Leonard Pitts recieves implicit threat because of column!!!!

Recently, I made a blog post which had a link to a Leonard Pitt’s column; namely this one:

‘Oppressed’ whites? Give me a break
By LEONARD PITTS JR.

Leonard Pitts Jr.’s column debuts today in Issues & Ideas, where it will be found each Sunday.

It always amazes me when white people put on the victim hat.

As in victim of racial oppression. By any measure — health, education, economics, employment — white Americans enjoy a superior standard of living. If that’s racial oppression, sign me up.

But still, one occasionally hears mewling noises from that subset of my white countrymen who feel put upon by big, bad racial minorities. This is one of those times. And Knoxville, Tenn., has become the capital city of that lunatic fringe.

It seems that in January, a young white couple, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, were victims of a brutal crime. They were carjacked, kidnapped and raped. Cleaning fluid was sprayed into Christian’s mouth. She was stuffed in a trash can and apparently suffocated. Newsom was shot and set afire. His body was dumped. Five African Americans, one a woman, have been arrested.

The story made headlines around Knoxville. It was unnoticed nationally.

That has changed. A constellation of white supremacists and conservative bloggers has pushed the story into the national limelight as illustration of their argument that news media, constrained by political correctness, refuse to report black on white crime while pulling out all the stops when crime is white on black as in the Duke lacrosse debacle. Me, I would see their Duke case and raise them a Central Park jogger, but what do I know?

Anyway, bloggers like Michael Oliver have chastised the ”liberal, biased, Mainstream Media” for missing the Knoxville story. He asked, “Had the roles been reversed, would the media ignore such a horrific crime?”

Truth is, media ignore horrific crimes all the time. Space is limited and growing more so. [...]

Part of me thinks I should consider the source and let this slide. But the argument being advanced here is so utterly, abysmally, stupidly, self-servingly wrong that I cannot help but respond.

Black crime against whites is underreported? On what planet? Study after study and expert after expert tell a completely different story.

For instance, there’s OffBalance: Youth, Race andCrime in the News, a 2001 report that concluded that:

• African Americans and Latinos are underrepresented in news media as victims of crime and significantly overrepresented as perpetrators, based on crime statistics.

• Newspaper articles about white homicide victims are longer and more frequent than those about black ones.

• Interracial violent crime is more likely to be reported even though it is just about the rarest kind of violent crime.

And here I’m obligated — because I’m black — to say that if the defendants in this case did what they are accused of doing, I’d be happy to see them rot under the jailhouse. Sadly, that needs saying because there are people who will not take it as a given. [...]

And then I recieved this in a “comments awaiting moderation” message:

Author : Bill White (IP: 68.10.35.153 , ip68-10-35-153.rn.hr.cox.net)
E-mail : answp@nazi.org
URL : http://www.overthrow.com
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=68.10.35.153
Comment:
— “Wilson, Dave – Miami” DWilson@miamiherald.com wrote:
> Mr. Bill White:
>
> Sir, I have to strongly protest the forum posting on
> your website –
> http://www.overthrow.com/lsn/news.asp?articleID=10433
> — that encourages the harassment of Miami Herald
> columnist Leonard Pitts and his family. You, your
> members or your contributors may disagree with what
> Mr. Pitts writes, but it doesn’t license harassment.
> This posting also appears on a Yahoo! news group
> that is affiliated with your organization.
>
> Please remove the personal information about Mr.
> Pitts from these postings immediately.
>
> Thank you for your attention in this matter.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Dave Wilson
> Managing Editor/News
>
> The Miami Herald
> 1 Herald Plaza
> Miami, FL 33132-1693
> dwilson@miamiherald.com

Dear Mr Wilson:

We have no intention of removing Mr Pitts’ personal information.

Frankly, if some loony took the info and killed him, I wouldn’t shed a
tear.

That also goes for your whole news room.

Bill White, Commander
American National Socialist Workers Party

http://www.overthrow.com/lsn/news.asp?articleID=10433

Pitts, born (date here) is a resident of xxxx, Maryland and
lives at (address), (city), MD (zip) with his wife, XXXX. You can
call him at (xxx) yyy-zzzz.
————–
This makes me want to vomit. Think violent racism is dead? Think again.

June 8 2007

Workout notes I only have a short hike with Barbara to add; in a few minutes I am going to the pool; I am waiting for the dog-paddlers to clear out.

When my daughter gets here (and I can’t wait!) I’ll go back to my 5 am swims.

Update: 3100 yards, 500 fist, 500 of drill/swim, 10 x 100 on the 1:45 (3 in 1:39, the rest were 1:37-38), 100 back, 5 x 100 IM on the 2:20 (slow, 2-2:08), 5 x 100 (alt side/free). ( I am adding this because this is my workout journal; I know that no one cares about this but me. )

The legs feel ok, though I feel it slightly in my left IT-band (up high, where my bike crash was).

Religious and Science stuff

Currently I am reading Darwin’s Origin of Species (I am on the Struggle for Existence chapter) and Zimmer’s Evolution. The latter is an easier read, though Darwin is very interesting. But I kept asking myself: why do new species form?; I know that species can “drift”, get seperated (due to space and other conditions), and I know that genetic mutation, and variances on how the genes combine with each other are factors. But it doesn’t seem to be an easy question to answer; evidently it is still a hot area of research!

I am still as dumb as a post, but I am becoming slightly less ignorant.

Happily, I’ve found some math to study as well (Jones polynomial for periodic knots) and am wondering if there is some sort of “equivariant” way of calculating such a beast.

Speaking of “dumb as a post”: check out Jon Stewart’s take on the Republican Party presidential debates! I laughed so hard, I almost cried. Video is here.

Darwin: still feeling the wrath of god! As the site LiberalsMustDie points out:

God is finally getting pissed off at all these stupid Atheists (Satan worshipers) and “Scientists” (liberal homosexuals).

Check out this story to see what I am talking about:

DARWIN was rocked by an earthquake centred in the Banda Sea last night.

The earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale occurred in Indonesian waters about 630km north of Darwin shortly after 9.30pm (AEST) yesterday.

There were reports of shaking buildings in Darwin, but no damage has been reported.

Ok, it was the town of Darwin, but it is Darwin nevertheless. Repent, you sinners!

Then again, perhaps there are lesbians in that town, and they are having sex?

On the June 4 edition of his Focus on the Family radio show, Focus on the Family founder and chairman James C. Dobson broadcast a sermon by John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, titled “A Nation Abandoned by God.” In the sermon, MacArthur said America had forsaken God and engendered the “wrath of abandonment” as a result. MacArthur declared: “You know a society has been abandoned by God when it celebrates lesbian sex.” MacArthur further argued that as a result of America’s abandonment, the destruction of a major U.S. city “could happen” and that “God would be just in any calamity he brought upon us.”

Yep, the great and mighty god has time to worry about what kind of sex you are having.

Update: Devilstower at the Daily Kos writes about a trip to the Moron Magnet (aka “creationist museum”) so you don’t have to waste your money.

Photos are here.

A bit of what Devilstower says:

From the description, a good part of the museum isn’t about “creation” at all, but is devoted to the kind of “Hell House” horror show that some fundamentalist churches are prone to constructing around Halloween. You know, the ones where not believing exactly as they do causes you to become a heroin-addicted homosexual teenager who somehow still needs an abortion, dies on the table, and goes straight to you-know-where.

And there was a box of frogs.

This was of particular interest to me, since they claim the reason poison frogs aren’t poisonous in captivity is due to the Almighty. I’m fairly sure it’s due to the lack of poisonous mites in their diet, but there you go.

Oh, and they have an example of a Triceratops with a genuine saddle and blanket on it, just like Adam and Eve use to ride. Not kidding.

Hmmm, perhaps Senator Brownback and Governor Huckabee should put in an apperance there.

What is with all of these atheist books?

From The Nation via the Sam Harris site: (yes, I subscribe to The Nation; this article is by RONALD ARONSON)

[...]The success of the New Atheists may, however, reflect something significant among their audience. In the past generation in the United States, atheists, agnostics and secular humanists have been a timid minority–almost voiceless, often on the defensive, routinely derided, both warned against and ignored. As Susan Jacoby pointed out in her book Freethinkers, it is symptomatic of the situation that the most dramatic presidential address in generations took place in the National Cathedral three days after September 11, 2001, so filled with religious language that it sounded like a sermon. It was delivered by a President flanked by Jewish, Muslim and Christian representatives, a model of religious inclusiveness, without anyone standing alongside them representing the tens of millions of nonreligious Americans. At this most important collective moment in our recent history, it was as if they did not exist. This is what the polls are telling us: Virtually everyone in America believes in God.

We know how zealously the conservative Christian denominations have politicized themselves in the past generation, how the GOP has harnessed this energy by embracing their demands–opposing stem-cell research, gay marriage and abortion rights, championing government aid to religious schools and faith-based social programs–and by appointing sympathetic judges. So effectively have they framed the issues that, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2006 report on religion and public life, fully 69 percent of Americans believe that liberals have “gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government.”

We commonly hear that only a tiny percentage of Americans don’t believe in God and that, as a Newsweek poll claimed this spring, 91 percent do. In fact, this is not true. How many unbelievers are there? The question is difficult to assess accurately because of the challenges of constructing survey questions that do not tap into the prevailing biases about religion. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, which interviewed more than 50,000 people, more than 29 million adults–one in seven Americans–declare themselves to be without religion. The more recent Baylor Religion Survey (“American Piety in the 21st Century”) of more than 1,700 people, which bills itself as “the most extensive and sensitive study of religion ever conducted,” calls for adjusting this number downward to exclude those who believe in a God but do not belong to a religion. Fair enough. But Baylor’s own Gallup survey is a bit shaky for at least two reasons. It counts anyone who believes in a “higher power” but not God as believing in God–casting a vast net over adherents of everything from spirit to history to love. Yet the study allows unbelievers only one option: to not believe in “anything beyond the physical world,” leaving no space for those who regard themselves as agnostics or skeptics, secularists or humanists. Contrast this with a more recent and more nuanced Financial Times/Harris poll of Europeans and Americans that allowed respondents to declare agnosticism as well as atheism: 18 percent of the more than 2,000 American respondents chose one or the other, while 73 percent affirmed belief in God or a supreme being.

A more general issue affects American surveys on religious beliefs, namely, the “social desirability effect,” in which respondents are reluctant to give an unpopular answer in a society in which being religious is the norm. What happens when questions are framed to overcome this distortion? The FT/H poll tried to counteract it by allowing space not only for the customary “Not sure” but also for “Would prefer not to say”–and 6 percent of Americans chose this as their answer to the question of whether they believed in God or a supreme being. Add to this those who declared themselves as atheists or agnostics and, lo and behold, the possible sum of unbelievers is nearly one in four Americans.

All this helps explain the popularity of the New Atheists–Americans as a whole may not be getting too much religion, but a significant constituency must be getting fed up with being routinely marginalized, ignored and insulted. After all, unbelievers are concentrated at the higher end of the educational scale–a recent Harris American poll shows that 31 percent of those with postgraduate education do not avow belief in God (compared with only 14 percent of those with a high school education or less). The percentage rises among professors and then again among professors at research universities, reaching 93 percent among members of the National Academy of Sciences. Unbelievers are to be found concentrated among those whose professional lives emphasize science or rationality and who also have developed a relatively high level of confidence in their own intellectual faculties. And they are frequently teachers or opinion-makers.

But over the past generation they have come to feel beleaguered and, except for rare individuals like comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher, voiceless in the public arena. The great success of the New Atheists is to have reached them, both speaking to and for them. These writers are devoted, with sledgehammer force and angry urgency, to “breaking the spell” cast by the religious ascendancy, to overcoming a situation in which every other area of life can be critically analyzed while admittedly irrational religious faith is made central to American life but exempted from serious discussion.

This does not make for restraint. Harris displays brash self-confidence, Hitchens and Dawkins angry intellectual bite and Dennett an inexhaustible theoretical energy and range of inquiry. Harris excoriates religious moderates, accusing them of providing cover for fundamentalists at home and abroad by refusing to contest the extremists’ premises–because they share them. More upbeat, Dennett is devoted to creating the intellectual conditions for future discussions, in which religion will be treated as just another “natural” phenomenon and accordingly subjected to critical scrutiny. Dawkins bulldozes his way through every major argument for religious belief, and a great many minor ones. And Hitchens endlessly catalogues religion’s crimes and absurdities. Each man is at war, writing as if no others had preceded him, and with a passion that can only be described as political.

Above all, each sees himself as breaking a taboo. This explains not only the vigor and urgency of these books, their mainstream character and their publishing success but also the common refrain in reviews that they have “gone too far.” Of course they have, because their many faults are often inseparable from their strengths. Self-indulgence is their common flaw: Dennett and Dawkins might have considered their readers more and disciplined their own need to follow out every line of thought, while Harris is so full of his point of view that he, like Hitchens, is unable to consider faith as anything but stupid. They show little understanding of religion or interest in it [see Daniel Lazare, “Among the Disbelievers,” May 28]. [...]