Your money or your freedom!

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

 __________________

Ever since we've had, and every time we do have a Democratic president, we hear about how we're losing our freedom and because the trope usually constitutes little more than Republican propaganda, those allegedly moribund freedoms aren't well  described and all the jejune yet fulsome polemics appear to relate to little more than the usual dispepsia about safety standards for oil rigs, restraints on proselytizing in schools and toxic waste dumping in our water supplies, about protecting our kids against preventable diseases -- and of course about rising taxes, whether they are in fact, rising or not.

It's not that our rights aren't being infringed upon, our protections under the law aren't being twisted out of shape and used against us.  That we are bombarded incessantly with carefully orchestrated and dramatically publicized scandals and outrages and endless preaching of crusade is part of the problem. The recent Florida case in which a young mother was given 20 years in prison because she fired a warning shot to chase off her violent and estranged husband got practically no attention and why? Because with the lucrative Zimmerman case filling the showcase windows, nobody wanted to suggest that someone under violent attack might ever have the right to warn off an attacker much less a right to self defense.
The American stage is occupied with cheap and endless burlesque and because of it, all sorts of  invisible horrors await in the wings and in the green room and out in the parking lots and we don't know and we don't find it entertaining enough to pay much attention even when we hear or smell it.  I've been bitching and whining and agitating to an unconcerned, short attention span audience jaded on its diet of  stage managed, sugar coated outrage for far too long and I've been wasting my time while our constitutional protections erode away in the name of security.

The fourth and fifth amendments have been abridged almost to the point of uselessness and justified by our war on "terror" but that our property can be seized without due process, that we can be searched without legitimate reason, without knowledge or permission or court supervision, that we can be blackmailed into paying police departments to avoid prosecution for things we didn't do or weren't illegal is commonplace, that we can involuntarily forfeit property without due process and without evidence is outrageous in the extreme and and yet no one seems to give a damn as long as it can be, as it is, justified by fighting drugs and/or terrorism.  There's always a justification, a war, a danger, an enemy to excuse it.

The August 12th edition of The New Yorker has a scary investigative piece by Sarah Stillman describing a case in which an interracial couple who set out for the dealer in a nearby town to buy a used car with $6000 cash in hand.    Followed and then stopped, ostensibly for spending too much time in the left lane, they were accused of being drug transporters even though there were no drugs and were threatened with felony charges for child endangerment and money laundering They were  told by the County DA that their children would be sent to foster homes unless they forfeited their cash. So much for the fourth and fifth amendments. So much for this being a free country. Your money or your freedom.

If you have cash you're fair game. If you have cash, you're legally presumed to be breaking the law.  If one is within 100 miles of a US border, the government is no longer required to pretend there is probable cause.  Thus half of our population lives in a constitution-free zone.  If one owns a boat, one accepts the risk of random Coast Guard searches, often at gun point and often it's only a training exercise. The guns are real, of course, and if they rip up your boat, it's your problem. 

In the America we sometimes still sing about, that's called extortion, that's called unconstitutional abuse of our right to due process, but that's the America we live in.  No, I'm not cherry picking isolated examples and dressing it all up as typical.  It is typical and forced forfeitures to avoid false charges are commonplace.  One truck driver who disliked banks had his life savings extorted from him  by New Mexico police at a weigh station and all because of  the unconstitutional presumption of guilt we now live with.  If you're caught with more than $10,000 in cash, and sometimes much less, you go to jail as a drug dealer and money launderer or you lose it all immediately to buy your freedom. Why burden the taxpayer after all if we can provide letters of marque to law enforcement and allow them to be pirates, corsairs and freebooters?  According to the New Yorker article:

"In general, you needn’t be found guilty to have your assets claimed by law enforcement; in some states, suspicion on a par with “probable cause” is sufficient. Nor must you be charged with a crime, or even be accused of one. Unlike criminal forfeiture, which requires that a person be convicted of an offense before his or her property is confiscated, civil forfeiture amounts to a lawsuit filed directly against a possession, regardless of its owner’s guilt or innocence.

There’s no right to an attorney and, in most states, no presumption of innocence. Owners who wish to contest often find that the cost of hiring a lawyer far exceeds the value of their seized goods. "

Cars, cash, firearms, real estate, children and even domain names can be and are regularly seized upon suspicion or accusation by entities as widespread as  small town police officers confiscating cars and money, to the DEA and ATF, funding their war, to private corporations -- even private contractors posing as police officers.
 
Lawless greed by police and government law enforcement personnel and the helplessness of the public to do anything about it is what I associate with third world countries and not the sort of thing I can be proud of as an American. 

Public passion and The Great Lottery of Justice.

 
Whether or not there's nothing new under the sun, I don't think you'll find anything under the rock that hasn't been tried before and won't be tried again.  With all the sensationalism, the emotionalism, the frenzy of  a  mob steered by familiar hands -- with the same readiness to believe the same old things and call for the same old retribution with the same old accusations we hear today by some of the same people, Tawana Brawly was all too readily believed to have been a victim of racism and rape nearly 30 years ago and some will still insist she was even when all the evidence gathered with such painstaking evidence, all the eye witness testimony and Grand Jury deliberation and all the science and all the logic failed to back up her accusations against six white men.

When the 'Reverend' Al Sharpton made the case his ticket to wealth and stardom, the accusations became an unshakable matter of faith as righteously indignant crowds assembled in the streets, lead by polemicists of dubious honesty like Louis Farrakhan, and noteworthy Liberals manned the barricades. It was so obviously a case of white racism and a cover up by racist police and racist courts that no evidence other than the story she told the cops was needed -- only it wasn't true. At the height of the controversy in June 1988, a poll showed a gap of 34 percentage points between blacks (51%) and whites (85%) on the question of whether she was lying.*  That in itself was used as further evidence of racism, of male bias.

Although Reverend Sharpton has long since and quietly paid  heavy  monetary damages to Steven Pagones, one of the people whose lives he and Brawly inter alia wantonly ruined, Brawly has only now begun to pay, on installment,  the $410,000 defamation judgement against her.

And then there was the infamous "central park jogger" case where 5 minority juveniles (4 African American and one Hispanic) were convicted of a massively brutal rape and beating of a white woman only three years later, in 1989.  The crime received massive coverage and generated massive outrage.

 "This is the ultimate shriek of alarm." 

said New York Governor Mario Cuomo, and of course the "wake up call"  the "turning point" had the result of forced confessions, extracted from 5 scared minority kids sending them to prison. It was hardly enough to satisfy the public blood lust, but of course this time those who smelled racism smelled correctly.  The convictions were based on the need to be "tough on crime" what with 3,254 rapes reported in New York City that year, and not on evidence. One 16 year old defendant shouted After the verdict, Wise shouted at the prosecutor: "You’re going to pay for this. Jesus is going to get you. You made this ... up." at the prosecutor.**

It didn't have to wait for Jesus, but the young man was right. The true rapist eventually confessed and his DNA, unlike that of the convicted youths matched that found on the victim.  the judgements were vacated ,  but once more, prejudice, the certainty of the public, the manufactured hysteria of rabble-rousers, the twisted view of facts had ruined more lives.

   



*  Robert Charles Smith, Richard Seltzer. Contemporary Controversies and the American Racial Divide. Rowman & Littlefield, 2000

**"2 guilty in jog case". New York Daily News. December 12, 1990.

Florida Burning

Like Elián González, the 6 year old Cuban boy found floating off the Florida coast in 2000, Jesus of Nazereth, Obiwan Kenobe and certain Roman emperors, Trayvon Martin  undergoing a sort of  post traumatic apotheosis.  So far however, and unlike the bogus pieces of the González raft , eBay isn't filled with fake Trayvon relics like pieces of the true hoodie or sacred skittles and I'm not aware of shrines being built to worship the young man killed in a dubious nighttime struggle with a Neighborhood watch volunteer who had seen too many movies, but  the Smithsonian Institution is planning exhibits about his life and untimely end - maybe right up there with the 1963 March on Washington, the Woolworth lunch counter and the bus Rosa Parks made famous.  The recent beating and brutal murders of homeless black men by white teens in Missippi?  Sorry, no guns involved and this is about guns, not about  justice.

Although reports that his "hoodie" will be acquired for display may be inaccurate, that item of clothing popular with baggypants, backwardhat adolescent mall rats of all sorts trying to look mysterious and dangerous, was at least briefly celebrated as a symbol of solidarity with something that frankly escapes me and perhaps also escapes anyone who is not convinced that the kids in the street are really really cool these days in everything they do, face tattoos and all.

Certainly everything that happens is history, but the importance of events and the level of the emotion surrounding them, the importance given them at the time -- the semiotic significance, the sensationalist potential of things, depends heavily on political needs, the need of rightly pissed-off people to blow off steam and the needs of professional manipulators of  public sentiment.   Was a deeply sad and really unnecessary event truly the most egregious example of  racial violence in America?  Does it really mean that violent racism is a serious and growing threat, that anyone suspiciously dark complexioned can now be shot on sight with impunity and immunity from prosecution?  It's being said. Are we right back to Mississippi in the 50's and 60's?  It's being written. I'm hearing exactly that and that's exactly the kind of bullshit that made "reverend" Sharpton a millionaire many times over and causes a muffled rumbling in MLK's tomb.

I have a hard time thinking that  deliberate racist murders, with no suggestion of legitimate self defense haven't occurred in recent memory and  with far, far less sturm und drang.  Indeed real outrages seem to overwhelm the ability of the media to list, much less to expatiate on, but they don't all lend themselves to illustrating the talking points of professional zealots.

It's no strain to remember black men, young and old being gunned down while reaching for a wallet, a pack of cigarettes, whistling at a white girl or for nothing at all --  a black professor accosted by police while trying to open his own front door.  Driving a nice car while having African ancestors seems still to be reason enough for a traffic stop and my old home town near Chicago admitted after many years that they had long harassed black people who had the effrontery to shop in the business district and make the white store owners nervous.

It's not hard to understand the hunger for outrage in people rightly frustrated by the way we are in America.  Easier perhaps to understand the desperate need for a constant supply of outrages in people and organizations in need of funding, in need of  apparent relevance while the things they get paid to fight fade slowly away or just don't happen enough. I'm just cynical enough to think that this sad story was grabbed as it passed by because CNN and Fox need scandals like a vampire needs blood and because someone needed a case to make against a right to self defense and was sure he could make a fraudulent and ignorant argument that that right was the reason Zimmerman wasn't convicted of murder - and our knees would jerk in unison.

My growing cynicism isn't ameliorated when I read that an organization of angry black men are offering a $10,000 reward for the "capture" of George Zimmerman, or that his mother and father are in hiding because of the death threats.  I'm no more sympathetic with these subhuman bastards than I am with the Aryan Nation or the Klan or Al Qaeda. I'm as disgusted when any of these disgusting people are used as a stereotype for all people of color ( and they are) as I am when I have to read that white people can't be trusted and will always be suspect whether they deserve it or not, because mixed-race Zimmerman is now the stereotype for Whites. Turnabout is not fair play, it's just more of the same.


I'm disgusted that I can't stand up for a trial by jury and a trial based on law and rules of evidence with a presumption of innocence without being labelled as a racist; that I can't quote the letter of the law itself  without being branded  by people who should damned well know better than to try someone in the streets, to overturn a court decision because in their prejudiced minds they just know Zimmerman was a racist and therefore must have committed murder.

Trey Martin was wrongly shot in my opinion, wrongly accosted, but Zimmerman didn't get off because the court thought it was ok to commit murder. Martin wasn't Martin Luther King, nor Medgar Evers. He wasn't even Rodney King. He isn't a Civil Rights Martyr.  He wasn't shot simply because he was black or because he was a fighter for freedom and  the murder of black people isn't becoming legal or even more common or tolerated.  It wasn't a turning point or wake up call and the whole world wasn't watching or even giving a damn.  A lynch mob is a lynch mob, white sheets or not and the kind of idiot anger and extremist rhetoric and calls for violence are an insult to the many people who did so much without resorting to it, without becoming the monsters they fought against. 

A shot in the dark

15 of them actually.

Well isn't that special -- or maybe not.  We will have to wait and see if  this shooting of an unarmed black man at night in his mother's driveway, (and in Florida no less,) will have Al Sharpton inter alia out in the streets demanding justice and the media yelling about wake up calls and demanding that we revoke the right of the police to carry guns or defend themselves with them.

Roy Middleton took two or three steps out to his car, parked in a carport set way back from the street  to get some cigarettes at two O'clock of a Florida morning.  Fumbling around in the dark, he heard invisible voices screaming, as police are wont to do, to put his hands up.  Thinking at first that it was a neighbor pulling his leg, he hesitated, but then complied, but police, thinking that anyone black and out at night  entering a car must be a thief, opened fire and shot him 15 times, according to a CNN report.  Oops.

Of course the official explanation is that he didn't comply with the shrieks, often obscene, often unintelligible that we so often hear during attempted arrests, that often confuse and stun people into momentary inaction particularly when they're in their homes or just outside their door or in their car or at 2 in the morning. There's nothing worse and little more deadly than a nanosecond's hesitation.

15 times, although police claim it was only 7.  Actually 2 hits out of  15 or even 7 at about ten yards is pretty damned poor, which indicates that either the officers were panicked or could hardly see well enough to tell a pack of cigarettes from a weapon.  Either way. . .

Mr. Middleton, says his mother, had been on pain pills for a back injury and perhaps that added to the normal 2:00 AM sluggishness -- perhaps not.  A next door neighbor says he thought Middleton was complying although he couldn't see clearly, but woe betide anyone, and anyone black in particular if he fails to instantaneously and abjectly prostrate himself  at the first shouted syllable from invisible voices in the dark of night - and even then.  15  times. There are bullet holes everywhere, but fortunately no bystanders were hit and fortunately for Mr. Middleton, none of the fusillade of bullets hit a vital area although he'll have to have reconstructive surgery on his leg as the bone was shattered. His car will need a few thousand in bodywork as well.

Perhaps as his elderly mother says, God saved him. Perhaps he has insurance. I hope so, so that his mother doesn't have to sell her house to pay for it because 'Obamacare" is still a long way off and Florida's Medicare Fraud governor is hell bent on ignoring it.

The sad thing is the frequency at which such things happen and a sadder thing is how often we never hear, or hearing once, we never hear again, like the case a few miles from my house where a cop shot a black man who after being deemed a suspicious character for being in a restaurant parking lot after closing time attempted to drive away and instead of perhaps shooting out a tire, the cop decided to kill the driver with a shot to the head.  In the last few months, I haven't seen or heard anything more about it and nobody seems to care because the media didn't see the chance to make a buck as they did with the Treyvon Martin case.

It remains to be seen what happens in Pensacola, but my money is on nothing. I'm betting that the self defense claim will be upheld, even though the Stand Your Ground legislation is as irrelevant here as it was in Sanford and perhaps because it's just as irrelevant and the media and the race baiters have already overplayed their hand.  If a local Florida newspaper poll has any relevance over 80% think that the Zimmerman verdict was justified because the prosecution could not prove, beyond a reasonable doubt that it was murder.

Reasonable doubt. Perhaps that alone is enough to make zealots angry, because after all, we all know who's guilty and who isn't because we've seen so many TV shows over the years.  You get a sixth sense, you know and isn't it better that every evil be punished even if some innocents happen to go to jail or to the execution chamber and even if minorities are over represented that way.  Contradiction?  Cognitive dissonance?  You bet, but passion and justice and caution and many other abstract terms don't play well together even if they make CNN fat and people like Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh and yes, Al Sharpton millionaires.

So will this be another "wake up call" which the "whole world is (but isn't) watching" despite riots, revolutions earthquakes and royal babies?  Will there be crowds accusing the Pensacola Police of  hunting black people for sport?  Will the parents and wives of these cops be getting death threats like the parents and family of George Zimmerman are getting?   I think not, although this should be worth more than the slight mention it's getting in the press, but then I've heard countless cases as bad and worse and I've seen them fade away.  History has made me a cynic. What about you?

The plastic palm at the end of the world

It's impossible to sum up American culture these days.  It's a farrago of barbarian freak chic, phony Euro faddism,  retro-futurism and gross slob-snobbery. That's only a sample, of course.  There are more sub-cultures, cults of style and lack thereof than I care to or can enumerate, but when a plain old cup of plain old coffee becomes an "Americano" even in the heart of America -- when Wendy's serves "Tuscan" hamburgers, when anything from dogfood to doughnuts, not made entirely by robots is "Artisinal" (and perhaps Tuscan as well) I might have to stop using the word culture at all and substitute circus, but for the fact that the large number of retired circus people and side show freaks in Florida are generally nice people and not given to parading around in "look at me" mode, unless of course they're getting paid for it.

Who the hell are we trying to fool but ourselves?  The waitress at the diner or Dunkin' Donuts or the Waffle House isn't any more a Barrista than a μπάρμαν  yet we've accepted that peremptory commercial intrusion unquestioningly as though it retroactively had been painted into the Nighthawks where the patrons were doubtless drinking "venti's" or Frappuchinos with hand harvested Madagascar Cinnamon -- free range, artisinal and fair trade, of course. In Germany they call it Barkeeper, In Paris and Madrid it's a barman, but English isn't good enough here.  You'd never order squid or snails and if you want Dolphin caught off Vero Beach, Florida, you'd better ask for it in Hawaiian, you uncouth American you.

Does the near universal phoniness and inept pretense indicate that Americans, for all their boasting and bravado really feel inferior?  Do we suspect that our commercialized, mechanized, industrial culture leaves us with an inchoate longing for authenticity that this same commercially manufactured culture is willing to provide in a chrome plated, sanitized, injection-molded and fake "Euro inspired" form?  Is it our American insecurity motivating our fashionably unshaven McEpicurians, Bourgeois bohemians, Natural Food and alternative medicine alchemists to seek out erzatz  authenticity and attach exotic names to our pedestrian lives and quotidian pursuits?  Is the white teenager with the shoes and baggy pants and rasta hat and the Kia Soul with "rims" really seeking the "authenticity" of not being middle class and white?

Come on, half the studded leather Bikers at Daytona Bike Week are dentists and accountants, pretending to live a life that wouldn't allow them to keep their Lexi and Audi-Doodys and suburban houses or to sip those 15 dollar artisinal Tuscan Latte's on their lunch breaks. How many of those red Ferraris on South beach are rented by the day and saved up for all year?  How many of the sad losers in those smoke filled casinos feel like high rollers when they toss the keys to their ten year old Hyundai or their leased Lexus to the valet ( or is it carrista now)? only to be made fools of by a beeping and hooting machine that just ate their Social Security check.

Yes, we'll raise hell with you if  you hint that we're not "number one" but I suspect we hate being Americans far more than the rest of the world hates us for being Americans. 

Too much monkey business

No need for me complainin' - my objection's overruled, ahh!
Too much monkey business. Too much monkey business.
Too much monkey business for me to be involved in!

 -Chuck Berry-


As though to deliberately illustrate what I've been saying, a horde of "impassioned" zealots in liberal clothing rallied in Miami Saturday to hear Bishop Victor Curry, a Baptist church official and South Florida president of the National Action Network tell them that the Zimmerman verdict was a "wake up call" which of course it was not, at least not any more than any case in which the accused was given the benefit of the doubt.  The argument that Zimmerman was a murderous racist looking to hunt black people is as disgusting as any of Al Sharpton's accusations, including his portrayal of Bernhard Goetz as a racist for shooting armed robbers.  The argument that the verdict was pursuant to the 'stand your ground' law is so blatantly, so earth shakingly false it would show up on a seismometer, so what is this all about?  The NAN is the creation of  Al Sharpton who makes  and has made his living by imaginatively accusing people of racism so egregiously, I'm sure Dr. king would be making speeches against him and his business were he alive today.

Bishop Curry has also staged protests in New York, Washington, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, and more than 90 other cities around the United States. This Zimmerman business is a business and a business that needs to foment race tension as much as the Mason Family did. 

Dragging Trayvon Martin's head on a pike around the country is about politics, not justice and I sure as hell don't remember Nicole Simpson or Ron Goldman being used similarly.  It was far more a travesty of justice that OJ was described as the victim of racism and that science and fact and evidence were laughed at.  It's a business and as much as I loathe racism, I loathe the business of using it to sell product, to make money, to build careers on it, to accuse people of it to further a political purpose because it cheapens the real cause, detracts from the real cause and furnishes the real racists a defense they don't deserve.

The death of Trayvon Martin was not about racism, not about a new birth of Jim Crow. Zimmerman wouldn't be allowed into the Klan, nor does he represent some resurgence, some recrudescence of  an early 20th century southern white mentality.  The verdict was not the result of racism and most of all, neither the verdict, the defense, nor for that matter the facts had anything to do with the law that some people oppose so hysterically that they dishonor the memory of an unlucky kid and a grieving family as well as they dishonor truth, decency and the liberal causes of justice and freedom for all.

Zimmerman got off because the prosecution could not prove that Martin was not holding him down so that he couldn't run away. That is an argument based on the older law requiring the duty to retreat, not the Stand your Ground law which did not permit Zimmerman to pursue or confront Martin nor to threaten him.  Such actions would, as I read the law, nullify his claim to self defense and his right to draw a weapon.

 Are we willing to dispense with the presumption of innocence because of the presumption of racism?

That Zimmerman was wont to call 911 when seeing suspicious characters in his neighborhood shows only that he was doing what a neighborhood watch participant is supposed to do, and when a preponderance of  unidentified people and a preponderance of those engaging in vandalism are black those calls are evidence of racism only to racists.

I'm all for practical gun control.  I  passionately hate racism and racists and bigots of all kinds, and I hate it when bigotry, stereotyping, racism and outright lies are used by people getting rich pretending to fight it.

Another orphan

It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan

Call it Outrage on Demand.  I wrote a while back about how the emotions and passions of American public remind me of  a marionette made to dance; made to laugh, cry, rage and mourn as strings are pulled by the various puppeteers, corporate, religious and political.  Some seemed to agree, but I'm not sure that many will admit to being just another wooden character in the great Punch and Judy show of America.

I used to blame Republicans for acting like dogs being sicced on selected targets, inflamed by slanted accounts of various incidents real or fabricated, to serve the political objectives of off-stage players.  Of late I think it describes us all: addicted to outrage, unable to advocate a cause without an outrage, and I'm increasingly alienated by the increasingly transparent performances of  Oz-like string pullers and drum beaters who in turn are increasingly desperate and increasingly careless.

It's easy to blame the media for the endless series of  outrages they trump up and package to command our obsessive attention, but we who watch, we who bark like dogs when told to, and demand that something be done or undone or punished or set free as the voices behind various curtains direct -- we who are addicted to following those voices because it makes us feel important, intelligent, worthy, are really to blame for the failure of  enlightenment, the fracking of progress and the increasing subjugation of the people.

It used to be easy for me to identify with the 'Left' when the right was openly advocating oppression, segregation, suppression of free speech and the like.  I became a 'lefty' when you could have your life ruined for being suspected or falsely accused of private political opinions, when conservatives could tell you where you could live, who you could marry, what you could do on Sunday, what you could and couldn't read, when they could restrict what you could work at, how much you could be paid, what public and private facilities you could use based on stereotype and prejudice and  religious belief and superstition.

It was easy to loath the party who supported Nixon, promoted him, lied for him and maintained ludicrous fictions about his words for decades after he skulked out of office rather than be removed.  It's been easy to feel disgust at their attempts to unseat Clinton and it's still easy to laugh at the claims of Communism, the promises that his tax policies would bankrupt us and his 'spending' was ruinous.  The stench of Republican hypocrisy was never more apparent than when they subsequently supported the ruinous spending, the reckless deregulation under Bush II.  The abandonment of government responsibility and massive escalation of  peremptory executive power all of  which actually was ruinous.  The Party that has resumed trashing the Executive with  unsupported theory, laughable fictions, vague, substance-free objections is no more worthy of  respect or support than it has been in half a century, but is that enough to make me a Democrat any more?

Is it enough to distract me from the troubling observation that the Democrats have also been the party that supports, perhaps eagerly supports silly regulations and prohibitions for their own sake, because 'our side' is touting it?  Are we as doctrinaire and unwilling to temper enthusiasm for obeying idiocies from national speed limits to regulations on how big a paper cup you can drink from?  Have we, and I'm still saying "we" for the moment, begun to paste together racial incidents from various events so that we can pretend it's still the 1960's when we had a clear mission?  Are we so obsessed with safety and security that we can justify anything "as long as one life is saved?"  Are we selling fear and ignoring fact, denying the abject failure of what we have sold as a panacea and refusing to change things that don't work or make things worse? After all, we're the party that signed off on that knife in the heart of liberty obscenity the Patriot Act, the party that seems to support the idea that unwarranted searches, universal surveillance, random investigation, hidden cameras, wiretaps and the reading of mail are a justifiable price for safety.  Incarceration without charges, secret trials and all the trappings of  totalitarianism all because "freedom isn't free."

The misrepresentation of  the George Zimmerman case by desperate, old-guard Democrats like Al Sharpton, with his long record of inventing racial incidents apparently forgotten, may have been some sort of last straw for me.  No I don't think the shooting was justified, but the case is black and white only in an ethnic sense. It has nothing to do with a law the overturning of  which is the real objective.  I want nothing to do with people who don't recognize that, who have no intention of reading the law or thinking about its implications to this case.  I'm tired of people who steadfastly misrepresent facts and law if they conflict with doctrine, who see racism everywhere, crazed, machine gun toting murderers everwhere, like the John Birchers see Communism and the Christian Right sees the devil.  I'm reminded of those who supported the horror in Vietnam because they missed WWII.

"Murder has now been legalized in half the states,”

 says Ladd Everitt, spokesman for the Washington (D.C.)-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.  Of course that's as wild and wooly and dishonest as the "abortion is murder" shibboleth.  Are we no longer the party of  liberation but the party of  bans, controls and worse, the party of the same old fictions, the same old failed solutions,  fanatically held? How does it compare to hyperbolic falsehoods we've been getting from the other side all these decades?  Are we as sold on the idea that extremism in defense of virtue is no vice as Spiro the crook Agnew?  Are middle of the road, pragmatic Democrats anywhere in sight?

The sordid events in Sanford do not mirror the murder of Medgar Evers or Dr. King or the civil rights workers in 1964 Mississippi. They have nothing to do with racism on the streets or in the courts.  They do not represent a return to Jim Crow and if  Democrats can't seem to live without an endless supply of  convenient but inapposite outrages; if  the Democrats can't find any way to promote progress toward freedom and justice for all without witch hunts and race baiting, lies and fabrications and misrepresentations, media circuses and fear mongering, then I'm an alien to both parties.

It was easy to appear to be on the side of the angels when we had the Commander Guy, the Old Ranger and Tricky Dick to be compared to, but after two consecutive presidential victories; after gaining some ground on the devil, it's time to ask ourselves if we haven't become, or at least come to more closely resemble what we've been fighting -- or have we been that way all along?

Florida Justice, Florida Law

Think the Zimmerman trial was a miscarriage of justice?  Think that maybe the State of Florida, even with all the lawyers who reside here, is as much a stranger to justice as Sierra Leon or Somalia or Burma?  What can I say, what can we do when someone is acquitted of killing an unarmed person while another gets 20 years in prison for firing a warning shot that hit no one?

20 years.

You can fulminate about the lack of gun control, about what a terrible thing having the legal right to defend yourself against a brutal attacker is, but I think you'd be misinformed.  It isn't a lack of gun laws that caused Marissa Alexander's life to be confiscated or her 11 year old daughter's life to be irreparably damaged or that allowed an allegedly brutal wife beater to go unpunished.  It's bad lawyers, bad juries, mandatory sentencing and a maze of legislation that so complicates what you can an cannot do with a weapon, even in your own home, that prompted a County Sheriff's deputy to advise me that if someone breaks into my house when I'm home  to shoot to kill.  Otherwise he said, and speaking from experience; you'll be in court for more than a decade and you'll lose everything you have.  Cops running amok, courts jailing the innocent. . .   Want something to be scared of?  Forget taxes, immigrants or any of the distractions we're offered.   

Firing into the floor can get you as much time as George Zimmerman might have got had he been convicted of manslaughter.  Mandatory sentencing, the same pigheaded policy that  might have allowed a judge to let her off with a fine or warning or probation  is the problem.  It's the policy that fills our prisons with pot smokers and destroys countless families and countless lives in the name of that Republican "Law and Order" campaign platform from from the 1970's and  80's. Democrats are, as the line goes "soft on crime" said the cowardly, justice hating, Nixon and Reagan supporting bastards looking for simple, stupid and unjust answers for complex questions.  Keeping it simple as the  Fascist Tea party likes to say. 


But how much time do we spend worrying about our eroding protection from abuse while we dance to the Piper's tune, getting angry at what we're told to fear, ignoring what we're distracted from as the innocent suffer and the guilty prosper.

Justified

This isn't the first time I've said that Justice in America isn't about the law, it's about the lawyers.  It won't be the last time.  The web footed honkers and quackers at CNN were still telling each other as I switched it all off and went to bed that we have a pattern of letting killers go free, but if you have a memory longer than a goose and if you still make an effort to look past the selected stories the angertainment industry allows us you'd be aware that if there is a pattern, it's a pattern of  framing the innocent.

I was appalled last Friday night when Cornell West told us on Bill Maher's show that Florida's Stand Your Ground law allowed everyone to carry a gun, but not surprised.  The level of ignorance about gun laws is shockingly high, stubbornly held and sadly near universal amongst those most vociferously opposed to public ownership of weapons. Tragically sad because the  law is written to exclude the right to chase down, confront and threaten or even to escalate a dispute if one wants to claim self-defense, but as I said, it's not about the law, it's about glib and sarcastic trial lawyers, dull witted jurors and ignorance.

I dread to read the news this morning. I don't want to lose my breakfast over yet more railing against guns, I don't want to hear that the decision to acquit Zimmerman was all about race or any of the other stale arguments imposed on this case before Trayvon Martin was interred. As far as I'm concerned, it's just another flim-flam defense based on making the law seem to say what it doesn't, and it doesn't say that you can shoot someone -- an unarmed someone who knocks you down or gives you a bloody nose particularly when you instigated the fight and violated someones civil rights in the process.  In fact, the law was designed to allow someone like Martin to use deadly force to defend himself against someone, some "crazy cracker" posing a credible threat to his life to force him out of any place he had a right to be.  He brought his fists and some skittles to a gun fight.

Innocent people wind up on death row. People are incarcerated for decades and their lives ruined for smoking Marijuana or receiving naked pictures of a girlfriend on a cellphone. People are locked up with false accusations and to me, that's worse than that a guilty man should go free, but although the NRA will doubtless try to make him a folk-hero like Bernhard Goetz, there is little similarity. Martin wasn't carrying a sharpened screwdriver and demanding money and Goetz didn't corner the muggers in a dark alley. Goetz wasn't a vigilante, Zimmerman I think, was, defending a community against burglars by carrying weapons and confronting and chasing suspicious people, something the gun laws do not permit.

But again, it's about the lawyers and while it's a respectable and necessary profession in any civilization, people like Mark O'Mara disgust me, convincing a jury that his "muscle tone" and perhaps his dangerous, hoodie wearing image was responsible not only for Zimmerman having chased him down but justified shooting him.

No doubt many axes of all sorts will be ground on this case.  Perhaps as with OJ and Bernhard Goetz there will be a wrongful death suit and I think there's a good case for it. Although I don't think either victim or vigilante was without fault or are in any way heroes, I do think the preponderance of responsibility is on Zimmerman.  There is a responsibility on us as well -- not to traduce the law, misrepresent it or to make more of this case than it is for the purpose of furthering our politics, but of course, this being America it's a false hope to expect us  not to -- as false as we are.

Impactification is now trending and it's awesomly resourceful.

I'm losing hope that the use of the word "trending" to mean occurring or becoming popular or simply being talked about is going to share the fate of "efforting," an equally bilious attempt that even my spell checker chokes on, to make a verb out of "trying to find out about."  I'm seeing "trending" everywhere, from shoe advertisements to CNN and they're not talking about a vector. It will soon become incomprehensible to the rising generation of Newpeakers to say the Dow is trending downwards.

If you're going to give me that old saw about living languages having to change, don't waste your words. If all change is a good thing, then it's a good thing for you to drop dead, not that I'm suggesting it and if all linguistic evolution is good, then every patios, every pidgin tongue and infantile balbation should be given prominence and all literature relegated to the compost heap.

I just read an article about new battery technology in Design News. The writer uses "resourceful" to mean there's a lot of  it available. Sand is very resourceful in the desert.  Hey, why use a dictionary when no solecism, ( no that's not an eclipse) no comically ignorant usage can ever be found to be in error. Smug ignorance is so resourceful, you know.  There's a lot of it around.

Yes, I know, technical journalism, like business writing seems to attract people who speak English as though they were native Wolof speakers who cheated their way through English 101, but the danger is in the cascade effect. 100 people will read it and begin to use the malapropism and it will spread to thousands like the disease it is and there will be nobody to say "hey, that's not what it means" because, you guessed it, language has to change. The meek may or may not inherit the earth, but the English language is already in probate and the beneficiaries are hipsters, hustlers, ad-men, con-men, marketers and morons.

In a educational system that ignores words as anything but random sounds with no history but treats spelling as immutable, it's not surprising that "in tact" is becoming a very frequent usage -- that is it's "trending."

I saw a tweet the other day "A plane crashed, lots of people impacted." and no, it wasn't a deliberate joke because 'Impact' now only exists as an unacknowledged metaphor having nothing to do with the collision of objects - like airplanes and the ground. Have an impacted molar? The dentist might ask you what it's impacted by. God help us, but our kids are being taught to use it that way and have no idea that words like affect and effect exist or what the difference is.

How many words have been subsumed into the universal "awesome" and how many times can a person work it into every expression? I'm sure the Guiness people are still counting. Is anyone counting the loss?  I don't think so and I do read fatuous articles ( I wanted to use that word one more time before it starts to mean fat) about how we're gaining so many new words like Diazepam and cloudsource, metrosexual and chillaxin.  But immensity and enormity, discomfit and discomfort,  infer and imply, noisome and noisy, torturous and tortuous, bated and baited, advise and advice, averse and adverse? -- half those words lost forever in a land where millions think Beethoven was a dog and couldn't read Melville if they were forced to. They're gone and won't be recognized by young readers if by some accident they should read anything.

Yep, it's a living thing and as with children, you never say no and everyone is a winner and everything they do and say is perfect in this best of Panglossian worlds and no, that's not a kind of paint. Or maybe it is now - whatever.

For any reason

Lyin' Bill.  He earns his title every day. What's he lyin' about now you might ask?  Why, he's telling us that a Texas women can get an abortion at any time -- simply because of a sprained hand for instance.

“You can just kill the baby, or the fetus, however you want to describe it, any time you want for any reason, you know, women’s health, that’s any reason at all.”

Sure, we all know that women are hypochondriacs, prone to hysteria and likely to be faking things like they fake orgasms and I'm sure Bill has experience there. God makes sure women don't die in childbirth anyway, just like he makes sure they don't get pregnant when they get raped. So if a woman wants to terminate a pregnancy, we can be sure it's because she doesn't want to cancel a hair dresser appointment or something equally as important. Why we ever let them vote, I don't know.

In one of those bilious exchanges that Fox is famous for, O'Reilly and Kirsten Powers went back and forth ratcheting up the lies:

Lyin' Bill:  “In New York here, there’s a proposal, ‘I don’t want any limitations on anything!' It’s crazy.”

Powers: “The current status quo in Texas that these people are fighting for, who are fighting the bill, is to be able to abort your baby up until the third trimester.”

Lyin' Bill:  “Yeah! For any reason! Women’s health! ‘Hey! Look I sprained my hand!"

Powers: “Yeah.  For any reason. For any reason. Yeah.”

Of course no one of integrity, no one who gives a rancid shit about the truth or human rights or anything but his stinking faith believes this garbage. Very, very few late term abortions are ever performed and even fewer of that "partial birth" procedure they'd love to tell you happens all the time.  Such things are done with dead fetuses,  fetuses with no brain and the like, but Fox has never stumbled over a fact so far.  Nor, for all their ranting, whooping and hollering, all their pusillanimous persiflage about how Liberals are trashing the constitution have they ever really seen the law as anything but a nuisance and impediment to "freedom" and something that can be and should be ignored by any state with or without public support. 

No, there should be no regulation of anything but women and if God didn't bother to ban abortion, well then the Great State a' Texas is gonna take care of it for him, now all y'all have a nice day, y'hear?

Floridiots

The problem with idiots is not just that they are idiots, but that they think other idiots are smarter than people who are not idiots. What's true of idiots in general is more true of that special breed -- the Floridiots: the idiots of Florida.  Few states are better at electing crooks and liars and perhaps few have elected as many well intentioned morons as the State of FloriDUH.

Perhaps you remember the Florida State Senator that opposed an "animal husbandry" exception to an idiotic law that made it illegal to watch animals having sex because he thought it allowed men to marry animals?  Floriduh.  Now that Floridiots have closed internet cafes ( mostly in less affluent areas) all over the state following a scandal involving  illegal gambling at some of those places affiliated with bogus charity Allied Veterans of the World, that brought down our Lieutenant Governor and prompted the state to make anything to do with video gambling illegal.  Unfortunately and typically, they also made anything that connects to the internet illegal and possibly any system that allows one to connect, like WiFi in public places. People without computers who use these places to wire money home and connect with family are SOL and Governor Scott was happy to sign off on it.  Governor Scott who told us that hiring thousands to save the everglades and our rivers was bad because hiring people kills jobs.

Did I mention that we are a Red State in Florida?  A state controlled by people who insist government can't do anything right and should be simplified and minimalized.  Leave it to the Floridiots to make it a felony to have a leg humping dog or a smart phone that after all, might be used to play poker. Now most people who have a thing about regulation of  private consensual things tend to oppose them, but that implies some kind of logical consistency not at all common in idiots and less so in Republican Floridiots. (yes I know that's a tautology)  After all we elected a governor who ran a corporation who set a record for stealing from Medicare in order to clean things up and restore fiscal responsibility and who defends the pollution the vast majority of us moved to Florida to avoid.

Oh well, galling as it might be to be associated with nitwits and knuckle draggers, unrepentant confederates and self defeating supporters of their own sad condition, there's always Texas.  We're not as bad as Texas, are we?

Ink Blots

Who needs ink blots?  Life itself is a Rorschach test. What you see as a pattern, a 'gestalt' if you prefer in something random or arbitrary is a window into your mind.  Likewise what you find to condemn in others may often illustrate what you feel - or fear to find - in yourself.  It's been my experience that people who feel guilty about all their lies are quick to see others as liars, for instance and when I hear certain TV personalities telling us how, as Rush once snickered, Michael J. Fox is faking his Parkinson's to get sympathy or the Republican hyenas who insisted that Hillary Clinton's cerebral blood clot was only an excuse to get out of testifying at the Benghazi witch hunt,  and when I heard Glenn Beck snickering yesterday that Theresa Heinz-Kerry, wife of our Secretary of State, hospitalized and in critical condition was faking it, what I heard was a faker, a phoney, a con man, a liar and a sociopath telling us his own story.

Am I wrong or is this a pattern?  Do the most vocal apologists for the wackadoodle Right routinely deny inconvenient reality and slander their opponents because they thing everybody is like them?  Takers, leeches, liars, fakes and idiots?    Hey, the ink blots don't lie.

What happens in Vegas

Needs to be heard around the world

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law

  -US Constitution, amendment III-

Of course our bill of rights is always being twisted by the perpetual state of hyperbole according to which we're always at war with drugs, poverty, crime, fear and moral decay.  Whether or not Osama Bin Laden hated us for what we're told is our 'freedom,' his attack on New York has been a gold mine for authoritarianism and the security state. Our conflict with Islamic terrorists has encouraged, as many 'paranoids' like me have warned, authorities of all types to trample all over our constitutional guarantees, whether it be searches and seizures without probable cause or, the right to confront our accusers, the right to a speedy trial, to know the charges against us and believe it or not, the right to be free from the quartering of troops in private homes.

One doesn't hear of  many court cases involving the Third Amendment although it was important enough to the American colonists and it's been a basis of the implied right to privacy that the Roe Vs. Wade decision is based upon.  Back in 1965 Justice William O. Douglas opined the amendment's implication that " an individual's home should be free from agents of the state" That followed the 1952 decision that inferred from the third amendment, the framer's intent: "to constrain executive power even during wartime." 

As far as I know, there is no law allowing a police department to commandeer one's residence and quarter policemen there in order to  conduct surveillance to see if there was domestic violence going on next door and gather evidence thereof. If there is, I would suspect it would run afoul of the third amendment, yet so confident were the suburban Las Vegas police that they could do any damned thing they wanted, that they blew open one Henderson, Nevada resident's front door with a battering ram, screaming obscenities at the unarmed man in his living room as the police are wont to do, pointing firearms at Anthony Mitchell whom they addressed as "asshole," forcing him to grovel before them on the floor while they fired several rounds of painful but non-lethal shotgun ammunition at him and his dog at point blank range and demanding that they occupy his house. As though this weren't enough, they continued on to occupy the victim's parent's house on the same street, rummaging, ransacking and arresting and forcibly removing everyone in manacles.

Oh it gets worse, but you can read about it yourself -- violations of the third, fourth and 14th amendments and of every principle of justice common to civilized societies.  It's not unique and it may wind up in the same limbo or wind up in some dark corner of oblivion as the many cases I've read over the years where police have entered the wrong house and murdered the occupants who were trying to defend themselves against what they thought, perhaps correctly, were armed invaders.

For all the public knows in the age of cringing cowardice and lapdog obedience, an age where liberty be damned, you can be locked up indefinitely without charges, where your possessions can be searched, where you can be beaten, tortured, tazed, roughed up and have your home and possessions trashed by brutal, obscenity-screaming, uniformed thugs without any recourse -- where for all the public is likely to know or hear in the 'reality show' media, what happened in Vegas never happened at all or at best might be an uninteresting crawl beneath the Snowden Story, or the Zimmerman story or some celebrity scandal or other Fox News fabrication.

So you want to tell me an armed citizen is a ridiculous idea, that the government can't be opposed by force and won't ever need to be?  Yes, I know, talk is cheap, but when to talk back to the police results in things that would make the KGB or the Gestapo veterans long for the good old days, what's a man to do?   How does the law and how does that blindfolded lady with the scales treat the man who defends his home against armed and rabid berserkers with no regard for the law or human life?  How does a man decide whether it's worth taking up arms when the law fails and nobody cares - decide between dying with dignity and groveling on the floor of his own home while he and his family and his dog are being shot and beaten and robbed and hauled away in chains. 

I know what I would choose.  The Mitchells have chosen to take it to court and I hope they prevail, but unless these thugs are locked forever in hot and tight cages, waterboarded, tubes crammed down their throats and screamed at day and night for the rest of their lives, justice will not have been done nor will this sad, ignorant nation of sheep be worthy of talking about, much less bragging about freedom.

The mourning will begin shortly, after this commercial announcement.

Pavlov rang the bell, the dogs drooled. The media directs, we mourn or we scorn -- we rage, we mock, we believe, we vote, we ignore.

At last, at least for a while yesterday, our media circus was forced to notice that there's a world outside the Seminole county Courthouse and took some time out from endless speculation and pointless discussion of the George Zimmerman trial to obsess about the Asiana airliner that landed short in San Fransisco.  In fact as of Monday Morning, it's still "Breaking News" long after the wreckage has gone cold and the survivors taken to hospitals or released.

Yes, two people died, as did many others in transportation related incidents over the weekend. 67 people were murdered in Chicago, one of the gun control capitols of our nation. 10 people died horribly when their plane caught fire in Alaska but I didn't hear a thing about it on CNN, nor about the runaway train explosion that killed 5 with 40 still missing.as the maudlin dirge droned and the newsreaders groaned on and on speculating and conjecturing and playing the same interviews and showing the same pictures of a California runway until I gave up and turned it off.
Oh, the humanity.

Yes, people who still read news heard about those other things and more, but I suspect they're in the minority. We get angry, we get upset; we mourn and we get indignant according to what we're given to pay attention to by others who profit by it and through it.

Last Saturday, driving home, I was astonished to see an ocean of flags huge and small on Route 1 as it passes through this tiny burg. Dozens of police motorcycles, black limos, police cars and a hearse followed by hundreds of cars carrying flags; motorcycles with flags down a highway lined with mourners waving flags in the 86 degree heat.  The President had a far smaller motorcade when he came through town last year.

A local sergeant killed in Afghanistan was being brought home for burial.  It's not that many people knew him. It's not that his death was more or less tragic than all the others in all our needless wars.  It's not that he was more or less a hero than anyone else in uniform and it's certainly not as though his loss and his family's grief had anything to do with a sacrifice for "our freedom."  But that's how it was sold by the papers, or rather by the corporate owners answerable to people who want to promote war and acceptance of war and the glorification of war.  All those thousands, all these years, but this, now.

As with all parts of America,  friends, neighbors, sons and daughters have been lost in this longest and most expensive of American wars. For a long time after we blew Baghdad halfway to hell, the dead were brought home in secret, the media bullied into not printing or reading lists of the casualties lest we seem to disapprove of  it all, like those hippies in the 70's.  but it's not about America mourning the loss of its volunteer soldiers, it's about entertainment, about deluding ourselves that  we don't respond to the ringmaster like circus performers -- to the conductor like an orchestra playing this great emotional symphony while the grip tightens on our lives.

Dead man talking

What is it with Brit Hume? I don't mean his embarrassing and offensive opinions, I'll get to that later, but his face hangs on him like a corpse propped up in its coffin at some ghastly wake or at best some dopey cartoon Basset Hound.  It's so distracting that the import of the things he says is delayed in reaching my awareness and often feels like a slap in the face.  It's not that I actually watch him on purpose. Fox News has long since been removed from my TV's menu, but sometimes I see him quoted and my jaw sags like Hume's jowls and I despair. Chewing the cud over Nancy Pelosi's comments about the challenge to the angry white birds party  of our changing demographics, Hume gives us:

“Look, I’ve read all kinds of analysis of this… I am absolutely convinced that this troupe [ now did he mean trope?] that you’re hearing, that says if the Republicans don’t go for immigration reform much as the Senate has done, they’re never gonna win another presidential election -- oh, baloney.”

That's a true conservative speaking.  Things you see, should always be like they were and if they change, we ignore it until it goes away. Bad things like genocide and deportation and slavery really don't matter and we should as Brit says, keep the focus on white people. America was always about white people, even if it wasn't and if we keep pretending, keep believing, why then we can fly to Never Never Land with Peter Pan (even if the name sounds a bit gay) where the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home and everyone knew his genetically determined place White men at the table, black men serving dinner and brown men outside trimming the topiary.

Look, 'these people' don't really vote all that much (we've put so much effort into making that so) and

“So, if you look at it from an ethnic point of view, that addresses the question of whether you need to get right with the Hispanics,” 

said Brit to the approval of his ventriloquist's dummy.


America is all about white people and white people like Brit Hume, or so he maintains. The Republican party shouldn't waste it's time pretending that isn't so and you can always depend on that league of white gentlemen to bring in the votes while the lesser folk, the folk that live here on our sufferance, keep their heads down lest we send them elsewhere. 

Will they continue to win elections as they continue to whistle Dixie and have seizures when they hear Spanish spoken?  Yeah, sure, but fewer and fewer and not just because more people have names like Gomez. The people who lick Hume's spittle, who watch Fox and drink Budweiser in the evening are being marginalized for all sorts of reasons and they know it.  That's why they watch -- to pretend they're not doomed to failure and insignificance as the empire of the past crumbles.

Are We Not Men?

Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?

-H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau-

I'd hate to make anyone think I'm an optimist. I'm not even sure I care too much about the human race aside from a few individuals, but that's what pessimism is about -- a cosmic frame of reference that sees no permanence; that sees everything that is on the way up as inevitably on the way down.

Perhaps not caring gives a clearer vision.  If it doesn't matter in the end that voting rights are in peril, or at least under continuing assault, then the failure of the Texas legislature to pass a bill further restricting abortion rights despite a ten hour filibuster by Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis, is less likely to be overshadowed. She might have gone on but was ruled to have drifted off topic amidst a chorus of boos and catcalls, and the bill was declared dead at 3 AM.

For those of us who still hope for sweeping reformation and the triumph of truth and justice for all,  it's a little and perhaps temporary victory over the animal meanness of human nature and as Dr Moreau learned, you can dress up the animal and teach it to walk on two legs, you can make it recite pledges and formulae, you can make up stories about divine origins, but the beast is still a beast and evolution is so slow.

Signs, portents and frames of reference

It is the best of times, it's the worst of times and if you're like Glen Beck; if you're like nearly every blathering godsmitten idiot in the last few thousand years, it is always the end of times. There are always signs, always comets, always wars and rumors thereof -- earthquakes, storms, floods and droughts. There are always famines and pestilences, always cause to go to the mountaintop to await or dress in purple and take poison for the magic trip to the mother ship.  If Jesus said the end times would be during the lives of his followers, it's no contradiction.  There are always plenty of  editors, redactors and other verbal shell-game operators to redefine and revise the prophecy to suit the game.

Someone smart once said that if we live only in the moment, there is no difference between falling and flying and if we've read Einstein we know that truth is a matter of the frame of reference you occupy. If your idea of "the world" is the Mediterranean, the Roman Empire, the end of it means one thing.  If you mean the Universe, a mid 20th century concept of something incomprehensibly larger, the importance of things like coveting your neighbors' ass or eating a Philly cheese steak becomes hard to see or justify as is the importance of anything that concerns a peculiar, transitory trick of chemistry on an infinitesimal dust mote we call life.

But the Grand Wazir of Beckistan said yesterday on his radio show that  the Book of Mormon is "really a calendar" and perhaps like the Mayan Calendar, accurately predicts the end of all things.  It's a level of rank stupidity that, like the size of the universe itself, utterly defies any attempt at analogy.  He told his staff a long time ago, he said yesterday, that if he mentioned that book, it meant "we are at the end."  It's the "Story of America" he said, but a story of things that never happened, cities that never were and people who aren't who it says they are and a story written by a charlatan with a demonstrated history of fraud.

But of course although each Plank length of time (tP) the smallest possible interval according to quantum mechanics, is the end of something, it's not likely the end of anything we would notice -- like the end of Glen Beck.  It's not likely the end of the US government nor either political party, nor is it yet the moment of the "within 24 hour" predicted whistleblower he talked about earlier this week to an audience whose memory of world begins anew every morning


In a frame of reference where such a length is significant, not only are falling and flying indistinguishable, beginnings and ends are a bit meaningless in a frame that includes weeks and days and hours and indeed, human events.  In the frame of reference where the stupid dwell, where anyone would credit anything Beck might utter, a report of cannibalism, although at least as old as the Neanderthalers, is so unique as to mean impending cosmic calamity.  The Book of Mormon, like the Bible (only harder to read with a straight face) and many other religious texts inhabit a frame of reference so at odds with the physical universe and its properties and dimensions that talking animals magic fruit and other things and events that never existed abound,  can be and always are used to frighten us to the profit of prophets. 

"We are living in Biblical Times" Beck tells us; a statement hard to decipher since the last ravings of the Christian versions end sometime in the late first century, but of course there we have another blurry, woozy, foggy and crepuscular magic frame of reference where nothing really has much to do with anything outside of it; where nothing is true and all things are true and words have power.  No offense intended to individual Mormons, but the book in question is hardly a calendar unless it be for a universe that never existed, inconsistent with the observable universe and inconsistent internally -- just like the Bible and Quir'an and others  which speak of imminent calamities and events and places that are pure fiction.

Pure fiction, just like Becks mysterious 'whistle-blower.'  Predictions of the impossible based on things with no significance selected for the purpose. Concepts like the end of time are far beyond science at the moment.  We don't know when life will end, but the end of stupidity might just be as far off.  There are signs.

Glenn Beck again.

"We are going to be greatly divided as a nation in the next ten days and you are going to witness things in American history that have never been witnessed before" Said Glenn Beck yesterday despite his recent claim that his vocal cords no longer worked. I was hoping that might have been the one true thing ever to escape his mouth.

It's true -- you're going to witness the last half of June, 2013 -- a historical first.  I'm pretty sure you're going to witness another spell of embarrassment for Glenn Beck too, not that he'll necessarily notice or acknowledge it.  There's a document, he says, that will "take down pretty much the whole power structure, pretty much everything" and he's going to announce it sometime today.

Those who remember back to last April, a set which obviously doesn't include his fans, might speculate that this new revelation will be as spurious and idiotic as his earthshaking revelation of a connection between Saudi Arabia and the Boston Marathon bombing.  Is anyone still waiting for an admission of error or a hint of humble retraction?

Of course to those folks who follow Beck in the way people used to mock dancing bears or court jesters, this is nothing new.  Students of buffoonery  and the charlatans who move their card tables and shells from one corner to the next in search of fresh idiots may not even notice this latest tantrum, but the clock is ticking Mr. Beck and there's not much time before the waitress brings you another plate of crow.  Do us a favor -- take a bite.

UPDATE:

Well days have gone by now and no whistles have been blowing and Beck has only some mumbling about immigration which is hardly the stuff of unprecedented division much less something to "take down the power structure."  

Do his faithful listeners remember as far back as a day or two or are they just so choked up on each new day's revelation that they don't care about yesterday?

So, want so fries with that crow Glenn?  Can I supersize it?

“We are going to be greatly divided as a nation. In the next ten days and you are going to witness things in American history that have never been witnessed before.” - See more at: http://freakoutnation.com/2013/06/12/glenn-beck-to-break-news-in-24-hours-that-will-rock-the-nation-take-down-the-entire-power-structure/#sthash.jh7vZy0Z.dpuf

“We are going to be greatly divided as a nation. In the next ten days and you are going to witness things in American history that have never been witnessed before.” - See more at: http://freakoutnation.com/2013/06/12/glenn-beck-to-break-news-in-24-hours-that-will-rock-the-nation-take-down-the-entire-power-structure/#sthash.jh7vZy0Z.dpuf

“We are going to be greatly divided as a nation. In the next ten days and you are going to witness things in American history that have never been witnessed before.” - See more at: http://freakoutnation.com/2013/06/12/glenn-beck-to-break-news-in-24-hours-that-will-rock-the-nation-take-down-the-entire-power-structure/#sthash.jh7vZy0Z.dpuf

“We are going to be greatly divided as a nation. In the next ten days and you are going to witness things in American history that have never been witnessed before.” - See more at: http://freakoutnation.com/2013/06/12/glenn-beck-to-break-news-in-24-hours-that-will-rock-the-nation-take-down-the-entire-power-structure/#sthash.jh7vZy0Z.dpuf

The right to kill

No matter that states like Florida have a "stand your ground" law, you're always on shaky ground when defending your life with a weapon.  If you don't get Current TV, you may want to watch this documentary giving examples of how the law has been abused; about how legitimate defense may ruin your life and how homicide may go unpunished. 

Although the author of Florida's landmark law emphatically states that the law does not support confrontation, pursuit or aggression; although the law does not justify lethal force to protect property, nor shooting a fleeing suspect in the back, courts have acted as though it does and opponents of the law are quite happy to act as though the intent was precisely to give the right to kill to anyone who feels uneasy or annoyed for reasons not quite related to fact.

Consider the story of an IRS agent whose car was run off the road by two men who pursued him, threatening his life.  Unable to get help from 911, Mr. Lewis used his pistol and wounded one of the assailants and in the lengthy process that ensued, lost his job, his home and his savings when the assailant sued him. 

And then look at the story of a unarmed man, in some sort of religious state of Ecstasy was gunned down in the street by someone who felt threatened.  Look too at a Texas Prostitute who was shot for refusing sex and refusing a refund.  In both cases the murderer got off scott free.

When a Sheriff's deputy told me not long ago, that if I were to need to defend my life or family with a weapon, I should shoot to kill rather than face a decade or two of litigation that would surely impoverish me, I had to remember an acquaintance, a Baltimore policeman who was in fact forced into poverty after having justifiably shot someone in the line of duty. If you're trying to survive an attack, should you have to choose between being killed or maimed, sent to prison or being torn to pieces by the courts?  That quandary is the origin of  laws intended to protect those who need to protect themselves.

Evidently, "Stand Your Ground" and "Castle Doctrine" laws have failed in some cases to protect those legitimately protecting their lives as well as they have failed to protect harmless people.  In a country steeped in the fear of crime; a country being convinced by false propaganda of the increasing dangers awaiting us  from armed civilians and by armed criminals, is there a solution?  Can we protect the right to self defense while protecting us from unwarranted prosecution, from armed aggression posing as justified use of deadly force?  Will we even have the chance to debate this? 

The unfolding case against George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin should be forcing us to consider whether the law should be changed, but of course it won't. Although it seems clear to me, as someone who has read the law that one can't claim self defense if one is himself the assailant -- if one pursued, harassed, confronted and illegally tried to remove someone from a place he had the right to occupy, the trial will not be about that and no minds will be changed.  It will become a soapbox for airing ill considered and irrelevant opinion, both from people who aren't going to be hindered by objectivity or facts and has a vested interest in divisiveness and partisanship -- whether making at about racism, about the need for more guns, fewer guns, about whether strict gun laws have any effect, about the need for disarmament or any of the other passionately held and incorporated positions, everyone will stand his ground, defend his opinion, and nothing will change.

Is it really about 'gun cultures', the NRA or 20 round magazines or plastic gun parts or gun shows or waiting periods -- or is it about a nation crippled by gullibility, by activists and lobbyists and irrational fear?

Rampage

You know people do all kinds of crazy things to get in the Guinness Book of World Records. People do crazy things to get on TV and I'm convinced that what we have going on is a contest here.  People who shouldn't be anywhere near weapons are vying to see who can do the most senseless act of senseless violence and some don't care if it's the last thing they ever do.  Every shooting spree seems to trigger another in some sort of macabre chain reaction.

I don't know if rampage shootings are on the increase, or whether they're on the decrease  I expect than in the long term it's the latter, but although we have evidently made strides in reducing most violent crime, we have more crazy people, psychopathic and schizophrenic people, treated or untreated roaming about looking for blood and despite our efforts at making mandatory background checks effective -- way too damn many are slipping through the gaping holes in the system.

Santa Monica gunman previously hospitalized for mental health

shouts the CNN.com headline.  So why, with all the gun control laws California has, was he able to get hold of a gun?  Did he pass a background check, did he buy it illegally, at a gun show; did he steal a gun?  I'm sure we'll find out, but the fact that he may have recently been hospitalized for urges to kill people and yet acquired weapons or retained weapons is inexcusable.

Yes, we are all upset at the failure of Congress to do something about our Swiss cheese system of background checks, but did we really read the bill or were we just satisfied as long as the title promised that everyone would have to pass a background check?  Did it only plug a loophole through damned little was passing?  Did it address the fact that 'no gun' lists are not adequately maintained or updated either because it's too much work for mental health professionals or because they are afraid of lawsuits or other repercussions? 

Passing laws that are not or cannot be enforced and are proven ineffective is inexcusable and while an effective approach must include checks, it must also make those checks real by making the reporting of such mental health issues real and if some are so concerned that the evil Obama is going to take their weapons and put stooges on the court that will make the second amendment nugatory, perhaps they should stop the kind of  stonewalling that is endangering the freedom they wish to keep. Perhaps our traditional practice of  writing and passing bills without reading them, without examining the assumptions and looking at past experience is going to have to change as well.

Background checks are necessary but they may as well not exist if we're going to prevent them from working, if we're going to be satisfied with doing the same things expecting different results.  But if we're to look at gun crime in general,  I have to agree with the USA Today article that discusses the failure of  our current approach that owes so much with our refusal to discuss or do anything about the poverty, the criminal subculture, the frustration and anger and hopelessness and yes, the untreated, unrestrained mental illness that that foster crime.  The most severe restrictions have far, far less effect on crime than their passionate advocates insist they do and in my opinion the traditional belief in bans and licenses and registration programs are always going to fail if we do nothing about the vast Petri dish of depravity that is America.

An embarrassment of witches

Yes,  many of us still think we can fix stupid with an embarrassment of regulations, but hey, there's one thing I've learned down here in the Cracker State is that you can't fix ignorance, hate, fear and superstition by kindness or firmness or cynicism or by embarrassing the practitioners thereof. People who like, who get rich on a society of serfs and barons don't want it fixed. If you're in the religion business, you sure as hell want a large reservoir of the downtrodden.

The town of Pahokee, Florida might be in Palm Beach County, but you'd hardly confuse affluent Palm Beach with this town of roughly 6000 people, almost as many churches, 12 billion mosquitoes and I don't know how many alligators. It's a sugar cane town and only an aging and unstable levee separates it from becoming the bottom of Lake Okeechobee once again.

Very little separates it from most rural South Florida towns. High crime, low income, high unemployment, low education and a hell of a lot of churches, both mainstream and esoteric; most of whom seem overly concerned with witches. Yes, I did say witches and in that respect, Pahokee seems to have much in common with far flung places like Wasilla, Alaska where a popular preacher and friend of Sarah Palin has bragged about killing such unfortunates in Africa.

The Lake Okeechobee Resort and Marina will, if all goes well,  host its first Lake Okeechobee Summer Solstice Festival on June 19-23. Now, recognizing the change of the Sun's apparent angle in the sky is more than geometry.  As every SwampChristian knows it's PAGAN and pagan means witchcraft, and witchcraft, both here and in pagan Papua New Guinea as a great danger to our moral, spiritual and actual health and the preachers of Pahokee ain't gonna stand for it, by God.

"An abomination" said Pastor Brad Smith, Florida Director of Kids for Christ.  “We don’t need this in our town. Not now. Not ever,” said Rev. Raul Rodriguez, of Church of God Door of Jesus Christ.“We cannot expect our city to survive and prosper if we allow these things,” said Pastor Eugene Babb, of Harlem Church of God. “God cannot heal our land if we have witches and warlocks violating our community,” said Evangelist Lillian Brown, of Saints on the Move. “We are opening ourselves up to things we should not, like belly dancing and magic spells,” said one citizen at a recent city commission meeting where protest against letting anyone express the most attenuated form of  religious freedom: abominations like belly dancing lessons.

So am I indulging in the same intolerant  thing by mocking the rubes, poking fun at Christians because I'm an atheist and think I'm superior to people who believe that occult incantations change nature and that tolerance of freedom risks having one dragged down to eternal torture by demons?

Not really. I'm mocking people who think it will ever be different, people that a free and liberal democracy is compatible with the culture that derives from and thrives on ignorance and superstition and hate, that tolerance of and indeed the support of such ignorance, poverty, disease and depravity is required by the mandates of "Smaller, less intrusive government."  I'm talking about the Republican base.

What will I be doing while witches shake their demonic bellies while the Devil beats the drum on the 21st?  If weather and witchcraft permit I'll be on Green Turtle Cay.  I mean who wants to be near Pahokee when the sky begins to fall.

Smoke gets in your lies

They asked me how I knew

None of this was true

Oh I of course replied

It cannot be denied

Bill O'Rielly lied

 -With apologies to Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach-

Newspapers have long been chastised for either getting it wrong or just plain lying on the front page and apologizing or retracting on the last page.  And then there's Fox News where the lies never stop, the lies never die -- ever.

On a recent Thursday night, Lyin' Bill  O'Reilly told us he'd found a "smoking gun" of some unspecified sort because  former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman had visited the White House 157 times between 2009 and 2012. One has to wonder what kind of smoke it was or into what orifice it was being blown since in actuality, as it came out the following day, the story was fake, Shulman having only attended 11 events having to do with health care, far fewer than he had been cleared to attend and having nothing to do with any kind of scandal, real or imagined. 

"You must explain under oath what you were doing at the White House on 157 separate occasions."

 Not much need to actually, Shulman had been cleared, as the public record shows, to meet, mostly in other venues than the White House with administration staffers involved in implementation of the health-care reform bill.  Still he did not attend 146 of them. Is it possible, under oath or not to explain what one was doing at a place one was not?  Perhaps Lyin' Bill would like to explain what he was doing in North Korea 157 times.  What?  He wasn't there?  Now there's a smoking gun for sure.

But it's too good a story for Fox to let go, even if it's not true, so although the debunking was thorough, Lyin' Bill was at it the next day saying:

 "We still don't know much about former IRS Chief Douglas Shulman visiting the White House 157 times.  That's extraordinary."

No, of course we don't know what he was doing there when he wasn't there to do anything and  if anything is extraordinary it's Lyin' Bill's ability to charge about like a bull in the arena with all sorts of facts stuck in his hide like banderillas and  bellowing discredited and debunked charges ad nauseam. Of course we're talking about Fox News here and their garbled and disreputable gospels have a following of the faithful and of course it was picked up as divine word by Investor's Business Daily and metastasised through the drainage system of the Blog world where, at least in the minds of the Right, it became true.

You know we still don't know about Bill O'Reilly meeting 157 times with Kim Jong Un to discuss an attack on Hawaii.  I think he needs to explain under oath just what he was doing there don't you?

Church of Hate

The old cliche has rats leaving a sinking ship.  Southern Baptists aren't that smart and it seems they do intend to go down with their foul and foundering wreck of antique bigotry.

Lifelong member President Jimmy Carter left that self-righteous ship of fools about 4 years ago over Church teachings about the subservient role of women and I'm waiting to see who tumbles into the lifeboats over the latest decision to dump the Boy Scouts because they decided on May 24th that they no longer are going to excommunicate gay Scouts.

It's a "Moral" thing you see and it's not really bigotry because they justify

it with some ancient political propaganda they somehow attribute to some god and so they can, in all good and righteous confidence recommend that Southern Baptist Churches all over the South withdraw support from about 100,000 scouts.  I wonder how many of those will, lacking something decent to do after school or in the Summer, lacking the impetus toward self-improvement will wander toward making bad personal decisions and wind up getting into trouble and into jail where predatory Southern Baptists can recruit them for the faith as though youth homes and penitentiaries  were prep schools and seminaries. 

Of course the SBC was a supporter of Slavery and Segregation because it was a moral thing and a Biblical one - not because they're a bunch of bigots and moral cowards. It's what God wants and who can question the absolute truth of anything someone put into God's mouth for his own purposes?

Yes, yes, they decided to stop beating that dead horse and renounced all that back in 1995 -- decades after the horse died but perhaps that's only because they had gays and women to turn to while blathering about God's word.  One wonders what they will choose as the next life raft when the world of decency, respect and morality, in due course rejects once again that rotting prison hulk of the Southern Baptist Convention.

No, Florida, I expect you to die

"Clearly, it’s time elected officials in Florida started looking out for the people they are supposed to be representing."

Wrote Florida's Democratic Senator, Bill Nelson in a Tampa Tribune editorial Thursday last. But they do, in fact.  They're supposed to be representing the mega-polluters like the Fanjul family and the Republican thieves and pirates who would like to run the state like some Central American fiefdom: the people who elected him.  Florida Governor Rick 'Medicare fraud' Scott doesn't want any of that Federal tax money to come home where it could create jobs and make Insurance more affordable because a failing state is a Republican state and failure through sabotage, after all is the game.  All the poorest and sickest states are doing it, after all.

 And so Scott, being an expert in defrauding the government out of your tax contributions, is ready to sign a bill;  legislation that, as Nelson writes:

"will remove the authority of Florida’s insurance regulator to approve, modify or reject rate hikes by health insurance companies for the next two years — effectively deregulating health insurers and allowing them to raise prices and gouge consumers at will. And, it conveniently allows officials and insurance companies to blame any rate hikes on the Affordable Care Act."  

Well of course.  That blackguard Scott has already turned down $1 million in federal funding

 "that would have helped the state cover the cost of overseeing insurance rates under the new health care law," and  " has not even applied for another $5 million in federal funding that is available to help states control their insurance markets"

Earlier in May the rogue state of Florida state refused to expand Medicaid to some 1.2 million poor and disabled Floridians who would have received health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act and thus tossed away over 50 billion bucks in Federal funds allocated to pay for it.  That's right, he doesn't want a tax refund for us, a refund of our own money,  because Big Sugar who made billions on 'reclaimed' land the taxpayer gave them and who thrive on Federal price supports wants the Obama administration to fail, wants the economy to fail, wants you and me to fail -- assuming we're not rich, of course or our name isn't Fanjul.

Look, I don't want to argue the niceties of the definition, but sabotaging Florida and the entire
US if they can get away with it is treason and of course the massive, pitchforks  in the streets opposition that one might expect to wholesale rape and pillage isn't happening.  Sure, we're all in arms, pun intended, about crime waves that don't exist and other pet Liberal shibboleths the Visigoths use to distract us but you and I are going to get old and sick, and choosing between bankruptcy, homelessness, starvation and that operation you need will sure as hell be our future if we let them get away with this scofflaw enterprise, this cold rebellion, this silent Civil War.

But we won't even write a letter.  We're too busy blaming the long standing health care crisis on Obamacare  too busy yelling Benghazi and IRS scandal.  We're too damned stupid, too damned ignorant and misinformed and too riddled with hate and superstition and bigotry and racism and our own pet issues and like those women who deserve it because they don't wear burkhas, getting screwed.