“No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”
C. S. Lewis, “The Screwtape Letters,” p. 71.
A posting on facebook tells me that there is such a thing as “Beat Up a White Kid Day,” apparently a kind of May-day ritual.
I was astounded and first thought it must be some kind of prank, but there it is on wiki:
“However he [Judge Russo] concluded that “based on the evidence I’ve heard, May Day is reality and the evidence was overwhelming that this was an attack based on May Day and that the victim was chosen because she was white.” In drawing such a conclusion, Judge Russo suggested that white students in Cleveland’s integrated public schools have reason to fear assaults by minorities in so-called May Day attacks every May 1.”
Lila:
The judge in question was Cuyahoga juvenile court judge Russo, who was ruling on the beating up of Melissa King, a 13 year old student at Wilbur Wright Middle School in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 1, 2003, by a group of black and hispanic children. Although the immediate cause in this case was a personal vendetta, almost everyone in the case, seems to have acknowledged the reality of “Beat Up a White Kid Day.”
Since there’s been so much talk about white supremacists and their links to tax protesters and militia groups, I thought it was only right to show that such ideologies don’t rise in a vacuum. There’s plenty of hate anger to go around. [Lila: hate is misused as a word so I changed it to anger] And here’s one instance.
What was the reaction?
In Cleveland, the original story brought a flood of more than 100 letters to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, in which readers wrote that in fact this had been a May-day ritual for many years in desegregated communities and that many of them had been afraid of going to school on that day.
I’ll be retuning to this blog post to add any links to interesting aspects of the media coverage of this (or lack of it).
(And yes, I know I have two other posts I have to return to to update…bear with me).
OK. Remember Jena in Louisiana ? In 2006 a white student, Justin Barker, was attacked by six black students, setting off a case that had the whole country in a ruckus.
In this Alternet piece, a black commentator looks at Jena and sees excessive fear of young black males that leads to their being sentenced much more stiffly than whites for comp[arable crimes.
On one site. black readers’ comments show that the central fact of the Jena case for them was the hanging of nooses.
That was seen by many of the whites in Jena as a prank.
For the whites the physical beating far outweighed the symbolic threat of the nooses (equivalent to cross-burning).
Here’s a Counterpunch article on it that plays up that angle. But there are some interesting slants in the piece which grate on me a bit. Picking apart the language of Jena residents (who refer to “coloreds” and “our blacks”) is a bit silly. Small town people without requirements to be PC in their language are going to express themselves in ways that are not as ‘sensitive’ as less insular society demands. This probably means nothing. And what was the need to emphasize that there was only one black person on the 9 member school board and only one black man in the 10 member parish government? Jena had a little less than 3000 people at the time. The African-American population is around 3500. That means the Af-Am percentage was at the time a bit over 10%. That means the racial make-up of the board seems quite fair, even if you subscribe to such numerical tests. [Correction: I have to go back and look at the hispanic population and find out how much of a difference to my calculations adding it would make].
But I digress. While I can find any number of articles on the Jena 6, most of them focusing on southern racism and noose hanging, I can find hardly any on Beat Up a White Kid Day. And on forums I’ve seen, the attitude is that there can be no race hatred among minorities because racism is related to power structure.
With Barack Obama now president, that leaves us with several possible positions.
One. Blacks now are part of the power-structure and can be as racist as whites.
Two. Blacks really aren’t part of the power-structure, and Obama is just a figure-head.
[In that case we need to ask who really is in power].
Three. There are many kinds of power. Opinion-making is also power.
Media Coverage:
On the Jena story, digging through links, I got an American Journalism Review piece which covers the media coverage (always the most interesting part of an American news story). The piece shows that the national media actually didn’t touch the story until 5 months later, when black bloggers and activists like Alan Sharpton had made a furor over it, and then they almost uncritically accepted the version put out by an activist called Alan Bean. The AJR piece questions Bean’s portrayal of the story, raising several points that also struck me.
Here’s a quote from AJR:
“Out of 57 stories:
Only eight stories allude to Mychal Bell’s prior criminal record….
Ten stories use the phrase “all white” to describe the jury that found Mychal Bell guilty of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated second-degree battery. None explains why the jury was all white…..
Multiple stories describe the tree the nooses were found on as a “white tree”…… No stories question if the description is correct, and none asks students about the tree. Only the L.A. Times does not describe the tree as “white.”
Descriptions of white student Justin Barker’s medical condition vary from paper to paper and from story to story.…….. [Lila: here’s a link to what is seems to be an injured Justin Barker. From the looks of it, the beating doesn’t seem too bad. ]
The Washington Post, the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune never, in months of coverage, mention Barker’s medical bills. [Lila: the medical bills seem to be equivalent to the cost of an ambulance, ER, stitches and a bit more – roughly $12,000; again, more like injuries in a school brawl)……….
All four papers link the events in Jena multiple times, without ever explaining why they’re linked…………
Thirty stories quote civil rights activists, organizations or advocates. Eight stories quote Jesse Jackson; twelve quote Al Sharpton; others quote the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP. Six quote Alan Bean of Friends of Justice five of them in the Chicago Tribune………
….. In a piece titled “How One Man Fired Up Jena 6 Case,” [Jason] Whitlock wrote that the media blindly accepted Bean’s story, to the detriment of the truth. Why? Because it was easy, he says.”
Lila: To put this in perspective, consider another race-hate crime in the last two years:
The Megan Williams torture case: in which a twenty-year old black woman was held captive for several days, sexually abused, forced to eat faeces, and stabbed by six whites, according to this AP report.
One of the defendants in this case got 10-25 years for second-degree sexual assault and another got three consecutive sentences, one for 10 years for violation of civil rights and the others for 2-10 years for assault.
Put this against what Mychal Bell, the 16 year old defendant at Jena, was initially charged with. He was charged as an adult with attempted second-degree murder (Lila: surely excessive). Later, this was reduced to aggravated second-degree battery.
At his initial conviction Bell faced up to 22 years in prison. On retrial, this was reduced to simple battery and finally he served 18 months altogether.
Lila (May 6):
Well, I don’t agree with the comment that “blacks are not part of the power structure” unless you want to say the president of the USA , the AG and a number of other positions are completely devoid of power. In which case, whites haven’t been all that powerful either. I think the third position is the correct one. There are many kinds of power: there’s money power, there’s political power, there’s public opinion, there’s academic opinion, there’s moral force, there’s biological power….
We tend to focus on money power/political power to make claims about the power or lack thereof of minorities. And largely, I think that’s correct – when you’re talking about structures of law, administration and institutions where those kinds of power hold sway. But there are other realms, as I’ve indicated.
My point is our discussion of race is abysmally simple-minded. We think in slogans and in memes. And that gets echoed in real life. Ultimately, this kind of mass thinking drives real life victimization, especially in troubled times. Exactly how it does this needs to be explored.
But this post is long enough now, and I’ll leave it at that.
PS (May 6): The context that is ignored in all this is inter-racial crime, crime that is not characterized as hate-crime officially, but is felt among whites as racially motivated. But since a post on this would be lengthy and involved I’ll address it separately.
Confirmation from Bill Engdahl that indeed swine flu is being hyped, with the WHO leading the hyping. The public has such a short memory. Doesn’t it remember that Tamiflu was the drug Rumsfeld was touting for avian flu a few years ago?
Engdahl point out that even the term “swine flu” is being dropped in favor of Influenza 2, in response to lobbying from pork manufacturers, even though toxic (that is, faeces-filled) factory farms, like Smithfields’ are said to be the probably source of the outbreak.
Engdahl:
“The Drug Cartel comes in
Rather than order a full-scale independent investigation into the pathogen-generation in the toxic waste of Smithfield Foods’ Veracruz CAFO pig operations or other similar pig CAFOs around the world for production of deadly toxics and various possible pathogens, the CDC and increasingly the WHO seem to be more concerned with creating a climate for mass distribution of what have been documented to be dangerous, and in some cases deadly, influenza drugs such as Tamiflu.
On April 14, almost two weeks before the panic over Mexico’s cases of Swine Flu or as CDC now prefers, Influenza A H1N1, the US pharmaceutical company, Novavax announced a pre-clinical study allegedly showing, ‘an investigational H1N1 virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine based on the 1918 Spanish influenza strain protected against both the Spanish flu and a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza strain.’ The genetically-manipulated vaccine of Novavax, the company claimed, ‘protected Mice and Ferrets Against the Spanish Flu and Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Bird Flu,’ and also conveniently ‘provided protection against highly pathogenic H1N1 and H5N1 Influenza strains.’[16]
On April 24, the WHO issued a press release stating that ‘The Swine Influenza A/H1N1 viruses characterized in this outbreak have not been previously detected in pigs or humans. The viruses so far characterized have been sensitive to oseltamivir…’ Osteltamivir is the technical name for Tamiflu, the drug invented by Donald Rumsfeld’s Gilead Sciences and licensed to Roche Inc. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a convenient Emergency Authorization on April 27 that allows US health officials and others to administer Tamiflu even to infants under one year of age. The FDA statement added it had decided, ‘to authorize the use of unapproved or uncleared medical products or unapproved or uncleared uses of approved or cleared medical products following a determination and declaration of emergency.’[17]
That suggests that the US Government has or is about to release experimental drugs on a panicked population such as the VLP-based Influenza vaccine of Novavax, as well as the vast stockpiles of Tamiflu and influenza drugs sold by giants like GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza (zanamivir).
With the evidence to date of the scale of the ‘confirmed’ cases of Swine Flu H1N1 variety worldwide, 985 cases of influenza A (H1N1) or Swine Flu infection, there is hardly grounds to subject the human population to drugs whose side effects have included death or severe complications and typically flu-like symptoms and, as in the case of Tamiflu, never even claim to ‘prevent or cure’ the influenza. The entire drama of the past weeks is reading more and more like a bad remake of Crichton’s Andromeda Strain.
Adding a note of the bizarre to the entire drama, in November 2004, amid the early days of the then-world panic over alleged Avian Flu, when Tamiflu was first promoted as a wonder drug by Donald Rumsfeld and others, the WHO published an extraordinary fantasy scenario. In a UN agency normally given to issuing dull scientific notices to world health professionals, the 2004 report was extraordinarily ‘prescient’ of the current scenario with Swine Flu panic……….
…..If one changed the name from Influenza A (H6N1) to Influenza A (H1N1) we could be talking about the current situation.”
Lila: Notice that Mexico now plans to implement a $1.3 billion economic stimulus package to counter the effects of the outbreak on the economy. Presumably this will help increase government spending, government control and global coordination – all long-term goals of the globalists.
For a tax-protest to be credible, the protester has to show evidence of good-faith.
Here are some points to consider:
If you want to engage in counter-economics, then you should know its activities are criminal and will be so regarded. Don’t expect sympathy from the rest of the public which does pay its taxes.
Notice that the media has made a distinction between the tax-resistance of the Vietnam war era and contemporary tax resisters – emphasizing the “white supremecist” elements and scams in the latter (and doubtless there are many).
Expect most people to believe (and, unfortunately, in some cases they will be right about it) that you are just another free-loader on the system.
Check out this factsheet to see how the government views tax protesters like Irwin Schiff.
And here’s a sympathetic view of Irwin Schiff from Libertarian Republican.
My view? I don’t know Schiff’s case in detail but I’m not persuaded by his methods, though sympathetic to his aims.
My suggestion, if you really don’t want to be subject to Uncle Sam, leave the country. Drop citizenship.
A large mass of people renouncing US citizenship is the smartest, least problematic way to defund the US government.
Never google yourself. You’ll be in for unpleasant surprises.
Here are a few:
Some blog post refers to me as a CIA2/Mossad operative.
On the strength of what, I wonder? Shouldn’t a Mossad operative at least know some Hebrew?
Maybe it was that post on Tikkun Olam I did around Easter?
You’d think the chump editor who runs this blog would realize that someone who taught comparative religion and mythology for several years could be expected to know something about the symbols and doctrines of various religious traditions, especially the one they came from.
Or, perhaps it’s a spoof of some kind that I missed. I didn’t read the post through and don’t intend to. It didn’t look like much.
What’s funny is I get articles turned down all the time for being too critical of Zionist figures in the government (for eg. Chertoff) or for criticizing the banking cartel (this is supposed to be code language for anti-Semitism).
What’s also funny is that recently, I’ve been linked by Christian blogs, some of my leftist friends have suspected me of Christian theocratic tendencies (on the strength of having some pieces published at Lew Rockwell) , whereas, last year, a Christian blog classified me as “demonic,” presumably for my interest in so-called occult studies.
So I am Mossad and anti-Semite, Christian theocrat and demonic
Jihadi and Hasbara
Far-right wing-nut and Knee-jerk leftist
You’d think the geniuses would ask why a Mossad double-agent would go to such career-busting trouble to point out the Zionist component of the two biggest stories of the last five years (torture and the financial heist. But, for some people, any one who doesn’t fall into an easy left-right, religious-secular, statist-libertarian box is someone who must have ulterior motives…..
James Turk of Gold Money is afraid that the gold cartel (Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, and to a lesser extent, Citi) may not go down so easily:
“The gold borrowed from central banks would not be repaid because obtaining the physical gold to repay these loans would cause the gold price to soar. So beginning this decade, the gold cartel would conduct the government’s managed retreat, allowing the gold price to move generally higher in the hope that, basically, people wouldn’t notice. Given its ‘canary in a coalmine’ function, a rising gold price creates demand for gold, and a rapidly rising gold price would worsen the marked-to-market losses of the gold cartel.
So the objective is to allow the gold price to rise around 15% p.a., while at the same time enable the cartel members to intervene in the gold market with implicit government backing in order to earn profits to offset the growing losses on its gold liabilities. Its trading strategy to accomplish this task is clear. The gold cartel reverse engineers the black-box trend-following trading models.
Just look at the losses taken by some of the major commodity trading managers on their gold trading over the last decade. It is hundreds of millions of dollars of client money lost, and gained for the gold cartel to help offset their losses from the gold carry-trade. All to make the dollar look good by keeping the gold price lower than it should be and would be if it were allowed to trade in a market unfettered by government intervention.
There are only two outcomes as I see it. Either the gold cartel will fail in the end, or the US government will have destroyed what remains of the free market in America. I hope it is the former, but the continuing flow of events from Washington, D.C. and the actions of policymakers suggest it could be the latter.”
My Comment:
This is my fear. I see a growth in public awareness. I see people writing and talking. But at the top, the policies don’t reflect public opinion at all. That tells me the disconnect is complete. They don’t listen, because they don’t have to. They’re hearing their master’s masters’ voices.
I knew the Supreme Court of the US was weighted heavily in favor of the elite products of high-powered law schools, high-powered federal work experience, and high-powered theories.
But this chart of the make-up of the Supreme Court in recent years at the New York Times (May 2, 2009) was still something of a stunner to me.
One hundred percent of SC justices are former federal judges.
How many now are state judges? Nil.
How many now are private lawyers? Nil.
How many now are elected officials? Nil.
How many now are government lawyers? Nil.
How many now are law professors? Nil.
As Adam Liptak, the SC correspondent at The Times, justifiably complains,
“None of the justices have held elective office. All but one attended law school at Harvard or Yale. And the only three justices in American history who never worked in private practice are on the current court..”
But then Liptak holds up as a model, David Souter, a former attorney-general of the State of New Hampshire.
This, as trial lawyer Norm Pattis points out, is like depending on a sprinter to win a marathon.
“When is the last time a lawyer who made his living from fees earned
representing ordinary working people sat on the Supreme Court?”
But the question could be asked of many more government insitutions.
When was the last time the SEC was staffed with officials from small banks and thrifts?
When was the last time a mayor from a small-town made it to the White House?
We talk about localism a lot. But in practice we’re heavily prejudiced against it.
A small-town resume, we presume, is fit only for small-towns.
There are a lot of reasons for this but I’ll focus on a couple that strike me at once (and I’ve blogged on them recently):
(1) It used to be that education fitted you to exercise judgment. These days we avoid judgment altogether, confusing it with judgmentalism.
In the absence of the ability to judge (and any common standard to judge by), we become victims of public relations and marketing. When no one can agree on substance, image becomes everything.
Brands rule. Harvard and Yale are the best known national brands, so we outfit our justices in them.
(2) Increasing specialization means that fewer people feel capable of pronouncing judgment about something, even if they felt it was permissble to. They look instead to experts to make their choices for them. The media, which has a disproportionate effect on nearly every choice made, tends to focus on experts who come from the same educational and socio-economic background. The circle of the elite thus tends to get smaller and clubbier with every year.
Jack Kemp, former Congressman and star quarter-back, George Bush Senior’s housing secretary and Bob Dole’s running mate, noted “compassionate conservative,” good-natured supply-sider and defender of Reagonomics, died of cancer today.
Kemp seemed to me to be one of the truly genial and sincere figures in politics. Here’s a characteristic quote:
“Pro football gave me a good perspective. When I entered the political arena, I had already been booed, cheered, cut, sold, traded, and hung in effigy.”
And a quick bio from Yahoo News.
“Kemp was born in California to Christian Scientist parents. He worked on the loading docks of his father’s trucking company as a boy before majoring in physical education at Occidental College, where he led the nation’s small colleges in passing.
He became a Presbyterian after marrying his college sweetheart, Joanne Main. The couple had four children, including two sons who played professional football. He joined with a son and son-in-law to form a Washington strategic consulting firm, Kemp Partners, after leaving office.
Through his political life, Kemp’s positions spanned the social spectrum: He opposed abortion and supported school prayer, yet appealed to liberals with his outreach toward minorities and compassion for the poor. He pushed for immigration reform to include a guest-worker program and status for the illegal immigrants already here….”
In January this year, around the time Kemp’s cancer was diagnosed, The American Conservative ran a long piece on his contributions.
The Am Con piece notes that Kemp would send his children out into the world everyday with three words:
“Be a leader.”
The rest of us might find them worth remembering too.
R.I.P. Jack Kemp.
(More later)
A British Christian libertarian blog on why canceling the debt is questionable from a Christian perspective:
“Should Christians be concerned about this [the levels of debt contracted by the government]? One angle on this is the fact that in the teaching of Jesus, sin is often compared with debt. Two obvious examples are the parable of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:23-35), and the fact that in the Lord’s Prayer as found in Matthew’s gospel, disciples are taught to pray “and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” (Matthew 6:12) In other words, there is a correspondence between sin and debt.
Many may consider sin not to be serious, but the Christian does. I am reminded of the words of Anselm of Canterbury, addressing Boso in Cur Deus Homo (Book 1, chapter 21) “You have not yet considered what a heavy weight sin is.”
If sin is serious and Jesus compares sin to debt, surely it follows that for Christians, debt is serious as well. And if that is so, government borrowing which will saddle our country with huge levels of debt, possibly for decades, is serious.
Yes, it is true that in the Old Testament, there was provision for the cancellation of debt every 50 years in the Jubilee, but to argue that such a provision means that one of the world’s wealthiest nations (that has incurred its debts by living beyond its means) should have its slate wiped clean is simply ridiculous.
Perhaps the message for Christians who are not horrified by the levels of debt that we are incurring is: “You have not yet considered what a heavy weight debt is.”
Greg at The Holy Cause lists the top 10 Christian libertarian blogs , with Lew Rockwell and the popular Pro Libertate making the cut among the blogs I follow.
Now Greg want to make another list of Christian libertarian blogs and invites nominees and suggestions. This sounds like an interesting way to get to know more bloggers out there. Here are Greg’s criteria:
(1) The blogger(s) openly professes Christianity, and includes biblical content at least occasionally in blog postings . This is a “big tent” as far as the definition of “Christian” is concerned.
(2) The blog has libertarian content as one of its main thrusts. This libertarian content may include activism, advocacy, commentary, debate, economics, education, persuasion, politics, research, etc. This too is a “big tent” but will of necessity be judged somewhat subjectively. An example – Father Hollywood easily qualifies, despite the fact that he has significant other content. It helps that his other content has a Christian thrust.
(3) The blog must have some longevity, being a minimum of 2 months old.
(4) The blog must show consistent and recent postings. “Consistent” means averaging at least one posting per week. “Recent” means at least two postings in the last month