Hegemony’s Achilles heel is the US economy. The fairy tale of American economic recovery supports America’s image as the safe haven, an image that keeps the dollar’s value up, the stock market up, and interest rates down. However, there is no economic information that supports this fairy tale.

Real median household income has not grown for years and is below the levels of the early 1970s. There has been no growth in real retail sales for six years. The labor force is shrinking. The labor force participation rate has declined since 2007 as has the civilian employment to population ratio. The 5.7 percent reported unemployment rate is achieved by not counting discouraged workers as part of the work force. (A discouraged worker is a person who is unable to find a job and has given up looking.)

A second official unemployment rate, which counts short-term (less than one year) discouraged workers and is seldom reported, stands at 11.2 percent. The US government stopped including long-term discouraged workers (discouraged for more than one year) in 1994. If the long-term discouraged are counted, the current unemployment rate in the US stands at 23.2 percent.

The offshoring of American manufacturing and professional service jobs such as software engineering and Information Technology has decimated the middle class. The middle class has not found jobs with incomes comparable to those moved abroad. The labor cost savings from offshoring the jobs to Asia has boosted corporate profits, the performance bonuses of executives and capital gains of shareholders. Thus all income and wealth gains are concentrated in a few hands at the top of the income distribution. The number of billionaires grows as destitution reaches from the lower economic class into the middle class. American university graduates unable to find jobs return to their childhood rooms in their parents’ homes and work as waitresses and bartenders in part-time jobs that will not support an independent existence.

With a large percentage of the young economically unable to form households, residential construction, home furnishings, and home appliances suffer economic weakness. Cars can still be sold only because the purchaser can obtain 100 percent financing in a six-year loan. The lenders sell the loans, which are securitized and sold to gullible investors, just as were the mortgage-backed financial instruments that precipitated the 2007 US financial crash.

None of the problems that created the 2008 recession, and that were created by the 2008 recession, have been addressed. Instead, policymakers have used an expansion of debt and money to paper over the problems. Money and debt have grown much more than US GDP, which raises questions about the value of the US dollar and the credit worthiness of the US government. On July 8, 2014, my colleagues and I pointed out that when correctly measured, US national debt stands at 185 percent of GDP.

-- The Neoconservative Threat to International Order, by Paul Craig Roberts

[The Dickies] [singing] pt barnum said it so long ago
there's one born every minute don't you know
some make us laugh, some make us cry
these klowns honey gonna make you die
everybody's running when the circus comes into their towns
everybody's gunning for the likes of the killer klowns
from outer space
Killer Klowns from outer space
Jocko!
Ringmaster shouts let the show begin
Send in the klowns, let them do you in
See a rubber nose on a painted face
Bringing genocide to the human race
It's time to take a ride on the nightmare merry-go-round
You'll be dead on arrival from the likes of the killer klowns
from outer space
killer klowns from outer space
There's cotton candy in their hands
Says a polka-dotted man with a stalk of jacaranda
They're all diabolical bozos
Oh look around what do you see
tell me what's become of humanity?
From California shores to New York Times Square
Barnum and Bailey everywhere
If you've ever wondered why the population's going down
blame it on the plunder from the likes of the killer klowns
from outer space
Killer klowns from outer space
Killer klowns killer klowns killer klowns killer klowns killer klowns
from outer space
Killer klowns from outer space
Killer klowns killer klowns

-- Killer Klowns, by the Dickies
-- Killer Klowns From Outer Space, directed by Stephen Chiodo

BRAVE: having or showing courage; making a fine show: colorful; excellent, splendid

HERO: a mythological or legendary figure often of divine descent endowed with great strength or ability; an illustrious warrior; a man admired for his achievements and noble qualities; one who shows great courage; the principal male character in a literary or dramatic work; the central figure in an event, period, or movement; an object of extreme admiration and devotion: idol

-- by Merriam Webster Dictionary

DISGUSTING: so unpleasant to see, smell, taste, consider, etc., that you feel slightly sick; so bad, unfair, inappropriate, etc., that you feel annoyed and angry.

-- by Merriam Webster Dictionary

Peaceful Warrior Comes for Peace

ANGRY: filled with anger; having a strong feeling of being upset or annoyed; showing anger; seeming to show anger; threatening or menacing.

-- by Merriam Webster Dictionary

BILLY THE KID. $500 Reward. I will pay $500 reward to any person or persons who will capture MICHAEL MOORE alias BILLY THE KID. Deliver him to any sheriff of New Mexico. Satisfactory proofs of identity will be required for reward. LEW. WALLACE, Governor of New Mexico.

"Warriors are not what you think of as warriors. The warrior is not someone who fights, because no one has the right to take another life. The warrior, for us, is one who sacrifices himself for the good of others. His task is to take care of the elderly, the defenseless, those who can not provide for themselves, and above all, the children, the future of humanity."

-- Sitting Bull

ANGRY: filled with anger; having a strong feeling of being upset or annoyed; showing anger; seeming to show anger; threatening or menacing.

-- by Merriam Webster Dictionary

Ten years ago this past week, Clint Eastwood stood in front of the National Board of Review awards dinner and announced to me and to the crowd that he would "kill" me if I ever came to his house with my camera for an interview.

"I'll kill you," he declared.

The crowd laughed nervously. As for me, having just experienced a half-dozen assaults in the previous year from crazies upset at 'Fahrenheit 9/11' and my anti-war Oscar speech ...

Thank you very much. On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Canada, I’d like to thank the Academy for this. I’ve invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and we would like to — they are here — they are here in solidarity with me because we like non-fiction.
We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times.
We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious President.
We — We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons.
Whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or the fiction of orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you.
And any time you’ve got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up.
Thank you very much.

... plus the attempt by a right wing extremist to blow up my house (he was caught in time and went to prison), I was a bit stunned to hear Eastwood, out of the blue, make such a violent statement. But I instantly decided he was just trying to be funny, so I laughed the same nervous laugh everyone else did. Clint, though, didn't seem to like all that laughter.

"I mean it," he barked, and the audience grew more quiet. "I'll shoot you."

-- The Day Clint Eastwood Said He Would "Kill" Me, 10 Years Ago This Week, by Michael Moore

ARROGANT: exaggerating or disposed to exaggerate one's own worth or importance often by an overbearing manner; showing an offensive attitude of superiority; proceeding from or characterized by arrogance.

-- by Merriam Webster Dictionary

Statistics: Posted by admin — Sat Jun 20, 2015 3:31 am

Pliny (VIII,29) tells us that the ape-men were in evidence at the Roman games, although earlier the Senate had been against this kind of nonsense and had forbidden the import of "Africans." Pliny (XI,44) describes this ape genus as "a perfect imitation of the human." It is only in the genital member that there exists a difference. "Protect yourself," thus warns Ignatius in his epistle to the Smyrnans IV, "from the beasts in the form of men" (apo ton therion anthropomorphon!).

-- Theozoology, or the Science of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron, by Dr. Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels

LIBERAL: of, relating to, or based on the liberal arts; of or befitting a man of free birth; marked by generosity; openhanded; given or provided in a generous and openhanded way; ample, full; broad-minded; especially; not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or traditional forms; of, favoring, or based upon the principles of liberalism; of or constituting a political party advocating or associated with the principles of political liberalism; especially of or constituting a political party in the United Kingdom associated with ideals of individual especially economic freedom, greater individual participation in government, and constitutional, political, and administrative reforms designed to secure these objectives.

-- by Merriam Webster Dictionary

because we tend to demonize Black and Hispanic people ...

Statistics: Posted by admin — Sat Jun 20, 2015 2:39 am

The implication of my argument so far is that the occurrence of sanctioned massacres cannot be adequately explained by the existence of psychological forces -- whether these be characterological dispositions to engage in murderous violence or profound hostility against the target -- so powerful that they must find expression in violent acts unhampered by moral restraints. The major instigators for this class of violence derive from the policy process, rather than from impulses toward violence as such. The question that really calls for psychological analysis is why so many people are willing to formulate, participate in, and condone policies that call for the mass killings of defenseless victims. In seeking answers to this question, I submit, we can learn more by looking, not at the motives for violence, but at the conditions under which the usual moral inhibitions against violence become weakened. To put it in Lewinian terms, we need to focus not so much on factors increasing the strength of driving forces toward violence, as on factors reducing the strength of restraining forces against violence. It is the weakening of such restraining forces that I shall address the remainder of my remarks.

THE LOSS OF RESTRAINT

I would like to discuss three interrelated processes that lead to the weakening of moral restraints against violence: authorization, routinization, and dehumanization. Through processes of authorization, the situation becomes so defined that standard moral principles do not apply and the individual is absolved of responsibility to make personal moral choices. Through processes of routinization, the action becomes so organized that there is no opportunity for raising moral questions and making moral decisions. Through processes of dehumanization, the actor's attitudes toward the target and toward himself become so structured that it is neither necessary nor possible for him to view the relationship in moral terms.

Authorization

Sanctioned massacres by definition occur in the context of an authority situation. The structure of an authority situation is such that, at least for many of the participants, the moral principles that generally govern human relationships do not apply. Thus when acts of violence are explicitly ordered, implicitly encouraged, tacitly approved, or at least permitted by legitimate authorities, people's readiness to commit or condone them is considerably enhanced. The fact that such acts are authorized seems to carry automatic justification for them. Behaviorally, authorization obviates the necessity of making judgments or choices. Not only do normal moral principles become inoperative, but -- particularly when the actions are explicitly ordered -- a different kind of morality, linked to the duty to obey superior orders, tends to take over.

An individual in an authority situation characteristically feels obligated to obey the orders of the authorities, whether or not these correspond with his personal preferences. He sees himself as having no choice as long as he accepts the legitimacy of the orders and of the authorities who give them. Individuals differ considerably in the degree to which -- and the conditions under which -- they are prepared to challenge the legitimacy of an order on the grounds that the order itself is illegal, or that those giving it have overstepped their authority, or that it stems from a policy that violates fundamental societal values. Regardless of such individual differences, however, the basic structure of a situation of legitimate authority requires the individual to respond in terms of authoritative demands rather than personal preferences; he can disobey only by challenging the legitimacy of the authority. Often people obey without question even though the behavior they engage in may entail great personal sacrifice or great harm to others.

An important corollary of the basic structure of the authority situation is that the individual does not see himself as personally responsible for the consequences of his action. Again, there are individual differences, depending on one's capacity and readiness to evaluate the legitimacy of orders received. Insofar as the person sees himself, however, as having had no choice in the action, he does not feel personally responsible for it. He was not a personal agent but merely an extension of the authority. Thus when his action causes harm to others, he can feel relatively free of guilt. A similar mechanism operates when a person engages in antisocial behavior that was not ordered by the authorities but tacitly encouraged and approved by them, even if only by making it quite clear that such behavior will not be punished. In this situation, behavior that was formerly illegitimate is legitimized by the authorities' acquiescence.

In the My Lai massacre, it is likely that the structure of the authority situation contributed to the massive violence in the two ways just described, that is, by conveying both the message that acts of violence against Vietnamese villagers were required and the message that such acts, even if not ordered, were permitted by the authorities in charge. The actions at My Lai represented, at least in some respects, responses to explicit or implicit orders. Everyone agrees that Lt. Calley, the officer in immediate charge of the operation, ordered his men to shoot all of the inhabitants of the village. Whether Calley himself had been ordered by his superiors to "waste" the whole area, as he claimed, is a matter of controversy. Even if we assume, however, that he was not explicitly ordered to wipe out the village, he had reason to believe that such actions were expected by his superior officers. Indeed the very nature of the war conveyed this expectation: The principal measure of military success as the "body count" -- the number of enemy soldiers killed -- and any Vietnamese killed by the U.S. military was commonly defined as a "Viet Cong." Thus it was not totally bizarre for Calley to believe that what he was doing at My Lai was to increase his body count, as any good officer was expected to do.

Even to the extent that the actions at My Lai occurred spontaneously, without reference to superior orders, those committing them had ample reason to assume that such actions would not be punished and might even be tacitly approved by the military authorities. Actions similar to those at My Lai, though perhaps not on the same scale, were not uncommon in Vietnam, and the authorities had quite clearly shown a permissive attitude toward them. Not only had they failed to punish such acts in most cases, but the very strategies and tactics that they themselves consistently devised were based on the proposition that the civilian population of South Vietnam -- regardless of whether it involved "hostile" or "friendly" elements -- was totally expendable. Such policies as search-and-destroy missions, the establishment of free-shooting zones, the use of anti-personnel weapons, the bombing of entire villages if they were suspected of harboring guerrillas, the forced migration of masses of the rural population, and the defoliation of vast forest areas helped to legitimize acts of massive violence of the kind that occurred at My Lai.

The events at My Lai suggest an orientation to authority based on unquestioning obedience to superior orders no matter how destructive the actions called for by these orders. Such obedience is specifically fostered in the course of military training and reinforced by the structure of the military authority situation. It also reflects, however, an ideological orientation that may be widespread in general populations. It seems that such an ideology -- similar to though obviously rooted in different historical experiences and probably differing in many nuances from that suggested for Nazi Germany -- is accepted by large numbers of Americans. In a national survey of public reactions to the Calley trial (Kelman & Lawrence, 1972), conducted a few weeks after the conviction of Lt. Calley had been announced, we asked respondents what they thought they would do if they were soldiers in Vietnam and were ordered by their superior officers to shoot all inhabitants of a village suspected of aiding the enemy, including old men, women, and children. Fifty-one percent of our sample said they would follow orders and shoot; 33% said that they would refuse to shoot. We cannot infer, of course, from their responses to a hypothetical question what these individuals would actually do if they found themselves in the situation described. Our data do suggest, however, that they are prepared, in principle, to engage in mass violence if faced with authoritative orders to do so. They are certainly prepared to condone such actions; they regard obedience to orders under these circumstances -- even if that means shooting unarmed civilians -- as the normatively expected, the required, indeed the right and moral thing for the good citizen to do. In short, the cognitive and ideological grounding for mass violence in an authority situation seems to be present in large segments of the U.S. population (and very probably of other populations as well; see, for example, Mann, 1973).

From the pattern of their responses to a variety of questions, we can gain some understanding of the differences between those who say they would follow orders and shoot in the hypothetical situation and those who say they would refuse to shoot (Kelman, 1973). Those who say they would shoot seem to feel, by and large, that the individual has no choice in the face of authoritative orders; he has neither the responsibility nor the right to question such orders. They make a sharp separation between authority situations and interpersonal situations in daily life. The moral norms that apply in the latter are, in their view, irrelevant in the former. Within authority situations, they feel unable to differentiate between circumstances under which it would be right and those under which it would be wrong to obey superior orders. Those who say they would refuse to shoot would generally agree that legitimate orders must be obeyed, but their view of the authority situation is more flexible: Obedience is less automatic; the individual has both the right and the duty to make certain judgments and choices. Thus they are prepared to make certain moral distinctions even in an authority situation; they are more inclined to see that situation as continuous with normal interpersonal relationships.

Respondents who say they would follow orders and shoot, seeing themselves as totally devoid of choices in the face of authority, feel strongly that the individual cannot be held personally responsible for actions that he takes under these conditions. They seem to conceive the relationship between citizens and authorities as governed by an implicit contract. According to this contract, the citizen -- at least in such areas as foreign and military policy -- obeys without question. In return, the authorities accept full responsibility for the consequences of his actions. This view is consistent with a pattern of involvement in the political system that I have described elsewhere (Kelman, 1969) as normative integration, i.e., integration based primarily on adherence to system rules. Normatively integrated individuals do feel included in the system, but their inclusion is tenuous. They do not see themselves as "owners" of the system and independent agents with regard to national policy, but rather as "pawns" who are obligated to support these policies regardless of their personal preferences.

Theoretically, we would expect normative integration and the conception of the citizen-authority relationship associated with it to be most prevalent among members of the working class and perhaps the lower middle class. Given their socialization experiences and the realities of their life situations, they are not likely to develop a sense of ownership of the system and a sense of power and personal agency within it, even though they are generally integrated in the society. Our survey data are consistent with this interpretation. Respondents who say they would follow orders and shoot Vietnamese civilians and who feel the individual should not be held responsible for actions taken under authoritative orders tend to be lower on several indicators of social class, especially on educational level. Though statistically significant, these relationships are not strong and must be interpreted very cautiously (Lawrence & Kelman, 1973). In any event, our data suggest that, within the population at large, the ideology of unquestioning obedience is related to a sense of political powerlessness.

Powerlessness within the system, conducive to an attitude of unquestioning obedience to authoritative orders, may help to explain the readiness to condone sanctioned massacres among large segments of the general population and the readiness to participate in such massacres among the lower echelons of the military or bureaucratic organizations involved. Sanctioned massacres, however, require the collaboration of organizational levels across the entire chain of command. What is often striking is the degree of unquestioning obedience to orders shown by officers and functionaries at high levels in the organizational hierarchy, who certain do not belong to the more powerless segments of the society. When asked to play their part in the murderous enterprise, they seem ready to do so without claiming the right or even feeling the need to raise questions. They too seem to assume that superior orders override the moral considerations that might apply in other situations and free them of personal responsibility for their actions.

The Senate hearings on Watergate have provided some insight into the dynamics of unquestioning obedience among those at middle or moderately high levels within an authority system. Watergate of course was not a sanctioned massacre, but it provides a vivid demonstration of the way in which processes of authorization sweep aside the usual moral restrains against participation in criminal acts. People who should have known better automatically carried out what they saw as authoritative orders without questioning the moral or legal implications. Similar processes can account for the unquestioning participation of large numbers of people, many of them clearly belonging to highly educated and powerful segments of American society, in the formulation and execution of Indochina policy.

There are, of course, many reasons why officers and officials are motivated to go along with policies prescribed by higher authorities. These have to do with holding on to or advancing in their jobs, with protecting or expanding their areas of jurisdiction, with nurturing ambitions for higher office or larger duties. In tightly managed authority systems, success often depends on being a good team player and refraining from rocking the boat. Granting the importance of such considerations, we still need to ask how the voice of conscience is subdued, why the moral restraints that would normally inhibit participation in murderous violence are so hopelessly weak in these cases. I would propose that, in the case of organizational functionaries, there are two ways in which processes of authorization help to make moral restrains inoperative, and that these may act either jointly or independently. Authoritative demands may elicit an overriding obligation or invoke a transcendent mission.

In certain authority systems, the governing ideology or the operating style places the highest value on the loyalty of functionaries -- to the leader as a person or to the organization. Those who are committed to such a system may well see it as their duty to follow authoritative orders regardless of their personal preferences. Within their value system, the order calls forth what they would consider a moral obligation that overrides any other moral scruples they might have. Their reaction is similar to that of the normatively integrated citizen, which I described earlier, in the sense that they also see themselves in a no-choice situation once an authoritative order has been given. The difference, however, is that they have chosen to be in that situation by making a personal commitment to the organization and its leadership. The net effect, of course, is the same in that the usual standards of morality are considered inapplicable. Like the normatively integrated, these functionaries also do not expect to be held personally responsible for the consequences of their actions, but again for a different reason: They seem themselves not as helpless pawns, but as agents and extensions of the authorities and thus by definition assured of their protection. Both groups believe they have no choice but to obey: the normatively integrated because they are so far removed from the centers of power that they feel overwhelmed by the authorities; the functionaries because they are so close to the centers of power that they identify with the authority system and are caught up in its glory and mystique. The functionaries thus tend to exaggerate the moral claim that the authorities have on their loyalties. What is interesting, if this analysis is correct, is that the tendency toward unquestioning obedience is most pronounced among two extreme groups: those far removed from the centers of power and those relatively close to them.

The second way in which processes of authorization may counteract the moral scruples of functionaries is by invoking a transcendent mission. By virtue of their relative closeness to the centers of power, the functionaries may share, to a certain extent, a view sometimes held by those in power. According to this view, the authorities are agents of a larger set of corporate purposes that transcend the rules of standard morality. Thus, their actions -- and their orders -- cannot be judged according to the usual moral or legal criteria. In acting on these orders, the functionaries become part of that transcendent enterprise. They feel justified in overcoming their moral scruples, indeed they feel obligated to do so. The nature of the transcendent mission may be quite vague. Himmler, in giving pep talks to the men in charge of extermination procedures, emphasized that they were "involved in something historic, grandiose, unique ('a great task that occurs once in two thousand years') [Arendt, 1963, p. 93]" without much further specification. He also, incidentally, praised them for their courage and devotion to duty in carrying out regugnant acts. However vague the transcendent mission may be (other examples of vague missions are "national security" or "the containment of Communist aggression"), once the authorities invoke them, the functionaries no longer feel bound by standard moral constraints.

The notion of a transcendent mission brings me directly to the authorities themselves, those who make the decisions and formulate the policies and plans that constitute or lead to sanctioned massacres. I would argue that they too, in their own way, may feel freed of moral restraints through the process of authorization. By virtue of their positions and of the popular mandate that has presumably placed them in those positions, they are authorized to speak for the state. According to a view that is widely held (although it has been challenged by the Nuremberg principles), the state itself is an entity that is not subject to the moral law; it is free to do anything it deems necessary to protect or promote its national interests. The central authorities, in acting for the state, are similarly not subject to moral restraints that might be operative in their personal lives. What is important to note is that, according to this view, the freedom from all restraints devolves on the central decision maker from a higher authority, the state, of which he is merely the servant. (See Kren and Rappoport, 1972, for a discussion of Bismarck's formulation of this issue.) The state is conceived as external to the decision maker, making demands that must be heeded without question. Since his authority derives from the state, whose pursuit of national interests transcends standard morality, everyday moral considerations do not apply.

According to the logic of this view, justification for the decision maker's actions parallels the justifications used by those lower in the hierarchy. He too claims that he had no choice in that he was responding to authoritative demands. He too makes a sharp separation between personal morality and the overriding requirements of authority situations. He too expects to be absolved of personal responsibility because, as head of state, he was acting under higher authority. It is interesting, in this connection, that the Nuremberg principles challenged both the claim of "superior orders" and that of "head of state" as ways of avoiding personal responsibility for war crimes (Bosch, 1970). This whole doctrine is, of course, extremely dangerous because of its total circularity. The decision makers themselves determine what the national interests are that are making unchallengeable demands on them. It becomes easy to identify their own interests and inclinations -- or at least their own views of the national interest -- with "the" national interest, which then acquires an independent status and can be pursued without reference to moral considerations. In effect, this doctrine authorizes central decision makers to use their power without restraint by invoking a transcendent mission that is not subject to principles of personal morality.

Routinization

Authorization processes create a situation in which the person becomes involved in an action without considering the implications of that action and without really making a decision. Once he has taken the initial step, he is in a new psychological and social situation in which the pressures to continue are quite powerful. As Lewin (1947) has pointed out, many forces that might originally have kept him out of the situation reverse direction once he has made a commitment (once he has gone through the gate region, in Lewin's terms) and now help to keep him in the situation. For example, concern about the criminal nature of the action, which might originally have inhibited him from becoming involved, may now lead to deeper involvement in efforts to justify the action and to avoid negative consequences.

Despite these forces, however, given the nature of the action involved in sanctioned massacres, one might expect moral scruples and revulsions to arise at any step of the way. To deal with such resistances, repeated authorization providing renewed justification is usually necessary. Furthermore, and very importantly, the likelihood of such resistances cropping up is greatly reduced by processes of routinization -- by transforming the action into routine, mechanical, highly programmed operations. Routinization fulfills two functions. First, it reduces the necessity of making decisions, thus minimizing occasions in which moral questions may arise. Second, it makes it easier to avoid the implications of the action since the actor focuses on the details of his job rather than on its meaning. The latter effect is more easily achieved among those who participate in sanctioned massacres from a distance, that is, from the desks of their bureaus or even from the cockpits of their bombers.

Routinization operates both at the level of the individual actor and at the organizational level. At the individual level, performance of the job is broken down into a series of discrete steps, most of them carried out in automatic, regularized fashion. The bureaucrat or officer concerns himself with making out schedules, keeping accounts, writing reports, assigning personnel, and dozens of other details and trivia that are part of his normal job. It becomes easy to forget the nature of the product that emerges from this process. Even those who cannot fail to see the product may come to see their actions as routine. When Calley said of My Lai that it was "no great deal," he probably implied that it was all in a day's work.

At the organizational level, the task is divided across different offices, each of which has responsibility for a small portion of it. Not only does this arrangement result in a diffusion of responsibility, but it reduces the amount and limits the scope of decision making that is necessary. The work flows from office to office, with each automatically setting the agenda for the one next in line (hierarchically or functionally). At each point, the only decisions that generally have to be made are operational ones. There is no expectation that the moral implications will be considered at any of these points, nor is there any opportunity to do so.

The organizational processes also help further legitimize the actions of each participant. By proceeding in routine fashion -- processing papers, exchanging memos, diligently carrying out their assigned tasks -- the different units mutually reinforce each other in the view that what is going on must be perfectly normal, correct, and legitimate. The shared illusion that they are engaged in a legitimate enterprise helps the participants to assimilate their activities to other purposes, thus further normalizing them. For example, they may concern themselves with the efficiency of their performance, the productivity of their unit, the prospects for personal recognition and advancement, or the cohesiveness of their group (Janis, 1971). The nature of the task becomes completely dissociated from their performance of it. As they become habituated to their assignment in a supportive organizational context, they come to treat it more and more as if it were a normal job in which one can take pride, hope to achieve success, and engage in collaborative effort.

Normalization of atrocities is more difficult to the extent that there are constant reminders of the true meaning of the enterprise. Moral inhibitions are less easily subdued if the functionaries, in their own thinking and in their communications with one another, have to face the fact that they are engaged in organized murder. Such moral constraints are augmented by prudential ones when it comes to the writing of memoranda and the issuing of communiques. The difficulty is handled by the well-known bureaucratic inventiveness in the use of language. The SS had a set of Sprachregelungen or "language rules" to govern descriptions of their extermination program. As Arendt (1963) points out, the term "language rule" in itself was "a code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie (p. 80]." The code names for killing and liquidation were "final solution," "evacuation," and "special treatment." The war in Indochina has produced its own set of euphemisms: "protective reactions," "pacification," "forced-draft urbanization and modernization." Whatever terms they use, participants in the sanctioned massacres are of course usually aware of what they are actually doing. The euphemisms allow them to differentiate these actions from ordinary killing and destruction and thus to avoid confrontation with their true meaning. The moral revulsion that the ordinary labels would arouse can be more readily suppressed and the enterprise can proceed on its routine course.

Dehumanization

Authorization processes override standard moral considerations; routinization processes reduce the likelihood that such considerations will arise. Still, the inhibitions against murdering fellow human beings are generally so strong that the victims must be deprived of their human status if systematic killing is to proceed in a smooth and orderly fashion. To the extent that the victims are dehumanized, principles of morality no longer apply to them and moral restraints against killing are more readily overcome.

To understand the processes of dehumanization, we must first ask what it means to perceive another person as fully human, in the sense of being included in the moral compact that governs human relationships. I would propose that to perceive another as human we must accord him identity and community, concepts that closely resemble the two fundamental modalities of existence terms "agency" and "communion" by Bakan (1966). To accord a person identity is to perceive him as an individual, independent and distinguishable from others, capable of making choices, and entitled to live his own life on the basis of his own goals and values. To accord a person community is to perceive him -- along with one's self -- as part of an interconnected network of individuals who care for each other, who recognize each other's individuality, and who respect each other's rights. These two features together constitute the basis for individual worth -- for the acceptance of the individual as an end in himself, rather than a means toward some extraneous end. Individual worth, of necessity, has both a personal and a social referent; it implies that the individual has value and that he is valued by others.

To perceive others as fully human means to be saddened by the death of every single person, regardless of the population group or the part of the world from which he comes, and regardless of our own personal acquaintance with him. If we accord him identity, then we must individualize his death, a sentiment epitomized in the words of the Talmud:

Therefore was a single man only first created to teach thee that whosoever destroys a single soul from the children of man, Scripture charges him as though he had destroyed the whole world, and whosoever rescues a single soul from the children of man, Scripture credits him as though he had saved the whole world [Sanhedrin, Chapter 4, Mishnah 5].

If we accord him community, then we must experience his death as a personal loss, a sentiment expressed with beautiful simplicity by John Donne's Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

Sanctioned massacres become possible to the extent that we deprive fellow human beings of identity and community. It is difficult to have compassion for those who lack identity and who are excluded from our community; their death does not move us in a personal way. Thus when a group of people is defined entirely in terms of a category to which they belong, and when this category is excluded from the human family, then the moral restraints against killing them are more readily overcome.

Dehumanization of the enemy is a common phenomenon in any war situation. Sanctioned massacres, however, presuppose a degree of dehumanization that is considerably more extreme. People may fear and hate an enemy; they may be sufficiently angered, provoked, or threatened by him to be prepared to take his life. They may still be reacting to him, however, as a human being; in fact, they may even respect him and feel a sense of kinship with him, regretting that clashing interests have brought them into conflict. If they kill him, it is because they perceive him as a personal threat. By contrast, in sanctioned massacres as I have characterized them the killing is not in response to the target's threats or provocations. It is not what he has done that marks him for death, but what he is -- the category to which he happens to belong.

In keeping with my characterization of sanctioned massacres as occurring in the context of a genocidal policy, the victims are converted into means in the most ultimate sense possible. They are killed because their deaths serve the policy purposes of their executioners. They are the victims of policies that regard their systematic destruction as a desirable end or a fully acceptable means. They are totally expendable.

Such extreme dehumanization, as I mentioned earlier, becomes possible when the target group can readily be identified as a separate category of people who have historically been stigmatized for one or another reason. There may be a long history of exclusion, distrust, and contempt of the victims by the victimizers. Or the victims may belong to a distinct racial, religious, ethnic, or political group which is commonly regarded by the victimizers as inferior, sinister, or uncivilized. The traditions, the habits, the images, and the vocabularies for dehumanizing such groups are already well established and these can be drawn upon when the groups are selected for massacre. The use of labels helps to deprive the victims of identity and community. Terms like "gook" help to define them as subhuman, despicable, and certain incapable of evoking empathy. Terms like "Communist" allow their total identity to be absorbed by a single category, and one that is identified by the perpetrators of the massacre as totally evil.

The dynamics of the massacre process itself further increase the participants' tendency to dehumanize their victims. Those who participate as part of the bureaucratic apparatus increasingly come to see their victims as bodies to count and enter into their reports, as faceless figures that will determine their productivity rates and promotions. Those who participate in the massacre directly -- in the field, as it were -- are reinforced in their perception of the victims as less than human by observing their very victimization. The only way they can justify what is being done to these people, both by others and by themselves, and the only way they can extract some degree of meaning out of the absurd events in which they find themselves participating (Lifton, 1971, 1973) is by coming to believe that the victims are subhuman and deserve to be rooted out. And thus the process of dehumanization feeds on itself.

Continuing participating in sanctioned massacres not only increases the tendency to dehumanize the victim, but it also increases the dehumanization of the victimizer himself. Dehumanization of the victimizer is a gradual process that develops out of the act of victimization itself. Zimbardo, Haney, Banks, and Jaffe (1973) have dramatically demonstrated, in a simulated prison study, the way in which subjects who were randomly assigned to a victimizer role tend to become brutalized by virtue of the situational forces to which they are subjected. In sanctioned massacres, as the victimizer becomes increasingly dehumanized through the enactment of his role, moral restraints against murder are further weakened. To the extent that he is dehumanized, he loses the capacity to act as a moral being.

The actions of the victimizer make his own dehumanization an inescapable condition of his life (Sanford & Comstock, 1971). Following my earlier distinction between identity and community, I would propose that the victimizer loses both his sense of personal identity and his sense of community.

Through his unquestioning obedience to authority and through the routinization of his job, he is deprived of personal agency. He is not an independent actor making judgments and choices on the basis of his own values and assessment of the consequences. Rather, he allows himself to be buffeted about by external forces. He becomes alienated within his task -- to adapt a concept developed by Pravaz (1959) for the analysis of task groups -- he is unable to distance himself from the task, to reflect about it, to recognize himself as a responsible agent. He is so caught up in the routine performance of his authorized task that he automatically slides into actions without stopping to make value decisions about them. He does of course make certain decisions, particularly if he is at a moderately high level in the hierarchy, but these focus on details of procedure and on the costs and benefits of various ways of carrying out the task. What they conspicuously fail to focus on are the truly important criteria for human decision making: What effects will these actions have on the human beings involved? From this point of view, even the high-level decision makers are alienated within their task and deprived of a sense of identity. They seem themselves as personal agents, often in fact as powerful actors on a global stage, participating in a historical drama, and to a certain extent this perception may well be true. Yet insofar as they operate without consideration of the human consequences of their decisions, their agency is stunted and illusory.

This brings me to the second source of the victimizer's dehumanization: his loss of the sense of community. In dehumanizing his victims, he loses his capacity to care for them, to have compassion for them, to treat them as human beings. He develops a state of psychic numbing (Lifton, 1971, 1973) and a sense of detachment (Opton, 1971) which sharply reduce his capacity to feel. Insofar as he excludes a whole group of people from his network of shared empathy, his own community becomes more constricted and his sense of involvement in humankind declines.

In sum, processes of authorization, routinization, and dehumanization of the victim contribute to the weakening of moral restraints, not only directly, but also by furthering the dehumanization of the victimizer. As he gradually discards personal responsibility and human empathy, he loses his capacity to act as a moral being.

-- Violence Without Moral Restraint: Reflections on the Dehumanization of Victims and Victimizers, by Herbert C. Kelman

Fellow Citizens: Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits, and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?....

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling of vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival....

-- Frederick Douglass, from "People's History of the United States: 1492-Present," by Howard Zinn

While most slaves were concentrated on the plantations, there were many slaves living in urban areas or working in rural industry. Although over 90% of American slaves lived in rural areas, slaves made up at least 20% of the populations of most Southern cities. In Charleston, South Carolina, slaves and free blacks outnumbered whites.

-- Conditions of Antebellum Slavery, by PBS.org

Outnumbered by their slaves, South Carolina planters had lived for generations in fear of bloody revolt. In 1739, the Stono Rebellion may have involved as many as one hundred slaves....

General Butler had been a successful lawyer and politician in civilian life. A few months earlier, Secretary of War Stanton, another lawyer, had urged him to exercise his “accustomed skill and discretion” in dealing with the abolitionist General Phelps. Butler now set out to allay his subordinate’s lack of confidence in the Native Guards. He pointed out that Weitzel had not complained that the Native Guards were unable to protect the railroad, the duty to which he had assigned them; neither had Weitzel given them a chance to test his privately expressed belief “that colored men will not fight.” As for the Native Guards’ unsettling influence on local black residents, the regiments had arrived at the same time as the rest of Weitzel’s force. Was it the presence of the Native Guards, Butler asked, “or is it the arrival of United States troops, carrying, by the act of Congress, freedom to this servile race? . . . You are in a country where now the negroes outnumber the whites ten to one, and these whites are in rebellion against the Government or in terror seeking its protection.” The solution, Butler told Weitzel, was to tell white Louisianans to lay down their arms, take the oath of allegiance, and pursue their private affairs. Then, U.S. troops would offer them “the same protection against negro or other violence” that had been available without interruption in states that had not seceded. It was the same course of action Butler had taken in the spring of 1861 when he arrived in Maryland, where white residents feared a slave rebellion. These remarks apparently placated Weitzel, for he remained in command of the La Fourche District and the Native Guards continued to protect the railroad ....

[T]he four Florida and Alabama counties on the line of march produced less than half as much cotton, on average, as neighboring counties did. Consequently, whites outnumbered black slaves by more than 50 percent.....

Across the Mississippi River from Arkansas lay the states of Mississippi and Tennessee. Mississippi had followed South Carolina out of the Union on 9 January 1861. Some of its richest farmland, including the Yazoo River country, had belonged to the Choctaw Indians as recently as 1834 and was becoming one of the nation’s great cotton-producing regions. The so-called Yazoo Delta really consisted of soil deposited by the Mississippi River during its annual floods, which planters sought to mitigate by building levees. In the Yazoo country, black slaves outnumbered the region’s white population by more than four to one. Farther south along the Mississippi in Warren County, of which Vicksburg was the seat, the ratio was smaller, but still more than three to one. As the land rose away from the river, the soil became too poor to support cotton plantations.

-- Freedom By the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867, by William A. Dobak

Nat Turner (October 2, 1800 – November 11, 1831) was an African-American slave who led a slave rebellion of slaves and free blacks in Southampton County, Virginia on August 21, 1831 that resulted in 60 white deaths. He led a group of other slave followers carrying farm implements on a killing spree. As they went from Plantation to Plantation they gathered horses, guns, freed other slaves along the way, and recruited other blacks that wanted to join their revolt. At the end of their rebellion they were accused of the deaths of fifty white people. Virginia legislators also targeted free blacks with a colonization bill, which allocated new funding to remove them, and a police bill that denied free black’s trials by jury and made any free blacks convicted of a crime subject to sale and relocation. Whites organized militias and called out regular troops to suppress the rising. In addition, mobs attacked blacks in the area killing an estimated total of 100-200, many not involved at all with the revolt. ...

The rebellion was suppressed within two days, but Turner eluded capture by hiding in the woods until October 30, when he was discovered by a farmer named Benjamin Phipps, where he was hiding in a hole covered with fence rails. While awaiting his trial, Turner confessed his knowledge of the rebellion to attorney Thomas Ruffin Gray. On November 5, 1831, he was tried for "conspiring to rebel and making insurrection", convicted and sentenced to death. Turner was hanged on November 11 in Jerusalem, Virginia. His body was flayed, beheaded and quartered. Turner received no formal burial; his headless remains were either buried unmarked or kept for scientific use. His skull is said to have passed through many hands, last being reported in the collection of a planned civil rights museum for Gary, Indiana, despite calls for its burial.

-- Nat Turner, by Wikipedia

In a dramatic battle in the cane fields, the slave army faced off against the twin forces of the American military and a hastily assembled planter militia. “The blacks were not intimidated by this army and formed themselves in line and fired for as long as they had ammunition,” wrote one observer. But the slaves’ ammunition did not last long, and the battle was brief. Soon the planter militia broke the slave line and the slaughter began.

The planters, supported by the U.S. military, captured Charles Deslondes, chopped off his hands, broke his thighs, and then roasted him on a pile of straw. Over the next few days, they executed and beheaded more than 100 slaves, putting their heads on poles and dangling their dismembered corpses from the gates of New Orleans. “Their Heads, which decorate our Levee, all the way up the coast… look like crows sitting on long poles,” wrote one traveler. The rotting corpses were grim reminders of who owned who—and just where true power resided.

-- America's Forgotten Slave Revolt, by Daniel Rasmussen

Black men convicted of raping white women in the antebellum South could legally be treated with brutality. In 1801, for example, when a slave was sentenced to death in western North Carolina, the court ordered the man decapitated and his head displayed to deter "evil doers and all persons in like cases offending."

-- White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th Century South, by Martha Hodes

At least 21 insurgent black slaves executed (1811) after the German Coast Uprising near New Orleans, Louisiana. Their heads were displayed on pikes and gates as a warning.

-- List of People Who Were Beheaded, by Wikipedia

[B]eheading is as old as human civilization itself. So it also reminds us how close we remain to savagery, which is what makes decapitation so repulsive and alluring at the same time. We don't want to behold our own brutal natures. But we also can't look away, as the millions of YouTube hits illustrate.

The ancient Celts hung enemies' severed heads from horses' necks or nailed them to the front of their homes. The heads of important rival leaders were preserved in cedar oil and displayed to admiring guests.

To the conquering Romans, such rituals marked the Celts as uncivilized. But that gave the Romans license to behead Celts, who allegedly lay so far outside of human decency that its norms did not apply to them.

With the rise of nation-states, meanwhile, beheading became a force of political repression as well as revolution. As Scottish nationalists reminded voters in the recent failed referendum for independence, English monarchs routinely beheaded Irish and Scottish challengers to their rule. But in 1649, King Charles I was himself beheaded. By decapitating the sovereign head of state, the people proclaimed their own sovereignty.

That's also what happened in the French Revolution, of course, when Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were both executed by a new beheading machine: the guillotine. Named after the French doctor who suggested it, the guillotine promised a more "humane" and efficient method of decapitation than the ax.

To horrified observers like England's Edmund Burke, however, the guillotine symbolized the brutality and instability that popular revolt unleashed. Marching in parades with their victims' heads on spikes, the French crowds reminded Burke of nothing so much as "a procession of American savages" — that is, of Native Americans — displaying enemy scalps.

By the late 1800s, as empires spread their reach, white Europeans and North Americans came to associate beheading almost exclusively with the racial or cultural "other." Never mind that Indians were themselves beheaded by whites, or that the French didn't outlaw the guillotine until 1977.

Americans continued to decapitate its foes too, using the same rationale as the Romans did: Some people are so savage that the rules of civilization don't apply to them. American troops decapitated a Japanese soldier in 1945 and propped his head on their tank for a picture. Troops did the same thing to an Iraqi soldier in 1991. But this time, Life magazine — which had declined to publish the World War II photo — put the new picture on its cover.

And the victim's eyes were pointed at us. Condemning Islamic State on Wednesday, President Obama said it "forces us to look into the heart of darkness." The allusion was to Joseph Conrad's classic 1899 novel, in which a deranged white colonist in Africa erects human heads on the fence around his house.

To Conrad, writing at the height of imperialism, the heads showed how whites could regress into the barbarism of the lesser races. Today, we know better — or we should. The savagery that you see on those YouTube videos isn't just in Islamic State, or in some other enemy that you fear and despise. It's in you too.

-- Practice of Beheading Not Limited to Islamic State, by Jonathan Zimmerman

[Note: No beheadings of White Masters by their slaves was found in a Google search on 3/6/15]

SLAVERY WITHOUT SUBMISSION, EMANCIPATION WITHOUT FREEDOM

-- A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present, by Howard Zinn

Statistics: Posted by admin — Sat Jun 20, 2015 2:38 am

Sodom & Gomorrah; Abraham & Isaac

Then we got to stories like Sodom and Gomorrah. All I remembered about that story is that they were these two sinful cities, like Las Vegas and Reno or something, and God got mad and wiped them out. And Lot's wife looked back when she was told not to and she got turned into a pillar of salt.

But the nuns of my grade school didn't explain to us about what happens right before they flee. Right before they flee, Lot is visited by these two angels, who are masquerading as two men, and they come and stay overnight at his house. And this mob forms outside and they yell, "Send out those two angel-like men to us so we can have sex with them!" And Lot yells "No!" (Which I think is a basic rule of hospitality: don't give up your guests to be raped by the angry mob outside.)



But then, what does he say next? He says, "Why don't you take my daughters and rape and do what you will with them? They're virgins!"

Okay, so Lot is evil, right? How is it that the story we know about him is about his wife getting turned into a pillar of salt? Maybe that was her only way out. Maybe being a big pillar of salt is preferable to being married to Lot!

Anyway, after Lot and his two traumatized daughters flee Sodom and Gomorra, they all go up to a cave in the mountains. And during the night, Lot's two daughters get Lot drunk and then rape him. Do they do this in revenge of what their father did to them? No. The Bible says it's because there aren't any other men around. Even though, the Bible also says that they're not that far from a city named Zoar. So, I guess no men around for maybe a few miles?

And wait a minute, so Lot's two daughters just had to drug and rape somebody? And then I guess if you're their dad and you're the only one there....

Okay, I knew the Bible had nutty stories, but I thought they'd be wedged in amongst an ocean of inspiration and history. But instead, the stories just got darker and even more convoluted.

This Old Testament God makes the grizzliest tests of people's loyalty. Like when he asks Abraham to murder his son, Isaac. As a kid, we were taught to admire it. I caught my breath reading it. We were taught to admire it?

What kind of sadistic test of loyalty is that, to ask someone to kill his or her own child? And isn't the proper answer, "No! I will not kill my child, or any child, even if it means eternal punishment in hell!"?

At the next Bible study class Father Tom reminded us, "That Isaac represents what matters to Abraham most. And that's what God asks us to give up for him."

I said, "But loving and protecting and caring for the welfare of your child is such a deep ethical, loving instinct and act. So, what if what matters to you most is your own loving behavior? Should we be willing to give up our ethics for God?"

And he said, "No! No, it's because your ethics, because your ethics IS your love and faith in God." That confused me a little bit, but I decided to just let that one go. But then, I found out that Abraham is not the only person willing to murder his own child for God. They're all over the place in the Bible.

For example, in the book of Judges, this guy named Jephtheh tells God that if he can win this battle, he will kill the first person who greets him when he comes home as a burnt offering. And who is the first person he sees? His only child, his beloved daughter, who runs up to him playing with tambourines and singing. "Hi daddy... what?"



And does God say, "No, don't kill your only child as a burnt offering to me!" Or even, "Jephtheh, who did you expect to be the first person to greet you when you came home?"

No, it appears the most important point of this story is that Jephtheh allows his beautiful daughter to go off into the woods for two months to mourn her virginity (I kept thinking, "Run! Run!") before she comes back and he kills her... by lighting her on fire.

Even if you leave aside the creepy sacrifice-your-own-offspring stories, the laws of the Old Testament were really hard to take. Leviticus and Deuteronomy are filled with archaic, just hard to imagine laws. Like if a man has sex with an animal, both the man and the animal should be killed. Which I could almost understand for the man, but the animal? Because the animal was a willing participant? Because now the animal's had the taste of human sex and won't be satisfied without it?

Or my personal favorite law in the Bible: in Deuteronomy, it says if you're a woman, married to a man, who gets into a fight with another man, and you try to help him out by grabbing onto the genitals of his opponent, the Bible says you immediately have to have your hand chopped off.

-- Letting Go of God, by Julia Sweeney

Marilyn Manson, "The Golden Age of Grotesque" (MP3s)

Four Common Flaws in Critiques of Media Violence Research

Let us now turn to a discussion of a few of the most frequently repeated errors of reasoning that have been made by critics who challenge the conclusion that exposing children to media violence puts them more at risk to behave aggressively in the short run and in the long run.

1. Assuming that the question is whether TV violence is the "only" cause of aggression, and arguing that TV violence can't matter because people who see the same TV shows differ in aggressiveness. For example, critics say that "Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario see essentially the same TV shows. But the murder rate is much higher in Detroit. Consequently TV violence cannot be increasing serious aggression." This argument has been repeated over many years by intelligent people ranging from social scientists criticizing the research to politicians to network vice-presidents. Of course, this argument would only make sense if nothing except TV violence influenced murder -- not guns, not poverty, not social support, not peer attitudes, not child rearing, not biological predispositions. The murder rate in Detroit has been higher for a lot of these reasons. It's puzzling how anyone could seriously offer this as an argument that TV violence has no effect. No reputable researcher of media violence has ever suggested that media violence is the only cause or even the most important cause of aggression. Serious aggressive behavior only occurs when there is a convergence of multiple predisposing and precipitating factors (Huesmann, 1998).

2. Ignoring laboratory experiments. It has been common among the naysayers (e.g., Freedman, 1984) to ignore completely the well-done laboratory experiments that have shown that exposure to violence stimulates aggressive behavior in the short run. Ignoring any of the different types of research (e.g., experiments, cross-sectional surveys, longitudinal studies) on media violence would be risky, but ignoring laboratory experiments is particularly inappropriate because it is the kind of study that most clearly tests causation. One typical rationale for ignoring laboratory experiments is the supposed artificiality of the aggression measures used in the laboratory, such as giving shocks to another person. The critics most often mention only the measures with the least face validity and never offer any empirical evidence that the lab measures are not valid indices of real-world aggression. The truth is that there is substantial empirical evidence that the measures of aggression used in laboratory studies are quite valid indices of how aggressively the person would behave outside the laboratory (Anderson & Bushman, 1997; Berkowitz & Donnerstein, 1982).

The other common complaint used against experiments without any justification offered is that "laboratory work suffers from strong experimenter demands" that bias the results in the direction of showing effects of media violence (Freedman, 1984). In fact, this criticism runs counter to the empirical evidence that suggests that participants in aggression experiments are likely to inhibit aggressive impulses because they fear being negatively evaluated by the experimenter (Turner & Simons, 1974). Finally, excluding laboratory experiments in favor of focusing only on field research reflects critics' misplaced confidence in such studies. While field studies may often (but not always -- see Berkowitz & Donnerstein, 1982) have greater external validity, it is much harder to confirm the internal validity of the conclusions of field studies. And causation can never be tested as conclusively with field research as with a well-controlled laboratory experiment. The critics who ignore experiments conveniently overlook this fact.

3. Selective reporting of negative results and changing criteria for accepting results. Another common flaw in the critics' analyses of the research is their tendency to change the criteria for reporting a study or evaluating it depending on how the results came out. One study with positive results is discounted because of supposed demand characteristics on participants to behave aggressively, while a study with negative results is praised despite the fact that there were clear demands placed on the participants not to aggress. Another study with positive results is discounted because the stimulus films may have differed in attractiveness to the viewers, while a similar study with negative results is praised even though differential attractiveness of the films could have accounted for the negative effects. While meta-analyses that systematically combine all studies on a topic uniformly show positive and significant effect sizes for media violence on aggression (see Comstock & Scharrer, chapter 11, this volume), the reviews of the naysayers often convey the impression that most studies do not have positive effects simply because, for one flimsy reason or another, they exclude many studies with positive results and include every study with no results.

4. Analyzing studies in a theoretical vacuum. Perhaps the most egregious common error made by the naysayers is to evaluate the research on media violence as if it is completely disconnected from our existing knowledge about learning, social cognition, and aggression. We have outlined earlier in this chapter the established theory that explains how media violence influences aggression. The psychological processes that account for the effect were not invented to account for the effect; they had been established independently. Given what we know about priming of social cognitions (Bargh, 1982), it would be incredibly surprising if media violence did not prime aggressive cognitions. Given what we know about arousal processes and excitation transfer (Zillmann, 1983a, 1983b), it would be startling if media violence did not produce such effects. Given what we know about the innate propensity of primates to imitate (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977, 2000) and the developmental course of observational learning in the real world (Bandura, 1977, 1986), it would be a shock if children did not acquire social scripts, world schemas, and normative beliefs from the mass media. Given the research on how hostile attributional bias (Dodge, 1980, 1985) and normative beliefs promoting aggression (Huesmann & Guerra, 1997) influence children's behavior, it would be surprising if such cognitions acquired from the mass media did not influence the children's behavior. And finally, given the established continuity of aggression from childhood to adulthood (Huesmann et al., 1984), it would be very surprising if the effects of media violence on children were not detectable when they were adults years later. Yet, the naysayers seem totally unaware of such psychological facts.

-- The Case Against the Case Against Media Violence, by L. Rowell Huesmann and Laramie D. Taylor

Greece: Film is regulated by the Commission Responsible for the Supervision and Control of Publications Destined to Children and Adolescents, under the authority of the Minister of Justice: "Publications (...) must not contain any illustration, article, story, title or insert presenting in a favourable light banditry, lying, thievery, laziness, cowardice, hate, any criminal act, or act that demoralises children or juveniles (...) or inspires or instils ethnic prejudice."

***

Portugal: The transmission of pornographic or obscene programmes or programmes which incite violence, the practice of crimes or whatever in a general way violates rights, liberties or fundamental guarantees is not permitted, according to the Television Law.

***

Spain: The classifications are recommendations but cannot be used to deny persons younger than the classified age to entry cinemas. X-rated films depicting pornography or extreme violence can be shown only in X-rated cinemas, where persons under the age of 18 are not allowed entry. The X classification is valid for video, as well. (Law 6/28, March 1995, prohibits the sale or rent to minors of video games and other audio-visual materials that contain messages contravening rights recognised in the Constitution or containing violence, delinquency or pornography.)

***

Sweden: According to the Examination and Control of Films and Videos Act (SFS 1990:886), all films shall be examined and approved by Statens Biografbyra, the national Board of Film Classification, prior to exhibition. For videos intended for sale or hire, the advance examination is voluntary. The Board does not take any action on religious or political grounds. Its task is to judge whether films or sequences are liable to have a brutalising effect on the audience. The distribution of certain scenes of violence is a criminal offence under the law on freedom of expression.

***

Norway: The Norwegian Broadcasting Act is in accordance with the EU Television Directive. According to the Act relating to Films and Videos, 1987, films shown in cinema shall be classified by the Norwegian Board of Film Classification and must not violate public decency or have a brutalising or morally corruptive influence. Computer games including moving photographic images are covered by the Film and Video Act. [38] Regarding Cable transmissions, the Statens Medieforvaltning can ban the local distribution of emissions from other countries sent from Norwegian soil, which regularly show pornography or violence in defiance of Norwegian law. Pornography is defined as 'sexual depictions which are offensive or which could otherwise be perceived as being humanly degrading or debasing, including sexual depictions involving children, animals, violence, enforcement or sadism."

***

Australia: The film/video (since 1984) and computer game (since 1994) industries are required to submit material to the OFLC, Office of Film and Literature Classification, for classification before they can be shown or sold." The ratings include Consumer Advice, which informs the public as to the rationale for a given rating. This consumer information is required by law to appear in advertisements for videos or films, and on the covers of video tapes for sale or rental. Rating categories are: G8 + for interactive electronic games suitable for children 8 years or older; M for media suitable for persons 15 years and over; MA for more advanced media content and titles with this classification may not be sold, rented or demonstrated to persons under 15 years of age. R -- restricted to persons 18 years or older -- is for films or other media and is not allowed for television broadcasting.

***

Japan: The Broadcast Law of Japan regulates both the public service television and radio, NHK, and the commercial stations " ... to make broadcasting contribute to the development of healthy democracy". The law requires broadcasters to establish standards for programming and to set up broadcast programme consultative committees to ensure that programmes satisfy the stated standards. The NHK Standards of Domestic Broadcast Programmes from 1959 says in article 1. Section 6-3: 'Under no circumstances shall acts of violence be permitted."

***

Azerbaijan: The Penal Code 1982, article 228-1 (adopted 1996) says: "For public protection, the distribution of films promoting violence and cruelty is liable for a prison term of up to two years or a fine of the equivalent of 700-800 times minimum wage."

***

Belarus: The Law of the Republic of Belarus Concerning Media and Other Means of Public Information contains an article prohibiting the use of media for the presentation of pornography or anything else against any violation of morality, honour and dignity of the citizens. The Law Concerning Television and Radio currently under consideration contains certain regulations aimed at protecting the rights of young viewers and listeners.

**

Ukraine: The Ukrainian Law on Television and Radio Broadcasting, 1993, Section V, article 4.1 states: "Programmes (films) that can damage the physical, psychological or moral development of minors are forbidden."

-- Children and Media Violence: Yearbook From the UNESCO International Clearinghouse on Children and Violence on the Screen, 1998, edited by Ulla Carlsson and Cecilia von Feilitzen

Marriage & Divorce

by American Psychological Association

3/6/15

Marriage and divorce are both common experiences. In Western cultures, more than 90 percent of people marry by age 50. Healthy marriages are good for couples’ mental and physical health. They are also good for children; growing up in a happy home protects children from mental, physical, educational and social problems. However, about 40 to 50 percent of married couples in the United States divorce. The divorce rate for subsequent marriages is even higher. (Adapted from the Encyclopedia of Psychology)

Britain has highest divorce rate in EU

by DailyMail.co.uk

3/6/15

Britain has the highest divorce rate in the European Union, a survey reveals today.

The number of divorces throughout the EU is on the increase, with an average of 1.8 divorces for every 1,000 people.

But in Britain and in Finland the rate is 2.8 divorces per 1,000, compared with just 0.6 per 1,000 in Luxembourg.

What is the divorce rate? [For England and Wales]

by Harry Benson, The Marriage Foundation

February, 2013

Based on current rates of divorce, 39% of couples marrying today will divorce.

Alternate Unemployment Charts

The seasonally-adjusted SGS [Shadow Government Statistics] Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers.

The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.

Updated: March 6th, 2015

The ShadowStats Alternate Unemployment Rate for January 2015 is 23.2%.

Canada's Unemployment Rate Steady At 6.6% As Economy Loses 4,300 Jobs

by CP/HuffPost Canada

01/09/2015

Canada lost 4,300 jobs in December, adding to the more than 10,000 lost in November, Statistics Canada reported Friday.

The unemployment rate stood pat at 6.6 per cent, with employment little changed in most provinces.

There was some good news behind the headline number: The country gained 53,500 full-time jobs last month. And while those were offset by 57,700 lost part-time jobs, the trend towards full-time work is encouraging, especially as economists had recently worried that Canada is turning into a nation of part-timers.

Ontario lost some 3,500 jobs in the month, while Quebec lost 6,700. Despite falling oil prices, Alberta still recorded a strong month, adding 5,700 jobs while British Columbia added 2,200.

Employment in natural resources was up by 10,200, suggesting the slowdown in energy investment hadn't yet impacted the job market significantly. But thanks to weakness earlier in 2014, natural resources employment for the year is up only 5,000.

The burden of unemployment is worse than Statistics Canada’s official number suggests

by Miles Corak

February 3, 2012

This morning Statistics Canada reported that the unemployment rate increased to 7.6%, confirming a rising trend since July of last year and still significantly above the low of about 6% just before the recession took hold in the autumn of 2008.

This statistic is probably the closest a number can come to having a human face; it relates directly to the hardship Canadians experience in providing for their families, saving for their retirement, and just meeting their day-to-day needs.

But in the end we can’t clearly see the faces of real people behind this number, which at best is an incomplete picture of waste and hardship.

Statistics Canada measures unemployment in a very specific way, asking a representative sample of Canadians if they did anything during a four-week period to look for a job.

If you are not actively looking, then you are not considered unemployed.

Incorporating those who are not looking for work, but certainly want a job, into the calculations—those who are waiting for a recall from a previous employer or waiting for a reply to applications already made; those who have given up looking for jobs because they believe none are available; and those who are working part-time but want and can’t get more hours of work—leads to a much higher unemployment rate.

According to official calculations the average monthly unemployment rate during 2011 was 7.4%, but the more comprehensive measure implies 10.6%.

The official rate understates the waste of human resources, but it also doesn’t tell us about the hardship being experienced.

A given unemployment rate could be due to rapid turnover in the labour market, with any one person experiencing a short spell of job search, with a different group next month going through the same experience and also finding a job within a couple of weeks. Or it could reflect the same individuals being jobless each and every month of the year, and suffering very long spells of unemployment.

In the first case unemployment does not entail much hardship; in the second it does.

In fact, the job losses triggered by the recession have led to much longer spells of unemployment.

Only 12% of all the unemployed in 2008 had spent six or more months looking for a job. But in 2011 more than one-in-five, fully 21%, were in this situation. Between these years the average length of an unemployment spell jumped by a month and half, from 14.8 weeks to 21.1 weeks.

All this said, the official unemployment rate is calculated using accepted international principles, and offers a good sense of how the job market is changing from month-to-month and year-to-year.

It also offers a basis for comparing the situation in our country to that in others.

While all statistical agencies follow the same principles in calculating these numbers, there remain subtle but important differences in how they are put into practice. This is the case in the comparison that is of most relevance to Canadians, that with the United States.

During 2011 the official unemployment rate in Canada was 1 1/2 percentage points lower than the American (7.4% versus 8.9%).

But Statistics Canada offers an alternative calculation that follows as best as it can the procedures used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and when this alternative is used the gap in the unemployment rates is even larger: almost 2 1/2 percentage points (6.5% versus 8.9%).

This is one case in which the official measure is painting a less rosy picture than it should.

Statistics Canada is certainly aware of the fact that no one number can offer a full portrait of the unemployed even though it never presents a more nuanced analysis in any of its monthly reports. In fact the text of today’s press release mentions the word “unemployment” only once.

The official measure is no doubt central to any story about unemployment, but if you look hard you will find this well written article on its website, “Inside the labour market downturn“, that uses all eight unemployment rates that Statistics Canada in fact calculates every month.

Statistics: Posted by admin — Sat Jun 20, 2015 2:38 am

A limited hangout is a form of deception, misdirection, or coverup often associated with intelligence agencies involving a release or "mea culpa" type of confession of only part of a set of previously hidden sensitive information, that establishes credibility for the one releasing the information who by the very act of confession appears to be "coming clean" and acting with integrity; but in actuality by withholding key facts is protecting a deeper crime and those who could be exposed if the whole truth came out. In effect, if an array of offenses or misdeeds is suspected, this confession admits to a lesser offense while covering up the greater ones.

A limited hangout typically is a response to lower the pressure felt from inquisitive investigators pursuing clues that threaten to expose everything, and the disclosure is often combined with red herrings or propaganda elements that lead to false trails, distractions, or ideological disinformation; thus allowing covert or criminal elements to continue in their improper activities.

Victor Marchetti wrote: "A 'limited hangout' is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting - sometimes even volunteering - some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further."

-- Limited Hangout, by Wikipedia

Routinization

Authorization processes create a situation in which the person becomes involved in an action without considering the implications of that action and without really making a decision. Once he has taken the initial step, he is in a new psychological and social situation in which the pressures to continue are quite powerful. As Lewin (1947) has pointed out, many forces that might originally have kept him out of the situation reverse direction once he has made a commitment (once he has gone through the gate region, in Lewin's terms) and now help to keep him in the situation. For example, concern about the criminal nature of the action, which might originally have inhibited him from becoming involved, may now lead to deeper involvement in efforts to justify the action and to avoid negative consequences.

Despite these forces, however, given the nature of the action involved in sanctioned massacres, one might expect moral scruples and revulsions to arise at any step of the way. To deal with such resistances, repeated authorization providing renewed justification is usually necessary. Furthermore, and very importantly, the likelihood of such resistances cropping up is greatly reduced by processes of routinization -- by transforming the action into routine, mechanical, highly programmed operations. Routinization fulfills two functions. First, it reduces the necessity of making decisions, thus minimizing occasions in which moral questions may arise. Second, it makes it easier to avoid the implications of the action since the actor focuses on the details of his job rather than on its meaning. The latter effect is more easily achieved among those who participate in sanctioned massacres from a distance, that is, from the desks of their bureaus or even from the cockpits of their bombers.

Routinization operates both at the level of the individual actor and at the organizational level. At the individual level, performance of the job is broken down into a series of discrete steps, most of them carried out in automatic, regularized fashion. The bureaucrat or officer concerns himself with making out schedules, keeping accounts, writing reports, assigning personnel, and dozens of other details and trivia that are part of his normal job. It becomes easy to forget the nature of the product that emerges from this process. Even those who cannot fail to see the product may come to see their actions as routine. When Calley said of My Lai that it was "no great deal," he probably implied that it was all in a day's work.

At the organizational level, the task is divided across different offices, each of which has responsibility for a small portion of it. Not only does this arrangement result in a diffusion of responsibility, but it reduces the amount and limits the scope of decision making that is necessary. The work flows from office to office, with each automatically setting the agenda for the one next in line (hierarchically or functionally). At each point, the only decisions that generally have to be made are operational ones. There is no expectation that the moral implications will be considered at any of these points, nor is there any opportunity to do so.

The organizational processes also help further legitimize the actions of each participant. By proceeding in routine fashion -- processing papers, exchanging memos, diligently carrying out their assigned tasks -- the different units mutually reinforce each other in the view that what is going on must be perfectly normal, correct, and legitimate. The shared illusion that they are engaged in a legitimate enterprise helps the participants to assimilate their activities to other purposes, thus further normalizing them. For example, they may concern themselves with the efficiency of their performance, the productivity of their unit, the prospects for personal recognition and advancement, or the cohesiveness of their group (Janis, 1971). The nature of the task becomes completely dissociated from their performance of it. As they become habituated to their assignment in a supportive organizational context, they come to treat it more and more as if it were a normal job in which one can take pride, hope to achieve success, and engage in collaborative effort.

Normalization of atrocities is more difficult to the extent that there are constant reminders of the true meaning of the enterprise. Moral inhibitions are less easily subdued if the functionaries, in their own thinking and in their communications with one another, have to face the fact that they are engaged in organized murder. Such moral constraints are augmented by prudential ones when it comes to the writing of memoranda and the issuing of communiques. The difficulty is handled by the well-known bureaucratic inventiveness in the use of language. The SS had a set of Sprachregelungen or "language rules" to govern descriptions of their extermination program. As Arendt (1963) points out, the term "language rule" in itself was "a code name; it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie (p. 80]." The code names for killing and liquidation were "final solution," "evacuation," and "special treatment." The war in Indochina has produced its own set of euphemisms: "protective reactions," "pacification," "forced-draft urbanization and modernization." Whatever terms they use, participants in the sanctioned massacres are of course usually aware of what they are actually doing. The euphemisms allow them to differentiate these actions from ordinary killing and destruction and thus to avoid confrontation with their true meaning. The moral revulsion that the ordinary labels would arouse can be more readily suppressed and the enterprise can proceed on its routine course....

The more often we associate killing with honor, with justice, or with sport, the easier we find it to perceive massacres as acceptable and socially approved forms of conduct. Paradoxically, some of the highly selective official pronouncements against violence to which our national leaders occasionally resort only contribute to the perversion of language that helps to dissociate actions from their meaning. When the architects of mass violence in Indochina say (in criticizing Ghetto riots) that there is never an excuse for violence in our society, or (in decrying abortion) that it violates the sacredness of human life, they destroy the utility of these words as aids to moral judgment. People learn to look to official definitions of actions rather than to their human consequences in assessing their legitimacy.

-- Violence Without Moral Restraint: Reflections on the Dehumanization of Victims and Victimizers, by Herbert C. Kelman

Cold Dead Hand, with Jim Carrey

[Old Man] Why did the ventriloquist quit drinking?

[Farm Boy] Because he was acting like a real drunk!

[Everyone laughing]

[Dick] Well, hi, ho and howdy, fine folks. And welcome back to Hee Haw! We want to thank our special guest, Charlton Heston, for joining us

[Charlton Heston] Well, Dick, it's an absolute pleasure to be here ...
in the sight of God on Hee Haw!
[Applause]
But who would be laughing if it weren't for The Patriots who answer the call of freedom?
[Applause]
The aliens who would exploit our every weakness ...
and suck the brains out of every living soul.
They'd be laughing! But not like you and me.
They'd go "beep beep beep beep beep.
"Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep."

[Making vibrating, electrical, whistling sounds.]
[Applause]

[Dick] Well, we want to lead here
with the sweetest, molasses sounds
of a man I'm sure you're all going to like.
Hens and roosters, lend an ear
to Lonesome Earl and the ClutterBusters.

[Clapping]

[Lonesome Earl & The Clutterbusters] Ah ... Ah ... Ah ...
Some folks ride
like the wind
With the whispering pines
to guide them
And the burning light inside them
Keeps them warm
in the snow
Others fear the sounds they hear
Make banditos
out of mole-hills
Fill their hearts
with porcupine quills
They’re dead and buried
long before they go
Charlton Heston movies
are no longer in demand
His immortal soul
may lay
forever in the sand
The angels wouldn’t take
him up to heaven like he planned
‘Cause they couldn’t pry that gun
from his cold dead hand

[Charlton Heston] What did he say?

[Lonesome Earl & The Clutterbusters] It takes a cold dead hand
to decide to pull the trigger
It takes a cold dead heart
and as near as I can figure
With your cold dead aim
you’re trying to prove your dick is bigger
But we know your chariot
may not be swinging low

[Coyote] [Howling]

Cold dead hand
cold dead hand
Cold dead hand
cold dead hand
You’re a big big man with an little bitty gland
So you need something bigger just to fill
Your cold dead hand

[Charlton Heston] They're making fun of everything
I hold dear! What was that?

[Lonesome Earl & The Clutterbusters] Imagine if the lord were here
And he knew what
you’ve been thinkin’
Would his sacred
heart be sinkin’
Into the canyon
of dismay
And on the ones
who sell the guns
He’d sick the vultures
and coyotes
Only the devil’s
true devotees
Could profiteer
from pain
and fear

[Charlton Heston] [Shaking his gun]

Charlton Heston movies
are no longer in demand
His immortal soul may lay
forever in the sand
The angels wouldn’t take him up
to heaven like he planned
‘Cause they couldn’t pry that gun
from his cold
dead hand

[Security pulling his rifle backwards, and Charlton Heston along with it, since he can't let go of it)

[Charlton Heston gains control of his rifle again]

It takes a cold dead hand
to decide to pull the trigger
It takes a cold dead heart
and as near as I can figure
With your cold dead aim you’re trying to prove your junk is bigger
But we know your chariot may not be swinging low

[Sam Elliot] Hi. I am Clearly Sam Elliot
Pay attention hombre. This boy's got something to say! Budding social satire. It goes down smooth. Enjoy the show! I'm going to watch that sunset.

Cold dead hands
cold dead hands
Cold dead hands
cold dead hands
Cold dead hands
cold dead hands
You’re a big big man
with an little bitty gland
So you need something bigger
with a hair-pin trigger
You don’t want to get caught
with your trousers down
When the psycho killer comes around
So you make your home like a thunderdome
And you’re always packin’ everywhere you roam
But the psychos win no matter what you do
‘Cause they’re gonna buy way more guns than you

[Big breath!]

And while you’re stumbling out of bed
They put five rounds in the back of your head
Or you get depressed ‘cause the money runs out
Then you put your own shotgun in your mouth
And your kids walk in and they find you there
Like a headless stump in your underwear
And they move the gun and it kills them too
And your wife just doesn’t know what to do
So she takes a hand grenade from her shoe
And she pulls the pin...
And it’s all
on
you
And your cold, dead
hand
[Gun cocks
and fires]

[Girl] Well, what in the heck was that?

[Charlton Heston] I accidentally
shot my foot off

[Ellie Mae] Awwwwww,
shoooot!

[Everybody laughs]

[Old Man] [Spits out his beer]

-- Cold Dead Hand, with Jim Carrey

The appeal of doctrines (on the right or the left of the political spectrum) that glorify violence can be understood more readily if we recognize their close relationship to commonly held stereotypes of masculinity. In our culture, as in many others, violence is often taken as evidence of the toughness and aggressiveness, the lack of sentimentality, and the emotional stoicism that males are expected to demonstrate. Thus the readiness to proclaim or endorse the glories of violence is often a response to the perceived requirements of the male sex role; to shy away from violence is to fail a challenge to prove one's manliness. Similarly, those who feel particularly oppressed by their powerlessness and lack of personal agency may resort to violence because they see it as a way of regaining their lost manhood.

-- Violence Without Moral Restraint: Reflections on the Dehumanization of Victims and Victimizers, by Herbert C. Kelman

[Peter Jennings] Tom, it looks like filmmaker Michael Moore
is also jumping on the "Fuck Team America" bandwagon.

["Michael Moore"] Protesting is not enough.
We must take radical action against the fascists in our own country.
Bring it down! Bring it all down!

***

["Michael Moore"] Hey, Team America.
I got something for you.

[Spottswoode/Nihilist Penis] What the hell?

["Michael Moore"] Prepare to die.

[Spottswoode/Nihilist Penis] Jesus titty-fucking ...

-- Team America, directed by Trey Parker, Written by Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Pam Brady. Puppets by Charles, Edward and Stephen Chiodo
-- Team America? -- One Sick Movie! by Charles Carreon

[GLENN BECK] Hang on, let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus -- band -- Do, and I've lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, "Yeah, I'd kill Michael Moore," and then I'd see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I'd realize, "Oh, you wouldn't kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn't choke him to death." And you know, well, I'm not sure.

-- Radio Host Glenn Beck "Thinking About Killing Michael Moore", by Media Matters Staff

And then there was Bill O'Reilly talking to Rudy Giuliani on his show:

"Well, I want to kill Michael Moore, is that right? All right? And I don't believe in capital punishment. That's a joke on Moore." (Source: Entertainment Weekly)

-- The Day Clint Eastwood Said He Would "Kill" Me, 10 Years Ago This Week, by Michael Moore

I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny’s house. “I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money,” he boasted. “I make people afraid for their lives.” On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny’s. “Trolling is basically Internet eugenics,” he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. “I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards .... We need to put these people in the oven!”

I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal Reserve and about Jews. Unlike Fortuny, he made no attempt to reconcile his trolling with conventional social norms. Two days later, I flew to Los Angeles and met Weev at a train station in Fullerton, a sleepy bungalow town folded into the vast Orange County grid. He is in his early 20s with full lips, darting eyes and a nest of hair falling back from his temples. He has a way of leaning in as he makes a point, inviting you to share what might or might not be a joke.

As we walked through Fullerton’s downtown, Weev told me about his day — he’d lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed — and summarized his philosophy of “global ruin.” “We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?” He seemed excited to have said this aloud.

Ideas like these bring trouble. Almost a year ago, while in the midst of an LSD-and-methamphetamine bender, a longer-haired, wilder-eyed Weev gave a talk called “Internet Crime” at a San Diego hacker convention. He expounded on diverse topics like hacking the Firefox browser, online trade in illegal weaponry and assassination markets — untraceable online betting pools that pay whoever predicts the exact date of a political leader’s demise. The talk led to two uncomfortable interviews with federal agents and the decision to shed his legal identity altogether. Weev now espouses “the ruin lifestyle” — moving from condo to condo, living out of three bags, no name, no possessions, all assets held offshore. As a member of a group of hackers called “the organization,” which, he says, bring in upward of $10 million annually, he says he can wreak ruin from anywhere....

I asked about the status of Weev’s campaign against humanity. Things seemed rather stable, I said, even with all this talk of trolling and hacking.

“We’re waiting,” Weev said. “We need someone to show us the way. The messiah.”

“How do you know it’s not you?” I asked.

“If it were me, I would know,” he said. “I would receive a sign.”

Zeno of Elea, Socrates and Jesus, Weev said, are his all-time favorite trolls. He also identifies with Coyote and Loki, the trickster gods, and especially with Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. “Loki was a hacker. The other gods feared him, but they needed his tools.”

-- The Trolls Among Us, by Mattathias Schwartz

-- Insane Clown Posse Juggalos: Responsible for Massachusetts Gay Bar Massacre?, by Doink

-- Columbine Families Sue Computer Game Makers, by Mark Ward

-- Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie & Video Game Violence, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano
-- The Case Against the Case Against Media Violence, by L. Rowell Huesmann and Laramie D. Taylor

SHUT UP AND ACT!

[George Clooney decapitated]

[Janeane Garofolo's head blown off]

[Susan Sarandon splat on the pavement]

[Sean Penn killed by a giant cat]

[Danny Glover killed by a giant cat]

[Helen Hunt cut in half]

[Samuel Jackson decapitated]

[Tim Robbins burned to death]

[Alec Baldwin decapitated]

-- Team America, directed by Trey Parker

-- Nailing the Coffin Shut on Doubts That Violent Video Games Stimulate Aggression: Comment on Anderson et al., by L. Rowell Huesmann

BE ALL YOU CAN KILL, by Tara Carreon
-- Children and Media Violence: Yearbook From the UNESCO International Clearinghouse on Children and Violence on the Screen, 1998, edited by Ulla Carlsson and Cecilia von Feilitzen

-- The Effects of Prosocial Video Games on Prosocial Behaviors: International Evidence From Correlational, Longitudinal, and Experimental Studies, by Douglas A. Gentile, et al.

-- The Satanic Roots of Rock, by Donald Phau

-- Seduction of the Innocent, by Fredric Wertham, M.D.
-- The Immediate Impact of Aggressive Cartoons on Emotionally Disturbed and Learning Disabled Children, by Joyce Sprafkin & Kenneth D. Gadow
-- Necessary Evil, by DC Comics

-- Television and Growing Up: The Impact of Televised Violence, Report to the Surgeon General

-- The Contagion of Violence: The Extent, the Processes, and the Outcomes, by L. Rowell Huesmann
-- Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism, an illustrated expose by Joel Andreas
-- War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing, by ACLU
-- Border Communities Under Siege: Border Patrol Agents Ride Roughshod Over Civil Rights, by ACLU
-- A Society of Captives, by Chris Hedges

-- The Only Time It Makes Sense to Blame Video Games Instead of Guns, by Tom Tomorrow
-- LAPD Shoot 15-Year-Old in Back for Standing Near Friend Holding Toy Gun, by Andrew Emett

-- The City of New York: Commission Report: Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption and the Anti-Corruption Procedures of the Police Department, by Milton Mollen (1994)
-- The Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption, by Whitman Knapp, Chairman (1972)
-- Graft Paid to Police Here Said to Run Into Millions: Survey Links Payoffs to Gambling and Narcotics -- Some on Force Accuse Officials of Failure to Act, by David Burnham

Statistics: Posted by admin — Sat Jun 20, 2015 2:25 am

A 12-year-old boy died this weekend after a Cleveland police officer shot him in the stomach on Saturday. Responding to a 911 call concerning a possible juvenile aiming a probably fake gun at people, a first-year rookie and a 10-year department veteran arrived at the playground and shot the 12-year-old. The officers later realized the boy had been playing with a toy BB gun.

While visiting his friends in the playground area outside Cuddell Recreation Center around 3:30pm on Saturday, 12-year-old Tamir Rice acquired an airsoft pistol with the orange safety indicator removed. As Tamir sat on the swings, he pulled the toy gun out of his waistband pretending to shoot people. A Cleveland resident called 911 to report “a guy with a gun pointing it at people.”

“I don’t know if it’s real or not,” the caller admitted.

Police officials released an audio recording of the 911 call in which the caller stated twice that the gun was “probably fake” and told the dispatcher that the person with the gun was “probably a juvenile.” According to Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association president Jeff Follmer, police dispatchers failed to inform the responding officers of the caller’s doubts. Instead of confronting a crazed gunman, the officers were responding to a child playing with an airsoft pistol.

According to Follmer, the rookie officer witnessed Tamir picking up the BB gun at a park bench and placing it inside his waistband. After ordering the child to put his hands in the air, the rookie claims Tamir reached for the toy gun instead. The rookie fired two shots hitting Tamir at least once in the abdomen.

-- Rookie Cop Guns Down 12-Year-Old Child on Playground, by Andrew Emett

LAPD officers shot a 15-year-old student on Tuesday morning because his friend was playing with a replica gun as they were walking to school. Although the police claim the officers issued multiple warnings to drop the gun, nearby residents do not recall hearing any warnings before the shooting.

Around 7:45am on Tuesday, 15-year-old Jamar Nicholson and a small group of friends were walking to school dressed in their uniforms and khaki pants. As they entered an alley, one of Jamar’s friends pulled out a BB gun. Following up an investigation in the area, LAPD Criminal Gang Homicide Group officers noticed the replica gun mistaking it for a real firearm.

According to a police statement, the officers ordered Jamar’s friend to drop the weapon multiple times before opening fire. But nearby residents who heard the gunshots reportedly did not hear the officers issue any warnings. A moment before a bullet entered his upper back, Jamar heard someone yelling, “Freeze!”

Instead of dropping the BB gun, Jamar’s friend allegedly turned toward the officers. Although Jamar was not holding the replica gun, the officers recklessly opened fired shooting him in the back. None of their bullets hit Jamar’s friend, who had been standing next to him.

-- LAPD Shoot 15-Year-Old in Back for Standing Near Friend Holding Toy Gun, by Andrew Emett

I have recently been made aware of several websites that focus on The Anarchist Cookbook. As the author of the original publication some 30 plus years ago, it is appropriate for me to comment.

The Anarchist Cookbook was written during 1968 and part of 1969 soon after I graduated from high school. At the time, I was 19 years old and the Vietnam War and the so-called "counter culture movement" were at their height. I was involved in the anti-war movement and attended numerous peace rallies and demonstrations. The book, in many respects, was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in.

I conducted the research for the manuscript on my own, primarily at the New York City Public Library. Most of the contents were gleaned from Military and Special Forces Manuals. I was not member of any radical group of either a left or right wing persuasion.

I submitted the manuscript directly to a number of publishers without the help or advice of an agent. Ultimately, it was accepted by Lyle Stuart Inc. and was published verbatim, without editing, in early 1970. Contrary to what is the normal custom, the copyright for the book was taken out in the name of the publisher rather than the author. I did not appreciate the significance of this at the time and would only come to understand it some years later when I requested that the book be taken out of print.

The central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I no longer agree with this.

Apparently in recent years, The Anarchist Cookbook has seen a number of "copy cat" type publications, some with remarkably similar titles (Anarchist Cookbook II, III, etc). I am not familiar with these publications and cannot comment upon them. I can say that the original Anarchist Cookbook has not been revised or updated in any way by me since it was first published.

During the years that followed its publication, I went to university, married, became a father and a teacher of adolescents. These developments had a profound moral and spiritual effect on me. I found that I no longer agreed with what I had written earlier and I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the ideas that I had put my name to. In 1976 I became a confirmed Anglican Christian and shortly thereafter I wrote to Lyle Stuart Inc. explaining that I no longer held the views that were expressed in the book and requested that The Anarchist Cookbook be taken out of print. The response from the publisher was that the copyright was in his name and therefore such a decision was his to make, not the author's. In the early 1980's, the rights for the book were sold to another publisher. I have had no contact with that publisher (other than to request that the book be taken out of print) and I receive no royalties.

Unfortunately, the book continues to be in print and with the advent of the Internet several websites dealing with it have emerged. I want to state categorically that I am not in agreement with the contents of The Anarchist Cookbook and I would be very pleased (and relieved) to see its publication discontinued. I consider it to be a misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken out of print.

-- A Repentant Anarchist, by William Powell

he Terror of War, or Napalm Girl, by Nick UT

It was a lucky shot, some say of Nick Ut's famous Vietnam War photo The Terror of War, or Napalm Girl, as it is more commonly known. Less lucky, of course, was the little girl in the photo, Kim Phuc. She was running down the street, naked, after a napalm attack on her village. Her skin was melting off in strips. Her home was burning in the background. It was June 8, 1972. Ut was 21 years old. "When I pressed the button, I knew," Ut says. "This picture will stop the war." It has been 42 years since then. But that moment still consumes him.

He is 63 now, agile and white-haired, save for bushy black eyebrows that have a life of their own. He is still a photographer, still for the Associated Press — only in Los Angeles instead of Saigon. Here in L.A., he has settled into a schedule that has been much the same for decades: Arrive at AP's downtown offices by 7 a.m., check messages, read the newspaper, shoot a feature assignment. If breaking news happens, or he can find something else to shoot, he does. He's done by 4:30 p.m.

Today's assignment is a pet cemetery in sleepy, upscale Calabasas — birds chirping, leaves rustling, the thrum of a lawnmower. "Boring," Ut says, with an apologetic sigh.

Ut grew up in Long An, a village near Saigon, the second youngest of 11 siblings. As a teenager, he lived with his older brother La, a photographer with AP's Saigon bureau. Before that, La had been a movie star. "Every Vietnamese actress knew who he is," Ut says. "He was handsome. Very tall. And the women with him? Always beautiful."

La was obsessed with taking a picture that would stop the war. In October 1965, however, he was shot and killed by Viet Cong while waiting for a helicopter.

Three months after La's funeral, Ut asked his brother's editor, Horst Faas, for a job. What use did Faas have for a skinny 15-year-old kid? "Go to school," he told Ut. "Go home."

"AP is my home now," Ut insisted.

Faas reluctantly hired Ut to work the darkroom. He'd make prints, process film, be a gopher. Soon he was shooting feature photos around Saigon City — urchins, the black market, politics.

"Then, all of a sudden, in 1968, Tet breaks out," recalls Hal Buell, former AP photography director. "Nick had a scooter by then. He scooted around making these pictures of battle scenes. He showed the adeptness and smarts you have to have to be a good combat photographer." The quest to take a picture that would stop the war became Ut's.

The moment came in late spring, 1972. Ut had heard there was fighting near the North Vietnamese–occupied village of Trang Bang and went to cover it. Refugees had clogged the road into the village. He stopped at a bridge with several soldiers and other journalists. Around 1 p.m., a South Vietnamese plane dipped low on a run aligned with the highway and released its napalm payload onto the village — an accident, it would turn out.

Dark smoke filled the air. Ut heard screaming. Then, the running villagers — women, children, a dog. An old lady with a burned boy in her arms. The photographers shot until they had no film left, then turned to the cumbersome business of reloading. The horror, however, wasn't over yet. Lagging behind, 9-year-old Kim Phuc emerged out of the smoke, naked, arms raised, melted flesh falling off her back.

"Too hot! Too hot!" she cried.

Ut reached for his spare camera and took the shot. Then he covered Phuc with a raincoat from a nearby soldier, trundled her into his car and drove her to the hospital, saving her life.

Later, Ut would say that when he pressed the shutter button, he thought of his brother. That he actually heard La's voice whispering, "Stop the war."

"I told him, 'I have the picture you are thinking about,' " Ut recalls now. "And everything came true."

Six months later, the war did stop. In January 1973, the United States, North Vietnam and South Vietnam signed the Paris cease-fire agreement. By March 30, the last American personnel left Saigon. By April, Ut had won the Pulitzer Prize. He was 22. His photo ran on the front page of practically every newspaper and magazine in the world, and is credited with swaying public opinion against the war. Time has proven it to be not only the iconic photo of the Vietnam era but also one of the most haunting and memorable of the entire 20th century.

As editor Faas once said, "It's a picture that doesn't rest."

-- Nick UT's Napalm Girl Helped End the Vietnam War. Today in L.A., He's Still Shooting, by Gendy Alimurung

Explosions and Fire

About mid-way through its route our bus passed along an explosives factory which produced dynamite for removing tree stumps and other small demolition projects. When this factory caught fire, they had to evacuate an area a few square miles around our route because the resulting explosion was supposed to be on par with a poor man's nuclear bomb -- one or two kilotons. When normal people are informed that there's a very real possibility that everything they've ever known and loved will be burned alive, their typical reaction is fear or sorrow. When they announced it to the kids on our bus, however, everyone began cheering and throwing their backpacks into the air. It seemed appropriate that these soulless little shitheads would erupt in celebration upon learning that our little Idahoan middle-earth was going to be engulfed in an all consuming fireball.

It's the end of times ... SO BRIGHT ... SO BEAUTIFUL

The end of days for Hayden Lake, Idaho

The fire was put out, however, and no one died. Years later, however, my brother and I took an interest in building explosives ourselves and we began building bombs using supplies purchased from a local sporting goods store. You had to be 18 to buy a gun, but you could buy smokeless black powder and waterproof cannon fuses without getting carded. We'd spend our summers creating new and exciting pipe bombs and detonating them in the woods. We weren't hurting anybody, we just liked creating craters where old trees used to be and producing massive fireballs and brain-trauma-inducing concussive shockwaves. Shrapnel was a problem too, but most of the time we'd just stand near a tree or crouch down a little to avoid the bits of metal that whizzed by our heads.

[Man] When it detonates you're gonna want to squat down a bit that way the shrapnel doesn't hit you. Don't squat down too far though or you won't be able to see the awesome explosion. Just squat a little -- yeah, just like that. PERFECT! **

** Author's note: These were the actual instructions we gave our friend for avoiding shrapnel wounds.

Shrapnel safety 101 with the Inman brothers

We eventually decided to teach one of our friends how to build bombs so he could also take part in our fun blow-shit-up-to-smithereens adventures. He'd come over and we'd all build bombs together and then go find an old shed or dead animal to splatter into unrecognizable bits. One particularly popular type of bomb we'd make is what we called a "crater maker," which involved filling an empty CO2 cartridge with black powder and sealing it with a fuse. One Christmas this friend of ours decided it would be a good idea to give these to his friends as gifts so they could take them home and have fun blowing things up like we did. He wrapped them in adorably festive Christmas wrapping paper and applied an equally adorable Christmas bow. He then handed them out to all his buddies as they boarded the school bus. He specifically instructed them NOT to open them until they got home from school, and I clearly remember one kid shaking the box next to his head and saying "What's inside? I can hear it rattling."

[Boy] Oh boy. I wonder what it is!
SHAKE SHAKE RATTLE RATTLE

[Boy 2] You'll just have to wait until Christmas! :):)

Explosives for Christmas

Perspective

Nowadays when I see a school bus I don't think of homework, pencils, academia, or the children of today being responsible for the future of tomorrow. I think of fascism, rage, and the moral compass we all have which can bend completely backwards when packed into a sweaty, motorized box full of Nazis and overly-caffeinated, puberty-stricken howler monkeys.

***

EXPLODING KITTENS
A CARD GAME
FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE INTO KITTENS AND EXPLOSIONS AND LASER BEAMS AND SOMETIMES GOATS
CREATED BY: ELAN LEE + THE OATMEAL + SHANE SMALL

-- Why I Didn't Like Riding the Bus As A Kid, by Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal

Exploding Kittens card game raises $8.8m on Kickstarter

by Stuart Dredge

February 23, 2015

Blend of ‘kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats’ becomes third-biggest campaign of all-time on crowdfunding site

The Exploding Kittens card game raised $8.8m on Kickstarter.

Card game Exploding Kittens has become the third biggest Kickstarter campaign of all-time, raising $8.8m (£5.7m) on the crowdfunding website.

The game’s initial funding goal was just $10k, but it attracted 219,382 backers for its promised mix of “kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats” during its 30-day campaign.

That put Exploding Kittens behind only drinks cooler Coolest and smartwatchPebble in Kickstarter’s most-funded list, with those projects having raised $13.3m and $10.3m respectively.

However, Exploding Kittens is the most popular project ever in terms of the number of backers, according to Kickstarter, more than doubling the previous record of 105,857 backers held by children’s literacy project Reading Rainbow.

The card game was created by former Xbox executives Elan Lee and Shane Small, and Matthew Inman, creator of popular online comics site The Oatmeal.

“On the very first day of this campaign, we hit our funding goal. That was a big deal. But after that, the campaign stopped being about money, and started being about a community,” they wrote in an update to backers as the crowdfunding campaign ended.

“We decided that everything we did from that point on would be to celebrate you guys, and help you celebrate each other. In the last 30 days, you’ve broken a lot of records, but we wanted to highlight our favourite one: you made this the most fun Kickstarter to run of all time.”

The first run of Exploding Kittens is due to ship in July, with 15,505 backers paying $20 or more for its basic deck, but 202,934 paying more than $35 for the “NSFW Deck” which includes bonus cards that aren’t “kid friendly”.

“Exploding Kittens is a highly strategic kitty-powered version of Russian Roulette. Players take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game,” explained its Kickstarter pitch.

“The deck is made up of cards that let you avoid exploding by peeking at cards before you draw, forcing your opponent to draw multiple cards, or shuffling the deck.

The game gets more and more intense with each card you draw because fewer cards left in the deck means a greater chance of drawing the kitten and exploding in a fiery ball of feline hyperbole.”

The Exploding Kittens team have been taking advice from the creators of Cards Against Humanity – a $15.6k Kickstarter success in 2011, which went on to sell more than 500,000 copies by mid-2013 – to ensure that “no matter how many people pledge, everyone gets their Exploding Kittens quickly after the campaign ends”.

-- Exploding Kittens Card Game Raises $8.8m on Kickstarter, by Stuart Dredge

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