In Cold Blood

It happens all the time.  It happened in my small town this Summer as the police questioned a man parked behind a restaurant after closing time.  Whether confused or inebriated, the man didn't get out of his car and it began to roll. The policeman stood his ground instead of stepping aside and emptied his pistol into him.  A grand jury decided against charging him and  like so many other stories involving citizens being shot by police for such things as asking for help or going out to their driveways to get a pack of cigarettes from their car, we will hear no more of it. No matter what a citizen is or is not guilty of, instant and abject obedience or summary execution is the law on the street.

I still remember a TV news story from back in the 1980s because the victim drove the same 1985 Pontiac Fiero GT I did at the time. The video, shot by a bystander, showed a police officer copying down the front plate number while the driver sat in his car parked at the curb. The nervous driver let his foot slip off the brake and the car rolled ever so slightly forward.  Instead of stepping to the side the officer drew his Beretta service pistol and emptied a magazine into the driver at point blank range.  That report was the last attention the media payed to the incident, but as I said, it happens all the time and it happened again in Ames Iowa on the university campus to a young, unarmed driver sitting in his van with the motor running.

Tyler Comstock and his father were working together as landscapers and when the elder Comstock refused to give his son a cigarette his teenage son got in the company truck to go out to buy  some. The father decided to "teach him a lesson" and reported it stolen. A police officer pursued him despite the dispatcher's telling him to back off. . There was a crash.  The officer's car was hit. Tyler didn't shut the engine off as directed and so the officer opened fire, killing the 19 year old.  Yet another senseless killing by someone either in a panic or in a fit of indignation at someone not obeying orders quickly enough. It happens all the time.  An officer fears for his life, feels his authority is being threatened or disrespected, mistakes a gesture sees a pack of cigarettes or a wallet as a weapon, a moving vehicle as a deadly attack -- pulls a gun, makes an excuse. . .

Sorry for this Recommendation....

I read plenty of articles that bash President Obama, but I am rarely affected or feel the need to share. Tonight's front page article on Yahoo! really hit a string. Obama makes a quick remark in which he says he is sorry.

The end of the year is my favorite. I enjoy the holiday season. The end of the year is busy in preparation for the following new year. Recently, we had our annual insurance plan meeting. I was shocked to learn that my insurance plan rose a little over twice as much the amount I am currently paying. I was very upset. By the way, I had 48 hours to make my decision, another unfortunate finding.  Needless to say, there is no pay raise with that raise. After reading the following article, I was reminded that I kept my insurance plan; even though, I am now going to pay more than twice as much for it. Sorry does not cut it. I am sorry I have to pay more; yet, I am paying more. I feel like I have been pushed off a cliff and my aggressor is yelling sorry as I am falling. The man who a month ago would not budge on negotiations regarding the Affordable Health Care Act is now sorry? With that, take a look, and off to bed I go.

http://news.yahoo.com/president-obama-he%E2%80%99s-sorry-for-americans-losing-insurance-plans-233753421.html




Aurora

Something is happening here

What the hell is going on with the rampage shootings?  Sometimes what's obvious isn't what's true, but hate mongering is now the American Passtime.  Even Baseball doesn't get round the clock coverage even during the World Series while anti-government rants and raves have more opinion shouters on more stations than I can count.  And then there's Fox News.  Is it any wonder the loose cannons of America are aimed at authority.

Who likes the TSA?   They've made traveling by air so unpleasant, I avoid it when at all possible, but apparently, some take it more seriously. Paul Anthony Ciancia took it with all the deadly seriousness only a madman can muster.  How he could walk into an airport with a rifle under his arm, like someone on a hunting trip, I don't know. Airports in Europe that I've been in have armed commandos in plain view, but apparently LAX does not and it seems almost miraculous that more people were not shot yesterday morning. At  this point I don't know who was responsible for wounding him multiple times, but fortunately he was captured before his suicide-by-cop plan came to fruition.

Ciancia was obviously deranged and apparently suicidal according to family members who called LAPD. At this point, I don't know who was responsible for wounding him multiple times, but fortunately he was captured before his suicide by cop plan came to fruition. We shall see, but at this point, the usual sources have been, since the original reports, concentrating on the military appearance of his "high powered" rifle as though that mattered in this day of handguns with 30 round magazines.  If  experience teaches anything, I'll bet that the choreographed media response will concentrate on repeating failed approaches and avoid any discussion of how people like Ciancia can buy any kind of weapon, how anyone can carry a rifle into an airport unopposed and how the anti-government hate mongers can act appalled while they continue to tell the idiots and madmen of America that the government is out to rob them of their freedom and property and put them in death camps.

It seems as though the TSA at LAX has been confiscating a frightening number of handguns, most loaded, at security checkpoints. We should be concerned.  We should wonder why
Because something is happening here. 
But you don't know what it is.  
Do you, Mister Jones?

12 Years A Slave

This is no "sentimental Gone With The Wind kitsch" as David Denby of the New Yorker Magazine observed, but a stark and powerful story of slavery in the pre-Civil War South and how it brutalized not only the slaves but the people who owned them.

The story is based on the book written by Solomon Northup, a free man from Saratoga Springs, New York, who was kidnapped and sold into bondage and endured the dehumanizing effects of slavery for 12 years.

I had recently read Frederick Douglass's memoirs and recognized much of what he suffered as a slave in Northup's story. Although Douglass was born into slavery and escaped to freedom, unlike Northup, who was born a free man and was forced into slavery, both men's stories of unimaginable suffering and humiliation remind us of this country's horrific original sin and how the South was unwilling to give up its barbaric addiction to a culture that forced its people to dehumanize their slaves so they could justify keeping them in unspeakably cruel and brutish conditions.

David Denby called 12 Years A Slave "...easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery."

After having seen Django Unchained and The Butler, I have to agree.  This is a radical film that challenges the viewer to confront the stark reality of "America's primal wound," and refuses to sentimentalize the savagery that was practiced in the pre-Civil War South.  And it is presented with elegance and historic clarity I rarely see in Hollywood films of this kind.

Do yourself a favor and go see this.  And take your children. This is real American history and all its bloody truth in the lash and the chain, brought to the screen by British director, Steve McQueen.

British Shakespearean actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, as Northup, is outstanding.


New York Times Review:

“12 Years a Slave” isn’t the first movie about slavery in the United States — but it may be the one that finally makes it impossible for American cinema to continue to sell the ugly lies it’s been hawking for more than a century. Written by John Ridley and directed by Steve McQueen, it tells the true story of Solomon Northup, an African-American freeman who, in 1841, was snatched off the streets of Washington, and sold. It’s at once a familiar, utterly strange and deeply American story in which the period trappings long beloved by Hollywood — the paternalistic gentry with their pretty plantations, their genteel manners and all the fiddle-dee-dee rest — are the backdrop for an outrage.

(O)CT(O)PUS Will Be Off Grid

I have a family milestone to attend and will be away until next Wednesday.  Meanwhile, I am sure Captain Fogg and the fabled critters of this realm will keep you enlightened and entertained.

My last post until I return, here is a short video that caught my fancy (for reasons that will become obvious to you).  Enjoy.

Musicotherapie from Beakus on Vimeo.

A short film created by Clément Picon, Manu Javelle and Beakus director Amael Isnard when graduating from France's prestigious school Supinfocom. In a mental hospital for animals, four patients start making music with every object they can find. Featuring music by Tambour Battant the film was shown at Pictoplasma, OneDotZero, Anima Bruxelles, NYCFF New York, and Animafest Zagreb, picking up several awards along the way.

Wing Dings

An exchange that took place in Cyberspace within the hour:

----------------------------------------------------

On Ignorant Leftists; Octopus

His avenue for uncovering "the truth"? Thumbing through the pages of the New York Times. I shit you not. 

POSTED BY WILL "TAKE NO PRISONERS" HART AT 1:41 PM

2 COMMENTS:

(O)CT(O)PUS said...

Will,

When you disparage a person on your weblog, at least have the decency to provide the link so readers can adjudge for themselves the subject conversation; otherwise all you have accomplished is a gratuitous argumentum ad hominem in a churlish and cowardly manner.

OCTOBER 25, 2013 AT 7:36 PM

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

Fuck you.

OCTOBER 25, 2013 AT 7:44 PM

----------------------------------------------------

Classy!

Song of the South

" If it hurts a bunch of lazy Blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.” 

Said North Carolina state GOP executive committee member and precinct chairman Don Yelton, about the new, more restrictive voting laws  --  and there you have it, the cornerstone, the key assumption, the basis of Republican philosophy.  I can't say, as much as it might seem otherwise, that there's been no progress in the old, old, quest for recognition of people of color as fully human; as real citizens with the same rights and privileges and responsibilities as white, Anglo-Saxon Americans.  After all when I was a kid, he wouldn't have said "lazy Blacks."

Barack Obama is of course all about buckets of chicken, watermelons, welfare checks and leering at white women, or at least he is in the imaginations of people like Yelton who is after all, the sad remainder of what was once a political party.  All else, all that purports to be principle, philosophy, policy and patriotism is simply camouflage. It's not a coincidence that what others might think of as undeserving categories of white people aren't mentioned, the kind of folks that a previous generation subjected to forced sterilization so that they wouldn't pass on their inferior genes. Undereducated, malnourished, uncivilized, unmotivated, intoxicated made dependent by welfare and ill-suited for informed citizenship, they're nevertheless white and at the very least more nearly all right.  In fact so many of them vote Republican they're needed, if for no other reason.

People that may have been Dixiecrats back before the civil rights movement alienated them from the Democratic Party,  have been feeling sorry for themselves since before the Civil War, burdened by the requirements of modern civilization which they see in terms of their hard earned money and privilege being taken away by the damn Yankees and given to the "takers."

And now one of "them" has taken the presidency. Ain't gonna let that happen again!

I often think of Republicans like Winnie the Pooh without the charm: as creatures of very  little brain, but of course they have their wicked wizards, smart enough to fire people like Yelton who make too much noise from behind the curtain and expose the game.

The County GOP Chairman, in firing Yelton's ass this week said in a statement to a local TV station that Yelton's statements were:

“offensive, uniformed and unacceptable of any member within the Republican Party.
“Let me make it very clear: Mr. Yelton’s comments do not reflect the belief or feelings of Buncombe Republicans, nor do they mirror any core principle that our party is founded upon, This mentality will not be supported or propagated within our party.”

Except of course in practice.

Texas Wants To Disenfranchise Women Voters. Do You Know Why?

Voter ID laws have been passed in eleven Republican-controlled states since the 2010 midterm elections; yet studies have shown that alleged cases of voter fraud are virtually nonexistent. The voters most likely to be turned away at the polls for not having valid state-issued IDs are groups targeted for suppression - African Americans, Latinos, students and younger voters, senior citizens, and now women -- groups that traditionally support Democrats.

In an effort to build support for voter ID laws, the Republican National Lawyers Association published a report that identified only 400 prosecutions for the entire country during a span of ten years. That’s not even one prosecution per state per year. Yet, an estimated 5 million voters will be disenfranchised - enough to alter election outcomes nationwide year after year.

Do you smell a rat?  In the state of Wisconsin alone, voter registration hours were lengthened in Republican districts and shortened in Democratic districts. This is a fact. Smell the rat! And Texas intends to go one step further:

"What I have used for voter registration and for identification for the last 52 years was not sufficient yesterday when I went to vote," said District Court Judge Sandra Watts.  Imagine that!  A District Court judge who is not allowed to vote!  Watts has voted in every election for the last past 49 years; the name on her driver's license had been unchanged for 52 years; and the address on her voter registration card has remained the same for two decades.

Imagine her surprise when District Court Judge Sandra Watts was told by voting officials that she would have to sign an affidavit confirming her identity.

Why? The middle name printed on her driver’s license is her maiden name. The middle name printed on her voter registration card is her original middle name recorded at birth. It was enough to raise a red flag under new and more restrictive laws.

Is this an unintended consequence of new voter ID laws in the Lone Star State?  Hardly!  This is why:

Meet Wendy Davis, the Democratic candidate for Governor in Texas. In case you haven’t noticed, Wendy Davis is a woman, and the good ole boys of the Lone Star State don’t want women to vote for her. 

Nothing stays in stasis forever. Once you establish election chicanery as standard operating procedure, it metastasizes cancer-like through the entire system. Today it may be Republicans doing this to Democrats; tomorrow it may be the Manchurian candidate from Chargoggagogg-manchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg doing this to Republicans.

This year, I am writing a book on voter suppression. I have interviewed canvassing commissioners of both parties, Democrat and Republican. There is no daylight between them on how to run a fair and honest election. Politicians, however, are another story and especially notorious for chicanery and corruption. 

In Florida last year, Governor Grifter-Scott ordered the purge of 180,000 names from state voter rolls. Canvassing commissioners, both Democrat and Republican, examined these lists and found all to be bogus - not even one name.

How can you have full faith and confidence in the legitimacy of elections when results are rigged along party lines! The question is rhetorical: You can’t.  How can you vote in good conscience for a candidate or party that wants to deprive you of a fundamental right?  The question is rhetorical: Don’t!

(More references with commentary in the comment section below)

Feeling the Elephant

Ur-Zababa King of Sumer
Ur-Zababa King of Kish
Ur-Zababa had a nightmare
Ur-Zababa had a dream
Sargon in a raft of rushes
Sargon of the floating basket
Pours the wine for Ur-Zababa
One last time.

________

The parallels between the literature that eventually became the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and other ancient legends in all their versions are inescapable, even for a beginning student of ancient history:  the eye for an eye of Hammurabi, the Story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, the story of the infant Sargon found floating in a basket on the Tigris, like Moses on the Nile.  Such observations are striking at first glance to the untrained eye, but sometimes that untrained eye may also be the unprejudiced eye.

 Does anyone not recall the first time they saw a globe, how obvious was the fit between the European and African coast of the Atlantic?  Studying Geology ages ago, we were taught that it was only a coincidence and Plate Tectonics was a radical, almost heretical concept.  The world, of course was still just as it was made, only cooler and with mountains perhaps thrust up by contraction. Of course, Eppur si muove, as Galileo may or may not have said about the 'stationary' Earth. And still it moves, or at least the continents do. Did that plucked turkey look like a dinosaur?  Coincidence. That ape like a man?

Was the Moses Story embellished with older folk tales?  There are so many other examples of plots and even phrases in Bible stories that it's tempting to say so and it's hard to say that it isn't so.  It's hard, at least for history buffs and students of ancient literature to deny it and yet easy, if perhaps the desperation shows a little, in the always condescending and often irrelevant or fallacious dismissals written by Biblical certainty advocates.

Yes, there are minor differences.  Moses' mother was not a princess; he was adopted by one. The Tigris is a fast river, the Nile is a slower one. the Atlantic coasts do not exactly mesh. Jesus is not an exact copy of Mithras or Osiris or Ganesh or any of the many other Biblical or extra Biblical sons of gods or resurrected saviors of nations or souls. Noah and Ut-Napishtim are different.  None of the myth makers whose stories appear in the Bible could have read the Popol Vuh with it's resurrection of Hun-Hunahpu -- but as Joseph Campbell said, when you get down to the deepest well of myth you find a deeper one at the bottom.  Such stories are archetypes perhaps; rooted in our basic human desire or propensity to concoct explanatory stories about what we cannot know or understand. Each culture creates the same stories in its own image.

Perhaps the Sargon story, in it's obviously mythologized form, comes from the same instinct or from the same primordial urge or instinct we all share that produced the obviously mythologized Moses tale.  We do have hard evidence for Sargon of Akkad, conqueror of Sumer, scourge of Elam. We have none whatever for Moses and we have so many contradictions and no evidence whatever in that story. yet look at how fiercely we defend it's inerrant accuracy!

All this is just another stanza in my long lament about the illusion of reason and truth and objectivity in the way we humans see reality.  Some of us do so more than others; more often that others do and about more things, but we are what we are. Like the blind men and the elephant we see dimly if at all, but the tragedy is not in our blindness, but in the fact that in gaining sight, we cling to the things we became comfortable with back when we were blind, even as the elephant laughs.

Turning a Glitch into a Gotcha

With the threat of debt default delayed until February, Tea Party Republicans remain determined to win in defeat what they lost by blackmail.  Unbowed and undeterred, the anti-abortion party wants to abort ObamaCare, exploit every glitch to turn public opinion against it, and sabotage reform at all cost. SNAFU! See, they told you so!

An error of attribution, real fault points in the direction of government contractors and the procurement process.  In this case, one culprit is Booz Allen, a legacy contractor with deep political pockets – the same corporation at the center of the Snowden mess.

An estimated dozen or more firms won ACA contracts - stalwarts such as Booz Allen, Rand, CGI, Deloitte, Xerox (a $72 million contract to build the Nevada exchange and $68 million for the Florida exchange), and Vagent (a vagrant subsidiary of General Dynamics).

On the lobbying and political contribution side of this mugging are QSS-United Health ($10 million in lobbying and direct political contributions), Vagent ($24 million), and Verizon Business Services ($$35 million), as examples.  Did I say lobbying and political contributions?  Oops, perhaps I should have used the words bribery and graft:

Some 17 ACA contract winners reported spending more than $128 million on lobbying in 2011 and 2012, while 29 had employees or political action committees or both that contributed $32 million to federal candidates and parties in the same period (source).

Every glitch feeds the narrative of an inept government, a favorite stalking point of the Tea Party Republicans.  Of course, mainstream media reports all controversies as high drama for entertainment but fails to investigate the creepier things lurking under rocks:

• Legacy contractors and their culture of overarching entitlement (meaning guaranteed profits with no obligation to be held accountable for the integrity and timeliness of their work),
• The incestuous relationship between the captains of capitalism and the politicians who sleep with them. 

In short, here is your free enterprise system at work - in secret and behind your back.

Remember Halliburton, the company that won billions of dollars in no-bid contracts and honored American taxpayers by moving corporate headquarters to a tax-free zone in Dubai? How quickly the public forgets the outrage expressed by Senator Patrick Leahy (D. Vermont): "This is an insult to the U.S. soldiers and taxpayers who paid the tab for their no bid contracts and endured their overcharges for all these years" source.

Those who blame glitches in implementation on President Obama or Kathleen Sebelius miss the point.  No amount of partisan pandering or intellectual dishonesty will get you to the root of the problem unless you are willing to dig deeper.