The thin-skinned and not-too-bright blue line

Over the past few weeks there's been a lot of bloviating in the media, lots of faux outrage, over the shooting of two New York Police Department officers. They were ambushed by a nutjob with a gun, a person with a long history of erratic and illegal behavior, a fellow who in the normal course of events would have been labeled a lone wolf, a mentally ill victim of the system who just didn't get the help he needed when he should have.

I say "in the normal course of events" because there is a remarkably long history of law enforcement officers being targeted by nutjobs whose obsessions have been stoked by ideologues who never bother to think about the consequences of their words. I can even name a bunch of the shooters without having to do a whole lot of Googling: Eric Frein (2014) and Richard Poplawski (2009) in Pennsylvania, Jared and Amanda Miller (2014) in Nevada, and Jerry and Joe Kane (2010) in Arkansas all pop up pretty fast in web searches. In every case there was a clear link with ideology being actively promoted by multiple people in the media. But you know what else is true of those cases? Every single shooter was white, so there was no hysteria about how every single white person was responsible for those guys' actions, no mass protests by aggrieved police officers, no ranting about the damage being done by activists. Nope. Why would there be? Apparently it's a given that when a white person does something bad, he or she is acting solely on his or her own with absolutely no outside influences affecting behavior.

Oh, every time there's an incident, a few brave souls dare to question the rhetoric used by right-wing bloviators like Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh, but they get drowned out pretty fast by the rhetoric about needing better mental health care and by the troubled lone wolf apologists. The stories also fell off the mainstream media news radar remarkably fast. After all, no one really wants to hear that white people engage in violent, sociopathic behavior, although you'd think the NRA would want to hype it -- if the guy next door might be an armed nut, then maybe I should own a few guns, too. In any case, it's odd, isn't it, that when it's white guy after white guy ambushing the police, there's no possible way they could have been influenced by anything other than the voices in their heads but when it's a black guy doing the shooting suddenly it's activists like Al Sharpton who are responsible? Who would have thought that the Rev had that much influence?

Bottom line: if you're really worried about the thin-skinned blue line, the guys who actually don't run that huge a risk of dying in the line of duty unless it's from choking on a doughnut (loggers have a higher occupational fatality rate than law enforcement, so do commercial fishermen), get pissed off about the media blow-hards that keep painting government as the enemy. Authority is authority, and when some lunatic decides he's going to stand up to the government, he's going to ambush the authority figures that are closest to home -- and that's going to be the local sheriff's deputies, a small town cop doing a routine traffic stop, or a Park Service ranger walking over to tell someone to keep his dogs on a leash. So go after the idiots with the Gadsden flags and tea bags tied to their hats. Or, better yet, go after the ideologues like Sarah Palin who babble mindlessly about "second amendment solutions." Because those are the people who really are encouraging the nutjobs to shoot cops.

And, as a side note, the real reason the cops in New York are so pissed at Mayor DeBlasio has very little to do with the shootings of Officers Ramos and Liu. It's just a convenient highly public way to mouth off about how much they hate the Mayor. The underlying problem is the department is in contract negotiations and, unlike previous administrations, DeBlasio doesn't believe the NYPD can do no wrong. He's had the nerve to question both the department and past policy, like the discredited broken windows theory and stop and frisk, that targeted minorities. The city and PD are currently operating under a Memorandum of Agreement, not an actual labor contract, and contract negotiations have not been going the way the Police Officers' Association would prefer. Naturally, journalism having pretty much disappeared into the toilet in the past couple of decades, you can count the number of media outlets that have reported on this aspect of the problem on one hand and still have several fingers left over.

So what's the point?

The House of Representatives has voted unanimously to provide retroactive pay to furloughed federal employees when they return to work. This is a fairly clear sign they all expect the shutdown to end soon. So what's the point of the shutdown other than to provide sound bites and toss some red meat to the extreme right wing base back in the hollers and swamps of the deep South? I speak figuratively of the hollers and swamps, of course. After all, there must be a few Tea Baggers who live in perfectly respectable trailer parks or have family trees that actually fork. 

The government shutdown has now gone on for five days (counting today). What has it accomplished? U.S. prestige is plummeting globally. We're looking more and more like a banana republic, a third world nation that's going to end up about as influential on the world stage as the Maldives or East Timor if the extreme right wing keeps its posturing up much longer. The U.S. is really keen on telling other countries how to run their governments, but after this debacle why should anyone listen? 

The shutdown is also damaging the economy: in addition to the federal employees placed on indefinite furlough, contractors and concessioners are shut down, and businesses that rely indirectly on the government are also hurting. How many days can a guy who operates a hot dog cart in front of an office building go with no customers before he's forced out of business? Whatever the economic cost ultimately is, it's probably going to be more than the current estimates of approximately $300 million a day. 

Given that the Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010 and has been rolling out incrementally ever since, it truly baffles me as to what the Tea Party minority within the Republican Party hoped to accomplish with their last minute grandstanding. Their posturing is the metaphorical equivalent of standing right in front of a 1,000-car BNSF coal train that's already moving at a good clip and hoping to stop it on a dime. Not going to happen. At this point, all one can do is hope the clown car that's parked on the tracks gets flattened, but, unfortunately for the country, its occupants are probably going to emerge unscathed. 

Much ado about nothing

Haven't been paying much attention to the news lately, but on the rare occasions when I did in the past week, it seemed like North Korea and its one or two nuclear warheads and its one-step-above-an-ox-cart delivery system were the main topics of discussion. Listening to the professional bloviators and fear-mongering politicians, you'd think that North Korea and its figurehead of a leader, Kim Jung Un, posed a global threat akin to the alien spaceships in the movie "Independence Day." If you believed the bloviators, you'd believe all Kim has to do is push a button and most of the West Coast will be transformed into smoldering rubble.

The truth is, of course, that if Kim pushes a button, it's far more likely that North Korea (or at least its launch facility) will be the site smoldering. North Korea doesn't exactly have a lengthy track record of successful launches of anything. Their long range missiles are more likely to blow up (or fizzle out) on the launch pad than they are to make it off the ground, and when the missiles do launch successfully, they don't seem to go where they were supposedly aimed. If North Korea decides to bomb Seoul, odds are they'll accidentally nuke Pyongyang instead.

As for North Korea posing a threat to the United States, pshaw. There's been a lot of blathering about a North Korean missile hitting the west coast, but when you listen closer, it turns out the "west coast" is actually western Alaska. As in the Aleutians. Somehow I find it hard to believe the North Korean military would waste one of its handful of warheads by trying to bomb Tanadak or Ugidak Island. Wiping out a seal colony wouldn't seem to have much propaganda or tactical value. Besides, the North Koreans, isolated and nuts though they may appear, are aware that for every nuclear weapon they have, the U.S. has 3,000 or more. They know that if they were stupid enough to ever use a nuke, they'd be utterly annihilated in less than an hour. The posturing and threats are bizarre, but they're not real. They're theater designed to help keep the Kim family in power

Still, I can understand why the Japanese and South Koreans would be nervous. There's always the possibility that the ongoing puppet show that's designed to make Kim Jung Un appear as militaristic and batshit crazy purposeful as his father and grandfather could get out of hand and a missile aimed at Seoul or Tokyo could be accidentally launched. But given that all the actual experts on North Korea are pretty much in agreement the whole build-up to "war" is designed for internal consumption as a way to shore up the Kim family's position, I don't see any reason for the media in this country to spend as much time obsessing about the non-threat as they do.

More weirdness

I am really happy I don't work on the main campus. This popped up in my e-mail a few minutes ago:

It has come to our attention that members of the Westboro Baptist Church will be protesting outside of the . . . gates in the . . . Road Corridor September 9, 2009 from 10:55 – 11:30 a.m. Should this occur, employees may experience traffic congestion in this area.

The protest is being held because the church believes [Large Nameless Agency] is supportive of homosexuality. Please be aware of this protest and prepare appropriately when travelling in and out of the campus.

[Identifying information for actual location edited out in compliance with my policy of not stating explicitly where I work on a personal blog.]