Militias in the Central African Republic are slitting children's throats, razing villages and throwing young men to the crocodiles. What needs to happen before the world intervenes?

By David Smith in Bossangoa, The Guardian, 22 Nov. 2013

A massacre of the innocents is taking place in the heart of Africa as the world looks the other way [....]

By Edward Wong, Sinosphere blog @ nytimes.com, Nov. 22, 2013

[...] One clue to the film’s fate has come in the form of a recent leaked directive from the Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Bureau. It ordered Chinese journalists not to write or comment on the film. Earlier, there had been a wave of coverage of Mr. Jia in both the domestic and foreign news media as “A Touch of Sin” drew attention at film festivals in New York, Toronto and elsewhere. It had its world premiere last May at the Cannes Film Festival, where Mr. Jia was awarded the prize for best screenplay [....]

Mr. Jia is the most celebrated maker of art house films in China, and his movies present a dark vision of the country, both of its recent history and forward direction. Perhaps none is bleaker than “A Touch of Sin,” which depicts, through four connected stories, a China wracked with violence because of economic inequities and political corruption.

In the first story, for example, a frustrated miner in Shanxi Province, played by Jiang Wu, the younger brother of the prominent filmmaker Jiang Wen, goes on a shooting rampage against local party officials and the mine owner [....]

By Andrew Kohut, Pew Research Center, Nov. 20, 2013

[....] liberalism had its limits when it came to integration and civil rights. Over the course of 1963, particularly following JFK’s call for civil rights legislation in mid-June, a growing number came to the view that the president was pushing racial integration too fast. A third of the public held that view in June (36%) but that number inched up to 41% in July, and soared to 50% in a Gallup survey following the March on Washington.

Indeed, the March on Washington was poorly regarded by the American public.  In August, 69% had heard of the planned March on D.C. – and 63% of those aware of the march had an unfavorable opinion of it. Even though most Americans outside of the South (55%) favored equal rights legislation that would give “Negroes” the right to be served in hotels, restaurants and theaters, a large majority thought mass demonstrations by African Americans would hurt their own cause.

There is little doubt that race had become the issue at the end of the Kennedy administration.  In September, 52% told Gallup that racial tensions were the most important problem facing the nation. Just 25% of Gallup’s respondents cited international problems, which had been the dominant issue of 1962 [....]

I really missed attending this year.

http://vimeo.com/79644543

Natasha Gural's first piece for The Awl, an excellent read about an elegant bromance.

I love Erik Wemple of the WaPo, this piece is going to be career altering for Allen or Politico or both.

The article is well worth the read. I hope this means I"ll never have to suffer through another Morning Joe with the breathless Michael Allen talking about his "Playbook". He is as wrong as is he disingenuous., blech.

BBC News, 20 Nov., 2013

Scientists have mapped the genome of a four-year-old boy who died in south-central Siberia 24,000 years ago. It is the oldest modern human genome sequenced to date, researchers report in the journal Nature.

The results provide a window into the origins of Native Americans, whose ancestors crossed from Siberia into the New World during the last Ice Age. They suggest about a third of Native American ancestry came from an ancient population related to Europeans [....]

[....] the most puzzling part of this finding was that the boy showed no clear affinities with East Asian populations such as the Chinese, Koreans or Japanese. Today's Native Americans are most closely related to East Asians, so the scientists had to work out how the Mal'ta boy could be related to indigenous Americans, but not to East Asians. The most likely scenario, they argue, is that a population like the one living in Siberia 24,000 years ago mixed with the ancestors of East Asians at some point after the boy died.

"Native Americans are composed of the meeting of two populations - an East Asian group and these Mal'ta west Eurasian populations," said Dr Willerslev. However, it remains unclear where this mixing took place [.....]

Henry Ford would recognize the principle that allows Theranos to complete accurate lab tests within four hours: Consistency and automation increase speed and bring price down. Even so, Theranos’s selling point is much smaller than a Model T: a capsule-sized lab vial, and just one needs to be filled for the company to run nearly any standard lab test.

Here’s how it works: Blood is drawn with a finger stick, rather than a needle in the arm. (It can also run urine tests with just a drop of that.) There are no botched sticks — of course, there are no phlebotomists, only machines, in Therenos labs.

Back in August, the anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber wrote an article for Strike! Magazine entitled "Bullshit Jobs." Graeber asked why we were still working so hard, despite being so much richer than in ages past. Where was the utopia of leisure that we were promised? He concluded that our economic system has invented pointless make-work jobs that keep us busy and distract us from overthrowing the ruling class. [...] Our jobs are probably not make-work handed to us by crafty overlords. But they may be something more insidious — an elaborate kind of wealth redistribution system, masquerading as value-creating economic activity, sustained and powered by all the economy's loopholes and flaws that Econ 101 barely mentions. If that's the case, then we really ought to ask ourselves: Why are we working so hard, instead of collecting checks to sit on a beach?

Doing the food stamp diet for a week or a month won’t give you a sense of how depressing, humiliating, exhausting and frustrating it is to be poor in our society. It won’t let you experience the ways poor diet and the grinding suffering of poverty degrade your health and your energy to keep going. It won’t give you a sense of what it is like to live on food stamps month after month, what it is like to be ashamed of yourself and your inability to give your children and family what they need. It won’t let you experience what it is like to feel that you can never catch up, so what’s the point of even trying? The truth is that all it can teach you is how challenging it is to start on second base and have to get to third with very limited means – but it cannot give you a real picture of what it is like to stand swinging at the ball and never even get near it, month after dreary month.

American food policy has long been rife with head-scratching illogic. We spend billions every year on farm subsidies, many of which help wealthy commercial operations to plant more crops than we need. The glut depresses world crop prices, harming farmers in developing countries. Meanwhile, millions of Americans live tenuously close to hunger, which is barely kept at bay by a food stamp program that gives most beneficiaries just a little more than $4 a day.

 

So it’s almost too absurd to believe that House Republicans are asking for a farm bill that would make all of these problems worse. For the putative purpose of balancing the country’s books, the measures that the House Republican caucus is pushing for in negotiations with the Senate, as Congress attempts to pass a long-stalled extension of the farm bill, would cut back the meager aid to our country’s most vulnerable and use the proceeds to continue fattening up a small number of wealthy American farmers.