JASON RILEY: THE LAW BREAKERS OF BALTIMORE

The racial diversity of local government does not matter when people want to seize on an excuse to commit crimes.

The racial makeup of city leaders, the police department and other municipal workers in Ferguson, Mo., played a central role in the media coverage and analysis of Michael Brown’s death, which is worth remembering as history repeats itself in Baltimore.

The Justice Department’s Ferguson report noted that although the city’s population was 67% black, just four of its 54 police officers fit that description. Moreover, “the Municipal Judge, Court Clerk, Prosecuting Attorney, and all assistant court clerks are white,” said the report. “While a diverse police department does not guarantee a constitutional one, it is nonetheless critically important for law enforcement agencies, and the Ferguson Police Department in particular, to strive for broad diversity among officers and civilian staff.”
Broad diversity is not a problem in Baltimore, where 63% of residents and 40% of police officers are black. The current police commissioner is also black, and he is not the first one. The mayor is black, as was her predecessor and as is a majority of the city council. Yet none of this “critically important” diversity seems to have mattered after 25-year-old Freddie Gray died earlier this month in police custody under circumstances that are still being investigated.

BALTIMORE IN FLAMES: HEATHER MacDONALD

The apologetics began almost as soon as the fires were lit in Baltimore yesterday, heralding a night of violence and looting that would leave 24 police officers injured and 19 buildings torched, including a $16 million senior center providing affordable housing and a CVS drugstore providing crucial medications for elderly customers. Society “refuses to help [young blacks] in a serious fashion,” Michael Eric Dyson announced on MSNBC. “We’re only there when they riot.” Mika Brzezinski observed on Morning Joe: “This was an extremely, desperately poor city. This was bound to happen.” We were seeing an “uprising of young people against the police,” the result of a “combination of anger and disparity,” said professional talking head Wes Moore. Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore police officer and member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, blamed the drug laws.

ISRAEL HAS DEPLOYED MORE AID TO NEPAL THAN ANY OTHER COUNTRY…PLEASE SEE NOTE

“According to a chart published by CNN – but now REMOVED from their site (link no longer functions!), Israel has deployed more aid personnel to earthquake-ravaged Nepal than every other country.
There are almost 6 times as many Israeli workers as Americans, more than 4 times as many as from China, and more than 5 times as many as from the UK. (Note: The population of China is 235 times the Jewish population of Israel. Now that’s “disproportionate!”)In other words, the tiny Jewish Nation has deployed almost exactly the same number of relief and aid personnel as ALL of the more than a dozen other nations sending aid COMBINED!Yet there was scant mention of Israel, no mention in most cases, in the majority of the world media which reported heavily on the tragedy.The CNN report (below) is headlined: “India Leads the Massive Aid Effort….” by Allan via Janet Levy

New Delhi, India (CNN) As the earth shook in Nepal, tremors were felt over the border in India as well.

It was a call to action: Within hours of the first 7.8 magnitude quake, India began planning a massive cross-border aid mission.

With each hour, the scale of the devastation in Nepal became clearer — some 3,862 people are known to have died so far — and plans in India, where 72 people were also killed, got bigger.

On Sunday alone, India delivered 187 tons of supplies, including 50 tons of water, 22 tons of food and 2 tons of medicine. And there will be more to come.

Hundreds of trained disaster relief troops landed in Kathmandu and quickly got to work.

With each flight in, there was a flight back out, packed with Indians and other nationals escaping to safety: 2,000 and counting have fled so far.
By Monday, India was in full-scale crisis mode: From airports across India, planes flew in loaded with aid, and trucks made the trip by land from India’s east, aiming for more remote areas.

Foreign Money Promotes Radical Islamist Agenda in Canada

Millions of dollars are flooding into Canada from Gulf states to promote a radical Islamist agenda, according to testimony by the prime minister’s national security adviser, the National Post reports.

“I think it’s fair to say, without commenting on the particular country of origin, there are monies coming into this country which are advocating this kind of [Islamist extremist] approach to life,” Richard Fadden said Monday during a national security hearing concerning a new counter-terrorism bill.

Fadden, a former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said that large sums of money are sent to religious-affiliated institutions in Canada to promote an “extreme Islamic jihadist interpretation of the Qur’an.”

MY SAY: AMERICANS FOR A SAFE ISRAEL

I have proudly been associated with AFSI virtually since its founding. We were right then and have been proven right by events. AFSI never grew into a major national organization, but it continues to be a beacon for those committed to the vision and nationalist spirit of the Zionist prophet and founding father Zeev Jabotinsky. Our budget is small, but our record of achievement is impressive and unmatched by any other group….rsk

Please read:Israel is 67 and AFSI is 44 Ruth King
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/israel-is-67-and-afsi-is-44-ruth-king.html

The Fake Palestinian Video that Cost Over a Thousand Israeli Lives By Richard Baehr

Two days after Ariel Sharon walked onto the Temple Mount on September 28, 2000, an alleged shooting of a young boy and his father at the Netzarim Junction in Gaza launched the deadly second Intifada. The several years of savagery that followed resulted in approximately 1,500 Israeli deaths from shootings, suicide bombings and other attacks by various Palestinian terror groups including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and an assortment of Fatah-affiliated groups under the supervision or control of Yassar Arafat.

The Sharon visit to the Temple Mount followed two months after the collapse of the Camp David talks between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Palestinian Authority President Arafat, and U.S. President Bill Clinton. Arafat abandoned the talks, clearly uninterested in resolving the conflict, and as is now well known, immediately began planning the new intifada. His widow Suha Arafat has confirmed that the planning for the violence began soon after the talks broke up and had nothing to do with any provocation by Ariel Sharon.

Scared Green: Sustainability Lies We Teach Our Children By Peter Wood

“Without Pharrell, our planet would not survive.” So says Marquis Jamont, one of 1,200 middle school children who, according to CBS News, trudged through the snow on the first day of spring to see musician Pharrell Williams talk about climate change at the UN. The event kicked off the meeting of the UN’s Open Working Group on new Sustainable Development Goals.

No disrespect to Mr. Williams, but the planet could survive without him and his “Happy” song. Likewise, the world could sustain itself without the goals being cooked up by transnational envirocrats in their endless rounds of meetings.

Pharrell’s appearance at the UN was orchestrated by the UN Foundation and MixRadio to project the message that “the next generation needs to pay attention to climate change.” He needn’t worry about that. From the moment he steps into kindergarten to the hour he graduates from college, Marquis will be trapped in an endlessly repeating loop of “climate change” messages. Pay attention? Try not paying attention. The combination of celebrity endorsements, pop entertainment, and mind-numbing bureaucratic sustaina-babble is part of the surround-sound of sustainability, worldwide. “Climate change education” now begins in kindergarten — and not merely in the form of green happy talk for tykes.

Dr Robert M. Carter: In Praise of CO2

Professor Bob Carter is a former Chair of the Australian Research Council’s Panel on Engineering, Applied and Earth Sciences, and a former Director of the Australian Secretariat of the international Ocean Drilling Program. Townsville, Australia

In perusing the near-daily deluge of articles advancing global warming as an indisputable fact, one is constantly confronted by the lack of balance, commonsense and critical thinking, not to mention an endemic ignorance of elementary science and basic economics. A new book sets the record straight
Given the heavily technical nature of the global warming debate, how is the ordinary citizen to assess whether the balance of truth lies with the specialist minority of scientists who assert climate alarm, or with the wider scientific opinion that (natural) climate change is happening today at about the same rate, and in the same ways, that it always has?

Western nations are fortunate to have inherited from their Enlightenment forbears a system of democratic government that is rooted in the application of empirical science, sound engineering and logical reasoning to address the problems of society. It is no accident, therefore, that many of the majestic engineering projects of the 19th century still stand proudly today, nor that 19th and 20th century science experienced such breathtaking advances in knowledge, which included the discovery of the mechanisms of evolution and genetic inheritance, the explanation of continental drift, the splitting and harnessing of the atom and the development of the transistor and microelectronics – to name just some of the most obvious.

Nonetheless, early in the 21st century we find that some branches of science have become tainted by the nihilistic diseases of post-modern and post-normal thinking, and that even up to the high level at which scientific academies provide policy advice to government. In parallel, our governments have increasingly become divorced from accurate scientific advice. They have also become hostage to divisive party politics, to the incessant use of political spin and above all to capture by special interest groups – of which the radical environmentalist lobby is significantly the most dangerous.

_______________________________

About Face! Why the World Needs More Carbon Dioxide: The Failed Science of Global Warming.
Arthur Hughes, Madhav Khandekar & Cliff Ollier.
Two Harbors Press, Minneapolis USA, 313 pp.
Paperback available here. Downloadable eBook from Barnes & Noble at US $7.99, here.

Peter Smith: The Welfare State’s Burning Question

Baltimore is in flames after yet another black man died in police custody. The facts remain foggy, but the specific details are, in many ways, beside the point. What matters is the future of a society where welfare dissolves families, thuggish ignorance is celebrated and rioting is the first reaction
The riot by young black men and schoolkids after Freddie Gray died in Baltimore is becoming par for the course in the United States. White men killed by the police (and there are more in absolute numbers) does not cause a stir. It has been assumed that the police were responsible for Gray’s spine and neck injuries which caused his death. However, the evidence is starting to become murky.

Gray has a long rap sheet and was running from police for a mile before he was caught and dragged into a police van. Could he have injured himself during the chase? A fellow prisoner in the van has been reported by The Washington Post as saying that he heard (couldn’t see) Gray attempting self harm by banging himself against the side of the van. Whatever the facts of the case turn out to be, they are incidental. The riots and the rioters have become the story.

Out has come the usual soul-searching about the malaise of black inter-city ghetto communities. President Obama made his usual mindless contribution. Apart from again getting ahead of the investigation and implying some blame on the part of the police, he said this: “What can we do to change those communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity?” Indeed! What can we do? Not, you will notice, what they should do to change their own feckless, fatherless, welfare-dependent lifestyles.

The Obama Administration Blocks Efforts to Stop Non-Citizen Voting (!!!!????)Noel Johnson

“Exhibiting an unmistakable hallmark of the Obama administration, the EAC was not deterred by its lack of authority to act in this area. The EAC made the unilateral determination that documentary proof of citizenship is not “necessary” to the states’ assessment of voter eligibility. In so doing, the EAC’s acting executive director claimed that the evidence presented by Arizona and Kansas — over 200 specific cases of non-citizen voter registration — “fail[ed] to establish that the registration of noncitizens is a significant problem in either state.”

Kansas and Arizona ask the Supreme Court to ensure that only citizens vote in their states. Approximately 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in the 2008 presidential election, according to a study released last year by professors at Old Dominion University and George Mason University.

The figure for the 2010 midterm elections was 2.2 percent. The Obama administration doesn’t care. In fact, it is trying to stamp out state-led efforts that would help ensure that only American citizens are electing our leaders. The latest bureaucratic roadblocks have been erected in Arizona and Kansas, which simply want people to verify their citizenship before voting.

To implement their commonsense measures, Arizona and Kansas asked the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) — a small federal agency that exists primarily to assist the states in creating the federal form citizens use to register to vote by mail — to add the proof-of-citizenship requirement to the registration instructions specific to Arizona and Kansas.

Their request was denied because of the decision of one federal employee in Washington, D.C. You might ask, “Where do Arizona and Kansas get the authority to verify citizenship?” The answer is the Constitution, whose Voter-Qualifications Clause grants the states the power to set qualifications for voting.

The power of the federal government to act in this area is limited. The Constitution’s Election Clause permits Congress to determine only the times, places, and manner of holding elections. As succinctly stated by our Supreme Court, “the Elections Clause empowers Congress to regulate how federal elections are held, but not who may vote in them” (emphasis in original). Deciding who may vote is the sole prerogative of the states under the Constitution.