Emptying The Ocean With A Paper Cup: That's The Job

“The problems may have been there, but they were new to me. A lot of this just destroyed me. We want our people back. We want everybody to come back and be a part of it. We would like to change. We want to improve, to be able to help what other people feel is the problem, because we didn’t see it.”

- Mike Brandon, 45, a Ferguson contractor whose suffered as protests stretched on over the months

"In the city of 21,000, there are literally 16,000 with outstanding warrants out for their arrests. That means that three out of every four Ferguson residents is a wanted fugitive. There’s something very wrong with that,..."

All supported by American law, and it's judicial system, we might add: every bit of it perfectly legal, as the plunder of blacks has always been in this "land of the free."

Knowing our fellow citizens will kill us, before securing our rights, is a discomforting feeling. That they think their murderous framing is good, and normal, is unnerving. That they'd rather fight over it, merely because they can, says all any black history student needs to know about the "content" of white America's "character" - a much discussed topic - after 400 years. Their willing betrayal is true, and still as based in their own ignorance as ever, reason be damned. No one can reason with the violently insane:

What’s hard is reforming the whole country, the whole culture, the whole world. What’s hard is looking at the systems that cause racism in your own workplace, your own community, in yourself. Because that’s a fight that doesn’t end with a “return to normalcy,” which usually just means people learning not to let their racism get caught on video. That’s a fight that requires we acknowledge that none of us in our lifetimes have ever seen “normal,” that we shouldn’t settle for a version of “normal” that’s anything less than “the normalcy that recognizes the dignity and worth of all of God’s children.” 

I worry that the ebb and flow of social change isn’t determined by the resistance of the reactionaries–that revolution doesn’t slow, stall or even reverse because the Right finds new reservoirs of strength. It happens because the revolutionaries get fatigued. We want to declare an easy victory, get some racists fired and go home. Progressives had a huge rowdy party the night we fired the GOP from the White House in 2008 and then, seemingly, spent the next four years in bed. 

What’s happening in Ferguson is great. It’s not over. The outcry on college campuses against SAE because of the Oklahoma University video is great. It’s not over. 

Getting racists fired is always satisfying. It’s never enough.

So you yell loud, you yell often, and you never change focus:

Reparations now. Reparations tomorrow. Reparations forever,...

The Temptations: Time Passes (U Learn To Walk & Talk)

I'm pondering conservative's racism from almost a century ago.

"White racial terrorism in places like Tulsa and East Saint Louis was the tyranny of white supremacy in human form, bombing, killing, raping, and burning black people alive and their communities to the ground. Anti-racism has created no such terrors or blood-letting where white conservatives are victims."

Compared to conservative's racism from almost a century later.

"The study revealed that most whites who claim to have a colorblind perspective on race, generally have poor perceptions about Black people and refuse to admit it. This passive-aggressive mentality about race ultimately gets passed down to their children. The children were directly asked questions about how their parents felt about Black people. Most of the children were very aware of their parents’ covert racism and candidly reported negative observations such as 'Blacks are bad' and 'Blacks are criminals.'”

With conservative's ability to see history elsewhere.

But not where it matters.

Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron compared Republicans that oppose President Barack Obama to the Ku Klux Klan.

Speaking to USA Today Tuesday on the 40th anniversary of his then record-breaking 715th home run, the 80-year-old Aaron said that Republicans are hindering Obama’s job performance.

“Sure, this country has a black president, but when you look at a black president, President Obama is left with his foot stuck in the mud from all of the Republicans with the way he’s treated,” Aaron told USA Today Sports. Aaron continued: “The bigger difference is that back then they had hoods. Now they have neckties and starched shirts.”

Aaron stated that there is still room for improvement for race relations in the U.S.

“We have moved in the right direction, and there have been improvements, but we still have a long ways to go in the country,” Aaron told USA Today Sports.

Aaron goes on to describe the racist letters he has kept for decades as he was chasing Babe Ruth’s home run record.


“To remind myself that we are not that far removed from when I was chasing the record,” Aaron explained to USA Today Sports. “If you think that, you are fooling yourself. A lot of things have happened in this country, but we have so far to go. There’s not a whole lot that has changed.”

It's almost like they're *up* to something,...

The White Racist Destruction Of OK's Black Wall Street

Oklahoma

Recognizing that Black youth are obsessed with money and fame without any correlation to the legacy of African American wealth, Prosperity Publications has selected The Fires of Greenwood: The Tulsa Riot of 1921 as their debut fiction release.

It is a chilling recount of how the prominent Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the once wealthiest Black community in the United States, was destroyed by a fire orchestrated by an angry White mob.

Jim Crow Laws in Oklahoma

Ya Never Caught A Rabbit & Ya Ain't No Friend O' Mine

"Yeah, I know that’s [Elvis],' says Bell, who is African-American. 'That’s the way he’d be looking. That’s the way he’d be dressed. And the bike too, that’s what we rode, those type of bikes.'”

"The Oklahoma Historical Society has uncovered some cool vintage footage of Elvis Presley on and off stage in 1956.”

"The city of Edmond [Oklahoma] prohibited African-Americans by ordinance from the city limits for generations."

Voices

Police officers who responded to a call about an Oklahoma City man with a bloody face thrashing around his apartment arrived to find 22-year-old Jeremy Jarnell Anderson covered in soap and salt and ranting about a "possessed homosexual demon" who ordered him to "cook the Bible."

Cults Need Beliefs - Not Guns - To Kill A Lot Of People

Let's try for a bit of good news:

Oklahoma Bill Aimed to Curb Scientology’s Drug Rehab Passes House Committee 

We just spoke with Robert Murphy, whose daughter Stacy died last July at Scientology’s flagship drug rehab center in Oklahoma, known as Narconon Arrowhead. Murphy had just come out of a legislative meeting in Oklahoma City to tell us that the House’s Public Health Committee had passed an amended Senate Bill which should put the Narconon center in some jeopardy. “It’s a good day,” Murphy told us.

I can't wait for when that impulse - to give relief to those suffering under cultism - sweeps the nation:

Call me,...

 

Cult Expert Rick Ross: Real Busy Doing Nothing

It's funny how someone can easily see what so many are easily missing:

CULT LEADERS are the pied-pipers of America, leading the outcast, the despondent, and sometimes the highly intelligent off into the dark, isolated fringes of society.

And then there's Rick Alan Ross, poking around in that darkness with a flashlight.

From his eclectic office in a former cracker factory in Trenton, Ross, 58, runs the Rick A. Ross Institute, a nonprofit Internet archive on "destructive cults" and "controversial groups and movements."

Attorneys, universities and the media often go to Ross for explanations when seemingly benign groups go off the rails, and parents turn to him when their children fall under a cult's spell.

"I've been quite active in China in recent years," said Ross, who launched his Web archive in 1996 and makes a living as a consultant, expert witness and speaker.

Next month, a computer hacker who unleashed a virus on Ross' website and several media websites will be sentenced in federal court in Camden. Ross will soon be traveling back to Arizona to testify in a case involving three people who died in a sweat lodge during a "spiritual warrior" event.

On a recent afternoon, Ross was on the phone with a reporter from an Oklahoma news station, after a member of the General Assembly Church of the First Born was arrested for failing to seek medical attention for her son before he died.

"There have been many children who have died, needlessly, in groups like this because a creator who leads the group demands that every member adhere to their belief system," Ross said.

It's not uncommon for someone with a television to get sucked in by cults and bizarre movements, at least for an hour or two, but Ross has been researching them since 1982, when someone messed with his grandmother. Ross said the Jewish Voice Broadcast, a fundamentalist group, had infiltrated his grandmother's nursing home looking to recruit elderly residents.

"They targeted Jews to convert them to Pentecostalism," he said.

Ross helped expose the group members working at the nursing home, and his life hasn't been the same since.

"It made me realize that there was a problem in my community," he said.

No, there's no problem. Cults? He's imagining things. On television? How everyone but him is missing that is beyond me,...

The Macho Response: Senator James Inhofe (R)

There are few men who deserve more credit for standing up to the environmentalist cult than Oklahoma's James Inhofe. During the dark days of Global Warming hysteria, when everyone and his brother was buying Al Gore's con job and the mere mention of the phrase "scientific consensus" as enough to shut any debate down with the laughter of idiots, Senator inhofe stood strong, stating clearly and unequivocally that, while he was only a senator, he was from Oklahoma and - knowing the smell of bullshit from even pretty far away - that "consensus" couldn't be around "science" in any true sense of the word. And history will record he was right.

We, too, got in many a battle in this regard, telling our share of scientists their theories weren't adding up - and being made to pay the price such as it was. But what made it so easy to do (when we, also, aren't scientists) was the unwavering conviction of Senator Inhofe that, until someone produced something that made some damn sense somehow, they weren't getting anything by him. His clashes with Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi are now legend. His multiple humiliations at the hands of Al Gore & Co. got tons of media attention. But after all that, of course, we think it is this moment, his triumphant victory speech, that should be imprinted in everyone's memory. When a great defender of mere common sense rose Reagan-like, in good spirits, to announce the defeat of friendly fascism in America and the world, knowing what he'd done was good. Is he gloating? Yes, just a little, but not enough to hide the simple decency of the man or his cause. Frank Zappa said, in a battle between man and the world, bet on the world. Well, as much as we love Frank, the great man got this one wrong:

James Inhofe "saved the planet" by beating it's world-wide cadre of self-appointed defenders at their own game.

Thank you, Senator, thank you. May your service be an example to us all.