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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sheriff of nottinghamism at epidemic levels...,

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

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

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

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

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

separate but equal?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the point is...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

guardian |  Among my questions, I asked:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

white america's biggest fear...,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’d also boost yields in the process. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

america lacks the resources to repeat mistakes of 68 - making draconian clampdown inevitable

theatlantic |  Commission staffers had produced a blistering and radical draft report on November 22, 1967. The 176-page report, “The America of Racism,” recounted the deep-seated racial divisions that shaped urban America, and it was damning about Johnson’s beloved Great Society programs, which the report said offered only token assistance while leaving the “white power structure” in place. What’s more, the draft treated rioting as an understandable political response to racial oppression. “A truly revolutionary spirit has begun to take hold,” they wrote, “an unwillingness to compromise or wait any longer, to risk death rather than have their people continue in a subordinate status.” Kerner then nixed the report, and his staff director fired all 120 social scientists who had worked on it.

Nevertheless, the final Kerner Report was still incredibly hard-hitting: “This is our basic conclusion: Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Though the commissioners had softened the language from the first draft, much of the data remained the same and the overall argument was still incredibly powerful. The report focused on institutional racism. This meant that racism was not just a product of bad individuals who believed that African Americans were inferior to white Americans, but that these racial hierarchies were literally embedded in the structure of society.

“Segregation and poverty,” the report said, “have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The riots in Newark and Detroit, the report continued, “were not caused by, nor were they the consequences of, any organized plan or ‘conspiracy.’” The rioters were educated and had been employed in recent years; most of them were furious about facing constant discrimination when seeking new employment, trying to find a place to live, or, worst of all, interacting with hostile law-enforcement officials.

The police received the most scrutiny in the report. In a haunting section, the report explained, “Negroes firmly believe that police brutality and harassment occur repeatedly in Negro neighborhoods.” The rioting had shown that police enforcement had become a problem not a solution in race relations. More aggressive policing and militarized officers had become city officials’ de facto response to urban decay. “In several cities, the principal response has been to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weapons.” The report stressed that law-enforcement officers were not “merely a spark factor” to the riots but that they had come to symbolize “white power, white racism, and white oppression.”

drug war deforestation

FP |  To hear the Guatemalan government tell it, the Maya Biosphere Reserve, a sprawling national park in the northern department of Petén, is the crown jewel of the Central American park system. Look on a map, and you’ll see the protected area spreads across the northern fifth of the country like a green carpet. Within those borders lie the famous Mayan ruins at Tikal and El Mirador, as well as huge swaths of the Maya Forest, the Americas’ largest tropical rainforest outside the Amazon, an invaluable storehouse of both carbon stocks and rare plants and wildlife, among them Guatemala’s last population of macaws.

But that rosy picture hides a grimmer reality. Journey to these protected areas of northern Guatemala, and you’ll find something resembling an ongoing ecological catastrophe. In Laguna del Tigre National Park, nestled in the heart of the reserve, the tall acacia and mahogany trees have been cut and burned, exiling the macaws to the tiny fringe of forest that remains. You can see this damage on a map included in an annual report published by the National Council of Protected Areas (CONAP), the Guatemalan national park service, in partnership with Western environmental NGOs, and paid for in part by the U.S. Department of the Interior. As the map shows, the Maya Biosphere Reserve is bisected by what appears to be creeping fungus — illegal cattle ranches, which have cleared about 8 percent of the reserve since 2000. These ranches stand as a parable for the drug war. According to Guatemalan park guards, U.N. researchers, and prosecutors alike, the unintended cause of the deforestation is a drug war victory: a successful interdiction campaign that redirected billions of dollars of drug cash across Guatemala, funding a trade that threatens to destroy Central America’s greatest forest.

According to a report by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), until the early 2000s, Central America was a relative sideshow in the Western Hemisphere’s cocaine trade. The drug largely moved from Colombia across the Caribbean into either Mexico or the southern United States. But starting around 2002, aggressive U.S. law enforcement and interdiction campaigns closed the Caribbean route, seizing some 200 tons of cocaine. Other victories followed in allied states. Security forces in Mexico largely shut down direct drug flights into the country. In South America, the Colombian government broke the power of the country’s main cartels.

But the drug trade is a river of money stretching from the Andes to North America. Dam it in one place and — as long as there are still users in the United States — it will find another course.

DPD has a supply of bombs, drones, and used one to kill a civilian in a public place today...,

theverge |  Police in Dallas used a bomb disposal robot to kill a suspect after last night’s deadly shooting during a protest. In a press conference, Dallas police chief David Brown said that the robot was deployed after negotiations with the suspect failed. "We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was," said Brown. "Other options would have exposed our officers to great danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb."

It’s not entirely clear what the "device" in question was, although it may have been one of the small explosives that are normally used to safely detonate larger bombs. A previous statement, from Dallas’ mayor, said only that the suspect had died after police used explosives to "blast him out."

Police have used remote-controlled bomb disposal robots for other purposes; San Jose police talked a man out of suicide last year after delivering a phone and pizza to him via one. But this is the first known case where a department has described using one as a weapon, defense technology expert Peter Singer posted on Twitter, although he notes it's been used this way informally by US troops and insurgents. Unlike with the "killer robots" that have ethicists most worried, any decisions in Dallas were made clearly by humans — it’s much more like an advanced tool used in an unexpected way than anything artificially intelligent or designed for murder. Still, beyond the unmanned drones used in bombing strikes, it’s one of the first known times that a robot has been intentionally used to kill a human outside the battlefield.

if this little unpleasantness stays rooted in race, it'll blow over - if it goes to class - all hell breaks loose...,

Criminality correlates a lot better to class than race.  It's just that in many areas, class correlates pretty well with race.  Looking at our nation's history, when the Black Panthers stuck to talking about race issues, the FBI didn't like them but dealt with them.  Even though the Black Panthers were arming themselves and talking of revolution.  However, as soon as the Black Panthers started talking about class and showing common cause with white people, the FBI exterminated them.  Food for thought. 

If this little unpleasantness stays rooted in race, it'll blow over.  If it gets anywhere near economic issues, all hell will break loose.  As soon as it looked like Occupy Wall Street was going to stick around, Obama coordinated public and private militias and took them out.  As ever, what Empires fears most is a peasant revolt.

rorschachian juggling of the absurdities of uhmurkan necropolitics internationale, worldwide...,

whitehouse |  "But regardless of the outcome of such investigations, what's clear is that these fatal shootings are not isolated incidents. They are symptomatic of the broader challenges within our criminal justice system, the racial disparities that appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust that exists between law enforcement and too many of the communities they serve.

"In the meantime, all Americans should recognize the anger, frustration, and grief that so many Americans are feeling -- feelings that are being expressed in peaceful protests and vigils.  Michelle and I share those feelings. Rather than fall into a predictable pattern of division and political posturing, let’s reflect on what we can do better.  Let’s come together as a nation, and keep faith with one another, in order to ensure a future where all of our children know that their lives matter."

peasant false flag distractions in Dallas vs great-ape war planning in Warsaw

Telegraph |  David Cameron 'shocked and horrified'

British Prime Minister David Cameron is "shocked and horrified" by the shootings, Downing Street has said.

The Prime Minister is expected to discuss the tragic incident with Barack Obama on the margins of the Nato summit which both are attending in the Polish capital, Warsaw.

The deaths - and injuries to six other officers - have been blamed on snipers who opened fire during a protest in the Texas city over this week's fatal police shootings of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota.

Mr Cameron's official spokeswoman told a regular Westminster media briefing: "The Prime Minister is shocked and horrified by the terrible scenes we have seen overnight.

"He is due to be at the Warsaw summit and I think he will have the opportunity to talk to President Obama about it directly.

"I think he would echo what the President has said, which is that these attacks on police officers simply doing their job and trying to keep people safe are horrific and cannot be justified."