Criminals

Scorpions

For the past few days, the news in Memphis has been dominated by the reported abduction of a school teacher who was kidnapped while out for an early morning jog. Her abduction was caught on tape and the story was made even more compelling since she is the granddaughter of a philanthropist billionaire. Her body was positively identified this morning, found less than a mile from her accused abductor. The cause of death hasn’t been released, but we can all assume that it wasn’t due to COVID. I’m also guessing that there will be evidence of sexual abuse.

The man accused from abducting her is Cleotha Abston.

Abston has quite the lengthy criminal history, dating back to when he was just 12 with charges including aggravated assault with a weapon and rape, all before the age of 16. Then, just after his 16th birthday, he graduated to the big leagues when he kidnapped a prosecuting attorney Kemper Durand at gunpoint in 2001, before forcing the man into the trunk of his car. Abston drove Durand around in the trunk of the stolen car for hours before taking him to a gas station ATM in order to force Durand to withdraw money.

Durand would later testify in court that he believed he would be murdered after the withdrawal. As luck would have it, an armed guard happened to enter the gas station during the robbery, and Durand would plea for help. Abston was convicted of the kidnapping and sentenced to 24 years in prison after being tried as an adult. He was released less than two years ago. In the two years since being released, neighbors have referred to him as the “creepy pervert” living down the street. He stayed with his brother, who is also a convicted felon (armed robbery). I mention the brother because he was also arrested last week for possession of drugs with intent (fentanyl and heroin) and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. (I wonder why they didn’t add possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, which would add a 5 year minimum under Federal law. We don’t need more gun laws, we need to enforce the ones we have.)

On Monday, Abston was arrested on charges of identity theft, theft of property under $1,000 and fraudulent use of a credit card, all unrelated to Ms Fletcher’s violent abduction. I’m sure they are about to add first degree murder to that list of charges.

Isn’t it time that we admit that blacks are largely a race of criminals who have a pathological inability to live in civilized society? It’s well documented that more than half of all homicides and nearly half of all violent crimes, are committed by blacks. In Memphis, the chances of becoming a victim of violent crime are 1 in 119, compared to 1 across 341 in Tennessee.

If the young teacher in this case had been willing to admit this fact, she would not have been out jogging in the early hours of the morning. I’m sure that she felt safe, but safety is an illusion. I’ve said this before: Stay away from areas where blacks congregate. Stay out of the cities, and be armed at all times.

As for Mr Abston, I wonder how attached his victim’s grandfather was to her. If I were a billionaire philanthropist and someone murdered my granddaughter, I would find a way to let someone in the jail know that, should her killer meet a particularly painful death in the prison, there would be some kind of reward coming. I might even see if I could arrange for the prison guards to assist in the effort. Justice would be done, and vengeance would be mine.

Isn’t it time that we had enough of this bleeding heart shit?

By Divemedic, ago

Cops Stealing PMs

This man sued PA cops because they took his silver coins and bullion. Note that the suit wasn’t dropped because it didn’t have merit. It was dropped because the man just couldn’t do it any longer.

I have a problem with how it all went down:

Because of Schifter’s rambling and vague answers plus a record showing arrests in three states, Conrad sought permission to search the RV.

It was denied due to six dogs in the RV. Asked if he would allow a search were it not for the dogs, he said no.

So no probable cause, they asked to search and were denied. So far, I don’t have a problem.

A search was conducted after Conrad’s drug detection dog had an alert at the front and passenger side of the RV. That is when the cash, bullion, coins and jewelry were discovered.

The entire thing of drug dogs alerting is bullshit. It is long past time for drug dogs to be eliminated as probable cause.

Dogs are very good at reading people. They know that if they give their handler what he wants, they get a reward. If the cop wants the dog to alert on a car, the dog will alert on a car. There was one study that actually supported that, but once the study was published, cops have refused to participate in any more studies unless those studies are being performed by pro-policing organizations.

Cops don’t even keep records of how often dogs alert to drugs and then no drugs are found. The police say:

“There’s been cars that my dog’s hit on… and just because there wasn’t a product in it, doesn’t mean the dog can’t smell it,” says Gunnar Fulmer, a K9 officer with the Walla Walla Police Department. “[The drug odor] gets permeated in clothing, it gets permeated in the headliners in cars.”

The problem here is obvious- even giving the dog the benefit of the doubt, probable cause means that the search is being done because drugs are probably there. What the cop in the above quote is saying is that by alerting, the dog is indicating that drugs may have been there at some time in the past. The dog indicates the odor of drugs, but not the presence of drugs. That isn’t the same thing and shouldn’t be enough to trigger a warrantless search of someone’s property.

Anyhow, back to the story at hand.

The silver was seized and taken to the state police barracks in Milton where Schifter claimed he had bought them periodically over the past several months at Nevada Coin and Jewelry but did not have any receipts.

Contact was made with the manager of the business who said Schifter always paid cash.

A review of receipts that were obtained revealed eight purchases for silver bullion between Oct. 17 and Dec. 19, 2019, totaling $64,904. One was in the name of the woman with him and the others in his.

That should have been the end of it. If they can’t prove that he bought the coins with the results of criminal enterprise in court, that is the end of it.

There were suspicions of money laundering because an ion scan indicated the cash had been in close proximity of high levels of methamphetamine.

We aren’t talking about cash. Where did cash enter this story? Just bad reporting. Are they saying that Schifter had cash on him that tested positive for drug residue? So what, most of the money in the nation does.

This is nothing more than theft. The government is out to steal your possessions. Asset forfeiture is theft. It is unconstitutional, but the courts don’t care about that.

By Divemedic, ago

Mayor Wants Gun Free Zone

Buddy Dyer, the Mayor of Orlando, wants to declare all of downtown Orlando to be a “gun free zone” but is upset that he cannot do so, thanks to the state’s preemption law.

Dyer said there will be access checkpoints on Friday and Saturday evenings downtown to limit how people can enter the downtown area. The city said patrons will have to go through metal detectors and a weapons check at these checkpoints before walking into the access areas.

I believe that this zone is a clear violation of Florida’s preemption law. What’s more is that violating this law places Orlando and any of its officials at risk of a lawsuit. Even more, since the quote in this news article shows that the mayor knew it was illegal to do so, he becomes liable to any taxpayer whose rights are violated.

If any county, city, town, or other local government violates this section, the court shall declare the improper ordinance, regulation, or rule invalid and issue a permanent injunction against the local government prohibiting it from enforcing such ordinance, regulation, or rule. It is no defense that in enacting the ordinance, regulation, or rule the local government was acting in good faith or upon advice of counsel.
 If the court determines that a violation was knowing and willful, the court shall assess a civil fine of up to $5,000 against the elected or appointed local government official or officials or administrative agency head under whose jurisdiction the violation occurred.

So my question here is this: Are there any pro gun organizations who are willing to take this on?

By Divemedic, ago

Buy Backs

Not those buybacks. Nope, after selling all of our oil reserves to the Chinese, the US is now planning to buy back 60 million barrels of oil at a future date.

The call for bids on the initial 60 million barrels “will take place in the fall of 2022 to secure delivery in future years when prices are anticipated to be significantly lower than they are today,” according to the press release.

I wonder if the press will investigate just who is making money on this deal. We already know that Hunter Biden is an investor in the company that is buying US oil, and I am wondering if he is an investor in the company that will be selling it back. I would also be interested to know if the deal is still “ten percent for the big guy.”

Can you imagine what the press would have done if Trump had been involved in a deal like this?

By Divemedic, ago

The Rest of the Story

Radio personality Paul Harvey used to do a bit called “The Rest of the Story” where he would tell a story. The end of the story would have a surprise ending, revealing a connection that the listener wouldn’t suspect. He would then close with the tagline: “Now you know… the rest of the story.” In homage to that show:

Stop me if you have heard this story before. New York police attempted to arrest a 21 year old man for driving with a suspended license. His 30 year old brother tries to physically prevent the arrest. Before it is over, 16 cops wind up involved. At the end of the day, the 30 year old brother winds up dead, and two cops are injured, one with a broken kneecap, and one with fractures in his back. The year was 1978, and the man’s name was Arthur Miller.

The son of that 30 year old man, Lamor Miller-Whitehead, was only six months old when his father died. Whitehead was arrested in a $2 million identity theft scam in 2006. When he was arrested, he was wearing a long mink coat like some bad 1970’s stereotype.

Whitehead and former girlfriend Valerie Rodriguez had access to personal identifying information of customers of the Honda dealership where she worked. They created fake email accounts and voicemail boxes using stolen identifying information, filled out fraudulent loan applications, and bought cars with the proceeds.

He was was convicted of one count of Scheme to Defraud in the First Degree, one count of Attempted Grand Larceny in the Second Degree, thirteen counts of Identity Theft in the First Degree, and two counts of Identity Theft in the Third Degree. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

He served five before being granted parole. (He claims that his conviction was overturned, but I can find no evidence of that. In fact, every one of the many appeals that he filed was denied, at least that I could find.)

Whitehead founded his own church when he got out of prison in 2013, and gave himself the title of “Bishop” just two years later. As the leader of this church, it appears as though the charity most favored by Whitehead’s church was Whitehead himself; he regularly drove the church owned vehicles: a Maserati, a $350,000 Rolls-Royce, and a Bentley. His church has over a million online followers, who he regularly urges to vote for politicians that he favors.

Whitehead is also a “community organizer” and has donated large sums to political causes. One politician that he favors is close friend Hizzoner Eric Adams, the mayor of NYC. In fact, he has called the mayor his “mentor” and is frequently seen with him.

It’s obvious what is happening here, at least to me. This guy is a scam artist, a convicted felon, and con man. He is using his fake church to con people out of money, then donating it to politicians so that they will look the other way. This is what community organizing is: criminals donating dirty money to corrupt politicians. If it seems like the criminals are running this country, that’s because they are.

Still, let’s stick with Whitehead’s story. So here we have a convict parolee who is running a fake church while driving multiple cars worth $300K apiece, while wearing ten thousand dollar outfits adorned with hundreds of thousands of dollars in jewelry.

Whitehead and his wife

That’s why I really don’t care that members of his flock decided to redistribute some of his property at gunpoint during a livestream of a church service.

Now you know the rest of the story.

By Divemedic, ago

Question to Ask

A person who gets elected to the House of Representatives receives a salary of $155,000 per year. Prior to being elected, they lived with their mother while working as a bartender and were fighting the foreclosure of their home. 29 months after assuming office, they have a net worth of $29 million. This person now owns 6 homes, 5 Cars, 2 Luxury Yachts, has cash reserves of over $3 Million and a stock portfolio that is valued at $15 million.

I am of course talking about AOC. The question I think we should all be asking is- how do you increase your net worth by over $1 million a month when your salary is only $13,000 a month?

She is a self described socialist, yet drives 5 cars with a combined value of half a million dollars: a Mercedes-Benz GLA, an Audi Q2, a BMW X7 ($100,000), a Mercedes-Benz EqC (valued at $140,000), and a BMW X8 ($200,000).

By Divemedic, ago

Government Beat Down

An Atlanta Patient Advocate at the VA (a government employee) brutally beat a 73 year old veteran. He still has a job there.

If this is how they treat citizens now, think of how things will be if the citizens are disarmed. You will also note that it is a black man beating the shit out of a white man, but not one of the articles on this event make a single mention of race. If it were reversed, how would the stories read?

By Divemedic, ago

Criminals Running the Place

Congresswoman Corrine Brown was convicted of fraud and tax evasion for running a fraudulent children’s charity and then using the money for her own benefit. She was sentenced to five years in Federal prison. She was let out after only two because of COVID.

Her conviction was later overturned because a juror told the judge that God came to her in a dream and said the congresswoman was innocent, so he replaced her.

Before she could be tried again, she reached a plea deal to plead guilty to one charge of tax evasion.

Now a convicted felon, she is running for office again. Many blacks will vote for her, because for all of the talk that we hear about wanting to eliminate racism, she is black.

By Divemedic, ago

The Problem

So I asked in a previous post, what are police good for? Today we ask why mass shootings have become such a problem? The root of the problem lies with a movement that started out west in California during 1955. I am referring to deinstitutionalization.

Deinstitutionalization began in 1955 with the widespread introduction of chlorpromazine, commonly known as Thorazine, the first effective antipsychotic medication, and received a major impetus 10 years later with the enactment of federal Medicaid and Medicare. Deinstitutionalization has two parts: the moving of the severely mentally ill out of the state institutions, and the closing of part or all of those institutions.

In 1975, the Supreme court ruled that people cannot be involuntarily committed to a mental institution unless it could be proven that they were a danger to themselves or others. That high bar caused many mental patients to be released from the country’s public mental hospitals. With no patients, those facilities ceased to exist.

The entire idea was to use medications to manage mental illness and make the mentally ill well enough to live amongst the rest of society. The problem with this theory is that many people with mental illness don’t take their medications, either because they can’t afford them, or they simply don’t take them. The medications, especially first generation antipsychotics like Thorazine, carry a huge number of serious side effects, so many of those who are supposed to take them wind up self medicating with street drugs, alcohol, or both. In fact, 80 percent of the most severely mentally ill are never able to manage their illness and slowly slide into an endless cycle of prison, psychiatric facilities, halfway houses, homelessness, then back to prison.

Psychotic people often can’t maintain a job, are addicted to drugs or alcohol, and find it impossible to maintain interpersonal relationships. So they fall out of society. They wind up homeless, they cycle in and out of prison, and there are no real answers that protect society or the mentally ill.

Then you add the war on drugs with their minimum prison sentences to the mix, and mentally unstable people get tossed out of jail to make room for drug offenders. Most of those who were deinstitutionalized from the nation’s public psychiatric hospitals were severely mentally ill. Between 50 and 60 percent of them were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Because of this, deinstitutionalization has helped create the mental illness crisis we are seeing now by discharging people from public psychiatric hospitals without ensuring that they received the medication and rehabilitation services necessary for them to live successfully in the community.

Deinstitutionalization further exacerbated the situation because, once the public psychiatric beds had been closed, they were not available for people who later became mentally ill, and this situation continues up to the present. Consequently, approximately 2.2 million severely mentally ill people do not receive any psychiatric treatment.

The connection between deinstitutionalization and incarceration is all too obvious. In 1978, the prison population was about 25,000. In 1980, that had grown to 501,886. In 1995, there were 1,587,791 people in US prisons, and 30 percent of the prison population were designated as needing mental health services.

In the last several years, California engaged in mental health deinstitutionalization 2.0. This time it was Gov. Brown who pushed for sweeping new laws. Measures approved by the Legislature and voters have drastically changed the legal landscape and reduced prison and jail populations. By the end of his tenure, prison population in California had fallen by almost a third.

As the jails and prisons emptied, homelessness jumped. Now, approximately a quarter of all people experiencing homelessness in this country reside in California. And while there are fewer inmates, the prevalence and severity of the mental illness among prisoners has increased. Astonishingly, in just four years, the number of people in California who were deemed incompetent to stand trial has increased by 60 percent, straining courts and state hospitals.

It’s a serious issue. Approximately 14.8 million people in the United States have severe mental illness. We emptied out the mental hospitals, and many of the former patients wound up in prison or in homeless camps. Now they are clearing out the prisons, so we can expect to see more and more attacks by people who are mentally ill. Since there are not enough mental health services, many people who would have been identified and institutionalized before they could hurt anyone now slip through the cracks, unnoticed.

America doesn’t have a gun problem. It has a mental health problem, and it is getting worse. America is sliding into madness, a phenomenon that Heinlein referred to as “the crazy years.”

Much of this post is the research I did for a paper that I wrote for a public health class I am taking for my BSN. It was interesting enough to me that I put some of the things that are inappropriate for school into a post, and the result is what you see here. This isn’t even a rough draft of the paper, just disjointed facts that are part of my process.

By Divemedic, ago