Jacobin Magazine: The Narco-State to the North

The result was, as we could have predicted, an escalation in the violence. Conservative numbers now put the number of dead since 2006 or 2007, when this began, at more than 125,000 people. Something like 30,000 people have been forcibly disappeared. Their families don’t know where they are. The result is massive levels of violence and destruction in places where drug trafficking had been centered: in the north, in Sinaloa, in what we call the Tierra Caliente, where much of the marijuana and opium poppies are grown, in Veracruz, which is a port city on the eastern side of Mexico. [...]

The state is deeply implicated in this and the massacres that we have seen: the disappearance of these students at Ayotzinapa, the killing of twenty innocent civilians at Tlatlaya, another massacre in a town called Apatzingán. There have been multiple places where innocent civilians were killed at the hands of security forces in execution-style killings. We see the Mexican security forces implicated in this violence, in these killings and disappearances. [...]

These Central American migrants are themselves fleeing violence having to do with the destabilization of their societies, which goes back to the US-backed wars in Central America in the 1980s and more recently the overthrow of the Honduran government in 2009. The role of the US in creating the conditions of violence in Central America and then militarizing the southern border has created incredible opportunities for the criminal organizations, particularly a ferocious group known as Los Zetas who emerged from the Mexican special forces and recruited Guatemalan Kaibiles, Guatemalan special forces, and are deadly killers. [...]

One of the biggest problems in Mexico is impunity. Something like over 95 percent of crimes aren’t investigated. People don’t call the police because often the police are corrupt and on the payroll of cartel members. When a family member disappears, for instance, it’s difficult to know who can help you because often the security forces are on the payroll of the people you suspect may have disappeared your loved one. [...]

That’s something that has been pointed out by observers across the political spectrum to Donald Trump. Mexico could stop agreeing to cooperate with the US. They could decide that they do not want to be the proxy militarization of the southern border, for instance. They could decide they no longer want to prosecute a militarized drug war. They could stop cooperating with the US in any number of ways, and that would have incredible consequences for the US, particularly the opposite of what it is that Donald Trump thinks that he is here to do.

read the article

The Atlantic: The Link Between Animal Abuse and Murder

Until recently, animal cruelty was categorized as a simple misdemeanor, not an indication of a perpetrator’s likelihood to commit other crimes. But research over the past few decades increasingly has backed Merck’s conviction. Back in 1986, a study in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry found that almost half of rapists and a third of child molesters reported committing animal abuse during childhood or adolescence. In 2001, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention reviewed the existing research and determined that nearly two-thirds of inmates who commit crimes of aggression might also abuse animals.

More recently, a study by the Chicago Police Department “revealed a startling propensity for offenders charged with crimes against animals to commit other violent offenses toward human victims.” A survey of women in domestic-violence shelters indicated that 71 percent had partners who abused or threatened to abuse pets. [...]

Animal abuse is beginning to be interpreted as the first outward sign of distress in a household (a child who hurts animals may be acting out scenarios they’ve encountered at home), but remedial work is only slowly starting to proliferate. Some schools include “humane education” on their curricula, designed to teach children empathy. There’s only one nationally recognized cognitive-behavioral intervention for child animal abusers: Based on psychodynamic and attachment theories, AniCare is meant to help perpetrators accept responsibility for their actions and respect for animals. Judges in seven states have specified AniCare Child in sentencing.

read the article

The Atlantic: How John Muir Is Revolutionizing the Farm-to-Table Food Movement

“Farm-to-table has failed to transform the way most of our food is grown in this country,” he writes in his new book The Third Plate: Field Notes for the Future of Food. Local, organic meals basically resemble what Americans have been eating for generations—a large hunk of meat in the center, veggies pushed off to the side. The sourcing’s better, but the diet hasn’t really changed. [...]

I went back to visit Klaas’s farm, thinking I’d write about him for my book, which was then in its earliest stages. On that visit, I had a second culinary epiphany—one that took place not in the kitchen, but in the field. Looking out from the middle of Klaas’s farm, about 2,000 acres, I realized there wasn’t any wheat—at least, not at that time of year. I was surrounded by millet, and oats, and barley, and buckwheat, some mustard greens, some kidney beans—but no wheat. All these crops, I learned from Klaas, had very specific functions. The beans gave the soil nitrogen, and the barley was there to build soil structure, the mustard plants helped cleanse the soil of pathogens and diseases. They were planted in this carefully timed sequence throughout the year. All of this was to prepare the soil, to create the best possible conditions for that great, amazingly flavored emmer wheat. Klaas couldn’t grow his healthy, vigorous, chemical-free wheat without those rotating those other crops in, too. [...]

I began to rethink my relationship to food, understanding that each isolated ingredient in my kitchen is implicated within a complex network of relationships. If I want Klaas’s wheat, I should try to find a way to support his beans and his rye and his mustard greens, too. We talk about nose-to-tail eating of animals—to waste less, to innovate, by finding inspired culinary use for all the gamy, complex, less “choice” cuts of meat. Well, we need nose-to-tail eating of the whole farm. We’ve got to learn ways to give these “undesirable” crops some mojo through really creative cooking. [...]

I don’t think the local foods movement, as it currently stands, has the power to change our food system in this way. You cannot transform the landscape with a chef who gets excited about a tomato and then decides to support a local tomato farmer. That’s a good beginning, but it’s not enough. Because any kind of good agriculture—especially organic agriculture—does not allow you to plant a lot of the same crop without chemicals, or without sacrificing plant health.

read the article

TED Talk: 7 principles for building better cities | Peter Calthorpe

More than half of the world's population already lives in cities, and another 2.5 billion people are projected to move to urban areas by 2050. The way we build new cities will be at the heart of so much that matters, from climate change to economic vitality to our very well-being and sense of connectedness. Peter Calthorpe is already at work planning the cities of the future and advocating for community design that's focused on human interaction. He shares seven universal principles for solving sprawl and building smarter, more sustainable cities.

The New York Review of Books: Kenya: The Election & the Cover-Up

Signs that something weird was going on emerged well before the election. A month earlier, Kenya’s electoral commission contracted Ghurair, a Dubai publishing firm, to print ballots. Newspaper reports linked the company to Kenyatta’s inner circle, and Kenyan courts ordered the electoral commission to use a different firm. The order was ignored, and the electoral commission issued a single-source contract to Ghurair anyway, citing time pressure. Then the accounting firm KPMG reported that more than a million dead people might still be registered as voters. NASA officials complained that Ghurair could print extra ballots to be used to create pro-Kenyatta ghost votes. Kerry dismissed these concerns, quipping after the election, “The people who voted were alive. I didn’t see any dead people walking around.” [...]

People who have witnessed election fraud in other African countries have told me that it’s normally done by making small changes to large numbers of tallies and this appears to have happened in Kenya, where there were over 40,000 polling stations. After NASA submitted its petition, a team of American experts led by University of Michigan Professor of Statistics and Political Science Walter Mebane volunteered to conduct a forensic analysis of the results. Results that have been tampered with show patterns and Mebane’s computer program identified over half a million fraudulent votes in this manner—almost certainly an underestimate of the true number. [...]

Another rigged election in Africa is not news. But that US election observers were so quick to endorse it is shocking. Perhaps they believed that wrapping the election up quickly would prevent violence. After Kenya’s 2007 election, which most observers have since concluded was rigged against Odinga, some of his supporters went on a looting and killing spree in ruling-party strongholds. Gangs backed by ruling-party officials fought back and the ensuing mayhem left more than a thousand people dead, caused hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, and nearly shut down the economy of much of eastern Africa, which relies on transport from the Kenyan coast. Members of Odinga’s coalition were quoted making ethnically charged statements, but it was Kenyatta and his current deputy, William Ruto—who was then allied with Odinga, but has since switched sides—who were charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity for organizing and supporting the violent gangs. (The cases against them collapsed after witnesses were intimidated or died under mysterious circumstances.) [...]

A far more troubling possibility is that the US wants Kenyatta to remain in power, at the expense of democracy. Kenya lies in one of the most volatile regions of the world. Its neighbor Somalia has been a war zone for a decade; conflict in South Sudan has sent more than two million refugees scrambling to neighboring countries, including Kenya, since 2013. Two of Kenya’s other neighbors, Uganda and Ethiopia, are ruled by US-backed autocrats who have instigated or worsened these conflicts. Ethiopia’s US-assisted invasion of Somalia in 2006 set off the mayhem there, promoting the rise of the Islamist terrorist group Al-Shabaab. In 2014, Uganda entered the South Sudan civil war on the government’s side. Humanitarian organizations called for an arms embargo, which would have made Uganda’s involvement illegal. The UN Security Council, including Russia and China, seemed open to an embargo, but the Obama did not pursue it.

read the article

Vox: Major evangelical leaders just signed a controversial document on sexuality and the church

The 14-article document, dubbed the “Nashville Statement,” was released by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) on Wednesday, focusing primarily on issues of gender and same-sex marriage. The first article in the document affirms that "God has designed marriage to be a covenantal, sexual, procreative, lifelong union of one man and one woman, as husband and wife” and not for “homosexual, polygamous, or polyamorous” relationships. The document follows a meeting in Nashville at the Southern Baptist Conference’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission's (ERLC) annual conference.

The statement also condemned Christians who expressed support of LGBTQ issues, saying: “it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness ... [we deny that it is a matter of] moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.” [...]

But the timing of the document — as churches grapple with much more pressing national conversations on issues like racism — has made it particularly jarring, especially to its critics. After all, the US Supreme Court ruled to establish same-sex marriage across the country two years ago. Meanwhile, in recent weeks and months, America’s Christian religious leaders have faced a number of politicized challenges, from the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, to how to respond to the Trump administration’s more controversial statements and actions. [...]

In other words, the evangelical community as a whole has seen a shift in recent months and years, as the conflation of Republican Party values and Christian values is no longer as straightforward as it once was. To an extent, the Nashville Statement thus seems like something of a reactionary gesture — an attempt to foster unity in the evangelical community (uniting, say, pro-Trump figures like James Dobson with critical firebrands like Russell Moore) by appealing to a doctrinal issue — sexual ethics — that still unites many of them. [...]

he “queer theology” movement of the late twentieth century, inspired by similar social justice Christian movements like liberation theology and feminist theology, featured thinkers like John McNeil and Marcella Althaus-Reid. They didn’t just argue that being queer was acceptable in Christianity, but rather that the very nature of Christianity — following a radical divine being who was willing to upend the whole social hierarchy in pursuit of justice — demanded that we reassess how we think about gender, sex, love, and desire outside of wider “cultural norms.” For these thinkers, racism, sexism, and homophobia were all themselves part of human “culture;” something that Christianity should resist. This thinking come to influence later progressive Christian approaches to social justice.

read the article

Vox: The Summer of Love ended 50 years ago. It reshaped American conservatism.

Yet the utopia called the Summer of Love wouldn’t last, and, after the movement faded out, not all of them went back to professional career paths. Disillusioned by bad trips and a sense that their pursuit of hedonism had been empty, thousands of burned out hippies soon experienced something possibly even more revolutionary than tuning out and turning on: a born-again religious conversion. [...]

While they would give up their drugs and promiscuous sex, the Jesus People retained much of their countercultural ways, bringing their music, dress, and laid-back style into the churches they joined. Their influence would remake the Sunday worship experience for millions of Americans. As the historian Larry Eskridge has argued, today’s evangelical mega-churches with their rock bands blasting praise music and jeans-wearing pastors “are a direct result of the Jesus People movement.”

But aside from the praise anthems and the casual preaching styles that have come to characterize contemporary evangelicalism, the Jesus People also reshaped American politics. They helped to inspire the birth of the religious right. Many conservative evangelicals had long avoided politics, believing it would corrupt their spiritual lives, but the Jesus People contended that Christians couldn’t keep their spiritual and political lives separate. “I think everybody should be a full-time Christian,” the Jesus People rock singer Larry Norman once said. [...]

The message that countercultural evangelicals delivered to their peers represented a radically different version of Christianity than preached in most churches at the time. Most repudiated institutional churches and their weak and vapid “Churchianity.” Instead, Ted and Elizabeth Wise, and others, stressed the need for a personal relationship with Jesus, who, in their telling, was not far from being a hippie himself. [...]

By the mid-1970s, the Jesus People had largely faded as a visible movement as the counterculture aesthetic fell out of fashion — “Where Have All the Jesus People Gone,” Eternity magazine asked in 1973 — but the reality was their deeper influence on American evangelicalism was just beginning to be felt. With their folk music, casual dress, and chill vibe, the Jesus People helped redefine the Sunday morning worship experience across American evangelicalism. For better or worse, the “Jesus Rock” that the Jesus People created and popularized led the way to the contemporary Christian music now embraced across many American denominations.

read the article

The Conversation: A Byzantine ancestor to same-sex marriage?

Spiritual brotherhood in the Byzantine Empire of the Middle Ages is an ancestor to our same-sex marriage. In the Byzantine Empire men became spiritual brothers and some scholars believe that sexual intimacy did or could occur. There is some controversy about this. For some it is a bridge too far to speak of sex, for we cannot know for sure. My position is that it was a possibility at all times and the Byzantines were aware of this.

First, how did men become spiritual brothers? In church two men would be blessed by a priest who would say a prayer over them. Many of these prayers survive and more are being located all the time. Spiritual brotherhood was popular. [...]

Experts have been divided about the question of sex between brothers joined in the rite. While there is not a lot of evidence and the rite was clearly not meant to allow men to have sex with each other, there is enough evidence to suggest that Byzantines thought affection and sexual feelings were possible. [...]

But that is not all. Just as we see in the histories, surviving letters that men wrote to each other show a culture of great warmth between men. The old language of male love that goes back to the ancient Greeks was used constantly. A handsome physique could inspire male desire.

read the article