Society's ChildS


Yoda

Actor Tom Hardy to gay journalist: 'Why are you asking me about my sexuality?'

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English actor Tom Hardy
At a Toronto film festival press conference for Legend, which stars Englsh actor Tom Hardy as London gangster twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray, a journalist for a gay news website asks the actor - in a convoluted way - about his sexuality. Hardy answers by asking why the subject is even being raised, before ending the intrusive questioning with a gentle 'thank you'. Really, who gives a damn what anyone's 'sexuality' is...

Bad Guys

34 people displaced by NATO's wars drown off Greek island, 15 babies and children among them

Capsizing of overcrowded boat in high winds off the Aegean island of Farmakonisi comes as Athens calls for more help to deal with growing crisis
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© AFP/Getty ImagesAsylum seekers wait to cross the Greece-Macedonia border near the village of Idomeni on 13 September
At least 34 people, including 15 babies and children, drowned when their overcrowded boat capsized in high winds off a Greek island on Sunday, the latest asylum seeker tragedy at sea.

The deaths came as Athens angrily defended its handling of the mounting refugee crisis in Europe and appealed for more help.

Four babies and 11 young children - six boys and five girls - were among those on the stricken wooden boat when it sank off the Aegean island of Farmakonisi.

Eight of the victims were found by coastguard divers in the hold of the boat.

A total of 34 people were found dead, while another 68 were plucked alive from the sea and a further 30 managed to swim to a beach on the island, according to latest coastguard figures.

The exact number of those aboard remains unknown but the Athens News Agency said the boat was overcrowded and went down because of high winds in the area.

Comment: Dead 'migrants' and psychopaths in positions of power

The refugees are coming!!! The world is on the move - tens of millions displaced


Sherlock

Delta State University shooting: College hosted many active shooter drills

ethan schmidt
© DELTA STATE UNIVERSITYProfessor Ethan A. Schmidt was killed Monday when a shooter opened fire on the Delta State University campus.
Remarkable Coincidences in Developing Story, Recent News Article on Delta's Active Shooter Exercises Deleted From Web

On Monday, September 14 Delta State University Professor Ethan Schmidt was allegedly shot by an unknown assailant who is presently on the loose. The story is being vigorously promoted by major news media vis-á-vis university and Mississippi state officials, and federal agencies including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Yet Delta State is also noted in the region for "active shooter exercises" - the most recent of which were held in late August of this year (see below news report). "We've had and hosted several active shooter trainings on campus," notes Delta State Campus Police Chief Lynn Buford in a story appearing in the Bolivar Commercial that has since been deleted from its website.

Delta State's police department works with the local sheriff's office on such drills. When a drill scenario begins to play out campus police receive word of an alleged "active shooter" on campus. "Then we send out a text message that goes to Facebook and Twitter and email," Buford explains. "Depending on the situation we'll decide to either lockdown or evacuate."

Comment: As it stands right now, the mainstream media narrative on this incident is that Professor Schmidt was shot by a fellow professor, Dr. Shannon Lamb, due to an ongoing love triangle between the two and a woman, Amy Prentiss, who was Lamb's live-in girlfriend.


Attention

The world has gone mad

mad world
The world just keeps getting crazier. On so many levels and in so many ways, epic alterations are taking place, which reinforces the old wisdom that the only constant is change.

Let's start with the geopolitical and economic instability that is unprecedented in human history. There are not only civil and transnational wars in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and elsewhere, but there is the strong potential for a global conflict to escalate into full-blown nuclear and chemical engagement.

As a result of these wars, millions of people are being displaced from their homes and are fleeing to nations that are already struggling economically. There are also currency wars. Trade wars. Race wars. Religious wars. A shadow war between good and evil. It's not just the external world in conflict either; there's a war happening within every single one of us where our old ways of thinking are evolving into new paradigms of awareness and activism.

The fact remains that individuals are listening to their inner voice which is demanding they wake up to the truths of reality. Each new member is contributing to the tipping point for a bitter-sweet collective awakening; the conscious society has been conceived and is well on its way to being born.

Comment: Things are quickly reaching a tipping point, and if more people don't become aware of the dire situation we face on planet earth, perhaps Mother Nature may take steps to re-balance civilization.
Our world is descending into chaos, have you noticed?

The Chinese believed that an emperor could reign only while he enjoyed the 'Mandate of Heaven', that is, while he 'looked after his people'; if for any reason he failed to look after their well-being, Heaven would withdraw its Mandate and the emperor and probably his ruling dynasty would be deposed. Heaven would have been seen to withdraw its 'Mandate' when all manner of 'unnatural' events began to take place that threatened the well-being and sense of security of the population. If the sky darkened, for example, and the crops failed and famine ensued bringing death to large numbers of people, the emperor, guilty or not, got the blame for failing his people.

Whether or not the 'mandate of heaven' has basis in reality, history shows that the human experience is broadly defined by a succession of more or less corrupt ruling elites and that those elites reached the peak of their corruption at the times of destruction of the great human 'civilizations'. In addition, there is a wealth of evidence, most of it not in standard history text books, that shows that these human 'colony collapses' were caused by major geologic and cosmic upheavals, and were preceded by the kind of environmental, social and political chaos, ignorance, lies and greed that reign on our planet today. For those who had knowledge of this cyclical nature of human civilizations and were watching the events unfold, it may have seemed that the collapse occurred progressively. But for the majority, who submitted or succumbed to the official exhortations or subtle temptation to ignore or shut out the reality of the world around them, it came as a "thief in night".



USA

Police academy preaches the 'War on Cops' myth

Police Academy
© Carlo Allegri/Reuters
In my rural red state police academy, instructors preach about 'officers dying left and right' - even though the numbers show this isn't happening.

The trumpets of the thin blue line and right-wing news sources have been sounding, piping out warnings of a "War on Police." You may have heard it on talk radio, seen it on Fox News or even read it in the New York Post, but now the rhetoric of charlatans has reached me in class at my police academy in a Northern red state.

The War on Cops is a grossly inaccurate response to recent police killings which are on track for another year that will rival the safest on record. Gunfire deaths by police officers are down 27 percent this year, according to the Officer Down memorial page, and police killings in general are at a 20-year low, given current numbers for 2015. Police deaths in Barack Obama's presidency are lower than the past four administrations, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan's presidency.

Not a single iota of evidence supports a War on Police, but it has become a battle cry among some in the academy.

Comment: This story further shows how the police have changed so much through the years and move further away from the "to serve and protect" motto.


Airplane

California wildfire mayhem: Windscreen of car is smashed by pieces of firefighting plane after engine explodes on take-off from Fresno airport

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Witnesses said the metal pieces were hot to the touch after crashing through a car's rear window
Residents of a California city narrow avoided injury when metal pieces from a plane fell from the sky as the aircraft experienced engine trouble.

A passenger jet was flying over Fresno when one of its engines failed shortly after take-off and it was forced to return and make an emergency landing.

One resident told local media she heard a loud 'boom' that shook her house moments before debris landed on her car.

Jeanette Sanders, who was inside her home at the time of Sunday's incident, told ABC30: 'I came out to check everything out and then I turned around and looked at my car and I had a hole in the back end, the windshield was busted out.'

Pieces of the jet engine crashed through the car's rear window as it was parked in front of her home.


USA

Best of the Web: Public education and hystericized society: For children in the U.S., school is the first indoctrination into the American police state

Child Arrested
© Lionel Nation
"Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning. From metal detectors to drug tests, from increased policing to all-seeing electronic surveillance, the public schools of the twenty-first century reflect a society that has become fixated on crime, security and violence."—Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes
In the American police state, you're either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).

Indeed, at a time when we are all viewed as suspects, there are so many ways in which a person can be branded a criminal for violating any number of laws, regulations or policies. Even if you haven't knowingly violated any laws, there is still a myriad of ways in which you can run afoul of the police state and end up on the wrong side of a jail cell.

Unfortunately, when you're a child in the American police state, life is that much worse.

Microcosms of the police state, America's public schools contain almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the "outside."

Heart - Black

Ridiculous: Journalist thinks prostitutes can't be raped - "it's more like theft of services"

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© Shutterstock
Mary Mitchell, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, declared over the weekend that prosecutors had been wrong to allege a prostitute had been raped at gunpoint because the crime was really "theft of services."

The Sun-Times reported last week that 29-year-old Roy Akins had been charged with aggravated criminal sexual assault after he allegedly raped a prostitute at gunpoint because he did not have the cash to pay her.

In her Saturday column, Mitchell argued that prosecutors were "making a mockery of rape victims" by prosecuting the crime as a sexual assault.

"I don't have one iota of sympathy for Akins' plight. But I'm grateful he isn't being accused of snatching an innocent woman off the street," Mitchell wrote. "Unfortunately, the way this case is being handled makes it look like sex trafficking is a legitimate business."

Comment: It is not an insult, it shows our humanity that we treat those in the sex industry, even if it's against the law, the same as we would anyone else. Many sex workers are in the industry because of trauma and numerous difficulties in life. If there is anyone we should be treating as humanely as possible, it should be sex workers. Her argument about 'legitimatizing sex trafficking' is as ridiculous as it is tone deaf. Apparently Mary Mitchell would like sex workers treated as less than human, since that is how she sees such people. No matter who you are, being raped at gunpoint is terribly traumatic and our law enforcement rightfully prosecutes people who commit such acts.


Heart - Black

Man claims cop charged at him, beat him, then charged him with assault for no reason

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© KFORChris Barger
An Oklahoma man suffered a broken nose and other injuries — but was charged with assault — when a police officer punched him during an arrest. Chris Barger said he dropped off a friend at an apartment complex Sept. 7 in Purcell when a police officer approached and shined a flashlight into his car, reported KFOR-TV.

"He begins to shine his light in my car window repeatedly, and after a while, I decided maybe I should get out of the vehicle and ask the officer what the problem is," Barger said.

Barger got out of the car with one hand in his pocket, and a witness said the officer charged him and began punching.


Comment: Pro-tip: NEVER exit your vehicle unless instructed to do so. If that does happen, use your phone to record everything. You can keep it in your pocket, and will at least have the audio. In general, you want to avoid contact with the police altogether.


Comment: Unfortunately, this is the new normal. Police are the new gestapo, able to brutalize, steal and murder on a whim, and get away with it


Cult

Blaming the victim: Bishop testifies that boy raped by priest was "culpable"

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© Syracuse DioceseBishop Robert Cunningham
Syracuse bishop objected to a news report that accurately quoted his remarks blaming victims of child-molesting priests for their own sex abuse.

Bishop Robert Cunningham testified in a 2011 deposition as part of a federal lawsuit filed by a man accusing a priest of sexually abusing him years earlier as a child, reported the Post-Standard.

The plaintiff's attorney asked Cunningham, who heads the Syracuse diocese, whether a child molested by a priest has committed a sin in the eyes of the church.

"The boy is culpable," Cunningham said during the Oct. 14, 2011, sworn deposition.

The bishop backed away from that statement later in the deposition but said he would need more information about the child's behavior to determine his culpability.