Showing posts with label PSYCHOLOGY. Show all posts

Thursday, July 6, 2017

Bill Cosby Retrial

© Gilbert Carrasquillo, WireImage Bill Cosby after his sexual assault case was declared a mistrial on June 17, 2017 in Norristown, Pa.
Bill Cosby will go on trial on sexual assault charges a second time in Pennsylvania on Nov. 6, a judge ordered Thursday.
Judge Steven O'Neill, who presided over Cosby's 11-day first trial which ended in a mistrial, ordered the second trial to take place in the same courthouse in Montgomery County outside Philadelphia.
Attorneys in the case, including District Attorney Kevin Steele and Cosby defense lawyers Brian McMonagle and Angela Agrusa, were ordered to notify witnesses and make them available to testify when needed.
O'Neill also ordered them to submit proposed jury questions and instructions no later than Oct. 30.
It is not clear where the jury will be selected; for the first trial, the judge and the lawyers traveled to Pittsburgh to pick a jury. Those 12, plus six alternatives, were then taken to Norristown, Pa., and sequestered for the trial, which included six days of testimony.
Cosby's lawyers rested their case after about five minutes and a few questions to a prosecution witness, signaling the Cosby defense strategy of arguing that prosecutors had failed to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
After the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict, following five days of deliberations for 52 hours, O'Neill declared a mistrial.
Cosby, who remains out on $1 million bond, is charged with three counts of aggravated indecent sexual assault stemming from an encounter with Andrea Constand at his home in Montgomery County in 2004. She says he drugged and molested her; he says their encounter was consensual.
Immediately after O'Neill declared the mistrial, on June 17, Steele told the court he intended to retry Cosby, a vow he repeated at a press conference later. He said Constand "deserved a verdict" in the case.
So far, several jurors have come forward, most anonymously, to talk about what happened in the jury room and why the seven men and five women could not agree on a verdict.
One juror, Bobby Dugan, 21, spoke to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and to ABC's Good Morning America, saying the jury tried hard, some to the point of tears, but were unable to convict Cosby for a common reason criminal trials fail, especially so long after the alleged crime.
"Evidence," he said. "We all said it a million times in the room. If there's other evidence, more substantial evidence, we would have had a better verdict than deadlock."
It is not clear what new evidence might be introduced by prosecutors at the new trial. But Steele could renew his motion to call as witnesses more of the five-dozen women who have accused Cosby of drugging and assaulting them in episodes dating back to the mid-1960s. Some of Cosby's accusers attended the first trial to support Constand.
For the first trial, O'Neill ruled that Steele could only call one such "prior bad acts" witness to testify against Cosby.
Related slideshow: Cosby's rise and fall (via Photo Services)

Slide 1 of 19

Full screen

1/19 SLIDES © Mel Evans/AP

Actor and comedian Bill Cosby has seen his once-iconic status badly tarnished with dozens of accusations of sexual assault, many dating back decades. Here's a look at Cosby, from his climb to stardom to his current troubles ...

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Charlotte police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott highlights racial divide in North Carolina city

There have been a lot of protests. Places where residents tire of seeing police only when teams of officers sweep in to make arrests, and remember well other blacks killed by police officers who did not face punishment.
Their anger at Scott's death made its way downtown. Rioting in Charlotte's center killed one protester, shattered windows and rattled finance executives whose salaries boost the city's median income to $10,000 above the national average. They told their workers in the skyscrapers to stay home.

To the protesters, home is a world away from those skyscrapers.
"For the people we serve, the Queen City is only the Queen City if you get on the train and ride into the glimmering, crystal core," said the Rev. Peter Wherry of Mayfield Memorial Missionary Baptist Church, about 5 miles from downtown.

Police officers face off with protestors on the I-85 (Interstate 85) during protests.
(Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

Nearly all of Charlotte lies in Mecklenburg County, which the U.S. Census Bureau estimated had the largest increase in the country in the percentage of people living in distressed neighborhoods during the first 15 years of this century — an index that combines unemployment, poverty rates and other items, like how many businesses close.
Those pockets of poverty aren't immediately evident. Charlotte doesn't have many stereotypical slums. Instead, lower-rent housing is in apartment complexes or condominiums nestled behind tree-lined roads or off the main thoroughfares.

That's the kind of place where Scott lived. Tracy McLean lived in the condominium complex just down the road; she said teams of police frequently come to the neighborhoods full of black and Latino families in a show of force, looking for suspects they often don't find, instead of talking to residents and getting to know them.
"The fear needs to be dispelled," Tracy McLean said. "It's fear, and it's ridiculous fear."
In the mid-1990s, as Charlotte pushed to become a world-class city, its leaders cracked down on crime with a heavy-handed police force. Longtime African-American residents remember James Cooper, a 19-year-old black man killed by a white officer in 1996 as he reached back in his car window during a traffic stop to check on his 4-year-old daughter. The officer said he thought he had a gun.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Al Sharpton V Guiliani

Crime

U.S.

World

Politics

NEXT ARTICLEDonald Trump would be terrible as president during racial tension

Al Sharpton: Improving police-community relationships starts with holding everyone — including cops — accountable for their actions

Al Sharpton: Rudy Giuliani clueless on police-community relations

BY Al Sharpton

SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Sunday, July 10, 2016, 8:16 PM

Sharpton says he was troubled by Giuliani's recent remarks.
(MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS)

Following last week’s tragedies in Louisiana, Minnesota and Texas, New York City’s former Mayor Rudy Giuliani made some shocking comments, including stating that black children have a 99% chance of killing each other.
The reality is, blacks are killed by other black people a majority of the time, just as whites are killed by whites a majority of the time.
But what his words show is an appalling lack of understanding of the notion that the issue of fighting crime in black and brown neighborhoods must include the fact that police crime embellishes the chaos in those communities and must be dealt with as well. It is that repeated and documented pattern of profiling, excessive force and shootings by police that we see in our communities and not in others. If we are to ever solve the issue of crime, we must tackle all crime — including crime committed by those who wear a badge.
My organization, National Action Network, has dedicated over 25 years toward fighting for social justice and equality across the board. That struggle includes reducing crime and uplifting our communities on every level. In addition to holding gun buyback events, we’ve coordinated programs like “Occupy The Corner” in cities like Chicago in order to help diffuse shootings. The residents of that community, and others around the nation, fully understand the challenges facing them, which includes the manner in which law enforcement sometimes interacts with them.

We cannot have neighborhoods under siege by both those that may be doing criminal acts and by those that are supposed to be protecting citizens from danger. Society can no longer ignore the fact that policing in white communities is starkly different than it is in communities of color.

NYC PAPERS OUT. Social media use restricted to low res file max 184 x 128 pixels and 72 dpi — Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani doesn't understand the impact that police crime has on neighborhoods of color, Sharpton says.

A clear example of this disparity is when the stop-and-frisk program was heavily touted and implemented in places like New York City. According to the NYCLU, a weapon was found only in 1.8% of blacks and Latinos who were frisked, but was found in 3.8% of whites who were frisked.
Despite stats like this, the number of stops of young black men exceeded the entire population of young black men in the city itself. That is just outrageous. When things like profiling, pulling people over disproportionately, searching people walking down the street excessively, locking people up unreasonably and shooting people unnecessarily are all realities, then we have a severe problem in this country.
We must have a sincere commitment to address crime not only on one side (while excusing crimes on your own side), but as it takes place whether at the hands of a citizen or someone in uniform. Blacks don’t make excuses about their communities, therefore police, officials and ex-officials shouldn’t make excuses for those officers that cross the line and abuse their power.

According to The Guardian’s data tracker, “The Counted,” 136 Black people have been killed by police in 2016 alone. Ask yourself, how many cops have gone to jail or even been remotely held accountable?

https://www.facebook.com/100007611243538/videos/1690073837922975/?pnref=story — Philando Castile's death helped fuel rage throughout the nation.
(Lavish Reynolds via Facebook)

Rather than choosing which crimes we want to focus on, there should be a total commitment to all crimes. To exclude alleged police abuse and misconduct is not the answer — it only adds to the problem. This isn’t about taking sides, but rather it is about having a society that’s crime free from both bad officers and bad citizens. Police should enforce the law, but they are not above it.
I have never been one that justifies black-on-black crime. I’ve preached at many funerals, including that of a 4-year-old who was shot and killed by a stray bullet. I have seen the anguish and pain in a parent’s eyes firsthand after such a tragedy. But I have also seen the same pain when a parent loses a loved one at the hands of those who were supposed to serve and protect them. I have stood alongside grieving mothers, fathers and grandparents who cannot comprehend how their child was shot and killed for reaching for a wallet, for simply walking down the street, for just driving home or a slew of other unfathomable and unjustifiable reasons. Just like we arrest and charge criminals, we must arrest and charge the bad cops so that there is accountability and fairness under the law.
Anytime someone says that you shouldn’t question police or the system, then the nation loses. We fight and march when there is an anti-gay killing in Orlando, when there is a black-on-black killing, when nine Church members are shot and killed in a hate crime and when police break the law or are alleged to have broken the law.

If we genuinely want to improve relations between law enforcement and the communities they serve, then we must have the consistency to hold everyone responsible for his or her actions in order to heal society. Otherwise, we’re simply shifting blame and that is a delay tactic none of us can afford.
Sharpton is founder of the National Action Network.

Saturday, June 20, 2015

Suspect in Massacre Faces Grief and Mercy

Among those fatally shot were, top row from left: Susie Jackson; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton; DePayne Doctor; Ethel Lance; bottom row from left: Tywanza Sanders; Cynthia Hurd; Clementa Pinckney and Daniel Simmons Sr. The ninth victim, not pictured, was Myra Thompson.

Senator Lindsey Graham attended a vigil on Friday at the College of Charleston for the victims of Wednesday’s church shootings. — Among those fatally shot were, top row from left: Susie Jackson; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton; DePayne Doctor; Ethel Lance; bottom row from left: Tywanza Sanders; Cynthia Hurd; Clementa Pinckney and Daniel Simmons Sr. The ninth victim, not pictured, was Myra Thompson.

Friday, January 16, 2015

CCC-Old Event

Children’s Services Council of St. Lucie County

2014 Summer learning Funding Request Form

Pg 1

Q1 The first three weeks will focus on increasing reading comprehension and vocabulary, as well as “understanding that cultural speak(ghetto or cultural dialect) has its’ place, but speaking a common language allows us to communicate, and be understood in business places.

Use of the arts (drawing to skits) in group work, as well as manipulatives for expressing and processing information learned in readings, and math is also useful as an evaluating tool. The students responsibility for learning, and ‘doing your very best at all times’ is stressed each morning during “Rap Time.” The Rap time Sessions are to build self esteem and have student in put what was done the day before and how it could have been done better.

Focus on the proper way to use a dictionary, reaching conclusions based on research, current events and the history that affects our communities is our basic curriculum. Responses in writing, verbal presentations, and visuals using the format taught is interesting and empowering as the student becomes enthusiastic because the issues are relevant and age sensitive. This summer experience is meant to instill a positive outlook on learning as a tool for progress, and to influence the student’s out look on lifelong learning. Youth, especially, are visual learners and will have additional tools for learning thus decreasing summer learning loss.

8 to 8:45 am **Rap session (input and inspirational time) Continental

Breakfast.

8:45 to 9:15 am *Review of vocabulary words in groups of 5, use of dictionary,

write unfamiliar words in journal. Social Studies Topic

9:15 to 10:00 am *Reading and discussion of a social issue.

10:00 to 10:30 am Break, refreshments

10:30 to 12:00pm Recreation, - step dancing, singing, rap (preparation for a

talent show)

12:00 to 12:30pm Lunch

12:30 to 1:30 Chess, Basketball, drill

1:30 to 3:00pm *Rap Session; Review of lesson by each group. Visuals and

demonstrations reflecting the lesson. Written remarks about

the days’ lesson, and student selection of groups with best

presentation.

3:00 to 3:30pm Break, refreshments

3:30 to 5:00pm **Historical DVD’s Video / Research/Discussion.

Saturday Young Lady of the Nile/ Young Men of Color, An Endangered Species. Two youth empowerment programs. ( Respect for self, elders and authority) 10 am to 1pm. $5:00 per child.

**Testing before and after summer program.

Saturday, November 1, 2014

The Wizard By Daniel Mendelsohn

The Wizard

Daniel Mendelsohn

March 25, 2010 Issue

The Wizard by Daniel Mendelsohn | The New York Review of Books

www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/mar/25/

Avatar

a film directed by James Cameron

MGM/Photofest

Dorothy and her friends on their way to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, 1939

"But of course, when you see Avatar, what overwhelms you is what the technology accomplishes—not only the battles and robots, to be fair, but all the other marvelous stuff, the often overwhelmingly beautiful images of a place that exists somewhere over the rainbow. "

All this would be well and good enough, in its ecofable, Pocahontas -esque way, but for the fact that Cameron is the wrong man to be making a film celebrating the virtues of pre- technological societies. As, indeed, he has no intention of doing here. For as the admiring scientists—led by a chain-smoking, tough-talking woman called Grace Augustine, played by Sigourney Weaver (the chain-smoking is an in-joke: Ripley had the same bad habit)—protest to the trigger-happy Marines, Na’vi civilization is in fact technologically sophisticated: by means of a pistil-tipped appendage, wittily described by Crain as a kind of USB cable, which plugs into similar appendages on both plants and animals, they can commune not only with other creatures but with what constitutes a planet-wide version of a technology with which we today are very preoccupied. “Don’t you get it?” an exasperated Dr. Augustine shouts at the corporate and military yahoos who clearly intend to blow all the Na’vi to kingdom come. “It’s a network—a global network!”

Dr. Augustine goes on to describe how, by means of the pistil-thing, the Na’vi can upload and download memories, information, and so forth—and can even communicate with their dead. One such upload to Eywa herself, transmitted through the Tree of Souls by Jake’s avatar, will, in the end, help lead the Na’vi and their furry friends to victory over the human exploiters. (This, of course, is the Dances with Wolves paradigm.)
In its confused treatment of that favorite Cameron preoccupation—the relationship between the natural and the technological worlds—the film, for all its richly imagined and dazzlingly depicted beauties, runs into deep and revealing trouble. As we know by now, Cameron’s real attraction, as a writer and a director, has always been for the technologies that turn humans into superhumans. However “primitive” they have seemed to some critics, the Na’vi—with their uniformly superb, sleekly blue-gleaming physiques, their weirdly infallible surefootedness, their organic connector cables, their ability to upload and download consciousness itself—are the ultimate expression of his career-long striving to make flesh mechanical. The problem here is not a patronizingly clichéd representation of an ostensibly primitive people; the problem is the movie’s intellectually incoherent portrayal of its fictional heroes as both admirably precivilized and admirably hypercivilized, as atechnological and highly technologized. Avatar ‘s desire to have its anthropological cake and eat it too suggests something deeply unself-aware and disturbingly unresolved within Cameron himself.
And how not? He is, after all, a Hollywood giant who insists on seeing himself as a regular Joe—a man with what he called, in the New Yorker interview, a “blue-collar sensibility”; more to the point, he is a director whose hugely successful mass entertainments cost hundreds of millions of dollars obligingly provided by deep-pocketed corporations—a “company” man, whether he knows it or not. And these shows depend for their effects—none more than Avatar—on the most sophisticated technologies available, even as that director tells himself that the technology that is the sine qua non of his technique isn’t as important as people think; that, in fact, what makes Avatar special is the “human interest” story, particularly the love story between Jake and Neytiri:

Too much is being said about the technology of this film. Quite frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass how a film is made. It’s an emotional story. It’s a love story. They’re not expecting that. The sci-fi/fantasy fans see the trailer and they think, Cool—battles, robots. What you really need to get to is, Oh, it’s that [a love story], too.

But of course, when you see Avatar, what overwhelms you is what the technology accomplishes—not only the battles and robots, to be fair, but all the other marvelous stuff, the often overwhelmingly beautiful images of a place that exists somewhere over the rainbow.

Will an "<b>Inquiry</b> Letter" Find You a Job?

MY COMMENTS***************************************************************

I liked this article by Daniel Mendelsohn very much. It encompassed many of the movies that I have watched over many years. He was able to go into many for the things that I did not even see or think about when many of James Cameron's films came out. Especially the mentioning of "The Terminator" films.

Of course I did note the "aggressor verses the natives" plotline, which we all have seen many times before. But the writes Mendelsohn also mentions how critics brought up things such as that, rather than bring up the special effects, the technology and many more images and underlying elements of James Cameron films.

One of the underlying features was a man wanting or becoming like a machine aspect which was brought up. This I did not see or think about, even though in "Terminator 2" it was brought up. The young John Connor emulating the cyborg that protects him was something I thought was cute but did not see into it. Being a science fiction fan, I took that at face value and did not look into it other than being the back plot to the main storyline.

There are always scenes or scripts written that deal with a variety of issues in movies and books. That is a given. I need to pay more attention to why it is being done, and what meaning these things have in our society, in my life, and its meaning in general.. Of course, I am there to enjoys the movie as well. So I must check things out a little more before leaving the theatre. It is always good to learn a little something.

Sekou Williams

Thursday, July 6, 2017

Bill Cosby Retrial

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Charlotte police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott highlights racial divide in North Carolina city

Police officers face off with protestors on the I-85 (Interstate 85) during protests.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Al Sharpton V Guiliani

Al Sharpton: Improving police-community relationships starts with holding everyone — including cops — accountable for their actions

Sharpton says he was troubled by Giuliani's recent remarks.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani doesn't understand the impact that police crime has on neighborhoods of color, Sharpton says.

Philando Castile's death helped fuel rage throughout the nation.

Saturday, June 20, 2015

Suspect in Massacre Faces Grief and Mercy

In Charleston, Raw Emotion at Hearing for Suspect in Church Shooting

Friday, January 16, 2015

CCC-Old Event

Saturday, November 1, 2014

The Wizard By Daniel Mendelsohn

The Wizard by Daniel Mendelsohn | The New York Review of Books

Avatar

Thursday, July 6, 2017

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Police officers face off with protestors on the I-85 (Interstate 85) during protests.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Sharpton says he was troubled by Giuliani's recent remarks.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani doesn't understand the impact that police crime has on neighborhoods of color, Sharpton says.

Philando Castile's death helped fuel rage throughout the nation.

Saturday, June 20, 2015

Victims’ Families Address Dylann Roof

Charleston’s Shifting Population

Friday, January 16, 2015

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Avatar