Colossus 2013

Revising the monument:

Not like the noble works of Western fame,

Of conquering race astride from land to land.

Here at bloodied, graffitied gates now stands,
A twerking harlot, some parent’s shame, named:

U S for Sale! Comprehensive Plan!
"Yo World; may your spawn slander, reprimand,

My breed, whose bequest, nonetheless, they'll have.
Keep," mumble her collagened lips, "your fit. Pour:

Your benighted, needy, your just plain bored!

Your aggrieved, those eager to settle scores,
Bloodied hands fleeing their criminal wars,

Bring misogyny, polygamy, crime,
Bring Hate, Greed, 'Vibrancy'; Power is mine!
Hit my cel at the door, for a good time..."

Feminine Ways of Knowing

I know next to nothing about the Jody Arias trial because I haven't had cable in a while (I still have a television, and watch a little too much streaming Netflix--one day I'll get rid of that and I can be That Guy, you know, who occasionally [or not so occasionally] sniffs "I don't even own a television"--someday!). So I was a little surprised to learn she stabbed her victim in the chest thirty times and then claimed self-defense. Are you kidding me? Nobody stabs someone thirty times in self defense. You stab someone thirty times out of rage, not out of fear. Then it struck me: in the feminist mindset, misandrist rage and self defense are one and the same thing. There is no guile in the lady.

Open Letter

The Carrot and the Stick

All of these fatigued and serious faces showed no evidence of despair; beneath the splenetic cupola of the sky, their feet plunged in the dust of a ground as desolate as the sky, they made their way with the resigned expression of those who are condemned to hope forever.
--Charles Baudelaire, To Each His Own Chimera

Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.  
--W.H. Auden

What made my dreams so hollow? 
--Tom Waits, The Train Song 

 You will not be cured. Live long enough and the realization can no longer be deferred. The expectation you've sustained--that has in return sustained you--that over time, with work and luck, you will make yourself whole, is a fraud. A necessary fraud, but a fraud nonetheless. It is not possible. You cannot "find" yourself, as the widely ridiculed cliché would have it--we ridicule it only because it's naïve to speak of it, not because we aren't each guilty of the conceit--because your self is not out there to be found. A thing can't be both seeker and sought. The eye cannot turn upon itself. And the conscious self reduces down entirely to point of view.

But we can't help trying. Each of us, to the extent we're not simply waiting out mortality eating, shitting, acquiring, procreating--to the extent we're human--is a philosopher. We want to know, and the only real object of inquiry left is the conscious self. It's the last mystery. Everything else is biology, physics, evolution. Technical issues.

The only thing setting us apart from the apes--those living, breathing mockeries of the noble idea of man-in-God's-image--is our ability and need to form this question. So, if the self is one's unique identity, and everything else is animal function, then the searching for the self, absurd and impossible, is the only self there is. The physical world, while infinitely vast, is infinitely explainable. Scientific questions will always arise, but so will their answers. We can assume every one of them has a solution, whether we've found it yet or not. There is only one question that has no answer: Why? In the first place, why?

Man has gone in search of God and he has found the void. The void will not hear our appeals, will neither love nor judge us, will not put things to rights; it is indifference itself. This pathetic lament is the last argument in favor of the existence of God; but I will not be led by an appeal to consequences--no matter how unthinkable the consequences. I will have the consequences, thank you; you can have the appeal. Take your fairy tale, if it sustains you. But take it somewhere else. I retain my sympathy, even some respect, for the religious. But I'm all out of patience for them.

Should I speak only for myself? Okay then. I will not be made whole; I will die as I was born: unfinished, incomplete, ill-adapted and ignorant. I'm okay with this; whatever the case, there's nothing else for it, and I'm in no hurry to prove this thesis. And anyway, I could be wrong. Now don't run off; humor me a bit longer. You've got nowhere to go, and besides, none of this is what I came to say. My concerns are of the petty, selfish variety--the only honest kind, in other words.

I've always been afraid of two things: beginnings and endings. I'm afraid to "take the leap" into new endeavor; I will stay for years in the same physical or metaphorical place purely out of inertia--often in tormented awareness of the fact. But I fear more finishes and finality--at least some part manifestation of my fear of death. I once took a job selling--or trying to sell--cars. I was thoroughly incapable. I couldn't "close". Second only to closing in my dread was opening the sale. Introducing myself. This holds mostly constant for me. The only thing I can bear, the only thing that feels natural to me, is the stringing along of a thing.

I want to fiddle in the middle. Better still to go back periodically, not to the beginning, but to some earlier point. Even as a  young boy I recall wanting to go back in time, to correct mistakes, to retrieve something irretrievable--never anything specific. I've just always been haunted by the vague suspicion I've screwed up. I don't defend this. I know it's untenable; I have paid dearly for it. Still, I despise you for not understanding. I despise your practicality. I despise your literal-mindedness, your impatience with all this, your perfectly logical and correct arguments. To hell with your careers, to hell with your ambition, to hell with your concern! To hell with you, closers, and this world of yours!

I say this because there was another, undeniable aspect to my aversion to closing the deal. Something less flattering still. I don't understand the appeal of bending someone to my will, of seduction--even of women. It repulses me, almost as much as the idea of being seduced. I always feel guilty about it. It is degrading. Maybe it's really just pride, pathological egoism--I refuse to play along, to compromise. I will not bow, I will not appeal, and I will not act the part. I have a few problems, you see, with my character as written in the script. I want to know who wrote these lines anyway. I will not read them--they are all trite cliché. I'm not feeling it. What about the audience? To hell with them. I didn't charge admission. I can't see beyond the floodlights; I'm not sure they're out there.

Yes, I know--the closing must be done; the cars have to be sold. The seductions, and subsequent screwing, must take place. Somebody has to do it. If no one does it, it won't get done, and if it doesn't get done, we'll suffer for it. But must everyone have join in, for Christ's sake? Modern life increasingly demands we all be closers--or closed upon. Closers run the world. What about creativity, you say? There are creators--like those who invented the car. But notice: they don't run things. They have some influence, often very much influence, yes, but they don't have the last word in this world. It's right there in the contract: they get a percentage of the gross, but they don't have final cut. Who does? Politicians? Well, that's what they call themselves, but what they really are is salesmen. Closers. And what they sell is necessarily corrupted. It's used by various interests. The world is run by used car salesmen. They even look the part, only somewhat better dressed. Their patter is, if anything, less honest. But this isn't what I came to say either.

I have given up the ghost--now don't start, it's not as grim as that. And some day--it's inevitable--you will too, if only on your deathbed. You fear this like the onset of dementia in old age, or like falling under the sway of a cult. You see it as death itself. Me, I can't remember truly caring. I have only wanted to escape it. Now I can't fake it anymore--yet I have to go on living. The battle has been lost but there is no surrender, no merciful slaughter; no resolution. I must go on fighting--I'm not the type to put a gun to my head. I am too jealous, too greedy, too envious for that, after all my gloating disdain for concern. I'm not leaving this all to you bastards. I might miss something! So I am condemned, not to die but to live.

But I have sinned; that's the worst of it. Because I have not contributed. It was pride that would not let me step onto the wire. I would not risk it. I have been a free-rider the whole time, the worst kind, the kind who consoles himself with the notion he's been cheated. But I haven't gotten away with it; mediocrity is its own punishment. I committed the worst sin of the healthy and sane: I held back. I was a miser, hoarding himself. Recently I read about a "hoarder" who'd been found, dead for weeks, buried in the refuse he wouldn't part with. That's how they'll find me, amidst the half-baked ideas, the false starts, the if-only regrets that are my refuse. For what was I saving myself? What did I expect to happen? I made an assumption that isn't mine to make--that none of it matters. Now that assumption fails too. What's the first thing to give with age? Certainty.

Those who act are better, nobler; they operate on faith, on the faith there is meaning, despite all evidence to the contrary. It takes faith to buy in without guarantee. And faith is all we ever had to go on in the end, in the absence of signs.
Ironic isn't it? But faith is all we have left in the absence of God.

A Moment of Silence, Attended by Fanfare

Derangement meets cynicism. From Politico, President Obama and the politics of kitsch:

Tuesday morning, a peculiar announcement trickled out of the White House press office: President Barack Obama would be holding a moment of silence for the victims of the Boston bombings. At the White House. By himself.
No press or other intruders allowed. Except the White House photographer. 

Nothing more than the president's sentiment is necessary, because nothing can exceed it. Perfection cannot be perfected. The tragedy is less significant than the great one's recognition of it. We're way beyond kissing babies in this country. This is getting weird.
So I guess it's inconceivable anyone will sit the One down to explain to him the whole point of a moment of silence is, well, silence. I wonder: what would an Oval Office intervention look like, anyway?

Operation Embrace in Effect, Operation Dry Hump Standing By

According to USA Today, the mosque attended by the terrorist Tsarnaev brothers is a tad less liberal than its Boston surroundings:

Several people who attended the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Mass., have been investigated for Islamic terrorism, including a conviction of the mosque's first president, Abdulrahman Alamoudi, in connection with an assassination plot against a Saudi prince. 

Its sister mosque in Boston, known as the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, has invited guests who have defended terrorism suspects. A former trustee appears in a series of videos in which he advocates treating gays as criminals, says husbands should sometimes beat their wives and calls on Allah (God) to kill Zionists and Jews, according to Americans for Peace and Tolerance, an interfaith group that has investigated the mosques. The head of the group is among critics who say the two mosques teach a brand of Islamic thought that encourages grievances against the West, distrust of law enforcement and opposition to Western forms of government, dress and social values. 

"We don't know where these boys were radicalized, but this mosque has a curriculum that radicalizes people. Other people have been radicalized there," said the head of the group, Charles Jacobs.

Recall Fareed Zakaria's advice that we "embrace" our Muslim communities like the Europeans do, establishing contacts so respectable Muslims will inform on their radical cousins. The feds are way ahead of you, Zak:

Yusufi Vali, executive director at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, insists his mosque does not spread radical ideology and cannot be blamed for the acts of a few worshipers. 

"If there were really any worry about us being extreme," Vali said, U.S. law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and Departments of Justice and Homeland Security would not partner with the Muslim American Society and the Boston mosque in conducting monthly meetings that have been ongoing for four years, he said, in an apparent reference to U.S. government outreach programs in the Muslim community. 

The Cambridge and Boston mosques, separated by the Charles River, are owned by the same entity but managed individually. The imam of the Cambridge mosque, Sheik Basyouny Nehela, is on the board of directors of the Boston mosque. 

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, attended the Cambridge mosque for services and are accused of setting two bombs that killed three people and injured at least 264 others at the April 15 Boston Marathon. The FBI has not indicated that either mosque was involved in any criminal activity, but mosque attendees and officials have been implicated in terrorist activity

Note the same organization, the Islamic Society of Boston, runs the Islamic Society of Boston Mosque in Cambridge and the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Boston proper. This may mean nothing, but it could be they have an official mosque for inoffensive services and more radical preaching in another to avoid alarming their more respectable congregants.

Observation

Our zeitgeist: everything is revealed and nothing is known.

People are going to have to think less about themselves and think more about me, Fareed Zakaria...

Fareed Zakaria was born into an elite Indian Muslim family and made his way into the global elite via Harvard and Yale. He's edited Foreign Affairs, Newsweek and Newsweek International; now he's a host on CNN. As you can imagine, this expertise and background have given him unique insight into the inexplicable horror of the Boston Marathon bombing by two young Muslim men whose family was welcomed into United States as refugees when they were children. Mr. Zakaria has had a whole week to apply his keen intellect and experience to the problem. What has he discerned? That we haven't done enough to "embrace" Muslims, and should take Europe, with its much larger, more hostile and separate Muslim communities, for our model:

Over the past two decades...European countries have recognized the dangers created by their indifference and have sought to integrate Muslim migrants. Governments at all levels have engaged with Islamic communities, taking steps to include Muslims in mainstream society but also to nurture a more modern, European version of Islam. In effect, many governments are now dealing with Islam as they have other religions, creating Islamic councils, providing funding for cultural activities, representation in public forums and being mindful of religious practices and holidays.

Note the use of "integrate" in place of "assimilate". This is a long-time trend that has been gaining steam as assimilation has failed due to the sheer number of newcomers, our regnant system of identity politics and the progressive elite's assault on the concept itself. Assimilation of immigrants is now considered either too ambitious or just so, I don't know, last millennium in its backwardness.

Of course I'm forgetting the most important question following the bombings. How does this affect the prospects of Fareed Zakaria and his progeny? Without a separate community (and the threat of violence and general social degradation coming therefrom) Zakaria cannot claim to be our diviner of intention, and his rougher poor relations ("Muslim leaders") cannot appropriate the role of intermediaries. All this talk of "fear" in the elite media--the average American wouldn't know he was in its throes if the Washington Post didn't tell him--is just wishful thinking. Your fear is desired, necessary even, and will be presumed whether you like it or not. The lad(ies) doth protest too much. This is all  leaving aside that Zakaria is nearly as alien to the average Muslim immigrant as Barack Obama is to the urban black.

Fareed goes on to reassure us that if we legitimize separate Muslim communities as such and deal with them through a new generation of Muslim political leaders, occasionally somebody will rat out the terrorists before they strike:

The lesson from Europe appears to be: Embrace Muslim communities. That’s a conclusion U.S. law enforcement agencies would confirm. The better the relationship with local Muslim groups, the more likely they are to provide useful information about potential jihadis.
An attack — apparently inspired but also perhaps directed by al-Qaeda — was foiled recently in Canada for just this reason. An imam in Toronto noticed one of his congregants behaving strangely and reported the behavior to the police, who followed up and arrested the man before he could execute his plan. Before briefing reporters on their collaboration, Canada’s top counterterrorism authorities invited Toronto’s Islamic leaders to a meeting and thanked them for their help. “But for the Muslim community’s intervention, we may not have had the success,” said the official, according to one lawyer invited to the meeting.

Of course a moratorium on immigration from Muslim countries is inconceivable. What would become of Fareed's CNN gig then?
Wait a minute, I think I've seen this bit before:

Resourceful Satirical Magazine Finds Americans Not Stereotyping, Ridicules Them For Their Ignorance

Via Steve Sailer, here's The Onion engaging in accidental self-parody:

Majority of Americans Not Informed Enough To Stereotype Chechens

The peoples' calm tolerance goes into the media's Narrate-o-Matic and voila, out it comes as popular "ignorance." The average American just can't win--must be why the elites think he's such a loser.

 Of course the real irony here is this failed bit acknowledges a certain amount of information is necessary for "stereotyping"; likewise the ongoing media campaign of obscurantism surrounding Boston (of which this piece is a part) reveals tolerance often requires a certain amount of ignorance. But that's getting way too complicated for the typically all-knowing twenty-something a couple of years out of Harvard. Easier (and safer) to just to fire away at the usual targets, because as you know, anyone who runs is a vc...

 

Strife Begins at Conception

In joking about the newest front in the war on the racial achievement gap--earlier and earlier pre-school intervention--Steve Sailer suggested the disparity in children's nurturing between lower and upper income homes, which all decent people know is the only possible explanation for inequality, begins as early as eight months, twenty nine days before birth--but not a day earlier!
Cue the New York Times' Opinionator blog, breathlessly announcing the latest in Promising Studies and Expert Consensus. Specula up, social workers of America! Emphasis added:

By the time a poor child is 1 year old, she has most likely already fallen behind middle-class children in her ability to talk, understand and learn. The gap between poor children and wealthier ones widens each year, and by high school it has become a chasm. American attempts to close this gap in schools have largely failed, and a consensus is starting to build that these attempts must start long before school — before preschool, perhaps even before birth.

 Your womb belongs to the state, er, village, so say "ahh", Shaniqua, and try not to chatter so much during the procedure...

Tyranny, Hard and Soft

I doubt severe torture could bring me to genuinely care about whatever merit there is behind Femen's protest of Vladimir Putin, and there must be some merit, him being a Russian tyrant and all, prompting the hysterics. But I appreciate the girls giving me the opportunity to use the word in both its original and later meaning: 
from Latin hystericus "of the womb," from Greek hysterikos "of the womb, suffering in the womb," from hystera "womb" (see uterus). Originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus. Meaning "very funny" (by 1939) is from the notion of uncontrollable fits of laughter. Related: Hysterically.

Indeed, this photo looks like one form of hysterics provoking another.

I couldn't help thinking of our own would-be czar's recent collision with modern feminist wrath. When I read that President Obama had complimented California Attorney General Kamala Harris on her looks I recognized immediately that it wasn't a slip of the tongue--as the outraged and apologists alike would have it, sort of latent misogyny leaching out of its own--but, like almost everything about the Wonder Brother, a calculated political move. Every now and then the president, who imagines--or at least is told by his advisors--that he has a special connection with women undergirded by sexual attraction, finds it advantageous to stoke the smoldering embers of this dysfunctional desire. Remember when he pretended to find Debbie Wasserman Schultz "cute"? Be reassured, bubbas everywhere--your president is a regular guy, not averse to telling an awkward and homely girl she's attractive to get what he wants. And feminist America is at this point one big, awkward girl suddenly all-powerful and settling scores, like Carrie as prom queen, indiscriminately destroying all about in her blind rage.

Masculine charisma was one of the things projected by the racism-consciousness-conditioned masses onto the blank screen that was candidate Obama as a modern Black Hero (along with wisdom, cool, depth of feeling, oratorical majesty--none of which the man, still, evidences any more, and probably less, than the average public figure in modern America; but then, if we really wanted to get down to it, black America only evidences these traits in the romance of film and television). We get a lot less of that now, having been subjected to that skinny, jug-eared face, that narrow-shouldered emaciated frame, that uncertain, transparently false voice and manner, for years now.

The president's maladroit handling of the grant of assumed sexual charisma just reinforces for me something I've suspected for a long time: he isn't much interested in women and he doesn't really get them. He has--let's face it--a rather dull but assertive wife at home who (and can you blame him?) he's only too glad to leave there to hit the links, court or work (and probably in that order) and who resembles nothing so much as a breed-mare, with her stoutness of height and frame and unqualified black American pedigree; he has a troubled relationship to a mother who absented herself from his formative years, and now half of American womanhood expecting him to bring home the political bacon. The cost of power is indeed high.

But the impression I get from both the methods of Femen and the president's awkward courtship of American womanhood is that feminism, despite its rhetoric of revolution, is still doing what women have been doing for ages: regulating masculine sexual energy.

Breach Born Man

God had a bad dream
the day I was born
I am an aborted scheme
this person you scorn

The Devil came winding
as a serpent in shadow
'Round feet of angel sentries unminding
watching the chaos below

Purring Satan let slip
in sleeping God's ear:
"Make his breast a crypt
for a heart of pure fear

"Let the cold inside chill him
when ambition will arise
Let dread always fill him
for the the shock of surprise

"Let his ardor be frigid
and his passions be dull
Let his habits be rigid
his disgust always full!"

God tossed in his slumber
frighted Devil withdrew
Now cursing the blunder
of a plot not seen through

"The blueprint's unfinished
and I had such a plan!
Now he's all the cold fish
and no part the man!"

He carried me away
His evidence to hide
But when I let out a bray
in panic he cast me aside

"If I had only the power
to give and take life
I'd pluck this weed-flower
and leave it to die

"But it's for Mother Nature
to do her best worst
She'll grind down this dull creature
and return it to Earth"

But then I was found
by a mother's good grace
She bore me away sound
to this safe place

And now I endure, down here on Earth
poorly adapted and forever unsure
Made in God's absence, of Devil's mirth
turning in circles, a creature impure!

The Varieties of Religious Expression

...manifest fabrications [of biblical scripture] should not be regarded as deliberate fraud, done with intent to deceive...they spring from a concept of the nature of documentary proof which is alien to us. Thus, an earnest scribe, believing wholeheartedly that the doctrine of the Trinity was true, thought it merely an accident or oversight that it was not made explicit in 1 John, and therefore saw it as his duty to remedy the matter. He was merely doing constructive work in the cause of truth!
--Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity

There is no doubt whatsoever that Gould’s humane and passionate writing in defense of racial equality will be looked upon by future anthropologists and historians as a beacon of rational positivism in an age in which genetic reductionism was showing alarming signs of resurgence—as indeed it still is, as race-stratified genome-wide association studies continue to dominate research on human variation. As Gould’s longtime friend, the anthropologist Richard Milner, told a correspondent from Discover magazine: “Whatever conclusions he reached, rightly or wrongly, he did with complete conviction and integrity. He was a tireless combatant against racism in any form, and if he was guilty of the kind of unconscious bias in science that he warned against, at least his bias was on the side of the angels."
--Ian Tattersall, Remembering Stephen Jay Gould

We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking.
The Humanist Manifesto I, 1933

Oh assumption!

Johnson's "concept of the nature of documentary proof" above--which would better be described merely as faith--is no more alien to us now than it was to his "earnest scribes" of before. They knew the truth, and that all roads of inquiry would end there--in Christian revelation. Likewise the modern "rational positivist" knows his truth--all races are equal in all things--and likewise that no truth can contradict it. In the minds of both morality and materiality intersect at this higher truth, like two ropes tethered to to an anchor.

Conventional liberalism has gone from resembling religious faith to becoming one, and like all religious faiths it bases its logical defense on an appeal to consequences--that any evidence against the absolute equality of races is thereby false, contradicting as it does our moral injunction and fervent desire that all races must be equal. This article of faith has become so dominant, so ingrained, men of science routinely invoke a fallacy they learned to detect in grade-school, without recognizing it!

When they cite, with that stubborn insistence that hasn't abated through decades of contrary evidence, the "debunking" of the "scientific racism" of the past by such as Gould (debunking that needs no empirical basis according to Tattersall and Milner, but merely the approval of "the angels"), they are reciting their version of Revelation. The conceit is now dogma (fitting that SJ Gould himself proposed science and religion be treated as "separate magisteria"); secular materialism and those who march under its banner have their own unassailable "truth" beyond the reach of reason or evidence. And they are very much on the march.

The religious tendency, which is natural to man, was not killed off with God by the Enlightenment, it has merely adapted; to use a term Gould himself helpfully defined for us, its present manifestation can be usefully viewed as an exaptation:

 (1) A character, previously shaped by natural selection for a particular function (an adaptation), is coopted for a new use—cooptation. (2) A character whose origin cannot be ascribed to the direct action of natural selection (a nonaptation), is coopted for a current use—cooptation. 

 As I've written here before, belief in God (or gods, for that matter) distorts less our understanding of the world than does our new regnant faith, which demands an equally unyielding belief in a fantastic view of human nature and thus has immediate consequences for society and the individual in the here and now. The old faith created a fantasy of the supernatural; the new created a fantasy of the natural world.

The Tattersalls of the world may not be as deluded as I make them out to be here, but if they aren't they're then banking on none of it mattering in the end--that is, they're counting on truth itself being of no ultimate consequence, or at least something that can be defied, indeed must be defied, for the good of mankind.

Of course this is the charitable view--they may be more accurately viewed as mere cowards, unwilling to sacrifice their careers, their positions of respect, the esteem of their fellows, for truth and principle. And, curiously, this brings us back to a belief in God--and the attendant belief in His judgment in the afterlife; because if there's only the judgment of other men to fear, and death brings no accounting, why shouldn't a man abide the egalitarian lie and get by? Indeed, why not perpetuate the lie with as much skill as one can, as Gould did, and get by very well? Telling the truth is still a mug's game in the absence of God--maybe more than ever.

We Didn't Start the Fire...

NBC is facing a defamation suit for deliberately altering the recording of George Zimmerman's 911 call to make him look "racist". To recap, the actual recording:

 Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about. 

911 Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic? 

Zimmerman: He looks black.

was "abridged", for time NBC asserts, to this:

 Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

In their response, NBC is asking a judge to stay the case until the misinformation campaign has run its course and Zimmerman is safely locked away:

...if Zimmerman is convicted, that fact alone will constitute substantial evidence that the destruction of his reputation is the result of his own criminal conduct, and not of the broadcasts at issue which, like countless other news resports [sic] disseminated by media entities throughout the country, reported on the underlying events.

If Zimmerman is convicted it will be (indeed, he's only facing trial) largely because of this lynch-mob narrative of which the dishonest edit in question is part and parcel, and which NBC helpfully documents elsewhere in its response:

[N]ewscasts across the country played relevant excerpts from the recording and newspapers and other publications similarly quoted only portions of it. On March 19, for example, the Los Angeles Times reported that “[t]he slaying has dominated social media and national news outlets in the wake of Friday’s release of 911 tapes in the Feb. 26 shooting. On the tapes is Zimmerman’s call to report Martin. ‘He’s got his hand in his waistband and he’s a black male,’ Zimmerman can be heard telling the dispatcher, saying he’s following Martin.”… Similarly, Fox News reported a summary of the call as follows: “On the 911 call, Zimmerman is heard describing Trayvon martin as a black man who appears to be, quote, up to no good and reaching in his pocket.” PBS’s “McLaughlin Group,” in a program taped March 23 and broadcast the weekend of March 23-24, summarized the Call this way:

MCLAUGHLIN: Here’s Zimmerman on the phone reporting to a 911 operator the presence of a suspicious person. (Begin audiotaped segment) 
GEORGE ZIMMERMAN: He’s got his hand in his waistband and he’s a black male. 911 OPERATOR: Are you following him?
 MR. ZIMMERMAN: Yeah. 
911 OPERATOR: OK, we don’t need you to do that (End audiotaped segment) 

 Keep in mind their first defense was that it was a "mistake", now that it's a time-edit--the first strains credulity because it's nearly impossible an honest mistake would just so happen to turn an indifferent exchange into a neat narrative fit. The second is no excuse at all--that they edited for time (saving a whole three or four seconds) oblivious or indifferent to an inflammatory alteration of meaning.

Sequester Reveals Government Hiring Bias Favoring Women, Blacks

...is not the title of this article at The Hill about the disparite impact the sequester will have on that massive, perpetually besieged cohort know as Women and Minorities (which covers by my quick estimation something like eighty percent of us, albeit with some confusing overlap), due to their prevalence in government work. I keep waiting to see that headline, but they went with a variation on that old standby World to End, Women and Minorities Hardest Hit. Maybe someday.

There is nothing so frightful as a bustling ignorance.
--Goethe

Two-Cent Tupac

In the latest incident of fatal black malice two innocents were killed as a result of a car-on-car drive-by on the Vegas strip. Yes, we've lost another "aspiring rapper" (see one of his compositions here) and all that potential therein.

All the usual elements are in place here: a confrontation between rivals spills out into the street, shots are fired, bystanders are killed. Inured as we all are to this grotesque cliche, this one will get a little more attention due to its dramatic, gruesome aspect--a taxi caught fire after being struck by the rapper's Maserati as it rolled through traffic with him (now dead, presumably less sentient than before) behind the wheel--and its similarity with Tupac Shakur's assassination just blocks away in 1996. So an obscure petty potentate calling himself "Kenny Clutch" gets to go out in high gangsta style, behind the wheel of a fine Italian sports car in a blaze of vainglory.

But he may also have something in common with another rapper (as of this writing still alive), the highly successful Rick Ross, unauthorized namesake of "Freeway Rick Ross", a drug dealer who almost single-handedly introduced crack cocaine to LA (now putatively reformed and blogging at Huffpo; but of course). Recently the rapper Ross was exposed as a fraud who lied about his criminal resume. Turns out he was in fact gainfully employed--as a prison guard no less.
This does not sit well with the Black Gangster Disciples. When the fake Rick Ross name-checked one of their more renowned killers in a rap they'd had enough. Ross had to cancel several shows when the gang declared he must pay them a tribute or he would be assassinated. Ross was later fired upon as he drove his Rolls Royce in Ft. Lauderdale.

 A commenter over at the L.A. Times reveals this comment was left on Clutch's Facebook page:

"lil kenny clutch better keep a killaz name out his fukin mouf or he gone stay stinkin..."

I wouldn't be surprised to learn this was a sort of local version of the Ross situation, or even that Clutch's killers were inspired by the Black Gangsters' successful intimidation.