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What To Do About Pig Poop? North Carolina Fights A Rising Tide. National Geographic

October 28, 2014, 8:30 pm
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What to Do About Pig Poop? North Carolina Fights a Rising Tide

The pork-loving state faces challenges in protecting water from contamination.

Sara Peach
for National Geographic
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 28, 2014
From the air, the place where bacon comes from is a quilt of fields and woods crossed by roads and winding creeks.

The animals were destined to become honey-cured ham, bologna, smoked sausage, pulled pork, pork chops, bacon bits, and more. The meat would be shipped all over the world.On an overcast day in September, I was buzzing over eastern North Carolina's flat coastal plain in a single-prop Piper Arrow with retired riverkeeper Rick Dove and pilot Bob Epting. From an altitude of 1,200 feet (366 meters), we gazed down at the land of hogs: fields in every direction dotted with long, metal-roofed barns housing thousands of animals—and, shimmering in the faint sunlight, the pink ponds that held their waste.
But before the hogs left the state, they would poop, a lot.
That waste is a lingering, stinky problem for North Carolina and other hog-heavy states like Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, and Indiana. Those states are the leading suppliers of meat to a nation—and increasingly, a world—with an abiding love of cheap pork. But residents must contend with waste from millions of hogs, which fouls the air near large operations and can contaminate local water supplies with germs and excess nutrients.
The dilemma is particularly acute for the barbecue-obsessed Tar Heel state, where swine sales totaled $2.9 billion in 2012. North Carolina gained national attention in 1999 when drenching rains from Hurricane Floyd caused waste ponds to rupture and flood, contaminating local water supplies. (Read "Carnivore's Dilemma" in National Geographic Magazine.)
Fifteen years after the disaster, the state remains the home of 8.9 million hogs—nearly as many as its human population of 9.8 million—making it the second largest pork producer in the nation. And despite a $17.1 million research project on waste options, it seems no one, in this state or elsewhere, quite knows what to do with all that poop.
Pigs from a farm near Trenton, North Carolina, wait for rescue from a flood in September.
Pigs from a farm near Trenton, North Carolina, wait for rescue from floods.
PHOTOGRAPH BY REUTERS
Swollen Lagoons
Until recently, people who raised hogs kept small numbers of animals that roamed in outdoor pens or fields, where their droppings fertilized crops.
In North Carolina, that started changing with industry consolidation in the 1980s. The number of small, diversified farms fell precipitously. Most of the farms that survived did so by going big—raising thousands of animals that spend their entire lives inside barns. Today, Duplin County, North Carolina, the top swine producer in the country, is home to 530 hog operations with a collective capacity of 2.35 million animals. According toa 2008 GAO estimate, hogs in five eastern North Carolina counties produced 15.5 million tons of manure in one year.
To handle all that waste, farmers in North Carolina use a standard practice called the lagoon and spray field system. They flush feces and urine from barns into open-air pits called lagoons, which turn the color of Pepto-Bismol when pink-colored bacteria colonize the waste. To keep the lagoons from overflowing, farmers spray liquid manure on their fields nearby.
The result, says Steve Wing, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is this: "The eastern part of North Carolina is covered with shit."
The Neuse River Air Force
Since 1999, to avoid a repeat of Hurricane Floyd, the state has bought out dozens of hog farms and closed more than 50 waste lagoons located in flood-prone areas.
In addition, hog farmers in North Carolina must follow state permit rules to avoid polluting streams and rivers with lagoon waste. They are not allowed to spray waste on fields when it's raining, for example, or on windy days when the mist could blow into nearby water bodies.
But as the Piper Arrow cruised over hog country recently, Rick Dove said the industry routinely breaks those rules. Peering at the ground below the plane, Dove suddenly spotted something.
"That's illegal," he said, pointing toward a field where an industrial-size sprayer was spouting a stream of pink-tinged waste on a field near a hog farm. Nearby, water from the previous night's rain lay puddled on the ground. As the plane banked to circle the farm, Dove explained that hog operations are not permitted to spray animal waste on fields with standing water.
Dove estimates that he has made more than a thousand flights like this one over eastern North Carolina. He and other volunteer observers and pilots—the self-styled Neuse River Air Force—photograph violations and report them to the state.
Doesn't the state have enough inspectors to do that job?
"No," Dove says. "The problem in North Carolina has always been that there's no enforcement."
Christine Lawson, program manager for animal feeding operations at the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, says the hog industry is the subject of much more regulation and oversight than in the 1990s. The state's 16 inspectors visit every hog facility at least once a year to make sure they're following the rules set out in their permits. "We see a very high level of compliance," she says.
But hog farmer Tom Butler says state scrutiny has declined under the current governor, Republican Pat McCrory. He says his most recent inspection amounted to little more than a courtesy call.
"We're surely not inspected like we used to be," he says. "I should be happy about that, but I'm not."
Regulations, he says, keep him on his toes: "We're always busy on a farm. We always have more than we can do. And the first thing we're not going to do is waste management. But if we know that inspector's coming in six months, or unannounced, what are we going to do? We're going to do good waste management."
Floodwaters from Hurricane Floyd engulfed this hog farm in eastern North Carolina in 1999.
Flooding from Hurricane Floyd engulfed this hog farm in eastern North Carolina in 1999.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN ALTHOUSE, GETTY
A Threat to Water and Air
Just as in North Carolina, the hog industry in the Midwest has seen an explosion in the number of large hog operations, says Ted Genoways, author of a new book on the industry called The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food. Iowa's hog population, for example, has swelled from 15.3 million in 2000 to 20.7 million this year. "It's just gone crazy in the last 30 years," he says.
U.S. pork exports have doubled over the past decade to more than two million tons a year, about 20 percent of total production. The leading buyers are Mexico, Japan, and, increasingly China, which has the world's largest per capita consumption of pork. (See interactive graphic, "What the World Eats")
But the growth in hog populations comes at a cost to the water around them, as scientists have shown in dozens of studies.
They have found evidence that nutrients wash into creeks and rivers from the fields where farmers spray manure or inject it into the soil, as is common in the Midwest. Hog waste is rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, which plants need to grow. But when too many nutrients flow from fields into waterways, they can contribute to harmful algal blooms and fish kills.
Nearby water can also be contaminated by parasites, viruses, hormones, pharmaceuticals, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria in hog waste, studies show.
In just the past two years, waste has spilled on hog farms in Iowa, Georgia, and Illinois. In October, a hog farm in Callaway County, Missouri, spilled 10,000 gallons (37,854 liters) of waste into a stream. In the same month, a lagoon spilled 100,000 gallons (378,541 liters) at a farm in Greene County, North Carolina.
Despite risks to waterways, many large livestock farms go unscrutinized by government inspectors, says Jon Devine, senior attorney for the water program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. Among the nation's 20,000 large livestock facilities, he says only about 40 percent are regulated under the Clean Water Act, the federal law that governs water pollution.
New regulations could cut pollution, he says, but the livestock industry fiercely resists attempts by the Environmental Protection Agency to monitor it. "It's a tough thing to move on, and so I have seen very little appetite at the federal level or at the EPA to move reasonable regulations forward," he says.
The Neighbors Notice
Then there's the matter of the stench.
Elsie Herring lives on land in Duplin County, North Carolina, purchased by her grandfather, a freed slave, in the late 1800s. Sixty thousand people live in this county, where hogs outnumber humans roughly 39 to one.
In the 1980s, a hog farmer moved in next door to Herring's family and installed two hog barns, a lagoon, and a spray field. The edge of the spray field is just eight feet from her home.
When the farmer sprays hog waste on his field, the wind carries it to Herring's land. The terrible, raw odor, she says, sneaks into her home even when she closes her doors and windows. It gives her a cough and makes her eyes burn.
"It's very, very offensive," she says. "I don't feel comfortable even having people over, because it's embarrassing and humiliating that, you know, you're trying to entertain someone and there's someone eight feet away spraying animal waste on you."
Steve Wing, the UNC-Chapel Hill epidemiologist, says hog operations give off ammonia, methane—a potent greenhouse gas—and hydrogen sulfide, which causes headaches and eye irritation. They also release endotoxin, an allergen, and at least a hundred volatile organic compounds, many of which contribute to the odor of hog farms.
In a study that began in 2003, Wing and a team of researchers set up air pollution monitors to measure hydrogen sulfide, endotoxin, and small particles in neighborhoods in eastern North Carolina within 1.5 miles of hog farms. They recruited 101 volunteers to record their physical symptoms and measure their own blood pressure and lung function.
When the researchers crunched the data, they found that when air pollution worsened in a given site as winds shifted, so did people's symptoms, including eye irritation, wheezing, nausea, and elevated blood pressure.
A pig stands on the roof of a car to escape floodwaters in September 1999, near Burgaw, North Carolina.
A pig stands on the roof of a car to escape Floyd's floodwaters near Burgaw, North Carolina.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN ALTHOUSE, GETTY
The Farm of the Future?
Hog farmer Tom Butler says he knew nothing about how his operation could affect the environment when he began raising the animals 20 years ago.
In late September, rain was falling steadily on Butler's operation, a 130-acre farm in Lillington, North Carolina, that holds 7,500 hogs. The odor of animals, musky but not overpowering, hung in the air.
When farm manager Dave Hull opened the door of one of the operation's ten barns, hundreds of hogs—which had been sitting nose-to-tail in their pens—abruptly stood up and unleashed a cacophony of grunts and squeals.
Undeterred by the noise, Hull pointed to slats on the floor of the barn. When the hogs defecate, he explained, it falls through the slats. From beneath the barn, the waste is flushed to a one-million-gallon manure digester, where bacteria decompose it for 21 days, producing methane in the process.
The gas flows through skinny yellow pipes to a nearby generator building, where it's burned to create electricity that the farm sells to a local cooperative. The remaining waste is piped to two overflow lagoons that—unlike most lagoons in the state—are topped with green plastic coverings.
The result? The covers trap odors, making the operation less smelly. Rain falling on the farm isn't contaminated by lagoon waste. And the farm is transforming waste into electricity-generating enough to power 90 refrigerators.
The only trouble with the setup, Butler says, is the price tag: more than one million dollars. Grants from the USDA, North Carolina Green Business Fund, Natural Resources Conservation Service, and North Carolina Farm Bureau covered about three-quarters of the cost, with the rest coming out of Butler's pocket. He hopes to recoup the total investment by 2022.
"A lot of people think this is foolishness, and so far they've been right," Butler says.
Across the United States, only 29 U.S. swine operations use digesters like the one at Butler Farms.
Mike Williams, director of the Animal & Poultry Waste Management Center at North Carolina State University, led a $17.1 million research project to examine ways to cut air and water pollution from hog waste.
As Williams sees them, hog farms in North Carolina are better managed than they were in the 1990s. But he says in the long run, the lagoon and spray field system isn't sustainable, because nearby fields simply can't absorb the volume of nutrients large hog farms produce.
He says technological solutions—like the anaerobic digester at Butler Farms—could address environmental concerns. So could burning the poop or putting it through a treatment system the way municipalities clean human waste.
But though prices for those technologies have fallen, the industry won't adopt them until the cost is equal to or less than that of the current system. "I am cautiously optimistic that we're going to get there," he says. "I'm frustrated that there hasn't been more progress."

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PBS: Is Soccer Safe For Kids? Amid Concussion Fears, A Parent Searches For Answers

October 28, 2014, 8:44 pm
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Youth soccer has become one of the leading causes of concussions for kids in America, sending an estimated 10,000 kids to the E.R. every year. NewsHour Weekend correspondent William Brangham, whose three kids all play soccer, weighs the risks and the benefits of the sport. Brangham also reports on the fledgling movement led by a prominent neurosurgeon and World Cup champion Brandi Chastain advocating taking headers out of youth soccer.



  • TRANSCRIPT
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Dr. Richard Flyer has been my family’s pediatrician for thirteen years, and to be totally honest: I love the guy. I admire him and I trust him. But three years ago — when my son, Jack was ten — Flyer said something that floored us. He told Jack he wanted him to stop playing soccer, completely.
Flyer argued that the dozens and dozens of kids he’d seen with serious, sometimes life-altering concussions – some of them from heading the ball — had convinced him that soccer itself was not safe.
DR. RICHARD FLYER: We need to look at these sports realistically and say, “Are they really something we want our children to do?” Do we want to, in the name of sport, put a child’s brain in harm’s way?
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Flyer’s warning got me and my wife Tory to take a long, uncomfortable look at whether the sport our three kids love is safe. The benefits they get out of the game? Those are obvious, but are they worth the risks of serious injury? For the last few years, we’ve been struggling with a dilemma that’s facing really millions of parents across the country.
TORY BRANGHAM: I just feel really confused and worried and just unsure what we’re supposed to do now.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: It’s important to say that we became a soccer family partly by design. Our three kids are Jack, who’s 13, Gavin is 11, and Ally is nine. When they were little, they all tried a lot of different sports, but when it came time to officially join a team, we really steered them to soccer, which we thought was a ‘safe’ sport, compared to something like football.
NFL ANNOUNCER: Lot of Dolphins sidelined today, including Donald Brown out with a concussion.
TORY BRANGHAM: I think I knew enough and this is now ten years ago to know that football wasn’t really an option for our kids.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Because it wasn’t safe.
TORY BRANGHAM: Because it was considered unsafe.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Then in 2008, that idea was driven home by an awful tragedy in our town. A 16 year-old football player at Montclair high school, Ryne Dougherty, died from a brain hemorrhage he got tackling during a game.
Three weeks before — he’d had another hard hit and a concussion. The whole town was really shaken up by his death. Did we console ourselves, thinking, well, that couldn’t happen to our kids? I don’t know. Maybe. But we kept signing the kids up — and they were playing – and loving – soccer.
ALLY BRANGHAM: I really like playing– how there are positions, cause there’s, like, a special thing that you have to do when you’re doing it so you feel like you’re an important part of it.
GAVIN BRANGHAM: You get to move around a lot, and you have to be a good team, not just composed of good players.
JACK BRANGHAM: Soccer is just the best sport there is. Period.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: That said, I can’t pretend that Dr. Flyer’s warnings weren’t always somewhere in the back of our minds. In 2012, one of jack’s soccer mates, a boy named nick graham, went up for a header, fell to the ground, and suffered such a severe concussion that his headaches and dizziness didn’t get better for months. Nick left the team and hasn’t played since.
Within the last year, at least three of his teammates have suffered concussions. Did that make us think about taking jack or any of our kids out of soccer? Honestly, no. Seeing them learn the value of hard work and dedication, how to handle the successes and the failures, it all seemed worth it to us.
TORY BRANGHAM: In this day and age, there’s so many warnings — parental warnings. It’s not safe to walk to school, it’s not safe to drink that drink, it’s not safe to look at that screen. There’s so many “No’s.” And quite frankly some of the things in life that are the most fun and are most rewarding have some risk involved.
And I’m not encouraging my kids to skydive or to cliff jump. What I’m saying is soccer is fun and it’s thrilling and it’s exciting.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And it gives them so much.
TORY BRANGHAM: And it gives them a lot of pleasure. So I wasn’t prepared to take that away from them.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: But then, during the 2014 world cup, which we loved, but also where we saw some of those really brutal blows to the head, I read this story about a movement to take heading out of kid’s soccer because of concern over concussions.
I raised this question with a friend who’s spent his entire life around the game. Declan Carney was born in Ireland. He manages my son Jack’s team and our sons have played together for several years.
DECLAN CARNEY: There’s no question that concussions need to be dealt with and need to be taken very seriously whenever they happen.
But if soccer, heading a soccer ball was actually a real danger of some sort of brain injury, I think it would’ve exhibited itself somewhere in medical history in Europe or in South America or in Asia, where people play soccer pretty much all their life and have done for the last 80, 100 years.
And I don’t think the science says it’s there.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: I checked, and Declan is right: there aren’t any large-scale, long term studies connecting soccer to brain injury among the millions of soccer players in Europe or South America or Asia.
But that article I read cited one small American study showing that adult amateur soccer players who headed the ball a lot – between about 900 and 1,500 times a year — showed abnormalities in their brains — represented here by the red and yellow sections. These are effects similar to what you’d see in concussions
But many of these players said they hadn’t had concussions. The suggestion being that brain trauma might be occurring from a lot of heading without obvious symptoms. Keep in mind, 900 to 1500 headers is far more than any kid I know ever heads the ball, even with regular practice.
But that article also quoted this man — Dr. Robert Cantu — he’s a neurosurgeon, co-directs a brain study center at Boston University, and is one of the nation’s top experts on youth concussions.
Cantu acknowledges the science connecting soccer with brain injury is limited. He’s in fact called for much more research, but even so he thinks it’s better to be safe than sorry and not allow young kids to head the ball.
DR. ROBERT CANTU: If you took heading out of soccer, it wouldn’t be behind football in the incidence of concussion. It wouldn’t even be in the high-risk group. It would be in a low-risk group.
Cantu told me that heading the ball as well as the collisions and hard falls to the ground that often accompany them are problematic for kids because unlike adult brains kid’s brains are still developing.
DR. ROBERT CANTU: The young brain is largely not myelinated. Myelin is the coating of nerve fibers that connect nerve cells, similar to coating on a telephone wire, it helps transmission but it also gives strength. And so when you violently shake the young brain, you have a much greater chance to disrupt nerve fibers and their connections than you do an adult brain.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And there’s this: a kid’s head sits on a less developed neck and torso than an adult’s. So the same blow might cause more damage to a kid than a grownup.
DR. ROBERT CANTU: So, you’ve got a bobble head doll effect with our youngsters, so that the very minimal impact is now gonna set their brain in much more motion than it would an adult brain with a strong neck.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Cantu says strengthening kid’s neck muscles can help, but those soccer helmets and headgear don’t really offer much protection, so he says there’s only one thing left to do.
DR. ROBERT CANTU: Take the most injurious activity for head injury out of it, but let the rest of the sport go on. And that’s playing soccer without heading.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Some others who know far more about the game than I do are listening to Cantu. One of whom you might recognize. Brandi Chastain’s dramatic penalty shot against China won the 1999 World Cup for the U.S. She also helped win gold for the U.S at two different Olympics.
She now lives in northern California with her husband and her 8 year-old son Jaden. She coaches his team, and helps coach a Division 1 team at Santa Clara University. She, along with several of her former teammates from the U.S. National team, have joined forces with Dr. Cantu’s organization.
BRANDI CHASTAIN: We don’t need to have heading in youth soccer, 14 and under.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: The interesting thing is just a few years ago Chastain was on NBC saying that heading was safe for kids, as long as they were trained correctly.
BRANDI CHASTAIN: [NBC News clip] It’s a part of the game, it’s an important part, and it’s a beautiful part of the game.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: At the time, were saying, “I think that it can be taught to kids, and it should stay in the game for kids.” Now you think differently. I wonder what was it in particular that changed your mind?
BRANDI CHASTAIN: I think it was hearing the information that Dr. Cantu was putting out. The more I started hearing about it, and the more research that has come out, I just thought, you know, I have to protect them, and this doesn’t need to exist at this young age.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Chastain admitted that so far — their campaign really hasn’t taken off. Just a handful of programs have removed heading. She says the lead really has to come from the top, from the international governing body of soccer, FIFA and the U.S. Soccer Federation.
Those organizations are currently being sued by a group of soccer parents in California who say the groups haven’t done enough to protect kids from head injury.
We reached out to FIFA and to the U.S. Soccer Federation for comment. While neither would go on the record, citing the litigation, they both said that player safety is a priority. And the Federation indicated heading and concussions are among the topics regularly reviewed by its policy makers.
Back in New Jersey, the soccer season goes on. We see a fair amount of heading, especially in my older son’s games. The boys take hard ones, soft ones. They score goals with them.
Our soccer club, Montclair United, says it’s very concerned about concussions and trains our coaches thoroughly but they say they don’t make the rules, and so heading remains a part of our game.
And quite frankly, there’s a lot of doubt on a lot of people’s minds that heading is a problem at all.
DECLAN CARNEY: I have a 13 year old son that I wanna protect as much as anybody wants to protect their son. But I will let my son head a ball because I see no evidence whatsoever that there is a danger for anybody in youth soccer playing, heading a ball.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: But then our pediatrician, Dr. Flyer says taking heading out doesn’t go far enough in his opinion. He says what he’s sees in his own patients is evidence enough that the sport isn’t safe for kids.
DR. RICHARD FLYER: We had this 30-year experiment. The results are coming in. It’s not safe for children to do this. It’s a contact sport. That and, you know, that’s also a euphemism. It’s a brain-injuring sport. And if I don’t get this information across, even the risk of upsetting people, I’ve failed.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So where does all this leave us? My wife and kids and I still get up every Saturday and Sunday and get ready for another long weekend of soccer.
But full disclosure: after all the interviews I’ve done tory and I recently told our kids not to head the ball anymore. So far, it’s not been an issue in their games or with their coaches.
Even so, when we go out there and cheer them on… our pediatrician’s voice is still in the back of our minds.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Do you feel like we’re doing the right thing by letting them play?
TORY BRANGHAM: We are sort of punting the ball down the field and avoiding a decision. Which in and of itself is a decision. Our decision is that we’ve let our kids continue to play soccer.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And are you okay with that?
TORY BRANGHAM: Well, you know, I sort of just sit there secretly hoping at the end of every game that they walk off the field in one piece. I just want them to be whole.

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Augustine Of Hippo And Humankind's Post-Modern Epistemological Crisis

October 29, 2014, 6:38 am
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St. Augustine of Hippo
Wikipedia

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"The Death Of Epistemolgy"

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Dear E,

Thanks for your daily thought.

Today's offering reminds me of the Augustinian principle that "We love to the extent that we know, and we know to the extent that we love."

I see humankind is passing through an epistemological crisis, and Augustine shows the way out: The fundamental fusion of knowledge and love and the existential interdependence of both.

Pax tecum

Alan

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 8:17 AM, EK wrote:

Seeing is not believing, but believing is seeing. 
— Michele O’Donnell
EK

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Rick Santorum: Iraq Truther

October 29, 2014, 6:42 am
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Rick Santorum, Iraq truther: Original WMD die-hard claims his (unearned) vindication
Richard John "Rick" Santorumhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Santorum***
"Bush's Toxic Legacy In Iraq"

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Rick Santorum, Iraq truther: WMD die-hard claims

Rick Santorum will take credit for being right about Iraq's WMDs -- even if George W. Bush won't

A week ago, I introduced you to the Iraq War Truthers: the conservatives who are so convinced that the Bush administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were correct that not even George W. Bush himself can persuade them that he was wrong. Their ranks include talk radio shouter Mark Levin and frequent Facebook user Sarah Palin, and they’re both operating under the theory that the evidence vindicating Bush’s pre-war WMD claims was covered up – for unknown reasons – by Bush.
Now the theory is getting a little bit of love from a presumed 2016 presidential candidate. Rick Santorum, who’s been pushing this bogus theory of Iraq WMD vindication for more than eight years now, co-wrote an Op-Ed for the Daily Beast (with Rep. Pete Hoekstra) on “George W. Bush’s Puzzling WMD Coverup.”
Jumping off from a New York Times report on the U.S. and Iraqi soldiers who were injured when they came into contact with the dilapidated remnants of Hussein’s chemical weapons program, Santorum and Hoekstra lay out their premise:
The entire world was understandably focused on finding chemical and biological forensics after toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, as it was a top argument for the operation. Yet investigations supposedly uncovered no evidence of older weapons or an active program.
We now know with more certainty that at least one of those conclusions was wrong. Media reports from various sources indicate that vast quantities of old stocks of WMD were scattered throughout the country and endangering members of the U.S. military.
The idea that investigators somehow missed or didn’t report on the old chemical weapons found in Iraq is flagrantly untrue. The Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which went looking for chemical weapons in Iraq shortly after the 2003 invasion, said in its 2004 final report that “a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered” in the country. A 2005 addendumto the report has an entire section on “Residual Pre-1991 [Chemical and Biological Weapons] Stocks in Iraq” that listed some of the “vintage chemical rounds” that had been discovered by coalition forces. It concluded that “Iraq and Coalition Forces will continue to discover small numbers of degraded chemical weapons.”
The following year, the Senate released its report on the pre-war Iraq intelligence and laid out the post-war findings regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons. It endorsed the ISG’s conclusions that older, unusable weapons had been discovered and also noted that “the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) published a report which noted that coalition forces have recovered another 500 filled and unfilled degraded pre-1991 Gulf War chemical munitions since the ISG completed its work.”
Having misstated what weapons investigators concluded regarding Iraq’s degraded chemical weapons stockpiles, Santorum and Hoekstra push on through with the cover-up allegations:
It isn’t exactly news to those of us who had been investigating the issue. Nearly a decade ago, a declassified Pentagon intelligence report determined that coalition forces had recovered some 500 munitions containing degraded mustard or sarin nerve agents. In reality we now know that the numbers of munitions was actually much higher.
But for reasons we may never fully know, elements of the Bush White House did not want to acknowledge their existence. They were engaged in a forceful and effective campaign to keep this information from Congress, the press and the American people.
Again, the presence of older weapons was a matter of public knowledge as early as 2004, when the Iraq Survey Group report was released. The likely reason why the Bush administration didn’t want to publicly disclose each discovery of chemical munitions was that corroded and unusable chemical artillery shells in no way justified their apocalyptic pre-war rhetoric about Saddam’s chemical weapons capabilities.
But Santorum views it differently. He thinks the weapons vindicate Bush – or at the very least, they vindicate Rick Santorum. In 2006, as he was staring down the end of his Senate career, Hoekstra and Santorum called a press conference announcing “we have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” referring to the 500 degraded mustard and sarin munitions. Asked on Fox News to respond to people who said those weren’t the weapons we invaded Iraq over, Santorum said that they were proof that he, Rick Santorum, got it right on Iraq: “I can tell you I voted because I was concerned about Saddam having destroyed the chemical weapons that he said he destroyed … the fact of the matter is he hid them, the fact of the matter is we’re still finding them, and that this is a continuing threat.”
But that’s not what the Bush administration thought. That’s not what the intelligence community thought. And that’s not what the New York Times reported. Indeed, the scandal laid bare by the Times’ reporting isn’t that the Bush administration refused to acknowledge that old chemical weapons were found in Iraq; it’s that U.S. soldiers were wounded attempting to dispose of these weapons and the Bush administration covered that up.
But that’s not what has Rick Santorum upset. He’s more concerned that the administration isn’t as eager as he is to claim a foreign policy vindication they haven’t earned.
Simon Maloy
Simon Maloy is Salon's political writer. Email him at smaloy@salon.com.




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The United States: A Nation Of Competing Extremes Whose Average Looks Centrist

October 29, 2014, 6:51 am
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"Brazen Lies About Obama"

"Obama Hatred"

The American Conservative: "Obama Is A Republican"

Ordinary voters probably hold extreme views. Typical voters hold both extremely liberal and extremely conservative views, making them appear like moderates when political scientists try to describe their views with a single number. There are few genuine moderates, which puts into question the underlying premise of centrist advocacy groups such as Third Way and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The New York Times.



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"The Great Kansas Tea Party Disaster," A Template For GOP Control Of Congress

October 29, 2014, 7:43 am
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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-kansas-tea-party-disaster-20141023

Mark Binelli, Rolling Stone: In 2012, [Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R)] enacted the largest package of tax cuts in Kansas history, essentially transforming his state into a lab experiment for extreme free-market ideology. The results (disastrous) have reduced the governor to making appearances at grim strip malls like this one in a desperate attempt to salvage his re-election bid. ... Brownback himself went around the country telling anyone who'd listen that Kansas could be seen as a sort of test case, in which unfettered libertarian economic policy could be held up and compared right alongside the socialistic overreach of the Obama administration, and may the best theory of government win. "We'll see how it works," he bragged on Morning Joe in 2012. "We'll have a real live experiment."

That word, "experiment," has come to haunt Brownback as the data rolls in. The governor promised his "pro-growth tax policy" would act "like a shot of adrenaline in the heart of the Kansas economy," but, instead, state revenues plummeted by nearly $700 million in a single fiscal year, both Moody's and Standard & Poor's downgraded the state's credit rating, and job growth sagged behind all four of Kansas' neighbors. ...

Brownback's policies have been so unpopular, in fact, that a group of more than 100 moderate Republicans, nearly all of them former or current state officeholders, have publicly backed his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Paul Davis, who, until the race's recent tightening, had been leading consistently in polls. Calling themselves Republicans for Kansas Values, the moderates released a manifesto of sorts, which reads in part, "We are Republicans in the historical and traditional sense of the word. Yet in today's political climate in Kansas, traditional Republican values have been corrupted by extremists, claiming to be agents of change. It is a faction which hides behind the respected Republican brand in an effort to defund and dismantle our state's infrastructure. . . . The policies [they] espouse are radical departures. . . . They jeopardize the economy and endanger our children's future with reckless abandon. . . . We reject their extremist agenda."


"Why Winning The Senate Would Be A Republican Nightmare"
(... and prelude to a Democratic sweep in 2016)






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How Many Eligible Voters Are Turned Away And How Many Ineligible Voters "Pass"

October 29, 2014, 8:09 am
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Alan: The nation's newspapers could provide an important public service by keeping "tallies" of certain ongoing "numeric issues" that are essential to understanding - and enhancing - the health of The Body Politic.

One such tally would create a log of all instances in which someone is killed or injured with a firearm, and -- correlatively -- all instances in which someone successfully defends himself against an attack that would otherwise have caused death or significant bodily harm. (Such tallies would not count macho encounters between hard-drinking, drug-using, chest-thumping gunslingers "spoiling for a fight.")
Another useful tally would be an account of every instance in which American citizens are not allowed to vote due to newly-devised voter restrictions and --correlatively -- how many voters attempt to vote with no legal foundation to do so.

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Pax On Both Houses: Compendium Of Voter Fraud And Voter Suppression Posts


That 93-year-old turned away at the polls in Texas is not the only person rejected for lacking an ID

Texas election Judge William Parsley told Emily Atkin at Think Progress that he had only seen one person turned away during the first six days of early voting at his downtown Houston polling station. In fact, there have been plenty of rejects.
That fellow Parsley rejected was a 93-year-old veteran whose driver's license had expired. Under the strict new Texas voter ID law that the U.S. Supreme Court gave a thumbs-up to, a current driver's license is one of the seven forms of identity accepted for voting. Those forms of identification—passport, military ID, veteran ID, non-driver's Texas ID, special voter's ID, a Texas gun license—exclude tribal IDs and student IDs. Out-of-date IDs are only acceptable if they have been expired for 60 days or less. Voter advocates estimate at least 600,000 Texans don't have any of the mandated IDs. For many people without the right ID there are financial and other obstacles to acquiring one:
The man Parsley said he had to turn away was a registered voter, but his license had been expired for a few years, likely because he had stopped driving. Parsley said the man had never gotten a veteran’s identification card. And though he had “all sorts” of other identification cards with his picture on it, they weren’t valid under the law—so the election judges told him he had to go to the Department of Public Safety, and renew his license.
“He just felt real bad, you know, because he’s voted all his life,” Parsley said.
Sympathy does little good with unbendable rules. Those rules were designed to discriminate, according to federal district Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos, who wrote the scathing 147-page ruling that the U.S. Supreme Court tossed aside October 18 to give Texas the go-ahead on its new law. That voter ID law, passed in 2011, originally was blocked under the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act. But the Supreme Court trashed that VRA provision in a 2013 ruling.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a fiery dissent over the Court's Texas ruling 10 days ago:
The District Court noted particularly plaintiffs’ evidence—largely unchallenged by Texas—regarding the State’s long history of official discriminationin voting, the statewide existence of racially polarized voting, the incidence of overtly racial political campaigns,the disproportionate lack of minority elected officials, and the failure of elected officials to respond to the concerns of minority voters.
The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.
Help elect Democratic governors. Please send $3 to these candidates.
There are more rejection stories below the orange obstacle course.
While Parsley may have only seen one would-be voter turned away, there have been others. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has collected a few stories in this regard. Some samples:
Jesus Garcia was born in Texas and lives in Mercedes. He was unable to vote with his driver’s license, which expired about a year ago. He went to the Weslaco Department of Public Safety (DPS) office twice and both times was unable to get an ID. His birth certificate was stolen and he does not have a copy. He wants to get identification, but to get both a replacement birth certificate and a new ID would be more than $30 combined. He is working a lot of hours, but money is tight. With rent, water, electricity, and everything else, Mr. Garcia is not sure he will be able to afford those documents, much less before the election.
Even if he does have the money, he will need to go through the whole process of getting the documents and going to the office again, when he has already tried to vote once and gone to a DPS office twice. Mr. Garcia thinks it is unfair that he cannot vote with the documents he has. He was born here and he has an ID with his picture on it; it’s just expired. He has a voter registration card, and voted in past elections.
Krystal Watson is a student at Wiley College in Texas, a historically black college. She is originally from Louisiana and has voted in past elections in Texas. This year, she signed up as a deputy registrar and registered about 100 people to vote. The person who deputized her told her the registration rules but not about the new voter ID requirement. When she herself went to vote, she was not allowed to cast a ballot because she had a Louisiana driver’s license and a Wiley College ID, but not the ID required by the law.
Ms. Watson stated that she has observed many other students having trouble voting. She didn’t know whether she would have the time or resources to get an identification card, which would require her to bring in her birth certificate.
So, a purposely discriminatory law in a state that—until last year—couldn't have imposed anynew voting law without first pre-clearing it with the U.S. Department of Justice is now taking away individuals' right to cast ballots just as voter advocates said would happen. Rotten laws backed by rotten court rulings produce rotten results unless undermining democracy is the goal.

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Arm Everybody! Safety Through Countervailing Violence?

October 29, 2014, 8:21 am
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The Right-Wing Dream
Absolute Safety vouchsafed by ubiquitous firearms.
(The impossible quest to make Reality safer than God intended is the core appeal of fascism.)

If every passenger can "pack," then every terrorist would have a firearm and only a few citizens. (Would you take a firearm on board a plane?)

Those who think ubiquitous firearms are a solution to any of life's problems contribute to  the problem.

The likelihood that well-armed citizens will perform acts of sudden, salvific heroicism when a criminal already "has the drop" is vanishingly remote. 

Such wishful thinking is the product of arrested development, the vestigial puerility of children playing at "cowboys and Indians."

Many more innocent Americans are killed by firearms "in the home" than the piddling number of Americans saved by domestic firearm heroics.

And when, at rare intervals, such heroics do occur, they often result in the death of property thieves who harbor no violent intent.

Where are the Christian literalists when we need them?

“You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But now I tell you: do not take revenge on someone who wrongs you. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, let him slap your left cheek too. And if someone takes you to court to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat as well. And if one of the occupation troops forces you to carry his pack one mile, carry it two miles. When someone asks you for something, give it to him; when someone wants to borrow something, lend it to him. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your friends, hate your enemies.’ But now I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the children of your Father in heaven. For he makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do good and to those who do evil. Why should God reward you if you love only the people who love you? Even the tax collectors do that! And if you speak only to your friends, have you done anything out of the ordinary? Even the pagans do that! You must be whole—just as your Father in heaven is whole."

I am 67 years old and have friends "on both sides of the aisle." 

I have never heard any of them say that their firearm saved a life.

I have never heard any of them say they know someone whose life was saved by a firearm.

Occassional anecdotes do not establish "general rules." 

On the flip side of this coin, I have heard several friends say firearms were used by family members to kill themselves.

Whether by accident... sudden eruption of anger... or by psychological disease... firearms in citizens' homes exact a terrifyingly high toll with correspondingly trivial benefit.

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The belief that individual heroes will "save the day" is essentially self-ish.

Yes, an occasional hero will "save the day."

But arming an entire society increases cumulative carnage.

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"Pass The Salt," A Clever Video About Cyber Distraction

October 29, 2014, 8:28 am
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PEW Research Center's "Current Events Quiz." Gringos Are More Stupid Than I Thought

October 29, 2014, 9:15 am
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Alan: The current gas price in 20 American states is under $3.00 a gallon - and falling like a stone. 

The reason gas cost so little at the end of the Bush administration is that The Economic Collapse that occurred "on Dubyah's watch" resulted in spiking unemployment which obliged citizens to cut back their gas purchases. Predictably, The Law of Supply and Demand ran its downward course.

The assumption that "current trends" can (and should!?!) be extrapolated forever is pathognomic of political benightedness. 

Another trait of political dimwits is their refusal to correct errors when proven wrong.

Bill Maher: The Zombie Life Cycle Of Republican Lies. They Never - Ever - Die

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Dear George,

Thanks for your email. 

I have posted the PEW Research Center "Civics Test" you sent: http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/the-news-iq-quiz/

When I took that test, I correctly answered all 12 questions.

As often happens on such tests however, I had to guess which answer the tester "thinks" is right rather than the one that is actually right.

This circumspection proved true for question #8 where "the right answer" is not the right answer.

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Your friend who forwarded this "Civics Test" thinks people should cancel their voter registration if they score below 50%. 

Given all the right-wing chatter about high academic standards, I wonder why Sonny's own standards are so low.

Maybe s/he's afraid of disenfranchising most conservative voters.

"People Who Watch Only Fox News 
Know Less Than People Who Watch No News"

Pax tecum

Alan

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 11:22 AM, GC wrote:

----- Original Message -----
From: SC
To: Undisclosed
Sent: Monday, October 27, 2014 1:16 PM
Subject: Fwd: Pew Research Quiz on current event



.Subj: Pew Research Quiz on current event



10 of 12    Crying face

Thought you might enjoy comparing your Current Events awareness with that of your fellow Americans.
This is a terrific test. It surely indicates that the majority of Americans don't know what's going on.

It's astonishing that 80% of the (voting) public doesn't have a clue, and that's pretty scary.

There are no tricks here -- just a simple test to see if you are current on your information.

Test your knowledge with the challenge of 12 questions, then be ready to shudder when you see how others did: If you get less than half correct, please cancel your        voter registration.

Good luck!

http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/the-news-iq-quiz/

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Evolution In 3 Words

October 29, 2014, 9:37 am
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U.S. Official Reportedly Called Netanyahu A "Chickenshit" For Building Settlements

October 29, 2014, 9:42 am
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"Is Israel The World's Worst Terror State? An Israeli General's Son Thinks So"

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Israel's Netanyahu fumes at reported U.S. slur


By REUTERS

PUBLISHED: 29 October 2014

By Jeffrey Heller

JERUSALEM, Oct 29 (Reuters) - An anonymous U.S. official's reported description of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a "chickenshit", or worthless coward, drew a sharp response on Wednesday from the Israeli leader - no stranger to acrimony with the Obama administration.

The American broadside, in an interview in The Atlantic magazine, followed a month of heated exchanges between the Netanyahu government and Washington over settlement building in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, which Palestinians seek as the capital of a future state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"The thing about Bibi is, he's a chickenshit," the unidentified official was quoted as saying, using Netanyahu's nickname and a slang insult certain to redden the ears of the U.S.-educated former commando.

"The good thing about Netanyahu is that he's scared to launch wars," the official said, in apparent reference to past hints of possible Israeli military action against Iran's nuclear programme. "The bad thing about him is that he won't do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states."

Netanyahu, the official was reported to have said, is interested only in "protecting himself from political defeat ... He's got no guts."

Israeli leaders usually do not respond to comments by unidentified officials. But Netanyahu addressed those remarks directly in opening a memorial ceremony in parliament for an Israeli cabinet minister assassinated by a Palestinian in 2001.

"Our supreme interests, chiefly the security and unity of Jerusalem, are not the main concern of those anonymous officials who attack us and me personally, as the assault on me comes only because I defend the State of Israel," Netanyahu said.

"...Despite all of the attacks I suffer, I will continue to defend our country. I will continue to defend the citizens of Israel," he said.

Such pledges by Netanyahu have resonated among Israeli voters, even amid fears his strained relations with U.S. President Barack Obama could ultimately weaken support from Israel's main diplomatic ally and arms provider.

Some pundits predict an Israeli election in 2015, two years early, speculation seemingly supported by the absence of any strong challenger to the Likud party leader and increasingly vocal challenges to his policies from senior ministers to the left and right of him within the coalition government.

Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, whose ultranationalist Jewish Home party belongs to the coalition but who has had testy relations with Netanyahu, defended him on Facebook.

"The prime minister of Israel is not a private person. He is the leader of the Jewish state and the entire Jewish people. Cursing the prime minister and calling him names is an insult not just to him but to the millions of Israeli citizens and Jews across the globe," he wrote.

Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog sounded a more critical note, telling Channel Two television: "Netanyahu is acting like a political pyromaniac, and he has brought our relations with the United States to an unprecedented low."

FRICTION

In a series of recent speeches widely seen in Israel as setting the stage for a possible poll, Netanyahu has highlighted growing security concerns in the wake of the July-August war with Hamas in Gaza and regional unrest that has brought Islamist militants to Israel's northern border with Syria.

Israel also worries that U.S.-led world powers will agree to what it deems insufficient curbs on the nuclear programme of its arch-foe, Iran, in talks with a looming Nov 24 deadline.

Fears of a possible new Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, have been stoked in Israel by now-daily rock-throwing by Palestinians in Jerusalem amid Muslim fears of an end to an Israeli de facto ban on Jewish worship at the al-Aqsa mosque compound in the holy city where Biblical temples once stood.

Netanyahu has pledged to preserve the "status quo" at the site, a commitment Palestinian leaders view with suspicion.
But drawing Palestinian outrage and a State Department accusation that Israel was distancing peace, Netanyahu pledged on Monday to fast-track plans for 1,000 new settler homes in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem.

Netanyahu described such criticism as being "detached from reality", saying Jews had a right to live anywhere in Jerusalem, regarded by Israel as its united capital - a claim not internationally recognised.

Most countries and the World Court deem the settlements Israel has built in areas captured in a 1967 war to be illegal. Israel disputes this, and has settled 500,000 Jews in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, among 2.4 million Palestinians. (Editing by Dan Williams and Dominic Evans)


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/reuters/article-2812679/Israels-Netanyahu-fumes-reported-U-S-slur.html#ixzz3HYJBiBs3
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
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Harvard Prof.Theda Skocpol: Tea Party And Republican Party On Collision Course

October 29, 2014, 9:48 am
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Tea Party's "intensified war": Why the GOP's happy time is about to endEnlarge
Tea Party supporter William Temple
Excerpt: There are a lot of Tea Partyers, especially in the grass roots, who see compromise as tantamount to treason, betrayal of the nation.
"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

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Tea Party’s “intensified war”: Why the GOP’s happy time is about to end

Celebrated Harvard professor says that even if they win the Senate, GOP leadership has a problem on the horizon

Salon
As pundits and wonks have been telling us since basically the day after President Obama was reelected — and as Nate Silver and others‘ forecast oracles still insist — we’re probably going to wake up on Jan. 3 of next year with a brand-new, Republican-controlled U.S. Senate. (I know, I know; you’re not sure you can wait.)
But while a lot of ink has been spilled in anticipation of how a GOP Congress will clash with Senate Democrats and President Obama, less attention is being paid to what might happen within the Republican Party once the post-victory honeymoon is over. Will a newly unified Congress be the first step toward a final end to the GOP’s civil war? Or will GOP leadership soon find that winning in 2014 was the easy part?
To answer those questions and others about our possible near-future, Salon recently spoke with Harvard’s Theda Skocpol, the influential professor of sociology and political science who in 2011 released “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” which is still perhaps the definitive analysis of the movement. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.
A few years ago, back when the Tea Party was relatively new, you and your co-author, Vanessa Williamson, wrote what I still consider to be the most useful in-depth study of the Tea Party. Now that it’s been a few years, do you think the media has integrated any of your analysis into how it talks about the Tea Party? Are there any big misconceptions that you think persist?
I think it’s hard for most analysts in the media to get away from the idea that popularity of the label in national opinion polls, or victory of self-described Tea Party candidates in Republican primaries — they tend to treat those as the primary indicators of whether the Tea Party is successful.
But as we explained in our book, the Tea Party is a set of organizations, top down and bottom up, that have exerted a lot of leverage on Republican candidates and officeholders. Sometimes they’ve directly challenged them in primaries — and I think those challenges are important — but this is a phenomenon that represents the more active half of Republican base voters, and … their aim has been to get Republican officeholders and candidates to toe a certain policy line, and not to compromise with Democrats. And they’ve been extremely successful in that. They continue to be very successful.
You hear a narrative sometimes that says that in 2014, unlike 2010 and 2012, the establishment of the Republican Party did a good job of keeping unelectable Tea Party radicals off the ballot. Then, depending on the source, that assertion is sometimes cited as proof that in the war to control the GOP, the establishment won. I’m guessing you disagree?
Yeah, I don’t agree with that at all.
First of all, the so-called unelectable, odd candidates that they’re talking about from earlier cycles are people like the woman in Delaware who said she wasn’t a witch [Christine O'Donnell], and Todd Akin in Missouri … It would be hard to say what a Tea Party candidate is, but [Akin and O'Donnell] were as much Christian right candidates [as Tea Party ones], in any event, in terms of where they came from and who they were speaking to in the Republican electorate.
More to the point, [saying the establishment won] is a little bit like noting that a group of generals, after losing most of their army, have retaken a hill, but not noticing that the entire battlefield has switched to the terrain that the opponent wanted it to be fought on. That’s what’s happened in the Republican Party. It’s very hard to find Republican leaders who are not adopting pretty extreme Tea Party positions and policy.
So it’s a little bit more like they’ve won the 2014 battle, but in a bigger sense they already lost the war.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens after Republicans take the Senate, as I expect that they will do, by two or three or four votes. There are some fairly extreme candidates who have been successful in the Republican primaries this time around who are going to get elected to the Senate and to the House (on top of some very extreme ones who made it even in the last cycle). So I think we’re going to see an intensified war inside the Republican Party between the business-oriented wing and those who are beholden either to popular Tea Party forces or to ideological funders.
How big of a role do you think the Tea Party’s view of compromise plays in the GOP’s internal divisions?
It’s very central. A lot of what the leveraging operating that is the Tea Party has been trying to do is to keep Republicans from compromising, either with Democrats in Congress or state legislatures or with, above all, President Obama. They’ve been pretty successful at that.
I’ve seen the polls showing that Democrats are so much more interested in compromise for its own sake than are Tea Partyers. How much does that have to do with the Tea Party having its own version of recent American history, one in which the country has long been falling apart, partially because of GOP capitulation? 
Certainly that belief is out there on the far right, [and] it’s fanned in the far-right media, too … There are a lot of Tea Partyers, especially in the grass roots, who see compromise as tantamount to treason, betrayal of the nation.
But if that’s the way they approach politics, then the argument some people have made that a Republican Senate will lead to more compromise, because the GOP will be expected to govern, doesn’t seem likely. 
There are going to be a lot of dilemmas.
We know that John Boehner, and presumably Mitch McConnell, are going to be trying to engineer some compromises, particularly on budget issues, and they’ve already shown some ability to bring enough people along to avoid shutdowns and fiscal cliffs. But what are they going to do with, for example, the fact that their party has promised repeal of Obamacare?
That is s completely disingenuous promise. It is certainly something that these leaders know can’t happen. But there’s going to be a lot of pressure, not just to hold the symbolic vote that Obama would then veto if it made it to his desk — and I’m not sure it would — but to start going after major subsidies in the law that benefit millions of voters and benefit businesses that are very uneasy about that Tea Party strand of Republicanism.
I don’t know what’s going to happen there — and of course that’s not even to get to the immigration issue. There are divisions within Tea Party forces on that one, but Republicans have fought an election on a maximalist, deport-them-all platform that just is not going to fly in [2016]. It’s already been clear in the last two years that John Boehner cannot control his own caucus. And in the Senate, nobody can really control [anyone]. So I’m not quite sure how that’s going to play out.
The Tea Party itself being divided when it comes to immigration reform — can you expand on that a bit? The conventional narrative holds that it’s the businesspeople, the rich country club-style Republicans, who are for it, and then it’s the Tea Party that’s against it, and that’s that.
You’re right that on most issues where divisions are playing out inside the Republican Party, it is business groups — who want things like agricultural subsidies and transportation bills and versions of immigration reform — against the Tea Party forces that don’t.
At least in the work that Vanessa Williamson and I did, we didn’t treat the Tea Party ever — and I still wouldn’t — as a unified organization. We all call it “the Tea Party,” but really it’s a field of organizations. Some of them are bottom up, grass-roots Tea Party groups, the kind of organized part of the Tea Party half of the Republican electorate. I call those “popular Tea Party forces” … and they are completely against immigration reform that includes any path to citizenship. I would put that up there right as practically the No. 1 issue in terms of passion at the grass roots.
Of all possible issues?
Yeah, pretty much.
The sense that our country’s being taken away from us, that a lot of government spending is benefiting undocumented immigrants — illegals, in their view — and that we must defend the country against this influx, that’s very passionate for grass-roots Tea Partyers.
But when we talk about elite forces that have labeled themselves Tea Party supporters and are trying to kind of whip up the fears below and use those fears along with their money and their ideological pressures on the Republican officeholders, they’re divided about immigration reform. You can look at the Jim DeMint crowd, and the Heritage Action Foundation, [and see] they staked out a maximalist, nativist position that is really the intellectual justification for the popular passions I described before.
But the Koch brothers network, instantiated most clearly at this point in Americans for Prosperity, they don’t care what kind of people they exploit. And they’re actually in favor of a version of immigration reform that might even include a kind of infinitely winding, very delayed route to some legalizations. Their guy is Paul Ryan (Paul Ryan always follows the Koch brothers’ line on everything) and he’s made favorable noises.
So it is a split within the elite ranks of Tea Party-aligned forces on immigration, in a way that it really isn’t on healthcare reform, where they want to sabotage it. They want to stop it.
To your earlier point about the promise to repeal Obamacare, I assume you’ve been watching Gov. Kasich’s Obamacare two-step?
[Laughs] Yeah.
Do you think his strategy of pretending the parts of Obamacare he supports — like expanding Medicaid or ending rescission — aren’t really part of the bill; do you think that is going to be a sustainable way future Republicans can thread the needle?
Well, Kasich is not the first to do this. We’ve seen a bunch of them trying this one. Ironically, the closer you get to the actual states, the more they’re talking about Medicaid expansion being OK, but it’s not Obamacare. That’s a little easier to pull off, at least as a public argument, because many states have their own name for Medicaid, and a lot of the voters don’t understand what program we’re talking about. McConnell’s claim that Obamacare was just a website was hilarious. I don’t think it’s even standing up inside Kentucky right now. I think he’s being called on it big-time.
It’s just that the minute you get to a position where they can, for example, try to structure budgets, the Tea Party part of the Republican electorate — and the large number of Tea Party-oriented legislators that will be in both chambers — are going to be pushing vociferously for using 51-vote budget bills to go after the heart of Obamacare. And they’re going to say, “Look, you ran on this; you made this promise.” That’s true. They have all made that promise. They’ve all misled the voters about what Obamacare is and about what they’re going to do about it.
So the moment of truth is going to come fairly soon, when they’re going to have to start engaging in more and more of these kinds of dances that I don’t think the right wing of the Republican Party is going to accept. I don’t think they’re going to be fooled.
Elias Isquith
Elias Isquith is a staff writer at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith, and email him at eisquith@salon.com.


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Watch How Maggots Help Solve Crimes. National Geographic

October 29, 2014, 9:50 am
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Watch How Maggots Help Solve Crimes

Forensic entomologists study how bugs colonize dead bodies to help establish a time of death.

Jane J. Lee
National Geographic
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 29, 2014
There's no quicker way to elicit a shiver of disgust than to mention maggots. Halloween brings maggot-filled tricks and treats, from cupcakes to faux maggots for zombie costumes. But maggots are more than creepy, crawly insects.
Maggots, which are actually the larvae of flies, have helped doctors clean wounds on and off the battlefield since Napoleon's time. Now, they're also helping to catch criminals. Forensic entomology—the study of how insects interact with dead bodies—can help law enforcement and lawyers in criminal investigations, and maggots are a big part of that.
The presence of flies or maggots on a dead body can give researchers a sense of when a person or animal died, and whether the body was moved from one location to another, said Jeff Tomberlin, a forensic entomologist at Texas A&M University in College Station. Hundreds of insect species can be involved in breaking down a dead body, but flies and beetles are the "major players," he said.
Flies Come First
When an animal dies, microbes begin to break down its tissues and produce gases, Tomberlin explained. This is what makes corpses bloat. Then come the insects.
"Typically the first things to show up are the flies," the forensic entomologist said. Blowflies, flesh flies, and black soldier flies are typical species found on vertebrate remains.
The flies home in on moist cavities like the mouth, nose, and eyes to lay their eggs. The young that hatch out are the maggots, which proceed to eat their way through the surrounding soft tissue.
Different fly species have different dietary requirements, Tomberlin explained. The black soldier fly maggots in the video (above) are omnivorous, meaning they can eat a wide variety of foods, including the chicken tacos provided as a demonstration.
"Later, you'll see a shift to beetles that consume the skin, hair, and cartilage [of a dead body]," Tomberlin said.
Scavengers such as raccoons, coyotes, and possums will also consume the remains. In the southern U.S. under the right conditions, "vultures can consume and skeletonize a human body in a matter of hours," said Tomberlin.
Colonization of the Dead
The forensic entomologist studies flies and maggots in his laboratory to figure out just what factors influence when the insects colonize human or animal remains.
"Time of colonization can vary from one decomposing body to the next," Tomberlin explained. A better understanding of colonization times would "allow forensic entomologists to better predict the actual time of death of the person in question."
Not much is known about what attracts insects to a decomposing body. Researchers suspect that the odors released by the microbes as they break down a body are a major factor in that attraction, Tomberlin said.
He is quick to point out that although the topic of dead bodies can be macabre, death and decomposition are natural processes that "play an important role in how an ecosystem operates.
"Nutrients are used to create a living animal, and when it dies the nutrients are returned to the environment," Tomberlin said. "Understanding that process is very important as it can apply to forensic science and human health."

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Did Amazons Cut Off Their Right Breast To Be Better Archers?

October 29, 2014, 9:58 am
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Amazons

Amazon Warriors Did Indeed Fight and Die Like Men

Archaeology shows that these fierce women also smoked pot, got tattoos, killed—and loved—men

Simon Worrall
for National Geographic
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 29, 2014
The Amazons got a bum rap in antiquity. They wore trousers. They smoked pot, covered their skin with tattoos, rode horses, and fought as hard as the guys. Legends sprang up like weeds. They cut off their breasts to fire their bows better! They mutilated or killed their boy children! Modern (mostly male) scholars continued the confabulations. The Amazons were hard-core feminists. Man haters. Delinquent mothers. Lesbians.
A photo of the book "The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World" by Adrienne Mayor.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Drawing on a wealth of textual, artistic, and archaeological evidence, Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons, dispels these myths and takes us inside the truly wild and wonderful world of these ancient warrior women.
Talking from her home in Palo Alto, California, she explains what Johnny Depp has in common with Amazons, why the Amazon spirit is breaking out all over pop culture, and who invented trousers.
We associate the word Amazon with digital book sales these days. Tell us about the real Amazons.
The real Amazons were long believed to be purely imaginary. They were the mythical warrior women who were the archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Every Greek hero or champion, from Hercules to Theseus and Achilles, had to prove his mettle by fighting a powerful warrior queen.
We know their names: Hippolyta, Antiope, Thessalia. But they were long thought to be just travelers' tales or products of the Greek storytelling imagination. A lot of scholars still argue that. But archaeology has now proven without a doubt that there really were women fitting the description that the Greeks gave us of Amazons and warrior women.
The Greeks located them in the areas north and east of the Mediterranean on the vast steppes of Eurasia. Archaeologists have been digging up thousands of graves of people called Scythians by the Greeks. They turn out to be people whose women fought, hunted, rode horses, used bows and arrows, just like the men. (See "Masters of Gold.")
What archaeological proofs have been discovered to show that these mythical beings actually existed?
They've been excavating Scythian kurgans, which are the burial mounds of these nomadic peoples. They all had horse-centred lifestyles, ranging across vast distances from the Black Sea all the way to Mongolia. They lived in small tribes, so it makes sense that everyone in the tribe is a stakeholder. They all have to contribute to defense and to war efforts and hunting. They all have to be able to defend themselves.
The great equalizer for those peoples was the domestication of horses and the invention of horse riding, followed by the perfection of the Scythian bow, which is smaller and very powerful. If you think about it, a woman on a horse with a bow, trained since childhood, can be just as fast and as deadly as a boy or man.
Archaeologists have found skeletons buried with bows and arrows and quivers and spears and horses. At first they assumed that anyone buried with weapons in that region must have been a male warrior. But with the advent of DNA testing and other bioarchaeological scientific analysis, they've found that about one-third of all Scythian women are buried with weapons and have war injuries just like the men. The women were also buried with knives and daggers and tools. So burial with masculine-seeming grave goods is no longer taken as an indicator of a male warrior. It's overwhelming proof that there were women answering to the description of the ancient Amazons.
Why were they called Amazons?
[Laughs.] That's such a complex story that I actually devoted an entire chapter to it. It's the one thing everyone seems to think they know about Amazons: that the name has something to do with only having one breast so they could easily fire an arrow or hurl a spear. But anyone who's watched The Hunger Games, or female archers, knows that that is an absolutely physiologically ridiculous idea. Indeed, no ancient Greek artworks—and there are thousands—show a woman with one breast.
All modern scholars point out that the plural noun "Amazones" was not originally a Greek word—and has nothing to do with breasts. The notion that "Amazon" meant "without breast" was invented by the Greek historian Hellanikos in the fifth century B.C.
He tried to force a Greek meaning on the foreign loan word: a for "lack" and "mazon," which sounded a bit like the Greek word for breast. His idea was rejected by other historians of his own day, and no ancient artist bought the story. But it stuck like superglue. Two early reviews of my book even claimed I accept that false etymology. Linguists today suggest that the name derives from ancient Iranian or Caucasian roots.
A photo of a vase with scenes of Amazon women fighting.
Amazons war on this fourth-century Greek vase.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DEAGOSTINI/ GETTY IMAGES
You describe them as "aggressive, independent man-killers." Were Amazons also lesbians?
That is one of the ideas that have arisen in modern times. Nobody in antiquity ever suggested that. We know that the ancient Greeks and Romans were not shy about discussing homosexuality among men or women. So if that idea had been current in antiquity, someone would have mentioned it.
The one interesting artistic bit of evidence that I did find is a vase that shows a Thracian huntress giving a love gift to the Queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea. That's a strong indication that at least someone thought of the idea of a love affair between Amazons. But just because we don't have any written evidence and only that one unique vase doesn't preclude that Amazons might have had relations with each other. It's just that it has nothing to do with the ancient idea of Amazons.
The strong bond of sisterhood was a famous trait in classical art and literature about Amazons. But it was modern people who interpreted that as a sexual preference for women. That started in the 20th century. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva declared that Amazons were symbolic of lesbianism in antiquity. Then others took that up. But the ancient Greeks didn't think of them as lesbians. They described them as lovers of men, actually. Man-killers—and man lovers.
You refer to the "Amazon spirit." What are its key characteristics?
I used that phrase in the dedication to a good friend of mine, Sunny Bach. She was a strong figure who believed in equality between men and women. She rode motorcycles, she rode horses, then became the first female railroad engineer. She was a risktaker who died an untimely death, probably because of her life of risk. She embodied the Amazon spirit: the assumption that women are the equals of men and that they could be just as noble and brave and heroic.
That comes through in the artworks and literature about Amazons. The Greeks were both fascinated and appalled by such independent women. They were so different from their wives and daughters. Yet there was a fascination. They were captivated by them. Pictures of Amazons on vase paintings always show them as beautiful, active, spirited, courageous, and brave.
I talked to a vase expert whose specialism is gestures on Greek vases. He has written an article about gestures begging for mercy in single combat images. Quite a few of the losers in duels are shown gesturing for mercy. But among Amazons, not so much. We have about 1,300 or so images of Amazons fighting. And only about two or three of them are gesturing for mercy. So they're shown to be extremely courageous and heroic. And I think that's the Amazon spirit.
Amazons smoked pot and drank a powerful concoction of fermented mare's milk called kumis, which they used in rituals. Put us around a campfire in ancient Scythia.
In that picture of the ancient Amazons sitting around their campfire we also have to include men. We don't have any evidence that there were whole societies with nothing but women. When we say Amazons, we mean Scythian women. In this case Scythian warrior women.
Herodotus gives us a very good picture. He says that they gathered a flower or leaves or seeds—he wasn't absolutely sure—and sat around a campfire and threw these plants onto the fire. They became intoxicated from the smoke and then would get up and dance and shout and yell with joy. It's pretty certain he was talking about hemp, because he actually does call it cannabis. He just wasn't certain whether it was the leaves or the flower or the bud. But we know they used intoxicants. Archaeologists are finding proof of this in the graves. Every Scythian man and woman was buried with a hemp-smoking kit, including a little charcoal brazier.
Herodotus also described a technique in which they would build a sauna-type arrangement of felt tents, probably in wintertime on the steppes. He describes it as like a tepee with a felt or leather canopy. They would take the hemp-smoking equipment inside the tent and get high. They've found the makings of those tents in many Scythian graves. They've also found the remains of kumis, the fermented mare's milk. I give a recipe in the book for a freezing technique they used to raise its potency. [Laughs.] Do not try this at home.
They were also very big on tattoos, weren't they?
There are a lot of tattoos—beautifully, lovingly detailed tattoos in images of Thracian and Scythian women on vase paintings. Ancient Greek historians described the tattooing practices of the culturally related tribes of Eurasia.
According to one account, Scythian women taught the Thracian women how to tattoo. The Greeks had lots of slaves from the Black Sea area, and they were all tattooed. They thought of tattoos as a sort of punishment. Who would voluntarily mark their bodies? Yet once again they had this push-pull attraction and anxiety about these foreign cultures.
We also now have archaeological evidence that Amazon-like women were tattooed. Tattoo kits been discovered in ancient Scythian burials. The frozen bodies of several heavily tattooed Scythian men and women have been recovered from graves. The famous Ice Princess is just one example—her tattoos of deer call to mind the tattoos depicted in Greek vase paintings.
Johnny Depp said, My skin is my journal, and the tattoos are the stories. I think that's a good way to think of this. They could have been initiations, they could be just for decoration, they could represent special experiences, either in reality or dreams. We don't really know. All we know is that they were heavily tattooed, mostly with real and fantastical animals and geometric designs.
A photo of female peshmerga fighters taking part in military training in northern Iraq.
Kurdish women in a Peshmerga battalion, whom some might seen as modern Amazons, take part in a training exercise near Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, on September 17, 2014.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MOHAMED MESSARA, EPA
A question I have been dying to ask: Who invented trousers?
The Greeks credited three different warrior women with the invention of trousers. Medea, a mythical sorceress and princess from the Caucasus region, was credited with inventing the outfit that was taken up by Scythians and Persians. The other two were Queen Semiramis, a legendary Assyrian figure, and Queen Rhodogune, which means "woman in red." The Greeks were not that far off. Trousers were invented by the people who first rode horses—and those were people from the steppes.
Leg coverings are absolutely essential if you're going to spend your life on horseback. Trousers are also the first tailored garments. They were pieced together and sewn. The Greeks wore rectangles of cloth held together with pins. They thought trousers were an abomination worn by the barbarians. But once again, they're fascinated by them.
In the vase paintings the Amazons have wildly spotted and striped and checked leggings and trousers. One of the things I find most interesting is that it was not just the men who rejected trousers. Greek women didn't wear them either. Yet we find images of beautiful Amazons in trousers on women's perfume jars and jewelry boxes. I think there's something going on in Greek private life that we don't really know about yet.
There was even an Amazon island, wasn't there?
Yes. It's the only island off the southern coast of the Black Sea. It's now called Giresun Island. But it was first written about in Apollonius of Rhodes's version of the epic poem The Argonauts. As Jason and the Argonauts are sailing east on the Black Sea, they stop at what they call Island of Ares or Amazon Island. There they see the ruins of a temple and an altar, where they claim the Amazons sacrificed horses and worshipped before they went to war.
This is really interesting, because it means the Greeks were finding ruins associated with Amazons as far back as the Bronze Age. It shows how real the Amazons were to them. Recently, Turkish archaeologists found the altar and temple ruins that are mentioned in Jason and the Argonauts.
They got a bad press in the ancient world, didn't they? There were rumors that they maimed and even castrated young boys. Separate the fiction from the fact.
The idea that Amazons abandoned, maimed, or killed young boys is a fairly early story that circulated among the Greeks, because several writers assumed that Amazon societies must be women only.
That then raised the question: How do they reproduce? They came up with these stories of women agreeing to meet with neighboring tribes to reproduce. But then what did they do with the boys? So there were stories that they either maimed them so that they couldn't participate in warfare or that they actually killed them to get rid of them and only kept the girls.
The most common story was that they sent the boys back to the fathers to be raised. Many modern scholars interpreted this as proof that they abandoned their duties as mothers. They don't take care of their babies! They give them away! Blah, blah, blah.
But it turns out that it was a very common custom among nomadic people, called fosterage. Sending sons to be raised by another tribe ensures that you're going to have good relations with that tribe. It's a way of sealing treaties. It was very common in antiquity.
Philip the Great was raised by an ally of his father. It was also common in the Middle Ages in Europe. It's also a way of ensuring you don't have incest within the tribe. The fact that the Scythian and Thracian tribes probably practiced fosterage led to these stories that the Amazons gave their sons to the father's tribe. That's probably a reality. But there is no archaeological evidence that they maimed boys.
Tell us about modern-day Amazons.
Today's news from the Middle East and Syria is filled with images of Kurdish Peshmerga women fighting IS. There are movies and TV series featuring bold warrior women and even Amazons. It started with Xena: Warrior Princess, and then there were the animated films Brave andMulan and The Hunger Games and the role of Atalanta in the Herculesfilm. The new Vikings TV show has all the shield maidens. And of course there are strong women in A Game of Thrones. So everyone's really aware of the idea of warrior women.
It's sort of fair to say that Amazons, both as reality and as a dream of equality, have always been with us. It's just that sometimes that fiery Amazon spirit is hidden from view or even suppressed. Right now they're blazing back into popular culture.

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Fox News' Parent Company Is Genuinely Worried About Global Warming

October 29, 2014, 10:01 am
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Fox News criticizes Al Gore's comments about Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Screenshot: Media Matters/Fox News

Fox News' Parent Company Is Really Worried About Global Warming

Rupert Murdoch's businesses lost millions during Superstorm Sandy—and they're warning that climate change could mean more extreme weather.

—By 
| Wed Oct. 29, 2014
The day after Superstorm Sandy devastated much of the East Coast, Al Gore issued a statement linking the storm to climate change. That's when Fox News went on the attack.
"These global warming claims have been debunked time and time again," declared Eric Bolling, a former crude oil trader who is now one of the network's most inflammatory hosts. "Look, it's weather. Weather changes. Things happen. It has nothing to do with global warming."
But Fox's parent company, 21st Century Fox, sees things differently.
Earlier this month, a London-based organization called CDP released hundreds of questionnaires it collected from corporations—including 21st Century Fox—that had agreed to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and outline the risks global warming could pose to their business. In its submission to CDP, 21st Century Foxnoted that climate change "may increase the frequency and power of tropical cyclones" and that the resulting storms could hurt its bottom line. And the company cited Sandy as a prime example:
In the current reporting year, 21st Century Fox was affected by Superstorm Sandy through filming interruptions, travel delays, facility and equipment damange [sic] and box office closings in the Northeast U.S. The storm showed that 21st Century Fox can be negatively impacted by climate-related weather impacts. Severe weather and climate change also pose physical risks to 21st Century Fox's supply chain, such as the ability and timeliness with which products and services can be delivered to and from the company.
An entertainment colossus with businesses that include everything from right-wing cable news to blockbuster movies to satellite television, 21st Century Fox is one of two media companies led by Rupert Murdoch. The other is News Corp, which controls newspapers worldwide and which split from 21st Century Fox last year. In its own response to CDP, News Corp also cited Sandy, similarly warning that climate change could disrupt its business by potentially increasing the "frequency and power of tropical cyclones."
Indeed, Sandy cost Murdoch's media empire more than $2 million in "damage and filming delays," according to the documents.
"21st Century Fox was affected by Superstorm Sandy through filming interruptions, travel delays, facility and equipment [damage] and box office closings."
The storm caused significant damage and shutdowns at News Corp plants, and it reportedly disrupteddelivery of the Wall Street Journal. (According to one of the documents, "weather-related missed deliveries" of the Journal have been increasing over the last three years.) Murdoch's entertainment business also took a hit. For example, 21st Century Fox reported that Sandy "reduced sales in a key market" and cited estimates that the storm was largely responsible for a 12 to 25 percent drop in box office sales. And flooding in Brooklyn damaged the set of the The Americans—a TV drama produced by Fox Television Studios—forcing the company to postpone filming. (A Fox spokesperson said the delay lasted "less than two weeks" while the necessary repairs were made.)
Of course, News Corp and Fox were far from the only businesses impacted by Sandy. Delta Airlines, for instance, told CDP that it lost $75 million in revenue. Abercrombie & Fitch lost more than $10 million in sales. And utility giant Con Edison shelled out more than $500 million to fix damage caused by the storm.
But the Murdoch companies' statements linking Sandy's devastation to climate change represent a striking contrast to the global warming commentary that often appears in their news outlets. Fox News, in particular, is a hotbed of climate denial; a recent Union of Concerned Scientists study found that fully 72 percent of the network's climate segments contained "misleading" statements. A Fox editor oncedirected reporters to cast doubt on temperature data showing that the Earth has warmed.
On the newspaper side, the Wall Street Journal regularly publishes editorials and opinion pieces skeptical of climate science. And according to a report last year from the Australian Center for Independent Journalism, News Corp's Australian papers are a "major reason" why that country's media is "a world leader in the promotion of scepticism."
Fox and Friends
Fox News, two weeks before Superstom Sandy Screenshot: Media Matters/Fox News
This tension is nothing new for Murdoch's companies. In 2011, Fox News hosts were attacking climate scientists even as Murdoch was announcing that News Corp had become carbon neutral. Media Matters (my former employer) wrote at the timethat the "contrast between what News Corp's chairman says and what its employees actually do is a stark illustration of the company's attempt to play both sides of the climate issue."
The companies' concerns about possible climate disruptions go far beyond Sandy. "To the extent that any increase in frequency of extreme events can be correlated to a trend like climate change," writes 21st Century Fox in its CDP submission, "there is a continued need to prepare for business disruptions." It warns that "extended and severe droughts" could worsen wildfires in Southern California, where much of its entertainment business is based. And it cites recent wildfires in Russia and floods in Australia that "disrupted film and TV productions and caused property damage."
News Corp has similar concerns about increasing wildfire risk, writing that its Australian businesses operate "in regions with bushfire risks, and 2013 saw the extreme fire season start earlier than previous years." And the company points to another—less obvious—threat from climate change. As droughts become more frequent and more severe, writes News Corp, there could be unpredictable consequences for the forestry industry that produces the paper its newspapers are printed on. But don't worry: The Wall Street Journal's climate-change editorials are available online.

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Our Chimp Ancestors Murdered—and Played Pacifist. Should We Expect Differently?

October 29, 2014, 10:08 am
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About 90% of chimp males participated in a killing at some point in their lives. ENLARGE
About 90% of chimp males participated in a killing at some point in their lives. GETTY IMAGES
By 
14 COMMENTS
Rousseau versus Hobbes: one of the most famous philosophical smackdowns ever. Are humans noble savages by nature, or are our lives innately nasty, brutish and short? Today, the best insight into this classic question comes from asking how our close primate relatives fit on the Rousseau/Hobbes spectrum.
A key observation concerns chimpanzees, with whom we share as much as 99% of our genes. As researchers have documented repeatedly over the last 35 years, chimps are no strangers to murder. Males cooperate to kill males from neighboring groups; males kill rivals for alpha positions in their own groups; and females kill the children of other females as a form of genetic competition. These killings, moreover, are not spontaneous outbursts; they are filled with intent and strategy.
The fact that chimps murder could mean two things. The first would be that chimps have always murdered; it’s basic to their behavior. If so, then a look at our evolutionary tree would suggest that the shared propensity for murder among chimps and humans stretches back to our last common ancestor, some eight million years ago. In other words, killing one’s kind is a basic, long-standing part of human behavior.
An alternative view would hold that chimp murder is unnatural and solely reflects the disruptive effects of human intrusion—higher chimp population densities due to habitat destruction; more competition for food because of humans hunting out stocks of game; and the battle for highly desirable foods provided by researchers in order to habituate chimps to the presence of humans (supplying a finite stock of bananas is a great way to get chimps at each other’s throats).
A recent paper in Nature addressed this debate. The authors, an all-star team of primatologists, had a collective 492 years of experience observing chimps. Pooling their data, they examined whether rates of “lethal aggression” across populations were best predicted by intrinsic features of the social lives of the chimps or by extrinsic factors reflecting human impact (for example, proximity to humans, or whether the chimps lived in a protected game park).
Vast amounts of data were crunched and back came the answer: Patterns of human disruption didn’t predict rates of chimp murders. For example, some of the highest rates of killing occurred in the most pristine populations. Instead, rates most reflected standard features of chimp social competition.
Remarkably, the 152 killings worked out to about 3.5 murders for every decade of observation. Males made up 92% of the killers and 73% of the victims. Killing occurred in 83% of these populations across the African continent. In most killings, groups of males ambushed someone from a neighboring troop, with an average of eight males ganging up on the victim. And about 90% of males participated in a killing at some point in their lives.
Whoa. This would seem to be Hobbes out the wazoo—in apes who share almost all their DNA with us.
Naturally, this paper hasn’t settled the debate. Proponents of the “it’s due to human disturbance” explanation question whether the right measures of human impact were used. Critiques and rebuttals are flying online and in the media, because this is a big deal. If this sort of violence is fundamental to chimps, if it’s “in their genes,” then it’s overwhelmingly likely to be in ours as well.
But that wouldn’t be the right conclusion to reach. Because the chimp research was only half the paper. The authors also examined bonobos, the “other” species of chimp, famed for their social affiliation and female dominance. What is the bonobo rap sheet after 92 years of behavioral observation? One suspected killing, a mere 3% of the rate in chimps.
Critically, we share as much as 99% of our DNA with bonobos as well (and chimps and bonobos share about the same percentage of genes with each other).
We’re not chimps. Sadly, we’re not bonobos either. We’re their cousins, the species that invented both Quaker pacifism and the atrocities of Islamic State. What a cross-species analysis like this teaches us, in short, is the evolutionary roots of our potential, not the inevitabilities of our behavior.

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Obama To Blame For Ebola

October 29, 2014, 10:17 am
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Malcolm X Was Right About Black People And Guns

October 29, 2014, 10:18 am
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Malcolm X was right about black people and guns. Gun restrictions were historically designed to prevent blacks from obtaining weapons. The National Rifle Association and the gun-rights movement should do more to reach out to the black community, who understand what the right to keep and bear arms really means. The New York Times.

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"Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"

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





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Returning To The Dark Ages?

October 29, 2014, 10:28 am
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"The last execution of the Inquisition was carried out in Spain on July 26, 1826. This was the execution of the school teacher, Cayetano Ripoll, for the teaching of Deism in his school. In Spain the practices of the Inquisition were finally outlawed in 1834."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition

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"Deism And Founding Father Links"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/06/deism-and-founding-father-links.html

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Dear Fred,

If Europe is "returning to the Dark Ages," America has already returned.

Relative to the United States, did Spain feel more, or less, civilized to you?

I have not been to Europe in 25 years but when I was last there, my Italian interlocutors laughed when I asked if they wanted to move to the United States.

The center of American politics has shifted so drastically that -- under the inexorable influence of zeitgeist -- we now entertain socio-political postulates that were, until recently, considered absurd.

Pax on both houses

Alan

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: EK
Date: Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 8:17 AM
Subject: Thought for the Day: Peace
To: Thought for the Day


Because of well-intentioned tolerance and an undisciplined pluralism, Europe is returning to the dark ages. 
-- Rabbi Shalom Lewis — Ehr Daw ("They are here”) 

Have a Great Day and a Wonderful Week … pray for peace…

REMEMBER TO VOTE!

E. K.





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