TO PROVOKE AND OFFEND

Should terrorists be treated as enemy combatants, or as common criminals — and given Miranda Warnings?

This is the cover of my latest book.  You can read about it at No Boundaries: Transnational Latino Gangs and America Law Enforcement (University of Michigan Press: 2009).  You can also listen to a podcast about transnational Latino gangs here.  (Transcript is also available at the same location.)

A very nice article about the book, the problem, and the men and women involved written by Charles Donelan for the Santa Barbara Independent is here.

Order the book from University of Michigan Press or from Amazon.com here.

If you prefer, you can read the table of contents and an excerpt from No Boundaries at the Barnes & Noble site here.

Read a Dallas News review here, and an article in La Opinion (Spanish) here.

Before Post-Racial Politics, There Was Racial Politics

Got a Kindle?  You do?  Swell!  You can read my (as Greg Diaz) Washington pot-boiler novel 1980 Something:  A Currency of Anger, published ONLY on Kindle (by me) and available here.  It’s got violent crime, lurid sex, jaded ink-stained wrenches of journalism, wry humor, and racial politics of the nitty-gritty kind that existed before the post-racial political era.  A real bonfire of the inanities.

YOUTUBE’S CENSORS PROTECT GANGSTERS — THEY HAVE LEARNED WELL FROM GOOGLE’S CHINESE MASTERS

Google's You Tube Has Learned Well From Its Chinese Teachers

Back in January, Fairly Civil commented on the so-called L.A. Gang Tour (“Why the Los Angeles Gang Tour and the Sicilian Mafia are Bad Ideas”).  You can read the post here.  Basically, the thrust of it is that the L.A. tour is superficial and simply encourages self-hating despair.  Most importantly, the “tour” does not include venues that might show the real consequences of gang violence, like trauma units and paraplegic wards.

Embedded in the blog was a link to a short video that had been posted on YouTube.  The video described the gangs as sweat shops for the drug trade and had actual pictures of actual gunshot victims shot by actual gangsters.

All that reality was too much for Google/You Tube/Chinese style censors.

Yesterday, without prior warning or notice, YouTube informed the video’s poster that it had been “disabled.”  The explanation offered was that the images of actual gang gunshot victims was merely shocking.  Unlike the many hundreds of viewers who had watched the video, YouTube’s anonymous censors did not “get” that the video was an editorial precisely against gang violence!

One can only assume that one of the LA gangster world’s bought-and-paid-for-politicians got to YouTube (or some weepy thug-hugger).

No matter. To paraphrase the inimitable Gen. Douglas MacArthur:  The Video Shall Return!  Fairly Civil will find another host site and re-post the new link.

Most likely, this stuff goes on every day.  But America’s actual news media — if such a thing still exists — have no interest in reporting it.

Like frogs in a pan of cold water over a high flame, they are content to be boiled alive.

Pathetic.

ALEX SANCHEZ — ACCUSED SECRET SHOT-CALLER — SPEAKS TO HIS SUPPORTERS

Alexander (Alex) Sanchez (AKA "Rebelde") Throwing Devils Horns Gang Sign

Alex Sanchez, the “anti-gang activist” who was accused last June of being a secret MS-13 gang shot-caller, is out on bail.  (For background details, start here and follow the links.)

Sanchez’s lawyer successfully beat back an Associated Press motion to make public the transcript of the star-chamber secret bail hearing conducted under the octogenarian aegis of  Federal Quirky Judge For Life Manuel Real.  (Go here for details.) His Honor agree to protect the spineless political hack(s) who testified on behalf of Sanchez.

Lesson: the public has no right to know anything and the First Amendment rights of a Free Press do not reach into the Realm of El Rey Real.

Meanwhile, Sanchez’s supporters cooked up this nicely done video in which The Mother Teresa of Gangsterdom turns his soulful eyes to you (woo-woo-woo) in thanks.  (Go here for link to the Simon & Garfunkel song, “Mrs. Robinson,”  to which the preceding parenthetical refers, kid.)

A nice touch in this video — which is making the rounds of the “immigration rights” movement — is the background music, a cover of Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up (For Your Rights).” None of Sanchez’s bobbleheads want to get up, stand up, for their right, much less the right of the public, to know what went on behind locked doors in the chambers of Doktor Herr Schiedsrichter Real.

And completely forget about the rights of ordinary people to be free from gang violence.

As Kurt Vonnegut once wrote: poo-tee-wheet, poo-tee-wheet.  Joltin’ Joe — a “Real” role model — may be gone, but we still have Alex!

Look around you, all you see are sympathetic eyes

Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home …

Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you, woo woo woo …

Joltin' Joe -- Son of Immigrants ... Not a Gangster

DiMaggio was born in Martinez, California, the eighth of nine children born to immigrants from Italy, Giuseppe (1872–1949) and Rosalia (Mercurio) DiMaggio (1878–1951). He was delivered by a midwife identified on his birth certificate as Mrs. J. Pico. He was named after his father; “Paolo” was in honor of Giuseppe’s favorite saint, Saint Paul. The family moved to San Francisco, California when Joe was one year old.

Wikipedia