in the hamlet of ferguson, nearly everyone is a wanted criminal

HuffPo |  This complete penetration of policing into everyday life establishes a world of unceasing terror and violence. When everyone is a criminal by default, police are handed an extraordinary amount of discretionary power. "Discretion" may sound like an innocuous or even positive policy, but its effect is to make every single person's freedom dependent on the mercy of individual officers. There are no more laws, there are only police. The "rule of law," by which people are supposed to be treated equally according to a consistent set of principles, becomes the "rule of personal whim." 

And this is precisely what occurs in Ferguson. As others have noted, the Ferguson courts appear to work as an orchestrated racket to extract money from the poor. The thousands upon thousands of warrants that are issued, according to the DOJ, are "not to protect public safety but rather to facilitate fine collection." Residents are routinely charged with minor administrative infractions. Most of the arrest warrants stem from traffic violations, but nearly every conceivable human behavior is criminalized. An offense can be found anywhere, including citations for "Manner of Walking in Roadway," "High Grass and Weeds," and 14 kinds of parking violation. The dystopian absurdity reaches its apotheosis in the deliciously Orwellian transgression "failure to obey." (Obey what? Simply to obey.) In fact, even if one does obey to the letter, solutions can be found. After Henry Davis was brutally beaten by four Ferguson officers, he found himself charged with "destruction of official property" for bleeding on their uniforms.

None of this is even to mention the blinding levels of racism, which remain the central fact of police interactions in Ferguson and nationwide. The overwhelming force of this violent and exploitative policing system is directed at the African American population. In 2013, 92 percent of Ferguson's arrest warrants were issued against African Americans, and black Fergusonians were 68 percent less likely than others to have their court cases dismissed. The racism is so blatant and comprehensive that the DOJ concluded that "Ferguson law enforcement practices are directly shaped and perpetuated by racial bias." Considering the qualified and colorless language typically deployed in government documents, this is an astonishingly forceful statement.

Ferguson's racism has been central to the media coverage of the release of the DOJ report. But in a certain way, by focusing entirely on disparate racial impacts without examining the sheer scale of the brutal state juggernaut, one misses crucial facts. MSNBC listed as the DOJ's number one "most shocking" finding the fact that "at least one municipal employee thought electing a black president was laughable." But the existence of racist views in the department is not the most shocking fact, not by a country mile. Rather, endemic racism in policing comes standard. However, that racism occurs in the wider context of an ever-enlarging interlocking system of administrative bureaucracy and police violence. 

The other pitfall in analyzing the Ferguson report is to see it as being about Ferguson. There are 19,492 municipal governments in America, and the chances that Ferguson happens to be the worst are extremely slim. In fact, there is strong evidence that in the world of better funded, more militarized, more technologically advanced police departments, Ferguson is simply a high-profile case study. While the Ferguson nightmare may dwarf the problems in cities like Boston, American policing is so out-of-control that Ferguson-style practices can occur on at least some level in almost every department.

It's hard to believe, but the Ferguson police department's massive deliberate racism only represents one of its problems. The DOJ report shows not just a racist criminal justice system, but one in which the very act of being alive has been made a crime, and in which nearly every resident is wanted by the law at every moment of every day.

which tribes of the north atlantic are empire-building?

spectator |  Just for once, let us try this argument with an open mind, employing arithmetic and geography and going easy on the adjectives. Two great land powers face each other. One of these powers, Russia, has given up control over 700,000 square miles of valuable territory. The other, the European Union, has gained control over 400,000 of those square miles. Which of these powers is expanding?

There remain 300,000 neutral square miles between the two, mostly in Ukraine. From Moscow’s point of view, this is already a grievous, irretrievable loss. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the canniest of the old Cold Warriors, wrote back in 1997, ‘Ukraine… is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.’

This diminished Russia feels the spread of the EU and its armed wing, Nato, like a blow on an unhealed bruise. In February 2007, for instance, Vladimir Putin asked sulkily, ‘Against whom is this expansion intended?’

I have never heard a clear answer to that question. The USSR, which Nato was founded to fight, expired in August 1991. So what is Nato’s purpose now? Why does it even still exist?

There is no obvious need for an adversarial system in post-Soviet Europe. Even if Russia wanted to reconquer its lost empire, as some believe (a belief for which there is no serious evidence), it is too weak and too poor to do this. So why not invite Russia to join the great western alliances? Alas, it is obvious to everyone, but never stated, that Russia cannot ever join either Nato or the EU, for if it did so it would unbalance them both by its sheer size. There are many possible ways of dealing with this. One would be an adult recognition of the limits of human power, combined with an understanding of Russia’s repeated experience of invasions and its lack of defensible borders.

white people are expats, the rest of you golliwogs are immigrants...,

guardian |  In the lexicon of human migration there are still hierarchical words, created with the purpose of putting white people above everyone else. One of those remnants is the word “expat”.

What is an expat? And who is an expat? According to Wikipedia, “an expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country other than that of the person’s upbringing. The word comes from the Latin terms ex (‘out of’) and patria (‘country, fatherland’)”.

Defined that way, you should expect that any person going to work outside of his or her country for a period of time would be an expat, regardless of his skin colour or country. But that is not the case in reality; expat is a term reserved exclusively for western white people going to work abroad.

Africans are immigrants. Arabs are immigrants. Asians are immigrants. However, Europeans are expats because they can’t be at the same level as other ethnicities. They are superior. Immigrants is a term set aside for ‘inferior races’.

Don’t take my word for it. The Wall Street Journal, the leading financial information magazine in the world, has a blog dedicated to the life of expats and recently they featured a story ‘Who is an expat, anyway?’. Here are the main conclusions: “Some arrivals are described as expats; others as immigrants; and some simply as migrants. It depends on social class, country of origin and economic status. It’s strange to hear some people in Hong Kong described as expats, but not others. Anyone with roots in a western country is considered an expat … Filipino domestic helpers are just guests, even if they’ve been here for decades. Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese are rarely regarded as expats … It’s a double standard woven into official policy.”

is this why valodya was at an undisclosed location for ten days?

eutimes |  The Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reporting today that the Federation is now in a “state of war” thus bringing to full activation President Putin’s “Dead Hand” nuclear order issued 29 July 2014 to The Strategic Missile Forces (SMF).

According to this report, the full activation of the much feared “Dead Hand” nuclear option was authorized under President Putin’s previous order due to the discovery that the nuclear forces of the United Kingdom (UK) were preparing a first strike against military and civilian targets located in the Federation.

The intention of the nuclear forces of the UK preparing a first strike against the Federation, this report says, was revealed by Federal Security Services (FSB) electronic intelligence experts working in conjunction with Kaspersky Lab who discovered last month a massive US National Security Agency (NSA) cyber espionage programme targeting not just Russia, but everyone else on Earth.

Both the FSB and Kaspersky Lab experts, the MoD reports, were able to swiftly reverse engineer the computer code(s) involved in this massive NSA spying operation which then enabled them to electronically obtain the launching codes and coordinates of all the UK’s nuclear weapons showing their plan to launch a first strike against the Federation during the week of 15 March.

Though information of this highly successful FSB-Kaspersky Lab intelligence operation has been suppressed in the West, some counter-news of it has been reported by a few technical websites, including The Verge which in their article reported yesterday titled “A Network Error Routed Traffic For The UK’s Nuclear Weapons Agency Through Russian Telecom”, in part, says:

“For the past week, something strange has been going on in the European internet. For five days, web traffic from Texas to certain addresses in the UK has been routed through Ukrainian and Russian telecoms, taking a detour thousands of miles out of the way. Network traffic often takes a circuitous route as a result of network congestion or interconnection difficulties, but neither one would be enough to account for these routes. Instead, this was the result of a bad route announced by Ukraine’s Vega telecom, inserting itself in between.

It’s particularly disconcerting because of the sensitive nature of many of the sites involved. Among the dozens of sites involved was the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, which is tasked with managing and delivering the UK’s nuclear warheads, as well as the UK’s official mail service, the Royal Mail. US defense contractor Lockheed Martin was also running a VPN connection that was caught up in the redirection.”

Upon the MoD’s confirmation of the UK’s intention to launch a nuclear first strike against the Federation, this report continues, Russian military forces throughout the country were immediately activated with a special emphasis placed upon massive rocket-artillery maneuvers on the southern borders.

capitalism and its handmaiden rule of law predicated upon injustice...,

RT |  The lack of civil rights, the lack of equality, the ‘ghettoization’, the institutionalization of racism are fundamental and making what is called ‘America in the 21st century'.

RT: What impact could this shooting have on police reforms that were supposed to take place in Ferguson?

Eric Draitser: It’s going to have a significant impact on everything that is happening in Ferguson. I think first and foremost we should begin with the impact that it’s going to have on the on-going protest movement, on the ongoing calls for justice, and it is not simply reform of the Ferguson Police Department, but calling attention to the institutionalized racism that exists both within that institution as well as within the larger institutions in Missouri and in the US. Of course this will delegitimize those protests, it will delegitimize that movement or at least that is the attempt that is going to be made. We have a very clear precedent here in New York City in the aftermath of the non-indictment of the killers of Eric Garner. When we had a massive protest movement developing in New York, you had a very similar incident in which two police officers were attacked and that incident was then used to attack the protesters, that is to say to attack them in the media, attack them in public relations, and we can expect a very similar outcome here. It’s very unfortunate because of all of the information that has come out about the racism, about the brutality and the other impacts that it was having in Ferguson itself. 

RT: The recent wave of resignations in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting was supposed to ease tensions. Does it look like they've had the reverse effect?

 

ED: They were certainly meant to present the illusion of changes, cosmetic changes, but again, I don’t think that anything was really addressing the criminal nature of the police department there. And certainly it is not easing tensions. We should come back to the facts in this case. We have corroborated accounts, that is to say corroborated by multiple eye-witnesses that the shots that were fired - which the mainstream media is attempting to allege came from the protesters - actually came from some distance behind them. 

The question then becomes exactly who is benefitting from this, and who might have perpetrated such an attack, naturally an investigation is what is really called for. But the larger question is: does anybody really expect justice and fairness from the Ferguson Police Department as if they would be the once investigating this incident. What might need to be called for a some kind of a special investigation possibly even a special prosecutor, special investigator, something along those lines, because the reality is, the situation in Ferguson is a volatile one and it … really addresses many of the most fundamental questions in the US regarding racism, social justice, institutionalization of the brutality, militarization of police. All of these issues that many of us have been talking for quite a long time; all of them come to the fore in the recent developments.

systemic delegitimization of the protest movement next on the establishment agenda

wsws |  The US media and political establishment have seized upon the wounding of two officers in Ferguson, Missouri on Wednesday night to reiterate their support for the police amid widespread hostility to the wave of police killings in America.

US President Barack Obama, making an appearance Thursday on the late-night television program Jimmy Kimmel Live, declared that police “have a terrifically tough job,” and added that “there was no excuse for criminal acts.” He added, “They’re criminals, they need to be arrested.”

These claims come despite the fact that, by their own admission, police have no information as to who fired the shots that wounded the officers, or whether the police were even the target. The shots were reportedly fired from up to 150 yards away.

By contrast, the Obama administration’s own report on the Ferguson Police Department revealed a “pattern” of criminal activity by police officers and officials. Obama was not referring to any cops as “criminals” or calling for their arrest. Instead, the Obama administration decided not to bring charges against Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown last August.

Prior to the shootings on Wednesday, the police had been on the defensive, following the release of footage showing the horrific killing of Charley Leundeu Keunang in Los Angeles on March 1; 19-year-old Tony Robinson in Madison, Wisconsin on March 6; Anthony Hill in Atlanta, Georgia on March 9 and many others.

The Justice Department’s report on the Ferguson Police Department, released last week, documented numerous crimes, including beating and arresting people and imprisoning the poor in order to compel them to pay fines.

Shortly before the shooting, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson announced his resignation, while the Missouri Supreme Court said it would place a state judge in charge of the city’s court system. These moves followed the announcement earlier in the week that Ferguson City Manager John Shaw would resign.

Ferguson Mayor James Knowles used the killings as an opportunity to take aim at the Justice Department report. He told NPR Thursday that “there continues to be hostile language coming out of the Justice Department—or rather, from Eric Holder, specifically.”

On Thursday, Rudy Giuliani, the former Republican mayor of New York City, denounced Obama for not going far enough to directly ally himself with the police. Giuliani declared that it is “the obligation of the president … to explain to the American people and the world that our police are the best in the world; they are the most trained; they are the most restrained.”

NYPD editing incident under internal review - look for future edits to "NYPD Wikipedia Scandal"..,

capitalnewyork |  Computers operating on the New York Police Department’s computer network at its 1 Police Plaza headquarters have been used to alter Wikipedia pages containing details of alleged police brutality, a review by Capital has revealed.

“The matter is under internal review,” an NYPD spokeswoman, Det. Cheryl Crispin, wrote in an email to Capital after examples of the changes were presented to the NYPD.

The edits and changes were linked to the NYPD through a series of Internet Protocol addresses, or IP addresses, which can be publicly tracked by various websites. (Here, for example, is one website that shows a number of IP addresses registered to the NYPD.) IP addresses can locate where a computer is when it connects to the Internet.

Computer users identified by Capital as working on the NYPD headquarters' network have edited and attempted to delete Wikipedia entries for several well-known victims of police altercations, including entries for Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo. Capital identified 85 NYPD addresses that have edited Wikipedia, although it is unclear how many users were involved, as computers on the NYPD network can operate on the department’s range of IP addresses.

NYPD IP addresses have also been used to edit entries on stop-and-frisk, NYPD scandals, and prominent figures in the city’s political and police leadership.

There are more than 15,000 IP addresses registered to the NYPD, which employs 50,000 people, including uniformed officers and civilians. Notable Wikipedia activity was linked to about a dozen of those NYPD IP addresses. Fist tap Ed.

did white flight spawn the criminal racket masquerading as a government running your town?

There are thousands of small towns and cities all across the US that budget for substantial revenues from fines and traffic enforcement in lieu of higher taxes. If the citizens don't like it, they can elect a new city council next year. Issues of racial profiling and police practice are also at issue everywhere. These, too, are subject to review by votes.

Why is Ferguson any different than any of these 10,000 other Valkanvanian hamlets?

St. Louis County has a total population of just over a million people and ninety municipal governments. The city of Toronto has over two million people and one municipal government. The City of New York has eight million people and makes do with one municipal government. It follows that each resident of St. Louis County has to support roughly ten to twenty times as many police chiefs, mayors, and possibly even city councillors as a resident of Toronto.

Since many residents of St. Louis County do not want to pay for this much government, the cities have grown dependent on fines as "revenue". Since fines apply to residents of other towns, a municipality that sustains itself through fines thus derives a percentage of its revenue from outside its boundaries. These municipalities thus find themselves in a variant of the "prisoner's dilemma"; the first municipal government to eliminate fine revenue will have to raise taxes, while its residents will continue to provide fine "revenue" for the surrounding municipalities. Even worse, some of these municipalities cannot sustain their operations from their tax base alone, which means that not everyone can cooperate.

White flight spawned the "system" of  racketeering hamlets that operates in St. Louis County; continuing racism accounts for the failure to undertake any sensible amalgamation. Once developed, the system of racketeering hamlets remains in place because of a prisoner's dilemma paradox that no hanlet can escape on its own.

FAIL: exagerated military cosplay exercise leads to destruction of the wrong house and no suspect...,

NYTimes |  Earlier, police SWAT units surrounded a house a few blocks from the scene of the shooting, and officers climbed onto the roof and broke through a vent to gain access. The police took in three people from the house for questioning and released them hours later.

The three, Iresha Turner, who lives at the home, and her friends Martez Little and Lamont Underwood, said they had attended the protest but had nothing to do with the shootings. Ms. Turner and Mr. Underwood said they fled from the protest to Ms. Turner’s house when the shots were fired, and Mr. Little said he came to Mr. Turner’s home later and was also detained.

Ms. Turner said her 6-year-old son had been traumatized by the search and the implication that his mother might have something to do with the crime.

“I have to live here,” said Ms. Turner, who identified herself as a single mother. “I have no help. I’m a good woman.”

Mr. Underwood speculated that someone might have seen him and Ms. Turner speeding away from the protest scene and reported it to the police.

FAIL: stl pd tweets about the shooting half hour before it happens - better bring in the sniper from the stl pre-crimes unit for questioning...,

cnn |  The shots rang out shortly after midnight, at the end of a protest against the maligned Ferguson Police Department. That department has been under fire ever since one of its officers, Darren Wilson, shot and killed black teenager Michael Brown last August, and more recently since the release of a scathing Justice Department report documenting a pattern of racial discrimination.

While the demonstrators' focus was the Ferguson department, neither of the wounded officers is from that St. Louis suburb.

you know who else has a judicial system that is hard to fight and extracts money from citizens?

reason |  The Department of Justice threatens defendants with dozens of federal charges that could put them behind bars for decades unless they accept plea deals and avoid a trial, a punishment for trying to defend themselves. Department of Justice prosecutors, working with other agencies like the IRS, seize assets from Americans and resist giving it back even when there's little evidence such Americans have done anything wrong. The DOJ engages in a lot of the same misbehavior found in the Ferguson system of justice—it's just not motivated by race.

Even though the Department of Justice may attack Ferguson's revenue-generating, they are quick to defend the role of their own "Equitable Sharing Program," which encourages law enforcement agencies to seize property and assets by allowing the agencies to keep 80 percent of what they take in the program.

A White House report crafted in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown and the police's militarized response to protests defended the program, along with others, as "valuable and have provided state and local law enforcement with needed assistance as they carry out their critical missions in helping to keep the American people safe." Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch defended asset forfeiture as a useful tool for law enforcement at a Senate hearing.

Ferguson's police department participates in this federal program. According to research by The Washington Post, the city has spent more than $100,000 on equipment and weapons paid for with assets seized by police in Ferguson (this also means the federal government has also received money from law enforcement activities in the community as well). The DOJ's press office has not returned calls to find out whether Ferguson would be booted from the program due to its behavior. Ferguson officials have said they will attempt to settle with the Department of Justice, not fight, so probably not. The DOJ has only cut off access to the Equitable Sharing Program to a handful of law enforcement agencies. One of them, Maricopa County in Arizona, is infamous for resistance to attempts by the DOJ to reform the way it deals with immigrants and Latino citizens. It's easy to look at the program and see the DOJ using access to its funds as a carrot/stick to influence the behavior of local law enforcement agencies. This is not inherently a bad thing, but all of this knowledge about how the DOJ operates should cause anybody to look askance at the agency's credibility when it comes to evaluating the accessibility of fiscal propriety of any justice system in the country.

For that matter, the DOJ, just like Ferguson, brags about the millions—billions—of dollars it brings in from settlements and enforcement activities in its annual reports. They put out press releases and hold press conferences. The difference may be that its targets are often rich corporations (but not always, as their actions against a small Long Island vending business shows). The DOJ and state-level prosecutors are looking for big paydays, too, to help bolster the budgets of the governments they serve. My story in Reason's April issue, titled "The Settlement Shakedown," helps explain how this all works out (It's available online now to digital subscribers).

None of this is to dismiss what is clearly racist animus by the people in power in Ferguson. But if every victim described in the DOJ report on Ferguson had been white and the racist comments and e-mails hadn't happened, these incidents would still have been huge violations of the rights of the citizens. Many would argue that these incidents wouldn't have happened at all absent the racial component. I cannot possibly say they're wrong. Every single government in the country is driven to bring in revenue to perpetuate itself, and their targets will most likely be those who will have the hardest times protecting or defending themselves. This often means poor minorities and immigrants, but don't confuse the symptoms with the cause. Racism just one sorting tool for governments to decide who they're going to plunder.

ah yessss! at last....., struggley was dug in like an engorged alabama tick...,

guardian |  “It has been an honor and a privilege to serve this great city and to serve with all of you,” said Jackson. “I will continue to assist the city in anyway I can in my capacity as private citizen.”

City officials said Jackson would receive a severance payment and health insurance for a year. Lt. Col. Al Eickhoff is to become acting police chief while city authorities carry out a “a nationwide search” for a permanent replacement.

The resignation of Jackson has long been anticipated.He was heavily criticised for his handling of the furore over a white police officer’s fatal shooting of a black 18-year-old in Ferguson last year.

Residents were appalled that Jackson’s officers left the body of Michael Brown lying for more than four hours in the residential side-street where he had been shot dead by Darren Wilson on 9 August. Successive nights of protests followed Brown’s death.

Jackson eventually apologise to Brown’s family in a video message. “It was just too long, and I am truly sorry,” he said of the time Brown’s body was left in the street. The chief was also criticised for announcing at the same time as he unveiled Wilson’s long-awaited name that Brown had been caught robbing a convenience store in the minutes before he was killed.

conservatives quiet about ferguson because it exemplifies naked american conservatism in a nutshell

theatlantic |  Conservatives are typically eager to disparage politicians and bureaucrats who conspire to seize wealth. So you'd think that they'd be outraged to learn that officials in one municipality treat residents as revenue sources rather than citizens. In this city, policymakers have made maximizing the intake of money their number one priority. They urge police to cite residents as aggressively as possible and evaluate their municipal court judge based on the fines that he levies. Challenges to the city's system are thwarted by a deliberately complicated thicket of rules and red tape. And violations of the Constitution are frequent and unpunished.

This city's government does not solve problems. Its government is the problem. One illustration of many concerns a poor woman who got a single parking ticket there. "From 2007 to 2014, the woman was arrested twice, spent six days in jail, and paid $550 to the court for the events stemming from this single instance of illegal parking," federal investigators report. "Court records show that she twice attempted to make partial payments of $25 and $50, but the court returned those payments, refusing to accept anything less than payment in full. One of those payments was later accepted, but only after the court’s letter rejecting payment by money order was returned as undeliverable. This woman is now making regular payments on the fine. As of December 2014, over seven years later, despite initially owing a $151 fine and having already paid $550, she still owed $541."

What a burden the public sector has imposed on her life.

No city in America better illustrates government run amok than Ferguson, Missouri. Libertarians have long excoriated the city. Less so, movement conservatives. Most are ambivalent about the abuses. Some have even defended Ferguson officials. Why haven't conservatives seized this opportunity to highlight government-caused damage and to show blacks, Ferguson's most frequently abused demographic, that the right is intent on protecting everyone's civil rights?

israeli foreign minister says arabs who don't love israel should be beheaded...,

WaPo |  Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign minister and the head of a right-wing, Israeli nationalist party, is known for his fiery rhetoric. But he possibly crossed a line during an election rally in the city of Herzliya on Sunday.

"Whoever's with us should get everything," Lieberman said, in reference to the loyalty of Israeli Arabs, who make up some 20 percent of Israel's population. "Those who are against us, there's nothing to be done – we need to pick up an axe and cut off his head. Otherwise we won't survive here."

Lieberman, the head of the Yisrael Beitenu party, may argue he was speaking in biblical metaphors -- his comments carried allusions to the Book of Esther, reports Haaretz. But they are deeply provocative, and reflect Lieberman's known antipathy for the Israeli Arab population.

The foreign minister's comments in the past have led critics to accuse him of racism. These include his calls last year to boycott Arab businesses that had shut their doors in protest of Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza, as well as a proposal made last November suggesting Israeli Arabs be given "economic incentives" to leave their homes in Israel for the West Bank.

Unlike some other politicians on Israel's right, Lieberman is staunchly secularist. His brand of nationalist populism is anchored among Israeli Jews who emigrated from countries in the former Soviet Union, where he himself was born.

all kind of non-lethal options against unarmed naked man including get back in your patrol car

NYTimes |  Ivan Lara, 43, a painter, said he saw Mr. Hill outside sometime after noon Monday, wearing a pair of shorts and lying face down. He assumed that he was exercising. But when Mr. Hill lifted his head, his speech was indecipherable, Mr. Lara said.

Workers at the rental office eventually called 911. Mr. Lara said one of the workers at the complex tried to calm Mr. Hill.

Pedro Castillo, 43, a maintenance worker at the complex, said Mr. Hill was naked and on his hands and knees in the parking lot when the officer arrived in his squad car, parking a good distance away.

When Mr. Hill saw the officer, Mr. Castillo said, he stood up and moved toward him with his hands raised, and the officer, who Mr. Castillo said looked frightened, yelled for him to stop.

Mr. Castillo said that he had not seen a scuffle, but that he did see the officer pull out a handgun and shoot Mr. Hill.

Another resident, a woman who did not want her name published because she is an undocumented immigrant, said Mr. Hill had his hands at his sides and raised them parallel to the ground as he drew nearer to the officer. She, too, said the men did not fight before Mr. Hill was shot.

A third witness, Xochi Macedonia, 27, said she had seen Mr. Hill running toward the police officer from more than 20 yards away. But Ms. Macedonia said she could not see what happened when Mr. Hill got close.

In a news conference on Monday, Cedric L. Alexander, the DeKalb County deputy chief operating officer for public safety, said the officer had a Taser at the time. He said he did not know whether the officer had used it. None of the witnesses said they saw a Taser used.

misery supreme court acts to shore up legitimacy shit upon badly tarnished by ferguson..,

WaPo |  The Missouri Supreme Court announced Monday it was placing a state judge in charge of cases in Ferguson, Mo., a decision that came after the Justice Department lambasted the city’s municipal court system as harmful and aimed only at boosting revenue.

Meanwhile, the city’s municipal judge, Ronald J. Brockmeyer, who was criticized in the Justice Department’s report for creating court fees that were described as “abusive and may be unlawful,” said in a statement that he had resigned his post.

Judge Roy L. Richter of the Eastern District of the Missouri Court of Appeals will be moved to the St. Louis County circuit court and he will be assigned all of Ferguson’s pending and future municipal cases, the state Supreme Court said.

The transfer order, signed by Missouri Chief Justice Mary R. Russell and approved by the full court, goes into effect on Monday and will remain until the court issues another order. It grants Richter, a St. Louis native, the ability to change the court’s policies and procedures and to “restore the integrity of the system.”

“Judge Richter will bring a fresh, disinterested perspective to this court’s practices and he is able and willing to implement needed reforms,” Russell said in a statement Monday.

To help Richter with this process, the state Supreme Court was also moving staff members from the state court administrator’s office to help review Ferguson’s court practices. The Justice Department made multiple recommendations for reforming the court system there, even as investigators noted that they found many people who had encountered problems with heavy fines from multiple courts in the region.

“Extraordinary action is warranted in Ferguson, but the Court also is examining reforms that are needed on a statewide basis,” Russell said.

brer preznit's irony too subtle for the thugs beseiging him...,

WaPo |  It’s safe to say that no president in modern times has had his legitimacy questioned by the opposition party as much as Barack Obama. But as his term in office enters its final phase, Republicans are embarking on an entirely new enterprise: They have decided that as long as he holds the office of the presidency, it’s no longer necessary to respect the office itself. Is that a bit hyperbolic? Maybe. But this news is nothing short of stunning:

The only direct precedent I can think of for this occurred in 1968, when as a presidential candidate Richard Nixon secretly communicated with the government of South Vietnam in an attempt to scuttle peace negotiations the Johnson administration was engaged in. It worked: those negotiations failed, and the war dragged on for another seven years. Many people are convinced that what Nixon did was an act of treason; at the very least it was a clear violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits American citizens from communicating with foreign governments to conduct their own foreign policy.

This move by Republicans is not quite at that level. As Dan Drezner wrote, “I don’t think an open letter from members of the legislative branch quite rises to Logan Act violations, but if there’s ever a trolling amendment to the Logan Act, this would qualify,” and at least it’s out in the open. But it makes clear that they believe that when they disagree with an administration policy, they can act as though Barack Obama isn’t even the president of the United States.

uk police killed one british citizen during the same period....,

 citylab |  This week the U.S. Department of Justice released a blistering report following an investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. The report included a long and (to some) shocking list of discriminatory police practices. But discrimination and police violence aren't limited to one police department, and a team of social justice activists has created an interactive map to demonstrate how pervasive such practices are across the United States.

The map shows that police violence disproportionately targets black men on a national scale. Or, in the words of data analyst Samuel Sinyangwe, one of the map's creators, it shows "that Ferguson is everywhere."

Sinyangwe and his fellow activists have been compiling information and resources to help support the #blacklivesmatter movement on the ground. In the process, they realized that a comprehensive national snapshot of police violence was missing—guided in part by articles from Reuben Fischer-Baum of FiveThirtyEight, who has argued that official figures on police killings aren't reliable.

Using non-governmental databases highlighted by Fischer-Baum, including Fatal Encounters and Killed By Police, Sinyangwe and his collaborators estimated that there were 1,175 total police killings in 2014. They then sorted the records by race and found that 302 of the deceased were black—or 26 percent of the total. That's an overrepresentation of African Americans, who make up 13 percent of the general population.

"In terms of comprehensiveness, our estimate is that [the data] is capturing at least 90 percent of all folks who are killed by police in 2014," Sinyangwe tells CityLab.

civilized madison police chief infuriates north atlantic tribeswoman...,

cityofmadison |  Sir Robert Peel, arguably one of those who first articulated the necessity of having "police" in our midst, created a number of fundamental principles by which police should view their mission.  Peel lived and made these observations in the mid-1800's. Surprisingly, despite the passage of time, many of these tenets still resonate today, in terms of what we expect from our police. The principle which has always loomed largest for me is:  "The police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the POLICE ARE THE PUBLIC AND THE PUBLIC ARE THE POLICE (my emphasis added).

I begin this blog with this thought hanging heavy in my heart.  Our community is grieving and hurting over the loss of a young African American man, who life was ended far too soon.  His family, his friends, and our community are in mourning.  The police are part of this community---and we share this sense of loss.  I have stated as much to representatives of his family, in statements to the press, and to our work force. Reconciliation cannot begin without my stating "I am sorry," and I don't think I can say this enough.  I am sorry.  I hope that, with time, Tony's family and friends can search their hearts to render some measure of forgiveness.  Certainly, this will not take place soon given the circumstances.  It may take some time for this loop to close but I pray that it will, in fact, close.

There is a process that now takes place which involves two tiers of independent review of the events that occurred on Williamson Street last Friday night.  The State of Wisconsin's Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) has the exclusive authority to investigate all elements of the officer involved shooting--forensics, interviews, technology feeds, etc..  MPD, like the public, has questions that will only be answered when DCI's findings are set for release.  This investigation is then turned directly over to the second layer of review, the District Attorney's Office, who then makes a ruling on the question of whether there is criminal culpability on the part of my officer.  I would urge that everyone consider that the foundations of the much-maligned criminal justice system should still pay heed to the basic requirements of due process and fundamental fairness.  If it were any one of us accused of wrong doing, wouldn't we hope for as much?

No one joins my profession hoping to do harm to anyone; we put on "armor" (bullet resistant vests) each day with the understanding that today may be the day that I provide the ultimate act of selflessness; to lay down one's life for a complete stranger.  I cannot think of a more noble cause than to be a "guardian" to those who need us most--the vulnerable, the voiceless, the victims.  That is what I and so many like me have sworn to do and have made it our life's calling.  While I know that a sacred trust has been severely tested, I ask that people not define the legacy of service that this Department has provided to our public by this tragic incident.  Let us continue to demonstrate to you that our commitment transcends mere rhetoric. . .we show how much we care on a daily basis; one call at a time.  I realize that in order for us to achieve greater strides in community-based policing, the cornerstone for making that a reality starts with us earning your trust.  I want that to happen, my Department wants that to happen, desperately.  Remember, we live here, we work here, we go to church here, we're your neighbor(s), our kids go to school with your kids, and we all want the best of what life has to offer our families.  The police are the public and the public are the police. . .

Posted by: Chief Koval 

Angry Tribeswoman Vents

the chemical muse at the root of western civilization

theatlantic |  In a massive study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, scientists at the Norwegian University for Science and Technology at Trondheim concluded that there is no link between use of LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) and mental health problems. The study selected 135,000 participants at random—including 19,000 who had used psychedelic drugs—and found no evidence linking such drugs to the onset of mental disorders.

"Over 30 million U.S. adults have tried psychedelics and there just is not much evidence of health problems," author and clinical psychologist Pål-Ørjan Johansen said.

Johanesen was careful to acknowledge that users of psychedelic drugs are not immune to bad trips, and are as susceptible as anyone else to mental health issues. But his findings negate a common perception that drugs like LSD put users directly in danger—a justification used in criminalization.

Most psychedelic drugs—including LSD and psilocybin—have been illegal in the United States since 1970, the year President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act. The legislation classified LSD and mushrooms under Schedule 1, prohibiting not only their consumption and sale but also their use in medicine. Research into the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs largely froze after decades of frenetic scientific investigation.

igziabeher - let jah be praised...,

fool |  Last year was another transformational year for the marijuana movement.

Beginning in 1996, California became the first state to legalize marijuana for medical purposes. Today, there are 23 states with legal medical marijuana programs in place, and there would have been 24 had Florida's vote not come up 2% short of what was required to change its constitution in 2014.

Additionally, we've witnessed four states progressively leading the way with the legalization of recreational marijuana. In 2012, Washington and Colorado legalized the drug for adult use, while Alaska and Oregon voters approved the measure just this past November.

How well are these dual legalizations working? That's been a difficult question to answer because getting accurate data isn't easy. However, a new report from the Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division helps to shed some light on the success and failures of the marijuana market in Colorado following its first full year of sales.

Here are seven stunning figures that help sum up what recreational and medical marijuana legalization look like in Colorado.

this child needs marijuana

theatlantic |  Lucy Rhoden, a three-year-old girl from Virginia, suffers from a rare type of epilepsy known as Dravet Syndrome. The genetic disorder causes severe seizures and, eventually, developmental issues. Her family, as well as several advocates for epilepsy patients, believe that marijuana could be the last-ditch medication she needs. Filmmaker John Picklap considers the case for treatment in this short documentary. "My daughter is actually higher right now, on the drugs that I gave her legally, with her doctor's prescription, than she would be on medical cannabis," says Lucy's mother, Melissa Rhoden. 

According to the Washington Post, several states have passed legislation that allows for the use of marijuana oils to treat epilepsy—and last week, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe signed a similar bill. In January, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that marijuana be re-classified as a Schedule II drug, which would acknowledge its medicinal value and allow the FDA to be involved in more research studies.

obnoxiously begging for the sovereign dominion to medicate as needed and as desired...,

somebody puh-leeze pleasure this "intellectually corrupt negroe" catcher...,

From the following passages you appear to be disarmed, believing that this "Intellectually Corrupt Negro" has effectively confronted the machinations that produce "Street Piracy"

1)  The majority of my public experiences today are about addressing violence in black communities.
2)  I don't think outrage will do it at this point, but I respect the sincere feeling. And then there are pundits who write more than they read, and talk more than they listen, and prefer an easy creationism to a Google search.

MB:
I can take words of my young frat brothers whose FaceBook messages that I read intently, adopting both "Trayvon/Ferguson/ICan'tBreath" and "Obama's MyBrother'sKeeper" as a catch basin for their "Third Generation Civil Rights Latch Key Kid" struggle motion.

When I see Ta-Nehisi Coats, "The Root", "The Grio", "Ebony", "Essence" and MSNBC riding on the same trail of "Scooby Snacks", having found their raison d'etre in the "Obama Era", beyond their presence in the virtual fort that guards the "Obama White House" as the "Embassy Of The Black Community" in Washington DC.   (You know it was "built by SLAVES", right?)

You give a "Complete" to this man who told us a few weeks ago that FERGUSON has its legacy in JIM CROW and that any "mal-acting Negro" on the streets of Ferguson was "MADE THIS WAY" by "American Racism".

This was a follow up to his "Chicago Reparations" piece in "The Atlantic" which got him booked on various Progressive outlets.   Again, we were told that the once pristine bungalows seen in "A Raisin In The Sun" became today's KILLING FIELDS FOR NEGROES - because RACIST housing policies sculpted the color composition of Chicago and other cities like it.

Pleasure me, MB  Tell me ONE TIME that Ta-Nehisi Coates has EVER told the "Americanized Negro" that the over-insertation of his HIS CONSCIOUSNESS into POLITICS poses a risk that leaves him vulnerable to accepting "CONFIDENCE MAN NARRATIVES" which INFERIORIZE the ability of Black people to erect a system of COMMUNITY GOVERNANCE INSTITUTIONS through which the "criminal element" (which he said was made that way by the theft of Black culture) would be made into WELL BALANCED MEN - are able to disarm the Black community from seeing its endemic responsibility to be the stewards of these young men?

With a man so intent on explaining away any and all culpability (akin to what Tim Wise does) - can you detail for us what Ta-Nehisi Coats have EVER TOLD THE NEGRO "WHAT HE MUST DO / STOP DOING in order to ATTAIN OUTCOMES, that are more in line with the jar of "Social Justice Unicorn Piss" that he is typically selling our people as their salvation?

it looks like that man is in charge of the country

the machinery of galactus

theatlantic |  It must noted that the rhetoric "personal responsibility" enjoys not just currency among the white officials of Ferguson, but among many black people ("black-on-black crime!") who believe that white supremacy is a force with which one can negotiate. But white supremacy—as evidenced in Ferguson—is not ultimately interested in how responsible you are, nor how respectable you look. White supremacy is neither a misunderstanding nor a failure of manners. White supremacy is the machinery of Galactus which allows for the potential devouring of everything you own. White supremacy is the technology, patented in this enlightened era, to ensure that what is yours inevitably becomes mine.

This technology has proven highly effective throughout American history. In 1860 it meant the transformation of black bodies into more wealth than all the productive capacity of this country combined. In the 1930s it meant the erection of our modern middle class. In Ferguson, it meant funding nearly a quarter of the municipal budget:

The City has not yet made public the actual revenue collected that year, although budget documents forecasted lower revenue than 10 was budgeted. Nonetheless, for fiscal year 2015, the City’s budget anticipates fine and fee revenues to account for $3.09 million of a projected $13.26 million in general fund revenues...

In a February 2011 report requested by the City Council at a Financial Planning Session and drafted by Ferguson’s Finance Director with contributions from Chief Jackson, the Finance Director reported on “efforts to increase efficiencies and maximize collection” by the municipal court. The report included an extensive comparison of Ferguson’s fines to those of surrounding municipalities and noted with approval that Ferguson’s fines are “at or near the top of the list....” While the report stated that this recommendation was because of a “large volume of non-compliance,” the recommendation was in fact emphasized as one of several ways that the code enforcement system had been honed to produce more revenue.

The men and women behind this policy did not approach their effort to "produce more revenue" somberly, but lustily. As the fruits of plunder increased, Ferguson officials congratulated and backslapped each other:

In one March 2012 email, the Captain of the Patrol Division reported directly to the City Manager that court collections in February 2012 reached $235,000, and that this was the first month collections ever exceeded $200,000. The Captain noted that “[t]he [court clerk] girls have been swamped all day with a line of people paying off fines today. Since 9:30 this morning there hasn’t been less than 5 people waiting in line and for the last three hours 10 to 15 people at all times.” The City Manager enthusiastically reported the Captain’s email to the City Council and congratulated both police department and court staff on their “great work.”

It is a wonder they did not hand out bonuses. Perhaps they did. The bonus of being white in Ferguson meant nigh-immunity from plunder. The bane of being black in Ferguson meant nigh-inevitable subjugation under plunder. Plunder is neither abstract nor theoretical. Plunder injures, maims, and destroys. Indeed the very same people who were calling on protestors to remain nonviolent were, every hour, partner to brutality committed under the color of law:

We spoke with one African-American man who, in August 2014, had an argument in his apartment to which FPD officers responded, and was immediately pulled out of the apartment by force. After telling the officer, “you don’t have a reason to lock me up,” he claims the officer responded: “N*****, I can find something to lock you up on.” When the man responded, “good luck with that,” the officer slammed his face into the wall, and after the man fell to the floor, the officer said, “don’t pass out motherf****r because I’m not carrying you to my car.”

The residents of Ferguson do not have a police problem. They have a gang problem. That the gang operates under legal sanction makes no difference. It is a gang nonetheless, and there is no other word to describe an armed band of collection agents.

gangsters of st. louis...,

slate |  This week the Department of Justice released a highly critical report about Ferguson, Missouri’s criminal justice system, accusing police and officials of perpetrating a racially biased regime that, among other issues, imposes abusive, excessive punishments and fines for trifling violations like jaywalking. The DOJ report was foreshadowed in September 2014 by Washington Post writer Radley Balko’s shocking investigation of the St. Louis County municipal court system, which seems to be a shakedown racket aimed at enriching everyone involved at the expense of regular citizens. Balko highlighted an individual named Ronald Brockmeyer who has made a lucrative living in the traffic-ticket game:

According to a recent white paper published by the ArchCity Defenders, the chief prosecutor in Florissant Municipal Court makes $56,060 per year. It’s a position that requires him to work 12 court sessions per year, at about three hours per session. The Florissant prosecutor is Ronald Brockmeyer, who also has a criminal defense practice in St. Charles County, and who is also the chief municipal prosecutor for the towns of Vinita Park and Dellwood. He is also the judge—yes, the judge—in both Ferguson and Breckenridge Hills.

(As I wrote at the time, Brockmeyer’s compensation as a prosecutor works out to about $1,500 an hour, which is what you’d make if you worked 40 hours a week at a salary of $3 million per year.)

As it happens, Brockmeyer is now back in the news thanks to the DOJ report, which criticized his work in Ferguson—and thanks to the Guardian, which reveals that Brockmeyer, who, again, makes his living by harshly enforcing the most trivial civic rules, owes the United States government some $170,000 in unpaid taxes.

bet not ever question a pro-Israel Hillel member's impartiality on divestment from apartheid Israel

NYTimes |  Yet some Jewish leaders here questioned whether Mr. Block or the students appreciated the meaning of the event. John L. Rosove, the senior rabbi at Temple Israel of Hollywood, said the incident “reflects something deeper, more troubling, insidious, and pervasive not just at U.C.L.A. but on college campuses nationwide.”

“I am not one who sees anti-Semites lurking under every bed,” he wrote in his blog. “I am not a fear-monger. I do not believe that all criticism of Jews or the state of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic.”

“Yet,” he said, “our inability to use the term anti-Semitism when it concerns Jews, when we don’t have a problem calling other forms of ethnic and religious bigotry what it is, raises disturbing questions about prevalent attitudes towards Jews, Judaism, Zionism, and the state of Israel.”

The president of the student council, Avinoam Baral, who had nominated Ms. Beyda, appeared stunned at the turn the questioning took at the session and sought at first to rule Ms. Roth’s question out of order. “I don’t feel that’s an appropriate question,” he said.

In an interview, Mr. Baral, who is Jewish, said he “related personally to what Rachel was going through.”

“It’s very problematic to me that students would feel that it was appropriate to ask that kind of questions, especially given the long cultural history of Jews,” he said. “We’ve been questioned all of our history: Are Jews loyal citizens? Don’t they have divided loyalties? All of these anti-Semitic tropes.”

He called Ms. Beyda a “stand-out applicant,” with strong grades, interest and experience in the law. The students who voted against her also praised her credentials, but kept returning to questions about whether she could set aside her religious affiliation when ruling on issues before the council.

Rachel Frenklak, who is Ms. Beyda’s roommate and president of the sorority, said she had gone to the meeting expecting an enjoyable night watching her “best friend” get approved, and was stunned at what she witnessed.

“I swear the word Israel was not said once,” she said Thursday. “It was all about Jewish affiliations. It didn’t leave any doubt that what this is, is anti-Semitism. There has to be recognition that there is anti-Semitism on the campus, and it manifested itself first with the anti-Israel stuff.”

what is hillel?

wikipedia |  As Hillel is funded by donations, it is usually free for an interested student to participate in their activities. However, as set by International Hillel Policy, there are restrictions on the services, topics of discussions, and events that can be held.^[14] These restrictions focus mainly on Zionism, where Hillel takes a firm stance in not promoting certain types of views on Israel, such as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign.^[15] Hillel's strategy, as redefined in 2006, explicitly set a goal to "inspire every Jewish student to make an enduring commitment to Jewish life". To be effective, Hillel activities vary from campus to campus, with an emphasis on responding to the needs of participating students. To reach a larger audience, campus Hillel foundations struggle to create a pluralistic, inclusive environment that still remains distinctively Jewish. To do so, the national foundation organizes trips to Israel,^[16] places service fellows at the campus foundations,^[17] creates a guide to Jewish student life,^[18] and leads advocacy work on Jewish and Israeli issues,^[19] as well as providing some financial support to its campus foundations.

Hillel chapters regularly offer Shabbat services. Hillel is also dedicated to social activism, fundraising, and philanthropy for charitable causes. These activities are usually led on the local campus level, but many campuses participate in alternative spring break trips dedicated to service, a Yom Kippur Fast Action Campaign, and the Oxfam Fair Trade Coffee Campaign, as well as more traditional local service projects at soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and Jewish community organizations.

Social justice

Since 2010, Hillel's campus initiative at the University of Washington, Freedom Shabbat, has highlighted the problem of modern-day slavery during the holiday of Passover, a time when Jews remember their escape from slavery in Egypt.^[20][21]

Hillel also organizes alternative break trips for students across the globe, where students participate in short-term service projects dealing with a range of issues, from poverty to food justice. They have partnered with the non-profit organization City Year to create civic engagement spring breaks for students.^[22]

what are goyim and shiksas?

haaretz |  Among all the rabbinical racism that’s been surfacing, among all the events of the national memorial days that made Israel look more like a racially exclusive society than a state, even more telling than the chilling preference for placing a flag only on the grave of a certified kosher fallen soldier was an event of extreme significance that got little public attention. 

It was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement saluting a Torah giant, teacher and arbiter of Jewish law. We’re talking about Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, who was arrested for giving a letter of approbation to the work “The King’s Torah − Laws of Killing Non-Jews.” 

As a rabbi, Yosef contributed to and expanded the body of racist halakha ‏(Jewish religious law‏) against Arabs, “goyim” and homosexuals until his recent death. But all this is dwarfed by the simple and unnerving fact that the prime minister of Israel referred to one of the people behind the “The Laws of Killing Non-Jews” as a posek gadol − a great halakhic arbiter. 

No Western leader could be caught doing something comparable, even if he’d wanted to. No one in the West publishes books on “the laws of killing Jews,” or on “the laws of killing non-Christians,” or on “the laws of killing non-whites.” They would be marched straight to prison, and anyone saluting them as “great arbiters” would be booted out of public service. 

Even in the most extreme Islamic countries you won’t find an exact parallel. There are no books there on “the laws of killing Jews,” or even on “the laws of killing those not of the Islamic race.” Yes, there have been religious rulings favoring suicide terrorists and the killing of Zionists. But never a blanket permit for racist murder. 

Netanyahu’s declaration, which is much more serious even than his whispered confidence to an old rabbi that “the left has forgotten what it means to be a Jew,” was in essence the zenith, or perhaps the basis, for what has become the long duration of Holocaust-memorial-independence ceremonies, which do everything to eradicate the most important half of our founding principle of “never again.”

left behind...,

guardian |  As science progresses the upgrades that become available will increasingly widen the gap between rich and poor. Research on implantable devices called brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are in trials to help disabled people move their defunct limbs or robotic prosthetics.

More advanced devices could link people's brains directly to the internet, giving them vast and faithful memory storage, and seamless access to information, even if that does include endless footage of cats in hats.

Work is ongoing into BCIs that connect many brains at once, allowing animals to cooperate by accessesing each others' brain power - work which raises deep questions about the future meaning of identity.

Genetic engineering will be more disruptive still. A new genome editing procedure called Crispr has given scientists their first real hope of making safe, precise changes to the human genome. They have already used it to correct cells with genetic faults that cause cataracts and cystic fibrosis. Similar therapies might allow improvements to human performance.

Western history has made many of today's researchers flinch at studies into the genetic basis of intelligence. But the Beijing Genomics Institute, the world's largest genomics research centre, has taken on the job . If the project bears fruit, it might drive attempts to boost human intelligence by genetically modifying embryos.

George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University, suggests another radical possibility. He has developed tools that can scramble the genetic code leaving it functional but unrecognisable to invading viruses. His first goal is to engineer a bacterium that is resistant to viral infection. But he does not dimiss the possibility of changing human DNA too – leading to a biologically new kind of human.

"In the 21st century, there is a real possibility of creating biological castes, with real biological differences between rich and poor," said Harari. "The end result could be speciation. We're used to being the only human species around, but there is no law of nature that says there can only be one species of human. With this kind of upgrading treatment we could have, in the not too distant future, more than one human species on Earth again."

as we harvest ever more genomes, one fact remains unshakeable...,

guardian |  Genetics has a blighted past with regards to race. Even today, important figures from its history – notably James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix – express unsupportable racist views. The irony is that while Galton spawned a field with the intention of revealing essential racial differences between the peoples of the Earth, his legacy – human genetics – has shown he was wrong. Most modern geneticists are much less like Galton and more like Darwin. A dreadful book published last year by former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade espoused views about racial differences seemingly backed by genetics. As with Watson, the reaction from geneticists was uniformly dismissive, that he had failed to understand the field, and misrepresented their work.

We now know that the way we talk about race has no scientific validity. There is no genetic basis that corresponds with any particular group of people, no essentialist DNA for black people or white people or anyone. This is not a hippy ideal, it’s a fact. There are genetic characteristics that associate with certain populations, but none of these is exclusive, nor correspond uniquely with any one group that might fit a racial epithet. Regional adaptations are real, but these tend to express difference within so-called races, not between them. Sickle-cell anaemia affects people of all skin colours because it has evolved where malaria is common. Tibetans are genetically adapted to high altitude, rendering Chinese residents of Beijing more similar to Europeans than their superficially similar neighbours. Tay-Sachs disease, once thought to be a “Jewish disease”, is as common in French Canadians and Cajuns. And so it goes on.

We harvest thousands of human genomes every week. Last month, the UK launched the 100,000 Genomes project to identify genetic bases for many diseases, but within that booty we will also find more of the secret history of our species, our DNA mixed and remixed through endless sex and continuous migration. We are too horny and mobile to have stuck to our own kind for very long.

Race doesn’t exist, racism does. But we can now confine it to opinions and not pretend that there might be any scientific validity in bigotry.