Copyright 2015 by John T. Reed

I was not going to write about Baltimore because the media seem to be covering it accurately. But a Baltimore reader wants me to comment.

Apparently police misconduct of some kind

Healthy kid is taken into custody and dies there. Something very wrong and some police are the perpetrators of it.

Unless…

The Washington Post reported that another prisoner in the van with Gray heard Gray making noises that sounded like Gray was trying to injure himself. Other reports say Gray’s spine was recently injured in a car accident and that he got insurance money for it. Those reports are false.

Deliberately injuring oneself is a common behavior to try to put the prosecutor on the defensive, get the cops fired or disciplined. Fox News’ Brett Bair showed a video clip of a guy in police custody alone in a holding cell injuring himself. He was not aware he was being videoed.

Among the missing details are the races of the cops, not that it’s relevant to me, but the rioters and others like Obama are claiming the death was caused by America’s treatment of blacks. How many of the Baltimore cops who caused Gray’s death were black? And if any were, what does racism have to do with it?

Would Baltimore cops have stood still while being pelted with grapefruit-size chunks of concrete if the throwers had been, say, white fraternity brothers pissed about their team losing the NCAA basketball tournament? Hell, no!

Excuse making

This reader also said my writings about West Point had changed his life. He did not go there. I’m not sure how, but funny he should mention that because my main reaction to Baltimore has been the contrast between one little part of West Point and what I hear coming out of the mouths of Obama, black “leaders,” and a high percentage of blacks on the street.

The first words spoken to you on your first day as a New Cadet at West Point are, “Mister, from now on you have three answers: yes, sir; no, sir; and no excuse, sir.” And they ain’t kidding. Any answer to a “why did you screw up” question other than “No excuse, sir” is met with an ass chewing, often by two or three upperclassmen simultaneously.

The best thing about the place

I think the “no excuse” habit was the best thing about West Point. 99% of grads say the best thing was the honor code (A cadet will not lie cheat or steal). Recently, a West Point grad who is head of the VA got caught lying to to a special ops wounded guy that the VA head had been in special ops. He had not. So much for the honor Code, but he did say “no excuse” when he apologized for it. Q.E.D. (I know they modified both the honor code and the number of “answers” since I graduated. They should not have.)

Anyway, Obama, the black political leaders, and a large percentage, maybe a majority, of the blacks in the streets are about as far from “no excuse” as you could get. “I am victim. Hear me roar my list of grievances—which excuse ALL my bad behavior.”

Finding ways to win or excuses for losing

I wrote a web article years ago about the choice between finding ways to win and finding excuses for losing. http://johntreed.com/succeedingwaytowin.html In it, I explicitly singled out blacks, among others, for screwing this up and noted all the successful black athletes.

Why the difference between the athletes and those educated by the teachers only? Coaches, including black coaches, also have a no-excuse ethos. Did they go to West Point. No.

They play a game against an opponent once or twice a week during the season. Teachers can adopt stupid theories and the union will protect them from the consequences forever. But the union does not protect black coaches from getting beat. And when you have to produce results, and you fail, the no-excuse ethos hits you up side the head a couple times a week during the season. No West Point required.

This month’s location of the monthly black riot and looting is …

Lately, every time a black guy dies in the vicinity of a cop or even a wannabe cop like George Zimmerman, blacks riot. Why, we ask? “The death was a lynching.” Scott and Gray look like police misconduct, but not the others. “Well, then we’re rioting because of the way we are treated every day.”

So riot every day.

When I was a kid in the 1950s and early 1960s, blacks found a way to win. Their parents—plural—told them you have to work twice as hard as a white person to get the same thing, so work twice as hard. Was that fair? No. But working twice as hard was a way to win, not an excuse for losing.

Now, they got a million excuses, all of which fit the general pattern of it’s all the fault of the racist whites. The racist whites stopped being racist in the 70s. But a whole hell of a lot of blacks have now turned into far bigger racists than Archie Bunker ever was. And thereby put themselves into a self-inflicted, death spiral of failure and crime. There was a real show of black young me in the rioting and looting—a veritable 100,000-man march of black young men; not so much on child-support-payment-due date. And the first black president and attorney general have been encouraging all this because keeping blacks in that mind-set and behavior pattern is a key part of their partisan-power business model.

Majority black population, majority black police force, black police chief, black mayor

One of the old stereotypes about blacks was that they were dumb. 96% of blacks voting for people who do to blacks what people like Obama, Holder, and the various black big shots in Congress and Baltimore have done to them is dumb. Or an extremely unfortunate bad habit. I hope it’s the latter. And if it is, they’d better get rid of it fast.

Writing them off

I expect the majority of Americans are watching the blacks on the street in Baltimore and Ferguson, etc. and silently writing them off, silently deciding there will be no more voting for a black presidential candidate, silently deciding to move out of Baltimore as they did Detroit decades ago, silently deciding not to build a branch of their chain stores there, silently deciding to move their offices in that city to the suburbs, silently cutting the blacks off from the “law-abiding, having children in wedlock, working at a job” rest of society.

The admitted unfairness of the pre-1964 America has been corrected—MORE than corrected when you look an affirmative action and disproportionate income redistribution from non-blacks to blacks. But it is now clear that it’s never enough. Every attempt to redress grievances is taken by the black professional victims as a sign of weakness to be exploited. The behavior of the mob toward the immobile police Monday night was a graphic example of it.

Were there a bunch of good blacks trying to stop it? Yep. Belatedly. Mostly ineffectively. They should have prevented it before it started, which is generally the situation in the non-black neighborhoods around the U.S. And none of the black “leaders” from Obama on down should have said one damned word about “having a conversation” and all that other enabling, excusing crap. The only “conversation” the rioters need is the one that mom gave her rioting, 16-year-old son. http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/28/us/baltimore-riot-mom-smacks-son/

Investigate the facts, prosecute where appropriate, and if you are neither a prosecutor nor a police detective, trust the people who are. If you don’t trust them, become one of them. If, instead, you throw a brick at a cop from a mob that outnumbers the cops, you should be shot for putting the cops in fear of their lives.

John T. Reed