Where’s your rage for Montrell, Beyonce? Or don’t black lives matter as much if they’re cops?

A black man named Montrell Jackson was executed in cold blood in America yesterday.  A hooded assassin drove hundreds of miles to deliberately shoot him and two of his white co-workers dead in the street with an AR-15.

It was a senseless, callous, horrific act of violence that left a wife without a husband and a baby 4-month old son without a father.

Montrell was by all accounts a decent, generous and loving man.  A ‘gentle giant’ who was ‘always about peace.’  Colleagues said he worked hard, often seven days a week. Friends spoke of his humorous streak and addiction to shoes.  He was a big fan of the New Orleans Pelicans and Dallas Cowboys.

Yet today he is dead.  Snuffed out in the prime of his life, aged just 32.

Last week, after two black men of similar age were shot dead, there was national outrage.  The black community rose as one to demand action against the perpetrators.  There was fury in the streets from New York to Los Angeles.  Men, women and children marching as one, bearing placards screaming ‘Black Lives Matter!’

Beyoncé even stopped a concert to read out a rally-cry for justice for the men who had been killed.

Yet for THIS black victim, there was a very different reaction from that same black community.

Where are the protests? Where are the placards? Where’s the incendiary Beyoncé statement? Where’s the RAGE?

Sadly for Montrell Jackson, he simply didn’t matter as much as those other two men to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Why? Because he was a police officer.  This, to many Black Lives Matter activists, made him the enemy.

In an eloquent Facebook post he wrote on July 8, the day after five other police officers were shot dead in Dallas, Montrell spoke of the difficulties he faced as black law enforcer.

‘I’m tired, physically and emotionally,’ he said. ‘Disappointed in some family, friends, and officers for some reckless comments. I still love you all because hate takes too much energy, but I definitely won’t be looking at you the same.’

Montrell thanked those who had reached out to him and his wife.

‘It was needed and appreciated,’ he said. ‘I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me. In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat. When people you know begin to question your integrity you realize they don’t really know you at all. Look at my actions, they speak LOUD and CLEAR.’

He then issued a heartfelt plea: ‘Finally, I personally want to send prayers out to everyone directly affected by this tragedy. These are trying times. Please don’t let hate infect your heart. This city MUST and WILL get better. I’m working in these streets so any protestors, officers, friends, family, or whoever, if you see me and need a hug or want to say a prayer, I got you.’

Today, just ten days later, Montrell Jackson is dead, targeted as he worked by another black man, a former Marine named Gavin Eugene Long from Kansas City who believed the only way to successfully protest was ‘through bloodshed’.  Such was Long’s hatred of the police that he didn’t care that one of the men he was killing was black.

So a black man full of hate and violence murdered another peace-loving black man because he wanted to exact revenge for the deaths of black men.

This is how twisted the spirit of the Black Lives Matter movement has now become in the wrong minds and the wrong gun-toting hands.

Montrell Jackson’s sister found out he was dead when she was sitting in church and the pastor asked the congregation to send prayers to her family.

Jocelyn Jackson, 49, instantly broke down. Later, she spoke out and said she understood the anger behind the Black Lives Matter movement, but added: ‘God gives nobody the right to kill and take another person’s life. It’s coming to the point where no lives matter, whether you’re black, or white, or Hispanic or whatever.’

She’s absolutely right, it is.

When the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag first sprang up on social media, I responded by tweeting #AllLivesMatter and got roundly abused for exercising my supposed ‘racist white privilege’.

But my issue with the movement was not born from any notion that blacks don’t get an unfair deal from American society, because they absolutely do.

Centuries of institutional racism have left African-Americans with higher poverty rates, worse education due to poorly funded schools, appallingly higher rates of incarceration and a far greater statistical likelihood of being targeted by police.

No, my issue was born from a serious concern that this particular movement, named as it is, would lead to more, not less division in an already race-charged country.

The original premise of Black Lives Matter is not that black lives matter more than anybody else’s, it’s that black lives should matter as much as anybody else’s.

As comedian and activist Franchesca Ramsey put it: ‘It’s OK for a movement to focus on issues specific to one marginalized group. Gay bars aren’t unfair to straight people. ‘Save the Rainforest’ isn’t saying you hate all other trees.’

But the problem with Black Lives Matter is that the movement’s been hijacked by those with a more violent concept of how to achieve equality and justice.  And I fear they’ve been inspired and egged on by the angry rhetoric they’re hearing from high profile people in their own community.

After the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Beyoncé demanded justice.  ‘We are sick and tired of the killings of young men and women in our communities,’ she said. ‘It’s up to us to take a stand and demand they stop killing us. We’re going to stand up as a community and fight against anyone who believes that murder or any violent action by those who are sworn to protect us should consistently go unpunished.’

I knew what she meant, but did Gavin Eugene Long? Or did he think this gave him licence to go kill a cop?

Last night, during another concert, Beyoncé dedicated her song Halo to the victims of the Turkey uprising.  She said nothing about Montrell Williams.

Black Lives Matter was a well-intentioned idea that’s gone bad very quickly and now represents a real and present danger to all police officers, of all colours.  The bottom line is this: if black lives matter so much, why are black Americans executing black Americans?  It makes no sense.

It’s time we come together to agree that ‘All Lives Matter’ equally, and strive to achieve that goal. Or as Montrell Jackson’s sister said: ‘No Lives Matter.’  Which is it to be?

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Why do boys prefer balls to Barbies? It may be in their GENES



Babies as young as nine months already prefer toys that are traditional for their sex, a study has found. Trucks were the preferred choice for baby boys in a test, while baby girls chose to play with cooking pots.

As girls got older they took more of an interest in typical boys toys like cars and balls.

The researchers suggest this may be because parents encourage girls to play with a wider variety of toys.

But the little boys were still less inclined to dabble with dolls – possibly because it is still considered less socially acceptable.

The researchers argue that because the differences appear so early on, biology must be playing a significant role in how boys and girls develop.

Researchers from University College London and City University studied 101 infants in three groups: nine to 17 months – the earliest age that infants can demonstrate which toys they like best - 18 to 23 months and 24 to 32 months.

The tests were carried out at four multicultural nurseries in London. The seven toys chosen to evaluate the children’s preferences were a doll, a pink teddy bear and a cooking pot for stereotypical girls’ toys, and a car, a blue teddy a digger and a ball for the boys.

Testing took place in a quiet corner of the nursery, at a time when all the boys and girls were engaged in free play.

The children were seated at a meter away from the toys, which were arranged in a randomised order in a semi-circle around the child.

The experimenter encouraged the child to play with the toys by saying ‘You can play with any of the toys that you want to.’ A record was then kept of which toys were touched at intervals of five seconds for three minutes.

The researchers, led by Dr Brenda Todd of City University write: ‘In general, the boys played with male-typed toys for longer than with female-typed toys and, conversely, the girls played with female-typed toys for longer than with male-typed toys.’

They said that there were six boys and eight girls in the very youngest age group, aged between nine and 12 months. ‘All of these boys played with the ball, and play with the ball accounted for 53.2 per cent of their time playing with the toys.

‘Overall the girls aged 12 months or less chose the cooking pot most frequently: seven of these eight girls played with the cooking pot, and their play with this toy accounted for 49.8 per cent of the time playing with the toys.’

The researchers argue that because there is a clear difference at such a young age this probably is a biological effect, as the babies have yet to have had extensive exposure to gender stereotypes.

The researchers found that as boys got older, they became even more interested in toys typical of their sex – although it was less true of girls.

‘The trends suggest that as boys grow older, they increasingly prefer male-typed toys, and although girls initially much prefer female-typed toys, this preference settles to a merely strong preference,’ the authors said in the study published in Infant and Child Development.

Explaining the results, the researchers say that the early preferences may be caused by exposure to male hormones in the womb.

This is supported by findings that show girls exposed to higher levels of male hormones are more likely to be tomboys.

And research has also shown even baby monkeys show sex differences in the toys they prefer – with male monkeys also preferring cars while female monkeys prefer the cooking pots.

Dr Todd said: ‘I think the thing that is interesting is that children are very young to be showing different preferences for different toys we offered them to play with.

‘Even in that youngest group of children we were still seeing sex differences in their preferences.'

She added: 'The other interesting thing is that as they get older, boys get more and more interested in boy toys, whereas that wasn’t the case for the girls.

'I think stereotypes are much more rigid for little boys, and even older boys, than little girls. It's’ OK for girls to play with pretty much everything, we see more pressure for girls to widen their use of toys.

‘We don’t see the equivalent social awareness to encourage boys to show greater nurturance behaviour, yet we expect adult men to be great fathers and cook in the home.’

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Progressives like Obama fuel rage that leads to cop-killings by promoting anti-police myths

Obama’s allies are helping fuel the black rage behind recent murders of policemen in Dallas and Baton Rouge. As the Daily Caller reported, an editor at the progressive website ThinkProgress responded to the Baton Rouge cop massacre Sunday by saying black people were “taking justice into their own hands.” Three Baton Rouge cops were murdered by Gavin Long, a member of the anti-white Nation of Islam who viewed police as racist killers. Ford declared that “Given how police haven’t been held accountable for murdering black people, it’s no surprise some are taking justice into their own hands.” Never mind that one of the three officers slain, Montrell Jackson, was black. ThinkProgress is the voice of the Center for American Progress, which is a close ally of the Obama administration, and has been aptly described as “Obama’s Idea Factory” by Time magazine. Ford was doubtless saying what many in the White House think but would never be so foolish as to say openly.

Obama himself continues to fuel this rage, by making baseless claims of systematic racism by America’s police against blacks, as he did both before and after the recent murder of five cops in Dallas. As Minnesota lawyer John Hinderaker notes, “From his earliest days as president, when he derided Cambridge police as ‘stupid,’ Obama has endorsed and propagated the great lie that American law enforcement is systematically racist. That strategy has worked very well for Obama and for the Democratic Party,” by mobilizing angry black voters.

As I explained at length earlier, it is simply false to claim that police are systematically racist toward blacks in arrests and convictions, since blacks’ higher arrest and conviction rates are the result of a higher black crime rate, not racism by police or prosecutors. Economist John Lott made the same point in the New York Post, in “Obama’s false racism claims are putting cops’ lives in danger.”

Yet, Obama made just such false claims against the police on July 7, right before the Dallas shootings, which were committed by a man who wanted to “kill white cops.” Incredibly, he did so after the shootings as well: Obama repeated this false meme at the Dallas memorial service for the slain officers, notes Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute. As the Washington Post reported, in the aftermath of Dallas, Obama once again resorted to “pointing to racial disparities in searches” and “arrests” of blacks compared to whites “as proof of police bias.”

As Heather Mac Donald notes in City Journal,

"In a speech from Poland just hours before five officers were assassinated in Dallas on July 7, Obama misled the nation about policing and race, charging officers nationwide with preying on blacks because of the color of their skin. Obama rolled out a litany of junk statistics to prove that the criminal justice system is racist. Blacks were arrested at twice the rate of whites, he complained, and get sentences almost 10 percent longer than whites for the same crime. Missing from Obama’s address was any mention of the massive racial differences in criminal offending and criminal records that fully account for arrest rates and sentence lengths. (Blacks, for example, commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, and at about 11 to 12 times the rate of whites alone.) Instead, Obama chalked up the disparities to “biases, some conscious and unconscious that have to be rooted out . . .  across our criminal justice system.”

Then five Dallas officers were gunned down out of race hatred and cop hatred. Did Obama shelve his incendiary rhetoric and express his unqualified support for law enforcement? No, he doubled down, insulting law enforcement yet again even as it was grieving for its fallen comrades. In a memorial service for the Dallas officers, Obama rebuked all of America for its “bigotry,” but paid special attention to alleged police bigotry:

“When African-Americans from all walks of life, from different communities across the country, voice a growing despair over what they perceive to be unequal treatment, when study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently. So that if you’re black, you’re more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested; more likely to get longer sentences; more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime. When mothers and fathers raised their kids right, and have the talk about how to respond if stopped by a police officer—yes, sir; no, sir—but still fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door . . .When all this takes place, more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.”

The irresponsible zealotry of this rebuke was stunning. Obama was fully on notice that the hatred of cops was reaching homicidal levels. And yet his commitment to prosecuting his crusade against phantom police racism trumped considerations of prudence and safety, on the one hand, and decent respect for the fallen, on the other. . .

It is possible that the Dallas killers and the Baton Rouge killers had not heard Obama’s most recent speeches on criminal-justice racism, or even the many that preceded them. But even if the cop murderers had not encountered Obama’s exact words, the influence of his rhetoric on the hatred in the streets is absolute. Obama’s imprimatur on the Black Lives Matter demagoguery gives it enormous additional thrust and legitimacy, echoing throughout public discourse into the most isolated corners of the inner city.

Obama’s false claim that the death penalty discriminates against blacks is rebutted by cold, hard facts and statistics.  As John Lott notes, this claim “is simply false. In murder cases, whites are executed much more frequently. Nationally, from 1977, when the death penalty was reinstituted, to 2011, the last year for which the FBI has compiled data, 64.7 percent of those executed were whites, but whites committed only 47 percent of the murders.”

Admittedly, liberal journalists think the death penalty is racist because only 13% of all people are black, yet a higher percentage than that of executed people are black.  But that higher percentage just reflects the higher black murder rate. More than half of all murders are committed by blacks, who are just 13% of the population. (See FBI, “2014 Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States,” Table 43A, Arrests by Race, 2014.)

Blacks’ higher arrest and conviction rates reflect higher black crime rates, not a greater likelihood of being arrested for committing the very same crime, and not racism by police or the criminal justice system. Innocent blacks are not being “railroaded” or subjected to “mass incarceration.” Black victims themselves tend to identify their assailants as black. As City Journal has noted, “the race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data. As long ago as 1978, a study of robbery and aggravated assault in eight cities found parity between the race of assailants in victim identifications and in arrests—a finding replicated many times since, across a range of crimes. No one has ever come up with a plausible argument as to why crime victims would be biased in their reports.” For example, 43.7% of all rapists in state prisons were black, according to a 1997 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, even though blacks are only 13% of the general population. (See Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Sex Offenses and Offenders“ (Feb. 1997) (NCJ-163392)).

In his July 7 speech right before the Dallas murders of five policemen, Obama pointed to racism in the fact that “African Americans are arrested at twice the rate of whites” and the fact that “the African American and Hispanic population, who make up only 30 percent of the general population, make up more than half of the incarcerated population.” But these higher arrest and conviction rates are completely unremarkable, and not proof of racism, given the fact that the crime rate among blacks is several times higher than among whites. As Wikipedia notes, “According to the National Crime Victimization Survey in 2002, the black arrest rate for robbery was 8.55 times higher than whites . . .Robberies with white victims and black offenders were more than 12 times more common than the reverse.[43][44]”

Nor are police shootings generally the result of racist white cops: as the Daily Wire notes, any such claim is contradicted by the following facts: “Black and Hispanic police officers are more likely to fire a gun at blacks than white officers. This is according to a Department of Justice report in 2015 about the Philadelphia Police Department, and is further confirmed that by a study conducted University of Pennsylvania criminologist Gary Ridgeway in 2015 that determined black cops were 3.3 times more likely to fire a gun than other cops at a crime scene. . . . Blacks are more likely to kill cops than be killed by cops. This is according to FBI data, which also found that 40 percent of cop killers are black.” Moreover, a “police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black than a cop killing an unarmed black person.”

Hillary Clinton has also falsely claimed that there is “‘systemic racism’ in police departments” fueling “mass incarceration,” both before and after the murder of the five police officers in Dallas.

SOURCE






Highest-Ranking Officer Charged in Freddie Gray Case Not Guilty

Lt. Brian Rice is the highest ranked officer to face charges in the case revolving around the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland. On Monday, the court ruled he was not guilty on all three charges he faced, including involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office. Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Barry Williams has acquitted Rice on all counts.

Three other officers have been tried in this case. Two of whom, Caesar Goodson, Jr. and Edward Nero, were acquitted. The third, William Porter, had a mistrial in December.

The Freddie Gray incident made national news last year after the 25-year-old African American man died in a police transport van. Prosecutors alleged that the officers failed to secure their client during the ride, which led to devastating spinal injuries. He died a week after his arrest.

The tragic situation spurred a string of violent protests throughout the city.

The final two officers involved, Garrett Miller and Sgt. Alicia White, will be tried within the coming months.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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