Is why something like this hasn’t happened long ago;

KNXV-TV in Phoenix is on air live when the two news helicopters collide while covering a car chase. The crash has claimed at least four lives.

I guess in a way, it has.
Graphic video. More here.
And thoughts I can’t help but agree with.

While the tragedy is profoundly distressing, it is even more depressing to realize that the deaths of these men were as pointless as the story they were covering.
Four good men lost their lives because unimaginative television news directors over the years have come to prize live video collected with expensive toys over stories characterized by greater subtlety and significance.

No question.

Debbie Schussel on the death of Detroit;

Forty years ago today, several days of race riots began in Detroit.
On July 23, 1967, Black Panthers and assorted other Black extremists (with White hippies and far-leftists backing and encouraging them) eventually wrote their political epitaphs with it (though their movement unfortunately died a long, slow death–far past its time, if there ever was a time). But they robbed and killed Detroit–and a significant portion of Black America with it.
Black Panthers and their radical allies, supported by a thousands of Black Detroiters, rioted for days, starting fires and destroying the city. They wanted more power in the city. They wanted a Black Mayor, a Black police chief, a Black city council.
[…]
With a pimp daddy mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, who dresses like a Gangsta and is involved in scandal after scandal, the city is the laughing stock. But, hey, the Mayor made an appearance on “Living Large,” a now-cancelled national hip-hop show. Thank you very little. Kilpatrick, whom I like to call Kwame the Kingpin, was suspected in the drivebuy shooting of “Strawberry,” a stripper who allegedly performed in the Mayoral Manoogian Mansion for “His Honor.” He used his 21-bodyguard posse of police officers to serve as his personal harem-recruiter and to ferret him to and from different girlfriends.
These are the people who betrayed Blacks in Detroit, not the Whites who took White flight (followed by Black flight) from the city and gave them free reign to “run” the city . . . and fail magnificently. And, yet, they still blame even this on the White man.

Read it all.
Photo Tour – the “Fabulous Ruins Of Detroit”. (h/t)

In a country

… whose chief domestic imperative for 50 years has been ending racism and righting long-standing wrongs against blacks—with such success that we now have an expanding black middle class, a black secretary of state, black CEOs of three top corporations, a black Supreme Court justice, and a serious black presidential candidate—how can there still exist a large black urban underclass imprisoned in poverty, welfare dependency, school failure, nonwork, and crime? How even today can more black young men be entangled in the criminal-justice system than graduate from college? How can close to 70 percent of black children be born into single-mother families, which (almost all experts agree) prepare kids for success less well than two-parent families?
The legacy of slavery and racism isn’t the reason, economist Thomas Sowell has long argued. That legacy didn’t stop blacks from raising themselves up after Emancipation. By World War I, Sowell’s data show, northern blacks scored higher on armed-forces tests than southern whites. After World War II and the GI Bill, black education and income levels rose sharply. It was only in the mid-1960s that a century of black progress seemed to make a sudden U-turn, a reversal that long-past events didn’t cause. Beginning around 1964, the rates of black high school graduation, workforce participation, crime, illegitimacy, and drug use all turned sharply in the wrong direction. While many blacks continued to move forward, a sizable minority solidified into an underclass, defined by self-destructive behavior that all but guaranteed failure.
What was going on in the mid-sixties that could explain such a startling development? Political scientist Charles Murray gave the first answer to that question: welfare benefits sharply rose just at that moment. Offering more purchasing power than a minimum-wage job, the dole, he argued, provided an economic incentive for women to have out-of-wedlock babies and for their boyfriends to live off their welfare payments, too.
A decade after Murray, I suggested that, though welfare was part of the answer, the real explanation was larger. It was cultural, not economic. Begun by the elites, vast changes reshaped mainstream attitudes in the 1960s. Sex became fine outside marriage, and illegitimacy lost its stigma. Drugs were cool; social authority and tradition weren’t. America was deemed a racist, unjust society that victimized and impoverished blacks, who could rarely better their condition and who therefore deserved generous welfare benefits as reparations for past and present oppression. If blacks committed crime, the system that drove them to it, out of poverty or as an act of protest, was at fault: we shouldn’t blame the victim, as the saying went—meaning the poor criminal, not his prey. Since people shape their actions according to the ideas and beliefs they hold, when these new attitudes reached the inner cities, what could result but an epidemic of social dysfunction?

Well worth your time.

Career pedophile Peter Whitmore has pleaded guilty to 12 counts in the Whitewood abduction case.
Lots on Google News, if you aren’t familiar with the history of this slimeball.
Something else you may not know – even career criminals tagged with “dangerous offender” status have the right to apply for parole after 7 years.
July 19 Mixed feelings in Whitewood.

Close the border to processed meats from China, please.
More: “That’s not chicken in your chicken chow mein”… thanks to reader Bruce for the hate mail that will generate.

On the global warming-mad European continent…

… fuel efficiency is measured by carbon dioxide emissions rather than miles-per-gallon, and the European Commission has mandated 120 grams/kilometer (equivalent to a staggering 62 mpg) by 2012.
They aren’t going to make it.
This week in Belgium, officials acknowledged that an interim goal of 140 g/km (48 mpg) by next year is already beyond reach, as the average emissions of vehicles today is “only” 160 g/km (42 mpg). Even bureaucrats are now suggesting the 120 g/km goal be pushed off to 2015. Why are the Europeans missing their targets?

The Movie.

Via Flaggman.
NCF TO (in the comments) – “They also forgot to tell him that the two-cheek Euro-kiss is totally wrong at a Stampede breakfast.”

Who currently has a child struggling in school, save this item.

Today [June 27] at the public works committee Councilor Vaughan will propose a new sidewalk tax in the entertainment district. He wants [Toronto] council to approve spending $10,000 in consultations about a new sidewalk tax.
He wants to tax bars and clubs that have line ups to get in. He argues it is an effort to calm foot traffic in the area.

When you receive the less than satisfactory academic reports from the teacher, you can open it again and reassure yourself that even the rock-hard stupid sometimes get ahead in life.
More.

(via email – location reported as a few miles north of Rosetown on a small bridge over Eagle Creek.)

“About 420 bottles of fake blood protein, albumin, were found at hospitals in Hubei province but none had been used to treat patients …. “

“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if, only, by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.“ – Ayn Rand

Story.
And there’s more!

See?
The diethylene glycol was put there for a reason.

Fred File;

“For a while, it didn’t look like Washington was going to listen to us regarding real immigration reform. Thankfully, we’ve been spared a serious mistake, but I wonder if things would have turned out the way they did without the work done by the bloggers, talk radio and the American people. Rush, Hannity, Laura Ingraham, RedState, Powerline, Pajamas Media and a lot of others have done a great job. Take that, Fairness Doctrine.”

h/t
More good news. The “Fairness Doctrine” Loses in a House vote.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal turns to “vengeful, vintage-nutroots conspiracy smears.”

Passed along by a gleeful reader;

Police are investigating claims that George Galloway, the Respect MP, was kicked and taunted during a sectarian attack. The politician said the incident happened at Glasgow Airport on Sunday, after he was threatened on a flight from London.
He believes a group of men returning from an Orange Walk in London targeted him because he is a Celtic supporter.
Mr Galloway, who was travelling to give a talk at the Royal Concert Hall, said: “There was one guy I would describe as a ringleader who said, ‘I don’t like your radio talk, I don’t like your newspaper talk, I have a religious duty to knock you down’.”

HITCHENS: But, to what I think is the hidden agenda of the question: ‘Is George Bush on a Christian crusade in Iraq and Afghanistan?’ Obviously not, obviously not. Anyone who’s studied what’s happening in either of those countries now knows that the whole of American policy — and by the way a lot of your own future, ladies and gentlemen — is staked on the hope that federal secular democrats can emerge from this terrible combat. We can protect them and offer them help while they do so. We know that they’re there, that we are — I’ve met them, I love them, they’re our friends. Every member of the 82nd Airborne Division could be a snake-handling congregationalist, for all I know, but these men and women, though you sneer and jeer at them, and snigger when you hear applause and excuses for suicide bombers — and you have to live with the shame of having done that — these people are guarding you while you sleep, whether you know it or not. And they’re also creating space for secularism to emerge, and you better hope that they are successful.
CHRIS HEDGES: I feel like I should be reading Kipling’s White Man’s Burden.
Audience: Laughter.
HITCHENS: What you mean is you wish you had read it.

Videos at the link.
h/t

Nigerial Official Falls For New Orleans Fraud Scam

Breitbart;

Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., was indicted Monday on federal charges of racketeering, soliciting bribes and money-laundering in a long-running bribery investigation into business deals he tried to broker in Africa.
The indictment handed up in federal court in Alexandria., Va., Monday is 94 pages long and lists 16 alleged violations of federal law that could keep Jefferson in prison for up to 235 years. He is charged with racketeering, soliciting bribes, wire fraud, money-laundering, obstruction of justice, conspiracy and violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Jefferson is accused of soliciting bribes for himself and his family, and also for bribing a Nigerian official.

You may have heard of Rep. Jefferson before;

Almost two years ago, in August 2005, investigators raided Jefferson’s home in Louisiana and found $90,000 in cash stuffed into a box in his freezer.
[…]
The impact of the case has stretched across continents and even roiled presidential politics in Nigeria. According to court records, Jefferson told associates that he needed cash to pay bribes to the country’s vice president, Atiku Abubakar.
Abubakar denied the allegations, which figured prominently in that country’s presidential elections in April. Abubakar ran for the presidency and finished third.
The indictment does not name Abubakar. But it describes Jefferson’s dealings with an unnamed “Nigerian Official A” who was a high-ranking official in Nigeria’s executive branch who had a spouse in Potomac, Md. One of Abubakar’s wives lived in that Washington suburb.

Moves are already underway for his explusion from Congress.
SDA Flashback – Rep. Jefferson enlists help of National Guard during Katrina: “Finally, according to the source, Jefferson emerged with a laptop computer, three suitcases, and a box about the size of a small refrigerator, which the enlisted men loaded up into the truck.”

Continue reading →

h/t