The Smoke Break

You want some brie with that whine?

The Dark Night

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Thursday night a young man in Aurora, Colorado made manifest his insanity and when the smoke cleared inside the movie theater 12 eager Batman fans were dead and 58 others were on their way to the hospital.

The hysterical response by the media was immediate and, in stereotypical fashion, unerringly irresponsible.  ABC’s Brian Ross pulled a connection between the shooter, James Holmes, and the Tea Party out of his ass and let it fly on the air.  A short while later an apology was issued but that doesn’t help the innocent man named Jim Holmes who IS a relatively recent member of the Colorado Tea Party (and happens to be a former law enforcement officer who clearly understands the gravity of making false accusations).

The social media exploded in tweets and Facebook posts of real anguish and quickly descended into the inevitable arguments for and against the 2nd Amendment.  The vultures of the left are still circling the bodies of the victims, seeing another opportunity to swoop in to push for anti-gun legislation; blind to their freshest hypocrisy of 300 dead Mexican citizens and Brian Terry as a result of the government’s nefarious back-door gun-control attempt of Fast & Furious.  The armchair quarterbacks on the right tap out their claims that if more people were allowed to carry guns, someone could have stopped Holmes before so many died.

It’s all as insane as James Holmes.

The inconvenient truth remains that if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will carry guns (example:  Chicago).  Not to mention that the Century 16 theater already has a “no weapons” policy that obviously meant squat to James Holmes – in the same way all “gun free zones” mean squat to any criminal looking for an easy target.  By all accounts, Holmes is extremely intelligent and as such would have found a way to wreak deadly havoc no matter what anyone allowed him to purchase if wreaking deadly havoc on innocent others was his intention (examples:  Bulgaria last week; 9/11).

Another inconvenient truth is that the 2nd Amendment is to protect the people from tyrannical overreach of the government.  While it’s decidedly both good and appropriately responsible to be able to defend ourselves against home invaders and thugs on the street and to keep those we send to Washington respectful of the citizenry as a whole (ok, at least in some measure), not enough people carrying guns take the time for training that instills the appropriate reactive instincts required in a situation like the one in which those moviegoers found themselves.  Indeed, unless you served as a military sniper, Navy SEAL or spent your days clearing away insurgents for military convoys your first reaction will be wet pants, not the fondly imagined efficient killing of a random madman who has unexpectedly flung chemicals in your direction and promptly started shooting at anything that moves.

The bottom line is that everyone needs to take a deep breath and simply shut up.  This was horrible, this was a tragedy, and so many families will never be the same because of the actions of a single madman.  Such madmen have always and will always walk amongst us; their insanity will forever be unfathomable, unexpected and there isn’t a damned thing we can do about it.  At least there is nothing we can do without inflicting serious pain on everyone.  As the old Star Trek movie once said, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one”.  In America that translates to one thing:  trampling the Constitution is never the answer.

Media Madly Manipulates Martin Murder

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It’s always horrible news that a 17-year old is dead.  For parents, it doesn’t matter why; it’s just never right to have to bury your own child.  So my heart goes out to the parents of Trayvon Martin.

But at the same time, I find my hackles raised by those using this young man’s death as a reason to continue to play the race card when heinous black-on-white crimes are only local news at best.  Truth be told, humans are rather a herd animal and it is an inherent survival instinct to profile in one way or another; no species can survive without using visual clues to ascertain friend vs. a foe who’ll eat you for lunch.  So unless it happens every day, a black man walking through a predominently white neighborhood is simply going to be noticed, just as a white man walking through a predominently black neighborhood will be noticed.  We’re hard-wired to pay attention to something that is different in our immediate environment but if we are to believe we’re really better than “animals” then it behooves us to put common sense to work when something does catch our eye and appears to be out of place.

That means I’m not going to be defending George Zimmerman’s actions here.  We are a nation that was founded on belief in the rule of law, not the rule of man and I will let the law do its job and investigate fully what happened last month.  That also means that  the bounty being collected and vigilantes being encouraged to go to Sanford, Florida by the New Black Panther Party and bring back Zimmerman “dead or alive”, Spike Lee’s tweet of Zimmerman’s home address and the thousands of ugly tweets calling for Zimmerman’s lynching, all being encouraged by the likes of Al Sharpton and even President Lame Duck are not only blatantly hypocritical, they are  absolutely wrong and I personally condemn them.

But you won’t get condemnation of black vigilantes or any encouragement for the rule of law from the lamestream media; they continue to do nothing but support racial divisiveness, starting with the first media reports noting Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic” instead of simply “Hispanic”.   And posting only a photo of Martin as a child instead of one more recent.  And forgetting to mention that Martin was 250 miles from home because he’d been suspended from school and although the father he was visiting claims he’d grounded his son because of whatever wrong behavior got him suspended, he was out on the street after buying treats while visiting his father’s fiancee and her son.

No, no.  No real reporting.  Just fluff and nonsense like last Friday evening when the ABC Evening News aired what might, if one wanted to be polite, be termed a “human interest” story related to the Sanford incident:  they interviewed an obviously middle-class black mother who told the reporter that she “always” tells her sons to act like what amounts to little more than a civilized human being when they go out in public.  To whit, pull your hood off when you go into a store (“remove your hat” in the “old days”), carry your purchases in a bag, be polite.  We called these things simple manners when I was growing up and god bless the woman for teaching it to her sons today.   The problem is that in a desperate attempt to appear somehow relevant, the lamestream media presents this wholly appropriate kind of parenting by a black mother as somehow “wrong” or “shameful” despite the fact that thousands of mothers of every race do the same thing with their sons and daughters every day.

Frankly, it is ABC and every other lamestream media hack that ought to be ashamed.  But that’ll happen about the time pigs fly.

To put what so many mothers say into plain English, if you want to dress like a “gansta” and slouch around on MY streets, you can bet that ass deliberately hanging out of your low-slung pants that I’m going to take notice and I’m not going to be pleased to see you.  For while self-expression is a fine thing, if you deliberately make the choice to identify with misogynists, thieves, gangbangers and murderers and to go out in public dressed the part, you will be labeled and treated as such when you show up where the majority do not make that same choice.  Should you really be a good kid with good parents, I sure hope your mama whips your butt for being such an embarrassment when you get home.