In the News

Snowden
What are the most talked about items when it comes to one Mr. Edward Snowden right now?

1. The fact that he is stuck in a Moscow airport trying to get to a Latin American country that has offered him asylum.
2. The fact that he leaked U.S. classified secrets.
3. The possible ramifications of how this may affect 'the press' (e.g. if you print his words you will be deemed liable).

Do you know what I think we should be talking about? The fact that our government has been fucking spying on U.S. citizens as well as other countries. Snowden leaked documents about our government's monitoring our phone calls and e-mails and that has been determined by said government to be a breach of security. How fucking secure am I to feel knowing that my government is getting closer and closer to that of 1984. And why is no one talking about this? Yes, it is a bit comical, the poor bastard being holed up in an airport terminal but is that what this is really about? 

Why don't people care? A guy I work with, King Shit, says that if you have nothing to hide you don't have to worry. It isn't about having something to hide. It is about a violation of my rights. Monitoring my phone calls and emails, boring and harmless as they are, constitutes a violation of the fourth amendment and, put simply, amounts to illegal search and seizure of my 'intellectual property'. 

But no one seems to care. 

Zimmerman

The long awaited verdict came in and George Zimmerman was found not guilty by a jury of six woman. People are crying out for justice and claiming that only white people matter when it comes to murder. According to the law, you cannot, in good conscience, find a person guilty of a crime if there is any reasonable doubt of their guilt. The jurors in this case evidently believed that there was doubt that Zimmerman willfully shot and killed Trayvon Martin for any purpose other than self-defense. 

That isn't what people want to hear. They don't want justice, they want vengeance or, at very least, a totem to represent this tragedy. They want a federal civil suit to prove that Zimmerman committed a hate crime. They want the family to suit for liable. No matter what, Zimmerman will never be innocent in the eyes of many. 

Another thing about this that really pisses me off is the race issue. This was not about race and would not have been about race if the media hadn't worked their magic. Every time they described Zimmerman it was as a "white Hispanic". How is that relevant? It isn't. It just makes it white against black. 

After the verdict, people said things along the lines of "only the deaths of white people matter". Does anyone remember the O.J. Simpson trial back in, what, 1994? If I recall, O.J., a black man, was accused of killing a white woman and a white man. He walked. Does that mean those deaths did not matter? 

That fact that a young man was killed is a tragedy. I'm sure Zimmerman regrets ever being on the damned neighborhood watch by this point and he is going to have to live with the knowledge that he took another life for the rest of his days. But crying out for blood or punishment when a man has been acquitted, when a jury believed this man was just protecting himself, that is not justice and that is not helpful. It just perpetuates racial divides and distracts us from what really matters. 

And the fucking media. I'm beginning to despise the fucking media. They fueled the fucking race issue from the word go.