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2:00PM Water Cooler 1/7/15

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By Lambert Strether of Corrente

2016

Political dynasties: Bush, Clinton, Paul, Cuomo… [New York Times]. So where the heck are the Gracchi Brothers?

Jebbie to recycle W’s “compassionate conservatism”? [NBC]. If so, somebody should ask him how he feels about Social Security cuts.

Jebbie’s Foundation for Excellence in Education is a better scam than any scam Neil Bush ever ran [WaPo]. Even if — by which I mean “exactly because” — the Gates Foundation did give it $5.2 million to promote Common Core.

Boehner re-elected speaker with all but 25 Republican votes [The Hill]. A historic victory, and that’s not enough for Republican ultras. Catch Democrats acting like that… And then Boehner punished the 25. Catch Democrats acting like that, especially to Blue Dogs.

Rubio’s written a book. He wants to turn Medicare into a voucher program [Tampa Bay Times].

Black Injustice Tipping Point

Interview with Michael Brown’s father [Esquire]. “We was treated like we wasn’t parents, you know? That’s what I didn’t understand. They sicced dogs on us. They wouldn’t let us identify his body. They pulled guns on us.”

“Broken windows” policing theory in New York made law enforcement a revenue source, exactly like Ferguson. Who knew? [WaPo].

IED explodes outside NAACP headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado [Denver Post].

A critique of Oprah’s critique of #BlackLivesMatter [Vox]. Readers who have been following Water Cooler know that, contra Oprah, there’s plenty of leadership, and plenty of strategic planning, and plenty of tactical brilliance in the movement whose epicenter was Ferguson. The Civil Rights movement was then. This is now.

Corruption

Judge gives former Virginia Governor McDonnell two years, instead of the ten to twelve prosecutors recommended [Los Angeles]. So, to review, if you sell loose cigarettes on the street in New York, you’re dealt summary execution and choked to death, and a grand jury will call it good. But if you put your elected office up for sale, a judge will be “moved by the hours of tearful testimony” and slap your wrist. Alrighty then.

Chinless wonder Fred Hiatt’s Editorial Board: “[T]he real punishment for former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell is disgrace” [WaPo]. Yes, indeed. Assuming such a thing to be possible in the Beltway, of course.

Stats Watch

ADP Employment Report, December 2014: Private payroll growth of 241,000, within consensus range [Bloomberg].

Gallup U.S. Job Creation Index, December 2014: “[T]he Job Creation Index has essentially remained at the same level for the past eight months, suggesting the job market plateaued in the latter half of 2014. Still, the score for the final month of the year is markedly higher than in previous Decembers” [Bloomberg].

Water

Judge to weigh conflict of interest argument in “Freedom Industries” case [Charleston Daily Mail]. Get a load of this:

Both [Freedom President Gary] Southern and [former company executive Dennis] Farrell have asked the federal judge to disqualify U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin’s office from the case, saying there is a conflict of interest because the prosecutor’s employees were affected by last January’s chemical leak, which affected 300,000 people in nine counties.

So, the spill is so massive that it affected personnel in the prosecutor’s office… who must then be disqualified for conflict of interest. Chutzpah? That theory would also make suing for global warming impossible, since there’s nobody on the planet without conflict.

Federal officials overlooked risks of fumes when people flushed their pipes after the “Freedom Industries” chemical spill on Elk River in West Virginia [AP]. Here’s the study. And here’s a fine local blog post.

West Virginia’s Public Service Commission says that West Virginia American Water provided “significantly over-redacted” documents for an investigation into its response to the “Freedom Industries” chemical spill [West Virginia Gazette].

West Virginia DEP: 1100 storage tanks “not fit for service” [Metro News]. Well, we’re only talking the headwaters of the Ohio River. What could go wrong?

Tree rings show California’s drought the worst in 1200 years [EarthSky].

California water usage down 10%, but Governor Brown’s goal was 20% [San Francisco Chronicle].

“When water goes bad, so do political relations” [The Atlantic].

America the Petrostate

Apparently, it’s going to take a court case to get safety included as a criterion for issuing a drilling permit in Ohio [Cleveland Plain-Dealer]. Get a load of the picture: A drilling rig in a suburban backyard. Yikes.

ObamaCare

Analysis: Shumlin built ‘lead airplane’ for single payer [VT Digger].

News of the Wired

  • How digital firms create habit-forming products [Economist].
  • The Internet Association, which represents Netflix, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, among others, says the FCC would be on firm footing to reclassify the Internet as a public utility [The Hill].
  • The tactile experience of reading in print enhances comprehension, improves empathy, and improves sleep [PolicyMic]. So no wonder the powers that be are encouraging e-readers.
  • Major manufacturers now see a world of self-driving cars [New York Times]. I don’t drive, so I wouldn’t know, but are self-driving cars the next Google Glass? A product foisted on us by squillionaires with more money than sense?
  • Bill Watterson reviews biography of Charles Schulz [Online WSJ].
  • American Economic Association’s annual meeting: Policy no longer a dirty word [New York Times].
  • Missouri grandmother charged with child endangerment after her six year-old grandson found a loaded gun in her home and accidentally shot himself [KMOV]. The price of liberty!
  • Hong Kong government report on Occupations seen by pro-Democracy advocates as “economical with the truth” [South China Morning Post].
  • Masked gunmen attack offices of Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly in Paris. 12 killed, 4 injured [BBC].

* * *

Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. And here’s today’s plant (Maria Moya):

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

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63 comments

  1. Jim Haygood

    Because lower energy prices and the stronger dollar will likely keep inflation below the Fed’s 2% target for some time, “it was noted that the Federal Open Market Committee might begin normalization at a time when core inflation was near current levels,” the [December meeting] minutes said.

    In that case, Fed officials said they “would want to be reasonably confident that inflation will move back toward 2% over time.”

    http://www.marketwatch.com/story/fed-signals-low-inflation-wont-be-obstacle-to-rate-hike-2015-01-07

    Core inflation currently is +1.7% year-on-year, while headline CPI is +1.3% y-o-y (and likely will fall again in the next report on Jan. 16th).

    Implicitly, Fedsters are saying ‘Don’t worry about the oil patch; buy now before prices go up.’

  2. Jess

    I don’t use much water, and certainly don’t waste any. But I’ll be glad to start conserving as soon as Gov. Moonbeam orders the country clubs to stop watering the golf courses. (Meaning, I don’t ever think I’ll have to conserve.)

    1. MyLessThanPrimeBeef

      Water is like money or money is like water.

      That is,, we have enough money or water except it is not distributed where it’s needed.

      1. different clue

        Great Lakestan may well not passively permit the redistribution of Great Lakestani water to the Subsidy Belts of the Desert West.

          1. ambrit

            Watch the South California like water wars erupt when the growing zones shift another notch to the North and the American Desert starts to become farmable on a commercial basis. I’ll bet you have a “Chinatown” in Portland too.

        2. Demeter

          You got that right! We in Michigan stomp on every little hint that we should drain our natural reservoir for the bottomless pits of California.

          The Great Lakes are only a reservoir for storing rain and snowmelt. They are not produced by springs (mostly) and so are not a never-ending source of fresh water.

    3. Kim Kaufman

      The real money and corruption is Big Ag water use in central CA. Jerry & Di-Fi aren’t going to cut them off.

  3. diptherio

    Some interesting points in this piece by someone I just saw hanging around these parts not too long ago:

    Mythical Man Months and Off-Shoring

    Simply, there is a cost associated with dividing the labor. That cost may be offset by overall group productivity. But, once the labor is divided past a relatively small number, the added cost of coordination and communication dwarfs the potential productivity increase. Past that point, the division decreases (often catastrophically) the productivity of the enterprise.[…]

    Modern Industrialism aggressively propagandizes against this observation. There are two factors at work. First, the division of labor beyond the relatively natural or organic level creates relatively low-skilled tasks to be done. The design and maintenance of the organizational processes and “tooling” becomes a bit of “Intellectual Property” (secret sauce, protected by Patents and Copyrights and ruthless trade secret Non-Disclosure law). This is a method of abstracting worker know-how from skilled workers, dumbing it down for less-skilled (lower paid, more compliant) workers, and letting “management” de-skill their workforce for “industrial peace” and improved profits. It is an unrecognized form of “enclosure” no less dishonest than the theft of any property for private profits.

    This is the foundation of “offshoring.” US high-paid workers are told to proceduralize their communal knowledge and teach it to lower-skilled “offshore” (often just cheaper and less experienced) workers so that the labor cost of various operations is reduced. This is a natural process in healthy institutions. The experienced and thoughtful members of workgroups mentor younger entrants and move on from the routine. But it does not happen fast enough for the financier or the corporate value-extractor.

    I’d never thought about de-skilling as a form of enclosure before, but it definitely fits the basic pattern.

    1. Joe Robinson

      Seems to me there is a parallel here to the process that takes place in education, where educational objectives are defined and broken down into measureable units. I don´t know whether there is an “organic” level of disaggregation in education though. In production that function of cost vs (dis)aggregation is an interesting one, and there is a lot going on behind the scenes as it approaches the organic threshold.

    2. different clue

      Unfortunately, skilled (especially unionized) workers did not foresee the de-skilling revolution before its initial rolling rollout; and therefor did not save any survival cushion of money/wealth to be able to live on for the year or so that “retraining” the deskilled recruits would take. Had they all been able to do that, they could have refused to do the training in return for being fired immediately as against doing the training in return for being layoffed afterwards anyway. (And perhaps a lot of skilled workers were even-then too low paid and high expensed to have been able to save any “mad-money” anyway.

      1. Jessica

        Harry Braverman wrote about this in the mid-70s, so it was foreseeable. However, the type of collective forward thinking and putting into action is rare among ordinary people. That would require actual democracy.

        1. different clue

          Forseeable to Harry Braverman, for which he deserves serious respect. But not foreseeable to very many, including not to me. Though I was very young then.

      2. j7915

        Sadly your scenario is what the union “bosses” never brought up and sadder even the uninion members would not have followed. That bass boat with color co-ordinated trailer and pickup had higher priority.

        Strikes would look very different if the union folks could have considered a strike, a one or two months vacation. Mainly because management usually ran on the treadmill to match or exceed the Jones’s themselves.

    3. Jessica

      Thank you for this useful post. Yes, it is much more about enclosure of various types of commons than meets the eye.

      1. hunkerdown

        Ha! Indeed, that’s Brooks’ Law, after Frederick P. Brooks, the very author of the book The Mythical Man-Month from which that observation was lifted. I found that book interesting and informative, although the genuflections to his deity on every second page seemed anachronistic well beyond the half-century ago when it was written, almost like a 17th-c. alchemist trying not to piss off the Church.

  4. MyLessThanPrimeBeef

    Freedom Industries case…conflict of interest.

    Basically, it also means any devout Buddhist who believes the whole world is interconnected and that we are one big family can’t serve on the jury, or anyone harboring similar un-civic feelings.

    ‘Your honor, I would like to be dismissed…’

  5. George Hier

    Slogged through the Michael Brown Sr. Interview article. Didn’t see anything about raising your kids to not rob convenience stores or assault people. If I did shit like that, my parents would disown me. Apparently the rules are different in Ferguson.

      1. George Hier

        Thousands of citizens are stop-and-frisked every day, thousands are pulled over for driving-while-black, hundreds are killed every year in black-on-black gang warfare, but do we hear about any of them? No, because you’re too busy screaming and ranting and defending the one dumb bastard who went and attacked two people and got himself shot to death by the second one.

        As if his skin color had anything to do with anything.

        1. hunkerdown

          Do street Blacks represent authority? No. You do. Start apologizing for your continued existence.

        2. Lambert Strether Post author

          “As if his skin color had anything to do with anything.” Well, anecdote, but:

          Police said Shields, blonde and wearing body armor, raced through the neighborhood, past well-manicured lawns and simple brick houses, firing multiple shots out her window at people and cars.

          Eventually, officers stopped and arrested Shields at Cloverdale Drive and Koblan Drive, near the spot where the shootings occurred and just blocks from her house. She pointed her firearm at an officer, but was taken into custody without incident or injury, the release stated

          George, you’d advocate that this woman should have been shot, right?

          1. George Hier

            I would advocate that she had no expectation to not be shot, either by the police or an ordinary citizen.

            But if you’re engaging in some childish eye-for-an-eye thing, where every incident of black injustice must be ‘balanced’ by an incident of white injustice, then you’re just a sick racist bastard. I hold the same standards for everyone. I’m not sure why MLK’s dream is considered such an evil thing these days.

    3. dannyc

      George,
      Slog through this interview. Rep. Michael Grimm is Eric Garner’s Congressman from Staten Island.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbpxVO-mnYU
      For doing shit like this Michael Grimm has been disowned by House leadership, but not until a year later and after he was re-elected by the people of Staten Island. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging free speech or the press, yet here a Congressman threatens to throw a member of the press off the balcony of the House itself. Congressman Grimm is also a former Marine and FBI so his threat is credible and he should know the law. You’d think the Marines and the FBI would’ve done a better job raising Congressman Grimm.

  6. MyLessThanPrimeBeef

    Oh, my Ahura Mazda,, Mish in his ‘ECB is About To Do Something Stupid,’ is making a distinction between ordinary price deflation/inflation and asset deflation/inflation, welcoming the deflation of the former.

    Are we on our enlightening way to jettisoning Manorial Household Economics leading to an eventually détente in the War on Wage Inflation?

  7. Carolinian

    On TV last night they showed and experimental Audi driving itself down a busy freeway and said that the company plans to incorporate this “lane keeping” technology into its cars in the next couple of years. So yes this form of robot driving is definitely coming. Google’s Nerf car on the other hand could be a long way off. The Google car only works by having all its routes elaborately mapped out in advance with a kind of super Street View.

    Personally I’d settle for a car robot that would just turn on the turn signal for all those drivers too lazy to do so.

    1. OIFVet

      Maybe they are out of blinker fluid? Once upon a time we received a newly minted private, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. One day, when the company was checking and maintaining the Humvees, one of the E-5s sent that private to the motor pool with instructions to bring back blinker fluid and Fallopian tubes. Hilarity ensued.

      1. ambrit

        AAArgh! One day, on the job, my Dad sent me off to the parts trailer for some ‘elbow grease’ for applying 90 degree bends in the copper water harness. Not being too sure I wasn’t being spoofed, I bought him back a tin of soldering paste. “It’s the closest I could find Dad,” I said. He gave me a very funny look.
        See also; “Muffler Bearings,” and the dreaded “Henweigh.”

    3. Demeter

      I am of the personal opinion that “driverless” cars are an evil devoutly to be avoided.

      I have a developmentally disabled adult child. Yes, a driverless car would get her around without my intervention. But what then? She’d still need someone to guide/protect/supervise so that she didn’t end up in a bad situation. No saving there.

      Perhaps some of the mentally competent but physically disabled would benefit. But what of the rest of us?

      We would raise generations of people with no ability to move through time and space. Driving is a skill, just as riding horseback or bicycle is a skill. It develops mind and motor reflexes, and provides physical training in physics. It also develops basic civic skills: courtesy, following rules, judgment.

      We lost a lot when horseback riding went out of style. We will lose even more when driving a vehicle is mandated away for “safety”.

      This is an example of over-reaching nanny-statism. Far better to have the vehicle lock out those impaired by drink, drugs or exhaustion. Maybe then they would take better care of themselves. Or at worst, have an emergency driverless mode for those that are temporarily impaired (but it would be prohibitively expensive, I would think.)

      When I’m 90, I would rather hire a taxi and driver than be stuck in a vehicle that I could not manage in the event something went wrong.

      And trust in Murphy–something will ALWAYS go wrong!

  8. Larry

    Missouri grandmother charged with child endangerment after her six year-old grandson found a loaded gun in her home and accidentally shot himself [KMOV]. The price of liberty!

    On a local drive time sports radio program this week (Toucher and Rich if you’re interested), one of the hosts recounted taking his family to visit a friend’s family in Georgia over the holidays. His friend yelled at his son not to go upstairs, and when the host asked why he shouldn’t go upstairs, his friend replied “because I haven’t put away the weapons yet”. The radio host packed up his family and left, but simply recounted how that doesn’t really happen in Massachusetts and how common an occurrence gun ownership is in the South. But he also couldn’t believe people were so god damned cavalier with their weapons, especially with children in the house.

      1. ambrit

        I know of at least two people who carry one of those four shot 22 caliber ‘very small frame’ revolvers. Fear is a wonderful sales tool for the firearms business. (I had to laugh at the p0rn on the wall to the right of the woman. Down here that would get you ‘messed with’ by the local church ladies auxiliary.)

  9. Bart Fargo

    RE: West Virginia DEP: 1100 storage tanks “not fit for service”

    According to the link, the “inspections” weren’t made by the DEP but rather by the tank owners:
    “The DEP did not go out and make these determinations. The tank owners themselves, as a result of wanting to comply with Senate bill 373, made those determinations,” he said.
    —
    If the owners themselves admit that 4% of their above-ground tanks aren’t fit for service, one can’t help but wonder what percentage of tanks outside inspectors would condemn. There are also 22,000 more tanks whose owners didn’t even bother to meet the Jan 1st self-inspection deadline, and that includes tanks owned by the DEP itself(!):
    “Huffman said the DEP itself has a number of above ground storage tanks that the agency is also working to get inspected. He said the agency missed the deadline with some of those tanks.”
    —
    So the total number of decrepit tanks will probably be in the neighborhood of 2,000 out of 50,000…at least according to the tank owners themselves. It’s hard to put much faith environmental regulations when even the enforcement agencies don’t seem to take them seriously.

  10. afisher

    GOP are continuing their warring ways: Day 2 They continue with their War on Women as they have added bills that again attempts to push the “fetal pain” / 20 week myth. They have also decided to regenerate all the crap that died in House: ( https://www.popvox.com/blog/week-ahead-jan-6-9?utm_campaign=website&utm_source=sendgrid.com&utm_medium=email) TAXES – redoing the number of hours that defined FTE and Re-engineering the number of employees ( by exempting Veterans) – reduction of employees for PPACA.

    1. hunkerdown

      Just think how much calmer life would be if the Democratic Party didn’t offer up your bodily integrity for public consumption like the totalitarians they are.

  11. Anon

    From Ars Technica: Only 25Mbps and up will qualify for broadband under new FCC definition

    Tom Wheeler, looking out for the little man and not giving priority to his old buddies over at Comcast? I wonder if there was some holding feet to the fire in the background. Anyway, as the article says:

    The proposed 25/3 definition of broadband doesn’t actually require ISPs to adopt that speed. But using the 25/3 definition for broadband will affect how the FCC reports on whether ISPs are offering Americans service that’s fast enough. Despite the 25/3 standard not being a requirement for government-funded projects, about four dozen rural broadband experiments funded by the FCC will offer at least 25/3, a senior FCC official told Ars.

    Let’s hold our breath and see, in any case.

    1. Bart Fargo

      I find that the mainstream media tend to get worked up only over attacks on crass, deliberately offensive speech. That’s how Sony was able to convince the media that its screening of The Interview made the company a champion of free speech, when in fact their lawyers were (and are) busy making legal threats against media outlets and journalists exercising freedom of the press in covering the content of the hacks. While the attack on Charlie Hebdo is most certainly an atrocity, it too can be contrasted with the countless cartel/government-commissioned murders of journalists in Mexico and Central America that have been met mostly with indifference in the mainstream American media. I guess it takes a connection to “Axis of Evil”-sponsored terrorism to motivate people to care, but this tendency also belies a lack of understanding about who really threatens our freedom of speech in the 21st century – rarely terrorists or hackers, far more commonly business, government and the wealthy who are able to exploit the legal system and state violence for their own benefit.

    2. George Hier

      The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

      –Attributed to H.L. Mencken

      1. JTFaraday

        Preserving freedom from said overreach of the state doesn’t mean protecting scoundrels. It means making constant judgments about what to defend and what not to defend.

        What you have here is a European and American populace constantly manipulated into a war against the Arab middle east that is driving extremism and which is dangerous to the very existence of Europe.

        Time to wake up and cut the puppet strings.

        1. George Hier

          So I should stop defending the concept of free speech… because this will cut my puppet strings and prevent war with eastasia, sorry, the Middle East?

          I seem to recall there was a lot of suppression of opposition to the Iraq War back in 2003. Protestors being blacklisted by the local news crews, etc. Apparently you’d rather throw your lot in with the anti-free speech crowd. For anti-war reasons. Or something.

          Me, I’m going to stick to those old fashioned values of defending free speech and demanding due process. These criminals can have their day in court, then have a nice quiet couple of decades in prison. No cowardice, no appeasement, no war mongering necessary.

  13. MartyH

    Yves, Self-Driving-Cars are a lot like Woodie Allen’s Orgasmatron. It is a Technocracy Wet Dream. Not sure what the perceived benefit is. Most people don’t want to be under the control of another, let alone a robot. But it is the latest masturbatory vision of yet another incursion into society of the “mechanical man.” FYI … the business case is for commercial vehicles … it is an “Amazon” (as a class) play that eliminates the labor cost and the uncertainty (it says here in fine print). Interfering with an annoyingly predictable (boring, intrusive, triple-parked) autonomous vehicle by any but the Security Forces will be a serious felony. There’s a difference between de-skilling the supply chain and de-humanizing it but that appears to have been lost by the Masters of the Universe.

    As we so often ask here: “So what could go wrong?”

    1. Kurt Sperry

      If self-driving cars are significantly safer and more efficient than the status quo–and I’m guessing both those thresholds can be pretty easily met–that alone makes a good case for their widespread adoption.

    2. different clue

      I remember seeing/hearing promises of this long long ago. The benefit was to be that many more self-driving cars could be packed onto existing streets and highways. Therefor, new streets and highways would not have to be built. ( An unstated benefit was also that no new rail travel would have to be restored either. “Smart Highways” would take care of all the cars and driving.)

      1. sd

        Starr Car…it was I believe proposed and tested back in the 1970s. Not quite self driving, more like they were linked. The cars would link together on freeways and then separate as individual units once they left the system making it possible to increase the number of vehicles, control flow and speed and maximize available space. And, wow…managed to find a link on the Starr Car.
        http://t.capecodtimes.com/article%2F20110412%2FBIZ%2F104120301&emailAFriend=1?template=printart

  14. McMike

    Bombing of NAACP office. So. Is the news devoting 24/7 coverage to the terrorist attack in our midst? Are we under martial law? Is the entire city on lock down? Is the entire region swarming with officers from every jurisdiction?

    Oh wait, just some good old boys sending a message to the nigras. Nevermind.

    1. hunkerdown

      Forget it. The MSM is to the world as a third-grader’s collage is to magazines.

      Isn’t Colorado Springs also home to at least one of those Christian Reconstructionist think tanks? Strange choice of venue, that.

      Identity-group targeting by false flag must be the flavor of this month.

      1. ambrit

        Colorado Springs is also the site of a major military base. I wonder what the M.P.s know about it?

  15. McMike

    Re conflict of interest defense.

    To me, the interesting thing is that this is the opposite of the usual approach, whereby the status quo is so heavily systemically conflicted that they stop bothering to talk about it.

    It is also a change in direction in that pollution defendants are usually trying to deny standing and agency to everyone involved.

  16. alex morfesis

    oprah and nigger bill (no not cosby) and before you go off and have david dukes ex-wife Chloe Black invite me over for brunch with my fellow cubans (my mom born outside havana) the fanjuls’, take a deep breath…

    oprah is as much “black” as I am going to start at center for the LA Lakers tall…not even close…not sure why anyone in ferguson cares what she thinks…when she had her studio on the west side of chicago, in the haymarket district (yes that haymarket), she would tell stories about poor victims of human trafficking across the globe, while insisting the chicago police department shoo away the under-aged drug addicts renting out their mouths for a fix from the housing project a few blocks away from her studios near the old greek town of chicago…obviously domestic traficking of young black american woman was not a story worthy of a national audience of women hoping to get the keys to a new car…no advertising dollars in that story…

    we have gone way way backwards in this country…what is the chance a black man shoots a white guy with witnesses without direct danger to himself and an all white jury deems it justifiable homicide…

    not a chance today…

    but…

    but back to “N” bill…
    bill costley (the son of nance costley, the case with abe lincoln where he fought for her freedom in 1841)

    http://www.lincolngroup.org/documents/fierytrial/The_First_Slave_Freed.pdf

    page 4:

    At the December, 1870, term
    of the Tazewell County Court, Nance’s
    first son was put on trial for killing a
    white man. An intoxicated man, pre-
    viously convicted of rape, was beating
    a woman in the street in front of wit-
    nesses. Bill had given the man fair
    warning to stop. Ignored, the Civil
    War veteran pulled his service revolver
    and killed the man with one shot to
    the chest.
    The People v. Wm Costley, alias Wm
    Corsley, alias ‘Nigger Bill’, opened on
    December 21, 1870.

    to paraphrase peter sellers…(“being there” ending…)

    “you go tell oprah…”

  17. Sam Kanu

    Re: the explosion outside NAACP headquarters in Colorado Springs
    – what are the chances that the FBI will new deem all white people as potential “terrorists” like they have done with muslim americans? None?

    Re: self driving cars
    – this is not at all about helping consumers. It merely a continuation of two trends throughout the tech word: tethering hardware and selling “subscriptions”. You will no longer control your car, it becomes part of someone’s hardware & software empire, and all data about your activity is now owned by them. You will pay for it – and then still be renting “access” to it at an ever increasing rate. Heck no, I’ll drive my own car, thanks.

    1. ambrit

      “…all white people as potential “terrorists”…”
      That is exactly what is beginning to happen, the State Security, by the act of collecting everything they can on everyone, has declared everyone a “person of interest.” The bombing in Colorado Springs falls under the rubric; Divide and Conquer. (The NAACP in Colorado Springs? Shouldn’t they be headquartered in Pueblo?)

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