Electrikmonkrjs

“When ordering at Starbucks, people have changed their name to “Black Lives Matter” so that, when their order is up, the baristas have to yell out their new moniker,” reports Taryn Finley at Huffington Post Black Voices.

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There’s no shortage of weather sites and webapps around the web that will show you weather conditions now or predicted ones in the future, but Ventusky is brand new, looks great, and shows you current conditions on a live, always-updating map that you can drag around, click on, or just search to explore.

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Pete from Doctors Without Borders writes, "Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders have today launched MapSwipe, an app that enables anyone with a smartphone to map the most vulnerable communities in the world. Geo-data is vital for aid agencies responding to emergencies such as disease outbreaks and natural disasters and MapSwipe now gives everybody the ability to contribute directly to these responses. So, instead of Angry Birds or Candy Crush, you can now do something meaningful on your commute! (MSF has developed MapSwipe as part of the Missing Maps project, where thousands of volunteers assist NGOs by mapping their areas of operations on OpenStreetMap.)" (more…)

In the week after shootings that left two black men dead, Alicia Keys, Beyoncé and other notable celebrities have teamed up to create this powerful video on the everyday interactions that can get black people killed in America.

The video, produced for Mic.com in collaboration with activist group We Are Here Movement, shows portraits of people who have been shot and killed by police, including Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, and what they were doing when they were shot. Often, as Mother Jones has documented, these acts are mundane: failing to signal a lane change; wearing a hoodie; selling CDs outside of a supermarket. 

"It's moving to see that celebrities have taken charge of telling this story. What we're seeing now are black entertainers — singers, actors, athletes and artists who are deeply in tune with what's happening in the United States — speaking out, taking action," Mic writer Jamilah King wrote in response to the video, which was based on one of her pieces. "Too often, the ordinary seems impossible for black folks in America. Violence follows everywhere — driving down the street, or selling CDs, or playing in a park, or sleeping on our grandmothers' sofa. We become suspects in our own deaths, tried and executed by those sworn and paid to protect us."

"We must tell the world that our lives matter no matter how controversial that point has become."

Watch the video below:

The man who made the video of the Alton Sterling shooting death go viral, one of two brutal videos from two states that sparked a national outrage and led to the shooting deaths of five Dallas police officers during an anti-police brutality protest Thursday – was arrested 24 hours later.

Chris LeDay believes it was an act of retaliation.

Considering police handcuffed and leg-shackled him after accusing him of assault and battery – only to jail him overnight for unpaid traffic fines – it certainly appears that way.

Especially considering his arrest took place 24 hours after he had posted the video on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram where it instantly went viral.

LeDay, 34, lives in Georgia, but was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana where the shooting took place early Tuesday morning, so he learned of the video through friends back home but it wasn’t getting much exposure.

At the time, the story – without the video – was being reported in the local news and was already generating controversy because the store owner was saying the shooting was unjustified and the coroner was saying he was shot several times in the front and back.

And the cops were saying their body cams had fallen off, so there was no video of the shooting.

But because he is very active on social media with almost 13,000 Instagram followers, more than 6,000 Twitter followers and almost 2,000 Facebook friends, he offered to post it on his social media platforms in order to get the word out to a much larger audience. He even tagged his local television news station on the Facebook post, hoping it would pick it up.

“I wanted everybody to see this video,” LeDay said in a telephone interview with Photography is Not a Crime. “I wanted it to go viral. The police were already saying their body cams fell off and I wanted to show there was video of the shooting.”

So he posted the video on all three social media platform Tuesday evening, where it began getting shared numerous times, including by Shaun King of the New York Daily News, who uploaded the video on his Facebook less than an hour after LeDay had posted it on his Facebook page.

And by midnight Tuesday, the story was picked up by several more news sites, including PINAC, which posted it at 11:05 p.m.

By Wednesday morning, the story was being reported on several major national news sites. And by Wednesday afternoon, it was picked up internationally, so he had fulfilled his goal of making the video go viral.

However, that evening as he walked into his job as an aerospace ground equipment technician at Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta, Georgia, going through the usual security checkpoint he had been going through for the month he had been working there, he was not allowed walk through.

Instead, he was detained by at least ten military police officers with guns, including a few with M-16s, all of them surrounding him in case he tried to make a run for it.

He managed to use his phone to inform his Facebook friends that he was being detained, but he wasn’t sure for what.

He didn’t dare record them, knowing those MP’s with their M-16s would not hesitate to use them.

They eventually told him he was wanted on a warrant for assault and battery and escorted him into a back room where he was handcuffed and forced to wait for Dunwoody police to come pick him up, the local police department who had this alleged warrant out for his arrest.

When the Dunwoody police officer arrived to transport him to jail, the warrant did not say anything about an assault and battery charge.

“It was just over some traffic tickets from a couple of years ago,” he said. “They said my license was suspended.”

And he acknowledges that he did not pay the fines, allowing his license to be suspended, but he also says he does not even drive anymore.

“At the time, I couldn’t afford it, then I was just being stubborn about it,” he said.

“But I take Uber to work anyway. Even one of the cops on the base said he sees me getting dropped off for work.”

But that did not stop the Dunwoody cop from leading him out of the base in handcuffs and leg shackles.

“It was embarrassing,” he said. “This happening in 2016.”

But the cop told him it was for his safety; LeDay not having paid his traffic fines and all.

He ended up spending 26 hours in the Dekalb County Jail and was released only after paying the $1,231 fine for his unpaid traffic fines.

Otherwise, he would have had to wait until the following Wednesday to see the judge, who apparently only drops by once-a-week.

LeDay was worried that he would lose his job because his boss had seen him getting arrested but when he told him it was for unpaid traffic tickets, his boss just laughed it off, saying they don’t care about stuff like that.

But his boss did say they had been concerned that he had omitted an assault and battery arrest on his security clearance form, which would have been immediate grounds for dismissal.

Even though he believes somebody in law enforcement was trying to get him fired in retaliation for posting the video, he said he is not going to stop speaking out against police abuse.

“We need to diffuse what the cops are doing,” he said. “They want to say that not all cops are bad but they are not speaking out against the bad cops.

“It just keeps getting worse and people are getting tired of it. I just want some change to occur.”

Watch: Louisiana Cops Shoot and Kill Man Selling CDs in Front of Store

New Video Surfaces from Louisiana’s Alton Sterling Shooting Showing No Gun in his Hand

Minnesota Cop Pulled Philando Castile Over for his “Wide-Set Nose”

BREAKING: Minnesota Cop Kills Driver, Girlfriend Facebook Live Streams His Last Moments (UPDATED)

 

The post Man who Posted Alton Sterling Shooting Video Arrested 24 Hours Later on Fabricated Charges appeared first on PINAC News.

Stingrays -- the trade name for an "IMSI catcher," a fake cellphone tower that tricks cellphones into emitting their unique ID numbers and sometimes harvests SMSes, calls, and other data -- are the most controversial and secretive law-enforcement tools in modern American policing. Harris, the company that manufactures the devices, swears police departments to silence about their use, a situation that's led to cops lying to judges and even a federal raid on a Florida police department to steal stingray records before they could be introduced in open court. (more…)

Via Daily Kos, Dallas Broadcaster Dale Hansen tells the truth about shootings and how White America now finds these events so commonplace that we hardly switch from watching the game.

Reporters in our newsroom were scrambling. Producers were yelling. We turned off the lights, just in case... and I kept watching the game.

It was another shooting in America. It was in our city this time and police officers were being killed, but it was a couple of blocks away and the Rangers were being shut out.

This is what I have become. This is what too many of us have been for a long time now.

A white man in America doesn't die for selling cigarettes on a street corner, he gets a ticket. A white man in America doesn't die for driving with a broken tail light, he gets a ticket, too. And the officers who abuse the badge and the power they have should be punished, but too many times they are not.

Well worth watching.

[link] [71 comments]

Sen. John Conyers reminded Republicans of the host of other issues they ought to be spending time on rather than wasting tax payers' money on another Clinton email witch hunt during a House Judiciary Committee hearing this Tuesday, where it was Attorney General Loretta Lynch's turn in the box to be grilled over the former Sec. of State's email server.

Here's Conyer's opening. I expect fully for it to have fallen on deaf ears.

The news of the past few days has been full of questions about violence, civil rights, and the safety of our police officers—and I want you to know that we take seriously the burden of each of these questions on your office.

It will not have escaped your attention that we are in the middle of election season. You may also know that there are just three working days left until we break for the summer—and, really, not much more time after that until the Congress ends.

Elections are about choices. And a short working schedule is about setting priorities.

As you are no doubt aware, one of this Committee’s top legislative priorities is criminal justice reform. We have already found consensus on a range of such issues, including sentencing, prison, and asset forfeiture reform.

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Leshia Evans was arrested for "obstructing traffic" by heavily armored Baton Rouge police officers on July 9. Jonathan Bachman's photograph of the event tells so many stories.

Revealed in the margins is the impossibly of 'traffic' when a formation of riot police fills the street. In the center, Evans stands like a pillar in front of officers we know are advancing upon her, but who appear to be falling away. Police uniforms so overbearingly militarized it's a wonder they can move at all.

They can remove their armor at the end of the day. She can't remove hers.

The BBC describes the image, all of two days old, as legendary.

In an atmosphere of heightened racial tension, and amid growing debate over the seeming militarisation of American police, one photo has stood out. ... The photograph was taken outside the Baton Rouge police headquarters, where most of Saturday's protest was focused. ... AP reported that the woman in the photograph was grabbed by officers after refusing to move off the public highway.

Heavy.com reports that it was her first protest and spent the night in jail.

On Facebook, she thanked people for the well wishes and wrote: “I just need you people to know. I appreciate the well wishes and love, but this is the work of God. I am a vessel! Glory to the most high! I’m glad I’m alive and safe. And that there were no casualties that I have witnessed first hand.”

Evans was arrested in the same protest as DeRay Mckesson, whom The New York Times calls “one of the best known voices for the Black Lives Matter movement.” The Times says Mckesson spent 16 hours in jail in Baton Rouge before he was released on Sunday.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BHtZW9TjXYB/

The $2 roadside drug-test kit is the go-to weapon of the War on Drugs, despite its incredibly high failure rate and the scientific consensus that the tests need to be validated in labs later; once you've had a random crumb of sandwich or aspirin identified as drugs by one of these kits, you're almost certain to plead guilty, thanks to the heavy-handed tacts of prosecutors and the disarray of public defenders, and then you're off for prison time and a lifetime as a felon. (more…)

PostGhost kept a record of everything that Twitter's Verified users said, even deleted tweets that may have been embarrassing or otherwise reputation impacting. Twitter sent PostGhost a cease and desist letter, effectively eliminating this public record of stuff that people have said but no longer want read.

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In a stunningly tone-deaf development, the Republican party has decided to use its party’s platform to weigh in on the transgender bathroom issue.

Or as someone on Twitter put it, the GOP is now in favor of universal bathroom checks.

The draft platform now includes language language “supporting and encouraging” use of bathrooms based on your gender at birth. NBC reports that the language is in the committee-draft — the platform has not been finished, so it’s still possible the Republicans could remove the language, but would they?

You may recall that this issue became hot this year when North Carolina passed legislation requiring people in state facilities to only use bathrooms corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate. The intent, and effect, is to ban transgender people from using the correct bathroom.

The North Carolina legislation, called HB2, also repeals all LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) civil rights legislation in the state, and bans municipalities from passing any such legislation in the future.

HB2 transgender bathroom backlash

The backlash against HB2 has been massive and unprecedented, especially from corporate America. The law has already cost the city of Charlotte $80 million in lost business, and the state has lost a large number of conferences, conventions and concerts. Among the companies that have spoken out against the law: American Airlines, Apple, Cisco, eBay, General Electric, IBM, Intel, LinkedIn, Microsoft, NIKE and Salesforce. More from the Independent:

High-profile music acts – Pearl Jam, Ringo Starr and Bruce Springsteen – have cancelled concerts in North Carolina. Cirque du Soleil also pulled an appearance in the state. Corporations such as Deutsche Bank and PayPal have put expansion plans on hold.

North Carolina is particularly worried about a threat from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), is threatening to pull tournament games from North Caroline in 2017 and 2018,

So with all of that, what could possibly inspire Republicans to put the trans bathroom ban in their party’s platform? The GOP is enough trouble already with the nomination of Donald Trump as their presidential nominee. Now they’re wading into gay-bashing and trans-bashing?

Several companies had already pulled their support for the GOP convention out of concern of being associated with Trump’s extremism, so the convention overlords decided to become even more extreme? Even Donald Trump, as wacky has he is, refused to fully endorse the trans bathroom ban — though after initially opposing it, Trump then reversed himself and said the matter should be up to individual states.

Trans bathroom language undercuts Trump’s claim to be pro-LGBT

Interestingly, Trump has been running as a pro-LGBT candidate, and has repeatedly claimed that he’s more pro-LGBT than even Hillary Clinton. He’s not — in addition to his wishy-washiness on trans bathroom bans, Trump doesn’t support marriage equality. Nonetheless, it’s interesting that while Trump is trying to woo the gays, the party faithful are bashing them at the same time.

And the Republicans have another problem now — now that the platform contains language bashing transgender people, removing that language would make a statement, a pro-trans statement. So the Republicans are now damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

The irony of all of this is that party platforms generally serve one purpose: To embarrass the party when the platform becomes too extreme. Other than that, the platforms tend to have little impact on enacting actual legislation and policy. And true to form, the Republicans have used the platform to embarrass themselves yet again.

Follow me on Twitter: @aravosis — Win a pony! (not really)

This redacted pair of letters surfaced two months ago: the first one is a letter from an anonymous law student (or group of students) who wrote to a prof to object to their choice to wear a Black Lives Matter t-shirt in class; the second, a devastating takedown from the prof, is a tiny masterclass in legal thinking, persuasive writing, and the nature and character of a legal education. (more…)

This story originally appeared on Fusion.

The National Rifle Association is often eager to jump into heated debates about guns. In case after case and lawsuit after lawsuit, they have rushed to get involved—usually when people are defending their concealed carry and open carry gun rights.

Those people are very often white.

Yet the NRA has been silent in the wake of Wednesday’s police killing of Philando Castile, a black man who was also a licensed concealed carrier of a gun, even though his legal right to a weapon played a key role in his death.

"He’s licensed, he’s carrying, so he’s licensed to carry," Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond "Lavish" Reynolds, explained in the now-infamous Facebook Live video she recorded just moments after his shooting. "He let the officer know that he had a firearm and he was reaching for his wallet and the officer just shot him in his arm."

No matter the heated political debate around the Second Amendment, the right to legally carry a gun in the U.S. is absolute. Castile was following the law and procedure, and yet he was still shot and killed by police. On Thursday, I called the NRA and asked if it had issued, or planned on issuing, any comment about his death.

The woman who picked up the phone told me that they "might not put out any statement" about the matter.

What does that tell you?

Castile’s death is the most recent example of the strained relationship between black people and guns throughout American history. To put it bluntly: it shows that the Second Amendment has never really been meant for black people.

Evidence of this can be found even before America was officially a country. The first gun control law in the territory that is now the United States was passed in Virginia in 1640. It explicitly banned black people from owning guns, even if they were not slaves.

Over 200 years later, in 1857, the specter of black people with guns was a key factor in the notorious Dred Scott case. Scott was attempting to gain his citizenship and all the rights that came with it, but the court infamously ruled that "a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves," were not "intended to be included in the general words used in [the Constitution]."

One of the main reasons behind the decision was the fact that granting full constitutional rights to slaves would mean they could "keep and carry arms wherever they went," the court ruled, continuing, "And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State."

Black people owning guns would upset the social order, so their rights were to be limited. Even after slavery ended, many Southern states enacted Black Codes which, in part, prevented the formerly enslaved population from owning guns.

In his seminal book Black Man with a Gun: A Responsible Gun Ownership Manual for African-Americans, author Kenneth V.F. Blanchard detailed how the impact of these policies trickled down through generations. Citing an oral history, he described how his grandmother’s grandmother, a slave, internalized the laws.

"To save her sons, she made sure that they would not touch, look at or think too hard about owning a gun because it would mean certain death," he wrote.

Things have not changed much in the past few decades. Nominally, black people do have the same gun rights as the rest of the population, but exercising that right has always carried a burden of paranoia and hinted provocation, as Philando Castile’s killing shows.

After Martin Luther King Jr.’s home was firebombed in 1956, he applied for a concealed carry permit for his self-defense in the state of Alabama. In those days, local police had the right to determine who could and couldn’t get a license. King’s application was denied, despite the fact that his life was threatened routinely, and that he wound up getting assassinated.

Fear of blackness was the pretext behind then-California Governor Ronald Reagan’s decision in 1967 to sign a law that made it illegal to openly carry firearms in the state. Just before the law’s passage, a group of Black Panthers openly carried their guns into the state Capitol Building, in an act that terrified mainstream white America. The law had the full backing of the NRA

Nearly 50 years later, black people still aren’t protected by gun laws that shield white Americans.

After Philando Castile’s death, his mother, Valerie Castile, told CNN that Philando and his sister, who also had a concealed carry permit, had talked about whether the laws permitting them to carry weapons would protect them.

"My daughter said, 'You know what, I don’t even want to carry my gun because I’m afraid they’ll shoot me first and ask questions later,'" she said.

Sadly, her fears were proven justified.

The Chart of Cosmic Exploration (larger)

The winners in this year's Illusion of the Year contest (previously) are all cool, but it took me a minute to figure out what was going on with the grand prize winner, Mathew T. Harrison and Gideon P. Caplovitz's "Motion Integration Unleashed: New Tricks for an Old Dog." (more…)

I don't know where or when this happened.

I'm also confident that this isn't the original upload of the video.


YouTube link.

John Cena does a lot of things. He delivers a mean body slam, raps, and now has some pretty awesome things to say about what patriotism should mean in America.

"Patriotism is love for a country—not just pride in it. But what really makes up this country of ours? What is it we love?" he asks. "It's the people." In this video, released on July 4 as part of an Ad Council campaign, Cena challenges our biases about who we think the average American is and reminds us that "almost half the country belongs to minority groups."

The main message? Throw out the labels. Love everybody. And stop imagining that the average American is a white man. Watch below:

QOTD: Krugman

by digby














Paul Krugman, who knows just a bit about international trade, concludes his column today about Trump's alleged "pro-worker" anti-trade agenda with this:

Sorry, but adding a bit of China-bashing to a fundamentally anti-labor agenda does no more to make you a friend of workers than eating a taco bowl does to make you a friend of Latinos.

Trump is not really an anti-free trader or a populist or a protectionist. He's a nationalist. His antipathy to China has to do with its emerging as a competitor for  global dominance. "Trade" is just the rhetorical tool he's using to illustrate that.  However many of his followers who really are worried about jobs lost to foreign trade are suckers if they think he's the guy who will fix their problems.

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Home of the brave

by digby

You've probably seen this, but if not ....



Happy 4th everybody.

A top Republican official in Tennessee resigned his position and accused the state party of being run by "a small corrupt core group who view our party as their private club and personal piggy bank."

The Tennessean reported that Tennessee Republican State Executive Committee member Mark Winslow, a Donald Trump supporter, announced on Twitter last week that he was resigning, and took some parting shots at his party on the way out.

"My state political party is beyond salvage," Winslow wrote. "Oh, sure, we're drifting along on inertia, collecting PAC checks and distributing the money to favored candidates or using the money to pay staffers to take out those who are not favored."

"We pat ourselves on our collective supermajority and claim that legislative status absolves every wrong deed," he continued. "Our soul rotted away some time ago."

According to Winslow, the state party "is really nothing more than a small corrupt core group who view our party as their private club and personal piggy bank."

"Money is passed around, doled out to friends, handed to favored consultants and staffers who ignore bylaws or common sense," he charged. "Rules are arrogantly and routinely broken by officers and staff with no consequence of accountability."

"It's time for me to resign from the State Executive Committee," Winslow concluded. "I encourage you to stand your ground and speak your piece."

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onFv48ju9MQ

America is in the grips of one of the worst housing crises in its history, with 1 in 3 households spending more than 30% of their income on mortgage or rent payments; the US government has two kinds of housing subsidy, one for poor renters and the other intended for middle-income mortgage payers, but guess who gets most of the money? (more…)

“We need to move away from inequitable local property tax-based school funding that rewards the wealthy and penalizes everyone else. Some may say we cannot afford to do this. I say we cannot afford not to. The human and economic costs of inequity are too high a price to pay. We can afford this investment if we reorient our national priorities and tax structures. We need to invest in ensuring the quality of the community public schools we already have rather than in escape schemes for individuals such as expanding the number of charter schools or funding vouchers for private schools. We need systemic strategies for all, not escape hatches for the few. We are all diminished when some of our children don’t get the highest quality education.”

- Arthur Camins: This is the Speech That Democrats Should Give (via azspot)

A new federal report shows that the number of surveillance requests skyrocketed in 2015, and that courts approved every single one of them. That's right, not one single wiretap request was rejected during 2015.

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The ACLU is suing to repeal parts of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a 1980s-vintage hacking law that makes it a felony to "exceed authorization" on a remote computer, and which companies and the US government have used to prosecute researchers who violated websites' terms of service. (more…)

You can't make the claim that this is just Trump being Trump because soliciting email contributions doesn't happen ion the fly or like an improvised word while reading a speech on a teleprompter. This has to be planned out with several other campaign officials involved.

What am I talking about?

Two watchdog groups, the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21, said they will file Wednesday a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, arguing that the Donald Trump campaign has broken federal law by sending fundraising emails to foreign elected officials.

"Donald Trump should have known better," Paul S. Ryan, the deputy executive director at the Campaign Legal Center, said in a statement. "It is a no-brainer that it violates the law to send fundraising emails to members of a foreign government on their official foreign government email accounts, and yet, that's exactly what Trump has done repeatedly."

Fred Werthemier, the president of Democracy 21, said that Trump's fundraising pleas to foreign members of parliament are "a strange and unique development that we have not seen before in campaign fundraising."

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Trump is soliciting donations from foreign leaders?!?

Since members of the British Parliament have complained about receiving several fundraising emails from Donald Trump, politicians in several other foreign countries have revealed that they've also been flooded with email requests for donations from Trump.

Members of parliament in Australia, Iceland, Denmark, and Finland have all received the emails, according to news reports and tweets from the politicians.

Tim Watts, an Australian member of parliament, told TPM's John Marshall on Twitter that he has received several fundraising emails from the Trump campaign, and that he believes all Australian members of parliament have gotten the emails as well.

The Trump campaign has also asked members of parliament in Iceland for campaign contributions, according to Icelandic media. At least three Icelandic members of parliament have received a Trump fundraising email, according to the Iceland Monitor. A couple members of parliament told the Morgublaðið newspaper that they had received emails, according to a report in Iceland Magazine.

"This whole matter is very perplexing. The letter left me speechless," Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the head of Iceland's Left Green Party, reportedly said.

And a member of parliament in Denmark, Ida Auken, revealed on Twitter that she had also received a fundraising email from Trump.

Anders Adlercreutz, a member of parliament in Finland, also said on Twitter that Finnish elected officials have received the fundraising pleas from Trump.

Here is Tony Hawk attempting a 900 at age 48. It's amazing to watch as he stumbles, and stumbles, but his determination pays off. His first 900 was exactly 17 years ago, and he says this is his last.

After getting 30 parking tickets while in London, a 19-year-old Stanford University student created an app called DoNotPay that lets people fight tickets by chatting with a bot.

From The Guardian:

The program first works out whether an appeal is possible through a series of simple questions, such as were there clearly visible parking signs, and then guides users through the appeals process.

The results speak for themselves. In the 21 months since the free service was launched in London and now New York, [Joshua] Browder says DoNotPay has taken on 250,000 cases and won 160,000, giving it a success rate of 64% appealing over $4m of parking tickets.

Browder is working on three other applications of his chatbot lawyer: one that helps people get compensated for flight delays, another that helps people with HIV positive exercise their rights, and another that helps refugees deal with foreign legal systems.