Different Strokes

A year-end travesty in Cincinnati.

In that link above, Charles Pierce wrote on 12/29—

I have to admit that it took a day before I could sit down and write about the thoroughgoing bag-job that was the official investigation into the summary execution-by-cop of Tamir Rice, a 12-year old who apparently had the misfortune of having a growth spurt in the fevered mind of one Officer Timothy Loehmann, who found it necessary to shoot Rice down before he could grow any bigger and more threatening. When will African American children learn not to grow so suddenly into monsters in the minds of our brave folks in blue?...

Pierce adds—

There certainly is no point in emphasizing the damn irony that Ohio is an "open carry" state so, even if the cops assumed Rice was 18, and they also assumed his gun was real, they had no cause even to stop him, let alone open fire. Listen to the spiel that Wayne LaPierre unspools every time he's in a room with more than four people listening: arm yourselves, because the world is a hellscape of violent Others who are coming for you and your children. At its heart, open carry is about open season on the people who scare you. It's certainly not about an absolute Second Amendment right that applies to black people as well as white. Open carry is about You and the Others, and so is the training of our modern, militarized police forces. If only Tamir Rice had not been born with that congenital ability to become huge and threatening the way he did in the mind of Timothy Loehmann. If only...

A media spectacle in Oregon's (white) hinterlands.

No cause for concern; as an ABC Twitter headline put it, "Peaceful protest followed by Oregon wildlife refuge action."

On January 3 tengrain observed—

Say, we have not heard from our old pals, the land-grabbing, tax-cheating, grifting Bundy family of Nevada. If it is an election year, the Bundy's must be up to something.

A couple days later, tengrain may have been correct here, in predicting the situation could be ended by a shut-off of power to the refuge.

But Roy Edroso is certainly right about these characters' efforts to seize federal land—

... which I guarantee you would not in such a case be equitably distributed among We the People, but would instead get funneled to the usual shitheels whose cries for devolution of government resources always come down to "gimme."