Blake's father, who can do anything with his hands, has also taken up photography.
Buy American - Is it possible benefits of media and entertainment technology, which is more visual oriented, has reached a level where thinking no longer predominates? Think about this, or can you?
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Members of the Democrat Party and an assortment of liberals have gone off the deep end along with corporate America. Names of food products are being changed so as not to offend. TV shows have been removed, sexual preference now dictates over biological sex. America is becoming a nation controlled by those afflicted with extreme sensitivity anxieties. Our nation always elevated the individual over government but the PC cops are carrying this rush to sanitize beyond insanity.
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Meanwhile, entire cities have been taken over by anarchists demanding their rules replace historical norms pertaining to law and order. Weak mayors and irrational governors have abdicated their administrative duties and responsibilities out of fear and cowardice. They drop to their knees, wash feet, hug anarchists and ban police from performing their duty or impose extreme restraints so the police simply fear responding when called upon.
Abolishing the Police
A Terrorist Dream Come True
A Terrorist Dream Come True
by Patrick Dunleavy
IPT News
What began as a sincere cry for justice in the tragic killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has evolved into a critical examination of policing in the United States. Some are calling for drastic changes in the way police departments operate in society.
And while that call has garnered support and triggered debate, it has also produced confusion. Some voices demand that we "defund the police." What that actually means is not yet clear.
A more dangerous clarion call has come forth reaching fever pitch among some and that is to put an end to policing altogether. Mariame Kaba, director of Project NIA, penned an oped in the New York Times recently Friday calling for just that.
"The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers," she wrote. "But don't get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don't want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete."
Words are important and while we can debate what is or isn't meant by the word defund, there is no ambiguity in the word abolish.
The group Muslims4Abolition, which counts Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam and Linda Sarsour's MPower Change among its supporters, wants "... to be part of the movement to abolish bail, abolish jails, abolish the police, abolish prisons, abolish immigration custody, abolish state surveillance, and to build the world we deserve."
In other words, they want to completely eradicate every important component in the criminal justice system. "It is a fact," they claim, "that police brutality is a leading cause of death amongst young Black men."
While black people, especially black men have been killed by police, it is far from a leading cause of death.
Accidents, illness, and homicide are the dominant causes of death among black men 44 years old and younger, Centers for Disease Control data shows.
So far, the movement to abolish police seems limited to activists and protesters. Elected officials seem more focused on reforms.
But what would the Muslims4Abolition world look like if the politics changed, and who would be happiest in it? One group that probably would be ecstatic over the thought of no cops are the terrorists.
Police are often expected to wear a variety of hats: counselor, confessor, protector, etc. The role of the local police officer and how he or she acts as a deterrent to terrorism is often overlooked.
We think of elite federal agencies like the CIA, FBI, or the even Navy Seals as the vanguard in defense from terrorist attacks. Too often, we forget the numerous occasions where it was a local cop who saved the day.
The FBI's vaunted Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) is comprised of city, state, and local law enforcement officers. The JTTF could not successfully operate without them.
Historically it has been a local officer or beat cop simply doing his or her job that deterred or thwarted the terrorists' evil goal.
For example, it was a New York Police Department cop named Don Sadowy who in 1993 uncovered the rear axle of the van used in the first World Trade Center bombing. That piece of evidence was used to identify the perpetrators who had rented the van from a company in New Jersey. Before becoming a cop, Sadowy attended an Automotive High School in Brooklyn where he learned to distinguish and recognize every component part of a motor vehicle. To the untrained eye, that axle might have simply appeared as another piece of twisted metal in the rubble.
Two years later, a routine traffic stop by Trooper Charlie Hanger resulted in the arrest of domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh, responsible for the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 and injured hundreds more.
Hanger later remembered noticing "an old yellow Mercury" driving with no license tag. After pulling the car over, Hanger noticed a bulge in the driver's jacket. It turned out to be a loaded .45 caliber Glock, which led to an arrest.
It was hours later that Hanger learned he nabbed the Oklahoma City bomber.
In 1997, two Long Island Railroad police officers with less than two years on the job, John Kowalchuk and Eric Huber, played key roles in uncovering a plot by Islamic terrorists to bomb the New York City subway. They were approached by someone with information regarding a terrorist bomb factory in Brooklyn. The officers relayed the details to the NYPD Emergency Services Division, which responded to the location and captured the terrorists and defused the explosives before innocent lives were lost.
In 2015, Garland, Texas police officer Greg Stevens took down two heavily armed ISIS supported terrorists as they exited a car, hoping to attack a cartoon contest involving images of Islam's prophet Muhammad at the Curtis Culwell Center.
Stevens returned fire as the two terrorists started shooting.
"This whole event probably didn't take no more than 10 and probably 15 seconds," Stevens remembered several years later. "I'm a pretty good shooter. I'm not a great shooter. My training kicked in. I wasn't formulating a plan."
In 2017, NYPD officer Ryan Nash single-handedly captured Sayfullo Saipov, an Islamic terrorist who had just mowed down eight innocent civilians with a truck and injured 11 others during an ISIS inspired attack. Officer Nash was on a routine call at a nearby high school when he heard the call of the terror attack.
Saipov tried to run off after crashing his truck, but Nash and other officers were able to stop him. Nash shot Saipov in the abdomen, but the suspect recovered and remains in jail pending trial.
How many more people might have been injured or killed that day if Nash and his fellow officers weren't there to respond?
The list goes on of ordinary men and women wearing the uniform and carrying the badge who, with extraordinary courage, save lives, prevent tragedies, and capture the bad guys every day.
Calls for police reform are reasonable.
But to abolish the police would mean removing the very fabric of American society that protects us. That is neither wise nor well thought out. It is perilous.
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Proprietors of stores that have served communities for decades are either boarded up, completed destroyed or entire inventories has been pillaged. Seattle looks worse than a city in a third world country. Trump did not know when he referred to some nations in a derogatory manner that he would eventually be talking about America.
Trending Now:
Anarchists Create New ‘Autonomous Zone’ in Portland, Police Destroy it Within Hours of Its Formation
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Reverse bigotry rules the land.
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28 Congressional Democrats Sign Letter Demanding Department of Education Allow Biological Males in Girls Sports+++
https://babylonbee.com/news/cr
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A House Committee Just Held a Congressional Hearing on…Eliminating “Whiteness”
(TheFreedomFlag.com)- Social justice warriors do more than just get your favorite TV shows canceled…they have infiltrated politics. On Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing, a real congressional hearing, on eliminating “whiteness.” Yes, really.
The hearing, which was called, “Health Care Inequality: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in COVID-19 and the Health Care System,” was held by the subcommittee on Wednesday and looked at the impact of whiteness on the U.S. health care system.
In a memo about the hearing, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Frank Pallone claimed that studies “show that racial and ethnic minorities receive lower-quality health care even when insurance status or severity of conditions are comparable.”
The hearing included three witnesses. They were the president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, Avik Roy, the president of the National Medical Association, Oliver T. Brooks, MD, and a pediatrician from Palo Alto Medical Foundation, Rhea Boyd, MD.
Testimony from Rhea Boyd is controversial for a number of reasons, in part because of some alarming comments recently made by her. Even the Wall Street Journal discussed her extreme comments recently, including her pre-prepared written testimony to the committee in which she says it is an injustice that white Americans (on average!) make more money than “Latinx” and Black households. In another article, published in January this year, she even suggested eliminating whiteness.
Just take a look at what she wrote:
“This entanglement between access and scarcity, privilege and loss, means white people’s unearned advantages have always been tethered to a legacy of untold deaths. This is not the result of an emotional positioning, but a structural one. In Dying of Whiteness, Metzl intricately outlines this structural framework but too often anchors it to an emotional foundation his analysis both critiques and depends on. This is perhaps why his conclusion is to “Promote more healthy and self reflective frameworks…of structural whiteness” when the only solution is to eliminate whiteness all together.”
The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed denouncing her insane comments, and she even received some heat from fellow leftists.
And yet, Boyd was given the chance to testify before a congressional hearing…
If you’re mad enough to watch it, take a look at the video below.
It’s nearly four hours of conspiracy theories and anti-white racism.
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The Morning Briefing: Polls Are Getting Worse for Trump, Which Probably Means He Wins in a Landslide
Poll Trolling
We're going to engage in a little #TGIF speculation about the state of the nation and our upcoming presidential election. This is a topic I've tiptoed around lately because I've not been exactly overflowing with optimism.
I gotta say, thanks to the rioting CHAZ/CHOP types on the Left, I'm perking up a bit these days.
In a Briefing last month, I wondered whether anyone believed the polls even though I knew the question was largely rhetorical for devoted readers here. Well, maybe not for our regular trolls, but they believed the polls in 2016 too and that's a big part of what made election night so delicious. That's why we keep the trolls around, for moments like that. And for the clicks.
It's been a little over three weeks since that post and the polls are getting worse for President Trump. A CNN poll at the beginning of the month had Trump ...
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What Became of America?
By Yonoson Rosenblum
"The centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . " (W.B. Yeats)
Toward the climax of his "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., envisioned an America in which "my four children will no longer by judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Like Abraham Lincoln, in the debates over slavery, MLK made his case based on the promise of America's foundational document, the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..."
That dream is aspirational, incapable of being fully realized in any human society. But America has come a long way since 1963. A black man was twice elected president, and a black woman born in Birmingham, Alabama served as secretary of state and national security advisor. South Carolina, the heart of the Confederacy and hotbed of secession, today has a black senator, and twice elected a dark-skinned woman of Indian descent as governor.
And, as the reaction to the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer makes clear, a black man can no longer be killed with impunity anywhere in the United States.
BUT NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER from Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society than contemporary identity politics, with its portrayal of society exclusively in terms of matrixes of oppression, in which skin color becomes the defining fact about each human being, the dividing line between oppressor and victim. To proponents of intersectionality, the only admissible explanation of any difference between two races — in rates of incarceration, income, representation in the Ivy League, etc. — is racism, that is, white supremacy and black victimhood. (Only the NBA is exempted from the general rule.)
Yet, certainly as applied to the police, the claim of systemic racism is demonstrably false. Over the past five years, blacks have constituted about one-quarter of the approximately 1,000 civilians killed by police per year. Yet blacks commit about 60 percent of violent crimes in the nation's 75 largest counties. Last year, according to the Washington Post, police killed nine unarmed blacks, including those who grabbed a police officer's weapon or had firearms in their cars, as against 19 whites, despite blacks committing over half of violent crimes. A 2016 study by Harvard economist Roland Fryer, Jr., who is black, found that blacks are less likely than whites to be fired upon by police.
John McWhorter, a black linguistics and comparative literature professor at Columbia University, points out that for every high-profile and unjustified police killing of a black man, like that of George Floyd, it is easy to find an almost identical case of a white person, albeit one that garnered scant media attention. A 2015 study of the Philadelphia police department by the Obama administration's Justice Department determined that black and Hispanic police officers were more likely to shoot unarmed blacks than were white officers.
THOSE WHO WILL SUFFER most from the false description of America as ineluctably afflicted with systemic racism are blacks themselves. Victimology is never healthy for the purported victims, as it denies them agency and makes them dependent. Even where one is truly a victim, as, for instance, someone raised in an abusive family, the only hope is to go beyond an exclusive focus on what one has suffered. That is true for groups as well.
Blacks would suffer most from current calls to abolish police departments, as the Minneapolis City Council voted to do last week, or to defund police departments. Their neighborhoods would become even more crime-ridden and dangerous than at present. Without the fear of the police, people would swallow one another alive, as our Sages say. For that reason, blacks were twice as likely as whites, in a 2015 Roper poll, to actually want more police in the neighborhoods.
Since Black Lives Matter (BLM) came to prominence in 2015 with a false narrative (as determined by the Obama Justice Department) of the shooting of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri — "Hands up, don't shoot" — many large cities have witnessed a dramatic upsurge in violent crime, as beleaguered police departments withdraw from the streets. That's the so-called Ferguson effect.
Similarly, when differential rates of school discipline are taken as prima facie evidence of racism, the result will be an end of all discipline, and black kids eager to learn will not be able to.
And finally, affirmative action, designed to bring the percentage of black students in prestigious universities in line with their percentage of the population, has harmed black students. Placing students in institutions for which they are unprepared or unqualified more often than not serves to suppress their academic achievement and leave them with a feeling of failure, whereas they might well flourish in a somewhat less demanding academic environment.
MORE FRIGHTENING in the long run than the recent rioting to protest "systemic racism" has been the complete capitulation, indeed the advancement of that narrative, by corporate, academic, and media elites; the ritual obeisance, prostration before and foot-washing of angry blacks; the world record number of abject apologies for expressing his reverence for the American flag by future Hall of Fame quarterback Drew Brees; the firing of a broadcaster for the suggestion that "all lives matter."
America is rapidly abandoning the traditional liberal values that made it possible for diverse people to live together, chief among them tolerance and belief in the free marketplace of ideas. Herbert Marcuse taught campus radicals of the 1960s that tolerance is "repressive," and only sustains existing power structures. Needed instead are "new and rigid restrictions" on certain teachings. Or as the joke used to go in the Soviet Union, "Of course, we have freedom of speech. We are just not allowed to lie." (American students no longer see the humor, reports Professor Gary Saul Morson, as it too closely reflects their lived reality.)
Followers of Marcuse (whether they've heard of him or not) now dominate university bureaucracies. And as Andrew Sullivan — not exactly a hard-core conservative — observed in New York magazine two years ago, "When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education... toward the imperatives of an identity-based 'social justice' movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well.
"If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristic like race or [gender]... then sooner or later that will be reflected in our culture at large."
Sullivan's younger colleagues at New York Magazine recently discovered that earlier piece and demanded their pound of flesh. His column last week was canceled, and he has reportedly been banned from writing about anti-racism protests. They were soon outdone, however, by their woke peers at the New York Times, where a newsroom revolt forced the resignation of editorial page editor James Bennet. His crime: publication of an op-ed by conservative Republican senator Tom Cotton arguing for the use of federal troops to put down widespread urban looting (a bad idea, in my opinion). No such protests ever greeted the Times's publication of op-eds by a gallery of international despots.
Northwestern's Gary Saul Morson, a distinguished professor of Russian literature, sees a parallel between the American present and pre-revolutionary Russia, in which virtually the entire educated class was anti-regime and felt one simply had to be a revolutionary.
"Well-intentioned liberal people [couldn't] bring themselves to say that lawless violence is wrong," writes Morson. "While some liberals did not condone terrorism, they refused to condemn it, and called for the release from prison of all terrorists."
That moment may not be as far away as we think for America.
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So you think I may be over-reacting:
And:
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Pompeo unloads on Bolton: https://newsthud.com/sec-
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Kim gets the story right as it relates to Trump's racial accomplishments and the false charge of racism. Trump has every right to be proud of what he has done and tried to do for those who are underprivileged. It is difficult for him to get his message out because the mass media will no report anything positive.
Kim gets the story right as it relates to Trump's racial accomplishments and the false charge of racism. Trump has every right to be proud of what he has done and tried to do for those who are underprivileged. It is difficult for him to get his message out because the mass media will no report anything positive.
MAGA—for All
Trump needs to give voters a reason to support him. He’s working on it
By Kimberley Strassel
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President Trump convened a roundtable last week in Dallas, which the media described as a talk on police and race relations. It was much more. Some Republicans are beginning to hope it was the basis of a compelling second-term agenda.
As national unrest continues, Democrats are intent on limiting this debate to law-enforcement brutality and “racism.” Mr. Trump’s Dallas event was an effort to broaden the discussion into one about “advancing the cause of justice and freedom.” Part of that, Mr. Trump said, was working together to “confront bigotry and prejudice.” As important, he added, is providing “opportunity” to every American.
The president handed it over to Attorney General William Barr, who called education the “civil-rights issue of our time” and argued for school choice. Housing Secretary Ben Carson discussed efforts to use telemedicine to remedy health-care disparities. Scott Turner, executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, touted the success of “opportunity zones,” created in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which have funneled tens of billions of dollars into distressed communities.
Mr. Trump campaigned in 2016 to work on behalf of “forgotten” Americans—whether they be in struggling blue-collar areas, inner-city minority communities, or rural towns. As fate would have it, both the coronavirus and George Floyd’s death have shined a spotlight on glaring disparities in the country. The white-collar elite work safely from home in shut-down cities, while hands-on workers and small-business owners become economic statistics. The focus on rare cases of police abuse has resurfaced the all-too-common reality of so many African-American communities—crime, high unemployment, poor health care, failing schools.
Mr. Trump campaigned in 2016 to work on behalf of “forgotten” Americans—whether they be in struggling blue-collar areas, inner-city minority communities, or rural towns. As fate would have it, both the coronavirus and George Floyd’s death have shined a spotlight on glaring disparities in the country. The white-collar elite work safely from home in shut-down cities, while hands-on workers and small-business owners become economic statistics. The focus on rare cases of police abuse has resurfaced the all-too-common reality of so many African-American communities—crime, high unemployment, poor health care, failing schools.
In those bleak headlines is an opening for Mr. Trump to embrace a second-term “opportunity” agenda, a promise that free-market policies won’t only revive the struggling economy but throw it open to those forgotten Americans. So far, Mr. Trump has seemed content to let the race with Joe Biden boil down to a debate over the past four years and whether the Democrat is too radical or too incompetent to be trusted. Those points will certainly energize the Republican base. But making inroads with independents, minority voters and suburban housewives will require something more concrete and aspirational. Why not an “American Dream” theme?
That’s the case many Republicans are making to the White House, even as they think about how to refine it. One benefit of such an agenda is that it doesn’t require the administration to try to package a theme around disparate or expensive proposals like infrastructure or tax credits. It gives the president something more to pitch than a return to lost prosperity. And it provides the Trump campaign with an opportunity to make inroads with minority voters—crucial in a close race.
The greatest merit of an opportunity agenda is that it rests on core conservative policies and principles. It’s about tailoring them—and ramping them up—to serve struggling communities. That’s the brilliance of opportunity zones, which South Carolina’s Sen. Tim Scott got included in the 2017 tax reform. He harnessed the power of smart tax relief and directed it at underserved, struggling communities. School choice is, likewise, about providing minority parents the opportunity to rescue their kids from crummy schools. Health-care choice is about giving poor Americans the opportunity to escape Medicaid. Deregulation is about providing more Americans the opportunity to engage in entrepreneurship.
Even better, the Trump administration already has the record, people and infrastructure to build on this theme. The common and absurd claim that Mr. Trump is “racist” has always been belied by the diversity of his administration and the programs it has pursued. Sentencing reform. An unprecedented focus on vocational education. Funding for historically black colleges. Tackling the opioid epidemic. Mr. Trump in 2018 set up the Opportunity and Revitalization Council, which Messrs. Turner and Carson oversee. In May the council put out a report brimming with case studies and best practices for spurring investment in economically distressed areas.
But perhaps the best argument for this agenda is that Mr. Trump already believes in it. Advisers note that there’s a reason he talks so frequently about the historically low black and Hispanic unemployment rates; he’s genuinely proud of them. The 2016 slogan was “Make America Great Again.” It would be no lift for Mr. Trump to add a couple of words and sell what he has done, and what he could with four more years. “Make America Great Again—for All.”
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