Encore makes pipeline play, licensing psoriasis drug from Dr. Reddy’s – FierceBiotech

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Encore Dermatology, formed two years ago as a vehicle for three ex-Valeant products, has picked upa late-stage pipeline drug via a deal with India's Dr. Reddy's Laboratories.

The Malvern, Pennsylvania, company says it has licensed a steroid candidate developed by Dr. Reddy's Promius Pharma subsidiary that has passed phase 3 testing in adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis and could claim U.S. approval within weeks.

Encore is paying up to $32.5 million for development, manufacturing and commercialization rights to the drug, a topical corticosteroid called DFD-06 that is administered twice daily as a cream and is also in phase 2 testing for psoriasis in children and adolescents.

If approved, the drug will slot into its portfolio alongside dermatologic creams Hylatopic and Tetrixacquired from Valeant along with acne drug BenzEFoam in 2015as well as low-potency corticosteroid cream Tridesilon (desonide) which was licensed from Perrigo and launched earlier this year for skin conditions such as atopic dermatitis.

Dr. Reddy's has been funneling 40% of its R&D spend into biosimilars and proprietary medicinesprimarily for the U.S. marketas it tries to move beyond its heartlands in generic small-molecule drugs that have been hampered of late by regulatory compliance problems at manufacturing facilities.

So far, that drive has focused on improved formulations of established drug molecules and has resulted in two drug launches in the U.S.Zembrace Symtouch, an injectable form of sumatriptan for migraine and Sernivo, a spray formulation of the steroid drug betamethasone. The company has targeted sales of $500 million for its proprietary business within the next five years.

We believe Encore and its management team are well positioned to realize the full potential of this asset DFD-06," said Anil Namboodiripad, Ph.D., president of Promius Pharma.

"We look forward to obtaining NDA approval this fall, enabling Encore's management team to quickly deliver this product to the providers and their patients," he added.

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Encore makes pipeline play, licensing psoriasis drug from Dr. Reddy's - FierceBiotech

Dr. Reddy’s sells off psoriasis candidate in out-licensing deal … – BioPharma Dive

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Dive Brief:

Dr Reddy's has completed Phase 3 studies, manufactured registration batches, and made preparations for a New Drug Application (NDA) filing for DFD-06, but has chosen to license the drug out rather than pursue commercialization in house.

"We look forward to obtaining NDA approval this fall, enabling Encores management team to quickly deliver this product to the providers and their patients." says Anil Namboodiripad, SVP, Proprietary Products, and president, Promius Pharma.

Dr. Reddy's has had a challenging year. Shares in the drugmaker began a month-long slide following the announcement of its first quarter 2018 results in July 2017, which recorded a 6% decline in revenues and a 53% fall in profits year-on-year. The lackluster results were due, in part, to price erosion from U.S. customer consolidation and a lower contribution from U.S. product launches.

The Indian drugmaker has also had a tough time with manufacturing, running afoul of stepped-up oversight from the Food and Drug Administration. In April, the regulator completed an audit of the company's Srikakulam-based production site, flagging points where the site fell shortof regulatory standards. This inspection resulted in a Form 483, adding to similar letters issued to the company's Miryalguda and Bachupally sites this year.

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Dr. Reddy's sells off psoriasis candidate in out-licensing deal ... - BioPharma Dive

NSA launches national geographic portal – Namibian

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Business | 2017-08-23Page no: 13

THE LAUNCH ... (From left) The deputy director for spatial data and national spatial data infrastructure Namibia, Alex Mudabeti, Khomas police regional crime investigations coordinator, commissioner Silvanus Nghishidimbwa, Information minister Tjekero Tweya, Land reform minister Utoni Nujoma, economic planning minister Tom Alweendo, Florette Nakusera, NSA board chairperson, NSA surveyor general Ndilipunye Shanyangana and statistician general Alex Shimuafeni at the launch of the national geograph

THE Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA) on Monday launched the online national geographic portal (geoportal), which will help citizens to search and evaluate data from different government institutions.

The portal will also help citizens link map browsers through Digital Namibia, which is found within the platform that permits the visualisation and analysis of core data.

The platform can be accessed at Geofind.nsa.org.na.

Speaking during the launch, land reform minister Utoni Nujoma said Namibia is committed to building soft infrastructure of government spatial data which will reflect a digital Namibia.

Together, as a network of government institutions, we can heighten a culture of evidence-based development planning, decision-making and policy formulation.

Spatial data, also known as geospatial data or geographic information, is data or information that identifies the geographic location, features and boundaries on earth, such as natural or constructed features and oceans.

Nujoma said launching the national geographic portal shows that all government ministries will live up to their mandate in maintaining and providing data to avoid promoting a redundant system that is populated with outdated information which does not live up to the government's mandate.

He applauded the Namibia Spatial Data Infrastructure team under the NSA, as well as economic planning minister and director general of the National Planning Commission, Tom Alweendo, and information minister Tjekero Tweya for their commitment towards the realisation of the platform.

This high level of commitment should serve as a pillar of hope and source of motivation to all of us to continue working in the best interests of our country, said Nujoma.

Speaking at the same event, Alweendo encouraged various government ministries and agencies to partner NSA to have full access to the portal.

He also urged citizens to be concerned with the quality of data that the portal will provide, adding that people and government ministries and agencies should make the best use of the platform. Nampa

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NSA launches national geographic portal - Namibian

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EXCLUSIVE NSA Whistleblower: Russia ‘Hack’ of DNC Server an ‘Outright Lie’ – Breitbart News

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Utilizing recently unlocked information from data that purportedly originated on the DNCs servers, Binney claimed that he is something like 99% sure that the DNC servers were not hacked from the outside. He urged the U.S. Intelligence Community to immediately release any evidence utilized to draw the conclusion that Russia may have been associated with the breach of the DNC servers.

Binney was an architect of the NSAs surveillance program. He is a former NSA technical director who helped to modernize the agencys worldwide eavesdropping network, co-founding a unit on automating NSA signals intelligence. He became a famed whistleblower when he resigned on October 31, 2001, after spending more than 30 years with the agency.

He is also a senior leader of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a group of former officers of the United States Intelligence Community founded in 2003. During the interview, Binney repeatedly referred to a forensic analysis conducted by VIPS members on DNC files posted online by the hacker known as Guccifer 2.0. The VIPS analysis highlighted data that purportedly indicated the DNC server was most likely not hacked from the outside.

Binneys findings are not without detractors, however, with some experts saying the VIPS report is flawed and ignores other explanations for the metadata. Binney pushed back against the criticism, charging the detractors have no evidence for their claims. He squarely placed the onus on the U.S. government to prove any hack.

He was speaking on this reporters Sunday radio program, Aaron Klein Investigative Radio, broadcast on New Yorks AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphias NewsTalk 990 AM.

The VIPS analysis was made possible after an independent researcher who goes by the online name of Forensicator found a way to unlock metadata from Guccifer 2.0s files.

The unlocked metadata shows that on July 5, 2016 a total of 1,976 megabytes of data were quickly downloaded into a file. A key finding is that the file downloads took only 87 seconds in total, which suggests a transfer rate of 22.7 megabytes per second.

A hack of the DNC server would have most likely used an Internet service provider. However, the analysts noted, in mid-2016 U.S. Internet service providers for residential clients did not have speeds capable of downloading data at that rate. The data upload is consistent with a regular transfer to a flash device like a thumb drive.

Yet, the VIPS report seemingly overlooked the fact that some corporate and cloud networks do have upload rates technically capable of transferring at that speed. The DNC has not commented on its own network speeds.

Speaking to this reporter, Binney stated, It is almost absolutely not possible to do it from outside. I mean you have to have some access to the DNC network and some access from there that would allow you to take that rate in. That meant you had to be on the DNC network or some very high-speed network connected to it.

Binney stated that if the data were transferred via the Internet, outside entities would have recordings of the transfer. The network managers would monitor the network log for the Internet, for example, he said. Basically, the people who manage the fiber optic lines. Like AT&T. If they saw a bulge in traffic being passed down one line they could see that maybe we need to offload to another line and reroute. Its like load-leveling across the entire network to make sure that it functions and it doesnt go down for being overloaded on one line only.

Binney, who helped build the NSAs surveillance program, alleged that the NSA would have picked up on any outside hack of the DNC.

They would know exactly where the package went if it were transferred. I would also add that, on the other end, NSA and GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), the British equivalent, are watching [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange in the embassy and all of the people who are related to him or are contacting him or having any kind of data transfer to or from him.

Theyre watching them all thats Wikileaks, basically they are watching them 24 hours a day cast iron. So, if anybody passed data to them across the network they would know. And be reporting it. Thats the whole problem. They didnt come out and say here is where the data came from that came to Wikileaks. And he is where it came from the DNC server to that point that is related to Wikileaks.

The Hill, however, quoted experts saying the VIP report overlooked other scenarios that could explain the quick transfer rate. This theory assumes that the hacker downloaded the files to a computer and then leaked it from that computer, Rich Barger, director of security research at Splunk, told the publication.

The Hill report continued:

But, said Barger and other experts, that overlooks the possibility the files were copied multiple times before being released, something that may be more probable than not in a bureaucracy like Russian intelligence.

A hacker might have downloaded it to one computer, then shared it by USB to an air gapped [off the internet] network for translation, then copied by a different person for analysis, then brought a new USB to an entirely different air gapped computer to determine a strategy all before it was packaged for Guccifer 2.0 to leak, said Barger.

Speaking to this reporter, Binney allowed that the files may have been copied multiple times before being posted by Guccifer 2.0. But he stated there is no proof that that was the case one way or the other. We should never infer anything without at least one fact to indicate its true, he replied.I would say again, if anything happened like these suggested events then NSA would have a trace on at least most of it. They have produced no information at all.

Besides the rate of transfer, here are some other findings from the unlock metadata included in the VIPS report:

The July date, however, is actually months after the DNC said they first registered a breach in April.Binney stated that it was possible the date and timestamp could have been changed.

The Nation related that possibility in a 4,500-word story on the VIPS analysis:

In addition, there is the adulteration of the documents Guccifer 2.0 posted on June 15, when he made his first appearance. This came to light when researchers penetrated what Folden calls Guccifers top layer of metadata and analyzed what was in the layers beneath. They found that the first five files Guccifer made public had each been run, via ordinary cut-and-paste, through a single template that effectively immersed them in what could plausibly be cast as Russian fingerprints. They were not: The Russian markings were artificially inserted prior to posting. Its clear, another forensics investigator self-identified as HET, wrote in a report on this question, that metadata was deliberately altered and documents were deliberately pasted into a Russianified Word document with Russian language settings and style headings.

The magazine points out that the CIAs cyber-tools would have allowed such an encoding. WikiLeaks began to release in March and labeled Vault 7 includes one called Marble that is capable of obfuscating the origin of documents in false-flag operations and leaving markings that point to whatever the CIA wants to point to.

The Nation story on the VIPS report is reportedly being reviewed by the publication. Were doing the review as we speak, and I dont want to rush to say anything, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the Nations editor and publisher, told the Washington Post earlier this month. The Post reported that the Nations review will include the technical feasibility of the article detailing the VIPS report.

The Gufficer 2.0 files are a key part of the Russia hacking narrative. AJanuary 6, 2017 U.S. Intelligence Communityreport alleging Russian government interference in the 2016 presidential campaign states this of the Gufficer 2.0 files:

We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.

The U.S. Intelligence Community has not publicly released any evidence to back up its charges. Despite false media characterizations of 17 intelligence agencies, the January 6 report was authored by three U.S. agencies the NSA, the FBI and the CIA.TheWashington Post,in its extensive June 23article, reported on details of the compartmentalized operation that indicates a high degree of secrecy involving top Obama administration officials.

A Bloomberg opinion piece by Leonid Bershidsky asserted that Binneys information should get more attention.

Bershidsky wrote:

Unlike the current and former intelligence officials anonymously quoted in stories about the Trump-Russia scandal, VIPS members actually have names. But their findings and doubts are only being aired bynon-mainstreampublicationsthat are easy to accuse of being channels for Russian disinformation. The Nation, Consortium News, ZeroHedge and other outlets have pointed totheir findings that at least some of the DNC files were taken by an insider rather than by hackers, Russian or otherwise.

In response to the Nation report, the DNC released the following statement:

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded the Russian government hacked the DNC in an attempt to interfere in the election. Any suggestion otherwise is false and is just another conspiracy theory like those pushed by Trump and his administration. Its unfortunate that the Nation has decided to join the conspiracy theorists to push this narrative.

During the radio interview, Binney pushed back against the DNC conspiracy theory charge.

They are joining the lie, Binney stated. I mean, it is an outright lie. All they are saying is they are claiming something. Where is any substance from anybody to prove any of that? There isnt any. They havent given any proof whatsoever.

The intelligence community has said it is highly likely. Well, they should absolutely know with all of the taps they have on the fiber lines in the U.S. and around the world. They should have no question whatsoever. Saying high confidence that means that they dont know. Thats really what they are saying. If they have anything else to say, let them produce any evidence that they have so that we can all look at it. So far, they have produced nothing but opinion and speculation and a lie to keep this Cold War going.

In a move that has raised eyebrows, the DNC did not allow the FBI to inspect its servers.

In Januarytestimonybefore the Senate Intelligence Committee, then-FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the FBI registered multiple requests at different levels to review the DNCs hacked servers. Ultimately, the DNC and FBI came to an agreement in which a highly respected private company would carry out forensics on the servers and share any information that it discovered with the FBI, Comey testified.

A senior law enforcement officialstressedthe importance of the FBI gaining direct access to the servers, a request that was denied by the DNC.

The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated, the official was quoted by the news media as saying.

This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier.

Comeys statement about a highly respected private company gaining access to the DNC servers was a reference to CrowdStrike, the third-party company ultimately relied upon by the FBI to make its assessment about alleged Russian hacking into the DNC.

As this reporterdocumented, CrowdStrike was financed to the tune of $100 millionfrom a funding drive last year led by Google Capital.

Google Capital, which now goes by the name of CapitalG, is an arm of Alphabet Inc., Googles parent company. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet, has been a staunch and active supporter of Hillary Clinton and is a longtime donor to the Democratic Party.

CrowdStrikeis a California-based cybersecurity technology company co-founded by experts George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch.

Alperovitch is anonresident seniorfellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. The Council takes a hawkish approach toward Russia and has releasednumerous reportsand briefs about Russian aggression.

The Council isfundedby the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc., the U.S. State Department and NATO ACT.

Another Councilfunderis the Ploughshares Fund, which in turn has received financing from billionaire George Soros Open Society Foundations.

Aaron Klein is Breitbarts Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. Follow him onTwitter @AaronKleinShow.Follow him onFacebook.

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EXCLUSIVE NSA Whistleblower: Russia 'Hack' of DNC Server an 'Outright Lie' - Breitbart News

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After Cyber Command Elevation, Split From NSA Could Be Next – Morning Consult

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President Donald Trumps elevation of U.S. Cyber Command to a full Unified Combatant Command amps up the powers of a national security unit that has taken center stage amid widening questions about Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.

This new Unified Combatant Command will strengthen our cyberspace operations and create more opportunities to improve our Nations defense, Trump announced in a statementon Friday.

Thepresidents move makes Cyber Command formerly a subordinate command unit under U.S. Strategic Command the 10th unified command in the U.S. military.Cyber Command was first established in 2009 on the orders of then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates to handle the U.S. militarys cyber operations.

Currently, both the National Security Agency and Cyber Command are overseen by Adm. Mike Rogers in a dual-hat role. As part of Trumps announcement, Secretary of Defense James Mattis is conducting a review to determine whether Cyber Command should be separated from the NSA.

The move aims to expand Americas war-fighting strategy: U.S. officials say cyberattacks are part of the military doctrine for Russia, whose interference in the 2016 elections is a focus of House and Senate intelligence committee probes, among other investigations.

But some critics say that removing CYBERCOM from the oversight of the NSA director could lead to information-sharing concerns.

Jamil Jaffer, founder of the National Security Institute at George Mason Universitys Antonin Scalia Law School and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, said that there is little opposition to a unified Cyber Command. But Jaffer added that there has been an ongoing debate over whether and how CYBERCOM should be split off from the NSA.

Ive always thought it made sense to dual-hat the NSA director and the Cyber Command commander because then they can appropriately balance the intelligence gains and losses, Jaffer said in a phone interview Friday. I think when you separate them, then you have competing equities.

Jaffer said a split could have the unintended consequence of slowing down the efficiency of both operations.

I do think its important to have the offensive and defensive cyber capabilities that Cyber Command has, while also ensuring we preserve NSAs signals intelligence capabilities, Jaffer added.

There is bipartisan support in Congress for Cyber Command to receive more independent operational authority, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle offered support for the decision.

Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, praised the announcement. But the Arizona Republican added there is much more to be done to prepare our nation and our military to meet our cybersecurity challenges.

While Cyber Command and the National Security Agency should eventually be able to operate independent of one another, the administration must work closely with the Congress to take the necessary steps that will make this separation of responsibilities successful, and to ensure that each agency will emerge more effective and more capable as a result, McCain said in a statement Friday.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, echoed McCains statement and said in his own Friday statement that the elevation of Cyber Command should also facilitate the eventual division of CYBERCOM from the NSA, a step that I believe is in the interests of both entities.

Trumps announcement fulfills a mandate in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2017 to promote Cyber Command and place it on equal footing with the other combatant commands.

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After Cyber Command Elevation, Split From NSA Could Be Next - Morning Consult

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Trump Considering a Big Change for US Cyber Command – Fortune

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President Donald Trump is close to making a decision to elevate the status of the Pentagon's Cyber Command, signaling more emphasis on developing cyber weapons to deter attacks, punish intruders and tackle adversaries, current and former officials told Reuters on Thursday.

A current U.S. official, who was speaking on condition of anonymity, said Trump could make a decision as early as Friday. The official added that the timeline could be pushed back if the White House was dealing with more pressing issues.

The Pentagon and White House declined to comment.

Two former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the plan said that the proposal awaiting Trump's approval would elevate Cyber Command and lead to a 60-day study to determine whether Cyber Command would be separated from the National Security Agency, a spy agency responsible for electronic eavesdropping.

That would lead to Cyber Command becoming what the military called a "unified command," equal to combat branches of the military such as the Central and Pacific Commands.

It would give Cyber Command leaders a larger voice in arguing for the use of both offensive and defensive cyber tools in future conflicts.

Currently, the NSA and Cyber Command organizations are based at Fort Meade, Md., about 30 miles north of Washington, and led by the same officer, Navy Admiral Michael Rogers.

NSA's focus is gathering intelligence, officials said, often favoring the monitoring of an enemy's cyber activities. Cyber Command's mission is geared more to shutting down cyber attacks and, if ordered, counter attacking.

The NSA director has been a senior military officer since the agency's founding in 1952. Under the plan, future directors would be civilians, an arrangement meant to underscore that NSA is not subordinate to Cyber Command.

Established in 2010, Cyber Command is now subordinate to the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees military space operations, nuclear weapons and missile defense.

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Trump Considering a Big Change for US Cyber Command - Fortune

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I’m a founder of the Satanic Temple. Don’t blame Satan for white supremacy. – Washington Post

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By Lucien Greaves By Lucien Greaves August 23 at 6:00 AM Lucien Greaves is co-founder of and spokesperson for the Satanic Temple, an international nontheistic religious organization advocating for secularism and scientific rationalism.

Soon after the violent white supremacist protests in Charlottesville this month, religious leaders and pious politicians began the usual drudgery of fitting the events into their preferred narratives.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) seized the opportunity to rail against secularism, declaring that the whole thing was but a symptom of a rampant evil that has been allowed to freely permeate public schools unmitigated by the moral corrective of compulsory Bible study.Some Christian leaders, such as Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., said little about the actual events in Charlottesville, but praised President Trumps bold and truthful statement at his news conferencethree days after the protest, which claimed many sides were to blame and that all sides harbored some very fine people. American Family Radio host Bryan Fischer blamed Democrats.

But the consensus among Christian leaders was that Satan was at fault. As Evangelist Franklin Graham put it: Shame on the politicians who are trying to push blame on President Trump for what happened in Charlottesville. Really, this boils down to evil in peoples hearts. Satan is behind it all. Premier Christianity, a popular news and culture blog from a Christian perspective, condemned both white supremacy and Trumps equivocating response to it as Satanic. Similarly, Morgan Guyton, director of the NOLA Wesley Foundation, the United Methodist campus ministry at Tulane and Loyola universities in New Orleans, saw in Charlottesville a manifestation of Satans power. Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, denounced white supremacy as Satanism and devil-worship.

[The man who organized the Charlottesville rally is in hiding and too toxic for the alt-right]

As the co-founder of and spokesman for the Satanic Temple, Im naturally irritated by such comments. To many casual observers, there seems to be a tendency to view condemnations of white supremacy as Satanism as a triumph of progressive thought among prominent U.S. Christians. But such language is not harmless. It lets mainstream religions off the hook for some of the darker periods of American history, despite the deep connections between slavery and Christian theology. These leaders invocation of the eternal adversary as a scapegoat comes with darker implicit assumptions that should be confronted and rejected outright.

I identify nontheistically with a Miltonic Satan that defies all subjugation, exalts scientific inquiry and promotes Humanistic, pluralistic values. The Satan of Modern Satanism is a metaphorical icon for Enlightenment values. Satanism adopts a mythological backdrop that we feel is more befitting to modern culture than the monarchical, feudalistic, theocratic superstitions of old. The Satanic Temple, far from endorsing crass nationalistic tribalism, actively fights for individual sovereignty and secular values.

In allowing the colloquial use of Satanic to stand unopposed as a blanket term to describe all that is reprehensible and morally corrupt, one also tacitly affirms the implied opposite, that Christianity defines all that is just and morally sound. Correcting this assumption is more than a matter of embittered punitive nitpicking; its a matter of maintaining fidelity to historical facts so that we might more appropriately confront the dire issues of the present. Its a matter of undermining the destructive certainty of moral authority held by the superstitious.

[Only white people can save themselves from racism and white supremacism]

Slavery in the United States was traditionally and rather credibly, from a theological perspective justified on scriptural grounds. The Ku Klux Klan is as much a religious Protestant sect as the Taliban or al-Qaeda are Muslim. The doctrine of the Christian Identity movement, with its spurious scholarship and militant apocalyptic urgency, forms the ideological backdrop of virtually all white supremacist and extreme anti-government movements in the United States, the Anti-Defamation League writes.

Allowing Christian leaders to merely disown Protestant radicalization by fiat absolves them of having to confront the problem. Its one thing to disagree with the scriptural interpretation of a movement; its another to deny that the movement had any foundations in scriptural interpretations at all. Facing the problem of Protestant racism from within means acknowledging its existence and dedicating a certain amount of energy to maintaining a nonracist church, not merely claiming thatsuch elements exist only when politically convenient.

Its well past time we stopped allowing religious authorities to pretend that their doctrines have guided the rights revolution, when in reality, far too many of them traditionally stalled and crippled it. Without a moments introspection, we find American Christian religious leaders claiming the glory of the 1960s civil rights movement while simultaneously fighting to prevent and undo any advances in rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans. As if theyve never been wrong, and failing to be corrected by those who know better, they carry on acting as if right is not defined by that which is equitable, increases happiness, or reduces suffering, but rather is defined by (their interpretations of) what is stated as such in their archaic, yet allegedly infallible, laws.

[White people think racism is getting worse. Against white people.]

Blaming Satan for any misdeeds, real or imagined, has never been a victimless crime. Moores words are the very stuff of witch hunts inspired by a guilty desire to purge ones own sins in a conflagration of the scapegoated other. In fact, Trumps own conspiracy scapegoating, his cozy relationship with deranged paranoia-mongers and his near unanimous support among evangelicals have all unquestionably contributed to the increasing flagrance of the racist right. Blaming Satanism for Charlottesville only adds fuel to the growing flames of conspiracist unreason while shifting responsibility from where it properly belongs.

Finally, it must be said that nothing could be more antithetical to modern nontheistic Satanism than racist ideologies. We embrace a large diversity of individuals from a wide spectrum of political and cultural backgrounds, but were all unified by our respect for individual rights and pluralism. It is axiomatic within Satanism that individuals must be judged for their own actions and for their own merits. To unfavorably relegate individuals into arbitrary categories, or to take credit for the achievements of another based upon a shared classification, is to defy the very foundational principles of our ethics. We simply have no place for simple-minded supremacist, nationalist ideologues, and its impossible to interpret our tenets otherwise.

Ironically, much of what Moore and other preachers of superstition claim to know about Satanism is derived froma mythology constructed from libels against minority out-groups by Christian majorities. Pagans and Jews were early victims of violent purges, their practices deemed Satanic and intolerable. Native Americans and black slaves were often suspected and accused of Satanic activity in Early America. The vision for a Christian Nation, persistently fought for by evangelical theocrats, with its refusal to accept cultural diversity, holds that there is but one right way to live our lives, one lifestyle for all households, only one acceptable religious outlook that should be dictated to the nation at large, one god for one people. Is it really so mysterious that some among them might decide theres a right race as well?

If were going to confront the violence in Charlottesville in any constructive manner, were going to have to do better than the Devil made them do it.

Read more:

As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession.

What the Pizzagate conspiracy theory borrows from a bogus satanic sex panic of the 1980s

The whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy

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I'm a founder of the Satanic Temple. Don't blame Satan for white supremacy. - Washington Post

A Brief But Very Informative History of How Fascists Infiltrated Punk … – Noisey

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Alexander Reid Ross is a lecturer at Portland State University, the editor of 'Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab,' and the author of the new book, 'Against the Fascist Creep' (AK Press). His book traces today's often-disguised forms of rightwing extremism through the decades and across the globe to show how infiltration is a conscious and clandestine program for neofascist groups that seek to co-opt and undermine both the mainstream and the new social movements of the left.

The fallout from the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville organized by open fascists has brought a renewed sense of urgency for the anti-racist and anti-fascist movement. Following the abortive rally, a neo-Nazi named James Alex Fields drove into a contingent of antifascists, murdering one and injuring 19. Fields was pictured at the rally among the fascist Vanguard America group, wearing their uniform of white polos and khaki pants and brandishing a shield with their logo of two fasces crossed in an X. This image appears to give us a clear understanding of what fascism looks like and where it can be opposed. However, fascist organizing is rarely so open or obvious. Fascist efforts to recruit and influence often take place under shades of ambiguity within subcultural spaces, for instance at shows, parties, in magazines, and online. There is a likelihood that many will either leave the alt-right or retreat back into such spaces to regain momentum.

For people who live across the country from Charlottesville, in Portland, Oregon, the August 12 slaying brought back sad memories of May 26, when a racially-motivated slashing by Jeremy Joseph Christian left two dead and one critically injured on public transit. News quickly emerged of Christian's associations with recent alt-right linked protests, but he did not fit the typical white supremacist profilehe was into heavy metal, anarchy, and nihilism.

While Fields gives us the image of the clean-cut fascist from the Midwest, eager to bully others whom he deems weaker and capable of extreme acts of violence, it is important to remember that the alt-right emerged through a longer history of ongoing efforts by fascists to manipulate different cultures and their values, from conservative anti-interventionism to leftist anti-imperialism and even rock subcultures. In order to stop fascists from continuing to organize, subcultures must stand against not just those wearing white polo shirts and khakis but those who are used to the cover of ambiguity often afforded by the insular subcultural dynamics of belonging and in-group formation.

In the wake of the May 26 murders in Portland and the Charlottesville slaying on August 12, the alt-right must have no safe space, no place to hide, and no capacity to organize.

A glance at the photographs and videos from Saturday's macabre display and the alt-right's torch lit march through the University of Virginia that took place the previous evening reveals not just a renegade country club aesthetic, but an assortment of styles, from hipster mustaches and haircuts to hate rock band shirts and open skinheads wearing Blood & Honour merch. The alt-right has not attempted to replace such counter-cultural scenes as add onto them with new sectors of the population. In fact, the punk attitude and metal subcultures remain vital to the modern fascist movement.

When the punk and metal scenes came to prominence first in the 1970s, they encapsulated the feelings of working class people betrayed by conditions out of their control. Exploiting an economic downturn in the UK under a left-wing Labour government, fascists began organizing for a political party called the National Front but faced violent opposition from the left. A group of National Front members agreed on a "metapolitical" approach, intervening in subcultural milieus like punk and metal to turn them into breeding grounds for fascism. This approach, gleaned from a group of fascist ideologues known as the European New Right, would later form the bedrock of the alt-right's ideology.

Taking inspiration from a network of "national revolutionary" terrorist cells structured like left-wing nuclei and inspired by the occult fascist, Julius Evola, this breakaway group founded the Official National Front and began actively working to recruit fascist skinheads as "political soldiers." Their seminal point person in this regard, Ian Stuart Donaldson, fronted a band called Skrewdriver, which emerged with the gritty rock' n' roll of the Oi! punk scene in 1976. When leftists organized an annual concert called Rock Against Racism to build a grassroots movement against the National Front and fascist skinheads, Donaldson created a counter-event called Rock Against Communism and a distribution network called Blood & Honour, both of which continue to this day.

When leftists organized an annual concert called Rock Against Racism to build a grassroots movement against the National Front and fascist skinheads, Donaldson created a counter-event called Rock Against Communism and a distribution network called Blood & Honour, both of which continue to this day.

In the early 1980s, two members of a left-wing band that had played at Rock Against Racism moved to Germany disillusioned by the left, and joined the "third positionist" tendency of fascism (neither capitalism nor state communism but national socialism). What they created was a kind of avant-garde fascist aesthetic that could draw in those who recoiled at the drunken, boisterous presence of skinheads.

Taking ideas from both left and right while adopting Evola's occult trappings "beyond" ideology, their new band, Death In June, produced a brooding, monotonous sound with often lugubrious lyrics evoking the ruins of civilization and the desire to rise, phoenix-like from the ashes. Soon, Death In June and associates developed a network of close-knit bands around the genre, "neofolk," which was loosely connected to the National Front, as well as fascist think tanks like the Islands of the North Atlantic (IONA) and Transeuropa.

While Donaldson's Blood & Honor distribution network helped spread the National Front and Nazi ideology through skinhead shows and parties around the world, neofolk bands and related noise and experimental artists like Boyd Rice and Michael Moynihan increasingly explored the counter-cultural allure of metapolitics, becoming involved in Satanism, paganism, and fascism. Dedicated musicians ensured that no milieu, excepting hate rock, could be exclusively claimed by fascists, but the struggle would be difficult and often violent.

In San Francisco, the fascist skinhead and avant-garde scenes converged with the American Front, which developed further ties to larger political assemblages from Australia to Belgium, Canada to Spain, France, and England in a new network that would take the name "European Liberation Front." Many of these groups organized under "national-Bolshevik" ideas that the world should be organized into ethno-states in a federated ultranationalist version of the Soviet Union. It was the earliest issuance of an international fascist syndicate that would later come under the influence of Russian fascist Alexander Dugin and his "Eurasianist" philosophy, both of which are currently associated with the alt-right.

European Liberation Front organizers like Troy Southgate, formerly of the Official National Front, sought to exploit the anarchist ideology associated with punk and metal subcultures, as well as rebellious autonomous radical groups. Calling their syncretic ideological fusion "national-anarchism," these fascists commandeered a Trotskyist strategy known as "entryism," entering groups (particularly in the green movement) and either turning them toward their ideology or destroying them from within. In a fashion later taken up by the alt-right, fascists deployed leftist ideas against the left in order to conceal itself while eroding egalitarian and anarchist tendencies within subcultures that remained superficially anarchic. Denying fascists such entry points cuts a large and important base off from their organizing.

Through record labels like Resistance Records, Elegy Records, and Unholy Records, distribution enterprises like Rouge et Noir, and magazines like Requiem Gothique and Napalm Rock, fascists merged haterock and neofolk with anarchist and nihilist thought in order to convincingly carry their ideas and themes into subversive, though politically ambiguous, countercultures. Important themes included spiritual occultism and nihilism (as in, everything must be destroyed for truly nationalist life to begin anew), as well as a linking of localized ecology with the essence and spirit of the nation, often identified along "folkish" or tribal lines.

Fascists also fetishized the Aryan mythos and a return to paganism as naturally closer to the European folka tendency that became especially clear with their championing of Scandinavian black metal. Developed as a reaction to the glitzy hair metal and messy death metal bands of the 1980s, early Scandinavian black metal strove for brutality in music, emphasizing an austere aesthetic of blood, violence, and sacrificial rituals.

As black metal spread to the US and several groups aligned with Blood & Honour, a number of bands became increasingly open about white nationalism. After Burzum leader Varg Vikernes murdered a member of a rival band, Michael Moynihan co-authored Lords of Chaos to discuss black metal and satanism in what became the leading narrative of the black metal scene. Thus, many young people intrigued by the gruesome and brutal black metal scene found their introduction through a "heathen anarcho-fascist," according to eminent scholar Mattias Gardell, feeding into a growing international network of specifically National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) bands and fans.

The consequences for cross-over between fascist and anarchist ideas in subcultures can be severe. In May 2010, antifascists campaigning against the violent fascist skinhead network, Volksfront, were shocked when an antifascist activist named Luke V. Querner was shot by a fascist, leaving him paralyzed. Following the shooting, Rose City Antifa released an expos of two NSBM bands, Immortal Pride and Fanisk, that eerily cautioned, "subcultural settings are also being contested ideologically, a reality that we ignore at our own risk."

According to comments on the Indymedia page, the Volksfront-connected group, Immortal Pride, admitted their fascism proudly, while Fanisk argued that their "transcendent" art had been misunderstood by vulgar, witch-hunting antifascists. Fanisk's attempts to deflect allegations ran parallel to fascists' attempts to translate their ideas into uncontroversial themes like "the right to difference," which means apartheid style ethno-states, or "simultaneously being in favor of White Power, Yellow Power[, Black Power], and Red Power."

Amid the controversy and fallout from both the shooting and subsequent expos, one Immortal Pride fan named Tom Christensen quietly announced on Stormfront his exploitation of the punk and black metal scene and gathering of information on antifascists:

"I used to be a big punk rocker in the music scene and there were some antis that ran around in the same scene. I was friends with a few I kept my beliefs to myself and would shut down any opinions the[y] expressed that seemed to have holes in them. It's been fairly useful to know some of these people. I now know who all the major players are in the anti and SHARP [Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice] scene."

He later asked Stormfront whether or not he should snitch out his antifascist associates. Christensen was discovered by Rose City Antifa and outed in a May 2013 alert, only after a series of regional grand jury indictments of anarchists that some speculate might have used information he handed over to the police. He also came to identify as "Trigger" Tom, suggesting perhaps that he had shot Querner in 2010. Whether or not those speculations are accurate, Christensen's position within radical subcultures opened antifascists to crucial vulnerabilities. As recently as Tuesday, August 8, Christensen was arrested for stabbing someone at a Rancid/Dropkick Murphys show in Chicago.

To this day, fascist groups find shelter moving between politically ambiguous subcultures and fascist groups. Paul Waggener, the leader of a violent bioregionalist-fascist group, the Wolves of Vinland, which has chapters across the US, attempts to spread his ethno-separatist vision through both neofolk and black metal projects. Despite the fact that WoV Portland-area leader Jack Donovan calls himself an "anarcho-fascist" and has spoken at alt-right conferences, efforts by Rose City Antifa to expose this group and their local workings have met with resistance from nihilist apologists.

It was significant to many that Jeremy Christian identified his idea of a bioregionalist, whites-only homeland in the Pacific Northwest as "Vinland," a term used not just by WoV but also by the now-defunct US chapter of the NSBM-linked fascist group, Heathen Front, headed by infamous Nazi, James Mason, whose work is published by "anarcho-fascist" Michael Moynihan.

Christian's mixture of bioregionalism, racism, and metal also resonated with the leader of the Nazi group Northwest Front, Harold Covington, whose experience as a Nazi includes participating in planning the 1979 Greensboro Massacre and creating the Blood & Honour-linked UK fascist skinhead group Combat 18. Currently dedicated to entering the popular Cascadian bioregional movement and turning it toward fascism, Covington declared, "it does look like [Jeremy Christian] was one of 'our' many fringe characters[.]" Similar white nationalist groups exist around the neo-Confederate movement in the South.

The metal scene, punk, bioregionalism, and other interlinked subcultural milieus continue to provide a sense of belonging for those who need it, but often become insular and defensive when criticized from the outside. That insularity opens a vulnerability to the persistent efforts of fascist entryists. Nevertheless, opposition continues to grow from within as people become increasingly wise to the dangers posed by creeping fascism.

In the last few years, protests have grown outside of venues that host metal and neofolk bands that have been proven to be or are allegedly associated with fascism. Protests against Death in June have emerged from Portland to South Florida; a large group of people demonstrated against Graveland in Montreal, while Satanic Warmaster had to play a secret show in Glasgow, Blood and Sun gigs were called off in the Midwest, and Marduk was cancelled in Oakland and protested in Austin. Meanwhile, antifascist black metal bands like Ancst and Dawn Ray'd are gaining notoriety for their rejection of sexism and racism.

Despite some fans and journalists complaining about the free speech of musicians, judging by the increasing demonstrations, the metal scene is becoming increasingly conscious not only of the safety of its own members, but its role in either fanning the flames of a global fascist revival or helping to put them out.

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A Brief But Very Informative History of How Fascists Infiltrated Punk ... - Noisey

Experts grill health claims of activated charcoal supplements – WRAL.com

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You think of charcoal for your grill, but it's now turning up in face masks, smoothies and even cocktails.

The ingredient is touted as a way to detox your body. But the claims of what some people call a "magic health bullet" might not be backed up by science.

Activated charcoal comes in black pills, and it's also found in soaps, beauty face masks and supplements as a simple way to remove toxins from your body.

The product is similar to the stuff used to grill, but the activated kind has been superheated into an extremely porous substance. It's been used in medicine for decades.

"Activated charcoal is sometimes used as an antidote for overdoses of some medicines," said Consumer Reports' Julia Calderone. "The porous charcoal traps certain toxins, preventing the body from absorbing them."

Some activated charcoal supplements claim to remove toxins in a similar way, but Consumer Reports medical experts say theyre not necessary because the body detoxes itself.

"The body already has organs such as the kidneys and liver to filter out impurities," Calderone said.

In small doses, activated charcoal has no known significant risks, but supplements are regulated much more loosely than drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and they dont necessarily contain whats advertised on the label.

Other products have come on the market recently, too, such as face washes, soaps and masks, but there's little published scientific evidence to suggest that activated charcoal helps them work better than products without it.

Consumer Reports advice is to keep charcoal in the grill, not the medicine cabinet. Experts say theres no reason to do a fad detox. Instead, just make sure your diet includes plenty of water and high-fiber foods.

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Experts grill health claims of activated charcoal supplements - WRAL.com

Philosophy for Life: An Interview With Jules Evans – HuffPost

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How did your to philosophy journey begin? What sparked your interest in Stoicism and philosophy as a way of lifeor as you put it for life? If we understand correctly, you discovered it after struggling with some issues on your own in your adolescence?

I think I read Marcus Aurelius at school. Then, when I was 21, I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and social anxiety brought on by some bad drug experiences. I suffered from that from 17 to 21, five pretty rough years. I eventually went to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy support group for people suffering from social anxiety. It helped me a lot, and it also reminded me of Stoicism. A few years later, in 2007, I interviewed the two founders of CBT Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck -and discovered theyd both been directly influenced by Stoicism. It was around then that I became interested in the revival of Stoicism, and started to interview other people who use its philosophy today.

How do you explain Stoicism to people when they ask? Does it depend on the audience?

I usually explain it through the prism of CBT, because a lot of people are already familiar with that, or I compare it to Buddhism. I emphasise three ideas: firstly, that our thoughts affect our emotions. Secondly, the wisdom of focusing on what you can control. Third, the importance of habits. Those to me are the three best ideas in Stoicism.

Do you have a daily routine that incorporates any Stoic exercises? If so, has it always been the same? And which exercises do you practice? How has it benefited you?

Not really. It helped me a lot from 21 to 27, Id say when I was in a crisis and needed to change myself to get out of it. I might occasionally turn to it now if Im in a difficult stage of life, but luckily life has been a lot easier since then.

What books would you recommend that you think embody Stoic lessons or ideas but usually are not mentioned in discussions about Stoicism? Or maybe you could recommend a Stoic gem that most people havent read?

Ohhmmm well there are Christian mystic books that are quite influenced by Stoicism, Thomas Trahernes Centuries of Meditation for example. There are modern takes on Stoicism, like Bertrand Russells Conquest of Happiness. Then theres a lot of rich stuff in classical philosophy in general no one reads Cicero any more but he was the most popular author of the Renaissance.

What would be the one Stoic idea or exercise that you think anyone would benefit from? What would you recommend? Feel free to suggest more.

Well, the idea that business people and sports people find most useful is to accept whats beyond your control. Were all control freaks, so thats a really useful, simple idea that we need to keep reminding ourselves of.

Do you have a favorite stoic quote?

This one from Seneca inspired me when I was writing Philosophy for Life: you are retained as counsel for unhappy mankind. You have promised to help those in peril by sea, those in captivity, the sick and the needy, and those whose heads are under the poised axe. Whither are you straying? What are you doing? I think a lot of academics could do with a reminder of that.

From what weve read, you feel like there is something missing from Stoic philosophy that youve tried to find by studying other schools and are beginning to write about. Can you tell us about that? Does that mean you would identify as a Stoic?

Well, theres a lot missing from Stoicism. Humour, for one, a sense of the absurd. They didnt have much sense of the power of the arts, imagination, music, dance, poetry. There isnt much dancing in Greek philosophy as Jean Vanier said when I interviewed him. It can overemphasise self-reliance and under emphasise the importance of friendship. Stoics can be Puritans, which Im definitely not. In general it can overemphasise rationalism and miss out all the importance of non-rational ways of knowing like ecstatic states, which involve the body more. I dont think rationalism is the last word in consciousness. Stoics often seem quite prickly, cold, pedantic personalities which they hide behind a stiff veneer of rationalism. I think its too rule-based Massimo Pigliucci wrote the other day of the algorithm of Stoicism I dont see life as something best approached with an algorithm, though I think thats why Stoicism appeals to computer programmers. No, I dont identify as a Stoic anymore, but I think there are Stoic techniques that everyone could benefit from knowing and practicing.

This interview was originally published on DailyStoic.com

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Philosophy for Life: An Interview With Jules Evans - HuffPost

Kerala Chief Minister presents MC Joseph award to litterateur MK Sanu – The New Indian Express

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Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan greets litterateur M K Sanu at the Yukthivadi M C Joseph Award presentation function in Kochi on Saturday | K Shijith

KOCHI:Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Saturday said those who came to power after swearing allegiance to the Constitution are now propagating superstitions, ill-practices, myths and fabricated tales. He was speaking after presenting the Yukthivadi M C Joseph Award to litterateur M K Sanu here. Calling for a joint fight against the covert moves to revive casteism as part of the wider goal to establish a theocracy, the Chief Minister said the rationalists should join hands with socio-political movements to rid society of ill-practices and superstition.The rationalists cannot take people into confidence unless their initiative reflects on the socio-political sphere.

The role of rationalism should not be limited to discussions on the existence of God, Pinarayi said. What the Communist movement suggested is rationalism should not be merely an idea, but it should have a socio-political impact.What human beings need is not a foolproof theory to substantiate the non-existence of God, but his daily bread, he said.

Pinarayi said M C Joseph had the capability to provide logical answers and establish his point of view on questions related to rationalism. He was one of those who fearlessly fought superstitions and ill- practices of his time. Such bravado energises posterity also, the CM said.

Dr K S David presided over the function. K V Thomas MP, CPM district chief P Rajeev, GCDA chairman C N Mohanan, Sreeni Pattathanam, P Raghavan and Jacob Laser spoke.

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Kerala Chief Minister presents MC Joseph award to litterateur MK Sanu - The New Indian Express

Alexander: One fleeting victory for reason – Quad City Times

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The great sky wolves devoured the sun Monday.

You won't see that headline in any American newspaper. Nor should you.

But that was the Viking explanation for a solar eclipse. In fact, the concept of a mythical beast or god consuming the sun was a pretty standard interpretation for much of antiquity. To the ancient Chinese, it was a veracious dragon. In Vietnam, a celestial toad swallowed either the sun or moon during a solar or lunar eclipse.

These were agricultural cultures, mind you, completely dominated by anecdote and the rhythm of the growing seasons. Those shadows of polytheism still exists today, remnants permitted by later, more powerful monotheistic traditions as a means to more easily sway recent converts.

Easter, for instance, is probably a fusion of Catholic doctrine and more ancient pagan spring festivals, built around the planting calendar and an associated concept of rebirth. The egg has long been a tangible, powerful symbol of new life. And that pre-Christian tradition sticks around today.

Point is, myths come and go. They're the necessary result of a curious species that spends an unprecedented amount of time pondering the world around it. And there tends to be substantial upheaval and pushback whenever a seminal moment throws shade at the established intellectual tradition. Entire political power structures are built around belief systems. Entire institutions derive their power from the myth itself. Overturning an established myth is, often, a direct assault on a civilization's cultural and political framework.

It's no surprise then that Galileo was put on trial in 1633 for suggesting earth revolved around the sun and offering conclusive evidence to prove it. The Vatican convicted the Italian naturalist of heresy, tantamount to a 17th century blacklisting, and forced him to recant his findings. It wasn't until 1992 that Pope John Paul II admitted the church's error after a 13-year investigation.

For more than 350 years, the story of Galileo's trial has stood as a symbol of the inherent tension between religion and rationalism.

On Monday, millions of Americans turned their gazes skyward to watch the moon blot out the sun. This time, it was widely understood that the entire event is just a chance occurrence of orbiting bodies passing by one another. With incredible accuracy, scientists predicted precise moments when the sun would be fully eclipsed by the moon. And Americans of all political and religious stripes took those predictions for granted.

It's a notable level of confidence in the predictive abilities of scientific observation and mathematics in a moment when similar endeavors are scrubbed from government websites and blasted as hoaxes of the most politically motivated kind. Such charges, mind you, would not be foreign to Galileo. They were the same accusations made against him.

Attempts to objectively measure the universe put us on the moon. It split the atom. It created a network that transmits information at light speed. It nearly doubled average life expectancy and eradicated polio.

And yet, scientists still fight for legitimacy, even though they are the one's whose only real agenda is understanding. That's because those in power weaponize irrational fear. Baseless conspiracy theories are wrongly cast as legitimate doubt. One can't pose legitimate questions about that which they don't understand.

But new information threatens those whose entire access to power is rooted in old systems. With that understanding, no one should be surprised that we're still arguing about evolution 158 years after Darwin published his widely confirmed mechanism for speciation. Nor should anyone be shocked that billions have been spent on delegitimizing climate science.

Almost 400 years ago, merely predicting Monday's eclipse could have been a capital offense. But rationalism soldiered on. It reshaped how the universe is understood. It built political systems, including the United States. And, on Monday, people accepted the calculus that accurately predicted the event.

On Monday, millions looked skyward and understood they weren't seeing the wrath of an angry god or hungry serpent. And that's only because those honestly seeking truth refused to back down.

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Alexander: One fleeting victory for reason - Quad City Times

Grace Mugabe debacle depicts the struggle between legal positivism and political realism – Bulawayo24 News (press release) (blog)

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A political commentator Pedzisai Ruhanya has argued that first lady Grace Mugabe's debacle in South Africa depicts the struggle between legal positivism and political realism.

This was after the SA authorities imposed diplomatic immunity to Grace after she assaulted a model in that country when she found her in the company of her sons.

"Explaining First Lady Grace Mugabe's SA problems from a REALISM analytic lens; is International Law Vs International Relations: International law and international relations have long been concerned with the ways in which states interact with one another, and both fields have traditionally build their theories on the twin assumption of state sovereignty and non-intervention, most notably embodied in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia," he said.

"The Grace Mugabe debacle depicts the struggle between legal positivism and political realism; that is the supremacy of politics over law. Like realism in international relations, rationalism in comparative politics concentrates on "means-ends" calculations and how they affect political outcomes. But realism engages in methodological nationalism, whereas rationalism as it is deployed in comparative politics engages in methodological individualism. For realism, the ontological unit of analysis is the state as a unitary actor from which the models and explanations for events and political outcomes in international relations are derived."

He said for rationalism, the ontological unit of analysis is the individual, whose strategic interaction forms the basis of political explanation.

"The difference between the two perspectives thus resides in their focus on states and individuals, whereas the common affinity of the two perspectives is their emphasis on the UTILITY-MAXIMIZING of the units of analysis. Like the polarity of LAW and POWER (which is the case with First Lady Grace Mugabe's issue) in the fields of international law and international relations, rationalist and structuralist accounts of politics have created a polarity between structureless agents on the one hand and extreme rational choice and agentless structure on the other extreme structuralists. To address the problem, there is need to construct an EMPIRICAL MODEL," Ruhanya posted on facebook.

"If the norms contained in the international human rights regime are important, as legal proceduralists, neoliberal institutionalists and liberal-republicans argue, then there aught to be a positive relationship between international law of human rights (rights in principle) and the protection of human rights (rights in practice). Such an expectation is supported by Henkin's (1979: 47) claim that "it is probably the case that all nations observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of their time."

He said the most probable explanation on why the First Lady got away with her transigressions could be understood using the REALISM analytic framework specifically.Strict realists make six assumptions about the world.

"States are the primary and most powerful actors in the international sphere . The world is anarchic. Since there is no power over states and no state may command another, there can be no order in international relations. States seek to maximize their security power. Realists perceive the world as having limited resources that are evenly distributed and so they see states as primarily focused on maximizing power and security. States behave rationally in their pursuits of security or power. There is utility in the use of force It is important to note that there is a major division within the Realist School regarding how states measure the maximization of power .Under classic realist theory states seek to make absolute gains in their power," he said.

"Under this view, a realist state does not care whether other states gain in the same transaction as long as the state that is acting makes a gain in power. Neo-realists argue that states seek relative gains. In this view states will want to know whether they will benefit more than other states based on the existing power structure. Based on these assumptions, realists tend to view the world as a series of prisoners' dilemmas. The classic prisoners' dilemma involves two suspects arrested for a crime. The suspects agree in advance not to say anything."

Ruhanya said the police interrogate them separately and over each leniency in return for a confession.

"If neither suspect cooperates, they will only face a light sentence for a lesser included offence. If both suspects confess, they will both go to prison for the full crime though they will get some leniency for their cooperation. If only one suspect confesses that suspect will be left off while the other gets the maximum sentence for the full crime. The best overall outcome for both suspects is when both choose not to confess. For each individual the best outcome is to confess while the other sticks to their agreement not to say anything. If either suspect believes the other will cheat by confessing, it is in their interest to also cheat and confess. Unless the two suspects are incredibly committed to their agreement this prisoners' dilemma should tend to end in both suspects confessing to protect themselves against worst possible outcome and possibly obtain the best outcome," he said.

"The basic idea from the prisoner's dilemma can be translated into the international relations sphere. For example, States will follow the Third Geneva Conventions (which protects prisoners of war and wounded soldiers) as long as they believe other states will also comply. Yet if one state suspects or knows that another state is violating the Third Geneva Convention, the other state would be motivated to break the treaty Criticism."

He said while realism may explain certain choices made by states in the international sphere and thereby illuminate conduct (particularly economic and military conduct), it has difficulty explaining the acceptance by states of international human rights in such as self-centered and power focused world as understood by the realist theory.

"The problems are two fold: Realists must find some benefit for states in agreeing to and complying with international human rights norms and other norms of good governance. Even if such a benefit could be found, realists would need to show why there would be a strong incentive to cheat under the prisoner's dilemma," he said.

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Grace Mugabe debacle depicts the struggle between legal positivism and political realism - Bulawayo24 News (press release) (blog)

POINT OF VIEW: Today’s GOP needs another William F. Buckley Jr. – Palm Beach Post

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After the neo-Nazi demonstration in Charlottesville, Va., William F. Buckley Jr. must have been rolling over in his grave. As the founder of the National Review magazine, Buckley was an important catalyst for the modern conservative movement. Perhaps his greatest service was marginalizing extremists to prevent them from gaining ascendancy within Republican ranks.

In his bid to make conservative politics mainstream, which over time allowed for someone like Ronald Reagan to become governor of California and later president of the United States, Buckley singled out the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand as unacceptable. Why he went after the Birchers and the author of Atlas Shrugged may offer a lesson for todays GOP.

First and foremost, Buckley sought a politics based on rationalism, facts, empiricism and expertise. At the cost of rationalism, the Birchers were prone to embracing oddball conspiracy theories.

In one outlandish charge, Bircher leader Robert Welch charged that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist agent. He further asserted that 50 percent to 70 percent of the U.S. government was communist-controlled.

Incidentally, it was during a 1964 meeting in Palm Beach that a plan was hatched between Buckley and then.-Sen. Barry Goldwater to denounce Welch. In a subsequent article, Buckley warned about the head Bircher being a liability for conservatives since he was far removed from common sense.

What Buckley did was use alternative media (which the National Review was) to neutralize fake news and keep it from corrupting the overall conservative movement. Today, unfortunately, the opposite has been occurring along with a president aiding and abetting disinformation.

Second, Buckley was a serious Catholic with sincere faith. Consequently, he was a staunch champion of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is why he had no patience for Rand, who reduced capitalism to materialism and selfishness. Her coffin bore not a cross but a dollar sign!

As an immigrant from the Soviet Union, Rand brought to Americas shores a reactionary economic belief system that became another ism. But her ideology retained Kremlin-brand atheism.

Though religion does continue to play a role in Republican circles, honest observers recognize that too often it has been reduced to a tool for fake God endorsement. Buckley was not so crass, but regarded religion as necessary for promoting our Lincolnesque better angels.

Today, many politicians prefer sharp tone over civil discourse. Such leaders operate as if they do not believe they will one day be judged by God. Religion, sometimes even its veneer, has the power to elevate behavior over dishonesty as well as promote a show of respect toward political opponents.

Buckley was not perfect, but he was a thinker and a life-long learner. His adamant position on states rights cast him on the wrong side of history with respect to civil rights, but near the end of his life, he confessed that he had been wrong and that federal intervention to end Jim Crow was the right action.

Republicans would do well to return to the political wisdom of Buckley. It could make the GOP great again.

ROGER CHAPMAN, WEST PALM BEACH

Editors note: Chapman is a professor of history at Palm Beach Atlantic University.

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POINT OF VIEW: Today's GOP needs another William F. Buckley Jr. - Palm Beach Post

Hall Center for the Humanities events to explore the posthuman condition – KU Today

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LAWRENCE The Hall Center for the Humanities Fall Faculty Colloquium is designed to enliven the intellectual atmosphere of the University of Kansas and contribute to the interdisciplinary training of faculty. This fall, four KU faculty members and four graduate students will convene under the leadership of directors Allan Hanson, professor emeritus of anthropology, and John Symons, professor of philosophy, to explore the topic of The Posthuman?

The faculty participants in the colloquium are Jennifer Foster, lecturer inSpanish & Portuguese; James Gunn, professor emeritus of English; Christopher Ramey, assistant professor of psychology, and Paul Scott, associate professor of French. The graduate student participants are Ramon Alvarado, philosophy; Anthony Boynton, English; Aaron Long, English, and Christina Lord, French & Italian.

The group will explore the question of whether we are morphing into something beyond the human. Today's bewildering onslaught of technology supplements and often replaces what were once defining features of humanity. Or is the whole idea of the posthuman misguided? Artificial intelligence may be fundamentally different from human intelligence, a supplement rather than a competitor. All current technological developments may signal nothing other than an unfolding actualization of what it is to be human.In a word, this colloquium raises the question of whether a posthuman condition exists. If not, why not? If so, what is it (or will it be) like?

The colloquium directors determine the theme, provide intellectual leadership and guidance, act as coordinators and facilitate feedback to participants on their presentations. The participants each present a paper and contribute to the discussion. Past colloquia have covered topics on global citizenship, colonizing knowledge, imagining the modern and future city, and consciousness.

Although the colloquium participants will guide the readings and responses, faculty and staff interested in the topic are invited to attend meetings. Starting Aug. 25, the Posthuman colloquium will meet at 10 a.m. most Fridays in the Hall Center Seminar Room. A detailed schedule of each meeting is available on the Hall Center website calendar and in the weekly e-bulletins.

In addition to the regular meetings, the colloquium will host guest speaker Katherine Hayles, James B. Duke Professor of Literature at Duke University. She teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. She will present a public lecture at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 13 in the Adams Alumni Center. Her talk is titled A New Mode of Orientation: Planetary Cognitive Ecologies. The next day, Nov. 14, she will meet with a special session of the colloquium.

For more information about the Fall Faculty Colloquium, please contact the Hall Center at hallcenter@ku.edu or call (785) 864-4798.

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Hall Center for the Humanities events to explore the posthuman condition - KU Today

Blockchain Technology Is Set to Disrupt Every Industry–and Music Is Next – Inc.com

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What is happening today with cryptocurrency and blockchain technology is how I imagine the dot-com gold rush in the 90s felt.

Since I was too young to experience those years (I was 5 years old), I am paying extra close attention to what is happening today. And for those that don't realize it yet, Bitcoin and Ethereum are quickly changing the world. Age-old industries are being disrupted, the first (and potentially most foundational industry of all) being money.

Anyone who thinks Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are just a fad falls into the same category of people who thought "that Internet thing" was just a fad back in the 90s. That's what makes these innovations so interesting is that they seem to be eliciting all the same reactions, meanwhile showing all the same signs of future success. Remember when we thought the concept of sending each other pictures over the Internet was "crazy" and would "never happen?" I swear, I have a family video from the early 90s of my uncle showing my dad his brand new laptop, and making a joke that one day they would press a button and the digital photo would just appear on the other person's laptop. They both started laughing--as if that would never happen.

And then it happened just a few years later.

That's what's happening today with blockchain technology. It's so dense and do difficult to explain (similar to the concept of the Internet back in the 90s) that it has yet to really become a mainstream topic of consideration. But to those paying close attention, blockchain has all the potential in the world to disrupt some very old, very big industries: banking, big pharma, insurance, voting, and entertainment, to name a few.

Here's what interests me about blockchain technology and the entertainment industry:

How many times have we heard the infamous case study of a band being signed to a major label, only to sue them (and usually their manager) a few years later after realizing they'd been skimped on millions of dollars in royalties?

That has been happening since the days of Elvis.

What's interesting about blockchain technology is that, by using what are called "smart contracts," those contracts are executed on automatically through the blockchain. So, if a band signs to a label and their contract states that they receive 70% of every dollar made, with the label receiving 30%, those distributions happen every time a dollar enters the door--assuming all of this is being done on the blockchain. No more relying on a person to count the dollars. No more trusting other people to deliver on the contract. It all happens on the blockchain, and is validated through math.

The whole idea behind blockchain technology is trust. Transparency. Everything is out in the open, and anything that gets processed through the blockchain can be seen and validated by anyone on the blockchain.

Take that concept, and you can see why this is such threatening technology to such big industries. A lot happens behind closed doors, so to put it all out into the open is groundbreaking, to say the least.

Another way that blockchain technology is impacting the music industry is with royalty distributions on digital platforms.

As it stands, artists are victims of the system. If they want access to the massive user bases on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, etc., then they have to be OK with getting paid pennies on the dollar for people to listen to their music. What an artist makes on these streaming platforms is nothing compared to what artists in the 90s made on CD sales.

One startup that is looking to tackle this issue with blockchain technology is called OPUS, a streaming platform for artists to upload their music and receive 98% of the revenue. For those that don't know, 98% is unheard of, and is leagues above what an artist would make selling their music on Apple Music, for example.

The idea behind OPUS is to solve for three massive issues in the music business: revenue share, censorship, and transparency. This is the beauty of using blockchain technology, because all three of those can be delivered on. The revenue share issue is solved by giving artists 98% of all royalties, the censorship issue because the power remains in the artists hands, and the transparency issue because labels can no longer hide money from the artists. And because it is built on the blockchain, none of these parameters can be changed down the road--whereas other services may decide one day to cut the percentage given to artists.

OPUS is currently raising funds through an ICO to continue working toward this vision of artist empowerment.

When you look at the landscape of digital music, I really do believe decentralizing the industry is the next logical step. Even SoundCloud, one of the most popular streaming platforms on the Internet, has reported that they are quickly running out of cash and exploring potential acquisition deals (not so much out of choice, but by necessity) because artists have no way to monetize their audiences. But with something like OPUS, artists still have to do the heavy lifting of marketing their own music, except they're more handsomely rewarded for their efforts.

Blockchain technology will fundamentally change the way business is done in industries all over the world. I would encourage you to start paying attention now.

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Blockchain Technology Is Set to Disrupt Every Industry--and Music Is Next - Inc.com

Most Faculty Say Technology Has Made Their Jobs Easier – Campus Technology

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Teaching with Technology Survey

Our 2017 Teaching with Technology Survey found that faculty have a positive outlook about technology's impact on their work, teaching effectiveness, student learning and more.

In a survey of faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States, 73 percent of respondents said technology has made their jobs "easier" or "much easier." And nary a one considered their job "much harder" thanks to tech.

Those findings came out of Campus Technology's second annual Teaching with Technology Survey, in which we asked faculty to dish on their use of technology, likes and dislikes, views of the future and more. Their responses revealed a lot about the business of teaching and learning with technology today and how it has changed over the last year.

While 73 percent of faculty were positive about the impact of technology on their jobs, that count represented a slip of four percentage points from last year, when 77 percent believed the same. The number of faculty who think technology has made their jobs harder is holding steady (17 percent this year compared to 16 percent in 2016), and a growing faction feels that tech has not had an impact either way (10 percent this year compared to 6 percent in 2016).

Whether technology is making life hard or easy for faculty, the majority of respondents (85 percent) feel the effort is worthwhile, agreeing that "Technology has positively affected my ability to teach." That number is slightly lower than last year, when 88 percent felt the same.

The results were similar when it came to technology's impact on student learning. Eighty-one percent of respondents saw a positive effect, compared to 84 percent last year. And 13 percent feel tech hasn't affected student learning one way or the other. "Technology is only as successful as the teacher who uses it," noted one respondent from a public university in California.

Overall, faculty in our survey hold an upbeat view of technology's value in higher education: Eighty percent think tech has had an "extremely positive" or "mostly positive" impact on education, similar to last year's count of 81 percent who felt the same.

A handful of respondents were less sanguine, feeling that technology has had a "mostly negative" impact, and 19 percent saw both positive and negative effects. As one faculty member from a two-year institution in Texas asserted, "Technology is rampant, but the actual impact on learning is unknown. Random studies have been conducted, but no one really knows."

"In some cases, technology is already overshadowing the learning process and making it more difficult," opined a respondent from Illinois. "More technology is not always the answer and more technology cannot replace good instruction."

"As with any facet of teaching and learning, there needs to be enough time for faculty to learn to properly use, adapt and implement for technology to be beneficial," pointed out a respondent from a Florida university.

"Technology used badly can be horrible," agreed a faculty member in Georgia. "Technology used to enhance student access to the world and their ability to collaborate and create can be awesome! It all depends on how you use it (like everything else)."

The full results of the Teaching with Technology Survey appear in the July digital issue of Campus Technology. Highlights from the survey will also be posted on this site over the coming months. You can check back for ongoing coverage in our Research section.

About the Author

About the author: Rhea Kelly is executive editor for Campus Technology. She can be reached at rkelly@1105media.com.

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Most Faculty Say Technology Has Made Their Jobs Easier - Campus Technology

COD board approves 4-year contract extension with adjunct faculty – Suburban Life Publications

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Mark Busch file photo - mbusch@shawmedia.com

Caption

College of DuPage adjunct faculty will receive a four-year contract extension under an agreement approved by the COD Board of Trustees and COD Adjuncts Association.

We appreciate our positive relationship with CODAA and we are very pleased to have reached this agreement, which we believe reflects the role and contributions of our adjunct faculty colleagues, COD President Ann Rondeau said in a news release from the college. We look forward to continued collaboration as we work together to serve our students.

The COD board has agreed to a pay schedule incorporating a 2.6-percent overall increase for fall 2017, according to the release. Increases in subsequent years will be determined by the Consumer Price Index Urban, plus 0.5 percent, with a minimum increase of 1 percent and maximum of 3 percent, the release stated.

Additionally, the contract includes an increase in the available pool for professional educational development funds and compensation for committee participation, according to the release.

"We believe CODAA and the college negotiated a contract that has resulted in significant improvements for adjuncts and is a move toward greater equity and fairness, COD Adjuncts Association President Cheryl Baunbach-Caplan said in the release.We thank the college's bargaining team, COD President Dr. Ann Rondeau, and the Board of Trustees for working with us in a respectful and mutually beneficialmanner."

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COD board approves 4-year contract extension with adjunct faculty - Suburban Life Publications

Global Naval Ship Modernization Assessment, Forecast to 2026 – PR Newswire (press release)

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Countries have to maintain a large number of operational naval assets in order to build deterrence, protect sovereignty, and secure Sea Lines of Communication (SLOC). Operators are initiating comprehensive midlife upgrades and life extension programs in order to field adequate operational assets. The naval ship modernization market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.3% during 20162026 and result in a total valuation of $49.10 billion. The market will be dominated by upgrades for surface combatant and submarine segments (92.5% of the total market).

Through this research service, Frost & Sullivan provides an assessment of global naval ship modernization programs, opportunities, forecasts, and technology trends from a macro level and also from a comprehensive micro-level countrywise assessment.

Key Target Audience

The key target audience includes: Defense OEMs and Integrators (especially their marketing and sales teams) Tier 1/ Tier 2/Tier 3 Suppliers Defense Consultants and Researchers Educational Bodies Personnel Working with Ministry/Department of Defense

Research ScopeThe market trends are analyzed for the study period 2016 to 2026, with the base year being 2016. The scope of the study is global, covering most nations which field a naval force.

The market is segmented across surface combatants, submarines, support ships, and patrol boats. Each segment is broken up into different vessel types and classes for granularity in information. Companies mentioned in the study include Lockheed Martin, Terma, Atlas Electronick, Raytheon, STM, TKMS, Kongsberg Marine, HII, and DCNS among others.

Country-specific modernization, life extension, and upgrade programs are arrived at using a combination of data including vessel acquisition and commissioning time frames, defense contract data, previous upgrades, defense spending patterns, and geopolitical exigencies.

Key Questions This Study Will Answer What are the committed, planned, and upcoming opportunities in the naval ship modernization market over the next 10 years? Which geographical markets and segments are growing? What are the key success factors that OEMs should consider in the market? What drives the need for modernizing naval ships in different nations and how do their procurement preferences and market dynamics differ? What are the major programs underway and planned within these markets and what opportunities do they open up for OEMs/contractors? Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p05075872/Global-Naval-Ship-Modernization-Assessment-Forecast-to.html

About Reportlinker ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.

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Global Naval Ship Modernization Assessment, Forecast to 2026 - PR Newswire (press release)

How to End Mass Incarceration – Jacobin – Jacobin magazine

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The United States has not always been the worlds leading jailer, the only affluent democracy to make incapacitation its criminal justice systems goal. Once upon a time, it fashioned itself as the very model of what Michel Foucault called the disciplinary society. That is, it took an enlightened approach to punishment, progressively tethering it to rehabilitative ideals. Today, it is a carceral state, plain and simple. It posts the highest incarceration rate in the world as well as the highest violent crime rate among high-income countries.

Politicians, reporters, and activists from across the political spectrum have analyzed the ongoing crisis of mass incarceration. Their accounts sometimes depict our current plight as an expression of puritanism, as an extension of slavery or Jim Crow, or as an exigency of capitalism. But these approaches fail to address the question that ought to be foremost in front of us: what was the nature of the punitive turn that pushed the US off the path of reform and turned its correctional system into a rogue institution?

While the state-sanctioned brutality that now marks the American criminal justice system has motivated many activists to call for the complete abolition of prisons, we must begin with a clearer understanding of the complex institutional shifts that created and reproduce the phenomenon of mass incarceration. Only then will we be able to see a clear path out of the current impasse.

The core features of Foucaults account of crime, punishment, and social control are well known, although they have not always been well understood. In the disciplinary society he describes, authorities progressively withdraw punishment from public view. And as discipline becomes increasingly private, it shifts its focus from criminals bodies to their minds. Increasingly, punishment is calculated to rehabilitate it is not meant to damage or destroy.

Foucault highlighted how these disciplinary reforms created new and more effective tactics for consolidating power, especially as they spread to non-judicial institutions, like schools, hospitals, factories, and offices. Unlike its predecessor, sovereign power, which subtracts giving kings the right to seize property, to damage or take lives disciplinary power corrects. The Enlightenments gentle punishments would convince the miscreant to mend his crooked ways, not beat the bad behavior out of him.

An American preference for rehabilitative discipline over harsh punishment has deep roots. Resonant with the image of the country as a nation of laws, American justice promised to punish lawbreakers only as much as was necessary to straighten them out. The Bill of Rights prohibited torture, and the Quaker reformers who founded early American penitentiaries treated them as utopian experiments in discipline, purgatories where penitents would suffer and introspect until they found salvation.

No doubt time and circumstance created different opinions about how much suffering genuine personal reformation required, but American practices generally aligned with rising standards of decency. As James Q. Whitman notes, Europeans once viewed the US prison system as a model of enlightened practices. Foreign governments sent delegations on tours of American penitentiaries, and Alexis de Tocqueville extolled the mildness of American punishment.

Of course, we can find exceptions. Southern penal systems, racialized after the Civil War under the convict-lease system, didnt even pretend to have rehabilitative aims. They existed to control the black population and supply cheap labor for agriculture and industry. No doubt, too, the spectacles of punishment associated with popular colonial justice the pillory, the stockade, the scarlet letter cast long shadows across American history.

But, even in the face of these contradictions, the US criminal justice system seemed to support a grand narrative of progressive history: the arc of history bends toward justice, and the slave drivers lash and the lynch mobs noose disappeared as the nation extended more rights and more freedoms to more people. Reasoned law inexorably overcomes communal violence and brute domination.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr thus distinguishes the true essence of the United States from its various manifestations of racism and intolerance, glossing history as the perpetual struggle of Americans to fulfill their deepest values in an enigmatic world.

As recently as fifty-odd years ago, Americans could still believe this story. Here, as in other North Atlantic countries, modern penal models that stress rehabilitation, reform, and welfare had become the prevailing approaches. At the peak of this trend, Great Society programs attempted to address crimes socioeconomic causes: poverty, institutional racism, alienation.

Indeed, as a result of the legal reforms of the 1960s, the American prison population was shrinking, and the state was developing alternatives to incarceration: kinder, gentler institutions that focused on supervision, reeducation, and rehabilitation. To many observers, the prison system actually seemed to be reforming itself out of existence. Leo Bersanis review of Foucaults Discipline and Punish began with the (now astonishing) sentence The era of prisons may be nearly over.

Nothing in Foucaults analysis or anyone elses, as David Garland has remarked could have predicted what followed: a sudden punitive turn designed to incapacitate prisoners rather than rehabilitate them. The practice of locking people up for long periods of time became the criminal justice systems organizing principle, and prisons turned into a reservation system, a quarantine zone where purportedly dangerous individuals are segregated in the name of public safety. The resulting system of mass incarceration, Garland writes, resembles

nothing so much as the Soviet gulag a string of work camps and prisons strung across a vast country, housing [more than] two million people most of whom are drawn from classes and racial groups that have become politically and economically problematic. Like the pre-modern sanctions of transportation or banishment, the prison now functions as a form of exile.

At the peak of this mania, one in every ninety-nine adults was behind bars. Since 2008, these numbers have leveled off and even posted modest declines, but the basic contours remain intact. The United States ranks first in imprisonment among significant nations, whether measured in terms of incarceration rates which remains five to ten times higher than those of other developed democracies or in terms of the absolute number of people in prison.

Hyper-policing helped make hyper-punishment possible. By the mid-2000s, police were arresting a staggering fourteen million Americans each year, excluding traffic violations up from a little more than three million in 1960. That is, the annual arrest rate as a percentage of the population nearly tripled, from 1.6 percent in 1960 to 4.5 percent in 2009. Today, almost one-third of the adult population has an arrest record.

At prevailing rates of incarceration, one in every fifteen Americans will serve time in a prison. For men the rate is more than one in nine. For African American men, the expected lifetime rate runs even higher: roughly one in three.

These figures have no precedent in the United States: not under Puritanism, not even under Jim Crow. While some observers point to significant declines in crime statistics after 1994 as evidence of these policies success, informed estimates show that locking up millions of people for long periods contributed to only as much as 27 percent and as little as 10 percent of the overall reduction in crime.

Eighth Amendment prohibitions notwithstanding, conditions in Americas crowded prisons have sunk to the level of torture. Indeed, the Supreme Courts Brown v. Plata decision affirmed that overpopulation itself constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, creating unsafe and unsanitary conditions, depriving prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care. The court found that mass incarceration is incompatible with the concept of human dignity.

In this context, structural abuses invariably flourish. Reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch catalog various forms of sanctioned and unsanctioned human rights abuses. These include beatings and chokings, extended solitary confinement in maximum security and so-called supermax prisons, the mistreatment of juvenile and mentally ill detainees, and the inhumane use of restraints, electrical devices, and attack dogs.

Modern prisons have become places of irredeemable harm and trauma. J. C. Oleson surveys these dehumanizing warehouse prisons, where guards have overseen systems of sexual slavery or orchestrated gladiator-style fights between inmates.

Sally Mann Romano describes shocking brutality in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) of Californias Pelican Bay State Prison, once touted as a model supermax prison:

It was in this unit that Vaughn Dortch, a prisoner with a life-long history of mental problems, was confined after a conviction for grand theft. There, the stark conditions of isolation caused his mental condition to dramatically deteriorate, to the point that he smeared himself repeatedly with feces and urine. Prison officials took Vaughn to the infirmary to bathe him and asked a medical technician, Irven McMillan, if he wanted a part of this bath. McMillan responded that he would take some of the brush end, referring to a hard bristle brush which is wrapped in a towel and used to clean an inmate. McMillan asked a supervisor for help, but she refused. Ultimately, six guards wearing rubber gloves held Vaughn, with his hands cuffed behind his back, in a tub of scalding water. His attorney later estimated the temperature to be about 125 degrees. McMillan proceeded with the bath while one officer pushed down on Vaughns shoulder and held his arms in place. After about fifteen minutes, when Vaughn was finally allowed to stand, his skin peeled off in sheets, hanging in large clumps around his legs. Nurse Barbara Kuroda later testified without rebuttal that she heard a guard say about the black inmate that it looks like were going to have a white boy before this is through his skin is so dirty and so rotten, its all fallen off. Vaughn received no anesthetic for more than forty-five minutes, eventually collapsed from weakness, and was taken to the emergency room. There he went into shock and almost died.

This scene recalls the opening moments of Discipline and Punish, in which Foucault graphically recounts the slow destruction of Robert-Franois Damienss living body in 1757. Of course, todays torture doesnt appear as a spectacle, staged for public edification. Nor does it resemble the touch of pain strategically administered as bitter medicine to cure the lawbreaker of his sickness a concept of corporeal punishment that goes back to Plato. In those cases, pain served a greater social purpose.

In contrast, a set of invisible and unsanctioned but nonetheless systematic practices, hidden away in the most secret parts of the penal system, has allowed brutality to flourish. Away from public scrutiny, it thrives on retributions personalized and sadistic logic, all that remains of the criminal justice systems moral purpose after rehabilitation disappeared.

Oleson summarizes the logic of the present system: [t]he prison no longer attempts to make angels of men. In modern prisons, a transformation of an entirely different kind is taking place: men are becoming animals. We should not be surprised that the modern penal system a pressure cooker of idle men packed into cramped space devolves into overt torture, for this prison was already an institution in which awful things regularly happen. Nor should we be surprised that these zealous punishments dehumanize the punishers no less than the punished.

The transition from a disciplinary to a punitive penal system happened very quickly, although its implications would go unnoticed for a long time. Arguably, we still dont fully understand the nature of this cultural shift, which exceeds the penal system and appears in a number of the institutions of everyday life. But I get ahead of myself.

The punitive turn began in the turmoil of the 1960s, a time of rapidly rising crime rates and urban disorder. In 1968, with US cities in flames and white backlash gaining momentum, congress overwhelmingly passed and Lyndon Johnson reluctantly signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. As Jonathan Simon has suggested, the act became something like a blueprint for subsequent crime-control lawmaking.

Shaped by a conservative coalition of Western Republicans and Southern Democrats, the legislation invested heavily in local law enforcement, asserted rules for police interrogations designed to countermand the liberal Warren courts decisions, including Miranda, allowed wiretapping without court approval, and, in a successful bid to secure liberal support, included modest gun control provisions.

Although the legislation did little to increase criminal penalties, it reversed the logic of earlier Great Society programs; instead of providing direct investment, the acts block grants ceded control to local agencies, often controlled by conservative governors. Most importantly, the act established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), an independent branch of the Justice Department. Blaming low conviction rates on a lack of cooperation from victims and witnesses, the LEAA launched demonstration projects aimed at recruiting citizens into the war on crime.

Tough talk about law and order articulated the strange new angers, anxieties, and resentments racking the nation in the 1960s, as Rick Perlstein has shown, and, by 1972, Richard Nixon had consolidated a new governing coalition that still dominates American politics. Nixons anti-crime narrative appealed to the traditional Republican bases rural and small-town values and incorporated conservative Southern Democrats, who viewed the civil rights movement as lawless and disorderly. It also attracted Northern hardhat conservatives and white ethnic voters alarmed at escalating crime, urban riots, and campus unrest. In short, the nascent war on crime firmed up white backlash and gave durable political form to a conservative counter-counterculture.

But race reactionaries were not the only group spreading tough law-and-order rhetoric. Vanessa Barker has described how African American activists, representing the communities hardest hit by surging crime rates, also agitated for harsher penalties for muggers, drug dealers, and first-degree murderers.

In 1973, incarceration rates began an unprecedented thirty-five-year climb, and political tides began to turn even in liberal states. That year, New York passed the most draconian drug legislation in the country. Under the Rockefeller Drug Laws, the minimum penalty for possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, or heroin was fifteen years to life. (It took until 2009 for New York to retire much of what remained of these laws.)

Ironically, the Left was helping to prepare the way for a decisive turn to the Right. Leftist activists from the civil rights, black power, and antiwar movements were leveling heavy criticism against the criminal justice system, and rightly so. Patterns of police brutality had been readily discernible triggers of urban unrest and race riots in the late 1960s, and minorities were overrepresented in the prison population (although not as much as today). Summing up New Left critiques, the American Friends Service Committees 1971 report, Struggle for Justice, blasted the US prison system not only for repressing youth, the poor, and minorities but also for paternalistically emphasizing individual rehabilitation. Rehabilitate the system, not the individual, the report urged but the point got lost in the rancorous debates that followed. As David Garland carefully shows, the ensuing nothing works consensus among progressive scholars and experts discouraged prison reform and ultimately lent weight to the arguments of conservatives, whose approach to crime has always been a simple one: Punish the bad man. Put lawbreakers behind bars and keep them there.

In 1974, Robert Martinsons influential article What Works? marked a definitive turning point. Examining rehabilitative penal systems efficacy, Martinson articulated the emerging consensus nothing works, and rehabilitation was a hopelessly misconceived goal.

Tapping into the zeitgeist, Hollywood released Death Wish that same year, followed by a host of other vigilante revenge films. Exploitation movies enlisted a familiar Victorian spectacle sexual outrages against girls and women in the service of right-wing populism. Their plotlines invariably connected liberals, civil libertarians, and high-minded elites with the criminals who tormented the ordinary citizen. Notably, however, such films carefully muted the racial backlash that had inaugurated the punitive turn: they depicted the vicious criminal as white, allowing audiences to enjoy the visceral thrill of vengeance without troubling their racial consciences.

Comprehensive crime-control bills came and went during the Reagan-Bush years, each more punitive than the last, and new social movements emerged around the politicization of crime.

The victims rights movement played an important role in this story. The movement had started inside the liberal welfare state, and proponents originally saw aid for victims of violent crime as the other half of their attempts to rehabilitate convicts. But, as conservatives recruited victims advocacy and self-help groups into the war on crime, the movement began to pit victims rights against the rights of the accused, aligning with claims that hordes of criminals were escaping justice on legal technicalities.

By 1982, the Reagan administration was drawing this movement securely within the compass of the right, as Bruce Shapiro explained. That year, the Presidents Task Force on Victims of Crime published a report based largely on anecdotal horror stories of double victimization and official unresponsiveness. Based in part on this report, congress passed the Victims of Crime Act in 1984.

This movement focused national attention on victims at a time when violent crime rates remained stubbornly high, providing the moral underpinnings for a punitive approach to crime. It persuaded voters to identify with victims, to diminish the rights of the accused, and to accept excessive policing. It aggressively lobbied for the harsher laws, enhanced penalties, and court procedures that put the prison system on steroids.

But liberal rationales also helped the punitive turn put down institutional roots. The victims rights movement had adopted feminist rhetoric around rape and domestic violence. For example, it claimed that survivors are victimized a second time by their unsatisfying experiences with the police and court system. During the same period, mainstream white feminists came to view rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence through a law-and-order lens and many started demanding harsh criminal penalties. This collusion between conservative victims rights advocates and white feminists undermined the historic liberal commitment to enlightened humanitarianism and progressive reform, especially as these related to crime and punishment.

Although no one could have known it at the time, the early 1990s represented a high-water mark in the crime wave that had begun in the early 1960s. In 1991, homicide rates crested at 9.8 per 100,000, matching the rate recorded in 1974 and almost matching the record rate of 10.2 per 100,000 set in 1980. After 1993, the thirty-year crime wave began to recede, but the punitive turn persisted.

In 1994, Democrats aggressively moved to take back the crime issue from Republicans, and a Democratically controlled congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Like the 1968 act, this 1994 legislation pumped a great deal of federal funding into local law enforcement, funding 100,000 new police officers, new prison construction, and new prevention programs in poor neighborhoods. The new legislation also included an assault weapon ban.

Unlike the 1968 act, however, the 1994 version increased penalties for hate crimes, sex crimes, violence against women, and gang-related crimes. It required states to create sex-offender registries and prodded them to adopt truth in sentencing laws that would entail longer prison sentences. It also dramatically expanded the federal death penalty and eliminated support for inmate education programs.

The 1994 act completely reversed Great Society penal welfarism, consolidating the punitive approach, which Democrats, liberals, and some progressive advocacy groups now embraced. Indeed, lawmakers drafted many of the acts sweeping provisions with liberal interest groups in mind.

We have now lived through more than fifty years of this punitive turn. Its resilience resists simple explanations. Originally a conservative phenomenon, it condensed fears over rising crime rates with the political reaction to the upheavals of the 1960s. In its middle period, liberal aims and rhetoric helped spread the logic of incapacitation, enshrining the victim as the subject of governance and treating the offender like toxic waste to be disposed of or contained. Sensational journalism contributed to this shift, honing the publics focus on the victim, stoking panic and outrage.

Successive waves of draconian legislation targeted outsized monsters: drug dealers, repeat offenders, gang members, sexual predators, terrorists and their sympathizers. Americas zeal for punishment has been bolstered not by one or two causes but by a variety of changing factors. Today, perhaps, it persists as much out of institutional inertia as anything else.

If my thumbnail history is accurate, then we must recognize many of the prevailing critiques of American punishment today as either erroneous or partial and inadequate.

For example, we sometimes see scholarly work that treats mass incarceration as an instance of Foucaults theorized disciplinary system. It would be difficult to imagine a more confused approach. No doubt, todays system has retained many of the disciplinary regimes features: the existence of an institution called the prison; forms of power that penetrate even the smallest details of everyday life; the production of a carceral archipelago that exports surveillance from the penal institution to the entire social body. But all this tells us is that institutions communicate with each other: such examples of connectivity do not belong to the disciplinary mode of power alone.

In fact, the current regime of power represents a radical break with the disciplinary regimes logic and aims: by the early 1970s, the United States was renouncing the corrective focus of penal welfarism, and it now deploys supplementary surveillance beyond the walls of the prison not to rehabilitate offenders or regulate conduct but to catch lawbreakers and feed more and more people into the prison system.

Scholars who study the penal system have developed a large body of work connecting mass incarceration to neoliberal economic policies of deregulation and privatization. Some posit a neoliberal cause and a punitive effect, while others argue that deregulation and privatization exacerbated social inequalities and therefore fostered a fear of crime, ultimately producing more surveillance, policing, and incarceration.

Bernard Harcourt provides a broader view, meticulously examining how classical liberal and neoliberal theories approach policing and punishment as market functions and regulators. In my view, however, he never quite demonstrates a strong connection between such models and present-day lawmaking, penalties, and practices.

No doubt, these analyses express an elemental truth about capitalism and coercion. The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist, as an apologist for both once put it. But the language that describes societys humdrum workings cannot explain systemic changes or historic shifts. Nor should we assume that whatever intensifies capitalism will also intensify coercive tactics. After all, neoliberalism is a global phenomenon, but the punitive state remains distinctly American, at least among developed democracies.

In any case, arguments that link neoliberalism and mass incarceration do not match the actual historical trajectory or the varied political currents in play. The punitive turn, as I have sketched it, began in the mid-to-late 1960s, but neoliberal policies did not begin gaining ascendency until the late 1970s.

Certainly, mass incarceration has had large economic effects. Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett estimated that, during the 1990s, Americas zeal for incarceration shaved two percentage points off unemployment figures. Roughly 4 percent of the civilian labor force either works for the penal system or works to put people in prison. If one includes private security positions and workers who monitor or guard other laborers, the results are striking: in an increasingly garrisonized economy, one out of every four or five American laborers is employed in what Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev call guard labor.

No doubt, the American variant of neoliberalism used these facts to help establish itself. Indeed, one might conclude that the punitive turn, with its disdain for rule-breakers, losers, and outcasts, paved the way for the neoliberal turn, with its love of the market.

Another common line of criticism begins by recognizing the role liberals have played in constructing the punitive state. This scholarship conveys essential truths, but it too often overcorrects the prevailing storyline and erases valuable points of reference.

Naomi Murakawas book, The First Civil Right, is a case in point. The author scrutinizes New Deal timidity in the face of racial violence and calls attention to prominent Democrats and liberals who helped build the prison state by pursuing color-blind laws and modern police forces. In telling this important story, however, Murakawa blurs the important distinction between the Great Society approach to law enforcement and the punitive turn that followed.

Had the Democratic Party stayed its fundamentally social-democratic course, had it kept with the penal systems reformist program, had the policies of Johnsons Attorney General Ramsey Clark remained in place, and this is no small matter had the criminal justice system continued to develop alternatives to incarceration, the United States would not have evolved into a carceral state.

It is of course possible that prison rates would still have risen with the crime rates between the 1970s and the 1990s, but they would not have exploded, and mass incarceration would have remained the stuff of dystopian fiction.

Many activists, journalists, and scholars have highlighted draconian drug penalties as a primary cause of mass incarceration. To be sure, the war on drugs played a significant role in the prison systems growth, especially during the 1980s. But it represents just one element of the larger war on crime and has been slowly winding down since the early 2000s.

Today, drug offenders represent only about 15 percent of sentenced prisoners. While this is by no means a negligible number, we need a wider perspective. Enhanced penalties for a variety of offenses drug possession and distribution, surely, but also violent crimes, repeat offenses, crimes committed with a firearm, and sex crimes have all fueled the growth of the penal system. One often-overlooked population is parole violators, who represented 26 percent of prison admissions in 2013. The fact that the parole system, devised to reduce the prison population, now enlarges it gives us important clues about the self-perpetuating nature of the system today.

Finally, sociologists, criminologists, and critical race scholars have closely scrutinized the racial disparities in arrest, prosecution, and incarceration rates. Many conclude that mass incarceration constitutes a modern regime of racial domination or a new Jim Crow.

This perspective highlights important facts. While African Americans make up only 13 percent of drug users, they account for more than a third of drug arrestees, more than half of those convicted on drug charges, and 58 percent of those ultimately sent to prison on drug charges. When convicted, a black person can expect to serve almost as much time for a drug offense as a white person would serve for a violent offense.

These statistics demonstrate how race-neutral laws can produce race-biased effects, especially when police, prosecutors, juries, and judges make racialized judgments all along the way. Needless to say, had the mania for incarceration devastated white middle- or even working-class communities as much as it has black lower- and working-class communities, it would have proved politically intolerable very quickly.

But the racial critique consistently downplays the effects of mass incarceration on non-black communities. The incarceration rate for Latinos has also risen, and the confinement and processing of undocumented immigrants has become especially harsh. And although white men are imprisoned at a substantially lower rate than either black or brown men, there are still more white men in prison, in both raw and per capita numbers, than at any time in US history.

In mid-2007, 773 of every 100,000 white males were imprisoned, roughly one-sixth the rate for black males (4,618 per 100,000) but more than three times the average rate of male confinement from the 1920s through 1972. As James Forman Jr argues, the racial critiques focus on African American imprisonment rates expressly discourages the cross-racial coalitions that will be required to dismantle mass incarceration.

In his important contribution to this debate, Forman has outlined the racial critiques main limitations. First, he argues that this analysis minimizes the historical effect of spiking crime rates on public opinion and lawmaking. By blaming only white backlash for harsher penalties, the racial critique obscures substantial levels of black support for these policies.

Second, Forman shows that the often-invoked Jim Crow system makes for a poor analogy with mass incarceration. Jim Crow was a legal caste system that took no notice of class distinctions among black people. By contrast, todays punitive system does not affect all African Americans the same way; rather, it predisposes the poorest and least educated to incarceration, and the impact of mass incarceration is concentrated in black inner-city neighborhoods. (As Bruce Western has shown, the risk of going to prison for college-educated black men actually decreased slightly between 1979 and 1999.)

Third, because of its emphasis on drug laws, the racial critique skirts the important question of violent crime. Roughly half the prisoners now in custody were convicted of violent crimes, and racial disparities among this population are even wider. [An] effective response to mass incarceration, Forman concludes, will require directly confronting the issue of violent crime and developing policy responses that can compete with the punitive approach that currently dominates American criminal policy.

We might make a similar argument about the racial critique of abusive policing, which highlights important injustices but fails to provide a comprehensive picture of the whole system. Police do kill more black than white men per capita, a disparity that only increases in the smaller subset of unarmed men killed in encounters with police. But in raw numbers cops kill almost twice as many white men, and non-blacks make up about 74 percent of the people killed by police. We cannot dismiss these numbers as collateral damage from a racialized system that targets black bodies.

Examining the profile of these unarmed men is revelatory. Statistically, an unarmed white man has a slightly smaller chance of being killed by law enforcement than he does of being killed by lightning; an unarmed black mans is a few times more. In either case, these rates are many times higher than in other affluent democracies, where violent crime rates are lower, the citizenry is less armed, and police if armed at all are less trigger-happy.

Whether black or white, the victims of police shootings have a lot in common: many were experiencing psychotic episodes either due to chronic mental illness or drug use when the police were called. Many had prior arrest records or were otherwise previously known to the police. Whether black, white, or brown, the victims of police shootings are disproportionately sub-proletarian or lower working-class.

Exceptions occur the white middle-class teen shot in the back while fleeing from the police; the black child spotted in the park and hastily shot with what turned out to be a toy gun but most victims appear to have lived lives of extreme precarity, variously marked by racial discrimination, poverty, mental illness, and social abandonment.

Thus far I have described the rise of the carceral state in largely negative terms: what happened in the late 1960s was not only a war on drugs nor a new system of racial domination but something wider. A succession of changing motives and rationales supported the punitive turn, and the urge to punish came from an array of sectors and institutions. The time has come to sum up my analysis in more positive terms.

First, beginning in the 1970s, all social institutions turned toward detection, capture, and sanction. A broad-spectrum cultural shift away from values of forbearance, forgiveness, and redemption animated this transformation. The punitive turn was, first and foremost, a cultural turn.

Many observers today look skeptically at cultural explanations of this sort, which claim that people do x because they believe y. From structuralism to poststructuralism and beyond, a cavalcade of theoretical currents promoted an abstract idea of culture, severing it from history and political economy. In highlighting the cultural element in these developments, however, I do not mean to suggest that culture always sets the course of historical events, only that it sometimes does a point that Friedrich Engels was also keen to make.

Further, I do not assert that once the desire to punish got into peoples heads, it spread uniformly throughout society, nor would I argue that this cultural shift sprang into being ex nihilo.

At its inception, the punitive turn found fertile ground in preexisting institutions of race and class. As it developed, political actors and moral entrepreneurs reworked received ideas, some of them older than the republic, some of them torn from the headlines. The United States long history of capitalism and various forms of power all participated in the carceral states development.

Second, federal legislation played a key role in institutionalizing and hardening this cultural change. This was not merely a question of mechanizing the law with mandatory minimum sentences or three strikes provisions but of automating a system of interconnecting institutions.

The nucleus of this development was already present in the 1968 Safe Streets Act, aimed at expanding and modernizing policing, and in the LEAA, designed to increase prosecution and conviction rates. From this start, police forces grew, became more proactive, and made more arrests.

Securing greater cooperation from more victims, prosecutors brought more cases to court often with higher charges. Responding to the shifting mood, judges sentenced more defendants. Across four decades, legislators passed laws that criminalized more activities, increased sentences, and expressly barred compromise, early release, consideration of mitigating circumstances, and so on. Put simply, the law became more punitive. Such mechanisms could persist under changing conditions because a vast institutional network spanning the state and civil society actively produced fresh rationales for them.

The punitive turn was consolidated into a punitive avalanche.

The result was a transformed system, in which prison, parole, and so on were stripped of their disciplinary aims (reeducation, rehabilitation, reintegration) and reoriented toward strictly punitive goals (detection, apprehension, incapacitation). Horkheimer and Adorno would have called this instrumental rationality: a nightmare version of bureaucracy that suspends critical reasoning and tries to establish the most efficient means to achieve an irrational end.

The present moment seems propitious for change. Violent crime rates have fallen to levels not seen since the early 1960s, reducing public pressure for harsh laws and tough sentences. Upbeat journalists periodically write stories covering more rational approaches to crime and punishment in even conservative states. The criminal justice systems racial disparities have become a point of national embarrassment, and, as early as 2007, the United States Sentencing Commission began retroactively intervening to reduce the sentences of some federal inmates convicted on crack-cocaine charges. Polls suggest that Americans across the political spectrum largely support reducing the number of people in prison.

Improvements have moved slowly, however. The prison population fell from a peak of 2.3 million in 2008 to 2.1 million today, but more substantial declines do not appear to be forthcoming. Thanks to our federal system, substantially reforming the carceral regime will prove difficult: it will demand revising thousands of laws and practices at mostly local levels.

Meanwhile, the Left is divided over how to imagine and advocate for our goals. Prison abolitionism has gathered steam among some activists, although it shows little sign of winning over the wider public. With evangelical zeal, abolitionists insist that we must choose between abolition and reform, while discounting reform as a viable option. The history of the prison system, they say, is a history of reform and look where that has gotten us.

I have tried to show here whats wrong with this argument. It is remarkably innocent of history. In fact, the history of reform was interrupted some time around 1973 and what we have had instead for the past five decades is a history of counter-reform. The unconscionable conditions we see today are not inevitable byproducts of the prison; they are the results of the punitive turn.

Abolitionists base their approach on an analogy between the prison system and chattel slavery. This is a strained analogy at best, and it only appears convincing in light of the oversized and unusually cruel American penal system. Slavery was an institution for the extraction of unfree labor over a persons (and his or her childrens) lifetime; the prison is an institution that imposes unfreedom for a set period of time as punishment for serious infractions historically with the express bargain that at least theoretically the lawbreaker was to be improved and reintegrated into society. The better analogy might be with other disciplinary institutions, which also to varying degrees curb freedoms in the name of personal and social good: the school, the hospital, the psychiatric institution.

Abolitionists usually respond to the obvious criticism but every country has prisons by citing Angela Daviss polemical work, Are Prisons Obsolete? Slavery, too, was once universal, they point out; it required the abolitionists utopian vision to put an end to that unjust institution.

But this, too, misstates history. By the time American abolitionism got fully underway in the 1830s, much of Europe and parts of Latin American had already partially or wholly abolished slavery. The Haitian Revolution had dealt the institution a major blow, and slavery was imploding in parts of the Caribbean. A world without slavery was scarcely unthinkable. The same cannot be said of prisons: all signs suggest that the public and not only in the United States believes that prisons are legitimate.

Abolitionist arguments usually gesture at restorative justice, imagining that some sorts of community institutions will oversee non-penal forms of restitution. But here, we are very far out on a limb. Such models might more or less work in small-scale, face-to-face indigenous or religious communities. But, in modern cities, it is implausible to think that families, kinship networks, neighborhood organizations, and the like can adjudicate reconciliation in a fair, consistent manner.

In short, abolitionism promises a heaven-on-earth that will never come to pass. What we really need to do is fight for measures that have already proven humane, effective, and consistent with social and criminal justice.

Consider Finland. In the 1950s, it had high crime rates and a punitive penal system with high incarceration rates and terrible prison conditions. In these regards Finland then was much like the United States today. After decades of humanitarian and social-democratic reforms, the country now has less than one-tenth the rate of incarceration as the United States. Its prisons resemble dormitories with high-quality health care, counseling services, and educational opportunities. Not coincidentally, its prison system does not breed anger, resentment, and recidivism.

Finlands system aligns with that of other Nordic and Northern European nations, all of whom remained continuously on the path of reform. There, small-scale penal institutions are insulated from public opinion, with its periodic rages against lawbreakers, and prioritize genuine criminological expertise. They have expressly rehabilitative aims, working not only to punish but also to repair the person and restore him to society. Penalties top out at around twenty years, consistent with the finding that longer sentences have neither a rehabilitative nor a deterring effect. Many Scandinavian prisons have no walls and allow prisoners to leave during the day for jobs or shopping. Bedrooms have windows, not bars. Kitchens and common areas resemble Ikea displays.

Rather than call for the complete abolition of prisons a policy unlikely to win broad public support the American left should fight to introduce these conditions into our penal system. We should strive not for pie-in-the-sky imaginings but for working models already achieved in Scandinavian and other social democracies. We should demand dramatically better prison conditions, the release of nonviolent first offenders under other forms of supervision, discretionary parole for violent offenders who provide evidence of rehabilitation, decriminalization of simple drug possession, and a broad revision of sentencing laws. Such demands would attract support from a number of prominent social movements, creating a strong base from which we can begin to build a stronger, universal safety net.

Institutions become obsolete only when more effective and more progressive alternatives become available. The poorhouse disappeared when its functions were replaced by social security, public assistance, health care clinics, and mental and psychiatric hospitals. We see no such emergent institutions on the horizon today that might render prisons a thing of the past. What we see instead are examples of criminal justice systems that have continued reforming, modulating, humanizing, shrinking, and decentralizing the functions of the prison. Creating just such a correctional system, based on genuinely rehabilitative goals consistent with our view of social justice, should be a main task of socialists today.

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How to End Mass Incarceration - Jacobin - Jacobin magazine