The Weekly Sift

The future ain’t what it used to be.

— attributed to Yogi Berra

This week everybody was talking about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech”

and just how much has or hasn’t changed since then.

Nobody who was alive in 1963 (I was six) can honestly say that nothing has changed. In the white working class where I grew up, white supremacy — the idea that whites are inherently superior and ought to be superior under the law — was a mainstream position. Supremacists didn’t sneak around and use code words and build camps out in the woods, they announced their ideas openly (saying “nigger” if they wanted to) and were included in respectable conversations.

So yes, things have changed. But changed a half-century worth? That’s a more dismal question. It’s like re-reading the science fiction of the era. By now we were supposed to have flying cars, Moon colonies, limitless energy, and maybe even teleporters or time machines. I like smart phones and a black president and all, but 2013 was supposed to be the effing FUTURE. Anything was supposed to be possible.

It sure doesn’t feel like anything is possible.

and the school shooting that didn’t happen

Antoinette Tuff showed that sometimes a bad guy with a gun can be stopped by a compassionate woman without one.

and the violence in Egypt and Syria

Speaking of dismal, the maps in some of my grade-school textbooks still showed Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic. In four years we’ll have the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War (which kept 10-year-old me glued to the TV during a sick day). Who thought we’d be here?

This week brought new reports of the Assad regime using chemical weapons. After the Bush administration’s shenanigans about Iraq’s WMDs, you always have to look for independent sources on stuff like this. So here’s what Nobel-prize-winning Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) says:

Three hospitals in Syria’s Damascus governorate that are supported by the international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have reported to MSF that they received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in less than three hours on the morning of Wednesday, August 21, 2013. Of those patients, 355 reportedly died.

… “MSF can neither scientifically confirm the cause of these symptoms nor establish who is responsible for the attack,” said Dr Janssens. “However, the reported symptoms of the patients, in addition to the epidemiological pattern of the events—characterised by the massive influx of patients in a short period of time, the origin of the patients, and the contamination of medical and first aid workers—strongly indicate mass exposure to a neurotoxic agent. This would constitute a violation of international humanitarian law, which absolutely prohibits the use of chemical and biological weapons.”

President Obama has promised a “serious response“, and now we’re left to wonder what consequences America can inflict without doing our interests more harm than good.

In yesterday’s NYT, strategist Edward Luttwak (never a bleeding heart) claimed that victory by either the Iran-backed regime or the jihadist rebels would be bad for the United States. So:

Maintaining a stalemate should be America’s objective. And the only possible method for achieving this is to arm the rebels when it seems that Mr. Assad’s forces are ascendant and to stop supplying the rebels if they actually seem to be winning.

Lovely.

As for Egypt, I recommend reading “Egypt in Crisis: Ten Observations” by University of Illinois Professor Feisal G. Mohamed. The gist: Egypt’s military is a vast institution with no foreign enemy to fight, so it’s mainly interested in extending its own power. There’s not much hope of balancing that power until the Islamists and the democrats come together in a movement that genuinely feels both Islamic and democratic. So far that’s not happening.

and what to do about Russia’s anti-gay laws

Dan Savage says boycott Russian vodka, but Villanova’s Mark Lawrence Schrad says not to. Since I never drink vodka no one can tell whether I’m boycotting or not. So I don’t find either choice very satisfying.

The bigger question is how to handle the Winter Olympics, which will start in February in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. If you are gay or just in the habit of correcting people who say incredibly ignorant things about homosexuality, it’s really not safe to go to Russia now. Legally, “propaganda of homosexualism to minors” (i.e., tweeting that gays and lesbians are people just like you and me) can get a foreigner fined, deported, or jailed for up to 15 days. And then there’s the illegal stuff. PolicyMic reports:

Against this backdrop, violent attacks on gays or “suspect gays” are becoming commonplace.

If gay athletes (or reporters or fans) aren’t safe at the Olympics, or if they’re safe only as long as they keep their mouths shut, why are we sending any people there at all?

But what’s the alternative? Given the huge logistics that surround an Olympics, moving the Games somewhere else really isn’t feasible. I also hate the idea of boycotting the Winter Olympics, since that affects mainly athletes, most of whom only get one shot at an Olympic medal during their prime.

The only satisfactory outcome I can imagine is a massive protest. Individual protests (as when Tommy Smith and John Carlos gave a black power salute from the medalists’ podium in Mexico City in 1968) would be welcome, but I hope the entire U.S. delegation plans something together. Sneak a rainbow flag into the opening ceremonies.  Attach a rainbow-flag patch to the standard uniform. Make a statement for freedom.

and that photographer in New Mexico

You may have missed this, but the religious right is going nuts (read the 3300+ comments at National Review) over a straightforward ruling the New Mexico Supreme Court made Thursday.

A New Mexico photographer refused to shoot a lesbian commitment ceremony, saying that she photographed only “traditional weddings”. This is a fairly obvious violation of New Mexico’s Human Rights Act, which states:

It is an unlawful discriminatory practice for: [skip over paragraphs A-E]

F. any person in any public accommodation to make a distinction, directly or indirectly, in offering or refusing to offer its services, facilities, accommodations or goods to any person because of race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, spousal affiliation or physical or mental handicap

The Court’s ruling isn’t long (30 pages including a concurrence) because the law is so clear. Justice Bosson’s concurring opinion addresses the “religious freedom” issue directly:

In a constitutional form of government, personal, religious, and moral beliefs, when acted upon to the detriment of someone else’s rights, have constitutional limits. One is free to believe, think and speak as one’s conscience, or God, dictates. But when actions, even religiously inspired, conflict with other constitutionally protected rights—in Loving [i.e., Loving v Virginia, the case that established the right to interracial marriage] the right to be free from invidious racial discrimination—then there must be some accommodation. … [The photographer’s] refusal to do business with the same-sex couple in this case, no matter how religiously inspired, was an affront to the legal rights of that couple, the right granted them under New Mexico law to engage in the commercial marketplace free from discrimination.

As I have stated on this blog many times, the principle is simple: When you open your business to the public, you have to serve the whole public. You don’t get to decide who is or isn’t included in “the public”.

and Private Manning

Wednesday, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for releasing a vast cache of secret documents through WikiLeaks, including hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables. He’ll be eligible for parole in ten years.

Manning’s case (like that of Edward Snowden and Vietnam-era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg) raises the fundamental conflict of a system that keeps so many secrets:

• The system can’t survive if every individual makes his or her own judgments about what secrets to keep.
• At some point, you have to make your own judgments.

It’s the nature of secrecy that a person’s pledge to keep secrets is never really an informed choice. Only after you start learning secrets do you understand what your pledge means. Sometimes you sign up for a secret-keeping position because you believe you’re fighting for the good guys, but after you start learning secrets you come to believe that you’re fighting for the bad guys. Or you sign up to keep secrets from the enemy, and end up keeping them from your own people.

Then what?

That said, I only have a limited amount of sympathy for Manning, because he could not possibly have read all the material he released or thought carefully about the consequences of releasing it — something I believe every responsible whistleblower ought to do.

Finally, I know that some people will consider this simplistic and naive, but the best solution to the whistleblower problem is to keep fewer secrets and do fewer morally objectionable things. The more nasty secrets our government has, the more likely it is that somebody on the inside will grow a conscience and tell the world.

Another twist in the Manning story was his announcement Thursday that he wants to be considered a woman and addressed as Chelsea. Manning wants to undergo hormone therapy, which is not part of the healthcare provided by military prisons.

A person’s gotta do what a person’s gotta do, but I consider this twist unfortunate, because a story that connects whistleblowers and the transgendered isn’t going to help either group. National Review has already published the predictable they’re-just-delusional article about the transgendered (and ThinkProgress responded). I’m sure somebody is already writing a trangendered-people-can’t-be-trusted-with-secrets article and a whistleblowers-are-mentally-ill article.

and what voters are telling Congress

Nothing I’ve heard in the last two weeks has changed my belief that we’re heading towards a major budget crisis, either when the new fiscal year starts in October or when we hit the debt ceiling in November. The gist of the conversation between the Republican leadership and their conservative base during the August recess — which I detail in How Republican Congressmen Spent Their Summer Vacation — has been the leaders’ warning that shutting down the government to stop ObamaCare is a doomed strategy, and the base responding “So?”

The Far Right really wants to see a Charge of the Light Brigade, and they may get it.

and you also might be interested in …

I’ve been working on an article summarizing what we now know about the NSA’s domestic spying. The story has been a bit hard to follow, since startling revelations are usually followed by the release of details that make the revealed program look a bit less startling, and then later we find out there’s a loophole in those details or another program entirely that is even worse. And so on.

Space considerations are pushing that article off to next week’s Sift. In the meantime I’ll leave you with TPM’s summary.

The scariest story I saw this week was Bloomberg’s “China Coal-Fired Economy Dying of Thirst as Mines Lack Water“.

About half of China’s rivers have dried up since 1990 and those that remain are mostly contaminated. Without enough water, coal can’t be mined, new power stations can’t run and the economy can’t grow. At least 80 percent of the nation’s coal comes from regions where the United Nations says water supplies are either “stressed” or in “absolute scarcity.”

… Severe water pollution affects 75 percent of China’s rivers and lakes and 28 percent are unsuitable even for agricultural use, according to the 2012 book “China’s Environmental Challenges,” by Judith Shapiro, director of the Masters program in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development at the School of International Service at American University in Washington.

Slate’s David Weigel coins the perfect phrase to describe right-wing talking heads’ repeated attempts to equate some black-on-white crime with Trayvon Martin’s shooting: “the search for the Bizarro Travyon“. The latest attempt fails for the same reason all the others did: The Martin story was never about white-on-black crime, it was about official indifference to black victims.

[U]ntil some white teen is killed and the killer walks for 40-odd days before being charged, the search for a Bizarro Trayvon will be fruitless.

Media Matters notes the difference between Obama-birtherism and Ted-Cruz-birtherism:

Absent from Hannity’s attack on “the left” was any specific example of a high-profile liberal or Democrat who has actually questioned Cruz’s eligibility. That differentiates Cruz birtherism from Obama birtherism, which has adherents in the House Republican caucus, was endorsed by Hannity’s Fox News colleagues, and became an absurd national spectacle in early 2011 owing to the incessant agitating of fake Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The two strains also differ in that no one doubts Cruz’s U.S. citizenship or his place of birth, while the animating principle of Obama birthers is that Obama is lying about where he was born and engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to falsify documents to that effect.

Finally, let’s close with something optimistic

OK, at least the Future gave us this much:

I didn’t want to be right, but sadly I am.

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg
interview with Associated Press
July 24, 2013

This week the conversation about race continued

CNN’s Don Lemon did a “No Talking Points” segment whose final bottom-of-the-screen admonitions was “Black people. Clean up your act!” In response, hip-hop activist Jay Smooth schooled him:

There are two types of advice that people usually give. There’s advice that you give to try and help someone with their problems, and then there’s advice that you give to help yourself feel better about not knowing how to help them with their problems. And the difference is all in the context.

The specifics of Lemon’s eat-your-vegetables guidance is unobjectionable, from “Pull up your pants” to “Just because you can have a baby, it doesn’t mean you should.” But in the context of a black man speaking to CNN’s mostly white audience at a time when white people are blaming black culture for Trayvon Martin’s death and refusing delivery on any talk of systemic racism, Jay Smooth is right: “His advice was f**king terrible.”

No doubt black culture could improve, just as white culture could improve. But white people are looking for ways to ignore or wash their hands of the systemic racism in the justice system. Don Lemon gave them one.

The comment thread on last week’s Sadly, the national conversation on race has to start here is worth a look.

Best thing I ran into this week: Peggy McIntosh’s TED talk “How Studying Privilege Systems Can Strengthen Compassion“. Terrible title, but an excellent message, not just about recognizing white privilege, but moving forward from there without getting trapped in liberal guilt.

And lots of people were talking about the increasing chaos in Congress

Another one of the basic, didn’t-used-to-be-controversial appropriations bills failed this week, and Congress took its summer recess with no plan for getting back on track. Increasingly it’s looking like the House might shut down the government in October, not because that’s part of somebody’s hardline negotiating strategy, but because the Republican majority is too fractured to pass anything. I flesh out that scenario in Chaos in Congress.

and the Ariel Castro sentence

The man who kidnapped three Cleveland women and kept them as sex slaves for years got life without parole plus a thousand years. Some radioactive waste doesn’t have to be held that long.

But we should be keeping tabs on voting rights

which I do this week in Voting Rights one month after Shelby.

and you also might be interested in …

This guy is likely to be the Republican candidate for Congress in my district. ObamaCare “is a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.” Sometimes I think the whole point of Tea Party rhetoric is to screw discourse up so badly that there’s no chance of reasoning together about our common problems.

The issue isn’t even whether corporations have freedom of religion. It’s whether their God is bigger than your God.

Every time it starts to sound like the NSA’s spying might be adequately controlled, something else comes out.

If it seems like the Republican Party is more anti-environment than it used to be, that’s because it is. Four former Republican EPA chiefs just called for action on climate change. If any Republican leaders in Congress or potential Republican presidential candidates have signed on to their program, I haven’t heard about it.

Google’s support for anti-science Senator James Inhofe is hurting their image:

The WSJ and New York Sun worry that women want Janet Yellin to become Fed chair just because she’s a woman.

Jonathan Chait points out what ought to be obvious: Women are used to being told that men would like to appoint women to powerful positions, but can’t find any who are qualified. (Finding that elusive qualified female was why Mitt Romney needed his “binders full of women“.) But now that the obvious and most qualified person is a woman, men seem to be saying “Not so fast.” That’s the source of the conflict, not “liberal diversity police”.

Here‘s Allison Lundergan Grimes’ announcement of her Kentucky senate campaign. Tough, charming, young, female, with real Kentucky roots — I think I’d be scared if I were Mitch McConnell and had to defend my role in creating the logjam in Washington. Recent polls show a tight race, if Mitch can make it past the Tea Party in his primary.

Lauren Green’s interview with author Reza Aslan — where she seemed dumbfounded by the notion that a scholar who practices Islam might write a book about Jesus — has been touted as possibly “the single most cringe-worthy, embarrassing interview” in the history of Fox News. (But Salon points out that there’s a lot of competition for that honor.)

Even if Aslan were writing as a Muslim rather than as a scholar, a Muslim writing about Jesus is no more suspicious than a Christian writing about Moses. Muslims revere Jesus as a forerunner of Mohammad — much as Christians revere Moses, the central figure of Judaism.

To me, this is all about projection. Right-wing Christians are quick to assume that a Muslim writing about Jesus must be doing a hit piece, because they have done so many hit pieces on Mohammad since 9-11.

With all the hoopla, you’d think they were revealing the 12th Imam, not the 12th Doctor Who.

The problem with laws that allow journalists not to reveal their sources is that “journalist” has no obvious definition.

Columbia Journalism Review does a retrospective on media coverage of the IRS scandal-that-wasn’t.

That big peak on the left is all the it-looks-really-bad speculation early in the story, and that flat-lining to the right is the non-coverage as the facts came out and showed that nothing really bad actually happened. Maddowblog’s Steve Benen sums up:

It’s tempting to chalk this up to human nature — there’s a major event, and everyone pays attention, but as time passes, our attention wanes and we lose interest. It happens all the time, and it’s understandable.

I’d argue, however, that what happened with the IRS story is something slightly different. … Outlets didn’t move on when nothing happened; outlets instead made a conscious decision not to report when all kinds of things happened — things that made the story itself appear baseless. In other words, in this case, the media only cared about the allegations from Republicans, not the evidence that proved those allegations false.

Let’s end with something fun: bears pole-dancing

Those motion-sensitive cameras out in the woods are recording some amusing things.

Only white people think the opposite of racism is “race-blind.”

– Jack Cheng, Trying Not to See Race Means Closing Your Eyes to Reality

How could I make her conscious of the racialization process to which her own Euro-American community had subjected her? I invented the Race Game and invited her to play it. For the next seven days, she must use the descriptive term white whenever she mentioned the name of one of her Euro-American cohorts. She must say, for example, “My white husband Phil,” or “my white friend Julie,” or “my lovely white child Jackie.” I guaranteed her that if she did this and then met me for lunch, I could answer her question. We never had lunch together again.

— Thandeka, Learning to be White (1999)

This week everybody was talking about topics that spin out of the Zimmerman case

like race

The most-discussed statement came from President Obama.

Obama did a subtle piece of framing here that is key in understanding the way the conversation has been going. The initial reactions to the verdict were to re-argue the evidence and the law, claiming that the jury got it wrong or that the prosecution or the judge botched the case. Obama doesn’t do that, and neither have most of the other commenters after the first day or two.

Later commenters have moved past that, largely because it’s a done deal. Like arguing umpire calls in baseball, it’s not going to change anything. Instead, they want to argue the justice issue rather than the legal issue. Forget whether the verdict is correct in a narrow legal sense; is it just? Is this what we want our laws to say and how we want our system to work?

Conservatives went both ways on Obama’s remarks, some polite, others not so much.

I channel-scanned through this large-panel discussion on Sean Hannity’s show (where Sean did his best to frame the discussion away from the justice issue) and felt like I was in some parallel universe. There is an odd notion on the Right that America’s race problem is created by people talking about America’s race problem. The last word in this segment goes to talk-radio’s Monica Crowley:

What [the race hustlers] have done is what the Left has done for decades, which is that they need the division. They have divided us by race, class, gender, ethnic group, age. They continue to do it because they need the divisions in order to divide and conquer. It isn’t about bringing America together, it’s about dividing us.

To me, the most striking thing about the pro-Zimmerman commentary (and Anderson Cooper’s interview with a juror) is how easily whites enter Zimmerman’s point of view and repeat his claims as facts (rather than treating them with the suspicion due someone trying to justify killing an unarmed teen), while Martin remains an Other; his point of view is not imagined and everything about him is open to suspicious interpretation, if not outright misrepresentation.

By contrast, the most effective liberal commentary brought Martin’s point of view back into the case. The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson wrote “I still don’t understand what Trayvon Martin was supposed to do.”

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris Perry raised the point of view of black parents: Where is a safe place to raise your kids? You leave the majority-black inner city to escape crime, but in the supposedly safe white suburbs your kids are under constant suspicion that can turn violent.

And the NYT’s Charles Blow raised another parental question:

We used to say not to run in public because that might be seen as suspicious, like they’d stolen something. But according to Zimmerman, Martin drew his suspicion at least in part because he was walking too slowly.

So what do I tell my boys now? At what precise pace should a black man walk to avoid suspicion?

And lest you think that black people had all the good insights, listen to 13emcha explain why she’s not Trayvon Martin.

and stand-your-ground laws

It’s nutty: With lax concealed-carry laws, you never know who might be armed, so it’s reasonable to be afraid of almost everybody. If you’re afraid enough of somebody, shooting him is self-defense. Which means the other guy has reason to be afraid of you and shoot first.

President Obama was pointing in that direction with these comments:

I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?  And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened?  And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.

Mark Fiore made a biting animation about Stand Your Ground, the Daily Show’s John Oliver blasted Florida for having it, and The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik wrote a fascinating piece on its deep roots in American culture, going back to dueling and a speech about armed violence that Abraham Lincoln gave near the beginning of his career; we tolerate vigilante and other outside-the-law violence

because the symbolic identity that guns provide matters more than the rational calculation of the harm that they do. When, Lincoln wondered, would Americans outgrow this feeling? In 1838, he thought it would happen soon. And here we are, still wondering.

I think irrational laws of any kind give more power to prejudice, because they rationalize multiple outcomes. In Stand Your Ground cases, for example, a jury could interpret the law strictly (giving the prosecution the impossible job to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the shooter wasn’t afraid for his life) and not convict, or it could fall back on the common sense that the law violates: “Come on! He provoked a confrontation with an unarmed teen and then shot him. Of course he’s guilty.” Either position can seem rational, but which one your mind drifts to depends largely on the prejudices you start with.

That’s why George Zimmerman is free and Marissa Alexander got 20 years.

and profiling

Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf points to the most disturbing thing about President Obama nominating Ray Kelly to head the Homeland Security Department: He’s an open proponent and practitioner of racial, ethnic, and religious profiling. If profiling is bad when George Zimmerman does it, why is it OK when the NYPD does it?

But also non-Zimmerman issues like the filibuster

Senate Democrats agreed (for now) not to eliminate the filibuster on executive appointments, while Republicans agreed to allow confirmation votes on seven Obama appointees. Republicans had been using the filibuster in an unprecedented way: to hobble agencies they don’t like rather than object to individual appointees. As a result of the agreement, the National Labor Relations Board will not have to shut down in August and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will get its first confirmed head.

But if you’re thinking Congress might be getting its act together to govern rather than just block everything Obama proposes, there’s still the House. Sunday Speaker Boehner brushed off the current session’s lack of accomplishments: “We should not be judged on how many new laws we create. We ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal.”

and Detroit’s possible bankruptcy

Atlantic has it covered. Salon points out that a Detroit bankruptcy will raise borrowing costs for all cities.

There are two main angles to consider this from: First, an accounting angle that identifies the specific bad decisions or mismanagement got the city in trouble. The final straw is a revision in the formula for computing pension liabilities, which could bite a lot of city and state governments.

Second, the larger story of the local economy’s death-spiral. The population is down 26% since 2000 and is less than half of its size in 1950. And there aren’t jobs for the people who are stayed: Detroit has an 18% unemployment rate. Even if you could install brilliant, impeccable management, it’s hard to know what to do with a city that was built for a larger, richer population.

and yet another example of conservative pundit profiteering

Erick Erickson is the latest to get caught, show no shame, and pay no price. I review the history and some of the logic behind it in Keeping the Con in Conservatism.

and you also might be interested in …

The Koch brothers are spending a lot of money airing an ad to raise fear, uncertainty, and doubt about ObamaCare. Dr. Sanjeev Sriram — a real pediatrician, not an actor — goes through it point by point.

In general, you should be suspicious of any political ad that just raises questions. If you’ve got the resources to make an ad and put it on TV, couldn’t you have found some answers for us? If some particular person or agency has specific answers but is refusing to release them (like some of the Justice Department memos that justify drone strikes on countries where we aren’t at war), an honest ad will say that in so many words. But this kind of ad — one that implies questions aren’t being answered without actually saying that — is almost always dishonest.

At the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic in 1989, doctors in Philadelphia started a long-term study on the effects of cocaine on fetal development, expecting the so-called “crack babies” to have developmental and emotional problems that would follow them through the course of their lives.

Results are in now, and the kids did have problems. But it turns out that the control group — babies born in the same hospitals in the same time period to women of similar socio-economic profiles who tested negative for cocaine use — had almost all the same problems.

At age 4, for instance, the average IQ of the cocaine-exposed children was 79.0 and the average IQ for the nonexposed children was 81.9. Both numbers are well below the average of 90 to 109 for U.S. children in the same age group. When it came to school readiness at age 6, about 25 percent of children in each group scored in the abnormal range on tests for math and letter and word recognition.

The similarities persisted through adolescence and into early adulthood. Explanation:

The years of tracking kids have led [Dr. Hallam] Hurt to a conclusion she didn’t see coming.

“Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine,” Hurt said at her May lecture.

This points to a larger problem: American society’s state of denial about the effects of poverty makes us cast blame all sorts of places where it doesn’t belong — for example, on our schools and our teachers.

Having passed a ban on abortion at 20 weeks, Texas Republicans are now going for six weeks, which is claimed to be the earliest point at which a fetal heartbeat can be detected. 20 weeks was supposedly when fetus begin showing signs of pain, though that is disputed.

The Right focuses on these thresholds-of-unacceptability because they can’t convince people that a single-celled organism with human DNA has the moral heft of a human being. Neither of these thresholds impresses me because we ignore them in animals: Cows feel pain and have heartbeats, but nobody’s proposing to ban steak.

Here’s a threshold that seems more meaningful: the point at which an ordinary person can look at a fetal ultrasound and reliably tell the difference between human and chimp. I have no idea when that would be, but I’ll bet it’s quite a bit later than six weeks. (The Elephant Fetus Project was fooling pro-lifers at 11 weeks. Elephants.)

While we’re on the absurdities of pro-lifers, Alternet’s Adam Lee notes that the Bible says nothing about abortion directly, in spite of the fact that ancient folklore is full of miscarriage-inducing practices. And when the Old Testament legal code does discuss miscarriages, it clearly is not attributing to the fetus the full value of a human being.

If you want to be Biblical about it, the soul enters the body with the first breath, not at conception. Genesis 2:7. “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” That’s not where I would draw the line, but if you really want to follow the Bible that’s where it should be.

A Tennessee high school had a pro-abstinence assembly, which was filled (as these things usually are) with scary misinformation about sex, STDs, and contraception. What was even more disturbing, though, was the principal’s lack of concern when the inaccuracies were brought to his attention:

Fortunately, I believe the Hillsboro High School kids are smart enough to separate fact from fiction and that some of the opinions and scare tactics used in the presentation they will know are incorrect.

Know how? By trial and error? Locker room rumor? What’s the point of having schools at all, when we could just let kids “separate fact from fiction” for themselves? Anyway, Martha Kempner debunks.

What if we applied abstinence-only logic to the other kinds of trouble kids might get into?

Slate wonders “Why Don’t Farmers Believe in Climate Change?” and never comes up with an answer, but decides it doesn’t matter because farmers are cutting their fossil fuel use for other reasons.

Having just sold a 160-acre Illinois farm for almost 50 times what my grandfather paid in the 1920s, I think I can answer: Like most of the Midwest, Illinois had a major heat wave and drought last summer. If that’s just weather, no big deal. But if it’s a sign of things to come, then the land isn’t worth its current price and farmers who borrowed to expand (i.e. most of them) are going to be in trouble. That’s plenty of motive for denial.

Elizabeth Warren went on CNBC to promote her 21st-Century Glass-Steagal Act. Predictably, the hosts went after her, and she totally ate their lunch.

and let’s end with something fun

A long time ago we used to be friends, but I hadn’t thought of you lately at all … until Friday.

The first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move. So when we said that the revolution would not be televised, we were saying that the thing that’s going to change people is something that nobody will ever be able to capture on film. It’ll just be something that you see, and then all of a sudden you realize “I’m on the wrong page.”

— Gil Scott Heron

This week everybody was talking about Egypt

and nobody knew what to think. Was it a revolution? A coup? The start of a civil war? Should we be happy because a popular movement for democracy succeeded in getting rid of an unresponsive government, or is that mob rule? Unhappy because the trash-canned government had been elected and was not replaced by constitutional means? Happy/unhappy because we fear/like the Muslim Brotherhood that won the election that formed the government? Unhappy/happy because we distrust/trust the Egyptian military that is setting up the provisional government? At times it’s best just to admit that you don’t understand and keep watching.

and the San Francisco plane crash

which is the kind of breaking news the Sift doesn’t cover very well. Turn on your TV.

and the 4th of July

Some patriotic videos never get old. I enjoy this 2002 celebration of the Declaration of Independence by Morgan Freeman and an all-star cast.

and a lot of stuff I’m studiously not paying attention to

like the Zimmerman trial and the chase after Snowden. I explained why last week.

because other stuff deserves a lot more attention than it’s getting

Some establishment liberals haven’t been taking the NSA leaks seriously, because who is this Snowden guy and why did he leak through Glenn Greenwald, who isn’t a “serious” journalist anyway. Well, the NYT’s Pulitzer-winning Eric Lichtblau has a new set of revelations. Listening yet?

Lichtblau has gotten access to classified documents from the secret FISA Court, and finds that it’s doing a lot more than just signing search warrants. It’s issuing sweeping legal opinions about the meaning of the Fourth Amendment (which protects us from “unreasonable searches and seizures”). Those opinions come out of a star-chamber process which only hears the government’s side of a case. The judges themselves are appointed by Chief Justice Roberts, and almost all were originally appointed to the judiciary by Republican presidents.

The FISA Court’s opinions have the force of law for the people who are cleared to read them — mostly the NSA, CIA, and others who would like to know what you’re doing. Its interpretation of the Fourth Amendment could be overruled by the Supreme Court, but since the unrepresented non-government side never finds out that it lost, who is going to appeal the case?

So in summary, your constitutional rights are at the mercy of a secret court that is far more authoritarian than the American judiciary as a whole. And you have no right to know what that court is doing to your rights, because Catch-22 says they don’t have to tell you what Catch-22 says.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are working on their ransom letter for the fall, when they once again plan to take the full-faith-and-credit of the United States hostage by provoking a debt-ceiling crisis. (“Nice country you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”) The National Journal says they’re willing to extend the debt ceiling for the rest of Obama’s term in exchange for, say, privatizing Medicare — a highly unpopular concession they could never get through any legitimate democratic process.

The debt ceiling, you may recall, didn’t exist until 1917, and while extending it has often been an occasion for the out-of-power party to make pious speeches about fiscal responsibility, never in history had it been used to extract concessions until 2011. Until the Tea Party, nobody was so committed to an unpopular agenda that it was willing to threaten that much damage to the country.

and I wrote about the misuse of “religious freedom”

in “Religious Freedom” Means Christian Passive-Aggressive Domination.

and you also might be interested in …

Bill Keller explains why liberals should be happy with the Senate immigration bill. Not that it matters, because that bill has washed up on the rocky shore of the House.

In related news: Remember November, when Republicans had learned the importance of the Hispanic vote and figured they had to do something to appeal to it? Never mind about that. The new line coming out of conservatives is that they just need to do a better job appealing to whites.

At some point, the Republican efforts to sabotage ObamaCare turn into active disloyalty. For example, interfering with the administration’s efforts to tell the public how to use the new program. Democrats didn’t like Bush’s Medicare Part D, or the strong-arm tactics used to pass it, but they didn’t try to make it not work.

More debunking of the IRS “scandal”.

What if gun rights were treated the way abortion rights are?

Or if we thought about mass shootings the way we think about terrorist attacks?

Here’s another great visual of Republican men signing away women’s rights. After all, why should there be any women in the room?

I don’t know whether this guy scares the government or not, but he scares me.

And I guess it really shouldn’t be surprising that the KKK has a show for (white) kids.

or that Colorado preachers are blaming local wildfires on abortion, civil unions, and women’s breasts.

Student loan interest rates doubled on July 1. But don’t worry. Congress will get to it sometime. It’s not like the issue affects people’s lives or anything..

Now that there’s practically no competition, Amazon isn’t discounting books like it used to. Who could have foreseen that? I wonder what will happen when all of retail comes down to Amazon or WalMart?

Gil Scott Heron explains what “The revolution will not be televised” meant.

And something fun to end with:

If you’ve ever envied those fantasy worlds where place-names actually mean something, take a look at this real-world map, which traces current names back to their linguistic roots, like “Navel of the Moon” and “Abundance of Fish”.

No Sift next week. The next articles will be posted on July 1.

At the hands of the press,
and in the eyes of the Government,
I fell from grace.
I too became a dissident.

— Thomas Dolby, “Dissidents” (lyrics, audio)

This week everybody was talking about Edward Snowden

And that misses the point. If you’re talking about Snowden — whether he’s a hero or a traitor, why he did it, what should happen to him, etc. — then you’re not talking about the NSA, what it’s doing, and what should be done to corral it.

The NSA loves that.

So no matter how many bright shiny objects the establishment press tries to distract you with — look! his girl friend is a pole dancer! — keep your eye on the ball. The issue that matters is the NSA, not Snowden. I flesh those ideas out, and cover what else we learned about the NSA this week, in Edward Snowden Is Not the Issue.

You know who does do a good job of laying out the issues? Juice Rap News.

and Syria

The Obama administration has become convinced that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons against the rebels. And governments can’t be allowed to do that, so we have to do something. But that doesn’t mean we know what to do, or how not to get sucked into another long war with nothing to win.

The British newspaper The Independent reports that Iran is sending 4,000 members of its Revolutionary Guard to help Assad. It frames Obama’s move to arm the rebels as the U.S. taking sides in the region-wide sectarian struggle between Sunni and Shia.

Foreign Policy explains why the Pentagon has been dragging its feet on intervention.

With some notable exceptions, top brass believe arming Syrian rebels, creating a no-fly zone and intervening in other ways militarily, amounts to a risky approach with enormous costs that won’t likely give the Syrian opposition the lift it needs.

And at that point do we say, “Oh well, at least we tried.”? Or do we have to go in deeper to justify what we’ve done already?

and Turkey

Turkish protestors make Les Miserables their own. I wish that didn’t fill me with foreboding.

I can’t say I really understand what the Turkish protests are about, but this article helps.

and DNA patents

Maybe my cynicism level has gotten too high. I was sure that a few of the corporatist justices on the Supreme Court would figure out a way to justify granting patents on naturally-occurring human DNA; I wouldn’t have been totally shocked if that view had won a 5-4 majority. Eventually, I figured, some mega-corp will patent lungs and charge the rest of us royalties for breathing.

Didn’t happen.

Instead, Thursday the Court unanimously decided that “separating [a] gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention” and is therefore not patentable. The decision specifically applied to Myriad Genetics’ claim of a patent on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes implicated in breast cancer. Because of those patents, Myriad had a monopoly on testing for those genes and was able to charge high prices. (Angelina Jolie launched those tests into the headlines a few weeks ago by having her apparently healthy breasts removed after seeing her results.)

But I wrote about Apocalyptic Optimism

It’s easy to be an optimist if you think the right people are in power and have things more-or-less in hand. But Gar Alperovitz’s What Then Must We Do? and David Graeber’s The Democracy Project are upbeat books by people who think our current system is falling apart.

and how to make the NSA’s job harder

I try out some simple anonymizing tools in Herd Immunity Against Online Spying.

and these things also caught my eye

The usual Brewer/Obama relationship.

In one of the year’s most fascinating political surprises, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (famous for the anti-immigrant “papers please” law S. B. 1070) succeeded in pushing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion through the legislature. Brewer had begun carrying out her threat to veto every bill until Medicaid expansion passed.

300,000 Arizonans will now get health insurance. The Medicaid expansion is important because it rationalizes healthcare for the working poor. Currently, many of them wait until health problems get out of hand, then go to the emergency room, generating huge bills they can’t pay. Some of those costs are absorbed by the hospitals (who make it up by overcharging the rest of us), and some costs eventually are borne by cities and states. Since the cost of Medicaid expansion is largely borne by the federal government, Arizona saves money by agreeing to it.

Nate Silver says the odds of a second Massachusetts Senate upset are slim.

Undoubtedly some everyday sexual harassment — pinching, grabbing, leering, etc. — is done with conscious malice. But I suspect most harassers have just never tried to imagine what being on the receiving side is really like. So they think: “It’s a game”, “women expect it”, “it’s no big deal”, “they should be flattered”, and so on. Well, for those guys, there’s this video:

Parody news sites are getting harder to spot. They’re more subtle than they used to be, and the level of craziness in real news keeps going up. So newslo.com fools quite a few people with stories like Texas Board of Education Revises Textbooks: Slaves were “Unpaid Interns”.

Every news-satire site should adopt Newslo’s help feature: the Show Facts button at the bottom of each story. Clicking it highlights the parts of the story that are true.

After another Republican man says something stupid about rape, Ta-Nehisi Coates comments on the value of diversity:

If you are not around people who will look at you like you are crazy when you make stupid claims about other people’s experiences, then you tend to keep saying stupid things about other people’s experiences.

Diversity in positions of power isn’t just a kumbaya thing or a way to buy off politically important minorities. If you’re about to embarrass yourself, your party, or your country by saying something stupid about (or doing something stupid to) people you don’t understand, a diverse leadership group has ways of shutting that whole thing down.

Ah, the perverse state government of Scott Walker’s Wisconsin. While the legislature has been in the process of passing one of those war-on-women forced-ultrasound laws, the amount of dissent tolerated in the galleries has been shrinking. Thursday they hit a new low: Women who protested by putting duct tape over their mouths were removed from the gallery. Somebody want to explain to me again how conservatism is all about freedom?