u/Ponder_wisely

Eye-popping piece from a while back...

Eye-popping piece from a while back...

“As it shuts downs schools and cuts public services all across the city, Chicago just admitted it has paid over $500 million in settlements because of police misconduct.

In 2010, the NYPD announced that they had spent nearly $1 billion settling cases of police misconduct in the previous 10 years.

They spent an additional $428 million in the five years that followed.

Since 1990, Oakland has paid $74 million in settlements for police misconduct.

Los Angeles has paid $54 million in settlements for police misconduct during the past few years.

Philadelphia has settled more than $40 million in police misconduct cases the past few years.

It was just announced that the Boston Police Department, in just the past 10 years, has settled more than 2,000 cases of misconduct that cost the city $36 million.

In six years Minneapolis paid $14 million in settlements for police misconduct.

Baltimore has paid millions.

Mind you, none of these costs include the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on legal fees by departments all over the nation as they attempt to defend their officers against an hour-by-hour stream of misconduct charges and work through the exhaustive settlement agreements with thousands of families. Not only that, but cities like Chicago recently admitted that they have an outrageous backlog of over 500 pending settlements to families who've been affected by police brutality and misconduct in their city. Police abuse has been so widespread in Chicago that the first reparations fund for torture victims from its police department has been created.

In Dayton, Ohio, the popular captain of the Montgomery County Police Department, Thomas Flanders was found to be sending texts like "I hate niggers. That is all" back and forth between his top detective.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the second and third highest-ranking officers in the department, Majors Tom Huckeby and Tim Albin, just resigned in disgrace over corruption within their department, which directly led to the shooting death of 44-year-old Eric Harris.

This Georgia police chief resigned in disgrace after he was caught calling African Americans "niggers" in text messages.

In Miami the racism was so widespread that more than a dozen officers have been implicated and hundreds of cases are having to be reviewed.

In St. Louis, the spokesman for the police union, Jeff Roorda, was actually fired as a police officer for falsifying reports.

This police chief was arrested for raping underage boys.

This police chief and his assistant were just arrested for violating their oath of office and submitting false reports.

This Tennessee police chief was just arrested for stealing.

This Alabama police chief was just arrested for stealing.

The Port of Los Angeles police chief was just arrested for corruption.

This police chief was just arrested and fired for prostitution.

This Columbia, South Carolina police chief was just arrested for domestic violence.

This Arkansas police chief was just arrested for selling drugs.

This Fresno, California, police chief was arrested for selling drugs.

Hundreds of other high-ranking officers have been arrested in the past few years alone on every charge you could imagine.

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2015/05/15/1384993/-Let-s-stop-saying-bad-police-officers-are-rare-Fact-is-they-re-plentiful-from-coast-to-coast?showAll=yes

u/Ponder_wisely — 2 days ago
▲ 55 r/Vespa

I’ll own a Vespa until I die

(Not me on the Vespa. I think it’s Brad Pitt)

u/Ponder_wisely — 3 days ago
▲ 309 r/Vespa

I’ll own a Vespa until I die

(Not me on the Vespa. I think it’s Brad Pitt)

u/Ponder_wisely — 3 days ago

Back in 1923, Zionists leaders like Ze’ev Jabotinsky were not talking about ‘reclaiming their homeland’. That false narrative came much later. They were talking plainly about COLONISING PALESTINE BY FORCE

“Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse
to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators. There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting “Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage. And it made no difference whatever whether the colonists behaved decently.

We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims,watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico , and their Sioux for their rolling Prairies.
To imagine, as our Arabophiles do, that they will voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism. In return for the moral and material conveniences which the Jewish colonist brings with him, is a childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of
contempt for the Arab people; it means that they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold, and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system.”

Anybody who believes in the myth of Jewish return has been deceived by blatantly false propaganda designed to cloak a brutal colonisation campaign. Jewish claim to the land is based on modern myths spun from ancient myths.
Here’s what Shlomo Sand, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Tel Aviv wrote about that:

“Is the Bible a historical text? Writing during the early half of the 19th century, the first modern Jewish historians, such as Isaak Markus Jost (1793-1860) and Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), did not think so. They regarded the Old Testament as a theological work reflecting the beliefs of Jewish religious communities after the destruction of the first temple. It was not until the second half of the century that Heinrich Graetz (1817-91) and others developed a “national” vision of the Bible and transformed Abraham’s journey to Canaan, the flight from Egypt and the united kingdom of David and Solomon into an authentic national past. By constant repetition, Zionist historians have subsequently turned these Biblical “truths” into the basis of national education.

But during the 1980s an earthquake shook these founding myths. The discoveries made by the “new archaeology” discredited a great exodus in the 13th century BC. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt into the Promised Land, for the good reason that the latter was Egyptian territory at the time. And there is no trace of either a slave revolt against the pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of Canaan by outsiders.

Nor is there any trace or memory of the magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon. Recent discoveries point to the existence, at the time, of two small kingdoms: Israel, the more powerful, and Judah, the future Judea. The general population of Judah did not go into 6th century BC exile: only its political and intellectual elite were forced to settle in Babylon. This decisive encounter with Persian religion gave birth to Jewish monotheism.

Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest.

Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this: Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, accepted it as late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt. Both stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea.”
https://mondediplo.com/2008/09/07israel

en.jabotinsky.org
u/Ponder_wisely — 11 days ago
▲ 44 r/Vespa+1 crossposts

Borrowed this Vespa from a friend, the taillight fell out due to the rot. Had to tape it back in place. Am I right that there’s something missing inside the frame that protects against water splashing from the tyre?

u/Ponder_wisely — 15 days ago