Kikes and Fairies

February 19, 2015 by Adam Cherry Leave a Comment

I know, I know, the lyrics from Ten Years After’s anthem “I’d Love to Change the World” read:

Everywhere is freaks and hairies
Dykes and fairies, tell me where is sanity

but I couldn’t make that work. Anyways, on to the story.

Julie Corey was so consumed with the idea of motherhood that she took the somewhat unoriginal tack of murdering a pregnant friend, hacking out the fetus and presenting the child as her own. Bruce Jenner’s tortured quest for a second X chromosome must have been equally gripping; leading a phalanx of paparazzi along Malibu’s Pacific Coast Highway, the ex-Olympian killed 69-year-old Kim Howe by ramming his Cadillac Escalade into the back of her Lexus sedan, thereby precipitating a high-speed, multi-car collision. As Los Angeles Sheriffs deputies arrived on the scene, they found Jenner amid the smoldering wreckage filleting Howe’s labia and sculpting them to into a vulva of his very own.

NBC news anchor Brian Williams took to the air that night and claimed he was embedded with National Enquirer photographers in the second pursuit vehicle, the one that took shrapnel from an atomized Prius. Scrambling for cover in the sand dunes, Williams reportedly saw one of the victims floating past Martin Sheen’s house while being robbed by Hezbollah gunmen.

As the presidential cycle begins to churn, we all seem to loose our feel for what is true. Weighing in on the vaccination debate, the New York Times queried, “How did we get to a point where personal beliefs can triumph over science?” Perhaps they should ask Galileo. Or those who repudiate climate change. Religion was invented, after all, to explain natural phenomena (see: Demeter, Ra), and now the zealots have no choice but to lash against science as their sphere of influence continues inexorably to dwindle. God willing, this current iteration of extremism is mainstream religion’s last stab against human evolution.

Who then, in this enlightened day and age, would herd another person into a metal container and set them ablaze? Apparently, operatives of New York’s Metro-North train system. Or the guys over at ISIS. Enmity for the militant group has reached such proportions that Egypt has retaliated for the beheading of Christians. Yes, I said Christians. But don’t break into Kumbaya just yet. In the wake of Denmark’s Charlie Hedbo copycat killings, piles of flowers and notes were left at the café where cartoonist Lars Vilks was targeted, yet the only regard for Jewish victims came in the form of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offer of “mass immigration.”

Defending Jews is not only wholly unpopular, it can also prove deadly. To wit: Argentine Federal Prosecutor Alberto Nisman was murdered in his apartment the day before he was set to testify that President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner had covered up Iran’s role in the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish Center that took 85 lives. His report detailed de Kirchner’s offer of immunity to the Iranians in exchange for accepting an oil-for-grain trade agreement. The proposed deal was far more critical than it might otherwise seem: due to hyperinflation earlier in the decade, Argentina was without the wherewithal to purchase commodities on the open market. Remarkably, a second prosecutor, Gerardo Pollicita, has taken up the case despite the anti-Semitic posters sprouting up across Buenos Aires. “The good Jew is the dead Jew,” they avow, “The good Jew is Nisman.”

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.