By John Gever
Action Points
Many individuals who took a single dose of psilocybin -- the active ingredient in what the drug culture calls "magic mushrooms" -- showed alterations in personality characteristics, largely for the better, that persisted for more than a year, a prospective scientific study showed.
Participants who reported "mystical experiences" during the hallucinogen sessions tended to show increases in the personality dimension known as openness, according to Katherine A. MacLean, PhD, and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University.
They found no adverse effects from the drug exposure.
Openness is generally considered a positive characteristic and includes such traits as aesthetic appreciation and sensitivity, imagination, intellectual engagement, and awareness of feelings in themselves and others, the researchers indicated in an online report in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
The findings were consistent with previous studies and anecdotal reports from psilocybin users, who have said the drug changed their interactions with the world long after the acute effects wore off, MacLean and colleagues said.
"Although there is still much to learn about the mechanisms by which hallucinogens might produce positive changes, the increases in openness observed in the present study indicate novel avenues of future research into the biological and psychological mechanisms of psilocybin treatment," they wrote.
The researchers suggested as well that mystical experiences with nonpharmacologic origins could have similar long-lasting effects on personality -- a hypothesis deserving more research insofar as such experiences have been found to help people fight addictions and cope with cancer and other life-threatening diseases.
Psilocybin is obtained from a variety of mushrooms and acts at the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor. It exploded in popularity for inducing "mind-expanding" hallucinatory experiences in the 1960s. Among the purported benefits are increased creativity, greater appreciation of music and visual art, and more tolerance of other people.
The current research involved 52 adult volunteers, whose self-described motivations were generally "curiosity about the effects of psilocybin and the opportunity for extensive self-reflection."
They were counseled extensively in several sessions before receiving the drug, and it was delivered under supportive conditions to minimize adverse reactions, according to accepted practice for human studies of hallucinogens.
There were actually two studies, both blinded with crossover designs, which individually have already produced published reports.
In one, participants underwent a series of eight-hour sessions in which they received a relatively high dose of psilocybin (30 mg per 70 kg of body weight) or methylphenidate at 40 mg per 70 kg as a control.
In the other study, participants had five sessions in which placebo or various psilocybin doses ranging from 5 to 30 mg per 70 kg were given.
Participants in both studies underwent personality assessments at baseline, one to two months after each drug session, and about 14 months after the last session, using the NEO Personality Inventory. This instrument evaluates five personality dimensions: openness, extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
Acute psychosensory effects in each session were measured as well with several questionnaires aimed at detailing "mystical experiences."
The current analysis focused on outcomes after the 30 mg/70 kg psilocybin sessions.
Openness scores with the NEO Personality Inventory at baseline averaged about 64. At the first personality evaluation after these high-dose psilocybin sessions, openness scores increased by a mean of 2.8 points.
Having a mystical experience during the 30 mg/70 kg psilocybin session was key to the increase in openness scores, the researchers indicated.
They found a significant correlation between high "mystical experience" ratings in the acute-effects assessments and increases in openness (r=0.42, P=0.002).
Among the 30 participants who met criteria for a "complete mystical experience," openness scores increased an average of 5.7 points, whereas there was no significant change in openness scores among the 22 others.
At the 14-month evaluation, openness scores in the participants who had complete mystical experiences had declined slightly but remained significantly higher than at baseline, by 4.2 points (P=0.05).
Participants who did not have complete mystical experiences had no long-term changes in openness.
There were no significant changes in the other four dimensions of the personality inventory at any point in the study.
MacLean and colleagues also checked on whether baseline openness scores were correlated with the likelihood of having a mystical experience. They were not (r=0.12, P=0.41).
The researchers characterized the increase in openness as probably a good thing for participants.
"Although the present study did not directly investigate the corollary benefits of increased openness, significant increases in nearly all of the facet scores indicate the potential for improvements in aesthetic and cognitive domains," they wrote.
Limitations to the study included the recruitment strategy: Participants were not drawn randomly from the community, but rather were weighted toward people who were already interested in the psilocybin experience.
"Nearly all of the participants in the present study regularly engaged in spiritual activities such as religious services, prayer, and meditation. It is possible that such individuals are particularly sensitive to the mystical-type effects of psilocybin, which were predictive of increases in openness," MacLean and colleagues wrote.
Also, neuroticism scores (reflecting anxiety, moodiness, and other negative traits) on the personality inventory at baseline were nearly one standard deviation below population norms.
As a result, the researchers conceded, the effects of the drug per se could not be separated from the self-selection bias.
20131028
'Magic Mushroom' Drug May Improve Personality Long Term
Four Futures
by Peter Frase
In his speech to the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park, Slavoj Žižek lamented that “It’s easy to imagine the end of the world, but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism.” It’s a paraphrase of a remark that Fredric Jameson made some years ago, when the hegemony of neoliberalism still appeared absolute. Yet the very existence of Occupy Wall Street suggests that the end of capitalism has become a bit easier to imagine of late. At first, this imagining took a mostly grim and dystopian form: at the height of the financial crisis, with the global economy seemingly in full collapse, the end of capitalism looked like it might be the beginning of a period of anarchic violence and misery. And still it might, with the Eurozone teetering on the edge of collapse as I write. But more recently, the spread of global protest from Cairo to Madrid to Madison to Wall Street has given the Left some reason to timidly raise its hopes for a better future after capitalism.
One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end. Maybe not soon, but probably before too long; humanity has never before managed to craft an eternal social system, after all, and capitalism is a notably more precarious and volatile order than most of those that preceded it. The question, then, is what will come next. Rosa Luxemburg, reacting to the beginnings of World War I, cited a line from Engels: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” In that spirit I offer a thought experiment, an attempt to make sense of our possible futures. These are a few of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if we fail.
Much of the literature on post-capitalist economies is preoccupied with the problem of managing labor in the absence of capitalist bosses. However, I will begin by assuming that problem away, in order to better illuminate other aspects of the issue. This can be done simply by extrapolating capitalism’s tendency toward ever-increasing automation, which makes production ever-more efficient while simultaneously challenging the system’s ability to create jobs, and therefore to sustain demand for what is produced. This theme has been resurgent of late in bourgeois thought: in September 2011, Slate’s Farhad Manjoo wrote a long series on “The Robot Invasion,” and shortly thereafter two MIT economists published Race Against the Machine, an e-book in which they argued that automation was rapidly overtaking many of the areas that until recently served as the capitalist economy’s biggest motors of job creation. From fully automatic car factories to computers that can diagnose medical conditions, robotization is overtaking not only manufacturing, but much of the service sector as well.
Taken to its logical extreme, this dynamic brings us to the point where the economy does not require human labor at all. This does not automatically bring about the end of work or of wage labor, as has been falsely predicted over and over in response to new technological developments. But it does mean that human societies will increasingly face the possibility of freeing people from involuntary labor. Whether we take that opportunity, and how we do so, will depend on two major factors, one material and one social. The first question is resource scarcity: the ability to find cheap sources of energy, to extract or recycle raw materials, and generally to depend on the Earth’s capacity to provide a high material standard of living to all. A society that has both labor-replacing technology and abundant resources can overcome scarcity in a thoroughgoing way that a society with only the first element cannot. The second question is political: what kind of society will we be? One in which all people are treated as free and equal beings, with an equal right to share in society’s wealth? Or a hierarchical order in which an elite dominates and controls the masses and their access to social resources?
There are therefore four logical combinations of the two oppositions, resource abundance vs. scarcity and egalitarianism vs. hierarchy. To put things in somewhat vulgar-Marxist terms, the first axis dictates the economic base of the post-capitalist future, while the second pertains to the socio-political superstructure. Two possible futures are socialisms (only one of which I will actually call by that name) while the other two are contrasting flavors of barbarism.
Egalitarianism and abundance: communism
There is a famous passage in the third volume of Capital, in which Marx distinguishes between a “realm of necessity” and a “realm of freedom.” In the realm of necessity we must “wrestle with Nature to satisfy [our] wants, to maintain and reproduce life”, by means of physical labor in production. This realm of necessity, Marx says, exists “in all social formations and under all possible modes of production”, presumably including socialism. What distinguishes socialism, then, is that production is rationally planned and democratically organized, rather than operating at the whim of the capitalist or the market. For Marx, however, this level of society was not the true objective of the revolution, but merely a precondition for “that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis.”
Elsewhere, Marx suggests that one day we may be able to free ourselves from the realm of necessity altogether. In the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” he imagines that:
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!Marx’s critics have often turned this passage against him, portraying it as a hopelessly improbable utopia. What possible society could be so productive that humans are entirely liberated from having to perform some kind of involuntary and unfulfilling labor? Yet the promise of widespread automation is that it could enact just such a liberation, or at least approach it—if, that is, we find a way to deal with the need to generate power and secure resources. But recent technological developments have taken place not just in the production of commodities, but in the generation of the energy needed to operate the automatic factories and 3-D printers of the future. Hence one possible post-scarcity future combines labor-saving technology with an alternative to the current energy regime, which is ultimately limited by both the physical scarcity and ecological destructiveness of fossil fuels. This is far from guaranteed, but there are hopeful indicators. The cost of producing and operating solar panels, for example, has been falling dramatically over the past decade; on the current path they would be cheaper than our current electricity sources by 2020. If cheap energy and automation are combined with methods of efficiently fabricating or recycling raw materials, then we have truly left behind ‘the economy’ as a social mechanism for managing scarcity. What lies over that horizon?
It’s not that all work would cease, in the sense that we would all just sit around in dissipation and torpor. For as Marx puts it, “labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.” Whatever activities and projects we undertook, we would participate in them because we found them inherently fulfilling, not because we needed a wage or owed our monthly hours to the cooperative. This is hardly so implausible, considering the degree to which decisions about work are already driven by non-material considerations, among those who are privileged enough to have the option: millions of people choose to go to graduate school, or become social workers, or start small organic farms, even when far more lucrative careers are open to them.
The demise of wage labor may seem like a faraway dream today. But once upon a time – before the labor movement retreated from the demand from shorter hours, and before the stagnation and reversal of the long trend toward reduced work weeks – people actually worried about what we would do after being liberated from work. In an essay on “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren”, John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a few generations, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” And in a recently published discussion from 1956, Max Horkheimer begins by casually remarking to Theodor Adorno that “nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings.”
And Keynes and Adorno lived in a world where industry only appeared possible at a very large scale, whether in capitalist factories or state run enterprises; that form of industry implies hierarchy no matter what social formation it is embedded in. But recent technological advances suggest the possibility of returning to a less centralized structure, without drastically lowering material standards of living: the proliferation of 3-D printers and small scale ‘fabrication laboratories’ is making it increasingly possible to reduce the scale of at least some manufacturing without completely sacrificing productivity. Thus, insofar as some human labor is still required in production in our imagined communist future, it could take the form of small collectives rather than capitalist or state run firms.
But getting past wage labor economically also means getting past it socially, and this entails deep changes in our priorities and our way of life. If we want to imagine a world where work is no longer a necessity, it’s probably more fruitful to draw on fiction than theory. Indeed, many people are already familiar with the utopia of a post-scarcity communism, because it has been represented in one of our most familiar works of popular culture: Star Trek. The economy and society of that show is premised on two basic technical elements. One is the technology of the ‘replicator’, which is capable of materializing any object out of thin air, with only the press of a button. The other is a fuzzily described source of apparently free (or nearly free) energy, which runs the replicators as well as everything else on the show.
The communistic quality of the Star Trek universe is often obscured because the films and TV shows are centered on the military hierarchy of Starfleet, which explores the galaxy and comes into conflict with alien races. But even this seems to be largely a voluntarily chosen hierarchy, drawing those who seek a life of adventure and exploration; to the extent that we see glimpses of civilian life, it seems mostly untroubled by hierarchy or compulsion. And to the extent that the show departs from communist utopia, it is because its writers introduce the external threat of hostile alien races or scarce resources in order to produce sufficient dramatic tension.
It is not necessary to conjure starships and aliens in order to imagine the tribulations of a communist future, however. Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom imagines a post-scarcity world that is set in a recognizable extrapolation of the present day United States. Just as in Star Trek, material scarcity has been superseded in this world. But Doctorow grasps that within human societies, certain immaterial goods will always be inherently scarce: reputation, respect, esteem among one’s peers. Thus the book revolves around various characters’ attempts to accumulate ‘whuffie’, which are a kind of virtual brownie points that represent the goodwill you have accumulated from others. Whuffie, in turn, is used to determine who holds authority in any voluntary collective enterprise – such as, in the novel, running Disneyland.
The value of Doctorow’s book, in contrast to Star Trek, is that it treats a post-scarcity world as one with its own hierarchies and conflicts, rather than one in which all live in perfect harmony and politics comes to a halt. Reputation, like capital, can be accumulated in an unequal and self-perpetuating way, as those who are already popular gain the ability to do things that get them more attention and make them more popular. Such dynamics are readily observable today, as blogs and other social media produce popular gatekeepers who are able to determine who gets attention and who does not, in a way that is not completely a function of who has money to spend. Organizing society according to who has the most ‘likes’ on Facebook has certain drawbacks, to say the least, even when dislodged from its capitalist integument.
But if it is not a vision of a perfect society, this version of communism is at least a world in which conflict is no longer based on the opposition between wage workers and capitalists, or on struggles over scarce resources. It is a world in which not everything ultimately comes down to money. A communist society would surely have hierarchies of status – as have all human societies, and as does capitalism. But in capitalism, all status hierarchies tend to be aligned, albeit imperfectly, with one master status hierarchy: the accumulation of capital and money. The ideal of a post-scarcity society is that various kinds of esteem are independent, so that the esteem in which one is held as a musician is independent of the regard one achieves as a political activist, and one can’t use one kind of status to buy another. In a sense, then, it is a misnomer to refer to this as an ‘egalitarian’ configuration, since it is not a world of no hierarchies but one of many hierarchies, no one of which is superior to all the others.
Hierarchy and abundance: rentism
Given the technical premises of complete automation and free energy, the Star Trek utopia of pure communism becomes a possibility, but hardly an inevitability. The bourgeois elite of the present day does not merely enjoy privileged access to scarce material goods, after all; they also enjoy exalted status and social power over the working masses, which should not be discounted as a source of capitalist motivation. Nobody can actually spend a billion dollars on themselves, after all, and yet there are hedge fund managers who make that much in a single year and then come back for more. For such people, money is a source of power over others, a status marker, and a way of keeping score – not really so different from Doctorow’s whuffie, except that it is a form of status that depends on the material deprivation of others. It is therefore to be expected that even if labor were to become superfluous in production, the ruling classes would endeavor to preserve a system based on money, profit, and class power.
The embryonic form of class power in a post-scarcity economy can be found in our systems of intellectual property law. While contemporary defenders of intellectual property like to speak of it as though it is broadly analogous to other kinds of property, it is actually based on a quite different principle. As the economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine observe, IP rights go beyond the traditional conception of property. They do not merely ensure “your right to control your copy of your idea”, in the way that they protect my right to control my shoes or my house. Rather, they give rights-holders the ability to tell others how to use copies of an idea that they ‘own’. As Boldrin and Levine say, “This is not a right ordinarily or automatically granted to the owners of other types of property. If I produce a cup of coffee, I have the right to choose whether or not to sell it to you or drink it myself. But my property right is not an automatic right both to sell you the cup of coffee and to tell you how to drink it.”
The mutation of the property form, from real to intellectual, catalyzes the transformation of society into something which is not recognizable as capitalism, but is nevertheless just as unequal. Capitalism, at its root, isn’t defined by the presence of capitalists, but by the existence of capital, which in turn is inseparable from the process of commodity production by means of wage labor, M-C-M’. When wage labor disappears, the ruling class can continue to accumulate money only if they retain the ability to appropriate a stream of rents, which arise from their control of intellectual property. Thus emerges a rentist, rather than capitalist society.
Suppose, for example, that all production is by means of Star Trek’s replicator. In order to make money from selling replicated items, people must somehow be prevented from just making whatever they want for free, and this is the function of intellectual property. A replicator is only available from a company that licenses you the right to use one, since anyone who tried to give you a replicator or make one with their own replicator would be violating the terms of their license. What’s more, every time you make something with the replicator, you must pay a licensing fee to whoever owns the rights to that particular thing. In this world, if Star Trek’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard wanted to replicate his beloved “tea, Earl Grey, hot”, he would have to pay the company that has copyrighted the replicator pattern for hot Earl Grey tea.
This solves the problem of how to maintain for-profit enterprise, at least on the surface. Anyone who tries to supply their needs from their replicator without paying the copyright cartels would become an outlaw, like today’s online file sharers. Despite its absurdity, this arrangement would likely have advocates among some contemporary critics of the Internet’s sharing culture; Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget, for instance, explicitly calls for the imposition of “artificial scarcity” on digital content in order to restore its value. The consequences of such arguments are already apparent in the record industry’s lawsuits against hapless mp3 downloaders, and in the continual intensification of the surveillance state under the guise of combating piracy. The extension of this regime to the micro-fabrication of physical objects will only make the problem worse. Once again, science fiction is enlightening, in this case the work of Charles Stross. Accelerando shows us a future in which copyright infringers are pursued by hitmen, while Halting State depicts furtive back alley “fabbers” running their 3-D printers one step ahead of the law.
But an economy based on artificial scarcity is not only irrational, it is also dysfunctional. If everyone is constantly being forced to pay out money in licensing fees, then they need some way of earning money, and this generates a new problem. The fundamental dilemma of rentism is the problem of effective demand: that is, how to ensure that people are able to earn enough money to be able to pay the licensing fees on which private profit depends. Of course, this isn’t so different from the problem that confronted industrial capitalism, but it becomes more severe as human labor is increasingly squeezed out of the system, and human beings become superfluous as elements of production, even as they remain necessary as consumers. So what kind of jobs would still exist in this economy?
Some people would still be needed to dream up new things to be replicated, and so there will remain a place for a small “creative class” of designers and artists. And as their creations accumulate, the number of things that can be replicated will soon vastly outstrip the available time and money to enjoy them. The biggest threat to any given company’s profits will not be the cost of labor or raw materials – both minimal or nonexistent – but rather the prospect that the licenses they own will lose out in popularity to those of competitors. Marketing and advertising, then, will continue to employ significant numbers. Alongside the marketers, there will also be an army of lawyers, as today’s litigation over patent and copyright infringement swells to encompass every aspect of economic activity. And finally, as in any hierarchical society, there must be an apparatus of repression to keep the poor and powerless from taking a share back from the rich and powerful. Enforcing draconion intellectual property law will require large battalions of what Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev call “guard labor”: “The efforts of the monitors, guards, and military personnel . . . directed not toward production, but toward the enforcement of claims arising from exchanges and the pursuit or prevention of unilateral transfers of property ownership.”
Nevertheless, maintaining full employment in a rentist economy will be a constant struggle. It is unlikely that the four areas just described can fully replace all the jobs lost to automation. What’s more, these jobs are themselves subject to labor-saving innovations. Marketing can be done with data mining and algorithms; much of the routine business of lawyering can be replaced with software; guard labor can be performed by surveillance drones rather than human police. Even some of the work of product invention could one day be given to computers that possess some rudimentary artificial creative intelligence.
And if automation fails, the rentist elite can colonize our leisure time in order to extract free labor. Facebook already relies on its users to create content for free, and the recent fad for “gamification” suggests that corporations are very interested in finding ways to turn the work of their employees into activities that people will find pleasurable, and will thus do for free on their own time. The computer scientist Luis von Ahn, for example, has specialized in developing ‘games with a purpose’, applications that present themselves to end users as enjoyable diversions while also performing a useful computational task. One of von Ahn’s games asked users to identify objects in photos, and the data was then fed back into a database that was used for searching images. This line of research evokes the world of Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game, in which children remotely fight an interstellar war through what they think are video games.
All of this means that the society of rentism would probably be subject to a persistent trend toward under-employment, which the ruling class would have to find some way to counter in order to hold the system together. This entails realizing a vision that the late André Gorz had of post-industrial society: “the distribution of means of payment must correspond to the volume of wealth socially produced and not to the volume of work performed.” This might involve taxing the profits of profitable firms and redistributing the money back to consumers – possibly as a no-strings-attached guaranteed income, and possibly in return for performing some kind of meaningless make-work. But even if redistribution is desirable from the standpoint of the class as a whole, a collective action problem arises; any individual company or rich person will be tempted to free-ride on the payments of others, and will therefore resist efforts to impose a redistributive tax. The government could also simply print money to give to the working class, but the resulting inflation would just be an indirect form of redistribution and would also be resisted. Finally, there is the option of funding consumption through consumer indebtedness – but readers in the early twenty-first century presumably do not need to be reminded of the limitations inherent in that solution.
Given all these troubles, one might ask why the rentier class would bother trying to extract profits from people, since they could just replicate whatever they want anyway. What keeps society from simply dissolving into the communist scenario from the previous section? It might be that nobody would hold enough licenses to provide for all of their needs, so everyone needs revenue to pay their own licensing costs. You might own the replicator pattern for an apple, but just being able to make apples isn’t enough to survive. In this reading, the rentier class are just those who own enough licenses to cover all of their own license fees.
Or perhaps, as noted at the outset, the ruling class would guard their privileged position in order to protect the power over others granted to those at the top of a class-divided society. This suggests another solution to rentism’s underemployment problem: hiring people to perform personal services might become a status marker, even if automation makes it strictly speaking unnecessary. The much-heralded rise of the service economy would evolve into a futuristic version of nineteenth century England or parts of India today, where the elite can afford to hire huge numbers of servants.
But this society can persist only so long as most people accept the legitimacy of its governing hierarchy. Perhaps the power of ideology would be strong enough to induce people to accept the state of affairs described here. Or perhaps people would start to ask why the wealth of knowledge and culture was being enclosed within restrictive laws, when, to use a recently popular slogan, “another world is possible” beyond the regime of artificial scarcity.
Egalitarianism and scarcity: socialism
We have seen that the combination of automated production and bounteous resources gives us either the pure utopia of communism or the absurdist dystopia of rentism; but what if energy and resources remain scarce? In that case, we arrive in a world characterized simultaneously by abundance and scarcity, in which the liberation of production occurs alongside an intensified planning and management of the inputs to that production. The need to control labor still disappears, but the need to manage scarcity remains.
Scarcity in the physical inputs to production must be understood to encompass far more than particular commodities like oil or iron ore – capitalism’s malign effect on the environment threatens to do permanent damage to the climates and ecosystems on which much of our present economy depends. Climate change has already begun to play havoc with the world’s food system, and future generations may look back on the variety of foodstuffs available today as an unsustainable golden age. (Earlier generations of science fiction writers sometimes imagined that we would one day choose to consume all our nutrition in the form of a flavorless pill; we may yet do so by necessity.) And under the more severe projections, many areas that are now densely populated may become uninhabitable, imposing severe relocation and reconstruction costs on our descendants.
Our third future, then, is one in which nobody needs to perform labor, and yet people are not free to consume as much as they like. Some kind of government is required, and pure communism is excluded as a possibility; what we get instead is a version of socialism, and some form of economic planning. In contrast to the plans of the twentieth century, however, those of the resource-constrained future are mostly concerned with managing consumption, rather than production. That is, we still assume the replicator; the task is to manage the inputs that feed it.
This might seem less than promising. Consumption, after all, was precisely the area in which Soviet-style planning was found to be most deficient. A society that can arm itself for war with the Nazis, but is then subject to endless shortages and bread lines, is hardly an inspiring template. But the real lesson of the USSR and its imitators is that planning’s time had not yet come – and when it did begin to come, the bureaucratic sclerosis and political shortcomings of the Communist system proved unable to accommodate it. In the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet economists tried heroically to reconstruct their economy into a more workable form – one of the leading figures in this effort was the Nobel prize-winner Leonid Kantorovich, whose story is told in fictional form in Francis Spufford’s recent book Red Plenty. The effort ran aground not because planning was impossible in principle, but because it was technically and politically impossible in the USSR of that time. Technically, because sufficient computing power was not yet available, and politically because the Soviet bureaucratic elite was unwilling to part with the power and privilege granted to them under the existing system.
But the efforts of Kantorovich, and of contemporary theorists of planning such as Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, suggest that some form of efficient and democratic planning is possible. And it will be necessary in a world of scarce resources: while private capitalist production has been very successful at incentivizing labor-saving technological innovation, it has proven to be terrible at conserving the environment or rationing scarce resources. Even in a post-capitalist, post-work world, some kind of coordination is needed to ensure that individuals do not treat the Earth in a way that is, in the aggregate, unsustainable. What is needed, as Michael Löwy has said, is some kind of “global democratic planning” rooted in pluralistic, democratic debate rather than rule by bureaucrats.
A distinction should be made, however, between democratic planning and a completely non-market economy. A socialist economy could employ rational planning while still featuring market exchange of some sort, along with money and prices. This, in fact, was one of Kantorovich’s insights; rather than do away with price signals, he wanted to make prices into mechanisms for making planned production targets into economic realities. Current attempts to put a price on carbon emissions through cap-and-trade schemes point in this direction: while they use the market as a coordinating mechanism, they are also a form of planning, since the key step is the non-market decision about what level of carbon emissions is acceptable. This approach could look quite different than it does today, if generalized and implemented without capitalist property relations and wealth inequalities.
Suppose that everyone received a wage, not as a return to labor but as a human right. The wage would not buy the products of others’ labor, but rather the right to use up a certain quantity of energy and resources as one went about using the replicators. Markets might develop insofar as people chose to trade one type of consumption permit for another, but this would be what the sociologist Erik Olin Wright calls “capitalism between consenting adults”, rather than the involuntary participation in wage labor driven by the threat of starvation.
Given the need to determine and target stable levels of consumption – and thus set prices – the state can’t quite wither away, as it does under the communist scenario. And where there is scarcity, there will surely be political conflict, even if this is no longer a class conflict. Conflicts between locales, between generations, between those who are more concerned with the long-term health of the environment and those who prefer more material consumption in the short run – none of these will be easy to solve. But we will at least have arrived on the other side of capitalism as a democratic society, and more or less in one piece.
Hierarchy and scarcity: exterminism
But if we do not arrive as equals, and environmental limits continue to press against us, we come to the fourth and most disturbing of our possible futures. In a way, it resembles the communism that we began with – but it is a communism for the few.
A paradoxical truth about that global elite we have learned to call the “one percent” is that, while they are defined by their control of a huge swathe of the world’s monetary wealth, they are at the same time the fragment of humanity whose daily lives are least dominated by money. As Charles Stross has written, the very richest inhabit an existence in which most worldly goods are, in effect, free. That is, their wealth is so great relative to the cost of food, housing, travel, and other amenities that they rarely have to consider the cost of anything. Whatever they want, they can have.
Which is to say that for the very rich, the world is already something like the communism described earlier. The difference, of course, is that their post-scarcity condition is made possible not just by machines but by the labor of the global working class. But an optimistic view of future developments – the future I have described as communism – is that we will eventually come to a state in which we are all, in some sense, the one percent. As William Gibson famously remarked, “the future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.”
But what if resources and energy are simply too scarce to allow everyone to enjoy the material standard of living of today’s rich? What if we arrive in a future that no longer requires the mass proletariat’s labor in production, but is unable to provide everyone with an arbitrarily high standard of consumption? If we arrive in that world as an egalitarian society, than the answer is the socialist regime of shared conservation described in the previous section. But if, instead, we remain a society polarized between a privileged elite and a downtrodden mass, then the most plausible trajectory leads to something much darker; I will call it by the term that E.P. Thompson used to describe a different dystopia, during the peak of the cold war: exterminism.
The great danger posed by the automation of production, in the context of a world of hierarchy and scarce resources, is that it makes the great mass of people superfluous from the standpoint of the ruling elite. This is in contrast to capitalism, where the antagonism between capital and labor was characterized by both a clash of interests and a relationship of mutual dependence: the workers depend on capitalists as long as they don’t control the means of production themselves, while the capitalists need workers to run their factories and shops. It is as the lyrics of “Solidarity Forever” had it: “They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn/But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.” With the rise of the robots, the second line ceases to hold.
The existence of an impoverished, economically superfluous rabble poses a great danger to the ruling class, which will naturally fear imminent expropriation; confronted with this threat, several courses of action present themselves. The masses can be bought off with some degree of redistribution of resources, as the rich share out their wealth in the form of social welfare programs, at least if resource constraints aren’t too binding. But in addition to potentially reintroducing scarcity into the lives of the rich, this solution is liable to lead to an ever-rising tide of demands on the part of the masses, thus raising the specter of expropriation once again. This is essentially what happened at the high tide of the welfare state, when bosses began to fear that both profits and control over the workplace were slipping out of their hands.
If buying off the angry mob isn’t a sustainable strategy, another option is simply to run away and hide from them. This is the trajectory of what the sociologist Bryan Turner calls “enclave society”, an order in which “governments and other agencies seek to regulate spaces and, where necessary, to immobilize flows of people, goods and services” by means of “enclosure, bureaucratic barriers, legal exclusions and registrations.” Gated communities, private islands, ghettos, prisons, terrorism paranoia, biological quarantines; together, these amount to an inverted global gulag, where the rich live in tiny islands of wealth strewn around an ocean of misery. In Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti makes the case that we are already constructing this new order, as climate change brings about what he calls the “catastrophic convergence” of ecological disruption, economic inequality, and state failure. The legacy of colonialism and neoliberalism is that the rich countries, along with the elites of the poorer ones, have facilitated a disintegration into anarchic violence, as various tribal and political factions fight over the diminishing bounty of damaged ecosystems. Faced with this bleak reality, many of the rich – which, in global terms, includes many workers in the rich countries as well – have resigned themselves to barricading themselves into their fortresses, to be protected by unmanned drones and private military contractors. Guard labor, which we encountered in the rentist society, reappears in an even more malevolent form, as a lucky few are employed as enforcers and protectors for the rich.
But this too, is an unstable equilibrium, for the same basic reason that buying off the masses is. So long as the immiserated hordes exist, there is the danger that it may one day become impossible to hold them at bay. Once mass labor has been rendered superfluous, a final solution lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor. Many have called the recent Justin Timberlake vehicle, In Time, a Marxist film, but it is more precisely a parable of the road to exterminism. In the movie, a tiny ruling class literally lives forever in their gated enclaves due to genetic technology, while everyone else is programmed to die at 25 unless they can beg, borrow or steal more time. The only thing saving the workers is that the rich still have some need for their labor; when that need expires, so presumably will the working class itself.
Hence exterminism, as a description of this type of society. Such a genocidal telos may seem like an outlandish, comic book villain level of barbarism; perhaps it is unreasonable to think that a world scarred by the holocausts of the twentieth century could again sink to such depravity. Then again, the United States is already a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency revels in executing the innocent, while the sitting Commander in Chief casually orders the assassination of American citizens without even the pretense of due process, to widespread liberal applause.
These four visions are abstracted ideal types, Platonic essences of a society. They leave out many of the messy details of history, and they ignore the reality that scarcity-abundance and equality-hierarchy are not simple dichotomies but rather scales with many possible in-between points. But my inspiration, in drawing these simplified portraits, was the model of a purely capitalist society that Marx pursued in Capital: an ideal which can never be perfectly reflected in the complex assemblages of real economic history, but which illuminates unique and foundational elements of a particular social order. The socialisms and barbarisms described here should be thought of as roads humanity might travel down, even if they are destinations we will never reach. With some knowledge of what lies at the end of each road, perhaps we will be better able to avoid setting off in the wrong direction.
Partnership between Facebook and police could make planning protests impossible
A partnership between police departments and social media sites discussed at a convention in Philadelphia this week could allow law enforcement to keep anything deemed criminal off the Internet—and even stop people from organizing protests.
A high-ranking official from the Chicago Police Department told attendees at a law enforcement conference on Monday that his agency has been working with a security chief at Facebook to block certain users from the site “if it is determined they have posted what is deemed criminal content,” reports Kenneth Lipp, an independent journalist who attended the lecture.
Lipp reported throughout the week from the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference, and now says that a speaker during one of the presentations suggested that a relationship exists between law enforcement and social media that that could be considered a form of censorship.
According to Lipp, the unnamed CPD officer said specifically that his agency was working with Facebook to block users’ by their individual account, IP address or device, such as a cell phone or computer.
Elsewhere at the conference, Lipp said law enforcement agencies discussed new social media tools that could be implemented to aid in crime-fighting, but at the price of potentially costing citizens their freedom.
“Increasingly in discussion in workshops held by and for top police executives from throughout the world (mostly US, Canada and the United Kingdom, with others like Nigeria among a total of 13,000 representatives of the law enforcement community in town for the event), and widely available from vendors, were technologies and department policies that allow agencies to block content, users and even devices – for example, ‘Geofencing’ software that allows departments to block service to a specified device when the device leaves an established virtual geographic perimeter,” Lipp wrote. “The capability is a basic function of advanced mobile technologies like smartphones, ‘OnStar’ type features that link drivers through GIS to central assistance centers, and automated infrastructure and other hardware including unmanned aerial systems that must ‘sense and respond.’”
Apple, the maker of the highly popular iPhone, applied for a patent last year which allows a third-party to compromise a wireless device and change its functionality, “such as upon the occurrence of a certain event.”
Bloggers at the website PrivacySOS.org acknowledged that former federal prosecutor-turned-Facebook security chief Joe Sullivan was scheduled to speak during the conference at a panel entitled “Helping Law Enforcement Respond to Mass Gatherings Spurred by Social Media,” and suggested that agencies could be partnering with tech companies to keep users of certain services for communicating and planning protests and other types of demonstrations. A 2011 Bloomberg report revealed that Creativity Software, a UK based company with international clients, had sold geofencing programs to law enforcement in Iran which was then used to track political dissidents. US Senator Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) told Bloomberg that those companies should be condemned for being complicit in human rights abuses. And while this week’s convention in Philadelphia was for law enforcement agencies around the globe, it wouldn’t be too surprising to see American companies adopt similar systems.
“Is Facebook really working with the police to create a kill switch to stop activists from using the website to mobilize support for political demonstrations?” the PrivacySOS blog asked. “How would such a switch function? Would Facebook, which reportedly hands over our data to government agencies at no cost, block users from posting on its website simply because the police ask them to? The company has been criticized before for blocking environmentalist and anti-GMO activists from posting, but Facebook said those were mistakes. Let's hope this is a misunderstanding, too.”
Lipp has since pointed to a recent article in Governing magazine in which it was reported that the Chicago Police Department is using “network analysis” tools to identify persons of interest on social media.
“95.9 percent of law enforcement agencies use social media, 86.1 percent for investigative purposes,” Lipp quoted from the head of the social media group for the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
Is the Security State Mainly Looking Out For Us, Or For Itself? Two Paradigms Compared
I think the reason so many Americans do not see eye-to-eye on these issues is that there are two competing paradigms or ways of interpreting our national security agencies:
- Top priority: protecting the nation. Our national security establishment—from the president to the heads of the three-letter agencies to the mid-level officials who make the gears turn—are focused on nothing but trying to protect the nation from harm. While occasional abuses by individual “bad apples” may take place, overall these institutions respect the Constitution and the rule of law and are just doing what they must to protect the nation.
- Top priority: protecting themselves. Our national security establishment, while full of well-intentioned people trying their best to protect the nation, should primarily be understood as a giant bureaucratic entity governed by a dynamic that is bigger than the sum of these parts, and as primarily concerned with expanding its own powers and domain and defending its reputation.
To answer this question, let’s look at certain recent events, what behavior the two models above would predict, and what behavior we have actually seen:
|
Situation
|
Paradigm: protecting the nation as #1 goal
|
Paradigm: protecting themselves as #1 goal
|
| An NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, brings allegations of agency corruption and malfeasance to public attention, without releasing any classified information. | The president and NSA acknowledge and respond to the allegations, take an honest look at them and whether there are improvements to be made in American security and protecting the American way of life. | The whistleblower’s home is raided by the FBI and the government scours his home and the law books searching for a crime with which to charge him. The DOJ pursues serious charges against him and he undergoes a grueling and expensive ordeal fighting the charges, which after several years are revealed to be bogus and are mostly dropped. |
| Employees of intelligence agencies engage in torture in clear violation of U.S. and international law, doing immeasurable damage to the nation’s image abroad and the rule of law. | Saying it is a duty to enforce the rule of law and uphold the nation’s reputation for human rights, the government appoints an independent counsel to determine the precise nature and scope of wrongdoing. Charges are filed and those found to have violated the law are prosecuted. Top officials in the agencies do everything they can to help serve justice. | The president says we must “look forward" not "backwards," and declines to name an independent counsel to investigate the officials responsible for these policies. When individual victims of these abuses file suit, the government seeks to have the suits thrown out under a dramatically expansive reading of the “state secrets” privilege. |
| The New York Times in 2006 reveals the existence of a massive warrantless NSA wiretapping program. | The government releases its internal legal opinions to explain why it thought the program was legal, seeks to convince Americans through public defense in court that the program is lawful and necessary, and respects the results of those lawsuits. Possible legal violations are investigated and, where appropriate, prosecuted. | The government releases little to no public explanation of the program, and strives to block any litigation by claiming lack of standing and the state secrets privilege. While blocking democratic discussion of these practices, it seeks authority from Congress to continue them as well as retroactive immunity for the participants. |
| At the urging of the executive branch, Congress passes a law, the FISA Amendments Act, allowing very broad surveillance of Americans’ communications. Many Americans believe that this law violates the Constitution. | The government presents arguments in court as to why it believes the surveillance powers are constitutional, recognizing that our courts play the vital role of interpreting the Constitution in our system of checks and balances. | The government claims that secrecy requirements prevent the courts from even hearing arguments on whether or not the surveillance is constitutional. |
| Unknown officials repeatedly leak classified information that puts the government in a positive light. | Out of respect for the integrity of the classification system, the government does not treat leaks that make the government look good any differently from those that make it look bad. | No investigations are ever launched, or charges filed, concerning leaks that make the government look good or advance its political goals. |
| A young member of the intelligence community, Edward Snowden, leaks documents revealing the existence of a vast NSA domestic spying operation that has been justified by an extremely aggressive stretch of the law, triggering a prolonged national debate over these powers. | The authorities treat Snowden evenhandedly and in accordance with some basic principles of fairness. | A furious government goes to extreme lengths to get Mr. Snowden, violating diplomatic norms and trampling relations with China, Russia, Bolivia, and other countries in a fierce pursuit of the whistleblower. |
In every case above, the behavior we actually saw from the government corresponds to that predicted by the self-protection paradigm in the far right column above.
The evidence seems clear: national security is the justification for our security establishment’s existence and powers, but self-preservation, defense of prerogatives and reputation, and expansion of powers is truly mission number one. In fact, as I argued recently, the most useful way to think about the national security state is as a gigantic beast with impulses that need to be carefully controlled. Naïve understandings of our security agencies will lead to inadequate checks and balances. Reforms aimed at reining in these out-of-control agencies must be predicated on a sophisticated understanding of their true character.
Apple’s Fingerprint ID May Mean You Can’t ‘Take the Fifth’
By Marcia Hofmann
Apple revealed a new fingerprint identification system this week. Photo: Alex Washburn / WIRED
There’s a lot of talk around biometric authentication since Apple introduced its newest iPhone, which will let users unlock their device with a fingerprint. Given Apple’s industry-leading position, it’s probably not a far stretch to expect this kind of authentication to take off. Some even argue that Apple’s move is a death knell for authenticators based on what a user knows (like passwords and PIN numbers).
While there’s a great deal of discussion around the pros and cons of fingerprint authentication — from the hackability of the technique to the reliability of readers — no one’s focusing on the legal effects of moving from PINs to fingerprints.
Because the constitutional protection of the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees that “no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” may not apply when it comes to biometric-based fingerprints (things that reflect who we are) as opposed to memory-based passwords and PINs (things we need to know and remember).
The privilege against self-incrimination is an important check on the government’s ability to collect evidence directly from a witness. The Supreme Court has made it clear that the Fifth Amendment broadly applies not only during a criminal prosecution, but also to any other proceeding “civil or criminal, formal or informal,” where answers might tend to incriminate us. It’s a constitutional guarantee deeply rooted in English law dating back to the 1600s, when it was used to protect people from being tortured by inquisitors to force them to divulge information that could be used against them.
For the privilege to apply, however, the government must try to compel a person to make a “testimonial” statement that would tend to incriminate him or her. When a person has a valid privilege against self-incrimination, nobody — not even a judge — can force the witness to give that information to the government.
But a communication is “testimonial” only when it reveals the contents of your mind. We can’t invoke the privilege against self-incrimination to prevent the government from collecting biometrics like fingerprints, DNA samples, or voice exemplars. Why? Because the courts have decided that this evidence doesn’t reveal anything you know. It’s not testimonial.
Take this hypothetical example coined by the Supreme Court: If the police demand that you give them the key to a lockbox that happens to contain incriminating evidence, turning over the key wouldn’t be testimonial if it’s just a physical act that doesn’t reveal anything you know.
However, if the police try to force you to divulge the combination to a wall safe, your response would reveal the contents of your mind — and so would implicate the Fifth Amendment. (If you’ve written down the combination on a piece of paper and the police demand that you give it to them, that may be a different story.)
To invoke Fifth Amendment protection, there may be a difference between things we have or are — and things we know.
The important feature about PINs and passwords is that they’re generally something we know (unless we forget them, of course). These memory-based authenticators are the type of fact that benefit from strong Fifth Amendment protection should the government try to make us turn them over against our will. Indeed, last year a federal appeals court held that a man could not be forced by the government to decrypt data.
But if we move toward authentication systems based solely on physical tokens or biometrics — things we have or things we are, rather than things we remember — the government could demand that we produce them without implicating anything we know. Which would make it less likely that a valid privilege against self-incrimination would apply.
Biometric authentication may make it easier for normal, everyday users to protect the data on their phones. But as wonderful as technological innovation is, it sometimes creates unintended consequences — including legal ones. If Apple’s move leads us to abandon knowledge-based authentication altogether, we risk inadvertently undermining the legal rights we currently enjoy under the Fifth Amendment.
Here’s an easy fix: give users the option to unlock their phones with a fingerprint plus something the user knows.
Student arrested for using phone app to “shoot” classmates
by Tyler Wing
GRAY, LA (WGNO) – A student at H. L. Bourgeois High School accused of using a mobile phone app to simulate shooting his classmates was booked and jailed in Terrebonne Parish.
The app is called “The Real Strike” and simulates a first person shooter game, except the battleground is real life.
“You can’t ignore it,” says Major Malcolm Wolfe. “We don’t know at what time that game becomes reality.”
Wolfe office says a 15-year-old was arrested after posting a video on YouTube using the Real Strike app to shoot other kids at school, “He said it was a result of him being frustrated and tired of being bullied. He said that he had no intentions of hurting anybody. We have to take all threats seriously and we have no way of knowing that without investigating and getting to the bottom of it.”
He says the student was arrested for terrorizing and interference of the operation of a school.
“With all the school shooting we’ve had in the United States, it’s just not a very good game to be playing at this time,” according to Wolfe.
Parents told investigators their son does not have access to any fire arms.
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Latest FISA Court Opinion: A Preview of Surveillance Without Limits
By Alex Abdo
The program—which we have called the “mass call-tracking program” in our lawsuit challenging it—is one of the most sweeping surveillance programs ever approved by a court or instituted in a democracy. And so you might reasonably expect that a judicial justification of the program would require a lengthy opinion explaining in detail how such indiscriminate surveillance can possibly be lawful. Not so—the FISC managed to approve the indefinite tracking of every American’s phone calls in under 30 pages.
There are a lot of reasons to question the court’s reasoning, but I want to focus on the key passage, which is this one:
The principal problem with the court’s explanation in this paragraph is that it has no limit. Imagine replacing the key words—“telephone communications” and “telephone company’s metadata”—with just about any other set of information the government wants to collect, and you’ll be well on your way to justifying pervasive and indiscriminate surveillance of not just our phone records, but our emails, credit-card transactions, medical records, and more. The court's opinion never addresses how far its reasoning might go.
According to the court’s logic, here are just a few examples of what we might expect to see in future opinions if we allow Big Brother to collect Big Data:
- Because known and unknown international terrorist operatives are using email, and because it is necessary to obtain the bulk collection of an email provider’s metadata to determine those connections between known and unknown international terrorist operatives as part of authorized investigations . . . .
- Because known and unknown international terrorist operatives are engaging in financial transactions, and because it is necessary to obtain the bulk collection of a financial institution’s transaction history to determine those connections between known and unknown international terrorist operatives as part of authorized investigations . . . .
- Because known and unknown international terrorist operatives are using the Internet, and because it is necessary to obtain the bulk collection of an internet provider’s usage history to determine those connections between known and unknown international terrorist operatives as part of authorized investigations . . . .
This should trouble us all for another reason: mission creep. The NSA’s surveillance is not limited to suspected terrorists. In fact, the government defines its “foreign intelligence” mission extraordinarily broadly to include gathering information about “foreign affairs.” And surveillance doesn’t stop with the NSA.
Other agencies have already clamored for access to the NSA’s vast databases, and there’s little to stop the government from attempting to import the FISC’s sweeping surveillance logic into other areas. I’m sure it would be useful to the FBI in investigating health-care fraud to have every American’s medical records, or in investigating drug conspiracies to have all of our telephony and email metadata, or in investigating illegal gun sales to have a record of every gun sale.
As our private lives become even more digitized, the lure of our data will become irresistible to the intelligence agencies. Historically, we have resisted that Orwellian urge by adhering to two key principles enshrined in our Constitution: that the government’s surveillance be targeted and that it be approved in advance by a court on an individualized basis. The NSA has subverted those essential safeguards against pervasive surveillance.
We hope to restore the balance that the Framers of the Constitution adopted, through our lawsuit challenging the NSA’s mass call-tracking program. Read more about our lawsuit here, and come watch the oral argument in New York on November 1.
DOJ Still Can't Do Math: Terrorist Statistics Inflated, Double Counted And Badly Organized
Of all the unsurprising news of inflated numbers and double-counting contained in the Office of Inspector General's (OIG) audit of the DOJ's reported terrorism statistics, this sentence from the introduction of the report is the least surprising -- and by extension, the most damning.
Department resources devoted to preventing terrorism and promoting the nation’s security have increased from approximately $737 million in fiscal year (FY) 2001 to approximately $5.26 billion in FY 2012, an increase of 614 percent.Despite the exponentially-increased budget and the fact that the EOUSA (which provides terrorism numbers to the DOJ) has had more than six years to get its case tracking system under control, the audit finds there has been little to no improvement. In fact, there's evidence the EOUSA (Executive Office for United States Attorneys) may be getting worse.
We found that although EOUSA revised its procedures for gathering, classifying, and reporting terrorism-related statistics based on the recommendations from our 2007 audit, EOUSA's implementation of the revised procedures was not effective to ensure that terrorism-related statistics were reported accurately. Specifically, we found that EOUSA inaccurately reported all 11 statistics we reviewed during this follow-up audit. Most of these 11 statistics were inaccurately reported by significant margins…Great, except that it's had since 2007 to improve and simply hasn't. The OIG's report shows that the EOUSA has trouble performing even the most basic of tasks, like updating numbers annually or attaching supporting documentation for the numbers in its reporting.
The continued inaccurate reporting by significant margins indicates that EOUSA needs to strengthen its implementation of controls for gathering, verifying, and reporting terrorism-related statistics.
Because the log and corresponding support were not previously maintained as required, EOUSA had difficulty providing us accurate lists for 5 of the 11 statistics selected for testing. An official of the Data Analysis Staff told us that, as the result of an oversight, the FY 2010 U.S. Attorneys' Annual Statistical Report was not recorded in the FY 2011 log. The official subsequently showed us that this oversight was corrected by updating the FY 2011 log to reflect the FY 2010 U.S. Attorneys' Annual Statistical Report.Further complicating the matter is the fact that the EOUSA entered case info into the NLIONS (National Legal Information Office Network System) in a completely arbitrary manner, which resulted in inaccurate case counts.
The official believed that the schedules listed in the annual report were the support for the reported statistics. However, the schedules in the annual reports only show the numbers reported for each statistic, but do not show necessary supporting details such as case numbers, defendant names, and disposition dates.
[A]n EOUSA official told us that while the defendant filed an appeal on June 23, 2007, the appeal was not entered into LIONS by the applicable USAO until January 22, 2009, and therefore the appeal was counted as filed in FY 2009. For the other eight cases, the official explained that these were the first appeals filed in FY 2009 for these cases.This isn't the only way the EOUSA screwed with/screwed up the NLIONS database. It also decided that the "smartest" way to track closed cases was by the date it was entered in the system.
When asked how this explanation was consistent with the NLIONS business rules, which state that an appeal should only be counted if it is the first appeal filed in the case, the official told us that a new methodology was used to count the appeals by which EOUSA had selected the defendant with the best disposition, first filing date, latest close date, and the highest participant identification or defendant number.
However, we noted that in a case with multiple defendants there is no guarantee that these criteria will be sufficient for EOUSA to identify a single defendant - for example, the defendant with the "best disposition" may not have the "first filing date." Therefore, this methodology appears likely to produce arbitrary results and therefore does not appear sufficient to us. Moreover, the official had no documented procedures to show the methodology had been changed from that described in the NLIONS business rules.
We discussed these discrepancies with an EOUSA official who said that EOUSA's terminated statistics are based on the date that USAO personnel enter the disposition into LIONS instead of the date when the case was actually terminated. The official told us that the system disposition date is used for reporting purposes because this date cannot be changed, whereas the actual termination date can be changed in the system, and therefore using the system disposition date improves the accuracy of the reported statistic.While relying on a static, unchangeable date might protect the integrity of the data, the delays between case closure and entry in the system completely undermines the data's accuracy, especially in terms of determining annual budget outlays.
[W]e found that the time lag between the date the 13 cases were actually terminated and the date the terminations were entered into the system by the USAOs ranged from 10 to 483 days, and averaged 266 days with a median of 314 days...Because of this discrepancy (which is putting it nicely), the OIG expanded its spot check to cover all 258 cases listed as terminated in 2010.
As a result, we concluded that EOUSA overstated by 32, or 14 percent, the reported number of cases actually terminated during FY 2010. We consider this amount of deviation to be significant. The time lag between the date these 32 cases were actually terminated and the date the cases were entered into the system by the USAOs ranged from 1 to 706 days, and averaged 201 days with a median of 176 days.That's just this one instance dealing with these specific cases. More examples are scattered throughout the report. Looking at pending cases, the OIG cross-referenced NLIONS with PACER and uncovered some truly lengthy delays.
PACER showed that one case was disposed of on June 25, 2008, but the USAO did not enter the disposition into LIONS until May 2, 2011, which was 1,041 days after the district court terminated the case.When auditing the numbers provided for suspects charged under the National Security Infrastructure statute, the system lag ran right off the charts.
PACER showed that one case was disposed of on December 19, 2007, but the USAO did not enter the disposition into LIONS until February 11, 2011, which was 1,150 days after the district court terminated the case.
PACER showed one case involving six defendants was disposed of on August 6, 2007, but as of February 1, 2013, the USAO had not entered a disposition for any of the six defendants into LIONS, and therefore the case was still shown as pending in LIONS.
Three defendants' cases were filed in FY 2008, 1 case was filed in FY 2001, and 2 cases were filed in FY 2000. For each of these cases, USAO personnel entered case data into LIONS during FY 2009. Data entry delays ranged from 323 to 3,391 days and averaged 1,848 days with a median of 1,743 days.This lack of timely data entry not only skewed annual numbers but has also resulted in double counting. In addition, a dozen or so cases were found to have been miscoded as "terrorist-related," including those covering such non-terrorist activities like animal fighting, narcotics possession and bank robbery.
As the OIG states early in the report, the accuracy of these numbers is crucial to making "informed operational and budgetary decisions." Unfortunately, it appears a truly informed decision hasn't been made for nearly the entire lifetime of the DOJ's War on Terror. If a report in 2007 found similar problems and nothing's changed over the past six years, it's safe to assume the problem runs all the back to the initial post-9/11 response.
Thirteen straight years of running a crooked game using ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer funds. In the private sector, this sort of thing would put someone out of business, if not at the receiving end of a class action suit or fraud charges. But here in our government, it's just one of those things -- the endless cycle of audits and corrective actions, neither of which have propelled the EOUSA to anything approaching excellence, much less mediocrity.
Intelligent people have 'unnatural' preferences and values that are novel in human evolution
More intelligent people are significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.
The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years."
"Evolutionarily novel" preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are "evolutionarily familiar."
"General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions," says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles."
An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent individuals. Because our ancestors lacked artificial light, they tended to wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk. Being nocturnal is evolutionarily novel.
In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.
Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa's hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as "very liberal" have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as "very conservative" have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.
Similarly, religion is a byproduct of humans' tendency to perceive agency and intention as causes of events, to see "the hands of God" at work behind otherwise natural phenomena. "Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid," says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. "So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists."
Young adults who identify themselves as "not at all religious" have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as "very religious" have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.
In addition, humans have always been mildly polygynous in evolutionary history. Men in polygynous marriages were not expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate, whereas men in monogamous marriages were. In sharp contrast, whether they are in a monogamous or polygynous marriage, women were always expected to be sexually exclusive to one mate. So being sexually exclusive is evolutionarily novel for men, but not for women. And the theory predicts that more intelligent men are more likely to value sexual exclusivity than less intelligent men, but general intelligence makes no difference for women's value on sexual exclusivity. Kanazawa's analysis of Add Health data supports these sex-specific predictions as well. One intriguing but theoretically predicted finding of the study is that more intelligent people are no more or no less likely to value such evolutionarily familiar entities as marriage, family, children, and friends.
Harvard study shows gun control doesn't save lives
In the spring of 2007, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy released a study of the relative effects of stringent gun laws. They found that a country like Luxenbourg, which bans all guns has a murder rate that is 9 times higher than Germany, where there are 30,000 guns per 100,000 people. They also cited a study by the U.S.National Academy of Sciences, which studied 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and it failed to find one gun control initiative that worked.
In fact, in many cases it found that violence is very often lower, where guns are more readily available. The report points to a myth that guns are more easily obtained in the United States than in Europe. That is factually incorrect.
John Kerry signs UN Gun treaty but it's unenforceable. Read why.
Austria has the lowest murder rate of any industrialized country, with .8 murders per 100,000 people, yet they have 17,000 guns per 100,000 people. Norway is second with .81 murders and 36,000 guns. Germany is third with .93 murders and 36,000 guns. The United states has a murder rate of 10.1 murders per 100,00 people. But Luxembourg, which does not allow gun ownership at all has a rating of 9.01.
The same pattern appears when comparisons of violence to gun ownership are done within nations. Indeed, "data on firearms ownership by constabulary area in England." like data from the United States show a "negative correlation" that is "where firearms are most dense, violent crime is lower, and where firearms are least dense, the violent crime rate is the highest."Another longstanding myth is that Europe's relatively low murder rate is because of their gun control laws. The truth is, their rates were low even before gun control laws were passed, according to the Harvard study. In fact, their murder rates hit an all time low, before any gun laws were passed. In fact, their violent crimes have risen since they enacted gun control laws. By comparison, violent crimes have dropped in the US over the same period.
Russia has a ban on hand guns and their murder rate is 30.6%, whereas in the United States the rate is a much lower 7.8%. And during the 1990s, gun ownership grew significantly in the United States, while violent crimes dropped by 30%. In England, after they banned handguns, the rate of violent crimes soared.
The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, conceeded that the results they found in their report was not what they expected to find.
ATF: All Your Amendment are Belong to Us
By: michaelboldin
As far as the ATF is concerned, the words in the Constitution don’t mean what the Founders said they mean. They mean what the 9 unelected judges on the Supreme Court say they mean. Well, until they change their mind, that is.
This year, Montana and Tennessee passed the “Firearms Freedom Act” – which under state law exempts firearms, parts and ammunition from federal regulation under the “interstate commerce clause” as long as they’re made in state, and sold in state. That is, as long as they never enter interstate commerce.
The ATF sent a stern letter to all license holders in both states this year – stating their position that the state law is invalid. Yesterday, a report in the Memphis Commercial Appeal gives us a little more insight into the ATF’s position:
But ATF Nashville Special Agent-in-Charge James M. Cavanaugh said several U.S. Supreme Court rulings have upheld the federal gun laws. “The Constitution says the Supreme Court interprets the law. The ATF hasn’t ruled this, the Supreme Court has, and we’re a law enforcement agency.”But wait, there’s more.
“It’s analogous to a speed limit. If the speed limit on the interstate is set at 70, a city along the interstate can’t come along and say there is no speed limit on the interstate through our city. The highway patrol could still enforce the speed limit,” he said.Seems to me that this ATF thug thinks that state and federal government have the same relationship as city and state government. Or, maybe he thinks of states as just big counties – and he’s part of the nationwide law enforcement. Either way, they certainly don’t believe that the 10th Amendment reserves powers “to the States respectively, or to the People.”
My big question is this – I wonder, does the ATF swear an oath to the Constitution, or to the Supreme Court? And more importantly, who in this country is sovereign – we the People, or the Court?
If it’s the latter, we might as well call them the American Mullahs – an unelected dictatorship.
Predator Drone Strikes Kill Up to 50 Civilians For Every 1 Terrorist Assassinated: Study
By Robert Taylor
While most of us celebrated the beginning of 2013 with friends, resolutions, and hope for a fulfilling new year, President Obama has been busy expanding on what is sure to be the defining legacy of his presidency: drone warfare and targeted assassinations.
In less than week since 2013 began, Obama has launched multiple drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, killing a few "suspected militants" and dozens of civilians in the process. And with top members of the Obama administration hinting at the indefinite nature of the drone program combined with eyes on Africa, Obama looks to be ushering in the New Year — and his second term — with an even more aggressive drone warfare campaign.
The problem, of course, is that Obama's drone-a-holic foreign policy is shrouded in secrecy, usurps the rule of law, and with the amount of civilian deaths that it is causing is incredibly counterproductive in its stated goal of fighting terrorism.
Proponents of the drone war, including the president and his administration on the rare occasion that they do discuss it, claim that drone strikes are precise and only target terrorists. A study, however, from Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute finds that the number of Pakistani civilians killed in drone strikes “significantly and consistently underestimated" and that as many as 98% of those killed by drone strikes are civilians.
While it is ultimately impossible to get exact numbers, this means that for every "terrorist" killed by a drone strike, anywhere between 10 and 50 civilians are killed. This is eerily reminiscent to what General Stanley McChrystal dubbed "insurgent math" during Obama's Afghan war surge. Same hyper-militaristic foreign policy, same results, creating far more enemies than are killed.
Even this estimate of civilian death rates from the drone program may actually be a bit conservative when judging simply by the Obama administration's own standards. The president has been counting all "military-age males in a strike zone" as combatants, assuring that nearly every person vaporized by a drone missile is labeled — and reported as — a "militant."
While President Obama claims that he is only using his secret, lawless power to kill those that pose an imminent threat to the U.S., a closer look at the individuals targeted tells a different story.
According to the New York Times, the White House is mainly targeting enemies of "allied governments" in Yemen and Pakistan. Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation estimated that among those killed by drones, only 13% of them could be considered "militant leaders" who want to harm the U.S. The rest, according to Bergen, "want to impose some degree of sharia law where they live, they want to fight a defensive jihad against security service and the central government, or they want to unseat what they perceive as an apostate regime that rules their country."
In other words, the drone war is basically a counter-insurgency Air Force (with the help of the Saudis) for governments like Yemen and Pakistan against internal rebellions in their countries. Should the litmus test for lethal overseas intervention really be the defense of cruel and authoritarian governments against internal dissent and tribal rivalries that possibly go back centuries? This is a dangerous precedent, and as I mentioned previously, it appears that this will guide U.S. policy until at least 2016.
This is why the recent news that the president is nominating former Nebraska senator Chuck Hagel for secretary of defense admittedly left me a bit surprised and optimistic. Hagel has a history of sober foreign policy prescriptions — at least compared to the Beltway establishment and his fellow senators — and best of all, believes that U.S. foreign policy should defend American interests, not Israel's.
But even if Hagel is confirmed, it is highly unlikely that he will have the ability to sway Obama's hand. The president, after all, is someone who relishes his nearly universally unquestioned authority to create "kill lists," suspend due process, and dispense arbitrary death from the sky. Besides, Obama wants drone-lover John Brennan to be the new CIA director, and Hagel's voice would likely be drowned out by the screeches of the hawks that surround the White House.
t looks like 2013 will be eerily similar to the last four years, and by the administration's own promises, quite possibly even worse and more reckless. The precedent set by the drone war, signature strikes, kill lists and "double-taps" has warped the rule of law, restraints on presidential power, and left a body count of innocents that grows by the day.
Since much of Obama's drone program was a direct extension of what the Bush administration pursued at the end of his second term, unless there is a radical shift in foreign policy consensus or a collapse of the dollar that allows this empire to limp along, a President Hillary or President Rubio will likely pick up right where Obama left off.
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