Society's ChildS


V

Peaceful man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask arrested at Arizona election fraud protest

guy fawkes mask
A man wearing an Anonymous mask, a symbol of the hacktivists fighting for justice, was arrested in Arizona while sitting peacefully during a hearing at the state Capitol regarding the suspected election fraud.

Bystanders and fellow protesters recorded the event as police approached the man, Jonathan McRae, who had the mask atop his head, not covering his face, and forcefully removed him from his seat. The crowd came to the aid of the man verbally, one man even reached for McRae despite inevitably being manhandled by police after, and the man remained silent the entire time.

The crowd continuously yelled, "Shame!" and "He didn't do anything!" They explained that, "The guy that was chanting already left," hoping to help the cops realize that they had the wrong man. The officers claimed in the police report that McRae was the man "yelling and causing a disturbance" and that they had already asked him to leave 4 times.

Comment: Here's video of the arrest:




Heart - Black

Tampa parents furious over 'privilege' quiz

'Her sexuality and all that has nothing to do with the school'

school sexuality test
© Photo: WTSP-10 screenshotStudents at Monroe Middle School in Tampa, Florida, were asked to fill out a “How privileged are you?” form by a Spanish teacher
Florida parents are livid at a Spanish teacher who assigned middle-school students a form titled "How privileged are you?" during class.

Seventh- and eighth-grade students at Monroe Middle School in Tampa were asked questions about race, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, and religion during a Spanish lesson. The teacher, who has been pulled from the classroom while officials investigate, allegedly used the form as a way to promote "diversity."

"Her sexuality and all that has nothing to do with the school," parent Regina Stiles told WTSP-10 on Tuesday. "You're here to teach my child a foreign language - not anything else."

Stiles' daughter revealed her ADHD in the form's "mentality disability" box due to the teacher's opinion on the condition. The child was also asked to consider boxes labeled "genderqueer" and "pansexual."

Comment: What chance do our children have of flourishing when they're living under such an onslaught of cultural toxicity?


Nuke

Britain is sending a huge nuclear waste consignment to America - why?

Nuclear Waste
© Gualtiero Boffi
A very unusual exchange is about to take place over the Atlantic. The UK is sending some 700kg of highly enriched uranium to be disposed of in the US, the largest amount that has ever been moved out of the country. In return, the US is sending other kinds of enriched uranium to Europe to help diagnose people with cancer.

The vast majority of the UK's waste comes from its fleet of nuclear power stations. Most of it is stored at the Sellafield site in north-west England. But the material being sent to the US is a particularly high (weapons usable) grade of enriched uranium that you wouldn't want to move to Sellafield from its current location at Dounreay in the north of Scotland without building a new storage facility - presumably more expensive than the cost of transportation.

The decision to move this radioactive waste out of the UK has been presented as making it harder for nuclear materials to get into the hands of terrorists, but this is implausible. The UK is capable of managing homegrown highly enriched uranium itself. The plan also contradicts the principle that countries are responsible for managing their own nuclear legacy.

Comment: Governments and scientists act like children playing with matches. A cursory glance at the news every day shows the recklessness of psychopathic governments in their pursuit of power and money at the expense of people and the environment. The nuclear energy/waste issue is one of the greatest hazards we face as a species and our world leaders' track record doesn't instill one with much faith when it comes to the disposal of nuclear waste.

Transporting 700kg of enriched uranium 4000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, over and/or through populated areas is typical of such psychopathic recklessness and is a disaster waiting to happen.


Donut

Ridiculous! Louisiana man faces 20 years in prison for stealing $31 in candy bars

Jason Grimes
© Via FacebookJason Grimes
A Louisiana man accused of stuffing $31 worth of candy bars into his pockets faces a possible sentence of 20 years to life in prison, prompting a judge to question whether the sentence was "over the top."

Orleans Parish prosecutors chose to charge Jacobia Grimes, 34, under a statute that boosts the alleged candy theft to a felony. The law applies to people who have been convicted of "theft of goods" at least twice. Grimes has five prior theft convictions, making him a "quad" offender under the state's habitual-offender law.

Grimes, 34, pleaded not guilty Thursday, The New Orleans Advocate reported.

The possible sentence raised questions with Judge Franz Zibilich, who was overseeing Grimes' arraignment last week.

"Isn't this a little over the top?" Zibilich said. "Twenty years to life for a Snickers bar, or two or three or four."

Grimes' attorneys, Miles Swanson and Michael Kennedy, said his prior guilty pleas were for similar shoplifting attempts, including stealing from a Rite-Aid, Save-A-Center, Blockbuster Video, and Rouses grocery stores.

Swanson said all the thefts were for less than $500 worth of items. The last theft of socks and trousers from a Dollar General store got him a four-year sentence in 2010.

One of his lawyers said he could have been charged under a different statute than the habitual-offender law.

"They're spending their time to lock someone up for years over $31 worth of candy," Swanson said.

Comment: 40 reasons U.S. jails and prisons are full of black and poor people


V

Palestinian activists slam UK arms company over profiting from Israeli war crimes

Palestinian child amidst rubble
© AFPA Palestinian child sits in front of the rubble of buildings which were destroyed during the 50-day war of Israel against Palestinians in the summer of 2014, in the village of Khuza'a, east of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on June 15, 2015.
Scores of pro-Palestinian activists in the UK have demonstrated outside the headquarters of an arms manufacturing company, accusing it of benefiting from Israel's deadly crackdown against Palestinians.

The protesters gathered in front of the UK headquarters of aerospace manufacturer Thales, in Crawley, on Friday and expressed their anger against the company's partnership with Israel's Elbit Systems to develop a surveillance drone, nicknamed Watchkeeper, used by the regime against Palestinians.

The rally was held by the Sussex Stop Arming Israel campaign and was supported by other human rights groups, including the Inminds. The main messages of the protest were "Stop Arming Israel" and "Thales profits from Israeli war crimes."
"Thales UK has a billion pound contract with Israel's largest arms company Elbit Systems to develop a fleet of drones. Human Rights Watch has documented [the drones] as being used by Israel to deliberately target Palestinian civilians in Gaza," said Inminds chair Abbas Ali.
"It's sickening that Elbit markets this killer drone as being extensively 'field tested' in 'real life' situations -- using the slaughter of Gaza's people as a marketing ploy to gain a competitive advantage," he added.

The Watchkeeper drone, which is produced through a joint venture dubbed UAV Tactical Systems, is modeled on Elbit's Hermes 450, a UAV that has been used in action by the Israeli military. According to the Sussex group, the drone is developed under a contract awarded by the UK Defense Ministry.


Thales UK is a subsidiary of the French company Thales, and is currently considered as the UK's second largest military company.

Handcuffs

The secret epidemic of police domestic violence: Cops up to 15x more likely than general public to be domestic abusers

domestic violence woman sign help
Could she be married to a cop?
This post was originally published at the "Ms. Magazine" blog in October of 2015 by Alex Roslinand Susanna Hope (who was married to a police officer for 20 years) under the original title "Police Wife: The Secret Epidemic of Police Domestic Violence." (See below for their full biographies.)
Domestic violence takes place in up to a staggering 40 percent of law enforcement families, but police departments mostly ignore the problem or let it slide, write ex-police wife Susanna Hope and award-winning investigative journalist Alex Roslin in their new book, Police Wife: The Secret Epidemic of Police Domestic Violence. The following excerpt is adapted from their book, available on Amazon or as an eBook from their website, and is being published as part of the Ms. Blog's Domestic Violence Awareness Month series.

According to Alex Roslin, Police Wife itself has more than 60 pages of appendices giving advice and resources to survivors, family and friends plus recommendations for advocates, police, governments, journalists and researchers.

In order to help survivors and others, they've made virtually all of the appendices available for free through their website. Here is the direct link to this extended free excerpt.

Comment: According to this research, statistically speaking, any cop you encounter is more likely to be a wife-beater than not. What an appalling state of society.


Eye 2

An open air prison: Feds routinely making surveillance flights across US with planes owned by fake front companies

drone domestic spying cartoon

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security have been running thousands of surveillance missions employing cellphone tracking and augmented reality technologies over US cities
.

According to a new investigation by BuzzFeed News that collected flight data logged by planes registered with the two agencies from the public tracking service, FlightRadar24, over 3,500 surveillance flights took place between mid-August and December of 2015.

Augmented reality is a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are supplemented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.

Comment: Privacy and civil-liberties are dead in America and it's just a matter of time until some event happens that causes people to demand more of this, making it even more blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention that the US is an open-air prison.


Arrow Down

Greenpeace gives "green" stamp of approval to corporations to destroy the planet

Greenpeace
Greenpeace and Sierra Club are doing more harm than good by co-opting grassroots environmental movements and giving destructive, polluting industries their "green" stamp of approval

"Greenwashing" is an attempt by corporations to cover up environmentally harmful practices by marketing products as "green" or "eco-friendly.' While saavy consumers are catching on that corporations still care more about the green in our pockets than the greenery of the earth, many of them would be surprised to learn that some of the world's most prominent environmentalist organizations have green "blood" on their hands too.

Black Cat

Israel implies BDS movement are terrorists while cracking down on German banks and violating international law

BDS protests against apartheid Israel
© Ruptly
Israel's Public Security Minister has linked the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement with terrorism and is threatening German banks using tactics previously employed against Al-Qaeda.

Netanyahu-appointee Gilad Erdan has threatened to coerce German banks to prohibit BDS activists from fundraising through their accounts, not through Israeli legislation, but the laws of other countries where Erdan has "increased awareness among decision-makers in Europe and North America of the anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, and discriminatory nature of the BDS movement, which seeks Israel's destruction and often has ties to terror-supporting organizations."

Comment: What's astonishing about this is that the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) people simply want to exercise their freedom of non-association and that freedom is being removed in their own countries due to Israel's influence. While clearly many people have missed the boat that Israel is in fact an illegal apartheid occupation, so the stance of the BDS is really a very reasonable response to the reality of the situation, one would think that they would at least respect the rights of others to not have anything to do with them if they don't want to.


Cult

French elites declare open season on Muslim women

French Elites

As billionaire Elisabeth Badinter calls for boycott of clothing lines that produce Islamic fashions, her PR firm promotes Saudi Arabia.


"We are tired and sick of always being targeted, of being the subject of stereotypes and racist fantasies," Sihame Assbague told AlterNet over the phone from her home in Villetaneuse, a suburb north of Paris. "Muslim women are talked about every day, but we are not given the right to speak. Other people speak for us."

An activist against state racism and organizer for the website Contre Attaques, aimed at countering Islamophobia, Assbague is not alone in her frustration. Muslim and Arab communities find themselves increasingly attacked by discriminatory house raids and warrantless arrests, over four months into a heavy-handed "state of emergency" imposed and then extended by the French government in the wake of the Paris attacks.

This state violence is abetted by those in France's intellectual and political classes who are calling for the intensified criminalization and public shaming of Muslim women in the name of "saving" them. Predictably, such figures have declared open season on the veil.

Comment: Watch it happen: The slow-motion horror show that moves step by step to marginalize, subjugate and ultimately destroy the lives of many millions of Muslim people around the world.