too sad to speak

I was shocked to read that the number of 'justifiable homicides' in Florida has tripled since this law was passed in 2005.

As I told my wife yesterday, "racism is alive and (un)well" in the US. I've seen it as I walk the "under-resourced" streets of NYC tutoring (mostly) black kids. I told my wife that it's still here because no one, not even the rich who've attended Harvard, has been educated as to why certain races of humans look different and were in different types of societies using different types of science in order to survive during the times of the Spanish conquistadors and the discovery of the "New World" (which had well-advanced civilizations and cities of 10 million using hydraulic energy for production of food, shelter and life).
If the white men in Texas want to alter schools' agendas, they should include Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel", which explains that ALL of the human species originated in NE Africa about 100,000 years ago, with parts of the first humans walking northwest into Europe, NE into Asia and south and SW into Africa. Over the 100,000 years, in adapting to different environments, different members of the same species had to evolve different skin colors to survive in their climate. Some, because of food supplies found mainly in off shore in the oceans had to develop shipping and metal-working. Those in Africa did not in order to survive in a land of plentiful animal and vegetable food.
End of story.
Each race has the same mental capacity, consciousness, and lifespan, and fear of mortality (which led to differing types of religions to assuage the universal fear of dying).
Instead, people like the male, white Texans and the male, white, old men running the Mormon Church in Utah continue to depend on Bronze Age science found in the Bible and disseminated by Joseph Smith, from racist western NYS in the early 1800s.

This case is so screwy, it's almost beyond comprehension. Zimmerman is recorded on the 911 calls, telling the dispatcher that he's following this kid, actually hunting him down. According to the letter of the law, Trayvon would have been justified in defending himself, as he was being threatened. Yet he ends up dead and his killer is on the loose, armed and very dangerous. I'm ashamed and outraged.

So Zimmerman has already fled???!!!! It's strange because this morning I got a flash of a chase ala OJ Simpson somewhere with Zimmerman trying to flee the police when his arrest warrant comes out. This guy has a big ego like OJ and would do just that. He's also a COWARD.

Zimmerman should get FIRST DEGREE MURDER with special circumstance -- hate crime and LYING IN WAIT. He should never be released from prison.

The Martin family should bring civil suits against Zimmerman for wrongful death and against the resident's association of the gated community for negligence. The gated community knew of Zimmerman's tactics but did nothing about this situation even though Zimmerman was acting on their behalf via Neighborhood Watch. The resident’s association should have gotten a restraining order against ZImmerman which would have made it illegal for him to ride around the gated community , with a gun in his car, looking for “suspicious people.” (code for Black males). A verdict against the gated community would send shock waves through those who just complacently watch the- less- than -responsible exercise their "Second Amendment" rights. Residents need to be held responsible for what goes on in their communities, especially if they are private, gated ones. A verdict in the Martin's favor would not only give the family some justice (especially in the absence of a prosecution of ZImmerman by Florida authorities) but also in the wider sense that people who say they are in favor of gun rights should have some skin in the game when the tragic consequences come home to roost.

Another try, folks:

“Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century” by Stephen Best, Ph.D, Proceedings of the 2nd International Meeting for Environmental Ethics in Athens, 2010
EXCERPTS FOLLOW:

Prologue to a Problem

We are winning many battles in the fight for freedom, rights, democracy, compassionate ethics, peace, interspecies justice, and ecology.

But we are losing the war.

The war against greed, violence, plunder, profits, and domination. The war against transnational corporations, world banks, the US Empire, and Western military machines. The war against metastasizing systems of economic growth, technological development, overproduction, overconsumption, and overpopulation.

Despite recent decades of intense social and environmental struggles, we are nevertheless losing ground in the battle for democracy and ecology.

SKIP

Animal Standpoint Theory

According to feminist standpoint theory, each oppressed group has an important perspective or insight into the nature of society.[iii] People of color, for instance, can illuminate colonialism and the pathology of racism, while women can reveal the logic of patriarchy that has buttressed so many different modes of social power throughout history.

While animals cannot speak about their sufferings in human language, it is only from the animal standpoint – analyzing how humans have related to and exploited other animals — that we can grasp central aspects of the emergence and development of hierarchy. Without the animal standpoint, we cannot understand the core dynamics of the domination of humans over animals, the earth, and one another; the pathology of human violence, warfare, militarism, and genocide; the ongoing animal Holocaust; and the key causes of the current global ecological crisis. From the animal standpoint, we can see that the oppression of human over human and the human exploitation of nature have deep roots in the human domination over nonhuman animals.

SKIP

But once Western patriarchal norms of rationality were defined as the essence of humanity and social normality, by first using non-human animals as the measure of alterity, it was a short step to begin viewing different, exotic, and dark-skinned peoples and types as non- or sub-human. Thus, the same criterion created to exclude animals from the human community was also used to ostracize blacks, women, “madmen,” the disabled, and numerous other stigmatized groups.

The domination of human over human and its exercise through slavery, warfare, and genocide typically begins with the denigration of victims. But the means and methods of dehumanization are derivative, for speciesism provided the conceptual paradigm that encouraged, sustained, and justified western brutality toward other peoples. Throughout history our victimization of animals has served as the model and foundation for our victimization of each other. History reveals a pattern whereby first humans exploit and slaughter animals; then, they treat other people like animals and do the same to them. Whether the conquerors are European imperialists, American colonialists, or German Nazis, western aggressors engaged in wordplay before swordplay, vilifying their victims as “rats,” “pigs,” “swine,” “monkeys,” “beasts,” and “filthy animals.”

Once perceived as brute beasts or sub-humans occupying a lower evolutionary rung than white westerners, subjugated peoples were treated accordingly; once characterized as animals, they could be literally hunted down like animals. The first exiles from the moral community, animals provided a convenient discard bin for oppressors to dispose the oppressed. Colonialism was a “natural extension of human supremacy over the animal kingdom.”… “It seemed clear to many Europeans,” Charles Patterson writes, “that the white race had proved itself superior to the lower races of man by bringing them under its sway, just as the human species as a whole had proved itself superior to the other animals by dominating and subduing them.” Big-game hunting expeditions in Africa, India, and European colonies was the perfect symbol of European domination of land, animals, and peoples, and for millennia hunting has been a ritual of domination and vehicle for asserting male power over animals and women.

It has escaped the attention of the entire Left that the arguments they use to justify human domination over animals – that animals allegedly lack reason and language – were the same arguments used by imperialists when they slaughtered native peoples and male oppressors when they exploited women. Humanists upholding speciesist views, therefore, ironically reinforce their own domination and cannot access the animal standpoint to understand the origins of domination, and so are in no position to advance a viable politics of liberation.

Comment: The "Left's" hatred and contempt for non-human animals in the face of evolutionary truths and facts is irrational. Every other species knows human beings ARE animals, too. And do any of them treat US as disgustingly arrogant and vile as we treat them? Of course not. Their own evolutionary options, natural histories, and social communities do not reflect or share in the pathological perspective of the psychopath a/k/a Western civilized "Man."

The victim was found guilty of wilfully being black.

Since there still seems to be generalized confusion about the facts of this case, here is what we know now:

The perpetrator was a white (half Hispanic, half Jewish) self-appointed vigilante (Zimmerman was not part of any of the 22,000 registered Neighborhood Watch groups in America and that organization forbids members from carrying guns or using police powers), with a violent criminal background (resisting arrest and battery on an officer - 2005, expunged by diversion) who should not have been granted a concealed weapons permit.

Zimmerman was known to target only blacks as "suspicious", he used racist language in his 911 calls, he was told by the dispatcher not to follow Trayvon, he continued to stalk the boy who had been attempting to get away from his pursuer, a fight ensued and at one point a witness saw little Trayvon on top, and Zimmerman used deadly force to end the confrontation he had initiated.

The police arrived soon after, performed a drug/alcohol test on the corpse but not on the shooter, accepted Zimmerman's assertions that he had no criminal record and felt mortally threatened by the young boy and acted in self-defense (in spite of dispatch recordings that he was stalking the boy), "corrected" a witness that the cries for help she attributed to Trayvon had actually come from Zimmerman, returned Zimmerman's gun, made no further investigation, and then failed to either identify the victim or notify his parents for three days (in spite of being in possession of Trayvon's cell phone).

The Florida Stand Your Ground statute allows the use of deadly force in a public place by a person who initiates a confrontation if at any point he feels mortally threatened by the person he was attacking. The law not only prevents arrest or prosecution in almost any case of the use of "justified" deadly force, but also prevents civil suits against the perpetrator and punishes the victim (if he's not dead) with loss of prison privileges for filing a civil suit - including canteen purchases, telephone access, outdoor exercise, use of the library, and visitation.

Additionally, "the court shall award reasonable attorney’s fees, court costs, compensation for loss of income, and all expenses incurred by the defendant in defense of any civil action brought by a plaintiff if the court finds that the defendant is immune from prosecution".

Florida's law, similar to but more extreme than those in 20 other states, in effect gives blanket permission to kill and then rewards the killer with compensation in the event of a civil suit while punishing the victim for using their legal rights to recover damages.

My wife and I served as volunteers in an evacuee shelter in Louisana in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and heard countless stories of the brutality and utter neglect in the anarchy resulting from the government's non-response to that disaster. From this experience we concluded that we needed a capability to defend ourselves in the lawlessness that might follow in the wake of a major failure of civil order. Recall the declaration that the air was safe to breathe at "ground zero" following the "collapse" of the three World Trade Towers, adding thousand of premature deaths to the three thousand murdered on the spot. The government's response to Waco, Ruby Ridge and Pine Ridge also did little to convince some folk that they need not arm themselves. People's minds seem to gravitate toward pistols when self-defence is discussed but, in fact, they are a poor choice for home defense. Marksmanship is difficult with a pistol, they are easily mishandled and they have a perverse effect on many, especially the young. The pump action shotgun, loaded with buckshot, commonly used for deer hunting, is easy to master, has less legal implications in puchase and ownership and is a formidable weapon. I am not talking about walking about the neighborhood armed, just absolute last-option home defense. When the poop hits the fan and all social order goes to hell, the Zimmermans of our nation come out from beneath their logs.
Tony Vodvarka

My first (and only) trip to Florida was for Spring Break 1970 (a year after I graduated from HS). I hitched down to the Everglades and was picked up by an Ontario Provincial Policeman on holiday (which was a lucky thing since we got into the national parks for free as "guests"). We spent three days together, making our way to the Keys.

At Florida City (a town of just a couple square miles), we stopped for gas and met a local city cop who was dressed like a state trooper with tall black boots and broad-brimmed hat. The Ontario cop asked why it was necessary to carry a 357 magnum when he was issued only a 22 handgun to patrol 200 square miles in Canada.

The grinning Florida cop said "that ain't nothin" and opened up his trunk to show us a sawed-off shotgun and an assault rifle. When the Ontario cop asked why he could possibly need such armaments, the Florida cracker said "to keep them niggers in line".

Obviously, little has changed in Florida in the last 42 years.

You step out onto the streets to stretch your legs. You notice someone following you, for what reason you do not know. As you speed up, your tracker speeds up in kind. You begin to worry, for you sense harmful intent. The tracker confronts you: "what are you doing here?" he asks belligerently. You've done nothing wrong and you find the guy somewhat menacing, so you attempt to move on. He grabs hold of you, because he feels entitled to an answer. He's bigger than you and older and you feel his strong animosity. You panic a little and you fight madly in an attempt to defend yourself. Your antagonist is taken back by the intensity of your reaction. He's carrying a gun. Almost without thinking, he pulls out the gun and shoots you dead. The last thing you see is the fading light as you fall towards the ground. In time, the police arrive. The gunman tells them that he shot you in "self defense." The police cannot find it within themself to doubt the gunman's story. They permit him to go home. So even though you were peaceably going about your business; even though the gunman confronted you for no good reason; and even though you are lying in the street, your blood running freely, the police decide that no crime was committed and there is nothing more to be said.

If the police had come upon Zimmerman and Martin fighting, they might have arrested one or both for simple assault and/or breach of peace. But Zimmerman shoots Martin dead in alleged "self-defense," and because the police did not catch him in the act, they are ready to accept his story. And thus they would have us believe that the LAW CANNOT BE SERVED BECAUSE, IN EFFECT, NO CRIME TOOK PLACE!! Most people, of reasonable temper, will find this an incredible interpretation of "the public safety" statutes that govern police powers.

One strongly suspects that if Martin had shot Zimmerman, he would not have been able to avail himself of the "self-defense" argument. The police would surely have charged with manslaughter at the least and quite possibly with murder.

Thoughts to Trayvon's parents--they have lost their son in a senseless act of violence. Yet another chapter in the ongoing "American tragedy."

Perhaps someone has already pointed this out (I haven't read all the comments), but it's interesting how peaceful protests are allowed for this problem, but Occupy is not allowed to peacefully protest.

It's inevitable that when right-wing extremists make one gain they will seek to extend themselves further. They defy international law with warz of choice and get away with it, then they will try to up the ante. Their wild spekulation binges that destroy the finances of huge swaths of people aren't dealt with properly, so now they want more. Their political assaults on immigrants and teachers are not met by resistance so they go a step further. Fortunately, the people are learning to take matters into their own hands, now. Without decent leadership in Merka's halls and channels of influence, the people are learning to manage things for themselves. The people are learning to distrust authority, anything that reeks of rotten ego, the superiority complex, elitism. Of course elitism fuels racism, because the key targets in the elites' war on people are the people's ethics, sensibilities, clarity, and self-esteem. As such, chaos is created, by elites, allowing elites to then extract booty from the people in exchange for "protection".

Can you visualize Mr. Zimmerman, hiding with his pistol wondering why the whole planet hates him. But, then again, that's why he shot Young Mr. Martin. Zimmerman hates himself and wanted to shoot himself but did not have the oyo's.

This "f*cking coons" issue needs to get sorted out right away. The only people I have seen who say this is what Zimmerman said are the family's lawyers, in particular this Jasmine Rand. I have listened to that tape 6 times and I can't hear that slur anywhere.

Lawrence O'Donnell was his usual goof-ball holier-than-thou self when he had Rand and Maxine Waters on. He tried to get them both to repeat the slur without saying it himself. Waters plain out said that she couldn't hear what Rand said was "f*cking coon." Of course, Rand repeated the slur numerous times and said she heard it on the tape. As the family's lawyer she has a financial stake in this and she is, of course, trying to gin the case up as best she can.

Eventually the FBI technicians will sort this out. But if it comes back that there was no such slur on the tape, somebody ought to sick the lawyer ethics cops on Rand. OTOH if the slur is on the tape, Zimmerman will be serving a good long stretch.

The other problem with all the publicity has been Sharpton saying on Morning Joe that the cops played hide the ball with the boy's body and that the family never even knew anything had happened for three days. What bs. The whole neighborhood knew there was a shooting -- cops all over the place. Sharpton's saying the family didn't know??? The kid was on the phone with his girlfriend -- she didn't call the family?? When the kid didn't come home from the corner shop after 2 hours, didn't the family contact the cops themselves?

Sharpton is obviously ginning this thing up, too. And very effectively.

Whenever a lawyer, and this goes for Sharpton, too, is talking on TV, turn the sound off because all you're going to hear is bs.

Goodman as per usual is not much better, emphasizing the obligatory "modern-day lynching" quote. Listen to me Amy: the killing of this boy was not a lynching -- lynching is where there is a mob of people who have been ginned up and the mob goes after someone. A one-on-one killing is not a lynching by any definition. Nothing like the word "lynching" when a black person is killed to bring out the worst in people.

The closest thing to a lynching in this case is the way the whole country is going after Zimmerman. Personally, it does my heart good to see the tables turned for once. Remember, just because a person gets lynched doesn't mean he wasn't guilty; I just hope they don't hang him before he gets a trial.

Wouldn't be the first time a white person was lynched in the Home of the Free. But because nobody wrote a To Kill A Mockingbird about a white lynching, nobody thinks of it in terms of mobs going after whites. That would really flip out Gregory Peck.

What sickens me is if all these white and black Americans got just half as excited over Bales executing 9 Afghani children, he would have been taken off the C-130 at Dover AFB when he landed and lynched from the wing-tip. Where's the angst over these Afghani babies? Where's Reverend Al over that case?

Blame the Hoodie? GIVE ME A BREAK. It was raining .... the kid was running .....and being stalked .......and ....SORRY, but we don't ALL use Totes umbrellas when going to the corner grocery store for a snack. Nor should we risk losing our very lives while doing so! Mr. Rivera: you should be ashamed of your inane, insensitive comments about Trayvon, and your attempts to create "excuses" for the inexcusable actions of judge-jury-and-executioner George Zimmerman (and those that would imitate him). We are becoming a society that seeks and sees threats under every rock; a frightened society that sees danger with every “other” that is not just like us;  a manipulated society with control-freaks running rampant (whether politicians or mayors or police chiefs or individuals). Power-hungry people that are only too eager to take advantage of our fears; that are only too eager to get away with anything and everything that they can, that are only too willing to deprive us of our our liberty (and sometimes our lives).....all in the name of defending it. What a shell game. But were it only a game. For it includes the worst provisions of the Patriot Act, the police spying on innocent people, papers-please and stop&frisk gone wild, the “right” to indefinitely detain Americans without trial, and out-of-control homicidal vigilantes such as we have tragically seen here. It’s a slippery slope that ultimately leads to a police state/Orwellian mentality that is more typical of places such as China or Cuba - NOT the America that I know and love. We USED to stand proud and free, and contrasted our open society to such sorry places. Now we imitate them. Our country is better than this. Our values are better than this. WE are better than this. Don’t blame the hoodie......blame what we are becoming, and allowing, and doing as a society. As Shakespeare once said: the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves. For we have come to accept things that should NEVER be accepted by a freedom-loving people. It’s time... it’s way past time, to have the strength and courage to reverse course.