Mediaboss Marketing

"North DakotaLegendarily Easy for Legally Killing People."

I can see Josh Duhamel in the slick YouTube video now, speeding along a rural highway and picking off walkers and joggers with Rep. Keith Kempenich riding shotgun.

"Shouldn't have been obstructing me on this public road, right Keith? I think that first one was a hippie, judging by the long hair. That's 15 points!"

Speaking of shotguns, in the next scene Josh and Republican Sen. David Clemens of West Fargo are firing their 12-gauges at fleeing teenagers in downtown Fargo.

"I think they were about to key my car, Dave. We winged one of 'em. Let's go have a beer and maybe we can pick up the blood trail later."

And if Duhamel's half-million price tag is out of reach considering all the budget woes the state is having, maybe the governor could slap a tax on kids in the cancer ward to cover the shortfall.

"North Dakota," Josh could say, looking into the camera with that goofy bomber's hat framing his dreamy mug. "Where Teddy Roosevelt came to hunt buffalo, and you can come to hunt people. Legendary."

And y'all thought the "pornographic vending machine" bill was going to be the bill by which all others were measured this session.

The hits just keep on coming.

First there was the bill introduced by Kempenich, an oil-country lawmaker from Bowman who wanted a way to keep the roadways clear of First Amendment rights. He came up with the idea of removing liability from a driver who "negligently causes injury or death to an individual obstructing traffic on a public road, street or highway."

Kempenich's purpose was to make it legal to run over Dakota Access Pipeline protesters"They're intentionally putting themselves in danger," he told the Bismarck Tribunebut the bill was so broadly written it applies to every road and a million situations. If a group of kids are standing in the middle of Elm Street playing catch, "obstructing vehicular traffic," and a driver turns them into speed bumpsthat driver "is not guilty of an offense."

It's a get-out-of-jail-free card. Except they'll never go to jail in the first place. No word on whether the victims' families will have to pay for fender damage caused by thumping somebody in the road.

Then there's the bill authored by Clemens, a rookie legislator from West Fargo. Clemens wants to protect you from bad guys real and imagined, so he's proposing to expand the justifiable use of deadly force (i.e., shooting somebody dead like in a John Wayne movie) to, well, just about everything.

Under Clemens' bill, if you even think somebody is about to vandalize your car you can come out guns a-blazin'!

The use of deadly force is justified, in the bill, "to prevent the other individual's imminent commission of arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, theft, or criminal mischief."

Imminent means about to happen. Criminal mischief means vandalism, perhaps doing as little as $100 in damage.

You see a kid about to throw a rock through your picture window ... it's open season, baby.

The best part is, no closed seasons and no limits. In North Dakota, you can legally shoot ducks from September into December and you're limited to six ducks a day. Clemens didn't include any such pesky restrictions in his deadly force bill, so North Dakotans can kill potential arsonists and cellphone thieves all day, every day.

We're probably making too much of this. Even though the actual words in Clemens' bill make it legal to shoot someone in the back if they're running away after stealing a box of doughnuts, he says he wants North Dakotans to exercise good judgment in using deadly force.

So plugging somebody for swiping doughnuts might be a stretch. But a Carson Wentz jersey? Fire away. Those suckers cost $100. Just make sure it's a head shot so the jersey doesn't get holes in it. Blood washes out.

Clemens says his bill isn't a reaction to any specific incident, but he wants to send a message to "the unlawful public" that entering someone's home illegally could have consequences. As if they didn't know that already, which is why homes aren't broken into at 8 o'clock on Saturday mornings.

The way the bill is written, he also wants to send a message to kids who are about to spray-paint graffiti on a wall. Details, details.

If Clemens' bill passes, North Dakota can return to its Wild West roots. It'll be the rootin'-est, tootin'-est show west of the Mighty Mississippi. Come to think of it, maybe Josh Duhamel wouldn't be the best choice for the tourism ads. Wonder what George Zimmerman is doing? He has experience at this sort of thing.

See the original post:
McFeely: 'North Dakota 'Legendarily Easy for Killing People' - Grand Forks Herald

Fortune

Tim Ryan's Awakening Fortune Black Lives Matter, which began as a hashtag after Martin's killer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted, had evolved into an increasingly visible movement trying to address, among other things, racism in the criminal-justice system. But for many white ...

See more here:
Tim Ryan's Awakening - Fortune

Virginia Tech's Graduate Life Center Auditorium was packed front to back on Wednesday, Jan. 18 at 7 p.m. for keynote speaker Opal Tometi, in part of a week-long celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Tometi is one of the co-founders of the international movement Black Lives Matter and is the executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.

Tometi spoke to an audience of students, staff members and Blacksburg residents. At the end of the interview, she answered three audience questions submitted on paper and collected by members of the Black Organization Council.

According to Tometi, her motivation for her activism was ignited by the murder of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Her fear was that in the current political and social climate, her little brother could end up in a similar deadly situation.

I was completely floored that a jury could deliberate and let him walk. It was like Trayvon Martin was on trial himself, Tometi said. Out of sheer love for my brother, I wanted to tell another story.

"Hearing her say that Black Lives Matter is so much more than just black lives made me realize it's about picking people up that have been thrown under the bus for so many generations."

Kimberly Williams of the Intercultural Engagement Center was chairperson of the group that organized other celebrations in honor of King around campus, such as the Black Liberation Talk Luncheon at the Black Cultural Center on Tuesday and a speech by Dr. Nnamdi Pole about ethnoracial diversity in post traumatic stress in Pamplin on Thursday. Similar events occurred all week long in Radford and all over the New River Valley as well.

Hearing her say that Black Lives Matter is so much more than just black lives made me realize its about picking people up that have been thrown under the bus for so many generations, said junior horticulture major Shaina Pigliacampi. This made me realize that its more important than people think it is.

Sociology Professor Ellington Graves and the vice president of the Black Organizations Council, senior Meriam Nure, were seated onstage with Tometi asking her questions about how Black Lives Matter started and how the movement has affected her life. Additional questions concerned Tometis faith, self-care and security issues as a visible activist.

Its important to understand that the trigger for Black Lives Matter was not just the behavior of police and the over-policing of black bodies, but also the marginalization of black life in general, Graves said.

Tometi explained how Black Lives Matter came from a Facebook post from one of Tometis friends, then expanded into a Twitter hashtag and eventually into a network to promote their mission to improve quality of life for African Americans.

We used social media to amplify our message we were building a space for resilience and hope, Tometi said. People decided that they wanted a network.

"The movement is ours. I'm proud of us."

In addition to how the Black Lives Matter movement started, Tometi recognized that the organization is not perfect, but is constantly evolving to be more intersectional.

Ive been blown away by how courageous we are and how powerful the human will is and to see hundreds and thousands of people mobilize around the globe. The movement is ours. I'm proud of us, Tometi said. I have so much hope in humanity because Im sitting in a room with people like you.

Read more here:
Opal Tometi speaks on Black Lives Matter movement - Virginia Tech Collegiate Times

Growing up, the lesson was everywhere: Every major woe in black America can be solved if we addressed the problem of missing fathers.

"No longer is a person embarrassed because they're pregnant without a husband," disgraced comedian and alleged rapist Bill Cosby said in 2004. "No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child." When a police officer was killed in Jersey City in July 2014, a local television news reporter said on air that "the underlying cause" of the "anti-cop mentality that has so contaminated America's inner cities" was "young black men growing up without fathers." A Reuters headline from 2007 proclaimed, "Father absence 'decimates' black community in U.S."

President Barack Obama has been one of the biggest advocates of this idea. In a 2008 speech delivered on Father's Day at a church on Chicago's South Side, the first viable black candidate for president of the United States chastised black fathers. Too many black fathers, he said, are missing from too many lives and too many homes. "They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. We know the statistics--that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison," Obama said. "They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it."

It became a staple in his speeches delivered to majority- or all-black audiences. As recently as last year Obama said at a poverty summit, "I am a black man who grew up without a father and I know the cost that I paid for that."

However, responsible fatherhood only goes so far in a world plagued by institutionalized oppression. For black children, the presence of fathers would not alter racist drug laws, prosecutorial protection of police officers who kill, mass school closures or the poisoning of their water. By focusing on the supposed absence of black fathers, we allow ourselves to pretend this oppression is not real, while also further scapegoating black men for America's societal ills.

In 1965, then-New York Sen. Patrick Moynihan's published The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. It argued that the number of women-led households in black communities was the largest obstacle to black people achieving economic and political equality. Since then, the issue of "missing black fathers" has been a top priority for black intellectuals, activists and community leaders, as well as a favored retort from people seeking to deflect from conversations about structural racism.

The thinking goes like this: The high rates of poverty and incarceration and low levels of educational achievement in black communities can be traced back to the high number of black babies born out of wedlock and subsequently raised in single-mother homes. It's a patriarchal twist on the mythological magical Negro. By their mere presence, black fathers could stem the devastating effects of oppression imposed from the classroom to the workplace to the court system. If black men just showed up in the homes of their children--acted like men instead of boys--black families and communities would fortify themselves and our long-held problems would simply wither away.

There are studies that show that children who grow up in two-parent households perform better in school, are less likely to commit crime and have higher future earning potential. What these studies often don't take into account is the impact of depressed wages, chronic unemployment, discriminatory hiring practices, the history of mass incarceration, housing segregation and inequality in educational opportunity, not just on family structure but on the resources available to black families to produce results similar to their white counterparts.

And there are other problems with romanticizing the family structure. Black nuclear families have been torn apart since the days of slavery, and since then we have also re-imagined the family structure. Where the biological parents haven't been available, aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, and a host of family friends and play cousins have stepped in to do the work of raising children. Today, as prison removes more and more black men from their homes, we do the same.

To say that these other family formations are inherently deficient because there isn't a father who sits atop a hierarchy is to say no one else is capable of providing adequate love to a child, while also teaching the children who grow up without that idealized nuclear-family model that their lives are somehow wrong. Raised to believe that they missed something vital, it's no surprise if children without fathers in their homes have more behavioral problems. And that families with women-led households are more likely to live in poverty speaks less to the necessity of fathers and more to the fact that a single income is no longer sufficient to support a family in this country, that our economy undervalues the work of women and that outside child care is a prohibitively expensive luxury. An economic shift to real living wages for women's labor and a total societal investment in the well-being of all children would solve a number of the problems we think are only alleviated by fathers.

Even with the presence of fathers in the home, the persistently high black male unemployment rate would do little to close the existing and increasing racial wealth gap, which is at a place where it would take 228 years for black households to catch up.

It's hard to put this inadequate philosophy to rest. It's hard because the "missing black father" has caused so much pain. That hurt runs through the rhetoric of every well-meaning person who has ever admonished black fathers for not being in their children's lives. It's the foundation of Obama's first book. That pain is real and can't be discounted.

But so long as it is the only way through which we see this issue, the myth will continue to entangle us and prevent us from reckoning with what's real. The damage isn't done by the absence of a father, but from the feelings of abandonment. If black children were raised in an environment that focused not on their lack of fathers but on filling their lives with the nurturing love we all need to thrive, what difference would an absent father make? If they woke up in homes with electricity and running water and food, went to schools with teachers and counselors who provided everything they needed to learn, then went home to caretakers of any gender who weren't so exhausted that they actually had time to sit and talk and do homework with them, and no one ever said that their lives were somehow incomplete because they didn't have a father, would they hold on to some pain of lack well into adulthood?

This isn't an argument in favor of deadbeat fathers, but a call to detach ourselves from the myth that the only and best way to raise a child depends on the presence of a man we call a father.

So far Obama has refused. In response to the killing of Trayvon Martin and subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman, his plan of action was a partnership between nonprofit organizations and corporations to provide increased mentorship for young black men, called My Brother's Keeper, which has recently enlisted the star power of rapper Kendrick Lamar and NBA guard Stephen Curry.

There is nothing wrong with promoting mentorship. There is something wrong with a president who told us for years that he was not the president of Black America but all of America, as if black people were not part of America, now putting forth his first racially specific program, and it not being any policy, but rather a spate of philanthropic endeavors. It was insulting, but right in line with his philosophy.

As if he had been elected to be mentor-in-chief. As if mentors are all black boys need to survive. As if what he really meant was mentor as a stand-in for father. As if he could save black boys by becoming their surrogate father. As if we can afford to continue believing the myth. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Michael Brown had a father. Tamir Rice had a father. Having a father won't protect black boys from America.

Editorial on 01/22/2017

Original post:
Idealizing the family structure - Arkansas Online

Men At Work's Colin Hay has released a new track, "I'm Walking Here," which was inspired by the fatal shooting of Florida teen Trayvon Martin. The track will be featured on Hay's forthcoming new album Fierce Mercy.

The song features rapped vocals by Joe Manuel "Deploi" Lopez, who co-wrote the song with Hay, his wife Cecilia Noel and partner Jonathan Eric "Swift" Piazza.

"It was when Trayvon (Martin) got killed by that clown (George Zimmerman)," Hay tells Billboard. "I kept on thinking about him when I was on tour, that whole idea of somebody walking home and having this maniac kind of follow you in a car and that moment of 'Why can't people just walk home,' you know? That really stayed with me."

Fierce Mercy, Hay's 13th solo album, comes out March 3.

by RTT Staff Writer

For comments and feedback: editorial@rttnews.com

Entertainment News

Videos games to watch out for in 2017

Trump Takes Power, Manufacturing In Focus -- Economic Preview For Week of January 16

Lazy, or Inefficient? These are the World's Least Productive Countries

Read more:
Men At Work's Colin Hay Shares New Track 'I'm Walking Here' - RTT News