how warren buffett intentionally targets and preys on the least of these...,

seattletimes |  After a few years living with her sister, Rose Mary Zunie, 59, was ready to move into a place of her own.

So, on an arid Saturday morning this past summer, the sisters piled into a friend’s pickup truck and headed for a mobile-home sales lot here just outside the impoverished Navajo reservation.

The women — one in a long, colorful tribal skirt, another wearing turquoise jewelry, a traditional talisman against evil — were steered to a salesman who spoke Navajo, just like the voice on the store’s radio ads.

He walked them through Clayton-built homes on the lot, then into the sales center, passing a banner and posters promoting one subprime lender: Vanderbilt Mortgage, a Clayton subsidiary. Inside, he handed them a Vanderbilt sales pamphlet.

“Vanderbilt is the only one that finances on the reservation,” he told the women.

His claim, which the women caught on tape, was a lie. And it was illegal.

It is just one in a pattern of deceptions that Clayton has used to help extract billions from poor customers around the country — particularly people of color, who make up a substantial and growing portion of its business.

The company is controlled by Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest men, but its methods hardly match Buffett’s honest, folksy image: Clayton systematically pursues unwitting minority homebuyers and baits them into costly subprime loans, many of which are doomed to fail, an investigation by The Seattle Times and BuzzFeed News has found.

Clayton’s predatory practices have damaged minority communities — from rural black enclaves in the Louisiana Delta, across Spanish-speaking swaths of Texas, to Native American reservations in the Southwest. Many customers end up losing their homes, thousands of dollars in down payments, or even land they’d owned outright.

Over the 12 years since Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought Clayton Homes Inc., the company has grown to dominate virtually every aspect of America’s mobile-home industry. It builds nearly half the new manufactured homes sold in this country every year, making it the most prolific U.S. homebuilder of any type. It sells them through a network of more than 1,600 dealerships. And it finances more mobile-home loans than any other lender by a factor of more than seven.

In minority communities, Clayton’s grip on the lending market verges on monopolistic: Last year, according to federal data, Clayton made 72 percent of the loans to black people who financed mobile homes.

The company’s in-house lender, Vanderbilt Mortgage, charges minority borrowers substantially higher rates, on average, than their white counterparts. In fact, federal data shows that Vanderbilt typically charges black people who make over $75,000 a year slightly more than white people who make only $35,000.

rule of law: creative exploitation of the least of these...,

WaPo |  Rex Muller has had lots of tenants over the years, but none quite like Terrence Taylor. He moved into a house miles outside of town but couldn’t drive. He was 30 years old but played with toy cars. His face was badly disfigured by burns, but attractive women often accompanied him. Muller nonetheless trusted Taylor more than most. He had lots of money.

When Taylor moved from Fairfax County to Muller’s Martinsburg, W.Va., townhouse in 2012, agreeing to pay $870 in monthly rent, he flashed an insurance document bearing impressive numbers. It said New York Life Insurance was paying him $10,000 every month as a result of a lawsuit settled in 1989. Muller learned that a malfunctioning electric heater had burst into flames when Taylor was a boy, leaving him disfigured — and rich. His settlement would pay him many millions of dollars over the course of his life.

Two years later, in June 2014, Muller watched as a local deputy knocked at Taylor’s door. Muller had just taken his tenant, who had not paid rent in three months, to court and evicted him. He stepped into the darkened home as Taylor, an amputee, descended the stairs and, without a word, limped past him on a prosthetic leg.

Taylor had left behind a mess of toys, dirty dishes and cards written by “go-go girls,” Muller recalled. Strange documents were strewn across the kitchen table. “It was a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo,” Muller said. “A lot of lawyer talk.”

The landlord, however, understood enough to know the tenant had been doing a lot of business deals. “He was selling off his loan,” Muller reasoned.

Not quite. What Taylor had been selling, chunk by chunk, for pennies on the dollar, was a settlement that had a lifetime expected payout of $31.5 million. In numerous deals approved in Virginia courts over two years, Taylor sold everything owed to him through 2044 and was now broke and homeless.

How did this happen, Muller said he wondered as he picked through the detritus.

pretending at racial goodness, granny has worn this tiny fig leaf to a frazzle...,

NYTimes |  In summer 1972, Mr. Clinton was in Miami working on George McGovern’s presidential campaign when Mrs. Clinton traveled from Washington to Atlanta to meet with civil rights lawyers and activists, then rented a car and drove the nearly four hours to Dothan.

“Hillary was not a derring-do type of person. It wasn’t her normal mode,” said Taylor Branch, the civil rights activist and author, who was a close friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton at the time. “But,” he added, “you do these things when you’re young, and this was the era when young people did more of that than normal.”

In Dothan, Mrs. Clinton most likely stayed at the Holiday Inn on Ross Clark Circle, since locally owned hotels might have been suspicious of a single woman with black acquaintances, several people who did the same work said. While Mrs. Clinton favored corduroy bell-bottoms for casual wear, the dress code for the investigative work called for conservative blouses and skirts, her colleagues said.

She drove over the railroad tracks near downtown, east of Park Avenue, to the black part of town. There, she met local contacts who told her over a lunch of sweetened ice tea and burgers “that many of the school districts in the area were draining local public schools of books and equipment to send to the so-called academies, which they viewed as the alternatives for white students,” she wrote in “Living History.”

Years later, Mrs. Clinton does not say she ever felt afraid, but a white woman traveling alone in the South would have been “looking over her shoulder,” said Marlene Provizer, who did similar research into segregation academies in Mississippi and Georgia in the same era.

“There weren’t many folks doing this work,” she said. “I was very conscious of being ‘the other.’ ”

chirac to the potomac: more attentive to downtown interests than to constituents...,

NYTimes |  “Rahm’s particular challenge isn’t whether he leaves office — it’s that he’s going to stay in office at a time that’s particularly demanding,” said David Axelrod, a political consultant and a longtime friend of Mr. Emanuel’s.

“Look, it’s been a painful, difficult time for him,” Mr. Axelrod said. “No human being could be unaffected by this whole episode and by the sort of anger and rancor that it’s stirred. When you talk to him, he clearly feels that he missed it, and that this whole episode has uncovered a problem on which he, himself, would say he was insufficiently focused — that this was not handled well by him or his administration.”

Mr. Emanuel swept into the mayor’s office in 2011, helped in part by what black Chicagoans knew about him at the time: that Mr. Obama trusted him. Four years later, he faced a steeper climb in a city that had gotten to know him better. He was forced into a runoff with Jesus G. Garcia, a county commissioner who was seeking to become the city’s first Latino mayor, partly because of critics who said Mr. Emanuel was too brusque and more attentive to the wishes of downtown interests than the needs of residents from some poorer neighborhoods.

The mayor, whose clash with public schoolteachers helped set off the city’s first teachers’ strike in a quarter-century, drew special anger in 2013 for overseeing the closing of nearly 50 public schools, many of them in black and Latino neighborhoods. After winning the unexpectedly tense campaign in April, Mr. Emanuel promised that he had gotten the city’s message.

The start of Mr. Emanuel’s second term already was complicated by the city’s fiscal problems. Facing mounting pension payments and sinking credit ratings, Mr. Emanuel pushed through the largest property tax increase in the city’s modern history. Also, the possibility of another teachers’ strike looms.

associated consciousness wars...,

realitysandwich |  The esoteric, Hermetic tradition, forced underground by the rise of material, mechanical science, has suffered, I believe, a full scale, no holds barred assault by the left brain and the deficient mode of the mental-rational structure. Its right brain worldview, with its sense of a living, intelligent universe with which we can participate through our imagination, was targeted for attack by its left brain antagonist. It is not the case, as it is generally accepted, that the Hermetic/esoteric view, anchored in what it erroneously believed was a profound “ancient wisdom,” was, with the rise of reason, rationality and the Enlightenment, simply superseded by a more correct view. It was not simply a case of “superstition” giving way to “science,” or of dogma dissolving in the face of free thought. That “more correct view,” informed by the proselytizing zeal of a competing form of consciousness, seems to have purposely and ruthlessly set out to consciously obliterate its rival. This was, indeed, a real war, one carried out on the fields of consciousness.

In the early stages of its campaign, the anti-esoteric view enjoyed many victories, and it eventually established itself as the sole arbiter of what is true, and what is “real” knowledge and what is not. But now, some four hundred years after Hermes Trismegistus the thrice great sage of magic and the ancient wisdom was dethroned, his usurper’s position seems threatened – or at least the foundations on which it established its supremacy seem somewhat less secure. In our time, the deficient mode of Gebser’s mental-rational consciousness structure has reached its peak, as it were. Developments like “deconstructionism” and “post-modernism” suggest that the western intellectual tradition has begun to take itself apart, with the left brain’s obsession with analysis turning on itself. Even earlier than these, the rise of the “new physics” of quantum theory and related fields in the early part of the last century has shown that the neat nineteenth-century vision of a perfectly explainable mechanical universe is no longer tenable. But there are more pressing concerns. We’ve seen that Gebser in his last days believed that we were heading toward a “global catastrophe,” and the various crises – ecological, environmental, economic, social, political, religious, and cultural – that fill our daily news reports suggest he was not far wrong. Our era has had no shortage of Cassandras, and it would be easy to lump Gebser’s concerns together with other, less eloquent — not to mention researched — jeremiads. But there is a tension, an anxiety about our time that somehow seems to suggest that something will happen, that some dike will burst, and that we will have a flood. As the philosopher Richard Tarnas remarked, “late modern man”– that is, ourselves — is “the incongruously sensitive denizen of an implacable vastness devoid of meaning,” living in a world in which “gigantism and turmoil, excessive noise, speed and complexity dominate the human environment.” Things, many believe, cannot stay this way much longer. As Yeats said long ago, “the center cannot hold.”

inevitable submission to the will of deez nutz...,

From a biological perspective, which includes a bio-social anthropological perspective, religions function primarily as in-group markers for a breeding population. Human breeding populations have been competing since the birth of your species as long as there are barriers to gene flow between them. Religion is a good barrier for gene flow. The scenario is always the same. An in-group grows > internal dissension (often over beliefs) > group splitting > competition between the groups, which often includes armed conflict. Competition always makes things better, including you deuterostems. As long as religions act as barriers to gene flow between populations, the conflicts will continue.

The metaphor of seeing religion as a mask for the clash of civilizations could be helpful if one thinks of religion-unique masks as in-group markers for a specific breeding population like the religious beard and hat on most Muslim men and the hijab on most Muslim women. These other items, like your metaphorical masks, are also just in-group markers for a breeding population like the gold crosses that some Christian women wear around their neck or the musty black clown outfits worn by Orthodox Jewish men.

The only way the conflicts using religions will end will be when the rest of the world's horny male deuterostems can get at lovely Muslim women with minimal barriers to entry. The Muslim male will not willingly secularize and share access to his women. He will have to be crushed into submission to the will of deez nutz.  Human nature being what it is, this will of course happen. Once that occurs, you humans will have to find other backwards isht to fight over. Political and racial ideologies also act as barriers to gene flow. Race, religion, and politics are about equal in their ability to act as in-group markers that keep breeding populations apart.

Religions decline in the industrialized western democracies correlates with the breaking down of barriers for gene flow between previously separated religious peoples. In the United States in the 1950s, 95% of Jews only married other Jews. Today, only about 30% of Jews marry other Jews outside of Israel. In Europe, now secularized Catholics and Protestants intermarry with some frequency, although there are still barriers to gene flow between previously Christian secularized Europeans and Muslims, most of whom in Europe are still religious. 

Form follows function. If the function is removed, the form becomes vestigial. Everything else is simple-minded conversation...,

chiraq to the potomac: black political class the souled-out slave of apokolips...,

Tribune |  Despite strong efforts at reform, history shows that it often takes atrocity to enact real change.

Before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, President John F. Kennedy tried to pass it and failed. It took horrific images of police hosing black protesters and voters in Alabama, of police dogs attacking them, to enable Johnson to push monumental legislation past an entrenched bloc of prejudiced lawmakers. It took an enraging video from New York last year of a dying Eric Garner gasping "I can't breathe" to force the NYPD to institute an unprecedented policy — one promising serious consequences for police who witness another officer's use of excessive force without reporting it. Sadly, it's now Chicago's turn.

Amid our anger, can we give City Hall a chance to break down previously impenetrable walls? Despite strong feelings about Mayor Rahm Emanuel's decision to delay showing the Laquan McDonald video to the public while a federal investigation continued, we must not confuse facts. Never was there an attempt by the city to withhold the video from investigators or slow down the federal investigation, which started within weeks of the shooting. Emanuel didn't cause this problem. As in too many American cities, issues regarding police using excessive force started decades before he became mayor. But this tragedy may finally enable him to challenge a despicable status quo.

As in 1964, we need leadership to enact change, but atrocity and public commitment must create an opening to do what couldn't be done before. A formidable police union that protects its worst and undermines its best must be challenged. Actions need to be taken ahead of the U.S. Department of Justice findings, and we all must support that effort. The brotherhood of deadly silence can no longer be tolerated.

We can't have it both ways. After pummeling Emanuel for challenging a powerful teachers union, can we really be enraged that he hasn't been able to take on the police union? Even within the force, good officers have been punished for speaking out. Former police Cmdr. Lorenzo Davis, a 23-year veteran, lost his job on the Independent Police Review Authority for refusing to justify certain police shootings of civilians. His review said he showed a "bias against police." How many other good officers hesitate to speak out?

is the hon.bro.preznit's operation wetback intended to sabotage granny goodness?

WaPo |  This scoop from Jerry Markon and David Nakamura is going to scramble the politics of immigration in the presidential race, and it may create more problems for Democrats than for Republicans:

The Department of Homeland Security has begun preparing for a series of raids that would target for deportation hundreds of families who have flocked to the United States since the start of last year, according to people familiar with the operation.

The nationwide campaign, to be carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents as soon as early January, would be the first large-scale effort to deport families who have fled violence in Central America, those familiar with the plan said. More than 100,000 families with both adults and children have made the journey across the southwest border since last year, though this migration has largely been overshadowed by a related surge of unaccompanied minors.

The ICE operation would target only adults and children who have already been ordered removed from the United States by an immigration judge, according to officials familiar with the undertaking…The adults and children would be detained wherever they can be found and immediately deported. The number targeted is expected to be in the hundreds and possibly greater.

Read the rest for the details, but the short version is that there has been vigorous internal debate inside the Obama administration about this policy, and it has not been signed off on officially. The administration has long signaled that families crossing over illegally who do not qualify for asylum will be deported. But advocates have been urging the administration to treat these migrants as refugees, because experts believe that violence in Central America is a key reason for their efforts to cross the southern border.

In a preview of more to come, a leading immigration advocate, Frank Sharry of America’s Voice, told me that there will be intense pressure on the Democratic presidential candidates — particularly likely nominee Hillary Clinton — to denounce the new policy. Sharry pointed out that this could force Clinton to decide whether to align with immigration advocates and Latinos, as she’s been doing in hopes of winning the Latino vote by a huge margin in the general election, which would mean breaking with the Obama administration and adopting a position that Republicans will attack as weak on immigration enforcement.

“This will be a political nightmare for the Democrats,” Sharry told me. “The specter of raids picking up families and sending them back to violent countries is going to put Hillary Clinton in a difficult position. She’ll have to choose between protecting refugees from Central America, a demand of the Latino community, or standing with the law-and-order position of Obama and Republicans.”

looks like a great matinee..., (viacom vs. the vampire squid?)

theburningplatform |   Ultimately, it is a highly entertaining movie with the right moral overtone, despite non-stop profanity that captures the true nature of Wall Street traders. This is a dangerous movie for Wall Street, the government, and the establishment in general. They count on the complexity of Wall Street to confuse the average person and make their eyes glaze over. That makes it easier for them to keep committing fraud and harvesting the nation’s wealth.

This movie cuts through the crap and reveals those in power to be corrupt, greedy weasels who aren’t really as smart as they want you to think they are. The finale of the movie is sobering and infuriating. After unequivocally proving that Wall Street bankers, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve, Congress, the SEC, and the mainstream media, destroyed the global financial system, put tens of millions out of work, got six million people tossed from their homes, and created the worst crisis since the Great Depression, the filmmakers are left to provide the depressing conclusion.

No bankers went to jail. The Too Big To Fail banks were not broken up – they were bailed out by the American taxpayers. They actually got bigger. Their profits have reached new heights, while the average family has seen their income fall. Wall Street is paying out record bonuses, while 46 million people are on food stamps. Wall Street and their lackeys at the Federal Reserve call the shots in this country. They don’t give a fuck about you. And they’re doing it again.

Every American should see this movie and get fucking pissed off. The theater was deathly silent at the end of the movie. The audience was stunned by the fact that the criminals on Wall Street got away with the crime of the century, and they’re still on the loose. I had a great discussion with my 16 year old son on the way home. At least there is one millennial who understands how bad his generation is getting screwed.

why do you choose the lies of apokolips over the truths of the working man?

bnarchives |Is economic growth a miracle of the free market? According to mainstream theory, growth is best ensured through conditions of ‘perfect competition’. However, economic growth is tightly correlated with the concentration of power in the hands of large corporations. Why? The capital as power framework provides potential answers that turn mainstream theory on its head: growth seems to be intimately related to the formation of hierarchy.

granny goodness' awkward hispandering backfires - not my abuela...,

nbcnews |  Hillary Clinton's campaign has run into another Twitterstorm over her Latino outreach over a blog that compares her to "abuelas" (Latina grandmothers), displaying the tightrope candidates are walking as they try to woo the community.

The blog post, written by a Latina, is titled "7 Things Hillary Clinton Has in Common With Your Abuela." It drew backlash and accusations of "Hispandering" Tuesday night that continued into Wednesday. The writer listed such things as "worries about children everywhere" and "knows what's best," things that many Latinos might say about their grandmothers. But the writer also says the seven items are ways Clinton is "just like your grandmother."

The Latino Twitterati found the blog's comparison so offensive, they started a hashtag, #NotMyAbuela, and listed ways Hillary is not like their abuela. It follows criticism over Clinton calling herself "Tu Hillary" and using Selena's "Bidi, Bidi, Bom Bom" as a campaign song in San Antonio.

But Clinton's also a candidate who has hired several Latino staffers, as well as a couple of Latino pollsters. She's tacked further left on her own view of immigration and taken positions on issues that many progressive Latino groups back, such as raising the minimum wage and finding a way to bring legal status to the 11 million people in the community who are not here legally.

Traversing the Latino identity landscape is a difficult thing. Republican Jeb Bush is often lauded among Latinos for having married a Mexican woman, speaking Spanish and having a "Hispanic heart." But Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are referred to by some as Latinos in Name Only, despite their Cuban ancestry. While Clinton enjoys heavy Hispanic support, she's regularly targeted in social media.

Democratic strategist Larry Gonzalez said the backlash was a "headscratcher" for him. He saw the blog as the musings of a writer who wanted to share her thoughts on how she feels about Hillary Clinton in relation to her own abuela.

"It's kind of a damned if you, damned if you don't situation," said Gonzalez, a Raben Group lobbyist in Washington, D.C. who is not working with any of the campaigns "You have Latinos on the campaign being given an opportunity to offer their opinions and who are not just window dressing and people don't appreciate whatever thoughts they have to offer."

let your imagination run wild with weird science's inevitable endgame...,

NYTimes |  Biologists in the United States and Europe are developing a revolutionary genetic technique that promises to provide an unprecedented degree of control over insect-borne diseases and crop pests.

The technique involves a mechanism called a gene drive system, which propels a gene of choice throughout a population. No gene drives have yet been tested in the wild, but in laboratory organisms like the fruit fly, they have converted almost the entire population to carry the favored version of a gene.

Gene drives “could potentially prevent the spread of disease, support agriculture by reversing pesticide and herbicide resistance in insects and weeds, and control damaging invasive species,” a group of Harvard biologists wrote last year in the journal eLIFE.

A much discussed application of gene drives would help rid the world of pest-borne diseases like malaria, dengue fever and Lyme disease.

A gene drive designed to render a population extinct is known as a crash drive. A crash drive being developed for mosquitoes consists of a gene engineered into the Y chromosome that shreds the X chromosome in the cells that make the mosquito’s sperm, thus ensuring that all progeny are male. Unless the drive itself is damaged through mutation, the number of females would be expected to dwindle each generation until the population collapses.

Biologists led by Andrea Crisanti and Tony Nolan at Imperial College London reported this month in the journal Nature Biotechnology their development of mosquitoes with gene drives that disrupt three genes for female fertility, each of which acts at a different stage of egg formation. Because the female mosquitoes are infertile only when a copy is inherited from both parents, the gene drives would be thoroughly disseminated through a population before taking their toll. They could “suppress mosquito populations to levels that do not support malaria transmission,” the authors wrote.

The mosquitoes are not yet ready for release. Because natural selection will heavily favor any wild mosquitoes that acquire resistance to the gene drives, the researchers need to prevent such resistance from arising. One approach would be to target two or three sites in the same fertility gene, giving natural selection a much higher barrier to overcome.

why it's important to keep an eye on weird politics and science...,

SA |  Robert G. Edwards might not be a household name, but the innovation he pioneered along with Patrick Steptoe certainly is. In vitro fertilization (IVF), the process whereby human eggs are fertilized outside of the body and the resulting embryos implanted in a woman's womb, led to the 1978 birth of Louise Brown—the world's first "test tube baby." To date, an estimated five million children worldwide have been born using this innovation. Edwards received the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this remarkable achievement.

Edwards’s passing earlier this year prompted an outpouring of praise. He has been widely described as a maverick researcher disinterested in personal recognition who simply wanted to give babies to those who couldn’t make them on their own. The New York Times quoted Edwards’s former collaborator, Barry Bavister, as saying “Dr. Edwards’s motivation—his passion, in fact—was not fame or fortune but rather helping infertile women.” Bavister continued, “He believed with all his heart that it was the right thing to do.”

But Edwards’s views on the technology he created and the uses to which it should be put may be more complicated than this portrayal. One detail omitted from the obituaries published around the world was that Edwards was a member in good standing of the Eugenics Society in Britain for much of his career. Recently uncovered documents show that Edwards served on the organization’s Council—its leadership body—as a trustee on three separate occasions: from 1968 to 1970, 1971 to 1973 and once again from 1995 to 1997 after the group euphemistically renamed itself  "The Galton Institute" for the founder of the eugenics movement, Francis Galton. As we consider Edwards’s legacy in light of his recent passing, it is important to think critically about the relationship between Edwards’s development of IVF and his participation in an organization that was dedicated to promoting one of the most dangerous ideas in human history: that science should be used to control human reproduction in order to breed preferred types of people.

Coined by Galton in the late 1800s to mean "well-born," eugenics became a dominant aspect of Western intellectual life and social policy during the first half of the 20th century. It started with the seemingly simple proposition that one's social position is rooted in heritable qualities of character and intellect.

Eugenicists of that era also believed that people with what they considered the least desirable traits tend to have the most children, precipitating what they saw as an inevitable decline in a society’s intellectual and physical vigor. Taking their cue from livestock breeders, eugenicists argued that socially disadvantageous characteristics could be bred out of human populations through policies that limited the reproduction of "the unfit"—the "feebleminded," the poor and the weak. Many eugenicists considered these qualities to be more prevalent among racial and ethnic minorities.

two kinds of due process in America -- one for overseers and another for the overseen...,

tomdispatch |  In the simplest terms, there is no war on the police. Violent attacks against police officers remain at historic lows, even though approximately 1,000 people have been killed by the police this year nationwide. In just the past few weeks, videos have been released of problematic fatal police shootings in San Francisco and Chicago.

While it’s too soon to tell whether there has been an uptick in violent crime in the post-Ferguson period, no evidence connects any possible increase to the phenomenon of police violence being exposed to the nation. What is taking place and what the police and their supporters are largely reacting to is a modest push for sensible law enforcement reforms from groups as diverse asCampaign Zero, Koch Industries, the Cato Institute, The Leadership Conference, and the ACLU (my employer). Unfortunately, as the rhetoric ratchets up, many police agencies and organizations are increasingly resistant to any reforms, forgetting whom they serve and ignoring constitutional limits on what they can do.

Indeed, a closer look at law enforcement arguments against commonsense reforms like independently investigating police violence, demilitarizing police forces, or ending “for-profit policing” reveals a striking disregard for concerns of just about any sort when it comes to brutality and abuse. What this “debate” has revealed, in fact, is a mainstream policing mindset ready to manufacture fear without evidence and promote the belief that American civil rights and liberties are actually an impediment to public safety. In the end, such law enforcement arguments subvert the very idea that the police are there to serve the community and should be under civilian control.

And that, when you come right down to it, is the logic of the police state.  

Due Process Plus

It’s no mystery why so few police officers are investigated and prosecuted for using excessive force and violating someone’s rights. “Local prosecutors rely on local police departments to gather the evidence and testimony they need to successfully prosecute criminals,” according to Campaign Zero . “This makes it hard for them to investigate and prosecute the same police officers in cases of police violence.”

Since 2005, according to an analysis by theWashington Post and Bowling Green State University, only 54 officers have been prosecuted nationwide, despite the thousands of fatal shootings by police. As Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green, puts it, “To charge an officer in a fatal shooting, it takes something so egregious, so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way. It also has to be a case that prosecutors are willing to hang their reputation on.”

bond market boondoggle this way comes...,

NYTimes |  The fight over the island’s future is stretching from the oceanside neighborhoods of San Juan, where a growing number of wealthy investors and financial professionals have migrated in recent years to exploit generous tax breaks, to Capitol Hill. Their efforts are being closely watched by financial institutions, labor unions and policy makers on the mainland, where many ordinary investors own Puerto Rican bonds through mutual funds.

Some warn that Puerto Rico could be a test case for the rest of the country, paving the way for troubled states like Illinois to escape unsustainable debts.

Stephen J. Spencer, a restructuring expert representing Puerto Rico bondholders including some hedge funds, said letting the government renege on agreements with hedge funds and other investors would set a dangerous precedent, undermining the integrity of the bond market.

“It’s really a wealth transfer from the bondholders to the municipalities,” Mr. Spencer said.

Others fear a different precedent: A handful of wealthy investors, they argue, are trying to rewrite the social contract of an entire United States territory. Puerto Rican officials say they have already cut public services and slashed central government spending by a fifth to keep ahead of payments to the hedge funds and financiers.

“What they are doing, by getting all the resources for themselves, is undermining the viability of Puerto Rico as a commonwealth,” said Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. “They want their money now, and they want to get the rules set so that they can make money for the next 20 years.”

causally connected to the campus catawampus?

electronicintifada |  During his time as UC president from 2008 to 2013, Yudof ignored a litany of assaults, vandalism and threats against members of Students for Justice in Palestine on UC campuses, but spoke out loudly against alleged “incidents of intolerance” when supporters of Israel were affected.

Yudof admitted he “sought guidance” from the American Jewish Committee, a leading Israel lobby group, following the 2010 divestment initiative at UC Berkeley and the UC Irvine protest by Muslim students during a university-sponsored propaganda event featuring Israeli ambassador Michael Oren.

The students — known as the Irvine 11 — were prosecuted at the instigation of the university administration and eventually convicted in September 2011 of “criminal conspiracy” for their decision to make statements of protest during Oren’s speech. The University of California also suspended the Muslim Student Union at UC Irvine.

Rights groups warned Yudof that the University of California under his administration had “exacerbated” a climate of fear for Arab and Muslim students.

Doubled down
Before he left office, Yudof doubled down on his support for Israel and suppression of speech related to Palestine on UC campuses.

He helped draft a 2012 California State Assembly resolution that conflated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

In 2013, Yudof participated in a conference organized by Israeli military and political elites — which renowned physicist Stephen Hawking boycotted.

In his talk, Yudof railed against the growing divestment campaigns on college campuses and asserted that the “delegitimization of Israel is an ongoing problem.”

Three years earlier, Yudof had changed the university’s policy to make it much harder to divest. Had his policy been in place a generation ago, it would have prevented the university divesting from apartheid South Africa, as it did in 1986.

Fear
Yudof’s fears about the spread of BDS on campus are shared by the presidents of Israeli universities. They are demanding that the American Anthropological Association not move forward with a referendum to endorse its recent vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

Many in Israel already fear that a “silent boycott” is taking hold that is far more threatening to the status quo than even the visible boycott initiatives.

rotflmbao@concrete and unmalleable demands...,

thedailycaller |  Oberlin College students have finally joined dozens of other colleges in releasing a Mizzou-inspired set of demands for their administration, and while the demands come a month late, they make up for it by being very numerous and remarkably extreme.

The list, which bubbled up online over the past three days, is no less than 14 pages in length, and includes a staggering 50 demands, many of which divide into several sub-demands. Not only are the demands numerous, but they are quite severe and are paired with stern rhetoric. The document opens as follows:

Oberlin College and Conservatory is an unethical institution. From capitalizing on massive labor exploitation across campus, to the Conservatory of Music treating Black and other students of color as less than through its everyday running, Oberlin College unapologetically acts as [sic] unethical institution, antithetical to its historical vision. In the 1830s, this school claimed a legacy of supporting its Black students. However, that legacy has amounted to nothing more than a public relations campaign initiated to benefit the image of the institution and not the Africana people it was set out for … [T]his institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy. Oberlin College and Conservatory uses the limited number of Black and Brown students to color in its brochures, but then erases us from student life on this campus. You profit off of our accomplishments and invisible labor, yet You expect us to produce personal solutions to institutional incompetencies. We as a College-defined “high risk,” “low income,” “disadvantaged” community should not have to carry the burden of deconstructing the white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist system that we took no part in creating, yet is so deeply embedded in the soil upon which this institution was built.

After continuing in this manner for a while and outlining some broad goals (such as “the eradication hegemony in the curriculum”), the document begins to reel off demands, warning that they are “not polite requests, but concrete and unmalleable demands.” If Oberlin doesn’t capitulate, the document warns of a “full and forceful response,” though, despite the detailed demands, what the “response” would be remains entirely undefined.

   Oberlin College Black Student Union Institutional Demands by Legal Insurrection

 

what's the matter with all of these children?

thedailybeast  |  University dining halls aren’t exactly famous for serving gourmet dishes, but Oberlin students say their meals aren’t merely bad—they are racially inauthentic, and thus, a form of microaggression.

It’s one thing to quietly gripe about the quality of dorm food (students have likely been doing that for centuries). It’s quite another to accuse the dining room staff of stealing from Asian culture because they didn’t prepare the General Tso’s chicken with the correct sauce.

And yet, here’s what one Oberlin student had to say about the dining hall’s sushi bar:

“When you’re cooking a country’s dish for other people, including ones who have never tried the original dish before, you’re also representing the meaning of the dish as well as its culture,” student Tomoyo Joshi told The Oberlin Review. “So if people not from that heritage take food, modify it and serve it as ‘authentic,’ it is appropriative.”

Cultural appropriation, readers will recall, allegedly occurs when people borrow the traditions of another ethnic or religious group. Liberal students at a Canadian university, for example, recently shut down a free yoga class for disabled students because yoga has its origins in Hinduism, meaning it doesn’t belong to white people and they shouldn’t practice it. This kind of thinking is actually bafflingly illiberal—who’s to say that culture itself belongs to anyone?—and yet it’s usually left-leaning students waging weirdly nativist campaigns of forced isolation on foreign cuisines and customs.

The culinary critics at Oberlin, however, aren’t just mad that the cafeteria has appropriated their culture—they’re mad that it’s been appropriated poorly.

“It was ridiculous,” student Diep Nguyen told The Oberlin Review (the “it,” in question was a Banh Mi sandwich with the wrong bun). “How could they just throw out something completely different and label it as another country’s traditional food?”

For one thing, the Banh Mi sandwich is itself the product of the blurring of cultural boundaries: French and Vietnamese.

For another, there’s something deliciously ironic about Oberlin students—some of the most privileged people in the world, as evidenced by the $50,000 they pay annually in tuition—whining about the bun-thickness of meals prepared by lowly paid cafeteria workers.

ironic the cathedral's cultural marxist wet dream will be implemented via algorithmic slashdotting...,

blacklistednews |  No regime, however ruthless its leaders, vast its ambitions, or extensive its resources, can tyrannize its subjects without their active cooperation. Every police state ultimately requires the public to regiment themselves--and each other. In the age of social media, successful totalitarians will have to crowd-source state coercion -- and China's new "social credit" system, which will encompass that country's entire population in 2020, is pioneering an approach that, if successful, will inevitably spawn imitators in the West.

"The Chinese government is building an omnipotent `social credit' system that is meant to rate each citizen's trustworthiness," reports the BBC. Note well that this system doesn't merely offer an assessment of creditworthiness -- which is a measure of the relative risks to financial institutions that would lend money to that individual. Instead, an opaque clique of supervisors employs an abstruse algorithm to rate the individual's social "worthiness," as defined by his support for the government, its policies, and its objectives.

"A social credit system is an important component ... of the Socialist market economy system and the social governance system," explained a June 14, 2014 "Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System" issued by China's State Council. "Accelerating the construction of a social credit system is an important basis for comprehensively implementing the scientific development view and building a harmonious Socialist society [and] an important method to perfect the Socialist market economy system."

The chief objective of this system is to "strengthen sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, social sincerity and judicial credibility construction," continues the Planning Outline. "Sincerity" in this context means much the same thing as "worthiness" -- that is, deference to the country's ruling elite, and at least a public display of enthusiasm for its schemes. Building "sincerity" is an important consideration during what the Chinese government calls "the assault phase of deepening economic structural reform and perfecting the Socialist market economy system."

How can a comparatively minuscule ruling elite like the Chinese Communist Party exert control over hundreds of billions of consumers in a decentralized cyber-economy? In an essay for CNN, Rogier Creemers of Oxford University explains that China's ruling elite "seeks to leverage the explosion in personal data generated through smartphones, apps and online transactions in order to improve citizens' behavior" by expanding the concept of a "credit score" into an index of social "worthiness."

"Individuals and businesses will be scored on various aspects of their conduct -- where you go, what you buy and who you know -- and these scores will be integrated within a comprehensive database that not only links into government information, but also to data collective by private businesses," Creemers elaborates.

Global Universal Temporary Solution For Unlimited Living

alasbabylon |  The televisions, radios, and computer screens around the world went briefly blank, then a news commentator appeared on television and somehow through the magic tricks of government agencies, the same commentator appeared on each and every computer screen everywhere.  The commentator greeted with voice only for radio, but in all screens around the world, booming and confident, announced what follows:

"As news coordinator, I am delighted to bring you the end of the year speech by the President of the United States of America.  The President called for this meeting - with all the media from around the globe, just one hour ago, saying that it would be the most important speech of his tenure in office.  Thanks to various government agencies, we are bringing this to you direct and live."  The television and computer screens then briefly blared with somber but presidential music, then the obviously distressed image of the President of the United States of America appeared. 

Around the world, people stopped what they were doing, listened and watched.


The address by the President -

"Good evening.  As each and every one of you know, the worlds population exceeds the world's resources.  I have devoted countless days and weeks and months, working day and night, with leadership groups from around the world to solve these problems.  We and scientists, decision makers, leaders, military officials, and others have considered each and every possibility, with a goal of answers for the year 2050.  However, we have an increasingly urgent situation, and we have determined that there is only one way to handle this situation.  Further, there is only now when action must be taken, as you and I know the problems are multiplying and combining.  Next month and next year will be too late.  Consequently, I and the other leaders of the world have agreed upon a compact that is global, universal and temporary, until a balance has been reached between resources and population.  This agreement will offer a long term and satisfactory solution for unlimited living in the future, a goal that all of us support and encourage.

By proclamation, I am bringing forward the planned program, Global Universal Temporary Solution For Unlimited Longterm Living (GUTSFULL), from 2050 to the immediate present.  As it is now 2029 and tomorrow will usher in the new year, the program GUTSFULL, will begin precisely at 1 minute after the New Year of 2030 begins, as a way to assure a healthy life for our planet and all its beings.  Every country, every corporation, every religious leader, every major association, every important scientist, around the globe, has agreed upon this new plan, this temporary solution to build a better and stronger and more stable planet for the future. 

I assure you that those who can contribute to the quality of life on earth will be safe and should have no worries.  Those who cannot meet the criteria will be reviewed quickly, thoroughly and with the best interests of all of the people of the planet in mind.  Some who are deemed unable to contribute will be selected for termination.  Euthanasia will be painless, quick, and all costs will be covered by the state and federal governments and national and international corporations.  If you happen to be selected, you won't have to pay for anything.

You will be pleased to learn that decisions made will be by community based teams, composed of a local councillor or political leader, a local and certified member of the ministry, a local registered medical professional or health practitioner, a local legally entitled financial manager, and a sworn deputy or officer of the law.  That process will assure virtually complete local control and effective management, so that no federal or state official will impinge in any way on anyone, not you and your family and neighbours.  Your rights will be preserved.  Your dignity will be respected.

These teams will be charged with making decisions based on each individual's past and potential future contributions to the community, their religious beliefs, their health considerations, their ability to contribute financially to the community, and any and all legal records.  Thus no one will be subject to arbitrary or capricious decisions and subsequent termination.  Scientists will rate and continually monitor the past contributions and potential contributions of each individual, so that the best solutions for all will be assured.  Local administration will assure the best and fairest outcome too.

Encouragement will be available, for if a person otherwise not selected for the program, decides to opt for euthanasia on a voluntary basis, they will be entitled to assure that another person of their choosing will be guaranteed life for another year.  Further, if any person can contribute significantly to the community, they will be guaranteed life for another year.   If they can contribute to the costs of government and program operation financially, and if their legal record is clear, they should have no worries.  Even better for many of you, if you have contributed by turning in those who were or are dissidents, free thinkers, radicals, or feeble minded, you will receive extra points towards prolonging your own life.  These points, if you so choose, can transfer to another person of your choosing, if you volunteer for euthanasia.  Those with religious beliefs, and there are many, will be offered an opportunity to demonstrate the strength of their beliefs and commitment to life in the hereafter, by volunteering regardless of their being otherwise selected.  Again, they will be entitled to designate another person for a guaranteed additional year of life.

I assure you that only those who cannot contribute to the community will be terminated, thus freeing up opportunities for those not selected for the program.  And a large number of jobs will be created to operate this program, thus employing many people who otherwise would not have a responsible role in the community.  This will give many people opportunity and security, as they contribute to the long term, sustainable, and overall well being of their communities.

I pledge to you that this is the only way to bring our global population into line with the available and projected resources.  And all of us, including me, will be subject to this plan, beginning 1 January 2030, just a few minutes from now.  Each country, and each corporation, will ensure the process is painless and in the best interests of all.  Thank you for your attention and cooperation.  God bless us all."

The President, looking serious and with tears running, then blinked and smiled, as if a weighty decision had been made.  Perhaps the prepared script was no longer being played.  He began again, looking directly at his audiences: 

"On one last and final personal note, I, as Commander in Chief, as your President, have worked day and night on this project to the point of utter exhaustion.  Accordingly, I have designated the Vice President to take over the role of President of the United States, at 1 minute after midnight, that is, in just hours at the end of tonight.   At the suggestion of the Cabinet and the team who created this project, I am proud to be the first person to volunteer for GUTSFULL and I will fulfil my duty and obligations with pride.  With a joyous and happy frame of mind, I bid you all a very good evening and a Happy New Year."

The President, by now looking ashen and grave, somber and serious, stopped speaking and promptly began walking off the podium.  Armed soldiers dressed in battle uniform, could be briefly seen in the background and joined him as he departed.  The light faded.

There were no cheers or applause, rather stunned silence, by people around the globe. 

Immediately however, some panic stricken citizens began organising.  Some within a few minutes, committed suicide on the spot without waiting for the awarding of merit points to others, unfortunately, thereby losing opportunities for their families and friends.  Other reactions were many and swift, particularly noted was the mobilisation of police, military, and emergency services, and then subsequently, seemingly in minutes, the positive commentaries came forth from all sides.  It seems that the response had been prepared for some time.  The media strongly approved, claiming that finally, something positive was being done to deal with the many urgent problems - pollution, corruption, climate change, global warming, overpopulation, and resource deficiencies. 

A few critiques  or angry fights emerged, but those who offered such critiques or who fought with each other, were quickly identified, taken into custody, and awarded demerit points, assuring that those who pointed them out were given merits.  A few minority groups, some organisations of senior and elderly citizens, and a number of disability rights group objected strongly, earning themselves the name or label - "the first to go", according to the news sources.  However, the President at the end of the speech, took that noble place of honour. 

The next morning the mortuaries and funeral parlour operators were overjoyed at the remarkable rise in their value on the stock markets of the world.  And the rest of the world joined in with vigour and energy to spare.