J-Pod puts the Eric Garner case in perspective

Podhoretz calls the decision inexplicable, and I tend to agree with him. Policing strategies and tactics need to change with the landscape. This is a much different case than Ferguson. Excerpt:

What happened to Eric Garner was certainly not deliberate, but rather the result of a series of horrible choices. First, by Garner, to resist, and then by Officer Daniel Pantaleo to immobilize Garner by using a choke-hold, which New York City cops are trained not to use (but which is not in fact illegal). It strikes me as understandable that a grand jury would look at the events and not see something they would call a murder.

But a murder charge was not the only choice open to them, or so we are being told right now. There are gradations of illegality involving the unnecessary death of someone, and it seems likely that (as was the case with the 1994 choke-hold death of Anthony Baez) the federal government will secure some kind of charge now that it has involved itself in this matter.

The real question that is going to be asked, now, is just how aggressive law enforcement can and should be in an era of low crime, which is what we’re in now. If you defang cops, you are inviting a return to trouble. As I wrote last week, “if we send police officers the message that it is safer for their careers and reputations to stand down, stand down they will. We are the ones who will have to reckon with the results.” At the same time, no civilized society can view the tape showing Garner’s desperate pleading and not ask some very difficult questions of itself.

I can see why people would protest this case because Garner's death seems like a completely disproportionate result of his noncompliance. He wasn't trying to kill Pantaleo like Michael Brown was evidently attempting to kill Darren Wilson. And I don't feel bad for Pantaleo who is probably going to lose his job. He made a bad choice, whereas Wilson wasn't even given a choice.

Something I've been thinking of for the last few weeks with regard to the whole Ferguson fiasco, and especially after Michael Medved echoed my thoughts on his show about a week ago, saying something like "Why this case? Why Michael Brown? What is there about this case which has everybody so excited?" My theory is that the race-hustlers like Sharpton and Holder know that in order to achieve their desired level of chaos they need to have the maximum amount of divisiveness and polarization about an incident. A black man who is innocent being killed wouldn't work for the purposes of demonstrating systemic injustice because everybody would agree on the injustice of the event. Obviously disproportionate responses on the part of police would also get more of a unanimous condemnation, thus precluding any type of claims of enduring racism and injustice. My theory is that if you want to cause maximum chaos, pick an incident which divides people along racial, demographic or ideological lines. Then you can easily create the perception that the system is utterly unjust and biased in favor of the rich, the white or those nasty conservative people. One side says "Michael Brown was a criminal thug and Darren Wilson was forced to act in self-defense. Everything else is irrelevant." The other side says "Michael Brown was a young black man and a white cop, Darren Wilson, harassed him for no reason. Everything else is irrelevant." The lines are drawn, time to go to war.

This is only a theory, and doesn't sound particularly strong to me, but I'm not a psychopath like Al Sharpton so I can't mimic his thinking exactly. There is an interesting comment at the end of this piece along the lines of my thinking:

But it is interesting how the Ferguson situation has calloused people like me who would normally be dismayed by the Garner grand jury verdict. Ferguson is a tipping point.

We have to resist the urge to say "OK, you don't like the police, fine. We won't send them to your neighborhoods anymore." That would just punish the silent, innocent majority, and I think it would give CNN and the race-hustlers just what they want: more chaos. This is why I tell people I had to move out of the City of Cleveland. I felt like if I stayed, I might become a racist.

"I'm part of the solution"

Heard that one before. This is hilarious.

We have ONE YEAR to prepare for this...

Back in 1983, 2016 seemed like THE FUTURE. Now...



...it's the present. Even Traficant has been beamed up.

At least Rick Springfield put those old Buck Rogers costumes to good use. Or are they from Space Academy?

Hey, remember Jason of Star Command?

I'm tucking my pants into my boots RIGHT NOW.

Speak and remove all doubt

I was reviewing this post from August 19, 2014 a little bit, especially looking at the comments. Most of the commenters—other than Chad, Peggy and Benjamin 2.0—look pretty foolish now.

For example, Mike Blackadder appeals to the authority of South Park to make his point.

That Brown would rush Wilson through a stream of gunfire because Wilson was maybe accusing him of committing a crime that he had just committed? It sounds like the South Park 'it's coming right for us' explanation for shooting him down. I'm not saying that I know it didn't happen, just wouldn't bet on it.

Yes; it's best not to bet either way with regards to a straw man scenario which you've concocted. Then we have Jroberts548, the most prolific commenter on the thread, explaining things in terms of unique dumbness

For it to be self-defense, and the cops not to have said anything yet would require the cops in Ferguson to be uniquely dumb. It is a clear case of murder, unless the cops are literally the dumbest cops in America.

...and the fact that the Ferguson Police Department is "just ran by morons".

With each day, the possibility that the killing was justified and the ferguson PD is just ran by morons does seem slightly more plausible.

Finally cmfe—of whose gender I'm not certain since his/her avatar is Bugs Bunny in drag—chimes in with this piece of brilliance:

Yes, by all means, let's get back to business as usual long as we don't have to worry about our own children getting gunned down.

Well, if business as usual for your children is smoking weed, robbing small businesses and attacking cops, then they will most likely get gunned down at some point. Sorry.

And I feel sorry for everyone who commented on the case in a prejudicial manner since they will be taken less seriously now that we have the facts in the case alongside their incredibly bad guesses as to what might have happened.

"No-fly zones for Democrats"

Great Dem-doom piece by Charlie Cook. Excerpt:

But considerably less is being said about a parallel problem that Democrats are facing. Although the national red-blue maps of the partisan makeup of the House, the governorships, and, somewhat less so, the Senate are misleading in that they equate population with land area, the maps do illustrate where Democrats are strong and where they are not (interesting factoid: Only 14 percent of the land area in the U.S. is represented by a Democrat in the House). Increasingly, Democratic strength is concentrated primarily in urban areas and college towns, among minorities, and in narrow bands along the West Coast (but only the first 50-100 miles from the beaches) and the East Coast (but only from New York City northward). The South and the Border South, as well as small-town and rural America, are rapidly becoming no-fly zones for Democrats. Few Democrats represent small-town and rural areas, and the party is find it increasingly difficult to attract noncollege-educated white voters.

Open Comment Thread (2014-12)

There are some weaknesses to my Open Line Post feature which I started recently to accommodate anything "off-topic". The comments aren't individually linkable and there can't be any label tags, and these cripple the usefulness of such a comment thread.

So here's my solution. I'm going to put up a new post for Open Comments on the first of every month. All the other Open Comment Threads will remain accessible, but the current one will be linked to the picture in the right side-bar. This is the first one—have at it!

Tamir Rice Made A Fatal Mistake

Here's my take on the sad Tamir Rice shooting at the Cudell Rec Center. Excerpt from the report:

Police saw Tamir take what they believed was a pistol from a picnic table under a gazebo where he was sitting with a group and stuff the weapon in his waistband.

A first-year officer, who officials have not named, got out of his car and told the boy to raise his hands. Instead, police said he reached for what later proved to be an airsoft-type gun, a replica of a semi-automatic handgun that shoots pellets.

The officer fired two shots from less than 10 feet away. A least one of the bullets hit Tamir in the stomach. He was rushed to MetroHelath Medical Center in serious condition and died early Sunday.

Questions about the shooting arose when police revealed that the man who called 9-1-1 before the boy was shot told dispatchers "the gun was probably fake."

The caller told the dispatcher he saw "a guy with a pistol" on the swing set pulling a weapon from his pants and "scaring the s—t out of everyone."

Listening to a local Saturday call-in show on WTAM-1100, it would seem that almost everybody who can speak proper English and form an argument agrees that the primary reason that Tamir Rice is now dead is his own stupidity. There were blacks as well as whites calling in to lament the kid's stupidity, and most people mentioned that if you're a cop and you get called to Cudell no one should blame you for being ready to use your sidearm. It's a crime-ridden place.

I don't have much to add except to say two things. One, maybe the cop could have done something else. I'm sure that in hindsight he wishes he used a taser, or maybe used he x-ray bionic vision to determine that the Rice's pistol was only an airsoft gun. As Christopher Johnson from MCJ recently noted:

....You’ve got one second to decide what to do an a life-threatening situation. Well, I guess I should…time’s up. You’re dead.

But come to think of it, I don't know if the officer has a bionic eye. (Sounds like a question Don Lemon might ask, though.)

The second thing is that Tamir Rice's father should be absolutely ashamed of himself for not teaching his son that playing with guns (which have been doctored to look real) in public and not listening to policemen with real weapons will get you killed. I realize that his father, Leonard Warner, has a criminal history, but that should only make him more ashamed that he hadn't taught his son simple survival skills, and what a mistake it is to play chicken with the cops.

Someone should do a quick anecdotal study about how many of these kids involved in these high-profile shootings (Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, etc.) have the same last name as their father and mother. It seems like they all come from broken homes, which would seem to be a much stronger indicator than race.

Around the internets, Vol. 3

Welcome to another installment of (dum-ta-da-DAAAAAHH...) Around the Internets! This awesome feature is one which I originally described as "[a] quick digest of stuff which I've seen, read, noticed, thought 'Gee I ought to blog that', etc. over the last 4 or 5 months." Actually the time-frame is a bit shorter this time. So without further ado....

Firstly, it's always a good idea to check in with Sistah Raccoon in St. Francisville, Louisiana. She always has something interestin' to share with us. Her latest:

Ain't you glad you not related to Lil Ray?

Lil Ray now telling the whole world how old an feeble an helpless Big Ray be now.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher...

Old age be a humiliation, say Lil Ray. Telling about old people like Big Ray crapping they pants in the hospital. Course he telling ever body all this about Big Ray out a LOVE, you understand, umh-hnh.

Slow down, Lil Ray. You gone get all that land in good time.

Just be glad Lil Ray not telling the world what happening in YOU pants.

Whoa. Let that be a warning to all y'all who be lettin' y'all's kids borrow those bloggin' computers, let alone willing them over all that land. They'll be puttin' up pictures on billboards of you sitting in wheelchairs next!

Meanwhile, in an entirely different part of the internets which Diane pointed out to us (thanks, Diane!), there is some discussion about animals and human sexuality and Rod Dreher's take on it. Near the end of the comments, our friend Owen White reminds us of an incident in Paris back in 2012. From the link provided by Owen:

The taste was electric, almost indescribably good. It was one of the few times in my life when the experience of tasting something delicious made me feel a sense of exaltation. They were like cold sea grenades exploding in my mouth, bursting with saline, iodine, and that metallic taste you only find in oysters. I slurped them from the half-shell, holding them in my mouth longer than usual to savor the new sensations. I have never, ever eaten oysters that prepared me for these glorious creatures. Later, I e-mailed Julie that eating French oysters was like licking the ta-tas of Poseidon’s favorite concubine. She was not amused. But it’s true! The aesthetic frisson was absolutely erotic. Dominique Strauss-Kahn lives around the corner, at the Place des Vosges; I think his proximity to Le Bar a Huitres (Oyster Bar) might explain a lot.

So why was Rod Dreher's wife not amused by his description of eating good oysters being like licking a concubine's breasts? I don't know; maybe it's because she is a Christian. Well, he went ahead and put it out there anyway, along with her reaction. I guess he has a shorter memory about this

So many times, I’ll put something on my blog, and my wife will say, “I wish you hadn’t done that.”

than we do. Just for a sanity check I read this to my wife. Fortunately the floor wasn't damaged when her jaw hit it. But I have to saw that Dreher has bigger ones than me; that doghouse don't be looking too good this time of year. The obvious takeaway is this: it's okay to have sex with animals if they are dead and being served by a Parisian cook. For the record, I'm still going to pass.

This all reminded me of the time (and you'll see why in a moment) that Dreher referred to conservatives as "mongoloids" and then made the weak excuse that he meant it in "the Ignatian sense", referring to the character named Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces. My memory had been jogged about a link Topix Pat provided to another man's experience with the book; excerpt:

One scene, near the beginning of the book, had an especially dizzying effect on me. (I’ve read it hundreds and hundreds of times.) It’s where we find Ignatius practicing a little "self-love" in his bed; an innocent, even saintly, wank to a happier time in his life. He had accessories nearby: a rubber glove, a piece of fabric from a silk umbrella, and a jar of Noxzema:

Ignatius manipulated and concentrated. At last a vision appeared, the familiar figure of the large devoted collie that had been his pet in high school...Ignatius’s eyes dilated, crossed, and closed, and he lay back among his four pillows, hoping that he had some Kleenex in his room.

This is the page where I went fag. The solitude and isolation, the very sadness of it all, didn’t turn me off—on the contrary, it was the hook. Sex scenes had always been filled with gorgeous people. Ignatius wasn’t gorgeous. But he was sexual. I think it must have been the first time, in literature or film or life, when it occurred to me these were two different things. It was loud and clear. I had been fooling myself. I wanted something else from the Ignatiuses of the world. Something if much more than hugs.

So we find out now that the inspiration for Dreher's famous referring to conservatives as "mongoloids" is a grown man with over-valued intelligence who thinks about the collie he had as a boy while he is "practicing a saintly wank". I don't know if everyone who reads A Confederacy of Dunces becomes a homosexual the way Giancarlo DiTrapano says he did, but it's probably not worth the risk. At any rate, this might explain why the topic of sex with animals is of interest to the Working Boy; it's been in his wheelhouse for a long time, or so it would seem.

By the way, you all might want to give that entire oysters post a read. It has a lot of interesting material about going to a Novus Ordo Mass celebrated in Latin in Paris and how great it was. I think it's just one more piece of evidence that, like Casella noted, Mr. Dreher remains "culturally Catholic" no matter how incessantly he insists that he's not.

Update: Pikkumatti has provided a pertinent link with this very interesting selfie. (Title translation: Ignatius, my love)