Sophianotloren

postcardsfromspace:

According to a Pew Research survey, only 37% of white Americans think the events in #Ferguson raise important issues about race.

Okay, fellow white people. We need to talk.

Let me tell you a story: I was an angry punk teenager. Not violent, but I did a shitton of trespassing, and I got into a lot of screaming matches with cops.

I have never been arrested.

I have never been violently attacked by police. Hell, I have never been seriously threatened by police.

I am fully aware that I’ve survived to adulthood largely on the benefits of my race.

When you are white in America, you get away with all sorts of shit. Have you read this account from a white dude who actively tried to get himself arrested? You should. It’s telling.

So, if that’s your main frame of reference for dealing with law enforcement, it is really easy to assume that when someone else gets targeted by the police, they must have done something really bad. After all, you know the police aren’t that petty, right? They’re there to help: That’s what TV tells you, what your teachers told you, what your parents told you. “If you’re in trouble, find a police officer. They’ll help.” And, y’know, if you’re white, most of the time, that’s probably true.

When you’re white in America, it is awfully easy to pretend that you don’t live in a country where the nonviolent physical presence of black people, especially black men, is considered sufficient threat to justify use of lethal force. It’s really easy to pretend that laws are enforced equally; that arrest rate has any demographic resemblance to actual crime rates; that the police are there to protect us from the bad guys.

And, I mean, I get that. It’s a lot more comfortable to pretend that safety correlates to virtue than to confront the ugly truth that a system that benefits you very directly does so at the cost of other people’s lives; that what you were taught was the just reward for being a good person is, in fact, the privilege of your skin. That’s a big part of why we work so hard to retcon narratives about how the black people our police murder must have been dangerous, highlight every casual infraction like it’s a killing spree. We are so desperate to believe that the system that feeds us is just.

It doesn’t feel good to acknowledge that stuff. It feels gross. A system we trusted—one we should be able to trust, that should work for the benefit and protection of everyone has made us accomplice to some deeply horrifying shit.

But here’s the thing:

This happened. This is happening. Not recognizing it; stonewalling and insulating ourselves in our little bubbles does not make it go away.

And not acknowledging it, not having asked for it, does not make us any less complicit, or any less responsible for owning and fixing this. We are actively benefitting from a fucked, corrupt, murderous system. That is on us. As it should be.

So educate yourself, get the tools, and start dismantling this fucker. You have the time: after all,  no one’s shooting at your kids.

Privilege is the bandwidth to speak up and dismantle because you’re not in fear for your life. And there is no conscionable excuse for failing to use it.

My friend Rachel says smart things.

This essay first appeared in Cliterati on July 13^th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.

After generations of ignoring the violence against sex workers which is directly or indirectly caused by either full (as in the US) or partial (as in the UK) criminalization, the public is slowly beginning to wake up to the reality: most of it is perpetrated by the police.  Prohibitionists and “authorities” want everyone to believe the opposite, that clients and “pimps” inflict the most violence, and that the police are welcome “rescuers” from it.  Nothing could be farther from the truth; in every study of violence against sex workers ever done (such as this one from India), police are the largest victimizers and clients and pimps the least, with domestic partners and people empowered or emboldened by the marginalization of sex workers in the middle.  And despite the best efforts of those who need the public to support ever more criminalization in order to punish men for being men or to enlarge the police state, the truth is beginning to leak out, and we see new stories of police violence against sex workers almost every month.  Some of this is due to the efforts of sex workers ourselves; some is due to the diligent efforts of allies and ethical journalists; some is due to the stupidity and hubris of the police; and some is simply the natural result of omnipresent surveillance, the internet and a 24-hour news cycle always hungry for lurid stories.

In just the past few months, there have been a number of incidents that provoked public outcry on sex workers’ behalf against the heavy-handed behavior of governments and the violence of police.  In December, sex workers in Soho were subjected to a pogrom in which they were manhandled, robbed and dragged out into the street in freezing weather in their underwear; the public learned about it first from news photographers the police had themselves invited along.  In March, the world was scandalized to hear that cops in Hawaii wanted the explicit legal right to rape sex workers before arresting them.  In April, the general public finally began to notice Phoenix, Arizona’s Project ROSE, in which women profiled as sex workers are arrested in mass sweeps, denied legal representation and forced into religious brainwashing programs under threat of incarceration in Arizona’s brutal prison system; later that month, the world heard of the US government’s threats against financial institutions to get them to “voluntarily” cut off services to sex workers and other target groups.  In May non-sex workers were shocked to see the surveillance video of a Chicago massage parlor raid in which a handcuffed, kneeling woman was beaten and subjected to racist insults and death threats; only a week later, Newsweek published an article exposing the lies and fabrications of Somaly Mam, who pays Cambodian police to abduct sex workers and lock them in filthy, crowded cells at her “rescue centers”, where they are beaten, robbed, gang-raped and starved while their “savior” hobnobs with celebrities and receives accolades from anti-whore fanatics.

These stories all have two things in common.  The first is that, while they are shocking to the general public, sex workers and those who work closely with us have known about them (or in the case of single-instance atrocities, many others like them) for years or decades; it’s simply that until recently, nobody wanted to listen.  The second is that those who shocked by them generally believe them to be isolated incidents rather than recognizing them as business as usual, merely visible outcroppings of the police violence that underlies the entire landscape of criminalization.  While I was glad to see people upset about Somaly Mam’s torture porn and abusive practices, they need to understand that these are endemic to the rescue industry everywhere.  Though I was grateful at the outcry over Project ROSE, I am frustrated at the media’s cover-up of similar rights-violating programs which are merely less obvious because they lack that special Arizona lunacy.  Though I was relieved at the disgust people expressed toward the racist Chicago thugs, I am sad that most of them seem to think this was unusual, when in fact it is wholly typical behavior during any massage parlor raid.  And despite the apparent public belief that the situation in Hawaii was unique,

…This is standard operating procedure everywhere in the United States, and the only thing unusual about Hawaii is that it’s spelled out in law.  Just in case you’re a new reader or have a short memory, here are three examples from just last year:  Indiana,  Florida and Pennsylvania are all especially shameless in their defense of government-authorized rape, excusing it by claiming that sex workers are “sophisticated” (while simultaneously being pathetic, infantile victims)…

The sad fact is that none of these scandals is unusual in any way, except for the fact that they came to the attention of the public.  And they will continue to be business as usual until that public stops pretending otherwise and demands the abolition of prohibition.

I like to take drugs in the daytime. I know that I’m in the minority on this one, but I find that a warm sunny forest is generally far more conducive to productive psychedelic exploration than the inside of a dark, loud, crowded club packed with tripping and/or tweaked out strangers, undercover police officers, and well-intentioned entrepreneurs cheerfully charging all that the market will bear for a tiny little bottle of freaking tap water.

It’s not that I fail to appreciate the upside of nocturnal adventures. Many of my more cherished psychedelic experiences have taken place under the cover of darkness. Most of them, actually. Evening is when things typically tend to get rolling, especially in Festival Land, which kind of makes sense, particularly in environments like Burning Man where it’s often too uncomfortably hot to do much of anything in the daytime. Playing too hard and forgetting to stay hydrated can easily land a discombobulated day tripper in the medical tent. Or worse. Besides which, most of the best dance scenes are at night, and the beautiful light-up stuff is far more impressive when it’s actually turned on. Frankly, you probably look a whole lot sexier in the dark, too. Especially if your eyes are kind of bugging out, and you can’t stop trying to chew your own bottom lip off.

But I was a Rainbow Gathering kid before I was a Burner. I’ve certainly spent more than my share of endless summer afternoons frolicking in alchemically enchanted meadows full of wildflowers. If you’ve not yet been fortunate enough to sample such diurnal delights for yourself, then the Teafaerie is here to tell you that you’re missing out.

Contrary to what you may have heard from certain suspiciously sparkly vampiric types, the rays of the “deadly day star” do not, in fact, blind the eyes and burn the skin. Well, okay, I guess that they actually do. Do not look directly at the sun. But the epidermal immolation happens fairly slowly, and for the most part it can be warded off by the judicious application of topical sunscreen. Indeed, so long as you stay hydrated and establish a shady refuge, old Sol can be a surprisingly powerful psychedelic ally. It is the ultimate source of all life on Earth, after all, and various cultures everywhere and at all times have worshiped and revered it. It certainly does light up the world. And it feels really nice on my skin. Plus if I look at the sun with my eyes closed, it often activates an intensely compelling aspect of my internal fantasia that is entirely its own; one that differs distinctly in both style and content from the familiar suite of psychedelic imagery that tends to arise for me from within the fecund void of primeval darkness.

I’ve been thinking about psychedelic sunshine a lot lately, mainly because of a truly incredible series of ayahuasca ceremonies that I was recently privileged to attend. They took place in the Netherlands, where ayahuasca is provisionally legal under certain circumstances. The event had been billed as the “Jam of a Lifetime”. Three days of live music, community, and healing were promised to the lucky participants, and a few special scholarships were to be made available to particularly talented musicians who could not otherwise afford to attend. Plus they chose to offer an additional scholarship to a certain rather musically inept Teafaerie, who just so happened to be in Amsterdam anyway, and who was planning on trying iboga for the first time on the following weekend. (But that’s another story to be told another time…)

It all kind of lined up so effortlessly that I figured I might as well check it out. I was intensely preoccupied with anxiety about my upcoming iboga journey, and to tell you the truth I didn’t really give much thought to what the Jam was going to be like at all, except insofar as it seemed like a fortuitous opportunity to straighten my inner house up a little bit before the cosmic cleaning lady came over to disinter all of my deepest darkest dust bunnies.

When I arrived on the evening of the first ceremony, I was somewhat taken aback by the number of mattresses that had been laid out. Places had been set for something like 40 participants! The room was large enough to accommodate that many people sitting side by side around the perimeter, but just barely. I took a spot in the corner near the door, wondering what I’d gotten myself into, and chastising myself for not having taken the time to research this outfit at any great depth before signing on. Why do you always do this to us, Faerie? Granted, a few dozen people on ayahuasca trying to play music together might be…awesome. But then again, we could be getting ourselves caught up in a totally cacophonous shit show.

The people seemed friendly enough. I was greeted with gusto by my contact who introduced me around to many of the others, all of whom were warmly welcoming. I was relieved that everybody spoke some English. Beautiful hangings adorned the walls and the floor was subtly heated from below somehow, making the space feel full of cheer and comfort; a bubble of protection against the freezing storm that hurled itself against the big picture windows and drummed on the numerous skylights.

The facilitator seemed like a nice guy, too. He was very gracious when we were introduced. He seemed really grounded and present, and he had precisely the right kind of a twinkle in his eye. Nevertheless I was feeling kind of anxious, and when my turn came to drink I indicated that I wanted to start with a slightly smaller portion.

The rain had let up when the music began, and the atmosphere that quickly developed in the ceremony space was truly a wonder to witness. It was more or less darkish in there, but the candle on the central altar remained lit, and people seemingly felt free to get up and move around more than I think of as being typical for ayahuasca ceremonies. Instruments came out over time, but to my surprise and delight there was a distinct lack of musical ego-tripping. There was a woman who sang like an absolute angel, and people seemed to be content to let her do her thing for a little while. Then a haunting flute joined in. Soon other musicians began contributing to the sound sculpture in ones and twos, fading in and out harmoniously (and also leaving room for silence) as if they were all in some sort of telepathic rapport with one another. Which I suddenly realized was, in fact, the case; furthermore I clearly saw that it was a big part of the raison d’être behind this whole event. I mournfully wished that I hadn’t been so stubborn about not sitting still for music lessons when I was a kid.

I could totally feel the medicine doing its work in me, but I never really got all that high, not even after I went back and re-upped with a full cup when seconds were offered. Which figured, I thought. Heck, if I had to be responsible for watching over 40 some odd voyagers at the same time, I’d probably cut the dose, too!

I got up and danced towards the end as the music became more joyful and festive. Almost everybody did. Lots of folks started singing something in Portuguese that most of them seemed to know, and there was a generalized sense of familial camaraderie in the air. By the time it all wound down I was sincerely looking forward to the next two evenings. This was turning out to be fun!

But wait, what did the facilitator just say? Meet back here for the next ceremony at 10 o’clock in the morning? At first I thought that I must have heard him wrong. Nobody does ayahuasca in the daytime. That’s some kind of a sacrilege, isn’t it? I mean, it simply isn’t done! Oh yeah, and the medicine is going to be about five times stronger tomorrow. This had just been the handshaking and bringing everybody into a mutual resonance ritual. The next day the real Work would begin.

I spent a sleepless night. But come morning I womaned up and took my medicine with the rest of the gang. When in Amsterdam and all… Besides which, I had Work to do. After we drank there were some communal eye gazing exercises and so forth, but I didn’t feel pressured to participate. I’m used to spending my come-up time in meditative contemplation (or sometimes just taking an anxious inventory of the sins that I might have committed since my last confession) and I didn’t want to be forced to play games or to make eye contact with strangers during that time. This was fine. Several participants went straight to their mats after the Service. Some of them donned fancy-looking eye masks that I later learned were designed to prevent light leakage, thus immersing their wearers in a darkness more total than that which one would encounter in a nighttime maloca.

The medicine was indeed much stronger this round, and the games soon started to break up. The purge was beginning, and some folks shamelessly used the provided blue barf buckets and paper towels in broad daylight, though most of us managed to make it to the nearby bathrooms in time.

And then it was upon us. Full on. For a timeless time I just sat there with my eyes closed, welcoming Aya into my system whilst simultaneously trying to keep one foot on the psychic brake pedal. I wasn’t sure if I felt safe to go super deep in that environment yet. Mama didn’t give me much of a choice in the matter, though. I soon found myself hanging on for dear life! I was starting to think that it just might be getting to be a little bit too much for me, even. Then that clear angelic voice started to sing again. Oh, wonderful! Yes! Next somebody across the room began tapping melodiously on a hang drum. After a moment a gentle acoustic guitar picked up on the tune, and I imagined that I could feel many of the individual minds in the room beginning to yearn towards the previous night’s communion. It occurred to me then that they were preparing for it, in fact. I wondered briefly if the telepathic aspect of ayahuasca might actually be somewhat amplified by having more than the usual number of transceivers in the room.

After a while, I opened my eyes. And that’s when things got magical. The storms had apparently passed in the night, and golden sunshine was streaming in through the enormous windows and the skylights, dappling the entire space with a warm luminescent radiance. I’d never seen anything like it. And if you’ve never taken ayahuasca in the daytime, you’ve never seen anything like it, either.

My first instinct was that I wanted my body to be inside of one of the luminous light pools, but my traditional training made me rather hesitant to leave my mat. Other people were getting away with it, though. One girl had moved out into the middle of he room to do yoga, and the facilitator hadn’t raised any objections. Little musical groups had begun to form on the open floor as well. And one guy was just lying down by the magnificent altar in the center of the room, deeply inhaling the fragrance of some exotic flowers. I watched rainbow-tinted dust motes dance lazily and gracefully in a sunbeam that was only a few feet away from me, leaving tracers. It seemed to be trying to seduce me. “Come here, little Faerie… There’s something that I want to show you!” Eventually I could refuse the call no longer, and I cautiously crawled into the light.

The moment that it struck me I knew that I was in for something special. The warm brightness seemed to open my heart. My whole body immediately began to feel amazing, as if I’d taken a much more psychedelic version of MDMA. I rolled around in it for a few minutes, then I lay back in Savasana (corpse pose), closed my eyes, and began to surrender. I felt perfectly safe doing so in that moment, which is unusual for me. I’m kind of cagey when it comes to surrender. I somehow knew that it was safe here, though. And the music blossomed into something victorious just as I let go, as if to confirm that the collective link was penetrating, enfolding, and upholding me.

A deep sense of relaxation overtook me right away. I could feel all of my chronic muscle tension pouring out into the heated floor below me. With every breath I took in more of the radiance and released a bit more of my defensiveness and anxiety. I began silently weeping with relief. I hadn’t realized how much weight I’d been carrying. The energy centers in my body that I take to be chakras slowly began to dilate open and I felt as if my body were leaving the ground. It was as if the shaft of sunlight were a tractor beam that was drawing me up towards some unimaginable spaceship. My interior holosthesia was exquisite, too! I was enveloped in radiating rainbows, and I was rising up through a delicate lattice of extremely intricate geometrical constructs towards what might have been Heaven’s own portal. I’m not even going to take a pot shot at describing that portal here. Suffice it to say that it was more beautiful than I could bear. Sincerely. I thought that if I got any closer I might well come apart just from looking at it. Which wasn’t exactly scary or anything. It seemed like a good way to go.

Photo courtesy Marco Reeuwijk. Beautiful!

I don’t know if I made it or not. The next thing that I remember was more purging. One of the many truly excellent Helpers had apparently noticed what was about to happen before I did, and when I came around I was sitting up in loving arms and a bucket was right where I needed it to be. For a moment I was shaken and disoriented, and my new friend encouraged me to lean back in her lap while another woman came over and started softly playing one of my favorite Rainbow chants. I soon found that I was able to sing along, as did a number of other people in the room. It felt like my whole tribe was welcoming me home.

After the peak had passed the music became more celebratory again, with many more of the musicians actively participating in what really did turn out to be the Jam of a Lifetime. Almost everybody who wasn’t playing an instrument got up to dance, so I busted out with my contact stick and thoroughly rocked it. I truly felt like the entire universe was dancing through me as I twirled my wide-open heart out during the glorious sunset scene, and I suspect that if it had been recorded, most of my friends would agree with me that it was one of my best sets ever.

There’s a lot more that I could say about the Jam. The third Ceremony was much like the second one, except this time I asked Mama if I could still have a baby if I wanted to, and she pointed out what later turned out to be a walnut-sized cyst on my left ovary. Of course I was concerned that it might be cancerous, and I started to become rather upset. The facilitator was immediately at my side, though, as were a couple of the Helpers. They all validated that they could feel what I was talking about by palpating my abdomen with their fingers, but their energy was calm and reassuring. They soon had me back in my sunbeam, which was probably the very best place for me to contemplate the matter, all things considered.

By the end we were all fast friends, and I’d definitely go back and drink with them again if I were ever to be granted another opportunity to do so. I very much appreciated their willingness to explore new and promising modalities.

Not that I have any problems with traditional practice. It’s doubtless been independently selected for through many generations of trial and error. Certainly there’s a lot to be said for just sitting there in the darkness and keeping your mouth shut. But there’s also a lot to be said for getting up and moving your body around. And there’s a lot to be said for the daylight. It’s comforting to be able to see one another. And yeah yeah, there’s the whole thing about how your pineal gland functions differently in the darkness. Which is a perfectly valid reason for wearing a fancy eye mask if you want to. Some people did. Turns out there’s something about the sunlight that’s magical, too, though. And I feel like it’s underappreciated.

One thing that I noticed was that nobody seemed to be getting attacked by anything. There were a couple of fairly demonic-sounding purges that went on and on over the course of the event, but my strong impression was that those people were in the process of releasing something that they had been carrying all along, rather than being harassed by foreign entities. There are a number of possible reasons for this. Maybe it’s simply a matter of expectation or the specific selection of individuals who were involved. Perhaps the energetic ecology is just differently populated in the rural area outside of Amsterdam where these ceremonies took place than it is in, say, the jungles of the Amazon where increasingly untrained humans have been willingly offering up their nervous systems for centuries. Or maybe the facilitator was just really good at holding up the fort.

Some people say that the taboo against taking ayahuasca in the daytime is because sunlight supposedly scares the spirits away. But, hey! The Teafaerie considers that to be a feature if it scares off the bad ones! I certainly felt the presence that I’ve come to think of as the spirit of ayahuasca during those ceremonies. I saw some deep healings go down, and I was shown something very real that needed attention inside of my body. So by my lights the daytime modality has a lot to recommend it. At the very least it’s worthy of a bit more research.

• Jam of a Lifetime : http://ayahuasca.nl/jamofalifetime
• Teafaerie Rocks the Stick

Check that out. That's an idyllic little town setting, isn't it? All crops and and trees and nicely manicured lawns and is that a diner? Just lovely. It's what the Tennessee Valley Authority promised Uniontown, Alabama, would happen when the local landfill, run by a company called Arrowhead, agreed to take the toxic coal ash from the largest coal ash spill ever in the United States. That happened up the road in Harriman, Tennessee, in 2008, and it just fucked things up for the white, middle-class people in that suburb of Knoxville. So they made a deal to tote the shit down the road, to Uniontown, which is almost 90% black.

Yes, it's that blatant.

And guess what? Things didn't turn out as the TVA promised. 'Cause missing from that pleasant scene is all the "headaches, dizziness, nausea and vomiting...Nosebleeds, sore throats, skin rashes, asthma especially in children, and inflamed sinuses," and the potential for an increase in cancer and lung disease. As for the corn field there, "once vibrant and fertile vegetable gardens that fed their families for generations are now barren, and fruit trees are dotted with deformed and withered fruit."

That's because the landfill wasn't treating coal ash, which contains arsenic, mercury, and lots of nasty shit, as a toxic substance. Arsenic was found in a creek near the landfill, which also takes in garbage from 33 states. For only the 8th time since 2003, the Environmental Protection Agency's Civil Rights Office has begun an investigation of the treatment of the mostly black citizens of Uniontown. The EPA started this week by interviewing residents. A report is expected in December.

By the way, the EPA was called in when the state agency tasked with protecting the citizens refused to even hear their case.

While we grapple with police violence against African Americans, we cannot ignore the more subtle violence committed by the disempowerment caused by poverty, a situation that leads people to be forced to live across the street from:

Earlier this month I wrote here that it would be very difficult to argue that a monkey could create a copyrightable work. Seems I was right.

The US Copyright Office just released a draft of its compendium of office practices. Although not official until this December, The Compendium of US Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition, (“Compendium”) now clearly states that the US Copyright office will register an original work of authorship (e.g. a photograph) “provided that the work was created by a human being.” The Compendium goes on to add, “copyright law only protects ‘the fruits of intellectual labor’ that ‘are founded in the creative powers of the mind.’” (Apparently the Copyright Office hasn’t watched Planet of the Apes.)

“Because copyright law is limited to ‘original intellectual conceptions of the author,’ the [Copyright] Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work.” The Copyright Office “will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants,” nor purportedly created by a divine or supernatural being. As one example of an unauthored and thus unregistrable work, the Compendium lists “a photograph taken by a monkey.”

So not only is the US Copyright office saying that an animal cannot author a copyrightable work, they are also saying that that particular work, no matter how cute or creative it may seem, cannot be registered with the US Copyright Office. And under US law, without that copyright registration a copyright lawsuit is untenable.

One last thing to note: although the Compendium is an administrative manual meant to provide instruction and guidance to its staff, attorneys, scholars, and the courts, it does not have the force and effect of law. However, it does have persuasive power, and the Supreme Court has said that as such, it is perfectly acceptable in a court of law.

No.

There, I saved you a click.

Let me qualify that. Some reporters are very good at reporting legal stories. They know what they are talking about in the first place, or they take pains to educate themselves. When a story is complex, they work to make it readable without making it inaccurate.

That is not the norm.

This week's example: the horrific July 2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

Survivors of the shooting, and relatives of the slain, sued Cinemark Holdings, Inc. and other companies in the movie theater's chain of ownership. A federal court consolidated multiple cases into one. Recently the defendants in that case filed a motion for summary judgment, arguing that the court should grant judgment to the defense without trial because the shooting was not foreseeable to the theater.

A motion for summary judgment doesn't ask a judge to weigh evidence. It asks this: is there any admissible evidence that supports a legally viable theory under which the plaintiff could win? If a jury believed plaintiff's evidence and not defendant's evidence, would there be evidence to support everything that the plaintiff has to prove? If plaintiffs supply any facts which support a valid legal theory, they have created a "genuine dispute of material fact," and the court must deny the motion. If, on the other hand, undisputed facts show that the plaintiff isn't entitled to relief under the law, or if the plaintiff has no evidence to support key claims, then the court must grant the motion.

Let me give you an example. Say someone calls me an assmunch and breaks my mint Chewbacca action figure, and I sue them for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress and, I don't know, trespass to Wookies. The defendant files a motion for summary judgment. There are a number of ways the defendant might win. The defendant might win the defamation claim if the court found (correctly) that it doesn't matter whether or not the defendant called me an assmunch, because that's a statement of opinion rather than one of fact and can't be defamation. The defendant might win the intentional infliction of emotional distress claim because, as a matter of law, being called an assmunch is nowhere near outrageous enough to support the tort.¹ The judge might grant summary judgment on the grounds that California does not recognize the tort of trespass to Wookies. The judge might grant summary judgment because I have no witnesses or evidence that the defendant bent my Wookie. But if the defendant offers declarations from twenty upstanding citizens that he did not bend my Wookie, and I offer one lonely declaration from a felon or heroin addict or Congressman or something, they lose, because a jury could conceivably believe my evidence.

That's what happened in the Aurora shooting case. The United States District Judge evaluated Cinemark's motion and denied it. The court answered the correct question posed by the motion: do the plaintiffs have any evidence which, if believed, would support their claim that the shooting was foreseeable? The court said:

None of these facts, even when taken together, compels the conclusion that Cinemark knew or should have known of the danger that the patrons of Auditorium 9 faced. I reiterate that this Court is in no way holding as a matter of law that Cinemark should have known of the danger of someone entering one of its theaters through the back door and randomly shooting innocent patrons. I hold only that a court cannot grant summary judgment on what is normally a question of fact under Colorado law unless the facts so overwhelmingly and inarguably point in Cinemark’s favor that it cannot be said that a reasonable jury could possibly side with the plaintiffs on that question. I am not convinced. Plaintiffs have come forward with enough – and it does not have to be more than just enough – to show that there is a genuine dispute of material fact. A genuine fact dispute must be resolved by the trier of fact, not by a court’s granting summary judgment. Whether the jury will resolve this issue in the plaintiffs’ favor is a different matter entirely.

In other words, the court did not find that the shooting was foreseeable. The court found that if a jury believed the plaintiffs' experts and evidence, the jury could conceivably find that the shooting was foreseeable.

Here's how that result is headlined in the Denver Post:

Federal judge rules Aurora theater shooting was foreseeable

No. That's not what the judge found. In fact the judge specifically and explicitly said it wasn't making that finding.

The article was edited at some point; I can't find the original. But now it says this in the body:

The owner of the Aurora movie theater that was the site of a deadly 2012 attack could have reasonably enough foreseen the danger of such an attack to be held liable for it, a federal judge ruled Friday.

Noting "the grim history of mass shootings and mass killings that have occurred in more recent times," U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson ruled that Cinemark — owner of the Century Aurora 16 theater — could have predicted that movie patrons might be targeted for an attack. Jackson's ruling allows 20 lawsuits filed by survivors of the attack or relatives of those killed to proceed toward trial.

This is not quite as bad as the headline, but it's still bad. The judge did not rule that the theater "could have reasonably enough foreseen" the shooting; the judge ruled that a jury could possibly find that the shooting was foreseeable.

Perhaps you think I am being a pedant, and that "could have reasonably enough foreseen" is acceptable shorthand for "there is some evidence from which a jury might find that the theater could have reasonably foreseen." That generous interpretation is dashed by the rest of the story:

Jackson's ruling does not decide the lawsuits' ultimate question: Did Cinemark do enough to try to prevent the shooting? The lawsuits argue Cinemark should have had extra security measures in place to discourage the attack and to stop it more quickly once it began.

By calling the question of reasonable measures the "ultimate question," the article incorrectly implies that the issue of foreseeability has been resolved, when in fact the judge explicitly said it is not resolved.

In short, the Denver Post got the story badly wrong, substantially changing the meaning of the judge's ruling. The gulf between "I find this was foreseeable" and "I'm not saying it's foreseeable; I'm saying a jury might possibly think so" is vast. As you would expect, this incorrect interpretation then propagated, causing predictable outrage in some quarters. How can a judge find this is foreseeable? Why doesn't a jury get to decide?

Some people got it right. For instance, the blog Deadline Hollywood, which quotes the key part of the decision and therefore tells its readers what actually happened.

Yet some would have us believe that traditional, respectable media outlets like the Denver Post are reliable, and blogs are not.

It ain't necessarily so.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go read coverage of the situation in the Middle East.

Can You Trust The Media To Get Legal Stories Right? © 2007-2014 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

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So, in the wake of Robin Williams’ suicide, Henry Rollins wrote a piece in LA Weekly called “Fuck Suicide,” in which he basically engages in a bit of “tough love” victim-blaming. This caused the world to drop on Henry Rollins’ head (here’s a fairly representative sample). Henry Rollins, to his credit, has offered up a reasonably decent apology, and plans to follow up in the same forum where the original piece ran. So that’s good, so far. Apologies are hard and hard to do well, and I think he hits the basics (and for those who don’t know, here are what I think are the basics).

A number of years ago a girl who I knew in high school committed suicide in college, in a way that at the time I thought was astoundingly dramatic. For years, when I thought of her at all, I was kind of pissed off at her. I thought of all the people she hurt with her actions, and I thought that fundamentally, what she had done was selfish and stupid and designed to get her attention that she thought she was owed and now would not be able to appreciate because she was dead — not that I thought she had thought about what would happen after she committed suicide. So that was my thinking about her, like I said, for years.

And then somewhere along the way, and I don’t remember when precisely it was, I realized that someone in this scenario was indeed an asshole, it’s just that I was putting the finger on the wrong person. The asshole was me. Because in fact I knew nothing about what was going on her head, or how much pain she may have been in, knew very little about depression or how it works on people — basically I knew nothing, period, about anything relevant. All I knew were my own opinions, based on my own life experience, in which neither suicidal thoughts, nor depression outside of a few occasional bad days, had ever featured. I wasn’t qualified to judge. Life is one long process of discovery about just how little you know about pretty much everything, and that includes people and the insides of their heads.

When I think of this young woman now, I mostly, simply, feel sad. I wish there would have been a way she could have seen her way through to sticking around. And I’m sorry that I spent years generally being pissed off at her. It was wrong of me, and it didn’t do either of us any good.

This is my way of saying that I get why Henry Rollins wrote what he did, and why he was the asshole in that scenario, and why I’m pleased, in that vague way that one is when thinking about people more famous than you, whose work you’ve enjoyed, that he’s accepted that he blew it and is trying to walk it back. As I’ve said many times, we all show our ass from time to time. I certainly have. What you do after you show your ass matters.

…kill people all by themselves.  But guns sure as hell make it easier to kill people.  Even three year olds.  Cause, sure and shooting grandparents, snatching kids, shooting it out with cops and dying is how everyone should handle custody disputes.

If that was really the case, really the correct choice for people with brains and a REAL respect for life and Constitutional guarantees?  It would have been a lot less than seven years since I last saw my own granddaughter!

Filed under: Politics, PTSD Journals, War on Women, WTUnholyF? Tagged: child abuse, domestic violence, gun violence, Gunday, guns, gunsense voters, murder

I haven’t found anything profound to add in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting in HendersonFerguson, Mo. Same shit different day. The life of a black person in this country is of little value while alive but can be a windfall for the person ending that life.

Darren Wilson, like George Zimmerman before him has been the beneficiary of 234,000 dollars donated on his behalf by supporters who are totally not in possession of any racial animus.

A sampling of some of the comments attached to donations:

“Ofc. Wilson did his duty. Michael Brown was just a common street thug.”

“Waste of good ammo. It’s my privilege to buy you a replacement box.”

“Black people can be their own enemy and I am not white…He was shot 6 times cause the giant wouldn’t stop or die. Evil people don’t die quick”

“All self-respecting whites have a moral responsibility to support our growing number of martyrs to the failed experiment called diversity.”

“I am so sick of the blacks using every excuse in the book to loot and riot.”

“I support officer Wilson and he did a great job removing an unnecessary thing from the public!”

The following screenshot was compiled by Jon Hendren

Click the above to embiggen. God Bless their hearts.
…

 Dear Friends,

This post is dedicated to AmyRose

of

http://herladypinkrose.wordpress.com.

With Love, Encouragement, and Inspiration.

Amy lit a light in me that had been dim for too long.

This is my first photographic post.

It is with my Love, Appreciation, Gratitude and Inspiration

that I’m dedicating this post to AmyRose.

 

Just look at them.

The Chemin de fer de Petite Ceinture (French for “little belt railway”) was a 32 km railway that encirled Paris, connecting all the major railway stations within fortified walls during the Industrial Revolution. In service from 1852 to 1934, the line has now been completely abandoned for 80 years.

Several developers and local officials have recently set their sights on the vast swath of unused land, tunnels, and stations as an opportunity for new development. However, some railway enthusiasts and related organizations want the tracks and stations to be preserved indefinitely as part of the cities’ heritage. Others want to turn areas of de Petite Ceinture into parkways similar to the nearby Promenade plantée, a 4.7 km park built on an elevated train track in 1988 that later inspired New York’s famous High Line.

As part of his project “By the Silent Line,” photographer Pierre Folk has been working since 2011 to photograph the 160-year-old railway’s last remnants before any final decisions are made. He stalks the tracks at all times of the year, often returning to the same locations to document nature’s slow reclamation as rusted tracks and crumbling tunnels are swallowed by trees, vines, and grass. This is just a small selection of Folk’s work, you can see many more photos right here.

theodd1sout:

I’ll be sleeping for most of eternity.

'Back to the Future' Makeup Aging vs. Reality [tiwuno]

Massive trigger warnings about domestic violence (described and photographed), rape, rape apologism, entitlement culture, police

I’ve written before on crowdfunding’s betrayal of sex workers, and how ridiculous their rules are that they ban sex workers entirely, whether they’re crowdfunding adult work or medical expenses.

There’s been a lot of press about MMA fighter War Machine’s near-fatal abuse of his ex girlfriend Christy Mack earlier this week. While some of the commentary has been the expected sex worker bashing, “but we don’t KNOW he did it!” type apologist bullshit, there’s also been some very thoughtful articles. The cops apparently hung up on 911 calls the night of the attack, and called her injuries non life threatening at first, which doesn’t surprise me but underlines how little the cops care about domestic violence or sex workers. Still, I’m glad to see that Christy Mack is being supported by a good number of people, who have compassion for what it’s like to live in an abusive relationship, are horrified by the way he spoke about her, and don’t think that her being a porn performer should be reason for her to be assaulted.

I certainly understand how horrifying intimate partner violence can be, and how hard it is to leave. This is fucking personal.

There’s another piece coming on Consent Culture about domestic violence and MMA, but I want to address something that became starkly clear when it came to the aftermath of Jon Koppenhaver’s arrest. And that’s the messed up ethics of crowdfunding.

As I’ve discussed before, sex workers have regularly had their attempts to crowdfund medical care, travel, and other things shut down because they’re sex workers, or have ever been sex workers. The purposefully vague language of the terms of service for many of these companies means they can determine what’s “too adult” seemingly on a whim. I’m glad to see Christy Mack hasn’t had her medical fundraiser challenged due to her profession, as Eden Alexander did, and I hope that crowdfunding has made a decision to stop penalizing sex workers for their jobs.

What sickens me, however, is that a fundraiser for War Machine, a.k.a. Jon Koppenhaver, is remaining up despite multiple challenges. Two other fundraisers that purported to be raising money for War Machine’s defense were shut down, with GiveForward offering an *apology* and advice:

Of course, War Machine’s supporters took this as complicity with their goal of raising money for a serial abuser, who had “joked” about murdering Christy Mack before.

And it is, which is why I will not be using GiveForward in the future, and encourage you to make the same choice.

When they took the fundraiser for his legal defense down (it’s now back, stating money raised is for “mental health funding”), Giveforward emailed me as well, by the way, and their tune with me was very different:

Obviously, I find the disparity in the emails to be pretty concerning and to not give me a lot of faith that they are, in fact, seeking to “empower compassion”.

Just to remind you of Christy Mack’s injuries, here is her statement, the police report, and the images she tweeted:

Both have said they had broken up in May at various times, though as is often the case with abusive relationships, codependency also seems to have been keeping them together after. His excuse for beating her, one that people men like Chuck Zito of “Sons of Anarchy” fame seems to agree with, is that she was cheating on him- not that it’s an excuse, but it doesn’t even seem to be true.

Here’s some statistics around “crimes of passion”, and how often the people who abuse women are their partners. (Also please please please, if you need support around these issues, check out the Consent Culture resource list).

The man who did this, who *is under arrest for doing it after being labeled a fugitive*, who has practically admitted to doing it (I mean, “she’s my property and always will be“?!?), *is crowdfunding* and this is totally ok with GiveForward. I mean FFS they could shut it down simply because he’s been a porn performer in the past, if they wanted a way to get out of it and still be consistent… but I guess that’s only an issue if you’re a women.

But hey, you know, if supporting *near* murderers isn’t your thing and you’d rather support a proper murderer, never fear! You can support Darren Wilson, the cop who murdered a black teen in cold blood and kicked off a week’s worth of (frankly justified) riots in Ferguson, Missouri. Residents are under curfew, and feel like they’re under house arrest (because they are). Tear gas is being used frequently and without restraint. The National Guard has been sent, which is going to make things even worse.

Well, the cop who felt murdering a black kid was a-ok has a fundraiser at $17,000+ on GoFundMe, and this isn’t even the fundraising effort started by the KKK! I guess GoFundMe isn’t worried about picking sides in legal situations the way GiveForward is.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that many of the people donating to Wilson’s fund are also cops. In case you questioned whether or not all cops are bastards, the fact this fundraiser is so heavily populated by them and that cops haven’t been condemning this behaviour should tell you all you need to know.

To underline: Darren Wilson murdered a black teenage boy, who was unarmed and facing away from him, and he’s on *paid leave*, and ALSO now getting $17,000 and counting.

GoFundMe is enabling *paying* this murderous cop for killing a black kid. This is the state of racism in the US right now.

Don’t ever, ever fucking tell me we’re post race and you don’t see colour.

I like to think that crowdfunding can be revolutionary. But it’s important to remember that these tools can also be wielded by the oppressor. Such is often the way in capitalism.

Next time you need to raise some money, may I suggest Tilt instead?

Spurred by the latest happenings in America vis-a-vis police officers and the stunning amounts of statism on display, I was reminded that we in the field know that officers are full of crap and most of the people in the world think officers are the second coming of Jim Carrey in “Liar, Liar”.

One of the many ways in which officers’ BS is on display is in their reports and their claims of probable cause or reasonable suspicion. The classic “furtive movement” or “clutching the waistband”.

So I figured why not just collect these nonsense pretexts and put them on display for the world to see? So send me screencaps of the reports that you find – with identifying information redacted, of course – and I’ll post them over at bspcproject.tumblr.com (there’s nothing there yet).

 

Last Friday, as the killing of Mike Brown continued to roil Ferguson, Missouri, the Ferguson Police Department released a police report and surveillance video showing a young man shoving a protesting convenience store clerk and leaving with merchandise. Mike Brown's family lawyer confirmed that the video showed Brown, but decried its release as an irrelevant smear. Later Ferguson's police chief later admitted that officer Darren Wilson did not seek to detain Brown based on the robbery, but because Brown was walking in the street.

Would the alleged robbery³ matter, in any case brought against Darren Wilson for the death of Mike Brown?

It might matter legally, but only for narrow reasons. It does matter practically, but shouldn't.

The Alleged Robbery Might Have Limited Relevance To A Case Against Officer Wilson

Imagine that federal prosecutors decide that the shooting was unjustified and file charges against Officer Darren Wilson for violation of Mike Brown's civil rights. The issue presented will be whether Brown posed "a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others," as required to justify deadly force. Could Wilson seek to introduce evidence of the robbery in his own defense? They answer — like most lawyer answers — is maybe.

The robbery is not broadly admissible to show that Mike Brown was the sort of person who robs convenience stores. Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b)(1) — which is duplicated in some form in most state evidence codes — provides:

Evidence of a crime, wrong, or other act is not admissible to prove a person’s character in order to show that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character.

In other words, if my client is accused of bank robbery, the government can't introduce his prior bank robberies to show that he's the sort of person who robs banks and therefore probably robbed this one. Note that the rule talks about persons, meaning it applies to evidence about parties and witnesses.

Here, Mike Brown's alleged robbery could not be offered to show that he was the sort of person who uses force against others. Wilson couldn't offer it, for instance, to support the argument "you know Officer Wilson is telling the truth about Mike Brown attacking him, because Mike Brown was violent on this other occasion."

However, there is a significant exception to Rule 404(b):

This evidence may be admissible for another purpose, such as proving motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake, or lack of accident.

The classic example of this rule is the old Law & Order episode where the kid "accidentally" shoots his friend, and detectives discover that he had previously "accidentally" shot another friend. The prior shooting wasn't admissible to show that the kid was the sort of person who shoots people, but it was admissible to call into doubt his story that the latest shooting was an accident, because it tended to show he knew guns and knew what he was doing — an absence of mistake.

Here, the robbery may be relevant to state of mind. At least as I understand the facts, it's not relevant to Wilson's state of mind, because he didn't know about the robbery when he shot Brown.⁴ But it could conceivably relate to Brown's state of mind. Wilson might argue that Brown resisted him because Brown thought he was being arrested for robbery, and that Wilson's story that Brown forcibly resisted arrest is more credible if Brown had a motive to resist.

For a very similar example, consider United States v. Williams. Sheriff's Deputy John Williams shot Adam Hall in the back. Hall was unarmed. The feds prosecuted Williams for violating Hall's civil rights. Williams asserted that Hall made "furtive movements" and that Williams thought Hall was going for a gun; witnesses contradicted this. Prosecutors offered evidence that Deputy Williams had previously shot another suspect, and that Hall knew this; they argued this was relevant to Hall's state of mind, because it showed that Hall would not make furtive movements when confronted with an officer he knew was a shooter. Williams appealed, saying that the admission of his past shooting and Hall's knowledge of it violated Rule 404. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the conviction, agreeing that the victim's state of mind was relevant:

Though a victim's state of mind indeed rarely matters, in this case it somewhat helped the government disprove Williams's main defense. The jury had to determine whether Williams acted reasonably when he shot Hall. This judgment turned on a credibility assessment: Was Williams telling the truth when he testified that Hall made several threatening movements before Williams shot him, or were the other witnesses telling the truth when they denied such movements? If Hall feared that Williams might shoot him, the government argues, then Hall would avoid anything that might provoke Williams to shoot.

Or consider Celaya v. Stewart, in which a federal court overturned Celaya's state conviction for killing a man. Prosecutors claim that Celaya posed as a prostitute, lured the victim into the desert, shot him, and took his truck. Celaya claimed the victim offered her a ride and then attempted to rape her, and that she shot in self-defense. Celaya offered witnesses who would say that the victim had previously picked up women and sexually assaulted them and that he had a reputation for violence amongst prostitutes. The trial court excluded the evidence under the state version of Rule 404, saying that because Celaya did not know about the victim's past conduct it was not admissible. The federal court disagreed, finding that the evidence was admissible under Rule 404(b) because it showed the alleged victim's intent, state of mind, and modus operandi, and thus corroborated Celaya's version of events. Because the exclusion of the evidence substantially prevented Celaya from corroborating her self-defense claim, the court overturned the conviction.

But determining whether Rule 404 allows evidence of a witness' prior conduct is only part of the analysis. Under Rule 403 — echoed in every evidence code in the country — the trial judge must also weigh the probity of the evidence (its tendency to prove something legitimate and relevant) against its potential for unfair prejudice (its tendency to lead the jury to decide the case based on illegitimate factors). Here, the trial court would weigh how evidence of the robbery would serve legitimate purposes (by showing why Mike Brown might resist Officer Wilson) against the danger it would serve illegitimate purposes (by suggesting to the jury that Mike Brown had it coming, or was a violent person). The rest of the evidence will influence this decision. For instance, if the evidence shows that Wilson shot Brown from 35 feet away while he was surrendering, the court might rule that the question of whether he initially resisted Wilson, and why, is not very probative.

Were Wilson a normal mortal, I'd give this a 50/50 chance of being admitted in evidence. Since he's a cop, and he wants it to come in, and cops generally get special treatment, I'll give it a 75% chance of getting in. The judge might limit the evidence to reduce potential prejudice; for instance, the judge might only allow the government to introduce a summary of the robbery rather than the video.

In short: the alleged robbery could conceivably be relevant and admissible if Darren Wilson is charged in connection with Mike Brown's death. But it would not be broadly admissible for the purpose of showing that Brown was a robbery or that he was violent.

The Alleged Matter Shouldn't Matter To How We Value Mike Brown's Rights

But he fact that Mike Brown allegedly robbed a convenience store shouldn't matter to our analysis of whether it was acceptable for Darren Wilson to shoot him. The fact that it does matter is nearly everyone's fault.

Whether or not they released the surveillance video in response to a public records request, as they claim, the Ferguson Police Department undoubtedly knew that the news would reach the pool of prospective jurors in any criminal or civil case against Officer Wilson, telling them facts that they might not hear in court. They knew that the media would run with the story, and that the media would run with it multiple times: first to report it, then to ask why the police released it, and possibly a third time in a mock-self-critical analysis of whether they were played. The effect in the public's mind is to emphasize the point Mike Brown was a robber, with the subtext so he probably had it coming.

The alleged robbery matters because nearly everyone accepts the subtext that a robber deserves to be shot even if he's unarmed. People who say "look, he was a robber" accept it, as do the people gleefully digging through Mike Brown's life to find things to dirty him up⁵ But more insidiously, many of Mike Brown's champions accept the narrative of just deserts as well. When Mike Brown's supporters say that he had no record, that he was a high-school graduate, that he was never in any trouble, and that he was going to college, they advance the narrative that because of these things he did not deserve to be shot as he stood, unarmed, attempting to surrender. This implies that had been a dropout with a record, he might have deserved it. A couple of years ago I wrote about how this notion played out in the evaluation of Rodney King:

But portraying Rodney King as a hero, or as a villain, plays into the central narrative of our criminal justice system, one that offers the ultimate excuse for cutting corners, giving police the benefit of the doubt, looking the other way at constitutional violations, putting our thumbs on the state’s end of the scales of justice. He got what he deserved — that’s what one side says, cutting through facts and law and reasoned analysis to pure us vs. them. He didn’t deserve that, says the other side, unwittingly lending support to the implicit argument that there are some who do. But deserve‘s got nothing to do with it. Heroism and villainy have nothing to do with it. We have to demand that everyone be treated justly, whether our viscera tell us that they do not deserve the rule of law at all. Rodney King should have been spared excessive force not because he’d earned respite, but because we extend it to everyone. We do so as a measure of grace, and because it’s so foolish and perilous to let the state (or the mob) decide who deserves rights and who doesn’t. Neither the state, nor the mob, will ever conclude that you deserve justice if it sets its eye upon you.

I don't care that Mike Brown apparently robbed the convenience store. I don't give a shit if Mike Brown was a career thug or a saint destined for a Rhodes scholarship. The question is the same: did Officer Wilson him have cause to believe that Mike Brown posed a serious physical threat at the moment Wilson pulled the trigger?

Everyone has rights, or nobody has rights.

Edited to add: Patterico, a prosecutor, disagrees at least in part. At the Volokh Conspiracy, former federal judge Paul Cassell thinks that I significantly understate the likelihood that evidence of the robbery would come in. At Simple Justice Scott Greenfield comes out more strongly for the proposition that the robbery should be inadmissible. When more facts are in, the evidentiary issues will be clearer.

Lawsplainer: How Mike Brown's Alleged Robbery Of A Liquor Store Matters, And How It Doesn't © 2007-2014 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

Just moments after my Twitter feed advised me that the Ferguson PD elected to crack down on the curfewed protesters and journalists about two hours early, I got a good idea about why—

The independent autopsy of Michael Brown’s body had been released (and where is the autopsy from the local ME? one might well ask, as well as ask why another federal one might be requested before this young man’s bones are put to rest). And the wounds tell a story. They can’t not.

“People have been asking: How many times was he shot? This information could have been released on Day 1,” Dr. Baden said in an interview after performing the autopsy. “They don’t do that, even as feelings built up among the citizenry that there was a cover-up. We are hoping to alleviate that.”

Dr. Baden said that while Mr. Brown was shot at least six times, only three bullets were recovered from his body. But he has not yet seen the X-rays showing where the bullets were found, which would clarify the autopsy results. Nor has he had access to witness and police statements.

But the entry wounds to the arms and head of Michael Brown from a distance suggest to me shots not to incapacitate but kill—two to the head? I think he was down and his hands may have been up to shield himself—a totally submissive posture and not out of line with what eyewitnesses have indicated.  And I don’t really have time to argue why this is not what anyone does with a suspect picked up for walking in the street who may meet the description of an unarmed person who boosted some ‘rellos from a convenience store.

So let’s take the unmeasured response the PD in Ferguson seem to have been taking, and let me drop any pretense at saying anyone did anything right here—can I point out that Democratic Governor Jay Nixon is about as clueless and useless as a person could be?  That enacting a curfew on mostly peaceful protests where local citizens used their bodies to block the efforts of looters, as if they were the problem, other than directing the local authorities to comply with some semblance of what was reasonably being requested—at least the appearance of an investigation and the charging of the officer in question with the homicide he apparently committed in the line—is shamefully pandering to the white law’n'order fetishists? Let me even go so far as to shame the Democrats in the House who have been presented with opportunity to demilitarize local police forces before, and abstained. It is entirely true that every step taken here has been wrongfooted.

But tonight’s fuckup is different. The tear-gassing of even children and the threatening of journalists on some real short notice to get out of the streets even after a formation to box folks in.  As if to distract from that tale of the young man’s body and to distribute shame all along that thin blue line. Journalists have been arrested and released—but with the understanding that they are not welcomed, and even the host of an MSNBC show, Chris Hayes, was threatened with being maced. 

I can’t stop myself from supposing that just like the police presser that had to dig in and release a store surveillance video that may be of Michael Brown to try and smear him even while releasing the officer’s name,  this weird overreaching response to hurt protestors and journalists and make things worse, is somehow to distract from the grave, murderous incompetence of the police force in the first place. When, for crying out loud!  Even an honest trial could not do so much damage to the reputation of any of these fine upstanding peace officers of the local law as this brutality which everyone has eyes to see.

It doesn’t have to be this way. They chose it.

(X-posted at Strangely Blogged)

While on a recent trip to Iceland, photographer Sarah Martinet had the opportunity to shoot these amazing landscapes from a plane with open windows. You can see much more of her work (as well as more from this trip) on 500px and Facebook.

[dropbear81]

Citing the immigration scholar, Francesca Pizzutelli, Fabio Rojas explains that the phrase “illegal immigrant” wasn’t a part of the English language before the 1930s.  More often, people used the phrase “irregular immigrant.”   Instead of an evaluative term, it was a descriptive one referring to people who moved around and often crossed borders for work.

Rojas points out that the language began to change after anti-immigration laws were passed by Congress in the 1920s.  The graph above also reveals a steep climb in both “illegal immigrant” and “illegal alien” beginning in the ’70s.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

I was supposed to see an angel today, but it didn’t happen. Now I must dedicate some lyrics to her.

I’ve walked through the valleys of the wilderness in time,
Only to find out
That you have love in places I can’t describe, yeah
I need you
It’s the sunrise

I just wanted to let you know,
I love you
Don’t ever let go
Cos the sun don’t shine when you’re not around mines
And I’ll never, be without you

Singing the sun don’t shine
The sun don’t shine, the sun don’t shine
The sun don’t shine without you, without you

From your beautiful dark hair, your adorable face, lovely glasses that highlight your hazel eyes to your amazing personality, remarkable insight, and humorous stories. I really do love you. It pains me so much we can barely see each other. However the time apart only seems to amplify the amazing moments we share together.

 

Next Day Sober Edit: This will happen from time to time FYI. I get a little emotional when I am drunk sometimes. It’s entertaining though I suppose

One day soon, she knows three o’clock on a Tuesday will pass and the bell above the door won’t chime. The shop’s old floorboards will not creak under his weight, and she won’t look up, because there will be no reason to.

He won’t come bearing coffees from the Starbucks up the street, smelling of crisp cold air and espresso beans.  He won’t reach into his jacket and pull out the ten or twelve sheets of neatly printed writing he pulls out now.

Carmen will have finished her part. It will be over.

* * *

The first time he came to the little shop where she worked selling books and proofreading for a fee, he strolled around, looking at the shelves, as if the books on them would give him some indication of her competence.  He didn’t speak to her then. She only remembered his pale, thin ivory hands. The skin was so white and the fingers so long, it reminded her of the hands she’d seen chiseled in stone, crossed upon the breast of some long dead maiden in a graveyard.

The second time, he had a dark, beautiful woman in tow, and a little girl dressed in a pink leotard. They parted at the door to her shop, and he stepped in, making the bell tinkle.

“I heard you do proofreading.”

“I do.”

“I’m working on something. I need some help with it.”

“I’m not an editor,” she said, still seated at the massive, dilapidated writing desk, that served as both a counter and a work area.

“I can’t afford an editor. And,” he said, tilting his head and giving her a self-deprecatory look, “I’ve no idea whether it’s worth an editor’s time.”

“What kind of writing is it? I don’t take on anything requiring specialized knowledge. If it’s highly technical, I know a few people who do that.”

“No.” His eyes roamed around the shelves, a little embarrassed, she thought. “It’s a novel. At least I hope it will be.”

“Why don’t you finish a first draft, and then get it proofread? Then you’ll know how much it will cost. I charge by the word. Most of us do.”

“How much do you charge?”

“A cent a word, but I can bring that down for a long work.”

He smiled at her. “A cent a word. How old fashioned. What else can you buy for a cent these days?”

She shrugged, and then smiled back. It was hard not to.  He had a mouth like a cherub. So at odds with the hard, bony lines of his face, the angular skull, with hair clipped so short it was almost shaved.  It covered his head like an ashen, velvet cap. He was handsome.  And very married and off-springed, she added mentally.

“My base charge is $10 for 1,000 words. Past 80,000, I’ll bring the price down. So, when you’re finished, please come back.”

“That’s not how I’d like to do it,” he said, leaning on the desk and looking directly into her eyes. “I’d like to bring you a chapter a week. That way, I’m forced to produce a chapter a week.”

For all its pragmatism, there was something about the way he delivered the proposition that sounded, for no reason she could put her finger on, like a proposition. There was something in his phrasing, in his tone: a lazy sung quality, a teasing inflection. And something in the proposal itself, as if he were making her complicit in a perverse discipline he wanted to indulge in.

“What do you say?” He stepped back, straightening and tilted his head childishly.

Or not. She was reading too much into the words of this strangely attractive man. “Bring me the first thousand words and we’ll see how it goes from there. How about that?”

He nodded, pushed out his lower lip and shoved his hands into the front pockets of his jeans.  “Sounds good to me. What about next Tuesday?”

“Tuesday’s fine.”

He turned to go. Reached the door and rested his hand – that strange, white appendage – on the handle. “Does anyone ever come in here and buy books?”

Carmen laughed. “Occasionally. But we do most of our business with schools and private libraries.”

“It’s quiet. I like it here.”

Before she could think of a response, he was out the door and walking up the street. It had begun to snow.

You will be unsurprised that Glenn Reynolds has no problem with academics being fired for the political content of their Twitter feeds:

A FACULTY CANDIDATE WHO TALKED ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE THIS WAY WOULD BE UNEMPLOYABLE ANYWHERE. SAY IT ABOUT JEWS, THOUGH, AND IT’S CONTROVERSIAL. “Yet ad hominem attacks are also a BDS strategy that serves to silence opponents. Many faculty who believe the university made the right decision about Salaita are now unwilling to say so publicly.” BDS people have made clear by their actions that they are nasty antisemites who deserve no respect.

First of all, let us once again dispense with the silly idea that Salaitia was a mere “candidate,” despite having agreed to an offer and been scheduled to teach classes.  By this logic, he could have been teaching for a month and not been hired.  The trustee approval is pro forma; he was treated by the university as an employee, which he was.  The idea that he wasn’t fired is such vacuous formalism it would embarrass proponents of the Hilbig litigation.  He was fired.

So let’s consider another hypothetical.  What if someone said “something like that” about, say, Palestinians?  I happen to have a test case handy:

@Deanofcomedy If Palestinians acted civilized, no one would die. You are a mouthpiece for bloodthirsty savages.

— Instapundit.com (@instapundit) August 3, 2014

Note here that Reynolds isn’t talking about Hamas, or Palestinian terrorists; he’s talking about Palestinans as a group. The evidence alleging anti-Semitism in Salaita’s tweets is far more ambiguous. (Indeed, I don’t think they constitute evidence that Salaita is anti-Semitic at all, although some of the tweets are hateful and indefensible even if they are not anti-Semitic.) It is being asserted that Salaita retweeting a tweet saying that a reporter’s story — not the reporter, the story — should have ended at the “point of a shiv” is a firable offense. Reynolds has called for the literal, not metaphorical, murder of Iranian nuclear scientists.

My position at the time of the latter incident is that Reynolds could not be fired for his statements based on the principles of academic freedom, and that applies to his new disgusting tweets as well. Reynolds himself, however, is happy to benefit from these protections but does not want them extended to people he disagrees with, which is a disgrace.

…in comments, IB refers us to this excellent post from Michael Dorf:

Some​ supporters of the university’s decision point to the often-important distinction between firing and not hiring. Academic freedom, they point out, is mostly a matter of contract law, and because Salaita had not yet been formally hired by the University of Illinois, he was not entitled to the same protection as someone who was already a member of the faculty.

But that view appears to be false as a matter of contract law. Like many other states, Illinois law offers protection to people who, in reasonable reliance on an offer that falls short of a fully enforceable contract, take actions to their detriment. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed this principle of “promissory estoppel” as recently as 2009, in the case of Newton Tractor Sales v. Kubota Tractor Corp.

Salaita has an almost-classic case of promissory estoppel. He was told by Illinois that trustee approval was essentially a rubber stamp, and in reliance on that representation he resigned from his prior position on the faculty of Virginia Tech.

This is a fascinating essay on the terrible wrath white colonialism has created in the Yosemite Valley. There are a couple of facets. First, in the early 1850s, whites committed genocidal acts against the indigenous peoples living in Yosemite, clearing out the population. Then in the late 19th century, the Yosemite became the nation’s first “protected” space, based in no small part upon the landscape indigenous people had created in the Yosemite Valley through the applied use of fire to clear brush. In the early 20th century, under the guidance of the supposed father of Yosemite and of the modern environmental movement John Muir, fire was banned entirely, drastically changing the region and, ironically, creating the circumstances for much hotter and out of control fires because of denser and smaller vegetation. As the West dries out and heats up today, the costs of controlling these fires gets higher and higher in harder and harder conditions, thanks a century of white American land management practices.

In other words, the history of white colonialism in the Yosemite Valley is not just about a distant massacre of indigenous people 150 years ago. It’s about land management practices with a series of ideologies–aesthetic, economic, racial–behind them that still profoundly shape the area today, and not for the better.

More on America’s most ridiculous industry: bottled water. Where are the sources of that water?

Yeah, that’s sustainable.

But that only accounts for 55% of the bottled water. What about the rest?

The other 45 percent comes from the municipal water supply, meaning that companies, including Aquafina and Dasani, simply treat tap water—the same stuff that comes out of your faucet at home—and bottle it up. (Weird, right?)

Not weird at all. It shows that you can create a fake problem (there is something wrong with the tap water!), develop a consumer market around it, and then sell people the same water they would be drinking if they turned on their faucet. Now that’s a capitalist success story! More on that:

Then there’s the aforementioned murkiness of the industry: Companies aren’t required to publicly disclose exactly where their sources are or how much water each facility bottles. Peter Gleick, author of Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession With Bottled Water, says, “I don’t think people have a clue—no one knows” where their bottled water comes from. (Fun facts he’s discovered in his research: Everest water comes from Texas, Glacier Mountain comes from Ohio, and only about a third of Poland Spring water comes from the actual Poland Spring, in Maine.)

Despite the fact that almost all U.S. tap water is better regulated and monitored than bottled, and despite the hefty environmental footprint of the bottled water industry, perhaps the biggest reason that bottling companies are using water in drought zones is simply because we’re still providing a demand for it: In 2012 in the United States alone, the industry produced about 10 billion gallons of bottled water, with sales revenues at $12 billion.

As Gleick wrote, “This industry has very successfully turned a public resource into a private commodity.” And consumers—well, we’re drinking it up.