Nuclear power is fading

Washington's Blog - Even though the American government has done everything possible to encourage nuclear power – by wholly subsidizing nuclear power, reducing safety standards after Fukushima, forcing Japan to re-start its nuclear program, covering up the severity of the Fukushima accident, raising acceptable radiation limits and agreeing to buy radioactive Japanese seafood – the number of nuclear plants worldwide and percentage of electricity provided by nuclear is declining.

The Economist reports:

The [nuclear] industry’s role in electricity production is continuing to decline, according to this year’s World Nuclear Industry Status Report, a compendium of analysis and data by the activist and expert Mycle Schneider. The number of reactors peaked in 2002 at 444, compared with 427 today. The share of electricity they produce is down 12% from its 2006 peak, largely because of post-Fukushima shutdowns in Japan. As a proportion of all electricity generated, nuclear peaked in 1993 at 17% and has now fallen to 10%. The average age of operating plants is increasing, with the number over 40 years old (currently 31 plants) set to grow quite rapidly.

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Israel grants Golan Heights loirl, drilling license to Dick Cheney linked company

Business insider - Israel has granted a U.S. company the first license to explore for oil and gas in the occupied Golan Heights, John Reed of the Financial Times reports. A local subsidiary of the New York-listed company Genie Energy -- which is advised by former vice president Dick Cheney and whose shareholders include Jacob Rothschild and Rupert Murdoch -- will have exclusive rights to a 153-square mile radius in the southern part of the Golan Heights. That geographic location will likely prove controversial. Israel seized the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War in 1967 and annexed the territory in 1981. Its administration of the area -- which is not recognized by international law -- has been mostly peaceful until the Syrian civil war broke out 23 months ago. "This action is mostly political – it’s an attempt to deepen Israeli commitment to the occupied Golan Heights," Israeli political analyst Yaron Ezrahi told FT. "The timing is directly related to the fact that the Syrian government is dealing with violence and chaos and is not free to deal with this problem."

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Charter school dumping kids with special needs

Juan Gonzales, Democracy Now - I’ve been now investigating for years the spread of charter schools across New York City and the nation, and in particular I’ve been focusing on the fastest-growing chain here in New York City, the Success Academies charter network, which now has about 20 schools and is planning to expand to a hundred schools after receiving this week a $5 million grant from the Eli Broad Foundation.

And one of the things that I’ve been uncovering is the enormous suspension rates of the charter schools, as more than two dozen parents have come to me complaining about their children, who are special needs, special education children, or children with behavior problems, that they feel are being pushed out or forced out by the charter school in an effort to improve its test scores, because the charter school, Success Academy, has one of the highest test scores of schools in the City of New York, and that’s part of its selling points to continue to seek corporate foundation funding and to attempt to grow the charter model.

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Number of intentional communities growing in DC

Washington Post

Fellowship of Intentional Communities website

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NSA spied on Al Jazeera

CNET - Just weeks after an editor at the Guardian said that British government agents smashed a computer containing sensitive information, Der Spiegel is reporting that the US National Security Agency accessed "internal communications" from Arab news broadcaster Al Jazeera.

The NSA, spurred by Al Jazeera's close coverage of al-Qaeda, hacked into the media organization's internal communications system, according to documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden reportedly seen by Der Spiegel. The agency also allegedly hacked into the airline reservation services for Russian airline Aeroflot.

A document dated March 23, 2006 shows that the NSA was able to access and read Al Jazeera's communications with "notable success," Der Spiegel reported. The US agency was reportedly able to access and read the communications of "interesting targets" who were protected by Al Jazeera. It's not yet known whether employees or journalists at the news organization were spied on as well.

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Furthermore. . .

Quotes

Nat: What were we talking about?
Midge: We wasn't talkin. You was talkin.
Nat: What was I saying?
Midge: I wasn't listening either.

-- Herb Gardner, 'I'm Not Rappaport'

Pocket paradigms

Life in America has become one big docudrama and you can't tell what's real and what's make believe.-Sam Smith

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Obama losing allies over Syria

Daily Beast - The drumbeats of war appeared to be strengthening in Washington, but recent partners from conflicts in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan have been backing away from direct involvement in the proposed military action against President Bashar al-Assad.

Italian politicians said their military bases, which were used for international assaults on Libya and Kosovo, would be off-limits for any strike unless the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution in support of an intervention. Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands urged caution, while British Prime Minister David Cameron, one of the loudest advocates of military action, was resoundingly overruled by a skeptical Parliament.

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Food workers strike tarwgets 1,000 stores in 58 cities

Portside - Fast food strikes reached record numbers yesterday, with organizers estimating that some 1,000 stores and restaurants in 58 cities were affected by workers walking off the job.

In addition to growing in cities that have seen numerous strikes in the past, like New York City, Chicago and Detroit, the strikes entered into previously uncharted territory, including Raleigh, N.C., Wilmington, Del., Missoula, Mont. and dozens of other cities.

For Chicago strikers, many of whom have walked off the job three times this year, confronting management and informing them of the decision to strike is less nerve-wracking than it once was.

Strikers strode up to a manager at a downtown Walgreens and, without so much as blinking, delivered a letter explaining they were walking off the job; at a Bed, Bath and Beyond in the Loop, workers strode around the store encouraging coworkers to strike with them, seemingly unconcerned about what the watching manager thought...

The strikes also seem to have legitimated walking off the job as a tactic for workers, even those without a union.

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Jimmy Carter says U.S. violating one third of UN human rights rules

Telegraph, UK - Jimmy Carter, the former US president, has warned that America is losing its moral authority on human rights by engaging in targeted assassinations, including drone attacks.
 
Mr Carter charged that US counterterrorism police was in violation of 10 of the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in an opinion piece in The New York Times.

"Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation's violation of human rights has extended," he said.

Mr Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work in resolving conflicts since leaving office in 1980, is credited with having made human rights a central theme of US foreign policy.

"At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the United States should be strengthening, not weakening, basic rules of law and principles of justice enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," he wrote.

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Syria: The back story

Nafeez Ahmed, Guardian - Few recall that US agitation against Syria began long before recent atrocities, in the context of wider operations targeting Iranian influence across the Middle East.

In May 2007, a presidential finding revealed that Bush had authorised CIA operations against Iran. Anti-Syria operations were also in full swing around this time as part of this covert programme, according to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. A range of US government and intelligence sources told him that the Bush administration had "cooperated with Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations" intended to weaken the Shi'ite Hezbollah in Lebanon. "The US has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria," wrote Hersh, "a byproduct" of which is "the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups" hostile to the United States and "sympathetic to al-Qaeda." He noted that "the Saudi government, with Washington's approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria," with a view to pressure him to be "more conciliatory and open to negotiations" with Israel. One faction receiving covert US "political and financial support" through the Saudis was the exiled Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.

According to former French foreign minister Roland Dumas, Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009: "I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business", he told French television:

"I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria."...

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Scary news: Obamites think they're doing a good job with economy

Center for Economic & Policy Research - Ezra Klein gives us some terrifying news in a Bloomberg column today. President Obama's economic team think they are doing a great job, hence the desire to bring back former teammate Larry Summers as Fed chair. This is terrifying because the economy this Labor Day is described by a set of statistics that can only be described as horrible.

We are almost 9 million jobs below the trend level of employment. The number of people involuntarily working part-time is still up by almost 4 million from its pre-recession level. Wages have been stagnant for a decade and show no signs of increasing any time soon. And, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the economy is still operating more than $1 trillion (6 percent) below its potential. Oh, and by the way, the financial sector is more concentrated than ever, with top honchos drawing the same sort of paychecks they did before the crisis.

This is an economy that under other circumstances we would all say is awful. The Obama team can pat themselves on the back for saying its better than a second Great Depression, but that's a bit like saying that the 1962 Mets didn't lose all their games. Horrible is horrible.

The best that can be said is that the crew has been ineffectual in the face of Republican opposition in building any sort of political support for a stronger economic agenda. But ineffectual is not a much better recommendation than incompetent.

And it's hard to blame items like the "pivot to deficit reduction" on the Republicans. If the Obama team has an aggressive plan for turning the economy around that is being stifled by the nasty Republicans they have not done a very good job of even making it known, must less rallying suuport.

There is one item in Ezra's piece that deserves special attention. He tells us that:

"Larry Summers isn’t just the favorite for Federal Reserve chairman. He’s the overwhelming favorite."

The inside tip to Ezra is not breaking news, it is part of the Obama administration's effort to diffuse opposition to Summers. Hey, what's the point in opposing somthing that has already happened?

Summers will be Obama's pick when Obama announces that he is his pick. Until then everything we read in the paper is political maneuvering. As the old saying goes, it's not over until the fat man is officially named.

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Furthermore. . .

Stats

@Harpers - Estimated number of high school students prosecuted each year for truancy by the state of Texas: 118,000 . . .By the other forty-nine states combined: 52,000

More than 99% of women aged 15-44 who have ever had sexual intercourse have used at least one contraceptive method. Some 62% of all women of reproductive age are currently using a contraceptive method

There's hope yet

CVS, the country’s largest pharmacy chain, announced Friday on its Facebook page that it will shorten the ExtraCare portion of its receipts by roughly 25 percent following a social media frenzy this month that poked fun at the company.

Polls

Polls differ markedly on Spitzer
 
How to beautify a fountain

Add caption

All in one dining experience
There I Fixed It

 Quotes

Everything has been said but not everyone has said it yet -- Rep. Morris Udall, 1988 Democratic convention

Pocket paradigms

There is one way to deal with guerrilla warfare and that is to resolve the problems that allow it to thrive. The trick is to undermine the violence of the most bitter by dealing honestly with the problems and complaints of the most rational.-Sam Smith

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Syria update

188 Representatives, including 69 Democrats, call for vote on Syria

Carter urges Syria summit

Green Party opposes attack

Obama losing allies over Syria

Only 25% support U.S, attack on Syria

British lawmakers vote against Syrian action

Words on Syria

Anti-war groups lag on Syria

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Pushing the poor out of the cities

More evidence of urban ethnic and class cleansing from Atlantic magazine: Suburban households' total food stamp use doubled between 2007 and 2011. By comparison, total food stamp use went up by 69 percent for city households.

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Carter urges Syria summit

Politico - Former President Jimmy Carter condemned possible chemical weapons attacks in Syria, but called for a “peace conference” and working with the United Nations, rather than using a military solution.

In a statement Friday from the Carter Center, the former president said that the U.N. investigation into possible chemical weapons attacks in Syria is under way and urged against action in the country without U.N. support.

“It is imperative to determine the facts of the attack and present them to the public. Those responsible for the use of chemical weapons must bear personal responsibility,” Carter said in the statement. “The chemical attack should be a catalyst for redoubling efforts to convene a peace conference, to end hostilities, and urgently to find a political solution.”

(PHOTOS: Scenes from Syria)

The Carter Center urged against a military response to possible chemical weapons use without a U.N. mandate, saying the action would be “illegal under international law and unlikely to alter the course of the war.”

“Instead, all should seek to leverage the consensus among the entire international community, including Russia and Iran, condemning the use of chemical weapons in Syria and bringing under U.N. oversight the country’s stockpile of such weapons,” the center said in the statement.

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Furthermore...

Holder caves on state marijuana laws

Madison police chief approves of officers exercising First Amendment rights

Federal judge rules those on no-fly list have a constitutionally protected interest in traveling by air, and the right to due process

New poll finds Spitzer's lead gone

Infrequently asked questions

Which of these previous conflicts will the planned Syrian war attempt to emulate: Korea, Vietnam, Bay or Pigs, Afghanistan or Iraq?

Urban ethnic cleansing
Half of New Orleans' black community has moved since Katrina. Of the remaining, "Nearly half of them are unemployed. And African-American households are earning 50 percent less than their white counterparts."

Quotes
You hear about 'constitutional rights,' 'free speech,' and the 'free press.' Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red....' You never hear a real American talk like that. - Frank Hague, Mayor of Jersey City 1917-47

Pocket paradigms

War is doing things overseas that we would go to prison for at home. -Sam Smith

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Exchanges to add to healthcare costs

National Journal - For the vast majority of Americans, premium prices will be higher in the individual exchange than what they're currently paying for employer-sponsored benefits, according to a National Journal analysis of new coverage and cost data. Adding even more out-of-pocket expenses to consumers' monthly insurance bills is a swell in deductibles under the Affordable Care Act.

Health law proponents have excused the rate hikes by saying the prices in the exchange won't apply to the millions receiving coverage from their employers. But that's only if employers continue to offer that coverage--something that's looking increasingly uncertain. Already, UPS, for example, cited Obamacare as its reason for nixing spousal coverage. And while a Kaiser Family Foundation report found that 49 percent of the U.S. population now receives employer-sponsored coverage, more companies are debating whether they will continue to be in the business of providing such benefits at all.

Whether the quality of care in the new market is comparable to private offerings remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: The cost of care in the new market doesn't stack up. A single wage earner must make less than $20,000 to see his or her current premiums drop or stay the same under Obamacare, an independent review by National Journal found. That's equivalent to approximately 34 percent of all single workers in the U.S. seeing any benefit in the new system. For those seeking family-of-four coverage under the ACA, about 43 percent will see cost savings. Families must earn less than or equal to $62,300, or they, too, will be looking at a bigger bill.

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Words on Syria

Mike Snyder, Activist Post

 Barack Obama, during an interview with Charlie Savage on December 20, 2007: "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

Joe Biden, during a television interview in 2007: "The president has no constitutional authority ... to take this nation to war ... unless we're attacked or unless there is proof we are about to be attacked.  And if he does, if he does, I would move to impeach him."

Robert Fisk: "If Barack Obama decides to attack the Syrian regime, he has ensured – for the very first time in history – that the United States will be on the same side as al-Qa’ida."

A Syrian Army officer: "We have more than 8,000 suicide martyrs within the Syrian army, ready to carry out martyrdom operations at any moment to stop the Americans and the British. I myself am ready to blow myself up against US aircraft carriers to stop them attacking Syria and its people."

 An anonymous senior Hezbollah source: "A large-scale Western strike on Syria will plunge Lebanon virtually and immediately into the inferno of a war with Israel."

General Mohammad Ali Jafari, chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guards: (an attack on Syria) "means the immediate destruction of Israel."

  Israeli President Shimon Peres: "Israel is not and has not been involved in the civil war in Syria, but if they try to hurt us, we will respond with full force."

Retired U.S. General James Mattis: "We have no moral obligation to do the impossible and harm our children’s future because we think we just have to do something."



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NSA paying U.S. corporations for access to communications networks

Washington Post  The National Security Agency is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to U.S. companies for clandestine access to their communications networks, filtering vast traffic flows for foreign targets in a process that also sweeps in large volumes of American telephone calls, e-mails and instant messages.

The bulk of the spending, detailed in a multi-volume intelligence budget obtained by The Washington Post, goes to participants in a Corporate Partner Access Project for major U.S. telecommunications providers. The documents open an important window into surveillance operations on U.S. territory that have been the subject of debate since they were revealed by The Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper in June.

New details of the corporate-partner project, which falls under the NSA’s Special Source Operations, confirm that the agency taps into “high volume circuit and packet-switched networks,” according to the spending blueprint for fiscal 2013. The program was expected to cost $278 million in the current fiscal year, down nearly one-third from its peak of $394 million in 2011.

Voluntary cooperation from the “backbone” providers of global communications dates to the 1970s under the cover name BLARNEY, according to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. These relationships long predate the PRISM program disclosed in June, under which American technology companies hand over customer data after receiving orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

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Leaked documents reveal US sees Israel as a spying threat

The Hill - The Obama administration views Israel as one of the top spying threats facing its intelligence services, leaked documents reveal.

A secret budget request obtained by The Washington Post from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden lumps Israel alongside U.S. foes Iran and Cuba as “key targets” for U.S. counterintelligence efforts. The document suggests Israel does not believe U.S. assurances that its interests are aligned with Israel's on crucial issues such as Iran and peace talks with the Palestinians.

“To further safeguard our classified networks, we continue to strengthen insider threat detection capabilities across the Community,” reads the FY 2013 congressional budget justification for intelligence programs. “In addition, we are investing in target surveillance and offensive CI [counterintelligence] against key targets, such as China, Russia, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and Cuba.”

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Fast food strike

Detroit McDonald's has to close

Strike in NYC

Fast food strikes in over 50 cities

More
 
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Furthermore. . .

Urban ethnic cleansing
Half of New Orleans' black community has moved since Katrina. Of the remaining, "Nearly half of them are unemployed. And African-American households are earning 50 percent less than their white counterparts."

Stats 

Number of unemployed his summer: 11.5 million. Number unemployed during Great Depression: 13-18 million

Nine million Americans take sleeping pills
 
Entropy update

Speakers at the March on Washington 50 years ago included Martin Luther King, Josaphine Baker and Walter Reuther. Speakers at this week's March on Washington included Barack Obama and Bill Clinton

The media carefully avoided sprecific crowd estimates for the march. The Washington Post, for example, listed 250,000 as having been at the original march but a vague "tens of thousands" this time.

Quotes

You hear about 'constitutional rights,' 'free speech,' and the 'free press.' Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red....' You never hear a real American talk like that. - Frank Hague, Mayor of Jersey City 1917-47

Pocket paradigms

War is doing things overseas that we would go to prison for at home. -Sam Smith

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Update

Egypt will not allow US & UK warships through Suez canal to attack Syria

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Word: Why America can't live without wars

Chidanand Rajghatta, Times of India -  Why a President who came to office on the strength of his anti-war credentials - especially on the phony war foisted on Iraq - is running with the war hounds, is something of a mystery. But the rest of the Washington establishment is champing at the bit to unleash missiles on the Syrian regime, promising a short punitive strike, in keeping with the well-worn belief that America cannot live without a war.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was among those who indicated that the US was "ready to go" the moment President Barack Obama gave the sign. "We have moved assets in place to be able to fulfill and comply with whatever option the president wishes to take," Hagel said on Tuesday.

This, when a UN team is still investigating the reported use of chemical weapons in the conflict between the regime of Bashir al Assad and the rebels. The UN team has been asked to pack up and get out of the way. "We clearly value the UN's work - we've said that from the beginning - when it comes to investigating chemical weapons in Syria. But we've reached a point now where we believe too much time has passed for the investigation to be credible and that it's clear the security situation isn't safe for the team in Syria," State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said Tuesday, echoing the kind of impatience that characterized the descent into the Iraq war.

Despite the appalling intelligence failures during previous such conflicts, US officials placed immense faith in their own findings while scoffing at international efforts. "I think the intelligence will conclude that it wasn't the rebels who used it and there'll probably be pretty good intelligence to show that the Syria government was responsible," Hagel said in a BBC interview. The prospect of the war, even a limited strike, upsetting a range of friends and allies, from Israel to India, does not seem to be holding back Washington's war veterans (both Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel served in the military).

If all this recalls the war against Iraq not too long ago, not many in Washington seem keen on remembering it. Instead, explanations are being proffered on how different this case is and how it will be a short, surgical strike, not really a war.

But America's discerning have long recognized that the country can never live without war. It is a country made for war. Small detail: Up until 1947, the Defense Department was called Department of War.

By one count, the United States has fought some 70 wars since its birth 234 years ago; at least 10 of them major conflicts. "We like war... we are good at it!" the great, insightful comedian George Carlin said some two decades ago, during the first Gulf War. "We are not good at anything else anymore... can't build a decent car or a television, can't give good education to the kids or health care to the old, but we can bomb the shit of out any country..."

Similar sentiments have been echoed more recently. "America's economy is a war economy. Not a manufacturing economy. Not an agricultural economy. Nor a service economy. Not even a consumer economy," business pundit Paul Farrell wrote during this Iraq War. "Deep inside we love war. We want war. Need it. Relish it. Thrive on war. War is in our genes, deep in our DNA. War excites our economic brain. War drives our entrepreneurial spirit. War thrills the American soul. Oh just admit it, we have a love affair with war."

And so, America will be off to another (limited) war shortly.

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Another reason to avoid Pennsylvania

Guardian - Marriage licenses given to same-sex couples in Pennsylvania are invalid because they were barred from marrying in the same way as 12-year-olds, attorneys for the Republican governor said on Wednesday.

Tom Corbett's administration has filed a lawsuit seeking to block same-sex marriage licenses in suburban Philadelphia, where Montgomery County register of wills D Bruce Hanes has issued more than 150 to gay and lesbian couples since July 24.

State attorneys said in a court filing on Wednesday the gay marriage licenses have no "value or legitimacy" and can't be defended in court. They compared gay and lesbian couples to children, who can't marry because a 1996 law says marriage is between a man and a woman.

"Had the clerk issued marriage licenses to 12-year-olds in violation of state law, would anyone seriously contend that each 12-year-old … is entitled to a hearing on the validity of his 'license'?" the state wrote, according to a story on the Philly.com news website.

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Word: The role of coercion in mental illness

Bruce Levine -Throughout history, societies have existed with far less coercion than ours, and while these societies have had far less consumer goods and what modernity calls “efficiency,” they also have had far less mental illness. This reality has been buried, not surprisingly, by uncritical champions of modernity and mainstream psychiatry. Coercion—the use of physical, legal, chemical, psychological, financial, and other forces to gain compliance—is intrinsic to our society’s employment, schooling, and parenting. However, coercion results in fear and resentment, which are fuels for miserable marriages, unhappy families, and what we today call mental illness.

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Great letters

Futility Closet - In 1966 a Swedish encyclopedia publisher requested a photograph of Richard Feynman “beating a drum” to give “a human approach to a presentation of the difficult matter that theoretical physics represents.” Feynman responded:

Dear Sir,

The fact that I beat a drum has nothing to do with the fact that I do theoretical physics. Theoretical physics is a human endeavor, one of the higher developments of human beings, and the perpetual desire to prove that people who do it are human by showing that they do other things that a few other human beings do (like playing bongo drums) is insulting to me.

I am human enough to tell you to go to hell.

Yours,
RPF

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Great allegations in New York suit against Trump University

From Business Insider:  

• Instead of Trump actually attending any of the seminars, attendees were often offered the opportunity to instead take a photo next to a life-size cutout.
• In addition to that, the theme song from Trump's show "The Apprentice" was played at the beginning and end of each seminar.
• A special database of lenders the "University" purportedly had insider access to was actually just "a list photocopied from an issue of Scotsman Guide, a commercially available magazine," the suit says.
• Attendees were told there was a toll-free "hotline" featuring instructors taking questions about real estate investing. The complaint says no such line existed, and instructors only made themselves available to individuals who'd signed up for the "elite" version of the seminar — "and often, not even then."
• But, students were asked to call their credit card companies during breaks in the seminar to ask that their credit limits be raised.
• The instructors repeated the business' ad claims that they'd been hand-picked by Trump himself, when in fact none of them were. And some of the instructors came to the organization after their own failed real estate investments bankrupted them.
• The organization comes pretty close to sounding like a pyramid scheme: The "students" would first attend a free seminar enticing them into paying $1,495 for a subsequent three-day seminar where they'd learn "everything they needed to know to start investing." Instructors at the three-day seminar would instead warn they would need to purchase additional programs — ideally the $35,000 "elite" program — or they would not succeed.
• Trump pocketed more than $5 million despite insinuating he would not profit directly from the organization.

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Word: The real change of the past fifty years

Cornel West - The fundamental difference between 1963 and 2013 is these days everything and everybody is up for sale,” he said. “It’s a market-driven culture. Just dangle enough money, dangle enough possessions, dangle enough assets, and folks will come running — which means we don’t get too much integrity, honesty, decency, and virtue. You get folks obsessed with having assets, folks obsessed with having wealth and position.

Civil rights leaders like Ella Baker, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X “would never sell out,” West added. “Never. They had integrity, they had decency, they had virtue, they had honesty. And that is what we’ve got to teach our young folk, because our young folk these days are exposed to all of this culture of superficial spectacle.”

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Harvard study finds gun bans don't reduce murder rate

Harvard gun study concludes gun bans don’t reduce the murder rate.
In fact, it appears, bans may actually see them increase. Here’s a summary of the study’s findings:

The Harvard study attempts to answer the question of whether or not banning firearms would reduce murders and suicides.  Researchers looked at crime data from several European countries and found that countries with higher gun ownership often had lower murder rates.
Russia, for example, enforces very strict gun control on its people, but its murder rate remains quite high.  In fact, the murder rate in Russia is four times higher than in the “gun-ridden” United States, cites the study. ”Homicide results suggest that where guns are scarce other weapons are substituted in killings.” In other words, the elimination of guns does not eliminate murder, and in the case of gun-controlled Russia, murder rates are quite high.

The study revealed several European countries with significant gun ownership, like Norway, Finland, Germany and France – had remarkably low murder rates. Contrast that with Luxembourg, “where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, had a murder rate nine times higher than Germany in 2002.

The study found no evidence to suggest that the availability of guns contributes to higher murder rates anywhere in the world.  ”Of course, it may be speculated that murder rates around the world would be higher if guns were more available. But there is simply no evidence to support this.”

And, as the study points out, where guns are banned, murderers still find weapons with which to do their dirty work.  The difference is that the victims potential means of self-defense.  With guns available, one would assume their deterrent effect if not outright effectiveness in the self-defense realm would predictably knock the murder rate down.  Criminals and murderers are less likely to attack if the possibility the potential victim is armed exists.  Common sense 101.

The study found no evidence to suggest that the availability of guns contributes to higher murder rates anywhere in the world.  ”Of course, it may be speculated that murder rates around the world would be higher if guns were more available. But there is simply no evidence to support this.”

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Understanding the transgendered

Blue Bronc, Trail Mix -  Most transgender people have known they have the wrong body for their entire lives. The best research shows that the brain is correct– it is just that the body got it wrong during the fetal hormone wash. That is when we are all female and then a blast of hormones makes the final adjustments to the brain and body. Usually it works out with the brain and body matching. Sometimes it does not. Some have a female brain and a male body. Others have a male brain and a female body.

Second, if you are transgender, or some place on the rainbow of gender not matching the brain, it is a very difficult time until you find out what is going on. Fortunately, young people know earlier than those who grew up in the Baby Boomer generation. The talk of the ignorant about choosing to be gay or transgender is more of them are afraid because they envy big penises and their mothers. Most, up to 80%, of grade 1 to 16 transgender students attempt suicide (European research) due to the pain of being in the wrong body and of discrimination (bullying). About 40% are successful. Transgender people do not “attempt” suicide. They already have the attention and do not want it.

Third, transgender is gender, male or female or in between (trans 202 We are not binary male or female). Just like the rest of the world. It is the body that is mixed up, not the brain.

Fourth, transgender is gender not sexual orientation. Orientation is what turns you on. At least one transgender person I know is very lesbian. Transgender people are gay, lesbian or bi, just like the rest of the world.

Fifth, transgender people are over 100% more likely to be killed walking down the street than the rest of the population (FBI stats). And, it is usually not a nice killing.

Sixth, transgender people just want to live their lives like everybody else. However, it is difficult when there are those who want to destroy them. Slights or discrimination can be a daily event.

Seventh, male to female surgery is about $20,000, the results are usually very good. Female to male surgery is at least $50,000 and not often successful. You may know or work with a transgender person and not know it.

Eighth, most transgender people do not have surgery, the cost is very high.

Ninth, most transgender people are underemployed if not unemployed.

Tenth, transgender people do not have equal rights in most of the US and the world.

We all need to provide support for Chelsea Manning, there are a lot who want to hurt her.

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Word: From I have a dream to I have a drone

Matthew Rothschild, Progressive Magazine - Jesse Jackson reminded us that King said, just a year to the day before he was assassinated, that a country “finding more security in bombs abroad than bread at home would lead to spiritual death.”

Jesse Jackson reminded us that King saw the linkages so vividly that he described them as the “evil triplets of militarism, materialism, and racism.”

And so Obama’s words ring kind of hollow today, invoking King as he did, on the very day that he’s making plans to go bomb Syria and after all the days he’s dropped drones on people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.

As my friend Kevin Alexander Gray put it so pungently, “We’ve gone from I have a dream to I have a drone.”

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Obama's copyright czar gets bought by software industry

Wired - Victoria Espinel, the nation’s copyright czar until two weeks ago, has been named president of an anti-piracy trade group that lobbies governments on behalf of the software industry.

Espinel resigned earlier this month from the key White House post she’d held for four years. The Software Alliance, which goes by the acronym BSA, announced today that Espinel was named president of the group that bills itself as “the world’s premier anti-piracy organization.”

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Furthermore. . .

De Blasio has big lead in NYC

Jordan: We're not cooperating

Black-white economic gap hasn't budged in 50 years

The greening of Greenland

NOAA says virus is killing dolphins

Midwest schools canceled because of heat wave

Fire threat to Bay area water may come later

The GOP's new civil war
57,000 Head Start students won't be going back to school this year because of budget cuts

Stats

In 1974, 3 percent of retiring members of Congress became lobbyists. Now 50 percent of senators and 42 percent of congressmen do.

Main source of news for young and old

Polls

53% think school shouldn't open until after Labor Day

70% oppose private school vouchers

Quotes

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has nothing to do - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pocket paradigms

War is the joint exercise of things we were trained not to do as children. -Sam Smith

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Who loses in limited U.S. attacks? Us

NPR  The Obama administration and several before it have seen limited attacks as a way to sending a tough message without drawing the U.S. into a larger conflict.

But critics say such strikes rarely, if ever, inflict serious damage or change the behavior of those targeted. And worse, limited U.S. military action has been followed by some of the deadliest attacks against American targets over the past three decades.

"If this is indeed the sort of attack on Syria that the president is contemplating, it is not likely to be very effective," writes , a professor at George Mason University and a frequent commentator on the Middle East. "Indeed, it may encourage [President Bashar Assad] to launch even more chemical weapons attacks due to the belief that while US retaliation may be annoying, it will not threaten the survival of his regime."

Here's a list of several limited U.S. strikes in recent decades:

Lebanon, 1983: U.S. warships in the Mediterranean shelled Beirut for several days in support of the Lebanese army, which was led by Christians fighting Muslim factions in the country's anarchic civil war. A month after the U.S. shelling, Shiite Muslim suicide bombers struck at the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut on Oct. 23, killing 241 Marines. This remains the biggest loss of life of U.S. military personnel on a single day since World War II.

President Reagan subsequently ordered the Marines out of Lebanon in February 1984 and the Lebanese civil war carried on for another six years. A military committee appointed by Reagan found that American commanders believed the U.S. shelling of Beirut led to the bombing of the Marine barracks.

Libya, 1986: Libya was implicated in the deadly bombing of a disco in Berlin frequented by U.S. servicemen. In response, Reagan ordered a one-night bombing raid on Libya, which targeted the compound of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

The Libyan leader survived, and two years later, in December 1988, a Pan Am plane was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people on the plane and the ground. Many of the dead were Americans. After a protracted international legal fight, Libya acknowledged involvement and paid compensation of $1.5 billion in 2008. Gadhafi remained in power until 2011, when a more sustained NATO air campaign helped rebels drive him from power.

Afghanistan and Sudan, 1998: Al-Qaida blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August, and President Clinton responded two weeks later with a brief barrage of cruise missile strikes directed at al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, a country that supported al-Qaida.

More On Syria

 The strikes inflicted limited damage and al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden interpreted this as a lack of U.S. resolve to engage in a major confrontation. Al-Qaida attacked the USS Cole while it was in port in Yemen in 2000 and followed that a year later with the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

Iraq, 1993, 1996 and 1998: On several occasions in the 1990s, Clinton ordered limited airstrikes and cruise missile attacks against Iraq. The intent was to put pressure on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein following aggressive action by his forces against opposition groups or by his refusal to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors.

However, the Iraqi leader remained firmly in control until the U.S. ground invasion in 2003 that ousted Saddam. Eight years of war followed until the U.S. forces withdrew in 2011.

Despite many years of tense relations between Syria and the U.S., Syria has not been directly implicated in any major attacks against the U.S. However, Syria's close allies, Iran and the Lebanese group Hezbollah, have been linked to actions that range from kidnapping Americans to terror attacks.

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NYC police label whole mosques as terrorist groups

Guardian - Confidential police documents uncovered by the AP show at least a dozen terrorism investigations into mosques since 9/11

The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorism organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen "terrorism enterprise investigations" into mosques, according to interviews and confidential police documents. The TEI, as it is known, is a police tool intended to help investigate terrorist cells and the like.

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Stupid cat lawsuit stories

Oregon Live      As he often did, Charley Gee picked up flowers for his wife while grocery shopping.

On this particular day in February 2012, he chose "Love Story Lily." The flower was packaged with a warning about not being for human consumption and about the risk of staining clothing, but there was nothing about potential harm to cats, said the Southeast Portland lawyer.

In the next 24 hours, Gee and his wife, Kara Bredahl, would rush their 8-year-old cat, Boogaloo, to DoveLewis Emergency Animal Hospital.

There, doctors flushed the cat's kidneys, put him on kitty dialysis and kept him for four days after the cat chewed on the leaves of the lily -- which is highly toxic to cats.

Now, Gee is suing New Seasons and its floral supplier, Bay City Flower Co. from Half Moon Bay, Calif., alleging product liability and negligence because they failed to label the flower with a cat-specific warning.

The lily was "unreasonably dangerous," according to the complaint, filed last week in Multnomah County Circuit Court.

Neither New Seasons nor Bay City immediately responded to messages for comment.

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The real Hillary Clinton: To indict or to not indict

ON APRIL 27, 1998, deputy independent counsel Hickman Ewing met with his prosecutors to decide on whether to indict Hillary Clinton. Here's what happened as reported by Sue Schmidt and Michael Weisskopf in their book, "Truth at Any Cost:"

"[Ewing] paced the room for more than three hours, recalling facts from memory in his distinctive Memphis twang. He spoke passionately, laying out a case that the first lady had obstructed government investigators and made false statements about her legal work for McDougal's S & L, particularly the thrift's notorious multimillion-dollar Castle Grande real estate project. . .The biggest problem was the death a month earlier of Jim McDougal. . . Without him, prosecutors would have a hard time describing the S & L dealings they suspected Hillary Clinton had lied about."

CNN, MAR 18, 1999 - Deputy independent counsel Hickman Ewing testified at the Susan McDougal trial Thursday that he had written a "rough draft indictment" of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton after he doubted her truthfulness in a deposition. Ewing, who questioned Mrs. Clinton in a deposition at the White House on April 22, 1995, said, "I had questions about whether what she was saying were accurate. We had no records. She was in conflict with a number of interviews."

Ewing said those interviews by investigators were primarily with other people in the Rose Law Firm. Ewing said he had questioned Mrs. Clinton about her representation of Jim McDougal's Madison Guarantee Savings & Loan when she was at the Rose Law firm in Little Rock. "I don't know if she was telling the truth. I did not circulate the draft. I showed it to one lawyer (in the independent counsel's office) who said he didn't want to see it," Ewing said, under questioning from McDougal attorney Mark Geragos. . .

Ewing also testified that in a later deposition with both the president and first lady on July 22, 1995, he had questions about the truthfulness of both Clintons. McDougal's attorney Mark Geragos asked Ewing: "Did you say the Clintons were liars?" "I don't know if I used the 'L-word' but I expressed internally that I was concerned," Ewing said.

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Notes from the cove

Sam Smith - It used to be that if you asked for directions in Maine, you were asking for trouble. Over the years I’ve collected some examples:

How much further is it to Freeport? . . .
About 25,000 miles the way you're headed.

How do I get to Skowhegan? . . .
Don't you move a goddamn inch.

Where does this road go?. . . .
Don't go nowhere. Stays right here.

How do I get to Boothbay Harbor? . . .
Can't get there from here.

How do we get to Topsham? . . . Don't rightly know . . . Well, how about Gorham then? . . . Nope, don't know that ithah . . . You don't seem to know much . . . Ayah, but I ain't lost.

How do you get to Bangor? . . . Well, I usually get my brother to drive me.

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Russia threatens Saudi Arabia

EU Times - A grim “urgent action memorandum” issued from the office of President Putin to the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation is ordering a “massive military strike” against Saudi Arabia in the event that the West attacks Syria.

According to Kremlin sources familiar with this extraordinary “war order,” Putin became “enraged” after his early August meeting with Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan who warned that if Russia did not accept the defeat of Syria, Saudi Arabia would unleash Chechen terrorists under their control to cause mass death and chaos during the Winter Olympics scheduled to be held 7-23 February 2014 in Sochi, Russia.

Lebanese newspaper As-Safir confirmed this amazing threat against Russia saying that Prince Bandar pledged to safeguard Russia’s naval base in Syria if the Assad regime is toppled, but he also hinted at Chechen terrorist attacks on Russia’s Winter Olympics in Sochi if there is no accord by stating: “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us.”

Prince Bandar went on to say that Chechens operating in Syria were a pressure tool that could be switched on an off. “These groups do not scare us. We use them in the face of the Syrian regime but they will have no role in Syria’s political future.”

London’s The Telegraph News Service further reported that Saudi Arabia has secretly offered Russia a sweeping deal to control the global oil market and safeguard Russia’s gas contracts, if the Kremlin backs away from the Assad regime in Syria, an offer Putin replied to by saying “Our stance on Assad will never change. We believe that the Syrian regime is the best speaker on behalf of the Syrian people, and not those liver eaters” [Putin said referring to footage showing a Jihadist rebel eating the heart and liver of a Syrian soldier HERE], and which Prince Bandar in turn warned that there can be “no escape from the military option” if Russia declines the olive branch

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Obama and Biden on war powers before something happened to them

Buzzfeed:

“The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” Obama in 2008.


"I want to make it clear to you," Biden said speaking at a campaign event in Davenport, Iowa in December 2007. "I've drafted, with the help of 17 years I was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee or the ranking member. Ladies and gentlemen, I drafted and outline of what I think the constitutional limits have on the president in over the war clause. I went to five leading scholars, constitutional scholars, and they drafted a treatise for me, and it's being distributed to every senator. And I want to make it clear and I made it clear to the president, if he takes this nation to war in Iran, without congressional approval — I will make it my business to impeach him."

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Grreat thoughts of Pat Robertson

Firedog Lake:

Pat Robertson - I was asked by a viewer whether she had a right to leave her church because she had been asked to transport an elderly man who had AIDS and about whose condition she had not been informed. My advice was that the risk of contagion in those circumstances was quite low and that she should continue to attend the church and not worry about the incident.

In my own experience, our organization sponsored a meeting years ago in San Francisco where trained security officers warned me about shaking hands because, in those days, certain AIDS-infected activists were deliberately trying to infect people like me by virtue of rings which would cut fingers and transfer blood.

I regret that my remarks had been misunderstood, but this often happens because people do not listen to the context of remarks which are being said. In no wise (sic) were my remarks meant as an indictment of the homosexual community or, for that fact, to those infected with this dreadful disease.

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Furthermore. . .

Russia says Syrian war could have "catastrophic consequences"

Iran warns of "serious consequences"

Lessons the media could learn from Iraq about covering Syria

Elizabeth Warren tries to make CNBC less dumb

Diane Feinstein wants government to determine who is a journalist

Governments asked for data on 38,000 Facebook users this year

Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant to close by end of 2014

Why not name extreme storms after climate change deniers?

Wall Street crook has cushy cell and man servant

Now hear this

Lester Young: DB Blues

Photos of San Francisco in the fog

Worst sentence of the day

“Military action” doesn’t mean war, of course. - Ezra Klein, Washington Post

Recovered history

Jim Hightower - In 2002, it was reported that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had told a friend about our man George W. Bush. It seems that the two of them and French President Jacques Chirac had gotten into an economics discussion, after which George supposedly confided to Tony that he was decidedly unimpressed with Jacques' views: "The problem with the French," Bush scoffed, "is that they don't have a word for 'entrepreneur.'"

Rules of thumb

Zigzag to outrun a crocodile
Quotes

A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good - Steven Wright

Pocket paradigms
The endless argument about who said what to whom about what demonstrates an illusion about honesty shared by all sides. America - including its politicians, media and ordinary citizens, have accepted a legal definition of honesty, to wit: if a public person can not be proved to have lied by the rules of a criminal court, he or she can't be called dishonest and, in the case of a nominee, remains qualified for office. In other words, our standard for confirmation to high office had become no better than that for acquittal of a common thief.

But lying often has little to do with court-defined perjury. It more typically involves hyperbolic hoodwinking, unsubstantiated analogy, cynical incitement of fear, deceitful distortion, slippery untruths, gossamer falsehoods, disingenuous anecdote, artful agitprop, and the relentless repetition of all the foregoing in an atmosphere in which facts are trampled underfoot by a mendacious mob and their semantic weapons.

One does not have to analyze such language legally to understand its evil. One need only have enough understanding of the manner of the honest, the sincere and the candid to know almost instinctively when their opposite is in command.. -Sam Smith

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Is this the same John Kerry?

 From Facebook:

George Galloway MP -Is the John Kerry talking of "cowardly crimes" in Syria the same John Kerry who participated in the massacre of millions of people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia? Many of them slaughtered by, er, chemical weapons, dropped in a toxic torrent upon Vietnamese civilians by the US airforce? 

Rami Elamine - Yes but this is also the John Kerry who as Senator and on and off chair of the foreign relations committee and previous presidential candidate supported both Iraq wars and the war on terror which has killed hundreds of thousands, left entire countries destroyed and worse off, and led to the growth of Al Qaeda and jihadists (and who will be the main beneficiaries of the US's bombs in Syria).

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The war of the terrified

Sam Smith

As news continues to gather of NSA’s abuse of the Constitution and those it is meant to serve, I find myself thinking of castles again. As I noted some time back:

The medieval  bifurcation of society into a weak, struggling, but sane, mass and a manic depressive elite alternately vicious and afraid, unlimited and imprisoned, foreshadows what we find today - leaders willing, on the one hand, to occupy any corner of the world and, on the other, terrified of young men with box cutters.

Similarly, many years ago some people built castles, walled cities and moats to keep the terror out. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured how to cross the moats and opponents learned how to climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces over the town wall during their siege of Siena.

The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile - unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.

Yet, like the castle-dwellers behind the moats, our elite is now spending huge sums to put themselves inside prisons of their own making.

While the NSA’s activities and similar offenses against the American people have been rightfully attacked for their criminal nature, hardly any attention is given to the fact that the same people who can destroy, damage and eliminate are also driven by paranoia and a fear that their present power is precarious and perhaps transitory. It is not an accident that the White House and Capitol grounds are the most heavily policed public spaces in America.

In 2009 I wrote:

After 9/11 the Capitol turned into an armed camp. The Capitol Visitors Center, under construction, was modified to serve as a bunker for members of Congress in case of an attack and the Capitol police force soared to three officers per member of Congress with the greatest number of police per acre of any spot in America. In the end the visitor's center/bunker would cost over $600 million, just slightly less than the city's new baseball stadium. Perhaps the most telling change was when the Capitol police, as a security measure, moved all tourist bus traffic a few blocks away. In essence, the police declared the lives of residents of 3^rd & 4th Streets less important than those of officials working at or near the Capitol.

I would later tell people that I knew exactly where the war on terror ended: 2nd Street. Living four blocks further to the east, there would never be the slightest sign that my safety was of any concern to the White House or Homeland Security.

It was an important lesson that made me realize the War on Terror was not about protecting me, but about protecting those extremely frightened men and women who ran our government, our major corporations and other large institutions. It was not about me, but about easing the fear of some Republican congressman from Idaho who was scared shitless.

The bipartisan politics that have brought us to this place has also ruined our economy, destroyed jobs and endangered the environment. Neither castles nor mass wiretapping can avoid the consequences of such behavior. Are our leaders in Washington as afraid of us as they are of Al Qaeda? Is this why they want to know what our emails say?

Here’s Wikipedia’s description of the late years of the Middle Ages:

Troubles were followed in 1347 by the Black Death, a disease that spread throughout Europe during the following three years. The death toll was probably about 35 million people in Europe, about one-third of the population. Towns were especially hard-hit because of their crowded conditions. Large areas of land were left sparsely inhabited, and in some places fields were left unworked…Urban workers also felt that they had a right to greater earnings, and popular uprisings broke out across Europe….

Meanwhile, the ultimate protection of the elite, the castle, was under attack. As one historian notes:

After the 16th century, castles declined as a mode of defense, mostly because of the invention and improvement of heavy cannons and mortars. This artillery could throw heavy cannonballs with so much force that even strong curtain walls could not hold up.

And not much later things like the French and American revolutions further damaged the once comfortable role of the nobility.

Which doesn’t mean it didn’t try to recover. One could argue that the Southern Confederacy was an attempt to reinstitute the values of the Middle Ages over those created in a new American republic the previous century. 

And one can argue that the First American Republic, which ended about three decades ago, has drifted so far out of our moral, political and  philosophical consciousness that a cabal of maniacally greedy corporations, a new GOP confederacy, and a Democratic Party that sold its soul to campaign contributors has successfully headed us back towards a society of nobles and castles, without even the feudal responsibilities toward the less powerful that its predecessors had accepted.

And there are things that NSA wiretaps can’t tell. Like when is climate change going to start causing spontaneous rebellion? When is labor going to rediscover its true foe? And when are food and water shortages going to energize revolt as is occurring in Egypt?

For the sane and still semi-autonomous parts of America – those places Thomas Jefferson called our “little republics” – substantial potential and security remain because we still cling to values, relationships and feelings that guided our nation through its first two centuries. I live in a small town in Maine and am repeatedly stunned by how much better my daily life is compared to the larger America I read, think and write about. These are two massively different places, and I, fortunately, live in the right one. Were I playing the game of the one percent in New York, Washington or Los Angeles it would be a whole different story.

There is a huge strength in this difference of place and purpose that, in the end, could save America. Those of us in the little republics – whether geographic, ethnic, or cultural – need to recognize this power and find ways to work together so that when the one percent has to confront the reality of its failure, there will still be an alternative America worth reviving.

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