No one's saying "Everybody just chill out" anymore

The second-to-last Sunday morning of August 2014.  Seems like an appropriate time for a quick roundup of world-stage events, does it not?

There's the tweet from Iran's supreme leader Khameini urging people to buy Roots, which would no doubt please race hustler Alex Haley to no end.  Black pundits from left to right have exposed Haley for the opportunistic guilt-monger that he was:

Black commentator Stanley Crouch doesn’t mince words when it comes to Alex Haley.  Haley, Crouch insists, was a “ruthless hustler” and “one of the biggest damn liars this country has ever seen.” Crouch likens Haley to Tawana Brawley, the young black woman who infamously lied about being raped and humiliated by a white police officer.  Like the lie concocted by Brawley and abetted by the likes of Al Sharpton, Haley’s story is also a “hoax” that beautifully illustrates “how history and tragic fact can be pillaged by an individual willing to exploit whatever the naïve might consider sacred.”

Crouch explains: “Haley came on the scene when Negroes were becoming obsessed with their African ancestry and were having overwrought reactions to a tale of slavery that always, conveniently, left out the crucial role of the cooperative and profiting Africans.”

Black thinker Thomas Sowell, who has written prolifically on race and slavery, makes the same point as Crouch — even if not quite as bluntly. Regarding the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Sowell remarks that Roots “presented some crucially false pictures of what had actually happened — false pictures that continue to dominate thinking today.”

For instance, “Roots has a white man leading a slave raid in West Africa, where the hero, Kunta Kinte [supposedly, Haley’s ancestor] was captured, looking bewildered at the chains put on him as he was led away in bondage.” Moreover, even “the village elders” likewise appeared perplexed by the sight of these “white men” who were “carrying their people away.” In glaring contrast to this depiction, Sowell correctly asserts, the location from which Kunta Kinte was taken — West Africa — had been “a center of slave trading before the first white man arrived there — and slavery continues in parts of it to this very moment.” He adds: “Africans soldvast numbers of other Africans to Europeans. But they hardly let Europeans go running around in their territory, catching people willy-nilly.” (Emphasis added.)

According to Sowell, Roots did more harm than good in fueling “the gross misconception that slavery was about white people enslaving black people.” In reality, “the tragedy of slavery was of a far greater magnitude than that.” Slavery knew no racial boundaries. “People of every race and color were both slaves and enslavers, for thousands of years, all around the world.” Sowell likens slavery to cancer in that it transcends time and place. He concludes: “If reparations were to be paid for slavery, everybody on this planet would owe everybody else.”

A jihadist militia has taken over Tripoli International  Airport in Libya after a monthlong battle.

NATO says that Russian artillery units have moved into Ukraine.  And pro-Russia rebels who control the Ukrainian city of Luhansk have killed a Lithuanian envoy there.

And China has been strutting its stuff in international airspace:

"The intercept was aggressive and demonstrated a lack of due regard for the safety and well-being of the U.S. and Chinese aircrews and aircraft," the Pentagon said in a statement."This incident is the most recent in a rising trend of nonstandard, unprofessional and unsafe intercepts of US aircraft that we have observed since the end of 2013."

The Navy's P-8 Poseidon aircraft are designed for long-range missions including intelligence collection and reconnaissance.

The Chinese fighter jet showed off its belly, deliberately behaving as provocatively as possible.  The planes were so close the pilots could see each other.

Hamas fired 200 rockets into Israel in the last 2 days. Also executed some more suspected informants.

Then of course there's the existential and imminent threat from the Islamic State.

And, of course, the Most Equal Comrade's dash back to the golf course after his inadequate statement on the Foley murder.  Even Maureen Dowd has had enough of it.


You know what I'm not seeing from any quarters worth noting?  That attitude one has until recently found among libs and libertarians of various stripes that expresses itself along the lines of, "Oh, everybody needs to calm down.  Life on our planet is proceeding within the parameters of what has been considered normal for a long time."

Anybody with a brain, a heart and a soul knows we're in territory vastly different from that.  I'll bet, way underneath the golf-cart giggles, the Most Equal Comrade even knows it.  But he's scared that he might have to actually rise to the occasion and do the job of a US president.

That's who we've elected, people.  An escapist little man-child who wanted the job to feed his narcissism and, yes, promote his utterly mad ideology - as long as it didn't put him in any icky situations.

It is so very late in the day.