A very good analysis:

McCulloch stood there, and described an execution, then in the next breath said there was nothing to see here. He didn’t sound like any prosecutor I have heard before. He sounded much more like a defense attorney, the defense attorney for Darren Wilson. A prosecutor wants an indictment when they go to a grand jury so therefore in the almost non-existent cases where they don’t get one, they are distraught, just as they are when they lose a case in court. McCulloch hardly seemed upset about the decision, in fact he seemed vindicated, just like a defense attorney would be after they got their client off.

Exactly. A prosecutor who couldn’t get a grand jury to indict is a prosecutor who failed to do his job. He should be contrite and apologetic. American justice system is an adversarial one. Its entire success hinges on it being adversarial. And “adversarial” means that a prosecutor is opposing the defense. He should be motivated to win against the defense, not do the defense’s work for it.

First, Wilson takes the people’s money and fails to perform his job duties, whining about his fee-fee-feelings. Then, McCulloch fails to do his job and flaunts his incompetence as a badge of honor. And somehow, after all this vaunted incompetence neither is subjected to public firing and shaming for being so inept. What is it with this worship of incompetence?

I don’t understand why people are not angry about this. If you failed this badly at your job, would your employer keep you around? If your employees fucked up this bad and this publicly, would you be keeping them on the payroll? This situation is an insult to everybody who brings home an honest paycheck.

I just arrived at Global Foods where I drove completely on my own. It’s 45 minutes on a difficult highway.

Shit’s terrifying but what wouldn’t I do for food? Now the trick is to get back in one piece.

N is cheering me on with text messages from work.

Have you read Darren Wilson’s testimony?  The members of that grand jury have zero self – respect if they allowed this load of steamy shit to be poured into their ears.

But notice an interesting thing: a grown man in a very macho profession has no problem whatsoever with publicly self – infantilizing to an extraordinary degree. Wilson offers a spectacle of regression to a childhood stage, hoping that the five – year – old persona he is adopting will help him avoid responsibility for his adult actions.

And the really sad part is that it works. Nobody seems repelled by the picture of an adult man in a very responsible position who starts to speak in a baby voice, sharing his childish fantasies about TV characters, the moment he is asked to account for his actions.

If Wilson can perform this kind of a regression so easily in front of a bunch of strangers in an official setting,  chances are, this was far from being the first time. Putting on a spectacle of being a lost and wronged little baby seems like a well – honed skill of Wilson’s. What’s curious is that working as a policeman did not get in the way of him developing this skill. This means that everyone around him must have reacted as if slipping into a childish persona is a normal thing for an adult man to do. And given that nobody is picking up on the deep pathology of his testimony, I’m not surprised.

The burden of adulthood and responsibility is too heavy for many people to carry. This is why they so easily identify with somebody who puts on a show of being a child trapped in an adult’s body. They experience no compassion whatsoever towards actual children. To the contrary, children provoke resentment because of their legitimate lack of adult responsibilities. Observing Wilson on the stand and reading his testimony allows such people to experience a cathartic feeling of symbolically killing an actual child in order to stand in the child’s place and declare their right to continue being children.

The grand jury’s refusal to hold Wilson accountable for his actions – as we know, the jury literally removed the need for Wilson to give public account of what he did – is an official endorsement of immaturity and irresponsibility as an acceptable way of life for an adult. The right of overgrown babies to remain babies for as long as they shall live is deemed even more important than somebody else’s right to keep living.

The time has come for us to ask ourselves: where does this road lead us all? What is each of us ready to sacrifice to allow the perennially infantile to keep sucking on the tit of our society because they refuse to learn to seek adult nourishment and work for it?

To know a thing intellectually–that Wilson would not be indicted–is one thing.

To see such a thing come to pass–that Wilson has cashed in his bounty for the killing a black person and is now enriched–is another thing all together.

Read the rest here.

I stopped watching because the extreme viciousness and total degeneracy of that so – called creep of a prosecutor is intolerable. What an absolute disgrace.

We all knew what the verdict of the kangaroo court was going to be but the cynicism of the prosecutor who is publicly and openly acting like the murderer’s faithful lap poodle is nauseating.

Can anybody explain why such a dog-and-pony show is being organized around the verdict in the case against Darren Wilson? Why was the announcement left until the night if the verdict has been in for hours? Why are there countdowns to the announcement? Why are there such enormous efforts to ramp up the drama?

N. believes that this is a result of a contract between the criminal justice system and the TV networks to help them sell more advertisement. I’m trying to be less cynical but seriously, people, WTF? This has been turned into a kangaroo court long before the verdict.

All TV shows are being interrupted to show Michael Brown’s father asking people to remain calm.

That can only mean one thing: the grand jury has reached its decision in Darren Wilson’s case.

This is not likely to be good.

A quote from Kotkin on how World War I made it so much easier for totalitarian regimes to slaughter millions:

Whereas European rulers and generals knowingly sent millions to their deaths for God knows what,  Lenin could assert that he was willing to sacrifice millions for what now, thanks to the imperialist war, looked more than ever like a just cause: peace and social justice.

The trivial war made people more likely to support non – trivial causes. If they were to die, at least it would be for something worthwhile.

Where Kotkin’s book really delivers is the discussion of why the Russian Empire entered into a suicidal war against Germany in 1914. I have never read a clearer, better argued analysis of Nicholas II’s decision to bring his tottering empire into this ridiculous war that served no actual purpose in terms of foreign relations.

Kotkin argues that the reason why Nicholas declared war on Germany was purely internal. The tsar resented his authoritarian powers being curbed even to a tiny extent by the Duma (or the Russian version of a parliament that the tsar had been forced to accept back in 1905). The tsar was convinced that Russia didn’t need a constitutional monarchy and was made very sulky by the attempts to move the country in that direction.

The tsar’s hope was that a massive war against Germany would create a feeling of a mystical union between the people and the tsar, sweeping away the needless parliament. Yes, he was that stupid. This actually wasn’t among the most bizarre of his ideas.

Of course, the result of the war was quite the opposite of what the tsar had envisioned: the people got extremely angry at the tsar for sending them to die for no particular reason and ended up killing the tsar and his whole family.

My phone always suggests that I follow the word “children” with “of God” and “of Israel”. It also refuses to recognize the word “Jesus” and keeps substituting it with “Jessica.”