Clarion Content

The Clarion Content broke the Durham ABC Board scandal a couple weeks back. The pace of the investigations appear to have picked up with coverage appearing in the Durham Herald Sun, the Triangle Business Journal, and on NBC-17. The Durham ABC Board is being investigated by the State Board and the public knows it. The Durham ABC Board has until October 28th to respond to state investigators.

In a classic case of slamming the barn door shut after the horses have dashed away, the Clarion Content's sources tell us the Durham ABC Board is holding meetings to hear employee complaints and grievances. Of course, the Durham ABC Board is not about to open those meetings to the public.

The Board is assuring Durham ABC employees that they have full protection under "state and federal" whistleblower laws. The Board's memo to employees about the opportunity to "speak freely" makes no mention of what those statutes might be.

Long time readers know the Clarion Content's feelings about how these things usually go for the whistleblower.

Stay tuned.

Labels: corruption, Durham, Ethically questionable, Politics

The Clarion Content has followed Facebook's contortions and claims not to violate its users privacy with bemused distaste for years. Somehow, we have cynically disbelieved their wide-eyed innocence. Perhaps, because, the evidence is so massively against them.


A reminder of what Facebook is really all about... the Benjamins

Yesterday, the Financial Times of London reported that, "Amid growing pressure for the social networking site to prove the value of its advertising, Facebook is gradually wading into new techniques for tracking..." [and mining data]. They noted that Facebook is working with a controversial data gathering company called Datalogix that connects Facebook users' links and clicks to in the store, as well as on-line purchases.

This is the more complex second-level data mining that privacy advocates have long warned about Facebook possessing. Their ability to connect tracked on-line habits with a massive database of off-line behaviors is unprecedented in the personal computing era.

Facebook's dance partner in these dastardly deeds, Datalogix, has customer shopping data from seventy million American households gathered from loyalty card programs they administer at thousands of retailers, grocery and drug stores. Datalogix matches identifying information associated with those frequent shopper cards against emails and personal information that is used to establish Facebook accounts to build its matrix of personal data about users.

Naturally, Facebook's head of Measurement and Insights, Brad Smallwood, assured the Financial Times that the emails and other identifying information of its users are made anonymous by collecting it into groups of people who saw an ad and people who did not.

Of course, why would one assume Facebook would do any less than the right thing.

In another not so shocking development, Facebook users are automatically included in the advertising data mining conducted by Datalogix. They cannot directly opt out through their Facebook account. Instead, they must go to the Datalogix website, for which Facebook has a link posted deep in its help center.

Labels: Ethically questionable, technology

The Clarion Content broke the story eight short days ago. It has gone viral now.

Yesterday the Triangle Business Journal reported yesterday that the State Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission has called for an investigation into the Durham County ABC Board.



Today, it is the front page of the Durham Herald-Sun.

"State officials have launched an investigation into the Durham County ABC Board, looking, among other things, at whether its still-new general manager has been steering contracts to friends of board members."

The way we attempted to bring you the story line to begin with was, where there is smoke, it seems unlikely there isn't fire too. We had sources that were bellowing and belching smoky details. Now to read the allegations in the Triangle Business Journal or the Durham Herald-Sun, the dealings are sordid. The allegations as originally reported by the Clarion Content last Wednesday, minutes of meetings altered, meetings conducted without traditional recording, violations of policy and state law.

And if you read the comment section on our original post, albeit some of the comments are anonymous, there are further allegations of missing minutes, of altered minutes in different font types and formats. There is a report that there is no job application in General Manager Emily Page's personnel file.

The Herald-Sun notes that Page, who was Board Chairwoman when she accepted the $100,000/yr. General Manager position, does not list any retail management experience on her Linked-in page. This, for a position that has her running eight busy retail liquor stores, the fishiness factor is self-evident. Down right sloppy.

In that vein, a final detail that caught our eye in the Triangle Business Journal's article, the Durham ABC Board, like all ABC Boards is supposed to distribute a proportion of its profits to city and local governments. The Durham ABC Board turned over $909,000 to the county and $101,000 to the city.

Those look like some awfully round numbers for a place that does as many transactions as your friendly, neighborhood, eight Durham ABC stores. Their revenue last year was nearly $25 million dollars.

As shady as some of their other dealings appear to be, let's hope the state is going over Durham ABC's books with a fine tooth comb.

Labels: Durham, Ethically questionable, Politics

You know how they say where there is smoke there is fire? Well... the Durham County ABC is smoking.



The last time the Clarion Content broke a story with this much heat, D.R. Horton was fixing to drill under Durham County homeowner's houses who had (allegedly) unwittingly signed off on deeds giving the company and its energy partners fracking rights.

The Clarion Content has reports from multiple sources within Durham ABC that the state is investigating The Durham County ABC. The Clarion Content's sources say the state's concerns range from improper use of Frontier-Visa gift cards as employee incentives, to irregularities in the selection process of current General Manager, Emily Page. Ms. Page served as the Chairwoman of the Durham County ABC Board before becoming Durham ABC's General Manager, a position that carries with it a salary in excess of $95,000 and a company car.

Employees within the Durham ABC report that minutes of board meetings have been substantially altered after the fact and original tape recordings of meetings have been destroyed. In concert with local Durham attorney, Carey Ewing, the Clarion Content inquiry has turned up strange inconsistencies. Minutes that were months old and supposed to be available to the public were not on the Durham County ABC Board's website, nor in the Clerk of the County Commissioner's office. Suddenly after questions about availability by Attorney Ewing, they were back on the website, and available to the public, if a written request was filed and a photocopying fee paid.

The Clarion Content has also heard from Durham County ABC store managers that employees have been allowed to work and sell alcohol without completing the mandatory Responsible Alcohol Selling Program part of their training, this despite the protests of Chief of ABC Law Enforcement, Derrick McMillan.

Employees also report that numerous "unofficial" directives in contradiction of Durham ABC policies have come from the General Manager's office; including new restrictions on leave and employee vacation, directives about the hiring of certain specific contractors, changes in the conduct of criminal background checks for new hires, and how ABC Board foundation money is allocated.

Shortly after Ms. Page took over as General Manager, she removed the ABC's recording secretary from General Manager's meetings and discontinued the process of taking minutes of those meetings.

Employees also allege Ms. Page has made use of office resources for her personal coaching and consulting business, and claimed to be working from home on days where she has been spotted biking the Tobacco Trail.

There have also been questions raised about Durham County ABC Board member Erroll Reese's use of County resources for personal causes.

We have spoken to as many as six Durham County ABC employees and Attorney Ewing has spoken to a handful more. All are concerned. All feel the new leadership has created a hostile, uncomfortable work environment. Some fear whistleblower retaliation for having hired a lawyer or spoken to the press, but they uniformly state that did not know what else they could do.

Just before publishing this article the Clarion Content was able to speak with Ms. Kimberly Shaw, Durham County ABC Board Chairwoman. While Ms. Shaw did not have direct knowledge and could not comment on all the allegations herein, she did clarify a few points. Ms. Shaw said that the gift cards in question were not received nor treated as gifts by Durham County ABC. Rather they were considered discount cards which are acceptable under state guidelines. Ms. Shaw had not heard about any irregularities concerning board meeting minutes.

She also noted concerning scheduling and leave policy that the General Manager, Ms. Page, has a certain amount of leeway. She said that the goal is maximum "operational efficiency" and that it was Shaw's understanding that the changes would save the ABC from having to hire additional employees at a greater fiscal cost. She noted, it is always the Board's goal to try to save funds where possible, so that as much money as can be is directed back to the City and County of Durham.

Ms. Shaw also mentioned that sometimes fresh eyes and new policies from leadership are met with disdain and gripes by employees, but are ultimately for the greater good of the organization.

Regarding the use of Durham ABC resources for Ms. Page's personal coaching and consulting business, Ms. Shaw said that the Board takes those kind of allegations very seriously, this was the first she had heard of it and they would look into it. The same goes for violation of the Board policies regarding the Responsible Alcohol Selling Program, this was the first she had heard of it, they take these issues very seriously and she would investigate.

Bottom line, Durham, stay tuned.

Labels: Durham, Ethically questionable, Politics

It is the return of an old school Clarion Content feature, Interesting Links and Links of Interest. You know, just in case you had not found enough ways to waste time on the inter-webs yourself. We have a few more places to kick it, read something you did not know, see something you had not seen, maybe get a laugh.

To see old Interesting Links posts click here and scroll down past this one.

Our first two links are about transit. We were going to go with a good news/bad news dichotomy. So what do you want first? The good news or the bad news?

Presuming in favor of your innate optimism, we are going to go with the good news first. India’s Tata Motors is working on a revolutionary new car, the Airpod. It runs on air. No kidding. It is part of Tata's line of super cheap nano cars that they hope to market and sell all over the less developed parts of the globe. They are built with pneumatic motors that use pressurized air to drive pistons. In May, the motor giant announced that it had completed the “first phase” of the Airpod cars, successfully testing out the engines in two vehicles. Its tank can hold 175 liters of air. Filling it up will cost about a dollar and get you 125 miles. Awesome!

Read the whole story here. Special thanks to a young reader from Pennsylvania for sending this our way.

The next transportation story is not such a happy one. But, it is important, especially if you are wondering why America doesn't have diddly for high speed rail, while all kinds of other countries do.¹

It is the same corruption, bureaucratic raj and systemic morass that is dragging down the rest of our economy. Stephen Smith offers up a fabulous expose in Bloomberg News. Here are a few of the nuggets. If the first segment of Manhattan’s Second Avenue subway opens on the current schedule in 2016, it will have only taken seventy-five years to get'er done. (Not a typo.) Smith says on average American mass transit projects cost as much as five times as much as similar work in Europe and Asia.²

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is spending $3.8 billion on a single subway station at the World Trade Center designed by Santiago Calatrava, a Spanish architect known for his costly projects. If New York could build subways at the prices that Paris and Tokyo pay, $3.8 billion would be enough to build the entire Second Avenue subway, from Harlem to the Financial District.---Bloomberg

Our next link falls more into the "What's grosser than gross category?"

Answer? Winning one of those storage wars, bidding on abandoned, rent unpaid storage units, and finding a stash of crudely preserved human organs inside, including hearts, brains and lungs, as a guy did in Pensacola, Florida last week. Most of the body parts found were not labeled, including a heart found in 32oz convenience store cup filled with formaldehyde. The AP reports the previous owner of the storage unit was Dr. Michael Berkland who worked for the state of Florida as a medical examiner. Find the rest of the story here. (Icky.)

The next one is actually an NPR story featuring a regular Clarion Content contributor, Storey Clayton, author and illustrator of Duck and Cover, director of the website The Blue Pyramid and in his day job, the Rutgers University debate coach.

In this article, he and Cornell University director of forensics, Sam Nelson break down the five most common argumentative fallacies likely to be seen this campaign season: Argumentum ad verecundiam, the appeal to authority, post hoc ergo propter hoc, meaning "After this, therefore because of this..." the familiar, argumentum ad hominem, "name-calling," and the rest of the lot.

In each case, they include explanations of what they mean, why they often work and an example from both presidential candidates. It is funny and an eye-opener. Read the whole story here.

One final one to blow you away. In case the military-industrial complex had drifted out of your subconscious; this will snap you back. Check out this article about the newest nano-drones from Lockheed Martin.



Notes
¹No, you can't simply keep blaming President Obama. It is more nuanced than that.

²The French rail operator SNCF told the California High-Speed Rail Authority that it could cut $30 billion off the project’s $68 billion estimated price tag!!! Repeat, the French.

Labels: Ethically questionable, infrastructure, interesting links, Politics, Pop Culture, technology

Long time readers know, the Clarion Content always has our radar on for any signs of police malfeasance. This is because the police in many places continue to espouse an ethic that is less "protect and serve" and more "enforcement." This combined with our philosophical distrust for government and the terrible imbalance in the power dynamic between cops and citizens makes us hyper-alert.



One such story crossed our scopes this weekend and the peripherals stink to high heaven. There is as yet no evidence of police wrongdoing, just a lot of smoke and suspicions. Here is the lowdown.

Chavis Carter, a twenty-one year-old African-American male was in a car stopped by police in Jonesboro, Arkansas on suspicion of smoking marijuana.¹ He was with with two other people. Cops released both of the other folks and detained Carter after discovering weed on his person and that he had an arrest warrant in Mississippi.²

Police searched Carter twice to find the pot, but did not find a gun. A police car's videotape of the events shows Carter lead toward the patrol cars and then out of the frame. A police report says Carter was placed in the second patrol car without handcuffs, though the video doesn't show that.

As NPR notes, "the other officer searches the driver and remaining passenger, who then stand in front of the first patrol car. The officer who searched Carter asked them where the rest of the marijuana was because he found some on Carter. The driver and other passenger are handcuffed and led out of the frame, too. Eventually, they appear without handcuffs and the officers let them leave."

The patrol car's video cuts off at that point.

Police reports indicate that Carter subsequently had his hands cuffed behind his back and was stuffed into a Jonesboro Police crusier.

A second batch of police video begins as police light flickers on an empty stretch of road. A dog barks and a white SUV turns around a ways down the street.

Suddenly, an unseen man curses and shortly after he says, "He was breathing a second ago." An ambulance pulls up and someone, perhaps the same man, says, "I patted him down. I don't know where he had it hidden."

Later, someone instructs the others to leave everything as it is.

The video goes on to show an officer cordoning off the area with police tape. Two people can be seen looking on, but they leave after interacting briefly with an officer.

Carter is not shown in that video.

Carter was quite likely already dead. The cops story, he concealed a gun from them, despite being searched twice, and shot himself in the head in the back of the car, despite his hands being cuffed behind his back.³

CBS News reports, "Carter's family and others have questioned the police story, claiming that Carter was not suicidal."

CBS News also notes the autopsy report released after the incident indicated that Carter tested positive for methamphetamine use and a trace amounts of oxycodone.

Clearly there were a lot of issues in play. The police have a difficult and dangerous job. One has to wonder how much the psychology that places "enforcement" on a higher plane than "protect and serve" had to do with the death of this young man.

The cops later released a reenactment video that shows an officer being cuffed, then sitting in the back seat of a police cruiser, retrieving a fake gun from his pants, and bringing the barrel to his right temple.

In a society where Abner Louima was brutally sodomized with a stick while inside a Brooklyn police station, Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times by police while reaching for his wallet in a doorway in the Bronx, and Arthur McDuffie⁴ died of police-administered skull fractures at a hospital in Miami after a traffic stop showed him driving with a suspended license, we worry.

We do not have the answers, but we surely hope they come to light.


Notes
¹Can we decriminalize already?? How many more young men have to die or rot in prison over weed?!?

²Of course, need we even note, it was drug related...

³Did you know, despite being left-handed and handcuffed, Carter managed to shoot himself in the right temple?

⁴Five white cops, one black man. Ask Rodney King. And the list goes on and on. Read more examples here in the Baltimore-Sun.

Labels: cop stories, Ethically questionable, facing race, Politics

There are those it makes awful mad to hear the Clarion Content excoriate Barak Obama¹ for the lack of change we have seen in the last four years. This video clip is a reminder, that it is not so much President Obama as it is the institutional barriers, blockades and outright resistance from The Establishment² that makes real change so difficult.³

Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, Representative Alan Grayson of Florida and the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve, on where your tax dollars have gone.





Notes
¹Fortunately, Representative Akin is out there in Missouri to remind our editors, no matter how tempting some of their minimalist vision of government might be, their social mores haven’t changed since the Inquisition. Romney’s V.P. nominee, Paul Ryan, co-sponsored a bill with Akin last year, that would have banned abortion except in cases of forcible rape, incest or the mother’s life was in-danger. Making the all important Evangelical Republican distinction between rapes where the victim invited it and “true” rapes. Unclear on where that slippery slope leads? Watch “The Accused,” starring Jodie Foster.

²The Man, the lifers in unelected positions of power, the holders and controllers of great and institutional wealth. Not that their secretive or unresponsive, but on Federal Reserve dot gov, one notes they have not revised the section headed "Purposes and Functions" since 2005, since ya know, like nothing of note has happened since then.

³Incidentally, The Man was who the Fed bailed out while the rest of us sucked on the carbon-monoxide filled tail pipe of The Great Recession. The bankers sure are taking it hard.

Labels: economics, Economy, Ethically questionable, political quips-n-quotes, Politics

This is what makes Rand Paul an interesting politician...

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is a different breed of politician because he calls out realities blithely ignored by the talking heads on both sides of the aisle.

Agree or disagree with him on his litany of policy positions, he is a check on the Nation's Constitutional conscience.

Two examples in the last month:

Last week Congress introduced and proposed to vote on a six hundred page bill within the same forty-eight hours. The Senate voted 72-22 to waive the rule requiring a 48-hour layover for legislation to be digested. As Senator Paul put it, "For goodness sakes, this is a 600-page bill. I got it this morning."

Paul then proceeded to put his proverbial senatorial caja where his mouth was, proposing legislation that would force the Senate to give its members one day to read bills for every 20 pages they contain.

A reality check.

A week or two earlier Paul had called out his own party's candidate for imperial overreach when Mitt Romney dictatorially declared that he could unilaterally take the country to war with Iran, without the prior consent of Congress.¹ Senator Paul slapped him down,

"I must oppose the most recent statements made by Mitt Romney in which he says he, as president, could take us to war unilaterally with Iran, without any approval from Congress...This is a misreading of the role of the President and Congress in declaring war.

Unfortunately, Senator Paul is running even more of a solitary course² in this, than he is in actually expecting Senators to read the legislation they pass.

Click here for a fascinating analysis from Doug Mataconis on Outside the Beltway.

How much does Mataconis think Paul's opinion will shift Romney's stance?

Hint: "during the GOP primary fight the only candidates who deviated from the neo-conservative aggressiveness that Romney is demonstrating now were Ron Paul, Jon Huntsman, and Gary Johnson, and we know how the voters treated them..."


Notes

¹Our own reality check forces us to recognize Presidents have been ignoring this rule since at least the Kennedy administration.
²A pessimist would say perhaps only Kucinich, the Maxine Waters faction in House of Representatives and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont would hold with Senator Paul when the chips were down.

Labels: 2012 presidential election, Ethically questionable, Politics

It was the late, great, Alan Turing's birthday this weekend. Turing was a polymath and a genius from whose mind spawned the connection to binary logic that enabled the computer to move from concept to reality. He made computers happen. Turing also contributed the test that is still used to determine artificial or machine intelligence.¹ He broke the Axis's secret codes and helped turn the tide of World War II. He paved the way mathematically for both chaos and complexity theory.


My what British teeth you have, Dr. Turing...

Tragically, one of the great minds of the 20th century was hounded and harassed until his untimely death at the age of only forty-two. Don't let anyone tell you that prejudice is anything but societal self-sabotage.² Read some of what this man accomplished and ask yourself what else he might have done for the world if he hadn't been stigmatized, derided and attacked for his sexuality.

Inane.

Gay is not an insult.


Notes
¹At the Clarion Content this weekend, we saw another great example of how machine intelligence fails to match human intelligence at the most fundamental levels. Shazam, one of our favorite iPhone apps, struggles with classical music recognition. Shazam is genius when it comes to looking up pop tunes. Hold your phone up to the music playing and it can identify the artist and title track almost every time. But it is not intelligent like a human, it does not recognize tunes. Classical music kicks its proverbial butt.

For example, the ditty playing is the 1812 Overture, if Shazam knows that particular version by that particular orchestra, bam, it has your back and can identify it just like a top-40 tune: the 1812 Overture by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.

But if it does not know that recording, it is not intelligent like a human, it does not know the tune. It cannot say, well, that is the 1812 Overture or Beethoven's 5th Symphony, even though I, Shazam, can't identify who is playing it, the music, the notes are quite familiar. No, for the binary machine it is all or nothing. No nuance. No AI.

²Prejudice is societal self-sabotage.

Labels: Ethically questionable, science, technology

The Clarion Content has been closely following the battle over fracking and subsurface mineral rights closely since we broke the story that national builder, D.R. Horton, had obtained fracking rights and mineral rights in the Triangle. Our sources are now saying that company holds these mineral rights in as many as sixty subdivisions in North Carolina.

However, they may be backing down in the face of massive amounts of bad publicity...

What? It isn't helping to sell homes when people discover you have the right to pump noxious chemicals 500 feet beneath the surface of their land? Just because those chemicals pollute groundwater and might cause earthquakes, people are concerned?

The Durham Herald-Sun's Laura Oleniacz reports that D.R. Horton gave mineral rights back to twenty-two Durham property owners according to the Durham County Register of Deeds office. The reason D.R. Horton gave was based on a technicality, "...company officials discovered last week that some property owners’ contracts didn’t mention that the company was reserving the mineral rights to some properties."

Oleniacz also notes that, "the D.R. Horton company also said that it is now stopping its practice of retaining mineral rights in cases where those rights have not already been reserved by a previous property owner, and until the state legislature 'has fully addressed the issues now pending before it.'"

Does not exactly sound like they have given up.

And clearly, statewide, the battle is not over yet, be prepared to hear the phrase "domestic energy production" hundreds of times in the upcoming presidential election cycle. Fracking is domestic energy production. Folks who attended the information session organized by Durham County Agricultural Cooperative Extension Services and Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA heard that while North Carolina farmers and landowners are being paid as little as a $1/acre for fracking rights, in some western states the going rate is $25/acre. Energy companies offer farmers and landowners, huge initial signing bonuses, too, in exchange for permission to frack on their property.

They build huge well pads, the hydraulic equivalent of open pit mines, often seven to ten acres in dimension. The pump their toxic brew beneath the surface, push what shale and natural gas products they can to the surface and leave, often with no reclamation provisions in place, not even minimal aesthetic repair.¹

State Senator Bob Rucho, R-Mecklenburg, introduced a bill to the North Carolina Senate's Energy Policy Issues Committee that recommends to the General Assembly eliminating the state's current prohibitions on horizontal drilling (fracking).

In the status quo many questions remain unanswered. Is D.R. Horton giving back mineral rights to all the North Carolina properties where they have claimed them? Or only where they did not properly disclose they were obtaining them? Are they willing to give back these mineral and subsurface rights to any D.R. Horton homeowner who requests them? What if your neighbor doesn't request their return? What is the effect on the property values of the neighborhood? The individual?

Durham property attorney, Carey Ewing, who was an essential part of bringing the story to the public eye, says that uncertainty prevails, "Homeowners need more information and no one is giving it to them."²

And while D.R. Horton's spokespeople insist, "D.R. Horton is not in the mining business. It is in the business of building, and selling, quality homes and providing excellent value to its homeowners..." What is the other part of their conglomerate up to? What is D.R.H. Energy's role in this dirty business?³

Stay tuned. We will keep you updated.



Notes
¹If North Carolina does end up legislating to allow fracking, at bare minimum, the state must put in place strong regulation about how the land is to be left afterward, both above and below the surface of the ground.

²Ms. Ewing is quoted in both the Durham Herald-Sun's and the AP's recent stories about fracking in North Carolina. Full disclosure: the Clarion Content editor has previously retained, on an entirely separate issue, Ms. Ewing's firm, the Ewing Law Center.

³D.R.H. Energy also owns mineral and subsurface drilling rights to many D.R. Horton properties in North Carolina. The energy company has not issued a public statement about its role or intentions.

Labels: Durham, ecology, energy policy, Ethically questionable, Politics

Don't be. Even though the bank reported a massive drop in first-quarter profits, they still made $653 million dollars in just the last three months, so they are probably not doing too badly with the money¹ they took from American taxpayers to bail themselves out of their own mess.

Their shareholders aren't so happy, but the CEO is doing great, according to the LA Times, Chief Executive Brian Moynihan's compensation has been more than quadrupled this year to $8.1 million per annum.²

How do young folks entering the job market feel about this kind of thing? Read this screed in the Arizona State University college newspaper, The State Press, for some insight. Hint: they're bent.


Notes
¹Bank of America borrowed and repaid in-full $45 billion from the U.S. Treasury.

²You know how that goes, lower the CEO's pay when under scrutiny, raise it back when you think no one is looking.

Labels: Ethically questionable

Why the murders of Trayvon Martin and Eve Carson cannot be compared.

by: Alicia Towler





Today when I logged into my favorite news site, I saw the headline: “Poll: Trayvon Martin case divides U.S. by race, age, wealth, and politics.” The poll taken by the Christian Scientist Monitor reports that the country is split in its perceptions of the handling of the case and whether or not the crime was racially motivated.

When I logged into Facebook, I saw that yet another friend had shared this poorly reasoned blog post asking why people were so outraged at the shooting of Trayvon Martin but not the Eve Carson murder four years ago in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The author argues that Carson was similarly racially targeted for being “a rich, blue-eyed, blonde haired, white girl” when she was kidnapped, robbed, and killed.

There are many differences between the two cases, but here are the core issues that make the comparison irrelevant:

When Carson was murdered, police worked quickly to identify her, find her car, phone, laptop, and wallet, and develop leads to identify her killers. Within days, police SWAT teams had stormed houses in Durham looking for the two identified men, Atwater and Lovette, and shortly after, both men were arrested, charged with 1st Degree murder, and imprisoned to await trial.

When Martin was killed, police did not use his cellphone, which was at the scene, to try to identify him or canvass the neighborhood where they would have found Martin’s father. There was no need for a manhunt - the killer was at the scene when police arrived. George Zimmerman was questioned and released that evening, and Zimmerman returned home.

And there is the problem – we were able to move on from Carson’s death without marches or phone calls from the president because justice was served. In Martin’s case, without the attention of the national media, there is no indication that there would have been any further investigation into the murder. Zimmerman would have been able to quietly return to his neighborhood watch with his concealed weapons permit and would have remained a threat to any “suspicious” persons who crossed his path.

So to the blogger who asked why there was no outrage over Carson’s death - hundreds of students showed up for a vigil on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus just hours after Carson’s body was identified. There was so much interest in the case and so much tension in the area that Lovette's attorneys had to request that his trial be moved to another district because they didn't think they could find an impartial jury in Orange County. But this outrage was channeled into remembering the contributions Carson made to the community and finding constructive ways to keep her legacy alive. The community was able to move on because it had closure.

At the time Carson was murdered, I was living in the same neighborhood, I had recently graduated from the same university, and I, too, felt safe on the streets of Chapel Hill alone at 3am. It’s been four years, and the town has never been the same to me. Personally, I am angry that two cruel young men took my sense of safety along with Carson’s life.

In the past few weeks since the news of Martin’s murder caught fire in the national media, I have read articles from black parents whose sense of safety has also been taken. These parents fear that their children may be perceived as suspicious, as dangerous, as criminal because of the color of their skin, and worse yet, that if a neighborhood watch captain gunned down their unarmed child on a residential sidewalk in the middle of the night, no one would even care.

The unnerving issue in this case is that police were immediately willing to believe that Zimmerman needed to use deadly force against an unarmed teenager. The unanswered question is whether Zimmerman would have been released without charges or further investigation if the races of the two men had been reversed.

Labels: constitutional issues, cop stories, Ethically questionable, facing race, Guest columns

The Clarion Content has been tweeting for several days that we are sitting on an amazing fracking related story. We have waited on the sidelines as political figures from Governor Bev Perdue on down have told constituents what a boon fracking will be to North Carolina, and specifically our region of North Carolina, which sits on the geologically promising Deep River Basin.

Quite obviously the debate between the believers in the economic benefits of fracking and those who fear its massive environmental costs are unresolved. There is strong opinion and strong emotion on both sides.

What we believe most of you, dear readers, are unaware of, is that in some parts of Durham County permission to frack is already being granted, in advance of state legislative approval and in preparation for private profiteering. The Clarion Content and our sources have obtained deeds from the public records that indicate prominent builder D.R. Horton is securing rights to frack underneath some of its most recent Durham developments.¹ (See below.)

We have redacted these deeds to protect the homeowners and their communities, but they should make you jump right out of your skin.

Public records indicate D.R. Horton homebuyers are using D.R. Horton's attorney at closing are receiving a "Special Warranty Deed" to their homes, rather than the far more common "General Warranty Deed." These "Special Warranty Deeds" grant D.R. Horton, a Delaware company and D.R. H. Energy, Inc.², any and all rights, titles and interests to subsurface resources beneath the homebuyer's property.

Fracking is the process of drilling into shale deposits and using water and toxic chemicals to break up the subsurface rock and extract natural gas. The fracking process usually comes in from the side, it is not drilling straight down like an oil well, so D.R. Horton and D.R. H. Energy do not need to own the land they intend to frack, if they own the rights to the minerals buried deep beneath the land.

As you can see in the deeds below D.R. Horton and their pals D.R.H. Energy have reserved:

"Any and all oil rights, mineral rights, natural gas rights, rights to all other hydrocarbons, geothermal heat rights, water rights and all products derived from these, collectively 'Subsurface Resources'."

They have also secured:

"the perpetual right to drill, mine, explore and operate for and produce, store and remove any of the Subsurface Resources on or from the Property by any means whatsoever including without limitation the right to whipstock or directionally drill and mine, from lands other than the Property wells, tunnels and shafts into, through or across the subsurface of the Property...and to redrill, retunnel, equip, maintain, repair, deepen and operate any such wells or mines..." ---All italics added for emphasis.

Yikes!

We sought comment from numerous Durham politicos and finally got this back from Amy Blalock, a Senior Public Affairs Specialist in the Office of Public Affairs, of the City of Durham,

"Ultimately, the State’s General Assembly will make decisions about where North Carolina goes on this issue, and local government authority over the matter will be determined by the State. In the meantime, all property owners should carefully consider any offers to purchase mineral rights, thoroughly research the matter themselves, and if necessary, consult an attorney with expertise in real estate and mineral rights law."

Doesn't exactly sound like city government has your back on this one, Durham.

D.R. Horton spokesman did not return calls requesting comment.

Considering fracking's potential list of harms include everything from ground water and well water pollution to increased seismic activity (yep, earthquakes) in previously seismically inactive areas, homebuyers ought to look long and hard at their deeds before signing anything.



See full size document here.



See full size document here.



See full size document here.



See full size document here.


Notes
¹The Register of Deeds Public Records Search reveals five Durham developments where D.R.H. Energy has secured similar rights. We have also seen similar deeds for properties in Granville, Franklin and Wake Counties.

²Think the similarities in the two companies' names might be more than coincidental?

Labels: Durham, ecology, energy policy, Ethically questionable, Politics

The story is only a week old, and the NFL effective buried the lead by announcing the New Orleans Saints bounty scandal the same week star quarterback Peyton Manning became a free agent.

Perhaps, if you are not a sports fan you have not heard about the story. According to the NFL, the Saints had an organized bounty program to reward players for knocking opposing teams' players physically out of the game, cash bonuses for incapacitating them via injury.

The hue and cry about this discovery from the talking heads in the media, especially at ESPN¹, has been ludicrous.

Our view, "What a bunchy of smarmy politically correct nonsense!"

The Clarion Content has no love for retired quarterback, and noted publicity hound, Brett Favre, but we think he got it right in this case. Favre said essentially, bounties or no bounties, it is a tough guy's league and people are basically trying to knock you out of the game on every play.

We at the Clarion Content cannot stand all the sanctimonious carping of the media mavens, like Dan Patrick, about how awful, how wrong, how devious these bounties the Saints put out on opposition players were.

Pul-leeze. The same folks who have been moaning about the NFL turning into flag football are suddenly horrified by bounties?? The same folks who were running weekly segments called "Jacked up!" and laughing their butts off at huge de-cleating hits are now disturbed by bounties??

Uh, huh, what?

It comes as a shock to you folks that the defenses were trying to knock quarterbacks and other star players out of the game? Really? That's a surprise?

Or it was the part where they were getting paid extra for it that bothered you morons?

Isn't that what their salary was for to begin with? NFL defensive players are performing a glorified version of the little kids' game, "Kill the Guy," week in and week out. Now somehow, because there are bonuses ponied up by the players involved its amoral?

What a crock!

Forgive the harsh language, but it is the same bullshit we see across a litany of other capitalist contexts. Whatever egregious violation of human rights or environmental degradation is being wrought, so long as it keeps costs down and it is largely behind closed doors or unreported, the mass of morons, will casually bury their heads in the sand and deny it is even happening. What Walmart/Nike/MNC X is paying little kids pennies a day in Asia to make our toys/clothes/crap? Eyes shut tight, head buried in sand, "No they aren't. No they aren't."

Undeniable mass media exposure brings said scandal to light, and the tune changes to "Oh wait, they are. Dang. Somebody needs to do something about that. Now! That's terrible."²

The standard political correct operating procedures see sanctimony rear its ugly head, and those caught out blantantly being abusive are punished, but real systemic change is never considered.³

In this case, sports is once again a microcosm of society. The reality is football is a hyper-violent sport. Kids are paralyzed and permanently injured playing the game every year. High school and college players sustain thousands of concussions annually, for a shot to make it into a pro league where the minimum annual salary is nearly $400 grand a year. Sudden traumatic death and/or disabling injury is an obstacle, but no kid ever thinks it is going to happen to them. Many serious injuries happen on otherwise seemingly innocuous plays.

Fans cheer the big hits. Violence sells.⁴

Pro football is a multi-billion dollar sport, and they play to win the game. To foolishly single out the New Orleans Saints, to pretend that their deliberate attempts to injure opponents are somehow unique is beyond ludicrous, it is civil hypocrisy of the most society annihilating sort. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Don't blame the player, change the game. Or accept that Americans are getting what we pay for, a brutal violent contest between highly compensated young athletes.


Notes
¹One of the leading practitioners of yellow journalism today.

²A similar example: Joseph Kony has been running the LRA conscripting child soldiers and committing a litany of heinous crimes for more than twenty-five years, only now when the visual evidence is positively shoved down their proverbial throats are the masses reacting. During the reign of King George the II, more than 5 million people died from civil war in the Congo, there was no hullabaloo. No call for intervention, Americans, en masse, ignored the tragedy.

³This is why most American's are fine with the United States intervening in Libya and equally fine with the United States ignoring the wholesale slaughter in Syria. It is the left to the morally stolid, the John McCain's, Ron Paul's, Dennis Kucinich's, Noam Chomsky's of the world to point out the blatant hypocrisy. Alcohol related hazing is treated the same way. 1) Deny it. 2) Over-punish the individuals involved when tragedy occurs as it inevitably will periodically. 3) Ignore the system until it happens again in such a way that the horror is an unavoidable spectacle.

⁴Why do you think Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) took off just when they started trying to limit the violence in boxing? Why did NASCAR, for all its attempts to run and hide from its roots, suddenly bring back the "Rubbing is racing" mantra when attendance and ratings figures started to fall off a cliff? In America, violence sells.

Labels: economics, ESPN, Ethically questionable, NFL, sports, Sports Economics

S S D D

Just in case you were under the mistaken impression Barack Obama represented some kind of change from King George the II, read his Attorney General Eric Holder's defense of the Presidential right to assassinate U.S. citizens here¹ in the L.A. Times.

This will escalate. Inevitably.

It will function much as Bill Clinton's assertions about the right of the President to keep certain things secret despite subpoenas (after all it was only a bj²) which led to Bush II's determination that he and the Dick could keep secret the non-evidence they had to justify attacking Iraq.³


Notes
¹ The reality is: The administration is asserting the authority to kill any American whom the president declares to be an enemy of the state. So sayeth Jameel Jaffer, a national security attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Clarion Content's editor-in-chief agrees with them hippies on this one.

²The man did have a complaint insofar as they started out investigating an Arkansas real estate deal that began before his first term and just kept extending their efforts and the scope of the investigation until they caught him getting head in the Oval Office six and half years later.

³At a cost, so far, to America's citizens and future generations of $3 trillion dollars plus, $4 per gallon gasoline, and a cratering world economy.

Labels: 2008's President, 2012 presidential election, constitutional issues, Ethically questionable, Politics

It has become a disturbing trend, one more sign that our government is off the rails, the compulsion to obliterate evidence, to eradicate history, so it cannot be reexamined. When the Clarion Content's editorial board was growing up, this was derided as something "they" had to do in the Eastern Block, hide the files, destroy the records. Perhaps that was a false pretense, as the Church Committee showed, the rot had started somewhat earlier.¹

What is most disturbing in the modern age is the lack of apology or embarrassment shown by authority when it comes to wiping the slate clean. King George the II simply told reporters they could not report what they saw in Iraq. The New York City Police Department pressure washed and scrubbed clean all traces of the Occupy protesters they booted out of Zuccotti Park.

Whitewash the truth, delete the emails has become the socio-political norm in America. So, it should probably come as not surprise that the compound that housed former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, before he was executed, is being bulldozed to the ground. Of course, in keeping with the Man's standard methodology, security forces blocked journalists and photographers from getting close to the site as it was being leveled.

"Nothing to see here, folks. Move along."

It is a bitter irony of the Information Age that the malleability of history has become ever greater.


Notes
¹Somewhere in China around 1944-45, or perhaps it was in the jungles of Burma, or Laos, America switched sides in the confusion between nationalists/militarists/freedom fighters/communists/people power/oppression. It was a complicated equation and an easy one to get lost in, amongst the particulars. Joe McCarthy was able to ruin lives because wide swaths of otherwise good folks were not able to grasp the details. Then, in a bi-polar era, nefarious action was easy to justify, America simply portrayed itself (to its citizens, too) as the lesser of two evils. When the Soviet Union collapsed, that rationale disappeared with it.

Labels: cop stories, corruption, Ethically questionable, Politics

Thinking about the Occupy movement?

Labels: 2012 presidential election, constitutional issues, Ethically questionable, political quips-n-quotes, Politics, public protest

We caught this strange and ugly scene on Bill Simmons vehicle, Grantland. Georgetown University and a local Chinese team, against whom they are playing an exhibition game, got in an ugly bench clearing brawl. It lasted less than a minute, but the visuals are disturbing. The crowd boos and throws plastic water bottles when the Georgetown team exits the court. Grantland links to the Washington Post's article here, which reads like a wire report: making no attempt at explanation or understanding. Just the facts ma'am.



Was there anything else going on beyond a roughly contested basketball game here? Anything regionally or locally that was relevant? Was their a strain of anti-Americanism here?



America ought be very careful about pissing off the Chinese holders of almost all of our sovereign debt.

Labels: college basketball, Ethically questionable, Politics, sports

Ruth as a Red Sox

The Clarion Content and the Sports Editor are familiar with the story of the Chicago Black Sox and the fixed 1919 World Series. We imagine many of our readers are as well. But had you heard the tale about the 1918 World Series between Babe Ruth's Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs? We hadn't either.

The New York Times had a fascinating article in its sports pages over the weekend (and fortunately we are not over our article allotment yet). The Times, relying heavily on a book by Sean Deveney called "The Original Curse," detailed the case that the Cubs threw the 1918 World Series. It centers around Cubs rightfielder Max Flack, the only man ever to get picked off-base twice in a single World Series game. In the same game, Flack also misplayed a Babe Ruth flyball into a triple by playing excessively shallow. In the final World Series game, Flack dropped a routine, two-out, can of corn, to right field in the fourth inning; his error allowed both Boston runs to score in the clinching 2-1 victory, a four games to one Sox triumph.

The NY Times reports there was strangely no celebration on the field. America's entry World War I was the big story, the following baseball season had been put on hold and most players assumed they would be drafted. Attendance was down. The economy was wobbly. World Series payout shares were going to be less than half of what had been anticipated. Conditions for a fix were ripe.

Anecdotal evidence from convicted Chicago Black Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte, indicated that several of his co-conspirators discussed the Cubs having been offered $10,000 per man to fix the 1918 Series.

All the principals are long dead and there is no more than Cicotte's words and the circumstantial evidence of Flack's failures. It is still an interesting story. Read more here.

Labels: baseball, Ethically questionable, sports

The SEC can always be counted on to top itself, that is to say, when you think that you have seen just how slimy it get can get, the SEC is happy to demonstrate it can go lower still. So in off-season where March saw four Auburn football players charged with first degree robbery, in an incident where students in an off-campus house were robbed at gunpoint, the University of Georgia is angling to beat that standard.

The Auburn robbers included the leading tackler on the national title team. UGA can trump that however, because this week they demonstrated that they like players who are criminals while they are still star high school recruits. Over at Auburn and Alabama, you have to wait until you get into school to become a felon, not at Georgia.

Seven Georgia players were the victims of locker-room thefts of iPods, iPhones and other small electronic devices. Whodunnit? Allegedly, three top Georgia football recruits who stole the items during an open house event at the Butts-Mehre Heritage Hall. Because the value of the property stolen did not exceed $1,500 the recruits in question were only charged with misdemeanor theft, clearly, leaving Alabama and Auburn free to argue that they recruit guys that are harder than that...

As ESPN SEC blogger Chris Low notes, this likely will hardlly even slow the recruiting of these kids in the scum filled pond that is SEC football, "Talent usually wins out, even when a kid has a troubled past." So that even after word of this incident broke, two of the three recruits involved were invited by Nick Saban and Alabama to attend their Spring football game.

Labels: college football, Ethically questionable, NCAA, sports, Sports Economics