Bell, via Kagan, on Critical Race Theory: The Constitution Is the Problem

In November 1985, the Harvard Law Review published an article by Derrick Bell that was a “classic” in the development of Critical Race Theory. The article was edited by then-student Elena Kagan, and was cited by Prof. Charles Ogletree in support of her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Barack Obama in 2010. The article makes clear that Critical Race Theory sees the U.S. Constitution as a form of “original sin”–a view later embraced by Obama as a state legislator, and reflected in his actions and appointments. The following is an excerpt from the non-fiction portion of the article; much of what follows is a fictional story that Bell intended as a parable of racial “fantasy.” (99 Harv. L. Rev. 4)

At the nation’s beginning, the framers saw more clearly than is perhaps possible in our more enlightened and infinitely more complex time the essential need to accept what has become the American contradiction.  The framers made a conscious, though unspoken, sacrifice of the rights of some in the belief that this forfeiture was necessary to secure the rights of others in a society embracing, as its fundamental principle, the equality of all.  And thus the framers, while speaking through the Constitution in an unequivocal voice, at once promised freedom for whites and condemned blacks to slavery….

The Constitution has survived for two centuries and, despite earnest efforts by committed people, the contradiction remains, shielded and nurtured through the years by myth. This contradiction is the root reason for the inability of black people to gain legitimacy — that is, why they are unable to be taken seriously when they are serious and why they retain a subordinate status as a group that even impressive proofs of individual competence cannot overcome. Contradiction, shrouded by myth, remains a significant factor in blacks’ failure to obtain meaningful relief against historic racial injustice.

Read the rest here.

Anyone remember when Dykstra used to be Jim Cramer’s go-to option trading guy?

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The former Mets and Phillies hero turned out to be the centerfielder who couldn’t shoot straight

On Feb. 11, 2011, Wilberto Hernandez called in a report of identity theft to the Los Angeles Police Department. Hernandez, then 37, worked as a personal credit repair consultant in L.A., and he kept a close watch on his own credit score. He became alarmed when he received a notice from a credit agency that his Social Security number had been presented for credit checks at two car dealerships, one in La Crescenta and another in Pasadena.

When Hernandez said he had reason to believe that Lenny Dykstra was involved, the call was routed to detective Juan Contreras, a decorated 24-year LAPD veteran. Contreras was familiar with the hard-nosed former Mets and Phillies star, and not just because he was a baseball fan. Four months earlier Contreras had taken a call from a Los Angeles limo driver who claimed that Dykstra borrowed the driver’s credit card and, after promising to pay him back for the charges, failed to reimburse him. Contreras had searched police records and found an earlier report, this one from a former personal assistant to Dykstra, naming the ex-player as a suspect in an identity theft case. Like the limo driver, the assistant said that Dykstra had used her credit cards and never paid her back.

Neither of those reports had led to charges, but Contreras began asking questions. By Christmas 2010, he had spoken with 17 people—personal assistants, drivers, private jet pilots and housekeepers—who claimed that Dykstra did not pay them for services, used their credit cards or got hold of their Social Security numbers and opened credit cards in their names. One of the pilots Contreras interviewed claimed that Dykstra had asked to use the pilot’s credit card to gas up a private plane on a stopover in Europe. “In October, I was thinking, Hey, this is Lenny Dykstra, I grew up with this guy, I want to meet him,” Contreras says. “By November, I wanted to put the guy in jail.”

Read the rest here.

You pretty much understand what the chart is telling you now. It’s important to look at the absolute value of this chart (currently 74.73%) as divergences are insignificant.

This is well worth a read. Some nice graphs are included.

Instead of just swallowing Ministry of Propaganda swill, let’s examine actual data. If we do that, we find job growth is mostly smoke and mirrors.

Friday, March 09, 2012

Most voters still say this country is overtaxed, and half think any federal tax increase should be submitted to the public for a vote.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 56% of Likely U.S. Voters believe America is overtaxed. But that’s down from 66% two years ago and 64% last year. One-out-of-three (33%) now believe the country is not overtaxed, while another 12% are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Read the rest here.

The Reformed Broker on Hussman’s thesis that this could be The Worst Time to Buy Stocks.

The following script is from “The Spymaster Speaks” which aired on March 11, 2012. Lesley Stahl is the correspondent. Shachar Bar-On, producer.

When President Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this past week, the subject was how, when and if to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Netanyahu saying Israel can’t afford to wait much longer; Mr. Obama arguing there’s still time to let sanctions and diplomacy do the job. And he said some top intelligence officials in Israel side with him.

Actually, you’ll hear from one of them tonight: Meir Dagan, former chief of the Mossad, Israel’s equivalent of the CIA. It’s unheard of for someone who held such a high-classified position to speak out publicly, but he told us he felt compelled to talk, because he is so opposed to a preemptive Israeli strike against Iran anytime soon.

Dagan headed the Mossad for nearly a decade until last year. His primary, if not his only mission was to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. And he says there is time to wait, perhaps as long as three years.

Lesley Stahl: You have said publicly that bombing Iran now is the stupidest idea you’ve ever heard. That’s a direct quote.

Dagan: An attack on Iran before you are exploring all other approaches is not the right way how to do it.

Read the rest here.

via Zero Hedge

The last time we plotted European youth unemployment in what was dubbed “Europe’s scariest chart” we were surprised to discover that when it comes to “Arab Spring inspiring” youth unemployment, Spain was actually worse off than even (now officially broke) Greece, whose young adult unemployment at the time was only just better compared to that… of the United States. Luckily, following the latest economic (yes, we laughed too) update from Greece, it is safe to say that things are back to normal, as Greek youth unemployment is officially the second one in Europe after Spain to surpass 50%. In other words, Europe’s scariest chart just got even scarier.

Read the rest (and see the scary chart) here.

Here is my Spectator cover story on wind power:

To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.

If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often wilfully deaf. The good news though is that if you look closely, you can see David Cameron’s government coming to its senses about the whole fiasco. The biggest investors in offshore wind — Mitsubishi, Gamesa and Siemens — are starting to worry that the government’s heart is not in wind energy any more. Vestas, which has plans for a factory in Kent, wants reassurance from the Prime Minister that there is the political will to put up turbines before it builds its factory.

This forces a decision from Cameron — will he reassure the turbine magnates that he plans to keep subsidising wind energy, or will he retreat? The political wind has certainly changed direction. George Osborne is dead set against wind farms, because it has become all too clear to him how much they cost. The Chancellor’s team quietly encouraged MPs to sign a letter to No. 10 a few weeks ago saying that ‘in these financially straitened times, we think it is unwise to make consumers pay, through taxpayer subsidy, for inefficient and intermittent energy production that typifies onshore wind turbines’.

Putting the things offshore may avoid objections from the neighbours, but (Chancellor, beware!) it makes even less sense, because it costs you and me — the taxpayers — double. I have it on good authority from a marine engineer that keeping wind turbines upright in the gravel, tides and storms of the North Sea for 25 years is a near hopeless quest, so the repair bill is going to be horrific and the output disappointing. Already the grouting in the foundations of hundreds of turbines off Kent, Denmark and the Dogger Bank has failed, necessitating costly repairs.

In Britain the percentage of total energy that comes from wind is only 0.6 per cent. According to the Renewable Energy Foundation, ‘policies intended to meet the EU Renewables Directive in 2020 will impose extra consumer costs of approximately £15 billion per annum’ or £670 per household. It is difficult to see what value will be got for this money. The total carbon emissions saved by the great wind rush is probably below 1 per cent, because of the need to keep fossil fuels burning as back-up when the wind does not blow. It may even be a negative number.

America is having far better luck. Carbon emissions in the United States fell by 7 per cent in 2009, according to a Harvard study. But the study concluded that this owes less to the recession that year than the falling price of natural gas — caused by the shale gas revolution. (Burning gas emits less than half as much carbon dioxide as coal for the same energy output.) The gas price has fallen even further since, making coal seem increasingly pricey by comparison. All over America, from Utah to West Virginia, coal mines are being closed and coal plants idled or cancelled. (The US Energy Information Administration calculates that every $4 spent on shale purchases the same energy as $25 spent on oil: at this rate, more and more vehicles will switch to gas.)

So even if you accept the most alarming predictions of climate change, those turbines that have ruined your favourite view are doing nothing to help. The shale gas revolution has not only shamed the wind industry by showing how to decarbonise for real, but has blown away its last feeble argument — that diminishing supplies of fossil fuels will cause their prices to rise so high that wind eventually becomes competitive even without a subsidy. Even if oil stays dear, cheap gas is now likely to last many decades.

Read the rest here.

Green Mountain put volume surges before Starbucks news

* Green Mountain downside March puts heavily traded

* Trading in Starbucks $52.50 strike calls stand out

By Doris Frankel

March 9 (Reuters) – A heavy burst of bearish option action in Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc in the hours before Starbucks announced plans to launch a single-cup coffee and espresso brewer has raised eyebrows among some option market participants.

Green Mountain’s Keurig machines are the No. 1 single-cup brewers in the United States. Starbucks Corp, the world’s biggest coffee chain, provides coffee refills for Keurig machines under a partnership with Green Mountain and its announcement late on Thursday was seen as a competitive threat to its partner.

Option bets on a big move up in Starbucks shares and on a sharp drop in Green Mountain stock preceded the news.

“The level of aggressiveness that traders early on Thursday came for Green Mountain March downside puts was very suspicious,” said Alan Thompson, options market maker at Timber Hill, a division of Interactive Brokers Group. “It raised our eyebrows.”

The put buying in Green Mountain “was off the charts into last night’s announcement,” said Jon Najarian, a co-founder of online brokerage TradeMonster in Chicago, who also noticed very strong buying of upside calls in Starbucks on Wednesday.

“We expect that the regulators will take a deeper look at both Starbucks and Green Mountain ahead of (Thursday) night’s announcement,” Najarian said.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which looks into unusual stock and options activity, declined to comment.

Read the rest here.

Doug Saunders

You have to drive far out into the West Country, through forested hills and ancient villages, if you want to find the last of the mad British inventors. His wide glass desk perches amid a clutter of aluminum tubes, DC-pulse motors, lithium-polymer batteries and whirring prototypes in a distant corner of a sleek, silver building that contains 1,450 engineers, accountants, marketing people, managers and lawyers, and not a single labourer.

Behind that desk sits the silver-haired man who has become the only living British inventor every school kid here can name, a guy known for building actual things. Five years ago, that status would have been almost quaint. Today, it puts him in the political vanguard, both at home and, increasingly, across the Atlantic.

James Dyson’s surname adorns an expanding array of bag-less vacuum cleaners, blade-less fans and washroom hand dryers that actually dry your hands. His private company claimed more than a billion pounds in worldwide sales last year, growing right through the recession.

Now, though, Mr. Dyson, 64, is even better known as the leading proponent of the suddenly popular idea that Western nations ought to return to manufacturing and exporting physical goods, after decades of shifting the roots of their economies to services, property and finance.

His call for an assemblyline renaissance has echoed far beyond Britain, where he was appointed a senior adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron’s coalition government and has spawned a raft of policies.

Read the rest here.

There’s Nothing “Fair” about it

Metro took several steps this week to address complaints that it wasn’t taking sexual harassment seriously enough.

The agency has established a new task force to address sexual harassment on the transit system, has created an email box ([email protected]) for complaints, and is urging its employees to report any cases to police, General Manager Richard Sarles told employees on Friday.

He specifically urged all workers to call Metro Transit Police if riders report any concerns, responding to complaints that some Metro workers had minimized, even laughed, when riders complained. He also called out Metro workers who make disrespectful comments to riders themselves.

“I was disturbed to hear their reports about assault and intimidation while riding trains and buses, particularly those accounts which involved our employees making disrespectful comments,” Sarles wrote to his more than 11,000 employees in a newsletter on Friday.

Several riders had testified at a D.C. Council hearing last month that Metro needed to take harassment more seriously, recounting stories of being groped on trains and accosted by masturbating men. They said other transit agencies had put up public service advertisements to address the issue.

The complaints became more heated, though, when a Metro spokesman told WUSA9 that “one person’s harassment is another person’s flirting.”

Since then, activists had been taking to Twitter, asking Metro to apologize for the comments and deal with the issue.

Read the rest here.

Obama: “Open your hearts and open your minds to the words of Prof. Derrick Bell”

Link to Bell’s “white folks” comment.

NetJets Inc., the private-plane company owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A), was countersued by the U.S. over $366 million in taxes and penalties.

NetJets in November sued the U.S., saying the federal government had wrongly imposed taxes, interest and penalties totaling more than $642.7 million.

Claiming the federal Internal Revenue Service wrongfully assessed a so-called ticket tax — an excise tax on payments made in exchange for air transportation — to private aircraft owners maintaining their own planes, the Columbus, Ohio-based company demanded refunds and abatements.

The federal government, in a revised answer and countersuit filed yesterday in federal court in Columbus, rejected NetJets’ claims and alleged that four of the company’s units owe unpaid taxes and penalties.

NetJets Aviation Inc. owes more than $302.1 million, and another unit, NetJets International, is liable for $52.9 million, the U.S. said. Executive Jet Management Inc. owes $10 million while NetJets Large Aircraft owes $1.19 million, the U.S. claimed.

“NetJets doesn’t comment on pending litigation,” General Counsel Colleen Nissl said in a statement e-mailed to Bloomberg News.

The case is NetJets Large Aircraft Inc. v. U.S., 11- cv-01023, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio (Columbus).

Source

Jose Canseco has been caught doping while trying to make a comeback in the Mexican League. That’s obviously not a shocker since the 47-year-old former slugger has been sticking needles where they don’t belong for years. What’s surprising is how he reacted to the news.

He sat down in-front of his computer, logged on to twitter and started threatening everyone imaginable. This is some quality, free entertainment!

Read the rest and see the tweets here.