ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY MY ONLY POST ABOUT OBAMA TALKING ABOUT TRAYVON MARTIN

You don't need me to tell you about the weekend protests over the Trayvon Martin verdict, or Presidente Obama’s comments about it, or the predictable conservative meltdown over both.

I don’t even have to Google it to know what they're saying at Fox News and Breitbart.com, et al. I’m guessing they’re complaining that Obama is sticking his Big Govt nose where it doesn’t belong, and playing the Race-Bait Card, and planning to take everyone’s guns away (again), and only saying what he said for political gain. Blah blah blah.

Admittedly, they have a point with the Big Govt thing, as least as far as General Holder’s interest in Stand Yr Ground goes. Unless he has a compelling reason apart from politics for the DOJ to get involved, the laws themselves should be sorted out state by state. The NRA seems jolly convinced Holder is using it as an excuse for Obama to outlaw guns, but they’ve been saying that since Obama’s first POTUS campaign, so there's no reason to take them seriously.

And as for Obama’s “It could have been me” speech, let’s admit that conservatives would be complaining about Obama no matter what. If he says nothing, he’s ignoring the issue. If he says something, he’s playing politics or starting a race war. There’s no pleasing these dingbats, and most of them are only really bagging on him for the sake of bagging on him. (Except for Sean Hannity, who is just being a dick about it.)  So Obama might as well do what he wants.

As you might guess, I do think Obama said what needed to be said. The inescapable fact is that Martin is dead because he was a black kid in a hoodie. That’s not specifically why Zimmerman shot him, but it is what led to it. And given all the people saying that Trayvon Martin got what he deserved for wearing a hoodie and (possibly) smoking a little weed, I think it’s more than fair to point this out. Because you can’t fix problems by pretending they don’t exist. 

So while we may all be Trayvon Martin, some of us are less Trayvon than others.

Of course, the downside of bringing all this up is that everyone starts getting defensive to the point that it becomes just another distraction. So here’s some decent advice on how to approach it more constructively. 

Not that it’s going to help much, if only because enough people get paid for a living to be as unconstructive as possible about every sociopolitical issue under the sun, and they have a big enough fanbase that just eats that stuff up like Skittles. The problem, as always, is FEAR – fear of kids like Trayvon, and fear that the solution to the problem is going to be inconvenient  in some way – like having their guns taken away (making them easy prey for black people in hoodies, for example) or some vague revenge fantasy (KILL WHITEY). Or something.

Fear will do that.

But hey, if it were that easy, we’d have fixed racism a long time ago. And anyway, as Presidente Obama correctly pointed out, we’ve come a long way from the 1960s. And our kids are better at it than we are. So why not, Jim?

The content of their character,

This is dF

WRAPPED UP IN BOOKS (2013 EDITION)

The annual Hong Kong Book Fair – where every publisher/book retailer in Greater China opens a huge discount bookstore in Hong Kong for one week a year and charges you money to shop there – has just wrapped up in Wan Chai. 

It looked like this.





The Bride and I were there, yes.

If you want to know what it was like, you can check out last year’s post, because there wasn’t all that much different this year.

In fact, the only differences I noticed were:

1. A bigger e-book presence, with a number of online retailers and e-book manufacturers on hand.

2. The English-language books were relatively cheaper this year – though, as I’ve said before, this is mainly good news if yr a big fan of Stieg Larsson, Sophie Kinsella, Stephen King, Jodi Picoult, Sidney Sheldon, James Patterson, Elizabeth Gilbert, Mitch Albom, Malcolm Gladwell, George RR Martin, JRR Tolkien, Stephanie Meyer, The Hunger Games, 50 Shades Of Whatever or Donald Trump, or if you tend to limit yr book-buying selections to titles that have already been made into Hollywood blockbuster films or HBO TV shows in the last five years.

That said, they did seem to have a lot more classic lit this year. Also, if you ever wanted to read Erica Jong, you would have been spoiled for choice this year, for some reason (I assume a number of her books have just gotten new printings.)

Anyway, as I say, there were a lot of good deals this year, though the fact that we went on the last day was decidedly a factor.

3. I was hoping to score some more Richard Stark/Parker novels from the university-press bookstore (which had been carrying the University Of Chicago reprints the last two years) to add to my collection, but unfortunately this year they didn’t have any. So that was disappointing.

That said, I came away with a pretty good haul for 2013 – one of the biggest ever, actually.

You may admire it now.

( Cut for awesomeness ... )

And so much for the 2013 HKBF. 

Same time next year,

This is dF