Sunday, June 30, 2013

Taking Outsize Role in Syria, Qatar Funnels Arms to Rebels - NYTimes.com

Taking Outsize Role in Syria, Qatar Funnels Arms to Rebels - NYTimes.com:

"WASHINGTON — As an intermittent supply of arms to the Syrian opposition gathered momentum last year, the Obama administration repeatedly implored its Arab allies to keep one type of powerful weapon out of the rebels’ hands: heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles."

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Risk for Redskins in Makeover of Team Mascot - NYTimes.com

Risk for Redskins in Makeover of Team Mascot - NYTimes.com:

 "Few teams in the N.F.L. have faced more pressing off-season concerns than the Washington Redskins, whose star quarterback, Robert Griffin III, hopes to be ready for training camp as he continues to rehabilitate his surgically repaired right knee."

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Historic Mistake Watch - NYTimes.com

Historic Mistake Watch - NYTimes.com:

 "When the Fed began its talk of “tapering” asset purchases, I warned that it might turn out to be a “historic mistake”. I guess the historic bit is still up in the air; but the mistake aspect is now glaringly obvious. Bond prices have plunged, and the Fed’s attempts to inform markets that they’ve got it all wrong have only modestly mitigated the impact."

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Ecuador Leader Says Biden Called About Asylum Request - NYTimes.com

Ecuador Leader Says Biden Called About Asylum Request - NYTimes.com:

"QUITO, Ecuador — President Rafael Correa of Ecuador said Saturday that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had asked him in a telephone call not to grant asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive former security contractor wanted in the United States."

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Friday, June 28, 2013

Expect the Unexpected - NYTimes.com

Expect the Unexpected - NYTimes.com:

 "Every once in a while, something happens that challenges your entire view of the order of the universe. For instance, this week the U.S. Senate actually passed something. Meanwhile, in Texas, liberal Democrats and the abortion rights movement won a huge political victory"

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Thursday, June 27, 2013

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: Julian Jaynes: 9780618057078: Amazon.com: Books

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: Julian Jaynes: 9780618057078: Amazon.com: Books:

At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion -- and indeed our future.

Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science of the Mind: José Luis Bermúdez: 9780521708371: Amazon.com: Books

Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science of the Mind: José Luis Bermúdez: 9780521708371: Amazon.com: Books:

 "This exciting textbook introduces students to the dynamic vibrant area of Cognitive Science - the scientific study of the mind and cognition. Cognitive Science draws upon many academic disciplines, including Psychology, Computer Science, Philosophy, Linguistics and Neuroscience. This is the first textbook to present a unified view of Cognitive Science as a discipline in its own right, with a distinctive approach to studying the mind. Students are introduced to the cognitive scientist's 'toolkit' - the vast range of techniques and tools that cognitive scientists can use to study the mind. The book presents the main theoretical models that cognitive scientists are currently using, and shows how those models are being applied to unlock the mysteries of the human mind. Cognitive Science is replete with examples, illustrations, and applications, and draws on cutting-edge research and new developments to explore both the achievements that cognitive scientists have made, and the challenges that lie ahead."

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Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity: Daniel B. Smith: 9780143113157: Amazon.com: Books

Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity: Daniel B. Smith: 9780143113157: Amazon.com: Books:

An inquiry into hearing voices-one of humanity's most profound phenomena

Auditory hallucination is one of the most awe-inspiring, terrifying, and ill- understood tricks of which the human psyche is capable. In the age of modern medical science, we have relegated this experience to nothing more than a biological glitch. Yet as Daniel B. Smith puts forth in Muses, Madmen, and Prophets, some of the greatest thinkers, leaders, and prophets in history heard, listened to, and had dialogues with voices inside their heads. In a fascinating quest for understanding, Smith examines the history of this powerful phenomenon, and delivers a ringing defense of the validity of unusual human experiences.

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Bicameralism (psychology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bicameralism (psychology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

 "Bicameralism (the philosophy of "two-chamberedness") is a hypothesis in psychology that argues that the human mind once assumed a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind. The term was coined by psychologist Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind only as recently as 3000 years ago."

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Julian Jaynes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Julian Jaynes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

 "Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American psychologist, best known for his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), in which he argued that ancient peoples were not conscious."

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Voyager

NYT

The Service of Snowden - NYTimes.com

The Service of Snowden - NYTimes.com:

 "LONDON — Edward J. Snowden, the whistleblower on global U.S. surveillance, has been called all kinds of things by members of Congress over the past couple of weeks — including a “defector” and a man guilty of “treason.” Federal prosecutors have prepared a sealed indictment against him."

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Immigration Bill Clears Final Hurdle to Senate Approval - NYTimes.com

Immigration Bill Clears Final Hurdle to Senate Approval - NYTimes.com:

"WASHINGTON — The most significant overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws in a generation easily cleared the final obstacle to passage on Thursday, when 68 senators, including 14 Republicans, voted to end debate on the bill and move to a final vote."

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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Wendy and the Boys - NYTimes.com

Wendy and the Boys - NYTimes.com:

"There is an old saying that Texas is “heaven for men and dogs, but hell for women and oxen.” But the state’s history is chock-full of stories of female role models. Barbara Jordan. Ann Richards. In downtown Austin, there’s a statue of Angelina Eberly, heroine of the Texas Archives War of 1842, firing a cannon and looking about 7 feet tall."

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Ecuador Hints at Slow Process on Snowden Asylum - NYTimes.com

Ecuador Hints at Slow Process on Snowden Asylum - NYTimes.com:

 "MOSCOW — Ecuador signaled on Wednesday that it may deliberate slowly on the asylum application from Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive former security contractor wanted in the United States, raising the possibility that he could spend weeks in legal limbo as he plots his next steps inside a Moscow airport transit area."

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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

3 Police Officers Abducted, Killed in Mexico - NYTimes.com

3 Police Officers Abducted, Killed in Mexico - NYTimes.com:

"MORELIA, Mexico — Authorities in Mexico's western Michoacan state say they have found the bodies of three local police officers who had been abducted hours earlier."

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Army to Cut Its Forces by 80,000 in 5 Years - NYTimes.com

Army to Cut Its Forces by 80,000 in 5 Years - NYTimes.com:

"WASHINGTON — Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, said Tuesday that the Army would institute the largest organizational change since World War II by eliminating combat forces from 10 bases across the United States, part of a planned reduction of 80,000 active-duty troops over the next five years."

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Democrat Wins Special Election for Kerry’s Senate Seat - NYTimes.com

Democrat Wins Special Election for Kerry’s Senate Seat - NYTimes.com:

 "BOSTON — Representative Edward J. Markey, a Democrat who has toiled for almost 40 years in the House in both the majority and minority, won a promotion to the Senate on Tuesday in a sweeping victory over Gabriel Gomez, a Republican who has never served in elective office."

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From ‘No’ to ‘Go’ - NYTimes.com

From ‘No’ to ‘Go’ - NYTimes.com:

"LONDON — Brazilians have an expression, “Vai acabar em pizza.” Something that ends in pizza is something that ends in a big zero, zilch, nothing. The phrase is commonly used for the predictable conclusion of judicial investigations of the white-collar crime practiced with impunity by rich folk in Brazil."

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Australian Spy Bosses Brief Government on Possible Asian Fallout Over Snowden - Report - NYTimes.com

Australian Spy Bosses Brief Government on Possible Asian Fallout Over Snowden - Report - NYTimes.com:

"SYDNEY — Australia's main intelligence and spying agencies have briefed the government on the PRISM internet surveillance program amid fears former U.S. security contractor Edward Snowden may release information damaging to Australia's relations with Asian neighbors, local media reported on Wednesday."

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An Emerging Hispanic Voice Defends Her ‘Maids’ - NYTimes.com

An Emerging Hispanic Voice Defends Her ‘Maids’ - NYTimes.com:

"LOS ANGELES — At a premiere party at the Spanish-colonial-style Bel-Air Bay Club last week for the new Lifetime show “Devious Maids,” the center of attention was not the five actresses who play the lead characters, Latina maids who cook, clean and scheme while looking after wealthy white families in Beverly Hills."

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Obama to Outline Ambitious Plan to Cut Greenhouse Gases - NYTimes.com

Obama to Outline Ambitious Plan to Cut Greenhouse Gases - NYTimes.com:

"WASHINGTON — President Obama will propose a sweeping plan to address climate change on Tuesday, setting ambitious goals and timetables for a series of executive actions to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and prepare the nation for the ravages of a warming planet."

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Putin Rules Out Extradition for Snowden in Russia Airport - NYTimes.com

Putin Rules Out Extradition for Snowden in Russia Airport - NYTimes.com:

"MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia offered the first direct confirmation on Tuesday that Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive former American national security contractor, was in an international transit area at a Moscow airport, and he appeared to rule out American requests for his extradition to the United States."

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Sunday, June 23, 2013

Et Tu, Bernanke? - NYTimes.com

Et Tu, Bernanke? - NYTimes.com:

 "For the most part, Ben Bernanke and his colleagues at the Federal Reserve have been good guys in these troubled economic times. They have tried to boost the economy even as most of Washington seemingly either forgot about the jobless, or decided that the best way to cure unemployment was to intensify the suffering of the unemployed. You can argue — and I would — that the Fed’s activism, while welcome, isn’t enough, and that it should be doing even more. But at least it didn’t lose sight of what’s really important."

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Helped By WikiLeaks And Julian Assange, Edward Snowden Needs Perry Mason - Forbes

Helped By WikiLeaks And Julian Assange, Edward Snowden Needs Perry Mason - Forbes:

"Whether you revile Edward Snowden or idolize him, he needs a good lawyer. Snowden revealed National Security Agency phone record mining from telephone carriers. Plus, he leaked the NSA’s harvesting from Apple and Google of data on foreign suspects. He fled to Hong Kong but could be extradited. The stakes go up now that he has left Hong Kong and flown to Moscow."

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Edward Snowden - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edward Snowden - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

 "Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983)[1] is a former technical contractor and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton,[2] a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), before leaking details of classified NSA mass surveillance programs to the press.[4][5] Snowden shared classified material on a variety of top-secret NSA programs, including the interception of US telephone metadata and the PRISM surveillance program, primarily with Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, which published a series of exposés based on Snowden's disclosures in June 2013. Snowden said the leaks were an effort "to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them."[5][6][7]"

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We Were Middle-Class Once, And Young - NYTimes.com

We Were Middle-Class Once, And Young - NYTimes.com:

 "As I noted the other day, Greg Mankiw (pdf), in his defense of the one percent, seems oddly oblivious, among other things, to the extent to which America has changed since he was young. We are a much more unequal society now, and as a consequence arguably one with a lot less intergenerational mobility too."

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AP Source - NSA Leaker Snowden's Passport Revoked - NYTimes.com

AP Source - NSA Leaker Snowden's Passport Revoked - NYTimes.com:

 "WASHINGTON — The former National Security Agency contractor who disclosed a highly classified surveillance program has had his U.S. passport revoked."

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N.S.A. Leaker Leaves Hong Kong on Flight to Moscow - NYTimes.com

N.S.A. Leaker Leaves Hong Kong on Flight to Moscow - NYTimes.com:

 "HONG KONG — The Hong Kong government announced on Sunday afternoon that it had allowed the departure from its territory of Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has acknowledged disclosing classified documents about United States government surveillance of Internet and telephone communications around the world."

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Saturday, June 22, 2013

Mexico Pursuing Vanished Victims of Its Drug Wars - NYTimes.com

Mexico Pursuing Vanished Victims of Its Drug Wars - NYTimes.com:

"MONTERREY, Mexico — Rosa González cannot shake the memory of the state investigator who was too afraid of reprisals to take a full report, the police officer who shrugged when the ransom demand came, the months of agonizing doubt and, most of all, the final words from her daughter before she disappeared."

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Syria Scorecard - NYTimes.com

Syria Scorecard - NYTimes.com:

ISTANBUL — IF you look at it from 30,000 feet, what we’re actually dealing with in the Middle East today are the long-delayed consequences of the end of the Ottoman Empire. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed as a result of its defeat in World War I, the colonial powers Britain and France were right there, for their own interests, to impose their own order on the diverse tribes, sects and religions that make up the Arab East. When the British and French left after World War II, they handed power, in many cases, to monarchs, who, in many cases, gave way to generals, who, in all cases, kept their diverse populations in line with iron fists.
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Social Networking in the 1600s - NYTimes.com

Social Networking in the 1600s - NYTimes.com:

"LONDON — SOCIAL networks stand accused of being enemies of productivity. According to one popular (if questionable) infographic circulating online, the use of Facebook, Twitter and other such sites at work costs the American economy $650 billion each year. Our attention spans are atrophying, our test scores declining, all because of these “weapons of mass distraction.”"

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Friday, June 21, 2013

Ex-Contractor Is Charged in Leaks on N.S.A. Surveillance - NYTimes.com

Ex-Contractor Is Charged in Leaks on N.S.A. Surveillance - NYTimes.com:

"Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor whose leak of agency documents has set off a national debate over the proper limits of government surveillance, has been charged with violating the Espionage Act and stealing government property for disclosing classified information to The Guardian and The Washington Post, the Justice Department said on Friday."

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Kenneth Wilson, Nobel Physicist, Dies at 77

Cornell University
Kenneth Wilson in 1982, the year he won the Nobel Prize. He determined how to calculate tricky moments in physics.
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Kenneth G. Wilson, who was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing how to calculate tricky moments like when ice melts or an iron bar loses its magnetism, died on Saturday in Saco, Me. He was 77.
The cause was complications of lymphoma, according to Cornell University, where he had been a professor for 25 years.
His colleagues hailed Dr. Wilson as a legend who had changed how theoretical physicists went about their work, especially in particle physics, the study of the elementary and fundamental constituents of nature. He was also a pioneer in using computers and then supercomputers to study the properties of quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons.
“He’s a giant in theoretical physics,” said Frank Wilczek, a Nobelist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calling his work “quite profound.”
Steven Weinberg, a Nobel winner at the University of Texas at Austin, said, “Ken Wilson was one of a very small number of physicists who changed the way we all think, not just about specific phenomena, but about a vast range of different phenomena.”
Kenneth Geddes Wilson was born on June 8, 1936, in Waltham, Mass., the first of three children of Edgar and Emily Buckingham Wilson. His father was a chemist at Harvard. His mother had been a physics graduate student before marrying. One grandfather was an engineering professor at M.I.T. and the other the speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives.
Kenneth Wilson entered Harvard at 16, majored in math and was the Ivy League mile champion. He obtained his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology under the legendary theorist Murray Gell-Mann, then did postdoctoral studies at Harvard as a junior fellow that included a year at CERN, the European nuclear research organization in Geneva. He joined Cornell as a physics professor in 1963.
He later said he was drawn to Cornell by, among other things, the folk-dancing scene in Ithaca, N.Y. It was at a folk dance that he met Alison Brown, who was working in the university’s computer center. They were doing a Swedish dance called the hambo. “His hambo and my hambo fit together really well,” she said.
They married in 1982. She survives him, along with a brother, David; a sister, Nina Cornell; a half sister, Anne Goldizen; two half brothers, Paul and Steven Wilson; and a stepmother, Thérèse Wilson.
Dr. Wilson arrived at Cornell already famous for his mathematical prowess. At Harvard he had proved a conjecture by the renowned mathematician Freeman Dyson while sitting around waiting for an M.I.T. computer to finish a job for him.
From the start, Dr. Wilson was drawn to difficult problems that could take years to solve, said Kurt Gottfried, a Cornell colleague. One such problem was phase transitions, the passage from water to steam or atoms lining up to make a magnet. At the critical point — the temperature at which the change happens — orderly behavior breaks down, but theorists had few clues to how to calculate what was happening.
Dr. Wilson realized that the key to the problem was that fluctuations were happening on all scales at once — from the jostling and zooming of individual atoms to the oscillations of the entire system — something conventional theory could not handle.
At the heart of Dr. Wilson’s work was an abstruse mathematical apparatus known as the renormalization group, which had been conceived by his thesis adviser, Dr. Gell-Mann, and Francis Low in 1951. They had pointed out that fundamental properties of particles and forces varied depending on the scale over which they are measured.
Dr. Wilson realized that such “scaling” was intrinsic to the problems in phase transitions. In a series of papers in the early 1970s, building on the work of Michael Fisher and Benjamin Widom at Cornell and Leo Kadanoff, then at the University of Illinois, he applied the renormalization idea to show how the critical phenomena could be solved by dividing the problem up into simpler pieces, so that what was happening at the melting point, for example, could be considered on one scale at a time.
The results showed that many seemingly unrelated systems — from magnets to liquids — could exhibit the same characteristic behavior as they approached the critical point. The concept proved to be of wide relevance in physics and was cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in presenting the Nobel.
Dr. Wilson went on to apply the same divide-and-conquer strategy to quantum field theory, the mathematical language that underlies the study of the most elementary particles and fundamental forces in nature. The theory was plagued by such vexing issues as infinities and other mathematical absurdities when physicists tried to calculate something like the mass of an electron. A method had been developed to work around these anomalies, but many physicists worried that they were just sweeping a fatal flaw in physics under the rug and that, in the words of Dr. Wilczek, “quantum field theory was doomed.”
Dr. Wilson’s new technique banished the infinities for good, putting the theory on a sounder footing. As the Caltech physicist John Preskill put it in a blog post, “Wilson changed that.”
Dr. Wilson’s ideas played a major role in the development of quantum chromodynamics, the branch of quantum theory that describes the behavior of quarks and the gluons that stick them together to form protons and neutrons. In 1974, in order to solve the equations of this theory numerically and gain a more precise understanding of this process, he invented a digitized version of the theory called lattice gauge theory, in which space is imagined as a kind of finely resolved jungle gym where every intersection of the bars represents a point in space-time.
Such computations required supercomputers, and Dr. Wilson was instrumental, his colleagues said, in establishing a national supercomputer center — one of five sponsored by the National Science Foundation — at Cornell.
In 1988, Dr. Wilson and his wife, Ms. Brown, moved to Ohio State University, where he helped found the Physics Education Research Group. Ms. Brown became the assistant director of a new supercomputer center.
They moved to Maine in 1995, drawn there in part by the kayaking. Dr. Wilson was associated with Ohio State until 2008, when he retired.
Ms. Brown said that Dr. Wilson’s health had begun to fail after he fell while hiking last year in the Southwest. Dr. Wilson liked to chew over physics problems as he walked.
Friends described him as a modest and informal man. At one conference in the 1960s he chose to camp out on the beach with graduate students, talking physics, rather than stay in a hotel with other faculty members.
“Ken was the most lacking in small talk of anyone I ever met,” Ms. Brown said. When he died, she sent an e-mail to friends, saying: “Ken died last evening. He always liked to do things quietly and without fuss, and that’s how he left us.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 21, 2013
An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to Leo Kadanoff, one of the physicists on whose work Dr. Wilson built in a series of papers. Dr. Kadanoff was at the University of Illinois when he conducted the research in question — not the University of Chicago, where he is now.

Why American Jews Matter - NYTimes.com

Why American Jews Matter - NYTimes.com:

 "LONDON — New ideas are scarce on Israel-Palestine but Secretary of State John Kerry may have the semblance of one: If major American Jewish organizations are among Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most important constituencies, perhaps those same groups can exert leverage over Israeli policy toward the Palestinians."

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Thursday, June 20, 2013

A Lifeline for Minorities, Catholic Schools Retrench

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Justice Sonia Sotomayor comforted a student during her visit to her childhood school, Blessed Sacrament in the Bronx, in March. The school is closing.
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Sonia Sotomayor lives in Washington, but she has never forgotten her roots in the Bronx. On a drizzly March afternoon, she returned to Blessed Sacrament School, where she began her celebrated, if improbable journey from her South Bronx childhood to the Supreme Court. But instead of a joyous reunion, it was more of a valedictory for her and the children — the school is closing for good.

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Ángel Franco/The New York Times
Theodore M. Shaw, a professor at Columbia Law School, said his experience as one of the few black students at Holy Family School in the Bronx taught him a valuable life lesson.
Ángel Franco/The New York Times
"It gave me a vision of what I could be. It freed me,” said Dr. Nelly Maseda, who credits her years at Aquinas High School with helping her aspire to become a doctor.
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
Fernando Ferrer, the former Bronx borough president, graduated from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx.

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“I’m really upset,” Justice Sotomayor told a fourth-grade class. “It’s hard to say goodbye. I won’t tell you it’s easy. I won’t lie to you.”
The children drew close and peppered her with questions: Why is the archdiocese closing the school? Doesn’t it know their parents worked hard? Why couldn’t it come up with the money? One girl, crying, got up and slumped into Justice Sotomayor’s embrace. The justice, her voice steady and reassuring, reminded the children to cherish the good times and move confidently ahead. But later, she, too, revealed her pain.
“The worst thing is, these kids could lose their faith in the adults around them,” she said in an interview inside her old fifth-grade classroom. “Children need to feel secure. This makes it worse. These kids are going to carry this trauma with them for the rest of their lives.”
Justice Sotomayor’s emotions are shared by a generation of accomplished Latino and black professionals and public servants who went from humble roots to successful careers thanks to Catholic schools. But they fear that a springboard that has helped numerous poor and working-class minority students achieve rewarding lives is eroding as Catholic schools close their doors in the face of extraordinary financial challenges and demographic shifts.
Since 2011, the Archdiocese of New York has closed 56 schools, the vast majority of them elementary schools, including 13 in the Bronx. Now 219 schools remain in the education system. Blessed Sacrament is one of 26 schools closing this year throughout the archdiocese, which covers the Bronx, Manhattan, Staten Island and seven counties north of New York City.
According to archdiocesan figures, enrollment in elementary and high schools shrank to 75,875 this year from 95,837 in 2006. While the Latino percentage of total enrollment increased during that period, the proportion of black elementary school students dropped precipitously, to 17 percent of enrollment from 31 percent.
Catholic high schools, which routinely boast of near 100 percent college admissions for their graduates, are worried that they will face harder times with fewer parochial schools to feed their ranks. And minority alumni are increasingly alarmed that New York will be deprived of a future generation of professionals — like lawyers, doctors and executives — to contribute economic and cultural vitality.
“The Catholic schools have been a pipeline to opportunity for generations,” said Justice Sotomayor, who was raised by her mother after her father, an alcoholic, died. “It gave people like me the chance to be successful. It provided me and my brother with an incredible environment of security. Not every school provides that.”
The story is much the same in other large cities, including Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles, where church officials have closed or consolidated schools.
Besides Justice Sotomayor, the list of New York Catholic elementary school alumni includes Cesar A. Perales, the New York secretary of state; Fernando Ferrer, a former Bronx borough president; Bobby Sanabria, a Grammy-nominated musician and educator; Theodore M. Shaw, a former head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund; and Julissa Reynoso, the United States ambassador to Uruguay.
Like their Irish and Italian predecessors, their parents chose Catholic schools believing that they offered a better education than the local public schools and taught religious values that would help keep their children on the right path.
For its part, the archdiocese says it is not abandoning urban schools, even after several wrenching years of closings, shoring up finances and reassuring angry parents and fearful alumni.
Having moved away from the old parish-based elementary school model, Catholic school officials have created regional districts where resources and help are more efficiently shared. And for the schools that are vulnerable, especially those in places like the South Bronx, the officials have established a $20 million annual fund to provide scholarships and a $6 million fund for operating expenses.
“The inner city is where we do our best work,” said Timothy J. McNiff, the archdiocese’s superintendent of schools. “Why would we walk away from it?”
Accomplishing that mission was a lot easier during the school system’s golden era in the 1960s, when low-paid nuns taught classrooms bursting with youngsters in parishes where large congregations contributed enough to keep tuition low. Mr. Ferrer said his mother paid about $4 a month to send him and a sister to St. Anselm’s in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Today it would be $420 for two children.
The draw, Mr. Ferrer said, was not only that the parochial school system provided a better education than available in the public schools, but also that it was a Catholic education rooted in shared values.
“Puerto Ricans by and large are culturally conservative,” he said. “My mother was faithful to the traditions from Puerto Rico which valued that. There was enormous trust of religion. To whom else would you entrust your children?”
That trust was strong enough to lead Nelly Maseda’s father to insist she be taken out of public school in Washington Heights and enrolled at Incarnation elementary school in the 1970s. He was dying of cancer, leaving her to be raised by a mentally ill mother, a drug-addicted brother and a brother with a violent temper.
It was at Aquinas High School in the Bronx that she discovered her talents, motivated by teachers with high expectations and a guidance counselor who encouraged her.
She once thought she would be a secretary. Instead, she became a pediatrician.
“I had no self-esteem,” Dr. Maseda said. “But Aquinas, without a doubt, made all the difference. It gave me a vision of what I could be.”
For some black students, Catholic schools were a place to compete and prove themselves. Mr. Shaw, now a professor at Columbia Law School, said his experience as one of the few blacks at Holy Family School in the Bronx taught him a valuable life lesson.
“I was near the top of the class,” Professor Shaw said. “That myth of racial inferiority and superiority was dispelled for me, because I went to school with white students.”
A more formative experience awaited him in high school, when he was selected for one for the earliest classes of the Archbishop’s Leadership Project in the late 1960s, which took promising black teenagers and exposed them to black literature, history and culture.
“It was not a college-bound program, per se,” Professor Shaw said. “It was to train people to be leaders in their communities.”
He thinks the stakes are even higher now. He said the wave of parochial school closings could not come at a worse time. The Supreme Court, which includes his Cardinal Spellman High School classmate Justice Sotomayor, will soon rule on what is expected to be a landmark affirmative action case on college admissions.
“This could be an opportunity for the court to strike a fatal blow against affirmative action or diversity efforts,” he said. “At the same time that is happening, you’re seeing the closure of many of the Catholics schools in black and brown communities. That is a double blow, since the only way they had been in a position to compete for admission into elite institutions has been because of their Catholic school education.”
The system that educated tens of thousands of working-class and poor children has itself been substantially transformed. The Second Vatican Council prompted droves of nuns to leave teaching for other careers, and a steep, and continuing, drop in the vocations led the schools to rely on lay teachers who demanded fair wages and better working conditions.
While some local public schools in poor areas continue to perform below average on reading and math scores, the rise of charter schools and small theme-based academies has presented parents with alternatives that a previous generation did not have. Many of these newer schools try to replicate the discipline, core curriculum and even the uniforms of Catholic schools.
But Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at New York University, said part of the reason for the success of parochial schools was the partnership forged with parents and the community, which is not always the case with charter schools.
“I think it is a mistake to say the charter schools will fill the void left by parochial schools,” said Dr. Noguera, whose research has focused on the achievement of black and Latino boys, adding, “It is a huge void that unfortunately the public schools cannot fill because they do not have the same values and culture.”
The close bond between parents and Catholic schools has been tested as the system has faced financial disaster. In 2008, Dr. McNiff, the schools superintendent, noted, there was a systemwide deficit of $23 million that had to be paid not by individual schools, but by the archdiocese.
The result was a series of closings that have left many bitter. But Dr. McNiff said closing half-empty schools that were in aging buildings provided significant savings. And the fact that about two-thirds of the students in closed schools transferred to other parochial schools helped strengthen the remaining schools.
He is now looking to next year, when he expects the State Legislature to consider tax incentives that could allow corporations to finance scholarships for parochial school students — something already happening in 17 states.
“We’re trying to hold the line,” he said. “It’s a false impression that we’re walking away from Catholic education. We closed a number of buildings, but there are still seats for all the children who want to go to our system.”
As the archdiocese goes forward with fewer schools, the task is to reassure parents.
At Blessed Sacrament, Justice Sotomayor’s old school, three quarters of the fourth-grade class is transferring to Santa Maria School a few stops away on the No. 6 line. Liz Luciano, a single mother and surgical sales representative, had thought of sending her son Edward to a charter school, but decided against it in favor of Santa Maria.
She is still angry about how the archdiocese went about closing the school, after suggesting parents might be able to devise a plan to save it before the decision to close it was made. “I think they lied to us,” Ms. Luciano said. “We never had a chance.”
The transition for her is a bit easier, since she can drive her son to school, as well as benefit from a scholarship where she has to pay $200 a month, instead of the full $440 tuition.
“We have to go out of our way now to take our kids to a different school that we’re not sure is not going to close,” she said. “They say it’s not. But we know they’ve wanted to close these schools for a long time.”

2 G.O.P. Senators Reach Deal on Border Security Plan - NYTimes.com

2 G.O.P. Senators Reach Deal on Border Security Plan - NYTimes.com:

"WASHINGTON — Two Senate Republicans reached an agreement on Thursday on a plan to strengthen border security with the bipartisan group of eight senators that drafted an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, raising hopes that the new deal could build Republican support for the immigration legislation being debated on the Senate floor."

'via Blog this'

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Merkel Challenges Obama on Surveillance - NYTimes.com

Merkel Challenges Obama on Surveillance - NYTimes.com:

 "BERLIN — Challenged personally by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany about American intelligence programs that monitor foreigners’ communications without individualized court orders, President Obama said Wednesday that German terrorist threats were among those foiled by such operations worldwide — a contention that Ms. Merkel seemed to confirm"

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Humanities Committee Sounds an Alarm - NYTimes.com

Humanities Committee Sounds an Alarm - NYTimes.com:

 "A new national corps of “master teachers” trained in the humanities and social sciences and increased support for research in “endangered” liberal arts subjects are among the recommendations of a major report to be delivered on Capitol Hill on Wednesday."

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Immigration Law Changes Seen Cutting Billions From Deficit - NYTimes.com

Immigration Law Changes Seen Cutting Billions From Deficit - NYTimes.com

: "WASHINGTON — Congressional budget analysts, providing a positive economic assessment of proposed immigration law changes, said Tuesday that legislation to overhaul the nation’s immigration system would cut close to $1 trillion from the federal deficit over the next two decades and lead to more than 10 million new legal residents in the country."

'via Blog this'

Of Rats and Hit Men - NYTimes.com

Of Rats and Hit Men - NYTimes.com:

 "BOSTON — It all depends how you look at it, really."

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Postcard From Turkey - NYTimes.com

Postcard From Turkey - NYTimes.com:

ISTANBUL — Having witnessed the Egyptian uprising in Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011, I was eager to compare it with the protests by Turkish youths here in Taksim Square in 2013. They are very different. The Egyptians wanted to oust President Hosni Mubarak. Theirs was an act of “revolution.” The Turks are engaged in an act of “revulsion.” They aren’t (yet) trying to throw out their democratically elected Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. What they’re doing is calling him out. Their message is simple: “Get out of our faces, stop choking our democracy and stop acting like such a pompous, overbearing, modern-day Sultan.”

'via Blog this'

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Taliban to Start Talks With U.S. and Afghan Government - NYTimes.com

Taliban to Start Talks With U.S. and Afghan Government - NYTimes.com:

 "KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban announced on Tuesday that they were prepared to take the first step toward peace negotiations with the Afghan government after 12 years of war, and American officials said that they would meet with Taliban representatives in Qatar within the week to start the process."

'via Blog this'

Sunday, June 16, 2013

China’s Great Uprooting - Moving 250 Million Into Cities - NYTimes.com

China’s Great Uprooting - Moving 250 Million Into Cities - NYTimes.com:

"BEIJING — China is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years — a transformative event that could set off a new wave of growth or saddle the country with problems for generations to come."

'via Blog this'

Against Stupidity, The IMF Itself Contends In Vain


Yesterday the IMF chided the United States for spending too little and cutting its budget deficit too fast — and most people, if they heard about it, just shrugged. To be honest, that was my initial reaction too: we’ve come to accept the sheer stupidity of our current economic policies, and the fact that apparently nothing can be done about it, as part of the “new normal”.
Still, every once in a while we should step back and consider the awesomeness of the situation. Normally, we expect governments to have trouble containing demands that they spend more and/or tax less. Normally, we expect the IMF to be a fiscal scold, telling spendthrift governments to make tough choices; the old joke is that IMF stands for It’s Mostly Fiscal.
But now we’re in a situation — a liquidity trap — in which more government spending is a good thing, because it helps put unemployed resources to work; meanwhile, the cost in terms of future debt service is minimal, because interest rates are so low. Both ends of the intellectual case for austerity — the claim that spending cuts are actually expansionary and the claim that terrible things happen when debt rises even if interest rates are low — have collapsed. What could be easier, then, than for politicians to make constituents happy by spending more on things voters like?
So what happens? More austerity, because a party dedicated to the proposition that less government is always more blackmailed Obama into accepting the sequester, and now uses its blocking power to prevent any solution; and it’s true, Obama has chosen not to make this a central political issue. There are many ways to show how big the government shortfall is; here’s a comparison of the track of overall government spending (federal, state, and local) during the last recession and aftermath with the Great Recession and aftermath, just in dollar terms (if we did it in, say, real per capita terms you’d see that spending is falling fairly quickly):
If government spending had grown at normal rates since 2007, it would be hundreds of billions higher than it is — and the unemployment rate would probably be 6 percent or less. At this point austerity is the main reason we’re still in an inadequate recovery.
But there isn’t even a hint of significant movement on fiscal policy. It’s really amazing.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

The Real War on Reality

If there is one thing we can take away from the news of recent weeks it is this: the modern American surveillance state is not really the stuff of paranoid fantasies; it has arrived.
The revelations about the National Security Agency’s PRISM data collection program have raised awareness — and understandably, concern and fears — among American and those abroad, about the reach and power of secret intelligence gatherers operating behind the facades of government and business.
Surveillance and deception are not just fodder for the next “Matrix” movie, but a real sort of epistemic warfare.
But those revelations, captivating as they are, have been partial —they primarily focus on one government agency and on the surveillance end of intelligence work, purportedly done in the interest of national security. What has received less attention is the fact that most intelligence work today is not carried out by government agencies but by private intelligence firms and that much of that work involves another common aspect of intelligence work: deception. That is, it is involved not just with the concealment of reality, but with the manufacture of it.
The realm of secrecy and deception among shadowy yet powerful forces may sound like the province of investigative reporters, thriller novelists and Hollywood moviemakers — and it is — but it is also a matter for philosophers. More accurately, understanding deception and and how it can be exposed has been a principle project of philosophy for the last 2500 years. And it is a place where the work of journalists, philosophers and other truth-seekers can meet.
In one of the most referenced allegories in the Western intellectual tradition, Plato describes a group of individuals shackled inside a cave with a fire behind them. They are able to see only shadows cast upon a wall by the people walking behind them. They mistake shadows for reality. To see things as they truly are, they need to be unshackled and make their way outside the cave. Reporting on the world as it truly is outside the cave is one of the foundational duties of philosophers.
In a more contemporary sense, we should also think of the efforts to operate in total secrecy and engage in the creation of false impressions and realities as a problem area in epistemology — the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge. And philosophers interested in optimizing our knowledge should consider such surveillance and deception not just fodder for the next “Matrix” movie, but as real sort of epistemic warfare.

To get some perspective on the manipulative role that private intelligence agencies play in our society, it is worth examining information that has been revealed by some significant hacks in the past few years of previously secret data.
Important insight into the world these companies came from a 2010 hack by a group best known as LulzSec  (at the time the group was called Internet Feds), which targeted the private intelligence firm HBGary Federal.  That hack yielded 75,000 e-mails.  It revealed, for example, that Bank of America approached the Department of Justice over concerns about information that WikiLeaks had about it.  The Department of Justice in turn referred Bank of America to the lobbying firm Hunton and Willliams, which in turn connected the bank with a group of information security firms collectively known as Team Themis.
Team Themis (a group that included HBGary and the private intelligence and security firms Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems) was effectively brought in to find a way to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks and the journalist Glenn Greenwald (who recently broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leak of the N.S.A.’s Prism program),  because of Greenwald’s support for WikiLeaks. Specifically, the plan called for actions to “sabotage or discredit the opposing organization” including a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error. As for Greenwald, it was argued that he would cave “if pushed” because he would “choose professional preservation over cause.” That evidently wasn’t the case.
Team Themis also developed a proposal for the Chamber of Commerce to undermine the credibility of one of its critics, a group called Chamber Watch. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that U.S. Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.”
(A photocopy of the proposal can be found here.)
In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to infiltrate Chamber Watch.  They would “create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.”
Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them.
The hack also revealed evidence that Team Themis was developing a “persona management” system — a program, developed at the specific request of the United States Air Force, that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (“sock puppets”) for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grass roots support.  The contract was eventually awarded to another private intelligence firm.
This may sound like nothing so much as a “Matrix”-like fantasy, but it is distinctly real, and resembles in some ways the employment of “Psyops” (psychological operations), which as most students of recent American history know, have been part of the nation’s military strategy for decades. The military’s “Unconventional Warfare Training Manual” defines Psyops as “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.” In other words, it is sometimes more effective to deceive a population into a false reality than it is to impose its will with force or conventional weapons.  Of course this could also apply to one’s own population if you chose to view it as an “enemy” whose “motives, reasoning, and behavior” needed to be controlled.
Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them, and in the case of private intelligence contractors, there are both incentives (billions of dollars in contracts) and capabilities.

Several months after the hack of HBGary, a Chicago area activist and hacker named Jeremy Hammond successfully hacked into another private intelligence firm — Strategic Forcasting Inc., or Stratfor), and released approximately five million e-mails. This hack provided a remarkable insight into how the private security and intelligence companies view themselves vis a vis government security agencies like the C.I.A. In a 2004 e-mail to Stratfor employees, the firm’s founder and chairman George Friedman was downright dismissive of the C.I.A.’s capabilities relative to their own:  “Everyone in Langley [the C.I.A.] knows that we do things they have never been able to do with a small fraction of their resources. They have always asked how we did it. We can now show them and maybe they can learn.”
The Stratfor e-mails provided us just one more narrow glimpse into the world of the private security firms, but the view was frightening.  The leaked e-mails revealed surveillance activities to monitor protestors in Occupy Austin as well as Occupy’s relation to the environmental group Deep Green Resistance.  Staffers discussed how one of their own men went undercover (“U/C”) and inquired about an Occupy Austin General Assembly meeting to gain insight into how the group operates.
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Stratfor was also involved inmonitoring activists who were seeking reparations for victims of a chemical plant disaster in Bhopal, India, including a group called Bophal Medical Appeal. But the targets also included The Yes Men, a satirical group that had humiliated Dow Chemical with a fake news conference announcing reparations for the victims.  Stratfor regularly copied several Dow officers on the minutia of activities by the two members of the Yes Men.
One intriguing e-mail revealed that the Coca-Cola company was asking Stratfor for intelligence on PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) with Stratfor vice president for Intelligence claiming that “The F.B.I. has a classified investigation on PETA operatives. I’ll see what I can uncover.” From this one could get the impression that the F.B.I. was in effect working as a private detective Stratfor and its corporate clients.
Stratfor also had a broad-ranging public relations campaign.  The e-mails revealed numerous media companies on its payroll. While one motivation for the partnerships was presumably to have sources of intelligence, Stratfor worked hard to have soap boxes from which to project its interests. In one 2007 e-mail, it seemed that Stratfor was close to securing a regular show on NPR: “[the producer] agreed that she wants to not just get George or Stratfor on one time on NPR but help us figure the right way to have a relationship between ‘Morning Edition’ and Stratfor.”
On May 28 Jeremy Hammond pled guilty to the Stratfor hack, noting that even if he could successfully defend himself against the charges he was facing, the Department of Justice promised him that he would face the same charges in eight different districts and he would be shipped to all of them in turn.  He would become a defendant for life.  He had no choice but to plea to a deal in which he may be sentenced to 10 years in prison.  But even as he made the plea he issued a statement, saying “I did this because I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors. I did what I believe is right.”  (In a video interview conducted by Glenn Greenwald with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong this week, Snowden expressed a similar ethical stance regarding his actions.)
Given the scope and content of what Hammond’s hacks exposed, his supporters agree that what he did was right. In their view, the private intelligence industry is effectively engaged in Psyops against American public., engaging in “planned operations to convey selected information to [us] to influence [our] emotions, motives, objective reasoning and, ultimately, [our] behavior”? Or as the philosopher might put it, they are engaged in epistemic warfare.
The Greek word deployed by Plato in “The Cave” — aletheia — is typically translated as truth, but is more aptly translated as “disclosure” or “uncovering” —   literally, “the state of not being hidden.”   Martin Heidegger, in an essay on the allegory of the cave, suggested that the process of uncovering was actually a precondition for having truth.  It would then follow that the goal of the truth-seeker is to help people in this disclosure — it is to defeat the illusory representations that prevent us from seeing the world the way it is.  There is no propositional truth to be had until this first task is complete.
This is the key to understanding why hackers like Jeremy Hammond are held in such high regard by their supporters.  They aren’t just fellow activists or fellow hackers — they are defending us from epistemic attack.  Their actions help lift the hood that is periodically pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth.

Peter Ludlow
Peter Ludlow is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and is currently co-producing (with Vivien Weisman) a documentary on Hacktivist actions against private intelligence firms and the surveillance state.