TomDispatch: Tomgram: William Hartung, The Doctrine of Armed Exceptionalism

Pillar one supporting that edifice: ideology.  As long as most Americans accept the notion that it is the God-given mission and right of the United States to go anywhere on the planet and do more or less anything it cares to do with its military, you won’t see Pentagon spending brought under real control.  Think of this as the military corollary to American exceptionalism — or just call it the doctrine of armed exceptionalism, if you will.

The second pillar supporting lavish military budgets (and this will hardly surprise you): the entrenched power of the arms lobby and its allies in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.  The strategic placement of arms production facilities and military bases in key states and Congressional districts has created an economic dependency that has saved many a flawed weapons system from being unceremoniously dumped in the trash bin of history. [...]

However, perhaps the biggest threat since World War II to an “arms establishment of vast proportions” came with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, also in 1991.  How to mainline fear into the American public and justify Cold War levels of spending when that other superpower, the Soviet Union, the primary threat of the previous nearly half-a-century, had just evaporated and there was next to nothing threatening on the horizon?  General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, summed up the fears of that moment within the military and the arms complex when he said, “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il-sung.” [...]

Although rarely discussed due to the focus on Donald Trump’s abominable behavior and racist rhetoric, both candidates for president are in favor of increasing Pentagon spending.  Trump’s “plan” (if one can call it that) hews closely to a blueprint developed by the Heritage Foundation that, if implemented, could increase Pentagon spending by a cumulative $900 billion over the next decade.  The size of a Clinton buildup is less clear, but she has also pledged to work toward lifting the caps on the Pentagon’s regular budget.  If that were done and the war fund continued to be stuffed with non-war-related items, one thing is certain: the Pentagon and its contractors will be sitting pretty.

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The Guardian: We’re all going to die. So the Catholic church is right to talk about it

As a society we vaguely know we ought to be better at facing up to death, to be asking questions about it and thinking ahead about the way we want to die; and now the Catholic church has taken the initiative and updated the Ars Moriendi, or The Art of Dying, a Latin manuscript popular in the 15th century designed to bring Christian comfort and guidance to the dying person and their family. The church has launched a new website, artofdyingwell.org, featuring real-life stories about dying, and interviews with professionals whose work focuses on death, such as palliative care doctors and nurses. And it has interviews with the nearest we get to accounts of what it’s like to die: the voices of those who are terminally ill or who have been close to death, reflecting on what it meant and means.

At a time when the Catholic church’s profile has been seriously dented by scandals, updating The Art of Dying is a positive contribution to society’s communal wellbeing. Some elements of the new site are heavily religious in tone, but there is plenty to draw in somebody of no faith or another faith.

One section, for example, looks at how it actually feels to die, and what we can expect to happen to our bodies when we are in the process of dying. Does dying feel like falling asleep; and what causes the famous “death rattle”? Church leaders and believers have never shied away from the reality of death, because for them it is the transition to a better state of being; but belief should not be a prerequisite for asking questions about what it’s like to die, about how to prepare for it, and about how to go on living in the final shadow of death.

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The New York Times: Why Republicans Don’t Even Try to Win Cities Anymore

Only three of the 25 largest cities in America now have Republican mayors. In the House of Representatives, Republicans from dense urban congressional districts have become extinct. In the 2012 presidential election, the counties containing Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Washington, San Francisco and Philadelphia each gave less than 20 percent of their vote to Mitt Romney. In this coming election, Donald J. Trump is unlikely to do better — and may fare worse. [...]

The pattern highlights a paradox about Mr. Trump: “He’s the most urban candidate in American history — he was born in Queens and lives in a skyscraper on Fifth Avenue,” said Aaron Renn, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. And Mr. Trump’s personal fortunes have risen with the comeback of major American cities, with signature real estate projects in New York, Washington and Chicago. But he has portrayed these same cities as dystopias.

Mr. Trump has elevated a strategy that is risky to the Republican Party in the long run. Not only have recent Republican candidates neglected cities, but they’ve also run against them, casting urban America as the foil to heartland voters. Rick Santorum and Sarah Palin caricatured coastal cities as unmoored from the “real America.” Ted Cruz derided “New York values,” as if those values, whichever ones he meant, were alien. Mr. Trump has pre-emptively annulled the votes of Chicago, St. Louis and Philadelphia, cities where he warns the election will be rigged against him. [...]

Those Chicago voters embody both trends — party realignment and white flight — that have remade political geography since then. In the 1950s, in presidential election results compiled by the Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden, a county’s population density was a poor predictor of how its residents voted. Today, the pattern is remarkably consistent: The denser the county, the more overwhelmingly its residents vote Democratic.

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Quartz: 150-year-old images reveal what Japanese artists once thought about exotic American visitors

“Strange” and “new” are relative terms, as a fascinating series of Japanese woodcuts unearthed by the Public Domain Review handily reminds us.

Inspired by the dress and habits of visiting Americans, artists in 1850s Japan once dedicated themselves with an ethnographic intensity to the study of exotic Western newcomers. Today, the artwork provides Americans with a novel perspective on their ancestors, described in portrait titles like People of the Barbarian Nations – Americans, and Americans’ Love for Children.

This particular genre of woodcut is known as Yokohama-e, and was produced in the small fishing village of Yokohama, today one of Japan’s most international cities. Yokohama was one of the first ports that Japan opened to foreign trade, at the insistence of the American government. The US made several failed attempts to get Japan’s attention throughout the early 19th century before finally forcing Japan out of isolation in 1854.

The images below were retrieved from the digital archives of the US Library of Congress.

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Motherboard: Elephant Poaching Is Costing African Countries $25 Million Every Year

Elephants are a big draw to parks across Africa, so as their numbers dwindle, so too do the numbers of tourists coming to see them. The first continent-wide assessment of poaching’s effects on tourism reveal that the annual killing of elephants results in a $25 million loss in tourism revenue across Africa. What’s more, this lost revenue is significantly higher than the cost of combating poaching, making it economically favorable to invest in the protection of elephants.

Every year some 20,000 to 30,000 elephants are slaughtered for their ivory tusks to feed a demand for Chinese and Southeast Asian markets, despite a commercial ban on the trade of ivory. Elephant populations across the continent have fallen up to 60 percent. [...]

Despite these national and international security concerns, funneling money into policing illegal wildlife trade is a hard sell when many of the countries where the killings occur have other serious humanitarian problems that need addressing like food security and access to clean drinking water, among others.

So researchers from World Wildlife Fund, Cambridge University, and the University of Vermont, conducted an economic analysis to try and find out just exactly what the economic benefit would have been if the 20,000 to 30,000 elephants killed each year were kept alive. [...]

The economic returns in the forested areas of Central Africa, however, were hugely negative. The parks there see much less tourist visitation, largely due to poor visibility of the dense jungle environments compared to the wide open savannah of East and Southern Africa. Security concerns outside of poaching might also play a part. The Eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, has been in a near constant state of conflict for over a decade. Regardless, the forest elephant losses there have been catastrophic.

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Politico: Central Europe resents double EU food standard

So-called “dual-quality foods” have been on Central European governments’ radar for years, but Slovakia’s presidency of the Council of the European Union has raised their hopes that Bratislava will finally push to combat double standards by launching action toward tighter regulation at the European level. The Slovaks, vocally supported by the Czechs, want to rectify what they see as an unfair distortion of the single market.

Researchers have found packaged foods may look the same in Germany and the Czech Republic, but aren’t the same on the inside — the version in Prague is often of an inferior quality. The practice, advocates say, reflects a belief among suppliers that they can still palm off poorer quality goods to Central European consumers more than a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The food industry says differences in some products’ ingredients are simply due to the peculiarities of national tastes across the EU. [...]

Current EU food legislation requires companies to fully label ingredients to inform consumers, but it doesn’t require that brand-name products are tied to specific recipes. Czech officials confirmed there was no way to address the differences in product of the same brand without drafting new parts of EU food law.

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Quartz: Israel is considering a measure to force people who watch porn online to ask for permission

On Oct. 30, the Ministerial Committee for Legislation unanimously green-lit a bill that would force internet companies to censor pornography by default. The committee approved the measure in a bid to clamp down on rampant underage access to adult content online, the Times of Israel reported. [...]

With the latest bill, censorship of offensive material will become an opt-out feature rather than an opt-in one. This means that instead of having to ask providers to bar access to select sites, they will be blocked to begin with. To access the blocked sites, people will submit requests to their service provider in writing, over the phone, or through the provider’s website.

Critics argue that the Israeli government is joining the ranks of Iran and China by keeping records of users who request unlimited access to the internet. Forcing people to admit that they want unfettered access to porn sites is a blatant violation of privacy, they say.

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Independent: Germany has unveiled a zero-emissions train that only emits water

Germany is set to introduce the world’s first zero-emission passenger train to be powered by hydrogen.

The Coradia iLint only emits excess steam into the atmosphere, and provides an alternative to the country’s 4,000 diesel trains.Lower Saxony has already ordered 14 of them from French company Alstom, and more are likely to be seen around the country if they are judged a success, reports Die Welt.

Testing is set to be carried out by the end of the year, before it opens up to the public in December 2017. [...]

The hydrail can travel almost 500 miles per day at speeds of up to 87mph, and the only sound it gives off comes from the wheels and air resistance. [...]

Nasa has used liquid hydrogen to propel its rockets into space since the 1970s. The huge cloud that erupts when one of its shuttles takes off isn’t smoke, but steam.

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National Public Radio: How To Win The Presidency With 27 Percent Of The Popular Vote

We decided to find out. A candidate only needs to win the 11 states with the most electoral votes to hit 270. Assuming a candidate won all of those states by just one vote, and then didn't win a single vote in any of the other states (or D.C.), how many votes would that candidate have to win?

Based on 2012 data, the answer is: 27 percent.  [...]

We're making a lot of assumptions here — we're using vote totals from 2012, for one thing. Moreover, we're assuming there are only two candidates in the race, which, of course, is not the case this year. [...]

Skewed wins like this happen regularly in U.S. elections — a modest popular vote margin can yield a ridiculously large Electoral College margin. For example, in 1984, Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale in the popular vote by 18 points — a sizable gap, but nothing like the Electoral College walloping: Reagan won 525 electoral votes, beating Mondale by 95 percentage points. [...]

Ironically, the 2000 election — whose outcome struck many people as unfair because Gore won the popular vote but not the electoral vote — also has the electoral-vote margin that most closely reflects the popular-vote margin. In that sense, one could call it one of the "fairest" elections in modern politics.

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