This and That...

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Sony Exec Who Made Racial Remarks About
Obuma Calls CRAPton, Jackson To "Heal"

Isn't it racist to assume black people need "leaders" and insulting to think they want leaders like these guys...

Via NY Post:
Amy Pascal is in crisis mode following the leak of racially charged emails between herself and producer Scott Rudin in which they mocked President Obama.

As a result, the Sony co-chairman has reached out to both Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to begin the "healing process."

"I'm being proactive," Pascal told The Hollywood Reporter about her conversations with both leaders. "And I want to accept responsibility for these stupid, callous remarks."

Pascal and Rudin talked about what to ask Obama at a fundraising breakfast in the fall of 2013. The exchange suggested she bring up black-themed movies including "Django Unchained," "12 Years a Slave" and "The Butler," as well as comedian Kevin Hart.

"It was a very preliminary conversation, and we just talked about getting together and hoping to discuss a healing process," Pascal said of her conversation with Jackson.

[Warph]

There Are Literally No Words For This Latest ThinkProgress Infographic

(I got nothing...)

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"Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?"

Alan Jackson's "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?" ("on that September day") is a loving and poignant tribute to the victims of the 9/11 atrocity. Debuting at the CMA Awards festival two months after the terrorist attack, it is country's version of Billy Collins's poetic memorial "The Names."

Like Collins ("Yesterday I lay awake in the palm of the night"), Jackson is modest and understated ("I'm just a singer of simple songs/I'm not a real political man"), but the political and communal messages are powerful. Listing the reactions of ordinary Americans, Jackson charts a range of caring responses to the terror attack. These include patriotism, gratitude to heroes, the turn to God for answers, and a reassessment of what matters most in life:

"Did you burst out with pride for the red, white and blue
And the heroes who died just doin' what they do?
Did you look up to heaven for some kind of answer
And look at yourself and what really matters?"

"I didn't want to write a patriotic song," Jackson told his interviewer Linda Owen at Today's Christian. "And I didn't want it to be vengeful, either," he explained, "but I didn't want to forget about how I felt and how I knew other people felt that day."

Whether he intended to or not, Jackson did end up writing a patriotic song filled with solicitude for his country and its people. There is one potentially vengeful, or realistically self-protective, response mentioned ("Did you go out and buy you a gun?"), but most of the emphasis is on holding loved ones close and affirming membership in community: phoning one's mother with a message of love, standing in line to give blood, speaking to a stranger on the street. Nowhere, of course, does Jackson imagine that ordinary Americans might have felt satisfaction at the thought of America being so wounded, or that their first impulse would have been to blame America and glorify the terrorists.

For many if not most Americans, the assumption of inviolability and non-involvement had crumbled with the Towers. The feeling of immunity or even apathy toward the possible irruption of terror on American soil had been replaced in the minds and hearts of decent people by an unexpected conviction of responsibility, coupled with a deep sense of anger, sorrow and resilience. "No man is an island, entire of itself," John Donne wrote in the 17th Devotion, "every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." Wherever many of us were on that September day, we were also in New York. I was marooned (no boats, no planes) on the tiny Greek island of Tilos, but rapidly understood that Tilos was a part of the North American continent.

[Warph]

How to Make Your Own Race Riot

by Daniel Greenfield

The angry rioter is a sacred figure in the progressive pantheon of social justice. The shirtless men in bandanas carting away cell phones are so outraged by injustice that they are willing to take to the streets and do what progressive hipsters taking social justice selfies of themselves in souvenir t-shirts plastered with the face of the latest victim of "white supremacism" can only dream about.

But the saint of the looted convenience store is as mythical a figure as the selfless community organizer. The race riot isn't a bubbling stew of outrage out of which wounded souls emerge to cry out for justice. It's a complicated criminal conspiracy in which the perpetrators rarely suffer any consequences.

Here's how a race riot is actually put together.

3. Riots aren't fed by outrage, but by opportunism

The rioters aren't outraged, they're usually bored young men, frustrated and lacking in empathy. Many of them have gang ties or a criminal record stretching back to kindergarten.

They're the same people who commit crimes in any other non-outraged context.

The rest are there to get some attention while providing them with protective coloration. 9 out of 10 people screaming frenziedly while holding up "Black Lives Matter" signs would eagerly scream and hold up "Justin Bieber 4 President" or "Ferguson Loves the KKK" signs if it got them positive attention and a shot at being on television.

Everything you need to do know about why the riots fizzled out can be read on a thermometer. On Monday, when the grand jury failed to indict Officer Wilson, the temperature hit a high of 57 degrees. The next day it was still in the forties. Now that the temperature is in the twenties, the riots have fizzled out.

Weather breaks up a riot faster than appeasement. It's hard to riot when your teeth are chattering.

There's a reason that riots usually happen in the summer. If the grand jury verdict had been issued in January, it would have been met peacefully.

The riots in Ferguson didn't happen because of outrage, but because the gathering mobs were told by everyone from CNN right up to Governor Nixon that angry protests were expected and would be tolerated. That was as good as throwing a match into a spreading pool of gasoline.

No one was stealing beauty supplies or starting fires in Walgreens because they were upset that Michael Brown got shot. They were stealing for the same reasons that Michael Brown stole; because they believed that they could get away with it.

2. The rioters and looters aren't burning their own community

A riot has two components. There are the bored and irritated locals who begin swarming streets because they have no jobs, it's hot outside and there's nothing good on television. They will loosely agree with whatever issue is on the table, but they aren't all that worked up about it.

And then there are the outsiders.

Before the riot, community organizers, citizen reporters and assorted activists show up to coordinate, spread slogans and justify the coming violence. They want violence far more than the locals do and they taunt police and try to create incidents, but they usually avoid personally engaging in violence.

(In the early twentieth century the group stirring up riots was usually some arm of the Communist Party. Later a variety of leftist groups, many closely entangled with the Democratic Party took over. The Ferguson protests are somewhat unique in the sizable Muslim presence with their activists playing the same role that the Communist Party used to play a century ago.) Most of the damage is done by looters and rioters from other areas looking for an opportunity to burn and steal. Some locals will tag after them, but they are usually responsible for the worst of the violence.

Being outsiders they're unknown to the police and rarely have to worry about being identified afterwards. And they don't care about burning down someone else's community.

The media usually sticks to its narrative of an outraged community that engages in excesses, especially when it can't tell apart the locals from the outsiders. Local cops can, but no one in the media listens to them. Arrest records usually show that most of those charged in the more violent crimes aren't locals, but the media remains immune to facts that conflict with a favorite narrative.


1. Riots are about power, not for the rioters, but for the establishment

"We must not reprimand our children for outrage when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system," Al Sharpton had said, in the aftermath of the murder of a Jewish student by an angry black mob.

This same rhetoric was used by the inciters of the violence in Ferguson and has been used in similar riots going back generations. Its major theme is that the rioters are free to do whatever they want. They carry no moral responsibility for their actions.

And what they want is to smash and steal anything they can get their hands on. This isn't outrage. It's textbook amoral behavior. The riot doesn't release anger; it frees the perpetrators of their morality.

The real purpose of a riot isn't to benefit the rioters. It's to benefit those who incite the riot. The rioters and looters react in response to riot-friendly conditions created from above. If you build the political infrastructure for a riot, the rioters and looters will come.

Sharpton's riots weren't about helping anyone except himself. By associating himself with violence, he sold the idea that he was an influential figure in the black community. Whether or not Sharpton was actually popular, his rise to the top of the political establishment became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Riots are about perception, not reality. The ringleader tries to keep his hands clean while convincing the establishment that he can turn the violence on or off any time he wants to.

Ferguson is the product of a new generation of Sharptons, ambitious activists feeding hate, of the New Black Panther Party's obsession with becoming relevant, of the ragged hipster ends of Occupy Wall Street drifting from occupation to occupation, of Muslim agents dreaming of turning African-Americans into a fifth column and of Obama's clumsy efforts to keep on playing community organizer by feeding racial grievances and then pretending to rise above them.

Those who gain from unleashing chaos and violence are not the powerless, but the powerful. Sharpton rose to his important role as Obama's liaison on a trail of bodies. Someone operating in Ferguson hopes to be the next Sharpton. Meanwhile Obama is playing a perverse fusion of Sharpton and MLK, amping up a bad situation and then telling blacks and whites that they need to rise above it.

It's an old and cynical game that has been played in and around the Democratic Party for too long.

The answers to Ferguson can't be found in its streets. The problem didn't come from there. It came from a black political establishment that lights the fuse for its own power and profit.

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As someone who experienced 12 years of Lutheran parochial schools, I have little sympathy for the prisoners at Guantanamo. (You have not known terror until you've had a six-foot-four-inch ex-Army chaplain, now a substitute religion teacher, ask you, age 11, whether you would like to share your "funny little joke" with the rest of the class or be sent to the front.*)

And so, when the government asked me, back in 2003, to come up with a list of appropriate "enhanced-interrogation techniques" to be used to elicit vital information from prisoners of the war on terror, I had no qualms about doing so, and submitted the following.**

Prisoners will view nonstop episodes of That Girl until they admit that Donald was being kind of a jerk that one time.

Prisoners will be subjected to random acts of karaoke. "Sister Golden Hair," "All By Myself," "My Heart Will Go On."

Prisoners will be told that, yes, your prison jumper does make you look fat.

Prisoners will be tricked into thinking it's 1971, and there is no such show as Happy Days.

Prisoners will be denied access to the Qu'ran, and instead will be provided with Joel Osteen's "Every Day a Friday."

Prisoners will be forced to wear white after Labor Day, depriving them of their "fashion self."

Prisoners will be stripped of their given names and referred to solely as "Mr. Fancy Pants."

Prisoners will be asked repeatedly "Why are you hitting yourself?" until it becomes blatantly obvious.

Prisoners will be kept on hold as they wait for Time Warner customer service to confirm that "sometime between 8 am and 10 pm" appointment.

Prisoners will be split into two groups, which will then divide into factions, which will splinter into sects, which will form cells, which will result in the total isolation of individuals. In other words, within a month, they will all be Protestants.

After reading the results of the recently released reports, I have every reason to believe my suggestions were ignored. (And also that I enjoy alliteration.)

I leave you with this.

* I could never be sure if he meant the front of the class or the Eastern Front, his grasp of mid-twentieth-century history being notoriously "off."

** This may have taken place in my mind.

[Warph]

Ga. police arrest suspect linked to hairstylist's death

(Calling the Rev. Al Crapton... Oh I forgot, the police didn't shoot him.  Forget it Rev.)

USToday:
http://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/nation/2014/12/12/20338715/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatodaycomnation-topstories

Police said the man arrested in connection with the deaths of two homeless men while they were sleeping is also wanted in connection with the shooting death of a popular hair stylist.

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Obuma's Affordable Golf Ball Act

Given his obsession with playing golf while others work long hours to support his bloated welfare state, it is only a matter of time until Obuma applies the principles of ObumaCare to golf balls:

VIDEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXv6dakT1Pk&feature=player_embedded#t=83

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How North Korea Deals With the Disabled

If you want to know what government-dominated healthcare will be like when statists are able to take it to its ultimate extreme, have a look at the country that has taken statism itself to the ultimate extreme — North Korea:

North Korea is systematically "cleansing" its population by making those with mental or physical disabilities disappear, a defector has claimed.

Ji Seong-ho ... who is researching a book on the plight of North Korea's disabled, said babies with disabilities are taken away by hospital staff, never to be seen again. He added that children with developmental difficulties are neglected until they die.

"The regime proclaims: 'There are no people with disabilities under the Kims' rule' and 'everyone is equal and living well'," he said. "And while that propaganda is going on disabled children are being taken away, suffering indescribable things and dying."
You want equality, right? That means holding everyone who is not part of the ruling oligarchy at the lowest common denominator. The only egalitarian alternative to letting the disabled die would be making everyone disabled.

A United Nations commission said in February that it had heard allegations that medical experiments are performed in "closed hospitals" on "persons with disabilities".

In a separate study, conducted in 2013 by the Citizens' Alliance on North Korean Human Rights, some 40 per cent of defectors said they believed that infants with disabilities are killed or abandoned and 43 per cent claimed to know of "an island" on which the disabled are forced to live.

One of the defectors told of a hospital where disabled people are sent "for medical tests, such as dissection of body parts, as well as tests of biological and chemical weapons."
We mostly have to rely on rumor and hearsay, since the Party completely controls the media (like the USA minus Fox News), but it seems obvious that North Korea is not the place to be for those with persistent medical needs.

But at least healthcare is free.

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Trey Gowdy Pulls the Wings Off an Insect

See how humble our liberal elite overlords become when their contempt for us has been exposed, compelling their comrades to throw them under the bus. Jonathan Gruber is unlikely to give back the $millions he was paid at our expense to help sell us lies and destroy our healthcare system, but at least we get to watch Trey Gowdy treat him to a public bullwhipping:

VIDEO: