You'll Never Guess What the Police Are Doing Now

Let me just ease my way around to my topic sentence.  It’s a fact of life that if someone has your password and has access to any account you have - - there is nothing to stop them from just changing the password and not telling you the new one, thus locking you out of your own account.  There seems to be a lot of police paranoia about videos.  In one case today, there was this guy when the cops came into his apartment wanting to search the place in case he were harboring criminals- - I would have just let them.  But that just might be a mistake too and I’ll tell you why.  I’ve seen more of those “Cops” shows than I care to admit where an officer says “Can I look around your car kind of quick like?” in a cheerful voice.  It never ends well.  If it were me I’d answer any question an officer cares to know like “Where are you coming from and where are you going?”  Those who don’t in my opinion appear to be looking for trouble.   One guy had police under video surveillance in his own apartment and apparently one of the cops just shined a flashlight continually at the camera blinding it.  There is another case where a guy was yards from his own property and an officer says “We want you to answer a few questions for us” and the guy kept walking on into his house.  Five minutes later the place was swarming with police cars and officers had the house surrounded talking to each other on their radios.  Then there is a case on the New Jersey boardwalk where some undercover beach patrol took exception to this guy shooting Videos with a bunch of his friends on the pier.  The guy thought this guy was an obnoxious jerk and ignored him.  Later a bunch of officers followed him and showed up at his house.  Now for the punch line.  According to Bill Carol, the police now are “requesting” that you give them your private passwords to your video surveillance cameras so that the police can “check up on you” any time they care to.   They say “It will make our jobs easier for us in case of any terrorist threat”, as though that happens every day.  Bill Carol says “No” to this.  He will be a good citizen and report anything he sees out of the order- - but he’s not going to turn over his passwords over to the police.  The police are overbearing for sure.  Race is still an issue.  In one case a bunch of cops (?) watch this one Black guy like a hawk any time he goes into a convienience store to make sure he doesn’t shoplift, and yet white kids routinely shoplift there all the time and they do nothing about it.  Thom Hartman says if he’s ever in “the wrong side of town” an officer might stop him but merely to ask if he needs help and to make sure he’s safe”.  It’s what you call White privilege- - that invisible backpack of special passports every White person gets when they are born that gives them an instant leg up.  In another case there was this Black guy out with his black friend- - and both people were rounded up by the police because there was a crime “committed by a Black man” in the area- - so the police just round up every Black person in the neighborhood regardless of whether any other evidence fits the crime.

Two brothers - - Black, of course- - were released from a North Carolina prison after thirty years because in 1986 they were convicted of raping and murdering an eleven year old girl and when they found her she had her panties shoved in her mouth.  In fact Justice Scelia used to refer to this case as “An outstanding reason why we should never get rid of the death penalty”.  But of course now we have DNA evidence and both brothers were exonerated and released, hopefully with a new suit of clothes and some cash in their pockets.  Apparently they aren’t bitter about it.  Bill Press says he would certainly be bitter about it- and so would I.  I would want to make sure “someone paid” somewhere, somehow.  There have just been so many of these Death Row cases where later they were exonerated by DNA evidence, which didn’t exist till not too many years before the OJ case in 1994.  Bill Press says that it’s been proven that keeping these convicts on Death Row all those years is just more expensive- - then doing what Pat Brown once suggested we do with murderers of “Dropping them in a hole and forgetting about them”.

There is a theory that the reason why Black young men pose as such macho dudes all the time in public with women and such and talk about bashing “Ho”s around- is because these young Black men are repressed in their masculinity because of the matriarchal situation they face at home with a dominant single parent mother.  Out on the street they are Mr. Macho stud, but once they close the door at home it’s “Yes mam, no mam, anything you way mam.”   I have had a small taste of this in my youth with a bullying brother.  So once I leave the house I change my attitude and what standards I’ll accept from other people.  I’m wondering whether Black kids would be less likely to join a college fraternity because of this.  By the way I didn’t know that hazing was illegal in this state.  From everything I’ve heard- - I thought college hazing was getting worse and more lift threatening all the time.  I would not join a fraternity- - so maybe I have a little of that “Black mentality” going on myself.  I think it may also be true with why Blacks are pretty cold to the idea of a gay lifestyle or in any way being seen as anything other than totally masculine.  They want to assert their masculinity because they feel repressed.  But of course times are different today.  My Dad used to smoke cigars regularly in the car, as did Bill Carol’s.  That would be frowned on today.  He said he didn’t want his young son taking “selfies” of himself in his underwear making faces at the camera on his daddy’s cell phone, because someone might see it (like an officer who asks to see his cell phone) and he might have some explaining to do.  It’s a paranoid age.  These days you don’t see eleven year old boys on bicycles delivering the neighborhood newspaper.  Today they are “drive by’s” thrown from a truck.   In terms of the “Home alone” thing- - the past hour I've been thinking that over.  I think we had lady babysitters up through about the middle of 1960, at least some of the time.  But I do have a specific recollection of the fall of 1960 when I was starting fifth grade that we were alone while parents were taking an investment night class.  They wanted to know what to do with all the money they got from finally selling the Weschester house in August of 1960 and they were advised to invest in Disney stock because "Disney was in a slump".  They didn't, and my Mom regretted it. But now they want to make it some kind of a statute like no younger than twelve or something.   Certainly nobody used seat belts assuming the car you were in even had seat belts.  And today they have these absurd booster seats.  And of course I have ridden in the back of a pick-up truck a time or two in my youth.  It never entered anybody’s mind that you had to be strapped in.  To hear Judy talk (about the government) you might come to wonder if even the standard church potluck or picnic was still legal.  People tell me that in shoe stores, they used to routinely have these X ray cameras in there where anybody could stick their feet in and see their bones.

Israel has illegally conthiscated the natural gas fields off shore from Gaza according to George Washington’s blog, which put out an extensive, thorough posting on this subject.  They are working out a natural gas export deal with Jordan right now.  They say “This changes the basic energy situation with Israel, which now makes them an exporter rather than an importer of energy.  So much of what Israel has done throughout their history is illegal, it seems.  But everybody insists on giving them a pass because after all “They’re Israel” and part of that Judeo-Christian American tradition which Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity are always talking about. 

President Obama, as you know, is going to deliver a major address to the American people on Wednesday evening on going to war with ISIS.  If I heard right, Norman Goldman was just saying that there will be NO war authorization act voted out of both houses of congress because the Senate and House will never agree in provisions.  I have a democratic senator’s plan all cure up right now and ready to go.  Yes, congress is back today so send in the clowns!  Of course the big news of the weekend is how Mitt Romney went on FOX news and pretty much put the President in his place, stating the republican point of view- - shall we say, more intelligently and diplomatically than you’d hear from Rush or Hannity.  There of course is that Romney surge in the polls now, as presumably everybody has “buyer’s remorse” in voting for President Obama less than two years ago.  Because a very good point can be made there would be much less strife in the nation today and the economy could be doing a whole lot better than it is now under Obama.  But not only that, but with Obama gone so would that “boogyman” be gone- for Republicans to make a continued whipping boy of.  The democrats right now would psychologically be in a whole lot stronger place- - with Mitt Romney in the White House.