Police officer reported as killed "execution-style" may have actually staged own suicide: http://t.co/xBJqZIsxWt
— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) September 15, 2015
More than one thousand people are killed by police every year in America
Nearly sixty percent of victims did not have a gun or were involved in activities that should not require police intervention such as harmless "quality of life" behaviors or mental health crises.
This year is no different. There have only been nine days this year when the police have not killed somebody. Last month alone, the police killed 125 people. This must stop. We must end police violence so we can live and feel safe in this country.
We can live in an America where the police do not kill people. Police in England, Germany, Australia, Japan, and even cities like Newark, NJ, and Richmond, CA, demonstrate that public safety can be ensured without killing civilians. By implementing the right policy changes, we can end police killings and other forms of police violence in the United States.
#BlackLivesMatter was created in 2012 after Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted for his crime, and dead 17-year old Trayvon was post-humously placed on trial for his own murder. Rooted in the experiences of Black people in this country who actively resist our de-humanization, #BlackLivesMatter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society.Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes.
It goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all. Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement.
When we say Black Lives Matter, we are broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state. We are talking about the ways in which Black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity. How Black poverty and genocide is state violence. How 2.8 million Black people are locked in cages in this country is state violence. How Black women bearing the burden of a relentless assault on our children and our families is state violence. How Black queer and trans folks bear a unique burden from a hetero-patriarchal society that disposes of us like garbage and simultaneously fetishizes us and profits off of us, and that is state violence. How 500,000 Black people in the US are undocumented immigrants and relegated to the shadows. How Black girls are used as negotiating chips during times of conflict and war. How Black folks living with disabilities and different abilities bear the burden of state sponsored Darwinian experiments that attempt to squeeze us into boxes of normality defined by white supremacy, and that is state violence.
#BlackLivesMatter is working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. We affirm our contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression. We have put our sweat equity and love for Black people into creating a political project–taking the hashtag off of social media and into the streets. The call for Black lives to matter is a rallying cry for ALL Black lives striving for liberation.
#BlackLivesMatter co-founder warns presidential candidates: ‘We will shut down every single debate’
Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors criticized both Sen. Bernie Sanders and ex-Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley after Saturday’s protest at the Netroots Nation progressive conference.
“He couldn’t take 15 more minutes of the heat,” Cullors said of Sanders in an interview on This Week in Blackness, making reference to the senator ending his appearance as demonstrators at the event walked out en masse.
Journalist and activist Jose Antonio Vargas, who interviewed both Democratic candidates during the forum, later told The Raw Story that he was directed to wrap up his discussion with Sanders 15 minutes ahead of schedule.
Cullors told This Week host L. Joy Williams that she felt neither O’Malley nor Sanders were “humble enough” during their town hall appearance, and called on presidential candidates to be willing to openly discuss issues of race and gender.
“No more skirting around the issues,” Cullor said. “We will shut down every single debate.”
With respect to Greece, the precise thing that European elites did to set the current chain of events in motion was to replace private debt with public during the 2010 first “bailout of Greece”. Prior to that event, it was obvious that blame was multipolar. Here are the banks, in France, in Germany, that foolishly lent. Not just to Greece, but to Goldman’s synthetic CDOs and every other piece of idiot paper they could carry with low risk-weights. In 2010, the EU, ECB, and IMF laundered a bailout of mostly French and German banks through the Greek fisc. Cash flowed into Greece only so it could flow out to rickety banks. Now, suddenly, the banks were absolved. There were very few bad loans left on the books of European lenders, everyone was clean, no bad actors at all. Except one. There were the institutions, the “troika”, clearly the good guys, so “helpful” with their generous offer of funds. And then there was Greece. What had been a mudwrestling match, everybody dirty, was transformed into mass of powdered wigs accusing a single filthy penitent (or, when the people with their savings in just-rescued banks decide to be generous, a petulant misbehaving child).
When the game was up, when the global house of credit cards collapsed in the late Aughts, European leaders had a choice. They had knowingly and purposefully brought weak states into the Eurozone, because they genuinely, even nobly, wished to build a large, strong, United Europe. When they did so, they understood there would be crises. A unified Europe, they had always claimed, would be forged one crisis at a time. The right thing to have done for Europe at this point would have been to point out the regulatory errors and misaligned incentives that encouraged profligate lending and enabled corruption and waste among borrowers, and fix those. Banks that had made bad loans would acknowledge losses. The banks themselves would have to be restructured or bailed out.
But “bank restructuring” is a euphemism for imposing losses on wealthy creditors. And explicit bank bailouts are humiliations of elites, moments when the mask comes off and the usually tacit means by which states preserve and enhance the comfort of the comfortable must give way to very visible, very unpopular, direct cash flows.
The choice Europe’s leaders faced was to preserve the union or preserve the wealth, prestige, and status of the community of people who were their acquaintances and friends and selves but who are entirely unrepresentative of the European public. They chose themselves. The formal institutions of the EU endure, but European community is now failing fast.
It is difficult to overstate how deeply Europe’s leaders betrayed the ideals of European integration in their handing of the Greek crisis. The first and most fundamental goal of European integration was to blur the lines of national feeling and interest through commerce and interdependence, in order to prevent the fractures along ethnonational lines that made a charnel house of the continent, twice. That is the first thing, the main rule, that anyone who claims to represent the European project must abide: We solve problems as Europeans together, not as nations in conflict.
...
The fact of the matter is no country, not Germany, not France, would voluntarily put up with the sort of “adjustment” that has been forced on Greece, for the good reason that gratuitous great depressions are not actually helpful to an economy. Creditors have had five years to mismanage Greece and they’ve done a startlingly effective job. Syriza has had five months to object. However much you may dislike their negotiating style, however little you think of their competence, Greece’s catastrophe was not Syriza’s work. If creditors respond to Syriza’s “intransigence” with maneuvers that cause yet more devastation, that will be on the creditors. Blaming victims for having insufficiently perfect leaders is standard fare for apologists of predation. Unfortunately, understanding this may be of little comfort to the disemboweled prey.
Europe’s creditors are behaving exactly as one might naively predict private creditors would behave, seeking to get as much blood from the stone as quickly as possible, indifferent to the cost in longer-term growth. And that, in fact, is a puzzle! Greece’s creditors are not nervous lenders panicked over their own financial situation, but public sector institutions representing primarily governments that are in no financial distress at all. They really shouldn’t be behaving like this.
I think the explanation is quite simple, though. Having recast a crisis caused by a combustible mix of regulatory failure and elite venality into a morality play about profligate Greeks who must be punished, Eurocrats are now engaged in what might be described as “loan-shark theater”. They are putting on a show for the electorates they inflamed in order to preserve their own prestige. The show must go on.
Well, we've already found a secret memo coming out of the Justice Department. They're now going to go after twelve new perversions: things like bestiality, polygamy, having sex with little boys and making that legal. And not only that, but they have a whole list of strategies to go after the churches, the pastors, and any businesses that tries to assert their religious liberty. This is comin' and it's coming like a tidal wave....They're coming down with twelve new perversions, and LGBT just isn't, is only the beginning. They're going to start expanding it to the other perversions.Very precise, and very magical number that: twelve.
"The Supreme Court's stay unnecessarily puts lives in danger by allowing unsafe facilities to continue to perform abortions," said the Republican presidential candidate in a statement. "I am confident the court will ultimately uphold these commonsense measures to protect the health and safety of Texas women."Women's health, yeah that's what he's concerned about in shutting down clinics that often provide other services for women's health, beside abortion.
Now on healthcare, the issue is again greater good. Obamacare is obviously yet another federal entitlement program designed to help poor Americans at the expense of non-poor Americans. The president sold the law on the basis that it's a benefit for all; but only his party bought that....Subsequently, health insurance costs have risen for many working Americans, and a significant number of Doctors are refusing to take government-mandated insurance programs. But the four liberal judges don't really care about the overall impact of Obamacare. They want free healthcare for the poor. That's what they want. And they'll find a legal justification for it, no matter what! the actual law says. Add in Roberts and Kennedy, and presto! another enormous social safety-net that benefits the have-nots survives a valid legal challenge.Note that there is no overlap between 'working Americans' and 'poor Americans' for Billo.
First of all, you're only talkin' three to five percent of the population. Now, I know a lot of people, the thought is that you're born gay. That's, actually not really true in most cases. In some cases, I think it probably is. But in a lot of cases, if you got back to it, there are parental issues, there's abuse, and and that has a lot to do with it. And as you see a collapse of family -- I don't think that it's a coincidence that a collapse of family is, is directly inverse proportional or inverse related to the rise in people who identify as being gay.Are we really living in the year 2015 ? Sure it's not still 1985 ?
I've not heard any body talking about this angle of what the Supreme Court did on Friday in their ruling imposing sodomy-based marriage on the United States of America. Now the whole world, this includes the Supreme Court, they know how the religion of peace deals with homosexuals -- they tie them to chairs and they throw them off of eight-storey buildings, and if they survive the fall, they stone them to death....Now how does the Muslim world justify their attacks on the United States ? Because they believe that we are the chief exporter of wickedness and decadence in the world. That's why they call us 'The Great Satan'. When we insult their god, their religion, their prophet, or their values, they claim a divine sanction to punish us for our transgressions. Now, the Left, interesting enough, actually agrees with the Muslim world on this score. Remember what happened with Pamela Geller and her 'Draw Mohammed Contest' in Garland, Texas. When the, when two Muslims shot the place up, who did the Left blame? They blamed Pamela Geller. She had provoked, she had incited, she had insulted the blessed prophet Mohammed and thus had brought this violence on herself. According to the Left, she got what she deserved. But now, what the Supreme Court did on Friday was to insult and offend the entire Muslim world, by celebrating and gloating and gushing over a sin that Muslims regard as so offensive to Allah that its practitioners must be thrown to their deaths. So the Supreme Court just gave the Muslim world another reason to attack us, and a terrorist attack appears imminent. So, if Muslims attack us, and they refer in any way to our celebration of homosexuality as part of the reason, then according to Liberals, culpability must be laid for that attack at the feet of the United States Supreme Court.He'll be jumping for joy the second a bomb goes off, and the ambulance-sirens start to be heard in the distance. 'See, I told ya! It's the fault of all those perverted corrupt homosexual Liberals destroyin' America!'
Leader: The retreat of social democracy
Throughout Europe, the populist right is becoming more acceptable to many. Meanwhile, social democrats are failing to adapt to globalisation.
...in Europe and throughout the west, social democracy is in crisis or retreat. The centre left is locked out of power in parliamentary systems in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and, of course, the United Kingdom. On the Continent, the experience is the same for the centre left in Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Hungary and now also Denmark, following the defeat of the centre-left bloc, which had been led by Helle Thorning-Schmidt.
The British left once looked to Scandinavia for inspiration and guidance. “If you want the American dream – go to Finland,” Ed Miliband observed. Yet Finland turfed out its centre-left coalition two months ago; three of the four Nordic countries now face being run by governments of the right. Only in Sweden is the centre left in power.
When Mr Miliband was elected as Labour leader in 2010, he was convinced that the world would turn left after the financial crisis. He gambled his entire leadership on this belief (and it was no more than that) – and he lost. Voters were certainly disturbed by widening inequality but just as important were desires for fiscal rectitude, balanced budgets and tighter controls on immigration.
The mainstream centre left has also produced an anaemic response to the rise of identity politics. It is true that parties of the radical left – such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain – have capitalised on a general mood of disenchantment but, significantly, both are Eurosceptic. More frequently, nationalism has been channelled by the mainstream centre right as well as populist insurgencies. Indeed, it was the rise of the right-wing Danish People’s Party – a Scandinavian version of the UK Independence Party – that contributed significantly to the defeat of the centre-left bloc in Denmark.
Throughout Europe, the populist right is becoming more acceptable to many. Meanwhile, social democrats are suffering from what the political scientist Peter Mair termed “indifference on the part of both the citizenry and the political class: they are withdrawing and disengaging from one another”. To many voters, the feeling of solidarity between fellow citizens so crucial to social democracy has become increasingly meaningless in an age of globalised mass migration: parties of the centre left have failed to adapt to globalisation and the collapse in trade union membership. Most fundamentally, they have not convincingly answered the existential question of what the left is for when parties of both left and right are committed to cutting public spending.
 |
| Photo: Christopher Koppes on Flickr. CC 2.0 |
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press
BEIJING (AP) — Often the target of U.S. human rights accusations, China wasted little time returning such charges following the shooting at a historic black church in South Carolina that left nine people dead. Elsewhere around the world, the attack renewed perceptions that Americans have too many guns and have yet to overcome racial tensions.
Some said the attack reinforced their reservations about personal security in the U.S. — particularly as a non-white foreigner — while others said they'd still feel safe if they were to visit.
Especially in Australia and northeast Asia, where firearms are strictly controlled and gun violence almost unheard of, many were baffled by the determination among many Americans to own guns despite repeated mass shootings, such as the 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults.
"We don't understand America's need for guns," said Philip Alpers, director of the University of Sydney's GunPolicy.org project that compares gun laws across the world. "It is very puzzling for non-Americans."
A frontier nation like the U.S., Australia had a similar attitude toward firearms prior to a 1996 mass shooting that killed 35. Soon after, tight restrictions on gun ownership were imposed and no such incidents have been reported since.
A similar effect has been seen elsewhere.
"The USA is completely out of step with the rest of the world. We've tightened our gun laws and have seen a reduction," said Claire Taylor, the director of media and public relations at Gun Free South Africa.
Ahmad Syafi'i Maarif, a prominent Indonesian intellectual and former leader of Muhammadiyah, one of the country's largest Muslim organizations, said the church shooting shocked many.
"People all over the world believed that racism had gone from the U.S. when Barack Obama was elected to lead the superpower, twice," he said. "But the Charleston shooting has reminded us that in fact, the seeds of racism still remain and were embedded in the hearts of small communities there, and can explode at any time, like a terrorist act by an individual."
A 21-year-old white man, Dylann Storm Roof, now faces nine counts of murder for the South Carolina shooting. An acquaintance said Roof had complained that "blacks were taking over the world."
Many places around the world struggle with racism and prejudice against outsiders, but mass shootings in the U.S., where the Constitution's second amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms, often receive widespread global attention.Probably, no-one's more disturbed by or frustrated by the American obsession with guns and flat-out denial of continuing racism (shout-out for Chief Justice John Roberts ! *) than...the slight minority sane population of Americans. Unfortunately, the history & the culture of said nation seems to have encouraged or attracted the development of an above-normal percentage of out-and-out lunatics in the population.
Let's be bold -- let's join the rest of the world and go metric," he said during his launch. He clarified during a question-and-answer session after that it would be a "symbolic integration" meant to show goodwill to the world.
He acknowledged that shifting to the metric system could cost the U.S., but that "the economic benefits that would come in would surpass those costs of putting up new signs and the like."
Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has already incorporated it into an attack. In an email to POLITICO, his spokesman Michael Reed said Chafee is a “Typical Democrat — wants to make America more European. Governor Jindal would rather make the world more American.”
So, why is Investigative Committee member Markin speculating about conspiracy theories surrounding US moon landings that happened decades ago? In his op-ed, the Russian official also emphasized that “US authorities had crossed a line by launching a large-scale corruption probe targeting nine Fifa officials,” according to the Moscow Times.We're descending to this level of pettiness in our new cold war already ?
US police kill more than two people a day, report suggests
Data collected by the Washington Post newspaper suggests that the number of people shot by US police is twice as high as official figures claim.Well, that's not really surprising. Probably even more than that.
The paper said that during the first five months of this year, 385 people - more than two a day - were killed.
The number of black people was disproportionately high among the victims, especially unarmed ones.
A national debate is raging about police use of deadly force, especially against minorities. To understand why and how often these shootings occur, The Washington Post is compiling a database of every fatal shooting by police in 2015, as well as of every officer killed by gunfire in the line of duty.
Police are authorized to use deadly force only when they fear for their lives or the lives of others. So far, just three of the 385 fatal shootings have resulted in an officer being charged with a crime — less than 1 percent.
Felix Kiprono is in love, and the young Kenyan lawyer is aiming high.
According to the daily newspaper Nairobian, the object of Kiprono’s affections is none other than President Barack Obama’s daughter, Malia.
Just how far is Kiprono willing to go to snatch the girl of his dreams? According to the Nairobian, he is prepared to offer the leader of the free world a dowry of 50 cows, 70 sheep, and 30 goats.
"People might say I am after the family's money, which is not the case. My love is real," Kiprono told the Nairobian newspaper.
Just how smitten is Kiprono with Malia Obama?
"I got interested in her in 2008," he said. "As a matter of fact, I haven't dated anyone since and promise to be faithful to her. I have shared this with my family and they are willing to help me raise the bride price."
He said he plans to deliver a letter to the US Embassy in Kenya to officially declare his intention.."
Ours will be a simple life. I will teach Malia how to milk a cow, cook ugali (a starchy dish) and prepare mursik (a sour milk) like any other Kalenjin woman," he said
Dr. Rand Paul
