Vile Christian Propaganda

August 25, 2014, 7:40 am

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Dear John,

I did not see the brief disclaimer in your email before I saw the photos.

As soon as I saw the charred bodies, I said to myself "that looks like the outcome of an African tank truck explosion a few years ago." (I also noted that certain unhinged Africans might have hacked people to death but would never have wasted so much expensive fuel just to carbonize cadavers.)

In fact, those charred corpses are not attributable to a Muslim-perpetrated slaughter of Catholics/Christians but to a fossil fuel tragedy.

Excerpt from previous communication: 

"Terrorism and The Other Religions"

by University of Michigan History Professor, Juan Cole

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/04/terrorism-and-other-religions-juan-cole.html

(Yes, it fact checks.)

***

The United States is the only country to drop "The Big One." 

And not just once, but twice.

And both times upon civilian populations.

"Christian Just War Principles" Established c. 500 A.D. 
Vs. America's "just war tradition"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/06/christian-just-war-principles.html

***

Your taxes - and my taxes - paid for My Lai and Abu Ghraib... not to mention the larger military obscenities of which they were part. 

Did you refuse to pay that percentage of your taxes which supported The Vietnam War or Bush-Cheney's Whimsy War in Iraq?

We could have.

But we didn't.

The resulting blood -- 3,000,000 dead in Vietnam and a million dead in Iraq (and counting) -- is on our hands. 

Make no mistake. Bush and Cheney launched The Whimsy War on sheer trumpery and brazen fabrication but they will "walk."

Then there are millions of maimed Iraqis hidden from view by our focus on "body counts."

***

Also hidden from view are tens of thousands of maimed GIs.

All for nothing.

Less than nothing.

"For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president’s men. If convicted, they’ll have plenty of time to mull over their sins."

Israeli War Historian, Martin van Creveld, the only non-American on the U.S. Military Officer Corps' required reading list.

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/costly-withdrawal-is-price-to-be-paid.html

Tell a friend.

Pax tecum

Alan

PS I believe that "God is Truth and Love" and that people who deliberately circulate lies to further religious agendas while actually promoting religious hatred are responsible for shitting in God's mouth while swinging the hammers that crucify God-Love.

***

ASSIST News Service (ANS) - PO Box 609, Lake Forest, CA 92609-0609 USA Visit our web site at: www.assistnews.net -- E-mail: assistnews@aol.com Saturday, January 19, 2013 Fake Picture caption still doing the rounds It alleges that it shows the charred bodies of Nigerian Christians supposedly burned in a massacre perpetrated by Muslim terrorists By Dan Wooding Founder of ASSIST MinistriesLAKE FOREST, CA (ANS) -- In the dark days when I worked for the British tabloids, we had a motto which was, “Never let the truth interfere with a good story.” The picture that has been doing the rounds Well sadly, this seems to also be the motto of well-meaning Christians who have been circulating messages claiming that the photo here shows the charred bodies of 500 Nigerian Christians burned in a terrible massacre by Muslim terrorists. While the story is true, for back in March of 2010, a terrible massacre took place close to Jos where as many as 500 people, many of them women and children, were killed by Hausa-Fulani, Muslim herders, the picture that has been doing the rounds, has nothing to do with Nigeria, but instead comes from a terrible tanker explosion in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Having been born in Northern Nigeria to British missionary parents, and given the Hausa name of Dan Juma (son of Friday), I was horrified when I first saw the picture of the hundreds of charred bodies. One posting of the picture said, “Christians burnt alive by Sunni Muslims in NIGERIA…PLEASE SHARE IT OR JUST UPLOAD YOUR OWN…BUT SOMEHOW SPREAD IT IF YOU’RE EVEN 1% CHRISTIAN — It is still not over yet!” Another picture of the charred bodies not in Nigeria, but Congo Another read: “The religion of peace is really showing us how it needs to be done. Apparently this happened in April 2011, but it did not make front page news. Why does the Western Church think they are special and needs to be raptured before the tribulation starts? We really need a wakeup call.” Being a journalist now for some 43 years, I have learned never to accept these claims on face value, so I did some checking and finally found this story by Katrina Manson of Reuters dated Saturday, July 3, 2010, with the headline, “Fuel tanker explosion kills over 230 in Congo.” You can read it for yourself athttp://www.reuters.com/article/2010/07/03/us-congo-democratic-explosion-idUSTRE6620H220100703. So it appears that the photo above was apparently not taken in Nigeria at all, but in Congo and story begins, “At least 230 people were killed when a fuel tanker overturned and exploded in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, unleashing a fire ball that tore through homes and cinemas packed with people watching World Cup soccer. “Officials said on Saturday the explosion late on Friday also injured 196 people, adding that the death toll could rise. “They described scenes of devastation in the town of Sange, where houses were burned and bodies littered the streets. Some people died while trying to steal fuel leaking from the tanker, but most were killed at home or watching World Cup soccer in cinemas.” So, like so many of you, I am horrified with the shocking violence that is being perpetrated by groups like Boko Haram in Nigeria, but I believe that we should also be careful when we circulate items like this one, and check them out, before claiming them to be true, which this time was apparently was not the case. Dan Wooding, 72, who was born in Nigeria of British missionary parents, is an award winning British journalist now living in Southern California with his wife Norma, to whom he has been married for 49 years. They have two sons, Andrew and Peter, and six grandchildren who all live in the UK. He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS) and he hosts the weekly “Front Page Radio” show on the KWVE Radio Network in Southern California and which is also carried throughout the United States and around the world. Besides this, Wooding is a host for His Channel Live, which is carried via the Internet to some 192 countries. Dan recently received two top media awards -- the “Passion for the Persecuted” award from Open Doors US, and as one of the top “Newsmakers of 2011” from Plain Truth magazine. He is the author of some 45 books, the latest of which is “Caped Crusader: Rick Wakeman in the 1970s.” To order a copy, go to: Caped Crusader - Amazon

On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 10:15 AM, John Tarantino <johntarantino@nc.rr.com> wrote:

----- Original Message -----

From: AT

Read the story below 1^st, then circle back to this:

http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/n/Nigerian-Catholics.htm#.U_LTVGOTbyA

(500 Nigerians Brutally Murdered by Muslims- Truth! but Inaccurate Details & Photo!)

Unbelievable!    What you see and learn here, you will never see in the official medias...Read and pass on!!    Statement by Father Juan Carlos Martos cmf Secretariat of PV Clarettiani Missionaries   "This is a brutal example of how far the struggle between muslims and catholics in Nigeria has reached. Muslims are determined to impose their 'religion' all over Africa as well as in other continents and countries of the world. Islam has but one goal: rule the world at any cost!"    "And where are the International Human Rights Organizations?  Christians are burnt alive in Nigeria: a horrific Holocaust right in front of International indifference! As denounced by Father Juan Carlos Martos, on behalf of the Missionari Clarettiani, via del Sacro Cuore di Maria, Rome, Italy."    "By publishing this graphic document on Facebook, I have intended to make the world aware of certain terrible events totally ignored or minimized by the mainstream media; an authentic genocide so cruel and inhuman only comparable with the most hateful and vile acts in the nazi extermination camps."    "To my great surprise, Facebook has criticized me for the publication of this graphic document as a proof of the Holocaust that Christians have been suffering in Nigeria in the last ten years. According to Facebook's Security policy of the 'social' Network, this photo has been classified as 'pornographic', 'violent' or 'inappropriate' and hence I was disallowed to publish any picture for a week. And I was threatened drastic measures if I insist publishing any document that prove the terrible violations of Human Rights in Nigeria.  This attitude by the (Spanish) Facebook Management is an attack to the freedom of expression as much as a shameful insult to the 500 victims (only in this horrible episode) slaughtered by islamic terror only for being christian."    "I thought that this social network, originated in the United States, would not bend its knees in front of terror. Especially, when still healing their wounds suffered in the gruesome 9/11 attack, just as our own 3/11 at Madrid railway station, all innocent victims of the wild fury and insanity of islamic terror."    "This seems even more unacceptable in Spain, a Democratic state, where the rights of opinion, expression and religion are guaranteed by the Constitution (Art. 16 and 20), if there is an                                  attempt to limit such rights, let alone through threats and coercion thus weakening their freedom of expression by condemning as "inappropriate" a graphic document (not a photomontage) which reflects a brutal reality in all its crudeness."    "Contrarily, the Administrators of Facebook Spain should welcome this public protest advocating that such a barbarian act will never be replicated and that its perpetrators will be brought to justice. This is a right and duty of every citizen: a service to society, ultimate goal, I feel, of any network that defines itself as 'social'."    "Regrettably, if the murders continue, this is greatly because truth is always hidden to the sovereign people, so that they may not be aware and 'disdained' by it: complicit silence by the mainstream media leads to the indifference of the international political community facing this unspeakable Holocaust! Let alone the cowardice already rooted in the western world facing the islamic terror. A consequence of the stupid "Alliance of civilizations": another regrettable incident of our former Prime Minister Rodriguez Zapatero."    "Can you imagine the reaction of the islamic terrorist organization in the (impossible) case of a massacre of muslims in a mosque, by the hands of christian terrorists? And how widely would our media cover and condemn the crime and the criminals??"    "Therefore, from this modest blog, I ask a favor from all people who are reading me: please distribute this photo and its comments using all the media you have. If only for commemorating these martyrs since, unfortunately, Facebook seems to be on the side of the executioners by preventing the publication of such tragic events."   Juan Carlos Martos cmf Segretariato di PVMissionari ClarettianiVia Sacro Cuore à Maria-500197-Rome

 

 

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Jewish Attachment To Land

August 25, 2014, 7:44 am

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The Holy Land

"Forbidden to own land for most of our two millennia of exile, we gradually became experts in accumulating capital, which is portable, easily inheritable, fungible, and expandable."

Ellen Frankel; Taking Stock; The Jerusalem Report (Israel); May 19, 2014

The Dreaded 'Bad Trip' on LSD -- Researchers Are Starting to Understand What Causes Them

August 25, 2014, 7:46 am

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The Dreaded 'Bad Trip' on LSD -- Researchers Are Starting to Understand What Causes Them

New research into psychedelics as therapies is figuring out how to maximize safety and benefits.

116 COMMENTS116 COMMENTS

August 11, 2014  |  

My memory of that long-ago terror-filled night clicks into focus a few minutes past 2 am, after the bars had last call in the one-horse town Alleghany, New York, where I was a freshman at Saint Bonaventure University. It was late February and freezing, with snow piled high on the ground. Inside the town’s all-night pizza joint—where never-say-die partiers loaded up on greasy subs and 12-packs of beer for after-hours—I was waiting for the bathroom. About six hours earlier my friend Brian and I had each dropped a purple tab of LSD, chasing it with Milwaukee’s Best. I was feeling pretty good.

Leaving the counter with his food, a hockey player, wearing his team jacket, approached me with a wide smile on his face. He told me about a half-keg running at someone’s house nearby. Then, looking into my eyes, he said, “You’re pupils are huge. You doing acid tonight?” I nodded, shrugged and said, “Yeah, man. Why? You?”

I had only taken LSD once before, but it was a commonly used drug across the school by jocks and stoners alike. At the time, in the mid-1990s, both LSD and ‘shrooms were peaking in popularity after years of decline. But psychedelics had by then been divorced from their originalcounter-cultural context as purported tools of enlightenment. They were just a cheap and interesting way of staying fucked up. In my case, on this night, a little too interesting. How I went from pleasantly fucked up to massively freaked out was the mystery that led to my investigation into bad trips and their causes, cures and prevention.

“I don’t take acid anymore—too many bad trips,” the hockey player told me. “Anyway, man, take it easy. Maybe I’ll see you in a few.” Then he was out the door.

As with my previous trip, the effects seemed as advertised: I felt hyper-alert, had intervals of intense wellbeing and saw “trails” and other minor visuals. But now, stepping into the bathroom, I had a premonition of the hellish several hours that would follow.

First, an eerie silence and distant chimes. Then the room around me disappeared. Standing in a complete void, I heard an echo of the hockey player saying repeatedly, “Too many bad trips.” I inwardly shook it off as a trick of the drug. After exiting the bathroom quickly, I signaled Brian and we trudged back to our dorm. Glancing back, the trail of my boot prints in the snow looked ominous. I told Brian about the disappearing bathroom hallucination. “Weird,” he said.

Back in Brian’s dorm room, a fat bag of weed appeared and the bong was sparked. My roommate Dave, who claimed to have taken LSD nearly every day during his last semester of high school, joined us. I smoked weed frequently and assumed that, because I had been drinking, it would make me sleepy. But after a few hits the room turned flat and black. Intense color wheels sparked around me. The wheels transformed into long caravans of a defeated feudal population. My arms and legs felt as if they were stretching into infinity. That’s when I lost my shit.

Standing up abruptly, I choked out, “Something is going wrong!” My heart started to pound against my chest and Brian realized I was really scared. Patting me on the back, he said, “Let’s go for a walk.” I acceded meekly and we walked down four flights of fluorescent-lit steps into the cold deserted quad. Loud bells from the quad tower rang 3 am, each peal vibrating through my body.

While an hour before I had played around with visuals, seeing “trails,” now my entire visual field became a vivid hallucination that I couldn’t control. Drinking a bottle of Snapple in the mini-mart’s parking lot, I wondered if I should check myself into the infirmary. Brian shook his head and said, “No way, dude.”

While an hour before I had played around with visuals, seeing “trails,” now my entire visual field became a vivid hallucination that I couldn’t control. Drinking a bottle of Snapple in the mini-mart’s parking lot I wondered if I should check myself into the infirmary.

When I got back to my room my hallucinations grew more vivid and scary. Everything around me changed colors and started melting like lava. I was convinced I might lose my mind for good. I splashed some water on my face and looked in the mirror hoping to ground myself. My face had turned to stone. Every minute lasted a short lifetime. I paced back and forth, and tried to pray. I listened to music. Periods of relative calm began interspersing the hallucinatory panic. By the time the sun rose I knew I would live, with my mind more or less intact.

The 1960s “Psychedelic Revolution”

As excruciating and unforgettable as acid freak-outs seem to the hapless person experiencing one, they are far from uncommon. After all, the world’s first “bad trip” dates back to 1943, when Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who synthesized ergot fungus into lysergic acid diethylamide, tested his new brainchild on his own brain. In his autobiography, LSD, My Problem Child, Hofmann writes that after taking a too-large dose, he felt as if “a demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my mind, body and soul.” His many following trips, however, were generally positive, he reports.

The fear of losing my mind passed quickly and in a couple of months I felt as good as new, but a healthy fear of hallucinogens remained. On reflection, that first hellish trip had multiple causes. I knew just enough about the powerful drug’s mind-bending properties to make me nervous about taking it. It didn’t dawn on me that I was too anxious and sensitive to be dropping acid so blithely. There’s also the factor of the weed-induced panic attack. At the very point when I should have been soothing my senses, I was throwing gasoline on the fire, and when I lost my shit I was too far gone to be talked down by a friend—and I didn’t have the inner psychological resources (or Valium) to center myself.

A year later, back in New York City, I hung out one night with a hippie girl staying nearby in her friend’s VW bus because Phish was in town. Asked the most tabs she had ever taken at once, she said, “Thirty.” She described entering a complete altered reality, where roofs fly off their buildings—a dimension understandable only to other “sheet eaters.” I asked her how long it takes to come down from that kind of massive dose of LSD. Peering at me intently, she said, “You never come down. You just readjust.”

Grob’s view is that a “bad trip” is a psychedelic-heightened anxiety attack. But he also observes that LSD users are prone to “anxiety symptoms resembling paranoid psychosis toward the latter part of the eight-to-twelve-hour experience.”

The “psychedelic revolution” had been, I decided, a historically unfortunate pop fad, motivated by dubious interests. Those championing their use were either deluded romantics or sinister provocateurs.

Today’s “Psychedelic Therapy” Resurgence

But more recently there has been a steady stream of news about scientific studies that suggest psychedelics have great promise in the treatment of PTSD and other psychiatric and substance use disorders.In March The New York Times ran a piece called “LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy”about LSD-assisted therapy benefitting terminally ill patients. During this period I watched a friend use the strong hallucinogen Ibogaine to free himself from a long physical dependence on heroin and methadone.

While the current experimentation takes inspiration from the fertile speculative groundwork of psychedelic mavericks like Richard Alpert, Stanislav Grof and Timothy Leary, the new crop of establishment-oriented academics are exceedingly cautious and responsible. In the early 1970s the popular narrative about psychedelics quickly shifted from excited curiosity to horror at fallout of LSD-induced suicides and “acid casualties,” wounded souls who suffered psychotic breaks from tripping too much.

Charles Grob, MD, is a professor of psychiatry at UCLA who has been studying psychedelics since the early 1990s, including the effects of psilocybin on anxiety in end-stage cancer patients—a project influenced by theories first developed by Grof, a pioneer in “psychedelic therapy.”

“What’s happening now is very different than what went on in the 1960s,” Grob says. In those days, information about hallucinogens “seeped out” from starry-eyed academics who, along with a pliant media, “popularized it as a rite of the so-called counter-culture and there were very few precautions.”

In a 2013 paper entitled “Hallucinogens and Related Compounds,” Grob describes the social fallout that ensued. “Given [young] users’ relative lack of knowledge and understanding [about] the range of effects of these potent compounds, and often disregarding essential safeguards, the use of hallucinogens by young people was capable of causing psychological injury.” These problems caused a societal backlash that created conditions for a decades-long ban on human psychedelic research.

What constitutes a bad trip?

An altered state that you experience as terrifying I may be able to roll with just fine—and even find blissful. Common psychedelic effects like ego dissociation and aural hallucinations are much more subjective than the straight ups or downs of more addictive drugs like cocaine and heroin. Unfortunately, a user can’t dial up or down the intensity of the LSD experience to suit the limits of the psychological loss of control he can handle.

Grob’s paper highlights case studies of adolescent patients undergoing bad trips. He describes physical symptoms such as “tachycardia, sweating [and] palpitations” alongside a potpourri of “psychological distress,” including “varying degrees of anxiety, depression, ideas of reference, fear of losing one’s mind, paranoid ideation and impaired judgment.” Transient anxiety states are observed in “adolescent, novice users.”

A negative psychedelic experience may be best explained by the concept of “set and setting,” popularized by acid guru Timothy Leary. According to this view, the variety of psychedelic experiences is primarily determined by the user’s character and expectations, or “set,” combined with the social and physical surroundings of the trip, or “setting.”Recent brain imaging studies have shown that psilocybin (‘shrooms) and LSD affect subjects’ brains similarly, inducing a disorganized ego-state typically associated with dreaming—and therein lies their allure and power. But as of yet there is no hard-scientific data “teasing apart vulnerabilities to psychedelic drugs,” says Henry Abraham, MD, a substance use expert and professor of psychiatry at Tufts University Medical School.

What causes a bad trip?

A negative psychedelic experience may be best explained by the concept of “set and setting,” popularized by acid guru Timothy Leary. According to this view, the variety of psychedelic experiences is primarily determined by the user’s character and expectations, or “set,” combined with the social and physical surroundings of the trip, or “setting.”

“The ‘set’ denotes the preparation of the individual, including his personality structure and his mood at the time,” Leary wrote in his tripping how-to, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. “The ‘setting’ is physical (the weather, the room’s atmosphere), social (feelings of persons present towards one another) and cultural (prevailing views as to what is real).”

“Set and setting”—a basic “self/environment” psychological concept—has the benefit of offering a framework that may be helpful for psychonauts, a means for fine-tuning trips via adjusting one’s expectations and environment. In this respect, it’s a technique akin to Native American spiritual systems in which naturally occurring hallucinogens like peyote, ayahuasca and magic mushrooms are a sacrament. Not for nothing did Leary dub these psychedelic Indian sacraments “flesh of God.”

“’Set and setting’ is definitely important,” Horgan says. “But I remember tripping on acid in high school with my friends while driving around. We were doing this illegal thing that we had to hide from our parents. We were worried that the police were going to pull us over. The setting was terrible.” But as for the set, he says, “We still had a great time.”

What can prevent a bad trip?

A critical aspect of current psychedelic clinical trials has been the establishment of an experimental process intended to ensure safety and maximize the potential benefits for the subject. “This has to be very serious, sober work,” Grob says. Such require a stamp of approval from several regulatory bodies, and the trial design, including the screening process, is evaluated very closely. “Some people are way too vulnerable for this—for example, anyone who has had a history of schizophrenia,” he says.

Once a  subject is chosen for a trial, a three-part process ensues. The first session is prep work as to what can be expected from the drug and how to handle its effects. The next time the person comes in, he is administered the drug. The investigator stays by his side “for the entire trip,” Grob says. That way “if someone hits a rough patch or has a hard time, we can talk him down.” Whether it’s part of a scientific or spiritual framework, having a knowledgeable facilitator is key to a good experience.” Transient anxiety states can usually be “resolved quickly with gentle reassurance and reduction of sensory stimuli.” If this technique fails, Grob recommends 20 mg of Valium, a benzodiazepine, “with bad trips usually resolving in about 30 minutes.”

The third step of the process is therapy, in which the subject talks about the psychedelic experience. Summing up the outcomes of several studies that he and his fellow investigators conducted, Grob says, “A lot of impressive data is piling up and we’ve had no bad trips,” adding that his patients in the cancer study were suffering from existential-level anxiety “sparked by their impending death.”

That this primal fear did not trigger a single bad trip makes a forceful case that the right facilitator can help control hallucinogenic effects. The idea that hallucinogens can ease existential dread also nests with 1960s psychedelic pioneers. During his dying hours in late 1963, Aldous Huxley, author of The Doors of Perception, asked for and was administered LSD.

What about recreational use?

But there are skeptics, even among psychedelic boosters. John Horgan, a self-described “old hippie acid head,” is a science journalist who wrote a highly praised book about psychedelic mysteries, Rational Mysticism. In it he describes unwittingly dosing with BZ, a psychedelic chemical warfare agent that makes even huge doses of LSD pale in comparison. What ensued for Horgan was a 24-hour out-of-body ordeal in which he travelled through different dimensions and felt a godlike power. For six months his shattered psyche was convinced the world was about to end. Over 25 years later he wrote Rational Mysticism, in which he interviews psychedelic figures like Stanislav Grof, as a way to “try to reconcile the questions the trip left me with” with his materialist beliefs.

A critical aspect of current psychedelic clinical trials has been the establishment of an experimental process intended to ensure safety and maximize the potential benefits for the subject. “This has to be very serious, sober work,” Grob says. “Some people are way too vulnerable for this.”

He raises a frightening example of government-funded DMT clinical trials conducted at the University of New Mexico by Rick Strassman, MD. During the project’s five years, Strassman injected 60 volunteers with about 400 doses of DMT. He was expecting them to have beautiful, blissful experiences; while a slight majority did, others had horrible hallucinations of an uncannily similar nature, including “robotic monsters from another dimension trying to eat them.” Even when the trip was over some were convinced that it wasn’t a hallucination.

Overall, Horgan is positive about revived interest in psychedelics as therapeutics. But when asked if he agrees that they have the potential to treat psychiatric disorders, he groans slightly, and says, “I don’t think the words psychiatric disorders and psychedelics even belong in the same sentence.”

While official numbers show a steady decline in LSD use since its mid-’90s resurgence, there’s some buzz that the drug is gaining again. A friend who lives in a glorified single-room-occupancy in downtown LA—filled with young aspiring reality stars and actors—reports that every Sunday is “‘cid” day, devoted to tripping. Hallucinogens of all varieties are readily available from anonymous online dealers, but as with buying any drug on the street, there is no quality control. Kitchen chemists frequently substitute easier-to-produce “mimics” with perceived similar properties for LSD and MDMA.

Both Horgan and Grob agree that the use of hallucinogens as “party drugs” is a good recipe for a bad trip. Horgan says, “They’re too psychologically messy for that.” Grob adds that there is also “rampant drug substitution, so you don’t know what you’re taking. Even if it’s called acid or Molly, there could be anything in there.”

And yet the desire to experience altered states of consciousness seems to be a permanent feature of human nature. Substances that briefly “open the doors of perception” can make visible the invisible processes and potentialities of our mind. They induce intense, extreme experiencesthat can offer not only sensory pleasure but revelations and breakthroughs. That is the source of their therapeutic power—whether in a clinical setting or a more casual or recreational one.

It is worth asking why our society has blocked access to these types of experiences through the criminalization of these substances. As with other illicit substances, most of the risks (such as contamination) involved in using hallucinogens could be greatly reduced, if not entirely eliminated, through legalization and regulation. Still, LSD will always be “psychologically messy”—that is what distorting and expanding consciousness is about.

When asked whether he would recommend the nonmedical use of LSD, Albert Hoffmann answered, “If such use were at present legal, which is not the case, then I would suggest the following guidelines: The experience is handled best by a ripe, stabilized person with a meaningful reason for taking LSD.”

Matt Harvey is an award-winning freelance journalist whose writing has appeared on AnimalNY.com, Black Book, the New York Post and the New York Press among other publications. He lives in Manhattan.

Dwight Eisenhower: War Is Brutal, Futile, Stupid

August 25, 2014, 7:47 am

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"Why We Fight"

A freely streamable documentary film 

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/08/why-we-fight-documentary-film-about.html

"We Like War Because We're Good At It"

George Carlin video

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/george-carlin-we-like-war-because-were.html

Human History Becomes More And More A Race Between Education And Catastrophe

August 25, 2014, 7:47 am

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Article 10

August 25, 2014, 7:48 am

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Truth and Tenderness: Ralph Waldo Emerson on Friendship and Its Two Essential Conditions

by Maria Popova

“What is so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling?”

It’s been argued that friendship is a greater gift than romantic love (though it’s not uncommon for one to turn abruptly into the other), but whatever the case, friendship is certainly one of the most rewarding fruits of life — from the sweetness of childhood friendships to the trickiness of workplace ones. This delicate dance has been examined by thinkers from Aristotle toFrancis Bacon to Thoreau, but none more thoughtfully than by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In an essay on the subject, found in his altogether soul-expanding Essays and Lectures (public library; free download), Emerson considers the intricate dynamics of friendship, beginning with our often underutilized innate capacities:

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Barring all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eyebeams. The heart knoweth…

The emotions of benevolence … from the highest degree of passionate love, to the lowest degree of good will, they make the sweetness of life.

More than mere gratification of the heart, however, Emerson celebrates friendship as something that expands and enriches our intellectual landscape:

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, and, forthwith, troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words.

But beyond the rewards of emotion and intellect lies an even deeper satisfaction — that of the soul:

What is so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling? How beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true! The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter, and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis vanish; all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

For Emerson, friendship isn’t something that can be willed or forced but, rather, the natural byproduct of our interaction with the world. A century and a half before the modern social web, he pens a passage that rings with extraordinary poignancy and prescience today:

We weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by-and-by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought.

Drawing from 'The Lion and the Bird' by Marianne Dubuc, a tender illustrated story about loyalty and the gift of friendship. Click image for more.

In the deepest of friendships, Emerson finds an element of reverie as the two friends amplify each other’s goodness through a boundless generosity of spirit:

I must feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his, — his name, his form, his dress, books and instruments, — fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.

But even the most absolute of friendships, Emerson argues, have a certain pace of presence and absence, a natural rhythm of “comings and goings” that should be respected rather than bemoaned as a weakness in the relationship:

The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this, to each new candidate for his love:

Dear Friend:—

If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match my mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles, in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise; my moods are quite attainable; and I respect thy genius; it is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not presume in thee a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious torment. Thine ever, or never.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from 'Open House of Butterflies,' 1960. Click image for more.

To rush these rhythms or force friendship to comply to a specific fantasy, Emerson gently admonishes, would be an assault on the relationship:

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fiber of the human heart. The laws of friendship are great, austere, and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness.

In a sentiment that John Steinbeck would come to echo a century later in the context of love, writing to his teenage son that “the main thing is not to hurry [for] nothing good gets away,” Emerson argues that to be impatient in friendship is to mistrust the depth of the relationship and to deny the resilience and immutability of the friend’s affections:

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are a tough husk in which a delicate organization is protected from premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the naturalangsamkeit [German for the slowness of natural development] which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in duration, in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.

[...]

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from 'I’ll Be You and You Be Me' by Ruth Krauss, 1954. Click image for more.

And yet how rare it is to have a friend with whom one can be earnest to the point of absoluteness — who doesn’t require the veneer of self-consciousness and the shield of cynicism. Echoing Aristotle’s assertion that a friend holds a mirror up to us and thus brings us closer to ourselves, Emerson outlines the two key elements of a true, solid, soul-fortifying friendship:

There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign, that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness, with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, but diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, thatbeing permitted to speak truth as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins… We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.

[...]

The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed, and we so pure, that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune.

In another stroke of exalting prescience, Emerson bemoans — more than a century before our networking-preoccupied, self-promotional society — the superficiality and transactional ego-stroking that defines most human interactions, the vacant “chat of markets or reading-rooms.” (We all know the people who bestow upon professional relations and marginal acquaintances the misplaced label “friend” in an act of name-dropping or self-inflation — an injustice against true friendship.) Emerson laments:

To most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age, is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility, — requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being in all its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

[...]

I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances.

He returns to the greatest gift of true friendship:

[Friendship] is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution… We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man’s life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.

Illustration by Carla Torres from 'Larry and Friends.' Click image for more.

But Emerson argues, as I too have long believed, that the fruits of friendship are best harvested in one-on-one companionship rather than larger social situations. He explores the inverse correlation between the quality of connection and conversation and the number of friends involved:

I find this law of one to one, peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals at once merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

Returning to the building blocks of true friendship, Emerson points out that the most valuable friendships don’t spring from a filter bubble of like-mindedness but, rather, from the perfect osmosis of shared values and just enough discrepancy in tastes and sensibilities to broaden our horizons:

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party… I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend, than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it… Let it be an alliance of two large formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them.

(A phrase like “a mush of concession” reminds you of just how daring a writer Emerson was in his era, and how original he remains in ours.)

Illustration by Ben Shecter from 'The Hating Book' by Charlotte Zolotow, 1953. Click image for more.

He returns once more to the organic formation of true friendship and the reverie with which its natural rhythms should be beheld, the room we should give a friend to breathe and grow and just be:

Friendship demands a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. [Your friend] has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor, if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend’s buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground…

Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit.

To entrust a friend with the burden of our own wholeness, he suggests, is not only to place an unbearable weight on the relationship but also to relinquish vital personal responsibility:

We must be our own before we can be another’s… The least defect of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire relation. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.

Illustration by André François from 'Little Boy Brown,' a vintage ode to friendship by Isobel Harris. Click image for more.

Emerson ends by considering the dual art of what it takes to have a friend and to be one:

Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue, is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

A patience with the rhythms of relationships and an attentive sensitivity to their dynamics, he argues, will eventually elevate the true friendships over the false ones, over those of unequal investment of affections and effort, which will invariably fall away to reveal the immutable:

It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away… But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer… The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.

Complement this with Andrew Sullivan’s beautiful reflections on friendship. Emerson’s Essays and Lectures includes equally insightful meditations on love, heroism, intellect, prudence, self-reliance, and more. The entire volume is available, and highly recommended, as a free download.

Errancy.com: Blog By Committed Christian Who Does Not Believe The Bible Infallible

August 25, 2014, 7:49 am

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"Mistakes In Scripture: When The Bible Gets The Bible Wrong"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/05/mistakes-in-scripture-when-bible-gets.html

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Alan: The presumption is that the Bible is "better" if it is literally true.

I believe that literal truth usually diminishes mythic and transcendant truth which is best approximated by poetic figures of speech and  good stories.

Generally speaking...

The literal truth is for accountants and lawyers.

The Truth is for lovers and artists.

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About Errancy.com

http://www.errancy.com/about/

Christian faith and belief in biblical inerrancy don’t have to go together. The idea of a non-Christian inerrantist doesn’t make much sense, but there’s nothing at all contradictory in the idea of a Christian errantist. In fact, that’s what I am.

As I write this in early 2009, I’m coming up to ten years as a Christian. During those ten years, I’ve spent a significant amount of time and energy studying the Bible, and my understanding of it has changed.

Early on, I would (cautiously) have endorsed biblical inerrancy. I knew that there were some passages in the Bible that were difficult to explain, but had seen many claims of error answered and thought it reasonable to believe that all claims of error resulted from problems in understanding the Bible that could ultimately be resolved.

I no longer hold to such a high view of Scripture. I believe that the Bible is generally reliable, more so in some areas than in others. I believe that although the Bible is fallible, it is still authoritative, both on matters of theology and of morality, and (with the proper caveats applied) to some matters of history too. I even believe that the Bible is in some sense inspired and, properly treated, a sound basis for Christian faith and living. But I no longer treat it as a magic book.

My aim in creating this website is to better think through this view of the Bible, and to provide an opportunity for others to join me in doing so. Unlike many websites about biblical errancy, this one is not here to debunk Christianity or cause crises of faith. Neither is it here to promote biblical inerrancy by showing that all claims of biblical error can be answered. Instead, it is here to help people (including myself) to decide what to make of the Bible, and to reconsider their (and my) views in the light of the evidence concerning its reliability.

My hope is that this website will develop into a reasonably comprehensive database of alleged biblical errors. That means that I’m not going to limit myself to posting errors that I think hold up under scrutiny; within reason, anything that looks like an error belongs here, even if there’s a perfectly good inerrantist explanation of it. When I post an apparent error, I’ll present it sympathetically, writing from the perspective of someone who believes that the claim of error stands up, but please don’t mistake this for me writing in my own voice; I just want to be able to cover as much ground as a detailed study of biblical inerrancy requires.

For the sake of balance, I’ll also include here possible responses to each claim of error. Visitors will have the opportunity to post responses using the comments system, and I hope that many will do so, but I’ll also post responses myself in the “Inerrantist Responses” section that follows each claimed error. Again, please don’t mistake this for me writing in my own voice; I just want to present both sides of the argument.

Where I want to express my own view on a claimed error, I’ll do so in the comments section along with everyone else, under the username “Errancy”.

Included on the site is a ratings system. This allows users to rate claims of error on a scale of 1 to 10 depending on how much of a problem they think they pose for biblical inerrancy. A rating of 1 suggests that there’s no case to answer; a rating of 10 suggests that it’s case closed for inerrancy. The raw numbers don’t matter so much, it’s the relative numbers that are interesting. As long as inerrantist users don’t rate every claimed error as a 1, and errantist users don’t rate every claimed error as a 10, then the ratings will indicate which claims of errors people generally find most convincing. Average ratings are shown on each alleged error, and a full list is on the overall ratings page.

Do feel free to use the ratings system even if you don’t have any comments to add; the more votes that are cast, the better. If you haven’t yet done so, then please register and get rating!

"How To Talk About Climate Change"

August 25, 2014, 7:49 am

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Not long ago, my newspaper informed me that glaciers in the western Antarctic, undermined by the warmer seas of a hotter world, were collapsing, and their disappearance “now appears to be unstoppable.” The melting of these great ice sheets would make seas rise by at least four feet—ultimately, possibly 12—more than enough to flood cities from New York to Tokyo to Mumbai. Because I am interested in science, I read the two journal articles that had inspired the story. How much time do we have, I wondered, before catastrophe hits?

One study, in Geophysical Research Letters, provided no guidance; the authors concluded only that the disappearing glaciers would “significantly contribute to sea level rise in decades to centuries to come.” But the other, in Science, offered more-precise estimates: during the next century, the oceans will surge by as much as a quarter of a millimeter a year. By 2100, that is, the calamity in Antarctica will have driven up sea levels by almost an inch. The process would get a bit faster, the researchers emphasized, “within centuries.”

How is one supposed to respond to this kind of news? On the one hand, the transformation of the Antarctic seems like an unfathomable disaster. On the other hand, the disaster will never affect me or anyone I know; nor, very probably, will it trouble my grandchildren. How much consideration do I owe the people it will affect, my 40-times-great-grandchildren, who, many climate researchers believe, will still be confronted by rising temperatures and seas? Americans don’t even save for their own retirement! How can we worry about such distant, hypothetical beings?

In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel cubicles, we sit cozy as kings atop 300 years of flaming carbon.

Worse, confronting climate change requires swearing off something that has been an extraordinary boon to humankind: cheap energy from fossil fuels. In the 3,600 years between 1800B.C. and 1800 A.D., the economic historian Gregory Clark has calculated, there was “no sign of any improvement in material conditions” in Europe and Asia. Then came the Industrial Revolution. Driven by the explosive energy of coal, oil, and natural gas, it inaugurated an unprecedented three-century wave of prosperity. Artificial lighting, air-conditioning, and automobiles, all powered by fossil fuels, swaddle us in our giddy modernity. In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel cubicles, we sit cozy as kings atop 300 years of flaming carbon.

In the best of times, this problem—given its apocalyptic stakes, bewildering scale, and vast potential cost—would be difficult to resolve. But we are not in the best of times. We are in a time of legislative paralysis. In an important step, the Obama administration announced in June its decision to cut power-plant emissions 30 percent by 2030. Otherwise, this country has seen strikingly little political action on climate change, despite three decades of increasingly high-pitched chatter by scientists, activists, economists, pundits, and legislators.
The chatter itself, I would argue, has done its share to stall progress. Rhetorical overreach, moral miscalculation, shouting at cross-purposes: this toxic blend is particularly evident when activists, who want to scare Americans into taking action, come up against economists, with their cool calculations of acceptable costs. Eco-advocates insist that only the radical transformation of society—the old order demolished, foundation to roof—can fend off the worst consequences of climate change. Economists argue for adapting to the most-likely consequences; cheerleaders for industrial capitalism, they propose quite different, much milder policies, and are ready to let nature take a bigger hit in the short and long terms alike. Both envelop themselves in the mantle of Science, emitting a fug of charts and graphs. (Actually, every side in the debate, including the minority who deny that humans can affect the climate at all, claims the backing of Science.)

Bewildered and battered by the back-and-forth, the citizenry sits, for the most part, on its hands. For all the hot air expended on the subject, we still don’t know how to talk about climate change.

As an issue, climate change was unlucky: when nonspecialists first became aware of it, in the 1990s, environmental attitudes had already become tribal political markers. As the Yale historian Paul Sabin makes clear in The Bet, it wasn’t always this way. The votes for the 1970 Clean Air Act, for example, were 374–1 in the House, 73–0 in the Senate. Sabin’s book takes off from a single event: a bet between the ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich and the economist Julian Simon a decade later. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which decried humankind’s rising numbers, was a foundational text in the environmental movement. Simon’s Ultimate Resource (1981) was its antimatter equivalent: a celebration of population growth, it awakened opposition to the same movement.

Ehrlich was moderately liberal in his politics but unrestrained in his rhetoric. The second sentence of The Population Bomb promised that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve to death within two decades, no matter what “crash programs” the world launched to feed them. A year later, Ehrlich gave even odds that “England will not exist in the year 2000.” In 1974, he told Congress that “a billion or more people” could starve in the 1980s “at the latest.” When the predictions didn’t pan out, he attacked his critics as “incompetent” and “ignorant,” “morons” and “idiots.”

Simon, who died in 1998, argued that “human resourcefulness and enterprise” will extricate us from our ecological dilemma. Moderately conservative in his politics, he was exuberantly uninhibited in his scorn for eco-alarmists. Humankind faces no serious environmental problems, he asserted. “All long-run trends point in exactly the opposite direction from the projections of the doomsayers.” (All? Really?) “There is no convincing economic reason why these trends toward a better life should not continue indefinitely.” Relishing his role as a spoiler, he gave speeches while wearing red plastic devil horns. Unsurprisingly, he attracted disagreement, to which he responded with as much bluster as Ehrlich. Critics, motivated by “blatant intellectual dishonesty” and indifference to the poor, were “corrupt,” their ideas “ignorant and wrongheaded.”

In 1980, the two men wagered $1,000 on the prices of five metals 10 years hence. If the prices rose, as Ehrlich predicted, it would imply that these resources were growing scarcer, as Homo sapiens plundered the planet. If the prices fell, this would be a sign that markets and human cleverness had made the metals relatively less scarce: progress was continuing. Prices dropped. Ehrlich paid up, insisting disingenuously that he had been “schnookered.”

Schnookered, no; unlucky, yes. In 2010, three Holy Cross economists simulated the bet for every decade from 1900 to 2007. Ehrlich would have won 61 percent of the time. The results, Sabin says, do not prove that these resources have grown scarcer. Rather, metal prices crashed after the First World War and spent most of a century struggling back to their 1918 levels. Ecological issues were almost irrelevant.

The bet demonstrated little about the environment but much about environmental politics. The American landscape first became a source of widespread anxiety at the beginning of the 20th century. Initially, the fretting came from conservatives, both the rural hunters who established the licensing system that brought back white-tailed deer from near-extinction and the Ivy League patricians who created the national parks. So ineradicable was the conservative taint that decades later, the left still scoffed at ecological issues as right-wing distractions. At the University of Michigan, the radical Students for a Democratic Society protested the first Earth Day, in 1970, as elitist flimflam meant to divert public attention from class struggle and the Vietnam War; the left-wing journalist I. F. Stone called the nationwide marches a “snow job.” By the 1980s, businesses had realized that environmental issues had a price tag. Increasingly, they balked. Reflexively, the anticorporate left pivoted; Earth Day, erstwhile snow job, became an opportunity to denounce capitalist greed.

Climate change is a perfect issue for symbolic battle, because it is as yet mostly invisible.

The result, as the Emory historian Patrick Allitt demonstrates in A Climate of Crisis, was a political back-and-forth that became ever less productive. Time and again, Allitt writes, activists and corporate executives railed against each other. Out of this clash emerged regulatory syntheses: rules for air, water, toxins. Often enough, businesspeople then discovered that following the new rules was less expensive than they had claimed it would be; environmentalists meanwhile found out that the problems were less dire than they had claimed.

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Progressives and Conservatives Agree: Single Payer Healthcare Is Inevitable

August 25, 2014, 7:58 am

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Obama's Preference For Single Payer Healthcare (Video Collage)

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/10/obamas-preference-for-single-payer.html

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Hoosiers For A Common Sense Health Plan
http://hchp.wordpress.com/

Progressives and Conservatives Agree: Single Payer Healthcare Is Inevitable

Posted on August 10, 2010 by hchp

“The new health care legislation is a step toward elimination, by slow strangulation, of private health insurance and establishment of government as the ‘single payer.’”  – George Will, in his weekly newspaper column,Sunday July 11, 2010

Everyone loves to pick on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and well they should.  This 2,000+ page contraption, this heap of handouts to the special interest lobbyists with a few shiny baubles thrown in to placate the common folk, was not only written by the for-profit health insurance industry but now will be implemented by former WellPoint/Anthem Vice President Liz Fowler who actually penned much of the law in her role as Max Baucus’ chief healthcare counsel for the Senate Finance Committee.  You don’t have to make this stuff up, as emptywheel reported on FireDogLake July 14, 2010, “Former WellPoint VP Liz Fowler to Implement Health Care Oversight”

But what about George Will’s fine whine that the insurance industry faces strangling regulation?  Robert Pear wrote in the New York Times on August 2 that the new law will lead to more regulation of the industry, and “the transition is full of risks and uncertainty for all involved.” If the Obama administration is going to “regulate the industry for the benefit of consumers,” he noted, then “they can’t help but destabilize or disrupt the existing market.”

Wall Street doesn’t like uncertainty.  It detests being destabilized.  Stock analysts are not missing out on this.  The brokerage firm Edward Jones “downgraded the ratings on the stocks of the three health insurers it covers – UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint and Aetna — to ‘sell’ from ‘hold’ late on Friday [7/30]. Those companies are the three largest U.S. health insurers.” (Reuters 8/2/10)

This new blow comes after legendary investor Warren Buffett pulled the plug on WellPoint and United Health, selling all Berkshire Hathaway’s holdings in the insurance giants during the first quarter of 2010 (“Buffett’s Berkshire Disposes Stake in UnitedHealth, WellPoint”)

Speaking in Virginia, former House Speaker and presumed presidential candidateNewt Gingrich said on May 14,

“The employer-based system will collapse because [the ACA] encourages businesses to drop health care coverage and incur the fine. When employees realize the high costs of the health care exchanges, they will demand a nationalized health care system.”

It only gets worse, or better, depending on your perspective.  According to Gingrich, the business community is going to lead the call for single payer Medicare for All.

And well they should.  Gingrich wasn’t making this up.  On May 6, CNN Moneyreleased documents showing that “many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government…  AT&T revealed that it spends $2.4 billion a year on coverage for its almost 300,000 active employees, a number that would fall to $600 million if AT&T stopped providing health care coverage and paid the penalty option.”

Is the Affordable Care Act unaffordable?  Isn’t it at least a step in the right direction?

Those questions can only be answered by considering whether the ACA ends up strengthening or weakening the health insurance corporations. Progressive critics of the bill point out that the new legislation hands over $350 billion in government subsidies to the private insurers while mandating consumers to buy the industry’s shoddy products.  That, combined with a lack of price controls means the ACA could prove to be a bonanza for the corporate stakeholders in the medical-industrial complex.

On the other hand, the changing marketplace is full of perils, even if the conservative icons quoted above are exaggerating them to stir up fear of Socialized Medicine (and maybe scare up some donations).

If we stand back and rest on our laurels, believing that the ACA will save us, then we are doomed. The industry lobbyists are working overtime to take the best parts of the bill and weaken them, while destroying any good that is in the bill (see Wendell Potter in the Huffington Post on July 27, Health Insurers Leaning on State Insurance Commissioners to “Reform” Reform).

“We believe that Medicare for All is inevitable in the United States.  It is up to all of us to determine when the inevitable becomes the reality.”

- Representatives Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), John Conyers (D-Mich.), and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), statement for Medicare’s birthday, July 29, 2010

If you’re not inclined to believe George and Newt, then how about Dennis, John, and Bernie:  “It is up to all of us to determine when the inevitable becomes the reality.”

The reality is that single payer, Medicare for All, is not inevitable, nor is there any guarantee the ACA won’t bankrupt us while enriching the corporations that lobbied for it.

It reminds me of a slogan we have in Indiana, “Healthcare Reform:  We’re Still For It, and We’re Not Done Yet!”

From California to Vermont, Medicare for All advocates are working for bills to create state single payer systems.  The grassroots are pushing up thru the disappointment of the Affordable Care Act.

Nationally, with the growing recognition that the health insurance giants stand as the greatest barrier to affordable healthcare for all, investors are beginning to see that this is not an industry socially responsible stockholders should be in (Huffington Post May 12, Napalm, Big Health Insurance, and Divestment).

I went to medical school to take care of sick people.  The insurance companies fulfill their fiduciary responsibility to their investors by finding ways not to pay for the care of the sick.  All their innovation and creativity go to this goal of not paying for care.  No other sector in our crazy healthcare system operates under this incentive.

It will take a mass movement, like those for women’s suffrage and civil rights.   It will take a divestment campaign like the one against apartheid in South Africa.  We must keep the pressure up, shine a light on their nefarious deeds, drive down their stock prices, and expose them for what they are: parasitic middlemen who add no value while sucking billions out of our economy.

“It is up to all of us to determine when the inevitable becomes the reality.”

Dick Cheney: "Invading Iraq Would Create A Quagmire" (Video)

August 25, 2014, 8:26 am

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Mad man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I

***

"For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president’s men. If convicted, they’ll have plenty of time to mull over their sins." War historian Martin van Creveld is the only non-U.S. author whose writings are obligatory reading by America's Officer Corps."

Israeli War Historian, Martin van Creveld
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/06/israeli-war-historian-martin-van.html

Invisible Consequences: Unemployment Insurance Prevented 1.4 Million Foreclosures

August 25, 2014, 8:41 am

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Unemployment insurance prevented 1.4 million foreclosures. 

Matt O'Brien

Those Who Are Against-Everything-But-Perfection Are Maximally Imperfect

August 25, 2014, 8:56 am

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"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice.  The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization.  We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal.  Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good.  The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”  

"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton

More Merton Quotes

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/04/merton-best-imposed-as-norm-becomes.html

***

"Is Perfectionism A Curse? Paul Ryan Tells The Truth"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/09/paul-ryan-tells-truth.html

Although Many Employer Health Plans Are Skimpier, They're Gobbling Workers' Wages

August 25, 2014, 9:09 am

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Obamacare: Government does it cheaper and better.

***

"Progressives and Conservatives Agree: Single Payer Healthcare Is Inevitable"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/08/progressives-and-conservatives-agree.html

***

Many employers will offer skimpy plans despite ACA. "Many thought such skimpy coverage would be history once the health law was fully implemented this year. Instead, 16 percent of large employers in a survey released Wednesday by the National Business Group on Health said they will offer in 2015 these so-called skinny plans along with at least one insurance option that does qualify under ACA standards. The results weren't entirely unexpected. Last year, it became clear that ACA regulations would allow skinny plans and even make them attractive for some employers. But this survey gives one of the first looks at how many companies followed through." Jay Hancock in Kaiser Health News and NPR.

Meanwhile, health premiums have gobbled up workers' wages. "To lasso runaway costs, companies are increasingly asking workers to pay more of the costs of their medical care. Most large U.S. employers are offering 'consumer-directed health plans' next year that typically have high deductibles. They’ll be the only option at one third of the big companies that answered questions for a new survey by the National Business Group on Health....Employers are gravitating to plans that combine high deductibles with health savings accounts often funded by both company and worker contributions. Workers use the accounts to pay for doctor visits or other care until they reach a deductible of often $1,500 or more, when the health plan starts paying." John Tozzi in Bloomberg Businessweek.

"Obamacare: Where's The Train Wreck?"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/01/wheres-train-wreck.html

The Republican Civil War Over Taxes Is Coming

August 25, 2014, 9:12 am

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This might sound crazy, but what if we tried cutting taxes for the rich? 

By Matt O'Brien August 22, 2014

A specter is haunting the Republican Party—the specter of Ronald Reagan's tax cuts.

For the last 35 years, the GOP has monomaniacally focused on lowering taxes on the rich. It's one part economic theory, and another party political mythology. The theory is that letting high-earners keep more of their money gives them the incentive to make and invest even more, which creates growth that benefits everybody. And the political mythology is that this is what made Reagan so popular. (Never mind that then-Fed chair Paul Volcker's rate cuts, more than Reagan's tax cuts, led to "Morning in America"). That's why, no matter what the problem, Republicans insist that government is not the solution; tax cuts for the wealthy are.

There's only one hitch: none of this is really true. Sure, incentives matter. But so do other things. Indeed, the economy grew faster after Bill Clinton raised the top rate to 39.6 percent than it did when Reagan cut it to 28 percent. Not only that, but, adjusted for inflation, stagnant median wages the past 25 years show that tax cuts for the rich have not, in fact, trickled down. So it's no surprise that "supply-side economics" hasn't been a political winner since the 1980s. Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, and no, that's not because they haven't promised deep enough tax cuts. Mitt Romney, you might remember, ran on bringing the top marginal rate down to the same sacrosanct level it was when Reagan left office.

It's time, some Republicans think, for the Party to confront the reality that it's not 1980 anymore. For one, there isn't as much bang for the tax-cutting buck when you bring rates from 40 to 25 percent as there was when Reagan brought them from 70 to 28 percent. For another, cutting the federal income tax doesn't help the 40 percent or so of households that don't pay it. And, finally, you can't blithely assume that growth will eventually reach the middle class when it hasn't for decades. In other words, we have different problems today that demand different solutions than 35 years ago.

What kind of policies? Well, reform conservatives—or "reformicons"—want what they call family-friendly tax reform. Now, this still involves cutting the top marginal rate from 39.6 to 35 percent. But rather than trying to cut it even further, they want to expand the Child Tax Credit by $2,500 instead. The idea, as former Treasury official Robert Stein explains, is to help middle-class parents and try to get them to have more kids. This, though, has its own problems. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center calculates that Senator Mike Lee's version of this plan would increase deficits by $2.4 trillion over 10 years. The way it structures the Child Tax Credit means it'd be worth more to upper-middle class parents than to poor ones. And it would still help the top 1 percent—and, particularly, the top 0.1 percent—more than anybody else.

But, as you can see below, it wouldn't help the top 1 percent nearly as much as Romney's plan would have. In a way, it's the policy that dare not speak its name: compassionate conservatism.

Indeed, George W. Bush's formula of tax cuts for the rich and tax credits for the rest is the only one that's been able to get Republicans elected the past 20 years.

But the supply-side Jacobins are having none of it. "I'm a classic growth conservative," Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told John McCormack of the Weekly Standard, who "believe[s] that the best way to help families, the best way to help the economy is to reduce rates across the board" rather than expanding the Child Tax Credit instead. Daniel Mitchell of the Cato Institute downplays the idea that giving middle-class families more money even helps them, and says Republicans should keep focusing on cutting tax rates. And Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal thinks that the Lee plan is just a "capitulation to the left's inequality and middle-class talking points" that ignores the timeless lessons of, you guessed it, Ronald Reagan.

Now, for the most part, the reformicons and the supply-siders are polite to each other. But don't mistake this agreeableness for agreement. Aside from monetary policy, the biggest schism between the reformicons and the rest of the Republicans is over taxes. That's because if the Party stays with its tax-cuts-for-the-rich-solve-all-problems philosophy, there won't be much money left for anything else. They won't be able to change their message. So the biggest question for 2016 is which side the GOP's presidential candidate chooses in this debate.

In other words, whether the Republicans will keep running on Reagan, or something else.

Matt O'Brien is a reporter for Wonkblog covering economic affairs. He was previously a senior associate editor at The Atlantic.

Schools Avoid New Nutrition Rules By Dropping Federal Funding

August 25, 2014, 9:20 am

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Michelle Obama chooses a la carte items at a Virginia school

"Nope, Don't Need No Nanny State Here!"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/12/nope-dont-need-no-nanny-state-here.html

Burger Queens 

The Reign of White, Conservative Ignorance

As superintendent of the Fort Thomas Independent School District in northern Kentucky, Gene Kirchner oversees 3,000 students who buy about 1,400 cafeteria lunches each day. At least they used to. Since federal school lunch nutrition requirements championed by Michelle Obama began phasing in over the past two years, Kirchner has noticed kids don’t buy lunch so much anymore. Last school year, Fort Thomas sold about 30,000 fewer meals than the year before. The problem is particularly acute at the high school level. “They’re just skipping lunch and stopping by the minimart on the way home instead,” Kirchner says. “And when they do buy a lunch, they go by the trash can and throw half of it away.”

The National School Lunch Program, which is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, reimburses public schools 30¢ for each paid lunch and $3 for each free one. To get the money, schools must abide by the government’s new limits on calories (750 to 850 for high schools, roughly the amount in a deli sandwich and a bag of chips); saturated fat (less than 10 percent of total calories, so there go the chips); and, starting this year, sodium (1,420 milligrams, reduced to 740 mg by 2022—or about a dill pickle’s worth). Salisbury steak, pizza, and chicken nuggets are giving way to lean meats, whole grains, vegetables, and fruit.

In July, Fort Thomas dropped out of the program. Kirchner estimates doing so will cost his district about $200,000 in federal funding. But he says his lunch budget will be deeper in the red if he has to serve food students refuse to buy. “With the new guidelines coming into effect on snacks and a la carte items this fall, we’d be losing money this upcoming year,” he says.

STORY: Nutrition Advice From the Other CIA

When the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was passed in 2010 as part of Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign, advocates praised it for attempting to combat childhood obesity. “We’ve seen the connection between what our kids eat and how well they perform in school,” President Obama said when he signed it into law. The USDA set a series of increasingly strict rules to be introduced over 10 years, starting in 2012. “I currently have one lunch entree that meets the a la carte requirements: grilled chicken breast on a whole-grain bun,” says Julia Bauscher, director of nutrition services for Louisville’s public schools and president of the national School Nutrition Association (SNA). “But I can’t serve condiments with it. How many kids are going to eat grilled chicken with absolutely nothing on it?”

Not many, it turns out. Nationwide, students are buying about 1 million fewer lunches a day than two years ago, according to the SNA. The USDA says about 150 districts have dropped out of the program since the rules went into effect, mostly in affluent communities that don’t depend on federal funds and where few students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. “We’ll be giving up $150,000 in federal money,” says Kevin Larsen, president of the board of education for Colorado’s Douglas County School District, near Denver, which left the program because the new rules would mean removing the popular and profitable Subway franchises the schools own and operate. The district will still provide free lunches for the 10 percent of its students who need them. “We’ve got the resources to cover that,” Larsen says. “That’s truly a drop in the saltshaker to us.”

The SNA was a major supporter of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, but it’s now urging the government to backtrack on some rules. The USDA suspended the requirement that bread products contain 100 percent whole grains after cafeteria workers complained that whole-wheat pasta turns to mush when cooked in bulk. But the agency hasn’t yielded on the sodium or calorie restrictions. “USDA is continuing to help schools by showing flexibility in the rules where appropriate,” says spokesman Cullen Schwarz. “But with one-third of our kids overweight or obese … rolling back basic standards is not a responsible option.”

STORY: Coke Confronts Its Big Fat Problem

The USDA estimates 90 percent of participating schools have met the new guidelines. Bauscher in Louisville says that’s because many have no choice—67 percent of her students qualify for free or subsidized lunch. “I get over $30 million in federal money,” she says. “I can’t just give that up.” Donna Martin, school nutrition director of Georgia’s Burke County School District, says the protests over the new rules are overblown. “Whenever you change something, the kids complain, ‘We’re not eating this!’ ” she says. “But they get over it. You just have to give them time.”

STORY: Poor Nutrition Holds Back China’s Rural Kids

The bottom line: About 150 school districts have left the federal school lunch program to avoid new restrictions on calories, salt, and fat.

Suddath is a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek.

---

Remembrance: Fr. Gabriel DesHarnais, Assistant Pastor, St. Matthew's Episcopal Church

August 25, 2014, 11:43 am

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Gabriel as a young man

***

Gabriel as I knew him

Dear Janet,

Gabriel and his twin brother, Gaston -- French Canadians by birth -- were Catholic priests.

Gabriel left the Catholic priesthood to marry a nun named Mary whose life/mission was so intertwined with Gabe's that they were customarily referred to as an indivisible union - "Gabe and Mary" or "Mary and Gabe."

In subsequent years, Gabe became an Episcopal priest and later served as assistant pastor at St. Matthew's Church in downtown Hillsborough. http://www.stmatthewshillsborough.org/stmatts/AboutUs/ClergyandStaff.aspx

Gabriel was linchpin to the creation of St. Matthew's prison ministry, a redemptive mission that went "all the way to the roots."

Eight "redeemed" prisoners -- all of them from heavy-duty, violent/murderous backgrounds - spoke with naked emotion at Gabe's memorial service.

One "ex-con" remembered Gabriel as his "Jesus," describing him as unstintingly generous and eagerly sacrificial.

***

I remember the event that "launched" the documentary film which tells the story of this extraordinary "work of mercy." 

At the movie's debut, both ex-cons featured in the documentary gave transfixing testimony.

Here is an online video clip from "Against The Tide: A Film About Re-Entering Life." http://www.imdb.com/video/withoutabox/vi330210329

Love

Alan

PS Gabe and Mary kindly gave me a DVD of "Against The Tide." Let's watch it on your Thanksgiving visit!

***

Gabriel DesHarnais Remembrance

I met Gabriel 16 year's ago in my Monday night Spanish class.

He and a small group of Orange County adults wanted to learn Spanish in order to welcome the surge of Hispanic farm workers fast becoming linchpins to North Carolina tobacco farms, dairy farms, chicken and pig farms. 

I cannot think of Gabriel without seeing his smile. 

I see it more clearly than I recall a single facial feature of any other person.

Gabriel was wide open, constantly cheerful, always looking to serve, eager to say "Well... Come!"

In Hinduism, there is a custom called darshan in which teachers and their disciples gather mostly for the joy of being together.

From the disciple's point of view. a friend once described darshan as "getting a spiritual sun tan."

People wanted to be in Gabriel's presence, wanted to see his sunny smile, wanted to be reminded of the undying light - so bright in Gabriel's life that it was always visible, always giving us hope to pass it on.

I have one more reflection.

A few days ago, I read an article about Charles Bukowski, an author I find rather unlikable but whose frequent insight I value.

Bukowski said: "If you want to find out who your friends are, get a prison sentence."

It was Gabriel's grace that he sought out people with prison sentences, that he became, providentially, a friend to the friendless.

If, as I imagine, we find our way to the heavenly mansion by virtue of our ability to make harmony with the peace therein, Gabriel's journey will, I trust, always be deeper in and farther up.

"Turnitin" And The Debate Over Anti-Plagiarism Software

August 25, 2014, 9:09 pm

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by CORY TURNER

August 25, 2014

Audio File: http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/08/25/340112848/turnitin-and-the-high-tech-plagiarism-debate

Students are heading back to campus. And when they finish writing that first paper of the year, a growing number will have to do something their parents never did: run their work through anti-plagiarism software.

One company behind it is called Turnitin. And the database it uses to screen for potential plagiarism is big. Really, really big.

Chris Harrick, Turnitin's vice president of marketing, describes it this way: "Automatically, that paper gets checked against about 45 billion web pages; 110 million content items from publishers, scientific journals, et cetera; and 400 million student papers to provide an originality report."

Harrick says the company is now used by more than half of all higher ed institutions in the U.S. and by roughly a quarter of all high schools. Turnitin isn't the only company doing this, but it is the biggest.

How It Works

Here's how it works: A student submits a paper through Turnitin's website. The company's algorithms then compare strings of text against its massive database. And, as Harrick said, it doesn't just check the Internet. Most of the papers, once they've been run through the system and scrubbed of student names, actually stay in the system.

i

Screen shot from a Turnitin report

Turnitin

When all the comparing is done, the teacher gets a report that gives the percentage of the paper that matched other sources. The report never says: This is plagiarism. Just: This is similar.

One complaint is that the filter turns up false positives. The report color-codes suspect passages and gives links to the material they matched, so a teacher can decide for herself. Instead of the old way ...

"I would basically have to do Google searches," says Jennifer Schroeder, an associate professor of biology at Millikin University, in Decatur, Ill. She has embraced Turnitin in a big way — and not just to save time.

"I saw a lot of cases of students that just simply didn't know what to do," Schroeder says. They didn't understand the rules of proper citation.

Accident Vs. Intent

Tom Dee is a professor in the graduate school of education at Stanford. A few years ago, he co-authored a study exploring why students plagiarize.

"It's not necessarily bad intent," Dee says. "It's just bad practices."

When Dee's team gave one group of students an early tutorial on what is and is not plagiarism, it saw "a substantial reduction in plagiarism," he says.

The fact that anti-plagiarism software can't tell the difference between accidental and intentional plagiarism is just one reason that Rebecca Moore Howard, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University, is not a fan. Here's another reason: "The use of a plagiarism-detecting service implicitly positions teachers and students in an adversarial position," Howard says.

Howard argues it's policing without probable cause. "The students have to prove themselves innocent before their work can be read and graded," she says.

"These tools are like a hammer or a scalpel," cautions Dee. "Whether using them is helpful or hurtful depends on the care and discretion with which they're used."

LA Johnson/ NPR

Hammer Or A Scalpel

For Schroeder, the software is a scalpel. She asks her students to use Turnitin on rough drafts, so they can learn from their mistakes. No penalty. No trip to the dean's office.

But Emma Zaballos, a senior at American University, says she had a professor who used Turnitin like a hammer against suspected plagiarists. He made a point of telling her class stories of past offenders he had reported to the academic board and worked to have expelled.

Plenty of plagiarism is intentional (though it's hard to know how much cheating is really happening). Many of the matches Turnitin finds come from paper mills, cheat sites and its own paper database. And, as the technology improves, some students intent on cheating will find ways to outsmart it. But with the company adding 300,000 student papers a day, intentional plagiarism is riskier than ever.

So Zaballos has some advice for students who find themselves in a cold sweat, deadline approaching but no paper to show for it.

"A zero will ruin your GPA," she says, "but it won't get you thrown out of school."

LA Johnson/NPR

And you can quote her on that.

7 Biggest Earthquakes in California History: Napa's Not Even Close. Cost Of Prediction

August 25, 2014, 9:13 pm

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A California winemaker assesses damage to wine stocks following an earthquake in storied Napa Valley on Sunday, Aug. 24, 2014.

***

A West Coast Earthquake Warning System Would Cost $38 Million With $16 Million Annual Operational Costs

http://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343203813/in-latest-calif-earthquake-shake-alert-tests-its-legs

***

The state has been home to many of the highest magnitude shake-ups in the contiguous United States.

Jessica Morrison

for National Geographic

PUBLISHED AUGUST 25, 2014

The earthquake that rattled Napa Valley wine country early Sunday morning clocked in at a magnitude 6.0. That was big enough to be felt across the Bay Area and to damage buildings, spark fires, and cause injuries in this populated region.

Sunday's shake-up was one of the largest to strike northern California since the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta quake in 1989. But quakes of magnitude 6.0 and greater are not uncommon historically along California's network of faults, notably the San Andreas.But it was far from the biggest in a state that was home to five of the ten biggest quakes on record in the lower 48 U.S. states. (Related: "What Caused California's Napa Valley Earthquake? Faults Explained.")

The buildup and periodic release of seismic pressure along the northern San Andreas fault in the 1800s produced a series of magnitude 6.0 or greater earthquakes, leading up to the famous 1906 San Francisco magnitude 7.8 earthquake, says John Rundle, a geophysicist at the University of California, Davis. And that pressure is building again, seismologists think. "History will not necessarily repeat itself, but we might see something similar," he added.

As for the biggest quakes in recorded history, size estimates vary. Over the past century, the ways that earthquake magnitude and intensity are recorded have changed with improving seismic measurements. The well-known Richter scale was devised in the 1930s to describe the relative sizes of earthquakes in southern California. In the 1970s, themoment magnitude scale was introduced to describe the physical size of an earthquake, and is preferred for very large earthquakes.

Here are the biggest earthquakes in California's recorded history, according to magnitude estimates from the U.S Geological Survey.

1. Fort Tejon; January 9, 1857
Magnitude 7.9

Often compared to the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Fort Tejon quake actually caused larger average ground movements than the more famous 1906 quake. Horizontal displacement along the fault was as much as 29.5 feet (9 meters). The rupture, which shook the San Andreas fault north of Los Angeles, set off tremors felt throughout northern and southern California and inland as far east as Las Vegas. One person died when an adobe house collapsed.

2. Owens Valley; March 26, 1872
Magnitude 7.4

Twenty-seven people were killed when a row of houses collapsed in Lone Pine, east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, in the early morning. Both dip-slip and strike-slip faulting, referring to vertical and horizontal movements of the Earth's crust, occurred on the Owens Valley fault, moving the ground horizontally as much as 23 feet (seven meters) and vertically an average of three feet (one meter). The earthquake was felt throughout California and into Nevada. It stopped clocks in San Diego and caused an estimated $250,000 of property loss, a large amount of money at the time.

3. Imperial Valley; February 24, 1892
Magnitude 7.8

Ground fissures and rock slides, crumbled adobe and plaster, and some 155 tremors followed this quake that struck near Baja, California. Both dip-slip and strike-slip movement probably produced the earthquake on the Laguna Salada fault. Aftershocks continued every few days through April 1892. But the earthquake affected a largely uninhabited region, and no deaths were reported.

The "Great Quake" of 1906 left the city of San Francisco severely damaged. It remains one of the most significant earthquakes in U.S. history.

PHOTOGRAPH BY BUYENLARGE, GETTY

4. San Francisco; April 18, 1906
Magnitude 7.8

Striking early in the morning, the "Great Quake" of 1906 left more than 80 percent of the city damaged from the quake itself and from fires. With the quake's epicenter near San Francisco, tremors from the shaking caused by rupture and horizontal displacement of the San Andreas fault were felt from southern Oregon to southern California and inland to central Nevada. Although some estimates place the number of deaths from the earthquake and fires at around 700, the number is now thought to be at least 3,000.

The 1906 earthquake remains one of the most significant earthquakes in U.S. history. Scientists study the quake as an example of seismic cycles in the Bay Area in which a huge quake, of magnitude 7.0 or more, is preceded by a series of smaller earthquakes.

5. West of Eureka; January 31, 1922
Magnitude 7.3

This offshore quake caused by the Mendocino fault off the coast of northern California was felt from Eugene, Oregon, to San Francisco. In 1992, a series of earthquakes greater than magnitude 6.5 struck over an 18-hour period in the same region. In 2010, another magnitude 6.5 offshore earthquake shook coastal Eureka, breaking windows and snapping power lines.

A predawn earthquake near Tehachapi, California, on July 21, 1952, killed 12 people and injured dozens more.

PHOTOGRAPH BY AP

6. Kern County; July 21, 1952
Magnitude 7.3

The largest temblor in the lower 48 United States since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, this quake caused property damage estimated at $60 million and claimed 12 lives. The shock was felt over most of California, in western Arizona, and in western Nevada. Nearly 200 aftershocks of magnitude greater than 4.0 were recorded through September 1952.

7. Landers; June 28, 1992
Magnitude 7.3

This early morning quake with an epicenter near the southern California town of Landers shifted the ground horizontally as much as 18 feet (5.5 meters) and vertically as much as 5.9 feet (1.8 meters). Three people died and more than 400 were injured. The shaking was felt throughout southern California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah, as far north as Idaho, east to New Mexico and Colorado.

Although the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake didn't make it into the U.S. Geological Survey's top 7 biggest California earthquakes, it is perhaps the best remembered today since it occurred during the 1989 World Series, caused 63 deaths and more than 3,000 injuries.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVE BARTRUFF, CORBIS

RELATED

— "What Caused California's Napa Valley Earthquake? Quakes Explained"

— "Earthquake Map Reveals Higher Risks for Much of the U.S."

— "Bizarre Earthquake Lights Finally Explained"

— "Scientists Seek Foolproof Signal to Predict Earthquakes"

Transnational Corporations Have NO Allegiance To The U.S. Zippo, Niente, Zilch

August 25, 2014, 9:23 pm

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Cutting the corporate tax would make other problems grow. "The abolitionists ask: Why not give up on the fiction that we can adequately and efficiently tax companies and instead tax their shareholders at higher income-tax rates? But as imperfect as the corporate tax may be, the end of it would create all kinds of problems and disadvantages....The corporate tax is an important balancing mechanism in an era of great inequality....Another reason abolishion is a bad idea: If you think we’ve got tax avoidance problems now — and if you don’t, you’re not paying attention — we’d have a much bigger problem with a zero tax rate on incorporated businesses." Jared Bernstein in The New York Times.

***

Alan: Big Business has brought penury on the working class by sequestering ever more wealth for itself.

The next phase of self-aggrandizement is to re-incorporate overseas to avoid U.S. taxes.

Will the right-wing emerge from coma or continue to applaud its oppressors?

"Plutocracy Triumphant"

Cartoon Collection

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/05/plutocracy-triumphant.html

***
Burger King Plots Canadian Invasion to Save His Faltering Kingdom

Fast food doesn’t sell like it once did so the burger chain is contemplating the takeover of Tim Horton’s—not for their donuts but for their lighter tax burden.

Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson put it, but a lack of it may be the last refuge of corporate executives who have run out of ideas on how to improve their business.

In recent months, we’ve seen a rash of “inversions” where an American company buys a company based in another jurisdiction with a lower corporate tax rate and swaps its American passport for a foreign one for tax purposes. Voila, higher profits!

Now Burger King, the iconic fast-food chain long based in Miami, may be joining the rush. The company is in talks to purchase Tim Horton’s, Canada’s ubiquitous coffee-and-donuts chain. “If completed,” the New York Times reports, “the deal would mean Burger King’s corporate headquarters would move to Canada, raising the specter of yet another American company switching its national citizenship to lower its tax bill.” (The statutory tax rate in the U.S. is 35 percent compared to 15 percent for Canada.)

Burger King, the perpetual Mets to McDonald’s Yankees, has recovered some of its mojo in recent years. Led by 33-year-old CEO Daniel Schwartz and several wunderkind executives who were lionized in a recent Bloomberg Businessweekcover story , Burger King has sold off the corporate jet, adopted other efficiency measures, and pumped up lagging growth overseas. They sold off most of the restaurants the company owned to franchisees, thus freeing up capital and putting the financial onus for revamping tired outlets on others. Lastly, it invested heavily to re-engineer one of its core products, the less-fatteningSatisfries.

This re-engineering couldn’t change the business model Burger King is playing with: low wages and low-quality, low-priced food is getting beat by “fast casual” like Chipotle and Five Guys that offer noticeably better food at slightly higher prices. Efforts to offer more healthful fare have largely fallen flat. Earlier this month, most of Burger King’s North American outlets dropped Satisfries. Meanwhile, several states and cities have jacked up the minimum wage.

Stagnant sales have followed, declining 1 percent last year. Same-store sales growth was just 0.4 percent in North America this summer—positive but below the rate of inflation. During the same period, 22 Burger King stores closed.

When sales are stagnating, costs are rising (wages, beef, and dairy), and your physical footprint is shrinking, the only way to maintain profits is to reduce expenses. In general, MBAs are agnostic about how cost cutting can be achieved. If Burger King’s executives realize they can save a few cents on every dollar of profits by relocating the corporate headquarters so that it is in another tax jurisdiction, then they will go shopping for an inversion. Which is why Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley have been pitching inversions as a strategy.

Low wages and low-quality, low-priced food is getting beat by “fast casual” like Chipotle and Five Guys that offer noticeably better food at slightly higher prices.

Sure, there may be valid business reasons for a combination. Tim Horton’s has a huge breakfast business, which Burger King lacks. But it’s easy to suspect that tax avoidance is a driving factor. (Burger King isn’t pursuing a U.S. donut chain like Dunkin’ Donuts.) The fact that hedge fund sharpie William Ackman, who is backing Canada-based Valeant’s effort to acquire Allergan—another potential giant inversion—is one of Burger King’s biggest shareholders doesn’t help matters. 

Burger King could easily ignore the outcry. Thus far, U.S. companies that have engaged in tax inversions have generally avoided any serious political or market consequences. Congress won’t do anything about it, although President Obama has instructed Treasury to examine its options. Investors seemed to agree. As this chart shows, Burger King’s stock jumped nearly 20 percent on the news.

Here’s the rub. It’s one thing for a fairly anonymous company that sells pumps or valves or industrial products to other businesses to renounce its citizenship for the sake of saving a few bucks on taxes. It’s quite another when you’re an iconic American consumer-facing company that relies on fickle American consumers for a large share of its business. 

No, throngs of American consumers won’t stop going to Burger King just because its formal corporate address moves from Miami to Oakville, Ontario. But a few might, and in a business of razor-thin margins, that makes a difference.

More significantly, companies like Burger King spend hundreds of millions of dollars—and lots of time—trying to encourage consumers to think about them in favorable ways, from quirky add campaigns (remember the subservient chicken) to trying to make fries more healthy. By the same token, any measure that can detract from or damage your public image can be very harmful—especially when you’re already losing market, stomach, and wallet share to competitors. It’s hard to think of any entity that has burnished its brand by moving to Canada. 

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