David Alfaro Sigueiros, “Struggle for Emancipation”, 1961.
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Anke Merzbach
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Washington Gets Explicit: The Endless War on Terror

On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether the statutory basis for this "war" - the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) - should be revised (meaning: expanded). This is how Wired's Spencer Ackerman (soon to be the Guardian US's national security editor) described the most significant exchange:

"Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, 'At least 10 to 20 years.' . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today - atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America's Thirty Years War."

That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the "war on terror" will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week's big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ) combined. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of "endless war". Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war - justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism - that is the single greatest cause of that threat. (...)

The genius of America's endless war machine is that, learning from the unplesantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. That is accomplished by heaping all of the fighting burden on a tiny and mostly economically marginalized faction of the population, by using sterile, mechanized instruments to deliver the violence, and by suppressing any real discussion in establishment media circles of America's innocent victims and the worldwide anti-American rage that generates.

Though rarely visible, the costs are nonetheless gargantuan. Just in financial terms, as Americans are told they must sacrifice Social Security and Medicare benefits and place their children in a crumbling educational system, the Pentagon remains the world's largest employer and continues to militarily outspend the rest of the world by a significant margin. The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves? (...)

And then there's the most intangible yet most significant cost: each year of endless war that passes further normalizes the endless rights erosions justified in its name. The second term of the Bush administration and first five years of the Obama presidency have been devoted to codifying and institutionalizing the vast and unchecked powers that are typically vested in leaders in the name of war. Those powers of secrecy, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and due-process-free assassination are not going anywhere. They are now permanent fixtures not only in the US political system but, worse, in American political culture.

Each year that passes, millions of young Americans come of age having spent their entire lives, literally, with these powers and this climate fixed in place: to them, there is nothing radical or aberrational about any of it. The post-9/11 era is all they have been trained to know. That is how a state of permanent war not only devastates its foreign targets but also degrades the population of the nation that prosecutes it.

by Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photo: AP/Carolyn Kaster

The Myth of Jackie Mitchell, the Girl Who Struck Out Ruth and Gehrig

On one side of the photo stood Babe Ruth, his portly frame draped in familiar Yankee pinstripes. Next to him was a small woman dressed in two-toned stirrups and a baggy baseball jersey, a ball cap shielding her dark, curly hair. The disparate pair was shaking hands. Joseph Wallace—author of two baseball history books and working on a third—had no clue what he was looking at. He was deep in the archives at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, thumbing through a generic file about women in baseball. He wanted to know more about the mystery lady ballplayer.

So he tracked down Tim Wiles, the Hall of Fame’s Director of Research. Wiles took one look at the snapshot and led Wallace to a small bookstore outside the library’s front door. On a shelf in the children's section sat a picture book, and its cover featured a cartoon pitcher who looked identical to the woman in Wallace’s photograph, down to the hat. Wiles said the woman’s name was Jackie Mitchell. A blunt title—The Girl Who Struck Out Babe Ruth—was splashed across the top in big blue letters.

The book told an amazing story. In the spring of 1931, a 17-year-old female signed a professional contract with a men’s minor league team in Chattanooga and, in the first inning of her first professional game, struck out Ruth and slugger Lou Gehrig consecutively. “She could put speed on the ball,” the book read. “She had control. And somehow, she could always guess a batter’s weakness.” Flipping through the pages, Wallace wondered how he’d never heard about Mitchell before, and why her triumphant outing wasn’t one of those canonical anecdotes fans of America’s most nostalgic game commit to memory. Eventually, a second thought entered his mind: Is there any way in hell this story could be true?

Andy Broome was similarly skeptical. A baseball card grader for Beckett Media and a Chattanooga native, Broome first heard about Mitchell’s feat from his great-grandfather, who talked about seeing the teen toe the rubber while he was a young man. In 2000, Broome became consumed by what he guessed was a tall tale. For half a decade, he scanned newspaper clippings, sought out collectibles from the April 2, 1931 game, and crisscrossed the country interviewing players who were still alive and had played with her, as well as friends and acquaintances who knew her later in life.“I was trying to find out, as much as I could, what was true and what had grown over the years from being retold countless times,” he says. “I went into it expecting to dig up the absolute truth about how everybody was in on it, and it was just a publicity deal.” After spending more time studying Mitchell’s life than anyone ever had, Broome reached a pair of conclusions. First, given the magnitude of the alleged achievement, the Mitchell paper trail was shorter than he expected. What evidence he could find didn’t necessarily support a hoax theory. “I went down as far as anyone has,” he says, “and I think it was a real deal.”

Here, thanks to decades-old newspaper reports, is what we know generally about the girl who struck out the Iron Horse and the Babe. Virne Beatrice “Jackie” Mitchell was born on August 29, 1913. (The 1920 U.S. Census indicates she was born in 1912, but there’s no reason to believe she would lie about her age as a young adult.) She was raised by her mother, who sold hosiery, and her father, a supportive and athletically minded optician who encouraged his daughter to swim and play ball at an early age. When Jackie was a toddler, the Mitchells moved to Memphis, and by coincidence, into the same building as Dazzy Vance, a Dodger great who won the NL MVP award in 1924 and struck out over 2,000 hitters in his 16-year career. Vance—then playing for the Memphis Chicks—took a liking to his tiny neighbor, teaching her how to throw a “drop ball,” now known as a sinker, among other tricks.

by Adam Doster, The Daily Beast |  Read more:

Image:Library of Congress

Spoiled Food to Energy

What happens to the 40% of food produced but never eaten in the U.S. each year, the mounds of perfect fruit passed over by grocery store shoppers, the tons of meat and milk left to expire?

At Ralphs, one of the oldest and largest supermarket chains on the West Coast, it helps keep the power on.

In a sprawling Compton distribution center that the company shares with its fellow Kroger Co. subsidiary Food 4 Less, organic matter otherwise destined for a landfill is rerouted instead into the facility's energy grid. Though many grocery stores have tried to cut down on food waste and experiment with alternative energy, Kroger says it's the first supermarket company in the country to do both simultaneously.

The technology that helps transform moldy chicken and stale bread into clean electricity is known as an anaerobic digester system. At the 59-acre Compton site, which serves 359 Southern California stores, more than 100 onlookers gathered Wednesday to watch the system go to work.

Several chest-high trash bins containing a feast of limp waffles, wilting flowers, bruised mangoes and plastic-wrapped steak sat in an airy space laced with piping. Stores send food unable to be donated or sold to the facility, where it is dumped into a massive grinder — cardboard and plastic packaging included.

After being pulverized, the mass is sent to a pulping machine, which filters out inorganic materials such as glass and metal and mixes in hot wastewater from a nearby dairy creamery to create a sludgy substance.

Mike Vriens, Ralphs vice president of industrial engineering, describes the goop as a "juicy milkshake" of trash.

From there, the mulch is piped into a 250,000-gallon staging tank before being steadily fed into a 2-million-gallon silo. The contraption essentially functions as a multi-story stomach.

by Tiffany Hsu, LA Times |  Read more:

Image: Christina House, For The Times

The History of Man

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Old street by atutitu09 on Flickr.
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George Christakis
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Cutter

The same woman has cut my hair for the last 21 years, since I arrived in Oregon and found her tiny shop and her brisk and friendly self, and we get to talking yesterday, as she edits my head in her usual brisk and friendly fashion, and she tells me about her craft. Well, men tip more than women, although women spend much more money than men, she says. In general a man wants you to cut his hair as quickly and efficiently as possible, ideally without overmuch chat, for which service he will tip generously, whereas women want me to spend a lot of time with them, and talk about everything, or more accurately listen to them talk about everything, for which privilege they generally will not tip generously, but they will buy all sorts of products, which the men never do. The women generally want me to be their friend, whereas the men want me to cut their hair. The more hair a man has the less time he wants you to spend on it, generally. Yes, we occasionally sell the hair we cut. If it’s longer than eight inches, and it is its original color, and it’s male hair, it’s eligible for wigs—men’s hair is thicker, and they don’t color it as much as women do. Occasionally we have had people come in and buy cut hair to put in their gardens to fend off deer and moles. No, I don’t know if that works or not. Yes, I cut my children’s hair and my husband’s and mine, too. That’s how I started as a cutter of hair. I was a teenager and my parents wanted us to have long hair and there came a day I didn’t want to so I cut it myself. Yes, that caused a ruckus. But it turned out I was good at it and rather liked it.

by Brian Doyle, American Scholar |  Read more:

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Andre Kohn

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All Sex, All the Time

If there is one thing of which modern man is utterly convinced, it is that he has reached a state of sexual enlightenment. Gone forever are the days of unhealthy concealment, of absurd Victorian taboos that led to the application of cruel and cumbersome devices to children to prevent masturbation, to prudish circumlocutions about sexual matters, to the covering of piano legs to preserve the purity of the thoughts of men in the drawing room. We are at ease with our sexuality, and the poet Philip Larkin's famous ironic lines

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three . . .

express for us an important truth: that for the first time in history we can now enjoy sexual relations without any of the unnecessary social and psychological accretions of the past that so complicated and diminished life. No more guilt, shame, jealousy, anxiety, frustration, hypocrisy, and confusion. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I'm free at last!

Yet, enlightened as we believe ourselves to be, a golden age of contentment has not dawned—very far from it. Relations between the sexes are as fraught as ever they were. The sexual revolution has not yielded peace of mind but confusion, contradiction, and conflict. There is certainty about nothing except the rightness, inevitability, and irrevocability of the path we have gone down.  (...)

Evidence of sexual chaos is everywhere. Not a day passes without several of my patients providing ample testimony of it. For example, yesterday I saw a woman who had tried to kill herself after her daughter, nearly 16 years old, moved out of her home with her eight-month-old child to live with her new 22-year-old boyfriend. It goes without saying that this boyfriend was not the father of her baby but a man she had met recently in a nightclub. The father of the baby was "off the scene," as the end of a liaison is invariably described: fathers round here having their exits and their entrances, their exits usually following their entrances with indecent haste.

The mother was 14 when the father, age 21, made his entrance. On discovering that she was pregnant, he did what many young men do nowadays in such a situation: he beat her up. This not only relieves the feelings but occasionally produces a miscarriage. In this case, however, it failed to do so; instead, the father was caught in flagrante delicto (that is to say, while beating her) by my patient, who promptly attacked him, managing to injure him so severely that he had to go to the hospital. While there, he and she did a little informal plea-bargaining: she would not inform on him for having had sex with an underage girl, if he did not press charges against her for having assaulted him.

My patient subsequently spent what little money she had upon her grandchild's clothes, stroller, crib, bedding, and so on, even going $1,500 into debt to fund its comfort. Then her daughter decided to move out, and my patient was mortified.

Mortified, that is, by the absence of her grandchild, for whom she thought she had sacrificed so much. This was the first objection she had made in the whole affair. She had not considered the sexual conduct of her daughter, or that of either of the two men, to be in any way reprehensible. If the father of her grandchild had not turned violent, it would never have crossed her mind that he had done anything wrong in having sex with her daughter; and indeed, having done nothing to discourage the liaison, she in effect encouraged him. And her daughter had behaved only as she would have expected any girl of her age to behave.

It might be argued, of course, that such obviously wrongful behavior has occurred always: for when it comes to sexual misdemeanor there is nothing new under the sun, and history shows plentiful examples of almost any perversion or dishonorable conduct. But this is the first time in history there has been mass denial that sexual relations are a proper subject of moral reflection or need to be governed by moral restrictions. The result of this denial, not surprisingly, has been soaring divorce rates and mass illegitimacy, among other phenomena. The sexual revolution has been above all a change in moral sensibility, in the direction of a thorough coarsening of feeling, thought, and behavior. (...)

And yet at the same time—in the same audience—there are many young people yearning for precisely the certainties that they feel obliged to mock: young women who hope to find a man who will woo her, love her, respect her, stand by her, and be a father to her children, while there are many men with the reciprocal wish. How many times have I heard from my patients of their aching desire to settle down and live in a normal family, and yet who have no idea whatever how to achieve this goal that was once within the reach of almost everyone! (...)

Thanks to the sexual revolution, current confusions are manifold. In a society that forms sexual liaisons with scarcely a thought, a passing suggestive remark can result in a lawsuit; the use of explicit sexual language is de rigueur in literary circles, but medical journals fear to print the word "prostitute" and use the delicate euphemism "sex worker" instead; commentators use the word "transgressive," especially in connection with sex, as a term of automatic approbation when describing works of art, while such sex offenders as reach prison have to be protected from the murderous assaults of their fellow prisoners; anxiety about the sexual abuse of children subsists with an utter indifference to the age of consent; compulsory sex education and free contraception have proved not incompatible with the termination of a third of all pregnancies in Britain and with unprecedented numbers of teenage pregnancies; the effective elimination of the legal distinction between marriage and cohabitation is contemporary with the demand that homosexual couples be permitted to marry and enjoy the traditional legal rights of marriage; and while it has become ever more difficult for married but childless parents to adopt, homosexual couples now have the right to do so. The right of lesbians to artificially aided conception by the sperm of homosexual men has likewise been conceded on the principle of non-discrimination, and 60-year-old women naturally enough claim the same rights to in vitro fertilization. Sexual liberty has led to an increase, not to a diminution, in violence between the sexes, both by men and by women: for people rarely grant the object of their affection the freedom that they claim and practice for themselves, with a consequent rise in mistrust and jealousy—one of the great, age-old provokers of violence, as Othelloattests. Our era admires sexual athleticism but condemns predatory conduct. Boundaries between the sexes have melted away, as men become women by surgical means, and women men, while demands for tolerance and understanding grow ever more shrill and imperious. The only permissible judgment in polite society is that no judgment is permissible.

by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal | Read more:

Image: City Journal

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John Butler

David İnshaw
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Mortify Our Wolves

There comes a moan to the cancer clinic. There comes a sound so low and unvarying it seems hardly human, more a note the wind might strike off jags of rock and ice in some wasted place too remote for anyone to hear.

We hear, and look up as one at the two attendants hurriedly wheeling something so shrunken it seems merely another rumple in the blanket, tubes traveling in and out of its impalpability, its only life this lifeless cry.

The doors open soundlessly, and the pall of sorrow goes flowing off into the annihilating brightness beyond. Then the doors close, and we as one look down, not meeting each other’s eyes, and wait.

The terrible thing—it could perhaps be a glorious thing; always the ill are meant to see it as such, are reproached if they don’t (carpe fucking diem)—the terrible thing about feeling the inevitability of your own early death is the way it colors every single scene: at some friends’ house I am moved by the beauty and antics of their two-year-old daughter—moved, and then saddened to think of the daughter D. and I might have, for whom my death will be some deep, lightless hole, which for the rest of her life she will walk around, grief the very ground of her being. What is this world that we are so at odds with, this beauty by which we are so wounded, and into which God has so utterly gone?

Into which, rather than from which: in a grain of grammar, a world of hope.

That conversions often happen after or during intense life experiences, especially traumatic experiences, is sometimes used as evidence against them. The sufferer isn’t in his right mind. The mind, tottering at the abyss of despair or death, shudders back toward any simplicity, any coherency it can grasp, and the man calls out to God. Never mind that the God who comes at such moments may not be simple at all, but arises out of and includes the very abyss the man would flee. Never mind that in traumatic experience many people lose their faith—or what looked like faith?—rather than find it. It is the flinch from life—which, the healthy are always quick to remind us, includes death—and the flight to God that cannot be trusted.

But how could it be otherwise? It takes a real jolt to get us to change our jobs, our relationships, our daily coffee consumption, for goodness sake—or, if we are wired that way, to change our addiction to change. How much more urgency is needed, how much more primal fear, to startle the heart out of its ruts and ruins. It’s true that God comes to the prophet Elijah not in the whirlwind, and not in the earthquake, and not in the fire that follows, but in the “still, small voice” that these ravages make plain. But the very wording of that passage makes it clear that the voice, though finally more powerful than the ravages it follows, is not altogether apart from them. That voice is always there, and for everyone. For some of us, unfortunately, it takes terror and pain to make us capable of hearing it. (...)

Though I have in my life experienced gout, bladder stones, a botched bone marrow biopsy, and various other screamable insults, until recently I had no idea what pain was. It islands you. You sit there in your little skeletal constriction of self—of disappearing self—watching everyone you love, however steadfastly they may remain by your side, drift farther and farther away. There is too much cancer packed into my bone marrow, which is inflamed and expanding, creating pressure outward on the bones. “Bones don’t like to stretch,” a doctor tells me. Indeed. It is in my legs mostly, but also up in one shoulder and in my face. It is a dull devouring pain, as if the earth were already—but slowly—eating me. And then, with a wrong move or simply a shift in breath, it is a lightning strike of absolute feeling and absolute oblivion fused in one flash. Mornings I make my way out of bed very early and, after taking all of the pain medicine I can take without dying, sit on the couch and try to make myself small by bending over and holding my ankles. And I pray. Not to God, who also seems to have abandoned this island, but to the pain. That it ease up ever so little, that it let me breathe. That it not—though I know it will—get worse.

by Christian Wiman, American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: uncredited. Amiens Cathedral

Georges Rouault - Petit écuyère IV, 1931-1939
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New Jersey Hospital Is the Costliest in the Nation

[ed. Follow-up to the recent article: Hospital Billing Varies Wildly, U.S. Data Shows. See also: Why Hospital Charges Vary So Much.]

The most expensive hospital in America is not set amid the swaying palm trees of Beverly Hills or the luxury townhouses of New York’s Upper East Side.

It is in a faded blue-collar town 11 miles from Midtown Manhattan.

Based on the bills it submits to Medicare, the Bayonne Medical Center charged the highest amounts in the country for nearly one-quarter of the most common hospital treatments, according to a New York Times analysis of 2011 data, the most recent available. No other hospital was at the top of the price list more often.

Bayonne Medical typically charged $99,689 for treating each case of chronic lung disease, five times as much as other hospitals and 17 times as much as Medicare paid in reimbursement. The hospital also charged on average of $120,040 to treat transient ischemia, a type of small stroke that has no lasting effect. That was six times the national average and 24 times what Medicare paid.

For those prices, the quality of care at Bayonne Medical is no better — or worse — than that at most other New Jersey hospitals. In a 2011 state hospital quality report, Bayonne Medical scored only in the top 50 percent. But profits at the hospital, which was bankrupt in 2007, have soared in recent years, in part because it has found a way to turn some of those high billings into payments.

The increasingly contentious issue of hospital charges drew renewed attention last week when the federal government released Medicare data showing that facilities nationwide submitted widely divergent bills for the same treatments. And while the unassuming, six-story brick hospital here holds a notable place in those rankings, others stand out as well.

The midsize Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland, Pa., was the top biller in the country for urinary tract infections, while one prestigious Manhattan hospital, NYU Langone Medical Center, charged twice as much as the equally high-end NewYork-Presbyterian to implant a cardiac pacemaker. But Medicare considers the two New York hospitals so similar it pays them both about $20,000 for the procedure. The hospital industry is quick to say that the charges are irrelevant because virtually no one — private insurers, Medicare or even the uninsured — pays anywhere near those amounts. Medicare sets standard rates for treatments and insurers negotiate with hospitals. But experts add that the charges reflect decades of maneuvering by hospitals to gain an edge over insurers and provide themselves with tax advantages.

Until a recent ruling by the Internal Revenue Service, for instance, a hospital could use the higher prices when calculating the amount of charity care it was providing, said Gerard Anderson, director of the Center for Hospital Finance and Management at Johns Hopkins. “There is a method to the madness, though it is still madness,” Mr. Anderson said.

A close look at the finances of Bayonne Medical Center sheds light on how hospital pricing at the extremes may financially benefit an institution. The practices at Bayonne Medical also highlight a new financial strategy used by a small number of hospitals to increase their profits by “going out of network” — severing ties, and hence contractual agreements that limit reimbursement rates, with large private insurers.

by Julie Creswell, Barry Meier and Jo Craven McGinty, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Nadav Neuhaus for The New York Times

The 'Other' IRS Scandal

The burgeoning “scandal” over how the IRS chose for review 75 applicants for tax-exempt status puts on full display an unfortunate tendency in journalism—to quote people accurately without explaining the underlying context. Yes, it is as wrong for IRS employees to select groups to scrutinize based on their names as it is for police to stop and frisk young people based on the color of their skin. Still, the facts here are not so black-and-white as with racial profiling.

There is a scandal in all of this—several, actually, and some are more significant than the one that is getting all the attention. As the story unfolds, here are some important points to keep in mind:

• Missing from much coverage is the relevant recent history—the role of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision and how it prompted a deluge of requests from new organizations seeking tax-exempt status under tax code Section 501(c)(4) as “social welfare” organizations—despite the fact that many of these are blatantly political operations.

• Congress requires the IRS to review every application for tax-exempt status to weed out organizations that are partisan, political, or that generate private gain. Congress has imposed this requirement on the IRS, and its predecessor agencies, since 1913.

• When it comes to 501(c)(4) organizations, what the IRS is supposed to do is draw a distinction between groups that are “primarily engaged” in politics and groups that really are primarily engaged in “social welfare”—somehow “promoting the common good and social welfare of the community.” It’s kind of mushy. Brad Plumer has a good explainerabout this on The Washington Post’s Wonkblog.

• The first scandal here, meanwhile, is that the social welfare tax exemption is being used by existing 501(c)(4) organizations, including some very large ones, to promote partisan political interests—the very activity Congress has explicitly prohibited for a century. The New York Times, after a weak political piece on Saturday, had a clear and useful explainer about this on Tuesday.

• Also worth pointing out: None of the organizations that the IRS scrutinized as a result of the ill-considered screening-by-name regime was denied tax exempt status.

• The second—and widely ignored—scandal in this unfolding story is that the IRS is drowning. Congress is demanding that the agency do more and more with less and less, as we have reported here and elsewhere. As David Levinthal reported Tuesday at the Center for Public Integrity:

The IRS’ Exempt Organizations Division, which finds itself at the scandal’s epicenter, processed significantly more tax exemption applications in fiscal year 2012 by so-called 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations — 2,774 — than it has since at least the late 1990s.

That compares to 1,777 applications in 2011 and 1,741 in 2010, he reported.

Meanwhile, in real terms the IRS budget has been cut 17 percent per capita since 2002, even as Congress has piled on other new duties, such as hunting for offshore accounts, dealing with the complexities of the Affordable Care Act, and other expanded obligations.

by David Kay Johnson, Columbia Journalism Review |  Read more:

Image via: Ameristar Tax Centers