When the events surrounding pederast Jerry Sandusky surfaced, I venturedthat, to an outsider, the American football scene was obscene—starting with its incestuous fraternities, the rock-star status surrounding handlers and players, their pompom-waving, knickers-baring groupies, and the tantrum-prone fans who experience bare-fanged fury when their heroes let them down. The problem with this freak show is that the participants are pathologically invested in it.
Besides, how did the words “coach” and “legendary” ever come to be paired? Ridiculous.
Now comes the news that the NCAA, whatever that stands for— reporters no longer follow the convention of first writing out acronyms in full—has leveled a punishment on Penn State that will likely affect every student at the university.
Collective punishment for transgressions (crimes included) committed by certain individuals (who are no longer at the helm)!
The football program will also be excluded from playing in bowl games and post-season games for four years, as well as having its football scholarships reduced from 25 to 15, and having to pay a $60 million fine, the equivalent of one year’s revenues from the football program.
Thirteen team victories have been voided. So many kids must have worked hard and played their hearts out. Why are they are being penalized?
Career and camera-conscious individuals will do anything to look as if they are busy doing something. This is all Brownian Motion, and terribly unfair.
I don’t know much about the political bent of Esquire Magazine. Is it left-liberal? (Bound to be.) Is it comfortably mainstream? (Ditto.) It looks like a déclassé New Yorker.
What I do know is that for “finishing off a 16-year old Yemeni boy—the son of Anwar al-Awlakias”—this writer, other non-beltway libertarians, and reporters outside the orthodoxy (the good folks at RT are an example) called Obama a murderer AROUND THE TIME HE COMMITTED THAT MURDER, not a year later.
Tom Junod of Esquire, a seemingly affable fellow, has only NOW come out with a “highly critical article about President Obama’s drone strike program.” To CNN, “Junod described Pres. Obama’s presidency as ‘lethal,'” and “told anchor Brooke Baldwin “why he wrote the article and the work that went into it.”
Read it, if you don’t mind the cloying format: a letter to the beloved Strong Man.
The point is that the establishment—Democratic and Republican—decides when Truth should be allowed to emerge. It’s not a conscious process; but a reflexive one. It’s not that these interests know the truth when they see it. Rather, reflexively, they marginalize those who speak it, until such politically opportune times when the truth can be spoken. Then they act (quite sincerely) as though they discovered said truth and are performing a great public service by speaking it.
If you want the truth about the plague of black-on-white violence, don’t watch Big Media’s news reports, where they work overtime to mask the facts. Don’t tune in to the vain chit-chat on Judge Jeanine’s show; read the Comments section. Despite the baffle-gab on cable, Americans get it. But why don’t they warn their vulnerable kids?
Let’s cut through the chase, the High School Graduate was killed because he was White. Don’t insult the rest of us with everything under the sun except what it really is, and very common. Let’s look at FBI murder stats, put that on TV.
Mild and meek, vulnerable boys like Carter Strange [or Marley Lion] deserve to be informed of the real dangers they face by the formative figures in their lives. Instead, these errant adults feed these precious people a pack of lies, and enfeeble them with pieties …
In any event, it’s not easy to find the Marley Lion story, and when it is “written up”—journalism of white-on-black hate crimes being so shoddy—the details are purposefully sketchy. Here is a journalism 101 FAIL from the Post and Courier’s EDWARD C. FENNELL:
Lion was shot multiple times early Saturday in a sport utility vehicle he had parked off Savannah Highway. Before dying, Lion told police he parked to sleep because he’d had too much to drink and was unable to drive home.
Marley Lion, a recent graduate of Academic Magnet High School, was shot inside his Nissan Pathfinder early Saturday morning in the parking lot by Famous Joe’s Bar and Grill at 1662 Savannah Highway, and around 4:05 a.m., police found him lying on the ground beside the vehicle. Lion was still alive at the time, and he told an officer he had been sleeping in the car because he was too intoxicated to drive home. He said two black males walked up to the vehicle and one of them shot him five times before they left the parking lot on a gravel path toward Yew Street.
The video shows someone walking up to the vehicle, doing something near the driver’s-side front door, and then leaving the scene when the vehicle’s headlights start flashing on and off. Detective Richard Burckhardt, the lead investigator in the case, says this is the point where Lion presses a button on a key fob to trigger the vehicle’s alarm system. About 20 seconds later, someone approaches Lion’s car with a gun and fires several times.
Police say the gunman is a black male who appears to be taller than the vehicle, putting him in the range of 5 feet 8 inches to 6 feet tall. He has a medium to stocky build and was wearing a striped or checker-patterned shirt at the time of the murder, and he fled on foot toward the Ardmore neighborhood afterward, according to the police investigation.
Poor boy. He pulled over because intoxicated. He used good judgement—and lived long enough to tell the tale. But Marley’s dying words were for naught. As expected, an “errant adult” in the person of Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen has issued the standard obfuscations. “There is no indication that this crime was anything other than random, senseless violence.”
UPDATE (June 24): Anyone who has a child who looks vaguely like Morely—clean-cut, enviably pretty, all-American—will find it near impossible to watch this devilish culling of the boy. (I analyze the envy that propels en masse slaughter in Africa in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot.”)
And anybody who has a child that has been through the “system,” as has my own, will find that that kid has been groomed for sacrifice—and turns on her parent for warning her off.
Public education (helped by parents) has turned our kids into the prototypical white left-liberals, whose creed is PC pietism, and who are passionate about sacrificing their precious lives for Da Creed.
Statists stateside have come down harshly on me for even suggesting that your average Egyptian under Mubarak or Libyan under Gadhafi was probably less likely than his American counterpart to be jailed, harassed or have a threatening encounter with the state’s emissaries.
Do you think these former dictators retaliated against “Their People” with diabolical efficiency for selling raw milk and homemade lemonade? Or unintentionally violating Honduran law of which the Hondurans themselves were ignorant? Or attempting to erect a structure on their land?
It’s the difference between organized and disorganized crime: Uncle Sam runs an organized criminal syndicate; Third World despots run disorganized criminal endeavors. It is not unreasonable to suggest that it’s easier to live off the grid in those tin-pot dictatorships America is forever overthrowing, than in the USA, the land of the “free.”
“Illegal Everything,” as John Stossel sees it. He “argue that America has become a country where no one can know what is legal.”
Kids who open lemonade stands are now shutdown by police. I tried to open a lemonade stand legally in NYC. That was quite an adventure. It takes 65 days to get permission from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
With government adding 80,000 pages of rules and regulations every year, it’s no surprise that regular people break laws without even trying.
A small businessman spent 6 years in federal prison for breaking Honduran regulations (and, to make it worse, the Honduran government said he didn’t). A family in Idaho can’t build a home on their land because the EPA says it’s a wetland-but it only resembles a wetland because a government drain malfunctioned and flooded it.
UPDATE: “The US Is More Authoritarian Than China,” writes Lew Rockwell:
China is nowhere near as authoritarian as the US, and where authority is exercised it appears to be with more restraint. There is no TSA at Chinese airports. My son has entered the country when the customs and immigration checks were simply closed (because it was outside normal working hours) and walked off the plane and into Beijing.
On the surface, there are a lot of “rules” in China, but no one pays any attention and the authorities don’t enforce them.
It’s time we came clean about our economic system. The Chinese are honest about theirs; they call it “socialism with Chinese characteristic.” We call ours free-market capitalism, when in fact it is a Third Way system too: “Socialism with American characteristics.”
The picture of China to emerge from behind those pretty Chinese screens is complex. The embodiment of feng shui it is not. The trend, however, is unmistakable: China is becoming freer, America less free. The devil is in this detail.
