Do we live in the "Post-Truth Era?"

It's a good question. The first article explains why the shooting of Walter Scott was a crime, and the wealth of evidence that supports that assertion:

The North Charleston shooting is not another Ferguson

[...] When I was a cop in Baltimore and I heard of some situation that got ugly, my first reaction was usually, "Thank God I wasn't there." Because nobody knows how they'll react. For that reason, most police officers are quite reluctant to criticize others forced to make split-second life-and-death decisions. Yet every police officer I've spoken to says that Scott's death was horrible and that Slager committed a crime.

In 1985, the Supreme Court ruled that police may not shoot at unarmed fleeing suspects, even felons. In line with that decision, shooting without an immediate threat is against the law in every state, and it's against department policy in every jurisdiction. It's also a violation of the most basic human right: life. Any innocent death is a tragedy, but it's worse at the hands of police. It's not too much to ask our civil servants not to murder us.

During his attempt to catch Scott, Slager fired his Taser. When that failed, Slager could have chased Scott or let him run away. But instead, Slager drew his gun and shot. This is why cops see this case so differently: The criminal was the police officer. And Slager was arrested and charged with murder. That is the way the criminal justice system is supposed to work. [...]

The article explains in detail the differences in this case, to many of the others that have been in the headlines in recent months. Of course every case has it's own facts, which is why it's so important to acknowledge them.

Contrast the above case with this next one, about a decorated an honored Boston cop shot in the face by a career felon. The felon was then killed in a shootout with other police officers. So who was the victim? You decide:




A Boston Cop Shooting and Our Post-Truth Era

[...] According to several Boston cops at the crime scene, people began calling them pigs, shouting “Ferguson…Ferguson” and “hands up…don’t shoot.” This despite the fact—the fact!—that an outside camera from a store next to where the shootout occurred captured the image of West emerging from the driver’s side of his car to instantly shoot Moynihan, who had not even drawn his weapon.

“This is where we are now,” one of the cops said. “Everyone has their own reality. Their own facts. The truth of the situation doesn’t matter. People want to believe what they think happened. Not what really happened. That’s the recent history of almost every encounter we have lately on the street.”

Sadly, it seems as if there is no longer any real history. Just momentary reactions to events that disappear like sky-writing with items like Twitter, texts, Meerkat, Snapchat, and Instagram. And in this, our snap-of-a-finger, Chernobyl-like culture, with almost daily explosions occurring only to be eclipsed in a single news cycle, email and Facebook can resemble the National Archives.

A majority of Americans are more aware of what happened in Ferguson last summer than with what occurred on a city street in Boston on Friday night or on too many streets and neighborhoods nearly every day. Know more about the life of Robert Durst than that of a parent who is afraid to let a child play outdoors in places where guns are more accessible than text books.

We have more tools at hand, literally, to make life easier and more productive than ever. We have Google, Wikipedia, iPads, iPhones, iTunes, YouTube, Netflix, and 600 cable channels. We can shop, pay bills, order food, and get nearly everything delivered, all of it with the touch of a finger on a device in the palm of our hand.

Yet we have a criminal justice system that seems unable to deal with proven violent career criminals like Angelo West who threaten lives every day. Our jails are crowded with those doing extended time for possession of drugs while those arrested multiple times for possession of handguns are often free to walk streets like time bombs eager to explode.

We are at the point where the immediacy of the moment crowds out any thought of reflection. Everyone has a smart phone and everything is recorded. One event spills into another. Conclusions come quickly at the near total expense of consideration of what just actually happened. Reality is self defined as the mob, any mob, writes its own history, never to be contradicted by the quiet statement of truth. [...]

The facts DO matter. Instant gratification of social media be damned.

There has always been people who jump to conclusions and make shallow assessments without looking more deeply. That's nothing new. What is new is that such people have access to social media, where they can instantly amplify their misguided opinions to the world. Ironically, that same technology can also make the facts of the situation be known more quickly, for anyone who cares to bother about the facts. In our technological world of instant gratification, people are often too willing to be lazy and treat their opinions like facts. People who don't care about the facts muddy the water for everyone, and do more harm than good.

These are just excerpts, please follow the links and read the full articles for the details, the complete picture.

I'm sick of hearing people talk about their unsubstantiated opinions as if they were facts. Our Brave New World is going to have to do better than that. For all of our sakes.

     

Does the Truth about Ted Kennedy matter?

We aren't supposed to speak ill of the dead, or so some people say. Yet many people are speaking ill of the living, about those who don't think Ted Kennedy was such a good man. Here is some typical nonsense from USA Today:

Kennedy funeral rings with hope, Twitter with vitriol

Are you and I the judges of atonement? How much is good enough?

Today at Ted Kennedy's funeral Mass, one priest said, wove together "memory and hope." But what of the judge on high -- if you, like most Americans, believe in a God who makes final judgment?

Like most Americans, you may believe all good people go to heaven. So who is good enough? Was he a good enough Catholic? (Although Pope Benedict XVI has so far made no public message of sympathy for his passing) A good enough Christian? A good enough man in the end? Not to judge by the vitriol on Twitter ... [...]

There are a whole bunch of people who want to ignore many things Kennedy did in his life, just white-wash it away like it never happened. Those who don't go along with that, are being targeted as unkind and mean spirited at best; as bitter, judgmental, unfeeling Monsters at worst.

But what about the plain facts?

In the comments section of the above article, someone posts the inconvenient facts that the Left wants to whitewash:

As soon as his cancer was detected, I noticed the immediate attempt at the "canonization" of old Teddy Kennedy by the mainstream media. They are saying what a "great American" he is. I say, let's get a couple things clear & not twist the facts to change the real history.

1. He was caught cheating at Harvard when he attended it. He was expelled twice, once for cheating on a test, and once for paying a classmate to cheat for him.

2. While expelled, Kennedy enlisted in the Army, but mistakenly signed up for four years instead of two. Oops! The man can't count to four! His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, former U.S. Ambassador to England (a step up from bootlegging liquor into the US from Canada during prohibition), pulled the necessary strings to have his enlistment shortened to two years, and to ensure that he served in Europe, not Korea, where a war was raging. No preferential treatment for him! (like he charged that President Bush received).

3. Kennedy was assigned to Paris, never advanced beyond the rank of private, and returned to Harvard upon being discharged. Imagine a person of his "education" NEVER advancing past the rank of Private!

4. While attending law school at the University of Virginia, he was cited for reckless driving four times, including once when he was clocked driving 90 miles per hour in a residential neighborhood with his headlights off after dark.. Yet his Virginia driver's license was never revoked. Coincidentally, he passed the bar exam in 1959. Amazing!

5. In 1964, he was seriously injured in a plane crash and hospitalized for several months. Test results done by the hospital at the time he was admitted had shown he was legally intoxicated. The results of those tests remained a "state secret" until in the 1980's when the report was unsealed. Didn't hear about that from the unbiased media, did we?

6. On July 19, 1969, Kennedy attended a party on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts . At about 11:00 PM, he borrowed his chauffeur's keys to his Oldsmobile limousine and offered to give a ride home to Mary Jo Kopechne, a campaign worker. Leaving the island via an unlit bridge with no guard rail, Kennedy steered the car off the bridge, flipped, and into Poucha Pond.

7. He swam to shore and walked back to the party passing several houses and a fire station. Two friends then returned with him to the scene of the accident. According to their later testimony, they told him what he already knew - that he was required by law to immediately report the accident to the authorities. Instead Kennedy made his way to his hotel, called his lawyer, and went to sleep. Kennedy called the police the next morning and by then the wreck had already been discovered. Before dying Kopechne had scratched at the upholstered floor above her head in the upside-down car.

The Kennedy family began "calling in favors", ensuring that any inquiry would be contained. Her corpse was whisked out-of-state to her family before an autopsy could be conducted.

Further details are uncertain, but after the accident Kennedy says he repeatedly dove under the water trying to rescue Kopechne and he didn't call police because he was in a state of shock. It is widely assumed Kennedy was drunk, and he held off calling police in hopes that his family could fix the problem overnight. Since the accident Kennedy's "political enemies" have referred to him as the distinguished Senator from Chappaquiddick. He pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, and was given a SUSPENDED SENTENCE OF TWO MONTHS.

Kopechne's family received a small payout from the Kennedy's insurance policy and never sued. There was later an effort to have her body exhumed and autopsied, but her family successfully fought against this in court, and Kennedy's family paid their attorney's bills.... A "token of friendship"?

8. Kennedy has held his Senate seat for more than forty years, but considering his longevity, his accomplishments seem scant. He authored or argued for legislation that ensured a variety of civil rights, increased the minimum wage in 1981, made access to health care easier for the indigent, funded Meals on Wheels for fixed-income seniors, and is widely held as the "standard-bearer for liberalism".. In his very first Senate roll he was the floor manager for the bill that turned U.S. Immigration policy upside down and opened the floodgate for immigrants from third world countries.

9. Since that time, he has been the prime instigator and author of every expansion of an increase in immigration up to and including the latest attempt to grant amnesty to illegal aliens. Not to mention the pious grilling he gave the last two Supreme Court nominees, as if he was the standard bearer for the nation in matters of "what's right". What a pompous a**!

10. He is known around Washington as a public drunk, loud, boisterous, and very disrespectful to ladies. JERK is a better description than "great American".. "A blonde in every pond" is his motto.

Let's not allow the spin doctors to make this jerk a hero -- how quickly the American public forgets what his real legacy is.

If Ted Kennedy did some good things in his life, fine. But the truth is the whole story, not just the cherry-picked good parts. No one is perfect, we are all flawed, yet some people's lives lean more in one direction than the other. The Kennedy fans want us to forget or not speak about his flaws, so they can stack the good side of the scale in his favor.

I don't particularly enjoy speaking ill of the dead. I just happen to care about what the facts are, what the truth is. The Left is now pissing in the soup, and trying to vilify those of us who won't drink it.

I say, no way, no white-wash. The truth is what it is. Deal with it.

If that makes me mean-spirited in some people's eyes, so be it. I can only say that, leaving Mary Jo to suffocate to death, clawing at the floor in his upside down submerged car, while he phoned his lawyer and then went to bed, could be interpreted as far more "mean" than anything anyone could say about him now.

It's a travesty that Kennedy was ever allowed to serve as a senator after what he had done was known. If the majority of people in this country now think he was a great man, they are either ignorant of the facts, or we, as a nation, are in big trouble.

As for comments like this, from the USA Today article:

Are you and I the judges of atonement? How much is good enough?

I'm not the judge of his soul. I liked what The Anchoress said about the life and death of Ted Kennedy on her blog:

[...] Some will focus on his personal sins -the assumed repentance or lack of same (of which they will likely have no real knowledge, just hunches) and some will presume to know the state of his soul, but those will be the inveterates, working from long-habit. Most Christians will, I think, understand that “the favors of the Lord are not exhausted, his mercies not over and done” and will simply pray in hopes that Kennedy had made a contrite and humble confession of his failings and sins.

Others, of course, will suggest that Kennedy’s pro-abortion positions, in and of themselves, should damn him forever in the eyes of God.

Thankfully, God knows more, and sees more, than the rest of us, because eventually we’ll all need to count on his mercy, as we face his justice. For all that we know of Kennedy, there is much we do not know. A family member who works with the very poor once told me that when he was in a real fix and unable to find help for, for instance, a sick child in need of surgery, a phone call to Kennedy’s office would set the “Irish Mafia” of professional people -doctors, lawyers, pilots and such- into brisk motion. I think an examination of the life of every “great” person (and I mean “great” in terms of power and influence) will expose deep flaws and surprising episodes of generosity. [...]

She says a lot of thoughtful things on the topic, follow the link if it interests you.

Here on my blog, I'm just wanting to provide the complete picture that the Media won't give you. At best, Ted Kennedy was a mixed bag, a man with serious character flaws. At worst... well, you decide.


Related Links:

Kennedy's Kopechne jokes

What About Questioning A Kennedy?

Ted Kennedy is dead. Now, "Chappaquidicare"?

Youtube: Kennedy liked to joke about Chappaquiddick?
     

Sarah Palin Smears, Lies, Rumors and Gossip

If you can't argue with what someone says, assassinate their character. That's what the left is making a massive effort towards doing to Sarah Palin.

I've been reading things this past week that are just ridiculous. Total fabrications. Even the MSM is quoting lunatic posts from the Daily Kos as if they were facts! How is anyone supposed to debate about things that are just made up out of thin air? Whatever happened to journalism? Checking facts?

Here are two sources for Palin fact checking:

FightThePalinSmears.com

We are not connected to or supported by the McCain/ Palin campaign. Strictly supported by ads.

Many of the major lies are listed in the left sidebar for quick and easy reference. Breaking stories in the center. Lots of links. References and resources in drop down menus from the top.

Palin Rumors

Cripes, this has gotten ridiculous. Folks, look, let’s just run through a list here. (Updated.)

An extensive list, with embedded links. The list numbers 53 items, at the time I'm publishing this link.

Fortunately, the true facts do matter to many of us. Wouldn't it be nice if the MSM thought the truth was important, too?

Here is an introductory video about Sarah Palin, that was meant to introduce her at the RNC. They cut it from the program due to time restraints, which is unfortunate. It's only about 4 minutes long, and it would have cleared up some things about her.



By not showing the video before she gave her speech, the teleprompter was thrown out of synchronization. Sarah gave that great speech just from her notes. Looking on the bright side, we found out she doesn't NEED a teleprompter.