A friend recently attended a memorial for Martin Luther King. The talented musician-actor Phil Darius Wallace performed. I did not see the performance but I did find his reading of Frederick Douglass' famous 1852 July 4th speech. And I looked at a few other presentations of that speech. Often they are paired with comments from today's activists who excoriate the U.S. as a racist nation founded by racists who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to preserve white supremacy. To make this point they have to bowdlerize Douglass' speech and insult his intelligence.  In other words these modern day abolitionists have to diss a man who risked his life for the cause and who was far more intelligent and eloquent than they.

Here is what they almost always leave out of the Douglass speech [emphasis added]: 

Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it.

​What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of land was made? Now, there are certain rules of interpretation, for the proper understanding of all legal instruments. These rules are well established. They are plain, common-sense rules, such as you and I, and all of us, can understand and apply, without having passed years in the study of law. . . . 
Now, take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.

Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic, are distinctly heard on the other. The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet.

The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen, in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God.” 

And that, remember, was written in 1852 before Emancipation. It stands today as an powerful reply to the often shallow and false history of the NY Times' Nikole Hannah-Jones and her "1619 Project".

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“Stop” is a word that has never stopped the enhancement of human powers. Latest example—creating humans whose genes are edited in the embryo stage. Dr. He Jiankui did it last year in China and intends to do more. Now he is joined by Dr. Denis Rebrikov of Russia.
Excerpts from this morning’s news:
Russian geneticist Denis Rebrikov last week went public with his plans to become the second researcher to cross this red line. “We can’t stop progress with words on paper,” Rebrikov told ScienceInsider yesterday, when asked about international efforts to ban such research.
“But in the near future, I think we can say to these parents, “Would you like to make some changes in the genome of your babies to reduce their risk of cancer?” And not only cancer, but different diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and so on.
https://www.sciencemag.org/…/russian-geneticist-answers-cha…
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Kaufman’s First Law of Human Powers: No enhancement of human powers can be successfully prohibited.
I invite readers to find any contradiction in the past 200,000 years of human history.

As they say (sort of) in Monopoly games, “Take a ride on Metro and get paid $10”. 
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The average rider on the Washington, DC Metro is both in the top 15% for income and highly subsidized by a losing transportation business. (Only 13% of rail riders are low income.)

https://ggwash.org/view/38631/see-the-average-income-of-metrorail-riders-by-line-and-station

D.C. Metro’s budget of $3.1 billion a year services about 219 million rides. Those largely high income riders receive about $10 a ride in government subsidies. State and local governments pay some $1.8 billion, federal tax payers pay about $.5 billion.

The subsidies per ride and rider will only climb since ridership is decreasing and maintenance and operating costs are increasing. Add to that a $2.8 billion shortfall in Metro’s pension plan. Unlike private pension plans that by law must be funded every year, government and union plans can skip payments and rely on their investments, usually in the stock market.

Metro is now asking to be taken over by the federal government. That would relieve tax payers in DC, Virginia and Maryland of taking on the debt, but it would mean that taxpayers across the country would be subsidizing affluent DC riders while simultaneously trying to fund their own pension plans.

This is mass transit at its worst. Mass transit is often funded with a blind eye to costs because of the myth that it will decrease traffic congestion and benefit everyone. (That happens only in very very densely populated areas.) In most areas mass transit attracts more development. A small percentage of new residents use mass transit, the rest drive. Anyone notice a decrease in DC traffic congestion since 1976 when Metro started?
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Metro and other systems like it give mass transit a bad name. Do unseen benefits make up for subsidizing rich riders? Numbers please.

​We saw it coming—the polarization that has led bitter and bloody divisions. Well, a few saw it coming, many should have, and others just ignored it. An article in the current Smithsonian on public intellectuals made me curious about a 1968 debate between Canadian media analyst Marshall McLuhan and macho novelist Norman Mailer.

Mailer says, “Look Marshall, we’re both agreed that man is accelerating at an extraordinary rate into a super-technological world, if you will. And that the modes and methods by which men instruct themselves and are instructed are shifting in extraordinary . . . [interrupted]

Later McLuhan replies, “An electronic world retribalizes man, yes.” And even later McLuhan, leaving Mailer out of his depth, explains how the retribalization has begun and will proceed. “When you give people too much information, they resort to pattern recognition.”

What patterns stand out for us a half century later? The patterns that reinforce the goodness of our ideas and of the groups that want these ideas to govern the world. And we see patterns that confirm the existence of our enemies – people who want to run the world differently. In a world where so much is changing, and change is accelerating, these patterns are reassuring. At best they create cooperative communities energized for good causes. They also divide us into warring tribes.

Accelerating and radical change is very unsettling to anyone who wants to settle down with a comfortable perspective, a loyal family, a stable set of friends, a nurturing tribe, and a defensible faith. The threat of losing these cherished human comforts means that each group or tribe defends or asserts its identity with increasing ferocity. Discipline and peer pressure within a group become more and more important and dissent becomes more dangerous. The vilification and dehumanizing of outsiders also intensifies. The proof is everywhere.

It’s here in America and in the violence of the Middle East. At home Liberals demonize conservatives and Trump supporters as greedy, coldhearted, selfish, ignorant, and bigoted. Conservatives and Trump supporters demonize liberals as elitists, naïve ideologues, extortionists, big spenders of other people’s money, hypocrites, and bigots.
In the Middle East and Afghanistan enforced tribalism and demonizing outsiders has displaced millions as it fuels suicide bombers, slavery, and mass murder.

Both the good and the bad consequences of technology, of course, come in degrees. European and American divisions are not even close to civil war though people have been bloodied and bruised, and a few have been murdered.

Across the Atlantic the European Union is even more divided and close to falling apart after its first secession. America’s Brexit was the election of Donald Trump, though less of a Brexit than a Break-It.
​
The mainstream media gets a large share of the blame for the bitterness of our divisions. Politicized college faculties and curricula also bear a big burden. Fortunately, the Internet that serves the very social media and independent web sites that fuel divisive tribalism is also overflowing with new ideas, new patterns. We will get what we look for.

​How serious are you about:
1. Feeding the world
2. Cruelty to animals
3. The destruction of the natural environment
4. Big reductions in green house gases

I predict a lot of people are not serious enough to consider answers that could succeed beyond their fondest dreams. Answers that would make livestock slaughter unnecessary, save hundreds of millions of acres of land, and make food shortages a thing of the past.

The answers require genetically modified meat, tissue culture, and capitalism. Below are a few excerpts from a recent summary of what we can do, how, and when.
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By Tara Duggan and Jonathan Kauffman
May 3, 2017 Updated: May 3, 2017 12:00pm
The current goal of Finless Foods: to produce a simulacrum of bluefin tuna fillet to help relieve the pressure on the prized, but severely overfished, species.

Animals have little to do with the future of meat, milk and eggs, argue Selden and Wyrwas — and similar new companies and their funders. Instead, that future belongs to scientists who can hack yeast cells to produce egg whites, torque plant proteins into musclelike fibers and grow slaughter-free “duck” or “chicken” in factories.

. . . The money flowing toward alternatives to animal agriculture in the past four years has been notable: Impossible Foods, the Redwood City company that makes plant-based burgers, has raised north of $180 million from funders that include Bill Gates. Modern Meadow, a New York firm that cultures leather cells, has taken in $53 million.

Those are just the marquee companies. Operating on funding in the six-figure and low seven-figure range are newer enterprises like New Wave Foods (high-tech plant-based shrimp), the aforementioned Finless Foods (cultured seafood) and several “meat breweries,” including Clara Foods and Geltor, which ferment yeast cells to express egg whites and collagen, respectively. Most are based in the Bay Area; in fact, several, including Geltor and New Wave Foods, share office and lab space in San Leandro.

. . . The very company that lured Memphis Meats to San Francisco, SOS Ventures, has been a major factor in turning the Bay Area into the hub for animal-free animal products. Sean O’Sullivan’s $150 million fund operates six accelerators around the world. One of them is IndieBio, and 25 percent of IndieBio’s participating companies, says chief science officer Ron Shigeta, are working on food.

Among the technocrat billionaire set, Bill Gates isn’t the only one to invest money in high-tech meat alternatives. Google co-founder Sergey Brin helped fund the Dutch research that produced the first lab-grown hamburger in 2013. Obvious Ventures, backed by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, bought into Beyond Meat, a Southern California plant-based meat company. Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt told a group of investors at the Milken Institute, a Santa Monica think tank, last year that replacing livestock with plant-based meat is No. 1 on a list of technologies he predicts will change the world.

The payoff that they are chasing is almost unfathomably huge. “Almost everybody eats meat,” says Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Good Food Institute, an advocacy group working to end industrial animal agriculture. “It’s a $200 billion market in the United States alone.”

At the moment, plant-based meat represents one quarter of 1 percent of that. Even if it reached parity with plant-based dairy (soy and nut milks), sales would be $20 billion a year — in the United States alone.

. . . raising animals for meat and dairy accounts for 14.5 percent of all human-produced greenhouse gas emissions, according to a recent U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization report on livestock and climate change.

Perfect Day Foods, which is developing what seems like an oxymoron — animal-free milk based on yeast-fermented cow milk proteins — says it has the potential to use up to 65 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and 84 percent less energy, 98 percent less water and 91 percent less land than traditional dairy production, according to an analysis by the University of the West of England.

Memphis Meats claims that its cultured meat eliminates the risk of e. coli contamination on the slaughter floor, as well as widespread antibiotic use on farms, which has been shown to contribute to antibiotic resistance.

The future that many of the Bay Area’s faux meat producers envision — meat grown in a lab, gelatin made in a tank from genetically engineered yeast — is exactly the opposite of the pastoral idyll the sustainable food movement has been pushing for four decades: Small family farms where chickens and pigs cavort in the sun until the moment they are given a merciful death. Wild fish allowed to prowl the oceans until they’re snatched out of the water.

That vision, says the Good Food Institute’s Friedrich, may be a beautiful one, but it’s too limited, at far less than 1 percent of total meat sales. The vast majority of industrial animal agriculture involves confinement and giant manure lakes and stockyards that can be smelled for miles.

With factory farming, says investor Coller, “we’ve been treating animals as objects.” To those in the meat-alternative market, cows and pigs will soon become an outdated technology.
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If these answers repulse you and you don't want to see these new products, then seriously consider if you are a change agent or a dreamer.

​Could it be that voters cared little about Trump's self-contradictions because the media has habituated them to such stuff?

CNN.com October 19
“Election officials and cyber experts say it’s virtually impossible for Moscow or some other outside group to influence the election outcome.”

New York Times, October 18, 2016
“Top Republicans must reject the ridiculous notion that a national election can be ‘rigged.’ ”

New York Times, Dec. 11, 2016
“Trump should be leading the call for a thorough investigation, since it would be the only way to remove this darkening cloud from his presidency. Failing to resolve the questions about Russia would feed suspicion among millions of Americans that a dominant theme of his candidacy turned out to be true: The election was indeed rigged.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter questioning Politico’s Julia Ioffe, Dec. 11, 2016
“Julia, we’re talking about a candidate who has lost in a historic way in terms of the popular vote but clearly won in the Electoral College. Is this something of a national emergency? And are journalists afraid to say so because they’re going to sound partisan?” 
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Perhaps this does prove Clinton was the better candidate since while she was sure to win, elections could not be rigged, but as soon as she lost, elections could be rigged.

f FaceBook pages could scream, I’d be deaf. When I look at what friends have posted and reposted every day, most of what I see are screaming, undocumented, divisive, demonizing, dehumanizing, ignorant, gloomy and divisive memes. Most of them play free with the facts or are fact free.I have good friends and family who are liberals, conservatives and almost every one of them is posting these screaming memes. I can’t think of any one of these people as evil or nasty or shallow or mean spirited in person. Yet they post these really nasty and shallow memes. It’s like watching boils erupt on healthy skin. It’s like watching a whole community suddenly having a bad drug trip and attacking each other.
As one friend who posts lots of memes recently said, they are not supposed to be dialogue and will change no one’s mind. So what are they for? Perhaps they are self-cleansing cries of anger and pain? If so, why are they almost always direct or implied attacks on someone else?
I’ve mediated hundreds of conflicts in the courts and in private, and almost all of them start this way—with one or both sides demonizing or dehumanizing or vilifying the other. The challenge for any mediator is to get both sides to listen TO each other rather than shouting AT each other.
Would that someone could mediate this national discussion, these FaceBook conflicts. Would that they could get good people to come out from behind their memes and talk to each other. Maybe it would be sufficient to ask if the memes people post don’t say more about the person posting than about the subject of the meme. Are people really as nasty and shallow as the stuff they post?

The Great Pension Fund Hoax
When Bernie Madoff cheated thousands of investors out of their life’s savings, he went to jail. Michael Milken went to jail for ten years and paid a $600 million fine for failing to file necessary securities reports about his high yield bond trading. So, what should happen to public officials who have engaged in fraudulent management of pension funds for millions of government employees?

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton almost daily call for throwing “Wall Street” scammers in jail. They have been silent about government officials who have perpetrated much larger and more obvious scams—not on voluntary investors, but on public employees and taxpayers who usually had no choice but participate in the public retirement plans. Both candidates, of course, are beneficiaries of public pensions and of donations from the public officials who run the pension scams.
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Hundreds of counties and municipalities, maybe thousands, will not be able to pay the pensions that they promised their workers or which they created to win the money and votes of employee unions. The simplest part of their fraud is very easy to understand.

In order to promise public employees comfortable to luxurious pensions, many governments simply chose a return on the invested funds that would yield the required pension benefits. They also made assumptions about how long pensioners would live. Requiring pensioners die early and requiring unrealistic rates of return on investment, allowed governments to claim that 10 or 20 years from now, they could support present workers in a style to which the rest of us are not accustomed. That includes most private sector workers.

Examples:
In 2009 New York City had about 275,000 retired workers on pension. They received $6.7 billion in benefits. The city didn’t have the money in the retirement fund. It took the money from general revenues. That means they took it from money that could have paid for schools, homeless shelters, hospitals, or roads. How did this happen?

The city estimated a 7% return on its pension funds. It received 3.4%, less than half. Depending on how one estimates, the city was $70 to $150 billion short on pension funds. The rosy 7% return on investment that helped create the shortfall was like those Madoff returns, a hoax to keep the members happy and ignorant. Federal Reserve and bank deposit interest rates were below 2%. Prudent stock investors considered 3-4% the best they should hope for.

This past week Chicago, the President’s hometown run by his former chief of staff, reported a pension liability of $18.6 billion, more than double from the year earlier. The fraud was uncovered by new rules that have long been used by the private sector. The city plan had to apply realistic rates of return for the growth of the pension funds. The city had been using 7.5%.

States and cities have also been investing billions of dollars of retirement funds through hedge funds. Those are the very Wall Street financiers that are the most heinous villains in Bernie Sanders’ campaign—the people he wants to send to jail. A teachers’ union analysis recently found that the hedge funds investments cost way more in commissions and returned less than funds invested outside the hedge funds. Nevertheless, CNBC reported earlier this month, “Large public pensions planning or considering an increase to their hedge fund allocation are the California State Teachers Retirement System, and the general state pensions of Massachusetts and North Carolina.” One is almost tempted to conclude that liberal states love Wall Street hedge funds.

The fraud is everywhere. The average rate of return used by state and local governments is 7.62%. According to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators only 10% of public funds estimate rates of return at less than 7%. The Administrators say 51% use rates over 8%. In other words, almost all public employees are being duped by the kind of promises that put Madoff in jail. They are being duped by accounting gimmicks far worse than those that sent Milken to jail.

The pension problem has been aggravated by the artificially low interest rate experiment that the Federal Reserve, with government support, has been running since 2009. Because the yields on government bonds has been kept below 2%, investors, including pension fund managers, have been desperate to chase higher yielding investments in stocks and corporate bonds. As they bid up the price of a stock or bond, its yield decreases. (I.e. a $10 return on a $100 stock or bond is 10%. If investors hungry for such a return bid up the price to $150, the return is 6.6%.)

How can politicians and public employee unions avoid this disaster that is building as certainly as pressures on the San Andreas fault? Tax the rich is the quick answer. Also a fraud. No conceivable tax on the rich would make the pension funds solvent again—even if the rich had no loopholes (like giving to the Clinton Foundation), and even if all the revenues went to pension funds. (Many rich people are already moving out of high tax cities and counties.) The only other answer is for the federal government to print trainloads of new money. That would cause inflation—the ability to pay promised pensions with dollars that buy far less transportation, food, clothing, housing, or medical care than anyone planned for.

Inflation, of course, would bring higher interest rates on government debt at a time when the national debt of some $19 trillion has almost doubled in the last 8 years. Washington and all other governments with debt would face soaring interest expenses.

Why aren’t the candidates talking about some fuzzy thing called “Wall Street” but not about this massive and widespread scam in state and local governments with names? As present and future benefits are taken back and more and more cities go bankrupt taxpayers will join beneficiaries in revolt. But that won’t happen before the November elections. Or are the beginnings of that revolt already energizing the Trump campaign?
 
Chicago's imploding economy leads to requests for the Illinois legislature to bail it out. The reasoning? It's too big to fail. Doesn't this situation which has already played out in Detroit and California cities suggest that the real problem with "too big to fail" handouts is not in the private sector but with governments and politicians? Hello, Senator Sanders? Mrs. Clinton? Boss Trump? Occupy Wall Street?