Debating Black Lives Matter's Impact on the National Conversation (VIDEO)

Here's an impact segment with Megyn Kelly, on Fox News, "The role of Black Lives Matter in the national conversation: Panel debates the movement's impact on 'The Kelly File'."

The Fire Next Time

Here's the classic, from James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time.

Selena Gomez Gets Tight for Marie Claire

At the Last Men on Earth.

And on Twitter.

Emily Ratajkowski Lingerie Behind the Scenes (Video)

Hat Tip: Egotastic!

Deal of the Day: Select WowWee Robots Starting at $39.99

Here, at Amazon, Miposaur by WowWee.

Pretty trippy, heh.

Also, WowWee Robosapien X.

And keep shopping, WowWee Robots.

More, from Tony Wright, British Politics: A Very Short Introduction.

And from Professor David McKay, The New British Politics.

Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World.

Still more, from Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power.

Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought.

BONUS: From Professor Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914, and The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000.

Facebook Live Video Represents New Chapter for Citizens' Journalism

This is pretty interesting.

And game-changing.

At Columbia Journalism Review, "Philando Castile, Facebook Live, and a new chapter for citizen journalism."

Philando Castile, Facebook Live, and a new chapter for citizen journalism https://t.co/mI1wBZbRt6 pic.twitter.com/h8AH487aaB

— CJR (@CJR) July 7, 2016

David Cameron Hums a Tune as He Heads Into 10 Downing Street (VIDEO)

Following-up, "Andrea Leadsom Quits Leadership Race (VIDEO)," and "U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May Set to Become Britain's Prime Minister (VIDEO)."

Watch, via Sky News, "David Cameron Hums a Tune After Resigning."

More, at Telegraph U.K.:

From being booed on Centre Court to bidding farewell to Downing Street: David Cameron's final 72 hours as Prime… https://t.co/65OvTyPvE7

— Telegraph News (@TelegraphNews) July 11, 2016

U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May Set to Become Britain's Prime Minister (VIDEO)

Following-up, "Andrea Leadsom Quits Leadership Race (VIDEO)."

At the Telegraph U.K., "Live - 'Together we will build a better Britain': New Tory leader Theresa May delivers vision for the country ahead of coronation as Prime Minister on Wednesday":

Theresa May will become Britain's second female prime minister on Wednesday evening after David Cameron makes his final Commons appearance as premier.

Mr Cameron hailed his successor as "strong and competent" as he announced he would go to Buckingham Palace to offer his resignation to the Queen following Prime Minister's Questions.

Mrs May's coronation follows rival Andrea Leadsom's shock decision to pull out of the Tory leadership race.

The Prime Minister said he was "delighted" that the Home Secretary would succeed him in Downing Street.

Mr Cameron will chair his last Cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning and will take his final Prime Minister's Questions at noon on Wednesday.

In a statement outside the Commons following her election as Tory party leader, Mrs May praised May Cameron for his stewardship of the party and country.

Mrs May also hailed Andrea Leadsom, whose shock decision to pull out of the Tory leadership race paved the way for her coronation, for the "dignity" she had shown...

Still more.

Andrea Leadsom Quits Leadership Race (VIDEO)

Leadsom cried in an interview with the Telegraph on Sunday. There's no crying in politics!

Maybe that's why she quit?

I'll check, but meanwhile, at the New York Times, via Memeorandum, "Theresa May Poised to Be Britain's Next Premier as Andrea Leadsom Quits Race."

The Meaning of Donald Trump

From Salena Zito, at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, "Can we retire our 'politics of the ridiculous'?":

Email says everything
PS does not fit voter stereotype most journalists parachute in to find https://t.co/RaA7w7Cek2 pic.twitter.com/qYveSEoUka

— SalenaZito (@SalenaZitoTrib) July 10, 2016

Take last week, when a scathing FBI report concluded that Clinton essentially lied several times about her conduct regarding her State Department Internet server and her handling of classified information. The headlines for two days afterward insisted that Trump failed to focus on Clinton's problems, that he was off-message.

Well, what the headline-writers didn't comprehend is this: If Trump had delivered a crisp, scripted message about Clinton to his supporters in suburban Cincinnati, he would have lost the audience; they were looking for vintage Trump and they got him.

Such Americans are tired of scripted messages; they don't want to hear about Clinton's woes, because that was pounded into them all day by the news networks and by social media.

They want to hear about Trump, from Trump; they enjoy his confrontation with the national media — just as they enjoyed his riff with NBC's “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd — or that he talks about his grandchildren and mosquitoes.

This race has never been about ideology, a strict platform that no candidate can veer from, scripted messages that are so coordinated that every candidate in the party repeats the same talking points.

This moment is about what happens when you spend an entire generation ignoring the will, the wants and the needs of your people beyond cosmopolitan America.

This is what happens when voters get tired of putting on their team jerseys and supporting their side, but get nothing in return when that team wins.

If politicians and academics begin diving into the whats and whys of Campaign 2016, instead of just walking around shaking their heads in judgment, then perhaps they will root out the results from 30 years of political correctness, of policies that benefit a select few, of creating a culture of “otherness” when it comes to the country's interior, of mouthing promises that they can't keep.

Then, maybe, we can retire our politics of the ridiculous and start to govern the country once more...

RTWT.

How Many People Have to Die Because of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement?

From John Hawkins, at Town Hall:

John Hawkins - How Many People Have To Die Because Of The #BlackLivesMatter Movement? https://t.co/Q07pZff1KJ

— Kim Priestap (@kimpriestap) July 10, 2016

“Pigs In A Blanket, Fry 'Em Like Bacon!” – Chant at a #BlackLivesMatter protest in Minnesota

“What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!” – Chant by "Million Marchers" in New York City

The whole Black Lives Matter Movement is pure crap designed to help liberals get their names out there and to increase black turnout in elections for the Democratic Party.

It’s a movement funded by liberal white Americans like the Ben and Jerry’s Foundation and supported primarily by privileged black liberals that does nothing but produce a bigger body count.

For whatever reason, black Americans have always had a more hostile relationship with the police than other groups. Maybe that comes from the bad old days of the civil rights movement when the police weren’t always fair to black Americans. Maybe it comes from the sky high crime rate in black America which insures that percentage wise, more black Americans profit from criminal activities or know people involved in regularly breaking the law than people from other races. Perhaps it’s just a “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” problem? Did police hostility cause black Americans to become more distrusting of law enforcement or did hostility by black Americans cause the police to become more distrustful? If that hostility and distrust ceased on one side, would it disappear on the other side, too? Whatever the reason for it, it exists and the Black Lives Matter movement has greatly exacerbated it for its own purposes.

The sad reality is that the police have to do a dirty, dangerous, unpleasant job that sometimes involves killing other human beings to protect themselves or others. There will NEVER be a time when mistakes aren’t made. So, if the goal is supposed to be to stop the police from ever making a mistake, it’s pie in the sky.

Moreover, the overwhelming majority of police shootings are justified and those that aren’t are USUALLY punished in a court of law. There are undoubtedly cases where guilty police officers skate in court for their crimes, but as Nicole Simpson could tell you if she were still alive, murderers don’t always get convicted in America.

Because this really isn’t a huge problem for black Americans, the #BlackLivesMatter scumbags have taken ambiguous cases and elevated them to practically legendary status.

Take the death of Eric Garner. The cops were trying to arrest him for illegally selling cigarettes. The cops weren’t the ones who decided that should be illegal, but it’s their job to enforce the law. Garner resisted arrest, the cops used an appropriate amount of force subduing him and he died because of underlying health issues (“acute and chronic bronchial asthma, obesity, and heart disease.”)

You may think Eric Garner was choked to death because it takes lies like that for #BlackLivesMatter to justify its existence. However, it’s not true. In fact, the person most responsible for Eric Garner dying is Eric Garner...

Actually, the cops used a choke hold on Garner that was banned by the NYPD, but the fact is, Garner resisted arrest, and told the police, "This ends right here!" You think the police might be concerned about him resisting and posing a threat to their safety? Of course, you never hear that part from the ghoulish leftists of BLM. Never.

But keep reading.

Natasha Lennard, Far-Left Rolling Stone Columnist, Won't Say 'Blue Lives Matter' — Because White Supremacy!

Typical leftist.

She's a former writer for Salon, so that helps explain things, heh.

After Dallas, we dont need to say 'Blue Lives Matter'- it's as established as white supremacy. My 1st @RollingStone: https://t.co/pY4CObQ6Tl

— Natasha Lennard (@natashalennard) July 8, 2016

I won't say Blue Lives Matter, because it does not need to be said. We know this because the death of five officers this week provoked an immediate response from the president, as did the assassination of two NYPD officers in 2014. That's what mattering looks like. While the president’s remarks earlier in the week on the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were moving, dozens of unarmed black men killed by cop go without presidential comment....

There was never any doubt about the mattering of cops' lives in this country. To say Blue Lives Matter is to falsely assert that the cops' lives are undervalued and systematically discarded. They are not — no life should be — and the shootings in Dallas do not change that fact.

Five police deaths provoke cries of "Civil War," but hundreds of black deaths are just the "tragic" normal.

And that is why we continue to shout "Black Lives Matter" — the statement contains in itself the recognition that it very much still needs to be said.

It's also relevant that it has consistently taken the visceral and visual representation of black death — Emmett Till's broken corpse in the open casket his mother demanded, Mike Brown's body in the street, Philando Castile bleeding out onto his whiteT-shirt — to prompt popular and media outrage. Black civilian bodies get humanized only through death. It doesn't take a photo or video of a killed cop to provoke outcry. That mattering doesn't demand brutal spectacular cues.

Which is not to delegitimize growing fears among police ranks that they will become targets by virtue of their profession, their uniform. Dallas shows the validity of these concerns. Yet it remains the case that policing does not even rank in the ten most dangerous jobs, according to a 2015 Bureau of Labor Statistics report. Fisherman, farmers and, above all, loggers are more likely to die on the job, and police are, according to the same statistics, more likely to commit suicide than be killed by a criminal. While cops may have reasons for increased concern, this does not deserve a movement. There remain no grounds at all to call police officers a persecuted minority, nor to equate the oppression of black life with that of police in America....

By comparison, for example, Peter Liang was the first NYPD officer to be convicted for an on-duty killing in the last ten years. He shot unarmed black man Akai Gurley in a Brooklyn project housing stairwell, after he had his gun drawn because a stairwell light was out in the residential block he was patrolling. He had not been called to the scene of a crime. He won't spend a day in jail; his manslaughter conviction was accorded a sentence of five years' probation.

I'm not equating the intentional assassination of police officers with the (regular) killing of black people by cops. I don't believe most cops are hunting down black people — but I also don't believe murderous racist intention is necessary to make an execution a brutal, racist act. There are not very many people hunting down cops. Cops' lives are already valorized; it costs everything to take one. For a cop to take a black life, in criminal-justice currency, costs nothing at all. This, again, is what mattering does and does not look like.

Ms. Lennard is someone whose default position is to hate the police, and it's visceral.

Keep in mind that police are the only ones who run to the source of danger, to protect those very same people, black Americans. No one is more important to the lives of blacks, with the sole exception of black families themselves. But as Heather Mac Donald has said, until we see the reconstitution of the black family in America, it's the police who're the first line of defense for at-risk black communities. Leftists like Natasha Lennard thus make the problem worse, actually threatening the safety of black lives.

She might as well be saying, "No Lives Matter," for that's the logical consequence of her thesis.

Angry Leftist Shot and Killed by St. Louis County Officer After Online Argument About Black Lives Matter

Everything's falling apart in Obama's America.

At Gateway Pundit:

Black Lives Matter Activist SHOT DEAD After Breaking Into St. Louis Police Officer’s Home https://t.co/BQ2oZVgT9Z via @gatewaypundit

— Jim Hoft (@gatewaypundit) July 11, 2016

And at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Off-duty St. Louis County officer fatally shoots intruder at home https://t.co/glbOTweOqm pic.twitter.com/xUu8Wk6poN

— STLtoday (@stltoday) July 10, 2016

LAKESHIRE • A former Affton High School football standout forced his way into a South County home and was shot and killed by an off-duty officer inside after a Facebook dispute over Black Lives Matter apparently boiled over late Saturday afternoon.

That's what can be pieced together from the accounts of police and an uncle of Tyler Gebhard, who said the young man had been struggling with mental health issues.

"He walked over there and into a gunfight," Gebhard's uncle, Patrick Brogan said, drawing on accounts offered by friends of his nephew. "When he got there, he was met with a gun and the guy killed him."

Authorities said Gebhard, 20, and the officer were acquainted, and Gebhard made Facebook threats to the officer's family and “uninvolved members of the community” in advance of the Saturday encounter with the unidentified officer.

Gebhard threw a 50-pound concrete planter through the window and entered the Lakeshire residence as the officer's wife, mother-in-law and two young children struggled to escape through a bedroom window, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said. The off-duty officer shot and killed Gebhard.

"I don’t think the officer had a choice — I honestly don’t,” Belmar told reporters on Saturday, labeling the situation “a very difficult position to be in.”

Toxic Political Culture, Divisive Politics, and the Left's War on Cops

From Karen Tumulty at WaPo:

"To acknowledge one horror guarantees being accused of diminishing or excusing another." @ktumulty https://t.co/y4bhTfcGI0

— Anne Hull (@annevhull) July 9, 2016

And Dan Balz at WaPo:

"This is not the summer of 1967 or 1968. But the political climate and the racial climate ..." https://t.co/HoxgG0khRN via @washingtonpost

— Jan Nolf (@NolfJan) July 9, 2016

Leaked Photos Appear to Show Dead Body of Dallas Attack Suspect Micah Xavier Johnson

This is London's Daily Mail, and it's a tabloid-style story.

But if there are indeed photos leaked online, we'll be hearing more about it.

Have photos of the dead body of Dallas sniper been leaked?https://t.co/TcburcwdoS #Dallas

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) July 11, 2016

Here's an image from an online forum, and it looks like him.

Violent Protesters Shut Down Interstate 94 Near St. Paul, Minnesota (VIDEO)

Here's the report, at CBS News 4 Minnesota, "102 Arrested, 21 Officers Hurt Following I-94 Protest."

More here, "Protesters Shut Down I-94; Multiple Officers Injured."

And at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, "Police chief 'disgusted' by violence at I-94 protest; 21 officers hurt":

About 100 people protesting late Saturday and early Sunday in a sometimes violent response to the police killing in Falcon Heights of Philando Castile were arrested, either during an hourslong human blockade of Interstate 94 in St. Paul or during a follow-up gathering elsewhere in the city, authorities said.

The violence perpetrated by some of the protesters against the police prompted denouncement in the strongest terms by St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and Police Chief Todd Axtell, who called the pelting of officers with rocks, bottles and other items "a disgrace."

Axtell said 21 officers from all law enforcement agencies on the scene were injured in the mayhem. One of them suffered a broken vertebrae after a concrete block was dropped on his head, police said late Sunday afternoon. The State Patrol said six of the 21 were troopers who were slightly hurt by what the protesters were throwing.

President Obama weighed in Sunday on protesters directing violence against police, saying at a news conference during a one-day stop in Madrid that "any violence directed at police officers is a reprehensible crime."

The nation's first black president went on to say, "Whenever those of us who are concerned about failures of the criminal justice system attack police, you are doing a disservice to the cause."

More.

Chief Axtell says last night saw the worst anti-police violence in his 28 years on the job. He was "disgusted" by the criminality. There's a full video of the press conference here, "Saint Paul Police Headquarters July 10, 2016 8:00AM Central."

Heather Mac Donald Discusses the 'War on Cops," the Ferguson Effect, and Black-on-Black Violence

Here's a video/audio interview with Jesse Lee Peterson, "Heather Mac Donald: War on Cops & Ferguson Effect, Increase Black-on-Black Violence - #BlackLivesMatter."

Grab a beer or a soda a listen to the whole thing.

A couple of things in particular stand out: 1) Peterson reflects on the Black Lives Matter movement and compares it to the KKK, saying that BLM's anti-white racism is just as visceral as anything one would see with so-called white nationalist/KKK-types. That's fascinating, since Tomi Lahren made virtually the exact same point on Twitter and subsequently came under vicious attack by totalitarian leftists. Lahren's got nothing to apologize about, nor should she back down. But I think she got scared by the backlash and stepped back from those statements, mostly likely in fear for her job. That's exactly what the left is after. That's exactly what its faux outrage is about: to shut down conservative voices and conservative views that hit too close to home, voices calling out the radical left for its racism and deliberate, revolutionary violence.

But also, 2) Ms. Mac Donald reports that after she first published her essay on the Ferguson effect, she was doxxed by Black Lives Matter organizers in Austin, Texas. Ms. Mac Donald is almost hilariously cool while discussing it, but to think for moment it's so fucking outrageous the lengths that leftists go to destroy dissenting opinion. When I talk about The New American Civil War #TNACW I mean it as war in every sense of the term: political, cultural, sociological, educational, on top of subversive leftist armed struggle against the totality of the U.S. system. It's the entire package. It's the full program of the radical left. And mainstream media types who enable it are working off their purported moral superiority over the so-called "racist" white redneck flyovers who are allegedly holding the country back from the promised land. Witness the shocked response from the elitist chattering classes, among both Democrats and Republicans, by the way, to the rise of Donald Trump and the GOP nomination. If Trump wins in November the debate over British voters backing Brexit's going to look like a trip to the grocery store. The entire world's going to erupt in anti-Americanism. We'll have the Nazification of Trump far above the scale we saw against George W. Bush and Iraq. We'll see a global culture war come to head. And importantly, lots of mainstream leftist folks in both parties are noticing. For various reasons, culture is peaking this year and its volatile. Criminal justice is one of the main platforms for the left's assault on the police, law, order and tradition --- something Ms. Mac Donald points out at the interview above.

In any case, the Wall Street Journal republished Ms. Mac Donald's February op-ed yesterday. See, "The Myths of Black Lives Matter."

And see, "The New Nationwide Crime Wave."

Her new book is here, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.

Bill Clinton Met with African American Defense League (AADL) in May

From Robert Stacy McCain, at the Other McCain, "Bill Clinton Met With Anti-Police Hate Group Leader Two Months Ago."

Remember, with Democrats it's "no enemies on the left," and the prove it time and time again:

During a campaign visit to Kentucky this year former President Bill Clinton met with the leader of a racial hate group that has been implicated in Thursday’s attack that killed five Dallas police officers. Mauricelm-Lei Millere is leader of the African American Defense League (AADL), which has repeatedly advocated violence against police. Dallas gunman Micah Xavier Johnson supported the AADL on Facebook, where Millere’s group posted messages that declared “ATTACK EVERYTHING IN BLUE EXCEPT THE MAIL MAN” and “sprinkle Pigs Blood” prior to Thursday’s attack. On his Instagram page, Millere wrote: “We have no alternative! We must kill white police officers across the country!”

Keep reading.

Kate Hudson Rule 5

Well, let's get things rolling this afternoon with something beautiful.

Here's ome lovely Kate Hudson, who's one of my absolute favorites.

I don't want to meet her in person, because Hollywood celebrities usually blow it for me.

I just want to gaze at her loveliness.

Kate Hudson covers the June 2016 issue of Shape magazine in her Fabletics swimwear https://t.co/wOobsLzQs6 pic.twitter.com/xh8LD2sHQT

— Shoppers Shop (@shoppersshop) May 31, 2016

Kate Hudson is giving Us all the motivation to hit the gym: https://t.co/7TqR7zpPyz

— Us Weekly (@usweekly) June 3, 2016

Kate Hudson flashes her derriere as she shares nude flashback photo on Instagram https://t.co/lgIGutNV18 pic.twitter.com/qv407TUngI

— WEST FUNDZ (@WEST_FUNDZ) June 30, 2016

Kate Hudson is totally nude in this epic throwback photo: https://t.co/ObzDDiu5m2 pic.twitter.com/j2V8JBHrKi

— InStyle (@InStyle) July 1, 2016

Kate Hudson flashes her derriere in nude flashback photo on Instagramhttps://t.co/6wEsn5uW8P via @DailyMailCeleb

— jackie stuart (@auldcove) July 1, 2016

ICYMI: Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops [BUMPED]

It's a great book.

Should be mandatory reading for every American.

At Amazon, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.