breaking away is the only viable option...,

churchandstate |  Many of us who have been paying attention to the state of the world over the last half century have now begun to realize with growing horror that the progressive deterioration we have been tracking shows no signs of resolution. In fact, to some of us it looks as though there is no way to resolve this deepening crisis. The end of the track is in sight. The planetary factory is in flames, and all the exit doors are barred.

Proposed technical solutions are utterly inadequate to the scale of the problem. Many ideas like geoengineering will simply make matters worse. There is no political constituency for degrowth – none at all. There is precious little political support for even putting a light foot on the brake. This road to Hell has been paved with the very best of intentions – giving our children a better life stands near the top of the list – but here we are nonetheless. The climate is signalling that our future may be a little warmer than we were expecting, once our seven-billion-passenger train passes those gates.

Now that the denouement is in sight, I’m setting aside the anger and outrage, the blame and shame, to focus my attention instead on why this outcome seems to have been utterly inevitable and unstoppable.

Why has this happened? I don’t buy the traditional “broken morality” or “flawed genetics” arguments. After all, our genetics seemed to be perfectly appropriate for a million years, and the elements of morality that some of us see as sub-optimal (the greed and shortsightedness) have been with us to varying degrees since before the days of Australopithecus. I don’t think it’s just a mistake on our part or a bug in the program – it appears to be a part of the program of life itself. It looks to me as though much deeper forces have been at work throughout human history, and have shaped this outcome.

The main difficulty I have with all the technical, political, economic and social reform proposals I’ve seen is that they run counter to some very deep-seated aspects of human behavior and decision-making. Mainly, they assume that human intelligence and analytical ability control our behavior, and from what I’ve seen, that’s simply not true. In fact it’s untrue to such an extent that I don’t even think it’s a “human” issue per se.

I have come to think that most of our collective choices and actions are shaped by physical forces so deep that they can’t even be called “genetic”. I haven’t written anything definitive about this yet, but the conclusion I have come to in the last six months is that a physical principle called the “Maximum Entropy Production Principle”, which is closely related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, actually underlies the structure of life itself. Its operation has shaped the energy-seeking, replicative behavior of everything from bacteria to humans. All our intelligence does is makes its operation more effective.

some reflections on the twilight of the oil age - part 2.

cassandralegacy |  Let’s acknowledge it, the situation we are in, as depicted summarily in Part 1, is complex.  As many commentators like to state, there is still plenty of oil, coal, and gas left "in the ground".  Since 2014, debates have been raging, concerning the assumed “oil glut”, concerning how low oil prices may go down, how high prices may rebound as demand possibly picks up and the “glut” vanishes, and, in the face of all this, what may or may not happen regarding “renewables”.  However, in my view, the situation is not impossible to analyse rigorously, away from what may appear as common sense but that may not withstand scrutiny.  For example, Part 1 data have indicated,that most of what’s left in terms of fossil fuels is likely to stay where it is, underground, without this requiring the implementation of  difficult to agree upon resource management policies, simply because this is what thermodynamics dictates.

We can now venture a little bit further if we keep firmly in mind that the globalised industrial world (GIW), and by extension all of us, do not “live” on fossil resources but on net energy delivered by the global energy system; and if we also keep in mind that, in this matter, oil-derived transport fuels are the key since, without them, none of the other fossil and nuclear resources can be mobilised and the GIW itself can’t function.

In my experience, most often, when faced with such a broad spectrum of conflicting views, especially involving matters pertaining to physics and the social sciences, the lack of agreement is indicative that the core questions are not well formulated.  Physicist David Bohm liked to stress: “In scientific enquiries, a crucial step is to ask the right question.  Indeed each question contains presuppositions, largely implicit.  If these presuppositions are wrong or confused, the question itself is wrong, in the sense that to try to answer it has no meaning.  One has thus to enquire into the appropriateness of the question.”

Here it is important, in terms of system analysis, to differentiate between the global energy industry (say, GEI) and the GIW. The GEI bears the brunt of thermodynamics directly, and within the GEI, the oil industry (OI) is key since, as seen in Part 1, it is the first to reach the thermodynamics limit of resource extraction and, since it conditions the viability of the GEI’s other components – in their present state and within the remaining timeframe, they can’t survive the OI’s eventual collapse.  On the other hand, the GIW is impacted by thermodynamic decline with a lag, in the main because it is buffered by debt – so that by the time the impact of the thermodynamic collapse of the OI becomes undeniable it’s too late to do much about it.

At the micro level, debt can be "good" - e.g. a company borrows to expand and then reimburses its debt, etc…  At the macro level, it can be, and has now become, lethal, as the global debt can no longer be reimbursed (I estimate the energy equivalent of current global debt, from states, businesses, and households to be in the order of some 10,700EJ, while current world energy use is in the order of 554EJ; it is no longer doable to “mind the gap”).

some reflections on the twilight of the oil age - part 1.

cassandralegacy |  Since at least the end of 2014 there has been increasing confusions about oil prices, whether so-called “Peak Oil” has already happened, or will happen in the future and when, matters of EROI (or EROEI) values for current energy sources and for alternatives, climate change and the phantasmatic 2^oC warming limit, and concerning the feasibility of shifting rapidly to renewables or sustainable sources of energy supply.  Overall, it matters a great deal whether a reasonable time horizon to act is say 50 years, i.e. in the main the troubles that we are contemplating are taking place way past 2050, or if we are already in deep trouble and the timeframe to try and extricate ourselves is some 10 years. Answering this kind of question requires paying close attention to system boundary definitions and scrutinising all matters taken for granted.

It took over 50 years for climatologists to be heard and for politicians to reach the Paris Agreement re climate change (CC) at the close of the COP21, late last year.  As you no doubt can gather from the title, I am of the view that we do not have 50 years to agonise about oil.  In the three sections of this post I will first briefly take stock of where we are oil wise; I will then consider how this situation calls upon us to do our utter best to extricate ourselves from the current prevailing confusion and think straight about our predicament; and in the third part I will offer a few considerations concerning the near term, the next ten years – how to approach it, what cannot work and what may work, and the urgency to act, without delay.

peasants incensed by the head negroe-whisperer in charge's scripted rorschachian funk-faking...,

theroot |  Thursday’s ABC town hall with President Barack Obama was anticipated with bated breath.

Many were looking forward to an honest conversation about race and about the current tensions between the black community and police officers in the aftermath of the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and the attack in Dallas that left five officers dead.

Unfortunately, many activists left disappointed, even angry, at what they witnessed and heard.

Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, who died after being choked by New York City police in 2014, stormed out of the taping of the town hall, saying that she had been “railroaded” by the network, denied the opportunity to ask the president a question, something she said she had been promised.

Garner said she felt that she had been “used for ratings,” and a few activists in the room agreed that the event seemed to be manipulative.

“It felt manipulative and disingenuous, and if we’re really trying to have a town hall about race in this country, it’s going to have to look much more like a truth-and-reconciliation process. It can’t be an hour and 15 minutes with the president taking up the most space, with people asking what he thinks of things instead of demanding that he do things,” Patrisse Kahn-Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Network, told The Root Friday.

“The town hall was clearly a curated event for ABC to quell protesters and organizers. It had nothing to do with actual future for black people, and I think that for us, we want to push POTUS in his last few months as the president to take executive action, to defund law-enforcement agencies that have consistently violated the civil and human rights of black people,” she added.

Pastor Traci Blackmon of the Christ the King United Church of Christ, and the acting executive minister of justice and witness of the United Church of Christ, wrote an extensive Facebook post after the town hall, describing her own disappointment.

lil'pookie gushing about Granny Goodness' newly-nuanced negroe-whispering...,

WaPo |  Clinton has been talking about how to “pull us together” on the campaign trail consistently since February. Her knowing, empathetic message that attracted African American voters during the primaries has remained consistent. But her words have gained more power and urgency in the wake of the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile by police and the murders of Lorne Ahrens, Michael J. Smith, Michael Krol, Patrick Zamarripa and Brent Thompson in Dallas.

During a speech at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem on Feb. 16, Clinton did something no white politician running for president had ever done to my memory: talked about the responsibility white Americans had in bridging racial divides. “White Americans need to do a better job of listening when African Americans talk about the seen and unseen barriers that you face every day,” the former New York Senator told the mostly African American audience. “We need to recognize our privilege and practice humility, rather than assume that our experiences are everyone’s experiences.”

In the midst of national grief, when both sides of the criminal justice debate felt justifiably aggrieved, Clinton repeated that call to empathy in an even more powerful address to the African Methodist Episcopal Church National Convention in Philadelphia last Friday.

Ending the systemic racism that plagues our country – and rebuilding our communities where the police and citizens all see themselves as being on the same side – will require contributions from all of us.  White Americans need to do a better job of listening when African Americans talk – talk about the seen and unseen barriers you face every day.  We need to try, as best we can, to walk in one another’s shoes – to imagine what it would be like if people followed us around stores, or locked their car doors when we walked past. Or if every time our children went to play in the park, or went for a ride, or just to the store to buy iced tea and Skittles, we said a prayer –‘Please, God – please, God – don’t let anything happen to my baby.’ 

And let’s put ourselves in the shoes of police officers, kissing their kids and spouses goodbye every day and heading off to a dangerous job we need them to do.  When gunfire broke out yesterday night, and everyone ran to safety, the police officers ran the other way – into the gunfire. That’s the kind of courage our police and first responders show every single day somewhere across America.  

Clinton returned to these themes on Wednesday, in Springfield, Ill., in an effort to show that all of the concerns roiled by the bloody events of last week are valid.

“Now I understand that just saying these things together may upset some people. I’m talking about police reform just a few days after a horrific attack on police officers. I’m talking about courageous, honorable police officers just a few days after officer-involved shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota. I’m bringing up guns in a country where just talking about comprehensive background checks and getting assault weapons off our streets gets you demonized,” she said then. “But all these things can be true at the same time.”

gestapo america

strategic-culture |  FBI Director James Comey got Hillary off the hook but wants to put you on it. He is pushing hard for warrantless access to all of your Internet activity.

Comey, who would have fit in perfectly with Hitler’s Gestapo, tells Congress that the United States is not safe unless the FBI knows when every American goes online, to whom they are sending emails and from whom they are receiving emails, and knows every website visited by every American.

In other words, Comey wants to render null and void the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution and completely destroy your privacy rights.

The reason Washington wants to know everything about everyone is so that Washington can embarrass, blackmail, and frame on felony charges patriots who stand up in defense of the US Constitution and the rule of law, and dissidents who criticize Washington’s illegal wars, reckless foreign policies, and oppression of American citizens.

Washington’s demand for power has nothing to do with our security. It has to do with destroying the security that the US Constitution gives us.

The security that Comey wants to protect is not our security or the national security of the United States. Comey’s intent is to make Washington secure despite its violations of statutory law and the US Constitution. The way Comey intends to do this is by intimidating, harassing, and arresting Washington’s critics.

Comey wants the unconstitutional power to demand from the providers of telephone and Internet services all records and information about you. These demands are not to be subject to oversight by courts, and the communication companies that serve you are prohibited from telling you that all of your information has been given to the FBI.

The Man gettin real tired of you peasants and your pesky smartphone cameras....,

theatlantic |  Even in the Photoshop age, photos and videos can win the public’s trust in a way that a story or an eyewitness account can’t. More than 500 people have been shot and killed by police so far this year, but it’s those whose final encounters with police were caught on tape—and occasionally their photographers—who go on to occupy national headlines. As my colleague Rob points out, for Americans whose experiences with police are generally characterized by respect and civility, there’s something fundamentally unsettling to seeing, with their own eyes, an officer commit an extraordinary act of violence.

Cheap smartphones with cameras have brought the power take documentary evidence to just about anyone, and the credibility of phone-shot video has held up in court and in the news. But a patent awarded to Apple last month hints at a future where invisible signals could alter the images that smartphone cameras capture—or even disable smartphone cameras entirely.

Apple filed for the patent in 2011, proposing a smartphone camera that could respond to data streams encoded in invisible infrared signals. The signals could display additional information on the phone’s screen: If a user points his or her camera at a museum exhibit, for example, a transmitter placed nearby could tell the phone to show information about the object in the viewfinder.

A different type of data stream, however, could prevent the phone from recording at all. Apple’s patent also proposes using infrared rays to force iPhone cameras to shut off at concerts, where video, photo, and audio recording is often prohibited. Yes, smartphones are the scourge of the modern concert, but using remote camera-blocking technology to curb their use opens up a dangerous potential for abuse.

nottingham: domestic political force-projection and self-funding criminal enterprise

mises |  Dealing with violent crime constitutes only a small minority of what police deal with on a daily basis. For example, in 2014, out of 11,205,833 arrests made nationwide (in the US), 498,666 arrests were for violent crimes and 1,553,980 arrests were for property crime.

That means 82 percent of arrests were made for something other than violent crime or property crime. 

Moreover, many of these non-violent offenses — such as drug use, liquor violations, carrying an illegal knife, or other infractions that should be regarded as small-time offenses can result in serious jail time or prison time, as well as steep fines and lost earnings. 

For instance, the highly publicized death of Eric Garner at the hands of police officers was a conflict precipitated by the sale of untaxed cigarettes by Garner. The police officers who killed Freddie Gray in custody in Baltimore later claimed the arrest was necessary because Gray possessed a knife that violated city ordinances. 

And then there are the countless cases of non-criminals who have been stopped, searched, arrested and imprisoned for petty drug offenses such as possession. 

Indeed, police departments spend an immense amount of time and resources on these non-violent offenses. In their book, The Challenge of Crime, Henry Ruth and Kevin Reitz observe: 

[W]e do know that the effort to stem the tide of illicit drugs has been massive — and expensive. On the local level, 93 percent of county police agencies and 82 percent of all municipal agencies with more than one hundred police officers contained a full-time drug enforcement unit, as did about 60 percent of the state police agencies, and almost 70 percent of all sheriffs' departments. New York City alone in 1997 reported over 2,500 police officers dedicated to drug units and task forcese. More than 90 percent of all these police agencies received money and property forfeited by drug sellers for use in law enforcement opertations. ...

State and local police made about 1.6 million arrests for drug abuse violations in 2000, four-fifths of them for drug possession. ... And in 1998, drug offenders were 35 percent of all felons convicted in state courts.

In Gangs and Gang Crime, Michael Newton Reports: "In 1987, drug offenses produced 7.4 percent of all American arrests, nearly doubling to 13.1 percent by 2005."

As Ruth and Reitz note, there are financial incentives to police agencies to pursue drug offenders. The nature of drug offenses also gives the police more reason to make arrests in general. As explained by Lawrence Travis in Introduction to Criminal Justice:

With increased emphasis on drug crimes, agents and agencies of the justice system have uncovered offenses that have been present for years. Because drug offenses have gone unreported in the past, Zeisel (1982) noted that they present an almost limitless supply of business for the police. changing public perceptions of the seriousness of drug offenses has supported increased drug enforcement efforts.

[Peter] Kraska observed that with drug offenders, police "can seek actively to detect drug crimes, as opposed to violent and property crimes, for which they have little choice but to react to complaints." Thus, the volume of drug offenders entering the justice system is more a product of police activity than is that of violent or property offenders.. Political pressure to treat drug offenses more seriously, coupled with giving incentives such as profit from seizing the property of drug offenders, spurs more aggressive police action."

In other words, rather than react to complaints about violent crime or property crime, drug enforcement provides the police with nearly limitless opportunities to search, question, and arrest suspects for any number of offenses related to drugs. Moreover, if the police attempt to stop and search a person, and the person becomes uncooperative, police may then be able to justify an arrest for "resisting arrest" or similar offense even if no drugs are found. 

Arrests in turn then bolster a police officer's career, even though little time has been spent on investigating violent crime or recovering stolen property.

Granny Goodness calls for conversation not concrete policy and legislation....,

NYTimes |  As Mrs. Clinton herself said last year, “I don’t believe you change hearts, I believe you change laws. You change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate.”

What, even, would the form of this conversation be? Editorials? Panels? Reports? “Hamilton”? Even the last, which Mrs. Clinton encouraged her audience to listen to, won’t prevent more Alton Sterlings, or get an ex-con back into mainstream life.

Mrs. Clinton is trying to win an election, and it isn’t the time for novelty or tilting at windmills. But she has said herself that we must change both laws and attitudes. If she is serious about dedicating her first 100 days to getting work for underserved people, then policies — not conversations — would do much more to prepare black America to take advantage of those opportunities.

What if, instead of calling for a conversation, Mrs. Clinton had called for revitalized support for vocational schooling to help get poor black people into solid jobs that don’t require a college degree? Or an end to the war on drugs, which furnishes a black market that tempts underserved black men away from legal work. Or ensuring cheap, universal access to long-acting reversible contraceptives, to help poor women (who praise these devices) control when they start families. Or phonics-based reading programs, which are proved to be the key to teaching poor kids how to read. All poor black kids should have access to them just as they get free breakfasts.

These narrow policy proposals may not have the emotional reach of a conversation, and in and of themselves they will not stop the next Philando Castile either. But they would do more for black America than any amount of formulaic dialogues, or exploring the subtle contours of whites’ inner feelings about black people. Maybe there could be compromise: Let’s have a national conversation, but make it about legislation, not feelings.

SCHOOL: remember to focus, focus, focus - on the economic dimension

stateofthenation2012 |  At the end of the day racial tensions are always the result of fierce economic competition. Race wars are actually class wars in disguise. Race riots occur during times of great financial duress.  Racial hatreds are easily inflamed when those on the other side of the tracks appear to be doing better.  The greater the divide between the 1% and the 99% the more anger and rage, frustration and discouragement will be vented.

The Obama Administration is already well-known for willfully neglecting the black communities throughout the nation.  Obama’s complete lack of sound economic policy and necessary financial restraint have pushed the nation to a monetary collapse and fiscal bankruptcy.  Truly, the political, economic and social consequences of Obama’s systematic destruction of American enterprise is catastrophic.  Obamacare alone has served to shudder countless businesses across the country.  The poor black communities have essentially shunned that cost-prohibitive scheme designed to enrich health insurance companies.

One need look no further than the city of Detroit (and Obama’s hometown Chicago) to understand the degree of Obama’s willful neglect.  That city resembles nothing short of an apocalyptic wasteland.  Having a predominantly black population, Detroit has nevertheless received very little federal assistance, financial aid or emergency relief (like when the water is shut off).  Just how long can such a dire situation continue before a ‘racial’ conflagration occurs.  Financial desperation will always push the economically oppressed into desperate actions.

This Administration is quite aware of their gross failure in regard to economic recovery because the Congressional Black Caucus has told them so repeatedly.  Many of the more honest minority state representatives have admitted that Obama has proven to be an unmitigated disaster for black America.  In fact he has done very little regarding the critical causes of community renewal, business development and genuine black empowerment.

Because of their monumental failure, Obama and his racist cohorts have chosen to play the race card at every opportunity as a means of misdirection.  By inciting racial tensions, race riots, and race wars their own profound failings are covered up.  By continually misdirecting the peoples’ attention to genuine or fictitious acts of racism, the root causes of the coming class war are never exposed so that they can be addressed.

Always and everywhere - remember the lessons you've learned at school.

When Reality is Too Much

the absolute certainty that nottingham gotta go, gotta go, gotta go....,

theatlantic |  Last week, 25-year-old Micah Xavier Johnson murdered five police officers in Dallas. This abhorrent act of political extremism cannot be divorced from American history—recent or old. In black communities, the police departments have only enjoyed a kind of quasi-legitimacy. That is because wanton discrimination is definitional to the black experience, and very often it is law enforcement which implements that discrimination with violence. A community consistently subjected to violent discrimination under the law will lose respect for it, and act beyond it. When such actions stretch to mass murder it is horrific. But it is also predictable.

To understand the lack of police legitimacy in black communities, consider the contempt in which most white Americans hold O.J. Simpson. Consider their feelings toward the judge and jury in the case. And then consider that this is approximately how black people have felt every few months for generations. It’s not just that the belief that Officer Timothy Loehmann got away with murdering a 12-year-old Tamir Rice, it is the reality that police officers have been getting away with murdering black people since the advent of American policing. The injustice compounds, congeals until there is an almost tangible sense of dread and grievance that compels a community to understand the police as objects of fear, not respect.

What does it mean, for instance, that black children are ritually told that any stray movement in the face of the police might result in their own legal killing? When Eric Holder spoke about getting “The Talk” from his father, and then giving it to his own son, many of us nodded our heads. But many more of us were terrified. When the nation’s top cop must warn his children to be skeptical of his own troops, how legitimate can the police actually be?

And it is not as if Holder is imagining things. When the law shoots down12-year-old children, or beats down old women on traffic islands, or chokes people to death over cigarettes; when the law shoots people over compact discs,traffic stops,drivers’ licenses,loud conversation, orcar trouble; when the law auctions off its monopoly on lethal violence to bemused civilians, when these civilians then kill, and when their victims are mocked in their death throes; when people stand up to defend police as officers of the state, and when these defenders are killed by these very same officers; when much of this is recorded, uploaded, live-streamed, tweeted, and broadcast; and when government seems powerless, or unwilling, to stop any of it, then it ceases, in the eyes of citizens, to be any sort of respectable law at all. It simply becomes “force.”

In the black community, it’s the force they deploy, and not any higher American ideal, that gives police their power. This is obviously dangerous for those who are policed. Less appreciated is the danger illegitimacy ultimately poses to those who must do the policing. For if the law represents nothing but the greatest force, then it really is indistinguishable from any other street gang. And if the law is nothing but a gang, then it is certain that someone will resort to the kind of justice typically meted out to all other powers in the street.

a lot of people get a basic fact wrong about criminal justice

WaPo |  The bipartisan congressional effort to reform federal criminal penalties has stalled, with little prospect of progress until autumn at the earliest. If you fear that Congress’ inaction could undermine the nation’s recent progress toward reversing mass incarceration, it may be helpful to reflect upon an underappreciated fact about American criminal justice: The number of people in prison has little to do with what happens in Washington.

In some policy areas, including health care, military affairs and the economy, the most consequential political decisions are made in the nation’s capital. But in the criminal justice system, states, cities and counties are the central players. For every federal law enforcement agent, about a half-dozen state highway patrol officers, county sheriffs and city police patrol the streets. Similarly, less than one-seventh of the country’s prison inmates are in federal facilities.

Because the federal prison system is so small, even dramatic congressional reforms in federal criminal penalties would have only a modest impact on the level of incarceration in the United States. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was thus making an empty promise when he pledged to reduce the number of prisoners in the United States below that of China: Not even granting presidential pardons to every single federal prisoner would achieve this goal.

milk and coerce your peasants, don't just slaughter them...,

bloomberg |  A new study shows that blacks and Hispanics in the U.S. are more than twice as likely as whites to "experience some form of force in interactions with police," but no more likely to experience the most "extreme use of force -- officer-involved shootings." That finding can be important to de-escalating the kind of violence that culminated with the tragedy in Dallas last week.

Roland G. Fryer, a Harvard economist, says his anger about the killings of blacks by police drove him to look into the data. The resulting paper, unsurprisingly, showed that blacks and Hispanics have more violent interactions with police -- being grabbed, pushed into a wall or onto the ground, having a gun pointed at them. The study looked at more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments, and found that even after correcting for various circumstances of the encounters -- such as the crime rate in the areas where they occurred -- the race effect remains. And non-whites are likely to be subjected to force even when they are compliant with police requests.

Fryer, however, was surprised to discover that lethal force is more infrequently applied to blacks and Hispanics than to whites. Using a dataset from Houston, Texas, he calculated that blacks were 23.8 percent less likely to be fired upon by police than whites. "Partitioning the data in myriad ways, we find no evidence of racial discrimination in officer-involved shootings," he wrote.

sheriff of nottinghamism at epidemic levels...,

HuffPo |  How are your local courts and jails funded? If your community is like most of America, chances are the criminal justice system itself has become a revenue collection service - with problematic results.

Every state except Alaska, North Dakota, and DC has increased civil and criminal fees since 2010. Many charge for services that are constitutionally required and were once free. As states and local governments have felt the pinch from the 2008 economic crash, they have turned to fines and fees to fill in budget gaps.

The most famous example is in Ferguson, Missouri. The U.S. Justice Department’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department exposed how the department collects fines and fees not for the sake of public safety, but to raise money for city government. The FPD revenue targets in 2015 accounted for 20% of the city’s operating budget.

Or listen to Jared Thornburg, in Westminister, Colorado. He was ticketed for making an illegal left turn. But because he had lost his job after a serious workplace injury, he couldn’t pay the ticket. He found a new job - but the day before he started, he was arrested for not paying the fines, which had escalated from $165 to $306. He was sentenced to 10 days in jail, which cost that city $70 per night. As Jared points out, “It cost the taxpayers more than what my fine was for and it just wasted 10 days of my life.”

It adds up to what Bill Mauer, from the Institute of Justice, calls “taxation by citation.” This reliance on fines and fees to cover fiscal gaps brings along with it four main problems.

separate but equal?

DOTE |  First, and just to get this point out of the way, Johnson's "killing spree" was totally meaningless unless one deems it meaningful that humans have big brains which can go haywire and often do. If you follow that uncomfortable truth to the end of the line, you risk becoming a social pariah. Few take that path!

Secondly, what we see above is that the shooting or abuse of unarmed black men by white police officers, which is routine in the United States, has been conflated with the actions of a single black man whose big brain had gone haywire. These incidents are taken to be separate but somehow equal. What's wrong with this picture?

I'll tell you what's wrong with it — in the former case, we're talking about a real and alarming trend reflecting implicit racial bias, whereas in the latter ("killing spree") case, we're talking about a one-off. Big brains go haywire all the time, but let's be specific:

How many times have black men armed with assault rifles carried out sniper-style attacks on white police officers?

Never! — until last week (as far as I know, and read here). Certainly there's no trend.

How many times have white police officers killed unarmed black men since January 2015?

Police have shot and killed a young black man (ages 18 to 29) — such as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. —175 times since January 2015; 24 of them were unarmed. Over that same period, police have shot and killed 172 young white men, 18 of whom were unarmed. Once again, while in raw number there were similar totals of white and black victims, blacks were killed at rates disproportionate to their percentage of the U.S. population.

Of all of the unarmed men shot and killed by police in 2015, 40 percent of them were black, even though black men make up just 6 percent of the nation’s population.
And, when considering shootings confined within a single race, a black person shot and killed by police is more likely to have been unarmed than a white person. About 13 percent of all black people who have been fatally shot by police since January 2015 were unarmed, compared with 7 percent of all white people.

Perhaps these raw statistics don't seem quite as damning as Black Lives Matter people would like to argue, but we are talking about only the most extreme cases here — black people were shot and killed. What about "less extreme" cases like this? (Vox, July 7, 2016). This incident is described by a former St. Louis police officer who is black. Reading this account requires a strong stomach.

As a new officer with the St. Louis in the mid-1990s, I responded to a call for an "officer in need of aid." I was partnered that day with a white female officer. When we got to the scene, it turned out that the officer was fine, and the aid call was canceled. He'd been in a foot pursuit chasing a suspect in an armed robbery and lost him.

The officer I was with asked him if he'd seen where the suspect went. The officer picked a house on the block we were on, and we went to it and knocked on the door. A young man about 18 years old answered the door, partially opening it and peering out at my partner and me. He was standing on crutches. My partner accused him of harboring a suspect. He denied it. He said that this was his family's home and he was home alone.
My partner then forced the door the rest of the way open, grabbed him by his throat, and snatched him out of the house onto the front porch. She took him to the ledge of the porch and, still holding him by the throat, punched him hard in the face and then in the groin. My partner that day snatched an 18-year-old kid off crutches and assaulted him, simply for stating the fact that he was home alone.

I got the officer off of him. But because an aid call had gone out, several other officers had arrived on the scene. One of those officers, who was black, ascended the stairs and asked what was going on. My partner pointed to the young man, still lying on the porch, and said, "That son of a bitch just assaulted me." The black officer then went up to the young man and told him to "get the fuck up, I'm taking you in for assaulting an officer." The young man looked up at the officer and said, "Man ... you see I can't go." His crutches lay not far from him.

The officer picked him up, cuffed him, and slammed him into the house, where he was able to prop himself up by leaning against it. The officer then told him again to get moving to the police car on the street because he was under arrest. The young man told him one last time, in a pleading tone that was somehow angry at the same time, "You see I can't go!" The officer reached down and grabbed both the young man's ankles and yanked up. This caused the young man to strike his head on the porch. The officer then dragged him to the police car. We then searched the house. No one was in it.

And the point is...

These kinds of scenes play themselves out everyday all over our country in black and brown communities.

Beyond the many unarmed blacks killed by police, including recently Freddie Gray in Baltimore, other police abuses that don't result in death foment resentment, distrust, and malice toward police in black and brown communities all over the country. Long before Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed Michael Brown last August, there was a poisonous relationship between the Ferguson, Missouri, department and the community it claimed to serve. For example, in 2009 Henry Davis was stopped unlawfully in Ferguson, taken to the police station, and brutally beaten while in handcuffs. He was then charged for bleeding on the officers' uniforms after they beat him.

So every time somebody treats that Dallas killing spree — blue lives matter — as akin to police brutality against black people in the United States — black lives matter — you can say "bullshit!" because that's what it is.

white house petition to declare BLM a terraist organization...,

RT |  Black Lives Matter has come under fire from over 100,000 people who have signed on to have the anti-police brutality group classified as a terrorist organization in a White House petition. However, the signatories may learn that petitions don’t matter. 

A petition seeking to classify the civil rights organization Black Lives Matter as a terrorist outfit has exceeded 100,000 signatures on the White House’s petition center, We the People. Any initiative that receives at least 100,000 signatures is placed on a list of pending petitions to which the administration must respond within 60 days.

The author of the petition, known only as Y.S., created the petition a day after Alton Sterling was killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the same day that Philando Castile was shot during a traffic stop in a St. Paul, Minnesota suburb.

pentagon studying and operationally targetting peaceful protest movements...,

guardian |  Among my questions, I asked:

"Does the US Department of Defense see protest movements and social activism in different parts of the world as a threat to US national security? If so, why? Does the US Department of Defense consider political movements aiming for large scale political and economic change as a national security matter? If so, why? Activism, protest, 'political movements' and of course NGOs are a vital element of a healthy civil society and democracy - why is it that the DoD is funding research to investigate such issues?"

Minerva's programme director Dr Erin Fitzgerald said "I appreciate your concerns and am glad that you reached out to give us the opportunity to clarify" before promising a more detailed response. Instead, I received the following bland statement from the DoD's press office:

"The Department of Defense takes seriously its role in the security of the United States, its citizens, and US allies and partners. While every security challenge does not cause conflict, and every conflict does not involve the US military, Minerva helps fund basic social science research that helps increase the Department of Defense's understanding of what causes instability and insecurity around the world. By better understanding these conflicts and their causes beforehand, the Department of Defense can better prepare for the dynamic future security environment."

In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in collaboration with the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate change. The three-year $1.9 million project is developing models to anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.

From the outset, the Minerva programme was slated to provide over $75 million over five years for social and behavioural science research. This year alone it has been allocated a total budget of $17.8 million by US Congress.

An internal Minerva staff email communication referenced in a 2012 Masters dissertation reveals that the programme is geared toward producing quick results that are directly applicable to field operations. The dissertation was part of a Minerva-funded project on "counter-radical Muslim discourse" at Arizona State University. 

The internal email from Prof Steve Corman, a principal investigator for the project, describes a meeting hosted by the DoD's Human Social Cultural and Behavioural Modeling (HSCB) programme in which senior Pentagon officials said their priority was "to develop capabilities that are deliverable quickly" in the form of "models and tools that can be integrated with operations."

surveillance is meant to crush citizen dissent, not catch terra-ists...,

washingtonsblog |  While many Americans understand why the NSA is conducting mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, some are still confused about what’s really going on.

In his new book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald writes:

The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalised and deserving group of those “doing wrong” – the bad people – ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong” in the eyes of such institutions encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behaviour and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat.

The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism – Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, anti-war activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they were all “doing something wrong”: political activity that threatened the prevailing order.

The FBI’s domestic counterintelligence programme, Cointelpro, was first exposed by a group of anti-war activists who had become convinced that the anti-war movement had been infiltrated, placed under surveillance and targeted with all sorts of dirty tricks. Lacking documentary evidence to prove it and unsuccessful in convincing journalists to write about their suspicions, they broke into an FBI branch office in Pennsylvania in 1971 and carted off thousands of documents.

Files related to Cointelpro showed how the FBI had targeted political groups and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, black nationalist movements, socialist and communist organizations, anti-war protesters and various rightwing groups. The bureau had infiltrated them with agents who, among other things, attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them.

Those revelations led to the creation of the Senate Church Committee, which concluded: “[Over the course of 15 years] the bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilate operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of first amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”

These incidents were not aberrations of the era. During the Bush years, for example, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed, as the group put it in 2006, “new details of Pentagon surveillance of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, including Quakers and student groups“. The Pentagon was “keeping tabs on non-violent protesters by collecting information and storing it in a military anti-terrorism database”. The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who “have done something wrong” should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing.

The opportunity those in power have to characterise political opponents as “national security threats” or even “terrorists” has repeatedly proven irresistible. In the past decade, the government, in an echo of Hoover’s FBI, has formally so designated environmental activists, broad swaths of anti-government rightwing groups, anti-war activists, and associations organised around Palestinian rights. Some individuals within those broad categories may deserve the designation, but undoubtedly most do not, guilty only of holding opposing political views. Yet such groups are routinely targeted for surveillance by the NSA and its partners.

One document from the Snowden files, dated 3 October 2012, chillingly underscores the point. It revealed that the agency has been monitoring the online activities of individuals it believes express “radical” ideas and who have a “radicalising” influence on others.

***

The NSA explicitly states that none of the targeted individuals is a member of a terrorist organisation or involved in any terror plots. Instead, their crime is the views they express, which are deemed “radical“, a term that warrants pervasive surveillance and destructive campaigns to “exploit vulnerabilities”.

Among the information collected about the individuals, at least one of whom is a “US person”, are details of their online sex activities and “online promiscuity” – the porn sites they visit and surreptitious sex chats with women who are not their wives. The agency discusses ways to exploit this information to destroy their reputations and credibility.

so long as the US populace accepts that it's white v black and not state v us, the state wins...,

theantimedia |  It is extremely important to note that in all of recorded history, an insurgency that matured through the phases and reached this stage has never been quelled through force. Ever. It may have been delayed, but the insurgency simply went underground until opposition forces relaxed. In some cases it took 800 years to achieve an insurgent victory. Once an insurgency reaches this stage, it wins. It is that simple. See: Irish Republic Army.

At this point, in a form of bizarre just deserts, the only option law enforcement has is the same option it offered to the American people, which prompted this cycle: comply or die.

Certain police departments may believe they are isolated from the violence because of their geographic location. They aren’t. Because of social media, events that historically would have only prompted violence within the immediate vicinity can prompt violence on the other side of the nation. We are so close to an open insurrection in this country that it boggles the mind. If police proceed with a law enforcement crackdown, events could spiral out of control and open insurrection could happen tomorrow.

Some in the media are calling for the arrests of the leaders of Black Lives Matter, Cop Block, and other organizations. This is possibly the worst move law enforcement could make. This gives the cause martyrs. To continue the Irish comparison, after the Easter Rising the British government arrested, interned, and even executed some of the rebellion’s leaders. The names of those men are still recited in songs today, 100 years later. It fanned the flames of rebellion and as Éamon de Valera is said to have  remarked while waiting for the British government to decide between executing or imprisoning him, “every one of us they shoot brings ten more to the cause.” Today, with social media, the effects of martyr-based propaganda are even stronger. As a more recent example, ask those associated with the Anonymous collective how much influence people like Jeremy Hammond, Aaron Swartz, and Dennis Collins hold. Two of them are deceased, one sits rotting in a federal prison, and yet they are still massive recruiting tools.

Is this guy really saying to give in to violence? Yes. That is exactly what I am saying. There was an opportunity for a negotiated peace after Ferguson. Law enforcement chose to refuse. Law enforcement chose to dismiss the threat. Law enforcement chose to listen to pundits within the media that were only interested in pandering to their viewers. Now, that time has past. My best advice: immediately decommission the MRAPs, end no-knock raids for non-violent offenders, make certain the suspect is home and that you have the correct house before executing a raid, issue body cameras to all officers, end intrusive electronic surveillance, decommission the drones, and adopt a “do not fire until fired upon” policy. The end result of this scenario will be law enforcement demilitarizing; the only thing left to determine is how many cops and innocents die along the way.

Those in political office do not care about police officers’ lives. The last time the United States came this close to an open insurrection we had a President that understood insurgency. In fact, he understood it so well that he is responsible for the SEAL Teams and Green Berets having the role they have today. He understood that once it reaches a certain point, violent revolution is inevitable. He said:

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”

uh..., is there seriously ANY QUESTION concerning the identity of the race war team?!?!?!?!

slate |  This is the central thing to understand about what happened in Dallas: Black people who target whites are fundamentally allied with white people who target blacks. They’re on the same team: the race war team. It’s a lot like the global struggle over jihadism, in which Muslims who hate Christians collaborate, in effect, with Christians who hate Muslims. In the case of jihadism, the real struggle isn’t between two religions. It’s between people who want religious war and people who don’t. The same is true of race: Either you’re on the race war team, or you’re against it.

The attack in Dallas—allegedly committed by Micah Johnson, a black man—comes barely a year after a white man, Dylann Roof, allegedly shot nine black people to death in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof told friends, and later police, that he wanted “to start a race war.” “He wanted it to be white with white, and black with black,” said a friend.

white america's biggest fear...,

WaPo |  They struggle to believe that the human indignity of being seen, apparently, as only a close-range shooting target by so many of those entrusted to protect and serve, can produce such heinousness. They refuse to understand what it means to be shot by police at 2.5 times the rate of whites, as are black males, according the The Washington Post’s database.

They don’t, or maybe can’t, comprehend what it is like to know that you make up 24 percent of all deaths at the end of law enforcement’s muzzle despite being just 12 percent of the population.

Instead, they’ve tried to find another reason Johnson could turn into a Charles. Maybe he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after his tour in Afghanistan? Maybe he was otherwise mentally disturbed? Maybe he was radicalized?

Especially for the families of the victims of Johnson’s outburst, he understandably will be seen forever as the madman he became. But as the best-selling white author of many sports books, Peter Golenbock, noted on Facebook on Friday: “For years we have seen the pictures of senseless murders of black men and children by white policemen. Afterwards, the cops are rarely indicted and never convicted.”

Golenbock continued, before knowing Johnson was the sole shooter: “After all these years a group of blacks, tired of this and obviously military trained, started shooting back in Dallas yesterday at white cops, and now everyone is scared to death. What is surprising is that this hasn’t occurred earlier.”

What is fortunate for America is that most black people, like those in the #BlackLivesMatter movement who marched that dreadful Thursday in downtown Dallas, just seek a fairer shake.

hillary escaped due process over drones and micah was denied due process by a drone....,

ronpaulinstitute |  This was a drone sent in to kill an American suspected of a crime.

Police claim that continuing the negotiations was pointless and attempting to capture him would have put officers at risk. He was supposedly shooting. While no sane person wants police officers to be killed, risk is something we are told they willingly accept when they sign up for police duty. There are plenty of low-risk jobs out there.

The media and opinion-leaders are presenting us with a false choice: if we question the use of drones to kill Americans -- even if we suspect they have done very bad things -- we somehow do not care about the lives of police officers. That is not the case. It is perfectly possible to not want police officers to be killed in the line of duty but to wholeheartedly reject the idea of authorities using drones to remotely kill Americans before they are found guilty.

African-American Dallas protester Mark Hughes was wrongly identified by Dallas Police as a suspect in the shootings. Police tweeted photos of Hughes marching with protesters openly carrying a rifle, as is permitted in Texas. Police claimed was involved in the shooting. He was a suspect just like Johnson was a suspect. During questioning they told Hughes that they had video of him shooting people, which was a lie. What if police had sent in a drone to take out Mark Hughes? What will happen in the future to a future Mark Hughes, falsely accused by police of being involved in a shooting? Will we come to accept murder without trial?

first the unnecessariat, then the precariat, now even illegal farm workers gotta go, gotta go, gotta go!!!

marketwatch |  I remember reading a piece about farmers using drones, and I must say I was impressed. 

For farmers, the transition from manned aircraft to drones is an easy choice to make. Not only are they much cheaper, but they also provide imaging tools, which can be used for detecting a variety of crop-related issues, ranging from problems with irrigation to measuring chlorophyll levels in plants.

So today I want to talk about the next step in agri-tech evolution: robots. Although most modern farmers don’t have to spend their days in the field anymore, sweating and toiling under the sun while harvesting crops or tending to cattle, they still spend a considerable amount of time servicing machines that harvest and spray for them. If this part of the production were automated, farmers would have more time (and money) to invest in expanding and perfecting their production capacities. 

They’d also boost yields in the process. 

If you think using robots in agriculture is too futuristic, think again: They are already assisting with a growing number of back-breaking activities in fields all over the world.

how is that community policing going in Iraq and Afghanistan again?!?!?!?!?!

WaPo |  I’m afraid that incidents such as those of the past several days will reinforce a view that violence is not only justified but appropriate. That such incidents will drive police and the communities they serve further apart, dampening any interest in reconciliation.

But I’m also optimistic. Even relationships that have been undermined by a long history of distrust and anger can be repaired. We have seen some remarkable progress in truly challenging situations, including police departments in Richmond, Calif., and Camden, N.J., just to name a few. 

We can learn from those successes, and from successes outside the United States. In Northern Ireland, for example, police and the Irish Republican Army were in a state approaching open warfare for years before establishing a tentative, then more lasting, relationship in the late 1990s. More recently, U.S. military personnel put community policing principles into practice with great effect in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

If positive relationships can be established or repaired in those environments, surely we can do the same in the context of domestic policing. Surely we must.