Today's Pix

 

Thoughts On The Side

“It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.” --Judith Herman, MD - Trauma and Recovery

Mike Brown gets buried in more ways than one.

We jump up and down on it for a while, but then somebody blows up a building or there's a bus crash or another jack-wad celebrity gets caught nanny-humping, and suddenly we're heading back for the group rate on self-lobotomy at the National Center For Social Amnesia.

Maybe we can get some things done that need to get done in places like Ferguson once some of the glare fades away, but don't count on it.  

If it turns out that Holder and his merry band of FBI careerists find anything that substantively exonerates Darren Wilson, we're right back in some very deep shit.

But if they scorch Wilson, & / or if they confirm what looks to be a pretty obvious pattern of abuse and corruption in Ferguson, we're likely to hear a very loud chorus of Obama The Race Hustler on an endless loop.

Mainly tho', why does it seem like somebody's always pushing us pretty hard to get back to an "equilibrium" that ends up sounding like "Both Sides", and feeling like Paralysis?

You First, Lady

hat tip(s) = Crooks & Liars

Andrea Tantaros wants to lead the parade of Awesomely Slaughter-'Em-All American Exceptionality into northern Iraq to make ISIS respect us for goin' in there and mowin' 'em down.



No wait - she wants you to lead the parade...no wait - she wants your kids...wait...she says it's disgraceful that "we" aren't over there lighting them up, while she sits in a very comfortable TV studio being all 35-ish, and holding a college diploma, and looking for all the world to be in pretty good shape, and so she's obviously the near-perfect candidate for enlistment in the US Military branch of her choice, and with her eagerness and her Gung Ho fighting spirit, I'm pretty sure she could take a few good men over there and clean out every snake in the nest in a blaze of Sgt Rock-level glory that'd give Audie Murphy self esteem issues.

So, no, she doesn't want any of that really.  She's there (ostensibly) to sell Reverse Mortgage scams to the rubes who love to hear her slag Obama at every opportunity, even tho' her real function is to give the Viagra-munching DumFux News fans a little taste of the dark-haired dominatrix of their post-adolescent fantasies so they can rub out a quick one before scootering down to the mailbox to pick up their Social Security checks.

This game gets more than a little boring, but what really grates on my soul is that I have to agree with Dan Rather.



Fuck.

Monday Music

Stand By Me (cover) --John Lennon





Albatross --Fleetwood Mac





Hurt (cover) --Johnny Cash





Tell Me Why --Neil Young





Waiting On The World To Change --John Mayer





Violin --Amos Lee





Sad Eyes --Maria Muldaur

Would The Real Media Bias Please Stand Up

From the Twitter thing called #iftheygunnedmedown, asking which picture would the Press Poodles use to tell the story:

Now then - what do we usually see when the Librul Press tells us about what's goin' on?

WHITE SUSPECT

That's how the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal chose to present the story of Amy Bishop, a former college professor who eventually pleaded guilty to killing three colleagues and wounding three others at a faculty meeting in 2010.

BLACK VICTIM

And that's the headline AL.com ran about the shooting death of a 25-year-old black man in Alabama earlier this year.

WHITE SUSPECT

This is how the Staten Island Advance covered the case of Eric Bellucci, a mentally ill New York man who allegedly killed his parents.

BLACK VICTIM

Meanwhile, NBC News ran this headline during ongoing coverage of the Trayvon Martin killing.

WHITE SUSPECT

This Fox News headline quoted friends shocked that 15-year-old Jared Michael Padgett had entered his high school heavily armed and killed a classmate, injured a teacher and took his own life.

BLACK VICTIM

But in Florida, this headline in the Ledger focused on a police account that made the death of a black 19-year-old seem somehow expected, or at least unsurprising.

WHITE SUSPECT

In the wake of the mass shooting in Santa Barbara, California, earlier this year, theWhittier Daily News offered a headline showing one man's disbelief that Elliot Rodger could have committed such a crime.

BLACK VICTIM

Earlier this month, the New York Daily News ran this headline, carrying comments by the Ohio attorney general that appeared to defend police after killing a black man at a Walmart.

WHITE SUSPECT

This was the headline given to an Associated Press story at Mlive.com about an Ohio teen who later pleaded guilty to a school shooting in which three students were killed and two were wounded.

BLACK VICTIM

But when an unarmed father of two was killed by a police officer while entering a vehicle that contained his own children, the Los Angeles Times served up this claimfrom officials.

WHITE SUSPECT

In 2008, 18-year-old Ryan Schallenberger was accused of plotting to bomb his South Carolina high school. Ohio's Chronicle Telegram wanted readers to know that he was a straight-A student, running an AP story with this headline.

BLACK VICTIM

And according to the Omaha World-Herald, this is what you needed to know about Julius B. Vaughn, a 19-year-old gunned down in Omaha last year:

WHITE SUSPECT

Kerri Ann Heffernan was charged in 2012 in a string of bank robberies and stores.This headline at Wicked Local wonders how she'd come so far from her days as a smart high school student.

BLACK VICTIM

Of 22-year-old black man Deon Sanders' killing in Ohio earlier this year, WKBN's headline said "gang member," and that apparently was enough.

Today's Quote

"If the poor could be organized to spit at the halls of power simultaneously, corruption would be washed away in a righteous flood." --anon

Ed Note: I can't find an attribution for this - if you know who said it, please let me know.

Today's Joke

A Jew, a Methodist, and an atheist walk into a bar.

They order a few rounds, and they have a good time - because they're not assholes.

They don't invite their Muslim friend because they know he's devout, so he doesn't drink, and they respect his choices.  They'll catch up with him later at the ballgame.

The End

A Different Kinda Challenge

Variation on a theme is almost always a good thing.



I've resisted the ice bucket challenge mightily.  Not because I'm a curmudgeonly old poopy head - OK, not just because I'm a curmudgeonly old poopy head - I care about ALS and I care about the people who have to suffer and die because of it.

I resist because the ice bucket thing has become so popular and so cool and so Cause Celebre, that it's not about the good works any more.  It's about participating in a fad.  Not that it's always and only a bad thing to go along with the crowd, especially when it's in service of a great benefit to the community.  The point is that this ends up detracting from bunches of other great ideas that need our support simply because a marketing department somewhere came up with an idea that's cut thru the clutter and gone viral (the holy grail of Digital Age Marketing), and because it lets us rationalize not doing much of anything else about much of anything else.

And BTW - the ice bucket thing did not originate as an ALS thing.
Today Show
Josh Levin - Slate (who can resist a really good creation myth?)

But more to the point, here's what Will Oremus at Slate Magazine suggests as a possible alternative to spending more on the ice and the water (plus your time) than you do on the contribution itself:

1. Do not fetch a bucket, fill it with ice, or dump it on your head.
2. Do not film yourself or post anything on social media.
3. Just donate the damn money, whether to the ALS Association or to some other charity of your choice. And if it’s an organization you really believe in, feel free to politely encourage your friends and family to do the same.

The curmudgeonly old poopy head has spoken.  So let it be written; so let it be done.

A While Back

200 years ago today, British troops sacked the capital of The United States of America.

The White House burned. So did the U.S. Capital, and most of the public buildings in Washington, DC. Invading British troops burned the city in this most humiliating episode in American history 200 years ago today. Some are tempted to call the War of 1812 “the forgotten war,” but that is absurd. Out of it came the national anthem, a daring act of bravery to save the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the most lopsided defeat of the British military in all of their conflicts.

The British struck at the nation’s capital to weaken the morale of their enemy, and as payback for American excesses in York — what we now call Toronto — where they had pillaged and burned public and private buildings. Admiral George Cockburn, the driving force behind the attack on Washington, had justified the fall of a capital as “always so great a blow to the government of a country.”

But there's always some kind of review going on.  Scholarship never rests for long.  So what we think we know because of what they taught us in junior high school 45 or 50  years ago, is likely to change. The point being that it's a good idea to keep looking for things to learn - especially when it's about things we already "know".

One reason for the British raids so close to the American seat of government was to persuade Secretary of War John Armstrong to move U.S. troops from up north and thus ease the burden on the British of defending their remaining major colony in North America, Canada.

With the arrival of the highly professional 48-year-old General Ross, policies of retaliation and burning for the sake of it changed. Ross, who had only recently recovered from a bad wound to his jaw and right neck suffered in February at the Battle of Orthez in southern France, was determined to spare private property and only burn military or government buildings and even then only if the Americans did not negotiate to spare them. One of the first things that Ross’s aide, deputy quartermaster general Lt. George de Lacy Evans did, was to devise a policy to be used in dealing with the Americans. On August 18, following Ross’s orders, Evans drew up a proclamation to reassure local inhabitants about the safety of their private property if they acted with neutrality. In other words, Ross ignored Cochrane’s recommendation to “visit retaliation” on the American civilian population for U.S. actions in Canada. There was to be no wonton burning of American homes.