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Some people want to find discrimination or outrage everywhere...

Yeah, the plight of the all-American worker having his government and economic prospects ruined by imaginary illegal voting. Its right up there with the back-breaking work required to keep the South's gerrymandering in a league of its own. Breaks my heart...

The dallasnews story is based on allegations made way back in 2007. How did those pan out?

People are looking for any opportunity to remove people with Latin- or black-sounding names from the voter rolls. Florida has experienced a rash of this form of disenfranchisement. The state of Florida claims there are many thousands of people illegally registered as voters, and yet they consistently do this based on misspelled names and such... as if their computers couldn't tell the difference. Its a pattern of intentional voter suppression. Just the number of citizens reporting disenfranchisement totally swamps the confirmed cases of voter fraud.

You may think voter IDs could solve these issues, but in reality it would just move the nature of the allegations to ID fraud. It would pit xenophobes against the ability of many citizens to even hold an ID. ...and it would. As a gay person, I see the issue through the Right's burning desire to exclude. There are always new tactics -- like the War On Drugs or "religious freedom of for-profit businesses" -- to try and preserve for the standard-bearers the luxury of choice: to pretend different people don't exist, or else intimidate and abuse them with impunity.

Since you're so dismissive about the studies on this subject, I'll leave it there.

"In some ancient Greece city-states, a person could be put to death by popular vote."

Oh come on now! If the US ever needed the ability to put to death some idiot scumbag by popular vote, this is the year. He has my vote! ;-)

Got Rump? (Click it. It is funny. Seriously.)

It's not the gradual rise that's the issue but the increased likelihood of extreme events. Events that might be considered "once in a lifetime" will happen with such frequency that insurers simply won't provide cover. People living in at-risk areas will be wiped out so often that they'll be driven to live somewhere else. It doesn't help that Florida is so flat either since it means storm surges could well travel miles inland and do damage.

"I was driving with Harold Wanless through Miami Beach one day when the sun suddenly disappeared and the skies opened up. When it rains in Miami, it's spooky. Blue sky vanishes and suddenly water is everywhere, pooling in streets, flooding parking lots, turning intersections into submarine crossings. Even for a nonbeliever like me, it feels biblical, as if God were punishing the good citizens of Miami Beach for spending too much time on the dance floor. At Alton Road and 10th Street, we watched a woman in a Toyota stall at a traffic light as water rose up to the doors. A man waded out to help her, water up to his knees. This flooding has gotten worse with each passing year, happening not only after torrential rainstorms but during high tides, too, when rising sea water backs up through the city's antiquated drainage system. Wanless, 71, who drives an SUV that is littered with research equipment, notebooks and mud, shook his head with pity. "This is what global warming looks like," he explained. "If you live in South Florida and you're not building a boat, you're not facing reality." http://www.rollingstone.com/po...

May I suggest you start talking to the Dutch. Their language sounds like a mix of German, English and a throat infection, but I assure you, they all understand and speak English excellently. The name "Netherlands" means "lower countries". You know that the Netherlands are famous for windmills, right? Well, those aren't all mills. Many are wind pumps, which were used to drain the land, most of which is below sea level.

"Some engineers point to the coastal resort community of Scheveningen in Holland as a possible inspiration for what might be done in Miami. In Scheveningen, engineers created an elaborate dike with a road and parking within it, as well as pedestrian walks and a man-made sand dune. But Scheveningen has an altogether different geology and coastline than southern Florida. Then there is the question of scale: The dike at Scheveningen is a half-mile long and cost nearly $100 million to design and construct. Miami Beach alone is seven miles long – the entire Florida coastline is more than 1,200 miles. Even if an elaborate dike like this were possible, you can't build a wall along the entire coast. If you just walled off Miami Beach, the water would still flow in from the bay side." http://www.rollingstone.com/po...

And pumps do wonders to remove water that gets past the wall. Or is New Orleans still flooded from Katrina and the levy breaches?

There are ways to mitigate. Just like the climate deniers can't wave their hands and make science go away, you cannot wave your hands and make engineering go away.

"Obey explains that when there is a torrential rain (a frequent occurrence) and inland Florida floods, there is nowhere for the water to go. Cities on the western edge of Miami-Dade County, such as Hialeah and Sweetwater, are now at risk of massive flooding with every big storm. To solve this, the South Florida Water District is installing pumps on the freshwater side of the control structures on the canals. The pumps, which cost about $70 million each, can take the runoff water from storms and pump it into the ocean to alleviate flooding.
But stopping saltwater incursion is more difficult. The town of Hallandale Beach, just a few miles north of Miami, had to close six of its eight wells due to saltwater intrusion. The town now buys half its water from a well field in Broward County and is working on a deal to drill six new wells of its own, at a cost of about $10 million. Fort Lauderdale has also faced saltwater intrusion, as has Lake Worth, a community just south of Palm Beach. "In the long run, the whole area is likely to have problems," Obey says." http://www.rollingstone.com/po...

I'm not sure that's possible.

It is when he is quite possibly the Zodiac killer

Rolling Stone had an unusually insightful analysis of Trump. I suggest everyone read it.

Basically, every single politician running is fake, there for show, and lying to you. Trump is just better at the game.

If you want to know what Trump would be like as a president, his concrete plans, it would be the same as he's always done: build things. He's serious about building a beautiful, great wall of Trump (beautiful in his eyes only). For things he doesn't care about, he'll listen to his advisers. Oh, and he'll destroy ISIS.

He chose to repeat it. He knew what he was doing. Here's a really good analysis of Trump, and his opponents.

Frankly I don't care if he calls anyone a pussy. I just wish we could get a presidential candidate who is competent.

Rio suffers from insufficient city management. Improvements that should have been done 50 years ago haven't been done. People in the U.S. often don't like dealing with details. Brazilians, in general, are even more intense about not liking details. So things don't get done.

To get a more balanced view, consider the U.S. metropolitan area centered on Portland, Oregon:

Intel has been emitting fluoride for years without state knowledge, permit. Quote: "When Intel applied for D1X approval, the company considered its fluoride emissions insignificant and did not include those. It was only when the company applied for the new DEQ permit required by greenhouse gas regulations that it requested a 6.4-tons-per-year fluoride emission limit. " 6.4-tons-per-year!!!

Oregon warns home gardeners, Portland leaders lash out at state pollution response. Quote: "Regulators have known for years that Portland has high levels of the heavy metal cadmium in the air, but didn't know until 2015 what the likely sources were." Another quote: "The department's own air monitoring found arsenic levels were 159 times higher than the state's safety goal in Southeast Portland and cadmium levels were 49 times higher."

Portland pollution: How does it affect you? Quote: "Tests detected cadmium and arsenic near Bullseye Glass in Southeast Portland and Uroboros Glass in North Portland. Superheating the metals, which are used to add color to glass, can send small particles up smokestacks and into surrounding air." The next paragraph: "The state also found that another carcinogen, hexavalent chromium, was used by the two plants."

Portland, Oregon is no longer a livable city in other ways. There are now traffic jams most of the day. Yet Portland city management is allowing the construction of large buildings with no parking! One story: New Portland apartment buildings with no parking have neighbors worried about congested streets.

The stories about Portland help give a more balanced view of the poor city management in Rio.

I have lived in Brazil a total of about 3 years. When the 2008 financial crash occurred in the U.S., Brazilian newspaper writers were assigned to write stories about how the crash affected Brazil. The writers seemed to put a lot of effort into finding stories about bad effects, but they never seemed to find anything particularly bad. Why? Brazil has better banking laws and the laws were followed.

The U.S. financial system continues to be corrupt. For example, see this story about Goldman Sachs: The Great American Bubble Machine.

Flint is an issue with switching from a good water system to a more acidic and known polluted one to save a few bucks. That's coupled with STOPPING procedures which helped prevent lead-leeching/corrosion in pipes, DENYING the issue despite people with rashes, hair loss, and other extreme symptoms, and then VICTIM BLAMING and COVER UPS (hey, it's better, we tested it... in homes that have already added filters) when many cases started to surface. At the same time people and their children were being poisoned by lead - and the gov't was denying it - they added extra water coolers of nice clean water in the offices of those same government officials.

But hey, keep telling yourself how bad other countries are, and how yours is so much better. When the "best country in the world" is also a polluted, dry desert rock with a bunch of sick jobless people you can pat yourselves on the back that China is so much worse.

The first step to addressing a problem is to stop denying it exists. Part of that means you start to realize that "but hey... look over there" is a method to distract from the problems "over here"

I don't generally disagree with any of your points. However, before you idolize the Tea Party - or those that support them - too much, you might want to read The Truth About the Tea Party. There's a lot of financial ignorance and hypocrisy lurking there... [short excerpt follows]

As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — "Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!" — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.

"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.

After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. I come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views.

"I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."

"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"

"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole life."

I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"

Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!

"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"

"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."

"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"

"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much."

Cheers.

Leftist activists trying to promote foist their hippy lifestyle on the rest of us.

Damn those hippy Koch brothers!. Get a hair cut!

If you vote republican and accept Medicare and social security you are a hypocrite.

Yup. That seems to be the trend.

My mother and step-father (both Republicans) are steadfastly against the Affordable Care Act (and anything "Obama" in general - like most R's), while enjoying their Medicare and Tricare (respectively). I guess single-payer, government-supported, universal health insurance is okay for them, but not the rest of us. (Big sigh - and, yes, I understand the ACA is flawed. I would prefer singer-payer for everyone.)

Just like this: "... elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending ..." as recounted in the 2010 Rolling Stone article, The Truth About the Tea Party

Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — "Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!" — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.

"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."

...

"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"

"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."

"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"

"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much."

Also...

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv......
http://www.forbes.com/sites/in......
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/......
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bro......

In any case, glad this abusive, corrupting program was shut down.

A time article on John Oliver's influence including noting his show on civil forfeiture. Here's an article where you could read that he had an effect on CF...

http://time.com/3674807/john-o......

Quote:
After the increased exposure given to the issue by the (Washington) Post and Oliver, Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that he would enact major limitations on the law.

Fortunately, we have these things called dikes, levees, and cofferdams that we can build when we need to to protect them from actually being underwater (as long as they're properly built and maintained).

Dikes and levees to keep the sea out don't work very well in much of Florida because the underlying bedrock is largely porous limestone. Even if you build a levee the water will just come up through the ground.

"Conventional sea walls and barriers are not effective here," says Robert Daoust, an ecologist at ARCADIS, a Dutch firm that specializes in engineering solutions to rising seas. "Protecting the city, if it is possible, will require innovative solutions."

Link

> Isn't it time to ban *ISLAM*?

1. You're throwing the baby out with the bath water.

2. This sets a precedent down a dangerous slippery slope -- _who_ determines _what_ is acceptable or not?

3. The problem is The Silent Majority"

4. Cars kill more people then guns but we don't ban cars simply because a few idiots don't know how to respect other's property or life.

**Education** and/or Name-and-Shame is the proper solution.

i.e. Scroll down to:

7. THE HARVARD MAN

* http://www.rollingstone.com/po...

Thanks Pollyanna. Of course the people who actually have to plan for this do not share your optimism: http://www.rollingstone.com/po...

I am curious about the bit where it says "allowance of rape culture."

I must have missed some headlines or something. What events are prompting that concern?

How about this? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

"The hacking group Anonymous has threatened to make public the identities of four boys accused of gang-raping a Canadian teenager who later killed herself after images of the attack went viral."

Or this? http://www.rollingstone.com/cu...

A summary of all the things above states essentially that Anonymous will defend the weak and preyed upon by exposing their tormentors.

You could not be more wrong about the Koch brothers!!! They, are the most malevolent influence in the US today... you must limit yourself to nothing but the incredibly biased dirt from Fox News, and Rupert Murdoch! It is nearly impossible to pay attention to any less biased news sources for a better view of the poison they spew. Just between the two of them, they are spending close to a billion dollars THIS ELECTION ALONE to drown out any other views, and put as many senators and congressmen in their pockets as possible! http://www.rollingstone.com/po... http://www.kochfaqs.com/ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... http://m.dailykos.com/story/20... http://www.juancole.com/2013/0... There are tons of such reports from nearly every major news source (notably NOT from FOX or Murdoch!). The only way you can, say they are "pro freedom" is that they don't want any restrictions on what they spend on campaigns, or how they spend it. The Bush administrations loaded the Supreme Court with justices that have been very regressive, such as allowing "Citizens United" to not only out-spend anyone more moderate, but ruling that such news outlets as Fox can report total lies on their broadcasts and it's okay because it's "free press". The Kochs complain angrily about union spending on political campaigns, but they spend TEN TIMES MORE ON ELECTIONS THAN ALL UNIONS COMBINED! Read up on the tons of dirty deals they were involved with, and then tell me how innocent and wonderful they are. The Koch brothers are the most INSIDIOUS siblings on the planet.

There clearly will be some sort of paying business model, like yelp, BBB, and others to hide or influence things that are displayed about you. The simplest solution is to take the approach the band Primus did, or the Botto Bistro in San Francisco.

Like him or hate him, Trump has shifted the national debate on several issues in his brief involvement in the campaign,

http://www.rollingstone.com/po...

Now you want to blame some mythical real estate developer for you buying swamp land in Florida!!!

Actually, I would. Southern Florida is expected to be underwater by the end of the century.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-the-city-of-miami-is-doomed-to-drown-20130620

... what's next; banning Mathematics?? Because that's exactly what encryption is.

Instead of banning the tool (which never works) how about going after the _behaviors_.

Gee, if only we had some evidence about the power of peer pressure (7. The Harvard Man)

They have HSBC (and others, no doubt) for that.

bullshit

Sigh...as opposed to the AGW lobby which is run by such selfless companies as Goldman Sachs while pushing cap and trade which has the rules written by the same one who cooked up credit default swaps and is the kind of scam frankly a kid could see through, meanwhile you have Rev Al setting himself up to be a carbon billionaire while driving a fleet of SUVs like a third world El Presidente and living in a McMansion with ACed basketball court while he says that YOU need to pay more, you filthy climate damaging peasant you.

Do we need to pollute less and save more? Of course, this is common sense, but we will get NO common sense approaches offered because companies like Goldman Sachs and scammers like Gore couldn't make out like highway robbery on common sense so we'll get scams like crap and trade pushed where the worst polluters get their carbon "indulgences" so pay nothing, scammers like Gore will pay themselves in carbon credits from their own company so he can have the brass balls to fly a lear jet for one and ride in a fleet of Caddie SUVs while claiming he is "carbon neutral" so who does that leave to pay these shitbags for their magic beans? Why that would be YOU, you filthy peasant who can't afford your own offshore LLC, why you are killing the planet!

I'm not referring to the Sam Smith case as much as the Thicke and Williams case. Mr. Gaye's heirs have sought an injunction against further exploitation of "Blurred Lines". I'm also referring to composers refusing to let their work be interpolated, and recording artists refusing to let their work be sampled, in new recordings. For example, one of the songs on the Bloodhound Gang album Use Your Fingers was intended to contain a sample of a song by The Cure, but Robert Smith denied sample clearance. And the version of "Pump Up the Volume" by MARRS heard in the United States is missing a few samples that couldn't be cleared for the U.S. market.

Happiness has a lot to do with attitude. I find that being generally happy is easy if you use your abilities to put yourself into situations that make you happy. I used to work for a place that got to be more and more like Dilbert. Instead of drowning in it, I broke loose and made a new life, using my brains to create interesting, fun things. I found part-time work in the sciences, and have extra time to make wacky inventions and volunteer with kids, teaching them how to do similar things. I am careful to take on projects only if they are likely to make me happier. The latest was building the red telephone for this...

the-last-time-our-oceans-got-this-acidic-it-drove-earths-greatest-extinction

http://www.rollingstone.com/po...

Eliminate mandatory sentencing. Rename it as "suggested". I think one issue is granting smaller sentences to people you "favor", hence why mandatory sentencing perhaps was created?

The point of mandatory sentencing was to remove "undesireables" from society without calling the prisons poor houses. http://www.rollingstone.com/po... A guy sentenced to life for stealing $2.50 in socks. That was the minimum sentence for his situation.

It's politics. When something happens most of the Senate and House and the President had to go along with it. This means that frequently they vote the same way on a bill for opposite reasons.

When mandatory sentencing was passed, for example, Conservatives liked the tough-on-crime angle. Liberals liked that Judges would no longer have the ability to let a pretty white middle-class girl off with a slap because she reminded the Judge of his daughter, while still sending black guys away for decades because they reminded him of this one scene in Birth of a Nation.

Eliminate mandatory sentencing. Rename it as "suggested". I think one issue is granting smaller sentences to people you "favor", hence why mandatory sentencing perhaps was created?

The point of mandatory sentencing was to remove "undesireables" from society without calling the prisons poor houses. http://www.rollingstone.com/po... A guy sentenced to life for stealing $2.50 in socks. That was the minimum sentence for his situation.

> bullshit WOD propaganda like the "gateway drug" theory.

I've pointed this out in the past. Those in authority always "scapegoat" some inanimate object they are afraid of:

* Movies
* Jazz
* Rock-n-Roll
* Heavy Metal
* DnD
* Computer Games
* marijuana - How America lost the war on drugs

Influence and power are out of context in a world where a dumpster diver is pwning those with influence and power.

What he learned, notes one friend, is that "if you try to work with the system, they fuck you over." And so, from then on, Hammond would dedicate himself to working outside it. Over the next few years, he threw himself into the day-to-day life of the radical community in Chicago, renting houses that quickly became crash pads for any homeless kid or traveler who happened through. Always the first to offer a toke or some food, he became famous for taking friends on epic dumpster-diving expeditions to hidden outposts like a local Odwalla plant, where, after plundering the refuse, he'd return with enough fresh juice to last a month. At night he'd settle in with "riot porn" – Internet clips of black-clad anarchists facing off with the police.

10.5 decades to be exact.

Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years in Jail: But no one can figure out what law he broke. Introducing America's least likely political prisoner

The summary, most of the article and most of the posts here are completely missing the point.

In November, when the U.S. and China announced a historic agreement to curb carbon emissions in coming decades, it sent a strong, if vastly overdue, message to the world's carbon kingpins: Global governments are mobilizing to meet the threat of climate change. If they're going to take that message seriously, more than two-thirds of established fossil-fuel reserves will have to stay in the ground.

The oil, coal and natural gas need to stay in the ground, regardless of what we are paying for it, $50, $150 per barrel, people still pay for it.

Is civilisation going to end when we stop using fossil fuels? Of course not.

Far better article about global warming:Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere â" the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

So far, we've raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.)

They try to spin it as so malicious, including:

This is at least the second time a U.S. warrant has been served at Google for data from someone connected to WikiLeaks. A sealed warrant was served to Google in 2011 for the email of a WikiLeaks volunteer in Iceland.

Right, it's not like they had any probable cause of illegal activity back in 2011, no sirree.... You've got a Wikileaks volunteer who was at the time acting as an unofficial spokeman for the organization in the news, voluntarily coming up to them and telling them that Assange is working with Anonymous and LulzSec and ordering hacks and spying, including against US targets, and providing troves of data - are they supposed to just ignore that?

It works pretty well for the cops, too. (though the main character in the article barely escaped, his peers did not) Bottom line: the government is above the law. Where there are laws that say otherwise, the government reinterprets them.

Why only to police?

Because 9/11.

No, really. This was just another piece of police state bullshit rammed through by Republicans after 9/11, along with warrantless surveillance by the NSA, the Patriot Act, and civil forfeiture laws http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/videos/john-oliver-amplifies-the-absurdity-of-civil-forfeitures-20141006, which allow police to seize your property with only an accusation.

Remember this next time the Republicans get on their soapbox pretending to be Libertarians.

Ironically, this technique of Name & Shame works for other drugs too ... but everyone seems to ignore its effectiveness! /sarcasm Why use something that costs almost nothing when police officers could be spending their budgets buying over priced weapons, tanks, etc.

http://www.rollingstone.com/po...

How America Lost the War on Drugs
7. The Harvard Man

For the cops on the front lines of the War on Drugs, the federal government's fixation with marijuana was deeply perplexing. As they saw it, the problem wasn't pot but the drug-related violence that accompanied cocaine and other hard drugs. After the crack epidemic in the late 1980s, police commissioners around the country, like Lee Brown in Houston, began adding more officers and developing computer mapping to target neighborhoods where crime was on the rise. The crime rate dropped. But by the mid-1990s, police in some cities were beginning to realize there was a certain level that they couldn't get crime below. Mass jailings weren't doing the trick: Only fifteen percent of those convicted of federal drug crimes were actual traffickers; the rest were nothing but street-level dealers and mules, who could always be replaced.

Police in Boston, concerned about violence between youth drug gangs, turned for assistance to a group of academics. Among them was a Harvard criminologist named David Kennedy. Working together, the academics and members of the department's anti-gang unit came up with what Kennedy calls a "quirky" strategy and convinced senior police commanders to give it a try. The result, which began in 1995, was the Boston Gun Project, a collaborative effort among ministers and community leaders and the police to try to break the link between the drug trade and violent crime. First, the project tracked a particular drug-dealing gang, mapping out its membership and operations in detail. Then, in an effort called Operation Ceasefire, the dealers were called into a meeting with preachers and parents and social-service providers, and offered a deal: Stop the violence, or the police will crack down with a vengeance. "We know the seventeen guys you run with," the gangbangers were told. "If anyone in your group shoots somebody, we'll arrest every last one of you." The project also extended drug treatment and other assistance to anyone who wanted it.

The effort worked: The rates of homiÂcide and violence among young men in Boston dropped by two-thirds. Drug dealing didn't stop â" "people continued what they were doing," Kennedy concedes, "but they put their guns down." As Kennedy reflected on the success of the Boston project, which ran for five years, he wondered if he had discovered a deeper truth about drug-related violence. If the murders weren't a necessary component of the drug trade â" if it was possible to separate the two â" perhaps cities could find a way to reduce the violence, even if they could do nothing about the drugs.

In 2001, Kennedy got a call from the mayor of San Francisco that gave him a chance to examine his theories in a new setting. The city had experienced a recent spike in its murder rate, much of it caused by an ongoing feud between two drug-dealing gangs â" Big Block and West Mob â" that had resulted in dozens of murders over the years. Could Kennedy, the mayor asked, help police figure out how to stop the killings?

Kennedy flew out to San Francisco and met with police. But as he researched the history of the violence, it seemed to confirm his findings in Boston. Though both Big Block and West Mob were involved in dealing drugs, the shootings were not really drug-related â" the two groups occupied different territories and were not battling over turf. "The feud had started over who would perform next at a neighborhood rap event," says Kennedy, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "They

Scott Stapp. http://www.rollingstone.com/mu...

The simplest solution would be to teach brown and black cultures that crime is not acceptable. Instead of celebrating, encouraging, and enabling crime, these cultures should stigmatize it. Teach children that it is a life-ruining mistake. Expose the "snitches get stitches" mentality for what it really is -- passive, silent support for crime in your community. Let children know that criminals are the bad guys.

Black and brown cultures have integrated crime to the point where it is seen as a legitimate way to support yourself or your family, while completely failing to observe that crime is hard to keep up as you get older, has severe ramifications for your employment once you stop being a criminal, and is not a stable, reliable way to generate income. It isn't even an option; engaging in crime is the point at which your strategy towards life has failed.

As long as these cultures handle crime as a rite of passage and as an acceptable alternative to legal employment, their youths will continue to be hounded by the police. And when you look at how such an overwhelmingly large amount of crime is caused by these groups, you can see why law enforcement seeks them out. When 99% of young black men are murdered by young black men, the police will stop and frisk young black men. It's that simple.

There's a reason we don't hear about Chinese people being targeted by the stop-and-frisk policy, and that's because their culture rejects crime. This issue isn't about the police, or current laws, it's about culture. Cultures that embrace and support crime will always be at odds with law enforcement.

Can we talk about the culture of crime that exists among rich white men in the financial industry? It seems that some of them have integrated crime to the point where it is seen as a legitimate way to support yourself or your family. Perhaps some of these brown and black people should call up the prosecutor working on their cases to tell him to stop the investigation. You know, like Jamie Dimon did. Maybe then they wouldn't be stopped and frisked like rich white criminals are not stopped and frisked. They just need more money, connections and better lawyers.

Like so much in America these days, it's as much about class as race. Bankers don't go to jail because of their wealth and status (and because they've successfully convinced everyone that prosecuting them would end civilization). They have done more damage to more people than some punk on the street will ever do. But we tut-tut to the brown and black people and scold them about their culture of criminality, while the biggest criminals wear three-piece suits and have lunch with the Commerce Committee chairman. Why is that?

No, it's always been about racism and moralizing.

Du Pont really had nothing to do with it. And probably had more to gain from it if it were legalized because they had the capacity to grow vast fields of it. Same with Hearst. He only held minority stakes in paper mills. If hemp fiber could've out performed paper, moving his stock into hemp wouldn't have been hard.

I have difficulty recognizing sarcasm... on the Internet, so if you are being that, apologies, but otherwise, your facts are in grave error and the source you cite do not support them. DuPont and Hearst were instrumental, for different reasons, in the ban of cannabis (those being nylon and racism, respectively). You are correct, Hearst wasn't so concerned about the price of paper, he was rich. He was concerned about oppression, in that he wished those he was bigoted towards would remain oppressed and working towards the ban of cannabis was the way he went about it. Du Pont, otoh, worked tirelessly to replace hemp wherever it was used. They lobbied the chief law guy at the Treasury dept. to make cultivating, transporting, selling it illegal. idk, maybe that had nothing to do with anything... but from the history I have gathered if not for Du Pont and Hearst, pot would have remained legal. Yes, there were and are a lot of racists, and Hearst was one. Racism and nylon... that made it illegal, and the money it generates, being illegal, for law enforcement and penitentiaries, keeps it illegal, along with money, ignorance, and racism, so the mix is a little different today.

No, it's always been about racism and moralizing.

Du Pont really had nothing to do with it. And probably had more to gain from it if it were legalized because they had the capacity to grow vast fields of it. Same with Hearst. He only held minority stakes in paper mills. If hemp fiber could've out performed paper, moving his stock into hemp wouldn't have been hard.

Here is an excellent article describing the Koch brothers: http://www.rollingstone.com/po...

Except, the system is setup to prevent the government from printing money directly for their own use.

Lets not forget how it works, the semi-independent federal reserve prints the money and then offers it out as no recourse loans to their industry cronies (or whoever is a most convininet front...like their wives: http://www.rollingstone.com/po... )

Then, those people, now with money in hand that they only have to pay back if they make a profit, they loan it to everyone else, with interest.

Indeed!

"Name & Shame" is definitely one way to go about this. It has been used successfully. See:

7. THE HARVARD MAN
http://www.rollingstone.com/po...

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

7. The Harvard Man

For the cops on the front lines of the War on Drugs, the federal government's fixation with marijuana was deeply perplexing. As they saw it, the problem wasn't pot but the drug-related violence that accompanied cocaine and other hard drugs. After the crack epidemic in the late 1980s, police commissioners around the country, like Lee Brown in Houston, began adding more officers and developing computer mapping to target neighborhoods where crime was on the rise. The crime rate dropped. But by the mid-1990s, police in some cities were beginning to realize there was a certain level that they couldn't get crime below. Mass jailings weren't doing the trick: Only fifteen percent of those convicted of federal drug crimes were actual traffickers; the rest were nothing but street-level dealers and mules, who could always be replaced.

Police in Boston, concerned about violence between youth drug gangs, turned for assistance to a group of academics. Among them was a Harvard criminologist named David Kennedy. Working together, the academics and members of the department's anti-gang unit came up with what Kennedy calls a "quirky" strategy and convinced senior police commanders to give it a try. The result, which began in 1995, was the Boston Gun Project, a collaborative effort among ministers and community leaders and the police to try to break the link between the drug trade and violent crime. First, the project tracked a particular drug-dealing gang, mapping out its membership and operations in detail. Then, in an effort called Operation Ceasefire, the dealers were called into a meeting with preachers and parents and social-service providers, and offered a deal: Stop the violence, or the police will crack down with a vengeance. "We know the seventeen guys you run with," the gangbangers were told. "If anyone in your group shoots somebody, we'll arrest every last one of you." The project also extended drug treatment and other assistance to anyone who wanted it.

The effort worked: The rates of homicide and violence among young men in Boston dropped by two-thirds. Drug dealing didn't stop -- "people continued what they were doing," Kennedy concedes, "but they put their guns down." As Kennedy reflected on the success of the Boston project, which ran for five years, he wondered if he had discovered a deeper truth about drug-related violence. If the murders weren't a necessary component of the drug trade -- if it was possible to separate the two -- perhaps cities could find a way to reduce the violence, even if they could do nothing about the drugs.

In 2001, Kennedy got a call from the mayor of San Francisco that gave him a chance to examine his theories in a new setting. The city had experienced a recent spike in its murder rate, much of it caused by an ongoing feud between two drug-dealing gangs -- Big Block and West Mob -- that had resulted in dozens of murders over the years. Could Kennedy, the mayor asked, help police figure out how to stop the killings?

Kennedy flew out to San Francisco and met with police. But as he researched the history of the violence, it seemed to confirm his findings in Boston. Though both Big Block and West Mob were involved in dealing drugs, the shootings were not really drug-related -- the two groups occupied different territories and were not battling over turf. "The feud had started over who would perform next at a neighborhood rap event," says Kennedy, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "They had been killing each other ever sinc

Good thing you're not solving real problems. What. A. Fucking. Waste.

It just proves that a carbon tax cannot come soon enough.

Too bad it's a total scam (which we knew about way back in 2009, BTW):

The new carbon credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

Here's how it works: If [Cap and Trade] passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy "allocations" or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.

The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.

Read the whole piece here

...to end drug prohibition since at least 1996, on both practical and 10th Amendment grounds. Statists love the "War on Drugs" because it gives them more ways to control people.

Meanwhile, President Obama, the first president who openly admitted to using illegal drugs, has cracked down harder on medical marijuana and other uses of "choom" far harder than Bush ever did.

yeah.

> The fire and police unions are driving my city into a race to the bottom. We are half a billion dollars in the hole for the pension fund thanks to these people.

Look deeper. The reason the pension funds are in the red is because wall street fucking blew all of it gambling with pension money - all those super safe AAA-rate securities (the only risk level that pensions are allowed to invest in) weren't actually worth shit. Wall-street looted the state pension funds and now they are coming back to do it again.