squawker |In what may be one of the most remarkable
conflicts of interest that we have seen in a long time, it appears that
Steven Wasserman, Assistant Attorney for the District of Columbia who
is the brother of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has been tasked with
overseeing the investigation of DNC IT employee Imran Awan, who was arrested earlier this week while attempting to flee the US and charged with bank fraud.
Meanwhile, the attorneys for Imran
Awan have released the following statement blaming their clients legal
troubles on “anti-Muslim bigotry”. It’s a pretty good read:
This is pretty wild stuff, and I would like to know what the heck AG Jeff Sessions is going to do about this.
Asked
if Wasserman Schultz should be forced to testify DeSantis responded, “I
think it's questionable what they were doing during that time,”
referring to Imran Awan and other members of his family. “We would have
to investigate that. Of course, they had access to intelligence and
House Foreign Affairs Committee members’ personal email and IT accounts.
There is some very sensitive information on there. This could be a
significant security breach.”
Around February, unnamed lawmakers
alleged Awan and other family members, who were employed since 2004 by
more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers to provide IT services, were running some kind of scam, the details of which have not been revealed.
Awan’s lawyer and congressional staff described the work as fairly low
level, including setting up computers, phones, and passwords.
Lawmakers
who contracted with Awan cut ties as the investigation went on.
Wasserman Schultz was the last to do so, after Awan was arrested last
week. She said that until the arrest she had been provided “no evidence
to indicate that laws had been broken,” and was concerned about “ethnic
and religious profiling” in the case.
President Donald Trump added
his support to the story, retweeting an article last week accusing
media outlets of “bury[ing]” the “IT scandal engulfing” Wasserman
Schultz’s office.
Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh – who
revealed in 1974 that the CIA was spying on Americans, who broke the
story of the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Iraq prison torture
scandal – said in a recent phone interview linked by WikiLeaks:
[The DC police took Seth Rich’s computer, but couldn’t get past his password.] So they call the FBI cyber unit.
***
The Feds get through [the password-protection on Rich’s computer],
and this is what they find. This is accoring to the FBI report.
***
What the report says is that – some time in late spring or early
summer – he [Rich] makes contact with WikiLeaks. That’s in his computer.
***
They [the FBI] found what he [Rich] had done was he had submitted a
series of documents – of emails, of juicy emails – from the DNC.
By the way, all this shit about the DNC, where the hack, it wasn’t hacked …
He offered a sample, an extensive sample, I’m sure dozens of emails,
and said I want money. [Remember, WikiLeaks often pays whistleblowers.]
Later, WikiLeaks did get the password. He [Rich] had a dropbox, a protected dropbox, which isn’t hard to do.
***
They got access to the dropbox. That’s in the FBI report.
He [Rich] also let people know with whom he was dealing … the word
was passed, according to the FBI report, “I also shared this box with a
couple of friends, so if anything happens to me, it’s not going to solve
your problem”.
***
But WikiLeaks got access, before he was killed.
***
I have a narrative of how that whole fucking thing began. It’s a [former CIA director John] Brennan operation. It was an American disinformation [campaign].
Getting ahead of myself here, but fitna jump full back into the turd-frosting that took place on the breakfast club in the Janet Mock interview. Every degenerate and its cousin seeks mimetic cover in the historic respectable negroe quest for civil rights in America.
On a black program that often advocates for the safety and lives of black people, its hosts laughed as their guest advocated for the murder of black trans women who are black people, too!
Nah, not gonna fly. The whole Janet Mock interview flew off the rails when Angela Yee started normalizing stripper culture. What is wrong with this picture?
There are tons of reasons why people shouldn't be strippers or prostitutes. Yet, the breakfast club is having a conversation about the flawed logic of fathers not wanting their daughters to become sex workers with a transsexual former teenaged prostitute and stripper during the commute time for school children?!?!?!?!
Is the goal to literally induce more young black girls into being prostitutes and strippers? Who benefits from increasing tolerance of our youth being turned into prostitutes, strippers, and drug-dealers because of economics and limited educational and economic access?
Yvette Carnell told you that Charlemagne the God is a social engineering sock puppet. I'm surprised Yee didn't say that twerking on the pole is "empowering". Let me guess... the next interview is going to be Amber Rose explaining why taking money for oral sex makes you an entrepreneur? Just like so many other nefarious social-engineering props deployed to distract, dismay, and confuse black minds addicted to celebrity, who do we find sitting on her fat-ass behind the curtain? Who gave the turd-frosting Janet Mock her initial foot up onto the public stage? Of course you know it was none other than Oprah Winfrey.
allure | Yet I was hopeful that I could use the show’s vast platform to speak
directly to their predominantly black and Latinx listeners, who are
often excluded from the conversations held in mainstream LGBT spaces
(which are largely white, moneyed, and concerned with the centering of
cis folk). I hoped I could make listeners aware of the lived realities
of their trans sisters, and let them know that we deserve to be seen,
heard, and acknowledged without the threat of harassment, exclusion, and
violence.
My ultimate goal was to be accessible — to not judge,
to call in rather than call out, and, above all, to exercise patience as
the (straight cis male) hosts processed my existence. It’s rare that I
do Trans 101 lecturing anymore, because I’ve already done that work with
my first book, Redefining Realness, which was filled with plain speak and explanatory commas about definitions, statistics, and context.
In
fact, I’ve turned down thousands from colleges and corporations because
I refuse to engage in Trans 101. Trans folk, especially of color,
should not be obligated to help cis folk play catch-up on our
experiences. The effort can detract from our work to protect and
liberate ourselves. Yet I also know that black and Latina trans women
often live in communities of color, so outreach to viewers of color,
from The Wendy Williams Show and Essence to Desus & Mero, was vital as I set out on my book tour.
I was invited to “The Breakfast Club” because cohost Yee chose my second memoir, Surpassing Certainty, for her book club. It was my last scheduled media appearance after a long, grueling tour in support of Surpassing Certainty,
which is about the years in my life I decided to keep my trans-ness
private — largely in order to gain access and maintain my safety. These
years coincided with my 20s, when I navigated college, graduate school,
and my early media career. The interview aired on radio stations across
the country (edited and condensed) and in its entirety on YouTube a week later.
Though
I have not been able to watch the video of my interview (I have already
experienced it and won’t be doing so again), I’m proud of the labor I
put forth, and I’m grateful to Yee for her preparation and effort to
steer the conversation away from the particulars of my body and instead
toward my work. The interview was what it was, and I refuse to
re-experience being asked about my vagina in such blatant, irrelevant,
and sensational ways. Again, if I am not fucking you, why do you care?
thedailybeast | Instead, the group of students thwarting Mock’s scheduled
lecture—those belonging to SJP—do, in fact, pressure people to conform
to their mind-set on the Middle East and quash intellectual diversity.
Sadly,
Mock caved to the pressure. Though the petition drew just 160
signatures, Mock canceled days before she was expected to speak on March
21 because, “We feel the focus of Janet’s work was lost leading up to
the proposed event,” her representative reportedly told the Moral Voices
organizers.
Way to go, student activists at Brown! You succeeded
in creating a hostile environment that led to a trans woman of color
being discouraged from sharing her voice and opinions. This all helped
the Palestinian people how, exactly?
Brown President Christina
Paxson expressed disappointment. “I respect her decision to avoid having
her talk be overshadowed by an issue unrelated to her work. However, I
am disappointed that a valuable learning opportunity was lost,” she said
in a Sunday email to the student body.
In that same email, Paxson also referred to campus housing facilities that had been defaced. According to the Brown Daily Herald, “Gay will die” and “Holocaust 2.0” were written on hallway walls.
“I
want to emphasize that there is absolutely no evidence that the
cancellation of the Mock event is related to the homophobic and
anti-Semitic graffiti that appeared,” Paxson wrote. “However, taken
together, these two events are deeply troubling. They come at a time
when the nation and colleges across the country are grappling with
concerns about injustice against individuals based on religion, race,
ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender expression.”
In their
op-ed, SJP members defended their group’s “my way or the highway
approach” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the initial the
petition stressed, the students’ objections were not over Mock but
rather her willingness to take part in an event even slightly tied to
Hillel. In other words, they wanted Mock to speak—but only as long as
she agreed to the terms they dictated. It’s hardly the stuff of
international diplomacy; has digging in your heels and refusing to let people share their opinions ever brought about peace or stability?
I'm an aggressor. I have a knife. Knives are never meant to be seen, only
felt. Not only can I model my desired aggression toward you in pictures,
words, and even movements, I can engage in active deception so that you
never see that knife attack coming. I don't believe there are any
animals capable of that complex mix of behaviors. Sure there's
deception, sure there's aggressive play and practice, but nothing even
remotely approaching the complex systematic, formal and premeditated
instrumental behavior I'm describing above.
Now if I were
blessedly more naive about how such things go, I might model in my
mind's eye displaying the knife like a poor simple creature
instinctively engaging in threat displays in hopes of scaring you off,
which threat displays mask its underlying real instinctual aversion to lethal violence.
Fourteen years ago on the afrofuturism list, I offered the ancient anecdote about Sack's aphasic patients sitting in the common
lounge watching Ronald Reagan deliver a speech. To a person, these language-disordered patients were
amazed by the paradox of the actor's facial expressions and body
language conveying a message totally at odds with what was coming out of
his mouth. They could directly observe both the unspoken intention and
the contrasting spoken deceptions. We all have this capability to varying degrees. My own liminal acuity (perception of facial or body language contradiction) is off the chart.
So it is with longstanding, consistent, and finely-honed trepidation that I spy out the corner of my eye the most recent speech as violence perpetrations emanating from a longtime, consistent, and influential source the NYTimes: When
the political scientist Charles Murray argues that genetic factors help
account for racial disparities in I.Q. scores, you might find his view
to be repugnant and misguided, but it’s only offensive. It is offered as
a scholarly hypothesis to be debated, not thrown like a grenade.
Milo Yiannopoulos is compared and contrasted in the same article as a genuine perpetrator of "speech as violence". That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a
provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your
school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is
nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is
offering.
With regard to Milo Yiannopoulos and the alt-right - there are few better example of the use of words as "virtue-signal" for collective violence. It's a very good thing that this cohort is demographically composed of untermensch. The alt-right is busily wallowing in the joys of formerly forbidden memetic signification within its demography. Keyboard warriors, one-and-all, these gamma males are living a bronetic Weimar Germany/MS-13 fantasy from the safety of their mothers' basements. Anonymous bad-talk through keyboards is not the same thing as MS-13 face tattoos.
Within MS-13, serial killers openly signify within their community of interest exactly what they're on about. A better example of "speech" as violence with an underlying ethological analog would be pretty hard to find. I would equate that signification to a brightly colored poisonous reptile advertising its venom, with the difference being that the gang-member has agency over its advert while the venomous reptile does not.
Yiannopoulos and Murray are each mentioned in the article, with the former given as an example of an
intentional provocateur and the latter as an example of a public
intellectual. From the perspective of "speech as violence" the now
ruined and discredited Yiannopoulos was never anything more than a
D-list gadfly. Murray, on the other hand, falls somewhere between
professional political propagandist and un-indicted war criminal -
imnsho.
Calling
Charles Murray "merely a political scientist" when in fact he was an
anthropologist studying, developing, and implementing large-scale
counter-insurgency methods in Vietnam, which methods he turned around
- and with substantial political backing - promoted aggressively in the
U.S. - is more than a little disingenuous. Charles Murray has always both intended
and practiced severe rhetorical violence against both real and imagined
enemies. The fact that his pseudo-academic deceptions are even more refined and
subtle than Ronald Reagan's thespian deceptions - (wonder what the aphasics who saw through Reagan's talk/expression contradictions would make of Murray?) doesn't make them any
the less premeditated, systematic, or violent.
Murray has always
known full-well that a knife is never meant to be seen, only felt. So
did President Reagan or at least his speech writers and handlers...,
NYTimes | What’s bad for your nervous system, in contrast, are long stretches of
simmering stress. If you spend a lot of time in a harsh environment worrying about
your safety, that’s the kind of stress that brings on illness and remodels your brain.
That’s also true of a political climate in which groups of people endlessly hurl hateful
words at one another, and of rampant bullying in school or on social media. A
culture of constant, casual brutality is toxic to the body, and we suffer for it.
That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur
and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of
something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from
debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.
On the other hand, when the political scientist Charles Murray argues that
genetic factors help account for racial disparities in I.Q. scores, you might find his
view to be repugnant and misguided, but it’s only offensive. It is offered as a
scholarly hypothesis to be debated, not thrown like a grenade. There is a difference
between permitting a culture of casual brutality and entertaining an opinion you
strongly oppose. The former is a danger to a civil society (and to our health); the
latter is the lifeblood of democracy.
By all means, we should have open conversations and vigorous debate about
controversial or offensive topics. But we must also halt speech that bullies and
torments. From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of
violence.
shameproject | Author of The Bell Curve; Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
Charles Murray is one of the most influential right-wing ideological architects of the post-Reagan era. His career began in a secret Pentagon counterinsurgency operation in rural Thailand during the Vietnam War, a program whose stated purpose included applying counter-insurgency strategies learned in rural Thailand on America's own restive inner cities and minority populations. By the late 1970s, Charles Murray was drawing up plans for the US Justice Department that called for massively increasing incarceration rates. In the 1980s, backed by an unprecedented marketing campaign, Murray suddenly emerged as the nation's most powerful advocate for abolishing welfare programs for single mothers. Since then, Murray revived discredited racist eugenics theories "proving" that blacks and Latinos are genetically inferior to whites, and today argues that the lower classes are inferior to the upper classes due to breeding differences.
theatlantic | There’s little disagreement
about the fact that economic inequality is problematic. But arguments
persist over its origins, solutions, and which economic gaps are
ultimately the most pernicious.
In his new book, Toxic Inequality: How America's Wealth Gap Destroys Mobility, Deepens the Racial Divide, and Threatens Our Future,
Tom Shapiro, a professor of law and sociology at Brandeis University,
lays out how government policy and systemic racism has created vast gaps
in wealth between white and black Americans. Shapiro and his colleagues
followed 187 families from Boston, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. Half of
the families were black and half white. They interviewed them in 1998
and then again in 2010, to see what had changed: how were their kids
faring, how had they weathered the recession—were they any better off in
2010 than they had been in 1998?
I spoke with Shapiro
about his new book, how policy impacts racial wealth, and what he makes
of current conversations about race and economic pain.
The interview below has been lightly edited for clarity.
penguin | In his first major book on the subject of income inequality, Noam
Chomsky skewers the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism and casts a
clear, cold, patient eye on the economic facts of life. What are the ten
principles of concentration of wealth and power at work in America
today? They’re simple enough: reduce democracy, shape ideology, redesign
the economy, shift the burden onto the poor and middle classes, attack
the solidarity of the people, let special interests run the regulators,
engineer election results, use fear and the power of the state to keep
the rabble in line, manufacture consent, marginalize the population. In Requiem for the American Dream,
Chomsky devotes a chapter to each of these ten principles, and adds
readings from some of the core texts that have influenced his thinking
to bolster his argument.
voxeu | Divisions in the US go well beyond the income arena, and in ways that
are particularly worrisome. In a new book, I document trends in
inequality from the perspective of well-being, starting with standard
metrics but also exploring how these relate to non-economic aspects of
welfare, such as happiness, stress, anger, and, most importantly, hope
(Graham 2017).
Hope is an important channel driving people’s willingness to invest
in the future. My early research on well-being work highlights its
particular importance for people with less means, for whom making such
investments requires a greater sacrifice of current consumption than it
does for the rich (Graham et al. 2004). In addition to widening gaps in
opportunity, the prosperity gap in the US has led to rising inequality
in beliefs, hopes, and aspirations, with those who are left behind
economically the least hopeful and the least likely to invest in their
futures.
There are, indeed, two Americas. Those at the top of the income
distribution (including the top of the middle class) increasingly lead
separate lives, with barriers to reaching the upper class being very
real, if not explicit (Reeves 2017). Those at the top have high levels
of hope for the future and make investments in themselves and in their
children’s health, education, and knowledge more generally. Those at the
bottom have much lower levels of hope and they tend to live day by day,
consumed with daily struggles, high levels of stress, and poor health.
There are many markers of the differences across these two Americas,
ranging from education levels and job quality to marriage and
incarceration rates to life expectancy. Indeed, the starkest evidence of
this lack of faith in the future is the marked increase in premature
deaths – driven largely but not only by an increase in preventable
deaths (such as via suicide and drug over-dose) among middle-aged
uneducated whites, as described by Case and Deaton (2017).
There are even differences in the words that these two Americas use.
Common words in wealthy America reflect investments in health, knowledge
acquisition, and the future: iPads and Baby Bjorns, foam rollers and
baby joggers, cameras, and exotic travel destinations such as Machu
Picchu. The words that are common in poor America – such as hell,
stress, diabetes, guns, video games, and fad diets – reflect short-time
horizons, struggles, and lack of hope (Leonhardt 2015).
Based on detailed Gallup data, we find stark differences across
people, races, and places in the US. Remarkably, poor minorities – and
blacks in particular – are much more hopeful than poor whites. Poor
blacks are three times as likely to be a point higher on the ten-point
optimism scale than are poor whites, while Hispanics are about one and a
half times more likely than poor whites. Poor blacks are also half as
likely to experience stress – a significant marker of ill-being – on a
daily basis as are poor whites, while poor Hispanics are about
two-thirds as likely.
alternet | In the long term, the indirect effect of the Pay Machine—the
increase in income inequality—is economically more injurious than the
erosion of company earnings or a stock market downturn.
Income
inequality in America has risen sharply since 1976. Economists and
pundits point to multiple causes—globalization and competition from
low-wage countries; growing educational disparities that particularly
affect men and minorities; technological changes that reward the highly
skilled; decline of labor unions; changes in corporate culture that
place stock price and earnings above employees; free market philosophy
and the rise of winner-take-all economics; households with high-income
couples; lower rates of marriage and of intact families; high
incarceration levels; immigration of low-skilled individuals; income
tax and capital gains tax cuts and other conservative economic and tax
policies; deregulation; and decreased welfare and antipoverty spending
coupled with redistribution programs that disproportionately benefit the
elderly.
All of the above may contribute to inequality. However,
the proximate cause is quite simple. The jump in inequality is due to a
small number of people, mostly business executives, who make huge
amounts of money. They are the Mega Rich, the top .1 percent in income,
who averaged $6.1 million in income in 2014. The Merely Rich are the
rest of the 1 percent. It’s the Mega Rich, not the Merely Rich, who
drive inequality. (I’m a member of the Merely Rich, so don’t blame me.) Between 1980 and 2014 the average
real income of the Mega Rich has nearly quadrupled, increasing by 381
percent. Over the same period, the Merely Rich doubled their income
while the bottom 90 percent lost ground, suffering a 3 percent decline.
theatlantic | “If you’re in an advantaged position in society, believing the system
is fair and that everyone could just get ahead if they just tried hard
enough doesn’t create any conflict for you … [you] can feel good about
how [you] made it,” said Erin Godfrey, the study’s lead author and an
assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University’s
Steinhardt School. But for those marginalized by the
system—economically, racially, and ethnically—believing the system is
fair puts them in conflict with themselves and can have negative
consequences.
“If the system is fair, why am I seeing that everybody who has brown skin is in this kind of job?
You’re having to think about that … like you’re not as good, or your
social group isn’t as good,” Godfrey said. “That’s the piece … that I
was trying to really get at [by studying] these kids.”
The findings build upon a body of literature on “system justification”—a social-psychology theory
that believes humans tend to defend, bolster, or rationalize the status
quo and see overarching social, economic, and political systems as
good, fair, and legitimate. System justification is a distinctively
American notion, Godfrey said, built on myths used to justify
inequities, like “If you just work hard enough you can pull yourself up
by your bootstraps … it’s just a matter of motivation and talent and
grit.” Yet, as she and her colleagues discovered, these beliefs can be a
liability for disadvantaged adolescents once their identity as a member
of a marginalized group begins to gel—and once they become keenly aware
of how institutional discrimination disadvantages them and their group.
“I do think that there’s this element of people think of me this way anyway, so this must be who I am,”
Godfrey said, adding that the behaviors—things like stealing and
sneaking out—reflect stereotypes perpetuated about youth of color. “If
you’re [inclined] to believe that things are the way they should be, and
[that] the system is fair, then you’re maybe going to accept
stereotypes about you more easily.”
While the sample was
relatively small, Godfrey said the findings are informative and mirror
prior research. Indeed, previous analyses have found that
system-justifying beliefs are associated with lower self-esteem in black adults and lower grade-point averages for Latino college students—though the same beliefs predicted better grades and less distress for “high status” youth.
“I
was really interested in trying to think of [early adolescents] as
active agents in their world,” Godfrey said, “and as people who can
understand and interpret their social world in a way that a lot of
research doesn’t recognize.”
WaPo | Growing up, guns were a thing to be feared. They
intersected with my life only as characters in narratives of pain: the
reason the boy from gym class was in the hospital, the thing that stole
the life of a friend’s cousin or father. My life has known no fear
greater than in the handful of times my eyes have found the opening of a
gun’s barrel.
It’s a fear that is present for
many black Americans. That same Pew poll found that 49 percent of us
see gun violence as a “very big” problem in our local communities,
compared with 29 percent of Hispanics and a fraction of as many whites —
11 percent. While 20 percent of whites and 24 percent of Hispanics say
they — or someone in their family — have been personally threatened with
a gun, that number jumps to 32 percent for black Americans. And while
43 percent of whites and 42 percent of Hispanics say they know someone
who’s been shot, it’s 57 percent among black Americans.
It was a similar fear that in 2015 prompted Stephen
Yorkman to launch the Robert F. Williams Gun Club in Prince George’s
County, Md., which is named for a civil rights activist who advocated
armed self-defense and now has about 150 members.
“For
me, it started with the shooting of Tamir Rice,” Yorkman, 48,
explained, referencing the 12-year-old Cleveland boy shot by police
while playing with a toy gun at the playground of a public park. “We
need to create a different, better perception of black people with guns
so that in an open-carry state the image of a black person with a gun
doesn’t so alarm a police officer. And we need to make it so it’s no
longer a sin in the black community to be a gun owner, but that it’s
more accepted.”
This new crop of black gun clubs aims to educate members on the history
of black gun ownership and the centuries of attempts to suppress it and
to host pragmatic conversations about the way their members will be
perceived, and the dangers they will assume, as black people who chose
to be armed — services often abdicated by the leaders of mainstream gun
culture.
evonomics | The above says: how people in the present value rewards they expect to receive (say) 10 years into the future,
is pretty similar across the world — although small differences can
make a big difference in the long term through compounding. But the
degree to which people want things right now, as opposed to tomorrow, varies quite dramatically.
By the way, Russia’s β is 0.21 !!! If that has
nothing to do with low investment rates or insecure property rights for
foreign companies, then I will eat my shorts !
The role of patience in cooperation is relevant to the
“commitment problem” of the state in solving collective action problems.
In theorising about the origins of the state, Mancur Olson gave a famous answer with
his dichotomy of roving bandits and stationary bandits. In the world of
political anarchy, roving bandits fight one another for opportunities
to pillage the productive peasants. But sometimes one of them defeats
all the others and establishes himself as a “stationary bandit”. He then
acquires a strong intrinsic interest in restraining his plunder — his
‘taxation’ — in order to let the economy grow. It’s the “fatten the
goose that lays the golden eggs” principle.
But that depends! If the stationary bandit is impulsive and impatient, he can remain a predator for a very long time.
Political scientist Carles Boix in
a recent book pointed out that the reciprocity of stateless foraging
societies cannot be sustained when the distribution of resources is too
unequal. But even his model depends on ‘patience’, with the implication
that uncoordinated cooperation is still possible with more inequality as
long as people are patient enough. This is actually true of models
using prisoner’s dilemma and stag hunt in general. Even Acemoglu‘s ruling elite with vested interests in maintaining “extractive institutions” would have incentives for “inclusive institutions” if they were only patient enough.
So to answer the question at the head of this post, “where
do pro-social institutions come from?” — if ‘bad’
institutions represent coordination failures, then intelligence and
patience must be a big part of the answer. This need not have
the same relevance for social evolution from 100,000 BCE to 1500 CE. But
for the emergence of ‘modern’, advanced societies, intelligence and
patience matter.
It’s not that people’s norms and values do not or cannot
change. They do. But that does not seem enough. Solving
complex coordination failures and collective action problems requires a
lot more than just ‘good’ culture.
I am not saying intelligence and patience explain ‘everything‘,
just that they seem to be an important part of how ‘good’ institutions
happen. Nor am I saying that intelligence and patience are immutable
quantities. Pinker argued in The Better Angels of Our Nature that the long-run secular decline in violence may be due to the Flynn Effect:
…the pacifying effects of reason, and the Flynn
Effect. We have several grounds for supposing that enhanced powers of
reason—specifically, the ability to set aside immediate experience,
detach oneself from a parochial vantage point, and frame one’s ideas in
abstract, universal terms—would lead to better moral commitments,
including an avoidance of violence.
What is the above describing, other than the increasing ability of
people to empathise with a wider group of people than friends and
family? Intelligence and patience allow you to understand, and weigh,
the intuitive risks and the counterintuitive benefits from
collaborating with perfect strangers. With less intelligence and less
patience you stick to what you know — intuit the benefits from
relationships cultivated over a long time through blood ties or other
intimate affiliations.
Your “moral circle” is wider with intelligence and patience than without.
scientificamerican | You walk into a bar and music is thumping. All heads are bobbing and
feet tapping in synchrony. Somehow the rhythmic sound grabs control of
the brains of everyone in the room forcing them to operate
simultaneously and perform the same behaviors in synchrony. How is this
possible? Is this unconscious mind control by rhythmic sound only
driving our bodily motions, or could it be affecting deeper mental
processes?
The mystery runs deeper than previously thought,
according to psychologist Annett Schirmer reporting new findings today
at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans. Rhythmic sound
“not only coordinates the behavior of people in a group, it also
coordinates their thinking—the mental processes of individuals in the
group become synchronized.”
This finding extends the well-known
power of music to tap into brain circuits controlling emotion and
movement, to actually control the brain circuitry of sensory perception.
This discovery helps explain how drums unite tribes in ceremony, why
armies march to bugle and drum into battle, why worship and ceremonies
are infused by song, why speech is rhythmic, punctuated by rhythms of
emphasis on particular syllables and words, and perhaps why we dance.
Schirmer
and her graduate student Nicolas Escoffier from the University of
Singapore first tested subjects by flashing a series of images on a
video monitor and asked them to quickly identify when an image was
flipped upside down. While participants focused on this task, a
synthetic drumbeat gently tapped out a simple four-beat rhythm in the
background, syncopated by skipping the fourth beat of each measure.
theburningplatform | Signalling is a basic human trait. We all do it to one degree or
another. Walk into a prison and you will see an array of tattoos on the
inmates. These will signal gang affiliations, time served in the system,
facilities in which the inmate has served and the individual’s violence
capital. That last part is an important part of keeping the peace. To
civilians, a face tattoo is always scary, but in jail, the right neck
tattoo can tell other inmates that they are in the presence of an
accomplished killer for a particular prison gang.
Virtue signalling and danger signalling are the easiest to
understand, but people also use verbal and non-verbal signals to
indicate trust or test the trustworthiness of others. A criminal
organization, for example, will have a new member commit a pointless
crime to demonstrate their trustworthiness. This is not just to sort out
police informants, as is portrayed on television. It’s mostly to
ascertain the willingness of the person to commit to the life of the
organization. It’s hard to be a criminal if you will not commit crimes.
Outlaw biker culture is a good example of the use of signalling to
establish trust relationships. Bikers have always, for example, adopted
Nazi symbols as part of their display items. Bikers are not sitting
around reading Julius Evola. What they are doing is signalling their
complete rejection of the prevailing morality. By adopting taboo symbols
and clothing, the outlaw biker is letting other bikers know his status,
as much as he is letting the squares know he is a dangerous guy, who
should be avoided.
This type of signalling is also defensive. Someone who is not serious
or unprepared for life in a motorcycle club will try hard to hide this
from himself and the club he is trying to impress. When those club
members all have visible tattoos and swastikas on their vests, no one
can kid themselves about what is expected from members. The visual
presentation of the outlaw biker does more to chase away posers and
trouble makers than character tests and initiation rituals. A biker is a
walking entrance exam for prospects.
It’s not just an in-group/out-group thing. When you start prospecting
for a biker club, you are routinely forced to choose between the moral
framework of society and the morality of the club. The same process
works in cults, interestingly enough. The prospect is always in a
position where he must either divorce himself emotionally from his old
life and the old world, or leave the club. It’s why one percenter clubs
take their time patching in new members. It takes time to leave the old
world and fully commit to the lifestyle.
That’s the way to read the alt-right and the stuff they say and do
on-line with respect to non-whites, Jews and women. They don’t actually
spend a lot of time talking and writing about these groups. They spend
most of their time talking about how to organize themselves, the issues
that face white identity movements and the philosophical points of their
thing. The offensive memes and the racists language are mostly
signalling. If you freak out over Hitler themed twitter avatars, then
you are never going to be in their thing.
maebrussell | Why were Hippies such a threat, from
the President on down to local levels, objects for surveillance
and disruptions?
Many of the musicians had the potential
to become political. There were racial overtones to the black-white
sounds, the harmony between people like Janis Joplin, Otis Redding,
and Jimi Hendrix. Black music was the impetus that got the Rolling
Stones into composing and performing.
The war in Vietnam was escalating. What
if they stopped protesting the war in Southeast Asia and turned
to expose domestic policies at home with the same energy? One
of the Byrds stopped singing at Monterey Pop to question the
official Warren Report conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was
a "lone assassin."
Bob Dylan's "Bringing it All Back
Home" album has a picture of Lyndon Johnson on the cover
of Time.
By 1966, LBJ had ordered all writers
and critics of his Commission Report on the JFK murder to be
under surveillance.
That research was hurting him. Rock concerts
and Oswald. What next?
While preacher preach of evil fates
teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
to stand naked.
Bob Dylan "It's Alright Ma"
Bringing it All Back Home album
John and Yoko Lennon were protesting
the Vietnam war. The State Department wrote documents describing
them as "highly political and unfavorable to the administration."
It was recommended their citizenship be denied, and they be put
under surveillance.
Mick Jagger, before he was offered Hollywood's
choicest women and heavy drugs, was concerned about the youth
protests in Paris, 1968, and the anti-war demonstrations at the
London Embassy.
"War stems from power-mad politicians and patriots. Some
new master plan would end all these mindless men from seats of
power and replace them with real people, people of compassion."
Mick Jagger
July, 1968, the FBI's counterintelligence
operations attacked law abiding American individual's and groups.
The stated purpose of these assaults
was to disrupt large gatherings, expose and discredit the enemy,
and neutralize their selected targets.
Neutralization included killing the leaders,if
necessary. Preferably, turn two opposing segments of society
against each other to do the dirty work for them.
Remember that among these dangers to
the security of the United States were persons with "different
lifestyles" and also "apostles of non-violence and
racial harmony."
CIA Director Richard Helms warned National
Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Feb. 18, 1969, that their study
on "Restless youth" was "extremely sensitive"
and "would prove most embarrassing for all concerned if
word got out the CIA was involved in domestic matters."
The FBI sent out a list of suggestions
on how to achieve their goals. They can all be applied to what
happened to musicians, youngsters at folk rock festivals, and
hippies along the highway.
Gather information on their immorality. Show them as scurrilous
and depraved. Call attention to their habits and living conditions.
Explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and sex,
break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges.
Investigate personal conflicts or animosities between them. Send
articles to the newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics
and free sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt.
Get records of their bank accounts. Obtain specimens of handwriting.
Provoke target groups into rivalries that may result in death.
"Intelligence Activities and Rights of Americans"
Book II, April 26, 1976
Senate Committee Study with Respect to Intelligence
NYTimes | Mr.
Colby refused comment on the domestic spying issue. But one clue to the
depth of his feelings emerged during an off‐the‐record talk he gave
Monday night at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
The
C.I.A. chief, who had been informed the previous week of the inquiry by
The Times, said at the meeting that be had ordered a complete
investigation of the agency's domestic activities and had found some
improprieties.
But he is known to have added, “I think family skeletons are best left where they are—in the closet.”
He
then said that the “good thing about all of this was the red flag” was
raised by a group of junior employes inside the agency.
It
was because of the prodding from below, some sources have reported,
that Mr. Colby decided last year to inform the chairmen of the House and
Senate Intelligence Oversight Committees of the domestic activities.
Mr.
Schlesinger, who became Secretary of Defense after serving less than
six months at the C.I.A., similarly refused to discuss the domestic
spying activities.
Anguish Reported
But
he was'described by an associate as extremely concerned and disturbed
by what he discovered at the C.I.A. upon replacing Mr. Helms.
“He
found himself in a cesspool,” the associate said. “He was having a
grenade blowing up in his face every time he turned around.”
Mr.
Schlesinger was at the C.I.A. when the first word of the agency's
involvement in the September, 1971, burglary of the office of Dr. Daniel
Ellsberg's former psychiatrist by the White House security force known
as the “plumbers” became known.
It
was Mr. Schlesinger who also discovered and turned over to the Justice
Department a series of letters written to a Mr. Helms by James W. McCord
Jr., one of the original Watergate defendants and a former C.I.A.
security official. The letters, which told of White House involvement in
the Watergate burglary, had been deposited in an agency office.
The
associate said one result of Mr. Schlesinger's inquiries into Watergate
and the domestic of the C.I.A. operations was his executive edict
ordering a halt to all questionable counterintelligence operations
inside the United States.
During
his short stay at the C.I.A., Mr. Schlesinger also initiated a 10 per
cent employe cutback. Because of his actions, the associate said,
security officials at the agency decided to increase the number of his
personal bodyguards. It could not be learned whether that action was
taken after a threat.
Many past and present C.I.A. men acknowledged that Mr. Schlesinger's reforms were harder to bear because he was an outsider.
Mr.
Colby, these men said, while continuing the same basic programs
initiated by his predecessor, was viewed by some as “the saving force”
at the agency because as a former high‐ranking official himself in the
C.I.A.'s clandestine services, he had the respect and power. to ensure
that the alleged illegal domestic programs would cease.
Some
sources also reported that there was widespread paper shredding at the
agency shortly after Mr. Schlesinger began to crack down on the C.I.A.'s
operations.
Asked
about that, however, Government officials said that they could
“guarantee” that the domestic intelligence files were still intact.
“There's certainly been no order to destroy them,” one official said:
When
confronted with the Times's Information about the C.I.A.'s domestic
operations earlier this week, high‐ranking American intelligence
officials confirmed its basic accuracy, but cautioned against drawing
“unwarranted conclusions.”
Espionage Feared
Those
officials, who insisted on not being quoted by name, contended that all
of the C.I.A.'s domestic activities against American citizens were
initiated in the belief that foreign governments and foreign espionage
may have been involved.
“Anything
that we did was In the context of foreign counterintelligence and it
was focused at foreign intelligence and foreign intelligence problems,”
one official said.
The
official also said that the requirement to maintain files on American
citizens emanated, in part, from the so‐called Huston plan. That plan,
named for its author, Tom Charles Huston, a Presidential aide, was a
White House project in 1970 calling for the use of such, illegal
activities as burglaries and wiretapping to combat antiwait activities,
and student turmoil that the White House believed was being “fomented”
—as the Huston plan stated—by black extremists.
The CIA began domestic recruiting operations in 1959 in the process of finding Cuban exiles they could use in the campaign against communist Cuba and Fidel Castro. As these operations expanded, the CIA formed a Domestic Operations Division in 1964. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson requested that the CIA begin its own investigation into domestic dissent—independent of the FBI's ongoing COINTELPRO.[4]
The CIA developed numerous operations targeting domestic dissent,
many operating under the CIA's Office of Security. These included:[2]
HTLINGUAL
– Directed at letters passing between the United States and the then
Soviet Union, the program involved the examination of correspondence to
and from individuals or organizations placed on a watchlist.
Project 2 – Directed at infiltration of foreign intelligence targets
by agents posing as dissident sympathizers and which, like CHAOS, had
placed agents within domestic radical organizations for the purposes of
training and establishment of dissident credentials.
Project MERRIMAC
– Designed to infiltrate domestic antiwar and radical organizations
thought to pose a threat to security of CIA property and personnel.
Project RESISTANCE – Worked with college administrators, campus security and local police to identify anti-war activists and political dissidents without any infiltration taking place
Domestic Contact Service – Focused on collecting foreign intelligence from willing Americans.
When President Nixon came to office in 1969, existing domestic surveillance activities were consolidated into Operation CHAOS.[5]
Operation CHAOS first used CIA stations abroad to report on antiwar
activities of United States citizens traveling abroad, employing methods
such as physical surveillance and electronic eavesdropping, utilizing "liaison services" in maintaining such surveillance. The operations were later expanded to include 60 officers.[3] In 1969, following the expansion, the operation began developing its own network of informants
for the purposes of infiltrating various foreign antiwar groups located
in foreign countries that might have ties to domestic groups.[2]
Eventually, CIA officers expanded the program to include other leftist
or counter-cultural groups with no discernible connection to Vietnam, such as groups operating within the women's liberation movement.[1] The domestic spying of Operation CHAOS also targeted the Israeli embassy, and domestic Jewish groups such as the B'nai B'rith. In order to gather intelligence on the embassy and B'nai B'rith, the CIA purchased a garbage collection company to collect documents that were to be destroyed.[6]
Targets of Operation CHAOS within the antiwar movement included:[5]
Officially, reports were to be compiled on "illegal and subversive"
contacts between United States civilian protesters and "foreign
elements" which "might range from casual contacts based merely on mutual
interest to closely controlled channels for party directives." At its
finality, Operation CHAOS contained files on 7,200 Americans, and a
computer index totaling 300,000 civilians and approximately 1,000
groups.[8]
The initial result of investigations lead DCI Richard Helms to advise
then President Johnson on November 15, 1967, that the agency had
uncovered "no evidence of any contact between the most prominent peace
movement leaders and foreign embassies in the U.S. or abroad." Helms
repeated this assessment in 1969.[1] In total 6 reports were compiled for the White House and 34 for cabinet level officials.[2]
larryrothsblog | I grew
up in the pre-Vietnam era. Our high schools taught a sanitized version of
American history. I was in college before I learned about the country’s
incarceration of ethnic Japanese, many of whom were citizens, during World War
II. I was shocked. Our country had concentration camps, and we put our own
people in them.
I had a
bit of the same feeling when I was reading The
Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,
by Richard Rothstein. I’d known that the GI Bill offered financing for veterans
returning from World War II to buy homes, and how that financing led to
suburban developments like Levittown on Long Island. What I didn’t know is that
the federal government, through both Veterans Administration (VA) and Federal
Housing Administration (FHA) loans, secured financing only for white veterans.
And, as I’ll soon discuss, both VA and FHA went beyond merely not providing
financing for black veterans. Further, the educational opportunities for black
veterans were often limited to vocational schools. Some benefit administrators
refused to process applications to four-year colleges for black veterans. I
guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. Black veterans, like their
white counterparts, had just returned from fighting a nearly four-year war only
to be treated like second-class citizens.
The book
goes back to post-Civil War era and especially the end of Reconstruction, but
I’ll start with a 1917 Supreme Court ruling in Buchanan v. Worley, which ruled that racial zoning violated the
Fourteenth Amendment, not because of protections granted freed slaves, but
because of a business rule—the freedom to contract, or the right of a property
owner to sell to whomever he wanted.
In our
day, a Supreme Court decision would be final, but not in the 1920s. Buchanan was not only ignored, but
flouted. As it would turn out, in the post-War housing boom, which was largely
financed by VA and FHA loans, subdivisions were not only encouraged, but required
to include covenants restricting the subdivisions to “Caucasians.” Our
government, in other words, enforced segregation in any area where VA or FHA
loans were used to finance homes. In one example, a man in Berkley, California
bought a house financed by FHA and was not able to move into the house. He let
a black teacher rent the house until he could move in. As a result he was
advised he’d lost his participation in the FHA insurance program and that he’d
never again be able to obtain a government-backed mortgage. And this was in 1959.
In Berkley.
The
result of black people’s not being able to get financing was they often paid
more than white people would in areas less desirable. Additionally, they
frequently bought using a contract for deed, meaning the house was theirs only
after all payments were made. These contracts for deed were frequently at high
interest rates, and one missed payment meant the loss of everything they’d
invested in the house. Because they paid higher prices for the homes and higher
interest rates, they frequently subdivided the homes and deferred maintenance.
The neighborhoods looked bad. Whites feared blacks’ moving in or even near
their neighborhoods (when, had black families had the same access to mortgages
whites did, their neighborhoods would have looked just as good). Realtors took
advantage of white fears. They started moving black families into white
neighborhoods and going door to door spreading fear among the white residents
that their neighborhood was about to be “taken over.” Whites sold at a loss.
Racial prejudice was a lose-lose proposition. Whites lost money on their homes.
Blacks paid more for their homes, both initially and in interest, than whites.
Unscrupulous Realtors made out like bandits.
Counterpunch | I will never forget an encounter I had back in the ‘90s with
then-Senator Joe Biden from Delaware. I was working as the house
photographer for Widener University, which is just south of the Philly
airport and just north of the Delaware line. Biden was then working hard
in the Senate to fund more cops and prisons. He came to Widener to
speak on the topic, and I was assigned to photograph him. After taking a
few shots, I decided to stay to listen to the man and his pitch for the
Drug War, something that personally interested me, beyond my job as a
flak photographer.
I forget exactly what the beloved working-class senator from the
corporate state of Delaware said. But it didn’t sit right with me. I had
been spending my vacation time as a photographer in places like El
Salvador and Nicaragua, in the middle of the Reagan Wars. I’d also been
photographing addicts on the street through a needle exchange program in
inner city Philadelphia and had been reading on Harm Reduction
research. Later, I become aware, from a book by Ted Gest called Crime & Politics: Big Government’s Erratic Campaign for Law and Order,
that when Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, Democrats were
freaked out: they feared they were finished politically.
According to
Gest, it was Joe Biden who saved the day by saying, “‘Give me the crime
issue and you’ll never have trouble with it in an election.’” Crime
bills were the way for Democrats to stay in the political game.
“How did so much crime legislation pass during the partisan 1980s?”
Gest asks. “A key element was important personal relationships in the
Capital, especially between Biden and the new Senate Judiciary Committee
chairman Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.” This is the famous racist
Dixiecrat who, following the Nixon Strategy, had changed his party
affiliation to Republican, keeping his Senate seniority. It was the
beginning of a fruitful political friendship — “fruitful” that is, if
you were a politician willing to pander and fuel the Drug War fears of
the time. The result was money for more cops and more prisons. It was
part and parcel with what Michelle Alexander has dubbed “the new Jim
Crow,” where the stigma of being a felon replaced the old stigma of being a nigger. Bill Clinton went on to pursue a similar strategy to stay in the political game.
It was thus that I encountered Senator Biden in a Widener University
auditorium shilling for the Drug War. I was in the second row and raised
my hand. Biden called on me, stepping toward me as I stood up. We were
maybe ten feet apart. My question focused on why he seemed to dismiss
addressing the demand problem in the United Stares. I mentioned Harm
Reduction. The important word I used was decriminalization. My
point was why couldn’t we try something other than using the military
and police and prisons to address our very real drug problem?
I might as well have said something about his children. He knew I was
there as some kind of working PR person, and he lit into me with
vicious glee. He turned to address the audience, avoiding both me and my
question.
“This fellow thinks he’s smart. He cleverly uses the term
‘decriminalization’ — when he really means legalization. He wants to
make drugs legal, folks.” He went on some more. All the time I wanted
to say: “Listen — SIR! — would you answer my question.”
It was personal. But it made the man’s huge investment in the Drug War very clear. He knew very well that decriminalization and
all the very reasonable Harm Reduction research was the Achilles heel
of the Drug War. If the well-respected Ted Gest is correct, the Drug War
virtually made Joe Biden’s political career; working with Strom
Thurmond to put away black people made him who he is today. Is this
unfair to Joe Biden? No doubt, his bi-partisan cooperation with Thurmond
to some degree mitigated the South Carolina senator’s Old South racism.
It did nothing, however, to ease up the trend that led to the mass
incarceration of African Americans; and some would add it did nothing to
mitigate the current dysfunctional national bruise caused by the
ideological struggle between the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives
Matter movements.
We all know Joe Biden’s well-nourished public persona as the working
man’s politician, the guy all of us want to sit down and have a beer
with. The fact is, I would have loved to sit down and have a beer with
Joe. I’d ask him to answer the question he parried away in that
auditorium. What do we have to do now to undo what you and your
bi-partisan allies created back in the ’80s? We all may have the
opportunity to ask him these questions, since it feels like he’s running
for 2020. But let’s hope the Democrats get their act together and do
better than running good ol’ Joe.
thehill | A House IT aide working for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), the
former Democratic National Committee chairwoman, was arrested Tuesday
on bank fraud charges while trying to leave the country.
Fox News reported that Imran Awan was arrested at Dulles International Airport.
Awan, an IT staffer who has worked for many House Democrats and is
currently employed by Wasserman Schultz, was allegedly at the center of a
scheme that involved double-charging the House for IT equipment, and
may also have exposed House information online, according to Fox.
Awan
and his family have reportedly worked for House Democrats for years. He
declared bankruptcy in 2012, but has made millions of dollars on the
House payroll over at least a decade of work for various members,
according to a Politico report.
In March, a group of House Democrats fired Awan and one other staffer
over their alleged involvement in the scheme and the looming criminal
investigation. However, Fox News reported Tuesday that Wasserman Schultz
still has Awan on her staff's payroll despite him being barred
from accessing the House's computer system since February.
At the time, Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Martha Fudge (D-Ohio) both defended Awan.
“As of right now, I don’t see a smoking gun,” Meeks told Politico in March. “I have seen no evidence that they were doing anything that was nefarious.”
“He needs to have a hearing. Due process is very simple. You don’t fire someone until you talk to them,” Fudge added
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
