the clinton years: mass incarceration and the aristocracy of prison profits

narconews |  The Clinton Administration took the groundwork laid by Nixon, Reagan and Bush and embraced and blossomed the expansion and promotion of federal support for police, enforcement and the War on Drugs with a passion that was hard to understand unless and until you realized that the American financial system was deeply dependent on attracting an estimated $500 billion-$1 trillion of annual money laundering. Globalizing corporations and deepening deficits and housing bubbles required attracting vast amounts of capital.

Attracting capital also required making the world safe for the reinvestment of the profits of organized crime and the war machine. Without growing organized crime and military activities through government budgets and contracts, the economy would stop centralizing. The Clinton Administration was to govern a doubling of the federal prison population.^[1]

 

Whether through subsidy, credit and asset forfeiture kickbacks to state and local government or increased laws, regulations and federal sentencing and imprisonment, the supremacy of the federal enforcement infrastructure and the industry it feeds was to be a Clinton legacy.

One of the first major initiatives by President Bill Clinton was the Omnibus Crime Bill, signed into law in September 1994. This legislation implemented mandatory sentencing, authorized $10.5 billion to fund prison construction that mandatory sentencing would help require, loosened the rules on allowing federal asset forfeiture teams to keep and spend the money their operations made from seizing assets, and provided federal monies for local police. The legislation also provided a variety of pork for a Clinton Administration vogue constituency — Community Development Corporations (CDCs) and Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs). The CDCs and CDFIs became instrumental during this period in putting a socially acceptable face on increasing central control of local finance and shutting off equity capital to small business.

The potential impact on the private prison industry was significant. With the bill only through the house, former Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti joined the board of Wackenhut Corrections, which went public in July 1994 with an initial public offering of 2.2 million shares. By the end of 1998, Wackenhut’s stock market value had increased almost ten times. When I visited their website at that time it offered a feature that flashed the number of beds they owned and managed. The number increased as I was watching it — the prison business was growing that fast.

However, the Clinton Administration did not wait for the Omnibus Crime Bill to build the federal enforcement infrastructure. Government-wide, agencies were encouraged to cash in on support in both Executive Branch and Congress for authorizations and programs — many justified under the umbrella of the War on Drugs — that allowed agency personnel to carry weapons, make arrests and generate revenues from money makers such as civil money penalties and asset forfeitures and seizures. Indeed, federal enforcement was moving towards a model that some would call “for profit” faster than one could say “Sheriff of Nottingham.”

On February 4, 1994, U.S. Vice President Al Gore announced Operation Safe Home, a new enforcement program at HUD. Gore was a former Senator from Tennessee. His hometown of Nashville was home of the largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). He was joined at the press conference by Secretary of the Treasury Lloyd Bentsen, Attorney General Janet Reno, Director of Drug Policy Lee Brown and Secretary of HUD Henry Cisneros who said that the Operation Safe Home initiative would claim $800 million of HUD’s resources. Operation Safe Home was to receive significant support from the Senate and House appropriations committees. It turned the HUD Inspector General’s office from an auditor of program areas to a developer of programs competing for funding with the offices they were supposed to be auditing — a serious conflict of interest and built-in failure of government internal controls.

According to the announcement, Operation Safe Home was expected to “combat violent crime in public and assisted housing.” As part of this program, the HUD Office of Inspector General (OIG) coordinated with various federal, state and local enforcement task forces. Federal agencies that partnered with HUD included the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Secret Service, the U.S. Marshal’s Service, the Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ). The primary performance measures reported in the HUD OIG Semi-Annual Performance Report to Congress for this program are the total number of asset forfeitures/seizures, equity skimming collections and arrests. Subsequent intra-agency efforts such as the “ACE” program sponsored by DOJ and initiated by U.S. Attorney’s Offices, working with the DOJ Asset Forfeiture Fund, HUD OIG and HUD Office of General Counsel promoted revenue generating activities as well.

the war on stupid people

theatlantic |  As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

It’s popular entertainment, too. The so-called Darwin Awards celebrate incidents in which poor judgment and comprehension, among other supposedly genetic mental limitations, have led to gruesome and more or less self-inflicted fatalities. An evening of otherwise hate-speech-free TV-watching typically features at least one of a long list of humorous slurs on the unintelligent (“not the sharpest tool in the shed”; “a few fries short of a Happy Meal”; “dumber than a bag of hammers”; and so forth). Reddit regularly has threads on favorite ways to insult the stupid, and fun-stuff-to-do.com dedicates a page to the topic amid its party-decor ideas and drink recipes.

This gleeful derision seems especially cruel in view of the more serious abuse that modern life has heaped upon the less intellectually gifted. Few will be surprised to hear that, according to the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a long-running federal study, IQ correlates with chances of landing a financially rewarding job. Other analyses suggest that each IQ point is worth hundreds of dollars in annual income—surely a painful formula for the 80 million Americans with an IQ of 90 or below. When the less smart are identified by lack of educational achievement (which in contemporary America is closely correlated with lower IQ), the contrast only sharpens. From 1979 to 2012, the median-income gap between a family headed by two earners with college degrees and two earners with high-school degrees grew by $30,000, in constant dollars. Studies have furthermore found that, compared with the intelligent, less intelligent people are more likely to suffer from some types of mental illness, become obese, develop heart disease, experience permanent brain damage from a traumatic injury, and end up in prison, where they are more likely than other inmates to be drawn to violence. They’re also likely to die sooner.

Britsh Corporatist THOTing and Plotting Is Called Reluctant Remaining

Guardian |  Britain has become a powerbase for a legalised financial mafia, which strips the assets of healthy companies, turns the nation’s housing into a roulette table, launders money for drug cartels and terrorists, then stashes its gains beyond the reach of police and tax inspectors. Through privatisation, outsourcing and the private finance initiative, the public sector has been repurposed as a get-rich-quick scheme for friends in the City, licensed to erect tollbooths in front of essential services. The media, largely owned by members of the same class, directs our attention elsewhere: blaming immigrants for the ills it has inflicted.

It was British lobbying that sank Europe’s soil framework directive and the financial transactions tax. Without a mandate from either Parliament or people, the British trade minister wrote secretly to the European Commission, insisting that investor-state dispute settlement should remain in the TTIP. Wherever barriers to the power of money are being kicked over, there you will find Mr Cameron’s bootprint.

Since the first states were established, they have sought power by making alliances. The splendid autonomy we are told a Britain out of Europe would enjoy is an illusion: we would swap one transnational system for another. The demand to leave Europe in the name of independence has long been accompanied by a desire to surrender our sovereignty to the United States. If judged by their own standards, the Brexit campaigners who foresee a stronger alliance with the US are traitors, ceding the national interest to a foreign hegemon.

Sixteen years ago, the Conservative party published a draft manifesto in which it proposed that we should join the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This remains a plausible outcome of leaving the EU: it is hard to imagine the business class permitting the UK to stand outside a formal trading bloc. What this means is swapping a treaty over which we have had some influence for one in which we have had none.

How do we know that TTIP would tear down public protections? Because the same clauses in NAFTA have already started doing so, across Canada, the US and Mexico. A closer alliance with the United States means surrendering to a system which has been signed, sealed and delivered to the power of money. The US campaign finance system, a Congress bound and gagged with dollars, a police and military machine pressed into the service of plutocracy; a media that scarcely bothers to disguise its own corruption: the political power of money there is naked, unashamed, even proud.

I suspect that Trump, or at least Trumpery of some kind, represents the future of US politics, especially if the Democrats fail to connect with those who are catastrophically alienated from politics. Exciting as it will be to have a woman in the White House, Hillary Clinton is embedded in corporate power and corporate dollars, strategically unable to connect.

We do not release ourselves from the power of money by leaving the EU. We just exchange one version for another: another that is even worse. This is not an inspiring position from which to vote Remain. But it is a coherent one.

DNC THOTing and Plotting Put Out on Front Street

guccifer2 |  Worldwide known cyber security company CrowdStrike announced that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by “sophisticated” hacker groups.

I’m very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) But in fact, it was easy, very easy.

Guccifer may have been the first one who penetrated Hillary Clinton’s and other Democrats’ mail servers. But he certainly wasn’t the last. No wonder any other hacker could easily get access to the DNC’s servers.

Shame on CrowdStrike: Do you think I’ve been in the DNC’s networks for almost a year and saved only 2 documents? Do you really believe it?

Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNC’s network.

They mentioned a leaked database on Donald Trump. Did they mean this one?

interracial friendships decrease over time with teachers playing a hidden role...,

nyu |  “Friendships provide opportunities to build empathy and practice social skills,” said Cappella. “Being friends with racially or ethnically diverse peers can create opportunities for academic and social learning different from the opportunities afforded by same-race friendships.”

The current study looked at student and classroom factors that affect the likelihood of children forming friendships across race. Cappella and her colleagues used data from the Early Adolescent Development Study, a longitudinal study of elementary and middle school children in a racially diverse middle-class suburban school district. Surveys were collected in the fall and spring of the 1996-7 school year in 53 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms, with a total of 553 African American and white students participating in the study.

On an individual or student level, the researchers looked at age, race, and psychosocial factors, including sociability, internalizing behavior (such as worrying or feeling sad) and externalizing behavior (such as acting out or getting in trouble). They also examined factors related to classroom context, including teacher support, whether teachers treat students with varying levels of academic achievement differently, and competition among students.

Results suggest that same-race friendships increase over the school year, with greater increases among white and older children. Externalizing behavior predicted a greater increase in same-race friendships, particularly among white students.

Teachers and classroom context influenced student friendships in two different ways. Classroom support – measured by student perceptions of teachers’ warmth, respect, and trust – predicted less of an increase in same-race friendships from fall to spring. In addition, African American students who perceived that their teachers treated students differently were more likely to have friendships with white peers over time.

“Teachers’ differential treatment sends messages regarding the value of different groups. We don’t know if the teachers in this study favored white students over African American students, as other studies have shown. But if this is the case, it’s not surprising that African American students formed more friendships with white peers as they began to internalize the higher value their teachers placed on white students,” said Cappella.

The researchers said their study points to the need not just for diverse schools, but also for teachers to foster classrooms where students and teachers support one another, and social and academic hierarchies are not dominant, which could increase the likelihood of students developing and maintaining interracial friendships.

going to college and being left behind...,

visualcapitalist |  SIMPLE ARITHMETIC SHOWS ONE OF THESE LOANS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER 

What do you get when you combine skyrocketing tuition costs, a lack of growth in high-paying jobs, moral hazard, and America’s largest-ever generation of students?

It’s a recipe for a mountain of $1.3 trillion in student loan debt – much of which is not being paid for.

VERY DELINQUENT STUDENTS

With many students graduating with high debt loads, a growing number of students are becoming delinquent on their loans. The most recent estimate by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimates the percent of 90+ day delinquent loans to now be at 11.0%.

This puts student loans at a higher delinquency rate than credit cards (7.6%), auto loans (3.5%), and mortgages (2.2%). It’s also particularly interesting because historically credit cards have had the highest rates among all types of consumer credit. Despite this, student loans “passed” credit cards in delinquency frequency at the end of 2012.

Why are student loans the most troubled form of consumer debt right now? It’s the result of a clear mismatch between supply and demand for college-educated workers.

if people under fbi investigation should lose constitutional rights, how you running for preznit?!?!

thefederalist |  If something horrifying happens, we must ignore due process and deny Americans their rights. To be safe. This was basically the argument many conservatives (and Democrats) made post-9/11 to help pass the Patriot Act, and it’s exactly the argument most liberals are making when they push gun bans to people on terror watch lists.

“If the FBI is watching you for suspected terrorist links,” Hillary Clinton said today in her supposedly apolitical speech, “you shouldn’t be able to just go buy a gun.”

If we’re going to do this, let’s be consistent.

If the FBI is conducting a criminal investigation of your suspected illegal use of a home email server to transmit classified intelligence, you shouldn’t be allowed to just go and run for president. Obviously. The idea that we would allow a person who can’t be trusted with our most vital secrets to hold the most powerful office in the nation is absurd. It’s just not safe.

It’s worse than that, actually. Being on a watch list would probably be best described—using Hillary’s own euphemism—as having a “security inquiry.” The Democratic Party nominee is under criminal investigation by the nation’s prime federal law enforcement agency. She’s practically guilty. Fist Tap Big Don.

Hitlery Clinton's Project For a New American Century...,

shadowproof |  Here we go again. Earlier this year, some were surprised to see Project For The New American Century (PNAC) co-founder and longtime DC fixture Robert Kagan endorse former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for president.

They shouldn’t have been. As is now clear from a policy paper [PDF] published last month, the neoconservatives are going all-in on Hillary Clinton being the best vessel for American power in the years ahead.

The paper, titled “Expanding American Power,” was published by the Center for a New American Security, a Democratic Party-friendly think tank co-founded and led by former Undersecretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy. Flournoy served in the Obama Administration under Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and is widely considered to be the frontrunner for the next secretary of defense, should Hillary Clinton become president.

The introduction to Expanding American Power is written by the aforementioned Robert Kagan and former Clinton Administration State Department official James Rubin. The paper itself was prepared in consultation with various defense and national security intellectuals over the course of six dinners. Among the officials includes those who signed on to PNAC letters calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, such as Elliot Abrams, Robert Zoellick, Craig Kennedy, Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross, and Flournoy herself, who signed on to a PNAC letter in 2005 calling for more ground troops in Iraq.

The substance of the document is about what one would expect from an iteration of PNAC. The paper cites a highly revisionist history of post-World War II American policymaking, complete with a celebration of America’s selfless motives for every action. Left out is any mention of overthrowing democratically elected and popular governments for US business, or the subsequent blowback for such actions in Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

For the neocons and liberal interventionists at the Center for a New American Security, the United States has always acted for the benefit of all.

The paper primarily focuses on the economy and defense budget, and American security interests in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Supporting the Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are considered the highest priority, as they will bind the main drivers of the US-led “liberal world order”—the US and Europe—closer together.

According to the paper, “Even in a world of shifting economic and political power, the transatlantic community remains both the foundation and the core of the liberal world order.” In other words, the West must maintain control of the planet, for the good of all, of course. 

how much $$$ has saudi funneled into hitlery clinton's campaign?

zerohedge |  In what may be the pinnacle of hypocrisy, moments ago Hillary Clinton, while speaking live on national security and addressing the Orlando shooting took some time from her constant bashing of the Second Amendment and calling for a ban on assault rifles, to say some less than kind words about Saudi Arabia whom it accused of supporting radical organizations. This is what she said:

The third area that demands attention is preventing radicalization and countering efforts by ISIS and other international terrorist networks to recruit in the United States and Europe. For starters, it is long past time for the Saudis, the Qataris and the Kuwaitis and others to stop their citizens from funding extremist organizations.And they should stop supporting radical schools and mosques around the world that have set too many young people on a path towards extremism. We also have to use all our capabilities to counter jihadist propaganda online. This is something that I spend a lot of time on at the State Department.

There is nothing wrong with that statement, as it is the whole truth - Saudi Arabia's involvement in supporting terrorism stretches from Sept 11 all the way through to ISIS - however, where there  is a big, and potentially law-breaking,  problem is what Jordan's official news agency, Petra News Agency, reported on Sunday citing the Saudi crown price, namely that Saudi Arabia is a major funder of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to become the next president of the United States.

As MEE notes, the Petra News Agency published on Sunday what it described as exclusive comments from Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman which included a claim that Riyadh has provided 20 percent of the total funding to the prospective Democratic candidate's campaign.

Tulsi Gabbard launches petition to end Democratic Party superdelegate process

politico |  The Democratic presidential primary process may be ending next Tuesday, but the fight among Bernie Sanders supporters to rid the party of superdelegates and install new leadership at the Democratic National Committee is not.

Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard encouraged her followers on Saturday to sign a petition ending the Democratic Party’s use of superdelegates.

“Whether you are a Bernie Sanders supporter or a Hillary Clinton supporter, we should all agree that unelected party officials and lobbyists should not have a say in who the presidential nominee of our party is,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “That should be left up to the voters.”

Gabbard resigned as a vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee in February to publicly endorse the Vermont senator’s campaign.

Gabbard isn’t alone in the fight: The West Virginia Democratic Party at its state convention Saturday passed a resolution calling for the elimination of superdelegates, or that superdelegates be required “in each state to vote in the same relative proportion as the elected delegates of the state they represent.”

the clinton university problem...,

jonathanturley |  While largely ignored by the media, the Clintons have their own university scandal. Donald Trump has been rightfully criticized and sued over his defunct Trump University. There is ample support for claiming that the Trump University was fraudulent in its advertisements and operations. However, the national media has been accused of again sidestepping a scandal involving the Clintons that involves the same type of fraud allegations. The scandal involves a dubious Laureate Education for-profit online college (Walden) and entails many of the common elements with other Clinton scandals: huge sums given to the Clintons and questions of conflicts with Hillary Clinton during her time as Secretary of State. There are distinctions to draw between the two stories, but the virtual radio silence on the Clinton/Laureate story is surprising. [I have updated the original column with some additional thoughts, links, and clarifications for readers).

I have long been a critic of many online courses, though I am increasingly in the minority even on my faculty. However, the rise of online courses has allowed for an increase in dubious pitches and practices that prey upon people who cannot afford or attend a traditional academic institution.  I should also reveal a general opposition to for-profit universities, a view shared by many teachers and experts.  While there are some good for-profit programs from student camps to specialized training courses, Laureate is a massive, mega-corporation that is often criticized for its impact on education.  As companies maximize profits, students often become a mere cost of doing business.  The rate of default has been higher at such for-profit universities and less than half of students at for-profit schools actually finish such programs accordingly to Brookings.  Laureate is often cited as the leader in reducing education to a commodity in a mass for-profit enterprise.  The company has made huge profits and is worth over $4 billion.

Laureate Education was sued over its Walden University Online offering, which some alleged worked like a scam designed to bilk students of tens of thousands of dollars for degrees. Students alleged that they were repeatedly delayed and given added costs as they tried to secure degrees, leaving them deeply in debt.  Laureate itself has been criticized for “turbocharging” admissions while allowing standards to fall and shortchanging education.

The respected Inside Higher Education reported that Laureate Education paid Bill Clinton an obscene $16.5 million between 2010 and 2014 to serve as an honorary chancellor for Laureate International Universities.  Various news outlets said that neither Clinton nor Laureate were forthcoming on how much he was paid for the controversial association.

Bill Clinton worked as the “honorary chancellor” which sounds a bit like the group’s pitchman. He gave speeches in various countries and was heavily touted by the for-profit company to attract students.  The size of this payment (which has been widely reported) raises obvious concerns as to what the company was seeking to achieve and whether Laureate received any benefit from the association with the State Department given its massive international operations.

isn't "word of mouth" one of the most important elements of a "free market"?

NYTimes |  American corporations are under new scrutiny from federal lawmakers after well-publicized episodes in which the companies laid off American workers and gave the jobs to foreigners on temporary visas.

But while corporate executives have been outspoken in defending their labor practices before Congress and the public, the American workers who lost jobs to global outsourcing companies have been largely silent.

Until recently. Now some of the workers who were displaced are starting to speak out, despite severance agreements prohibiting them from criticizing their former employers.

Marco Peña was among about 150 technology workers who were laid off in April by Abbott Laboratories, a global health care conglomerate with headquarters here. They handed in their badges and computer passwords, and turned over their work to a company based in India. But Mr. Peña, who had worked at Abbott for 12 years, said he had decided not to sign the agreement that was given to all departing employees, which included a nondisparagement clause.

Mr. Peña said his choice cost him at least $10,000 in severance pay. But on an April evening after he walked out of Abbott’s tree-lined campus here for the last time, he spent a few hours in a local bar at a gathering organized by technology worker advocates, speaking his mind about a job he had loved and lost.

“I just didn’t feel right about signing,” Mr. Peña said. “The clauses were pretty blanket. I felt like they were eroding my rights.”

Leading members of Congress from both major parties have questioned the nondisparagement agreements, which are commonly used by corporations but can prohibit ousted workers from raising complaints about what they see as a misuse of temporary visas. Lawmakers, including Richard Durbin of Illinois, the second-highest-ranking Senate Democrat, and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the Republican chairman of the Senate JudiciarySubcommittee on Immigration, have proposed revisions to visa laws to include measures allowing former employees to contest their layoffs.

“I have heard from workers who are fearful of retaliation,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. “They are told they can say whatever they want, except they can’t say anything negative about being fired.”

Capitalism will collapse because banks & political elite ‘allow poor to rot’

RT |  The banks behind politicians in the western world “have allowed the poor to rot,” and now the elites in those countries, especially the US, are facing a revolt, journalist and author Tariq Ali told RT America’s Chris Hedges in an exclusive interview. 

“The elites who have run the United States and western Europe have proven incapable of offering even the smallest palliatives to their populations. They have allowed the poor to rot ‒ regardless of skin color ‒ and grow,” Ali said. “And so what we have is a protest against this center elite, which I call the extreme center because whether it’s social democratic or conservative, they unite to crush.”

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has become a perfect example of this protest against the extreme center, he tells Hedges.

“They’ve found in Trump someone who airs their most crazed fantasies at the same time who attacks the banks, at the same time attacks these new treaties which are being carried through and promises some palliatives to the poorest section of the white working class,” Ali said.

The right and the far right are growing around the world, while the left has been weak. That is part of the reason that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders wasn’t able to succeed, even though he also offers an independent voice to the working class.

“I don’t think that there’s anything on the radical left at the moment ‒ of course, these things are volatile, things can happen,” he said.

thought leadership

cbc |  Pat Kelly vividly remembers when he first knew he was a "thought leader":

"In 2005, I met another 'thought leader' and I asked him how he became a 'thought leader' and he said 'I don't know.' It was then that I knew I could be one too."

Kelly proved his skill at leading thoughts on the This Is That Talks stage this past April in Whistler, BC. As you can see in the video of his talk, Kelly confidently made grand statements, spoke with his hands, and had slides - all hallmarks of a true "thought leader" or "influencer."

"My talk was a big success: I said things and the audience nodded their heads."

Based on the success of his talk, Kelly hopes to appear on a number of podcasts about "big ideas."

are humans the only animals that mock one another?

telegraph |  Our animal ancestors, and most of their descendants, laughed simply because they were enjoying themselves, according to a new study. 

But over millions of years humans have perfected how to use the sound to wound as well.

Great apes which roamed the earth 16 million years ago are thought to be the first who developed the ability to laugh.

Modern-day Orangutans, the only species of Asian great ape, laugh when they are having fun, while African great apes, which include gorillas and chimpanzees, have learned that the sound can be used to influence others, but still only use laughter while playing.

However, human have gone much further, using laughter for a range of negative emotions, including to ridicule or sneer.

ruthless conflation and exploitation of personal as political - hillBilly is the GOAT!!!

Haaretz |  "Religion ain’t bad; it’s people who are bad," he said. "You know the entire power structure is Zionist. They control America; they control the world. They are really against the Islam religion. So whenever a Muslim does something wrong, they blame the religion.”

Despite his frequent jabs at the Jewish community and Israel, Ali couldn't seem to alienate some of his most fervent Jewish admirers, among them Hollywood star Billy Crystal.

Crystal's 1977 impression of the boxing legend deciding to convert to Judaism and change his name to Izzy Yiskowitz became legendary on its own right. Fifteen years later, Ali had the pleasure of having Crystal perform at his 50th birthday party.

Sportscaster Howard Cosell, born Howard Cohen, was perhaps Ali's biggest defender. Unlike many others, Cosell immediately called Ali by his new, Islamic name after he changed it from Cassius Clay, and also stood up for his right to resist the draft. The Jewish journalist and the Muslim champion had a rapport that was evident in post-fight interviews, where they exchanged barbs and bantered, drawing in enchanted viewers.

triple-down on the faux identity-politics of Granny Goodness' faux populist VP...,

WaPo | The furor over Trump’s assaults on the impartiality of a Latino judge had just begun to subside when he lobbed two tweets Friday morning responding to Warren, who had lambasted him as a “thin-skinned, racist bully” in a speech the previous evening.

“Pocahontas is at it again!” Trump wrote in one. “Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one of the least productive U.S. Senators, has a nasty mouth.”

“No, seriously — Delete your account,” Warren tweeted back. One of the senator’s supporters secured Pocahontas.com and redirected it to Warren’s campaign site.

The real estate developer has repeatedly invoked the ­17th-century Native American figure to refer to Warren, an allusion to controversy about her heritage. The senator has said she grew up amid family stories about her Cherokee lineage, but that account has not been proved.

Trump began going after Warren’s claimed ancestry earlier this year, responding to the senator’s repeated slams of him as a “loser” and a bully. “Who’s that, the Indian?” he said at a March news conference when asked about Warren. “You mean the Indian?”

when passing out political favors is delegated to incompetent staff...,

abcnews |   Newly released State Department emails help reveal how a major Clinton Foundation donor was placed on a sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no obvious experience in the field, a decision that appeared to baffle the department’s professional staff.

The emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to “protect the name” of the Secretary, “stall” the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later.

Copies of dozens of internal emails were provided to ABC News by the conservative political group Citizens United, which obtained them under the Freedom of Information Act after more the two years of litigation with the government.

A prolific fundraiser for Democratic candidates and contributor to the Clinton Foundation, who later traveled with Bill Clinton on a trip to Africa, Rajiv K. Fernando’s only known qualification for a seat on the International Security Advisory Board (ISAB) was his technological know-how. The Chicago securities trader, who specialized in electronic investing, sat alongside an august collection of nuclear scientists, former cabinet secretaries and members of Congress to advise Hillary Clinton on the use of tactical nuclear weapons and on other crucial arms control issues.

soul'd-out blonde-haired, blue-eyed devil pocahantas all-in for Granny Goodness

bostonglobe |  “I’m ready,” Warren said in an interview with The Globe. “I’m ready to jump in this fight and make sure that Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States and be sure that Donald Trump gets nowhere near the White House.”

She added: “I’m supporting Hillary Clinton because she’s a fighter, a fighter with guts.”

Asked whether Clinton should release the transcripts of paid speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, Warren said: “That’s for her to decide — there will be a whole lot of issues to talk about over the next several months.”

Sanders frequently calls on Clinton to release them.

She praised Sanders, saying that he has run an “incredible campaign.”

Warren, a champion of the left who passed up a presidential bid of her own, despite the urging of legions of followers, is uniquely positioned to serve as a bridge between the establishment candidacy of Clinton and Sanders supporters, who are being forced to come to terms with the Vermont senator’s loss.

Democrats view the freshman Massachusetts senator as a path of sorts to party unity, which helps explain an upsurge in buzz about Warren as a potential vice presidential pick. Senators and top staff say talking up Warren for vice president is a way to show Sanders and his millions of followers that the party establishment heard them loud and clear.

Warren and Clinton haven’t always been close — Warren called out Clinton in her book “The Two Income Trap” for switching her vote on legislation to overhaul bankruptcy laws when Clinton was in the Senate.

“Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn’t coming from families in financial trouble,” Warren wrote in a biting critique of the episode in which Clinton sided with the financial services sector and helped pass an industry-friendly overhaul of the bankruptcy laws.

Warren did not directly address the issue when asked about it Thursday. Instead, Warren told the Globe, “She’s someone who has had to take on a lot, and she’s going to fight back.”

bad fake indians

counterpunch |  JF: I notice you made no mention of public speaking. You used to do quite a lot of it, as I recall. Do you still?

WC: Nowhere near as much as I was doing prior to 2005. That, in part, is because I’ve been administratively blacklisted on campuses nationwide. There’ve been a fair number of instances in which I’ve been lined up by faculty and/or students to deliver a lecture and college or university presidents have directly intervened to prevent the event from happening. In a few cases, the organizers took such abridgments of their own intellectual rights seriously enough to force the issue and staged the events anyway, but usually not. The meekness with which tenured faculty members have typically submitted to administrative dictates in situations like this has been quite enlightening, and speaks volumes to the state of “academic freedom” in the contemporary U.S.

Both politically and psychologically, it’s of course been necessary that the folks I’ve just described, especially those claiming a liberal pedigree, advance some other, more palatable explanation of their behavior and its implications. Most often, this has taken the form of their citing some supposed defect in my scholarship and/or my “abrasive style,” either or both of which were ostensibly pointed out to them after their invitation was extended, causing them to rethink the propriety of offering me a forum in a campus setting imbued with such lofty standards of scholarship and collegiality as their own. In the name of something like “quality control,” then, preserving the “academic integrity” of their institutions leaves them no alternative but to concur—always with the utmost reluctance, of course—and only in this particular instance, mind you—with the administration’s preemption of students’ right to hear and assess whatever I might have to say and customary faculty prerogatives in the bargain.

The upshot is that not only has a decided majority of the liberal professoriate exposed itself as being guilty of the most craven sort of capitulation vis-à-vis the principles they espouse and are purportedly prepared to defend, but the manner in which they’ve sought to rationalize the capitulation has served to lend a completely unwarranted appearance of “left wing” validation to the welter of falsehoods promoted on the right for purposes of discrediting both me, personally, and, more importantly, the kind of work I’ve been doing over the past several decades. All of that nonsense about my having perpetrated “scholarly fraud” and the like has been long since and repeatedly disproven, both in court and elsewhere—that’s a matter of record, easily accessible to anyone who cares to look—but they simply ignore such facts in favor of the convenience embodied in regurgitating the same old lies as a pretext.

None of this is breaking news, of course, or at least it shouldn’t be. It’s how blacklisting has always worked. Which means, among other things, that being blacklisted is in no sense an experience unique to me, either currently or historically. A lot of people have been blacklisted for one reason or another and to a greater or lesser extent over the years, and, as is readily evidenced by the examples of Norman Finkelstein and a number of others, that’s still true. It just happens that among the recent cases, mine has been especially high-profile, and is thus rather useful for illustrative purposes. So I’ve run down this aspect of it mainly to demonstrate to anyone entertaining doubts on the matter that not much has really changed in these respects since, say, 1955.

good fake indians...,

politico |  Elizabeth Warren has pushed back hard on questions about a Harvard Crimson piece in 1996 that described her as Native American, saying she had no idea the school where she taught law was billing her that way and saying it never came up during her hiring a year earlier, which others have backed up.

But a 1997 Fordham Law Review piece described her as Harvard Law School's "first woman of color," based, according to the notes at the bottom of the story, on a "telephone interview with Michael Chmura, News Director, Harvard Law (Aug. 6, 1996)."

The mention was in the middle of a lengthy and heavily-annotated Fordham piece on diversity and affirmative action and women. The title of the piece, by Laura Padilla, was "Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue."


"There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries," the piece says. "This is not inconsequential. Diversifying these arenas, in part by adding qualified women of color to their ranks, remains important for many reaons. For one, there are scant women of color as role models. In my three years at Stanford Law School, there were no professors who were women of color. Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995."

Padilla, now at California Western School of Law, told POLITICO in an email that she doesn't remember the details of the conversation with Chmura, who is now at Babson College and didn't respond to a request for comment. It is unclear whether it was Padilla's language or Chmura's.

corporate media complicity in western imperial crimes against humanity...,

medialens |  One of the essential functions of the corporate media is to marginalise or silence acknowledgement of the history – and continuation – of Western imperial aggression. The coverage of the recent sentencing in Senegal of Hissène Habré, the former dictator of Chad, for crimes against humanity, provides a useful case study.

The verdict could well have presented the opportunity for the media to examine in detail the complicity of the US, UK, France and their major allies in the Middle East and North Africa in the appalling genocide Habré inflicted on Chad during his rule – from 1982 to 1990. After all, Habré had seized power via a CIA-backed coup. As William Blum commented in Rogue State (2002: 152):

'With US support, Habré went on to rule for eight years during which his secret police reportedly killed tens of thousands, tortured as many of 200,000 and disappeared an undetermined number.'

Indeed, while coverage of Chad has been largely missing from the British corporate media, so too was the massive, secret war waged over these eight years by the United States, France and Britain from bases in Chad against Libyan leader Colonel Mu'ammar Gaddafi. (See Targeting Gaddafi: Secret Warfare and the Media, by Richard Lance Keeble, in Mirage in the Desert? Reporting the 'Arab Spring', edited by John Mair and Richard Lance Keeble, Abramis, Bury St Edmunds, 2011, pp 281-296.)

By 1990, with the crisis in the Persian Gulf developing, the French government had tired of Habré's genocidal policies while George Bush senior's administration decided not to frustrate France in exchange for co-operation in its attack on Iraq. And so Habré was secretly toppled and in his place Idriss Déby was installed as the new President of Chad.

Yet the secret Chad coups can only be understood as part of the United States' global imperial strategy. For since 1945, the US has intervened in more than 70 countries – in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South America and Asia. Britain, too, has engaged militarily across the globe in virtually every year since 1914. Most of these conflicts are conducted far away from the gaze of the corporate media.

morality, stereotypes, and scientists—the anatomy of science denial

physorg |  Individuals tend to group others based on their perceived morality, often employing stereotypes to describe individuals or groups of people beliveved to have different morals or values. According to Fiske et al., stereotypes are well described using two dimensions: warmth and competence. Warmth (or lack of it) refers to the perceived positive/negative intent of another person, while competence refers to the other person's capacity to achieve their intent. Using this terminology, the ingroup, or the group that you belong to, is both warm and competent, and thus trustworthy. Stereotypes with high perceived competence and low perceived warmth, including stereotypically wealthy individuals, are often not trusted because perceived intent is either unknown or negative. Similarly, scientists have unclear intent due to their perceived amorality, and they are not trusted.

I believe that in order to incur more trust from the public, scientists must cultivate more warmth from the public.

I propose two ways to achieve this goal. First scientists need to make their intentions clear. Social psychologist Todd Pittinsky, mentioned in the introduction, has some terrific ideas on how to clarify intentions. One strategy is open access to data and methods, which is readily achieved through open access publishing. Scientists also need to treat misconduct by other scientists more seriously so that people don't, for example, deem that all vaccine science is fraud due to one case of misconduct. Finally, we need to treat science denial without disdain and acknowledge uncertainty properly when describing scientific results.

Second, scientists need to move into the ingroup sphere by imitating those already in the ingroup. Kahan et al. point out that an individual's established ideology greatly influences how they process new information. I would suggest scientists frame their findings in a way that fits with the audience's ideology, thus promoting "warmth". For example, the Pew report that reveals 37% of the public thinks that GMOs are not safe, which violates the individual foundations. Highlighting how certain crops can be genetically engineered for health (e.g. rice that is genetically engineered to produce beta carotene) shows how GMOs can be compatible with individual foundations. Behaving like an ingroup can then move scientists into the ingroup sphere.

Battling misinformation is definitely an uphill climb, but it is a climb scientists must endeavor to make. Climate change denial and the anti-vaccination movement threatens the future of scientific progress, and while the danger cannot be ignored, we should not belittle non-scientific ideas. Scientists can build goodwill through increased transparency and communicating the significance of their findings to the public. By taking other worldviews into account, we can find common ground and create open dialogue and perhaps find solutions to benefit everyone.

Hillary Clinton Talks About Inequality In Jacket That Cost More Than A New Car

theantimedia |  As someone who wants to give the appearance of knowing the hardships of common people, Hillary loves to bring up the topic of income inequality. In April, while giving a victory speech for her win in the New York primary, Hillary brought up that very subject — and then attempted to boast about her support among average Americans.

“I know how important it is that we get the campaign’s resources from people just like you, who go in and chip in $5, $25.  I am grateful to every one of you.

And she said every word of it while wearing a Giorgio Armani tweed jacket that cost a hefty $12,495.

At least lie to me Hillary — don’t pretend to be a champion against inequality while wearing an article of clothing that literally costs more than a new car. You lie about everything else, so rather than flouting your riches while championing the poor (and letting your riches show through the cracks), you might as well put on a cheap suit and give this ‘populist’ deception the effort you give your other ones.

Perfect End to Granny Goodness' Imperious Primary Fraud

theintercept |  Last night, the Associated Press — on a day when nobody voted — surprised everyone by abruptly declaring the Democratic Party primary over and Hillary Clinton the victor. The decree, issued the night before the California primary in which polls show Clinton and Bernie Sanders in a very close race, was based on the media organization’s survey of “superdelegates”: the Democratic Party’s 720 insiders, corporate donors, and officials whose votes for the presidential nominee count the same as the actually elected delegates. AP claims that superdelegates who had not previously announced their intentions privately told AP reporters that they intend to vote for Clinton, bringing her over the threshold. AP is concealing the identity of the decisive superdelegates who said this.

Although the Sanders campaign rejected the validity of AP’s declaration — on the ground that the superdelegates do not vote until the convention and he intends to try to persuade them to vote for him — most major media outlets followed the projection and declared Clinton the winner.

This is the perfect symbolic ending to the Democratic Party primary: The nomination is consecrated by a media organization, on a day when nobody voted, based on secret discussions with anonymous establishment insiders and donors whose identities the media organization — incredibly — conceals. The decisive edifice of superdelegates is itself anti-democratic and inherently corrupt: designed to prevent actual voters from making choices that the party establishment dislikes. But for a party run by insiders and funded by corporate interests, it’s only fitting that its nomination process ends with such an ignominious, awkward, and undemocratic sputter.

N.Y. Governor and Democrat Establishment Attack Free Speech to Protect Israel

theintercept |  One of the greatest free speech threats in the West is the growing, multi-nation campaign literally to outlaw advocacy of boycotting Israel. People get arrested in Paris — the site of the 2015 “free speech” (for Muslim critics) rally — for wearing pro-boycott T-shirts. Pro-boycott students on U.S. campuses — where the 1980s boycott of apartheid South Africa flourished — are routinely sanctioned for violating anti-discrimination policies. Canadian officials have threatened to criminally prosecute boycott advocates. British government bodies have legally barred certain types of boycott advocacy. Israel itself has outright criminalized advocacy of such boycotts. Notably, all of this has been undertaken with barely a peep from those who styled themselves free speech crusaders when it came time to defend anti-Muslim cartoons.

But now, New York’s Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo (above, in the 2016 Celebrate Israel Parade) has significantly escalated this free speech attack on U.S. soil, aimed at U.S. citizens. The prince of the New York political dynasty yesterday issued an executive order directing all agencies under his control to terminate any and all business with companies or organizations that support a boycott of Israel. It ensures that citizens who hold and express a particular view are punished through the denial of benefits that other citizens enjoy: a classic free speech violation (imagine if Cuomo issued an order stating that “anyone who expresses conservative viewpoints shall have all state benefits immediately terminated”).

Even more disturbing, Cuomo’s executive order requires that one of his commissioners compile “a list of institutions and companies” that — “either directly or through a parent or subsidiary” — support a boycott. That government list is then posted publicly, and the burden falls on them to prove to the state that they do not, in fact, support such a boycott. Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told The Intercept: “Whenever the government creates a blacklist based on political views it raises serious First Amendment concerns and this is no exception.” Reason’s Robby Soave denounced it today as “brazenly autocratic.”

To read the relevant provisions of Cuomo’s order is to confront the mentality of petty censoring tyranny, flavored with McCarthyite public shaming, in its purest form.

H.R.5181 Seeks to Establish an American Ministry of Truth

theantimedia |  In the true Orwellian fashion now typifying 2016, a bill to implement the U.S.’ very own de facto Ministry of Truth has been quietly introduced in Congress — its lack of fanfare appropriate given the bill’s equally subtle language. As with any legislation attempting to dodge the public spotlight, however, the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 marks a further curtailment of press freedom and another avenue to stultify avenues of accurate information.

Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger and Ted Lieu, H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability.”

“As Russia continues to spew its disinformation and false narratives, they undermine the United States and its interests in places like Ukraine, while also breeding further instability in these countries,” Kinzinger explained in a statement. “The United States has a role in countering these destabilizing acts of propaganda, which is why I’m proud to introduce [the aforementioned bill]. This important legislation develops a comprehensive U.S. strategy to counter disinformation campaigns through interagency cooperation and on-the-ground partnerships with outside organizations that have experience in countering foreign propaganda.”

Make no mistake — this legislation isn’t proposing some team of noble fact-finders, chiseling away to free the truth from the façades of various foreign governmental narratives for the betterment of American and allied populations. If passed, this legislation will allow cumbrously pro-‘American’ propaganda to infiltrate cable, online, and mainstream news organizations wherever the government deems necessary.

“From Ukraine to the South China Sea, foreign disinformation campaigns do more than spread anti-Western sentiments — they manipulate public perception to change the facts on the ground, subvert democracy and undermine U.S. interests,” Lieu explained. “In short, they make the world less safe.”

H.R. 5181 tasks the Secretary of State with coordinating the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to “establish a Center for Information Analysis and Response,” which will pinpoint sources of disinformation, analyze data, and — in true dystopic manner — ‘develop and disseminate’ “fact-based narratives” to counter effrontery propaganda.

quantum criticality at the origin of life

arvix |  Why life persists at the edge of chaos is a question at the very heart of evolution. Here we show that molecules taking part in biochemical processes from small molecules to proteins are critical quantum mechanically. Electronic Hamiltonians of biomolecules are tuned exactly to the critical point of the metal-insulator transition separating the Anderson localized insulator phase from the conducting disordered metal phase. Using tools from Random Matrix Theory we confirm that the energy level statistics of these biomolecules show the universal transitional distribution of the metal-insulator critical point and the wave functions are multifractals in accordance with the theory of Anderson transitions. The findings point to the existence of a universal mechanism of charge transport in living matter. The revealed bio-conductor material is neither a metal nor an insulator but a new quantum critical material which can exist only in highly evolved systems and has unique material properties.

physorg |  Stuart Kauffman, from the University of Calgary, and several of his colleagues have recently published a paper on the Arxiv server titled 'Quantum Criticality at the Origins of Life'. The idea of a quantum criticality, and more generally quantum critical states, comes perhaps not surprisingly, from solid state physics. It describes unusual electronic states that are are balanced somewhere between conduction and insulation. More specifically, under certain conditions, current flow at the critical point becomes unpredictable. When it does flow, it tends to do so in avalanches that vary by several orders of magnitude in size.

In suggesting that biomolecules, or at least most of them, are quantum critical conductors, Kauffman and his group are claiming that their electronic properties are precisely tuned to the transition point between a metal and an insulator. An even stronger reading of this would have that there is a universal mechanism of charge transport in living matter which can exist only in highly evolved systems. To back all this up the group took a closer look at the electronic structure of a few of our standard issue proteins like myoglobin, profilin, and apolipoprotein E.

pseudoscience or a new kind of science?

theatlantic |   If his mushrooms could grow tailor-made weapons against any other types of fungi, would it be possible for them to do the same against any type of bacteria, too?

The rise of drug-resistant bacteria is sobering. Just last week, colistin-resistant E. coli––a “superbug” resistant to the antibiotic that’s considered the last resort for combatting particularly dangerous types of infections––landed in the U.S. Soon, public health officials anticipate, infections will be harder to stop; 10 million people could die of drug-resistant superbugs

It may be a long shot, but it’s conceivable that Cotter's process offers a new kind of hope. While scientists have been working on the problem of antibiotic resistance for many years—some are looking to harness the human immune system to better fight it; others are working on simply detecting the superbugs faster—his vision is to beat superbugs with medicine that actually adapts to destroy them. It’s not pharmaceuticals he has in mind; he's not planning to mass produce many different types of secondary metabolites. Rather, he believes it’s his unique style of co-culturing itself––the process of culturing two different microbes together to produce a defense entirely specific to the attacker––that may be able to create custom antibiotics that, at least in theory, could be inherently less susceptible to resistance.

His goal, in other words, is to grow mushrooms that are themselves medicine, because they could create whatever metabolites a sick person needs.

"The best situation I could describe is something everyone has gone through, like a strep throat culture,” Cotter says, imagining a scenario in which an infected patient walks into the doctor’s office, gets a throat swab, and then has the swab dropped into a specially designed module containing a fungus. That fungus would then sweat metabolites into a reservoir that would be naturally calibrated to combat the patient’s illness.

Cotter doesn’t know how the metabolites would be administered yet. A lollipop or throat spray for strep? Delivered topically for staph? His testing is still thoroughly ongoing. Should he receive the NIH grant he's applying for––a grant backed by a $1.2 billion White House Initiative to stop resistant diseases––answers could arrive rapidly. Analytical labs would go up, animal testing would begin, streptococcus lollipopus before we know it.

the rise of artificial intelligence and the end of code

wired |  Artificial intelligence wasn’t supposed to work this way. Until a few years ago, mainstream AI researchers assumed that to create intelligence, we just had to imbue a machine with the right logic. Write enough rules and eventually we’d create a system sophisticated enough to understand the world. They largely ignored, even vilified, early proponents of machine learning, who argued in favor of plying machines with data until they reached their own conclusions. For years computers weren’t powerful enough to really prove the merits of either approach, so the argument became a philosophical one. “Most of these debates were based on fixed beliefs about how the world had to be organized and how the brain worked,” says Sebastian Thrun, the former Stanford AI professor who created Google’s self-driving car. “Neural nets had no symbols or rules, just numbers. That alienated a lot of people.”

The implications of an unparsable machine language aren’t just philosophical. For the past two decades, learning to code has been one of the surest routes to reliable employment—a fact not lost on all those parents enrolling their kids in after-school code academies. But a world run by neurally networked deep-learning machines requires a different workforce. Analysts have already started worrying about the impact of AI on the job market, as machines render old skills irrelevant. Programmers might soon get a taste of what that feels like themselves.

Of course, humans still have to train these systems. But for now, at least, that’s a rarefied skill. The job requires both a high-level grasp of mathematics and an intuition for pedagogical give-and-take. “It’s almost like an art form to get the best out of these systems,” says Demis Hassabis, who leads Google’s DeepMind AI team. “There’s only a few hundred people in the world that can do that really well.” But even that tiny number has been enough to transform the tech industry in just a couple of years.

These forces have led technologist Danny Hillis to declare the end of the age of Enlightenment, our centuries-long faith in logic, determinism, and control over nature. Hillis says we’re shifting to what he calls the age of Entanglement. “As our technological and institutional creations have become more complex, our relationship to them has changed,” he wrote in the Journal of Design and Science. “Instead of being masters of our creations, we have learned to bargain with them, cajoling and guiding them in the general direction of our goals. We have built our own jungle, and it has a life of its own.” The rise of machine learning is the latest—and perhaps the last—step in this journey.