Can We Break the Circle of Fear?

I hate to jump on bandwagons and for sure, everyone who writes on blogs will be writing about all this, either trying to make sense out of madness, or adding to it.

I don't want to add to it or to look for blame or offer an interpretation that no one wants to read -- but I do have questions.  Why do arresting officers work themselves into an incoherent lather, screaming hysterically so that anyone they're addressing is more likely to panic than to comply?  Anyone who has handled firearms for long enough will realize that when you have your finger on the trigger, guns go off when you least expect it. In fact that fact is used to improve accuracy in target shooting.   If you're howling like a wild animal backed into a corner, the gun will go off in your finger is on the trigger. It most certainly will and you'll be as surprised as anyone else when it does.

Are police trained to do this?  Why?   Why when someone is pinned to the ground and someone yells "gun" and you don't know why, do you start pumping one round after another into the man on the ground, shrieking like scalded cats? Is the technique of descending into group panic designed to turn good men into dangerous cowards?

I'm very tired of the folk psychology about hidden prejudice lurking behind every white face. It makes as little sense as shooting Dallas cops for something that happened in Minnesota, because if we're training police to be trigger happy and paranoid, anyone could be a target, including other policemen.  The key word, I think is training, teaching cops to handle people as well as they handle weapons would be a start. As it is, some cops are training the public to fear them  and mistrust them to the point of panic and especially minorities.  I'd call it a vicious circle if it weren't a cliche'.

Prejudice is a natural part of learning in humans and animals. We make judgments based on past experience -- we prejudge from our training as well. Our reflexes, our conditioned responses are the result of learning from many sources and to say it's hopeless and a property of our race is no less than racism, and although the idiot Trump can say we have to fight fire with fire, we don't. We don't fight racism with racism and we don't have to murder people because they make us nervous and we don't have to make the public terrified by yelling at them as though we were insane.  If we're that untrained and unstable we shouldn't be cops in the first place.

Star Light, Star Bright

"Fluch ist auch ein Segen, Nacht ist auch eine Sonne,"

 -Friedrich Nietzsche- Also Sprach Zarathustra 

 One of the difficulties in searching for exoplanets is seeing the minuscule light reflected from a planet against the massive glare of a star. It's the same thing with politics, only in reverse. The dim flicker of the FBI's decision that Mrs. Clinton's email problem didn't rise to the level of justifying prosecution, no doubt tempered by the observation that George Bush's Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, did the same thing, somehow seems still to be outshining the grave damage done to the world by that administration and the consequences we're still struggling with.

 But of course you don't campaign with the facts you actually have, you campaign with the facts you pretend you have and one still hears breathless talk of treason and espionage from the Trump campaign. It creates a sort of fake light that masks the idiocies still so gallantly streaming from those puckered lips. It's not easy though.

 Today's Trumpet blast from the golden-haired boy is that  more dictators like Saddam Hussein  "who knew how to deal with terrorists.*

That's an excellent observation at a time when the motivation for attacking the US is fueled by the fact that we've interfered with democracy and supported vicious tyrants like Saddam Hussein for so long.

What can I say but Shock and Awe?

 A curse is also a blessing, the night is also a sun. Light is dark, dark light and Trump will makes us great.

 * Nerve gas, torture, germ warfare summary executions, conquest and more.

73 to Juno

For those of you who know the International Radiotelegraph  code or Morse as it's popularly known, The letters HI (or more often HIHI)  has for a very long time been shorthand for laughter between telegraphers.  The sequence .... .. sort of sounds like it, don't you think?  Anyway, it's been heard around the world but now also out of this world.

Most of us have heard by now that Spacecraft Juno has entered a Jupiter orbit after years of dancing around the inner planets picking up speed. Not as many know that back in October, 2013 Ham Radio operators around the world participated in a test of one of Juno's radios designed to explore Jupiter's radio spectrum by transmitting the letters HI in slow Morse code as Juno flew past Earth.

Using the 10 meter band, hams tuned to a specific frequency depending on the last letter in their call sign and transmitted HI slowly in synch with the Internet. The test was successful and the signal received from myriad Earthbound transmitters, most no more powerful than 100 Watts, at a distance of over 23,000 miles.

Of course Hams have been talking to the International Space Station for years, but somehow this felt more dramatic even though there was no one on board to listen or answer.  Anyway 73 Juno, as one says in code:  So long, best wishes.

TO TAKE A MORAL STAND

Even if it means antagonizing the newspaper that publishes my columns, there are times when taking a moral stand becomes necessary.

I write about hate speech. About the bully pulpits of animus and injustice that surround us.  I write about pols and trolls and new millennium brown shirts who scapegoat innocent people and paint them with the brush of guilt. Guilt by color. Guilt by race. Guilt by religion. Guilt by association. Guilt according to the news headlines de jour.

Blood libel.  Do you know the term?  It refers to a medieval superstition that accused Jews of drinking the blood of Christian children. Blood libel lead to pogroms and the mass murder of Jews by Christians throughout Europe.  It lead to centuries of anti-Semitism culminating in the Holocaust.  

Hate speech laced with blood libel inflames lynch mobs. It turns unhinged people into frenzied insects who swarm online with words of hate and scorn. Swarming insects feasting on blood libel. 

The blood libel of medieval Jews is now the blood libel of American Muslims. There have been numerous hate crimes committed against Muslim citizens in recent months. Intimidation. Vandalism of homes and places of worship. Beatings. Gunfire. This weekend, a Muslim man was beaten in the parking lot of a local Mosque.

Good citizens, husbands and fathers, people who pay taxes and fulfill their civic duty who happen to be Muslim Americans … all are turned into objects of ridicule and scorn.  Blood libel.  It makes no difference what they do.  Blood libel.  Hate speech is not free speech when innocent people are forced to live in fear, in their homes, in their communities and places of worship.  Blood libel.

Meanwhile, bigots wrap themselves in raptures of pretend patriotism and phony piety … and inflame public opinion with toxic blood libel. Here a letter addressed to the editors on my local newspaper:

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

To the Editors of the Scripps/USA Today newspaper chain:

If a Neo-Nazi group submitted an anti-Semitic hate screed, would you print it?  If a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan submitted a racist hate screed, would you print it?

If the answer is “no” to the above questions, then why do you countenance these comments online:

Jim Matthews (See Percy Kepfer letter @ 9:20 AM): “Shouldn't we keep stone age barbaric MoonGod Allah devil worshipers ... from infiltrating modern civilization??”

Jim Matthews (See Gerald James letter @ 9:08 AM): “Stoneage Barbaric devil worship belongs back in their own stoneage caliphate ... totally incompatible with any modern society!!”

William Addeo (see Gerald James letter @ 9:15 AM): “It's time to play Cowboys and muslims.”

William Addeo (see Mohammed Malik column @ 1:40 PM): “You are the enemy Pat Griffis … That's called treason.”

Andrew Treacy (see Anthony Westbury column @ 9:03 AM): “See you all at the next Biker rally” [ note provocation].

William Addeo (see Mohammed Malik column @ 5:56 PM): “Here goes; big mouth, it's time to eat your words … Can a good muslim be a good American? NO, BECAUSE HIS ALLEGIANCE IS TO ALLAH, THE MOON GOD OF ARABIA … What part of this don't you understand?  The answer is simple.  You are one of THEM.  May Jesus Christ, the only God [my bold], bless America.”

Please note the irony (and hypocrisy) of the last comment: “My only God trumps your only God,” and “Freedom for me, but not for thee.”

If your answer is “no” to publishing hate screeds in your newspaper, then your online edition has failed miserably:

William Addeo (see Jack Bergstressor letter @ 1:13 PM): “Hollywood is controlled by Jews … It's all about power and money and control of the masses.”

Note: This comment trades on old shibboleths that equate Jews with power and world domination — straight from the pages of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the book that inspired Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. What next? Crude jokes about ovens of the Holocaust or lynched bodies hanging from Cottonwood trees? If you disavow hate screeds, why then do you allow anti-Muslim comments to flourish unchecked online? Speaking of  double standards …

There have been numerous reprisals against Muslim citizens in recent months. A Muslim woman profiled by police was strip searched in public. Intimidation. Vandalism of homes and places of worship. Beatings. Gunfire.  This weekend, a Muslim man was beaten at the Fort Pierce Mosque (((but no hate crime according to Sheriff Mascara))).

For Anthony Westbury, the “Patriot Cruise” around the Fort Pierce Mosque is an act of intimidation. He says: “As a community, we need to nip such divisive efforts in the bud before they escalate into hate crimes and cause irreparable damage.” Why then do you countenance hate speech online!

Addeo and Matthews are predatory trolls. They dominate, disrupt, and overwhelm online discussions. They target specific topics and writers for bullying and treat readers with rude ad hominem insults. Please note:

Trolls do not make fools of themselves. When you enable them, they make fools of you.

Recently, I contributed two guest columns on hate speech: (1) “With freedom of speech comes great responsibility” [May 12, 2016], and (2) “Merchants of hate in a moment of crisis” [June 25, 2016].  It is especially galling to devote time and attention on an urgent moral message only to see these efforts undermined by the very same newspaper that hosts bigots and allows its online discussion boards to be used as a medium for hate speech and incitement.  

No audience deserves harangues and verbal abuse. What steps will you take to clean up your cesspool? When will you establish a disciplined standard of civil discourse? With comment moderation? And the removal of abusive trolls? I want answers.

July 3, 2016

Shahada

The myth of Sodom and its destruction is a lesson about there being no forgiveness for the mistreatment of strangers and visitors.  For centuries, preachers and other liars have pretended it was about sex, but it's not and it remains a lesson for our time.

I continue to be disgusted and offended and embarrassed and angry about the response of the locals to the recent Orlando terrorist attack. Hearing  the vicious calumnies leveled at Muslims and a nearby Islamic cultural center, serving American Muslims, I have a hard time separating these subhuman but self-righteous bastards from the people who blow up and shoot up churches and synagogues and clinics:  people who give good people good reason to hate the self-styled Christians and patriots who claim this used to be a great country when they had their way. It's never been a great country because it's always been driven by bigots, slavers, genocidal monsters and murderers of the innocent.

I may check the headlines in the local papers, but the editorial pages, both in print and on-line could have been published in any right wing German newspaper in 1936. It's all hate, and all the time. Last Wednesday's paper included a political cartoon labeling Muslims as murderers and bigots as though these good and gentle Christian soldiers didn't stink of the Beast.

All these bozos seem to be scholars of the Quir'an and are quite convinced that it's all about justifying lies that serve jihad and justify slaughter.  Of course that's true to exactly the same extent that the Greek nonsense tacked on to the Hebrew bible justifies hatred, intolerance and the actions of the Reverend Jim Jones, David "Koresh" and Timothy McVeigh.  Listen to them tell you those weren't "real" Christians but Osama bin Laden was the prototype for all Muslims! Does it even rise to the level of hypocrisy?  Is it just inconsistent to go after, to insult and threaten the guy who turned the shooter in to the FBI because he's a Muslim -- or is it just insanity?

It looks like the local law enforcement doesn't want to provide extra patrols and I read with disgust one motorcyclist advocating driving around and around the mosque revving his engine to annoy and intimidate.  How can it not remind anyone who remembers those days of  Mississippi and Alabama in the 1950's? Does anyone think anyone will be prosecuted for terroristic threats against Muslims?

It's more than hate, it's cowardice, it's fear and panic. It's ignorance and it's everything that makes us the ugliest and meanest of peoples.  I can't separate it from our religious and military boasting, another product of cowardice and ignorance.

It would be tempting to blame it on Southern provincialism and Southern rage and Southern custom, but you know, almost everyone here on Florida's Treasure Coast is from somewhere else: New England, New York, New Jersey.  It's an American thing, it's a Trump thing, it's a stupid, ugly and evil thing and I'm to the point where, despite my loathing of religion in general, I'm about to bind it on my arm, nail it to my doorpost, wear it on my forehead as frontlets between my eyes: لا إله إلا الله محمد رسول الله  you miserable bastards. Get the fuck out of my country.

Safety First

Like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir. I have tried in my way to be free.

-Leonard Cohen-


Here's a nightmare for you: Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty seeking America in a self-driving, air conditioned, Japanese safety capsule with no windows but with blue tooth and WiFi.  

Self driving cars: the urge to produce them mystifies me since being able to drive is an essential and precious freedom in my book. for over a hundred years it's been what America was about and I wonder what has done as much, rightly or wrongly - for personal liberty in America as the automobile.

I understand that the "millennials" are now the center of all marketing targets.  I understand the "millennials" aren't quite as keen on the fading American car culture that defined my own youth. They seem to prefer staring at those little black boxes and perhaps having a self-driving vehicle will allow their undivided attention to games and TV and playlists while shopping and texting their 19,642 Facebook Friends -- who knows?  

But robot cars are being touted as an important safety measure and safety in our country is seen as paramount, with all other rights and privileges pertaining to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness being secondary to the needs of absolute safety and the demands of an entertainment addiction.

You'll gather that  I'm mostly against these things, and I am, but not only for the threat of  restrictive "car control" regulations but for the firm belief that no machine can possibly predict the actions of another driver nor read the pavement to predict adhesion nor even distinguish a paper bag in the road from a cement block -- or someone's cat.   That opinion seems not to be so technophobic after May 7th when a Florida Tesla driver, cruising along on "autopilot" watching Harry Potter, found his Tesla not quite so good at discriminating between an 18 wheeler and a cloud and refrained from taking evasive action or hitting the brakes and putting the driver into another and safer vehicle: his coffin.

But it's "potentially life saving" and as anyone knows, even if one life is saved, all is justified.  Safety First, as everyone knows.

Now autopilots on airplanes are dependable and probably safer than requiring a pilot's concentration of great lengths of time. My former yacht had one and it worked amazingly well but the law and common sense demand that someone be at the helm watching out and able to take over command with the push of a big, red, button.  Cars?  Not so much as the popular phrase suggests.  Sure, pass a law so you can give out a ticket after a couple of carloads worth of people get killed. Great idea.

Of course highway safety has increased steadily, decade after decade and hasn't been much affected by speed limits or stop light cameras or $3000 speeding fines. So why are we ever more demanding of safety gadgets that pretend to be better than a trained and practiced human?   Is the day getting closer when we spend our lives sealed in a safety capsule, experiencing the real world only second hand via virtual reality coming soon?  Probably not. Nothing in history is linear, but that general trend makes reality so much more precious. Exercizing a skill, relying on it for your own safety, Being part of the enviornment first hand is worth it, but everywhere I see black boxes in the hands of people sitting in black boxes with blacked out windows and not looking out of them as they go about their connected days, oblivious.

So maybe this is a good morning to take the Schwinn out for a ride, while I still can ride it without body armor, back up cameras and padded pavement.

Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be

"I'm self-funding my own campaign."

— Donald Trump on Monday, February 1st, 2016 in a campaign rally in Iowa

I would promise to strangle the next person who told me Trump is the most trustworthy of candidates because "he financed his own campaign" but really, at my age I lack the stamina.  So many necks (red and otherwise) and so little time.

Besides the shaky argument that he'd be honest by being beholden to no contributor, it's not entirely true since not only does he have donors, but much of that self-funding consists of loans by him to his campaign. Whether or not he intends to use donations to repay himself is unclear either from his record or his promises.   But of course he's hardly refraining from asking for money and apparently in mockery of his accusations of dishonesty against his opponent, he's mocking the law too by soliciting donations from officials of foreign governments on their official e-mail accounts.  Investigation?  Sure maybe 75 years from now when they're done with investigating Clinton for treason while ignoring a Republican Secretary of State for doing the same thing.

Has any candidate done more for ratings than Dishonest Donald? We'll probably hear little about this scandal. (Yeah, yeah, Bloomberg is the Liberal press.) Don't look for even the most "Liberal" of the Liberal press to inconvenience that goose in the laying of it's golden eggs.

Energizing the Base

Makes me feel like I'm in grade school again and it's supposed to. Sitting there, hand in the air knowing the expected answer and hoping to be the first to yell out "GUNS!"

Like so many of these Facebook posts, it's meant for the converted and not to convince anyone outside the tribe  -- and it doesn't.  To the convinced, it will slip by the normal reaction of skeptical analysis and will immediately toggle the "boy, those gun nuts are just plain stupid" program. and the "if he argues he must be one of them" subroutine. Guns!  Just guns and only guns! is the Pavlovian response, There's only one cause, only one solution in this simplest of all possible worlds.

People are simple and want only simple answers. That's why we support demagogues. That's why we make conclusions from inconclusive data.  We have about twice the automobile fatality rate of the UK and Australia, can we assume the same causes?  Do we dare to add other countries to the same guns question or have we Gerrymandered the short list?  Are we selecting the data points to fit on the theoretical curve? Where do we fit on a universal danger list?

To those outside that bubble the first reaction might be "Those countries have a different health care system and they don't dump the mentally ill on the streets."  It might also be true that there are fewer members of a large impoverished, addicted. angry and hopeless class trapped inextricably by circumstances, prejudices and a lack of social services, housing, education, opportunity for improvement, medical care and adequate diet: so much fodder for the many hate merchants we have. And of course no one is defining mental illness here.   Even the less perceptive from outside the circle might suspect the band is playing another false equivalence Foxtrot.

Does restricting the view to massacres only, that tiny proportion of the firearms assault spectrum give a biased view? Is the apparent trend real, is it a short aberration on a line with a different long term trend?   Is it the same kind of sophistry as letting the deeds of one man be the paradigm, the "typical." It comes right out of the manipulator's playbook.

Of course those countries have had massacres. We're just inclined to think they don't because the teacher is always right. The UK has had a great many of them: Bloody shootings in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin bombings in London. Spain, France and other countries in Europe have had massacres in train stations and public areas for years. Algerians, Basque Separatists,  Baader-Meinhoff in Germany and the Red Brigade of Italy; ISIS, al Qaeda, etc.  Mentally ill pilots crash planes, crazy people use truck bombs and poison gas and set fires,shoot up newspaper offices, theaters, night clubs and hotels. It doesn't register with us as being the same thing even though the innocent victims are the same type and degree of being dead.

Worst ever! worst ever! is what you hear and you're not supposed to factor in the fact that the previous worst ever and comparable school shooting was 90 years ago and the century's experience seems more sporadic and episodic than progressive. Everything is getting worse, say people like Trump and the Tea Party con men  and manipulators of all kinds and the respective bases have never been more energized. No one will bother to notice that murders and armed assaults have steadily declined for decades despite the stated erosion of gun laws.

If it comes from our crowd we don't question, we just glad hand, high five and fist bump just the way the Trump Chumps do every time some silly giggling camp follower excuses his latest gaffe.  After all, part of being a cult is to alienate the outsider and prevent him from being heard. It works.

So what if you have constructive ideas, will it ever be heard through the untruths and distortions; red herrings and outright lies?  Over the grins and back slapping? I think not. Semi-automatic will always mean machine gun and they always spray super high velocity big-bore bullets that actually aren't.  The number of murders will always be off by a factor of two. The decline in the number of guns per household will always be explained as bad or irrelevant and the lack of correlation between regulations and effects will always be shouted down. It's always getting worse, it's a disaster, a trainwreck and only Donald or Bernie or Hillary of Ted can save us. Hey teacher - pick me!

And then there's the unsupported assumption that only guns are suitable in a world where most massacres are done with bombs, from Haymarket Square to the Anarchist bombs of the early 20th, to Oklahoma City to New York and Washington DC to Boston. The single cause fallacy supporting the single solution fallacy.

I'm tempted to ask whether gun control advocates are just Onanists or are they really interested in winning over an opposition who doesn't trust any of their reassurances because of all the lies, distortions, half truths, unsupported assertions and hyperbole?

Just Island universes are we, or non-intersecting circles in some vast Venn diagram. No one to tell us what we don't want to hear that we can't dismiss with a snark and a bark and some fudged figures as the world ends, not with a bang but a giggle.  Call on me teacher!

Springtime For Trump

Shocking to wake up and find you've lost enough to buy a nice house because some Brit Brats with nose rings and face tattoos want to return to chauvinist nationalism and don't understand or like foreigners or the way the modern world economy works.

Everyone suddenly notices that Herr Drumpf might just defy reason and find himself the American Führer. Drumpf who seemed yesterday, taking time off from campaigning to do some shifty business,  to think running away from the EU means Scottish independence, which it doesn't, or that the
British can now have their own currency, which they always have had, and can protect their borders which they already do. I'm betting that most fifth graders know that.

Everyone has begun to reminisce about how the disaffected Weimar Republic Germans who felt left out and cheated and robbed, turned to the scapegoats offered by the Nazis and decided to make Germany Great again. I'm starting to be very aware how possible it is that we'll have a president who wants to default on Treasury bonds to "improve" the economy and make American hate again. I see wealthy old men, with their yachts and Ferraris wearing Trump hats and I see tens of millions of less wealthy ones losing their pensions and savings because Trump has the economic expertise of a garden slug, his campaign almost bankrupt like many of his businesses. I see him sitting in the White House screwing the American people as he did with his bogus "university" I see him making America White Again, deporting millions and destroying lives and families and ruining the lives of children while peddling real estate and cheap steaks like the huckster he is.

The UK may get a chance to change their minds.  The US won't if Trump is elected.  Absent a revolution or a military coup we'll have to ride that train straight down to hell. This is a man, we're told by people close to him, reads Hitler's speeches and admires Goebbels' technique of repeating a lie until it becomes true.

Crooked Trump.  Say it loud. Say it again.

Islamophobia in my Backyard

The shooter who staged the Orlando massacre lived less than 30 minutes from my home. Nearby lives another man, the one who knew the shooter and performed his civic duty years ago when he notified the FBI of potentially erratic behavior. Yesterday, his story made national headlines: 

I reported Omar Mateen to the FBI

(Washington Post).

Friend Who Told FBI About Orlando Shooter Omar Mateen Saw a Red Flag

(NBC News).

Friend of Orlando shooter tipped FBI in 2014

(USA Today).

His name is Mohammed Malik. We exchanged friendship on FaceBook over a year ago. We share a mutual interest in human rights and cultural exchange within our community.  Since then, we share email messages and an occasional lunch together.  

We met more than a year ago through a online forum run by our local newspaper.  Over another writer, another guest column, another impassioned plea for tolerance. Trolls assailed the writer and his Op-Ed viciously. I spoke up in his defense; but no one else.  Mohammed thanked me. It was the start of our friendship.  

Today, another column in our local newspaper, again written by my friend. And again the trolls are ganging up. Vicious stuff. It never ends.

I’ll be busy for the next few days … again speaking on behalf of my friend.