Baltimore, Maryland

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Week’s Weakest, Bleakest, and Meekest Headlines

BALTIMORE TRIES TO MAKE MURDER ILLEGAL FOR ONE WEEKEND
Two years ago, Baltimore’s mayor said she was giving rioters “a space to destroy.” It worked! Baltimore’s residents are doing a bang-up job of destroying their once adorable little brick town by the harbor.

Ever since Charm City’s police were basically told to holster their guns and bite their lips, the murder rate has been spectacularly high in this decaying burg that dwells ignominiously between DC and Philly. Whereas a mere 211 Baltimoreans were slain in 2014, that number jumped like an eager frog up to 344 in 2015 after it was decided that white cops were the main reason black people were getting killed. The number dipped slightly to 301 last year. As of August 3, Mobtown had witnessed 209 homicides—if that pace continues, the city will set an all-time record of 355 murders, two more than the current record of 353 set in 1993, when the town’s population was 100,000 residents higher.

Erricka Bridgeford is a black woman who possibly spells her first name that way as a lifelong act of passive aggression against white people. Her younger brother was shot to death in Baltimore a decade ago, and she wants to send a message to the community: “Nobody kill anybody” for a 72-hour period starting on Friday, August 4 and ending at midnight on Sunday, August 6, at which point it will presumably be OK for them to start slaughtering one another again over perceived slights and random acts of mild disrespect.

A dedicated community activist, Bridgeford actively acted on behalf of Baltimore residents who didn’t want to get caught in the act of being killed. There were peace walks and vigils and chants and even T-shirts with the catchy “Nobody kill anybody” slogan emblazoned on them.

Over Memorial Day Weekend this year, a Baltimore group called Mothers of Murdered Sons had called for a similar ceasefire, only to experience great weeping and gnashing of teeth at the sad specter of four shootings, two of them fatal.

This time around, it was fun while it lasted—the 72-hour ceasefire abruptly ended 41 hours into the festivities around 5 PM on Saturday, when a 24-year-old man was fatally shot in southwest Baltimore.

Now the only question that remains is whether or not Baltimore will set a murder record this weekend.

A.D.L. CLAMPS DOWN ON YOUTUBE “HATE SPEECH”
There is one group in America that you are completely forbidden to criticize, and that is, of course, white people.

To help dismantle this rancid system of white privilege and supremacy, a helpful group known as the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai Brith assists media giants in ferreting out and then smashing “hate” with the unrelenting zeal of steel-toed clog-dancers squashing cockroaches.

A couple weeks ago the ADL published a hate list which insinuated that even Taki’s writer Gavin McInnes—who takes great pains to say nice things about Jews—is an anti-Semite.

Now the well-financed and tightly organized rabbinical hate group has crowbarred its way into setting ideological policy for YouTube, the third most highly trafficked website in the USA that is visited by a staggering two-thirds of all Americans monthly.

YouTube is partnering with such obviously unbiased organizations as the ADL, the No Hate Speech Movement, and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue to neuter any videos that contain “controversial or religious content:”

We’ll soon be applying tougher treatment to videos that aren’t illegal but have been flagged by users as potential violations of our policies on hate speech and violent extremism. If we find that these videos don’t violate our policies but contain controversial religious or supremacist content, they will be placed in a limited state. The videos will remain on YouTube behind an interstitial, won’t be recommended, won’t be monetized, and won’t have key features including comments, suggested videos, and likes.

According Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s head Hebrew:

Google has been a leader in this area from the beginning. The reality is extremists and terrorists continue to migrate to and exploit various other social media platforms. We hope that those platforms can learn from and emulate what YouTube is doing to proactively identify and remove extremist content.

YouTube also plans to employ robots that will filter out any speech that the ADL deems to be unacceptable. Would it be overstepping the bounds of decency to insinuate that the ADL are a real bunch of schmendricks?

STUDY: 38% OF AMERICAN ADULTS PRESCRIBED OPIOIDS IN 2015
Students of history realize that back in the days when Westerners were advancing across the world rather than retreating, opium was used to numb and pacify potentially hostile indigenous resistance elements in both China and India. Now it appears that forces within the West are hell-bent on doping up the West from within. A new study published in Annals of Internal Medicine finds that in 2015, a full 38% of adult Americans were prescribed opiates. From 1999 to 2015, drug overdoses quadrupled in the USA.

We suspect that Americans are gobbling all these pills to mollify something that runs much deeper than mere physical pain.

HALF OF DETROIT’S MAYORAL CANDIDATES ARE FELONS
A recent analysis by Detroit News finds that of the city’s eight mayoral candidates, four are felons. While that may be true, this also means that half of the candidates are not felons, meaning that the article is just a wee bit racist.

Among the felonious contenders is Donna Marie Pitts, who “has multiple felony convictions dating back to 1977,” including receiving a stolen vehicle, eluding police, assault with intent to murder, and firearms offenses related to two shooting incidents.

Pitts will be competing with Danetta L. Simpson, who was convicted in 1996 of assault with intent to murder; Articia Bomer, who was convicted in 2008 of carrying a concealed weapon; and Curtis Christopher Greene, who was convicted in 2004 at age 19 with eluding police and delivering marijuana.

May the best felon win!