how psychopaths choose their victims

Psychology Today | As my fellow Psychology Today blogger Marisa Mauro has pointed out, psychologists have long been known that the more psychopathic a person is, the more easily they can identify potential victims. Indeed, they can do so just by watching the way a person moves. In one study, test subjects watched videos of twelve individuals walking, shot from behind, and rated how easily they could be mugged. As it happened, some of the people in the videotapes really had been mugged -- and the most psychopathic of the subjects were able to tell which was which. Writes Mauro:

The [subjects] completed the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale: Version III, which measures interpersonal and affective traits associated with psychopathy as well as intra-personal instability and antisocial traits... Overall results confirmed a strong positive correlation between psychopathy scores and accuracy of victim identification. This means that individuals that score higher for psychopathy are better at selecting victims.

And what was it about these people that made them seem vulnerable? A later study found that the men were picking up on whole suite of nonverbal cues, including the length of their stride, how they shifted their weight, and how high they lifted their feet. Taken together, these cues gave the psychopathic men a rough gauge of how confident their potential victims were. Body language that implies a lack of confidence --- read: socially submissive --- includes lack of eye contact, fidgeting of the hands and feet, and the avoidance of large gestures when shifting posture.

The researchers' findings confirmed my own suspicions regarding the dubious fellow I mentioned above. The women who wound up on the receiving end of his attentions were individuals who, in their own description, were not very worldly, experienced, or outgoing. They were psychologically vulnerable and hence ill-equipped to either resist this fellow's predations or to deal with them emotionally after they had occurred. In the aftermath, they are so traumatized that even speaking about their experiences is extremely painful. And so the psychopath continues on his way. Fist tap Dale.

is there a liberal gene?

Discovery | Is political ideology derived from a person's social environment or is it a result of genetic predisposition?

It's an interaction of both, according to a recent study on our political leanings that boosts both sides of the nature versus nurture debate.

Scientists at the University of California San Diego and Harvard University determined that people who carry a variant of the DRD4 gene are more likely to be liberals as adults, depending on the number of friendships they had during high school. They published their study in a recent issue of The Journal of Politics.

Data was analyzed from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (the same source for a recent study that found intelligent children drink more alcohol as adults).

The four authors, including UCSD's James Fowler, wanted to explore if politics were heritable by identifying a specific gene variant associated with political leaning. They hypothesized that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences would tend to be more liberal.

The 7R variant of DRD4, a dopamine receptor gene, had previously been associated with novelty seeking. The researchers theorized novelty seeking would be related to openness, a psychological trait that has been associated with political liberalism.

However, social environment was critical. The more friends gene carriers have in high school, the more likely they are to be liberals as adults. The authors write, "Ten friends can move a person with two copies of 7R allele almost halfway from being a conservative to moderate or from being moderate to liberal."

They theorize a larger social network may bring more diverse viewpoints, which could be an influence on the liberal development.

Neither the gene nor social networks alone influenced political identification. Fist tap Ken.

america 2.0 - from private greed to public service

how NOT to organize a community

ClubOrlov | Dire predictions made by authoritative figures can provide the impetus to attempt great things: establish community gardens and farmer's markets, lobby for improved public transportation, bike lanes and sidewalks, promote ride-sharing initiatives, weatherize existing homes and impose more stringent construction standards for new ones, construct of windmill farms and install solar panels on public buildings, promote the use of composting toilets and high-efficiency lighting and so on. In the midst of all this organizational activity neighbors get a chance to meet, perhaps for the first time, and discover a commonality of interests that leads them to form acquaintances and perhaps even friendships. As neighbors get to know each other, they start looking out for each other, improving safety and reducing crime. As the community becomes more tight-knit, it changes in atmosphere and appearance, becoming more fashionable and desirable, attracting better-educated and more prosperous residents while pricing out the undesirable element. News of these vast improvements spreads far and wide, and the community becomes a tourist mecca, complete with food festivals, swank boutiques and pricy bric-à-brac shops and restaurants.

The undesirable element is forced to decamp to a less desirable neighborhood nearby. There, it has no choice but to suffer with high levels of crime, but is typically afraid to ask the police for help, having learned from experience that the police are more likely to harass them then to help them, to arrest them for minor offenses and to round them up and deport them if they happen to be illegal immigrants. They also learn to be careful around members of local gangs and drug dealers. Since official jobs in the neighborhood are scarce, they seek informal, cash-based employment, contributing to an underground economy. Seeking safety in numbers, they self-organize along racial and ethnic lines, and, to promote their common interests, form ethnic mafias that strive to dominate one or more forms of illegal or semi-legal activity. Growing up in a dangerous, violent environment, their children become tough at a young age, and, those that survive, develop excellent situational awareness that allows them to steer clear of dangerous situations and to know when to resort to violence.

When the fossil fuel-based national economy shuts down due to the increasingly well understood local ramifications of the global phenomenon of Peak Oil, both of these communities are harmed, but to different extents and in different ways.

GOP Web

Fist tap Arnach.

deliberate fraud and coverup by the fed?

Video - William Black on Dylan Ratigan on the Fed and Bank Fraud.

scary new wage data

Tax.com | Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar, new data from the Social Security Administration show. Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined, but at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold.

Not a single news organization reported this data when it was released October 15, searches of Google and the Nexis databases show. Nor did any blog, so the citizen journalists and professional economists did no better than the newsroom pros in reporting this basic information about our economy.

The new data hold important lessons for economic growth and tax policy and take on added meaning when examined in light of tax return data back to 1950.

The story the numbers tell is one of a strengthening economic base with income growing fastest at the bottom until, in 1981, we made an abrupt change in tax and economic policy. Since then the base has fared poorly while huge economic gains piled up at the very top, along with much lower tax burdens.

A weak foundation cannot properly support a massive superstructure, as the leaning Tower of Pisa shows. The latest wage data show the disastrous results some of us warned about, although like the famous tower, the economy only lists badly and has not collapsed.

Measured in 2009 dollars, total wages fell to just above $5.9 trillion, down $215 billion from the previous year. Compared with 2007, when the economy peaked, total wages were down $313 billion or 5 percent in real terms.

The number of Americans with any wages in 2009 fell by more than 4.5 million compared with the previous year. Because the population grew by about 1 percent, the number of idle hands and minds grew by 6 million.

These figures show, far more powerfully than the official unemployment measure known as U3, how both widespread and deep the loss of jobs was in 2009. While the official unemployment rate is just under 10 percent, deeper analysis of the data by economist John Williams at http://www.shadowstats.com shows a real under- and unemployment rate of more than 22 percent. Fist tap Dale.

how foreclosure fraud is done

Video - FORECLOSURE FRAUD pt 1 of 5 HOW THEY DO IT

MersCorp was formed in the early 1990s by the former C.E.O.s of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Indy Mac, Countrywide, Stewart Title Insurance and the American Land Title Association. Smell anything funny???

Here I will show you how MY personal Mortgage Foreclosure FRAUD happened. Pay close attention and learn before it is too late. Here are the subjects and principles.

Foreclosure Hamlet - Supporting, Informing & Connecting People in Foreclosure

malicious bankers with syphilis?

Video - Dylan Ratigan interviews Lisa Epstein of Foreclosure Hamlet on mortgage backed securities.

more powerful and well connected than you thought

CommonDreams | Right-wing brothers Charles and David Koch, each worth over $21 billion, don't just underwrite a huge conservative infrastructure of front groups, think tanks and political campaigns, reports Think Progress; they also strengthen a "culture of prosperity" through meetings with like-minded corporate "investors" who oppose health, energy, financial and other reforms. Details on their symbiotic relationship with big moneyed interests from Glenn Beck and the Chamber of Commerce to oil, health insurance, Wall Street and real estate companies here; more on those connections from CounterPunch here.

koch plan and participants for the 2010 election

ThinkProgress | In 2006, Koch Industries owner Charles Koch revealed to the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore that he coordinates the funding of the conservative infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks, media outlets and other anti-government efforts through a twice annual meeting of wealthy right-wing donors. He also confided to Moore, who is funded through several of Koch’s ventures, that his true goal is to strengthen the “culture of prosperity” by eliminating “90%” of all laws and government regulations. Although it is difficult to quantify the exact amount Koch alone has funneled to right-wing fronts, some studies have pointed toward $50 million he has given alone to anti-environmental groups. Recently, fronts funded by Charles and his brother David have received scrutiny because they have played a pivotal role in the organizing of the anti-Obama Tea Parties and the promotion of virulent far right lawmakers like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). (David Koch praised DeMint and gave him a “Washington Award” shortly after the senator promised to “break” Obama by making health reform his “Waterloo.”)

While the Koch brothers — each worth over $21.5 billion — have certainly underwritten much of the right, their hidden coordination with other big business money has gone largely unnoticed. ThinkProgress has obtained a memo outlining the details of the last Koch gathering held in June of this year. The memo, along with an attendee list of about 210 people, shows the titans of industry — from health insurance companies, oil executives, Wall Street investors, and real estate tycoons — working together with conservative journalists and Republican operatives to plan the 2010 election, as well as ongoing conservative efforts through 2012. According to the memo, David Chavern, the number two at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Fox News hate-talker Glenn Beck also met with these representatives of the corporate elite. In an election season with the most undisclosed secret corporate giving since the Watergate-era, the memo sheds light on the symbiotic relationship between extremely profitable, multi-billion dollar corporations and much of the conservative infrastructure. The memo describes the prospective corporate donors as “investors,” and it makes clear that many of the Republican operatives managing shadowy, undisclosed fronts running attack ads against Democrats were involved in the Koch’s election-planning event

israel sees double-standard in wikileaks response

CSM | The Wikileaks release of US military field reports from Iraq that detail tens of thousands of civilian casualties in seven years of fighting is being used by some Israels to argue that their country is a victim of an international double standard on human rights.

With Israeli politicians facing possible arrest in Europe and their government facing allegations of war crimes stemming form the United Nations' Goldstone Report on the 2009 Gaza war, some Israelis are drawing a connection between the conduct of the US military in Iraq and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza. They say that the world's likely response – or non-response – to the Wikileaks revelations will demonstrate that Israel is held to a higher standard than other nations.

On Monday, Israeli lawmaker Michael Ben Ari said he filed a formal complaint with the UN, calling for war crimes investigations of senior American politicians and "international arrest warrants for US government leaders."

In a letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, he wrote: "I call on the UN to condemn the behavior of the US and especially its attempts to hide the facts... We need to expose the hypocrisy of the West... The world must understand who the criminals are."

Such a call emanating from Israel – usually a staunch US ally – may seem strange. But Mr. Ben Ari, a member of Israel's far right, isn't interested in prosecutions of Bush or Obama administration officials so much as he is in pointing out what, to his mind, is unfair criticism of Israel.

israel's rise of the right

NPR | In Israel, a recent poll shows that support for traditional left-of-center parties is slipping dramatically. Analysts say it's an indication of the waning power of the peace movement in Israel. The mostly right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reflects a fundamental shift in Israeli politics.

'Reflecting the Israeli Mood'
On a recent afternoon, Israel's parliament, or Knesset, tables a no-confidence motion in the government's settlement policies in the occupied West Bank. A few left-of-center politicians take to the podium, but the hall is mostly empty.

It's a sign of the times in Israel. Netanyahu leads what analysts here say is the most right-wing government in Israel's history. Parties that up until recently were marginal at best now have a powerful voice.

The recent poll shows that if elections were held today, left-leaning Labor, the party that used to control Israeli politics, would only get nine seats in the 120-member Knesset. Left-leaning parties in all would only get about 47 seats.

On the other hand, the right-leaning nationalist and religious parties would get about 73 seats.

And the group that has been making the biggest inroads is Yisrael Beiteinu, or Israel Our Homeland, led by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

"In a way, he's reflecting the Israeli mood more than I do, more than the Labor does," says Daniel Ben Simon, a member of parliament for the Labor party. "I have witnessed it from the parliament. I am sitting next to the people from Yisrael Beiteinu Lieberman party. It's their Knesset, it's their time, it's their period. They are moving within the Knesset as if they were the owners of this place."

Rise Of The Right
Analysts say there are several reasons why the rise of the right in Israel is no temporary phenomenon. The first is demographic. Israel's population is becoming more religious. Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews have bigger families.

But, critically, the failure of the left's long push for peace with the Palestinians has gutted its support.

weimar in jerusalem?

redress | Even now, 77 years later, there is no final answer to the question: why did the German republic collapse?

This is an all-important question, because now people in Israel are asking, with growing concern: is the Israeli republic collapsing?

For the first time, this question is being asked in all seriousness. Throughout the years, we were careful not to mention the word fascism in public discourse. It raises memories which are too monstrous. Now this taboo has been broken.

Yitzhak Herzog, the minister of welfare in the Netanyahu government, a member of the Labour party, the grandson of a chief rabbi and the son of a president, said a few days ago that “fascism is touching the margins of our society”. He was wrong: fascism is not only touching the margins, it is touching the government in which he is serving, and the Knesset, of which he is a member.

Not a day – quite literally – passes without a group of Knesset members tabling a new racist bill. The country is still divided by the amendment to the law of citizenship, which will compel applicants to swear allegiance to “Israel as a Jewish and democratic state”. Now the ministers are discussing whether this will be demanded only of non-Jews (which doesn’t sound nice) or of Jews, too – as if this would change the racist content one bit.

This week, a new bill was tabled. It would prohibit non-citizens from acting as tourist guides in East Jerusalem. Non-citizens in this case means Arabs. Because, when East Jerusalem was annexed by force to Israel after the 1967 war, its Arab inhabitants were not granted citizenship. They were accorded only the status of “permanent residents”, as if they were recent newcomers and not scions of families that have lived in the city for centuries.

The bill is intended to deprive Arab Jerusalemites of the right to serve as tourist guides at their holy places in their city, since they are apt to deviate from the official propaganda line. Shocking? Incredible? Not in the eyes of the proponents, who include members of the Kadima Party. A Knesset member of the Meretz party also signed, but retracted, claiming that he was confused.

“The Knesset members act like sharks in a feeding frenzy. There is a wild competition between them to see who can devise the most racist bill.”

This proposal comes after dozens of bills of this kind have been tabled recently, and before dozens of others which are already on their way. The Knesset members act like sharks in a feeding frenzy. There is a wild competition between them to see who can devise the most racist bill.

It pays. After each such bill, the initiators are invited to TV studios to “explain” their purpose. Their pictures appear in the papers. For obscure MKs, whose names we have never heard of, that poses an irresistible temptation. The media are collaborating.
Israel’s place in the international club of fascists

This is not a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. All over Europe and America, overt fascists are raising their heads. The purveyors of hate, who until now have been spreading their poison at the margins of the political system, are now arriving at the centre.

In almost every country there are demagogues who build their careers on incitement against the weak and helpless, who advocate the expulsion of “foreigners” and the persecution of minorities. In the past they were easy to dismiss, as was Hitler at the beginning of his career. Now they must be taken seriously.

FDIC called upon to put BoA into receivership

HuffPo | Charging that the ongoing foreclosure fraud epidemic is the work of precisely the same unrepentant bank officers whose fraudulent mortgage schemes crashed the financial system in the first place, two leading critics of the financial industry are calling on the FDIC to put some of the nation's biggest banks into receivership -- starting with the Bank of America -- and make them clean house.

William K. Black, a former regulator and white-collar crime expert who cracked down on massive fraud during the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, and his fellow economics professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, L. Randall Wray, write in the Huffington Post that it's time to "foreclose on the foreclosure fraudsters". They write:

The lenders, officers, and professional that directed, participated in, and profited from the fraudulent loans and securities should be prevented from causing further damage to the victims of their frauds, through fraudulent foreclosures.

They argue that, far from being a coincidence, massive foreclosure fraud "is the necessary outcome of the epidemic of mortgage fraud that began early this decade." The reason for that:

The banks that are foreclosing on fraudulently originated mortgages frequently cannot produce legitimate documents... Now, only fraud will let them take the homes. Many of the required documents do not exist, and those that do exist would provide proof of the fraud that was involved in loan origination, securitization, and marketing. This in turn would allow investors to force the banks to buy-back the fraudulent securities. In other words, to keep the investors at bay the foreclosing banks must manufacture fake documents.... Foreclosure fraud is the only thing standing between the banks and Armageddon."

So the only solution, then, is new management. "We should remove the senior leadership of the banks and replace them with experienced bankers with a reputation for integrity and competence, i.e., the honest officers that quit or were fired because they refused to engage in fraud," Black and Wray write.

They suggest starting with Bank of America, which they call "a 'vector' spreading the mortgage fraud epidemic throughout much of the Western world."

Looming large among Bank of America's sins is its purchase of mortgage giant Countrywide Financial long after it became clear that the company had engaged in massive fraud.

Even the extremely slow-to-anger New York Fed, which bought billions of securitized mortgages that Bank of America improperly represented as fully documented and conforming to underwriting standards, is now demanding that it buy some of them back.

was the sub-prime crisis a light shower?

Video - foreclosuregate parody.

TheMarketTraders | Homeowners can only be foreclosed and evicted from their homes by the person or institution who actually has the loan paper...only the note-holder has legal standing to ask a court to foreclose and evict. Not the mortgage, the note, which is the actual IOU that people sign, promising to pay back the mortgage loan.

when a homebuyer signs a mortgage, the key document is the note. As I said before, it's the actual IOU. In order for the mortgage note to be sold or transferred to someone else (and therefore turned into a mortgage-backed security), this document has to be physically endorsed to the next person. All of these signatures on the note are called the 'chain of title.'

You can endorse the note as many times as you please...but you have to have a clear chain of title right on the actual note: I sold the note to Moe, who sold it to Larry, who sold it to Curly, and all our notarized signatures are actually, physically, on the note, one after the other.

If for whatever reason any of these signatures is skipped, then the chain of title is said to be broken. Therefore, legally, the mortgage note is no longer valid. That is, the person who took out the mortgage loan to pay for the house no longer owes the loan, because he no longer knows whom to pay.

To repeat: if the chain of title of the note is broken, then the borrower no longer owes any money on the loan.

Read that last sentence again, please. Don't worry, I'll wait.

You read it again? Good: Now you see the can of worms that's opening up.

The move by the United States Congress last week, to sneak by the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act? That was all the banking lobby. They wanted to shove down that law, so that their foreclosure mills' forged and fraudulent documents would not be scrutinized by out-of-state judges. (The spineless cowards in the Senate carried out their master's will by a voice vote...so that there would be no registry of who had voted for it, and therefore no accountability.)

And President Obama's pocket veto of the measure? He had to veto it...if he'd signed it, there would have been political hell to pay, plus it would have been challenged almost immediately, and likely overturned as unconstitutional in short order. (But he didn't have the gumption to come right out and veto it...he pocket vetoed it.)

As soon as the White House announced the pocket veto...the very next day!...Bank of America halted all foreclosures, nationwide.

Why do you think that happened? Because the banks are in trouble...again. Over the same thing as last time...the damned mortgage-backed securities!

The reason the banks are in the tank again is, if they've been foreclosing on people they didn't have the legal right to foreclose on, then those people have the right to get their houses back. And the people who bought those foreclosed houses from the bank might not actually own the houses they paid for.

And it won't matter if a particular case...or even most cases...were on the up -and up: It won't matter if most of the foreclosures and evictions were truly due to the homeowner failing to pay his mortgage. The fraud committed by the foreclosure mills casts enough doubt that, now, all foreclosures come into question. Not only that, all mortgages come into question.

People still haven't figured out what all this means. But I'll tell you: if enough mortgage-paying homeowners realize that they may be able to get out of their mortgage loans and keep their houses, scott-free? That's basically a license to halt payments right now, thank you. That's basically a license to tell the banks to take a hike.

sun-belt sprawl

either The Discipline - or - the State will always win

Video - Don't let yourself get attached to anything you're not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.

NYTimes | “I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone to disclose information on a scale that might really make a difference,” said Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed a 1,000-page secret study of the Vietnam War in 1971 that became known as the Pentagon Papers.

Mr. Ellsberg said he saw kindred spirits in Mr. Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old former Army intelligence operative under detention in Quantico, Va., suspected of leaking the Iraq and Afghan documents.

“They were willing to go to prison for life, or be executed, to put out this information,” Mr. Ellsberg said.

Underlying Mr. Assange’s anxieties is deep uncertainty about what the United States and its allies may do next. Pentagon and Justice department officials have said they are weighing his actions under the 1917 Espionage Act. They have demanded that Mr. Assange “return” all government documents in his possession, undertake not to publish any new ones and not “solicit” further American materials.

Mr. Assange has responded by going on the run, but has found no refuge. Amid the Afghan documents controversy, he flew to Sweden, seeking a residence permit and protection under that country’s broad press freedoms. His initial welcome was euphoric.

“They called me the James Bond of journalism,” he recalled wryly. “It got me a lot of fans, and some of them ended up causing me a bit of trouble.”

In late September, he left Stockholm for Berlin. A bag he checked on the almost empty flight disappeared, with three encrypted laptops. It has not resurfaced; Mr. Assange suspects it was intercepted. From Germany, he traveled to London, wary at being detained on arrival. Iceland, a country with generous press freedoms, has also lost its appeal, with Mr. Assange concluding that its government is too easily influenced by Washington.

He faces attack from within, too.

After the Sweden scandal, strains within WikiLeaks reached a breaking point, with some of Mr. Assange’s closest collaborators publicly defecting. The New York Times spoke with dozens of people who have worked with and supported him in Iceland, Sweden, Germany, Britain and the United States. What emerged was a picture of the founder of WikiLeaks as its prime innovator and charismatic force but as someone whose growing celebrity has been matched by an increasingly dictatorial, eccentric and capricious style.

Iraq War Logs: Every Death Mapped - From Wikileaks and Guardian

Video - Iraq war logs, every death mapped.

wait, what was the mission again?

Video - Leaks reveal Blackwater excesses.

NYTimes | The first shots sailed past Iraqi police officers at a checkpoint. They took off in three squad cars, their lights flashing.

It was early in the Iraq war, Dec. 22, 2004, and it turned out that the shots came not from insurgents or criminals. They were fired by an American private security company named Custer Battles, according to an incident report in an archive of more than 300,000 classified military documents made public by WikiLeaks.

The company’s convoy sped south in Umm Qasr, a grubby port city near the Persian Gulf. It shot out the tire of a civilian car that came close. It fired five shots into a crowded minibus. The shooting stopped only after the Iraqi police, port security and a British military unit finally caught up with the convoy.

Somehow no one had been hurt, and the contractors found a quick way to prevent messy disciplinary action. They handed out cash to Iraqi civilians, and left.

The documents sketch, in vivid detail, a critical change in the way America wages war: the early days of the Iraq war, with all its Wild West chaos, ushered in the era of the private contractor, wearing no uniform but fighting and dying in battle, gathering and disseminating intelligence and killing presumed insurgents.

There have been many abuses, including civilian deaths, to the point that the Afghan government is working to ban many outside contractors entirely.

wikileaks iraq deaths map

Wikileaks Iraq Deaths Map. Fist tap Arnach.

a renegade history of the united states

HuffPo | I was raised by pot-smoking, nudist, socialist revolutionaries as an egghead white boy in black neighborhoods in Berkeley and Oakland. I nearly flunked eighth grade and finished high school with a C average. Then I went to the anarchist, ultra-hippy Antioch College in Ohio, which accepted all their applicants, didn't give grades, and didn't have a history department.

So even though I managed to pull myself out of that background and into and through Columbia for a PhD, then onto a job at an elite college, I was highly uncomfortable moving from the world of weed to the world of tweed. I hated being "Professor." I cursed in class. I talked about sex. I used politically incorrect terms. My students said they had never heard the things I was teaching them in class. They called me "Bad Thad."

I showed them that during the American Revolution drunkards, laggards, prostitutes, and pirates pioneered many of the freedoms and pleasures we now cherish -- including non-marital sex, interracial socializing, dancing, shopping, divorce, and the weekend -- and that the Founding Fathers, in the name of democracy, opposed them. I argued not only that many white Americans envied slaves but also that they did so for good reason, since slave culture offered many liberating alternatives to the highly repressive, work-obsessed, anti-sex culture of the early United States. I demonstrated that prostitutes, not feminists, won virtually all the freedoms that were denied to women but are now taken for granted. By tracing the path of immigrants from arrival as "primitives" to assimilation as "civilized" citizens, I explained that white people lost their rhythm by becoming good Americans. I presented evidence that without organized crime, we might not have jazz, Hollywood, Las Vegas, legal alcohol, birth control, or gay rights, since only gangsters were willing to support those projects when respectable America shunned them.

This was not the standard left-liberal perspective my students had heard, and it certainly wasn't a conservative one, either. It was informed by an unlikely mix of influences, including the hippies and other cultural radicals I had encountered in my early life, black and gay cultures that showed me a way out of the self-imposed limitations of being white and straight, and libertarians who caused me to question the commitment to freedom among the left that I had been born into and which employed me as a professor.

I gave my students a history that was structured around the oldest issue in political philosophy but which professional historians often neglect - the conflict between the individual and community, or what Freud called the eternal struggle between civilization and its discontents. College students are normally taught a history that is the story of struggles between capitalists and workers, whites and blacks, men and women. But history is also driven by clashes between those interested in preserving social order and those more interested in pursuing their own desires -- the "respectable" versus the "degenerate," the moral versus the immoral, "good citizens" versus the "bad." I wanted to show that the more that "bad" people existed, resisted, and won, the greater was what I called "the margin of freedom" for all of us.

My students were most troubled by the evidence that the "good" enemies of "bad" freedoms were not just traditional icons like presidents and business leaders, but that many of the most revered abolitionists, progressives, and leaders of the feminist, labor, civil rights, and gay rights movements worked to suppress the cultures of working-class women, immigrants, African Americans, and the flamboyant gays who brought homosexuality out of the closet.

I had developed these ideas largely on my own, in my study and in classrooms, knowing all the while that I was engaged in an Oedipal struggle to overthrow the generation of historians who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s, controlled academic history, and had trained me. They were so eager to make the masses into heroes that they did not see that it was precisely the non-heroic and unseemly characteristics of ordinary folks that changed American culture for the better.

standing up to the corporate bully

RagBlog | Big corporations charge citizens extra for making mistakes and penalize them unjustly for being the suckers who fall for their sales pitch.

There has been an increasing amount of talk taking place around the issue of bullying. Several young children and college students have recently committed suicide as a result of what many feel was bullying.

On Oct. 1 a 13-year-old boy committed suicide at his home in Houston after being bullied at the Cypress Fairbanks Independent School District. Asher Brown’s parents blamed the school for their son’s death, saying that he shot himself in the head after being tormented by classmates for being gay.

Tyler Clementi, a first year student at Rutgers University in New Jersey, jumped off a bridge to his death after his roommate and another student secretly filmed him engaging in a sexual act with another male student.

Kevin Morrissey committed suicide near the University of Virginia campus after being tormented on the job. At least two co-workers said they warned university officials about his growing despair over alleged workplace bullying at the award-winning Virginia Quarterly Review.

On July 30, Morrissey, the Review's 52-year-old managing editor, walked to the old coal tower near campus and shot himself in the head.

Bullying can take many forms, but one of the most lethal and least recognized is corporate bullying. Corporations treat citizens like commodities and charge them for services they don’t even render.

confusing ritual and superstition

Video - The Samurai of Soma Noma Oi.

Scientific American | Ray Allen’s pregame routine never changes. A nap from 11:30am to 1:00pm, chicken and white rice for lunch at 2:30, a stretch in the gym at 3:45, a quick head shave, then practice shots at 4:30. The same amount of shots must be made from the same spots every day – the baselines and elbows of the court, ending with the top of the key. [Ray Allen is a samurai] Similar examples of peculiar rituals and regimented routines in athletics abound. Jason Giambi would wear a golden thong if he found himself in a slump at the plate, and Moises Alou, concerned about losing his dexterous touch with the bat, would frequently urinate on his hands. [Jason Giambi and Moises Alou are nasty, superstitious ass-clowns] This type of superstitious behavior can veer from the eccentric to the pathological, and though many coaches, teammates and fans snicker and shake their heads, a new study headed by Lysann Damisch at the University of Cologne and recently published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that we should all stop smirking and start rubbing our rabbit’s foot.

When it comes to superstitions, social scientists have generally agreed on one thing: they are fundamentally irrational. “Magical thinking” (as it has been called) is defined as the belief that an object, action or circumstance not logically related to a course of events can influence its outcome. In other words, stepping on a crack cannot, given what we know about the principles of causal relations, have any direct effect on the probability of your mother breaking her back. Those who live in fear of such a tragedy are engaging in magical thought and behaving irrationally.

Yet in their study, Damisch and colleagues challenge the conclusion that superstitious thoughts bear no causal influence on future outcomes. Of course, they were not hypothesizing that the trillions of tiny cracks upon which we tread every day are imbued with some sort of sinister spine-crushing malevolence. Instead, they were interested in the types of superstitions that people think bring them good luck. The lucky hats, the favorite socks, the ritualized warmup routines, the childhood blankies. Can belief in such charms actually have an influence over one’s ability to, say, perform better on a test or in an athletic competition? In other words, is Ray Allen’s performance on the basketball court in some ways dependent on eating chicken and rice at exactly 2:30? Did Jason Giambi’s golden thong actually have a hand in stopping a hitless streak?

show me the note!!!

GonzaloLira | So the week before last, I wrote about Brian and Ilsa, a retired couple in their mid-to-late sixties, living in a house in the Southwest that had—unremarkably—gone underwater.

They had tried to refinance their home mortgage, under the auspices of the HAMP, the Home Affordable Modification Program. HAMP was part of the Financial Stability Act of 2009—the famed “Stimulus Package”.

The point of my piece was, if and when solid upstanding middle-class people such as Brian and Ilsa ever do throw in the towel and let out a collective Fuckit, then it’s curtains for the American Republic: You cannot have a viable society where the backbone of the country thinks that following the rules and the law is for suckers and chumps.

Life goes on. Between when I last spoke to Brian and Ilsa, and when the reactions to my post started rolling in, Brian and Ilsa’s story continued, of course—

—and it took quite the amazing turn over the last couple of weeks.

“And we have you to thank,” Ilsa told me.

“Oh?” I said.

“Yes indeed,” said Brian—and then he explained: Fist tap Dale.

where poverty is rising in america

hemp is the far bigger economic issue

Video - speeded up version of 1942 gubmint documentary "Hemp for Victory".

AlterNet | Prop 19 will open up California to hemp, a multi-billion-dollar crop that has been a staple of human agriculture for thousands of years.

Hemp is the far bigger economic issue hiding behind legal marijuana.

If the upcoming pot legalization ballot in California were decided by hemp farmers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, it would be no contest. For purely economic reasons, if you told the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that the nation they were founding would someday make hemp illegal, they would have laughed you out of the room.

If California legalizes pot, it will save the state millions in avoided legal and imprisonment costs, while raising it millions in taxes.

But with legal marijuana will come legal hemp. That will open up the Golden State to a multi-billion-dollar crop that has been a staple of human agriculture for thousands of years, and that could save the farms of thousands of American families.

Hemp is currently legal in Canada, Germany, Holland, Rumania, Japan and China, among many other countries. It is illegal here largely because of marijuana prohibition. Ask any sane person why HEMP is illegal and you will get a blank stare.

For paper, clothing, textiles, rope, sails, fuel and food, hemp has been a core crop since the founding of ancient China, India and Arabia. Easy to plant, grow and harvest, farmers---including Washington and Jefferson---have sung its praises throughout history. It was the number one or two cash crop on virtually all American family farms from the colonial era on.

If the American Farm Bureaus and Farmers Unions were truly serving their constituents, they would be pushing hard for legal pot so that its far more profitable (but essentially unsmokable) cousin could again bring prosperity to American farmers.

Hemp may be the real reason marijuana is illegal. In the 1930s, the Hearst family set out to protect their vast timber holdings, much of which were being used to make paper.

But hemp produces five times as much paper per acre as do trees. Hemp paper is stronger and easier to make. The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper, and one of Benjamin Franklin’s primary paper mills ran on it.

But the Hearsts used their newspapers to incite enough reefer madness to get marijuana banned in 1937. With that ban came complex laws that killed off the growing of hemp. The ecological devastation that’s followed with continued use of trees for paper has been epic.

what if we ran universities like wikipedia?

ChronicleofHigherEd | A silly question? Maybe. But the analogy, made by a speaker at the Educause conference here today, reflects a recurring theme at this year’s event: Do our university bureaucracies still make sense in the era of networks?

In a session called “The University as an Agile Organization,” David J. Staley laid out the findings of a focus group he conducted asking educators what a college would look like if it ran like Wikipedia.

First, it wouldn’t have formal admissions, said Mr. Staley, director of the Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching at Ohio State University. People could enter and exit as they wished. It would consist of voluntary and self-organizing associations of teachers and students “not unlike the original idea for the university, in the Middle Ages,” he said. Its curriculum would be intellectually fluid.

And instead of tenure, it would have professors “whose longevity would be determined by the community,” Mr. Staley said, and who would move back and forth between the “real world” and the university.

Universities “seem to be becoming more top-down and hierarchical at a time when more and more organizations are looking more like networks,” said Mr. Staley, who expanded on the Wikipedia theme last year in Educause Review. Fist tap Dale.

culture of poverty makes a comeback

NYTimes | “Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.

The topic has generated interest on Capitol Hill because so much of the research intersects with policy debates. Views of the cultural roots of poverty “play important roles in shaping how lawmakers choose to address poverty issues,” Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, noted at the briefing.

This surge of academic research also comes as the percentage of Americans living in poverty hit a 15-year high: one in seven, or 44 million.

With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture, but they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects: Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.

To Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, culture is best understood as “shared understandings.”

“I study inequality, and the dominant focus is on structures of poverty,” he said. But he added that the reason a neighborhood turns into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,” believing that “laws were made to be broken”?

changing education paradigms

Video - Changing Education Paradigms

the limits of social media

Shareable | Blogs have been a twitter about Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article last week slamming those who believe social media can revolutionize activism. The article compares the high risk activism of the civil rights movement with Twitter’s role in the Iranian elections concluding that, “the revolution will not be tweeted.”

First of all, taking aim at those who are love drunk for social media is like shooting fish in a barrel. Secondly, it’s no revelation that a tweet is less effective than putting your life on the line for a cause.

Moreover, Gladwell gets the role of the online activism wrong. As someone who worked with professional online activists on a daily basis for two years while at Care2.com, I can tell you that none of my clients believed online activism had much value by itself. It was always part of a larger strategy and, as Mashable pointed out, serves a very specific role in activism – it offers citizens a no risk first step on the path to higher risk engagement. But this is no reinvention as Mashable argues. It’s mostly optimization.

From my perspective as publisher of Shareable, Gladwell's article and the resulting hubbub misses the larger points:

1.) activism by itself can’t achieve its stated aims no matter what medium is used. A new social order requires a new economy.

2.) social media is primarily creative – its true power is not as a tool for resistance but as a coordinating medium for an emerging peer-economy which promises to obsolete state capitalism.

The reason I co-founded Shareable is that having been a lobbyist and a capitalist, and now a nonprofit activist, I’ve come to believe that activism by itself is no match for state capitalism. I remember vividly the time ten years ago when I naively asked a peer at the FCC, who I interfaced with as a representative of a large telecom trade association, where the FCC got their market research. They said, “from you.” I was shocked. The FCC didn’t do their own research. They relied mainly on industry for that. Of course the public could way in too, but the presence of public interest advocacy seemed minimal. We, on the other hand, never missed a beat. The association membership was unified and funded our lobbying efforts well.

This story points to a systemic issue - activists face a classic collective action problem that has no resolution: the nonprofit sector is composed of many entities with many agendas; the corporate sector is composed of a smaller number of vastly more powerful entities with only one agenda – profit. This means that it’s significantly easier for corporations to act collectively and achieve their goals than it is for nonprofits. This is partly why corporations have become so powerful.

Bottom line, the nonprofit sector is structurally fucked and social media doesn’t change this one byte, because after all it’s available to both sides in the game. The failure of the COP15 climate negotiations is a good example of activism’s limits. And then there’s this brave letter from Bill McKibben admitting that the environmental movement is failing to get action on climate change. This is despite having public opinion on its side and a legion of activist across the globe. Fist tap Dale.

economics memewar

Adbusters | In anticipation of November’s Carnivalesque Rebellion, a memewar salvo has been opened on the University of California – Berkeley’s prestigious Economics department. The first act was a defiant challenge. The Kick It Over Manifesto was boldly pinned to the door of Daniel McFadden, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, along with bulletin boards throughout the department. [The Kick It Over Manifesto was pinned to McFadden's office door.]

Printed on bright pink paper, the manifesto declares in part: “You hide in your offices, protected by your mathematical jargon, while in the real world, forests vanish, species perish and human lives are callously destroyed. We accuse you of gross negligence in the management of our planetary household.”

The goal was to disrupt the obliviousness of students and teachers who preach the self-destructive consumerist lie that societies should pursue economic growth. It worked: the manifesto hit a nerve.

Within three hours, an adjunct professor emailed Adbusters to justify his approach to teaching economic theory. But he concluded with a defiant flare: “I have a fairly strong hunch that you are mistaken about the system crumbling, or the imminent loss of relevance of mainstream economics. In all likelihood my students will continue to have considerable influence on the body politic for many years to come.”

We, jammers and activists, vow to make the econ department a key location in the coming insurrection of ideas. To the students of economics in universities across the world, we say that it is time to challenge the flawed economic theories of your professors. As Kalle Lasn wrote in his Preface to the Student, before you is a decision moment: “You can ignore all of the screaming inconsistencies and accept the status quo. You can cross your fingers and hope the old paradigm has a generation or two left in it, enough for you to carve out a career. Or you can align yourself from the get-go with the mavericks. You can be an agitator, a provocateur, one of the students on campus who posts heterodox messages up on notice boards and openly challenges professors in class. You can bet your future career on a paradigm shift.”

The economics department at Berkeley will be jammed again… and again. Join us by spreading the memewar to your campus. Remember, the Carnivalesque Rebellion is November 22 to 28!

tea party parasites

RollingStone | Quelle surprise! So it turns out that one after another of the Tea Party candidates is in one way or another mooching off the government. The latest series of hilarious disclosures center around Alaska’s GI-Joe-bearded windbag Senatorial candidate, Joe Miller, who appears to have run virtually the entire gamut of government aid en route to becoming a staunch, fist-shaking opponent of the welfare state.

Miller’s pomposity and piety with regard to government aid programs has all along been in line with the usual screechingly hysterical self-righteousness Tea Party candidates bring to such matters, railing against Obamacare and other “entitlement” programs and promising to end the “welfare state.” That makes it all the more delicious now that he and his family have been exposed for taking state medical aid, unemployment insurance, farm subsidies, hell, even for using state equipment to run a private political campaign.

Back in June, Miller was saying this about his Republican primary opponent Lisa Murkowski, blasting her for supporting a state health care program:

As you are aware, just last week the Anchorage Daily News reported that the Denali KidCare Program funded 662 abortions last year. Senator Murkowski has been a champion of this program, voting against the majority of her Republican colleagues for CHIPRA (HR 2) in January of 2009.

Of course it now turns out that back in the Nineties, Miller himself and his three children (with one on the way; he now has eight) were at one point receiving assistance via a program almost exactly like the Denali KidCare program, which is only for low-income earners. Various reports note that Miller received this assistance after he’d bought a house and been hired by a prestigious law firm; he also got low-income hunting and fishing licenses during that time. It’s also come out that he received some $7,000 in farm subsidies and that his wife received unemployment insurance benefits.

So now of course Miller, who said he and his family “absolutely” used Alaska’s state medical program, is backtracking and saying that he’s not against the modern Denali Kidcare program, only against the “expansion” of it. But even more telling was his longer answer about the program, as reported in the Anchorage Daily News:

Miller said what he's advocating is complete state control of the programs. "That doesn't mean we cut off the programs. That is ultimately a state decision. And I think there is a use; in fact the most effective use is probably those programs that help transition the populations from more of a situation of dependency" to one where they can be economically independent, Miller said.

You see, when a nice white lawyer with a GI Joe beard uses state aid to help him through tough times and get over the hump – so that he can go from having three little future Medicare-collecting Republican children to eight little future Medicare-collecting Republican children – that’s a good solid use of government aid, because what we’re doing is helping someone “transition” from dependency to economic independence.

This of course is different from the way other, less GI-Joe-looking people use government aid, i.e. as a permanent crutch that helps genetically lazy and ambitionless parasites mooch off of rich white taxpayers instead of getting real jobs.

I can’t even tell you how many people I interviewed at Tea Party events who came up with one version or another of the Joe Miller defense. Yes, I’m on Medicare, but… I needed it! It’s those other people who don’t need it who are the problem!

Or: Yes, it’s true, I retired from the police/military/DPW at 54 and am on a fat government pension that you and your kids are going to be paying for for the next forty years, while I sit in my plywood-paneled living room in Florida watching Fox News, gobbling Medicare-funded prescription medications, and railing against welfare queens. But I worked hard for those bennies! Not like those other people!

hitler exhibit explores nazi empowerment

NYTimes | As artifacts go, they are mere trinkets — an old purse, playing cards, a lantern. Even the display that caused the crowds to stop and stare is a simple embroidered tapestry, stitched by village women.

But the exhibits that opened Friday at the German Historical Museum are intentionally prosaic: they emphasize the everyday way that ordinary Germans once accepted, and often celebrated, Hitler.

The household items had Nazi logos and colors. The tapestry, a tribute to the union of church, state and party, was woven by a church congregation at the behest of their priest.

“This is what we call self-mobilization of society,” said Hans-Ulrich Thamer, one of three curators to assemble the exhibit at the German Historical Museum. “As a person, Hitler was a very ordinary man. He was nothing without the people.”

This show, “Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime,” opened Friday. It was billed as the first in Germany since the end of World War II to focus exclusively on Adolf Hitler. Germany outlaws public displays of some Nazi symbols, and the curators took care to avoid showing items that appeared to glorify Hitler. His uniforms, for example, remained in storage.

Instead, the show focuses on the society that nurtured and empowered him. It is not the first time historians have argued that Hitler did not corral the Germans as much as the Germans elevated Hitler. But one curator said the message was arguably more vital for Germany now than at any time in the past six decades, as rising nationalism, more open hostility to immigrants and a generational disconnect from the events of the Nazi era have older Germans concerned about repeating the past.

“The only hope for stopping extremists is to isolate them from society so that they are separated, so they do not have a relationship with the bourgeoisie and the other classes,” Mr. Thamer said. “The Nazis were members of high society. This was the dangerous moment.

“This we have to avoid from happening.”

why 13 percent of germans would welcome a 'Führer'

CSM | A new survey signals that Germany, where the term 'Führer,' or leader, is explicitly linked to Adolf Hitler, is not immune from the far-right sentiments that are spreading across Europe.

A new survey in Germany shows that 13 percent of its citizens would welcome a “Führer” – a German word for leader that is explicitly associated with Adolf Hitler – to run the country “with a firm hand.”

The findings signal that Europe’s largest nation, freed from cold-war strictures, is not immune from the extreme and often right-wing politics on the rise around the Continent.

The study, released Oct. 13 by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, affiliated with the center-left Social Democratic Party, revealed among other things that more than a third of Germans feel the country is “overrun by foreigners,” some 60 percent would “restrict the practice of Islam,” and 17 percent think Jews have “too much influence.”

The study's overall snapshot of German society shows new forms of extremism and hate are no longer the province of far-right cohorts who shave their heads or wear leather jackets adorned with silver skulls – but register in the tweedy political center, on the right and the left. Indeed, the study found, extremism in Germany isn’t a fringe phenomenon but is found in the political center, "in all social groups and in all age groups, regardless of employment status, educational level or gender." Fist tap Nana.

how hitler won over germans

Bloomberg | In their neatest handwriting, hundreds of children wrote to Adolf Hitler congratulating him on his 43rd birthday in 1932. One letter is on Mickey Mouse writing paper; others enclose photos of their diminutive authors posing in “Heil Hitler” salutes or waving swastikas.

“I hope that you will save Germany in the election on April 24!” writes 12-year-old Elga. “Here in Liebenburg, 90 percent of the people are Nazis and voted for you!”

More than 65 years after Hitler’s death and the collapse of the Third Reich, the German Historical Museum is seeking answers to a question that each generation asks anew: How did Germany, known as a nation of poets and thinkers, fall under Hitler’s spell and let him commit some of the worst crimes in history?

The new exhibition, called “Hitler and the Germans, Nation and Crime,” is the first in Berlin to focus exclusively on the dictator and his influence over the people. That is not to say that Hitler is still a taboo topic in Germany, as some of the international coverage of the exhibition would have it.

Far from it. Hitler sells. Television news channels such as N-TV and N-24 broadcast Hitler documentaries back-to-back in non-peak hours. Der Spiegel news magazine has put him on its cover no fewer than 40 times since 1947. The first academic biography of Eva Braun, published this year, became a bestseller. The fascination extends beyond Germany: the English- language film rights to the book have already been snapped up. Fist tap Nana.

scenes from life in a drug war

NYTimes | Incidences of drug-related violence in Mexico and on the border continue to make news. We tend to hear about the crimes that touch American lives — like the reported killing of a man riding a Jet Ski on the Rio Grande. What we don’t hear as much about is how drugs and violence shape the everyday lives of Mexicans. So here are dispatches from four writers on how drug trafficking has changed their parts of the country. They were translated by Kristina Cordero from the Spanish.

The Walls of Puebla
The drug lords like this city for the same reason I do: it’s safe.

Tijuana Reclaimed
Drug-related violence has driven away the tourists, but now locals are reclaiming their city.

Ground Zero in Sinaloa
In the state where Mexico’s drug trade started, narcotics have seeped into the social D.N.A.

Monterrey’s Habit
In Mexico, we have a drug problem — but it’s not the one you think.

mexico under siege

LATimes Series

Video - Collection of youtube videos on Mexico's Drug War stories.