zerohedge | A year ago we wrote about
how electricity consumption could provide clues to the performance of
the US economy, which generated a lot of interest and comments.
A relationship between the two variables makes sense, but needs to be
framed in the proper context. Genuine economic (and population) growth
should translate into more electricity consumption, as we have more
activity and transactions taking place throughout the economy.
However, factors such as energy efficiency and the weather can muddle this relationship:
An increase in efficiency means that the same output can be obtained
with less inputs. Therefore, a small-ish reduction in electricity
consumption versus a prior period may not necessarily be indicative of a
sluggish economy over that time. And we know that this efficiency has
been on the rise in recent years (just look at the power rating of your
new appliances).
Likewise, a warmer winter versus the prior year may also cause a
drop in electricity consumption, simply due to home heaters not being
used as hard, not necessarily because the economy is doing badly.
So can we adjust electricity consumption to take these factors into
consideration and get a better measure of its relationship with economic
growth?
We developed an indicator to do just that together with DegreeDays.net,
an energy systems data company. We provide a brief technical
explanation of our proposed methodology below (for a much better
overview please visit this supporting article). Bear with us, the analysis is quite interesting!
alternet | Rich people rarely tell you how they really feel about poor people.
Occasionally, though, you get a glimpse. Earlier this week, the
Washington Post published a storyabout
Rancho Santa Fe, a small but extremely wealthy enclave in Southern
California. Like the rest of California, the people of Rancho Santa Fe
are dealing with a drought. As you might imagine, that means water is
scarce and conservation is critical. For the denizens of Rancho Santa
Fe, however, conservation is someone else’s problem, namely poor people.
According
to Steve Yuhas, who lives in the area and hosts a conservative
talk-radio show, privileged people “should not be forced to live on
property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for
wanting their gardens to be beautiful.” Oh, the humanity! In case it
wasn’t clear, Yuhas added that the right to water ought to scale with
income: “No, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”
And Yuhas
isn’t alone. Gay Butler, an avid equestrian and fellow resident of
Rancho Santa Fe, fumed for similar reasons. “It angers me because people
aren’t looking at the overall picture,” she said. “What are we supposed
to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?” Perhaps Butler
has a point. It’s one thing to demand sacrifice in extraordinary
circumstances, but we’ve got to draw the line somewhere, right? If a
woman wants to ride her finely manicured horse on a dirt-free prairie in
the middle of the desert, what matters a little drought?
Brett
Barbre, a fellow Orange Country aristocrat, also appears to get it. “I
call it the war on suburbia,” he remarked. “California used to be the
land of opportunity and freedom. It’s slowly becoming the land of one
group telling everyone else how they think everybody should live their
lives.” Barbre continued: “They’ll have to pry it [his water hose] from
my cold, dead hands.”
You may be asking yourself: Do restrictions
on water consumption during a historic drought really constitute an
all-out assault on human freedom? Fair question. Most of us fail to see
this issue in such grand terms. Maybe we’re missing something. Mr.
Barbre is either a bold lover of liberty or a detached plutocrat with a
penchant for hyperbole. You be the judge.
In any case, I see the
decadence of the people in Rancho Santa Fe as a microcosm of America
today, particularly corporate America. What these people exhibit, apart
from their smugness, is a complete absence of any sense of collective
responsibility. They can’t see and aren’t interested in the consequences
of their actions. And they can’t muster a modicum of moderation in the
face of enormous scarcity. Every resource, every privilege, is theirs to
pilfer with impunity. These people are prepared to endanger an entire
ecosystem simply to avoid the indignity of brown golf courses; this is
what true entitlement looks like.
unh | In his new book, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic
Abuse in History, Frankfurter investigates the social and psychological patterns
that have given rise to myths of witches, demons, satanic cults, and cannibalism
throughout history. According to Frankfurter, evil does not exist as an entity
beyond the realm of human understanding, but instead manifests as an unsettling
public discourse created by folklore, cultural ideas, literature, and oral
traditions.
The first work to provide an in-depth analysis of the topic, the book draws
upon the history of religion, anthropology, sociology and psychoanalytic theory
to probe the myriad ways people imagine evil, how they treat those who are
deemed evil and the factors that give rise to panic about witches or evil cults.
“People have been obsessed by evil for centuries—obsessed with
what evil is, who is evil, and how to avoid evil—and the 21st century
is no exception. President Bush famously dubbed Iran, North Korea, and Iraq
the Axis of Evil in his 2002 State of the Union address. In casual conversation
and media stories alike, terrorists, politicians and criminals are labeled
evil. With all these accepted references to evil, it is time that its true
nature is exposed and thoroughly examined,” Frankfurter says.
According to Frankfurter, linking terrorism and evil shifts the view of the
terrorist “from a concrete mass-killer with a biography, distinct motivations,
and specific goals, to a shadowy opponent of family and society in heartland
America. And terrorism, of course, is the evil force that will stay outside
as long as we conduct large-scale military exploits off in the distant lands
we associate with it.”
In many ways, the term terrorism and its close association with the concept
of evil conjures meanings and responses similar to the terms witchcraft, devil-worshipper,
and commie. And that, Frankfurter says, should be of concern to many.
“We become lost in these large-scale terms for evil, invoking them for
every anxiety, every criminal suspect, every political maneuver,” he
says. “Those who have become wed to large-scale schemes of danger and
conspiracy have sought to root it out by any means necessary.”
People imagine evil in many ways. In its most basic form, evil for many takes
on the likeness of demonic spirits: half-animal, monstrous, overly sexual or
cannibal. However, often people have imagined evil as actual people: foreigners,
especially those nearby, or members of strange religions that we imagine ritually
abusing or eating children and women.
“Imagining evil people and demons and witches is also exciting: we think
about all the outrageous things they do with a kind of prurience,” Frankfurter
says.
So how do certain people or groups become labeled as evil? According to Frankfurter,
the major factor is the arrival of "experts in the discernment of evil" --
witch-finders or experts in satanic ritual abuse or cults who bring a broad
and intensified concept of evil to a community already anxious about misfortune,
subversion, enemies, foreigners, cults and demons.
“But more broadly, we find these panics especially in cultures that
are experiencing a kind of tension between their familiar worlds of neighbors,
spirits, demons, evil eye, and bad luck, and a larger world of institutions
(churches, child protective services, presidents and law enforcement). What
happens is that the small community begins to feel that its familiar problems
must now be understood in terms of the large-scale evil,” Frankfurter
says.
For those deemed evil, often the public response is to take drastic measures
to cleanse them from the landscape. “One imagines the view of Tutsis
in 1994 Rwanda, the view of Jews in 1939 Germany (and often in European history),
and the view of Christians in second-century Rome. They represent predators,
obstacles to safety and success,” Frankfurter says.
When society labels people as evil, it places them outside humanity where
others don't have to think about motivations or context in any critical way. “Use
of this label amounts to intellectual laziness and has led, consistently, to
the worst atrocities we know about. Speaking of ‘evil’ leads people
to evil,” Frankfurter says.
And according to the professor, people are thinking more about evil today. “We
see and hear about so many horrible atrocities and crimes, yet are constantly
presented with contexts and backgrounds and ways of understanding how they
could happen. For many people, especially people of evangelical Christian bent,
to label something or somebody evil has a refreshing clarity to it,” he
says.
This clarity provides an easier concept for understanding evil than thinking
about the complex motivations of a person or a group. Thinking about evil is
also exciting, Frankfurter says, offering a kind of license to think about
sexual perversions and brutality we couldn’t otherwise let ourselves
imagine.
theatlantic | Saudi Arabia produces much of its
electricity by burning oil, a practice that most countries abandoned
long ago, reasoning that they could use coal and natural gas instead and
save oil for transportation, an application for which there is no
mainstream alternative. Most of Saudi Arabia’s power plants are
colossally inefficient, as are its air conditioners, which consumed 70
percent of the kingdom’s electricity in 2013. Although the kingdom has
just 30 million people, it is the world’s sixth-largest consumer of oil.
Now,
Saudi rulers say, things must change. Their motivation isn’t concern
about global warming; the last thing they want is an end to the
fossil-fuel era. Quite the contrary: they see investing in solar energy
as a way to remain a global oil power.
The Saudis burn about a quarter of the oil they produce—and their
domestic consumption has been rising at an alarming 7 percent a year,
nearly three times the rate of population growth. According to a widely
read December 2011 report by Chatham House, a British think tank, if
this trend continues, domestic consumption could eat into Saudi oil
exports by 2021 and render the kingdom a net oil importer by 2038.
That outcome would be cataclysmic for Saudi Arabia. The kingdom’s
political stability has long rested on the “ruling bargain,” whereby the
royal family provides citizens, who pay no personal income taxes, with
extensive social services funded by oil exports. Left unchecked,
domestic consumption could also limit the nation’s ability to moderate
global oil prices through its swing reserve—the extra petroleum it can
pump to meet spikes in global demand. If Saudi rulers want to maintain
control at home and preserve their power on the world stage, they must
find a way to use less oil.
Solar, they have decided, is an obvious alternative. In addition to
having some of the world’s richest oil fields, Saudi Arabia also has
some of the world’s most intense sunlight. (On a map showing levels of
solar radiation, with the sunniest areas colored deep red, the kingdom
is as blood-red as a raw steak.) Saudi Arabia also has vast expanses of
open desert seemingly tailor-made for solar-panel arrays.
Solar-energy prices have fallen by about 80 percent in the past few
years, due to a rapid increase in the number of Chinese factories
cranking out inexpensive solar panels, more-efficient solar technology,
and mounting interest by large investors in bankrolling solar projects.
Three years ago, Saudi Arabia announced a goal of building, by 2032, 41
gigawatts of solar capacity, slightly more than the world leader,
Germany, has today. According to one estimate, that would be enough to
meet about 20 percent of the kingdom’s projected electricity needs—an
aggressive target, given that solar today supplies virtually none of
Saudi Arabia’s energy and, as of 2012, less than 1 percent of the
world’s.
HuffPo | Western companies including Shell and BP have already shown interest to
re-enter Iran's oil market as soon as a final nuclear deal is reached
and issues of economic and banking hurdles are resolved.
After several decades, this is the first time that Western super-major
oil and gas corporations are openly and publicly expressing their
interest to access Iran which enjoys the world's second-largest
natural-gas and fourth-biggest oil reserves.
Iranian leaders will attempt to use the short term nuclear deal as a
platform to seal long term oil contracts, which will institutionalize
the profits for many years to come. This will make it more difficult for
sanctions to snap back in case Iran defied the terms of nuclear deal.
Iran's oil ministry is looking for roughly $200 billion investment
in order to revive and rehabilitate its oil industry. Iran has been
publicizing and circulating its oil and business contracts. As Zanganeh
stated, the new contracts are "long-term, with better situations, rather
than the previous framework that we have."
In closing, unprecedentedly, both Western oil and gas companies and Iran
hardliners are openly expressing interest in cooperating with each
other, as Iran will gain legitimacy from the final nuclear deal.
This suggests two crucial issues. First of all, OPEC members ought to
be prepared and chart ways for Iran's full return to the oil market. As
an Iranian delegate pointed out
"Iran is telling other OPEC members to get ready for its return". Iran
is planning to boost exports by one million barrels a day after sanction
are lifted. Currently, Iran's oil production is roughly
2.7 million barrels a day and it oil exports is approximately 1 million
barrels a day. Secondly, the international community. and particularly
the US, needs to have a strategy pre-planned for Iran's economic return,
which will boost Tehran's geopolitics and the IRGC's influence in the
region. So far, the Obama administration does not appear to have any
particular strategy to rein Iran's economic return.
bloomberg | Not content with the blow it’s dealt to U.S. oil drillers, Saudi
Arabia is set to escalate the battle for market share by raising
production to maximum levels.
The world’s largest oil exporter has already increased output to a
30-year high of 10.3 million barrels a day in a bid to check growth from
nations including the U.S., Canada and Brazil. It will add even more to
the global glut, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Citigroup Inc.
predicts the kingdom will push toward its maximum daily capacity, which
the bank estimates at about 11 million barrels, in the second half of
2015.
Saudi Arabia steered the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries in November to protect its market share in the face of
swelling U.S. crude output, rather than cut supplies to shore up prices
as it did in the past. Having abandoned the role of swing supplier --
adjusting production in line with demand -- the kingdom will maximize
sales to increase pressure on producers outside the group, the banks
said.
“If you are Saudi Arabia and you’re looking at the new oil order we
live in, you would go to full capacity,” Jeff Currie, head of
commodities research at Goldman Sachs in New York, said by e-mail on
June 15. “The world has come around to the realization that the U.S.
shale barrel is the swing barrel.”
theatlantic | “It’s no longer OK to be an open racist and an anti-Semite,” she said.
Instead, many members of these groups have adopted a claim first
popularized by Robert Whitaker, an elderly segregationist from South
Carolina, who in 2006 posted on his website a warning about “the third
world pour[ing] into EVERY white country and ONLY into white countries.”
The tract, known as The Mantra, helped promote the term “White
Genocide,” which has since become a watchword among white supremacists
for immigration and fertility trends
that could lead to whites losing their majority status in U.S. and
European populations in the coming decades. Beirich said it’s less that
there is a coordinated global white-supremacist movement than that the
rhetoric its adherents use has congealed around an issue that many
“white countries” are perceived to be facing.
And that rhetoric is distinctly international in scope. Whitaker’s mantra suggests the existence of a double standard, in which whites are denied privileges that others enjoy—“ASIA
FOR THE ASIANS, AFRICA FOR THE AFRICANS, WHITE COUNTRIES FOR
EVERYBODY.” It claims that only whites are being forced to accept
“multiculturalism.” A petition
to the White House posted last month, calling on the Obama
administration to “stop White Genocide in our country!”, encourages the
president to turn to Liberia, of all places, for lessons on racial
purity. It quotes approvingly from the Liberian constitution of 1986, which says
that “in order to preserve, foster and maintain the positive Liberian
culture, values and character, only persons who are Negro or of Negro
descent shall qualify by birth or by naturalization to be citizens of
Liberia.”
A group called the White Genocide Project, which drew notice
earlier this year for posting billboards in Alabama displaying Mantra
quotes such as “Anti-racist is a code word for anti-White,” cites international law to establish the existence of white genocide,
specifically Article II, subsection (c) of the United Nations Genocide
Convention. The definition of genocide offered there includes
“deliberately inflicting on the group”—which can be a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group”—“conditions
of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or
in part.” Under that definition, the White Genocide Project’s website
states that a “combination of mass immigration (of different groups of
people) plus forced assimilation would qualify as genocide.” The authors
compare the trend to Han Chinese migration into Tibet—which Tibetans have complained
dilutes their culture—with the only difference being that “White
Genocide is taking place across many countries, and it is being done to
the majority, rather than a minority.”
theapricity | The present book is a textbook designed for the use of college students
who have had or are taking a preliminary course in anthropology. Enough
of it is, however, written in a non-technical way, so that students of
allied disciplines may use it for reference. The subject matter to be
studied consists of the body of statistical material collected by the
world's physical anthropologists which concern the somatic character of
peoples belonging to the white race. This material may be divided into
(A), skeletons; and (B), metrical data and observations on the living..
By the use of this material we propose to follow the history of the
white race from its Pleistocene1 beginnings to the present, and to
provide a classification of sub-races which will be fully in accord
with the facts as we now know them. We submit the thesis that man, as a
domestic animal, is extremely variable; and that he has subjected
himself, in his wanderings, to all of the environments of the earth,
and hence is subject to environmental modification in a way unequalled
by any other species. We further suggest that man, through his
development of human cultures, has modi-fled his bodily form by his own
devices.
During the Pleistocene period there were several species of primates
which had attained some degree of human culture, by the acquisition of
stone implements, of fire, and of speech. In the present post-glacial
or interglacial period, in conformity with the general reduction in
faunal varieties, man has been reduced to a single species, unique in a
single genus. During the Pleistocene one species, at least, had
developed in the manner of a foetalized terrestrial ape, and it is that
species which carries today the main stem of Homo sapiens. Other
species, including the fossil men of Java, of Peking, and Homo
neanderthalensis, had developed at the same time into a heavier,
hypermasculine endocrine form, with a luxuriance of jaws, teeth, and
bony crests.
We propose to demonstrate that these non-foetalized species did not
wholly die out, but that at least one of them was absorbed into the
main human stem, at some time during the Middle, or the initial part of
the Late, Pleistocene. From this amalgamation was produced the large,
rugged, and relatively un-foetalized group of Upper Palaeolithic men in
Europe, North Africa, and northern Asia. This type of man passed over
Bering Straits in early post-glacial times, if not earlier, to provide
the basic ge-netic stock from which the American Indian developed, in
combination with later arrivals. From a branch of this hyperborean
group there evolved, in northern Asia, the ancestral strain of the
entire specialized mongoloid family.
We suggest that the ancestors of the whites in their major form
developed during pluvial periods of the Pleistocene in parts of what is
now the arid zone reaching from the Sahara to northern India; that in
post-glacial times many were forced out of these homes by desiccation,
and that some of them originated agriculture and animal husbandry in
northeastern Africa and southwestern Asia. From these centers
agricultural pioneers followed post-glacial zones of climate into
Europe, gradually encroaching upon the lands formerly glaciated. In
most of the regions which they occupied they greatly outnumbered the
descendants of the hunters and fishers whose ancestors had clung on
since glacial times, and many of whom had followed the retreating ice
toward its last melting nuclei.
The occupation of all arable lands, and those suitable for grazing, was
not completed in a century. or in a millennium; the process was a
gradual one, and the withdrawal of the earlier inhabitants into
environmentally protected fastnesses equally gradual. The entry of
food-producers from Asia and Africa did not take a single route or
involve a single people; it was a complex sequence of migrations
through several ports of entry. The various strains of food-producers
mixed with the food-gatherers whom they encountered, and with each
other, until, in our own time, not a single group of complete
food-gatherers has remained in white man's territory.
The food-producers seem to have been variants on one central racial
theme, the basic Mediterranean. This basic Mediterranean stock varied
in many respects, especially in stature and in pigmentation, but in its
essential qualities, which segregated it from non-whites, it was
remarkably uniform. We do not know that the survivors of the
food-gatherers whom the Mediterranean food-producers absorbed were
white in soft-part morphology, and there is some evidence that some had
begun to evolve in a mongoloid, others perhaps in a negroid, direction.
Such variations may be seen within the present composite white racial
amalgam.
At any rate, the main conclusion of this study will be that the present
races of Europe are derived from a blend of (A), food-producing peoples
from Asia and Africa, of basically Mediterranean racial form, with (B),
the descendants of interglacial and glacial food-gatherers, produced in
turn by a blending of basic Homo sapiens, related to the remote
ancestor of the Mediterraneans, with some non-sapiens species of
general Neanderthaloid form. The actions and interactions of
environment, selection, migration, and human culture upon the various
entities within this amalgam, have produced the white race in its
present complexity.
In view of these circumstances, the exact classification of living
whites into sub-races, such as Nordics, Alpines, Dinaric, and so on,
need not be made at this point, but can await (A) the historical study
of the white race which will follow in Chapters II to VII; and (B) the
survey of the living as a whole which will be made in Chapter VIII. In
Chapters IX m XII, inclusive, we will make a more detailed regional
survey of the living peoples of Europe to supplement the preceding
sections.
NYTimes | In the 14 years since Al Qaeda
carried out attacks on New York and the Pentagon, extremists have
regularly executed smaller lethal assaults in the United States,
explaining their motives in online manifestoes or social media rants.
But
the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a
surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been
killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other
non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by
extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in
Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists,
according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.
The
slaying of nine African-Americans in a Charleston church last week,
with an avowed white supremacist charged with their murders, was a
particularly savage case.
But
it is only the latest in a string of lethal attacks by people espousing
racial hatred, hostility to government and theories such as those of
the “sovereign citizen” movement, which denies the legitimacy of most
statutory law. The assaults have taken the lives of police officers,
members of racial or religious minorities and random civilians.
Non-Muslim
extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according
to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America program
associate, and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By
comparison, seven lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place
in the same period.
If
such numbers are new to the public, they are familiar to police
officers. A survey to be published this week asked 382 police and
sheriff’s departments nationwide to rank the three biggest threats from
violent extremism in their jurisdiction. About 74 percent listed
antigovernment violence, while 39 percent listed “Al Qaeda-inspired”
violence, according to the researchers, Charles Kurzman of the
University of North Carolina and David Schanzer of Duke University. Fist tap John.
newyorker | Criminal-justice reformers like to
say that if a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a liberal
is a conservative who has served time. Nolan did not emerge from prison
any less conservative, but he says he experienced a profound
disillusionment, which has led him to play a central role in a cause
that is only now finding its moment. These days, it is hard to ignore a
rising conservative clamor to rehabilitate the criminal-justice system.
Conservatives are as quick as liberals to note that the United States, a
country with less than five per cent of the world’s population, houses
nearly twenty-five per cent of the world’s prisoners. Some 2.2 million
Americans are now incarcerated—about triple the number locked up in the
nineteen-eighties, when, in a panic over drugs and urban crime,
conservative legislators demanded tougher policies, and liberals who
feared being portrayed as weak went along with them. African-Americans
are nearly six times as likely as whites to be incarcerated, and Latinos
are more than twice as likely. More than forty per cent of released
offenders return to prison within three years.
Several
Republican Presidential candidates—Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, and
Ted Cruz—have been embraced by Right on Crime, a campaign to promote
“successful, conservative solutions” to the punitive excesses of
American law and order. In February, the American Conservative Union’s
Conservative Political Action Conference, which serves as an audition
for right-wing Presidential aspirants, featured three panels on
criminal-justice reform, including one called Prosecutors Gone Wild.
Bernard Kerik, who was Rudolph Giuliani’s police commissioner and served
three years in prison for tax fraud and other crimes, now promotes an
agenda of reforms, including voting rights for ex-felons. The
libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch are donating money to
the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, to help insure
that indigent defendants get competent legal representation, and they
are co-sponsoring conferences on judicial reform with the American Civil
Liberties Union.
In
Congress and the states, conservatives and liberals have found common
ground on such issues as cutting back mandatory-minimum sentences; using
probation, treatment, and community service as alternatives to prison
for low-level crimes; raising the age of juvenile-court jurisdictions;
limiting solitary confinement; curtailing the practice of confiscating
assets; rewriting the rules of probation and parole to avoid sending
offenders back to jail on technicalities; restoring education and job
training in prisons; allowing prisoners time off for rehabilitation; and
easing the reëntry of those who have served time by expunging some
criminal records and by lowering barriers to employment, education, and
housing. As David Dagan and Steven M. Teles write, in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,
“Retrenching the carceral state is becoming as orthodox on the Right as
building it was just a few short years ago.” They conclude that this
has created a “Nixon goes to China” opportunity to reverse decades of
overkill.
This conservative transformation is
often portrayed in the media as a novelty, and some progressives regard
it as a ploy to cut taxes and turn prisons over to the private
corrections industry. Yet it has deep roots and a tangle of motives, one
of which is indeed a belief that downsizing prisons promises taxpayers
some relief. (Locking up an inmate for a year can cost as much as
tuition at a good college.) But for many conservatives, Nolan says,
reducing spending is “ancillary.” “It’s human dignity that really
motivates us.”
WaPo | “Is it realistic to hope that those who are obsessed with maximizing
profits will stop to reflect on the environmental damage which they will
leave behind for future generations? Where profits alone count, there
can be no thinking about the rhythms of nature.”
The pope
condemns the current global economy “where priority tends to be given to
speculation and the pursuit of financial gain, which fail to take the
context into account, let alone the effects on human dignity and the
natural environment. Here we see how environmental deterioration and
human and ethical degradation are closely linked.”
Wall Street comes under particular criticism: “Finance overwhelms the
real economy. The lessons of the global financial crisis have not been
assimilated.” As a result, “whatever is fragile, like the environment,
is defenseless before the interests of the deified market, which become
the only rule.”
For Pope Francis, the market and the economy
must be bound by rules that serve “basic and inalienable rights.” At the
center of these is work: “We were created with a vocation to work.”
Work is the setting for “rich personal growth . . . creativity, planning for the future, developing our talents, living out our values . . .
giving glory to God.” Therefore, priority should be given to “the goal
of access to steady employment for everyone, no matter the limited
interests of business and dubious economic reasoning.”
But
instead of the common good, we have constructed an economy built on
private interest and unrestrained appetite, an economy that excludes the
poorest and most vulnerable. For Pope Francis, “the cry of the earth
and the cry of the poor” derive from the same distorted global market
economy.
.........
Pope Francis is seeking a far more profound change: economic policy
grounded in moral values, measured not by how much money the few make
but the respect accorded the rights of all and the health of the
environment. Conservatives say he should stick to theology. But he
already is sticking to theology, understanding that the worship of
markets and the acceptance of unrestrained appetites are moral problems,
not technical ones. If this statement on climate is most welcome, his
teachings on the economy offer a critique necessary to finding the way
out of these problems.
dailyimpact | The dominoes are toppling, just as we have been expecting for nearly a
year now, but slower than we thought. The fact-resistant strain of
humans (Thank you, Borowitz Report)
now in charge of the world are trying to use vast amounts of money to
counteract gravity, and, counterintuitively, succeeded in slowing the
dominoes’ fall. But not for long.
To review our expectations of last summer: the hideous decline rate
of fracking wells (of up to 90% in three years) was forcing frackers to
borrow huge amounts of money to put up large numbers of new wells at a
breakneck pace in order to preserve the illusion (it was always an
illusion) of a revolution in American oil leading to prosperity and
“energy independence.” On average, it cost the frackers over $4 to get $1 of revenue in the door
during the first quarter of this year. A year ago, with oil commanding
$100 a barrel, they were still spending $2. As the old joke goes, the
only way to make any money when you’re losing on every transaction is to
make up for it with volume. But since most of the money spent was
capital expenditure — i.e. new wells — their operating statements showed
profits and nobody looked at the balance sheets.
We ran this scenario on our abacus and concluded that these guys were
going to go broke. And that when they did, not only would U.S. oil
production resume its long slide toward zero, begun in 1970, but they
would blow up the junk-bond market, almost certainly the bond market,
and probably the stock market. These expectations were in place before
the price of oil tanked last fall, and set the expectations in concrete.
NYTimes | One
would imagine that congressional Republicans, almost all of whom are on
record as adamantly opposing abortion, would be eager to fund programs
that help reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.
That would be the common sense approach, anyway.
And
yet since they took over the House in 2011, Republicans have been
trying to obliterate the highly effective federal family-planning
program known as Title X, which gives millions of lower-income and rural
women access to contraception, counseling, lifesaving cancer
screenings, and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
They tried and failed in 2011, when the Senate was under Democratic control — although they still managed to extract
significant cuts from an already underfunded program. Now that
Republicans run the show, opponents of sensible and effective family
planning are back to kill it off for good. Last Tuesday, a House
subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services proposed to eliminate all Title X funding — about $300 million — from a 2016 spending bill.
The
bill would also slash funding by up to 90 percent for sex education,
specifically President Obama’s teen-pregnancy prevention initiative. The
only winner was abstinence-only education, whose funding the
subcommittee voted to double, despite the fact that it has basically no
effect on abstinence and has been associated with higher rates of teen pregnancy.
Meanwhile,
Title X, which was enacted by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in
Congress in 1970, is caught up once again in the nation’s abortion wars —
even though like all federal programs, it is barred from providing any
funding for abortions.
NYTimes | Hardest
to accept, though, is the moral premise implied throughout the
encyclical: that the only legitimate human relationships are based on
compassion, harmony and love, and that arrangements based on
self-interest and competition are inherently destructive.
The
pope has a section on work in the encyclical. The section’s heroes are
St. Francis of Assisi and monks — emblems of selfless love who seek to
return, the pope says, to a state of “original innocence.”
He
is relentlessly negative, on the other hand, when describing
institutions in which people compete for political power or economic
gain. At one point he links self-interest with violence. He comes out
against technological advances that will improve productivity by
replacing human work. He specifically condemns market-based mechanisms
to solve environmental problems, even though these cap-and-trade
programs are up and running in places like California.
Moral
realists, including Catholic ones, should be able to worship and
emulate a God of perfect love and still appreciate systems, like
democracy and capitalism, that harness self-interest. But Francis
doesn’t seem to have practical strategies for a fallen world. He
neglects the obvious truth that the qualities that do harm can often,
when carefully directed, do enormous good. Within marriage, lust can
lead to childbearing. Within a regulated market, greed can lead to
entrepreneurship and economic innovation. Within a constitution, the
desire for fame can lead to political greatness.
You
would never know from the encyclical that we are living through the
greatest reduction in poverty in human history. A raw and rugged
capitalism in Asia has led, ironically, to a great expansion of the
middle class and great gains in human dignity.
You
would never know that in many parts of the world, like the United
States, the rivers and skies are getting cleaner. The race for riches,
ironically, produces the wealth that can be used to clean the
environment.
A few years ago, a team of researchers led by Daniel Esty of Yale looked at the environmental health of 150 countries.
The nations with higher income per capita had better environmental
ratings. As countries get richer they invest to tackle environmental
problems that directly kill human beings (though they don’t necessarily
tackle problems that despoil the natural commons).
You
would never suspect, from this encyclical, that over the last decade,
one of the most castigated industries has, ironically, produced some of
the most important economic and environmental gains. I’m talking of
course about fracking.
There
was recently a vogue for polemical antifracking documentaries like
“Gasland” that purport to show that fracking is causing flammable tap
water and other horrors.
bloomberg | The debt that fueled the U.S. shale boom now threatens to be its undoing.
Drillers are devoting more revenue than ever to interest payments. In
one example, Continental Resources Inc., the company credited with
making North Dakota’s Bakken Shale one of the biggest oil-producing
regions in the world, spent almost as much as Exxon Mobil Corp., a
company 20 times its size.
The burden is becoming heavier after oil prices fell 43 percent in
the past year. Interest payments are eating up more than 10 percent of
revenue for 27 of the 62 drillers in the Bloomberg Intelligence North
America Independent Exploration and Production Index, up from a dozen a
year ago. Drillers’ debt ballooned to $235 billion at the end of the
first quarter, a 16 percent increase in the past year, even as revenue
shrank.
“The question is, how long do they have that they can get away with
this,” said Thomas Watters, an oil and gas credit analyst at Standard
& Poor’s in New York. The companies with the lowest credit ratings
“are in survival mode,” he said.
The problem for shale drillers is that they’ve consistently spent
money faster than they’ve made it, even when oil was $100 a barrel. The
companies in the Bloomberg index spent $4.15 for every dollar earned
selling oil and gas in the first quarter, up from $2.25 a year earlier,
while pushing U.S. oil production to the highest in more than 30 years.
“There’s a liquidity issue, and you start looking at the cash burn,” Watters said.
theatlantic | By demanding that the Charleston church attack be dubbed terrorism even before key details were known, observers meant to assert some mix of other claims, including that even the earliest details of the attack very strongly suggested that it was rooted in racial hatred against blacks and white-supremacism; that the killer acted every bit as abhorrently as, say, the men who attacked the Boston marathon; that the black lives lost to this and other acts of white supremacist terrorism matter every bit as much as the lives lost on, say, September 11, 2001; that the press, the police, and politicians would’ve responded differently to this attack had it been perpetrated by a Muslim gunman; or that Charleston warrants a response in keeping with what follows attacks by Muslim terrorists.
Years ago, after an attack on a Sikh temple that’s mostly forgotten because it wasn't regarded as terrorism, I argued that the reluctance to apply the label to acts carried out by white people is partly due to an awareness of what might happen next. When terrorism is invoked, many Americans––Republicans especially––have assented to indefinite detention; the criminalization of gifts to certain charities; secret, extrajudicial assassinations; ethnicity-based surveillance; and the torture even of people who might know about a future attack. Having undermined so many civil-liberties protections in pursuit of terrorists, the white majority and Republicans especially are alarmed at the idea of the homeland-security bureaucracy treating them as they’ve treated Muslim Americans.
NYTimes | On the first Sunday after Pope Francis issued a landmark document on the environment, Roman Catholics attending Mass in Kenya, France, Mexico, Peru and the United States said they were thankful that he was using his pulpit to address climate change, pollution and global inequality.
But
few priests or bishops — other than in parts of Latin America — used
their own pulpits on Sunday to pass on the pope’s message, according to
parish visits, interviews with Catholic leaders and reports from
Catholics after Mass. Despite the urgent call to action
in Francis’ document and the international attention it received, it
will take some time to know whether Catholic clergy are familiar or
comfortable enough with its themes to preach them to the faithful.
It traditionally takes months for papal teaching documents, known as
encyclicals, to be read, understood and disseminated. And this one, “Laudato Si’,” or “Praise Be to You: On Care for Our Common Home,”
is long, nearly 200 pages, and intricately weaves spiritual and moral
teachings with economic, scientific and political analysis. It includes a
forceful denunciation of a global economic system that the pope says
plunders the resources of the poor for the benefit of the rich, leaving
the poor to disproportionately suffer the consequences, including the
effects of climate change.
“There has not been that much awareness among parish priests of climate
change,” said the Rev. Aris Sison, a spokesman for the Diocese of Cubao
in Manila, the Philippines
capital. “The Holy Father has now made a clear connection between the
environment and morality. He has given us a whole new way of thinking
about the environment.”
splc | In 2013, Josh Doggrell took the stage at the national conference for theneo-ConfederateLeague of the South(LOS). In a non-descript suit-and-tie, he spoke about gun rights, county supremacy, the state of law enforcement in Alabama and his loyalty to the League.
“It’s wonderful to be around sanity,” the founder and chairman of the League’s John C. Calhoun chapter in a video of the event posted to YouTube.
It was a common speech for a League conference. But Doggrell wasn’t quite a common southern nationalist. He was a police officer, a lieutenant in the Anniston Police Department, and he wasn’t the only one. A second officer from his department, Lieutenant Wayne Brown, joined Doggrell at the convention, and they had come with good news –– good news for any self-respecting southern nationalist at least.
“The vast majority of men in uniform are aware that they’re southerners,” Doggrell said, touching on gun rights and the perennial fear among extremist groups that the Second Amendment is under attack. “And kith and kin comes before illegal national mandates.”
Doggrell knows a little bit about kith and kin. He joined the LOS in 1995 after meeting its presidentMichael Hillat the University of Alabama while Doggrell was a student, serving as the secretary vice chairman and chairman of the school’s LOS chapter before founding his own chapter in 2009.
Kith and kin is part of an explicitly racist ideology called “kinism” that Hill has long promoted through the LOS. The Kinist Institute, an organization that promotes kinism, has called for laws against racial intermarriage, an end to non-white immigration, expelling all “aliens” (“to include all Jews and Arabs”), and restricting the right to vote to white, landholding men over the age of 21. In the past, LOS websites have referred to kinism as “a biblical solution for all races” that will save the South by preventing “white genocide.”
It was an odd thing for a police officer to say, especially one from Anniston. Fifty years earlier, Klansmen firebombed several buses carrying civil rights workers, known as Freedom Riders, coming to the South to test a U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordering that buses be desegregated. On May 14, 1961, in Anniston, a mob of Klansmen, some reportedly still wearing their Sunday church clothes, attacked and firebombed the riders. Police did nothing.
But Doggrell has never hidden his extremist ties, not from his family – in 2013, his two-year-old was already a League member – and definitely not from his employer. As Doggrell boasts elsewhere in the video, his superiors are well aware of his associations.
“It’s always wonderful to go back and show my bosses all the radicals that I cavort with on the weekends,” he boasts.
Thevideowas posted on YouTube two years ago by the Southern Nationalist Network and has only recently came to the attention of Hatewatch, which immediately sought to bring Doggrell’s associations to the city’s attention.
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
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