Saturday, November 7, 2015

SAR #15311


Merely saying “no” is not advice.
Messages: Israeli PM Netanyahu's new PR flack says that President Obama is an anit-Semite and Secretary of State Kerry has the mental capacity of a 12-year old. And by the way, Bibi wants the US to up its conscience money from $3 to $5 billion a year.
A Day In The Life: The female police officer who shot an unarmed man in the back as he lay helpless on the ground from her taser was acquitted of all charges because she had learned to say “I thought he had a gun. I was afraid for my life.” Which justifies most of these sorts of murders. He died over an expired inspection sticker. Cops in Louisiana killed a six year old boy, a passenger in a truck they wanted to stop for speeding. Two cops who claimrd that a motorist tried to grab their guns were convicted when their dashcam video showed he had his hands up the whole time. That's why the Denver cops have filed a lawsuit to stop the use of body cameras because it violates their rights to kick the crap out of anyone whenever they want – and with good reason: a NYC cop was arrested when a camera showed him to be lying about an arrest... of a photographer. The second trial of an Alabama cop who paralyzed an elderly Indian man suspected of looking in a garbage can ended in a mistrial. In Illinois cops followed a student into her classroom and tackled her at her desk because she had smoked a cigarette outside – and it was a smoke free campus. On the positive side, cops in Galveston arrested a man for photographing public buildings while black. At least they didn't shoot him.
Twilight Zone: Facebook, which produces nothing but couch zombies, is now more valuable than GE.
Passive Voice: A review of voting patterns in last Sunday's Turkish coronation of Erdogan as Supreme Leader etc. suggests there was widespread manipulation of the vote.
Paternity Test: A teacher in Butts County, Georgia forced a teen to swear on a Bible that she was not pregnant, so she could be a member of the Student Government Association. Apparently they've dropped the virginity test.
Curses, Red Ryder: “Tesla’s showing all the signs of a company in trouble: bleeding cash, securitized assets, and mounting inventory. It’s the trifecta of doom for any automaker, and anyone paying attention probably saw this coming a mile away”
Victory! Two former mid-level traders with the Dutch Rabobank have become the official scapegoats for an decade or more of all the big banks in the world rigging Libor rates. Because the Justice Department is now new and improved and tough on white collar crime committed by poorly connected foreigners.
Nuance: Ohio legislators are working on a bill that would “make it more difficult for law enforcement” officers to steal cash and property from innocent people. Two things (a) is it still okay to steal stuff from the bad guys? And (b) Ohio doesn't have a law about stealing stuff?
Porn O'Graph: Sure not insured.

6 comments:

McMike said...

re cops lie. I wonder if these growing cluster of stories may burst another sacred bubble in the public consciousness, or if it is you and I who still live in a bubble of hope, scouring the news for signs for hope in the coming light of truth - vainly waiting for the sleeping American mind to finally, finally stir into consciousness.

I do thank God for video technology in any case, I am not always a fan, but it has surely made it more difficult to be a habitual liar, and has made it a bit more difficult for the overweening state to spread its lies.

Here's the takeaway. Cops lie. Frequently. Reflexively. Automatically. In unison. Without compunction. And, until recently, without any expectation that they would be challenged or called to account for their lies. They lie after assassinating innocent people. They lie after accidently murdering unlucky bystanders. They also lie, we can presume, about lesser things: about robberies and drug possession and assaults and public protests. They lie to pull cars over and they lie steal people's assets.

They don't just gild the lily or omit a detail here and there: they make up tales from whole cloth. They plant damning evidence and disappear other crucial clues; they have people running who were lying on the ground; they fabricate entire narratives that they weren't even on the scene to witness; they have people pointing guns who were incapacitated; they have people resisting violently who were actually begging for mercy. Innocent people spend lives in prison (or face execution) as a result of these lies, murdered victims get no justice, and criminal sociopathic cops continue to carry a badge and a gun perhaps to kill and lie again. This is happening on a daily basis, around the country, and at all levels.

Trigger-happy murderers and panicked shooters hide behind a thick blue line of lies. Roving gangs of uniformed thugs terrorize the public with tasers and clubs and domination holds and handcuffs and lies.

And of course the corollary: prosecutors lie too.

So who else then? Politicians lie. Of course. And so do their spokespersons, our spokespersons. They lie about laws and they lie about money and they lie about what they know and when they knew it. They lie about their opponents. They lie about poverty and they lie about taxes. They lie about what they talk about and who they talked about it with. They lie about who they spy on and how and when. They lie about our friends and they lie about our enemies. They lie about what they are thinking and they lie about what they are doing. They lie about war. They lie about who they bomb and how they bombed them and where they bombed them and why they bombed them and who was killed and maimed by our bombs. They lie about our friends who use our guns and money to kill and torture civilians and children. They lie about the torturing and killing that that we do ourselves.

Companies lie. They lie about what they know and what their products do. They lie about how well their products work. They lie about how much their products cost. They lie about who they serve. They lie about what they do with their money and how their company is performing. They lie about what they own and where they bank. They lie about who their products hurt.

We talk about democracy, and corruption, and greed, and a variety of other ails of our nation and society. But what is most epidemic, what pervades seemingly every single public and private activity among our nation's leaders and authorities, is lies. We have become a nation of lies. Lying is what truly defines us.

Sorry for this Saturday morning bummer, but with each emerging story about cops getting caught in a blatant and clearly habitual lie, I feel this seed of hope flicker of light. So, I need to be sure to shove it back in its hole.

Charles Kingsley Michaelson, III said...

No, no, McMike. You don't have to shove hope back into the darkness.

That's my job.

McMike said...

L.O.L.

Anonymous said...

Funny guy CMK...TT

mistah charley, ph.d. said...

bill black, who actually managed to get some modicum of justice for some of the building and loan thieves of the late twentieth century, quoted something he said was from the dutch, which they told themselves their long struggle to get out from under the spanish -

"it is not necessary to hope; it is only necessary to persevere"

one of life's persistent questions, at least for me - if the creative forces of the universe are so great and all, why is there so much suffering? by a series of steps, i came across the following abstract, although so far i have not spent the thirty dollars that could get me a copy of the paper itself:

A Neo-ontological Solution to the Problem of Evil

Jim Hanson
Theology Today January 2012 vol. 68 no. 4 478-489


Abstract

The problem of evil, or the question of how evil can exist with a God that is benevolent and omnipotent, has challenged theologians and moralists through the ages. Many have attributed evil to the gods; most theistic theologians have attributed it to humankind; a better, ontological solution is to attribute it to being. Three ontological solutions are reviewed, the traditional arguments, the modernist of Heidegger/Tillich, and postmodernist of Derrida. Building upon the thought of Heidegger, Tillich, and Derrida, a neo-ontological solution is proposed, which locates evil and suffering within a complex structure of being that is analyzed from the standpoints of experience and practice. God may be beyond being, but being best qualifies the benevolence and omnipotence of God.

McMike said...

Re evil. Although I claim no particular depth of thinking on this, I tend away from a view of good-and-evil as distinct entities, and certainly not as forces that exist and influence somehow outside of us.

So my question is not so much why is there evil under a good God. Nor even why do evil doers so often prevail (i.e. why is our system of incentives set up to reward sociopathic behavior, and our system of punishment inadequate to stop it). My question is, at a basic visceral level, why do we put up with it? Moreover, why do we not only put up with it, but let ourselves get worked up, ripped off, and killed over it?

Or in a more practical sense: why do people keep turning on the TV and giving their time to proven liars, over and over, year after year, generation after generation? Why are we so wiling to cut slack to politicians, corporate PR hacks, retired generals, and cops?

Even in Soviet Russia, when supposedly everyone knew that Pravda was an overt organ of lies, the government kept printing it, and the people kept reading it.