To Serve and Project

Brother of George Floyd: 'I just want justice' | News | Al Jazeera

Like the rest of the nation, I did not know George Floyd existed until he did not. I did not know about neck-pinning, either — and I was a cop reporter for two decades.

Yet among some police departments, neck-pinning remains a practiced “non-lethal” method of subduing suspects. Like the choke hold. Or stun gun. Or pepper spray. Or rubber bullets.

I have more than a few questions about what happened to Floyd. Like how he went from being handcuffed and sitting against a building wall to laying handcuffed precisely out of view of a police dash cam as Officer Derek Chauvin choked him out for at least seven minutes.George Floyd autopsy: no sign of traumatic asphyxia or strangling ...

Did Chauvin think Floyd would charge him like a bull and use his skull as a deadly weapon? Is that compliance procedure standard for forgery suspects? Why did none of the fellow officers suggest Floyd had been amply debilitated?

When I was on the cop beat, an officer once demonstrated how effective — and painful — a simple pair of cuffs are at getting you to submit. With a subtle flick of the wrist, he showed me, you can be brought to your knees for fear of your hands snapping off your forearms. When someone dons the bracelets, they can do little within the geometry of pain besides wince. What possibly elevated the threat during that arrest?

Perhaps answers will emerge from Chauvin’s third-degree murder trial, though I doubt it. If the recent spate of racially-fueled incidents — from Floyd to the Hunger Games killing of Ahmaud Arbery to Amy Cooper’s panicked false police report against bird-watcher Christian Cooper — has proven anything, it’s that video surveillance does not curb behavior.  Man who recorded the Ahmaud Arbery shooting has been receiving ...

And with a morally corrosive president who dog whistles that “thug” “looting leads to shooting,” that behavior isn’t likely to change. If anything, Trump’s last political maneuver may be to gin up his base into a Civil War 2.0 — now gluten-free!

I’m tired of our impotent condemnations of racism and empty demands for wholesale changes to the way we behave. The mealy-mouthed calls for sensitivity training. When our highest elected official is a racist pederast, do we really expect his yokel fanbase to somehow wise up? Make some specific calls for change, or get off the pot.

And, yeah, this is directed at you, asshole.Why Trump Supporters Hate Being Called Racists - The Atlantic

Here’s my call for change: A federal law that mandates that any law enforcement officer authorized to employ “non-lethal force” must experience it in training first.

Want to employ a neck-pin? You must first have a 250-pound training commander kneeling on your windpipe.

A choke-hold? Time for a chin up on a billy club.

A taser? Brace for the bolt. Same with Mace, rubber bullets and flash bangs. We’ll see if our definition of “non-lethal” changes.

Shit, expand the tactic to include our military. Before you can waterboard a state enemy, you’ve gotta try the bathwater first. How long do you think Dick Cheney’s heart would last in the drip? Would he still consider it not to be torture?

None of this may have changed Floyd’s fate. But maybe one of those cops would have said enough. We clearly need to become familiar with the taste of the medicine we dole out.

Enough with the fucking lip service. The only way we’re going to move the needle is by stepping on the goddamned gas.

Pulling Up Dickweeds

Today’s column was going to be about the photo above and this nation’s emergent Cognitive Immune System. Instead, it’s going to be about people who are active participants in the real world.

My sister Caroline turned me onto this goldmine of FactSlaps. So this edition is dedicated to her and the singularity of the universe. It comes from 100people.org, and sourced to several  serious fact-finders, including the UN, UNICEF and, of all things, the CIA’s “World Fact Book.”

The following is a detailed version of our 100 People statistics, updated in 2016 to reflect the world population having reached almost 7.5 billion people. Source information for each of the categories is available at the bottom of the page.

If the World were 100 PEOPLE:

Gender 50 would be female
50 would be male
Age 25 would be 0-14
66 would be 15-64
9 would be 65 and older
Geography 60 would be from Asia
16 would be from Africa
10 would be from Europe
9 would be from Latin America & the Caribbean
5 would be from North America
Religion 31 would be Christian
23 would be Muslim
16 would not be religious or identify themselves
as being aligned with a particular faith
15 would be Hindu
7 would be Buddhist
8 would believe in other religions
First Language 12 would speak Chinese
6 would speak Spanish
5 would speak English
4 would speak Hindi
3 would speak Arabic
3 would speak Bengali
3 would speak Portuguese
2 would speak Russian
2 would speak Japanese
60 would speak other languages
Overall Literacy 86 would be able to read and write
14 would not
Literacy by Gender 90% of males would be able to read and write
10% of males would not be able to read and write
82% of females would be able to read and write
18% of females would not be able to read and write
Education 78% of eligible males would have a
primary school education
76% of eligible females would have a
primary school education66% of eligible males would have a
secondary school education
63% of eligible females would have a
secondary school education

7 would have a college degree
Shelter 78 people would have a place to shelter them
from the wind and the rain, but 22 would not
Urban/Rural 54 would be urban dwellers
46 would be rural dwellers
Drinking Water 91 would have access to safe drinking water
9 would use unimproved water
Food 11 would be undernourished
Infectious Disease 1 would have HIV/AIDS
1 would have tuberculosis
Poverty 11 would live on less than $1.90 USD per day
Electricity 82 would have electricity
18 would not
Technology 65 would be cell phone users
47 would be active internet users
95 live in an area with a mobile- cellular network
Sanitation 68 would have improved sanitation
14 would have no toilets
18 would have unimproved toilets

Take 2 Tide Pods and Don’t Call Me in the Morning

Globetrotter legend Curly Neal made us want to be point guards

Awww, and we were doing so good.

Like, really good. Maybe even Snausage good. Dog Food – All Hail The Dog

And then we took our eyes off the ball. Or rather, we became hypnotized and paralyzed by the spinning ball atop Curly Neal’s finger as he juked by for an easy layup.

After all, what are we in the news media if not a reiteration of the Washington Generals, the hapless team that squares off against The Harlem Globetrotters? And while Donald Trump has no certifiable skills yet discovered by science, we still went for his head fake last week — the claim that he’s been taking Hydroxychloroquine for a couple weeks now.

Before that tumble, we had been near-noble against a high tide of proud oblivion. The 24/7s (at least those not named Fox von Foxington) had managed to feature real scientists in a pandemic. We looked to Johns Hopkins for death tolls, hot spots and steps to protect ourselves.

Sure, Trumptards proudly donned bacterial suicide vests, threw away their own masks and demanded that the public be gathered for target practice. Some drank aquarium cleaner on the advice of Dr. Bone Spurs. But that’s Darwin and America: Ignorance is not only deadly bliss, it’s guaranteed in our Bill of Rights.“All I can tell you is so far I seem to be OK,” President Trump said on Monday.

Then May 18 happened. What’s most puzzling about the media reaction to Trump’s allegation is that it broke the only two Commandments of News:

  1. It must be true. Minutes after the hydroxy stunt, the 24/7s nearly trampled each other to get doctors on-air, urging people to not take the Tide Pod Challenge to fight coronavirus.

It’s one thing to warn the public about the president’s quack recommendations. But Donnie simply claimed it as a personal practice. If he’d said he uses peanut butter to treat hemorrhoids, would we have doctors urging people to not salve their anuses with Extra Crunchy Skippy? Amazon.com : Skippy Peanut Butter, Extra Crunchy and Super Chunk ...

When people die from overdosing on a malaria drug (does anyone doubt they will?), the deaths will be at the feet of those who reported Trump’s unproven claim as true.

Imagine, for a second, that president Kool-Aid said he’d paid $45 in taxes in 2015 — a figure that’s probably $45 more than he did. Would we scurry to get financial experts on TV to talk about the broken tax system? Or serve up lectures on the dangers of income gaps?

Of course not. We’d demand to see the W-2s, as we know we can trust the dimwit as far as we can spit. We should admit we went for the easy story, one that simply complained about what a dumbass Trump is. THAT may be true. But can we say the same for any of the words that spew from his oddly-pursed lips? SNL' mocked Trump's national emergency and he responded on Twitter ...

To abridge Tom Waits, we went for the free cheddar in the mousetrap, and got snapped.Mouse Trap With Cheese Stock Photo, Picture And Royalty Free Image ...

2. It must be news. This one is trickier, and we often confuse “Fake” with “Non.” Even the word “news” is subjective. One man’s trash, and all that.

But this we can say, unequivocally: The man has tried to peddle at least 13 major products onto Americans, nearly all with some degree of failure. From steaks to board games to universities to vodka, the man doesn’t endorse anything in which he doesn’t have an investment. How much has Trump staked in hydroxy?

Now that’s a news story.

And consider the timing of the “admission.” His Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, is the president’s un-indicted dealer in arms sales to the Saudis, the flying wedge against allegations of Russian meddling, and the index finger of Trump’s conspiracy claim that China weaponized the virus in a lab. Mike Pompeo Threw Lavish Dinners for Fox Hosts, GOP Megadonors ...

But Mike Pompeo doesn’t sell. Panic porn does.

It’s not too late to get out of the dog house. A presidential election may be arriving in November. We should have enough time  to prove we’ve learned to go poo-poo outside.