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Christian Conservatism: Social Engagement Based On Resentment

September 26, 2014, 6:06 am
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Introspection time for evangelicals

Michael Gerson, September 25, 2014

Christian conservatives are often the subject of study by academics, who seem to find their culture as foreign as that of Borneo tribesmen. And this is a particularly interesting time for brave social scientists to put on their pith helmets and head to Wheaton, Ill., Colorado Springs or unexplored regions of the South. They will find a community under external and internal cultural stress.
It is fair to say that some cultural views traditionally held by evangelicals are in retreat. Whatever the (likely dim) future of political libertarianism, moral libertarianism has been on the rise. This is perhaps the natural outworking of an enlightenment political philosophy that puts individual rights at its center. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy described this view as the “right to define one’s own concept of existence.”
It was not, as far as I can tell, really the spirit of any age. But many evangelicals believe it was, subscribing to the myth of a lost American Eden. There has certainly been a cultural shift in the United States on religion and public life. But it has largely been from congenial contradiction to less-sympathetic contradiction. There is more criticism of the (thin) veneer of Protestant spirituality in public places. There is also a growing belief that individual rights need to be protected, not only from the state but also from religious institutions that don’t share public values. In the extreme case, this means that nuns who don’t want to participate in the provision of contraceptives are interfering with conceptual self-definition.Whatever else traditional religious views may entail, they involve a belief that existence comes pre-defined. Purpose is discovered, not exerted. And scripture and institutions — a community of believers extended back in time — are essential to that discovery. This is not, to put it mildly, the spirit of the age.
The reaction of evangelicals to these trends can (and does) vary widely. They can accommodate to the prevailing culture, as many evangelicals have already done on issues such as contraception, divorce and the role of women (without talking much about it). Or they can try to fight for their political and cultural place at the table, as other interest groups do.
A recent study, “Sowing the Seeds of Discord,” by a group of scholars associated with the Public Religion Research Institute, describes a mix of reactions. There is some evidence that younger evangelicals are more socially accepting of social “outgroups,” including gays and lesbians. A higher proportion of evangelical millennials (more than 40 percent) support gay marriage than do evangelicals overall. But there is no evidence this shift is changing political allegiances. White evangelicals remain reliably and monolithically Republican.
My interpretation: Even as some evangelical cultural views change along with broader norms, the Democratic Party is still viewed as a hostile instrument of secularization — a perception reinforced by the health-care mandates of the Obama era.
But the most interesting finding of the study concerns where disaffection with conservative politics is developing among evangelicals. On a number of questions — Should “under God” be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance? Does religion solve more social problems than it creates? — evangelical millennials expressed more negative views on the social role of religion according to an unexpected pattern. Those who lack friends and ties outside evangelicalism are more critical of traditional evangelical views. “Millennials,” according to the study, “react more negatively and see less value in religious socialization when they have more homogenous networks .” The authors believe this small but significant shift represents a rejection of “the embattled, political subculture of their parents.”
My interpretation: A desperate, angry, apocalyptic tone of social engagement alienates many people, including some of the children of those who practice it.
Conservative evangelicals, like other religious people before them, are responding to a culture that does not always share their values. But a purely reactive model of politics is not attractive, even internally. And the problem is not only strategic but theological. A Christian vision of social engagement that is defined by resentment for lost social position and a scramble for group advantage is not particularly Christian.
There is an alternative: A commitment to civility, rooted in respect for universal human dignity. A passion for the common good, defined by inclusion of the most vulnerable. A belief in institutional religious freedom and pluralism for the benefit of everyone, including non-Christian faiths.
This type of religious engagement will not always prevail, but it would, at least, be distinctly religious.

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Reluctantly, Krauthammer Approves Obama's "Workable" ISIS Strategy

September 26, 2014, 6:13 am
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U.S. President Barack Obama meets with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi during the United Nations General Assembly in New York September 24, 2014. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)


Charles Krauthammer
By Charles Krauthammer September 25, 2014 
Late, hesitant and reluctant as he is, President Obama has begun effecting a workable strategy against the Islamic State. True, he’s been driven there bypublic opinion. Does anyone imagine that without the broadcast beheadings we’d be doing anything more than pinprick strikes within Iraq? If Obama can remain steady through future fluctuations in public opinion, his strategy might succeed.
But success will not be what he’s articulating publicly. The strategy will not destroy the Islamic State. It’s more containment-plus: Expel the Islamic State from Iraq, contain it in Syria. Because you can’t win from the air. In Iraq, we have potential ground allies. In Syria, we don’t.
Charles Krauthammer writes a weekly political column that runs on Fridays. View Archive
The order of battle in Iraq is straightforward. The Kurds will fight, but not far beyond their own territory. A vigorous air campaign could help them recover territory lost to the Islamic State and perhaps a bit beyond. But they won’t be anyone’s expeditionary force.
From the Shiites in Iraq we should expect little. U.S. advisers embedded with a few highly trained Iraqi special forces could make some progress. But we cannot count on the corrupt and demoralized regular Shiite-dominated military.
Our key potential allies are the Sunni tribes. We will have to induce them to change allegiances a second time, joining us again, as they did during the2007-2008 surge, against the jihadists.
Having abandoned them in 2011, we won’t find this easy. But it is necessary. One good sign is the creation of a Sunni national guard, a descendant of the Sons of Iraq who, fighting with us, expelled al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) during the Anbar Awakening. Only they could push the Islamic State out of Iraq. And surely only they could hold the territory regained.
Syria is another matter. Under the current strategy, the cancer will remain. The air power there is unsupported by ground troops. Nor is anyone in Obama’s “broad coalition” going to contribute any.
Perhaps Turkey will one day. But Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not just refusing to join the air campaign. He has denied us use of his air bases.
As for what’s left of the Free Syrian Army, Obama has finally come around to training and arming it. But very late and very little. The administration admits it won’t be able to field any trained forces for a year. And even then only about 5,000. The Islamic State is already approximately 30,000 strong and growing.
Not that air power is useless. It can degrade and disrupt. If applied systematically enough it can damage the entrenched, expanding, secure and self-financing Islamic State, turning it back to more of a fugitive guerrilla force constantly on the run.
What kind of strategy is that? A compressed and more aggressive form of the George Kennan strategy of Soviet containment. Stop them, squeeze them and ultimately they will be defeated by their own contradictions. Ashistorian David Motadel points out, jihadist regimes stretching back two centuries have been undone by their own primitivism, barbarism, brutality — and the intense hostility thus engendered among those they rule.
That’s what just eight years ago created the Anbar Awakening that expelled AQI. Mahdi rule in Sudan in the 1880s and ’90s was no more successful. As Motadel notes, half the population died of disease, starvation or violence — and that was before the British annihilation of the Mahdi forces at Omdurman.
Or to put it in a contemporary Middle East context, this kind of long-term combination of rollback and containment is what has carried the Israelis successfully through seven decades of terrorism arising at different times from different places proclaiming different ideologies. There is no one final stroke that ends it all. The Israelis engage, enjoy a respite, then re-engage.
With a bitter irony born of ceaseless attacks, the Israelis call it “mowing the lawn.” They know a finality may come, but alas not in their time. They accept it, and go on living.
Obama was right and candid to say this war he’s renewed will take years. This struggle is generational. This is not Sudan 1898. There is no Omdurman that defeats jihadism for much of a century.
Today jihadism is global, its religious and financial institutions ubiquitous and its roots deeply sunk in a world religion of more than a billion people. We are on a path — long, difficult, sober, undoubtedly painful — of long-term, low-intensity rollback/containment.
Containment-plus. It’s the best of our available strategies. Obama must now demonstrate the steel to carry it through.

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Emma Watson's Gender Equality Speech At U.N.

September 26, 2014, 6:33 am
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The Blotch on Eric Holder’s Record: Wall Street Accountability

September 26, 2014, 6:45 am
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Eric Holder
Eric Himpton Holder Jr.
Wikipedia
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Excerpt: "“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” Holder said."
The Blotch on Eric Holder’s Record: Wall Street Accountability
George Zornick, The Nation
Attorney General Eric Holder will announce Thursday he is stepping down from the post he has held for nearly six years—making him one of the longest-serving attorneys general in American history.
Holder was the first African-American to hold the position and will surely be remembered as a trailblazer for civil rights. From sentencing reform to combating voter suppression to investigating some of the country’s most violent police forces, Holder made huge progressive strides. It’s no coincidence Holder called the civil rights icon Representative John Lewis on Tuesday before his resignation became public. White House officials are already pushing out narratives about Holder’s “historic legacy of civil rights enforcement and restoring fairness to the criminal justice system.”
But there is one area where Holder falls woefully short: prosecution of Wall Street firms and executives. He came into office just months after widespread fraud and malfeasance in the financial sector brought the American economy to its knees, and yet no executive has faced criminal prosecution. Beyond the crash, Holder established a disturbing pattern of allowing large financial institutions escape culpability.
“His record is really badly blemished by his nearly overwhelming failure to hold corporate criminals accountable,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “Five years later, we can say he did almost nothing to hold the perpetrators of the crisis accountable.”
Advocates for financial accountability often point to the Savings and Loan crisis as a counter-example: despite much smaller-scale fraud, 1,000 bankers were convicted in federal prosecutions and many went to prison.
Holder has tried to explain his lack of prosecutions relating to the 2008 collapse by claiming the cases were too hard to prove—but many experts disagree. The Sarbanes Oxley Act, for example, would provide a straightforward template: it makes it a crime for executives to sign inaccurate financial statements, and there is ample evidence that Wall Street CEOs were aware of the toxicity of the sub-prime mortgages sold by their firms.
Late last year, Judge Jed Rakoff of the Federal District Court of Manhattan wrote an essay in The New York Review of Books bluntly titled, “The Financial Crisis: Why Have No High-Level Executives Been Prosecuted?” He suggested a doctrine of “willful blindness” at Holder’s Justice Department and said “the department’s claim that proving intent in the financial crisis is particularly difficult may strike some as doubtful.” A federal judge will generally not proclaim people guilty outside the courtroom, but Rakoff came close with that statement. The fact he wrote the essay at all stunned many observers.
In recent years, the Justice Department has obtained some large-dollar settlements with Wall Street firms like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. But the headline-grabbing amounts end up being significantly less after factoring in tax accounting and credits for actions already being undertaken by the bank. There is also a lack of transparency around how these penalties are being paid to aggrieved consumers.
Holder himself suggested in Senate testimony last year that some firms really are too big to jail:
“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” Holder said.
He later walked that back in subsequent testimony, saying “Let me be very, very, very clear. Banks are not too big to jail.” But the data suggest otherwise.
Under Holder, the Justice Department has greatly expanded the use of deferred prosecution agreements with large corporations, from financial firms to agricultural giants. These are arrangements that take the place of criminal prosecutions—instead, the offending corporation admits wrongdoing, pays a fine (that is usually a small fraction of yearly profits), and agrees to remedy internal problems that lead to the crime. In return, the government agrees not to prosecute.
Public Citizen did an analysis of these agreements at the Department of Justice and found that Holder made them a routine affair:
There isn’t much transparency over which bad actors are awarded deferred prosecution, and which are not, and advocates are alarmed by the precedent.
“[Holder] ensconced the de facto ‘too-big-to-fail’ doctrine by which large financial institutions were effectively immunized form criminal prosecution simply by virtue of being so big,” said Weissman.
This was brought into sharp relief when Justice allowed HSBC to enter deferred prosecution for wide-ranging multibillion-dollar money laundering at the bank on behalf of large illegal drug operations and also terrorist groups.
“The facts are unbelievable. Epic-level money laundering on behalf of narco-traffickers, un-denied by the corporation,” Weissman said. “And no criminal prosecution, and no responsibility for the executives.”
It did seem that Justice became more responsive to these criticisms after Obama was re-elected, and Weissman hopes that continues after Holder. “With a clean slate, Obama should apply a litmus test: a new nominee has to clearly show their willingness to hold accountable the institutions and individuals on Wall Street who devastated Main Street,” he said. “And they have to be crystal clear that they are abandoning the too-big-to-jail doctrine.”
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Ferguson, Missouri: Holder's biggest legacy? "For someone who has been such a punching bag while in office, Attorney General Eric Holder is leaving on a more successful note: his response to the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, that may serve as a capstone for a civil rights legacy that could outlast the controversies of his tenure. Holder’s visit to Ferguson last month after the police shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager — and the Justice Department’s promise to conduct a wide-ranging investigation of all of the Ferguson Police Department’s practices — will help solidify what allies see as his lasting legacy: a commitment to equal justice for all Americans." David Nather in Politico.

He provided legal support for secrecy, surveillance and war. That's just pragmatism. "While Holder’s decisions disappointed civil libertarians of all stripes, they were not obviously wrong. Indeed, they were mostly right. 'In times of war, the law falls silent,' said Cicero. This is something of an exaggeration in the United States today, but it remains true that the rights of people considered a threat to a country tend to diminish as the magnitude of that threat increases, for good reason. Holder, like his Bush administration predecessors Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft, adopted a pragmatic rather than rigidly legalistic position on civil rights, human rights, and the laws of war. That pragmatism will be his legacy." Eric Posner in Slate.


"Bad Black People." Why Bill O'Reilly Is Wrong Even When He's Right"

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Open Carry Mania: Good Christians Pack Pistols In Public

September 26, 2014, 7:00 am
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Black people don't open carry.

Why?

Imagine this black guy getting out of his car with a holstered gun, 
then turning back to get his license...
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/sc-trooper-of-year-faces-20-years-for.html

Here's what happened when black man, John Crawford, "open carried" a toy gun.
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/video-john-crawford-didnt-aim-toy-gun.html

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Paul Krugman: The Ungodly Rich Make Out Like Bandits, Then Flaunt Their Booty

September 26, 2014, 7:09 am
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The show-off society. "Giant yachts and enormous houses have made a comeback....And there’s no mystery about what happened to the good-old days of elite restraint. Just follow the money. Extreme income inequality and low taxes at the top are back. For example, in 1955 the 400 highest-earning Americans paid more than half their incomes in federal taxes, but these days that figure is less than a fifth. And the return of lightly taxed great wealth has, inevitably, brought a return to Gilded Age ostentation. Is there any chance that moral exhortations, appeals to set a better example, might induce the wealthy to stop showing off so much? No." Paul Krugman in The New York Times.


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"The Rich Aren't Just Grabbing A Bigger Piece Of The Income Pie. They're Taking All Of It"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-rich-arent-just-grabbing-bigger.html

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"Pope Francis Links"

"Plutocracy Triumphant"
Cartoon Compendium


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"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"





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The Universal Failure Of For-Profit Colleges Is Emblematic Of Capitalism's Decline

September 26, 2014, 7:12 am
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Ever More Corporate Welfare

The public investment in for-profit colleges isn't paying off. "For-profit colleges can’t get no respect, at least not from employers. Which suggests that maybe they should be getting less generous taxpayer subsidies, too.... it turns out that dropout rates aren’t the only reason this sector’s default rates are so high. The lucky few students who actually complete their degrees have serious trouble getting jobs, too....These findings, like others suggesting that for-profit college graduates have higher unemployment rates, should give pause not just to students considering attending such schools but to policymakers and taxpayers more broadly." Catherine Rampell in The Washington Post



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Scottish Proverb: Do Not Judge By Appearances

September 26, 2014, 7:25 am
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Youth Should Be A Time For Fruitful Mistakes.

September 26, 2014, 8:45 am
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And so it is that "the bourgeoisie" is born.


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"Liberal Democracy Is Living Off Borrowed Moral Capital," Christopher Lasch

September 26, 2014, 11:23 am
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Excerpt from Lasch's "The Revolt Of The Elites"
"Liberal democracy has lived off the borrowed capital of moral and religious traditions antedating the rise of liberalism... Democracy has to stand for something more demanding than enlightened self-interest, openness and toleration." 

"The Revolt Of The Elites And The Betrayal Of Democracy"
Christopher Lasch
Freely available online
Alan: The chief champions of American consumerism are "conservatives," often "Christian""conservatives.

Possessed by unshakable belief in authority, it does not occur to "conservatives" that The Enemy is within the gates and has always been within the gates; that it paid for the gates in order to protect itself! 

"Follow the money" and you will find conservative fingerprints all over "the destruction of family life."

Yes. Liberals share the blame.

However, "conservatives" approve the entire Economic System whose substructure and superstructure degrade the family synergistically.

On the other side of the aisle, the degratory outcomes wrought by liberals focus particular policies rather than lickspittle adulation of Cowboy Capitalism, lock, stock and barrel.

Conservative acclaim for the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision is an egregious case in point, demonstrating The Right Wing's total (and totalitarian) surrender to The Big Money  increasingly sequestered by America's plutocratic class. 


"The Rich Aren't Just Grabbing A Bigger Slice Of The Income Pie. 
They're Taking It All"

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"Plutocracy Triumphant"
Cartoon Compendium

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"Politics And Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"

In the end, the destruction wrought by conservatives is contextual-and-comprehensive whereas the destruction wrought by liberals concentrates the specific content of patchwork policies while consistently disapproving the overarching (and now unimpeded) corrosion of Cowboy Capitalism.

"Algorithms And The Anti-Christ"

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Behind it all is "conservatism's" impotent insistence on resurrecting a Golden Age that never was and never will be.

Liberals, on the other hand, partially redeem themselves by nourishing communitarian connectedness which is very family friendly as I know from my own liberal neighborhood in a small southern town. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough,_North_Carolina


Conservatives are constitutionally unable to recognize that T.R.'s "invisible government" is comprised of thieving plutocrats who, if a profit can made, will sacrifice any value on the altar of Mammon. It's what these self-professed "conservatives" have always done. And it's what they're doing now - more corrosively than ever. 

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For conservatives, the championship of "Impossibly Pure Principles" is everything. These squeaky clean "patriots" are, literally, "to true to be good." 

In fact, they are systematically antagonistic to the achievement of limited, imperfect goods that are within our grasp.

"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

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The Seven Deadly Sins
Americans generally -- and "conservative" Americans in particular -- are blind to (and blinded by) the fact that unregulated Capitalism promotes The Seven Deadly Sins better than Beelzebub himself.
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-seven-deadly-sins-create-your-own.html






America's Deepening Confusion Of Sex And Violence
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/06/americas-deepening-confusion-of-sex-and.html






"American Conservatives And Oppositional-Defiant Disorder"

Republican presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, the living American who has served longest as a White House senior staff adviser, observed: “The Republican philosophy might be summarized thus: To hell with principle; what matters is power, and that we have it, and that they do not.” “Where the Right Went Wrong" 

The Daily Show Asks A Real Hostage Negotiator How To Handle The GOP (Video)

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/10/watch-daily-show-ask-real-hostage.html


"The Reign of Morons Is Here," Charles P. Pierce, The Atlantic

"A Southerner Explains Tea Party Radicalism: The Civil War Is Not Over"


"The Republican Party Is A Satanic Cult"




"The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success - is our national disease." 
William James

Thomas Merton was once asked to write a chapter for a book entitled "Secrets of Success."  He replied: "If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again.  If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this:  Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing:  success."














Alan: I hold that "common sense" is overvalued and that it is more important to have uncommon sense.
Two illustrations come immediately to mind:
"Love your enemies. Do good to those who persecute you." 
"The last shall be first and the first last."




Alan: I think Lasch misinterprets the essence of bigotry.


"Bigotry in the main has always been the pervading omnipotence of those who do not care crushing out those who (do) care in darkness and blood." 
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/12/chesterton-quotations.html


















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Bird Droppings Led To U.S. Possession Of Newly Protected Pacific Islands

September 26, 2014, 11:28 am
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Red-footed Booby (Sula sula) sitting on nest in tree, Cooper Islands, US Line Islands, Palmyra Atoll.
This red-footed booby enjoys the view from its nest on Cooper Island in the Palmyra Atoll, part of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument.

A 19th-century quest for natural fertilizer, bird guano, led to the world's largest marine reserve.

Dan Vergano
National Geographic
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 26, 2014
Blame it on "guano mania." A craze for natural fertilizer made from bird droppings spurred the U.S. to take possession of a group of remote Pacific islands in the 19th century, and now those islands are home to the world's largest marine reserve.
The Guano Islands Act of 1856 made it possible. The United States long ago used the act to claim islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as territory, which means that today the U.S. government has the legal authority to protect waters up to 200 miles out from each island, an area known as the exclusive economic zone.On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced an expansion of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument to cover nearly 490,000 square miles, six times larger than its previous size. (See "U.S. Creates Largest Protected Area in the World, 3X Larger Than California.")
Map of Pacific Ocean showing U.S. island territories, and highlighting those islands claimed under the 1856 Guano Islands Act, as well as the 2014 Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument boundaries.
NG STAFF. SOURCE: U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE
For the Pacific Remote Islands preserve, this includes Palmyra, an atoll of about 50 low-lying islands that were first claimed for the United States in 1859 under the Guano Islands federal statute, which remains on the books. In all, the law claimed five Pacific Remote Island Areas now in the reserve, including the triangular Kingman Reef and tiny Baker, Howland, and Jarvis Islands.
Ultimately, the islands of the newly expanded monument owe their present-day good fortune to the digestive tracts of the abundant seabirds and bats that inhabited them a century and a half ago.
White Gold
Guano was fertilizer as good as it got at the time for fertilizing farmer's fields to feed a growing world population, before the development of synthetic ammonia fertilizers in the early part of the 20th century.
"American farmers first learned of the powerful fertilizing properties of guano in the mid-1840's," wrote legal historian Christina Duffy Posna of Columbia University Law School in New York in a 2005 essay on theAmerican "guano islands."
Peruvians had known about it for centuries and enjoyed a monopoly over the Chincha Islands, where birds had deposited tons of what came to be known as "white gold." Hundreds of thousands of seabirds can nest on a single island, and migrating birds overwinter on them as well. The tightly packed birds cover the small islands, which receive little rain and intense sunlight, perfect conditions for drying out guano deposits.
Video: Experience what it's like to live on a Peruvian guano island.
Once realized, guano's potency as a fertilizer led to "a perfect mania" for the stuff, according to the historian Richard Wines. By 1850, guano cost as much as $76 per pound ($167 per kilogram). That was about a quarter of the price of actual gold, which at the time was going for about $19 per ounce, or $300 a pound ($660 per kilogram).
U.S. entrepreneurs looking for alternatives to Peruvian guano sparred with British firms that were setting up guano mining on a Caribbean island, and in one 1854 international incident even faced off with the Venezuelan navy over a guano island.
In 1856, then-Senator William Henry Seward (who would later buy Alaska as Secretary of State under President Andrew Johnson) sponsored a bill empowering U.S. citizens to claim uninhabited islets holding guano deposits as territories of the United States. It was signed into law by President Franklin Pierce.
"There were lots of experiments in imperialism in the 19th century. Some of them we are still living with today," Posna says in an interview. "They were artful ways to take possession without incurring unwanted obligations."
The five Pacific Remote Island Areas were claimed soon after the Guano Islands Act was signed, and the islands were mined for guano until the end of the century. The atolls, it turned out, were a bust for guano. Palmyra received too much rain for the guano to dry out, and Kingman Reef seems to have been too low-lying, at only about six feet above sea level (two meters), so guano deposits occasionally got washed away. It was never mined.
The guano islands also figured in lawsuits for the rest of the century, Posna noted in her essay. They were territories "appertaining" to the United States, a kind of convenient legal limbo that bred confusion. Even though about 70 islands were eventually claimed in some way under the law, she noted, a 1931-1932 State Department review concluded that "no one knew what the Guano Act really did mean."
Monument Act
President George W. Bush's January 6, 2009, declaration that proclaimed the original Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, now expanded by Obama, notes only that the U.S. "owned or controlled" the islands. Wake Island, also part of the reserve, was acquired in the 1898 Spanish-American War.
"Saying we 'owned or controlled' the islands is likely a diplomatic way of not being too specific about how we possess these islands," says Posna in an interview. "Sovereignty, when you drill down to it, is always a very complicated matter, one we still disagree over today."
The true history of the guano islands' ownership is more complicated, she notes, as some of the islands were later mined by New Zealanders, abandoned, and then claimed by the Kingdom of Hawaii. When Hawaii was incorporated into the United States, the remote islands came along, some serving as landing strips for early trans-Pacific air travel.
"The islands of Jarvis, Howland, and Baker were also the location of notable bravery and sacrifice by a small number of voluntary Hawaiian colonists," notes the White House proclamation released on Thursday expanding the reserve. These colonists, called the Hui Panalā'au, occupied the islands from 1935 to 1942 "to help secure the U.S. territorial claim over the islands."

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"Americans Have No Idea How Bad Inequality Really Is," Harvard Business School Study

September 26, 2014, 11:35 am
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Protesters affiliated with Occupy Wall Street demonstrate for a variety of causes at Zuccotti Park.
Protesters affiliated with Occupy Wall Street demonstrate at Zuccotti Park on the second anniversary of the movement on Sept. 17, 2013, in New York City.
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
If Michael Norton’s research is to be believed, Americans don’t have the faintest clue how severe economic inequality has become—and if they only knew, they’d be appalled.  
Jordan WeissmannJORDAN WEISSMANN
Jordan Weissmann is Slate's senior business and economics correspondent.
Consider the Harvard Business School professor’s new study examining public opinion about executive compensation, co-authored with the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok’s Sorapop Kiatpongsan. In the 1960s, the typical corporate chieftain in the U.S. earned 20 times as much as the average employee. Today, depending on whose estimate you choose, he makes anywhere from 272 to 354 times as much. According to the AFL-CIO, the average CEO takes home more than $12 million, while the average worker makes about $34,000.
In their study, Norton and Kiatpongsan asked about 55,000 people around the globe, including 1,581 participants in the U.S., how much money they thought corporate CEOs made compared with unskilled factory workers. Then they asked how much more pay they thought CEOs should make. The median American guessed that executives out-earned factory workers roughly 30-to-1—exponentially lower than the highest actual estimate of 354-to-1. They believed the ideal ratio would be about 7-to-1.
“In sum, respondents underestimate actual pay gaps, and their ideal pay gaps are even further from reality than those underestimates,” the authors write.
Americans didn’t answer the survey much differently from participants in other countries. Australians believed that roughly 8-to-1 would be a good ratio; the French settled on about 7-to-1; and the Germans settled on around 6-to-1. In every country, the CEO pay-gap ratio was far greater than people assumed. And though they didn’t concur on precisely what would be fair, both conservatives and liberals around the world also concurred that the pay gap should be smaller. People agreed across income and education levels, as well as across age groups.
This is the second high-profile paper in which Norton has argued that Americans have a strikingly European notion of economic fairness. In 2011, he published a study with Duke University professor Dan Ariely that asked Americans how they believed wealth should be split up through society. It included two experiments. In the first, participants were shown three unlabeled pie charts: one of a totally equal wealth distribution; one of Sweden’s distribution, which is highly egalitarian; and one of the U.S. distribution, which is wildly skewed toward the rich. Then, the subjects were told to pick where they would like to live, assuming they would be randomly assigned to a spot on the economic ladder. With their imaginary fate up to chance, 92 percent of Americans opted for Sweden’s pie chart over the United States.
In the second experiment, Ariely and Norton asked participants to guess how wealth was distributed in the United States, and then to write how it would be divvied up in an ideal would (this, it seems, served as the template for Norton’s most recent study). Americans had little idea how concentrated wealth truly was. Subjects estimated that the top 20 percent of U.S. households owned about 59 percent of the country’s net worth, whereas in the real world, they owned about 84 percent of it. In their own private utopia, subjects said that the top quintile would claim just 32 percent of the wealth. In fact, the ideal looked strikingly like Sweden.
The Actual Wealth Distribution of the U.S., What Americans Think the Wealth Distribution Is, and What They’d Like It to Be
140926_$BOX_PercentWealthOwned
As in Norton’s more recent study, responses varied a bit by age, income, and political party, but there was overall agreement that America would be better off with a smaller wealth gap.
Estimated and Ideal Wealth Distribution by Income and Political Affiliation
140926_$BOX_EstimatedAndIdeal
“People drastically underestimate the current disparities in wealth and income in their societies,” Norton told me in an email, “and their ideals are more equal than their estimates, which are already more equal than the actual levels. Maybe most importantly, people from all walks of life—Democrats and Republicans, rich and poor, all over the world—have a large degree of consensus in their ideals: Everyone’s ideals are more equal than the way they think things are.” Theoretically, Americans aren’t exceptional in their views about distribution at all—they have a sense of fairness similar to that of Germans, French, and Australians, and most Americans would be offended if they actually knew the degree of economic inequality that exists in this country.
But let’s say all of America woke up one morning and could cite Thomas Pikettychapter and verse. Would today’s moderates suddenly demand Scandinavian tax rates and mass wealth redistribution? Would our politics become more progressive?
It’s one thing to talk about fairness in the abstract; it’s another to agree on policies that would address it. Gallup, for instance, has consistently found that a solid majority of Americans believe wealth should be distributed more evenly. But fewer support the idea of imposing heavy taxes on the rich in order to do it. The Pew Research Center reports that 45 percent of Republicans already believe thegovernment should at least do something to reduce inequality. But good luck finding GOP voters who are begging for a more robust welfare state.
Americans broadly support ideas that don’t require them to make an obvious personal sacrifice, like raising the minimum wage; they’re less happy to make tradeoffs. Europeans have long had social democracy baked into their politics; we have a libertarian streak. Maybe that would change if more Americans knew just how dire inequality has become. But I wouldn’t bank on it.
Jordan Weissmann is Slate's senior business and economics correspondent.

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How Do You Solve A Problem Like Denzel Washington?

September 26, 2014, 11:40 am
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Photo illustration by Ellie Skrzat. From left to right: Courtesy of TriStar Pictures/IMDB, Courtesy of 20th Century Fox & Regency Enterprises/IMDB, Courtesy of Touchstone Pictures/IMDB, Courtesy of Scott Garfield/Columbia Pictures, Courtesy of Clinica Estetico/TriStar Pictures/IMDB, Courtesy of Universal Pictures/IMDB, Courtesy of TriStar Pictures/IMDB
Denzel’s many roles.

Excerpt, Denzel's Wikipedia page:

Washington is a devout Christian,[34] and has considered becoming a preacher. He stated in 1999, "A part of me still says, 'Maybe, Denzel, you're supposed to preach. Maybe you're still compromising.' I've had an opportunity to play great men and, through their words, to preach. I take what talent I've been given seriously, and I want to use it for good."[35] In 1995, he donated $2.5 million to help build the new West Angeles Church of God in Christ facility in Los Angeles.[36][37] Washington says he reads the Bible daily.[38]


How did the best film actor of his generation end up playing badasses in action movies? 

Last week I sat in a lit, crowded multiplex theater near Times Square, awaiting a preview screening of The Equalizer, director Antoine Fuqua’s big-screen adaptation of the ’80s TV series. A few minutes before the movie began, a couple of twentysomethings next to me got into a discussion about what they were about to see. “So is this, like, a highly rated movie?” one asked. “I dunno,” his friend replied, then added: “It’s a new Denzel movie.”


Aisha HarrisAISHA HARRIS
Aisha Harris is a Slate staff writer.

What exactly is a “Denzel movie”? In 2014, it means the Hollywood star, now nearly 60, being a badass. Lots of gun-wielding, fistfights, killings; some scenes of torture; maybe an explosion here and there. The stakes are improbably high, and the star navigates them sporting his familiar, undeniably cool demeanor and trademark megawatt grin. You’ll find all of this inThe Equalizer, in which Denzel—and of course he is “Denzel” to all of us, not “Washington”—plays a former Special Forces soldier who comes out of retirement to save a young prostitute from a predictably tattoo-adorned Russian mob.
The formula is clearly working—he’s one of the few major Hollywood players of the ’80s and ’90s who’s still a consistently bankable star. He certainly doesn’t look likehe’s approaching his seventh glorious decade on Earth, and his box office clout has only grown: Out of his last 17 films, only three have made less than $50 million; most have made upward of $70 million.* Compare that to his career prior to 2000, where all but six of his films fell below $50 million.
But is this how we hope the greatest film actor of his generation spends his time? Denzel isn’t Will Smith, who has always been vocal about his desire to be the biggest movie star in the world. Denzel was that very rare contemporary Hollywood star, the kind who simultaneously graced Sexiest Man Alive lists (withlyrical shoutouts from admiring ladies) and Oscar ballots, even winning a couple in the process. Rarer still, he did it all while being black, carrying the baton handed to him by Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, running with it gracefully. And now, inThe Equalizer, he’s playing a half-baked variation of the “retired gunfighter” trope in a junky action movie. Denzel deserves better.
How did this happen? Training Day, directed by Fuqua, sowed the seeds for the badass Denzel we know of today, casting him against type as a dirty, rogue cop with virtually zero redeeming qualities. It wasn’t an action movie—really it was a gritty two-hander with indie DNA—but it resembled an action movie if you squinted at it just right. Denzel won an Oscar for Training Day; made the two modest dramas (John Q and Antwone Fisher) that both disappointed; and then went straight to a big-budget, all-action extravaganza. Man on Fire, directed by five-time Denzel collaborator Tony Scott in 2004, watered those seeds and kept them growing. He plays an ex-CIA officer, now a bodyguard, who seeks violent revenge on the kidnappers of his young charge, played by Dakota Fanning.


Since then, he’s played a lot of loners entangled in dangerous circumstances: In last year’s truly terrible action-comedy 2 Guns, Denzel plays a loner undercover DEA agent forced to team up with Mark Wahlberg to battle dirty military agents and the Mexican mob. In Safe House, he’s a former CIA agent turned fugitive on the run from rookie agent Ryan Reynolds in a dangerous chase for top-secret data.Unstoppable and The Taking of Pelham 123, both directed by the late Scott, involve rogue trains—the former a runaway containing dangerous chemicals, the latter taken hostage by an unabashedly campy John Travolta—that must be saved by everyman Denzel. In the post-apocalyptic The Book of Eli, he must save humanity.
The action movie genre, as entertaining as it can be, doesn’t play to Denzel’s strengths: vulnerability and droll humor. In all of these roles, Denzel’s range as an actor is distilled, his solemn side embraced to the point of near humorlessness. His characters are too preoccupied with trying to defuse catastrophic situations to reveal nuance—in Unstoppable, for instance, his personal issues at home (a strained relationship with his teen daughters) are clumsily inserted into the runaway train narrative via clunky heart-to-hearts with his younger co-star, Chris Pine. And while2 Guns is supposed to be an action-comedy, the script works way too hard—there’s no room for Denzel’s easy sense of humor.  
It’s not that these performances are bad, exactly. He hasn’t reached De Niro levels of awfulness just yet. He can still bring profound weight to these roles, as in Pelham 123, when Travolta’s villain wrangles Denzel’s NYC subway dispatcher into a confession of having taken a bribe over a contract, in front of all his colleagues:
Denzel embodies vulnerability and frustration in this scene, stuttering embarrassedly while Scott’s camera circles him intensely. But such moments, which could be found so often in his earlier films, are fewer and further between in his race-against-the-clock, life-or-death filmography of late. The Equalizer renders this most acutely and ridiculously—the violence is slickly choreographed and staged, with Denzel using martial arts and gun expertise to kill and fend off the Russian mob. A long, protracted climax is the adult-sized version of Home Alone, with Denzel setting up various booby traps in the home-improvement warehouse where he works to, among other things, hang and impale his adversaries. No time to be vulnerable when there’s impaling to be done.
And the movie even features the archetypal badass movie shot: Denzel, cool as ice, sauntering in slow motion toward the camera as, behind him, a shipyard is blown into fiery bits. The audience at my screening cheered when the fireball went up.
Denzel starred in action movies early in his career as well, of course. Some of them were really bad. But for every Fallen there was a He Got Game; for every Virtuosity aPhiladelphia. In the 1980s and 1990s, a “Denzel movie” wasn’t so clearly defined as it is now. Sometimes his characters were aggrieved, resentful men pushed to their breaking points, like Pfc. Peterson in A Soldier’s Story and Pvt. Silas Trip in the Civil War drama Glory (that horrific, perfect single tear may have single-handedly won him his first Oscar). He often worked with exciting, challenging directors: Spike Lee brought out the best of him in Mo’ Better Blues, He Got Game, and, of courseMalcolm X; Mira Nair made him a charming, complicated romantic lead in her thoughtful interracial love story Mississippi Masala; he returned to his early stage roots and tackled Shakespeare in Kenneth Branagh’s delightful Much Ado About Nothing.
One thing he never was, though, was boring. In Carl Franklin’s criminally underrated 1995 neo-noir film Devil in a Blue Dress, for instance, Denzel exquisitely embodied the weary, postwar male archetype that characterized such classics asOut of the Past and In a Lonely Place. Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, an out-of-work World War II vet who finds himself entangled in the seedy, racist underworld of Los Angeles politics and law enforcement, is an iconic Denzel role, one that makes the most of his gift with sharp, playful dialogue. (Franklin adapted the screenplay fromWalter Mosley’s novel.) He’s given moments to be utterly sexual (as when he “hits the spot”—till sunrise—of his friend’s girlfriend), vulnerable (the tense encounter when some angry whites notice one of their girlfriends chatting him up on the boardwalk), and passionate and angry (his edgy, fast-talking confrontation with a nightclub bouncer entangled in a murder).
Unlike early Robert De Niro or Al Pacino, Denzel rarely “disappears” into his roles; even when he’s taking on as larger-than-life a figure as Malcolm X, you’re always aware that you’re watching Denzel onscreen. His cadence is comfortingly familiar; that megawatt smile, often punctuating moments of intense moral seriousness, is instantly recognizable. In this way he was one of our few great actors who was also, effortlessly, a movie star.
Yet Denzel is now approaching the status of aging action hero: an elite but mildly pathetic club that includes Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. (I suppose we can be grateful he didn’t appear in The Expendables 3.) What’s especially weird about this career arc is that he came to the party late—Stallone and the rest of the club began and made their careers as action heroes and never really left, so it’s unsurprising that they would try to rekindle the fire well into old age. In this career left-turn Denzel most closely resembles Liam Neeson, another dramatic, invigorating performer who’s turned to a steady diet of action (anti-)heroes later in his career. As with Neeson’s, Denzel’s ride has been fun at times, but surely this is not the only side of him fans want to see from now on. (There’s even talk of The Equalizer serving as the introduction of a franchise, which would be a first for Denzel—who, despite repeating himself many, many times over the last few years, has never made a sequel.)
There may still be hope. It was only two years ago that Denzel played Whip Whitaker, the alcoholic, coke-snorting pilot who manages to save his doomed plane in an inebriated haze. The role in Robert Zemeckis’ Flight brought out a dark, new variation on the Denzel brand, with a character arc—from reckless drug abuser to pitiful, angry recluse to wearied, repentant soul—that served as a reminder of all the great things Denzel is capable of. When Whip confronts his colleague at the funeral of one of his dead crewmembers about keeping his intoxication during the flight a secret, the desperation to cover up his own lies is painfully palpable.
The actor took a pay cut to play Whip, which earned him his first Oscar nomination since Training Day. His reason for doing so? “The script,” he told Deadline around the time of the film’s release. “As simple as that. Good scripts are hard to find.” A charitable way to view Denzel’s turn to action in the past decade is not that he’s gotten complacent or bored; even an actor of his caliber is subject to the typecasting that drives the economics of Hollywood, and if all Denzel gets is scripts that have him playing foil to Russian mobs, Mexican mobs, and everything in between, what can he do?
But I hold out hope that someone, perhaps an up-and-coming director, will give Denzel the chance to be Denzel in a new way, for the last act of his career. Imagine what Ava DuVernay, for instance, of the beautifully wistful Middle of Nowhere and the upcoming MLK biopic Selma, could bring out of him, with the right script and supporting cast. Or Ryan Coogler, whose impressive debut was Fruitvale Station? Heck, I’d even be curious to see Lee Daniels tackle Denzel—his filmmaking may be uneven, but he gets great performances out of his stars.
Denzel could even stretch his wings and try out another full-on comedy role. The current Denzel type often reads as humorless, but in fact he’s a nimble comic actor: He was absolutely charming reinterpreting Cary Grant’s guardian angel in The Preacher’s Wife, the 1996 remake of The Bishop’s Wife; in the 1989 Caribbean-set mystery The Mighty Quinn he was easygoing and mischievous; in Much Ado About Nothing he warmed up the sometimes wan role of Don Pedro. Even when he’s serious, Denzel has shown flashes of humor: In The Equalizer, he kids a younger co-worker that he used to be one of Gladys Knight’s Pips, and breaks into a little dance, grinning irresistibly. Denzel has expressed an eagerness to return to comedy—a long-rumored plan to remake Uptown Saturday Night has been all but confirmed by him, though supposed co-star Will Smith seems to be slowing things down. To that I say: Big Will, don’t screw this up.



And of course Denzel has earned the right to make action movies if that’s what he’s happy doing. Sometimes, when he’s in that rare exceptional one, like Inside Man, it’s thrilling. But he could stand to take a page from his contemporary Jeff Bridges. Only a few years older than Denzel, Bridges has invigorated his career by dabbling in indies (Crazy Heart), prestige flicks (True Grit), and paycheck roles (Iron Man). He too has crafted a persona over the years, just like Denzel, but he’s found use in varied shades of those personas in different kinds of films. Denzel should do the same—he’s more than proven to us that he can be our hero. Now it’s time to remind us of the days when he was a complicated, interesting human being—albeit a much cooler, better-looking one than most.
*Correction, Sept. 25, 2014: This article originally misstated that Denzel Washington is approaching his sixth decade on Earth. He is approaching his seventh.
Aisha Harris is a Slate staff writer.
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Judge Gives Montana Teacher 31 Days In Rape Of 14 Year Old. Guess Judge's Politics

September 26, 2014, 9:53 pm
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STORY HIGHLIGHTS

  • Stacey Dean Rambold was originally given 31 days in prison
  • Rambold pleaded guilty to raping a student in his business class
  • The 14-year-old victim committed suicide before the case went to trial
  • The original month-long sentence drew intense criticism for the judge who set it










Montana teacher -- initially  given 31 days in rape of      student -- now gets 10 years
      By Joshua Berlinger and Jack Hannah, CNN
Billings, Montana (CNN) -- Fighting back tears, Auliea Hanlon sat on the witness stand in a Montana courtroom, just feet away from the man who pleaded guilty to raping her 14-year-old daughter -- and initially received a sentence that required him to serve just 31 days in prison.
"Here we are -- six, seven years later, still waiting for justice," she said, according to video of the sentencing from CNN affiliate KTVQ. "He knew what he was doing. He knew what was going to happen to her."
"And he didn't care."
Stacey Dean Rambold was accused of raping Cherice Moralez, a freshman in his business class at Billings Senior High, in 2007.
Moralez committed suicide in 2010, before the case went to trial and before she reached her 17th birthday.
The 55-year-old teacher pleaded guilty to sexual intercourse without consent; last year Judge G. Todd Baugh handed Rambold a 15-year sentence with all but 31 days suspended.
On Friday, Judge Randal Spaulding resentenced Rambold, this time to to 15 years in prison, with five years of that suspended, according to a prosecutor in the case. Rambold was then handcuffed in court and taken to Montana State Prison.
Rambold will get credit for the month he served behind bars earlier in the case, according to Yellowstone County prosecutor Scott Twito.
Montana teen loved pit bulls, poetry before rape and suicide
The first sentence
Rambold was first charged in 2008, after Moralez confided in a church group leader.
After the initial ruling, Baugh drew intense criticism for both the brief duration of his initial sentence and comments he made which some said placed blame on the victim.
Baugh said the victim looked older than her years and was "probably as much in control of the situation as was the defendant," according to the Montana attorney general's office.
Montana's Supreme Court ruled Baugh used an inapplicable statute to impose the original sentence and that a new judge would have to re-sentence Rambold.
State Supreme Court Justice Michael E. Wheat wrote in ruling in April that Baugh's comments reflected an improper bias and "cast serious doubt on the appearance of justice."
Baugh apologized for the comments but defended his initial sentence. Writing to a judicial review board, he said: "I am sorry I made those remarks. They focused on the victim when that aspect of the case should have been focused on the defendant."
Baugh told KTVQ in January that he would retire at the end of the year. The decision, he said, wasn't related to the Rambold controversy.
Texas judge under fire for rape sentence, implying victim was promiscuous
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Goodbye, Aral Sea

September 26, 2014, 10:07 pm
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140926_FT_AralSeaWreck
A picture taken August 4, 2005, shows rusty shipwrecks where the Aral Sea once was.
A Significant Part Of The Aral Sea Is Now "Completely Dried."

The Aral Sea—a huge part of it at least—is no more.
According to NASA, “for the first time in modern history, the eastern basin of the South Aral Sea has completely dried.”
Humans have been farming the Aral Sea area in Central Asia for centuries, and the lake has gone through spectacular boom-and-bust cycles in the past. But the lake hasn’t been this dry in a long, long time. Speaking with NASA, Philip Micklin, a geographer emeritus from Western Michigan University, said, “it is likely the first time it has completely dried in 600 years, since Medieval desiccation associated with diversion of Amu Darya to the Caspian Sea."
In the early 1900s, the Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake in the world. It has been dwindling since the 1960s, when a Soviet program of irrigated agriculture diverted the region’s major two rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, largely to grow lucrative but water-intensive cotton. Sound familiar, California?
Since the Soviet Union dissolved, things have only gotten worse. According to a report (PDF) by the United Nations Environment Programme, more than 60 million people now live in the Aral region, up fourfold since 1960. At the same time, inflows into the lake are down sharply, a phenomenon possibly linked to climate change. With the help of the World Bank, in 2005 Kazakhstan built a dam as a last-ditch effort to save part of the lake, with mixed results. According to NASA, this year’s final push toward record-low lake levels came as a result of low snowpack in the mountains that feed the lake.

140926_FT_AralSea
This isn’t a story of climate change, though. It’s a story of barreling ahead with the status quo amid a superfluity of stop signs. Rice and cotton fields are still widespread in the Aral region, though oil and gas exploration in the dry lakebed is becoming more common, too.
Without the steadying influence of the lake on local weather, winters in the surrounding region are now colder, and summers are hotter and drier. Blowing dust, laced with agricultural chemicals that have built up as a result of runoff into the lake over the years, has contaminated surrounding communities. This is not a place you’d want to live.
The tragedy of the Aral Sea should be a cautionary tale for people in the increasingly water-scarce American Southwest. After all, we have our own fair share of Aral Seas here, too. About 100 years ago, eager California farmers drained Lake Tulare, then the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. More recently,Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead, now at record-low levels, has lost its title as the biggest reservoir in the country. (As of February of this year, it had fallen all the way to fourth.) Lake Shasta, the largest reservoir in California, is starting this year’s rainy season at only 26 percent of total capacity.
There’s tenuous hope that California is finally starting to recognize the dire situation the mix of agriculture, urban growth, and climate fluctuations have put them in before it’s too late. California’s legislature recently passed a series of measures that will regulate groundwater pumping, the last Western state to do so. Last week, the governor signed the bill into law.
As for the desiccating Aral region, there’s nowhere to go from here but up.
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University.
Eric Holthaus is a meteorologist who writes about weather and climate for Slate’s Future Tens

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Fat Man Tattooed All Over With Fast Food Logos

September 26, 2014, 10:31 pm
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Pew Survey Exposes Chasm In "Parenting Culture": Religion Vs. Tolerance

September 27, 2014, 10:54 am
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An illustration of a family sitting on a couch.
According to a recent Pew Research study, "being responsible" is the most important lesson Americans want to impart on their children, followed by "hard work", "religious faith" and "helping others".
Dig a little deeper into the survey numbers, however, and the cultural rifts that run through US society become apparent.
According to the Pew, 59% of "consistently conservative" respondents rated religious faith as the most important value to teach children, versus 11% of "consistently liberal" respondents. Obedience (15%) is the second-most common choice among conservatives.
For liberals qualities like empathy for others (34%), curiosity (23%) and tolerance (22%) were considered most important.
"It's the culture war, in one Pew Research figure," tweets University of Virginia Prof W Bradford Wilcox.
The split was also apparent when subjects were asked whether values were "especially important" or not. Among conservatives, 81% said that this described religious faith, while only 26% of liberals felt this way.
As for tolerance, 88% of consistently liberal respondents said it was important, while only 41% of conservatives agreed.
There's also an interesting divergence in values when the responses are broken down by race. Blacks placed more importance on religious faith and obedience, for instance, while whites and Hispanics emphasised being responsible.
Pew interviewed 3,243 adults, 185 of whom were parents, in late April and May for the survey.
Parenting has become a major topic of conversation recently due to NFL star Adrian Peterson's indictment on child endangerment charges for disciplining one of his 4-year-old sons by hitting him with a stick.
Views on Mr Peterson's actions - and his resulting suspension from participation in the sport - have diverged in part based on different experiences and views on child-rearing. The Pew survey provides some interesting insight into the values that could lie behind these divided opinions.

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Federal Reserve Bank Investigator Carmen Segarra Fired For Holding Banks Responsible

September 27, 2014, 10:57 am
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The Secret Recordings of Carmen Segarra


SEP 26, 2014
An unprecedented look inside one of the most powerful, secretive institutions in the country. The NY Federal Reserve is supposed to monitor big banks. But when Carmen Segarra was hired, what she witnessed inside the Fed was so alarming that she got a tiny recorder and started secretly taping. ProPublica's print version.
Note: we released this episode early online, because we wanted it to be available when people heard the excerpt on Morning Edition.

  • PROLOGUE

    Ira introduces Carmen Segarra, a bank examiner for the Federal Reserve in New York who, in 2012, started secretly recording as she and her colleagues went about regulating one of the most powerful financial institutions in the country. This was during a time when the New York Fed was trying to become a stronger regulator, so that it wouldn't fail to miss another financial crisis like it did with the meltdown in 2008. As part of that effort to reform, the Fed had commissioned a highly confidential report, written by Columbia professor David Beim, that identified why the regulator failed in the years leading up to the crisis. Beim laid out specific recommendations for how the Fed could fix its problems. Carmen's recordings allow us to see if the Fed successfully heeded those recommendations more than two years later. What we hear is not reassuring.

  • ACT ONE

    ProPublica's Jake Bernstein tells the story of Carmen's first months at the New York Fed, and how she came to start recording. And we hear the story of how the Fed examiners respond to an unusual, questionable deal that Goldman Sachs did — a deal that the top Fed guy stationed inside Goldman calls "legal but shady."

  • ACT TWO

    We hear what the New York Fed and Goldman Sachs say about all this. We hear a Goldman Sachs supervisor tell Carmen Segarra how an examiner should talk and act to be successful at the Fed. And we hear what happens to Carmen when she does exactly what David Beim's confidential report told the Fed it needed to encourage its examiners to do in order to spot the next financial crisis.
    In the course of reporting our story with ProPublica, we sent lots of questions to the New York Fed and Goldman Sachs. We wanted to share those with you, along with the institutions' responses.
    Our questions to the New York Fed are here.
    The New York Fed responded with a statement and later this email.
    Our questions to Goldman Sachs are here.
    Goldman Sachs' response is here.
    And one last document that plays an important role in our story: theconfidential report Columbia professor David Beim wrote for the New York Fed in 2009, as it was trying to figure out why it failed to anticipate the financial crisis and what it should do to make sure it wouldn't fail to catch the next one.
    Here is a transcript of the full episode.

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"Why There Is So Much Bad Writing," Harvard Professor, Steven Pinker

September 27, 2014, 1:45 pm
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Steven Pinker: We Live In The Most Peaceful Time Ever.
(Bad thinking - reinforced by bad writing - creates the illusion that this is not true.)
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/harvard-prof-steven-pinker-on-slight.html

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Poor wording drains vast sums of money from the economy, writes Steven Pinker. 
Why is so much writing so bad? Why is it so hard to understand a government form, or an academic article or the instructions for setting up a wireless home network?
The most popular explanation is that opaque prose is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats insist on gibberish to cover their anatomy. Plaid-clad tech writers get their revenge on the jocks who kicked sand in their faces and the girls who turned them down for dates. Pseudo-intellectuals spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook.
But the bamboozlement theory makes it too easy to demonize other people while letting ourselves off the hook. In explaining any human shortcoming, the first tool I reach for is Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. The kind of stupidity I have in mind has nothing to do with ignorance or low IQ; in fact, it's often the brightest and best informed who suffer the most from it.
I once attended a lecture on biology addressed to a large general audience at a conference on technology, entertainment and design. The lecture was also being filmed for distribution over the Internet to millions of other laypeople. The speaker was an eminent biologist who had been invited to explain his recent breakthrough in the structure of DNA. He launched into a jargon-packed technical presentation that was geared to his fellow molecular biologists, and it was immediately apparent to everyone in the room that none of them understood a word and he was wasting their time. Apparent to everyone, that is, except the eminent biologist. When the host interrupted and asked him to explain the work more clearly, he seemed genuinely surprised and not a little annoyed. This is the kind of stupidity I am talking about.
Call it the Curse of Knowledge: a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The term was invented by economists to help explain why people are not as shrewd in bargaining as they could be when they possess information that their opposite number does not. Psychologists sometimes call it mindblindness. In the textbook experiment, a child comes into the lab, opens an M&M box and is surprised to find pencils in it. Not only does the child think that another child entering the lab will somehow know it contains pencils, but the child will say that he himself knew it contained pencils all along!
The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn't occur to the writer that her readers don't know what she knows—that they haven't mastered the argot of her guild, can't divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so the writer doesn't bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.
Anyone who wants to lift the curse of knowledge must first appreciate what a devilish curse it is. Like a drunk who is too impaired to realize that he is too impaired to drive, we do not notice the curse because the curse prevents us from noticing it. Thirty students send me attachments named "psych assignment.doc." I go to a website for a trusted-traveler program and have to decide whether to click on GOES, Nexus, GlobalEntry, Sentri, Flux or FAST—bureaucratic terms that mean nothing to me. My apartment is cluttered with gadgets that I can never remember how to use because of inscrutable buttons which may have to be held down for one, two or four seconds, sometimes two at a time, and which often do different things depending on invisible "modes" toggled by still other buttons. I'm sure it was perfectly clear to the engineers who designed it.
Multiply these daily frustrations by a few billion, and you begin to see that the curse of knowledge is a pervasive drag on the strivings of humanity, on par with corruption, disease and entropy. Cadres of expensive professionals—lawyers, accountants, computer gurus, help-line responders—drain vast sums of money from the economy to clarify poorly drafted text.
There's an old saying that for the want of a nail the battle was lost, and the same is true for the want of an adjective: the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War is only the most famous example of a military disaster caused by vague orders. The nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979 has been attributed to poor wording (operators misinterpreted the label on a warning light), as have many deadly plane crashes. The visually confusing "butterfly ballot" given to Palm Beach voters in the 2000 presidential election led many supporters of Al Gore to vote for the wrong candidate, which may have swung the election to George W. Bush, changing the course of history.
How can we lift the curse of knowledge? The traditional advice—always remember the reader over your shoulder—is not as effective as you might think. None of us has the power to see everyone else's private thoughts, so just trying harder to put yourself in someone else's shoes doesn't make you much more accurate in figuring out what that person knows. But it's a start. So for what it's worth: Hey, I'm talking to you. Your readers know a lot less about your subject than you think, and unless you keep track of what you know that they don't, you are guaranteed to confuse them.
A better way to exorcise the curse of knowledge is to close the loop, as the engineers say, and get a feedback signal from the world of readers—that is, show a draft to some people who are similar to your intended audience and find out whether they can follow it. Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us. Only when we ask those people do we discover that what's obvious to us isn't obvious to them.
The other way to escape the curse of knowledge is to show a draft to yourself, ideally after enough time has passed that the text is no longer familiar. If you are like me you will find yourself thinking, "What did I mean by that?" or "How does this follow?" or, all too often, "Who wrote this crap?" The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. Advice on writing is not so much advice on how to write as on how to revise.
Much advice on writing has the tone of moral counsel, as if being a good writer will make you a better person. Unfortunately for cosmic justice, many gifted writers are scoundrels, and many inept ones are the salt of the earth. But the imperative to overcome the curse of knowledge may be the bit of writerly advice that comes closest to being sound moral advice: Always try to lift yourself out of your parochial mind-set and find out how other people think and feel. It may not make you a better person in all spheres of life, but it will be a source of continuing kindness to your readers.
— Mr. Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the chairman of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. This article is adapted from his book "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century."
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September 27, 2014, 1:53 pm
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