EFTA00653368.pdf

From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bcc: jeevacation@gmail.com Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 06/29/2014 Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 07:46:07 +0000 Attachments: No_more_fillings_as_dentists_reveal_new_tooth_decay_treatment_The_Guardianiune_16, _2014.docx; Jinuny_Carter_Drops_a_Truth_Bomb,White_Menidentify_with_GOP_Because_of_Race_ SALON_April_10„2014.docx; Wisconsin? s_worst_case_is_a_Republica_n_JOAN_WALSH_SALON_Jtme_24„2014.docx; Iraq? s_vicious_downward_spir_al„Wars_about_oil_beget_more_wars_about_oil_Michael_Schw artz SALON_Jtme 25,2014.docx; itoehner_plans_to_file_lawsuit_against_Obama_over_use_of_executive_orders_Paul_Kane _TWP_June_25„2014.docx; Gerald_Albright_bio.docx; More_than_three_quarters_of_conservatives_say_the_poor_CHRISTOPHER_INGRAHAM TWP June 26„2014.docx; Plizabah_VTarren_says_the_U.S._economy_is_rig,ged„Many_conservatives_agtee_Jaime_ Fuller_TWP_June_27,2014.docx Inline-Images: image.png; image(1).png; image(2).png; image(3).png; image(4).png; image(5).png; image(6).png; image(7).png; image(8).png DEAR FRIEND Jimmy Carter Drops a Truth Bomb: White Men Identify with GOP Because of `Race' Inline image 1 EFTA00653368 At the age of 89, former President Jimmy Carter no longer cares about political correctness or defending the status quo. In his latest book "A Call to Action," subtitled "Women, Religion, Violence and Power," Carter is unafraid to tackle controversial topics: sexual assault on campus and the military; religious leaders of all faiths who use sacred texts to justify oppression; punitive prison sentences weighted against the poor and against racial minorities; American drone wars and endless military operations. If this wasn't enough Carter says that Bush didn't win in 2000 to discussing the fallacy of cherry-picking bible verses. And now he's called out Southern Republicans, saying that they flock to the GOP because of race. Asked why white males have embraced the Republicans, Carter, 89, was unequivocal. "It's race,"he said. The conversation was a part of an interview Salon held with Carter: Salon: "You were elected governor and president as a white male Southern Democrat, which is a segment of the population that has deserted the Democratic Party. In some Southern states now it will be maybe 30 percent of white Southern males who back the Democrats. This is something your grandson Jason is dealing with now, certainly, as he runs for governor of Georgia. But why do you think this is? The economy only gets tougher, inequality only worsens, and the response of white men in the South is to back the party of the 1 percent. Is it race? Gender? Fear?" Caner: "No, it's race. It's race. That's been prevalent in the South, except for when I ran, I secured every Southern state except Virginia. Ever since Nixon ran — and ever since Johnson didn't campaign in the Deep South, the Republicans have solidified their hold there. And even this year, as you may know, the Republicans have put forward a proposal that we have a license plate made available in Georgia with a Confederate flag on it. Well, those kinds of things, the subtle things and the appeal to richer people, which is almost always white people, and the derogation of people that get food stamps and that sort of thing, which are quite often poor people. And the allegation that people who go to jail are just guilty people, when they're mostly black people and Hispanics and mentally ill people. Those kind of things just exalt the higher class, which is the whites, and they draw a subtle, but very effective racial line throughout the South." Carter talked about a number of other issues in the Salon interview, including slut-shaming, cable news, the United States' involvement in armed conflict, and more. Attached please find a condensed summary of the interview as the former President in his post-presidency, has grown into one of our finest global citizens. ****** Inline image 8 EFTA00653369 Yesterday, was the 100 anniversary when the first two shots of World War I were fired in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the day that Europe exploded. On June 28, 1914, the Austro-Hungarian crown prince Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, where he had come to inspect his occupying troops in the empire's eastern province. The shots fired by Serb teenager Gavrilo Princip sparked the Great War, which was followed decades later by a second world conflict. Together the two wars cost some 8o million European their lives, ended four empires — including the Austro-Hungarian — and changed the world forever. The continent's violent century started in Sarajevo and ended in Sarajevo with the 1992-95 war that took 100,000 Bosnian lives. For the Serbs, Princip was a hero who saw Bosnia as part of the Serb national territory at a time when the country was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His shots were a chance for them to include Bosnia into the neighboring Serbian kingdom — the same idea that inspired the Serbs in 1992 to fight the decision by Muslim Bosnians and Catholic Croats to declare the former republic of Bosnia independent when Serb-dominated Yugoslavia fell apart. Their desire is still to include the part of Bosnia they control into neighboring Serbia. Serbia itself flirts with both — the EU opposed unification with the Bosnian Serbs and its own EU membership candidacy. World War I, which began 100 years ago, has moved from memory to history. But its resonance has not faded — on land and geography, people and nations, and on thecauses and consequences of modern war. 8.5 million or more from both sides who died, and 20 million who were severely wounded. In Europe's first total war, called the Great War until the second one came along, fifty million civilians also died. World War I could be said to have begun in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, by a young nationalist seeking a greater Serbia. The four and a half years that followed, as the war spread throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia, reshaped the modem world in fundamental ways. The war destroyed kings, kaisers, czars and sultans; it demolished empires; it introduced chemical weapons, tanks and airborne bombing; it brought millions of women into the work force, hastening their legal right to vote. It gave independence to nations like Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic countries and created new nations in the Middle East with often arbitrary borders; it brought about major cultural changes, including a new understanding of the psychology of war, of 'shell shock' and post-traumatic stress. It also featured the initial step of the United States as a global power. President Woodrow Wilson ultimately failed in his ambitions for a new world order and a credible League of Nations, setting off much chaos with his insistence on an armistice and his support for undefined for "self-determination." And the rapid retreat of the United States from Europe helped sow the ground for World War II. Historians still squabble over responsibility for the war. Some continue to blame Germany and others depict a system of rivalries, alliances and anxieties, driven by concerns about the growing weakness of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires and the growing strength of Germany and Russia that was likely to produce a war in any case, even if there was some other casus belli. But the emotional legacies are different for different countries. For France the war, however bloody, was a necessary response to invasion. Preventing the German Army from reaching Paris in the first battle of the Marne spelled the difference between freedom and slavery. The second battle of the EFTA00653370 Marne, with the help at last of American soldiers, was the beginning of the end for the Germans. This was France's "good war," while World War II was an embarrassing collapse, with significant collaboration. For Germany, which had invested heavily in the machinery of war, it was an almost incomprehensible defeat, laying the groundwork for revolution, revanchism, fascism and genocide. Oddly enough, says Max Hastings, a war historian, Germany could have dominated Europe in 20 years economically if only it had not gone to war. 'The supreme irony of1914 is how many of the rulers of Europe grossly overestimated military power and grossly underestimated economic power,"Mr. Hastings said, a point he now emphasizes when speaking with Chinese generals. The Germans, too, are still coming to terms with their past, unsure how much to press their current economic and political strength in Europe. For Britain, there remains a debate about whether the British even It had to fight. But fight they did, with millions of volunteers until the dead were mounded so high that conscription was finally imposed in 1916. The memory of July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme — when 20,000 British soldiers died, 40,00o were wounded and 60 percent of officers were killed — has marked British consciousness and become a byword for mindless slaughter. "The sense that the war wasfutile and unnecessary still hangs over a lot of the discussion in Britain," said Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College, London. In Britain there is also a deep presumption that the generals were incompetent and cold to human sacrifice, that "lions" — the brave ordinary Tommies — were led by donkeys"like Field Marshal Douglas Haig. "That was almost certainly true at the start, but not true at the end," Mr. Freedman said. "But the notion that lives were lost on an industrial scale because generals kept trying to launch offensivesfor a fewfeet of ground is widespread." In fact, the beginning of the war was mobile and extremely bloody, as were the last few months, when the big offensives of 1918 broke the German Army. The rate of killing in the muck and mud of the trenches was much lower than during the mobile part of the war. If the inheritance is mixed, the war still casts a long shadow, refracted through what can now seem the inevitability of World War II and our tumultuous modern history. This is also, after all, the 75th anniversary of the start of that war and the 25th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The end of the Cold War was in a sense a return to the end of World War I, restoring sovereignty to the countries of Eastern Europe, one reason they are so eager to defend it now. Analysts wonder if the period of American and European supremacy itself is fading, given the rise of China and the return of traditional nationalism, not just in Russia but in the many euroskeptic voters in France, Britain and Denmark. Inevitably, analogies are drawn. Some analysts compare Germany after the war to Russia now, arguing that just as Germany rejected the "Carthaginian peace"at the end of World War I, so Russia is now rejecting the "settlement" of the Cold War, seeing it as unjust, chafing over its defeat and prompting a new Russian aggressiveness and irredentism. Some question whether the lessons of 1914 or of 1939 are more valid today. Do we heed only the lessons of 1939, when restraint was costly, and miss the lessons of 1914, when restraint could have avoided the war? EFTA00653371 Some see a continuing struggle between Germany and Russia for mastery of Europe, a struggle that marked both world wars and continues today, and not just in Ukraine, where a century ago its people fought on both sides. Others see World War I, at least as it began in Sarajevo, as the third Balkan War, while the post-Cold War collapse of Yugoslavia and its multinational, multicultural, multireligious model continues to present unresolved difficulties for Europe, in Bosnia, Kosovo and beyond. Similar tensions persist in Northern Ireland, the rump of Ireland's incomplete revolution that began with the Easter Rising of 1916. Others point to the dangers of declining powers faced with rising ones, considering both China and the Middle East, where the Syrian civil war and the advance of Islamic militants toward Baghdad are ripping up the colonial borders drawn up in the Sykes-Picot agreement by the French and British, with Russian agreement, in 1916, the middle of the war, when the Ottoman Empire was cracking. The carnage at Gallipoli helped shape the national identity of the inheritor state, modern Turkey, let alone Australia. Even the Balfour Declaration, which threw British support behind the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, was signed during the war, in November 1917. On that fateful day the archducal couple were on their way to a civic reception in the yellow-and orange-banded city hall, an endowment of the Hapsburg era that borrowed from Moorish Spain, when the violence began, with a conspirator tossing a homemade bomb from a bridge over the Miljacka River. It bounced off the folded canopy of the archduke's car before exploding. What ensued stands as a monument to imperial folly and to the role of chance and mischance in history. Shortly before 11 a.m., the couple left the reception, deeply shaken by the bombing but determined to see the day's formalities through. With the archduke in a military tunic and helmet, and the duchess in a dress of white filigreed lace with a matching hat and parasol, they headed back along the lightly guarded Miljacka embankment — and, 50o yards on, to their fateful encounter with Princip. A century later, Bosnia's Serbs, Muslims and Croats remain deeply divided in their attitudes toward Princip. Many Serbs view him as a heroic fighter against Austro-Hungarian rule — on behalf of Serbs first, but also, they say, on behalf of Croats and Muslims — and thus as an early standard-bearer for the South Slav kingdom of Yugoslavia, which emerged from the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and disintegrated amid the resurgent nationalist and sectarian passions of the 199os. Among the largely Catholic Croats and some Bosnian Muslims, many of whom looked to the authorities in Vienna at the time of the assassination for protection against Balkan domination by the mainly Orthodox Serbs, it is more common to condemn Princip as an anarchist or terrorist, as the Sarajevo court did when it sentenced him to 20 years' imprisonment. He died of tuberculosis, proud and unrepentant, in a Hungarian prison in 1918. Today, Europe diligently promotes an ideology of harmony, broad areas of the continent, the Middle East and elsewhere continue to struggle with versions of the destructive forces unleashed that day. But we should remember that on June 28, 1914 when the excuse of the assassination of two individuals set in motion for Germany, Russia, Great Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire to march head on in lockstep to an unmitigated carnage that continues on through today.... To me, what is happening in many other parts of the world, is very much like the beginning of the loth century, we continue to find excuses to go to war So why should anyone believe that we have hardly moved on at all? Because if EFTA00653372 I remember correctly from history in school, WW1 was touted as The War To End All Wars What Happened and why haven't we learned anything? As former President aspirant Gary Hart wrote this week in an op-ed — The Destruction of Memory - in The Huffmgton Post — "You can't claim to love your country and hate its government." Yet somehow these media driven attacks on "Washington" are now routine by most candidates of both parties, but especially on the right, to run against "Washington." That is, even when one's own party is running "Washington." An off-shoot of this bizarre political tactic that involves seeking office in a government one opposes, was the pre-Tea Party movement for term limits. That lasted only as long as it took term limit candidates to get to Washington and find out that it wasn't such a bad place after all and begin to reject their own term limit pledges. What the pro-term limiters began to realize was the pretty obvious truth that there is value in experience in government. But the constant churning of elected representatives pledged to "change things" in "Washington" devalues experience and produces a constantly changing panoply of legislators and administrators with little if any experience and no knowledge of history. Take, for example: national security and intelligence. That required top secret clearances, the first of many thereafter. Foreign Affairs, the biblical publication of the foreign policy establishment, just produced four case studies of what really happened in the use of covert operations as an instrument of foreign policy in Iran, Chile, Congo, and Bangladesh decades ago. In each case we have been living with the unintended and destructive consequences of those ill-advised operations since then. Think about a farmer or rancher who wins a congressional seat coming to Washington for the first time and being confronted with policies issues in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa. Or a former state legislator in on the West Coast who has worked his/her way up through the ranks to a Congressional seat being confronted with cap and trade issues for the first time. What experience do they bring to the table on this issues? We want our pilots who fly our commercial aircraft to have thousands if not tens of thousands of hours flying and our surgeons to have years if not decades of experience before repairing a blood vessel in our heart or removing a clot in our brain or reattaching a detached retina. Why then are we limiting experience when it comes to politics in both Washington and in our state houses around the country? We value experience almost everywhere else then in politics. A current example is that Brazil is favored to win the World Cup, not because they have the world's best player, Lionel Messi for Argentina, but because they have won the World Cup six times.... And yes, they may not win this year but they are considered the odds-on favorite because of the fact that they have won it six times. As Gary Hart points out that it would have been helped Barrack Obama to weave his way through the new world of the 21st century as President if he had first served in the Senate Select (Church) committee on intelligence oversight. Because he would have learned invaluable lessons about the follies and long-term consequences of covert operations, the limits on military force to rearrange history, the laws of unintended consequences, and the truth that nothing ever remains secret for long. The same observation would have applied to President George W. Bush who, given that kind of experience, might have been less inclined to trust unquestioningly the concerted advice of a group of ideologues about the ease with which America could remake the entire Middle East by invading Iraq (using less than factual arguments about non-existent weapons of mass destruction.) EFTA00653373 Foreign policy is being driven by two wings of interventionism: the human rights interventionists, largely Democratic, who wish to use military force to liberate oppressed people; and hegemonic interventionists, largely Republican, who wish to use military force to achieve political dominance in the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere. The vast majority of Americans, however, are by nature cautious about sending troops and ships here and there willy-nilly. They are not isolationists. They are realists. They know the lessons of history more than right and left ideologues. Hart says that reading Lawrence in Arabia provides invaluable lessons in the history of the Middle East and how late colonial ambitions and competition between Britain and France during and after World War I, a century ago, still returns to plague us. Sykes and Pico drew arbitrary national boundaries that forced tribal societies and theological enemies, Sunnis and Shia, into awkward nation-states that, soon after the British and French were forced to leave following World War II, required dictators, oligarchies, and new royal families to bring order by force. Now those arrangements are coming unglued and the region faces disintegration. In the early 1950s, the Iranian people democratically elected a progressive prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, whom we, the United States, covertly overthrew because he nationalized Iran's British- controlled oil company. Anyone who denies that we are living with the consequences of that does not deserve to be taken seriously. Likewise, now we are reportedly trying to evict Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq because he has failed to govern in ways we approve. It is reliably reported that one of the candidates being touted to replace him is Ahmad Chalabi, the neo-conservatives' candidate for prime minister who promised that when marched on Baghdad in 2003 that we would be greeted as liberators and Iraqis would embrace US style democracy. What a crock? Nothing changes. And so it goes. So, the churning of leadership in an effort to destabilize the government of the country we all claim to love has many consequences, not least of which is the loss of experience, the lessons of history, and any recollection of what failed in the past and is not likely to succeed now and in the future. By undermining our government, we are destroying our national memory. And then it is easy to repeat the same mistakes as well as make them worse. Didn't we try Nation Building in Vietnam in the 196os, then why did we try it again in Afghanistan and Iraq and somehow believe that it would work this time? I watched in horror last week as the same knuckleheads (Wolfowitz, Feith, Bremer, Bolton, Kristol and Cheney) who led us into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were saying that President Obama was somehow responsible for the current carnage in Syria and Iraq because he pulled our troops out of Iraq and not supported "the Moderates" fighting against Assad in Syria. These guys had their chance and not only did they blow it, they efforts totally destabilized the entire Middle East. We can forget the fact that there were never any WMDs and remember that al Qaeda didn't exist in Iraq during the reign of Saddam Hussein and he was the sworn enemy of Iran. When you hate your government you also hate the good that it can do but more importantly hate is the easiest emotion that can be used by others to manipulate the collective. The Tea Party hates Washington. Republicans hate President Obama. Our politicians openly hate the Iranian Government vowing to bring it under their control. The Conservative Right hates Muslims and Arabs openly lamenting that President Obama is their tool. And it seems that everyone in Government hates Putin. And we wonder why we are hated. If ISIL isn't a threat to Brazil, Japan, China, Switzerland, New Zealand, India and South Africa then why are they a threat to us in the United States? Maybe the reason is because we are the original haters who hate our own government even though we are demanding that other countries use it as their role model EFTA00653374  More than three quarters of conservatives say the poor "have it easy' The Pew Research Center is out with part two of its huge survey of American politics. The first part, released a couple weeks ago, focused on political polarization. For this round, Pew's researchers have created a political typology which "sorts voters into cohesive groups based on their attitudes and values." There's plenty to say about this - and you can see where you fall in Pew's typology quiz here! - but for now I want to focus on the chart below, particularly the left half. Inline image 2 So much for compassionate conservatism. More than three quarters of conservative Americans - those in the steadfast conservative, business conservative, and young outsider typology groups - agree that "poor people have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything." Only seven percent of steadfast conservatives say that the poor "have hard lives." Even a not-insignificant share of left-leaning groups say that the poor have it easy. But overall the widespread agreements among conservatives on this point is what's really striking here. There are reasonable, well-intentioned arguments on either side of many poverty-related issues - about the causes of poverty (see the right half of the chart), or whether government benefits provide a leg up or simply perpetuate poverty, for instance. EFTA00653375 But one should have a hard time understanding how anyone could read about the experience of families relying on food stamps to eat, or those trying to manage chronic conditions with Medicaid, and conclude that these people somehow have it easy. For context, here is a brief and wildly incomplete list of the ways life is "easy" when you're poor: • Compared to middle and upper-income Americans, the poor are three times less likely to have health insurance coverage, and more likely to put off or skip necessary medical treatment as a result; • They are three times more likely to be victimized by crime; • The daily stresses of living under poverty impose a cognitive burden equivalent to losing 13 IQ points; • Poor children are three times more likely to be affected by food scarcity and obesity; • Poor children receive a lower quality education in public school, and the ones who make it to college are more likely to drop out; • Poorer Americans breathe dirtier air, they sleep less, and the even have less sex; • And in the end all this "easy living" literally shaves decades off their lives. The notion that poor people have it easy is at odds with the data. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has built a sizable political profile — including the requisite presidential speculation — by espousing a simple idea: that the system is "rigged" against average Americans. And you might be surprised who agrees with her: A whole bunch of conservatives. According to the new Pew survey mentioned above, 62 percent of Americans think that the economic system unfairly favors the powerful, and 78 percent think that too much power is concentrated in too few companies. The discontent isn't limited to those who share Warren's liberal ideology; 69 percent of young conservative-leaning voters and 48 percent of the most conservative voters agree that the system favors the powerful, according to Pew. Still as mentioned above a majority of Conservatives believe that the poor have it easy. Inline image 3 Although Warren seems an outlier in the legislative branch for her fiery discontent with inequality — and the role she says Wall Street plays in exacerbating it — the Pew survey suggests that the vast majority of Americans are at least open to her underlying premise. Everyone, that is, except business conservatives. This faction has vastly different views of the American economic system than most EFTA00653376 Americans. Two-thirds of business conservatives think the economic system is fair to most people, and 57 percent think that large companies do not have too much power. The demographics that bind business conservatives go a long way toward explaining why they diverge on this issue. The business conservatives that Pew surveyed were the most affluent of the seven political typologies they defined — 45 percent have family incomes above $75,000. Fifty-seven percent of business conservatives say they are interested in business and finance, and 68 percent invest in the stock market. No other typology has them beat on these two measures. Americans' political beliefs are generally grounded in how they see politics interact or interfere with their own lives. We can focus on the diner-embed model of analyzing politics day and night, but for most Americans, gossiping about how a next-door neighbor lost their house or a cousin got a promotion at Goldman Sachs is all they've got. Business conservatives think the economic system is fair; others who aren't as enmeshed in it disagree. So does conservative discontent with the current economic system mean that the rest of Congress is going to hang Thomas Piketty posters on their office walls and head to Zuccotti Park? (Or vote for Elizabeth Warren?) Don't count on it. Business conservatives' confidence in the economic system might differ from everyone else, but business conservatives are politically active enough to make a big impression on politicians. Seventy-one percent of the business conservatives surveyed by Pew say they always or nearly always vote in primaries. "Steadfast conservatives" are similarly active too, but they aren't quite as affluent as their conservative counterparts, and they don't donate nearly as much money. Inline image 4 Another reason conservative politicians aren't about to join hands with Warren? The conservatives — and many of the liberals — who agree with her on the economy's unfairness don't agree with her on the source of the problem. Skeptics, solid liberals and young conservative outsiders were the only political typologies more likely to think Wall Street was hurting the economy more than it helped it. Until Americans agree on what needs to be done to fix the economy, their disappointment with its EFTA00653377 underpinnings are unlikely be met with any sweeping populist changes in policy. And this poll suggests that's not happening today. I am not against big business especially when we are living in a global economy where size does matter and our private enterprises compete with state own and/or sponsored competitors on almost every continent. And like Elizabeth Warren and other liberals I believe that the economy is rigged in favor of Big Business and the rich at the expense of the Middle Class and the Poor and the Big Ugly is that not only does our political leaders seem not to care but a huge part of society is willing to blame the victims for being poor and falling through the cracks and this is my rant of the week.... WEEK's READINGS Inline image 5 Scientists in London have developed a pain-free filling that allows teeth to repair themselves without drilling or injections. The new treatment, Electrically Accelerated and Enhanced Remineralisation (EAER), could be available within three years. Scientists have developed a new pain-free filling that allows cavities to be repaired without drilling or injections. The tooth-rebuilding technique developed at King's College London does away with fillings and instead encourages teeth to repair themselves. Tooth decay is normally removed by drilling, after which the cavity is filled with a material such as amalgam or composite resin. The new treatment, called Electrically Accelerated and Enhanced Remineralisation (EAER), accelerates the natural movement of calcium and phosphate minerals into the damaged tooth. A two-step process first prepares the damaged area of enamel, then uses a tiny electric current to push minerals into the repair site. It could be available within three years. Additionally, the method can also be used to whiten teeth, with the repair at least as cost-effective as current dental treatments." EFTA00653378 Professor Nigel Pitts, from King's College London's Dental Institute, said: "The way we treat teeth today is not ideal. When we repair a tooth by putting in afilling, that tooth enters a cycle of drilling and refilling as, ultimately, each rrepairfails. "Not only is our device kinder to the patient and betterfor their teeth, but it's expected to be at least as cost-effective as current dental treatments. Along with fighting tooth decay, our device can also be used to whiten teeth." A spinout company, Reminova, has been set up to commercialize the research. Based in Perth, Scotland, it is in the process of seeking private investment to develop EAER. The company is the first to emerge from the King's College London Dental Innovation and Translation Centre, which was set up in January to take novel technologies and turn them into new products and practices. King's College is a participant in MedCity, a project launched by the London mayor, Boris Johnson, to promote entrepreneurship in the London-Oxford-Cambridge life sciences "golden triangle". The chairman of MedCity, Kit Malthouse, said: "It's brilliant to see the really creative research taking place at King's making its way out of the lab so quickly and being turned into a new device that has the potential to make a real difference to the dental health and patient experience ofpeople with tooth decay." I can't wait until this new treatment reaches American shores because I hate when my dentist drills in my mouth. Prance Preibus and Scott Walker The Republicans have been claiming voter fraud as the reason for instituting stricter voter ID laws and other voter suppression legislation. Since 2011, Republican lawmakers in swing states have pushed hard for new restrictions on voting, from voter identification to new rules on early voting and ballot access. "Nine states have passed measures making it harder to vote since the beginning of 2013," notes the New York Times, and other states "are considering mandating proof of citizenship, like a birth certificate or passport, after a federal judge recently upheld such laws passed in Arizona and Kansas." Voting rights advocates have attacked these laws as blatant attempts to suppress the votes of low- income and minority voters, but Republicans defend their actions as justified to protect "voter integrity" and ensure Tairness"and "uniformity" in the system. Here's Wisconsin state Sen. Glenn Grothman on a bill — signed last week by Gov. Scott Walker — to end early voting on weekends. "Every city on election day has votingfrom 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. The idea that some communities should have weekend or night voting is obviously unfair,"he said. "It's a matter of uniformity. I don't know what all the hoopla is over,"he told Reuters. It's always seemed strange that Wisconsin Republicans like Reince Priebus and Scott Walker would insult their own state by claiming that it has a problem with voter fraud and needs tougher laws to prevent it. Wisconsin has traditionally been known for an uncommonly clean political culture (until recently, anyway), and I've never quite understood why conservatives would want to impugn it. Now we learn about the curious case of Robert Monroe, a 5o year old health executive who is accused of voting a dozen times in 2011 and 2012, including seven times in the recalls of Scott Walker and his GOP ally Alberta Darling. Wisconsin officials say it's the worst case of multiple voting in memory. And now it appears that Monroe is a white Republican stuffing the ballot box in favor of GOP candidates. EFTA00653379 Investigators say Monroe voted twice for Alberta Darling in her 2011 recall, and five times for Walker in the June 2012 recall. He's used his own name, his son's name, and his girlfriend's son's name. (They can't be sure exactly who he voted for in each case, but he gave money to Darling and Walker.) Then in the November presidential election, he voted first in Shorewood, then again in Lebanon, Indiana, where he also owns a home. He claims he had temporary amnesia and doesn't remember any of the Election Day events. Right before the 2012 recall, Reince Priebus claimed that Democratic voter fraud could account for up to two percent of the vote on Election Day. "I'm always concerned about voterfraud, you know, being from Kenosha, and quitefrankly having lived through seeing some of it happen," Priebus told reporters. "Certainly in Milwaukee we have seen some of it, and I think it's been documented. Any notion that's not the case, it certainly is in Wisconsin. I'm always concerned about it, which is why I think we need to do a point or two better than where we think we need to be, to overcome it." Walker wouldn't go as far as Priebus, but endorsed his view that voter fraud was a problem in his state. "We have seen problems in the past in Wisconsin," Walker said. "I don't know what percentage to predict on that. I hope it's none. I hope there is none. But certainly we're cautious, and we want to make sure there are enough volunteers out there." Even at the time, voting rights advocates pushed back. If 1 to 2 percent of the vote in Wisconsin's 2010 gubernatorial election were fraudulent, that would amount to 21,000 to 42,000 votes, or 6 to 12 fraudulent votes in the state's 3,63o precincts, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel found. A 2008 bipartisan voter fraud investigation resulted in 20 prosecutions, mainly of felons who tried to vote after being disenfranchised. "They have zero, zero evidence to substantiate it," said voting rights attorney Richard Saks said. "It's simply demagoguery to whip up fear." Or maybe it's projection, since the most notorious case of voter fraud turns out to be a Republican. "During 2011 and 2012, the defendant, Robert Monroe, became especially focused upon political issues and causes, including especially the recall elections," the complaint against him alleges. And Republicans became especially focused on fighting voter fraud as well as cutting back on early voting, primarily used by low-income Democratic voters in Milwaukee. Of course, the federal judge who invalidated Wisconsin's new voter ID law in April found no evidence of voter fraud. U.S. District Court judge Lynn Adelson wrote in his decision (h/t Andrew Cohen): The evidence at trial established that virtually no voter impersonation occurs in Wisconsin. The defendants could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past. The only evidence even relating to voter impersonation that the defendants introduced was the testimony of Bruce Landgraf, an Assistant District Attorney in Milwaukee County. Landgraf testified that in "major elections," by which he means gubernatorial and presidential elections, his office is asked to investigate about 10 or 12 cases in which a voter arrives at the polls and is told by the poll worker that he or she has already cast a ballot. However, his office determined that the vast majority of these cases—approximately 10 each election— have innocent explanations, such as a poll worker's placing an indication that a person has voted next to the wrong name in the poll book. Of course, Adelson didn't know about Robert Monroe. Unbelievably — or not — Wisconsin conservatives are saying the Walker supporter's crime is "the Democrats' fault," because Democrats opposed the voter ID law. I suppose it's just a matter of time until we hear that from Reince Priebus, too. EFTA00653380 Republican voter suppression might not be an explicit attempt to target low-income and minority voters, but as far as effects go, it doesn't matter. The outcome is still one where minorities and low- income Americans have a harder time at the polls. It should be said that none of this is new. Most Americans are familiar with race-based voter suppression — the poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses of Jim Crow — but those are part of a larger history of partisan voter suppression that stretches back to the early 19th century when a flood of Irish immigrants tipped the electoral scales and threatened Whig electoral prospects in New York. Whig lawmakers rushed to pass tough new registration rules for New York City, which contained the largest concentration of Irish voters. What's more, in states like Missouri, Maryland, and Indiana, Know-Nothing and Whig lawmakers sought to delay voting rights for naturalized citizens, fearing the political consequences of large-scale immigrant enfranchisement. It turns out that voter fraud is real, and Republicans are guilty of doing it. I just love the irony of Republicans suppression efforts in light of the fact that the worst case of voter fraud in Wisconsin has been perpetuated by a supporter of Scott Walker having been charged with 13 felonies. So where is Scott Walker and Reince Priebus now that voter fraud in Wisconsin has been proven? iraq-MMAP-md Does anyone remember what Iraq looked like a dozen years ago, when Saddam Hussein still ruled the country and the United States was about to invade? On the one hand, Iraqis, especially Shiites and Kurds, suffered under the iron heel of an oppressive dictator — who may have killed 250,000 or more of his own people during his 25-year reign. They also struggled against the privation caused by U.S.- led sanctions — some estimates at the time placed the number of sanction-caused infant deaths alone at 500,000. On the other hand, the country worked. It had a number of successful export-oriented industries like leather goods and agricultural products like dates that offered employment to hundreds of thousands of relatively well paid workers and entrepreneurs. It also had a resilient electrical, water, and highway infrastructure (though increasingly decrepit thanks to those sanctions). In addition, it had a best-in-the-region primary and higher educational system, and the finest (free) health care in the Middle East. In a nation of 27 million people, it also had — in comparison to other countries in the area — a large, mainly government-employed middle class of three million. EFTA00653381 These pluses all flowed from a single source: the 2.5 million barrels of oil that Iraq produced each day. The daily income from the sale of the "national patrimony"undergirded the country's economic superstructure. In fact, the oil-based government budget was so ample that it supported Hussein with multiple palaces, enriched all his relatives and allies, and financed his various wars, both on other countries and on Iraq's Kurds and Shiites. This mixture of oppression and prosperity ended with the U.S. invasion. Despite denials that it would ever touch the Iraqi "patrimony,"the Bush administration went straight for those oil revenues, diverting them away from the economy and into "debt payment" and soon enough, a pacification campaign. Despite promises from Washington that, under an American occupation, production would soon rise to six million barrels per day, the struggle to take control of energy production out of Iraqi hands ended up crippling the industry and reducing production by 40%. In fact, the occupation government was a whirlwind of economic destruction. It quickly began dismantling all government-run (and oil-subsidized) industrial plants, bankrupting the private industries that depended on them. It disrupted or destroyed commercial agriculture, again by discontinuing Saddam-era oil-financed subsidies and by air attacks on insurgents in rural areas. It imposed both austerity measures and a "de-Baathification" program on the country's educational and medical systems. Since most Iraqis holding any position of significance had no choice but to belong to Saddam's Baath Party, this proved a disaster for middle class professionals, a majority of whom found themselves jobless or in exile in neighboring countries. Since they had managed such systems, often under increasingly terrible conditions, the effect on the management of the electrical, water, and highway infrastructure was devastating. Add in the effects of bombing campaigns and the privatization of maintenance and you had a lasting disaster. When, in 2009, the Obama administration first began withdrawing U.S. combat troops, Iraqis everywhere — but especially in Sunni areas — faced up to 6o% unemployment, sporadic electrical service, poisoned water systems, episodic education, a dysfunctional medical system, and a lack of viable public or private transportation. Few Westerners remember that, in 2010, Maliki based his election campaign on a promise to remedy these problems by — that figure again — increasing oil production to six million barrels per day. Since the existing production was more than sufficient to operate the government, virtually all of the increased revenues could be used to reconstruct the country's infrastructure, revive the government sector, and rehabilitate all the devastated public services, industries, and agricultural sectors. Despite his obvious Shia sectarianism, Sunnis gave Maliki time to fulfill his campaign promises. For some, hopes were increased when service contracts were auctioned off to international oil firms with the aim of hiking energy production to that six million barrel mark by 2020. (Some, however, just saw this as the selling off of that national patrimony.) Many Iraqis were initially reassured when oil production began to rise: in 2011, the Hussein-era mark of 2.5 million barrels per day was finally reached, and in 2013 production finally exceeded 3.o million barrels per day. These increases raised hopes that reconstruction from the invasion and occupation era would finally begin. With oil prices holding steady at just under $roo per barrel, government oil revenues more than doubled, from about $p billion in 2010 to more than $roo billion in 2013. This increase alone, if distributed to the population, would have constituted a windfall $ro,000 subsidy for each of the five million Iraqi families. It also would have constituted a very promising down payment on restoring the Iraqi economy and its social services. (The electrical system in itself required tens of billions of dollars in new investment simply to restore it to inadequate pre-war levels.) But none of this oil wealth trickled down to the grassroots, especially in Sunni areas of the country where signs of reconstruction, economic development, restored services, or jobs were hard to discern. Instead, the vast new revenues disappeared into the recesses of a government ranked by Transparency International as the seventh most corrupt on the planet. EFTA00653382 So here's where Iraqi oil, or the lack of its revenues at least, comes into play. Communities across Iraq, especially in embittered Sunni areas, began demanding funding for reconstruction, often backed by local and provincial governments. In response, the Maliki government relentlessly refused to allocate any oil revenues for such projects, choosing instead to denounce such demands as efforts to divert funds from more urgent budgetary imperatives. That included tens of billions of dollars needed to purchase military supplies including, in 2011,18 F-16 jets from the United States for $4 billion. In a rare moment of ironic insight, Time magazine concluded its coverage of the F-16 purchase with this comment: "The good news is the deal will likely keep Lockheed's F-16 plant in Fort Worth running perhaps a year longer. The bad news is that only 70% of Iraqis have access to clean water, and only 25% have clean sanitation." In the beginning Maliki use some of the new oil revenues to begin restaffing wrecked government agencies and social service institutions, but virtually all of the new employment went to Shia citizens in Shia areas, while Sunnis continued to be fired from government jobs. This lack of employment — which meant, of course, the lack of oil money — has been key to the Sunni uprising. As Patrick Cockburn of the British newspaper, the Independent, wrote, "Sunni men were alienated by not having a job because governmentfunds were spent elsewhere and, on occasion, suddenly sacked without a pensionfor obligatory membership of the Ba'ath party decades earlier. One Sunni teacher with 30 years' experience one day got a crumpled note under his door telling him not to come to work at his school anymore because he had beenfiredfor this reason. `What am I to do? How am I going tofeed myfamily?' he asked." With conditions worsening, Sunni communities only became more insistent, supplementing their petitions and dem