Tom Petty Knows U.S. Blacks Must Live Like Refugees

"Beyond the flag issue, we're living in a time that I never thought we'd see. The way we're losing black men and citizens in general is horrific. What's going on in society is unforgivable. As a country, we should be more concerned with why the police are getting away with targeting black men and killing them for no reason. That's a bigger issue than the flag. Years from now, people will look back on today and say, 'You mean we privatized the prisons so there's no profit unless the prison is full?' You'd think someone in kindergarten could figure out how stupid that is. We're creating so many of our own problems,..."

- Tom Petty "gets" it - after causing black fans decades of discomfort - in "Rolling Stone"

There Simply Are No Words (For What America's Doing)

Ben Carson & Dr. Oz R 4 Entertainment Purposes Only

Thank you, Republicans: I love popcorn,...

Wrapping

Distractions, Restrictions (And Something To Live For)

Jake Tapper was on CNN, reporting on the fear being generated by a rumour of ebola, maybe being weaponized by terrorists.

Graphic of an enlarged ebola virus with a member of ISIS.

We've only had one death from ebola.

Jake Tapper brought on a White House expert.

The White House expert said the ebola rumor was "highly likely" a hoax, and weaponizing ebola is almost impossible.

Jake Tapper rattled on for another three minutes anyway.

He didn't play Roosevelt's "nothing to fear but fear itself" clip.

But how could he, when he knows 1 in 9 on death row are innocent, and we've got more Americans in prison than China?

Jake Tapper's a professional,....

California Leads The Nation (In Racial Embarrassment)

"After a lawsuit, the State of California has agreed to end its practice of imposing blanket 'lockdowns' on prison inmates according to their race. The year is 2014."

White Americans Start To Give The Nazis A Good Name

Nazi Germany only lasted for 12 years

Living under the white gaze is a horrible experience, these tasteless arbiters of everything. They have a billion ways at their disposal of getting at blacks, each requiring nothing more than deciding that's what they want to do, and setting the wheels in motion. 

The white gaze is all-powerful, as there's no recourse against it, and it's holder's credibility can never be questioned. There's no justice as long as they're alive. Why think otherwise? They walk away from what they've done - and do. 

  "The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid." 

 I know who I'm dealing with. You'd be smart to do the same,...

 

The Total Truth Of This Racist Place (It's Not Really Anybody's Home) Is So Disgusting It Blows The Mind

John Oliver Slams America 4 Not Caring About Racism

Prison jokes in children's movies are revealing of a nation's sickness,...

In The Black: Rand Paul, Roger Simon & Glenn Reynolds

"We look at slavery like its a thing of the past, but you can go to any penitentiary in this nation and you will see slavery. That was the reason for the protests by prisoners in Georgia in 2010. They said they were tired of being treated like slaves. People need to know that when they sit on trial juries and sentence people to prison time that they are sentencing them to slavery.

If a prisoner refuses to work and be a slave, they will do their time in isolation as a punishment. You have thousands of people with a lot of prison time that have no choice but to make money for the government or live in isolation. The affects of prison isolation literally drive people crazy. Who can be isolated from human contact and not lose their mind?" 

 I've been reading the letters of Ray Jasper, a black murderer who was just executed. They're part of Gawker's Death Row series.

"I am aware of the truths that Jasper writes of." 

 That one's from the victim's brother, Steven-Alejandro. These were men who understood this country, if not each other.

“Whatever you think of Rand Paul, he’s actually doing something that politicians rarely do — talking at length to audiences who don’t usually agree with him. And winning over new friends in the process.”

This is Pajamas Media's Roger Simon, being quoted favorably by Glenn Reynolds while giving us the "whatever you think of Rand Paul" routine. Paul's a man who also seems to know this country pretty darned well, but he doesn't want to talk about it. He didn't at Berkeley. Good for us, right guys?

 

 Paul discussed the NSA. He stuck to a tightly-controlled script and still came off, to me, like a delusional paranoid white supremacist twerp. Did Roger Simon hear the NSA speech - or something else?

"The country is changing. Whole new groups are ripe for the picking, most obviously the young who are being so completely raked over by the Obama administration via Obamacare and the rest of the entitlements so many of them know they will never see. They were ready to applaud at Berkeley." 

 So Simon DIDN'T hear the NSA speech. He's hearing other things. ObamaCare speeches. Speeches on entitlements. Speeches on getting scammed and "raked over". And he's hearing voices. Voices that tell him to use his PJ apparatus to publicly pump up Rand Paul, by launching into those very "social issues" Paul has said we'll have to "agree to disagree" on - by not discussing them.

But I'm chilled by Simon's phrase, "ripe for the picking," signaling, as it does, such malevolent concern. Excellent choice for a fan of Paul's reptilian charms. It's amazing how, when doing the white supremacist/white privilege thing, those on the Right can achieve a perfect pitch they fail to find with minorities.

I don't know how Simon can type while vigorously rubbing his hands together, but that's just me. He does see a power dynamic, with himself perched above, though. I wonder if Simon, like his hero Rand Paul, would have a difficult time deciding if he'd let Martin Luther King sit at a lunch counter? I know now to *duck* when such men voice their "concern":

"And African Americans — when, since the end of Jim Crow, have they done worse than under the Obama administration with its record black unemployment numbers and horrifying statistics on out-of-wedlock births in their community? Consciously or unconsciously, Democrats have been waging a 'War on Blacks' since the days of the Great Society. It’s been a disaster for African Americans, a nightmare, in truth." 

 And the guy who had Wolf Blitzer drag a statement out of him, affirming the Civil Rights Act, is going to save us? Roger Simon needs to take off that damned hat - the headband's getting too tight.

"But where are the Republicans, the party of Lincoln, on that? They should be in the black communities talking to them about it, suggesting ways to make things better. Instead, they just sit around getting annoyed when the Democrats call them racists. Play offense, not defense." 

 Look, why don't you guys cut the crap? Blacks don't have any "friends" - friends would bring us justice - not try to figure out a new way to keep us working for you. What we've got is a bunch of unthinking, insensitive, clods who still think we're desperate to hear them tell us what to do. 

Rather than being jerks, "suggesting ways to make things better", I strongly suggest you non-racists read Gawker's Death Row series. Or pick up a copy of Richard Wright's Native Son, and reacquaint yourselves with what you - and "colorblind" Rand Paul especially - are all so desperately running from.

And, by the way, social isolation from the culture you grew up in, even online - for saying exactly the cultural truths no one wants to hear - that's one of America's prisons, too…

High Society

Hendrix did so many drugs he'd never get old and he's celebrated.

I am NOT the only person talking about reparations, and that's a fact, so prepare to see it on the agenda soon:

America incarcerates more of its citizens than any country in the world, with a disproportionate number of those citizens being African American men.  This has created a crisis in the black community, where many of the children that Bolger would be supporting also have parents in prison right now.  The mass incarceration epidemic is nothing short of a socio-political holocaust that has served to obliterate the black family in America.

I recently spoke with Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” who agrees with me that the War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration have been so devastating to the African American community that it is only logical to call for reparations.  In fact, we both find it extraordinary and ironic that white males are now earning billions of dollars from the sale of legalized marijuana, while black men are serving long prison sentences for possession of the same drug.

Not everyone can play.

Yeah, what's occurring around Colorado, and Washington state, has to look sinister - and uniquely racist - from a prison cell,...

Conservatives Suffer Passed-It-Aggressive Syndrome

Stan and Kyle voted to give blacks reparations.

1) Never believe that slavery is disconnected from the present.  It wasn’t that long ago.  If you take the age of your parents and multiply it by three (or four), you are probably somewhere near the slave era.  This is just a few generations back.

2) Many of the atrocities that occurred during slavery, which did tremendous psychological and economic damage to African Americans, are similar to the same processes used to enslave African Americans today in the prison industrial complex.  To make this point more clearly, the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution says that slavery is allowed to this day if a person has been convicted of a felony.  Similar to the Fugitive Slave Acts, this implies that any African American who has a label placed on their head due to an arbitrary law (such as the crack-to-powder disparity) can then be made into a slave.  So, when someone says that prison is modern day slavery, they aren’t exxaggerating:  The constitution says that it is.

Perusing The Mail, Notes & Letters From TMR's Readers

Racist whites are always challenging me, suggesting TMR doesn't have many commenters because no one agrees with it's position on race, or even likes me or blacks.

The idea that TMR has a sophisticated readership - who don't want to engage with white supremacists - never occurs to them. White supremacists can never be the problem. But they are:

"Loved it. Linked it on my blog, though I don't think anyone reads my blog, and Facebook, which people do read. I said that I received in my my email, but didn't specify from who, to keep those who regularly argue with you from dismissing it before even watching it."

And, then, there are those who claim TMR's NewAge cult work is equally impotent, though they rarely look past the blog's first page:

  "I LOVE your blog post!! THANK YOU SO Much. I say with very little pride that my head was up my ass about all this when you wrote this so many years ago.

But 2 years ago I finally woke up,…" 

Rarely am I happier than when reading those words.

Or the words of David Lott, a thoughtful man who has decided to grace TMR, once again, with more of his casual observations from deep within America's South - Go, David:

In South Carolina, if you are convicted of a felony, you can not get a drivers license. It's hard enough to get a job with a felony conviction, but since we don't have a lot of public transportation, lack of a license puts convicted felons at a great disadvantage.

Blacks are 30% of population, 69% of prison population.

Overall incarceration is 536/100,000, about the national average.

The reduced number of young black males in jobs in the community is easily observable. Black females mostly have the jobs, both menial and advanced. I eat breakfast regularly at Waffle House. I once asked the manager of the Waffle House (a very able and congenial black female) why there were so few black males working there. She said she rarely gets applications.

There was one young black man working there a few years ago who was obviously outstanding. He's gone now. He applied for and got a spot in the Norfolk Southern RR training program for train engineers. It's a very hard program to get into. I'm sure he's done great. Both black and white, the most talented young people tend to leave the community for better jobs elsewhere.

A few weeks ago we had three murders in one week in the community. We are not a big place. All black victims, all black alleged perpetrators. All young. Two of the crimes have suspects in custody, and the third is unsolved. In the same week, a 27 year old black man who had stolen a car about a month previously was spotted by police at a gas station. The cops moved in to arrest him and he took off in the car, Less than 2 minutes later he was dead after losing control of the car and hitting a tree.

All those lives ended or messed up. Such waste.

Generally the crimes for which people are prosecuted are not trumped up charges. There's plenty of white crime too. My guess is that if you sliced the data by income and education levels, you would get similar outcomes white and black. As far as I can tell, no one has done the study around here. There's a correlation between race and crime but that is not causation.

Family matters. There are strong black families in the community, even though out of wedlock births now predominate. The kids with the strong families are usually ok. The education isn't good enough, black or white. I tend to think the biggest problem is that expectations are set too low, but in truth I don't have enough knowledge of the school system to have a very good insight.

Southerners are polite. Blacks and whites have good manners. During the work day and in the public places, blacks and whites interact cordially and often warmly. But at the end of the day they tend to go separate ways. There's still a social schism, largely self imposed by both groups. If I were to ascribe group thought to each race, I'd say each thinks the other is a bit crazy. But we have reached the point where most can see persons of the other race as individuals, with individual traits. The ascription of group traits is still in decline.

But we have a long way to go on the core issues of education and economic opportunity. Progress is hard to discern sometimes. None of the kids are getting the education they need for the world that awaits them. It's worse for the black kids. We need radical change to fix that but we continue to get incremental change (and often that change is not progress, just change.) 

Whether the strong families will persist, I do not know. When the best move away, it's more of a challenge.

As to incarceration, you can look it up,...