Here he is, Mr. America

Racism?  Just like those liberals to think that "American Values" are racist, says Fox jerk Todd Starnes and after all it was only 'politically correct' judges that enabled a dark skinned American woman of East Indian descent to win the Miss America contest over  someone with real American values like blond hair and big tits. American womanhood as traditionally seen by pageant judges always has been typified by tattooed Army Sergeants, hasn't it?  If that isn't true American womanhood, perhaps those judges will choose a man next.

"Americans were backing Miss Kansas -- but the liberal Miss America judges were not interested in a gun-toting, deer-hunting, military veteran." said Tiny Todd on his Facebook page on Sunday.  Americans -- Americans who can't tell the difference between Indians, Arabs and Muslims but are sure that to be an American; to have American values means TBBT: you're tall and blond and have big tits.

"Americans" (that being Todd) were backing Theresa Vail and I'm sure many were, even though most Americans I would venture have as little interest in this cattle call as I do -- even though tattoos make me cringe even on male Army Sergeants, she was a fine candidate and for all I know a fine person. 

If that's what the repulsive troglodyte from the caves of Fox likes, that's his privilege - de gustibus and all that, but for those of us who don't have a problem calling an American citizen, born and raised a 'real' American if they don't have 100% European ancestry; even for those of us who might actually consider an Indian or Chinese or Middle Eastern or, God forbid, African woman attractive and intelligent and talented and worthy to represent 'American Values"  --  for us Nina Davuluri is a fine choice and a real All-American girl.

Smug racist assholes like Starnes and the Network he rode in on don't, needless to say, represent any values, much less American ones I'd respect, or even tolerate -- or even refrain from punishing with extreme prejudice and considerable violence given the chance.  But I've been around long enough to know there isn't anything to be done about convincing these people. No dispassionate analysis, no baseball bat will make these people see non-European people as anything but a threat to their imaginary "values."  As Max Plank once said, the truth does not triumph by making its opponents see the light, but because they eventually die.

So if we're unable to stop hoping for some new America that gives more than lip service to its principles while festering like a cesspool of hate and stupidity and bellicose self-aggrandizement perhaps we should hope and pray that Fox fall into some lake of fire, that the earth opens up and swallows Todd Starnes like the foul and fetid carcass of the loathsome creature he is, so every good and true and righteous person can piss on his grave.

Global Climate Hoax?

Or not.

More than 20% of Einstein’s original papers contain mistakes of some sort, says Mario Livio in Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein.  Indeed, Darwin’s  Origin of Species contains far more of them, owing in no small part to the total ignorance of the mechanisms of heredity at the time or writing.  It was thought that the mysterious elements we now call genes simply mixed in the offspring like different colors of paint rather than like the shuffling of cards.  Yellow and blue paint may give green  until diluted by combining with one or the other color,  but Genes, Jacks and Queens are always one or the other and undiluted and a joker introduced into a deck will always turn up again sooner or later.  Darwin’s blunder was in not noticing that an advantageous mutation would under the blending model of his day eventually disappear, making  the passing on of small traits almost impossible with successive generations. 

Mountains of new data both from fossils, in the laboratory and from the comprehensive understanding of genetics proved that the blunder was only apparent when viewed in a glass darkly.  Inheritance didn’t work the way his detractors insisted  (and some still do.) As to one of Einstein’s apparent blunders, first in adding and then removing Lambda, the Cosmological Constant, the  truth seems when viewed through more modern glasses that  adding it was not a blunder but understanding it is so far an unachieved goal. 

  

Yet when we examine the kind of Denialism modern communications have  facilitated, we will find much commentary using the early pre-Mendelian uncertainties in the theory of Evolution to attack what may now be the most documented and supported theory of anything and further, a theory that gains more supporting data with every new discovery and finds wider and wider application.  We find, at least in my opinion, far less outrage about any of the proposed  explanations  of the apparently accelerating inflation of  empty space in our universe .  Astronomy was not yet advanced enough  for Einstein’s early cosmology to include an expanding cosmos, much less an accelerating expansion and he famously removed the constant, which he called ugly, from his equations as being no longer necessary. 

Still, deniers and opponents  of all sorts  exist and passionately marshal outdated observations, invalid arguments and fallacies against the science.  I don’t think I’m being venturesome by seeing patterns amongst denialists. I think there is a constellation of beliefs that seem to accompany passionate attacks on well documented  scientific and historical consensuses and they differ from the truly valid observations that consensus changes when new data appears.  There certainly is no new data refuting evolution, nor are geneticists and paleontologists moving in all seriousness away from accepting it. The same is true of  the currently accepted ages of the Earth or of the Universe.  There is no new data showing that millions were not rounded up and gassed by the Nazis and I’m convinced that there is no new data and only an assemblage of fragments of old data to argue that not only is the idea that the worldwide climate is changing but that the deforestation and   artificial introduction of  carbon and sulfur compounds  into the air are not a significant factor.  Arguments that examine only fragments of data, chosen for ambiguity are often cited without reference to other firm data that clarifies the matter. Insinuations are made of suppression for political reasons as if everyone from Communist to Libertarian would agree to delude the world for no particular gain.  Assertions are made that radiocarbon dating “is a joke” and  “is no longer trusted.” Assertions that  global warming is part of a natural cycle, contrary to observed data.  Assertions that one data set invalidates all other data with no mention of peer reviews of that set.  It’s almost monotonous.  

People, or at least a large proportion of the people who angrily deny theories and the data that support them also possess, as I mentioned, a constellation of other traits and particularly a personal attachment to belief systems political and religious.  Most people for instance, who argue in the total absence of empirical observation  and contrary to huge and growing masses of data, from physics, mathematics and geology  are certainly  religious.  Likewise, the people who write books and articles about the “hoax” of climate change tend also to have not only an affiliation with ‘Conservative’ politics and religious traditions but a propensity to assemble the same sort of arguments.  Concocted evidence of human footprints next to dinosaur tracks,  fictitious articles about oil forming magically in the deep strata,  dishonest testimony that evolutionary science is giving way to other interpretations,  books asserting  evidence against the existence of Nazi extermination camps almost always written either by heretofore unknown “experts”  often unconnected or only tangentially connected to the science in question or to science in general all grasped at  like floating straws to Denialists:  Books by Engineering professors about the Holocaust Hoax,  Articles and talks about  anthropogenic factors in climate change by aeronautical engineers,  and TV meteorologists.  Paleontologists, Paleoclimatologists, Geologists?  Not so much,  unless they work for the petroleum industry.

Certainly the history of science is the history of how theories are modified as technology allows new data; how theories are replaced by theories that explain observed phenomena, certainly -- but  giant worldwide hoaxes involving  nearly every scientist in a field including  suppression and falsification of data? I can’t think of one, nor can I think of a motivation that would affect such a widely diverse set of individuals and make them act in such unlikely  harmony.

No, as I said, not only Einstein’s work but the work of all the most brilliant pioneers of science and mathematics have contained errors, oversights and blunders.  We don’t have shoe salesmen writing anti-Newtonian diatribes. We don’t hear about Galileo’s Hoax, the mendacity of Kepler, do we and that's because they don't endanger the dearly held fictions of today's religious people or wealthy corporations.

Science progresses haltingly but the ultimate test is the agreement of theory with data even as data emerges and refines theory. Theories have been overthrown, discredited and abandoned but the level of passion involved has nothing to do with the soundness or unsoundness of a theory as history asserts in a loud voice.  If Einstein, Newton Kepler, Kelvin, Darwin, Hoyle and in fact all of them  spent their lives revising and reviewing, blundering and going back to the drawing board, none of them have been perpetrating hoaxes.  Hoaxes involving multitudes only seem apparent to certain kinds of people who share certain characteristics. Not understanding how science works is one of those characteristics. Being Republican is another.

There is no new data arguing against accepted cosmological and paleontological or anthropological theories. There is no emerging data arguing for a climate hoax, Intelligent design, a  worldwide flood  – only cranks seeking attention and the people with personal, financial and psychological reasons to become their disciples.  Yet they go on and on. Fox goes on reporting and deciding for us.

  

Remember the Raisin!

The people who like to manipulate us by creating and preserving anger like to give us slogans.  Remember the Maine, Remember the Alamo, Remember Pearl Harbor, remember the raisin! Never Forget!! 
 
All these things are inevitably forgotten despite the slogan advertising campaigns and sooner or later we'll get tired of remembering 9/11. Sloganeers will get tired of milking the faded fear and self-pity and choreographed mourning. The people who were born too late to remember it will eventually need to be told to remember something else that some party needs to cultivate anger about, so as to pass some kind of horror like the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 or the Patriot Act.  9/11 will be forgotten by most everyone but historians and those who remember will remember it in context of the things we did and the laws we passed and the freedom we gave up while we were whipped into a passion.

Think calls to 'always remember'  are genuine and untainted by politics?  Wonder why we shouted Remember Hoover! in 1936 but nobody remembers to Remember Bush?  Remember Katrina and at least 1800 fatalities?  Why not?   We spent billions and billions on a the Largest government agency in history and abridged the Bill of Rights in 2001, but we didn't do a damned thing to improve reactions to natural disasters which you can be sure will occur more often than a repeat of 9/11.

I suspect that calls to remember are  calls to preserve a mental state in which we can be manipulated, tricked and sold some unsavory product. Stay angry, stay afraid and obey.

Fox News - Bow to My God or get out.

"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

-George H.W. Bush-

Perhaps you're old enough to remember, as I certainly am, to remember when Dwight Eisenhower had his arm twisted by the Knights of Columbus into adding a mandatory affirmation of  individual and collective subordination of  national allegiance and legal obligation to religious belief.  It may have had something to do with the need to give the rabble some reason they could understand to make us seem like the good guys in the struggle against the Communists for world domination of the 1950's but it's really the same struggle for domination our founders participated in against tyranny over the human mind and spirit by Established Christianity in Europe and it goes back millennia - or longer.

Perhaps you're old enough to remember the days of the Vietnam war, the conflict that like the Civil War was never really won, never really resolved and which still divides the nation our kids are forced to call indivisible every morning. Anyone my age either cringes or puffs up in self-righteous idiocy when he hears "America - love it or leave it." 

That fulsome piece of carrion of course deconstructs to "this country is only for those who agree with the lowest and angriest common denominator" and that, at the time, being the John Wayne/Martha Ray duo shouting that if you don't support the war and all it's horrors, lies and sinister motivations, you're not a "real" American. And of course real Americans believe in the correct god and them commies don't and there's the whole story. Napalm - God wills it!

Isn't it odd, by the way how we still make a hero out of that bloated, talentless fart-bag despite his support for the oppression and slaughter of two million people in order to preserve a system of government that had enslaved them?

Does anyone doubt that Fox, had it existed 50 years ago would have supported that national embarrassment, the stench of which still is detectable like some cosmic background radiation?  Fox, in fact has always supported the dichotomies the Right uses to foment anger, promote dictatorial colonialism and criminal exploitation and set us one against the other. Men against women, rich against poor, white against black, corporate against individual -- those contrived dichotomies have always set up the most ignorant, deluded, misinformed and stupidly self-righteous to be the good guys, the sensible, clear thinking guys who oppose science, empiricism, mathematics and indeed honesty in favor of myth and legend, whether corporate, political, religious or any mixture of them. Those clear thinking, God fearing deniers of evolution, geology, cosmology, nuclear physics, climatology and history.

Hence when a President like George Bush the Elder says he can't understand how someone who doesn't believe in some god or another can be considered a citizen and thus demonstrate his contempt for the letter and spirit of Our Constitution and indeed the Enlightenment and Humanist movement that produced it, you won't hear a peep of protest from the gaggle of birdbrain gigglers at Fox.

Yes, I'm tired of listening to the things Fox News is tired of and particularly since one of those things is my freedom. Every time some parent somewhere gets tired of his kid being cajoled, coerced, forced and even bullied into not only acknowledging some category of deity, we're affirming that our freedom itself is subordinate to what its shamans say that deity demands.

Dana Perino "is tired" of "atheist's demands" for freedom from religion and says "they don't have to live here."  I wonder if her  distaste for individual freedom of conscience includes the suggestion that the bones of Madison and Jefferson and Franklin and Washington be disinterred and dumped elsewhere in some free country, but of course even that obvious extension of her idiotic ire implies an intelligence far too great to exist in such an empty skull.

Dana Perino and the bastards who pay her are the enemies of freedom, truth, justice and what I used to think of as our great nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Yes, I'm tired of you Dana and of the miserable, evil, corporate bastards who pay you to undermine everything special and praiseworthy about our country - or should I say my country, because not only are you not part of it, you're not worthy of being part.

The part of it you hate is the heart of  Democracy, the soul of freedom and if you won't tolerate the humanity, the humanism at the heart of America - you don't have to live here.

Datashock and Awe

I've had a lot of datashock recently. Datashock?  Why that's what you fell when you're hit with data that contradicts everything you took for granted about yourself.  I recently had a DNA test for instance, expecting that it would reflect the generations of genealogical data I'd been putting together for years and going back centuries.  Imagine the surprise to find that I'm half Scandinavian.

But that's nothing compared to what I found out.  You know that mysterious database used by every hardware and ladies' underwear marketer to send you catalogs and interrupt your most private moments with phone calls?  An article in CNN Money this morning had me laughing about the errors in her publicly disseminated information the reporter found when she went to AboutTheData.com . I stopped laughing when I checked my own information.

I've been running a long and angry battle with companies like Experian to remove erroneous data from my credit report: 'aliases' that originated in clumsy data entry and became irrevocably enshrined, addresses I've never heard of, addresses that never existed, household members long dead and other items likely to follow me to the grave before Experian ever takes the time or makes the effort to look into revising the Gospel. It's the same story with various web sites that claim to have data about me and my house and other things. The stock answer to my assertions is that "Sir, we get our data from public records and they cannot be changed." Thus spake Zarathustra.

But that's nothing. AboutTheData  asserts, despite evidence to the contrary, that I'm 93 years old, have no children and my DNA and birth certificate be damned, I'm German.  Of course they know my credit cards and everything I have ever purchased with them.  they know the size of my house and what it's worth and what I payed for it and when it was built, but they also insist that I have a large mortgage on it which I don't.

This is the kind of data that affects one's life, one's well being, one's credibility and for the most part it's immutable, unchangeable, ineradicable. Now unlike the other people search sites like Pipl.com, AboutTheData does allow one to edit this farcical farrago of  data, although I'm tempted to let them think I'm 93. I'm tempted to tell them I'm dead actually, although I now understand why my mailbox is full every morning with prepaid funeral fliers, ads for nursing homes, walk-in bathtubs, home nursing services, motorized wheelchairs and crematoriums. (It would be nice if the IRS thought so, but I'm sure they have their own databases. )

But it's still a shock to think about how we assume, living in an "information age,"  that the information about your age is true, but it seems more and more that no one has any interest in correcting mistakes or even hearing about the ocean of ludicrous errors they spend so much money and bandwidth maintaining against the unheard protests of a baffled, astounded and rightly pissed-off public.

Purple haze

 I like to read books by theoretical physicists who are good at presenting mind-bending material to the general public. I should say that I like reading about these things in English because I can't, quite frankly, even imagine being able to follow the math involved in portraying multidimensional universes, Calabi-Yau manifolds, P-branes and loop quantum physics, just to scratch the surface.

The idea of other universes, possibly an infinite number of them with every point therein stretched out on holographic membranes only a tiny distance apart yet forever isolated, fascinates me far more than any science fiction written these days. There was one school of thought not long ago.  I'm not sure it gets any credit or ever did, but it attempts to explain the relative weakness of the gravitational force by postulating that force particles, or gravitons are able to leak into neighboring planes where they perhaps show up as 'dark' matter, but I'm so far from being able to talk about such things intelligently that I might as well be in another universe. Another universe perhaps identical but perhaps subtly different. I have sometimes nonetheless to wonder if somehow, by some random quantum fluctuation, we don't on occasion just take that tiny jump to the left, that little step to the right, and do the time-warp again.

 I'll bet that you've occasionally asked yourself if you've just woken up in another universe, almost exactly like the one you were in yesterday -- almost.  Silly sci-fi scenarios involving worm holes and time warps are just that: silly -- and we've all read or watched the cheesy movies. The pilot loses contact briefly only to reappear in another time and place. The guy wakes up on groundhog day every day.  You've seen that movie I'm sure.

And yet.

Over the weekend I was motoring south down the Indian River Lagoon as a thunderstorm engulfed us.  The radar reflecting off the rain made the radar screen a sea of purple superimposed over the GPS chart.  I couldn't see ten feet in any direction, reflections  from my nav lights in red and green made an eerie glow in the downpour..

It passed in time for me to be able to find my intended port and eventually to arrive safely home -- but still -- did I return to the same place I set out from? I was gone only a couple of days, but how and when and why, if  this is still the same reality, did all the yogurt in all the supermarkets and groceries in the world suddenly become Greek?  A small thing, but small things add up. And when did the hipsters stop calling each other "bro" and unanimously begin saying "brah?"  Just what did happen in that purple downpour just at the edge of the Bermuda Triangle?

Before that mysterious, disorienting moment,  president Obama should have been impeached for any involvement in Libya and now his delay in  bombing Syria is "shameful" according to one Krauthammer I won't mention by name.  No, I don't believe in space aliens flying around at night with their lights on or in ancient aliens, prophecies and apocalypses, but something is happening here and I don't know what it is. There's a purple haze all in my brain. Lately things just don't seem the same.

Imagine

Police confiscating cash and property without due process, stopping-and frisking suspiciously 'different' citizens for any damned reason.  Police SWAT teams invading private homes, terrorizing law abiding civilians, screaming obscenities for hours and waving automatic weapons; police harassing people trying to open their own doors; shooting a man over a dozen times for getting a pack of cigarettes out of his own car in his own driveway -- I could go on, and of course I have ranted endlessly and probably all too often -- and more than probably to no effect.

We're a nation of scared-shitless cowards and kept that way by endless fear mongering, endless promotion of anger by a 24 hour propaganda machine interested only in boosting ratings and profits by hiding the fact that violent crime is lower than in a hundred years and getting lower.  Most people you ask will tell you that things are getting more dangerous every day. A few of them may have a valid case for that.

One can't go for an hour without hearing some dimwitted diatribe about Obama's tyrannical government trying in Communist fashion to promote industrial safety or safe food and water and air -- and to reform our unfair and inadequate health system -- just like a fascist, but egregious infractions of Constitutional protections?  Hey, that's different, unless of course it's the second amendment so vital to that apocalyptic war against authority we dream about.

I read this morning about three Bronx kids, two girls and their brother, all siblings, who were verbally abused, handcuffed, beaten, choked, pepper sprayed and thrown to the ground by a swarm of police apparently for no better reason than for playing handball in a park while wearing Muslim hedjabs.  The girls had their scarves pulled off for the crime of not producing identification quickly enough while being black and/or Muslim, or so the police say.  Within moments dozens of police swarmed the area intimidating and tackling  bystanders and arresting one who tried to record a video of this obscenity.

"Come here, you little motherfucker, you like recording?" said one cop, mashing the 18 year old bystander's  face into the pavement;  punching  and pepper spraying him.

"Where's the phone? I'll break your arm." He screamed at the college student.

Of course the police have a cover story. Pulling one's 12 year old sister from a raging policeman who was "escorting" the children out of the park is criminal assault of course and the police were injured and had to be hospitalized -- of course and although Internal Affairs is "investigating" my bet, based on experience is that not a damned thing will happen to them. My guess is that this, like so many of the disgusting offenses that happen constantly all over the nation; like so many of the abuses of  civil rights and constitutional protection, whether it be the right to assembly, protection from searches, seizures without warrant, probable cause or any pretense of due process it will just fade away leaving only the stench of hate, racism, injustice, fear and smug hypocrisy. And all the while we will be concerned about what the leaders tell us to be concerned about; get angry on cue, ignore this fact and believe that fiction.  All the while we'll belabor the same talking points pursue the same bogeymen and we'll cringe in fear of  our neighbor's shotgun while Policemen carry machine guns, batter down our doors, blind us with gas, beat us with clubs, sodomize us with broomsticks and shoot down unarmed citizens and get way with it.

Imagine if you will, a boot stamping on a human face forever. Imagine a voice screaming "Freeze Motherfucker!"  forever.  Imagine.

 

The Canadian Candidate.

Or is it the Cuban Candidate?

Birthers, or at least the ones I've heard from, like to disassociate their theory about Obama's African origins from racism and pretend instead a real concern for constitutional propriety, but the lack of enthusiasm for pursuing the same line of  'thinking' as it applies to Ted Cruz's eligibility for Canadian citizenship and perhaps even Cuban citizenship is a bit like a porthole in a septic tank.  All the shit is on display.

But a cynic has to be grateful for having the Tea Party to quote, its members being far, far too stupid to conceal the opinions they'd like to deny. I read with delight the Texas Tribune article that has one Tea Partootie insisting that there's no comparison between their lack of concern for Ted Cruz' conflict of interest or his eligibility for the presidency and the obvious problem of Obama since Obama - wait for this - was born in Kenya and has strong ties to that country. Facts be damned.

The fact that you can damn all you like but is here to stay, is that Cruz is a Canadian citizen. Constitutional or not, this is a conflict of interest, but since "Canada is not really foreign soil" according to one Tesas TP twit. we can ignore it.  And why pray tell is there no concern that a Canadian Candidate might have a hidden agenda including Health Care Reform and forced hockey game attendance?  Because Canadians are more likely to be white or whiteish? Ya think?

Look, Cruz can't just promise to deny his citizenship and make it so.  The government of Canada may have something to say about that. According to Reuters, Cruz has to prove to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service they are or will become a citizen of another country, do not live in Canada and are not a security threat. They must also explain in writing why they do not want to be a Canadian anymore. A Canadian judge must sign off on it and it can take 8 months, so until and unless that happens, Mr. Cruz is campaigning not only stupidly, but dishonestly -- in other words in true Tea Party style.

And then there's the matter of his father having been a Cuban citizen at the time and a Cuban citizen who fought with Fidel Castro before coming to the US. That makes him eligible for Cuban citizenship.  Is he going to deny that too?  The plot thickens, but not so thick as the skulls of his supporters.  Racist supporters I might add.

Al Sharpton is a lying son of a bitch

"So many unscrupulous people have got hold of the progressive cause of late and have so distorted in their own interests everything they touched, that the whole cause has been dragged in the mire"

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky-

So we have today, on MSNBC, the cable network we liberals prefer by default, the millionaire Al Sharpton smearing the memory of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by acknowledging that although the cause of justice and equality in America has made great strides we still need to overturn the Florida 'stand your ground' law that makes it illegal for someone like Trayvon Martin to walk home.

You'll notice that I didn't put Reverend in front of Sharpton's name.  He doesn't deserve it.  He's a liar and he knows he's a liar today as well as he knew he was a liar when he amplified the lies of Tawana Brawley and used them fraudulently to vilify innocent people in the name of  the Progressive cause, used the lies to ignite hatred, used the hatred to make himself rich and important.  He could have picked a better day to insult the preacher of non-violence than the 50th anniversary of his famous "I have a dream" speech  -- a better day to drag the cause of equality before the law and justice through the mire.

That law was not invoked and did not apply to the shooting. That law would have justified Martin's resistance to someone trying to chase him out of his neighborhood, had the gun been pointed in another direction.  That law does not make it illegal for any one to walk anywhere. It played no part in the acquittal.

The world is full of dishonest men and men who use sincere and well intentioned people wrongly. Sharpton recruited many influential African American figures back in 1987 and he's doing the same today and aren't we being duped when we raise our liberal voices against things that didn't happen, presuming prejudice and bigotry where it isn't?  There's a difference between righteous and right and self-righteous - a difference between acting from virtuous indignation and reacting to our own ingrained and unexamined prejudices, which makes us little different from vicious dogs loosed on the innocent by an unscrupulous master. 

Once again, Mr. Sharpton has put his wedge between people Dr. King dreamed about uniting and once again he rung the Pavlovian bell, but instead of the food we've been trained to expect, he's once again given us a full plate of shame.

Shorty Belton and the banality of evil

The battles for the Japanese islands toward the end of WWII were as horrific as they were necessary and in an age where we can be appalled at a few thousand casualties in a year, losing thousands in a hour seems unimaginable. In an age where we feel obligated to thank everyone who ever wore a uniform for his service in perpetuity and call him a hero; in an age where every dubious deployment is a fight for our "freedom," it might be worthwhile to remember the few remaining survivors of the assaults on Japan and Europe with a little extra respect.

I don't know whether Shorty Belton was considered a hero in 1945 or whether he considered himself one for having taken a bullet at Okinawa, but I do. What then can I think of  the two teenage boys who beat him to death for sport in Spokane Washington on Wednesday?  Certainly no less than I think of the teenagers who shot the Australian baseball player to death for no goddamned reason.  I take it personally. If it weren't for guys like Belton the world would be unrecognizable and a lot worse than it is.

In some way I take it personally that much of our nation has, despite all the lip service and jingoistic rhetoric, forgotten not so much the sacrifice of a generation but forgotten the horror they fought and died to end.  Not only has time seemed to erase the infamy, but generations of propaganda and decades of stage managed amnesia have transferred the infamy to us.  I'm betting these monsters never heard of Pearl Harbor much less the violent murder of millions perpetrated by the Empire of Japan -- as many as 16 million in China alone.  Like December 7th, 1941, September 22, 2013 is a date that should live in infamy.  It's the date Shorty died. Unfortunately infamy is as mortal as everything else. We forget.

No, I'm not one of those people who will attempt to profit or make some point by raging about an increase in violent crime in a year when murder is at a hundred year low. I'm not proposing some program, some legislation, some stronger or more lenient laws. The significance of this to me is that there is no significance. It's about the banality of heroism as well as the banality of evil. It's about human nature.  Some people murder for money, some for hate, some for revenge, but they killed Shorty Belton out of boredom - for amusement, because they could. The most vicious and fanatical military on Earth couldn't get Shorty, but some bored bastards without a conscience and without respect did. There is no explanation.

George who?

Here's a history quiz for you.  Which President of the United States do we see on the left, telling the incompetent Mr. Brown he's doing a "heckuva" job responding to hurricane Katrina?  

29% of Louisiana Republicans said in response to a TPM poll that it was Barack Obama - still only an obscure freshman senator from Illinois who bears most of the blame.  44% weren't sure just who was responsible for the poor response to the devastating hurricane. George who?

These people vote.  These people say Liberals are retarded. These people are happy to lecture you about history and science and laugh at your education. George who?


I credit Libby at The Impolitic for bringing this to my attention, but I wish she hadn't.  Of course, being a Floridian, I'm glad for evidence for the argument that Florida isn't the Stupidest State as long as we have Louisiana, but none the less; how can I not feel despair at reading a poll showing, as she says, that "73% of Louisiana Republicans don't remember who was president when Katrina hit NOLA."

Breaking up is hard to do

Ted Cruz, AKA Rafael Edward Cruz, the Tea Partootie who would be president in 2016, has finally contradicted his official position that he is not a Canadian citizen and declared his intention to renounce it so as to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.  Knowing how difficult it is to renounce US citizenship, I have to wonder if a simple renunciation will suffice for Canada.  The IRS, you see, assumes that the only reason to do so is to avoid paying US taxes and it's my understanding that they will consider you liable for same for ten years after you flee to some tax haven, vehement renunciation notwithstanding. You're a US citizen until they allow you not to be and in the eyes of European financial institutions you're an American for life.

But there's the Communist elephant in the room -- Cuban communist that is. At first face it seems that having been born to a Cuban father resident in Canada, "Ted" would be eligible for Cuban citizenship  under Cuban law as well and indeed under the Cuban Adjustment Act he could be considered to be  a Cuban national. It's certainly a more valid hypothesis  than the idiocy about Obama's divided loyalties we've listened to from Republican idiots, crooks and liars (if you'll pardon the tautology) for years.

So if the requirement to be a "natural born" American is to avoid such conflicts of office that would ensue if a US president could also be the Prime Minister of Canada and hold simultaneous office in Cuba wouldn't that argue against the interpretation that being foreign born to one American parent is sufficiently "natural" to fulfill the requirement?  I think the interpretation needs to be that a candidate be like Bruce Springsteen,  Born in the USA.

Not, of course that Rafael Edward Cruz meets many other minimum standards. But if turnabout be fair play, can't we -- just for fun -- start our own Birther madness and require him to prove that he's not a Communist agent as well as the Canadian Candidate?  Seems fair to me.

A creature of their own

Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers (#68) that:

“the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in [American] councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”

 I would think such sentiment  informed the Constitutional requirement for a US president to be "natural born."  Of late however, the definition of natural born has been kneaded into whatever shape is needed to make our current president, born on American Soil to a natural born and Caucasian mother, seem illegitimate while his first opponent, Panamanian born John McCain , never had his suitability challenged, nor indeed did Mitt Romney who although born in the US may have descended from illegal aliens. Odd indeed as so many Republicans would like to change the constitution to deny citizenship to those born here, but to parents who are not citizens.  Situational ethics and silly arguments all and perhaps colored by racism as the only one challenged was the only one with an African father.  Romney's Mexican immigrants were white and thus all right as the saying goes.

If in fact the Constitutional requirement was to serve to keep foreign "creatures" out of office and if in fact, such a circumstance motivated the "birther" madness, there is a disturbing dissonance when one considers the eagerness of Republicans to allow unlimited campaign funding from offshore corporations to finance a creature of their own.  A cynic might be tempted to propose that when such domestic creatures claim that the objection is about the law, that it's really about Obama. It's really about racism.

The cynicism might be affirmed when one considers the proposed 2016 ascendant, Canadian born Senator  Ted Cruz (R-T.)    Now Cruz may have had a US born mother, just as Mr. Obama had, but Obama does not hold a foreign passport as Cruz does.  Does dual citizenship mean divided loyalty?  Is that more or less of a concern when one has a foreign loyalty to a country where most people are Caucasian and Christian?  Res ipsa loquitur, I should think, or freakin' obvious for those with undivided loyalty to English.

Cruz's father, Cuban born Rafael Cruz was a Cuban citizen and a legal resident in Canada when Ted was born and thus Ted is automatically a Canadian citizen at birth under Canadian law as well as a legal US citizen at birth -- because his mother was a US citizen.  He has never renounced Canadian citizenship and yet his spokeswoman claims with a kind of logic suspiciously alien that he has no Canadian citizenship to renounce.  He does. 

Perhaps that's a simple misunderstanding or perhaps it's the kind of duplicity and denialism that has come to define the faux-conservative, morally impoverished and greedy for power creatures of  the Republican ascendency. No matter where Mr. Cruz was born and no matter where his loyalties may lie, Cuba, Canada, the United States of America, he's a creature of their own.

Organic vegetables and free range terrorism

Last month I described one example of police insanity and constitutional travesty that still seems to have stayed in Vegas for all the the uproar it failed to produce.  Perhaps it's a valid example about how America no longer cares about the core issues of our war of Independence. Perhaps it's an indication of how we always emulate our enemies, but there are so many examples that get little notice while we assiduously obsess about  what we're directed to obsess about.

I'm talking about quasi-military invasions of private homes with battering rams, obscenity shrieking SWAT team members abusing citizens at gun point and often for no cause and with no warrant.  It's a rare week that I don't hear of such a thing and I'm convinced that most go unremarked upon at the national level. Sometimes people die. One never hears of consequences or even apologies.

I'm talking about the recent commando raid on a small organic farm near Arlington Texas, ostensibly for the purpose of our disastrous War on Drugs, but which turned out to be a war on organic tomatoes.  Is the threat of a couple of hippies growing vegetables on a seedy little farm sufficient to warrant holding them at gunpoint  and not showing a warrant until hours after the 10 hour ransacking by police WITH THEIR BADGE NUMBERS CONCEALED of their property began?  Apparently all they had was a complaint from a neighbor who thought the upkeep on the farm was lax.  Of course nothing illegal was found and the victims, for such they are, didn't suffer any more than humiliation and half a day of terror in which police seized "17 blackberry bushes, 15 okra plants, 14 tomatillo plants ... native grasses and sunflowers,"

The use of SWAT teams using machine guns, armored vehicles, battering rams and dogs to serve warrants is growing and one might argue that the largest perpetrators of domestic terrorism are in uniform. Can anyone explain to me why regulating oil drilling, explosive fertilizer storage and food sanitation are an unwarranted abridgement of liberty, in the minds of Conservatives, but armed assaults on peaceful unarmed citizens by unidentified men in black with real assault weapons is permissible in the name of safety?

Fanboys crowdfund Babel - or how not to write

As with many and perhaps all phenomena, now and in the past, one does not have to postulate a deity to explain it.  Take the Tower of Babel story, for instance. Divergence in language is the product of the same laws of evolution that govern all self propagating systems and the internal divergence in the English, or should I say American, idiom can be shockingly fast since we model ourselves on the linguistic and economic babbling of the young and ignorant: those born yesterday and dependent upon marketing executives  and other criminals for language lessons.  It ain't God.  We did it ourselves and we think it's cool. Our pursuit of a cheap way to sound special has made us into babbling twits.

Take one headline I just read:  "Apple fanboys crowdfund a giant statue of Steve Jobs".  What?   "If a couple Apple fanboys have their way, a giant Steve Jobs statue may be headed stateside. The duo have launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to raise money for a Jobsian sculpture to be built and erected somewhere in the Bay Area," it continues. 

Is a 'couple fanboys' an actual couple or does the hipster mean a couple of?  There's a huge difference, but hipness comes first and hipness means automatic rejection of prior norms even when it renders the statement ambiguous at best and meaningless at worst. Especially when.

Obviously the intent is not to inform, else half the words would not be needed and in fact words, if they are words, like  "Crowdfund" instead of public funding serve only to attach the writer to an exclusive group created for the purpose of synthetic exclusiveness  since the appearance of belonging to elusive and exclusive groups of trendy young people is the real goal of American speech - and of course spending like an idiot as well as talking like one. Then too, it's so much easier to speak 'crowdsourced' indiebabble  than to master a language.  Backward hat and baggy pants notwithstanding, everybody knows you're over the hill and bald  - dude.

Fanboy?     "Apple fans raise money for a Bay area statue of Steve Jobs" wouldn't express the poncy and desperately sought hipness of the paid by the word writer sufficiently and so we diverge into two species: English and Hipster and the tower crumbles.  Not only can't I talk to them, I don't want to.

But if being hip and trendy and edgy, if those words have a discernible meaning, means rejecting last Thursday's Cliches, then why is it still so cute to say 'shrooms after 40 years? That never was funny in the first place, even back when you were a sales clerk trying to insinuate some high-life experience with psilocybin  in the 70's.  Why is it still so cute to tell us you were talking about something that just happened when what you mean is that you approve and you weren't talking at all?  Remember, old jokes, old fish and geriatric hip talk have much in common and even the fact that we've become so desperate to sound unique in our conformist culture that we cling to antiquated mimicry of what the "kids"were saying last year or last decade or last century defeats the attempt to sound new and unique that our mediocre, uninteresting lives are all about.  New and unique, but just like everyone else.  How long will we try to work "not so much" into our speech?  I hope it's not as long as we've been wearing our hats backward or display our ass cracks at shopping malls like strutting geese.


  

My dinner with Raskolnikov

     "Russky Pu-leeze!" I said to Rodya, already wishing he hadn't poured that 4th Vodka. It wasn't going to help me in putting together a cogent denunciation much less assist me in remembering what the hell he'd been saying that was so naive long enough to refute it. "You're starting to sound like Ayn Rand"

     "You mean she's going to sound like me.  Remember she hasn't been born yet."

     "And you haven't been born at all, you're just a figment of  Dostoevsky' dyspepsia or the 'Russian soul' which means too damned much vodka -- and speaking of too much Vodka, can't we get something to eat - other than borscht?"

      "Da, sure Captain,  but you're not going to argue that there are not two kinds of people in the world - those who like rules and like to be ruled, and the great men, or even men a little out of the common, that is to say, capable of giving some new word -- and those men, must from their very nature be criminals -- more or less, of course.  And from my mind they ought not, indeed, submit to remaining in the common rut."

     "which means, what:  be prevented from ruining or at least unfairly exploiting the misery of others or even creating it in order to have a flock to fleece?  Russky please!"  You just don't want to pay taxes and think you can handle a society without them.  Trust me you wouldn't rise to the top if the top were the bottom and who the hell would buy you dinner if it weren't for me?

     " Well, I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known without sacrificing the lives of one, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound. . . to eliminate the dozen or the hundred. . ."

     " Yes, yes, so I claim I have have a solution for Fermat's enigma or cold fusion  so I get to lie, cheat, steal and murder and everyone who does evil can complain that he's Newton or Feynman or even Ayn freakin' Rand and pretend to be  some sort of  supergalt who must not be restrained by the peasants even while he's eating their children.  It's like some mirror image of Communism."

     I was getting hot under my high collar and that 4th glass of  cheap vodka was starting to look more attractive.

     "What you're saying is that you feel guilty about murdering an old woman and you're inventing an ethical system that absolves you by putting her into a 'class.'  Next thing you know, you'll write some crappy fiction about a super savior,  job creator who gets crucified by taxes and OSHA regulations by the mob of greedy "takers." 

     "Look Foggy, as I said in my article, if you've bothered to read it, is that all legislators and leaders of men, such as Lycergus, Solon, Mohammad, Napoleon, and so on were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one -- and they did not stop at bloodshed."

     "Neither did Chairman Mao and you know, his new word might have been a bit more credible if 20 million didn't starve to death, even if they're now Galty capitalist ass kickers pretending their self-interest is enlightened, but perhaps with a little less of the potato juice you might ask yourself  how you know in advance between Moses and Mussolini so that you can decide whether to follow him or hang him?   Or Mickey Mouse for that matter, in which case we just smile while we're getting fleeced.  Should there be some sort of test, some academic degree -- or should it be hereditary, the way it was back before the Revolution that will someday take  away Alisa Zinovyevna's wealth and make her bitter and self righteous and a bit horny?  At least we had only one Tzar at a time.  You'd give us a mob of every jerk who wants to blame others for his failures.  Like 'I'd be a rich man instead of working in this shoe store if it weren't for the Liberals.'"

     "Look, Fogg, I acknowledge that it's somewhat arbitrary -- I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior, ordinary, that is to say material that serves only to reproduce its kind -- and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word.  the first category are men conservative in temperament -- it's their vocation.  the second transgress the law; they are destroyers.  The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied. They seek the destruction of the present for the sake of the better.  However the masses will scarcely ever admit this right, they punish them or hang them. The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future.  Each class has an equal right to exist. In fact all have equal rights with me and vive la guerre eternelle -- til the New Jerusalem of course.  More Vodka?"

     "The old Jerusalem is enough of a headache, thanks and no, but damn it, you're missing the point.  If those classes are only discernible after the deaths of millions and the destruction of nations and peoples, all you're doing is saying  'do what thou wilt shall be the law' and let God or the Devil or Dostoevsky sort it out later.

     Two classes my ass Rodya, that's the assumption behind every horror mankind has done and call it what you like that eternal war of all against all is the road to the new deluge - at best. If you could 'remember'   150 years into the future like I do, you'd be surprised to hear that 'creator class' calling itself conservative and the others Liberals, but you don't remember, now do you? At least acknowledge the title of your silly life -- it's crime and Punishment, dude.  Punishment, not apotheosis.  But again, how do we tell the builder of railroads who has to bend the rules a bit even if people are killed or ruined in the effort to build an empire, tell him from the embezzler, the cheat, the negligent, the greedy and unscrupulous?  What's the difference between a Galt and a Goering?

 As Razumihin asked you -- "couldn't they adopt a special  uniform, for instance, couldn't they be branded in some way?  For you know if confusion arises and a member of one category imagines that he belongs to another, begins to 'eliminate obstacles' as you so happily expressed it, then. . ."

     "Look, Captain,  take not that the mistake can only arise in the first category, that is among the ordinary people.  In spite of their disposition to obedience many of them like to imagine themselves advanced people, 'destroyers,' and to push themselves into the 'new movement' and meanwhile the really new people are very often unobserved by them, or even despised as reactionaries.  You really need not be uneasy for they never go very far."

    "WTF?  Что за черт? Are you serious"?  If you can't tell man from superman how can you say you're not saying anything goes and winning is the only justification; success or profit  the only judge of morals and only after the carnage is finished?   Are you sure you're not here from the future selling Ayn Rand books to a yet untapped reservoir of wanabees -- or 'followers' as you call them?  Hitler created jobs and since that Godwin git hasn't been born yet any more than Galt has, I can ask how this конское дерьмо, this horseshit is useful in any way.  There is another judge of worthiness, another way to tell what's just and what's just criminal and that's what you're afraid of - that voice quietly saying 'murderer'  Just wait, I've read the book after all."

     Why don't we reserve our reverence, our excuses for the excesses of  others, our discrimination between avarice and altruism for historians looking back and having seen the results and being able to ask if  millions of dead and a world of misery were a just price for jet planes and video games and on-line porn.  Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, Rodya and if you're quoting that randy Ayn verbatim and before you've even read her --  why then, it's a poor sort of memory that works only backwards.  This 'philosophy of yours can justify things as disparate as Fascism and Communism and organized crime as well as the Spanish Inquisition, I expect -- and if  no price is too great for progress, and progress only defined by the people who committed crimes to make it happen, you've sold us a world no different from the world of jackals and hyenas and for that matter, you'll please forgive me for sticking you with the check, me being above that sort of obligation, being an 'advanced' person who needs the  money to destroy the old and bring in the new and create jobs and all. Right?"

Dasvidanya, dude.
   

     ____________

The reader will please excuse me for having excerpted big chunks from  Crime and Punishment. It's a cheap way of filling a page and of course it's all in the public domain too, but I can't help seeing in that tale the author's contempt both for Socialism in it's infancy and naivete and what would have been equal contempt I imagine, for the labored arguments for that equally jejune and opposite in name only to Communism:  Objectivism, with it's fictional and contrived classes of people and the warfare between them.

Liberals in the shower?

Are ya uncomfortable showering at the gym?  Asked Rick Santorum of students at a "Students for Life" rally last month.  Apparently he thought they should be, because there might be 'Liberals' in the shower and you know they can't stop talking about abortion rights and saying uncomfortable things. Of course Students for Life aren't lifetime students nor are they particularly interested in preserving life in general - only that of unbaptized embryos.  But hey, Students for Imaginary Biblical Commandments is too long for people whose lips move when they read.

And those are Rick's people. People who somehow see a point in his idiotic jabberwocky. But even those people can't be expected to focus very long, and so the pretense that liberals will follow you into the shower down at the YMCA to discuss reproductive rights until you're uncomfortable is more likely  than that Rick's little village people will likely follow you anywhere and everywhere to blather about not showering with Liberals.

It's all about youth and beauty says Rick, incomprehensibly, but it's also all about a culture of death that needs sparks and someone to rebel.  If that makes any kind of sense to you, I don't want you or Rick in my shower.  Particularly if you love people the way Rick and his chosen claim to.  Rick thinks his flock is very much like the liberals who broke away from England, even though he's a Conservative and he thinks conservatives did away with slavery and that's why we had to rebel.  Sorry If I'm making your stomach rebel.

Oh hell, it's impossible to make sense of any of that passionately meaningless garbage about -- about whatever it is he's blathering about, about what 'the left' has done to America in recent times.  Those are basically meaningless things he says, even when he says they aren't, but don't look for anything more than the barking of dogs at a Santorum giggle gallery, because people who think it's OK to kill children and people who are so retarded and mentally ill they don't know right from wrong, are people who don't get to gurgle and gobble and gargle about anyone's right to remain alive even when that "someone" isn't a someone.  I doubt his audience needs a coherent or factual argument anyway. They're mostly looking for a comfortable venue to express their righteous contempt and those things only get in the way of the self-esteem they think they acquire from being a "conservative" at best.

 You need to hear it, because it's none too early, with the Republicans beginning their campaign of  meaningless babble and emotional idiocy and self-righteous lies.  This idiot intends to run for president again and  he will have followers again and  this expression of the worst, most retrograde manifestation of human meanness and stupidity will always be with us.

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.