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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Press refuses again to check and report the facts, this time in BART shooting

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The crescent memorial to Flight 93 would have been stopped long ago if the media was willing to check and report simple facts like the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent. The same thing happens whenever the facts of a case are not congenial to our left-wing elites.

Another extreme example is now taking place in Oakland California, where inflammatory reports of police criminality in the New Year's Day shooting of Oscar Grant are held up by the Oakland street mob as justication for last week's murder of four police officers. Even after this massacre of Oakland police, the press still refuses to publish dramatic exculpatory evidence in the Oscar Grant case.


Video proof that Oscar Grant swung his own arm up onto his own back AFTER he was shot by BART officer Johannes Mehserle

Oscar Grant was lying face down on the ground when he was shot in the back by BART officer Johannes Mehserle, who seems to have thought he was firing his newly issued Taser. (Fellow officer Tony Pirone told investigators that Mehserle said he was going to Tase Grant, then warned him to get clear just before firing.)

If Mehserle did experience Taser confusion then he is not guilty of ANY crime. This is what the DA asserted in an earlier California case of Taser confusion:
Wyatt explained that without the intent of criminal negligence, criminal charges against Noriega could not be sustained.

“The required aggravation ... did not occur in this case,” he said.
Criminal negligence is based on foreseeable consequences. If Mehserle thought he was firing his Taser, he can only be liable for the foreseeable consequences of firing his Taser, not his gun. The shooting at that point is just an accident, and the only person who is responsible for creating the dangerous situation in which that accident occurred is Oscar Grant, with his reckless and criminal decision to fight with the police for 30 seconds.

Alameda District Attorney Tom Orloff set aside the Noriega precedent on the grounds that:
... both of Grant's hands were behind his back, a position hands are commonly placed in by police officers in order to handcuff individuals, when the shot was fired into his body.
Orloff somehow decided that the fact that Grant’s hands seemed to be in a compliance position made the shooting “an intentional act” that calls for a charge of murder.

This makes little sense. We already know that Mehserle intended to pull the trigger. His claim is that he thought he was pulling the trigger on his Taser, a point which is unaffected by the position of Grant's hands. Nevertheless, this is the weak reed upon which Orloff decided to hang murder charges, and it turns out to be verifiably false. Grant's hands were NOT both on his back when the shot was fired, as can be seen when the video is slowed down.

Here is an animation of the fatal second:
Fatal second
37;05 – 37;29 of KTVU’s highlighted cell phone video of the shooting, slowed to 1/2 second a frame. Red circle (added) shows the first appearance of officer Mehserle's muzzle flash.

At the start of the animation (after the black frame), Officer Pirone (kneeling on Grant’s shoulder and neck) has just gotten control of Grant’s right hand, pulling it up behind Grant’s back. As the action starts, Pirone lets go and draws back (presumably in response to Mehserle’s Taser warning). Look at the spot where Pirone’s arm pulls back behind his own body. From about this same spot in the image, Grant’s left arm then appears, as Grant starts to swing his own arm up towards his own back. One frame after Grant's left arm first appears (1/15th of a second later), Mehserle’s muzzle-flash first appears (red circle). Then Grant finishes swinging his own arm up onto his own back.

Here is a frame grab of the fatal instant (37;17):

FatalMomentAnimation
When Mehserle's muzzle flash first appears (red circle) Grant has just started to swing his own left arm (circled in blue) around behind his own back (presumably in a belated attempt to avoid getting Tased).

Grant’s left hand was NEVER under either officer’s control, after they both fought for 30 seconds to get control of it, with Mehserle telling Pirone from the beginning that he thought Grant was “going for his waistband”. Thus Mehserle was certainly justified in trying to Tase Grant, and the clear evidence that he WAS trying to Tase Grant makes this almost certainly an accidental shooting, in which case Mehserle is innocent of ANY crime.

Alec Rawls (the author of these blobgurst posts) has been trying for six weeks to get Bay Area print and television news to let the public know about about this video proof that Orloff's stated grounds for charging officer Mehserle with murder is FALSE. This isn't just news. It vitiates the state's own accusations of criminal behavior, now being used to justify acts of war against the Oakland Police, yet despite repeated outreach to most of the reporters who have been covering this story, the local press still won't report it.


The press also refuses to fact-check Pirone’s claim that the video shows Grant kneeing him multiple times in the groin

Oakland is also inflamed by another portion of the Oscar Grant video, about a minute and a half before the shooting, where Officer Pirone knocks Grant to the ground with a forearm to his head. KTVU interviewed two law professors who both interpreted the blow as an unprovoked criminal assault. Professor Peter Keane, of UC Hastings was the most emphatic:
That officer is committing a crime. … There’s no question in my mind that that’s vivid powerful evidence that he committed a vicious physical assault, unprovoked, upon a citizen, for absolutely no reason.
UC Boalt Professor Franklin Zimring added an important qualification, but unless the public learns that the qualification does in fact apply, the effect is the same:
Unless there’s something more that we don’t see, then the degree of force that was use, and the way it was used, are not justified.
Officer Pirone’s lawyer Bill Rapoport told the press that a frame by frame analysis of the video shows that Pirone was responding to multiple knees to the groin by Grant, but again, our biased media is refusing to fact-check and reported on the accuracy of this easy to verify claim. All they have to do is slow down the video and take a look. Immediately before Pirone strikes Grant, Grant can be seen driving his knees up above 90° into Pirone’s groin. Here is a frame grab of one of the knees:

Grant knees Pirone in the groin
9;05 from KTVU’s raw cell phone video. Surrounding frames show the denim “7” shape in this frame to be Oscar Grant’s right knee, coming up above 90° as Grant tries to knee Pirone in the groin. Full segment here:


The accusations of criminal assault by Pirone are FALSE. He was defending himself against a criminal assault, as anyone can verify just by looking.

KTVU actually slowed the video down for professors Keane and Zimring, but obviously not enough. All KTVU has to do to verify the accuracy of Pirone’s claims is open up their laptop again and slow the video down a bit more, but they have yet to report this video proof that Pirone was defending himself against a vicious assault by Oscar Grant.

If prosecutors claimed that frame by frame analysis showed some previously undetected evidence of police criminality, the frame by frame video would be prime time news for a week. Since it proves Pirone’s innocence, the press is not interested. Even with the murder of four policemen being justified as retaliation for the alleged criminal behavior of Mehserle and Pirone, the entire bay area media remains silent.

So let’s us break the story. The innocence of Pirone and the almost certain innocence of Mehserle are major unreported news. Shout it at the top of your blogs!

If we can break this story, not only might we save some lives in blue, but we can direct the resulting attention to other explosive facts that the media refuses to examine and report, like the terrorist memorial mosque now being built on the Flight 93 crash site.

The Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent makes it a mihrab, the central feature around which every mosque is built. They call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, remains exactly as it was in the original Crescent of Embrace design. It is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.


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Monday, March 23, 2009

Obama's laughter: amused by the win-win uncertainty of what kind of hero he will turn out to be



Obama's laughter about the financial crisis could be "gallows humor," as he contends, but it looks more like genuine amusement. Real gallows humor is morbid, not mirthful.

Michael Goodwin recounts a comment from a fellow journalist during the presidential campaign: "I know Obama is a Manchurian candidate, I just can't figure out what for." Obama might not know yet either. Depending on whether his policies crash the economy or not, there are two ways he can be a hero, and indifference between them would explain his laughter. Teetering on the edge of the abyss is a win-win situation for Barack Hussein Obama.


Will he be an eco-leftist hero, or a Muslim hero?

All of Obama's mentors are communist or Islamofascist, with a few, like William "Abu Zyad" Ayers, being both. If these are his loyalties, then Obama is just waiting to find out what kind of hero he is going to be. If America can successfully transform in the socialist-green direction that he is taking us, then he will be a leftist hero. If this attempt to remake America destroys America, then he will be a Muslim hero.

The laughter shows how open he is to being the Muslim hero. He recognizes that there is a theater-of-the-absurd aspect to it, but if this is the kind of hero he turns out to be, this is the kind of hero he turns out to be, eliciting a big "whoud'a thunk it" laugh that bubbles straight up from inside.

If this is the source of Obama's mirth, we won't have proof until it is too late. As I have said more than once before:
This is why it is a mistake to elect someone with extensive Islamo-fascist ties in the first place.

Pretty much ALL of Obama's mentors and confidants are not just Muslim, but Islamofascist

1. William Ayers, who put Obama on the board of the Annenberg Challenge (where the two of them funneled education funds to Afro-centric racists like Obama's pastor/mentor Jeremiah Wright), gave himself the Nation of Islam name "Abu Zayd" (a reference to his naming his son after Black Panther/Nation of Islam thug Zayd Malik Shakur, who murdered a NJ policeman Werner Forrester in 1973).

2. Kenyan Prime Minister and Obama "cousin" and confidant Raila Odinga, who like Obama calls himself a Christian, but was outed by Muslim leaders in Kenya for secretly declaring himself to actually be a Muslim and promising to impose Sharia law on Kenya. (Odinga recently removed his rationalizations for the Memorandum of Understanding from his Odinga for President website, but I saved a copy.)

3. "Ex-Muslim" Jeremiah Wright, Obama's "Christian" pastor (the Koran urges Muslims in infidel countries to hide their true faith, verse 16:106), who champions Louis Farrakhan and teaches the Muslim version of the law of love: to love members of your own group and to hate outsiders (in particular, he teaches hatred of white people, as NOI leader Louis Farrakhan does).

4. Khalid Al-Mansour, who managed Obama's admission to Harvard Law, is another radical Nation of Islam racist, who once declared that God wanted blacks to go around cutting white people's noses off.

5. Obama best dinner buddy Rashid Khalidi is a PLO terror supporter.

6. The only identifiable mentor/confidante of Obama who is not a known Islamofascist is Frank Marshall Davis, the communist pedophile who shepherded Obama as a boy in Hawaii. (Davis wrote in his memoirs that he didn't want to "disappoint" a 13 year old girl by not having sex with her.)

7. Then there is Obama's Muslim/Communist/racist father, who Obama never met, but does dream about. Barrack Sr. was a member of a Kenyan opposition party when he slammed the sitting regime for not being socialist enough or Afro-centric enough, calling instead for "Europeans" and "Asians" to be stripped of their property.

8. Last and probably least is Michelle, whose Princeton thesis favored a black-separatist viewpoint, and is lauded by her husband as a "fellow traveler."

Of course they are laughing.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

No Mt. Redoubt eruption please

We have too much global cooling already. A cooling earth is harsh for man and beast alike. At least with the global cooling that is now being caused by the ongoing extended lull in solar activity, we get a silver lining. If lack of solar-magnetic activity is demonstrated to cool the earth, it won't be possible to hide from the public what all the scientists already know: that the small bit of late 20th century warming was almost certainly caused by the "grand maximum" levels of solar activity from 1940-2000, NOT by CO2. If we have to freeze our butts off, at least this natural calamity might save us (MIGHT save us) from the un-natural calamity of having our economy unplugged by the anti-CO2 lunatics who now occupy the White House.

Eruption of Mt. Redoubt, on the other hand, would be a pure bad, like getting hit with a good-size asteroid. Not only would a large eruption substantially hasten harmful global cooling, but it would give the eco-liars something to blame the cooling on besides the lull in solar activity, allowing them to pretend that, if not for the eruption, the world would still be warming, and that warming is still the danger.

The eco-religionists don't need much more time. With control of the White House, another couple years of unchecked alarmism could be all they need to get their anti-CO2 policies in place, and then we are done. We will have pulled the plug on heat, light and power just as the planet is descending into freezing cold.

Sit Mt. Redoubt. Stay. Be a good Iditardog.

UPDATE: Bad dog.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Senator Specter’s payoff for betraying his party: betrayal of his state

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Note to Google policy-violation reviewers: I received notification that Google has un-published this post for malware or virus violation. I presume this is because it includes at the bottom a list of participating blogs that were simultaneously helping to pass on my information about the Islamic design features in the "Crescent of Embrace" memorial to Flight 93. 

At the time (circa 2009) all of those links were operational and linked to legitimate blogs posting important information of national importance. After all these years many of those links will have succumbed to link-rot. Have some of them actually been taken over by malware? 

In any case, I have removed all of the links from the list of participating "blogburst" blogs and am doing the same for the four other blogburst posts that were also just unpublished. When I get a chance I will go through and do the same for other posts that contain the blogburst list.

Hopefully this is what you need in order to republish. If anything else is required, can you please let me know, maybe via a comment left on the offending posts? 

Thanks, Alec Rawls 5/28/2023


We now know one of the payoffs that Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter received for being one of three Republican Senators who allowed President Obama’s trillion-dollar Spendulus bill to become law. WPXI in Pittsburgh reports that Specter has a 5.5 million dollar earmark for the crescent-shaped Flight 93 memorial in the omnibus spending bill just passed by the Senate.

Much as the people of Pennsylvania want to see a fitting memorial built, they yanked support for the crescent design in August 2007 after Tom Burnett Sr., father of Flight 93 hero Tom Jr., started warning the country that the memorial design is STILL packed to the gills with Islamic symbolism. Since that time the Memorial Project has hardly raised a dime, and a September 2007 interview with State Senator Jane Orie, who sponsors the Hearts of Steel memorial fund, makes clear that concerns about Islamic symbolism predominate. Here is her exchange with Pittsburgh talk-radio host Fred Honsberger:
Orie: "No matter who it is, and no matter where I went today for 9/11 events, everybody brought up this crescent. Whether it is intentional or not, it is disturbing to people."

Honsberger: "So everyone is bringing it up to you."

Orie: "Absolutely."
Orie is talking here about the so-called “redesign.” The people of Pennsylvania know that the giant crescent, which the redesign was supposed to remove, is still there. The Park Service calls it “Circle of Embrace” now, but the circle is still broken, and the unbroken part of the circle——what is symbolically left standing in the wake of 9/11——remains exactly as it was in the original Crescent of Embrace (pictured above). Architect Paul Murdoch's design is still a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.

Pennsylvanians have voted with their pocketbooks to reject this memorial to the terrorists, but Arlen Specter is determined to cram it down their throats anyway, the same way he helped Obama cram a trillion dollars of socialist pork down America’s throat.


Specter knows better than any other politician not just that the giant Islamic-shaped crescent is still there, but that it points to Mecca

Our group was actually very hopeful back in 2007 that Senator Specter might put and end to the memorial debacle. After Mr. Burnett’s public appeal, Specter’s office wanted a briefing on the Islamic symbolism that we have found in the crescent design. One of our most knowledgeable people then spent 45 minutes with Stan Caldwell, Executive Director of Senator Specter’s Pittsburgh office, explaining in detail the Islamic and terrorist memorializing symbolism.

Caldwell had no trouble understanding our graphical proof that the giant crescent points almost exactly at Mecca:

QiblaOverlaidOnCrescent,400px
A person standing between the tips of the Crescent of Embrace and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) will be facing within two degrees of the Muslim prayer direction (qibla), which is calculated as the great circle direction to Mecca. (Green qibla graphic produced by the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com. Another calculator is available at QiblaLocator.com.)

Caldwell also had no trouble understanding that the giant crescent is still there. All the redesign did was place an extra arc of trees out behind the mouth of the crescent, an arc of trees that according to the Park Service’s own website explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle:

Crescent-BrokenCircle animation, 400px
Animation starts with the bare naked Crescent of Embrace. The re-colored Circle of Embrace site plan is superimposed on top, then everything but the changes are removed. The only change is extra arc of trees (flashing) that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact.

Our man also explained the significance of the Mecca orientation: that it turns the giant Islamic-shaped crescent into a mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built). The planned memorial is actually the world’s largest mosque, and Arlen Specter’s office is fully aware of it.

Do Specter and Caldwell have some explanation? The press will never ask, but we can:
DC Phone: 202-224-4254
DC Fax: 202-228-1229

Another Washington Post cover-up

Dan Eggen reports how Families of Flight 93 (an adjunct to the Memorial Project, representing only those families who are backing the crescent design) have been in Washington seeking federal money. He includes no mention of WHY the private fundraising effort has failed. But State Senator Orie’s discussion of her fundraising difficulties is not hard to find. Any reporter doing a story on the memorial’s fundraising problems would presumably start here:
Google search for fundraising+problems+Flight+93+memorial
The whole first page of search results is our blogburst post about Orie. (“Fundraising difficulties” yields the same result.)

Either Dan Eggen is completely incompetent, or the Post is taking sides, refusing to report the facts that don’t support the terrorist memorializing side.

Perhaps ombudsman Andrew Alexander should weigh in on this. The Post has NEVER reported on Mr. Burnett’s long battle to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Islamic-shaped crescent atop his son’s grave. Mr. Burnett left a long comment on Dan Eggen’s article which Eggen simply ignored, along with private offers to talk.

So which is it Mr. Alexander? Is the Post incompetently ignorant of a controversy that has raged for years, or is it intentionally suppressing the facts about the giant Mecca-oriented crescent?


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We're under attack! Quick, everyone disarm!

Germany school shooting - 15 dead

After attacks, Europe hurries to tighten gun laws
And just in time too, as Kara Mustafa comes marching back over the horizon. Whew. Good thing the Europeans have gotten rid of their guns, or they would REALLY be in trouble.


UPDATE In related news from Somalia:
Cabinet votes for Islamic law, hoping to weaken insurgency
Give them what they want. That'll weaken 'em for sure.

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