Category Archives: Law

UPDATED: Blade Runner Still Walking On Water

Celebrity, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, Pseudoscience, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Race, South-Africa, Sport

A high-profile murder involving a class of people whose role in South Africa’s endemic crime is statistically insignificant occurred last week. The two wealthy white South Africans involved, however, will become a perfect foil for the hypocritical tele-twits of the West. The latter have said nothing about the carnage of crime in that country—and they’ll continue to say nothing meaningful at all.

Crime in South Africa should have been making news headlines across the world throughout South Africa’s overnight transition from minority to majority rule. It hasn’t. Blade runner Oscar Pistorius’ run-in with the law has occasioned the first such mention that I can recall by anchor-personality Megyn Kelly of Fox News, and her colleagues in the industry. (The killing fields of South Africa are dissected in “Crime, The Beloved Country,” a chapter in my book).

A statistical outlier, an anomaly—the murder of a (white) South African celebrity (Reeva Steenkamp) by another (Olympian Oscar Pistorius), allegedly—has newsmen in the West mentioning a subject they’ve so far submerged.

Steenkamp was a South African model. Pistorius is also a celebrity whose fame comes from being a tenacious (and talented) track-and-field annoyance. An annoyance, because most hardcore track-and-field fans want able and disabled Olympians segregated. (Yes, this is an intentional play on “loaded” words. Call the PC police!) The separation why? So as to allow fans (me) to enjoy the sport without the accoutrements of technology and the incontinent gushing that accompanies Pistorius whenever he makes a run for it.

In any event, how PC and TV perfect is this crime? (This or any other crime should never be called “a tragic circumstance,” as such vague language implies that bad deeds are invariably caused—never committed. And that they are caused by factors outside the perpetrators. (See “Rah-Rah For Rioters.”)

I wager that next, Anderson Cooper or Piers Morgan will call on the actress Charlize Theron to comment about the relevance of her pet campaign to stop violence against women in our former homeland, and its relevance to this case.

There is no relevance. Violence in the “Rambo Nation” is unidirectional: black on black and black on white. Violence against women—at least the kind that causes more than hurt feelings—follows the same pattern.

Meanwhile, the blade runner is still walking on water. Oscar Pistorius is receiving “overwhelming support” from his fans. Or so his agent informs the fans and the press.

UPDATE: FROM the Facebook thread. It’s just as I said. The Guardian is turning a statistical anomaly in this group (well-to-do whites) into a generic statement about violence against women in South Africa.

Messiah Stood Up By Media, Momentarily

Barack Obama, Fascism, Journalism, Law, Media

The saving grace of Big Media’s excruciating blow-by-blow coverage of the stand-off with LAPD officer and Navy veteran Christopher Jordan Dorner is that it made the network nits forget about their date with Barack Obama.

That Obama’s fourth State of the Union extravaganza promises to be excruciatingly boring we already know. One other thing known about this SOTU—also the secret to his success—is that, as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, and “for the [fourth] straight address, the President’s State of the Union message will be written at an eighth-grade level.”

“‘You Can’t Fix Stupid.'” Last year, a “Smart Politics” study seemed to back Ron White’s aphorism.

A “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’) sensibility” is how National Review’s John Derbyshire has described the annual State of the Union address. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derbyshire in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” in which John (he’s a friend) goes on to detail how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. (This year, the most repulsive among the representatives staked out aisle seats for themselves, starting early in the morning.)
“On the podium at last, the president offers up preposterously grandiose assurances of protection, provision, and moral guidance from his government, these declarations of benevolent omnipotence punctuated by standing ovations and cheers from legislators” (p. 45). The president of the USA is now “pontiff, in touch with Divinity, to be addressed like the Almighty.”
The razzmatazz includes a display of “Lenny Skutniks” in the royal box. These are “model citizens chosen in order to represent some quality the president will call on us to admire and emulate.” Last year it was the family of the girl who was murdered by the Tucson shooter. This year’s “Lenny Skutnik” was Debbie Bosanek, Warren Buffett’s secretary. Bosanek is supposed to embody the Barf(fett) Rule, described by the Divine One thus: “If you make more than a million dollars a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.”

More about this monarchical, contrived tradition in “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State.”

Here’s MSNBC’s “coverage” of Il Duce’s address.

In For The Kill

Crime, Government, GUNS, Law, Liberty, Private Property, The State

Local, state and federal assassins are hunting for LAPD officer and Navy veteran Christopher Jordan Dorner, 33, who is alleged to have shot three police officers, one fatally, in Riverside, and committed a double homicide on Sunday, in Irvine, murdering “the daughter of a retired LAPD captain and her fiance.”

Not only have the authorities and their SWAT teams been locking down businesses and invading private homes in the course of the manhunt—the once-bustling winter resort of Big Bear, in Southern California, is one example—but they have been firing on bystanders in the process.

Oops. “Mistaken identity” is what the police perps are calling this collateral damage.

More like “unbridled police lawlessness,” says Robert Sheahen, an attorney of one of the victims. “These people need training and they need restraint.”

Via the LA Times:

In the first incident, LAPD officers opened fire on another pickup they feared was being driven by Dorner. The mother and daughter inside the truck were delivering Los Angeles Times newspapers. The older woman was shot twice in the back and the other was wounded by broken glass.
In Perdue’s case [the latest victim of the state’s assassins], his attorney said he wasn’t struck by bullets or glass but was injured in the car wreck, suffering a concussion and an injury to his shoulder. The LAX baggage handler hasn’t been able to work since, and his car is totaled, Sheahen said.
“When Torrance issues this ridiculous statement saying he wasn’t injured, all they mean is he wasn’t killed,” his attorney said, referring to a press release reporting “no visible injuries” to Perdue.

Gun violence? As Vox Day (who, sadly, called it a day on WND) pointed out, in December of 2012,

800,000 law enforcement officers have killed 525 unarmed citizens with guns so far this year. Approximately 310 million private citizens killed an estimated 10,500 of their fellow citizens with guns over the same period of time. Given that a law enforcement officer is 19.4 times more likely to shoot and kill an unarmed American than a private citizen, if you genuinely care about reducing gun deaths, why aren’t you calling for the disarmament of law enforcement?

Welcome to the militarize, police-state USA.

Sen. Graham: ‘Not Fair to Let President Get Hit.’ But What About The Drone’s Victims?

Barack Obama, Homeland Security, Justice, Law, Technology, The Courts, War, WMD

Bloodthirsty neoconservative Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican Senator, supports President Obama’s drone policy, which, as I noted on 02.05.13, is being debated only because of the very public confirmation hearings for John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Sen. Graham says it’s not fair to leave the president out there on his own while he’s getting hit from libertarians and the left,” reports MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.

I guess it’s fair to leave kids like little Shakira to brave the cowardice of Uncle Sam’s Assassin. As you see, not much remains of the child’s small, charred face.

The Los Angeles Times concedes that it is time “to press the architect of the administration’s policy of targeted killings about its legal rationale and practical application.”

…the document espouses a “broader concept of imminence” in which a suspect can be killed even when the U.S. government lacks “clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” Another passage suggests that the determination of whether there is an “imminent” threat can take account of the fact that certain Al Qaeda members are “continually plotting attacks against the United States.”

Despite the horror of the concept of “Targeted killings”—and the violation of 4th and 5h amendment safeguards—the LA Times posits the need only to “limit” rather than “eliminate” this barbarism.