Ceasefire: Throwing Money on a Blood Soaked Street

Ceasefire was ceased back in March of 2015.   That means simply that Ceasefire received no more State Money from us to them.

Ceasefire's web page commands, Cure Violence.  Well, Ceasefire is smoked, salted, honeyed and cured like any great piece of pork and it is done.

Now, the Illinois voices that depend upon Illinois Alzheiner's (IA) are calling for the return of cash to Ceasefire $$$$$$. Illinois Alzheimer's- voters forget everything, every screwing, every promise, every election.  IA is the only explanation for the continued public life of Dick Durbin, Jan Schakowsky, Mike Quigley, Forrest Claypool, Toni Preckwinkle, 90% of the Chicago City Council and the guy from over by Midway, what runs the State. IA allows Ralph Martire to continue to pie-chart Illinois into the poor house.  IA allows Lisa Madigan to shine the light on workers and not the real gonifs - SEE Above.

Illinois Alzeheimers is chronic, progressive and fatal.

IA comes from being a person of normal intelligence, generous sentiments and modest income being too afraid to tell his neighbors, that 'No, I do not think that Andy Shaw is not a goof, I do believe that WBEZ is as lame as Derrick Rose, I am not with Hillary, Abortion is always killing a baby and the Sun Times is the Tribune with more wasted space.'

This fear being termed a Tea Party Palin-ite, Earth Hating, Meat Eating, Cretinous Downton Abbey Ignorant, Trumper Bumper Sticker, Racist Homophobe is all too real and has made all of us afraid to speak our minds and our expeinces, for fear that Bill Moyers will pop out the bushes and DEFINE US!  Being defined by other people who need social reassurances verfied by WTTW, only hurts once.  You get over it. It gets better and that is the Savage Truth.


Now, Ceasefire is back on the tongues of people taking the Metra to the Merc, looking for great seats to Hamilton and finding just the right candelabra for the last picnics of the summer at Ravinia.

Only last night I heard a jazz fan at the Serbian Village, a Chicago Police Officer say, " Ceasefire will get funded, but cops will get railroaded out of existence."  I agreed and we listened to the music, Waiting for the Train to Come In.

Rich Miller's Capitol Fax Blog - the Illinois Clearing House of Budget Scams and Legislation lashing, is all in for Ceasefire. Miller offers a hand-wringing lament over the numbers of Chicago's fallen citizens,

Today’s number: 425
Monday, Aug 22, 2016
* Tribune…
Through Sunday, 425 people were slain in Chicago, up 50 percent from 283 in a year-earlier period, according to official police statistics. During the same period, shooting incidents rose by 48 percent to 2,136, up from 1,443, the data show.
Other violent crimes such as sexual assaults, robberies and aggravated batteries also have spiked by double digits.
- Posted by Rich Miller      

and opens the door for commentary by lobbyists and Democratic operatives around Illinois

 - uptown progressive - Monday, Aug 22, 16 @ 11:11 am:
There is no magic bullet - but in my community we lost CeaseFire funding (violence interrupters) and the CCBYS funding (crisis intervention with at-risk youth) was greatly reduced. No expansion in youth employment opportunities or for fully funded afterschool programing. These programs do make a difference.

Examples, please?  No?

 - Earnest - Monday, Aug 22, 16 @ 11:31 am:
>These programs do make a difference.
If only Rauner worried that his intentional destruction of the social service system could result in him appearing “soft on crime.”

Examples, please,  of Ceasefire bringing thug violence to a $hit-screaming halt? One deep thinker lamented the fact that blood is not spilled in Switzerland Chicago -

- cassandra - Monday, Aug 22, 16 @ 12:02 pm:
Let’s not forget that some parts of Chicago are said to be a safe as Switzerland, and those of us who live in or near Chicago know which these (predominantly white, upper-middle-class) areas are.
Chicago is deeply segregated, by race and economic status. More police and social services and persuading more folks to get married may help around the edges, but it is persistent segregation which must be addressed–and isn’t being addressed adequately at any level of goverment. Too risky for our political masters, I guess.

Well, Ride the Nine Down on my Broad Manly White Ass!   I live in Geneva!  Morgan Park!

That same Monday morning, The Better Government Association's Andy Shaw thundered loudly for all of us to "Think Ouside the Box" on thug violence ( often referred to as gun, or police violence in the Media), including opening the coffers to Tio Hardiman's Ceasefire Interrupters and Gang-banger Alumni Association

Are there any solutions?  While we’re waiting for City Hall and CPD to implement reforms spelled out several months ago in a task force report, including a new agency to replace the ineffectual Independent Police Review Authority, other well- intentioned suggestions are surfacing:
Veteran Chicago journalist Jim O’Shea, writing in the Sun-Times, encourages CPD to resurrect the Cease Fire program that enlists former gang members and ex-convicts to work with police to curb violence.
O’Shea points to the program’s impact over the July 4th weekend in Englewood last year—no homicides or shootings—compared with 11 shootings this year, after the program was sidelined by insufficient funding and CPD’s reluctance to work with the group.
“City officials and the Chicago Police Department,” O’Shea writes, “seem willing to try anything to stop the violence…except something that actually works.”

Los Angeles police chief Charlie Beck and civil rights lawyer Connie Rice, writing in the New York Times, argue for the kind of sophisticated community policing that’s reduced violence in some of LA’s toughest sections.
Success, they write, depends on communities cooperating with “humane, compassionate, culturally fluent cops who have a mind set of respect, do not fear black men, and serve long enough to know residents’ names, speak their language and help improve their neighborhoods.”

Microphone!!!!!!!

Ceasefire has done . . .nothing to stop, curb. or hinder thug violence.

LA is not Chicago, Andy. Chicago is more like Philly, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, or Baton Rouge, because the Media, the political oligarchs. academics and Marxist lawyers have destroyed policing.

The answer to the problem is radical.  Stop listening to morons, grifters and Reds.  Even more radical - start voting out the morons, grifters and Reds.  That is how one avoids Illinois Alzheimers.

President Skips 2016 Water Hazzard - America the Emerging Nation

\

Afternoon at the Beach and Dinner Date in Edgartown
8 hours 42 sec ago
The Obama family headed to the beach on Saturday, their final full day of their Vineyard vacation.
The family arrived at a beach off Pohogonot Road in Edgartown around 1:30 p.m. After spending the afternoon at the south shore beach with friends, the First Family departed at about 5:30 p.m.
Later in the evening the President and First Lady went back to Edgartown for dinner at Chesca's on North Water street. The sidewalk outside Chesca's was blocked off with yellow tape, and the summer crowd lined the street.
Chesca's, a restaurant "marrying gourmet and comfort food on Martha's Vineyard," is owned by chefs Jo Maxwell and David Joyce. According to a meal ticket the restaurant posted on Facebook, the President's party ordered spinach salad, braised beef shortribs, and pappardelle bolognese, and creme caramel for dessert.
The couple arrived at 7:45 p.m and departed at 9:28 p.m. to head home for one last night in Chilmark.

DENHAM SPRINGS  — After floods devastated pockets of south Louisiana, mental scars are already showing on the youngest victims of a disaster that prompted more than 30,000 rescues and left an estimated 40,000 homes damaged.
Children who endured harrowing rescues are returning home to a jarring landscape that even their parents can scarcely grasp: Homes filled with ruined possessions must be quickly gutted. Damaged schools and daycare centers are closed indefinitely. Parents juggling jobs and cleanup work must also line up caretakers for their kids.

Hey, I ain't judging; I'm just saying.   I have 1st World Problems, generally of my own creation.  Yesterday. it rained like a cow peeing on a flat rock and my basement took on water, like a Nazi sub in them black and white movies.  If a neighbor's pooch cocks his leg on one of my three parkway trees, I get 'some moisture,' as the real estate agents say. So I shop Vac'd most of the afternoon and night - no big deal.

I did not toss my fists heavenward and scream, " What kind of a God would do this.?"  I am pretty centered.  I don't take Public Radio, or television seriously at all.  I don't give a hoot to listen to hours and hours of sap about emerging nations.  Ask the Olympic Committee how all of that gushy bullshite about host cities being from emerging nations.  Ask NBC about Rio?   Ask that Turkeybird Ticket Scalper Pat Hickey about the accommodations in Rio's Iron Hotel.  NPR - when a nation emerges, get back to me.

Baton Rouge, Denham Springs and Martha's Vineyard are all in a fully emerged nation that is President-ed by a South Side with You guy who wants this emerged nation to become an emerging nation - to sort of equal things out,

In an emerging nation, the Jefe, Generalismo, or Dear Leader never visits suffering people.  Emerging Nations tend to be run by war-lords and when all of the blood settles, oligarchs.  Dear Leaders do not jet down to famine relief stations, they have Khat, Coco , or betel leaf chawers armed with AK-47s and big Toyota Flat beds with heavy machine guns to do that.  Oligarchs go to hot spots, casinos, springs and The Emerson, or Graystone in L.A. to unwind.

President Obama is taking much needed vacation-time in Martha's Vineyard. Can't fault any family man for that.  Me?  I'd rather go up to New Glarus, Wisconsin.  At least he's not dragging the wife and kids around Civil War battlefields.

Hey, he plays golf; so what.  I read, or watch Maverick re-runs, or go out for a great meal with a gorgeous woman, or catch some live jazz.  Whatever floats your boat.

However, if yesterday's down-pour produced crashing waves along my window sills, I know that my Alderman Matt O'Shea ( D-19th Ward) would be in a row boat outside of my picture window.  Were he on vacation in Sisters Lakes,MI, Delavan, WI, or Flint Lake, IN ( the Irish Rivieras)Matt O'Shea would drive back to his Ward an personally see to it that the elderly, kids and the more delicate of souls were safe.

He would, and has in times of danger, personally put himself out on the line and direct the more robust of heart in salvage and rescue efforts behind the First Responders ( cops, fire fighters and EMTs) already on the job.

You see Matt O'Shea, belongs to the same political party as the President, but not of the same Progressive mindset.

President Obama is exiting the job in January.

In November, America will decide if it is becoming an emerging nation.   If it is, Matt O'Shea will have no business being Alderman of the 19th Ward.

Mary Schmich, Tell Me Quick, Before I Fainst; Iz We Friends. or Iz We Ain't? Why The Liars of the Media Love Narrative, Not Truth

False statement is a fancy term for lie. Mary Schmich Pulitzer Prize Recipient

Mary Schmich grew up in Georgia in a family of 10. She went to high school in Phoenix and attended Pomona College in California, where she co-edited the college newspaper. She still remembers the smell of rubber cement. . . .Mary Schmich Tribune Bio

I usually take a pass on Chicago Tribune's Mary Schmich columns.  They have the tone of an NPR passive aggressive on crack.  Hey, but that's just me. Ms. Schmich is a Pulitzer Prize Recipient. Here is what Pulitzer says about Ms. Schmich, " (The Prize) For her wide range of down-to-earth columns that reflect the character and capture the culture of her famed city."  

Like this prairie fire of blazing thought:

We can all agree that certain kinds of people are unfit to be mayor of Chicago.
Crooks. Wimps. Anyone who can’t at least pretend to love baseball.
And how about people who went to high school on the North Shore?
When the rivals to replace Mayor Richard Daley met for a debate Thursday, Gery Chico suggested that Rahm Emanuel doesn’t pass mayoral muster because of where he’s from.
“He comes from the wealthy North Shore, I come from the Back of the Yards,” Chico said, talking with the media after the debate. “If you come from the South Side, you think of Chicago like a South Sider. He’s North Shore wealth, entitlement and privilege.”
Chico pointed out that Emanuel attended “the wealthiest high school in the state of Illinois.” That’s New Trier in Winnetka.
“If you come from Wilmette, Winnetka, Lake Forest, that’s what you think like,” Chico said. “I didn’t go to some elite high school. I went to Kelly High School.”
Chico is partly right. The North Shore is different from Chicago.  

 Boy, howdy it sure is, Mary!  Mary went on to take no position.  Outsiders, are people too,

" . . .Gery Chico undoubtedly understands some things about Chicago that Rahm Emanuel doesn’t.
But that doesn’t indicate who can best manage this city. Governing a city requires seeing it on many levels, and sometimes an outsider’s eye is the clearest one.
Emanuel, insider and outsider, is the front-runner in the mayor’s race. Chico is his closest rival. They’d both, probably, make decent mayors."  

  Yet, within this equivocation, buried deeply, is this Schmichian insight,

" The city remains deeply segregated, racially and economically. Its mansions and skyscrapers are surrounded by neighborhoods where jobs are scarce, guns are abundant, schools are chaotic and it’s hard to buy a fresh vegetable.

The candidate who sees those divisions clearly, and has the best plan for repairs, is the one to vote for, regardless of where he or she went to high school.  

 Something to that - Five Mayors attended De La Salle Institute and only four left the City in something like good shape and one teamed up with the Progressive elites and gave us our Balkan Banana Republic as Chicago stands today, where a gal can't buy a fresh vegetable, except at Whole Foods, Jewel, Caputo's, Pete's Produce, Tony's Mariano's, or Cermak Produce.

Well Rahm won and Mary wants some truth.

She knows what cops go through - she is a Pulitzer Prize Recipient.

Today, Mary Schmich goes all Gangsta on Lies and Liars who give false statements, like ' No Ransom was paid, but a plane load of Euros and Swisse Francs on pallets landed when the four were released,' or ' Pastor Pfleger has done, so much for the people of Auburn Gresham,' or ' Police killings are rooted in systemic racism,'  or ' more of your money makes better public schools,' or  well you have read plenty and here is more, Mary Schmich: 

"On Thursday, Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson recommended that seven officers be fired for lying.In an email to the force, he said the seven had made false statements about what happened on the now-infamous night that a 17-year-old African-American named Laquan McDonald was shot to death on a city street by a Chicago cop. False Statement is a fancy term for a lie."

 Now, you may recall my mention of the fact Mary Schmich is a Pulitzer Prize Recipient because of  "her wide range  of down-to-earth columns that reflect the character and capture the culture of her famed city."  I know of another 'down-to-earth' voice that captures the culture of our famed city - Second City Cop*. The great Steve Allen once said that Chicago had an authentic voice that he described as " a tone that one hears. . . that of a nice friendly Detective, . . . you hear it more in the male and the middle class . . . it is an un-neurotic voice. "  

So, I went to that voice and I heard this, "So now, the Department is firing people for statements contradictory to the video? Were the officers allowed to review the video prior to signing statements? Were statement even signed or were Detective summaries of interviews used to "justify" this travesty? (emphases my own)

Here's a neat little graphic: What a video camera records from a fixed spot is different from what an officer may see ten feet to the left, twenty feet to the right, from behind cover, from a moving vehicle, from across the street. That doesn't make it wrong and it certainly doesn't make it criminal, let alone an offense deserving of separation. Johnson is playing politics with seven coppers lives while three or more exempts skate into secure futures." (emphases my own)

Yeah, about that false statement being a lie - it can be Ms. Schmich.  How about a lie of omission?

Two words, five little syllables are missing from Mary Schmich's scold: Rahm Emanuel.

The video release of the 2014 shooting of the PCB jacked-up knife wielding menace-er of Burger Kings in Garfield Ridge, Laquan McDonald by a Chicago Police Officer, was delayed by the man who hires the Superintendent of Police.  

Mary Schmich, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, spins the compelling narratives that keeps the liars in the game and praises the judas-goating of random cops.

Any truth to that?

* from the SCC comments - this merits a prize:

 Anonymous said...Knowing the officers involved it disgusts me what the supt is doing. These officers did NOTHING wrong. You cannot tell anyone what they saw from their vantage point. It's a complete railroad job by this asshole and good coppers and more importantly good people are losing their jobs because of politics and racial rhetoric
8/19/2016 12:19:00 AM

Who's A'Scared of the Big Red Scare? The Media Don't Want to Be Old Ernest T.

Milwaukee Burns - here is why.

Flynn(Milwaukee Police Chief) cast blame on some Chicago-based activists representing the Revolutionary Communist Party, who apparently organized young people to take to the streets and march on the then-barricaded District 7 police station, which received a number of threats.
"The (group) showed up, and actually they’re the ones who started to cause problems leading into evening by marching and trying to take over Sherman and Burleigh," Flynn said. "That was about 11:30 at night. We made it to 11:30 in the evening, and we had these characters show up …" The Chicago Tribune

 In October 1947, 10 members of the Hollywood film industry publicly denounced the tactics employed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), an investigative committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, during its probe of alleged communist influence in the American motion picture business. These prominent screenwriters and directors, who became known as the Hollywood Ten, received jail sentences and were banned from working for the major Hollywood studios. Their defiant stands also placed them at center stage in a national debate over the controversial anti-communist crackdown that swept through the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Besides the Hollywood Ten, other members of the film industry with alleged communist ties were later banned from working for the big movie studios. The Hollywood blacklist came to an end in the 1960s. History.com

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the prospect of communist subversion at home and abroad seemed frighteningly real to many people in the United States. These fears came to define–and, in some cases, corrode–the era’s political culture. For many Americans, the most enduring symbol of this “Red Scare” was Republican Senator Joseph P. McCarthy of Wisconsin. Senator McCarthy spent almost five years trying in vain to expose communists and other left-wing “loyalty risks” in the U.S. government. In the hyper-suspicious atmosphere of the Cold War, insinuations of disloyalty were enough to convince many Americans that their government was packed with traitors and spies. McCarthy’s accusations were so intimidating that few people dared to speak out against him. It was not until he attacked the Army in 1954 that his actions earned him the censure of the U.S. Senate. History.com

“Maybe his [Satan’s] greatest achievement in these times has been to make us believe that he does not exist, and that all can be fixed on a purely human level,”  Pope Francis

I can almost hear Eric Zorn in The Chicago Tribune boning up to Change the Subject,"The Hollywood Blacklist, Senator Joe McCarthy, Chilling.  Who believes that Satan is cause of the world's evil?  Come on! Where's the science in that?"

Social Science? Physics?

Milwaukee, like Baton Rouge, St. Paul, Philadelphia and Dallas have been treated to riots, media circus-es, murders and assaults on police officers, because funded, well- organized little devils enthralled with the hammer and sickle and hot rhetoric and sloganeering ventured to those post-Ferguson flash points, with signage, fliers and bull horned cheerleaders from not only the Black Live Matters newbies, but veteran agitators from CPUSA, the Revolutionary Communist Party and International Solidarity Organization.  Reds and the usual useful idiots.






Snopes - a fact countering mill of Occupy,inc. says, don't believe our lying eyes." In fact, Reds are behind the more violent encounters in post-Ferguson America.
 

The American Journalist ( Medill School/Columbia variety) eschews the shoe-leather reporter image, for the Brand Journalist: gone to the finest schools, Miss Lonely, and got used to it; activist with ink and a soul-patch; Glenn Greenwald approved and Howard Zinn washed in the blood of revolutionary martyrs, but still maintain hip and with it ironic lifestyle.

One sure path to journalistic self-immolation is to walk on the wild side of the agreed upon narratives.  For example, when was the last time a Chicago, New York, or BumHump, Iowa journalist connected the dots pointing to Marxist lawyers and journalists involved in the Wrongful Conviction/ Police Torture industries? Never.  You never read a columnist like Mark Brown, Neil Steinberg, Eric Zorn, or Carol Marin question the number of times Judge Robert Gettleman ruled for G. Flint Taylor - judge shopping.

Shucks when was the last time any one of the above mentioned CTU puppet-master Jesse Sharkey's take over of the public service union for the International Solidarity Organization?  Wha?  Whaa?
Atticus Finch
It is unseemly to suggest, much less point out the very real and tangible evidence of organized and well-funded Marxist agenda at work on in our streets, courts, schools and public service unions.  Can't do that; it's called Red baiting.

One can Hillbilly Bait.  One can Evangelical Christian bait. One may Jew bait,so long as it is for the Death of Israel.  One does not need to Catholic bait, because our clergy and hierarchy does a pretty good job sneering at us in the press. But, Red bait.  No way, Jose Stalin.

Progressives (most columnists and editorial board members) tend to view themselves as Atticus Finch. especially activist lawyers who even dress like old Atticus.  Progressives view the rest of us as Ernest T. Bass.
Many of us deemed to be Ernest Ts, do not want to be considered so and we join along with group thought and ape the narratives and end up looking like Ernest T. Bass in a slick panama suit.

The media hides the fact that Reds are agitating the violence.

The potential for a revolutionary crisis lies within the very nature of this capitalist system itself—with its repeated economic convulsions, its unemployment and poverty, its profound inequalities, its discrimination and degradation, its brutality, torture and wars, its wanton destruction. All this causes great suffering. And at times it leads to crisis on one level or another—sudden jolts and breakdowns in the “normal functioning” of society, which compel many people to question and to resist what they usually accept. No one can say in advance exactly what will happen in these situations—how deep the crisis may go, in what ways and to what extent it might pose challenges to the system as a whole, and to what degree and in what ways it might call forth unrest and rebellion among people who are normally caught up in, or feel powerless to stand up against, what this system does. But two points are very important:
1) Such “jolts” in the “normal functioning” of things, even if they do not develop all the way to a fundamental crisis for the system as a whole, do create situations in which many more people are searching for answers and open to considering radical change. The work of building the movement for revolution must be consistently carried out at all times, but in these situations of sharp breaks with the “normal routine” there is greater possibility, and greater potential, to make advances. This must be fully recognized and built on to the greatest degree possible, so that through such situations, leaps are made in building up the movement and the organized forces for revolution, creating in this way a stronger basis from which to work for further advances.
2) In certain situations, major events or big changes can happen in society and the world and can come together in such a way that the system is shaken to its foundations...deep cracks appear and magnify within the ruling structures and institutions...the raw relations of oppression are more sharply exposed...conflicts among the powers-that-be deepen, and cannot be easily resolved, and it becomes much more difficult for them to hold things together under their control and keep people down. In this kind of situation, for great numbers of people, the “legitimacy” of the current system, and the right and ability of the ruling powers to keep on ruling, can be called seriously and directly into question, with millions hungering for a radical change that only a revolution can bring about. RevCom

The riots in Milwaukee prove that but the media wants us to believe that Reds don't exist - just like Satan

Meet Ald. Brian Hopkins The Gentry Liberal of the Liberal Gentry

"It (softball fields) really ties up the park for hours a day all summer long," Hopkins said. "You don't even want to be on the running track because you'll be hit by a fly ball."

Gentry Liberalism - "Gentry liberalism combines four basic elements: faith in postindustrial “creative” financial capitalism, cultural liberalism, Gore-ite environmentalism and the backing of the nation’s arguably best-organized political force, public employee unions. Obama rose to power on the back of all these forces and, until now, has governed as their tribune."

To the doctrines of Gentry Liberalism I would add the concept of the smart city - that high-density living in the core, rather than suburban sprawl, is the optimal design for the modern urbanopolis.

Chicago was a city of villages, called neighborhoods occupied by African Americans, Lithuanians, Croatians, Serbs, Poles, Italians, Irish and Germans.  The city center, the Loop, was where you might go to work, take the bus, or L home to your neighborhood - West Lawn, Clearing, Englewood, or Hegewisch.

Real estate, banks, TIFs, University of Chicago social scientists, Northwestern journalists and Shakman exempted public grifters, as well operators of gyms, bike fascists and empty nesters bought into city center living.  The south Loop, west of the Loop and Goose Island became choice real estate, once Richie Daley was convinced to knock down the Jets.  HUD sprinkled FHA tenants out into Englewood, Gresham, Lawndale, Austin and the immediate suburbs to cut off white flight.

This Progressive, affluent and self-concerned coalition changed the Chicago landscape, language and lifestyle.  Neighborhoods became communities.  The Fort Dearborn Massacre became a battle and the verbal "shootings" were padded with the modifiers gang-related and police - to ensure media purity of language and litigation surety.  Fried boneless chicken breast is not a Chicago Value. Bike lanes replaced everything, Divvy stations took up parking spaces and fruit flavored IPAs replaced beer.

A few weeks ago two of the more idiotic members of City government put their dainty toes in the waters to see how a private army of real estate cops would fly.  One of these worthies is Alderman Brian Hopkins!  Along with Proco Joe Moreno, Hopkins shares the Wicker Park community, as hipster-doofi barons.  Proco Joe, at the prodding of Rahm Emanuel, made a national joke of himself ( always a good litmus test for a Progressive - see Jan Schakowsky and Mike Quigley) when he thundered against fried boneless chicken.

Well, Brian Hopkins is plunging into similar notoriety with his indictment of 16" Chicago, Clincher softball ( God, I hope it is that and not the dweeb-happy 'play with gloves' variety) being played in Chicago Parks.

Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) told the Chicago Park District board last week that he would prefer a "grassy meadow" over the ball fields at Lake Shore Park, 808 N. Lake Shore Drive, citing concerns from neighbors who say its adult softball league has outgrown the quaint park surrounded by luxury high-rises.

I would prefer a greasy cheeseburger smothered in grilled onions basket with cheesefries over a new bike lane any day, but that ain't about to happen.

Parks are for people not some hipster doofus with a sinecure. The mission of the Chicago Park District is to:

• Enhance the quality of life in Chicago by becoming the leading provider of recreation and leisure opportunities
• Provide safe, inviting and beautifully maintained parks and facilities
• Create a customer-focused and responsive park system that prioritizes the needs of children and families 

Looks like Brian fails the sniff test on all three infinitives; undaunted the Progressive crank is undeterred:

"It ( people playing a team sport) really ties up the park for hours a day all summer long," Hopkins said. "You don't even want to be on the running track because you'll be hit by a fly ball." HIKE THAT SKIRT!
The park has two diamonds that are primarily used by an adult coed league run by Chicago Sport & Social Club. Hopkins said the diamonds "are not really in an ideal place" for the league, which has some "pretty good players" who often hit the ball out of the park.
"One ball hit the side of a CTA bus not too long ago," he said. "It's an accident waiting to happen." ( emphases, sarcasm, sexist irony and parenthetical notes my own)

Think of the Buses, People!!!!!!!!!

Hopkins ends his appeal with that grand old Progressive chestnut -The Children, "If you want to use the field to teach your kid to kick a soccer ball, throw a Frisbee, lay a blanket down for a picnic, you can’t,"

Send your kid with other kids to the prairie like normal people. You picnic in a Chicago mini-park?  Vote this clown down.

These clowns really are too much, but not nearly as "too much" as the voting Chicagoan who goes along with our protected morons.

Shakman Exempt Career Grifter Forrest Claypool Explains The Pad in The Sun Times

 Career Grifter and Shakman exempt Forrest Claypool CPS Boss and Ron Marmer, CPS’ top attorney are amused. So would we all, were we oligarchs and not helots.

To be "On the pad" means that someone, usually in law enforcement or other position of authority, regularly takes bribes.Detective Dolan was kicked off the force because he had been on the pad to local wiseguys for years.Urban Dictionary

Shakman Exempt - Anyone Micheal Shakman deems to be

• A-OK, on-the-level, a stand-up Progressive, really great person, who will feed all news outlets precious pieces of propaganda to ensure that no helots, their fat breeder wives, or horrible kids ever get a fair shake, much less a job dragging a shovel behind a big, blue City, operated Garbage truck and just keep their damn traps shut about how good Shakman Exempts have it . .  . well, not as good as Michael Shakman, but then again, Michael was blessed by the late Abner Mikva

• Necessary to maintaining "Our Village City," for US, By Us and only US in this urban Banana Republic

Forrest Claypool, more than any other public person in Chicago, is the perfect Progressive Shakman Statesman.

Since the fabled and idiotic 1983 Federal Decree, limited to Cook County, gelded the Cook County Democratic Committee and made a Committeeman as useless as a mint flavored suppository.

Claypool boarded the Cook County Ship of State,right after law school where he branded himself as "an attorney and served in several non-elected positions in state and county government, including deputy commissioner of the Cook County Board of Appeals and as Deputy State Treasurer " and yadda, yadda, yadda from meeting Dave Axelrod to Kopping a plea in the Chicago Sun Times this morning, and has been looting it to the scuttles ever since.

Today, Forrest fogs the facts with his love of children and heroic chinless jaw thrusting in the name of the people, as well as working his Huckleberry Hound-like-Carbondale Hillrod eyes in perplexed self-pity at being caught out.

In response to your editorial (CPS can’t afford to flunk ethics, transparency class — Aug. 12), as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, I take seriously the trust the public places in us and my responsibility to protect every dollar for our classrooms. ( scan for giggles, tittering, or rolled eyes and go thundering!)
That’s why my administration pursued (BUT never brought) a potential ( Yeah, I said Potential) civil rights lawsuit against the state of Illinois. With the district’s very survival at stake, and years of academic progress at risk because of a racially discriminatory funding system, retaining the finest legal counsel was paramount.
A last-minute settlement by Gov. Bruce Rauner and legislators altered the need for such a drastic measure. However, had the lawsuit been necessary, the skills of outside counsel could have been the difference between defeat and victory. That’s why, with the concurrence of CPS Board President Frank Clark ( AKA- The COMEd Mailroom Guy), I sought out Jenner & Block, perhaps the nation’s leading litigation firm with a proven track record in civil rights cases. CPS’ general counsel himself ( Ron Marmer, CPS’ top attorney).is one of the country’s preeminent litigators,( Ron Marmer, CPS’ top attorney.).having served as the American Bar Association’s litigation chair.
The Sun-Times’ character aspersions are beneath the well-considered views of this editorial page. Our general counsel ( Ron Marmer, CPS’ top attorney).earns a tiny fraction of his private-sector pay and the attorneys at Jenner & Block took this case at steeply discounted rates, because of their belief in the cause. Few attorneys (Ron Marmer, CPS’ top attorney). or firms of this stature and expertise would do so. . . ."

And so on with the firm belief that everyone in Cook County is a dope and  Forrest Claypool is not - he's a Shakman Exempt!

The Inspector General told the Sun Times these pearl onions of interest left out of Claypool's gimlet:

• Acting in closed session on July 27, the school board voted to pay as much as $250,000 to Jenner & Block, which spent months preparing a never-filed lawsuit against the state seeking increased funding.
• The Sun-Times reported Marmer left the law firm in 2013 but has continued to receive yearly payments of $200,000, which are to end in 2018.
• Under CPS’ code of ethics, school officials can’t have any “contract management authority” over any deal with a contractor “with whom the employee has a business relationship” — defined as any transaction worth at least $2,500 in a calendar year to the school system employee.
• According to Claypool, Marmer wasn’t involved in hiring Jenner & Block, which he said “was my decision” along with Frank Clark, the board president.
• A CPS spokeswoman declined to comment Monday. ( You Know It, Mabel!)
• The lawsuit Jenner & Block was preparing didn’t get filed because legislators and Gov. Bruce Rauner agreed on a stopgap budget deal on June 30 that’s to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding to CPS.
• Marmer and Claypool once worked together at Jenner & Block. Claypool worked there in 1982 — his first job out of law school. Marmer was at the firm from 1978 to 1993 and 1997 until 2013.
• Marmer — who had a solo law practice after leaving Jenner & Block and started his $185,000-a-year job at CPS on Nov. 2, 2015 — has made $29,000 in campaign contributions to Claypool’s bids for elected office since 2003. That includes $10,000 toward Claypool’s unsuccessful run for Cook County assessor in 2010. Marmer also gave $5,000 to Rahm Emanuel’s first campaign for mayor in 2011. (And Forrest Got the CTA! Ventra and Bomdardier!!!)
• Jenner & Block began working for CPS on March 3, though the contract with the firm that Claypool’s administration released last month was dated June 20.
• Through June 30, the firm had billed the school system for more than $182,000.
• CPS had refused to release any of the firm’s invoices for more than two months after the Sun-Times filed a public records request seeking them in May.
• The Jenner & Block lawyer who signed the deal with CPS was Randall Mehrberg, who worked for the Chicago Park District in the 1990s when Claypool was parks chief under then-Mayor Richard M. Daley. State election board records show Mehrberg contributed a total of $30,500 to Claypool’s campaigns and $10,000 to Emanuel.

Let's all join hands and sing the joys we all share in our Chicago oligarchy and let's try to remember that Forrest Clypool, really, really  "takes seriously  the trust the public places in us and my responsibility to protect every dollar for our classrooms."

Stosh and Stella in Garfield Ridge can't call Cap Mizenshky, over by the Ward, to see, if, maybe, their son Marek, in the Marines after St. Rita, can get a job on the trucks, when he gets back from KAIA by the Kabul airport this September, because no that would be just Shakman wrong.  Ask Forrest Claypool.

Blood on the Streets of Chicago - Everyone knows Why; No One is Telling the Truth, But The Good Police

That's right, Officer; only people in blue shirts and checker banded hats have your back.

I know many Chicago Police Officers, black, white, yellow and brown.  They are my neighbors and they protect me and the students I serve in one of Chicago's most active killing grounds: Gresham. They are brave, witty, professional and patient.  I have watched them run down streets in Gresham and Englewood towards gunfire that is never "police" shootings.  I have heard them tell about the oddities and frustrations and politics of the job with rhetorical flourishes that embarrass a Metaphysical Poet, 

I have sat with them when a young black teenager explained how the GDs, or the Stones harassed, threatened, robbed and beat them for book bags, cell hones, or change.  I have talked with them about the mistreatment meted out Daley, Aldermen, Rahm, Alderman, Jesse Jackson, Pastor Pfleger, Andy Shaw, Mark Brown, Carol Marin, Eric Zorn, Neal Steinberg, John Conroy,  Dan Placko, G. FLint Taylor, Jon Loevy, Locke Bowman, the Blum Center for Justice and MacArthur Center for Justice and they shrug and say, " They give us way too much credit for being crafty, vicious and mean. Hell we are just not that smart. Most of us went into the Service (military) and not Northwestern after Mendel, Loyola, Mount Carmel, Harper."

Then I read about the Chicago Police in the Chicago Tribune and the Sun Times, watch Phil Ponce on WTTW and I ask myself, " Where are all of these racist Mymidons hiding?"

Actually, I do not really ask that question.

Chicago is a Thug Comfort Zone.  It was created by Thugs, of course, but also Peoples Law Office, Bernardine Dorhn, Shasha Abramsky, G. Flint Taylor, Dave Protess, the Center for Wrongful Convictions, The Bluhm Legal Clinic, the editorial Boards of both news papers, the MacArthur Foundation, The Woods Fund, Richard M. Daley, Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago City Council, Governor Pat Quinn, the Illinois Legislature, Attorney General, Lisa Madigan and all of our social justice activists across this the town.

Jon Burge is the face of the police.  Most critics of Jon Burge were not alive during his time on the police force, but free-lance writer John Conroy married the Bernardine Dorhn narrative of Vietnam War born methods and racist methodologies to the court briefs of Peoples Law Office G. Flint Taylor back in the late 1980's.  A sexy story with a beefy red-faced cop bulldozed legal and law enforcement procedures and practises off the streets and into the court of public opinion.

Murdering Felons were all wrongfully charged, prosecuted and convicted.  Murder by arsonist, the torture and assassination of two police officers returning from the wake of a murdered rookie cop, monosyllabic psychopaths became the Hurricane Hunters and even Cliff Huckstables of Chicago.

Commander Jon Burge was never convicted of torture, but is universally accepted to be one.  He is no Alfred Dreyfus, but he did go prison for perjury via legal and rhetorical forensics , thirty years in the making. In the Chicago memory hole is the fact that Burge arrested and helped convict criminals, during Mayor Harold Washington's terms of office and they were not solely African American victims of systemic racism.  Burge was a pro-active street sweeper of thugs and became a political liability for gutless politicians.  Thug life flourished, because there are no longer consequences to anything in Urbs in Horto.

The urban life without consequences is masked with the compelling narratives,

• systemic racism
• a culture of police brutality
•  the system is broken
• cops code of silence
• Homan Square black ops
• police shootings
•  gun violence
• more money for jobs, education and 'lives turned around.' 

This morning before I went to Mass, I read Second City Cop, as is my wont.  I read this important blog, because it is much more accurate than Frank Main.

I read about the anguished words of a west side grandmother from an article in Chicago's usually very accurate DNAinfo Chicago. The anonymous police officer who blogs is a very good writer and a very fair minded person.  Like most Chicagoans, this writer of the SCC blog eschew bullshit, which is the staple of the Chicago Media and the political and social Justice classes.  I reprint the piece in full:

FRIDAY, AUGUST 12, 2016
Boo Hoo
The neighborhood is noticing something:
Delores Coleman watched 22-year-old Irell Mitchell's life come to an abrupt end around the corner from her home Monday evening and, she said, the police came and went in 90 minutes.
"They didn't talk to anyone ... they just picked up his body and left," Coleman said. "Didn't do no investigation or nothing."
90 minutes to tag, bag and wrap up a crime scene? Well done! There should be a lot more scenes like that.
Hours later, gunmen returned to her block, firing a volley of shots that hit 10-year-old Tavon Tanner in his back while he sat with his family on their front porch. The next day he was in critical condition, with a bullet lodged in his chest.
The 3900 block of West Polk Street has been choked by violence all year, but for her part, Coleman said the twin tragedies Monday made her feel abandoned.
"It's clear the police don't give a f--- about us," she said. "They don't care. We call them, and they just ride right past us."
Well grandma, it's pretty clear that the neighborhood doesn't give a fuck about....well, pretty much anything.
Is anyone in the media asking why the 10-year-old got shot? The neighborhood knows, the detectives know, the coppers know. We've gotten a bunch of e-mail about it, and it gives lie to everything the "community" has been protesting the past few months. This wasn't a kid caught in the crossfire. But god forbid the media actually does its job, interview people, and report what is actually going on in the 'hood, especially if it runs contrary to a "police don't care" narrative.
The trouble is, it was a police sergeant who enabled that kid to even get to the hospital.
Labels: general

This city needs an enema.   Chicago ain't ready to be cleansed.

Chicago Will Top the Bloodiest Year of the Northern Ireland Conflict With Four Months To Go

 A small force of British troops was also deployed to Northern Ireland. Pitted against the Provisional Irish Republican Army,PIRA, the British Army conducted house-to-house searches and imposed a curfew, albeit limited. Rather than diminishing the power of the IRA, in reality more people were driven into its ranks.
This was evident on 30 January 1972, when the army controversially suppressed rioting at a civil rights march in Derry in a day that became known as ‘Bloody Sunday.’ The resulting death toll of 14 civil rights protestors fed into the hands of the IRA; more recruits flooded into their ranks. In turn, more British troops were deployed to the area.  The Conflict

Leaders from three West Side gang factions allegedly met last week to discuss plans to shoot members of the Chicago Police Department in response to the fatal police shooting of Paul O’Neal. 

The meeting took place Thursday between higher-ups from the Vice Lords, Black Disciples and Four Corner Hustlers, according to an alert issued to department members the day after the meeting.  

The Four Corner Hustlers “provided guns” and have “a sniper in place” though authorities do not know where, according to the alert. The Four Corner Hustlers also are supplying the other two gangs with automatic weapons, which all three factions also have agreed to use against police, the alert states. Chicago Sun Times

Deaths in Northern Ireland Troubles 1969-2010

Chicago Killings 2016

1972 was the year that combat deaths of civilians, IRA, UDF and U.K. & Northern Ireland security forces reached  479 Deaths.

Chicago will top that this year.

I heard a young man from Derry say, " I'm going to heaven, because I lived in Hell."

I live in Chicago and Hell is a long walk up.

Chicago Tribune's Series Porky Agonistes Snouts Out The Facts That Do not Fit Its Narrative

 

Porky made Captive, Gelded, and now in the Prison at Gaza Farms outside of Kankakee, there to labour as in a common work-house, on a Festival day, in the general cessation from labour, comes forth into the open Air, to a place nigh, somewhat retir'd there to sit a while and bemoan his condition Bbbgweeeeeeeeeepppppppppppppppppp! (snuffle-snort) Bbbgweeeeeeeeeepppppppppppppp!.   Porky Agonistes. 

Apologies to old Jack Milton.

Retired Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan, the only Cook County Sheriff to retire without a vault full of cash, had been a target of the Chicago Tribune "investigative reporters" and their editorial overlord for the better part of two years.

Fueled by a narrative provided by the MacArthur Center for Justice (formerly of at U of C) and its buzz-cut-Bolshevik attorney Locke Bowman and the now faded from view Jean Maclean Snyder.

Only a very few years ago, the Medill Empire went to war on Sheriff Mike Sheahan. When the MacArthur Center for Justice teamed with the Medill Empire ( Tribune journalists/Chicago Magazine Medill School of Journalism/Bernardine Dohrn & etc.) to prove that Sheriff Michael Sheahan brutalized prisoners at Cook County Jail,  it took a jury less than twenty minutes to toss all charges. Sheriff Sheahan quipped “Tribune Investigative Journalism is BS.” Quite right, Mr. Sheahan.

The Chicago Tribune depends on manufactured thought and leans on University "Centers" for Social Engineering at all levels.   They provide the narrative, the talking points and most of all the conclusions.

Michael Sheahan was plagued a bit by the Combination ( John Kass Owns Combine) of Ink and Agit-Prop and pettifogging Marxist lawyers, but at a time when common sense still had some currency.  The MacArthur Center, like Progressives Universal, went judge shopping to bring down the Sheriff, but Sheahan, unlike most Democrats did not cave-in to political onanists.

The Chicago Tribune would like everyone breathing and in the future to know nothing about this episode. As Mike Sheahan so aptly and succinctly put it, “Tribune Investigative Journalism is BS.”

BS is what too many people gobble down but ladle-full.  It is what creates elected officials like Toni Preckwinkle, Mike Quigley, Pat Quinn and Rahm Emanuel.  It is what fuels Tribune Investigative Journalism.

The Illinois Pork Producers, people at the meat counter and people who eschew BS for a healthy diet in all things have been victimized by the Chicago Tribune once again.

Pork is cheap, people buy pork, pork is meat and the UN wants a global Vegan diet by 2050, so the Chicago Tribune decides to one up the Guardian in matters porcine and grab a Pulitzer with a series on the High Cost of Cheap Pork, pork waste is a pollutant, pigs get hurt -mortally so, and family farms are successful:  Gaea weeps, pigs squeal and people are happy and one can not have that.

For a week the articles of Mr. Jackson and Mr. Marx accompanied by photos of pigs in harm's way have treated the sensitivities of NPR/WTTW devotees to Porky Agonistes!

However, the Illinois Pork Producers (IPPA) have responded.

Several months ago, the Illinois Pork Producers Association stood at just such a crossroads when investigative reporters with the Chicago Tribune, David Jackson and Gary Marx, began contacting producers about an upcoming series of articles focusing on the Illinois pork industry. At that time, the association, along with support from National Pork Board and the National Pork Producers Council, made the conscious decision to work with the reporters in order to provide a balanced and educated voice to their story.

Since that time, many of our producers and industry stakeholders have graciously opened their farms to these reporters, spent hours on the phone answering detailed questions and put their reputations and livelihoods on the line for the greater good of the pork industry.

Our efforts were to provide the writers from the Chicago Tribune accurate information about what is happening in Illinois’ pork industry and the dedication and passion our producers demonstrate every day on their farms. We are disappointed that our voice was not heard and that the promised balance was not conveyed to their readers.

I want to personally take a moment to thank those individuals who took the time from their busy schedules to share their life experiences and knowledge about our industry in a positive thought-provoking manner.

IPPA President Bob Frase is in the unhappy position shared by millions of people, who live outside of the editorial though bubble of rarefied academic, legal and journalistic soma - Huxley's master dope that is "Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant!"

NPR/WTTW nodders dig soma, as do the residents of certain Chicago areas like Hyde Park, Evanstson and Oak Park.

Bob Frase writes in the knowledge that his message will be buried by Tribune Editors and that Carol Marin, or the sunshiny chirppers of All Things Considered will ignore every phrase, clause and punctuation mark.

Mr. Bob Frase and Illinois Pork Producer Executive Director Jennifer Tirey have a frustrating job in getting some voice in the big media to to say, " Hold on a minute!  I know Illinois Farmers and they are not about pollute the very waters they drink, much less put out a bad product.  They are not "factory Farms," they are family farms.

Porky Agonistes gets plenty of shout.  It may even get a Pulitzer.  They come cheap these days.

Click the link bellow and read the facts.

http://www.ilpork.com/news-and-events/news-and-updates/article/2016/08/chicago-tribune-pork-industry-series

This Is the Most Honest Analysis of the Shooting Covered by Nine Police Body-Cams

There is a proverb which has been of old, 

And many men have likewise been so bold, 

To the discredit of the Taylor’s Trade,Nine Taylors go to make up a man, they said.

          But for their credit I’ll unriddle it t’ye:

A draper once fell into povertie, Nine Tayors joyn’d their purses together then, 

To set him up, and make him a man again. Captain William Hickes Grammatical Drolleries, 1671

Cousin Bill might have been thinking of all cutting and pasting and rewinding and sewing sentiments about the recent Paul O'Neal shooting in Chicago.

It seems that nine Body/Dash Cams have been offered up to the lawyers and the activists and each and every one of us to come to the final public judgment of the Police officers involved.

I watched the videos.  They remind me of the shootings that I have been in the middle of on 79th Street over the last twenty years. Everything happens in a blink and the adrenaline pumps furiously. Circa 1999: Who fired the shots?  Some GD from near the parking lot entrance on Sangamon, across from Leo High School.  Describe him.  He was a GD emptying a 9mm as fast as he could.   How was he dressed?  Something like this? 

Yeah, that's him.

The police no longer investigate a shooting - good or bad - because that has been coopeted, to use that swell socially and politically correct Marxist appellation so vocally hugged on NPR and aped on CBS, NBC and ABC, by the activists and the lawyers and the hungry media.  The activists and the lawyers dole out the portions of "facts' to media players according to their willful suspension of disbelief and accountability.

No matter that the prosecution of police officers in the Philadelphia Freddie Grey case have been universally found not guilt of murder.  The attorney for the O'Neal Family punctuates each clause and sub paragraph with shouts of " Murder Most Foul" just to make sure that rage is all the rage.

I read everything.  I talk to my neighbors and many of them are current or retired police officers of very long service.  Some neighbors think the one thing and others the other. The police neighbors are identical in their assessments.  Body/Dash Cams, or not, the police officers will come out of the situation in any manner - well.

This morning I read the best assessment of what has happened, in Second City Cop.  This is valuable.

We've been seeing a bit of criticism in the comment sections, ripping coppers for "Monday morning quarterbacking" and "you weren't there..." and everything in between. This isn't 1970 any more. This isn't the 80's or the 90's. This isn't even the 00's when personal cell phone cameras were just coming into widespread usage. This is 2016, and in-car cameras along with body-worn cameras are fast becoming the norm along with every single person on the street with a digital photo studio at their fingertips.
Policing is under a harsh spotlight and police work, especial hands-on police work, isn't pretty. But a even-handed, unemotional critique of the actions captured on video can be a benefit. It can educate the public, media and our critics. If the only voice being heard is the voice of the assholes shutting down reasoned discourse, then we are going to be backed into a corner that there is no coming out from. Some here feel we're already at that point. Reasonable men and women can disagree as to how far gone it is. And sometimes that involves taking a look inward.
That being said, we have a series of posts to address the videos over the next few days. And the first one is to rebut some of the more outrageous "sanctification" promulgated by the media and the protestors. We want to take you back in time to 03 August, to the Naperville Sun newspaper:
Five vehicles were stolen during the early-morning hours of July 26 in Naperville, while four were taken around 3 a.m. July 28 in Bolingbrook, authorities in both communities confirmed. Additionally, more than 30 vehicles were burglarized that same morning in Naperville.
A suspect in the Bolingbrook thefts, 18-year-old Paul O'Neal, of Chicago, was fatally shot by police around 7:30 p.m. July 28 behind a house in the 7300 block of South Merrill Avenue in Chicago.
Bolingbrook police Lt. Carter Larry on Wednesday said O'Neal was "clearly seen on video" at a service station where six suspects regrouped following the thefts in that village.
This is the "hero" of the media and "community" narrative - a car thief and a credit card thief. Does anyone know what his record looks like? And why is it all of these "heroes" seem to have social media pages with them holding guns?
And the early onset arthritis - we forgot about that.
Then there's the family, weeping, saying "He had goals." Um, what goals? Stealing a Bugatti maybe? Ferrari? How about a Lamborghini? Unfortunately, he'll always be remembered as only achieving a Jaguar. How sad.
Here's the thing - all of this, every single bit of it, could have been avoided if he didn't take something that didn't belong to him. Blame is on the parent(s), family, whomever - someone didn't install a moral compass on this thief and in the process, set him on the road to destruction, taking who knows how many others with him.
And there were plenty of opportunities to stop him - his first arrest, his second, the judge(s) who gave him how many additional chances, the parent who didn't better monitor his associations, maybe a clergy person, a social worker, the list is endless. But the cops are going to take the final hit because all of these other misses led to:

• Theft of Auto

• PSMV

• Aggravated Assault (with the auto)

• Aggravated Battery (with the same auto)

If he had survived, how many felonies is that right there? All committed in the span of sixteen hours? Let's not lose sight of that, even though the media and story-tellers already have. He began, continued and ended with bad decisions he made, all on his own.
More tomorrow.

Naperville and Bolingbrook police are investigating a possible link between two incidents of multiple vehicle thefts that occurred within two days of one another, and in which one suspect was later shot to death by Chicago police.

Nine cameras come nowhere near the Truth.  However, the people with the loudmouths, the bullhorns, the talking-points and the final solutions are not interested in anything but outcomes.

Nine tailors  have their work cut out for them  

Chicago Tribune's War on Cheap Pork: Piggy Move-up Journalism

 

Herscher, Il family farmer Brian Downs

“One could not stand and watch very long without being philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe.... Each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart's desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him, and a horrid Fate in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, all his protests, his screams were nothing to it. It did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life.”
― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle  

Pigs have their own language; perceptions; primal fears, urges and reactions; social structures and motivators (food, mostly). I think learning to speak their language is more valuable and better from a humane-treatment standpoint than trying to force them into ours and that’s what farmers do. Righteous Bacon.

    

The late Marietta Frogge would bring the piglets into the Frogge Farmhouse, when Martinon, Illinois went arctic in the late 1970's.  I delighted in watching her husband Calvin whistle the critters into the kitchen and seeing a dozen squealers slide on the linoleum floors and crash into the cabinets to be first up on Calvin's lap.

I am no stranger to hogs.  As a kid, I remember north-easterly breezes meant summertime aroma therapy from the stockyards just to the north of me. Blood, bone, hide, horn and innards from cows, pigs and sheep created an atmosphere of bad smells like no other - well,maybe Gary, IN. On certain humid days in Chicago when it gets hotter than Honduras and buzzes with more big, black flies than Bombay ( Mumbai for NPR doctrinaires), one can still detect that scent thirty years after the Yards closed in Canaryville.

As a young teacher, I taught in French Illinois,  South Will, Kankakee and northern Iroquois Counties. It was there that I met my wife to be and her farmer family on her mother's side.  They are ten generation French American who lived in St. George, Illinois and later moved to Herscher, where they developed four massive farms growing soy and corn and raising hogs.

Hog farming is one tough business - on pigs and on the folks raising them.  One can not be a farm child and not learn that life is cruel, dirty, smelly and bloody and that is decades before they learn about politicians.

Lisa Madigan and Dick Durbin are part of the Chicago Tribune series.  The Attorney General filed suit against one farm three years after an 'environmental disaster' took place and Dick Durbin sails in the direction of media crafted winds.

Life is tough enough without public grifters and their propaganda apparatchiks making misery universal.

Farmers, large and small, are stewards of the land first above all and business people second.  Farms pass from one generation to another and respect for the life is the key to any exchange so sacred.

I spent quite a bit of time on farms and with farmers. I observed, tried my hand at, understood the work and respect it mightily.

Animals are treated like what they were born to be - food. They are handled hygienically and with great care.  Here is what a farm kid raising pigs learns at a very early age.

• Piglets used to get their needle teeth clipped at birth. Cruel ? How many of us drag around a yard of umbilical chord and dried placenta?  Piglets are born with teeth as sharp as needles and to protect the nursing Mom (Sow) and the piglets themselves the razor sharp buckers get their teeth cut with a tool that looks like a pliers. However , most farmers have ended the practice The verbal "cutting one's teeth" comes from this practice.
• Piglets get their tails snipped as well.  Newly weaned piglets often get their tails "docked" in order to prevent other pigs from sucking on the tails and chance the biting and infections.
• Hogs ( male piggies)  get castrated in order to prevent Boar Taint - a strong male odor and taste that makes the appeal of dining less favorable.  More so, hogs are nasty brutish and violent.  Vive le difference! Thank Heavens for Little Sows.  Hogs with all the male juices a bubbling are one aggressive quartet of trotters.
• Pigs are kept indoors to protect the environment, reduce waste and excessive feeding
• Sows are kept in two kinds of crates: gestation crates when the sow is 'large with child' for the purposes of monitoring the pig's food and health and the farrowing crates once the sow has given birth - PETA activists like to highlight the crates and give the impression that purpose is to inflict pain and suffering on the animals, which is far from the case and further from the truth.

Farms that are successful become larger.  The Duvals, or Messiers, or Fortins, or Marchands pass their lands, expand their lands and develop new means of growth.  These are French names common to Kankakee and Iroquois Counties and along with their Dutch farming neighbors along the Illinois Indiana border they have succeeded wildly.

The Chicago Tribune series is intended to villainize such names and family success in general. 

The articles give the indication that the pork producers are faceless corporations, via the 'compelling narrative' appellation - Factory Farms.

The reader is astounded to learn that the little pigs are abused and slaughtered by farm hands out of a Steinbeck novel to fatten the bank accounts of soulless plutocrats living in global tax-havens and pleasure-palaces.

You can hate Factory Farms, corporations and deny that they a people. They are corporate persons and subject to the law, however.

The law is the handmaiden of political opportunists, as well as Justice.

The authors combed through State archives from the Attorney General, the Illinois EPA, Sierra Club and Peta. 

Farmers are not going to poison their children, their livestock and their land. Jackson and Marx would have the reader believe that faceless tycoons own Factory Farms and they are raising awareness of ordinary people to the cost of low-priced pork.

Their targets are family farmers.

I have never witnessed idiotic cruelty, like too many urban youths scalding, burning and torturing cats and dogs, by farmers.  I have never heard cruelty to animals approved, much less orchestrated.

Farming is a business and a lifestyle.

The culture of farming is respectful of all living things - plants and animals.

The Chicago Tribune series on Pork Production seemed to me a cutesy, one-sided, pimp-slap by investigators who have concluded their thesis long before the ink hit the paper, reminiscent of Michael Moore's modus operandi of making the facts fit not matter where they might pop-up.   The thesis is simple; cheap pork comes about because of massive agri-corporations and disregard for the torments afflicted upon pools of pigs and rivers of blood and guts and chemicals pumped into our water tables and this is horrible. Or, $ 3.15 per pound for clean, dressed and safe to eat pork loin is only possible because pork producers are 1% er nasty creeps. Cue Andy Thayer's bullhorn! Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho! Low/Low Prices Have Gotta Go!

State EPA and Sierra Club findings with charts and graphs and interviews with alleged pollutants and animal abusers hand-cuffed by the bludgeon of the law appear to be "gottcha-ed" into declining comment or offering vague assent to inquiries like, " The Attorney General has filed suit against you."  

Where is the question, your Honor?

Let me try and answer. If the accused are treated as Factory Farms and Corporations, the reader could care less.  The fact of the matter is that the farms being villainized are where the farmers actually live.

To the charges of polluting the water-ways, Mr. Jackson, you are saying they pollute their own drinking, bathing and cooking water?

The accused are hand-cuffed by law as their cases are "pending." Talk about limiting free speech.  Police officers accused of every barbarity in the media are likewise abused by this breed of journalist.

Things sure seemed that way to me from reading the articles over the last three days, so I decided to call Jennifer Tirey, Executive Director of Illinois Pork Producers in Springfield and get her take on the articles and opinion hits from reporters David Jackson, Gary Marx and editor-in-chief Bruce Dold.

Ms. Tirey told me that she had been contacted by Jackson and Marx and that she had offered a great deal of information to them in answer to their questions and very little of that information found its way into print.

Ms. Tirey and I spoke together over the phone on Thursday and Friday of this week.  She was as baffled by the series as I had been and noted that much of the farm tours conducted for the two reporters were ignored, as well as data concerning farm safety, livestock care and meeting State and Federal standards for water, soil and air safety.

My theory is journalism piggy move-up.

Piggy move-up was a form of softball played in Chicago, when space or players were limited. After tossing the bat and two fingering to the "bottle cap," a batter was chosen.  He needed to make a hit. The pitcher, the catcher (if needed) the basemen and fielders took up the bat in an agreed upon order.

Modern Journalism ( from Dewey on) begins with an assumption and ends when that assumption is satisfied with phrases, narratives, graphs, polls, and charts.  That assumption moves along the great chain of being from Thinks Tank, to Political Action Committee, to newspapers, television and radio,  to politicians and to legislation, until whatever is believed with same level of reverence as if it came from a Burning Bush- Public schools only need more money; homicides are down in Chicago; gender is neutral; Lisa Madigan really, really cares.

Theorists and social engineers come up with an idea to handcuff the planet.  Global Veganism is the agenda soon to replace Climate Change, formerly called Global Warming.  The United Nations came out with a decree in June calling for Universal Veganism, The Guardian ( Glenn Greenwald) wrote a compelling series on Vegan or Death, Chicago Tribune Declares war on low pork prices and Dick Durbin rushes to judgment. Journalism piggy move-up.  It is not baseball.

Neither is the series on pork production in Illinois.  It will only harm one more of Illinois' key industries and in the process vilify people who do not have it coming to them.

*Ms. Appell is currently a member of the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations, a position she has held since 2010, and the USDA Agricultural Technical Advisory Committee for Trade of Animals and Animal Products. She is also a past President of the National Pork Producers Council and the Illinois Pork Producers Association. In addition, she previously served as Illinois State Director for Rural Development for the USDA. Ms. Appell farms in Knox County.