Links - 22nd March 2019

Police Say Jussie Smollett Paid Two Men By Check To Stage Attack; ‘This Publicity Stunt Was A Scar That Chicago Didn’t Earn’ - "Smollett, who is black and openly gay, had told police he was attacked as he was walking home around 2 a.m. on Jan. 29. He claimed two masked men – one of them also wearing a red hat – shouted racist and homophobic slurs as they beat him, put a noose around his neck, and poured a chemical on them.Police said, in reality, Smollett had paid those two men, Ola and Abel Osundairo, $3,500 by check to stage the attack. CBS 2’s Charlie De Mar has reported Smollett also directed the brothers to buy the noose at a hardware store and the hat and masks at a store in Uptown. Johnson said police have the check... The two brothers allegedly told police Smollett also was behind creating a racist letter sent to the show, according to two sources with first-hand knowledge of the investigation.At Smollett’s bond hearing, prosecutors said the letter was coated in a white powder that turned out to be crushed ibuprofen pills."
According to many liberals, the police made up the evidence

Chicago police say 'Empire' actor Jussie Smollett refuses to hand over cellphone to them - ""Empire" actor Jussie Smollett has refused to turn over his cellphone to detectives, who are investigating the alleged attack that sent him to the hospital earlier this week, Chicago police said Thursday.The actor declined to share telephone records that could show he was speaking with his manager just as the alleged assault happened early Tuesday morning in Chicago... Police have reviewed hundreds of hours of footage from more than 20 surveillance cameras in the area, according to Guglielmi. They have not found any images of the alleged attack"

More Strange Details in the Jussie Smollett Case - "Smollett underwent a vicious beating by two attackers that apparently lasted less than 60 seconds, since that is the reported gap in surveillance footage between an image of him without a rope around his neck and an image of him with the rope. Smollett now says he fought back, but apparently he lost neither his Subway sandwich nor his cell phone in this brawl. Also he didn’t immediately call the police on that phone to describe the suspects and inform the police which way they had gone when they suddenly ran away from him, but instead waited about 40 minutes to inform the police."

Jussie Smollett Reportedly Held Onto Sandwich Throughout Racist Attack - "Smollett was seen in the footage still carrying the sandwich as he returned to his building after being attacked... Skeptics have already questioned how the star of Fox’s “Empire” kept a grip on his sandwich while, by his account, being beaten, having a noose put around his neck, and getting doused with bleach."

Chicago Police Superintendent: 'Empire' Star Jussie Smollett 'WILL Be Held Accountable' If He Made A False Crime Report - "Although two individuals were pictured on security cameras near where Smollett says he was attacked, sources close to CPD told local media that those two individuals appear to be homeless... police have filed a series of subpoenas in order to compel the production of Smollett's phone records from the night of the attack"

Behind the Scenes, It's Clear Chicago Media and Police Doubt Jussie Smollett's Story - "because of Smollett’s persona and the nature of his allegation, no one in law enforcement or the news media wants any part of publicly questioning his story. Everyone knows that if they make any sort of negative implication against a black, gay, liberal, celebrity, victim of a horrible hate crime, that they will be roundly and severely attacked, regardless of whether they turn out to be correct."

Jussie Smollett update: Brothers regret roles in alleged fake attack - "The two brothers who allegedly helped "Empire" star Jussie Smollett stage a fake homophobic and racist street assault in Chicago say they have "tremendous regret" about it and know the impact it will have on true victims of hate crimes... The brothers were arrested on Feb. 15, detained and interrogated for nearly 48 hours, and finally told police that Smollett had paid them to stage the attack"
Black White supremacists!

Attorney for the brothers involved in the Jussie Smollett case says they were 'betrayed' by the celebrity - "Smollett, an actor on the Fox drama "Empire," was recently indicted on 16 felony counts of disorderly conduct by a Cook County grand jury."

This LGBT Activist’s House Was Burned Down. Police Now Suspect He Set the Fire Himself. - "In 2017, prominent Michigan LGBT activist Nikki Joly, a transgender man, was the victim of an apparent hate crime: An unknown arsonist burned down his house, which had two dogs and three cats trapped inside. Some presumed the act was retaliatory—a response to Joly's successful campaign to persuade the government of Jackson, Michigan, to adopt an anti-discrimination law, for which a local newspaper declared him "Citizen of the Year."Now the police finally have a suspect in custody: Joly... He may have suggested to friends that he was upset about the diminished attention being paid to his advocacy in the wake of the anti-discrimination law's passage—a possible motive, according to the police."

Hate Crime Hoaxes are More Common than You Think - "hate crime hoaxes aren’t new or unusual. In our book The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, we discuss a number of cases of people falsely reporting or even staging hate crimes. In 1997 two black students at Duke University hung a black baby doll from a tree near the spot where the Black Student Alliance was planning a protest. In 1998 a St. Cloud State University student slashed her own face and claimed that two men had assaulted her and yelled anti-gay slurs. In 2004 a visiting professor at Claremont McKenna College slashed the tires of her own car and painted ethnic slurs and a swastika on it. In 2011 a University of Virginia law student published a letter in the law school’s newspaper in which he falsely claimed to have been mistreated by two white police officers... Strange, implausible details don’t mean an attack didn’t occur, but they’re enough to raise questions. Yet many celebrities and Democratic presidential candidates immediately accepted the story at face value and offered their support for Smollett, sometimes placing the blame for the attack on Republicans... Real hate crimes happen, of course. We’re not arguing that all or even most alleged hate crimes are hoaxes. But the ones dominating the headlines in recent years have often been false or misleading, possibly because fake cases are better designed to push the buttons of drama and partisanship. Real hate crimes don’t necessarily have offenders who conveniently announce themselves to be members of your political outgroup, or display a stylized iconography of evil, like nooses and swastikas. The hoaxes, by contrast, often read like political-struggle fan fiction, with the hoaxers making themselves Mary Sues and their adversaries stock villains... Something like a hate crime hoax would make no sense in an honor culture... In a victimhood culture, even when hate crime hoaxes are exposed, they are excused as an attempt to raise awareness of a real problem or as the understandable reaction of someone suffering from so much unrecognized oppression."

Smollett lies expose a culture of lying to — and about — the police - "In 2012 in the city of Rialto, California, with a population of approximately 100,000, cops were randomly assigned body cameras based on their shifts. Over the next year, a follow-up analysis showed use-of-force incidents on the shifts with body cams were down 59 percent compared to those without cameras. But something else rather extraordinary also happened. Complaints against all Rialto police officers — with or without body cams — were down 87.5 percent from the prior year. Why? It was not because officers changed their behavior. They applied the same training they used before body cams. It was the civilians who changed their behavior. It turned out that when civilians knew they were being recorded, they behaved better and stopped making false accusations. Civilians — aware that they might be taped — became less confrontational, followed officers' instructions more readily and did not engage in the kind of resistant behavior as before random cops were required to use body cams. As a result, officers did not have to use the kind of force previously needed... The city of Rialto is not alone in experiencing an almost 90 percent drop in officer complaints as a result of body cams. A 2016 Cambridge University study of five police stations in the U.K. (in England and Northern Ireland) and two in the U.S. (including Rialto) found the same result. Complaints against the police fell 93 percent when some officers were randomly assigned body cams... the drop in complaints against police translated into a savings of $4 in complaint litigation for every $1 spent on the installation of body cams."
Addendum: The phenomenon of aggroing the police then pretending you're a victim when they enforce the law seems uniquely American

Addendum:
Body-Worn Cameras: What the Evidence Tells Us - "the use of body-worn cameras led to increases in arrests, prosecutions, and guilty pleas. From an efficiency standpoint, the use of the technology reportedly enabled officers to resolve criminal cases faster and spend less time preparing paperwork, and it resulted in fewer people choosing to go to trial... officers with body-worn cameras were more productive in terms of making arrests, had fewer complaints lodged against them relative to officers without body-worn cameras, and had higher numbers of citizen complaints resolved in their favor... officers with body-worn cameras generated fewer use-of-force reports and complaints from citizens compared to officers without body-worn cameras. Additionally, officers with body-worn cameras issued higher numbers of arrests and citations compared to officers without body-worn cameras"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Gang Culture - "More than 70,000 young people admit, boast of being in gangs. Roughly half of them under 15. Who are they? They tend to be poor, more than half convicted of carrying knives would qualify for free school meals if they went to school. Most have been excluded. Many are from broken families. A third of those in young offenders’ institutions have been in care. And black youths are disproportionately likely to be both the offenders and the victims. A young black man is 10 times more likely to be stabbed to death than a white one...
This is not all about gangs. If you're interested in preventing knife crime, you need to look at the way young people are behaving and the way society is treating young people. And they're not necessarily members of gangs are carrying knives. They are young people who think that they will be safer if they have a knife. We need to get the message across to them. Actually you're more likely to become a victim of knife crime if you’re carrying a knife...
If you look at a kind of correlation across countries between different levels of enforcement of drug prohibition then what you end up finding is actually not much of a relationship either way [with drug use]...
‘I won't put it down to any one thing. I would also put into perspective also historical things that affects the black community around slavery and around the Willie Lynnn [Ed: Lynch?] syndrome that still affect us’...
'In certain areas, I think it's idle to pretend that it's not a black issue. It's black children killing other black children. I remember myself going to America and meeting people in the black community in I think it was Philadelphia who said, we have spent all this these years blaming white society and racism and then we realized it's our children being murdered. And it was when the black community took charge of that as a community and started to act on its own children, they brought down the murder rate and I think that's what's required in certain areas. I think it's an abandonment of black children to say that this is nothing to do with the black community… The police went down that road and stopped stop and search on that basis, that they thought it was racist, as a result, more black children have been murdered.'"
More knifes, less crime
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a knife is a good guy with a knife
Maybe the UK had Jim Crow too

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Life in Gaza - "‘They have a blockade, of course, but it happens for a reason. People are trying to shoot at my house. I needed to give my dog away because I couldn't took him for walks. I couldn't do that. I was scared. They chose it, they had elections, they chose Hamas’
‘I feel like most of them are being brainwashed’...
‘I think mostly this is their problem cos every time that Israel or Hamas wants to have a break, Israel is 99% of the time says yes. So most of the time we act out of their rules, their condition.’...
‘Those Palestinians who protested peacefully as part of what they call the Great Return March… What do you think of them demanding their right to return or calling for their rights to be recognized?’
‘What do you mean by peacefully? Truly, I'm asking’
‘People who've been inside the fence. They haven't thrown stones or rocks, who've been part of peaceful protests’
‘Ok, from the information I get from the IDF, the Twitter, the Facebook, everything. We don't see any peaceful protest. Truly I don't really care because my Friday nights are in the shelter because I'm scared to go out to the synagogue and to eat dinner with my friends. I can't do it.’ ‘My name is Talia. I’m 17. I live less than two kilometres away from the border. I didn't see any peaceful protests. I can see Gaza from my bedroom window. And all we heard and all we saw on all of the news updates and everything was people rioting. It wasn't peaceful protests. It wasn't anywhere close to peaceful protests. It was riots.’"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Chidera Eggerue guest edits Today - "She wants to promote body positivity. But what is that exactly?
‘It's about kind of giving a voice to people who haven't been able to see themselves represented on the big ,screen on billboards, etc. and beauty products.’
‘Why does that matter?’
‘Well, it matters because everybody has a right to feel beautiful. And beauty is something that is not something that should be dictated’...
[On Ancient Greece] We see a very very powerful stress on male body image too. And I think one of the definitions of the male citizen was that he was kalos kai agathos. He was beautiful and good. That ultimate equation between someone who looks good and someone who is good...
‘She tells me she does get work but usually as a peripheral character’
‘So one of my first jobs, it was for a music video. And then all the other girls who got opportunities were of lighter skin, big curly hair, skinny, tall. And then it was just me who was curvier, dark skin, and just an extra. And I was just thinking am I not worthy of being a main girl, am I not worthy of being in front of the camera more?’...
According to Agaroo [sp?] it's men who are over represented at the top of the music advertising and fashion industries that are to blame"
If everybody is beautiful, no one is
If your sense of worth is based on other people, apparently everyone else has to change to accommodate you
Too bad they don't mention that most of these men are probably gay