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

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

Lack of Organizational Acceptance, Identity

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

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

Regulation by Los Angeles Police Department

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

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

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

Watts Riot

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

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

Backdrop – California

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

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

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

Drugs

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

holder eliminating the federal colored people tax

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

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

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

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

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

high energy to solve the challenge of the planets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

the great acceleration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great Acceleration 2015 from International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme

for whom the muzzein calls....,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

theory of capital as power: call for papers

bnarchives |  The theory of capital as power (CasP) offers a radical alternative to mainstream and Marxist theories of capitalism. It argues that capital symbolizes and quantifies not utility or labour but organized power writ large, and that capitalism is best understood and challenged not as a mode of consumption and production, but as a mode of power. Over the past decade, the Forum on Capital as Power has organized many lectures, speaker series and conferences. Our most recent international gatherings include "Capitalizing Power: The Qualities and Quantities of Accumulation” (2012), "The Capitalist Mode of Power: Past, Present and Future" (2011), and "Crisis of Capital, Crisis of Theory" (2010). The 2015 conference seeks to broaden the vista. We are looking for papers that extend and deepen CasP research, compare CasP with other approaches and critique CasP’s methods and findings. Articles could be general or specific, theoretical or empirical, analytical or historical. The conference is open to everyone, with submissions vetted entirely on merit. We accept applications from established and new researchers, in and outside academia. However, we are particularly interested in submissions from young researchers of all ages, including MA and PhD students, private and public employees and free spirits. If you have an interest in the subject and something important – or potentially important – to say, please apply. Financial assistance: we may be able to assist presenters by partly covering the cost of travel and accommodation. This possibility is still tentative; it is conditional on ability to secure sufficient funding. Deadline for abstract submissions: March 20, 2015.

Statistical Physics of Self-Replication

rule of law: the perfect site for the gop national convention...,

cleveland |  The handling of dispatching came under fire after Tamir's death.

When a person calls 9-1-1, the call-taker relays the information electronically to a dispatcher, who then relays the information to police, according to a police spokeswoman.

Constance Hollinger took the initial 9-1-1 call from a man outside the Cudell Recreation Center who said that someone was pointing a gun that was "probably fake" at people. 

The details of what Hollinger relayed to Mandl are not clear. At no point were the officers told that the gun was "probably fake" or that Tamir was a boy and not an adult.

Northeast Ohio Media Group has requested any communication between Hollinger and Mandl.

Tamir's shooting exposed what many have said are inadequate hiring practices of Cleveland police. Timothy Loehmann, the officer who shot the boy at close range less than two seconds after he jumped from a police car, was on his way to being fired at Independence Police Department when he resigned in 2012, according to his personnel file.

Cleveland police did not examine Loehmann's file before they hired him. They've since updated their policy to check all personnel files of potential recruits.

Loehmann unsuccessfully applied to several Northeast Ohio law enforcement agencies before Cleveland hired him in 2014, including the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department. That agency is now leading the investigation into the shooting, and will hand over its evidence to the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office, which will take the case to a grand jury.

Loehmann's partner, Frank Garmback, was sued in federal court in an excessive force case that cost the city $100,000. Garmback and his partner at the time were accused of beating up a 39-year-old woman on Clifton Boulevard.

how crime in america has decreased over the past decade

movoto |  Things can really change over the years, and that includes a place’s safety.

Population grows, police forces change hands, new regulations are put into practice… there are a multitude of factors that can cause the crime rate to soar or plummet, no matter where you live. This can be seen fairly easily when it comes to state crime statistics in particular.

Here at the Movoto Real Estate Blog, we’re all about analyzing data, so it was an obvious choice to look into how much crime rates have changed in each state over the last 10 years. Using FBI Uniform Crime Reports, we compiled enough data to see how crime has fluctuated across the United States.

If you want to know more about how we created these maps, you can check the methodology section at the end of this article for additional information. For now, though, let’s discuss some interesting things we found out about crime over the last decade.

The National Average Is Actually Dropping

With the news always talking about major crimes and tragedies across America, you might think that crime is only getting worse. Actually, after looking at the numbers, we found that the national average of crimes per 100,000 people has been dropping steadily for a decade.

In fact, in 2004, there were 3,824.34 crimes per 100,000 people on average in the U.S. For the most recent FBI Uniform Crime Report in 2013, there was over a 20 percent decrease in crime compared to just 10 years prior.

This is great news, not just for the nation, but for many states in particular.

rule of law: overseer union president doesn't speak for the overseers

New York Daily News | Not exactly the blueprint for a more perfect union.

Members of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association nearly came to blows on Tuesday during a meeting of delegates in Queens. There was pushing, shoving and lots of screaming at Patrick Lynch, president of the 23,000-member union.

The in-house battle erupted over the issue of what patrol officers really need — an apology from Mayor de Blasio or better equipment and more officers to back them up on the streets.

“This is what my members want!” a cop yelled near the end of the raucous meeting. “They want more cars, better vests, more manpower!”
And then the cop — one of about 350 in attendance — took a verbal jab at Lynch, who has called on de Blasio to offer a mea culpa for his continued lack of support for police.

“They don’t want an apology,” he said.

necropolitics: freedom fries thought crimes

theintercept |  The apparently criminal viewpoint he posted on Facebook declared: “Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly.” Investigators concluded that this was intended to mock the “Je Suis Charlie” slogan and express support for the perpetrator of the Paris supermarket killings (whose last name was “Coulibaly”). Expressing that opinion is evidently a crime in the Republic of Liberté, which prides itself on a line of 20th Century intellectuals – from Sartre and Genet to Foucault and Derrida – whose hallmark was leaving no orthodoxy or convention unmolested, no matter how sacred.

Since that glorious “free speech” march, France has reportedly opened 54 criminal cases for “condoning terrorism.” AP reported this morning that “France ordered prosecutors around the country to crack down on hate speech, anti-Semitism and glorifying terrorism.”

As pernicious as this arrest and related “crackdown” on some speech obviously is, it provides a critical value: namely, it underscores the utter scam that was this week’s celebration of free speech in the west. The day before the Charlie Hebdo attack, I coincidentally documented the multiple cases in the west – including in the U.S. – where Muslims have been prosecuted and even imprisoned for their political speech. Vanishingly few of this week’s bold free expression mavens have ever uttered a peep of protest about any of those cases – either before the Charlie Hebdo attack or since. That’s because “free speech,” in the hands of many westerners, actually means: it is vital that the ideas I like be protected, and the right to offend groups I dislike be cherished; anything else is fair game.

eliminate the conditions which breed the muslim movement

get rid of the useless eaters, the simulation

Motherboard | SimCity players have discussed a variety of creative strategies for their virtual homelessness problem. They’ve suggested waiting for natural disasters like tornadoes to blow the vagrants away, bulldozing parks where they congregate, or creating such a woefully insufficient city infrastructure that the homeless would leave on their own.

You can read all of these proposed final solutions in Matteo Bittanti's How to Get Rid of Homelessness, "a 600-page epic split in two volumes documenting the so-called 'homeless scandal' that affected 2013's SimCity."

"I started to find the discussion about homeless in SimCity way more interesting than SimCity itself because people were talking about the issue in a very—how can I say, not racist, not classist, but definitely peculiar way," said Bittanti, a visiting professor at IULM University in Milan who spent seven years teaching in the Bay Area.

Bittanti collected, selected, and transcribed thousands of these messages exchanged by players on publisher Electronic Arts' official forums, Reddit, and the largest online SimCity community Simtropolis, who experienced and then tried to "eradicate" the phenomenon of homelessness that "plagued" SimCity.

anti-definition of cathedral manliness

Art of Manliness | When I first started the Art of Manliness, I didn’t put too much stock in physical strength as an important component of manhood. Strength of character, sure, but physical strength was more of a secondary pursuit. Maybe it was because I started AoM partly to get away from the overdone fetishization of getting ripped that was (and is) promoted by other men’s magazines. Maybe it was because I wasn’t in shape myself at the time. (We often construct our definition of manhood in accordance with that which describes ourselves best, and I’m certainly not immune to this temptation!). I had played football in high school, but after going to college, my workouts became halfhearted and sporadic. This was especially true in law school — between trying to keep up my grades and running a fledgling blog, exercise just wasn’t a top priority.

Over the last couple years, however, working out, and lifting weights in particular, has become a fundamental part of my life. It started with my 90-day testosterone experiment; I started exercising regularly to see what effect it would have on my T levels. When the official experiment ended, the habit stuck. I went from being fairly indifferent to exercise, to looking forward to my workouts as my favorite part of the day. And I found that building my body changed the way I felt and carried myself as a man.

At the same time, my research into the core of masculinity gave me a theoretical understanding of the role of strength in the ancient, universal code of manhood. This research convinced me that strength forms the nucleus of manliness, as it truly makes all the other manly virtues possible.

Over time then, the importance of strength-building to a man’s virility sunk into both my mind and my bones. Strength may not seem very necessary in today’s world where most men sit behind desks at work all day. But being strong is never a disadvantage, and it is frequently quite beneficial on a variety of fronts. Most importantly, strength forms the backbone of the code of manhood. Today I’d like to talk about why.

neologism: the midgley effect

resilience |  We imagine ourselves to be members of a thoroughly scientific culture and to be scientifically minded. But, what science tells us is that the evolution of the universe and thus of planet Earth and its inhabitants is random. It is following no predetermined felicitous course. This process of change could be favorable to humans or it could be horrifically dangerous to them.

Our technological innovations will not necessarily shield us from this change. In fact, these innovations are part of the change. They influence climate in a way that is deleterious to the human future; they empty fisheries with a swiftness never before seen; they lead to degradation of the soil, not in isolated areas, but worldwide; and they poison the food, the air and the water in a manner that is global in scale.

A friend refers to this as the Midgley Effect. Chemist Thomas Midgley Jr. was heralded for his work in creating leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons. The story of leaded gasoline is rehearsed every time we pull up to a gas pump and fill our automobiles with UNLEADED gasoline. Lead added to gasoline for the purpose of preventing so-called engine knocking turned out to be very bad for human health. Big surprise!

But chlorofluorocarbons were even worse. Used primarily as refrigerants from the 1930s onward and later as aerosol propellants, they escaped into the air. No one thought to track their destination until the 1970s when one scientist, F. Sherwood Rowland, asked where these compounds ended up. They were by design inert--that is, they didn't readily break down--so they must be somewhere.

That somewhere turned out to be high in the atmosphere attacking the ozone layer which protects humans and other living creatures from excessive radiation from the Sun. Had it not been for Rowland asking a very specific question and receiving a grant to fund the answer, we might well be living with little or no atmospheric protection from dangerous levels of solar radiation. Such are the perils of our technology. In this case, only one curious man stood between the human species and widespread disaster. Chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-destroying chemicals were subsequently phased out worldwide by the Montreal Protocol.

Midgley--who believed he was doing good things for society and received many awards for his discoveries--turned out to have "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history," according to environmental historian J. R. McNeill. And, it wasn't a good impact.

One of the pillars of our modern techno-utopian outlook is that invention is presumed to be good and should not be unduly impeded. It turns out, however, that our own science has shown that inventions can be potentially catastrophic.

So, now we come to the central contradiction of the modern outlook. We rely on science. We say we believe in science. But what science tells us about the trajectory of the universe and thus human beings is no more complicated that what "Planet of the Apes" tells us. There is no particular or preordained direction for the future development of humans or the universe we live in.

Yet, the techno-utopian vision that we cling to as modern people rejects this view even as we say our favored instrument of progress is science. Thus, we must conclude that our dissenting party guest's reply above--"They'll figure something out. They always have."--enunciates a religious belief, not a scientific observation.

tony blair pretending he doesn't understand what russell brand is on about...,

telegraph |  Tony Blair has revealed he is mystified by Russell Brand. 

The former Prime Minister said he has “studied” the works of Brand, the comedian turned popular philosopher, and concluded he “literally doesn’t know what he means”.

Mr Blair, Labour’s most electorally successful leader, said modern politicians should spend less time attempting to “empathise” with voters who are disaffected and instead show strong leadership.

“I’ve studied a lot of what the Russell Brand stuff really means. But I suspect if you implemented that, or tried to implement that, I literally don’t know what it means,” Mr Blair told the BBC’s Nick Robinson, whose latest series looks at a “crisis” in democracy.

Mr Brand, a multi-millionaire comedian, has sought to reinvent himself as the leader of a populist, anti-capitalist “revolution” against a broken “system” of tax evasion, environmental destruction and poverty. Critics argue Mr Brand’s manifesto is intellectually arid and devoid of meaningful policies.

None the less, he has struck a chord with the public, earning nine million Twitter followers and a wide audience for his internet television show. 

He has refused to stand for election in case he becomes “one of them”. He fled from Mr Robinson as he attempted to interview him. 

Mr Blair said MPs should not think that changing the process of democracy, such as introducing internet voting, will address public cynicism towards Westminster. 

“There is a whole swathe of the country that thinks, I elect my government, you guys go and govern. Don’t keep troubling me every three seconds with what I should think or shouldn’t think; they want to see their leaders leading.”

necropolitics: a war zone of the mind playing itself out on the streets

NYTimes |  At least in these cases that have galvanized the nation and the world in protest, we all see the twisted logic that results in the exoneration of the police who take away the lives of unarmed black men and women. And why is that the case? It is not because what the police and their lawyers present as their thinking in the midst of the situation is very reasonable. No, it is because that form of thinking is becoming more “reasonable” all the time. In other words, every time a grand jury or a police review board accepts this form of reasoning, they ratify the idea that blacks are a population against which society must be defended, and that the police defend themselves and (white) society, when they preemptively shoot unarmed black men in public space. At stake is a way that black people are figured as a threat even when they are simply living their lives, walking the street, leaving the convenience store, riding the subway, because in those instances this is only a threatening life, or a threat to the only kind of life, white life, that is recognized.

G.Y.: What has led us to this place?

J.B.: Racism has complex origins, and it is important that we learn the history of racism to know what has led us to this terrible place. But racism is also reproduced in the present, in the prison system, new forms of population control, increasing economic inequality that affects people of color disproportionately. These forms of institutionalized destitution and inequality are reproduced through these daily encounters — the disproportionate numbers of minorities stopped and detained by the police, and the rising number of those who fall victim to police violence. The figure of the black person as threat, as criminal, as someone who is, no matter where he is going, already-on-the-way-to-prison, conditions these pre-emptive strikes, attributing lethal aggression to the very figure who suffers it most. The lives taken in this way are not lives worth grieving; they belong to the increasing number of those who are understood as ungrievable, whose lives are thought not to be worth preserving.

But, of course, what we are also seeing in the recent and continuing assemblies, rallies and vigils is an open mourning for those whose lives were cut short and without cause, brutally extinguished. The practices of public mourning and political demonstration converge: when lives are considered ungrievable, to grieve them openly is protest. So when people assemble in the street, arrive at rallies or vigils, demonstrate with the aim of opposing this form of racist violence, they are “speaking back” to this mode of address, insisting on what should be obvious but is not, namely, that these lost lives are unacceptable losses.

necropolitics: freedom fries any semblance of fair and uniform application...,

France24 |  "Tonight, as far as I'm concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly", Dieudonné, who has several convictions for making anti-Semitic remarks and jokes, wrote in a post that has since been deleted from his Facebook page.

The comment was a play on “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie), the phrase that has become a rallying cry following the massacre of 12 people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last Wednesday. But it uses the last name of Amédy Coulibaly – the gunman who murdered four people at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris on Friday.

Coulibaly, who prosecutors say was also behind the fatal shooting of a policewoman in the French capital on Thursday, was killed when police stormed the supermarket and freed the surviving hostages.

He is believed to have acted in coordination with Said and Chérif Kouachi, the brothers responsible for the Charlie Hebdo shootings, who were also killed in a police raid Friday.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who visited the heart of Paris’s Jewish quarter on Monday, described Dieudonné's remarks as "contemptible".

Dieudonné: 'I’m no different from Charlie'

In an open letter to Cazeneuve published online Monday, Dieudonné responded to the minister’s criticism, accusing the French government of “trying to kill me by any means”.

“For a year, I have been treated like public enemy number one, while I seek to do nothing but make people laugh,” he wrote.

Defending his right to freedom of speech, he compared himself to Charlie Hebdo, which frequently sparks debates over its controversial content, such as publishing cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

“When I speak … you look for a pretext to ban me. You consider me an Amédy Coulibaly, while I'm no different from Charlie,” he said.

Dieudonné made his controversial Facebook post after attending Sunday's unity march against extremism that brought more than 1.5 million people on to the streets of Paris in the wake of the attacks.

He described the march, considered the biggest rally in modern French history, as "a magical moment comparable to the big-bang".

necropolitics: freedom fries structure, meaning, self-worth and dignity...,

truthdig |  Becoming a holy warrior, a jihadist, a champion of an absolute and pure ideal, is an intoxicating conversion, a kind of rebirth that brings a sense of power and importance. It is as familiar to an Islamic jihadist as it was to a member of the Red Brigades or the old fascist and communist parties. Converts to any absolute ideal that promises to usher in a utopia adopt a Manichaean view of history rife with bizarre conspiracy theories. Opposing and even benign forces are endowed with hidden malevolence. The converts believe they live in a binary universe divided between good and evil, the pure and the impure. As champions of the good and the pure they sanctify their own victimhood and demonize all nonbelievers. They believe they are anointed to change history. And they embrace a hypermasculine violence that is viewed as a cleansing agent for the world’s contaminants, including those people who belong to other belief systems, races and cultures. This is why France’s far right, organized around Marine Le Pen, the leader of the anti-immigrant Front National, has so much in common with the jihadists whom Le Pen says she wants to annihilate.

When you sink to despair, when you live trapped in Gaza, Israel’s vast open-air prison, sleeping 10 to a floor in a concrete hovel, walking every morning through the muddy streets of your refugee camp to get a bottle of water because the water that flows from your tap is toxic, lining up at a U.N. office to get a little food because there is no work and your family is hungry, suffering the periodic aerial bombardments by Israel that leaves hundreds of dead, your religion is all you have left. Muslim prayer, held five times a day, gives you your only sense of structure and meaning, and, most importantly, self-worth. And when the privileged of the world ridicule the one thing that provides you with dignity, you react with inchoate fury. This fury is exacerbated when you and nearly everyone around you feel powerless to respond.

The cartoons of the Prophet in the Paris-based satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo are offensive and juvenile. None of them are funny. And they expose a grotesque double standard when it comes to Muslims. In France a Holocaust denier, or someone who denies the Armenian genocide, can be imprisoned for a year and forced to pay a $60,000 fine. It is a criminal act in France to mock the Holocaust the way Charlie Hebdo mocked Islam. French high school students must be taught about the Nazi persecution of the Jews, but these same students read almost nothing in their textbooks about the widespread French atrocities, including a death toll among Algerians that some sources set at more than 1 million, in the Algerian war for independence against colonial France. French law bans the public wearing of the burqa, a body covering for women that includes a mesh over the face, as well as the niqab, a full veil that has a small slit for the eyes. Women who wear these in public can be arrested, fined the equivalent of about $200 and forced to carry out community service. France banned rallies in support of the Palestinians last summer when Israel was carrying out daily airstrikes in Gaza that resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths. The message to Muslims is clear: Your traditions, history and suffering do not matter. Your story will not be heard. Joe Sacco had the courage to make this point in panels he drew for the Guardian newspaper. And as Sacco pointed out, if we cannot hear these stories we will endlessly trade state terror for terror.

“It is a sad state of affairs when Liberty means the freedom to insult, demean and mock people’s most sacred concepts,” the Islamic scholar Hamza Yusuf, an American who lives in California, told me in an email. “In some Latin countries people are acquitted for murders where the defendant’s mother was slandered by the one he murdered. I saw this in Spain many years ago. It’s no excuse for murder, but it explains things in terms of honor, which no longer means anything in the West. Ireland is a western country that still retains some of that, and it was the Irish dueling laws that were used in Kentucky, the last State in the Union to make dueling outlawed. Dueling was once very prominent in the West when honor meant something deep in the soul of men. Now we are not allowed to feel insulted by anything other than a racial slur, which means less to a deeply religious person than an attack on his or her religion. Muslim countries are still governed, as you well know, by shame and honor codes. Religion is the big one. I was saddened by the ‘I’m Charlie’ tweets and posters, because while I’m definitely not in sympathy with those misguided fools [the gunmen who invaded the newspaper], I have no feeling of solidarity with mockers.”

Charlie Hebdo, despite its insistence that it targets all equally, fired an artist and writer in 2008 for an article it deemed to be anti-Semitic. Fist tap Vic.