Excusing Rogue Cops

Here is a nice post on The Agitator blog citing a new low in police "professionalism" in the US:

Maybe there’s a legitimate law enforcement reason to strip a man naked, strap him to a chair, tie a “spit hood” around his mouth, put a hood over his head (see video at the link), and douse him with pepper spray until he dies. That’s what sheriff’s deputies in Lee County, Florida did to 62-year-old Nick Christie two-and-a-half years ago.


I certainly can’t think of any such legitimate reason. But Lee County State’s Attorney Stephen Russell apparently can. Because he cleared the deputies involved of any wrongdoing.

Christie’s family just filed a lawsuit.

The cop's crime is obvious. But the more insidious crime is the State Attorney who looked but could find no "crime" in this brutal case.

Egypt in the Throes of Another Revolution

To defeat cruel leaders and a country with a tiny elite is very hard. You can kill the monster who officially runs things, but quickly a new monster grabs the reins of power and re-imposes the cruel regime. That is exactly what is happening in Egypt.

Here is a bit from an excellent article by Ahdaf Soueif in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Since Friday the military has openly engaged with civilian protesters in the heart of the capital. The protesters have been peacefully conducting a sit-in in Ministries' Street to signal their rejection of the military's appointment of Kamal Ganzouri as prime minister.

Ganzouri announced that no violence would be used to break up the Cabinet Office sit-in. Moments later the military took on the protesters. For a week Military Police and paratroopers had kidnapped activists from the streets, driven them off in unmarked vehicles, interrogated them and beaten them. On Friday they kidnapped Aboudi – one of the "Ultras" of the Ahli Football Club. They gave him back with his face so beaten and burned that you couldn't see features – and started the street war that's been raging round Ministries' Street for the last three days.

The protesters have thrown rocks at the military. The military has shot protesters, and thrown rocks, Molotov cocktails, china embossed with official parliament insignia, chairs, cupboards, filing-cabinets, glass panes and fireworks. They've dragged people into parliament and into the Cabinet Office and beaten and electrocuted them – my two nieces were beaten like this.

They beat up a newly elected young member of parliament, jeering: "Let parliament protect you, you son of … ". They took a distinguished older lady who's become known for giving food to the protesters and slapped her repeatedly about the face till she had to beg and apologise. They killed 10 people, injured more than 200, and they dragged the unconscious young woman in the blue jeans – with her upper half stripped – through the streets.

The message is: everything you rose up against is here, is worse. Don't put your hopes in the revolution or parliament. We are the regime and we're back.

Playing as Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette, the doomed queen of Louis XVI, loved to play the peasant with a cute little pastoral setup on the grounds of Versaille.

The modern equivalent is this cozy little Halloween costume party by a big foreclosure firm where the overpaid staff got to dress as homeless people. From an article by Joe Nocera in the NY Times:

On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party. The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

The party is the firm’s big annual bash. Employees wear Halloween costumes to the office, where they party until around noon, and then return to work, still in costume. I can’t tell you how people dressed for this year’s party, but I can tell you about last year’s.

That’s because a former employee of Steven J. Baum recently sent me snapshots of last year’s party. In an e-mail, she said that she wanted me to see them because they showed an appalling lack of compassion toward the homeowners — invariably poor and down on their luck — that the Baum firm had brought foreclosure proceedings against.

When we spoke later, she added that the snapshots are an accurate representation of the firm’s mind-set. “There is this really cavalier attitude,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that people are going to lose their homes.” Nor does the firm try to help people get mortgage modifications; the pressure, always, is to foreclose. I told her I wanted to post the photos on The Times’s Web site so that readers could see them. She agreed, but asked to remain anonymous because she said she fears retaliation.

...

These pictures are hardly the first piece of evidence that the Baum firm treats homeowners shabbily — or that it uses dubious legal practices to do so. It is under investigation by the New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman. It recently agreed to pay $2 million to resolve an investigation by the Department of Justice into whether the firm had “filed misleading pleadings, affidavits, and mortgage assignments in the state and federal courts in New York.” (In the press release announcing the settlement, Baum acknowledged only that “it occasionally made inadvertent errors.”)

Go look at the rich people pretending to be poor and homeless. What fun! By day you can dispossess people and by night party pretending to be the victims of your day job!

Why is America going to hell in a handbasket? Because it has lost its moral compass. The rich have gobbled up everything including the morality of the society.

Applying the Law One Foot at a Time

The police at Occupy Wall Street have become tired of pepper spraying and swinging batons, so now they just run over people with their motorcycles. Then park the motorcycle on top of the body to ensure that the "miscreant" won't wander away. This is bringing "policing" to a new high. Maybe the US is seeking to achieve the efficiencies of Syria's Bashar al-Assad, just mow the people down. Bring in the tanks and drive over them. Everybody knows that "rule of law" means give the police a free hand to be as thuggish as they want to be...



And there is this:



And this:



And this:



Of course the police and media present it as "rioting" and "unruly behaviour" by people and that the police are "just doing their duty". The fact that "their duty" included roughing up people, macing/pepper straying them, grabbing anybody with a camera and throwing them hard to the ground taking away the camera is just "standard police procedure" for the NY police.



When was the last time you saw a drunk billionaire screaming obscenities and making a "scene" at a bar or on the sidewalk manhandled like this. Never? Oh, but that is because the police have one set of rules for the bottom 99% and another for the "important" people who are in the 1%.

This is why if you are the offspring of a billionaire you can happily rape innocent people and kill them and the police never seem to connect the dots and find you guilty of anything. Here's

• an Anheuser-Busch billionaire who has left two dead people and wild car chase and has never been charged


• Ted Kennedy who left a woman to drown in his car and got away with no charges


• a Kennedy that literally got away with murder for 25 years

... America has one very lenient law for the rich and one brutal law for the bottom 99%.

Here's the best explanation I've seen yet for the behaviour of the police. Here is comic Andy Borowitz applying his keen eye to the situation:

NYPD spokesman Frank Hannefy explained the controversial decision to arrest Occupy Wall Street protesters while leaving the people who had brought the nation’s economy to the brink of Armageddon unmolested.

“As far as soulless individuals pillaging the country for their personal gain, that’s none of our business,” he said. “But we’ll be damned if we’re going to let people march on newly seeded grass.”

Right on! Get those miscreants who would trample grass and show no respect for THE LAW!

The late 19th century writer Anatole France nailed the sublimity of THE LAW:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

The Wall Street billionaires didn't trample any grass. All they did was implode the economy, destroyed $10 trillion, caused 25 million people to be unemployed, forced 10 million people to lose their homes. No reason for the cops to show any concern there. It is those Occupy Wall Street types who think they can lounge on park benches and hang out 24x7 in public parks trampling on the grass. Now there is the real danger to society!

Ultimate Evil: Stealing a Person's Soul

The "dirty war" by the right wing military reached depths only touched on by the vile regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. But they did it with a unique twist. They stole the children of the freedom fighters that they killed and raised them as their own. They not only stole the lives of those they "repressed" but they stole the very identity of the children and taught them there were something other than what they were. That is as ugly a crime as I can imagine. You literally steal a person's soul by hiding their real origin and pretending they are one with you (and your murderous ways).

Here's a bit from an article in the NY Times:

Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where “subversives” had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his “slamming his gun on the table,” she said.

It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.

Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said.

He confessed to her what he had done in 2000, Ms. Montenegro said. But it was not until she testified at a trial here last spring that she finally came to grips with her past, shedding once and for all the name that Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife had given her — María Sol — after falsifying her birth records.

The trial, in the final phase of hearing testimony, could prove for the first time that the nation’s top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.

Jorge Rafael Videla, who led the military during Argentina’s dictatorship, stands accused of leading the effort to take babies from mothers in clandestine detention centers and give them to military or security officials, or even to third parties, on the condition that the new parents hide the true identities. Mr. Videla is one of 11 officials on trial for 35 acts of illegal appropriation of minors.

The trial is also revealing the complicity of civilians, including judges and officials of the Roman Catholic Church.

Notice the crimes of the Catholic Church. Not only is the Church into sheltering pederasts and a long history of using Church doctrine to shield tyrants and the rich from the just social demands of the poor, the Church worked with these ghouls who stole babies from victims they killed to let right wing crazies raise them "as their own".

Here is the crime in which the Catholic Church freely collaborated:

In Latin America, the baby thefts were largely unique to Argentina’s dictatorship, Mr. Vivanco said. There was no such effort in neighboring Chile’s 17-year dictatorship.

One notable difference was the role of the Catholic Church. In Argentina the church largely supported the military government, while in Chile it confronted the government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and sought to expose its human rights crimes, Mr. Vivanco said.

Priests and bishops in Argentina justified their support of the government on national security concerns, and defended the taking of children as a way to ensure they were not “contaminated” by leftist enemies of the military, said Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a Nobel Prize-winning human rights advocate who has investigated dozens of disappearances and testified at the trial last month.

...

Church officials in Argentina and at the Vatican declined to answer questions about their knowledge of or involvement in the covert adoptions.

For many years, the search for the missing children was largely futile. But that has changed in the past decade thanks to more government support, advanced forensic technology and a growing genetic data bank from years of testing. The latest adoptee to recover her real identity, Laura Reinhold Siver, brought the total number of recoveries to 105 in August.

Go read the whole article. It is very sad. It takes these victims years to shed their old identity and come to understand the horror of the crime committed against them and their birth parents. Read the article to become acquainted with just a couple of the hundreds of victims.

The Horror of War

Here is the first of 20 videos from a 2001 BBC production War of the Century. It focuses on the fight between Hitler and Stalin. It is very graphic. The producers wanted to focus on how vicious the fighting was, how both sides stooped to war crimes. It is a very ugly insight into how brutal people can be. Soldiers on both sides who participated in war crimes are asked if they felt they had committed a crime (they mostly say "no" or justify it by saying "it was long ago and a different time) and they are asked if they would do it again (a few say "yes" and many beat around the bushes). The video exposes the hatred that is still there:

America's Dirty Little Secret

Here is a bit from an opinion piece by Michael Gerson at the Washington Post:

The human papillomavirus (HPV) is a nasty, sexually transmitted disease contracted by about three-quarters of Americans at some point. You can have it, and spread it, without knowing it. In some women, the virus causes abnormal cells in the lining of the cervix that can develop into cancerous lesions. Virtually all cervical cancer is caused by HPV. There is, however, a vaccine that is highly effective against the most dangerous HPV strains. The main side effect, as you’d expect in a procedure involving a needle, is fainting. The Cen­ters for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that all girls should get it anyway.

At least this approach would have added to the public stock of health information. Instead, Michele Bachmann talked of “innocent little 12-year-old girls” who were “forced to have a government injection” by Rick Perry’s 2007 mandate of HPV vaccinations in Texas. Bachmann later added, on the medical authority of a weeping mother’s anecdote, that the HPV vaccine, or maybe it was some other vaccine, might cause “mental retardation.” Bachmann herself seems prone to a serious condition: the compulsive desire to confirm every evangelical stereotype of censorious ignorance....

Try to imagine a parent-daughter conversation about sexual restraint and maturity that includes the words: “Honey, I’m going to deny you a vaccine that prevents a horrible, bleeding cancer, just as a little reminder of the religious values I’ve been trying to teach you.” This would be morally monstrous. Such ethical electroshock therapy has nothing to do with cultivation of character in children. It certainly has nothing to do with Christianity, which teaches that moral rules are created for the benefit of the individual, not to punish them with preventable death.

This approach to moral education may appeal to a certain kind of conservative politician. How could it possibly appeal to a parent, conservative or otherwise?

America's political right is willing to play dirty, willing to use 12 year old girls, and the ugly painful death from cancer to win its political games. This is called "family values". I call it sadistic, cruel, inhuman, and vicious politics, a no-holds-barred ugly politics whose only purpose is to game power and is willing to stomp all over anybody to get to the top of the heap.

Dominic Streatfeild's "A History of the World Since 9/11"

This is an excellent history of our times. I expected a typical history of events, leaders, and themes. But instead this author presents 8 chapters which introduce a policy stance then burrows down to look at a small handful of "ordinary" people affected by the policy. The author's intent is to lay bare just how badly wrong the "war on terror" has gone. Here is a nice summary of the author's view from the Epilogue:

Outspoken liberals like to display their hatred of the lead players behind the War on Terror. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair: the villains of the piece. The truth is that, with a few notable exceptions, nobody covered themselves with glory. Opposition political parties failed to intervene; the military failed to stand behind its beliefs that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan required better resourcing, manpower and planning; the intelligence community failed to insist that caveats in the products were there for a reason. The media failed to inform the public there were serious problems. Perhaps the blame should be shared? There's enough to go round.

Doubtless there is a case to be made that the world changed as a result of 9/11. But how it changed was not up to Bin Laden, al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It was up to us. We could have reacted differently. We didn't.

As a result, the situation in which we currently find ourselves is not one that has been thrust upon us. It's one that we have chosen. Al-Qaeda doesn't threaten our existence. It never did. Our reaction to it just might.

The book has some wonderfuly graphic stories of individuals and the very real effects of 9/11 on them:

• Chapter 1 looks at Bush's dictum that "the rules have changed" and that "we must take the war to them" and that pre-emptive war was necessary. It ties this with a crazy criminal character in Texas who goes unhinged after seeing the towers fall on 9/11 and decides to go after "the enemy". For him this is anybody ethnically Middle Easternish and he ends up killing an innocent immigrant from India, a Hindu. Streatfeild lays out these characters in great detail. The hard struggle by the Hindu to build a life in America and provide a business built on serving his customers. A very nice guy who worked hard but ended up killed by a madman lashing out at "enemies" to pre-empt their attack on his beloved America. A madman with a criminal past and a mind twisted by drug abuse and violence. Tragic.


• Chapter 2 looks at the "gloves are off" and "the rules have changed. It focuses on a family fleeing Iraq prior to 9/11 but who get caught at sea in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and harshly interned by Australia. The Australians tried to turn away the boat but the desperate immigrants tried everything to prevent being turned away. The brutal treatment left many deeply injured, some insane, from the years spent in limbo under vicious treatment by an anti-refugee policy by Australia. Tragic.


• Chapter 3 looks at the idea that the "war on terror" had to be fought viciously and that all deaths were the fault of al Qaeda and not of those in the West responding to having been attacked. This chapter looks at the excited and joyous planning of a wedding in Afghanistan. Unfortunately this was in the home province of Mullah Omar and the Americans with their "too little boots on the ground" incompetent intelligence decide that Mullah Omar will show up at the wedding. So they unleash the hell fire of US weapons on innocent people 48 were killed and 117 wounded. This disturbing story is only one of many, many in Afghanistan over a decade of "mistakes" by Americans in their war against a nearly invisible enemy.


• Chapter 8 looks at the "unintended consequences" of a war. In this case, it focuses on the world-wide program to eradicate polio. This program was within a year or two or three of success when 9/11 happened. Sadly, it now appears the world has utterly failed to eradicate polio and since there is now billions with no experience with the disease and many hundreds of millions of children with no immunity, the disease is poised to strike back worse than it was during the height of the great polio epidemics of the mid-20th century. This chapter focuses on the tale of a very dedicated, wonderful doctor who struggles to complete the fight against polio in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Sadly, the Muslims come to believe that the vaccine is a Western plot to sterilize them and that the drugs given to them are adulterated with female hormones and pig fat, they refuse the vaccine. Worse, they blow up the car in which the vaccine team is traveling and kill several including this doctor. Another tragic "consequence" of the war.

The other chapters focus on big policy themes and make them real by looking at the level of individual lives. It is all very tragic. But it makes this book especially powerful and poignant. Wars have consequences. How you fight them is very important. Sadly, the Bush administration was cavalier (cowboyish?) in its conduct of a war that has now killed hundreds and soon thousands more than were ever killed on 9/11.

One final quote from the book to hammer home the obscenities that have come out of "the war on terrorism":

Meanwhile, most of these nations seized on the exceptional nature of the post-9/11 threat, then used it as a justification for enacting domestic legislation that aped US policy regarding human rights: restrictions of rights for foreigners and asylum seekers; indefinite incarceration of suspects without trial; withdrawal of the right to an attorney; suspension of habeas corpus; enhanced surveillance techniques. The list went on and on.

'I do not underestimate the ability of fanatical groups to kill and destroy,' conceded Lord Hoffmann in a famous judgement on the incarceration of terror suspects without trial in the United Kingdom in December 2004. 'But they do not threaten the life of the nation.' The real threat to the United Kingdom, he warned, 'comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.'

Five years later, the Human Rights Council's Eminent Panel of Jurists on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights agreed. After an exhaustive three-year study of the effects of the War on Terror on human rights globally, the Panel concluded that human rights protections, assembled over the last sixty years, had been corroded to the point where the international legal order was in jeopardy. Especially worrying was that the nations that had previously argued for the primacy of human rights were the very same nations now busily opting out of them. The result was 'perhaps one of the most serious challenges ever posed to the integrity of a system carefully constructed after the Second World War.'

Everybody should read this book. It will make them sit up and pay attention to the "war" that has been conducted "on their behalf". It will change their way of viewing the world.

Lawrence O'Donnell Against Police Brutality

It isn't often that somebody with the pulpit of major media uses that position to speak the truth. Here is an excellent segment on the brutal NY City police beating up "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrators behaving legally.



He tells the truth when he says that the police are behaving brutally because they don't want video catching their behaviour. The police want to keep their brutal crimes hidden from the public's eyes. O'Donnell speaks the truth. This video is well worth watching.

Previous posts are here and here.

Update: The UK's Guardian newspaper has identified the cop who maced the woman. He's a repeat offender because he is also up for a previous charge of abusing his powers and assaulting an innocent demonstrator. Here is the key bit:

A senior New York police officer accused of pepper-spraying young women on the "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations is the subject of a pending legal action over his conduct at another protest in the city.

The Guardian has learned that the officer, named by activists as deputy inspector Anthony Bologna, stands accused of false arrest and civil rights violations in a claim brought by a protester involved in the 2004 demonstrations at the Republican national convention.

Then, 1,800 people were arrested during protests against the Iraq war and the policies of president George W Bush.

The Insanity of Anti-Technology

Most people are abysmally ignorant of the role of science and technology in today's world. They have wildly romantic images of "organic gardening" and "back to nature" view of life. They are terrified of pesticides and absolutely ignorant of the fact that your veggies are packed with lethal concoctions natural to the plant as its defense against insects and other animals tempted to nibble on it.

These people think they can give up on nuclear power because it is dangerous while not aware of the deaths from traditional energy sources. They don't understand the trade-offs that must be taken in all aspects of our life. Mostly these are the coddled children of middle and upper class families, young adults never responsible for feeding and clothing themselves. But they get sucked up in a "great cause" of anti-science.

One of the most laughable was the "frankenfood" movement based in Europe. These people are convinced that if you transfer genes from one species to another you are upsetting "God's plan" and have created a great sin. They see genetically modified food as both dangerous and sinful. But they are completely ignorant of science and the fact that all life is chock-a-block full of "foreign genes" transported by viruses. This has been happening for a couple of billion years. The genetically modified food is perfectly safe unless the experiment was to move toxin-generating coding into the new species. But no food researcher is interested in poisoning people. They are trying to create stronger, better crops, e.g. move vitamin A into rice crops to fight disease. From Wikipedia:

Approximately 250,000–500,000 children in developing countries become blind each year owing to vitamin A deficiency, with the highest prevalence in Southeast Asia and Africa.

Again from Wikipedia:

Golden rice is a variety of Oryza sativa rice produced through genetic engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of pro-vitamin A in the edible parts of rice.

This is the horror of "frankenfood"? This is engineered food to save half a million children per year from blindness.

The madness of anti-science was seen in the Unabomber. He was judge, jury, and executioner for his perceived "wrongs" of scientific researchers. Nobody appointed him. He had to pass no tests or get a license to go on his murderous spree. Rather than work within the system and try to set up regulations for ensuring safe research, he went on a killing spree. This is the "saviour" of mankind. Just as Osama Bin Laden was the "saviour" of a purist Islam. Self-appointed fanatics gone murderous and feeling saintly about their vicious trade.

Now I come to the purpose of this post. You should read about the latest gang of murderous anti-science fanatics and their handiwork. Here is a bit from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about attacks on nanotechnology researchers in Mexico by self-appointed "saviours" of humanity:

A package bomb that injured two professors at a university here this month is the latest in a string of attacks by a new terror group inspired by the Unabomber. Its violent actions have put campuses across Mexico on alert and caused nanotechnology researchers worldwide to take precautions with their mail.

Nanotechnology was singled out as a target for the attacks in manifestos posted on the Web by the group behind the bombs, which calls itself "Individualities Tending Toward Savagery." It has been linked to attacks in France, Spain, and Chile, and to a bomb sent earlier this year to a scientist at another Mexican university who specializes in nanotech. An analyst who helped identify the Unabomber—who turned out to be a former professor—says the posts show signs of someone well-educated who could be affiliated with a college.

The online rants credit the Unabomber as an inspiration. ...

...

In the group's online post (written in Spanish) claiming credit for the latest bombing, the terrorists complained about the growing number of nanotechnology experts in Mexico, which it estimated at 650. "The ever more rapid acceleration of this technology will lead to the creation of nanocyborgs that can self-replicate automatically without the help of a human," it said.

...

Many people in the region are skeptical of science, he adds. "In our country, and in the whole Latin American region, we put more faith in the supernatural than in reason. This poses fatal consequences, making people view researchers in science and technology with suspicion and hate, as inhuman individuals, who work against society and as the exploiters and destroyers of natural resources."

These anti-science fanatics can't be bothered with facts. No researcher that I know of is trying to develop this kind of dystopian technology. Everybody I know is working to make a better world, like the first fellow who rubbed two sticks together to create fire. Sure, I'll bet there were those sitting around the resulting campfire speculating that some mad caveman would use this "new technology" to set afire all the forests of the world and destroy earth. Maybe they even plotted to kill the fire-starter and ensure the knowledge was lost because they saw it as a clear danger to the lovely lifestyle of sitting in the dark and cold eating raw meat and uncooked veggies.

People need to realize that science is what gives us the comfortable life we have. Those who are anti-science should put their energies into going "back to the land" and living with a "technology-free" lifestyle and quit trying to use murderous plottings to kill of the rest of us that are quite happy to benefit from fire, metal working, the wheel, the agricultural revolution, modern medicine, etc.

Two things astound me about these fanatics:

1. Their temerity to act on own behalf to bring their twisted vision of the future to reality. Who appointed them? What right have they?


2. The abysmal ignorance of these fanatics of the role of science in technology in modern life. Their blind ideology puts ignorance on a pedestal and they worship it. They use religion or just crass stupidity as justification for their evil actions without understanding what they claim to oppose or what the consequences of their actions truly are.

In my youth I was naive and thought the aberration of the Nazis with their ignorant anti-science views (the condemnation of "Jewish science" and their idiotic race theories) was a one-time thing. But as I get older I see more and more outbreaks of this kind of insanity. What truly astounds me is that these deluded people convince themselves they are the "benefactors" of humanity by going on a killing spree (just as Osama Bin Laden saw himself as the saviour of Islam by going on a jihad against the West). Insane!

Your Friendly Local Helpful Police

Before:


After:


From Wikipedia: Kelly Thomas (April 5, 1974 – July 10, 2011) was a 37-year-old homeless man suffering from schizophrenia, and living on the streets of Fullerton, California. He was fatally beaten by members of the Fullerton Police Department on July 5, 2011.

If you are curious how the protectors of community safety, the "good guys", decided upon this treatment of Kelly Thomas, watch this video:



Sadly, in Canada the oversight of the police rests with the police. And -- surprise! -- the police decide that the good guys only do good. There are no bad apples in the barrel and the citizens are the ones up to no good and must be "disciplined" to ensure public order.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for a well-paid, professional police force. But I want a police that serves the public and not themselves. They shouldn't abuse their position to beat up the weak and defenseless. They should focus on crime. And their focus must not be limited to the corner store hold-up. It must include the while collar crimes that steal millions -- even billions -- and unfortunately are treated as "victimless" crimes. They aren't. People lose their life savings from financial crimes. The devastation of a Bernie Madoff or, on a smaller scale, the Canadian Bertram Earl Jones is vastly greater than a corner store stick up. But the police and the courts come down hard on the little guy and let the white collar criminal off scot-free.

What is especially bad is when police take matters into their own hands and become judge, jury, and executioner. A classic case of this is the killing of Ian Bush who supposedly struggled with an RCMP officer who was behind him and trying to subdue him. The RCMP story is that Ian Bush reached behind himself, disarmed the officer, then in the struggle managed to point the gun behind his head, and shot himself to death while holding the pistol behind his own head. (Try that for yourself!) If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I can sell you for a very good price.

For a short list of "police gone wild" in Canada, read this Wikipedia article.

Your Friend, Mr. Policeman

Funny. When I was a kid I was taught that Mr. Policeman was my friend. I've since learned to give them wide berth because you can't predict how they will behave and you essentially have no rights unless you have lots of money and powerful friends to help you buy/bribe the appropriate "justice".

Here is a case of an adolescent who was beaten and arrested "because he had a suspicious bulge in his pants". That was a colostomy bag. And the guy suffered Down's symdrome so when the police got pushy and aggressive, the poor kid did what any normal person (or animal) would do. He tried to flee. That simply enraged the cop who was too stupid to recognize mental impairment or be acquainted with the need for colostomy bags.

And here is the case of a physically disabled woman sitting in front of her house who didn't jump when a cop ordered her to "jump". She mistakenly believed that she had a right to sit on her property and wait for the ice cream truck to drive by so she could get some ice cream. The cop "subdued" her so violently during her arrest she had to be taken to the hospital for treatment of injuries during the "arrest".

It is good to see that the "land of the free" has police to make sure that freedom is properly respected. It is so heart-warming to read that "the best country in the world" is protected by diligent police who aren't confused or impeded by mental retardation or physical disability. They believe in dishing out "justice" to any and all with an "even hand".

When you read the above, you can understand why the US is busy killing thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are simply doing "police work" on an international scale bringing the fruits of American "freedom" and "love of liberty" to everyone.

I wish I lived in a world where the police were in fact "working for the people" and respected citizen's rights. But sadly, I live in an alternate universe where the police feel they are employed by the top 1% to enforce a system where the job of the bottom 99% is to help enrich to top 1%. In this alternate universe, the laws are written to give tax cuts to the rich while providing the "benefits" of fees and hidden taxes to the bottom 99%. The judicial system is a pompous, expensive, ridiculous system that delivers "justice" that is tangential to real justice. The rich get their wrists slapped no matter how many victims and how seriously harmed those victims are. The poor get manhandled and long prison terms for their "crimes" no matter how little real harm (if any) was done because "everybody knows" the poor are dangerous and must be watched closely and severely punished for the least intimation that they might step out of line.

The New Trend in American Politics

Mark Thomas has a post on his Economist's View blog discussing the new trend in American politics:

The CBPP notices what may be a new trend:

Yet another state has proposed raising taxes on low-income residents to pay for new corporate tax breaks. Leading lawmakers in Missouri want to eliminate a property tax credit for low- and moderate-income seniors and people with disabilities in order to help finance new tax credits for businesses.

Sadly, swaps like this are increasingly common; both Michigan and Wisconsin have cut low-income programs this year to pay for business tax breaks.

The Missouri proposal, which the legislature will consider in a special session that begins today, would make renters ineligible for the state’s property tax “circuitbreaker” credit. Landlords generally pass along a large share of their property taxes to tenants in the form of higher rents; the circuitbreaker credit helps offset those higher rents for more than 100,000 low-income and disabled Missouri residents. ... Some 29 states offer property tax circuitbreakers or similar programs.

Killing this tax credit would raise taxes on some of Missouri’s most vulnerable residents by up to $750 a year. It would also hurt local retailers and other businesses, since low-income people are among those most likely to spend every dollar they have. That’s not a smart deal for Missouri.

It used to be that policymakers would try to shift income from higher to lower income individuals based upon the idea that the lower savings rate at lower incomes would stimulate demand (i.e. the MPC is higher at lower incomes, so transferring income in this way increases consumption). That is a demand-side argument.

...

The supply-side, trickle down argument from the GOP goes beyond the rich:

...Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) told CNN yesterday that he’s visited with a lot of business people lately, and he’s learned they’re “actually afraid to hire people” because they’re “afraid of what the government will do to them.”

That’s awfully dumb — when Republicans find evidence of government punishing employers for hiring workers, they should let everyone know — but it was the next part of the interview that really stood out.

“I have talked to a lot of businesses in South Carolina who can’t get employees to come back to work because they are getting unemployment and they’re getting food stamps and they say, ‘Call me when unemployment runs out.’ […]

“There are a lot of people who desperately need it and we need to make sure that we have that safety net in place, but we also have to realize there are a lot of people gaming the system right now.”

I’m not sure which of DeMint’s talking points were supposed to believe — are employers afraid to hire or are they struggling with lazy people who won’t apply for openings? — but the rhetoric is a reminder that Republicans just don’t seem to like the unemployed.

In DeMint’s mind, the jobless are living it up on meager unemployed benefits, and don’t want to seek gainful employment.

Thus, instead of arguing that giving money to the unemployed helps to stimulate demand, and thereby boost sales and employment, the supply-sider's argument is that it makes the unemployed lazy. So we should take away all of that money and give it to the rich who, of course, deserve and earn every penny they get and will run out and invest it in new business ventures no matter how depressed the economy might be. It has nothing to do with the incentive to do what's best for the rich and powerful, it's what's best for the people whose programs get cut to fund these tax cuts for wealthy indiviuals and businesses.

Go read the original post to get the embedded links.

Mark Thoma has made the right wing politics of the US utterly clear. No more progressive taxes. No breaks for the guy on the bottom. The guy on the bottom will be taxed and taxed so more tax cuts can be engineering for the fat cats on top. Oh... and the politicians are getting more ridiculous in the "blame the victim" game by claiming that the unemployed are refusing to work because they are addicted to the "easy money" from unemployment. I guess those huge lines of tens of thousands showing up at the Black Caucus jobs fairs around the US weren't serious about finding a job. They went and stood in the hot summer sun for long hours just to get their jollies. That's the story of the right wing politicos.

What a mean-spirited, vicious country the US has become under the right wing. And the amazing thing is that the real heart of the Republican party are those evangelicals, the Bible-thumping Christians who apparently haven't opened their holy books to find what Jesus said about the poor (love them, give to them) and the rich (it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven). It is pretty clear to me that as the role of religion has grown in the right wing politics in the US, the right has gotten more mean-spirited and vicious in their treatment of the poor, the disadvantaged, the sick, etc. What a sad, sad state of affairs.

Paul Krugman Notices an Oddity of 9/11

Here is a post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog:

The Years of Shame

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

Paul Krugman takes a lot of flak for telling things as he sees them. He is courageous and modest, and he has stayed in the fight despite being ignored and hated. To me, he is like an Old Testament prophet: reviled in his own land, but one day he will be recognized for his honest, heroic, and prescient stand. He's been dead right on almost every issue.

Meanwhile, for comic relief, there is Michael Moore who has done much to publicize problems and wrongs, but who can't resist putting his own ego front and centre. If you want to read something that is 180^o out from Krugman's quiet stance, read this article by Michael Moore where he turns the focus off the big issue and instead focuses on "me, me, me". I like Michael Moore but I don't like his narcissistic egotism. Krugman stays at his post focused on the issues, while Michael Moore makes sure he is in the shot when he does a documentary or writes up the injustice or tragedy with his own ego front and centre. I prefer the quiet hero.

As for 9/11... here is a post by Barry Ritholtz at his The Big Picture blog that best captures my opinion about the way the media is milking the situation:

Relentless Media Hype

I’ve already had my say about what happened 10 years ago. I do not feel a compelling need to revisit it again and again and again.

MSNBC is replaying their September 11, 2001 broadcast; the WSJ made their entire 9/12 paper available online. Other outlets are doing similar “tributes” if thats the right word.

I don’t know if anyone else feels this way, but the relentless 9/11 coverage and tributes feels both ghoulish and exploitative. Sorry, but this is simply too much, I’ve had more than I can take of this. I do not care to spend the entire day crying, but if I watch any more of this coverage that is what will happen.

To those people who can find some consolation in this, I wish you well. Its a macabre spectacle to me. I need to find something more joyous and upbeat.

Between narcissistic egoism and bathetic maudlinism and commercial exploitation, I'm finding early September to be the doldrums of the year.

Update 2011sep12: Here is an added post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog that gives his thoughts about the exploitation of 9/11:

More About the 9/11 Anniversary

It looks as if I should say a bit more about yesterday’s anniversary. So:

The fact is that the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America – a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq. It’s probably worth pointing out that I’m not saying anything now that I wasn’t saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there’s nothing I’ve done in my life of which I’m more proud.

It was a time when tough talk was confused with real heroism, when people who made speeches, then feathered their own political or financial nests, were exalted along with – and sometimes above – those who put their lives on the line, both on the evil day and after.

So it was a shameful episode in our nation’s history – and it’s one that I can’t help thinking about whenever we talk about 9/11 itself.

Now, I should have said that the American people behaved remarkably well in the weeks and months after 9/11: There was very little panic, and much more tolerance than one might have feared. Muslims weren’t lynched, and neither were dissenters, and that was something of which we can all be proud.

But the memory of how the atrocity was abused is and remains a painful one. And it’s a story that I, at least, can neither forget nor forgive.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous

For me the 1980s were a nightmare. America fell in love with the TV show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. I found it wretched to think that people "adored" the rich because of their wealth. But the era from 1980 to now has been marked by this deference to the rich and powerful

People need to wake up from their illusions. This story from CNN should help. Here is yet another story of "lifestyles of the rich and famous" where the curtain is peeled back and you can see the corruption and meanness and the evil that lurks behind the glitter:

As we were about to leave, one of the staff told us there was a nanny who worked for Hannibal Gadhafi who might speak to us. He said she'd been burnt by Hannibal's wife, Aline.

I thought he meant perhaps a cigarette stubbed out on her arm. Nothing prepared me for the moment I walked into the room to see Shweyga Mullah.

At first I thought she was wearing a hat and something over her face. Then the awful realization dawned that her entire scalp and face were covered in red wounds and scabs, a mosaic of injuries that rendered her face into a grotesque patchwork.

Even though the burns were inflicted three months ago, she was clearly still in considerable pain. But she told us her story calmly.

She'd been the nanny to Hannibal's little son and daughter.

The 30-year-old came to Libya from her native Ethiopia a year ago. At first things seemed OK, but then six months into her employment she said she was burned by Aline.

Three months later the same thing happened again, this time much more seriously.

In soft tones, she explained how Aline lost her temper when her daughter wouldn't stop crying and Mullah refused to beat the child.

"She took me to a bathroom. She tied my hands behind my back, and tied my feet. She taped my mouth, and she started pouring the boiling water on my head like this," she said, imitating the vessel of scalding hot water being poured over her head.

She peeled back the garment draped carefully over her body. Her chest, torso and legs are all mottled with scars -- some old, some still red, raw and weeping. As she spoke, clear liquid oozed from one nasty open wound on her head.

After one attack, "There were maggots coming out of my head, because she had hidden me, and no one had seen me," Mullah said.

Eventually, a guard found her and took her to a hospital, where she received some treatment.

But when Aline Gadhafi found out about the kind actions of her co-worker, he was threatened with imprisonment, if he dared to help her again.

"When she did all this to me, for three days, she wouldn't let me sleep," Mullah said. "I stood outside in the cold, with no food. She would say to staff, 'If anyone gives her food, I'll do the same to you.' I had no water -- nothing."

Her colleague, a man from Bangladesh who didn't want to give his name, says he was also regularly beaten and slashed with knives. He corroborated Mullah's account and says the family's dogs were treated considerably better than the staff.

Mullah was forced to watch as the dogs ate and she was left to go hungry, he said.

It seems to sum up how the workers at the beachside complex were viewed by the Gadhafi family.

This is definitely beyond the Queen of Mean, Leona Helmsley, who was a darling of Robin Leach and his unctuous program Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

The problem with a society where a few are fabulously weathy and many are dirt poor is that the rich become unhinged. They develop delusions of grandeur and think they deserve what they have and turn ugly and mean toward those who are not so "blessed" with the goodies of life. This is a sickness.

Sadly, America has fallen to this illness and is still running a fever. I hoped that with the election of Barack Obama the fever would break, but it hasn't. I know it must and will some day. I wish it were sooner rather than later. But for now, the disease is still running wild in the soul of America.

Understanding Why Some Poor People Oppose Assistance to the Poor

Here is a theory of behaviour that I had never considered. It is counter-intuitive but after reading it, I can see the truth in it. But without the imprimateur of a scientific study, I admit that I wouldn't believe it.

Here are some details of a study reported in an article in The Economist magazine:

Paradoxically, as the share of the population that receives benefits in a given area rises, support for welfare in the area falls. A new NBER paper finds evidence for an even more intriguing and provocative hypothesis. Its authors note that those near but not at the bottom of the income distribution are often deeply ambivalent about greater redistribution.

Economists have usually explained poor people’s counter-intuitive disdain for something that might make them better off by invoking income mobility. Joe the Plumber might not be making enough to be affected by proposed hikes in tax rates on those making more than $250,000 a year, they argue, but he hopes some day to be one of them. This theory explains some cross-country differences, but it would also predict increased support for redistribution as income inequality widens. Yet the opposite has happened in America, Britain and other rich countries where inequality has risen over the past 30 years.

Instead of opposing redistribution because people expect to make it to the top of the economic ladder, the authors of the new paper argue that people don’t like to be at the bottom. One paradoxical consequence of this “last-place aversion” is that some poor people may be vociferously opposed to the kinds of policies that would actually raise their own income a bit but that might also push those who are poorer than them into comparable or higher positions. The authors ran a series of experiments where students were randomly allotted sums of money, separated by $1, and informed about the “income distribution” that resulted. They were then given another $2, which they could give either to the person directly above or below them in the distribution.

In keeping with the notion of “last-place aversion”, the people who were a spot away from the bottom were the most likely to give the money to the person above them: rewarding the “rich” but ensuring that someone remained poorer than themselves. Those not at risk of becoming the poorest did not seem to mind falling a notch in the distribution of income nearly as much. This idea is backed up by survey data from America collected by Pew, a polling company: those who earned just a bit more than the minimum wage were the most resistant to increasing it.

Poverty may be miserable. But being able to feel a bit better-off than someone else makes it a bit more bearable.

This is an almost classic case of "cutting your nose off to spite your face" except here the poor opposing aid are getting a benefit. A meagre one. But something of value to them. They can be smug in the distance between their own poverty and that of those who they are pushing down further into poverty.

Education in America

This story is the Springfield Missouri News-Leader takes the cake for benighted, misguided, and stupid school administration. It is so crazy it seems impossible to be true:

A female student raped in 7th grade, but the school officials don’t believe her and force her to “apologize” to her rapist, and then they go ahead an expel her from school as her punishment for "lying". Next year she is allowed to come back to school, and her rapist commits yet another rape on her!

A lawsuit filed against the Republic School District alleges school officials failed to protect a middle school girl from a male classmate who harassed her, sexually assaulted her, and raped her.

In its written response, the school district denies all allegations in the suit and calls the claims frivolous.

The suit, filed July 5, alleges when the girl — a special education student — told officials about the harassment, assault and rape that occurred during the 2008-09 school year, they told her they did not believe her. She recanted.

The suit also alleges that, without seeking her mother’s permission, school officials forced the girl to write a letter of apology to the boy and personally deliver it to him. She was then expelled for the rest of the 2008-2009 school year and referred to juvenile authorities for filing a false report.

...

In 2009-10, the girl was allowed back in school, and the boy continued to harass and assault her, the suit says. She did not tell school officials because she was afraid she would be accused of lying and kicked out of school.

In February 2010, the boy allegedly forcibly raped the girl again, this time in the back of the school library. While school officials allegedly expressed skepticism of the girl, her mother took her to the Child Advocacy Center and an exam showed a sexual assault had occurred. DNA in semen found on the girl matched the DNA of the boy she accused, the suit says.

The boy was taken into custody in Juvenile Court and pleaded guilty to charges, the suit says.

In the days before DNA analysis and before female empowerment, this series of crimes would have been ignored and the victim would have been stigmatized for life. I personally think the old-fashioned punishment of tar-and-feathering should be revived and used on the school board, the principal of this school, and some of the senior staff. This story is simply incredible.

Not only is this girl working with a mental handicap, but she has to deal with a cruel and indifferent school board and school staff. I can only imagine that the school staff was absolutely ignorant and indifferent to the conditions of their school and the plight of kids being bullied and harrassed by the wild and cruel elements in the school population (and probably even in the school staff). It is a story of an incompetent and probably vicious school hierarchy that attracted depraved types to both run its schools and act as teachers in the sadistic enterprise that pretended to be a "school"). Incredible.

If Your Culinary Taste is for the Lively...

Here's how to prepare your next meal...



That is mildly interesting. But what I like as my next meal is something that doesn't look like macabre death, a discombubulated frog with one last twitch left in him.

I like a dish that jumps up and shouts "I'm very much alive". I want a dinner that is going to arm wrestle with me as I try to down it...



Yum!

Anybody for another course of dishes? Maybe something with sharp teeth and not just lively movement? Something that has an aura of both death and danger?

Here's a blog posting on Scientific American to explain all this mysterious animation. It is nicely titled "Instant Zombie -- Just Add Salt".

How the Natural World Really Works

Everybody "just knows" that what is natural is better than the artificial man-made stuff. Everybody "knows" that before Western society brought their brutal colonizing ways to the rest of the world, the primitives and other cultures lived in a natural harmony because nature is good and kind. Like the Bible says: in the natural world the lion lies down with the lamb.

But scientists didn't get the memo. They go out and look at the "natural" world and bring back some real horror stories. Here's a blog post by Robert Lamb on Tor.com that helps dissolve the illusion that "natural is better, natural is good, natural is beautiful"...

To quote esteemed mad scientist Seth Brundle, “Insects don’t have politics.” Theirs is a world of intricate brutality and wasps have been excelling in it for more than a hundred million years.

This latest example comes to us in this paper from France’s CNRS (Délégation Paris Michel-Ange) and it concerns a wasp that not only hatches from its egg inside the belly of a ladybug, but upon emerging forces its eviscerated host to guard its cocoon while it transitions from larva to full-grown horror wasp.

Dinocampus coccinellae is its name and one can only imagine that Zombie author Joyce Carol Oates keeps a few of them as pets.

To recap, parasitism runs big in the wasp world. As I explain in How Wasps Work, the ancient wasps of the Cretaceous period were predatory and carnivorous. They ate arachnids and other insects and they LOVED it. But then the rise of the angiosperms introduced an even better food source: nectar and pollen. So the wasps of old largely abandoned their flesh-eating ways, except for the carnivorous feasts required by their squirming young. Some wasps abandoned this practice all together (and became bees), but you’ll still find countless varieties of wasps that either deposit their eggs inside a living host (that’s what the stinger evolved for) or who fill larval chambers in their nest with stunned meals.

So the fact that that Dinocampus coccinellae hatches inside the belly of a host bug following some makeshift, catastrophic surgery by its parent is nothing out of the ordinary. But when it celebrates its Chest-Burst Mitzvah, that’s when it gets all weird and noteworthy. Normally, the host organism mercifully dies at this point, but DC’s ladybug is not so lucky. Not only does it live, but a little behavior modification forces it to hang around and “guard” its parasite-baby as it grows into adulthood beneath its protective bulk. Scientists believe that secretions left by the larva when it bursts out might play a role in reprograming the host.

But then the ladybug dies right? Surely once the wasp reaches adulthood, our long-suffering host can at last rest in peace. No such luck. This is the insect world, after all. The researchers found that 25 percent of the manipulated ladybugs recovered normal behavior following their ordeal.

I’m really hoping this makes it into the next PIXAR A Bug’s Life movie.

I get a chuckle out of people who believe that "natural" cures are better than scientifically developed drugs. They are so deluded. But the joke is on me. This kind of anti-science and looney thinking is spreading. A hundred and fifty years ago you could have destroyed science and the world would have trudged on to miserable future compared to what we live in, but it would have struggled on without a mass die off. But if you removed science today, something like 80% of the population would die within a few years. We can't feed or clothe ourselves without modern science. Despite this, a rising majority shun science and hold tight to a warm-and-fuzzy lie that "natural is best".

People buy "organic" groceries not realizing that (1) everything is "organic" unless you redefine it from its original meaning of "from organisms" and (2) all plants are loaded with poisons to try to protect themselves from grazers and modern chemicals are really just more of the same (sure some of them are really bad for you, but that's why we have government and regulations to protect us from bad stuff like that).

Nothing is more "natural" than to be parasitized (or at least co-habited by other organisms). Right now I'm host to 100 trillion bacteria and only 10 trillion human cells. I'm ten times more bacteria than I am "human". Bacteria are only one of a range of "natural" organisms that live in and on me. This includes fungi and arachnea. This is the human microbiome.

The Fumbling Incompetence of Obama

Here is an excellent interview by Keith Olbermann with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. The video starts with a gaff by Obama's new Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, who simply gets wrong the "reason" for invading Iraq.

At 1:50 the video mentions the outrageously brutal treatment of Bradley Manning. Manning comes up in the discussion with Wilkerson at 4:15 in the video. Wilkerson's position: "the treatment of Bradley Manning is unconscionable".

At 2:05 the video begins the interview with Wilkerson:



All of this shows that Obama is a continuous of Bush policies despite running an anti-war campaign with a promise to end the war in Iraq, close down Guantanamo, and generally stop the excesses of Bush's "war on terrorism". Sadly, Obama has ratcheted the war up, not down.

Obama sold himself to the electorate as anti-war and as a more moral and honourable person than Bush, but he has shown himself to be as indifferent to rights or the limits of the law as Bush in his most extreme positions. The press doesn't explore this, but this is incredible. See 6:00 into the video where Wilkerson is upset that the Justice Department refuses to investigate the 2008 financial collapse and the on-going torture treatment of detainees.