Fake It Till You Make It Incompetents Need To Return The Oxygen They Stole In Memphis...,

tri-statedefender  |   Sharing their experiences with crime reduction, The Black Mayors’ Coalition on Crime wrapped up a two-day conference at the Hyatt Centric Beale Street Memphis on Thursday, March 28.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young hosted Black leaders from 18 U.S. cities during the meeting that began Wednesday, March 27. 

“People want the short-term solution. They want to figure out how we are going to stop crime today. And then, we want to figure out how to stop crime in the future. In order to do that, there has to be an intense dialogue,” said Young.

In addition to Washington D.C., they came from several states with large African-American populations, like Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina and California. 

“We have a lot of violence around convenience stores and gas stations,” Mayor Tishaura Jones told Action News 5 after the conference. “So how can we hold those business owners accountable and also bring down crime? (We’re also finding that ) some of the things that we’re already doing, we’re finding that other mayors are doing as well.”

Strategies were front and center in the discussion. They included Operation GOOD in Jackson, Miss. and Operation Scarlett in Charlotte, N.C. According to proponents, both have paid dividends in their respective communities.

Operation GOOD is a nonprofit with ambitious goals to curb recidivism, reduce violence and tackling blight, for example. Operation Scarlett is an ongoing anti-luxury car theft operation that was expanded to 11 states and 152 law enforcement agencies. So far, 132 vehicles have been retrieved.

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris and Memphis Police Department Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis also appeared at the event.

Russ Wiggington, president of the National Civil Rights Museum, moderated the conversation. 

The Council on Criminal Justice, a think tank devoted to criminal justice policy, began the conference with a keynote presentation.

To allow attendants to speak freely, no media were invited to the event. However, Young has suggested future meetings could be open to the public and virtual. It’s a sentiment matched by Mayor Chokwe Lumumba Jr. of Jackson, Miss.

“We’re ensuring amongst ourselves that this will not be the last engagement, but that we will continue to lean in,” Lumumba said at a post-conference press event.

Latest Crime Stats

Although crime rates in Memphis has dropped recently, they are still above pre-pandemic levels.

Overall, the Memphis-Shelby County Crime Commission statistics reflect a 6.4% drop in fourth quarter of 2023, over 2022’s final period. This includes murder, burglary, robbery, theft, weapons and drug charges. Property crimes fell 10.1% too.

However, violent crime in Memphis bucked the trend. In addition to 398 homicides in 2023 – breaking the 2021 record – the major violent crime rate rose 7.4% in Memphis. Shelby County saw inflated numbers too, with a 6.3% jump over 2022.

To date, there have been over 80 homicides in 2024. Memphis has the highest number of all the cities represented during he meetings. Most have seen a decrease.

The Black Mayors Coalition on Crime is the latest in a series of conversations Young has recently held to address crime early in his first term.

The U.S. Lacks The Cognitive Infrastructure To Do What Russia And China Do

WSJ  | In 2016, a high-level panel of the National Academies, an independent scientific group that provides advice to the federal government, warned that foreign adversaries, including China, were readying a new generation of hypersonic weapons. While the details of the study are classified, its conclusions set off alarm bells inside the Defense Department. 

“My joke was, if I briefed it to any more people in the Pentagon, I would’ve been briefing the janitors down on the mezzanine level,” said Mark Lewis, a former senior Pentagon official who was involved in managing the military’s hypersonic portfolio and who participated in the 2016 study. “Everyone and their brother wanted to see it.”

Concerned by the growing threat, the Pentagon ramped up testing and development. The Army, Navy and Air Force are developing hypersonic weapons, sometimes in cooperation, as is the Pentagon’s research agency Darpa. “We are in a race,” said Lewis, who is now president and chief executive officer of the Purdue Applied Research Institute.

Pentagon officials are now debating how best to respond to this buildup. Some argue the U.S. should focus more on defensive systems, rather than missiles. Others say that even if U.S. adversaries have more hypersonic missiles, the state of American hypersonic weaponry—even if not yet deployed—will ultimately be more advanced. And not everyone agrees that a hypersonics arms race comes down to numbers of missiles. “If you have 10, should I have 11?” asked Heidi Shyu, the Pentagon top technologist.

Last year, the Air Force awarded

Raytheon Technologies, now known as RTX, a nearly billion-dollar contract to develop a hypersonic cruise missile that would be launched from an aircraft and is designed to strike enemy ships. The Army hoped to have ready this year the U.S. military’s first hypersonic weapon—missiles that would be launched from trucks. 

 

While a second generates heat exceeding 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, beyond the limit of most materials. “The biggest challenge with hypersonics has always been the thermal management,” said Wes Kremer, the president of Raytheon.

Cost is also an issue. Hypersonic missiles, which are complex to develop and require specialized materials, are pricier than conventional missiles—about one-third more than ballistic missiles with comparable capabilities, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Kremer said that hypersonic missiles would be a “niche capability” to go after moving targets, where speed is essential. “Obviously you don’t need it to go against the bridge, the bridge isn’t moving,” he said. 

The bigger challenge may be for the Pentagon to decide, after so many years and so much money spent, what sort of hypersonic capabilities it wants in its arsenal. The U.S. military is currently pursuing two different types of hypersonic weapons: cruise missiles that use an air-breathing jet engine known as a scramjet, and glide vehicles that are launched from the air, and then glide to their targets at high speeds. 

The Pentagon is funding about a half dozen different hypersonic weapons—though the exact number is secret—and some former officials suggest there is no clear plan for deciding which of these to field and how. “There wasn’t a strategy during my time at the Pentagon,” said William Roper, the former head of Air Force acquisition. “And from what I can see from the outside, there doesn’t appear to be one now.”

One of the biggest stumbling blocks is a lack of infrastructure needed for testing. Developing the weapons requires testing in wind tunnels that can replicate the unique aerodynamic pressures of hypersonic flight.

 

Not Black And White - Rethinking Race And Genes (REDUX Originally Posted 5/10/08)

Late last year, I was compelled to keep my foot planted deep in William Saletan's ignorant, overreaching backside. Saletan was down to the same insidious and habitual stupid human tricks that certain of our visitors seem to be perennially stuck on. Shame. As it turns out, Saletan has finally come around to the errors and omissions plaguing his thinking. While it's at least five months and some years too late to warrant respect (I mean really, only a true simpleton could go down this path in the first place) - at the very least - his epiphany is worth noting;

policy prescriptions based on race are social malpractice. Not because you can't find patterns on tests, but because any biological theory that starts with observed racial patterns has to end with genetic differences that cross racial lines. Race is the stone age of genetics. If you're a researcher looking for effects of heredity on medical or educational outcomes, race is the closest thing you presently have to genetic information about most people. And as a proxy measure, it sucks. By itself, this problem isn't decisive. After all, racial analysis did lead to the genetic findings about beta blockers. But as the conversation shifts from medicine to social science, and particularly to patterns laden with stereotypes, the moral cost of framing such patterns in racial terms becomes unsupportable. We can't just be "race realists," as believers in biological distinctions among races like to call themselves. We have to be realists about racism. No fact in human history is more pervasive than our tendency to prejudge, fear, despise, persecute, and fight each other based on even the shallowest observable differences. It's simply reckless to feed that fire.

Of course Saletan equivocates waaaaay too much, understandable given that it's humiliating to be found out as intellectually underendowed. That said, at least he's taken the first step toward scientific and intellectual sobriety. He's no longer in complete denial of what's trivially obvious to those of us with the eyes to see. Let's hope everyone is capable of bootstrapping themselve up and out of the psychological stone age.

Identifying And Destroying False Ideas (REDUX Originally Posted 11/30/07)

As allegedly independent agents within the consensus reality, one of the things each of us has to do in our lives is to discover, as far as possible, the grounds for believing what we are asked to believe. Theories of human nature are inherently controversial because they are socially constructed. This includes allegedly scientific theories of human nature. Whenever you see something presented under the rubric of human nature: science, technology, and life - question it ruthlessly. 

 

 

 

No amount of special pleading on behalf of the alleged moral and ethical neutrality of genomic science should be allowed to obscure the fact that the conceptual and material deliverables of scientific research are not value-free. Yet, we have recently been beset by precisely such special pleadings within two dominant organs of the mainstream media which have each sought to make the case that the long-standing theories of genetic determinism of IQ is in fact a useful, helpful, and value-free research domain. Nothing could be further from the truth. Racists in America, the UK, and Germany have believed in and pursued these value-laden and heavily politically charged notions for well over a century, long prior to the advent of the scientific realization that there was even such a thing as a "genome". The story of eugenic pseudo-science is one of manifold superstitions and cruelties and measures and meanings invented, fostered, and propagated for no other reason than to provide an excuse for the exercise of social and political power that would otherwise be completely morally and ethically inexcusable. Those who govern employ a variety of methods to control the contents of the consensus. Much of that content is engineered to provoke fear and to foster ignorance between groups because a divided and fearful populace is a more readily controlled and manipulated populace. Often as not, what induces human groups to fear and destroy one another is the prevalence of false ideas about human nature. Last friday, I wrote that the NY Times and Slate.com have each published a series of articles drawing from the blogs of ill-informed people who do not warrant respectful attention in the case of the Times, and in the case of Slate - a conservative commentator draws from both racist blogs and a hardcore racist pseudo-scientist backed by strategic capital going back to the Nazi era. Slate and the New York Times are supposed to know better. Because I know that they know better - this leads me to one inescapable conclusion. Decision makers at these two media giants have decided for whatever reason to editorially back the reintroduction of racist pseudo-science into the public and political discourse. I was not aware at the time I wrote this opinion that Slate is a property of the Washington Post. Now knowing this fact, I find the assertion that elements of the Establishment are injecting eugenic themes back into the public discourse even more compelling. If I can find an instance where the Wall Street Journal is also involved with the eugenic revival, I'll consider it a media Establishment trifecta. What brings me back to this topic is William Saletan's pathetic mea culpa published in yesterday's Slate.

Many of you have criticized parts of the genetic argument as I related them. Others have pointed to alternative theories I truncated or left out. But the thing that has upset me most concerns a co-author of one of the articles I cited. In researching this subject, I focused on published data and relied on peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue. As a result, I missed something I could have picked up from a simple glance at Wikipedia.

For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to "the scientific study of heredity and human differences." During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime ("Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous") and heresyAmerican Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences. ("Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people"). New Century publishes a magazine called

I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I'm sorry. I owe you better than that.

Oh Hells to the Gnaw - Saletan categorically must not be given a pass for his "dog ate my homework excuse" of sloppy fact checking! This was not merely an instance of sloppy fact checking, rather, it was a demonstration of the willful deceit which would have people to believe that research into the genetic determination of IQ is value-free, morally and ethically neutral, scientific research for the common good. What an audacious and ahistorical crock of conservative nonsense. Such nonsense trading on the collective amnesia and historical ignorance of the public demonstrates the free and easy interlocks between conservative and racist politics and serves as a tour de force illustration of the extent to which the latter ideology perniciously infects and pervades the political and scientific expressions of the former. Only a month earlier, writing in defense of James Watson, Saletan drew the following conclusion;

Well, if he wants to paper over his bruised ego, that's his business. But racism, genetics, culture, black America, and the future of Africa are too important to be papered over.

It's clear from Watson's revisionism, reticence, and retirement that he wants to make his hypothesis go away. But wanting it isn't enough. That's not science. It's politics.

Saletan is a liar, plain and simple. That he was exposed very quickly and decisively is to the good. The fragemented state of the American political world is one tiny click less fragmented for these disclosures. That the attempt to misuse tidbits of genomic "evidence" in support of socially and politically defined objectives is evidence of a larger scheme of fragmentation that is very widespread and backed by some very serious strategic capital. The process of fragmentation maintained by elements in the U.S. establishment makes it very difficult if not impossible for most folks to put the world and its contents in a proper perspective. Fragmenting theories of human nature comprise a continuing exercise on the part of certain evil elements in society to excuse the inexcusable aspects of their past and continuing conduct.

Ukrainian Nazi Blowback In America Will Be Extensive And Ugly

thegrayzone |  As the United States undergoes a national mourning process over a spate of mass shootings, American white nationalists with documented histories of violence are attaining combat experience with advanced US-made weapons in a foreign proxy war.

That’s according to the Department of Homeland Security, which has been gathering intelligence on Americans who have joined the ranks of the more than 20,000 foreign volunteers in Ukraine.

The FBI has indicted several American white nationalists associated with the Rise Above Movement after they trained with the neo-Nazi Azov Battaliion and its civilian wing, the National Corps, in Kiev. But that was almost four years ago. Today, federal law enforcement has no idea how many US neo-Nazis are participating in the war in Ukraine, or what they are doing there. 

But one thing is for certain: the Biden administration is allowing the Ukrainian government to recruit Americans – including violent extremists – at its embassy in Washington DC and at consulates across the country. As this report will show, at least one notorious extremist fighting in Ukraine has received extensive promotion from mainstream media, while another who is currently wanted for violent crimes committed in the US was mysteriously able to evade FBI investigators looking into war crimes he previously committed in Eastern Ukraine.

According to a Customs and Border Patrol document released thanks to a May 2022 Freedom of Information Act request by a nonprofit called Property of the People, federal authorities are concerned about RMVE-WS’s, or “racially-motivated violent extremists – white supremacy” returning to the US armed with new tactics learned on the Ukrainian battlefield.

“Ukrainian nationalist groups including the Azov Movement are actively recruiting racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist white supremacists to join various neo-Nazi volunteer battalions in the war against Russia,” the document states. “RMVE-WS individuals in the United States and Europe announced intentions to join the conflict and are organizing entry to Ukraine via the Polish border.”

The document, which was drafted by Customs and Border Protections, the Office of Intelligence, and other Homeland Security sub-agencies, contains write-ups of interviews conducted by law enforcement with Americans en route to Ukraine to fight Russia.

One such volunteer interviewed in early March “admitted to contacting the Georgian National Legion but decided against joining the group as they were accused of war crimes,” according to the document. Instead, the volunteer “ hoped to obtain a work contract with the Azov Battalion.”

That interview was conducted nearly a month before additional war crimes committed by the Georgian Legion were reported by The Grayzone. However, the volunteer’s allegation may also refer to the illegal execution of two men who had attempted to break through a Ukrainian checkpoint, or an additional, unreported crime known to insiders within volunteer networks.

One key “intelligence gap” listed in the document speaks to the US government’s complete lack of oversight in the proxy war it is sponsoring in Ukraine. NATO arming campaign which has offered no assurances that Western weapons won’t fall into the hands of Nazis. “What kind of training are foreign fighters receiving in Ukraine that they could possibly proliferate in US based militia and white nationalist groups?” the document asks.

 

 

Police Protection For Cowardly Uvalde IQ-75 LARPS In Uniform?

dailybeast  |  As families in this rural town prepare to bury the 19 children and two adults gunned down in a brutal school massacre this week, they are left shell-shocked by not only the devastation the gunman wrought, but by the revelation that, as they see it, those who were sworn to protect and serve them did just the opposite.

“While those babies were in there dying, they stood there with their thumbs in their asses trying to figure out what to do,” said Roger Garza, a friend of the family of teacher Irma Garcia, who was killed by the gunman as she tried to shield her fourth-grade students.

“I mean don’t we pay them to rush in and protect people? Somebody needs to be held accountable for this,” Garza told The Daily Beast.

“We were waiting outside and yelling about how we wanted to go in and storm the classroom,” said Javier Cazares, whose fourth-grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack. “I came running and the police were in a panic trying to figure out what to do. Now we know children, including my daughter, were dying in there. That is what hurts. Knowing they could have maybe protected her and those other kids.”

Cazares wants to know why they didn’t do anything; it is a question that everyone here is asking.

“While those children sat in there with this madman, as many as 19 officers had to think about what to do,” said Ignacio Perez, who was doing his best to comfort Cazares. “I promise you these parents had a plan and were ready to act on it. Where was the bravery? In those kids. That is where it was.”

Amid the growing outrage over the botched police response, authorities in Uvalde have reportedly called in reinforcements from around the state to protect the local officers from potential threats.

The additional cops, from various agencies in other jurisdictions, will supplement Uvalde’s ranks for an unspecified period, and will also provide security for the mayor, officials with the Texas Police Chiefs Association told CBS DFW.

In the immediate aftermath of the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary, Gov. Greg Abbott lauded the police response, insisting that officers had acted heroically and saved numerous lives. But he lashed out angrily when a different narrative later emerged, saying he was “livid” over having been “misled.” Federal agents on the scene said no one seemed to be in charge, and at one point, agonized parents waiting outside considered rushing the school themselves.

One Uvalde cop claimed there “was almost a mutiny,” telling People magazine that he and his colleagues “felt like cowards” for not storming the building earlier.

 

 

Red Ants Getting SHOOK!!! That Bell Curve NOT Working In Their Favor...,

About a week ago I posted thus: Oh Yes, but you have guns you say. Well those pasty faced, namby, pamby West Coast transgender wokeists, as you call them, may not be able to shoot straight but they have drones, swarming drones, robots and God knows what else in the way of weapons. They have satellite data and  almost perfect intelligence regarding your behaviour. They don't have to shoot accurately, they have machines to do that. They can and will commit unspeakable acts of murder and destruction before they turn off the monitor and jog off for a Latte. After all if you are not with us you are a domestic terrorist aren't you? There is no middle ground. smdh....,  this is on a grad student's budget with open source technology. DAYYUM!!!

FACES OF

THE RIOT

wired |  When hackers exploited a bug in Parler to download all of the right-wing social media platform's contents last week, they were surprised to find that many of the pictures and videos contained geolocation metadata revealing exactly how many of the site's users had taken part in the invasion of the US Capitol building just days before. But the videos uploaded to Parler also contain an equally sensitive bounty of data sitting in plain sight: thousands of images of unmasked faces, many of whom participated in the Capitol riot. Now one website has done the work of cataloging and publishing every one of those faces in a single, easy-to-browse lineup.

Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared. The site's creator tells WIRED that he used simple open source machine learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot that resulted in five people's deaths. The creator of Faces of the Riot says his goal is to allow anyone to easily sort through the faces pulled from those videos to identify someone they may know or recognize who took part in the mob, or even to reference the collected faces against FBI wanted posters and send a tip to law enforcement if they spot someone.

"Everybody who is participating in this violence, what really amounts to an insurrection, should be held accountable," says the site's creator, who asked for anonymity to avoid retaliation. "It's entirely possible that a lot of people who were on this website now will face real-life consequences for their actions." Fist tap Dale.

If I Had A Dollar For Every Pompous IQ-75 EdD I've Ever Met - I'd Be A Very Rich Man

WSJ  |  Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the “Dr.” before your name? “Dr. Jill Biden ” sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title “Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.” A wise man once said that no one should call himself “Dr.” unless he has delivered a child. Think about it, Dr. Jill, and forthwith drop the doc.

I taught at Northwestern University for 30 years without a doctorate or any advanced degree. I have only a B.A. in absentia from the University of Chicago—in absentia because I took my final examination on a pool table at Headquarters Company, Fort Hood, Texas, while serving in the peacetime Army in the late 1950s. I do have an honorary doctorate, though I have to report that the president of the school that awarded it was fired the year after I received it, not, I hope, for allowing my honorary doctorate. During my years as a university teacher I was sometimes addressed, usually on the phone, as “Dr. Epstein.” On such occasions it was all I could do not to reply, “Read two chapters of Henry James and get into bed. I’ll be right over.”

I was also often addressed as Dr. during the years I was editor of the American Scholar, the quarterly magazine of Phi Beta Kappa. Let me quickly insert that I am also not a member of Phi Beta Kappa, except by marriage. Many of those who so addressed me, I noted, were scientists. I also received a fair amount of correspondence from people who appended the initials Ph.D. to their names atop their letterheads, and have twice seen PHD on vanity license plates, which struck me as pathetic. In contemporary universities, in the social sciences and humanities, calling oneself Dr. is thought bush league.

 The Ph.D. may once have held prestige, but that has been diminished by the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards in university education generally, at any rate outside the sciences. Getting a doctorate was then an arduous proceeding: One had to pass examinations in two foreign languages, one of them Greek or Latin, defend one’s thesis, and take an oral examination on general knowledge in one’s field. At Columbia University of an earlier day, a secretary sat outside the room where these examinations were administered, a pitcher of water and a glass on her desk. The water and glass were there for the candidates who fainted. A far cry, this, from the few doctoral examinations I sat in on during my teaching days, where candidates and teachers addressed one another by first names and the general atmosphere more resembled a kaffeeklatsch. Dr. Jill, I note you acquired your Ed.D. as recently as 15 years ago at age 55, or long after the terror had departed.