The first guy goes for the female fed with the machete and she not even ramping she took man out like robocop never seen nutn like it

— Boya Dee (@BOYADEE) May 22, 2013

I’m feeling things today in the wake of this act of religious barbarism on the streets of London that I haven’t felt for a while. The monster who paraded around on the street after hacking a soldier to pieces is chilling in many ways. But everything points to a religious act of terror, motivated by the same Jihadist rage that captured the Tsarnaev brothers. For these men, “our land” is not Britain; it is the land of Islam in their minds. Here’s the full quote of the Jihadist:

We swear by the Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. The only reason we have killed this man this is because Muslims are dying daily. This British soldier is an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth … We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth. I apologize that women had to witness this today but in our lands our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government. They don’t care about you.

This eye-witness account shows that even in the midst of this Islamist barbarism, some shred of humanity remained:

“I saw a guy with no head lying on the ground. He had been decapitated. There were two black guys walking around his body saying ‘This is what God would’ve wanted’. My friend and her mum were walking up the hill and the mum came straight to the victim. She asked the black guys ‘can I help him?’ And one of them said he was already dead but she could go. Then one of them said ‘No man is coming near this body, only women’. She was so brave, she didn’t care what happened to her – she knelt down by his side and comforted him. She held his hand and put her other hand on his chest. I think she might have been praying.”

There is no formal confirmation that the victim, who was run over on the sidewalk by the Islamists’ car, was actually a soldier, but he was wearing a t-shirt that referred to a charity for veterans, and was near a barracks. Mercifully, the response from the Muslim community in London has been unequivocal:

This is a truly barbaric act that has no basis in Islam and we condemn this unreservedly. Our thoughts are with the victim and his family. We understand the victim is a serving member of the armed forces. Muslims have long served in this country’s armed forces, proudly and with honour. This attack on a member of the armed forces is dishonourable, and no cause justifies this murder.

A girl scout leader, Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, was on the scene and managed to talk to the butchers as they hung around, bragging for the cameras, their hands dripping with blood:

I spoke to him for more than five minutes. I asked him why he had done what he had done. He said he had killed the man because he [the victim] was a British soldier who killed Muslim women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was furious about the British army being over there.

There was blood on the pavement by the car where the man on the ground had been hit by it. At first there was no blood by the body but as I talked to the man it began to flow which worried me because blood needs a beating heart to flow. But I didn’t want to annoy the man by going back to the body.

I asked him what he was going to do next because the police were going to arrive soon. He said it was a war and if the police were coming, he was going to kill them. I asked him if that was a reasonable thing to do but it was clear that he really wanted to do that. He talked about war but he did not talk about dying and then he left to speak to someone else.

Two things are true here. The first is that this was a religious sacrificial murder, authorized by God in the eyes of the killers. The second is that this is clearly motivated by blowback from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The first is indefensible on any grounds. The second is a reminder that in the war against this religious barbarism, occupying Muslim countries is not an answer.

A primer on the Juggalo subculture:

The term originated during a 1994 live performance by Insane Clown Posse. During the song “The Juggla”, Violent J addressed the audience as Juggalos, and the positive response resulted in Bruce and Shaggy 2 Dope using the word thereafter to refer to themselves and their friends, family, and fans, including other Psychopathic Records artists. The fanbase boomed following the release of their third album, Riddle Box, in 1995, leading Insane Clown Posse to write the songs “What Is A Juggalo?” and “Down With The Clown” for their 1997 album The Great Milenko.  According to Utsler, “[Juggalos come] from all walks of life – from poverty, from rich, from all religions, all colors. [...] It doesn’t matter if you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth, or a crack rock in your mouth.”

Susan Karlin previews an upcoming PBS documentary about the “artistic sleight-of-hand” that helped the US defeat the Germans in WWII:

This is the astonishing true story of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, nicknamed the Ghost Army, a group of 1,100 handpicked American G.I.s who tricked the German army with rubber artillery, sound effects, fake radio transmissions, and psychological illusions during the summer of 1944. Many of these young soldiers were art students who would go on to illustrious careers in art, design, and fashion–including fashion designer Bill Blass, painter Ellsworth Kelly, and photographer Art Kane. But during quiet moments, they would often sketch and paint their surroundings, offering a fine-art chronicling of the mission. …

The Ghost Army devised more than 20 deceptive operations, phony convoys, and phantom divisions–each impersonating a different (and vastly larger) U.S. unit–to fool the enemy about the strength and ubiquity of American units. Soldiers even hung out at local cafés, spinning yarns for eavesdropping spies. The effort culminated along the Rhine in the final days of the war, in which thousands of lives depended on a convincing performance.

This sickening atrocity in London is exactly what we are paying the same kind of people to do in Syria

— George Galloway (@georgegalloway) May 22, 2013

The first element in this story is rising individualism. A study by Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell and Brittany Gentile found that between 1960 and 2008 individualistic words and phrases increasingly overshadowed communal words and phrases. That is to say, over those 48 years, words and phrases like “personalized,” “self,” “standout,” “unique,” “I come first” and “I can do it myself” were used more frequently. Communal words and phrases like “community,” “collective,” “tribe,” “share,” “united,” “band together” and “common good” receded.

The second element of the story is demoralization. A study by Pelin Kesebir and Selin Kesebir found that general moral terms like “virtue,” “decency” and “conscience” were used less frequently over the course of the 20th century. Words associated with moral excellence, like “honesty,” “patience” and “compassion” were used much less frequently.

Robin Lakoff, professor of Linguistics at UC-Berkeley, counters with an example:

Consider “racism.” It is first attested, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the first decade of the 20th century. By Brooks’ standard, that would imply that racism, the attitude and behavior, only came into being then, and therefore only then needed a word to describe it. Similarly, “sexism,” in its current sense, is only attested in the mid-1960s. What should we make of that?

Actually, the appearance of these words at those times is a positive indicator. Racism and sexism have been endemic in our species as far back as the historical record allows us to determine, and probably further. But it was only in the 20th century that people first began to see these kinds of behaviors as something other than normal and inevitable, and therefore worthy of naming and eventually changing.

A woman receives a beauty treatment at the Carmen Navarro luxury beauty center in Sevilla, on May 20, 2013. By Cristina Quicler/AFP/Getty Images.

As the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox pointed out recently, there’s a strong link between suicide and weakened social ties: people — and especially men — become more likely to kill themselves “when they get disconnected from society’s core institutions (e.g., marriage, religion) or when their economic prospects take a dive (e.g., unemployment).” That’s exactly what we’ve seen happen lately among the middle-aged male population, whose suicide rates have climbed the fastest: a retreat from family obligations, from civic and religious participation, and from full-time paying work.

Nate Cohn pushes back:

Contrary to what Douthat might expect, there’s no correlation—zero—between a states’ suicide rate and religion, marriage rates, or single occupancy homes.

State economic growth or unemployment don’t line up, either. … If anything correlates with suicide rates, it’s a states’ population density: In populous areas, suicide rates are low; in the sparsely populated hinterlands, suicide rates are high. Perhaps depression and loneliness is particularly harsh in desolate areas, and maybe it’s easier to cope in a major city like D.C. or New York.

A more intriguing possibility is gun ownership, which, like suicide rates, is highest in the West and lowest in the Northeast. The relationship between gun ownership and suicide isn’t hard to envision, since more than half of suicides are by firearm. Therefore, accessible firearms could plausibly increase suicide rates. Then again, the South has high levels of gun ownership and higher levels of depression than the inland West, but suicide is rarer in Alabama than Montana.

Douthat goes another round:

A strong link between population density and suicide hardly demonstrates that social belonging doesn’t play a role in suicide rates: It just suggests that the literal physical component in loneliness can matter as much or more than emotional and institutional ties. And the geographic pattern Cohn describes is perfectly compatible with other factors — from unemployment to divorce to, yes, gun policy — playing a role in national trends. There are plenty of cases where longstanding patterns don’t suffice to explain emerging trends that cut across regions and demographic groups: The fact that crime rates are generally higher in cities doesn’t mean that “population density” suffices as an explanation of changes in the crime rate, for instance, and the fact that out-of-wedlock birth rates are higher among African-Americans than whites doesn’t mean that “race” suffices as an explanation for the post-1960s rise in unwed childbearing.

One factor that might be salient in increasing suicides is the staggering increase in the use of prescription drugs. Here’s what I recently wrote in my column for the Sunday Times:

Consider that for eleven consecutive years, drug overdose deaths have risen in America, from 4,000 in 1999 to 16,000 by 2010, according to the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control. The majority of these deaths are now from drugs prescribed legally in the US and the world – opiate pain-killers like Oxycodone leading the way, but often combined with anti-anxiety medications. Yes, these require a prescription – but just sit down and see how easy it is to get these drugs online through fake doctors or doctors for hire. Yes, more monitoring is now recommended and more crackdowns on unethical doctoring. But you get the distinct sense that this is a losing struggle. Both the technologies of pharmaceuticals and of their distribution have been revolutionized in the last couple of decades. It’s going to be as hard to return to more social control as it will be to sustain newspapers printed on paper.

But that may simply confirm Ross’s worry about social isolation, and the consequences of untrammeled libertarianism. The trouble is that if you accept Ross’s analysis, it’s not clear what the solution is. Freedom is contagious; community fragile.

Brad Keywell downplays Google Glass privacy concerns:

[Y]ou don’t need Google Glass to surreptitiously record something or someone. Generic-looking eyewear with hidden cameras have long been available for about $300, a fraction of Google Glass’s $1500 price tag. Micro wireless cameras sell for about $40 on eBay, and devices like pens and MP3 players can be purchased with hidden cameras. While you would never think twice about someone wearing sunglasses or carrying a pen in their pocket, Google Glass is literally in your face. You need to say, “OK, Glass,” and “Record a video,” or move your head in certain directions to capture anything — not exactly discreet. With the flash turned off, recording with a smartphone would be less obvious.

Along the same lines, Timothy B. Lee thinks that driverless cars are worth sacrificing some privacy. But he also wants stronger protections:

Fights over privacy in the self-driving future will focus on many of the same issues that are currently being debated with regard to cellphones. Governments currently claim broad power to seek location records from cellphone companies without judicial oversight. Reforming those laws to require the government to get a warrant before seeking historical records for a cellular connection would protect the privacy of both mobile phone users and self-driving car passengers.

The team took this information and used it to make DNA that contained both the gene sequences themselves and the genetic apparatus needed to let a cell read those sequences and produce proteins from them. They then put these pieces of synthetic DNA—which were, in effect, tiny chromosomes—into cell cultures derived from dog kidneys, which have been found particularly effective for this kind of work.

The dog-kidney cells duly churned out viruses, suitable for seeding the process of vaccine manufacture, that contained the proteins in question. Since these two proteins are the variable elements that stop new strains of flu being recognised by the immune systems of people who have had influenza in the past, this is an important step forward. Experiments on ferrets (which are often used as stand-ins for people in tests of flu vaccines) showed that these seed viruses stimulated the animals’ immune systems in the desired way, producing protective immunity.

Surowiecki doubts it:

The underlying issue is that in recent decades there’s been a shift in the U.S. economy: it’s become far more congenial to businesses and investors. The fundamental trends that have driven the profit boom are unlikely to be reversed. That doesn’t mean that companies are going to be able to keep slashing their way to profit growth. As Doug Ramsey, the chief investment officer for Leuthold Weeden Capital Management, told me, “It’s hard to see how companies can get profit margins much higher, unless they want to see massive labor strikes across the country.” But keeping profits where they are doesn’t look all that difficult, which makes stocks today quite reasonably priced. It’s still possible that investor hysteria could eventually inflate stock prices, or that investor panic could send them crashing, but there is no profit bubble and, for now, no stock-market bubble, either.

Felix Salmon weighs in:

The stock market is a rising tide which is lifting only the luxury yachts; everybody else is underwater. That is genuinely deplorable. But it doesn’t mean that we’re in a bubble, and it doesn’t mean that if and when the tide goes out, the rest of us are going suffer massive injuries. There are always tail risks, of course: there are always unknown unknowns. But for the time being, the most likely scenario is that when asset prices start to fall, the main people to be hurt will be the ones owning the assets in question. In other words, the people who can best afford it. That’s not a bursting bubble: it’s just a common-or-garden bear market, of the type that all investors should be able to withstand.

(Chart from Doug Short)

London beheading - if Christians did such a thing to a soldier in S. Asia there'd be mobs rioting, churches burning soa.li/6lgXbAW

A reader writes:

Today’s atrocity will remind people everywhere what we are up against. Past revolutionary groups killed hostages, planted bombs and committed all manner of violent mayhem to try and destabilize the societies they hated. But Islamic fundamentalist terrorists have been different since they announced themselves on the world stage decades ago. They also take hostages and plant bombs. But they bring to their work a suicidal commitment and a depravity Westerners simply cannot fathom. Every time there is a horror like this we have to learn it all over again. We have to think  ”oh, right…I forgot…they are monsters among us.”

The significance of today is that people like this, monsters like this, will never stop and will use any tool that comes to hand. For many this will mean “conventional” attacks with low body counts. For others it will mean designing spectacular events that may take years to come to fruition. So our choice is not simply to come terms with terrorism as a cost of doing business. X number of bombs and deaths a year a normal part of modern life that only unmanly hysterics bother to get upset about. This is something we have never actually experienced in the civilized world.

Also of interest today is the story regarding the friend of Tsarnaev shot by the FBI. It looks likely that in addition to the bombing they slit the throat of some Jewish kids on another 9/11 anniversary. Monsters.

Ze Frank’s latest video tackles the awesomely weird aye aye.

It will in all likelihood pass the House tomorrow and, with the efforts of [John] Barrow [D-GA] and [Jim] Matheson [D-UT], will be hailed as a “bipartisan” bill. It will then go over to the Senate where it could very well pass as well, since so many Democrats take massive bribes from Big Oil. Perhaps Obama prefers it this way, so he doesn’t get the blame for this pollution bill.

Alan Grayson (D-FL) is challenging the constitutionality of the move:

Republican supporters of the bill have argued that Congress has the authority under the Constitution to regulate international commerce. They say the Keystone pipeline falls into that category because it would move tar sands oil between Canada and the United States. Opponents can point to recent court decisions saying that the responsibility for permitting for transnational pipelines has fallen on the president for several years. But if Grayson’s question comes up for a debate, Republicans are likely to argue that they are seeking to re-establish congressional authority over pipeline decisions — especially the Keystone pipeline, which the GOP says has been unduly delayed by Obama for several years.

Rebecca Burns explores the divisions the pipeline has caused within the Democratic party:

So far in the Keystone XL conflict, unions have largely ended up on the other side of the line in the tar sand. The Teamsters, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) and others have backed the pipeline as a way to create jobs. And as environmental groups flooded the State Department with comments opposing the pipeline, members of the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD) rallied to send President Obama a different message: “We can’t wait,” said BCTD president Sean McGarvey during an April 24 demonstration calling for the State Department to approve the project. In other words, the Keystone pipeline fight has turned into an XL-sized problem for an already tenuous labor-environmental alliance. …

This isn’t the first time that greens have been painted as latte liberals removed from the issues facing ordinary people. But the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline has actually helped “redraw the cultural map” of participation in the environmental movement, according to Kim Huynh, a spokesperson with the group Tar Sands Blockade. She notes that Tar Sands Blockade, the more radical edge of the broader movement, has drawn participation from conservative landowners, Texas grandmothers and indigenous communities in staging tree-sits, lockdowns and other dramatic demonstrations to halt the ongoing construction of the pipeline’s southern leg. She believes that this has succeeded in “legitimizing direct action” in the broader environmental movement and building, for the first time, a climate change movement “with real teeth.”  But do environmental activists have any hope of successfully fighting global warming without labor’s support?

It was in broad daylight – by two men who attacked a British soldier near his barracks. An eye-witness account:

“We saw clearly two knives, meat cleavers, they were big kitchen knives like you would use in a butcher’s, they were hacking at this poor guy, we thought they were trying to remove organs from him. These two guys were crazed, they were not there, they were just animals. They then dragged him from the pavement and dumped his body in the middle of the road. They took 20 minutes to arrive, the police – the armed response.”

There were cries of “Allahu Akbar” as the horrifying attack took place. The murderers seemed from initial accounts to be proud of what thay had done and hung around the corpse, until the police arrived and both assailants were shot. The above video is of a British man declaring Jihad against his own country. He is bragging of the beheading. He is a barbarian. Let me quote the Pope again:

To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.

A reader notes the striking similarity between Francis’ words today and the legendary Persian poet and mystic, as masterfully translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne:

Out Beyond Ideas

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

Yesterday, Iran’s Guardian Council shocked the country by disqualifying the presidential candidacy of Rafsanjani, one of the architects of both the Iranian Revolution and the country that resulted from it. Thomas Erdbrink passes along [NYT] this succinct reaction from an Iranian citizen:

“They say a revolution eats its children,” said Mehdi, 27, a teacher. “But in the case of Rafsanjani, the revolution has eaten its father.”

Erdbrink makes a key observation with regards to what this election, on its current course, may mean for Iran:

Since its founding in 1979, the Islamic republic has been characterized by constant and often public competition among opposing power centers, a back-and-forth that gives ordinary citizens and private business owners the ability to navigate among the groups.

Barring further surprises, the winner of the June election will now be drawn from a slate of conservative candidates in Iran’s ruling camp, a loose alliance of Shiite Muslim clerics and Revolutionary Guard commanders. That would the presidency under their control and would mark the first time since the 1979 revolution that all state institutions were under the firm control of one faction.

Meanwhile, Iranian MP Ali Motahari, a Rafsanjani ally, has voiced his outrage over the Rafsanjani’s disqualification in a public letter that has already been deleted off of some Iranian news sites:

“My strong assumption is that if Imam Khomeini were alive and he registered under a pseudonym, he would be disqualified, because sometimes he expressed criticism.” Although Rafsanjani has never publicly criticized Khamenei, after the 2009 contested elections Rafsanjani took a moderate tone with regard to the protesters, and it is commonly understood that the two are at odds over various political and economic issues of the country.

Motahari wrote, “You are informed that with the entry of Rafsanjani to the political scene, how much enthusiasm it created among the people and how much hope it gave them for reform and growth. With his disqualification, naturally, this enthusiasm and hope has disappeared.” He continued, “My recommendation is that with a [government decree], you approve of Rafsanjani’s” candidacy.["]

Ayatollah Khomeini’s daughter has similarly asked for him to reinstate Rafsanjani’s candidacy. Suzanne Maloney thinks through the regime’s reasoning:

However absurd the Islamic Republic’s vetting process has been in the past – and more than two dozen elections over the course of 34 years have provided plenty of fodder – the suggestion that a man who has been at the apex of power in the Islamic Republic since its inception no longer meets its constitutional standards for the presidency carries the farce to a new level.

Rafsanjani sits on the Assembly of Experts, which appoints Iran’s supreme leader, and leads its Expediency Council, which adjudicates challenges to proposed legislation. The determination that he is unfit for the presidency inevitably calls into question the credibility of these other institutions. The other rationale on offer— the aspersions on Rafsanjani’s advanced age (78) that were invoked by a number of conservative power brokers— is similarly insupportable. The Islamic Republic is, after all, a clerical gerontocracy. Rafsanjani may be closing in on 80, but he cuts a relatively spry figure among the Iranian political establishment, including by comparison with its late founder who seized power as a septuagenarian.

Regardless, Maloney doesn’t buy the idea that Rafsanjani would have been some kind of savior:

The image of the former president as an infallible architect of economic reform is in fact greatly exaggerated. He did spearhead the post-war reconstruction program against considerable domestic opposition, but his policies also instigated a destabilizing debt crisis and spiraling inflation. Rafsanjani’s reputation for personal enrichment, the ascendance of his sons and daughters and nephew, and the culture of crony capitalism that emerged during his tenure left deep resentments among ordinary Iranians whose share of the post-war spoils typically did not expand.

As part of an extended look at the complicated relationship between the Rafsanjani and Khamenei, Max Fisher highlights how Rafsanjani’s flirtation with the American oil industry during his presidency may have played a role in his disqualification:

Despite those years of post-presidential loyal service to the supreme leader, Rafsanjani is still closely associated with the signature foreign policy issue that appears so anathema to Khamenei: outreach to the United States. The supreme leader, after years of tension with his country’s president during Rafsanjani’s tenure, during Khatami’s more reformist administration and, finally, in the now-ending Ahmadinejad era that saw the two grapple for power, perhaps does not want to grapple with Rafsanjani again.

Marcus George rounds up Iran’s remaining pre-approved presidential candidates:

“All of the approved candidates are either loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei or are mostly irrelevant,” said Alireza Nader, an analyst at RAND Corporation. “Khamenei may still overturn the decision, but Rafsanjani’s disqualification shows that Khamenei is determined to wield all power. This appears to be a presidential selection rather than an election.”

BBC has a primer on the eight approved candidates.

(Photo: Iranian influential cleric and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani delivers his sermon during Friday prayers at Tehran University in the Iranian capital on July 17, 2009. By Ali Rafiei/AFP/Getty Images)

My take on the bill’s removal of gay couples here.

(Disclosure: I serve on the board of Immigration Equality.)

Ryan Broderick rounds up some choice pics. Update from a reader:

Here [NSFW] is the best short documentary ever on Juggalo culture. So much to say about this. It demands a larger sociological analysis, but I gotta get back to work.

To date, the Obama administration hasn’t talked about rolling back any of the emergency powers it enjoys. Those powers, and the rebalance of liberty and security they represent, have already outlived Osama bin Laden. The basic inertial forces of American politics position them to outlive al-Qaida. Just two years ago, cabinet officials talked about being ten or 20 kills away from strategically defeating al-Qaida. Now senior Pentagon aides talk about a war that will last ten to 20 years.

“Enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war,” Obama said in his second inaugural address. Rhetoric like that is cheap, and arguably cynical, considering Obama’s geographic expansion of the war on terror. If Obama wants his speech tomorrow to surpass empty rhetoric, he can at least acknowledge that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war powers, either.

I hope Spencer is pleasantly surprised tomorrow. I think Obama understands that one of his critical legacies will be unwinding the “perpetual emergency” and to normalizing our relations with the rest of the world so we can return prudently to a pre-9/11 posture again. The ferocious critics of the drone strikes do not, it seems to me, acknowledge the role of drones in this process. The drone strikes really did help wipe out the human infrastructure of al Qaeda as a formal network in Af-Pak while allowing us to draw down troops in that region. There came a point, of course, at which their success in undermining the formal institution of al Qaeda actually fortified the informal Jihadist movement, and its support in Muslim countries, and even here, as in the Tsarnaev losers. Since that inflection point, the drone war has been reduced enormously.

This has been a terribly difficult needle to thread, and I wish some of the president’s critics would occasionally acknowledge that difficulty, instead of getting more and more shrill in blanket condemnations. Obama wants both to end the Bush-Cheney “war on terror” rubric without letting our guard down against Jihadists. That’s why I’m not too outraged by the fanatical pursuit of national security leaks.

If we are to defang Jihadist terror – and it is real and resilient – without the horrible error of occupying Muslim countries with troops, we have to use intelligence, infiltration, espionage and superior data analysis to prevent plots before they bear bloody fruit. When the existence of informants are exposed by the AP, the chances of keeping terror at bay by these least worst means dwindle. Which means the temptation to return to war and torture would remain, in the hands of future presidents. This may be hard for purists to grasp. But if Obama is going to unwind the full Bush-Cheney apparatus of the permanent war, he needs to be able to fight Jihadist terror on traditional intelligence grounds as well. And that requires some secrecy.

But it also requires more boldness than Obama has shown so far. He needs to have Gitmo closed and bulldozed before he leaves office. That may require some truly difficult calls – but that’s what the executive branch is for, especially in its control of the release of prisoners. Maybe this cannot happen until the near the end of his term. But if Gitmo is left open, its legacy of brutal torture, murder and violation of core American values will remain for a future Republican to reboot. Obama has already come a long way in unwinding much of this. But before he leaves, he must ensure that no trace of the Cheney gulag remains.

Many of us on the right would like to tell a story of the post-Civil War South that indicts segregation as a product of government regulation only. Wilkerson’s quashes that illusion.

The oppressive actions of the Southern state presupposed the oppressive organization of Southern society and the Southern economy. It was no act of government that imposed the rule that a black customer in a shop must wait until all the white customers had been served. Store owners did not worry that mistreating black customers would cost them business, because the post-1865 settlement had failed to compensate ex-slaves in any way for their unpaid labor, meaning that even in freedom they remained nearly as landless and poor as ever. The stark divide between economic wealth and political power that matters so much to libertarian theory does not describe reality in the South of 1915.

In the North, the migrants encountered discrimination. No matter how much wealth they accumulated – and some accumulated a great deal – they could not gain the highest degree of status. But in the South, the utter lack of status had prevented black Southerners from accumulating wealth in the first place. To transform the South into something more like a market economy, open to all participants, would require the forceful application of federal government power in the years after World War II.

Sitges, Catalonia, 10.12 am

The lesson: Flat taxes seem to work pretty well when an economy is growing—but not so well when it is stagnant or shrinking. Across Central and Eastern Europe, “every country is in need of more revenue because of debt and public deficits,” says Andreas Peichl, a senior research associate at the IZA think tank in Bonn, Germany. “There is a feeling that the crisis has affected poorer people more than the rich and that the rich should contribute more. But that is not easy to do if you only have one tax rate.”

Given the extremes of inequality we are now facing – and likely to intensify as technology cuts yet another swathe through entire industries that sustain a middle class – I have to say I am pragmatically against such a tax now, even though I have consistently supported one in the past. I’m only flip-flopping, I hope, in the best way. A flat tax remains theoretically and symbolically deeply attractive to me. I still believe that penalizing people for succeeding in our economy is unjust to those individuals. But in our current contingency of accelerating inequality, a flat tax would be socially destructive.

And a true conservative seeks to avoid social destruction more than he enshrines ideological purity (which is why I really have no love, and a lot of distaste, for the current GOP). Nonetheless, we clearly, desperately need simpler taxation. And surely that is one area of potential compromise for both the GOP and the president, if the GOP hangs on in the House.

You would have to make it revenue neutral at first. But taking not a scalpel but a sledge-hammer to deductions, especially corporate welfare, could finally create a tax code that is comprehensible to most citizens.

It is deeply damaging to our core democratic legitimacy that the average citizen has no hope of understanding the tax code. If we cannot understand it, we cannot truly monitor it. And thereby lies one root of profound distrust of government, of the way in which powerful interests, like Apple, can find ways to avoid tax, while the struggling middle class has no way out. Yes, we need new revenue. Desperately. But if the actual politics prevent it, why not the next best thing: radical tax simplification. Some may argue that this could ultimately hurt the Democrats’ leverage for more revenue. So be it. We have four years of what could be stalemate – and this framework could unite sane people in both parties to make our tax regime comprehensible, reduce the income of lobbyists, and restore a sense that the game is not rigged. Those are important – close to indispensable – elements of a functioning democracy.

I had no idea – and you probably didn’t either – that Simon Cowell’s Simon Fuller‘s Idol franchise extends to the Arab world – and, in fact, may be one of the last gasps of pan-Arabism, as the region descends into a sectarian and educational hell. But the story of a young Palestinian who somehow managed to get past all the roadblocks and barriers to make it to the first stage of the competition in Cairo is quite something. From a Gaza refugee camp, he eventually had to climb over the walls of the compound where the auditions were taking place because he arrived too late. Once inside, without a ticket, he just burst into song amid the crowd of contestants, and one of his fellow competitors was kind enough to offer him his place. He’s now one of the favorites to win – and has managed to pierce through the grinding existence in Palestine to offer a unifying – and strikingly Western – vision. His main rival? A Syrian woman.

Maysoon Zayid, in a truly engaging essay, explains what she sees as his significance:

Mohammed Assaf is the face of the Palestinians that Netanyahu and friends refuse to admit exists. He is Muslim, but not radical. He is owned neither by Hamas nor Fatah and represents not just Gaza but Palestine as a whole. He humanizes a generation of males who have been reduced to terrorist caricatures. He has parents who obviously love and support him, the antithesis of the fabled Palestinian parents who want their children to die martyrs, and he has fan girls. Arab girls of all ages are in love with Mohammed Assaf and they are not afraid to Tweet it. Nor are they in danger of being “honor”-killed by the men in their families for doing so.

Know hope.

A reader writes:

As an African-American, I respect your point about the value of Obama’s speech at Morehouse, but ultimately, I completely agree with TNC’s critique.  Why?  Because I am tired.  It seems that every time Obama comes to the black community to address us, he lectures us; he does not simply speak to us. He gives us a lesson about personal responsibility; he preaches to black men about responsible fatherhood; etc.  These are crucial topics, and matters that we, as a community must solve and address, but must he talk about them every goddamned time he comes into the community?

This is especially galling when he refuses to address in explicit terms the specific policy needs of the black community (and they do exist).

I understand that he is the President of ALL of America, but would it kill the man to fight for at least a few policy initiatives that would specifically benefit low-income African-Americans, in particular?  God knows we fought for him when we stood in lines across this country, often times for hours, in the face of relentless Republican efforts to disenfranchise us, simply so that he could put up with those boneheads for another four miserable years.  If he is going to be our constant scold, it would ease the sting if he was occasionally more than our symbolic benefactor.

I will close on one last note, and I want you, in particular, to be mindful of this.  Some of the best and brightest young African-American men in the country attend Morehouse, and many of those men grew up in middle and upper middle-class families (a number of which are likely still intact).  I would not be surprised if there are at least 1-2 men in each class who turn down Harvard, and a handful more who turn down other Ivy League schools, in order to attend Morehouse.  It has a storied history, and the men who attend that institution graduate, attend exceptionally fine graduate institutions, and often lead wonderfully productive lives.

Of all the groups of young men in the world who needed to hear the lecture that the President gave, they should not have been high on that list.  He should have treated them like he would have treated the graduating class at Harvard: like bright young people with a world of possibilities in front of them, who had the right to pretend on just one day that a legacy of pain and the assumption of inadequacy did not accompany their every step.

I’m grateful for that perspective. And for my reader’s sharing of it.

David Cay Johnston believes that “costly specialized storm shelters—big public structures that would be used only every few years or even every few decades” aren’t smart investments:

In Webb City, next door to Joplin, the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave $3 million last year to build a safe room at the local high school. It can shelter 3,000 people, if they can get there before a twister strikes. (And that’s a big if, given the short time between a tornado warning and the moment when the doors need to close; just picture how tough it is to get 250 people into a jumbo jet in 40 minutes.) The shelter cost $1,000 per person it can protect from a tornado; building shelters for everyone in Missouri at this rate would cost $6 billion. Based on Missouri’s average of two deaths per year from tornadoes, this measure would save 100 lives over 50 years at a cost of $60 million per life. Even if the shelters last 200 years, the cost would be $15 million for each life saved.

An alternative:

A planned addition to Andalusia Middle School in the southern part of Alabama includes an interior multipurpose room designed to withstand deadly storm winds. Its walls are made of thick concrete with rebar reinforcing rods. And the hallways are built with the doglegs that Roberts favors. The new school also has windows, which are good for education and a sense of well-being. If a tornado approaches, heavy steel shutters inside the building lock in place, letting the winds throw the glass outward, but leaving those inside safe.

(Photo: Shown is the storm shelter that Gary and Ferrell Mitchusson used to ride out a massive tornado on May 21, 2013 in Moore, Ok. Their home was completely destroyed in the massive tornado. By Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

David Gianatasio looks away:

I’m not sure which is more disturbing—the hirsute images that adorn the Beardvertising site from Kentucky ad agency Cornett-IMS, or creative Whit Hiler’s use of the work “mancessory” to describe such facial hair. You might recall Hiler from past wacky ventures such as conquering Reddit with fake fliers (including a meetup to recreate scenes from Human Centipede—”Guys only”) and crafting a tourism campaign that was presumably too “kick-ass” for the Bluegrass State. Here’s his latest pitch: “Do you wanna get paid for having an epic beard? Of course you do. Join the world’s first Beardvertising network. Get paid. It’s simple—turn your beard into a business. Just like Duck Dynasty. Hang a BeardBoard (Patent Pending) in your beard. Sit back and get paid up to $5 per day.”

Damn. I just trimmed mine right back.

“This ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God. That we can kill in the name of God. And that, simply, is blasphemy. To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy … The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! …

We all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there,” – Pope Francis, in a homily today that brought tears of relief to my eyes.

We’ve built a 58% majority for same-sex marriage nationwide, up from 27% in 1996, when Congress passed the so-called DOMA as I was co-counseling the world’s first-ever trial on whether the government actually has a good reason for denying the freedom to marry in Hawaii. We are, happily, winning … but we are far from having won.

Freedom to Marry … is gearing up for the next round of work and battling it will take to turn the public opinion we have persuaded into the actual legal and political action that will be the true “mission accomplished” that Kinsley is prematurely celebrating. We know we will win, but also know we have a huge amount still to do – organizing, educating, enlisting, lobbying, door-knocking, fundraising, and campaigning that Kinsley’s piece trivializes when he writes, “The challenge [is] simply getting people to think about it a bit.” If only it were, or had been, or will be that simple.

I think Evan mistakes Mike’s enthusiasm – and the extraordinary gains we have indeed made – with complacency. But they’re both right; we have won the argument in a way few movements have so swiftly; but we still have not come close to accomplishing the mission. We saw the still-enormous gap to overcome yesterday as gay couples were removed from being covered under the new immigration reform. The reform tries to include everyone trapped in immigration hell or limbo (and sometimes, trust me, purgatory), but it explicitly excludes only one group of people: gay and lesbian Americans who have taken up the responsibilities of civil marriage.

These people are not immigrants; they are American citizens forced to choose between their country and their spouse. No heterosexual would see that exclusion as anything other than what it is: the American government’s persecution of its own citizens, even as it seeks to ease the plight of its resident non-citizens. And breaking up families or forcing them to move abroad to stay together is more than discrimination. It’s cruelty. It doesn’t get clearer than that. Gay citizens are regarded as less worthy than straight non-citizens by their own Congress.

The quote of the day was from Lindsey Graham: “You’ve got me on immigration. You don’t have me on marriage. If you want to keep me on immigration, let’s stay on immigration.” There are things I would want to say to Butters that only human decency prevents. I wish he’d treat Americans like my husband with a scintilla of such respect.

Harry Enten examines the deep-red states least hospitable to equality:

With the exception of Virginia, it’s pretty clear that southern Republican support for gay marriage is lower than among Republicans nationally. As such, it’s difficult to see how support among southern Republicans will hit 50% anytime before 2040. It’s hard to imagine more than the stray Republican voting for same-sex marriage. Polarization is at all-time high, and politicians are more afraid about losing primaries than general elections. Republicans have no need to vote for same-sex marriage.

Thus, unless the federal government jumps in, most, if not all southern states won’t legalize same-sex marriage for the foreseeable future. Most of their citizens don’t want it, and by the time they do, most Republicans still won’t. Considering you’ll need a majority or supermajority of state legislators to get the bans reversed, and that Republicans have a strong hold over these chambers, same-sex marriage in the south doesn’t have much of a chance anytime soon.

(Photo by Instagrammer rudydesign)

Anthropologists, according to [Professor John] Hawks, often ask the wrong questions of our extinct siblings: “Why didn’t you invent a bow and arrow? Why didn’t you build houses? Why didn’t you do it like we would?” He thinks the answer isn’t that the Neanderthals couldn’t but that they didn’t have the same ability to share ideas between groups the way H. sapiens did.

Their bands were so spread out and remote that they didn’t have a chance to share information and adapt their tools to life in new environments. “They were different, but that doesn’t mean there was a gulf between us,” Hawks concluded. “They did things working with constraints that people today have trouble understanding.” Put another way, Neanderthals spent all day in often fatal battles to get enough food for their kids to eat. As a result, they didn’t have the energy to invent bows and arrows in the evening. Despite these limitations, they formed their small communities, hunted collectively, cared for each other, and honored their dead.

When H. sapiens arrived, Neanderthals finally had access to the kind of symbolic communication and technological adaptations they’d never been able to develop before. Ample archaeological evidence shows that they quickly learned the skills H. sapiens had brought with them, and started using them to adapt to a world they shared with many other groups who exchanged ideas on a regular basis. Instead of being driven into extinction, they enjoyed the wealth of H. sapiens’ culture and underwent a cultural explosion of their own. To put it another way, H. sapiens assimilated the Neanderthals. This process was no doubt partly coercive, the way assimilation so often is today.

Recent Dish on Neanderthals’ extinction here.

Adrian Paci documented a group of Chinese craftsmen as they sculpted a classical Western column from a solid piece of marble, all while aboard a cargo ship traveling from China to France.  Paci describes his inspiration for the resulting short film:

The Column came out of a story I heard from a friend of mine, a restorer, who needed a new marble sculpture for a castle he was restoring. Somebody told him that it could be done in China, because they have good marble, good craftsmen, cheap labour, and they can be quick because they can actually do the work while the marble is being transported by boat. I found it terrific. It sounded so weird, simultaneously sick and fabulous, something mythological and at the same time in keeping with the capitalistic logic of profit—merging the time of production with the time of transport.

The full film can be seen here.

(Hat tip: Gizmodo)

The Listserve is a mailing list lottery. Sign up for the Listserve, and you’re joining a massive e-mail list. Every day, one person from the list is randomly selected to write one e-mail to everyone else. That’s it. As of this writing, the Listserve has 21,399 subscribers. There has been one email per day since April 16th, 2012. Run by a group of Masters Candidates in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), the Listserve emerged from a class exploring new ways of creating conversational spaces online. There were other ideas: chain letters, or a message board for only 100 people at a time. But eventually email’s directness and ease-of-use won out. An email flies straight, circumventing the myriad distractions of other online gatherings, where some voices pack disproportionate clout (or, er, Klout).

She goes on to differentiate the list from other forms of modern social media:

Where Facebook has devalued the word “friend” to the point of worthlessness, Listserve takes the opposite tack: it has imbued “stranger,” with its associations of danger and otherness, with an immediacy much more akin to real friendship. Listservers don’t spam you with vacation photos or cheap pleas for attention. Instead, they share long, personal stories of adversity and dole out big-picture life advice. “With the lottery mechanism slowing down interaction,” says [Listserve co-founder Greg] Dorsainville, “the emails have a pleasant tone: people talk about their own lives, and how they have battled against hardship or achieved success in their life. People share slices of their own identities and what have shaped them.”

Japanese artist Macoto Murayama creates diagrams of flowers for his series “Inorganic flora”:

He buys his specimens… from flower stands or collects them from the roadside. Murayama carefully dissects each flower, removing its petals, anther, stigma and ovaries with a scalpel. He studies the separate parts of the flower under a magnifying glass and then sketches and photographs them.

Using 3D computer graphics software, the artist then creates models of the full blossom as well as of the stigma, sepals and other parts of the bloom. He cleans up his composition in Photoshop and adds measurements and annotations in Illustrator, so that in the end, he has created nothing short of a botanical blueprint. …

Murayama chose flowers as his subject because they have interesting shapes and, unlike traditional architectural structures, they are organic. But, as he has said in an interview, “When I looked closer into a plant that I thought was organic, I found in its form and inner structure hidden mechanical and inorganic elements.” After dissecting it, he added, “My perception of a flower was completely changed.”

Gallery here.

(Image: A side view of Lathyrus odoratus L. 2009-2012, by Macoto Murayama. Courtesy of Frantic Gallery.)

The United States only began measuring poverty in the 1960s, so we lack standard figures dating farther back than that. But it’s recognized that the trend of decreasing poverty among seniors dates back to the thirties and forties. 2011 Census figures place poverty among Americans aged 65 and older at 8.7%, well below the national average of 15%.

Today it is the Millennials, the youngest generation, that finds itself poor, vulnerable, and screwed by financial storms caused by another generation. Unemployment among 18-29 year olds is 11.1% and has been over 10% for 53 months. The rate for people age 16-24 is16.1%. Poverty is highest among teens and children - 27%.

Dylan Matthews, on the other hand, argues that seniors are poorer than those statistics would lead you to believe.

Brian Merchant contrasts this project with other skyscrapers:

So, should we cheer or jeer the prospect of mass-produced biggest-ever skyscrapers? And also: why mass-produce ginormous skyscrapers in the first place?

Well, if the specs [that Broad Sustainable Construction] provides are to be believed, mass-manufacturing prefab skyscrapers is much more efficient than our more traditional towers. It’s five times more energy efficient, can be built at half the cost, and packs a lot more people into a smaller space. BSC is going to stuff 30,000 people into these self-contained skyscraper communities—a resident of Sky City will use up 1/100th of the land used by a typical Chinese citizen.

And it really is a city in and of itself—4,450 apartments, nearly 100,000 square feet of indoor vertical farms, 250 hotel rooms, 92 elevators, 30 foot courtyards for athletics, and a six mile ramp that can be used to walk or run around the entire city.

In a cool new paper, Marianne Bertrand, Jessica Pan, and Emir Kamenica pose a theory that some people might find controversial but others might find intuitive: What if there’s a deficit of marriages where the wife is the top earner because — to put things bluntly — husbands hate being out-earned by their wives, and wives hate living with husbands who resent them?

If this were true, we would expect to see at least [four] other things to be true. First, we’d expect marriages with female breadwinners to be surprisingly rare. Second, we’d expect them to produce unhappier marriages. Third, we might expect these women to cut back on hours, do more household, or make other gestures to make their husbands feel better. Fourth, we’d expect these marriages to end more in divorce. Lo and behold (as you no doubt guessed), the economists found all of those assumptions borne out by the evidence.

Regardless, Derek expects we’re nearing the end of male-breadwinner dominance:

Women are going to be the primary breadwinners in more and more families for so many reasons  — (1) the shift from brawn economy to service economy; (2) women’s growing share of college degrees; and (3) sexism softening among male-dominated industries as women establish themselves in more positions of power. A national aversion to successful wives is a really bad recipe for economic growth and family formation. Get over it, guys. It’s a woman’s world, now.

Previous Dish on female breadwinners here, here and here.

A survivor of the Oklahoma tornado gets a surprise:

I totally lost it with that video. First off: what a great human being. No bullshit, no mawkishness: “I know exactly what happened.” Then the little dog – her second prayer. Sometimes it takes just one tangible story to fully grasp from a distance what these people have just experienced. And to see the hidden values – of love and life rather than property – that redeem us even after that horror.

The human death toll from the tornado now stands at 24, with hundreds more injured. Alan Taylor is up with a striking gallery of the destruction and rescue efforts.

(Hat tip for the video: Dashiell Bennett)