unz | The actual story is that Duterte is not only using the threat of
summary executions to round up addicts and pushers; he’s naming names,
both of cartel leaders and the national and local politicians and
officers who shelter them. It’s a rather thrilling high stakes
game—allegations emerged this week that the bombing in Davao that killed
14 people and was apparently an assassination attempt on Duterte was
actually conducted by threatened narcopoliticians, not the Abu Sayyaf
Islamist banditti—but the US press has apparently shown little interest
in covering these ramifications.
Also I haven’t seen a lot of reporting on the fact that Duterte’s
drug war necessitates deeper PRC-Philippine engagement in several
important aspects.
First of all, the Philippine drug trade—primarily meth, locally known as shabu—is
dominated by Chinese Triads by virtue of the fact that the large and
poorly regulated PRC drug industry is a ready source of the
intermediates needed to make the drug and also by the fact that Triads
are deeply embedded in the major Chinese-diaspora presence in Filipino
society. The PRC has a lot to offer in terms of tighter enforcement on
the mainland and perhaps in using its good offices to encourage
crackdowns in a key Triad operational base, Hong Kong.
On the other hand, the PRC can make life difficult for Duterte if it
wants to, by turning a blind eye to the export-oriented meth trade. So
there you have it.
Duterte made his expectations concerning PRC assistance quite clear by summoning the PRC ambassador back in August:
The Philippines government said on Wednesday it had
summoned the Chinese ambassador earlier this week to explain reports
that traffickers were bringing in narcotics from China, opening a new
front in President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial war on drugs.
On Tuesday, the country’s police chief told a Senate hearing that
China, Taiwan and Hong Kong were major sources of illegal drugs, and
Chinese triads were involved in trafficking.
Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay told a Senate hearing on
Wednesday that the Chinese ambassador had been summoned for an
explanation, and the government would also send a diplomatic
communication to Beijing to “pursue this in a more aggressive note.”
Another area of potential Philippine-PRC cooperation is PRC
assistance in a crash program to rehabilitate the Philippine drug users
who have turned themselves in to the police to avoid getting targeted by
the death squads.
Though virtually unreported in the Western media, over 700,000 users have turned themselves in.
Let me repeat that. 700,000 drug users have turned themselves in.
And they presumably need to get a clean “rehab” chit to live safely
in their communities, presenting a major challenge for the Philippines
drug rehabilitation infrastructure. Duterte has called on the
Philippine military to make base acreage available for additional rehab
camps and the first one will apparently be at Camp Ramon Magsaysay.
Magsaysay is the largest military reservation in the Philippines. It
is also the jewel in the diadem, I might say, of the five Philippine
bases envisioned for US use under EDCA, the Enhanced Defence Cooperation
Agreement that officially returned US troops to Philippine bases. It
looks like the US military might be sharing Magsaysay with thousands of
drug users…and PRC construction workers.
I expect the Pentagon is quietly fuming at Duterte’s presumption.
rehmat1 | On Monday, Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte offended the Israeli colony(United
States) by calling for the withdrawal of American Special Forces in the
South Philippines. These American force has been training Philippine
soldiers to use US supplied military hardware against Muslim separatists
in the Mindanao and other Muslim majority islands.
“They have to go,” Duterte said in a speech during an oath-taking
ceremony for new officials. “I do not want a rift with America. But they
have to go.”
Speaking at an event being held in honor of the Islamic day of Eid’l
Fit’r in Davao City in July 2016, Duterte challenged the narrative that
the Middle East is the root of terrorism. It is not that the Middle East is exporting terrorism to America; America imported terrorism (to the Middle East), he said.
rappler | The Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines (JSOTF-P) was a
contingent of US troops, including Special Forces, that was set up to
fight terrorism in the Philippines in 2002.
But it was deactivated
in February 2015. Its mission was "to advise and assist Philippine
security forces at the tactical, operational and strategic levels
against violent extremist organizations throughout the southern
Philippines," according to the US embassy.
A small group of US soldiers have stayed in the Philippines to help
the Philippine military and police in their operations against the Abu
Sayyaf and terrorists. Some of them, for example, had helped gather
intelligence that led to the Mamasapano operation
in 2015 against alleged Malaysian bomb-maker Zulkifli bin Hir alias
Marwan, according to high-level government sources. The operation killed Marwan and 44 elite cops.
The US troops have a rotating
presence in the region as part of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation
Agreement (EDCA) which the Philippine government signed with the US
government.
Duterte previously said he would implement the EDCA after the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality.
'It will get more tense'
Duterte also seemed to say that the presence of American soldiers in
Mindanao would make the situation there more tense. Though no American
soldier has been held captive by the Abu Sayyaf, Duterte seemed to say
American soldiers would be prime hostage targets for the terrorist
group.
"Mas lalong iinit. Pag makakita ng Amerikano, papatayin talaga
'yan. Kukuha ng ransom, papatayin. Even if you're black or white
American, basta Amerikano," said Duterte.
chinamatters |With that context, let's take another look at Rodrigo Duterte.
Duterte
is not native to Mindanao. His family comes from a central Philippine
island group, the Visayan Islands. Christians from Visayan Islands and
other regions were settled in Mindanao by the U.S. and Philippine
governments as part of a strategy to demographically submerge the Moro,
distribute prime land and resources to settlers and corporations, and
economically and politically marginalize the Moro and criminalize their
resistance in a manner that will be familiar to observers of tactics in
Tibet, Xinjiang, and Palestine.
It appears to have been successful to the point that Moros are perhaps 17% of the population of Mindanao today, down from 90% in 1900.
A 2015 news
article/puff piece provides a useful perspective on Dutarte and his
attention to the Mindanao/security issue beyond the usual “murderous buffoon” framing.
Concerning the Moro disdain for
the term “Filipino”, I have to say I did find it odd that an Asian nation decided
to keep King Philip II of Spain as its namesake, but I guess naming America
after some Italian sailor is just as weird.
All in all, a thoughtful perspective on coexistence and reconciliation in a difficult and complicated neighborhood--made more difficult and complicated by a century of massacre and meddling by the US and Manila-- that Duterte has been governing for a couple decades with considerable success.
How 'bout that.
Having said that, I would not take that “Safest City
in the World” designation to the bank. Apparently an on-line poll was successfully freep'd with 800 responses.
By now, it should be clear that there's more to the Philippines than
Manila, more to its politics and society than upper class Catholicism,
and more to its security concerns than partnering with the United States
to push back against the PRC in the South China Sea.
There's Mindanao, there's Moros, there's separatism, there's issues of
justice that have been papered over by the Manila establishment to
present a neat neo-liberal narrative that complements the US pivot to
Asia.
unz | The deep state in American is completely corrupt because it exists to sell out the public interest and it includes both major political parties as well as government officials. Politicians like the Clintons who leave the White House “broke” and accumulate more than $100 million in a few years exemplify how it rewards its friends while a bloated Pentagon churns out hundreds of unneeded flag officers who receive munificent pensions and benefits for the rest of their lives. And no one is punished, ever. Disgraced former general and CIA Director David Petraeus is now a partner at the KKR private equity firm even though he knows nothing about financial services. More recently, former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who supports Hillary and is publicly advocating assassinating Russians and Iranians, has become a Senior Counselor at Clinton-linked Beacon Global Strategies. Both Petraeus and Morell are being rewarded for their loyalty to the system.
What makes the deep state so successful? It wins no matter who is in power by creating bipartisan supported money pits within the system. Unending wars and simmering though hard to define threats together invite more spending on national security and make for good business. Monetizing the completely unnecessary and hideously expensive global war on terror benefits the senior government officials, beltway industries and financial services that feed off it. Because it is essential to keep the money flowing, the deep state persists in promoting policies that otherwise make no sense, to include the unwinnable wars currently enjoying marquee status in Iraq/Syria and Afghanistan. The deep state knows that a fearmongered public will buy its product and does not even have to make much of an effort to sell it.
The United States of America is not exactly deep state Turkey but to be sure any democracy can be subverted by particular interests hiding behind the mask of patriotism buttressed by phony international threats. Ordinary Americans frequently ask why politicians and government officials appear to be so obtuse, rarely recognizing what is actually occurring in the country. That is partly due to the fact that the political class lives in a bubble of its own creation but it might also be because many of America’s leaders actually accept and benefit from the fact that there is an unelected, un-appointed and unaccountable presence within the system that actually manages what is taking place from behind the scenes. That would be the American deep state.
truthdig | Yes, self-identified liberals such as the Clintons and Barack Obama
speak in the language of liberalism while selling out the poor, the
working class and the middle class to global corporate interests. But
they are not, at least according to the classical definition, liberals.
They are neoliberals.
They serve the dictates of neoliberalism—austerity,
deindustrialization, anti-unionism, endless war and globalization—to
empower and enrich themselves and the party. The actual liberal
class—the segment of the Democratic Party that once acted as a safety
valve to ameliorate through reform the grievances and injustices within
our capitalist democracy and that had within its ranks politicians such
as George McGovern, Gaylord Nelson, Warren Magnuson and Frank Church and
New Deal Democrats such as Franklin D. Roosevelt—no longer exists. I
spent 248 pages in my book “Death of the Liberal Class”
explaining the orchestrated corporate campaign to erase the liberal
class from the political landscape and, more ominously, destroy the
radical labor and social movements that were the real engines of social
and political reform in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Democratic and the professional elites whom Frank excoriates are,
as he points out, morally bankrupt, but they are only one piece of the
fake democracy that characterizes our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”
The problem is not only liberals who are not liberal; it is also
conservatives, once identified with small government, the rule of law
and fiscal responsibility, who are not conservative. It is a court
system that has abandoned justice and rather than defend constitutional
rights has steadily stripped them from us through judicial fiat. It is a
Congress that does not legislate but instead permits lobbyists and
corporations to write legislation. It is a press, desperate for
advertising dollars and often owned by large corporations, that does not
practice journalism. It is academics, commentators and public
intellectuals, often paid by corporate think tanks, who function as
shameless cheerleaders for the neoliberal and imperial establishment and
mock the concept of independent and critical thought.
The Democratic and the professional elites are an easy and often
amusing target. One could see them, in another era, prancing at a masked
ball at Versailles on the eve of the revolution. They are oblivious to
how hated they have become. They do not understand that when they
lambast Donald Trump as a disgrace or a bigot they swell his support
because they, not Trump, are seen by many Americans as the enemy. But
these courtiers did not create the system. They sold themselves to it.
And if Americans do not understand how we got here we are never going to
find our way out.
During Barack Obama’s administration there has been near-total
continuity with the administration of George W. Bush, especially
regarding mass surveillance, endless war and the failure to regulate
Wall Street. This is because the mechanisms of corporate power embodied
in the deep state do not change with election cycles. The election of
Donald Trump, however distasteful, would not radically alter corporate
control over our lives. The corporate state is impervious to political
personalities. If Trump continues to rise in the public opinion polls,
the corporate backers of Hillary Clinton will start funding him instead.
They know Trump will prostitute himself to money as assiduously as
Clinton will.
Our political elites, Republican and Democrat, were shaped, funded and largely selected by corporate power in what John Ralston Saul correctly calls a coup d’état in slow motion. Nothing will change until corporate power itself is dismantled.
guardian | Exclusive: New survey, part of most definitive portrait of gun ownership in decades, shows just 3% of American adults own half of guns in the US.
Americans own an estimated 265m guns, more than one gun for every
American adult, according to the most definitive portrait of US gun
ownership in two decades. But the new survey estimates that 133m of
these guns are concentrated in the hands of just 3% of American adults –
a group of super-owners who have amassed an average of 17 guns each.
The unpublished Harvard/Northeastern survey result summary, obtained exclusively by the Guardian and the Trace,
estimates that America’s gun stock has increased by 70m guns since
1994. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who own guns
decreased slightly from 25% to 22%.
The new survey, conducted in 2015 by public health researchers from
Harvard and Northeastern universities, also found that the proportion of
female gun owners is increasing as fewer men own guns. These women were
more likely to own a gun for self-defense than men, and more likely to
own a handgun only.
Women’s focus on self-defense is part of a broader trend. Even as the
US has grown dramatically safer and gun violence rates have plummeted,
handguns have become a greater proportion of the country’s civilian gun stock, suggesting that self-defense is an increasingly important factor in gun ownership.
“The desire to own a gun for protection – there’s a disconnect
between that and the decreasing rates of lethal violence in this
country. It isn’t a response to actuarial reality,” said Matthew Miller,
a Northeastern University and Harvard School of Public Health professor
and one of the authors of the study.
The data suggests that American gun ownership is driven by an
“increasing fearfulness”, said Dr Deborah Azrael, a Harvard School of
Public Health firearms researcher and the lead author of the study.
nntaleb | By some coincidence, the day before the Boston barbecue, I was flaneuring in New York, and I dropped by the office of a friend I wanted to prevent from working, that is, engage in an activity that when abused, causes the loss of mental clarity, in addition to bad posture and loss of definition in the facial features. The French physicist Serge Galam happened to be visiting and chose the friend’s office to kill time. Galam was first to apply these renormalization techniques to social matters and political science; his name was familiar as he is the author of the main book on the subject, which had then been sitting for months in an unopened Amazon box in my basement. He introduced me to his research and showed me a computer model of elections by which it suffices that some minority exceeds a certain level for its choices to prevail.
So the same illusion exists in political discussions, spread by the political “scientists”: you think that because some extreme right or left wing party has, say, the support of ten percent of the population that their candidate would get ten percent of the votes. No: these baseline voters should be classified as “inflexible” and will always vote for their faction. But some of the flexible voters can also vote for that extreme faction, just as nonKosher people can eat Kosher, and these people are the ones to watch out for as they may swell the numbers of votes for the extreme party. Galam’s models produced a bevy of counterintuitive effects in political science –and his predictions turned out to be way closer to real outcomes than the naive consensus.
This idea of one-sidedness can help us debunk a few more misconceptions. How do books get banned? Certainly not because they offend the average person –most persons are passive and don’t really care, or don’t care enough to request the banning. It looks like, from past episodes, that all it takes is a few (motivated) activists for the banning of some books, or the black-listing of some people. The great philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell lost his job at the City University of New York owing to a letter by an angry –and stubborn –mother who did not wish to have her daughter in the same room as the fellow with dissolute lifestyle and unruly ideas. [5]
The same seems to apply to prohibitions –at least the prohibition of alcohol in the United States which led to interesting Mafia stories.
Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.
An insight as to how the mechanisms of religion and transmission of morals obey the same renormalization dynamics as dietary laws –and how we can show that morality is more likely to be something enforced by a minority.
thedailybell | It is fairly clear to anyone who pays attention that the Clintons are part of a larger corrupt system that is dedicated to removing or diminishing nation-states in order to create stronger global governance.
Part of this system involves putting into place destructive mechanisms that undermine the military, politics and even the media.
It is this last point that is important to note here. Hillary’s political campaign has forced the worst kind of biased and inaccurate reporting out into the open.
The most “prestigious” publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times as well as the country pre-eminent thought magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic regularly issue article that almost anyone capable of reading can debunk.
We would argue this is not by accident. The other day (here) we made the point that it seemed Hillary’s elite backers were desperate to ensure her election. We hypothesized that her ability to lead the US into war was seen as most valuable.
It is fairly clear that the world’s economic system is worsening and that central banking actions are undermining whatever shards of solvency are still apparent. Consider this thesis as viable and then accept that it is being buttressed by reports such as the one just issued by Gallup (here) showing that Americans hold mass media in lower respect than ever.
We would argue that these two results are not unrelated. American mainstream media is being torn down on purpose along with the political process to further raze democracy and weaken the West’s functionality generally.
christianmerc |Given the extraordinary access a "free press" has been given to the president, members of congress and the judiciary, it is all designed to allow the people, the voters, the ones who actually decide who the office holders will be, information that could not be gained individually. It is their duty to provide the voters with information that might make a candidate unsuitable to hold office; to expose lies and report the truth, regardless of who the other contender for the office might be. The press is, right now, acting as voters, as imposing themselves into the election and making a determination for the rest of society. That is not their Constitutional role and despite the great contempt the Constitution seems to evoke among these "elites," it is still a duty, a responsibility, to reveal the flaws and inadequacies of any given candidate for any given office from dog catcher to president and while they fully understand their responsibility when it comes to Trump, they seem at a complete loss when it comes to Hillary Clinton.
I personally am not all that interested in this election; it is a disgrace, a disappointment to consider either candidate as the best we have to offer; as serious representatives of the American people, but that is not my call and I recognize it. I believe the American people are as disserved by these candidates as they are disserved by the people reporting on the election.
If there is anything to be said about any of it, it is that we always get what we deserve and our lack of principle, our lack of interest in the political process has led to this debacle. We are the laughing stock of the world and deservedly so.
Granny Goodness - sick and contagious with pneumonia hugs little girl on the street
theamericanconservative | On the day she is said to have been diagnosed with “pneumonia,” Mrs. Clinton delivered a notorious speech in which she denounced “xenophobes,” among others, as fit for a “basket of deplorables.” People who are for open borders and globalism have a habit of dismissing their opponents as xenophobes — that is, people who fear (and therefore loathe) foreigners.
A reader has sent inan essay by Georgetown professor Jason Brennan, in which he argues that we can avoid stupid decisions like the Brexit vote if we institute an “epistocracy,” system through which smart people who know things rule. Excerpt:
In an epistocracy, political power is to some degree apportioned according to knowledge. An epistocracy might retain the major institutions we see in republican democracy, such as parties, mass elections, constitutional review, and the like. But in an epistocracy, not everyone has equal basic political power. An epistocracy might grant some people additional voting power, or might restrict the right to vote only to those that could pass a very basic test of political knowledge.
Any such system will be subject to abuse, and will suffer from significant government failures. But that’s true of democracy too. The interesting question is whether epistocracy, warts and all, would perform better than democracy, warts and all.
All across the West, we’re seeing the rise of angry, resentful, nationalist, xenophobic and racist movements, movements made up mostly of low-information voters. Perhaps it’s time to put aside the childish and magical theory that democracy is intrinsically just, and start asking the serious question of whether there are better alternatives. The stakes are high.
theatlantic | Before there was an alt-right, there was The Turner Diaries.
First
published nearly 40 years ago, the infamous dystopian novel depicts a
fictional white nationalist revolution culminating in global genocide.
The
events of the book open 25 years ago today—September 16, 1991, the date
of the first entry in Earl Turner’s diary. The fictional diary
describes a racist’s vision of a nightmare world, in which “The
System”—African American enforcers led by Jewish politicians—attempt to
confiscate all guns in the United States. A secretive organization known
as The Order rises up to take back the country for white supremacists,
eventually winning an apocalyptic insurgency and nuclear war, first
taking over the country and later the world.
The Turner Diaries was created in the 1970s by William Luther Pierce, leader of the neo-Nazi group the National Alliance. Crudely written and wildly racist, The Turner Diaries has helped inspire dozens of armed robberies and more than 200 murders in the decades since its publication.
The Turner Diaries first
made headlines when a violent white nationalist gang appropriated the
name of The Order, following the tactical blueprint for terrorism in the
book. Turner catapulted to national prominence when it was revealed to
be a key inspiration for Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people using a truck bomb strikingly similar to one described in detail in the book. Since then, The Turner Diaries
has inspired hate crimes and terrorism across the United States and in
Europe in more than a dozen separate plots through the present day.
But beyond the violence committed by its readers, The Turner Diaries was
also the seed of significant shift in white-nationalist ideology and
recruitment, the effects of which are increasingly relevant today. In “The Turner Legacy,”
a new paper for ICCT – The Hague, I examine the complicated history of
racist dystopian propaganda and the reasons for Turner’s enduring
impact.
monoskop | This is the first volume of this study of the fantasies of some of the men centrally involved in the rise of Nazism. The author develops his account by focusing on the representation of masculinity and homosexuality and their relation to the preparations for and conduct of war. He offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of the role of warfare as a search for sensation without desire or pleasure, leading to an image of the body which emphasizes hardness, self-discipline and, ultimately, violence.
psychoanalyze-aktuell.de | The book grew out of the spring lecture "The laughter of the perpetrators", which was held on 10 and 11 March 2014 Cultural Minoriten in Graz and as an event of the Graz Academy in cooperation with the Cultural Minoriten PRESS held.The blurb of the book can read that the number UNRUHE RETAIN to a "present tendency (the responses), which is more and more uncomfortable.The progress of modernity inherent in an wear unrest during the past increasingly devalued and the future of their substance is robbed. "
The origin of the material for this lecture and for the design of the book is named at the end of the book by Klaus Theweleit: "This book is made largely of newspaper;written along current newspaper reports on the in and contexts perpetrated murders of recent years and decades between and ;between the killers of IS in northern Iraq and Syria, the genocide of the Tutsi population in Rwanda in the 90s and the murders of the German NSU in the first decade of the 21st century.But older murders are included in the text: the mass murder of Communists in Indonesia of the 60s, the torture of the indigenous population in Guatemala in the '80s, back to the deeds German World War soldiers, provided they under the common viewpoint :the laughter of the perpetratorswere (and fall).For many of these events is true: <Everything we know, we know from journalists.>"(P.245)
The collected quotes serve to prove the thesis of the book, which is subtitled "psychogram killing lust".In the journalistic representation of atrocities caused by their rows citation objectivity and compression that makes any displacement impossible and the reader pulls into a voyeuristic close so that in a second, this time the body's defense procedure in the form of nausea and vomiting, the defense against any form is amplified by pleasure through (identificatory) participation in the atrocities.Again, this could be interpreted as evidence of the existence of killing desire, albeit in the form of defense against, understand.This physical reaction makes the book but also a disgrace.
The journalist quotes are indeed consistently taken from current affairs, but it goes Klaus Theweleit but also to the continuation of his thesis of the "male fantasies" that two-volume work of 1977, in which he Fascist masculinity and violent fantasies of soldiers of 2 . WK had analyzed.He describes a certain dominant type of man who is trying to enforce its rule without regard to others with violence and killing.In an interview with the FAZ he says of his latest book itself: "Yes, true, in a way it is also a kind, male fantasies revisited".But this is not so much about this almost universally observable male fantasies of tyranny and killing desire, but also the conditions under which from fantasies action records, with the result that "psyche and physique .... completely absorbed by the act" are (S. 15).
It seems therefore to go to both topics in the book, about the conditions that lead to the emergence of these male fantasies and the conditions which make acts of fantasies.But this does not happen as in a scientific paper, but in the process invented by Klaus Theweleit style that already use found in the "male fantasies".The FAZ (01.09.2016) describes in a comment: "He did this with a completely new method and science sound, in a mixture of literature and psychoanalysis, autobiographical narrative, books, maps and political commentary".30 years after the publication of the "male fantasies" commented Sven Reichart (University of Konstanz) this style with the words: "In fact, from a stringent structure of the two-volume out of the question.Between numerous books and paintings can be found on 1147 printed pages long source quotes that are sometimes whimsically-associative, sometimes not interpreted.Then there is again the passages in which produced a close relation to the theories and interpretations of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich to Melanie Klein and Gilles Deleuze / Felix Guarttari and the material will be indicated accordingly.The book is anything but linear or written from a single source.Scroll forward or back are appreciated and factored in this permeable written network.Theweleit gave in an interview the advice: .Reichart comes with Benjamin Ziemann to the judgment that "male fantasies" today could apply as well as a book.
This description can also be applied to the new book, "The laughter of the perpetrators, Breivik among other things".It gives the impression that the author finds an empathic access to the inner world of the perpetrators and also the description of contextual factors of the outside world seem like plausible explanations and let hunches of contexts and reasons arise, but as in a collage (eg Kurt Schwitters and others), in where the overall vision and the individual elements continuously alternate.The temptation is then great to look at the individual elements in their details and about losing the overall picture in mind.But what Klaus Theweleit wants to tell us with this book?He speaks of himself, he speaks of us and he speaks of our present.
After Klaus Theweleit the perpetrators are not sick, they do not want it to be.They embody a male form of existence in which unrestrained "power noise Bloodlust killing desire" manifested when they can or could it, and the only: "To stand in the absolute certainty about the law." In "male fantasies" he called the the "soldier" man.Theweleit places him in the ranks of the "Knights Templar" (knight templar = KT - these are also the initials of the author - coincidentally?) Because Breivik had argued thus, he had acted as a Templar.The author concludes: "The killings and mass murders part of the Man type this - always where the floodgates are opened once" (p 225).He contradicts the "social psychologists" who wanted a "violent theorists" it out, "that the killing prepare killer-in-law or suicide bombersexcept peoplewould be or should be." He vehemently contradicts and says that thenotso was.Although he finds it "worrying" but said that "it is important to acknowledge simply that the murder full trains always ofordinary men in ordinary organizationsoff and be done." However, the author circling the formation conditions, the predispositions that arise and the wait for "locks" are opened, making the plot file possible closer one.But these are conditions that thehuman conditioninclude, namely "psychophysical turbulence spätpubertärer adolescents" (p.187).He refers to psychoanalytic insights as Moses Laufer / M.Eglé Laufer in "Adolescence and development crisis" (Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1994) have argued.To "psycho-physical changes," it is not only by "physical and hormonal changes;ie / the young person has no control over their own bodies "...." and thus also to the bodies of the environment ", but also" because the body of the person concerned(and thus be I -. Note the Rez)be thrown into a fundamental uncertainty looks "(p.187).
antimedia | Though the U.S. population accounts for only 4.4 percent of the world’s population, its prisons held 22 percent of the world’s prisoners at the end of October 2013, making America’s incarceration rate the highest in the world.
And while the cost of today’s federal prisons has surpassed the Federal Bureau Of Prisons’ $6.85 billion budget, state prisons are not far behind. With “[s]tate corrections budgets … nearly [quadrupling] in the past two decades,”
Vera Institute of Justice notes, each average inmate now costs
taxpayers over $31,000 per year. In 2010 alone, states spent over $5.4
billion on maintaining their prisons.
But while we know everything about government’s prison budgets, few
reports shed light on the hidden costs of high incarceration rates.
In order to help the U.S. population understand what mass
incarceration means to smaller communities, Washington University in St.
Louis conducted a study entitled “The Economic Burden of Incarceration in the U.S.,” led by doctoral student and certified public accountant Michael McLaughlin.
Researchers concluded the “annual economic burden” resulting
from the high rate of incarceration in America is an estimated $1.2
trillion, or nearly 6 percent of the GDP. This burden is also eleven
times higher than what governments take from taxpayers to support state
and federal prisons.
NYTimes |This short film, narrated by Jay Z (Shawn Carter) and featuring the artwork of Molly Crabapple, is part history lesson about the war on drugs and part vision statement. As Ms. Crabapple’s haunting images flash by, the film takes us from the Nixon administration and the Rockefeller drug laws — the draconian 1973 statutes enacted in New York that exploded the state’s prison population and ushered in a period of similar sentencing schemes for other states — through the extraordinary growth in our nation’s prison population to the emerging aboveground marijuana market of today. We learn how African-Americans can make up around 13 percent of the United States population — yet31 percentof those arrested for drug law violations, even though they use and sell drugs at the same rate as whites.
Policy makers are joining advocates in demanding an end to biased policing and mass incarceration, and in November, Californians specifically have the opportunity to vote Yes on Prop 64, the most racial-justice-oriented marijuana legalization measure ever. Prop 64 would reduce (and in many cases eliminate) criminal penalties for marijuana offenses, and it’s retroactive — people sitting in prison for low-level marijuana offenses would be released and have their records expunged. In addition, Prop 64 would drive millions of dollars in direct funding and investments to those communities most harmed by the criminal justice system.
guardian | Teenagers in America are resorting to sex work because they cannot afford food, according to a study that suggests widespread hunger in the world’s wealthiest country.
Focus groups in all 10 communities analysed by the Urban Institute,
a Washington-based thinktank, described girls “selling their body” or
“sex for money” as a strategy to make ends meet. Boys desperate for food
were said to go to extremes such as shoplifting and selling drugs.
The findings raise questions over the legacy of Bill Clinton’s landmark welfare-reform legislation
20 years ago as well as the spending priorities of Congress and the
impact of slow wage growth. Evidence of teenage girls turning to
“transactional dating” with older men is likely to cause particular
alarm.
“I’ve been doing research in low-income communities for a long time,
and I’ve written extensively about the experiences of women in high
poverty communities and the risk of sexual exploitation, but this was
new,” said Susan Popkin, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and lead author of the report, Impossible Choices.
“Even for me, who has been paying attention to this and has heard
women tell their stories for a long time, the extent to which we were
hearing about food being related to this vulnerability was new and
shocking to me, and the level of desperation that it implies was really
shocking to me. It’s a situation I think is just getting worse over
time.”
The qualitative study, carried out in partnership with the food banks network Feeding America,
created two focus groups – one male, one female – in each of 10 poor
communities across the US. The locations included big cities such as
Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington and rural North Carolina and eastern
Oregon. A total of 193 participants aged 13 to 18 took part and were
allowed to remain anonymous.
Their testimony paints a picture of teenagers – often overlooked by
policymakers focused on children aged zero to five – missing meals,
making sacrifices and going hungry, with worrying long-term
consequences.
Popkin said: “We heard the same story everywhere, a really disturbing
picture about hunger and food insecurity affecting the wellbeing of
some of the most vulnerable young people. The fact that we heard it
everywhere from kids in the same way tells us there’s a problem out
there that we should be paying attention to.”
The consistency of the findings across gender, race and geography was a surprise.
NYTimes | The golden main dome of a new Russian Orthodox cathedral
now under construction on the banks of the Seine shimmers in the sun,
towering over a Paris neighborhood studded with government buildings and
foreign embassies. Most sensitive of all, it is being built beside a
19th-century palace that has been used to conceal some of the French
presidency’s most closely guarded secrets.
The
prime location, secured by the Russian state after years of lobbying by
the Kremlin, is so close to so many snoop-worthy places that when
Moscow first proposed a $100 million “spiritual and cultural center”
there, France’s security services fretted that Russia’s president,
Vladimir V. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer, might have more than just
religious outreach in mind.
Anxiety
over whether the spiritual center might serve as a listening post,
however, has obscured its principal and perhaps more intrusive role: an
outsize display in the heart of Paris, the capital of the insistently
secular French Republic, of Russia’s might as a religious power, not
just a military one.
While
tanks and artillery have been Russia’s weapons of choice to project its
power into neighboring Ukraine and Georgia, Mr. Putin has also
mobilized faith to expand the country’s reach and influence. A fervent
foe of homosexuality and any attempt to put individual rights above
those of family, community or nation, the Russian Orthodox Church
helps project Russia as the natural ally of all those who pine for a
more secure, illiberal world free from the tradition-crushing rush of
globalization, multiculturalism and women’s and gay rights.
WaPo | “I am hopeful that the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is a
passing fad: people with different backgrounds rubbing up against each
other and exchanging ideas and practices is self-evidently one of the
most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life,” Shriver said
during her speech, a statement that reminds us “cultural appropriation”
is just another way of saying “culture.” Except for the isolated tribes
of the deserts and the rainforests cut off from outside contact, all
human cultures borrow from other human cultures. Some traits are
absorbed, others rejected. What remains is, simply, “culture.”
Unfortunately,
the debate is likely here to stay, as evidenced by the outraged
walkouts during Shriver’s speech and the Brisbane Writers Festival’s
hasty efforts to arrange a new event: a “right of reply” designed to
counter Shriver’s devastatingly hurtful opinions.
Yassmin
Abdel-Magied seemed to speak for many of the aggrieved when she
denounced Shriver on the Guardian’s website. Indeed, she was so flummoxed
by Shriver’s opinions that she doesn’t quite seem to recognize the
irony of this passage in an essay penned after the triggering episode:
The
fact Shriver was given such a prominent platform from which to spew
such vitriol shows that we as a society still value this type of
rhetoric enough to deem it worthy of a keynote address. The opening of a
city’s writers festival could have been graced by any of the brilliant
writers and thinkers who challenge us to be more. To be uncomfortable. To progress. [emphasis added]
It
seems clear that Abdel-Magied wasn’t looking for a challenge or to be
made uncomfortable, but for someone willing to reinforce her
preconceptions.
That the Brisbane Writers Festival was not a safe
space for Magied is neither here nor there. Far more troubling is the
mind-set behind her meltdown, the suggestion that writers should write
only about their own experiences, that characters from different
backgrounds should be treated with kid gloves. As Shriver noted in her
remarks, authors currently face a Catch-22: They are required to include
a smattering of non-white characters lest they face accusations of
erasure or whitewashing, yet not delve into them too deeply or make them
leads, lest they be accused of appropriation.
NYTimes | Poverty in the United States is deeper than in all other wealthy
nations. Yet neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump has a specific
anti-poverty agenda.
Mr.
Trump has said that more jobs will help cure poverty — which no one
disagrees with. His promises to create jobs, however, are hollow.
Historical evidence and economic analysis
indicate that his agenda — less trade, less immigration and huge tax
cuts for the wealthy — would harm job growth. Even his recent attempts
at a middle-class agenda, including subsidies for child care, and paid
maternity leave have been fatally flawed. The former skews toward
high-income earners and the latter relies on states to come up with the
money.
The failure to talk frankly about poverty is especially regrettable in light of this week’s Census Bureau report.
reuters | The United States
and Israel have reached final agreement on a record new package of at
least $38 billion in U.S. military aid and the 10-year pact is expected
to be signed this week, sources close to the matter told Reuters on
Tuesday.
The deal will
represent the biggest pledge of U.S. military assistance made to any
country but also involves major concessions granted by Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to officials on both sides.
Those
include Israel’s agreement not to seek additional funds from Congress
beyond what will be guaranteed annually in the new package, and also to
phase out a special arrangement that has allowed Israel to spend part of
its U.S. aid on its own defense industry instead of on American-made
weapons, the officials said.
Israel’s chief negotiator, Jacob Nagel, acting head of Netanyahu’s national security council, arrived in Washington overnight in preparation for a signing ceremony with U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice, according to one source familiar with the matter.
Nearly 10 months of drawn-out aid negotiations have underscored continuing friction between U.S. President Barack Obama and Netanyahu over last year's U.S.-led nuclear deal with Iran, Israel's arch-foe. The United States and Israel have also been at odds over the Palestinians.
But the right-wing Israeli leader decided it would be best to forge a new arrangement with Obama, who leaves office in January, rather than hoping for better terms from the next U.S. administration, according to officials on both sides.
theintercept | Could someone explain why it’s noble, enlightened, justifiable, and
progressive to boycott an American state, but hateful, bigoted,
retrograde, and evil to support a boycott of a foreign country that has
been imposing a brutal, discriminatory, and illegal occupation for many
decades, a boycott that is led by people with virtually no political
rights? How did that happen? Hillary Clinton is far from the only person
espousing this bizarre distinction — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, as but
one example, is punishing companies that support a boycott of Israel while forcing state employees to honor the boycott of North Carolina — but what could possibly justify U.S. politicians drawing the moral and ethical lines about boycotts in this manner?
newyorker | At least since the
Moynihan Report, in 1965, Americans have tended to answer the question
“Why are people poor?” by choosing one of two responses: they can either
point to economic forces (globalization, immigration) or blame cultural
factors (decaying families, lack of “grit”). These seem like two
social-science theories about poverty—two hypotheses, which might be
tested empirically—but, in practice, they are more like political fairy
tales. As Kelefa Sanneh wrote earlier this year, the choice between
these two explanations has long been racialized.
Working-class whites are said to be poor because of outsourcing;
inner-city blacks are imagined to be holding themselves back with
hip-hop. The implicit theory is that culture comes from within, and so
can be controlled by individuals and communities, whereas economic
structures exert pressures from without, and so are beyond the control
of those they affect.
This theory
is useful to politicians, because political ideologies function by
identifying some people as powerless and others as powerful. The truth,
though, is that the “culture vs. economics” dyad is largely a fantasy.
We are neither prisoners of our economic circumstances nor lords of our
cultures, able to reshape them at will. It would be more accurate to say
that cultural and economic forces act, with entwined and equal power,
on and through all of us—and that we all have an ability, limited but
real, to harness or resist them. When we pursue education, we improve
ourselves both “economically” and “culturally” (and in other ways);
conversely, there’s nothing distinctly and intrinsically “economic” or
“cultural” about the problems that afflict poor communities, such as
widespread drug addiction or divorce. (If you lose your job, get
divorced, and become an addict, is your addiction “economic” or
“cultural” in nature?) When we debate whether such problems have a
fundamentally “economic” or “cultural” cause, we aren’t saying anything
meaningful about the problems. We’re just arguing—incoherently—about
whether or not people who suffer from them deserve to be blamed for
them. (We know, meanwhile, that the solutions—many, partial, and
overlapping—aren’t going to be exclusively “economic” or “cultural” in
nature, either.)
It’s odd, when
you think about it, that a question a son might ask about his
mother—“Where does blame stop and sympathy begin?”—is at the center of
our collective political life. And yet, as American inequality has
grown, that question has come to be increasingly important. When Rod
Dreher asked Vance to explain the appeal of Trump to poor whites, Vance
cited the fact that Trump “criticizes the factories shipping jobs
overseas” while energetically defending white, working-class culture
against “the condescenders” who hold it in contempt. Another way of
putting this is that, for the past eight years, the mere existence of
Barack Obama—a thriving African-American family man and a successful
product of the urban meritocracy—has implied that the problems of poor
white Americans are “cultural”; Trump has shifted their afflictions into
the “economic” column. For his supporters, that is enough.
Vance
is frustrated not just by this latest turn of the wheel but by the fact
that the wheel keeps turning. It’s true that, by criticizing “hillbilly
culture,” “Hillbilly Elegy” reverses the racial polarity in our debate
about poverty; it’s also true that, by arguing that the problems of the
white working class are partly “cultural,” the book strikes a blow
against Trumpism. And yet it would be wrong to see Vance’s book as yet
another entry in our endless argument about whether this or that group’s
poverty is caused by “economic” or “cultural” factors. “Hillbilly
Elegy” sees the “economics vs. culture” divide as a dead metaphor—a form
of manipulation rather than explanation more likely to conceal the
truth than to reveal it. The book is an understated howl of protest
against the racialized blame game that has, for decades, powered
American politics and confounded our attempts to talk about poverty.
Often,
after a way of talking has obviously outlived its usefulness, a period
of inarticulateness ensues; it’s not yet clear how we should talk going
forward. “Hillbilly Elegy” doesn’t provide us with a new way of talking
about poverty in post-globalization America. It does, however, suggest
that it’s our collective job to figure one out. As individuals, we must
stop thinking about American poverty in an imaginary way; we
must abandon the terms of the argument we’ve been having—terms designed
to harness our feelings of blame and resentment for political ends, and
to make us feel either falsely blameless
or absurdly self-determining. “I don’t know what the answer is,
precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or
faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things
better,” Vance writes. “We hillbillies need to wake the hell up.” As do
the rest of us.
So what are some of the wider implications of this morbid retreat
into the data of violent death? At the outset, it is a reminder that a
comparatively modest number of countries (and cities) are dramatically
more at risk of terrorist and homicidal violence than others. Clearly,
greater investment in diplomacy, crisis management and conflict prevention
is urgently needed, alongside improved intelligence sharing within and
between cities. This would certainly be more cost-effective – both
economically and in terms of live saved – than hardening potential
targets from asymmetric attacks in Western cities.
Perhaps even more important, the data shows that homicidal violence
is a much larger problem than terrorism. What is more, it is just a
handful of cities – most of them in Latin America, the Caribbean and parts of Africa
– that account for the lion’s share of murders globally. If lethal
violence is to be reduced in these areas, the issue must be prioritized
by national and municipal authorities, with a focus on driving down
inequality, concentrated poverty, youth unemployment and of course
corruption and political and criminal impunity. Doubling down on the
world’s most violent cities could do much to drive down the global
burden of violent death.
In the end, it is important to recall that the threats of urban fragility
are broader than a narrow focus on the prevalence of lethal violence.
If cities are to become more resilient – to cope, adapt and rebound in
the face of shocks and stresses – they will need to contend with a wide
range of threats, not just terrorism and homicide. This is as much about
promoting good governance as reducing structural social and economic
risks in cities that give rise to extremism and murder. At the very
least, it implies rethinking the role of cities as not just a site of
violence but a primary driver of security in our time.
thetimes | It’s the most exclusive party in the world — the Oscars of the
fashion industry and the red carpet with the highest stakes — but what
actually happens beyond the velvet rope at Anna Wintour’s Met Gala has
remained a mystery to the likes of you and me.
Until now. A new documentary, The First Monday in May, follows the Vogue editor
along with the fashion curator Andrew Bolton as they plan the
Metropolitan Museum’s 2015 costume exhibition and the party to end all
parties that will launch it to the rest of the world.
“There’s something surreal about the spectacle of all those people in
such a heightened atmosphere,” says Rossi. “One of the theses of the
film is that celebrity and haute couture combine to transcend their
individual parts and become something even more powerful together.”
Therein lies the event’s allure for the rest of us plebs: its mystique
and its sheer stardust quota. Does it live up to the hype?
The first rule of the Met Gala has always been that you don’t talk
about the Met Gala — or rather, you do, but only in suitably glowing
terms. The few celebrities who have offered any other opinion of the
annual bash haven’t been invited back.
Gwyneth Paltrow once
described it as “hot, crowded and un-fun”; the comedian Tina Fey called
it a “jerk parade” full of “all the people you would punch in the whole
world”. For the rebel comic Amy Schumer, it was “people doing an
impression of having a conversation, dressed like a bunch of f***ing
assholes”.
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4/3
43
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