bonded workforce. In fact, they are seeking to replicate these conditions throughout the society.

States, in the name of austerity, have stopped providing prisoners with essential items including shoes, extra blankets and even toilet paper, while starting to charge them for electricity and room and board. Most prisoners and the families that struggle to support them are chronically short of money. Prisons are company towns. Scrip, rather than money, was once paid to coal miners, and it could be used only at the company store. Prisoners are in a similar condition. When they go broke—and being broke is a frequent occurrence in prison—prisoners must take out prison loans to pay for medications, legal and medical fees and basic commissary items such as soap and deodorant. Debt peonage inside prison is as prevalent as it is outside prison. 

States impose an array of fees on prisoners. For example, there is a 10 percent charge imposed by New Jersey on every commissary purchase. Stamps have a 10 percent surcharge. Prisoners must pay the state for a 15-minute deathbed visit to an immediate family member or a 15-minute visit to a funeral home to view the deceased. New Jersey, like most other states, forces a prisoner to reimburse the system for overtime wages paid to the two guards who accompany him or her, plus mileage cost. The charge can be as high as $945.04. It can take years to pay off a visit with a dying father or mother. 

Fines, often in the thousands of dollars, are assessed against many prisoners when they are sentenced. There are 22 fines that can be imposed in New Jersey, including the Violent Crime Compensation Assessment (VCCB), the Law Enforcement Officers Training & Equipment Fund (LEOT) and Extradition Costs (EXTRA). The state takes a percentage each month out of prison pay to pay down the fines, a process that can take decades. If a prisoner who is fined $10,000 at sentencing must rely solely on a prison salary he or she will owe about $4,000 after making payments for 25 years. Prisoners can leave prison in debt to the state. And if they cannot continue to make regular payments—difficult because of high unemployment—they are sent back to prison. High recidivism is part of the design.

you know some of this already exists given how far along those paperclip nazis were 60 years ago...,

CNN |  Imagine a blimp city floating 30 miles above the scorching surface of Venus -- a home for a team of astronauts studying one of the solar system's most inhospitable planets.

NASA is currently doing just that; floating a concept that could one day see a 30-day manned mission to Earth's closest planetary neighbor.

Eventually, the mission could involve a permanent human presence suspended above the planet.

Deep heat

Also known as the morning star, and named after the goddess of love and beauty because it shone the brightest of the five planets known to ancient astronomers, Venus is a hot, sulphurous, hellish place whose surface has more volcanoes than any other planet in the solar system.

With a mean temperature of 462 degrees Celsius (863 degrees Fahrenheit), an atmospheric pressure 92 times greater than Earth's and a cloud layer of sulphuric acid, even probes to Venus have lasted little more than two hours. Its surface is hot enough to melt lead and its atmospheric pressure is the equivalent of diving a mile underwater.

But above this cauldron of carbon dioxide at an altitude of 50km (30 miles) scientists say the conditions are as close to Earth's as you'll find anywhere in the solar system.

The gravity at this altitude is only slightly lower than that of Earth, its atmospheric pressure is similar and the aerospace provides enough protection from solar radiation to make it no more dangerous than taking a trip to Canada.

Creating HAVOC

Known at NASA as HAVOC - High Altitude Venus Operational Concept - engineers and scientists at the Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, have been working on a preliminary feasibility study on how robots and humans could make a Venus mission a reality.

"The atmosphere of Venus is an exciting destination for both further scientific study and future human exploration," said aerospace engineer Christopher A. Jones of the Space Mission Analysis Branch.

policy-makers know that climate disaster is inevitable

NYTimes |  OUR galaxy, the Milky Way, is home to almost 300 billion stars, and over the last decade, astronomers have made a startling discovery — almost all those stars have planets. The fact that nearly every pinprick of light you see in the night sky hosts a family of worlds raises a powerful but simple question: “Where is everybody?” Hundreds of billions of planets translate into a lot of chances for evolving intelligent, technologically sophisticated species. So why don’t we see evidence for E.T.s everywhere?

The physicist Enrico Fermi first formulated this question, now called the Fermi paradox, in 1950. But in the intervening decades, humanity has recognized that our own climb up the ladder of technological sophistication comes with a heavy price. From climate change to resource depletion, our evolution into a globe-spanning industrial culture is forcing us through the narrow bottleneck of a sustainability crisis. In the wake of this realization, new and sobering answers to Fermi’s question now seem possible.

Maybe we’re not the only ones to hit a sustainability bottleneck. Maybe not everyone — maybe no one — makes it to the other side.

Since Fermi’s day, scientists have gained a new perspective on life in its planetary context. From the vantage point of this relatively new field, astrobiology, our current sustainability crisis may be neither politically contingent nor unique, but a natural consequence of laws governing how planets and life of any kind, anywhere, must interact.

The defining feature of a technological civilization is the capacity to intensively “harvest” energy. But the basic physics of energy, heat and work known as thermodynamics tell us that waste, or what we physicists call entropy, must be generated and dumped back into the environment in the process. Human civilization currently harvests around 100 billion megawatt hours of energy each year and dumps 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the planetary system, which is why the atmosphere is holding more heat and the oceans are acidifying. As hard as it is for some to believe, we humans are now steering the planet, however poorly.

Can we generalize this kind of planetary hijacking to other worlds? The long history of Earth provides a clue. The oxygen you are breathing right now was not part of our original atmosphere. It was the so-called Great Oxidation Event, two billion years after the formation of the planet, that drove Earth’s atmospheric content of oxygen up by a factor of 10,000. What cosmic force could so drastically change an entire planet’s atmosphere? Nothing more than the respiratory excretions of anaerobic bacteria then dominating our world. The one gas we most need to survive originated as deadly pollution to our planet’s then-leading species: a simple bacterium.

The Great Oxidation Event alone shows that when life (intelligent or otherwise) becomes highly successful, it can dramatically change its host planet. And what is true here is likely to be true on other planets as well.

But can we predict how an alien industrial civilization might alter its world? From a half-century of exploring our own solar system we’ve learned a lot about planets and how they work. We know that Mars was once a habitable world with water rushing across its surface. And Venus, a planet that might have been much like Earth, was instead transformed by a runaway greenhouse effect into a hellish world of 800-degree days.

By studying these nearby planets, we’ve discovered general rules for both climate and climate change. These rules, based in physics and chemistry, must apply to any species, anywhere, taking up energy-harvesting and civilization-building in a big way. For example, any species climbing up the technological ladder by harvesting energy through combustion must alter the chemical makeup of its atmosphere to some degree. Combustion always produces chemical byproducts, and those byproducts can’t just disappear. As astronomers at Penn State recently discovered, if planetary conditions are right (like the size of a planet’s orbit), even relatively small changes in atmospheric chemistry can have significant climate effects. That means that for some civilization-building species, the sustainability crises can hit earlier rather than later.

necropolitics: the torture squad struggle against extremist islamist terror...,

guardian |  “Stand up, motherfucker,” they both shouted, almost synchronous. Then a session of torture and humiliation started. They started to ask me the questions again after they made me stand up, but it was too late, because I told them a million times, “Whenever you start to torture me, I’m not gonna say a single word.” And that was always accurate; for the rest of the day, they exclusively talked.

_______ turned the air conditioner all the way down to bring me to freezing. This method had been practiced in the camp at least since August 2002. I had seen people who were exposed to the frozen room day after day; by then, the list was long. The consequences of the cold room are devastating, such as ______tism, but they show up only at a later age because it takes time until they work their way through the bones. The torture squad was so well trained that they were performing almost perfect crimes, avoiding leaving any obvious evidence. Nothing was left to chance. They hit in predefined places. They practiced horrible methods, the aftermath of which would only manifest later. The interrogators turned the A/C all the way down trying to reach 0°, but obviously air conditioners are not designed to kill, so in the well insulated room the A/C fought its way to 49°F, which, if you are interested in math like me, is 9.4°C—in other words, very, very cold, especially for some- body who had to stay in it more than twelve hours, had no underwear and just a very thin uniform, and who comes from a hot country. Somebody from Saudi Arabia cannot take as much cold as somebody from Sweden; and vice versa, when it comes to hot weather. Interrogators took these factors in con- sideration and used them effectively.

necropolitics: no more a terrorist than forest gump...,

guardian |  “I will be back soon,” I said, as we stood up and shook hands. Then I turned and walked a few steps to the gate, and waited for the guard to unlock it so I could leave. Those were the last words I said to Mohamedou Ould Slahi after I met him in the tiny compound he shared with Tariq al-Sawah in the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. That was seven and a half years ago. I have never been inside the camp again. Slahi has never been out.

I didn’t know, that afternoon in the summer of 2007, that in a few weeks I would send an email to the US deputy secretary of defence, Gordon England, saying I could no longer in good conscience serve as chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo military commissions. I reached that decision after receiving a written order placing Brigadier-General Tom Hartmann over me and the Pentagon general counsel, Jim Haynes, over Hartmann.

Hartmann had chastised me for refusing to use evidence obtained by “enhanced” interrogation techniques, saying: “President Bush said we don’t torture, so who are you to say we do?” Haynes authored the “torture memo” that the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, signed in April 2003 approving interrogation techniques that were not authorised by military regulations – the memo where Rumsfeld scribbled in the margin: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing [for detainees during interrogations] limited to 4 hours?” Rather than face a Hobson’s choice when they directed me to go into court with torture-derived evidence, I chose to quit before they had the chance.

Slahi and al-Sawah had been recommended to me as potential cooperating witnesses. Before I met them, I asked one of my prosecutors to review their files and check with other agencies to be sure nothing had been overlooked. We attended a meeting where those who had spent years investigating Slahi briefed their findings. The end result was a consensus that, like Forrest Gump, Slahi popped up around significant events by coincidence, not design.

necropolitics: Guantánamo Diary

guardian |  The groundbreaking memoir of a current Guantánamo inmate that lays bare the harrowing details of the US rendition and torture programme from the perspective of one of its victims is to be published next week after a six-year battle for the manuscript to be declassified.

Guantánamo Diary, the first book written by a still imprisoned detainee, is being published in 20 countries and has been serialised by the Guardian amid renewed calls by civil liberty campaigners for its author’s release.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi describes a world tour of torture and humiliation that began in his native Mauritania more than 13 years ago and progressed through Jordan and Afghanistan before he was consigned to US detention in Guantánamo, Cuba, in August 2002 as prisoner number 760. US military officials told the Guardian this week that despite never being prosecuted and being cleared for release by a judge in 2010, he is unlikely to be released in the next year.

The journal, which Slahi handwrote in English, details how he was subjected to sleep deprivation, death threats, sexual humiliation and intimations that his torturers would go after his mother.

After enduring this, he was subjected to “additional interrogation techniques” personally approved by the then US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. He was blindfolded, forced to drink salt water, and then taken out to sea on a high-speed boat where he was beaten for three hours while immersed in ice.

The end product of the torture, he writes, was lies. Slahi made a number of false confessions in an attempt to end the torment, telling interrogators he planned to blow up the CN Tower in Toronto. Asked if he was telling the truth, he replied: “I don’t care as long as you are pleased. So if you want to buy, I am selling.”

necropolitics: not gonna make no more ghetto muslims, no, no, no....,

theweek |  Chérif Kouachi was born in 1980 in Paris' diverse 10th arrondissement, which stretches from the Place de la République to the Gare du Nord. He was one of five children of Algerian immigrant parents. A source who knew Chérif Kouachi when he was arrested on his way to catch the flight to Damascus in 2005 said, "He was abandoned very young; it's not clear if his parents couldn't look after the children or if his parents died. But he was put in care homes early — before the age of 10." The care homes were far from Paris, and his childhood was described as chaotic.

When he reached 18, he returned to the northeast of Paris with his elder brother. He had a sports education qualification but a poor school record and no other family support. When he became involved in the Buttes-Chaumont group of friends, he was back in Paris but living precariously.

"He was living almost like a homeless person, staying with someone, but it was more of a mattress on the floor than a real home," the source said. "He was very clearly marginalized. He was immature, just out of adolescence. He wasn't vindictive…He went to the mosque, but went clubbing, made rap music, smoked hash, drank. He wasn't a hermit."

It seemed at the time that Benyettou, the young guru figure by whom Kouachi was enthralled, used methods similar to those of a sect. "He made him feel important; he listened to him, recognized him as an individual…Chérif Kouachi was fragile, looking for a family…He didn't have a family he could turn to for support," the source said.

When he was arrested over the attempted flight to Syria and Iraq, Kouachi described himself to investigators as a "ghetto Muslim," according to Le Monde. "Before, I was a delinquent. But after, I felt great. I didn't even imagine that I could die," he told the court. A French TV documentary on radicalized youth showed footage of him rapping. "It's written in the texts that it's good to die as a martyr," he said.

The Buttes-Chaumont group's jihadi aspirations were directly linked to the second Iraq War, in 2003. They would sit in apartments watching footage of the U.S.-led invasion. "Everything I saw on TV, the torture in Abu Ghraib prison, all that, that's what motivated me," one of Kouachi's friends later said at trial.

But under Jacques Chirac, France had refused to intervene in the Iraq War, and the young cell's stance wasn't really a movement against the French state. It was more a rage directed against the U.S. Some of the group stated that jihad wasn't done in France. The focal point was fighting a foreign invader in Iraq.

necropolitics: social exclusion backed by the rule of law is the root cause of radicalization

wikipedia |  Substance The documentary discusses the many, unique circumstances of the 1960s that lead to the creation of these violent gangs. Some of the factors that are discussed in the documentary are listed below:

Lack of Organizational Acceptance, Identity

Bird discusses his multiple attempts to join youth organizations, such as the Boy Scouts of America or Explorer Scouts of America. He stated that he, like most other young African-American males, was constantly shut out of such predominantly white organized activities or organizations. He felt that it was almost like there was nowhere for young African-American men to turn. Bird accounts a lack of a sense of identity or acceptance and that is when African-American males began forming their own fraternities.

It began with small competition, between neighborhoods and streets, and definitely was not as violent. Groups like the Slausans, Del Vikings, and the Gladiators formed. <http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/03/local/me-businessmen3>. Often, they fought protected against the white gangs of the area terrorizing the African American neighborhoods <http://www.communitywalk.com/location/the_slausons/info/944937>. In these brotherhoods African Americans found acceptance and a sense of identity.

Regulation by Los Angeles Police Department

First and foremost, the media portrayed and the public perceives African-American males as violent criminals. Therefore, the Los Angeles Police Department, especially under Chief Officer William Parker regulated the Los Angeles area "like a military." African Americans were to remain in their neighborhoods at all times. Like Kumasi said, you had to be at the "right neighborhood at the right time. You couldn’t go east of Alameda, for example."

That was a predominantly white neighborhood, where African Americans were not wanted. Kumasi further discusses the invisible barriers that African Americans were not allowed to cross. If one was found simply walking through the “wrong neighborhood,” he was questioned and investigated almost like a criminal. There was in essence no freedom to walk to streets of a free country.

Kumasi described the experience of an African-American male of Los Angeles as a "walking time bomb." They were experiencing so much hatred from the police that sooner or later they would erupt. "The only question was upon whom," said Kumasi.

Watts Riot

The documentary then goes on and demonstrates how these African-American experiences set the stage for the Watts Riot. African-Americans were killed for absolutely trivial crimes. After a police encounter leading to the arrest of an intoxicated male, his brother, and mother, African Americans took to the streets against the Los Angeles Police Department, protesting racial injustices against them. Chief Officer William Parker only fueled the already racialized tension by calling African-Americans "monkeys in a zoo." The documentary discussed how it was all over the news and media. Let alone the Los Angeles Times, newspapers all over the nations were covering the Watts Riots of Los Angeles.

Institutional changes occurred afterwards. The documentary discussed the changes that were led by Black Panther Organization and then the backlash against these organizations. FBI investigations began, claiming that "Black panthers were the biggest threat to internal stability of USA." Its leaders were murdered, jailed, etc. After those leaders disappeared, the new generation started – Crips and Bloods (see background, membership, and history below).

Backdrop – California

California was different from the South. There were no prior bus laws or segregation in public schools. However, there were covenants against black housing. There was neighborhood segregation. Even after outlawing it eventually, neighborhoods stayed that way.

Industrialization hit in Los Angeles in the late 1950s in response to the booming industries of the country. The American economy was changing to an economy with either high end or low end jobs. African-Americans found themselves displaced in the job market. They did not have the prior skills, knowledge, or education to perform the high wage technological jobs, due to the historical discrimination and lack of opportunities.

They also did not feel like they, as U.S. citizens, should have to do the low labor jobs either. After all, they felt that they were above the immigrant low level jobs. In turn, they found themselves totally displaced from the labor market. Eventually, by the latter half of the 1960s, jobs and factories both disappeared from the Los Angeles region. Consequences were enormous. Businesses are empty and there is nowhere to turn. It simply becomes harder and harder to survive as time goes on.

Drugs

After the introduction of crack cocaine, even the African-American families were torn apart. The family institution became dysfunctional as well. There were no male role models in the family any longer. Seventy percent of black children are born to single mothers. Twenty eight percent of all black men will be jailed in their lifetime. There is a disproportionate number of black males in prison, making the possibility of a male figure in an African-American family even less likely.

holder eliminating the federal colored people tax

Ars Technica | Attorney General Eric Holder announced Friday that the Department of Justice would be putting a stop to local and state police participation in a federal asset seizure program called “Equitable Sharing.”

The program has allowed local and state police to seize assets—usually cash and vehicles—without evidence of a crime. If the former owner of the seized property fails to make a case for the return of his or her property, the local and state police were allowed to keep up to 80 percent of the assets, with the remaining portion returning to federal agencies.

"This is a significant advancement to reform a practice that is a clear violation of due process that is often used to disproportionately target communities of color," Laura Murph, the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office director told Ars in a statement.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation also did its own research into how much of the federal asset forfeiture funds were going back into surveillance and wiretapping, finding that California spent $13.6 million on spying.

“Holder’s announcement could have a significant impact on how law enforcement agencies fund electronic surveillance,” Dave Maas, an EFF spokesman, told Ars. “However, it’s important to remember that the next administration’s attorney general could easily reverse this policy decision. Further, many states also have their own asset forfeiture programs, so a whole second layer of funding remains on the state level.”

high energy to solve the challenge of the planets

wired |  Today we know that Americans can reach the “ends” of the Solar System without resort to nuclear propulsion (though a radioisotope system is handy for generating electricity in the dark beyond Jupiter, where solar arrays become impractical). When President Kennedy gave his speech, however, it was widely assumed that “high-energy” propulsion – which for most researchers meant nuclear rockets – would be desirable for round-trip journeys to Mars and Venus and a necessity for voyages beyond those next-door worlds. In his speech, President Kennedy referred specifically to the joint NASA-Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) ROVER nuclear-thermal rocket program. As the term implies, a nuclear-thermal rocket employs a nuclear reactor to heat a propellant (typically liquid hydrogen) and expel it through a nozzle to generate thrust.

ROVER had begun under U.S. Air Force (USAF)/AEC auspices in 1955. USAF/AEC selected the Kiwi reactor design for nuclear-thermal rocket ground testing in 1957 – a major step forward for the U.S. nuclear rocket program – and USAF relinquished its role the program to NASA in 1958. As President Kennedy gave his speech, U.S. aerospace companies competed for the contract to build NERVA, the first flight-capable nuclear-thermal rocket engine.

Nuclear-thermal propulsion was not the only form of nuclear-powered high-energy propulsion. Another was nuclear-electric propulsion, which can take many forms. This post examines only the form known widely as ion drive.

An ion thruster electrically charges a propellant and expels it at nearly the speed of light using an electric or magnetic field. Because charging propellant and generating electric or magnetic fields require a great deal of electricity, only a small amount of propellant can be ionized and expelled. This means in turn that an ion thruster permits only very gradual acceleration despite the speed at which propellant leaves it; one can, however, in theory operate an ion thruster for months or years, enabling it to push a spacecraft to high velocities.

American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard first wrote of electric propulsion in his notebooks in 1906. By 1916 be had begun experiments with “electrified jets.” Interest faded in the 1920s and resumed in the 1940s. The list of ion drive experimenters and theorists reads like a “Who’s Who” of early space research: L. Shepherd and A. V. Cleaver in Britain, L. Spitzer and H. Tsien in the United States, and E. Sanger in West Germany all contributed to the development of ion before 1955.

valigursky made pretty pictures, but ernst stuhlinger was the man...,

wikipedia |  Stuhlinger was born in Niederrimbach (now part of Creglingen), Württemberg, Germany. At age 23, he earned his doctorate in physics at the University of Tübingen in 1936, working with Otto Haxel, Hans Bethe and his advisor Hans Geiger.^[4][5][6] In 1939 to 1941, he worked in Berlin, on cosmic rays and nuclear physics as an assistant professor at the Berlin Institute of Technology developing innovative nuclear detector instrumentation.^[7]

Despite showing promise as a scientist, in 1941 Stuhlinger was drafted as a private in the German Army and sent to the Russian front, where he was wounded during the Battle of Moscow. Following this, he was in the Battle of Stalingrad and was one of the few members of his unit to survive and make the long, on-foot retreat out of Russia in the cold of winter.^[8] Upon reaching German territory in 1943, Stuhingler was ordered to the rocket development center in Peenemunde where he joined Dr. Wernher von Braun's team. For the remainder of the war, he worked in the field of guidance systems.^[9] In 1954, Stuhlinger assisted in the founding of the Rocket City Astronomical Association (Renamed to the Von Braun Astronomical Society following von Braun's death) where he served as one of the five original directors for the observatory built inside Monte Sano State Park.^[10]

 

Research Scientist Stuhlinger was one of the first group of 126 scientists who emigrated to the United States with von Braun after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip. In the 1945–50 years, he primarily worked on guidance systems in US Army missile programs at Fort Bliss, Texas. In 1950, von Braun's team and the missile programs were transferred to Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, Alabama. For the next decade, Stuhlinger and other von Braun team members worked on Army missiles, but they also devoted efforts in building an unofficial space capability. He eventually served as director of the Advanced Research Projects Division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA).^[7] On April 14, 1955, together with many other Paperclip members, he became a naturalized United States citizen.^[1]

the great acceleration

igbp |  choosing the beginning of the Great Acceleration leads to a possible specific start date: when the first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert on Monday 16 July 1945.

“Radioactive isotopes from this detonation were emitted to the atmosphere and spread worldwide entering the sedimentary record to provide a unique signal of the start of the Great Acceleration, a signal that is unequivocally attributable to human activities,” the paper reports. The research explores the underlying drivers of the Great Acceleration: predominantly globalisation.

The bulk of economic activity, and so too, for now, the lion’s share of consumption, remain largely within the OECD countries, which in 2010 accounted for about 74% of global GDP but only 18% of the global population. This points to the profound scale of global inequality, which distorts the distribution of the benefits of the Great Acceleration and confounds international efforts, for example climate agreements, to deal with its impacts on the Earth System. However, the paper shows that recently, global production, traditionally based within OECD countries, has shifted towards BRICS nations -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Moreover, the mushrooming middle classes in BRICS nations are driving greater consumption here too.

About one half of the global population now lives in urban areas and about third of the global population has completed the transition from agrarian to industrial societies. This shift is evident in several indicators. Most of the post-2000 rise in fertilizer consumption, paper production and motor vehicles has occurred in the non-OECD world.

Coinciding with the publication of the Great Acceleration indicators, researchers also led by Professor Steffen have published a new assessment of the concept of “planetary boundaries” in the journal Science. The international team of 18 scientists identified two core planetary boundaries: climate change and “biosphere integrity”. Altering either could “drive the Earth System into a new state.” The planetary boundaries concept, first published in 2009, identifies nine global priorities relating to human-induced changes to the environment. The new research confirms many of the boundaries and provides updated analysis and quantification for several of them including phosphorus and nitrogen cycles, land use and biodiversity.

The original 24 indicators were published in the first IGBP synthesis in 2004, when Professor Steffen was IGBP Executive Director. The term ‘Great Acceleration’ was not used until 2005 at the Dahlem Conference on the history of the human–environment relationship, which brought together many IGBP scientists. This new research is part of IGBP’s final synthesis, which will be completed in 2015.

The International Commission on Stratigraphy has set up a working group to analyse the validity of the Anthropocene claim. Professor Steffen is a member of this working group, which is due to report its conclusions in 2016.

Great Acceleration 2015 from International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme

for whom the muzzein calls....,

WaPo |  The poor pay more for everything, from rolls of toilet paper to furniture. It's not because they're spendthrifts, either. If you're denied a checking account, there's no way for you  to  avoid  paying a fee to cash a paycheck. If you need to buy a car to get to work, you'll have to accept whatever higher interest rate you're offered. If you don't have a car, the bus fare might eat up the change you'd save shopping at a larger grocery store as opposed to the local corner store.

It's easy to feel that "when you are poor, the 'system' is set up to keep you that way," in the words of one Reddit user, "rugtoad." That comment is at the top of an extraordinary thread full of devastating stories about what it's like to get by with nothing in the United States of 2015.

"Growing up really poor means realizing in your twenties that Mommy was lying when she said she already ate," wrote "deviant_devices," another commenter.

You can buy only a single pack of paper towels at a time, rather than saving on a bundle of 10, as "Meepshesaid" noted:

When you are broke, you can't plan ahead or shop sales or buy in bulk. Poor people wait to buy something until they absolutely need it, so they have to pay whatever the going price is at that moment. If ten-packs of paper towels are on sale for half price, that's great, but you can only afford one roll anyway. In this way, poor people actually pay more than others for common staple goods.

You can't pay for health insurance, and instead buy medicine from pet stores, as "colorcoma" writes:

I buy "fish" antibiotics online because I can't afford health care. … Amoxicillin and such. Mostly for husband who has Lyme's disease. We can't afford our monthly health care rates. We are 30somethings in the US. Really feel like a "bottom feeder".

You can't also buy shoes that will last for more than a few months, according to "DrStephenFalken":

I'm making $150- $200 a week and I need new shoes. So I can buy $60 shoes that will last or $15 walmart shoes. So I buy the walmart shoes and some groceries instead of just the $60 shoes and no groceries. Three months later I'll need new shoes again. But I'll also have to pay rent and my light bill is due. So I'll pay the light bill and buy some "shoe glue" for $4 to fix my shoes for another few weeks until I can buy the $15 ones again.

Economists have documented the "ghetto tax," as the additional costs of living paid by the poor are often known. A Brookings study from 2006 found that someone who is not able to open a checking account will typically pay between $5 and $50 to cash a $500 check, and that people in poor neighborhoods paid several hundred dollars more for homeowner's insurance, or to buy a car of a given make and model, than someone living in a wealthier neighborhood.

staten island race politics a microcosm of america and the world...,

WaPo |  Staten Island itself is far more pro-police and anti-de Blasio than the rest of the city.

This is not a surprise. In the immediate wake of the decision, Staten Islanders were quick to offer support for the police when asked. New York's most conservative and whitest borough, it is known for its strong support for -- and population of -- law-enforcement officers.

Nonetheless, the scale of Staten Island's differing opinions is pretty remarkable. We pulled a number of the Quinnipiac questions in which Staten Island was furthest from the city on the whole. Staten Island is in red; the vertical axis marks how far above or below the citywide opinion (in bold on the vertical axis) responses from each borough fell.

On the first graph, in other words, New York was nine points more likely to approve of de Blasio's handling of crime than to disapprove, but Staten Island was 48 points more negative than the city overall.