April 29, 2012

Memories, misty watercolor memories ...

It's nostalgia time at the Daily Beast:
L.A. Riots Anniversary: Two Gang Members Remember 
... It wasn’t an unusual anecdote for Townsend and fellow former gang member Alfred Lomas, who shared their memories of participating in the riots with The Daily Beast. The riots were a sudden opportunity to vent frustrations with the police, with a judicial system that favored everyone but them, with limited employment. By taking to the streets and looting, they were only getting what was theirs. The two said that violence on the same scale could spring from those Los Angeles neighborhoods again, and that while fewer residents believe that a riot in the next five years is likely, many of the same problems remain. 
And although Rodney King’s beating mattered to the rioters, it wasn’t their sole or even always their primary motivation for rioting. Townsend was less upset by Rodney King than he was by the shooting of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl who was killed with a single bullet by a Korean convenience-store owner who suspected her of shoplifting. That was in March 1991, one day after the four policemen charged with assault in King’s beating pleaded not guilty. Townsend says he couldn’t understand why Harlins’s shooter was let off with a sentence of only five years’ probation. “The liquor-store owner said she had stolen a bottle of orange juice,” Townsend said. “That penetrated my heart.” 
On April 29, when the not-guilty verdicts were handed down in the case of the four LAPD officers who had beaten Rodney King, faith-based groups tried to keep demonstrations peaceful. Townsend, in fact, was on his way to church with his cousin as the first bottles flew. On their way, he said, he saw a Korean liquor store being looted, one of many Korean businesses targeted out of anger over the Harlins shooting. “I went to the church, and while we were in the church everybody’s pager and phone was going off saying it was a riot,” Townsend remembers. 
“None of us needed tires, but let’s fill the backyard up with tires. Now we have tires.”   
As the riots spread beyond Florence and Normandie, Townsend said, it seemed the natural order had gone unhinged. “There was no such thing as a red light,” Townsend said, and the Los Angeles Police Department was nowhere to be seen. When he did see police, “they weren’t making arrests”—not even the cops in two squad cars that pulled up when Townsend’s buddies were robbing a pawn shop. He says the cops shooed them away, got back in their cars, and drove off. 
The gangs were on their own, and they seized the opportunity. “Pretty much we started thinking in terms of what is of value,” Townsend recalled. “Where are the jewelry stores, the television store, the furniture store.” When they saw an automotive store, they “went in and started stealing tires. None of us needed tires, but let’s fill the backyard up with tires. Now we have tires.” ...
Former Florencia 13 heavy hitter Alfred Lomas says that gang members were far from the only participants in the riots. 
“It wasn’t entirely a gang issue as much as people assume,” Lomas told The Daily Beast. “The L.A. riots represented a population that involved all different kinds of ethnic groups, that involved more a population unrest than a gang unrest.” 
Lomas had gotten his start in gang life early, crewing up as a 12-year-old drug addict with the city’s largest Latino gang in 1976, a process that involved him being beaten by the other members of his new fraternity for 13 seconds. A few years later, at the age of 18, Lomas volunteered to serve his country because he “wanted to learn how to shoot and kill people.” 
“My specialty was using that skill set”—skills he acquired at the expense of the American taxpayer—“to further the gang and support my drug habit, and it took me into some pretty high-profile stuff,” Lomas said. “I was part of the introduction of crack cocaine in the area I was from in South Central,” said Lomas, who grew up in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood and helped coordinate his gang’s drug trade. “I’ve been involved in every major gang war in South Central until about 10 years ago.” 
To this day, despite having left gang life, Lomas says that he remembers the simmering tensions that bubbled and bubbled before boiling over in 1992.
“Being a young kid growing up in one of these areas, there’s always a sense of harassment from the police,” Lomas said. “We’re talking about a high-crime, a high-unemployment area, and you grow up and you know you’re disadvantaged.” 
“At the time I was watching the actual riots, the Reginald Denny thing, I was located one block east of South Central in Huntington Park,” Lomas said. He was with other Florencia 13 members; Lomas says the very fact that he was a career lawbreaker seemed to separate him from most rioters. For one thing, his gang was more organized than the neighborhood toughs of the 8 Tray Crips who flogged Denny. Lomas’s gang disapproved of that kind of display, he said. 
“The criminal element, we’re looking at this like, ‘We don’t agree with this beating, that’s obviously wrong, they’re assholes, but where is the LAPD? Where are the illustrious blue lights?’” Lomas said. “It was actually days, one or two days, before we saw any sort of action from law enforcement.” 
After the first day, Lomas said he and his friends had to expand their scope to find fresh shops to loot, driving into Koreatown as well as neighborhoods on the city’s west side, including Hollywood. “Our areas got burnt up pretty quick,” Lomas said. “We’re an equal-opportunity gang, so we drove around looking for other places. I remember seeing some, now we would call them hipsters, with a shopping cart taking TVs, taking clothes, taking furniture.” It’s this last observation that has most stuck with Lomas through the years—what one may call the egalitarian nature of the pillaging and pilfering. 
“Given what occurred then, in the state of mind I was in, it was like, F the police, F the government, F everyone,” Lomas said. “And I think the L.A. riots—I don’t care what anyone says—the L.A. riots represented that kind of catharsis on a mass level.”

Good times, good times ...

Thank God that Ron Paul has finally renounced that disrespectful joke that appeared in his newsletter in 1992 about how the riot ended on May 1, 1992 because the looters stayed home to await their welfare checks. What a scandal. Some things are too sacred to joke about.

84 comments:

  1. And for the next decade and a half residential real estate prices tumbled in LA as a result.

    Er, wait a minute...

    Angelenos are odd.

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  2. "Thank God that Ron Paul has finally renounced that disrespectful joke that appeared in his newsletter in 1992 about how the riot ended on May 1, 1992 because the looters stayed home to await their welfare checks."

    Ron Paul 2012.

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  3. “I went to the church, and while we were in the church everybody’s pager and phone was going off saying it was a riot,” Townsend remembers.

    Apart from ER doctors , who owned a pager, much less a cell phone in 1992?

    Businessmen?

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  4. That's *so* great, that the two gangs "struck a truce, looting and partying together."

    See? We *can* all just get along!! ¡Sí, se puede!

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  5. '... illustrious?' The gang banger used 'illustrious' in a sentence?

    I call BS, a la Jayson Blair.

    Gilbert Pinfold.

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  6. L.A. riots represented that kind of catharsis on a mass level

    Somehow I doubt that Mr Lomas ever heard the word catharsis, much less actually used it. I find it more likely that Daily Beast journalists put these words into his mouth. Prompts a question of what else they invented in the interview?

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  7. in a situation without laws or rules, like it was in LA then, it's every man for himself. If I'm hungry, I'm taking food. If I need a TV, I'm stealing a TV. I have no problem with that. I'm a law-abiding person but we all have frustrations, and when laws are ineffective you need to adjust.

    White men could learn a thing or two from blacks. Blacks know that we won't truly disrespect them, because if we do, they can always fuck shit up.

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  8. "who owned a pager, much less a cell phone in 1992?"

    In my dinky flyover town, I took a class with an MD in 1985 and he wore a pager. In 1991 I worked with a salesman who had a cell phone and would call me on it while driving through the Midwest. The technology was out there and surely LA gangbangers would be all over it by then.

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  9. riot ended on May 1, 1992 because

    Or, going by the foto you posted earlier, maybe they needed to cut the grass.

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  10. What's incredible to me is how of the 53 (some count 54) people killed in the riots, only 1 was Korean, and he was killed by accident after being mistaken for a looter. Considering how the Koreans were targeted, it's a miracle none was killed by thugs. Ultimately "The dead included 25 African-Americans, 16 Latinos, eight whites, two Asians, one Algerian, and one Indian or Middle Easterner. Men outnumbered women, 48 to 5." Here's a breakdown of the victims:

    http://www.laweekly.com/2002-05-02/news/the-l-a-53/

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  11. The '77 NY blackout also lead to widespread looting. There's apparently hordes of these rat-like creatures all over the country just waiting for an opportunity to loot, burn and run amuck should the usual societal constraints be temporarily weakened.
    As far as I'm concerned Rodney King should be brought back and beaten all over again. He should be beaten on every anniversary of the LA riots.

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  12. “I went to the church, and while we were in the church everybody’s pager and phone was going off saying it was a riot,” Townsend remembers.

    Apart from ER doctors , who owned a pager, much less a cell phone in 1992?

    Businessmen?

    Evangelical churchmen?

    They after all need to be able to get hot tips any time of the day as to possible new recruits for their church.

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  13. In my dinky flyover town, I took a class with an MD in 1985 and he wore a pager. In 1991 I worked with a salesman who had a cell phone and would call me on it while driving through the Midwest. The technology was out there and surely LA gangbangers would be all over it by then.

    I remember when pagers were considered cool for a few years in the 90s.

    Looking back, I can't believe they were considered cool. They were so lame.

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  14. "eight whites, one algerian, one midle easterner" - you should say 10 Caucasians. It was, maybe, the reason why they die...

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  15. In 1992 I had just taken a job with a paging transmitter company in Quincy, Ilinois. They made a fortune for about five years. They went bankrupt because the owners, Canadian Jews from Vancouver, not only refused to spend money on the emerging cellphone market but sold off everything but paging from the Quincy company they bought. I knew trouble was imminent when their test equipment quit working because _all the manufacturing employees had cell phones_ and the RF was interfering. Sure enough paging became obsolete a couple of years later and they folded the Quincy plant. At the time I thought they were really stupid.

    I was the stupid one, because what it was, was a bust-out. The mobsters buy a small retail business in New Jersey and "bust it out" buy ordering everything possible on credit, leveraging the reputation and creditworthiness of the store, then take everything out and wholesale it or sell it at flea markets while burning the store down or otherwise bankrupting it.

    These guys played the bigger game: they issued stock (GEMS), got it up to the mid-70s, sold out and watched it drop to $1 and delisted. Like "The Producers" they had it planned from the beginning.

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  16. The technology was out there and surely LA gangbangers would be all over it by then.


    Yeah, I remember now those gangbangers were all around showing off the hottest '92 phone.

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  17. I can't help but feel if the police and authorities had cracked down very forcefully right from the very beginning, that things never would have gotten out of hand like they did. But they didn't.

    And where are we now? Rodney King, such an odious individual, is broke. He squandered the millions that should have had him set for life. Blacks have been relentlessly pushed out of Los Angeles by Mexicans and other Latinos. I'm sure there is no love lost between Koreans and other Asians for blacks and their looting.

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  18. There is a 1992 film called TRESPASS. It stars Bill Paxton. It shows gangstas using cell phones to communicate.

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  19. "eight whites, one algerian, one midle easterner" - you should say 10 Caucasians. It was, maybe, the reason why they die...

    2 Armenians + 2 Georgians + 2 Azerians + 1 Chechen + 1 Circassian + 1 Daghestani + 1 Ossetian

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  20. LA Riots : NAM underclass youth :: Occupy Wall Street : white upper middle class youth

    Lame.

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  21. " remember when pagers were considered cool for a few years in the 90s.

    Looking back, I can't believe they were considered cool. They were so lame."


    They seemed very cool in a very high-tech way. Then suddenly, they didn't.

    Lately whenever I watch an old black and white movie and some bell sounds and an actor picks up what looks like a small barbell and holds it to his ear, I start laughing. The old-fashioned cars and clothes don't faze me but the telephones just crack me up. They're so huge that suddenly the movie seems like a Monty Python skit.

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  22. Some rapper oughta to Randy Newman's I LOVE L.A. as I LOOT L.A..

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  23. “The liquor-store owner said she had stolen a bottle of orange juice,” Townsend said. “That penetrated my heart.”

    They'd have a much better case if they'd targeted and controlled their violence against the perpetrators of this act. Burn their store to the ground, but not steal anything, and demand that they go back, but not mess with other businesses(unless said owners came out to support their fellow).

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  24. Drug dealers used pagers, they might still. And public phones. Cell phones didn't kill off public phones first, drug dealers did, at least in urban areas.

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  25. http://northavenuemagazine.net/2012/04/granger/

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  26. Charlesz Martel4/29/12, 11:49 PM

    I had both a pager and a cell phone in the 80's- several of my friends did too ( a few had car phones pre-cellular- some of my ham friends had HT's they would phone patch through repeaters) The early hand held cell phones had a short battery life if you left them on, so people would page you and you'd call them back on the cell. I think Chicagi got the first cell system around 82, I remember Miami had them by 85 or so. My hacker friends were tracking cellphones across cells by then as well....Europe had cell phones by the late 80's, although I didn't see many pagers at that time...

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  27. I am Lugash.

    I can't help but feel if the police and authorities had cracked down very forcefully right from the very beginning, that things never would have gotten out of hand like they did. But they didn't.

    Daryl Gates, tired of hearing the LAPD smeared for months, intentionally let the riots get out of hand the first evening. I can't find it at the moment, but there's a video of him at a fund raiser that evening. You can tell by his attitude that he's not taking it seriously.

    I am Lugash.

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  28. LA is proof positive that multi-racial societies simply do not work, and will always and inevitably end in tears.
    Basically LA is 'The Economist's' and the WSJ's wet-dream come true. A multi-racial ant-hill circus populated by evveryone and anyone from around the globe who can drift in on the wind (apart from Papuans - yet - curiously)with an enormous gap between the rich ownership class (who happen to be mostly Jewish with a few white gentiles plus assorted dark 'hairy men' super-preadtors from the near east) and a mass of helot poor darkies - the sevant, ass-wiping classof the elitists - who scrabble, toil and murder for a few cents plus tax, less money in fact than the gilded elites in the hills spend on dog grooming. Plus all the good jobs were shipped over to China by the elitists.
    What can the darky helots do apart from working servant to the elitists, literally cleaning uo their shit, deal drugs to each othe or pilfer from convinience stores and get 'double tapped' in the process - and the pornographers add to the filth, pumping out the worst depravity the sick mind can think of, further explioting the helots (porno is actually LA's biggest industry by turnover - that says it all).
    1992 was a period of mass unemployment and desperation and the pressure cooker boiled over. It will happen again and again with more horrifying results.
    This is what American politica elitists thinking they are 'smart' by following the sub-asinine policies of the WSJ and 'The Ecomonist' gives you. Hades on Earth.

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  29. Simon in London4/30/12, 12:48 AM

    Someone on isteve told me that most US riot deaths are caused by the police, and that seems true of eg the 1940s Detroit riots. But from what data I can find, only around 10 out of 55-62 deaths in the LA riots were caused by police shooting rioters, with a small number caused by Korean shopkeepers shooting rioters (and in one case accidentally shooting a fellow Korean). As far as I can tell - and there does not seem to be a full tabulation anywhere online - the majority of killings were black racist killings of whites, much as I expected. But if anyone has a full tabulation I'd like to see the data, thanks.

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  30. Simon in London4/30/12, 12:55 AM

    Re my above post, I see 'anon' has posted a listing - http://www.laweekly.com/2002-05-02/news/the-l-a-53/ - it looks like many of the deaths were Mexicans killed by blacks, as victims they don't count as 'white Hispanics'; likewise middle-easterners etc are not counted as white, leaving African-American rioters and African-American victims of rioters lumped together as the largest category.

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  31. Simon in London4/30/12, 1:17 AM

    Looking at the LA riot deaths, it seems that the reason only around 5 people died in the big August 2011 riots in London and other English cities was the lack of guns - there was 1 shooting death, a black possible rioter shot by other rioters, which also seems to have been common in LA. 3 Muslims defending Muslim territory in Birmingham were killed by a black car driver deliberately ramming them, and white man in London was killed by black rioters beating him to death when he tried to put out a fire they'd started - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_England_riots#Trevor_Ellis

    So 100% of the deaths were caused by black rioters. It looks to me that disarmament reduces the number of killings by rioters/looters, but the biggest relative difference is that compared to LA there were zero killings by police, and zero killings by defensive militias.

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  32. As commenters above note, the interview is likely to be fabricated. "Illustrious", "catharsis", "everybody’s pager and phone was going off". Yeah, right.

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  33. http://youtu.be/f0Gp5rr8wqI

    'whose ear?'

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  34. Simon in London4/30/12, 1:22 AM

    One commonality between LA 1992 and England 2011 was that in both cases there was an initial stand-back attitude by the police. In our case it seems to have been due more to hyper-sensitivity to the Mark Duggan protesters - the very soft policing may have helped defuse the initial anti-police racial protest/riot, but the absence of police encouraged looting and property destruction by blacks, quickly joined by whites. In the London underclass non-Muslim blacks merge into mixed-race (white mothers) merge into whites, which gives different dynamics than in the US.

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  35. "the interview is likely to be fabricated"

    Also, why was he going to church on a Wednesday (which was what April 29, 1992 was)? A funeral, maybe, but why not say funeral?

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  36. http://news.yahoo.com/police-handcuff-georgia-kindergartner-tantrum-165424558.html

    kids being kids ...

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  37. everybody’s pager and phone was going off

    Immediate red flag for me.

    I know that even ten years ago mobile/cellular phones were more commonplace here in the UK compared to the US, so much so that American friends remarked on that to me when visiting here.

    But we are asked to believe that ten years earlier than that phone ownership was a commonplace in LA.

    Not buying it.

    Doesnt mean that most of whats said isnt true but at the very least this guy is not remembering things correctly re phones.

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  38. They'd have a much better case if they'd targeted and controlled their violence against the perpetrators of this act. Burn their store to the ground, but not steal anything, and demand that they go back, but not mess with other businesses(unless said owners came out to support their fellow).

    White man's thinking!

    For all we know the store where the shooting happened survived completely intact. Did it? Anyone?

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  39. While watching the riots on TV, I called my parents in L.A. from my motel room in Bentonville, Arkansas on my company-provided cell phone.

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  40. >Daryl Gates, tired of hearing the LAPD smeared for months, intentionally let the riots get out of hand<

    Completely forgot about this aspect of the riots. It was much mentioned (speculatively) in the news coverage.

    One wonders if the prosecutor in the Zimmerman case overcharged in order to lose - and thereby create a riot that increases property values elsewhere. White flight's gotta go somewhere.

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  41. The only thing scarier than an urban Youth is a white Liberal.

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  42. I always take these kind of interviews with a grain of salt.

    The writer is probably your typical mid 20s liberal idiot, believing anything said by a noble black, and the interviewee is your typical black who embellishes and lies continuously. Blacks are very good at figuring out what liberal idiots want to hear and delivering.

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  43. I agree that there's something fishy seeming about the article, but I'm not convinced that it's fake. "Illustrious" is not that big a word, and "catharsis" might have been picked up in an intro college literature class (the guy's been out of gangs for a decade).

    Here's a picture of cell phones circa 1991:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GSM-Telefone-1991.jpg

    They obviously weren't using these widely, but pagers were definitely in use (I remember, I think). The nature of memory is such that the person may have false memories of cell phones ringing along with pagers, also of where he was when they started getting paged. He was, after all, probably drunk or high at the time.



    During the riots, I was in Germany as an exchange student, living with a typical leftist German family. What struck me is that no one was really surprised or interested. Once we watched some initial coverage on the news, everyone stopped paying attention.

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  44. I agree with the other commentators that the interviews seem to be made up; too neat, too pat, creative writing aimed at a white, middle class audience. Everybody in church is a drug dealer, what with them all having pagers at the time?
    At the time of the riots I had a job in the middle of the west side ghetto over here, Lawndale, to which I took public transportation and then would walk a few blocks to work. I think I was the only white person coming and going in that area. The job itself had an 80% black and 15% Hispanic staff so I was curious as to how they would be taking it all in. Strangely, they acted as if nothing much was happening. It was just business as usual.

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  45. I recall a pager in 1978. I called the office, and the office paged the boss in his car.

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  46. Albert Magnus4/30/12, 7:33 AM

    I knew Baptists (I think) in Texas who went to church on Sundays and Wednesday. My grandmother goes to church everyday, but she's catholic.

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  47. "the interview is likely to be fabricated"

    Good observation.

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  48. The old-fashioned cars and clothes don't faze me but the telephones just crack me up.
    they were built like german tanks. They could easily last 20, 30 years. can you say that about any cell phone??

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  49. To Steve,

    Wednesday night church is big in the evangelical and charismatic church world. Wednesday church is likely for a black congregation.

    Wednesday is as good as any other day for taking a collection.

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  50. By 1992, most trendies and early adopters had cellphones but market penetration was widely remarked on to be surprisingly high amongst ghetto dwellers.It was the equivalent of the Welfare Cadillac since most ordinary working and middle class whites were just then seeing a few of their friends get them. I did not have one until 2006 though.

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  51. I don't recall anyone I knew (or saw) having a cellphone in the U.S. in 1991; that same year, it seemed every last person in Singapore had the latest and smallest Motorola (with Singaporeans, it's all about the brand)cellphone made.

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  52. "Also, why was he going to church on a Wednesday"

    Not saying the story isn't BS, but lots of black & evang type churches have Wednesday evening services.

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  53. "Thank God that Ron Paul has finally renounced that disrespectful joke that appeared in his newsletter in 1992 about how the riot ended on May 1, 1992 because the looters stayed home to await their welfare checks. What a scandal. Some things are too sacred to joke about."

    Thanks Steve for always reminding us "true blue" Americans of all the subtle and not-so-subtle jokes that are told in our national narrative, and that the joke is usually at our expense..

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  54. http://www.philly.com/philly/health/132456883.html

    Being 'Born-Again' Linked to More Brain Atrophy: Study

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  55. Auntie Analogue4/30/12, 10:28 AM

    Media-Pravda's stooges were likely delighted to ballyhoo this year's anniversary of the L.A. riots. The anniversary furnished them with ample fig leaf and, in their Mullti-Culti-Diversity Fairytale Narrative groupthink minds and ambiton, what they take to be justification for their execrable "reporting" of the case they've this year been fulminating against George Zimmerman.

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  56. Just some random thoughts...

    One of the things I remember about the LA Riots was hearing Rush Limbaugh basically advocate the use of military force to quell the riots just as Abe Lincoln had done. I agreed at the time.

    Someone said, "What's incredible to me is how of the 53 (some count 54) people killed in the riots, only 1 was Korean, and he was killed by accident after being mistaken for a looter. Considering how the Koreans were targeted, it's a miracle none was killed by thugs. Ultimately "The dead included 25 African-Americans, 16 Latinos, eight whites, two Asians, one Algerian, and one Indian or Middle Easterner. Men outnumbered women, 48 to 5." Here's a breakdown of the victims"

    Another thing I distinctly remember was seeing television news footage of Korean shop owners shooting looters from the rooftop of a building. I rooted for them. I wonder if that explains some of statistics quoted above. Apparently Koreans have no qualms packing heat and taking fire to protect their own.

    Presumably and unfortunately Reginald Denny wasn't armed. I wonder had some Korean shop owners been present during the beating, what the likelihood is that they would would have snipped members of the "LA Four" on Reginald's behalf. And in the advent that they would've taken aim, would they have received understanding and support from the MSM or would they simply have received the Zimmerman treatment?

    It's certainly no wonder why people are interested in the LA Riots episode in the aftermath of the Trayvon/Zimmerman brouhaha. I wish the media would permit more open discussion about the most obvious causes and also the utter impotence of the LA police to protect the citizenry during those 3 days.

    I really like the idea of a responsible, armed citizenry banding together and taking charge in the wake of total social breakdown over having the US military stroll into town with tanks and all, and certainly over letting the looters and bandits have their fun.

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  57. "who owned a pager, much less a cell phone in 1992?"

    Maybe he meant the prison cell phone.

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  58. The end result of this is that no one among Whites trusts the police anymore, that saw Reginald Denny abandoned to Black thugs at Florence and Normandy. The beating seemed to go on forever, on live TV, I saw it, and nothing was done, not a single cop came, to rescue the guy.

    So, that was the day the "Civil Rights" movement truly died. That no one really believed in it, as dictated by actions. Forcible recitation of pure cant is still the norm, but no one believes in it. Or trusts the institutions of government at all, either.

    From that day forward, the top LAPD leadership has been portrayed as brutal and corrupt on TV. Oh its the usual liberal stuff, but underneath is the acceptance based on the LAPD's failure. Gates made his point, but the other point was not to trust the police.

    That pretty much made a "hillbilly"/Scots-Irish "Borderer" out of most people who saw and remembered that day.

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  59. "Also, why was he going to church on a Wednesday (which was what April 29, 1992 was)? A funeral, maybe, but why not say funeral?"

    Baptists? Not that I'm 100% sure this article is genuine either.

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  60. The Methodist Church in my hometown always held Wednesday services in additional to Sunday services. Wednesday services always began at 7:00 PM.

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  61. Anonymous said...
    "Also, why was he going to church on a Wednesday (which was what "April 29, 1992 was)? A funeral, maybe, but why not say funeral?"

    Baptists? Not that I'm 100% sure this article is genuine either."


    I know of a lot of Protestant churches, especially black and protestant hispanic, that have Wednesday evening services.
    But if he's hispanic, perhaps he was going to stop in church and say the rosary.

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  62. "http://www.philly.com/philly/health/132456883.html

    Being 'Born-Again' Linked to More Brain Atrophy: Study"

    The headline is deceiving: atheists also had more brain atrophy. It's the people who had stable religious affiliations who had less atrophy.

    So actually, the paper is saying traditional religion is good for you.

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  63. 60 posts in and I don't think anyone remarked on the one 'gangster' bragging about his military training.

    Nowadays having a Confederate flag tat can be grounds for dismissal for being part of a 'hate group'. Meanwhile Crips/Bloods et al tags have been popping up in Afghanistan and Iraq for years.

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  64. Wednesday evening church services -- but the riots broke out in the middle of the day on Wednesday.

    A funeral is still possible.

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  65. "atheists also had more brain atrophy."

    I guess PC too is a form of religion.

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  66. As far as I'm concerned Rodney King should be brought back and beaten all over again. He should be beaten on every anniversary of the LA riots.

    Along with the jackass who took the video, and the TV station that ran it.

    I've often wondered if the guy who took the video of King's beating ever felt guilty for burning down LA in exchange for his 15 minutes of fame.

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  67. I don't know why anyone commented about the article regarding Brain Atrophy and religion here on this post, but I followed the link and read (in the first two paragraphs no less):


    "Older adults who say they've had a life-changing religious experience are more likely to have a greater decrease in size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain critical to learning and memory, new research finds.

    According to the study, people who said they were a "born-again" Protestant or Catholic, or conversely, those who had no religious affiliation, had more hippocampal shrinkage (or "atrophy") compared to people who identified themselves as Protestants, but not born-again."

    ...but with a headline of "Being 'Born-Again' Linked to More Brain Atrophy: Study"

    Yeah it's pretty irritating when science reporters of all people have such clear biases. I was raised in a protestant church but can't say I have had any "life changing religious experiences." I'd say the results probably just show that people who have gone through trauma are more likely to have both brain atrophy and "life changing religious experiences" or some form of condition like bipolar, depression, etc...

    Well, it wouldn't surprise me in the least that people who rebel heavily against their religious upbringings might also be people who statistically are more likely to have experienced trauma, feelings of rejection, depression, bipolar, etc..

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  68. alonzo portfolio4/30/12, 3:17 PM

    drug dealers did, at least in urban areas.

    No, pay phones themselves endured well past 2000 even in the cities. All the drug trade did was limit them to calling out- no receiving.

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  69. Well, I guess my working class white privilege has robbed that lad of any dream he might have wanted to grasp. Guess I should just leave my doors unlocked so that he and his pals can come in and take what they want. That way no one gets hurt on shards of broken glass.

    I wonder in how many college classes in American one hears the phrase "white privilege." For all the civil unrest when I went to school, I never once heard it.

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  70. I took a history course on the 1960s in college. One day, we were covering the Chicago riots. To explain what motivated the rioters, my professor showed pictures of buildings while describing living conditions all of which looked and sounded exactly like my neighborhood in the old country. I raised my hand and said, rather indignantly, "Hey! That is exactly like where I was born!" He looked me straight in the eye and said, "And THAT, precisely, was the problem."

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  71. Paul:

    I prefer knowing what reality looks like to being kept in the dark to maintain social order or achieve other goals of the media, however worthy. Thus, I am glad that the video was taken and run, just as I'm glad the video of Denny being beaten was taken and run, the Wikileaks collateral murder video was leaked, the various footage of urban black kids beating whites unconscious is leaked, etc.

    The shitty media we have is largely the result of thinking like that in your comment. I don't want socially responsible media, I want honest media portraying the best available picture of the world.

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  72. If it was a funeral, I think he would've mentioned it. It seems like a pretty important detail to omit.

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  73. "'The old-fashioned cars and clothes don't faze me but the telephones just crack me up.'

    they were built like german tanks. They could easily last 20, 30 years. can you say that about any cell phone??"


    I'm not ridiculing the heavy old phones. I much prefer them to the new-fangled models. I loved my granny's heavy old black phone. When we moved to our new house in 1965 and got two telephones, I was thrilled, until I discovered they were plastic donuts, not Bakelite tanks.

    As for cell phones, I never use mine if I can avoid it.

    But seeing actors use those old phones, which look like oversized versions of Maxwell Smart's shoe phone just cracks me up. It's like the old sci-fi movies in which the computers are huge machines requiring their own rooms.

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  74. Those old AT&T landline phones delivered very nice sound. Teenagers talked for hours. Now they text, in part because cell phone audio is so grating.

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  75. As for cell phones, I never use mine if I can avoid it

    Here is a revolutionary idea: don't own one. I don't. Nothing's fundamentally changed in my life since the time when cell phones were not common. Survived then, still survive without it now. Threw some $30 prepaid cheapo into the car's glove box in case of emergency. That's all. If someone needs me, I have land line at work and at home. Considering how much more expensive cell phone services are, their ubiquity is an ultimate triumph of marketing.

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  76. Auntie Analogue4/30/12, 10:24 PM

    I still have two Bell (Western Electric) rotary dial telephones. From time to time I plug them in and, having become inured to ragged cell phone sound, I'm pleased by the fidelity of those old handsets' audio. Their weight, their heft does become onerous when you've become unused to holding them up for a long conversation, and it is disconcerting to find my travel limited to the four-foot extent of their spiral cords. I've not tried to dial out on them, so I don't know if their rotary-pulse signals would intiate a call, but for incoming calls they still ring their glorious old rings. In fact, one of the things I dislike about cell phones are their ringtones - even the ringtone on my own cell phone grates on mey nerves. The other lovely thing about hard-wired telephones is that they ring until you can get to them to lift their handset to take a call, unlike the rude brief ringtone duration of my cell phone which caterwauls for only about six seconds before it shifts the caller off to my voice-mail and forces me to return the call instead of having allowed me sufficient time to have answered the incoming call.

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  77. The riots started mid-day, but kept on going. So folks gathering for church-and-marching-orders that very evening isn't a stretch.

    The part that strikes me is "everyone's pager was going off." That doesn't mean (as he suggests) that the news that a riot was starting was coming in fresh, right there in church. Maybe he's conflating all the events of the day. It could be that the latest developments in the already started but growing riot were occurring, and this is what was popping the pagers. (I.e., many were following it for some hours before they decided whether to join in.) Also, "pagers and phones" in that era and place indicate a significant presence of drug dealers and maybe people connected with prostitution.

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  78. "'As for cell phones, I never use mine if I can avoid it'

    Here is a revolutionary idea: don't own one. I don't"


    Actually, I ended up getting a cell phone because the revolutionary idea I tried (living with a spouse who, when apart from me, couldn't get in touch with me if he needed to) didn't pan out.

    He dispensed with our land line years ago; a cell phone makes more sense for him at work because he has no ready access to a land line and he didn't want to pay two phone bills.

    "Considering how much more expensive cell phone services are, their ubiquity is an ultimate triumph of marketing."

    Mine's cheap and of the 1000 minutes my husband put on it last year, I still have nearly 700. I only used as many as I did because I traveled last summer.

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  79. I prefer knowing what reality looks like to being kept in the dark to maintain social order or achieve other goals of the media, however worthy.

    I don't watch TV to know what reality is like. I already knew that cops often give miscreants a well-earned beat down, and I personally would have never made/shared that video. 54 dead for 15 minutes of fame is not my idea of responsibility.

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  80. Anon at 11:41 am;

    "But of course, despite all the black bitching about 'white racism', all blacks know they wouldn't amount to a plate of beans if not for white wealth, white productivity and white competency."

    SO TRUE. This is why so many blacks have had no shame at all in inviting themselves to live in almost 100% white countries like Britain, France and Canada among others.

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  81. I not only still use Western Electric 500 and 1200 sets at home, my home office has a working four line 1A2 system. Mine are all the touch tone, square selector button 70s style but the kind on Mad Men works on this exact same system. I have two "real" copper pairs coming in the house, plus a common MagicJack VoIP and an inside only pair we use as an intercom. (Yes, I also have a Selectric typewriter-works great for envelopes.)

    Also, I think the photographer who shot the Rodney King footage is not so much responsible for the riot as the news media who showed ONLY the beating footage and refused to show the whole thing. Some Senator should have said that this was seditious and that their broadcast license would be terminated if they did not show the whole thing. It took a long time for all of the footage to finally air and few sympathized much with King after they saw the whole thing.

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  82. Helamonde:

    Is there a link to the full and edited versions somewhere, say on Youtube?

    Are you okay with the power for the government to stop TV stations showing footage the feds don't want shown in general? Because I can think of about a hundred times more ways I'd expect that to be misused than ways I'd expect it to be used for good purposes. Our media is already tame enough.

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  83. "Steve Sailer said...

    Those old AT&T landline phones delivered very nice sound. Teenagers talked for hours. Now they text, in part because cell phone audio is so grating."

    During wide-spread, prolonged power-outages, landlines will also often work even when cell-service and internet phones go dark.

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  84. During wide-spread, prolonged power-outages, landlines will also often work even when cell-service and internet phones go dark.

    They used to, because the phone company was also its own power company, with 48 volt battery banks and DC gensets. My mother was an operator and a supervisor with the Bell System and I remember being in a call center during an outage. The whole building had a second DC system that ran lights, fans, you name it. They had 48 volt DC stuff of all sorts, a whole catalog of it, for phone facilities.

    Then came the MBA mentality, outsourcing and VoIP on fiber. Now, the CO may still run but after a couple of hours the fiber is going dark as the distribution boxes lose power. Some have a small natural gas genset but if that fails you are out of luck.

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