The Bizarre Bubble of Leftist Insanity

Cluster12 Comments

Amazona coined this appropriate phrase and it certainly defines the current time period very well, if not actually a good definition for the last 6 years. The tragic shooting of the NYPD officers highlights liberal insanity in that it exposes their inability to speak the truth and their desperate resistance to never admit fault. The truth surrounding the Michael Brown and Eric Garner tragic deaths have never been part of the liberal narrative. “Hands up, don’t shoot” was a liberal spun bumper sticker that fit in very well with their agenda, and was a nice center piece for Al Sharpton’s race baiting speeches but never bore any resemblance to the truth. In fact nothing about the Michael Brown liberal narrative ever came close to the truth – from being a gentle giant (who just happened to be involved in a strong armed robbery and who assaulted a police officer), to the sad fact that Michael was raised in difficult circumstances born from very young parents who had difficulty caring for him, as so many other young black kids experience, and a culture of which so often leads to negative outcomes. But these two, core, hard truths have never been part of the story, thus reasonable people who see the deeper, underlying causes of his tragic death must contend with the loud shrill voices of the insane liberal agenda led by none other MSNBC’s and President Obama’s chief race baiter Al Sharpton.

Fast forward to the unfortunate death of Eric Garner. While in my opinion the police did overreact a bit in this instance, race was never a part of this story. However, in the insane, fact void, liberal world, this was again about white police officers targeting black men. The President spoke on it, the AG spoke on it, and the Mayor spoke on it and went so far as to make it personal, claiming that he counsels his half black son to be particularly cautious when dealing with police. An overlooked fact surrounding this issue is that minority shop owners were the folks who initially called in the police, and the ranking officer at the scene was a black woman. Also, despite the fact that Garner’s widow went public with her opinion that this was not about race, the liberal agenda ignored these truths and continued to push the false narrative, black sports stars even wore “I can’t breathe” jersey’s and ultimately one protest crowd started the chant – “What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want it? Now.” Liberal leaders and their minions in the media remained silent about this protest and now those chants have in fact resulted in two dead cops. The liberal media and people like Sharpton have been spinning the false narrative of police brutality and fomenting police hatred for the last 5 months now following the death of Michael Brown, so no one should believe their surprise as to what happened last Saturday night. In fact, no one should ever believe liberals. They lie as easily as they breathe. They have a seething hatred for anyone who disagrees with their false sense of self superiority and benevolent intent. They will never honestly discuss issues. They can not be trusted, and incompetence is part of their DNA. Fortunately, I think the majority of Americans are coming around to these undeniable facts, but that won’t stop the liberals from becoming louder and more insane over the next two years.

The Real Problem With Sony

Mark Noonan20 Comments

I notice the MSM, with their usual keen eye, have entirely missed the point of the Sony issue – it isn’t that there was a cyber-attack: in the modern era, cyber-attacks will only become more common. No, the problem is that Sony – and Paramount – have shown an incredible level of cowardice.

I’m not sure if Sony was more worried about a terrorist attack on a theater or further revelations of internal Sony communications, but whatever the reason for their surrender, it is disgusting. It doesn’t matter who really did the cyber-attack – and people falling over themselves to devise ever more bizarre theories about who might “really” be behind the attack are just distracting from the real issue (and as the MSM seems to be running with it, I’m guessing that a lot of MSM outfits are terrified of their internal communications being revealed to the world: as an aside, this brings me back to my view about doing anything over the internet – it is a completely public place, there is no real possibility of privacy…if you can’t do it in broad daylight in your front yard with your grandmother watching, don’t do it on the internet). What have we become? A nation which is afraid – afraid to say things and do things for fear that someone might attack us for saying or doing. It is a terrible state of affairs.

It is also, of course, tailor-made for leftism…and no surprise that a Communist nation like North Korea might well be behind such things. What is the difference between what North Korea has allegedly done and screaming Stalinists in the United States do when they, for instance, get a speaker banned from a college? Peas in a pod. What this event tells me is that 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Communism is again on the march and is being far more successful than it ever was when run from Moscow…now its run from a hundred different places, and enabled by cowards who are afraid of a fight.

UPDATE: Rand Paul has essentially taken Obama’s side on the Cuba issue. This is just another reason why I can never be a Libertarian and while I’d vote Paul if he got the nomination, he’s way down there on my list of choices. Libertarians have the nonsensical – really, rather stupid – idea that if you trade with tyrannical regimes they will liberalize. Grab a clue: they won’t. In fact, they’ll get more tyrannical. We’ve been going down this route with tyrants since we set up relations with Stalin’s USSR in the 1930’s. Here’s the thing everyone needs to understand: tyrants don’t care. They’ll steal their own people’s money in order to live well. They’ll have them slave away in order to make things which can be sold to us for hard cash (tyrant money is always functionally worthless in the global market). They’ll use the wealth we provide – that which they don’t steal to build themselves palaces and monuments, that is – to buy weapons to fight us, allies to hate us, and traitors to undermine us (the USSR routinely funded leftist groups in the West – these days, Oil State kleptocracies spend money in the US to burnish their image, and hold down US oil production). Trade with tyrants is always a bad idea – we shouldn’t be opening up to Cuba; we should be shutting ourselves down to China.

UPDATE II: Had forgot about this – but, all people of the left are all alike…and so remember when the Clintons managed to get a movie cancelled?

Dealing With the Unreasonable

Mark Noonan13 Comments

Anyone paying close attention would have noticed that last night I deactivated my Twitter account. The account for Wost President (Victory Books, actually) is still up and running and will remain so – but I dumped my personal Twitter account. There were several reasons for this, but one of the major reasons was to drop down the level of crazy in my life.

Not to condemn Twitter – which does have some very good uses, especially when there is major, breaking news – but we have in our society quite a large number of unreasonable people. People who don’t know history; are only hazily aware of the facts, but are absolutely convinced of their worldview and determined that anyone who dissents from it be squashed. This is mostly on the left, but it is all too common on the right, as well. Twitter is ready-made for such people – it is impossible to explain to someone in 140 characters or less just how they are wrong but it is very easy for someone to get very insulting in 140 characters. I found myself getting drawn into the crazy on Twitter too often. The Worst President account is easier to handle – as it is not a personal account, people seem less inclined to start a flame war on it; I guess its the difference between insulting Victory Books (meh) or insulting Mark Noonan (woohoo!!).

But this also brings to mind the general unreasonableness of our society – You might have heard that the President of Smith had to apologize for saying “all lives matter”, this a take on the Twitter hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Because someone made a Twitter meme which has been identified by some as the “correct” position to have, the President of a major university had to crawl in apology essentially for not having the right hashtag in her statement. This isn’t just political correctness: this is crazy. And crazy is a good definition for the modern West in general.

And I do wonder just how crazy we will get before something really goes smash. It might seem cool to encapsulate an idea in just a few words, but the trouble with slogans is that they tend to shut down thought (which is, by the way, the secret of advertising). Mindless repetition of slogans and shouting hate at anyone who questions the slogans is picture perfect for a totalitarian society trying to have uniformity of belief…but in a still-free society like the United States, its the recipe for developing vicious hatred, on both sides.

I’d like to say that our solution is to convince those who don’t know to shut up and listen – but those who are least knowledgeable are most likely to believe they are practically all-knowing. Our actual solution is to try to ignore such silly creatures. In a sense, that is what we’ve done here – and while there are fewer comments, such comments as their are tend to increase the sum of knowledge. Of course, this is just a little-noticed blog – but I think it can serve as a model. Let us who are reasonable discuss what is best and then try to obtain the ability to implement it. Don’t engage every silly screwball out there who has an opinion armored from head to foot in ignorance. It just doesn’t pay – and it doesn’t help advance the solutions we need.

And just in case the crazy seems a bit much, some advice:

A Ballad Of Suicide by G. K. Chesterton

The gallows in my garden, people say,

Is new and neat and adequately tall;
I tie the noose on in a knowing way

As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours—on the wall—
Are drawing a long breath to shout “Hurray!”

The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
To-morrow is the time I get my pay—

My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall—
I see a little cloud all pink and grey—

Perhaps the rector’s mother will not call— I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way—

I never read the works of Juvenal—
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
The world will have another washing-day;

The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H.G. Wells has found that children play,

And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,
Rationalists are growing rational—
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray

So secret that the very sky seems small—
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

The Feinstein Report

Cluster15 Comments

As a parting shot, the Democrats decided to dust off an old playbook once agin and expose America in bad light in the name of transparency. Never missing an opportunity to make themselves feel “enlightened” at the expense of average Americans and this time, at the possible cost of patriotic military lives, Dem. Sen. Diane Feinstein has issued her $40 million report that has revealed absolutely nothing new regarding the CIA’s conduct in the direct aftermath of 9/11. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by publishing this report with the possible exception of settling a personal score for Feinstein which wouldn’t surprise me knowing the base level of childishness shared by all Democrats. Additionally, in an interview this morning ex-CIA Chief Michael Hayden confirmed that members of Congress including Feinstein were briefed all along the way on all methods of interrogation being used and at the time there were no objections. Only now, years after the fact and at a time when personal agendas can be served do the objections rise, although only on behalf of the Democrats, as every single GOP member of the committee abstained from contributing to this report. In fact, the GOP did issue their own minority report as did the CIA but strangely I am not hearing accounts of those reports at least in the liberal MSM. My personal opinion, shared by many others, is that water boarding is not torture. While it is an obviously brutal technique, and should only be used in extreme and rare instances, I believe that the circumstances surrounding the events of 9/11 did warrant such techniques and furthermore believe that the men and women of the CIA should be applauded for their efforts and not criticized by self serving, sanctimonious politicians or their sycophantic minions in the media.

The irony of course in this “search for the truth” effort on behalf of Democrats is deep and wide considering their lack of transparency on nearly every other major issue confronting the country, i.e.; the Fast & Furious program, the IRS, the NSA, the EPA, and of course the ACA. Speaking of the ACA, did everyone see Dr. Jonathan Gruber apologize for revealing the truth behind that program? Not surprisingly MSNBC, the publicity department of the Democrats spent approximately 40 minutes over two separate hours covering the Feinstein report this morning, and about 2 minutes at most covering the Gruber hearing. So what issue has the most impact on American lives? The partisan manipulation of the health care industry under the cloak of secrecy? Or the rough interrogation techniques of sub human murderers? And they wonder why they no longer control the Congress.

UPDATE: We are now in the third hour of Morning Joe on MSNBC and it is wall to wall coverage and analysis of the Feinstein report. Apparently, nothing else is going on in Washington. One liberal analyst anguished over the “humiliating” treatment of the sub human murderers, which reinforces my belief that media liberals, Progressives and/or Democrats (my apologies for the redundancies) should be ignored and excluded from future debate and decisions on governing this country.

One of the Results of Ferguson: Worse Policing

Mark Noonan4 Comments

Victor Davis Hansen notes:

…Will some law enforcement officials now surmise that it is wiser to ignore some crimes in the inner city on the practicable logic that the denouement for the officer will likely be negative — either by stopping the assailant through force or not stopping the assault and thus being assaulted?…

Why should a police officer even try? After all, if you’re policing a heavily minority area then any action you take may be construed as racist, and career-ending. Act or don’t act, and it can work out equally badly for you…so maybe just work your patrol route so that you just don’t go into certain areas where you suspect there will be a number of minority men who are up to no good. In other words, surrender part of the streets to them, because fighting them for control of the streets will still leave them in control and might get you fired and possibly sent to jail for civil rights violations.

As readers here know, I am in favor of very deep reforms to policing – but what we’re getting here now is the creation of “no go” areas of our cities. That, I think, is what the criminal element (ie, those who actually looted) want, and it is what the political element doesn’t care about (and, remember, most of the race-baiters live in carefully policed areas…safe and sound in their swell homes, free from any fear of criminal activity, it is easy for them to rabble rouse, knowing that the ill-effects won’t come back to haunt them).

We’re getting in to a very bizarre world here: a world in which lies triumph (only for the moment, of course) and those who are rational are hated. It could be a very bad few years coming up here.

Stupid Liberals

Mark Noonan26 Comments

They are everywhere – a few examples:

The Obama administration is refusing to discuss reports that emerged early Thursday claiming that the White House is considering imposing sanctions on Israel for continuing construction on Jewish homes in Jerusalem.

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf dodged several questions on Thursday when confronted with reports that the administration had held secret internal meetings to discuss taking action against Israel for its ongoing building in East Jerusalem…

And then this:

Rolling Stone has gotten a lot of publicity recently with a sensational article about a rape in 2012 at the University of Virginia, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely and featuring some harrowing and disturbing details. The victim was identified only as “Jackie.”

Almost as soon as the story was published, doubts arose about its veracity, or at least about the journalistic standards of its author, who did not manage to interview the alleged perpetrators even though it would seem there were ways to have contacted them. Even worse, Erdely hasn’t been forthcoming about the extent of her efforts to find them, and did not include any mention of any of her efforts or failures in the article.

I’ve read many articles pro and con, including of course the original Rolling Stone piece in question (warning: it’s long), and I’ve got my own opinion, which is that not only did Erdely demonstrate abysmal journalistic standards, but that the story itself is quite possibly a fabrication by the alleged victim…

And then, this:

…When asked about Mubarak’s exoneration, State Department Spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki offered a rambling non-answer which did not fool the diplomatic press corps one bit. When Associated Press reporter Matt Lee called Psaki out for essentially saying “nothing,” Psaki gave it another try.

“Generally, we continue to believe that upholding impartial standards of accountability will advance the political consensus on which Egypt’s long-term stability and economic growth depends,” she said. “I don’t have any more specifics on this.”…

And,finally, this:

But she also told the audience that the world still has a long way to go in terms women’s participation.

Of the hundreds of peace treaties signed since the early 1990s, between or within nations, she said fewer than 10 percent had any female negotiators and fewer than 3 percent had women as signatories.

“Is it any wonder that many of these agreements fail between [sic] a few years?” Clinton asked.

So, we’ll lift sanctions on Iran even though, as just one for-instance, they hang people for being gay, but we’ll mull placing sanctions on Israel because they’ll build a house. Meanwhile, over in race-and-gender-war-land, we’ll write an article full of details but won’t include any proof the event in question happened. Over at State we’ll mouth some meaningless words and at the end of the verbal spew which contained nothing specific, we’ll say we don’t have any further specifics (in defense of the State Department flack, she was later caught on a hot mike admitting that her statement was worthless). And to top it all off, we’ve got the putative next President of the United States asserting that only if a few more women had signed the treaties, wars and calamities would have been prevented.

Why, when Hillary made her absurd statement, did the audience not immediately laugh in scorn, walk out and announce their support for Elizabeth Warren in 2016? When the article for the Rolling Stone went up to the editors, why didn’t even one of them ask, “you got any facts to back this up?”. The reason for those two bits of stupidity – and all other liberal stupidity we see these says – is that they didn’t dare. You see, to hold Hillary in utter contempt for her stupid statement is forbidden to liberals – such an act would do the worst thing possible: confirm that the liberal narrative is wrong. Similarly, when the Rolling Stone story hit the editor’s desk, there was no chance such a question would be asked: merely to ask such a question would indicate a disbelief in liberal ideology about what goes on at elite universities vis a vis women.

If you ever thought that at some point liberals, as such, could become sensible then just give that thought up – the only way they can is by switching all the way over to conservative. To be a liberal in 2014 requires belief in not just a series of lies, but in a series of very stupid lies – and my guess is that the enforcers of thought on the left want it this way: the more absurd beliefs they can enforce, the more firm their control – after all, to switch from being liberal in 2014 not only requires you to change your beliefs, but to admit you believed things which anyone with an IQ of 80 could see were stupid lies. Just do the mental exercise yourself for a few minutes and think of all the admissions of being a sucker a liberal would have to make by switching to conservatism…and how much fear of humiliation that carries along with it. Better for most to just brazen it out: “Ok, so I believe a lot of stupid stuff: but I can’t admit it or I’ll have to admit I was a fool so I’ll just keep going! Hey, conservatives, if women signed treaties there would be less war!”.

To me, its all rather sad – and yet another reason to work hard to get these people away from the levers of power. Who knows what the opinion enforcers of the left will force their minions to believe next…

UPDATE: Huge amount of comment today around the interwebs regarding the Rolling Stone article…a bunch of “how could this have happened”. Seriously? People gotta ask how an MSM outfit could have allowed a falsehood to get published? Look, my friends, when it comes to reports which advance the liberal agenda – especially in areas of race, gender and class – assume every one of them is a lie…if not an outright fabrication, then at the least a severe twisting of the facts to fit the liberal narrative. Dishonesty in liberalism isn’t a bug, its a feature.

But, you say that you know honest liberals? Sure. Bet you do. But where the rubber hits the road, that won’t matter all that much. Think about it – you’re at the editorial meeting and the UVA story comes up for review. To question the story – which supports the liberal narrative – would be highly dangerous. Even if you proved to all and sundry that it shouldn’t be run, you’ll anger the more hard core leftists whom you work with – and who might have charge of your employment prospects. Meanwhile, if you let it all slide, 90%+ of the time no one is ever seriously called out for falsehoods. Much easier to go along to get along, even if you want to be honest…the hard core lefists didn’t care, don’t care and never will care if the UVA story is true: what matters to them is that it must be true because that is what leftism demands; even if the particular details of this story are false – even if you can never find an actual, demonstrable example of that sort of thing going on (and, remember, the contention of the story is that the horrific action described is endemic to the culture of UVA…that the student body of that school knowingly and callously does this horrible thing as if they believed it to be a good thing) – the overall story is true: because those who in any way adhere to any institution not on the side of the left are just like that in the view of the left…rat bastards who kill, steal, pollute and oppress just for the sheer fun of being evil. Anything which attacks non-left institutions is thus good and true, even if false in actual fact.

Monday Open Thread

Mark Noonan21 Comments

Hands Up, Don’t Shoot – its entered the popular mind. Another great example of just how well the Big Lie works.

Liberal stupidity continues – Minnesota plans to eliminate gender gender distinctions in sports…leading to either a 200 lb boy tackling a 90 lb girl, or the banning of anyone weighing more than 90 lbs playing football…or a ban on football (which would probably be a liberal goal these days).

Apparently, Dear Leader is not to be offended – be nice if next time there’s a GOP President that the Presidential kids are actually off limits.

How about we just leave Ferguson burned down? We can call it the Barack H Obama memorial ruin.

Work on Thanksgiving? No, Thank You

Mark Noonan7 Comments

One Democrat has found his solution:

A lawmaker in Ohio wants stores in the state to pay triple wages for employees who work on Thanksgiving, an effort that comes as Macy’s, the holiday’s quintessential retailer, is allowing its workers to choose whether to work that day.

Both are attempts to counter frustration among workers and their families over holiday store hours that have expanded into the holiday.

State Rep. Mike Foley, a Democrat from Cleveland, said his bill would allow employees to bow out of the holiday shift without job sanctions while protecting family time from excessive consumerism…

I absolutely loath the idea of working on a holiday. As a matter of principal, I’ll accept being fired before I’d ever work on Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving. My employer is currently closed on Christmas and asks for volunteers on Thanksgiving (and pays them triple time for doing it), while on Easter I’ve always managed to get a vacation day for it. Things like New Year’s Day, Fourth of July and such are a bit of a different animal – New Year’s Day off is only really important if you’re rather hung over from the night before, while the Fourth only gets rolling as the sun goes down. But the basic idea I hold is, still, that holidays are, well, holidays – and by and large everyone should be off. Other than crucial things such as hospitals, pharmacies and gas stations, everything else should be closed to the largest degree possible – some exceptions for vacation resorts, of course, because vacation resorts are designed, as it were, to care for people during holidays. But to have some retailer drag their people in on a holiday? Obscene. Stupid, too – you don’t actually increase your sales by doing that: you just move them from the day after the holiday to the day of.

I don’t like the idea of the government forcing businesses to close or pay massive increases in pay for holiday work but, goodness, corporations can be infuriatingly inhuman in their actions. I don’t know which nimrod in a boardroom first thought that being at work on a holiday would be a good idea, but I’d erect a statue in his memory, with “Idiot” on the name plate.

There is nothing wrong with working hard and trying to get ahead. Businesses do have to be profitable to survive – but there’s a time to work, and a time to not work. God is a little wiser than all of us, after all, and He did state that we should take a day of rest every week…not be open 24-7 in the hopes of squeezing out one more tenth of a percent of profit for the quarter. Let us, good people, be human – and let us therefore take a day off. Its not like its every week there’s a holiday – if the cash register isn’t ka-chinging merrily four or five days a year, it won’t kill anyone.

A happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Brown Family: Wilson “Wanted to Kill Someone”

Mark Noonan7 Comments

Even given the fact that she’s grieving, this is astounding:

Michael Brown’s family reacted with anger and tears to the first televised interview with Darren Wilson, in which the officer said he “would not have done anything differently” about the sequence of events that led to the shooting death of Brown.

“He didn’t do what he had to do, he did what he wanted to do,” Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden told CBS Morning News. “I don’t think he wanted to kill my son, but he wanted to kill someone.”

In the mind of Ms. McSpadden, it appears, is this picture: Officer Wilson, uniformed and in his police car, is cruising the streets of Ferguson looking for someone to kill.

Like all human beings, I suppose, there have been times in my life when I have been almost frantic with anger and sorrow. I’ve never experience the death of a child, of course, but I’ve lived long enough in this world and experienced enough things to peer into the depths upon depths of anger and sorrow that Ms. McSpadden must feel – but even with that, I simply cannot put the two together. I cannot comprehend someone actually believing that a police officer – in the normal course of his duties – would be out to kill someone…some random person on the streets. To be sure, there could be a situation in which there is a psychotic cop who does such a thing, but unless one has rock-solid evidence of this being the case, to make such an accusation is massively beyond the bounds of rational thought. But Ms. McSpadden thinks this.

And trolling the Twitter feed over the last couple of days on Ferguson, I realize she is not alone. Quite a lot of people believe the same sort of thing – and not just about officer Wilson, but about the police, in general.

As readers here know, I believe we need deep reforms of both the police and our larger criminal justice system – but to believe that the police, on the whole, are out to do evil in the world is, well, stupid. I really don’t like to use that word, but I can’t think of a word which better describes it. I mean, you’ve really got to be disconnected from reality to believe that – you have to have woven yourself (or have had woven for you) a series of myths which are entirely impervious to the facts. Police are, of course, human beings – they are prey to all our faults. They can be unreasonable; they can be unjust; they can make purely stupid mistakes – and in the case of Wilson and Brown, maybe the police officer didn’t handle the situation in the best possible manner…but it is abundantly clear that Brown also didn’t behave in the best possible manner. To hold up Brown as some sort of complete innocent in this case is to defy facts and logic – and to turn about and accuse Wilson of a malevolent desire is to go completely ’round the bend.

And it gets worse: the entire liberal narrative is built upon the concept that the police are deliberately malevolent, at least towards minorities. The belief that the system is built against black people and the police are created to enforce the system against black people is the core of this – and in the comments from the Brown family, we see it writ large. Understand it’s not an accusation that Wilson just didn’t do his job right – it is an accusation that Wilson is a murderer who went out to find someone – almost certainly black – to kill that night, because that is what police officers do…and they do it because a racist system sends them out to do it, to keep the black man down (we won’t even get into the particular lunacy of such a belief in a land where the President is black – and so is the attorney general; we don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole lest we get swallowed up – stare into the abyss long enough and eventually the abyss stares into you, dig?).

I have things to say to my fellow conservatives on this. Don’t trust the word of the police – that is just the word of the government and if we don’t trust the IRS, no reason to trust the police, either. Understand that in the African-American community a lot of people are caught by the system and rather ground up in it – sure, maybe some so caught aren’t pure as wind-driven snow, but a lot of people are caught in the gears over trivialities and the overall community reasonably feels that they are being unjustly singled out: a lot of our laws are designed to be worked by people with plenty of education and resources but when applied to people with less education and resources, they can become an unjust burden. The police shouldn’t be so militarized. The police shouldn’t be effective strangers in the areas they patrol. We conservatives have our own blindness in the matter and we should be kind and understanding and try to see it from a different point of view.

That said, we’ve got a real problem in this nation – there are tens of millions of Americans who aren’t living in the real world. They are living in an intellectual fantasy world. I always wondered when I read accounts of the death of Stalin why so many Russians would be crushed under genuine sorrow for the man’s passing. If you look back into it, there was genuine grief when the man died – and not just from senior apparatchiks of the Stalinist regime, but from regular folks. A man who had done in at least 20 million of his own people – and millions of his people wept at his passing as if they had lost something good. Now I understand it a little better – just feed people enough lying propaganda long enough, and some will come to sincerely believe it. The American people have been fed a line of propaganda about race and the police – and for some, it has sunk right in, and they really believe such things as that racism is still a bar to achievement in America, and that the police are out to get minorities.

The cure for this will be a long time coming – because as we reform things, we’ll be also trying to undo 50 years of lies.

Ferguson, the End

Mark Noonan9 Comments

Well, there ya go – a Grand Jury of American citizens good and true ruled there was no cause to indict officer Wilson. We all suspected as much – when the autopsy information was leaked a little while back, it looked pretty clear that for whatever reason, Mr. Brown decided to attack the police officer. You do that, you’re risking your life. As I said when this whole thing first came up, the police had better have a very good reason for shooting when the dead person is unarmed. Per the jury, they had very good reason.

As for the “riots” in Ferguson – I don’t get a “riot” feel out of them. I was in the Los Angeles area when the King riots erupted and that was quite different from what happened in Ferguson. In Ferguson, I just get the feeling that criminal gangs had scoped out where they wanted to loot and were just waiting for the verdict – which makes the decision to release the verdict after dark exceptionally stupid. Also stupid was the decision to not have the police more spread out. From what I can tell, they were concentrated – ready to move, as it were, but not able to just be there out in front of likely looting targets. I could be all wrong on this, but I figure a couple of cops on each corner in the shopping center might have worked better in keeping the looting from happening.

Plenty of people were on Twitter, of course, venting their feelings – what most struck me is the rank ignorance of how the justice system works, and the sheer idiocy in people demanding a certain verdict from a court. You can’t do that – if you want justice, you have to just be fanatically in favor of juries and deeply respectful of whatever judgement they provide. It isn’t that juries are perfect, of course: but they are the only real defense any of us have against tyranny. People these days don’t seem to understand fully just how hard fought the battle was to just ensure that any accused will have a jury of his peers to judge the facts in his case. This is crucial to human liberty – only thus are we freed from fear that the police will just clap is in jail on the whim of the ruler. Trust me, I’ve seen jury verdicts I thought screwed up – but I still want to live in a world where if I’m ever accused of a crime, it will be 12 random citizens who will sift the evidence and decide if I did it.

We can’t write of Ferguson without taking a moment to note the race-baiters. Led, sadly, by our President and Attorney General, they had a field day in this. The really sad thing is that they helped to fuel the hatred and anger for the most trivial of reasons: just to try and gin up political support (Sharpton and Jackson joining in so they can rake off a few bucks and a bit of TV time).

All in all, an entirely pathetic performance – really sad for my nation.