I am not exactly a CNN bureau chief, but JamesLaFond.com has become something of a news clearing house for street violence reports. Below is a report and a link from Shane, one of my East Coast reporters:

“Look Son!”

“Your Mayor is a stupid bitch..but then again so is mine..”

Okay, knowing Shane as I do, having gotten drunk with him on occasion, I can tell you that the above statement is in fact a challenge to my off-bruised intellectual mass to make sage sense of whatever my mayor of questionable intellect has to say in the above link. I have pasted the text from the story below. If you click on the link you will also be treated to a brief audio report.

LANHAM, Md. (WNEW) – After two recent “knockout games” left several people in Baltimore injured, the city’s mayor has decided to speak out.

WNEW Annapolis Bureau Chief Karen Adams reports that Baltimore City Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is disgusted by the attacks and says they are not a game.

“They don’t understand the consequences,” Rawlings-Blake said. “If you knock someone out, you could think its a joke and you’ll hurt somebody – that person could die. And then your life is ruined for some stupidity that you and your friends think is fun. It’s just not worth it.”

Rawlings-Blake said Wednesday that adults in the city can help to prevent these crimes by being more involved in the lives of children who may be roaming the streets.

This comes days after two incidents that police believe are connected to the knockout game, which involves a group of people trying to knock someone out with a single punch.

This past weekend, a Texas man in town for his college orientation was reportedly punched in the head outside the Baltimore Harbor Hotel by a group of youths. Last week, two brothers claimed they chased down a group of about 20 kids after being punched. Police say a 16-year-old boy was later arrested.

However, the violence is not exclusive to Baltimore.

In November, a woman in Northwest Washington told police she was attacked by a group of eight people, with one hitting her in the head.

The “games” have caused deaths in New York, New Jersey and Missouri.

Mayor O’Mamma is guilty of a blatantly amoral appeal to the soulless youth she intends as her audience. She has not made a stupid statement in this instance. You see Shane, there is no other way to appeal to Harm City youth than to appeal to their sense of inconvenience, and this may only be done via their sense of innocence.

Yes, all hip-hop identified youth are innocent, the very neo-Rousseauian paragons of primordial nobility. Seriously, anytime you address a Harm City youth as a perpetrator or suspect, they stop listening and start lying and denying. She knows that they intend to hurt people. The older associates of these kids have already whacked one of her family members. To have a chance they will hear anything, you must preface your statement with assurances that they are innocent. This stems from the criminal versus cop culture that is the cornerstone of Harm City dynamics. Always deny, then lie. It’s liked these kids were all raised by Bill Clinton.

Permit me to translate her entire statement, as if she had spoken in private to a group of these fine youngsters:

“We know you’re just follin’. But, these crackers have soft heads—it’s not like dropping the phone book on Uncle Rodney’s head while he’s sleeping off that forty buzz—and one of them could split open, and if they die, you’ll have to decide which one of your set is going to do the time. And then you won’t be able to hang out with that person until they get out of Juvy in three years. Now, unless you are the ho giving head, or the dude with the dope connect, you could very well have your friends snitch you out, and then it’s your ass—your dumbass doing three years in Juvy. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

Being a politician who lives and dies by crime stats, and not always certain if she can trust the police to ‘juke’ the stats to her advantage, she wants this to go away, sees it as a ‘game’ as ‘stupidity’, because that is how it is reported, and she is a creature of the media. She buys into their template as part of her function. The problem with her reasoning is the same as every other political figurehead’s reasoning; it is shortsighted. She, like most of law enforcement, and all of the media, does not give these kids enough credit, does not know where this knockout game is going.

The knockout game is a gang building activity, an external ‘jump-in’, with some stranger getting blooded instead of the wannabe gangbanger. In that sense it is am evolutionary improvement on the jump-in—Darwin would approve.

More ominously, this is practice. The knockout game, as played, is precisely how blind-side muggers attack victims. The only difference is that the ‘game players’ run away instead of stomping and robbing the target of the attack, which makes this much less risky legally than an actual mugging. As the Mayor’s statement implies, criminals and aspiring criminal youth will try to avoid doing time. When these kids grow up, they will cruise in cars ‘five deep’ with four leaping out and ‘running up on somebody’ who will be hit from behind or the side, usually with a right to the right side of the head, and hopefully knocked to the pavement where they can be stomped. Ghetto youth understand this type of preparation. Many of them train their pet pit bulls on small domestic ‘bait dogs’ that are grabbed from yards.

Thanks for the heads up Son!