Lead paint made him do it

Karoli, enraged, blames pretty much all the failure, crime, and stupidity of Gray's life on rich white people.

Where I Tell Wealthy White Cable Commentators To Eat Lead Paint

A variation on the Twinkies defense, that looks like.

Think of it this way.

Some people (like Karoli) side with the Somali pirates of life, and some people (like me) - however much they sympathize - side with their victims.

Think of the film, Captain Phillips, that pits a black Somali pirate so scrawny he could have just come from a death camp against a pudgy, white Tom Hanks.

Mimicking the ethic of slum trash everywhere, the pirate explains to Phillips that, hey, this is the best gig I could get.

And whose fault is that, anyway, really?

Why, it's Phillips' fault, right?

And that of the rich white folks of the global North who, out of sheer racist meanness, haven't used their super powers to turn the entire planet into a placid, well-fed suburb, yet.

[Aside.

Sure, Elysium is a fun movie, but isn't it just a little weird that those rich folks up there in the sky had enough of those little magic medical gizmos to cure everybody in the impoverished planet below but were just too gosh-darned mean to actually send them down to the surface?

Or what do you suppose they were saving them for?

/Aside.]

Which brings to mind the admiring story the Romans told of young Julius Caesar who, taken hostage by pirates, told them he would return to kill them all.

As the story goes, he was ransomed and then went out and did just what he had threatened.

Easy enough to imagine what Karoli would make of that tale.

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