Baltimore – Page 3 – The Burning Platform

America’s Achilles’ Heel

Guest Post by Dmitry Orlov

Heiko Müller

Last Saturday, a massive Victory Parade was held in Moscow commemorating the 70-year anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Red Army and the erection of the Soviet flag atop the Reichstag in Berlin. There were a few unusual aspects to this parade, which I would like to point out, because they conflict with the western official propaganda narrative. First, it wasn’t just Russian troops that marched in the parade: the troops of 10 other nations took part in it, including the Chinese honor guard and a contingent of Grenadiers from India. Dignitaries from these nations were present in the stands, and the Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife were seated next to President Vladimir Putin, who, in his speech at the start of the parade, warned against attempts to create a unipolar world—sharp words aimed squarely at the United States and its western allies. Second, a look at the military hardware that rolled through Red Square or flew over it would indicate that, short of an outright nuclear mutual self-annihilation, there isn’t much that the US military could throw at Russia that Russia couldn’t neutralize.

It would appear that American attempts to isolate Russia have resulted in the exact opposite: if 10 nations, among them the world’s largest economy, comprising some 3 billion people, are willing to set aside their differences and stand shoulder to shoulder with the Russians to counter American attempts at global dominance, then clearly the American plan isn’t going to work at all. Western media focused on the fact that western leaders declined to attend the celebration, either in a fit of pique or because so ordered by the Obama administration, but this only highlights their combined irrelevance, be it in defeating Hitler, or in commemorating his defeat 70 years later. Nevertheless, in his speech Putin specifically thanked the French, the British and the Americans for their contribution to the war effort. I am sorry that he left out the Belgians, who had been so helpful at Dunkirk.

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English Spoken Here

Guest Post by Jim Kunstler

Of course, the Freddie Gray riots in Baltimore last week prompted the usual cries for “an honest conversation about race,” and countless appeals to fix the “broken” public school system. So, in the spirit of those pleas, I will advance a very plain and straightforward idea: above all, teach young black kids how to speak English correctly.

Nothing is more important than acculturating ghetto kids out of their pidgin patois and into real English with all of its tenses, verb forms, and cases. It’s more important initially than learning arithmetic, history, and science. I would argue that it is hardly possible to learn these other things without first being grounded in real grammatical English.

When these kids grow up, their manner of speech will identify them and their prospects for success at least as much as the color of their skin — and probably more, in my opinion. Their ability to speak English correctly will be the salient feature in how others assess the content of their character

I’m sure by now that the racial justice hand-wringers are squirming over this proposal. All dialects are equally okay in this rainbow society, they might argue. No they’re not. Have you noticed that TV news, business, show biz, education, and politics increasingly employ people whose parents came from India and other parts of Asia. Do they speak in a patois lacking in complex verb forms? Apparently not. Are they succeeding in American life, such as it is? Apparently so.

Notice that the speech issue — how people talk — is never part of the “honest conversation about race” that we are supposed to have. Has anybody noticed that in his public speeches Martin Luther King spoke regular English correctly, if with a Southern inflection? Has anybody noticed how important that was in his role as “a communicator?” Why is this crucial question of language absent from the public conversation about “the intractable problems of race in America?” Is it because both blacks and whites are too fearful, too cowardly, to face this particular problem of how English is spoken?

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Running With the Predators

Hat tip I95east

Guest Post by Heather MacDonald

Liberal elites continue to condemn law enforcement and excuse inner-city crime.

A December 2014 protest against the police in New York City

Starting in late summer 2014, a protest movement known as Black Lives Matter convulsed the country. Triggered by the fatal police shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, the movement claimed that blacks are still oppressed by widespread racism, especially within law enforcement. The police subject black communities to a gratuitous regime of stops and arrests, resulting in the frequent use of lethal force against black men, according to the activists and their media and academic allies. Indeed, America’s police are the greatest threat facing young black men today, the protesters charged. New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio announced in December that he worries “every night” about the “dangers” his biracial son may face from “officers who are paid to protect him.” Less than three weeks later, a thug from Brooklyn, inspired by the nationwide anti-cop agitation, assassinated two New York police officers.

The protest movement’s indictment of law enforcement took place without any notice of the actual facts regarding policing and crime. One could easily have concluded from the agitation that black and white crime rates are identical. Why the police focus on certain neighborhoods and what the conditions are on the ground were questions left unasked.

The year 2014 also saw the publication of a book that addressed precisely the questions that the Black Lives Matter movement ignored. Alice Goffman, daughter of the influential sociologist Erving Goffman, lived in an inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood from 2002 to 2008, integrating herself into the lives of a group of young crack dealers. Her resulting book, On the Run, offers a detailed and startling ethnography of a world usually kept far from public awareness and discourse. It has been widely acclaimed; a film or TV adaptation may be on the way. But On the Run is an equally startling—if unintentional—portrait of the liberal elite mind-set. Goffman draws a devastating picture of cultural breakdown within the black underclass, but she is incapable of acknowledging the truth in front of her eyes, instead deeming her subjects the helpless pawns of a criminal-justice system run amok.

At the center of On the Run are three half-brothers and their slightly older friend Mike, all of whom live in a five-block area of Philadelphia that Goffman names Sixth Street. Sixth Street, we are told, isn’t viewed as a particularly high-crime area, which can only leave the reader wondering what an actual high-crime area would look like. In her six years living there, Goffman attended nine funerals of her young associates and mentions several others, including one for “three kids” paid for by local drug dealers, eager to cement their support in the community.

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Hillary Blames the Cops

Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan

Had Freddie Gray been robbed, beaten and left to die in the streets of his Baltimore neighborhood, no one would be mourning him today.

No one would be marching for Freddie. No one would be using Freddie as the new poster child of “Black Lives Matter!”

No one would care, three weeks later, but his family and friends.

It was the manner of his death, suffering a fractured spine in police custody, that makes Freddie matter. For he can now be credibly cast in the victim’s role in the great new narrative against America — that ours is a society of unequal justice where racist cops routinely brutalize black men and boys and are rarely called to account.

In this narrative, the liberal is always the hero.

Hillary Clinton knows the narrative by heart and has rushed forward to cast herself as the champion of black America.

As The Washington Times reports, Hillary declared Wednesday she would help to end a “pattern” of cops killing black men.

“There is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes. And an estimated 1.5 million black men are ‘missing’ from their families and communities because of incarceration and premature death. …

“My heart beaks for these young men and their families. We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.”

We certainly do, Hillary.

She specifically mentioned Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.

But Trayvon died when he was shot sitting on top of and beating senseless a neighborhood watch guy, “martial arts style,” and banging his head on the sidewalk as he screamed for help.

Michael Brown died of gunshot wounds when, after knocking over a convenience store and throttling the clerk in Ferguson, Missouri, he tried to wrestle a gun from a cop, and, told to halt, charged the officer.

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Baltimore As A Microcosm Of America

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

In these drug-saturated neighborhoods, they weren’t policing their post anymore, they weren’t policing real estate that they were protecting from crime. They weren’t nurturing informants, or learning how to properly investigate anything. There’s a real skill set to good police work. But no, they were just dragging the sidewalks, hunting stats, and these inner-city neighborhoods — which were indeed drug-saturated because that’s the only industry left — become just hunting grounds. They weren’t protecting anything. They weren’t serving anyone. They were collecting bodies, treating corner folk and citizens alike as an Israeli patrol would treat Gaza, or as the Afrikaners would have treated Soweto back in the day. They’re an army of occupation. And once it’s that, then everybody’s the enemy. The police aren’t looking to make friends, or informants, or learning how to write clean warrants or how to testify in court without perjuring themselves unnecessarily. There’s no incentive to get better as investigators, as cops.

– From the excellent Marshall Project article: David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish

Baltimore, Maryland is in many ways the perfect microcosm for these United States of America. If you still don’t get that, you’ll be in for a rude awakening in the years ahead.

A gradual erosion of the Constitution and the civil rights of the citizenry, the abuse of power by people in authority, perverse financial incentives that lead to horrible outcomes, zero accountability, and a ubiquitous surveillance state apparatus; Baltimore has it all. Yet all of these troubling traits have also come to characterize early 21st century America.

As tends to be the case, the populations that have been victimized the longest and most systemically — in Baltimore and across the U.S. — are the poor, weak and disenfranchised. Like a cancer, corruption, theft, and blatant abuse of the citizenry by the powerful will spread and spread until it consumes everything unless the tumor is removed. It has now spread so deeply and so dangerously throughout American life, the general public will soon have no choice but to confront it and do something about it, or face a total extinction of opportunity and suffer the same desperate fate as the people out in the streets of Baltimore.

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WHOSE FAULT IS BALTIMORE?

I’ve seen the liberal lying MSM pondering how WE could allow the riots, looting, burning and lawlessness to happen, as if it is our collective fault. Obama stands before his teleprompter and pontificates about the need for us to end the poverty that supposedly led to Purge Night in Charm City. That term cracks me up. The city has so much charm, its football team once snuck out of town overnight and headed to Indianapolis. It has so much charm its baseball team was forced to play a game with no fans in the stands.

I think most people can agree that Freddie Gray, a petty drug dealer, was killed in police custody for the crime of looking suspicious. The policemen who killed him deserve to go to jail for murder. As usual, the powers that be circled the wagons and intended to exonerate the hero first responders. The people of Baltimore had a right to be pissed. They had a right to protest. They didn’t have a right to burn businesses and cars. They didn’t have the right to riot, loot, and injure others.

It is the police department created and controlled for decades by Democratic progressive politicians that has committed the atrocities against the people who have been electing these progressives year after year. Baltimore has a corrupt, reckless, out of control police department enabled by a crooked and incompetent Baltimore politicians. The rap sheet for Baltimore’s finest is long:

Police commissioner Ed Norris was sent to prison on corruption charges (2004)
Two detectives were sentenced to 454 years in prison for dealing drugs (2005)
An officer was dismissed after being videotaped verbally abusing a 14-year-old and then failing to file a report on his use of force against the same teenager (2011)
An officer was been fired for sexually abusing a minor (2014)
The city paid a quarter-million-dollar settlement to a man police illegally arrested for the non-crime of recording them at work with his mobile phone.

The cries of racism and white oppression ring hollow. It’s a tired storyline. Facts are always inconvenient to race baiters with an agenda to extract more money from whites with a guilty conscience and the inability or unwillingness to speak the truth. Let’s examine some facts about good old Charm City, USA.

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Despair seen in Baltimore is rife in other cities

Guest Post by John Kass

Americans watched the fires burning in Baltimore, and the police retreating, the mayor there already having given the thugs all the space they needed to destroy.

I figure that’s when you felt it. Whether you live in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago or any other large urban area, you felt it:

This could happen here, as it has happened before.

Here’s all that it takes: A bad police shooting, or a merchant killing a black kid for stealing candy, some frightened white guy on the train with a gun, and political activists begin shouting race.

Watching the fires burn in Baltimore, remembering those fires burning in Ferguson, Mo., you may have given a passing thought to civil society. And how thin is that wall that protects it, as if it were built of paper left out in rain and dried in the sun, so easy to poke through, so easy to burn.

Some of you may have opted out, but I just couldn’t. I remember Chicago in the 1960s and the white migration out, and the black migration out soon afterward, the same thing happening in Detroit and other cities.

Then as now there was the anger and the fires and the looting and the politicians wringing their hands, afraid to offend, later meeting with gang leaders to have “a conversation” for peace.

It is the liturgy of race and rage and violence that many of us, unfortunately, now know by heart. And it was a warning.

The first warning, of course, came as they all do: unintentionally, this time from the foolish mouth of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

She was commenting on the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore police. Gray’s spine was severed. Six Baltimore cops are under investigation.

Protesters wanted to protest. Most were peaceful. And that’s when she issued her now famous quote that should be seared on the mind of every mayor in the country.

“It’s a very delicate balancing act,” she said, “because while we try to make sure that they were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.”

Space to destroy? They used that space all right. They burned cars in it, and businesses, and senior citizen housing, the cops retreating to give the rioters “space to destroy,” the thugs advancing, as the rest of us watched.

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