OH...The HUMANITY!

There’s a great scene in that Mel Brooks movie Blazing Saddles (http://www.amazon.com/Blazing-Saddles-30th-Anniversary-Special/dp/B0001Z4OXS/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1400087266&sr=1-2&keywords=blazing+saddles), in which the Governor demands a “Harumph” out of everyone around the table, after loudly declaring, “Gentlemen, we NEED to protect our phony, baloney jobs here!”

That’s kind of what’s gone on in the media lately, EVERY “journalist,” EVERY commentator, on news shows, sports shows and entertainment shows HAS TO excoriate Donald Sterling, or risk being suspected of being a “racist.”

Worse STILL, somehow anti-black bigotry is seemingly defined as “racism,” when the reverse tends to be politely overlooked! Fact is, there’s precious little of the virulent anti-black bigotry that existed just decades ago, sadly the same CANNOT be said for the virulent anti-white bigotry of the Nation of Islam, the Five Percenters, the Black Israelites, etc.

Donald Sterling is almost certainly an asshole, BUT contrary to a very comfortable MYTH, many of the "best & brightest" among us are deeply flawed, often anti-social and utterly ruthless people. Very often super high achievers are singularly driven people. They take a laser-like and single-minded focus on the one thing they excel at, often at the expense of developing social skills, being well-read, well-rounded, or otherwise decent people.

WHY is that at all surprising? ONLY the most ruthless sharks get to that rarefied air of the Billionaires club. ANYONE who thinks Sterling amassed his wealth by ever backing down or apologizing to others is nuts. This guy's been a ruthless, cut-throat, highly litigious individual his entire life and he’s probably NOT going to stop being that NOW!

We hold to many myths to preserve this thin veneer of civility. Some would argue that the fact that most of us cling to, at least the illusion of humanity and decency shows that, at heart, we all WANT to be that, even if we often fall short.

I’m more cynical about that, myself. I think most of us admire the ruthless sharks among us, that even if we don’t act as ruthlessly, we’d very much like to, so I hold us humans in pretty low regard, so far as civility and humanity go.

Donald Sterling isn’t even a rare, let alone singular example of the outrageous excesses of the “best & brightest” among us. We’ve seen it recently in the cases of Oscar Pistorius of South Africa (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/06/oscar-pistorius-murder) and Bruno Fernandes of Brazil (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2579411/Goalkeeper-girlfriend-kidnapped-murdered-fed-dogs-allowed-prison-12-months-22-year-sentence-continue-play-professional-football.html)...both were focused and driven high achievers who murdered their paramours, Pistorius allegedly in a fit of rage and Fernandes, angered at a woman with whom he’d had an affair (Eliza Samudio) demanding child support for the child that union produced. The Samudio murder was particularly gruesome, as Fernandes reportedly had Ms. Samudio handed off to a crew of killers he knew from his days growing up in Brazil’s slums.

Zac Bissonnette has chronicled Magic Johnson’s association with numerous “predatory financial services” scams that have primarily “targeted low income communities, from Jackson-Hewitt’s refund anticipation loans, to prepaid credit cards, to his partnering with Washington Mutual in a subprime mortgage scam. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AVP7cUPAhM)

John McAfee (the anti-virus creator) is suspected of murdering a neighbor (Gregory Viant Faull -  http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/05/12/john-mcafee-portland-belize-mysterious-murder/2135255/) in Belize. McAfee initially avoided Belizian authorities, saying that he’d always been afraid that the police would kill him, in refusing to answer their routine questions. Subsequently, Belize's prime minister Dean Barrow has called McAfee "extremely paranoid, even bonkers". McAfee fled Belize when he was sought for questioning concerning the murder, but was caught in Guatemala for illegally entering that country and his request for asylum there was denied.

Only the most driven, the most obsessed, the biggest sharks rise to such levels and yes, people of that ilk have their flaws...often many, MANY great flaws. The “best and brightest,” the most productive, etc., are rarely “the nicest, kindest and most decent,” that’s just the way it is. WHY should that surprise any of us?

How pervasive is this ruthless, shark-mindset? In the late 1970s after the Trilateral Commission (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateral_Commission) issued a report titled, “The Crisis of Democracy” (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0814713645/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=3F4Q0Y2GSP126&coliid=IGH7BEARBDV02) in which, among other things they expressed the concern that many of the social and economic problems have resulted from an over-educated populace that had unreasonably high expectations concerning quality of life. During the Carter administration all of the top positions in the government - the office of President, Vice-President, Secretary of State, Defense and Treasury - were held by members of the Trilateral Commission, and the National Security Advisor (Zbigniew Brzezinski) was its director. Many lesser officials also came from this group. No less a Leftist that Noam Chomsky noted, “It is rare for such an easily identified private group to play such a prominent role in an American Administration.” The Trilateral Commission was set up byDavid Rockefeller in 1973.

Chomsky asserted that, “Its vision of "democracy" is reminiscent of the feudal system. On the one hand, we have the King and Princes (the government). On the other, the commoners. The commoners may petition and the nobility must respond to maintain order. There must however be a proper "balance between power and liberty, authority and democracy, government and society." "Excess swings may produce either too much government or too little authority." In the 1960s, Huntington maintains, the balance shifted too far to society and against government. "Democracy will have a longer life if it has a more balanced existence," that is, if the peasants cease their clamor. Real participation of "society" in government is nowhere discussed, nor can there be any question of democratic control of the basic economic institutions that determine the character of social life while dominating the state as well, by virtue of their overwhelming power. Once again, human rights do not exist in this domain.” (http://www.chomsky.info/books/priorities01.htm)

When the primary global leadership see their own “best practices” as rooted in a feudal-styled system, they prove themselves no more “evolved,” no more civil, or decent than the likes of the Bruno Fernandes’, the John McAfee’s and the Donald Sterling’s of the world!

It would be a good thing if the outrage over the Donald Sterling affair was about our collective mythos falling, but it’s not. Sadly and disastrously, it’s mostly about “the evils of white “anti-black racism”), which pretty much amounts to chasing unicorns.

But the real cost is that some very ugly issues get ignored. One of the very few to point some of these out has been yet another committed Leftist, Bill Maher, who correctly pointed out, that we SHOULD ALL have a HUGE problem with the way this private conversation was made public. That's the sordid part of all this that most people would like to simply ignore. YES, today, many of the same people who excoriate Nazi Germany's "informant culture," where children were taught and encouraged/rewarded for reporting relatives who weren't “pro-nazi enough,” seem to laud this behavior by a possible blackmailer. I think that's called hypocrisy.

As I’ve said, I have long ago acquiesced and accommodated myself to the new realities of the surveillance state in which we all live. I have 3 video cameras set up in my car, a half dozen outside my home and more inside my home. I have NO expectation of privacy outside my front door.

I also know how easy it is to track cell phone calls and record them (I've done it myself)...Newt Gingrich had some of his private cell calls made public years ago. It's easy to do and those who cheer when a Gingrich is brought down HAVE TO (yes, it's a legal mandate...implied within the law) also support the SAME being done to those they might support...or perhaps even themselves! It IS what it IS.

Once we accept the righteousness of such an intrusion in one case, it is de facto accepted in ALL others...or, in the Latin-rooted legal term..."No BACKSIES!"

That SHOULD BE a problem for most of us, hell even I (who endorse much of the modern surveillance state) object to and worry about much of this private data-mining, BUT instead, most of the talk today STILL centers around this national obsession with our masochistic self-flagellation over race.

Bigotry Appears to be in Fashion on the Left

First it was Alec Baldwin, then it was Martin Bashir, NOW it’s Steven Colbert, with his “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong” so-called “skit.” Of course, “Asians don’t count as a minority group,” even Federal judge Nicholas Garaufis said so, in his recent disparate impact ruling against the FDNY. So maybe Colbert is safe?

It all started innocently enough when Steve Colbert decided to mock Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder’s recent creation of a foundation to benefit Native Americans, Colbert replayed the skit and jeered in character that he’s “willing to show the Asian community that I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.”

The response came swift…and hard, from of all sources, a group of diehard liberal Asians, led by young Korean-American writer Suey Park, who gave Colbert a very hard time about his cringe-worthy act, an act that left the very clear impression that the real-life Colbert enjoys crude, ethnic-language mockery quite a bit.

Park and her liberal Twitter followers went after Colbert’s misuse of “satire,” for stoking the racism it purports to mock. They used the twitter hashtag #CancelColbert

Perhaps, Colbert didn’t know the “skit” was so offensive. After all, he is incompetent enough to have thought he could swing his sister’s (Elizabeth Colbert Busch) Congressional election her way by stumping for her in good old South Carolina - EPIC FAIL, as Elizabeth lost to disgraced former S.C. Governor Mark Sanford!

Ouch!

And it’s not like it’s just the celebrity Leftists who dabble in petty bigotries, nope, commoners regularly join in the fun, as well.

Like this, gem of a response to black Conservative David Webb, by a disturbingly bigoted black dissenter;

A Botched Execution?…

Clayton Lockett      Stephanie Nieman

How do you “botch” an execution?

Oh yeah, IF the goal is a sterile and painless death, then anything less seems, “botched.”

Fact is, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were geniuses – BOTH of them (as well as a few of their friends) were far smarter men than any we have around today. If either of them were around today, all modesty aside, they’d tell you so. Neither was at all shy about proclaiming their brilliance…and rightly so. They wrote and very clearly defined the phrase “cruel and unusual punishment,” which meant that NONE of the various penalties of THAT day were considered either “cruel,” or particularly “unusual,” which included hanging, shooting (firing squads), usually reserved for soldiers, as it was considered a more honorable death than hanging.

It was Thomas Jefferson who helped institute the first reforms of the death penalty between 1776-1800. Thomas Jefferson and four others, authorized to undertake a complete revision of Virginia’s laws, proposing a law that recommended the death penalty for only treason and murder. After a stormy debate, the legislature defeated their bill by a single vote.  At the time, there were at least 13 crimes that one could be given the death penalty for.

TODAY, we seek to entitle those convicted of the most cruel and unusual acts a death that most cancer patients would pray for. THAT, seems cruel and unusual, at least in so much as it debases the victim, by elevating the concerns and treatment of the murderer.

Without question, the death penalty has, in numerous cases, been appallingly misapplied in this country. A cursory look at the files of the Innocence Project, or even a quick read of fiction-writer John Grisham’s NON-fiction work, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town(http://www.amazon.com/The-Innocent-Man-Murder-Injustice/dp/0345532015/ref=sr_1_3_bnp_1_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1398878324&sr=8-3&keywords=An+Innocent+Man) about the incompetent investigation of the murder of  Debra Sue Carter and the malicious prosecution of  Ron Williamson (using the actual killer’s testimony to convict the innocent Williamson), proves that, BUT the answer to prosecutorial misconduct and incompetence should NOT be an indictment of a legitimate form of punishment, but INSTEAD, the reforming of the rules prosecutors must operate under, even requiring DNA evidence in all such death penalty cases. If the goal is to eradicate prosecutorial misconduct, abuse and incompetence, then THAT and NOT the penalties meted out should be the focus.

In the most recent “botched” execution, that of Clayton Lockett, in Oklahoma, there is no question of his guilt. The crime he was justly given the death sentence for was horrific. In 1999 Lockett and two accomplices conducted a home invasion on the home of a guy he claimed owed him money. During that home invasion, 19 y/o Stephanie Neiman and another 19 y/o woman approached the house, as they’d been staying there. Miss Neiman’s friend was dragged into the house and hit in the face with a shotgun. Under duress, the friend then called Miss Neiman into the home and she was also hit in the face with the gun. Ms. Nieman’s friend was raped by all three men before both the homeowner and the two women were taken to a rural part of Kay County, Oklahoma.

.

Lockett told them that he was going to kill them all, and shot Miss Neiman twice when she refused to give him her keys and pickup’s alarm code. When she was shot, she was dragged to a shallow grave that had been dug by one of Lockett’s accomplices, Shawn Mathis. When Mathis told Lockett that Miss Neiman was still alive, Lockett ordered Mathis to bury her. She was subsequently buried alive.

Some have argued that the state should not be involved in the act of killing people. On that I can agree...with reservations. I’ve long supported a system whereby a person is convicted, with DNA evidence required for a sentence of death, but when that sentence is delivered, independent contractors or bounty hunters would track down, incapacitate and ultimately deliver an “appropriate” death sentence. In a case like this, Mr Lockett would be severely beaten and buried alive. It is NOT “cruel and unusual,” as it was no more “cruel and unusual” than what Clayton Lockett himself subjected his victims to. Moreover, the state is NOT directly involved in the meting out of the actual penalty, it would merely pay the independent contractor a fee, or reward for carrying out that service.

Such a system would provide jobs to many existing for former mercenaries, professional hunters, even many former Special Forces members who come back from military engagements and still “miss the action.” Moreover, it would much more efficiently eradicate the plague of violent felons like Mr Lockett, while keeping the state’s hands relatively clean.

The system would, of course, be very structured. Those convicted would have their travel curtailed. Once basic guilt is firmly established, NO further “Appeals” on behalf of the condemned would be allowed.

Of course, there would be strict “rules of engagement” for the hunters in public areas. Perhaps they’d have to first tranquilize a target before taking him to an appropriate place for the execution, which would then be required to be filmed. The victim’s family could have a copy, so they could have some real closure on the event, if they so desired. Another caveat, ANYONE who offered any aid and comfort to a condemned becomes a legitimate target upon that act. This way, the hunters couldn’t be sued over “collateral damage,” occurring to those who may have offered a condemned person sustenance and sanctuary.

There ARE better ways of dealing with such issues. Without question, prosecutorial rules NEED to be reformed and the state probably shouldn’t be directly involved in the execution business. BUT prosecutorial abuse, misconduct and incompetence DOES NOT condemn the death penalty, any more than it condemns ANY other penalty given out under such flawed circumstances. YES, require the state to PROVE guilt, and with DNA evidence so readily available, coupled with ubiquitous surveillance cameras, that’s become easier and easier to accomplish with each passing year, THEN let the state simply “contract out” the actual retrieval (we already pay bounty hunters to track down bail jumpers) and execution of the condemned.

Like any idea, this one would require a bit of fine-tuning, but I think it preserves both the honor & integrity of the state and the respect & dignity of the VICTIM, the person who most often gets lost in the existing process.

WHY Do So-Called “Elites” ALWAYS Get Things WRONG?

(See: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/wm-b-fankboner/the-educated-muslim-terrorist/)

In the wake of WWII, two separate ideas  bubbled up, with the goal being, to keep another Third Reich from ever happening again. Both ideas were widely embraced by ALL the existing “elites,” and fast-tracked into place.

One view was that the Third Reich was, at heart, in effect a macho men’s club and the answer was to empower women to take on more leadership roles. The idea being that females are naturally LESS violent, thus less prone to war, with a greater reverence for life.

It was argued that this transition would take some time in order to groom women AND men to accept this sea change in the social order. Society itself would have to become more androgynous.

In other words, it would take some time to groom women to be more like men…makes sense, in a dumb kind of way.

It was a radical idea alright, radically insipid.

In short order, female leaders proved to be every bit as bloodthirsty as their male counterparts. In India, the first of these leaders, Indira Gandhi initiated the India-Pakistan war that began in 1971. She also embarked on a vigorous (often violent), many would say tyrannical policy of land reform, starting in 1969 and placed a cap on personal income, private property, and corporate profits. She also nationalized major banks, a bold step, as the rift between herself and the party elders grew. The Congress would expel her for “indiscipline” on November 12^th, 1969, in an action that split the party into two factions. She also ordered a military attack on the Golden Temple (Amritsar-in Punjab India), a shrine that sacred to the Sikh’s, in order to remove Sikh separatists that where collecting weapons inside the temple (called Operation Blue Star). She was assassinated to avenge this act by two of her bodyguards – who were Sikh.

Israel’s Golda Meir, the first “Iron Lady” of Israeli politics also led with a fist, her tenure ending after the Yom Kippur War of late 1973.

England’s Margaret Thatcher garnered a similar reputation for a propensity for the gun during her own tenure as Prime Minister.

All this only proving that the “fairer sex” was no fairer and no less prone to violence and war than their male counterparts.

The other view was that Nazism was a particularly Western (European) flaw, born of the old (pre-WWI) European social order and that the answer was to raise up those who comprised what those old Europeans once called “the lower races.” The idea being that these groups were generally more peaceful, at one with nature and not prone to those vile European vices.

Again, recent events show this idea was also fatally flawed, as Rwanda conclusively proved that ethnic genocide was NOT a uniquely German, let alone European flaw. Nor are massive wars with horrific civilian losses. It’s been estimated that over 10 MILLION people have died in the Congo wars since 2000!

HOW could two separate ideas embraced by the prevailing “elites,” that is, bolstered and supported by legions of academics, along with a majority of business and governmental leaders be so completely and utterly WRONG?

Sadly, these “elites” generally aren’t as smart as they think they are. There’s a great difference between being educated and being bright. Creativity and genius aren’t educated into people, it can only be “brought out” in those who ALREADY have it. Moreover, the best students are often the best conformists. They tend NOT to be very creative, NOT prone to questioning themselves and unable to accept, let alone deal with concepts like expanding variability (the MORE information that becomes available, the MORE variables or complications are uncovered). The result is overly simplistic distillations like the ones above.

TODAY, we have an excellent example of that in America’s current Secretary of State, John Kerry. In Rome, this past January, Kerry said, “We talked about the common interest of Pope Francis and President Obama in addressing poverty and extreme poverty on a global basis. The United States of America is deeply involved in efforts in Africa and in other parts of the world – in Asia, South Central Asia – to address this poverty, as is the Catholic Church. And so we have a huge common interest in dealing with this issue of poverty, which in many cases is the root cause of terrorism or even the root cause of the disenfranchisement of millions of people on this planet.”

Really?!

Ever heard of Mohammad Atta? Wealthy family, an educated engineer? Any of that sound at all familiar? How about Major Hasan Nadal...M.D., well-educated, affluent, does any of that ring a bell?

Princeton economist Alan Krueger’s in-depth research, delivered in a lecture at the London School of Economics last year notes, “Each time we have one of these attacks and the backgrounds of the attackers are revealed, this should put to rest the myth that terrorists are attacking us because they are desperately poor,” he says. “But this misconception doesn’t die.”...“As a group, terrorists are better educated and from wealthier families than the typical person in the same age group in the societies from which they originate.”

Mr. Krueger went on to state, “There is no evidence of a general tendency for impoverished or uneducated people to be more likely to support terrorism or join terrorist organizations than their higher-income, better-educated countrymen,” he said. The Sept. 11 attackers were relatively well-off men from a rich country, Saudi Arabia [DS: Not all of them, as 4 were not from Saudi Arabia].

John Kerry isn’t just WRONG on the nature of terrorism, he’s dangerously wrong!

So, WHY do these so-called “elites” ALWAYS get it wrong?

Primarily because they rarely question themselves, or their initial ideas...and because they CAN, with very little prospect for any personal accountability.

In South Korea, the Prime Minister just resigned in the wake of a private sector Ferry disaster. In many other places throughout Asia, leaders have, by custom, taken their own lives after a disastrous turn of events, like when their policies turn out wrong. Hmmmm...just musing aloud about that, that’s all.