is obama the same as george zimmerman?

nationalreview | He could have been me. I could have been out on neighborhood watch in my community performing my duties on a rainy night. It could have been me following a young African-American male around in my neighborhood because I did not recognize him, and because my neighborhood had been burglarized by young African Americans. It could have been me lying beneath a young black man who was striking my head against the concrete, my nose broken in a fight gone bad. It could have been me that tragic, deadly night.

It could have been me facing criminal charges for doing nothing illegal that night, presumed guilty of a crime I didn’t commit, and presumed guilty of being a racist, even though I had not an ounce of racism in me, and even though the way I lived my life was proof of that assertion.

It could have been me who, after being acquitted by a jury of my peers in a state trial that never would have happened but for the color of my skin — not even the color of my skin, but what my name suggested the color of my skin might be — soon became the target of an investigation by the federal government.

It could have been me facing a media so hell-bent on turning me into a monster that they said and did almost anything, including doctoring a 9-1-1 call, in order to turn me into something I wasn’t.  

It could have been me who will live with the fact that my actions led to the taking of a young life.

It could have been me. I could have been George Zimmerman.

That was the part of President Obama’s speech I was waiting to hear after his very good — but incomplete — speech about the Zimmerman case. It is true that President Obama could have been Trayvon Martin. But it is equally true that he could have been George Zimmerman.

That’s the thing about real empathy; you have to walk in the shoes of all people, not just the ones you agree with or relate to.

I was waiting for that part of the speech because President Obama is uniquely qualified to give it. Because he is half white and half black, just as George Zimmerman is half white and half Hispanic — just as most Americans are half something and half something else.

Part of the speech given by President Obama was sensitive and filled with the right kind of emotion and tone. The warehousing of young inner-city males in prisons for low-level crimes is a tragedy and also a national disgrace (one, by the way, that white Christian conservatives are working hard to rectify). Disparity in sentencing is a real problem; too many African-American males are sentenced far more stringently than whites who commit similar crimes. And the president was right to talk about the terrible disparity in unemployment rates between white people and African Americans, and the particularly high rate of youth unemployment in our inner cities. White people need to know more about these facts, and President Obama was right to talk about those things.

black "public intellectuals" up in arms and increasingly at odds with one another and the hon.bro.preznit...,

eurweb | This past week Dr. Cornel West has been working overtime with  the clowning of anything Obama. His latest fusillade is directed at both both MSNBC and their host Rev. Al Sharpton.

As we reported earlier, When Dr. West was asked his opinion President Obama’s comments on the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case, he resorted to characterizing the president as a “global George Zimmerman.”

Well, West made a visit to Tavis Smiley’s radio show this past weekend and said Rev. Sharpton is still on “the Obama plantation” which has keeps Sharpton from being more critical of the president and Attorney General Eric Holder.

Smiley has also made controversial remarks about Obama and his response to the George Zimmerman trial.

“Deep down in his soul I think he really does feel a fire, but he can’t allow that fire to in any way spill over toward the White House. Why? Because he’s still too tied, he’s too uncritical, he’s too deferential, he’s too subservient as it were and as long as that’s in place we’re going to find ourselves unable to tell the fundamental truth,” West told Smiley.

Both West and Smiley of course had their own spin on Zimmerman’s acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin and continued to delve into the media’s handling of the racial dynamics involved in the case.

“What’s your sense of how the media, and not just Fox News but beyond that, your read as you’ve been watching this, how the media handled this case?” Smiley asked West.

“I think that it’s been decrepit though, brother. I mean, you get a focus on some of the upper middle class folk. I mean, what I call the ‘rent-a-negro’ phenomenon on MSNBC…’” West answered. West’s displeasure with MSNBC may come as a surprise to some as he has appeared as a guest on the network frequently in the past.

entheogenic esotericism

Fist tap Dale.

academia | That entheogens might have a legitimate place in religion at all is controversial among scholars, but for reasons that have less to do with factual evidence than with certain ingrained prejudices rooted in Western intellectual culture. Firstly, on the crypto-Protestant assumption that “religion” implies an attitude in which human beings are dependent on the divine initiative to receive grace or salvation, the use of entheogens is bound to suggest a “magical” and therefore not “truly religious” attitude in which human beings themselves dare to take the initiative and claim to have the key of access to divinity. Such a distinction (in which the former option is coded positively and the latter negatively) makes intuitive sense to us because modern intellectual culture since the Enlightenment has internalized specific Protestant assumptions to an extent where they appear wholly natural and obvious: in Cliford Geertz’s famous formulation, the dominant symbolic system clothes them with such an “aura of factuality” that the “moods and motivations” connected to them seem “uniquely realistic”.6

These assumptions are, however, culture-specific and highly problematic. The underlying opposition of “religion” versus “magic”(along with “science”) as reified universals has been thoroughly deconstructed,in recent decades, as artificial and ethnocentric to the core: it depends on normative modernist ideologies and implicit hegemonic claims of Western superiority that are rooted in heresiological, missionary and colonialist mentalities but cannot claim universal or even scholarly validity. Ultimately based upon the theological battle against “paganism”, the “magic versus religion” assumption, including its “manfipulative” versus “receptive” connotations, is a distorting mirror that fails to account for the complexity of beliefs and practices on both sides of the conceptual divide.7

A second cause of controversy has to do with certain idealist frameworks or assumptions that seem so natural to Western scholars that they are seldom reflected upon. Religion is generally supposed to be about spiritual realities,not material ones, and therefore the claim that modifying brain activity by chemical means might be a religious pursuit seems counterintuitive. It comes across as a purely technical and quasi-materialist trick that cheats practitioners into believing they are having a “genuine” religious experience. However, such objections are extremely problematic. First, they wrongly assume that there are scholarly procedures for distinguishing genuine from fake religion. Second, they ignore the fact that any activity associated with mind or spiritis inseparable from neurological activity and brain chemistry. In our experience as human beings we know of no such thing as “pure” spiritual activity (or, for that matter, any other mental activity) unconnected with the body and the brain: if it did exist, we would be incapable of experiencing its effects. 8

Since all forms of experience, including “experiences deemed religious”, are bodily phenomena by defnition, it is arbitrary to exclude entheogenic religion merely because of the particular method it uses to influence the brain. A final cause of controversy is, of course, the well-known rhetoric employed in the “war on drugs” since the end of the 1960s. Here the polemical use of reified universal categories is once again decisive: rather than carefully differentiating between the enormous variety of psychoactive substances and their effects, the monolithic category of “drugs” suggests that all of them are dangerous and addictive. Although the medical and pharmacological evidence does not support this assumption, politics and the media have been singularly successful in promoting the reified category; and as a result, the notion that entheogens might have a normal and legitimate function in some religious contexts is bound to sound bizarre to the general public. Scholars who insist on differentiating between different kinds of “drugs”, pointing out that some of them are harmless and might even be beneficial 10 therefore fnd themselves ina defensive position by default: it is always easy for critics to suggest that their scholarly arguments are just a front for some personal agenda of pro-psyche-delic apologetics.

The bottom line is that, for all these reasons, the very notion of entheogenic religion as a category in scholarly research finds itself at a strategic disadvantage from the outset. It is simply very difficult for us to look at the relevant religious beliefs and practices from a neutral and non-judgemental point of view, for in the very act of being observed – that is, even prior to any conscious attempt on our part to apply any theoretical perspective – they already appear to us pre-categorized in the terms of our own cultural conditioning.

Almost inevitably, they are perceived as pertaining to a negative “waste-basket category” of otherness associated with a strange assortment of “magical”, “pagan”,“superstitious” or “irrational” beliefs; and as such, they are automatically seen as diferent from “genuine” or “serious” forms of religion. The “drugs” category further causes them to be associated with hedonistic, manipulative, irresponsible, or downright criminal attitudes, so that claims of religious legitimacy are weakened even further. In this chapter an attempt will nevertheless be made to treat entheogenic esotericism as just another form of contemporary religion that requires our serious attention. A first reason for doing so is strictly empirical: if it is true that entheogenic esotericism happens to exist as a signifcant development in post-World War II religion and in contemporary society, then it is simply our business as scholars to investigate it. A second reason is more theoretical in nature: both the “esoteric” and the “entheogenic” dimension of this topic challenges some of our most deeply ingrained assumptions about religion and rationality, and studying their combination may therefore be particularly helpful in making us aware of our blind spots as intellectuals and scholars.

the racist war against the native american church...,

nativeamericanchurches | Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere: and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith” Felix S. Cohen 

The Genealogy of James Warren ‘Flaming Eagle’ Mooney (James) shows he is an American Native Black Seminole, and a bloodline descendant of Seminole Medicine Man and War Chief Osceola (1804 –1838) and his escaped African American slave wife (Name, date of birth and death unknown).  James is also the namesake and bloodline descendant of one James Mooney (02/10/1861 – 12/22/1921), Irish-Scottish son of Irish Catholic immigrants, and American born U.S. Citizen.  James Mooney was employed as an Ethnologist at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. (1885 – 1921). Here is an account of three men that did everything in their power to assist the indigenous peoples and preserve their ancient spiritual ceremonies. Without their efforts, it is possible that the American Native spiritual ceremonies and peoples of North America may not have survived the repeated atrocities perpetrated or supported by misguided United States Bureau of Indian Affairs for more than 100 years. 

Osceola (Billy Powell), Medicine Man and War Chief (1804-1838) was an influential Seminole leader who fought the United States to a standstill in the Florida Everglades during the second Seminole War, also known as the Florida War of 1835.  James’s ancestral family fought the U.S. military in an attempt to stop the expulsion of our First Nations people from their ancestral homeland. They strongly resisted efforts to bring about the deliberate annihilation of their indigenous earth based religious culture.

In 1918, James’s forefather James Mooney fought a war of words before Congress, successfully halting the passage of a Peyote law that was designed to make illegal the entire American Native way of life. Pointedly, the dominant Christian religious mainstream sought to end our earth-based ceremonies and healing and empowerment rites, supplanting these traditions with those imported from across the seas.  More recently, the efforts to deny constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom have been promoted and enforced by a federal agency known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).  James’s great grandfather’s successful defense of our sacrament before Congress was a first step in a long journey to restore and maintain our ancient religious heritage.  Later in that same year, he persuaded a group of Oklahoma American Native Spiritual leaders, gathered by Frank Eagle (Ponca Tribe), and wrote the by-laws that incorporated the first United States Native American Church  (est. El Reno, Oklahoma, 1918).  He astutely sought to use the laws of the insurgent intruders to protect the sacred use of the Native American Church’s indigenous religious ceremonies.  Sadly,  establishment of the Native American Church has, until recently, only provided nominal legal protection for the rights of its members.

James Mooney understood the relentless nature of the illegal and immoral political maneuvers designed to outlaw the First Nation’s entire earth-honoring religion. He foresaw the overwhelming influences of zealot religious ministries from a variety of churches, conspiring with greedy business owners seeking profits at any cost.  These political factions have continued for decades to persuade the BIA to attempt to outlaw many practices of the Native American Church, supplanting our religious ceremonies with  ‘modern’ alternatives that, in some cases, violate the very spirit of our understanding and our way of life.

As James Mooney predicted, our indigenous religious culture would endure decades of anti-American Native spiritual edicts and activities, enacted and propagated by the BIA.  This agency has repeatedly conspired with the entire United States Judicial system, including but not exclusive to the United States Attorney General’s Office, through State, County and City Attorney’s offices, in an orchestrated effort to continue to deny the civil liberties of America’s First Nations.

This hierarchy has acted and conspired  to deny our religious indigenous culture the ability to practice healing and empowering spiritual ceremonies and rites honoring our ancient Mother Earth and Father Sky. 

black indians forcibly prevented from freeing their minds...,

MAPS | In a 1991 case related to peyote (Lophophora williamsii), U.S. District Chief Judge Juan Burciaga stated: “The government’s war on drugs has become a wildfire... today, the war targets one of the most deeply held fundamental rights—the First Amendment right to freely exercise one’s religion.”1

Burciaga could rebuff the prevailing political mandate of religious discrimination only because he was about to retire. Unfortunately, the courts and law enforcement in the United States are rarely sympathetic toward the use of psychoactive sacraments. This article clarifies some of what is being suppressed with regard to churches that use peyote, other psychedelics, or Cannabis.

Negro Church of the First Born. John C. Jamison of Tulsa, Oklahoma was a black man who was raised among the Indians and spoke three Native American languages. His small Christian church had an organizational infrastructure with at least six officers. Some members were drawn by the healings that Jamison tried to perform in the traditional Indian manner. Jamison conducted peyote ceremonies from 1920 until his murder by a lunatic in 1926. The government’s hostility toward peyote discouraged some of his black congregation. Jamison never succeeded in getting his organization officially incorporated. His road meetings were similar to those of the Native American Church, although he was criticized for introducing some modifications of the conventional ritual.

how did the irs, the dea, and the judiciary become our primary religious judges?

NYTimes | Sixty-four-year old Roger Christie, a resident of Hawaii’s Big Island, although most recently of Cell 104 at the Honolulu Federal Detention Center, is a Religious Science practitioner, a minister of the Universal Life Church, ordained in the Church of the Universe (in Canada), an official of the Oklevueha Native American Church of Hilo, Hawaii, and the founder of the Hawai’i Cannabis THC Ministry.

As you might guess, it was the last of those spiritual vocations that landed him in prison. 

In 2010, Mr. Christie, along with several co-defendants, was indicted on charges including conspiracy to manufacture and distribute marijuana. He does not dispute the facts of the case. He just believes that his operation — “a real ‘street ministry’ serving the needs of our neighbors from all walks of life,” he told me in an e-mail from prison, “busy six days a week,” employing “three secretaries and a doorman” — was protected by the First Amendment. 

On July 29, Mr. Christie’s lawyer will argue in Hawaii federal court that his client should be allowed to present a religious-freedom defense at the eventual criminal trial. He will base his argument on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by Congress in 1993, which requires the government to show a “compelling interest” whenever it “substantially burdens” a religious practice. In 2006, the Supreme Court relied on the act to permit a New Mexico church to use the hallucinogen hoasca, or ayahuasca, for sacramental purposes. 

But so far such exceptions have been granted to small religious communities and relatively obscure drugs: for American Indians’ use of peyote, for example, or the New Mexico church with its ayahuasca. But marijuana? That would be problematic. 

“The difference is that peyote and hoasca have little or no recreational market, and that is not likely to change because they make you sick before they make you high,” Douglas Laycock, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Virginia, wrote in an e-mail in explaining why a court would be unlikely to approve of the church’s practice. “Marijuana has a huge recreational market. Diversion from religious to recreational uses, and false claims of religious use, would be major problems.” 

Mr. Christie is hoping that now, as many state marijuana laws are liberalized, federal courts may allow him to argue for the sacramental needs of his ministry, where he worked full time until his arrest. First, he must convince a federal judge that his religion — or one of his religions — is not just a form of personal spirituality concocted to get stoned legally.

2nd/3rd line inheritors of the civil rights movement gotta find a new hustle...,

hoover | Today's black leadership pretty much lives off the fumes of moral authority that linger from its glory days in the 1950s and '60s. The Zimmerman verdict lets us see this and feel a little embarrassed for them. Consider the pathos of a leadership that once transformed the nation now lusting for the conviction of the contrite and mortified George Zimmerman, as if a stint in prison for him would somehow assure more peace and security for black teenagers everywhere. This, despite the fact that nearly one black teenager a day is shot dead on the South Side of Chicago—to name only one city—by another black teenager.

This would not be the first time that a movement begun in profound moral clarity, and that achieved greatness, waned away into a parody of itself—not because it was wrong but because it was successful. Today's civil-rights leaders have missed the obvious: The success of their forbearers in achieving social transformation denied to them the heroism that was inescapable for a Martin Luther King Jr. or a James Farmer or a Nelson Mandela. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton cannot write a timeless letter to us from a Birmingham jail or walk, as John Lewis did in 1965, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a maelstrom of police dogs and billy clubs. That America is no longer here (which is not to say that every trace of it is gone).

The Revs. Jackson and Sharpton have been consigned to a hard fate: They can never be more than redundancies, echoes of the great men they emulate because America has changed. Hard to be a King or Mandela today when your monstrous enemy is no more than the cherubic George Zimmerman.

Why did the civil-rights leadership use its greatly depleted moral authority to support Trayvon Martin? This young man was, after all, no Rosa Parks—a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the much smaller Zimmerman. Yes, Trayvon was a kid, but he was also something of a menace. The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch.

The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon's cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America's inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural "truth" that is the sole source of the leadership's dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership's very reason for being.

The purpose of today's civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism. This idea of victimization is an example of what I call a "poetic truth." Like poetic license, it bends the actual truth in order to put forward a larger and more essential truth—one that, of course, serves one's cause. Poetic truths succeed by casting themselves as perfectly obvious: "America is a racist nation"; "the immigration debate is driven by racism"; "Zimmerman racially stereotyped Trayvon." And we say, "Yes, of course," lest we seem to be racist. Poetic truths work by moral intimidation, not reason.

In the Zimmerman/Martin case the civil-rights establishment is fighting for the poetic truth that white animus toward blacks is still such that a black teenager—Skittles and ice tea in hand—can be shot dead simply for walking home. But actually this establishment is fighting to maintain its authority to wield poetic truth—the authority to tell the larger society how it must think about blacks, how it must respond to them, what it owes them and, then, to brook no argument.

yet another admonition against the hair-trigger male ego...,

WSJ | Two tragedies are apparent in the Trayvon Martin case. The first is obvious: A teenager—unarmed and committing no crime—was shot dead. Dressed in a "hoodie," a costume of menace, he crossed paths with a man on the hunt for precisely such clichés of menace. Added to this—and here is the rub—was the fact of his dark skin.

Maybe it was more the hood than the dark skin, but who could argue that the skin did not enhance the menace of the hood at night and in the eyes of someone watching for crime. (Fifty-five percent of all federal prisoners are black though we are only 12% of the population.) Would Trayvon be alive today had he been walking home—Skittles and ice tea in hand—wearing a polo shirt with an alligator logo? Possibly. And does this make the ugly point that dark skin late at night needs to have its menace softened by some show of Waspy Americana? Possibly. 

What is fundamentally tragic here is that these two young males first encountered each other as provocations. Males are males, and threat often evokes a narcissistic anger that skips right past reason and into a will to annihilate: "I will take you out!" There was a terrible fight. Trayvon apparently got the drop on George Zimmerman, but ultimately the man with the gun prevailed. Annihilation was achieved.

If this was all there was to it, the Trayvon/Zimmerman story would be no more than a cautionary tale, yet another admonition against the hair-trigger male ego.

steele got the "bound man" part right...,

WaPo | It was disarming to hear the most powerful man in the world speak of powerlessness.

“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son,” the president said. “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”

Obama noted that “the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away,” then narrowed his focus once again to the personal. I quote the next passage at length because, for me, it is the heart of the speech:

“There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.”

I’m not sure I know an African American man who hasn’t had these experiences. What’s new is the idea that the president of the United States knows what it feels like to be eyed warily, to be presumed guilty of malicious intent. That gets your attention.

Obama went on to explain why, in his view, Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s acquittal had such tremendous impact for black Americans. African Americans are not naive, he said; we know that young black men are “disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence.” But it is not making excuses for bad conduct to recognize that the pathology seen in many poor black communities has a historical context. Refusing to acknowledge this context, Obama noted, “adds to the frustration” that many African Americans feel.

“There is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws,” Obama said. He might have gone further and noted that nowhere will you find citizens more supportive of tough law-and-order policies than in poor, high-crime neighborhoods. But law-abiding citizens want those policies applied fairly — and know that often they are not.

There is “a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.” Here the president was guilty of understatement; most of us don’t have “a sense” that things would be different, we’d bet the ranch on it.

the wild west mentality...,

WaPo | Zimmerman would not have followed Martin if Zimmerman weren’t carrying a gun. If Martin were perceived as dangerous, wouldn’t an unarmed individual keep his distance until police arrived? 

Thus, we conclude that Zimmerman’s actions led to the confrontation that ultimately resulted in a fight that ended with the fatal shooting. 

It never should have happened. And it didn’t have to.

The jury obviously felt that Zimmerman acted in self-defense, or, at least, that the state failed to prove otherwise. It must have been a terrible conclusion to reach because, no matter the legal definitions that guided them, it seems impossible that someone’s young son, guilty of nothing, should die while his killer walks. Adages become such for a reason: The law is an ass.

As soon as passions cool, assuming we let them, the discussion that needs to take place surrounds a question: What was George Zimmerman doing walking around his neighborhood armed and loaded? In what world is this normal behavior? 

The answer: Not a world most of us want to live in. Let’s start there.

james earl carter: the u.s. has no functioning democracy...,

jonathanturley | We have been discussing the collapse of the American civil liberties movement and the attacks on the free press and privacy under the Obama Administration. As discussed in prior columns, we continue to refer to the United States as the “land of the free” despite a comprehensive reduction of civil liberties and due process in this country. The Snowden affair has put that record in sharp relief as the White House and Congress has joined together in barring the prosecution of perjury by high ranking officials and pursuing Snowden with close to unhinged rage. As previously discussed, our governing class has created a new American Animal farm. Long ago, American politicians adopted a type of dismissive paternalism toward the public as shepherds to so many sheep. Then one sheep goes and spooks the flock. The response has been bipartisan rage that has included demands to cut off aid to entire nations if they grant sanctuary to this whistleblower and even boycott the Olympics. The shepherds want Snowden made into mutton for stampeding the flock and no measure appears too extreme. Now Jimmy Carter has entered the fray and said what many citizens are saying in denouncing our duopoly. Carter told Spiegel “America has no functioning democracy.” Of course, you have to live in Germany to read such views. 

Carter has rightfully pointed to the dramatic reduction of the United States as a moral authority in the world after Bush and Obama. He clearly views Edward Snowden as a whistleblower. Yet, the media has yielded to the demand of the White House that Snowden not be called a whistleblower. This is follows media allies who have attacked Snowden and even mocked his concern about coming back home. As for the refusal to call him a whistleblower, it seems part of the full court press to demonize Snowden or prevent favorable references to him.

math behind leak crackdown

NYTimes | Soon after President Obama appointed him director of national intelligence in 2009, Dennis C. Blair called for a tally of the number of government officials or employees who had been prosecuted for leaking national security secrets. He was dismayed by what he found. 

In the previous four years, the record showed, 153 cases had been referred to the Justice Department. Not one had led to an indictment. 

That scorecard “was pretty shocking to all of us,” Mr. Blair said. So in a series of phone calls and meetings, he and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. fashioned a more aggressive strategy to punish anyone who leaked national security information that endangered intelligence-gathering methods and sources. 

“My background is in the Navy, and it is good to hang an admiral once in a while as an example to the others,” said Mr. Blair, who left the administration in 2010. “We were hoping to get somebody and make people realize that there are consequences to this and it needed to stop.” 

The Obama administration has done its best to define those consequences, with an aggressive focus on leaks and leakers that has led to more than twice as many prosecutions as there were in all previous administrations combined. It also led to a significant legal victory on Friday when a federal appeals court accepted the Justice Department’s argument that the First Amendment does not protect reporters from having to reveal the sources suspected of leaking information to them. 

In tracing the origins of this effort, present and former government officials said the focus on leaks began at the administration’s highest levels and was driven by pressure from the intelligence agencies and members of Congress.

ayn rand killed sears...,

salon | Eddie Lampert, the legendary hedge fund manager, was once hailed as the “Steve Jobs of the investment world” and the second coming of Warren Buffett. These days, he claims the number 2 spot on Forbes’ list of America’s worst CEOs. He has destroyed Sears, the iconic retail giant founded in 1886, which used to be known as the place “Where America Shops.”

America now avoids Sears at all costs, thanks largely to Mr. Lampert and his love of twisted economic logic.

So when you walk into a Sears store today, you find a sad, dingy scene with scuffed floors and chipped paint. Tense-looking workers hover over merchandise scattered onto ugly display tables. Hardly makes you want to buy a microwave.

Conclusion:  The lessons of Crazy Eddie seem so obvious that a bunch kids running a lemonade stand could understand them. You have to know something about the business you’re running, especially a big one. Success requires cooperation rather than constant competition. Greed is ultimately destructive.

The invisible hand of the market appears to have attempted to slap Lampert upside the head to teach him these things. But he remains committed to his nonsense, and the real losers are all the hard-working people who have lost their jobs, and the potential loss to the American economy of two revered brands.

It’s probably a good thing Ayn Rand never tried to run a business.

establishment "peace and social activism" opposes escalation of violent self-defense..,

WaPo | A useful moment in President Obama’s thoughtful and thought-provoking remarks Friday on crime, race and Trayvon Martin — one of several such useful moments — came when Mr. Obama questioned the thinking behind “stand your ground” laws:

“If we’re sending a message as a society in our communities that someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there’s a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?” 

The president’s question resonated with the words of Eric H. Holder Jr., his attorney general, who addressed the NAACP early last week. These laws “senselessly expand the concept of self defense,” Mr. Holder argued. “By allowing — and perhaps encouraging — violent situations to escalate in public,” he continued, “such laws undermine public safety.” 

Critics slammed both men for their remarks. But Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder were right to address the issue, and they are right on its substance.

Florida was the first to adopt a stand-your-ground statute, in 2005; about half the states have followed. Instead of requiring potential victims of crime to retreat if they have a safe escape route, these laws allow people to use deadly force without attempting to avoid a potentially lethal confrontation. They also often contain other generous protections for killers claiming self-defense.

George Zimmerman, who shot Trayvon Martin, didn’t invoke Florida’s stand-your-ground statute in an attempt to avoid trial. But the law could have contributed to the police decision not to charge him for more than a month after he killed Mr. Martin. At trial, the judge informed the Zimmerman jury explicitly of the stand-your-ground law, and the statute came up in closing arguments. 

There is a reason that the duty to retreat is a concept respected by centuries of legal application. Setting a laxer standard encourages tragic mistakes, poor judgment and perhaps even vigilantism. A recent study from two Texas A&M University researchers found that “lowering the expected cost of lethal force causes there to be more of it.” Stand-your-ground states saw more homicides than their peers — about 600 more a year over the period they studied. One possible explanation is that stand-your-ground laws encourage people to escalate conflicts rather than withdraw.

duty to retreat?

wikipedia | In the criminal law, the duty to retreat is a specific component which sometimes appears in the defense of self-defense, and which must be addressed if the defendant is to prove that his or her conduct was justified. In those jurisdictions where the requirement exists, the burden of proof is on the defense to show that the defendant was acting reasonably. This is often taken to mean that the defendant had first avoided conflict and secondly, had taken reasonable steps to retreat and so demonstrated an intention not to fight before eventually using force.

Some U.S. jurisdictions require that a person retreat from an attack, and allow the use of deadly force in self-defense only when retreat is not possible or when retreat poses a danger to the person under attack. The duty to retreat is not universal, however. For example, police officers are not required to retreat when acting in the line of duty. Similarly, some courts have found no duty to retreat exists when a victim is assaulted in a place where the victim has a right to be, such as within one's own home.^[1] The Model Penal Code^[2] suggests statutory language that also recognizes an exception to the usual duty to retreat when the victim of the attack is in his or her own dwelling or place of work. It is common to exempt a person's home or car from the duty to retreat, known as the castle doctrine.

Many states employ stand your ground laws that do not require an individual to retreat and allow one to match force for force, deadly force for deadly force. The Washington State Supreme Court, for example, has ruled "that there is no duty to retreat when a person is assaulted in a place where he or she has a right to be."^[3][4]

stand your ground law...,

wikipedia | A stand-your-ground law is a type of self-defense law that gives individuals the right to use reasonable force to defend themselves without any requirement to evade or retreat from a dangerous situation. It is law in certain jurisdictions within the United States. The basis may lie in either statutory law and or common law precedents. One key distinction is whether the concept only applies to defending a home or vehicle, or whether it applies to all lawfully occupied locations. Under these legal concepts, a person is justified in using deadly force in certain situations and the "stand your ground" law would be a defense or immunity to criminal charges and civil suit. The difference between immunity and a defense is that an immunity bars suit, charges, detention and arrest. A defense, such as an affirmative defense, permits a plaintiff or the state to seek civil damages or a criminal conviction but may offer mitigating circumstances that justify the accused's conduct.

More than half of the states in the United States have adopted the Castle doctrine, that a person has no duty to retreat when their home is attacked. Some states go a step further, removing the duty of retreat from other locations. "Stand Your Ground", "Line in the Sand" or "No Duty to Retreat" laws thus state that a person has no duty or other requirement to abandon a place in which he has a right to be, or to give up ground to an assailant. Under such laws, there is no duty to retreat from anywhere the defender may legally be.^[1] Other restrictions may still exist; such as when in public, a person must be carrying firearms in a legal manner, whether concealed or openly.

"Stand your ground" governs U.S. federal case law in which right of self-defense is asserted against a charge of criminal homicide. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Beard v. U.S. (158 U.S. 550 (1895)) that a man who was "on his premises" when he came under attack and "...did not provoke the assault, and had at the time reasonable grounds to believe, and in good faith believed, that the deceased intended to take his life, or do him great bodily harm...was not obliged to retreat, nor to consider whether he could safely retreat, but was entitled to stand his ground."^[2][3]

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. declared in Brown v. United States (1921) (256 U.S. 335, 343 (16 May 1921)), a case that upheld the "no duty to retreat" maxim, that "detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife".^[4]

castle doctrine...,

wikipedia | A Castle Doctrine (also known as a Castle Law or a Defense of Habitation Law) is an American legal doctrine that designates a person's abode (or, in some states, any legally-occupied place [e.g., a vehicle or workplace]) as a place in which that person has certain protections and immunities permitting him, in certain circumstances, to use force (up to and including deadly force) to defend against an intruder -- free from legal responsibility/prosecution for the consequences of the force used.^[1] Typically deadly force is considered justified, and a defense of justifiable homicide applicable, in cases "when the actor reasonably fears imminent peril of death or serious bodily harm to himself or another".^[1] The doctrine is not a defined law that can be invoked, but a set of principles which is incorporated in some form in the law of most states.

The legal concept of the inviolability of the home has been known in Western Civilization since the age of the Roman Republic.^[2] The term derives from the historic English common law dictum that "an Englishman's home is his castle." This concept was established as English law by 17th century jurist Sir Edward Coke, in his The Institutes of the Laws of England, 1628.^[3] The dictum was carried by colonists to the New World, who later removed "English" from the phrase, making it "a man's home is his castle", which thereby became simply the Castle Doctrine.^[3] The term has been used in England to imply a person's absolute right to exclude anyone from his home, although this has always had restrictions, and since the late twentieth century bailiffs have also had increasing powers of entry.^[4]

yeah, let's examine them joints...,

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Along the same lines, I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if it -- if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than defuse potential altercations.

I know that there’s been commentary about the fact that the stand your ground laws in Florida were not used as a defense in the case.

On the other hand, if we’re sending a message as a society in our communities that someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there’s a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?

And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these “stand your ground” laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?

And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.

two-gun pete...,

chicagotribune | Two-Gun started as an anonymous bluecoat walking a beat, but he ended up as a ghetto superstar — a flamboyant, crooked, braggadocious, womanizing, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed police detective.

He was tasked with clearing out bad elements from every nightclub, flophouse and pool hall in what was then called Black Metropolis, a South Side community mired in poverty and violence, yet bouncing to a jazzy beat.

Washington spent most of his career working out of the old Wabash Avenue police station at 48th Street and Wabash Avenue. By the mid-1940s, his 5th District, with a population of 200,000, led the city in slayings, robberies and rapes, and was nicknamed the "Bucket of Blood." But the mention of Two-Gun Pete's name could clear a street corner in seconds.

"Everybody knew Sylvester Washington," said Rudy Nimocks, a former deputy police superintendent. "They knew his car. And the prostitutes would go hide someplace when they saw him. He was something else."

Facing criticism that police were failing to protect black residents, Chicago's top brass looked to Washington and other tough black cops to get ahold of crime. But the bosses may have made a pact with the devil, entrusting citizens' safety to a profoundly violent man.

"He was the meanest, cruelest person that I have ever seen in my entire life," said his third wife, Roslyn Washington Banks.

Pete augmented his fierce reputation with the tools of his trade: a nightstick and meaty hands that he used to slap grown men to the ground like small children.

And there were his sidearms — pearl-handled .357 Magnum revolvers. One had a long barrel, the other a short barrel. Each pistol was holstered in its own belt around his hips, both pearl handles pointing right for the right-handed gunslinger.

"I seldom miss the mark with them," Washington bragged to Ebony magazine. "I can put 14 bullseyes into a target out of 15 shots, and have made a marksmanship record of 147 out of a possible 150."  Fist tap BTx

the kind of peace, and security, and order I'd like to see

of course cancer is caused by bacteria..., told you so years ago

bytesizebio | Cancer and microbiology have been closely linked for over 100 years. Cancer patients are usually immunosuppressed due to chemotherapy, requiring special treatment and conditions to prevent bacterial infection. Bladder cancer is typically treated with inactivated tuberculosis bacteria to induce an inflammatory response which turns against remaining cancer cells, with remarkably effective results.  Also, viruses are known to cause cancer, including  papillomavirus (cervical cancer), Hepatitis B (liver cancer), and  HTLV (human T-lymphocyte virus, causing lymphoma). In 1982, the bacterium  Helicobacter pylori was discovered to be the main cause of gastric ulcers, and the first direct link between bacteria and cancer — stomach cancer — was established. The link between chronic ulcers and stomach cancer was already well known: what was not knows is that bacteria were the initial cause of stomach ulcers. Since then, several other suspects have been named, including links between Chlamydia and lung cancer, and  Salmonella and gallbladder cancer.

Inflammation changes the gut ecosystem 

There are two fields in which are not  generally thought of as being linked: microbial ecology and cancer research.  When we think of microbial ecology, we think of agricultural soil enrichment, marine ecology, air quality, nutrient recycling, species interaction,  diversity and all that jazz. Not of cancer though. But in the past five years we have amassed more genomic DNA data than we have in the 50 years preceding them, including data from cancer tissue and associated bacteria. These data are beginning to show us that that the links between microbial populations and cancer are more prevalent, complex and intimate than we thought. Bacteria, as microbiologists keep repeating ad nauseam, make up 90% of the cellular population of our bodies (the extra 10% are, well, us).  Following metagenomic sequencing, human microbial flora have been shown to affect conditions as varied as obesity, metabolic disease (including diabetes)  infant growth and colorectal cancer — all of which we have not associated with bacteria until recently. As a result the people who study bacteria, and the people who study cancer are working together more than ever before. Last year, a study in Science  led by a group from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, has shown a clear mechanistic link between microbial communities, inflammation, and colorectal cancer. In a nutshell, their study suggests that the following sequence of events takes place: 1) inflammation disturbs gut ecosystems; 2) this disturbance to conditions that allow pathogens to invade the gut; 3) the pathogens damage the host cells increasing the risk of the development of colorectal cancer. The study used mice that lacked the gene that makes Interleukin-10 (IL-10). IL-10 suppresses the inflammatory response, and IL10-deficient mice (IL10^-/-) are genetically prone to gut inflammation.  The team compared bacterial communities in the inflamed guts of IL10^-/- mice with those in healthy normal (“wild type”) mice. They found that the diversity of different kinds of bacteria was significantly lower in the IL10^-/- mice. But the team found little difference in microbial diversity between mice that simply had inflammation and those that had inflammation and cancer, indicating that the inflammation was the critical factor affecting bacterial populations, reducing the diversity of bacteria in the colon. In fact, one major species to shoot up and dominate the inflamed gut was E. coli, another was Enterobacter faecalis. But IL10^-/- mice that were inoculated with E. faecalis only rarely developed cancer, while 80% of the group with E. coli did. Specifically, E. coli strain NC101 was foind to be the culprit. The NC101 strain has a cluster of genes under the name of “pks island”. In 2010 a group from Toulouse found that pks island genes cause cellular replication and DNA damage in the host: the harbingers of cancer.  The UNC researchers colonized a mouse gut cell-line with E. coli that had the pks genes, and with E. coli lacking the pks genes. The inflammation remained, but the cells inoculated with E. coli without the pks developed fewer tumors. While mice take longer to develop tumors, the researchers saw 80% more DNA damaged cells in gut cells of IL10^-/- mice inoculated with E. coli that had pks genes, versus those that were associated with E. coli without the pks genes.

Bacterial DNA in Cancer Cells

But the link between bacteria and cancer may run deeper than a changing microbial community. A recent study by a group at the University of Maryland School of Medicine shows that bacteria DNA gets transferred to human cells, in a process known as lateral gene transfer, or LGT.  LGT is known to occur quite commonly between bacteria, including bacteria of different species. In fact, that is how antibiotic resistance is transferred so quickly. But findings of bacterial LGT to humans are generally treated as possible experimental artifacts, rather than true events. The UMSM team scanned data from from the 1,000 Genomes Project and found more than 7,000 instances of LGT from bacteria to human cells. When they analyzed sequences from the Cancer Genome Atlas, they discovered 691,000 more cases  of LGT, and an overwhelming majority of LGT findings came from tumor samples, not from healthy cells. They found that DNA from Acinetobacter , was integrated into the genome of acute myeloid leukemia cells, especially in the mitochondrial genome. Acinetobacter is a soil bacterium but some species are known to be oppotunitic pathogens. For unknown reasons, this bacterium’s DNA was found more frequently in the genome of myeloid leukemia cells. Fist tap Dale.

isn't smegma believed to cause cervical cancer?

thescientist | In what appears to be a novel form of bacterial gene transfer, or conjugation, the microbe Mycobacterium smegmatis can share multiple segments of DNA at once to fellow members of its species, according to a study published today (July 9) in PLOS Biology. The result: the generation of genetic diversity at a pace once believed to be reserved for sexual organisms.

“It is a very nice study providing clear evidence that, in Mycobacterium smegmatis at least, conjugation underlies much of species diversity,” said Richard Meyer, who studies conjugation at The University of Texas at Austin, in an email to The Scientist.

Traditionally, transfer of genetic material through conjugation has been considered an incremental process. Plasmids mediate the transfer of short segments of DNA, one at a time, between pairs of touching bacterial cells, often conferring such traits as antibiotic resistance.

But M. smegmatis, a harmless bacterium related to the pathogen M. tuberculosis, appears to use a more extensive method of gene shuffling, endowing each recipient cell with a different combination of new genes. The researchers dubbed this form of conjugation “distributive conjugal transfer.” “We can generate a million [hybrid bacteria] overnight, and each of those million will be different than each other,” said coauthor Todd Gray, a geneticist at the New York State Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center.

Coauthor Keith Derbyshire, also a geneticist at the Wadsworth Center, and colleagues had previously published data indicating that M. smegmatis used a novel form of conjugation, but the new study confirms and expands on their suspicions using genetic data. The researchers compared the whole genome sequences of donor and recipient bacteria before and after the massive gene transfers.

The researchers found that, after the transfers, up to a quarter of the recipient bacteria’s genomes were made up of donated DNA, scattered through the chromosomes in segments of varying lengths.

According to the authors, the diversity resulting from distributive conjugal transfer approaches that achieved by meiosis, the process of cell division that underlies sexual reproduction. “The progeny were like meiotic blends,” said Derbyshire. “The genomes are totally mosaic.”

the doe has a "joint genome institute" exploring uncharted reaches of the microcosmos...,

thescientist | The tree of life is dominated by microbes, but many large branches remain uncharted because scientists have been historically restricted to studying the small fraction of species that will grow in a lab. An international team of scientists has now begun to redress this bias, sequencing full genomes from single cells to bring the “uncultured majority” into view.

In total, the team identified more than 200 new microbial species belonging to 29 underrepresented or unknown lineages. And the results, published today (July 14) in Nature, were full of new metabolic abilities and genetic surprises.

“[There has been a] strong imperative to fill in the microbial tree of life,” said Philip Hugenholtz from the University of Queensland, one of the study’s leaders. “If you have an incomplete view of evolution—vastly incomplete in the case of microorganisms—you have a vastly incomplete understanding of biology.”

By sequencing DNA directly from environmental samples, geneticists have suggested that the two microbial domains of life—bacteria and archaea—include at least 60 major lineages (phyla), but just four of these account for more than 88 percent of cultivated microbes. Of the others, around half are “candidate phyla,” whose members have never been grown in lab cultures.

To fill these gaps, the team collected samples from nine diverse habitats, including industrial reactors, hot springs, and a gold mine. The researchers gravitated towards places that were low in oxygen since these tend to harbor a greater and more interesting spread of microbes than familiar sites like our bodies. 

From these samples, Tanja Woyke from the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute in California isolated 9,600 individual cells and amplified the genomes of around a third of these. If any of these genomes looked like they came from new lineages, the team sequenced them completely.

They ended up with 201 full genomes representing 21 bacterial lineages and 8 archaeal ones. Some of these were candidate phyla known only by abstract codes, but the team has now given them descriptive names based on the biology of their members. For example, EM19 is now Calescamantes (“heat lovers”) because they hail from an extremely hot environment, and OD1 is now Parcubacteria (“thrifty bacteria”) for its streamlined metabolism. 

pandoraviruses hint at fourth domain of life...,

fauxnews | The discovery of two new jumbo-sized viruses is blurring the lines between viral and cellular life and could point to the existence of a new type of life, scientists suggest. 

The two large viruses, detailed in this week's issue of the journal Science, have been dubbed "Pandoraviruses" because of the surprises they may hold for biologists, in reference to the mythical Greek figure who opened a box and released evil into the world.

The discovery of Pandoraviruses is an indication that our knowledge of Earth's microbial biodiversity is still incomplete, explained study coauthor Jean-Michel Claverie, a virologist at the French National Research Agency at Aix-Marseille University.

"Huge discoveries remain to be made at the most fundamental level that may change our present conception about the origin of life and its evolution," Claverie said.

Eugene Koonin, a computational evolutionary biologist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Md., who was not involved in the study, called the Pandoraviruses a "wonderful discovery," but not a complete surprise.

"In a certain sense, it's something that we saw coming, and it's wonderful that it has come," Koonin said.

the human eusocial prime directive - cybernetic civilization

paulchefurka | Humanity appears to be in the grip of a global system - one that we originally created, but which is now shaping our lives independently of our wishes.

I've recently begun to suspect that humanity is at a point of endosymbiosis with our electronic communications and control technology, especially through the Internet. In a sense, we humans have incorporated ourselves as essential control elements of a planet-wide cybernetic super-organism. The precedent for something like this is the way that mitochondria migrated as bacteria into ancient prokaryotic cells to become essential components of the new eukaryotic cells that make up all modern organisms, including us.

To expand on the "super-organism" concept a bit, it looks to me as though what humanity has done over the last few centuries is built ourselves a global cybernetic exoskeleton. Although its development started back with the emergence of language and the taming of fire, it's most visible in the modern world, and especially in the last two decades.

Transportation systems act as its gut and bloodstream, carrying raw materials (the food of civilization) to the digestive organs of factories, and carrying the finished goods (the nutrients) to wherever they are needed. Engines and motors of all kinds are its muscles. The global electronic communication network is its nervous system. Electronic sensors of a million kinds are its organs of taste, touch, smell and sight. Legal systems, police and military make up its immune system.

Human beings have evolved culturally to the point where we now act largely as hyper-functional decision-making neurons within this super-organism, with endpoint devices like smart phones, PCs and their descendants acting as synapses, and network connections being analogous to nerve fibers.

Just as neurons cannot live outside the body, we have evolved a system that doesn't permit humans to live outside its boundaries. Not only is there very little "outside" left, but access to the necessities of life is now only possible though the auspices of the cybernetic system itself. (For example, consider living without a socially-approved job. It's barely possible for a few people, but essentially impossible for most of us.) As we have developed this system around us, we have had to relinquish more and more of our autonomy in favor of helping the machine continue functioning and growing.

While we can no longer survive outside our cybernetic exoskeleton, in return it can't exist without our input. I realized over the last month or so that this means the symbiosis has already occurred. If I had to put a "closure date" on it, the period where it transitioned to its current form was around 1990 (plus or minus a decade or so). We didn't even notice it happening - to us it just looked like our daily lives going on as usual.

I realize that I'm re-visiting an old, familiar science-fiction idea. In reality it seems to have happened through a quiet, "natural" process of coevolution driven by the mutual amplification effects of human ingenuity, electronic technology and large amounts of available energy - rather than through the drama of a Borg-like assimilation of humans into a hive mind, or Ray Kurzweil's eschatological vision of a Technological Singularity.