Tick Tock Sheptock

 Republished from 7/12/16: Let's be BRUTALLY HONEST ; lay aside any emotions and take a good, hard, rational look at what led up to the Dallas massacre . I've been thinking about it a lot and this is my second blog post on the matter in the five days since Private First Class (E3) Micah Xavier Johnson shot 12 Dallas law enforcement officers, killing five. In the minds of some -- but not all -- people he went from being a military hero to being a criminal zero when he transitioned from shooting at foreigners in Afghanistan to shooting at cops in America. Now some people are wondering why Private Johnson chose to shoot cops in a city that has not been in the national media for its police brutality and killing of unarmed Black men. I assure you that there are many in Afghanistan who still don't know why we decimated THEIR country when we didn't find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, when Osama Bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan and when most people in that countr...

  "I don't condone it; but, I understand it."   -- Various people responding to the 7/7/16 Dallas Massacre No sooner had I written about how "It's a madder, madder, madder, madder world" when we had a week of murders by White police of Black men who either did not have guns drawn or were even complying with orders from ofcrs. JERONIMO YANEZ and JOSEPH KAUSER. Then, fed up by White police shooting and killing unarmed Black men, MICAH JOHNSON (and possibly others) used the sniper skills afforded him by the U.S. military to kill A DOMESTIC ENEMY . Apparently, unlike American active-duty soldiers , he and any accomplices he might have had were good marksmen who didn't kill any civilians. Taken together with what we know about the DC Sniper and how he was possibly upset that he was flunked in sniper school (having only been designated an "expert shooter") or may have had a host of reasons for being upset, I suppose the military wil...

The fact of the matter is that, if we can't have conversation about contentious but important issues, then we can't come to agreement on those issues and they'll always be contentious. So I'll touch on a few of those issues here with a focus on police shootings of unarmed Black men. I hope this blog post gets people talking more productively about these issues and brings us closer to resolving them. I hope that our governments will begin to proactively reverse the damage done to poor people in general and to Blacks in particular or that poor people will start a revolution which ends with them taking more than they would have gotten through civil reparation “RAP-arations”. Simply put, anyone who tells those who are reacting to the violent police shootings and deadly beatings of unarmed people that they should remain calm and just vent on social media is not only out of touch with reality but also grossly illogical. When the police who have sworn to “serve and pro...