uh.., colleges and healthcare complexes are little unsustainable artificial urban densities

npr | The debt-laden city of Detroit has been an incubator for new strategies in urban revitalization, including a downtown People Mover, casinos, urban farms, artist colonies and large scale down-sizing.

In the wake of the city's bankruptcy, many in the community are thinking small.

Just outside of downtown Detroit is a neighborhood called Midtown. Like many hip, urban neighborhoods, it's got hipsters on fixed geared bikes, yoga studios, boutiques for dogs.

And while urban neighborhoods in other cities have been redeveloping for a decade or more, things here are just now starting to take off.

Part of the reason is a woman who's often called the Mayor of Midtown.

Sue Mosey is president of , a non-profit planning and economic development agency that works to encourage new business and housing and preserve the history of the neighborhood about two miles north of downtown.

"It's been an area that's experienced a lot of disinvestment over the last 60 years," says Mosey. "But over the last 10 to 20 years there's been a lot of reinvestment coming back into the neighborhood."

The neighborhood has a large public university, an arts college. It has two major healthcare systems, the big cultural institutions. It's anchored by Wayne State University, the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Medical Center and the Henry Ford Hospital and the College of Creative Studies.

why detroit failed - peak capitalism/contraction/racism/corruption

boomerangbeat | Early 1950s

• Peak population at 1.8 million as the automobile industry boomed
• Automobile factories generated high-profile labor unions, which initiated strikes  in support of benefits, pensions, and increased wages

Mid 1950s

• Increased competition from foreign auto makers led to several U.S. auto manufacturing mergers
• Because Detroit had gone all in in the auto industry, the mergers proved problematic as jobs started to disappear (poor planning)

1960-70s

• Rapid growth from the auto industry boom resulted in social tension and racism as whites repeatedly refused to work with blacks
• Extensive freeway systems allowed for commuting, causing several to move to the suburbs
• People in the suburbs meant fewer jobs and a smaller tax base in the city
• Late 70s – Detroit continued to struggle with foreign auto competition

1980s

• On the verge of bankruptcy, rather than restructure they imposed a city income tax in addition to the state income tax (city/state takes a percentage of your paycheck – based on income – to pay the government)

1990s

• Mayor opted not to battle union concessions meaning public union workers were getting what they wanted with little push back
• Unions received higher wages and generous pension packages (payment during retirement) that caused the local government to pay millions to people who were no longer working
• Politicians would often give the unions what they wanted in return for votes (corruption)
• People will often vote for politicians to break up or weaken public sector unions in order to fix state budget problems

2000s

• Mayor (now a convicted felon) used the city’s credit card recklessly for more than $2 billion, including more than a billion against the city’s pension funds (union workers)

Current

• Mayor racked up 1/3 of a billion dollars against the city’s pension funds
• Detroit has had to rely on the state to help pay its government employees

Overarching problem = political corruption. Instead of using money to restore the city, Detroit raised taxes (2.5%, highest in the state) and gave the money to union workers in return for labor peace.

the "family" silver WILL be sold to pay these bills....,

NYTimes | As Detroit files for bankruptcy — the largest American city ever to do so — the impressive collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts has become a political bargaining chip in a fight that could drag on for years between the city and its army of creditors, who have said in no uncertain terms that the artworks must be considered a salable asset. 

“We haven’t proposed selling any asset,” said Bill Nowling, a spokesman for Kevyn D. Orr, the state-appointed emergency manager appointed to deal with Detroit’s debts, which could amount to more than $18 billion. “But we haven’t taken any asset off the table. We can’t. We cannot negotiate in good faith with our creditors by taking assets off the table. And all of our creditors have asked about the worth of the D.I.A. And we’ve told them that they’re welcome to find out.” 

Unlike most art museums around the country, which are owned by nonprofit corporations that hold a collection in trust for citizens, the institute is owned by Detroit, as is much of its collection — which is not particularly deep but includes gems by artists like Bruegel, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and van Gogh. It is considered among the top 10 encyclopedic museums in the country. 

Museums do not generally appraise the market value of their works beyond a blanket amount for insurance policies. But experts have speculated that the institute’s works could bring more than $2 billion if sold.

About a month ago, the institute’s officials were contacted by Christie’s auction house, which asked for an inventory of works and asked if appraisers could visit to assess the collection. It is unclear whether such a visit took place and whether it was creditors or someone else who enlisted Christie’s to begin an appraisal. (Mr. Nowling said that the emergency manager’s office did not do so, and Christie’s declined to comment.)

But as Detroit’s financial fate comes before a federal bankruptcy judge, it is clear that the desire of creditors to determine the collection’s worth will not go away. 

The museum, which has hired a well-known bankruptcy lawyer, Richard Levin, to advise it on its possible exposure, declined to comment on Friday. But on its Facebook page, the museum said: “As a municipal bankruptcy of this size is unprecedented, the D.I.A. will continue to carefully monitor the situation, fully confident that the emergency manager, the governor and the courts will act in the best interest of the City, the public and the museum.” 

Few large American art museums have found themselves in the financial cross hairs quite as often as the Detroit Institute of Arts. Not long after it was founded in 1885, it became enmeshed in a lawsuit that led to a loss of city appropriations, putting it in budgetary straits. In 1955, during a city financial crisis, the museum’s acquisitions mostly ceased. And in 1973, during another economic downturn, it had to close temporarily.

the real reason for modern gun control...,

The Gun Control Act of 1968 kicked off a frenzy of new US gun laws... Here´s the secret history behind the timing.

The first gun laws restricting private citizens were dictated by the British Empire against American colonists. The Empire wanted only the military to have weapons of self defense.

The next wave of anti guns laws in the US took place after slavery was abolished. The laws, passed by Southern legislatures, prohibited Afro-Americans from owning firearms.

The next big wave of anti gun laws, which we are still in the middle of, started in the mid 1960s.

Why?

Yes, we had a number of assassinations, but they´ve been proven to be government conspiracies (JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King, etc.)

The hysteria against private gun ownership begin when Afro-Americans started using firearms to protect their civil rights.

That´s the history behind these laws.

The Gun Control Act of 1968 kicked off a frenzy of new US gun laws... Here´s the secret history behind the timing.

The first gun laws restricting private citizens where dictated by the British Empire against American colonists. The Empire wanted only the military to have weapons of self defense.

The next wave of anti guns laws in the US took place after slavery was abolished. The laws, passed by Southern legislatures, prohibited Afro-Americans from owning firearms.

The next big wave of anti gun laws, which we are still in the middle of, started in the mid 1960s.

Why?

Yes, we had a number of assassinations, but they´ve been proven to be government conspiracies (JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King, etc.)

The hysteria against private gun ownership begin when Afro-Americans started using firearms to protect their civil rights.

That´s the history behind these laws. - See more at: http://www.2ndamendmenttv.com/videos/history/the-secret-history-of-gun-control-and-the-civil-rights-movement-of-the-1960s.html#sthash.wWFIVw9l.dpuf

the two faux democracies threaten life on earth...,

paulcraigroberts | Amitai Etzioni has raised an important question: “Who authorized preparations for war with China?” http://yalejournal.org/2013/06/12/who-authorized-preparations-for-war-with-china/ Etzioni says that the war plan is not the sort of contingency plan that might be on hand for an improbable event. Etzioni also reports that the Pentagon’s war plan was not ordered by, and has not been reviewed by, US civilian authorities. We are confronted with a neoconized US military out of control endangering Americans and the rest of the world.

Etzioni is correct that this is a momentous decision made by a neoconized military. China is obviously aware that Washington is preparing for war with China. If the Yale Journal knows it, China knows it. If the Chinese government is realistic, the government is aware that Washington is planning a pre-emptive nuclear attack against China. No other kind of war makes any sense from Washington’s standpoint. The “superpower” was never able to occupy Baghdad, and after 11 years of war has been defeated in Afghanistan by a few thousand lightly armed Taliban. It would be curtains for Washington to get into a conventional war with China.

When China was a primitive third world country, it fought the US military to a stalemate in Korea. Today China has the world’s second largest economy and is rapidly overtaking the failing US economy destroyed by jobs offshoring, bankster fraud, and corporate and congressional treason.

The Pentagon’s war plan for China is called “AirSea Battle.” The plan describes itself as “interoperable air and naval forces that can execute networked, integrated attacks-in-depth to disrupt, destroy, and defeat enemy anti-access area denial capabilities.”

Yes, what does that mean? It means many billions of dollars of more profits for the military/security complex while the 99 percent are ground under the boot. It is also clear that this nonsensical jargon cannot defeat a Chinese army. But this kind of saber-rattling can lead to war, and if the Washington morons get a war going, the only way Washington can prevail is with nuclear weapons. The radiation, of course, will kill Americans as well.

Nuclear war is on Washington’s agenda. The rise of the Neocon Nazis has negated the nuclear disarmament agreements that Reagan and Gorbachev made. The extraordinary, mainly truthful 2012 book, The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, describes the post-Reagan breakout of preemptive nuclear attack as Washington’s first option.

who authorized preparations for war with china?

yalejournal | Abstract—The Pentagon has concluded that the time has come to prepare for war with China, and in a manner well beyond crafting the sort of contingency plans that are expected for wide a range of possible confrontations. It is a momentous conclusion that will shape the United States’ defense systems, force posture, and overall strategy for dealing with the economically and militarily resurgent China. Thus far, however, the military’s assessment of and preparations for the threat posed by China have not received the high level of review from elected civilian officials that such developments require. The start of a second Obama administration provides an opportunity for civilian authorities to live up to their obligations in this matter and to conduct a proper review of the United States’ China strategy and the military’s role in it. 

The U.S. Military /Civilian Relationships in Facing China

The United States is preparing for a war with China, a momentous decision that so far has failed to receive a thorough review from elected officials, namely the White House and Congress. This important change in the United States’ posture toward China has largely been driven by the Pentagon. There have been other occasions in which the Pentagon has framed key strategic decisions so as to elicit the preferred response from the Commander in Chief and elected representatives. A recent case in point was when the Pentagon led President Obama to order a high level surge in Afghanistan in 2009, against the advice of the Vice President and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. The decision at hand stands out even more prominently because (a) the change in military posture may well lead to an arms race with China, which could culminate in a nuclear war; and (b) the economic condition of the United States requires a reduction in military spending, not a new arms race. The start of a new term, and with it the appointment of new secretaries of State and Defense, provide an opportunity to review the United States’ China strategy and the military’s role in it. This review is particularly important before the new preparations for war move from an operational concept to a militarization program that includes ordering high-cost weapons systems and forced restructuring. History shows that once these thresholds are crossed, it is exceedingly difficult to change course.

In the following pages I first outline recent developments in the Pentagon’s approach to dealing with the rise of China; I then focus on the deliberations of the highest civilian authorities. These two sides seemed to operate in parallel universes, at least until November 2011 when the pivot to Asia was announced by the White House—though we shall see their paths hardly converged even after that date. I conclude with an outline of what the much-needed civilian review ought to cover.

I write about the “Pentagon” and the “highest civilian authori­ties” (or our political representatives) rather than contrast the view of the military and that of the civilian authorities, because the Pentagon includes civilians, who actively partici­pated in developing the plans under discussion. It is of course fully legitimate for the Pentagon to identify and prepare for new threats. The question that this article raises is whether the next level of government, which reviews such threats while taking into account the input of the intelligence com­munity and other agencies (especially the State Department), has adequately fulfilled its duties. Have the White House and Congress properly reviewed the Pentagon’s approach—and found its threat assessment of China convincing and ap­proved the chosen response? And if not, what are the United States’ overarching short- and long-term political strategies for dealing with an economically and militarily rising China?

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