Last week I caught a Kanye West trainwreck on MTV2. Sway, MTV's genial rap expert who usually wears an interesting turban/headpiece, looked on in stunned silence as West recounted youthful homophobia and other off-topic meanderings. As the interview's ramblings continued, West was interrupted off-camera, presumably by a press aide horrified by what he saw. The emotive West waved him off and rambled on about his gay cousin. Sway's blank stare belied the gears turning in his head: "Am I witnessing this?" TV hadn't viewed such an incoherent rant since Fiona Apple cited Maya Angelou at 1997's Video Music Awards. So it was with disbelief that I glimped West on the cover of Time magazine a week back. "Hip-hop's class act," Time decreed. If West is "the smartest man in pop music," as Time proclaimed on its cover, then our culture is worse off than even the most dour pessimist imagined.

"George Bush doesn't care about black people," West told a nationwide audience via NBC's Friday-night fundraiser. "They're saying black families are looting and white families are just looking for food...they're giving the [Army] permission to shoot us." NBC didn't put the disjointed Mr. West on the air to inspire millions to change the channel. The sound they and their Gulf Coast beneficiaries were looking for was cha-ching, not click.

Anyone else out there think it awfully suspect that the NBC employee on the kill switch and the director let this incredibly intellingent rant "accidentally" go out on the air?

Things are so bad for Bush PR right now that the best thing that could happen for him is more screwballs go on rants like this. Then average people would realize that the blame-Bush sentiment (rather than blaming nature, the mayor, the govenor, etc etc) is a bit over the top.

Didn't see the rant. Can't comment (much).

Blaming Bush for the media coverage labling African Americans "looters" and caucasians "finders", was a bit off target. What was wrong with the gay comments? (No quotation makes it difficult to tell).

I say: Kayne West must be smoking crack; in fact he probably does.

Indeed, our response system is WAY too slow, but does anyone really believe the gov't has sat back and said: "Let's deliberately make the system slow, so we can hurt certain segments of our Republic"? Please. But if this idiot believes that's the case, I say: "Prove it, smart boy; where's your evidence?!"

Kanye West, like others of his ilk, such as Jesse "The Racist" Jackson, Al "How Does My Hair Look" Sharpton and many others are a problem because they are dividers; dividers who front themselves as uniters. The truth is: Unity would put these idiots out of business; and they don't REALLY want that. Actually, if they could get socialist/communist unity, they'd probably would take that.

Anyway, may God Bless ALL the victims. Each of us should do whatever part we can to help them and DEMAND a much better response capability for the future. This will cost $$, but I wonder: Wouldn't cutting ALL the PORK spending (for ALL of those bull crap programs) our Congressional leaders advocate, merely for votes, help us "find" the necessary funds? Of course it would.

We should DEMAND OUR Congress OUTLAW pork spending. GREAT idea!

My two cents...

Found a copy of what Kanye West blurted out.

"I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says they're looting. See a white family, it says they're looking for food." - Kayne West in Reference to the the media not George Bush

"George Bush doesn't care about black people...""...(America is set up)to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible" - Kayne West putting his foot in it.

"We already realised a lot of the people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way, and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us." - Kayne West showing innapropriate timing, but no something that belongs between the same quotation marks as the media coverage statement. The media doesn't give permission to shoot-to-kill.

Peeps, as a rule be careful when reading more than one sentence in the same quotation marks containing the three "...". Often in the press, comments are merged to infer meaning that wasn't meant by the person quoted. Sometimes inadvertently, other times on purpose.

Thanks Dan for giving us an example. I have to say I ate it up hook line and sinker (at first). Keep us vigilant ;)

Bruce: you seem like you are dedicated to keeping people on the right honest. OK. Good. Worthy persuit. There are lots of good targets for that, but I don't think you hit your target here. (1) Flynn clearly took this quotation with its elipses from the a source without access to the whole quotation. More importantly, (2) your elaboration of the quotation only makes West appear MORE insane and conspiratorial than the original amended quotation. Clarifying the antecedent to the two "they"s doesn't make Flynn's quotation dishonest (though it is incomplete), and it doesn't make West look any better, so it doesn't undermine Flynn's point at all.

Peeps, beware of people who proclaim themselves as keeping other people honest. We all have the responsibility to be honest and humble, because in real life there are no referees.

Bruce, no offense, but I'm with Skeptic here; I just don't see where your attribution makes this imbecile appear any less idiotic than he already does. I guess what people don't or can't understand is this is the biggest calamity to befall a large urban center since the San Francisco earthquake. Yes, I agree, we weren't prepared for it on a national level, but having a Democratic Mayor, a Democratic Governor, and a bunch of other Democratic mouthpieces and politicians, who ALSO weren't prepared, is simply not constructive. It's politically-motivated bullsh_t!

I still don't know who Kanye West is.

I don't even feel like googling his name to find out. I guess it is a MTV/VH1 pop culture thing. Anyway, it does seem strange if there was a fundraiser to let performers speak freelysince everything should be geared to getting the phones ringing.

You guys have to understand that the oppression of black people was very real and just one generation ago. Then LBJ's "Great Society" experiment destroyed began the decline in the black family structure by encouraging young women to have babies out of wedlock.

Today, over half of all black Americans are born out of wedlock. This explains their higher criminality rates. If you were black and you saw the media calling a black woman wading through the water with a bag a "looter" and a white woman doing the same a "finder", you might be wary, as Kenye is.

The pictures have been all over the internet, especially on leftist blogs, and on television there was a discussion about this.

Americans are trying to help the victims of the storm surge of Hurricane Katrina, but leftists are agitating and dividing people (Professor MarX, Democratic Philosopher: "America is racist, sexist, homophobic" blah blah blah). If their myths die, so does their credibility. So they have to fan the flames.

-- Skeptic (etc)
I don't recall saying Kayne wasn't insane. Hey that rhymes, maybe I should start rapping ;)

I have seen those pics, but there isn't any issue to complain about. One news provider captioned a black guy as a "looter" and ANOTHER news service captioned a white couple as "finders." They were from 2 sources so it is impossible to draw conclusions that make either news source look particularly bad. The one caption on the white couple was real illogical though, in that it said they were returning from having "found" food at a grocery store. As if when I am hungry and I wander into a grocery store I shout "Eureka! What great luck, I have found food!"

Both pics were of people who had looted food but in both cases such an act of looting was ethical. The one news service correctly described the situation as a looting of food. Another news source apparently decides to not call justified and ethical taking of what is not yours as "looting" but instead "finding." Apparently that news service feels it is their part to make sure that viewers of their photos draw the correct ethical conclusions and think words like "looting" would impede that.

So there was no issue there.

I was trying to highlight the way that libs manipulate people. There is a definite sensitivity that has been exploited here.

You don't know if Kenye West thinks that there is a journalistic "standard" or "template" or process in captioning pictures like these. You've probably seen how illogical libs can be. And his industry is full of them. It really takes alot of experience and awareness to spot what libs work fervently to obscure: anything that contradicts their nonsense. West may not be aware of the relativistic chaos churning about in the minds of lib journalists. Plus, I wouldn't blame anyone for complaining about media bias.

--Brian

Then we will have to agree to disagree; the two stories were presented to together under the same topic which implies some uniform selection process. Depends on what you define as looting; I usually prefer a conviction first, although nicking a wide screen telly is pretty much red-handedness.

Of course, an appeal for the victims was no place for politicising by Kayne. There will be enough time for recriminations further down the track.

TIM TOLE: I do not believe that he is smoking crack. For whatever that's worth.

Sirc Valence, you are correct that LBJ's "Great" Society was largely responsible for the breakdown of the black family, just as it has been for many white families. One would have thought Libs would have learned through this experience that handing people money for nothing is counter-productive, yet they still see it as the solution to all problems, foreign and domestic.

However, I disagree with your characterization of Blacks as having been "oppressed" a generation ago. Yes, in many parts of the South Blacks were treated as second-class citizens, but like slavery, such conduct was primarily limited in its scope to the South. And like Slavery, it was Democrats who oversaw the oppression, and yet now Republicans are somehow deemed responsible. Come to think of it, its Dems that run New Orleans and Louisiana, and they're both trying to blame Bush for their respective states of unpreparedness!

But it wasn't my family, any of my friends or anyone I have known who perpetrated the despicable acts of Jim Crow; all those who did are either dead or well-advanced in age, as are those who actually suffered. And Kanye West wasn't one of them. Neither were Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson!

It's interesting in a rather detached, academic way that real oppression and racism couldn't destroy the Black family. It took the supposed loving care of the welfare system and the Liberal concept of something for nothing to accomplish that task.

Ouch... ;)

Thom....BRAVO!

Well said.

Good post- but we just disagree about whether some lingering heavy-handed discrimination was oppressive or not.

I've never personally witnessed that with police officers (all my impressions have been positive), but just a relatively short while back, people told me some pretty bad stuff.

I also saw a special, I don't know if it was 20/20 -and they're not that bad- which conducted experiments with people lying on the ground or asking for help or acting like they might need it. Black people were much less frequently tended to by strangers than white people.

And then there was a white teacher, who was pretty cool, who was in an argument outside of the classroom with a black student. The teacher ended up grabbing the kid (though he was a bit taller than the teacher) by the neck. I don't know if it was because the guy is a smartmouth, or if he tried to attack the teacher. But the teacher got in trouble. This was not a big deal to me at the time, I wasn't very interested in the matter. I do recall that he didn't get fired, though.

This was at one of the schools that I went to, it was small and deliberately designed that way, for people that need extra attention, like pregnant girls or kids that got out of juvi or kicked out of schools or just had problems. If the LAUSD or the district that this school was located in found out, I believe the teacher would have gotten fired and possibly sued by the guy's parents. But the parties probably reached a reasonable solution.

Again, it was a small school. I just want to illustrate that something like this can happen and be buried in the media or not noticed by large segments of the public. If this had been some kind of racial attack, at a time with more tolerance toward racism, and you were a minority, it wouldn't take that many "officials" or people in authority to oppress you, or at least discriminate against you, with an oppressive effect.

Rodney King deserved some of what he got for being high and driving wrecklessly to get away from the "one-timez". I don't believe in treating criminals with kid gloves. I do believe in discouraging people from bad behavior, instead of making them feel like it is an "alternative-lifestile" that we condone and cater to.

Yet I believe that the tape of the beating was evidence that people would cross the line of professionalism and of some sort of aniumus against people that may have fit the description of a Rodney King or someone else that the police were after. So if you're an upstanding citizen and the police are pulling you over and messing with you, you're gonna have a problem. Especially when your older relatives tell you about what they faced. Of course this is evidence of how much better things have gotten since.

But if some people are vigorously pushing the idea -with silly arguments- that its happening again, I can understand how some people might come to believe them. Some silly behaviors are more possible than others to some people. Like I've said; the libs like to play with people's perceptions. They're epistemologically programmed that way. Don't you remember what the Communists said? Repeat a lie often enough and people begin to believe it.

It's like Dennis Prager said. If there's no truth, there's only power.

The point that none of the idiots and multicultis have bothered to make is that the blacks were looting while the whites were finding

From Editor and Publisher
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001054569
__________________
The Associated Press said its policy was clear. "When we see people go into businesses and come out with goods, we call it looting," said Santiago Lyon, AP's director of photography. "When we just see them carrying things down the road, we call it carrying items."

Lyon said the photographer who took Tuesday's photo, Dave Martin, had seen the man go into the store and take out the items.

As for the other photo, Getty said it stood by its caption and its photographer, Chris Graythen, who says the subjects of his photo were simply picking up items floating by in the dank waters.

And Graythen, frustrated by the controversy, wrote an emotional response on a photojournalism Web site, SportsShooter.com.

"These people were not ducking into a store and busting down windows to get electronics," he wrote. "They picked up bread and cokes that were floating in the water. They would have floated away anyhow."
_________

Does anyone in their right mind actually think that bush or anyone else thought "hey, most of the people in new orleans are black and poor, let's just let them die because we hate black people?" Of course not, but then again the majority of black people in this country think that Crack and AIDS were created by the government just because we want to Keep the black man down, so this seems slightly less insane.

That's why the title here is "Kanye, Rest." I posted earlier to try to share my views of how agit-prop like this can gain so much traction.

But I think it takes away from the fact that the people in both pictures were doing what they had to do when you throw around statements like "the blacks were looting while the whites were finding."

I know this remark is meant to tease, and I get it. But there will be plenty of time for having fun with libs this way later. Although, I'm being somewhat hypocritical here after posting this link at BlogsForBush.

Marcus,

I seriously doubt a majority of Black Americans subscribe to those crack or AIDS conspiracies. Probably not even a majority of inner city blacks. I have heard them before though and they do receive some play.

Bruce,
Unless you have seen something different than I have then those two stories (photos actually) you mentioned were presented together by one site, Yahoo news. The two pics are seperable as I indicated above since they were from different sources and captioned from those sources. If the criticism is simply of Yahoo News then maybe we are getting somewhere.

Also, the original caption in the white couple photo did make it seem like they had gone into a grocery store to "find" the provisions. Marcus has found that the photographer actually meant that they "found" the food floating around. That would then make the term "finding" make since instead of using "looting" as I thought they were. But "looting" carries no immediate stigma for me so I am not worried about first having convictions. That is why I prefer the term "looting" to the term "stealing" for these situations, since in disasters it is just to "loot" food, and that action isn't then stealing. As you say though "looting" tv's is really just "stealing." I think the term looting indicates the sort of opportunity or situation that has presented itself for actions of taking what isn't yours but it doesn't make the distinction of whether those actions are justified by dire need or are simply stealing.

--Brian
"If the criticism is simply of Yahoo News then maybe we are getting somewhere."

In this case yes, implied when I said "under the same topic", although I should have specifically stated Yahoo! for those who hadn't seen the pics etc. my bad. Although, it does remind me of a number of other, similar occurences (not related to Katrina) but that's a topic for another blog.

I've noticed people have had a bit of trouble positioning me on this one. Maybe I need to be a bit more explicit in future.

In the last thirty years or more, has any minority group been coddled, cajoled, been handed opportunities and overall been given a pass as much as African Americans have? And what has it produced: more whining, more dependence and a constant "what have you done for me lately" attitude.

When does it stop? Answer: when society (aided by our enabling politicians) stop pandering and start expecting people to stand up and take responsibility for themselves.

All this guy did was put into words and publicly speak of things that a lot of his friends think but only speak of amongst themselves.

Sirc, I had a white friend in high school who passed some years ago from Hodgkins. He followed my through flight training in Pensacola after college, and while on a weekend to New Orleans, sitting on a bench, was told by a fat slob of a white cop to dispose of an empty beer bottle. All he did was start to say the bottle wasn't his, and he received a beating with a night stick that put him in the hospital. He eventually got a grand total of $5,000 for his pain, and his lawyer said he was lucky to get that.

White friend, white cop; obvious point is, there are bad apples in every profession. There were pilots I flew with in the Navy whose voices I certainly wouldn't want welcoming me on my next flight to the west coast. It isn't all "racism", and the to blindly play the race card at every opportunity, as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and other professional race baiters of every color and religion do, is not only counter-productive by incredibly destructive, as it numbs the body politic to the real thing when it rears its ugly head.

--asdf
"All this guy did was put into words and publicly speak of things that a lot of his friends think but only speak of amongst themselves."
If "they" only speak of it amongst themselves, how can you verify that Kayne accurately represents them?

Because Bruce, I have a substantial amount of experience and exposure and have been privy to the kinds of circles of friends and aquaintances where I've heard these kinds of complaints and whiny references.

Haven't always been the filthy rich, white suburbanite that I now am.

So, I know of where I speak.

I was wrong, only 1/3 of blacks think the government created aids, over half think they created crack

Did The Government Manufacture AIDS and Make Drugs Available in Inner Cities to Attack Blacks?

A sizable number of people would agree with at least one of these accusations. In a 1990 poll, reported in the October 29, 1990 edition of The New York Times:

· Near one-third (29%) of black New Yorkers indicated belief that AIDS was "deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people," versus one in twenty (5%) among white New Yorkers.

· More than half (60%) of black New Yorkers indicated belief that government "deliberately" made drugs available to poor black people, versus a little more than one in ten (12%) among white New Yorkers.

In another 1990 survey, reported in the November 2, 1995 edition of The Boston Globe:

· More than one-third (34%) of black churchgoers polled in five cities agreed "the AIDS virus was produced in a germ warfare laboratory."

The 1997 Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University nationwide poll discovered:

· More than half (52%) of Americans believe it is likely that the CIA allowed drug dealers from Central America to sell crack cocaine to African-Americans in U.S. inner cities.

In the December 4, 1991 edition of The New York Post, comedian Bill Cosby said that AIDS was "started by human beings to get after certain people they don't like."

In a Benneton advertisement (see November 12, 1992 edition of Rolling Stone for an example), movie director Spike Lee said, "AIDS is a government-engineered disease."

If all racism disappeared from the earth tonight,
Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson would lose money.
Al Sharpton And Jessie Jackson will never let that happen.

I disagree.

Do Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton exist to fight racism, whatever that means? No. They exist to rile up blacks on the drop of a dime and threaten riots, boycotts etc. if they don't get corporations and the government to shell out millions of dollars to their organizations whenever they open their mouths.

If all "racism, disapeared, there would still be great disparities between blacks and whites. There would still be huge problems with the black underclass. There would still be a bunch of whiny guilt ridden white liberals, and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would be doing exactly what they are doing now.

Some sensible commentary on the tragedy

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050903_new_orleans.htm

Obviously, denounced by Michelle Malkin, John Podhoretz, Instapudit, Randy Balko.

http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2005/09/africa_in_our_m.php