400-408 – Anthony Bradley, Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics at The King's College in New York (tkc.edu), research fellow at the Acton Institute (acton.org), and author of Liberating Black Theology: The Bible and the Black Experience in America. You can contact him through his website dranthonybradley.com. Anthony argues that the reason there are more black males than white males in prison on drug charges is because of class, not race.
• Michelle Alexander (Sojourners, 2/8/2011) Cruel and Unequal: Blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate, yet African Americans are 10 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug offenses. The unbalanced effects of the 'war on drugs.' [From the end of the piece – Michelle Alexander, a longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, is an associate professor of law at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. Portions of this article are adapted from her book The New Jim Crow (New Press, 2010).]
Selections from her piece –
// In major urban areas such as Chicago, Obama's hometown, the majority of working-age African-American men have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.
// We, as a nation, are in deep denial about how this came to pass. On the rare occasions when the existence of "them" -- the others, the ghetto dwellers, those locked up and locked out -- is publicly acknowledged, standard excuses are trotted out. We're told black culture, bad schools, poverty, and broken homes are to blame. Almost no one admits: We declared war. We declared a war on the most vulnerable people in our society and then blamed them for the wreckage.
And yet that is precisely what we did. The so-called War on Drugs has driven the quintupling of our prison population in a few short decades. The vast majority of the startling increase in incarceration in America is traceable to the arrest and imprisonment of poor people of color for nonviolent, drug-related offenses.
// Politicians claim that the enemy in this war is a thing -- drugs -- not a group of people. The facts prove otherwise.
Studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell drugs at remarkably similar rates, yet in some states African-American men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate up to 57 times higher than white men. In some states, 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison have been African Americans. The rate of Latino imprisonment has been staggering as well. Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black and Latino.
// This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor, ghetto communities. For those who are tempted to imagine that the goal of the war has been to root out violent offenders or drug kingpins, think again. Federal funding flows to those state and local law enforcement agencies that dramatically boost the sheer volume of drug arrests; it's a numbers game. Agencies don't get rewarded for bringing down drug bosses or arresting violent offenders. They're rewarded in cash for arresting people en masse. Ghetto communities are swept for the low-hanging fruit -- which generally means young people hanging out the street corner, walking to school or the subway, or driving around with friends. They're stopped and searched for any reason or no reason at all.
In 2005, for example, four out of five drug arrests were for possession; only one of five was for sales. And in the 1990s -- the period of the most drastic expansion of the drug war -- nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests were for possession of marijuana, a drug less harmful than alcohol and tobacco, and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities and college campuses as it is in poor communities of color.
// It is impossible to imagine anything like this happening if the enemy in the drug war were white, as economist Glenn Loury observes in his book The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. Can we envision a system that would enforce drug laws almost exclusively against young white men and largely ignore drug crime among young black men? Can we imagine large majorities of young white men being rounded up for minor drug offenses, placed under the control of the criminal justice system, labeled felons, and subjected to a lifetime of discrimination, scorn, and exclusion? No, we cannot. If such a thing occurred, as Loury says, it would make us wonder "what had gone wrong, not with them, but us" -- all of us. The large-scale criminalization of white men would "disturb us at our core. So the question becomes, What disturbs us?" What upsets us? Or, more to the point: Whom do we care about?
413-423 – Anthony Bradley, Calls –
428-437 – Anthony Bradley, Calls – Do you agree with Anthony that the reason there are more black males in prison on drug charges than white males has to do primarily with class and not race?
443-452 – Anthony Bradley, Calls –
458-508 – Jack Dean, Vice President of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility (pensiontsunami.com), talks about pension reform in light of the union protests now going on in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and elsewhere. What must happen before real changes are made in government pension reform? More Wisconsins? The huge problem is that there is no one in the negotiation process to say "the taxpayer can't afford that." Private sector unions share profits with their owners, but the government unions aren't sharing profits, they're taking our future taxes to fund the generous pension benefits given them by the very Democratic politicians they elected.
• Jonah Goldberg (NRO, 2/23/2011) Public Unions Must Go: A death knell for government unions? If only. .
512-523 – Jack Dean, Calls
528-539 – Jack Dean, Calls
544-554 – Jack Dean, Calls
558-608 – Edward Amey, Executive Director of the Concordia K-12 Schools here in LA and the San Fernando Valley (concordiaschoolsla.org/, 888.770.2752), has just united several schools together as Concordia Schools, is currently in the process of forming a Christian school district, and has just begun building a beautiful new campus in the Valley. And, if someone would like a gym or a new school building named after an individual, call Edward :). If you call now to begin the registration process for your child to enroll in Concordia Schools, Edward will waive the $300 registration fee.
612-623 – (2:01) Dominos 1. (Action News 5 WMCTV Memphis, TN Lori Brown reporting @ 2/21/2011.)
(2:15) Dominos 2. (Action News 5 WMCTV Memphis, TN. Nick Kenny reporting @ 2/22/2011.)
• Consumerist (2/22/2011) Domino's Delivery Driver Saves Life Of Regular Customer. Pizza delivery person Susan Guy saved 82-year-old Jean Wilson, by checking in on Jean when she didn't hear from her for three days, when she didn't place her daily morning-call for her large thin-crust pepperoni pizza – and two diet cokes.
• NY Daily News (2/23/2011) Pizza diet may have saved life of woman when Domino's driver noticed she missed daily order.
• WMCTV (2/22/2011) Alert pizza delivery driver saves customer's life.
628-639 – Calls – What's your "I did ministry while on the job" story? When have you gone the "extra mile" for a customer? When have they done that for you?
644-655 – Calls –
• Michael Goodwin (Fox News, 2/23/2011) In Wisconsin, A Sense of Entitlement Imperils Nation.
[?] •• Andrew McCarthy (NRO, 2/22/2011) Who Attacked Lara Logan, and Why? The answer is obvious — but nobody talks about it.
• John Searle (WSJ, 2/22/2011) Watson Doesn't Know It Won on 'Jeopardy!' IBM invented an ingenious program—not a computer that can think. Mr. Searle is professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He lays out his famous Chinese Room illustration.
// Watson did not understand the questions, nor its answers, nor that some of its answers were right and some wrong, nor that it was playing a game, nor that it won—because it doesn't understand anything.
IBM's computer was not and could not have been designed to understand. Rather, it was designed to simulate understanding, to act as if it understood. It is an evasion to say, as some commentators have put it, that computer understanding is different from human understanding. Literally speaking, there is no such thing as computer understanding. There is only simulation. 400-408 – Anthony Bradley, Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics at The King's College in New York (tkc.edu), research fellow at the Acton Institute (acton.org), and author of Liberating Black Theology: The Bible and the Black Experience in America. You can contact him through his website dranthonybradley.com. Anthony argues that the reason there are more black males than white males in prison on drug charges is because of class, not race.
• Michelle Alexander (Sojourners, 2/8/2011) Cruel and Unequal: Blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate, yet African Americans are 10 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug offenses. The unbalanced effects of the 'war on drugs.' [From the end of the piece – Michelle Alexander, a longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, is an associate professor of law at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. Portions of this article are adapted from her book The New Jim Crow (New Press, 2010).]
Selections from her piece –
// In major urban areas such as Chicago, Obama's hometown, the majority of working-age African-American men have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.
// We, as a nation, are in deep denial about how this came to pass. On the rare occasions when the existence of "them" -- the others, the ghetto dwellers, those locked up and locked out -- is publicly acknowledged, standard excuses are trotted out. We're told black culture, bad schools, poverty, and broken homes are to blame. Almost no one admits: We declared war. We declared a war on the most vulnerable people in our society and then blamed them for the wreckage.
And yet that is precisely what we did. The so-called War on Drugs has driven the quintupling of our prison population in a few short decades. The vast majority of the startling increase in incarceration in America is traceable to the arrest and imprisonment of poor people of color for nonviolent, drug-related offenses.
// Politicians claim that the enemy in this war is a thing -- drugs -- not a group of people. The facts prove otherwise.
Studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell drugs at remarkably similar rates, yet in some states African-American men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate up to 57 times higher than white men. In some states, 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison have been African Americans. The rate of Latino imprisonment has been staggering as well. Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black and Latino.
// This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor, ghetto communities. For those who are tempted to imagine that the goal of the war has been to root out violent offenders or drug kingpins, think again. Federal funding flows to those state and local law enforcement agencies that dramatically boost the sheer volume of drug arrests; it's a numbers game. Agencies don't get rewarded for bringing down drug bosses or arresting violent offenders. They're rewarded in cash for arresting people en masse. Ghetto communities are swept for the low-hanging fruit -- which generally means young people hanging out the street corner, walking to school or the subway, or driving around with friends. They're stopped and searched for any reason or no reason at all.
In 2005, for example, four out of five drug arrests were for possession; only one of five was for sales. And in the 1990s -- the period of the most drastic expansion of the drug war -- nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests were for possession of marijuana, a drug less harmful than alcohol and tobacco, and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities and college campuses as it is in poor communities of color.
// It is impossible to imagine anything like this happening if the enemy in the drug war were white, as economist Glenn Loury observes in his book The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. Can we envision a system that would enforce drug laws almost exclusively against young white men and largely ignore drug crime among young black men? Can we imagine large majorities of young white men being rounded up for minor drug offenses, placed under the control of the criminal justice system, labeled felons, and subjected to a lifetime of discrimination, scorn, and exclusion? No, we cannot. If such a thing occurred, as Loury says, it would make us wonder "what had gone wrong, not with them, but us" -- all of us. The large-scale criminalization of white men would "disturb us at our core. So the question becomes, What disturbs us?" What upsets us? Or, more to the point: Whom do we care about?
413-423 – Anthony Bradley, Calls –
428-437 – Anthony Bradley, Calls – Do you agree with Anthony that the reason there are more black males in prison on drug charges than white males has to do primarily with class and not race?
443-452 – Anthony Bradley, Calls –
458-508 – Jack Dean, Vice President of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility (pensiontsunami.com), talks about pension reform in light of the union protests now going on in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and elsewhere. What must happen before real changes are made in government pension reform? More Wisconsins? The huge problem is that there is no one in the negotiation process to say "the taxpayer can't afford that." Private sector unions share profits with their owners, but the government unions aren't sharing profits, they're taking our future taxes to fund the generous pension benefits given them by the very Democratic politicians they elected.
• Jonah Goldberg (NRO, 2/23/2011) Public Unions Must Go: A death knell for government unions? If only. .
512-523 – Jack Dean, Calls
528-539 – Jack Dean, Calls
544-554 – Jack Dean, Calls
558-608 – Edward Amey, Executive Director of the Concordia K-12 Schools here in LA and the San Fernando Valley (concordiaschoolsla.org/, 888.770.2752), has just united several schools together as Concordia Schools, is currently in the process of forming a Christian school district, and has just begun building a beautiful new campus in the Valley. And, if someone would like a gym or a new school building named after an individual, call Edward :). If you call now to begin the registration process for your child to enroll in Concordia Schools, Edward will waive the $300 registration fee.
612-623 – (2:01) Dominos 1. (Action News 5 WMCTV Memphis, TN Lori Brown reporting @ 2/21/2011.)
(2:15) Dominos 2. (Action News 5 WMCTV Memphis, TN. Nick Kenny reporting @ 2/22/2011.)
• Consumerist (2/22/2011) Domino's Delivery Driver Saves Life Of Regular Customer. Pizza delivery person Susan Guy saved 82-year-old Jean Wilson, by checking in on Jean when she didn't hear from her for three days, when she didn't place her daily morning-call for her large thin-crust pepperoni pizza – and two diet cokes.
• NY Daily News (2/23/2011) Pizza diet may have saved life of woman when Domino's driver noticed she missed daily order.
• WMCTV (2/22/2011) Alert pizza delivery driver saves customer's life.
628-639 – Calls – What's your "I did ministry while on the job" story? When have you gone the "extra mile" for a customer? When have they done that for you?
644-655 – Calls –
• Michael Goodwin (Fox News, 2/23/2011) In Wisconsin, A Sense of Entitlement Imperils Nation.
[?] •• Andrew McCarthy (NRO, 2/22/2011) Who Attacked Lara Logan, and Why? The answer is obvious — but nobody talks about it.
• John Searle (WSJ, 2/22/2011) Watson Doesn't Know It Won on 'Jeopardy!' IBM invented an ingenious program—not a computer that can think. Mr. Searle is professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He lays out his famous Chinese Room illustration.
// Watson did not understand the questions, nor its answers, nor that some of its answers were right and some wrong, nor that it was playing a game, nor that it won—because it doesn't understand anything.
IBM's computer was not and could not have been designed to understand. Rather, it was designed to simulate understanding, to act as if it understood. It is an evasion to say, as some commentators have put it, that computer understanding is different from human understanding. Literally speaking, there is no such thing as computer understanding. There is only simulation.
