Sine Nomine
After news broke that a 15 year old Chicago girl who attended President Obama’s inauguration was shot dead by a gang which opened fire on a group she was with the problem was immediate: who to blame. “Outrage” spread with alarming speed “from City Hall to the White House, the 15-year-old became a symbol Wednesday of escalating violence in Chicago while fueling the national debate over guns and crime.”
Symbols are often vague. And Chicago has had a wide choice of symbols of late. The Hadiya Pendleton tragedy was very similar in its essentials to the death of Heaven Sutton, a 7 year old “shot dead while selling candy and lemonade at a stand outside her Chicago home … caught in the crossfire of a gang dispute”. Sutton — and now Pendleton — was a symbol of what exactly?
As expected, even before the victim was in the grave the struggle to cast her death into a narrative had already begun.
Hadiya’s slaying also came up in an interview Obama did with Telemundo. The president was asked whether the example of Chicago, with strict gun control laws, gave credence to the National Rifle Association’s position that more gun laws don’t necessary mean less gun violence.
“Well, the problem is that a huge proportion of those guns come in from outside Chicago,” Obama said. The president said it was true that creating a “bunch of pockets of gun laws” without a unified, integrated system of background checks makes it harder for a single community to protect itself from gun violence.
Set against the backdrop of the record breaking homicide rate in Chicago and the Sandy Hook massacre, Hadiya’s death was to put it cruelly tailored made for talking points. Talking heads are almost certainly going to hold forth on whatever abstract thing they think caused her death.
The list is a long one. The Second Amendment? The lack of national gun control? Perhaps the failure of the Blue Model? The heartlessness of the Red Model? The projects? A former CEO of Playboy even argued Climate Change was to blame. Heck, why not?
But if the past is any guide then after the hue and cry of Hadiya dies down and the smoke clears only the victims will have definite names.
Actual things you can actually jail are likely to be scarce. In the end the causes of the Pendleton’s death and the hundreds like her in Chicago will remain as abstract as a Picasso. The reason the objects of outrage are buildings like City Hall or the White House is simple: its safe to blame a structure but nobody wants to take the risk of naming a persons inside them.
That’s because people inside the building can reach out and punish you. Cancel your permit, forget to send the police around when things get tough. So as it was in the beginning and ever shall be: it will boil down to “the system did it”.
As to the nameplates outside the offices inside those systems, none of them will change. Rahm Emmanuel will remain Mayor of Chicago as all the aldermen will. Nobody in Washington is going to be replaced. But the system will be changed. Some new piece of paper will be required. Some new restriction enacted. And everyone charge with enforcing these new systems will be exactly the same. Only Hadiya Pendleton will change, from living to dead.
One of the the things that Saul Alinsky taught his disciples is that if you seriously wanted to attack a problem you named the man causing it. City Hall never hurt nobody, Alinsky argued, because it’s made of concrete and doesn’t walk around. But the reverse of Alinsky’s rule also holds true: that if you don’t want to solve a problem — or only blow smoke — then don’t name a person as the problem. Hold forth instead on such lofty subjects as poverty, racism, the gun culture or my personal favorite, “violence”. Just so long as The System Did It. Cause the system pays and besides the academics will believe it and there the matter ends.
In the end the dead kids in Sandy Hook, like Sutton or Pendleton become grist for the policy mill. Their ultimate usefulness is as fuel for some narrative. The words change. But the human infrastructure of corruption, the web of spiders who enable the gangs of Chicago and elsewhere will never change.
Which is a pity. The late Ed Wood may have made stupid movies, but he also wrote a line of dialog whose point should be recalled. “But one thing’s sure. Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and somebody’s responsible.” How quaint. Today we are so much more clever. Hadiya Pendlton is dead, and no one — at least nobody who matters — is responsible.
The belief in the need to fix the rules and not the people in the building, the belief that the Age of Aquarius would make human responsibility, personal or otherwise, unnecessary was perhaps the greatest conceit of the 20th century. It was the age when everything was explained and could be fixed by reference to social causes. Individual will played no part in it. It was as mechanical as a merry-go-round. Clever people would say to each other “don’t give to beggars, you’ll delay the Revolution” when they really wanted to say was the money was better spent on dope. But not everyone was fooled. The same guys who minted the phrase the Age of Aquarius also wrote about the dodge of blaming systems:
How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be proud
Easy to say noAnd especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
And social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend
And would that be a Facebook friend or a Twitter friend? Oh a human friend. Well if you really need that kind of friend, buddy, then better buy a dog.
Update: I closed this thread because it was tending toward a subject we can’t look at head on: race. Race is a subject which might not be rationally debatable because it goes to some primordial programming in human beings. And if that’s the case then it operates according to some other calculus, along with such things as sex or deeply held belief. A friend wrote to me “millions of Americans have refused to face this issue head-on; which is one of the reasons, we end up with Chicago. Everyone looks the other way.”
Well not everyone. For there’s a great deal of power in using the subject of race to political advantage such that the strongest argument for talking about race, however irrationally, is that you can try to do better than the hustlers. But maybe the rules in that polemical universe are different and there’s really no rational calculus in it just an emotional one.
There are limits to reason; or rather there are limits to what can reasonably be discussed. Objects outside the realm of reason can exist but we must find some other road to them than words.
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
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The problem with blaming individuals is that the individual responsible for something may have died a long time ago.
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”
Look at the 10′s if not 100′s of millions killed because of the words of Karl Marx. So what if you blame him and blame him correctly? What does it matter? At some point you end up pointing to a political idea.
It is a shame we cannot pass judgement upon the misguided purveyors of good intentions who have lead us to this point. You cannot get restitution from the dead
Instead of talking about responsibility, Obama pushed the victimhood card in Chicago.
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_1_chicago-crime.html
He very stupidly doesn’t realize that taking responsibility for your own life leads to personal accomplishments that can truly bring meaning and happiness to your life.
“Hadiya Pendlton is dead, and no one — at least nobody who matters — is responsible.”
‘Why do the innocent suffer? Why does evil go unpunished’
Far better men than me have chewed on these questions for eons. I have read and listened to a few of them and most have answers or solutions that don’t really satisfy, they don’t close the circle. The answers I have been taught and have come to believe are ultimately true, comfort me.
All of us, every man and woman ever born, will someday stand before God, alone and naked, and answer for what we have done, or not done.
Whatever injustice you have suffered, all the pain you have endured, God WILL make right; He will wipe away the sorrow and balance the books.
A man responsible for great wrong has only one life to forfeit, we can exact no more vengeance than that. More often than not the guilty are beyond our reach.
God is able to balance the books.
I believe if you could go into Hell and see Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Adam Lanza there, you would weep for them.
The trouble with our understanding of things unseen is our fairytale image of them. God made dandelions, cherry blossoms and puppy dogs, but He also made Tyrannosaurus Rex, tigers and giant squid. Each has its function.
At any rate, it comforts me.
It “keeps away the things that come and peer in the night.”
Chicago needs to control not only her own guns, for the children, but all the guns outside that could get into Chicago. This reminds me of LBJ who said of the Russians that they were like the Widow Brown, in that she only wanted her own farm and the farm immediately next to it. Iterate. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg has sent NYPD officers to investigate gun sales in other states. This has broken the bond of brotherhood that LEOs could take for granted. Now an out of town cop instead of getting a handshake and “Whatever you need” is met with suspicion. We are soon likely to see federal and intruding blue municipality officers arrested. The Alinskyites may want to push such a confrontation to crash The System.
There always some named individuals. Often they are defenseless ciphers. A mediocre youtube video editor or a Hispanic man with a Jewish sounding name can represent alternative systems that must be shut down. In these cases the alternatives were fear of Islam and personal responsibility. By attacking the symbolic individuals the possibility of discussing their beliefs, of choosing alternative systems, is precluded.
“the 15-year-old became a symbol”
A fate almost as bad as death. Wasn’t it Kant who said not to treat people as means?
…
And may you grow to be proud,
dignified and true
and do unto others
as you would have done unto you..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGEe_zpddNI
RIP – Hadiya Pendleton
The NAACP launched a lawsuit several years back when it was revealed that black people, displaying gang colors and phrases, could leave Chicago or Detroit and buy guns elsewhere with no problem.
But the people buying the guns were in fact black police officers from the big city, not gang members. And, naturally, they passed the required background check. The NAACP was suing on the basis that gun store owners would NOT refuse to sell to black people just because they were black and dressed a certain way. That is an interesting interpretation of “discrimination.”
People from large cities think themselves well informed and everyone else mere rubes. In my experience the exact opposite is the case. A gunshop owner well outside the city is likely to regard gang signs, language, and colors as yet another baffling big city eccentricity.
Meanwhile, the glad news comes that Tawany Brownley, the black woman who launched Al Sharpton’s career as a race pimp, has been hit with a $400K lawsuit by the people she falsely accused.
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/01/30/columbia-shuttle-disaster-changed-spacecraft/?intcmp=features
How the Columbia shuttle disaster changed spacecraft safety forever
The solution??
NASA – RIP!
And we are supposed to listen to Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords on gun control?
Intrepid Citizens Save Timbutu’s Priceless Manuscripts
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/01/30/intrepid-citizens-save-timbuktus-priceless-manuscripts/
Chicago doesn’t have a gun problem, they have a gang problem. They have a gang problem because the Democratic Party deliberately destroyed the black, and now the Latino, family structure to create a dependent population who has only one purpose — vote (D) on election day. This pattern has repeated itself wherever the Democrats are allowed to rule without opposition. Just remember three things determine the level of violence in a community: the percentage of the population on welfare, the percentage of children born out of wedlock, and the length of time the Democrats have run a city. The ultimate destination of Democratic Party rule is social and economic destruction. Detroit is the final destination we all are facing. This path to destruction will not change until those who receive a welfare check in exchange for a vote wake up and realize they are committing social suicide. I am not holding my breath.
>> “Well, the problem is that a huge proportion of those guns come in from outside Chicago,” Obama said. <<
And a huge proportion of out cocaine and heroin come in from outside the USA. And we've been just SOOO effective in controlling our borders to prevent stuff coming in. Mexico has some pretty draconian gun laws, and yet is awash in blood from all the firepower in criminal hands. You think the drug gangs will ever lack firepower?
Somewhere, inside something there is a rush of
Greatness, who knows what stands in front of
Our lives, I fashion my future on films in space
Silence tells me secretly
Everything
Everything
As I got older I disagreed completely with the premise. But, the music was still great.
9. tdiinva, very interesting. Have you or anyone you know of actually put numbers to your observations? It could be an interesting research project… say the largest 100 or so cities for the last 75 or 100 years?
Have you considered doing it yourself?
Blessings
M
CHU LIED, DOLPHINS DIED! ****** UPDATE******
FREE KURT MIX!!!!!!
Getting a bit desperate aren’t you, Ed Markey and Admiral Allen????
http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2013/01/justice_asks_federal_judge_to.html
Let’s see, the day after the blowout, the Deepwater Horizon was still afloat. It did not sink until April 22. So a worst case estimate might assume that the blowout preventer would get ripped off altogether, leaving the well totally open to the sea.
As anyone who watched the video from the cameras Ed Markey insisted be installed, thereby delaying the well control operations, the BOP was still in place, at least unti it was removed and taken ashore for inspection, AFTER THE STATIC KILL HAD KILLED THE WELL! With the BOP removed, no oil flowed into the Gulf of Mexico.
The whole government meme that the well would not be killed until completion of the relief well was
TOTAL BS!!!!!!!!!!!!
…
And may I say,
not in a shy way,
oh no, not me,
I did it MY WAY!
…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXr59ZKaVTI
http://machiasprivateer.blogspot.com/2011/10/plagiarism-masquerading-as-leading-from.html
You’re welcome!
Heaven Sutton, age 7, shot dead while selling candy and snow cones at a stand in front of her home.
Shot at what time? 10:30 p.m.
I’m not being judgemental though, because that would be frowned upon. Mean. Even “rayciss”.
Selling foodstuffs without a city health inspection certificate and an Illinois tax registration number shouldn’t be a death sentence. /sarc off.
#12
I believe John Lott probably has the data on the first two but my observation about Democratic Party rule is more heuristic. A casual glance at the cities with the highest murder rates shows that they all have long term rule by the Democrats. This, in and of itself, is merely correlation but as we all know the Democrats have pushed policies that maximize the number of people on welfare and welfare breeds single motherhood.
So the people who say it is impossible to sieze all of the people who are here illegally beleive that it is necessary to sieze all of the guns that are here illegally or better yet, make most of the guns here illegal. Got it. Doing what is right is too hard and doing what is wrong is all too necessary.
“the cities with the highest murder rates shows that they all have long term rule by the Democrats”
A small price to pay for enlightened leadership and free condoms.
diinva (#15) wrote “Democrats have pushed policies that maximize the number of people on welfare and welfare breeds single motherhood.” The Demoncrats have also cut Sentencing time and Incarceration Facilities budgets to the point Murders get less than 10 years for a “nobody”(i.e. middle class person) murder, only more time dependent on the “Who” or “How many” they murdered or they are Ordered early releases for Overcrowding.
I want to reiterate what I have spoken here before, All those people fleeing the loser states like Mexifornia, Gangsta Illinois, Blue States etc, because of the High Taxes, Illegal influx, etc. are moving into the Red States will be voting the very same way there that they did in their former home state… I have spoken to several transplants from Mexifornia and they full understand what’s wrong in their former state but they don’t think it has anything to do with the Democrat they voted for! It was the other guys Demoncrat, or idiot Republican, I predict in the next three to four elections Texas will become a Demoncrat bastion!
“Well, the problem is that a huge proportion of those guns come in from outside Chicago,” Obama said.
This idiotic talking point can be negated very easily; if guns are the problem how come the cities where the guns are supposedly purchased don’t have the same murder rate as Chicago?
Answer:”I was hoping you would not think to ask that question.”
And the Obama-fawning media never do. Think that is….
Many neighborhoods in the city of Chicago are being held captive by a de facto Army of Occupation. The majority of the citizens are out-gunned by this Army, and although they outnumber them, they are able to do nothing about it. Hadiya and Heaven are shot dead and nothing happens but more cries to tighten gun laws.
Now indulge me in a Gedankenexperiment. Imagine a street in the worst part of town on a Spring evening, with folks sitting on their porches or stoops, socializing and enjoying the evening breeze. No one is brandishing or waving any weapon, but on every porch there is an AR-15 or M1911 within easy reach. The first time the gang-bangers showed up, things got ugly. Very ugly. Twenty rifles beat a half dozen pistols any day of the week. The gang-bangers hadn’t had it explained to them that way before, but after the initial confrontation they left that street alone.
The point I am getting to is that the men and women on those porches are a perfect example of a well-ordered militia.
If some thirty year old woman can justify the ‘right’ to have her birth control payed for by somebody else, then I can certainly justify the right to have my weapon paid for by somebody else. Or is it that my right to keep and bear arms, being specifically spelled out in the constitution, is automatically assigned a lower priority?
An individual right defines those things that an individual may do, it does not and cannot involve stuff; stuff belongs to the realm of ‘have produced’, not ‘may do’.
Group rights, on the other hand, have nothing to do with individual rights but with group power. This is the hallowed ground upon which our politicians play. There can be no wrong here, for surely somebody benefits somehow. It could have been better, or it might have been worse, but it is never wrong. Just like the 4th quarter GDP was the ‘best looking contraction you’ll ever see’.
Never ceases to amaze me: 99-plus percent of all the privately-owned firearms in America will never be used to shoot up a school or a neighborhood or to rob a store or subdue a rape victim. As a matter of fact, they won’t be used at all — in a majority of cases not even on the firing range for practice; and yet the ultimate solution is supposed to be to take those guns away.
#17 Charles,
I’ve lived my whole life in California (3rd generation), but I never knew my fellow California conservatives voted liberal Democrat and supported their failed policies that have bankrupted the once-Golden State. Learn something new every day…
You see, I’ve voted for a Democrat only once in my entire life – the man was a personal friend of my fathers’ and was actually much more conservative on taxes and spending than his crooked (now jailed) Republican opponent – but don’t you worry kid, it’s attitudes like yours (sadly, all too common) that have convinced me that when I can finally leave this place, I and my business won’t be headed for Texas – not even passing through.
Yo Ed Markey!!
It is true that Article 1 Section. 6.
“The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”
It gives you immunity for lying through your teeth anywhere outside the House, even on CNN with Anderson Cooper, but note that if YOU were to be questioned UNDER OATH BY YOUR PEERS, your protection vanishes!
Hey Ed, do you know what the Fifth Amendment provides? A way for you to emulate Frank Costello.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Costello_v._Immigration_and_Naturalization_Service/Dissent_White
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH88H7lxJHM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei7r2ex5j48
RWE/7: can you supply a link to the news about Tawana Brawley? And how come she’s getting sued now, when the statute of limitations (for events in the 1980′s) should have run out long ago?
I hold no brief for Ms. Brawley (quite the contrary), I’m just curious. Thanks.
Spiny Norman (#22) Wrote “#17 Charles, I’ve lived my whole life in California (3rd generation), but I never knew my fellow California conservatives voted liberal Democrat and supported their failed policies that have bankrupted the once-Golden State. Learn something new every day…”
Well I guess your right “Spiny Norman” only “California conservatives” are fleeing Mexifornia, the rest are on temporary leave…. Really what this is telling you is “California conservatives” are rare! I have yet to personally meet one and I live in a very conservative state in one of the most conservative counties, yet the three transplants (2 retired one company moved) are very liberal, but maybe my Liberal is conservative in Mexifornia?
oMan@24: can you supply a link to the news about Tawana Brawley?
The defamed prosecutor in the case won a $429,000 defamation suit against Brawley back in 1998. Brawly was discovered living under an alias in Virginia.
NY Post
According to this article in the New York Post, Brawley was served with papers ordering her to pay Steven Pagones the damages from the 1997 defamation lawsuit. She has never done so, and the initial judgment of $190,000 has grown substantially since then.
Spiney@22: I’ve lived my whole life in California (3rd generation), but I never knew my fellow California conservatives voted liberal Democrat and supported their failed policies that have bankrupted the once-Golden State.
I suspect that most of whatever conservatives exist in California such as Victor Hanson, stay in California trying to make it work. It is the successful liberals who fail to connect their voting with California’s failures that are fleeing what they have wrought.
WINDY CITY BLUES
I’m a little guy who’s lost in the wood
I know I should
Stay in the hood
With someone to watch over me
Chicago town is where I reside
And though we take pride
In the number who’ve died
Have someone watch over me
There’s a teenage boy who’s havin’ some fun
Look at him run
Forgot his gun
No one will watch over me
“As a matter of fact, they won’t be used at all — in a majority of cases not even on the firing range for practice;”
Probably true. Which means that said weapons, because they probably haven’t been maintained either, are quite likely to be completely useless for at least one of two different reasons. If you can’t hit the broad side of a barn, then your gun is more of a danger to you than anyone else.
“Well-ordered militia”, remember? Which, at the very minimum, implies that a gun owner, and probably especially a CCW permit holder, has a responsibility to practice with it every so often.
mp @ 8: … safer seats for the Titanic …
OMG
As a lifelong Chicago resident, I should point out that last year’s homicide total of 508 dead is not the “record” media outrage makes it to be. In 2006 over 600 people were murdered, and a murder rate over 600 was typical. After that the rate declined and it’s only last year’s uptick that runs counter to national trends that is gaining attention.
Chicago bans concealed carrying of guns, so thugs know they’re safe as long as their victims are law-abiding citizens.
In what is being labeled “Duck and Cutter” Homeland Security offers helpful advice…
WASHINGTON — Is your workplace getting shot up by a crazed gunman?
No problem — just grab a pair of scissors and fight back!
That’s some of the helpful advice in a new instructional video from the Department of Homeland Security that was posted on the agency’s Web site just a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/shear_bravery_beats_guns_feds_d9BanDpupuVezePd6trYoM
I guess you can either run or defend yourself with scissors but don’t do both: OSHA will fine you for running with scissors!
Fletcher:
I have received this message from Vice Admiral Bligh:
Mr. Christian:
You never get anything correct! Those damn Yankee rebels said “Well Regulated” not “Well-Ordered. FYI, that means the ability to executed the Prussian Manual of Arms as given to them by Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Stueban late of King Friedrick II’s General Staff.
There’s the right way, the wrong way, the Navy way and my way. We do things my way.
V/r
William Bligh, VADM of the Blue, RN
32. Peter Grynch “I guess you can either run or defend yourself with scissors but don’t do both: OSHA will fine you for running with scissors!”
Bravo!
What could be more alike than units in an army? They have a standard size, uniform equipment, a prescribed organizational structure. The people in them even wear the same type of clothes. And yet no two units are alike. Some are incredibly effective. Others are a menace even to themselves.
The difference is Element X. The people factor. Institutions are circumscribed by their structure like a wine bottle, but their content depends on what fills it. The search for “big solutions” can be a way of avoiding the deficiencies in Element X.
Rahm’s job isn’t to feel someone’s pain but to solve the problem. How come he’s got these gangs running around in Chicago. Let me guess: it’s because Illinois is near Indiana, right? But the alternative answer is that neither Rahm nor the relevant officials are doing their job.
There are laws — their laws — against guns. There are probably laws for everything. But they apparently have neither legitimacy nor enforcement in certain places. And the answer is not principally to go blame Indiana, though doubtless that will happen in the end. When you can’t succeed even by your own terms of reference the strategy of the incompetent is to move the goalposts. National gun control; global gun control; disarm the universe! Make it so we don’t have to enforce our own laws.
Changing models won’t help a dysfunctional leadership. This is well known in companies. You can’t fix a losing team by making them attend a motivational seminar. Ultimately you do it by changing the leadership.
Some punk will probably be rousted and clapped in jail. But will anything change from a statistical viewpoint? Maybe not. Because the guys who own the street, own the schools and control the institutions have an arrangement. And it’s not going to be upset by so a little a thing as the death of a 15 year old girl.
Charles, we conservatives are plentiful out in California. Unfortunately, we are outnumbered and get out voted most of the time. Being in a democracy means when you lose a vote you get to live with the consequences of the majority’s decisions, no matter how stupid and/or short-sighted they may be. And the consequences of decades of Democratic misrule are about to be visited upon all Califorians, regardless of political leanings. Then we will see how CA votes after TSHTF.
Oh, in my lifetime there was a time that Texas voted Democrat every election and California voted Republican every election. So spare us your Texan smugness.
#33 tdiinva – My bad for faulty memory. Does that invalidate the point I was making?
Josh @ 31 – Look at it this way, the Challenger Commission had the first lesbian astronaut’s (Sally Ride) opinions included in the main report, and Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Richard Feynmann’s put into a minority report, Appendix F. And her primary legacy was to iintroduce P langauge into space.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rwcbsn19c0
http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
RIP – NASA!
The Man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, must be weeping. So when you see a full moon, give him a wink to cheer him up! It’s the least you can do.
Tarnsman (#36) Not a Texan, been thinking of moving there but not likely with the coming change… I can see your upset with what’s happening to you (Mexifornia), 50% of the state is Hispanic now (30% of that illegal) and very, very unlikely to go Republican in yours or my life time if ever (It may not even stay American in another 20 or 30 years, especially reading VDH blog)! I guess I will have to spell it all out, cause for some reason you and “Spiny Norman” think I don’t think there are Conservative Mexifornian’s, when I said “I have spoken to several transplants from Mexifornia”, I have meet 3 ex-Mexifornia (personal, as in at the neighborhood pool/house parties) all three (none knew each other before moving to my state) are very Liberal, one a closet homosexual (retired, lives with another man about the same age, just won’t come out and admit it) the other two I guess are straight, both have wife’s, the non-retired one has a young child, any way all I said was these three people from Mexifornia that I have meant where all Liberal, voted Liberal, voted for 0bama the first time and based on the last time we talked (at neighbors house party in October) they were on track to vote “0” again, the homosexual one was flaming Demoncrat (non-violent), even if you whipped out the ole smart phone and pulled up the facts he was unsure that he could trust the internet “cause that ain’t what he heard on CNN”. I have not personally meant a “Conservative Mexifornian” but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe they (you) exist.
Machias #8:
“Later analysis found that Columbia was doomed during its launch, when a small bit of foam insulation broke off the shuttle’s external fuel tank and tore a hole in the orbiter’s wing.”
Well, they got that wrong. The assertion all during the flight was that it was a “small bit of foam” but in reality it was neither small nor foam. It was a big piece of silicone rubber that formed a aerodynamic streamlining ramp in front of one of the struts that held the Shuttle to the External Tank. Even after the loss of Columbia the Shuttle program manager still asserted that it was a “small bit of foam” that could not have done any damage that could have caused the loss.
I knew many of the details but I am finally reading Comm Check, the book about the Columbia disaster. The shocking thing I found in the book was not facts but attitudes. Multiple people at NASA responded to requests by engineers to seek USAF and NRO data on the Shuttle’s on-orbit condition by saying, basically “What difference does it make now? We can’t do anything about it.” They did not think there was a way to save the crew, so they did not want to know if they needed saving. They persisted in that attitude even when their own computer simulations showed that even if it was just foam, a strike of that size at that time would be sufficient to rip away the thermal protection to a degree to cause loss of the vehicle.
That was worse than Challenger. With Challenger they ignored data and opinions they did not like. With Columbia they even refused to acquire data and ignored people who they hired to provide opinions.
I study failures, and it is amazing how much things get misremembered. Inside of a year it will be widely recalled that Haidya Pendleton was killed by a white man wielding an AR-15 as part of an attack on Obama’s gun control efforts. In the cases of Tawany Brownley and the Duke Lacross Rape it was asserted that the seriousness of the charges outstripped the utter lack of evidence; no doubt many felt that such things had happened in the past and they were just catching up.
Chuck Hagel is apparently making a hash of his testimony issuing nonsensical and incoherent replies that he subsequently has to retract because it is so off-base. Hagel has been accused of many things, including some kind of anti-semitism. But he may not be a bad man at all, just an unsuitable candidate.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with being incompetent, so long as you know it. Now nearly all of us are incompetent at some things. There are things we’re not good at doing and there’s no shame in admitting that. Hagel might be good at many things, including being a decent human being, yet not have the aptitude, or background or the mental suitability for the job he is about to assume. In other words, he might be incompetent for the task.
But it’s the narrative that rules. Hagel will probably be confirmed for the worst of all possible reasons: rejecting him will mean the President was fallible. Or worse it will mean the President is an incompetent selector of subordinates. And since that can never be, Hagel will be confirmed, however poorly suited he might be.
Making things work seems less important than assigning blame. And we’ll pipe ourselves to doom in the greatest of faked confidence. And about all the defense anyone could offer for poor Hagel was that asking such mean questions only proves that Republicans should never be trusted with power again.
Now wait a minute. Has anybody every stopped to think that selecting an incompetent Secretary of Defense can affect the safety of the country and by extension, themselves? Did it occur to these purveyors of talking points that one day — perhaps soon — Mr. Hagel will have to make a decision that will determine whether they personally live or die?
My guess is that they do not. Because “nothing ever happens since nothing ever has”. We are invulnerable. Seventy years of peace. What are you worried about pardner? Our only problem is to ensure the steady supply of Obamaphones and the stuff that Julia and Lena Dunham like.
Maybe Chicago’s road to murder began in this way. Maybe Detroit’s path to collapse started thus. One more lie didn’t matter. One more incompetent wouldn’t make a difference. Until it did. And when the thing gives, the conclusion is: the system did it! Sue somebody! Like we did before! But no system in the world can survive a fool. A musical genius can do more with a comb and harmonica than a doofus with a grand piano.
The coefficient of silliness in Obama land grows ever larger. How long before someone in the White House claims that about 500 murders per year in Chicago – population about 2.7 million – is “sustainable” so it can’t be bad?
When “Wheel of Fortune” has more gravitas than and a rationale superior to, the nominated Defense Secretary does one laugh or cry?
Hadiya, a black child named in the Arabic idiom, deserved everything she got including the bullet in the head. The self-pitying black community now owns Barack Obama and his racist anti-American communism. They own the 20+% unemployment. The blacks of America own their utter destruction. They deserve everything that’s coming to them. The White Liberals who push multiculturalism deserve their utter dispossession, their utter alienation, their utter repudiation under Obama.
Justice is funny with her blindfold and her equanimity. Nemesis is funny with her relentless pursuit of balance.
The New York Times argues that Chicago’s gun laws are failing because it is an island of gun-free sanity in a gun-crazy environment.
Thus, for things to work, the gun ban must comprehensively cover more territory otherwise “those outside the city can, in the words of one city official, carry guns to gang members in the city with ‘zero accountability.’ … State lawmakers, too, are soon expected to weigh new state provisions like an assault weapons ban, as Chicago already has.”
Thus, if you fix the system at a high enough level nobody can screw up.
Right, there at 43. Nobody wants to name the problem. The problem is Negro culture, which precedes all the other problems. Send ‘em all to Chicago.
Not recognizing that Islam and African culture is a threat is a fool’s game.
And the fools are going to lose it.