Archive for the ‘Uncomfortable Truths’ Category

DaTechGuy’s 3rd law of media outrage states

The MSM’s elevation and continued classification of any story as Nationally Newsworthy rather than only of local interest is in direct correlation to said story’s current ability to affirm any current Democrat/Liberal/Media meme/talking point, particularly on the subject of race or sexuality.

Thus when a local cop in Minneapolis exceeded his authority causing the death of George Floyd it became national news.

However when the riots which broke out pretty much destroyed a chunk of Minneapolis, when a part of Seattle was taken over by Antifa these stories were downplayed and ignored (until POTUS pushed the 2nd forward) as were the 20 deaths attributable to said riots.

Make that 21

Police said Turner was riding in a car with her mother and her mother’s friend when they exited the interstate at University Avenue. The driver tried to turn into the parking lot at 1238 Pryor Road when he was confronted by an “group of armed individuals” who had blocked the entrance.

“At some point, someone in that group opened fire on the vehicle, striking it multiple times and striking the child who was inside. The driver then drove to Atlanta Medical Center for help,” police said in a statement.

Police said the 911 caller told them they were heading to Atlanta Medical Center with the victim. The child died at the hospital.

But the real news here isn’t the shooting of eight year old Secoriea Turner it’s how the BLM riot / protest deaths are being reported or not, as David Bernstein notes concerning another Black lives matter protest related death this weekend…

I had to go to an Australian news source to discover that the driver of the vehicle that sped into BLM protesters in Seattle is an African American. (Apologies if one of my colleagues at Instapundit covered this, I have been away for the holiday weekend.) I have to assume that American media outlets know this, and decided intentionally not to mention it to create the implication that this was a racist murder, rather than a guy driving recklessly on what he thought was an abandoned highway. I increasingly feel like I’m living somewhere akin to the former USSR, in terms of the way the media are dedicated to a particular narrative regardless of the facts. At least unlike in the USSR I can access alternative sources to our equivalent of Pravda.

He’s talking about the death of 24 year old Summer Taylor a white “non-binary” BLM protester who was run down while blocking a freeway by a black driver who likely didn’t anticipate a bunch of people protesting in the middle of it at 1:36 AM in the morning.

The murder of Secoriea Turner is a huge inconvenience to those who have gone all in on the protests being “mostly peaceful” (which is as accurate as saying my vegan soup recipe is “mostly unpoisoned” but the real question will be what happens next

If Black Lives Matter was true to its name, there would be as much global outrage over the death of eight year old Secoriea Turner, gunned down by anti-police protesters in Atlanta Sunday night, as there was for George Floyd….Or as Secoriea Turner’s tearful father, Secoriya Williamson, told local media in Atlanta, “They say black lives matter … but you killed your own this time. You killed a child. She didn’t do nothing to nobody.”

Of course, there won’t be any BLM protest marches held in honour of Jomo, little Secoriea, or any of the other innocents of any race slain in the ensuing crime wave.

No they won’t because highlighting her death would not cause sports leagues to funnel billions to the BLM front group to elect democrats in fact it might retard such cash. And of course there is the 4th law of media outrage:

The degree of media exposure of the corruption or illegality committed by any individual or organization under investigation is directly proportional to its distance from the media’s ideology.

Now I think the President won’t allow them to downplay this action by BLM but their media/democrat/blm left will do their best.

The truth is they don’t give a damn that Secoriea Turner was murdered, they just regret that it wasn’t done by someone who looks or votes like me.

THEN her life or rather her death would matter.

Update: Dad speaks out:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I predict that none of the money that the NBA, NFL or MLB gave to BLM will be spent remembering her, nor do I expect her name to be painted on any NBA court or her name worn on the jersey of any player as a social justice statement.

Although it would be nice

Our Lady of Guadalupe, with distinctly non-white features, from Wikipedia

This past week we saw two very different responses to Shaun King, a self-proclaimed activist that called on images and statues that showed Jesus depicted as a white European to be taken down. On its face, that sounds legitimate because if Jesus came from the Levant, in all reality he would likely be more tan or brown color. It might make it appear that the Catholic Church was whitewashing Jesus.

Except its not hard to see past this. I’ve traveled a fair amount, and every Catholic Mass I attend overseas, I noticed that the statue depictions are different. Jesus in Turkey was more brown. Jesus in Ethiopia is black. The Blessed Mother appeared in Guadalupe with distinctly Mexican features. And so on. It only takes a brief pause from your cat videos to Google “Jesus around the world” to see this first hand. The fact that Jesus and his Blessed Mother take on the various characteristics of the local population is amazing to me. We have a truly universal Church. It really is for everyone, no matter your skin color.

(And as an aside, if he was a carpenter, he was probably ripped and muscular from working all day, and could have run a Crossfit gym)

Sadly, this is the first part of linking the Catholic Church to slavery. Already, there is vandalism on the Wikipedia page about the Church and African Americans. Already we have people linking vague actions by the Church, such as this article, to racism:

“The way the church would sustain or enable racism would be through the acts of the people who make it up,” he told Catholic News Service. “But the actions of all of those people are deeply influenced and shaped by social, political, and economic structures they inhabit.

“Many of them would not perceive their actions as enabling racism, but if they accept the structures uncritically, they are doing that, and they inhibit the church from realizing the full impact or engagement of its social teaching.”

The Boston Pilot

So, pray tell, what are we supposed to do with the above information? Feed the poor? Educate people? Help people find jobs? The Church already does these things! Has the author not looked at a Church bulletin lately? There is a ministry for all these things and more, limited only by people’s imagination and time.

As said before, the best strategy with people like this is to push back. Folks like Shaun King won’t stop with their demands, they are simply looking for weakness to exploit. I give Bishop Hying props for standing up to this mob, where he accepts that we need to have dialog and action while rejecting calls for destruction. Compare this with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is now “reassessing” depictions of Jesus as white.

No matter what the Anglican Church does, someone in the mob will find it as not enough and will call for further action. Mobs don’t stop. When they find weakness, they push harder. Pushing back forces them to stop. The Anglican Church isn’t going to get a break, and they are going to learn this rule, unfortunately, the hard way.

We live in a democracy, but if aren’t willing to enforce its rules, we’ll soon live in a mob state.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Don’t Be Like King Josiah

by baldilocks

Fletch Daniels at American Thinker:

Nobody gets to sit this one out.  The cultural enforcers expect everyone to parrot their talking points publicly, to destroy all resistance, forcing dissenters to grovel in submission.  That’s the whole idea behind the “silence is violence” aggression.  Cultural violence is quite the opposite of silence; it is forcing people to say what no sane person should believe in order not to be destroyed.

Few stand against this pressure, which is why nearly all major companies and organizations have come out with quisling statements of support of the name of a vile Marxist organization like Black Lives Matter.  It’s why Hillsdale College’s response was so notable, because it was a rare exception to the rule.  (This was not surprising coming from one of the only places in America still putting up statues to honor our tremendous heritage of liberty when the cultural zeitgeist is to rip them all down and start at a Marxist Year Zero.)  Hate groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter operate quite freely in this environment, serving as the cultural shock troops and the terrorist wing of the cultural tyrants who have taken over the Democrat party.

Consider just a few of the displays we’ve watched over the last few weeks.  A football coach had to apologize for wearing a One America News sweatshirt…in Oklahoma.  We watched as most of our senior military leaders bowed before their cultural masters.  We watched as statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Francis Scott Key, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and even an assortment of abolitionists either were destroyed or came under attack, even as discussions of replacing the National Anthem erupted from the propaganda and activist cultural tyrants.

We watched as the weaponization of the federal bureaucracy by a U.S. president against a president of the opposite party was unveiled before our eyes to a massive shrug by the seditious media, who see it as a wonderful use of state power by their fellow leftist travelers in the bureaucracy.  They are smug in their belief that they can use their cultural power to protect the perpetrators, whom they regard as heroes.

We even watched as a sports league that caters to a conservative audience was complicit in perpetrating a crazy Jussie.  We observed an emboldened social media giant censoring the president of the United States for promising to protect Americans.

We also watched what I believe is the vilest propaganda campaign of my lifetime, when every cop in America was slandered as a racist with barely a protest.  The guardians of civil order, who put their lives on the line every day, often under unimaginably difficult circumstances, to protect their fellow Americans, are being demoralized and hounded out of service.  This has created the fertile ground for a massive increase in lawlessness that will result in a significant rise in the deaths of black Americans, showing that black lives matter not a lick to those claiming that name.

I wish I had a dollar for every American who uttered the phrase “never in my lifetime did I expect to see…” over the last few weeks.  We are living in the upside-down when patriotism is outlawed, the vilest of criminals are celebrated, and brave law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line daily are slandered as the worst of society so thoroughly that it descended into evil farce, when a kid’s show, Paw Patrol, came under attack since it is apparently racist to have a positive police character in a children’s show.

This is war, and the left is playing to win.

(…)

I’d like to see far more people vocally pushing back against the mob within their social circles.  Every person who pushes back emboldens others to do the same.

So, would I, but each person who does so has to be prepared first, and the primary area of necessary preparation is in the spiritual realm.

I know that I’m not alone in think that our country finds itself here because it has turn away from God. We have seen the results of this before; God lifts up His hand of protection and of favor just a little bit – not a total removal. And, suddenly chaos, anger, and fear seem high, wide and deep.

All I’m saying is that is we are plainly seeing the result of doing things the secular way; of raising children to hate each other and themselves. Of believing that if something isn’t perfect – like our history – that it should be eradicated.

Newsflash. Nothing in this world is perfect. Will every imperfect thing be blown up and every imperfect person be dead before the rampaging mobs figure this out?

I think that Daniels is right, action must be taken. But don’t run out there halfcocked, like that couple in St. Louis did while defending their lives and property.

They weren’t fully prepared, though they had just enough. Learn from them. (Side note: I heard that they’re Democrats, fans of Biden. After what has happen to them in the last few days — including being doxxed, I wonder if that is still so.)

Plan your rhetorical tactics and strategies. And take all your self-defense classes and whatnot for when those don’t work.

But if you act against the marauders without preparing your soul, you’re making the same mistake this country has been making for the last sixty years. You will make things worse, not better.

However, between the Wuhan pestilence and the hordes of demons er rioters, looters and mayhem-makers, it’s certain that a ton of people are talking to God already — more than was so in December 2019, at any rate.

Good.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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Defund and depose the Democrat dimwits

Posted: June 30, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths

By Christopher Harper

As Philadelphia slouches toward its new normal, city residents face myriad issues from police protection to garbage removal to exploding fireworks on a continuing basis to downed trees to….

You get the drift. Mayor Jim Kenney and Police Chief Danielle Outlaw—no kidding—apologized to demonstrators who were tear-gassed while blocking an interstate highway. 

The police have suspended the use of tear gas and pepper spray except when an officer faced an imminent threat of death! 

At least the police union got it right. “We’re apologizing to protestors? Protestors?” said FOP Lodge President John McNesby. “To the officers out there, the message is be careful. Call us if you need us. No one has your back.”

Although the city did not fire or furlough any workers, garbage pickup has generally been one or two days late. Recycling has been changed to once every two weeks. 

That’s unlikely to change, given an allegedly huge hole in the city budget. I know that my city income tax and real estate taxes didn’t decline during the pandemic. The tax on soda and other drinks goes on unabated. 

But the city did use its “forward-looking approach” to an urban environment by eliminating laws against using fireworks in Philadelphia. 

Since the first of the year, the city has had nearly 1,000 complaints about excessive noise from fireworks, but no prosecutions. With fewer police wanting to get into any confrontations over enforcing laws, it’s unlikely that the boom of summer evenings will dissipate anytime soon. 

In Kensington, a poor neighborhood in North Philly, veterans with PTSD have complained vociferously about the nightly barrages of fireworks. See https://billypenn.com/2020/06/23/its-the-first-year-fireworks-are-legal-in-philly-and-cops-have-gotten-nearly-1000-complaints/

Then there is the massive number of trees downed a month ago during a severe storm. Dozens litter my neighborhood in Northwest Philly. Residents pushed the branches aside, but the downed trunks require cranes and chainsaws. Some people got so tired of the junk on the sidewalks they paid thousands of dollars to cut up the trees that are technically on city property. 

It would be nice to consider a home outside of Philly, but the Democrat creeps in the suburbs have created significant increases in real estate taxes. 

So I’ll just have to sit back and watch the Democrats destroy what remains of a once-proud place.

One final note: At least I was able to get a haircut this week!