The Manchurian Candidate

December 20, 2014 by Adam Cherry 1 Comment

Oh the irony. Sony Pictures’ production of “The Interview”, a Seth Rogan (aka: Dirty Randy) post-stoner buddy film about a pair of journalists recruited to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, has itself been extirpated by Pyongyang’s cyber attack on the Hollywood studio. The latest twist has the dudes in the bad haircuts and impossibly large military hats disavowing the hacking of Amy Pascal’s email and offering to spearhead a joint investigation in an effort to identify the real culprit (recall: Orenthal James Simpson).

While the rapprochement may at first seem disingenuous, – if not a thinly veiled attempt to discern the capabilities of our counter-intelligence apparatus – consider the recently appended video showing Ray Rice’s then-fiancée, Janay Palmer, snuggling in for a kiss shortly after he knocked her ass out in a hotel elevator. Conceivably, what convinced Former U.S. District Judge Barbara S. Jones to vitiate Rice’s NFL suspension was not Commissioner Goodell’s “arbitrary abuse of discretion,” but the supposition that Rice’s left cross was merely a sadomasochistic act of foreplay. In that light, the Koreans’ Internet assault may have been nothing more than their version of intercontinental fluffing.

Paradoxically, left-wing artistes in Tinseltown are all clamoring to be Sony’s preeminent critic; Judd Apatow described the cancellation as “An un-American act of cowardice,” while Rob Lowe lamented, “Everyone caved.” Even President Obama got into the act, opining, “I think they made a mistake.” ” We cannot,” he further bloviated, “have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.” Well, unless they serve on the Jefferson County school board.

Newt Gingrich’s alarmist missive aside, the greatest threat to the commonweal is not the prospect of all-encompassing cyber warfare, but rather the potentiality of another Bush presidency. Though the economy is adding a quarter million jobs per month, Fed Chairwoman Yellen conceded that the system remains fragile; the last thing we need, then, is one more Bible thumping screw-up telling us not to fret because Jesus will fix it in the end.

Nonetheless, we do have much to be grateful this holiday season. Ebola contagion is again less likely than a mumps outbreak at a hockey game, gas prices are regressing to 2005 levels and the stock market is ascending as rapidly as Michael Phelps sinks (think: pot, DUI, Chicks with Dicks).

I do have one regret, though. Having spent countless years in mind-numbing lines taking the kids to sit on Santa’s lap, I was looking forward to the new Wal Mart “Kill a Darkie” Holiday Ritual. Sadly, a selfish and frivolous lawsuit brought by the family of John Crawford means that white folks can no longer gun down people of color in Wal Marts even if we come upon them clutching BB guns that were stocked on open shelves or witness them grabbing the last Skylanders Trap Team Starter Pack in existence. I guess I’ll have to content myself, then, by making sugar cookies and watching a Chinese black market DVD of “The Interview”.

Blood in the Streets

December 12, 2014 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

Recent cases in Ferguson, Cleveland and New York have reignited the Trayvon Martin debate about law enforcement’s use of lethal force and America’s perceived “valuation” of black life. If putting a price tag on human beings seems unworkable if not immoral, consider it is done everyday by insurance actuaries, elder caregivers and those lobbying for slavery reparation. Yet in the era of social media, what distinguishes one episode from the next is not the decedent’s economic potential or social worth, but rather the availability of video evidence, or in today’s zeitgeist, the Ray Rice Factor.

Remarkably, many reasonable people impassively accept the non-indictment in Missouri. The evidence presented to the grand jury was, they argue, incongruous, fatally obscuring the true sequence of events. While details of the “hands up” narrative were as inconstant as they were inconceivable, it was, nonetheless, allowed to marginalize every other piece of testimony that failed to comport with Officer Wilson’s somewhat plausible rendition. The processing of forensic evidence, on the other hand, was just shoddy enough to raise the specter of outright collusion.

Not so in the Staten Island case in where we all viewed the murder of Eric Gardner at the hands of officer Daniel Pantaleo. The facts are incontrovertible: Even the NYPD-friendly medical examiner ruled Gardner’s death a homicide. That the grand jury failed to indict (although, ironically, charges were brought against the videographer) is so beyond comprehension that the federal government has initiated a civil rights investigation.

Prosecution of such a federal case hinges on two elements: establishing a racial component of Officer Pantaleo’s actions and proving his intention to kill Mr. Gardner. The racial aspect is easy enough to satisfy in that Danny Boy has spawned three lawsuits for false arrests and police misconduct – which possibly includes planting evidence – against African-Americans. In other words, Pantaleo’s behavior on the force is downright Fuhrmanesque. As for the intent to kill, all NYPD officers are taught that choke holds were banned outright in 1993 because they are “potentially lethal and unnecessary.” Employing such at tactic, therefore, shows a priori the objective of inflicting a mortal blow.

There’s blood in the streets, it’s up to my ankles

Blood in the streets, it’s up to my knee

Blood in the streets in the town of Chicago

Blood on the rise, it’s following me

– Jim Morrison

Some point to the untoward behavior of the protesters as justification for policing without restraint. But know this; the mob wants its pound of flesh. And the rage will not be quelled by the indictment of some cracker sheriff in Eutawville, SC or even by the prosecution of a white officer in Charlotte. No, they want to see a big city cop, a Caucasian, get the chair. (Note: The shooting of Akai Gurley by an Asian patrolman in Brooklyn last month caused barely a murmur.) So whether it’s Detroit or L.A., Chicago or New Orleans, the people need to know that gunning down an unarmed person of color will not go unpunished. They want to see for themselves that racism, not one of their own, is what has died.

50 Shades of Black

November 26, 2014 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

Despite Apple stock bouncing up against at all-time highs, the company is beginning to resemble a bungling Microsoft. The newest version of its computer operating system, dubbed Yosemite, has been fraught with bugs – and none of the issues from WiFi connectivity to YouTube video streaming to kernel panics could be resolved by the recently released 10.10.2 update. In fact, it is rumored that computers controlling both the NASA rocket and Virgin Galactic plane that exploded last month were running the beleaguered Mac OS.

Meanwhile, videos show the new ultrathin iPhone 6 can be so easily bent that it can folded by a Samsung employee’s bare hands. Yet for those of us still using the prior generation of mobile devices, the newly released iOS8 has crippled essential applications such as email, Apple Pay, Bluetooth and Internet browsing. Far more troubling, however, is a flaw in the new mobile operating system that makes users vulnerable to hackers in search of sensitive data like bank information and passwords. Phones and tablets can be taken over by phony apps that users unwittingly load onto their handheld gadgets due to a loophole Apple uses to allow large software developers to bypass the App Store.

All of this recalls the disastrous 2012 rollout of Apple’s proprietary mapping application: Roads appeared in the wrong places and the 3-D feature warped and bobbed like a bad acid trip. In the end, key executives like Richard Williamson and Scott Forstall got canned after several unprepared tourists were sent deep into the Australian outback and nearly died. I had my own problems with Apple maps which until Tim Cook’s recent announcement made little sense; why was it that every time I tried to get directions to the nearest Starbucks in SoMa, I was directed to Blow Buddies on Harrison Street?

With any luck, then, the National Guard will deploy Google Earth or some NORAD Command Guidance System to get themselves to Ferguson, MO where protesters have taken over the streets in the wake of the non-indictment of police officer Darren Wilson. Wilson, you must know by now, gunned down unarmed black teenager Michael Brown for stealing $38 worth of cigars from a convenience store. Setting aside the internecine battle between the KKK and Anonymous, Bill Cosby declared:

We, as black folks have to do a better job. We have to start holding each other to a higher standard. We cannot blame the white people any longer. Those people are not Africans. They don’t know a thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap, and all of them are in jail. People with their hats on backward, pants down around the crack, isn’t that a sign of something?

Yes, Bill, it’s a sign that the drugs have taken hold and it’s rape time.

Understandably, the Big Apple is not accustomed to playing second fiddle, especially to some Podunk Midwestern hamlet. So days before the Wilson verdict was rendered, a NYPD rookie cop shot and killed an unarmed African-American male in the Brooklyn projects. With a legacy that includes names like Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond, New York is looking to regain the top spot; after all Los Angeles went all up in shit after Rodney King merely got his ass beat. In the final analysis, jail breaking your phone might just prove a viable solution, while jail breaking the prison in Ferguson may only lead to greater violence. As one marcher scrawled on the sidewalk there, “Po leeces gonna be killed.”

The Trojan Horse

October 29, 2014 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

The outrage over diseased West Africans seems to have died out with Thomas Eric Duncan; we now concentrate our indignation on American healthcare workers, those infected both here and abroad. Given that the mortality rate of Ebola victims in West Africa is nearly 80%, Doctors Without Borders is providing care that is little more than palliative. Is it worthwhile, then, that these NGOs transform our doctors and nurses into contagious carrier pigeons?

Duncan, you will recall, was released into public after being initially diagnosed by physicians at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital as a black man without health insurance, a condition, by the way, that was supposedly eradicated by the Affordable Care Act. Such an abject failure to measure up to Jonas Salk left the President both addled and vengeful. After publicly hugging infected nurse Nina Pham in the Oval Office (insert Clinton joke here) Mr. Obama pressed the governors of New York and New Jersey to relax quarantine restrictions on returning aid workers in an attempt to expose White Americans. It is in this manner that the President hopes to fulfill Martin Luther King, Jr.’s half-century old prophecy: “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”

Precedent: The use of forced isolation dates back to the plague; in the U.S., broad scale quarantines were imposed during the Spanish Flu pandemic following WWI and more recently during New York’s 1992 Tuberculosis outbreak. Well within his rights, then, Chris Christie was nothing if not prudent when he sequestered Kaci Hickox in a tent behind University Hospital in Newark upon her return from Sierra Leone with an apparent fever. Yet Kaci, to Mr. Obama’s great delight, is now on her way home to Maine – to potentially spread the pestilence throughout New England – after complaints of civil rights violations that stem, in the main, from a lack of running water and cable television. Quizzically, Ms. Hickox met eerily similar living conditions in Africa with nothing but alacrity.

A report published in 2007 showed that the Ebola virus can linger in semen months beyond “recovery” while more recent studies suggest that not only can Ebola survive on a doorknob for eight weeks, it is also transmissible by air. Any one of these free-roaming vectors, therefore, could well be the next Gaëtan Dugas. And even though the survival rate is markedly higher here than overseas, we reflexively regard these volunteers as vermin rather than Samaritans. One do-gooder clinician can cause exponentially more harm than a popular high school freshman with a legally obtained firearm or a radicalized Muslim with a penchant for decapitation.

Perhaps, in the end, it is our Political Correctness that poses the greatest hazard. If these folks can willingly live in a mud hut for six months, why can’t they live in a motel on the outskirts of town for a couple of weeks? Do they have the Constitutional right to infect the rest of us? Not only are we putting ourselves at risk by kowtowing to their demands, we are rearming the granola munchers over in Bolder who refuse to immunize their kids: Failing to prove that the Pertussis vaccine causes Autism, they can now demur on the grounds that the diaphoretic school nurse just got back from Liberia.

The Wayback Machine

July 27, 2014 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

When Stalin was cautioned, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, that the Yalta Agreement contravened plans for the Soviet annexation Central Europe, he famously rejoined, “Never mind. We’ll do it our own way later.” So it is today for Vladimir Putin. Having resorbed Crimea with nothing more than a gaggle of pipe-wielding thugs, Vlad thought his quest to procure the rest of Ukraine would be best served by shooting down a commercial jetliner. The United States and European Union swiftly condemned the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17, while Taiwan, in an act of solidarity with Ukraine, crashed one of their own passenger aircraft. President Ma Ying-jeou told reporters his nation “well knows the fear and anxiety of being gobbled up by one’s hegemonic neighbor.”

In the grand timeline of history, it wasn’t long after Judge Greene broke up AT&T, that the TelCo giant began clawing back some of her severed parts. So while it may be understandable that Putin is trying to put the band back together, one is left to wonder, now that Russia’s westward creep is sharing the stage with the off-Broadway revival of the 1948 Palestine (Arab-Israeli) War, whether Mr. Peabody has set the Wayback Machine to the Truman Administration.

David Plouffe, President Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, thinks so. Plouffe called the Supreme Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby that employers who claim a religious objection are exempt from providing contraceptive coverage to employees “A 1950 decision in an America of 2014.” “The notion,” he expanded, ”that five older men will say that some business can dictate health choices… for millions of women… can be a huge issue.”

An issue more profound, however, is that the Court has firmly established itself as a purely political organization (I would concede to those that cite Bush v Gore – a ruling that erased its own precedent by virtue of being “limited to the present circumstances” – as the moment of conception), a body which comes to a conclusion based on pure ideology and then strains to defend itself by cobbling together incongruent case law fastened by flawed logic. The Hobby decision hinged on the notion that a private company’s religious beliefs were satisfactorily preserved when the government used the “least restrictive alternative” – e.g. the use of Form 700 by religious nonprofits to pass contraceptive coverage to insurance companies or third party administrators – to implement the law. Yet only days later, the court granted an emergency injunction to Wheaton College, allowing the evangelical school to refuse complying with the very Obamacare “workaround” used to support Hobby.

Wheaton contended that the mere affirmation of religious objection was anathema because it precipitated outside coverage of birth control. That’s like saying orthodox Jews can simply ignore don’t walk signs on the way to Sabbath services. While the wanton hypocrisy so blatantly displayed by the majority might be de rigueur in Congress, it didn’t sit well with the dissenters. Justice Sotomayor: “Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today. After expressly relying on the availability of the religious-nonprofit accommodation to hold that the contraceptive coverage requirement violates [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] as applied to closely held for-profit corporations, the Court now, as the dissent in Hobby Lobby feared it might, retreats from that position.” Never mind all that high-minded verbiage; the logical extension of the Court’s dictum means investment banks controlled by Muslims could refuse to pay for porcine heart valves, entertainment companies run by Scientologists needn’t pay for anti-depressants, and bookstores owned by Christian Scientists would be excused from providing any medical coverage whatsoever. What is most disturbing is that life-long appointees are imposing their ideology with impunity, and that the rule of law is no longer sacrosanct. In effect, then, Messrs. Putin and Stalin have already extended their reach.