Today they rolled up the last rainbow flag while unfurling these:
"Charleston suspect had long been on troubled road to radicalization" by Mitch Weiss and John Mone Associated Press June 27, 2015
CHAPIN, S.C. — The people who know Dylann Storm Roof — the people who watched his progression from a sweet child to a disturbed man — are struggling with guilt.
How could they have missed the signs? Could they have done something to prevent the deaths of nine innocents at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church? How did it all happen?
It didn't, and does this cover story script ever stink at this point.
*******************
Roof began having trouble in school. He failed the ninth grade twice, then dropped out for good in 2010.
And yet he penned that manifesto that was beyond his education? Pleeze!
People around him worried about his lack of direction. He was spending too much time in his room in front of the computer. They pushed him to get a job, but he was unhappy, his friends said.
Over the past year, Roof became increasingly unhinged.
So what pharmaceuticals was he on?
In February, worried employees at a Columbia shopping mall called the police when Roof, dressed in black, asked them suspicious questions about when stores closed and when they left for the night, according to court records. He was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of possessing the drug Suboxone, which is used to treat opiate dependence.
In March, a police officer searched his car and found six empty 40-round magazines for an AR-15 assault rifle, according to a police report. Roof said he was saving up to buy an AR-15, the report said.
In April, he was arrested again on a charge of trespassing at a mall from which he had been banned.
Look at this, once a month bread crumbs and warning trail.
He had become a recluse. He never responded to an invitation to Amber’s wedding, which had been planned for last weekend but was postponed after the massacre. He also appears to have begun a journey into the world of Internet hate sites, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks those sites.
Sigh.
See: Is the SPLC An American Arm of the Mossad?
And yet the name sounds so benign and benevolent, doesn't it?
Roof appeared to be ‘‘AryanBlood1488,’’ who began posting on the white supremacist site the Daily Stormer in August, said Keegan Hanks of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Over several months, ‘‘AryanBlood1488’’ described how he typed ‘‘black on white crime’’ into a Google search, found the Council of Conservative Citizens site, and descended into radicalism from there.
Kyle Rogers, a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens who lives in Summerville, S.C., says Roof didn’t have any direct dealings with the group.
Another sign of a psyop cutout.
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He was/is also an "obsessive compulsive who played video games in a stressed-out home" -- and somehow he has become emblematic of the whole Confederacy because he was holding a flag in a photograph.
Speaking of stress:
"Stressing hope, S.C. mourns three more" by Lizette Alvarez and Kenneth Rosen New York Times June 28, 2015
CHARLESTON, S.C. —Meanwhile Saturday, a protester climbed a 30-foot flagpole and removed the Confederate battle flag from its perch outside the State House before she was arrested and the flag replaced, the police said.
The protester, a black woman, was nearly halfway up the pole when a Capitol police officer on routine patrol ordered her to come down. The authorities said the woman, who was wearing climbing gear, ignored the command.
She continued her climb to the top of the flagpole and unhooked and removed the flag before descending.
An officer from the Bureau of Protective Services arrested her and a man who had aided her.
The police identified the woman as Brittany Ann Byuarim-Newsome, 30, of Raleigh, N.C., and her alleged accomplice as James Ian Tyson, 30, of Charlotte, N.C.
Related: Confederate Flag Strategy of Tension Campaign Gets it’s Saddam Statue Moment
Later Saturday, about 50 people who support keeping the flag held a rally at the State House. Many were waving Confederate flags as they shouted ‘‘Heritage Not Hate!’’
That's rather BRAVE, isn't it?
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The governor is “sorry this happened on [her] watch,” while the controlled-opposition figure the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson also showed up. Like father, like scum.
Related:
Episcopal Church elects first black leader
In Confederate flag debate, GOP establishment finds its spine
Oh, they finally got one?
Maybe BU will, too:
"Controversy trails new professor to BU; Educator’s comments on white males stir debate on race, academic freedom" by Laura Krantz Globe Staff June 27, 2015
Incoming Boston University professor Saida Grundy stirred up an Internet frenzy last month over a heated string of tweets that disparaged white males. An uproar about academic freedom, self-expression, and alleged racism followed.
Yeah, that's freedom of speech. White men have become everybody's whipping boy and punching bag. Can insult them all day long, and it's all funny!
As the daughter of well-known civil rights activists, the newly minted PhD understands controversy, and has not generally shied away from hot-button topics, whether in class, in magazine articles she has penned, or online interviews.
She's a provocateur.
But now, Grundy, who will start at BU on Wednesday, is trying to escape the firestorm and has declined several requests for interviews. The Globe contacted more than two-dozen friends, family, academic colleagues, and even her childhood dentist, all of whom declined to speak about her, sometimes after conferring with Grundy.
A review of her credentials, writings, and family history, however, reveals a lifetime of forcing difficult conversations, undaunted by backlash.
Grundy grew up in Kentucky, where she learned firsthand lessons about the civil rights movement. Her father attended the University of Kentucky in the 1960s, when it was still primarily a white school, an experience that took a toll on him, he later told an oral history project.
Grundy’s mother, Ann, participated with Martin Luther King Jr. in the famous march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, and devoted her life to advocating for racial justice.
Is that all she heard form him?
Grundy’s grandfather, Ann’s father, was the pastor of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., until a few years before it was bombed in 1963 by the Ku Klux Klan, killing four young black girls. Even though Saida Grundy did not witness it, the event shaped her life, she later wrote in a magazine article.
“In the call for justice to roll like thunder, the Grundys are noisemakers and rollers,” a presenter said last year at a lifetime achievement award ceremony for Grundy’s parents at the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice.
The debate about Saida Grundy’s tweets began last month, and although now her account is private, the messages are captured elsewhere online. One of the most often-cited calls white college males the “problem population” in America.
Then maybe, you know, we should round 'em all up, put 'em in camps, and exterminate them.
Related: Incoming BU professor defends racially tinged Twitter posts
It's okay to hate if you are not white, and a real Solomon_Grundy she.
Among other tweets, she posted: “Every MLK week i commit myself to not spending a dime in white-owned businesses. and every year i find it nearly impossible.” And “can we just call st patrick’s day the white people’s kwanzaa that it is?”
If I could only take a moment to remind you of what the good doctor said:
"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men.... They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government."
Of course, no whites have died in the wars based on lies, none had their homes fraudulently stolen from them by looting banks, and the ultra-elite cla$$ -- which happens to be of all races and gender -- hasn't taken advantage of us all.
Hone$tly, that's where King was going and what he was doing in Memphis, and that is why he was killed. She completely missed his point, and there is something untoward about a supremaci$t media hurling racial division and hatred.
While Grundy later apologized for the manner in which she communicated her thoughts, she didn’t apologize for the content. Indeed, the 30-something academic has spent her career studying and observing racial interactions.
Not really an apology, is it?
At the University of Michigan, where Grundy earned both a master’s degree and last year a doctorate, she attempted to fill what she saw as a gap in academic research about middle-class black males.
She didn't benefit from affirmative action and racial quote policies, did she? She get a scholarship? Or was it all Clarence Thomas bootstrap stuff?
“In contrast to scholarship on the ‘crisis of the black male,’ which repeatedly addresses young black men as a national problem, this project asks how black men experience an institution that bills them as solutions to that problem,” Grundy wrote in a 2012 paper.
Grundy’s bluntness about race didn’t surprise Fatma Müge Göçek, her graduate school sociology professor at Michigan. In class, Grundy was passionate and lively, she said.
“She stood out among others,” Göçek said.
In academic sociology, she said, it is common to analyze situations in terms of power dynamics, race, and gender. And throughout history, white men have held the most power and influence.
And therefore we must collectively blame all white men, even those not alive at the time, for the dominance of a few incestuous families at the top of the pyramid. Wow.
Maybe the POWER DYNAMICS of CLA$$ are being LEFT OUT TOO MUCH there!
“She’s a sociologist, that’s the lens through which she sees the world,” Göçek said.
Oh, I know all about lenses through which one sees the world. That's why you and I are here, reader (thank you).
In a 2013 Huffington Post video interview, Grundy railed against black Greek life organizations, calling them corrupt and mismanaged.
Those damn frats!
Even Grundy’s everyday communications hint at her spunk. E-mails sent from her phone arrive with this tagline: “[sent from an overpriced mobile device where autofill and autocorrect ironically cause more errors than they resolve. please excuse punctuation, typos, and terseness.]”
Allegedly, Dylan Roof was worried about the same things.
A 2010 commentary Grundy wrote for Essence Magazine illustrates how her upbringing shaped her worldview. She wrote about Aiyana Jones, a 7-year-old black girl shot and killed in a police raid in Detroit, near where Grundy lived at the time. She compared the child’s death to those of the girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church.
What was that, a botched drug raid?
“The State does not protect little Black girls,” Grundy wrote.
Aren't protecting any of us these days, ma'am.
As she has been thrust into the spotlight, other parts of Grundy’s past also have surfaced. News outlets published stories last month saying she was convicted in 2008 of a misdemeanor after she created a fake online account for another woman on an adult website.
Oh, NO!
Grundy allegedly told police “this was a jealous thing regarding another man.”
So that makes it all right? The woman is a FRAUD!
After stories broke, Grundy in a statement last month called the incident “poor judgment of a heartbroken 24-year-old.”
(Blog editor rolls eyes at ceiling)
For now, Grundy is focused on her move to Boston, finding a place to live, and preparing for her classes. She is set to teach two sociology courses on race and ethnicity at BU this fall, both of which are full, according to the university.
Still time to switch, kids.
Virginia Sapiro, dean of BU’s College of Arts and Sciences, said she hired Grundy for the tenure-track position, along with 17 other assistant professors who will start this fall, because of her impressive credentials.
“Universities are not opposed to controversy,” Sapiro said. “Education requires that people be able to communicate with each other and listen and tolerate people communicating.”
Just don't wave a Confederate flag around or invite an Iranian to speak (or dare point out inconsistencies in the official and undergirding myth of our time, 9/11).
I mean, the HYPOCRISY of these POLITICALLY-CORRECT BRAINWASHING FACTORIES is astounding!
Grundy is joining a university where race is a controversial topic. The Boston City Council last year compelled president Robert Brown by subpoena to answer questions about Boston University’s hiring and enrollment diversity.
OMG, she was hired for quota!
Only 3 percent of BU students are black, and 2.8 percent of faculty are black, a percentage that has risen less than 1 percent during the past three decades. Other area universities report similarly low numbers of black students.
Well, it is Bo$ton!
BU has also come under fire for its decision to close the African Presidential Center, whose founder, Charles Stith, has criticized the school for not doing enough to support black students.
Brown has defended the school’s record on diversity and in May wrote a letter about Grundy’s tweets that criticized them but stopped short of calling them racist.
“Words have power and the words in her Twitter feed were powerful in the way they stereotyped and condemned other people,” Brown wrote.
But that's okay because it was only white men we don't like, guffaw, guffaw.
Others at BU have rallied around Grundy, praising her bravery and candor. The faculty union criticized Brown for ignoring the “cultural value of such intellectual labor.”
BU’s black student union, Umoja, has given an even stronger statement, mentioning hurtful Facebook comments, anonymous posts, and letters directed at black BU students as a result of Grundy’s tweets. “We believe that we need to have these dialogues, even if they make us uncomfortable,” the group said.
Just don't wave a Confederate flag around or mention any substantial issues such as wars for empire or criminal private central banking.
An image from the Twitter account of Saida Grundy, who starts this week as a Boson University professor.
Actually, it's more than two and half of them are white.
No one making a big deal about it, though.
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What a hateful person. So much for the harmony.
It's enough to turn you white:
"Massachusetts sees brisk trade in illicit ivory" by Brian MacQuarrie Globe Staff June 27, 2015
The Beverly auctioneer made quick work of a bullwhip belonging to television cowboy Rex Trailer and a 19th-century Russian icon before turning later to Chinese figurines that had been advertised as wood.
Except the pair weren’t elaborately carved wood. They were ivory. And they sold for $600 at Kaminski Auctions without proof of their age, which is required by the US government.
Such is the murky world of the ivory trade, where few transactions are scrutinized, few questions are asked, and understaffed federal agents are overwhelmed by a market in which 30,000 African elephants are killed each year for their tusks.
There once was a day where I would have celebrated what I suspect is a one-day wonder, and one that will be used to bash China while pushing the poor government narrative.
Don't get me wrong, I love elephants; however, I no longer trust the motives of my paper no matter what the subject. Sorry.
That trade, much of it illegal, is doing brisk business in Massachusetts, according to a prominent wildlife organization that conducted a survey this year on ivory sales in the United States.
The International Fund for Animal Welfare ranked Boston fourth among US cities in its study of ivory advertised on Craigslist, a popular online marketplace. And nearly all of the ivory items — tusks, jewelry, furniture, and statues — were being offered without the proof of age and origin required for a legal sale.
As a result, wildlife activists said, some of these items could belong to the vast cache of elephant ivory, carved and uncarved, that is smuggled into the United States by an industrial-size criminal network.
Maybe the NSA could help.
“We don’t have a system in the United States to determine whether what people are seeing online, or in a store, or in an antique shop is legal or not,” said Azzedine Downes, chief executive officer of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which conducted the survey in March.
“There’s no real fear of being found out,” Downes said.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has made illegal ivory sales and imports its top priority. To spread the word, the agency earlier this month crushed a ton of ivory in a public display at Times Square in New York.
Not that I'm in favor of killing elephants for ivory, but what good did that do other than meaning the elephants died in vain?
At least it makes government look good!
The ivory had been seized during an undercover operation, but the agency’s 198 law-enforcement officers are able to investigate only a small portion of crimes.
“You’re looking at multiple tons of ivory coming in across the country, much of it illegally and under the radar,” said Adam Roberts, chief executive officer of Born Free USA, an animal advocacy group.
The size of the Massachusetts market is impossible to gauge accurately, federal authorities said. But the Craigslist survey conducted by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a fleeting snapshot that illuminated only a sliver of the problem, showed that Boston’s healthy economy is a powerful magnet for ivory, Downes said.
Meaning the $cummy elite of Bo$ton are buying! No wonder government can't get to the bottom of it.
“There is a correlation between wealth centers and the sale of ivory,” Downes said. “There’s always been an allure.”
The San Francisco area ranked first in the number of ivory items offered for sale between March 16 and 20 on Craigslist, followed by Los Angeles, South Florida, and Boston, which also ranked fourth in the value of its ivory.
All liberal areas that lecture others on the ills of everything and anything!
A British and Kenyan report published in 2008 ranked Boston and Cambridge as the country’s seventh-largest ivory market. Overall, the United States ranks second in ivory trade, trailing only China.
Under a complicated welter of federal wildlife laws and regulations, African elephant ivory can be sold within the United States only if it was lawfully imported before 1990, or lawfully imported after 1990 but shown to have been taken from the wild before 1976.
“The obligation is on the seller” to document compliance, said Craig Hoover, chief of the wildlife trade and conservation branch of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Kaminski Auctions canceled its $600 ivory sale within days of the transaction, citing the legal dangers of selling ivory without proof of age. In the week before the sale, a Kaminski appraiser confirmed that the figurines were ivory for a Globe reporter who did not identify himself. He also told the reporter that the ivory might be difficult to resell out of state.
At this point I've stopped by Globe window shopping. Sorry.
When asked why Kaminski had advertised the ivory as wood, vice president Steven Demers said he did not know.
Edward Grace, deputy chief of law enforcement for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, said auction houses must identify ivory correctly.
“If someone advertises something as wood, when they know it’s ivory, then it’s false labeling,” Grace said. “They either need to redo their catalog listing or take it out of the sale.”
Internet traffic accounts for much of the trade in ivory, which can fetch up to $1,500 a pound, but ivory also can be found on the shelves of some antique houses in Massachusetts.
Many of these items are more than a century old, but unscrupulous sellers will use stains or other techniques to make recent ivory look antique.
“It’s so easy to make newly poached ivory look like old ivory. That’s essentially the problem in a nutshell,” said state Senator Jason Lewis, a Winchester Democrat who has filed legislation to ban all sales of African elephant ivory in Massachusetts.
“It can be heated and dried out and cracked, just like furniture can be. It’s carved in the style of various periods, and just like any antique or piece of furniture, it’s tough to know the authenticity,” said Lewis, a native of South Africa.
The bill is supported by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals-Angell Animal Medical Center, and Zoo New England.
Many ivory traders use false documents to deceive authorities. Last month, a Concord woman pleaded guilty to conspiring with Chinese nationals to smuggle ivory to China and mislabeling ivory as wood.
The woman, Carla Marsh, helped ship ivory that had been purchased at auction houses in the United States, according to court documents. She once suggested that items be mailed through the US Postal Service, because “it’s less expensive than UPS and does not get scrutinized quite as much in Customs.”
In addition to the Kaminski auction, ivory also was available at two of four antique shops visited recently on Charles Street in Boston.
At Elegant Findings Antiques, a visitor was shown ivory that had been painted with Napoleon’s portrait.
Valued at more than $2,000, the item had been given by the French emperor to one of his officers, according to a handwritten note that accompanied the artwork. Although the ivory appeared antique, no independent proof was available.
At Marika’s Antique Shop, ivory figures from Japan were displayed on a shelf. Their sales history is known, a staff person said, but not their age.
Some antique dealers in Massachusetts believe all of their peers must stop selling ivory.
“Antique dealers and auction houses have to take an ethical or moral stance,” said Tom Lang, co-owner of Alexander Westerhoff Antiques in Essex. “Ivory has got to be devalued in the marketplace.”
US wildlife officials said they are committed to a near-total ban on ivory sales, and that they are moving to prohibit the interstate trade of ivory and limit the number of imported elephant trophies.
Wildlife advocates say the clock is ticking.
“This is really one of those times in history when you have to decide as a person to contribute to changing society,” said Downes, at the International Fund for Animal Welfare. “A trinket is a live elephant roaming Africa. That’s the choice.”
What do you think I've been trying to do here the last eight years and before?
I'll admit, things have changed, but only for the worse.
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Time for this post to go dark.
NDUs:
Biden worships, speaks at S.C. church
In a surprise visit.
Gay pride events celebrate ruling
Honestly, I'm going to tolerate that rainbow flag but not proclaim myself better than you.
This is my calling, folks, and a sadder result to this life I can not imagine. It's my cross to bear, flag to march, pick your metaphor.
UPDATES:
Just another hate crime hoax where the guy was caught, and a happy reminder for you.
