Sunday, September 04, 2016


Australia: Multiculturalist shot dead during police chase




The deceased -- Etu Ahokava

Two men have fronted court, following a police pursuit through Melbourne's north, during which a 23-year-old Deer Park man was shot and killed by an officer.

The dramatic 40-minute chase through the city's west began 1am yesterday, after police spotted a car carrying three men suspected of involvement in a series of business burglaries.

The trio fled from police in a car before abandoning the vehicle in an industrial area in Tullamarine, running across a field and into a factory. With the assistance of a PolAir helicopter and the dog squad, police tracked them down.

The men allegedly stole at least two vehicles from inside the factory in a bid to evade police, and one suspect was isolated by a sergeant in a police car.

The sergeant got out of the car and was then pinned against a wall by one of the stolen vehicles.

“The offending vehicle has pinned the sergeant against a brick wall,” Mr Leane said.

“At that stage the sergeant has discharged his firearm. We believe there was four shots fired, one of them fatally wounding the man who was driving, what we say was a stolen vehicle, at that time.”

Two police officers were taken to hospital after the incident, with one sustaining an injury to his hand, another an injury to his leg.

“We thought the sergeant was seriously injured, we thought he may very well have a broken leg, but we’ve had some good news,” Mr Leane said.

“We are waiting for some x-rays but it may be he’s got some severe bone bruising.

“If that’s all he’s got he’s been very, very lucky.”

In a statement today, police said the 18-year-old had been charged with burglary, attempted burglary, theft of a motor car, criminal damage by fire, dangerous driving while pursued by police and reckless conduct endangering life.

The 22-year-old has been charged with burglary, theft of a motor car, dangerous driving while pursued by police, reckless conduct endangering life and handling stolen goods.

Both men appeared before a bail justice in an out of sessions hearing overnight and have been remanded in custody to appear at Melbourne Magistrates' Court today.

SOURCE







LOL. A new politically correct term for genetic inheritance:  "rubbing off"

Parents' math skills 'rub off' on their children

September 1, 2016 in Other Sciences / Social Sciences
Parents who excel at math produce children who excel at math. This is according to a recently released University of Pittsburgh study, which shows a distinct transfer of math skills from parent to child. The study specifically explored intergenerational transmission—the concept of parental influence on an offspring's behavior or psychology—in mathematic capabilities.

"Our findings suggest an intuitive sense for numbers has been passed down—knowingly or unknowingly—from parent to child. Meaning, essentially, the math skills of parents tend to 'rub off' on their children," said lead researcher Melissa E. Libertus, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and a research scientist in the University's Learning Research and Development Center. The Department of Psychology is within the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. "This research could have significant ramifications for how parents are advised to talk about math and numbers with their children and how teachers go about teaching children in classrooms."

Within the study, Pitt's researchers found that the performance levels for early school-aged children on standardized mathematic tests could be reliably predicted by their parent's performance on similar examinations. Specifically, they observed major correlations in parent-child performance in such key areas as mathematical computations, number-fact recall, and word problem analysis. Surprisingly, the researchers also found that children's intuitive sense of numbers—i.e. the ability to know that 20 jelly beans are more than 10 jelly beans without first counting them—is predicted by their parents' intuitive sense of numbers. Researchers determined that such close result parallels could not have been produced through similar institutional learning backgrounds because their previous research showed that this intuitive sense of numbers is present in infancy.

The findings represent the first evidence of intergenerational transmission of unlearned, nonverbal numerical competence from parents to children. While separate studies have pointed to the existence of intergenerational transmission of cognitive abilities, only a select few have examined parental influences in specific academic domains, such as mathematics.

Libertus said the study is an important step toward understanding the multifaceted parental influences on children's mathematic abilities. Her future studies will examine why this transference of mathematic capability occurs.

"We believe the relationship between a parent and a child's math capabilities could be some combination of hereditary and environmental transmission," said Libertus. "We look forward to future research endeavors that will explicitly examine the degree to which parents pass down key genetic traits and create an in-home learning environment that is conducive to producing high-achieving math students."

For the present study, the math abilities of parents and children were assessed using the appropriate subtests from the Woodcock-Johnson III Tests of Achievement, a nationally recognized standardized examination of baseline math ability. Children completed three subtests designed to gauge their capabilities in mathematical computations, basic number-fact recall, and word problems with visual aids. Parents completed a math fluency subtest as a measure of mathematical ability, and they were surveyed on the importance of children developing certain math skills.

The study sampled 54 children between the ages of 5 and 8 as well as 51 parents—46 mothers and five fathers—between the ages of 30 and 59. In terms of racial demographics of participating children, 45 were Caucasian, five biracial, three African American, and one Asian. Forty-six participating parents had at least a college degree, and all possessed at least a high school diploma.

A Pitt faculty member since 2013, Libertus' research focuses on the understanding of how children perceive and learn mathematical concepts. The long-range goals of her work seek to identify key factors in the successful learning of mathematics. Emily J. Braham, a doctoral student with a cognitive-neuroscience concentration in the Department of Psychology, assisted in this research study.

The study "Intergenerational Associations in Numerical Approximation and Mathematical Abilities" is available in the latest edition of Developmental Science.

SOURCE






Black Voters, er, Lives Matter to Democrats

The infamous hacker Guccifer 2.0 released hacked memos he claims came from Nancy Pelosi’s personal computer. She and her staff have denied the allegation, saying, “Leader Pelosi does not have a personal computer at the DCCC, so no hacked, dumped or doctored documents can be attributed to her computer.” In any case, the leaked memos reveal strategic guidance for Democrats as to how best to deal with the Black Lives Matter activist/agitator group. They advise Democrats to “partner” with the group and to “lead from behind,” but not to “co-opt” their movement. The memo warns Democrats to steer clear of using phrases such as “all lives matter” and “black-on-black crime.” You know, avoid saying true things.

Many of the demands of Black Lives Matter are outright racist, yet Democrat leadership views BLM as a movement that can help garner them more votes and support for their leftist causes. The problem is that because the BLM platform is so radical, Democrats risk looking too extreme should they be aligned too closely with BLM. In the meantime, they are content to show support for the radical movement, without getting their hands dirty, as it were.

The real story here is that the Democrat Party would want to so willingly identify itself with such a radical, racist group as Black Lives Matter. Then again, it should come as no surprise given Democrats' long, checkered history of supporting various radical and racist groups.

SOURCE






A Racial Conversation the Left Wishes to Avoid

Blacks are mired in an unendurable status quo engendered by Democrat policies

“It was a simple bump on the street,” she said. “They apologized, but the female did not accept the apology.” —Katia Toussaint, mother of Anthony Nazaire, who was stabbed to death at Cornell University following a brawl early Sunday morning.

While the talkingheads obsess over the antics of second-string NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick — a man so committed to fighting black “oppression” that he wore a Fidel Castro t-shirt at his post-game press conference and pigs-as-police socks during practice — the primary engine of black oppression remains unaddressed.

That engine? A thuggish element in the black community that has been glorified for years, and has turned inner cities into de facto war zones. War zones such as Chicago, where an astounding 400 people were shot and 78 killed in August alone, making it the deadliest month since October 1997.

Chicago is not alone. Baltimore just “celebrated” its 200th homicide of the year, making it the fifth consecutive year it has reached that dubious milestone. Yet as the Baltimore Sun notes, this represents an 11% decline in homicides compared to last year. That’s because 344 people were killed in Baltimore in 2015, making it the city’s highest-per capita rate ever.

One suspects the lack of another record-setting pace is scant comfort to those innocents caught in the maelstrom — a maelstrom overwhelmingly generated by inner city gangs.

“Their street or thug culture is real, with a configuration of norms, values and habits that are, disturbingly, rooted in a ghetto brand of core American mainstream values: hypermasculinity, the aggressive assertion and defense of respect, extreme individualism, materialism and a reverence for the gun, all inflected with a threatening vision of blackness openly embraced as the thug life,” writes Harvard sociology professor Orlando Patterson.

One suspects those toxic values — that have now bled beyond gangs into the greater minority culture — cost Anthony Nazaire his life.

Yet Patterson, like many of his fellow apologists, attributes this dysfunction to America’s track record of racism, dating back to the days of slavery. But as black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams have argued for years, black Americans were making steady progress in times that were far more challenging than today.

What changed? Prior to the “Great Society” project initiated by President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program was reserved for widows to fund once-married women who had lost the primary male supporter of the family. Johnson and Congress, however, changed the qualifications: any household where there was no male family head present became eligible for taxpayer subsidies.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the truth-telling Democrat who was branded a racist for doing so, accurately warned America — in 1966 — where the resultant decimation of the nuclear family would ultimately lead. He explained that any community “that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future … asks for and gets chaos.”

And today, the efforts of an ungrateful and misguided NFL quarterback and his fellow apologists are attempting to shift the blame for that chaos onto the police, who they paint as trigger-happy oppressors.

Not exactly. As the leftist Washington Post reveals, “only a small number of the shootings — roughly 5 percent — occurred under the kind of circumstances that raise doubt and draw public outcry.” The paper further notes that in 74% of fatal police shootings, “individuals had already fired shots, brandished a gun or attacked a person with a weapon or their bare hands,” and another 16% “came after incidents that did not involve firearms or active attacks but featured other potentially dangerous threats … most commonly of individuals who brandished knives and refused to drop them.”

What are the apologists trying to obscure? Inconvenient reality: 258 black Americans were killed by police gunfire in 2015. By contrast, nearly 6,000 black Americans were killed by their fellow black Americans.

Sadly, this is not a new phenomenon. “Between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the United States,” Jason Riley reveals. “The black arrest rate for most offenses — including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes — is still typically two to three times their representation in the population.”

Other pathologies abound as well. “Police say it was just one sucker punch to the head that killed Sincal Jochola,” reports CBS Philly. “He stumbled, hit the ground and the group, not even waiting a moment, runs away. Detectives are now looking into if this brutal attack could be part of that knockout game.”

That game is one “in which a young man — all the perps appear to be male people of color, mostly blacks — tries to literally knock out an innocent bystander with one blow,” explained black columnist Larry Elder in 2013. A game whose mention the mainstream media characterizes as overblown, despite author Colin Flaherty documenting its “coincidental” occurrence in more than 21 other cities.

The media have also attempted to cover up the existence of disproportionately black flash mobs that have participated in numerous robberies and attacks, some of which are race-based. And then there are just out-and-out black mobs, like the one that attacked white people during the most recent riot in Milwaukee. The same riot our “post-racial” president golfed his way through and maintained a steady silence about, even as his spokesman, Josh Earnest, defended Kaepernick’s anthem protest.

The same president who pals around with music moguls like Jay Z and Beyoncé, both of whom have made careers out of glorifying thug culture and ginning up anti-police sentiment.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder once castigated America as a “nation of cowards” when it comes to discussing racial matters. Yet there’s nothing more revealing than the firestorm directed at Donald Trump by Democrats and their media partners, all for having had the temerity to point out that the overwhelming majority of inner city dystopias have been run by Democrats for decades. What really set them off, however, was when Trump asked black Americans for their votes by posing a simple question: “What have you got to lose?”

That firestorm revealed that the real cowardice resides among progressives who will discuss race only within the parameters they themselves define. The truth “is condemned as hate speech simply because it exposes those who have done genocidal and horrific actions,” writes former congressman Allen West. “We must continue to challenge them at every turn.”

The alternative? “One big difference is that now, on the street, there is no fear,” stated retired Chicago Police Detective Ted O'Connor to Chicago Tribune reporter John Kass. “Even in the ‘90s, with all the killing, the gangs feared the police. When we’d show up, they’d run. But now? Now they don’t run. Now, there is no fear.”

Yes, there is, for the millions of inner city black Americans who continue to endure an unendurable status quo engendered by Democrat policies.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.

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