July 4, 2014

What did $7 billion spent on opium eradication in Afghanistan buy? More opium.

With the outcome of Afghanistan's controversial presidential election still in doubt, and uncertainty over Afghan forces' ability to stand against the Taliban after most US forces withdraw, it's hard to say with certainty what the US-led war there has accomplished, or failed to accomplish.

But one thing is clear, as shown by latest quarterly report from the US Special Inspector General on Afghanistan Reconstruction: The $7 billion US program to eradicate poppy cultivation there over the past decade has been a flop.

The country is today the world's largest supplier of opium, the purified latex sap from the Papaver somniferum poppy species that is usually then converted into heroin. It accounts for about three-quarters of the global recreational supply, and surging Afghan production is one reason why street heroin prices have been falling across the globe.

What has the anti-opium effort in Afghanistan yielded US taxpayers?

The latest (United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime) Opium Survey estimates that 209,000 hectares are under opium-poppy cultivation, an all-time high and a 36% increase from 2012.

more

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/Backchannels/2014/0703/What-did-7-billion-spent-on-opium-eradication-in-Afghanistan-buy-More-opium?cmpid=FB

July 4, 2014

Paul Krugman- Build we won't

You often find people talking about our economic difficulties as if they were complicated and mysterious, with no obvious solution. As the economist Dean Baker recently pointed out, nothing could be further from the truth. The basic story of what went wrong is, in fact, almost absurdly simple: We had an immense housing bubble, and, when the bubble burst, it left a huge hole in spending. Everything else is footnotes.

And the appropriate policy response was simple, too: Fill that hole in demand. In particular, the aftermath of the bursting bubble was (and still is) a very good time to invest in infrastructure. In prosperous times, public spending on roads, bridges and so on competes with the private sector for resources. Since 2008, however, our economy has been awash in unemployed workers (especially construction workers) and capital with no place to go (which is why government borrowing costs are at historic lows). Putting those idle resources to work building useful stuff should have been a no-brainer.

But what actually happened was exactly the opposite: an unprecedented plunge in infrastructure spending. Adjusted for inflation and population growth, public expenditures on construction have fallen more than 20 percent since early 2008. In policy terms, this represents an almost surreally awful wrong turn; we’ve managed to weaken the economy in the short run even as we undermine its prospects for the long run. Well played!

And it’s about to get even worse. The federal highway trust fund, which pays for a large part of American road construction and maintenance, is almost exhausted. Unless Congress agrees to top up the fund somehow, road work all across the country will have to be scaled back just a few weeks from now. If this were to happen, it would quickly cost us hundreds of thousands of jobs, which might derail the employment recovery that finally seems to be gaining steam. And it would also reduce long-run economic potential.

How did things go so wrong? As with so many of our problems, the answer is the combined effect of rigid ideology and scorched-earth political tactics. The highway fund crisis is just one example of a much broader problem.

more

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/opinion/paul-krugman-build-we-wont.html?smid=re-share&_r=0

What wen't wrong? Republicans.

July 4, 2014

Fourth of July Toon Roundup

4th








Court






GOP











Immigration







The issue








Rights




Media


Fbook





Hoping everyone has an enjoyable and safe 4th!

July 4, 2014

L.A's first cannabis farmer's market to open Friday

Los Angeles' first-ever cannabis farmer's market will open for business Friday, where up to 50 pot vendors will sell their wares to card-carrying patients.

Organizers of the California Heritage Market plan to showcase high-quality cannabis vendors and growers from throughout the state. The market will be held at West Coast Collective, a marijuana dispensary in Boyle Heights.

So far, city and police officials have not publicly objected to the event.

"It is very clear what we are doing here and we are following the law as it written," said Paizley Bradbury, 22, event organizer and the collective's executive director.

For organizers, the concept is simple -- give marijuana card-carrying patients direct access to medicinal products without steep dispensary costs.

more

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-cannabis-farmers-market-20140703-story.html

July 3, 2014

The New Law of Religion

Hobby Lobby rewrites religious-freedom law in ways that ignore everything that came before.

By Micah Schwartzman, Richard Schragger, and Nelson Tebbe


Monday’s decision in Hobby Lobby was unprecedented. Much of the commentary has focused on the Supreme Court’s decision to extend rights of religious free exercise to for-profit corporations. Hobby Lobby is for religion what Citizens United was for free speech—the corporatization of our basic liberties. But Hobby Lobby is also unprecedented in another, equally important way. For the first time, the court has interpreted a federal statute, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (or RFRA), as affording more protection for religion than has ever been provided under the First Amendment. While some have read Hobby Lobby as a narrow statutory ruling, it is much more than that. The court has eviscerated decades of case law and, having done that, invites a new generation of challenges to federal laws, including those designed to protect civil rights.

To see how we got here requires some history. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court adopted an expansive interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. In a pair of cases, Sherbert v. Verner (1962) and Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), the court held that the government may not impose substantial burdens on religion unless it has a “compelling interest” and “no alternative forms of regulation” could be used to advance that interest. But in 1990, the Supreme Court repudiated this balancing test for assessing Free Exercise claims. In Employment Division v. Smith, which upheld a federal law banning the use of peyote, the court declared that generally applicable laws can incidentally burden religious practices without violating the First Amendment, and that the government does not need to provide any special justification for such laws.

After a storm of criticism, in 1993, a nearly unanimous Congress passed RFRA to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in Smith. As the text of the law states, its purpose is to “restore the compelling interest test as set forth” in Sherbert and Yoder. In other words, RFRA was designed to reinstate the legal principles that had existed before the court’s dramatic anti-religion decision in Smith.

But that is not how the court in Hobby Lobby interprets the law. Instead, writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito claims that RFRA marks “a complete separation from First Amendment case law.” This is not a “restoration” of the legal principles that existed prior to the court’s decision in Smith. The majority isn’t just reading RFRA to overturn its decision in the much-maligned peyote case. It isn’t just bringing back the balancing test from its decisions in the 1960s and 1970s. Quietly, buried in the text and footnotes of the majority opinion, Justice Alito holds that RFRA is a complete break from earlier law, a discontinuity—not a “restoration,” but a revolution—in the test for protecting religious liberty. The law of religious exemptions can evolve past Smith, as Justice Alito points out, but there is a difference between evolution and revolution.

more
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/07/after_hobby_lobby_there_is_only_rfra_and_that_s_all_you_need.html

Great article on just how extreme and anti-conservative (in the old sense) this ruling was. Frightening.

July 3, 2014

Snort- Court gets stuck

July 3, 2014

Mitt Romney is tan, rested, and ready to lose again

In a move that can be seen as either desperation or ‘we’re all gonna die anyway, so what the hell?’ conservatives are casting their eyes westward to a man — a stoic man, an honest and true man of values, standing knee deep in the Pacific Ocean watching the sun go down on America — as their savior in 2016.

That man is a man called Mitt. Family man, businessman, gentle and attentive lover, and owner of both a car elevator and a losing career in elections.

Surveying the 2016 GOP field and falling into a pit of existential dread and despair where there is no light, no hope, no exit, nothing but a bleak meaningless abyss of wretchedness and desolation, Republicans see hope in the sparkle of Mitt Romney’s eyes and the Earth-mother joy in life his wife Ann brings to the party.

So the ‘Why not Mitt?’ crowd is going to throw some shit against the wall and see what sticks. After all, that is what fan-mag Politico does.

more

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/03/mitt-romney-is-tan-rested-and-ready-to-lose-again/

July 3, 2014

The Elizabeth Warren Demonization Society

By David Weigel

Last weekend, Sen. Elizabeth Warren traveled to Kentucky to stump for Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes. The Democratic secretary of state has remained competitive in the race against Sen. Mitch McConnell, and has thus far avoided the damage from some concerted Republican trolling tying her to the Obama administration. Like West Virginia's Natalie Tennant, she's attempting to run as an anti-"Washington" candidate who'll also oppose EPA rules. Tenannt, too, is going to get a campaign visit from Elizabeth Warren this month.

The Republican reaction to the Warren visits has been wholly predictable. "If she's elected her only problem with Barack Obama would be that occasionally he's not liberal enough for her taste," said a McConnell spokesman of Grimes. American Crossroads welcomed Warren to Kentucky with this Web ad, calling Warren the "queen of class warfare" by applying a Tim and Eric-style cut to her 2011 speech about what the rich owe the American system.

The coal thing I get; the EPA thing I get. "The underwhelming candidate has not only failed to separate from the liberal left's anti-coal leaders like Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Elizabeth Warren," said NRSC spokeswoman Brook Hougesen, "she has cozied up to them."* Noted. A Democrat in coal country cannot be trusted unless he/she starts each day with a rant against the EPA and a heaping bowl of coal flakes.

But the rest of the political messaging here seems fairly rote. What is Warren talking about when she credits Obama for "squaring his shoulders" and fighting? The creation of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, opposed by Republicans in Congress but favored by as many as three out of four voters. How unpopular was Warren's "the rich should pay more taxes" riff? Very popular; at the time she said it, voters approved of raising the top tax rate by a 2-to-1 margin.

more

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2014/07/03/the_elizabeth_warren_demonization_society.html

July 3, 2014

Mantis shrimp tune their eyes with sunscreen

The secret to a mantis shrimp’s ultraviolet vision is, oddly enough, UV-blocking sunscreen.

The mantis shrimp Neogonodactylus oerstedii sees its watery world via 16 kinds of light-detecting photoreceptor cells. Six kinds see only ultraviolet, each photoreceptor especially sensitive to a different wavelength. Yet five photoreceptor types have identical light-detecting pigments, says Michael Bok of Lund University in Sweden.

Their diverse sensitivities come from different sets of tiny UV-absorbing filters above the visual pigments. The filters, with mycosporine-like amino acid compounds, block different wavelengths, Bok and his colleagues report in the July 21 Current Biology.

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/mantis-shrimp-tune-their-eyes-sunscreen

Nature is pretty amazing

July 3, 2014

Psychedelic mushrooms put your brain in a “waking dream,” study finds

Psychedelic mushrooms can do more than make you see the world in kaleidoscope. Research suggests they may have permanent, positive effects on the human brain.

In fact, a mind-altering compound found in some 200 species of mushroom is already being explored as a potential treatment for depression and anxiety. People who consume these mushrooms, after “trips” that can be a bit scary and unpleasant, report feeling more optimistic, less self-centered, and even happier for months after the fact.

But why do these trips change the way people see the world? According to a study published today in Human Brain Mapping, the mushroom compounds could be unlocking brain states usually only experienced when we dream, changes in activity that could help unlock permanent shifts in perspective.

The study examined brain activity in those who’d received injections of psilocybin, which gives “shrooms” their psychedelic punch. Despite a long history of mushroom use in spiritual practice, scientists have only recently begun to examine the brain activity of those using the compound, and this is the first study to attempt to relate the behavioral effects to biological changes.

more

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/07/03/psychedelic-drugs-put-your-brain-in-a-waking-dream-study-finds/?tid=sm_fb