Suffer The Children

I have some kids, and I've tried to teach them a whole boatload of life lessons.

From--
"please and thank you"
--to--
"no, your socks don't have to match - it just makes it easier when you do the laundry"
--to--
"learn to live your life without needing me or a cop or Jesus looking over your shoulder all the time".

As any parent knows, some of the lessons will stick, while others get thru but don't take hold right away, and the rest just kinda bounce off and may or may not come back around in a (hopefully) benign way later on.

But since my skin is not a particular shade of brown, it never even occurred to me that I should be teaching my kids this:

That's just pretty fucked up right there.

Today's WTF

I was going to put up a post this morning about the sheriff's deputy in Loudoun County who'd shot his daughter because he'd mistaken her for a home invader:

A Loudoun County sheriff’s deputy shot his teenage daughter at their Winchester home after mistaking her for an intruder, then crashed his car as he tried to race her to the hospital, according to the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office.

The shooting occurred about 3:30 a.m. Tuesday, when Easton McDonald, a sergeant with the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, responded to a home security alarm that alerted him to an open garage door, said Capt. Donnie Lang of the Frederick sheriff’s office.

As McDonald approached the garage, he heard noises coming from outside the door, Lang said.

“He figured someone had broken into the garage, and his family was upstairs asleep,” Lang said.

I decided not to post it because it just seemed redundant and I really get tired of the feeling that I'm yelling about something important, and nobody's listening.

BTW, don't worry - I'm not pissing on my loyal readers - all few of you are greatly appreciated.

I'm bitchin' about the world out there that's filled with people who seem bent on becoming Eloi.

Anyway, I'm putting it up now because these "isolated incidents" kinda pile up and get to be a little irksome if you don't air 'em out, so:

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- A grandmother shot and critically wounded her 7-year-old grandson early Tuesday after mistaking him for an intruder who had broken into her home, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office said.

Linda Maddox, 63, and her twin grandsons were sleeping in a bedroom after her son, who is the boy's father, had left for work at the postal service, deputies said. Maddox told deputies she had placed a chair against the bedroom door handle for extra protection while they slept.

When she heard the chair sliding against the wood floor about 1 a.m. Tuesday, she assumed it was an intruder and grabbed a loaded .22-caliber revolver she keeps by the bed and fired one shot in the dark toward the door.

The Very Excellent Mr Oliver

The Inevitable Chart Emerges

Every time the cops get slammed for a bogus shooting, we hear the standard argument from one side that cops have to go to work every day thinking they might not make it home; and from the other side, we get the contention that a career cop faces far less potential for death on the job than lots of other occupations.

Being the Google Sapien that I am, I looked it up and made this handy-dandy little chart for your referential convenience (hat tip = Democratic Underground):

Ain't none of that the point, kids.

The point is that it appears an overeager (and likely under-trained) asshole, who prob'ly shouldn't have been allowed out with a badge and a gun in the first place, confronted a young man who was walking in the middle of the street, and when he resisted the officer's orders to move to the sidewalk, was shot something like six times - including twice in the head.

Michael Brown was no angel - and BTW, Officer Wilson didn't know Brown had stolen anything at the time of the shooting - but if being something less than perfectly charming is a capital offense, then it wouldn't be so hard to find a parking place downtown on a weekday.

Two in the hat, boys and girls.  That's the fuckin' point.

Let's Try Something Else

Retribution and punishment.  That's what is seems we're all about now.

Mom Danielle Wolf was grocery shopping at a Kroger store in North Augusta, South Carolina when she was arrested for disorderly conduct after cursing in the presence of her two daughters, WJBF News Channel 6 reports.

--and--

Ms. Richardson, 28, was arrested after an officer saw the kids playing in the park with no adult supervision, parked her patrol car, and saw the kids waving her over. What then, Bay News 9?

Maybe the cops involved in those incidents could've just done a little mediating and defusing and admonishing; or maybe they could've concentrated a little more on the whole "To Serve" part of the customary motto that's supposed to be kind of a guiding principle for Law Enforcement.

But peace-making isn't what's cool now.  It isn't sexy like blowin' shit up.  When you've trained an entire generation to be soldiers (a shitload of rookie cops are coming straight outa the US Military these days), and you've reduced everything to the binary - "you're either with us or you're against us" - when it's always and only either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white - what you end up with is the mindset that wearing the uniform makes you the hero, and that means everybody else is the bad guy.

So the default position is Shoot-First-And-Fuck-You-And-Your-Questions, which doesn't leave a lot of room for anybody who wants to do the real work involved in keeping the shit from hitting fan in the first place, which is what makes it way too extraordinary when real cops like Ron Johnson come along who understand what the job is supposed to be all about, with the first tenet being that a fellow American is not the fucking enemy.

Prevention is always more cost-effective than remedy.  It costs us a lot less to provide food, clothing, housing and a decent education for a kid in the first 18 years of his life than it does to hunt him down, arrest him, put him on trial and to keep him in jail for the next 3 or 5 or 10 years.  And the costs of grinding him up in the "Justice System" are only the direct costs; the ones we can easily see and identify.  There are plenty of other costs associated with whatever his "crimes" happened to be that we usually don't even acknowledge - the Opportunity Costs of lost productivity, insurance, emergency response, recovery and rehab and on and on and on.

What's been going on in Ferguson is a really great example of all those hidden costs kinda poppin' up all at once.

And the question is: why do the people of Ferguson have to pay that price for us, instead of Wall Street and General Dynamics and Corrections Corp of America?

Today's Quote

"War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few." --James Madison

hat tip = truthout

Heroes Are People Too

I've always had a hard time articulating what rattles around in my brain when it comes to issues of military and war and the use of force.  Saying war does shitty things to "those other people" is fairly easy.  The hard part is understanding what we're doing to the war-fighters themselves.

Sending people to war is often itself the real crime.

From truthout:

"If someone orders you to kill someone else and tells you it's for a very, very good reason and you do it with the best of intentions but it turns out that you were lied to and actually killed an innocent person, then does that make you a hero, a murderer or a victim?" Haan says. "I know it doesn't make you a hero. I can't say if it makes you a murderer, but it definitely makes you a victim."[xxvii]

Weird Feeling

I was in California in August of 1962 the night Marilyn died.

And I was in California in August of 1977 the day Elvis died

It finally occurs to me that I should maybe stay the fuck outa California in August.

How Great I Art

Nothing like a little shameless self-promotion to get me goin' early in the mornin'.

I noticed my traffic numbers went way up for yesterday, and I tho't it must be another  Russian Phishing expedition - or maybe the Gold Line spammers are at it again.  

But wow - my silly little blog got a mention at Crooks and Liars!?!  

Must've been a really slow day for 'em over there, but hey - thanks, guys.

Musica

A little pensive tonite.

(for whatever stupid reasons, the levels on a lot of classical stuff is AFU - you'll wanna standby your volume/mute so you don't get blasted by the commercials)

Adagio in G Minor --Albinoni





On Wings Of Song --Mendelssohn

Nocturne No.2 Op.27 Adagio Sostenuto --Chopin

Pavane For A Dead Princess --Ravel

Reverie --Debussey

Solace (Mexican Serenade) --Scott Joplin

It's A Wonderment

We can always count on the NRA to come up with something clever to say every time some dipwad kills somebody with a gun.

So I'm wondering why they've said nothing about how the folks in Ferguson wouldn't be having all these problems if they were all properly armed.

And since we're seeing some actual repression of people by an over-amped militarized local police force - as opposed (eg) to the phony crap that went down at the Bundy place in Nevada - where are all those valiant defenders of freedom?  Where is the Tea Party Militia?  Where are the Oath Keepers?

I'm really disappointed that the True Patriots haven't showed up yet - if for no other reason than to show the Murican Public once and for all that they aren't really the gun-sucking, whiny-butt-pussy, racist assholes we all know them to be.

Francis Wilkinson at Bloomberg went to the NRA website:

What I was looking for, of course, was outrage over "jack-booted thugs" terrorizing the populace. After fundraising and paranoia, outrage is the NRA's chief product. Whether it's President Barack Obama conspiring to subvert the constitution and strip citizens of self-defense, or former President Bill Clinton deliberately fomenting violent crime as a predicate to gun control, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre has always been extra vigilant about government's potential to abuse its police powers.

"If you have a badge" under the freedom-hating Clinton administration, he said in 1995, "you have the government's go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens."

I wonder: Has the shooting death of the Missouri teen traumatized LaPierre into silence?

Logical Fallacy #22 - Anecdotal

The expression anecdotal evidence refers to evidence from anecdotes. Because of the small sample, there is a larger chance that it may be unreliable due to cherry-picked or otherwise non-representative samples of typical cases.[1][2] Anecdotal evidence is considered dubious support of a generalized claim; it is, however, perfectly acceptable for claims regarding a particular instance. Anecdotal evidence is no more than a type description (i.e., short narrative), and is often confused in discussions with its weight, or other considerations, as to the purpose(s) for which it is used. This is true regardless of the veracity of individual claims.[3][4][5]

The term is often used in contrast to scientific evidence, such as evidence-based medicine, which are types of formal accounts. Some anecdotal evidence does not qualify as scientific evidence because its nature prevents it from being investigated using the scientific method. Misuse of anecdotal evidence is an informal fallacy and is sometimes referred to as the "person who" fallacy ("I know a person who..."; "I know of a case where..." etc. Compare with hasty generalization). Anecdotal evidence is not necessarily representative of a "typical" experience; in fact, human cognitive biases such as confirmation bias mean that exceptional or confirmatory anecdotes are much more likely to be remembered. Accurate determination of whether an anecdote is "typical" requires statistical evidence.[6][7]

What I Love

It seems a lifetime ago, but there was a time I had the great privilege of being allowed to hang around at the periphery of arguments like this one:



There's just something amazingly inspiring to me when I hear the heavyweights gettin' after it like that.

And also too, the exchange between Tyson and Dawkins was exactly that - it was an exchange.  Both men are strong advocates of their respective points of view, and they don't mince words in presenting them or defending them.  But what makes this important to me is that both men have points of view that have real and intrinsic value.  They're both coming at it from the perspective of reason and provable fact - and they'll battle it out as to the best way to get their points across to an audience less knowledgable than themselves.  Ya just can't not love that.

But instead of hearing this kind of smart discussion, the "debate" we get to witness on practically any subject is limited to a stultifying exhibition of Fact vs "Yeah, but Jesus" - or Fact vs "Yeah, but some people say" - or Fact vs "Yeah, but the Democrats".

And it ends with, "So, scientists are telling us the earth is a sphere that rotates on its axis and orbits the local star, while others believe this not to be the case - obviously some good arguments on both sides, but we'll have to leave it at that because the marketing department needs to sell you some shit you've never heard of, which you don't need, and you can't afford.  Please join us tomorrow for our featured segment - Oxygen: Essential to human life or just another scam from the Chemical Manufacturers?"

Image Is A Thing

In the picture below, there are 5 guys clearly visible.

Only one of them is not dressed (and not behaving) in a manner which might indicate that he's looking for trouble.

I'm not saying there's anything that justifies the riots.  Sometimes, the reality of shitty circumstances plus the tears of impotent rage just kinda catch up with you and it all blows up in unpredictably unavoidable (and understandable) ways.

You may be at the protest to show a little solidarity with your community, and maybe to vent your spleen a little by yelling at the cops, but all it takes is for one jag-off to throw one bottle, and suddenly a really bad situation gets a whole lot worse.

Cuz here's the thing: Authoritarians will always provoke you into actions they can use to rationalize their intentions to lord their power over you.  Once that bottle is thrown, they have the excuse they were looking for all along.

Today's Pix

(click on an image to blow it all up into a slideshow)