not only did they have you killing each other, they had you singing and dancing about killing each other...,

theatlantic |  The dramatic rise of incarceration and the precipitous fall in crime have shaped the landscape of American criminal justice over the last two decades. Both have been unprecedented. Many believe that the explosion in incarceration created the crime drop. In fact, the enormous growth in imprisonment only had a limited impact. And, for the past thirteen years, it has passed the point of diminishing returns, making no effective difference. We now know that we can reduce our prison populations and simultaneously reduce crime.

This has profound implications for criminal justice policy: We lock up millions of people in an effort to fight crime. But this is not working.

The link between rising incarceration and falling crime seems logical. Draconian penalties and a startling expansion in prison capacity were advertised as measures that would bring down crime. That’s what happened, right?

Not so fast. There is wide agreement that we do not yet fully know what caused crime to drop. Theories abound, from an aging population to growing police forces to reducing lead in the air. A jumble of data and theories makes it hard to sort out this big, if happy, mystery. And it has been especially difficult to pin down the role of growing incarceration.

So incarceration skyrocketed and crime was in free fall. But conflating simple correlation with causation in this case is a costly mistake. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, called What Caused the Crime Decline? finds that increasing incarceration is not the answer. As Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in the foreword, “This prodigious rate of incarceration is not only inhumane, it is economic folly.”

Our team of economic and criminal justice researchers spent the last 20 months testing fourteen popular theories for the crime decline. We delved deep into over 30 years of data collected from all 50 states and the 50 largest cities. The results are sharply etched: We do not know with precision what caused the crime decline, but the growth in incarceration played only a minor role, and now has a negligible impact.

comey's full georgetown address on law enforcement and race squashing further race-partisan cherry-picking

fbi |  Given Georgetown’s remarkable history, and that of President Healy, this struck me as an appropriate place to talk about the difficult relationship between law enforcement and the communities we are sworn to serve and protect.

With the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, the ongoing protests throughout the country, and the assassinations of NYPD Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, we are at a crossroads. As a society, we can choose to live our everyday lives, raising our families and going to work, hoping that someone, somewhere, will do something to ease the tension—to smooth over the conflict. We can roll up our car windows, turn up the radio and drive around these problems, or we can choose to have an open and honest discussion about what our relationship is today—what it should be, what it could be, and what it needs to be—if we took more time to better understand one another.

comey acquitted himself well at georgetown jesuits gonna work it out...,

NYTimes |  The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, on Thursday delivered an unusually frank speech about the relationship between the police and black people, saying that officers who work in neighborhoods where blacks commit crimes at higher rates develop a cynicism that shades their attitudes about race.

He said that officers — whether they are white or any other race — who are confronted with white men on one side of the street and black men on the other do not view them the same way. The officers develop a mental shortcut that “becomes almost irresistible and maybe even rational by some lights” because of the number of black suspects they have arrested.

“We need to come to grips with the fact that this behavior complicates the relationship between police and the communities they serve,” Mr. Comey said in the speech, at Georgetown University.

While officers should be closely scrutinized, he said, they are “not the root cause of problems in our hardest-hit neighborhoods,” where blacks grow up “in environments lacking role models, adequate education and decent employment.”

“They lack all sorts of opportunities that most of us take for granted,” Mr. Comey said.

Mr. Comey’s speech was unprecedented for an F.B.I. director.

rule of law: using fbi muscle for a canadian company is _____?

Globe and Mail | Unexpected visitors have been dropping in on anti-oil activists in the United States — knocking on doors, calling, texting, contacting family members.

The visitors are federal agents.

Opponents of Canadian oil say they’ve been contacted by FBI investigators in several states following their involvement in protests that delayed northbound shipments of equipment to Canada’s oilsands.

A lawyer working with the protesters says he’s personally aware of a dozen people having been contacted in the northwestern U.S. and says the actual number is probably higher.

Larry Hildes says it’s been happening the last few months in Washington State, Oregon and Idaho. He says one person got a visit at work, after having already refused to answer questions.

“They appear to be interested in actions around the tarsands and the Keystone XL pipeline,” Hildes said in an interview.

“It’s always the same line: ‘We’re not doing criminal investigations, you’re not accused of any crime. But we’re trying to learn more about the movement.“’

He’s advised activists not to talk — and they mostly haven’t. That lack of communication has made it a little complicated to figure out what, exactly, the FBI is looking for.

The bureau hasn’t offered too many clues.

social network analysis and surveillance technology fitna be applied to gangbanging and professional dope-slanging (aka black-on-black crime)

AmericanThinker |  Sociology, which is sometimes defined as the painful and tedious explication of the obvious, occasionally comes up with useful insights, or at least proof that some useful insights are true. That seems to be the case with a study by Yale sociologist Andrew Papachristos, published in the academic journal Social Science & Medicine, and featured in the Chicago Sun-Times.

It turns out that being arrested with someone else is the best predictor of who will get shot in Chicago. No, not by the police, as the Al Sharptons of the world would like to claim. Shot by another civilian, in the epidemic of shootings that have made Chicago at some times more dangerous than Baghdad.

If you and another person get arrested together in Chicago, you’re both part of a loose network of people with a high risk of getting shot in the future, Yale University researchers say in a newly published study.
Only 6 percent of the people in Chicago between 2006 and 2012 were listed on arrest reports as co-offenders in crimes, the study says. But those people became the victims of 70 percent of the nonfatal shootings in the city over the same period.

The logic is pretty simple: if you are the type of person who goes out and commits crimes with others, you are probably connected to people who commit crimes with some frequency.  And that puts you at risk of getting shot, because people who commit crimes sometimes shoot others who become inconvenient, or who just get in the way.

The study is done with social network analysis, studying who knows who and how they interact, and drawing up networks that reveal the clustering that results from various commonalities.

 The latest Yale University study was built on Papachristos’ previous social-network research into murders on the West Side. He had studied killings between 2005 and 2010 in West Garfield Park and North Lawndale. About 70 percent of the killings occurred in what Papachristos found was a social network of only about 1,600 people — out of a population of about 80,000 in those neighborhoods. Inside that social network, the risk of being killed was 30 out of 1,000. For the others in those neighborhoods, the risk of getting murdered was less than one in 1,000.

These statistics demonstrate the wisdom of the old adage, “Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.” They also show that it is not per se that is related to the higher incidence of violence in some black communities…

For every 100,000 people, an average of one white person, 28 Hispanics and 113 blacks became victims of nonfatal shootings every year in Chicago over the six-year study period.

… but rather the existence of networks of people who engage in violence and reinforce each other in patters of violent behavior.

There are some useful implications for policing in Chicago IF the race demagogues don’t start calling it profiling: Fist tap Big Don.

UMKC |  An ongoing law enforcement effort to rethink strategies to reduce violent crime in the Kansas City area has its own secret weapon: UMKC.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, part of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, is intimately involved in the Kansas City No Violence Alliance (NoVA). NoVA is a 2-year-old multi-agency effort to reduce gun-related violence.

Chancellor Leo E. Morton serves on NoVA’s governing board, and UMKC faculty members and graduate students are embedded in NoVA’s effort to implement a crime-prevention approach known as “focused deterrence,” which helps police look beyond individual criminals to the criminals’ entire social networks.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police this month called out UMKC’s relationship with the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department through NoVA when it awarded the department its 2014 bronze medal for Excellence in Law Enforcement Research Award. The award recognizes law enforcement agencies that demonstrate excellence in conducting and using research to improve police operations and public safety.

UMKC became involved with NoVA at the very beginning. In 2012, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker came to Ken Novak, chair of the Criminal Justice and Criminology Department, to ask how UMKC could help curb a rising tide of violence on Kansas City-area streets. She’d heard about focused deterrence and its success in other cities and wanted to try it here. It just so happened that Andrew Fox had just taken a job as a professor in UMKC’s criminology department, and Fox happened to have experience with focused deterrence.

there's a very compelling reason comey was tapped to address the issue of law enforcement and race

NYTimes |  The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, on Thursday will wade into the national debate about the relationship between police officers and African-Americans that was highlighted by the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Mo., in August. It will be the first time one of the bureau’s directors has publicly addressed the issue of race at length.

In a speech at Georgetown University, Mr. Comey is expected to say that much research shows that people in a society with a majority of whites unconsciously react differently to blacks. The text of Mr. Comey’s speech has not been released by the F.B.I., but several bureau officials described parts of it.

He also plans to say that in areas where nonwhites commit a majority of the crimes, law enforcement officers can become cynical and develop mental shortcuts that lead them to more closely scrutinize members of minority groups.

Mr. Comey is expected to say that most police officers are not racists, and that they chose their profession because they wanted to help protect others, regardless of whether those people are white, black or another ethnicity.

Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, said that by addressing race, Mr. Comey was beginning “to show how he’s a much different F.B.I. director than the previous ones.”

Previous directors have limited their public comments about race to civil rights investigations, like into murders committed by the Ku Klux Klan and how the bureau wiretapped the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The surveillance of Dr. King is considered one of the F.B.I.’s greatest overreaches of power.

Mr. Comey, who has led the F.B.I. for about 18 months, has said that as part of his job, he wants to foster a national debate about law enforcement issues that state and local authorities across the country are facing.

what the ashcroft hospital showdown on nsa spying was all about

arstechnica |  We know that thanks to an AT&T whistleblower, who described a series of secret rooms containing powerful “semantic analyzers” that filtered all the traffic flowing through a company’s fiber optic cables.

Such broad fiber surveillance would, however, pretty clearly be “electronic surveillance” as defined by FISA, meaning it would require either a warrant (for content) or a pen register order (for metadata) from the secret FISA court. And since the NSA wanted everyone’s metadata, not just that of suspected Al Qaeda operatives, it would have a harder time applying the “AUMF exception” theory in order to get that permission.

What to do, then?

Words and meanings 

At first, according to the leaked NSA report, it seems government lawyers tried to evade this rather obvious problem through a variety of word games.

Specifically, NSA leadership interpreted the terms of the Authorization to allow the NSA to obtain bulk Internet metadata for analysis because the NSA did not actually “acquire” communications until specific communications were selected. In other words, because the Authorization permitted the NSA to conduct metadata analysis on selectors that met certain criteria, it implicitly authorized the NSA to obtain the bulk data that was needed to conduct the metadata analysis.

There were a couple of problems with this. First, while the NSA’s own internal definitions may not count a communication as “acquired” until it has been processed into a human-readable form, that’s not a definition that applies anywhere else in the law. Rather, if you bug someone’s room or tap her phone, you’ve “intercepted” her communication (and committed a felony) as soon as it is rerouted into your recording device, regardless of whether you ultimately listen to the recorded conversation. As one federal court has put it, “When the contents of a wire communication are captured or redirected in any way, an interception occurs at that time.”

Second, NSA lawyers hadn’t actually been kept in the loop on the legal justifications for the STELLAR WIND program, which means they may not have understood that the administration was now relying on the AUMF as the authority for circumventing the FISA process.

This, then, was almost certainly the problem that provoked the hospital showdown. The interception of phone and e-mail content was clearly electronic surveillance, but it was (in theory) limited to targets within the scope of the AUMF (which allowed the president to “determine” who had “aided” the 9/11 perpetrators). The bulk collection of phone records was not limited, but it also wasn’t “electronic surveillance” as defined by FISA. The bulk collection of Internet metadata, however, was both plainly “electronic surveillance” and also too broad to shoehorn into the language of the AUMF.

Comey, it would seem, wasn’t willing to countenance the legal gymnastics required to pretend otherwise.

This time, it's legal 

Of course, we now know that after the hospital showdown, the administration simply went to the FISA court and obtained a blanket “pen register” order allowing the metadata collection to continue, this time with legal cover (though the Court apparently imposed stricter limits than the NSA’s own lawyers did).

This particular type of bulk Internet metadata collection was reportedly halted in 2011. What the NSA is doing now instead is anybody’s guess.

This is in us. It is in our brains. It is part of who we are

Boing Boing | The United Nations says the drug war’s rationale is to build “a drug-free world — we can do it!” U.S. government officials agree, stressing that “there is no such thing as recreational drug use.” So this isn’t a war to stop addiction, like that in my family, or teenage drug use. It is a war to stop drug use among all humans, everywhere. All these prohibited chemicals need to be rounded up and removed from the earth. That is what we are fighting for.

I began to see this goal differently after I learned the story of the drunk elephants, the stoned water buffalo, and the grieving mongoose. They were all taught to me by a remarkable scientist in Los Angeles named Professor Ronald K. Siegel.

The tropical storm in Hawaii had reduced the mongoose’s home to a mess of mud, and lying there, amid the dirt and the water, was the mongoose’s mate — dead. Professor Siegel, a silver-haired official adviser to two U.S. presidents and to the World Health Organization, was watching this scene. The mongoose found the corpse, and it made a decision: it wanted to get out of its mind.

Two months before, the professor had planted a powerful hallucinogen called silver morning glory in the pen. The mongooses had all tried it, but they didn’t seem to like it: they stumbled around disoriented for a few hours and had stayed away from it ever since. But not now. Stricken with grief, the mongoose began to chew. Before long, it had tuned in and dropped out.

It turns out this wasn’t a freak occurrence in the animal kingdom. It is routine. As a young scientific researcher, Siegel had been confidently toldby his supervisor that humans were the only species that seek out drugs to use for their own pleasure. But Siegel had seen cats lunging at catnip — which, he knew, contains chemicals that mimic the pheromones in a male tomcat’s pee —so, he wondered, could his supervisor really be right? Given the number of species in the world, aren’t there others who want to get high, or stoned, or drunk?

This question set him on a path that would take twenty-five years of his life, studying the drug-taking habits of animals from the mongooses of Hawaii to the elephants of South Africa to the grasshoppers of Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia. It was such an implausible mission that in one marijuana field in Hawaii, he was taken hostage by the local drug dealers, because when he told them he was there to see what happened when mongooses ate marijuana, they thought it was the worst police cover story they had ever heard.

What Ronald K. Siegel discovered seems strange at first. He explains in his book Intoxication:

After sampling the numbing nectar of certain orchids, bees drop to the ground in a temporary stupor, then weave back for more. Birds gorge themselves on inebriating berries, then fly with reckless abandon. Cats eagerly sniff aromatic “pleasure” plants, then play with imaginary objects. Cows that browse special range weeds will twitch, shake, and stumble back to the plants for more. Elephants purposely get drunk off fermented fruits. Snacks of “magic mushrooms” cause monkeys to sit with their heads in their hands in a posture reminiscent of Rodin’s Thinker. The pursuit of intoxication by animals seems as purposeless as it is passionate. Many animals engage these plants, or their manufactured allies, despite the danger of toxic or poisonous effects.

Noah’s Ark, he found, would have looked a lot like London on a Saturday night. “In every country, in almost every class of animal,” Siegel explains, “I found examples of not only the accidental but the intentional use of drugs.” In West Bengal, a group of 150 elephants smashed their way into a warehouse and drank a massive amount of moonshine. They got so drunk they went on a rampage and killed five people, as well as demolishing seven concrete buildings. If you give hash to male mice, they become horny and seek out females — but then they find “they can barely crawl over the females, let alone mount them,” so after a little while they yawn and start licking their own penises.

In Vietnam, the water buffalo have always shunned the local opium plants. They don’t like them. But when the American bombs started to fall all around them during the war, the buffalo left their normal grazing grounds, broke into the opium fields, and began to chew. They would then look a little dizzy and dulled. When they were traumatized, it seems, they wanted — like the mongoose, like us — to escape from their thoughts.

where is germany's gold?

bloomberg |   Gold bugs around the world are winning unprecedented concessions from their governments, and gold is streaming out of 33 Liberty St. and across the Atlantic.

 

In May 2014, the Bank of Italy, which has the third-biggest gold reserves after the U.S. and Germany, ended years of secrecy by disclosing the locations of its holdings. Citing the German repatriations, the central bank said about half its gold is in Rome and most of the rest is beneath the New York Fed. Then in November, the Dutch central bank announced that it had secretly moved 122.5 tons of gold from New York to Amsterdam. In apparently just months, the Dutch had shipped almost 25 times the gold that Germany moved in all of 2013. “Beyond realising a more balanced distribution of the gold stock across the different locations, this may also have a positive effect on public confidence,” the Dutch bank said in its announcement. Soon after, the leader of France’s anti-euro, anti-immigration National Front party, Marine Le Pen, asked the Bank of France for an independent audit of its gold and to reveal any lending or financial commitments related to the reserves.

At the end of November, a referendum in Switzerland to repatriate some holdings failed but led the country’s central bank to disclose locations and amounts of its gold for the first time. Swiss politicians are pushing for more. “I want a clear inspection where you have a list of all the gold bars, where it’s written that it’s fine gold and only belongs to Switzerland,” says Lukas Reimann, a member of the Swiss parliament who led the referendum.

On Jan. 19, the Bundesbank delivered its own surprise, publishing a tally of its 2014 gold repatriations. During the year, the German central bank had shipped 85 tons from New York to Frankfurt, blowing away the mere 5 tons from 2013 and setting a pace at which the Bundesbank would easily meet its target of 300 tons returned by 2020.

Even if the world’s biggest central banks did explain away his gold bug speculations, Boehringer had triumphed. But for him, and his sense of order, the itch is never scratched. There were still 1,447 tons of German gold under Manhattan at year’s end, and he wants all of it back in Frankfurt. At the current rate it would take more than 30 years for all German gold stored abroad to return, he says.

And there’s this detail from the German announcement: “The Bundesbank took advantage of the transfer from New York to have roughly 50 tonnes of gold melted down and recast according to the London Good Delivery standard.” Bar lists were cross-checked with bar markings, the statement said. Spot checks found no irregularities. Yet any identifying trace of the original gold had been wiped out, the bars “now destroyed,” a freshly fired-up Boehringer says. Melted bars might not prove something’s rotten under Liberty Street, but the mere disclosure shows Boehringer is making a difference.

I wake up every morning and think about how I can help Israel

mondoweiss |  I’m announcing my new Jewish identity project today. Well actually it’s my old project, but dressed up a little. This is from Haaretz today, Anees of Jerusalem spotted it. Who knew?

Although his alleged sexual exploits are making waves, it is Israel, not women that is in former IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s heart. In an interview with the newspaper “Liberation” back in April, just over a month before he made headlines for attempted rape charges (that are looking increasingly shaky), DSK told the French daily that only three things could prevent him from becoming the next president of France – his money, his women and his Judaism.

The fallen-from-grace financier recounted an interview he gave some years back with the “Tribune Juive”(The Jewish Tribune), in which he said “I wake up every morning and think about how I can help Israel.”

And does this kind of affection have any consequences? You tell me. Don’t be conspiratorial now.

Cathedral?!?! at a Jesuit University?

theatlantic |  Professor John McAdams is being stripped of tenure by Marquette University for writing a blog post that administrators characterize as inaccurate and irresponsible.

Academics all over the United States ought to denounce the firing of the 69-year-old, a Harvard Ph.D. who taught courses on American politics and public policy. If tenure can be taken away based upon one controversial blog post, what protection does it offer? How many tenured professors will censor themselves from participating in public conversation to avoid a similar fate? Marquette has violated core academic values, regardless of what one thinks of McAdams' commentary or the shabby treatment of the graduate instructor he was criticizing (who deserves sympathy for the horrifying torrent of misogyny others directed at her).

For purposes of discussion, I'll begin with the version of events as described by Marquette University Dean Richard C. Holtz, who notified McAdams of his termination. Even assuming that the factual claims Holtz makes are correct, the move has set several sweeping, alarming precedents for when tenure can be revoked.

a new theory of energy and the economy

ourfiniteworld |  How does the economy really work? In my view, there are many erroneous theories in published literature. I have been investigating this topic and have come to the conclusion that both energy and debt play an extremely important role in an economic system. Once energy supply and other aspects of the economy start hitting diminishing returns, there is a serious chance that a debt implosion will bring the whole system down.

In this post, I will look at the first piece of this story, relating to how the economy is tied to energy, and how the leveraging impact of cheap energy creates economic growth. In order for economic growth to occur, the wages of workers need to go farther and farther in buying goods and services. Low-priced energy products are far more effective in producing this situation than high-priced energy products. Substituting high-priced energy products for low-priced energy products can be expected to lead to lower economic growth.

Trying to tackle this topic is a daunting task. The subject crosses many fields of study, including anthropology, ecology, systems analysis, economics, and physics of a thermodynamically open system. It also involves reaching limits in a finite world. Most researchers have tackled the subject without understanding the many issues involved. I hope my analysis can shed some light on the subject.

Part 2. Here.

you can't squeeze blood out of turnips...,

NYTimes |  St. Louis County is a web of 90 municipalities. For those with unpaid traffic debts and arrest warrants in multiple towns, a trip to one jail often means a journey, over days or weeks, through others as each jurisdiction seeks a payment for release until a court date or a payment of old fines.

Keilee Fant, a nursing assistant with nine children, has been locked up repeatedly. She said her problems began with traffic violations decades ago, then intensified as she was unable to pay the fines, often did not go to court because she feared the repercussions and kept driving. At one point in 2013, Ms. Fant was held for several weeks on warrants, as city after city called on her to put up hundreds of dollars in what court officials describe as a bond, though the amounts, she said, seemed to change and appeared to be a matter of negotiation with jail officials.

“I was bouncing from place to place, and all I could think was: ‘Wait, I’m in here for traffic. I haven’t killed anybody,’ ” Ms. Fant, who is 37 and a plaintiff in both lawsuits, said.

“If I don’t have any money, they send me to jail, so why is it so important to show up if you’re going to send me back to jail?” she said. “All I want is my license back. My license and my life.”

The lawsuits were filed on behalf of the plaintiffs by representatives from the Equal Justice Under Law, a nonprofit civil rights organization in Washington; ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit group in St. Louis; and St. Louis University Law School. They seek to bar the cities from continuing the practices and compensation for people whose rights were violated.

In some cases, the suits say, prisoners have gone without showers, toothbrushes, sufficient blankets or sanitary napkins; medical care has been denied; and food, often honey buns and potpies, has been scanty.

In Ferguson, some residents say the authorities seem to have eased off at times since Mr. Brown’s death on Aug. 9 set off months of demonstrations. In a series of changes discussed at the City Council meeting in September, officials said they would end several fees that had been routinely issued if a defendant failed to show up in court and would start a special docket for those who had trouble making payments on their fines.

That is little comfort to Roelif Carter, who is 62 and has been arrested on warrants by the authorities in Ferguson at least three times. The counts he has faced include violating a dog leash law and resisting arrest.

“It’s the same old thing, just a different day,” Mr. Carter, who is unemployed, said. “It’s making me feel like you can’t trust them. There’s no way you could work off the anger.”

four grilled-cheese trucks valued at $100 million...,

bloomberg |   Signs of excess and froth in the equity markets.

Exhibit 1: Grilled Cheese Truck Inc., which began trading on the pink sheets last week after receiving OTCQB certification.

 Let's look at the fundamentals of the Ft. Lauderdale, Florida-based company. Based on the 18 million shares outstanding and a recent stock price of $6 the company has a market value of about $108 million. No matter how much you like grilled cheese -- and I like a good GAC BAC TOM as much as the next guy -- I can't see this as a reasonable valuation.

If you go to the company’s website, you will learn that “The company currently operates and licenses grilled cheese food trucks in the Los Angeles, CA area and Phoenix, AZ and is expanding into additional markets with the goal of becoming the largest operator in the gourmet grilled cheese space.”  You can see an interview with the founder here. The company employs military veterans, and it even lists retired General Wesley Clark as vice chairman.

However, according to the company’s financial statements, it has about $1 million of assets and almost $3 million in liabilities. In the third quarter of 2014, it had sales of almost $1 million, on which it had a net loss of more than  $900,000.  The story is much the same for the first nine months of the year: $2.6 million in sales and a loss of $4.4 million.

But forget the losses for a moment, and make the generous assumption that it will have sales of $4 million this year. This means its shares trade for more than 25 times sales, a very rich valuation.

Which brings me back to my original comments regarding looking for contrary indicators to my bullish posture. I can't think of a more interesting sign of the old irrational exuberance in equity markets than a publicly traded grilled cheese truck (four in this case) business trading at a $100-million-plus valuation. That sort of thing doesn't happen unless there is significant excess in the markets.

baltic dry index at its lowest level ever...,

zerohedge |  Having fallen for 47 of the last 51 days, The Baltic Dry Index (tracking the cost of shipping dry bulk from iron ore to grains) has been collapsing in a well-documented manner by Zero Hedge (though not the mainstream media). With Cramer having told investors of its importance previously, it will be hard to ignore the fact that, as of this morning, the index of global shipping costs has never (ever) been lower at 554. We leave it to readers to decide what they think this means (but we already know what it means for shippers and ship-building companies).

always and everywhere - remember yourself...,

newyorker |  Within the brain, memories are formed and consolidated largely due to the help of a small seahorse-like structure called the hippocampus; damage the hippocampus, and you damage the ability to form lasting recollections. The hippocampus is located next to a small almond-shaped structure that is central to the encoding of emotion, the amygdala. Damage that, and basic responses such as fear, arousal, and excitement disappear or become muted.

A key element of emotional-memory formation is the direct line of communication between the amygdala and the visual cortex. That close connection, Phelps has shown, helps the amygdala, in a sense, tell our eyes to pay closer attention at moments of heightened emotion. So we look carefully, we study, and we stare—giving the hippocampus a richer set of inputs to work with. At these moments of arousal, the amygdala may also signal to the hippocampus that it needs to pay special attention to encoding this particular moment. These three parts of the brain work together to insure that we firmly encode memories at times of heightened arousal, which is why emotional memories are stronger and more precise than other, less striking ones. We don’t really remember an uneventful day the way that we remember a fight or a first kiss. In one study, Phelps tested this notion in her lab, showing people a series of images, some provoking negative emotions, and some neutral. An hour later, she and her colleagues tested their recall for each scene. Memory for the emotional scenes was significantly higher, and the vividness of the recollection was significantly greater.

musical language

royalsocietypublishing |  Musicality can be defined as a natural, spontaneously developing trait based on and constrained by biology and cognition. Music, by contrast, can be defined as a social and cultural construct based on that very musicality. One critical challenge is to delineate the constituent elements of musicality. What biological and cognitive mechanisms are essential for perceiving, appreciating and making music? Progress in understanding the evolution of music cognition depends upon adequate characterization of the constituent mechanisms of musicality and the extent to which they are present in non-human species. We argue for the importance of identifying these mechanisms and delineating their functions and developmental course, as well as suggesting effective means of studying them in human and non-human animals. It is virtually impossible to underpin the evolutionary role of musicality as a whole, but a multicomponent perspective on musicality that emphasizes its constituent capacities, development and neural cognitive specificity is an excellent starting point for a research programme aimed at illuminating the origins and evolution of musical behaviour as an autonomous trait.

secrecy has no place in our criminal justice system

silive |  Do grand juries really protect the public against overzealous corrupt prosecutors? Was the Fifth Amendment provision of the U.S. Constitution requiring grand jury presentment for felony crimes really included in the Bill of Rights in 1791 to protect the public? I truly believe that this provision was intended to protect the rich and powerful who wrote the Constitution and controlled the wealth of the new nation. Consider the fact that only white male property owners were permitted to sit on grand juries and that everyone non white and non-male was excluded from the judicial and legislative process. Thus, the rich, white and powerful were guaranteed that only their true piers would judge them and determine their criminal liability.

Now I didn't start this race business, I'm just dealing with reality. Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney started it in 1857 when Dred Scott asked for his full rights of citizenship. Justice Taney denied his plea, stating: "The framers of the constitution believed that a black man had no rights that a white man was bound to respect."

You remember the Central Park jogger defendants? Swiftly arrested and indicted by a grand jury based upon incomplete evidence and police coerced confessions. All defendants were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms before the guilty party confessed and exonerated them all. Its nice to believe that all prosecutors will be fair and honest, but we need only look at the record of former Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes.  Convictions by Hyne's office of 11, yes 11, black men have been overturned following the revelation that the testimony and evidence offered by the assigned detective and accepted by the courts, was false, shoddy and manufactured. None of these men benefited from a secret grand jury proceeding, an honest prosecutor or a courageous judiciary.

We have entered an era when more rather than less openness is sought in legislative, regulatory and judicial proceedings. Is a witness more inclined to tell the truth if his/her secrecy is guaranteed or are they more likely to lie and slip the truth if they know that their identity and testimony may never see the light of day or the eyes of a competent defense attorney? I'll take openness and transparency over protection and secrecy any day.

rule of law: not just the DoD, G-Dub salted the DoJ with dominionists too...,

salon |  The Republican’s strategy should be clear by now: at the most superficial level, it’s about base mobilization, not trying to persuade those in the middle. Whitehouse was right about that much. But this doesn’t mean the GOP isn’t targeting the middle, and doing it more successfully than Digby might suggest—they’re just not doing it directly. At a deeper level, their play is simple: go hard right with no concern for facts or any other standard, and pull the “both sides do it” brain-dead centrist journalists, pundit class and the rest of Washington along with them, so that they do the actual work of moving everyone in the center to the right.

With so many attacks made so continuously, even the reporters who’ve helped debunk them come to accept the situation as normal. But the bottom line of normal in this instance—the GOP charge that the DOJ under Holder has suddenly become politicized—is precisely the opposite of the truth. It was actually the Bush DOJ that was politicized like no other in modern history, save Nixon’s post-Watergate, and Obama’s biggest mistake (as in so many other things) was in giving them a pass in hopes of fostering bipartisan cooperation going forward.

It wasn’t just Democrats complaining about politicization under Bush, either. The watershed event—though far from the only violation involved—was the U.S. attorneys scandal—an unprecedented set of politically motivatied high-level firings that eventually had politicians of both parties shaking their heads in disbelief. The scandal took some time to decode, but in late February 2007, Salon identified one key aspect—that high-performing U.S. attorneys had been forced out to make way for perceived Bush loyalists. McClatchy played a key role in reporting many of the differently inflected twists and turns, while Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, who first raised the alarm widely, was key in drawing attention to the political core of what was happening. As he explained in March 2007, as the outlines were still coming into focus:

The issue here is why these U.S. Attorneys were fired and the fact that the White House intended to replace them with U.S. Attorneys not confirmed by the senate. We now have abundant evidence that they were fired for not sufficiently politicizing their offices, for not indicting enough Democrats on bogus charges or for too aggressively going after Republicans. (Remember, Carol Lam is still the big story here.) We also now know that the top leadership of the Justice Department lied both to the public and to Congress about why the firing took place. As an added bonus we know the whole plan was hatched at the White House with the direct involvement of the president.

That same month, Salon highlighted the role of bogus voter fraud claims in the years leading up to the firings. That story briefly touched on New Mexico, where, “in 2004, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, one of the two fired U.S. attorneys who allegedly failed to pursue electoral fraud cases, took a pass on an especially dubious prosecution,” but it focused intently on Missouri, where Salon noted, “three different [Bush era] U.S. attorneys have launched investigations into electoral fraud… indicting nine people”—not a very large haul, which was part of the problem. In Missouri, the replacement U.S. attorney—appointed without Senate approval, as was then possible, due to a Patriot Act loophole—was Bradley Schlozman, who had previously supervised the voting section of the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, which we’ll soon see was another hotbed of politicization within the Bush DOJ.

But it wasn’t just Democrats and a handful of remaining “good government” Republicans who were upset. By late August, McClatchy’s Marisa Taylor reported widespread internal criticism based on extensive interviews with “current and former department officials,” as well as at least one anonymous federal judge. “Charges of cronyism and partisan politicking have sunk the Justice Department’s reputation to levels not seen since Watergate and damaged the Bush administration’s ability to fight crime, pursue the war on terrorism and achieve its other goals,” Taylor reported in late August 2007.

william bennett's confused and confusing defense of marijuana prohibition

Forbes |  “With marijuana,” declare William J. Bennett and Robert A. White in Going to Pot, their new prohibitionist screed, “we have inexplicably suspended all the normal rules of reasoning and knowledge.” You can’t say they didn’t warn us.

The challenge for Bennett, a former drug czar and secretary of education who makes his living nowadays as a conservative pundit and talk radio host, and White, a New Jersey lawyer, is that most Americans support marijuana legalization, having discovered through direct and indirect experience that cannabis is not the menace portrayed in decades of anti-pot propaganda. To make the familiar seem threatening again, Bennett and White argue that marijuana is both more dangerous than it used to be, because it is more potent, and more dangerous than we used to think, because recent research has revealed “long-lasting and permanent serious health effects.” The result is a rambling, repetitive, self-contradicting hodgepodge of scare stories, misleading comparisons, unsupportable generalizations, and decontextualized research results.

Bennett and White exaggerate the increase in marijuana’s potency, comparing THC levels in today’s strongest strains with those in barely psychoactive samples from the 1970s that were not much stronger than ditch weed. “That is a growth of a psychoactive ingredient from 3 to 4 percent a few decades ago to close to 40 percent,” they write, taking the most extreme outliers from both ends. Still, there is no question that average THC levels have increased substantially as Americans have gotten better at growing marijuana. Consumers generally view that as an improvement, and it arguably makes pot smoking safer, since users can achieve the same effect while inhaling less smoke.

But from Bennett and White’s perspective, better pot is unambiguously worse. “You cannot consider it the same substance when you look at the dramatic increase in potency,” they write. “It is like comparing a twelve-ounce glass of beer with a twelve-ounce glass of 80 proof vodka; both contain alcohol, but they have vastly different effects on the body when consumed.” How many people do you know who treat 12 ounces of vodka as equivalent to 12 ounces of beer? Drinkers tend to consume less of stronger products, and the same is true of pot smokers—a crucial point that Bennett and White never consider.

When it comes to assessing the evidence concerning marijuana’s hazards, Bennett and White’s approach is not exactly rigorous. They criticize evidence of marijuana’s benefits as merely “anecdotal” yet intersperse their text with personal testimonials about its harms (e.g., “My son is now 27 years old and a hopeless heroin addict living on the streets…”). They do Google searches on “marijuana” paired with various possible dangers, then present the alarming (and generally misleading) headlines that pop up as if they conclusively verify those dangers. They cite any study that reflects negatively on marijuana (often repeatedly) as if it were the final word on the subject. Occasionally they acknowledge that the studies they favor have been criticized on methodological grounds or that other studies have generated different results. But they argue that even the possibility of bad outcomes such as IQ loss, psychosis, or addiction to other drugs is enough to oppose legalization.