Excerpt: “The death of Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam, the first African-American woman to serve on New York state’s highest court, has been ruled a suicide, the office of New York city’s medical examiner said in a statement Wednesday.
Abdus-Salaam died from drowning in the Hudson River, the statement said.
Friends and colleagues described the judge as a trailblazer and pioneer.
Her life had also been marked by personal tragedy. Her brother committed suicide three years ago, two law enforcement sources told CNN.
Abdus-Salaam, 65, had also been stressed recently at work, the sources said. Her body was found April 13. Detectives did not find a suicide note.”
NB Commentary: So let’s talk about Jake Tapper and Keith Olbermann and the issue of the “Independent” news not being welcomed in the White House. Jeez Louis, the Mainstream Muppets are having a heart attack because Trump doesn’t want to keep company with them.
You know what gets me more than anything is the BS hypocrisy that goes on especially these days since the Trumpster became President.
Just think about it. Even the Press conferences are staged. So Jake Tapper is having a hissy fit cause he can’t ask his already approved questions, and Kellyanne is not Olbermann’s favorite mouthpiece for the establishment.
What is wrong with these people? Do they really live in the twilight zone or is it me, I am in the twilight zone.
How do you walk through life and never see the light, I mean, they call us sheeple and easily lead, but I got a funny feeling it ain’t us as much as it’s them.
How do you sit in front of a teleprompter and parrot words pasted across the screen and then call yourself “Independent”?
Somebody wake me up cause this is really gotta be a dream. I mean you sit there day in and day out parroting what the producer has presented to you. You don’t come in there with your own thoughts, if you did you would get fired! You are an actor, your stage is your anchor desk and your audience is on the other side of the camera. What exactly is free or independent about that? Why are you trying to claim that you are independent yet just a few weeks ago, you were peddling a list of “Fake News” outlets who are truly much more independent then you are!
Do you realize that you folks are own by 6 major corporations? Do you read the stamp on your paycheck, or maybe you just get direct deposit.
How on God’s green earth can CNN, NBC, MSNBC or any of those other alphabet news outlets consider themselves independent and yet not a single one of them could see that Trump was going to win?
I don’t think you all are real. You all must be holograms or something, just light fixtures because you certainly are not independent and you do not tell the truth and you ain’t even alternative.
You are stomping and crying and lying because folks don’t wanna listen to you anymore, they are tired of your lies and you are feeling a little scared about your paycheck, that’s what I think. You ain’t mad at Trump, you’re afraid you may no longer be needed.
Well let me tell you something, don’t come trying to hang out with us. Cause we are gonna be very suspicious of you wanting to tell the truth after all these years and years of lying. So forget about infiltrating us and promising us spots on your podcasts, we don’t want it. We don’t trust you anymore and calling yourself “independent” just put the nail in the coffin. You either think we are stupid, or you must be because we over here, we know who signs your paycheck.
Many of us don’t get paid no where near what we are worth for questioning the official narrative, and some of us don’t get paid at all, meanwhile, you all are bringing in millions just to sit there and parrot what flies across your teleprompter or what is slid in across your desk while you are in the make-up room. You have made so many slip ups and mistakes it ain’t funny and you seldom if ever make a retraction, like “yo, my faithful audience out there, I was an asshole when I said that yesterday, and I knew it was wrong but I said it anyway, please forgive me”. No you just go right ahead, like you never pissed on us and call it rain. I stopped watching you all anyways, even Amy Goodman has lost my vote, cause once you go mainstream, it’s a wrap.
I just want you all to know that that list of “Fake News” you all so helpfully put out, was a serious bust, because some of those outlets are where I get my real news from.
You guys in MuppetStreamMedia, are simply actors. Maybe, after you are driven out of the MSM because of lost of revenues, you could try out for Hollyweird. You shouldn’t have no trouble, the same scoundrels that run the Media, Hollyweird too, so you should feel quite comfortable. And besides, you won’t have to pay for acting school, you are already well seasoned actors.
It just galls me when these folks start crying. They are the ones who went to war with alternative news calling it fake news. They are the ones peddling a narrative of anarchy and now that Trump doesn’t want you in his house, you want to cry it’s un-American. For real, really.. Un-American?
How un-American was it to tell these lies?
Man, whatever…. who told the lies on 911?
Who lied about Emmet Till?
Who lied about building 7?
Who told the lies about WMD in Iraq?
Who told the lies about gassing the Syrians?
Who told the lie about JFK?
Who told the lie about MLK?
Who told the lie about Marcus Garvey and the Black Panthers?
Who told the lie about Gaddafi?
Who told the lies about Sandy Hook, Boston Marathon, Orlando Nightclub shooting.
Who told the lie about Ms. Parker killed on live TV in VA with two different staged takes and a dude with a white hand?
Who Frick lies about everything under the sun and changes history to support their lies? Who the f $*$*k does that, each day, every day?
And has the nerve to cry out fake news?
And Olberman, I’m surprised at you, cause you were a casualty of the very industry you are now defending! Sell outs come a dime a dozen.
Trump is America, all of you corporate liars. Y’all just mad cause he’s showing who you really are, liars and thieves and robbers. Y’all just mad cause you wanted your idiot to be in charge and not the other idiot. You are stomping your feet and crying like babies because it just ain’t working out the way you wanted or envisioned.
Were you all promised some rose garden, lillies of the field, free pizza and hot dogs, caramel candy… fat pay checks, what?? Cause obviously this is not turning out the way you wanted and you all are not taking it well, at all, you are acting like somebody who had a promise broken and your feeling some kind of way and you are gonna make sure that the person who prevented you from getting all your rewards for being a good parrot, catches hell.
These people are such hypocrites and I can’t take it!
WASHINGTON — A regular guest commentator on Fox News who has been lying for years about working for the Central Intelligence Agency was arrested on Thursday and is being charged in connection with falsely claiming he worked as an “Outside Paramilitary Special Operations Officer” for the CIA for nearly three decades.
There is no excuse for violence against another for any reason, and should not be condoned by anyone. this whole 4 thugs torture a poor defenseless mentally challenged child” narrative is skewed. I read a lot of comments under the videos presented and news stories written about this event. It seems that folks can hardly wait to spew venom at the supposed perpetrators of a crime against someone they deem innocent, harmless and defenseless.
And then I remember. The innocents who were kidnapped, tortured, beaten, starved and stuffed in the hulls of ships during the North Atlantic Slave trade. I remember the many who died and who still cry in the slave Castles of Elmina. I remember standing there and feeling the walls close in on me as their cries ripped my ears apart. I remember not being able to even read the entire book “Black cargoes.”
I remember Antoine Sterling, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland and many others who simply wanted to be able to be treated like human beings.
I remember the Palestinians, who face torture and trepidation every day as they watch home after home, community after community bulldozed to the ground and their guts squeeze in a vice grip, like a traffic jam.
I remember homeless veterans who fought for a cause not their own, but for a false system with the false belief that it is the protectorate of the world and the way to keep it safe from tyrannical leaders, is to drone democracy down its throat.
I remember the many traumatic false flags perpetrated by a thuggish system that only cares about the financial advantage of its escapades and not the hurt, trauma, guilt and deceit perpetrated on the masses who view this thuggishness.
I remember the many lost children, lost forever and barely recorded by the alphabet agencies, who thru their own complicity, cover up the many scandalous crimes perpetrated against the most vulnerable of our world, our children.
I remember how the churches, mosques and synagogues are filled with hate, deceit, anger, distrust, incest, rape and adultery, while their walls are painted in diamonds and gold.
I remember the buried bodies of aborted fetuses, silenced in the night by the desperation of ill-informed and frightened women, who see their bodies as property for someone else to use and discard of as they see fit.
I see, lost children, stuck in their devices, screaming and fainting when they don’t
get what they feel they deserve no matter how outlandish it may seem to their adult counterparts.
I remember men in dark cloaks, in dark rooms in the middle of the night, who plot and plan the annihilation of millions of people from the face of the planet by any means necessary.
I remember the destruction that is blasted through the media in movie after movie, video game after video game where oversized imaginations struggle to believe it ain’t real, when, all the credits say is, “no animal was hurt in this film.”
I remember the cognitive dissonance.
And then I remember the litany all over again, the pain, hurt, distress, agony, abuse, etc. that one human being can impose on another, but then, somehow, it has to do with race or nothing at all to do with race, or maybe a little bit to do with race, or maybe it’s just ugly people doing ugly things.
And then I remember how fascinated we as humans become, to watch and engage in the total destruction of another human.
Maybe some of it is poor judgment, some of it nervousness, some of it voyeurism and some of it just incredulous, but all of it is us.
Every last one of us. All of it is in us.
And each of us, have the potential to be mean, cruel and despicable as the person we happen to be recently pointing our fingers at.
Cause I remember those cries for blood for the murderer. The lust and pleasure and joy in the eye when the verdict came down, “Execution” and the crowds that gather around to “watch” the “murdering thug” take his last breath. I remember the pleas for clemency from that murdering thug both behind bars and free .
I remember how quickly we are able to commit acts of violence, spanning a wide spectrum, against another human being and blame them for just being there, in the way.
So, yeah, those 4 young people, who lost their minds, lost their sensibilities, lost their empathy for another helpless defenseless one, were being insensitive thugs, they were committing a crime, and Facebook was complicit in this criminal act for allowing it to be aired and participating in the agenda of divide and conquer.
And yes, there is justice, and yes, there is truth, but in this reality, were we are all complicit, were we are all capable, so. Let us all remember, but for the Grace of God, go I.
Four Chicago Suspects Charged With Hate Crime After Broadcasting Torture of Special Needs Teen on Facebook Live
NB Commentary: This guy! We are being hoodwinked again with this proposition that we need “Big Brother” to censor “Fake News”!
No, we don’t need discernment.
We don’t need our own ability to sort through and sift through the BS.
No we are not mature enough or able to critically think for ourselves.
We need to have it done for us.
So, under the guise of protecting Democracy, whose greatest tenet is freedom of speech, let’s start sorting through the “Fake News”, shut them down, censor them on social media and decide for the ignorant masses what they need to or don’t need to know, read or discern.
Facebook, you fail at doing this for the masses.
Twitter, you are so awful we need to tell you what to keep out of your feeds.
Oh, we won’t look at the color revolutions that took place because of social media. In fact, when they happened we were cheering and jumping up and down about how wonderful it was that we were able to use social media to get the word out in a moments notice. People on the streets in mass, like never before.
And when we were able to get the word out on social media about the never ending threats posed by ISIS and their (fake) beheadings, we were very confident that the viewing public would be certain that what they were seeing was true. Without a doubt.
Let’s go all the way back to the Bin Laden videos while we are at it. Or how about 9/11 CGI. That news was so real we were able to go to war on it and kill millions of people.
I am not talking about the “news” that accused Assad of gassing his own people and the picture of the dead bodies that turned out to be “fake” news.
No, it doesn’t apply when the government is behind the propaganda. It is just when the alt-right and alt-left do not parrot the party line, that’s when we need to determine which one of those characters are faking it till they make it.
Hillary started this ball rolling when she spoke out against Info-Wars and Brietbart.
The major networks did their stories so well that when the Donald won, they were shocked!!! So who faked those polls? Certainly not alternative media. In fact it was there that folks could get the real news.
These people are always coming up with some way to counter a movement when it is not in their favor, but will surely feel really happy about a movement that is in their favor.
The majority of folks, especially here in America, barely read any other news except what comes from mainstream. They believe the lies the MSM tells them that is blasted at them thru their televisions. If you mention to them something that was not on Television, a counter perspective or simply a different one, they look at you like you have 2 heads, they dismiss you as a kook or a conspiracy theorist.
So this is an attack on Democracy! This is censorship! This is a big fat lie, to say freedom of speech needs to be monitored and by whom may I ask. Will the government get a think tank together to determine who’s fake and who’s not? According to what criteria??
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
What’s going on? Both Internet companies claim they’re changing their advertising policy to counter misinformation, indicating they’ll monitor content to assure it. Is censorship intended instead? Will reliable information sources challenging the official narrative be targeted? Will other similar online companies operate the same way?
Is net neutrality threatened? Is online freedom and openness at risk – content available without restrictions, limitations, or discrimination, a level playing field for everyone, the essence of democratic free expression?
A pre-election article discussed covert Google support for Hillary – its searches rigged for her, a way to sway undecided voters to choose her over Trump, while suppressing negative search terms about her.
Media scoundrels, Google, Facebook, and similar online operations and powerful tools for what power brokers want disseminated, restricting or blocking content they want suppressed.
Speech, press and academic freedoms are vital elements of free societies. Without them all other rights are endangered.
We the poor sheeple, who read newspapers, watch television and get our news from social media, may be in peril when it comes to being able to determine what is really going on in our world. I guess they see how easily we can be lead astray, in fact, haven’t they done it more times than we can count.
The history of this country is over populated with propaganda to support an agenda. Let’s just start with the profusion of false flags for starters. However, what they did not expect was that outlets like Facebook and Twitter, which they thought they could manage by infiltrating them with CIA agents, has gotten off the ground running faster than the speed of light, and too fast for them to keep up with, so now we need to crack down on them more and more, because Democracy is now in peril, as if this was ever a Democracy anyway.
How many times have folks been censored or demonized because they offered an alternative perspective to what the MSM has given us? How often has policies, laws and codes been instituted based on what was given to us in the MSM? How many times did they “Wag the Dog” to make a point and affect public sentiment? Not the so called “fake news” outlets but the so called “Real News”, the mainstream Media.
Now, social media, has become a runaway locomotive and it is not doing what they initially thought it would do. It is allowing folks to fact check, to research, to look deeper into the narrative that is being given by the MSM and now it’s a threat.
Ironically, these outlets have been censoring content since before he felt threatened by it. They have also been moving content around so that it could be viewed under circumstances that would get the most traction. People have resorted to the Blogosphere in order to get the news out due to the already entrench censorship.
So what are we looking at here?
YouTube, creating a rewards program to encourage folks to become “flaggers” of content.
Facebook dropping folks into the Facebook jail and giving police access to the ability to shut down your live stream.
And Twitter, stopping content from being in their streams.
Is he just parroting what is already taking place. Or does his words sanction it?
Forget the BS around Democracy or fake news threatening. Has fake news become the new ISIS?
I really hadn’t intended on ranting on this one, but hypocrisy really gets me hyped!!
“In an age where there’s so much active misinformation ― and it’s packaged very well, and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television ― where some overzealousness on the part of, you know, a U.S. official is equated with constant and severe repression elsewhere, if everything seems to be the same, and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect,” Obama said.
“We won’t know what to fight for, and we can lose so much of what we’ve gained in terms of the kind of democratic freedoms and market-based economies and prosperity that we’ve come to take for granted,” he added.
Marina Fang Associate Politics Editor, The Huffington Post
In a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Obama warned that the ease with which people can promulgate fraudulent news stories threatens basic democratic principles.
“In an age where there’s so much active misinformation ― and it’s packaged very well, and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television ― where some overzealousness on the part of, you know, a U.S. official is equated with constant and severe repression elsewhere, if everything seems to be the same, and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect,” Obama said.
“We won’t know what to fight for, and we can lose so much of what we’ve gained in terms of the kind of democratic freedoms and market-based economies and prosperity that we’ve come to take for granted,” he added.
Facebook in particular has come under fire for not distinguishing between credible and false news sources, helping to fuel misinformation on political issues and candidates. The site’s algorithm doesn’t filter out articles from websites presenting slanted or blatantly false coverage ― instead, when users post those links, they look as if they were from reliable news outlets. The company announced on Monday that it would take steps to address the problem.
If we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.President Barack Obama
In a veiled criticism of President-elect Donald Trump, Obama spoke more broadly on the state of democracies around the world, cautioning both Americans and Europeans to “not take for granted our systems of government and our way of life,” advising that “democracy is hard work.”
He also urged a greater emphasis on facts and reason.
“If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, and particularly in an age of social media, where so many people are getting their information in sound bites and snippets off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” Obama said.
“If people, whether they are conservative or liberal, left or right, are unwilling to compromise and engage in the democratic process and are taking absolutist views and demonizing opponents, then democracy will break down,” he added. “And so I think my most important advice is to understand, what are the foundations of a healthy democracy and how we have to engage in citizenship continuously, not just when something upsets us, not just when there’s an election or when an issue pops up for a few weeks. It’s hard work.”
Rather than connecting people – as Facebook’s euphoric mission statement claims – the bitter polarization of the social network over the last eighteen months suggests Facebook is actually doing more to divide the world.
In the memo, staffers weighed the pros and cons of accepting an invitation to the G20, if it were extended. On one hand, the meeting just 11 days after the election would “afford you an early and efficient opportunity to evaluate the positions of leaders from other economically important countries,” they wrote.
The report is a work of fiction published by a fake-news website that calls itself Fox News the FB Page. In fact, the parody website has no connection to Fox News whatsoever. Nor is it a Facebook Page. Nothing published on the site should be taken seriously.
The result of the popular vote is, I’m sure you know, immaterial to the result of the Presidential election – but it carries a undeniable moral weight. Equally obviously, the claim is simply untrue. Clinton will ultimately win between one and two million more votes than Trump.
NB Commentary: So I was asked the magic, 50 million dollar question… “You mean don’t vote?”
Yep. Cause every time you vote you co-sign the madness. You can’t say not in my name if you sign on the dotted line. This system needs an overhaul. Every time you vote you are supporting the liars and criminals.
I know that folks will continue to vote. The American voter is an enabler with a severe case of cognitive dissonance. So they will continue to do the same thing over and over thinking things will change, their voice will be heard when time and time again it has shown them otherwise.
They vote against their interests over and over again. They vote for known liars and deceivers but they feel they should vote.
They see that their votes are stolen miscounted or not counted at all.
They see the governments, city, state and local redistricting their towns and cities to garner more votes for those the big hats have selected.
They see campaign promises reneged on over and over and over.
They see a black face, white face, brown face lie to them about know cover-ups.
They see their lives gripped in fear porn while their government is supposedly protecting them.
They see their fellow citizen die in the streets and bombed in parking garages and go on as if it’s business as usual.
They see tax cuts for the rich while the middle class is down graded to lower class and the poor become obsolete.
They see their freedoms of speech and assembly severely curtailed behind barb wire fences, tear gas, mace and militarized police.
They see their lives being under surveillance 24/7 and their privacy stripped to the bone.
They see whistle blowers jailed, killed and demonized.
They see the polluting of the air, water and food by corporations and banksters with no oversight or convictions for their crimes.
They see their country go to foreign lands and kill innocent people on a lie and no one is convicted of war crimes.
They are subject to invasive fondling by the TSA and are humiliated at airports and traffic stops.
They have to lock themselves in their homes and have armed police at their children’s schools.
They are told over and over again that the government is for the people, yet day in and day out they see lobbyists steal the allegiance of their representatives thru bribes and payoffs.
They are of the illusion that they cannot govern themselves so they gladly pay taxes to and for their representatives to lie, cheat and steal from the tax payer by blowing up other countries with money that could rebuild large portions of the infrastructure in the US.
They watch their government arm the so called rebels when they can see that in doing so it prolongs a regime change war that never ends but revels from one “axis of evil” country to another.
They see them bail out corrupt bankers and foreclose on the homes of hard working citizens.
They watch their government send money overseas to victims of so called natural disasters while the Katrina victims are still displaced.
They cannot see blue skies or stars at night and believe their government when it tells them bogus weather reports about what is happening with the weather.
They walk in a fog created by mind control and the illusion of democracy which was never really what this country stood for.
They actually believe that the Masonic, Jesuit, banking cartel that pinned the constitution had them in mind.
They believe that the earth they walk upon stained with the blood of millions of indigenous peoples and millions more of enslaved, tortured and brutalized blacks, can be free.
They are walking and living in a nightmare calling it a dream.
The American voter is so lost in the illusion of inclusion, they actually believe their vote will make a difference.
So to answer your question, I do not vote for politicians. I vote with my dollars. I vote with my mind in resisting tyranny and doing research about what is really going on. I vote by reading and comparing the so called facts about this world.
I vote by doing all I can to stay in alignment with my Divinity and purpose on this planet.
I follow laws put forth. But I will not agree to their unrighteousness.
I vote by avoiding plastics and recycling the ones I do use.
I vote by being conscious of how I consume energy and by purchasing only what I need.
I vote by avoiding pharmaceuticals and using all natural products for healing and cleansing.
I vote by being conscientious about what I put into my body.
I vote by not owning a television or paying a cable bill.
I vote by sharing what I have with others who may need it.
It may not be much, but I don’t participate in their holidays, or shop at Walmart.
My vote is to boycott wherever and when ever I can.
If folks say that every vote counts than my little efforts should count as well.
Links of Interest:
“Finally, this isn’t about Trump vs Clinton, that is merely the illusion we are being invited into believing. This is about awakening to the fact that our system is absurd and it’s time to do something different. What is the answer? That is what we must discuss instead of playing this broken political game of dividing and choosing which goon to “vote” for.”
What is the purpose of this? How is it that these cowards can get into buildings fully armed and kill people unabated, unobstructed, and yet filled with keywords.
Get ready for all of your buttons to be pushed by these keywords,
Breaking News
Subject to Revision
Black SUV
Heavily armed
Bloodbath
Dec.
Sandy Hook
Human Tradegy
Targeted Attack
Worst since
Gun Control
The news as we have it coming in
Could it be International Terrorism?
Could it be domestic Terrorism?
Etc., etc., etc.
And let me not forget, there was a drill going on in the vicinity. Yes the infamous drill that went live, again.
Are you surprised? Are you startled? Are you frightened? Are you ready to give up more than you gave up yesterday? Just plain, ole, are you ready for this again?
Sometimes, I have to sit and wonder, what is the message they are trying to give Obama? For some reason all these breeches of security seem to be sending a deeper message. Like that dude that jumped the white house fence during their dinner party. Can I get a witness? I mean how many of these events took place during Bush’s administration? I’m not counting but it surely does seem like more than I have ever seen before.
It’s purely conjecture on my part but it certainly seems strange to have all of these killings and mass murders and disruptions and breeches of security during the Obama Administration.
At Least 14 Dead in California Shooting, One Suspect Killed
by CORKY SIEMASZKO, PETE WILLIAMS and M. ALEX JOHNSON
At least 14 people were killed and a suspect was dead Wednesday after up to three gunmen on a “mission” barged into a holiday party in a California conference room and unleashed a bloodbath, law enforcement sources told NBC News.
The gunman or gunmen fled in a black SUV after the shooting about at 11 a.m. (2 p.m. ET), police said.
About 4½ hours later, multiple police cars were involved in a high-speed chase nearby with three people in a dark truck or SUV, law enforcement sources told NBC News. Two of the suspects were shot, the sources said – one was killed, and the other was unresponsive after having been wounded in the chest.
One suspect killed, one in custody in CA 2:39
The location of the third person wasn’t immediately clear, but San Bernardino police Sgt. Vicki Cervantes said a third subject was believed to be “outstanding.” NBC Los Angeles broadcast video of officers ringing a black vehicle after the shootout.
In addition to the 14 dead:
At least 10 of 17 wounded are in critical condition.
Police arrested at least one suspect after shootout hours later.
The shooting erupted during a holiday party in a conference room.
Federal agencies are assisting the investigation.
Cervantes said that one officer was shot in the confrontation but didn’t suffer a life-threatening wound and that one suspect possibly remained at large.
Seventeen other people were wounded when the shooting started inside the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, about 55 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, police said.
Authorities said 10 of the 17 injured were taken to hospitals in critical condition. Fire Chief Tom Hannemann said three people were in serious condition.
It appeared to be the worst mass shooting since the December 2012 slaughter of 20 first-graders and six staffers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
“These people came prepared to do what they did as if they were on a mission,” San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said. “They were armed with long guns, not with handguns.”
• President Barack Obama restated his call for more gun control reforms in the wake of the mass shooting. Speaking to CBS News, Obama said Congress should act in a bipartisan manner to close loopholes, including one that allows people on the TSA no-fly list to legally purchase firearms
Breaking: mass shooting, San Bernardino, plus “training exercise”
by Jon Rappoport
December 2, 2015
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.)
KTLA reports—here’s a key quote:
“The call first came in at 10:59 a.m. of multiple shots fired from the area of 1365 S. Waterman Ave., San Bernardino Police Department Lt. Richard Lawhead said. The department’s SWAT team was training nearby and was suited, ‘ready to roll’ and responded rapidly, Lawhead said.”
—Yet another mass shooting where, by chance, a training exercise was going on during or prior to the event.
San Bernardino, east of Los Angeles. Reports state several shooters in a cluster of three office buildings that employ 600 people, 20 victims down, and shooters apparently at large.
Here is a recent article I wrote about mass shootings paralleling training exercises:
Watch Live: NBC Special Report on Shootings in San Bernardino, California.
President Barack Obama called for stricter firearms laws as after a mass shootingin California that left at least 14 people dead, calling the spate of gun violence in the U.S. “unparalleled” to other countries.
Obama spoke with CBS News Wednesday as the shooting at a center that serves the developmentally disabled in San Bernardino was still unfolding, and cautioned that much was still unknown.
“It does appear that there are going to be some casualties, and obviously our hearts go out to the victims and the families,” Obama said.
“The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world,” Obama said. “And there are some steps that we could take — not to eliminate every one of these mass shootings — but to improve the odds that they don’t happen as frequently.”
Racist Killing Fields in the U.S.: The Death of Sandra Bland
Posted on Jul 23, 2015
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout
Sandra Bland, 28 years old
On July 9, soon after Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman, moved to Texas from Naperville, Illinois, to take a new job as a college outreach officer at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M, she was pulled over by the police for failing to signal while making a lane change. What followed has become all too common and illustrates the ever-increasing rise in domestic terrorism in the United States. She was pulled out of the car by the police for allegedly becoming combative, and was pinned to the ground by two officers. A video obtained by ABC 7 of Bland’s arrest “doesn’t appear to show Bland being combative with officers but does show two officers on top of Bland.”
A witness reported that “he saw the arresting officer pull Bland out of the car, throw her to the ground and put his knee on her neck while he arrested her.” In the video, Bland can be heard questioning the officers’ methods of restraint. She says: “You just slammed my head to the ground. Do you not even care about that? I can’t even hear.” She was then arrested for assaulting an officer, a third-degree felony, and interned at the Waller County, Texas, jail. On July 13, she was found dead in her cell. Quite unbelievably, the police reported that she took her own life, and the Waller County Jail is trying to rule her death a suicide. Friends and family say that this scenario is inconceivable, given what they know about Sandra: She was a young woman starting a new job, who was eagerly looking forward to her future.
Sandra Bland was an outspoken civil rights activist critical of police brutality. She often posted videos in which she talked about important civil rights issues, and once stated: “I’m here to change history. If we want a change we can really truly make it happen.”
Sandra Bland’s family and friends believe that foul play was involved in her death, and rightly so. Their belief is bolstered by the fact that the head sheriff of Waller County, Glenn Smith, who made the first public comments about Bland’s in-custody death, was suspended for documented cases of racism when he was chief of police in Hempstead, Texas, in 2007. After serving his suspension, more complaints of racism came in, and Smith was actually fired as chief of police in Hempstead.” Bland’s death over a routine traffic stop is beyond monstrous. It is indicative of a country where extreme violence is the norm – a society fed by the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, the incarceration state, the drug wars and the increasing militarization of everything, including the war on Black youth. There is more at stake here than the fact that, as federal statistics indicate, the police are “31 percent more likely to pull over a Black driver than a white driver”: Routine traffic stops for Black drivers contain the real possibility of turning deadly. This regular violence propels a deeply racist and militarized society. It is a violence that turns on young people and adults alike who are considered disposable. This type of harassment is integral to a form of domestic terrorism in which Black people are routinely beaten, arrested, incarcerated and too often killed. This is the new totalitarianism of the boot-in-your-face racism, one in which the punishing state is the central institution for both controlling poor people of color and enforcing the rules of the financial elite. How much longer can this war on youth go on?
CONFIRMED: Dashcam Video of Sandra Bland’s Violent Arrest was Indeed Edited Read more at
The United States has become a country that is proud of what is should be ashamed of. How else to explain the popularity of the racist and bigot, Donald Trump, among the Republican Party’s right-wing base? We celebrate violence in the name of security and violate every precept of human justice through an appeal to fear. This speaks clearly to a form of political repression and a toxic value system. Markets and power are immune to justice, and despise it. All that matters is that control – financial and political – serves soulless markets and the Darwinian culture of cruelty. How many more young people are going to be killed for walking in the street, failing to signal a lane shift, looking a police officer in the eye, or playing with a toy gun? How many more names of Black men, women and young people will join the list of those whose deaths have sparked widespread protests: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Renisha McBride, Aiyana Jones and Sakia Gunn, among many others – and now, Sandra Bland. Is it any wonder that one funeral director in Chicago stated that “young people in the city do not expect to live late into their adult life”? Moreover, police violence in the United States is not only a direct manifestation of state violence, but also serves as a gateway to prison, especially for people of color and the poor.
Yet, the mainstream media is more infatuated with game shows, financial brutishness, celebrities and the idiocy of Donald Trump than they are concerned about the endless violence waged against poor children of color in the United States. This violence speaks clearly to a society that no longer wants to invest in its youth. And if one measure of a democratic society is how it treats young people, the United States has failed miserably.
The form that the “war on terror” has taken at home is a war on poor people of color, especially Black people. Racism and police militarization have created a new kind of terrorism, one in which extreme violence is being used against Black people for the most trivial of infractions. The killing of Black youth by the police – a norm that stretches back, in an unbroken line of terror, to slavery – takes the form of both routine affair and spectacle. Nowadays, acts of domestic terrorism perpetrated by police take place increasingly in full view of the US public, who more and more are witnessing such lawlessness after it is recorded and uploaded onto the internet by bystanders. New technologies now enable individuals to record such violence in real time and make it a matter of public record. While this public display of the deployment domestic terrorism is undeniably crucial, in that it makes visible the depravity of state violence, these images are sometimes co-opted by the mass media, commodified, and disseminated in ways that can exploit – and even attempt to erase – Black lives, as William C. Anderson argues.
In the current environment, racial violence is so commonplace that when it is perpetrated by the police against innocent people, justice is not measured by holding those who commit the violence accountable. The official measure of justice is simply that the presence of violence be noted, by the authorities and the mainstream media. Few of the most powerful people seem distraught by the ongoing shootings, beatings, and killings of African-Americans in a society in which a Black man is killed every 28 hours in the US by police, vigilantes or security guards.
In a country in which militarism is viewed as an ideal and the police and soldiers are treated like heroes, violence becomes the primary modality for solving problems. One consequence is that state violence is either ignored, rendered trivial or shamelessly legitimated in the name of the law, security or self-defense. State violence fueled by the merging of the war on terror, the militarization of all aspects of society, and a deep-seated, ruthless and unapologetic racism is now ubiquitous and should be labeled as a form of domestic terrorism. Terrorism, torture and state violence are no longer simply part of our history; they have become the nervous system of an increasingly authoritarian state. Eric Garner told the police as he was being choked to death that he could not breathe. His words also apply to democracy itself, which is lacking the civic oxygen that gives it life. The United States is a place where democracy cannot breathe.
This authoritarianism fueled by the mainstream press, which seems especially interested in stories in which it can (wrongfully) frame victims as assailants, as in the case of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, but is less interested when the old stereotypes about crime and Black culture cannot be invoked. When dominant forces cannot figure out a way to label victims of police violence “thugs” – consider the case of Tamir Rice, who was only 12 years old when shot to death by a policeman who in his previous police assignment in another city was labeled as “unstable” – such acts of state terrorism often fade out of the mainstream view.
Why was there not a more sustained and mainstream public outcry over the case of Kalief Browder, a young Black man who was arrested for a crime he did not commit and incarcerated at the notorious Rikers Island for than a one thousand days – two years of that time in solitary confinement – waiting for a trial that never happened? Shortly after being released he committed suicide. Would this have happened if he were white, middle class and had access to a lawyer? How is what happened to him parallel to the egregious torture inflicted on innocent children at Abu Ghraib prison?
Not surprisingly, the discourse of “terrorism” once again is only used when someone is engaged in a plot to commit violence against the government – but not when the state commits violence unjustly against its own citizens. What needs to be recognized, as Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out, is that the killing of unarmed African Americans by the police is not simply a matter that speaks to the need for reforming the police and the culture that shapes it, but also for massive organized resistance against a war on Black youth that is being waged on US soil. The call for police “reform,” echoed throughout the dominant media, is meaningless. We need to change a system steeped in violence, racism, economic corruption and institutional rot. We don’t need revenge, we need justice – and that means structural change.
Ending police misconduct is certainly acceptable as short-term goal to save lives, but if we are going to prevent the United States from becoming a full-fledged police state serving the interests of the rich who ensconce themselves in their gated and guarded communities, the vicious neoliberal financial and police state has to be dismantled. Such resistance has taken shape with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, along with youth movements such as the Black Youth Project, Million Hoodies, We Charge Genocide and other groups.
A new brutalism haunts America, drenched in the flood of intolerable police and state violence. Millions of people are being locked up, jailed, beaten, harassed and violated by the police and other security forces, simply because they are Black, Brown, young and/or poor, and therefore viewed as disposable. Black youth are safe neither in their own neighborhoods nor on public streets, highways, schools – or any other areas in which the police can be found.
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