Society's ChildS


Heart - Black

'I hate that thug music,' white man told fiancée moments before gunning down black teen

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A Florida woman testified Saturday that her fiancée, who is on trial for murder, used a racially charged word to complain about loud music before gunning down a black teen sitting in an SUV.

Michael Dunn fatally shot 17-year-old Jordan Davis in November 2012 during a dispute at a Jacksonville gas station, but the 47-year-old man claims the shooting was in self-defense.

Dunn was charged with first-degree murder, and he was also charged with the attempted murders of three other people in the SUV with Davis the day after Thanksgiving.

Rhonda Rouer testified that she and Dunn were on their way to a hotel after drinking rum and cokes at Dunn's son's wedding when they pulled into a convenience store parking lot, where they heard loud music coming from a Dodge Durango.

"I hate that 'thug' music," she recalled Dunn saying. Some people consider the term, "thug," to be aeuphemism for another racial slur.

Prosecutors said Dunn told the teen to turn down his music while Rouer went into the store, and the pair exchanged curse words, and defense attorneys claimed Davis got out of his car with some sort of weapon.

Bulb

West Virginia families, billed for contaminated water they didn't use, bill water company for losses

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The chemical spill in West Virginia has left thousands of people near Charleston with licorice-scented tap water that they're afraid to use, despite the assurances of government and their water company.

West Virginia American Water promised customers a credit on their bills for the water homeowners needed to use to flush their pipes of contamination. But when many received their January bills, the credit was no where to be found, ThinkProgress reported. And some bills showed hundreds of gallons of water use that homeowners claimed as impossible even with the flushing, given how circumspect their water use had been since the January 9 contamination of the Elk River with 10,000 gallons of Crude MCHM.

So, about a hundred people marched Saturday to the offices of West Virginia American Water to present the company with invoices for the water they've had to buy on the open market, along with their ancillary expenses.

Arrow Down

How much of Facebook's ad revenue is from click fraud?

Facebook Likes
© PubChase.com
The following incredible video was brought to my attention by Mish at his Global Economic Trend Analysis website. As I read his post, I was blown away by the fact that his thought process on Facebook's ad revenues and his experience in running a website was so incredibly similar to my own. He wrote:
I do not pay anyone to direct traffic to my blog and I do not ask people to click on ads they are not interested in. Nor do I want them too.

On several occasions, I even reported myself to Google.
I am in the exact same camp as him, and in fact, just last month I noticed some suspicious clicks coming to my site that made no sense and generated a massive amount of revenue. I emailed Google to report this.

I was stunned when I saw Facebook's revenue for the last quarter. As someone that makes money off of online ads, I know what the trends with cost per click are. Facebook's numbers made me scratch my head. I have been trying to understand what is going on, and thanks to the following video a lot of things are starting to make sense. Something is definitely fishy with Facebook. This is a must watch video on Facebook Fraud.

Black Magic

Zombie Nation: 70 MILLION Americans are on mind-altering drugs

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The heroin-overdose death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has caused the media to focus, however fleetingly, on America's drug problem.

News accounts of the Oscar-winner's tragic demise typically reference the startling increase in heroin-related deaths in the last four to five years. The problem, reporters explain, is the vast number of Americans addicted to prescription pain meds like OxyContin, many of whom discover heroin to be both cheaper and easier to obtain than the prescription opioid drugs to which they initially became addicted.

That's accurate as far as it goes. But by following the trail further, we arrive at a place far more shocking and consequential. We discover that not only has the traditional distinction between illegal "street drugs" and legal "therapeutic prescription drugs" become so blurred as to be almost nonexistent, but between America's twin drug epidemics - one illegal, the other legal - well over 70 million Americans are using mind-altering drugs. And that number doesn't include abusers of alcohol, which adds an additional 60 million Americans. So we're really talking about 130 million strung-out Americans. How is this possible?

Of course, most of the drug news we've heard lately has been about pot. It started with medical marijuana, with state after state successfully defying the federal ban. Then on Jan. 1, flat-out legalization took center stage, when Colorado and Washington opened their doors to exhilarated pot-smokers, while numerous other states - from Alaska, Oregon and California in the west to Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., in the east - announced plans to push for legalization in the coming months.

Sheriff

Cop breaks 10-year-old's leg then sexually assaults his mom claims lawsuit

Court documents claim officers of the NYPD's 63rd Precinct came to Krystle Silvera's home looking for an ex-boyfriend at 7 a.m. on Jan. 30, 2013.

Silvera's mother, a 61-year-old lung and brain cancer patient, answered the door, but couldn't understand why the officers were there. That is when Silvera's 10-year-old son picked up his moms phone and attempted to record the events taking place as he was "fascinated by the police, he looks up to them", according to his mom Krystle Silvera.

The events alleged in court documents to have followed are extremely ominous. The officer, in violation of established case law, attempted to violate the child's right to film by assaulting him according to the suit. Ms. Silvera is quoted by NY Daily News as saying, "I heard my son screaming, 'You can't do that! You're hurting me! Don't hit me!' "

Heart - Black

Second giraffe named Marius at risk of being put down in Denmark

Copenhagen zoo's giraffe named Marius, before he was killed, dissected and eaten by lions
© Scanpix Denmark/Reuters
Jyllands Park zoo says it may kill male giraffe to make way for female, days after death at Copenhagen zoo sparked outcry

If you are a giraffe and your name is Marius, now might be a good time to leave Denmark.

Days after the euthanasia of a healthy young giraffe at Copenhagen zoo sparked controversy around the world, a second Danish zoo has announced that it is considering a similar fate for another giraffe - also named Marius.

V

Anger in Bosnia, but this time the people can read their leaders' ethnic lies

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© Sulejman Omerbasic/Corbis'The protesters' despair is authentic. One is tempted to paraphrase Mao Zedong: there is chaos in Bosnia, the situation is excellent!'
Last week, cities were burning in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It all began in Tuzla, a city with a Muslim majority. The protests then spread to the capital, Sarajevo, and Zenica, but also Mostar, home to a large segment of the Croat population, and Banja Luka, capital of the Serb part of Bosnia. Thousands of enraged protesters occupied and set fire to government buildings. Although the situation then calmed down, an atmosphere of high tension still hangs in the air.

The events gave rise to conspiracy theories (for example, that the Serb government had organised the protests to topple the Bosnian leadership), but one should safely ignore them since it is clear that, whatever lurks behind, the protesters' despair is authentic. One is tempted to paraphrase Mao Zedong's famous phrase here: there is chaos in Bosnia, the situation is excellent!

Why? Because the protesters' demands were as simple as they can be - jobs, a chance of decent life, an end to corruption - but they mobilised people in Bosnia, a country which, in the last decades, has become synonymous with ferocious ethnic cleansing.

Smoking

Totalitarian science and second-hand smoke, where 'facts' fit policy.

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Simon Hills gives his reaction to the House of Commons voting, on the back of junk science, to ban smoking in cars when under 18s are present - suggesting it's only a matter of time before our homes are next

So our politicians have finally crossed a rubicon in passing legislation banning adults from doing something in their own private space on the grounds that they don't approve of it. Smoking is to be banned in cars if there are children in the vehicle. Writing an article for The Times about the proposal, the columnist Gaby Hinsliff wrote: "There's little point arguing this one out with hardcore libertarians, although it beats me why anyone would fight for the right to give their children cancer."

This was the headline for the piece: "Who would fight for the right to give kids cancer?" This is the same as writing, surely, "Who would fight for the right to give kids a paralysing spinal injury?" for those parents who might want to take their children horse riding. Or, "Who would fight for the right to let their children freeze to death?" for those who take them walking in the Cairngorms.

In fact, despite the demonic, despotic science on the effects of secondary smoking, there has been the most pitiful evidence that it has done any children any harm at all.

Comment: Passive smoking is another of the Nanny State's big lies,
The devious plan of anti-smoking campaigns to control people and stop them from using their brain.
Smokers' lungs used in half of transplants: Improves Survival Rate!
Smoking Does Not Cause Lung Cancer
Smoking Does Not Cause Lung Cancer (According to WHO/CDC Data)
Air pollution causes lung cancer in non-smokers (erm, can't it cause it in smokers too then?)
Government Suppresses Major Public Health Report
Air pollution leading cause of cancer, World Health Organisation warns
5 Health Benefits of Smoking
'World No Tobacco Day'? Let's All Light Up!


Pistol

Border Patrol teaching children to shoot at human-shaped targets that look like immigrants

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Controversial photographs from a recent Border Patrol event show agents teaching children to aim and shoot a paintball gun at a human-shaped target. Immigrant activists have accused Border Patrol of using this activity to encourage children how to shoot immigrants in an area where migrants have died.

"The target is dressed to resemble a migrant and is located within 100 feet from Virginia Avenue where actual persons have been killed by Border Patrol gunfire," Immigrants Rights Consortium's Pedro Rios said, according to NBC San Diego News. "While encouraging children to use guns to shoot at a migrant effigy is unconscionable, it is also symbolic of the agency's unabashed culture of violence which has grown from a lack of accountability, oversight and unprofessional standards that rebuke best practices in situations involving use-of-force."

Border Patrol claims it is "standard" practice to use targets dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. It denies, however, that the target was meant to look specifically like an immigrant, and said the "activity was meant to create awareness about law enforcement tools used to address some violent situations without the use of deadly force."

Bizarro Earth

'Significant' spill of coal slurry taints creek in West Virginia

coal slurry west virginia
© Mark Cornelison

The coal slurry spill in West Virginia Tuesday morning wasn't nearly as bad as this one in Inez,
Kentucky, 11 years ago, but the risk is always there, especially when regulators don't regulate. Officials of the state's Department of Environmental Protection don't yet know how much coal slurry has leaked from a facility in Kanawha County, West Virginia. But a DEP spokesman characterized it as "significant."

It has already blackened Fields Creek not far from where it empties into the Kanawha River. State officials and those at West Virginia American Water say the spill is no threat to drinking water supplies. Indeed, Jimmy Gianato, the director of the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management at the state's Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety, said: "I don't think there's really anything to it. It turned out to be much of nothing."

That doesn't quite seem to mesh with "significant," but if true, it would be good news after more than a month of worries caused by the 10,000-gallon spill of a chemical mixture - Crude MCHM - from Freedom Industries on the Elk River. That spill did taint drinking water. One elementary school, according to the Charleston Gazette, detected low levels of MCHM in water from a drinking fountain Tuesday morning. Authorities say they will flush it out after school.