more bias

The CBS news crawl just told me that the Occupy Movement has cost local taxpayers "an average of" $13 million. How is it we have never heard how much Tea Party demonstrations, which come complete with armed second amendment "defenders" cost local taxpayers?

This doesn't even touch the meaninglessness of the word "average" in this context.

Thoughts I thunk

I commented over supper that campus police, such the geniuses of UC Davis, are the bottom of the law enforcement food chain. I've reflected that isn't totally fair. Armed mall cops and similar security guard types are lower. The rationalisers are doing their little dance about these Weight Watchers dropouts being "surrounded." It's clear they spent more time on donut patrol than on training for nonviolent protests, so perhaps they did find it challenging to simply step over a rank or two of kneeling protesters, or fit between the standing people behind them.

That argument evaporates on the reflection that during the Occupy movement, we've noted two things. First, that today's cops seem to get orgasmic pleasure in dressing up in their riot gear. They'll put it on to put a parking ticket on your grandmother's car*. Second, they'll reach for the bear spray (that's what this is, friends: bear spray) with no provocation at all. The UC Davis Keystone Kops are just the latest to fall to these weaknesses. I have stayed away from nonviolent protests for several years, ever since I discovered that dealing with reactionaries at short range now makes me violently angry. But the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree, and my daughter has taken a few shifts with her city's Occupy demonstration. One is equally proud and apprehensive.

Speaking of Occupy, isn't it interesting that Mayor Bloomberg's police have had Jose Pimentel under surveillance for two freakin years, and they simply just had to arrest him now, a week after cops wielding pepper spray descended upon Occupy Wall Street? When Deadeye Dick Cheney ran the White House, we used to call this a Weapon of Mass Distraction. Apparently the lesson isn't lost on Hizzoner.

Late news has it that the Not-so-Super-Committee has, in its ineptitude, advanced the cause of Social Security and virtually guaranteed the death of the Bush tax cuts the Republicans were so desperate to protect This bears watching. Oft evil will shall evil mar. Or, ROTFLMAO.

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* If it was my grandmother, they would have needed it.

Deja news

More and more, I've noticed that coverage of the Occupy movement is a step into the WABAC machine. Destination is, say 1968. So is the coverage...status quo prejudices and all.

I make almost no exceptions to the observation.* I follow Tom Wolfe in thinking that nearly all media exist to defend the established order. There is a spectrum of sorts. Media that wear their conservatism on their sleeve (q.v. Fox and the Boston Herald) are obvious in their contempt for Occupy's challenge and its people. (The Tea Party, of course, has been exempt from such negativity.) Centrist and left-leaning enterprises have been more guilty of benign neglect of the story, and to some extent of retailing stereotypes of protest.

We'll see what happens. It is a world where McLuhan's observation has been eclipsed. The medium now is all. On the other hand, it's a world where the rage of the people has, in the past year, shown a promising capacity for outrunning and embarrassing the media's cultural strictures. That is the newer phenomenon and my money's on the new.

* I followed a Facebook link to a Mother Jones story and got severely stuck in a loop demanding I subscribe. Capitalism has its tentacles eveerywhere.