Cardinal Bernard Law, symbol of church sex abuse scandal, dead at 86
Cardinal Bernard Law, the former Boston archbishop who resigned in disgrace during the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal, has died, the Vatican confirmed. He was 86.
The Doctor of Common Sense
Cardinal Bernard Law, the former Boston archbishop who resigned in disgrace during the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal, has died, the Vatican confirmed. He was 86.
Will Smith delved into politics at a press event for his latest filmBright this week, calling the country’s current political environment a “natural reaction” to what he described as the more favorable years of Barack Obama’s presidency.
The 49-year-old actor — who has previously teased a future run for public office himself — did not mention President Donald Trump by name but speculated about the country’s future during Wednesday’s event in Beverly Hills for Netflix’s Bright, a dystopian police thriller directed by David Ayer that reportedly cost the streaming service $90 million.
“This is the purge, right?” Smith said, according to Indiewire. “This is the cleanse, this is what happens. This is the natural reaction to the amount of light that came into the world when Barack Obama was the president.”
“We had to expect that [the pendulum] was going to go the other way,” he added. “As a cleanse – this is the darkness before the dawn.”
The actor went on to add that he believes the current political climate will reveal “what the next age of humanity” will be going forward.
“It’s going to be really interesting to see how humanity reacts to it, and it’s going to be a f**king mess. It’s going to be a mess, but it’s the mess in the cleanup,” he said. “It’s the mess and the purge before that new, real light shows up.”
Smith — who plays a police officer tasked with tracking down a powerful weapon in a world in which humans live alongside mystical creatures in his latest film — has become increasingly politically outspoken in the last few years, in accordance with Trump’s own political rise.
As far back as December of 2015, Smith had said that “crazy” discussion surrounding Trump’s policy proposals, including building a security wall on the southern border, had made him consider his own run for office.
“If people keep saying all the crazy kinds of stuff they’ve been saying on the news lately about walls and Muslims, they’re going to force me into the political arena,” he said in an interview with CBS.
In August of last year, shortly before the election, Smith said Trump’s political rise had the benefit of allowing a “cleanse” of his ideology from the country.
“As painful as it is to hear Donald Trump talk and as embarrassing as it is as an American to hear him talk, I think it’s good,” Smith said then, according to the Associated Press. “We get to know who people are and now we get to cleanse it out of our country.”
Bright is due out December 22 on Netflix and in select theaters.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/12/15/will-smith-darkness-trump-era-reaction-light-filled-obama-years/
Corey Feldman labels film example of “child grooming”
Despite a wave of sexual assault allegations that have rocked Hollywood, film executives at Sony have decided to show a film depicting a relationship between a teenage boy and an adult male – a decision slammed by former child actor Corey Feldman.
The Sony Pictures Classics film “Call Me By Your Name,” which depicts a relationship between a 17-year-old boy and a 24-year-old man, has been generating rave reviews and drawn speculation about an Oscar nomination after picking up three Golden Globe nominations and an award for best picture by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Released in select theaters on November 28, the movie has earned a 98 percent rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and 90 percent from audiences.
Despite the film’s creepy premise, made more so in light of the wave of sexual assault allegations that have rocked Hollywood, defenders of the film assert that the love affair is consensual and would not be illegal given that it takes place in Italy, where the age of consent is 16.
Actor Corey Feldman, who announced plans to name Hollywood pedophiles who abused him as a child actor following a incident during which two trucks drove towards him at high speed, questioned the premise of the film after another Twitter user claimed it did not depict “child grooming.”
“We think it’s at least questionable, and at worst glorifying pedophilia,” declared Gabe Hoffman, co-producer of “An Open Secret,” a documentary about child sexual abuse in Hollywood released in 2014.
David Sims of The Atlantic described the film as a “sumptuous new romance, which follows a deep connection that springs out of those restless days of late adolescence.”
Others who reviewed the film wisely questioned the timing of the film’s release.
“Perhaps we can, at least, agree that maybe promoting a movie about a 25-year-old man seducing a 17-year-old boy is not exactly wise in light of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and a dozen other Hollywood A-listers?” asked Paul Bois in The Daily Wire. “Apparently not.”
https://newswars.com/irony-pedo-film-takes-hollywood-by-storm-amid-wave-of-sexual-assault-allegations
A police department in Oklahoma released body camera footage Monday of former State Senator Ralph Shortey caught in a hotel room with an underage boy, days after he pleaded guilty to child prostitution and pornography charges.
The Moore Police Department released the footage of the encounter that occurred early on March 9 at a Super 8 Motel in Moore, Okla., FOX59 reported.
The footage showed police knocking on the door of a room occupied by Shortey — a Republican — and the underage male. Police said they went to the room after receiving a welfare check call placed by the teen boy’s father.
“So, what are they saying?” one of the officers asked the other.
“Well, drug-related, maybe,” an officer replied. “Maybe was coming here to buy some weed. Either here for narcotics, or prostitution for narcotics.”
“Like the kid’s prostituting himself out?” the other officer asked.
The officers said they smelled marijuana and later discovered a small amount of it in the room along with condoms and lotion found in a backpack that belonged to Shortey, FOX25 News reported.
“Hey, it’s Moore Police Department, man. We just need to check on your welfare, make sure you’re OK. We’re not going away,” the officers were heard saying.
Later the officers were heard talking to someone inside and telling the person to hurry up and get dressed.
The video cuts when the teenager appeared and then picks back up to the officers speaking to Shortey, who was hiding behind the door.
“Come out,” an officer ordered Shortey. “Now, you’re getting me worried, show me your hands.”
Shortey appeared and was wearing a shirt with a reference to the Bible verse from Ephesians 5:22, which called for women to “submit to their husbands,” FOX25 News reported.
The officers told Shortey he was with a 17-year-old male but the former state senator replied, “Can you show me that he’s only 17?”
“I can’t,” an officer replied. “But I can convince you that he is. I can put you in handcuffs and throw you in the back of the car.”
The officers asked what Shortey was doing in the room with the teenager and he said they were having a conversation.
The former state senator was eventually arrested. Police accused Shortey of hiring the 17-year-old for sex.
A police report indicated a search of the teen’s tablet computer uncovered a series of sexually explicit exchanges in which Shortey referred to him as “baby boy” and offered him cash in exchange for “sexual stuff.”
The FBI became involved in the case following Shortey’s arrest and searched his Oklahoma City home.
The married father of four resigned in March after he was arrested on state charges of engaging in child prostitution and transporting a minor for prostitution.
Last Thursday, Shortey pleaded guilty to the charges in exchange for federal prosecutors dropping three child pornography charges against him. He faces between 10 years and life in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 for child sex trafficking. The judge did not set a sentencing date.
https://nypost.com/2017/12/05/video-shows-oklahoma-senator-caught-with-underage-boy-in-hotel/
The Democratic Party and the liberal left’s obsession with disparate impact race politics crept into K-12 public education. Their latest social engineering experimentation uses black and Hispanic kids in poor urban classrooms as pawns for political power. Education is secondary.
Liberals believe they can artificially wipe away serious behavior problems that are cultural in nature. They do this by labeling reasonable standards of classroom discipline as racist or discriminatory. When urban schools with predominantly black and Hispanic students enacted protocols that create an environment where learning can take place, more suspensions and expulsions resulted, accompanied by a widening of the achievement gap between black students and their white counterparts.
The knee-jerk reaction from liberals was to claim that school disciplinary policies that disproportionally affected black and Hispanic kids were culturally insensitive, discriminatory and evidence of racism. The liberals were confusing correlation and causation. School officials were even discouraged from calling police even in cases of violent assaults – that could also be considered racist.
Social engineers in colleges and universities began drawing up untested experiments using black and Hispanic kids as laboratory rats. They wanted to show that leaving disruptive kids in the classroom, instead of removing them for serious behavior violations including assaults on teachers, would improve scholastic performance.
Instead, disruptions and scholastic performance both got worse. Leaving disruptive kids in a classroom is a danger not only to the teacher but to other students as well. The university professors are nowhere near the classrooms to see the disaster they created with their inane idea, nor are they held accountable.
Not surprisingly, no amount of cultural sensitivity training of school officials will negate the culturally dysfunctional baggage brought to school every day by students.
Too many black kids today do not come to school in a state of readiness to learn. They have not been read to by parents. They are not socially adjusted for a group environment like a classroom, nor have they been reasonably disciplined for unwanted behavior. This emotional baggage is then thrown into the lap of a teacher who does not have the education or skills for handling these serious emotional and behavioral problems.
Kids have an excuse because of their age, immaturity and bad parenting. The parents of those disruptive kids have no excuse. Long ago, parents were absolved of their responsibility to raise their kids effectively. Liberal social dogma told them racism was at the root of their inability to raise kids who were ready for the demands of a school classroom.
Poverty was to blame too. Now liberals had a reason for not just government but economic intervention as well. This gave the left a two-for-one moment to enact expensive government-run tax-supported programs. They could spend more money not just on unproven education experiments but also on new anti-poverty programs.
K-4 programs have become K-3 programs. This further absolves mainly black and Hispanic parents from their rightful responsibility of raising their kids.
We are on our way to kids being taken immediately from the maternity ward to a government school. They are already being fed three meals a day and provided for by taxpayer-funded after-school programs. Why not just start them on the road to government dependency, not to mention indoctrination and exposure to leftist dogma, as early in life as possible?
GOP politicians in Congress have been reluctant to challenge the efficacy of these expensive programs lest they are accused of not caring about black and Hispanic children, or being outright racist. Nothing makes a white Republican politician run like their hair is on fire faster than being accused of not caring about black kids.
Education has always been the traditional vehicle for upward mobility in America. It is even more important in today’s knowledge-based economy.
Blacks who have embraced education are less likely to have kids who drop out of school, commit crimes, join gangs or make other flawed lifestyle choices like drug and alcohol abuse and having children they are ill-equipped to raise.
One of the hallmarks of slavery was criminalizing the education of black children thus keeping them ignorant. I would argue that many of today’s public school policies achieve the same results – they keep kids ignorant.
The goal of social activists is not to fix education problems but to fix the statistics. They are focusing on the wrong thing. Statistics can be exploited not only to make school problems (seem to) disappear, but also to demonstrate the need for the continuation of government programs. The kids who fail in school today are the population that tomorrow will fill jails and prisons and be in need of government assistance.
Former President George W. Bush called these low expectations “soft bigotry.” He was right. Now the left wants to back up the soft bigotry with faulty statistics.
https://townhall.com/columnists/sheriffdavidclarke(ret)/2017/12/02/statistical-bigotry-n2417043
A Louisville man admitted to police that his actions killed his 3-month-old son.
Cody Bates is charged with murder for the June death of his baby boy.
In an interview with police not long after the boy died, Bates changed his story several times.
At first, he said the baby fell of the couch while he was sleeping with him at their home on Jessica Allen Drive.
When investigators told him his story did not add up and was not consistent with the brain bleeds and skull fractures doctors found, Bates changed his story again.
“I was standing right about the middle of the table. I flung him over and he missed this thing and actually hit the floor right there with his head up,” Bates said during an interview with police.
Bates said the boy would not stop crying and he was overwhelmed.
“I was just tired. I over-slung my son. Now I don’t even have my best friend anymore,” Bates said.
The man cried several times after giving his final account of what happened, but in the police car on the way to the interview he was more calm. He mentioned that his son’s death would allow he and the boy’s mother more freedom.
“She’s going to go back to school for nursing and all that. I mean, I hate to say it, but I mean now would probably be a better time now that we just lost our son,” he said.
When Bates realized he was going to be charged with murder, he once again broke down in the interview room.
“I’m going to go to jail. I’m going to lose my job. I’m going to lose her. I’m going to lose everything,” he said.
Bates is not allowed to have any contact with the family of his son’s mother.
He’s at Metro Corrections on a $1-million bond.
http://www.kcra.com/article/i-was-just-tired-man-admits-to-throwing-killing-3-month-old-son/10333272