Tiny Homes For the Homeless

The UN and NGOs have been working on developing cheap modular housing for disaster victims for about 10 years now. A lot of different approaches have been tried, including completely modular “flat pack” style houses which are easily shipped in containers cost as little as $4000 – $30,000 depending on size and amenities, as well as using the containers themselves as housing. Containers were particularly attractive, due to the low cost of a 40′ container, which used, is typically between $1500 and $4000 depending on type and condition. There are literally millions of these containers sitting in storage yards, as they typically are only used once. Indeed, there is a burgeoning market in the US and overseas selling kits, complete with tools and components to DIY for under $20k.

The Rev in this article could probably have done better with a flat pack. This very basic model is $4,000, and this gorgeous one $8,000. Noticing that all of the Rev’s houses are set on trailer frames (which are expensive), I am going to guess the local zoning laws prohibit actually setting the house on the ground, considering them permanent.

In other parts of the world, like London, and in Slovakia – this concept is being introduced to the urban environment.

Seems to me that stripping this concept down into something useable by the urban/suburban homeless could result in a shelter designed for a 7-10 year lifecycle, with a toilet, and electrical connection for heat for something in the $3,000-$4000 range. Making the annual cost of housing about $300-400 a year. Which seems to me cheaper than running a shelter (feel free to correct me if I am wrong). It doesn’t eliminate the need for food and water, nor would the basic model be useable by families (a somewhat larger model?). There are a lot of “cracks and crevices” in most cities (open ground) where clusters of 5 or 10 of these could be placed. Clustering also adds to security for the homeless.

One Nashville pastor has a plan to help those without permanent shelter: building 60-square-foot houses with no bathroom, kitchen, or electricity.

ASHVILLE—Around the time that Vanderbilt University released the results of a large-scale study outlining the most effective solutions to homelessness, Pastor Jeff Obafemi Carr was moving into a 60-square-foot house with no bathroom, kitchen, or even a sink. Carr’s idea was to temporarily leave behind his wife and five kids to live in the tiny house, which looks like a tool shed, to raise $50,000 to build more such homes for the homeless.

After two months living in the home, Carr had raised $66,967—enough to build six. The buildings are now set up, on wheels, in the backyard of the Green Street Church on Nashville’s east side, part of a sanctuary that also houses homeless people living in tents who moved from an encampment in one of Nashville’s parks that recently closed.

The homes are brightly painted yellow, blue, orange, and purple, with red doors and white trim. They cost about $7,000 each to build, and measure 5-by-12 on the inside. Residents use bathrooms in the church, and shower outside with a hose. They eat donated food and drink coffee set up under a tent in the yard.

Peter Regan lives in one of the homes. He hangs his jacket on a bar above his bed, and folds his clothes in tiny cube containers at the foot of it. Batteries power a fan in the window, and many days, he’ll sit on a camping chair on his front porch and talk to his neighbors, other people without permanent homes.

“It’s a lot better than living in a tent, and if you’ve got some Yankee ingenuity in you, you can figure stuff out,” he told me from his porch, gesturing to the jury-rigged lights he’s set up (the homes are not yet connected to a power grid or generator).

Tiny homes for the homeless may not be the solution policy wonks dream of. Indeed, the Vanderbilt study found that housing-choice vouchers, which allow families to live in market-rate apartments, are among the best solutions for homelessness. But in many booming cities, including Nashville, where rents are rising and vouchers can be hard to come by, and there’s little city money for anti-homelessness programming, short-term solutions such as Carr’s may make sense. Regan, for instance, says he’s been on the waitlist for a Section 8 voucher for months.

“This model provides a stepping stone to homefulness,” Carr told me. “If you set the goal as homefulness, you have to think, ‘How do we get to that?’ So many times, people think they have to get a Ph.D. so they can get grant money to do a study to find out that the number-one thing to do to fight homelessness is to give someone a home.”

This DIY model to solving social problems is common in Nashville, a Bible Belt city where faith-based organizations play an especially important role in anti-poverty programs. Just consider where these homes are set up: the backyard of the Green Street Church, which welcomed in tents and tiny houses once homeless people were evicted from Fort Negley, a city park. “Sanctuary,” a sign reads on the fence surrounding the lot, the “T” in the word designed to double as a cross…The Rest Here…

 

A Conservative Racist Mal-appropriates “Authentically Black”

The racist POSs are at it again. This one by Jonah Goldberg, best known for the white supremacist rag, “The Jewish World Review”, and contributor to the white supremacist conservative toilet wipe, the National Review. Eventually this scumbag is going to piss somebody off so bad, they going to hang Size 13 Broghans up where the sun don’t shine so far…

The black woman who gave birth to the folks who migrated to Europe 50,000 years ago, is going to wake up and kick his a** again, for causing somebody else to have to disturb her.

National Review Writer: Ben Carson ‘More Authentically Black’ Than Obama

National Review writer Jonah Goldberg is usually in the position of dismissing racism as a paranoid fantasy. But on Friday, the conservative magazine’s senior race reporter had some news: “Dr. Ben Carson is black.”

Goldberg, in a column on the magazine’s website, criticized the media for not talking enough about Carson’s race, suggesting that “it’s intriguingly rare to hear people talk about the fact that he’s black.” Forget the ample discussion among the media about Carson’s race and Republican politics — if Goldberg hasn’t come across it on Breitbart, it doesn’t exist.

But here’s the kicker: Like Rupert Murdoch — who recently made waves by saying Carson would be a “real black president” — Goldberg said he thinks the retired neurosurgeon is “more authentically African-American” than President Barack Obama.

One could argue that he’s even more authentically African-American than Barack Obama, given that Obama’s mother was white and he was raised in part by his white grandparents. In his autobiography, Obama writes at length about how he grew up outside the traditional African-American experience — in Hawaii and Indonesia — and how he consciously chose to adopt a black identity when he was in college.

And they say conservatives don’t get race.

 

Epidemics in Black and White…The End of the War on Drugs

The “crack epidemic” of the late 80’s and early 90’s is over. One of the key racial hypocrisies of the response to the epidemic was to make sentences for possessing “crack”, used by black folks, about 5 times worse than cocaine, the same drug – used by whites.

Now we have a “heroin epidemic”, but the legal and legislative response is almost invisible. Indeed, you wouldn’t even know this was going on if you watched the evening news.

That’s because about 90% of the new addicts are white, don’t live in the city…And start using heroin as a cheaper substitute to the drugs they have been stealing out of Mommy and Daddy’s bathroom cabinet.

The move now is to “treat” addicts.

Having some experience in dealing with that with a friend – that is one long hard road. I went to some of those meetings in support, about 5 years ago, and was stunned by what I saw. I remember years ago the streets of downtown Baltimore being covered by heroin addicts – mostly black, mostly from the ghetto. Baltimore during the 8070′ through the 90’s had the largest population of addicted in any major city. These folks at the the new meeting were mostly white, mostly the addicts were kids under the age of 25, and we mostly from middle class families. And it is driving ancillary crime in rural and suburban areas to support their habits.

But heaven forbid we fill the jails with white addicts.

The end of the senseless “War on Drugs”, is indeed all about racial politics.

A photo of Courtney Griffin, who died of a heroin overdose in 2014, with her sister Shannon, left, and her mother, Pamela.

In Heroin Crisis, White Families Seek Gentler War on Drugs

When Courtney Griffin was using heroin, she lied, disappeared and stole constantly from her parents to support her $400-a-day habit. Her family paid her debts, never filed a police report and kept her addiction secret — until she was found dead last year of an overdose.

At Courtney’s funeral, they decided to acknowledge the reality that redefined their lives: Their bright, beautiful daughter, just 20, who played the French horn in high school and dreamed of living in Hawaii, had been kicked out of the Marines for drugs. Eventually, she overdosed at her boyfriend’s grandmother’s house, where she died alone.

“When I was a kid, junkies were the worst,” Doug Griffin, 63, Courtney’s father, recalled in their comfortable home here in southeastern New Hampshire. “I used to have an office in New York City. I saw them.”

Noting that “junkies” is a word he would never use now, he said that these days, “they’re working right next to you and you don’t even know it. They’re in my daughter’s bedroom — they are my daughter.”

When the nation’s long-running war against drugs was defined by the crack epidemic and based in poor, predominantly black urban areas, the public response was defined by zero tolerance and stiff prison sentences. But today’s heroin crisis is different. While heroin use has climbed among all demographic groups, it has skyrocketed among whites; nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white.

And the growing army of families of those lost to heroin — many of them in the suburbs and small towns — are now using their influence, anger and grief to cushion the country’s approach to drugs, from altering the language around addiction to prodding government to treat it not as a crime, but as a disease.

“Because the demographic of people affected are more white, more middle class, these are parents who are empowered,” said Michael Botticelli, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, better known as the nation’s drug czar. “They know how to call a legislator, they know how to get angry with their insurance company, they know how to advocate. They have been so instrumental in changing the conversation.”

Mr. Botticelli, a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for 26 years, speaks to some of these parents regularly.

Their efforts also include lobbying statehouses, holding rallies and starting nonprofit organizations, making these mothers and fathers part of a growing backlash against the harsh tactics of traditional drug enforcement. These days, in rare bipartisan or even nonpartisan agreement, punishment is out and compassion is in.

The presidential candidates of both parties are now talking about the drug epidemic, with Hillary Rodham Clinton hosting forums on the issue as Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina tell their own stories of loss while calling for more care and empathy.

Families meet at a Counseling Session and pray for their family members and friends who are addicted.

Last week, President Obama traveled to West Virginia, a mostly white state with high levels of overdoses, to discuss his $133 million proposal to expand access for drug treatment and prevention programs. The Justice Department is also preparing to release roughly 6,000 inmates from federal prisons as part of an effort to roll back the severe penalties issued to nonviolent drug dealers in decades past.

And in one of the most striking shifts in this new era, some local police departments have stopped punishing many heroin users. In Gloucester, Mass., those who walk into the police station and ask for help, even if they are carrying drugs or needles, are no longer arrested. Instead, they are diverted to treatment, despite questions about the police departments’ unilateral authority to do so. It is an approach being replicated by three dozen other police departments around the country.

“How these policies evolve in the first place, and the connection with race, seems very stark,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, which examines racial issues in the criminal justice system.

Still, he and other experts said, a broad consensus seems to be emerging: The drug problem will not be solved by arrests alone, but rather by treatment.

Parents like the Griffins say that while they recognize the racial shift in heroin use, politicians and law enforcement are responding in this new way because “they realized what they were doing wasn’t working.”

“They’re paying more attention because people are screaming about it,” Mr. Griffin said. “I work with 100 people every day — parents, people in recovery, addicts — who are invading the statehouse, doing everything we can to make as much noise as we can to try to save these kids.”

An Epidemic’s New Terrain

Heroin’s spread into the suburbs and small towns grew out of an earlier wave of addiction to prescription painkillers; together the two trends are ravaging the country…

Deaths from heroin rose to 8,260 in 2013, quadrupling since 2000 and aggravating what some were already calling the worst drug overdose epidemic in United States history.

Over all, drug overdoses now cause more deaths than car crashes, with opioids like OxyContin and other pain medications killing 44 people a day….Read the Rest Here…

 

Lying Liars on The Clown Bus – CNN Calls Carly Fiorina Out

The entire Board at HP must have been on a bender when they hired this woman. I can’t imagine letting her in the front door of a major corporation, much less an opportunity to sit in the “big seat”. It is true she was well liked by some at her previous company, Lucent – but that is entirely subjective based on Lucent having an executive management team which tanked a $100 b corporation.

She damn near tanked HP. And now we see the “reality dysfunction” which caused it. Serial lying…

CNN here (FINALLY!) takes her to task, and suggests her serial lying, and reality disconnect with realy are why after a brief rise, her poll numbers are sinking like the Titanic.

Somebody call the cleaning crew…We got another dead rat on the Clown Bus.

 

Simone Biles

If you haven’t heard of this diminutive woman, trust me – you will by the 2016 Olympics barring injury or unforeseen circumstance. Move over, Dominique Dawes!

Like the majority of great gymnasts she is tiny – only 4′ 9″ tall. Check her floor routine out!

An on the bars!

And the megawatt smile…

Got into the sport when my little one competed. Would just about give Dad a heart attack every time she would do those aerials over the beam or on the bars.

And then there is fellow American teammate Gabby Douglas, who is currently running a close second…

 

 

Arrest In Church Arsons in St Louis

Police have arrested a suspect in the ongoing church fires set in the St Louis area.

Man Arrested in String of St. Louis Church Fires

A suspect has been arrested in a string of fires at seven St. Louis-area churches, most of them with black congregations. The blazes are being investigated as possible hate crimes.

St. Louis police spokeswoman Schron Jackson says a 35-year-old man was taken into custody Thursday.

As of midday Friday, the man has not been charged in St. Louis, where five of fires occurred, or in St. Louis County, the site of the other two.

The fires broke out from Oct. 8 to Oct. 22.

Five of the churches have predominantly black congregations. Jackson says the suspect is black.

A motive has not been disclosed.

In every case, a church door was ignited and in most cases the building was unoccupied. No one was hurt.

 

 

The Continuing Role of HBCUs

HBCUs percentage of college graduates is dropping. However, HBCU graduates still make up about 50-60% of those students matriculating to graduate studies in the STEM Fields.

One of the major issues with HBCUs has been graduation percentage. On average only about 35%. Spelman, Howard, Hampton, Morehouse, and Fisk are the only HBCUs with graduation rates above 50%. Despite issues the top HBCUs are graduating people competitive with anyone from the non-HBCU Universities in their fields.

Black Colleges Might Be Struggling, but Their Alums Are Thriving

African Americans who graduated from majority-minority colleges feel more professionally and personally fulfilled than their peers who attended predominantly white schools.

Anyone who has spoken with alums of a historically black college or university (HBCU) can attest, they really love their schools. Whether it’s the swarms of current and former students who travel to attend homecomings year after year, the (mostly) friendly competition among schools, or just the ferociousness with which grads defend and promote their alma maters, there’s something about most HBCUs that inspires intense loyalty.

A new poll from Gallup and Purdue University might help explain why.

The “Quad” at Howard University

The report takes a look at the post-graduation outcomes of a broad sampling of American college graduates to determine how they measured their own well-being, defined as physical health, social relationships, finances, goal achievement, and community engagement. The researchers then categorized individuals as either thriving, struggling, or suffering in each area. The method is highly subjective, but there were some noticeable differences, especially when it came to black college graduates: Graduates of HBCUs ranked their well-being higher in all five areas than their black peers who attended predominantly white institutions. Additionally, HBCU alums were more likely to say that they’re engaged and fulfilled at work and ranked significantly higher in measures of financial success and fulfillment than black grads who went to other schools.

This achievement is notable for HBCUs given the struggles that black Americans continue to face when it comes to completing college and finding gainful employment afterward, compared to graduates of other ethnicities. Black students are less likely than other ethnicities to complete a bachelor’s degree within six years. They also have a higher unemployment rate after graduation. When compared to other races in the Gallup poll, black grads ranked lowest on every measure of well-being except for social relationships. Black women ranked the lowest in most measures of well-being.

Part of the reason may be the education that HBCU students received while enrolled: HBCU grads were substantially more likely to say that they had professors who cared about them and mentors who helped them pursue their goals. They also felt certain that their school prepared them well for post-grad life. These feelings may help help explain why alums of HBCUs are so much more likely (49 percent vs. 34 percent for black grads who didn’t attend HBCUs) to say that their university is the perfect place for someone similar to them, and why they have so much affinity for these institutions, despite the fact that many of these colleges and universities are struggling.

But the strength of HBCUs may also derive from another resource, one that lives off-campus, and that is a robust and engaged alumni network. The warm feelings that HBCU grads have about their schools may stem from deeper feelings of belonging and connection created at such schools, and that can help create a sense of kinship not only among classmates, but among all grads, which makes them more open to assisting and mentoring the students who come after them.

AKAs Step

As more black Americans attend colleges outside of the HBCU system, some wonder if such institutions have outlived their usefulness. Attendance at the country’s 107 HBCUs as a share of total black-student enrollment has dropped in recent years. In 2010 through 2011, these schools accounted for 16 percent of black college graduates, in 1976 to 1977, the share was more than double that. The schools have a lower-than-average graduation rate: about 35 percent for HBCUs compared to 59 percent nationally, though that’s in part because these schools are more likely to enroll low-income, first-generation students, a population that’s more likely to drop out before finishing.

There are other problems, too. Morris Brown, an HBCU in Atlanta is struggling to stage a comeback after losing its accreditation years ago. Howard University in D.C., which remains one of the most popular and well-known HBCUs has publicly struggled with financing and has been forced to cut staff and been subjected to credit downgrades in recent years. Fisk University in Nashville was placed on probation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges  until the university overhauled its finances a few years ago. With all of their challenges, the survival of many of these schools—once the only places where black Americans could get a college education—is largely uncertain.

But for now, both alums and current students aren’t hesitant about supporting and promoting the value of these institutions. I conducted a much less robust, more informal survey, taking to social media to ask HBCU alums if they had good feelings about their college experience. The answers were largely similar to Gallup’s results: People were mostly positive, noting that the benefits of their education were as much personal as they were professional…Read the Rest Here…

 

The History of “Zombies”

The origination of the concept of the “Walking Dead” came from Haiti, It really only has been adopted into the American lexicon in the past 100 years or so. So, on the night before Halloween – the true tale of Zombies…

The original “zombies” were Haitian slaves, condemned to be trapped inside their bodies as slaves forever.

The Tragic, Forgotten History of Zombies

The horror-movie trope owes its heritage to Haitian slaves, who imagined being imprisoned in their bodies forever.

In the original script for 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, the director George A. Romero refers to his flesh-eating antagonists as “ghouls.” Although the film is widely credited with launching zombies into the cultural zeitgeist, it wasn’t until its follow-up 10 years later, the consumerist nightmare Dawn of the Dead, that Romero would actually use the term. While making the first film, Romero understood zombies instead to be the undead Haitian slaves depicted in the 1932 Bela Lugosi horror film White Zombie.

By the time Dawn of the Dead was released in 1978 the cultural tide had shifted completely, and Romero had essentially reinvented the zombie for American audiences. The last 15 years have seen films and TV shows including Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, World War Z, Zombieland, Life After Beth, iZombie, and even the upcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

But the zombie myth is far older and more rooted in history than the blinkered arc of American pop culture suggests. It first appeared in Haiti in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the country was known as Saint-Domingue and ruled by France, which hauled in African slaves to work on sugar plantations. Slavery in Saint-Domingue under the French was extremely brutal: Half of the slaves brought in from Africa were worked to death within a few years, which only led to the capture and import of more. In the hundreds of years since, the zombie myth has been widely appropriated by American pop culture in a way that whitewashes its origins—and turns the undead into a platform for escapist fantasy.

The original brains-eating fiend was a slave not to the flesh of others but to his own. The zombie archetype, as it appeared in Haiti and mirrored the inhumanity that existed there from 1625 to around 1800, was a projection of the African slaves’ relentless misery and subjugation. Haitian slaves believed that dying would release them back to lan guinée, literally Guinea, or Africa in general, a kind of afterlife where they could be free. Though suicide was common among slaves, those who took their own lives wouldn’t be allowed to return to lan guinée. Instead, they’d be condemned to skulk the Hispaniola plantations for eternity, an undead slave at once denied their own bodies and yet trapped inside them—a soulless zombie.

After the Haitian Revolution in 1804 and the end of French colonialism, the zombie became a part of Haiti’s folklore. The myth evolved slightly and was folded into the Voodoo religion, with Haitians believing zombies were corpses reanimated by shamans and voodoo priests. Sorcerers, known as bokor, used their bewitched undead as free labor or to carry out nefarious tasks. This was the post-colonialism zombie, the emblem of a nation haunted by the legacy of slavery and ever wary of its reinstitution. As the UC Irvine professor Amy Wilentz has pointed out in her writing on zombies, on several occasions after the revolution Haiti teetered on the brink of reinstating slavery. The zombies of the Haitian Voodoo religion were a more fractured representation of the anxieties of slavery, mixed as they were with occult trappings of sorcerers and necromancy. Even then, the zombie’s roots in the horrors of slavery were already facing dilution.
It was in this form—Voodoo bokor and black magic—that the Haitian myth first crossed paths with American culture, in the aforementioned White Zombie. Although the film doesn’t begin to transform the undead in the way that Romero’s films and the subsequent zombie industrial complex would, it’s notable for its introduction of white people as interlopers in the zombie legend. It would take another few decades or so, but eventually the memory of Haiti’s colonialist history and the suffering it wrought—millions of Africans worked into the grave—would be excised from the zombie myth for good…

Which is a shame, because the zombie is such a potent symbol. For example, there’s a clear connection between the zombie of slave-driven Saint-Domingue and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent exploration of black disembodiment—the body under constant threat of capture, imprisonment, and murder. For Haitian slaves, the invention of the zombie was proof that the abuse they suffered was in a way more powerful than life itself—they had imagined a scenario in which they continued to be slaves even after death. In Between the World and Me, observing a young boy in front of a 7-Eleven, Coates writes, “This was a war for the possession of his body and that would be the war of his whole life.” The same declaration could be transported 1400 miles and 300 years and still hold true.

Instead American pop culture has used the zombie, fraught as it is with history, as a form of escapism, rather than a vehicle to explore its own past or current fears. Writing for GreenCine, Liz Cole is onto something when she says that, whatever their allegorical shadow, zombies are perhaps “indulging our post-apocalyptic fantasies” above all. Elmo Keep notes in The Awl how pop culture tends to romanticize depictions of the end of the world: In these situations, “Petty frustrations and mundane realities of real life all disappear, as do the complexities.” And so the zombie apocalypse isn’t an outlet for fears but for fantasies, functioning as an escape hatch into a world with higher dramatic stakes, fewer people, and the chance to reinvent oneself, for better or worse….Read the Whole Article Here…

 

Another Travesty in Texas – Judge Releases Cop From Murder Charge Quoting 1889 Law

It’s like convicting the Klan in Mississippi and Montgomery all over again…

Citing federal immunity, judge tosses manslaughter charge for Texas detective who shot unarmed black man in 2013

On Thursday night, just four days before the former Austin police officer was set to stand trial, a federal judge in Texas dismissed a manslaughter charge against Charles Kleinert in the 2013 shooting death of Larry Jackson Jr., an unarmed black man.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel cites a little known 1889 case that determined federal agents can be granted immunity from state criminal charges and undoes one of a handful of indictments handed down to police officers out of the thousands of fatal police shootings that have occurred in recent years.

Kleinert was one of 54 officers to be charged in connection with a fatal on-duty shooting from 2005 to 2014, according to a Washington Post analysis published earlier this year. So far in 2015, there have been more than 800 fatal on-duty police shootings that have resulted in charges for just five officers, according to a Post database.

Jackson, 32, was shot to death on July 26, 2013, after he visited his local bank.

The bank was on lockdown after a robbery earlier in the day. Austin Police have said that Jackson returned to the bank a second time, when he was confronted by Kleinert, a detective who was investigating the robbery. After a few minutes, Jackson ran.

Kleinert gave chase, commandeering the vehicle of a woman driving in the area.

“(Kleinert) was breathless and agitated and yelled, ‘Go go go’ and ‘follow him’ multiple times,” the woman, Regina Bethune, told KVUE, a local television station, in February. “He seemed very out of control and highly agitated. I was uncertain if he was really a police officer or not. I realize that either way I needed to remain calm and help him try to calm down. He did not identify himself any further once in the car. He did not tell me his name or offer any explanation as to what was going on.”

Kleinert caught up to Jackson underneath a bridge. The officer said he drew his weapon and that during a violent struggle it accidentally discharged, putting a bullet in the back of Jackson’s neck.

On Thursday night, just four days before the former Austin police officer was set to stand trial, a federal judge in Texas dismissed a manslaughter charge against Charles Kleinert in the 2013 shooting death of Larry Jackson Jr., an unarmed black man.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel cites a little known 1889 case that determined federal agents can be granted immunity from state criminal charges and undoes one of a handful of indictments handed down to police officers out of the thousands of fatal police shootings that have occurred in recent years.

Kleinert was one of 54 officers to be charged in connection with a fatal on-duty shooting from 2005 to 2014, according to a Washington Post analysis published earlier this year. So far in 2015, there have been more than 800 fatal on-duty police shootings that have resulted in charges for just five officers, according to a Post database.

Jackson, 32, was shot to death on July 26, 2013, after he visited his local bank.

The bank was on lockdown after a robbery earlier in the day. Austin Police have said that Jackson returned to the bank a second time, when he was confronted by Kleinert, a detective who was investigating the robbery. After a few minutes, Jackson ran.

Kleinert gave chase, commandeering the vehicle of a woman driving in the area.

“(Kleinert) was breathless and agitated and yelled, ‘Go go go’ and ‘follow him’ multiple times,” the woman, Regina Bethune, told KVUE, a local television station, in February. “He seemed very out of control and highly agitated. I was uncertain if he was really a police officer or not. I realize that either way I needed to remain calm and help him try to calm down. He did not identify himself any further once in the car. He did not tell me his name or offer any explanation as to what was going on.”

Kleinert caught up to Jackson underneath a bridge. The officer said he drew his weapon and that during a violent struggle it accidentally discharged, putting a bullet in the back of Jackson’s neck.

Kleinert was indicted on manslaughter charges, with a grand jury concluding that Kleinert “did then and there recklessly cause the death of Larry Jackson by striking and by attempting to strike Larry Jackson with [his] hand while holding a loaded firearm.” But Kleinert’s legal team argued that the shooting was accidental and that, because he was a member of an FBI task force that he was entitled to ‘Supremacy Clause immunity’ — a defense that argues that because the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, a federal officer who at the time reasonably believes his actions were necessary to the performance of his federal duties is immune from state criminal prosecution.

Judge Yeakel agreed, ruling that Kleinert was acting in his federal capacity while investigating the bank robbery and therefore has federal immunity.

The federal immunity defense dates back to an 1889 shooting, in which a U.S. marshal assigned to protect Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field shot and killed a man who had attacked the judge. The Supreme Court ruled that because the officer was acting in his capacity as a federal agent he could not be tried or found guilty of murder.

Kleinert’s attorney argued that while he was an Austin detective, he was also deputized as an FBI agent, and therefore immune from prosecution.

“The court concludes that from the time Kleinert began his conversations with Jackson until the time Jackson died, Kleinert was acting in his capacity as a federal officer,” Yeakel wrote. “At all times, Kleinert was attempting to detain and arrest Jackson for committing federal offenses in Kleinert’s presence — actions that Kleinert was authorized by federal law to perform.”…The rest of this travesty here…

 

Jared the ex-Subway Guy Caught on Tape

 

CNBC Republican Debate…A Liar’s Conference

Once the neo-nazi slimy POS Ted Cruz opened the gate by using the conservative meme of a “liberal” MSM attacking poor, poor, pitiful conservatives…

The race was on to see who could tell the biggest whopper.

CNBC was woefully unprepared to take on the tidal wave of outright untruths and lies which spewed from the fact free Clown Bus synchopats…

Fact-Checking The CNBC Republican Presidential Debate

There were quite a few questionable claims made during the event.

Summary

The Republican candidates met once again, and we found several claims worthy of fact-checking. Here are some of the highlights from the debate:

• Former CEO Carly Fiorina claimed that 92 percent of the job losses in President Obama’s first term belonged to women, but women — and men — gained jobs by the end of Obama’s first term.
• Businessman Donald Trump disputed the idea that he had criticized Sen. Marco Rubio and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for supporting H-1B visas. In fact, Trump’s immigration plan, posted on his website, is critical of both of them.
• Trump also claimed his campaign was 100 percent self-funded, but more than half of the money his campaign has raised came from supporters’ contributions.
• Fiorina blamed the Affordable Care Act for a large disparity in firm closings versus openings every year. But closings outnumbered firm births by the widest margin in 2009, a year before the law was enacted.
• Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson said it was “total propaganda” to say he was involved with a controversial nutritional supplement company, but he appeared in promotional videos for the company, touting its products.
• New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said that Social Security would be insolvent in seven to eight years. But even after the trust funds are exhausted — estimated to be in 14 to 19 years — the program can still pay out 73 percent of benefits for several decades.
• Sen. Ted Cruz said women’s wages have declined under Obama, when in fact the latest figures show their wages have increased.
• Rubio claimed CNBC’s John Harwood was wrong that a Tax Foundation analysis of his tax plan found those in the top 1 percent of earners would get nearly twice the gain as those in the middle. Harwood was right, and that’s on a percentage basis.
• In the undercard debate, former New York Gov. George Pataki claimed the Iranians, Russians and Chinese “hacked” the private server Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state and obtained “state secrets.” There’s no evidence of that.

 

Prepay for Breakfast?

Besides the obvious racism…Somebody needs an education on what you can and cannot do. Might save this small franchise company a lot of money. This is quite simply a) stupid management at it’s worst, or b) a failure by the management of the chain to recognize risk. You train your employees to do things like put down a mat by the door, and even the little yellow cones to mitigate the chance of customers falling (and suing), and costing the company tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollar of money…

Racism also costs money which also hurts the bottom line.

Black man says Washington restaurant made him prepay for breakfast — but not white customers

A Black man says he was asked to prepay for his meal at a Washington restaurant — even though white customers were allowed to pay after they had finished eating.

Brian Eason filed a discrimination lawsuit Tuesday against Elmer’s Restaurants and the franchise’s parent company, Karsan, Inc., reported The Oregonian.

The 44-year-old Eason, a Multnomah County, Oregon, sheriff’s deputy and real estate agent, said he went Dec. 16, 2014, to the Vancouver restaurant and ordered breakfast — and the waitress told him he must pay for his food before she would serve him.

“I was kind of curious about it and said, ‘Well, is that new?’ And she said ‘Yes, we had a few walk-aways and my boss asked me to ask for prepayment,” Eason told the newspaper.

Eason said he thought nothing of the request until he ordered another drink and the waitress asked him again to pay first, and he told the woman that he considered the policy “kind of odd.”

“She said, ‘I think it’s discrimination and my boss is here, and she’s forcing me to have me do this,’” Eason said.

He said the waitress was apologetic, and he actually felt bad for her and gave her a big tip and one of the $10 Starbucks gift cards he planned to send to clients.

Eason left the restaurant, but he was troubled by the experience and returned about a half hour later and asked a white couple dining at Elmer’s whether they had been asked to prepay.

The couple said they hadn’t.

Eason asked the pair for their names and phone numbers, which they shared.

He wasn’t sure what he planned to do about the experience, but he couldn’t sleep that night and his family encouraged him to take action, the newspaper reported.

Eason eventually filed a lawsuit in Multnomah County Circuit Court seeking $100,000 in damages for his “feelings of racial stigmatization.”

A spokeswoman for the Elmer’s restaurant chain, which was founded in 1960 and has 25 restaurants in four states, said the company was investigating Eason’s claims.

“At Elmer’s, we are proud to provide a welcoming guest experience to everyone in the communities we serve,” said Jill Ramos, director of restaurant support. “We are disappointed to hear about the complaint which occurred at one of our franchise-operated restaurants.”

Eason said the experience still bothered him.

“My office is right down the street there,” Eason said. “It’s a constant reminder of ‘they don’t want me in there.’”

 

The Fourth Founding – Civil Rights

One of my favorite, and person I consider one brightest media people is Sherrilyn Ifill. In this article she discusses the evolution of Civil Rights in terms of  America, from the “First Founding”, the emergence of the country, the Second Founding, the 13h, 14th, and 15th Amendments promising freedom and equality under the law, and the Third Founding being the post WWII period mid-Century Civil Rights Movement eliminating post Reconstruction JIm Crow.

I disagree with her belief that the current Civil Rights movement, coalesced around organizations like Black Lives Matter and Color of Change is part of the Third Founding, and would say that is is part of a Fourth. Just as the murder of Emmett Till galvanized the post-war Civil Rights Movement by laying bare the videotaped murders of black people by the Police, and the murders in Charleston have stripped away the coating of yet another teflon coated racist belief system, laying bare systemic, if not always supported by legislative protection, racism in America.

Systemic racism in America has it’s own TV, it’s own publications, and indeed political party built upon the remnants and cultural vein of the Dixiecrats of the late 40’s, and George Wallace of 1968. The Fourth Foundation in my view, not only won’t be televised, it will will be fought across the Internet. Whether in the deconstruction of the New Jim Crow of the carceral state and Voting Suppression – or the denouement of white privilege. Why? Because unlike when King marched across that bridge in Selma, there is no specific geography of systemic racism. And the “black community” is now less descriptive of a location than a shared history, culture, and values.

Freedom Still Awaits

A century and a half after Reconstruction, fights over voter suppression and police brutality reveal that it remains an unfinished project.

The Civil War and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution that were ratified in its wake created a new America as imaginative and fraught with controversy as the country founded after the Revolutionary War. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to describe this period as America’s “Second Founding.” But neither the enduring power of the Second Founding nor its limitations can be fully understood without an examination of the Third Founding—the civil-rights movement of the mid-20th century.

The extraordinary courage, vision, and commitment of civil-rights lawyers and activists in the period between 1954 and 1968 rooted an America as new and bold as the one forged from the battles of the 18th-century Revolutionary War and 19th-century Civil War. But that the battles of the civil-rights movement continued nearly 100 years after the passage of the Civil War amendments demonstrates the limitations of the rights articulated in the Reconstruction amendments, which proved to be the least self-executing of all of the Constitution’s rights-expanding amendments.

This was not lost on the framers of the Reconstruction amendments. They understood from the outset that the rights of suffrage, equal protection, due process, and freedom from slavery would need to be protected from the actions of the state and enforced by the federal government. This is, in no small measure, the essence of the Second Founding—a fundamental reordering of the relationship between the states and federal government. “States’ rights” were to be tempered and cabined where they undermined black citizenship. The powerful enforcement clauses and unequivocal “no state shall” language of the Reconstruction Amendments is the textual evidence of the framers and the clear intention to recalibrate state power in relationship to blacks.

To protect black citizenship, the Reconstruction Amendments opened a new front in the unfinished battles of the Civil War. The federal courts would do the hard work of securing the victory for newly freed slaves. As the historian Eric Foner notes in his seminal treatment of the Reconstruction period, the protections of the Civil War amendments “placed an unprecedented—and unrealistic—burden of enforcement on the federal courts.” Certainly until the Warren Court in the mid-20th century, the Supreme Court showed itself to be both unprepared and unwilling to take up the full measure of that responsibility. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s devastating 1876 decision in U.S. v. Cruikshank (in which the Court vacated the conviction of three white men who participated in the massacre of 300 blacks protecting the federal courthouse in Louisiana), the widespread white-supremacist violence in the South, and the removal of federal troops from Louisiana and Mississippi are among the leading factors that ended Reconstruction.

A decade later, when in the Civil Rights Cases the Supreme Court exhibited what the scholar Darren Hutchinson calls “racial exhaustion,” it was clear that it was simply not up to the exercise of robust enforcement power contemplated by the architecture of the Reconstruction Amendments.* Just 20 years after the end of slavery and during a period of intense white-supremacist violence, the court declared in the Civil Rights Cases that there must be a time when former slaves “cease to be the special favorite of the laws” and instead “take the rank of mere citizens.”

Ironically, the centerpiece of the Third Founding was also a Supreme Court decision—Brown v. Board of Education. The Court’s decision to strike down racial segregation in public education (and soon in all aspects of public life) began the deconstruction of Jim Crow—the system of legal apartheid that had become the principal means of enforcing 20th-century white supremacy. Brown and the civil-rights movement that followed it, ushered in the promise of a new America—one that included unprecedented opportunities for many African Americans and other racial minorities, a lexicon of equality and racial justice that endured, and black political power not seen since the early days of Reconstruction.

Yet Brown, like the Civil War amendments, faced its own opposition—a concerted movement named “Massive Resistance” by integration opponents. The resistance to Brown from Congress to towns and hamlets in the South was so rabid that counties were willing to close public schools rather than have black children attend school with white children. Black children were spat upon, cursed, and assaulted on the way to school by white teenagers and housewives. The homes of civil-rights lawyers and activists were fire-bombed.  Resistance toBrown became yet another front in the battle over black citizenship. In the courts, the battle became a war of attrition, with the Supreme Court at first robust and then increasingly cautious and timid, and ultimately hostile to the project of integration. By the time the Court decided in Milliken v. Bradley that desegregation plans could not cross city lines into suburban counties to stem the effects of white flight on integration, the project of integrated schools in urban centers was dealt a crushing blow. For good measure, the Supreme Court scuttled even voluntary integration efforts in 2006 in Parents Involved In Community Schools v. Seattle School District, with Chief Justice Roberts’ tautological and tone-deaf instruction that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

The decades-long resistance by whites to school integration doomed the full promise of the civil-rights movement. Massive resistance spawned even more deeply entrenched housing segregation, the abandonment of support for public institutions, white flight from U.S. cities, and a renewed hostility to the federal government. The hope held by the most visionary civil-rights leaders and activists for a unified country of racial equality has been put off for future generations, even as the vision articulated by those men and women has become central to America’s public self-narrative….Read the Rest Here…

 

Black American Seeks Asylum in Canada

Bit of an unusual case…DOubt he will win asylum in this case.

Black American Seeks Asylum in Canada Over Police Brutality

Kyle Canty says blacks are ‘being exterminated at an alarming rate’ and that he’ll only be safe north of the border.

It has been nearly two months since he crossed the border into Canada, fleeing the discrimination and state violence plaguing his home country.

In seeking refugee status before Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board in Vancouver, Kyle Lydell Canty argued that belongs to a vulnerable minority that is “being exterminated at an alarming rate” in his homeland.

Canty was referring to the United States and police brutality.

“I’m in fear of my life because I’m black,” Canty, 30, told the board during his hearing on Oct. 23, where he cited the killings of Michael Brown in Missouri andEric Garner in New York. “This is a well-founded fear.”

Canty, who was born in New York, has resided in six states over the span of three decades. He traveled to Vancouver early last month as a tourist, but says he decided to apply for refugee status shortly after his arrival. He now resides at a homeless shelter.

“When I see the police coming in the U.S., I cross the street,” he said.

In presenting his case before the IRB, Canty submitted evidence that he claims demonstrates that cops have harassed and profiled him in every state he’s lived in.

“I got bothered because I’m black,” he alleges. “This is a history of false arrest. My name is ruined because of the false arrest.”

In Canada, however, Canty says he does not perceive any existential threat from law enforcement and that he is more than comfortable interacting with Canadian authorities.

During his hearing, Canty also discussed his outstanding criminal charges in the U.S., including ones for disorderly conduct, issuing threats, and resisting arrest.

Melissa Anderson, the IRB spokeswoman for this case, told The Daily Beast that a decision regarding Canty’s application would likely be issued within the next few weeks. When asked if she would characterize this as an unusual case, Anderson demurred, but said that she is “not aware of any” other cases like this in Canada, but couldn’t be sure.

“For us, every case is unique,” she said. “Refugee protection and refugee discrimination, this is a complex issue.”

Canada has accepted American refugees before. In 2013, three U.S. citizens were granted asylum, for instance. In 2010, actor Randy Quaid applied for refugee status, claiming he was being persecuted and possibly marked for death by“Hollywood star whacker” assassins. (He later withdrew his claim.)

 

Is “The Fix” In on the Tamir Rice Investigation?

Commented that the two “experts” hired by the DA were questionable, at best in my last blog on this. In June, a judge found “ample probable cause” for the DA to file charges…But so far no charges have been filed.

Further, in the Kangaroo Grand Jury, neither officer has been requested to testify.

Things appear to following the path of the Michael Brown Grand Jury.

Outrage Is Growing Over the Tamir Rice Investigation

Is the grand jury process stacked in favor of the cop who killed the 12-year-old?

Tamir Rice’s sister and mother at the park where the 12-year-old was gunned down.

On Saturday, October 10, the prosecutor overseeing the Tamir Rice grand jury investigation released two reports authored by independent experts and concluding that Timothy Loehmann, the cop who killed the 12-year-old African American boy in Cleveland last November, acted within the law. The Cuyahoga County prosecutor, Timothy McGinty, knew this was an unusual move to make during grand jury proceedings. “Historically, the norm in most places has been that there’s an incident, and then a long investigation shrouded in secrecy, followed by a conclusion that sometimes mystifies large segments of the public,” a spokesperson for McGinty’s office told Mother Jones regarding the publication of the two reports. “We’re trying to break that pattern.”

But the reports have sparked outrage from Rice’s family and supporters, who saythe grand jury investigation amounts to “a charade aimed at whitewashing” and are demanding that a special prosecutor take over the case. Some legal experts suggest that the reports could improperly influence the pool of people serving on the grand jury, who began hearing evidence in recent weeks and will ultimately determine whether Loehmann should face charges. The development adds to a cloud of questions hanging over the case ever since Rice’s death almost a year ago—including why Loehmann and his partner who drove the squad car, Frank Garmback, have never spoken to investigators.

Delores Jones-Brown, a former prosecutor in New Jersey and a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says it was unusual that McGinty enlisted a Colorado prosecutor and a former FBI agent to analyze the evidence and then release their findings. “I have never seen an incident in which that happened before,” she said, adding, “Normally it would be the defense attorney’s responsibility to get those kinds of experts.”

Tim Young, the director of Ohio’s public defenders office, sees McGinty’s release of the reports as “a measured attempt to try and reduce potential backlash” if the grand jury decides to not indict Loehmann. “The idea that this is somehow making it more fair and transparent, I think, is disingenuous. They’re still going to present this case in a private proceeding that you may or may not get to see the transcript of. We won’t know how they present Tamir.”

As fatal officer-involved shootings have fueled a nationwide debate about policing and racial injustice in America, prosecutors and grand juries have come under scrutiny. Some prosecutors have taken unconventional steps in response to criticism; after a grand jury declined to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown, St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch released the evidence reviewed by jurors in that case. In August, California became the first state to ban the use of grand juries in officer-involved shootings.

Prosecutors are now in a tough position, says Dave Klinger, a former police officer and a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “No matter what happens, the prosecutor is going to get criticized,” he says. The use of outside investigators by a prosecutor, he adds, is not unheard of in grand jury proceedings. “The goal in a situation like that is to explain to the grand jurors in detail about things that perhaps the prosecutor really doesn’t know him or herself, about police training, practice, or tactics, so that the jurors can have a better understanding of what it is that officers are supposed to do.”

The experts who reviewed Loehmann’s use of deadly force, Colorado prosecutor S. Lamar Sims and former FBI agent Kim Crawford, emphasized that the circumstances leading up to and immediately following the shooting were not relevant to their findings. “To suggest that Officer Garmback should have stopped the car at another location is to engage in exactly the kind of ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ the case law exhorts us to avoid,” Sims wrote. Some policing experts have said that Garmback’s pulling up to within 10 feet of Rice just seconds before Loehmann shot him was among glaring tactical errors made by the two officers. And neither Sims nor Crawford mentioned the fact that for several minutes following the shooting, Loehmann and Garmback stood around without administering first aid to Rice while he lay bleeding on the ground.

“To say that the actions were constitutional does not [necessarily] relieve the officers of negligence or recklessness,” says Jones-Brown. That decision is ultimately up to the prosecutor and the grand jury, she says, adding that a special prosecutor should be appointed. “I’m afraid the damage may have already been done by disseminating these reports.”…Read the Rest Here…