Society's ChildS


Stormtrooper

'She was screaming': Psychopathic Calif. Highway Patrol officer caught on video pummeling woman

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An unidentified California Highway Patrol officer is under investigation after getting caught on video beating a woman about the head a dozen times with no apparent indication that he was in danger.

KNBC-TV reported on Thursday that the incident was filmed Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles by motorist David Díaz as he was making his way onto Interestate 10.

Díaz's 90-second clip begins with the officer catching up to the woman on foot. She appears to walk away from him, before the officer takes her to the ground. After a brief struggle, the officer begins pummeling her with punches to the head. The woman can be seen covering up and not fighting back.

Comment: Once again a cop violently beats what appears to be a defenseless woman and yes it's a white male cop that's beating a black woman!


Airplane Paper

Another drone mishap: Colorado man finds crashed drone in backyard

George Ray drone crash
© CBSGeorge Ray shows CBS4′s Suzanne McCarroll where the drone was flying before it crashed
A drone crashed into a Brighton man's backyard and now the homeowner wants answers.

George Ray said the drone had a GoPro camera mounted on it and was videotaping over his property located off Interstate 76 near 136th Ave. early this morning.

Ray said he heard a strange sound outside his bathroom, "All I could hear was a 'Beep, beep, beep."

When he looked outside he saw a drone with a camera.

"What dummy would be flying around a drone at 3:30, 3:45 in the morning? It doesn't make sense," said Ray.

Shortly after the drone made an unexpected landing, "This is where it landed at. Apparently it crashed right here, fell to the ground."

Comment: As drones are becoming less expensive and more prevalent in the airways, the potential for crashes is increasing and some no doubt will be deadly. Passenger aircraft pilots are already reporting numerous near-collisions with drones.

Crash!!! Its Raining Drones
Drone weighing 375 pounds crashes near elementary school, Pennsylvania
Drone collision redux! German drone crashes into plane on Afghanistan runway
Passenger plane nearly collides with unmanned drone at Australian airport


Stock Down

What jobs plan?? Record number of Americans out of a job in June

Obama
© APPresident Obama introduces his jobs plan in October 2012 in Delray, Fla., one month before he was re-elected.
The number of Americans 16 and older who did not participate in the labor force climbed to a record high of 92,120,000 in June, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

This means that there were 92,120,000 Americans 16 and older who not only did not have a job, but did not actively seek one in the last four weeks.

That is up 111,000 from the 92,009,000 Americans who were not participating in the labor force in April.

In June, according to BLS, the labor force participation rate for Americans was 62.8 percent, matching a 36-year low. The participation rate is the percentage of the population that either has a job or actively sought one in the last four weeks.

Comment: Perhaps the jobless numbers reflect the war economy that has been draining funds and productivity to the military since 2001.

American workers hanging on by the skin of their teeth


Robot

Computers to take on writing duties at AP news wire

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© Reuters / Adrees Latif
Quarterly earnings reports already read like they've been written by robots, but the next step will make that a reality: Going forward, the Associated Press will be using automated technology to write the majority of articles on company returns.

In a statement released on Monday, the news service dubbed the move as "a leap forward" that will allow its journalists to focus on writing other types of business-related stories while advanced algorithms - designed by Automated Insights using data from Zacks Investment Research - take over the drier responsibility of reporting company numbers.

According to the AP's managing editor Lou Ferrara, the company's human journalists provide readers with roughly 300 earnings reports every quarter - a number that will be dwarfed by the amount of stories the new automated algorithms can put together. Under its new system, Ferrara estimates that 4,400 earnings reports will be released each quarter.

"Zacks maintains the data when the earnings reports are issued. Automated Insights has algorithms that ping that data and then in seconds output a story. The structure for the earnings reports stories was crafted by AP with Automated Insights. All conform to AP Style," Ferrara said on the news outlet's blog.

Comment: Since most journalists at major news outlets are wholly robotic in repeating government/corporate talking points anyway, we doubt that most of us would notice a difference.


War Whore

Shameful! How did the FBI miss over 1 million rapes?

fbi badge
© FBI
Systematic undercounting of sexual assaults in the US disguises a hidden rape crisis.

Earlier this month, a 911 dispatcher in Ohio was recorded telling a 20-year-old woman who had just been raped to "quit crying." After she provided a description of her assailant, the caller went on to say, "They're not going to be able to find him with the information that you've given." This incident had its viral moment, sparking outrage at the dispatcher's lack of empathy. But it also speaks to the larger issue of how we are counting rapes in the United States. Sixty-nine percent of police departments surveyed in 2012 said that dispatchers like this one, often with little training, are authorized to do the initial coding of sexual assault crimes.

That's important, because miscoding of such crimes is masking the high incidence of rape in the United States. We don't have an overestimation of rape; we have a gross underestimation. A thorough analysis of federal data published earlier this year by Corey Rayburn Yung, associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, concludes that between 1995 and 2012, police departments across the country systematically undercounted and underreported sexual assaults.

Yung used murder rates - the statistic with the most reliable measure of accuracy and one that is historically highly correlated with the incidence of rape - as a baseline for his analysis. After nearly two years of work, he estimates conservatively that between 796,213 and 1,145,309 sexual assault cases never made it into national FBI counts during the studied period.

That's more than 1 million rapes.

The estimates are conservative for two reasons. First, in order to consistently analyze the data over time, Yung looked only at cases defined by the FBI's pre-2012 definition of rape (one established in 1927): "carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will." This definition did not include anal or oral rape, cases involving drugging or alcohol, or the rape of boys and men. The Federal Criminal Code was recently broadened to include these categories. Second, the FBI and crime experts estimate that anywhere from 60 percent to 80 percent of rapes are never reported to the police.

Yung's analysis, which focused on cities with populations of more than 100,000, found that 22 percent of the 210 studied police departments demonstrated "substantial statistical irregularities in their rape data."

"It's probably true that in all cities there is undercounting," explains Yung. "However, forty-six outlier cities appear to be undercounting on a consistent, high level, which makes sense because you have to show [improved crime statistics] results year over year, and you get into a trap where you have to improve upon already low numbers." Even worse, the number of jurisdictions that appear to be undercounting has increased by 61 percent during the period studied.

How are police departments undercounting sexual assault?

Pistol

Cops called to help suicidal teen, they show up and kill him

Christian Sierra
Christian Sierra
A community is devastated after a suicidal teenager was shot to death by police following a family's call for help.

Christian Alberto Sierra, 17, was a popular student and athlete at Loudoun Valley High School. His friends noticed his good-natured demeanor begin to slip into a depression and ultimately toward the unthinkable. On May 24, 2014, he suffered a breakdown and threatened suicide.

While at a friend's house on a Saturday afternoon, he began to act erratically and harmed himself with a knife. The Washington Post describes what happened:

Attention

Rampant sexual abuse by officers ignored by police departments

traumatized woman
© Shutterstock
Nicole Smith is terrified that her rapist, a former police officer, is up for parole soon and could be released from prison, possibly as early as September 2015. Smith's name has been changed due to potential retribution from her attacker, should he be released.

Smith said that, upon first meeting this man, she trusted him because he was a police officer, and felt more comfortable and safe around him after seeing him in uniform and in his patrol car. When they started dating for a short time, she went to visit him in an undisclosed city one weekend.

She could never have predicted he would viciously attack her during their stay in a hotel room.

Comment: See also:



Palette

Put Tracey Emin's iconic (ironic) 'My Bed' artwork on public display, art experts say

my bed
© Tracey Emin, My Bed (c. 1999) Installation.Such beauty! What a talented artist!

The work itself consists of Emin's bed after she had lain in it for roughly seven days while contemplating suicide. The objects that surround the bed include used condoms, stained undergarments, cigarette butts, empty bottles of alcohol and the bed itself is covered in stained sheets with bodily fluids.
Art experts have called for Tracey Emin's My Bed to be put on public display, after it emerged her art dealer Jay Joplin had bought the "iconic" work on behalf of an unnamed client.

Tania Buckrell Pos, head of specialist art consultancy Arts & Management International, said: "It is a pivotal piece, it belongs in a museum. Hopefully whoever he bought it for will pass it to an institution."

The best place for it, she continued, would be the Tate, saying: "That's absolutely where it should be."

The White Cube would only confirm that "we were involved in the purchase on behalf of a client" adding it was "very early days at this stage".

Comment: for more examples of the psychopathic degradation of the beauty that is real art:

Eradicating beauty: The destruction of art and The Plot Against Art


USA

Symbolic? Wall under historic Brooklyn Bridge collapses during storm

Brooklyn bridge collapse
© Jean-luc Torchon
During last night's pounding thunderstorm, a facade under the Brooklyn Bridge on the Brooklyn side collapsed, injuring numerous people.

It happened at Washington and Prospect Streets, near the exit ramp to Tillary Street and Cadman Plaza. The Daily News reports:

"Jerome Dilligard, 52, said his wife noticed water seeping from between the heavy stones of the facade as they took shelter under the Brooklyn Bridge. The retired correction officer decided to run for their car.

As soon as Dilligard left, the wall collapsed - burying his wife, Teresa, and their 8-year-old daughter, Kaylah, as well as his 30-year-old daughter, LaToya Jackson, her son, Khmani, 10, and little Kiarra in debris. The baby was knocked to the street, her grandfather said.

"A stranger picked her up," Dilligard said. "They were right under the wall when it came down.

"My wife had to dig them all out. It's a miracle they got out with their lives.""

Map

Streets near New York Brooklyn bridge reopen after facade collapse

Brooklyn Bridge facade1
© Andrew Renneisen/The New York Times A section of the wall under the Brooklyn Bridge on Prospect and Washington Streets has been removed for safety, according to the city’s Office of Emergency Management.
Streets and walkways around the Brooklyn Bridge reopened Thursday morning after part of the stone facade of a bridge underpass crumbled to the ground during a thunderstorm Wednesday evening, injuring eight people who were taking shelter from the heavy rain under the bridge.

The collapse, at Prospect Street and Washington Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn, brought nearly a dozen fire trucks and paramedics to the bridge just before 8 p.m. on Wednesday, a Fire Department spokeswoman said. She said five adults and three children were treated for minor injuries at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan.

A spokeswoman for the city's Office of Emergency Management, Nancy Greco-Silvestri, said investigators had determined on Wednesday that there were no structural issues at the bridge. The streets in the area, which were clogged Wednesday night with emergency vehicles, have reopened, and a temporary walkway has been built for pedestrians, she said.