Freddie Gray’s Arrest Conjures Carol Anne Gotbaum’s

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, The State

Freddie Gray, whose fatal injury in police custody led to his death, was clearly manhandled by the officers. Three to 4 oafs likely dug their knees into the spinal column of this slim man. Something bad happened to the vertebrae. The arresting oafs failed to immobilize Gray’s neck in the patrol wagon, even though he was already limp and listless. The affected vertebrae could have further snapped or moved by the van’s motion, resulting in the injury that killed Gray.

The reports on Gray’s injury conjure Carol Anne Gotbaum’s trauma. The petite 45-year-old who weighed 105 pounds was scrummed by meaty policemen in Phoenix’s Sky Harbor, tackled to the ground, and a knee jabbed into her skinny spine. She was then thrown in a holding cell, where she was shackled and chained to a bench. Minutes later Carol Anne Gotbaum was dead.

What a shame that nobody marched for Mrs. Gotbaum, too.

The Geopolitics Of Genocide-Recongition

History, Israel, Middle East

The following puzzling snippet comes via Vox Day:

Israel does not plan to recognize the Armenian genocide perpetrated by Turkey, Rafael Harpaz, Israel’s ambassador to Azerbaijan, told Azeri website Trend.

“Israel is a democratic country, everybody has two opinions, not one opinion,” Harpaz said. “The government has a very clear opinion.”

He said Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman had made Israel’s policy clear. Harpaz told Trend he hoped Israel’s troubled relations with Turkey would improve.

Vox correctly notes that “this decision makes sense from a geopolitical grand strategic point of view.”

I would go further and venture that Israel’s “willingness to throw away the moral high ground” on the Armenian genocide is indicative of the Jewish State’s sense of insecurity in a region that is rapidly forming new alliances. This, coupled with the alienation from the administration of Barack Obama has clearly made Israel a lot more cautious as to which Middle-Eastern potential partner it annoys with symbolic gestures.

Government’s Critter Kill List

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, IMMIGRATION

Central planners and their scientists, especially the liberal ones, like a perfect natural world. To that end, they’ve developed a utopian idea of the natural world and will kill, kill, kill to achieve Order at all costs. Thus, when a remarkable flock of conure parrots made San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill its home, radical environmentalists wanted this flock—which has a complex and highly evolved social life—exterminated because it was not indigenous. It took a remarkable man to save these precious parrots.

While animals may not deviate from the preordained natural order, unless part of the indigenous human population, established human populations must be destroyed by centrally planned, human mass migration.

Of course, bureaucracies under Republican are no different in the critter kill lists they develop. Via Mother Jones:

… Department of Agriculture’s tally of every animal it killed or euthanized over the last fiscal year [is] … 2,713,570 … from 319 different species. … The culling, conducted by the agency’s Wildlife Services division, is controversial. That’s because—much like the actual kill list—the USDA’s operations are shrouded in secrecy, prone to collateral damage, and symptomatic of an approach that often uses force as something other than a last resort. (A 2012 Sacramento Bee series explored the problems with the USDA’s methods in detail.) One of the problems with culling wildlife is that once you’ve gotten into the business of killing some animals to save other animals, it’s awfully hard to get out of it.
The contradictions can be glaring. To wit, the USDA killed cats (730) to save rats, but if you’re scoring at home, it also killed 1,327 black rats, 353 Norway rats, 74 Hutia rats, 7 Polynesian rats, 4 bushy-tailed woodrats, and 3 kangaroo rats. It slaughtered more than 16,500 double-breasted cormorants to save salmon. It’s shooting white-tailed deer (5,321) to save various plant species and the small fauna, like rabbits, that eat them. But the woods aren’t safe for Thumper either—the agency bagged 7,113 cottontail rabbits, plus assorted varieties of jackrabbits, swamp rabbits, and feral pet rabbits. The USDA killed 322 wolves and 61,702 coyotes to save livestock, perhaps in an attempt to atone for the 16 unspecified livestock it killed by accident.

Via RT: “The Obama admin accidentally killed 113 porcupines last year.”

And:

Avoiding controversy can lead to cover-ups.

Gary Strader, a former USDA employee, told the Sacramento Bee he once discovered a federally protected golden eagle dead in a trap.

“I called my supervisor and said, ‘I just caught a golden eagle and it’s dead,'” said Strader. “He said, ‘Did anybody see it?’ I said, ‘Geez, I don’t think so.’”

“He said, ‘If you think nobody saw it, go get a shovel and bury it and don’t say nothing to anybody.’ ”

“That bothered me,” said Strader, whose job was terminated in 2009. “It wasn’t right.”

Hillary’s Trust Issue

Economy, Ethics, Hillary Clinton, Politics, Taxation

Not content with acquiring wealth through the dishonest, predatory process of politics (to contrast with the honest, productive, economic means of earning a living)—Hillary Clinton and husband have protected their ill-gotten gains from the taxman through trusts. These are “common among multimillionaires, and help shield some of their estate from the [inheritance] tax that now tops out at 40 percent of assets upon death.” BloombergBusiness:

Among the tax advantages of such trusts is that any appreciation in the [asset’s] value can happen outside their taxable estate. The move could save the Clintons hundreds of thousands of dollars in estate taxes …

The height of Hillary’s hypocrisy, however, is that, while she “shields her own wealth from it,” she recommended, during her last campaign, that estate taxes be further raised on Americans who’ve managed to amass more than $3.5 million.

… Clinton supported making wealthier people pay more estate tax by capping the per-person exemption at $3.5 million and setting the top rate at 45 percent, a policy Obama still supports. Congress decided to go in the other direction and Obama went along as part of a broader compromise. The per-person exemption is now $5.34 million..

Clinton has referred to estate tax as a “wealth tax.”

To say that she has a trust issue is to minimize how repulsive these people truly are.