Why cops lie Police officer perjury in court to justify illegal dope searches is commonplace. One of the dirty little not-so-secret secrets of the criminal justice system is undercover narcotics officers intentionally lying under oath. It is a perversion of the American justice system that strikes directly at the rule of law. Yet it is the routine way of doing business in courtrooms everywhere in America. Count this as one more casualty of the "war on drugs." Why do police, whom we trust as role models of legal conduct, show contempt for the law by systematically perjuring themselves? The first reason is because they get away with it. Another reason is the nature of most drug cases and the likely type of person involved. But the main reason is that the job of these cops is chasing drugs. Maybe the video tape scandal from the Henry Hotel will help change this culture.
Ken Starr Reminds Us Brett Kavanaugh Used to Work for Him on Bill Clinton Investigation There is no less excusable human being walking on the public stage than Kenneth Starr, the bed-sniffing yahoo who led the Great Penis Chase in 1998, and who then moved on to allegedly covering up sexual crimes on-campus at Baylor, where he lost his gig because he'd allowed the university to become universally despised. Now, it appears, he has a new book-like object out, a "memoir" of his days chasing Bill Clinton's penis all around the Beltway. Naturally, he's out shilling for his product in various friendly radio and television venues. Ironically, of course, this comes at the same time as the nomination of one of his minions, Brett Kavanaugh, to a lifetime position on the United States Supreme Court. Brett and I were part of a close circle of cold, cynical and ambitious hard-right operatives being groomed by GOP elders for much bigger roles in politics, government and media. So, yes, we are all going to have to think about those glorious days one more time. My god, what a pissant.
Dylan Evans – On evolution and inequality When The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett came out in 2009, it chimed well with the post-crash mood. The book claimed that higher levels of inequality were associated with a whole range of poor health issues, including lower life expectancy, increased obesity, and higher murder rates. It seemed that those fat cat bankers hadn’t just wrecked the financial system: they were making us all ill, too. Subsequently, however, these claims came in for a great deal of criticism, especially from sociologists on the libertarian end of the political spectrum. Evolutionary biology casts considerable light on this question. It was only when the first humans started farming, around 10,000 years ago, that it became possible for one person to accumulate many more possessions than another. It would hardly be surprising then if the sudden appearance of inequality didn’t have deleterious consequences for the human mind and body. 17 January 2013 Comments
Kenneth Starr, Disgraced Baylor Ex-President and Clinton Investigator, Dies The nation owes a great debt to the investigators who exposed the grotesque incompetence of Kenneth Starr as president of Baylor University. From Sports Illustrated: The regents believe that the blame for the school’s failure in handling rape and sexual assault reports falls on Starr, according to the report, and they might not bring punishment down on head coach Art Briles. Starr has been Baylor president for the last six years. If it weren’t for some incredibly brave women and some dogged reporting, Starr might’ve died on Monday with some people still thumping his tub as the brave truth-teller of 1998, when he pursued a criminal president (and that president's penis) all over the Beltway to produce the first government-financed soft-core porn novel in the nation’s history. Within Starr’s office, far from the TV lights of the capital, he and his team were mercilessly ruining lives. And now Starr is dead. Fin. This content is imported from OpenWeb.
What if foreign policy officials suddenly told the truth Here's a little fantasy for you to ponder: what if one of our senior foreign policy officials accidentally swallowed some sodium pentothal (aka "truth serum") before some public hearing or press conference, and started speaking the truth about one of those issues where prevarication, political correctness, and obfuscation normally prevail? You know: what if they started saying in public all those things that they probably believe in private? What sorts of "inconvenient truths" might suddenly get revealed? In that spirit, here's my Top Five Truths You Won't Hear Any U.S. #1: "We're never gonna get rid of our nuclear weapons." But let's get serious for a minute. #2: "We don't actually care that much about human rights." #3: "There's not going to be a two-state solution." #4: "We like being #1, and we're going to stay there just as long as we can." #5: "We do a lot of stupid things in foreign policy. Like I said, this is just an idle fantasy. Alex Wong/Getty Images
Gar Alperovitz | Historian, political economist, activist, writer Bill Moyers: Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair Photo Credit: Camilo Torres/ Shutterstock February 9, 2013 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. BILL MOYERS: You’ve heard me before quote one of my mentors who told his students that “news is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity.” Back then, the U.S. was in the catbird seat – poised to lead the world down this astonishing new superhighway of information and innovation. In those days, it was muckrakers like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens rattling the cages and calling for fair play. SUSAN CRAWFORD: Thank you so much. BILL MOYERS: “Captive Audience?” SUSAN CRAWFORD: Us, all of us. BILL MOYERS: But we are a long way from F.D.R., the New Deal and those early attitudes toward industry.
Families United for Freedom - Changing the Abortion Rights Playbook - Winning Big The initial test of whether ballot measures in defense of abortion rights could be more popular when put to the voters directly came in Kansas, a red state, in August, soon after Dobbs. Voters there weighed in on a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the state legislature to restrict abortion in the state. The amendment, which had been put on the ballot before the Supreme Court’s decision and timed to coincide with the primary elections in a deep-red state that no Democratic presidential candidate had carried since Lyndon Johnson, failed overwhelmingly. In that campaign, FUF contributed $600,000 to the local group Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, which coordinated abortion-rights efforts in the campaign. That initial win molded Families United for Freedom’s thinking and approach, Rachael Bedard, the group’s executive director, told POLITICO. In Kansas, it wasn’t just messaging. “But that’s almost a signifier, and not where most folks stand on the issue.”
World Bank’s IFC Arm Responds to Our Critique of Its Poverty Fighting Below is a letter from an official of the World Bank's International Finance Corp., taking issue with our article [1] posted Jan. 2 and co-published with Foreign Policy magazine. It is followed by our brief response. We are deeply disappointed by your article, "Can You Fight Poverty With a Five-Star Hotel?," which raises an important question about the International Finance Corporation's (IFC) impact fighting poverty in developing countries. It failed to be fair and it failed to fully examine our impact. What is our record? Every dollar of profit we make is reinvested to support private sector development, increasingly in the poorest countries. Since IFC began in 1956, we have invested more than $125 billion in developing countries, improving the lives of millions. The World Bank Group's recent World Development Report focused on the importance of creating jobs. In addition to failing to examine this record, the writer, Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, also made several factual errors. Sincerely,
Americans’ IQ Scores Are Lower in Some Areas, Higher in One Summary: While scores for verbal reasoning and matrix reasoning have decreased, scores for spatial reasoning have improved, researchers report. Source: Northwestern University IQ scores have substantially increased from 1932 through the 20th century, with differences ranging from three to five IQ points per decade, according to a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect.” But a new study from Northwestern University has found evidence of a reverse “Flynn effect” in a large U.S. sample between 2006 and 2018 in every category except one. Ability scores of verbal reasoning (logic, vocabulary), matrix reasoning (visual problem solving, analogies), and letter and number series (computational/mathematical) dropped during the study period, but scores of 3D rotation (spatial reasoning) generally increased from 2011 to 2018, the study found. Composite ability scores (single scores derived from multiple pieces of information) were also lower for more recent samples. Why the decline in IQ scores?
Can You Fight Poverty With a Five-Star Hotel? Accra is a city of choking red dust where almost no rain falls for three months at a time and clothes hung out on a line dry in 15 minutes. So the new five-star Mövenpick hotel affords a haven of sorts in Ghana’s crowded capital, with manicured lawns, amply watered vegetation, and uniformed waiters gliding poolside on roller skates to offer icy drinks to guests. A high concrete wall rings the grounds, keeping out the city’s overflowing poor who hawk goods in the street by day and the homeless who lie on the sidewalks by night. The Mövenpick, which opened in 2011, fits the model of a modern international luxury hotel, with 260 rooms, seven floors, and 13,500 square feet of retail space displaying $2,000 Italian handbags and other wares. But it is exceptional in at least one respect: It was financed by a combination of two very different entities: a multibillion-dollar investment company largely controlled by a Saudi prince, and the poverty-fighting World Bank. But the policies continue.
A California journalist documents the far-right takeover of her town: ‘We’re a test case’ | Fox News-Dominion case In a seemingly long gone era – before the Trump presidency, and Covid, and the 2020 election – Doni Chamberlain would get the occasional call from a displeased reader who had taken issue with one of her columns. They would sometimes call her stupid and use profanities. Today, when people don’t like her pieces, Chamberlain said, they tell her she’s a communist who doesn’t deserve to live. One local conservative radio host said she should be hanged. Chamberlain, 66, has worked as a journalist in Shasta county, California, for nearly 30 years. Never before in this far northern California outpost has she witnessed such open hostility towards the press. She has learned to take precautions. These practices have become crucial in the last three years, she said, as she’s documented the county’s shift to the far right and the rise of an ultra-conservative coalition into the area’s highest office. Chamberlain and her team at A News Cafe, the news site she runs, have covered it all.