Racism, White Supremacy & Guns: NOT Just Another "Bias Incident"

 
 

3 white college frat guys were caught-in-the-headlights by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting on March 1, 2019 when one of the students posted a photo to his private Instagram account in showing the trio in front of a roadside plaque commemorating the site where Emmett Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River.
In the past few days - 4 months later - it's all over mainstream news channels. 2 days ago ProPublica pushed the report forward into the spotlight to show the heart of darkness.
What's the story here? 2nd Amendment Right-to-Bear-Arms or Military Training Tactics gone insane?

Till’s death helped propel the modern civil rights movement in America.
This is not the first time Ole Miss fraternity students have been caught up in an incident involving an icon from the civil rights movement.

Documenting Hate

We Found Photos of Ole Miss Students Posing With Guns in Front of a Shot-Up Emmett Till Memorial. Now They Face a Possible Civil Rights Investigation.

". . . Three students were suspended from their fraternity house, Kappa Alpha, after we shared an Instagram photo one of the men posted that was taken in front of a sign commemorating the murder of the 14-year-old black youth in 1955.

by Jerry Mitchell, Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting

July 25, 1:35 p.m. EDT

. . . The 14-year-old black youth was tortured and murdered in August 1955. An all-white, all-male jury acquitted two white men accused of the slaying.

The photo, which was obtained by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica, shows an Ole Miss student named Ben LeClere holding a shotgun while standing in front of the bullet-pocked sign. His Kappa Alpha fraternity brother, John Lowe, squats below the sign. A third fraternity member stands on the other side with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. The photo appears to have been taken at night, the scene illuminated by lights from a vehicle.

LeClere posted the picture on Lowe’s birthday on March 1 with the message “one of Memphis’s finest and the worst influence I’ve ever met.”

Neither LeClere nor Lowe responded to repeated attempts to contact them.

Five days after LeClere posted the photo, a person who saw it filed a bias report to the university’s Office of Student Conduct. The complaint pointed out there may have been a fourth person present, who took the picture.

“The photo is on Instagram with hundreds of ‘likes,’ and no one said a thing,” said the complaint, a copy of which was reviewed by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica. “I cannot tell Ole Miss what to do, I just thought it should be brought to your attention.”

The photo was removed from LeClere’s Instagram account after the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica began contacting fraternity members and friends. It had received 247 likes within a day of being posted.

Kappa Alpha suspended the trio on Wednesday, after the news organizations provided a copy of the photo to fraternity officials at Ole Miss.  .  ."

READ MORE > Pro Public

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All three students withdrew from Ole Miss, and the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity’s national headquarters shuttered its chapter on the Ole Miss campus after its own investigation, blaming the closing on behavior that included “hazing, underage drinking, alcohol abuse and failure to comply with the university and fraternity’s codes of conduct.”

Shirley L. Smith and Debbie Skipper of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and Thalia Beaty, Benjamin Hardy and Claire Perlman of ProPublica contributed to this report.

Jerry Mitchell is an investigative reporter for the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization that seeks to hold public officials accountable and empower citizens in their communities.
Email him at Jerry.Mitchell.MCIR@gmail.com and follow him on Facebook at @JerryMitchellReporter and on Twitter at @jmitchellnews.

If you have any information about the people who took this picture or who appeared in it, please let us know at Mississippi@ProPublica.org.

Update, July 26, 2019:
University of Mississippi interim Chancellor Larry D. Sparks issued a statement Friday, which said in part: “The incident occurred off campus, did not rise to the level of a threat per federal authorities, and was not part of any university-affiliated event.

The real problem with facial recognition

Heads up!

Published on Jul 26, 2019

Views: 73,320 at time of upload to this blog

Police across the country are using facial recognition to check IDs and find suspects -- but are they using it the right way?
A new study from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology suggests even good algorithms can be put to bad uses, particularly once police start getting creative with the images.
Learn more: http://bit.ly/2K4MPLb

Boris's Britain.

Pie at it again!!
YEAH

Published on Jul 25, 2019

Views: 273,0606

The most diverse cabinet in history - with Britain's Trump at the helm.
For tickets to see Jonathan Pie: The FAKE NEWS Tour go to: https://www.jonathanpie.com

PENTAGON EYES BOLD NEW STRATEGY FOR WAR AGAINST RUSSIA, CHINA || WARTHOG...

'Multi-Domain Operations' + Embedded Cyber-Warriors, new communication networks, joint surveillance attack systems, advanced battle-management systems. Satellite more crucial than ever  before.
Published July 26, 2019
Views at time of upload to this blog: 3,374
GILLIAN RICH
The Pentagon is crafting a bold strategy for a potential U.S.-Russia war or U.S.-China war in the future, shifting military spending priorities for defense stocks as new aircraft, missiles and satellites gain favor among top officers.
https://www.investors.com/news/us-rus...

Scorsese's NetFix "Rolling Thunder Review" Blows-Away The Myth of Boomer Idealism

It's a hard rain gonna fall again when award-winning Martin Scorsese creates a fictional character -  a fictional politician - to speak to Dylan’s influence on an entire generation.
That 'character' Scorsese creates, according to what Charles Homans writes in a scrib for Screenlandia for The New York Times
He’s not a member of a generation; he’s a mirror.
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THE TRAILER uploaded to YouTube
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story By Martin Scorsese | Trailer | Netflix
LINK > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS4gsWDSn68

Published on Jun 3, 2019

Views: 668,079

ROLLING THUNDER REVUE: A BOB DYLAN STORY BY MARTIN SCORSESE captures the troubled spirit of America in 1975, and the joyous music that Bob Dylan performed that fall. Master filmmaker Martin Scorsese creates a one-of-a-kind movie experience: part documentary, part concert film, part fever dream. Featuring Joan Baez, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Sam Shepard, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan giving his first on-camera interview in over a decade. The film goes beyond mere reclamation of Dylan’s extraordinary music—it’s a roadmap into the wild country of artistic self-reinvention.
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Charles Homans is the politics editor at the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

It blows your MesaZona blogger's mind when Homans writes in the review of Scorsese's film

"We know now that the real story wasn’t the people at the protests and the concerts; it was all the people who weren’t."

This lends a plaintive edge to his nostalgia, and to Scorsese’s.

After the film fades out on Tanner, a voice — it sounds like Scorsese himself — intones:

“Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be.”

Charles Homans clearly states at the end of his own review that Scorsese's own film "Rolling Thunder Review . . .  a bombastic plea to let the boomer legacy be the dream it used to be.

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READY FOR THIS ???

These are the opening lines of a Langston Hughes poem.

John Kerry, that Zelig of the boomer political experience, used the first sentence as a slogan in his 2004 campaign. “It’s a statement about what’s broken,” a campaign staff member told The Times that June, “and that something’s broken — but it’s also a statement of hope and aspiration.”

stop right there to see the trailer:

Published on Jun 3, 2019

Views at time of upload to this blog: 668,079

"ROLLING THUNDER REVUE: A BOB DYLAN STORY BY MARTIN SCORSESE" captures the troubled spirit of America in 1975, and the joyous music that Bob Dylan performed that fall. Master filmmaker Martin Scorsese creates a one-of-a-kind movie experience: part documentary, part concert film, part fever dream. Featuring Joan Baez, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Sam Shepard, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan giving his first on-camera interview in over a decade. The film goes beyond mere reclamation of Dylan’s extraordinary music—it’s a roadmap into the wild country of artistic self-reinvention.

Watch Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story By Martin Scorsese on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80221016
SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/29qBUt7
About Netflix:
Netflix is the world's leading internet entertainment service with over 148 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, documentaries and feature films across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can watch as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on any internet-connected screen. Members can play, pause and resume watching, all without commercials or commitments.

https://youtu.be/PS4gsWDSn68

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In Scorsese’s mouth, the words seem at once to refer to the actual Rolling Thunder Revue — an attempt to “rediscover America,” as Allen Ginsberg, who came along for the ride, described it — and to his own film, a bombastic plea to let the boomer legacy be the dream it used to be.

But “Let America Be America Again” is a dark and angry poem, an explicit critique of national nostalgia.

Hughes denounces the vast chasm between America’s promises and its reality for people of color, for immigrants, for the poor, answering the stanza that Kerry and Scorsese borrowed with a bitter parenthetical: “America never was America to me.”

He concludes the poem with a call to “make America again!”: an exhortation one word short of a Trump slogan but a world removed from it,

a call not to the sentimentality of the left or the right but for rebuilding the thing from the original blueprints, and better this time.

He is saying that the most comforting stories Americans tell themselves about themselves are the ones that never happened.

FB's $5Billion Privacy-Breach Fine from U.S. Federal Trade Commission > Too Big, Too Little or Not Enough

The so-called 'settlement' agreed to might be an historic penalty of sorts or unprecedented but it does not really settle anything when the value of your privacy is in-the-balance.
Most of the industry and public feedback is thumb pressure tipping the scales for more scrutiny and more penalties for breaches of privacy we all hold close and dear both in democracies and human rights. Stealing your data matters.

The Editorial Board of the New York Times stated their opinion two days ago:A $5 Billion Fine for Facebook Won’t Fix Privacy

The Federal Trade Commission’s record-breaking levy has barely dented the company’s stock price

The Federal Trade Commission issued a $5 billion fine against Facebook on Wednesday. It’s an eye-popping number for sure, one that blows previous fines out of the water.

It’s a number that makes for impressive headlines, but it is largely meaningless. Facebook posted $15 billion in revenue last quarter, at which point it announced that it had set aside $3 billion to pay potential fines. Facebook’s stock price barely budged when the size of the expected fine was first reported this month. After the F.T.C.’s official announcement on Wednesday, the stock price closed slightly higher than at opening. . .

The weightlessness of the fine isn’t the only problem with the deal. The settlement order grants Facebook and its officers immunity in a wide range of possible misdeeds committed before June 12. The agency has also declined to hold Mark Zuckerberg — or anyone else — personally liable for Facebook’s repeated privacy violations. Come again? . .
READ MORE > New York Times PRIVACY PROJECT/Opinion
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Extracts from https://gbhackers.com

Facebook Agreed to Pay Historic Penalty of $5 Billion & Provides New Tools For FTC To Monitor Facebook

By BALAJI N July 25, 2019

"Facebook finally agreed to pay $5 billion penalty from the Federal Trade Commission for the failure to protect its user’s privacy and FTC also imposes new restrictions to change the Facebook privacy model and creating multiple channels of new compliance.

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BLOGGER NOTE:

You can follow GB Hackers on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook for daily Cybersecurity updates also you can take the Best Cybersecurity course online to keep yourself updated.

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$5 Billion is the highest penalty ever imposed on any other companies for violating consumers’ privacy or any type of violation by U.S Government, and it is 20 times biggest than the highest penalty for the violation of user privacy.

The $5 billion fine is not a big deal for Facebook which made a profit of $22 billion last year on $56 billion in total revenue through the business model advertisement for its customer’s product and service among more than billion Facebook users. . .

Statement From Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook released an official statement about the penalty and new major changes in structure and privacy controls.
“We’ve formally reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission about privacy. We’ve agreed to pay a historic fine, but even more important, we’re going to make some major structural changes to how we build products and run this company.”
“We have a responsibility to protect people’s privacy. We already work hard to live up to this responsibility, but now we’re going to set a completely new standard for our industry.”
Overall, these changes go beyond anything required under US law today. The reason I support them is that I believe they will reduce the number of mistakes we make and help us deliver stronger privacy protections for everyone. Mark said in his Facebook statement.
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On July 24, 2019 Nicole Lindsey had this question in her headline writing for https://www.cpomagazine.com/

Record-Setting $5 Billion Facebook Fine Too Little Too Late?
For the past eight years, Facebook has managed to evade the full wrath and fury of U.S. regulators . . . The Facebook fine is a penalty for privacy breaches related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which first came to light in early 2018.
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The big question now is whether regulators acted strongly and swiftly enough in order to deter Facebook from future privacy abuses.

DEBATE OVER THE SIZE OF THE FINE
Despite the massive, unprecedented size of the Facebook fine, the overall response from privacy advocates, politicians and security experts is that regulators did not act nearly strongly enough. When considered in the overall context of Facebook revenues and profitability, the FTC essentially slapped Facebook on the wrist with a fine. . .
a $5 billion Facebook fine won’t even make a dent in the company’s overall profitability or force the company to make any real changes in how it approaches user privacy and data
. . .As long as Facebook is allowed to crank out billions of dollars of profit per quarter, it’s reasonable to assume that Facebook will not make any real changes to its underlying business model. Yes, the $5 billion Facebook fine might force the company to re-think upcoming business initiatives (such as the launch of its new Libra cryptocurrency), but does anyone really think that Facebook will make changes to its digital advertising model that relies on sharing data with as many entities as possible?

. . . Judging by the slim 3-2 vote at the FTC that led to the fine that broke along party lines (with Republicans voting for the fine and Democrats voting against the fine), there’s still not any real political consensus about how to regulate Facebook . . . From a long-term perspective, it’s clear that something needs to change in how the U.S. government regulates technology companies, especially when it comes to user privacy and data. For nearly 8 years, Facebook was allowed to grow unchecked and largely unregulated. Now is the time for sweeping new privacy legislation to rein in the big Silicon Valley tech giants.
Critics have long said the United States lags Europe and other parts of the world in digital privacy regulation and that Congress should enact an expansive new data protection law

It Ain't Just One "Randy Cop" Here In Mesa > It's The Whole Corrupt System!

Something's rotten-to-the-core here and it's gonna take way more than a charge of sexual harassment to bust it up > Basically, City officials here in Mesa need to buy the loyalty of members of the Mesa Police Department to guarantee results in elections. 
Laurie Roberts writing an opinion piece  in The Arizona Republic asked this question
What does it take to get rid of a randy cop?
". . . .While he was the city’s SWAT team sergeant, various female officers complained that he gave them naked pictures of themselves – pictures he had drawn based upon photos of them fully clothed – and/or notified them via text that he was masturbating as he thought about them. . . .
Based upon the many women accusing Neese of randy behavior, this guy put the a-s-s in sexual harASSment.
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Policing Pensions

Shocking abuse of authority in California shows how far some public unions will go to protect their contracts.

Michael Hendrix

September 27, 2018

City Journal 
These tactics draw on what’s widely called “the playbook.”
It was written by the Costa Mesa Police Officers Association’s now-defunct law firm, Lackie, Dammeier, McGill & Ethir.
It advises unions to “focus on a city manager, councilperson, mayor, or police chief, and keep the pressure up until that person assures you his loyalty and then move on to the next victim.” Clients were told to employ work slowdowns and sick-outs, to “storm city council,” and, above all, to convince the public that higher compensation and pension benefits ensured continued public safety.

Police patrol the “thin blue line” between order and disorder.
Their service on that line of duty is not free, nor should it be, but when the unions representing those in uniform abuse their members’ privileged status to secure lucrative payouts, they risk crowding out essential public services—and even bankrupting cities.
“Public officials should not be extorted over public benefits,” concluded Righeimer’s colleague, former Costa Mesa city councilman Steve Mensinger. That’s a lesson that many more cities in California, and beyond, may learn in the coming years.
_________________________________________________________________________Mesa Police Chief Tried to Curb Horrific Brutality Problem, So 95 ...

The Free Thought Project

Because the Mesa police chief said cops shouldn't beat up innocent people, nearly the entire department voted to remove him.

Despite trying to hold Mesa police officers accountable, Batista has been incredibly ineffective, and now, we likely know why—the entire department thinks accountability amounts to intimidation.
This is in spite of the fact that the Mesa police department is an incredibly violent unit.
As TFTP has previously reported, this is the same department that responded to the hotel room of an innocent unarmed father and murdered him on video as he begged for his life on his knees. . .
Playing victim when there are literally pools of blood left behind by these officers — from innocent people — is a kick in the teeth to all that is just.
This situation shows the problem with policing.
It is not just one bad apple either. That is inaccurate. In this case 95 percent of the department is acting out in support of bad apples, in turn, making them all bad apples. Until this culture of protecting bad cops is brought to a halt, we can continue to see this problem get worse until American police departments are completely filled with violent unaccountable criminals perpetually playing the victim card