tenderfoot
tenderfoot's Journal"Enjoy the Killing" says a man that trains cops all over the US
"Enjoy the Killing", DO NOT RESIST, deleted scene, 2015
http://www.donotresistfilm.com/
https://sports.yahoo.com/george-floyd-death-in-custody-puts-spotlight-on-warrior-training-for-police-195640810.html
A podcast about the tv show "Cops" that is a must hear...
https://www.topic.com/runningfromcopsDan Taberski talked to The Business last year about his podcast, “Running from Cops” — about the long-running and money-minting reality show.
He and a team of six screeners watched and catalogued more that 800 episodes of “Cops” and set out to interview anyone involved in the show — police officers, camera operators, producers, and most crucially, people who had appeared as suspects on the show.
In his podcast series, Taberski found several troubling things about “Cops.” Police departments often got final say in what viewers did and didn’t see. And people who appeared on “Cops” told Taberski their lives were much the worse for it, and that they never were asked to sign releases.
Above all, the show presented bad police tactics, like using faulty field drug tests, as effective.
Now, Taberski is back to talk about the end of “Cops” and the impact of it’s very successful alter ego, “Live PD.”
On June 9, following weeks of protests against police misconduct, the Paramount Network canceled “Cops.” The next day, A&E dropped “Live PD,” its highest rated series. Note: When we talked to Taberski, that last development with “Live PD” had not yet happened.
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/the-business/police-tv-cops-cancellation-live-pd/dan-taberski-running-from-cops-live-pd
Newsrooms Are in Revolt. The Bosses Are in Their Country Houses.
Those who can afford it left the city, shining a spotlight on class divisions in the media.
EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — Real estate out here is too expensive for a working person, so the East Hampton Golf Club usually provides shared houses for its caddies. But Covid-19 means no boardinghouses, and no boarding means no caddies, and no caddies means that the media moguls who pay more than $400,000 to join (putting it in the middle range for initiation fees in the Hamptons) now must pull their own clubs around, which they’ve been telling one another reminds them of their youth, and which is just the kind of sacrifice that the coronavirus has brought to East Hampton.
That’s not all. The parties and attendant deals are off, and executives face a summer without tiki-torch-lit pathways leading to raw bar spreads on the beach, catered for tens of thousands of dollars for a few dozen friends. Parents are growing desperate: “With no camps being open, they’re looking for things to do,” said Boomer Jousma, a yacht broker, who has met that need by selling twice as many yachts as usual, including four of the $1 million-plus Vanquish brand in the last two weeks.
There’s also not so much Instagram. Everyone saw what happened when their neighbor, David Geffen, who paid $70 million for his spread on Lily Pond Lane in 2016, posted a picture of a sunset over his $590 million superyacht in late March and shared that he was “isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus,” provoking a wave of public shaming. Out here, they’re being careful to avoid both the disease and the anger seething out of New York City, where much of the working media is both exhausted from covering the story of their lives and in open revolt.
<snip>
Underlying much of this tension is a sense — in media as in the rest of American society — of just how deep the gaps can be. I felt that sting last week when I saw a tweet from Amber Jamieson raging about rich New Yorkers who fled the coronavirus, leaving behind spacious houses and apartments that would have made for a relatively easy quarantine. “Genuinely hope they feel deep shame their whole lives,” she wrote.
I was Ms. Jamieson’s editor at BuzzFeed News until earlier this year, and I couldn’t help thinking this was about me, since I headed up to Columbia County, N.Y., in early March, and so I called Ms. Jamieson, 34, an Australian native who lives in a studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant, to ask her what she meant.
“The biggest story in the world came to your front door and you left — that to me is insane,” she said, adding that her experience — the woman who works the front desk of her gym died, and she wrote about a funeral procession for another neighbor — has been essential to her reporting. “You left for your own personal safety and because it made you stressed and anxious.”
She paused.
“I feel bad that I feel like everybody should feel absolutely self-loathing and shame,” she said.
I asked Ms. Jamieson if what she was feeling was rooted in a desire for justice, or for better journalism, or just free-floating, Australian-inflected rage.
“All of those things,” she said.
Nothing personal, of course. Ms. Jamieson has reporter friends who left a small apartment for a place in Aspen; she understands that people have children, parents, health conditions. “They wanted more space for their kids, or to care for an elderly relative, OK, everyone has a reason,” she said. But she thinks that the bosses, and journalists, have a special obligation to stay: “Being a leader means staying with your people and seeing what they see.”
But Ms. Jamieson said it had been an eye-opening experience.
“It revealed the money in journalism — who has cash and who doesn’t and how much this industry is from people with trust funds or well-connected parents and they could stay in the Hamptons or the Catskills,” she said. (On that note, I should disclose again that I don’t extensively cover BuzzFeed, which I left in February, in this column because I have yet to divest my stock options in the company, as required by The Times.)
more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/business/media/media-executives-hamptons.html
best comment in response:
https://nyti.ms/3fuMQWK#permid=107606522
Media bosses' and news readers' extreme wealth goes a long way to explain the infuriating obsession with propping up the status quo. This system benefits them and that is why, while their front-line people are being harassed and assaulted at Trump rallies and beaten by police, they push the both-sides narrative with such vigor and always have. Truth and facts have taken a back seat to "balance" for years. Judith Miller ring any bells? There is not a left/right bias in media. It is a bias in favor of the oligarchs at all costs and that is because the oligarchs run the media. This article confirms the suspicions of most people who have been paying attention.
How the GOP brought antisemitism from the margins to the White House
How the GOP brought antisemitism from the margins to the White House
A new website tracking incidents of right-wing antisemitism finds that rarely a week goes by without the Republican Party boosting white nationalism.
By
Natasha Roth-Rowland
June 15, 2020
On March 25, 2019, Republican Representative Mo Brooks took to the floor of Congress and read aloud a passage from “Mein Kampf.” Brooks, who represents Alabama’s 5th District, claimed that by initiating impeachment proceedings against Trump, the Democrats were perpetrating the “Big Lie” — a propaganda technique Hitler accused German Jews of using, which involves creating a fiction so massive no one could believe it was an invention. Throughout his speech, Brooks repeatedly referred to Hitler and the Nazi party as “socialists” in an effort to imply political proximity to the Democrats.
A few days later, Donald Trump, Jr. gave an interview to TruNews, a far-right racist website that most recently drew attention for referring to Trump’s impeachment as a “Jew Coup.” Just over a week later, on April 6, President Trump told an audience at a Republican Jewish event that Benjamin Netanyahu was their prime minister, invoking the antisemitic “dual loyalty” trope, which holds that Jews are more loyal to the Jewish community worldwide (or, more recently, to Israel) than they are to their own countries.
As much as observers were shocked by these incidents, this was a fairly typical fortnight in contemporary U.S. politics. As a new website, How to Fight Antisemitism, shows, rarely a week goes by without the GOP engaging in antisemitic rhetoric or actions, or enabling the wider ecosystem of white nationalism it has emboldened in recent years.
https://www.972mag.com/gop-antisemitism-white-nationalism/
Quite possibly the most hilariously awful speech ever!
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1271814819507834881How the grads didn't fall over laughing...
A political cartoon from Morten Morland
https://twitter.com/mortenmorland/status/1269530884350316545
Philly burned this week; just across the river Camden did not.
NYTs Kate Zernike story on Camden, two years after it dismantled its police force and started over.
https://twitter.com/kzernike/status/1269759886130319360
Camden Turns Around With New Police Force
CAMDEN, N.J. — In the summer of 2012, the year this city broke its own record for homicides, there were 21 people murdered here. This summer, there were six.
Just as remarkably, with shootings down 43 percent in two years, and violent crime down 22 percent, Osvaldo Fernandez now lets his sons walk to school alone. Nancy Torres abandoned plans to move to Florida. And parents from Center City Philadelphia are bringing their children here — notoriously one of the nation’s poorest, most crime-ridden cities — to play in a Little League that has grown to 500 players from 150 in its first season three years ago.
It has been 16 months since Camden took the unusual step of eliminating its police force and replacing it with a new one run by the county. Beleaguered by crime, budget cuts and bad morale, the old force had all but given up responding to some types of crimes.
Dispensing with expensive work rules, the new force hired more officers within the same budget — 411, up from about 250. It hired civilians to use crime-fighting technology it had never had the staff for. And it has tightened alliances with federal agencies to remove one of the largest drug rings from city streets.
<snip>
No one, least of all law-enforcement officials, is declaring victory on crime: Camden has seen too many promises and rescue packages to be so bold.
Still, the improvements have come faster than anyone predicted. And while the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., has drawn attention to long-simmering hostilities between police departments and minority communities, Camden is becoming an example of the opposite.
“We’re not going to do this by militarizing streets,” Chief Thomson said. Instead, he sent officers to knock on doors and ask residents their concerns. He lets community leaders monitor surveillance cameras from their home computers to help watch for developing crime.
The police have held meet-the-officer fairs at parks and churches, attended baseball games and sent Mister Softee trucks into neighborhoods. Officers stand at school crossings and on corners where drugs and violence flourished. Chief Thomson’s theory is that in a city of 77,000, there are thousands more well-intentioned people than bad, and that the police must enlist them to take back the streets.
“For a city to be prosperous, it needs to be safe and busy,” he said. “The police are a variable in that equation, but we are just one variable.” He tells his officers that he measures their success not in tickets written, but in the number of children riding bicycles on the street.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/01/nyregion/camden-turns-around-with-new-police-force.html
What I Saw from the Midst of the Looting in Santa Monica
I was in Santa Monica that afternoon, on my way to the protests when a caravan of luxury vehicles brimming with passengers arrived on the scene, leaving a strong scent of cannabis in their wake. Instead of heading towards Ocean Avenue, I followed them, believing that something was about to go down. For the next two hours I watched, then filmed, as they surrounded one store after another. There was no pretext of politics to their activities and they certainly weren’t there to protest. Instead, what I witnessed was a well-planned organized heist that used the protestors as a shield and a diversion for their own nefarious purposes.
<snip>
The following is my account of what I saw on Sunday: a view from one block, on one street, in one city, engulfed by unrest and grief.
2:14 p.m. – Arrival
Walking up Fourth Street toward Broadway, I first hear the boom of tear gas canisters being fired. It’s far enough away that there is no smoke. Tiny explosions reverberate through downtown Santa Monica, an ominous welcome to the neighborhood. On Twitter, I read that a small group of protesters has broken away from Ocean Avenue and is making its way to Third Street Promenade. The police, hoping to prevent a repeat of what happened the night before on Fairfax, stands alert.
2:26 p.m. – Vans Store
I first see the familiar red and black boxes strewn in piles outside the smashed storefront. A young woman looking for some checkerboard slip-ons shouts, “Get me a size 11!” Two young men drag one of their friends inside the store, exhorting him to “Get a new board.” It’s a strange sensation to watch a store being looted in broad daylight. The sense of lawlessness creates a weird tear in reality where I feel slightly outside myself, like I’m watching all of this happen in a dream, asking myself and others, “Is this really happening?” But it is real. And the looters come streaming out of the store pushing hand trucks piled high with shoes and clothing. They carry boxes on top of boxes, their arms stuffed to capacity. A woman standing next to the entrance shouts, “Please stop, you’re going to get Trump reelected.” Instead, they leave with backpacks and skateboards and hoodies. The store is quickly picked clean.
<snip>
The scope of the afternoon’s looting only began to sink in after I left the scene. As I walked out of the commercial district and towards my car, the damage was shocking. Store after store had been vandalized and emptied. Now local business owners and neighbors are left to pick up the pieces. Many express solidarity with the protestors, but say they feel abandoned by the SMPD.
In the next few days, as the enormous breadth of the looting became apparent, Andrew Kirschner, chef and owner of Tar and Roses, told Eater, “Santa Monica was targeted. I kept telling myself throughout the coronavirus that Santa Monica was safe. It’s been a ghost town the past few months, why would I need to board up the place and protect it? But I’ll say this: The outpouring of community support is really amazing. Hundreds of people in the streets with brooms, cleaning up, removing graffiti. You do see how the community can rally together.”
The police response to Sunday’s looting has been roundly criticized. “This was a tactical failure on the part of the SMPD,” says Eric Preven, a local activist and former city council candidate. “They were wrongly focused on arresting peaceful protestors while the looters were left to go about their business.” Reached for comment by Los Angeles, a member of SMPD had no official response to the issues raised in this article as they were unauthorized to speak to the press. They did agree to speak on background and offered the following assessment. “These are gang members,” he said based on information ascertained from suspect interrogations and arrestee reports. “They’re highly organized and deadly serious and are using social media to decide where and what to hit.”
https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/santa-monica-looting-essay/
Do you think the GOP stays silent about Trump's abuses because he does what they want?
Which everything he's done so far and they simply couldn't give a flying fuck what anyone thinks?
I do. Trump is doing everything they want. He is who they are.
Do you think the looting and destruction in cities are the doings of Erik Prince?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/07/us/politics/erik-prince-project-veritas.htmlWASHINGTON — Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents.
One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.
Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.
Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians and liberal advocacy groups. Mr. Seddon’s role in the teachers’ union operation — detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle between the group and the union — has not previously been reported, nor has Mr. Prince’s role in recruiting Mr. Seddon for the group’s activities.
<snip>
Mr. Prince invited Project Veritas operatives — including Mr. O’Keefe — to his family’s Wyoming ranch for training in 2017, The Intercept reported last year. Mr. O’Keefe and others shared social media photos of taking target practice with guns at the ranch, including one post from Mr. O’Keefe saying that with the training, Project Veritas will be “the next great intelligence agency.” Mr. Prince had hired a former MI6 officer to help train the Project Veritas operatives, The Intercept wrote, but it did not identify the officer.
Mr. Seddon regularly updated Mr. O’Keefe about the operation against the Michigan teachers’ union, according to internal Project Veritas emails, where the language of the group’s leaders is marbled with spy jargon.
They used a code name — LibertyU — for their operative inside the organization, Marisa Jorge, who graduated from Liberty University in Virginia, one of the nation’s largest Christian colleges. Mr. Seddon wrote that Ms. Jorge “copied a great many documents from the file room,” and Mr. O’Keefe bragged that the group would be able to get “a ton more access agents inside the educational establishment.”
The emails refer to other operations, including weekly case updates, along with training activities that involved “operational targeting.” Project Veritas redacted specifics about those operations from the messages.
In August 2017, Ms. Jorge wrote to Mr. Seddon that she had managed to record a local union leader talking about Ms. DeVos and other topics.
“Good stuff,” Mr. Seddon wrote back. “Did you receive the spare camera yet?”
As education secretary, Ms. DeVos has been a vocal critic of teachers’ unions, saying in 2018 that they have a “stranglehold” over politicians at the federal and state levels. She and Mr. Prince grew up in Michigan, where their father made a fortune in the auto parts business.
AFT Michigan sued Project Veritas in federal court, alleging trespassing, eavesdropping and other offenses. The teachers’ union is asking for more than $3 million in damages, accusing the group of being a “vigilante organization which claims to be dedicated to exposing corruption. It is, instead, an entity dedicated to a specific political agenda.”
