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Left Out of the Narrative (The Ferguson convenience store clerks, etc.)
PJ Media's Belmont Club ^ | November 30, 2014 | Richard Fernandez

Posted on 11/30/2014 11:06:40 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet

Everybody recognizes the names of Michael Brown and Darren Wilson in connection with the riots in Ferguson. But here’s a question. What was the name of the manager of the convenience store who Michael Brown strongarmed? We may not be able to cite a name, but Joe Biden can put us in the ballpark. ”You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”

We know that whatever his name was it was of Indian derivation.

The Ferguson Market, where Brown allegedly grabbed a handful of cigars before his deadly encounter with police, looters twice targeted the store owned by a Patel family along with several other Asian-American owned stores, according to the Daily Beast.

At least eight stores were looted in nearby Dellwood too with Pakistani American Mumtaz Lalani’s Dellwood Market among those ransacked and almost burnt down by dozens of looters, according to South Asian Times.

It’s not just convenience stores. The low-cost motel industry is also largely Indian. The Times of India notes: “the hotel industry in the United States, particularly the budget hotels segment, is dominated by people of Indian origin. Some 60 per cent of all budget hotels, typically called motels, are owned by Indians. Their predominance has led to the term ”Potel Motels” because they are usually run by Gujaratis with the last name Patel.” So whenever a night motel clerk is robbed or a convenience store is looted in a low income neighborhood the guy at the losing end was probably called something like Patel.

The race problem is usually defined in terms of black versus white. But it’s not really that simple. I asked one South African Indian what life was like before and after apartheid. He answered that ”during apartheid the problem of South African Indians was that they weren’t white. Afterward their problem was that they weren’t black.”

Recently Harvard University has been accused of “disappearing” Asians. “Asian Americans are invisible,” writes Tim Mak in the Daily Beast.

That, at least, is the contention of Students for Fair Admissions, an organization alleging in an anti-discrimination lawsuit that Harvard systematically excludes Asian Americans through its “holistic” admissions process. The argument is that by considering information about an applicant other than test scores and GPA, the school is trying to limit the number of Asian Americans in attendance—and that the result is a form of affirmative action for non-Asians.

The media’s ability to define the narrative is so enormously powerful it almost distorts reality. Take Ebola. Everybody knows that the epidemic is over because it’s no longer reported. But as Deutsche Welle notes, it isn’t. The apparent drop is an artifact of the way the disease has been reported.

The World Health Organization has dramatically revised the death toll from the Ebola outbreak. Almost 7,000 have died from the virus – adding 1,200 more to a count released days ago. …

It is an abrupt increase of just over 1,200 deaths compared to its previous report, released days ago. A WHO spokesman said the steep hike in fatalities, mainly in Liberia, was mainly “a reconciliation of historical numbers” and not due to new deaths in recent days.

The UN’s health agency has previously said it believes there are far more deaths than actually registered.

Virology Down Under has an informative graphic which shows how significant this “reconciliation” is. Writing at the start of November, Dr Bruce Aylward wrote that the weird numbers coming out of the WHO reflected the fact that they were catching up with unreported or misreported cases. It went away and now it’s back because the numbers went away and now they’re back.

The World Health Organization (WHO) Ebola virus disease (EVD)case numbers that came out on 29-Oct were pretty big (see graph on the left). As if there weren’t already enough new cases and deaths every 2-5 days, now there is this bolus of 3,562 cases added to the total. And a net change in deaths of -2? What the heck? …

In terms of the jump in the number of cases, one of things that we’ve talked about in the past on this is that with the huge surge in cases in certain countries, particularly in September and October, people got behind on their data.

It’s like the Indian convenience store managers in Ferguson, it’s not that the ‘reconciled’ Ebola fatalities don’t exist; it’s just that we don’t see them due to reporting problems. Yet the victims are as dead as the stores are burned. But it’s not just a problem of Potels or individuals with the Wong name. Oblivion can happen to white guys too. Chuck Hagel has disappeared from the news, which is remarkable because he’s still Secretary of Defense. But we have to rely on the ever retentive Joe Biden to recollect this forgotten man.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden is reportedly “ticked off” with the way Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s resignation was handled by the White House.

An administration official told Politico on Monday that Mr. Biden scowled in the State Dining Room as the news was delivered that Mr. Hagel, a friend, would not remain on staff for the duration of the administration.

David McRaney calls the phenomenon of importance based on what pundits or news sources focus on “the frequency illusion”. The public is lulled into thinking that because something is above the fold, it is more important. And what is worse, the ‘frequency illusion’ feeds back on itself through confirmation bias. Individuals are rewarded by others for talking about the same things. Pretty soon they are all talking about the same thing. Once a meme gets started it takes over the narrative universe.

Just as things can be made to disappear, certain persons or objects can be made larger than they are by frequent repetition. The Daily Mail writes: “me, me, me! Obama uses first-person singular 91 times in immigration speech”. The man is big, real big through the operation of frequency.

The world as seen through the Narrative can be compared to reality as viewed through the reflection in a fun-house mirror. It’s not exactly the way it looks. Perhaps a more accurate metaphor is to compare it to adaptive optics, in which images can be ‘corrected’ through selective deformation so that certain undesirable artifacts can be made to disappear. “Adaptive optics was first envisioned by Horace W. Babcock in 1953, and was also considered in science fiction, as in Poul Anderson’s novel Tau Zero (1970), but it did not come into common usage until advances in computer technology during the 1990s made the technique practical.”

It may have been science fiction once, but it’s commonplace reality now. News aggregation and organized punditry are easily manipulated to project a given image through a process similar to adaptive optics. What you see is not necessarily what is out there. By adding data or emphasizing it differently you can overlay the image of a cat and make it look like a tree. This method of concealment is called steganography.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears the thud, is there really any noise? If nobody notices Indians and “Asians”, do they really exist? Ernst Mach once asked Albert Einstein a similar question.

Mach was an Austrian physicist whose name is used as a measurement of speed, as in “Mach 1,” the speed of sound at sea level. He was a contemporary of Einstein, to whom he suggested a thought experiment: What if there was only one object in the universe? Mach argued that it could not have a velocity, because according to the theory of relativity, you need at least two objects before you can measure their velocity relative to each other.

Taking this thought experiment a step further, if an object was alone in the universe, and it had no velocity, it could not have a measurable mass, because mass varies with velocity.

Mach concluded that inertial mass only exists because the universe contains multiple objects. When a gyroscope is spinning, it resists being pushed around because it is interacting with the Earth, the stars, and distant galaxies. If those objects didn’t exist, the gyroscope would have no inertia.

It’s called Mach’s principle. Nobody has actually refuted it. “A very general statement of Mach’s principle is ‘Local physical laws are determined by the large-scale structure of the universe.’”

This concept was a guiding factor in Einstein’s development of the general theory of relativity. Einstein realized that the overall distribution of matter would determine the metric tensor, which tells you which frame is rotationally stationary. Frame dragging and conservation of gravitational angular momentum makes this into a true statement in the general theory in certain solutions. But because the principle is so vague, many distinct statements can be (and have been) made which would qualify as a Mach principle, and some of these are false.

Do the Indians in Ferguson matter? Does Chuck Hagel really exist? You tell me.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Government
KEYWORDS: asians; biden; blacks; crime; ferguson; hagel; indians; obama

1 posted on 11/30/2014 11:06:40 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Good point. The liberal racemongers have their hierarchy of victims, and South Asian convenience store operators appear to be way down on the totem pole. And George Zimmerman is just a “white Hispanic” don’t you know. Here’s a thought, why don’t we just have a colorblind society where people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin?


2 posted on 11/30/2014 11:18:46 PM PST by Unam Sanctam
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
Do the Indians in Ferguson matter?

For me, they are the real story. They invested in an iffy neighborhood in order to get the most bang for their investment buck, and for their trouble they get robbed, beaten, and burned out. And no one in the media gives two hoots about it.

If you want to see racism, there is your racism.

3 posted on 11/30/2014 11:19:13 PM PST by marron
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To: Unam Sanctam

George Zimmerman’s Black Ancestry is Revealed
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2876811/posts

George Zimmerman: the black, Hispanic, Peruvian, kind-hearted non-white, not-racist poster boy
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2876692/posts

George Zimmerman Has ‘Black Roots’
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2876518/posts


4 posted on 11/30/2014 11:20:06 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet (The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

If America is so racist, why are the racism only targeted towards black and not Asian. Are we lead to believe that racists only hate black but favor Asians? Not only do Asians commit less crimes, they also do well economically as well


5 posted on 11/30/2014 11:21:57 PM PST by 4rcane
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
At this point it should be perfectly clear the whole Mike Brown story is nothing more than a fraud being perpetrated on the American people by the Media, the Obama Administration especially Holder's DOJ, professional community organizers and agitators, and the weird ass Gang Banging Thugs of Ferguson and the Brown (Very) extended family.

The people responsible for this scam deserve ridicule and condemnation. In no way should we, the intended fraud victims, even acknowledge that these people a legitimate claim or viewpoint.

They are just a bunch of schemers trying to pull off a scheme on America

6 posted on 12/01/2014 12:08:24 AM PST by rdcbn
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

bump


7 posted on 12/01/2014 1:11:18 AM PST by SteveH
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To: Unam Sanctam

“why don’t we just have a colorblind society where people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin?”

Because people are more apt to cluster based on the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.


8 posted on 12/01/2014 2:32:53 AM PST by Excellence (Marine mom since April 11, 2014)
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To: marron

They see an opportunity to rake in our tax dollars from the gibsmedats, and are so notoriously cheap they don’t invest in any type of security. Having dealt with them for decades, I have no sympathy. Case in point: Many years ago I was in a convenience store in NYC and bought cigarettes. There was a tray of matches on the counter, and I took one with my change. The Indian-type behind the counter (to be fair, he could have been from anywhere on the sub-continent) literally grabbed my arm and said they were three cents. Being with people who had lighters, I simply returned the matches - to hell with them.

They have spread much wider here now; when they run places that traditionally had a bathroom, don’t count on it - they are perpetually “broken”. Not that a bathroom is a divine right, but when ownership changes, that courtesy goes out the window. Also, no matches - but you can buy a lighter for $1. In my town they get in trouble for selling alcohol to minors; they have a different sense of morality centered around making money. As for motels, Wi-Fi can be sporadic to non-existent (I guess they only want to pay for so many connections/whatever); also, the only place I’ve seen a sign threatening to charge for “unused food” was in a formerly-good chain they ran. “Ice machine is broken - ice for sale in office” - ridiculous. Let them battle our permanent underclass on their own...


9 posted on 12/01/2014 2:40:01 AM PST by kearnyirish2 (Affirmative action is economic warfare against white males (and therefore white families).)
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To: Excellence
“Because people are more apt to cluster based on the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.”

Not totally sure I agree with that. One of my best friends is African American. He has told the story many times of how he joined the Army the minute he could, “just to get away from that life.” He also lived in a minuscule garage apartment while he was going to college so he could “stay away from that crazy stuff.”

Needless to say, he has been quite successful in life. I think anyone of actual ‘character’ quickly realizes that the ‘ghetto-thug’ lifestyle is a total dead end and gets away from it as quick as they can.

10 posted on 12/01/2014 3:45:53 AM PST by I cannot think of a name
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