• okay so i decided to do medusa after all! Dinosaur Comics (2011-02-07). archive – contact – sexy exciting merchandise – cute – search – about!!!@@e2;2020;90; previousFebruary 7th, 2011nextFebruary 7th, 2011: The only solution is to start building a theology around Axe Cop; kinda surprised this isn’t already happening! If you enjoy myths then you may enjoy Better Myths! If you enjoy Batman… (Linked Tuesday 2011-02-08.)

• just a few minutes ago, cbs published a story with this. Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2011-02-05). just a few minutes ago, cbs published a story with this headline: clinton advocates 'orderly transition' in egypt. see, my view is that you actually publish news; a random sentence by an average demonstrator would be more interesting. you can't make news out of continuous extreme redundancy, much less the 1,235th… (Linked Tuesday 2011-02-08.)

Here’s some of Radley Balko’s recent story on mendacious War on Cops trend reporting. The footnotes, where present, were added by me.

Some police advocates have drawn unsupported conclusions from this rash of attacks, claiming that they are tied to rising anti-police sentiment, anti-government protest, or a lack of adequate gun control laws. Media outlets also have been quick to draw connections between these unrelated shootings. While these incidents are tragic, the ensuing alarmism threatens to stifle much-needed debate about police tactics, police misconduct, and police accountability.

Jon Shane, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told NPR the January shootings follow some bit of a larger trend in the United States, which he described as an overriding sense of entitlement^[1] and don’t tread on me. Craig W. Floyd, chairman of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, told UPI, It’s a very troubling trend where officers are being put at greater risk than ever before. The same article summarized the opinions of other police leaders who think the shootings reflected a broader lack of respect for authority.

Richard Roberts, spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations, told MSNBC, It’s not a fluke....There’s a perception among officers in the field that there’s a war on cops going on. Police critic William Grigg notes that Smith County, Texas, Sheriff J.B. Smith told the NBC station in Tyler, I think it’s a hundred times more likely today that an officer will be assaulted compared to twenty, thirty years ago.^[2] It has become one of the most hazardous jobs in the United States, undoubtedly—in the top five.^[3]

… Dig into most of these articles, however, and you will find there is no real evidence of an increase in anti-police violence, let alone one that can be traced to anti-police rhetoric, gun sales, disrespect for authority, or “don’t tread on me” sentiment. (CNN is one of the few media outlets that have covered the purported anti-police trend with appropriate skepticism.) Amid all the quotes from concerned law enforcement officials in MSNBC’s War on Cops article, for example, is a casual mention that police fatality statistics for this month are about the same as they were in January 2010. Right after suggesting to NPR that the recent attacks were related to anti-government rhetoric, Shane acknowledged there has been little research into the underlying causes of police shootings.

In truth, on-the-job police fatalities have dropped nearly 50 percent during the last 20 years, even as the total number of cops has doubled. According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, 279 cops were killed on the job in 1974, the worst year on record. That number steadily decreased to just 116 in 2009. The leading cause of death for cops on duty is car accidents, not violence. For the last several years, the number of officers intentionally killed on the job each year has ranged from 45 to 60, out of about 850,000 cops on the beat. That makes police officers about 50 percent more likely to be intentionally killed than the average American. But contrary to Sheriff Smith’s claim, the job isn’t among the 10 most dangerous in the country,^[4] let alone the the top five, even if you include officers unintentionally killed in traffic accidents.

— Radley Balko, reason.com (2011-01-31): The Anti-Cop Trend That Isn’t

You should read the whole thing.

As I said about this time last year, the years go by but the trend story rhetoric never changes. It never stops being the most dangerous year ever for cops, and criminals never stop getting more and more dangerous and desperate. Whenever there is a rash of reporting “civilian” violence against police, no matter how small or localized, this is always taken as conclusive evidence of a growing and troubling trend. Writers and spokesmen will grasp at even the slenderest evidence to assert one.^[5] But whenever there is a rash of well-documented police violence against us civilians, it is always an anomaly — a scandal, perhaps, but an aberration, nothing more than a few more bad apples involved in yet another isolated incident, which is not to be related in any way to the institutional culture of policing or taken to reflect, in the least, general conditions in the hundreds of police departments where these things happen over, and over, and over again. The little people like us don’t merit trends, and to even suggest that we might is itself taken as an expression anti-cop bias — as, indeed, contributing to the very War on Cops that the police trendsters are denouncing. But for the armed agents of the state, trends are a vital part of the job, and if the trends do not exist, then it will be necessary to invent them.

As I said about this time last year:

In other words, it’s never been safer to be a cop in America than it has been over the past 2 years. Yet boss cops, spokespeople for the government police, and articles written by cops and for cops, constantly repeat the demonstrably false claims that criminals are more violent than ever before, and that government cops somehow face more danger on their patrols now than they ever have before. That this is a complete lie would be obvious to anyone who had spent 15 minutes perusing the police’s own institutions and resources for honoring their fallen comrades. The interesting question, then, is what kind of purpose the constant refrain of this unfact from government police serves — what it means when ever-more-heavily-armed government cops keep insisting on a completely mythical ever-present, ever-increasing danger to their politically-sacred persons, in spite of the evidence of the senses and the consistent trends over the last century of historical reality. When you see heavily-armed, well-protected men trying so very hard to psych themselves up to believe in a growing danger that does not actually exist — and when this constantly repeated Big Lie is used to slam pop-culture for any attempt to portray any abuse of police power; to swat down real-life complaints about police belligerence or invasions against civil liberties; to explain the alleged need for assault rifles, tanks, cordoning off strategic hamlets in inner cities, and a niche industry in warrior mindset trainings — I couldn’t much blame you if you did see some real danger in this concerted effort to inculcate and reinforce a consciously-constructed, fact-resistant permanent siege mentality among patrol cops. But not danger for the cops.

Do you feel safer now?

— GT 2010-01-23: Siege Mentality

1. ^[1]Sic! Hearing a retired cop boss like Jon M. Shane, a member of the most entitled and perpetually outraged and demanding class in America, complaining about the public’s overriding sense of entitlement is rather like listening to Frollo denouncing Esmeralda. –R.G.↩
2. ^[2]A hundred times! In fact there were 21 percent fewer assaults on cops in 2009 than there were 20 years ago in 1990 (57,268 in 2009; 72,091 in 1990). Thirty years ago, in 1980, about as many cops were assaulted as were assaulted in 2009 (57,268 in 2009; 57,847 in 1980), but since the number of cops has more than doubled during that time, the per-capita likelihood that a cop would be assaulted in the past few years is much lower than it was thirty years ago. Cf. the FBI’s annual LEOKA reports for the numbers year over year. –R.G.↩
3. ^[3]No, it hasn’t. –R.G.↩
4. ^[4]It’s more dangerous to be a farmer or a garbage collector in America than it is to be a cop. –R.G.↩
5. ^[5]There are, for example, the percentage games that Radley talks about in his article; I have also read articles in cop magazines repeatedly predicting one of the deadliest years for law enforcement which were published in Spring or Summer, based on about 3-6 month’s worth of data. This predictions are almost invariably wrong — for example, when it was predicted that 2010 would be one of the deadliest years for law enforcement since the late 1980s, it turned out instead that 2010 was the deadliest year for law enforcement since … 2005.↩

From Tom H. Hastings, The Invisible King, at truthout (2011-01-17):

You watch. Over the weekend and on Monday, the Hallmarked memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. will be sanitized and blackwashed until he is no more than a sentimental husk hoping that little children of all races will one day be able to play together. Then you’ll see shots of just that, as if to indicate, “Well, thanks, that’s all done, nice historical figure. Bye.” One of these years, they will probably launch the USS Martin Luther King Jr., a spanking new destroyer, or perhaps they will name a class of drone aircraft the “MLK Ground Dominators.”

But I am sure that if Dr. King were alive today, he would agree with all of my political objectives, including especially the most violent parts of my foreign policy agenda and all of my most accommodating moral compromises with the political status quo.

As a historical note on the rest of the article, King, SNCC, and other activists in the Freedom Movement certainly innovated and developed the understanding of nonviolent resistance beyond what Gandhi had done. But I don’t think it’s quite fair to Gandhi to say that he volunteered to help the British or stood aside without objection during Britain’s wars. Perhaps this is a fair summary of his attitude toward the Boer War, the Bambatha uprising, and World War I. But Gandhi’s thought was evolving throughout his life, too, and he later said that it was what he saw during the Bambatha war that really brought home the horrors of war and the need for a different approach. It is, in any case, not at all an accurate description of Gandhi’s attitude during World War II. It was in the midst of World War II that he drafted the Quit India resolution and called for non-cooperation with the British war effort. He also routinely criticized the Allied war effort as trying to defeat the Nazis by becoming as ruthless as they were. As a result, he spent 1942-1944 in prison, along with most of the rest of the Indian National Congress leadership, specifically for criticizing and calling for resistance against the War.

LOL: Judith Miller criticizes Wikileaks' Assange for not verifying his sources. Boing Boing (2011-01-18):

Why is disgraced former New York Times reporter Judith Miller not fond of Wikileaks and Julian Assange? “Because he didn’t care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone,” she said.

Sometimes I am genuinely surprised when the cognitive dissonance doesn’t make somebody’s head explode.

In logic, a non sequitur is the fallacy of asserting a conclusion which simply does not follow from the given premises. The world being what it is, I noted a while back that that isn't a strong enough criticism for some popular arguments; we need a new category, the contrarium sequitur (or contra-sequitur for short), which is the fallacy of asserting a conclusion which is exactly the opposite of the conclusion that you should draw from the given premises.

The New York Times Op-Ed page has always a particularly fertile field for picking ripe contra-sequiturs. That’s no doubt partly a function of the sort of people they employ. But I don’t think it’s just those particular guys; it’s really a feature of the house style, and perhaps an inevitable product of the intellectual environment when Very Serious People set themselves to issuing important opinions about matters of public concern.

Any political hack can churn out something that tries to shoehorn unruly facts into a predetermined party line, but it takes a special kind of environment to go beyond mere hackery day after day, to maintain such consistency in coming up with conclusions so exquisitely opposed to what the facts obviously suggest. For example, consider the recent online battle over Wikileaks, and the ongoing government efforts — led by the Obama administration and by Senators like Joe Lieberman — to pressure corporations like Amazon, Dyn Inc. (EveryDNS), et al. into cutting off the Internet services that Wikileaks needs to keep its website running, and to pressure payment processors like PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and Bank of America to cut off their access to funding, in the interests of national security and the alleged public interest. Many people see this and offer opinions which are better or worse informed, better thought out or worse thought out.

But only the New York Times Op-Ed page could take this government-driven campaign of intimidation to shut down Wikileaks and take it as proof of a crying need for more extensive government regulatory controls, which would allow the United States federal government to take a more active role in directing the business decisions of banks and payment processors. So that they can protect irksome bloggers, risky organizations, and unpopular opinions from being shut down by risk-averse banks, you see. This decision should not be left solely up to business-as-usual among the banks — so, instead, they’ll leave it up to someone you can always count on to stand up for open debate and a free press for organizations like Wikileaks — the United States federal government.

All in the public interest, of course.