It came to mind that I hadn't read of or seen anything about police shootings of unarmed black men recently in the paper. And I grew curious, I mean, in 2016 you couldn't go a week without hearing something, "Black Lives Matter", there were the disturbing videos live-streamed to Facebook, the US was at war.
But 2017 was different. There were no killings, that I could recollect, in the past few months, and I tried to fix a date upon when this sea-change happened...
Micah Xavier Johnson. The 2016 Dallas Police Shootings. The Wikipedia, Ambush - Fair enough, but they were armed, which is more than you can say about the 102 unarmed black people shot in 2015.
For a moment I thought that maybe he'd effected a difference, that somehow his pushing back made the police realize they couldn't continue this without the expectation of reasonable repercussions. For a moment. But a little further digging and I was disappointed...
Links:
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2017/
- http://www.killedbypolice.net/kbp2015.html
Sea-Change, See-Change, and I'm wondering if the under-reportage now is to protect the police, or because Dumbo has all the press...
Key Findings:
Police killed at least 102 unarmed black people in 2015, nearly twice each week. (See which police departments were responsible for these deaths)
Nearly 1 in 3 black people killed by police in 2015 were identified as unarmed, though the actual number is likely higher due to under-reporting
37% of unarmed people killed by police were black in 2015 despite black people being only 13% of the U.S. population
Unarmed black people were killed at 5x the rate of unarmed whites in 2015
Only 10 of the 102 cases in 2015 where an unarmed black person was killed by police resulted in officer(s) being charged with a crime, and only 2 of these deaths (Matthew Ajibade and Eric Harris) resulted in convictions of officers involved. Only 1 of 2 officers convicted for their involvement in Matthew Ajibade's death received jail time. He was sentenced to 1 year in jail and allowed to serve this time exclusively on weekends. Deputy Bates, who killed Eric Harris, will be sentenced May 31.
(from: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/)
In any event, there will come a time when he's seen as a hero, the one who pushed back and was the first to fight for justice and change, and his statue - with a rifle, will adorn the police station. Which is as it should be, only that time should be now...
- Details
- Category: Rants
What's the difference between Bombardier and the fat, chain smoking guy down the street on Welfare? The fat guy's better for the economy.
What's remarkable is the comments - people seem to honestly believe it was better under Harper. It wasn't. Time to start rounding them up and loading the guns, folks...
More opinion on Bombardier: http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/kelly-mcparland-ok-bombardier-board-whats-the-going-rate-for-repeated-failure
- Details
- Category: Rants
Political Correctness has foreshadowed the "Post-Truth" movement, the inability to call a spade a spade or make decisions or predictions based on data that might possibly offend a group of people.
We know that purebred dogs - most having existed a mere hundred years or less - are genetically inferior; that they are generally stupid, sickly, prone to early death, those qualities they were bred for as well highlighted and amplified all the bad traits. Like the British Monarchy, any of the fancy European Aristocracies, with their selective inbreeding until they became weakened and anemic...
We allow that different nations have different advantages in sports largely due to their genetic (to some extent "racial") heritage.
...yet suggest for a minute that those same evolutions and adaptations that made a select group of people better swimmers or runners might have in some way made them "inferior" - aka intellectually, socially, or otherwise, and you're a racist. This is not good science. We've been breeding dogs - selectively, with the intent to create breeds - for only a couple of hundred years, tops, the results are in. To suggest that a group genetically isolated for 100, 1000, even tens of thousands of years, might have evolved some traits that show poor adaptive value to current civilization and circumstance labels you a racist.
I'm not particularly for this "racism" thing, of far more concern to me are the Cultural Liberals that would find value in the headhunters of Borneo, invite them into the country and feed them their children. Clearly that's a slight exaggeration, but only slight. The point of the argument is that as long as we continue to deny our differences we are denying the truth, and we were in the post-truth movement a long time before Donald Trump came to office...
- Details
- Category: Rants
The daughter lures me in, there's a career fair at her school she wants to go, see what's on offer...
I know that her school, it's convenient, handy to her home, but it has a pretty bad reputation otherwise. Not the best school. Not by a longshot. The demographic of the students, it's ranking province wide on the tests, not my choice, but as always her mother knows best. Sure.
We go, and it's filled with stalls advertising such companies as Mr. Lube, Part's Source, AutoValue, Earl's, WTF? Where's Law, Medicine, Engineering? But no, this is a school exclusively devoted to raising it's students above the level of their parents, any of these jobs would be "success" in their terms, and I'm filled with despair...
Never mind. She knows better, she's there to grab a few free treats and snacks and then we leave, she gets it as well, laughs, shrugs it off, for me it's not so easy...
- Details
- Category: Rants