most legendary wild west outlaws were confederate guerrillas and bushwhackers...,

wikipedia |  Jesse Woodson James (September 5, 1847 – April 3, 1882) was an American outlaw, gang leader, bank robber, train robber, and murderer from the state of Missouri and the most famous member of the James-Younger Gang. Already a celebrity when he was alive, he became a legendary figure of the Wild West after his death. Some recent scholars place him in the context of regional insurgencies of ex-Confederates following the American Civil War rather than a manifestation of frontier lawlessness or alleged economic justice.^[1]

Jesse and his brother Frank James were Confederate guerrillas, or Bushwhackers, during the Civil War. They were accused of participating in atrocities committed against Union soldiers, including the Centralia Massacre. After the war, as members of various gangs of outlaws, they robbed banks, stagecoaches, and trains. Despite popular portrayals of James as an embodiment of Robin Hood, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, there is no evidence that he and his gang shared their loot from the robberies they committed.^[2]

The James brothers were most active with their gang from about 1866 until 1876, when their attempted robbery of a bank in Northfield, Minnesota resulted in the capture or deaths of several gang members. They continued in crime for several years, recruiting new members, but were under increasing pressure from law enforcement. On April 3, 1882, Jesse James was killed by a member of his own gang, Robert Ford, who hoped to collect a reward on James' head.

like stick em up there's dirty history involved with overseers labor unions...,

jacobinmag |   Their profession is heavily unionized. Culturally, they have more in common with bus drivers than business executives. Many come from working-class backgrounds.

Yet on the beat, police come in contact with — to question, to arrest, to brutalize — the most disadvantaged. This presents a problem for radicals. If the Left stands for anything, it’s worker emancipation and labor militancy. But police and others in the state’s coercive apparatus, workers themselves in many respects, are the keepers of class society. Their jobs exist to maintain social control and protect the status quo.

The introduction of unions to this portion of the state raises additional concerns. Can “coercive unions” ever advocate for the broader working class, rather than members’ narrow self-interests? Or are police unions irredeemably reactionary?

It’s easy to focus on the individual over the institution. Not a few police officers are drawn to the profession out of a desire to “serve the public.” Many genuinely want to serve, and take great pride in their chosen occupation. Police don’t have to enjoy breaking up protests; they don’t have to be racists or hate homeless people. But once they decide to do their jobs, institutional exigencies overwhelm personal volition. When there’s mass resistance to poverty and inequality, it’s the cops who are summoned to calm the panic-stricken hearts of the elite. They bash some heads, or infiltrate and disrupt some activist groups, and all is right in the world again.

Such is the inherent defect of law-enforcement unionism: It’s peopled by those with a material interest in maintaining and enlarging the state’s most indefensible practices.

It’s hard to imagine how it could be any different. Chicago teachers, exemplifying the kind of social-movement unionism that defends the working class broadly, organized the community before their strike by trumpeting a vision of equitable education. The Left cheered. How could anything similar be achieved by prison guards? A police strike would appear to signal an incipient authoritarianism, cops untamed by democratic dictates. How could empowering police — increasingly militarized and shot through with a culture of preening brutality — yield anything but stepped-up repression? How could the traditional socialist goal of worker self-management result in anything but a dystopia of metastasizing prisons, imperious cops, and Minuteman-esque border-patrol guards? The best we can hope for from police, it seems, is passivity.

As Kristian Williams documents in Our Enemies in Blue, professionalized policing arose in the United States amid urbanization in the 1820s and 1830s. Controlling “dangerous” classes (principally of the industrial working variety), more than ameliorating any pronounced spike in crime, was the reason for its formation. The institution had its roots in slave patrols, which were established to control the behavior of slaves — the “dangerous” classes of that day.

how police unions and arbitrators keep abusive overseers on the streets

theatlantic |  When Frank Serpico, the most famous police whistleblower of his generation, reflected on years of law-enforcement corruption in the New York Police Department, he assigned substantial blame to a commissioner who failed to hold rank-and-file cops accountable. That's the classic template for police abuse: misbehaving cops are spared punishment by colleagues and bosses who cover for them.

There are, of course, police officers who are fired for egregious misbehavior by commanding officers who decide that a given abuse makes them unfit for a badge and gun. Yet all over the U.S., police unions help many of those cops to get their jobs back, often via secretive appeals geared to protect labor rights rather than public safety. Cops deemed unqualified by their own bosses are put back on the streets. Their colleagues get the message that police all but impervious to termination.

That isn't to say that every officer who is fired deserves it, or that every reinstated cop represents a miscarriage of justice. In theory, due process before a neutral arbiter could even protect blue whistleblowers from wrongful termination. But in practice, too many cops who needlessly kill people, use excessive force, or otherwise abuse their authority are getting reprieves from termination.

la quenelle americain?

WaPo |  "'Hands up; don't shoot' is a rallying cry of people all across America who are fed up with police violence," Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said from the floor of the House on Monday night. And to punctuate the point, he mimicked the gesture that goes with the cry. He put his hands up.

ok yankee, stick em up! (damn it's hard to find cowboy movie stick-up clips)

mcmillandictionary |  [transitive] very informal to steal money or goods from a person or place using a gun

an attempt to stick up a local bank

[spoken] Thesaurus entry for this meaning of stick up

stick 'em up spoken if someone with a gun tells you to stick 'em up, they are ordering you to raise your arms above your head, usually because they are going to steal money or goods from you

thai's give the three-finger salute to their gun-wielding stick-up kids in uniform...,

NYTimes |  A Thai theater chain has withdrawn the latest “Hunger Games” movie after several student protesters were detained for using a gesture taken from the films, a three-finger salute of resistance to authoritarian government.

The salute, which in the movies is a daring act of silent rebellion, began to appear here in the weeks after the May 22 coup. The authorities warned that anyone raising it in public could be subject to arrest.

The military government in Thailand has clamped down on all forms of protest, censored the country’s news media, limited the right to public assembly and arrested critics and opponents. Hundreds of academics, journalists and activists have been detained for up to a month, according to Human Rights Watch.

The arrests came on Wednesday, before the premiere in Thailand of “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1.” Five students in T-shirts bearing the slogan “We don’t want the coup” flashed the sign during a speech by Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who led the coup and later became head of the military government.

The students were quickly detained by the police, who handed them over to military authorities.

Army officials later confirmed that the students were held for several hours for “attitude adjustment” and then released. They were told to report back the next day with their parents and still could be charged with violating martial law.

where oh where is dieudonné?

wikipedia |  Various public figures such as Tony Parker, Nicolas Anelka and National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen were pictured making the gesture.^[13] A new trend has emerged, consisting of performing quenelles beside unwitting public figures identified as members of the establishment (such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, Pierre Bergé or Manuel Valls^[20]) or in front of the media's cameras. TV host Yann Barthès publicly apologized for quenelles made by someone in the audience during his show and revealed the identity of the author. Shortly afterwards, a picture of Yann Barthès himself performing a quenelle surfaced on social networks. Barthès argued that he didn't know what he was doing when the picture was taken.^[21] Several people have been fired for having published photos of them performing quenelles^[22][23] and some people have been assaulted for the same reason.^[24] Two teenagers were arrested for having performed a quenelle at school.^[25]

While Dieudonné said in August 2013 that "the quenelle had taken on a life of its own and had become something he could no longer claim as his exclusively," his wife Noémie Montagne registered the quenelle as a trademark with the French National Industrial Property Institute.^[13][26]

By professional athletes

When French footballer Nicolas Anelka of West Bromwich Albion F.C. performed the quenelle to celebrate scoring a goal on 28 December 2013, the gesture, which was already considered "something of a viral trend" in France,^[27] became an international news story and one of the most searched terms on Google.^[28] Anelka described the gesture as anti-establishment rather than religious in nature, and said he did a quenelle as a "special dedication" to his friend Dieudonné.^[27][29] However, French minister for sport Valérie Fourneyron called his actions "shocking" and "disgusting", adding: "There's no place for anti-Semitism on the football field."^[27] A subsequent statement released by West Bromwich said Anelka agreed not to perform the quenelle again,^[30] but nevertheless on 27 February 2014, Anelka was banned for five matches and fined £80,000 for this action.^[31] In response to the incident, club sponsor Zoopla announced that it would not continue its sponsorship deal with West Bromwich after the 2013–14 season.^[29] Dieudonné, who intended to visit and support Anelka in England, was banned from entry to the United Kingdom in February 2014.^[32] Anelka was subsequently sacked by West Brom on 15 March 2014.

In November 2013, a photograph of French footballer Mamadou Sakho performing the quenelle with Dieudonné was discovered. Sakho said he had been tricked into making a quenelle without knowing its meaning, and that the photo had been taken six months earlier.^[33]

Following the Anelka incident, a photograph surfaced of Tony Parker, a French professional basketball player who currently plays for the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association (NBA), performing the quenelle alongside Dieudonné. Parker apologized, saying he didn't know at the time that "it could be in any way offensive or harmful."^[34]

corrupt overseer rooda a thug union leader and legislator opposed to video evidence of overseer misconduct...,

slate |  After several members of the St. Louis Rams NFL team made a "hands up" gesture of solidarity with Ferguson protesters before the team's home game yesterday, a group called the St. Louis Police Officers Association issued a statement criticizing the players. The group's statement quoted its business manager, Jeff Roorda:

The SLPOA is calling for the players involved to be disciplined and for the Rams and the NFL to deliver a very public apology. Roorda said he planned to speak to the NFL and the Rams to voice his organization's displeasure tomorrow. He also plans to reach out to other police organizations in St. Louis and around the country to enlist their input on what the appropriate response from law enforcement should be. Roorda warned, "I know that there are those that will say that these players are simply exercising their First Amendment rights. Well I've got news for people who think that way, cops have first amendment [sic] rights too, and we plan to exercise ours. I'd remind the NFL and their players that it is not the violent thugs burning down buildings that buy their advertiser's [sic] products. It's cops and the good people of St. Louis and other NFL towns that do.

The St. Louis Police Officers Association is a union that represents city officers in collective bargaining and lobbies legislators; it appears to have been around for at least 46 years. Roorda himself has been in the news before: In 2001 he was fired from his police job in Arnold, a Missouri city about 20 miles from St. Louis, after making what an investigation determined to be a false accusation of abusive behavior against his police chief during a dispute over paid leave. The department's justification for his termination made reference to a previous incident in which Roorda had lied on a police report. From a Missouri Court of Appeals ruling upholding his firing:

google |  Jeffrey Roorda is a Democratic member of the Missouri House of Representatives and a corrupt police officer. He has been serving in the house since 2013. Wikipedia

gladiators worth far more than overseers on this chessboard...,

usatoday |  The NFL will not adhere to a request from the St. Louis Police Officer’s Association to discipline St. Louis Rams players who did the “hands up, don’t shoot” pose used by protesters in Ferguson, Mo. during pre-game introductions on Sunday.

“We respect and understand the concerns of all individuals who have expressed views on this tragic situation,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said in a statement to USA TODAY Sports.

The police officer’s association issued a letter late Sunday condemning the players’ actions as “tasteless, offensive and inflammatory” given a grand jury’s decision not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of black teenager Michael Brown.

Five Rams players raised their hands as they walked out of the tunnel onto the field at the Edwards Jones Dome before Sunday’s game against the Oakland Raiders.

Wide receiver Stedman Bailey said he and his teammates decided to make the gesture shortly before the game, and intended it to be something positive.

“Violence should stop. There’s a lot of violence going on here in St. Louis. We definitely hear about it all, and we just want it to stop,” Bailey told reporters after the game.

Tight end Jared Cook said he and his teammates wanted to show solidarity with protesters, because they had not been able to physically join them since the grand jury’s announcement was made last week. Cook said his family members went to Ferguson last week and reported back to him what they saw.

“It’s dangerous out there. None of us want to get caught up in that. We wanted to come out and show our respect to the protesters that have been doing a heck of a job,” Cook said.

bird bomb

NBC | KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan police said they are investigating how a wild bird came to bear an antenna, electronic devices and explosives. Police came across the strange sight around 8 a.m. in the northern Faryab province, a volatile region ravaged by Taliban violence. When police spotted the white bird — which isn't native to the area and appeared larger than an eagle — walking along a highway, they noticed it had an antenna and decided to shoot it, provincial police chief Maj. Gen. Abdul Nabi Ilham told NBC News on Saturday. The bird then exploded, he said, and "suspicious metal stuff" scattered around.

wanderers

Erik Wernquist | Best viewed full-screen.

WANDERERS is a short science fiction film by Erik Wernquist (that´s me) - a digital artist and animator from Stockholm, Sweden.

The film is a vision of our humanity's future expansion into the Solar System. Although admittedly speculative, the visuals in the film are all based on scientific ideas and concepts of what our future in space might look like, if it ever happens. All the locations depicted in the film are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System, built from real photos and map data where available. For those interested in learning more of the places featured in the film, I recommend turning to the gallery section.

The title WANDERERS refer partly to the original meaning of the word "planet". In ancient greek, the planets visible in the sky were collectively called "aster planetes" which means "wandering star". It also refers to ourselves; for hundreds of thousands of years - the wanderers of the Earth. In time I hope we take that leap off the ground and permanently become wanderers of the sky. Wanderers among the wanderers.
There is no apparent story - other than what you might imagine for yourself - and the idea is primarily to show a glimpse of the fantastic and beautiful nature that surrounds us on our neighboring worlds - and above all, how it might appear to us if we were there.

how english describes color vs. how chinese describes color...,

Here's a fascinating visualization created by Muyueh Lee that shows the differences between how the English language and Chinese language each describe colors.

triangulating the long arc of the inevitable endgame...,

oxfordjournals |  Western cultures encourage self-construals independent of social contexts whereas East Asian cultures foster interdependent self-construals that rely on how others perceive the self. How are culturally specific self-construals mediated by the human brain? Using functional MRI, we monitored neural responses from adults in East Asian (Chinese) and Western (Danish) cultural contexts during judgments of social, mental, and physical attributes of themselves and public figures to assess cultural influences on self-referential processing of personal attributes in different dimensions. We found that judgments of self vs. a public figure elicited greater activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in Danish than in Chinese participants regardless of attribute dimensions for judgments. However, self-judgments of social attributes induced greater activity in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) in Chinese than in Danish participants. Moreover, the group difference in TPJ activity was mediated by a measure of a cultural value (i.e., interdependence of self-construal). Our findings suggest that individuals in different sociocultural contexts may learn and/or adopt distinct strategies for self-reflection by changing the weight of the mPFC and TPJ in the social brain network.

evolution of collaborative ability creates conditions for subsequent evolution

royalsocietypublishing |  Humans are unique both in their cognitive abilities and in the extent of cooperation in large groups of unrelated individuals. How our species evolved high intelligence in spite of various costs of having a large brain is perplexing. Equally puzzling is how our ancestors managed to overcome the collective action problem and evolve strong innate preferences for cooperative behaviour. Here, I theoretically study the evolution of social-cognitive competencies as driven by selection emerging from the need to produce public goods in games against nature or in direct competition with other groups. I use collaborative ability in collective actions as a proxy for social-cognitive competencies. My results suggest that collaborative ability is more likely to evolve first by between-group conflicts and then later be utilized and improved in games against nature. If collaborative abilities remain low, the species is predicted to become genetically dimorphic with a small proportion of individuals contributing to public goods and the rest free-riding. Evolution of collaborative ability creates conditions for the subsequent evolution of collaborative communication and cultural learning.

negroes off your knees - on the current trajectory it's NOT going to get any better...,

physorg |  Last year, University of Pennsylvania researchers Alexander J. Stewart and Joshua B. Plotkin published a mathematical explanation for why cooperation and generosity have evolved in nature. Using the classical game theory match-up known as the Prisoner's Dilemma, they found that generous strategies were the only ones that could persist and succeed in a multi-player, iterated version of the game over the long term.

But now they've come out with a somewhat less rosy view of evolution. With a new analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma played in a large, evolving population, they found that adding more flexibility to the game can allow selfish strategies to be more successful. The work paints a dimmer but likely more realistic view of how cooperation and selfishness balance one another in nature.

"It's a somewhat depressing evolutionary outcome, but it makes intuitive sense," said Plotkin, a professor in Penn's Department of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences, who coauthored the study with Stewart, a postdoctoral researcher in his lab. "We had a nice picture of how evolution can promote cooperation even amongst self-interested agents and indeed it sometimes can, but, when we allow mutations that change the nature of the game, there is a runaway evolutionary process, and suddenly defection becomes the more robust outcome."

Their study, which will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examines the outcomes of the Prisoner's Dilemma, a scenario used in the field ofgame theory to understand how individuals decide whether to cooperate or not. In the dilemma, if both players cooperate, they both receive a payoff. If one cooperates and the other does not, the cooperating player receives the smallest possible payoff, and the defecting player the largest. If both players do not cooperate, they both receive a payoff, but it is less than what they would gain if both had cooperated. In other words, it pays to cooperate, but it can pay even more to be selfish.

negroes off your knees - america has no operational collective emotional function of "guilt" or "shame"...,

lab.usb.ve/klaus |  Shame has biological roots, possibly enhancing trust, favoring social cohesion. We studied bioeconomic aspects of shame and guilt using three approaches: 1—Anthropo-linguistic studies ofGuilt and Shame among the Yanomami, a culturally isolated traditional tribal society; 2—Estimates of the importance different languages assign to the concepts Shame, Guilt, Pain, Embarrassment, Fear and Trust, counting the number of synonyms listed by Google Translate; 3—Quantitative correlations between this linguistic data with socioeconomic indexes. Results showed that Yanomami is unique in having overlapping synonyms for Shame, Fear and Embarrassment. No language had overlapping synonyms for Shame andGuilt. Societies previously described as “GuiltSocieties” have more synonyms for Guilt than for Shame. A large majority of languages, including those from societies previously described as “Shame Societies”, have more words for Shame than for Guilt. The number of synonyms for Guilt and Shame strongly correlated with estimates of corruption, ease of doing business and governance, but not with levels of interpersonal trust. We propose that cultural evolution of shame has continued the work of biological evolution, but its adaptive advantageto society is still unclear. Results suggest that recent cultural evolution must be responsible for the relationship between the levels of corruption of a society and the number of synonyms for Guilt and Shame in its language. This opens a novel window for the study of complex interactions between biological and cultural evolution of cognition and emotions, which might help broaden our insight into bioeconomics.

from Black Power to "black lives matter"....,

a man who respects himself assiduously prepares to meet violence with ultra-violence - everything else is conversation....,

theatlantic |  Black people know what cannot be said. What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street, but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is the idea of superhuman black men who "bulk up" to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson, but a staple of American racism.

What clearly cannot be said is that American society's affection for nonviolence is notional. What cannot be said is that American society's admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. increases with distance, that the movement he led was bugged, smeared, harassed, and attacked by the same country that now celebrates him. King had the courage to condemn not merely the violence of blacks, nor the violence of the Klan, but the violence of the American state itself.

What clearly cannot be said is that violence and nonviolence are tools, and that violence—like nonviolence—sometimes works. "Property damage and looting impede social progress," Jonathan Chait wrote Tuesday. He delivered this sentence with unearned authority. Taken together, property damage and looting have been the most effective tools of social progress for white people in America. They describe everything from enslavement to Jim Crow laws to lynching to red-lining.

the great marijuana hoax

theatlantic |  How much there is to be revealed about marijuana in this decade in America for the general public! The actual experience of the smoked herb has been clouded by a fog of dirty language perpetrated by a crowd of fakers who have not had the experience and yet insist on downgrading it. The paradoxical key to this bizarre impasse of awareness is precisely that the marijuana consciousness is one that, ever so gently, shifts the center of attention fromhabitual shallow, purely verbal guidelines and repetitive secondhand ideological interpretations of experience tomore direct, slower, absorbing, occasionally microscopically minute engagement with sensing phenomena.

A few people don't like the experience and report back to the language world that it's a drag. But the vast majority all over the world who have smoked the several breaths necessary to feel the effect, adjust to the strangely familiar sensation of Time slow-down, and explore this new space thru natural curiosity, report that it's a useful area of mind-consciousness to be familiar with. Marijuana is a metaphysical herb less habituating than tobacco, whose smoke is no more disruptive than Insight.

This essay, conceived by a mature middle-aged gentleman, the holder at present of a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing, a traveler on many continents with experience of customs and modes of different cultures, is dedicated to those who have not smoked marijuana, who don't know exactly what it is but have been influenced by sloppy, or secondhand, or unscientific, or (as in the case of drug-control bureaucracies) definitely self-interested language used to describe the marijuana high pejoratively. I offer the pleasant suggestion that a negative approach to the whole issue (as presently obtains in what are aptly called square circles in the USA) is not necessarily the best, and that it is time to shift to a more positive attitude toward this specific experience.1 If one is not inclined to have the experience oneself, this is a free country and no one is obliged to have an experience merely because friends, family, or business acquaintances have had it and report themselves pleased. On the other hand, an equal respect and courtesy are required for the sensibilities of one's familiars for whom the experience has not been closed off by the door of Choice.

The black cloud of negative propaganda on marijuana emanates from one particular Source: the US Treas. Dept. Narcotics Bureau.2 If the tendency (a return to common sense) to leave the opiate problem with qualified M.D.'s prevails, the main function of this large Bureau will shift to the persecution of marijuana. Otherwise, the Bureau will have no function except as a minor tax office, for which it was originally purposed, under aegis of Secty. of Treasury. Following Parkinson's Law that a bureaucracy will attempt to find work for itself, or following a simpler line of thought, that the agents of this Bureau have a business interest in perpetuating the idea of a marijuana "menace" lest they lose their employment, it is not unreasonable to suppose that a great deal of the violence, hysteria & energy of the anti-marijuana language propaganda emanating from this source has as its motive a rather obnoxious self interest, all the more objectionable for its tone of moralistic evangelism. This hypocrisy is recognizable to anybody who has firsthand experience of the so-called narcotic; which, as the reader may have noticed, I have termed an herb, which it is -- a leaf or blossom -- in order to switch from negative terminology and inaccurate language.

A marvelous project for a sociologist, and one which I am sure will be in preparation before my generation grows old, will be a close examination of the actual history and tactics of the Narcotics Bureau and its former chief Power, Harry J. Anslinger, in planting the seed of the marijuana "menace" in the public mind and carefully nurturing its growth over the last few decades until the unsuspecting public was forced to accept an outright lie.3

I MUST begin by explaining something that I have already said in public for many years: that I occasionally use marijuana in preference to alcohol, and have for several decades. I say occasionally and mean it quite literally; I have spent about as many hours high as I have spent in movie theaters -- sometimes three hours a week, sometimes twelve or twenty or more, as at a film festival -- with about the same degree of alteration of my normal awareness.