Month: July 2020

Last night I dreamed about the wave of Republican cruelty under Trump. Yes, it was a political dream. In it I was painfully aware of the scope and depth of wrongs happening right now. I could feel them.

I woke up to a story about the first of three planned state killings being carried out.

In 2019, Barr moved to reinstate the federal death penalty after a nearly two decade lapse.

Daniel Lewis Lee, a convicted killer, was executed Tuesday morning in the first federal execution in 17 years after the Supreme Court issued an overnight ruling that it could proceed.Lee was pronounced dead by the coroner at 8:07 a.m. ET in Terre Haute, Indiana. His last words were “I didn’t do it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life but I’m not a murderer. You’re killing an innocent man,” according to a pool report.The Supreme Court cleared the way for the resumption of the federal death penalty in an unsigned order released after 2 a.m. ET Tuesday.

Daniel Lewis Lee executed after Supreme Court clears the way for first federal execution in 17 years

Imagine a printed version of your Facebook wall that is distributed by mail like a magazine subscription.

It’s self absorbed like social media. It’s a stapled collection of pages like a magazine.

There are follows like social media. The more people you follow, the thicker your printout.

Not mega + zine

Me + magazine

Police could not shoot so many people if they didn’t have guns. As long as police do carry guns there will be a lot of shootings. It is rarely necessary to carry guns.

If you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. If you have a gun everything looks like something which calls for it. Those of us who are not carrying guns get by just fine. Police can do the same as anybody else.

There are not many situations which really demand guns. Among other reasons, suspects would be less inclined to reach for a gun if officers weren’t known to be carrying themselves. There is an arms race between suspects and law enforcement. If law enforcement stands down, suspects will too.

If a suspect has a gun, police don’t need to engage immediately. The suspect isn’t going to shoot them just for the hell of it. In the moment the police can put their hands up and hand over their wallets. They can get the suspect later.

There do exist rare situations which call for police with guns. When that happens the unarmed cop should call a specialist, like a SWAT team.

Outside of the US police don’t always wear guns. They get by fine using weapons with lower lethality.

In Manchester, England, where the number of deaths in the last 40 years is two. Sir Peter Fahy, the chief constable of the Greater Manchester Police, believes that the the number is the result of a radically different approach toward guns and mental health than we have in the United States. “The whole way that we train officers is that the absolute last resort is to use your firearm,” he says. “When you get into a situation, you assess the situation, you give yourself other options. And it starts from a position, always, that the best weapon is their mouth.” The vast majority have to use their mouths, or at least not firearms, because only 209 of the 6,700 officers in Manchester’s force are armed.

How British police officers keep the peace, without carrying guns

In a battle between a suspect who does not have a gun and a cop who does have a gun, the cop should never ever use their gun.

You can argue that guns are too common in the US for everybody to be armed but the police. But this is a problem created by 2nd amendment extremism. Guns should not be so common. We should not accept that broken situation. That police carry guns feeds into gun-nutism.

In that sense the reason there are so many police shootings is that gun nuts have put guns in so many hands. The cause of Breonna Taylor’s death and so many others is political obsequiousness towards guns. Which matters more, Black lives or plentiful guns?

The answer to that in American politics is clear: guns. We all know which way the scales will tilt. And this raises the question of whether that is by design. Do we have so many guns floating around out of fear of Black people? Are police carrying guns in the first place because of Blackophobia?

The Pedal Steel Guitar Slides Into Jazz

Roots

Ecstacy

Agony

I hate hearing Black people say n****. I hate it every time. It always makes me recoil. It makes me feel alienated and sad.

I was watching a Dave Chappelle show on Netflix. He is really funny. Great comic. But he uses the N-word a lot. And get this — he uses it to talk about white people. Like this: You my <N-word>. I’ve been told, not by Chappelle, that it’s a term of endearment. To me, that’s ridiculous — it’s a threat. Because if I use that term of endearment, a 10-ton weight comes down on my head. I don’t like it. We’re also told this is a word African-Americans use among themselves, and we wouldn’t understand what it means. But many of the people in Chappelle’s audience are white. We’re his N-words. I’m watching it, and reminded every time I hear the world, and he says it a lot, that this is something I’m not allowed to like. The more I listen to him use the N-word, my inner voice, constantly yapping about nothing, repeats what he says, and I’m concerned that will eventually come out of my mouth, without thought because that actually happens in real life. It’s a painful word, not just for African-Americans.

http://scripting.com/2020/07/03.html#a130938

Over my lifetime the word has grown and grown and grown. There seems to be nothing I can do but accept it, but how can I accept it?

I don’t understand why Black people want this to happen. It is inevitable that non-Black people will use it. Like, hello, DJ Khalid.

The Palestian DJ explained that he grew up using the word and doesn’t see how he isn’t entitled to use the racial epithet. He justified his use of the word in songs and everyday conversation, drawing a line between variations on the term but explaining how it could be used as a term of endearment. “For me to say ‘We the best, oo wee nigga, we the best!’ You know what I’m talking about. Niggas that’s thinking that is dumb fucks. Once again, I’d like to shout out the fans who love this music. What makes me mad, when I grew up, niggas was calling me sand nigga. That’s ignorant, because there’s only one way to say it. You can’t say, ‘Yo what up my sand nigga?’

https://hiphopdx.com/news/id.16970/title.dj-khaled-justifies-his-use-of-the-n-word

Earlier this week, Dilbert creator and local Twitter crackpot Scott Adams claimed that he’d lost multiple jobs because he was white. I don’t think that’s something that ever actually happened. I want to believe Adams will immediately delete his tweets after realizing they are banana pants with crazy cheese frosting.

Wonkette

The path of Trumpism leads to madness. No functioning mind can hold all the contradictions. Either adherents embrace nihilism or they go banana pants.