Whatever became of America?

[liberty]

If hate is not evolved perhaps you can tell me why some victims are more news worthy than others.
One these stories made the national news and other did not. One involved white southerners as victims and other involved a black woman. Can you guess which made the national news?

Murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom
Channon Gail Christian, 21, and Hugh Christopher Newsom, Jr., 23, were a couple from Knoxville, Tennessee. They were raped, tortured and murdered after being kidnapped early on the morning of January 7, 2007. Their vehicle had been carjacked.[1][2] Five suspects were arrested and charged in the case, and the fact ofthe suspects all being black gaverise to public speculation on the possibility of racial motivationfor the attacks (see "Reaction and accusations of racism," below). The grand jury indicted four of the suspects on counts of capital murder, robbery, kidnapping, rape and theft (a fifth was indicted on the federal level).
Of the four charged at the state level, three (Letalvis D. Cobbins, Lemaricus Davidson and George Thomas) had multiple prior felony convictions. After a jury trial, Lemaricus Davidson was sentenced to death by lethal injection and Letalvis Cobbins and George Thomas were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Vanessa Coleman has been convicted of facilitating the crimes and sentenced to 53 years in prison, and Eric Dewayne Boyd has been convicted of federal charges as accessory after the fact to carjacking and sentenced to 18 years in prison.[3] The state convictions had since been set aside because of misconduct by the presiding judge, who has since been disbarred; retrials (pending appeals in all except the Coleman case, whose retrial is not being contested) had slated for the summer and fall of 2012, until in May 2012 the Tennessee Supreme Court vacated the motion for new trials.


Six Held In West Virginia Torture Horror
Cops: Black woman raped, beaten, abused during week-long captivity
SEPTEMBER 11--A black West Virginia woman was sexually assaulted,stabbed, and tortured while being held captive by her white abductors, one of whom told her, 'That's what we do to niggers around here.' The 23-year-old victim was freed Saturday after cops responded to the home of Frankie Brewster for a 'welfare check on a female that was reportedly being held against her will.' When cops arrived, Brewster claimed she was the only one home, but then the victim limped to the door and said, 'Help me.' According to six harrowing criminal complaints, the woman, who apparently had been held for more than a week, had four stab wounds in her left leg, bruised eyes, and had been repeatedly sexually assaulted and humiliated. The woman told police that she was forced to lick Brewster's 'toes, vagina, and anal cavity.' Brewster's son Bobby forced the woman to eat dog and rat feces, according to one complaint filed in Logan County Magistrate Court. The victim, who is now hospitalized, was raped at knifepoint, choked with a cable cord, and had her hair pulled and cut during the ordeal. Police, who have arrested six defendants for their roles in the abduction and attack, are looking for other suspects who may have lured the victim to Brewster's home. The arrestees are seen in the below mug shots. Pictured clockwise from the upper left are Frankie Brewster, 49; Bobby Brewster, 24; Danny Combs, 20; George Messer, 27; Alisha Burton, 22; and Karen Burton, 46. (11 pages)

Megan Williams case
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The Megan Williams case involves a 20-year-old African American woman from West Virginia who originally claimed that she was kidnapped, raped and tortured in an allegedly racist attack by six white residents from Logan County, three of whom are women, in August 2007. Among many other things, the suspects were charged with stabbing Williams, dousing her with hot water, and forcing her to eat rat, dog, and human feces. In addition, the suspects were alleged to have hurled racial slurs at her while doing so. The torture and sexual assault was said to have been carried out for about a week.
At the time civil rights leaders, community activists and others asserted that the apparent racial motive made the incident subject to prosecution under hate crimes statutes. Authorities did not initially file hate crime charges in the attack, but prosecutors did not completely rule out such a move down the road. When pressed on the possibility of such charges, authorities said that they were focused on the charges with the toughest penalties, noting that the maximum sentence for a hate crime was just 10 years. One defendant was convicted of a hate crime in the incident.
In October 2009, Williams recanted her accusations against five of the defendants, but still accuses her former boyfriend, Bobby Ray Brewster, of abuse.[1]

[dales]

And when you have nothing coherent to say and it is too much effort to engage in reason turn the thread into a hate-fest.

You'll always have company there.




yrs,
rubato

I love you, you love me
We're a great big family.
With a great big hug
and a kiss from me to you
Won't you say you love me too!

[liberty]

And when you have nothing coherent to say and it is too much effort to engage in reason turn the thread into a hate-fest.

You'll always have company there.




yrs,
rubato

I love you, you love me
We're a great big family.
With a great big hug
and a kiss from me to you
Won't you say you love me too!

So you think that is what he going to say? Well we will see. However, when a phenomenon can be observed no honest person will denied its existence.

[oldr_n_wsr]

I think everyone in the world should do step 4 of the 12 steps.
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

I am currently on Step 4 in my recovery

[dales]

Indeed, Step 4 takes courage..........the rewards are worth it.

Let me add this: If more people practised the 12 steps in all their affairs, the world would be close to paradise.

[liberty]

And when you have nothing coherent to say and it is too much effort to engage in reason turn the thread into a hate-fest.

You'll always have company there.




yrs,
rubato

I love you, you love me
We're a great big family.
With a great big hug
and a kiss from me to you
Won't you say you love me too!

Are you saying that it does not exist? The truth is the truth.

[dales]

AA chapters can be found through out the world.

[liberty]

AA chapters can be found through out the world.

Should inequality be ignored?

[dales]

There must be dozens of local AA Chapters in Lousiana.

[liberty]

There must be dozens of local AA Chapters in Lousiana. =translation= yes

[Crackpot]

I take fearless moral inventories all the time.....
you'd think those ingrates would appreciate all the work I put in on their behalf

[oldr_n_wsr]

Indeed, Step 4 takes courage..........the rewards are worth it.

Let me add this: If more people practised the 12 steps in all their affairs, the world would be close to paradise.

Isn't that the truth.
I actually looked forward to doing Step 4 and am finding the search most rewarding. While I will be moving on to step 5 and beyond shortly, I can't see myself ever not doing step 4 (and 5).

[Sue U]

I take fearless moral inventories all the time.....
you'd think those ingrates would appreciate all the work I put in on their behalf

Best laugh of the day so far.

[Gob]

A new study says white Americans with low educational levels have already lost an average of four years from their life expectancy.

That's the loss of 5 per cent of the average lifespan for an American who lacks a high school diploma, and it's happened at astonishing speed - between 1990 and 2008, says the lead investigator for the study, S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

It compares to the much-deplored loss of life expectancy in post-Soviet Russia, when the collapse of the state-run system and an epidemic of alcoholism cut seven years from the life of the average Russian.

While less-educated Americans were losing 5 per cent of their life expectancy, humanity as a whole went in the opposite direction, at about the same speed. Average life expectancy across the planet rose by 7 per cent from 1990 to 2010, according to UN data.

"The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less-educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least-educated Americans who lack health insurance," summarises The New York Times' report of the study.

And the US overall was not doing very well by international comparison to start with. Americans rank 36th in the world for longevity with an average 78.3 years, almost identical to Cubans, who have one-fifth the level of income.

Americans live 3½ years less than citizens of the five top-ranked countries - Japan, Hong Kong, Iceland, Switzerland and Australia.

The story of American life expectancy is an alarming expression of its larger story. The US is delivering the full benefits of prosperity and modernity in an increasingly narrow way.

It was long known that richer Americans improved their life expectancy at a greater rate than poor Americans, but lifespans lengthened for all. Today, advantaged Americans live longer while the disadvantaged live shorter. That is the real import of the new findings. It is about inequality, in the most basic manifestation - the number of days of life.

Inequality is a subject American society has always found uncomfortable.

The Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, with an estimated net worth of $200 million, is a case in point. Asked about inequality of wealth, Romney told the Today Show in January: "I think it's fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms … it's a very envy-oriented" approach.

He did speak about it in a quiet room, during a private, $50,000-a-head fund-raising event. At least, he thought it was private until his remarks were leaked. He appeared to disparage the poor.

Pointing out that that 47 per cent of Americans don't pay federal income taxes, Romney called them "victims" who have become dependents of the government. He said: "My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

Romney thinks that inequality is not a concern for government. He's dead wrong. An impressive body of new research demonstrates that severe inequality aggravates problems all the way across the social spectrum.

And as equality improves, so does a society's performance in dealing with violent crime, depression, mental illness, obesity, educational failure and personal debt, among many other problems, as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett showed in their groundbreaking book, The Spirit Level.

The man Romney is challenging, Barack Obama, took the presidency determined to do something about the problem of America's glaring inequality.

The US was the only developed country that didn't have universal healthcare. An estimated 40 million Americans had no health insurance. Obama set up a health reform program, nicknamed Obamacare, designed to bring healthcare within the grasp of many more people.

It's not the sort of system of state benefits that other developed countries run - instead it forces more people to buy private health insurance. It's imperfect, but it's an improvement.

"Socialism" was the catchcry, and it was the single biggest target of the angry Tea Party movement. But while Obama had the right impulse, he had lousy timing. He took office as the economy collapsed.

Income inequality in the US, already very skewed, has grown more unequal since the great recession of 2008. Before the recession, from 2002 to 2007, the richest 1 per cent enjoyed a generous 65 per cent of the gain in total national income. In 2010, it was a startling 93 per cent.

Even the most committed Democrats are starting to despair. Joe Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former member of the Clinton administration, writes: "Four years ago there was a moment where most Americans had the audacity to hope. Trends more than a quarter of the century in the making might have been reversed. Instead, they have worsened. Today that hope is flickering."

The US needs stronger growth to generate jobs and wealth, and it needs to curb inequality so its citizens can enjoy the benefits. Instead it struggles with economic recession as well as social regression, and the outlook is dim, Republican or Democrat.

Peter Hartcher is the international editor.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/ ... z27QolASD0

[Gob]

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who are more interested in getting validation of what they already believe rather than getting information in order to intelligently construct their views....

These people don't want to think....
...

Bias in American media is not new. During the Gilded Age, the Hearst and Pulitzer press empires competed for readership with sensationalism and propaganda.

But after World War II, the US media market settled into a detente, where two or three newspapers and the three networks led national coverage. All strove to divorce opinion from news.

Back then, says David Maraniss, an associate editor of The Washington Post, the networks' voices were no more rabid than the fatherly tones of news anchors such as Walter Cronkite and Ed Murrow.

The detente collapsed with the rise of talk radio, then cable and internet news. The three networks have lost 50 per cent of their audience since 1980.

But this year, says Steve Schmidt, who as a senior strategist for John McCain's campaign in 2008 was partly responsible for the selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, America's media has become so polarised it is possible for followers of both camps to live entirely inside their own news echo chambers,

''It used to be as, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts,'' said Schmidt, quoting the patrician Democrat senator, who died in 2003. ''Well now you can have your own facts, too.''

It is a phenomenon becoming known as post-truth politics.

Maraniss notes that hyper-partisanship has even spread into the more traditionally staid world of book publishing. His painstakingly researched and well reviewed biography of Obama was significantly outsold by the nakedly partisan biography The Amateur, which charges Obama with wrecking the economy and being rude to Oprah Winfrey.

He says reporters striving for objectivity are becoming so hectored by partisan media accusing them of bias that many news outlets have created ''fact-checking'' teams to insulate them.

It is not hard to find evidence that what we once knew as ''facts'' have become contestable. On Thursday, if you wanted a snapshot of the campaign, you might have looked at an average of 471 national polls published by The Huffington Post's pollster (online, left-leaning) to find that Barack Obama was ahead nationally 48.9 per cent to 44.3 per cent.

But what if you were a Republican and those 471 polls didn't suit your worldview? No problem, just head over to UnSkewedPolls. com, where the hosts skew all the polls with a weighting towards Mitt Romney on the basis that the ''mainstream media'' and its pollsters are biased. There, Romney was up by 5 percentage points on Thursday.

With the success of Fox News on the right, and MSNBC on the left, the honest broker CNN has had its market share plummet and other smaller cable news networks have risen to mimic the partisans - Glenn Beck's The Blaze (right), Al Gore's Current TV (left).

This year, Twitter has allowed people to create their own news feeds by choosing to follow reporters and commentators whose views reflect their own, increasing the volume in their personalised echo chamber.

Meanwhile, stories, true and false, are being fed into the machine by an endless loop of wild claims spread via email chains.

David Frum, the former George Bush speechwriter who now can be relied upon to criticise both sides, noted in his Daily Beast blog that to decode Fox you need to see these emails.

He cited Fox host Greg Gutfeld's line that ''Obama is now out of the closet. He's officially gay for class warfare.'' This, writes Frum, is a reference to the email meme that Obama is gay. ''Fox is only the most visible part of a vast alternative reality. Fox's coverage of the news cannot be properly understood in isolation, but only in conjunction with the rest of that system - and especially the chain emails that do so much to shape the worldview of Fox viewers.''

The impact of the polarisation is demonstrable. A survey taken before the 2010 mid-term elections by the University of Maryland's World Public Opinion project found there were ''substantial levels of misinformation'' among all daily news consumers but that those who got their information from Fox were more likely to be misinformed on issues regarding the environment, the impact of the stimulus package and the war on terrorism.

Greater exposure to Fox News increased the degree to which viewers were misinformed.

But viewers of public broadcasting and MSNBC were more likely to believe (incorrectly) that the US Chamber of Commerce was spending money raised from foreign sources to support Republican candidates.

And a new poll by Dartmouth found 63 per cent of Republican respondents still believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the US invaded in 2003. By contrast, 27 per cent of independents and 15 per cent of Democrats shared that view.

The impact can also be witnessed in the broader polarisation of American society. It turns out Romney was right - both candidates have achieved their expected 46 per cent or 47 per cent support, but neither has so far been able to convince enough independent voters to join their camp, and neither side has made any real effort to attract voters to swap camps.

The polarisation is reflected in Congress, which has been unable to pass a budget in three years. Nor can it be a coincidence that a survey last week found mistrust of the media at the highest in history, at 60 per cent.

It is affecting even the most basic social building blocks. One recent study found 30 per cent of Democrats wouldn't want their child marrying a Republican, compared with 50 per cent of Republicans who don't want their child to marry a Democrat. Overall, 40 per cent of Americans objected to mixed political marriages, up from 5 per cent in 1960.

The Pulitzer prize-winning Princeton professor Paul Starr fears there are fewer tangible but perhaps more consequential impacts of the bipolar American media. He cites research by Diane Muntz that shows that, though people tend to be more tolerant when they mix with people with whom they disagree, few people actually encounter opposing positions and those who do become less likely to act politically. This could lead to lower voter turnout.

This is a quandary that could be exacerbated by the influence of Twitter during this campaign.

He also raises research by Cass Sunstein that shows when groups of like-minded people congregate and speak - as was happening en masse online - their existing biases tend to grow more extreme.

The echo grows in the chamber rather than fade

[liberty]

The problem with group think is that it can hide problems and camouflage solutions. Here for example it appears to be to the general opinion that high taxes are the worse thing that can happen to the human race. But I disagree there are worse things than taxes.

[dales]

Yeah, death.

[Gob]

And you're right, there's a huge cadre of people out there, across the political spectrum, who are more than happy spout back to folks whatever validating crap they want to hear; on the radio, on the tube, on blogs and websites, in books....there's big bucks to be made in that, so there's no shortage of "validators"....

I like this;

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his essay On Bullshit, attempts a rigorous philosophical definition of bullshit. For Frankfurt, this consists of drawing a sharp distinction between a bullshitter and a liar; the difference being that a liar cares enough about the truth to state known falsehoods, whereas a bullshitter does not care because some other goal is paramount. "Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

An illustrative example of Frankfurt's distinction between lies and bullshit is the methodology of various currents of political extremism. Historically, the rhetoric of the far right has relied primarily on lies (e.g., conspiracy theories involving Illuminati, Jews, the New World Order, etc.), while the rhetoric of the far left has relied primarily on bullshit (e.g., postmodernism, politicized New Age natterings). This makes it much easier to discredit the right-wing extremists than the left-wing ones, although their statements generally contain identical amounts of truth. Although this is not so much the case now with the latest methodological shifts among conservatives who tend to align with the religious right — of particular note is the replacement of evidentialist with presuppositionalist creationism, which is bullshit combined with lies and added denial on top.