Zucotti Park

Although the usually intelligent Glenn Greenwald and many other liberal bloggers are bemoaning the absence of media sunshine on the protesters now encamped in Zuccotti Park under the inaccurate banner of “Occupy Wall Street,” it may or may not be worth mentioning that this intentionally and devotedly disorganized little mob is not occupying Wall Street like the protestors in Cairo actually occupied Tahrir Square and protesters in Beijing actually occupied Tiananmen Square and protesters in Madison Wisconsin actually occupied the state Capitol once upon a time.

So it isn’t really as reprehensible for the mainstream media to ignore this “occupation” as the excellent Glenn Greenwald and so many dim-witted progressive bloggers pretend, because nobody is really “occupying” Wall Street except the thousands of bankers and brokers who work there, and even those weasels go home at night.

The bad news is that nobody can integrate the enormous volume of information available on the internet into any kind of coherent picture.

The good news is that everybody has an excuse for being stupid.

Republicans thought Obama was a socialist, Democrats thought he was a liberal, and independents just voted for a pretty face.

But white people have an excuse!

“TV made us stupid!”

Black people have an excuse!

“Hip-hop made us stupid!”

Hispanics have an excuse!

“We don’t speak the language!”

Asians have an excuse!

“All we care about is money!”

Independents have an excuse!

“Our woowoos tell us how to vote!”

Democrats have an excuse!

“Sarah Palin scares us stupid!”

And Republicans don’t even need an excuse, because Republicans aren’t ashamed to be stupid.

“Global warming is a myth!”

From ABC News…

George W. Bush called invading Iraq “a mistake,” if you believe Tony Bennett, and if you can’t trust Tony Bennett, who the heck can you trust?

American icon Tony Bennett took to the airwaves at Sirius Radio to promote his new album, “Duets II,” but it’s what he said about war, peace, terrorism, and who was to blame for the Sept. 11 terror attacks that could get people talking.

Before leaving, Bennett recalled an evening in 2005 when he was honored at the Kennedy Center. Meeting President George W. Bush at the event, the singer said that the commander-in-chief shared his opinion about the Iraq War.

“He told me personally that night that, he said, ‘I think I made a mistake,’” Bennett said.

And we lefties thought Bush was stupid!

But way back in 2005, when only 3000 American soldiers and 800,000 Iraqis had been killed and only about 3,000,000 refugees from Iraq had been transformed into destitute and stateless persons all over the Middle East, George W. Bush could see the BIG PICTURE!

“I think I made a mistake!”

This is probably the biggest “Duh!” in the history of the world.

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20203888/ns/us_news-life/t/study-murder-victims-disproportionately-black/

Nearly half of the nation’s murder victims in 2005 were black, and the number of black men who were slain is on the rise.

Most of the black murder victims — 93 percent — were killed by other black people, the study found. About 85 percent of white victims were slain by other white people.

Black people represented an estimated 13 percent of the U.S. population in 2005, the latest data available, but were the victims of 49 percent of all murders and 15 percent of rapes, assaults and other nonfatal violent crimes nationwide.

Two years ago, 6,783 black men were murdered, up from 6,342 in 2004, the study shows. The murder rate among white men also rose, but less dramatically: 5,850 were slain in 2005, compared with 5,769 the year before.

Additionally, more than half of black murder victims — 51 percent — were in their late teens and twenties.

And meanwhile…

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/22/us-usa-execution-court-idUSTRE78L6QE20110922

The number of executions in the United States generally has been trending downward from a high of 98 in 1999. There were 46 executions last year and 35 so far this year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

46 executions and more than 6000 murders!

Executions (46) account for even more fatalities than dog-bites (33)…

http://www.dogsbite.org/bite-statistics-fatalities.htm

…but fewer than getting struck by lightning (62)!

http://www.infoplease.com/science/weather/lightning-deaths.html

So if you’re a young black man in Chicago or Los Angeles or Walterboro SC (where an infant was killed in a drive-by shooting in July 2011), then you’re about 150 TIMES MORE LIKELY TO GET SHOT TO DEATH than you are to get executed by the state or killed by a dog-bite or lightning, and so you might think that all those thousands of self-righteous protesters around the world who protested the execution of Troy Davis would be protesting 150 TIMES AS VEHEMENTLY about the the infinite supply of HANDGUNS in America, and picketing gun-shops and pestering their state and federal representatives night and day, because if you really want to save the lives of young black men and women, getting handguns off the street would do about 150 TIMES AS MUCH GOOD as stopping every execution in America.

But if all that those thousands of “beneficent” black leaders and “benevolent” white liberals really want to do is flatter themselves and burnish their images with a very cheap thrill of self-righteousness and self-satisfaction, then high-profile protests of high-profile executions is exactly where you would expect them to show up and shoot off their big fat mouths, while almost every one of them passes over gun-control in silence, and that’s exactly the way it is.

  The political disease that turned the Republican Party of Eisenhower into Rush Limbaugh affects Democrats and even their progressive allies and critics in almost exactly the same way, and it’s just as senseless to pretend that the Left is magically immune to our cultural disintegration as pretending that Democrats and Republicans don’t catch the same kind of swine flu.

This proposition is easy enough to illustrate with the progressive icon Amy Goodman, who has already over-ruled a whole bevy of state and federal judges and only accidentally aligned herself with the United States Supreme Court in the case of Troy Davis.

Ms. Goodman’s "brief" for Troy Davis is a fun-house mirror-image of David Addington and John Yoo arguing for extra-legal detention and torture of suspected terrorists "for the higher good," and I am also in favor of "the higher good" and would be happy to substitute my own plausible arguments about "the higher good" not only for our system of criminal justice but even more so for our foreign policy and national security apparatus.

But unfortunately my idea of "the higher good" isn’t quite universal, and when David Addington and John Yoo and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush decide to substitute their idea of "the higher good" not only for my idea of "the higher good, but also for the rule of law, I want to appeal to something besides an infinite variety of interpretations of "the higher good," and what might that be?

Common sense? Kant? Jesus? Confucius? Chairman Mao? Zeus? Ahura Mazda? Lao-Tzu? The Prophet Mohammed? Ayatollah Khamenei? The Pope? The Southern Baptist Convention? Saint Paul? John Rawls? Bertrand Russell? Albert Camus? Sartre? Socrates? Kierkegaard? Arne Næss? Jonathan Edwards? John Winthrop? Moses? Isaiah? St. Francis of Assisi? Mary Baker Eddy? Fidel Castro? Pol Pot? Lenin? Marx? Adam Smith? Brigham Young? Martin Luther? Gandhi? Shabbetai Tzevi? Al Mahdi? Krishna? Abraham Lincoln? Baha’u'llah? The Bab? The Dalai Lama? Max Weber? Mahavira? Savonarola? Albert Schweizer? Osama bin Laden? Jerry Falwell? Leo Tolstoy? Martin Luther King? John Calvin? Adolf Hitler? Martin Buber? Billy Graham? Ronald Reagan? Li Hongzhi?

Amy Goodman?

Anyone who doubts that Amy Goodman wants to do the right thing is probably insane, but she doesn’t make much more of a case for Troy Davis than John Yoo and David Addington made for torture and the "unitary executive," and the first block of testimony Ms. Goodman presents in favor of retrying Mr. Davis is just a rant by his sister Martina Correia, beginning with a discussion of the witnesses against her brother who have subsequently recanted their testimony…

"These people were easily manipulated. They built this case around Troy with no physical evidence, no DNA. And what they did is they ran on the excitement and the adrenaline that we have to get somebody for this police officer’s murder, we have to appease community. And, you know, it got to the point where they were attacking so many black men that it’s like any black man will do. And when Sylvester Coles came and pointed at Troy, everything dropped, and they just built a case around Troy."

Leaving aside Ms. Correia’s correct assertion that no DNA evidence connected her brother with a shooting in a parking lot, we arrive at her analysis of police psychology…

…we have to get somebody for this police officer’s murder, we have to appease community.

Ms. Correia would have to be a very gifted telepath indeed to see so clearly into the souls of all the detectives investigating the murder of their brother office Mark MacPhail, but apart from serving as the source of any number of sad jokes, the only real question about Ms. Correia’s testimonial is…

Why did Amy Goodman publish so much nonsense by a supremely prejudiced witness who had even accompanied her accused brother when he fled the jurisdiction of the shooting to avoid prosecution?

I don’t care.

The middle-brow Ms. Goodman’s appeal to her middle-brow audience has just about the same cultural depth as the plastic Burger King who attracts a susceptible demographic into the parking lot where this whole mess began…

But behind Ms. Goodman’s shallow but probably righteous outrage about the apparently "innocent" Troy Davis, the same systematic disrespect for the rule of law, which only recently expressed itself in a flood of Leftist support for the Honduran dictator-in-the-making Manuel Zelaya, who was busy enforcing his own idea of "the higher good" in contravention of the Supreme Court, Congress, Attorney General, federal elections commission and constitution of Honduras…

The same systematic disrespect for the rule of law now resurfaces all over the American Left as it proclaims its superior perspicuity about guilt and innocence above all courts and legal procedures.

So many witnesses who apparently gave false testimony in a capital murder case, for reasons known only to themselves, have now recanted their criminal misrepresentations, once again for reasons known only to themselves, and Ms. Goodman provides a brilliant specimen of so many bums and liars…  

Jeffrey Sapp is typical of those in the case who recanted their eyewitness testimony. He said in an affidavit:

"The police … put a lot of pressure on me to say ‘Troy said this’ or ‘Troy said that.’ They wanted me to tell them that Troy confessed to me about killing that officer … they made it clear that the only way they would leave me alone is if I told them what they wanted to hear."

The police wouldn’t leave him alone! Or so he claims, and it’s a very slender claim to justify false testimony against a man who was on trial for his life.

Did they beat you, Mr. Sapp? Were you water-boarded, Mr. Sapp? Did they threaten you with life in prison, Mr. Sapp?

Or was it just the inconvenience of multiple interrogations which produced your false testimony against a man who was on trial for his life?

So now another zephyr has blown Mr. Sapp across the street to the side of "innocence," and if yet another little wind blows him back to guilt again, shall we also ignore merely procedural prohibitions against double jeopardy and try Troy Davis again, and again and again as the trash who testified against him blows back and forth in obedience to a breeze which they alone can feel?

But Amy Goodman quotes Mr. Sapp with the same unquestioning credulity as if she were quoting Abraham Lincoln.

Ms. Goodman has reserved her indignation for Justice Antonin Scalia, with his mysterious scare-quotes in a dissenting opinion which Amy Goodman cannot fathom!

"This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent."

Why would Scalia quote "actually," and why would I likewise enclose "innocence" in the same alienating punctuation, (almost) wherever it appears in this essay? Is there suddenly something strangely questionable about the meaning of "innocence" and even "actuality?"

Yes.

The whole history of Roman and Anglo-Saxon criminal law is nothing but a long and incomprehensibly complicated process for defining guilt and innocence, and the climax of every criminal trial which ever reached a verdict was one determination or the other, guilty or innocent.

What else can it possibly mean to declare that a human being is guilty or innocent of a crime, except that he or she has been fairly tried and convicted in a court of law?

But now we declare our superior wisdom over so many generations of judges and legislatures, and install a "higher meaning" of guilt and innocence… a higher meaning which derives from more trust-worthy agencies than the courts, and more trust-worthy agents than judges and juries, and those new and unimpeachable agents and agencies of justice will be…

Amy Goodman and NPR? Pope Benedict XVI, President Jimmy Carter, the NAACP and Amnesty International, and whichever other previously unacknowledged legal authorities or organizations of well-meaning lawyers and NGO’s just happens to be on our side in the case of Troy Davis?

Criminal law is an instrument for determining guilt and innocence analogous to the analytic apparatus for determining chemical composition which has evolved over three hundred years of scientific chemistry, and when that apparatus apparently malfunctions, where shall we appeal to correct it?

Shall we look around for yet another psychic like Martina Correia, someone supposedly as gifted at guessing chemical composition as Ms. Correia claims to be adept at reading the souls of detectives?

Or are we obliged to content ourselves with recalibrating our usual instruments or rechecking our measurements with brand new instruments of exactly the same or a slightly improved design, and if we cannot find a flaw in the procedure, what then?

Shall we call our mystery metal "gold" based on the well-meaning intervention Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI, and when another ex-President like George W. Bush and a Pope more like Alexander VI intervene in our lab and call all the silver in our pockets dross, to which higher authority will we appeal?

Now our mob supports Zelaya, and our favorite ex-President supports Troy Davis, but when another mob turns around on us, where can we appeal, when the law was already superseded by psychics and radio personalities, Popes and ex-Presidents?

Jacob Freeze :: The Beautiful Impartiality of Our Political Disease

Will you then flee from well-ordered cities and virtuous men? and is existence worth having on these terms? Or will you go to them without shame, and talk to them, Socrates? And what will you say to them? What you say here about virtue and justice and institutions and laws being the best things among men? Would that be decent of you? Surely not. But if you go away from well-governed States to Crito’s friends in Thessaly, where there is great disorder and license, they will be charmed to have the tale of your escape from prison, set off with ludicrous particulars of the manner in which you were wrapped in a goatskin or some other disguise, and metamorphosed as the fashion of runaways is- that is very likely; but will there be no one to remind you that in your old age you violated the most sacred laws from a miserable desire of a little more life? Perhaps not, if you keep them in a good temper; but if they are out of temper you will hear many degrading things; you will live, but how?- as the flatterer of all men, and the servant of all men; and doing what?- eating and drinking in Thessaly, having gone abroad in order that you may get a dinner. And where will be your fine sentiments about justice and virtue then?

But whenever so many liberals or progressives or conservatives or Democrats or Republicans or any conceivable subgroup of the delusional fuddy-duddies who dominate American politics agree about anything, there’s almost always a simple alternative which hasn’t occurred to many of them, and in this case it’s the simple expedient of a pardon from President Obama for Troy Davis, and the question why Mr. Obama hasn’t already availed himself of this power is more genuinely interesting than any amount of middle-brow noise on the radio about trashy witnesses recanting their perjured testimony.

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Chill a little (0.00 / 0)

Like all other death-row inmates in Georgia, Troy Davis currently resides at the “Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison,” a title right out of Kafka.

He will probably be executed at 7 PM tonight, September 21, 2011.

This graphic from the US Census Bureau tells a long sad story.

Between 1970 and 2008 the top fifth of American households increased their share of aggregate income about 15%, from 43.3% to 50%, while the top 5% increased their share by a whopping 29.5%, from 16.6% to 21.5%.

29.5% increase for the top 5%!

Meanwhile the middle of the MIDDLE CLASS in the middle fifth of the income distribution LOST 15%, while their share declined from 17.4% to 14.7%.

And the LOWER MIDDLE CLASS in the next fifth down did even worse, losing 21.2%, while their share declined from 10.8% to 8.6%.

The UPPER MIDDLE CLASS lost a little, too, as their share declined from 24.5% to 23.3%, and of course the POOR got poorer, with a 17% decline from 4.1% to 3.4%.

So the TOP 5% PIGGED OUT, with almost twice as much of an increase as the top fifth, while the share of everybody else declined.

Pools in Malibu

From Bloomberg…

After accounting for inflation, median wages for men between 30 and 50 dropped 27 percent—to $33,000 a year— from 1969 to 2009, according to an analysis by Michael Greenstone, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor who was chief economist for Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

The portion of men holding a job—any job, full- or part-time—fell to 63.5 percent in July—hovering stubbornly near the low point of 63.3 percent it reached in December 2009. These are the lowest numbers in statistics going back to 1948.

Among the critical category of prime working-age men between 25 and 54, only 81.2 percent held jobs, a barely noticeable improvement from its low point last year—and still well below the depths of the 1982-83 recession, when employment among prime-age men never dropped below 85 percent.

From Paul Krugman…

The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

Arrivals and departures at Raleigh-Durham International Airport

Grinch SA-24 surface to air missiles can destroy any airliner on any of the arrival and departure paths on this map, where none of the departures has yet attained an altitude of more than 11,000 feet, and all the arrivals are below that threshold.

So what?

Allow me to refresh your memory about the chaotic aftermath of Obama/NATO’s brilliant plan to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi…

Libya’s neighbors warned of missing surface to air missiles early

President Idriss Deby Itno of Chad warned of missing surface to air missiles going missing from Libya back in March, as did sources from Mali and Niger. Itno warned that pillaged weapons were falling into the hands of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

20,000 surface to air missiles unaccounted for in Libya, any number of them leaking out to al Qaeda affiliates, and every one of them can knock down a helicopter full of Navy Seals. You don’t even have to aim those things! Just point them at the sky and they find the nearest hot body.

Grinch SA-24s are designed to target front-line aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles and drones. They can shoot down a plane flying as high as 11,000 feet and can travel 19,000 feet straight out.

So now al Qaeda controls hundreds or thousands of surface to air missiles that will fit in the back of a van, and anywhere they park that van on this map, they can shoot you right out of the sky even after you took off your shoes and were groped by some poorly-trained doofus at the departure gate.

And how can the US protect RDU (for example) from SA-24 missiles leaking out of Libya?

Look at the map!

It’s crisscrossed by dozens of state and federal highways and local roads! There’s even an Interstate Highway (85) right through the middle of it!

If an SA-24 comes off a boat in Wilmington or Charleston or Savannah or a hundred other ports, and a couple of jihadis load it in a van, can all your multi-trillion dollar defense establishment save your life?

No.

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