Leslie Fish's Blog, page 25

Another Workplace Shooting

So another "disgruntled" ex-employee marched into his former place of business, shot the person who'd taken his job and two other people who happened to be in the vicinity, then died in the resulting shootout with the police.  What makes this case notable is the role of the media.  The workplace was a TV station, the "disgruntled" ex-employee was a former newsman, the people he shot were the current news-anchor and her cameraman and a woman she was interviewing, the killer was carrying a gun in one hand and a video-camera in the other, he published a 15-page manifesto on the Internet (which revealed his motivations and psychology at great length), and the whole thing wound up on prime-time TV.

Naturally the media had a field day with this story.  Not only were the victims -- and the killer -- Their Own, but there was plenty of footage covering the whole event, some of it from the killer's own camera.  What's interesting are the varying media reactions.

The usual hardcore anti-gun crowd are trumpeting the usual cliches (and the usual lies) about the Evils of Guns, and When Will America Wake Up and Scrap the 2nd Amendment -- but they're sounding rather weak nowadays, especially as the FBI crime statistics have revealed some embarrassing facts.  Among these are: 1) the homicide/gun-homicide/violent-crime rates in America have been falling since the 1990s, which (coincidentally?) is the same period when the majority of states made it easier for civilians to obtain firearms concealed-carry permits, the number of permits and the number of civilian gun-owners skyrocketed;  2) an average of 10,000 Americans every year are killed by firearms, while at least 900,000 Americans every year prevent violent crimes by use of a firearm (and the number could easily be twice as high);  3) the vast majority of gun-homicides (85%) every year are committed by young Black males.  Oops.

Far more pundits concentrated on the killer's manifesto, where he ranted about racism, the recent church shooting and its clear racist motives (by one vicious punk), and police killings of Blacks (ignoring police shootings of poor Whites, Indians and Asians).  He also raved about losing his job to a White woman and claimed it was because he was Gay as well as Black, but the commentators played down that part.  Those first two points gave plenty of fodder for raps about Racism In America by Black petty-politicians -- such as "leaders" of Black Lives Matter, and Al "Mighty Mouth" Sharpton.  Interestingly, there are far fewer -- if any -- such raps from the Gay community, probably because Gays are used to enduring worse treatment and more often.

Only a few news analysts I've heard have focused on the killer's manifest -- and manifestoed -- personality.  He was obviously a self-obsessed, infantile, paranoid, malignant narcissist who blamed everybody else in the world for his disappointments in life.  Comments from the TV station where the event happened make it clear that the killer lost his job not because he was Black, or Gay, but because he was "thin-skinned", "touchy", took everything as a personal attack, and got along with nobody.  It's not surprising that a personality like that, when the station suffered shrinking income and had to lay off some personnel, got the boot.

The problem is that nobody realized that such a personality could actually be dangerous, could come back to the studio two years after he was fired and shoot up the place -- and that is exactly the problem.  Much of modern middle-class culture encourages infantilism like this, and doesn't realize the danger of encouraging it, let alone have any strategy for discouraging it.  Various pundits have discussed the importance of spotting people with serious mental problems before they get to the point of shooting (or bombing, or knifing) random targets, but what good is mental-health testing when the society applying the tests doesn't know recognize the problem when they see it?

--Leslie <;)))><         

Bibliolatry

Bibliolatry -- the worship of a book -- is the curse that plagues the three major religions of the western world: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  Regarding a Holy Book as containing sacred power by itself makes it unquestionable, and freezes the mind of the worshipers in the mental attitudes common at the time of the book's writing, and allows no possibility of change or learning from subsequent experience, even over centuries -- a rigidity which puts the worshipers increasingly out of touch with the real world, with all the friction that implies.

The Jews, to their credit, consider only the first five books of the Old Testament to be sacred -- the Five Books of Moses -- and all the rest are commentary.  Even so, the ambiguities of ancient Hebrew allow for wide interpretation of even those five books.  Ancient Hebrew was a pidgin, a trade-language cobbled together from the tongues of twelve different tribes, with a large smattering of ancient Egyptian, and as such it was word-poor -- containing less than 10,000 words when the Five Books were written.  Since there weren't very many words in the language, each word had to carry the freight of several meanings;  just which meaning was intended in any given sentence had to be guessed at from the context.  This makes a language excellent for poetry, but very poor at anything requiring precision -- such as history or law -- as the authors were quite aware.  This means that the Old Testament was never meant to be taken literally, not even by those who wrote it.  This did not stop the Orthodox Jews, over the centuries, from arguing over the precise meaning of those imprecise words until they created a rigid code of behavior and ritual which sets them apart -- sometimes dangerously so -- from the rest of the world.  Reform Judaism grew up after modern scholarship revealed the facts about the Old Testament -- the ambiguity of the original language, the effect of ancient Egyptian politics on the writing, and the multiple authorship.  That last had been obvious from the beginning;  the collection is called the Five Books of Moses, but in the accounts Moses dies in the second book, so somebody else had to finish the rest of them.  The likeliest candidate is Aaron, Moses' brother, who had been a priest in Egypt -- and not a priest of Yahweh.  The Reform Jews used this knowledge to break free of the ancient bibliolatry and shape their religion with a more enlightened attitude, extracting moral and philosophical lessons out of the ancient writings, rather than being bound to ritual observances.  This is why most modern Jews are Reform rather than Orthodox.

Christianity, which evolved out of Judaism, followed a somewhat similar path.  Its holy book, the New Testament, is the account of the life and death of Ieshua bar-Ioseph of Nazareth and his immediate followers, and was written in Aramaic sometime in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.  This was during the Roman occupation of Judea, which followed the Alexandrian Greek occupation after the conquests of Alexander the Great.  At that time the literate people in Judea spoke, and wrote, in Aramaic -- which was a hybrid of Hebrew and Greek.  Whether Ieshua himself spoke Aramaic or Hebrew is anyone's guess, since he was the son of a carpenter and wasn't raised with the expectation of a literary profession but worked -- presumably at his father's trade -- until he took up preaching in his 30s.  Just what he preached was religious reform: direct mental contact with the Jewish god, rather than blind observance of ritual and dutiful subservience to the temple priesthood.  His proposed reforms earned him the enmity of the priesthood, and his popularity gained him the hostility of the paranoid local king, which got him killed.  Ieshua never claimed to be anything but a Jewish religious reformer;  it was his followers who labeled him Messiah and deified him in memory, so that his legend spread after his death.  The first written account of his life wasn't penned until nearly 60 years after his death, and the rest still later, so none of the Gospels were eyewitness accounts.  The official New Testament was put together by a council of bishops in the 3rd century, and those bishops left accounts of the several other books that they threw out of the final version.  The custom of considering the book itself to be holy and unuestionable didn't start until Constantine (on his death-bed, if indeed it was him instead of his pious wife speaking) made Christianity the official religion of the floundering Roman empire.  As the religion spread and the empire collapsed, the book became the emblem of the church's power -- and so remained holy and unquestionable for another thousand years.  It wasn't until literacy and learning returned to Europe on any sizable scale, during the Renaissance, that anyone started questioning the book's supposed absolute accuracy.  Not until the 19th century did scientific discoveries, contradicting the book's claims, make acceptance of its literal inaccuracy widespread.  The parables of Ieshua -- which he clearly labeled as parables -- and the obvious symbols and allegories of the gospel of John made it easier to accept the entire book as a collection of parables, myths and symbols.  Even so, there are large numbers of people even today who try to insist that the entire book is literally true -- and therefore science is wrong.

Islam was largely the creation, in the 600s, of one man: an Arabian tent-maker who lucked into early marriage to a wealthy widow.  Muhammed was prone to mild epileptic fits, during which he saw ecstatic visions.  When his wife died and left him a wealthy widower, he consolidated his visions into a religion composed of fragments from the Christian bible and his own creations.  Muhammed was illiterate, so he hired a small army of clerks and dictated his visions, thoughts and memories to them.  Just how accurately those clerks transcribed his accounts, and how much they added or subtracted according to their own political agendas, nobody knows.  Muhammed was also ambitious, and used his inherited wealth to hire troops and entice armed allies.  He courted the local Jews and Christians, hoping to win them over to his religion, but when they declined he grew angry with them and took to conquering them instead.  By the time he died, Muhammed was an exceedingly wealthy conqueror whose empire stretched across Arabia and much of the middle-east.  His notes to his clerks were collected into a single book, which was subsequently called the Koran;  it was used as the emblem of his new religion and the justification for his empire.  His heirs fell to squabbling over who would inherit which part of his empire, thus creating the major divisions within Islam, but all of them claimed the Koran as their holy and unquestionable justification.  No one in the conquered territories dared to question the absolute truth and holiness of the Koran for another thousand years.  In the 19th century the Baha'i sect dared to claim that the revelations of the Koran might be transcended by later revelations, for which various imams and ayatollahs denounced the Baha'is and declared them not to be Muslims at all.  In the 20th century a scholar revealed, in a novel called "The Satanic Verses", the fact that Muhammed had not directly written the Koran, for which various imams and ayatollahs put out a death-order on him.  Only in the safety of distant countries have any modern Muslim scholars questioned the holy unquestionability of the Koran, and they haven't made much headway anywhere else.  Instead, the current wave of Jihadis -- typified by ISIL -- have made themselves a threat to everyone else in the world with their strict adherence to the absolute literal interpretation of the Koran.

What history has shown is that bibliolatry creates extensive and unnecessary warfare with one's neighbors, and likewise destructive treatment of one's own people.  Religions that indulge in it descend into stagnation at best and savagery at worst.  No religion has advanced into modern enlightenment without freeing itself from such holy-book worship and allowing its worshipers to think for themselves.  To put it another way, no sensible god would be pleased at seeing humans blindly worship questionable writings, instead of learning from the signs the god currently gives them or using the brains he gave them in the first place.

--Leslie <;)))><                       

Ferguson Revisited: Beginning to Wise Up

On the anniversary of the Michael Brown shooting the usual protesters, now calling themselves part of the Black Lives Matter organization, did their usual peaceful march down the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, with the cops out in force watching them.  Nothing happened until the sun went down and visibility got poor.  Then, just like last year, a bunch of Black provocateurs started throwing rocks and bottles at the cops.  One of them started waving a gun around -- as the news cameras caught --  and the cops shot him, nonfatally, and hauled him off to jail.  His relatives posed for the cameras, weeping and wailing that it was all a mistake, and their son was a good boy.

But there were some differences between this year's "unrest" and last year's.  For one thing, this year the cops didn't go merrily hog-wild and attack the whole protest march, but only shot the one fool and arrested him;  they seem to have learned some self-control in the past year.

Second, as the protesters and even the police insisted to the reporters, the troublemakers were not the protest marchers but "two gangs" of crooks who "took advantage of the cover" of the march to "settle some personal scores".  I suspect that the provocateurs were a little more than that, but at least the townsfolk are beginning to realize that there's another group of players in the game.

Third, another group has joined the factions;  the Oathkeepers -- a libertarian bunch of ex-military and ex-police (and sometimes not to ex-), who claim to keep the oath they swore on joining the police and/or the military: to uphold and defend the Constitution.  They brought their rifles and shotguns with them, and volunteered to guard the local shops and businesses so as to prevent the kind of looting and burning that happened last year.  To all accounts, it worked;  none of the provocateurs went after the local shops, but tangled with the police on the street.  This seems to have upset the police, who afterward ordered the Oathkeepers to leave their posts -- on the excuse that they didn't have a "license" to work as security guards.

The Oathkeepers then promised to join the protest march next day, which seems to have upset everybody:  the police because they're worried about the "inflammatory" effect of all those adults carrying long-guns, the protest organizers because the Oathkeepers are largely (though not entirely) White, the media because they've convinced themselves that the Oathkeepers are "right-wingers" and therefore racists, and the provocateurs (though they don't call themselves that) because it's "unfair" that "these White guys" can walk around carrying guns without getting shot by the cops.

Actually, it would be a great idea for the Oathkeepers to march with the protesters -- especially out on the margins of the march.  It would keep the cops from too readily shooting at the protesters, it would discourage the provocateurs from provoking trouble with the police, it would prove that it's a lot more than just Black lives that matter -- or Black people who get attacked by thuggish cops, and damn-well resent it --and it would display the usefulness of the 2nd Amendment.  It's a win-win situation for everybody. 

Of course, there are a lot of people in Ferguson who don't like any of those outcomes.  Black Lives Matter has been trying terribly hard over the past year to make police abuse look like a purely racist issue, neatly ignoring the fact that more than half the unarmed civilians killed by police every year are not Black.  The police really hate any bunch of civilians proving in public to do their job better than they do.  The provocateurs don't like any bunch of armed civilians interfering with their business, and the media don't like the idea of armed civilians contradicting the stereotypes that the media have already set up for them.  Nobody likes having their precious prejudices refuted!

Besides, libertarians and other Bill-of-Rights protectors tend to throw a monkey-wrench into pre-planned political plots of established political factions, wherever they go.  Boo-hoo.

I'm writing this at 10:30 PM on Thursday, August 13, while watching the TV news.  On no channel do I see any mention of anything happening in Ferguson.  Was the protest march called off?  Or did the Oathkeepers join the march as promised -- and nothing whatever happened?

--Leslie <;)))><          

The GOP Follies: CoIntelPro Redux

The latest news on the GOP's merry competition for a 2016 candidate is the revelation that, back in May, Bill Clinton had a long phone conversation with Donald Trump, during which he urged Trump to try for the Republican nomination.  The more intelligent Republicans are screeching over this, because they know -- and have been saying for awhile -- that Trump is absolute poison for the Republican Party, and this phonecall shows that Trump's campaign is a Democrat plot to get Hillary Clinton elected.

The real irony is that they're right.  Trump, and his ham-fisted appeal to the worst elements of the Republican voters -- the foaming right-wingers, to be precise -- have already alienated the majority of voters, and if he won the nomination he'd guarantee a victory for Hillary in 2016.  That would cripple the GOP for years to come, if not forever.  They know because they've seen this done before. 

It's a trick the FBI invented, 'way back in the late '60s to use against the anti-war movement and then the women's movement, called CoIntelPro.  It didn't work against the peaceniks and hippies because the anti-war and counter-cultural movements were amorphous, with no central authority that could be brought down, whose collapse would destroy or at least cripple the whole movement.  The FBI did manage to destroy Students for a Democratic Society, which had originally been the center of the student movement for civil rights and against the Vietnam war, but that didn't stop the movements SDS had inspired.

CoIntelPro did work against the feminists because, back then, the center of the women's movement was the National Organization of Women.  Destroying NOW stalled the feminist movement for a good ten years.  The way the FBI worked it was to choose a real political lunatic named Andrea Dworkin, an obese and slobby lesbian who really did hate men, and hype her to NOW with a lot of covert and overt media coverage.  Her big message was that pornography encourages rape, and therefore must be censored out of existence.  There are always fringees, hangers-on, in every organization, and Dworkin really appealed to the wing-nuts in NOW.  Once NOW publicly agreed with her on the porno angle, this drove a wedge between the organization and all the defenders of free speech and the First Amendment.  When Dworkin, encouraged by carefully-primed flatterers, began making such off-the-wall statements as "Men must give up their precious erections", NOW lost all alliance with the Sexual Revolution movement.  Step by step, publicized idiocy by idiocy, Dworkin alienated all of NOW's previous supporters until there was nothing left and the organization died.  The feminist movement eventually recovered, but that's another story.

Donald Trump is to the Republican Party what Andrea Dworkin was to the National Organization of Women.  He appeals to the fringees -- the foaming reactionary right-wing nuts -- in the GOP, and he's covered intensely by the media (who may or may not be complicit in the game).  Now a good CoIntelPro campaign depends on the absolute ignorance of the spoiler him/herself -- Dworkin never could figure out why the media stopped listening to her after NOW dissolved -- and Trump sails on with his incredibly stupid statements, apparently not realizing that all this media attention is revealing his idiocy to the world.  His fool claims about Latinos has cost the GOP their vote.  His crude attacks on McCain have lost him the support of veterans.  His history of raiding and bankrupting various companies has made the more intelligent of the business community back far away from him, and his well-noted past statements about women's rights and environmental protection have lost him all hope of their supporters' votes.  Group by group, he's peeling the Republican Party like an onion, and -- provided the GOP is stupid enough to nominate him -- by election time there'll be nothing left but the reactionary right-wing nuts, and that's absolutely not enough to win any election.  Yes, even before being nominated, Trump is guaranteeing a Democrat victory.

So now we know, folks.  The fix is in, the professional political manipulators are in place, and Hillary will be the next Pres.  Brace yourself for a lot of disastrous laws, worsening economy, and concerted attacks on the Constitution.

What can we do about it?  Spread the word: "A plague on both their houses.  Vote Libertarian."  Of course the Libertarian Party won't win any offices above small local ones, but the point is to collect a bigger chunk of the vote.  The professionals who analyze elections will notice if enough voters become disgruntled enough with business as usual to abandon both major parties and vote for a minor one -- one that's all for cutting the size and cost and powers of government, which is anathema to the Big Two.  This will, at least, shake up the Rs & Ds and make them reconsider their positions.  At best, if the LP gets more than 10% of the vote, the media will take notice and just might jump ship to hitch their wagons to a rising star;  they just might start hyping the Libertarians and reporting on them truthfully at long last.  The presence of a viable third party just might make the Big Two clean up their act and start actually listening to the people for a change.


--Leslie <;)))><           

A Better Deal With Iran

By now probably everybody has seen those TV ads about how Obama's deal with Iran is unacceptable (to Republicans, anyway) because it allows Iran to keep its nuclear program.  Now, the details of the proposed treaty haven't been  published, so I'd like to know how everybody knows what's in it.  I haven't read it;  have you?

I'd agree that leaving Iran with the makings of nuclear weapons is a bad deal.  I'd also agree that Iran can't be trusted to allow outside inspections, or left to develop nuclear power without such inspections.  There's only one country in the entire middle-east that I'd trust with nuclear weapons or the means to make them -- and that country already has them.  Uhuh.  Maybe the worst-kept secret in politics is that Israel has The Bomb, and in fact has had more than one of them for quite a long time -- thirty years, at least. 

Surely Iran knows that too, and, despite the ravings of the local Ayatollahs, the culture of Iran is not piously suicidal.  Iran wants The Bomb not to throw at Israel but simply to make itself the biggest and baddest bully in the middle-eastern neighborhood.  Iran, as any Iranian will tell you, is not an Arab country;  it was originally called Persia, with all that implies, and its people have never forgotten that.  Iranians -- excuse me, Persians -- despise Arabs, and consider them good for nothing except to serve Persians.  Persia was a great empire 2000 years ago, and ruled the entire middle-east, and would love to do so again.  Iran doesn't want to intimidate Israel;  it wants to intimidate all the Arabs -- and yes, that includes the Palestinians.  This is why Iran wants to join the coalition to smash ISIL.  Such are politics in the middle-east.

Well, anyway, the US can't allow Iran to get The Bomb.  And, believe it or not, there's a way to do that.

Okay, sidebar here.  If all you want from nuclear science is to make electric power, there's a much safer and cheaper way than to use Uranium or Plutonium, and that's to use Thorium.  Thorium is radioactive enough to provide heat, to boil water, to turn a turbine, which is how a nuclear power-plant works -- but it's not radioactive enough to reach critical mass, fission, and explode.  It's remarkably common, and cheap.  India and China right now are building Thorium-reactor power-plants to provide them with cheap electricity.  The use of Thorium has been known for more than half a century.  The only reason the US and the USSR used Uranium and Plutonium for their power-plants is that such plants produce weapons-grade radioactive material, which they wanted for their A-bomb arsenals -- bombs which both countries had better sense than to actually use.

So, if Iran really wants -- as it has publicly claimed -- nuclear power only to give it electricity, then Thorium will serve them just as well, in fact much better, than Uranium.  The US could call their bluff: insist, as part of the treaty, that Iran trade us, pound for pound, all their Uranium in exchange for Thorium.  We can even throw in designs for the latest in Thorium reactors.  We could do this largely in secret, revealing such details of the deal only to Congress -- and to Israel -- while keeping them secret from the rest of the world, especially the Arab countries.

Of course, if the State Department is really working on a treaty that involves just that, they'd keep the details hidden from everybody until it was ready to read the treaty to a closed (and sworn to secrecy) session of Congress -- and likewise slip the news secretly to Israel.

In that case, the rest of us wouldn't really know what was in the treaty, would we?

--Leslie <;)))><      

Not Just Civilians!

In an ironic follow-up to my last post, a few days ago a covert Arab terrorist got into a military recruitment center in Chattanooga and shot up the place, killing five sailors and Marines, and wounding several others.  At least this time the local police  shot the vicious SOB before he could do more, or get away.  Again, the media are pumping the "tragedy", but this time they don't seem to have any target to aim the usual outrage at.

The killer was obviously a Jihadi, whether he was working for ISIL or not, and the media hint about his "radicalization" during his visits to the middle-east, but they stop short of saying the words "Arab terrorist".  Can't say that, no;  it's "racist".  Neither will they say the words "Muslim fundamentalist", because that might cause "religious persecution".  Uhuh.  No politically correct target there.

Worst, the classic target, guns, is totally off the board for this one.  Soldiers, Marines, and even sailors, are supposed to carry guns -- but this time, uncharacteristically, they didn't.  That's what made them vulnerable, and nobody can deny it.  Any Marine of a rank fit to work in a recruiting station, with so much as a pistol, could have drawn and shot the Jihadi thug the minute he started shooting, preventing at least four deaths and an unknown number of injuries -- and nobody can deny that, either.  The uniformed folk in that recruiting station weren't armed because the office was inside a commercial shopping mall, which bans such things.

A few of the media have made fleeting reference to the topic which is obviously absorbing the people of Chattanooga right now: that it's bad enough to disarm civilians in public, but the military too?  They're supposed to be armed and trained to protect the rest of us.  If our soldiers, Marines and sailors aren't fit to carry weapons, who on Earth is?  You can bet that the managers of that shopping mall are getting a lot of flak right now, either openly or behind the scenes, about their 'gun-free zone' policy.  I daresay that in a short while you won't see military recruiting stations with disarmed recruiters inside anymore.

And once active military is allowed to be armed, why not Reserves?  Why not active National Guard?  Why not veterans, who have obviously had training?  Why not civilians who have bothered to obtain state concealed-carry permits?  The pendulum is swinging back, at long last.  'Gun-free' zones are beginning to erode, and a few more Jihadi shoot-ups will finish them.

One can almost see the media mourning for their lost cause, and their lost influence.  Michael Moore should be crying in his beer.         

You can be sure the Marines won't cry.

--Leslie <;)))><  

 

Jeanne Assam, and Turning the Stampede

Who is Jeanne Assam, you say?  She's a middle-aged cop who was working as a volunteer security guard at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs on December 9, 2007, when a murderous lunatic named Matthew Murray, who was wearing a flak-vest and toting two pistols and a rifle, began shooting up the parishioners as they left the church after services.

He killed two church-goers and wounded three others while the rest of the congregation fled back into the church.  Jeanne Assam moved against the tide to get to the church door just as the lunatic was coming in.  She drew on him and announced herself as a cop.  He fired at her but missed as she ducked into cover.  She fired twice, hitting him in the flak-vest, which knocked him down.  He fired and missed again, she fired at him again -- higher, above the vest -- and took him down.

She was hailed as a hero in the local, county and state (not national, for some reason) media, but that didn't last long.  The police department she worked for subjected her to sexual harassment, then fired her for trivial reasons when she filed a complaint.  The state media then did an 'expose' about Assam losing her police job. An agent supposedly helping her write a book about the shooting 'accidentally' revealed to the New Life Church's pastor that she was a lesbian, whereupon the church she had rescued asked her to leave.  The local media glibly reported that, too.  The book deal dried up, no other police department in the state would hire her, and she wound up on Unemployment.  To all accounts, she's still there.

For some reason, no other church seems to have drawn the obvious conclusion from this story.  On June 17, 2015, a vicious racist named Dylann Roof sneaked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, shot up the church, killed nine people and wounded several others.  He escaped, though he was caught and arrested later.  There was no armed security guard, no Jeanne Assam, at that church to prevent the slaughter.  The mass media never drew the connection between the two incidents, but commentators on the Internet did.  A large and growing number of them spread the story, and there are rumors of churches making  tentative offers to hire Jeanne Assam full time.  Let's hope this is true.

But perhaps this is the reason that the national media haven't quite treated the Charleston church-shooting quite the way they usually cover mass shooting cases.

Oh yes, the papers, TV and radio stations have done the usual -- in fact, downright cliched -- emotion-stirring articles about the Horrendous Tragedy, with thumbnail biographies of the slain, weepy interviews with the survivors, et al.  But this time there's a difference in direction.  Usually, when following up a multiple-shooting story, the media quickly move into editorial demands for "reasonable gun-control", steering all that stirred-up emotion into political support for ill-thought-out and at least partly unconstitutional laws.  This time, instead, the media homed in on Dylann Roof's blatant racism -- then broadened that into decrying modern racism in general, and finally narrowed their aim onto, if you please, public showing of the Confederate flag.

Now just how banning a piece of cloth, which has not commanded any troops nor had any power for more than 150 years, is supposed to reduce racism in America is a really puzzling question.  All that this media campaign has done, really, is provide a target for all the emotion they so thoroughly stirred up.  It has the feel of a stampede that the media started for one purpose, and then suddenly decided they had to turn away to another, harmless, use.    

Could it possibly be that all those stories in the unofficial media -- blogs on the Internet -- about the 2007 shooting and Jeanne Assam, actually made the managers of the media stop and think?  Could they possibly have realized that all recent polls have showed at least 57% of the population opposed to further gun-control laws and instead insisting on arming potential victims?  Could they have guessed that the same old tricks wouldn't work in this case, and would actually make the public distrust them further?  Could it finally have dawned on them that The Fourth Estate doesn't really have power -- the ability to force others to do one's will -- but only influence -- the ability to make others listen seriously to what one has to say -- and that if they continued to lie and manipulate so obviously, in the face of facts that everyone knows, that they just might lose that influence altogether?  It has, after all, been more than a century since Hearst's newspapers were able to manipulate the US into waging a war;  Americans today have a lot more sources of information, and are a lot more jaundiced and cynical, than they were back then.  We'll know if they continue to pull in their horns on their formerly-cherished campaign for disarming the public.

It will also be interesting to follow up the story of Jeanne Assam in the next few weeks and see if she got a job again.

--Leslie <;)))><   )O(             

Playing Victim for Fun and Profit

So the news -- and the Comedy Channel -- are bouncing around with the story about Rachel Dolazel, who's still pretending to be Black, even to the point of denying her parents.  The question everyone seems to be hung up on is, why? 

Well, I can think of a few motives.

1)  The same reason that a perfectly White, but ambitious, young journalist a few years ago changed his name from Gerry Rivers to Geraldo Rivera:  to cash in on the economic fruits of Bourgeois Liberal Guilt.  There are a surprising number of benefits available to Blacks and Latinos who know how to game the system:  loans, grants, scholarships, internships, earmarked jobs, free housing, preferential hiring, a free pass on several questionable ethical and legal practices, and so on.  Of course, you have to know the system, or have a patron who does, in order to even know these goodies exist, let alone get them.

2)  To get back at Mumsie and Dadsie.  This is a common syndrome among privileged -- some would say spoiled -- children who cherish an adolescent grudge against their parents, whom they think haven't given them enough.  If the parents are perceived as liberal, the disgruntled child will often become a noisy reactionary -- like Randall Terry, son of a well-known feminist, who rebelled by becoming a foaming anti-abortionist.  If the parents are perceived as conservative, the child -- especially if female -- will usually rebel by flaunting his/her sex affairs with multiple partners of other races.  It's rare that a child will go so far as to insist that he/she is a member of another race, or insist -- after early teen years, anyway -- that he/she was really born to other parents and was Stolen By Gypsies or somebody like them.

3)  To gain the political justifications of victimhood.  Claiming retaliation for some real or fancied injury is an old excuse for doing harm to people one intended to harm anyway.  This is often linked to the Big Lie tactic, perfected by the Nazis to justify their intended conquest of the western hemisphere, and used by various breeds of Fascists ever since.  Note how Syrian and Jordanian Arabs, over the last 70 years, have labelled themselves "Palestinians" and wailed that The Wicked Jews "stole" their land -- when in fact "Palestine" never existed as a country, and those Arabs indignantly refused to accept a proposed country of that name when the UN offered it to them in 1947.  (They refused because they didn't want just "Palestine" but all of Israel as well, and thought they could take it for themselves.  The Israeli army proved them wrong, multiple times, so they've been crying to bigger and stronger neighbors ever since to give them "back" what they refused in the first place.)  There are considerable political rewards to being perceived as a victim.

4)  To gain the emotional rewards of playing Pity Me.  This is a game usually played by women who can't or won't put out the effort to win love, so instead they settle for pity.  In extreme cases, such women may secretly harm their own children so as to gain their friends'/relatives'/neighbors' "sympathy".  In lesser cases, they'll often arrange survivable injuries for themselves.

Any or all of these may be involved in the Rachel Dolazel case.  What's interesting is that she chose Blackness as her path to sympathy, righteousness, money, power, and revenge.  I don't blame the NAACP, who'd been so thoroughly taken in by her charade, for dropping her like a hot potato.

--Leslie <;)))><        

Reining In The Cops

I've said much of this before, but enough folk have asked me for details that I thought I'd best fill them in.

Okay, problem: thuggish cops killing unarmed civilians.  A lot of Black civil rights groups have tried to make this a racism issue, claiming for justification the fact that a lot of police victims are Black, but what they're not saying is that more than half of police victims are anything but Black.  Thuggish cops have happily assaulted and killed poor Whites, Asians, Indians, and everything else.  (If you want to see a real-life horror movie, Google the name "Kelly Thomas", and go to the video on YouTube -- but be warned: when the beating starts, turn your volume down;  the screams get very loud.)  What all the victims have in common, besides being unarmed, is that they're poor -- therefore unlikely to afford clever lawyers or political leverage.  Cops seem to have a keen nose for class. 

They also seem to be covertly training and practicing for class warfare.  This seems to have been encouraged by whoever in the federal government started the practice of giving county and municipal police departments surplus military gear, up to and including small tanks and artillery.  This makes sense, seeing how much political as well as economic power the corporate aristocracy have collected over the past few decades.  It's clear that the famed One Percent intend to rule the world just as much as the Jihadists do.  It would be nice if those two would make war directly on each other, leaving the rest of us out of it, but looks very unlikely in the immediate future.

So, to quote Tolstoy, what is to be done?

Obviously we have got to stop, and reverse, the militarization of the civil police forces -- which will include reining in the cops' thuggish tendencies.  I have some suggestions, all of which will take concerted action -- petitions, and other pressures on the local and federal governments -- to pull off.

1)  Get the exact facts and figures from the army, find out exactly where those surplus military toys went, take them back from the police departments and send them to the nearest National Guard armories, where they belong.  Mollify the police by assuring them that if they ever really need those tanks and helicopters and artillery, the National Guard will be happy to supply -- and operate -- them.  The only real military gear that civil police need on a daily basis is--

2) --state-of-the-art military-grade body armor.  Dress all the beat-cops in armor whenever they go out on patrol, and assure them that this grade of armor will turn any bullets that civilians are known to have.  This will handily cancel out the standard police excuse of "I'm In Fear For My Life", which will make a difference in court.

3)  Yes, body-cameras, with audio pickup.  Make every on-duty cop wear one, from check in to quitting.  Make certain that these are transmitting cameras, which send to one or more archival locations separate from the police stations, where all the recordings shall be automatically time-stamped, safety-copied, and stored.  Likewise, make certain that the cameras cannot be turned off, censored, or blocked by the wearer.
Make certain that the cameras include batteries with sufficient charge to last 12 hours at a stretch and sufficient power to transmit through concrete and steel buildings.  Also make sure that the people staffing the receiving/recording stations are kept unknown to the cops.

4)  Take away the cops' firearms, and give them stun-guns instead.  Leave the firearms locked up at the police station-houses, not to be taken out except when an emergency requiring the SWAT team is called in.
There already are, on the civilian market, stun-guns which can fire two shots before being reloaded, and a little incentive would encourage their producers to come up with stun-guns that carry more shots than that.  Of course the cops could still carry their clubs, hand-stunners, and tear-gas spray bottles on patrol, so they could still kill unarmed civilians if they worked at it -- the one-eyed cop who helped kill Kelly Thomas bragged of how he beat the boy's face in with the butt of his stun-gun -- but they would seriously have to work at it, and of course the body-cams would pick up all of it.

5)  Send trained dogs out with ever police car.  This way, if a suspect tried to run, the cops could merely sic the dogs on him to bring him down and hold him still.  Of course, this would require that somebody other than the cops themselves would train the dogs, so as to prevent teaching any secret signals for "kill the perp", "bark even if you don't smell drugs", or "don't bark even if you do smell drugs".  It might be a good idea to put small body-cams on the dogs, too.

Implementing these changes would make a real difference in police behavior, and save quite a few lives.

Naturally, the police would be highly resistant to any such reforms (except maybe the improved body-armor), but that can be put to good use, too.  Get the media seriously involved in the argument, and tell them to do thorough research on just how dangerous a cop's job really is.  This would lead to revealing the Department of Labor's and FBI's statistics, which show that there are easily a dozen civilian jobs that are more likely to kill or permanently injure their workers than being a cop.  These include: fireman, commercial pilot, logger, garbage collector, high-wire lineman, high-iron construction worker, farmer, miner, heavy-equipment repairman, sandhog, chemical-plant worker, and -- if you please -- professional football player. 

If the police resist the reforms to the point of going on strike, that could be useful too.  A really intelligent (and freedom-minded) mayor or even governor could use the opportunity to summon the Militia to "deal with the emergency".  Surprise: every state still has laws on the books establishing and defining state militias.  Among other things, said mayor or governor could suspend or even rescind the local gun-control laws, instead command all remotely-able-bodied citizens to go purchase firearms and citizens'-band radios, if they don't have them already, take formal training in the defensive use thereof, practice regularly (drilling on the village green, anyone?), and go patrol and defend their neighborhoods themselves (with or without body-cams, or dogs). 

I can tell you from experience exactly what would happen;  rates of crime -- especially violent crime -- would take a nosedive.  People would become very polite in public.  Winos and junkies would quickly get off the streets (and alleys), and find ways to indulge their habits quietly, in private.  As soon as these facts became public knowledge, the police would end their strike and come back to work very quickly -- if only because some of them would guess that it was only a matter of time before the citizens realized that they didn't really need police, and the jobs began to evaporate.

But the situation is unlikely to get that far.  We can, and should, start promoting these reforms right now.  They'll make a hell of a difference.

--Leslie <;)))><         

   

"The Shtetl Mentality" -- Relayed

I don't usually copy/relay other folks' articles, but this one is insightful enough to deserve it.

--Leslie <;)))><  

The Shtetl Mentality http://jpfo.org/articles-2015/shetl-mentality.htm By Eric King, Guest Contributor.[image error]Not just for years but for decades I have been perplexed by the fact that American Jews are overwhelmingly anti-gun. Now they are not just indifferent to guns as they were when I was growing up 60 years ago, but today they are genuinely hostile to them. They are both in leadership positions of the movement to ban private ownership of all firearms as well as at the grass-roots level individually in favor of gun bans by over 10 to 1. After much thought I have arrived at what appears to be the explanation for this cultural aversion to firearms by most American Jews, and since I have never seen anything like this explanation in print anywhere, I thought it worth writing the following essay describing what for want of a better term I refer to as “the shtetl mentality.”I was raised in New York City and later in a New Jersey suburb of New York by Jewish parents who had no interest in firearms, nor did any members of my extended family. Like most boys in those pre-PC days I had toy guns, but BB guns were absolutely forbidden. When I asked for one when I was 8, I was not told, “You’re too young” or “Maybe when you’re older.” I was told, “Not in my house.” As far as I knew, I was the only Jewish boy who asked for one.[image error]My interest in “real” guns stems from a specific event. I was six years old sitting in my grandparents living room looking through old Life magazines. I came upon the photographs taken at the liberation of the death camps. I saw the pictures of bodies stacked like cord wood. I was stunned. “Mommy, why are all those people dead?” I asked.·      My mother, a brilliant and subtle woman, thought for a moment and said, “The bad Germans called Nazis killed them.” Remarkably even in 1947 she made the distinction between the group “Germans” and the subgroup “Nazis.”·      Of course, I asked, “Why did the Nazis kill them?”·      She replied, “They killed them because they were Jews.”·      Although I was only six and not yet sure of my identity or its meaning, I asked, “We’re Jews, aren’t we?”·      “Yes,” answered my mother.·      Almost without missing a beat I asked, “Mommy, do you and Daddy have a gun so we can protect ourselves if the Nazis come for us?”·      My mother sought to reassure me of my security by answering, “This is America. That can’t happen here.”All across America little Jewish boys and girls got the same answer and accepted it, but that answer never satisfied me.  From that day on I wanted to own a gun and know how to shoot it. The question is where did that answer come from and why, in the face of no little anti-Semitism in America, did Jews in 1947 and thereafter so strongly devote themselves to the answer that it could not happen here. For example, in a New Jersey suburb of New York City with a large Jewish population in 1955 why was I the only Jewish member of the junior high school rifle club? There even were two girls and two Blacks, along with about 35 Caucasian boys of various Gentile parentage, but I was the only Jew. I tried repeatedly throughout junior high and high school to interest Jewish friends in visiting the rifle club. None would step outside the accepted Jewish sphere of organizations like chess and math clubs and the debate team.My parents were moderately supportive of this interest because they saw substantial positive effects of my target shooting in that I became much more disciplined and focused where previously I had been opposed to authority figures. I quickly recognized that you could not have 40 12 to 14 year old boys shooting guns without someone in charge to make the rules absolutely clear and then to enforce them. This was a role admirably filled by a local police lieutenant who worked very well with adolescents and probably had more influence on me than anyone outside my own family, especially my understanding of why people living in groups could not demand absolute freedom to do anything they wanted. Nevertheless my parents were still skeptical of the long-term value of my interests in this area and wished I would be more like other Jewish boys. For example, they were never willing to pay for my ammunition which I had to buy with the earnings from my paper route.At that time I encountered a few Holocaust survivors who told me that just as American Jews felt secure from genocide in 1956, German Jews had felt similarly secure in 1926. [image error]They said that if you had asked every Jew in Berlin in 1926, “Do you think it is possible that 20 years from now almost every Jew in Europe will be dead, systematically exterminated by the German government?” almost all would have thought you were crazy. Needless to say, these Jews were more skeptical of their security in America, but it is important to note that I did not then, do not now and never in the intervening years have felt that there was some imminent likelihood of genocide against Jews, or for that matter any other group, in America. I just never saw the wisdom of assuming 50 or even 20 years from now this could not change.This brings us to the shtetl mentality. Before the existence of the state of Israel, ever since the diaspora Jews have lived in small areas of other people’s countries. Among American Jews this now typically means great grandparents who lived in shtetls or ghettos, segregated, isolated, rural or urban areas in Europe. One of the major hazards of this situation was that occasionally a few Cossacks would get drunk, ride over to the nearest shtetl, rape a few women, maybe murder a man who protested rather than begging for his life, and then ride off into the sunset, big fun... for the Cossacks.It had to be inescapably clear to these Jews that there were dozens if not hundreds of them, able-bodied and sober, surely a match for 8 or 10 drunk Cossacks. It would have been easy, even for people not trained in arms, to kill them and bury them someplace, but it is obvious why they did not. If they had done so, all the Cossacks would have come to the shtetl fully armed for battle. They would have massacred every Jew in this shtetl and every other one within 100 versts. Defense was just not an option, not a survival trait. The women raped and the men murdered had to be seen as the price Jews paid for living, for surviving as a people. Since no Jew ever even remotely considered the possibility that without some major provocation someday the Cossacks would try to kill them all, it seemed like a reasonable if awful compromise.Such a compromise must have taken a devastating and horrific psychological toll on the people forced to make it. Sooner or later someone among our traumatized ancestors had to make the following rationalization to justify this situation: “We are better than those people because they are violent and we are not. They handle weapons, and we do not.” In order to maintain self-respect people in such a condition had to explain it as the result of something that made them better than their oppressors. This was the notion that they voluntarily (rather than of necessity as was the actual case) eschewed the use of weapons of any sort because they understood that violence was evil while their tormentors did not. It was the key to survival, self-respect and eventually the shtetl mentality which American Jews, far removed from the shtetl, still carry with them despite the fact that it has long since lost its utility.[image error]There is now no possibility that if a 21st century American Jew used a weapon to defend him or herself, even to the point of lethality, against an assailant, anti-Semitic or not, that all the anti-Semites would descend on South Florida to murder all the retired old Jews who live there. What is worse, the shtetl mentality lumps all violence together in its rationalized prohibition of the use of weapons. For those with the shtetl mentality the knife wielding rapist who would slash a women’s throat after assaulting her is no different from the gun wielding woman who would shoot such a man to defend herself and her 12-year-old daughter.Why is the shtetl mentality limited to American Jews? Do not Israeli Jews come from the same ghettos and shtetls? Yes and no. American Jews are the direct descendants of immigrants who left the ghettos and shtetls with the shtetl mentality intact and came to the United States between 1885 and 1925. They raised their children who raised their children to believe all weapons were wrong because all violence was wrong even though the conditions in America were different, the horrible compromise of Europe was behind them, and their survival and self-respect no longer depended on willingness to let some members of the group be raped and murdered without defending themselves.[image error]The Jews who remained in Europe lived through the Holocaust. This caused the ones who survived and emigrated to Israel to see that the rules had changed. They saw that not all violence was wrong, that violence could be used to preserve the Jewish people, and that the defensive use of weapons was necessary for the survival of the group. This led to a greater acceptance of individual use of weapons for personal defense. American Jews only observed this from afar. They did not live it so they did not adopt this new insight as valid for themselves, even if most grudgingly accepted it as necessary for Israeli Jews.The shtetl mentality has led to the Jewish Plan A for what to do in case seriously bad things begin to happen to Jews in America. Under such circumstances Jewish leaders plan to yell “Holocaust” as loudly as they can. They plan to use their not insubstantial resources and assets in the media to do this in hopes that the rest of Americans will rise and protect them from whatever new Cossacks have emerged. While this is a most reasonable Plan A, the fact that if this fails there is no Plan B is at the heart of what is foolish and stupid about the shtetl mentality. We have learned, or we should have learned, that there always must be a Plan B, a Plan B based on the notion that for a Jew the phrase “assault rifle” is a misnomer. The correct term, once the shtetl mentality has been transcended, is “Jewish defense rifle.”In a way it is both ironic and sad that one of the best insights I ever have gotten into the relation of the Jewish portion of my identity to the rest of the world comes from a most unlikely source, the late Eldridge Cleaver, he of Black Panther Party fame. Once I heard him say, “The Jews are God’s chosen people. When anyone wants to blame something on someone, they choose the Jews.” Anyone of us who refuses to recognize this potentially is doomed.Sincerely, Eric King