Not One to Let an Opportunity Pass

All the stuff goin' on in the news,
it's just a trick to get your mind off the war.
That's all it is
--Chris Rock 

I can cast a spell 
With secrets you can't tell 
Mix a special brew 
Put fire inside of you 
But anytime you feel 
Danger or fear 
Instantly I will appear 
--I'm Every Woman, Chaka Khan 

We sing about beauty and we sing about truth 
At ten thousand dollars a show   
--The Cover of the Rolling Stone, Dr. Hook  
_________________

More on TMZ (Travyon Martin / Zimmerman) as artifact of our culture and ourselves:

President Obama said in 2012 "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon".  After Zimmerman's recent acquittal and subsequent liberal self-flagellation he told RollingStone.com,"Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago". Ranger has a suggestion for a final bravura installment: "George Zimmerman IS me!" as he meditates upon his drone killing of 16-year-old U.S. citizen Abdulrahmen al-Awlaki. It would be momentous. The truth shall set you free, Mr. Obama, and the humility may even effect a reconciliation with your mentor, Rev. Wright.

[Addendum for those who could not understand why the Obamat - Z nexus: They are both whitish-dark-skinned men who have killed a dark person; however, Obama's kill of Abdulrahmen was premeditated, while Z's was not.]

Alas, the press continues to spin its inanity and lies. National Public Radio this week reported on the small protest at Florida's capital against the state's "Stand your Ground" law, but ended the piece stating -- incorrectly -- the law was a significant factor in the acquittal of George Zimmerman.  In fact, the law was not invoked in the case.

Next, the reliably unreliable William Saletan in his recent Slate feel-good piece "Rules for Racism", cloddishly slips in the following fabulation disguised as fact:

"Yes, Zimmerman is the one who pulled the trigger. Yes, white-on-black racism dwarfs black-on-white racism. ..."

Um, no, this is purely conjecture, and actual homicide data from FBI.gov would seem to contradict Saletan's supposition. It's a slicky boy one-two punch -- fact followed by a non-sequitur imaginary statement, but the latter gains credibility by proximity to the leading statement (ergo propter hoc).

"White-on-black racism" is an unquantifiable statistic. Racism is a felt emotion and as such, purely subjective. One could extrapolate racist intent from crime stats, but that would be pure conjecture; myriad other motives could explain the vastly larger number of violent crimes committed by blacks against whites, however, that statistic stands.

And today I note the liberals are chomping at the bit to diminish the public black-on-white murder of a white man by four blacks in an Atlanta suburb last week. The most egregious and non-sensical of the damage control articles was exemplified by this one, which blames the victim for his own situation, without any notice of the blatant hypocrisy of the title: "Joshua Chellew: Right Wing Propaganda Tool."

The rambling piece quotes Mr. Chellew's passenger as saying, "He was a good person, one of them funny, outgoing kind of people" -- just so you get the message: They were probably ignorant hicks (see the pronoun error?) and didn't know how to behave any better than getting four young black punks to kill him, no doubt as a result of their racial Sturm und Drang. He didn't know how to defuse a situation which took him from life to death in two minutes, but that'll show him for being an ignorant cracker.

So there you have it -- my disgust for the media and those who call themselves liberals, hawking their pet interests and points of view, entrenching their biases. They are worse than the neocons who at least do not deny their reactionary stance. There is nothing new or wholesome in the liberal message, just deaf, impotent rage and anger.

For all the gnashing of teeth, we are still a racist, sexist, ageist -- you name it -- bunch. We are guilty as sin, and a little penance feels good, even for the most godless among us; perhaps, by virtue of that fact. Oh, as long as they don't have to actually dirty their hands ... it is all done in the neat and tidy realm of the computer.

Believing in nothing or maintaining dissonant views, their rancor stews, running the lines of least resistance, seeking the easy fault line so it may erupt and discharge their passions for a moment. They love to slaver and congregate over their own pathos, but their rage belies their project.

The media is happily complicit with their disunity, starting little fires here and there as their denizens run hither and thither to squawk and gawk, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.


[In justification for addressing TMZ @ RAW: the war within ourselves and our society is expressed also as the war without; it is inescapable.]

Really Going Dark

We can do the innuendo
We can dance and sing
When it's said and done
We haven't told you a thing
--Dirty Laundry, Don Henley

Olivia de Havilland: You speak treason!
Errol Flynn: Fluently
--Robin Hood (1938)
________________

O.k. -- I lied. Just a quickie from the WaPo today about the recent Holocaust Museum shooting:

"Which is why one hopes nothing changes at the Holocaust Museum. The defense against terrorism isn't just physical, and it isn't just about violence. It's about the decision not to be terrorized ("The Built-In Response to Terrifying Moments").

This is erroneous commingling of crime with terrorism. The Holocaust Museum shooter was a bigoted whack job who committed a craven crime. A white supremacist who figured he'd go hunting over a baited field, and ended up killing a black security guard. Not the sharpest pencils in the box, those supremacists.

I resent the news media using every instance of "scary crime" as being in the same ballpark as terrorism. The media exploited the recent killing of an abortion doctor in the same way.

Instead of using these discrete examples of criminal behavior as teaching points to highlight the difference between what is homegrown crime versus terrorism, they shamelessly elided the two into one muddy ball of wax. Fear is the product, all the time.

They could have said, "a terrorist aims to reach an audience beyond the actual target. This crazed racist just wanted to kill him some Jewish people." But that would be to put the blame where it belongs, squarely on the shoulders of the racist and bigoted society and subculture which spawned such a murderer.

It is the intersection in the media of two impulses, neither good: Feeding a no-responsibility culture, and a need to whip up fear and frenzy among the populace, to keep them on the straight and narrow path their government has laid out for them. The press is colluding with the government.

It is lax thinking and reportage.