Is Critical Journalism To Follow Alpizar To The Grave?

Or is it already dead and buried?

I wish I had more time to consider, research, compose, review and finalise postings like this but I haven't. Nobody pays me to do this but I feel it necessary and if it helps anybody to even the slightest degree, then it was worth it. Bearing that in mind, I offer my humble apoligies here and now for any failure on my part to maintain reasonable style, spelling, grammar, logic or accuracy.

Please don't let my blog be the last stop on your travels.

This is yet another post to remind you that there very much ARE alternative reports, editorials, opinions, sources of information and perhaps even facts available out there, if you know where to look. As always and perhaps more so than ever before, caveat emptor! To anybody who does not remain completely a fool, it is now absolutely clear that we cannot unquestioningly accept ANYTHING we are told by ANYBODY.

You have the tools. Use them. The responsibility sits with each and every one of us to use our heads, hearts and the universe around us to seek the truth.

Bearing that in mind, we have yet another example of why the above is true.

Rigoberto Alpizar is dead. That is perhaps the only thing we on which we can all agree. There are slight variations in all the stories of why he is now dead but any fool who follows the news can tell you sure, this is a tragedy but the authorities had no choice.

Alpizar was a mentally-ill young man who had not taken his medicine and as a result, had displayed worrying signs of aggression and imbalance at several times and places in the run up to the fatal shooting [Pun not intended. Seriously]. Alpizar was 44 years old.

This reminds me of news reports in Detroit in the 1970s and perhaps even into the following decade that invariably referred to suspects as something along the lines of "...a 26 year-old black youth..." I am not joking. The jokes came later from at least one American comedian who pointed out this stupidity by joking about "...a 38 year-old negro youth..." You really think I make this stuff up?

So back to the diatribe at hand. What choice did those poor air marshalls have? They were confronted with a man running up and down the aisle of that packed aircraft, shouting that he had a bomb. What else could they do? What would you have done? It's obvious isn't it?

Or is this really what happened?

Once again almost all - perhaps even all - of the news outlets reported some slight variation on the same story.

Once again, almost all - perhaps even all - of the news outlets reported the only thing they could at the time - reports by federal officials.

Once again, reality appears to be charting a different course from that maintained by the authorities. Havey you checked the definition of psychosis lately?

Now that news outlets have had time to begin compiling their own reports, based on their own investigations and their own uncovering of what may be the facts in this case, some worrying inconsistencies appear to be exposed.

But are we not living in the 21st century? Do we not benefit from near instant access to overwhelming historical record, analysis and opinion? Has anybody not heard some variation on this:

"He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it."

It seems as if every time we "paranoid, anti-establishment, conspiracy-theorist cranks, screwballs and nutjobs" question official position, wonder aloud about general public opinion, point out apparent consistencies or otherwise fail to toe the party line, we are later shown to have been at least somewhat on the right track.

There, I did it. I just consigned all of this and every thing I ever write here to the scrap heap. I used emotive, left-wing-sounding terminology. "Look! He said 'party line'!! He's a red-and-gold-tutu-wearing, Marxist-Lennonist reactionary gay boy. Don't listen to a word he says! He obviously hates us and everything we represent!"

I don't hate you, I hate the wrongs you do. And maybe that awful print you're wearing, darling, but the truth is out there.

Remember, just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you....

I must have been about twelve when my father, a medical doctor, used to work all day and night in emergency. He would come home completely exhausted at some God-awful hour but the next day, he often had interesting tales to share with us. I always got a kick out of hearing about the latest "Jesus-freak" character the cops had dragged into the hospital shortly after they had dragged their fat asses out of the donut shop.

Dad would tell how these characters - invariably wild-eyed, shaggy-maned and oddly-dressed - would insist they were Jesus Christ. Invariably, they were also nutjobs, suffering from extreme emotional imbalance of one kind or many. After all, they couldn't ALL be Jesus, there were only two Jesuses. And don't get pernickity with me, ok?

But even at my young age, I asked how they knew this was not Jesus Christ? Hell, HE's supposed to return at some point, isn't HE? For Christ's sake, where would we be if the first time around, he'd been dragged off to hospital, protesting his innocence and mental health, only to be bound, drugged and "treated for his obvious illness"?

Anyway, enough of me prattling on about all the morons who are allowed to call themselves journalists these days. You don't need to read my ego-centric bluster about the sorry state of "news" organisations. You might want to listen to Robert Fisk when he criticises news reports, however.

You know what really worries me? JFK was killed over thirty years ago and we STILL don't know the truth. One bullet? Yeah, right. If you swallowed that one, boy do I have a real-estate deal for you!