Black, Brown Skin In NYC- The New Armband

New Yorkers are being tormented by police supposedly because  they live in high crime areas.
All over the world, people in poverty-stricken areas have a greater tendency to live with high crime rates than their neighbors in more middle classed neighborhoods.
I suppose in NY authorities feel luckier than authorities in say, neighborhoods in Scotland afflicted with high poverty rates.
They can see us coming.
Now, this outgoing mayor wants to fingerprint poor people, again, before the person who is one of the poor has committed a crime.
In Bloomberg's lust to build scores of luxury office buildings and residences in the city as he exits
the active government power in the city, he now has businessmen asking for tax breaks if they build edifices with two entrances- one for the rich, and one for the poor. That is, New York City poor- studios for a bit over $900.
Is Bloomberg reissuing the torments inflicted on his fore bearers?
Decades ago, the "group" government officials decided were the biggest problem-causers were quite
often "rounded up" for reasons which did not matter, because no reason is reasonable for inflicting
that sort of commonplace assault on the bodies of any persons perceived vulnerable, in that their race, religion, or national origins seem recognizable.
The worst thing about Bloomberg's horrors are that he really ought to know better.
We all ought to know better.
We should have recognized the nightmare when the Armenians were stripped of civil rights, as a start
to the remainder of the terrors inflicted on them at the turn of the twentieth century.
Serbia has taught us in more recent history.
Rwanda has informed us.
The build-ups of mishandling people by governments can lead to even more crushing policies against those peoples, especially when people begin bitter complaints against the treatment.
Bloomberg and his cronies are mishandling people.
Another truly astounding thing is that now we tolerate these outrages not only from states, but by lesser municipalities targeting minorities for habitually degrading, debilitating treatment.

Michigan State Representative David E. Nathan

Representative Nathan doesn't want us Michiganders to have to endure No Fault "reform".
His defense of our insurance is that it has been working.
Michigan House Bill 4612 would alter those benefits.
But wouldn't our car insurance premiums go down, as I have hoped since the ACA was enacted?
Some no fault could be necessary, but with lifetime caps destroyed for those who have health insurance, we don't need it to be as expensive as it has been for the past thirty years.
When it comes to rehabilitative care for auto accident victims, I know Mr. Nathan could have a point.
He also worries about home and vehicle modification costs, as well as in-home attendant care.
Inasmuch as Michigan's Medicaid expansion would cost drivers $25 more than they pay now, that
sounds unconstitutional.
Someone will have to challenge states accepting federal Medicaid payments for expansion while
charging citizens for it. The initial expansion sees federal funds paying 100% . I don't see how a state
can hope to collect more than 100% on any citizen benefit.
Michigan insurers, according to Nathan, will offer a net $125 savings on our premiums, but only for
2015.
In 2016, insurers are free to raise our rates again. That makes no sense, because in 2016 the ACA will
be fully implemented- as in...paying all expansion claims.
Representative Nathan worries because MCCA ( Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association) is considered a private entity, therefore not required to disclose how they determine insurance rates for
Michigan citizens.
So, since this group services citizens as public entities- that makes no sense either. No state should be
allowed to receive federal monies if that state's insurance watchdogs are allowing companies to raise
rates without transparencies.
MCCA is immune to the Freedom of Information Act, and the Open Meeting Act.
If Michigan accepts federal health care monies, both those immunities need to go.
Our Republican legislature claims the MCCA will be dissolved after its final liability is paid, presumably sometime during fiscal year 2015, and their assets will be transferred to a new entity called Michigan Catastrophic Claims Corp.
Well, we shall see.
After WWII a great many German companies dissolved themselves, moving their personnel to the
U.S. as innocents, then congealing a great many of those business principals into brand new companies with brand new names.
I tried to steer clear of giving any business to these companies if I suspected they were hiding their
origins.
But even back then, in the 70s, I knew they were out there. I know now too, how slick some companies think they are when they may claim to be MCCC instead of MCCA with government
winks and nods.
If House Bill 4612 doesn't deliver the savings we drivers deserve from the millions our state will
collect from ACA for driver health care they no longer have to pay, we should be very, very angry.
For Michiganders, small car insurance premiums often will mean the difference between a family
having two sorely needed cars instead of one.
Whatever state a citizen lives in, U.S. constituencies should demand lower no fault rates.

Please!

Close the donut hole! Medicare people can afford to stay healthy if it closes. Obamacare will do that for us if Republicans get out of the way. Medicine is "way" expensive.
Insurance policies for healthy people can be had for forty dollars a month if they want the most basic
policies. Even if all 30million new insured want only a forty dollar policy, the system will enjoy a new $120,000,000 per month. Not every newly insured person is going to get sick every month.
However, not many will show up in emergency rooms completely uninsured.
So emergency rooms can open again.
I've  read a lot in recent years, and years not so recent actually, about nurses who quit nursing because rural people had no emergency rooms available.
Maybe all that can reverse itself. So many of us will get unintended benefits from nurses
coming back into the system. I only hope we can get enough doctors.
Maybe you hate POTUS. But you don't hate medical care.
Enroll. Hurry!

White On White Crime

So is anything interesting happening with white on white crime?
Are any new deterrents in place to ease it?
It seemed quite often to be mainly against women when violence was involved.
And when I peruse TV channels, I see a lot of crime reality depicting various types of violence,
sparing us most violence against children.
There is a show called Snapped.
One is called Dateline. Then we have...
American Justice
I Almost Got Away With It
Missing
Dominick Dunne's crime dramas... (Dunne's daughter was killed by someone who did not pay for the crime.)
I Killed My BFF
Caught On Camera
Nancy Grace
Who The (Bleep) Did I Marry?
Mobsters
Gangsters
There are more.
I hope the Violence Against Women Act,  recently passed in the U.S. Congress, has helped.
When Debbie Stabenow was in the Michigan legislature women in Michigan got a lot safer on a very
regular basis. I have no idea how she worked her magic, but the fact that she did was wonderfully
inspiring to me.
I can think of some who didn't like it at all of course.
In one case, a man brought a woman he didn't know, but met at a bar, to his home the same night he met her.
When he got cantankerous, the lady called the police.
When the officers arrived, they removed him from his own house.
In Michigan, no one could make another person feel threatened in a domicile- any domicile.
Once, in a downtown  Detroit courtroom,   I saw a very quiet lady was speaking to a female judge.
The judge was asking her if her husband had raised his voice eat her in their shared home.
This lady seemed to be in her late thirties, very pretty. I wondered why she was so intimidated.
She answered the judge, saying her husband had indeed shouted at her.
The judged then asked the husband if he had raised his voice at his wife.
The husband answered the judge in the affirmative, admitted he had done what he was accused of doing.
So the judged asked the woman if she called the police because her husband had frightened her.
Barely above a whisper, the woman admitted she had become frightened.
The judged then informed the couple the husband would have to be legally barred from their home
until he had completed anger management courses
The couple looked panicked.
The judge asked them both if they understood her order of  "no contact".
The lady said she couldn't afford to pay the family bills if her husband paid room and board
somewhere else.
The judge got the lady's husband to agree he could stay with a family member.
Then, the judge admonished against either of them compromising her ruling, then let them go.
I remember thinking, "Wow, this couldn't be more serious. I hope this family will be OK."
This couple was black, but the laws were state laws.
Later, a friend of mine was locked up for a night. His girlfriend (a family member of another of my
friends) accused him of threatening her. So he had to be in jail a certain number of hours in case his
girl wanted time to get away, leaving no forwarding information.  That was the law.
That made me nearly breathless.
Michigan was serious about its women.
Thank you Debbie.
Now, though, one wonders if anything has been rolled back. I hope not.
People of all colors are apparently capable of doing great bodily harm to one another.
Is any of that important during Stop And Frisk climates?
If not, what is happening to victims of crimes not reported, not prosecuted, or conveniently not noted in police files.
Does any of the suffering and/or intimidation of people not Black or Hispanic merit the serious
consideration of officers who have had time to Stop 4.3 million minority young between 2004 and 2008?
Sure. Police resources are limitless.

Speciation

How many believe Trayvon would have been gunned down, the killer knowing the police were on the way, if Trayvon appeared to be white, or even dressed in African garb?
I don't know what the average American believes.
I know what American Black men believe.
Even those who believe in these men, and believe what these men believe about themselves should know that to an average Black man, the support isn't the same as having the
body that Is set apart.
American Black men have decided they Are apart
When American Black men come together, most come together as those who agree they are apart..
Sometimes they like it; but they always hate how it came to be.
They hate this coming to be quietly.
They hate it together.

Citizens Worry About Fraud

Fraud destroys your mortgage.
Fraud destroys your retirement funds.
Fraud which gives people less than four dollars per day for food is tiny; and not worth sacrificing
millions of dollars and millions of tiny little stomachs in order to incite paranoia in ourselves.
My doctor's office put up a sign asking people to report Medicaid fraud.
The office is in an upper middle classed neighborhood of working business and professional people.  I felt certain the people in question hadn't drastically changed their habits to embrace medical services fraud.
So I asked the receptionist, who knew me fairly well, "Why do you  think you are seeing Medicaid fraud now?"
She replied, "We have young people driving up in Mercedes Benzes, and giving us Medicaid cards for payment!"
I told her-  "I know a lot of young people who've moved back home after college. They can't find
good enough work to continue living on their own. Some of them do qualify for Medicaid, and parents let them use the car if they need to see a doctor."
She thought about it.
"Check some of them out," I challenged her.
After a short time, the sign came down. I think she must have investigated.

Markwayne Mullin Mumbo Jumbo

What a loser!
So many people who are fit and working get their parents' groceries, you loudmouth.
I know a lady who gets the groceries for her auntie.
Many people who cannot afford to buy all their mom's groceries are still willing to go to the
store for her.
Not every elderly or disabled person feels comfortable going to the grocery store nearest
their home. Sometimes bargains are farther away, so the elderly person may send trusted relatives.
Not every senior gets Meals On Wheels.
You are the one who is a complete fraud. You publicly accused people you don't know at all.
If you want to show intelligence, investigate bank fraud.
Apparently, you worship at the altar of labor theft, and labor fraud.
Offer someone a job somewhere if you are so worried about musculature.
Stop ogling a person's body for the use you believe should be made of it.
If you are so attracted to a young guy, why don't you tell him that?
You yourself are on the government dole. Do you legislate?

Black Fathers

Until you have walked in their shoes, or heard the truth from their own mouths, leave them alone.
You won't walk in their shoes. American black men do feel they are a completely separate genus
and species than any other group on earth.
You won't hear the truth from their own mouths, because you aren't one of them. They don't speak
the truth to any but each other, and that on rare occasions.
Black women are not in their speciation. Not as far as they are concerned.
Black children are not fully incorporated.
White people are barely affiliated.
I don't know if I can include all those Black men who feel culturally assimilated. Some of them are
only concerned with equality.
However, those people are the exception- not the rule.
Very few people on earth have heard black men speak true affinity to one another, except at times during family gatherings. Even then, they will often take each other aside: 'Hey brother man, lemme holla at y' 'bout somthin.'  Only they are privy to those conversations.
I've read about their communication connections to each other in books.
I've seen movies attempt to depict it.
I haven't seen anything come close to authenticity though, excepting in some of the earlier episodes of the TV series- The Game.  I don't know how producers managed that!
Sometimes, rap music approaches it.
But then- how would I really know? I am not a Black man.
There are times I can tell they don't mean to hold back.
There are times I can tell they don't know they are holding back.
But in most Black men, something inexplicably specific to them, inside of them, is held aside. They mean for something they hold askew as unique and dear and not for public, or "other" consumption to remain forever unacculturated except for the American Black maleness of it.
There is no way, therefore, to tell them how to parent their children, unless they ask because they really want to know.
How often will that happen? Don't hold your breath.
Sometimes black men stay away because they love their children.
Haven't you read For Colored Girls?
Some would stay away if they loved their children.
American Black men, who feel they set the standards nowhere, won't submit to an inability to set the
standards at home.
They'd rather not even have a real home.
Somehow, they usually ask anyone they feel on the outside looking in...'what's love got t' do with it?'

"Rot" In The U.S. Air Force

According to The Rachel Maddow Show, critical nuclear weapons' bases have been failing at weapons' handling.
One base flew live nuclear warheads across country from North Dakota to Louisiana. 
So the Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff and several lower level
commanders were relieved of their duties.
Since then, one of the Air Force Deputy Commanders has said, "there is a 'rot' in the nuclear
handling force in the Air Force ranks.
Seventeen other officers were removed from launch control duty.
Two of these bases are continually flunking their readiness and proper procedures functioning exams,
even as late as June of this year.
The Commander in charge of training was relieved in June.
What can the Chief of Staff do?
What can a trainer do?
There truly does exist a 'rot' in the ranks because the chief of staff has no top notch pool from which
to select.
The trainer cannot train cement.
The intellectual rigor required to understand the processes and power in nuclear matters and reactions
happens to be a massive requirement.
People who wind up in the ranks of these Air Force details don't have to compete with enough other
brilliant people to acquire their jobs.
Nuclear power is seventy years old.
One needs to be able to understand its history and evolution in order to understand how and why its
protocols are important and relevant in various complicated warhead realities.
How can the U. S. Air Force find a pool of the most intellectually exercised minds who have the loyalty, discipline, patriotism and willingness to serve this country?
They cannot. The U.S. uses a great deal of its most powerful intellects to force many of the remainder
of its citizens with the most muscled thinking processes to use every waking moment of their lives to
stay alive, stay out of jail, and avoid suppression in general.
Wake up America.
You are wasting time, talent, and energy- in geometric proportions over the time we've had nuclear power.
Force your best people into competence and excellence by forcing them to compete with the best of
each other for real, high level informational acquisition.

Does POTUS Believe This?

Bloomberg believes it.
POTUS says young black and Latino youth are disproportionally represented as crime perpetrators.
No, not always, not actually...
These youth are disproportionally reported as perpetrators of crime.
So many times authorities shrug off the criminal behavior of white youth.
I had white friends who religiously went into stores with our black friends so that the black guys
could meander around the store while the white guys robbed the people blind. The theory the white
guys had worked. They would say if the black guys went with them the store operators would be so
obsessed with following the black guys around that the rest of them could work their will with
the merchandise.
The group would pay for half the things they'd amassed.
A million of these stories abound in this country.
So many police precincts report the sort of crime they feel like reporting, and get federal money for
the crimes ascribed to the people they want to accuse.
So many women in this country get slapped on a regular basis, and so much of that in communities
with a majority of white citizens is overlooked.
So many more young white women are raped than any of us see on the Lifetime channel or in the
news.
Black women don't report rape so much either, but on college campuses (where we suffer a shortage
of black men) rape is as prevalent as it is in our Armed Forces, if unofficial persons are actually speaking to coeds.
What Bloomberg needs is a better definition of  "crime".
Trashing the constitution thousands of time is terribly criminal.
To me, this Mayor is a criminal. He has the power to deny it. He has the authority to convince the
majority of people who aren't assaulted on the streets. Thank heaven, though, one of them has called
him out on it.
Judge Scheindlin has explained to him he has no business using unconstitutional means to stop "crime", because that is CRIMINAL.
He keeps saying, "so what"?
So we have to see in this country: there is crime, and there is Crime.
Right?!

Affordable Care Act

People still have no idea about the funding of the Affordable Care Act. Even health care
workers are groaning that their health care insurance will go up.
Wouldn't that be illegal? Most policies will be cheaper.
If ten people in a group have health insurance, it could cost $4000 per month.
If 400 people are going to buy the policies instead, those policies will cost only $10 per month.
Why is that so difficult to understand?
If one hundred of us go in on one thousand bunches of flowers, we will all get them for
cheaper than if only fifty of us go in on them.
The cost of a physical is not going up when more people get physicals. The cost of physicals will
go down!
Not only that, but car insurance costs will have to go down. People will have to demand that. No
state can claim too many uninsured people are costing them a lot of money after car accidents.
The worst thing that will happen when more people get health care is that doctors will get overworked if immigration doesn't get solved. America is certainly not interested in educating physicians because drug companies fund our med schools. Drug companies want drugs, not physicians to run health care.
We will need more doctors, but also more health care workers in general.
Perhaps more workers are being trained right now.
I hope people will begin to understand they have nothing to lose when Mary Doe gets a health care
policy. She will not harm you.
All you may have to worry about is a minority person travelling to your doctor's office to have a
seat while waiting for the care her new policy provides.
Sorry.

Robert Mugabe

No sooner said than done.
I can't say the wisdom of nationalizing all Western interests; but you are showing you know to
make ready for the slavish greed the West employs in order to devalue other people's labor,
turning it into their own highly valued wealth.
I know how much I want for my labor.
I know how much of my labor I want translated into your wealth.
In my country, my knowing how much I value my own labor is often called Communism.
To let someone else tell me how valuable my labor is is called Democracy.
You, Mr. Mugabe, are not praised for open, democratic, working public policy.
However, you are absolutely right to make some sort of move toward not letting foreigners tell you
the value they place on your countrymen's labor. So what if greedy foreigners call you names.
Don't believe the hype which says joy comes from being compromised by foreign exploitation.
Don't get caught up in the "communist" rhetoric.
Communism is the extreme, not the rational middle between Socialism and Democracy.
We in the west don't have a name or even a rational for policies which should fit in a normative
mid-point between Communism and the capitalism of  Democracy.
If you can avoid the traps which ensared The Last King of Scotland, maybe you can develop the
languages and economies of such a mid-point.

Woe Betide THE Continent

Watch out Africa!
Now that malaria is all but solved;  if history holds true, the west will swamp you, and attempt to
re-colonize you as Americans are now doing to their own countrymen.
Your citizens may be healthier, but as poor as ever, while new foreigners become as rich as crocus
from exploiting their labors.
As we speak, 1% of the American wealthy are stepping on all other Americans as hard as they can.
They'd be glad to transfer their feet to your lands and resources.
They'd be glad to re-institute apartheid, calling it a different name, but affecting the same results as
apartheid.
At this time, Europe is in about the same position it was when England and King George III
insisted on slavery in the Thirteen Colonies of America.
Many Americans are still bitter about that. Who do they hate for it?... The very people whose ancestors were kidnapped and tortured to do the work colonists felt it was their birthright to be paid to do.
France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal killed or diseased as many Native Americans in South America as did Great Britain in North America.
And so, Africans built the New World because Native Americans refused to be enslaved in their own lands.
Is Europe to do the same now to the Old World in our sub-Saharan Africa of  the Eastern Hemisphere?
Do you want your societies to devolve the way Native American societies have done in
the west?
Already, you house millions of Chinese in your countries.
If disease begins to dissipate on your continent, where will Africans live when displaced by foreigners who are not carefully shown what your countries want as allowable.
Malaria was the biggest barrier to Western infiltration into your motherlands.
Woe betide you if you you don't stand ready for an onslaught you don't carefully monitor.

Political Sex

Since Anthony Weiner is not in office, I don't see how he is qualified to be a New York dignitary.
Since Mayor Filner is already in office, why go to the expense of a recall? Mainly, he is sexually
inappropriate with grannies;  but he can be sued for the money the city may have to pay for his
disturbing proclivities. If he has no more incidences, why does he need to step down? He needs to
cease and desist only his inappropriate tendencies.
If Governor Spitzer hasn't been offensive since he left office, people have a right to believe he'd be
a tremendously effective comptroller, especially since Senator Elizabeth Warren is in Washington for
him to work with for a few years to come.
If a person's presence is not controversial in and of itself, or not any longer controversial, people
may rightly assume the person's judgement is healed, or straightened.

Are American Sexual Mores Amoral?

I don't mean immoral. I do mean amoral.
Do morals attach at all?
Do we attach morals to certain sexual behaviors which are amoral? Behaviors that don't harm anyone shouldn't attach to anyone's morality.
How are we willing to spend so much time on harmless behavior, but none on criminal financial
conduct in the banking industry, behavior that actually does a great deal of harm.
I heard a speech by Ted Cruz's father, during which the Reverend used the term "homosexual
marriage".
How can a marriage be homosexual? Only the people involved can be homosexual. I would not
have ever said I was in a heterosexual marriage.
Each marriage is as different as the individuals in it.
No two marriages, then, can be alike, no matter what sort of sex is involved- because no two people
are alike.

McCrory - North Carolina Backslider

No, we don't need a specific picture in order to vote.  Many things can identify a citizen.
If .001% persons are voting illegally, then you don't have a whole entire citizen voting illegally.
North Carolina has just enacted a racist Jim Crow law.
New Jim Crow is still racist, burdensome, and completely transparent.
Thank YOU for identifying YOURSELF.

Techno Me

As I sit watching a TV program, a device in my hand can tell me a lot of things about what I am
watching, whether I ask it to or not.
Do we imagine our government doesn't have infinitely more technology than that?
If so, we're delusional.

Joy Reid Is Back!

I hadn't seen Joy Reid, chief of The Grio, on MSNBC', in a while.
I wondered what had happened to her.
The lady is an absolute genius. When she is speaking, I find myself wondering what her IQ must be.
I'm embarrassed about wondering because I am sure doing so is not politically correct. Sometimes
I can't help it though.
Her analysis connects seemingly disparate philosophical dots to current ideological dots.
It can join topically relevant policy dots to anecdotal dots of customs from centuries ago.
Sometimes, she seems embarrassed she can do these feats, because she speaks very quickly, and almost under her breath.
At times, Ms. Reid seems to hold back. On Martin Bashir's show, however, I never see her suppress.

Do You Mean To Tell Me...

that fter all the horror and turmoil of so many families losing their homes,  we don't need public
schools?
No you aren't telling me that.
You are telling me the state no longer wants to invest in public schools.
People who own rental properties are obviously unwilling to pay new millage.

POTUS May Be Right About Real Estate

I don't know what the best alternatives would be, but we sure don't need anymore sub prime climates
abounding.
I was approaching sixty, living in the hood, and I had very young white guys knocking on the door.
They wanted to see the property.  If I would just borrow several thousand dollars, and give them a big
chunk of it, they would see I walked away with a little too.  All I had to do was agree that in a few years I'd be able to afford a huge mortgage payment!
So, was I getting any younger, or what?
Was I going back to working five jobs?
Was I about to obtain a Ph.D. in computer engineering? Biophysics? Applied Mathematics?
Was I sure of hitting the lottery?
Sometimes I'd have to repeat myself over and over..."No, if all goes as it has been going, which I have to assume sir, I may have less income, not more, a few years from now."
When I actually needed to remortgage, I had to search high and low for a thirty year fixed.
I still haven't figured out the urgency. Was it all a playful scheme to them?
Very young white guys were driving up in Chrysler 300s, and I kept saying to myself- "I hope these
guys are also investing in an education, or saving- because they have to know this won't last.
One of them said to me at a closing: "I bet you've done this a thousand times before."
I couldn't understand what he meant. I had only done it once before, and was asking a lot of questions because I was only doing it this time to get a better interest rate, ergo a smaller payment.
My payment lessened by nearly $100 per month.  I was puzzled, but didn't know the industry was
about to explode.
I feel terrible for the people who were making so much money redoing these loans.
I feel terrible for the people  with children who bought nice houses in established neighborhoods, but
moved out right away because they woke up one morning to see they lived in ghost towns.
I feel awful for the lady whose two year old wandered next door to drown because his mom  didn't know her neighbor had moved suddenly, embarrassed about losing her house, without draining the pool.
Fine print...
Balloons...
Lax proofs of income...
It all turned out to be a nightmare.
It rained on the just, as well as the unjust.
So then- it was biblical.
When POTUS says invest in a good rental, he may be exactly right. Too bad for the housing
market if that continues to be the best living circumstance for young families.

Why Can't Bloomberg Ask For Government Technology?

Apple improves its products every other year or so.
Technology in America is vast and it updates at lightning speeds.
The government would cooperate with him if he wanted more 'crime' resources.
What would the middle of the country do without New York? Wither.
The East coast, West coast. and auto industry pay nearly all the taxes in the U.S.
Where is Wall Street? Where is Hollywood? Where is Ford, General Motors, Chrysler?
These places fund nearly everything in between.
Our government knows that.
New York doesn't need to reduce itself to the lowest common denominator it wants to
embrace in order to preside over safety.
I feel sure they aren't looking for guns.
They are looking for terrorists.
Jihadists have a habit of training people who will be "invisible men" in America to do their
dirty work. But-
New York can get help doing technologically savvy searches without terrorizing an entire people.
Bloomberg does his evil because he can, not because he must.
Police departments know exactly who is committing crime in cities. They are not as mystified
as TV detectives at crime scenes. Specific identifiable groups and individuals commit most of
the crime in all our big cities. The police know exactly who they are, how to locate them, and
who is getting added to their ranks.
The New York mayor simply doesn't think it's a big deal to disrespect the black community.
He gets away with it, so why not continue?
NYPD cops have been gunning down young black men so long now, they wonder what all the
fuss is about  with simple assaults on dignity.
Are we actually supposed to listen to that cliched paternalistic mound: "This hurts me more than
it hurts you. I'm doing this for your own good."
What a load. Unbelievable.

Tell It To Trayvon

Bloomberg claims his stop and frisk policies mean people can walk down the streets without having
to look over their shoulders. Really? Some freak won't call to report your 'look' to the police, then
gun you down as they approach?
Some badge won't start handling you on the pretense you need to be disarmed?
You ARE kidding, right Mr. Mayor?
Do you know how jealous The Klan is of you New York gangs in blue?
They would love to do what you do all day long. If they knew all they had to do was change colors
from white hoods to blue shirts, they would have done it. When they killed Emmett Till they ran and they hid. They denied it.
Byron De La Beckwith, as well, denied all.
Bloomberg- he is proud of his malfeasance. Former New York  Mayors and Governors are proud of it. Current New York politicians are proud of it.
We can't really be surprised. Things may have always been this way in New York, without such
increasing  media scrutiny.
At one time nearly every average New York family owned slaves. Slavery did not stay in the south,
and The New York Times was a beacon of a foul rag when it came to slaves and slavery in America.
I imagine that is why they were so tickled at the opportunity to use the term "refugees" during our
Katrina crises in this country. If we weren't here as valued lifestock, what are we doing here? We must be refugees if FEMA was duty-bound to respond to us, right? How else were they to think
of us? Sadly, we built this country and have nowhere else to go.
Maybe the average modern New Yorker has a hard time leaving vestiges of their "privileged" legacy behind.

Saving Black and Hispanic Lives? What Guff!

Bloomberg my dear- try saving some white people now. We will applaud that. White people you stop and frisk are found with more contraband than black and Hispanic people you stop and frisk.  Actually do the math you enjoy spouting to bolster your racist claptrap. Can you quantify?
Stop saving us, Bwanna. Today you talked about people pulling guns as though you were
Wayne LaPierre. I suppose you believe black and hispanic drug use bolsters more various types of
crime than white drug use, and I understand those statistics. However, once a person has the drug,
you decided to frisk for, whatever crime you could have prevented is already complete. If you aren't focusing on big suppliers, you are criminalizing Americans for no good reason.
Not shifting your resources is causing tremendously racist outcomes of destruction in the very
communities you purport to protect.
Grow up. The harm you do does matter.

Thank You Eric Holder!

We don't need minimum sentencing for most non-violent crimes unless massive harm is proven to have been done to others. Why are we incarcerating so many non-violent people?
These policies of relaxation could not have come at a better time for us in the Midwest.
In Michigan, we are building nothing right now except prisons! No. Violent crime is not increasing
here.

NYC Crime Drop? Slop!

Crime has dropped in the country in general.  Bloomberg claims he has to stop a group who prove
in practice to be 89% not guilty. The group is 80% Black and Latino.
He has to criminalize your minority sons to keep you safe.
Does he at the same time criminalize those who destroy your savings, your pensions, your college funds, your salary costs of living increases? Why should he? He is one of them.
NYC incidence of what Bloomberg likes to call crime may be down.
Incidences of what we in stop and frisk victimization communities call crime are not down at all. We
call 'stop and frisk' as it is practiced in our communities, criminal. We think of it as 'high crimes',
because we cannot afford it; yet we are the ones who pay for it. These practices financially burden
the black and Latino communities with nonsensical fines. But Bloomberg and Quinn are wonderful
cosmetic artists- so skilled at putting lipstick on pigs.
Didn't we find out again in the first decade of this century that New York needs to be healthy?
If it does get better, we all will.

Fannie AND Freddie

POTUS isn't any longer enamored of these two.
Many liberals moan the only way for women and minorities to buy homes is with government
backed security.
I think what the President may be hinting is that for a while, people should be more cautious
about buying.
The first sub prime loans were targeted to made to African American female single heads of
household. That probably began in 2006 or so.
In the 70s, black families bought a great many homes.
At the turn of this century, those mortgages began to be free and clear.
Why should banks allow that to continue?
In some of those families deaths had occurred to allow transfer of property.
In other families divorces had occurred.
Many of those retiring women were those who fulfilled the female and black requirements companies
sought in the seventies so they could seem diverse moved to upscale retirement apartments and condos. Why should those properties stay in that family? Why should greed not want those properties
back from the black community?
Then, since it had begun to work in many cases, why not spread the disease to other working
communities?
See, when a black woman in her fifties or sixties loses her home, society thinks that's par for the course. No one bothers to see any of it as a worrisome trend. Our society would take quite a while to
even start a study of what had begun to happen.
The black community is a bell weather for the nation because banks target blacks unchallenged.
When they perfect their poison products here, of course then they go for the best meat in our herds.
I think POTUS knows how dangerous this is for the country as a whole, and would like to discourage
it in real estate.
The Latino population in the U.S. is encouraged to buy fifty, sixty, seventy year old homes.  They are
not as inclined to do so as black families. A black person feels more secure living outside the
ownership of any kind of white or majority- even as regards the geography of real estate.
But here in Detroit, churches often invest in building and renting, providing housing for their faithful.
Maybe that is the better model. Banks are still owners, but not quite so intimately, and not of huge
difficult to regulate properties.
Although I know black families will always prefer ownership, I think younger ones would be willing
to work and save a little longer if rental properties were 'clean, well-lit places', as Ernest Hemingway
might say. We in this city would surely never want to go back to slum landlords. New York can't be
much different.
The thing is, I don't believe the bank ensnared as many black family properties as they had hoped to
acquire. Which is so odd, because with everyone out of work, what could have been the plan for so
many foreclosed homes?
The crisis was fomented when banks moved their machinations to so very many mainstream
middle-class hoods all at once.
I guess that can happen again, right?  If people begin to buy in large numbers we could see the banks
attempting to repeat this folly. They were so desperate, they foreclosed on people who didn't even
have defaulted mortgages! They foreclosed on people serving in Iraq.
So properties large and small were attacked.
Next stop, pensions.
Detroit's pensions are 90% funded. Since people worked for them, why allow them to be raided?
Easy question to answer.
Detroit city proper is considered a third world. In a great many parts of the city, Detroit is third world. Some neighborhoods have been depressed for nearly thirty years. They are not developing,
or underdeveloped. They have been and are continuously depressed areas...almost no commerce whatsoever.
When Detroit pensions are attacked, as the city has been, people in the country as a whole will say
'par for the course', what would anyone expect?
Bad idea people.
If the housing crisis put your property underwater, think about your pensions being underwater?
Detroit citizens are having their public schools decimated, though they have never turned down a tax
millage.
Lansing is destroying us as much as they can as best they can.
What good is my pension going to be if all my neighbors who were once city workers begin to starve?
When they get a few of us because we love coded racism so very, very much- they wind up getting
a bunch of us.
Pay attention to the city of 750,000 citizens who number only about 20,000 white.
I was forced to read Ernest Hemingway in college. So let's go back to him. 'Don't ask for whom the
bell tolls...'

Is Race A Mere Social Construct?

No. No it is not.
Unlike some Ph.D.s, I can  many times, perceive race with at least one of my five biologic senses.
That means, for one thing, that it is often a phenotype.
Phenotypical realities are such helpful facts as we attempt to understand biology.
Race is evolutionarily inheritable.
Evolution is so biological.
Race is many things.
One of those things, is biology.

POTUS and Vanity In Mother Russia

At first, President Obama let Dmitri Medvedev believe they were the two who needed to be talking
after the American elections.
Putin may have spun out of his potential political grave in some sort of rage at that time.
Then, President Obama won the American election by more than a million votes. What nerve...
Lastly, Putin is said to have won the Russian election, questionably, with vociferous protests
in his country after that vote.
That was the last straw. How much can the vain be publicly one upped?!

Potus In Russia

Putin has already shown how much he values President Obama's bi-lateral talks visit.
Is our President supposed to want the message delivered in person?
What new will that accomplish?

Deja Vu

Remember when Vice President Al Gore began to be bitterly resentful of the Clinton/Monica Lewinsky affair?
As far as our Vice President was concerned, the whole thing blew up right at the time President
Clinton could have begun to think about working on the Vice President's presidential campaign.
Now as Hillary Clinton has to decide about a 2016 presidential run, she must be pondering the
unfortunate circumstance of her close friend Huma Abiden, and Abiden's husband Anthony Weiner
being rendered unable to work on a possible campaign.

A Texas Conservative Rick Perry

Even though Governor Perry spouts a lot of racist, homophobic, anti-woman gibberish, he tried for
one bright shining moment in 2012 to be progressive in advocating for little girls. For his efforts, the
truly dim, including M. Bachman, tried to crucify him.
Governor Perry attempted to ensure all little Texas girls got their three HPV shots on time.
If a girl gets her shots once a month for three months, before she becomes sexually active, yet after her puberty begins, she will be vaccinated against this cancer-causing disease.
That could be a life saver and a suffering saver for so many women in their lifetimes.
Now we see research which affirms the same vaccine also inoculates girls against many throat
cancers.
Gov. Perry should do what so many Americans are refusing to do in their political lives today...the right thing.
Insist on protecting all the little girls, Governor Perry.
At this moment, nothing is more important for you to attempt.
If you have this power now, you may be the actual difference between life, death, and sterility for
thousands of women, and the women they may unwittingly, cascadingly, infect through same partner
contacts in early social life decisions.

The Science And Sociology Of PEDs

One of the problems my high school physics class devised and worked out to test the pressure limits
of human bone reminds me of the performance enhancing drug scandals now plaguing American
sports.
We found the possible density of human bone, and human muscle.
Then we worked out some equations on how the two groups of human tissue masses support one
another.
Muscle, more tender and more malleable, could be amassed more easily on the body than bone- but
to the limits that bone could grow to support it. More poundage could be supported in muscle than in
bone.
Bone, we measured, could support height in humans somewhat south of eight feet tall.
Once a human being reached eight feet or so, if he or she stood up, their bones would crush each other.
Gravity is gravity.
It will pull anything on earth toward the earth at approximately 10 meters per second, for every second a thing can move or be pulled toward the earth's center; and density is density. We did those
experiments fifty years ago.
A certain amount of force- or mass x ability to move or be moved, will crush.
And so fifty years ago people a lot more savvy than me knew a lot about the limits of endurance of
natural muscle and bone.
I assumed everyone in America knew full well Lance Armstrong wasn't winning all those Tour de France fair and square. Why would he? He wasn't superman. He was a not-so-young cancer survivor. He just doped enough to contract cancer and keep on pushing. Armstrong as some Texas American superman defied all logic.
I didn't understand the French going along with it, so I began to ignore the whole spectacle. I thought
eventually everyone would have to do the same so that someday, some true athlete could showcase natural talent.
No. Only a 'scandal' seemed to shake us awake. Is that how it is?
I think we all knew better, but needed an excuse to say so.
Perhaps the truth is ugly.
Somehow, in America, we have convinced ourselves that proof is not proof enough unless it  highlights some code we've collectively manufactured.
Common sense can't seem to align itself with reality or probabilities for a discovery here.  Instead, reality must align itself with some code determined to undermine common sense, even common knowledge.
Codes are not conducive to being discovered because they are easily devised and discarded.
Common sense, common knowledge has to be accumulated over time, it is controlled by time.
Truth and reality are a bit different.  Each exists in the vacuum of a kind of timelessness for every second in which it is actually experienced.
If a baby is born at midnight on August 7th, he or she will be born at that time according to how we
measure time right now, right in this moment.
If we change the way we measure time, that baby will not have been born differently.  The real day,
date, and time of the birth will always be available to be discovered if there is ever a question of the
birth facts.
However, common sense will have to come into play if we change the way we measure and describe time on August 6, 2013 so that a man or woman who needs a heart valve replaced in 2043 appears to be sixty, but is described as a child.
Someone will look for a reality, a truth about this person's birth that is not simply coded to be called
'yesterday'.
However, in order to do that, the someone looking would have to be willing to enlist common sense.
The  cognitive tools we employ to 'discover' have to be those we must admit are uniquely tailored for discovery.
And yet discovery is unnecessary for  those of us unwilling to value reality. 
If  I care nothing for the relationship between truth and reality, then why not let practically anybody tell me practically anything? If a thing seems real, I would like to know or at least suspect the probability that it is the truth. Normally, I don't prefer to believe a mirage is real.
So, if we know from common sense that dopers are doping, what is at stake, and where is that something at stake for us not to want to admit we aren't actually duped by doping possibilities?
We need cultural shifts in our willingness to be publicly 'fooled' if we don't expect to raise a
generation of pathological liars. Or do we feel some realities are too distasteful to accept publicly?
Young people experiment, even if only mentally, with where they'd like to fit in in the wide wide world. They will choose early on whether they want to exploit their natural abilities, or their chemically enhanced possibilities. They may use faulty pros and cons to think through the decisions
if common sense risks and benefits are not questioned.
Tom Brady didn't want to be an insurance salesman simply because his dad was an insurance salesman.
He wanted to be a quarterback when he looked into the world and found some people grew up to be
NFL quarterbacks.
If a child were to have discovered a guy has to dope and lie about it in order to get that job, he still might quite likely have wanted to be a quarterback, especially if he believed it would be fine to camouflage what he may have to do if people generally agreed it was fine to look away.
Baseball hasn't proven to be much different than cycling has become.
Some people have said A-Rod isn't taking the drugs which could help his performance.
Some say his performance hasn't even changed much over time.
The thing is- we do know how much change over a given amount of time is too much change to be natural.
If we want dopers in baseball, we can easily have that.
We have encouraged it. People seem to grow magically- and we clap.
Plenty of American kids loved playing baseball in the sixties and seventies.  They were both creative
and competitive.
However, so many of them were American black kids. Oddly enough, they were not welcome in American baseball. Baseball authorities searched far and wide in the hemisphere for powerful pitchers and hitters in spite of all Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson did to reverse racial trends in awarding baseball contracts here.
We have always had black players, of course; but our American luck was that just when qualified black players could have gotten more attention in the majors, they were deemed not meek enough
to sustain the audience players like Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella could survive.
The Civil Rights Movement was going full steam ahead every day right when black players could
have made quiet inroads into pro baseball.
The time wasn't quite right for the introduction of a lot of new black players into the majors.
Then came Hank Aaron.
He did prove a black baseball star could not be meek enough.
He tried to be nice.
He tried to be quiet.
He tried to be the guy getting his job done to the best of his ability.
But all this happened in the 70s.
As the seventies rolled along, I proceeded to become more and more horrified about the events
surrounding Mr. Aaron's success.
I was one who refused to believe the intimidation reports coming in about fans.
What were they so angry about?
Babe Ruth's record.
I had no idea Americans didn't know they weren't actually superior simply because they preached themselves to be so. Of course that record would be challenged when black players entered the
league!
Hank Aaron kept wanting to quit. He could barely stand the terror of steadily approaching that record.
He said the abuse from the fans and the constant death threats all day and all night was daunting.
I was devastated. I remembered Jackie Robinson's trials.
Later, I got Mr. Robinson's book, to re-read it, to see if I remembered it all correctly.
Sure enough, fans were spitting tobacco on him, spitting on him period, throwing urine and whatever
else on him. Sadness ensues when reading those accounts.
Then I read Hank Aaron's story.
I couldn't see what had changed.
I got the sense Babe Ruth's record was simply the catalyst to push fans from a tolerance I'd mistaken
for acceptance in baseball land.
There would not have been half so many people wanting to actually threaten death to a Caucasian player who was closing in on Ruth's record. Why did it make so much difference?
My heart was broken when I realized how glad Aaron was to get out of his game.
Americans may never be ready for the reality of the truth about competitive human abilities in black
America.
I can imagine what Barry Bonds may have been thinking when he realized his natural talent might
portray as seriously compromised by people artificially propped up to seem believably superior.
He of course had a baseball star dad, so he may have experienced two panics, one personal, one generational.
This is America.
Don't believe it.
You don't have to believe it.


.

Will London Get Even Now? Will Any Of Us?

Once the British outlawed slavery in the U.S. colonies, many colonists felt they'd been left holding the bag from the ships and contracts they'd invested in before the prohibition became law.
So they sailed happily to the west coast of Africa again anyway. They claimed they were bringing
back lots of goods. This went on for a while.
The colonials insured everything on every ship from stem to stern with Lloyd's Of  London Insurance Co.
Then, they loaded their ships with kidnapped people anyway.
They chained the people together with heavy pieces of blacksmith's metal.
When they were a safe enough distance from the African shore, they dumped every man, woman, and
child into the ocean to drown fighting for air- screaming for a motive, begging for life.
After all, though, if British ships caught ships with slaves on board, each and every one of the captain and crew would be hung on board then and there.
What were they supposed to do instead of traffic in these ventures? Lose money?
Massachusetts, Wall Street, and the southern colonial planters had become as rich as Crocus in the
slave trade.
Furthermore, there were still some Africans on the west coast of Africa.
There was more money yet to be made, don't you see?
Maybe now all our museums will go bust, and London will get some of its money back.
Christie's can buy all worthy items from The Detroit Institute of Arts cheap, then sell them high.
Maybe when London gets somewhat avenged, so do some Detroiters whose ancestors paid a heavy
price so that our colonies could cheat a London insurance company.
So how did the planters get slaves after the trade was outlawed? That story may be even more brutal
than the one we've told here today. Suffice it to say for now...
The arc of the moral universe is long indeed.

Christie's And Detroit

Now we enter a situation in which our undemocratic state has decided to hire Christie's of London
to appraise the pieces and collections at the Detroit Institute of Arts for sale.
That strikes me as a bit rich. No pun intended.
The Institute has long been too precious for Detroiters as far as its directors are concerned.
Of late, advertising tried hard to encourage Detroiters to visit; but people who have a hard time ever
getting regular art or music classes at school, or bus transportation to the cultural center, don't
sacrifice time and money to get to a place they barely understand save the bells and whistles recently
trotted out with them in mind. We can't exactly blame the schools. Detroiters have never voted to
turn down a millage, not even for the libraries.
When we citizens should have been welcome at the museum, tricky privacies were afoot everywhere.
Nearly all the square footage in the place was off limits to most of the public most of the time.
Whenever the museum had to let people in, we got to see a very limited number of art collections, and even then we rarely saw any of the paintings by  brilliant contemporary black oil painting artists we have in this country. Yes, we saw a great deal of Omare Bearden and some quilts.
My mom would always say, 'Phooey! Western civilization looted the world, and now charges ordinary people who may have come from the looted countries in the first place to take a look at their own works. I won't give them a dime.'  Well, 'phooey' was my dad's word. My mother actually used
a more colorful word.
My own views were mellowed from hers because I had to invest in my babies getting exposed.
My parents paid for my piano lessons for ten years without a break. I still don't know how they did it.
What a commitment...rain, sleet, snow, buying pianos. But that's another story.
As a single mom, I didn't have a great deal of luck getting art or music into my house on anything like a regular basis. I was working two, three, four, once five different jobs per week to hang on to the mortgage. I think, as a matter of fact, my children went for months or even a year or two without having any more than a radio.
When I taught for a while at a city university (I had time to edit then.) I occasionally got a glimpse of
offerings at the  Detroit museum. If any of the programs were a little bit affordable, I'd bite.
Sometimes, I'd even get one of the children into a program.
Other times, I was stonewalled.
The museum does have some wonderful permanent collections, and at least one wonderful library.
I've heard about  them. I've seen precious little of any of it.
Once I insisted on a meeting with one of the museum officials to discuss my having an opportunity to see one of the book collections. I had some room to insist because I knew the official as one of my
colleagues at the U.
Still, he came down a long flight of stairs to meet me, cracked the door open, a tiny bit, but then told
me he didn't have the authority to let me come upstairs, but would speak to
someone about it when he could.
Fast forward more than twenty years. I still haven't seen any of the books, or even the offices.
At this moment, I'm wondering what I will miss about this museum.
I will miss the museum theater in a way. I went there often, but most of those movies were foreign
language film, so I didn't go there for a hometown crowd.
The museum had a lot of jobs, a lot of curators- most of them available only to non-Detroiters.
The things I am more interested in are now in the African American museum recently built next door to the Institute.
Still, Christies?
Well the suburbs were the people most interested in this museum.
I don't think, though,  that they will get a bang for their buck from the conservative Christie's.
Maybe they will get a dime for each of the dollars they feel is their own.
If they get 18 billion, will they fork it over to our city?
Smile...

Detroit Still Has Business

I moved from Detroit from June,2009 until July 2011.  When I left, we had a very convenient gasoline company here called Valero.
A person with a Valero credit card can buy anything sold at a Valero station with great interest rate
availability on the cards.
When I got back to Detroit, I saw we also had Omero gas stations either in the city itself or in the
nearby bordering suburbs.
I assumed these businesses were related; but I know the latter was new here.
So someone here spends money. Otherwise the big name oil producers would be enough for us.
Every one of them is here: Shell, Standard, BP, Clark, Sunoco, Mobil etc.
Then I recall the disappointment I felt in early 2009 when DHL moved out of the U.S. back to
Germany.
More lost jobs for city workers.
Today, I saw a DHL delivery truck driven by a person with a delivery uniform.
Someone must have purchased something!

Vice President Al Gore

So sorry you couldn't save us from the horrors dumped on us from 2000 until 2008.
But you have done so very much to save the planet we all must inhabit.
I  wish you could have done it while saving people like Cindy Sheehan from the injustices
we suffered at the start of the millennium.
Congratulations on your grace and your preparedness. 
You showed us the greatness which can surface in the American character when we needed to see it most, after having been subjected to that awful majority on the Rehnquist court.
As tacky as the Supreme Court was, as tacky as Jeb Bush and the Florida election officials and as
tacky as other Florida state officials were at that time, you were exactly the opposite of all of that.

Thank You For The 2008 Election

Thank you to the extremist, radical, activist judges of the Supreme Court.
Thank you to the president and vice president you appointed against voter interest.
Thanks Clarence Thomas.
Thanks William Rehnquist.
Thank you Sandra Day O'Connor.
Thank you Anthony Kennedy.
Thank you Antonin Scalia.
We couldn't have done it without you.
You shone a bright light on abuse of power. You showed us how much we resented that abuse.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remarked to one or more of the majority during deliberations: 'You're
disenfranchising the voters of south Florida".
Antonin Scalia replied: "Now you sound like Rev. Al Sharpton."
(Really, what would be wrong with that?)
Thank you George W. Bush.
And thank you so much to Richard Cheney.
We couldn't have done it without you.
Well, you made it so much easier than it would have been. We did have an Exceptional candidate!

Our Internet

The U.S. Army invented the Internet.
The Internet has such power and complexity that most hackers won't ever understand it the way our
government does.
Edward Snowden can't tell you that; and Army engineers won't tell you that.
I remember an east coast engineering school dean telling our group of parents in 1992 that the
computer engineering half-life was maybe three to four years. In some areas it could have been five.
So if a student took five years in '92 to get a degree in engineering, all the student learned in year one
would already be obsolete by that student's graduation date.
Wasn't '92 over twenty years ago?
How much more sophisticated is our Army technology today?
Most of us can't even guess.
Lay persons don't know how to measure mounds and mounds of data. We cannot give a precise or
even average number to an Army engineer's conceptualization of  'mounds'.
Non engineers don't know how many strokes are in a 'mound', or how big a 'mound' really could be.
We aren't going to know, whether we like it or not. If we come close to knowing, technology will
change almost instantaneously.
We can train hackers without allowing them to hack. That is the most power we are ever going to
have over the Internet invented by the U.S.Army. Hacking is dangerous; so should be reserved for
acts of practice on systems which may mimic the best designed ones professionals can construct.
We can go back even further than '92.
I was a teller in 1970 when we put stacks of checking account deposit slips on tables in the bank lobby.
In those days, our machines read bar codes on the deposit slips as real, important, permanently affirmed information.
Someone who was conversant in computer science removed all the "blank" bar coded deposit slips
from lobby tables in several of our city banks.
They replaced these lobby slips with seemingly identical ones; however, the replacement slips had the bar codes of the usurper's account.
Every person who deposited anything with the use of a lobby deposit slip that day, deposited to the
fraudulent account. As soon as the deposit was recorded, the trail and memory of the transaction had
been programmed  by the thieves to be erased- immediately upon the acceptance of the money by the receiver account.
Early the next morning, whoever opened the account with phony I.D. for strangers to enrich, used that same I.D. he or she had forged, in order to withdraw every penny of said money.
Banks changed the way they accepted and tracked deposits then, and how their machines read deposit
slips... after the fact.
Our government accesses the FISA courts to get information in an attempt to be somewhat transparent.
How would any of us know what level of transparency would be safe?
Why would any of us listen to one word of Snowden's delusions?
Our government has a difficult time making sure certain foreign governments don't hack our personal, sensitive information-  as well as our governmental classified, departmental, and administrative information.
Governments friendly to the U.S. would still enjoy having a leg up on us.
We don't have enough information about any of that to judge how our government must operate to
keep our info safe from real hackers, foreign and domestic.
Unfriendly governments would stop at nothing to bring down our infrastructures if they
could.
Then there are governments who aren't unfriendly, but would quickly become so if they could get the
upper hand over the U.S.
Citizens in this country don't ask themselves what part II would have been on 9-11.
Once the Pentagon, the White House, the Twin Towers and Wall Street were a rubble, what was the
plan for the good old U.S.of A.?
Who in this country knows how far our government has to go to protect us from the rubble some
would like us to call home?
Those who know the answer to that question could be the ones leaking the names and numbers of
the people we need for those answers. But wouldn't that put those people in danger?
I am certain the U.S. Government can get nearly unlimited info whenever they need it, erasing any
trace they had gotten it, or stored it, with probably a single stroke on the right computer.
There are foreign entities in this world, even some Americans, apparently, who would stop at absolutely nothing to see this whole nation go up in smoke.
And maybe we've been safe so long since 9-11, that we don't even have time to know what it takes
to make certain such horrors couldn't happen again.
We can make no mistake about it though; as determined as "some" are to see us powerless, our
officials themselves will stop at absolutely nothing aside, perhaps, from mass murder, to make certain this country doesn't become vulnerable to a possible Armageddon again.
The U.S. has the will, and the power to use methods we are not going to know much about, and they
can modify them on a dime.
We can still keep whining. That's what we can do. Waa- waa-waa...that and of course,once again, train hackers who don't hack.
We may need hacker capabilities, but not so much, hacker actualities.

I See Even More Clearly Now

I can understand what Republicans want.
I hope Obamacare gets in the way of their vision.
Republican businessmen have long scoured the globe for  many decades seeking colonial models for exploiting entire cultures.
That scouring is coming to a screeching halt overseas.
So many people have so many phones and smart phones, they are more and more difficult to separate
from the ideas they want to come to fruition.
Being exploited is not an idea they want to espouse.
So in an extreme panic, Republicans continue to search abroad,  but also to search for a way to legislate their poisons into our lives at home.
If Republicans can strangle governments at home into quivering heaps of lifeless mass, who stops
them from refusing to pay employees?
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives tried to kill the National Labor Relations Board
this year.
If you work all week, then don't get paid, you're out of luck if there is no NLRB- especially if you
live in a state run by Republicans.
Right now, Wal Mart workers in 100 degree warehouses drink dirty water because no other water is
available to drink.
If one of these workers dies, well they've been contracted by a company that contracts workers of a
third company.
That third company barely admits to knowing the names of their workers.
Companies like Wal Mart do to workers what the real estate market did to homeowners in the last
recession. Some, of course, didn't lose their homes, but they lost their pensions.
They give us so many cheap goods and services that we fail to notice how much our taxes go up as
more and more of their workers qualify for food stamps and emergency rooms.
Why buy from them? If we want to pay more taxes, pay them without helping the greedy exploit
everyone in sight.
I heard an economist in an MSNBC interview say Republicans are using the cash they should be
paying out in wages as raises and benefits to pay themselves back for any taxes they pay.
Therefore, worker wages have remained incompetent to keep pace with costs of living.
All of this, and still these businesses are enraged with the Federal Reserve for keeping interest rates as low as possible for students, and other ordinary people.
They go on and on about the wonders of Texas, when Texas pays low wages, has weak regulation, and gets more tax dollars back from the Federal Government than they ever pay out in citizen income taxes. How in the world could they ever secede?
Republicans want to tank labor markets the same way they tanked the financial markets.
If they do succeed, workers will have third world lifestyles in a first world country.
We bailed out banks. We bailed out auto companies.
Who's going to  bail us out? We barely have the vote any longer.

Immigration Reform

Here's an idea.
The people who have profited most from hiring undocumented workers pay the taxes the workers
didn't have money to pay when they had to work "under the table".
I know so many Latino people who work legally here, so that they can return home when they retire.
Many of them have been told 'do this, do that, so we can give your mom temporary permission to visit her grandchildren'.
I won't go into the language these insults are met with when I ask what a person affected might think of them.
Recently I met young musicians, one from Africa,m I thought wanted to stay in America when their student visas expired.
The very idea terrified the African student.
The idea of not being able somehow to get back home as soon as he could unnerved him. I wanted to say, "Calm down son. This isn't the late seventeenth century. You will be able to get home when you want."
So many legal immigrants feel the U.S. is a reprehensible refuge. They stay so they can afford to get
away. Many stay so that they can send money home.
I can't see why any average adult would want to complete the stringent requirements for citizenship our senators are proposing.
Of course kids can easily apply, and Dreamers will want to work on it.
But a cab driver who is thirty-five with three kids will think twice about turning himself inside out to
pay a lot of money though he never got fair pay in the first place.
Republicans in the House have a proposal the President himself would have to be insane to sign into
law.
These House members want the government to hire 20,000 more yokels to guard the fence, give each
yokel several guns, and give their leadership some drones.
Aren't these the same nuts who keep forming more and more militias?
These "enforcement" radicals must think everyone in the country is tremendously slow.
New bigots call themselves conservatives.
New bigots call their sectors right winged.
But we all know what a pig happens to be, even if we adorn it with lipstick.

Founders?

I find it so silly when people whose ancestors are in Europe talk about their 'founding fathers'.
American founding fathers in truth, had the misfortune of being slaves, and some slavers.
I don't mind if people are adopted. I can't see why they seem to ignore the historical facts of the adoptions.
And they are often the ones who wail loudest about the black community.
Columbus got to American shores in 1492.
In 1592, a century after Europeans began to arrive, there was still nothing in North America but
Native Americans and wilderness.
Any other history is scant at best.
Settlements made feeble attempts, then died away nearly every winter.
Some of them haven't left so much as a cup or bowl or bone behind.
Europe didn't send physicians, attorneys, professors, scientists, and statesmen to these shores.
America didn't get an educated, outstanding crowd simply wanting more religion.
Europe emptied its shores of the undesirable.
I don't see one glorious thing about it, especially since they are often still laboring under so many
illusions of grandeur.
All Americans should be required to read Moll Flanders. They could understand, then,who their European ancestors truly were. Of course, the book was written by an Englishman.
I recall having been assigned to read Miles Standish's writings in eighth grade. I was appalled.
The poor man was all but illiterate.
I wanted to ask questions, but the teacher was so proud of him, I just didn't.
Until the British empire instituted slavery in these colonies, no profit was declared in these
settlements.
The first profit was declared from Jamestown, VA. That was in 1620 a year after my ancestors
arrived as captives. The Africans brought forth the crops which built a new nation.
By the time the second century of American settlement was done, America was rich, rich, rich,
and expanding.
Before another century could be done, America had become rich enough to win the war with the
most powerful army and navy then on the planet.
However, for all those who believe they have founders in all that mess- read Thomas Jefferson's
address to the Virginia legislature of 1787. 
I see nothing honorable about the man. I grant he was as intelligent as could be though. Just an
inveterate liar.
Whenever I came home with tales of American history, my parents would laugh at me.
"Do you know what your own ancestors were doing in that year you are talking to us about?"
After a while, I knew American history in my house was the sought out history one dug for in the
recesses of the library, or the history we learned from grandma, who was born in 1898.
There wasn't much in my history book I could mention to my parents and they agree I'd learned the
truth except the arguments on the floor of the house and the senate leading up to the civil war.
Every single argument was slave state vs. free state...every day.
Ron Paul has the bright idea all the states should have become slave states.
He doesn't know the history of agriculture.
And he doesn't seem to understand the rest of the world would have gotten just as sick of us as the
north did of the south, and vice verse, sooner of later.
Now John Roberts, the 'Tea' party, the Libertarians, and the prison complex have a 'grand bargain'
alright for the black and brown people of this country. thing is: we've seen it all before, and we can
see you coming.
The circa 1900 immigrants and their children are some of the most fervent haters of our President
now.
They were certain black people should believe of themselves what they were asked and told to
believe of themselves.
That is not going to happen outside the purview of the richest, most famous, and most educated
black people. We do have many in our race who are concerned with what they have been told to be
concerned about, of course. They are privileged to be able to work on these concerns by the people in the U.S. civil rights movements who had better sense than to worry about those things. Needless to say, however,  most of us are not rich, or famous, or a decade or more out of post doc work.
Even then, there are some Michael Eric Dyson truth tellers among us!
If you tell me I don't read well, do I have to believe you?
If you tell me I need always speak the king's English, do I have to believe you?
If you are a colleague of Professor Barack Hussein Obama, and you write a best seller which includes an entire dumb chapter on why won't loving black parents have sense enough to name their children names white people love to hear, can't I think you backward if I choose?
Barack and Oprah, and many many others might think you backward- and they'd have cause.
So many people in this country were anxiously awaiting the first Italian president.
So many awaiting the first Jewish president.
So many looking for the first Greek president.
A great many hoping for the first Polish president.
On and on...
Well, even though he is American, and even though he is of mixed race, he is a first African president. His dad was way more African than mine. In that, I am so proud of the arc of the moral
universe.
As Benjamin, a Jewish tailor said to the noble Roman Marcellus in chapter nine of Lloyd Douglas's The Robe, 'you don't rob a slave of his divine character when you buy him and hitch him to a plow, between an
ox and an ass. He has had no choice in the matter. It isn't he who has demoted mankind: it is you!
He is still free to believe
that God is his spiritual father. But you aren't!
According to Benjamin, the slave is free to consider himself whatever he likes, but his slavery makes
slavers relatives to beasts, because they are the ones with warped ideas about the conception of a man's value.
I do know Benjamin isn't real. But I just love the speeches Douglas gives him.

Not Supreme At All

The Robert's court is a big contradictory mess.
One day a few weeks ago, they assert the right to marry has to be a legal one without the distinctions
which would create two classes of U.S. citizenship, one inferior to the other.
The very next day, the same court held the right to vote to be a legal right with the distinctions which
creates two classes of citizenship dependent upon what a state wishes.
One group has the right if they have the exact bright shiny picture card a state wishes them to have.
The other group, has no rights at all. I believe 'no rights at all' to be inferior to rights with an exact
shiny picture card.
I'm pretty sure.
So either one of these rulings is whole milk, and the other skim, or the court doesn't admit to knowing
the difference after all.
Twenty years ago one of our U.S. olympic groups wanted my young daughter to perform in South Africa with a card saying she was white. Without the card, her performance would become illegal.
See how phony people attempt to legislate lies?
Since my little girl was most assuredly NOT white, how were we to navigate a foreign legal system
had she lost her card. Mom wasn't even going overseas with the team. What protocol did they not send me about foreigners not being white under apartheid?
Well, I will never know. I was never dumb enough to think apartheid, or shiny white picture cards
were just.
Now in America, twenty years later, I am supposed to pretend they are a law I need to accept.
I don't accept them at all.

Bring These State Governments Up On Charges

If you are a woman who feels you need an abortion, you won't go to the state legislature to obtain
one, or to seek information about one.
If you are a woman who seeks an abortion, and/or gets an abortion, that's your business. No one but
your medical advisors and practitioners have a thing to say about it if you are safe, medically safe.
So when some group decides to pass laws which force anyone at all to insert things into your private
parts you have expressed a desire not to have inserted, you need a prosecutor.
If a prosecutor is denied- sue to get one. Your constitutional protections have been violated.

City Pensioneers

Every pension for City of Detroit retirees is crucial for every person in that pensioners family.
I guess the state will find a way to force starvation on the old and the young, while the more able
bodied adults resort to doing things they can be jailed for in order to eat.
On thing Michigan is building a great many of these days...prisons. Michigan is closing a great many
schools, but building a great many prisons.
Sound like a good plan?