Category Archives: Police Brutality

Hot Air: Can You Dig It?

Intelligent Or Not?

Despite my daily bellyaching about the dopes who are running for prez and the lunatics who populate this holy land, I really believe we’re living in the very coolest days.

For instance, astronomers from MIT and Belgium’s University of Liège, working together, have determined that three planets orbiting a nearby ultracool dwarf star have similar temperatures and sizes to the Earth and Venus and maybe — just maybe — can support life.

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Artist’s Conception of Nearby Dwarf Star & Its Planets

Now, these space geeks are using the term ultracool to describe the actual thermometer readings on the little star and its planets. Me? I’ll use the term to describe…, well, how freaking ultracool the whole damned thing is.

The astronomers will study these exoplanets closely because they’re only 40 light years away, which translates to just a few blocks more than 235 trillion miles. Hell, in cosmological terms, that’s nothing, like the distance between Starbucks in [pick your town].

Now what if scientists determine there’s life on one of these hunks o’rock? Well, first, we have to establish precisely what life is. Honestly, that’s the huge philosophical quandary researchers are grappling with these days. There’s a dizzying array of criteria that various smart gals and guys insist are the real deal. For instance, the walking brains at New Mexico Tech are convinced these are the seven criteria:

  1. Living things are composed of cells. I have loads of them.
  2. Individual living things are constructed of a ascending set of organizations, from cells, to tissues, to organs, and –finally, to each organism. That latter category would include you and me.
  3. Living things use energy. Even I do, on occasion.
  4. Living things respond to their environment. Me too, except when I’m taking a nap.
  5. Living things grow. You should see my waist size.
  6. Living things reproduce. Nope, not me.
  7. Living things adapt to their environment. Except when I refuse to; remember, I’m a contrarian.

I dunno. NMT’s list of criteria seems too vague. Hell, rocks respond to their environment. Have you ever picked up a smooth pebble on a beach?

NASA’s Phoenix Mars Mission page posits its own seven properties of life:

  1. Order: Molecules in living things are arranged in specific structures.
  2. Reproduction: Living things have the ability to reproduce their own kind.
  3. Growth and Development: Living organisms grow and develop in patterns determined by heredity, the traits passed to offspring by parents.
  4. Energy Utilization: Living things need to capture and use energy, a process known as metabolism.
  5. Response to stimuli.
  6. Evolutionary adaptation.

See? Already we’ve got a debate going on. Here, lemme try to settle it; in my readings, I’ve determined these five criteria define life or, more accurately, the properties of a living thing:

  1. Ability to build DNA, ATP, Ribosomes, & proteins
  2. Active metabolism
  3. Growth
  4. Reproduction
  5. Evolution (mutation & selection)

Then again, we can’t even agree on what is life here on Earth. To wit: Is a virus alive? Is the entire planet and all living things on it really a single living entity, as put forward in the Gaia hypothesis?

In any case, what might we discover on these three planets 40 light years away? A civilization that has developed agriculture, technology, and the game of baseball? Or some slime on a rock face?

You know very well you, I, and everybody else around wants us to find a thriving civilization, just so we can show off to them our cat pix on social media. I’m afraid, though, the first ironclad proof of life on another planet will look something like this:

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Sure, I’d be excited about these guys. A little bit. Well, nah, not really. This’d pretty much be a bummer.

Anticlimax or no, we’re going to find life on another planet sooner rather than later. That, babies, is ultracool.

Unintelligent

Well, sure, there’s life here on planet Earth but is it intelligent life?

I wonder.

Take my beloved hometown of Chicago. Acc’d’g to a recent piece in The Nation, the City of Chi. has pissed away more than $600 million on police complaint settlements in the last dozen years.

The city could have used that half a bill.-plus, funding municipal employee pensions, rebuilding infrastructure, or giving teachers a fat raise.

Instead, Chi.’s cops fire away at unarmed dark-skinned young men, beat like red-headed stepchildren others, and arrest grannies and harmless protesters with impunity. Many, many, many of these recipients of Chicago police excesses sue the city and then collect massive payouts to settle.

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Wouldn’t it be a tad more cost effective to train the goddamned police the right way and weed out the bad apples on the force?

For pity’s sake, when beings from another planet looks at the Earth — specifically, Chi. — in their own search for intelligent life, they’ll equate us all with the aforementioned slime on a rock face.

Deranged

New World monkey George Zimmerman is back in the news. Apparently, the guy who killed Trayvon Martin  more than four years ago, got his pistol back from prosecutors because, y’know, under this holy land’s Wild, Wild, West laws, pumping a guy full of lead is no big deal. So the gun, which had been evidence, now is safely back in the hands of the racist, paranoiac, pointer of guns at girlfriends, estranged wives, and the fathers, road-rager, and otherwise teeterer on the brink of violence and mayhem.

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Simian

Georgie-boy seems always to need money, mainly because this benighted nation does not recognize a hero in its midst and refuses to properly recompense him simply for being itchy with his trigger finger. He’s sold a bunch of jingoistic, puerile paintings and now — oh yeah — will auction off the gun.

The bidding, on a site called gunbroker.com, starts at $5000. Don’t worry, you haven’t been left in the dust — or gunpowder — as the bidding will begin this AM at 11.

My guess is a successful bid will come in at a level a hell of a lot higher than a paltry 5K. There are enough people in this nation who view Zimmerman as a great man that, if you really think about it, would cause you to toss and turn all night long.

Zimmerman’s description of the firearm includes the following lines:

Prospective bidders, I am honored and humbled to announce the sale of an American Firearm Icon. The firearm for sale is the firearm that was used to defend my life and end the brutal attack from Trayvon Martin on 2/26/2012….

Many have expressed interest in owning and displaying the firearm including The Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. This is a piece of American History….

The firearm is fully functional as the attempts by the Department of Justice on behalf of B. Hussein Obama to render the firearm inoperable were thwarted by my phenomenal Defense Attorney….

On this day, 5/11/2016 exactly one year after the shooting attempt to end my life by BLM sympathizer Matthew Apperson I am proud to announce that a portion of the proceeds will be used to: fight BLM violence against Law Enforcement officers, ensure the demise of Angela Correy’s persecution career and Hillary Clinton’s anti-firearm rhetoric….

Now is your opportunity to own a piece of American History. Good Luck. Your friend, George M. Zimmerman….

Someone soon will proudly possess this symbol of Murrica’s sheer lunacy and Georgie-boy himself will have a pocketful of blood money.

We’re nuts.

May 12th Birthdays

Cosimo II de’ Medici — Scion of the 15th Century Florentine ruling family, Cosimo as a youngster was sent to study under the then-relatively unknown Galileo Galilei. He recognized the scientist’s genius and became Galileo’s financial patron.

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Florence Nightingale — She professionalized nursing and was instrumental in the founding of the world’s first secular nursing school at London’s St. Thomas Hospital. A tireless reformer, she pushed for programs to feed the hungry, strove to eliminate laws against sex workers, and advocated women joining the workforce.

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti — 19th Century British poet and painter and the brother of poet Christina Rossetti. His illustrations of his own and others’ poetry stood as inspiration for the development of Aestheticism, an arts movement away from social issues and toward sheer visual beauty.

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Katharine Hepburn — Named the Top Female Legend from American film history by the American Film Institute.

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Dorothy Hodgkin — 1964 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry for her development of protein crystallography. Later, she identified the structure of insulin. Her interest in wealth inequality led her to hang around the fringes of communism. She also fought for world peace, becoming president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.

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Mary Kay Ash — Frustrated by women’s second-class status in the workplace, she founded Mary Kay Cosmetics partly as a way to help women succeed financially and in business. Her business plans always stressed women helping women.

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Burt Bacharach — He knew the way to San Jose.

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Bacharach With Dionne Warwick In Background

Tom Snyder — Late night talk show host described in National Lampoon magazine as the “living room gibbon.”

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George Carlin — One of the funniest — and most serious — people ever to grace a stage.

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Bebel Gilberto — Isabel Gilberto de Oliveira, Brazilian singer and composer, daughter of Joao Gilberto and Miúcha. Joao, collaborating with Antonio Carlos Jobim, was at the forefront of the development of bossa nova and Miúcha was herself a beloved Brazilian singer. Bebel has become a star in her own right and has worked with the likes of David Byrne and Stan Getz. Her style ranges from electronic bossa nova to acoustic lounge.

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And finally, ah, I didn’t care much about anybody who died on this date.

 

Hot Air

One Shot, One Year

For my money, this is the picture of the year, 2015:

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[Image: John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune, November 25, 2015]

That’s a young fellow named Lamon Reccord, a participant in street protests against Chicago police brutality and the killings of black people in general around this holy land. The protests broke out this fall in the aftermath of the release of a video showing a CPD officer shooting Laquan McDonald 16 times on a South Side street some 13 months earlier.

This particular confrontation took place at the corner of State and Randolph streets in the Loop the day after the video footage was released. Reccord already had gained national notoriety when he was video’d staring down another Chicago cop the day before. He’s either a symbol of morally-justified resistance to police racism and the use of deadly force or he’s a troublemaking punk, depending on where you stand on police/black relations in Murrica these days.

Loyal Pencillistas know where I stand.

Insurrection?

Correct me if I’m wrong, lawyers and military experts, but if Sy Hersh is right about this*, Gen. Martin Dempsey has committed a clear violation of military chain of command, putting the himself at risk of court-martial, incarceration, and even death. It seems like treason, pure and simple. It doesn’t matter if the president’s decision is right or wrong. That’s not how the military works. In fact, it borders on a coup.

And, really, haven’t you been expecting one or another Obama opponent to lead some kind of mutiny, even at this late date in his presidency?

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Dempsey (L) & Hersh

Remember when the big panic going around held that Obama was secretly planning to get us involved in a big war or some such emergency so that he could declare martial law and remain in office even after his term(s) expired? Then again, that particular paranoiac delusion might well have gotten lost in the flood of all the other psychotic reactionary hallucinations to Obama’s election. There were so many of them, after all.

In any case, at least one reactionary was sure to commit some act of overthrow, given all the panic surrounding the first black prez.

[ * Just in case you’re too pressed for time to read the piece, Hersh asserts in the January 7, 2016 issue of the London Review of Books that Dempsey engaged in a secret plan to lure the Russians into the Syrian civil war and simultaneous battle against ISIS. Further, he ignored the White House’s strategy of attempting to remove Bashar al Assad from power. Dempsey, acc’d’g to Hersh, thought Obama was all wet in his Syria strategy so he freelanced his own plot.

Hersh, BTW, is a dogged, fearless investigative journalist who exposed the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War and the US Army’s abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. He also occasionally cooks up the occasional crockpot conspiracy theory. The question, then, is where does this latest revelation fall in Hersh’s spectrum? ]

Cashing In

CBGB’s in New York City’s Bowery district was the chic-est place for punks to hang out in the late 1970s and into the early ’80s. The seediest bar imaginable, run by a guy named Hilly Kristal on a side street rife with the homeless, junkies, broken glass, and discarded syringes, the place introduced the world to the likes of the Ramones, the Talking Heads, Television, Blondie, the Dead Boys, Patti Smith, and countless other heroes of punk.

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Even inside the place, CBGB was littering with trash, vomit, dog shit, and strung-out mainliners. The very ugliness of CBGB became its selling point. Punk — and CBGB — symbolized a violent reaction to Middle American sensibilities, corporatism, advertising, music marketing, and the use of personal hygiene products.

CBGB served food, after a fashion, because its liquor license demanded it do so. Nobody went there to eat, believe me. The place has been closed for years now, its frontage now redone a la gentrification moderne.

Nevertheless, an entrepreneur named Harold Moore is opening up a CBGB restaurant in Newark Int’l Airport. Moore says he’ll serve $9 deviled eggs, an $11.50 iceberg lettuce salad, and a $14 hamburger to travelers hoping to recreate the Bowery/punk experience. The only thing is, Moore isn’t going to be serving Hilly’s legendary chili which, acc’d’g to lore, usually contained cigarette ash, spit, and other bodily fluids you can only imagine.

Need I remind readers that this holy land is one weird fking place?

Duh!

FactCheck.org has named Donald Trump its political liar of the year. The truth-digging organization selects an annual top lying bastard and, really, who else could it be in 2015?

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Our National Shart

 

Girl Cooties

Ugh! Hillary’s got lady parts. And stuff comes out of them! Gross.

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Please, Click This Link — It Gets Better!

Okay, can we all admit now that Donald Trump is the worst excuse for a human being this holy land has produced in many, many a year?

Okay then.

 

Hot Air

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Covenants

Just in case anyone was wondering if the police of this holy land are getting more trigger happy these days, or if our Officer Friendlies are any more bloodthirsty than their counterparts in other civilized nations, there is this:

The Unites States has failed to respect and protect the right to life by failing to ensure that domestic legislation meets international human rights law and standards on the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers.

That’s the conclusion issued by Amnesty International researchers this past week. They studied how the legislatures of the 50 states write laws setting standards for cops taking target practice on the citizenry. Murrica, they found, is failing. Our lawmakers are not living up to the standards set in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — which we signed in 1992. The Covenant, essentially, set guidelines for cops using firearms and other force. We were all for it more than two decades ago, ergo our signature on the document.

But in everyday practice, our lawmakers as well as our deputized guardians of public safety have pissed all over the document.

Militarization of Police

Ready, Aim….

And the funny thing is, those folks who hoot and holler most about big bloated gov’t, the tyranny of federal guidelines, the coming disarmament of all US citizens, and the rounding up of Christians and Republicans into re-education camps, are those most likely to shriek that our cops should be able to fire their guns at will whenever folks sneeze.

If you care to — and if you’ve the stomach for it — here’s the full text of the report. BTW, if you click on this link to the Covenant itself, you’ll note that it was drafted and adopted by some 35 countries in 19-freakin’-66! So the US didn’t jump on the bandwagon for more than a quarter of a century. And among the original signatories were such bastions of gentility and civil rights as the Soviet Union, Romania, Rwanda, Chile, and Iran.

Keep in mind that during all that time, our soldiers were fighting for “freedom” in countless hot spots around the globe.

Welcome To The Show

In more pleasant news, Indiana University’s beloved fireplug and wizard with a bat in his hands, Kyle Schwarber, had a smashing cameo appearance in Major League Baseball this week.

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Kyle Schwarber

Schwarber was selected in the first round of last year’s amateur draft by the Chicago Cubs and he’s done nothing but force professional pitchers to rethink their career choices since then. Through four levels of minor league ball thus far, Schwarber has demonstrated an uncanny ability to hit for average and power and control the strike zone. The Cubs are trying to make a Major League catcher out of him, an aim that most scouts say is problematic. But the kid’s such a spectacular slugger that the big league club might be satisfied if he only achieves mediocrity as a backstop.

Schwarber was brought up this past week because the Cubs played in two American League ballparks where the Designated Hitter is employed. The kid, ergo, was able to take his swings w/o being forced to lug the leather onto the field. As a hitter, he continued to amaze, hitting a home run and a triple, driving in six runs overall, and even going 4 for 5 in his first start at Cleveland’s Progressive Field.

The Cubs sent him back to the minors immediately after yesterday’s game. So, what does the future hold for him? Best case scenario is that, with proper tutelage, he can become an adequate Major League catcher by Opening Day 2016. Other possibilities include the National League adopting the Designated Hitter rule, making his defensive deficiencies moot, and the sad chance that the Cubs might use him as trade currency, shipping him off to an American League club in exchange for what ought to be a bushel-full of talent.

Puttin’ On The Ritz

A pal o’mine is heading up to Indianapolis as I type this. His errand? Picking up a stack of bumper stickers for Glenda Ritz for Governor. The Loved One and I have already put in our orders. We mentioned lapel buttons as well but my source tells us Ritz hasn’t got around to getting them made yet.

Bumper Sticker

Right now Ritz is trying to raise enough dough to make her quarterly financial report, due later this month, look good. She’s competing with John Gregg for Dem dollars. Now, I was happy to vote for Gregg when he ran in the last gubernatorial election against eventual winner Mike Pence, but I’d be even more thrilled to throw my lot in with a Dem who’s closer to my heart, as Ritz is.

Ritz

Ritz Wants You

[Photo: Kelly Wilkinson/Indianapolis Star]

She’s My Best Friend

It’s The Loved One’s annual Birthday Week, wherein she takes the week off work and celebrates her entrance into the world by mowing the lawn and scrubbing down the patio furniture [I know, she’s a weirdo.]

Anyway, I’ll be featuring vids of songs I’m dedicating to her for the next five days. The first, written by Queen’s bassist, John Deacon, came out in 1975. Deacon wrote the song in honor of his wife, Victoria Tetzlaff, to whom he’s been married for 40 goddamned years. The couple has six kids — actually, adults, now. Pretty neat for a rock star, no?

 

Hot Air

Hoosier Bloodlines

Okay, sure, yeah yeah, there’s something in the water in Texas that makes people, well, Texans.

And so, no one’s surprised that it’s a Texan who started a GoFundMe page to raise a million bucks so he and whatever other pals he’s rounded up can run uppity Negroes out of the Lone Nut…, er, Star State. A guy who brands himself “Dr.” Rich Kent — as well as a “red-blooded American” — pledges he will personally show up at the “little hotel[s]” and “little hiding spots” black activists are staying in down McKinney, Texas way and throw them out of the state.

Click on over to his Facebook video page. He’s not a racist — swear to god.

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The “Doc’s” Video Page

All because these race-baiters want to gripe and moan about the cop who threw that vicious, murderous, bikini’d 14-year-old on the ground and flashed his piece at a bunch of other swimsuited terrorists. Sheesh.

Anyway, the “doctor” will show up at the various hotels and hiding spots at 10 o’clock this morning to begin the eviction process. Stayed tuned for further updates on his and his pals’ progress.

A final trivia point: The “doctor” originally hails from — here it comes — Indiana.

Yup. If people from Texas become Texans because of some weird substance in their drinking water (haha), what’s our excuse?

Hot Air

Democracy

It’s WFHB board election time with three plucky souls throwing their hats in the ring. And, BTW, Board president Joe Estivill is snatching his hat back. Joe, proprietor of The Players Pub, is retiring after a tumultuous term as the big man of the nine-member conclave.

Among other fires he and his Board battled, the resignation of dynamic General Manager Chad Carrothers and the subsequent botched hiring of Kevin Culbertson rank among the hottest. Under Estivill’s captaincy, the Board eventually rectified the Culbertson mess and the station settled back into a somewhat peaceful existence.

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Joe’s Board also authorized the hiring of a politically-wired money-raiser: Dorothy Granger became the station’s Development Director in the summer of 2014. Granger also is District II representative on Bloomington’s City Council.  With on-air fundraiser revenues falling short of projections since the departure of Carrothers, the station has been in need of cash. Granger’s hat-in-hand work has been a lifesaver.

Station members will vote on the Board members at WFHB’s annual meeting in June. Here’s the slate thus far:

  • Attorney Pam Davidson is running for reelection. She serves on the finance committee, volunteers at Middle Way House and Lotus, and is a member of the WFIU & WTIU Community Advisory Boards.
  • Louis Malone was appointed to fill out an unfinished term on the Board early last year. He’s running for a full term now. Louis is shelter care coordinator for the Youth Services Bureau of  Monroe County. He’s a member of the personnel and nominating committees.
  • Tom Henderson is a first-time aspirant for the Board. He says he offers public radio, media technology, information technology experience.

The above three have been vetted by the Board’s nominating committee. As always, the Board has put out the call for petition candidates — that is, any who collects 10 signatures of station members can get on the June ballot. None have to this point.

Harry As Dick

Y’gotta watch Harry Shearer do his dramatization of the Nixon Tapes. That’s all; just watch.

Broken Taillights

So, a Charleston, South Carolina cop was charged with murder for shooting a guy in the back the other day. It’s not known just yet how many slugs Walter Scott caught from behind but Officer Michael Slager did fire eight shots at the 50-year-old as he ran away.

The killing might have been a blip on the radar screen of today’s police war on America’s dark-skinned citizens save for the fact that someone caught the incident on video. Hearing about a summary execution on the street is one thing; seeing it is entirely another.

Cop apologists can moan all they want about how we — the woefully uninformed citizenry — can never understand what pressures and fears officers endure on the streets. How would you react? they typically say in that challenging tone of voice. My answer in this case would be I wouldn’t shoot a goddamned guy in the back.

It’s true, we civilians don’t know all the nuances and details about the relationship between cops and people of color but we do know this: one police department after another has been busted for racial profiling, cops all over this holy land exchange racist emails, many big city police forces have KKK sects within their departments, story after story tell us about cops shooting unarmed black men but not shooting armed white men, and US citizens are 100 times more likely to be shot by the police than UK citizens, after allowances are made for the population difference.

Walter Scott was stopped for a broken taillight. Those in the know are fully aware that the broken taillight is the hassling cops best friend. As attorney Mark Geragos told one cop defender on CNN last night, “…[M]y father was a prosecutor for many years [and] used to say, ‘There’s more guys in state prison for broken tail lights than any other offense. Broken tail light means go hassle somebody of color.'”

What the cops are doing is a natural outgrowth of human behavior. Cops are confronted with the ugliest side of humanity every day. They begin feeling helpless under the constant onslaught of immorality, illegality, and — pure and simple — viscerally disgusting behavior.

Like any other human, a cop wants to lash out. He wants to find someone to punish for the flood of vice he witnesses every moment of his working day. He wants to make someone pay. In the United States, we have a convenient population of poor, alienated, scarily different-colored people. Being poor, they’re more likely to be involved in crime — petty and otherwise — so the poorly prepared cop zeroes in.

Go look for a broken tail light and fuck that gorilla up.

And don’t underestimate the usage of the term gorilla or any other similar apish pejorative. Cops are not anthropologists. They’re not scientists of any sort. Too many only know that those black bastards are animals.

Until our American city governments start training cops properly and weeding out the reactionaries and racists, until even the “mildly” prejudiced cops are separated from the overall force, more black men will be killed. And make no mistake, it’s not just bad white cops  who see black men as the enemy — far too many black cops see ghetto blacks as some kind of substandard citizen.

These shootings have to stop.

[h/t to Richard Lloyd.]

Hot Air

Well-Preserved

Mighty mite real estate guy John Saunders looks to be next in line to become chair of Bloomington’s Historic Preservation Commission. He was notified by current Commission member Marj Hudgins that he’d been tabbed. The full Commission will vote on new officers at one of the two upcoming February meetings.

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Saunders

The Commission, as of today, has two vacancies. Under normal circ.’s, some 13 B-ton citizens fill the board, with nine appointed by the mayor and four named by the city council. Just in case you were wondering, here are the members:

  • Jeannine Butler retired educator and current MCCSC board member
  • David Harstad real estate
  • Saunders real estate
  • Hudgins real estate
  • Marleen Newman senior lecturer, Indiana University, Dept. of Apparel Merchandising & Interior Design
  • Sam DeSollar architect
  • Chris Cockerham real estate
  • Doug Bruce architect
  • Chris Sturbaum construction company owner and city council member
  • Leslie Abshier Boys & Girls Clubs of Bloomington
  • Duncan Campbell historic preservation consultant and retired Ball State University architecture professor

BTW: Saunders says he attended Keb’ Mo’s show at the packed Buskirk Chumley Theater Tuesday night. The neo-delta bluesman shook the place to the rafters, the BHPC’s next chair observed.

Pence: Aw, I Was Just Joshin’

So, Gov. Mike Pence was really dedicated to his Just IN idea, huh?

Indy Star

Peeps have been saying his aborted state-run news agency will come back to haunt him as he chases the Republican presidential nomination. I say, Meh. Give the citizenry a month, two at the very most, and they’ll have forgotten it ever happened.

Open Season

The interwebs last week were abuzz with yet another story of cops gunning down a citizen. This time it was a teenaged white girl named Kristiana Coignard who was turned into a swiss cheese by constables from the smallish east Texas town of Longview.

Pix of the teen show a cute and delightful-looking little gal. Natch, the prevailing sentiment was Johnny Law had gone way, way, way too far. That’s two extra ways owing to the target’s Caucasian-ness.

Coignard

Coignard

Why, it was wailed, would the police do such a thing?

It occurs to me that there was a time when cops were well-known for solving problems with their fists or with hand held tools meant to inflict excruciating but not necessarily life altering damage. Think rubber hoses, nightsticks, and telephone books. Think also guys like Chicago’s notorious street sergeant nicknamed “Gloves” — he’d dramatically slip on kid leather gloves before administering one of his patented beatings to juveniles, be they delinquent or not. Civil rights and anti-police brutality crusaders worked tirelessly to get these kinds of police practices outlawed. To a large extent, police brutality has been reduced. At least the hand-to-hand variety.

Sadly, what we’re left with ain’t much better. In fact, it’s worse. A lot worse. Cops today, it seems, often fire their pistols at the drop of a hat. And prosecutors and mayors are reasonably happy to let them do so.

So why did the cops shoot this teenaged girl? Because they can.

Scientists Should Be Seen, Not Heard

The citizens of this holy land say they dig scientists. Only they’re not so fond of all that much scientists have to say.

Scientist

A Scientist Works On An Old School Laptop

That’s the finding of the latest Pew Research Center poll conducted in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Scope these poll findings:

  • 87% of scientists polled say eating GMO food is safe; only 37% of civilians think so
  • 68% of brain geeks think eating pesticide-treated food is safe; a mere 28% of the public buys that
  • 87% of these scientists are sure humans have caused climate change; only half the people do
  • 98% of the scientists accept evolution; 65% of your neighbors do

The takeaway for scientists? Americans think you look great in your lab coats. But just shut up, wouldya?

Natural?

Speaking of science, do you read the Natural News website?

Please don’t.

NN‘s majordomo, Mike Adams, who fancies himself “the Health Ranger,” is one of the wingnuttiest characters in this mad, mad, mad, mad world. I point this out because the name of his compendium of falsities, nonsense, and woo suggests a crunchy, peaceful, kumbaya message. It ain’t.

Adams is beloved by misinformation mavens like Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Food Babe, and scads of huffers and puffers about how there’s a worldwide arch-criminal conspiracy to turn us all into scurrying lab rats. He’s also from the moon.

Adams

Mike Adams And…, Hell, I don’t Know What It Is

Here are a few examples of what he believes:

  • GMO researchers are modern-day Nazis
  • In “chemtrails
  • In “quantum healing
  • HIV has nothing to do with AIDS
  • Parents should not have their children vaccinated
  • The Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax
  • Western medicines and doctors are useless
  • Barack Obama was not born in the United States
  • 9/11 was an inside job

Neurologica’s Steven Novella has said of Adams:

If it is unscientific, antiscientific, conspiracy-mongering, or downright silly, Mike Adams appears to be all for it – whatever sells the “natural” products he hawks on his site.

One final shot: Last summer in a series of posts on NN, Adams repeated his claim that GMO researchers are the moral equivalent of Dr. Josef Mengele and his cronies and called for right-thinking folks to, well, murder them.

No, Natural News is decidedly not crunchy, peaceful, and kumbaya-ish.

 

Hot Air

Something’s Rotten

For a very long time I’ve resisted the terms fascism and police state to describe the happenings in this holy land.

I figured the folks who threw these words around were drama queens and kings, prone to hyperbole and panicky language. Hell, I’m prone to hyperbole, as Pencillistas well know — but I use it for comic effect. Too many others, though, have employed the rhetorical device to make whatever case they have for or against Barack Obama and other Murrican saints/sinners seem that much more urgent.

I’d hear or read the word fascist and roll my eyes.

Now, no more.

There is indeed a fascism here. This is truly a burgeoning police state. When cops start killing people willy-nilly, when prosecutors and Grand Juries and courts say, Hey, that’s cool to more and more homicides of citizens, be they petty criminals or innocent victims, when police departments large and small armor up like an occupying army, well, then, we’ve got a rotten problem.

Police Militarization

We hated the Nazis, the KGB, the East German Stasi, Lon Nol’s Cambodian thugs, even Bull Connor’s deputies and Alabama state troopers for their brutality. We called them fascists. We understood that they ran police states.

In the case of the Americans just mentioned, we comforted ourselves by saying, What bad guys! They weren’t real Americans. Those were isolated incidents. We’re better than that.

We weeded out our fascists — or so we hoped.

And then in the 21st Century, we started calling everybody and everything we disagreed with fascist.

A Congress and a President imposing a national health insurance program on the citizenry is not fascism. Nor is a passel of benighted fundamentalists claiming that dinosaurs strode the Earth with humans or that global warming is a hoax.

What defines fascism more than anything is the drawing of blood. Governments regularly draw blood — both of their own citizens and of those from far off lands — but most have the decency to try to hide it, to excuse it, or to apologize for it.

Today, though, American police officers are drawing blood and many of us — way, way, way too many of us — not only are excusing it, we’re cheering for it.

Fascism only works when the people demand it. Many Americans, babies, are demanding it today.

There’s your fascism. There’s your police state.

It’s here. Now.

Hot Air

An Elbow To The Face

What should a rational observer think about Cecily McMillan?

She’s the Occupy Wall Street protester who was convicted yesterday of second degree assault on a police officer during a scuffle at Zuccotti Park in NYC in March 2012. McMillan — there is no doubt — clocked the cop square in the face with her elbow as she was being run in during the disturbance. Numerous people, apparently all allies of hers, shot video of the clocking. In fact, her defense team presented one of those videos during her trial.

A trial, by the way, that lasted four weeks. Seems like an inordinate amount of time to spend on a simple slugging case but this whole incident is far from simple. McMillan has become a face of what could be a revolutionary movement. Cops, prosecutors, and public officials don’t brush such folks off lightly. Not in this holy land, nor in Russia, China, India, or Thailand.

As such, the entire arsenal of New York City’s justice system, seemingly, was aimed at her. Cops are clocked all the time in bar fights and domestic disturbances. Generally, cops take care of such transgressions in their own inimitable way. Remember the old comic strip Beetle Bailey? The Sarge used to pummel Beetle now and again, resulting in this:

Beetle Bailey

Mort Walker/King Features Syndicate

That’s what cops usually do to guys whose knuckles come uncomfortably close to their pretty faces. It’s never wise to tap, brush, shove, or otherwise cause physical impact upon the body of a man wearing a uniform. Especially if he outranks you. And on the streets, the cops always outrank you. Their guns and badges trump any Constitutional subtleties.

For her part, McMillan says the cop she clocked had grabbed her breast, causing her pain and injury. She struck him, she says, in a defensive reaction. The numerous videos don’t show the cop in question actually doing that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did. I’ve known too many cops in my time to be burdened by any fairy tale that they all are upstanding, wholesome sweethearts.

During the trial, McMillan’s lawyers showed the jury this photo:

McMillan

Note the trauma and bruising on her right breast. The prosecutor in McMillan’s trial told the jury that McMillan had injured herself after her arrest just so she could make a specious allegation against the officer.

That’s possible. Then again, that line of reasoning sounds suspiciously close to a rapist’s defense that his victim had created her story out of thin air.

And I’ve known too many prosecutors to be burdened by the fairy tale that they all are devoted to the sacred truth.

Cops and prosecutors work together all the time. They need each other in order to make cases stick. They are allies in our system of justice. It’s not unreasonable to assume they would, on occasion, attempt to coordinate stories that would protect each other from certain accusations.

That said, revolutionary and lesser protest movements attract extremists ranging from drama queens to the odd homicidal maniac. I’m on the side of the OWS gang, sure, but that doesn’t mean I’d be happy sitting down to dinner or having a beer with each and every one of them.

Even the sainted civil rights and anti-war protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s were peopled by some number of folks who would scare the bejesus out of a mental institution warden.

It’s as likely that Cecily McMillan made up her story as it is that the cop had squished her breast. And even if he did squish her breast, does that excuse her slugging him, under the law?

OWS supporters are screaming to high heaven that this is a great miscarriage of justice. Proof, some say, that this nation is now a police state. They fail to realize that this charge and this verdict would just as likely have happened 20 years ago, 40 years ago or even a hundred years ago, given the same set of circs.

McMillan is being held without bail until her sentencing on May 19th. That’s harsh. But that’s what you get when you scare cops and prosecutors — and the men who control the nation’s wealth.

So, what can a rational observer conclude about her case? Nothing really, not just yet.

And that’s a stance very few people take.

Queenly Hot Air

Believe It Or Not

So, Saint Ronald Reagan’s infamous “Welfare Queen” has been fingered and her sins catalogued.

You remember her don’t you? During Saint Ron’s first honest-to-gosh presidential run in 1976, he made tons o’hay by railing against a woman who would become known as the Welfare Queen of Chicago. See, flamboyantly white people at the time not only were scared to death of the black penis, they also soiled their pants thinking about the fat, lazy mama raking in gov’t dole checks while she sat around in her house slippers, gorging on potato chips (bought and paid for with our hard-earned tax dollars), while watching soap operas on TV.

Reagan’s target market cared not a whit for poverty, the environment, wars here and there, or whether or not women made 69 cents for every dollar men made. Pish tosh. The paramount concern of the Archie Bunker crowd that Ronnie coveted — hell, their only concern — was whether it would be indolent black women or savage black men who would destroy our holy land first.

Washington Post Clip

Back in the 1950s, a shocking number of pols could feel comfortable saying, in no uncertain terms, that the niggers were coming. By the mid-’70s, that kind of candor was out. Candidates trying reach the then-“Silent Majority,” the one that would shortly morph into the “Moral Majority,” needed code words and misdirection to foist their fear-of-a-black-planet message upon a happily suspecting public.

The future Commander-in-Sleep claimed at a campaign rally in January, 1976, that the forces of good had discovered a woman who’d gamed the feds to a shocking degree. He said:

She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.

You can easily imagine RR’s facial expressions and the shifting tones of his voice as he ran down the laundry list of her sins, ranging from golly-gee, can-you-believe it? to righteous rage. He was, after all an actor. And, even though all politics is theater, The Saint was the first thespian-turned-pol to enthrall audiences on a national scale.

Within weeks of that speech, the Chicago Tribune had dubbed the woman, now revealed to be one Linda Taylor, the “Welfare Queen.” Saint Ronnie never had to say it but his crowds knew this in their hearts: There was nothing unusual about her. In fact, she was the archetype, not the outlier. All those lazy bums collecting welfare are living the life, man! They all know how to squeeze blood out of the system. The Reaganistas wondered in private conversations with each other, Why are blacks like that? Within 20 years, America’s attitudes had been so shaped by Reagan’s vivid imagery that a Democratic president would lead the charge for “welfare reform.” The Welfare Queen was dead.

Or, more accurately, the Welfare Queens. Plural. The millions and millions of them. Driving Cadillacs and eating lobster with their chitterlings, all paid for with food stamps and public aid checks. Why are blacks like that?

Through the years, liberal commentators have speculated that Good Old Ronnie had conjured his Welfare Queen out of whole cloth. Even so respected an observer as Paul Krugman once wrote that Reagan’s literal bête noire was nothing more than a “bogus story.”

Turns out Linda Taylor was not only real but her slurping at the public trough was even more criminal than Ronald Reagan implied. Man, oh man, you might marvel, Reagan was right.

Reagan

Up With (White) People

He was and he wasn’t. Taylor was a cheat, a parasite, and a truly despicable figure. But there was only one Linda Taylor and Reagan knew it. He also knew his audiences wouldn’t care. They craved to believe everybody collecting welfare was a fraud. Men believe, Julius Caesar once noted, that which they wish to be true.

So Linda Taylor did well by herself, financially if not morally. Yet she inadvertently was responsible, in some small part, for the growing numbers of mal- and under-nourished schoolkids, the burgeoning homeless population, and the millions more medically underserved citizens of this great nation in this day than in hers. (Ronald Reagan, natch, was far more responsible.)

Her unique sins became the sins of the whole.

Funny thing is, at precisely the time Taylor was scamming the feds and the State of Illinois, another Chicagoan was engaged in an even more ugly evil.

Beginning in the mid-1970’s, Detective, and later Violent Crimes Commander, Jon Burge of the Chicago Police Department’s Area 2 headquarters on the South Side, carried out and/or oversaw the systematic torture of hundreds of prisoners to extract phony confessions from them, particularly in high-profile cases. Burge and the boys in the Area 2 HQ basement enjoyed beating, burning, and suffocating suspected lawbreakers, all in the pursuit of quick indictments and ultimate convictions. The reported incidents include the shooting of prisoners’ pets in front of them, snuffing out lit cigarettes on suspects’ skin, tying them to scalding hot radiators, and covering their heads with plastic bags until they passed out. They employed cattle prods, high voltage electroshock devices, and old reliable standbys like telephone books and rubber hoses to inspire their subjects to sing. They enjoyed using something called the “violet wand” which delivered a severe electric shock when pressed against a suspect’s anus or genitals.

Occasionally, the Burge boys used their more “enhanced” methodology on witnesses to crimes as well as suspects. The witnesses, it has been reported, were thus persuaded to testify in a manner that would please the officers.

One suspect, who eventually signed a phony confession that led to the death sentence for shooting a police officer, described a typical torture device used at Area 2 HQ: “It’s black and it’s round and it had a wire sticking out of it and it had a cord on it…. [Burge] took it and he ran it up between my legs, my groin area, just ran it up there very gently… up and down, up and down, you know, right between my legs, up and down like this, real gentle with it, but you can feel it, still feel it.

“Then he jabbed me with the thing and it slammed me… into the grille on the window. Then I fell back down, and I think that’s when I started spitting up the blood and stuff….”

Burge and fellow duly deputized officers of the law differed from Stasi agents or Gestapo officers only in the color of their uniforms.

And, speaking of color, all of the Burge crew’s victims were — you guessed it — black.

After nearly 40 years’ worth of charges and several headline trials, Burge finally was convicted of torture, obstruction of justice, and perjury. He’s now serving a 4½-year sentence at the federal correctional facility near Raleigh, North Carolina.

Chicago Sun-Times Cover

Which is the proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the many, many years dozens of tortured suspects spent in prison, at least 10 death penalty convictions leveled against others (since overturned, thanks to Burge’s convictions), and the nearly $100 million the City of Chicago has had to pay out in punitive damages.

Oddly, few outside the shifting boundaries of Chicago’s black neighborhoods thought to jump to the conclusion that Burge’s team might not be the only Police Department crew using cruel and inhuman methods to frame innocent people. Not even after reports issued by the CPD itself and the United Nations Committee against Torture suggested that Burge et al were not really outliers in the force, but archetypes.

No, nobody among the Silent and Moral majorities wished to believe their friendly men in blue, those who served and protected them, would actually torture prisoners. Why, that kind of stuff only goes on in East Germany and Communist China, for heaven’s sake! Not here in the land of the free and the home of yadda, yadda.

And since they didn’t wish to believe it, as Caesar pointed out, they simply didn’t.

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