Cobb

With the alcohol addicted and coke addled numbskull sitting dumbly in the whitehouse sending your thermodynamically doomed land of the free and home of the brave straight down the shitter like a bullet - you'd think you'd have a little higher regard for those with a genuine and demonstrated passion for self-medication, sigh...,

Be that as it may, what is in question is the propriety of making any of these sundry substances illegal in the first place? What is in question is the underlying motivation for doing so? Since even mass-media educated dimwits are vaguely aware that the whole law and order drive has far more to do with governance and mass social acquiesence in the face of a highly dubious governance regime that was first brought scathingly to light in conjunction with the mass consumption of entheogens during the 1960's, it seems to me that you before you went wagging your head in ditto-like thrall, doh!!!! did I say ditto-head as in freudian reference to the bombastic oxycontin fiend whose jones was so fierce he permanently damaged his hearing abusing my bad...,

It just seems to me that you would be enough of a scholar and an objective critic of psychotechnology and governance broadly to know that there is more to this than meets your jingoistic polemicist eye.

Nowhere ever have I seen a rational, econometric justification of the historical U.S. drug prohibition and the amplified contemporary War on Black Men

I fully expect that between you and Sir_Valence, some nederlandish gobbledygook is soon to be produced in defence of whatever claims to moral certainty and legal reality you'll now mechanically foist

But if we're to stay on point with the history of the drug prohibition in America, we are brought inexorably around to the fact, that the entire history of the U.S. drug prohibition is so tightly bound up in racism and xenophobia as to point toward a fundamental and intractable barrier to logical entry. It's an absolute interrupt in the logical structure of American governance policy that undermines any conceivable apologetic you could advance in that cause.

Actually, nothing less than the integrity of the American system is at stake here. There are no acceptable alternatives to legislative correction of this grotesque, racist, and irrational domestic war on black men. Every other possible claim presented by the American system is rendered moot by this highly damaging vestige of jim crow which clearly discloses the seignurial nature of the American social ecology.

The jim crow application of drug laws makes them highly useful and lucrative tools for maintaining the status quo of white supremacy. Not only do they serve as pretexts for the mad dog policing of black communities, they also provide a vital revenue stream for cops, judges, lawyers, and the contractors who build and maintain the prison industrial complex. Even the phone companies have climbed on board, charging usurious rates for long distance calls from prisons, rates prisoners and their families can ill-afford. This operates in concert with the practice of housing black inmates in rural prisons where they provide jobs and incomes for white folks and contribute to the census data used to calculate and apportion Congressional representation. Thus black and Latino felons, who have been excised from voter roles, form a critical segment in the population of these rural voting districts. This practice in some ways mimics the clause established in the U.S. Constitution authorizing the use of the formula that a black slave constituted 3/5 of a human being for the purpose of determining proportional representation in slave-holding states. As you can imagine, many of the "representatives" from these voting districts go to Washington and vote against the interests of black folks in general, and for the continuation of the policies that foster and maintain the ghetto-prison pipeline. Their jobs depend on it.

Now that it's proven it's mettle as an instrumentality of war on black men, there's no way that the legislative corrective will ever be forthcoming. It should be most interesting to hear your tortuous defense of thesis on this burgeoning jim crow atavism.

I toss it back at you. Who, in the history of raising a people, has demonstrated that the way to health and strength is through the ingestion of mind-altering substances?

There are far too many people who would reject the very idea of the strength of the nation and wish to take no part of it. So why should we weep for their penny ante self-destruction? Once again here is your call for the alternative and derivative to be culled into a majority. But it is not one based on strength, but on the deluded premise of detachment from commitment. Simply because one doesn't participate in a failed attempt at leadership does not mean one is in possession of a solution. Take your exiles and freaks.

The interests of 'black folks in general' is not tied to the disposition of criminals amongst them any more than is the case in the history of the planet, and your assertion of that interest, despite what currency it might have with the incorrigable left, does not alter the shape of things.

Blackfolks in general are not criminals of any sort, and this 'war' is hardly effective against any but the criminal element and their perennial defenders. Taking drugs is not courageous rebellion against injustice, it is self-destructive pathology.

I have no doubt that the viability of this democracy is sustained without the contributions of those that amble into felony so idly. But I understand why you would have them vote. Anyone who would defend the morality of addictive personalities would surely have a political platform from hell quite popular with crackhead felons. Thank God we don't have to stand for it.

Once again here is your call for the alternative and derivative to be culled into a majority. But it is not one based on strength, but on the deluded premise of detachment from commitment. Simply because one doesn't participate in a failed attempt at leadership does not mean one is in possession of a solution. Take your exiles and freaks.

What?

as for me and your majority, aside from echoing Mencken's sentiment about you and your normative herd;

"As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

H. L. Mencken

I'd say let you thermodynamically doomed cretins reap the whirlwind you so richly deserve - your collective fates are sealed.

Who, in the history of raising a people, has demonstrated that the way to health and strength is through the ingestion of mind-altering substances?

Why the Assassins did a remarkable job of impressing upon european seignurial governance the deadly earnestness of their ways. Just to name an historically and culturally appropriate example for your consideration. The consumption of entheogens doesn't undermine the health of a people as surely as the violently enforced criminalization of the same in furtherance of indisputably racist policy.

Keep apologizing for fin d'siecle jim crow bro.

Anyone who would defend the morality of addictive personalities would surely have a political platform from hell quite popular with crackhead felons.

You voted for a classically addictive personality that has incompetently embodied all your now desperately frustrated imperial ambitions..., that aside, surely you're not leaving yourself open to discourse with me about the dopamine addiction hypothesis and the fact that what you trumpet as a "strong culture" is nothing other than a normalized set of addictive behaviours rooted in well documented and trivially understood mechanisms of habituation.

Surely you wouldn't dare blunder into THAT realm of discourse with moi?

What I defend is the oppositionality of young men who defy racist drug laws. Crackheads expendable, dealers not.

ah yessss....., deafening silence is the realm of misguided conservative apologia. Mr. Virtue crapped out then and now again because he's got ISSUES!!!!

ventromedial PFC damage can still reason about social problems, provided the premises are cast verbally, but fail in natural settings. The IOWA GAMBLING TASK, which was preceded by similar gambling tasks57, was put forward as an experimental surrogate for decision-making in real life. Bechara and colleagues58 showed that normal individuals develop anticipatory galvanic skin responses whenever they contemplate a risky choice, and begin to choose advantageously before they are consciously aware of the best strategy. Patients with ventromedial PFC damage do not develop anticipatory autonomic responses and behave as if they are insensitive to future consequences, positive or negative, being primarily guided by immediate prospects that ultimately lead to a net financial loss.

hmm..., sounds familiar, don't it? now we see that not only is Bill-bo incapable of owning up to his own issues, he's being victimized by the media. What a phuggin loser.

Cobb, you should go and roust all your clever and articulate little neo-con absolutist cronies so that I can administer a one-time mass spanking up in here. Just for you brah, it would be glorious. You and the entire kool-aid sipping crew have been tricked into a moral blind alley by your exemplars. I'm not about to let you back out of it without exacting a righteous pound or two of flesh. But instead of you getting skinned alone and taking yet another big one for the team, you could all go out in blaze of hand-holding rhetorical glory and that way none of your would have to feel particularly bad about it.

Who, in the history of raising a people, has demonstrated that the way to health and strength is through the ingestion of mind-altering substances?

Do the mind-altering drugs that fight depression or hyper-activity count?

Sorry. I'm tired.

There's nothing so incriminating as your rhetorical overkill and misdirection, Nulan. I think I'll just let it stand as testament to the mountains of drivel you and your'n are capable of manifesting in your attempts to draw in as many vectors as possible into argument, none of which counter the thrust of my original point, which is that there is no empowerment or uplift wrapped up in the fate of convicts. Further the destiny of a detestable minority within a minority adds only the slimmest usefulness in moral debate. That said, I'll take my gambling addict over your crack addict in a heartbeat. But both are disposable.

You find an ex-con with truth to tell and I'll subject it to a fair hearing, but as for the legions... you are welcome to all the comfort that they give your revolutionary fantasies. I have little use for such politics except as a barometer of Leftist desparation.

Whatever the faults of GWBush, he will be gone and just another ghost whose spirit you'll distort 15 years hence for the sake of whom, Stanley Williams perhaps? Maybe John Africa? How about Mumia Abu Jamal, or any number of the latter day Muhammads rousting up more inductees into the Coalition of the Damned. I don't know how it is you keep your hierarchies of heroes straight with such rabble in the mix.

Be that as it may I only ask that you try not to presume to speak for the interests of blackfolks when indulging your anti-establishment paranoia. It gives me the creeps to see college-educated people do that.

none of which counter the thrust of my original point, which is that there is no empowerment or uplift wrapped up in the fate of convicts. Further the destiny of a detestable minority within a minority adds only the slimmest usefulness in moral debate. That said, I'll take my gambling addict over your crack addict in a heartbeat.

Like your boy sirc_valence, you toss heaping helpings of straw into the mix. I have never said a word about crackheads. What I've argued about from the outset is the racist drug prohibition in all its sundry manifestations. If I were to mention crackheads, it would be in the context of a legalized, medicalized approach in which the cost of the addicting drug would be so low, without subsidization, that feeding the most monstrous drug habit would be trivial.

The criminalizing scorched earth law enforcement policy in the hood has been implemented to hurt black folks and to subsidize useless eaters in law enforcement who hurt black folks, period.

It is a jim crow pseudo-economy which will not be replicated in the rural precincts where methamphetamine is running rampant now. Predictable, paradoxical and ironic all at once how the meth problem is being addressed as a medical threat rather than the demonized criminal threat that crack was made out to be. Maybe you've spent too much prejudicial time around urban law enforcement to have an objective view of its political realities.

In my most direct statement of difference with you Cobb, it is your odious self-exemption from the conflation of black and criminal that undermines the integrity of your entire political world view. You seem pathologically unable to place yourself in the shoes of the many of us who have been serially criminalized while black.

THAT It is the central weakness in all your hyper-assimilationist fantasies. Your delusory zeal in exempting yourself from the demonizing or criminalizing mentality which underscores the War on Drugs, or the War on Terror has tainted your politics with a shrill hypocrisy that always and everywhere shines through. You can't even step up to condemn the obvious instance in which your venerated gambling addict gives voice to this foundation stone of conservative ideology.

You really ought to read Leonard Pitts Friday column in the Herald;

So how do I explain that to my son? Should I tell him to content himself with the fact that to some people, all black men look alike, all look like criminals?....The conflation of black and crime may be easy for William Bennett, but it never gets any easier for me.

y youngest son was arrested last year.

Police came to my house looking for an armed robbery suspect, five-feet eight-inches tall with long hair. They took my son, six-foot-three with short braids. They made my daughter, 14, fresh from the shower and dressed for bed, lie face down in wet grass and handcuffed her. They took my grandson, 8, from the bed where he slept and made him sit on the sidewalk beside her.

My son, should it need saying, hadn't done a damn thing. In fact, I was talking to him long distance -- I was in New Orleans -- at the time of the alleged crime. Still, he spent almost two weeks in jail. The prosecutor asked for a high bail, citing the danger my son supposedly posed.

NO CHARGES FILED

A few weeks later, the prosecutor declined to press charges, finally admitting there was no evidence. The alleged perpetrator of the alleged crime, a young man who was staying with us, did go on trial. There was no robbery, he said. The alleged victim had picked a fight with him, lost and concocted a tale. A surveillance video backed him up. The jury returned an acquittal in a matter of hours.

But the damage was done. The police took a picture of my son the night he was arrested. He is on his knees, hands cuffed behind him, eyes fathomless and dead. I cannot see that picture without feeling a part of me die.

So I take personally what William Bennett said. For those who missed it, Bennett, former education secretary and self-appointed arbiter of all things moral, said last week on his radio program that if you wanted to reduce crime, ``you could . . . abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.''

COMMENT SPEAKS VOLUMES

The comment has been widely denounced. Bennett says critics are quoting him out of context, leaving out his denunciation of the idea and the fact he was criticizing a thesis that holds that making abortion readily available to low-income women in the '70s led the U.S. crime rate to drop in the '90s.

Fine. I get all that. But see, my anger doesn't stem from any mistaken belief that Bennett wants to practice eugenics on black mothers. No, what bothers me is his easy, almost causal conflation of race and crime. Not class and crime, not culture and crime, but race and crime. As if black, solely and of itself, equals felony.

It's a conflation that comes too readily to too many. The results of which can be read in studies such as the one the Justice Department co-sponsored in 2000 that found black offenders receive substantially harsher treatment at every step along the way than white ones with similar records.

They can also be read in that picture of my son, eyes lifeless and dull with the realization of How Things Are.

ANY BLACK WILL DO

I once asked a black police officer who was uninvolved in the case how his colleagues could have arrested a six-foot-three man while searching for a five-foot-eight suspect. They were looking for a black man, he said. Any black man would do.

So how do I explain that to my son? Should I tell him to content himself with the fact that to some people, all black men look alike, all look like criminals?

Actually I don't have to explain it at all. A few months back, my son was stopped by police and cited for driving with an obstructed windshield. The ''obstruction'' was one of those air fresheners shaped like a Christmas tree.

So my son gets it now. Treatment he once found surprising he now recognizes as the price he pays for being. He understands what the world expects of him.

I've watched that awful knowledge take root in three sons now. In a few years, I will watch it take root in my grandson, who is in the fifth grade.

The conflation of black and crime may be easy for William Bennett, but it never gets any easier for me

The fact that bad things happen does not mean that an entire society is illegitimate or evil or whatever cnulan thinks. All over the world people are doing horrible things to each other, far worse than are being done in the US. If cnulan's logic was extended, black people would hate all muslims. Of course we don't. Should a white person who is attacked by a black person hate all black people? That is not a justifiable way of thinking and neither is cnulan's.

Also, I agree with Cobb that people have to be responsible for what they do. Yes, even in the face of injustice and bigotry. We are responsible for our own actions

I guess all those white meth heads I keep locking up are victims of the racist war on drugs as well

you ever travelled to the towns the meth heads come from?

I routinely transit small Missouri, Illinois, and Kansas towns in which Meth has gone wild. Having grown up in Kansas, I could see this coming years, and years ago. What I don't see is the hysterical demonization in the media that accompanied the crack phase of the racist urban War on Drugs.

This entire society has fatally compromised its integrity and legitimacy at all levels with the racist War on Drugs. Exhibit One in the process of painful reality correction. Common sense and the black experience have always shown that blacks are by no means a criminal race, however, we are a people embedded in a social ecology which has gone to enormous lengths to criminalize and marginalize us for reasons and motives too shameful for the society to admit.

Even now, Anita and Golasso and any others feeling empowered by Cobb's acquiescence to jim crow law enforcement - want to talk about "moral choices" instead of the root causes of the predicament. How you can lie to yourselves and digest such immense hypocrisy is truly astonishing to me.

When I first returned to Wichita from the east coast, I discovered that the neighborhood I grew up in had a serious gang problem. Since I hold libertarian views regarding the stupidity, malfeasance, and impracticality of the drug prohibition, I wasn't concerned about the question of illegality. Instead, I was concerned about the cultural dynamic enlarging the gap between traditional residents of my hood and the new jack bangers and professional dope slangers.

I was concerned about the ladies in my neighborhood and how they were alientated from and threatened by the Crips and the BGD. My answer to the problem and to my concerns was jarringly simple. I made a point of personally getting to know all the relevant crimey leadership in my neighborhood. In turn, I introduced these young men to the older folks in my neighborhood from whom they were previously alienated.

Upshot, criminal activity continued, but never overran the neighborhood. Diplomacy and familiarity saw to it that mutual and reciprocal consideration was exhibited on both sides. What I discovered to my amazement is that many highly charismatic, naturally gifted and talented young men had fallen into the business of gangbanging and professional dopeslanging, particularly in the leadership ranks.

Now, knowing first hand how hard it was for a black man to get a decent job in Wichita, despite having the Institute credentials and Fortune 100 work experiences, I was hardly one to fault or blame any of the several young criminal division chiefs I met over the course of that first year back in my hood for their pursuit of economic opportunity by illegal means.

Because it was easy to achieve relative detente in my neighborhood through interpersonal communion, the primary takeaway lesson I learned in the late 80's and early 90's is embodied in part here. It was during this period of time that I learned how to take the future into my own hands and ignore influences that I knew to be fundamentally corrupt.

Of course it helped that I had first hand access and exposure to law enforcement and saw how the situation was being presented from that perspective. I had never seen anything as blatantly racist as some of the police academy textbooks I got to examine during this time. My childhood best friend was a sheriff's narcotics detective and showed me quite a lot from the other side. Meanwhile, I knew and daily interacted with federal law enforcement who were in party central mode over the asset forfeiture windfalls they were reaping from drug law enforcement.

I will hereby never accept any credibility in your anti- 'just-so' arguments. Personal experience counts.

Be that as it may, I understand that false arrest is a problem. That's class two racism and I'll be the first to recognize. The question is whether or not such injustices should dominate one's political orientation to the state when mainstreaming and integration is so clearly the solution.

Let me put it to you simply and straight. The ghetto is the defacto definition of 'harms way' when it comes to empowerment on any basis greater than survival. If you want to be upwardly mobile, don't go there. If the ghetto were not exceptional in this regard, the experience of all Americans would be similar to those of us busted DWB. But it's not, and if you are willing to believe it is a massive racist conspiracy, then it's your privilege. But the simple fact is, which should be appreciated by anyone who has lived in more than one neighborhood in their life, that cops are different and behave differently in ghettos than they do in 'hoods, 'burbs and hills. When you live in a burglar bar neighborhood, you takes your chances. You pay cheap rent, you increase your risk. Is there anybody in America who doesn't get this?

No.

So there's no excuse for those who want to work against the obvious option of voting with your feet. You who stay behind to reform what's broke are on a Sisyphean treadmill, which you may consider ennobling, but I say is ultimately foolish. The solution to the reform of "Dienigga, Alabama" is to leave. And history shows that generation after generation, African American families have made exactly that choice: migration from fields of hopelessness to moutaintops of opportunity. What completely confounds me is the naive faith that socialistic and communistic appeals to unity via the enforced caste of radical black identity is going to transform a dysfunctional ghetto into anything other than a dysfunctional ghetto with kinte cloth.

I understand and recognize the value of mitigation. There are still old ladies who need to be walked across the street, even in the 5th Ward of Houston where half the population's mind is playing tricks on them. So I'm all for neighborhood watches and cooperation with cops, paramedics, firemen, activists, poets, priests and politicians and all manner of bourgie institutions that separate us from the desparate of Darfur. But understand that the politics of charity, are and must remain marginal to the progress of the bulk of African America. There is no alternative path - our destiny is bound to the destiny of the nation.

I'm not going to suggest every Huey Newton wannabe be rounded up and countermanded. People need the freedom to learn things the hard way. I'll watch for your eventual burnout. You'll be welcome to my bright sparkling kitchen. Unfortunately, you'll be in line behind Poles, Czechs, Russians and Iraqis.

The question is whether or not such injustices should dominate one's political orientation to the state when mainstreaming and integration is so clearly the solution.

Your proposed solution erroneously presupposes that WE are the source of the problem. And THAT is precisely the error that corrupts much else that follows.

if you are willing to believe it is a massive racist conspiracy, then it's your privilege. But the simple fact is, which should be appreciated by anyone who has lived in more than one neighborhood in their life, that cops are different and behave differently in ghettos than they do in 'hoods, 'burbs and hills.

uh, yeah, the presumption in my now 21 DWB's in the burbs had to do with whether or not I belonged there. Leaving aside for the moment your indefensible apologia for enforcement's unacceptable serving with no regard rather than protecting and serving mentality in the hood - kind of a tacit admission on your part that there is an institutional conspiracy afoot - whether architected by ill-telligent design or emergent from culturally selected forces, allowing the situation to go unaddressed seems the height of political cowardice to me.

While I recognize that the drug prohibition is a political 3rd rail, my expectation of and continuing support for black leadership in the republican zone has everything to do with taking on uncomfortable issues. Go along to get along motives appear suspect, and are of course morally repugant.

What completely confounds me is the naive faith that socialistic and communistic appeals to unity via the enforced caste of radical black identity is going to transform a dysfunctional ghetto into anything other than a dysfunctional ghetto with kinte cloth.

You will please tell me where the kinte cloth or socialism is lodged in the Mayhem Academy initiative
where we do cultural production via the web as a carrot to lure the kids down the open source rabbit hole? We just turned on the php-shop on sunday and intend to provide not only the ways and means for expression, but for commercialization, as well. To date, the boys involved range from 8 to 18 and are all highly enthused about our Wu-Tang approach to the creation and commercialization of structured narratives.

In a week or so, we'll be turning on Frontline Media Networks with the generic purpose of providing the same ways and means to kids through the learning center to do the same things but without the comics/sci-fi anchor. Please tell me how that's socialism with kinte cloth?

There is no alternative path - our destiny is bound to the destiny of the nation.

The destiny of this nation is bound to whether it can evolve past its institutionalized endogamous racist psychopathologies toward us. Sorry, but American ethology is discernably primitive and everybody in the world can now plainly see that that is true. This is not the time to hitch your wagon to the descending octave of governance and control in this society.

I'll stick with my orthodox Work among the so-called Coalition of the Damned in complete certainty of the rightness of its aims.

Your proposed solution erroneously presupposes that WE are the source of the problem. And THAT is precisely the error that corrupts much else that follows.

YOU are, if YOU are basing your political philosophy in the 'nobility' of victimhood. If you are willing to turn your victimhood into a neighborhood then more power to you, but it can't stand justfied on the basis of the lie that everyone else is out to get you. The success you make in your flavor doesn't prove that every other flavor is wrong, and if that incremental burden is something you are willing to bear, clearly in spite, then that's your path. Mayhem doesn't have to be a public corporation.

Bennett bears no special burden of proof.

The colorline has been narrowed from a wall to a tree. In the 21C The law is on the side of the anti-racist. If you choose to bang your head against the tree and complain about the fact that it is part of the American ecosystem then you're missing the forest. You may satisfy yourself to get out the microscope and examine the countless enignmas and psychopathologies of that tree, those who breathe its oxygen and those who are tripped up by its deep roots. That's your stumbling block. I'm already around it. But hey, here's another tree. I walk around that one to. Over to the right is the highway. I hope you get out of the woods.

If you are willing to turn your victimhood into a neighborhood then more power to you, but it can't stand justfied on the basis of the lie that everyone else is out to get you.

Please explain how you leap from an indisputably leastwise you haven't attempted to dispute it yet War on Drugs to the projective notion that I believe everyone is out to get me? My statement is that in a country which tolerates an obviously immoral, gerrymandered, and racist law enforcement regime - all other governance intentionality is corrupted and rendered suspect.

Mayhem doesn't have to be a public corporation.

Not everything is reducible to pimping and exploitation. Haven't you read Norman Kelly's essay on the historic theft of black cultural production?

In the 21C The law is on the side of the anti-racist.

Nonsense. The Drug Prohibition and disparate and racially focused enforcement of the same puts the lie to this claim - and you know it

As Ourstorian said so eloquently at P6 in response to my characterization;

"There are no acceptable alternatives to legislative correction of this grotesque, racist, and irrational domestic war on black men. every other possible claim presented by the American system is rendered moot by this highly damaging vestige of jim crow which clearly discloses the seignurial nature of the American social ecology."

The jim crow application of drug laws makes them highly useful and lucrative tools for maintaining the status quo of white supremacy. Not only do they serve as pretexts for the mad dog policing of black communities, they also provide a vital revenue stream for cops, judges, lawyers, and the contractors who build and maintain the prison industrial complex. Even the phone companies have climbed on board, charging usurious rates for long distance calls from prisons, rates prisoners and their families can ill-afford. This operates in concert with the practice of housing black inmates in rural prisons where they provide jobs and incomes for white folks and contribute to the census data used to calculate and apportion Congressional representation. Thus black and Latino felons, who have been excised from voter roles, form a critical segment in the population of these rural voting districts. This practice in some ways mimics the clause established in the U.S. Constitution authorizing the use of the formula that a black slave constituted 3/5 of a human being for the purpose of determining proportional representation in slave-holding states. As you can imagine, many of the "representatives" from these voting districts go to Washington and vote against the interests of black folks in general, and for the continuation of the policies that foster and maintain the ghetto-prison pipeline. Their jobs depend on it.

There simply are no suitable apologetics for this racially engineered and operationalized situation.

The 'prison industrial complex' is a pimple on the face of capitalism and you know it. The number of blacks that are a part of that mess, are a tiny minority of blackfolks. If you insist on overinflating the significance of this matter, then get used to being ignored.

Excuse me while I find statistics on potato chip consumption.

English penal colonies (USA, Australia) + supported by the inappropriate appropriation of land and labor = "counter the thrust of my original point, which is that there is no empowerment or uplift wrapped up in the fate of convicts."

Good night everyone...cobb is done.

intellectual pimp, "cobb magic swab" - buffing and glossing the idiosyncracies of white supremacy with regurgitated negro apologetics of centuries gone by...

i must say cobb that i appreciate your stuff because when you roll out the apologetics you keep it project 21 - you keep it conservative in a way that belies cultural grounding - and you keep it grounded in logical fallacy. what i'm really looking for is a blogger of a similar ideological orientation that uses tight logic that comports with the history and lived experience of black folk.

like here, i had to depart from you on the drug argument because you ignored the history of criminalization. that seems an odd thing to do. that seems a dishonest thing to do. i could lament this as situational rigor. in any case, i shan't ascribe any bad intentions to you. i think i really appreciate the reflections on growing up in the 70s and life in SoCal back in the day. that stuff is tremendously illuminating because it resonates experientially with my time in harlem. keep it up.