rotflmbao..., wattles and their "family research" council...,

alternet |  Mega-family superstar, Josh Duggar, has resigned his position as lobbyist for the Family Research Council after In Touch Magazine published a police report confirming that JimBob and Michelle Duggar of TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting” fame’s oldest son confessed to molesting several female minors in 2002 - 2003.

According to the 2006 police report, Duggar family patriarch, JimBob actively covered up Josh’s confession and neglected to notify authorities or provide professional help for Josh and/or his victims. To make matters worse, Josh’s pregnant wife, Anna Duggar, believes her husband is a changed man and continues - along with the couple’s three young children - to live with an admitted child sex offender. And to top it all off, the Duggar family publicly declared that God used the tragic situation to draw their family closer to Him.

Jesus Friggin’ Christ, what a mess! As a former Quiverfull believer, I recognize in this Duggar family debacle several essential beliefs which are widely held amongst fundamentalist Christians which shackle True Believer’s™ common sense to an outdated and irrelevant god-myth and seriously impair their ability to make sound moral choices.

JimBob and Michelle Duggar live in a fantasy world of their own making, and they believe that, just like in the fairy tales, they all will live happily ever after. While confessing to not being a perfect family, and admitting their family faces challenges and struggles every day, the Duggars are convinced “that dark and difficult time caused [the family] to seek God like never before,” which in their minds, means the molestation really wasn’t so bad, and in fact, has turned out to be a kind of blessing in disguise since each one of them “drew closer to God,” as a result of “something so terrible.”

According to the “eternally happy ending” story which the Duggars are telling themselves, the little girls whom Josh allegedly groped and fondled are not victims or even survivors of sexual abuse, but are instead equated with the “highly favored” Old Testament Joseph whose brothers sold him into slavery: What Satan meant for evil, God used for good.

Suffering in this life is insignificant - even trifling - compared to the faith-strengthening and soul-saving purpose of trials which will be richly rewarded with eternal life in Heaven … so praise the fucking Lord for whatever misery He sends to you and your children.

who stands to profit from gunning down omgs in waco?

agingrebel |   The unnamed Cossack’s account is layered with and given the same credibility as ludicrous statements made by Waco police spokesman W. Patrick Swanton. The Post also has discovered the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives report, “OMGs and the Military 2014,” which was published last July 1 and first reported here last July 11. The Bandidos are mentioned 26 times in the report. The Cossacks are not mentioned once. The Iron Order, the “law abiding motorcycle club” is mentioned eight times. The Post uses the ATF report to substantiate a claim by the Waco police that “the Bandidos, the most notorious biker gang in Texas,” are arming themselves “with grenades and C4 explosives.” Not some Bandidos but “the Bandidos.”

The Post’s story raises at least as many questions as it answers.

For example, the Post states that two large packs of outlaw bikers travelled to Waco. The Post says there were 70 Cossacks and 100 Bandidos but it neglects to mention how many Texas Highway Patrol cruisers and how many Texas Department of Public Safety helicopters followed the packs. Anyone who has ever ridden in a large pack probably has the same question. Where were the helicopters? Where were the police who followed the big packs into the Central Texas Market Place shopping center?

According to the Post, the Bandidos made a disturbance at and shot up their own event. Whether the Bandidos is the preeminent club in Texas or not, the club thinks it is. The COCI meeting had at least the tacit approval of the Bandidos and most one percenter motorcycle clubs in the world, when placed in a similar situation, would assume responsibility for keeping the event violence free.

According to the Post: “A Bandido with a patch identifying him as sergeant-at-arms of the same chapter threw a punch at Richard Matthew Jordan II, 31, known as ‘Richie,’ who was from Pasadena, Tex. Jordan punched the guy back. ‘“At that point in time, the sergeant in arms shot Richie point-blank,’ the Cossack said.”

Really? In front of at least 22 sworn peace officers? In broad daylight? In a location that was obviously well-surveilled by video cameras?

“Then all the Bandidos standing in the parking lot started pulling guns and shooting at us,” the Cossack chapter president told the Post. Really? Without a thought to what their legal defense would be? In broad daylight in front of numerous police?

The anonymous Cossack told the Post, “Three of our guys went down instantly. They caught a couple more that tripped and fell, and Bandidos were shooting at them.” In other words, the police stood and watched as Bandidos executed five Cossacks? Does that pass the smell test?

Talk

Presumably, the Post verified that its anonymous source was actually a Cossack club officer and an eyewitness. But it is unclear how he escaped and it is equally unclear how and why he started talking to a freelance writer named Tim Madigan.

The Post’s story reads like a federal racketeering indictment so the biggest question of all is whether the source is working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Has he been debriefed by the ATF? Is he under arrest now? Is he working for the government now? Was he working for the government eight days ago? Why is this man talking?

america cannot lock its poor people problem away

guardian |  Every day, indigent Americans are ripped from their homes and their communities and forced into jails of varying degrees of dysfunction and decay. The US supreme court ruled three decades ago that it is unconstitutional to imprison people because they cannot afford to pay debts. The ruling, however, hasn’t ended the practice of jailing people for unpaid government fees and fines. 

In 2010, the ACLU found that courts across the nation regularly deny Americans proper consideration of their financial position and throw them into jail over fines they could never hope to pay. As a result, local jails nationwide have transformed into modern-day “debtors’ prisons” overcrowded with indigent people whose only punishable offense is being poor. The effects are devastating. 

This growing phenomenon funnels poor Americans into the criminal justice system with sentences that disrupt their lives, too often trapping them in a damning cycle of poverty and incarceration that far outlasts their initial conviction. These practices have a disparate impact on communities of color in the United States. 

Consider 19-year-old Kevin Thompson, a black teenager in DeKalb County, Georgia, who was jailed simply because he was unable to pay $838 in fines and fees associated with a routine traffic citation. Though only half of DeKalb County’s residents are black, nearly all probationers jailed for failure to pay by its recorders court, which handles minor offenses like traffic misdemeanors, are black. The ACLU filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Mr Thompson and reached a settlement with the county that included a number of new reform measures aimed at preventing others from facing the same unconstitutional treatment. 

Jail sentences like those imposed on Mr Thompson and Mr Staten aren’t just unjust – they’re also costly. The ACLU’s 2010 report In for a Penny found that individuals incarcerated for failure to pay often cost the state more than they owe. The report identifies one individual whose incarceration in New Orleans cost more than six times his $498 debt. So why are we stuck with this senseless system?

pensions and politics in illinois

NYTimes |  Illinois is facing one of the worst fiscal crises of any state in recent decades, largely because it has mismanaged its pension system.

The shortfalls could potentially mean sharply higher taxes and cuts in spending. And even though the state’s highest court just this month threw out a landmark plan to cut worker and retiree benefits, some lawmakers say they may have to find another way to make those reductions as well.

Illinois’s problems resonate well beyond its borders. Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Kentucky are among the states confronting similar problems, and to them, Illinois is a model of what can go wrong — with political intransigence, mounting costs and a complicated legal terrain.

The state faces a range of problems. Illinois has one of the worst-funded pension systems in the nation. Chicago also has a pension crisis, leading Moody’s Investors Service to downgrade its credit rating to junk status on May 12, potentially threatening the city’s ability to borrow.

And the state faces an expected budget deficit of $6 billion, which it needs to address quickly. With just days before a legislative deadline, the new Republican governor, who ran on cutting costs and holding down taxes, is at odds with Democrats who hold a veto-proof supermajority in the legislature.

“Really, it’s not a clear road map at this point,” the governor, Bruce Rauner, said of solving the pension crisis.

“We have to make big decisions,” Mr. Rauner told reporters. “The state is in dire financial straits. Chicago is in big, big challenges. And everybody’s a little bit on edge.”

Courts in other states, including Colorado and Minnesota, have sometimes approved measured pension cuts for public workers, especially for the benefits that current workers have not yet earned. And in Detroit and Stockton, Calif., federal judges have said pensions could be cut in a bankruptcy.

john nash dead

reuters |  Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1994 for his work on game theory and the mathematics of decision-making.

The film "A Beautiful Mind" was loosely based on his battle with schizophrenia.

Nash received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1950 and spent much of his career there and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He began experiencing what he described as "mental disturbances" in 1959 after marrying Alicia, a MIT physics major who was then pregnant, according to his biography on the Nobel Prize website.

"I was disturbed in this way for a very long period of time, like 25 years," Nash said in a 2004 video interview on the Nobel website.

He stressed that his was an unusual case, as he was able eventually stop taking medication and return to normal activities and his research.

The 2001 movie represented an "artistic" take on his experience, giving insight into mental illness but not accurately portraying the nature of his delusions, Nash said in the interview.

"John's remarkable achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists who were influenced by his brilliant, groundbreaking work in game theory," Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber said in a statement.

"The story of his life with Alicia moved millions of readers and moviegoers who marveled at their courage in the face of daunting challenges," he added.

Nash and his wife were living in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, New Jersey police said.

evolutionary game theory

wikipedia |  Evolutionary game theory (EGT) is the application of game theory to evolving populations of lifeforms in biology. EGT is useful in this context by defining a framework of contests, strategies, and analytics into which Darwinian competition can be modelled. EGT originated in 1973 with John Maynard Smith and George R. Price's formalisation of the way in which such contests can be analysed as "strategies" and the mathematical criteria that can be used to predict the resulting prevalence of such competing strategies.^[1]

Evolutionary game theory differs from classical game theory by focusing more on the dynamics of strategy change as influenced not solely by the quality of the various competing strategies, but by the effect of the frequency with which those various competing strategies are found in the population.^[2]

Evolutionary game theory has proven itself to be invaluable in helping to explain many complex and challenging aspects of biology. It has been particularly helpful in establishing the basis of altruistic behaviours within the context of Darwinian process. Despite its origin and original purpose, evolutionary game theory has become of increasing interest to economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers.

The most classic game (and Maynard Smith's starting point) is the Hawk Dove game. The game was conceived to analyse the animal contest problem highlighted by Lorenz and Tinbergen. It is a contest over a non-shareable resource. The contestants can be either a Hawk or a Dove. These are not two separate species of bird; they are two subtypes of one species with two different types of strategy (two different morphs). The term Hawk Dove was coined by Maynard Smith because he did his work during the Vietnam War when political views fell into one of these two camps. The strategy of the Hawk (a fighter strategy) is to first display aggression, then escalate into a fight until he either wins or is injured. The strategy of the Dove (fight avoider) is to first display aggression but if faced with major escalation by an opponent to run for safety. If not faced with this level of escalation the Dove will attempt to share the resource.

Payoff Matrix for Hawk Dove Game

	meets Hawk	meets Dove
if Hawk	V/2 - C/2	V
if Dove	0	V/2

Given that the resource is given the value V, the damage from losing a fight is given cost C:

• If a Hawk meets a Dove he gets the full resource V to himself

• If a Hawk meets a Hawk – half the time he wins, half the time he loses…so his average outcome is then V/2 minus C/2

• If a Dove meets a Hawk he will back off and get nothing - 0

• If a Dove meets a Dove both share the resource and get V/2

The actual payoff however depends on the probability of meeting a Hawk or Dove, which in turn is a representation of the percentage of Hawks and Doves in the population when a particular contest takes place. But that population makeup in turn is determined by the results of all of the previous contests before the present contest- it is a continuous iterative process where the resultant population of the previous contest becomes the input population to the next contest. If the cost of losing C is greater than the value of winning V (the normal situation in the natural world) the mathematics ends in an ESS – an evolutionarily stable strategy situation having a mix of the two strategies where the population of Hawks is V/C. The population will progress back to this equilibrium point if any new Hawks or Doves make a temporary perturbation in the population. The solution of the Hawk Dove Game explains why most animal contests involve only “ritual fighting behaviours” in contests rather than outright battles. The result does not at all depend on “good of the species” behaviours as suggested by Lorenz, but solely on the implication of actions of “selfish genes”.

outlaw motorcycle militias mayhem over a $10,000/month texas rocker patch fee dispute....,

WaPo |  Richie was the first to die, then Diesel, then Dog.

Whatever else they were in life, the men with the biker nicknames were Cossacks, loud and proud and riders in a Texas motorcycle gang. And that’s what got them killed, shot to death in a brawl with a rival gang in the parking lot of a Texas “breastaurant” that advertised hot waitresses and cold beer.

“I saw the first three of our guys fall, and we started running,” said their brother in arms, another Cossack, who said he was there May 17 when the shooting started at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco. Nine bikers died, 18 were wounded and more than 170 landed in jail.

 

The Cossack, president of a North Texas chapter of the motorcycle gang, asked not to be identified because he is now in hiding and said he fears for his life. He is a rare eyewitness speaking publicly about the Waco massacre, one of the worst eruptions of biker-gang violence in U.S. history.

The bulletin warns that Bandidos who serve in the U.S. military may be “supplying the gang with grenades and C4 explosives” to target officials and their families with car bombs, the network reported.

A spokesman for the Waco police, Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton, said police had received an increasing number of threats in recent days. “We are taking the necessary precautions,” he said.

U.S. military ties to the Bandidos and other biker gangs were detailed in a U.S. Justice Department report published last year that concluded the gangs were using “active-duty military personnel and U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) contractors and employees to spread their tentacles across the United States.”

 The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives study, first reported by the Intercept, concludes that biker gangs have recruited scores of employees of federal, state and local governments, police and firefighters, National Guardsmen and reservists, some of them with government security clearances, to help them “maim and murder” in support of their “insatiable appetite for dominance.”

despite being exponentially more violent than prison gangs or street gangs most bikers aren't murderous drug running kingpins...,

DallasMorningNews |  Harold Pollack is co-director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab and an expert on gangs and guns. Just as important, he lives in a city where urban violence is so entrenched that Mayor Rahm Emanuel began his second term Monday with a speech warning that the city may lose an entire generation of children to gang violence.

So how would Pollack compare outlaw motorcycle gangs, like those that got into a gun battle Sunday in Waco, with urban street gangs, such as those that commit terror in Chicago? Here’s his take, courtesy of The Marshall Project:

#1 The number of perps involved in the Waco shootout – not to mention the nine deaths – far exceeds the typical urban gang-related shooting.  “I have never encountered a gang incident in Chicago remotely like this.”

#2 Urban gangs and their criminal organizations rarely get into gun battles with police.

#3 Outlaw biker gangs are rarely found in big media centers. Given our expectations regarding race and geographic location of people who perpetrate crime, biker gangs are perceived as more “curiosity” than threat. That must change.

#4 100 weapons at one crime scene is absolutely remarkable.

#5 Biker gangs have far-flung connections, particularly in South and Central America.

Money quote: “If these biker gang members were non-white, I think this would cause a national freakout.”

My take: Outlaw biker gangs are homegrown terrorists. That doesn’t mean everyone who walked into that Twin Peaks Sunday is an outlaw or a homegrown terrorist. But those who weren’t should be charged with stupidity for associating with bikers who clearly are.

the american conscience is dead...,

thenation |  the US bombed Cambodia, a sovereign nation Washington was not at war with, from 1965 to 1973. When Nixon and Kissinger entered the White House in early 1969, they greatly intensified (in terms of bombing rate and amount of munitions dropped) and expanded (in terms of extent of territory targeted) the air assault. They did so both because Cambodia reportedly housed the headquarters of the National Liberation Front and because they wanted to send a message to Hanoi that Nixon was “mad” and unpredictable. Between 1969 and 1973, the US dropped at least 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia, killing over 100,000 Khmer civilians, according to Ben Kiernan, the founding director of Yale’s Cambodian Genocide Program. Broadly speaking, Nixon’s and Kissinger’s Cambodia bombing comprised two named operations. The first, Operation Menu, ran from March 18, 1969, to May 1970. The second, Operation Freedom Deal, ran from May 1970 to August 1973. Menu was the phase that was most secret, carried out with the deception protocol put into place by Kissinger. Freedom was less covert, justified by requests for support from the Cambodian government to fight the growing insurgency. Still, the extent and intensity of Freedom Deal was under-reported in the US press, which was often fed confusing and mixed messages by the administration.

It wasn’t until 1973 that Congress and journalists began to investigate Operation Menu, around the same moment that the Watergate scandal was unfolding. At the time, some members of Congress were “convinced that the secret bombing of Cambodia will emerge as another, perhaps more dangerous, facet of the Watergate scandal,” as Hersh, then a New York Times reporter, wrote in July of that year.

But investigators couldn’t identify the person (it was Kissinger) in Nixon’s staff that presided over the cover-up nor find the link (Sitton) connecting the conspiracy to the White House. “Who ordered the falsification of the records?” one senator asked General Creighton Abrams, the commander of military operations in Vietnam. “I just do not know,” he answered.

Hersh didn’t give up. Nixon resigned, Ford finished his term, and Kissinger left office in 1977 having largely escaped association with Watergate. Compared to the preverbal thuggery of the rest of Nixon’s inner circle—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell—not to mention actual thugs like G. Gordon Liddy, Kissinger’s reputation was intact: “prodigiously intelligent, articulate, talented, witty, captivating and imposing man…. he is not mean-spirited, he seems drawn to telling the truth, and he wants to serve his country well. He also appears to have a historical vision,” as none other than The New Yorker’s William Shawn wrote (in 1973).

Hersh, though, kept digging, researching a book that still remains the defining portrait of Kissinger. As Colonel Sitton, recalling his encounter with Hersh, said: Hersh “was so upset with Kissinger’s first book he had decided to write an exposé, a counter if you will.” Sitton here is referring to Kissinger’s The White House Years. Published in 1979, that first volume of Kissinger’s memoirs won the National Book Award for history. Today, most honest historians would place it in the category of fantasy. In it, Kissinger devotes, as he does in nearly every subsequent book he’s written, a good many pages distorting the catastrophe he helped visit on Cambodia.

Hersh “countered” in 1983 with The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. An “authorized” biography of Kissinger will be out soon, but Hersh’s Kissinger is still the one to top. He gives us the defining portrait of the man as a preening paranoid, tacking between ruthlessness and sycophancy to advance his career, cursing his fate and letting fly the B-52s. Small in his vanities and shabby in his motives, Kissinger, in Hersh’s hands, is nonetheless Shakespearean, because the pettiness gets played out on a world stage with epic consequences. The Price of Power covers all of Kissinger’s many transgressions—from Bangladesh to Chile, from wiretapping his own staff to giving Suharto the greenlight to invade Timor.

But the secret bombing of Cambodia is the book’s centerpiece, fueling the paranoia that drives Nixon’s downfall.

well, that explains the proliferation of fin d'siecle tattoo parlors....,

doj |  Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (OMGs) are organizations whose members use their motorcycle clubs as conduits for criminal enterprises. OMGs are highly structured criminal organizations whose members engage in criminal activities such as violent crime, weapons trafficking, and drug trafficking. There are more than 300 active OMGs within the United States, ranging in size from single chapters with five or six members to hundreds of chapters with thousands of members worldwide. The Hells Angels, Mongols, Bandidos, Outlaws, and Sons of Silence pose a serious national domestic threat and conduct the majority of criminal activity linked to OMGs, especially activity relating to drug-trafficking and, more specifically, to cross-border drug smuggling. Because of their transnational scope, these OMGs are able to coordinate drug smuggling operations in partnership with major international drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs).

no love for the modus operandi of violent predatory parasites...,

Dale sent me a link to some interesting pictures on Thursday, pictures that I think may have had something to do with my little epiphany about the nature of the thugs and the peculiar parasitic outlaw subculture quietly tolerated in our midst. The characters mugging in this picture are not in fact samurai, as much as the characters dressing up in leathers and riding around on Harley Davidson motorcycles are not in fact warriors. These are peasants dressed-up and posed in found armor - you can see it in their faces as well as in the unsheathed steel slung across the 2nd from the left's shoulder.

My introduction to Edo culture was as romanticized and artificial as it could be, coming from a teenage encounter with the book Shogun compounded and instantiated by the presence of a genuine Japanese martial arts studio on the outskirts of my neighborhood that preserved, highlighted, and sought to faithfully transmit a cultural and religious ethos embodied - at least in part - in the warrior's arts. Better to watch the period series Zatoichi and be reminded how bleak, predatory, brutal and crimey every installment was inclined to be, and to remember that there was a reason that the samurai put aside their old and lethal religion and imposed the Meiji restoration upon Japan.

angels, bandidos, outlaws, and pagans: the evolution of organized crime among the big four 1% motorcycle clubs

angelo.edu |  This paper outlines the evolution of the Big Four one percent motorcycle clubs—Hell’s Angels, Bandidos, Outlaws, and Pagans—from near-groups to well-organized criminal confederations. The insights of criminological theory unify a variety of journalistic and scientiŽc sources into a holistic picture of the development of these organizations. The interaction of members’ psychological needs with group dynamics and mainstream social forces lead to periods of expansion as core values shift to emphasize dominance over rivals. The resulting interclub tensions encourage the creation of organized criminal enterprises but also attract police attention. Internecine rivalries were eventually subordinated to these enterprises as their profiŽt potential was recognized and intergroup warfare took its toll. Core biker values were reasserted as certain aspects of club operation became less countercultural in order to assure the future of the subculture and its basic components.

gubmint issued outlaw motorcycle gangs far worse than simple "thugs"...,

DallasNews |  The real name for this is mindless, idiot violence. The correct term for the people involved is criminals so stupid they shot and stabbed one another in a chain-store shopping center where ordinary citizens go to eat lunch, browse sporting goods, shop for sofas.

“Thug” might be a little too smart for this bunch. And while we’re at it, “biker” and “outlaw” may be a little too romantic.

Los Angeles writer Donald Charles Davis, who blogs about the “1 percenter lifestyle” under the pseudonym “The Aging Rebel,” elegantly describes gang-affiliated bikers as “brotherhoods of men who have left themselves no choice but to stand apart from the world at large.”

Oh, those daring outlaws, the ghostly remnants of a manly frontier spirit that “stands apart” from a culture made soft by iPads and wine tastings and women who talk back. TV and Hunter S. Thompson-addled journalists have turned “MC clubs” into the last of the Marlboro men.

Except they’re not. Take away the motorcycles and the vests (“cuts”) and the hieroglyphic patches and you have your basic gang-banger. A thug. A dum-dum so besotted by his own sense of “badness” that he’ll shoot someone over some perceived act of “disrespect” — walking into the wrong bar, wearing the wrong color, sporting the wrong patch.

Sure, you can call that “bad.” You can also call it “dangerously stupid.”

“These guys become very violent to each other very quickly over nothing,” said McClennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara. “Very quickly over nothing” is a woefully inadequate reason for a broken jaw or a knife in the gut or a gunshot to the head.

Davis (“Aging Rebel”) is a gifted writer, but if you read some of the 1 percenter comments to his blog post about the Waco shootings, you’ll find something scary but drearily familiar.

You’ll find the contemporary flavor of bunker-brained craziness that’s poisoning everyday culture: vicious hatred of government, contempt for ordinary citizens (“sheeple”), manic belief in elaborate conspiracy theories.

One online scenario that’s floating around the Waco shootings is this: Law enforcement orchestrated the Sunday killings, sending undercover cops disguised as bikers into the bar to start a fight. Once the fight spilled outside, SWAT teams opened fire, deliberately slaughtering members of the brave brotherhood who dare to stand apart.

That’s a level of paranoid delusion I find a lot more alarming than an academic debate over who we can or can’t call a “thug.”

that tier 2 organized criminal trash is gubmint issued...,

Time |  “Motorcycle clubs are function of military service, period,” declares William Dulaney, who is both national president of Hell on Wheels Motorcycle Club and a professor of organizational communication at Air University, located on Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. “Chain of command is very strictly adhered to. Its’ about identity for a group of people who, outside this social structure, don’t have much identity. You’re talking about a core identity to a bunch of warriors.”

And yet, even as Harley sales soared and weekend warriors, known derisively by outlaw clubs as RUBs, or rich urban bikers, crowded highways, the clubs that started it all lost a lot of their juice. “Back in the ’80s, or like 1995, dude, gangland, no doubt about it,” Dulaney says. “But those days are gone. ” Federal RICO prosecutions and other law enforcement efforts have dramatically reduced the criminal threat level from outlaw groups, as perhaps has aging. Dulaney now numbers himself among the older generation, and understands the violence in Waco as a problem of kids these days.

“They don’t have years and years if not decades in the subculture, understanding that there is hierarchy,” he says. Young bucks may enjoy the swagger of wearing a leather vest, but they fail to respect the full import of the patches, or “colors,” sewn on the back, he says. The diamond-shaped patch reading “1%” denotes the wearer as a member of the outlaw elite. And the place name — “Texas” — sewn at the base of the vest in the embroidered crescent bikers call the bottom rocker, announces more than a claim on turf.

“The way to understand the bottom rocker, with 1 percenters, is it’s territory, yeah, but it’s responsibility,” Dulaney says. “Because they have responsibility to enforce peaceful coexistence in that area. Because if they don’t, law enforcement will come in and be all over you.”

military operations against tier 1 and tier 2 threats unequivocally social cleansing...,

NYTimes |  In much of Brazil, proponents of harsh policing tactics are growing stronger.

Responding to widespread fears in a crime-weary country with more homicides than any other — 50,108 in 2012, according to the United Nations — conservative politicians with law enforcement backgrounds and tough talk on crime collected huge vote counts in recent state and federal elections, bolstering what is often called Brazil’s “bullet caucus” in Congress.

Some bullet caucus members openly celebrate the number of people they killed while patrolling the streets. One rising political star, Paulo Telhada, boasted of killing more than 30 people as a police officer in São Paulo, saying in a recent interview he felt “no pity for thugs.”

“There are parts of the middle class that accept killings by the police as a legitimate practice,” said Ivan C. Marques, director of Instituto Sou da Paz, a group that tracks police issues.

In the state of Rio alone, the police killed at least 563 people in 2014, a 35 percent increase from the year before, according to the state’s Institute of Public Security.

That is significantly more than the F.B.I. recorded for the entire United States, which has a population about 20 times as large as that of Rio State.

Researchers say the reasons for the large numbers of police killings are varied. To begin with, poorly trained and poorly paid police forces in crime-plagued slums are often imbued with a shoot-first instinct stemming from a mixture of fear, paranoia and a sense of impunity.

Some elite units, like the Police Special Operations Battalion in Rio, openly advertise, and even glorify, their lethality. The unit’s symbol is a skull and crossed pistols.

But analysts say such squads are merely the sharp end of larger policing systems in which criminals, or people perceived to be criminals, are considered undesirable elements who cannot be reformed.

As drug gangs control many prisons in Brazil, arresting criminals and sending them to jail is viewed by some police officers as feeding the growth of crime, not reducing it.

Many cases involving the police are registered as “resistance killings” or “deaths in police confrontation,” though rights groups say that the episodes often amount to summary executions.

when the gangbangers are white, it doesn't hit "our" dopamine receptors the same way...,

themarshallproject |  If you thought violent biker gangs were a relic of the Altamont era, Sunday’s shootout at a Waco, Texas restaurant might have come as a shock. A long simmering beef between the Bandidos and Cossacks boiled over into gunfire. When police arrived at the scene, gang members shot at them, too, leaving nine bikers dead, 18 people injured, and 170 suspects in police custody. Over 100 weapons have been confiscated. 

The scale of this incident dwarfs a typical urban gang confrontation, says Harold Pollack, co-director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab and an expert on gangs and guns. We talked to Pollack about why biker gang violence typically gets so little attention. He believes the Waco incident confounds our expectations regarding the race and geographic location of people who perpetrate crime, causing us to see biker gangs as more of a “curiosity” than a threat. 

How does the shootout in Waco differ from the gang violence you study in Chicago?

I have never encountered a gang incident in Chicago remotely like this. The number of perpetrators involved — not to mention the nine deaths — far exceed the typical urban gang-related shooting. Maybe there was some gang incident in Chicago like this decades ago. But this sort of pitched battle? I’ve never heard of anything like it. If these biker gang members were non-white, I think this would cause a national freak out.

One of the shocking parts of this incident is that after the police arrived, there was a gunfight between the gang members and the authorities.

Urban gangs and criminal organizations very rarely get into gun battles with police. They certainly have access to powerful weaponry. Police around the country periodically capture large caches of AR-15s and other weapons in cities. Yet when they break down the door to a gang safe house or a drug location in a city, whatever weapons might be piled on a mattress in the adjoining room are left where they are. They aren’t picked up and used to attack the police. The people who do attack police are typically cornered individuals or people with serious mental health problems.

These biker gangs have a long history in organized crime. They began with restless, traumatized veterans returning home after World War II. Today, biker gangs still act as a sort of private militia that police can’t always control, patrolling festivals and other events. Why don’t we pay more attention to them?

Geography may be part of the answer. There are not a lot of outlaw biker gangs in gentrifying Brooklyn and other key media centers. Of course, the number of deaths is lower overall with these groups. You don’t have the daily deluge of homicides the way we would in Chicago. But I do think that our views about urban crime are so framed by race and inequality in a variety of ways. When criminal activity seems unrelated to these factors, it doesn’t hit our national dopamine receptors in quite the same way. People tend to view these motorcycle gangs as a kind of curiosity.

what has america come to when its third-world hoochies cain't even sell tail to feed their kids?

dailymail |  The waitresses who were working at a Texas restaurant when a massive gunfight broke out over the weekend are revealing the terror they felt as bullets began to fly.

The women, all employees at Twin Peaks sports bar in Waco, have taken to social media to share stories of hiding in freezers, running in fear and their belief that this tragedy could have possibly been prevented in the first place.

And now, after enduring this horrific scene, they all find themselves unemployed.

'What we went through Sunday was scary as s**t,' wrote Alicia Ortiz on her Facebook page. 

'I wouldn’t want to have gone through it with anyone else. Being in that freezer with y’all made me see how much of a family we really are.'

She also bemoaned the fact that the restaurant has been closed down in the wake of the incident, and what that means for the staff.

'So the whole restaurant needs to be shut down because of bad management? Peoples jobs need to be lost because of bad management?' she wrote

'We are getting the short end of the stick. And people are blaming all of Twin Peaks like we knew what was going to happen.'

Another employee, Sara Violet Parker, seemed to echo Ortiz's comment, writing on her Facebook; 'Twin Peaks is not to blame, my heart is so heavy for all of my friends who were scared for their lives. Now we are worried none of us have jobs, with bills to pay and some have children to provide for.'

waco overseers dealt directly with breastaurant management, not the breastaurant community...,

WaPo |  Two days after nine people were shot and killed at the Twin Peaks restaurant here, Oddissie Garza can’t seem to shake a single, unnerving thought:

“I was supposed to be there,” she told The Washington Post on Tuesday as she lingered on her porch in a solemn mood. “That keeps running through my mind. I was supposed to be right there at the front where all the fighting was.”

Garza, an easygoing 18-year-old with a shock of pink hair, was often the first person customers saw when they walked into Twin Peaks. She began working at the new restaurant in September as a waitress and was promoted to hostess five months later, placing her just past the front door at the restaurant.

“It was my first job and I was nervous in the beginning, but I found out I had a bunch of sisters in plaid,” she said, referring to the servers’ infamous uniform. “After I got pregnant, I kept this job because of the other girls.”

When she thinks about Sunday’s violence she is less concerned with her own safety than the person she would have been carrying with her. Garza is eight months pregnant with a baby boy, a fact that may have saved her life, she said.

After a long shift on her feet Saturday night, Garza’s legs were swelling and she asked a co-worker if they could trade shifts the next morning.

Her co-worker agreed. The next time she heard from anyone at the restaurant was when they were locked in a freezer as gunfire erupted. Garza got a call from her mother saying something — possibly a shooting — had occurred at work. She immediately texted her friends at Twin Peaks, hoping the rumor was some sort of joke.

why are white gang members destroying their own community?

HuffPo |  Rival biker gangs clashed violently in Waco, Texas, on Sunday afternoon, in a brawl that ultimately left nine gang members dead and at least 18 others injured. As the fight spilled out of a local restaurant and into the parking lot, participants reportedly used fists, chains, knives and later firearms to attack one another. Eventually they exchanged gunfire with police. Waco law enforcement announced Monday that 170 people had been arrested and will be charged with engaging in organized crime.

The brutality terrorized the surrounding community, leading to large-scale evacuations, closed businesses and ongoing fears, though remarkably no physical harm to bystanders.

The incident has temporarily shoved biker gangs and their overwhelmingly white membership into the national spotlight. But these groups -- which the FBI labels outlaw motorcycle gangs, or OMGs -- typically receive far less media attention than urban street gangs, though the biker gangs' criminal networks reach across the country and have erupted violently before.

Sunday's bloodshed reportedly began inside the bathroom of a local Twin Peaks "breastaurant" that has catered to bikers in the past. Between 150 and 200 gang members were apparently inside at the time, and one witness said that as many as 30 gang members were shooting at each other at the height of the battle.

Police have accused the Waco restaurant of being uncooperative in earlier attempts to scale back large and often contentious biker gatherings, and now its clientele has led to serious consequences for management. On Monday, the Twin Peaks corporate office revoked the establishment's franchise, stating that "the management team of the franchised restaurant in Waco chose to ignore the warnings and advice from both the police and our company, and did not uphold the high security standards we have in place to ensure everyone is safe at our restaurants." The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission had already closed the restaurant for a week in order to avoid further possible violence.

Nearby businesses that fell within the police perimeter were also put on lockdown or evacuated following the initial melee. Walmart reportedly closed early Sunday after being cleared. Best Buy, Cabela's and other stores in the Central Texas Marketplace -- the shopping center that contains the Twin Peaks restaurant -- remained closed Monday as the investigation continued.

The manager of a local Denny's told the Austin American-Statesman that a "huge" group of bikers came into her restaurant a few hours after the shooting. Many were served but left abruptly a short time later, some without paying their checks. The manager said a SWAT team showed up minutes after the bikers departed, leaving her and other patrons rattled.

The Waco Tribune reported that "other local dining and drinking establishments" closed early Sunday amid fears that gang members might be looking to resume the violence.

Law enforcement officials in Texas said they've received numerous retaliatory threats from biker gangs following Sunday's incident and have gone on high alert in case of any backlash.

Biker gang violence is not unusual in Central Texas. OMGs play a key role in methamphetamine and marijuana trafficking throughout the region. The FBI says they're involved in cross-border drug smuggling as well as domestic drug trafficking, prostitution, human trafficking and other criminal enterprises. Police said that five OMGs took part in the violence on Sunday, though authorities haven't identified the organizations by name. Fist tap Rohan.

why criminal threat tiers 1, 2, and 3 must be terminated with extreme prejudice

questioneverything |  One could reasonably argue that I am, after all, biased and will tend to ignore evidence against my basic hypothesis, that civilization must necessarily collapse due to the decline of net free energy (i.e. peak oil combined with declining energy return on investment — EROI — and still growing populations). I am probably not immune to such selective bias. Thus I put it to you, the readers, to let me know of any evidence of some reasonably impactful institutions or organizations that seem to be working and contributing positively to human happiness (please also include estimates of the magnitude of such impact). As I was writing this one possible example did come to mind, if I allow that some kinds of religious experiences are positive (and I do even if I do not believe in most of what religions teach about an ethereal world). The current Pope of the Catholic faith (Francis), it seems to me, has done some worthwhile things that could have a positive impact on the followers of that religion, if not on other states owing to their leaders paying deference to what the Holy See says (e.g. calls for peace). But I reserve judgment of the effectiveness of his reign on the Church. For example, will he ferret out gross behaviors like child sex abuses or financial corruption in the Vatican's dealings? 

If you have any contributions please make them in comments here. Let's see what sort of list we come up with. But please do not post examples of dysfunction. We already know so many it would be an act of waste of bandwidth.

Economists' View the “New Normal”

Meanwhile if we just examine the state and trends of the global economy we get a basic picture of the developing collapse. An article in today's New York Times Business section by Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University “Signs of a Shakier New Normal”, May 17, 2015, brought into focus a variety of comments made by a number of neoclassical economists of late (including, from time to time, the titular representative of ‘liberal’ economists, Paul Krugman) that we have entered a new kind of economic situation that they don't quite understand but have labeled “the new normal.” I suppose they are trying to subtly say that they expect the current set of conditions to continue indefinitely into the future. But, their reasons for saying so have nothing to do with their understanding the dynamics of the real economy and making predictions based on their bogus models. They are just tacitly admitting that something unusual is happening and it has persisted long enough now to be acknowledged as possibly permanent. 

While the US government and a variety of media talking heads are hailing the “recovery” the reality of life for the vast majority of Americans does not demonstrate recovery. They continue to grow poorer, budgets are stretched even for those who have jobs, the real cost of living is still going up even in spite of the recent relief in energy costs, in short for most people there is no recovery. And that is what these economists are referring to (academically) as the new normal.

put the three day weekend to good use and start with the tier 1 and 2's already locked up...,

NYTimes |  The difficulties facing the police and prosecutors were foreshadowed by the last mass arrest of bikers in the United States. In that case, in 2002, three motorcycle gang members were killed and about a dozen others were injured in a shooting and knifing brawl in Laughlin, Nev. The brawl broke out at Harrah’s Casino and Hotel between the Hells Angels and the Mongols, all of whom were attending an annual motorcycle rally. About 120 people were detained by law enforcement. A total of 44 Hells Angels were indicted in federal court, but only seven were convicted. Six Mongols members pleaded guilty to state charges.

“Oftentimes, these mass prosecutions fail because of the overreach,” said Robert Draskovich, a Las Vegas criminal defense lawyer who represented a member of the Hells Angels in the Laughlin case. The charges against his client were dropped. In the Waco case, Mr. Draskovich predicted, “the majority of these people will walk.”

Officials, however, have defended their handling of the arrests and the $1 million bonds. “I set that bond because there was nine people killed, and I felt that was appropriate for the incident that occurred,” said Walter H. Peterson, the justice of the peace in McLennan County who made the decision.

Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton, a spokesman for the Waco Police Department, said the three bikers who had been released — Juan Garcia, Drew King and Jim Harris, all of Austin — were back in custody. The three men were arrested Sunday after they rode up to the scene carrying weapons and wearing motorcyle-gang colors, Sergeant Swanton said. After their release, new arrest warrants were issued for them, and bond was set at $1 million for each, he said.

“They were not mistakenly released,” he added.

Law enforcement officials and gang experts said conflicts between two motorcycle groups, the Bandidos and the Cossacks, had led to the shooting outside a Twin Peaks restaurant in south Waco on Sunday. The shooting, which left nine bikers dead and 18 others wounded, stemmed from both petty disputes and broader tensions over the smaller group, the Cossacks, failing to pay respect, and money, to its larger rival, the Bandidos, officials said.

national security epiphany: suspend due process and liquidate all tier 1 and 2 threats immediately

texas.gov |  The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has released the updated Texas Gang Threat Assessment, which was developed to provide a broad overview of gang activity in the state of Texas. 

“Gang violence and crime are a chief threat to public safety in Texas, and protecting our communities from these criminals remains a top priority,” said DPS Director Steven McCraw. “This assessment provides detailed information about the gangs operating in our state, which will enhance the ability of law enforcement to combat these dangerous organizations and their associates.” 

The Texas Gang Threat Assessment was developed according to statute, which requires an annual report to be submitted to the governor and Texas Legislature assessing the threat posed by statewide criminal gangs. The report is based on the collaboration between multiple law enforcement and criminal justice agencies across the state and nation, whose contributions were essential in creating this comprehensive overview of gang activity in Texas. 

“Gangs represent one of the top organized-crime threats to public safety,” said Sen. Craig Estes, chair of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Rural Affairs and Homeland Security. “The Texas Gang Threat Assessment will serve as a critical tool to assist law enforcement agencies in developing and executing strategies to protect Texans, and I applaud the Texas Department of Public Safety for its efforts in combating this critical threat.”

“The most effective tool in fighting any threat is understanding the enemy. This intelligence report amasses information about gang trends and their relationships that is critical to effectively targeting and disrupting these criminal organizations,” said Rep. Joe Pickett, chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security and Public Safety.

This assessment details the state’s systematic approach to evaluating and classifying gangs in order to identify which organizations represent the most substantial threat. The report reveals that current gang membership across the state may exceed 100,000 individuals.

Additional significant findings include:

• Gangs continue to pose a substantial threat to public safety in Texas and are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime in our communities.
• Many gangs in Texas continue to work with Mexican cartels to smuggle drugs, weapons, people and cash across the border. The relationships between some gangs and cartels have evolved over the past year due in part to volatility and changes in cartel structures and relationships in Mexico.
• Of the incarcerated members of Tier 1 and Tier 2 gangs, more than half are serving a sentence for a violent crime, including robbery (25 percent), homicide (13 percent), and assault/terroristic threat (15 percent).
• Texas-based gangs, gang members and their associates are active in both human smuggling and human trafficking, which often includes sex trafficking and compelling prostitution of adult and minor victims. Gangs will continue to operate in human trafficking due to the potential for large and renewable profits and the assumed low risk of detection by law enforcement.
• Tango Blast remains the state’s most significant gang threat. The Tier 1 gangs in Texas are: Tango Blast and Tango cliques (more than 8,200 members); Texas Syndicate (more than 4,400 members); Texas Mexican Mafia (more than 5,500 members), and Barrio Azteca (more than 2,000 members).

View the full Texas Gang Threat Assessment.

please tell me where I can find the blacks who followed Malcolm X?

NYTimes |  A Duke University professor criticized for an online post comparing blacks and Asians said Monday that it's not racist to discuss what he sees as differences in how the groups have performed in the U.S. over the past few decades.

Political science professor Jerry Hough has been sharply criticized for a response he posted in the online comments section of the New York Times editorial "How Racism Doomed Baltimore," dated May 9. The 80-year-old professor, who is white, has been on an unrelated academic leave for the past school year.

In his online comments, Hough wrote that Asians have been described as "yellow races" and faced discrimination in 1965 at least as bad as blacks experienced. Of Asian-Americans, he wrote: "They didn't feel sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard."

The posting goes on to say: "I am a professor at Duke University. Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration."

In an email Monday to The Associated Press, Hough defended his comments but said it's difficult to be subtle in a post on a newspaper's comments section with a limited word count.

"I only regret the sloppiness in saying every Asian and nearly every black," he wrote in the email. "I absolutely do not think it racist to ask why black performance on the average is not as good as Asian on balance, when the Asians started with the prejudices against the 'yellow races' shown in the concentration camps for the Japanese."

Hough described himself as a disciple of Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s who supported integration. In his lifetime, he said, he's observed prejudice ranging from the World War II-era internment camps for Japanese-Americans to segregation in the South, and he's dismayed that more progress hasn't been made.

"My purpose is to help achieve the battle of King's battle to overcome and create a melting pot America," he said.

andrea tantaros keeps forgetting why roger ailes has her on the fauxnews couch...,

dailymail |  FoxNews.com reported Monday that on February 25, Ms Chamberlin went on a public Facebook thread and weighed in on a controversial article posted on TheGrio.com condemning Patricia Arquette's Oscar speech, in which she famously said that women deserve to get equal pay for equal work.

The author of the opinion piece, writer and filmmaker Blue Telusma, who is black, argued that African-Americans and members of the LGBTQ community do not owe white women any assistance.

‘I LITERALLY cry and lose sleep over this,’ Ms Chamberlin wrote in reaction to the op-ed, revealing that she had been raped as a child. ‘What this article did was tell me that I'm not aloud [sic] to ask for help… Because I am a WHITE woman… So when I read this article… you do understand what that does to me, right? It kills me…’

In response, a commenter by the name Sai Grundy, who used the same photo as the BU professor on her now-private Twitter account, poked fun at the married mother of two, writing: ‘I literally cry… While we literally die.’

When Mrs Chamberlin replied that she ‘got’ Grundy’s message and assured her that she can now take her ‘claws’ out, the African-American studies professor unleashed a torrent of vitriol in the form of a foul-mouth message partially written in caps.

‘^^THIS IS THE S**T I AM TALKING ABOUT. WHY DO YOU GET TO PLAY THE VICTIM EVERY TIME PEOPLE OF COLOR AND OUR ALLIES WANT TO POINT OUT RACISM. my CLAWS?? Do you see how you just took an issue that WASNT about you, MADE it about you, and NOW want to play the victim when I take the time to explain to you some s**t that is literally $82,000 below my pay grade? And then you promote your #whitegirltears like that’s some badge you get to wear… YOU BENEFIT FROM RACISM. WE’RE EXPLAINING THAT TO YOU and you’re vilifying my act of intellectual altruism by saying i stuck my “claws” into you?’

Chamberlin tried to extricate herself from the tense exchange by writing to Grundy: ‘'I am choosing to "exit" this conversation, You don't know me. I don't know you. It's really as simple as that.' 

But Grundy continued piling on and ended up having the last word in the heated back-and-forth.

'^^YOU DONT HAVE TO KNOW ME. what you SHOULD know is that you don't know more about this issue than margenalized women. And instead of entering this conversation with an iota of humility about that, you have made it a celebration of your false sense of victimization. no [sic] go cry somewhere. snce that's what you do.'

Chamberlin signed off with the words: 'Will do.'

Ms Grundy wrote in a separate comment in the thread: 'am I mocking her tears or am I saying that her tears are meaningless displays of emotions because they don't reflect at ALL an intention to understand the issue from the prospective [sic] of women of color and queer women.'

The entire conversation has since been removed from Facebook, along with Saida Grundy's social media account.