Yesterday Stuff tut-tutted away about a horse named ‘The Terrorist’ (stable-mate of ‘Terror the Christian’) and suggested that the naming was insensitive in view of the March mosque shootings (the horse’s name had actually been registered in 2018, but; never mind) and the connotations thereof.
The sanctimonious tone of the story surprised me as hypocritical because I believe the Stuff editor keeps a cow named ‘The Racist’ to which staff are dispatched every day to milk of her awful poison, which they use to splash over their pages. I’ve been certain of it since the moment the publisher embarked on a mission of calling some-one or something racist every single publishing day, whether morning, noon or night.
In fact, Stuff reminds me of the old TV ad showing a pilot about to alight his aircraft. He takes out a pair of binoculars he scans the surrounding landscape declaring ‘Everywhere I look, I see Griffin’s Chocolate Wheatens.’ He does, of course, because the little delights are glued to the device’s lens, just as Stuff scribes have, I’m very sure, wee post-notes saying ‘racism’ stuck to their computer screens reminding them to find that particular slant in every story possible. Facts be damned.
The latest 24 hours offering was this headline: “Getting shot by police a leading cause of death for black men in the US, study finds.” The opening sentence declared “About one in 1000 black men and boys in the US can expect to die at the hands of police”.
My finely-tuned bullshit-meter started sounding loudly (in fact it had gone off before I even looked at the story, silly-me; I thought it had malfunctioned, but the odour from the ‘story’ was so powerful it had leapt the inter-web straight to the sensitive nostrils of my device).
Luckily for facts, but unhappily for the racist ratbags at Stuff, the latest version of Vital Statistics for the US was only released just some short weeks ago, so I searched the brand-new numbers out and, surprise, surprise, the Stuff story is untrue, propaganda lies; call it what you will.
The truth is that less than one in 1000 black men and boys can expect to die at the hands of police each year, not even one in 10,000 will, not even one in 20,000, not even one in 50,000. The actual number of black male deaths as a result of ‘Legal intervention’ at the hands of, not just police, but all US law enforcement agencies combined is less than one per 100,000 of the black population.
The factual figure is 0.7 per 100,000. Stuff is pretending the deaths are 1,300% higher than reality. That’s a very bold stretch even for their extremely elastic ethics.
The only other similarly rare cause of death among the black population (expressed in rate per 100,000) was the highly unusual method of ‘suicide by poisoning’.
As for Stuff’s race-baiting headline; well that is a very, very, obvious lie. The facts are that, despite homicides being an all-too-common occurrence amongst some particular black enterprise-cohort’s and neighbourhoods, all black deaths by all-cause homicide together as a grouping don’t even make it into the ‘leading’, or most common, causes of black’s demise. It’s not in the ‘top’ fifteen, while death at the hands of law-enforcement officers rates as an infinitesimally small factor.
Finally, just on a whimsy, perhaps you might spot the elephant, so to speak, in this interesting table:
If there were 152 ‘cop killings’ visited upon the black population compared to 9,908 ‘non-cop killings’ that can be expressed as a ratio of (about) 1.50:100. Whereas the ‘total’ population figures are 616 and 19,510 respectively, or a ratio of 3.15:100. Make of that whatever you wish, but it seems to suggest that being a homicidal perpetrator is far deadlier, more than doubly so, for ‘non-blacks’ than ‘blacks’- if police are involved.