Kara Jean

Drug testing: is there nothing it can’t do? Remember when Florida was gonna drug test all the poors because they were poor and were foolish enough to apply for state aid and then everyone realized that living skeleton Governor Rick Scott was going to make large amounts of coin from the endeavor because his company was the only company that could perform drug tests? Good times.

The Florida thing turned out to be a failed venture, but at least one private school figured out that this would be a sweet way to humiliate children AND kick some cash over to the brother of the school president.

James Kubacki oversees St. Edward High School in Cleveland, and his brother, Raymond Kubacki, is president and CEO of Psychemedics, which claims at least $7 million in quarterly revenue. [...]

“Our primary focus is workplace drug testing,” Raymond Kubacki said last year. “Secondarily would be emerging markets, and one of those would be schools and colleges.” [...]

[T]he company will provide those services to three private schools in northeast Ohio, including St. Edward, that plan mandatory drug testing for all students starting next fall.

We’re sure high school students are happy to be thought of as an “emerging market” for drug testing. This cool new plan calls for about 2800 kids to be tested at $40 bucks a pop. $112K isn’t a bad amount of business to kick over to your brother. Generally, most nonprofit enterprises like private schools frown upon these sorts of nepotism shenanigans, but these guys are all like “conflict of interest? what conflict of interest?”

[VP of Admissions K.C.] McKenna admits the school’s president knew a little more about the company his brother had overseen since 1991, but [he] said James Kubacki’s “brother being CEO of that company in no way led to us making the decision to use Psychemedics.”

School officials did not notify parents of the relationship between the school president and the company’s CEO, but they said committee members from all three schools were aware of the possible conflict of interest.

“How we picked the company isn’t of interest to high school boys,” said Lisa Metro, spokeswoman for St. Ignatius. “They’re more interested in how it’s going to play out to them.”

Funny thing: high school boys usually aren’t the people most qualified to decide if something is a sleazy conflict of interest. Who knew?

Mandatory drug testing is banned in public schools, but private schools are a rich exciting new investment opportunity for those looking to turn children into involuntary consumers of drug testing, especially if your brother needs some extra scratch. Everybody wins!

[Raw Story]

The law is a grand thing, a collection of not merely statutes, but also precedents from previous cases, and when a legal innovation comes along, sometimes there have to be a few test cases to determine the boundaries of that new law. Do Nazis have the right to march in Skokie? (yes) Can ‘intelligent design’ be taught as science? (no) Just how black dangerous-seeming does someone have to be before it’s legal to shoot them on your property, and if you really really want to shoot a criminal, any criminal, can you lay out a trap to entice one onto your property? (undetermined) Thankfully, with a lot of states broadening the scope of what counts as “self defense,” several brave Responsible Gun Owners have taken to killing folks for the sake of finding out what kinds of homicide are justified. No applause necessary; these everyday Second Amendment Heroes just see it as their civic duty.

Both of the cases the Washington Post examines involve Responsible Gun Owners whose homes had been burglarized, but didn’t happen to be home to defend their castles that first time, so instead of just waiting for an opportunity when their schedule coincided with that of a thief’s, they laid traps to make their homes seem like attractive burglary targets, then lay in wait so they could bag a perp. You have to admit it’s much more efficient to make a crime more likely to happen than to secure your house and hope someone will actually break in. What’s the sense in having to rely on criminals’ notoriously laggardly work routines?

According to David LaBahn, the head of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys,

More than 30 states have laws expanding the self-defense principle known as the “castle doctrine,” a centuries-old premise that a person has the right to defend their home against attack, LaBahn said. The name evokes the old saying, “my home is my castle.”

The laws have generally made it easier for people to shoot other people if they feel threatened, regardless of actual danger or whether the person they shoot was armed.

In Missoula, Montana, hero homeowner Markus Kaarma was arrested Sunday after shooting a 17-year-old German exchange student in his garage. Kaarma and his partner, Janelle Pflager, had set up a trap in the garage after recent burglaries, which they thought might have been committed by someone in their neighborhood. So they left the garage door open, and a purse in plain sight, with video cameras and a baby monitor to watch it, and Mr. Kaarma waited up watching the video monitor. The day of his arrest, he told a hairdresser that he’d waited up three nights with a shotgun so he could “shoot some fucking kid.” And on the third night — which sounds almost Biblical — lo, he saw someone on the video monitor, so he went out his front door, walked to the garage, and fired his shotgun four manly times without saying a word, because why would you want to alert an intruder to your presence? And by golly, he killed him an intruder, Diren Dede, an exchange student from Hamburg, Germany.

Kaarma’s attorney, Paul Ryan (no relation), intends to defend Kaarma under a Montana law that allows deadly force when someone believes it’s necessary to prevent an assault or a forcible felony. And it doesn’t matter that Kaarma set up the situation, says Ryan:

“He was scared for his life. It shouldn’t be up to a homeowner to wait and see if (an intruder) is going to shoot him when he announces himself,” he said.

We bet it was really exciting and kind of scary to find that your trap had someone in it, and that you finally got the chance to blow away a bad guy who walked into the open garage door you set up for him. (No, we are not justifying burglary — Dede should not have gone into the garage. He also should not have been murdered by an asshole who set up a special fort where he planned to shoot someone and get away with it.)

In another case, just concluded, Byron Smith of Little Falls, Minnesota, was convicted of premeditated murder Tuesday after claiming self-defense in a somewhat similar situation — his home had been burglarized, so in 2012, he decided to set a trap and kill him a burglar, a neighbor girl he believed responsible for the break-in. So he made his house look vacant by parking his truck away from the driveway, then waited in his basement with snacks, his guns, and a novel, because even when you’re staking out your own home to kill a teenager, you need some entertainment. He even had a tarp ready in the basement to wrap the intruder’s body in — smart fellow, thinking ahead like that. He also set up an audio recorder to capture all the excitement.

And so, as it turns out, two teenagers, 18-year-old Haile Kifer and 17-year-old Nick Brady, broke into his house through a window, and eventually made their way down to his basement, where he shot them dead:

Brady descended the basement stairs first, and Smith shot him three times, saying “You’re dead.” He dragged the body to another room and waited until Kifer followed, and he shot her. “You’re dying,” he told her, according to the audio recording.

After killing the teens, Smith also said, on the recording, “I don’t see them as human. I see them as vermin.” No, he doesn’t seem nice at all.

The jury didn’t seem convinced by Smith’s defense that he was in fear for his life in the little sniper’s nest that he’d set up, and sentenced him to life in prison without parole. His attorney, Steve Meshbesher, said that he plans to appeal, since the judge hadn’t allowed the introduction of evidence that the teens had been involved in previous burglaries in the area, on the grounds that Smith could not have known anything about his targets’ history at the time he was filling them with holes. The prosecutors said that protecting yourself is one thing, but setting up a shooting gallery is quite another. It’s like these prosecutors think there are limits to the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to kill people who piss you off.

And so our glorious experiment in ground-standing continues; future cases will no doubt help us gain a better understanding of just when it becomes OK to purposefully set a trap for a human being you want to kill. We bet there will be lots of volunteers from the Responsible Gun Owning community to serve as the armed portion of those experiments, and tough shit for those who get killed, because they never should have been there in the first place.

[WaPo / Star Tribune / Daily Mail]

Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. He’s a fan of the behavioral sciences, though not so much the ones where the test participants get autopsied.

You know how after 9/11, before the jingoism and the bullshit, all you wanted to do was cry, and even The Onion couldn’t really make fun of what happened and just went full on poignant and wrote pieces about baking cakes and having your neighbors come over because you didn’t know what else to do? That’s pretty much how we feel about the botched execution in Oklahoma last night.

An Oklahoma inmate who was supposed to be executed Tuesday instead died of a heart attack after the execution was botched, state officials said.

Clayton Lockett’s execution Tuesday night was halted after about 20 minutes due to an issue with a vein, the Associated Press reported. Not long after Lockett was deemed unconscious from the first of three drugs, he began “writhing on the gurney,” according to the Associated Press. He was declared dead 43 minutes after the execution began.

You know what? That’s sort of a clinical account. It’s the “mistakes were made” version. Let’s read a little more about how this went down.

[Clayton] Lockett, 38, received the first dose of the three-drug cocktail at 6:23 p.m.

The drugs were midazolam, which causes unconsciousness; vecuronium bromide, which stops respiration; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. They are administered in that order. The state has said the procedure is meant to involve three doctors with hand-held syringes, injecting the drugs into IV lines in both the inmate’s arms.

At 6:33 p.m., 10 minutes after the execution began, a doctor said Lockett was unconscious. But three minutes later, Lockett began to nod and mumble and writhe, witnesses said. [...]

A spokesman for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections [...] confirmed to the Los Angeles Times that Lockett did not die immediately after the lethal injection was administered.

“The director did say that it appears that a vein [in Lockett's body] blew up or exploded, it collapsed, and the drugs were not getting into the system like they were supposed to,” spokesman Jerry Massie said.

Massie said that after the new injection was administered, the condemned man “was obviously showing some movement.”

“After several minutes, five minutes, he was not unconscious,” Massie said. “They made a decision to halt the execution, but at 7:06 he suffered a massive heart attack and expired.”

See? Honestly, what can we say except things like “I feel sick to my stomach” and “I am ashamed to live in America, a place that still does this to people” — both of which were things we actually said last night. Let’s take refuge in a little background lawsplaining for a bit.

One of the major reasons that we are currently treating inmates like guinea pigs is that the anti-death penalty movement has actually been remarkably successful in using good old capitalism to make killing harder.

Each time a state has found a new source for a drug to use in executions, Reprieve, an anti-death penalty organization based in London, in collaboration with death penalty lawyers in the United States, has used freedom of information laws, the local news media and the powers of persuasion to compel the drug’s manufacturer to cut off the supply.

However, because some people are terrible people who deserve no redemption in this life or the next (looking at you, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin) some states like Oklahoma responded to this by passing laws that explicitly said the names of the manufacturers of the drugs had to be kept secret to insulate them from any economic pressure and to ensure the state got to go on killing without interruption. This led to lawsuits by inmates — including Clayton Lockett — pointing out that sentencing someone to die by a means that was largely undiscoverable and had no safety or inspection controls built in whatsoever might actually be cruel and unusual punishment, which is a thing that we theoretically prohibit in America, even for people receiving the death penalty. And for people that want to show up and say things like “he got what he deserved because he did far worse blah blah blah” we will say to you “fuck you, read the goddamn constitution, because we are obliged, even if we choose to kill people, not to do so in a cruel and unusual fashion, because if we take that away we’re basically Idi Amin, assholes.”

Where were we? Oh, yeah, so the drug cocktail that was set to be pumped into Lockett’s veins was a complete fucking mystery, quality-control wise.

In March, Oklahoma [...] said it would instead use one of five possible drug combinations, including a two-drug cocktail of midazolam (a sedative) and hydromorphone (a pain killer). When states first proposed using those drugs in lethal injection mixes last year, defense lawyers and medical experts warned that inmates receiving them would essentially suffocate to death. Brushing aside these concerns, in January Ohio used the drugs to execute Dennis McGuire, who gasped and convulsed horribly for more than 10 minutes before taking a record 26 minutes to die. [...]

Oklahoma has since shifted course again and announced that it would use a three-drug combo that includes midazolam and pancuronium bromide. According to Madeline Cohen, an assistant federal public defender representing Charles Warner, the state claims that both drugs are being purchased from manufacturers rather than compounding pharmacies but wouldn’t provide any other information. The only known use of this drug combination for executions was in Florida in 2013, but Florida used five times the dose of midazolam that Oklahoma plans to use, meaning Lockett and Warner will essentially be human guinea pigs.

For a wee bit, based on this argument, the Supreme Court of Oklahoma stayed the execution of Lockett and another inmate scheduled to die yesterday, Charles Warner, while Fallin and the state GOP huffed and puffed and threatened to impeach the judges or just order the executions anyway. Then the OK Supremes abruptly reversed course and decided that the Mystery Death Injection was totally cool, so let’s go ahead.

Except it was not totally cool because of the whole part where it DID NOT WORK RIGHT and Lockett lived an agonizing 43 minutes after they started pushing the stuff into his veins. And we don’t actually know how he exactly died, because he suffered a massive heart attack, which could have been brought on from one of the three drugs, all of the drugs, one of the drugs coming from a batch of tainted or fucked-up drugs or many more depressing possibilities.

Look, America. We’re better than this. We’ve got to be better than this. We are not a people that should kill people in any state-sanctioned fashion (yes, drones too, please do not hijack the comments to talk about drones goddammit) and if we are awful enough to choose to do so, we really are obliged to do so in a fashion that doesn’t make them die of a heart attack only after an agonizing three quarters of an hour.

Here is Robert Patton, Oklahoma corrections chief, talking about the botched execution. Look at his face.

Justice Harry Blackmun who was as good, and as flawed, a human being as ever sat on the United States Supreme Court bench, was a death penalty supporter for most of his career, until he just couldn’t take it anymore. Couldn’t take the uncertainties inherent in the system, couldn’t be responsible for the arbitrary infliction of death, couldn’t couldn’t could not.

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored–indeed, I have struggled–along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies. [...] The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal, and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent, and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.

From this day forward, let us all tinker with the machinery of death no more. Please.

[Los Angeles Times/WaPo/ProPublica/Mother Jones/Callins v. Collins, Justice Blackmun dissenting]

avianawareness:

THEY JUST KEEP GETTING BETTER

SRI International is creating coordinated systems of tiny ant-like robots that can build larger structures. The aim is a swarm of magnetically-controlled bugbots that could construct electronic devices, conduct chemistry for lab-on-a-chip applications, or do other micro scale manufacturing. It's part of the US Department of Defense's "Open Manufacturing" program. (via Re/code)

britishstarr:

Motivational quotes from Vietnamese Crystal

ruinedchildhood:

same

svxp:

You think this a game, motherfucker?

"Benkiman" - Kinnikuman Muscle Grand Prix 2 (Aki - PS2 - 2007)

He’s part man and part squat toilet. And yes, that is a turd on his head.

So here is a funny thing. And not an April Fools haha-just-kidding-PSYCH!-YA BURNT! unfunny funny thing, but an actual hilarious-on-any-day-of-the-year funny thing.

You know that arts and crafts store, Hobby Lobby, created in God’s image to provide bored housewives with all their scrapbooking and needlepointing needs at made-in-China bargain basement prices? Of course you do, because Hobby Lobby is suing for its right to tell its lady employees they cannot use contraceptives (scratch that, SOME contraceptives that the Bible says are actually abortion even though they are not abortion and the Bible doesn’t say that).

You may remember way back to last week when Hobby Lobby’s attorney, Paul Clement, argued to the Supreme Court that requiring the company’s insurance provider to comply with federal slut-pills regulations would be a “burden” and also super unfair and would make Jesus cry, and the Greens, who founded the store, would be forced to violate their Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs^TM, which they discovered — coincidentally, wink wink — in 2012, when Hobby Lobby suddenly decided to stop covering those very same medications it now says have been banned by God since the beginning of the world, 6000ish years ago. Justice Sotomayor asked Clement if granting a Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs exemption to companies could lead to refusing coverage for other such medical treatments as blood transfusions and vaccines. Clement said (basically), “Hahah, no, silly lady, don’t be ridiculous, we’re not trying to restrict real health care, just lady health care” because (actual quote) “it’s so religiously sensitive, so fraught with religious controversy.” Justice Sotomayor was said to then bang her head on her desk repeatedly and end her day drinking all the bleach. Or so we’ve speculated.

So you can see that Hobby Lobby sincerely believes slut pills and abortion are THE WORST and should therefore be allowed to deny its employees access to such. If the government crams this mandate down Hobby Lobby’s throat, it will be the end of religious freedom and the First Amendment and probably the apocalypse will be nigh because that is how much Hobby Lobby is opposed to being involved in any way at all whatsoever, even through a third party, with SOME birth control. In all circumstances, no exceptions, no asterisks.

Oh, what’t this we have here? Why it is an asterisk, courtesy of Mother Jones:

Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012—three months after the company’s owners filed their lawsuit—show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).

But but but but but … that is unpossible!

Hobby Lobby would never spend its own money or have anything to do with contraception or abortion on account of how it SINCERELY believes that shit is whack sayeth the Lord, yo. It would never spend millions of its own dollars so its Bible-abiding employees could cash in on the profits of those sinful companies that make those sinful products. Perhaps it is a mistake. Perhaps Hobby Lobby had no choice but to invest in such funds because there must be some government mandate that requires employers to offer matching funds for their employees’ retirement funds. But, like, a real government mandate that cannot be disputed, unlike the birth control one, of course. Right?

Hahah. Of course not.

To avoid supporting companies that manufacture abortion drugs—or products such as alcohol or pornography—religious investors can turn to a cottage industry of mutual funds that screen out stocks that religious people might consider morally objectionable. The Timothy Plan and the Ave Maria Fund, for example, screen for companies that manufacture abortion drugs, support Planned Parenthood, or engage in embryonic stem cell research.

Well, gosh and golly and holy fucking Christ on a cracker. Hobby Lobby willfully, without objection or fear of going straight to hell, invests its money — $3.8 million in 2012 — in mutual funds that make ka-ching! ka-ching! from slut pills, slut injections, and the EVILEST of all, slut medications used for slutty abortions.

Are we surprised to discover that Hobby Lobby does not practice what it preaches in how and when it decides to get all indignant about its Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs and when it does not actually give a good goddamn? Not even remotely. After all, its employee insurance plan covered all this slutty goodness back in 2012, right up until it decided to sue for its right to not do that anymore because Obamacare made all that slutty goodness to which Hobby Lobby previously had no objection suddenly evil and bad and wrong and THE WORST. Damn you, Obama, and your reverse-Midas touch, turning all that was once good and holy into a steaming pile of socialist Hitlerian First Amendment-crushing sin. Impeach! Repeal! Other things!

Now, remember, the entire litigious hill on which Hobby Lobby is willing to die like Jesus on the cross is based on the concept that (a) Hobby Lobby believes the medications it used to never have a problem with violate its Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs; (b) once you say “Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs,” it’s basically like calling shotgun and it is indisputable, argument over, can’t touch that or question whether those beliefs are in fact anti-science bullshit (they are) or if they are all that sincerely held to begin with (they are not), and you get to ride in the front seat; and (c) whether lady health care is so controversial, so extra super special, that it is not totally absurd to make exemptions for organizations and companies that have a problem with it on account of how lady health care is not like real health care and is therefore subject to the whiny complaints of dudes who do not understand what they’re talking about but sincerely believe it anyway.

Based on the oral arguments before the court last week, the SCOTUS men, who unfortunately comprise the majority of the court even though we bitches totally killed patriarchy already, found all of these arguments pretty compelling even though all of these arguments are actually, in legalese, totally fucking stupid.

Despite the best efforts of the lady justices to point out the utter absurdity of Hobby Lobby’s arguments, we are placing our bets that they will be outnumbered by the men on the court who nodded along and said, “Yup, that makes perfect sense to us.” Sigh.

Hobby Lobby has been flat-out lying about just how sincerely it believes its own nonsense. Obviously. We know this. It is a fact. And not a “fact” like the “fact” that contraception, which prevents pregnancy, is actually abortion, which terminates pregnancy. It is an actual fact. Hobby Lobby never cared about its employees using these medications prior to 2012, and it sure as heck has no problem with employees profiting from these medications.

So while the court is likely to shrug off facts and give Hobby Lobby exactly what it wants anyway, at least we can take some comfort in knowing that there’s apparently a pretty serious consequence for those who violate this one little rule on God’s great listicle of rules. You know, for people who sincerely believe that sort of thing.

[Mother Jones]

Follow Kaili Joy Gray on Twitter. If you don’t, you will burn in hell. Sincerely.

humanslikeme:

stoned-n-saracidal:

Kate performing Wuthering Heights (1978) - by our-young-cathy-bush

sincerelyyoursxthebreakfastclub: 30 years ago today, The Breakfast Club met for detention.

Usually we dig on Massachusetts because it is chock full of gay-loving liberals (though we are a little worried about your Jew-jailing schoolchildren right now) but that is because we forget about the weird Republicans that also inhabit the Bay State. Recently, one of them coughed up this dog’s breakfast of an idea: why not punish slutty slut slut people who think they can just get divorced all willy nilly and still keep having sex?

In divorce, separation, or 209A proceedings involving children and a marital home, the party remaining in the home shall not conduct a dating or sexual relationship within the home until a divorce is final and all financial and custody issues are resolved, unless the express permission is granted by the courts.

Totally reasonable!

Who doesn’t want to wait for a judge to give you the go-ahead to have sex, even though you are already an adult person! And also, we have no idea how the law gets enforced. Does the court get to come over and hang out at your house to make sure you don’t do the nasty? Do you have to have court-supervised visits with any possible gender of people you might want to have sex with, because lord knows one moment you’re just hanging out and then you realize it is date and holy crap you have broken Massachusetts law now and you should go to jail forever and ever, or at least not get custody of your kids.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize this is just a way for people going through a divorce — people who are already MASSIVELY PISSED OFF at one another — to fuck with each other during the divorce and custody process by declaring that they are certain that the other parent is getting some illicit nookie and is therefore unfit.

Also too, given Massachusetts’ divorce timeframe, you could be waiting quite a while to get laid.

Massachusetts law currently mandates a waiting period of at least 120 days for divorces to become finalized, and that’s only after a judge has approved the separation agreement. In other words, it could take at least four months, if not longer, before a person getting a divorce is legally allowed to fornicate.

Four months. FOUR MONTHS! And that’s if everything in your divorce is going hunky dory. (Doktor Zoom interjects: freakin’ IDAHO has a 20-day wait provided a couple stipulates to an agreement and takes their parenting class. Bunch of wild-eyed libertines in the Gem State.) Think how long your dry spell could be if your soon-to-be-ex decides to drag out the process.

To sum up: this law is literally the worst, and if you live in Massachusetts — hell, if you live anywhere, really — you should call or write Richard J. Ross, sponsor of this bilious piece of sex-shaming drivel, and give him what for. And while you get started on that, yr Wonkette hopes he enjoys his nomination for our coveted Legislative Shitmuffin of the Year Award.

[Think Progress/Massachusetts Senate Bill S787]

Kate performing in 1979 - by Astranius