the competitive exclusion principle

The Guardian Overpopulation, Overdevelopment and Overshoot in Pictures

peakoilbarrel |  Every animal had adaptations that allowed it to survive in the wild. But no animal had a “super adaptation”, that is no animal evolved an adaptation that gave it ultimate control over other animals. There was no colossus in the animal world. No matter what the adaption, no animal could be that strong.

But the first hint of such an adaptation evolved about 5 million years ago. Somewhere in Africa a species of great ape evolved that had all the other survival adaptations of other great apes plus one more, that ape was just a wee bit smarter than other apes. And among these smarter apes, some were smarter than others. These smarter apes had a slightly higher survival and reproductive rate than the ones in their own group who were not so smart. But even these “smarter” apes were not really all that smart.

Brain size, which is correlated with intelligence, increased very slowly over two and one half million years. But the ultimate competitive weapon, the weapon that would give this one great ape a huge survival weapon over all other species had begun to evolve. From this point on the fate of the earth, the fate of all other species, was set. The ultimate weapon had begun to evolve. And about 100,000 years ago modern humans appeared.

about 10,000 years ago, give or take, humans depended entirely on the natural world for its substance. Killing animals that they could find and gathering what fruits, roots and tubers than nature provided them. Then slowly the Neolithic Revolution started to happen. People began to plant seeds and domesticate animals. However Homo colossus had not yet appeared.

Homo colossus appeared about 250 years ago. That was when man began to spend nature’s non renewable carbon deposits as if they were income.

William Catton: When the earth’s deposits of fossil fuels and mineral resources were being laid down, Homo sapiens had not yet been prepared by evolution to take advantage of them. As soon as technology made it possible for mankind to do so, people eagerly (and without foreseeing the ultimate consequences) shifted to a high-energy way of life. Man became, in effect, a detritovore, Homo colossus. Our species bloomed, and now we must expect crash (of some sort) as the natural sequel.

However we need to get back to the subject of this post, the competitive exclusion principle.

Wiki: The competitive exclusion principle, sometimes referred to as Gause’s Law, is a proposition that states that two species competing for the same resource cannot coexist at constant population values, if other ecological factors remain constant. When one species has even the slightest advantage or edge over another then the one with the advantage will dominate in the long term. One of the two competitors will always overcome the other, leading to either the extinction of this competitor or an evolutionary or behavioral shift toward a different ecological niche. The principle has been paraphrased into the maxim “complete competitors cannot coexist“.

expecting common sense from reptile brains is inherently risky...,

npr |  And nobody feels as much like a nobody as an immigrant does. And you can engage with a great power like the United States simply by throwing a bomb. You can declare war on the United States. And the amazing thing about it is that the United States will accept the declaration of war. We respond to terrorism by treating it not as a crime, but by treating it as war. So someone like Tamerlan, who feels small and insignificant, can suddenly claim a sense of belonging to a great, big effort - and a place in history.

GREENE: This is obviously an event that many Americans followed and have memories of. What do you hope people will learn from your book that they haven't learned from other places?

GESSEN: A couple of things. One is that - and I understand that this is a risky strategy, but I think it is really important to see people as people, and to try to understand the story, and perhaps catch yourself being sympathetic to these brothers, because I think that the more we understand about something that we believe is a huge threat to this country, the more effective we can be inviting it.

GREENE: And you said catch yourself being sympathetic there -just want to make sure I understand that. You're suggesting that it can be healthy to find some level of sympathy somehow.

GESSEN: Yes, I am suggesting it could be healthy to find some level of sympathy because I think that the way that wars are fought is that the enemy is always dehumanized. That's what we have done with terrorism. It's a perfectly normal and logical thing to do. It also makes wars continue and build. And until you start seeing your enemy as a human being for at least a second, you're never going to advance in your understanding of what's going on. That's one thing I want people to take away from it. Another thing is I want people to question what they think about terrorism and the war on terror, and how it's fought, and the assumptions that have been made and that aren't usually questioned by the media, like this whole radicalization narrative.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

Popular Science | In case you were wondering whether Steve Wozniak is afraid of robots, get this: He probably is. "Computers are going to take over from humans, no question," the Apple co-founder told the Australian Financial Review earlier this week. He also said that, "If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently.” Wozniak goes into so much detail, however, wondering aloud about whether the machine will squash us like ants, or pamper us like pets, that it's hard to tell whether this was a cathartic expression of his genuine fears, or just the more respectable version of the sort of freshman-year prognosticating happening in any given dorm room, on any given night. But while Wozniak doesn't have the same prophetic gravitas as an Elon Musk, a Stephen Hawking or a Bill Gates, the list of household names who want robots to plot a path off of humanity's lawn is growing.

It's a bad time, in other words, to be staging the most ambitious robotics competition in history. Worse still, the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals, scheduled for June 5-6 in Pomona, California, will feature machines that walk on two legs—imagine the hubris—or skitter across rubble like giant insects. Robots will turn doorknobs, and saw through walls with power tools. The DRCis a robophobic's worst nightmare.

DARPA is fully aware of this climate of fear, and plans to tackle it head-on. “We actually take these questions about what the future is going to be like, and what the applications are, for the different technologies that DARPA helps to develop, in a very serious way.” said DRC program manager Gill Pratt in a telephone briefing earlier this month. “And we don't want to presume that we're the ones who have to come up with the answers, but we do want to be responsible for asking the questions.”

the symbolic "great father" was really just a demented old fool....,

NYTimes |  Even before Ronald Reagan became the oldest elected president, his mental state was a political issue. His adversaries often suggested his penchant for contradictory statements, forgetting names and seeming absent-mindedness could be linked to dementia.

In 1980, Mr. Reagan told me that he would resign the presidency if White House doctors found him mentally unfit. Years later, those doctors and key aides told me they had not detected any changes in his mental abilities while in office.

Now a clever new analysis has found that during his two terms in office, subtle changes in Mr. Reagan’s speaking patterns linked to the onset of dementia were apparent years before doctors diagnosed his Alzheimer’s disease in 1994.

The findings, published in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease by researchers at Arizona State University, do not prove that Mr. Reagan exhibited signs of dementia that would have adversely affected his judgment and ability to make decisions in office.

But the research does suggest that alterations in speech one day might be used to predict development of Alzheimer’s and other neurological conditions years before symptoms are clinically perceptible.

psychological science and social change? how you gonna manage the reptile brain?

NYTimes |  “I wanted the research I was doing to match the stuff I was thinking about,” he says. “And I just felt more and more that the most relevant level of analysis for generating social change was the psychological level.”

He started looking into conflict-intervention programs and discovered that there were hundreds more like the one he volunteered for in Ireland, and that hardly any of them had been scientifically validated. No one was really checking to see if the programs accomplished their stated goals, or even if their stated goals were the best ones for achieving the desired outcomes. “They have all these very straightforward metrics like building trust, and building empathy, that sound totally reasonable,”

Bruneau says. “But it turns out that a lot of those common-sense approaches can be way off-base.”

Increasing empathy seemed to be a key goal of every conflict-resolution program he looked at; he thought this reflected a misconception about the type of people who engage in political violence. “If Hollywood is to be believed, they’re all sociopaths,” he says. “But that’s not the reality. Suicide bombers tend to be characterized by, if anything, very high levels of empathy. Wafa Idris, the first Palestinian woman suicide bomber, was a volunteer paramedic during the second Intifada.”

Bruneau developed a theory to explain this paradox: When considering an enemy, the mind generates an “empathy gap.” It mutes the empathy signal, and that muting prevents us from putting ourselves in the perceived enemy’s shoes. He couldn’t yet guess at the mechanism behind the phenomenon, but he hypothesized that it had nothing to do with how empathetic a person was by nature. Even the most deeply empathetic people could mute their empathy signals under the right circumstances. And it was difficult to determine what role empathy played in group conflicts. Increasing empathy might be great at improving pro-social behavior among individuals, but if a program succeeded in boosting an individual’s empathy for his or her own group, he reasoned, it might actually increase hostility toward the enemy.

science can explain but not undo the works of the reptile brain...,

phys.org |  Figure 2 now shows on the horizontal axis the share of total income inequality due to differences between racial groups. Under this dimension, the two cities turn out to be actually very different. The share of total inequality due to differences between races is twice as large in Houston as in San Francisco. This in turn is related to the level of trust in the two cities. In San Francisco, where the probability of meeting an individual of a different race but similar income level is relatively high, the level of trust is higher than in Houston, where belonging to a different race is also likely to be associated with a difference in income.

This same pattern of apparent similarity, which is in reality masking an additional dimension of heterogeneity, is repeated over different pairs of cities in the US My empirical analysis documents the pattern in a systematic way, exploiting answers from 20,000 respondents to the US General Social Survey (GSS) between 1973 and 2010. The survey contains a variety of indicators on the respondents' political views, social behavior and socioeconomic characteristics. Crucially, it also asks respondents whether they think that most people can be trusted. I match their answers to this question to their socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, and to the level of racial diversity, total income inequality and racial income inequality in the MSA of residence.

I start out by showing that racial diversity and total income inequality have a statistically significant, negative effect on individual measures of trust, a result that is consistent with previous studies. But I then find that these effects become statistically insignificant once I account for the income inequality between racial groups, which instead remains negatively and significantly associated to the level of trust of the respondent.

I then show that the negative impact of racial income inequality on trust is larger in more racially fragmented communities, and that members of minority groups reduce their trust towards others more, when racial income inequality increases. These results are consistent with a simple framework in which individuals can be similar in both race and income, and trust towards others falls at increasing rates as individuals become different in both dimensions.

Overall, my results suggests that racial diversity is more detrimental when associated with income disparities between races and that, similarly, income inequality is more harmful when it has a marked racial connotation. This in turn suggests that policies aimed at reducing income disparities along racial lines might be particularly effective in increasing the level of social participation and trust in US communities.

when the stupid go to stunting it can't end well...,

newyorker |  The Indiana law is the product of a G.O.P. search for a respectable way to oppose same-sex marriage and to rally the base around it. There are two problems with this plan, however. First, not everyone in the party, even in its most conservative precincts, wants to make gay marriage an issue, even a stealth one—or opposes gay marriage to begin with. As the unhappy reaction in Indiana shows, plenty of Republicans find the anti-marriage position embarrassing, as do some business interests that are normally aligned with the party. Second, the law is not an empty rhetorical device but one that has been made strangely powerful, in ways that haven’t yet been fully tested, by the Supreme Court decision last year in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. That ruling allowed the Christian owners of a chain of craft stores to use the federal version of the RFRA to ignore parts of the Affordable Care Act. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her dissent, argued strongly that the majority was turning that RFRA into a protean tool for all sorts of evasions. As Jeffrey Toobin has noted, she was proved right even before the Indiana controversy.

Both of those factors have combined to produce real confusion about the Indiana law. Some people are not being straightforward about its implications, whether because they are calculating, mortified, or—in the case of opponents, some of whom have also been unclear about what the law means—alarmed, but it also inhabits novel legal territory, so it is genuinely hard to know what those implications would be.  Governor Pence has done much to muddle things even more. On Sunday, on “This Week,” George Stephanopoulos asked Pence “a yes-or-no question” about whether “a florist in Indiana can now refuse to serve a gay couple without fear of punishment.” He asked half a dozen times, but never got an answer:

Pence: This is not about discrimination, this is about …

Stephanopoulos: But …

Pence: … empowering people …

Stephanopoulos: But let me try to pin you …

Pence: … government overreach here.

Stephanopoulos: … down here though. … It’s just a question, sir. Question, sir. Yes or no?

Pence: Well—well, this—there’s been shameless rhetoric about my state and about this law and about its intention all over the Internet. People are trying to make it about one particular issue. And now you’re doing that as well.

hustling up a little darren wilson $$$...,

WaPo |  The pizza shop in Walkerton, Ind. — a small town of about 2,200 people about 20 miles south of South Bend — doesn’t look like the epicenter of a national controversy. The black-and-white linoleum and red booths are unassuming — the decor of any take-out joint anywhere in America. A Triple XXX Root Beer will set you back $2. It even has a piano — and a prayer suggestion box.

“Every day before we open the store, we gather and pray together,” reads a sign posted in the store, which also boasts numerous crosses, including one that says “Glorify the Lord.” “If there is something you would like us to pray for, just write it down and drop it in the box.”

But Memories Pizza — “a Walkerton mainstay,” according to local media, for more than a decade — is feeling the heat of a great debate about religious freedom and gay rights. Memories has been billed by a local ABC affiliate as the “first business to publicly deny same-sex service” after Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) into law. Many feel the law, which advocates say is intended to protect religious freedom, will result in discrimination against homosexuals.

The affiliate was looking for reactions to RFRA — and it made some memories at Memories.

David Brooks: politely respect being refused service or risk bloody war of all against all...,

NYTimes |  The 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was supported by Senator Ted Kennedy and a wide posse of progressives, sidestepped the abstract and polarizing theological argument. It focused on the concrete facts of specific cases. The act basically holds that government sometimes has to infringe on religious freedom in order to pursue equality and other goods, but, when it does, it should have a compelling reason and should infringe in the least intrusive way possible.

This moderate, grounded, incremental strategy has produced amazing results. Fewer people have to face the horror of bigotry, isolation, marginalization and prejudice.

Yet I wonder if this phenomenal achievement is going off the rails. Indiana has passed a state law like the 1993 federal act, and sparked an incredible firestorm.

If the opponents of that law were arguing that the Indiana statute tightens the federal standards a notch too far, that would be compelling. But that’s not the argument the opponents are making.

Instead, the argument seems to be that the federal act’s concrete case-by-case approach is wrong. The opponents seem to be saying there is no valid tension between religious pluralism and equality. Claims of religious liberty are covers for anti-gay bigotry.

This deviation seems unwise both as a matter of pragmatics and as a matter of principle. In the first place, if there is no attempt to balance religious liberty and civil rights, the cause of gay rights will be associated with coercion, not liberation. Some people have lost their jobs for expressing opposition to gay marriage. There are too many stories like the Oregon bakery that may have to pay a $150,000 fine because it preferred not to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex ceremony. A movement that stands for tolerance does not want to be on the side of a government that compels a photographer who is an evangelical Christian to shoot a same-sex wedding that he would rather avoid.

Furthermore, the evangelical movement is evolving. Many young evangelicals understand that their faith should not be defined by this issue. If orthodox Christians are suddenly written out of polite society as modern-day Bull Connors, this would only halt progress, polarize the debate and lead to a bloody war of all against all.

As a matter of principle, it is simply the case that religious liberty is a value deserving our deepest respect, even in cases where it leads to disagreements as fundamental as the definition of marriage.

Morality is a politeness of the soul. Deep politeness means we make accommodations.

RFRA: Indiana's First Church of Cannabis

rawstory |   In a classic case of “unintended consequences,” the recently signed Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in Indiana may have opened the door for the establishment of the First Church of Cannabis in the Hoosier State.

While Governor Mike Pence (R) was holding a signing ceremony for the bill allowing businesses and individuals to deny services to gays on religious grounds or values, paperwork for the First Church of Cannabis Inc. was being filed with the Secretary of State’s office, reports RTV6.

Church founder Bill Levin announced on his Facebook page that the church’s registration has been approved, writing, “Status: Approved by Secretary of State of Indiana – “Congratulations your registration has been approved!” Now we begin to accomplish our goals of Love, Understanding, and Good Health.”

Levin is currently seeking $4.20 donations towards his non-profit church.

According to Indiana attorney and political commentator Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Indiana legislators, in their haste to protect the religious values and practices of their constituents, may have unwittingly put the state in an awkward position with those who profess to smoke pot as a religious sacrament.

Shabazz pointed out that it is still illegal to smoke pot in Indiana, but wrote, “I would argue that under RFRA, as long as you can show that reefer is part of your religious practices, you got a pretty good shot of getting off scot-free.”

man-up dumbasses - MUCH more respect for old bessinger than for these fruity-assed conservatard creepers...,

theatlantic |  There’s a factual dispute about the new Indiana law. It is called a “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” like the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in 1993.* Thus a number of its defenders have claimed it is really the same law. Here, for example, is the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack: “Is there any difference between Indiana's law and the federal law? Nothing significant.” I am not sure what McCormack was thinking; but even my old employer, The Washington Post, seems to believe that if a law has a similar title as another law, they must be identical. “Indiana is actually soon to be just one of 20 states with a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA,” the Post’s Hunter Schwarz wrote, linking to this map created by the National Conference of State Legislatures. 

The problem with this statement is that, well, it’s false. That becomes clear when you read and compare those tedious state statutes.  If you do that, you will find that the Indiana statute has two features the federal RFRA—and most state RFRAs—do not. First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to “the free exercise of religion.” The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s; in fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs. 

The new Indiana statute also contains this odd language: “A person whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened, by a violation of this chapter may assert the violation or impending violation as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.” (My italics.) Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state statutes cited by the Post, says anything like this; only the Texas RFRA, passed in 1999, contains similar language.

What these words mean is, first, that the Indiana statute explicitly recognizes that a for-profit corporation has “free exercise” rights matching those of individuals or churches. A lot of legal thinkers thought that idea was outlandish until last year’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, in which the Court’s five conservatives interpreted the federal RFRA to give some corporate employers a religious veto over their employees’ statutory right to contraceptive coverage. 

Second, the Indiana statute explicitly makes a business’s “free exercise” right a defense against a private lawsuit by another person, rather than simply against actions brought by government. Why does this matter? Well, there’s a lot of evidence that the new wave of “religious freedom” legislation was impelled, at least in part, by a panic over a New Mexico state-court decision, Elane Photography v. Willock. In that case, a same-sex couple sued a professional photography studio that refused to photograph the couple’s wedding. New Mexico law bars discrimination in “public accommodations” on the basis of sexual orientation. The studio said that New Mexico’s RFRA nonetheless barred the suit; but the state’s Supreme Court held that the RFRA did not apply “because the government is not a party.”

Remarkably enough, soon after, language found its way into the Indiana statute to make sure that no Indiana court could ever make a similar decision. 

how can you tell if a ruhtarded hoosier is lying?

NYTimes |  The state laws were not used to protect minorities, these critics say, but to allow some religious groups to undermine the rights of women, gays and lesbians or other groups.

“The coalition broke apart over the civil rights issues,” said Eunice Rho, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. The organization, which initially supported the measures, now opposes them unless they include language ensuring that they will not be used to permit discrimination or harm.

In the 1990s, for example, in the kind of case that raised red flags for civil rights advocates, landlords cited religious beliefs, sometimes with success in court, after refusing to rent to unmarried heterosexual couples.

The clash of values erupted again after Indiana adopted its own version of a “religious freedom” act last week. Arkansas is expected to approve a similar law this week.

The furor has put Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, who is considered a possible Republican presidential candidate, under national scrutiny. On Monday, Republican legislators in Indiana said they were searching with the governor for a possible amendment to the law to “clarify” that it does not permit discrimination against gays and lesbians.

“It is not the intent of the law to discriminate against anyone, and it will not be allowed to discriminate against anyone,” David. C. Long, president pro tem of the State Senate, said on Monday at a news conference with Brian C. Bosma, speaker of the State House of Representatives.

a scientific ranking of subreddits liable to trigger intersectional allies and others...,

   
   

idibon |  In any community there’s bound to be friction, but some… take it further than others. Reddit is a platform for thousands of online communities (known as “subreddits”), where community members can submit content, and upvote, downvote, or comment on content that others have submitted. Topics of discussion on Reddit run the gamut of human interest, but one of Reddit’s favorite topics to talk about is, unsurprisingly, Reddit itself.

A recent post on AskReddit posing the question – “What popular subreddit has a really toxic community?” – surged to the top of the front page with 4,000 upvotes and over 10,000 comments as Redditors voiced their opinions on which Reddit communities they found to be the most abhorrent (the “/r/” prefix denotes a subreddit):

• /r/parenting: “there are a TON of sanctimommies in there”
• /r/MakeUpAddiction: “[has] cult-like tendencies” encouraging a “race to be the palest and most translucent snowflake”
• /r/leagueoflegends: “[we] made professional players quit the game, that’s how lovely we are”

As I sifted through the thread, my data geek sensibilities tingled as I wondered “Why must we rely upon opinion for such a question? Shouldn’t there be an objective way to measure toxicity?”

With this in mind, I set out to scientifically measure toxicity and supportiveness in Reddit comments and communities. I then compared Reddit’s own evaluation of its subreddits to see where they were right, where they were wrong, and what they may have missed. While this post is specific to Reddit, our methodology here could be applied to offer an objective score of community health for any data set featuring user comments.

Defining Toxicity and Supportiveness

So what is Toxicity? Before we could do any analysis around which subreddits were the most Toxic, we needed to define what we would be measuring. At a high level, Toxic comments are ones that would make someone who disagrees with the viewpoint of the commenter feel uncomfortable and less likely to want to participate in that Reddit community. To be more specific, we defined a comment as Toxic if it met either of the following criteria:

1. Ad hominem attack: a comment that directly attacks another Redditor (e.g. “your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries”) or otherwise shows contempt/disagrees in a completely non-constructive manner (e.g. “GASP are they trying CENSOR your FREE SPEECH??? I weep for you /s”)
2. Overt bigotry:  the use of bigoted (racist/sexist/homophobic etc.) language, whether targeting any particular individual or more generally, which would make members of the referenced group feel highly uncomfortable

However, the problem with only measuring Toxic comments is it biases against subreddits that simply tend to be more polarizing and evoke more emotional responses generally. In order to account for this, we also measured Supportiveness in comments – defined as language that is directly addressing another Redditor in a supportive (e.g. “We’re rooting for you!”) or appreciative (e.g. “Thanks for the awesome post!”) manner.

By measuring both Toxicity and Supportiveness we are able to get a holistic view of community health that can be used to more fairly compare and contrast subreddit communities.

An Anonymous, Online, Geo-Tagged System to Report Microaggressions at College!

reason |  So remember, kids, you don't go to college to learn new things and feed your head. You go to college to be subjected to an anonymous system of collecting information about the bad thoughts you have and the misstatements you make, some of which you might not even have intended to be hurtful.

But rest easy, because if you are in fact accused of microaggressing, your accuser "would likely have to reveal their identity" if any charges are pressed (emphasis added). Because we know how well colleges do at handling legal-style proceedings.

The system would allow individuals reporting microaggressions to remain anonymous. However, junior Kyle James, vice president of communications and co-sponsor of the bill, said those reporting a microaggression would likely have to reveal their identity if they wanted to pursue any legal action.
James said in addition to a space to report the particular incident, the online system would track the demographics of those reporting microaggressions as well as those accused of committing them.

More here and here.

I would like to believe that awfulness of imposing such a system is self-evident, especially at a university, which is supposed to be about the free and open exchange of ideas and the production of knowledge (at least in the few spare moments between football games and re-education seminars). In an astonishingly short half-century, we have cycled from a demand for "free speech" on college campuses to the condemnation of speech via anonymous, online, geo-tagged systems that may or may not accord the accused any ability to speak up in their own defense.

Unless your goal is to chill or control speech and thought, this sort of program is a complete anathema to everything that higher education is supposed to promote and cherish. But there you are, another year older and deeper in debt.  Fist tap Big Don.

how much economic pain can the intersectional allies inflict and how much can the hoosier bibtards take?

dailysignal |  As Ryan T. Anderson and I explained Thursday, the Indiana law is good policy. Like the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Indiana’s new law prohibits substantial government burdens on religious exercise unless the government can show a compelling interest in burdening religious liberty and does so through the least restrictive means.

These protections for religious freedom provide a commonsense way to balance the fundamental right to religious liberty with compelling government interests.

backchannel private security and intelligence-gathering sounds a lot like crime to me

gawker |  Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from Blumenthal's account.

The emails, which were posted on the internet in 2013, also show that Blumenthal and another close Clinton associate discussed contracting with a retired Army special operations commander to put operatives on the ground near the Libya-Tunisia border while Libya's civil war raged in 2011.

Blumenthal's emails to Clinton, which were directed to her private email account, include at least a dozen detailed reports on events on the deteriorating political and security climate in Libya as well as events in other nations. They came to light after a hacker broke into Blumenthal's account and have taken on new significance in light of the disclosure that she conducted State Department and personal business exclusively over an email server that she controlled and kept secret from State Department officials and which only recently was discovered by congressional investigators.

The contents of that account are now being sought by a congressional inquiry into the Benghazi attacks. Clinton has handed over more than 30,000 pages of her emails to the State Department, after unilaterally deciding which ones involved government business; the State Department has so far handed almost 900 pages of those over to the committee. A Clinton spokesman told Gawker and ProPublica (which are collaborating on this story) that she has turned over all the emails Blumenthal sent to Hillary.

The dispatches from Blumenthal to Clinton's private email address were posted online after Blumenthal's account was hacked in 2013 by Romanian hacker Marcel-Lehel Lazar, who went by the name Guccifer. Lazar also broke into accounts belonging to George W. Bush's sister, Colin Powell, and others. He's now serving a seven-year sentence in his home country and was charged in a U.S. indictment last year.

The contents of the memos, which have recently become the subject of speculation in the right-wing media, raise new questions about how Clinton used her private email account and whether she tapped into an undisclosed back channel for information on Libya's crisis and other foreign policy matters.

indicative of the way lawyers in power act wrt the rule of law?

firstlook |  One of the earliest and most intense grievances of civil libertarians during the Bush presidency was its radical abuse of the “state secrets privilege.” That doctrine began as a narrowly crafted evidentiary rule whereby parties to litigation would be barred from using specific documents that could reveal sensitive national security secrets. But it morphed into the legal equivalent of a nuclear bomb whereby the U.S. government could literally demand not that specific documents be excluded but that U.S. courts dismiss entire lawsuits before they began — even when those lawsuits alleged criminal behavior by top U.S. officials — on the ground that the subject matter of the lawsuit was too sensitive to be safely adjudicated.

The Bush Justice Department used this weapon to prevent its torture, detention, rendition and surveillance victims — even those everyone acknowledged were completely innocent — from having a day in court. They would simply say that the treatment of the plaintiffs was classified, and that disclosure would risk harm to national security, and subservient U.S. federal judges (an almost redundant term) would dutifully dismiss the lawsuits before they even began. It literally removed high U.S. government officials from the rule of law: if you commit crimes or brutally abuse people, you will be immunized from legal accountability if you did it in a classified setting.

When Obama was in the Senate and then running for President in 2007, he was highly critical of the Bush use of the “state secrets privilege” to get rid of troublesome lawsuits. His official campaign website cited Bush’s abuse of the privilege as a hallmark of excessive secrecy.

But like so many of his purported views, this concern about the use of the “state secrets privilege” was abandoned almost immediately upon his inauguration. His DOJ invoked the privilege to demand victims of Bush programs of torture, rendition, detention, and surveillance be denied any opportunity to be heard in court even when the U.S. government itself acknowledged they were innocent. Obama lawyers even invoked secrecy to argue that a lawsuit challenging the legality of their own targeted assassination program against a U.S. citizen could not be heard in court. As an early headline in the Obama-supporting TPM site recognized: “Expert Consensus: Obama Mimics Bush On State Secrets. And it worked in virtually every case.

indicative of the way a lot of people in power behave?

nypost |  In 2012, Forbes magazine ranked Brunei the fifth-richest nation in the world. Yet there is little fun to be had: Alcohol is banned and there is virtually no nightlife or culture.

“I’m trying to think of a place that’s duller,” Australian writer Charles James told Fortune in 1999. “Maybe a British village in midwinter.”

In one way, the brothers adhere to Islamic law: As prescribed, each has several wives and families. But everything else they do is in defiance of the Koran and the law they’ve just imposed.

“It’s a radical double standard,” says Jillian Lauren, who wrote about her life as a member of Jefri’s harem in her memoir, “Some Girls.” “They have more money than anyone else. I know that they both have been married and divorced multiple times. It’s really hypocritical.”

“With their money, they could have cured diseases,” an adviser to Jefri told Fortune. “But they have little interest in the rest of humanity.”

Another described Jefri and his brother as incredibly dim. “They don’t have a lot of thoughts,” he said. “If you were a fly on the wall and heard their conversations, they’d take you to Bellevue.”

A third brother, Mohamed, was reported to loathe his brothers’ wantonness and profligacy. But when the Sultan tasked him with rebuilding the economy that he and Jefri had so badly damaged, he took more than $2 billion for himself and was promptly fired.

cut and run

radiolab |  At the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City, Kipchoge Keino overcame a gall bladder infection to win gold in the 1500 meter race. Since then, one particular group of Kenyans - the Kalenjin - has produced an astonishing number of great long-distance runners. Gregory Warner - NPR's East Africa correspondent - takes Jad and Robert down a rabbit hole of theories about what exactly is going on in Kalenjin country.  

David Epstein and John Manners help Greg untangle a web of potential factors - from something in the cornmeal to simple economics. And, after talking to a young Kalenjin runner named Elly Kipgogei, Greg discovers a somewhat disturbing explanation for Kalenjin running prowess that actually makes him want to get on the treadmill and push himself just a little harder.

peak casinos

newyorker |  In the summer of 2010, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie travelled by helicopter to Atlantic City for what the local media described as a historic press conference. The news out of the city had been growing steadily worse, and by the time of Christie’s appearance it was clear that, nearly four decades after it had legalized gambling in an attempt to avoid economic ruin, Atlantic City was back where it had started. Standing in front of Boardwalk Hall, next to the mayor and members of the city council, Christie declared, “Atlantic City is dying.” The city, once known as the World’s Playground, had become unclean and unsafe. The number of visitors had fallen, and casino revenues were plummeting. Christie then announced a plan to return Atlantic City to its rightful place as the East Coast’s premier entertainment destination. There would be a sparkling new tourist district, with more conventions, restaurants, retail outlets, and non-gambling attractions. Also in development were bold new marketing plans and nonstop air routes to deliver fresh gamblers. Atlantic City, the Governor promised, would become “Las Vegas East.”

Four years later, Christie’s plan has failed. Four of Atlantic City’s twelve casinos have gone out of business this year, including Revel, an estimated $2.3-billion jewel that opened just two years ago; another, the Trump Taj Mahal, has announced that it could close within weeks. An estimated eight thousand jobs have already been lost, and thousands more seem likely to follow. Since Christie’s 2010 press conference, the assessed value of all the property in the city has declined by nearly half.

While it would be easy to conclude that Atlantic City’s demise is the predictable result of decades of well-documented greed, corruption, and incompetent leadership, the city is in fact one of the first casualties of a nationwide casino arms race. Eager for new jobs and new revenues that don’t require raising taxes, states from coast to coast have turned to gambling: in 1978, only Nevada and New Jersey had commercial casinos; today, twenty-four states do. Atlantic City once had the densely populated Northeast all to itself, but now nearly every state in the region is home to casinos. And with both New York and Massachusetts poised to open massive new gambling resorts, the competition for the fixed number of gamblers there will only get tougher. “It’s a war,” Father Richard McGowan, a professor of management at Boston College who studies the gambling industry, said. “It’s remarkable to me how the states are fighting each other for gambling revenue.”