Different Day, Same Shit.

Jeb Bush.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 23:11:00 +0000

You gotta feel bad for ol' Jeb. In an ideal world (at least one that's ideal for the conservative world of the Bush clan), Jeb would have been an absolute shoe-in for the GOP nomination, thus continuing a presidential legacy that started with Papa Bush (George H.W.) and continued with big bro George W.

Instead, poor Jeb became one of several casualties in the face of Trumpmania™ running wild, with each debate devolving into a middle school reality show. And there's The Donald, in rare form, treating Jeb like a weedy little pipsqueak of a nerd by shoving the guy's head into the nearest toilet, slamming him against lockers and generally taking his lunch money every chance he got.

And why not? The Donald knows what the people really want and what they want to see is The Donald giving these political dorks a high-powered wedgie and a hoist up the ol' flagpole. Which is how our "low energy" nerd wound up being pushed around by a businessman/entertainer who understands how to captivate a crowd fed up with seeing the same old batch of political dorks being their typically dorky selves. Even the one guy who everyone thought was the biggest bully up to that point (Chris Christie) wound up backing out of the 3:00 after-bell fight The Donald had set up during 5th period.

With Jeb out of the running, The Donald's now free to focus on Canadian exchange student Ted Cruz, whose lunch tray he's been knocking out of his hand while mockingly saying "tough luck, eh?" every time he does it. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio's praying the GOP administrators will step in and slap The Donald with a suspension or at least haul him off to detention for a while. Poor Marco might have the money, but he has neither the muscle nor a mob of onlookers that'll back him up. Stalking around in the background is spoiled rich kid Mikey Bloomberg, whose chances of jumping into a fight with The Donald seem slim. Those two other guys (John Kasich and Ben Carson) are too busy digging out remnants of the last wedgie.

So let's pay our respects to ol' Jeb!, a guy who would have made a somewhat palatable GOP candidate if Hollywood Trump hadn't brought a folding chair over the poor guy's head.

Of Captives, Colonies And Compensation.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Wed, 27 Jan 2016 08:55:00 +0000

This is what black people have to tolerate... This is what we have to tolerate... pic.twitter.com/db2vv6oD3U
— chamonille (@chamonille) October 1, 2015

Personally, I wouldn't be too bothered by any of this. Like so many others of his ilk, David Cameron's operating on a long-standing global narrative. That narrative requires national leaders to pay lip service to the Holocaust and the plight of the people who were forced to endure it, regardless of their actual sincerity. The global narrative says nothing about acknowledging the tremendous damage slavery has done throughout the world, especially when it concerns one of your former colonial holdings.

Right about now, Cameron's probably wondering why couldn't Jamaica be a good little colony and not trouble the Crown with their nonsense. After all, it did its part by putting an end to what some Yanks called the "peculiar institution":

Speaking to the Caribbean country’s parliament, the prime minister struck a defiant note as he spoke of his pride that Britain had played a part in abolishing the “abhorrent” trade, without highlighting its historic involvement in the transfer of slaves from west Africa and ownership of slaves in the Caribbean.

He called for the two countries to “move on from this painful legacy and continue to build for the future”.

To wit:

“While there is indeed much to celebrate about our past, it would be wrong to do so while ignoring the most painful aspects of it – a period which should never be forgotten, and from which history has drawn the bitterest of lessons,” Cameron said.

“Slavery was and is abhorrent in all its forms. It has no place whatsoever in any civilised society, and Britain is proud to have eventually led the way in its abolition.

“That the Caribbean has emerged from the long shadow it cast is testament to the resilience and spirit of its people. I acknowledge that these wounds run very deep indeed. But I do hope that, as friends who have gone through so much together since those darkest of times, we can move on from this painful legacy and continue to build for the future.”

Yours truly has always taken issue with victims being told they should move on and let bygones be bygones. I'd rather let the Jamaican people decide when to let the pain and anguish of slavery and its legacy go. After all, that's something that should be done on their own terms, not when someone else tells them to.

There's a good reason why Cameron and the British government are so eager to push past slavery, whether the Jamaicans are ready to do so or not:

A No 10 spokesman said Cameron told the Jamaican prime minister that the “longstanding position of the United Kingdom is that we do not believe reparations is the right approach”.

Reparations has always been the solid brick wall that stops most attempts at righting both age-old and current wrongs cold in their tracks. While I'm not familiar with the countless losses suffered by the descendants of Jamaica's captive ancestors, I am very much familiar with those suffered by countless black Americans.

The thought of cutting countless checks for past wrongs is something that turns the blood a lot of white Americans a bit chilly. Considering America's zero-sum view of societal spoils, many whites feel that balancing out the scales of justice in the form of reparations would take a sizable sum of the spoils right out of their pockets. In other words, they believe it would personally cost them dearly and further lower their socioeconomic standing. After all, who really wants to see uppity Negros bettering themselves through the spoils that were wrenched out of the hands of hard-working white men and women?

But it's more than that. If the Powers That Be™ were forced to make a concerted effort to recompense those who have suffered most from slavery and all of its aftereffects, including the institutions it created to manage black ambition and extract black wealth, it would likely put the whole idea of America (or Great Britain) as a bastion of liberty and its very principles in question. Such an inward look, let alone an actual acknowledgement or even movement to correct past wrongs, would shake the nation to its core and likely cause a loss of identity and an existential crisis among much of its citizenry. It may even provoke a last-gasp backlash conjured from deep within the very soul of the nation, akin to a demon's final torrent of fury and rage before being finally vanquished once and for all.

For this and other reasons, it's likely that the British people and the Powers That Be™ at 10 Downing Street would rather ignore the monumental debt owed to the Jamaican people and others who've suffered deprivation at the hands of slavery and colonialism and let the gentle erosion of time itself scrub away the debt until it becomes unrecognizable to all. Hence the forgive and forget posture taken by Cameron and countless others.

However, time doesn't heal all wounds. Some wounds tend to fester until they've been properly tended to. Otherwise, the noisome sore becomes the gangrenous tissue that threatens to destroy the patient. So David Cameron and others like him can continue to ignore the issue and hope it goes away on its own, but only to their everlasting peril.

Adventures In Double Standards: MOVE Edition.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Wed, 27 Jan 2016 06:48:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, I wanted to make a compare/contrast between how authorities were handling the Oregon standoff led by Ammon Bundy and the standoff led by members of MOVE. I wound up not doing it not only because reading and researching what happened on May 13, 1985 angered me in a way very few things do, but because I knew people would point out there wasn't a direct connection. Whereas the so-called "showdown" at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge involved federal authorities (most notably the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), the MOVE bombing involved the Philadelphia Police Department (and with the blessing of Philadelphia's first black mayor, Wilson Goode).

Nevertheless, the two events provide yet another stark contrast as to how authorities throughout the nation deal with perceived threats. Whereas Philly's finest elected to use extraordinary force when dealing with MOVE, resulting in 11 dead, 65 houses destroyed and over 250 people rendered homeless, the feds chose to wait out the Oregon standoff, only using the absolute minimum amount of force when left with no other choice.

It's no secret that authorities often choose to ratchet up the force continuum faster when dealing with black individuals and black groups, but where they start out on the force continuum is often higher than where their white peers start out. In other words, LEOs have proven to not just escalate faster and with more force when dealing with black suspects, but also hold them with a higher level of suspicion to begin with.

In short:

Again, if Ammon Bundy was Ammon X., this whole ordeal would have been over weeks ago. #Oregonstandoff
— Mack Lyons (@DDSSBlog) January 27, 2016

It's true that the feds were feeling (and still feel) gun-shy about how to handle standoffs in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Waco, but the leniency of which the self-described militiamen at the heart of the event were treated still rankles the nerves of every black person who knew that a black group conducting itself under the same circumstances would not get the same courtesy.

Unearthing A Treasure.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 00:28:00 +0000

Days before receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled to London and on December 7th, 1964, delivered a speech addressing the civil rights struggle in the United States and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. The speech was recorded in its entirety by then-Pacifica Radio correspondant Saul Bernstein. Decades later, the recorded speech was discovered by Pacifica Radio Archives director Brian DeShazor.

The actual recording can be found at Democracy Now! Unfortunately, yours truly couldn't get the video hosted there to properly embed, so the above comes courtesy of the Youtube channel People Power Television.

The recording is an hour long and the accompanying transcript also makes for a hefty read, so only the first two portions provided by Democracy Now! will be reposted here:

I want to talk with you mainly about our struggle in the United States and, before taking my seat, talk about some of the larger struggles in the whole world and some of the more difficult struggles in places like South Africa. But there is a desperate, poignant question on the lips of people all over our country and all over the world. I get it almost everywhere I go and almost every press conference. It is a question of whether we are making any real progress in the struggle to make racial justice a reality in the United States of America. And whenever I seek to answer that question, on the one hand, I seek to avoid an undue pessimism; on the other hand, I seek to avoid a superficial optimism. And I try to incorporate or develop what I consider a realistic position, by admitting on the one hand that we have made many significant strides over the last few years in the struggle for racial justice, but by admitting that before the problem is solved we still have numerous things to do and many challenges to meet. And it is this realistic position that I would like to use as a basis for our thinking together tonight as we think about the problem in the United States. We have come a long, long way, but we have a long, long way to go before the problem is solved.

Now let us notice first that we’ve come a long, long way. And I would like to say at this point that the Negro himself has come a long, long way in re-evaluating his own intrinsic worth. Now, in order to illustrate this, a little history is necessary. It was in the year 1619 when the first Negro slaves landed on the shores of America. And they were brought there from the soils of Africa. Unlike the pilgrim fathers who landed at Plymouth a year later, they were brought there against their wills. And throughout slavery, the Negro was treated in a very inhuman fashion. He was a thing to be used, not a person to be respected. The United States Supreme Court rendered a decision in 1857 known as the Dred Scott decision, which well illustrated this whole idea and which well illustrated what existed at that time, for in this decision the Supreme Court of the United States said, in substance, that the Negro is not a citizen of the United States, he is merely property subject to the dictates of his owner. And it went on to say that the Negro has no rights that the white man is bound to respect. This was the idea that prevailed during the days of slavery.

With the growth of slavery, it became necessary to give some justification for it. You know, it seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some thin rationalization to clothe an obvious wrong in the beautiful garments of righteousness. And this is exactly what happened during the days of slavery. There were those who even misused the Bible and religion to give some justification for slavery and to crystallize the patterns of the status quo. And so it was argued from some pulpits that the Negro was inferior by nature because of Noah’s curse upon the children of Ham. Then, the apostle Paul’s dictum became a watchword: "Servants be obedient to your master." And one brother had probably read the logic of the great philosopher Aristotle. You know, Aristotle did a great deal to bring into being what we now know as formal logic in philosophy. And in formal logic, there is a big word known as the syllogism, which has a major premise, a minor premise and a conclusion. And so, this brother decided to put his argument for the inferiority of the Negro in the framework of an Aristotelian syllogism. He could say all men are made in the image of God—this was a major premise. Then came the minor premise: God, as everybody knows, is not a Negro, therefore the Negro is not a man. This was the kind of reasoning that prevailed.

While living with the conditions of slavery and then, later, segregation, many Negroes lost faith in themselves. Many came to feel that perhaps they were less than human. Many came to feel that they were inferior. This, it seems to me, is the greatest tragedy of slavery, the greatest tragedy of segregation, not merely what it does to the individual physically, but what it does to one psychologically. It scars the soul of the segregated as well as the segregator. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority, while leaving the segregated with a false sense of inferiority. And this is exactly what happened.

Then something happened to the Negro, and circumstances made it possible and necessary for him to travel more—the coming of the automobile, the upheavals of two world wars, the Great Depression. And so his rural plantation background gradually gave way to urban industrial life. His economic life was gradually rising through the growth of industry, the development of organized labor and expanded educational opportunities. And even his cultural life was gradually rising through the steady decline of crippling illiteracy. All of these forces conjoined to cause the Negro in America to take a new look at himself. Negro masses all over began to re-evaluate themselves.

And then something else happened, along with all of this: The Negro in the United States turned his eyes and his mind to Africa, and he noticed the magnificent drama of independence taking place on the stage of African history. And noticing the developments and noticing what was happening and noticing what was being done on the part of his black brothers and sisters in Africa gave him a new sense of dignity in the United States and a new sense of self-respect. The Negro came to feel that he was somebody. His religion revealed to him that God loves all of his children and that all men are made in his image, and that the basic thing about a man is not his specificity, but his fundamentum, not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin, but his eternal dignity and worth.

And so the Negro in America could now cry out unconsciously with the eloquent poet, "Fleecy locks, and black complexion cannot forfeit nature’s claim; Skin may differ, but affection dwells in black and white the same," and, "Were I so tall as to reach the pole, or to grasp the ocean at a span, I must be measured by my soul; the mind is the standard of the man." And with this new sense of dignity and this new sense of self-respect, a new Negro came into being with a new determination to suffer, to struggle, to sacrifice, and even to die, if necessary, in order to be free. And this reveals that we have come a long, long way since 1619.

But if we are to be true to the facts, it is necessary to say that not only has the Negro re-evaluated his own intrinsic worth, the whole nation has come a long, long way in extending the frontiers of civil rights. I would like to mention just a few things that have happened in our country which reveal this. Fifty years ago, or even 25 years ago, a year hardly passed when numerous Negroes were not brutally lynched by some vicious mob. Fortunately, lynchings have about ceased today. If one would go back to the turn of the century, you would find that in the Southern part of the United States you had very few Negroes registered to vote. By 1948, that number had leaped to about 750,000; 1960, it had leaped to 1,200,000. And when we went into the presidential election just a few weeks ago, that number had leaped to more than two million. We went into that election with more than two million Negroes registered to vote in the South, which meant that we in the civil rights movement, by working hard, have been able to add more than 800,000 new Negroes as registered voters in the last three years. This reveals that we have made strides.

Then, when we look at the question of economic justice, there’s much to do, but we can at least say that some strides have been made. The average Negro wage earner who is employed today in the United States earns 10 times more than the average Negro wage earner of 12 years ago. And the national income of the Negro is now at a little better than $28 billion a year, which is all—more than all of the exports of the United States and more than the national budget of Canada. This reveals that we have made some strides in this area.

But probably more than anything else—and you’ve read about it so much here and all over the world, I’m sure—we have noticed a gradual decline, and even demise, of the system of racial segregation. Now, the legal history of racial segregation had its beginning in 1896. Many people feel that racial segregation has been a reality in the United States a long, long time, but the fact is that this was a rather recent phenomenon in our country, just a little better than 60 years old. And it had its legal beginning with a decision known as the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which said, in substance, that separate but equal facilities could exist, and it made the doctrine of separate but equal the law of the land. We all know what happened as a result of the old Plessy doctrine: There was always the strict enforcement of the separate, without the slightest intention to abide by the equal. And the Negro ended up being plunged into the abyss of exploitation, where he experienced the bleakness of nagging injustice.

And then something marvelous happened. The Supreme Court of our nation in 1954 examined the legal body of segregation, and on May 17th of that year pronounced it constitutionally dead. It said, in substance, that the old Plessy doctrine must go, that separate facilities are inherently unequal, and that the segregated child on the basis of his race is to deny that child equal protection of the law. And so, we’ve seen many changes since that momentous decision was rendered in 1954, that came as a great beacon light of hope into millions of disinherited people all over our nation.

Then something else happened, which brought joy to all of our hearts. It happened this year. It was last year, after the struggle in Birmingham, Alabama, that the late President Kennedy came to realize that there was a basic issue that our country had to grapple with. With a sense of concern and a sense of immediacy, he made a great speech, a few days before—rather, it was really on the same day that the University of Alabama was to be integrated, and Governor Wallace stood in the door and tried to block that integration. Mr. Kennedy had to have the National Guard federalized. He stood before the nation and said in eloquent terms the problem which we face in the area of civil rights is not merely a political issue, it is not merely an economic issue, it is, at bottom, a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and as modern as the Constitution. It is a question of whether we will treat our Negro brothers as we ourselves would like to be treated.

And on the heels of that great speech, he went in, recommended to the Congress of our nation the most comprehensive civil rights bill ever recommended by any president of our great nation. Unfortunately, after many months of battle, and for a period we got a little tired of that—you know, there are some men in our country who like to talk a lot. Maybe you read about the filibuster. And you know they get bogged down in the paralysis of analysis, and they will just go on and on and on. And they wanted to talk that bill to death.

But President Lyndon Johnson got to work. He started calling congressmen and senators in and started meeting day in and day out with influential people in the country and making it clear that that bill had to pass, as a tribute to the late President Kennedy, but also as a tribute to the greatness of the country and as an expression of its dedication to the American dream. And it was that great day last summer that that bill came into being, and it was on July 2nd that Mr. Johnson signed that bill and it became the law of the land.

And so, in America now, we have a civil rights bill. And I’m happy to report to you that, by and large, that bill is being implemented in communities all across the South. We have seen some surprising levels of compliance, even in some communities in the state of Mississippi. And whenever you can find anything right in Mississippi, things are getting better.

We can never forget the fact that just this summer three civil rights workers were brutally murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi. All of this reveals to us that we have not achieved the level of brotherhood—we have not achieved the brotherhood that we need and that we must have in our nation. We still have a long, long way to go.

I mentioned voter registration and the fact that we have been able to add about 800,000 new registered voters in the last two or three years, the fact that it’s over two million now. I guess that sounded like real progress, and it does represent some progress. But let me give you the other side, and that is the fact that there are still more than 10 million Negroes living in the Southern part of the United States, and some six million of the Negroes living in the Southern part of the United States are of voting age, and yet only two million are registered. This means that four million remain unregistered, not merely because they are apathetic, not because they are complacent—this may be true of some few—but because all types of conniving methods are still being used to keep Negroes from becoming registered voters. Complex literacy tests are given, which make it almost impossible for anybody to pass the test, even if he has a Ph.D. degree in any field or a law degree from the best law schools of the world. And then actual economic reprisals are often taken out against Negroes who seek to register and vote in some of the Black Belt counties of Mississippi and Alabama and other places. Then, some are actually faced with physical violence, and sometimes physical death. This reveals that we have a great deal that must be done in this area.

I mentioned economic justice, and I am sure that that figure, $28 billion, sounded very large. That’s a lot of money. But then I must go on and give you the other side, if I am to be honest about the picture. That is a fact that 42 percent of the Negro families of the United States still earn less than $2,000 a year, while just 16 percent of the white families earn less than $2,000 a year; 21 percent of the Negro families of America earn less than $1,000 a year, while just 5 percent of the white families earn less than $1,000 a year. And then we face the fact that 88 percent of the Negro families of America earn less than $5,000 a year, while just 58 percent of the white families earn less than $5,000 a year. So we can see that there is still a great gulf between the haves, so to speak, and the have-nots. And if America is to continue to grow and progress and develop and move on toward its greatness, this problem must be solved.

Now, this economic problem is getting more serious because of many forces alive in our world and in our nation. For many years, Negroes were denied adequate educational opportunities. For many years, Negroes were even denied apprenticeship training. And so, the forces of labor and industry so often discriminated against Negroes. And this meant that the Negro ended up being limited, by and large, to unskilled and semi-skilled labor. Now, because of the forces of automation and cybernation, these are the jobs that are now passing away. And so, the Negro wakes up in a city like Detroit, Michigan, and discovers that he is 28 percent of the population and about 72 percent of the unemployed. Now, in order to grapple with that problem, our federal government will have to develop massive retraining programs, massive public works programs, so that automation can be a blessing, as it must be to our society, and not a curse.

Then the other thing when we think of this economic problem, we must think of the fact that there is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a segment in that society which feels that it has no stake in the society, and nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a number of people who see life as little more than a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign. They end up with despair because they have no jobs, because they can’t educate their children, because they can’t live in a nice home, because they can’t have adequate health facilities.

We always hear of the various reasons why and the various myths concerning integration and why integration shouldn’t come into being. Those people who argue against integration at this point often say, "Well, if you integrate the public schools, for instance, you will pull the white race back a generation." And they like to talk about the cultural lag in the Negro community. And then they go on to say, "Now, you know, the Negro is a criminal, and he has the highest crime rate in any city that you can find in the United States." And the arguments go on ad infinitum why integration shouldn’t come into being.

But I think there’s an answer to that, and that is that if there is cultural lag in the Negro community—and there certainly is—this lag is there because of segregation and discrimination. It’s there because of long years of slavery and segregation. Criminal responses are not racial, but environmental. Poverty, economic deprivation, social isolation and all of these things breed crime, whatever the racial group may be. And it is a torturous logic to use the tragic results of racial segregation as an argument for the continuation of it. It is necessary to go back. And so it is necessary to see this and to go all out to make economic justice a reality all over our nation.

I mentioned that racial segregation is about dead in the United States, but it’s still with us. We are about past the day of legal segregation. We have about ended de jure segregation, where the laws of the nation or of a particular state can uphold it, because of the civil rights bill and the Supreme Court’s decision and other things. We have passed the day when the Negro can’t eat at a lunch counter, with the exception of a few isolated situations, or where the Negro can’t check in a motel or hotel. We are fastly passing that day. But there is another form of segregation coming up. It is coming up through housing discrimination, joblessness and the de facto segregation in the public schools. And so the ghettoized conditions that exist make for many problems, and it makes for a hardcore, de facto segregation that we must grapple with on a day-to-day basis. And so, this is the problem that we face, and this is a problem that we are forced to deal with. And we are going to deal with it in a determined way. I am absolutely convinced that segregation is on its deathbed, and those who represent it, whether they be in the United States or whether they be in London, England, the system is on its deathbed.

But certainly, we all know that if democracy is to live in any nation, segregation must die. And as I’ve tried to say all over America, we’ve got to get rid of segregation not merely because it will help our image—it certainly will help our image in the world. We’ve got to get rid of segregation not merely because it will appeal to Asian and African people—and this certainly will be helpful, this is important. But in the final analysis, racial discrimination must be uprooted from American society and from every society, because it is morally wrong. So it is necessary to go all out and develop massive action programs to get rid of racial segregation.

Now I would like to mention one or two ideas that circulate in our society—and they probably circulate in your society and all over the world—that keep us from developing the kind of action programs necessary to get rid of discrimination and segregation. One is what I refer to as the myth of time. There are those individuals who argue that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice in the United States, in South Africa or anywhere else; you’ve got to wait on time. And I know they’ve said to us so often in the States and to our allies in the white community, "Just be nice and be patient and continue to pray, and in 100 or 200 years the problem will work itself out." We have heard and we have lived with the myth of time. The only answer that I can give to that myth is that time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I must honestly say to you that I’m convinced that the forces of ill will have often used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. And we may have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around saying, "Wait on time."

And somewhere along the way it is necessary to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. And so we must help time, and we must realize that the time is always ripe to do right. This is so vital, and this is so necessary.

Now, the other myth that gets around a great deal in our nation and, I’m sure, in other nations of the world is the idea that you can’t solve the problems in the realm of human relations through legislation; you can’t solve the housing problem and the job problem and all of these other problems through legislation; you’ve got to change the heart. We had a presidential candidate just recently who spoke about this a great deal. And I think Mr. Goldwater sincerely believed that you couldn’t anything through legislation, because he voted against everything in the Senate, including the civil rights bill. And he said all over the nation throughout the election that we don’t need legislation, that legislation can’t deal with this problem. But he was nice enough to say that you’ve got to change the heart.

Now I want to at least go halfway with Brother Goldwater at that point. I think he’s right. If we’re going to get this problem solved in America and all over the world, ultimately, people must change their hearts where they have prejudices. If we are going to solve the problems facing mankind, I would be the first to say that every white person must look down deep within and remove every prejudice that may be there, and come to see that the Negro, and the colored peoples, generally, must be treated right, not merely because the law says it, but because it is right and because it is natural. I agree with this 100 percent. And I’m sure that if the problem is to be solved, ultimately, men must be obedient not merely to that which can be enforced by the law, but they must rise to the majestic heights of being obedient to the unenforceable.

But after saying all of that, I must go on to the other side. This is where I must leave Mr. Goldwater and others who believe that legislation has no place. It may be true that you can’t legislate integration, but you can legislate desegregation. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law can’t change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me. And I think that’s pretty important also.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Sat, 16 Jan 2016 01:06:00 +0000

Today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on this day in 1929. In 1983, an official holiday honoring the slain civil rights leader was established as a part of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. As a result, most people will celebrate his legacy on Monday, January 18.

Required Reading:
"He Ended The Terror Of Living As A Black Person." (2012)
"Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (Also found here)
"I Have a Dream..." (2013)
"Judged By The Content Of One's Character." (2013)

More content will follow in the coming weeks, as time and current events permit.

Tamir Rice.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Tue, 29 Dec 2015 09:48:00 +0000

If Tamir Rice was a blonde-haired, hazel-eyed 12-year-old Caucasian child, he would likely still be alive today. His parents would have been called and he would have been admonished about playing with a BB gun in the middle of a city park. There would be no guns drawn and the responding police officers would have felt a bit annoyed about being called out over some kid playing in the park with a toy gun.

But Tamir Rice had the misfortune of being a black-haired, brown-eyed 12-year-old black child in a land where being black is considered a credible threat and where such threats are commonly terminated by law enforcement with extreme prejudice, even if you're just a child.

But it's not like most white Americans see black children as actual children:

In one experiment, a group of 60 police officers from a large urban police force were asked to assess the age of white, black and Latino children based on photographs. The officers were randomly assigned to be told that the children in the photographs were accused of either a misdemeanor or felony charge. The officers overestimate the age of black felony-suspected children by close to five years, but they actually underestimated the age of white felony-suspected children by nearly a year.

Particularly relevant to the Tamir Rice case: "Black 13-year-olds were miscategorized as adults by police officers (average age error 4.59 years)."

Similar experiments involving 169 mostly white students found that "participants began to think of black children as significantly less innocent than other children at every age group, beginning at the age of 10." These experiments also showed that respondents were more likely to see the black children as "culpable" of a hypothetical felony compared with white and Latino children.

This research comports with other research done in the mid-2000s, which confronted police officers and civilians with photos of black and white armed and unarmed people, and asked them to press a "shoot" or "don't shoot" button for each image. Cops and civilians were more likely to press "shoot" for black images overall, but they were slower to press "don't shoot" for unarmed black images, and quicker to press "shoot" when an image showed an armed black man.

The APA researchers sum up their findings this way: "Our findings suggest that, although most children are allowed to be innocent until adulthood, black children may be perceived as innocent only until deemed suspicious." The Tamir Rice case illustrates that for some black children, those biases can play out with deadly consequences in just a fraction of a second.

Threats come in all shapes and sizes. Any "good guy with a gun" can tell you that. And yet:

A North Carolina woman was arrested on Christmas Eve after she was spotted with a BB gun in front of the police department and pointed it at officers and told them to shoot her.

Police received a 911 call about a woman in front of the police department with a gun around 7:30 p.m. Thursday. They found Elaine Rothenberg, 66, standing in front of a doorway at the police department with a gun raised and in a shooting stance.

Police said Rothenberg, who was from North Carolina but had been staying on Cliffside Drive in the city, yelled about hating cops and told officers “what are you doing, shoot me!” and “what are you, scared?” She raised the gun at officers and yelled “boom, boom, boom.”

After a brief standoff Rothenberg told officers the gun was fake and threw it to the ground, police said. She was taken into custody and police determined she had been holding a BB gun.

Rothenberg was charged with first-degree threatening, second-degree breach of peace, seven counts of reckless endangerment and interfering with police.

There was no split-second threat assessment needed. After all, she wasn't a 12-year-old black kid.

Donald Trump.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Sat, 19 Sep 2015 11:53:00 +0000

Like Newton Leroy Gingrich, Donald Trump (who will now be known henceforth as "the Donald") knows that the fastest way to a conservative's heart is by tickling that particular portion of the brain that loves dog whistles and coded rhetoric. By throwing those big, juicy slabs of "straight talk" at the GOP masses, the Donald has managed to become the GOP's Flavor of the Month™ for the 2016 elections. The big question now is "will he manage to nab the nomination?"

The answer is a pretty definite "no." While the GOP masses adore a guy who "finally tells it like it is" on hot-button issues like immigration, the GOP establishment prefers its candidates to have a bit more...discretion. Unfortunately, the Donald's bombastic star power and deep pockets make the rest of the GOP field look absolutely hapless in comparison.

So will the GOP establishment manage to temper the Donald's presidential ambitions before things get out of hand? That remains to be seen. A few prominent pundits and writers (including one of my favorites, Chauncey DeVega) have compared the Donald's presidential run to a wrestling match. Judd Legum sums it up thusly:

In the current campaign, Trump is behaving like a professional wrestler while Trump’s opponents are conducting the race like a boxing match. As the rest of the field measures up their next jab, Trump decks them over the head with a metal chair.

The Donald is the heel that everyone's supposed to hate, but has a massive cult following. His fans love how he throws his weight around in the ring and hate how boring and inept all of the babyfaces seem in comparison. He has the showmanship and stage presence, plus his refusal to play by the established rules is what his fans love most about him.

With a beloved heel like the Donald, the GOP establishment will have to pull its own Montreal Screwjob if it has any hope of getting the controllable candidate it wants.

White Mobs, Black Lives And You.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 03:22:00 +0000

Our country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.

- Ida. B Wells

Throughout our nation's history, bigotry against black Americans, the dreaded Other, has always been enforced through a number of means. Whenever institutional, state-sanctioned methods of bigotry and discrimination failed to achieve the desired results, it was left to the white mobs to enforce bigotry through violence. Time and time again, seemingly decent, God-fearing American men and women would transform themselves into a hateful, virulent force bent on protecting the ideals of white supremacy by violently and publicly destroying a few black bodies, regardless of innocence or guilt and with the quiet sanction of law enforcement seemingly rendered impotent in the face of a spontaneous and unruly force.

Mob-led lynchings were the preferred means of educating the black populace on where they lay on the societal totem pole through terror and violence. After all, there's nothing scarier than seeing dozens of angry white faces drag off a single black soul in the middle of the night in preparation for a public, hands-on exhibit on the dangers of being an affront to whitekind, for whatever reason.

These days, the hands-on lynching of old has fallen along the wayside in favor of more high-tech means. Nevertheless, there are those out there who still believe that the old ways are still best.

Nathan Ener's rant against the New Black Panther Party, the Black Lives Matter movement and those he sees as "black thugs" comes in the aftermath of the unfortunate death of Texas sheriff's Deputy Darren Goforth and his killer, Shannon Miles, being found incompetent to stand trial for his murder. At this point, a white mob would have gladly stepped in to deliver the sort of "justice" they thought was denied to them and the rest of whitekind, but you'd have to get them fired up about it first. And that's where the above rant comes into play.

Stirring up deep-set indignation and fear over the dreaded Other running roughshod over God-fearing white men, women and children has always been part of the recipe for inciting white mob violence. The death of a white person (or at least rumors of white deaths) serves as its explosive catalyst. Had this event happened in 1915 instead of 2015, it's very likely that Shannon Miles' corpse, shredded from head-to-toe, would be hanging from some forlorn oak somewhere as a shining symbol of mob-delivered justice - and as a warning to any black American who'd even harbor thoughts about harming the hair on a white person's head.

It's not beyond the pale to wonder if, given the right circumstances, someone like Nathan Ener would gladly lead the way.

Yours truly would have written off Ener as your typical bigot, something of which East Texas has in spades, if it weren't for a rather disturbing link to another case where a young black man by the name of Alfred Wright was found murdered. According to authorities, Wright died of a drug overdose shortly after a deal involving 28-year-old Shane Hadnot. But it was the manner in which he was found dead that brought a great deal of suspicion:

Wright's body was disfigured when he was found Nov. 25, 2013, which led his family to suspect foul play.

His sister Annilia Wright-Mosley said her brother's tongue was cut out, eyes gouged out, throat slit and ear cut off. He was also missing teeth and fingernails, which are signs of violence and torture, she said.

Wright's family believes Alfred was tortured and brutally murdered and has called Hadnot a "scapegoat" in the case.

The authorities wrote off those allegations by citing how the damages were likely caused by scavenging animals.

So what's Nathan Ener's link to all of this? Here's Ener squaring off with black rights activist and New Black Panther Party leader Quanell X.

“I know why you’re upset. You’re upset because of Ashley,” Quanell X taunted Ener as they met in the street. “’Cause your daughter likes black coffee, no sugar no cream. That’s why you’re upset. It’s eating you up, ain’t it? That she likes a black man?”

Ener called to a white man on the sidewalk.
“Ben, does any of my people—any of my family like black folks?”

“Not that I know of.”

Quanell X goaded Ener: “Ashley does! Ashley does! Now let me tell you something, peckerwood. I will whup your ass. I’m that one.” He peeled off his suit jacket, stepped up inches from Ener’s face, and the two jawed to the crowd’s amusement. A line of uniformed troopers filed out of the county building and led Ener away.

It's likely that not only was Nathan Ener's own daughter might have been romantically involved with Wright, but also that her father told her he knew what really happened to him:

Nathan Ener Should take a Polygraph here is PROOF he told his daughter Ashley Ener he knew what happened to my brother Alfred Wright.
Posted by Annilia Wright-Mosley on Friday, February 28, 2014

The plot thickens.

Wright may have also been romantically involved with Cindy Maddox, daughter of Sheriff Tom Maddox. The same guy who complained bitterly that he was missing out on a good day's hunt by searching for Wright.

Now you'd have to wonder if this was what Alfred Wright was really murdered for. In many unspoken parts of the nation, consorting with white women is the highest unspeakable offense for a black man to commit. In some cases, it could lead directly to his death.

You also have to wonder if Nathan Ener had anything to do with Wright's death. Town gossip being what it is, it's likely that some tightly-held secrets are bound to come spilling out at some point.

A mob is a great way for an evil to be committed without any of that pesky responsibility or guilt assigned to you. But it doesn't take a mob to commit evil. Sometimes, it only takes one or two individuals to get the job done.

Adventures In Double Standards: Baltimore Edition.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Thu, 07 May 2015 18:55:00 +0000

Recently, Abagond wrote about how the mainstream American media handles riots involving black Americans and riots involving whites. Anyone who's keeping score can see how there's a glaring double standard in the way those events are covered.

Take a close look at the 1965 Watts riots, the 1967 Detroit riots, the 1992 L.A. riots and the recent Baltimore riots and you'll find a couple of common threads:

These riots and many others like them have been about black America's ongoing frustration over genuine injustices directed towards the black community and ignored by white society - discrimination and police brutality being the two biggest injustices.
Every time these riots happen, mainstream American media frames them as yet another demonstration of black America's innate criminality and lust for violence - a narrative that's played well among legions of upstanding white Americans ever since the Stono Rebellion and perhaps even before.

Now take a look at the above photo, a snapshot of the riots that occurred shortly after the end of the 2013 U.S. Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, CA. According to the L.A. Times, this one broke out after a fight led scores of young, largely white and quite possibly intoxicated revelers to indulge in a bit of the old ultraviolence. Why? There's no injustice here, except that maybe they'll have to go home at some point.

Notice how the media didn't dismiss this as just another display of primal Caucasian rage, nor was it tamped down with the same sort of heavy-handed show of force exemplified by Baltimore and Ferguson.

That's the thing. Riots led by largely white participants over largely innocuous things (your favorite sports team lost, your favorite sports team won, your favorite event just ended, you're drunk, others are drunk so let's tear shit up) are never treated with the racial disdain that the highly uncommon riots that occur in black communities receive.

There's no condemnation of white Americans as a whole, nor are there any calls for the Caucasian community to restrain itself and seek non-violent means of expressing itself. They're not denigrated as "thugs," accused of being "out of control" or used as fodder for unreconstructed fantasies of putting them back in their rightful place. Even the language becomes different - these are "disturbances," not "riots." They're not "thugs," but "young partygoers" and "revelers" who just happen to be "over-exuberant."

No one thumbs through Wikipedia to find the perfect MLK quote to tut-tut black Americans with for having the temerity to burn buildings (in their own neighborhoods, mind you), throw rocks and generally act out of anger and frustration. Even the good Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood perfectly what happens when the concerns of a frustrated people are constantly put on ice.

Now I wanted to say something about the fact that we have lived over these last two or three summers with agony and we have seen our cities going up in flames. And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view.

I'm absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society.

These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.

It's no secret that mainstream America tends to be hard of hearing when it comes to the fears, concerns and strife black Americans have faced in this country, at least when said plight is couched in non-violent terms. It's only when those terms suddenly turn violent that mainstream America starts paying attention, only to learn the wrong lessons from what they've seen and heard and quietly hope that "those people" can leave them alone and go back to suffering in silence.

Lessons Learned.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 12:03:00 +0000

Yours truly has learned something these past few months watching and reading up on current events, especially those affecting black Americans:

The value of a black life in the United States remains marginal, at best. At worst, that value is nonexistent.
At any given moment, said life can be put to an end at the whim of a white American, whether under color of law or as a concerned citizen who "feared" for their safety and well-being.
The value of a black life in the United States is determined and enshrined by mainstream America's view of the black community, and then verified and validated in its treatment at the hands of law enforcement and other institutions throughout the nation.
Said law enforcement members have been given card blanche to respond to the black community and other ethnic and social minority groups as aggressively as possible.
Respectability politics has long since proven to be absolutely ineffective in improving the black community's image in mainstream America's eyes or preventing further life-ending incidents at the hands of law enforcement and concerned citizens.
When confronted with the above, many mainstream Americans will resort to blaming the black community for these problems based on a strict adherence to the Just World fallacy and their belief of black Americans as a morally bankrupt people. They'll also support law enforcement officials and concerned citizens who've put black lives to rest, at least as far as polite society will allow.
Overt racism is still taboo and a serious faux pas in polite discussion. However, coded talk remains perfectly acceptable and preferred among many.

The entire black blogosphere has undergone an airing out of grievances and a sharing of thoughts, feelings, experiences and the pain suffered by many within the black community. There have been protests, marches, demonstrations, the works. There have been a few indictments and even a few cases where authorities have quickly acted, if only out of self-interest and self-preservation.

Still, the killings and the beatings continue.

Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Stanley-Jones - the list goes on. And it's one that grows longer with each passing day.

Shades of Freddie Gray.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 11:35:00 +0000

Another day, another dead black American, another outrage.

These days, black Americans are being murdered like clockwork by men and women charged with protecting the public. Except protecting and serving the public takes a back seat to a whole host of corrupt behaviors, none least the brutalization and wanton murder of black individuals.

Judging by history, these things are to be expected. Bigotry against the dreaded Other has always been iron-clad policy, even in today's so-called "post-racial" environment. Institutional enforcement of said bigotry has also been de rigueur, especially when fears of being overrun by said Other has always lurked in the back of mainstream America's collective mind since colonial times.

So Freddie Gray's death at the hands of the Baltimore Police Department is, in history's grand scope, nothing out of the ordinary. The only remarkable thing about it is the reaction it elicited from the city's black residents.

And even that response doesn't seem out of the ordinary. Protests and demonstrations have been the default method of expressing outrage by a people who feel otherwise powerless to prevent these atrocities from happening, The attendant rioting and looting is another side of that response, mostly done by those whose sheer anger and fury explode into a whirlwind of fire and shattered glass, interspersed with opportunists in search of a quick profit from chaos.

Mainstream America has always looked at these displays with a bit of bemusement, especially when burned-out businesses and overturned cars come into focus. If anything, these displays are treated as proof positive of law enforcement's raison d'etre - to prevent so-called lawless elements from initiating these displays in the first place.

So it's not out of the ordinary for a white American to see a phalanx of police officers in full riot gear facing down a lone demonstrator and dismissing the entire thing as the taxpaying public getting it's money's worth. In a way, they would be absolutely correct.

It's also not out of the ordinary for the mainstream American media to write off the entire exercise as just another mass exhibition of black America's latent criminality. Acknowledging the unreconstructed public's confirmation bias happens to be a great way of raising viewership, even if it's at the expense of a people who suffer day in and day out.

It's no wonder that mainstream American media outlets are more interested in slow-panning property damage and opportunists with stolen goods in hand. It's those sort of things that make for good ratings and even better outrage porn among unreconstructed minds.

There's no arguing that Freddie Gray in no way deserved what happened to him. No human being deserves to be brutalized to the point of paralysis, coma and eventual death. There's never an excuse for it and there never will be.

Regardless, what happened to Freddie Gray is just one of a long, depressing and seemingly unending line of atrocities committed mainly by law enforcement officials throughout the U.S., with the occasional "concerned citizen" or vigilante delivering a helping hand*. The slave patrols, "heroic" klansmen and angry mobs of "respectable Christian" whites might not be taking part in these modern-day tragedies, but their spirit remains in full effect.

* As seen in the murder of Trayvon Martin

Meanwhile...

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 09:39:00 +0000

Pictured above is suspected wildlife terrorist and television personality Phil Robertson, seen at a recent event declaring "jihad" on the treacherous Marxist Usurper in Chief, Baraq Hussein Superallah Obama al-Kenya. Moments after this speech, Robertson's prized pickup truck was destroyed along with 7 other trucks and a small ice cream cart in a targeted drone strike.

- Phil, you've got some pretty unhealthy and un-Christian fantasies. Maybe you need to seek help.

- It's no surprise that a company specializing in legalized racketeering would eventually get nailed for...racketeering:

Judicial Correction Services (JCS), the for-profit probation company at the center of the recently settled Georgia "debtors' prison" suit, is now being sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center for violating federal racketeering laws in Clanton, Alabama.

In the federal lawsuit, SPLC accuses JCS and its Clanton manager Steven Raymond of violating the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, by threatening jail time for probationers who failed to pay their misdemeanor fines and probationer fees in a timely fashion. This, the group argues, is plain and simple extortion.

The suit also goes after the current contract between Clanton and JCS, alleging that their relationship violates Alabama law, which forbids city courts from charging individuals extra money for being on probation. Since 2009, Clanton has contracted with JCS to manage its pay-only probationers (individuals who are only on probation because they can't pay their court fines upfront); however, the courts pay nothing for the for-profit company's services. Rather, JCS makes money off of the additional fees it forces upon probationers. For example, JCS charges probationers a $10 "set up" fee and then an additional $40 a month for the privilege of having their money collected.

For many municipalities, it's a win-win setup: leading officials keep taxes low and maintain a "tough-on-crime" posture that wins elections, police departments and courts get to fund themselves by shaking down offenders and the ordinary Johns and Janes who have the money and class/race privilege to stay off the radar get to feel a bit safer at night.

Meanwhile, the offenders are marched through a revolving door of poverty, incarceration and wealth extraction, thus keeping them in a state of permanent underclassdom.

- Serena Williams is the first black female athlete to appear on a Vogue solo cover. What took you so long, Vogue?

- You'd figure that by now, people would learn not to be racist on the job:

Officials say four Fort Lauderdale police officers have lost their jobs following an investigation into a racist video and text messages.

CBS Miami reported 30-year-old James Wells, 31-year-old Jason Holding and 25-year-old Christopher Sousa were fired. A fourth officer, 22-year-old Alex Alvarez, resigned.

"The officers were terminated due to a sustained department misconduct," Chief Frank Adderley said during a news conference Friday. "The four officers conduct was inexcusable, and there is zero tolerance for this type of behavior within the Fort Lauderdale Police Department."

According to CBS Miami, the video was allegedly made by Alvarez. Styled as a movie trailer, it included "racially insensitive" images including attacks on minorities, a Ku Klux Klan hood and a caricature of President Barack Obama with large gold teeth.

Some of the text messages mentioned killing and injuring black people, CBS Miami reported. According to an investigative report obtained by the station, "The messages criticized their coworkers' grammar, appearance, work ethic and referred to an entire shift as lazy (expletives).... The officers also exchanged text messages that included derogatory comments towards Hispanics and homosexuals."

For these guys, I have a feeling the moral of the story won't be "being racist shitheads comes with consequences." It'll be "no paper trails and no credible witnesses equals no racism."

- For some reason, Nellie Andreeva thinks too many black faces on TV and film is actually a bad thing.

Ted Cruz Will Not Be Your President In 2016.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Wed, 25 Mar 2015 08:47:00 +0000

I gotta admit, I haven't been all that enthused about following the 2016 presidential electoral campaigns. As I've said before, I'm not getting paid to engage in full-time punditry. But it doesn't take a pundit to realize that Ted Cruz's presidential aspirations are a classic case of showboating and attention whoring.

Let's face it - a presidential campaign is perhaps one of the best ways of grabbing some well-needed spotlight time if you want to be somebody on the Beltway scene. Just ask Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum and a bunch of others who clawed their way towards the brass ring back in 2012. There's plenty to gain from being "that guy who ran for president back in 2016" just so long as you don't slice your own campaign into the weeds.

As to why Cruz's presidential aspirations will wind up unfulfilled, it's not the citizenship issue that'll trip him up (unless he's revealed to be Stephen Harper's Manchurian Candidate). Like our esteemed current president, Rafael Edward meets all of the important qualifications: he's over 35, he's lived in the U.S. for over 14 years and his dear mum was a U.S. citizen when he was born, in spite of his dad being a commie canuck.

A long while ago, I said Ralphy was a shoe-in for the 2016 presidential candidacy. That doesn't mean he'll be a shoe-in for the actual Oval Office job.

Poor Ralphy might be the darling of the birther/Tea Party set, but the rest of the GOP world just isn't feeling him:

First, Cruz doesn’t have enough support from party bigwigs. To win the Republican or Democratic nomination, you need the backing of at least some of the party apparatus. At a minimum, your fellow party members shouldn’t hate you. Otherwise, you end up getting the Newt Gingrich 2012 treatment. That is, you get pounced on the moment you’re seen as a threat to win the nomination.

If we’re ever in a world where it looks like Cruz could win the nomination, you’ll very likely see such pouncing. You can read article after article about how Cruz has isolated himself in the Senate. It got so bad that he recently had to apologize to his Republican colleagues.

And the Cruz hatred doesn’t stop at the edges of the Senate cloakroom. Influential party actors dislike him, too. I can’t remember another Republican who united Ann Coulter, Pat Robertson, Jennifer Rubin and Thomas Sowell in opposition.

Ralphy's previous showboating has put him at odds with many of the establishment players within the GOP. Being the political equivalent of a firebrand evangelical preacher packs the pews full of far-right conservatives looking for that old time religion, but at the end of the day, the GOP establishment picks moderates who won't scare the mainstreamers with their talk of fire, brimstone and damnation, but have just enough fire to avoid being called a weak RINO by their peers. It's all a balancing act, you see.

Which is why your chances of seeing Ted Cruz being sworn into office on January 20, 2017 are about as remote as Jon Huntsman's.

But pissing off the GOP establishment isn't the only reason why he might walk away from his 2016 campaign empty-handed. The fervent pursuit of ideological purity for appearance's sake tends to create a lot of moral and ethical casualties along the way. To wit, Ralphy's begrudging move towards Obamacare:

The newly announced Republican presidential candidate told CNN's Dana Bash on Tuesday that he will sign up for health care coverage through the Affordable Care Act -- a law he has been on a crusade to kill.

"We'll be getting new health insurance and we'll presumably do it through my job with the Senate, and so we'll be on the federal exchange with millions of others on the federal exchange," Cruz said.

Asked whether he would accept the government contribution available to lawmakers and congressional staffers for their health care coverage through the ACA, Cruz said he will "follow the text of the law."

"I strongly oppose the exemption that President Obama illegally put in place for members of Congress because (Senate Minority Leader) Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats didn't want to be under the same rules as the American people," Cruz said, before repeating: "I believe we should follow the text of the law."

That's right, the same man who was captured on video calling Obamacare a "trainwreck" had no other choice but to buy a ticket and climb aboard, hoping that his supporters and the general public would have the common decency to forgive him (or at least forget).

To sum things up, you can expect Rafael Edward Cruz to run in the 2016 primary, but don't expect him to become the preferred choice of the GOP establishment and consequently, their favored front-runner for the election. Personally, my money's on Jeb Bush - established pol, plenty of name recognition and deep down, America loves its dynasties.

Take it from someone who does this punditry stuff for a living:

If Cruz were in the position of someone like Rubio or even Rick Perry, I'd be more bullish. But he's not nominee material at all.
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) March 25, 2015

DDSS Has An Open Thread Now.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Wed, 25 Mar 2015 01:43:00 +0000

So yours truly decided to create an open thread for general commenting. Why?

All blog posts are closed to commenting after five days, unless otherwise specified by the blog owner. This is to prevent the comments sections of older blog posts from being inundated with spam or posts that are in violation of the House Rules.

The above was intended to keep the idiots and assholes among us from spamming the comments section while nobody's looking. Unfortunately, it also gives off the appearance of stifling debate. Just an unintended consequence of protecting blog-goers from the slings and arrows of stupidity.

In contrast to 99.999% of the regular posts here at DDSS, the Open Thread comments will remain open. Forever. At least that's the plan.

Everything else concerning the House Rules apply. Don't want everyone getting carried away, now.

Required Reading.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Wed, 25 Mar 2015 00:32:00 +0000

- Alternet's Sam Adler-Bell interviews Robin DiAngelo on the concept of "white fragility" and how terms like "white privilege" and "entitlement" are losing their effectiveness in the white mindspace. Witness DiAngelo succinctly explain the origins of white fragility and how feelings of superiority are cultivated in the first place:

RD: Exactly. And white fragility also comes from a deep sense of entitlement. Think about it like this: from the time I opened my eyes, I have been told that as a white person, I am superior to people of color. There’s never been a space in which I have not been receiving that message. From what hospital I was allowed to be born in, to how my mother was treated by the staff, to who owned the hospital, to who cleaned the rooms and took out the garbage. We are born into a racial hierarchy, and every interaction with media and culture confirms it—our sense that, at a fundamental level, we are superior.

And, the thing is, it feels good. Even though it contradicts our most basic principles and values. So we know it, but we can never admit it. It creates this kind of dangerous internal stew that gets enacted externally in our interactions with people of color, and is crazy-making for people of color. We have set the world up to preserve that internal sense of superiority and also resist challenges to it. All while denying that anything is going on and insisting that race is meaningless to us.

One of the best quotes in the interview, IMHO.

- Strong Towns has a series of articles on American suburbia as a glorified ponzi scheme and the growing costs of maintaining this far-flung infrastructure. Yours truly will hopefully have a post on gentrification and suburbia's changing demographics later on.

- In post-racial America, blatant, naked discrimination takes more subtle, insidious forms. For instance, Mother Jones' Marc Bookman shows how virulent racism affects how the gears of the justice system turns for minorities. To wit:

...nearly eight years after Kenneth Fults was sentenced to death for kidnapping and murdering his neighbor Cathy Bounds in Spalding County, Georgia, one of the trial jurors made a startling admission under oath: He'd voted for the death penalty, he said, because "that's what that nigger deserved."

In 2005, a former prosecutor in Texas revealed that her superiors had instructed her, if she wanted to strike a black juror, to falsely claim that she'd seen the person sleeping. This was just a dressed-up version of the Dallas prosecution training manual from 1963, which directed assistant district attorneys to "not take Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans, or a member of any minority race on a jury, no matter how rich or how well educated."

As the clock wound down on Osborne's appeals, a former US attorney general, a former Georgia chief justice, and former President Jimmy Carter (previously the governor of Georgia) all spoke out against the execution. They had heard the allegation by another one of Mostiler's clients, a white man named Gerald Huey, that Mostiler had told him, speaking of Osborne, that "that little nigger deserves the chair."

a transcript from the trial of Derrick Middlebrooks, a black defendant who was so troubled by the racist talk that he asked the judge to dismiss Mostiler as his public defender: "He indicated to me that he wouldn't—he couldn't go up there among them niggers because them niggers would kill him," Middlebrooks said. "Now personally I don't know if he meant anything really by it. But I find it, you know, kind of hard to have an attorney to represent me when he uses those type of words. It doesn't help my confidence in my attorney."

This is nothing new, aside from the fact that things like these are being aired out for all the world to see.

- Gawker's David Graeber talks about Ferguson and how a perfect storm of institutional racism and policing for profit has culminated into a system that essentially harvests its own captive citizenry while keeping them locked in a permanent state of underclassdom.

- Abagond talks about segregation academies and their legacy. A few of the commentators are also discussing how integration has possibly done more harm than good for the black community (which is something I'll talk about at a later date, as well).

Meanwhile...

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Tue, 17 Mar 2015 13:28:00 +0000

Pictured above is the treacherous Marxist Usurper in Chief, Baraq Hussein Superallah Obama al-Kenya, palling around with his "bestie" and fellow dictator, Supreme Leader Kim Jong "Make-em Say" Un, in an undisclosed location.

- Putin's back, baby! Turns out he was just in bed with the flu. Even authoritarian ex-KGB types get sick every once in a while. He should be glad he didn't come down with a sudden case of polonium poisoning.

- Say "goodnight" to the grand white Christian experiment. White, non-Hispanic Christians are no longer a majority in 19 states. By the 2040s, the white majority in the U.S. will vanish altogether.

- Fresh-faced senator and presumptive shoe-in for the "who's ready to become a GOP presidential candidate 2016" sweepstakes Tom Cotton recently led the effort to undo the White House's efforts to not start any more Middle Eastern conflicts. The Iranian government, POTUS and the rest of America reacted in shock and disdain.

Now let's see what an Army veteran has to say about Tom Cotton:

“I would use the word mutinous,” said Eaton, whose long career includes training Iraqi forces from 2003 to 2004. He is now a senior adviser to VoteVets.org. “I do not believe these senators were trying to sell out America. I do believe they defied the chain of command in what could be construed as an illegal act.” Eaton certainly had stern words for Cotton.

“What Senator Cotton did is a gross breach of discipline, and especially as a veteran of the Army, he should know better,” Eaton told me. “I have no issue with Senator Cotton, or others, voicing their opinion in opposition to any deal to halt Iran’s nuclear progress. Speaking out on these issues is clearly part of his job. But to directly engage a foreign entity, in this way, undermining the strategy and work of our diplomats and our Commander in Chief, strains the very discipline and structure that our foreign relations depend on, to succeed.” The consequences of Cotton’s missive were plainly apparent to Eaton. “The breach of discipline is extremely dangerous, because undermining our diplomatic efforts, at this moment, brings us another step closer to a very costly and perilous war with Iran,” he said.

“I think Senator Cotton recognizes this, and he simply does not care,” Eaton went on to say. “That’s what disappoints me the most.”

Ouch.

- The recent hubbub over Selma has besmirched the delicate sensibilities of the city's most stalwart Confederates, prompting a valiant defense of the grand southern tradition and the peculiar institution it nurtured and supported:

“The people in the south – the white people, who were being abused – organised a neighbourhood watch to try to re-establish some order,” he said of the nascent Klan. Slavery in the south was “a bad institution”, he said, but possibly “the mildest, most humane form of slavery ever practiced”.

“If you look at the wealth created by the slaves, in food, clothing, shelter, medical care, care before you’re old enough to work, care until you died, they got 90% of the wealth that they generated,” he said. “I don’t get that. The damn government takes my money to the tune of 50%.”

You know what the scariest thing about this is? A mainstream conservative pundit like Glenn Beck can clean this up and totally roll with it nearly word-for-word and no one in his listening group would bat an eyelash.

- Because the great state of Alabama largely finds the idea of same-sex marriages to be an absolute affront to the natural order of things, a gay couple's having second thoughts about leaving their substantial estate to the University of Alabama.

And how much were they intending to leave behind? A cool $15 to 18 million.

- Because the GOP largely finds the idea of helping the undeserving poor to be an absolute affront to how the natural order of things should be, it's unveiling a budget that cuts a $100 million chunk out of the SNAP program.

And remember, if you call yourself a "Man of God" and think it's totally OK to ask your congregation for a cool $65 million so you can buy yourself a new private jet, then you probably need to have another pastor sit with you while you re-read the Holy Bible cover to cover.

Jeffrey Williams.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Sun, 15 Mar 2015 21:24:00 +0000

The fine chap in the above photo is one Jeffrey Leehoust Williams, recently arrested in connection with the recent shooting of two of Ferguson's finest. Now, gunning after law enforcement in response to the massive injustice that was the Michael Brown saga isn't something that's advocated here at DDSS or anywhere else, for that matter. Let's just say that aside from breathing a sigh of relief over said officers being alive and relatively well, there wasn't much sympathy to be had around these parts.

With that said, here are some of the facts behind the shooting, courtesy of St. Louis County prosecutor and possible Alcoholics Anonymous attendee Robert McCulloch:

Turns out Williams wasn't gunning at the cops, after all. Williams was reportedly involved in a separate altercation towards the end of the demonstrations. He admitted firing the shots, but claimed he was aiming at someone else. That "someone else" remains unknown at this point...
As a result, Williams is only being charged with first degree assault and not attempted murder.
McCulloch claimed information from "members of the public" led to the arrest. Aside from that, it's unknown precisely how Williams was found to be the suspect.
Police retrieved a .40 handgun whose bullets matched the casings left behind by the shooter, presumed to be (and self-confirmed as) Williams.
Williams apparently had a prior conviction for receiving stolen property. It's unknown how he managed to get access to a gun.

But here's the big question that many in the Ferguson protesting community have been asking:

Has any of my protest family seen this guy at any of demonstrations cuz I haven't #FergusonShooting pic.twitter.com/Col2L8cLgu
— Sass-N-Class (@christy_shantel) March 15, 2015

Survey says...

Never seen Jeffery Williams a day in my life since I came out on 8/13/14.
— Miles Baévis (@keenblackgirl) March 15, 2015

Looking at this guys photo and I've never seen him. In passing or a protest.
— ShordeeDooWhop (@Nettaaaaaaaa) March 15, 2015

Asked 4 protest regulars if they've ever seen/met Jeffrey Williams. Their text responses: "No" "Hell no" "Nope. No" "Never"
— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) March 15, 2015

So no one knows who this guy is, where he came from and whether he was really a part of the protest. Most of the well-known figures involved in the protests agree that he wasn't a regular.

If shooter was a regular protestor in #Ferguson there would be pics & vids of him posted all over Social Media. Yet nobody recognizes him.
— Delonte (@Delo_Taylor) March 15, 2015

Nope. No one knows who he is and how he came to be.

Why is this important? Because in light of massive levels of police misconduct in this and other departments throughout the U.S., most people tend to have...trust issues...when it comes to police information. No one's taking the circumstances surrounding the shooting and Williams' arrest at face value.

For all anyone knows, Jeffrey Williams could have been an elaborate scapegoat or, worse, a convenient plant whose actions would have done damage to the ongoing protests and destroyed its message.

In the meantime, there's plenty of questions being asked:

@mattdpearce @deray So it was a drive by? Was he the driver? Did anyone witness the vehicle on top of the hill?
— #MIKEBROWNCOVERUP (@mikebrowncover) March 15, 2015

How did McCulloch know #JeffreyWilliams was in a vehicle? Officers didn't say anything about a vehicle following the #FergusonShooting.
— #MIKEBROWNCOVERUP (@mikebrowncover) March 15, 2015

I want to stress this over & over. Using a handgun in the #fergusonshooting makes no sense. The range is extreme. pic.twitter.com/9NfdDAJVHF
— Andrew Westmoreland (@drewwest_press) March 15, 2015

Look at the distance from eyesight between where protesters were and police. Tightly packed pattern with a .40 at that range is unheard of.
— Andrew Westmoreland (@drewwest_press) March 15, 2015

Meanwhile...

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Sun, 15 Mar 2015 13:13:00 +0000

Russian president Vladimir Putin's last known whereabouts. The Appalachians are wonderful this time of year...

- Where's Putin? Who knows? Maybe he took a page from Mark Sanford's book and went on a "hiking trip." After all, presidential side chick Alina Kabaeva recently gave birth to a bouncing baby girl, although Swiss authorities claim there's no proof he ever paid a visit.

- Pando's Mark Ames (nee NSFWCorp) offers a quick reminder of the racist origins behind "Right to Work" legislation. From Ames' previous piece on the same subject:

Those hearings revealed that the anti-FDR "convention" that Vance Muse put on, through his "Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution"— which featured guests of honor like Gerald L K Smith, America’s leading anti-Semite and godfather to the modern American Nazi movement — was financed not only by Confederate sponsors like Texan Will Clayton, owner of the world’s largest cotton broker, but also reactionary northeast Republican money: the DuPont brothers, J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil, Alfred Sloan of General Motors... That unholy alliance of Northeastern and Confederate plutocrat money financed the first serious attempt at splitting the Southern Democrats off by exploiting white supremacism, all in order to break labor power and return to the world before the New Deal — and to the open shop.

Incidentally, Vance Muse’s northern donors — DuPont, Pew, Sloan — were the same core investors in (and board directors of) the first modern libertarian think-tanks of the 40s and 50s, including the Foundation for Economic Education. DuPont, Pew and Sloan funds also seeded the American careers of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, among others. In other words, Vance Muse’s funders built the first layer of the libertarian nomenklatura that Charles Koch later took control of — no surprise, since Koch outfits are credited with making the Michigan "right to work" law possible.

To the average industrialist in search of fatter bottom lines and cheaper labor, unrepentant bigots like Vance Muse are useful tools. All you have to do is stir up their feelings about those blacks and browns and they'll do whatever you ask of them, just as long as it accomplishes knee-capping the "other" even at the expense of their own well-being.

- It's been a while since the right wing had a "vast left-wing conspiracy" to catch vapors over. So when it was discovered that former Secretary of State and likely presidential candidate Hillary Clinton not only exclusively used a personal email account instead of a government account and pole-axed over 30,000 emails associated with that personal account, you knew the right finally had another juicy Clinton scandal to work themselves silly over.

Yes, using your personal email for your State Dept. gig smacks of a complete lack of accountability and, if it were anyone else, grounds for termination. But when you step back and think of all the potential controversies that could have surfaced, this one seems a bit weak in comparison.

Meanwhile, some sources say Valerie Jarrett blew the whistle over Email-gate because of how the Clintons seemed to be dissing the current Commander-in-Chief.

- Jarvis DeBerry drops a little Dr. Seuss on presumptive presidential fodder Bobby (nee Piyush) Jindal.

- Sure, the Department of Justice wasn't able to stick Darren Wilson in a can, but it did crack open the proverbial hamper and aired out the city of Ferguson, Missouri's dirty laundry. And because of the DOJ's findings, several high-ranking city officials have resigned, including the city manager and police chief.

Meanwhile, St. Louis-based Organization for Black Struggle has launched an effort to recall the city's current mayor. This is the same guy who, months prior to Michael Brown's death, staunchly championed privatizing large portions of Ferguson's law enforcement services.

The DOJ revealed a city (and numerous others like it) as little more than a naked cash-harvesting program using captive residents as a semi-renewable revenue stream. Yours truly will have more on this soon.

- Jeremy Clarkson discovers there are consequences for punching people not named Piers Morgan. How this affects the future of one of the world's most popular television series remains to be seen.

And by the way, John McCain, the next time you and your friends in the Senate try to undermine the president's authority and foreign affairs acumen, you might want to come up with an excuse a bit more substantial than "I sign lots of letters."

Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 18:59:00 +0000

There's a lot I could say about this. Like how racism is far from dead and will likely never die. Or how many corners of mainstream society still harbor prejudicial thoughts about minorities, but at least have the decency to keep them out of earshot of polite society. Or how an organization founded in the very heart of the Confederacy in antebellum times still perpetuates the same attitudes and beliefs that were present at the time of its foundation.

I could talk about all of that. Instead, I'll just pull a quote from a segment of Larry Wilmore's Comedy Central show, The Nightly Show:

“They also kicked the fraternity off campus, so don’t worry, you won’t be seeing any more of those frat boys - until they’re your congressmen.”

Imagine all the crazy shenanigans Trent Lott got up to during his time in Sigma Nu, except no one thought enough to capture it all on Double 8 film.

And that's the thing. No matter what the University of Oklahoma does to people like Parker Rice, these guys will inevitably land in places and positions of power and prestige, where their actions and beliefs will invariably shape and mold the processes and systems our society deals with on a regular basis.

Could you imagine Parker Rice on a Senate subcommittee deciding the fate of an education or healthcare initiative? I can and it's a scary feeling.

So while everyone pats SAE and OU on the back for performing the damage control required of them by their PR departments, keep in mind that you might be seeing some of these people again in another 10 or 15 years. I suggest you start jotting down names and committing them to memory.

Adventures In Double Standards: 2nd Amendment Edition.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 15:51:00 +0000

Anyone who's bothered to read through this blog knows how I feel about gun ownership. In my opinion, there's no stark black-and-white or good/bad about it - it's your intent and the level of responsibility you take in owning one that defines whether it's a good or bad thing to own one.

On the other hand, I'm not a big fan of open carry, if only for the following reason:

Last but not least, one has to be careful not to get sucked into the "cowboy/tough guy" image that comes with certain aspects of gun ownership. For some, having the ability to end someone's life in an instant is the ultimate rush and it's one that often leads them to adopt cavalier attitudes and to do stupid things and take idiotic risks that they otherwise wouldn't have taken had they not had instant death in the palm of their hands.

Sadly, a lot of open carry advocates are prone to take a cowboy/tough guy stance whenever someone challenges them on the necessity of what they do, constitutional issues notwithstanding, even when confronted by law enforcement:

Which is where the double standard comes in. Law enforcement officials have shot unarmed people for much less, yet here are several LEOs conversing with a guy who's openly armed and near a school, no less. Considering the spate of school shootings in recent years, it's no wonder why administrators would be a bit on edge around a guy who's supposedly exercising his 2nd Amendment rights.

John Crawford III was shot for examining a BB gun in a Walmart. Could you imagine a person of color being given the same sort of leeway as the person in the video was afforded?*

*Speaking of which, the last time black men open carried in significant numbers, it provoked a fear response in an entire state legislature.

Every Month Is Black History Month.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Sun, 01 Mar 2015 04:07:00 +0000

Just a friendly reminder from yours truly that black history isn't something you can just shove into the shortest month of the year and promptly forget about it when that month ends. Every Month is Black History Month.

Meanwhile...

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Mon, 23 Feb 2015 05:30:00 +0000

Pictured above is the treacherous Marxist Usurper in Chief, Baraq Hussein Superallah Obama al-Kenya, currently engaged in a vile act of vanity in preparations for Oscar night. Off-screen, the First "Lady" of the American Republic prepares a calorie-laden macaroni casserole while torturing a patriotic Real American with a single arugula leaf.

More and more haters are climbing out of the woodpile for our esteemed president. Just ask Rudy Giuliani, would-be/could-be/shouldn't-be contender for the 2016 presidential elections, who recently expressed doubts over POTUS's love of country and all it stands for, for better or worse. Meanwhile...

- The Great State of Alabama officially apologizes for mistaking an elderly Indian man for a really skinny black guy. You know how these things are and, well...they all look alike sometimes. Fortunately for Sureshbhai Patel and family, the Indian government has brought to bear tremendous pressure upon the state on their behalf, resulting in the offending officer's swift dismissal and arrest. Meanwhile, the black community looks on in envy.

- Police shootings are kinda getting out of hand. You shouldn't be shot 16 times in your own bed for grabbing your wallet. At least the victim got a $3 million settlement out of it.

- As it turns out, the conservative PACs that benefited most from Citizens United have been lining their own pockets by fleecing their donors:

Let’s say Ronald Reagan is still alive and someone starts the Re-Elect Ronald Reagan To A Third Term PAC. Because people love Reagan, let’s suppose that conservative donors pony up $500,000 to help the organization. However, the donors don’t know that Ronald Reagan has nothing to do with the PAC. Furthermore, the real goal of the PAC is to line the pockets of its owner, not to help Ronald Reagan. So, the PAC sets up two vendors, both controlled by the PAC owner: Scam Vendor #1 and Scam Vendor #2. Let’s assume it costs $50,000 to raise the half million the PAC takes in. Then, the PAC sends $100,000 to the first company and $100,000 to the second company to “promote Ronald Reagan for President.” Each of the companies then goes out and spends $1,000 on fliers. The “independent expenditures” that show up on the FEC report? They’re at 40%. That’s because the FEC doesn’t require vendors to disclose how much of the money they receive is eaten up as overhead. The dubious net benefit that Ronald Reagan receives from an organization that raised $500,000 on his name? It’s $2,000. On the other hand, the net profit for the PAC owner is $448,000. Is that legal? The short answer is, “It’s a bit of a grey area, but, yes, it is legal.”

I'm not surprised. This is what happens when you open the floodgates to every grifter and con artist on the block.

- Dinesh D'Souza continues to fight for America's freedoms using the power of Twitter. Shine on, you crazy diamond.

And remember folks, a little rioting is healthy for the soul. Unless you happen to be black, then it's a mug's game for thugs or, as buyers of commemorative "I Am Darren Wilson" sweatshirts would say, "a good day for a good shoot."

Islamic State, Domestic Terrorism and You.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Sat, 14 Feb 2015 04:39:00 +0000

I'll admit - I've been out of the loop these past few months. A lot of things have happened and there's a lot of ground to cover, but playing catchup, let alone keep up with a fast-paced news cycle that has a life expectancy shorter than Michael Sam's NFL career, takes time and effort. But I'll do my best, which leads me to ISIS.

Or IS. Or Islamic State, as it seems to be called at the moment. According to the mainstream media, it's a terrorist group that's shaped up to be the worst thing that's happened to the world since...well...this happened.* According to Gary Brecher, Pando Daily's (and formerly NSFWCorp's) very own War Nerd, it's just a collection of sullen Sunni Arab combatants who weren't happy about winding up on the losing end of the latest rounds of sectarian warfare. Sorta like the various Confederate revanchists who weren't happy about the dream of the southern planter class going up in smoke.

See that analogy? IS reminds us of a lot of things. The most recent antics of IS reminded Chauncey DeVega of a little thing that most good Americans have worked hard to studiously ignore, which is the lengthy reign of terror suffered by black Americans all throughout the post-Reconstruction and pre-Civil Rights era. Domestic terrorism, even under the guise of white anti-federalism as expressed by the likes of Timothy McVeigh, isn't really called that. That's a title generally reserved for leftist groups and people of Middle Eastern persuasion or non-Christian religious mores.

The people who were responsible for the 4,743 officially counted lynchings that occurred between 1882 and 1968 - good, upstanding Christian Americans one and all - wouldn't have considered themselves "terrorists," nor are they referred as such anywhere other than the occasional comment on a black-oriented blog. Make no mistake - those acts were every bit as much terrorism as the act of hurling two fully-loaded jets into the tallest skyscrapers New York City had to offer. Both acts were designed to instill sheer terror in those watching or even hearing about them.* The main difference is that 9/11 was designed to strike terror into the heart of all Americans. With few exceptions, the average lynching struck terror in the heart of minority groups who weren't fortunate enough to have their rights as citizens and human beings respected.

It's that comparison that apparently drew the ire of the War Nerd:

For people like Chauncey’s fans or Moyers’s admirers, nothing that happens outside the US matters at all. Only our sins are important. So a man burned alive in the Syrian desert becomes nothing but an excuse for a sermon on American History X, because only America matters, only America’s sins are real.

Brecher's beef lies with how, along with Bill Moyer, DeVega seemingly discounts Muadh al Kasasbeh’s death in favor of expounding on America's own flaws and ills. It's something that many of the more conservative types accuse liberal minded folks of doing - gleefully pointing out how America's just as bad as the bad guys it fights. It's no wonder this apparent failure to acknowledge this act and its ramifications in the broader geopolitical world in favor of domestic navel-gazing somehow struck a nerve:

Try imagining Chauncey or Bill minimizing an IDF phosphorus bombing in Gaza the way they trivialize this IS pyro video. Phosphorus burns people alive just as horrifically as kerosene, but would Moyers or de Vega trivialize Palestinian kids burnt alive with phosphorus by saying, “Remember the KKK! We’re just as bad!” Never. Because everyone would scream, quite rightly, that they were trivializing the IDF’s atrocity.

But both these fools spend thousands of words trivializing IS snuff movies, because…ah, it’s too stupid to paraphrase, but it goes something like this: “The US is the root of all evil, so IS is only acting out because it’s a victim. We did something bad to it somehow.”

If Brecher thinks DeVega is minimizing terrorist actions overseas by throwing up comparisons to lynching, then he should probably step back and consider this from the perspective of the average black person, a person unencumbered by the sectarian shit-kicking antics of a dying terrorist group in a land beset by sectarian strife and international intervention, but sorely affected by an entire institution seemingly sanctioned to commit a much quicker and more solitary form of lynching.

To the average black person on the street, the doings of IS pale in comparison to what they've directly and collectively experienced at the hands of America's own oft-acknowledged terrorist groups, with plenty of ongoing help from state institutions that continue to instill terror in black Americans to this day.

To say that DeVega gives few damns about what the IDF does to Palestinian children because what the NYPD does to young black Americans by far and large somehow overshadows the former is...well...a damn sight moronic in its own right, as DeVega himself points out. As for the distress over how lefty liberals are loath to go all-in on IS-bashing, Moyer's biggest fear is how it might lead to a renewed occupation effort by U.S. forces - the very thing that many on the left had fought tooth-and-nail against during the salad days of Iraq.

I respect the War Nerd's work, as it offers a no-bullshit perspective of current events (which is why I enjoyed NSFWCorp in the first place) and the occasional no-holds-barred takedown of some of the more egregious assholes who've somehow managed to actually get paid for their fluff work (I see you, Jen Percy). But he's off-base on this one. Even the commentariat over at Pando's calling foul.

* That's right Mack, just crack open the hornet's nest with your bare fist.

2015 State Of The Union Address.

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 04:27:00 +0000

If you're anything like yours truly and walked in on the ending segment of this year's State of the Union address, here's your chance to see it again in its entirety.

The White House recently broke tradition by releasing the full text of the speech to the public shortly before the address. Of course, there's also an official transcript of the full address available on the White House website.

Also:

WWMLKD?

noreply@blogger.com (Mack Lyons) — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 01:48:00 +0000

In light of all that's happened in the past year, all the lives unnecessarily lost and the unhinged hatred put on display thus far, one has to wonder what would the iconic civil rights leader would have to say about it all?

We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.

And it's something that a lot of people, including the very officers tasked with protecting and serving the citizenry, are having exceptional trouble grasping.

But America's obligation to the Negro has been, for lack of better words, wanting:

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

That "shameful condition" that existed at the time Dr. King uttered the above still exists, and not on part of the Negro, as many would gleefully claim.

Just a little food for thought on this MLK day.

Previous posts:

Martin Luther King, Jr. (2012)
'He Ended The Terror Of Living As A Black Person.' (2012)
Martin Luther King, Jr. (2014)