Dictators do not go quietly into the night

Dream, Baby, Dream!

By ROGER COHEN, NYT

LONDON — So now we know: Mitt Romney believes the 13 North American colonies caused needless bloodshed by rejecting British authority, declaring independence in 1776 and waging war rather than encouraging King George III to see the error of his imperial ways, go touchy-feely with the upstarts across the Atlantic and grant freedom to the United States of America.

The revolution could have been a consensual, bloodless glide to liberty if only Washington, Jefferson and their cohorts had taken the time to convince the British monarch that empires were yesterday’s news and their “freedom agenda” the way to go.

That, at least, is what I take away from Romney’s hilarious suggestion that Ben Ali, Mubarak, Qaddafi and Saleh — with almost 130 years of despotic rule between them — could have been transformed into democrats and their societies changed “in a more peaceful manner” if President Obama had stuck with his predecessor’s “freedom agenda” and gotten Mubarak “to move toward a more democratic posture.”

We all know what George W. Bush’s freedom agenda was in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere: two vapid words no democrat could count on and every security goon could laugh at. We also know — look at Syria — dictators who have spent decades ruling through fear do not go quietly into the night any more than great powers readily abandon their profitable dominions.

(More here.)

Making it impossible to break the law

The Perfect Non-Crime

By MICHAEL L. RICH, NYT

Greensboro, N.C.

EVEN if we could make it impossible for people to commit crimes, should we? Or would doing so improperly deprive people of their freedom?

This may sound like a fanciful concern, but it is an increasingly real one. The new federal transportation bill, for example, authorized funding for a program that seeks to prevent the crime of drunken driving not by raising public consciousness or issuing stiffer punishments — but by making the crime practically impossible to commit. The program, the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (Dadss), is developing in-vehicle technology that automatically checks a driver’s blood-alcohol level and, if that level is above the legal limit, prevents the car from starting.

The Dadss program is part of a trend toward what I call the “perfect prevention” of crime: depriving people of the choice to commit an offense in the first place. The federal government’s Intelligent Transportation Systems program, which is creating technology to share data among vehicles and road infrastructure like traffic lights, could make it impossible for a driver to speed or run a red light. And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 has already criminalized the development of technologies that can be used to avoid copyright restrictions, making it effectively impossible for most people to illegally share certain copyrighted materials, including video games.

Or consider a more speculative scenario: some pharmaceuticals show the promise of blunting the “high” of cocaine use or reducing antisocial thoughts of the sort that often lead to crime. Widespread dissemination of such drugs — say, putting them in the public water supply — could make some crimes impossible by eliminating a potential offender’s desire to commit them.

(More here.)

Trump bumped?

Ducking The Donald

By FRANK BRUNI, NYT

Donald Trump and self-doubt: a proper noun and a human reality that have no business in the same sentence.

To be The Donald is to possess The Confidence. It’s to revel in your own appeal. That hair, that birtherism — who could resist? Certainly not the Republican Party, at least not in The Donald’s objective estimation. So when the first round of speakers for the party’s late August convention leaked out Sunday and he wasn’t on it, he fretted not a whit. In due course he would surely get his summons to participate.

“I know they want me to,” he said on Monday on “Fox and Friends.” “I’ll see what happens.”

So will we. The giddy excitement of Convention Season is here.

The Republicans go first, in Tampa, while the Democrats follow a week later, and just as humidly, in Charlotte. In the matter of convention sites, neither party gave much thought to global warming.

(More here.)

'Spearphishing' Fraud Hooks More Victims

How cybercriminals disguise themselves as your bank, your boss, or even the IRS

By JEN WIECZNER, SmartMoney

One fall day in 2009, the phones started ringing off the hook at the Virginia offices of Nacha, the electronic payments association that oversees the processing of billions of transactions each year. On the line were dozens of consumers and financial institutions, clamoring with questions about emails they'd received -- from Nacha, they believed -- telling them there was a problem with their payment.

The agency quickly realized its identity had been hacked. And it turned out to be only the first incident of many that since plagued Nacha with increasing frequency and sophistication. Over the past year, cybercriminals have sent out millions of messages -- as many as 167 million forged emails in a single day -- that use Nacha's logo, phone number, physical address and even verbiage from its own website in order to appear completely authentic -- all with the goal of filching sensitive financial data from Nacha's customers. "They're stealing our identity, just as they do anyone else's," says Scott Lang, Nacha's vice president of association services.

It's a potent new phase of the cybercrime wave: "Spearphishing," in which online scammers masquerade as legitimate corporations and government agencies and target the people most likely to open their emails. These messages increasingly look nearly identical to authentic emails from companies, commandeering everything from their email addresses to logos andelectronic watermarks. They usually lack the traditionally telltale signs of email scams, such as typos and jumbled sender addresses.

(More here.)

Another example of House GOP dysfunction

How Not to Pass a Bill

By JOE NOCERA, NYT

Among the many things the House never got around to doing before shutting down for the summer was holding a vote on a bill that would have granted permanent normal trade relations to Russia.

Please don’t turn the page.

Yes, compared with its inability to pass a farm bill, this may sound like small potatoes. But it is a near-perfect illustration of the way the House Republican leadership has largely abdicated its responsibility to get useful things done — as opposed to, say, conducting votes to repeal Obamacare a few dozen times.

There wasn’t much controversy over the Russia bill. Business supported it because American companies could then take advantage of Russia’s imminent entry into the World Trade Organization. It would have required repealing the old Jackson-Vanik amendment, which links trade to the emigration of Russian Jews. But that’s been a nonissue for decades. The Senate was lined up to pass the bill quickly once the House acted.

(More here.)

Did Romney really pay no federal income taxes for 10 years?

Warring over tax returns

By Eugene Robinson, WashPost, Published: August 6

Mitt Romney’s defiant secrecy about his personal finances looks like a cross Republicans will have to bear all the way to Election Day. To put it mildly, the burden seems to chafe.

Apoplexy is not the tone politicians generally seek to project. Yet there was GOP chief Reince Priebus on ABC’s “This Week,” calling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid a “dirty liar” for his claim about how little Romney may have paid in taxes. There was Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on CNN’s “State of the Union,” saying of Reid, “I think he’s lying.” There was Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” decrying a “reckless and slanderous charge by Harry Reid.”

It was a coordinated Sunday morning display of righteous indignation, a pageant of scenery-chewing. But in making such a show of denouncing Dirty Harry’s foul calumny, all Republicans succeeded in doing was draw attention to Romney’s stubborn refusal to release more than a year’s worth of tax returns (okay, one year and sort of a second) — and guarantee more coverage of Reid’s claims.

Reid was a boxer in his youth, and what he did to Romney was the equivalent of a head butt. He claimed to have a “source” — someone who had business with Bain Capital, the private-equity firm Romney ran — who told him Romney paid no federal income taxes for 10 years.

(More here.)

Competing policy plans: Mush or specifics?

The massive policy gap between Obama and Romney

By Ezra Klein, WashPost, Updated: August 6, 2012

The central difficulty of covering this presidential campaign — which is to say, of explaining Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s disparate plans for the country — is the continued existence of what we might call the policy gap. The policy gap, put simply, is this: Obama has proposed policies. Mitt Romney hasn’t.

It is important to say that this exists separately from any judgments about the quality of either man’s policies. You can believe every idea Obama has proposed is a socialist horror inspired by Kenyan revenge fantasies. This would, I think, be a strange judgment to reach about plans to invest in infrastructure, temporarily double the size of the payroll tax cuts and raise the marginal tax rate on income over $250,000 by 4.5 percentage points. Nevertheless, Obama’s policy proposals are sufficiently detailed that they can be fully assessed and conclusions — even odd ones — confidently drawn. Romney’s policies are not.

Romney’s offerings are more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. They exist on his Web site, under the heading of “Issues,” with subheads like “Tax” and “Health care.” But read closely, they are not policy proposals. They do not include the details necessary to judge Romney’s policy ideas. In many cases, they don’t contain any details at all.

Take taxes. Romney has promised a “permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates,” alongside a grab bag of other goodies, like the end of “the death tax.” Glenn Hubbard, his top economic adviser, has promised that the plan will “broaden the tax base to ensure that tax reform is revenue-neutral.”

It is in the distance between “cut in marginal rates” and “revenue-neutral” that all the policy happens. That is where Romney must choose which deductions to cap or close. It’s where we learn what his plan means for the mortgage-interest deduction, and the tax-free status of employer health plans and the Child Tax Credit. It is where we learn, in other words, what his plan means for people like you and me. And it is empty. Romney does not name even one deduction that he would cap or close. He even admitted, in an interview with CNBC, that his plan “can’t be scored because those details have to be worked out.”

Compare that to Obama’s tax plan, which you can read on pages 37 through 40 of his 2013 budget proposal (though not, it should be said, on his campaign Web site, which is even less detailed than Romney’s). In these pages, Obama tells you exactly how he would like to raise taxes on the rich. He proposes allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for income over $250,000, capping itemized deductions for wealthy Americans at 28 percent, taxing carried interest as ordinary income and more. The total tax increase, compared to current policy, is $1.5 trillion.

Whether you think it’s a good idea or a bad idea to raise taxes on the rich, Obama has told you exactly what he wants to do. Conversely, whether you think it’s a good idea or a bad idea to cut marginal tax rates by broadening the base, Romney hasn’t actually told you what he wants to do.

(More here.)

Global weather: Too many extremes to be 'natural'

Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press — A Texas State Park police officer walked across the lake bed of O.C. Fisher Lake in San Angelo, Texas. A new scientific paper says that the drought and other recent extreme weather events have been caused by global warming.

Study Finds More of Earth Is Hotter and Says Global Warming Is at Work

By JUSTIN GILLIS, NYT
Published: August 6, 2012

The percentage of the earth’s land surface covered by extreme heat in the summer has soared in recent decades, from less than 1 percent in the years before 1980 to as much as 13 percent in recent years, according to a new scientific paper.

James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist, led a study that says it is nearly certain that recent extremes wouldn’t have occurred without the release of greenhouse gas.

Smog from peat fires outside Moscow hung over Red Square during a heat wave in 2010.

The change is so drastic, the paper says, that scientists can claim with near certainty that events like the Texas heat wave last year, the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the European heat wave of 2003 would not have happened without the planetary warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases.

Those claims, which go beyond the established scientific consensus about the role of climate change in causing weather extremes, were advanced by James E. Hansen, a prominent NASA climate scientist, and two co-authors in a scientific paper published online on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The main thing is just to look at the statistics and see that the change is too large to be natural,” Dr. Hansen said in an interview. The findings provoked an immediate split among his scientific colleagues, however.

(More here.)

GOP insider: Religion destroyed my party

A veteran Republican says the religious right has taken over, and turned his party into anti-intellectual nuts

By Mike Lofgren, Truthout

This article is an excerpt from the book "The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted," available from Viking.

Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its followers—all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.

Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party.

Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastical calling, I did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln.

The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs. All around us now is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the sheet anchor of the dreary forty-year-old culture wars.

(More here.)

Aw heck, it's a free market, ain't it?

British Bank Accused of Hiding Transactions With Iranians

By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG, NYT

Thwarting controls against money laundering, Standard Chartered Bank enabled Iranian banks and corporations to hide roughly 60,000 transactions worth at least $250 billion within the bank, New York State’s banking regulator charged Monday.

The New York State Department of Financial Services accused the British bank, which it called a “rogue institution,” of hiding the transactions to gain hundreds of millions of dollars in fees from January 2001 through 2010.

Under United States law, transactions with Iranian banks are strictly monitored and subject to sanctions because of government concerns about the use of American banks to finance Iran’s nuclear programs and terrorist organizations.

The highest levels of management knew that Standard Chartered was deliberately falsifying records to allow billions of dollars in transactions to flood through the bank, according to the regulatory filing.

(More here.)

Oh, to be 20 and young again ... NOT!

[VV note: In the following essay Robert Samuelson, a conservative thinker, lists two reasons why he is concerned for the future of his 20-something children. TM and I both have 20-something children, and we too are concerned, but for more reasons than just two. Many of these are covered in the recent book by Jorgen Randers entitled "2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years." These include the effects of unsustainable population growth on a finite planet, the false premise of the current economic growth-based model and, perhaps most dangerous of all, the potential catastrophic changes let loose by anthropogenic climate change.

As we observe the absurdity and relentless inanity of yet another U.S. presidential election season, totally lost — not even slightly mentioned — are the real challenges that a future president and country must face. Ultimately any significant action will only result, as it has inevitably in the past in Europe and the U.S. and is currently doing in the Middle East, from a cataclysmic, life-changing upheaval. — LP]

The social and economic reasons for Generation Squeezed

By Robert J. Samuelson, WashPost, Published: August 5

I worry about the future — not mine but that of my three children, all in their 20s. It is an axiom of American folklore that every generation should live better than its predecessors. But this is not a constitutional right or even an entitlement, and I am skeptical that today’s young will do so. Nor am I alone. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll finds that nearly 60 percent of Americans are also doubters. I meet many parents who fear the future that awaits their children.

The young (and I draw the line at 40 and under) face two threats to their living standards. The first is the adverse effect of the Great Recession on jobs and wages. Even if this fades with time, there’s the second threat: the costs of an aging America. It’s not just Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — huge transfers from the young to the old — but also deferred maintenance on roads, bridges, water systems and power grids. Newsweek calls the young “generation screwed”; I prefer the milder “generation squeezed.”

Already, batteries of indicators depict the Great Recession’s damage. In a Pew survey last year, a quarter of 18-to-34-year-olds said they’d moved back with parents to save money. Getting a job has been time-consuming and often futile. In July, the unemployment rate among 18-to-29-year-olds was 12.7 percent. Counting people who dropped out of the labor market raises that to 16.7 percent, says Generation Opportunity, an advocacy group for the young. Among recent high-school graduates, unemployment rates are near half for African Americans, a third for Hispanics and a quarter for whites, notes the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.

The weak labor market hurts even job holders. From 2007 to 2011, “real” (inflation-adjusted) wages fell nearly 5 percent for recent college graduates and 10 percent for recent high-school graduates, says EPI. Among college grads, only four in 10 said their jobs required a four-year degree, reports a survey by the John J. Heldrich Center at Rutgers University. If the economy doesn’t fully recover, slack labor demand will continue to depress employment and wages for years.

(More here.)

In praise of leaks and the journalists who ferret them out

The Leak Police

By BILL KELLER, NYT

In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, this newspaper famously published a number of stories regurgitating the Bush administration hype about Saddam Hussein’s supposed arsenal of mass destruction. A few journalists elsewhere — notably Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, then of the Knight Ridder newspapers — dug deeper, discovered contrary intelligence, and challenged the official line. Later, The Times also published some excellent work on how an administration eager to justify its decision to go to war cherry-picked the intelligence to make its case.

The Times has owned up to — and, we pray, learned from — the things we got wrong. But this is a good time to look a little harder at the journalists who got it right. How did they come up with the evidence to refute the version embraced by the president, by most officials in both parties and by a lot of the mainstream media?

They got it from government officials with access to classified information, who risked their jobs to confide the truth to journalists. Critics call these “leaks,” although such stories hardly ever spill out unbidden; they are painstakingly assembled by teasing out bits of information, triangulating, correcting, testing, confirming. I’d call them a public service.

Washington is currently going a little nuts on the subject of leaks. The Obama administration, which has, without really setting out to do so, already surpassed all previous administrations in its prosecution of leakers, has begun new investigations into disclosures by The Times, Newsweek, The Associated Press and others. Congress has mandated surveillance systems that make it easier to identify leakers and to prevent unauthorized downloads of classified material.

(More here.)

Principal Romney supporter under investigation for money laundering and bribery

Embracing Sheldon Adelson

By THOMAS B. EDSALL, NYT

There are two things that set Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign apart: his caution and his secretiveness.

The presumptive Republican nominee refuses to release his pre-2010 tax returns, will not identify his major fundraisers and bundlers and wiped all computer records of staff emails clean at the end of his term as governor of Massachusetts in 2006.

Romney’s rationale is that material like this could be used by the Obama campaign to discredit him. In an interview published a few weeks ago, Romney told National Review:

In the political environment that exists today, the opposition research of the Obama campaign is looking for anything they can use to distract from the failure of the president to reignite our economy. And I’m simply not enthusiastic about giving them hundreds or thousands of more pages to pick through, distort, and lie about.

(More here.)

The end of the Assad regime

Syrian prime minister defects and flees to Jordan as Assad regime cracks at highest level

By Associated Press, Updated: Monday, August 6, 6:23 AM

BEIRUT — Syria’s prime minister defected and fled to neighboring Jordan, a Jordanian official and a rebel spokesman said Monday, evidence that the cracks in President Bashar’s Assad’s regime have reached the highest echelons of government.

Ahmad Kassim, a senior official with the Free Syrian Army, said Prime Minister Riad Hijab defected to Jordan along with three other ministers. A Jordanian government official confirmed Hijab defected with his family but did not comment on the three other ministers. The Jordanian government official spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he was not allowed to make any public statements on the defection.

Hijab is the highest-level government official to defect since the uprising against Assad’s authoritarian rule began 17 months ago. The other ministers’ identities were not immediately known.

“Don’t be scared. Defect from this criminal regime,” said Mohammad Otari, who identified himself as a spokesman for Hijab. He spoke on Al-Jazeera TV, urging other Syrians to join the defecting ministers.

(More here.)

Another reason why Congress is so unpopular

Fearing an Impasse in Congress, Industry Cuts Spending

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ, NYT

A rising number of manufacturers are canceling new investments and putting off new hires because they fear paralysis in Washington will force hundreds of billions in tax increases and budget cuts in January, undermining economic growth in the coming months.

Executives at companies making everything from electrical components and power systems to automotive parts say the fiscal stalemate is prompting them to pull back now, rather than wait for a possible resolution to the deadlock on Capitol Hill.

Democrats and Republicans are far apart on how to extend the Bush-era tax breaks beyond January — the same month automatic spending reductions are set to take effect — unless there is a deal to trim the deficit. The combination of tax increases and spending cuts is creating an economic threat called “the fiscal cliff” by Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Until recently, the loudest warnings about the economy have come from policy makers and economists, along with military industry executives who rely heavily on the Pentagon’s largess and who would be hurt by the government reductions.

(More here.)

And no, we're not talkin' about the cheap sandals you wear on your feet

Mitt Romney's Biggest Flip Flops

by: Rolling Stone Editors

Is GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney "a strong believer in stating your position and not wavering," as he once bragged? Or is he, as his onetime presidential rival Gov. John Hunstman called him, a "perfectly lubricated weathervane"? Take a read and decide for yourselves.

ABORTION

Flip

"I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it. I sustain and support that law and the right of a woman to make that choice." — Debate with Sen. Edward Kennedy, 1994

"I will preserve and protect a woman's right to choose and am devoted and dedicated to honoring my word in that regard." — Massachusetts Gubernatorial Debate, 2002

Flop

"Look, I was pro-choice. I am pro-life. You can go back to YouTube and look at what I said in 1994. I never said I was pro-choice, but my position was effectively pro-choice. I changed my position." — Iowa Straw poll debate, 2007

"What I would like to see happen would be for the Supreme Court to say, look, we’re going to overturn Roe v. Wade and return to the states the authority to decide whether they want to have abortion or not, state by state. That’s the way it was before Roe v. Wade. So I am firmly pro-life." — Town hall meeting, Hopkinton, NH, 2011

(More here.)

Syrian rebel says captured Iranians are members of pro-government militias, not pilgrims

By Liz Sly and Babak Dehghanpisheh, WashPost, Sunday, August 5, 11:15 AM

ANTAKYA, Turkey — Rebel fighters said Sunday that 48 Iranians captured in the Syrian capital Damascus were affiliated with Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard and not pilgrims as the Iranian government has claimed.

In a video broadcast by the Al-Arabiya TV network, a man identifying himself as a representative of the al-Baraa battalion of the Free Syrian Army identified the 48 as “shabiha,” the word used to describe pro-government militias in Syria. He produced documents he said proved that one of the men was an officer in the Revolutionary Guards, and that he had a permit allowing him to carry arms.

The Iranians were “on a reconnaissance mission in the field to study the situation in the city,” when their bus was seized Saturday by rebels, the commander said. Several dozen men, apparently the captured Iranians, sat behind him as he spoke.

“We warn Iran and all those who stand with the regime: The fall of this regime is inevitable,” the rebel commander said. “We pledge that the fate of all who work on your behalf in the land of Syria will either be imprisonment or death.”

(More here.)

Hell in less than a decade: Self-fulfilling prophecy or true historical cycle?

Does the US really face a violent upheaval in 2020?

By Natalie Wolchover
8/3/2012 6:07:41 PM ET
NBCNews.com

Circa 1870, the North fought the South in the Civil War. Half a century later, around 1920, worker unrest, racial tensions and anti-Communist sentiment caused another nationwide upsurge of violence. Then, 50 years later, the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement triggered a third peak in violent political, social and racial conflict. Fifty years after that will be 2020. If history continues to repeat itself, we can expect a violent upheaval in the United States in a few years.

It sounds like pseudoscience, but it's a published theory. "My model suggests that the next (peak in violence) will be worse than the one in 1970 because demographic variables such as wages, standards of living and a number of measures of intra-elite confrontation are all much worse this time," said Peter Turchin, an ecologist, evolutionary biologist and mathematician at the University of Connecticut.

Turchin has led the development of a field of study called "cliodynamics," in which scientists attempt to find meaningful patterns in history. The endeavor flies in the face of the traditional study of history, which assumes the countless variables interacting within a society lead to chaotic fluctuations in outcomes like violence and social unrest. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher of science at CUNY-Lehman College, said most historians believe that "the factors at play are so many and so variable that there is little reason to expect quasi-regular cycles, or a unified theory to explain them."

(Continued here.)

Mitt Romney: Son of Abraham?

Mormonism has led the Republican candidate on an unlikely path toward Israel

By Valerie Tarico, Alternet

While in Jerusalem Mitt Romney made an appearance at the Wailing Wall in a yarmulke. Was he just trying to pay tribute to Orthodox tradition or does he think he’s a Jew? Perhaps both.

Conservative Christianity teaches “supersessionism,” the idea that God’s covenant with Christians replaced his covenant with the Jews and now Christians are the Chosen People, the spiritual heirs of Abraham. Mormonism takes this a step further, teaching that Mormons are not only the spiritual heirs of Abraham, they are his physical descendants as well.

Mormonism includes a ritual called the “patriarchal blessing” in which a member in good standing receives a set of pronouncements spoken by an older male who is thought, during the ritual itself, to act as a latter-day prophet. Like many of Mormonism’s better known distinctive features, such as plural marriage and wearing sacred undergarments , the practice was instituted by Joseph Smith himself.* One of the most central functions of the patriarchal blessing is to reveal which great-grandson of Abraham a person can claim as his ancestor. Per Mormonwiki:

“Through these blessings, Latter-day Saints are told their lineage from the tribes of Israel. All tribes have been represented, but Latter-day Saints descend mostly from the sons of Joseph—Ephraim and Manasseh.”

One former Mormon describes the experience: “While reading my patriarchal blessing I took note that it says I was: ‘born through the loins of Ephraim.’ I found it fascinating how patriarchs could tell which tribes people were descended from.”

(More here.)

Does prison time really deter crime?

Too Many Prisoners

Published: August 4, 2012, NYT

The Justice Department in its recent annual report on federal sentencing issues wisely acknowledged that public safety can be maximized without maximizing prison spending. As it noted, the growing federal prison population, now more than 218,000 inmates, and a prison budget of almost $6.2 billion are “incompatible with a balanced crime policy and are unsustainable.”

The department calls for reforms “to make our public safety expenditures smarter and more productive.” Yet it fails to address sentencing changes that should be made, which would significantly reduce the problem of overincarceration in federal prisons.

Last fall, the United States Sentencing Commission issued a comprehensive report that said mandatory minimum sentences are often “excessively severe,” especially for people convicted of drug-trafficking offenses, who make up more than 75 percent of those given such sentences. Mandatory minimums have contributed in the last 20 years to the near tripling of federal prisoners, with more than half the prisoners now in for drug crimes.

There is no good evidence that long mandatory sentences deter crime. There is very good evidence that older prisoners (45 and up) are the least dangerous and that many should be released.

(More here.)

And you thought the Indian wars were over ...

Lucrative Gambling Pits Tribe Against Tribe

By NORIMITSU ONISHI, NYT

OROVILLE, Calif. — A pitted gravel road snakes through the forest to the Enterprise Rancheria of the Maidu Indians’ sole piece of tribal land about 15 miles east of here in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Broken trailers and a hot tub rejiggered to irrigate a garden sit in a clearing, the few acres of flat land where a handful of people live in houses in disrepair.

With little accessible space on its 40-acre territory, the 800-member tribe used government grants last year to buy a nearby trailer park that is now home to a dozen families. About half live in old trailers that were used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house those displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

To pull itself out of poverty, the tribe applied in 2002 to build an off-reservation casino at a spot with more economic potential, near towns and highways about 35 miles south of here. After the federal government gave its approval last year, the final decision now rests with Gov. Jerry Brown, who is expected to decide on the fate of the Enterprise casino and another tribe’s off-reservation proposal by an Aug. 31 deadline.

But plans for the two casinos are drawing fierce opposition and last-minute lobbying in the state capital from an unexpected source: nearby tribes with casinos that they say will be hurt by the newcomers. Leading the fight against Enterprise is the United Auburn Indian Community, whose casino, Thunder Valley, has become one of America’s most profitable and has brought the formerly destitute tribe unimaginable riches.

(More here.)

One by one we are outsourcing our mental functions to the global prosthetic brain

Auto Crrect Ths!

By JAMES GLEICK, NYT

I MENTION a certain writer in an e-mail, and the reply comes back: “Comcast McCarthy??? Phoner novelist???” Did I really type “Comcast”? No. The great god Autocorrect has struck again.

It is an impish god. I try retyping the name on a different device. This time the letters reshuffle themselves into “Format McCarthy.” Welcome to the club, Format. Meet the Danish astronomer Touchpad Brahe and the Franco-American actress Natalie Portmanteau.

In the past, we were responsible for our own typographical errors. Now Autocorrect has taken charge. This is no small matter. It is a step in our evolution — the grafting of silicon into our formerly carbon-based species, in the name of collective intelligence. Or unintelligence as the case may be.

Earlier this year, the police in Hall County, Ga., locked down the West Hall schools for two hours after someone received a text message saying, “gunman be at west hall today.” The texter had typed “gunna,” but Autocorrect had a better idea.

(More here.)

More money and elections blather

Record Spending by Obama’s Camp Shrinks Coffers

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and JO CRAVEN McGINTY, NYT

President Obama has spent more campaign cash more quickly than any incumbent in recent history, betting that heavy early investments in personnel, field offices and a high-tech campaign infrastructure will propel him to victory in November.

Since the beginning of last year, Mr. Obama and the Democrats have burned through millions of dollars to find and register voters. They have spent almost $50 million subsidizing Democratic state parties to hire workers, pay for cellphones and update voter lists. They have spent tens of millions of dollars on polling, online advertising and software development to turn Mr. Obama’s fallow volunteers corps into a grass-roots army.

The price tag: about $400 million from the beginning of last year to June 30 this year, according to a New York Times analysis of Federal Election Commission records, including $86 million on advertising.

But now Mr. Obama’s big-dollar bet is being tested. With less than a month to go before the national party conventions begin, the president’s once commanding cash advantage has evaporated, leaving Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee with about $25 million more cash on hand than the Democrats as of the beginning of July.

(More here.)

'Meatless Monday': Where’s the beef?

The Republican backlash against a USDA recommendation to eat less meat is shocking, disgusting and frightening

By David Sirota, Salon.com

To understand how utterly broken our society is, how hostile to sacrifice we are and how willfully ignorant we have become, you need only look at the historic drought hammering the heartland — and how our elected officials are responding to that cataclysm.

As you likely know from this arid summer, America is suffering through the worst drought since 1950. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, half of all counties in the nation are officially disaster areas — a situation that has devastated the country’s supply of agriculture commodities. Consequently, food prices are expected to skyrocket, and eventually, water-dependent power plants may be forced to shut down.

This is a full-on emergency, and USDA, a key agency involved in the national security issues surrounding our food and water supply, last week responded with a minor non-binding recommendation. In its inter-office newsletter to agency employees, it suggested that those who want to conserve water could simply refrain from eating meat on Mondays.

The idea is part of the worldwide “Meatless Monday” campaign, which the New York Times notes is backed by “thousands of corporate cafeterias, restaurants and schools.” In the face of a drought, it’s a pragmatic notion. Cornell University researchers estimate that “producing a pound of animal protein requires, on average, about 100 times more water than producing a pound of vegetable protein.” According to the U.S. Geological Survey, that means a typical hamburger requires a whopping 4,000 to 18,000 gallons of water to make.

(More here.)

Palestinians say there is no difference between Obama and Romney

Occupation, Not Culture, Is Holding Palestinians Back

By MUNIB R. MASRI, NYT

Nablus, West Bank

EARLIER this week, while Israel’s cheerleaders and Las Vegas casino moguls were parsing every syllable uttered by Mitt Romney in Jerusalem as fastidiously as the Olympic judges were scrutinizing every back flip in London, millions of Palestinians issued a giant collective yawn.

There was little anger when Mr. Romney made thinly veiled racist allusions to the supposed inferiority of Palestinian culture and genuflected at the altar of distant fund-raising thrones in New York and Los Angeles.

Of course, Hamas sputtered rejections and the Iranians hyperbolically accused Romney of “kissing the foot” of Israel — shrill criticisms easily dismissed in the West.

On the legendary “Palestinian street,” however, there was only weariness after Mr. Romney’s slight. It was nothing we haven’t heard before, nothing we haven’t seen in so many other pre-election panderings.

American Jews like to split hairs over which candidate is more pro-Israel or who better represents their interests: Is Mr. Obama’s facial expression lacking? Is that omitted adjective by Mr. Romney significant? But ask 9 out of 10 Palestinians and you will get an identical response: “There is no difference between Obama and Romney.”

(More here.)

If other countries can have lower health care costs and better outcomes, why can't the U.S.?

Smart Ways to Keep the Brake on Health-Care Costs

By Peter Orszag, Bloomberg - Aug 1, 2012

The rising cost of health care in the U.S. has been slowing over the past few years, driven both by weakness in the general economy and by some changes in the way medical services are provided. The crucial question now is, how can we make sure that progress continues?

Surprisingly, for all the recent talk about constraining cost growth, few specific proposals have been made.

That’s why the Center for American Progress should be commended for gathering a group of health-care experts and putting forward more than 10 specific proposals. (Disclosure: I was part of the group, which included a broad array of doctors and other medical practitioners and academics.) The proposals, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, aim to reduce costs wherever possible by curtailing care that is unnecessary and reducing the prices of procedures people need.

First, consider how drastic the recent deceleration in health-care costs has been. A common way to evaluate the growth in spending for Medicare is to compare the increase per beneficiary to income per capita. Over the past 30 years, this excess cost growth for Medicare has averaged about 2 percent a year. The goal of many policy proposals, including provisions in the 2010 Affordable Care Act, is to reduce the future excess cost growth to about 1 percent annually.

(More here.)

The man who helped hand U.S. 'democracy' to the highest bidder

Fifty Shades of Scalia

By TIMOTHY EGAN

He grumps and harrumphs, he charms, fidgets and scolds, but mostly, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia just endures - the fools, that is. He's on a book tour now, promoting product, though he occasionally has to remind some intellectually inferior interlocutor that he's untouchable: we have lifetime tenure, Piers.

It's been fascinating to watch Fifty Shades of Scalia, without the insulation of black robe or white marble. The permutations are cosmetic. The 18th-century man is intact. If only he could face Jon Stewart; the comedian, at least, would not let Scalia get away with the kind of drivel he's been serving in defense of the court decision that handed American democracy off to the highest bidder.

Asked by Piers Morgan on CNN about the Citizens United case - the 5-4 ruling that eliminated the last restraints on the very rich to dominate public discourse in the way they know best, by buying it - Scalia was unrepentant, as you might expect.

"I think Thomas Jefferson would have said, the more speech, the better," said Scalia. "That's what the First Amendment is all about, so long as people know where the speech is coming from."

(More here.)

Machines are now in charge of Wall Street

Frankenstein Takes Over the Market

By JOE NOCERA, NYT

This week, yet another Wall Street firm most people have never heard of, relying on a computerized trading program that they can’t possibly understand, shook investors’ faith in the market. This is happening a little too frequently, don’t you think?

The company, of course, was Knight Capital, a major market maker that generated an astonishing 11 percent of all the trades in the first half of this year, according to the Tabb Group. It caters to sophisticated Wall Street traders as well as small investors, whose brokers often used Knight to fulfill their trades.

Trying to stay a step ahead of its competitors, Knight rolled out some new trading software. The software wasn’t ready. Instead of fulfilling customers’ orders, Knight’s computers went on an out-of-control spree of rapid-fire buying and selling. As trading volumes swelled, the Wall Street guys jumped in. (Sophisticated traders, relying on their own rapid-fire computers, often love volatility because it leads to trading anomalies they can take advantage of.) Many retail customers, having no idea what was going on, wound up losing money. I know: shocker.

The mishap also cost Knight so much money that its future is in jeopardy. Even putting aside the havoc wreaked on customers, you’d think that self-preservation would have been enough for Knight to want to ensure that its software worked. But apparently not. Wall Street is now as blindly reliant on computers, on algorithms, on high-frequency trading, as it was once blindly reliant on the risk models that allowed “toxic bonds” to be rated Triple A. Wall Street has created its own Frankenstein. The machines are now in charge.

(More here.)

Communism or Congress: Which is more popular?

Congress Goes Postal

By GAIL COLLINS, NYT

Congress is gone. Yeah, I miss them, too.

All the members are off on a five-week recess, after which they’ll return for a few days, then go away again, then hobble back as lame ducks. This is going to do terrible things to the Congressional approval rating, which had climbed all the way up to 17 percent at one point this year. Now it’s sunk to BP oil spill level, and it’s only a matter of time before we’re back to the point where poll respondents say they have a more favorable attitude toward “the U.S. becoming communist.”

You are probably wondering what your elected officials have been up to. Well, the best news is that House and Senate leaders worked out a plan to avoid a government shutdown for six more months by agreeing to just keep doing whatever it is we’re doing now.

This is known as “kicking the can down the road.” Failure to kick the can down the road can lead to “falling off the fiscal cliff.” There are so many of these crises looming that falling off a cliff should be reclassified as an Olympic event.

(More here.)

It could only happen in the movies ... or in Mississippi

The Curious Case of Chavis Carter

By CHARLES M. BLOW, NYT

Let me get this straight: A young man is stopped by police, who find $10 worth of drugs on him; he had twice been searched by officers and then double handcuffed behind his back and placed in the back of a police car; yet, somehow, he retrieves a gun that both searches failed to find and uses it shoot himself in the right temple?

That is what police in Jonesboro, Ark., say happened on the evening of Sunday, July 29, to Chavis Carter, a 21-year-old African-American man from Southaven, Miss., a suburb of Memphis. They say he committed suicide with a hidden gun while handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser. According to a local CBS News report, his mother was told that he shot himself in the right temple, but she claims that Chavis was left-handed.

The strange circumstances of this case, which even the Jonesboro police chief, Michael Yates, called “bizarre” and said “defies logic at first glance,” have raised questions that sorely need answering.

First, some background on how Carter came into contact with police that Sunday night.

(More here.)

The controversial job of applying cost-benefit analysis to federal regulation

Powerful Shaper of U.S. Rules Quits, With Critics in Wake

By JOHN M. BRODER, NYT

WASHINGTON — Cass R. Sunstein, who wielded enormous power as the White House overseer of federal regulation, came to Washington to test his theories of human behavior and economic efficiency in the laboratory of the federal government. Now he is departing with a record that left many business interests disappointed and environmental, health and consumer advocates even more unhappy.

Mr. Sunstein, 57, who projected an air of disheveled academic detachment while becoming one of the Obama administration’s most provocative figures, announced Friday that he was leaving government to return to Harvard Law School.

Applying a cost-benefit analysis to his reviews of proposed rules, he said his goal was simply to make the nation’s regulatory system “as sensible as possible.”

His critics saw it differently.

(More here.)

For whatever a man sows, this he will also reap

"Even with climate change, you will occasionally see cooler-than-normal summers or a typically cold winter. Don’t let that fool you."

Climate change is here — and worse than we thought

By James E. Hansen, WashPost, Published: August 3

When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988, I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.

But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.

My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.

In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

(More here.)

An outrageous token sentence for a military death

Military Hazing Has Got to Stop

By JUDY CHU, NYT

Los Angeles

LAST fall, at an outpost in Kandahar, Afghanistan, Danny Chen, a 19-year-old Army private, was singled out for hazing by Sgt. Adam Holcomb and five other soldiers, all of whom were senior in rank to their victim. They believed Danny was a weak soldier, someone who fell asleep on guard duty, who forgot his helmet. So for six weeks, they dispensed “corrective training” that violated Army policy. When he failed to turn off the water pump in the shower, he was dragged across a gravel yard on his back until it bled. They threw rocks at him to simulate artillery. They called him “dragon lady,” “gook” and “chink.”

Finally, Danny could take it no longer. He put the barrel of his rifle to his chin and pulled the trigger. The pain was over.

Earlier this week, a jury of military personnel found Sergeant Holcomb guilty of one count of assault and two counts of maltreatment, for which he was sentenced to one month in jail — far less than the 17 years that he could have received.

When I read about this outrageous token sentence, I had a flashback. On April 3, 2011, my nephew, 21-year-old Lance Cpl. Harry Lew, was serving his second year in the Marines in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, when he was hazed for over three hours by two of his fellow soldiers because he, too, fell asleep on duty. At the urging of their sergeant, who told them that “peers should correct peers,” they punched and kicked him. They poured the contents of a full sandbag onto his face, causing him to choke and cough as it filled his nose and mouth. Twenty-two minutes after the hazing stopped, he, too, used his own gun to commit suicide, in a foxhole he had been forced to dig.

(More here.)

The (Possible) Coming Obama Landslide

Liberals don’t want to jinx it. It terrifies the right. And the press would prefer a nail-biter. But the fact is that finding Romney’s path to victory is getting harder every day.

by Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, | August 4, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

There’s a secret lurking behind everything you’re reading about the upcoming election, a secret that all political insiders know—or should—but few are talking about, most likely because it takes the drama out of the whole business. The secret is the electoral college, and the fact is that the more you look at it, the more you come to conclude that Mitt Romney has to draw an inside straight like you’ve never ever seen in a movie to win this thing. This is especially true now that it seems as if Pennsylvania isn’t really up for grabs. Romney’s paths to 270 are few.

First, let’s discuss Pennsylvania. There has been good reason for Democrats to sweat this state. True, Obama won it handily in 2008, by 10 points. But it’s a state that is older and whiter and more working-class than most of America. Obama benefited from all the unique circumstances of 2008 that helped him across the country, but if ever there were a state where the “well, we gave the black guy a chance and he blew it” meme might catch on, it’s the Keystone State.

But the jobless rate there is 7.5 percent, well below the national average. Democratic voter registration has held its own. The Philly suburbs have grown. And this odious voter ID law is facing meaningful challenges. A hearing on the law’s validity has just been concluded. A state judge says he’ll rule on the law’s constitutionality the week of Aug. 13. It sounds as if the law’s opponents made a stronger case at the hearing than its supporters. In any case, the losing side will appeal to the state Supreme Court.

(More here.)

Losing face(book)

Refugee from Facebook questions the social media life

By Craig Timberg, WashPost, Updated: Friday, August 3, 9:07 AM

MARFA, Tex. — Not long after Katherine Losse left her Silicon Valley career and moved to this West Texas town for its artsy vibe and crisp desert air, she decided to make friends the old-fashioned way, in person. So she went to her Facebook page and, with a series of keystrokes, shut it off.

The move carried extra import because Losse had been the social network’s 51st employee and rose to become founder Mark Zuckerberg’s personal ghostwriter. But Losse gradually soured on the revolution in human relations she witnessed from within.

The explosion of social media, she believed, left hundreds of millions of users with connections that were more plentiful but also narrower and less satisfying, with intimacy losing out to efficiency. It was time, Losse thought, for people to renegotiate their relationships with technology.

“It’s okay to feel weird about this because I feel weird about this, and I was in the center of it,” said Losse, 36, who has long, dark hair and sky-blue eyes. “We all know there is an anxiety, there’s an unease, there’s a worry that our lives are changing.”

(Continued here.)

Why doesn't Mitt come clean?

In northern Ohio, Obama ads effectively define Romney

Swing voters in a long-struggling manufacturing region express suspicion of the Republican's record at Bain Capital.

By Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times

3:00 AM PDT, August 3, 2012

FAIRVIEW PARK, Ohio — Strike up a conversation about Mitt Romney in this working-class suburb of Cleveland, and it's a good bet that it will quickly turn to Bain Capital.

President Obama's blistering indictment of his Republican challenger's career at the private equity firm has come to define Romney, interviews show, among swing voters here in one of the election's Great Lakes battlegrounds.

Television ads that Obama and his allies have aired on Cleveland stations for weeks have left some wondering how Romney earned up to $250 million at Bain and whether he caused the layoffs of Americans like themselves along the way.

Echoing the Obama ads, they also question why some of Romney's personal fortune wound up in Switzerland, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

"He should just surrender his tax returns and let the people see what he's done," said 50-year-old Kevin Cannon, a Fairview Park grocery store cashier who voted for Republicans George W. Bush and John McCain, but might reluctantly support a second term for Obama.

(More here.)