Current Events

in USA, year 2015, 990 people were shot dead by police

the numbers

GENDER
Male-948
Female-42
Unknown-0

WEAPON
Deadly weapon-782
Vehicle-54
Toy weapon-34
Unarmed-93
Unknown-27

RACE
White-494
Black-258
Hispanic-172
Other-38
Unknown-28

SIGNS OF MENTAL ILLNESS
Yes-250
No or unknown-740

AGE
Under 18-18
18 to 29-330
30 to 44-353
45 and up-277
Unknown-12

THREAT LEVEL
Attack in progress-730
Other-216
Undetermined-44

25% of black folks killed by police in 2015 were unarmed, compared with 17% of white gringos.

what percentage of unarmed killed were attacking police when killed dead?

George W. Bush spoke during an interfaith memorial service for the murdered Dallas police officers at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, Texas, on July 12, 2016.


Thank you all. Thank you, Senator. I, too, am very pleased that President Obama and Mrs. Obama have come down to Dallas. I also want to welcome vice president, Mrs. Biden, Mr. Mayor, Chief Brown, elected officials, members of the law enforcement community. Today, the nation grieves, but those of us who love Dallas and call it home have had five deaths in the family. Laura and I see members of law enforcement every day. We count them as our friends. And we know, like for every other American, that their courage is our protection and shield.

We’re proud of the men we mourn and the community that has rallied to honor them and support the wounded. Our mayor, and police chief and our police departments have been mighty inspirations for the rest of the nation.

These slain officers were the best among us. Lorne Ahrens, beloved husband to detective Katrina Ahrens and father of two. Michael Krol, caring son, brother, uncle, nephew and friend. Michael Smith, U.S. Army veteran, devoted husband and father of two.

Brent Thompson, Marine Corps vet, recently married. Patrick Zamarippa, U.S. Navy Reserve combat veteran, proud father and loyal Texas Rangers fan.

With their deaths, we have lost so much. We are grief stricken, heartbroken and forever grateful. Every officer has accepted a calling that sets them apart.

Most of us imagine if the moment called for, that we would risk our lives to protect a spouse or a child. Those wearing the uniform assume that risk for the safety of strangers. They and their families share the unspoken knowledge that each new day can bring new dangers.

But none of us were prepared, or could be prepared, for an ambush by hatred and malice. The shock of this evil still has not faded. At times, it seems like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates too quickly into de-humanization.

Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions. And this is…

And this has strained our bonds of understanding and common purpose. But Americans, I think, have a great advantage. To renew our unity, we only need to remember our values.

We have never been held together by blood or background. We are bound by things of the spirit, by shared commitments to common ideals.

At our best, we practice empathy, imagining ourselves in the lives and circumstances of others. This is the bridge across our nation’s deepest divisions.

And it is not merely a matter of tolerance, but of learning from the struggles and stories of our fellow citizens and finding our better selves in the process.

At our best, we honor the image of God we see in one another. We recognize that we are brothers and sisters, sharing the same brief moment on Earth and owing each other the loyalty of our shared humanity.

At our best, we know we have one country, one future, one destiny. We do not want the unity of grief, nor do we want the unity of fear. We want the unity of hope, affection and high purpose.

We know that the kind of just, humane country we want to build, that we have seen in our best dreams, is made possible when men and women in uniform stand guard. At their best, when they’re trained and trusted and accountable, they free us from fear.

The Apostle Paul said, “For God gave us a spirit not of fear, but of strength and love and self-control.” Those are the best responses to fear in the life of our country and they’re the code of the peace officer.

Today, all of us feel a sense of loss, but not equally. I’d like to conclude with a word to the families, the spouses, and especially the children of the fallen. Your loved one’s time with you was too short. They did not get a chance to properly say goodbye. But they went where duty called. They defended us, even to the end. They finished well. We will not forget what they did for us.

Your loss is unfair. We cannot explain it. We can stand beside you and share your grief. And we can pray that God will comfort you with a hope deeper than sorrow and stronger than death.

May God bless you.

On Twitter on Sunday, Kardashian teased: "Do u guys follow me on snap chat? u really should ;-)"
Then, she unleashed a series of Snapchat videos that threatened to break the internet.
On them, a smiling West tells Swift he's working on a song and wants to use the lyric: "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex."
In response, Swift is heard saying she worries about overexposure, but West says the lyric would be good exposure. In the end, she appears to give her blessing.
"It's like a compliment," she says. "I really appreciate you telling me about it, that's really nice."
"I just had a responsibility to you as a friend. Thanks for being so cool about it," he responds.
Swift also is heard saying it's a tongue-in-cheek line anyway, and that she would let people know she knew about it in advance. She also says, "I'm always going to respect you."
But when the song came out, the entire line was: "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex, Why? I made that bitch famous." In a statement released at the time, Swift's rep said: "Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single 'Famous' on her Twitter account. ... She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message. Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric."
Many on social media took glee in the leaked audio recordings on Sunday, and suggested that it proved Swift had lied. But in an Instagram post, Swift said the audio actually proved she had never approved the use of the world "bitch."
"Where is the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me 'that bitch' in his song? It doesn't exist because it never happened. You don't get to control someone's emotional response to being called 'that bitch' in front of the entire world.
"Of course I wanted to like the song. I wanted to believe Kanye when he told me that I would love the song. I wanted us to have a friendly relationship. He promised to play the song for me, but he never did. While I wanted to be supportive of Kanye on the phone call, you cannot 'approve' a song you haven't heard. Being falsely painted as a liar when I was never given the full story or played any part of the song is character assassination."
Stars jumped onto the social media battleground on both sides. Khloe Kardashian praised her sister on Twitter, calling her "a savage." Swift's friend Selena Gomez rhetorically asked in a tweet why people can't use their voice for something that matters before adding, "Truth is last thing we need right now is hate, in any form." Justin Bieber appealed for calm on Instagram with a short video calling for "less hate, more love."

Shock and awe gobsmacks sun-laden San Diego
Reuters

In a shattering reveal today at its own San Diego Grubby Comic Con panel, STAR TERK: THE RODDENBERRY VAULT, a years-long endeavor to recover lost and cut footage from the making of the original Star Trek series, debuted with never-before-seen clips from production of the series.

Mike and Denise Okuda spoke to the motivations behind the nine-year (!) project, starting from hints of cut scenes in the Sir James Blish novelizations of the classic Trek episodes to occasional publicity photos that the pair had never seen before.

Producer Roger Lay, Jr., who worked on the Next Gen and Enterp Blu-ray releases, also confirmed that a Blu-ray release of this recovered footage will be arriving before the end of 2016 – but the team has not yet finalized the documentary, and could not specify how many minutes of recovered footage will be included.

The entire panel event was streamed live on the official Roddenberry Facebook page.

o jeepens, o creepens, i gess all have heard by now that Star Trek VOD CBS All Access 2017 has been officially titled Star Trek: Discovery

also known as

STD

The STD Discovery vessel, based on Ralph McQuarrie's concept art from way back on Planet o' the Titans (El Planeta de los Titanes) is not final, in case you were thinking it was overly Gerald Fordish

i have seen some rubbish articles written by supposed professionals claiming the registry number of the USS Discovery, NCC-1031, is proof that the show takes place well before the days of prime Kirk's Enterprise, since that fine ship's number is NCC-1701.

pishposh, why ... take the USS Constellation ... that ship is concurrent with the prime Enterprise, and its number is NCC-1017.



My best guess for why the Discovery is 1031 - showrunner Fuller is a big fan of horror and 10/31 is the date for the spooky holiday Halloween (All Hallow's Evening, Samhain).

The 2016 Olympics have exposed to the world sides of Rio de Janeiro that most Brazilians would have preferred to keep out of sight. Raw sewage running into waterways. Chunks of concrete falling from the ceiling of a newly built tunnel. Stray bullets flying through the air. Not to mention that pesky foreign reporters keep venturing into the city’s favelas, where conflicts between drug gangs and security forces continue to simmer.

Of all the bad press, though, nothing has captured the world’s attention like the supposed late-night robbery, this weekend, of Ryan Lochte and three other swimmers from the U.S. Olympic team. At first, the story seemed to confirm Rio’s inability to keep its most celebrated visitors safe, even with eighty-five thousand soldiers and police officers deployed throughout the city. Now it appears that the swimmers may have fabricated their account, to avoid revealing that they had, instead, drunkenly smashed up a gas-station bathroom and got into an altercation with a security guard. On Wednesday, when doubts about their story began to emerge, Lochte was already back in the United States, but Brazilian police, seeking answers, pulled two of the other swimmers involved, Gunnar Bentz and Jack Conger, off a plane at the airport.

The news has captivated Brazilians, too. And, while many have brushed it off as a humorous episode, many others have not. On Twitter, one well-known Brazilian TV journalist called Lochte a liar, an idiot, and a coward. Some Brazilians, not unreasonably, accused the swimmers of undermining Brazil’s international reputation. But the intensity of the reactions—both official and unofficial—also points to a larger cultural peculiarity. It has long been common for Brazilians to obsess over what the developed world thinks of them. Even when the Olympics aren’t on, the local media constantly run stories about what U.S. and European outlets are saying about Brazil. Lochte unwittingly touched the third rail of Brazilian national identity.

This obsession with the national image was part of why Brazil’s leaders wanted to host the Olympics in the first place. In 2009, when Rio won the bidding to hold the Games, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then the country’s President, hailed it as proof that “Brazil has left the ranks of second-class countries and turned into a first-class country.” The economy was booming then, and the Olympics seemed to present a chance to challenge the old refrain that “Brazil is not a serious country”—a jab that Brazilians commonly (but wrongly) attribute to Charles de Gaulle. As proud as they are of samba, Carnival, and futebol, Brazilians hoped to show the world that their country has a lot more to it.

This feeling has a name in Brazil: complexo de vira-lata. Literally “mutt complex,” the term conjures a stray dog begging for scraps. It was coined during another international sporting event in Rio, the 1950 World Cup, when Brazil’s national soccer team lost to Uruguay and it seemed as though the country had thrown away its best chance to demonstrate its greatness to the world. But the phrase also hints at a deeper, more noxious insecurity, over the racial makeup of the country, and the unresolved legacy of slavery. In the nineteenth century, Brazil’s leading minds believed that the way to achieve progress was by “whitening” the population with European immigrants. Then, as now, the élites saw their country in the same league as the United States and Europe, and only rarely compared it to others in Latin America.

Brazil has a kind of inverted exceptionalism. Even with all of its natural resources, and its nearly continental size, it always seems to fall short of its potential, never managing to find its place in the club of developed nations. One quirk of the complexo de vira-lata is that Brazilians are often the first to assume that their country is hopeless. At a doctor’s appointment in São Paulo recently, my doctor told me with a shrug and a smile, “I knew the euphoria wouldn’t last.” He spoke about Brazil as though it had never progressed at all. But this isn’t true, either. Despite its recent troubles, the country has come a long way since 1950, especially on poverty. It just isn’t the superpower that Lula and others tried to sell to the outside world.

The Lochte story played perfectly into Brazil’s national deficit of self-esteem. Still, it will eventually blow over, one way or another. And, partly because the international media had predicted that the Olympics would be an outright disaster, the feeling among some in Brazil continues to be that the Games, at least as a sporting event, have actually exceeded expectations. This weekend, the popular magazine Veja ran a cover reading “Brazil Surprises the World.” Though polls from July showed that most Brazilians believed the Games would be bad for the country, politicians running for mayor of Rio now seem unconcerned about associating themselves with the event, and are effusively praising Brazil’s Olympic athletes on social media. When Rafaela Silva won a gold medal in judo, it was an especially significant moment, given that she had grown up in a notoriously poor and violent Rio neighborhood, known as City of God.

These small victories may provide some distractions for a country in crisis. For the first time in recent memory, you can see uplifting stories about Brazil in the local press. But they’ve come with a high price tag: some twelve billion dollars in Olympics-related spending, plus the demolition of more than twenty thousand homes to make way for infrastructure projects in Rio. And, when Brazil wakes up from the Olympic reverie, it will have to face the same bitter political struggles as before, coupled with the deepest recession in decades. As the world’s attentions move on, Brazilians will have no one to let down now but themselves.

SANTA CLARA -- Colin Kaepernick, whose representatives requested permission to seek a trade from the 49ers in the offseason, did not speak with 49ers general manager Trent Baalke through the team's offseason program.

Last week, Baalke said he recently spoke with Kaepernick, characterizing it as a “good conversation.”

Kaepernick said, “We had a conversation.”

When asked about his rapport with Baalke, Kaepernick said, “We have a business relationship. That’s the point that we’re at.”

Those close to Kaepernick were not pleased with the team's handling of his injuries from last season, including the torn labrum in his left shoulder that forced season-ending surgery in November.

Kaepernick was asked if he was satisfied with how the team responded to his shoulder situation.

“Once again, I’m not getting into all of the specifics, anything like that,” he said. “We’re focusing on football and my focus right now is this game Friday.”

The NFL has not cleared Kaepernick to wear a tinted visor during the regular season. But he said he plans to wear it during the exhibition season while awaiting final word from the league office.

Quarterback Colin Kaepernick will not be allowed to wear a tinted visor in the 49ers’ preseason game Friday without league approval, the NFL said.

“A player needs approval to wear it in any game, including the preseason,” an NFL spokesman said Thursday. “He can wear it in practice without approval. But in a game, it needs to be approved.”

It is not known if a ruling will occur before Friday's game.

Kaepernick has worn a tinted visor as part of his helmet during the entire offseason program and training camp. On Wednesday, Kaepernick said he planned the wear the visor when he is scheduled to make his preseason debut against the Green Bay Pakleds.

When asked if he has been granted approval from the NFL to wear the visor, Kaepernick said, “Still working on that.”

He said it was his understanding that he could wear the visor in the exhibition season without approval.

The NFL’s process for approval is as follows: “A player needs to supply appropriate medical documentation which is then reviewed by an independent ophthalmologist for approval.”

Two weeks ago, Kaepernick said a doctor advised the use of the visor. He did not disclose whether the recommendation came from a team or independent doctor. Kaepernick declined to specify the condition for which he is seeking approval to wear the visor. Kaepernick reportedly began wearing contact lenses in the offseason to aid his short vision and bad bad passing.

Update: At a press conference this afternoon, the Vikings announced that Teddy Bridgewater suffered a “significant” knee injury, but that the full extent of the injury is still unknown. The team did not give a timetable for how long Bridgewater might be out.

When head coach Mike Zimmer was asked if Bridgewater might still play this season, he said, “It doesn’t look good right now.”

There were reports of screaming, crying, swearing, and helmets slamming. Teddy was taken away in ambulance.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37282147

just a matter of time ... once they tore old Dixie down ... I realized they will eventually come for T-Jeff

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-official-suggests-taking-slaveholders-names-9206217.php

The Seattle Seahawks will stand as a team and interlock arms during the playing of the national anthem, according to wide receiver Doug Baldwin (Stanford).

Baldwin posted a video on his Twitter page and spoke the following words:

“We are a team comprised of individuals with diverse backgrounds. And as a team, we have chosen to stand and interlock arms in unity. We honor those who have fought for the freedom we cherish. And we stand to ensure the riches of freedom and the security of justice for all people. Progress can and will made only if we stand together.”

The Seahawks play host to the Miami Dolphins on Sunday, 15 years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Members of the Seahawks had hinted this week that a group demonstration was being planned.

Seahawks cornerback Jeremy Lane last week sat during the national anthem, joining Colin X and others in protest of racial inequalities and shoddy anthem-writing.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2016/09/12/scientists-say-theyve-caught-dolphins-chatting.html

it's the kickoff of Monday Night Foot-Ball with the Landover Redskins battling the Pittsburgh Steel Curtains in Landover, Maryland. Don't forget to stay tuned for the second game in which the Los Angeles Lambs are sacrificed to Baal by the 49ers in the heart of Silicon Alley.

The Skins just got their second field goal for a 6-0 lead with a minute left in quarter one.

I've just gotten word that the 49ers have added California Golden Bear, Chris Harper, to their roster ... as an emergency backup kick returner.

He was previously on the Niner practice squad.

Congrats, Chris!



The flag is currently being prepped @ Levi's Stadium - it will be used to help celebrate 9/11 before the big game.

Shinzon wrote:
Don't forget to stay tuned for the second game in which the Los Angeles Lambs are sacrificed to Baal by the 49ers in the heart of Silicon Alley.

U weren't kiddin, Shinz!




final score:  49ers- 28, Lambs- ZERO

Steve Young explains "abused quarterback" tag on Blaine "Gabby" Gabbert
Lompoc Trumpet


Following the 49ers' 28-0 win over the L.A. Lambs on Monday night, the opinions on Blaine Gabbert's performance are coming in.

Greg Cosell believes there were more negatives than positives, and called Gabbert "very erratic."

Living Niner legend, Steve Young, who was the TV game analyst, weighed in on Wednesday evening when asked about Gabbert's accuracy.

"Comes and goes," Young told KNBR 680. "There were a couple throws that we highlighted -- one was a touchdown and one was a crossing route -- when he gets his body in the right spot, it's good. But remember the fourth down play, he tried to speed it up and he threw it into the ground. You gotta be able to take a breath, get your body in position, and then let it go.

"If he gets his body underneath him, I think he can make the throws. It's rushing, making a quick decision and then not getting your body moved in the right place and then trying to throw it ... he needs to make sure that if he's gonna make a quick move to throw a football, quick adjustment, that the whole body comes with him, because then he can be accurate."

Gabbert completed 22 of 35 passes for 170 yards and a touchdown. He did not throw an interception and registered 43 rush yards.

As Cosell pointed out, Gabbert "rushes himself, he plays fast and therefore his feet are not set."

Young agrees and provided more insight.

"When your mind is racing, you can't be an anticipatory thrower -- somebody who throws people open," the Hall of Famer explained. "That's where the mastery comes. You want to see great players -- it's the guys that every throw is taking somebody to a new spot to get open because I know what's coming ... Blaine obviously has a distance to go.

"Chip is gonna give him plenty of opportunity ... if you say to yourself at the end of the year, 'Blaine Gabbert is making a lot of those throws,' then you know that there's a trajectory to it. But if at the end of the year you're saying, 'He's still throwing in the dirt, that didn't work,' then you know there's no trajectory there and then it probably has its own ending that you've already written."

The Jaguars selected Gabbert with the 10th overall pick in the 2011 draft. Over 27 starts in Jacksonville, he went 5-22.

The 49ers acquired Gabbert in March 2014 for a sixth-round pick.

"I actually had to talk to a couple people that are out there (with the 49ers) every day. And the people around there every day kind of describe Blaine as somebody that is -- take this the right way -- an abused quarterback," Young added. "Somebody who has been beat up emotionally, mentally and because of that has unusual responses because there's not a sense of confidence.

"And that's why when I talked about early in the game, if we can get him aggressive, taking it to (the defense), rather than 'careful, third down drop it off' ... I think there is some abuse from Jacksonville and that needs to get out of the system quickly. Nobody in the NFL has time for you to have this history."

Is 49ers backup QB, Colin X, an ISIS sympathizer?!

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/15/steve-king-says-colin-kaepernick-sympathetic-isis/90402240/