President Barack Obama on Saturday rejected the notion that this week’s stunning violence is a signal that the U.S. has returned to some of the darkest days of its past, saying that as painful as the killings of police and black men were, “America is not as divided as some have suggested”
THE NEW YORK POST printed before the 5th officer perished.. but their cover this morning will be blazing through the early streets of New York City and beyond .. they are calling it a “civil war” and showcasing images of dead police officers next to their squad cars..
Those who slept peacefully through the night and are waking up to news this morning are going to have their souls rocked..
I woke up around 230am as my phone kept buzzing with breaking news events.. I tried to ignore at first until I realized just what those breaking news alerts were saying…
My mind turned into panic about the country.. Obviously I could not fall back to sleep and become glued to news coverage of the Dallas carnage.. I even turned on Coast to Coast AM and listened to George Noory take calls and try to get a mental handle no the mess that is occurring right now..
“I didn’t see anybody else get shot, just the cops. I saw cops getting shot, right there in plain sight. While we was running, like, they just kept shooting,“ Washington said. "We didn’t know where it was coming from”
-
These are the words of
Cortney Washington to NBC Dallas-Fort Worth in the chaos after the Dallas police carnage ..
The shootings occurred as Americans nationwide took to the streets to demand answers over the killings of two black men in two days. They wept, marched and chanted “Black Lives Matter."Crowds gathered outside Gov. Mark Dayton’s residence in St. Paul, Minnesota, miles from the spot where an officer killed Philando Castile in a car on Wednesday.
MORE
Gunshots rang out Thursday night during demonstrations against the shooting deaths of two African-American men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota.
A total of 11 officers were shot, Dallas police said. A standoff is underway as authorities try to negotiate with a suspect in a downtown garage.It was the deadliest single attack on law enforcement since the 2001 terror attacks, when 72 officers died, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.
A total of 10 police officers were shot by snipers during the protests, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said. An 11th officer was shot during an exchange of gunfire with one of the suspects, authorities said.
It is unclear at this time how many snipers were actually involved .. no motive has been released..
If you were in Washington DC last night (or many other East Coast cities) you hardly saw the July 4th fireworks shows. It was cloudy, murky, ugly, and rainy as a storm zipped by the major metros just in time for dusk fire shows..
If you watched PBS’ version, you saw something very different: Other fireworks shows from curiously clear skies.
Perhaps it’s only in D.C. where a PBS show can become a scandal.. But it did just that. Even forcing PBS so say sorry..
In the old days before the Internet people may not have questioned this. In the new era where information runs wild, it become an instant obsession of Twitter and social media.
PBS defended itself first, Tweeting:
We showed a combination of the best fireworks from this year and previous years. It was the patriotic thing to do.
When they realized they sounded like Twits they apologized over the social media airwaves for “for any confusion this may have caused”..
The fourth of July upon us.. the fireworks, the nostalgia.. the pride. I have always had mixed emotions no this holiday– more so than any other one as a matter of fact. It’s the birthday of American independence, it’s the festival of a nation united in common causes.. It sure took a long time for some of us to become more in common than others.. We have been through pain and tribulation as a country.
And we will again.
The ending of the WONDER YEARS from 1993 (yes, that long ago) was the same mixture of nostalgia and pain that Americans so often feel as they glare at the bombs bursting in air above their towns every year.. Kevin Arnold didn’t marry Winnie. And his dad had a heart attack. And things didn’t really go the way people thought they would .. or could.
Possibilities often dashed but somehow it all works it.
America has the same feeling sometimes.. The same coupling of pain and laughter, sorry and joy. All at once as well…
And that is just life. American life. Fourth of July 2016.
This being reported by a CBS news dispatch this morning:
SANTA ROSA – A man watching a horror movie was stabbed repeatedly at a Santa Rosa movie theater Wednesday afternoon, CBS San Francisco reports.
Santa Rosa police said the man was watching the movie when someone came up behind him and stabbed him. The victim, a 21-year-old man, remains in critical condition.
Police said the attack appears to be random and unprovoked.
The Santa Rosa Press Democrat newspaper reported that the man was watching the movie “The Shallows” when he was attacked.
Santa Rosa police responded to a stabbing at about 4 p.m. inside the Roxy Theater, located at 85 Santa Rosa Ave.
Police said the suspect, identified as a 23-year-old man, stabbed the victim several times and then ran out of the theater toward the Prince Memorial Greenway.
Some witnesses called 911 while other witnesses assisted the victim until emergency crews arrived. The victim was taken to a hospital with multiple life-threatening stab wounds, police said.
Santa Rosa police said witnesses were able to provide officers with a physical description of the suspect and the direction that he fled. officers located the suspect at Prince Memorial Greenway and A Street. He was taken into into custody but his identity has not yet been released.
Flash-forward to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and another uptick in extreme horror films, led by two franchises, “Saw” and “Hostel,” that reflected a darkening mood. In the wake of the 2003 Abu Ghraib scandal, mainstream entertainment passed on dealing with the morals and efficacy of torture, aside from the ticking-time-bomb fantasies of “24.” But the “Saw” series, beginning in 2004, steered right into the curve. Over seven straight Halloween weekends, young audiences turned up in large numbers to watch like-aged victims wriggle under elaborate torture devices. And as post-9/11 goodwill eroded into hostility toward U.S. foreign policy overseas, 2005’s “Hostel” imagined the grimmest possible fate for American backpackers in Europe.
All that said, the newest PURGE movie still looks ridiculous.
Gunmen seized a bakery in Dhaka overnight, killing 20 hostages and two officers in a standoff that ended Saturday morning, the Bangladeshi military said.
All the hostages killed were foreigners, the military said.
The attackers used guns, explosive devices and “a lot of sharp domestic weapons,” said Brig. Gen. Naeem Ashfaq Chowdhury of the Bangladesh army. The hostages’ bodies were found after the standoff ended more than 10 hours later.Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said 13 hostages were rescued"We were able to save 13 people, we weren’t able to save a few,“ Hasina said at a news conference. Six terrorists were killed and one was captured alive, she said.One Japanese national and two Sri Lankans were among the hostages rescued, officials from both nations said.The rescued Japanese national was having dinner with seven other colleagues from Japan, who are missing, said Koichii Hagiuda, the deputy chief Cabinet secretary.
There is this notion around the world as of late: WE lack civility..
We are told by countless social observers that the death of civility has come and gone.. that we are worse off now because of social media and the internet than ever before .. that our rudeness has been peaking and not stopping.
But is any of that true?
Quite honestly, it would appear that the world is less civil than ever before. The headlines of fishwrappers prove that to us daily, right? The talking heads on the soon to be extinct TEE VEE set bloviate until their red-faced sweaty necks can’t take anymore .. And online? Oh online. Where comment threads on news articles feature insults and anonymous hateful tirades from one person to the next.. Basements across America!! Alive with keyboard bullies hiding behind screens.
So it would then appear that civility, is dead, right? Not so fast, muchacho..
There may be a number of factors at play … The first, and foremost point: The NET is an open forum of things that already existed in real life. It is a continuation of what people act like, just in a net version. Before online criminals were found and prosecuted (easier with the NET now don’t forget) there was still crime. Cyber crime has made identity theft and human trafficking simplier – but it has also given officials a better avenue to catch it. Yes, I know, there is a dark net… Whole other story.
I would argue that civility was never alive.
I would venture to say that if we were truly civil people throughout history, very civil things would have happened. Women were oppressed. Large portions of society were enslaved.. and even up until the latter half of the 20th century, people who were free from bondage were still being hung and tortured in towns across America. Civil for some .. very uncivil for others.
Sometimes civility is not needed. There are fans of Donald Trump who like his for a brashness that has not been seen in American politics in generations. Some equate him to Teddy Roosevelt. Others may say he is Eugene McCarthy with worse hair. Either way, his lack of civility caught on enough to be recognized and now, in fact, his insults have become sport. His Twitter is followed by millions of people anxiously awaiting his next insult and who he will choose to hear his wrath. And for all of those who say they take the high road, if THEIR candidate fought back against Trump in typical Trump style, they would be applauded for taking the stand. After all, how do you deal with someone who lacks civility? Join them.
Around the time of then Al Qaida beheadings being uplaoded and broadcast to the world online (long before ISIS), we were hit with relentless footage. The snooze media didn’t show the most revulting aspects. For that, you were able to just trek online. The information age suddenly turned gruesome and disgusting… footage of various hostages deaths made its way around the net in 2004 and beyond. Nick Berg was the first and most famous, but there were certainly many more after him. Along with that, the news that the American government approved what some term torture made its way to front pages… And then the perverbial excrement hit the fan when we found out soldiers were systmatically invovled with sexual and mental torture of Guantameno detainees. Around the same time, the horror movie SAW franchise became popular and other torture porn flicks made their way onto the cinema.. the first being HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES by Rob Zombie .. The 2000s have featured a cultural array of uncivil media.. Obviously, we would be told, a sign that we are uncivil.
Hold on a minute…
Those alive in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, may recall a video set that made its way around the world in the underground called FACES OF DEATH. The most famous scene probably is one where a group of wealthy elites slowly torture a monkey and eat its brain. But included with the series were other horrid and tragic featurettes that should go unspoken about on this forum. The 1960s and 70s also featured a series of films with depravity. Torture was in then. The TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE may have been mostly bloodless, but the idea of torture and uncivil behavior was included.
Congress can’t get along now. But in the past would have fist fights.
There have even been presidents—presidents who are currently on legal tender!!—that killed others in duals. There have been labor unions that used violence to carve a better path to the future.. some of them, like the Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania, were hung without due justice and killed without true reason.
If you want to talk uncivil, imagine a world where a “Civil” (really an oxymoron) War is taking place and brother is murdering brother in battlefields across the Eastern seaboard of the United States…
Imagine a system of torture devised to convince you to be a Christian. Or even the most Christian person of all, Jesus himself, being tortured by Roman guards and forced to die on a cross. Even if you don’t buy into Jesus, you can at least acknowledge that the very essence of punishment for years has been horribly uncivil.
Yes, I know the argument. The internet makes it easy to be anonymous. That is true. 4Chan and others have perfected the rapid speed of the net to get their social ways. But more and more people online are using their real names on sign ups for forums. Even Facebook commenting leaves it all ‘out there.’
Oh selfies, too.. that makes us uncivil, right?
Look back in history… people loved when cameras were invented and, while it may have taken 18 minutes to take a photo (no wonder people looked so miserable) people still clearly enjoyed having their photos taken for posterity. Every new generation growing up will judge their parents for the sins they commit. But then they’ll judge the new generation that comes after them just as much as they judged their elders. Judging .. judging… judging.. No solutions are rendered, but instead criticisms are hurled. Nothing changes.
Nothing is civil. And quite frankly. Nothing ever was.
The passage of time.. On a dirt path somewhere near an abandoned coal mine in Pennsylvania, my wife and I climbed this.. It was when we first met. There were no trees then. Circa 2004. The earth takes over quickly when the toils of man focus on other absurd things.
Here is what you need to know based off of the few things people actually know: Newsfeeds are going to feature less click bait links.. less “you will never believe what she said” nonsense.. less politics and less divisive uncivil nonsense that clutters the otherwise cluttered newsfeed of the day.
Facebook wants to make it personal. Go back to the roots–family, friends, baby pictures, endless vacation shots from the mountains… You know the drill. 2008 stuff.
I am good with it. I check Facebook much less than before. But when I do, I get annoyed with the stream of news nonsense that is already known.
But there could be an ulterior motive at play here too..
Don’t forget the controversy that Mark Zuckerberg recently found himself in.. The site was stearing readers away from conservative content. But not only that media sin exposed, the bigger was how Facebook’s internal agorithms actually invent news stories and change new cycles–making less important things bigger. Think of it.. how can Chewbacca Mom, for as fun as she was, receive 70 million hits in a few minutes. It’s all in the code, baby. Make it look natural but behind the scenes know it’s not.
I am fine with friends and their status updates.
But what Facebook may have done wrong is wait this long. Maybe after all this time of being force-fed manipulated nonsense-content, people have moved on. Moved on to other platforms.. or just back to reality again? Time will tell.
Friends and families unite!!Facebook won’t bite. But Zuckerberg? He still has that tape overtop of his MIC..
