Poverty is difficult for any culture.. looking over history it seems to be 
dealt with by denial and pointing to the wealth..  you never see getto tours.. 
and world wide.

I see disasters people are placed in floor less tents maybe 4 x 4 m sq. Then 
they are trapped in them for years.. over here one can purchase a wooded garden 
'shed' for around 1000€..  and could be a far better shelter that people could 
take with them when  it became safe for them to return.. (a start) there is 
much that can be done

تجنب. القتل والاغتصاب واستعباد الآخرين
Avoid; murder, rape and enslavement of others

-----Original Message-----
From: Molly <[email protected]>
To: [email protected], [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Sent: Thu, 14 May 2015 1:04 PM
Subject: Re: Mind's Eye Re: Cops and robbers

I would agree with Hegel on that after working with communities. The upper and 
lower socioeconomic groups have kids with the highest risk because they get the 
least and worst attention and bonding. Speaks to the nature of what corrupts 
us. I can see corruption all around me but don't let it guide me. When it is in 
your face, there are ways to move ahead without becoming corrupted. But I have 
to wonder what was lost to Big Bill Ricketts when mass poverty and survival 
became the cultural norm. And remember that we are all corrupted by society in 
ways we don't recognize until relieved from the distress of its constant 
influence. Clearing out the dross of personality is never easy.

On Thursday, May 14, 2015 at 2:53:24 AM UTC-4, archytas wrote:

I agree at personal levels on needing to recognise poverty of spirit and 
forgiveness.  .Problems then arise in those who will manipulate and pervert 
meaning.  The routes to perverse leadership are many.  One can be at Waterloo 
one day and Peterloo the next, fighting for one's country and dying at its 
hands the next.  Our great hero Wellington (very Clinton-like with women) was 
also a fascist-aristocrat.  The "rabble" whether poor or rich were problematic 
for Hegel.


It's tough stuff..  

On Thursday, May 14, 2015 at 12:59:52 AM UTC+1, Molly wrote:

I had was was said to be a viral meningitis in 2000 that was ghastly. Best 
wishes.


After making our way through effort, we (hopefully) eventually learn there is a 
better way, through recognition of spirit. There is much to be said for 
surrendering to grace, and knowing that our own will needs to be aligned with 
the divine for the world to reflect a heavenly life to us. That doesn't 
discount the suffering, but leads us to something more.


Value is relative, and that fact cannot help anyone trapped in poverty until he 
understands poverty of spirit and the way out. The way of the world will follow.


The world is changing when it comes to society and policing. Technology 
dictates transparency and eventually policy and practice will catch up, but not 
without more struggle. It wasn't that long ago that the most popular US 
president in history went on global TV to say "I did not have sex with that 
woman." The lies we tell ourselves about our own lives are much worse. Instead 
of continuing the lie, we can forgive.

On Wednesday, May 13, 2015 at 11:40:08 AM UTC-4, archytas wrote:

Thanks Molly, have done a lot to remind me of other possibilities.  Still 
feeling my 'brain; rather too much, a little like it has cramp!  When 
considering cops and policing w need a lot of balls to juggle - we forget stuff 
like this in the radical humanist paradigm - 
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-12/face-baltimore-you-wont-see-news - 
though we can no doubt find a lot of the opposite across the world.


I can see little alternative now (perhaps for 40 years) to a radical economics 
of positive, project and green-based  'money'.  This will need imagination and 
new ways of thinking about its role in material creation.  One thing I am sure 
of is that imagination working without facts and scepticism is no use to us in 
the modern world.  We live in a kind of directed imagination, something I 
suspect uses deep biology to have us charging to the centre of a moronic 
inferno..  Once in this the way out is very tough.  Much as the incident 
described at Zerohedge is disgusting, the current actions of our elite is much 
worse.  We have a post-election media discussion in the UK that still begins in 
the false idea our economy is recovering - this might represent, writ large, 
Molly or me talking up some more local reconstruction in the hope enthusiasm 
will stretch to better performance.  I have a metaphor and it's the half-time 
team talk - something widely misunderstood.


A good team will have done a huge amount of work on its skills, strengths, 
weaknesses and the opposition (one might think SWOT with weights) before going 
in at half-time 20 points down.  The team talk will not be motivational in 
terms of up-and-at-'em and very much focused on the match facts and a change of 
tactics.  In the popular imagination, some Henry V speech gets your people 
going - but actually this is a recipe for further disaster beyond amateur 
level.  What's needed is a professional evaluation of what's going on and the 
ability to switch to an alternative and practised way of playing.  Imagination 
is full of myths and the kind we want can't work when full of them and the 
copying impulse.

, 

When we think of young Chinese and Indians immigrating to our economies, we 
might think of Australians and New Zealanders coming into English rugby league. 
 There is a huge pot of these guys with the basic physique and high-level 
skills (formed in their schools and junior rugby).  They make an immediate 
impact, but take opportunities from our own and also erode our own junior 
system.  These days, the flow of top players is the other way to better pay and 
conditions in the Aussie game.  I don't really care about sport in this sense 
much, but think there is a lot we could look at in many ordinary areas of life 
that explain what we might call the unbalanced score card of current economics. 
 I can vouch that 'loyalty' changes as soon as you change club jersey.


Motivation is complex.


We like the idea of people making their own way through effort.  Yet our work 
ethics and meritocracy stand little criticism.  So much so that we shy away 
from the facts.  The import of young foreign labour, one assumes the best, is 
an advantage to us and a disadvantage to the original countries (may be some 
advantage is remitted wages etc) - almost like the purge of leaders in Korean 
POW camps.  Taking these best people in also means won't train our own (may be 
they are not fit to train?) and wages are depressed.  Work done in our 
countries is not being done in the poorer ones - where there is more need.  


Later I would argue the whole business of jobs and reward is based on vile 
myths from long ago - yet we keep seeing 'green shoots' and dream of job 
creation when it is clear most of these jobs have long needed tax credits  and 
I would argue that many professions have their equivalents like legal aid, the 
gruesome fees that put students in debt.and the weird derivatives and financial 
scams that pay CEOs, bankster bonuses and the idle rich.  Our solutions are 
education, training and a business friendly environment - but I have seen these 
fail for 40 years.  Germany is way best at all this - but I bet only Francis 
has much clue about this in here - and a world of Germanies is impossible.


We might start thinking about people in Baltimore and Bolton as awaiting a 
similar fate as the Plains Indians after Lincoln - just sitting unproductively 
on land - maybe not unlike the Enclosures that provided people for the conquest 
of the New World.  Just as the Plains Indians found, there is nowhere to run.  
Cops even call poor ghettos such as 'The Swamp' and 'The Reservation'.

,

I favour a form of international work programs funded by positive money after a 
debt jubilee - yet this leaves issues on how the world gets policed, whether we 
are dealing with scum teenagers or stealing (often murdering) cockalorums and 
oligarchs.  Many current solutions bring making silk purses out of sows' ears 
to mind.  Let's fix Baltimore by making all unemployed black people into rocket 
scientists!  And worse, we have politically correct idiots about who want to 
howl such down as racism.


We could start small - but one suspects 'they' don't want any rivals the the 
current mess.  We have seen this in many US interventions around the world at 
country level, continuing European imperialism (we cling to the shirt-tails 
now).  Yet the idea in this is partly to prevent any real rivalry to policing 
power of Empire.  In examining Baltimore, we should first ask if we would go 
and live in the deprived areas on benefits and work our way up with only the 
money and help available there.  Anyone going!  There's a similar area down the 
road called Union Road.  I don't even drive my car through there, let alone 
park.


If you can't get a handle on why we 'know' about "Baltimore" because we won't 
go and live in the conditions, then I give up.  In older societies and 
primitive ones now, we abandon the disabled, less able and old - weirdly by 
burying them alive in noble savage communities.  Now we use 'sink estates' 
(making the song difficult for the next Elvis).  My first question would be 
whether people abandoned in these places are socially disabled or impaired - 
it's often a combination.  And when we think of urban renewal and the rest we 
might wonder just how socially disabling neo-liberal economics has become.  I 
fear we intend to kill off our sink estates because there is no need or profit 
in their labour. 

On Wednesday, May 13, 2015 at 12:06:55 PM UTC+1, Molly wrote:

Great to see your words in good form here Neil, and hope that means you are on 
the mend. It just isn't the same without you, and I don't know where to send 
the post cards. Such is the nature of these groups, I suppose, but after a 
decade here I notice that for me, your absence is felt deeply.


The problems are indeed age old and may always be the same, but I only have to 
think about what life was like for my grandmother to know how quickly life is 
changing. I've always been grateful that I don't have to sew my own sanitary 
napkins together from old sheets and have always had cars to zip around in. 
Because I am the grandmother now I don't know if I've told the story of Big 
Bill Ricketts, my great grandfather, who was Sheriff of Ames Iowa, which lent 
my grandmother an "Andy of Mayberry" childhood, but without cars for 
transportation, phones in every home etc. When the depression hit, and people 
began to starve, Big Bill had to stop treating the vagrant prisoners so well, 
taking them to the city limits and rolling them instead of putting them in a 
cell for the night with a good dinner. Circumstance has much to do with 
community life. you g


I saw an NPR article that showed a graph depicting immigration statistics to 
the US, Indian & Chinese 20 somethings being 90%. That ought to change things 
up.

On Tuesday, May 12, 2015 at 2:01:40 PM UTC-4, archytas wrote:

To shift anything in the world of poverty we need to take a very cold look at 
what doesn't work.  This is true in general organisational change.  This raises 
the immediate problem of sounding negative and even racist  about whoever is 
poor.  I see the same problems now as 40 years ago with much the same 
non-solutions on offer, usually massively under-funded.  Like Don I see 
throwing money at the problems more of less useless.  The big ideological 
'solutions' whether capitalist or socialist have failed everywhere and neither 
strike me as rational.  These latter seem to function only as means to prevent 
sensible alternatives being discussed.


Francis and I could probably do a 24/7/month doing a filibuster on social 
epistemology, Critical Theory and economics (even this has at least 9 forms) 
between us.  Fear not, I suspect we both know such is practically hopeless 
other than as a torture device.  It all grinds down to most expert opinion 
being the self-interested yakker of particular groups.  'Yakker' probably means 
talking from the nakkers.  I have long wanted us to look at new ways of 
discussion and action.  In academic terms we don't do argument, though this is 
not to say there is much 'cure' about in the academy.  This view is put forward 
by Dan Sperber and others in weak form.  We need something much more simple as 
a framework.


First of all I think existing knowledge cannot be the answer.  I could cobble 
together academic papers on regional economic renewal in a few months - but I 
did plenty of that once to no real effect other than as adjuncts to bids for 
project finance and know even 'successful' projects don't really work.  I can 
claim over £10 million and none of it did much other than support a few 
bullshit jobs for a while and stress me half to death.  It's a lousy and 
corrupt business and I even saw a really good project attract mainstream 
funding and then get worse!


The first problem in community involvement is the nature of the community 
needing help.  We may seem to know little about relevant bits of Baltimore or 
Bolton, but we know enough not to live there.  Even if we get the chance to 
travel to Rwanda we will live in the comfortable ex-pat community in Kigali and 
I spent time as an economic-educational advisor flying in steel tubes between 
good meals and rarely speaking other than English.  I did seem to pierce this 
bubble more often than colleagues,  but really I have been no more part of 
targeted communities than most.  I'd say the biggest problem is our own 
middle-class ideologies - the real ones, not the ones we can learn to speak.  
Few of us are capable of looking at the real data and then working from the 
facts.  The most radical Critical Theorist is quickly found not to live next 
door to drunken, druggie, criminal and loud neighbours or work among them other 
than as a professional living somewhere else.  My nearest was as a cop 
undercover in France.  And I can point to police action so stupid no one would 
take what I could say at face value not far away.


We regularly imagine some kind of invisible economic hand will fix things, but 
I now suspect jobs in the old sense no longer exist to be 'brought back'.  
Worse, in western societies I suspect most jobs are already bullshit jobs we 
would not miss if no one did them.  The next financial bust may also become a 
jobs' bust like the period between the wars - and remember that was corrected 
by war.  The US, in this sense, looks much like the old British Empire with a 
comparable and larger number under arms.


Can anyone tell me what products they can imagine we need if we could get 
growth, that would form the basis of a stable situation of jobs for all?  This 
is tough enough, then one has to think of comparative advantage and what other 
countries could do to have full employment too.  Germany does better than 
others, but translate this economy across the globe and we finally throw a 
match into an atmosphere that will burn.


The real answers on growing green and world peace lie outside current 
economics.  We have just had, in an apparently well-educated country (UK), a 
few months of hopeless election coverage and a weird result against opinion 
polling, that contained no sensible economics, nothing of any interest to me, 
and a majority government on 37% of votes cast and maybe as low as 20% of the 
potential vote when one considers that only 67% of registered voters voted and 
somewhere between 7 and 10 million were not registered.  It's actually worse 
than this.  We have 650 first past the post constituencies and in 550 of them 
one party tends to get in whatever and so only about 100 matter as changeable 
in the election.  In these marginals only around 20% of swing voters matter.  
The winners worked very well in these marginals on a tiny percentage.of our 
population.  


Not much we can debate is "real".  American friends now face even longer 
elections in which the majority will probably not vote and with coverage as 
presstituted as that in the UK.  I mean no 'vote this way' politics in any of 
this.


Even shifting poor people out into the burbs is no good if they don't get 
income.  How is this income going to happen in an economy with nearly 95 
million of working age 'not in the economy'?  We have a very similar problem 
here and those with low skills remain more or less unmarketable.  Think of the 
numbers on tax credits too, employed on subsidy.  54% of even Americans get 
some kind of welfare.  Now wonder if any of this will get much election 
coverage.. We seem to be living in deluded faith that economies can recover in 
the old business cycle sense.


When I lecture these days, I start out with a blank paper equivalent to test 
knowledge of how current economies work.  They are returned blank.  I guess we 
should start in some kind of admitted ignorance.  Someone tell me what jobs 
black unemployed in largely blac ghettoes can do, what training they could do 
and so on.  Then, as dots are supposed to join up in economics, lets have some 
answers on whose jobs such lucky black people might take?  And whether you 
would bother as an entrepreneur to take on the expense of the training, 
possibly low attitude and aptitude population, rather than employ some already 
ready others?


Drongoes wanting to moral high ground me as racist in this last bit should 
leave their heads in the sand.   You won't help. 

On Monday, Md even racisay 11, 2015 at 12:52:40 PM UTC+1, Allan Heretic wrote:

The inner citues are truly  a work of art. In 1965 (I was 18) i was volunteered 
to teach a reading class in the inner city section of L.A. known as Watts. At 
the time my education  was pitiful but compared to the kids in the area it was 
as if i had several doctoral and masters degrees.
It was some class.. they were young kids. Though it was not much we had a total 
 of 2 books both the same. We sat on the floor as we only had a mattress with a 
couple of blankets.  We took turns read or i should say they read.. and helped 
them when they stumbled or didn't know the word.. in a way we had a lot of 
fun.. joined the navy and was in boot camp when the riots hit . (I was very 
lucky to be out of there.) 
Oddly many years later i was approached by a nicely dressed black lady.  She 
bought me coffee and lunch saying i had given her the knowledge that she to 
could read.. she was a beautiful soul.. she said that too gave reading  classes 
and only need two of the same books. 
It really does not take much mostly the desire to help others. 

تجنب. القتل والاغتصاب واستعباد الآخرين
Avoid; murder, rape and enslavement of others

-----Original Message-----
From: Molly <[email protected]>
To: [email protected], [email protected]
Sent: Mon, 11 May 2015 12:49 PM
Subject: Re: Mind's Eye Re: Cops and robbers

Poverty sucks for every culture, Don, and there are so many catch 22 factors 
involved like mental health and addiction. 90% of what goes through a county 
court system involves one if not both of those on some level. Not easy to break 
out of if you are raised in it. In the 90s Chicago was recruiting former 
athletes that were raised in those situations to go back and work with kids 
there to give them hope. They were a great group of guys who did a lot of good. 
The program may still be in place, not sure.

On Sunday, May 10, 2015 at 4:08:05 PM UTC-4, Don Johnson wrote:

Oh yeah, forgot about the harbor. I'm really just talking about the really bad 
neighborhoods anyway. The kind of neighborhoods you'd have to be a junkie or 
mentally disabiled to actually want to live in. IF they can be saved, fine. 
Using Chicago as a template I don't see that happening. Looking at who's in 
charge over there I don't see that happening. They'll get hundreds of millions 
of State, Federal and Charity dollars and they will line their pockets and piss 
the rest away with fresh paint and pinewood shacks. That's the ugly truth. 


My brother used to be Director of Radiation Control for the Navy but now heads 
the EPA Dept. He still goes to all the shipyards, including Japan, fairly 
regularly. I know he was over there in Baltimore last week I wonder if the 
riots affected their routine. Actually he was in Kittery last week don't know 
about Baltimore. 


Your right about the Moms, Molly. I've been impressed by single black moms 
before. Particularly sports star's moms. 6 or 8 kids and she manages to raise 
decent human being on her own and even one or two that end up really excelling. 
Impressive. The dead beat dads I have a healthy dose of contempt for. Some 
cultures suck. 






On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 9:56 AM, Molly <[email protected]> wrote:

We have a long way to go with race relations in this country, Don. Our personal 
feelings are one place to begin because we have complete influence on them. My 
own are by no means pure, and I've had to flush out much cultural programming 
over the years. Since it's mother's day, I will say that in every race, barring 
mental health and addiction issues, mothers want the best for their children 
including opportunities to succeed given the resources available. I have seen 
this and lived it.


I can't say that Baltimore does not want to be helped. When I was there on 
business I loved the city and the harbor, but learned little of the politics 
effecting it now. Because of the navy's presence in the harbor, I imagine that 
this brings several federal security agencies into town to maintain order, as 
is also the case in Detroit. I see Baltimore as a city worth saving. And not 
just because it is in Mary-land.



On Saturday, May 9, 2015 at 7:55:54 PM UTC-4, Don Johnson wrote:

You can't save a town that doesn't want to be saved. If I was king shit of turd 
mountain I'd focus on those individuals and families that want to be saved. I'd 
get them the hell out of Baltimore and set them up in the 'burbs somewhere. 
It's worked before. The rest can burn; I'm fed up. The same goes with the ME. 
And Africa. Anywhere oppressed with Sharia law. Those that want to be saved; 
come here. Assimilate. 


But no. Pardon moi. I think I just went all bigoted and racist. Live and let 
live as they say. I'll just mind my own beeswax. Nothing to see here. 



On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 10:08 AM, archytas <[email protected]> wrote:

We have almost become each other Francis - I used that poem in my doctorate and 
now find myself agreeing everything you say like the worst of disciples!  The 
rough beast is obvious - I was more impressed by the bit about the best lacking 
all conviction and who now had conviction.  The German public were voting for 
parties that would end democracy - Nazis and Communists - how often do we see 
that with Muslim Brotherhoods and the West's now de facto behind-the-scenes 
one-unelected-party state.  I went through a phase of trying to make leadership 
a key factor, but in the end I hate the concept for its lack of 'biology', real 
history and anthropology.  I always think of the septic tank theory of society 
with the really big chunks rising to the top..


Veblen was writing in the same times.  His hope was in technological progress 
matched to human needs and his rough beast the business-financial control 
system - I lump the latter as the 'allocation class'.  Soddy was doing 
economics too, saying we would be better off with a few good adding machines 
than the banksters.  There was much discussion of lytric systems - the word 
doesn't google now.  Today's talk is in Modern Monetary Theory and Positive 
Money and would have relevant application in such as Detroit, the Middle East 
and Bolton.  Jumping somewhat, Molly's local ideas have much merit until one 
thinks of the rough beast bogeyman of economics and their failure almost 
everywhere for 50 years.  Talk of economies coming back is rarely true - though 
I have made such claims in regional economic forums to get hands on what relief 
effort (EU grants mostly) was up for grabs.  Molly as Mary is a spokesperson 
for such an outfit.  I worked with people from Chicago more than 15 years ago 
doing much the same.


Positive Money could bring the rough beast of economic externality to heel in 
the local.  Such would be an attack on the allocation class through government 
by the people.  I pronounce this world revolution feeling too knackerd to put 
up a couple of replacement fence panels!  Old Boxer feels on his way to the 
glue factory.  The scheme sounds rather too like the Nazi effort for comfort, 
rather than Soviet Paradise, in economic-social terms.  The first thing one 
must accept is the current economic system cannot work for peaceful, stable, 
reasonably egalitarian outcomes.  The idea that it can is a myth, held by many, 
especially Americans, that we can fine tune the current system.


There are many voices on positive money, whether they refer to it or not 
directly.  Zerohedge has the libertarians, naked capitalism the MMT and the 
notion is implied in all social epistemology (Critical Theory etc) economic 
geography and the heterdox economists like Steve Keen.  Economists generally 
are a dire block to the discussion and I agree with fellow scientists that 
their departments should be closed.  I favour bringing a much wider form of 
project based money and learning into operation.  There are some small examples.


The big question is how to do anything under the gaze of the Establishment gun. 
 We are, of course, up to our arses in alligators and only now thinking of 
draining the swamp (and hopefully concerned to relocate the alligators).  If we 
were able to find a model that worked in practice, there is still a history in 
which we don't transfer it in order to maintain beggar they neighbour.  
Afghanistan is a good example, though there are many.  Modernisation there has 
repeatedly been kiboshed by the West since the 1920's, even to power systems on 
the Hellmand river raising salt into the agricultural land leaving it fit for 
poppy growing.


My guess is the technical doing isn't that hard. 

On Thursday, May 7, 2015 at 2:13:57 PM UTC+1, frantheman wrote:

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;, 

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst

    Are full of passionate intensity.


Yeats' "Second Coming" is nearly 100 years old now, written in the immediate 
aftermath of WWI and in the middle of a six year convulsive period (1916-1922) 
which led to Irish independence. I've read somewhere that it's one of the most 
quoted poems in the English language - the "rough beast [...] slouching towards 
Bethlehem to be born" seems to ring all kinds of bells. Reading your latest 
post, Neil, brought the first verse immediately to my mind.


Even data has problems; what data do you collect (though this problem is solved 
if you collect everything about everything, which is now the normal digital 
standard, from Google to the NSA), more importantly, what criterea do you use 
to sort it - or, put more contemporarily, what algorithms do you use to mine it?


To quote another fellow Irishman, Oscar Wilde has a character in "Earnest" 
observe; "The truth is rarely pure and never simple." In our fractured 
post-modernist realities, truth has become irrelevant. You have your truth, I 
have mine, the Salafist living across the road from me has another, the 
neo-Nazi down the street yet another. In the social media the extremists from 
both sides shout without listening and any nuanced and more complex analysis 
is, at best, ignored, more frequently instrumentalised by the one or other 
extreme.


The recent British election campaign has shown that neither of the putative 
Prime Ministers wants to say anything real about any serious issue, for fear of 
alienating potential supporters. They've both been trying to learn from the 
doyenne of no-speak, Angela Merkel here in Germany, whose only principle is to 
say as little as possible while, at the same time, mastering the art of 
producing anodyne balm for the insecure, self-righteous petit bourgeois soul of 
the German majority.


The first season of The Wire (in my view one of the best series TV has ever 
produced) will be 13 years old next month. One of the frightening things about 
Baltimore is that the city and US society seem to have learned exactly nothing 
from David Simon's work. 


"Il faut cultiver notre jardin," Voltaire's Candide increasingly seems to me to 
have got it right. As you say, the temptation to retreat to an ivory tower, 
having secured - as far as possible - the necessities of basic living, is 
almost overwhelming. 


And yet ... and yet ...


Maybe all we can do is just not give up, try to cultivate decency and humanity 
and openness and listening to each other in our own lives and in the small 
islands of dignity we can discover in our ordinary lives. And protest in our 
own little ways against the lies, and oversimplifications, and hypocrisy, and 
bigotry. Shout out. And howl ...


   I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving 
hysterical naked,

   dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry 
fix,

   angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the 
starry dynamo in the machinery of night ...


Am Montag, 4. Mai 2015 12:59:15 UTC+2 schrieb Molly:

The big ongoing news here in the states is the rash of clash between 
demonstrators and police. The demonstrations are (supposedly) brought on by the 
ever growing voice against the use of excessive force by police. It is such a 
complex issue, and the demonstrations themselves are not a simple problem.


Since living in Detroit I've heard many storied about how the riots of 1967 
altered the course of history for the city, and changed individual lives 
forever. Most recently, I cried like a baby listening to the eulogy of a fine 
man given my his loving wife, my friend. He was a catholic priest at the time, 
and she a Detroit resident. He left the priesthood afterward and they married a 
couple of years later. There were over 40 priests at the services, three from 
Rome officiated the funeral mass. This guy was on the fast track to Cardinal 
when the riots shook his very core and changed his value system forever.


It gets me thinking about the very nature of the waves of demonstrations. In 
the sixties, of course, they were spurred by civil rights issues, Then the war 
in Vietnam (four dead in Ohio). Now it seems, in the age of transparency, the 
relationship between law enforcement and the criminals they deter (treatment 
during the time of arrest.) Complicated and exacerbated by the new "protest for 
hire" gang, the same well funded group that travels the US heightening racial 
tension (Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson.) Baltimore's riots had a big gang problem 
that hasn't been seen yet, the street gangs hoping on board in an organized way 
to conduct criminal activity in the chaos. Something's gotta give.


Certainly, the police methods employed in some metropolitan cities should be 
eliminated and cleaned up. But the police have to be able to defend themselves 
and do their job (which should be protecting and serving the public.) Where any 
of that goes off the rail is where it gets murky.


When we can't have civil unrest without it being corrupted by monied interests 
looking to make things worse, there is little hope for societal change. This 
may be the reason for the current chaos. Follow the money.

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