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Year: 2014

Ferguson’s Biggest Threat Is Ferguson PD

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The disturbing news about Ferguson PD just keeps growing and growing. A few weeks ago, I learned that Michael Brown’s shooting was the first murder of the year in Ferguson (see my previous post to understand why I’m justified in referring to it as murder). When I read that, I naturally got to fact checking. I got some crime statistics for 2000 – 2012. Here are the total number of murders for those years:

  • 2000 – 3 murders
  • 2001 – 1 murder
  • 2002 – 1 murder
  • 2003 – 1 murder
  • 2004 – 1 murder
  • 2005 – 1 murder
  • 2006 – 1 murder
  • 2007 – 1 murder
  • 2008 – 1 murder
  • 2009 – 3 murders
  • 2010 – 0 murders
  • 2011 – 5 murders
  • 2012 – 2 murders

I know that sounds like Ferguson is a really safe place to live, but that’s misleading. You have to remember that Ferguson only has a population of 21,000 people so it’s a tiny place. If you calculate those murders in the context of the national average murder rate per 100,000 people, it’s not good. Ferguson is not a particularly safe place to live.

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I bring up this data so that you have the context you need to get to where I got when evaluating the situation in Ferguson. Ferguson has 2.54 officers per 1,000 residents, compared to Missouri’s average of 2.45.

Here’s the big bombshell that makes reading all of that context pay off; five people (including Michael Brown) have been killed by Ferguson PD so far this year. They have shot at sixteen people so far this year.

We’ve still got 1/3 of the year left to go.

That link contains a whole lot of information that I’m not going to go into for the purpose of this post, but you should definitely read it. I want to focus in on murders. In a community that has an average of 1.61 murders per year (over the span I have data for), also has 6.66 police officer killings per year (assuming they keep up their average for the rest of the year).

Be honest; if you lived in Ferguson, would you be more afraid of your neighbor, or the police officer hanging out in front of the doughnut shop?  

 

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No, Libertarians Have Not Fallen Victim To Brain Eating Amoebas

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I’ve always maintained that the government does tens of thousands of things for you that you have no idea they do. I’m pretty on top of these things, and there are thousands of things that the government does for me that I’m not aware of so it must be in the tens of thousands for people who believe that government does nothing for them. Libertarians in particular, seem to have a difficult time with believing this. One might conclude that they simply can’t bring themselves to believe in something they can’t see, except that they cling on to their unicorn of Austrian economics like it’s the precious blankie that kept them so safe when they were (yes, I’ve generously chosen to use the past tense) infants.

But I digress. Brain eating amoebas. The government takes care of them for you so that you don’t have to worry about it. I came across this story about St. John the Baptist Parish in Louisiana, where a four year old died as a result of these brain eating amoebas (known by their much less fun scientific name: naegleria fowleri). The CDC (that dreaded government entity that is constantly intruding in our lives) determined that the problem was the amoebas in the water system. Apparently, someone was misreporting the chlorine levels in the water to DHH (the dreaded department of health and human services) and claiming that the required levels of chlorine were present. The actual level of chlorine in the water was zero. So a child died because government regulations weren’t being adhered to. Damned big government!

Anyway, big government in Louisiana has mandated an increase in chlorine into the water supply for the next 60 days. This should kill the amoebas completely and prevent anymore easily preventable deaths. Damned big government! 

But overall, this is good news Louisiana. We finally have an answer to one of Louisiana’s most confounding questions, "where the fuck did our idiot governor come from?"  Since we now have confirmation that he probably crawled out of your unclean water, we know how to prevent the next infection.

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Bush’s Beheadings

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So we had a second beheading of another journalist from ISIS yesterday. Fox is (naturally) positive that they know this is all Obama’s fault. Listening to some of them yesterday actually made my ears bleed. The ignorance and complete lack of facts is becoming too hard for me to take. So I’m going to give you my analysis.

This is the Bush administration’s fault.

If I were Fox, that would have been the end of the post and millions of incredibly dim witted people would be very satisfied with that analysis. So satisfied, that they would parrot it to their friends and on social media with the impunity of people who are well informed and intelligent.

But since I’m not Fox and I expect my readers to be more discerning and more demanding that to settle for my opinion, I’m going to do something unconventional by showing you the basis of my opinion. I know! Weird, right? In the interest of keeping this post at a readable length, I’m going to stick to basics.

Let’s start with President Obama and see if we can find a way that this could possibly be his fault. First off, there was a rescue attempt made. It would have been great, had they been successful but these missions usually don’t work out that way so it failed. That’s just an unfortunate fact of life. Here’s what Fox had to say about the rescue attempt;

President Barack Obama’s “hesitation” to make a decision about American reporter James Foley’s rescue mission delayed the failed operation, according to a report.

Personally, I like hesitation and pensiveness. I wish Bush had (ever) partaken because I suspect that things would have turned out better for us if he had. Let me digress for a moment; I don’t understand how a person who writes at a junior high school level gets paid to write things for grown-ups. I’ve never heard of Sarah Hurtubise, who wrote this piece for Fox (she appears to be on loan from the Daily Caller), and I hope that I never do. Look at that sentence structure for a minute. First off, why is hesitation in quotes? Who is she quoting? Or does she maybe think that the word hesitation was erroneously used, and wants to highlight that opinion? But that wouldn’t make much sense because the criticism of the hesitation seems to be the basis of her piece. Maybe there were just some random crayon marks that the transcriber of the piece mistook for quotes? Also, shouldn’t the sentence begin with "according to a report"? Is she Yoda? Seriously, who reads this crap and thinks they’re getting information?

Anyway, enough of my twit rant. Let’s contrast that pile of dung with the way that everyone else reported the story. NBC just put forth the facts. Here’s what happened, here’s our sources, and here’s how it turned out. Newsweek likewise told us what happened, who they spoke to, and how it turned out. CNN, The Washington Post,USA Today, ABC, Business Insider, and every other journalistic outfit presented the facts of what happened. They all used the word "failed" in the headline, which is perfectly fine. It was a failed attempt. The Fox fucks talked about the hesitation without bothering to demonstrate how said hesitation affected the mission. Did the hesitation cause it to fail? Was there a delay that changed the outcome of the mission? Or is the point that hesitation in and of itself a bad thing? Does anyone remember Fox touting how Bush made another huge decision without giving any thought to it? If hesitation is bad, shouldn’t the opposite approach be good? And what kind of critically thinking impaired idiot reads that tripe and walks away feeling informed?

Okay, I spend way too much time on that. Onto the next point. Before the actual beheading of James Foley, Isis demanded cash for his return. They wanted A LOT of cash, and the release of a prisoner. Was President Obama supposed to hand over one hundred and thirty million dollars and a bunch of terrorists? Was that where he fucked up? Would this have satisfied Isis and been the end of our troubles with them? Cause they definitely didn’t want to use that money to do bad things, right?

Okay, so they behead James Foley because President Obama fucked up by not giving them what they wanted. They were thoughtful enough to produce a video with, not only the beheading, but also an explanation of why it happened and a list of things that the US needed to do to prevent the next one. Here are some of the key points contained in the video entitled, "A Message To America". In the video, Foley was made to say,

[The American Government] effectively hit the last nail in my coffin [with the recent airstrikes in Iraq]

He’s referring to the strikes we assisted with to save the Yazidi. Is that where Obama fucked up? By not sitting idly by while Isis exterminates people they don’t like in Iraq? Would abiding by a genocide have been the right course of action?

The charming fellow who actually did the beheading had some tips for President Obama, on how to prevent the next beheading. He’s of the belief that Isis isn’t an insurgency so he refers to them as a "state".

State that has been accepted by a large number of Muslims worldwide.” He threatened: “Any aggression towards the Islamic State is an aggression towards Muslims from all walks of life who have accepted the Islamic Caliphate as their leadership. So any attempt by you, Obama, to deny the Muslims their rights of living in safety under the Islamic Caliphate will result in the bloodshed of your people.

The video concludes with the fighter holding Sotloff in a similar outfit and saying:

The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision.

Okay, so allowing Isis let their genocidal freak flags fly unmolested would have prevented the next beheading. Is that where Obama fucked up? By proceeding with bombings even though Isis told him not to? Should he let them be in charge now? They’re bigger than Al Qaeda ever were, with an estimated 50,000 members but President Obama fucked up by not letting them get bigger and stronger?

Where exactly did Obama go wrong, other than being too pensive for Fox’s taste?

Now onto why this is Bush’s fault.

Everyone who knew anything about the middle east was opposed to Bush’s invasion of Iraq. They were opposed because they all knew that getting rid of Saddam would mean that Iraq would splinter into warring factions and come apart at the seams, paving the way for extremist groups to fester. You can Google Russ Feingold, Juan Cole, Reza Aslan, and a slew of other people’s statements about what would happen for yourself (set the search parameters to dates that preceded the invasion), but I’m going to give you just one. Here’s Dick Cheney in 1994, before he lost his fucking mind.

That would be precisely what happened. Isis is an acronym for "The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria". Bush paved the way for Isis, just like Cheney said would happen. But creating the environment in which they could thrive and grow isn’t all that Bush did. He pissed them off and gave them permission to behave barbarically.

Let’s go back to the Foley video. I’m not going to post it (but I did provide a transcript above), and I haven’t watched it so I’m relying on journalism from people who have watched it. In the video, Foley is apparently wearing an orange jump suit, a la Gitmo. That wasn’t an accident. Isis said that it was a statement about Gitmo. Who could have guessed that Guantanamo Bay was going to come back to bite us in the ass? Oh, right. Never mind.

Guess what else Bush did to piss off Isis? I’ll give you a hint; it was Cheney’s precious waterboarding. Thanks to Bush, Isis is doing it to our people with the impunity that only Bush could have given them by doing it first. Again, who could have possibly seen this coming?

So yeah, I blame Bush. I don’t blame Bush because I have a hard on for Obama, who can do no wrong in my partisan hack mind. I blame Bush because Bush is to blame. Ten or fifteen years from now when the children of Pakistan, who grew up under a barrage of drone strikes come for us, I will blame Obama because that will be Obama’s fault.

But not today. Today, we’re living with Bush’s colossal fuck up.                       

 

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Child Sacrifices At The Altar Of FREEDOM (yay FREEDOM!)

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Followers of my Facebook page are familiar with my "child sacrifices at the altar of FREEDOM" posts. I intermittently post one shooting of a child per day. I do it intermittently because I can’t spend every day looking for a child shooting story. It’s emotionally exhausting. So when I don’t post them, it’s because my heart is tired, not because I can’t find them. I use a very narrow parameter of criteria to choose my child sacrifice stories. I post only stories in which a child shot themselves or someone else "accidentally" with a weapon that their "responsible" gun owning friends or family members didn’t secure. Occasionally, I post a story about a dumbass gun owner who intentionally put a gun in the hands of a child that has no business playing with guns at their age. You know, like the Bullets and Burgers shooting this week when a nine year old killed a firearms instructor because her idiot parents thought that putting an uzi in the hands of a nine year old seemed like a good idea. To be clear, I don’t mourn for the dead firearms instructor. He was as big a dumbass as the dumbass parents. He went along with this insane idea of arming a nine year old with a semi-automatic weapon. I just hope he died before he had a chance to procreate and further this idiot "gun culture" of ours. If he did procreate, and raised a dumbass, I hope that dumbass learned a lesson from daddy’s death. If that sounds harsh to you, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you don’t care more about the kids and our country. Anyone who is actively participating in the furthering of our idiotic gun culture gets no sympathy from me when they fall victim to their own idiocy. Better the death of the gun whackadoodle, than their unsuspecting neighbor or friend who wasn’t a dumbass. Darwinism makes me happy, and the death of a dumbass evokes no feelings of sympathy from me.

Anyway, the point of my posts is bring attention to the number of children who are victimized by the "freedom" loving idiots charged with caring for them, but also to highlight the fact that those idiots seldom face consequences for what they’ve done. My third criteria for my posts is that they’re all incidents where no charges are filed against the dumbass. Why are charges filed in so few cases? Cause the NRA wants it so. So to recap, if your kid gets a hold of your pot and gets a little high, you’re in a world of hurt but if they kill their sibling with your gun, no problemo. Huh. I wonder if this lack of accountability is shaping our culture?     

I capitalize the word FREEDOM every time to illustrate that as a society, we care more about this fetishized bullshit fantasy of freedom than we do about our kids. Without fail, and much to my delight, an ammosexual troll always shows up with an ammosexwellian comment. What’s an ammosexwellian comment? It’s a dystopic, Orwellian style comment constructed to distract you from the gun. It’s always a moronic comment like, "what about cars and swimming pools?". Yeah, cause pointing in another direction is a smart defense of your position. Fucking jackasses.

Until January of this year, I was unable to find out how many child shootings we have per year. Why? Cause the NRA doesn’t want us to count. They’ve done everything in their power to limit our ability to study the effects of guns and wide spread gun ownership. I promise you that if they believed that gun ownership was so fucking awesome, they would make sure that we study the shit out of them The American Academy Of Pediatrics published a study in January that tallied how many kids are shot every year in America. That study is behind a pay wall now, but I have it if you want to download it from me. They found that about 8,000 kids a year are shot in America. They had to compile the data by getting gun shot records from each hospital. Since being an irresponsible gun owner isn’t a crime, it’s not as simple as going through arrest records.

Well, someone else just used the same method to compile numbers for a ten year period between 2002 and 2012. Brace yourself for enough FREEDOM to make you vomit, cause I’m going to share what they found.

  • For every U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan during 11 years of war, at least 13 children were shot and killed in America. Yay FREEDOM!
  • More than 450 kids didn’t make it to kindergarten. Yay FREEDOM!
  • Another 2,700 or more were killed by a firearm before they could sit behind the wheel of a car. Yay FREEDOM!
  • Every day, on average, seven children were shot dead. Yay FREEDOM!
  • Between 2002 and 2012 at least 28,000 children and teens 19-years-old and younger were killed with guns. Yay FREEDOM!
  • Teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 made up over two-thirds of all youth gun deaths in America. Yay FREEDOM!
  • More than 1,100 children and teens were killed by a gun that accidentally discharged. Yay FREEDOM!

Go to the link to the story. It’s full of facts that I don’t want to lose focus by writing about. This post is about our fucked up culture and how it got so fucked up. It’s not the fucking video games, it’s not just a function of mental illness, it’s not any other ridiculous ammosexwellian excuse you want to make to absolve the volume of guns in this country by blaming goddamned everything else.

It’s the fucking guns. And every time an ammosexual points in another direction, they’re helping to insert another FREEDOM bullet into a child they were supposed to take care of. Oh well. Everyone knows that you have to crack a few kids to make a FREEDOM omelet.

Let the ammosexwellian comments begin!    

   

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Michael Brown’s Death May Have Been Recorded

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UPDATE: The recording below has been authenticated by the company that makes the app used to record the call so we are looking at a first degree, premeditated murder situation. To be clear, the only way this company could possibly know that their app was used to make the recording, is because the FBI went to them for authentication.

 

We may have an audio recording of Michael Brown’s murder. Here’s the report and audio from CNN:

 

If this audio is authentic (we don’t definitively know that), it’s pretty significant since we know two things to be empirically true:

  • The fatal shot to Michael brown was the last one to enter his body.
  • Per the Ferguson police chief’s initial press conference, the shooter was 35 feet away from Michael when he fired.

You can hear six shots, a three to four second pause, and then either four or five more shots. So either the shooter got all six of the first wave of bullets into Michael and missed all of the last four or five shots OR he had time to let a couple of thoughts run through his mind before firing the fatal shot. We know that the incident began with physical contact between Brown and the shooter at the police car. Three different witnesses, including Michael Brown’s friend all confirm that. Since the Ferguson police spokesman told us that there was thirty-five feet between Michael and his shooter at the time of Michael’s death, we know that Michael ran away because that distance didn’t magically open up on its own.

Here’s the Ferguson police spokesman‘s first press conference:

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 He plainly confirms that a distance opened up between Brown and the shooter. Let me digress for a moment to review some other notable comments the spokesman made. He said that he didn’t know how many times Brown had been shot. I find that incredibly hard to believe, given that the press conference was held the day after Brown was killed. He said that it would be up to six weeks before the toxicology report was going to be available and yet, they conveniently managed to get that out within hours of the details of Michael’s private autopsy being revealed. Curious. He also volunteered the following, "….the officer who was involved is, ah, been on the police department about six years. I’m unaware of any other issues that he’s been involved in during his employment as a police officer in the city of Ferguson". Let’s take a closer look at the parts of that sentence that stood out to me;

….the officer who was involved is, ah, been on the police department about six years. I’m unaware of any other issues that he’s been involved in during his employment as a police officer in the city of Ferguson.

That was a lot of equivocating. "I’m unaware" is a clear establishment of plausible deniability. "I’m unaware" is very different from, "He was not involved in any…". I found "he’s been" a curious (and possibly Freudian) way to phrase what he’s trying to say. There should be something between "he’s" and "been" like, "hasn’t" or "may have". It was just strange. That one could just be nothing, but it’s odd. When I heard the press conference initially, I thought the last part of the sentence, "in the city of Ferguson" was odd, but I didn’t know why. Now we know. The shooter came from a police force that were disbanded and all fired because their relationship with the black community in the area they were charged with "serving" and "protecting" was so toxic, that they had to go. That was three years ago, which would fall into the spokesman’s "six years" statement. I don’t know why he didn’t just limit his comments to the shooter’s tenure with the Ferguson police department, but he didn’t and that explains the last part of that sentence. He was lying, and he knew it. There’s no possible way that Ferguson was unaware of the circumstances of the shooter’s separation from his previous employer.

If the only information we had on this incident, was the information contained in that original press conference, this would be unacceptable to anyone who cared about their community and the country at large. There was a distance of thirty-five feet that opened up during the course of an unarmed person being gunned down. Thirty-five feet is not self defense, and no rational person can make that claim. And anyone who wants to defend this is a fool. We can’t sanction this kind of behavior from our police forces.

The identity of the victim is irrelevant. The color of the victim is irrelevant. The size of the victim is irrelevant. The drug use of the victim is irrelevant. The temperament of the victim is irrelevant. All of these things became irrelevant with every foot of increasing distance that opened up between him and his shooter. Period. I have to question the motive and intelligence of anyone who wants to make these things relevant. Motive, because this is a clear case of a cop overreacting with disproportionate force and I have to question where the motivation to see it differently comes from. Intelligence, because you really have to be a special kind of stupid not to be able to see where condoning this shooting by this cop will lead for all of the cops, contemplating any shooting.

Without this audio recording, this was a clear cut case of murder. If this recording is authenticated, we know that this was a premeditated execution. Remember, premeditation doesn’t mean pre-planning. It means that whatever that cop was thinking for those three to four seconds before firing off another barrage of bullets at an unarmed man, was meditation.

I imagine that there are a significant number of people that will press on with defending the shooter by making Michael Brown a "bad guy" but the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t matter what kind of guy he was. This was an execution, and no one should want a cop to get away with doing that to anyone in their community because the next victim may be someone they know. Giving a group of people license to shoot their weapons with impunity and no fear of repercussion is an incredibly bad idea. I can’t even fucking believe I have to say that. 

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Republicans Like It Rough

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So I was listening to The Young Turks yesterday, and Cenk ended the first hour by telling a lovely story about a shop owner in Ferguson. The shop was one that was looted on the first night. Here’s Sonny Dayean (the store owner) telling his story in his own words (from the HuffPo article);

We got some advisements from people from the neighborhood that said that they heard something, that you know maybe I should board it tonight. But I just didn’t believe it. I’m here 17 years. … So I had faith in the community, and indeed it wasn’t the community — it was just a couple of, you know, bad guys, I don’t know what to call them. But they were drinking all over the store. They stir drinks, they come here, vodka was everywhere, soda was spilled everywhere. I mean you should have seen the store this morning. Man, a mess!

… There’s been four break-ins in here, so it’s not my first time, and it’s not a big deal. But most of the time it’s minor, a door here, a door there, they call Ferguson[police], they come here, they save the day. This time around, the alarm company called Ferguson and said there’s movement inside the store, the officers said we can’t do anything. There’s riots going on and there’s troopers out there.

I had to immediately come over here, and I tried to get into the area. I couldn’t get into the area because the whole area was blocked. And I was like, ‘People are robbing my store, can I just go and put some boards on it?’ They did try, but then in the middle they changed their mind and said no, it’s too risky or something, please wait. They took my information and told me they’re going to call me as soon as the area is clean. That was about 1:45, 3:45 a.m., I’m just waiting.

Nobody calls me, so I just decide to come over. So I get here around 5, 5:30 a.m. There are a few people outside, some reporters were outside too, but the whole store was open, people could come in and out and take what they want at their leisure.

So that’s on the sad part. The good part is the people who were out here were waiting outside, they wanted to help me. So as soon as I got here, they said ‘Can I help you? Can I do this, can I do that?’ I wanted to take my time and clean as part of my therapy, as part of dealing with the situation. But some of them would not leave unless they did something to help, unless they got a hug or something. So that was very overwhelming, I didn’t think I’d come in there to be so overwhelmed by the community. So that’s very sweet.

That’s a great story, right? When I heard Cenk telling it, it felt great to hear a positive story coming out of all hurt and pain in Ferguson. I started to look up the story, just to hear it again. The three minutes it took Cenk to tell it, wasn’t a sufficient amount of loveliness for me so I wanted to spend a little more time being charmed and feeling joy. The first hit I got was from the very conservative National Review. Here’s the headline;

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I read that and thought, WTF? This couldn’t possibly be about my charming store owner. So I read the story to make sure it was about the same person as the story I excerpted above. Here’s what the National Review story said;

Sonny Dayan, owner of St. Louis Cordless Communications, tells National Review Online police prevented him from returning to his business while it was being looted and the police did nothing to stop the crime.

Dayan says police would not let him walk down the street to his business, a cell-phone service and supply store, as they were letting looters run through the streets and into stores. “As far as I know my business is burning down, I’m getting calls from the alarm left and right, you got to get here, you got to get here,” he says. “They [the alarm company] called the police. The police said, ‘We cannot come help you because it’s not our job anymore. We got kicked out.’”

He says police told him they would call him when it was safe to return to his store, but never did. When he did make it back to his store a few hours later on Saturday morning, he found several Ferguson residents standing guard and waiting to help him clean up. He says police came into his store on Saturday to make sure he was okay, but offered no explanation as to why they would not protect his store. “My store or my business, it’s nothing that they worry about,” he says. “It’s the last thing they worry about.”

Huh. This doesn’t even seem like the same person. These stories were published in the same day and posted about seven hours apart, both by reporters who I confirmed are physically in Ferguson covering the events here. I’m a sunny optimist, so my assumption is that neither of these reporters made up any of the quotes attributed to Mr. Dayean (or Dayan, depending on who you read). I’ve observed human nature for long enough to know that both versions of this shop owner can very likely be real. People change depending on who they’re talking to and how questions are presented to them so my observations regarding these two accounts aren’t about the store owner.

Here’s what the HuffPo headline looked like;

HuffPo

 

They’re about the reporters. Specifically, they’re about the reporters skill in writing the type of story that appeals to their audience. This is an observation I’ve made many times before. I regularly (okay, daily) go to websites that range varying points on the political ideological spectrum. I’m not one that just gets my news from sources that will tell me what I like, and what supports the ideology I started with. My opinions don’t precede my information. I like to form opinions based on a diverse pool of information.

When reading articles on the same topic, I always (literally) find the precise difference that is illustrated in this piece; conservatives like it rough, dark, and mean. They like reading about how the world is a bad and scary place. That’s just a fact. Liberals don’t really have a preference as to how a situation is presented. In other words, liberals don’t have a proclivity for "happy" news all the time. They’re not the inverse opposite of conservatives. So called liberal outlets run the gamut of emotional tone and world views, depending on what the topic at hand is. And different liberal outlets will have very different interpretations, even among the liberal community. Conservatives don’t have that. Every conservative article will have precisely the same analysis, and it’s always created around the narrative that the world is full of bad things. We have physiological evidence for why conservatives like it rough. There have been a couple of studies that suggest that conservatives possess a bigger amygdala. That’s the fear center of your brain. The studies used entirely different methodologies and were conducted in different countries. I’m not going to get deeply into the studies because that’s a more analytical post for another day, but they absolutely suggest that we’re (to some degree) born either conservative or liberal.

The reporting on this store owner in Ferguson perfectly illustrates this. I’m positive that Ryan Lovelace’s (from the National Review) approach to the store owner absolutely elicited the responses he received just as Ryan Reilly’s (HuffPo) approach did the same to elicit an entirely different approach to the same situation. I believe that the store owner was more positive and warm in regard to what happened to his store when he was speaking with Reilly, than he was when he was speaking with Lovelace. Ryan Reilly was drawing out those positive emotions.

To be clear, I’m not accusing anyone of intentional bias. I believe that all of us find what we’re looking for when we go on a fact finding mission. I went to Ryan Lovelace’s twitter page to review his tweets from Ferguson. He isn’t attempting to create a narrative that demonizes one side or another. He’s not trying to paint police officials as demons, while lionizing the protestors or vice versa. He genuinely seems to be sharing what he sees so sometimes he tweets about a fucked up thing the cops have done, and sometimes it’s about a fucked up thing a protestor did.

I’ll be honest with you, I found Reilly’s story in HuffPo to be more authentic and credible. Not because I wanted to, but because Reilly used more of the store owner’s words. Many more of his own words. He let the store owner’s narrative dominate his story. Lovelace’s article felt less authentic.

Okay, maybe I want Reilly’s story to be the truth, just a little bit. I’ve been knee deep in the angst of the world for too many days in a row. I’m tired of getting it rough. I want some gentile cuddling for a minute. Is that so wrong?      

 

 

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Michael Brown’s Private Autopsy

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We finally, nine days after an unarmed boy was gunned down in Ferguson Mo, have an autopsy. Do we have an official autopsy from the ME in Ferguson? No. Nine days later, do we have a statement from officials in Ferguson regarding the manner of Michael Brown’s death? No. What we’ve gotten from Ferguson officials in the past nine days is a video of a completely unrelated crime committed by the victim. But virtually nothing regarding the actual murder of Michael Brown. To recap; Ferguson officials have given the public no information regarding Michael Brown’s death, but have instead provided us with a video that depicts malfeasance on behalf of the victim. Curious, but I will get back to this later. Now about the autopsy.  

What we finally have, is a private autopsy conducted by a medical examiner from New York, that was done at the behest of the victim’s family. That’s right. In order for a family in America to know how their son/brother/cousin/nephew died in America, the family must now pay for their own medical examiner (this one did the work pro bono, but you get my point).

What did the autopsy show? Michael Brown was shot six times; four times in the arm, and twice in the head. Here’s the actual visual from the report (I highlighted the bullet wounds in red because they were hard to see).

Autopsy1

 

This lines up with witness accounts. We only have witness accounts because nine days later, we still haven’t heard the shooter’s version of events. Does anybody think that if they killed someone in Ferguson, that the police would give them a week and a half to get a story together? Or is it standard procedure to question a suspect immediately after a crime has been committed? Okay, that waiting to get a story out there thing isn’t unique to Ferguson, but it’s still bullshit every single time a police force does it. They shouldn’t get a different standard than any other suspect in a crime.

My point here is that everything the Ferguson police department has done so far looks like a cover up and a smear job. Their only comments about Michael Brown so far, have been in reference to the (let me say it again) completely unrelated crime that he committed prior to being killed. Not a peep about the killing itself. Not a peep about the manner of death. Not a peep about why the officer felt justified in firing several bullets at Michael. They have literally given us no reason to believe that this killing was justified.

And yet, despite that fact, there are a group of people rallying on behalf of the shooter. Let me repeat; the shooter himself, has said nothing to defend his actions and yet, there are people out there who are willing to defend him. It seems to me that defending someone who hasn’t defended themselves appears to be a choice that’s separated from the situation. When we hear another account, we will weigh that. But for now, we have several witnesses and (now) an autopsy that supports those witness accounts that this was a wholly unjustified murder. And that’s all we have. Creating a narrative on the other side is just that; a creation.

Huh. What could the motivations here be? Why would a person create a defense for someone who hasn’t come forward with one of their own?

I’ll let you decide.    

 

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The Enthusiasm Gap Mystery

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I haven’t said much about the 2014 election. And I’ve said nothing about 2016. I won’t say anything about 2016 until people actually start announcing they’re really running because literally nothing that I can say at this point would be anything other than wild speculation.

I haven’t said much about 2014 for a couple of reasons. First, we’re not really going to get an accurate picture of exactly how it’s going to turn out until September. Most people aren’t paying attention at this point of the year since there’s too much grilling and beaching to be done. And secondly, because it’s not going to produce shocking results. Democrats are definitely not going to do well. I strongly suspect that control of the senate is going to hinge on Kentucky. If Alison Lundergan Grimes can wrestle that seat away from Mitch McConnell, the senate will remain in democratic hands. But I digress.

My point in this post isn’t to look at all of the races across the country. I want to talk about the enthusiasm gap everything is incorrectly analyzing. Democrats have an enthusiasm gap problem. That part is true enough. It’s always true in midterms. But everybody seems to be missing the reason for the lack of enthusiasm on the part of democrats.

It boils down to the inherent difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives are inherently blindly loyal and less critical in their thinking. They’re republicans, and they will always show up to vote for the republican. It doesn’t matter who that republican is, and if that candidate has ever done anything for them. That’s not a dig, that’s a fact that has been demonstrated in study after study. I’ve been asking this question for several years now;

Tell me something that republicans have done in the past 30 years that has benefited you personally.

I have literally gotten no answer to that question since I started posing it. Even the trolls go quiet for that post. And yet they vote, oh how they vote. 

Liberals are different. Some (significant) percentage of liberals do assess the democrat put before them. They don’t just show up and check off whichever name appears in the democratic column. And if they deem their democratic choice "unworthy", they just don’t show up at all. Liberals don’t show up to vote against someone in midterms, while republicans show up to vote against someone or something in every election. For about the last 20 years, republicans have been conditioned to believe that voting is an exercise of opposing something. They lost their platform when Poppy Bush lost his shot at a second term. Against is literally all conservatives are for anymore. And since we know that conservatives thoughtlessly do what they’re told by their party to do, they faithfully show up and enthusiastically vote "anti" every single time they get the chance to. 

Liberals generally like to be for things and for people. And liberals have held onto ideas they’re for; access to education for all, fair wages for everyone, equality for all, providing for the most vulnerable among us, and equality of opportunity. When those things are on the ballot, liberals show up in great numbers. The midterm enthusiasm problem that democrats have, is that they’re increasingly not for those things anymore. Since they’re demonstrably not for those things, they’re having a harder and harder time getting a party message together. A Rahm Emanuel type candidate running for congress in DesMoines is not going to inspire liberals to show up and vote. A Bill de Blasio or an Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand will manage to beat the odds and win by a landslide. Why? Because they’re for the things that liberals are for, and that democrats used to be for. Both Warren and de Blasio managed to raise more money than their opponents who were well funded by corporate interests. They did so, despite being perceived as the long shot underdogs. So people gave them money believing they had almost no chance of winning. That’s enthusiasm.

There was nothing wrong with de Blasio’s better known democratic opponents. They were fine in the grand scheme of democrats. But de Blasio ran as a flaming fucking liberal. He ran on a platform of raising taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers to pay for free pre-k education for all New Yorkers. He ran on a platform of ending the racial profiling that the NYPD had been practicing for twenty years. He wants to get rid of the horses in Central Park. For the love of God, is there anything more granola crunching than saving the horses? And you know what? He beat his ‘just fine’ democratic opponents by a big enough margin to avoid a runoff election. And then he went on to just embarrass the republican candidate by kicking his ass to the tune of a 50 point spread.

I started volunteering for his campaign when he was polling in fourth place. And you know what? I knew that he was going to become the next mayor of New York City. I started donating generously to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, when she had no chance of winning because I knew she was going to win.      

The problem democrats have is that they’re trapped between their liberal base and Citizen’s United. You can’t win an election in America unless you have the biggest pile of cash. In 94% of all congressional elections, the candidate with the most money wins. Think about that; ninety-four percent. Democrats can’t be for the people without getting money from the corporations. And that’s why they have been putting forward uninspiring, corporatist ‘lite’ candidates in the midterms.

Republicans walked away from every single tenet of conservatism, and that didn’t matter. Small government? Peh, Reagan and W grew government in ways we had never seen before. Fiscal responsibility? Who fucking cares cause "deficits don’t matter". Not intervening in the world’s problems unless we have to? The Bush doctrine effectively crapped all over that idea. And yet, they still show up. With nothing to show for themselves, they still show up. With no coherent platform, they still show up.

There would be no enthusiasm gap if democrats ran liberal candidates. Why? Because liberals are still passionate about traditionally democratic principles. Democrats need a platform. Liberals are not inspired by the "anti" doctrine. We’re not automatons, and we have principles we hold more dear than we do our party. And therein lies the enthusiasm gap.

Read me now, quote me later; this strategy of "stop the impeachment efforts against President Obama" that democrats have cooked up isn’t going to work. We need something to vote for, not something to vote against.         

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Andrew Sullivan Is A Douche With No Credibility

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Credibility is something that we either don’t understand or no longer have any use for. In an effort to explain what credibility is (and to bring it back in style), I will occasionally be highlighting pundits or "journalists" who inexplicably still have a voice, despite the fact that they have no credibility. I say occasionally because exposing media hacks isn’t my mission here, and there are plenty of places you can go for that. But every once in a while, I read something that really steams my beans and I have to write about it. 

Andrew Sullivan is a twat waffle. He has been espousing liberal views since his "awakening", without ever acknowledging that we were right about everything.

This piece showed up in my G+ feed. It was posted by one of my progressive peeps who thought it was worth sharing. I disagreed because this piece embodies everything I despise about Andrew Sullivan, who lost all credibility in the Bush years (it actually started earlier). My problem with Sullivan is that he pretends that he’s invented the less batshit crazy ideas he’s been espousing over the past 7 years (or so) without ever acknowledging that liberals had it right all along. He does this while peddling (and advancing) right wing fallacies.

Let’s unpack this heaping pile of poop so that I can show you where I’m coming from by looking at the paragraph that bitched me out the most;


Like Ricks, I don’t believe my general inclinations politically have changed that much over the years. I prefer smaller government in general; I too believe in a robust defense; I have few issues with the free market; I think marriage and family are critical social institutions; I’m still a believing Christian; I have deep qualms about abortion and abhor affirmative action; I’m a fiscal conservative; want radical tax reform, cuts in unfunded entitlements, and culturally,..

 
Let’s discuss. "I prefer smaller government in general". Are you still being a fucking child and referring to regulating Wall Street as "big government" intrusion into your life? Who the fuck is for "big government"? And why are you caricaturing the liberal position? Asshole.

"I too believe in a robust defense". Again, what the fuck does this mean without clarity? Do you believe in spending twice as much as the next X number of countries combined? You know, the way the Soviet Union used to before it went bankrupt? Are you down with spending billions of dollars on planes that don’t work and tanks that the army doesn’t want? Again, the implication that liberals want to leave the US defenseless is bullshit. Asshole.

"I have few issues with the free market". That’s just fucking stupid, no matter how you look at it. Are actually still humping the free market unicorn that helped itself to 60% of your retirement funds in 2007? I get why Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer still hump that unicorn. They’re getting paid handsomely for their stupid. But you Andrew Sullivan, you’re doing pro bono stupid, you unmitigated, unabashed asshole?

"I think marriage and family are critical social institutions; I’m still a believing Christian". And liberals are what? On the other side? Godless sodomite heathens? I’m sorry, but the implication that the right wing has a monopoly on God or spirituality is total bullshit. Liberals happen to do this whole thing better by not foisting our beliefs on other people, and certainly not legislating based on what we do or do not believe. The implication that conservatives have nailed this down, despite the obvious fact that they’re doing it all wrong makes you (say it with me) an  asshole.

"I’m a fiscal conservative". Guess which party actually reduces deficits? Asshole.

I’m sorry, but I despise Andrew Sullivan, and he gets no credit for being slightly less batshit than he has been in the past.

That’s not to say that credibility can’t be rebuilt. I absolutely believe that it’s possible for someone to have an epiphany and see where they went horribly wrong. But  I need to hear you Andrew Sullivan, break down for me in great detail where you believe you went horribly wrong. Because I need to review that thought process before deciding if you’re worth spending my time on. There is no turn toward credibility without clearly laying out the basis for the "I was wrong" epiphany. You can’t just admit to being wrong about one war or one president and then go about telling me what you think, as if I need to give a flying fuck. You were wrong about everything. The very foundation upon which you built your belief system was wrong. Wanna know how I know? Because the internet archives every piece of steaming shit you foisted upon the world.

You certainly can’t rebuild your credibility while still caricaturing the side that was right all along. You can’t falsely paint me as a big spending, all controlling, spiritually empty wuss who would leave this country defenseless in order to explain your incredibly stupid beliefs about how the world should work. You were wrong about everything. Leave me out of it because it’s all on you. And you certainly don’t get a cookie from me for not being wrong 100% of the time anymore while you’re still calling me an idiot.

I’m sorry, but if you’re a liberal who listens to this jackass because he’s suddenly telling you what you want to hear, you’re the only reason why he still exists. Without you, he disappears because he certainly hasn’t retained his batshit crazy republican audience. He’s calling you an idiot every single day. Stop helping him!

Credibility doesn’t come from telling you what you want to hear. It comes from creating a history of being either correct in analyzing situations, or explaining the reason for an incorrect analysis. I’ve been wrong about stuff. Just go through my archives about health reform. I was not correct in everything I said about the way it was going to turn out. I acknowledged that I was wrong, and proceeded to show you the basis of my ongoing analysis.

Why admit to being wrong? Because I don’t expect you to take me seriously if I don’t. Despite the way that credibility has been disregarded and undervalued in our culture, I still feel it’s important for me to have it.

Liberals and conservatives have both devalued credibility. Conservatives have done it exponentially more, but liberals do it too. Liberals do it when they point to a douche like Andrew Sullivan and say, "he knows what he’s talking about". No he doesn’t. And telling you something you want to hear doesn’t make him right or credible, especially since he’s still calling you an idiot.

Stop it! Stop listening to people who have already shown you they have no credibility, and no regard for their own credibility. If you’re right, you can find plenty of credible people to show you that you’re right.

As for Andrew Sullivan, he’s going to have to go much further in building his credibility now that he’s been playing the stupid game he’s been playing for the past several years. I need to see him crawl on his hands and knees to beg (for example) Robert Reich’s forgiveness for not acknowledging that Reich has been right about everything he’s ever said over the course of thirty years. He needs to apologize to Bill Clinton about every stupid and demonstrably wrong thing he said about him. He needs to apologize for advancing the mythological version of Ronald Reagan in order to claim that there’s value in conservatism. I want to hear Sullivan talk about the eleven-times-tax-raising Reagan that blew up the deficit and sold arms to terrorists. I need for him to acknowledge that every single aspect of FDR’s New Deal were exactly the right policies to create prosperity and growth for America. To summarize, I need him to acknowledge that liberals have been right about just about everything. Okay, we fucked up when we built ghettos in America. I can acknowledge that. It was a mistake. We really should have integrated low income housing into middle class neighborhoods, but at least we tried to do something. Live and learn.

Hindsight should be 20/20. And until Andrew Sullivan’s is, he can kiss my right-all-along liberal ass.           

 

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Jon Stewart: Bad Jew?

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Hardly.

I missed this, but apparently the unhinged Israel-is-good-and-righteous-at-all-times lunatics went after Jon Stewart. When he did the first (very short) bit about what’s happening in Gaza last week, I noted how unusual it was for Stewart to bring up Israel. He never does it. Literally, never. I always assumed that his silence on the matter was an effort to to keep the peace with the unhinged Israel-is-pure-as-the-driven-snow crowd.

He’s Jewish so if he was of the opinion that Israel can do no wrong, sharing that opinion would be unsurprising, right ? I mean, it’s human nature to band with your tribe and be more forgiving and understanding of what your own people are doing. I always assumed that his silence was a sign that he didn’t want to ruffle feathers among the the pro-Israel crowd with his objectivity. The reality of the world is that when  a Jew says that these bombings are atrocious, it means more than when anyone else says it. When a famous Jew says it, all hell may break loose. It means more because that Jew grew up learning our history of persecution and suffering. We know how many times we’ve been scattered all over the earth, and we know why. So when we conclude that Israel is doing wrong, it has the voracity that comes with being intimately aware of the history.

Jon Stewart is very open about his Jewiness, which is why the attacks against him are unhinged. He’s not ashamed of who he is so implying that he’s anti-semetic is patently absurd. First the offending clip. He starts at 4:53 and stays on the topic for roughly 2 1/2 minutes.  

 

 

That was it. Two and a half minutes of what Jon Stewart does; present empirical facts in a way that highlights the absurdity of the situation. That sent back bench, right wing whackadoodle extraordinaire, Mark Levin into a tizzy. He started off with this little nugget of crazy;

As you well know, the Israelis are doing everything humanly possible to use their technology and their weaponry to limit civilian casualties. But Hamas is doing everything possible to kill its own people, because apparently that’s the price of a good press release.

Huh. Some might say that a 70% – 80% civilian casualty rate indicates either a lack of effort, or a lack of competence in regard to minimizing casualties but eh, evidence! Who needs to introduce facts into the conversation when there’s so much irrational emotion to present as fact?

Then Levin goes on to call Stewart a "little twerp" several times, which is funny, since in terms of audience size, Levin seems to be projecting. Then he rants on about "Jon Stuart Liebowitz". Ummm, does he understand that using Stewart’s name in that way has a seriously anti-semetic tinge to it?

And then David Horovitz jumped in with an editorial in The Times Of Israel. He was more civil, but equally unhinged. He starts off his piece by saying;

That Jon Stewart, he’s sooooo funny. Just watch his amusing take on the current Israel-Gaza conflict. Really, it’s a nonstop laugh fest. Yeah, it misrepresents what’s going on here. But hey, it is funny, and all those millions of Americans who watched it on Monday know that it’s just satire, don’t they?

Okay so at this point, I’m prepared to be informed about all of Stewart’s "misrepresentations". He goes on;

Our super-smart, engagingly frustrated host starts up despairing over a news report of the intensifying conflict which says Israeli troops are poised to invade Gaza, and which ends with the words “as the aerial bombardment from both sides continues.”

Stewart: “Tastes great. More killing.”

See, right off the bat, I’m unhappy. Because, first up, he’s begun with talk of Israel being set to invade Gaza, but without any cited reason — such as, say, Hamas being a terrorist organization with a notorious track record of suicide bombings, individual killings, kidnappings, and incessant rocket fire. And, second, because the implication here is that the combatants — Israel and Hamas — are both happy to be back killing again, and that’s just plain false. Hamas is avowedly committed to the destruction of Israel and holds to a perverted interpretation of Islam that claims killing Jews, Christians and non-believing Muslims is your guaranteed path to paradise if you also die in the process. Israelis, by contrast, would much rather live and let live. (We left Gaza unilaterally in 2005, under international pressure, hoping that the security risk would be worth it, and that we’d be rewarded with tranquility rather than rocket fire, but I wouldn’t expect Stewart to go back that far.)

Okay, well you didn’t demonstrate that Steward misrepresented anything, you’re just upset that he didn’t make Israel’s case for their part in the bombardment. How does an otherwise intelligent person think they’re doing anything productive here? If the goal is to discredit Stewart, it didn’t work. So then he continues "exposing" Stewart’s misrepresentations; 

Stewart: “Both sides are engaging in aerial bombardment, but one side appears to be bomb-better-at it. (Studio laughter at the wordplay.) Most Hamas rockets are neutralized by Israel’s Iron Dome technology, and Israeli citizens can even now download a warning app. (Cut to clip of Israel’s US ambassador Ron Dermer explaining how Israelis can know where and when they’re being attacked.) So Israelis seem to have a high-tech, smart-phone alert system.”

Let me see if I understand the point he’s making here: Having falsely implied that Israel is as keen on killing as Hamas is, Stewart now seems to be criticizing Israel for not being as vulnerable as Hamas would like it to be to those Hamas rockets that are sent to kill us. He seems to be bashing us for having those tech smarts. It’s a bad thing that we developed a unique, astonishing Iron Dome missile defense system, without which hundreds of us would be dead? It’s a bad thing that we developed an app to warn us that the rockets designed to kill our citizens are heading this way?

Israel isn’t as keen on killing as Hamas is? Really? The Israeli death toll is around 30 and the Palestinian/ Hamas death toll is over 700. If this imbalance doesn’t suggest an enthusiasm for killing by Israel, I don’t know what does. Is Horovits suggesting an inadvertent killing proficiency going on here? How does one accidentally get so proficient at killing? Curious. But don’t believe your own lying eyes, believe Horovit’s feelings that Israel are the good guys.

Then he goes on to sound super stupid by "misunderstanding" what Stewart was saying about how absurd it is to warn civilians that bombs are coming, with smaller bombs. I’m not going to pick apart the rest of it because it’s more of the same. You can read it for yourself if you want, but he didn’t expose any "misrepresentations", so much as demonstrate how smart people turn really stupid when they let emotions form their opinions.

So in response to the super crazy Zionist whackadoodles, Jon Stewart brilliantly did this;     

   

 

I can’t conceive of a better way to demonstrate the level of crazy here, than the way Stewart did it.

I suspect this will be the last time he brings up the topic of Israel, and that’s too bad because no one is as good at exposing hypocrisy, lies, or absurdity, as Jon Stewart is. Plus, he has the Jew shield against allegations of anti-semitism. Not that it stops the whackos from accusing him of it, but it does demonstrate just how crazy they are. 

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