President of Philippines says that Donald Trump offered support for his wholesale slaughter of drug dealers in phone call. Well isn't that nice?

Good luck with murdering your citizens. 

Courtesy of The Daily Beast:

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte says President-elect Donald Trump wished him luck with his controversial campaign against drugs, a campaign which international bodies say includes extrajudicial killings. 

According to Duterte, the conversation occurred late Friday, when he called Trump to offer congratulations. 

The talk, in which both sides invited the other to visit, was described by one of Duterte’s aides as a “very engaging, animated conversation,” the Associated Press reported. 

A video released by Duterte’s aide showed the strongman leader smiling while on the phone with Trump, talking about enhancing bilateral ties. 

In a part of the conversation that wasn’t aired, however, Duterte says Trump “was wishing me success in my campaign against the drug problem.” 

“He understood the way we are handling it and I said that there's nothing wrong in protecting a country," Duterte said, commenting on his heavy-handed tactics. 

“It was a bit very encouraging in the sense that I supposed that what he really wanted to say was that we would be the last to interfere in the affairs of your own country,” he said. 

It was unclear whether Trump explicitly said he approved of Duterte’s tactics, and Trump has yet to confirm Duterte's account of the conversation. 

Yes it is entirely possible that Trump had no idea that Duterte had murdered over 4,000 suspected drug dealers without benefit of trial when he made the comments of support.

But then again since this is a guy who ran for office with the promise of kicking out millions of Mexican immigrants, and targeting Muslims due to their religion, perhaps he did.

A sea of blue.

Courtesy of ABC News:  

New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton called slain New York City Police Officer Rafael Ramos "a hero" and gave the officer a posthumous promotion during Ramos' funeral today. 

"The men and women who hear that blue and wear that badge, we know who Rafael Ramos was," Bratton said at Ramos' funeral. "He was a New York City Police Officer, and he was, he is a hero." 

Thousands of uniformed police officers gathered for the funeral at Christ Tabernacle Church, in the Glendale neighborhood of Queens, standing outside the church where it was broadcast on large screens. 

Bratton was just one of many high level government officials who spoke, including Vice President Joe Biden and New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio. 

Biden called the New York Police Department the finest in the world. 

"They were a part of New York's finest, and that not an idle phrase," he said. "This is probably the finest police department in the world, the finest police department in the world. They earn that praise."

I posted this partly to because I wanted to affirm the fact that for the most part I support the police, and I think what they do is both heroic and necessary to keep all of us safe.

My beef is not with the honest cop on the beat, and I do know they exist. My beef is with power hungry assholes and the over militarized police departments that are equipping their officers as if they expect to be invaded by China at any minute.

And yes I do realize that we live in a society with numerous citizens that are so heavily armed that the average police officer is ill equipped to neutralize them WITHOUT having access to the kind of weaponry one might expect to find during a zombie Apocalypse.

But that of course is a whole other argument for a whole other post.

And besides I thought that was what we had SWAT teams for.

But just like we should not lump all cops together we also should not excuse them for blaming the protesters and Mayor de Blasio for these murders.

And scenes like this of the police turning their back on the mayor while he gives the eulogy are inexcusable in my mind. You know I hate to disagree with Vice President Biden but it does not seem to me that the "best police force in the world" would behave in this manner.

Man kills two New York police officers execution style. Online postings indicate possible retaliation for deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

Courtesy of Fox News:  

The gunman who ambushed and murdered two NYPD officers as they sat in their squad car Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn vowed to kill police in a number of social media posts that vowed retaliation for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, authorities said. 

Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, wrote on his Instagram account: "I'm putting wings on pigs today. They take 1 of ours, let's take 2 of theirs," hours before the killings, two city officials with direct knowledge of the case confirmed for The Associated Press. He used the hashtags Shootthepolice RIPErivGardner (sic) RIPMikeBrown. The post also included an image of a silver handgun and the message, "This may be my final post. The post had more than 200 likes but also had many others admonishing his statements. 

Police said Brinsley, who was black, approached the passenger window of a marked police car at approximately 2:45 p.m. local time and opened fire, striking Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in the head. The officers -- one Hispanic, one Asian -- were on special patrol doing crime reduction work in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. 

"They were, quite simply, assassinated -- targeted for their uniform," said Police Commissioner Bill Bratton during a news conference at Woodhull Medical Center, where the officers were pronounced dead Saturday evening. 

As you can see I linked to the Fox News report on this because I knew they would put the connection to Michael Brown and Eric Garner front and center. And that is going to be the focus from conservative outlets going forward.

It is quite appropriate to report on those connections of course, but we all know that Fox and their Right Wing counterparts are going to make sure to focus on the shooters ethnicity and the online postings to suggest that the peaceful protests that have been taking place in New York and other places around the country are partly responsible for this shooting.

After all that is what they do.

And this gunman, who did a terrible and inexcusable thing, provided them with an early Christmas gift that they can now exploit in order to suggest that cops are dealing with animals on the streets and it is understandable that occasionally they utilize too much force in response to the constant fear that they could be murdered at any moment.

New study reveals that more than half of the people executed in this country are mentally ill. Oh my god!

Courtesy of the Washington Post:  

A new study by Robert J. Smith, Sophie Cull and Zoë Robinson, published in Hastings Law Journal, of the social histories of 100 people executed during 2012 and 2013 showed that the vast majority of executed offenders suffered from one or more significant cognitive and behavioral deficits. 

One-third of the offenders had intellectual disabilities, borderline intellectual function or traumatic brain injuries, a similarly debilitating impairment. For example, the Texas Department of Corrections determined that Elroy Chester had an IQ of 69. He attended special education classes throughout school and never functioned at a higher level than third grade. The state had previously enrolled Chester into its Mentally Retarded Offenders Program. Despite these findings, Texas executed him on June 12, 2013. 

More than half of the 100 had a severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder or psychosis. For example, for more than 40 years, Florida’s own psychiatrists found that John Ferguson suffered from severe mental illness. Ferguson had a fixed delusion that he was the “Prince of God” who could not be killed and would rise up after his execution and fight alongside Jesus to save the United States from a communist plot. When Ferguson was executed on Aug. 5, 2013, his last words were: “I just want everyone to know that I am the Prince of God and I will rise again.”

On Ferguson's belief that he was the "Prince of God," the Florida court stated that his delusions were "normal Christian beliefs." Which is very troubling but may be the result of how many Christians have been acting lately.

I am shocked by these statistics, even though I have long been aware that many mentally ill people are sent to prison as criminals, when instead they should be sent to psychiatric hospitals as patients.

I work this population all of the time and I can tell you that their behaviors can be incredibly challenging, especially those who are schizophrenic of have psychotic episodes.

However if they receive the care they need, and the medications they require, they can sometimes live reasonably happy and productive lives.

Throwing them into a cage and ultimately killing them for something they may have had no, or little, ability to control is inhumane and a travesty of justice.

But the problem is that this country has little problem shoveling piles of money into the prison system to warehouse the mentally ill, or execute them, yet balks at the money needed to prevent them from becoming criminals and providing the support they will need for their entire lives to enjoy the freedom that is their birthright as Americans.

Today's Atheist martyr.

This according to Wikipedia:

Kazimierz Łyszczyński was a nobleman, landowner, philosopher, and soldier in the service of the Sapieha family. For eight years he studied philosophy as a Jesuit and then became a supply judge (podsędek) in legal cases against the Jesuits concerning estates. 

Łyszczyński had read a book by Henry Aldsted entitled Theologia Naturalis, which attempted to prove the existence of divinity. But its arguments were so confused that Łyszczyński was able to infer many contradictions. Ridiculing Aldsted, Łyszczyński wrote in the book's margins the words "ergo non est Deus" ("therefore God does not exist"). 

This was discovered by one of Łyszczyński's debtors, Jan Kazimierz Brzoska, who was the nuncio of Brest in Poland or a Stolnik of Bracławice or Łowczy of Brześć. Brzoska, reluctant to return a great sum of money to him lent by Łyszczyński, accused the latter of being an atheist and gave the aforementioned work as evidence to Witwicki, bishop of Poznań. Brzoska also stole and delivered to the court a handwritten copy of De non existentia Dei, which was the first Polish philosophical treatise presenting reality from an atheistic perspective, and which Łyszczyński had been working on since 1674. Witwicki along with Załuski, bishop of Kiev, took up this case with zeal. 

The King attempted to help Łyszczyński by ordering that he should be judged at Vilna, but this could not save Łyszczyński from the clergy. Łyszczyński's first privilege as a Polish noble, that he could not be imprisoned before his condemnation, was violated. The Łyszczyński case was brought before the diet of 1689 where he was accused of having denied the existence of God and having blasphemed against the Virgin Mary and the saints. He was condemned to death for atheism. The sentence was carried out before noon in the Old Town Market in Warsaw, where his tongue was pulled out followed by a beheading. After that, his corpse was transported beyond the city borders and cremated.

For untold centuries the religious have done everything in their power to destroy any who would dare question of reality of their God. They have burned us, tortured us, hanged us, imprisoned us, for doing nothing more than using the brain that THEIR faith stated that THEIR God had gifted to mankind.

Would any loving God give a bird wings and then lock him in a cage, or a fish gills and then strand him on the shore, why give a man intelligence and demand that he not think?

And if such a God existed, would he be worthy of worship?

Seems fair.