TakeYouToTasker

Fully acknowledging that people don't start in the same place, and the truly disadvantaged have the tallest hills to climb, individuals absolutely shoulder the blame for the poor choices they make; and the choices people make are even more important when their is less margin for error. Poverty, like wealth, is intergenerational. If you are poor, and you do not graduate from high school, do not have a job, and/or have children out of wedlock you are far more likely, by multitudes, to normalize that lifestyle for your progeny, and pass down your poverty to them. This is a fact, and regardless of how uncomfortable it may be, it does not change the reality. There is no substitute for an involved two parent family who takes an active involvement in their child's education. None. Worse, you won't even begin to solve the problem until you accept this absolute truth. Black Americans have agency. They are responsible for the choices they make. The change needs to begin in black communities, where black community leaders must advocate for intact black families who embrace upright social responsibility. There has to be a massive cultural change.

Correct. LBJ's policies led to the death of the black family as they incentivized fatherless homes. Families, no longer bound together by shared economic need, began shifting men out of the home by replacing their presence with a government paycheck. The has systemically led to generations of shiftless, purposeless black men; and a legacy of fatherless black male children doomed to repeat the cycle.

You would be wrong. Value systems are learned in the home, and success requires a work ethic and a value system which places a priority on education.

Graduation rates are driven by home life and culture. If you come from a broken home that isn't emotionally or intellectually involved in your education, and a culture that is hostile to education at worst and places no social value on it at best, the odds are not in your favor.

What people may not realize until they begin mull it over, is that a foreign nation participating in a coup attempt is an overt act of war. England assisted in attempting to overthrow our democratically elected federal government. Let that sink in. Then proceed with the understanding that President Trump, and our military leaders know this to be a true fact. Contrast that fact with the early media narrative that the President was unhinged and would plunge us deep into war. The truth of the matter is actually quite different. The President has resisted taking us into war with other global powers, and has instead become a force for global peace.

The issue is that you can't stop policing crime, and crime needs to be policed where it happens. Compounding the issue is, you can't have a situation where people committing crimes aren't being sentenced for racial reasons, especially given the need to work to eliminate/reduce crime in those areas. Those individuals who are economically at risk, and are not themselves criminals, need to have safe communities to raise their kids in, free from gangs and open drug use, in order to have any chance at breaking the cycle of poverty. In order to do this you have to get rid of the criminals, which means higher incarceration rates.

It reeks of monarchy.

It's not worth wasting any bandwidth trying to convince people that your predictions about things that, in the long run, don't really matter and aren't that important, are correct. Tell them your thoughts, and if they disagree and you're right you get to enjoy a round of "I told you so" over beer. If you're wrong, you can use those same beers to wash down your plate of crow. Either way, don't emotionally involve yourself, because again, none of it matters.

A Blue Ray copy of The Rainmaker?

What the hell are you reading that this is your understanding of the subject matter? Just the linked Op-Eds? I have to assume that's the case, because your limited understanding of the dynamics seems to be not much more than a half-digested regurgitation of those articles, which do little more than work to drive an agenda. There are economic studies spanning decades studying this subject, some more complete than others, most of which agree with nothing you've said. There are many scholarly, and in places divergent, opinions about the African economy between the years of 1700 and 1850. The one point they nearly uniformly agree on, is that African nations consciously made the choice to shift their economic imperatives to the purpose of creating slaves because of effective demand and opportunity cost. They chose to create supply in order to satisfy demand. But you don't know any of this, and worse, you refuse to learn it. So why, then, would anyone waste any time discussing complex subjects with someone who refuses to avail themselves of abundant available research, instead succumbing to bull **** agenda driven un-truth for no other reason other than it prevents them from having to challenge the basic assumptions of their own myopic world view? My answer is that they wouldn't. And that you're the problem.

Does he have a frame that will allow him to pack on 25-30 lbs of lean muscle using the Julian Edelman diet?

I'd like to enter into evidence every totalitarian nation in modern history, and their state sponsored media. I's also like to enter into evidence the calamity going on in England, with their media blackouts, specifically engineered to crush opposition to the desires of the state. I'd also like to enter into evidence your own concerns about the WaPo. Imagine if, rather than simply being an operating arm of various agencies within government, they were instead sanctioned as the official mouthpiece of the government, and counter reporting were outlawed. These are real concerns, Joe. Not ghosts. These things actually happen, and they oppress the populations where they arise.

OK, so we have a start. Now, can you think of any reasons why the Founders specifically enumerated this "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom ... of the press" in the Bill of Rights? http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/tocs/amendI_speech.html

You think the reasoning behind why the Founders included explicit prohibitions on ex-post-facto laws in the Constitution is tough to figure out?

Do you think it's better to live under a system of government under which the government can invent crimes and prosecute it's citizens for ex-post-facto? Why do you think the Founders took the efforts to make doing so unConstitutional?

You prosecute based on the law you have. Freedom is a tricky thing, Joe. People are free to do ****ty things that you (and I) don't like which don't break the law. You don't to invent laws out of whole cloth which they broke, however. You are free to change the law going forward, and can prosecute when and if those laws are broken in the future. But you can't go back and invent crimes. There's sound reason for this. Can you conceive of a way in which a system which allowed citizens to be rounded up and purged by the Executive for "crimes" it invented ex-post-facto could be incredibly harmful to the citizens the live under it? The Founders conceived of this, which is why they explicitly made doing what you prescribe unConstitutional in Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3 of the Constitution.

Less of a problem than a federal edict surrounding what press outlets are allowed to say, and far less of a problem than a system which can invent crimes out of thin air to convict it's citizens of retro-actively. You prosecute based on the law you have. Full stop.

Yes. Canada is a commonwealth of England.

No. That's not what I'm on the record as saying. That's a gross mischaracterization. What I'm saying is you prosecute criminal wrongdoing. What you're saying is that you invent crimes, and then retroactively prosecute the people you say have committed them. The former is consistent with the behavior of a government in a free society, the latter is consistent with the behavior of banana republics.

No naivety at all. People guilty of actual crimes should be prosecuted. That's not what you're advocating though.

I'm not going to delve too deep here, because I don't want to drag this any further into the mud, but I'll try to neatly walk the line. No, I do not think Malcolm Jenkins was blowing smoke. What I will suggest is that these outcomes do not exist in a vacuum, and are not driven by institutional racism. The disparities are usually driven by differences in crimes rates in certain areas which then demand more policing, as you tend to move heavily police areas which have high rates of crime. It's a very complex issue, and while I sympathize with Mr. Jenkins, he's giving a very incomplete reporting. There are dozens and dozens of systemic problems which have led us here, which absolutely include abhorrent racial injustices in our past; and things absolutely do need to change. However I'm afraid Mr. Jenkins is tilting as the symptoms rather than the disease, and the cancer of racial division can't be cured that way.

Hawaii and it's volcano are weird. The science surrounding it's formation is pretty cool. Unlike most seismic activity, Hawaii's happens in the middle of a tectonic plate, not around the edges.

Not surprising you come out against freedom of the press, given your penchant for having the Executive place them on a list for purging.

You should petition your local or state government to enact law which would benefit your daughter and family. The federal government should be dealing in things which only have direct shared utility: the military, the border, currency, etc.. The country is too large, and there are too many different cultures to be guided by policy which tax us all to provide exclusive direct benefit for some. State populations are more homogenous, and are likely to share more similarities in values. Hopefully you live in a state which would provide such a benefit to your daughter. If not, you can petition the governments local to you, as I mentioned above. Failing that you can move to an area which holds those same values. You can reach out to private charities and churches. You can reach out to the institutions of higher learning and ask them to provide the service at a reduced cost. Every family and every individual has unique problems. It is not the federal government's job to solve them. The only just role of the federal government is to provide economic stability through law which is conducive to business, to provide and protect legal equity, and to secure peace and prosperity through the protection of our borders against invasion. That's just about it.

He's too dumb to even realize that he's the one making a racist argument. Denying the African nations' massive role in the slave trade directly denies them agency.