New video from Portland, Oregon shows communist protestor running into oncoming traffic and getting hit by innocent truck driver
This is from this past Saturday at Portland, Oregon.
While a bunch of pro-Christian people were expressing their opinion safely away from traffic, one member of a group of self described “communists” (who were protesting against the Christians) decided to suddenly dart into oncoming traffic without first looking to see if it was safe.
This is clearly not the truck driver’s fault. You can hear the truck’s brakes screeching.
I feel sorry for the innocent truck driver, who will be haunted by this for the rest of their life.
Skip to 1:17
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsT1Qrhi2gU
Social justice warriors forgot to tell this family of black, legal immigrants how racist the U.S. is
The New York Times just published this article about a family of black, legal immigrants from Cameroon.
The article quotes the family’s mother as saying:
“We brought the girls to this country because there are better opportunities here… I don’t know of another country where you can try hard, work hard and get somewhere. Where you are given the opportunity to fulfill your potential.”
It looks like the social justice warriors forgot to tell this family how racist the U.S. is.
In my opinion, we should let 50 million more black immigrants such as these into the country.
Things I like about this family:
1) They strongly appreciate the good things about the U.S. That doesn’t mean they don’t see bad things about this country. But they prefer to focus on the good over the bad.
2) The parents encourage their children to seek out extra education beyond that which is mandated at their school.
3) The parents are married.
4) The entire family learned English, and they did so in a relatively short amount of time. By comparison, there are other immigrants who have been here for far longer but have chosen not to learn English.
5) Both parents put in the time and effort to acquire real world job skills that justify paying them a living wage. By comparison, there are other people in this country (including many who were born here) who choose to work at fast food restaurants but then demand that they be paid more than such a job is actually worth.
6) They put in the time and effort to do what was required to come to this country as legal immigrants.
The immigrants in this family are far more American than the U.S.-born social justice warriors who insist on seeing victimhood everywhere they look.
I’m not saying that there is no racism in this country. There is racism in this country. But that doesn’t mean that people should put most of their focus on it. My advice would be to set a small percentage of one’s time to focus on the racism, but to focus the bulk of one’s time on the wonderful opportunities that this country has to offer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/24/opinion/trump-african-immigrants-ivy-league.html
As Trump Rages About Immigrants, They Go to the Ivy League
American sisters born in Cameroon, from left, Ella, Chris and Xaviera.
December 24, 2017
Ten years ago, a family arrived in the Bronx from Yaoundé, Cameroon, not speaking a word of English. This Christmas, they are celebrating a feat that would be impressive for any family: Three of the family’s five daughters have been accepted to Ivy League universities.
In a year in which our nativist president would have you believe that immigrants are, at best, a job-stealing drain and at worst, criminals, rapists and people with AIDS, these three remarkable sisters are worth paying attention to. Not just because they are inspiring — they are — but because they are far better ambassadors for this country and exponents of its ideals than the 45th president.
“We brought the girls to this country because there are better opportunities here,” says Flore Kengmeni, their mother, who works as a nurse. “I don’t know of another country where you can try hard, work hard and get somewhere. Where you are given the opportunity to fulfill your potential.”
“This country is built on immigrants,” Francois de Paul Silatchom, their father, a professor of economics at SUNY, starts to say, before his middle daughter, Ella, a sophomore at Yale, interjects: “Our experience as a family is what America is.”
That experience is marked by hard work, optimism, resilience and a persistent sense of gratitude even to have the opportunity.
All three girls admit it wasn’t easy. They recall sitting in class during their first year in America and not understanding what their teachers and classmates were saying. They remember being made fun of, but not really knowing why.
“Everyone spoke so fast and I guess we speak that fast now, too,” says Xaviera, the youngest of the three, who was accepted to Harvard earlier this month.
They turned to books for guidance. Their parents got the girls library cards and made reading mandatory — “Education is the most valuable asset,” the parents say repeatedly when we meet. The sisters were encouraged to read broadly, from “The Magic School Bus” to “ Harry Potter,” and they practiced English as a family in their two-bedroom apartment in the Bronx’s Pelham Parkway neighborhood.
By the end of their first year at their local public schools, the girls had learned enough English to take the state exams, and were excelling in their classes. But their parents were alarmed that they were finishing their homework during the school day and coming home bored. They asked teachers to assign their daughters more homework. But even that wasn’t enough.
“Something was wrong,” Mr. de Paul Silatchom says. “I started looking for schools that would challenge them and keep them busy. At a school fair, we learned about Democracy Prep.”
At Democracy Prep, a public charter school in Harlem where I met them one recent afternoon, the day begins at 7:45 a.m. and ends at 5 p.m. Longer school days, many argue, allow teachers to spend more time on subjects other than math and English, and keep students out of trouble.
Francois de Paul Silatchom, left, poses for a portrait with his daughters (Left to right,) Xaviera, 17, Ella, 19, and Chris, 20, and their mother Flore Kengmeni, center, at their church on the Upper East Side.
Through the school’s Korean language program, the sisters were exposed to a culture completely different from their own, which sparked an interest in global affairs for all of them. Civics is a core part of the school’s curriculum, which Xaviera says showed her that, “Regardless of how disadvantaged you are in society, you have an advantage if you understand how our system of government works.”
“I learned so much here,” Ella says of the school. “And between that and our parents, my work ethic — our work ethic — really developed. Our parents required us to do an extracurricular, so sports or choir or whatever and that was for after 5 o’clock. That was normal for us.”
When the oldest, Chris, now a junior at Dartmouth, got into the college in 2014, friends and family were elated, but her parents made it clear that the work wasn’t over.
“The night I got into Dartmouth, Mom asked me, ‘Have you done the dishes?’ Getting in was exciting and I knew she was proud, but it was just a regular day,” Chris says.
“They haven’t ‘arrived,’ as people like to say, just because they are into Ivy League schools,” Mr. de Paul Silatchom says. “It’s a good start and a platform of opportunity.”
When speaking, the sisters transition seamlessly between New York-accented English and French, their first language. The irony that they landed at a school called Democracy Prep after immigrating from one of the world’s least democratic countries is not lost on them.
It’s something they’ve spent a lot of time thinking about as President Trump has rolled out various cruel immigration policies, from his proposed travel ban to, in September, rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA — an Obama-era program that protected the country’s approximately 800,000 undocumented youth raised in the country from being deported.
“It’s scary to see because this is not the country we know,” says Chris, who along with her sisters, became an American citizen in 2016. “America at its core is principled on immigrants. We came to this country to improve our futures and I feel as American as anyone born here.”
“These girls are more American than Cameroonian,” their mother says. “Can you imagine being undocumented? We were very lucky,” Xaviera adds.
Watching videos of immigration agents separating families in recent months has been particularly difficult for Ms. Kengmeni and Mr. de Paul Silatchom. “I can’t imagine what it’s been like for these children who go to school in the morning knowing they might come home at the end of the day to no parents,” Ms. Kengmeni says.
This year, Christmas break involves running around to pack for Chris’s semester abroad and attending three Christmas Masses, but the family is grateful to be all together, even if it’s for just a few days. They know they are the lucky ones.
Forty percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded or co-founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Watching Ella, Chris and Xaviera, I’d bet good money that they will join those ranks of these world-class leaders. But the question I find myself asking as I leave their school: Who are the young women the Trump administration is currently keeping out?
Venezuelan government tells doctors and hospitals not to list starvation as cause of death for babies and children who starve to death
For a detailed explanation of how Venezuela went from being a rich well fed country, to a poor country with severe shortages of food, please see this previous blog post that I wrote, which is called “Here’s how most Venezuelans lost an average of 19 pounds in 2016, and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again in 2017.”
Now the latest news.
The New York Times just published this article about the situation in Venezuela.
According to the article, even though large numbers of babies and children are starving to death, the government is telling doctors and hospitals not to list starvation as the official cause of death.
In addition, the Times kept track of 21 pubic hospitals over a period of five months. During that time period, the Times was unable to get any kind of official starvation counts from any of those hospitals. However, doctors at nine of those hospitals told the Timed that they had kept at least a partial count, and that of these partial counts at nine hospitals, nearly 400 children had starved to death. The cause of these deaths was not listed as starvation in the hospitals’ official records, but the doctors know that starvation was their true cause of death.
The Times also reports that the food shortages are so severe that even most hospitals do not have enough baby formula to meet the needs of their patients.
And it’s not just food that’s in short supply. The Times also reports that many of these hospitals don’t have enough of basic supplies such as soap, syringes, gauze, diapers, and latex gloves.
Please keep in mind that before Hugo Chavez implemented price controls and seized farms, factories, businesses, and other private property, the country was quite affluent and had a first world standard of living.
There’s a huge lesson in all of this.
No matter how well off and prosperous a country is, it simply cannot maintain anything even remotely close to such levels of prosperity when it adopts communism.
Poll: What should the prison sentence be for someone who makes a false accusation of rape?
A false accusation of rape can cost an innocent person their education, their job, and their reputation. It can force them to spend years in prison. It can ruin their life.
In addition, every false accusation of rape potentially gives ammunition to people who might want to falsely argue that other accusations or rape – ones in which a rape really did take place – are false.
It’s also a waste of the taxpayers’ money.
https://nypost.com/2017/12/16/rape-trial-falls-apart-after-accusers-40000-texts-are-revealed/
Rape trial falls apart after accuser’s 40,000 texts are revealed
December 16, 2017
A student has described going through “mental torture” after a rape case against him was thrown out in court because police had failed to hand over more than 40,000 messages from his accuser.
Liam Allan, 22, faced up to ten years in jail charged with six counts of rape and six counts of sexual assault against a young woman over a 14-month period that began when he was 19.
The criminology student at Greenwich University had spent nearly two years on bail and three days in Croydon Crown Court when the trial was stopped in a dramatic fashion after it emerged police officers had failed to hand over evidence that proved his innocence.
The alleged victim had claimed she did not enjoy sex, while Mr Allan claimed it was consensual and she was acting maliciously because he refused to see her after he returned to university.
Now, the judge has called for an inquiry at the “very highest level” to understand why police failed to hand over critical evidence including 40,000 messages from the accuser to Mr Allan and friends.
The messages showed how she had continually messaged Mr Allan for “casual sex”, said how much she enjoyed it and discussed fantasies of violent sex and rape, The Times reports.
Outside the court, Mr Allan said he went through “mental torture” over the two year period and relied on the system to uncover evidence that would exonerate him.
When first accused, he turned to a local lawyer he had done work experience with and said he was terrified at the idea of going to prison with sex offenders and worried about what would happen to his mum and flatmates when he was away.
“You are all on your own. I could not talk to my mother about the details of the case because she might have been called as a witness. I couldn’t talk with my friends because they might have been called. I felt completely isolated at every stage of the process,” he said.
“I can’t explain the mental torture of the past two years. … I feel betrayed by the system which I had believed would do the right thing, the system I want to work in.”
The life-changing discovery was made at the 11th hour when a new prosecutor, Jerry Hayes, took over the case one day before the trial began and ordered police to hand over records — including a computer disk that contained 40,000 messages.
Mr Allan’s lawyers had already sought access to the accusers’s telephone records and messages but their requests were denied on the basis there was nothing of interest in them.
Upon discovering the messages, Mr Hayes said he would offer no evidence in court and would like to “apologise” to Mr Allan.
“There was a terrible failure in disclosure which was inexcusable,” he said. “There could have been a serious miscarriage of justice, which could have led to a very significant period of imprisonment and life on the sex offenders register. It appears the officer in the case has not reviewed the disk, which is quite appalling.”
Speaking later, he said detectives had previously told him the sexual messages were “too personal” to share.
“The defence quickly saw the information blew the prosecution out of the water. If they had not been seen this boy faced 12 years in prison and on the sex offenders’ register for life with little chance of appeal. This was a massive miscarriage of justice, which thank heavens was avoided,” he told the BBC.
Judge Peter Gower said Mr Allan was not guilty on all charges.
“There is something that has gone wrong and it is a matter that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in my judgment should be considering at the very highest level,” he said.
“Mr Allan leaves the courtroom an innocent man without a stain on his character.”
Mr Allan’s defence lawyer Julia Smart said she also received details about the text messages the night before she was due to cross examine the accuser, and when she told the court of her findings the trial was scrapped.
Mr Allan’s mum, Lorraine Allan, 46, said the “current climate” means that many people are treated as “guilty until you can prove you’re innocent.”
A spokesman for London Metropolitan Police said: “We are aware of this case being dismissed from court and are carrying out an urgent assessment to establish the circumstances which led to this action being taken.
“We are working closely with the Crown Prosecution Service and keeping in close contact with the victim while this process takes place.”
The Crown Prosecution Service said they will not conduct a “management review” with the Metropolitian Police to “examine the way in which the case was handled.”
Mr Hayes, who is a former Conservative MP, wrote in The Times the case marked the most “appalling failure of disclosure I have ever encountered.”
“The CPS are under terrible pressure, as are the police. Both work hard but are badly under-resourced.
“Crown court trials only work because of the co-operation and goodwill of advocates and the bench — but time pressures are making this increasingly difficult.
3 people arrested in firebomb attack on Swedish synagogue
3 people arrested in firebomb attack on Swedish synagogue
December 10, 2017
HELSINKI — Three people have been arrested for allegedly throwing firebombs at a synagogue in the Swedish city of Goteborg, the second anti-Jewish attack in the Nordic nation in two days. Jewish groups condemned the attacks as “unconscionable” and demanded that authorities take action.
No one was injured in the attack late Saturday during a youth event at the synagogue and the adjacent Jewish center in Sweden’s second-largest city. Goteborg police spokesman Peter Nordengard said Sunday it is being investigated as an attempted arson.
The attack took place after some 200 people rallied late Friday in the southern city of Malmo, yelling anti-Jewish slogans and waving Palestinian flags to protest U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Witness Allan Stutzinsky told the TT news agency he saw a dozen masked youths who threw what appeared to be firebombs into the garden surrounding the synagogue in Goteborg, but they failed to damage the building.
Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven and other top politicians condemned the incidents and authorities increased security around the synagogue and at Jewish centers in Stockholm and Malmo.
“I’m terribly upset over the attack on a synagogue in Goteborg yesterday and calls for violence against Jews at a demonstration in Malmo,” Lofven said Sunday. “There is no place for anti-Semitism in our Swedish society. The perpetrators will be held accountable.”
He urged “all democratic forces” in Sweden to work together to create “a tolerant and open society where everyone feels safe.”
On Saturday, Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom tweeted that those who called for Jews to be killed did something “totally unacceptable.”
The European Jewish Congress said Sunday it was “unconscionable that Jews are under attack on the streets of Europe” and urged Swedish and other European governments to take “strong punitive action” against perpetrators.
In Nordic neighbor Finland, national broadcaster YLE said police would raise security measures around the Helsinki synagogue.
The American Jewish Committee, meanwhile, condemned a separate protest Friday in Berlin, during which American and Israeli flags were burned in front of the U.S. embassy.
The director of the AJC’s Ramer Institute in Berlin, Deirdre Berger, called Sunday for an “unequivocal response” from German politicians, saying “the protests have to be condemned.”
Berlin police said 10 people were detained and 12 criminal complaints were filed over the protest of Trump’s decision to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Cook County Circuit Judge William Hooks is a bigger scumbag than the four scumbags who kidnapped and tortured a learning disabled man in Chicago
In January of this year in Chicago, two black men and two black women kidnapped a learning disabled white man, imprisoned him, tortured him, cut off part of his scalp, forced him to drink from the toilet, demanded ransom from his parents, and posted part of the torture as a video on Facebook. They also called him racial slurs, which puts this into the hate crime category.
Well, one of these scumbags has just been sentenced to probation instead of prison, after spending less than one year in jail. Her name is Brittany Covington. (The other three scumbags – Tesfaye Cooper, Jordan Hill, Tanishia Covington – are still awaiting sentencing.)
Given the horrific kidnapping, imprisonment, violence, and torture that they committed, I think all four of these scumbags should be forced to spend at least several decades in prison.
The fact that Brittany Covington was sentenced to probation instead of prison is inexcusable.
The judge responsible for giving probation instead of a prison sentence to this violent scumbag is Cook County Circuit Judge William Hooks.
Judge Hooks said he could have given her a prison sentence, but chose not to because “I’m not sure if I did that you’d be coming out any better.”
Although prison is referred to as a “correctional facility,” that is not the only reason that we put people who are convicted of violent crimes in prison. We also do it to protect the innocent, as well as to send a message to the guilty that their violent behavior is not to be tolerated.
Judge Hooks is a bigger scumbag than the four scumbags who kidnapped and tortured the learning disabled man.
By not sentencing Brittany Covington to prison, Judge Hooks is giving his approval to what Brittany Covington did. He is saying that what she did is OK. He is saying that what she did is acceptable.
But in the real world, what Brittany Covington did is not OK.
It is not acceptable.
Shame on Judge Hooks.
Slaughterbots: a weapon of the future
This fictional video was created as a warning about what may be real in the near future: tiny little drones with artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and enough explosive to destroy a person’s head. One drone can kill one specific person. A big group of drones can kill a large number of specific people, or an entire city for that matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 