US Army Veteran Arrested for Being Black While Touring House for Sale

A 911 call was placed by “neighbors” near Grand Rapids, Michigan when a black army veteran with his son and his real estate agent toured a home for sale.

The trio suddenly found themselves surrounded by police pointing guns… with no cause.

Thorne and his son were touring a home Sunday with real estate agent Eric Brown, who’s also Black, in Wyoming, Mich., when police suddenly surrounded the house with guns drawn. The officers were responding to a neighbor’s 911 call about a break in. They ordered the three out of the house, handcuffed them and put them in separate vehicles.

Except it wasn’t a break in. Brown, 46, who has been working in the Grand Rapids area market for 20 years, had arrived at the house on Sharon Avenue SW around 2 p.m. Thorne brought his 15-year-old son, Samuel.

The police were forced to release them since they had absolutely no cause (other than racism) in what amounted to little more than a “shining city” intolerance operation at taxpayers’ expense.

Here’s a map showing the location of the house.

Source: SPLC


Update: August 9th, 2021.

Police have tried to explain away their racist actions by saying they were following procedures when reacting to a report based on… color.

I am not kidding.

Read this version of events:

Another Black man with a similar car to the real estate agent’s vehicle was arrested after he went into the house without permission July 24, police said. […] A neighbor saw Brown’s car parked in front of the house on Aug. 1 and called police, wrongly reporting that the intruder had returned, the statement said. Brown’s car is the same color as that first person’s but a different make and model.

Ok, let’s break this down, because it’s so racist it screams here are some racists who actually think they aren’t being racist while being even more racist.

Did you notice how the recount starts by claiming a “similar” car yet ends up claiming it was a “different” car?

Imagine the police saying to the 911 caller “you said someone similar is in the house” and the caller replies “I see a different person in the house, they just have similar skin color”.

Take a proper look at what is really being said.

“Another black man” was driving “the same COLOR as that first person”… “but a different make and model“.

In other words…color. It reads as a confession. If you display the same color as a criminal, you will be treated as a criminal. The police literally have confessed now, albeit awkwardly, their actions were BASED ON COLOR ALONE and no actual cause.

It’s like a bad joke: Have you heard about the neighborhood where police can’t tell that a black driver named John in a Hyundai with license plate XYZ123 is NOT the same person as a black driver named Roger in a Mercedes with license plate ABC456?

Fun history fact: license plates were invented because the first cars all looked too similar and people reporting crimes in progress couldn’t tell them apart. That is true.

With everything said so far it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to calculate what blinds police into incorrectly fixating when there were so many obvious differences.

Again, no other reason has been given for calling 911, just COLOR. And again, no other reason has been given for drawing guns, surrounding the house and detaining three people, just COLOR.


See also, an introduction to American racism and related housing discrimination:

NYC’s $200 Million “Suicide Machine” Closed Again After 4th Tragedy

The easily predictable disaster has been a disaster:

…two years before The Vessel opened, architecture critic Audrey Wachs was warning that the waist-height railings around the staircases would fail to prevent deaths: “When you build high, folks will jump.”

Even an “easy solution” came with predictions.

Three suicides in the early 2000s at New York University’s Bobst Library – which originally featured internal open-air balconies – offered both a warning and an easy solution.

This story just gets worse and worse.

Carla Fine, who has spent 40 years writing about and talking to those affected by suicide… lives in Chelsea, eight blocks from The Vessel, says the danger of the structure was obvious from the moment it was unveiled… “I knew what was going to happen… It’s a suicide machine.”

Despite the predictions, despite the easy solution and despite clear warnings… the deaths continued due to alleged negligence.

After the first death at The Vessel in February 2019, Fine raised the matter at a public meeting of the local community board. In March, representatives of the board wrote to Andrew Cantor, senior vice-president of Related, urging the company to install higher safety barriers – but it took no action. Over the next year, Fine wrote repeatedly to Related, as well as to Heatherwick Studios, urging them to take the matter seriously. When the next two suicides happened, she was still waiting for a reply that never came.

The total disregard for others comes through in another element of this story.

[Owner of the suicide machine] claimed that it could use, for promotional purposes, any photo of The Vessel posted online, without awarding royalties or due credit.

The owner said even if people did not lose their life, they were guaranteed to lose their assets.

I’m surprised the owner didn’t announce they could rob people visiting their site since they wouldn’t be needing anything after suicide.

Indeed, after multiple suicides the owner decided it would add a $10 fee to tax people at the bottom before their lives were taken at the top.

“If you want to kill yourself, usually you go ahead and kill yourself. Ten dollars doesn’t make the difference,” Fine says. The fact that Related was about to make a profit from the deaths to which its site was linked is also fairly unpalatable.

The owner also started a requirement for people to only be allowed entry in groups, a truly terrible and tone-deaf attempt to ignore safety experts yet again.

That only made the horror worse, because the boy who jumped yesterday did so in front of his family. The structure’s only purpose was to offer a climb and a view. The problem is that the adjacent shopping mall (no stairs or entry fee required) offers a similar view, and the observation deck 1,000 feet above puts them both to shame.

Does it even have any purpose at this point other than to increase preventable deaths?

And who designed this monstrosity of harm, an immediate folly in the truest sense?

The man responsible for this disaster design, Thomas Heatherwick, has no formal training in architecture. Patronage seems to be how he ended up with the job. His prior work was also shutdown as failure, also with massive losses.

During his tenure as London mayor, Johnson championed Heatherwick’s designs for a garden bridge across the Thames. The project collapsed in August 2017, leaving taxpayers with a bill of £43 million, making it one of the costliest project failures in British political history.

What is he doing now? Perhaps he should be forced to create a monument to the dead of Heatherwick Folly — “suicide machine” — paid out of his own pocket?

Heatherwick’s Folly Has Been Called a “Suicide Machine”

Apparently he already has some designs in mind.

Thomas Heatherwick is in discussions with a government minister over plans for a memorial to the victims of the Covid pandemic.

Victims of COVID?!

It seems incredibly cruel to ignore the deaths he allegedly is responsible for, which he easily could have been prevented. Many have pointed out his suspicious lack of response this whole time people are dying from his obvious design failure.

Even more cruel is if he has been thinking about the victims… in terms of another quick enrichment scheme to get a back-room deal to design a memorial elsewhere for something else.

Is Heatherwick thinking he can somehow redeem himself through another suspicious deal because it awkwardly shows he at least acknowledges suffering of someone? Or is it just bald corruption, lacking any more thought than moving along from big failure to bigger failure?

This Day in History 1991: The WorldWideWeb Project

The header for the email says it all, really.

From: timbl@info.cern.ch (Tim Berners-Lee)
Newsgroups: alt.hypertext
Subject: WorldWideWeb: Summary
Keywords: heterogeneous hypertext, web, source, protocol, index, information retrieval
Message-ID: <6487@cernvax.cern.ch>
Date: 6 Aug 91 16:00:12 GMT
References: <6484@cernvax.cern.ch>

Remember VAX?

WorldWideWeb – Executive Summary

The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to
make an easy but powerful global information system.

The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should
be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within
internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by
support groups.

Reader view

The WWW world consists of documents, and links. Indexes are special documents
which, rather than being read, may be searched. The result of such a search is
another (“virtual”) document containing links to the documents found. A simple
protocol (“HTTP”) is used to allow a browser program to request a keyword
search by a remote information server.

The web contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are
hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places
within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar
to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme.

To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or
she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other
search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire
world of data.

Information provider view

The WWW browsers can access many existing data systems via existing protocols
(FTP, NNTP) or via HTTP and a gateway. In this way, the critical mass of data
is quickly exceeded, and the increasing use of the system by readers and
information suppliers encourage each other.

Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your
existing data. Making it public involves running the FTP or HTTP daemon, and
making at least one link into your web from another. In fact, any file
available by anonymous FTP can be immediately linked into a web. The very small
start-up effort is designed to allow small contributions. At the other end of
the scale, large information providers may provide an HTTP server with full
text or keyword indexing.

The WWW model gets over the frustrating incompatibilities of data format
between suppliers and reader by allowing negotiation of format between a smart
browser and a smart server. This should provide a basis for extension into
multimedia, and allow those who share application standards to make full use of
them across the web.

This summary does not describe the many exciting possibilities opened up by the
WWW project, such as efficient document caching. the reduction of redundant
out-of-date copies, and the use of knowledge daemons. There is more
information in the online project documentation, including some background on
hypertext and many technical notes.

Try it

A prototype (very alpha test) simple line mode browser is currently available
in source form from node info.cern.ch [currently 128.141.201.74] as

/pub/WWW/WWWLineMode_0.9.tar.Z.

Also available is a hypertext editor for the NeXT using the NeXTStep graphical
user interface, and a skeleton server daemon.

Documentation is readable using www (Plain text of the instalation instructions
is included in the tar file!). Document

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

is as good a place to start as any. Note these coordinates may change with
later releases.

And thus began the WWW with a line mode browser in a Z compressed tar (tape archive).

Get the Vaccine So People With Vaccines Aren’t in Danger

A long personal story published in Business Insider tries to reduce the stigma around those opposed to vaccines in order to help “change minds”:

The reason for everybody to get the vaccine is to make sure that the virus doesn’t mutate to a point where it’s resistant to the vaccines — now even the people with vaccines are in danger. As soon as I read that, I said to myself, “Oh my God, it all makes sense.”

Here’s the real kicker, though:

Whenever I hear stuff in the media in terms of vaccines, it’s always “It’s safe and effective, go get it.” There’s never a whole lot of data explaining why it’s safe and effective. That took a lot of digging for me. It’s not so readily available. And then once I got the data, I thought, “Why didn’t I know this stuff?”

The answer to his own question actually comes right at the start of the article, but the connection back to it was never made:

[Pop culture] made me feel like I had some special insider knowledge. From there, I got into fasting, detoxification, sunlight, walking barefoot, and so on. Through that, I developed a general mistrust of the medical community.

Bingo. The answers aren’t easy because, to put it simply, they aren’t easy. Working hard does work, such that the act of digging is really what led to “it all makes sense” more than any simple formula.

Maybe a better way of saying this is just because you’re passionate doesn’t mean success or knowledge is dropped in your lap. Question why you feel entitled to arrival instead of accepting a humble path to get there.

The article is a good example of how education of children needs to focus far more on cognition and systems thinking, instead of narrowly defined skills in specific trades that promise “special insider knowledge” while mostly allowing for ignorance.