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Andrew Lawler, author of Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?: The Epic Saga of the Bird That Powers Civilization, suggests that the vicious sport “may be responsible for creating the bird that today is the world’s single most important source of protein”:

Pitting two roosters against one another may seem barbaric and arcane, but it may be why the bird became so ubiquitous. Biological evidence suggests that thousands of years ago in South Asia, its ancestral home, the chicken existed only in small numbers. In other words, chickens weren’t kept for producing meat and eggs; there weren’t enough of them for that purpose. They must have had a specialized use, and some scholars believe that use was cockfighting.

It may have begun, like bull fighting, as a religious ritual. A clan or village may have pitted its sacred rooster against another group’s bird. In northern Thailand, for example, the faun phi ceremony honoring ancestral spirits entails cockfighting of a religious nature that may reflect ancient practices. And in Indonesia’s Bali, few religious rituals take place without a cockfight that spills blood into the soil, satiating earth demons.

As the chicken spread, so did its use in ritual and gambling. One of the earliest recorded cockfights took place in China in 517 B.C. The match was held in Confucius’ home province of Lu during the philosopher’s lifetime. The earliest unequivocal evidence of cockfighting in the West comes from this same era. In a tomb just outside Jerusalem, excavators found a small seal that shows a rooster in a fighting stance. The seal was owned by Jaazaniah, who is called “the servant of the king.”

(Image of cockfight in Tamil Nadu, India, via Wikimedia Commons)

#CIA & #Politicians pointing fingers at each other The Blame game begins over enhanced interrogation call it what it is #TORTURE #Orwellian

— davebraham (@davebraham1) December 9, 2014

#ZeroDarkThirty is trash and glamorizes #HumanRightsViolations & #Torture http://t.co/Pfr2dffQ #SocietyOfFear #Orwellian #Nightmare

— Brandt Hardin (@DREGstudios) January 9, 2013

Robert Butler remarks on the ever-expanding influence of the great writer 65 years after his death:

In his office in Holborn, overlooking the Family Courts, [Orwell’s literary executor, Bill Hamilton] describes the onward march of “1984”. “We’re selling far more. We’re licensing far more stage productions than we’ve ever done before. We’re selling in new languages—Breton, Friuli, Occitan. We’ve recently done our first Kurdish deals too. We suddenly get these calls from, say, Istanbul, from the local publisher saying, ‘I want to distribute a thousand copies to the demonstrators in the square outside as part of the campaign,’ and you think, good grief, this is actually a political tool, this book. As a global recognised name, it’s at an absolute peak.” A new Hollywood movie of “1984” is in the pipeline, “Animal Farm” is also in development as a feature film, and Lee Hall, who wrote “Billy Elliot”, is writing both a stage musical version of “Animal Farm” and a television adaptation of “Down and Out in London and Paris”. It’s boom time for Orwell: “total income”, Hamilton says, “has grown 10% a year for the last three years.”

His enduring impact is particularly noticeable online:

Type “#Orwellian” into the search box on Twitter and a piece in the South China Morning Post says the Communist Party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, has attacked the pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong on the Orwellian grounds that they are “anti-democratic”. An article in Forbes magazine warns of an Orwellian future in which driverless cars catch on and computer hackers track “rich people in traffic and sell this information to fleets of criminal motorcyclists”. A story in the Wall Street Journal reports the Supreme Court judge Sonia Sotomayor warning that unmanned drones will create an Orwellian future. In a piece in Politico, Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale, advises, “To understand Putin, read Orwell.” …

Barely a minute goes by when Orwell isn’t namechecked on Twitter. Only two other novelists have inspired adjectives so closely associated in the public mind with the circumstances they set out to attack: Dickens and Kafka. And they haven’t set the terms of reference in the way Orwell has.

Christopher Jobson presents a new way to kill time while waiting for the light to change:

Back in 2012, a trio of interaction design students from HAWK University unveiled a concept for StreetPong, an interactive game of pong installed at a street crossing that allows you to play opponents waiting on the other side. The concept video (above) was viewed a bajillion times around the web, compelling designers Amelie Künzler, Sandro Angel, and Holger Michel to work with design firms and traffic experts to build a fully-functional device. After two years of waiting, the game units have been designed and approved for use by the city of Hildesheim, Germany where they were installed two weeks ago.

Chris Mills considers the practical implications:

Called ActiWait, the idea is reasonably simple: rather than the usual push-button to cross the street, you’ve got a touchscreen unit. It lets you play Pong with whoever’s waiting across the street, rather than losing yet again at Candy Crush. Pong is just the start, though: the developers want to enable all sorts of apps, like speed dating, or traffic safety eduction for children.

Apart from the obvious benefits to humanity of spontaneous Pong games, ActiWait has actual, tangible benefits. It could reduce jaywalking (and thus increase road safety), by providing something fun to do whilst waiting for the lights to turn. It’s also an interesting use of public space, both making it more interactive, and giving complete strangers a moment of connection.

Plus, Pong.

Krauthammer – who was a key intellectual architect of the torture program – worries that the report will compromise our intelligence relationships:

I wish he’d worried about that before he backed rushing into an unprecedented American torture regime, don’t you? Gee,who could have predicted  that setting up special black sites to torture prisoners with Nazi and Communist techniques could lead to unraveling alliances with our Western democratic friends? Which is to say that Krauthammer seems to believe that violating the Geneva Conventions in the first place is less damaging than subsequently exposing the truth!

The awful truth is that we used our disproportionate power in these alliances to co-opt otherwise civilized countries into the most appalling acts of criminality – thereby staining and violating the core values that sustain these alliances. It was this violation of basic Western values that truly weakened our alliances and intelligence relationships. And this could get much worse. Other countries, unlike the US, take the prohibition of torture seriously, and will be forced by the rule of law to investigate and prosecute those implicated in war crimes. We could, in fact, in the near-future have torture prosecutions for those cooperating with these US-originating human rights abuses abroad, while the country that pioneered them refuses to do anything. How’s that for wrecking this country’s moral standing for good and all? And your response to this is that we should merely cover everything up? Does Krauthammer believe we still live in the 1940s and could do such a thing even if we wanted to?

K.T. McFarland of Fox News immediately reaches for the crudest partisan lever: that this report is not about democratic accountability for abuses at the highest levels, but about “punishing America” and “blaming Bush”. But notice something interesting about the op-ed: McFarland does not deny that the US tortured prisoners:

According to media reports, the report concludes that we tortured terrorists.

These are the same terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center, bombed the Pentagon, and tried to level the U.S. Capitol. These are the same terrorists that today have beheaded Christians, Westerners and, just this past weekend, another American citizen.

So … we did torture terror suspects, right? But they apparently deserved it. Which is a good summary of the reptilian brain in many neocons. Stephen Hayes tries another route:

Such matters should be subject to tough, dispassionate, fact-based investigation. Actual failings should be condemned by both Republicans and Democrats, by supporters of the program as well as opponents. That’s not what happened here. Instead, the report was produced by the Democratic staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Dianne Feinstein. Republicans declined to participate.

Feinstein required former CIA directors and deputy directors to sign nondisclosure agreements in order even to see the accusations made against them. Despite the fact that virtually all of the 500-plus-page report has been declassified for release, the Feinstein committee also imposed, as a condition of access to the report, severe restrictions on what those officials may say in their own defense. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, told The Weekly Standard: “Based on the nondisclosure agreement I signed, I cannot talk to you about the details of the Feinstein report, the Republican rebuttal, or the agency response—all as a condition of my being able to see it.”

In the clearest evidence that the committee was interested in blame rather than truth, the staffers did not seek to interview those involved in the interrogations.

The committee restricted itself to the CIA’s own documents not because they were trying to rig the results, but because those were the terms of the investigation, and because the millions of pages of documents they had to fight through were more than enough to handle. They did not interview the CIA agents because of an ongoing DOJ investigation into the same material. This was a self-consciously limited investigation. It was not set up to assign blame or responsibility for anything (and doesn’t). It collects the CIA’s own facts and documents with respect to the torture program in the various black sites. It was not tasked with coming up with the definitive account of the much bigger criminal apparatus that the Bush-Cheney administration set up to torture prisoners. It covers nothing in the military or JSOC or GTMO. It does nothing but examine the CIA’s own internal record.

As for the notion that the Republican refusal to participate somehow reveals the bad faith of Feinstein, et al, you just have to laugh. It merely highlights the appalling partisanship of the contemporary GOP, a party whose last nominee, Mitt Romney, was an enthusiast for torture. It demonstrates just how extreme the current GOP is, and how obstructionist they have been to a very basic act of oversight and due diligence. It doesn’t show Feinstein’s corruption; it exposes the GOP’s.

Then there is Nicolle Wallace, who played the 9/11 card this morning:

On Tuesday’s “Morning Joe”, former Bush administration spokesman Nicolle Wallace offered a heated defense of the torture techniques, arguing that she “didn’t care” what officials did because it was in order to protect Americans.

“Months after 9/11, there were three people we thought who knew about imminent attacks and we did whatever we had to do and I pray to god that till the end of time that we do whatever we have to do,” Wallace said. “The notion that this somehow makes America less great is asinine and dangerous.”

No it’s not. It’s a matter of basic human decency and a minimal adherence to American values as they have been espoused from George Washington onwards. Wallace is directly attacking the West by her remarks. And all Western civilization has achieved.

Joel Kotkin and Richey Piiparinen posit that America’s erstwhile industrial heartland “could well be on the verge of a major resurgence, one that should be welcomed not only locally but by the rest of the country”:

Two factors drive this change. One is the steady revival of America as a productive manufacturing country, driven in large part by new technology, rising wages abroad (notably in China), and the development of low-cost, abundant domestic energy, much of it now produced in states such as Ohio and in the western reaches of Pennsylvania.

The second, and perhaps more surprising, is the wealth of human capital already existent in the region.

After decades of decline, this is now expanding as younger educated workers move to the area in part to escape the soaring cost of living, high taxes, and regulations that now weigh so heavily on the super-star cities. In fact, more educated workers now leave Manhattan and Brooklyn for places like Cuyahoga County and Erie County, where Cleveland and Buffalo are located, than the other way around. …

The rustbelt revival relies not on mimicry but on embracing the regional culture that values production of things over simply their mere consumption. Cities like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle may have started with industrial roots, but their recent success has been tied to such factors as attractive geographies and, to Midwest sensibilities at least, mild climates. These regions have been enriched for decades by the migration of people from the rustbelt—Microsoft’s former President Steve Ballmer (suburban Detroit), venture capitalist John Doerr (St. Louis), and Intel co-founder Andrew Noyce (Iowa) are just a few examples.

But the cost of housing, among other factors, is changing the calculus:

Housing prices in most rustbelt cities, adjusted for incomes, are one-third those of the Bay Area and at most one-half those seen in the Los Angeles, New York, or Boston areas. This can be seen not just in distant exurbs or suburbs, but in prime inner-city neighborhoods. Whatever dreams millennials have are likely to center around affordable single-family housing, as they begin to marry and start families. The rustbelt offers this younger generation the kind of choices, and middle class standards, that are increasingly unattainable in the superstar cities.

(Photo: Monessen, Pennsylvania, 2007. By Flickr user christine592)

A blast of sanity and intellectual honesty:

I don’t have any criticism for radical leftism in general, at least not here, not today. What I feel compelled to criticize is only one very specific political phenomenon, one particular incarnation of radical leftist, anti-oppressive politics.

There is something dark and vaguely cultish about this particular brand of politics. I’ve thought a lot about what exactly that is. I’ve pinned down four core features that make it so disturbing: dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism. I’ll go into detail about each one of these. The following is as much a confession as it is an admonishment. I will not mention a single sin that I have not been fully and damnably guilty of in my time.

First, dogmatism.

One way to define the difference between a regular belief and a sacred belief is that people who hold sacred beliefs think it is morally wrong for anyone to question those beliefs. If someone does question those beliefs, they’re not just being stupid or even depraved, they’re actively doing violence. They might as well be kicking a puppy. When people hold sacred beliefs, there is no disagreement without animosity. In this mindset, people who disagreed with my views weren’t just wrong, they were awful people. I watched what people said closely, scanning for objectionable content. Any infraction reflected badly on your character, and too many might put you on my blacklist. Calling them ‘sacred beliefs’ is a nice way to put it. What I mean to say is that they are dogmas.

The author is not just whining; she’s making the case for an alternative form of leftism, and revels in the new freedom after leaving this cult behind:

The aftermath was wonderful. A world that seemed grey and hopeless filled with colour. I can’t convey to you how bleak my worldview was. An activist friend once said to me, with complete sincerity, “Everything is problematic.” That was the general consensus. Far bleaker was something I said during a phone call to an old friend who lived in another city, far outside my political world. I, like a disproportionate number of radical leftists, was depressed, and spent a lot of time sighing into the receiver. “I’m not worried about you killing yourself,” he said. “I know you want to live forever.” I let out a weak, sad laugh. “When I said that,” I replied, “I was a lot happier than I am now.” Losing my political ideology was extremely liberating. I became a happier person. I also believe that I became a better person.

Know hope.

Danielle Kurtzleben explains why more education hasn’t meant higher incomes:

The Census Bureau [on Thursday] released new data from its American Communities Survey, showing that today’s 18-to-34-year-olds are earning less today than the same age group in 1980, 1990, or 2000. …

[E]veryone thinks of college as the ticket to prosperity, so America’s young people have increasingly invested in college degrees. And it’s true that those graduates are doing way better than those without degrees, both in terms of income and employability. But it’s mostly paying off because the economic situation just keeps getting worse for people with only a high school diploma. For millennials, this means investing four or more years, plus tens of thousands of dollars, to get a degree whose value isn’t really increasing much. The whole generation has been stuck on a sort of cruel economic treadmill: working harder and harder without really getting much further ahead.

Derek Thompson also absorbs the Census findings:

In retail, wholesale, leisure, and hospitality—which together employ more than one quarter of this age group—real wages have fallen more than 10 percent since 2007.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that most of this cohort are seeing their pay slashed, year after year. Instead it suggests that wage growth is failing to keep up with inflation, and that, as twentysomethings pass into their thirties, they are earning less than their older peers did before the recession. …

Why are real wages falling across so many fields for young workers? The Great Recession devastated demand for hotels, amusement parks, and many restaurants, which explains the collapse in pay across those industries. As the ranks of young unemployed and underemployed Millennials pile up, companies around the country know they can attract applicants without raising starter wages.

But there’s something deeper, too. The familiar bash brothers of globalization and technology (particularly information technology) have conspired to gut middle-class jobs by sending work abroad or replacing it with automation and software. A 2013 study by David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson found that although the computerization of certain tasks hasn’t reduced employment, it has reduced the number of decent-paying, routine-heavy jobs. Cheaper jobs have replaced them, and overall pay has declined.