WAR!

Yesterday marked the hundredth anniversary of the US entry into World War I, a transformative exercise to say the least.

So what does El Caudillo do? He authorizes a missile strike on a Syrian airbase while at dinner with China's Xi Jinping at the Winter Palace in Florida. Hm. Who'd a thunk?

This is supposed to be the Peace-Maker, Deal-Maker God-Emperor who will keep the US out of Syria, make nice with the Russians and preserve, protect and defend us from that horrid warmonger Hag who was just itching to engage in nuclear annihilation with Putin.

Clintons, Obamacrats, and all they represented delenda est! 

Of course it was all fantasy and bullshit, but what the hell. We saw our politics fall through the looking glass a long time ago, and there seems to be no way back. Fantasy and bullshit rule for the duration. Make the most of it.

I pointed out a long time ago that there was never much difference in the policies of Clinton vs Trump on most matters. Their rhetoric tended to emphasize differences, but when you drilled down, their policies were close, in some cases identical. Where they differed was in implementation -- whether radical and harsh (as Trump wanted)  or incremental and "softer" (as Hillary seemed to want -- it was never clear with her.)

So here we are now with Trump executing Hillary's Syria policies without a qualm, a near 180° turn around from statements out of the Regime just days ago.

Of course, things change. Assad (once again) "gassed his own people." The way he does. Ergo, something had to be done. After all, such monstrousness cannot be allowed to stand!

Never mind that Assad may not have intended any such thing, but in WAR!!! strange things happen.

Never mind the hundreds of civilians (including "beautiful babies") slaughtered in Mosul by an American air attack the other day. "Collateral damage, too bad, so sad."

Gotta root out them terrrisss.

Ya.

It's all stupid -- much as WWI was -- and follows a course of events that cannot be controlled.

We should know that by now.

And even Caudillos and God-Emperors cannot make events conform to desires.

They say the cable news nets are wetting themselves with delight over WAR!!! frenzy. Not surprising. It is their stock in trade. They enjoy slaughter for its own sake, for the ratings boost, for the patriotism of it all.

But no.

This won't end well.

Any more than WWI did.

What a whirled.

Why Wypipo Are Dying

I've been reading this deeply flawed Brookings study (60 pg pdf) on morbidity and mortality in the 21st Century. It has so many problems it's almost useless, but it nicely fits the narrative of suffering, despairing rural white folks -- who elected Trump in their misery -- that it's become something of a go-to "proof" that white folks are dying in their multitudes (ostensibly from despair at their future-less lives.)

The statistics do not support the conclusion. The  simple facts don't. But don't let that stand in the way of a good narrative.

The primary issue for the authors is the increase in opioid addiction leading to overdose deaths in rural America -- even though it is not the leading cause of death, but so what. It involves drugs, and everyone knows drugs are eeeeeevil.

There have been any number of reports that parts of rural (white) America have been flooded with prescription opioid pain killers; millions and millions of doses sent to pharmacies in areas that have populations in the tens of thousands if that. Surprisingly, these areas then experience a spike in opioid addiction and overdose death. How interesting.

The authors of the Brookings study, however, are careful to hold harmless the prescription drug manufacturers, pharmacies and doctors in those areas. The problems associated with opioids are entirely on the shoulders of the patients who, apparently, falsely claim to be in pain in order to procure a scrip, then trade the meds among themselves. Or something.

It really doesn't make sense given the already restricted access to opioids and other narcotic pain medications. And at least 9 times out of 10, patients presenting with pain are in pain, not "despair," real, physical pain, and the medication is intended and used for pain relief.

Yet the narrative says, "No, no! These people are not in physical pain. They suffer from Wypipo-despair!"

OK.

Interestingly, in other drug abuse frenzies (the crack epidemic, the crank era) nobody cared a whit about the why of such drug use. They wanted to see the users and their unpleasantness eradicated forthwith.

And so it was with the ever-present War on (some) Drugs and (some) Drug Users.

Now, though, the issue is Salt of the Earth Wypipo in rural communities who voted for Trump and all of a sudden, treatment, love and compassion for the despairing victim-users is the general  attitude toward the Unfortunates.

No war on these people and their drug use at all. No sirree.

Except.

Well, there is an exception. What is being proposed and in some cases enacted are further tightening of the restrictions on the prescription and dispensing of opioid pain medications.

In other words, the point is not to "help" the victims -- poor, rural Wypipo that they are -- the point is to make it difficult or impossible for people in pain to legally obtain opioids for pain relief. There. That should solve the problem, right?

Jeebus.

In some areas it is already nearly impossible for people in pain to legally obtain opioid or other narcotic pain relief medication because doctors are terrified of the DEA and refuse to prescribe it -- or any effective medication for pain.

They refuse outright and patients are left on their own to find medications to deal with their pain -- or just live with it. Too bad, so sad. The proposed additional restrictions and prohibitions will simply mean that more people in pain will be refused medications to alleviate their suffering.

I think that's the point of the narrative. "Suffering is good for the soul," right?

Whatever else Our Rulers want to do, they want to impose sufficient suffering on the Rabble to keep them in line, and they want to punish anyone who gets out of line.

That's Doctrine.

Of course I have a personal interest in these things. Until recently, pain associated with my condition was fairly well controlled without specific medications for pain. But about two weeks ago, I started having what they call a "flare," something that hasn't happened since before I started treatment, and it lasted a good long time, despite attempts to mitigate/control the pain with steroids. I received no pain medication at all.

Steroids alone were supposed to be enough to control the pain, but they weren't. What was happening was that generalized joint pain would concentrate in one joint or pair of joints and at one point I could not walk because of the intensity of pain. Standard pain killers like Aleve had no effect.

As it happened, I had some left-over pain medication from a previous bout of sciatica, and sure enough, within minutes of taking it, the pain was controlled.

But it's an opioid, and it was never offered by my doctor -- nothing was -- for pain relief, only the steroids, which did not control the concentrated joint pain that made basic functioning impossible.

According to what I'm being told, my condition has "evolved" into a new and more serious phase that requires more aggressive treatment with stronger immunosuppressants an other drugs that can have serious or fatal side effects. But that's how it goes. I'm not as concerned about that as I am about being stuck in a painful situation (another "flare" for example) without access to effective relief.

Given the urge of policy-makers to further restrict or prohibit the use of opioids for pain relief, I wouldn't be surprised...

[This Politico article explores some of the criticism of the Brookings study. Still, the general thrust of it is accepted.]

The Democratic Party Is Irrelevant

I saw Bernie on Charlie Rose last night. As he always does, he made a strong case for his policies and programs that he believes would control Wall Street greed and uplift the working class, curb the police state, and inspire confidence in America around the world. All well and good, but by pleading with Trump to do the right thing, he's essentially declared the Democratic Party irrelevant.

Of course.

Democrats have been yielding power to the Rs for decades, truly since Reagan, but they weren't so savvy about wielding power after Nixon defeated Humphrey either. Nixon was practically a Communist compared to Trump, and the Republicans in Congress in Nixon's day weren't anything like today's radical reactionaries who call themselves Republicans. But Nixon's election signaled the end of the New Deal/Great Society coalition headed by Democrats and progressives, and the coming reversion to prior theories of what it was appropriate for government to do.

As things have devolved from that point, the Democratic Party has reverted more and more to its roots as an aristocratic and deeply conservative party not particularly intent on rule so much as it is on influence. Democrats have adopted populist and/or progressive positions periodically throughout the long history of the Party, but they've also been perfectly willing to throw them away.

During the most recent campaign for president, it appeared that Hillary was attempting to pull off something Democrats have long yearned for -- the union of the Democratic Party with top level Republican "moderates," those Republicans who had rejected Trump.

I think she thought she had achieved her objective, but lo and behold, she hadn't. The R "moderates" went right back to the fold once Trump was declared the victor. The power that Rs can wield by holding the White House and both houses of congress is truly intoxicating,  They won't let this moment pass unexploited. Oh no.

Trump's apparent EC victory was stunning because it wasn't expected or planned for. The shock waves ran through the Ruling Clique, just as they did through the media and the public; it was in its own way an even greater shock than the Supreme Court's lawless interference in 2000 to give the presidency to GW and his bloodthirsty cohort. It makes no sense, and it is "illegitimate" from the get. Just as GW's elevation was. GW was forced upon an unwilling but also largely unresistant public and he caused the very horrors his opponents warned he would. Wars and economic collapse being the highlights -- or lowlights as the case may be.

Democrats, to their undying shame, did not serve as an opposition party but were instead enablers, co-conspirators, and willing victims. Even when they were given back Congress in 2006 they sat on their hands and essentially pretended that everything was OK, and Bush and Company would not be more than ritually challenged. For some, it was a shocking revelation: Democrats were useless.

And in 2008 when Obama was elected in a landslide and congress had a filibuster proof Democratic majority, guess what? Obama's prime objective was rehabilitating the Rs, resuscitating them from their near-death experience, and carrying on the Republican lite programs and policies the Ds had been notorious for since the victory-debacle of 2006.

To say the public was disappointed is to put it gently, and the Ds were given their punishment in 2010. The interesting thing to me is that the Ds didn't even try to reverse the trend. They essentially conceded state houses all over the country without a fight, knowing full well that by doing so, Republican gerrymandering would ensure R political dominance for at least ten years and possibly much longer than that. The Ds knew what would happen and they let it, if they didn't actually help engineer it.

They lost most of their Congressional majority as well.

As long as they had the White House, apparently the Ds didn't care. Of course the policies which essentially favored Rs, Wall Street, and the financial elites were enacted right and left (intentional pun) to the horror of many Americans who simply wanted fairness and justice from their government and got something else entirely. Disappointment? Ha.

Government obviously was totally out of the hands of the public, governing contrary to the public interest was the operating theory of both parties, and for all intents and purposes, there was no alternative. NeoLibCon capture was complete.

There was nothing We the Rabble could do about it. Elections in 2012, 2014 and now 2016 confirmed the People's powerlessness.

But this time, instead of the stability and continuity that would have been Hillary's direction in office, we get another shock to the system, equivalent to, maybe even greater than that of 2000, and literally nobody knows for sure where we go from here. I'm convinced that's designed and deliberate, not an accident of the voters' unexpected preference. I think the voters had very little to do with it. And it is obvious from Hillary's increasing, indeed unprecedented, lead in the popular vote (now up above 1,000,000 it seems and headed toward 2,000,000 maybe even 3,000,000 or more) that the voters chose stability and continuity -- even if they didn't like Hillary -- not whatever radical upheaval is in the works.

But it doesn't matter. What the voters want in any given election is of no interest or consequence to the Ruling Clique. They want what they want, and they will get it by hook or crook. The trouble is, until the outcome was announced, they obviously wanted stability and continuity, though not for the same reasons the public did.

So what happened?

Somebody or some faction which could do so pulled the plug.

Given the tiny margins in some of the battleground states that switched the outcome, and given the exit polls showing a substantial Hillary victory in those same states -- much like Gore's exit poll victory in Florida which was conveniently overruled -- it's pretty obvious that the count was interfered with (somehow) by a faction that wanted shock and destabilization rather than stability and continuity.

Crisis-opportunity, right?

Crisis=Opportunity.

We've been through this so many times, we should understand it by now. And we should have some way to counter it. But no.

Every time is like the first time. "Whut?!" And the cycle repeats over and over.

That is one of the ways Our Rulers keep their grip on power no matter the wishes of the public.

But it's a factional rulership, not a monolith, and the factions are constantly contending for the upper hand.

The fact that Hillary, Obama, and nearly all the Democratic hierarchy went along with the... odd... outcome without question and rank and file Democratic office holders are stunningly mute about it indicates to me -- having observed these things over the years and having had an inside view of DP operations for a while in California -- that the Dems really don't care, never did, and as far as they're concerned, it's no problem -- for them. In other words, they're useless and irrelevant as a political opposition, for they do not oppose; they enable.

Of course I and many others have known that for years, but seeing it so obviously presented in this case is still a shock.

But that's the intention.

Shock the public and get away with god knows what while they're fighting among themselves.

Works every time.

So far anyway. This time it may run into a few speed bumps, but what needs to happen are spike strips at least.

That can happen if the results in the battleground states are investigated thoroughly enough to discover the kind of jiggering I suspect went on. But I don't see that on any agenda. I don't think anybody wants to do it for fear of what they'll find. This is essentially complicity in fraud but that's hardly unusual in American politics and elections.

If it were discovered that the results actually were jiggered in Trump's favor just enough to clinch the EC, that would essentially cancel the election. The whole thing, the vote in its entirety would have to be reviewed (which wouldn't bother me) and the transition schedule would be thrown into chaos. What would be found would likely be appalling to everyone. One shock would follow another. Our Rulers would find that unacceptable because the whole system would shudder and potentially collapse. A crisis indeed, but one which the Wrong People could use as an Opportunity. The Wrong People being the Rabble.

The Rabble want fairness, justice, economic comfort/prosperity for themselves, and a sense of self-worth. Our Rulers do not want the Rabble to have those things because if they do, they can't be exploited to the extent they must be to please and pleasure their Betters.

What the Trump cabal appears to be preparing to do is to restore White Supremacy pretty much as it was in the 1950s and before, as a sop to some of the Rabble to make them think they're getting what they want while exploiting and robbing them to the hilt.

It's a nasty tactic, but it worked back in the day, so I suspect the Trumpists think it will work again. Why not?

The rest of the Rabble, the ones who will suffer the most under this scheme, "deserve their punishment" according to the principles of White Supremacy. They are inferior. Period. End of discussion. Some of them are Good Mexicans, Good Darkies and such, and so they can be rewarded, but the rest? They're lucky to be alive, they can bow down and shut up. Or leave. Or die. Their choice.

No, this isn't Nazi-ism or straight on Fascism. This is the way the US was ruled and operated from its origin until the mid Sixties and LBJ's Great Society when many of the disabilities imposed on Out Groups began to be removed.

The Trumpists want to restore America's Greatness by reverting to the white supremacist principles that they believe made America "great" in the first place.

Whether the Ruling Clique is down with that, I don't know. Some of the factions aren't, but some are.

The Democrats, in the end, though, will go along with whatever faction wins.

The Rabble can have a say, if they take the reins and force the issue, but in the meantime, the Trump cabal can get away with a lot of mischief while the issue of White Supremacy is serving to distract the masses.

Oh, these people know how to run cons all right, and they know most people are marks. Breaking free of this crap is what the People need to do. Whether they or we can, I dunno....

More later. I'm tired.

Curbing Violent Policing... Why and How

Violent policing is routine in this country and in many other crisis-ridden societies. It's not a new standard by any means, even though Americans tend to look at the current state of police conduct as something new and unprecedented.

According to statistics I've seen, though, policing now is less violent and deadly than at almost any time in our past. We see it as unprecedentedly violent in part because there is far more visual evidence of police violence than ever before. The ubiquity of video of police conduct means they can't hide behind their traditional curtain of lies, though they still try and they will lie outright even in the face of contradictory video evidence. It is their way, and efforts at police reform doesn't change that.

Though this arguably a less violent policing era, there is still too much violence inherent in the culture of policing, and there is far too much brutality and death at the hands of police. It is not a law of nature that police behave the way they do. There is no law of nature that requires them to kill on impulse. There is no law of nature that requires the public to obey police orders immediately or face a bloody beating or die.

Obedience will not necessarily save you in any case.

The problem is that police are given too much authority to use force and very little concept of their responsibility for the sanctity of life. They are filled with negative notions about the "scum" and "trash" they have to deal with, but they have few or no concepts which will lift people up. They do not value the lives of those they come in contact with, every one of whom they consider a potential existential threat. If their contacts are black, brown, mentally ill, homeless or disabled, they too often respond with an utter lack of insight, compassion or empathy. Thus the dead and wounded pile up, even though in absolute terms, the number seems to be quite low compared to previous eras.

The point I've made many times is that realistically, the police don't have to use lethal or even less lethal force more than a tenth of the number of times they do. I use statistics from cities like New York and Oakland and others where police killings have been reduced by up to 90% simply by changing the rules for use of force and enforcing those changes on officers in the field.

In these and other cities, the goal was set to reduce the killing and to curb police violence -- and it was done. It's not rocket science, and it is not an insoluble problem. It doesn't require endless conferences, task forces, public meetings and a "national conversation" to accomplish.

It requires orders from the top that the killing stop. It requires clear and enforceable rules for the use of any kind of force during encounters with the public. And it requires violations to be punished.

To endure, it also requires changes to police culture, particularly the "us against them" belief system, and the "comply or die" behavior.

The reason for doing this is simple: violent policing is modeled by society in general, forming a basis for dealing with almost any problem. Beat the shit out of somebody or shoot them dead. Threaten. Belittle. Demean. Dominate. Demand submission. Immediate compliance or face the consequences. Victim blaming. One could go on and on describing the destructive results of violent policing on society as a whole.  Other destructive results include the kind of blowback we've seen, where snipers target police. It's a wonder it doesn't happen more often. But it's the kind of blowback violent policing is bound to produce. Reduce violence by police and there will be a parallel reduction in violence against police. Again, it's not rocket science. It's common sense.

The "national conversation" has been going on for years, seemingly with little to show for it apart from the widespread recognition that policing has an inherent racial bias. Black and brown men especially are targeted by police as Bad Dudes, regardless of their actual threat. They are seen as dangerous simply by their presence. This is due in part to training and conditioning which assumes that black and brown men are the primary perpetrators of crime and will be the most commonly encountered threats to officer and public safety.

This assumption is partly due to a misuse of crime statistics, partly due to institutional racism (as in the origins of police departments as slave patrols, posses and militias to hunt down and 'bring to justice' disobedient Others) and partly due to a cultural belief within policing that sees police as anti-crime troops sent to occupy Tiger Town. Of course to justify their occupation, crime of some sort must flourish. How ironic, then, that as crime rates have plummeted from historic highs a few decades ago to historic lows today, police budgets and the number of police have increased exponentially, while the number of dead at police hands continues at an average of three a day, every day -- a good third of whom present no objective threat to police or anyone else, and almost all of the rest could have been dealt with without use of lethal force.

Of course I've mentioned two police consultants who go around the country training and convincing police officers and their supervisors that killing is their highest accomplishment, and aggressive and violent policing is the correct means of dealing with "today's" potential threats from terrorists and active shooters and such, which means that every encounter should be approached as if the subject were a terrorist or active shooter because potentially they might be. You never know.

"Better to be safe than sorry."

Shoot first, worry about the consequences afterwards, and don't worry about the subjects they kill at all. Their departments will inevitably smear and blame the victim. Inevitably.

This is too often just what happens.

I am reluctant to blame the officers for this state of affairs because they aren't the ones who come up with the policies which lead to so much death and destruction. They carry out their orders. If they don't, they can be disciplined or fired, such as what happened to the young officer in Weirton, WV, who didn't kill a suicidal man, and who was fired for not doing so -- thus "endangering" other officers. [In the linked story, the tradition of lying about events is honored by the police department and the city manager...]

The problem is not so much officers in the field though they are the ones committing most of the violence; the problem is at the top where policies are made and expectations are set.

The "top" includes police chiefs and sheriffs as well as city managers (who have authority over most police departments) and county managers (who are in authority over even elected sheriffs departments) and local elected officials (who have theoretical authority but little practical authority over policing policies).

Policing power actually flows from local elites and moneyed interests through layers of government. Police essentially serve as guards and guarantors of those elites and moneyed interests.

Policing policies and practices will change when the it is in the interests of those elites to change them.

Economic pressure is the surest way to force change on a resistant elite.

There are growing calls for economic boycotts and other forms of economic pressure where violent policing practices continue to be fostered and implemented. On the other hand, we're seeing the demise of the Warrior Cop in city after city where maintaining those principles of policing is proving to be counterproductive.

We're close to the tipping point where police departments can no longer be celebrated for acting like occupying troops in communities of color, but it will be a long slog to transform them into positive elements in a complex social, economic and political matrix. It's under way but inertia is so hard to overcome.

It's Very Simple: Stop Violent Policing, Stop the Killing, and the Disturbances Will Stop

I'm trying to get caught up with all the disturbances yesterday and last night, mirroring and supporting the uprising in Baltimore that has taken place as a consequence of the killing of Freddie Gray by police.

These uprisings and disturbances were widespread before the killing of Freddie Gray, but they have become a near permanent feature of American urban landscapes because, simply, the power structure that directs the police will not yield to the demands of the people.

"Stop killing us!" It's very simple. Stop violent policing. And still the killing goes on and on and on, violent policing and brutality continues unabated, and all the fancy military gear that has been supplied to police departments all over the country is trotted out again and again to suppress nonviolent crowds of protesters demanding that the police stop killing us.

And when vandalism and looting occur in conjunction with these protests, the authorities and their media handmaidens become all incensed because the Negroes are running wild instead of being docile little lambs like MLK would want them to be. Except he wouldn't.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an important piece for The Atlantic the other day titled "Non-violence As Compliance." As those who have followed some of my writing since the days of Occupy and before probably know, I don't take kindly to those who try to assert "non-violence" as a means of shutting down effective resistance -- which is what is done over and over and over again by most of those citing "Ghandi [sic] and King" as models of the way Those Negroes (or whomever is resisting) ought to be.

I have my issues with Ta-Nehisi, but in this piece, he brought the truth right out in the open: those who insist Those Negroes must follow the non-violent paths blazed by Gandhi and King are basically telling Those Negroes they must comply with authority. It's a way to shut down effective resistance. Which is as thorogoing a mischaracterization of Gandhi's and King's activism and resistance as there could be.

Of course it is deliberate.

The structure of power has so far refused to yield to the demands of the people that violent policing and killing stop. So there is resistance and there are disturbances. It will continue until the killing and violent policing stops.

It's that simple.

Sometimes, however, it appears that Our Betters are simply too stupid to grasp simple concepts like that.

Stop the killing. Stop violent policing.

Just stop.

The Killing Spree Continues

But the data seem to be showing a concentration of police killings... interesting.

By state since January 1, 2015:

TX -1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1  (24)
CA -1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 (21)
AZ -1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 (8)
FL -1 1 1 1 1 1 1 (7)
CO -1 1 1 1 1 (5)
OK -1 1 1 1 1 (5)
MO -1 1 1 1 (4)
UT -1 1 1 1 (4)
GA -1 1 1 1 (4)
MN -1 1 1 1 (4)
NC -1 1 1 (3)
AK -1 1 1 (3)
IL -1 1 1 (3)
MT -1 1 1 (3)
MD -1 1 1 (3)
TN -1 1 1 (3)
PA -1 1 1 (3)
KS -1 1 1 (3)
MI -1 1 (2)
ID -1 1 (2)
MS -1 1 (2)
OR -1 1 (2)
WA -1 1 (2)
NY -1 1 (2)
VA -1 1 (2)
NE -1 1 (2)
NJ -1 1 (2)
OH -1 1 (2)
KY -1 1 (2)
MA -1 1 (2)
AL -1 1 (2)
IN -1 1 (2)
LA -1 1  (2)
AR -1 1 (2)
IA -1 1 (2)
NM -1 (1)
NV -1 (1)
HI -1 (1)
NH -1 (1)
ME -1 (1)

The Zero States (so far this year):

ND
SD
SC
VT
DE
RI
CT
WV
WI
WY
and DC

The pattern is stark and obvious.

The killingest states BY FAR are Texas and California. They are ranked #2 and #1 in population, #1 and #2 in police killings, but their populations are not so much larger than states with far smaller kill rates -- such as New York with ten times fewer police killings than California. Something else is happening. It's not just about population.

We could put it simply by saying that the authorities in Texas and California don't put much value on human life and police kill with apparent abandon whenever they choose. Like police nearly everywhere, they face few or no consequences when they kill; it's part of their job, a job that they are expected to do, and so they do.

For all the justified rage about NYPD brutality and killing, New York police do not kill at anywhere near the rate of other police forces. Their kill-rate is almost insignificant compared to others, and not just compared to the rate of killing maintained in Texas and California.

New Mexico has reduced its police kill rate substantially, demonstrating that it can be done without society unraveling and descending into utter chaos.

Arizona and Florida have a comparatively high police kill-rate compared with other states, but Arizona maintains a slightly higher police kill rate with a population only a third of Florida's. On a proportional basis, Arizona's kill rate is among the highest in the nation.

But then perhaps human life, particularly brown human life, has little value in Arizona.

It's barely two months into the year, and already at least 152 people have been killed by police, a national kill rate of one every eight hours, three a day, comparable to the kill rate documented throughout the period "Killed by Police" has been maintaining records gleaned from mass media outlets.

The kill rate has been rock-steady at three a day for almost two years -- despite all the protests and public outrage at the constant bloodshed that arose last year and continues this year.

Almost as if by design. As if a certain number of "sheep" must be culled on a daily basis... to keep the rest of the herd in line?

If it worked, of course Our Rulers would require such a thing. Pragmatists to the end.

The protests continue, though somewhat abated by time and exhaustion. Some things have changed, and there will no doubt be more changes before too much longer.

But it's unlikely the basic premises of policing in this country will change substantially for the better any time soon.

The police state will most likely consolidate and endure, even if its domestic kill rate is reduced (and let's pray it is.)

In the Matter of Jamar Nicholson -- Dumb and Dumber With A Gun

This is insane, and the LAPD is defending it? This is Bratton's old stomping grounds, do not forget, and he is ever-so-proud of how the department was turned around under his watch and of how the community now loves and respects their police.

Then something like this happens. It's not the only incident of its kind, but it's one of the dumbest, and the department is determined to do what all departments reflexively do: blame the victim(s), maintain the ranks, insist that even in obvious error, they were right.

It won't be long before the smears of young Jamar begin. It's so routine, many just accept it as the way things are supposed to be.

A cop sees what he "thinks" (I use the term advisedly) is a Negro with a gun, and his automatic, "split-second decision" is to shoot. He hits a bystander -- Jamar Nicholson. Oh well, too bad so sad. Bystander is wounded, so he is handcuffed for transport to the hospital. At least he did get medical attention. As we know, so often in these cases, none is rendered until it is too late.

Nicholson remains handcuffed at the hospital until some brighter light in the LAPD recognizes that, oops, he was completely innocent of having a gun or of threatening anyone -- let alone a cop.

Oops. Oh well, all in a day's work for the Manly Men of the LAPD, right?

Jeebus.

A "Negro with a gun," whether or not said Negro actually has a gun, whether or not said "gun" is real, is routinely a target for amped up police who see threats to be neutralized everywhere, especially among youth of color. Just the report of a "Negro with a gun" is enough to get the supposed suspect shot on sight (re: Tamir Rice, John Crawford III, etc.) 

This situation is very closely related to the behavior of troops in Iraq: the very sight of a Iraqi with a gun -- or the perception that an Iraqi had a gun, whether or not s/he had one -- was sufficient cause for immediate execution. Hundreds were killed in practically every city in Iraq on that basis. Hundreds more were killed at make-shift checkpoints for "failure to obey" orders they could not understand. Every time, or almost every time, the killings in Iraq were ruled "justified" because the brave trooper -- who was actually scared out of his wits of the local Natives -- was "following procedure" and the rules of engagement (even if he wasn't.)  This is not much different than the behavior of police departments and district attorneys in ruling (almost) every police killing "justified" because of policies and procedures, training, and unstated rules of engagement.

Clearly the unstated rules of engagement domestically are that Negroes who are perceived or reported to have weapons are to be shot on sight. They needn't be threatening anyone -- they don't even need to have a weapon. The report of a Negro with a weapon is sufficient cause for summary execution. Many police departments employ and deploy snipers to carry out executions -- just as the military does. And it does not matter whether the target has a weapon or is an actual threat. The perception is all that matters. "What was in the officer's (trooper's) mind at the time?"

In the case of Jamar Nicholson, the officer who fired claimed to have perceived a weapon in the hands of Jamar's friend with whom he was walking to school at the time. The police officer claims that he ordered the friend to drop the weapon, but the friend refused. The officer then fired, unintentionally striking and wounding Jamar -- who was unarmed and a witness not an offender.

The LAPD at its press conference regarding this officer involved shooting displayed an air-soft pistol which was claimed to be the one Jamar's friend was holding "in the shooting position" when the officer fired, striking and wounding Jamar. For his part, Jamar says he never saw his friend holding a gun that day or any other day, and that the only thing he can remember is that he asked his friend for some cologne, and his friend had sprayed some on him. Was that what the amped up officer perceived as a weapon justifying the shooting?

Where did the air-soft pistol displayed at the press conference come from, then? Speculation is that it was a "throw down," a toy weapon planted by the police. I suspect there was no "weapon" on the scene. The air-soft pistol came from the department's storage room along with all the other replica guns displayed at the press conference.

This incident was a cock-up from the get-go, but I will bet cash money that the officer has no idea he did anything wrong and basically cannot comprehend the  outrage this and so many other officer-involved shootings generate.

The department will back him up to the bitter end. More than likely, there will be no charges against him, as long as the case is made that he was "following" procedures. Jamar will probably get a financial settlement in the 6 or 7 figure range, and that will be that. Case closed.

Policies and procedures regarding shooting at suspects thought to have weapons might be slightly adjusted but not sufficiently to prevent the next shooting of an unarmed Negro who the cop perceives to have a weapon.

The makers of air-soft replicas will be blamed for these incidents, as they already have been in numerous previous cases.

But wait. Gun ownership is prevalent and legal in this country. White people with guns are considered normal and natural. The issue with air-soft and other "replica" firearms isn't that they look real, it is that Negroes sometimes have them, and thus represent an existential threat that must be neutralized.

White people with replica or real weapons are not automatically perceived by police officers as existential threats.

There's your trouble.

Another part of trouble in this case is that the young man who apparently precipitated the incident by standing in "the shooting position" and not immediately obeying the officer's commands about dropping a weapon that he may not have had in the first place, has not been produced. The LAPD asserted that he was arrested and is in custody, but their assertions in this incident have turned out to be false on more than one occasion.

The young man who was shot and was treated as a criminal after he was wounded, Jamar Nicholson, is the only one so far who has been named and presented to the public. In news reports, the other boy is described only as "the person with the gun."

The problem here is rigid and dumb police policies which enable and require shooting at Negro suspects perceived to have a weapon.

Those policies can be changed from the top. Legislation is not required.

I advocate changing those policies forthwith.

Blue on Blue

There have been two blue on blue police shootings in New Mexico in the last few months.

The first one, in Las Cruces, involved two Santa Fe County deputies who apparently got drunk on their way back from Arizona where they had deposited a prisoner. One shot the other in the back as he got on the elevator while talking on the phone with his girlfriend at the hotel where the the two officers were staying; the elevator went down to the lobby where the wounded officer was found by other hotel guests. The officer died of his wounds.

The shooter was taken into custody, but the reason for the shooting remains a mystery.

More recently, an undercover drug sting in Albuquerque went awry and two officers were apparently shot by another officer, one was critically wounded. The drug suspects were apprehended, apparently without a further incident.

This happened in the parking lot at a McDonald's around lunchtime, but as far as I can determine, none of the patrons witnessed the shooting itself, as it apparently took place behind the place, out of view of the folks inside having their McFood nuggets and such.

Nevertheless, it has caused quite a stir in the region because the whole thing seems so outrageous.

How two cops got shot by another in the course of apprehending two drug sting suspects over a $60 meth purchase is a mystery. "Under investigation...." Right. That it happened where and when it did is perhaps the more troubling for ordinary Burqueños. This location, on Central near Tramway, is a high traffic area, and a McDonald's at lunchtime is where a lot of people will be found, no matter where it is.

According to reports, the suspects were driven to the McDonald's parking lot by the undercover officer who shot the other two officers. Apparently the shooter, whose name has been inadvertently revealed, signaled the start of the apprehension to the officers waiting in the parking lot, they approached the car with their guns drawn, and she -- the shooting officer -- fired on them, lightly wounding one, critically wounding the other.

WTF?

Really, WTF?

Trigger happy police are so out of control, they're now firing on anything and anyone who "approaches" -- the term of art is "lunges at" -- them in a "threatening" manner, whether or not they are armed (often they are not), and now, apparently, whether or not they're on the same team...

WTF?

The oddness here -- among so many oddities and perfect lack of judgement -- is that all of the officers involved in this botched operation were long-time APD undercover detectives, and it is almost impossible to imagine that they didn't know one another and that the shooter couldn't recognize her compadres. Maybe they were masked. And further, the site of this shooting was the chosen site for the sting. Surely she knew that the other officers were there and waiting for her to arrive, and surely she would know they would approach the car with guns drawn, yelling obscenities, and all roided up.

At any rate... oops.

But it goes to the trigger-happiness police have been showing all over the place.

"Inappropriate."

In Billings, MT the other day, an officer who shot and killed an unarmed suspect while he was sitting in the backseat of a car the officer had stopped was ruled "justified" -- because the suspect (apparently tweaking) was moving around and didn't follow commands to keep his hands on the back of the seat in front. The video is quite clear that the suspect -- Richard Ramirez -- is posing no threat; the officer is the threat, indeed he is a clear and present danger to everyone's life and limb as he barks his commands with gun drawn and assuming a shooting stance.

Ramirez is apparently rattled -- gee, ya think? -- and tries to comply, but cannot; instead, he's agitated and obviously frightened to death. When he fails to comply with the officer's barked commands, the officer shoots him three times at nearly point blank range, and then inexplicably the officer continues to order his compliance or he will shoot Ramirez again. Ramirez, of course, is mortally wounded and could not physically comply if he wanted to.

This shooting of an unarmed suspect was the officer's second to be ruled "justified" because... something about hands, waistbands,  feared for his life, split-second decisions, that sort of thing.

"Inappropriate."

Inappropriate, but -- once again -- "justified."

How the APD will sort out the most recent police involved shooting -- the blue on blue misadventure at the McDonald's -- is anyone's guess at this point. The initial report by APD made it seem that somehow the suspects were shooting. It was only hours later that the emotional police chief, standing with the distraught mayor, said it was another officer who shot and critically wounded the undercover cop. It was hours after that that the public learned that yet another officer had been wounded in the incident.

So, it's clear they are prepared to dissemble and obfuscate in "piecing together what happened."

Unfortunately, because this dissembling and obfuscation is as standard as paid administrative leave in cases of police involved shootings, we may never know fully what happened or why.

But we will never forget it was "inappropriate."

#BlackLivesMatter Propaganda and Testimony

Speaks for itself



I would only add that I am well aware that I benefit from white privilege every single day, as I have my entire life. I have personally witnessed incidents like those described and I have heard testimony from many people who have never had the benefit of white privilege, and I have been strongly affected by what I've witnessed and heard. There are some things that are just wrong, and one of them is targeting/profiling on the sole basis of skin color -- which is what police departments and private security are trained and expected to do. Do not believe their denials. They lie.

I have also witnessed disparate sentencing for exactly the same crime. Black and brown people are sentenced to jail, white people -- who have committed the same crime get probation or community service in lieu of jail.

This is wrong. This has to stop, but most white people don't even know it goes on. They have no idea because it doesn't affect them. They assume that all the black and brown people in jail and prison are there because of all the criminality among those people -- but that's not the way it is. They are in jail or prison because that's the way plea bargaining and sentencing works in this country of injustice: black and brown people are sentenced to jail regardless of what they've done or not done; white people are not. They may not even be charged with crimes they've committed, thus they may never wind up in court to plead out and be sentenced.

It's a royally fucked up system. It is a systemic problem of disparate injustice. It is fundamentally racist, classist and sexist.

Tré Melvin is telling the truth, and it is a hard truth for many white people to grasp or understand -- unless they've seen it for themselves and have the compassion to recognize that racism and injustice  is inherent in the system itself. So many people are invested in this system that it is almost impossible to change, but that was the case with slavery and Jim Crow too.  Yet they were changed... well, incompletely and insufficiently, but they were changed.

As for the killing, I want it to stop.

What I Learned This Year: Part The Second

Needless to say, the main social issue this year has been that of police violence and murder.

The issue has been an important one to me since I worked on the problem of police brutality in Sacramento from 1996-1998. The project there was spearheaded by the NAACP local organization -- the National wouldn't support it, as the problem of police brutality was not one they thought was all that important in those days. We documented hundreds of cases of police brutality and disrespect, however, and we used that information to press for changes in police culture that would reduce violence against civilians by the Sacramento Police Department. It was a long struggle, and it was only partially successful. For example, we didn't get a civilian review board, but we did get an "independent monitor" whose job it was to investigate claims of police brutality and recommend action.

The issue in Sacramento was never police killings as they were and are relatively rare. Instead, we were dealing with a tradition of violent policing, a tradition that probably went back to the vigilance committees of the Gold Rush era, and a tradition that primarily -- but not exclusively -- impacted communities of color. Certainly during the Black Panther era, Sacramento's police department went on a rampage against the black community. By the late 1990's some of that violence had dissipated, but black men were still prime targets for police brutality.

Community policing was becoming the standard and we sought means to make it happen in Sacramento. And behold, the new police chief, Arturo Venegas, was on the same wavelength. Introduction of community policing reduced the incidence of police violence by some 60% or more, and the presence of a monitor has helped reduce it further. The point is that when police know the people they're dealing with and know the communities, and they know they are being watched and will be held to account for their actions, their use of violent means and methods against civilians declines. Sure enough, it works.

When I moved to New Mexico in 2012, I wasn't really aware of the culture of violence among the local police forces, particularly Albuquerque's, but soon enough I became aware, as reports of police violence and killing were constant. There were the reports of  'anal probing,' in custody assaults and killings, mayhem on the highways. It was just amazing. Wild West didn't begin to describe it.

In Albuquerque, it seemed there were police shootings and killings practically every week.

When Oriana Farrell was stopped on Highway 518 out of Taos in December of 2013, and she then fled violence by State Police, the issue became focused on specific acts of violence by police -- such as firing at a fleeing van full of children -- that were simply incredible.

At some point, you have to say, "Stop! This is wrong!" And that point came. First with the Farrell incident on Highway 518, and then will the egregious shooting/execution of James Boyd in Albuquerque in March of 2014.

That incident, the killing of James Boyd, catalyzed a nationwide movement that's still going on.

I learned a great deal about the national problem of police killings this year. I learned that changes can take place, that police cultures of violence are not immutable, and that public outrage must be sustained and disruptive in order to make headway against corrupt and resistant police cultures.

In Sacramento, police killing was relatively rare. In New Mexico, it seemed to be frequent. So frequent, and so ridiculously inappropriate, that a people's movement against it seemed to spontaneously arise after James Boyd's killing and the efforts of the APD's chief to call it justified.

But I learned it was not a spontaneous movement at all; the movement was the product of years and years of protest against dozens and dozens of police killings in Albuquerque. Many of the people involved were the loved ones of people  who'd been killed by police over the years, and they'd had enough. They'd protested for years, but the killings kept happening. They'd manged to get the DoJ brought in to investigate the pattern and practice of policing in Albuquerque, but the investigation had been going on for a year and a half with no result. The DoJ appeared to be dragging its feet, and the city administration, from the mayor and the city manager on down, seemed oblivious to the existence of a problem with police killing. They were more inclined to review the parallel issue of police corruption, the Good Ol' Boys backscratching, and the culture of going along to get along.

The people who were killed by police so regularly were mostly people that "needed killing" -- the poor, homeless, mentally ill, drunk, drug addict, gang-banger, tattooed, pierced, troublemaker, etc. Few people cared if a certain number of the riff-raff were eliminated from the gene pool every year.

The administration of the city saw no problem.

The Boyd killing changed all that, and it opened up the question of police violence and killing nationwide.

There were demonstrations and protests in Albuquerque throughout the spring and into the summer. They closed down the freeway through town briefly, and they caused the police department to bring out its military equipment and horse patrols to put down what they saw as an insurrection. This led to some real and honest questioning of police behavior toward protest and protesters, and to a debate about police militarization that would spread nationally, too.

Who, exactly, were they meeting in battle this way? Civilians who simply wanted the killing to stop and for the killers to be held to account? Who's idea was this?

And so it went, day after day, on and on. The demonstrations and protests seemed to spur the DoJ out of its slumber and force it to release a scathing report on the unconstitutional policing and inappropriate uses of force by the APD. There was a spate of killings after the report was issued in April, then the numbers started declining, until in August, they stopped.

The killing stopped. THE KILLING STOPPED.

There has only been one officer involved killing in Albuquerque since August, and that one involved a county sheriff's deputy, not APD. It may have been an unfortunate act of panic.

The city entered into a consent decree with the DoJ at the end of October -- it hasn't been formalized by the court yet -- which overhauls and monitors the department. Simultaneously, they began an extensive PR campaign that was intended to show that police were not the monsters and killers they'd been made out to be.

I don't live in Albuquerque, so I don't see what goes on day to day, but my impression is that there has been a marked behavior change on the part of APD officers. They don't agress against the community the way they once did, and they engage in crisis intervention, de-escalation, and alternative arrest and intervention tactics far more than they once did. Police are being disciplined for not utilizing body cameras. They are required to report and justify any used of lethal or non-lethal force, and they are expected to behave professionally.

All this has made a difference, and it seems to be having a positive effect on communities that were once policed so aggressively. When police behave respectfully toward communities and in fact become part of those communities as opposed to outside invaders and armies of occupation, surprising things happen. Hostility is reduced and violence diminishes.

I learned that one man in particular has been selling a version of killer-policing for years, he makes his living at it, and is in essence a cult leader, fostering a police culture of violence and killing. His name is Dave Grossman, a former Army psychologist, whose philosophy is known as "Killology" and who says that the highest accomplishment a police officer or military troop can achieve is to kill in "righteous battle." For that, he says, is what the police and military are for.

They are, in his mind, "sheepdogs," protecting the "sheep" from "wolves."

Killing is what they must do. It is their mission in life. To kill.

And he goes around giving talks and counseling police departments in the crackpot theories of killing he's come up with.

In my estimation, the man is insane, and his theories are destructive and dangerous. But they have been adopted almost universally by police departments in this country, and they go a long way toward explaining why there is so much police killing while crime rates are at historic lows despite the fact that in the last fifty years, more and more everyday activities have been criminalized, and despite the fact that the high and the mighty are not subject to criminal sanctions at all.

Grossman behaves like a cult-leader, and his devotees are police officers all over the country who act violently because they believe his teachings -- that they are doing God's work, no matter who they kill. It's all just and righteous, because...

I learned that there are approximately 100 police killings every month, a constant rat-a-tat of killing, or rather there were. The rate appears to have declined slightly since the summer of discontent and nationwide protest following the killings of Mike Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York.

When I looked at the reports in detail, I was shocked at the patterns and statistics:

A third of those killed by police were unarmed.

A third were suicidal or mentally ill for which crisis intervention was never or was inappropriately employed

A third were involved in domestic disputes for which nonviolent or alternative resolutions are appropriate.

I've long maintained that 90% or more of police killings are unnecessary. I learned that statistically, it's true. Police kill out of a basis of irrational fear and from a position of "righteous authority."

Their commands MUST BE OBEYED -- or the subject must die.

Failure to obey leads to death over and over and over, and when the subject cannot obey for whatever reason, too bad for them; the officer commits no crime when the subject does not follow commands.

It's crazy.

As more and more people wake up to the fact that policing is crazy, the protests and demands for change spread.

The police have been caught off guard. They have been so brainwashed, most can't imagine why or how the people have risen in revolt against them. It seems to their eyes to be a criminal conspiracy of some sort. They cannot imagine that the people do not see their actions and their killings as righteous.

They're fighting back, at least rhetorically, but it seems to me that the message is getting through to the high and the mighty that the killing must and can stop.

We await further developments in the new year, but there has been surprising progress this year.

What Then Must We Do?

It's the perpetual question, no?

Not all of us can do as much as we might want to do in the face of so much adversity, but at the same time, many more have been taking the risks to do something about what's been going on, so it's quite possible for some of us old folk to step back and let the young do what they must to bring about that Better World we know is possible.

When I saw the pictures of congressional staffers walking out and posing with their hands up on the steps of the Capitol yesterday, I knew the long-awaited tipping point had come. No more could the status quo of perpetual police murder with impunity be maintained. Something would change.

This doesn't mean that a resolution to the problem has been achieved or ratified, but it does mean that the Powers have noticed there is a Problem and have decided intervention is necessary. Police departments will follow certain orders, but they cannot and will not reform themselves absent firm and direct orders for change -- and perhaps not without a good deal of behavior modification along the way.

In that regard, I'm reminded of that insane freak (Lt Col) Dave Grossman who goes around in a kind of ecstatic religious trance speaking before large audiences of police officers, telling them that their highest accomplishment is "killing in righteous battle" -- essentially absolving them by declaring their actions "righteous" by nature. They are "sheepdogs" as he puts it, "protecting the flock" from the "wolves."

Dogs, even sheepdogs, can go rogue and start killing the sheep, and that's what's happened. There have been few or no controls on the behavior of the police with regard to their duties for many years, and the situation reached a crisis point with the execution of a homeless mentally ill man in Albuquerque in March. Many tried to blame the victim for his own demise, as almost always happens in the case of police murders and executions, but this time there was a significant push-back from the public.

Message: "No! Stop. The. Killing!"

There were months of demonstrations and protests against police violence in Albuquerque, some of which involved shutting down the freeway through town and other direct actions to discommode the comfortable and powerful. At times, these protests were met with militarized and violent police responses which drew national attention to the problems created by abusive police and the militarization of police.

The DoJ had been investigating complaints against he Albuquerque Police Department for many months, but there was little sign they would release findings any time soon. The persistent public protests appeared to affect the department's investigators enough to move process forward, and a scathing report was released in April documenting numerous cases of inappropriate use of force and deadly force in a pattern and practice of "unconstitutional policing" which would have to change.

There was a spate of police killings following the release of this report, most of them questionable if not completely outrageous, and then things started to change. There has not been a police killing in Albuquerque since August, and in October the city and DoJ entered into a consent decree to reform the Department, mostly focused on training and reporting, but including disbanding a notorious APD kill-squad and otherwise curbing the use of force and deadly force by the Department while building a genuine crisis intervention policy and program that would reduce police violence when dealing with mentally ill people in crisis.

So far, it's held.

The issue was police violence and murder and the complete impunity with which the police operated. It was obvious that the city administration was taken aback by the response to the killing of James Boyd in March. They had no idea that such a killing would trigger so much passion and outrage. Until the release of the DoJ report, the city's police and administration had insisted there was nothing wrong with what was going on. Business as usual meant that there would be a police killing to two a month, every one of them justified by the DA, and that would be that. Those who died obviously needed killing, or they wouldn't have gotten in the way of police bullets, amirite?

The way it was, according to police and civic officials, was the way it was supposed to be. When the People rose up in outrage and demanded change, however, Authority was non-plussed. When a greater Authority than the local police and civic officials said "You done bad," there seemed to be something of an awakening in City Hall and the Police Department.

Wait. They were doing it wrong? So it seemed.

Meanwhile, elsewhere the killing went on and on and on. Eric Garner, Mike Brown, John Crawford, Kajieme Powell, Vonderrit Myers, and so many more. The dead kept piling up. The People's outrage and fury kept growing.

"STOP. THE. KILLING!"

The plea from the People went largely unheard, however. Outside of Albuquerque, the official response was a blank stare, followed too often by a bullet, a taser, a chokehold. Someone would die, at the rate of two or three a day, day in and day out, as documented by the only resource that is compiling media reports of police killings in almost real time, "Killed by Police." More than a thousand have died at the hands of police so far this year, and that number tracks closely with reports of police killings in years past. The problem has been, however, that until Killed by Police started tracking media reports of police killings, there were no comprehensive national statistics on the matter; it was purely up to local police departments to voluntarily report to offices in Washington, DC, and the resulting numbers announced by the FBI each year were vast undercounts.

The casualty list is enormous, far greater by orders of magnitude than the number of police killed by gunfire or other acts of violence against them. FAR greater. No one knew. Further, as the dead piled up and reports of killings of unarmed victims were collected, it became clear that black men and boys were particularly vulnerable to police violence, being shot on sight -- often on video -- based on... what? Their gender and color and the intrinsic "threat" that represents to Power?

Further analysis has shown that Native American men are almost as vulnerable to police violence. The mentally ill and the poor of any gender, race or ethnicity face similar vulnerabilities.

I've long been convinced that most of these deaths are preventable, that 90% or more of police killings are not justified by the facts and necessity. They are matters more of convenience or willful acts of murder and terror.

Police kill because they can and because it suits their nature -- and they know they will get away with it almost always.

The People have risen up in their multitudes and demand -- yes, demand -- that the killing stop.

The People are doing what they must do. And yes, doing what they must do sometimes discommodes the comfort and convenience of the unvictimized, and it sometimes shames the powerful. Given the number of dead at the hands of police, a little inconvenience is a relatively minor cost to bring attention to and hopefully correct an out-of-control social problem.

What did the sign say during Occupy? "Sorry for the inconvenience, we're trying to change the world."

Photo by Ben Terrett, Creative Commons license

Actually, the inconvenience is necessary.

And I'm not sorry at all.

Crazymaking Crazymaker

Yesterday's police kill-count got up to 1001  according to "Killed by Police". That means there's a ways to go in December to get to the kill-goal of 100 a month, so we'll see. Tensions always rise around the Holidays, and December may well have a bloody and spectacular outcome.

The sudden execution of Tamir Rice and the false stories the Cleveland police were putting out about it have caused more than a little tension in Cleveland and elsewhere. The video evidence shows that the police arrived at the park where he'd been playing (albeit with a toy gun, and Negroes and toy guns tend to give white folk the heebe-jeebes. EEEE!) Anyway, the police arrive and immediately shoot the boy. The video is compressed, only two frames a second, but it is clear that literally no time at all transpires between the moment the police cruiser arrives and the boy is lying on the ground, mortally wounded.

Split-second decision? No, Tamir Rice was marked for death when the call came in and the warrior cops were dispatched to take care of him. Negro with a gun, that's all they needed to know.

These are the rules:

White man with a gun, you talk him down, banter with him, and you let him go. Only in the most extreme circumstances is a white man subject to summary execution.

Negro with a gun, you shoot his ass, and you keep shooting his ass until he is good and dead. Even if the "gun" is his wallet, his cell phone, his air soft, or -- as so often happens -- his blackness.

Job well done. Carry on.

Why is it that a Negro -- pretty much any person of color -- with a gun or said to be armed in any way is subject to instant execution, whereas white folk are not (though we should not come to think that white folk are immune. They are by no means immune -- as a cursory look at the stories documented at "Killed by Police" will demonstrate.)

The point is that Negroes are the primary targets for summary execution in this country, and they are the ones who take the brunt of today's Killer Kop culture. It's devastating families and whole communities. If we can get a handle on why that is and what can be done about it, we might simultaneously be witness to a reduction in police killing and violence of all kinds.

Police departments are aware that they are in some disrepute among a growing segment of the population, though they comfort themselves in the belief that a "majority" of the public still loves and appreciates them. The City Administrator who is in charge of the police in Albuquerque used that line in an interview before the release of the consent decree with the DoJ, and it was false. A "majority" of the public in ABQ indicated in a poll taken shortly before the interview that they did not have confidence in the police. Disconnect was stark. The public's confidence in the police had declined sharply from previous polls, in part because of the constant rat-tat-tat of police killings of innocent and/or mentally ill victims. They were killing too many people too often, too often over issues that could have been handled without violence or gunfire at all. And it was too obvious.

That fact had not penetrated the police culture, however. It had not yet reached the protected enclaves within the city administration. The police were still of the opinion that they were beloved by the people when they were not. The city was still convinced that if the community were annoyed with all the bloodshed, it was merely a matter of public relations and perception management.

In studying the issue, I came across a video-lecture by (Lt. Col.) Dave Grossman that seemed to me to encapsulate the philosophical, almost spiritual madness that has led to so many police killings and seemed to me to be a key to understanding -- and perhaps dealing with -- the police mindset that is primarily responsible. I posted the video last Friday, and have mentioned it in other posts.

Today, I'll try to transcribe and annotate it.

The video is titled "The Sheep, the Wolf, and the Sheepdog," and it comes from Grossman's book "On Combat." 

I talk about the sheep, the wolf and the sheep dog, and I can't tell you how many people have come up to me over the years and said, "You know I always thought there was somethin' wrong with me. All my life people told me I was a 'wolf.' I'm not a wolf. I would never harm the flock. But I yearn for a righteous battle. I yearn for an opportunity to use my skills."

The sheep are all those kind, decent, gentle creatures who can only hurt ya by accident or extreme provocation, and the wolf will feed on the sheep without mercy.

Then there's the sheep dog. The sheep dog is a predator too. The sheep dog's a meat-eater, too.  It takes a predator to hunt a predator. But that sheep dog, if if if you have no propensity for violence, then you're a nonviolent citizen. If you have a propensity for violence and an absence of empathy, violence without any emotion for others, pretty good definition of aggressive sociopath, or a wolf. But what if you had a propensity for violence and a love for the lambs? What if you spent a lifetime nurturing the capacity for violence and a desire to use it in a righteous battle?

You know the sheep heard about the 9/11 highjack and said, "Thank god I wasn't on that plane." The sheepdog heard about the 9/11 highjackings and said, "I wish I was on that plane. Maybe I coulda made a difference."

And that's that mindset. The amazing thing is that the sheep dog, they're not destroyed by combat. They thrive in it. We have got to go into combat with what I call a 'positive self-fulfilling prophecy.' People have scripts in their minds, and if you get in a gunfight and say "Oh my God, my life is gonna go to hell, I had to kill this guy, everything's gonna be shit," then that's a mental program you just gave yourself. "My life is gonna go to hell, everything's gonna go to shit."

Most people will tell you -- in private, one on one -- "that when I had to shoot that bad guy, it was the culminating achievement of a lifetime of preparation. I used my skills in a life and death event  to stop a deadly threat and to stop a bad man. It was the ultimate achievement of my lifetime. The pinnacle of a lifetime of preparation. It was a moment of great adrenaline, achievement. All my training came together and and and it was one of the greatest moments of my life!" 

If if if you think about going into combat that way -- and the sheepdog does, the sheepdog yearns for that opportunity -- then then when combat comes, you're not destroyed, you got a positive self-fulfilling prophecy. And and and it's so important that we don't sink into what I call the "pity party." That we have this positive self-fulfilling prophecy as we go into combat.

The sheepdog. They yearn for that righteous battle, and when the moment comes they thrive on it, they take pride in it, and and and they get on with their lives and are able to sustain themselves and be triumphant and stronger for their experience."

Well, there you have it.

I only saw some of the interview with Brave Officer Wilson the other day, and I don't see much reason to watch it all. It was clear enough from what I saw that Brave Officer Wilson believes himself to be a sheepdog and for him, killing Michael Brown was a high, if not the highest, achievement of his lifetime. He had to shoot that bad guy, a weaponized NegroDemonHulk, and it gave him a rush. He's still high from it.

How many police officers have adopted this cultic belief -- propagated by this man, (Lt Col) Dave Grossman -- that killing is their highest achievement, what they live for, and how many carry a positive view of killing? A positive self-fulfilling prophecy about their coming opportunities to kill?

I've pointed out that many police departments maintain and deploy kill-squads, snipers. Many deaths caused by police are due to the deployment of these kill-squads, but not all. Quite a few are the result of trigger-happy patrolmen confronted with what they think is a Bad Guy who needs killing, and here is their opportunity to fulfill that "positive prophecy." They then reach their highest achievement. They've killed the Bad Guy/Gal for the good of the flock...

Imagine how this madness infects rookie policemen especially, and then imagine how the killer of Tamir Rice must have seen himself as the cruiser pulled up to the boy and he got out and shot little Tamir (he was a small boy) bam, bam, and he knew it was a Good Kill, for Tamir was a Negro With A Gun, and that is absolutely all he needed to know to designate him as a Wolf from whom the rest of the flock of Sheep had to be protected. Bam-bam.

A little boy.

And so it goes. In Albuquerque and many other places, the primary victims of police killings are mentally ill individuals having some kind of episode or breakdown. Police are always dispatched first on these calls, and they almost always approach them with weapons at the ready. Far too often, the result is a dead mentally ill individual. In the police mind, "the Bulletproof Mind" (another of the training videos and seminars Grossman offers), the mentally ill are nearly as dangerous to the flock of sheep as the Negro With A Gun, and they are treated with almost as much deadly contempt and force.

Supposedly, police aren't trained to deal with the mentally ill, but they ARE trained. They're trained to kill them if they feel there is a sufficient threat from the individual. They are trained to kill suicidal individuals who threaten no one but themselves. They are trained to kill Negro males in their multitudes ("thugs" don'tcha know). They are trained to kill Hispanic males ("thugs" and drugs, don'tcha know), and they are trained to kill poor whites ("meth monsters" don'tcha know) of whatever gender.

And they do. They kill them day in and day out, and they see every one of these killings as a high achievement, perhaps the highest achievement of their lives.

You can see it in Brave Officer Wilson's apparently passionless description of what he did to Michael Brown. He's still jazzed. Thrilled. He killed. He killed a Negro Demon Hulk, a weaponized black man, a jibbering savage, an animal to be put down. He killed! There is no higher purpose or calling than that. He did his job.

Insane freaks like (Lt. Col.) Dave Grossman are the reason why.

They are the ones who inculcate the theories, theology, "killology," and philosophy that leads police to kill so many and so inappropriately.

I'm convinced that 90% or more of lethal force incidents do not require lethal force at all. The blanket use of lethal force in so many of the incidents that do take place leads to contempt for police and worse. The abject failure of the injustice system to hold police accountable, indeed its celebration and rewarding of police killing, leads to contempt for law.

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, however. The police do not have to kill, certainly not as often as they do, but they do it because of insane beliefs that are inculcated by people like (Lt. Col.) Grossman, by use of lethal force policies which propose that "force protection" -- that is protection of the officer -- is the highest value, and by laws which protect police when they kill.

But they are on the wrong side of history. Their cult of killing is self-fulfilling the demise of the killer cop. It won't come quickly, not quickly enough to save the lives of the thousand or more killed this year and probably next, but it will come.

Too many police forces have faced too much public outrage at their cult of killing to sustain the practice much longer. They've gone too far for too long.

A reckoning is on the way.

Getting Closer To Labor Day and the End of Summer

The closer we get to Labor Day and the End of Summer, the more apprehensive I become. It's a form of conditioning, I guess, driven by an understanding that the first week of September has turned into the pivot of the year, and what follows is often horror almost beyond comprehension.

Summertime events can be bad or they can be foolish, but after Labor Day, things get real. Real and often harsh.

This year seems to be soaked in the blood of innocents and the somewhat off-kilter. It's a matter of police killings by the great gross, one after another, all over the country, now well over 1,000 dead at police hands -- don't believe the "400 annually", it's a deliberate deception to make you think that "well, it's not so bad". But it's much more than that, too. The US has been engaged directly or peripherally in numerous bloodlettings in hotspots all over the world, pushing, pushing, pushing the edges of neo-imperialism in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and (apparently) in the Americas as well. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, have paid for this neo-imperial expansionism with their lives and it looks like many, many more must do so before this phase is done.

What did we do to deserve this? "We" in the sense of the global non-elite, the ordinary people who seem to get blown up and blown away willy-nilly and who have little or no say in the march of this or any other empire.

It is not for us to say they tell us. Not for us to say.

As we get closer to the year's pivot, I become more and more apprehensive as there are so many potential explosion-points, far more than I can recall in any previous year. Many observers have seen parallels to the outbreak of World War I or the outbreak of World War II, and many have seen madness in the eyes of Our Leaders. They are careening out of control, and without some form of intervention, they will almost inevitably lead us into apocalypse and catastrophe. They seem to want it desperately.

The question is whether there can be an intervention before the end.

I don't know.

But I shudder to think where the madness is headed.

Ukraine Lies and Damned Lies

V Alupki︠e︡. Krym c. 1910 from the

Prokudin-Gorskii Collection 

Library of Congress

Jebus.

The lies and damned lies surrounding the Ukrainian situation -- and the wars and rumors of wars that go along with it -- are blood curdling. What are Our Rulers up to this time? Or as they say, "What fresh hell is this?"

I had intended to write about "caring," as elucidated by David Graeber in the Guardian several weeks ago, and countered by Suren Moodliar at Counterpunch and then given a sense of immediacy by Graeber as he Tweeted his eviction from his family's New York co-op apartment. It was all really quite a dramatic sequence.

But ultimately... what? Not irrelevant, it's more like so very personal given the ever more cacophonous saber rattles out of Ukrainia. WTF is going on, and to whose benefit might it be?

The sense of déjà-something-if-not-vu is powerful right now. We've been led down this bloody, wrong and deliberate path too many times in the past.

For whose benefit?

Why?

And this time Our Rulers think it will come out different?

No.

It's wrong, dead wrong, every time.

"War on War"

Anarchists and Internationalists in Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, and North America are speaking out against the warmongers and the oligarchs that are trying to make a "Good War" in Ukraine. There is no "right side" of the oligarchic class. The oligarchs are not your friends.

Declaration of the Internationalists Against the War in Ukraine

WAR ON WAR!

NOT A SINGLE DROP A BLOOD FOR THE “NATION”!

The power struggle between oligarchic clans in Ukraine threatens to escalate into an international armed conflict. Russian capitalism intends to use redistribution of Ukrainian state power in order to implement their long-standing imperial and expansionist aspirations in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine where it has strong economic, financial and political interests.

On the background of the next round of the impending economic crisis in Russia, the regime is trying to stoking Russian nationalism to divert attention from the growing workers' socio-economic problems: poverty wages and pensions, dismantling of available health care, education and other social services. In the thunder of the nationalist and militant rhetoric it is easier to complete the formation of a corporate, authoritarian state based on reactionary conservative values and repressive policies.

In Ukraine, the acute economic and political crisis has led to increased confrontation between "old" and "new" oligarchic clans, and the first used including ultra-rightist and ultra-nationalist formations for making a state coup in Kiev. The political elite of Crimea and eastern Ukraine does not intend to share their power and property with the next in turn Kiev rulers and trying to rely on help from the Russian government. Both sides resorted to rampant nationalist hysteria: respectively, Ukrainian and Russian. There are armed clashes, bloodshed. The Western powers have their own interests and aspirations, and their intervention in the conflict could lead to World War III.

Warring cliques of bosses force, as usual, force to fight for their interests us, ordinary people: wage workers, unemployed, students, pensioners... Making us drunkards of nationalist drug, they set us against each other, causing us forget about our real needs and interests: we don`t and can`t care about their "nations" where we are now concerned more vital and pressing problems – how to make ends meet in the system which they found to enslave and oppress us.

We will not succumb to nationalist intoxication. To hell with their state and “nations”, their flags and offices! This is not our war, and we should not go on it, paying with our blood their palaces, bank accounts and the pleasure to sit in soft chairs of authorities. And if the bosses in Moscow, Kiev, Lviv, Kharkiv, Donetsk and Simferopol start this war, our duty is to resist it by all available means!

NO WAR BETWEEN “NATIONS” – NO PEACE BETWEEN CLASSES!

KRAS, Russian section of the International Workers Association
Internationalists of Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, Israel, Lithuania, Romania, Poland

Anarchist Federation of Moldova
Fraction of the Revolutionary Socialists (Ukraine)
Workers Solidarity Alliance (North America)

The Greek Thing Redux -- Europe Has Gone Completely Mad

There are reports circulating that the Troika that runs Greece on behalf of its creditors (ie: the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) has determined that Greek labor law must be "reconfigured" shall we say to enable/require Greek employees to work 6 or possibly 7 days a week, with restrictions on overtime pay, minimal breaks between shifts at labor, and with sharply reduced or eliminated wages and benefits.

Ah, the industrial model of the late 19th Century returns. What fun.

These recommendations or directives were in a leaked email from the Troika to the Greek Ministers of Labor and Finance, whose only job it seems is to implement the Troika's demands immediately and with a smile on.

These people are crazy. These people are absolutely insane. Europe has been down this path of enforced misery before; it didn't work out so well, not for Europeans and not for many peoples of the world who were, until being plunged back into the darkness, trying to recover from their experience with "European Civilization." (Newsman to Gandhi back in the day: "What do you think of Western Civilization?" Gandhi to newsman: "I think it would be a good idea.")

This is in a country where the official unemployment rate is in the high teens and due to the calamitous economic conditions imposed by the Troika already, it is expected to rise into the high 20s or even 30s soon enough.

In other words, those who can maintain employment for wages will be expected/required to work extra days and hours and with fewer or no benefits, while millions upon millions of Greeks go without jobs, housing, healthcare, education, food and so forth -- in order to satisfy the utterly insatiable demands of banksters.

If the banksters are able to pull it off in Greece, then they can -- and most likely will -- do it anywhere. Germany itself, the Center of the Euro-Core, could easily face the same calamitous conditions and would have no recourse. It is as plain a statement Europe's workers as you could want: "pay or else," nice little country you have here...

This isn't even so-called "Neo-Liberalism." It's straight out extortion.

For a time, I had some hope that the revolt of the Greek People would be able to stop the madness, but that hope has, at least for the time being, proved illusory. The revolt didn't seem to matter. Not to those in power, and certainly not to those who could engineer election victories for the more or less rightist parties (including the Socialists, damn) who would do the rest of Europe's (mostly Frau Merkel's) bidding.

So. Further down the Rabbit Hole.

Madness like this is not likely to end well...

As Might Be Expected

As might be expected, the Imperial Ukase issued yesterday regarding the Deportation of Young Aliens has caused a bit of a ruckus in the Imperial Court. It has, they say, put the Republicans and Mr. Romney "on the spot." I'm sure it has. Not that it will likely matter in the end, but there you are.

As has been the case with many Emissions from On High, this latest Directive From the Throne is somewhat ambiguous and open to interpretation Down Below. Much like the multiple HAMP fiascos and the confusion surrounding other mortgage programs announced with great fanfare that wind up dashing rather than enhancing Hope, this one orders that DHS stop deporting "Dreamers" -- ie: students who through no fault of their own don't have immigration papers because they were brought to the US as children by undocumented immigrants. Other than that, of course, deportations can continue apace.

And what a pace it is, too. Millions have been sent packing into the Netherworld of Outer Darkness, some not surprisingly by mistake -- either they are legal immigrants or even citizens who get caught up in the Kafkaesque nightmare of a very brutal and totally unaccountable (to the People) bureaucracy which is apparently institutionally incapable of figuring out the most basic matters such as whether or not they should be deporting this or that individual, or even in some cases comprehending accurately who the individual is.

So now the Throne is declaring a halt to the deportation of undocumented students; that's going to work well, since their parents are still subject to random and arbitrary detention and deportation. As if breaking up families weren't bad enough as it is... And what was this about farmers and ranchers? I don't quite get it. Was he saying that illegal farmworkers are to be permitted so that farmers and ranchers can continue to exploit their labor or what? I actually think that's what he was getting at. "Because it's the right thing to do."

Yes, well.

On the other hand, I don't know that the Throne has control of DHS -- in fact, it doesn't look like anybody does. As was warned about at its creation, the Department has metastasized into a security behemoth that enjoys trampling all in its path and ignoring orders from On High. In fact, it seems to declare its independence from oversight and control every day, much like the CIA and such.

This is what happens when a massive security bureaucracy is instituted on the fly, under panic conditions, with a mandate but no realistic controls, oversight, or accountability for actions as opposed to meeting targets.

The US has had much experience with this sort of thing, and to see it happening again is sad. But the People have little or no say in these things, and Government is blind, deaf and dumb to persuasion from those who tend to get it right as opposed to those who tend to get it wrong.

So what will be the upshot of this move by His Serenity?

My sense? Much like many other domestic initiatives, little or nothing. ICE and DHS will continue to do whatever they damn-well please with regard to round ups and deportations; students will continue to be randomly selected for ejection; the brutal wheels of the Juggernaut will grind on, crushing all in its path.

And no one in a position to do anything about it will.

That's how Our Rulers want it to be, too.