Futility Is The Watchword

Nothing is going well right now. The only reason I’m putting in an entry today is the hopes of maintaining the discipline of blogging. Futility is the watchword.

The headline today is that Ed Brayton has died.The former stand-up comic, newsman, and long-time blogger is no longer with us. The story continues, but he has dropped out of it, as it were. “Dispatches from the Culture Wars” will continue to be archived at the Patheos site, and some at least of his voluminous work will be preserved at The Internet Archive, but there will be no further insights from the iconoclastic writer. Sic Transit.

The Santa Clarita police seem to have screwed up big time, when they responded to a call about an altercation reporting something-or-other. (The call (or calls) has not been released.) According to witnesses a man attacked several teenagers with a knife, and they drove him off using their skateboards to defend themselves. Somebody from a local business called 911. When the police showed up, however, they held the victims at gunpoint while they looked for somebody they described as the “victim”—even though the witnesses informed them they had got things the wrong way around. The official account says that the officers responded to a call about a man being assaulted with a deadly weapon—a skateboard—and that the witnesses were uncooperative. The incident is being investigated to determine whether the officers involved used the correct amount of force while holding the victims at gunpoint.

In India Muslims are again rioting over some goddamn silly thing—a meme depicting the alleged religious leader Mohammed as a child molester. (This is taken straight from Islamic tradition, by the way.) Unmentioned by the media reports is that this was posted in reply to a derogatory meme about the legendary religious leader Krishna posted by Muslims. Given the attacks by the current Hindu government on the rights of Muslims, this may be more of a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back sort of thing than an example of Muslims simply flying off the handle. Given their history, though, I wouldn’t bet on it.