Grading Betsy DeVos

It seems relatively easy to be cast into uncertainty in regards to any and all American political machinations as of late but I plan on focusing specifically on the problems with our current Secretary of Education Betsy, both real and imagined.  This confusion is especially true as quite a few 'politicians' would have trouble understanding that proceeding sentence (it has too many syllables perhaps?) and label the author an elitist simply based on vocabulary, sentence structure and the fact that there were no glaring typos - something the current administration is laughably bad at avoiding.  More likely it would simply be ignored as it was not a simple bullet point list, which, unlikely as it might be, could be appreciated by Henry David Thoreau ("Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify."*) Or even worse it wouldn't be read at all beyond the title and it would be roundly criticized, mischaracterized, argued using straw men, then ignored once the next problem arises in, judging by current tempo, about twenty minutes.

*"Please don't associate my name with those cretins.  Also, did you not read any of my works about civil disobedience you idiot?", what I imagine Thoreau might say to this inference.  After, of course, the whole "Oh my god I’m not dead anymore and what the fuck is a cell phone and did someone build a parking lot on my fucking pond?  I swear to crap this country sucks now."  Guess all that time transcending or whatever didn’t stop him speaking like a longshoreman when angry.

Besides the fast and loose method of dealing with the truth, the terrifying manner in which we find ourselves concerning the fourth estate, we are at a cultural war between rational thought and anti-intellectualism.  Thrust in the middle of this fiasco is an entirely pleasant woman who simply wants to change our education system in the manner she thinks will help children.

Her complete lack of experience, her lack of knowledge beyond the narrow scope of causes she champions is entirely glossed over in an era when being an actual expert is derided.  She lacks knowledge concerning; education; differentiation and special needs (IDEA); guns in schools (wait, what if the bears have guns, how do we deal with them then?); classroom experience; the laws around education; and countless (boxless if we are using common core math) other important topics that should concern someone running the department.

Millions of citizens have emailed and multiple thousands have called senators over the hearing for DeVos.  Phone lines have been overloaded with calls.  This is both amazing and disheartening.  Amazing in that people who opposed to a bad choice took time out of their day to fight politically, something the nation has been sorely lacking for time due to what I can only assume is long standing apathy from consistent failure and painful realities of being an American in the modern age of obstructionism and partisan politics.  Disheartening in that only two senators dissented in the face of this unprecedented outpouring of concern.

When we look at the amount of push back concerning DeVos it is curious in comparison to other nominations for executive departments.  People who have, in their recent past, been actively opposed, in legal battle with, or defy the modis operandi of the very department they are nominated to helm.  It is placing wolves as shepherds.  These departments are meant to help and defend American’s against predatory practices.  The EPA is meant to protect us against businesses and individuals who would circumvent laws and morality to pollute our environment doing us irreparable harm.  Placing a proponent of dirty energy who sued (by sued I mean sued thirteen times) the very agency he is now beholden to uphold in charge of this agency is exceptionally damaging.  By the way he sued the EPA thirteen times.  Now, it could be argued that bringing law suits against the agency does not mean he finds the EPA to be bad institution he simply wants to take legal action as is his right and without looking into his lawsuits and simply claiming the number as evidence is sloppy.  I’ll just leave this here for arguments sake.  While job creation is important dirty energy is not creating jobs at the same pace as green energy.  It’s being phased out.  It’s a last gasp and it is terribly important that those giants of industry, as they crumble, don’t crash around us and threaten to further damage our environment.

But this follows a trend of nominations.  The first Secretary of Labor nomination was Andrew Puzder, who ultimately, thank goodness, decided to walk away from the nomination.  Nominating a man in charge of fast food chains to look out for workers’ rights is to turn a blind eye to the predatory behavior of the franchise models and the exploitation of the unskilled minimum wage workers.  Predatory also aptly applies to Steven Mnuchin who has already been confirmed as Secretary of Labor. A man whose company “[used] potentially illegal tactics to foreclose on as many as 80,000 California homes.”  80,000 illegal foreclosures.  Do we really want a man who illegally helped removed a small city’s population from their homes in this position?

It only seems logical to assume there is glaringly evil – and I mean glaringly mustache twirling, dastardly kind of evil - trend to nominate people who essentially hate the safeguards their agency in is charge of enforcing and creating.  This is beyond fucking terrifying.  Remember Flint Michigan still doesn’t have clean water.  Good luck having that fixed any time soon.  Imagine not having water for a few days, this has been going on since April.. April 2014…  twenty fucking fourteen!  DAPL is still fighting on sovereign Native American soil to place an unwanted oil pipeline through their territory.  Oil pipelines have a long, storied history of their contents someone how seeping into the ground and groundwater through breakages or seepages.
Here’s a few entirely unrelated links…

Pipeline Spill
Oil spill undiscosed
Does big oil care
Oil and gas well inspections


Unlike many of the nomination Betsy does not seem evil.  She seems quaint in comparison.  While some of the other nominees do have the experience and knowledge that Betsy lacks they combine that knowledge with hauntingly awful ideology.  But there are some trends that appear.  One trend seems to be with these nominations to highlight those who are not simply unfit but antagonistic to the very core of the department.  Also these individuals, who work for the executive branch of the government, are advocating having the federal government less involved in state affairs.  What does this have to do with Betsy DeVos?  It all boils down to school choice.

The aim of school choice is the ability to give parents and children choice in where they can go to school.  It’s intent is to give parents the ability to bring their child to another school be it private, religious, public or charter school.  In effect some politicians (while Republicans are the majority or those who want school choice the idea of supporting charter schools as a viable alternative to public schools is often a democrat’s rally cry) want to move the money bookmarked for each child to the school chosen by the family.  They want schools to compete and the best (the strongest) schools will grow stronger and the worst (the weakest) will be shuttered.  It’s the social Darwinism of education.  While this might be an effective policy in that good schools will get better and bad schools will close the reality is likely very, very different.

Part of the reason why schools are good or bad isn’t necessarily due to policy or the strength of the teachers and administration (I am in no way impugning teachers or policy but at a macro scale there is another metric that is far mightier).  It’s money.  Funding is derived from the state government, the local government and the federal government.  The state accepts federal funds (usually with strings attached which is why most states decided to accept common core as their mandate) and mixes that with funds from sales and income taxes.  At this point all schools are essentially equal.  The districts use property taxes to fund schools.  Higher property taxes correlates to more dollars feeding local schools.  This creates desirable communities for wealthier parents.  These higher performing desirable schools have more money to perpetuate this cycle.  Meanwhile inner city schools have less funding, they can barely keep up with infrastructure.  They start falling behind on items like federally mandated paraprofessionals, cutting arts programs, after school programs, and teachers begin to abandon the system.  It’s the opposite cycle.  Then testing comes into play with how federal and state funds are split.  Higher performing schools get more funds while other schools are penalized.  School in order to get those dollars they need simply to limp along alter how they teach so that they are focusing more on testing and less on holistic education.  The cycle perpetuates.  Parents move to better neighborhoods.

Then the idea of school choice comes in.  The argument is that parents should be free to choose schools and have a larger array of options.  On its face this is a wonderful idea.  Poor families who cannot move to desirable school systems could perhaps move their child out of poorly funded areas and give their child a better chance for success.  One question which immediately comes to mind is what happens to schools in inner cities or poor neighborhoods if all the children simply leave?  Another is the logistical nightmare regarding the sudden influx of millions cramming into better schools.  Obviously, the schools should be able to reject certain students, especially if they aren’t from the district of the parents paying into the system?  So then, if that’s true, not all the students can get in.  Choice is then narrowed and the students are competing for the school not the other way around.  Some students will make it out while other will not.  Yes, you may have choice but necessarily not the ability to get in.  In the end choice means nothing.  Could school choice possible work?  Yes?  Can it work without nitty gritty details, amazing legislative work and careful planning?  Zero boxes… sorry, I mean no chance.

Competition is not always better in this case we develop a zero sum game.  That’s essentially the system we already have.  For one school to benefit (get more funding) the other must get less.  So we can predict the success of school through game theory.  This of course is fucking maddening because it can look like this**:

M_{F}={\frac  {W_{O}+3W_{F}}{W_{O}+3W_{F}+2W_{O}+0W_{F}}}={\frac  {W_{O}+3W_{F}}{3W_{O}+3W_{F}}}

**Okay, maybe that is part game theory called battle of the sexes (postulated by Russel Crowe maybe?) but it still applies, kinda, but more than likely the formula for schools would be way more complicated.

So then we come to a decision are we treating schools like the economy and allow a free unregulated method for competition of funding, prestige, rating, and resources (this being teachers and students which one would assume have different values on their abilities both innate and learned) or do we regulate more tightly.

Is this about kids or is it about money?  Is this just some fucked up economic model to be exploited?  If so we shouldn’t let the administration populated with wall street villains hoist their pick upon us.  That’s damning in it of itself.  Look at the system for incarceration and how bad it became under privatization.  As an aside if group of politician think the best way to run the country is more privatization because the government can’t be trusted to run things correctly why are we letting those same politicians make choices?  Shouldn’t we stop paying them?   This obviously is not a real argument but simply one to highlight to hypocrisy and foolishness of privatization as simply passing along the problem.

Another solution is the probably unpopular but likely empathetic choice of the diverting funding into the failing schools that need more help instead of penalizing them.  If it’s broken simply fix it.  Bring those schools on par with the others in the nation.  Why have these schools compete when they aren’t on a level playing field.  That’s part of the premise of school choice: competition.  The weak fall and the strong survive.  Will this help all kids or will it simply divert funds from public and follow students to parochial and private schools.  Several politicians would like to see the money ear marked per child follow them to the appropriate school.  Troubling here would be that through choice American’s would be funding religious schools, private schools, or charter schools that don’t need to meet the same rigid standards as public schools.

So perhaps instead of figuring out ways to move people away from failing schools – which is the intent of school choice – we fix the failing schools.  But that’s just theory it isn’t like anyone has actually done that.  Well unless you count Finland because Finland totally did that.  They completely changed how they ran schools.

“There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.”***

This lack of competition is decidedly an unamerican cultural trend.  It may very well be something that is helpful to education.  However, don’t think that removing competition means removing work or challenge.  It shouldn’t.  Finland also treats it’s teachers markedly different and enables then to teach in manner they deem most effective.  Imagine that the person who deals with the students directly, who has educated him or herself through countless years of schooling to do just that, is treated with the level of respect they earned through hard work and experience.  The teachers are trusted to do what is best for the children.

Here are two links about Finnish schools:
What Americans keep ignoring about Finland school success
***Why are Finland's schools succesful

Let’s ignore Finland for a moment.  Let’s even ignore school choice which is the only ideology we seem to know about from Betsy DeVos.  Let’s look at her first visit to a school that actually let her arrive.  For some reason schools’ have been hesitant or outright belligerent to Secretary DeVos.  I can only hope there is enough self awareness among Betsy and her cadre to understand that reaction.
She finally visited a school in the D.C. area (Jefferson Academy) and was able to spend the day watching teachers interact with their class.  While Betsy had praise for the school and the teachers it was comingled with sharp criticism in regards to them in what she terms receive mode.

Here is the quote in full:

“I visited a school on Friday and met with some wonderful, genuine, sincere teachers who pour their heart and soul into their classrooms and their students and our conversation was not long enough to draw out of them what is limiting them from being even more success from what they are currently. But I can tell the attitude is more of a ‘receive mode.’ They’re waiting to be told what they have to do, and that’s not going to bring success to an individual child. You have to have teachers who are empowered to facilitate great teaching.” ~ Secretary Betsy DeVos

Now it’s entirely possible Secretary DeVos is correct in her assessment.  More likely she is simply wrong as Jefferson Academy is “one of the fastest-improving schools in the city’s public school system.”****  It is also likely that DeVos, who has likely never gone into a classroom and observed before, is simply taking an opportunity to build a support system for her views.  If she states that the teachers here are in support mode and aren’t creating success she is developing a narrative that fits her goals.  That she is creating a narrative without any substance is what truly ties Secretary DeVos to this administration.  Perhaps she’ll mandate curriculum to include alternative facts or false narratives.
But I’m not an educator.  It might seem hypocritical to admonish her for something I have roughly the same amount of experience regarding.

Fortunately Jefferson Academy responded through a series of tweets (see below).  I really do hope that reliance on tweets to get messages, propaganda, and political views across is scoured from the earth sooner rather than later.  However, it’s nice to see the passion and counterargument from the school.

“This is what Sec. DeVos said about our teachers after her visit. Needless to say, we're about to take her to school...

“First, the secretary visited the classroom of Ashley Shepherd and Britany Locher, a dynamic co-teaching team that differentiates for the...

“needs of students ranging from a first grade level to an eighth grade level in reading. They build amazing relationships with students and..

“maintain a positive classroom environment focused on rigorous content, humor, and love. They aren't waiting to be told what to do.

“Then she saw Latisha Trent in action. Ms. Trent has been at Jefferson for 3 years, and each year her students grow MULTIPLE grade levels...

“in Math. EVERY student realizes his or her maximum potential in Ms. Trent's room. She isn't waiting to be told what to do.

“Then the Sec. met Band teacher Jessica Harris, who has built our Music program from the ground up. Ms. Harris pours her heart into her work.

“Ms. Harris is patient, kind, relentless, and reflective. She is everything you want in a teacher. She isn't waiting to be told what to do.

“Morgan Markbreiter was there as well. Ms. MB has unleashed the passion of countless students through her Video Game Design course. MB also..

“runs our INCREDIBLE after-school program, which provides FREE tutoring and enrichment to our kids. She isn't waiting to be told what to do.

“JA teachers are not in a "receive mode." Unless you mean we "receive" students at a 2nd grade level and move them to an 8th grade level.

Here are two links on the visit:
****DeVos criticized teachers at a DC school she visited and they are not having it
Public school fires back after betsy DeVos criticizes it's teachers


If you still believe Secretary DeVos is a good pick you are allowed to have that opinion.  But I hope you remember that not all opinions are created equal.  You certainly have the choice to make this opinion.  But maybe not the ability to make an informed one.  Now go and hug a teacher and tell them everything is going to be okay.  They likely need it.

Ben

Gently Cuddle the Police, or Maybe Some Spooning

Is it really a surprise that our espionage agencies spy more than we think and spy on those whom we don't expect?  You are allowed to say yes, just understand this marks you as an idiot.  How did this happen?  Well, slowly and covertly or at times things like the Patriot Act.  Named thusly so we don’t notice the fact that it really the invasion act.  Or those pesky places like Gitmo that have people taken away and never heard from again.  The crimes and trials are never released because it’s too sensitive to reveal.  This is fine in some aspects but it is also allows the government a way of disposing of unwanted opinions and dissenters.  This is a perilous slide.  And no it isn’t from just some shadow organization that operates under cloak and dagger.  It’s from business people like the Koch brothers who buy politicians, universities and whatever they want to negate what they don’t like.  It’s from a few really tyrannical and misguided politicians who think it’s a good idea to keep tabs on everyone, heavily prosecute people for minor infractions, develop and entrench cronyism and several other items that make froth at the mouth with anger.  They get away with it through things like apathy cultivated by gluts of information, misinformation and 24 hour news that is more editorial than factual.

But let’s back up.  I shouldn’t load all the scary things into one paragraph, let’s lay them out one by one so the fear can gestate.  Man, that’s a dark sentiment.  I guess I’ll focus on one scary thing, the police and possibly the fact that NWA was at times correct about their four letter statement towards them.  Moving on we can start with the evolution of the police.  To most of us these are the guys that force us to tap our brakes when driving on the highway and give us small heart attacks when they end up following you until the turn off or pass you.  They are minor but necessary inconveniences in the grand scheme of things.  But lately it seems the mentality of the police is a bit meaner, a bit more aggressive, more like a them versus us mentality.  This manifests itself when cops seem to go out and look for trouble and force a confrontation.  Cough** Andrew Zimmerman ** cough.  Obviously an officer has the right to defend him or herself if they are in an ugly situation.  And it’s hard for a person sitting comfortable behind a monitor to say what level of violence to use when meeting this danger.  But there are specific steps and guidelines for use of force.  It starts with a base level like your voice and conflict de-escalation.  After then of course it immediate goes to your sidearm and deadly force.  Or, well, maybe pepper spray, or a nightstick (still deadly but with a lower mortality rate that guns).  But maybe this could be fixed with some better training around preventative measures and not creating, encouraging, or fostering an environment where the violence happens or escalates.  Simply put, stop fucking making the situation worse until the only answer is shooting someone.  If some idiot runs away because you scare them over an ounce of weed creating a deadly scenario is not in anyone’s best interest.  Think of the paper work.  Or that, you know, you killed someone over a small crime that a lot of people indulge in.

Think that scenario is a really overdoing it?  No, killing a man by mistaking a colostomy bag for a conspicuous bulge in his pants, that is over the edge.  Oh, yeah, the man who was 22 years old and had down syndrome.  So someone who processes information at a slower rate was involved in a violent death with the cops where he, had done nothing wrong and had no weapon.

http://libertycrier.com/22-year-old-syndrome-beaten-police-bulge-pants-colostomy-bag/

So maybe that is a one off.  That’s a pretty extreme example.  But it happened.  Maybe that might call for some severe turn around in training and behavior for the police departments across the nation.  But we aren’t fighting just some policy it’s a mentality, a culture.  A culture of violence and suppression.  Cops violently attacking peaceful student activists?  That happened in the sixties to national outcry and it’s been happening again.  There is a meme of a police officer casually pepper spraying students who were sitting.  I don’t know about you but I am not terrible dangerous when sitting on the ground without a weapon.  I mean I could be singing some atrocious folk music or awful and pretentious poetry slam recitals whatever that is, but really that’s about the worst of it.  I’m rather sure I have mentioned this gentleman, I hesitate to use that word but walking piece of excrement seems a tad judgmental, but he is worth mentioning as an enemy of decency.
I mentioned Zimmerman and the Trayvon Martin debacle which brings me to the somewhat horrifying stand your ground law.  What this means is you can use lethal force with having to attempt to extricate yourself from a dangerous situation.  You don’t need to attempt to leave.  That seems kinda bad.  If walking away stops the problem maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to shoot someone.

Oh, also stand your ground doesn’t seem to work all the time.  Odd that a black woman using that same tactic went to jail.  And yes, I am saying that there is racial motivation here.  But that statement is made lightly as I think all things should be examined.  It could be this lady is interpreting the law incorrectly and she should not be allowed to use deadly force in here circumstance, it could also be that it is easier to shoot to a black man and get away with it if you happen to not be black.  But it doesn seem that Florida is its own little microcosm of fucked up.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/01/08/fla-mom-who-failed-in-bid-to-use-stand-your-ground-law-as-defense-faces-parole/

I am not in any way against the use of the proper amount of force.  I am just questioning, strongly, the choices made.  If someone stood in the way of me getting home to wife and I thought the only way out was violence that might kill the other person I would feel justified in doing so.  I might hesitate, which could be disastrous, but once I committed I would go through that person and I would show little mercy.  I think this an important distinction to make.  I also think it’s important to note that no job of mine has required me to be in situation where this might happen.

Back to the police.  My premise is that there is often a black and white mentality, an us (cops) versus them (criminals and suspects).  And sometimes this isn’t bad.  There are plenty of scum the cops have to deal with.  But they are still people who deserve to be treated something resembling decency.  Or then there is a time someone died in police custody over an allergy.  This case is a man who turned himself in over a misdemeanor charge for pot possession.  He died from a reaction to dairy, something that was brought up before he ate breakfast in jail.  Someone he complained about for quite some time.  Once being brought out for use of an inhaler.  But then ignored later because they thought he might be faking it.  Unsurprisingly after being ignored for some time he died.  Inattention caused a young man to die a totally preventable death.  But let us look at it from the side of the police.  This is some fresh faced whiny kid wasting their time. He is there on a misdemeanor and they have other pressing matters they need to deal with.  They already brought him out once and now he won’t quit wasting their time.  He is just some brat who is probably faking it.  Maybe so, but allergies are nothing to be ignored.  I know people who are so sensitive just taking a bite and spiting it out may still lead to a hospital trip.  And that indiscretion can’t be fixed.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/06/todays-drug-war-outrage-m_n_4225995.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

Or what about the whole knockless warrant thing?  Those are warrants that allow for entry without notification.  So the police do not have to identify themselves and can, and do, burst in weapons drawn making commotion.  This proves to be problematic for several reasons.  It is acceptable to react within this country violently to those that enter our homes in said fashion unannounced.  If it was an armed burglary it would be acceptable to protect yourself in violent methods.  It is also acceptable for a police officer once fired upon to fire back.  You can see where this is going and has happened.  People have their houses broken into, they don’t know it’s the cops.  They fire back, then the cops who know have few options left after it has escalated to a firefight shoot and kill the homeowner.  The cops have the right to fire back, I am not denying this.  What would be nice is if the situation didn’t happen.  The need for knockless warrants is over stated as these types of situations arrive from it.  There is the occasional need for entry without stating you are cop and simply barging in but there are only so many places this is necessary.  A drug bust is often not one of them.  Drugs are not a good thing but it isn’t akin to violent crime.  It only devolves to that because of search and seizure and America’s war on drugs.  A war we are in no winning.  A war that our neighbors are suffering for (look at what is happening in Latin and South America because of it), a war that is promoting street violence and a war that provides easy money for people with an ambiguous moral code.  If you conjure up in your mind someone who is growing their own pot in their house that image most likely does not equate to an evil criminal mastermind.  This is not a violent sociopath who needs several police officers to barge in announced in fear that stating their intention will cause harm or the subject will evade arrest.  I posit that knockless warrants in many, if not most, cases create more harm than good.

There is also the extreme use of force in calling the swat teams for situation that do not necessitate that show of force.  Seeing several well-armed and rather intimidating officers with large weapons pointed at you can cause many things besides simply unwanted bowel movements.  Like, for instance, fatal heart attacks.  Again I’m not saying SWAT teams are bad or unnecessary.  That is a blatantly false assertion in my opinion.  My opinion is that again these highly specialized teams are being over used for offenses and situations well below what I think is the necessary threshold to have such a reaction.

Violence begets violence.  This is a rather simple truth.  These are just a few examples of problems with unjustified force by police.  So it’s a known problem which needs to be fixed.  But is it simply a matter of implementing some better training.  That would accomplish a lot I am sure but this entrenched culture can’t simply be shrugged off.  It goes past training.  It comes around to things like repercussions and making sure there can’t be easy cover up.  You can’t simply allow an environment that does little to stop things planted evidence to justify a shooting or lying on the stand or falsification of records (he came in with that black eye and broken rib).

There is a way to accomplish this.  And a town in California figured it out.  Rialto, California has a new policy and its genius in its simplicity.  Cameras.  That’s it.  A simple camera mounted to sunglasses.  It can help the police as they now have video evidence of what happens and help the suspects as they now have video evidence of what going on.  Having a camera switched on might make an officer think twice about excessive force.  By might I mean it does.

“In the first year after the cameras were introduced here in February 2012, the number of complaints filed against officers fell by 88 percent compared with the previous 12 months. Use of force by officers fell by almost 60 percent over the same period.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/us/in-california-a-champion-for-police-cameras.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

The article also makes mention of the racial profiling made legal in the form of New York City’s ill-fated stop and frisk program.  Something Bloomberg should be ashamed of but he is too busy trying to ruin fat and salt for people (not a terrible idea helping curb obesity just rather fascist in execution).  It’s an interesting comparison.  Our police departments are rather disparate in policy and behavior.  If New York is encouraging random search and seizure while Rialto is putting pressure on their officers for more transparency.  I hope we have more movement towards the Rialto way of thinking.  It would be nice to feel you can trust a cop.  It would be nice to think if them as bastions of public good.  And then we can stop fucking the police and just have a nice cuddle, with hot cocoa in front of the fire and everything.

Ben

The Generation of The Lost

Normally I’m of a mind to say when a person becomes an adult after a certain point in time they are no longer able to lay blame at the feet of the parents.  There is a tendency to hold onto these excuses and clutch to the safety of finding fault elsewhere.  I think one of the true tests of being a fully realized adult is accepting your own failures.  Mine are myriad and I only have myself to blame.  Yes, there were often external forces and, yes, I was often surrounded by assholes intent on ruining things but it doesn’t excuse me from not succeeding.  Everyone has their own unique difficulties.  I’ve stopped trying to weigh out such intangibles.  There a many people who think they suffer the sling and arrows of misfortune when compared to most they suffer no more than stiff breeze and an inconvenience.  It’s not like we are Chinese prisoners who are cruelly forced to play online games to farm gold and so the prison system can profit by selling them to spoiled kids in the States.  (http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/06/02/cinhese-prisoners-forced-to-famr-world-of-warcraft-gold).  Meta humor points: Insert obligatory racist Chinese Gold Farmer joke that only gamers can understand.

I continue to mess up but as much as I want to say it’s another person’s fault, and my god is that an attractive excuse, it does me nothing but harm to embrace this false platitude.  So I’ll stick with fully realized self loathing over ignorant narcissistic rage.

However, to an extent my generation is screwed for many reasons.  There actually are forces aligned against us that are wholly unfair and completely out of our control.  Not that we can’t succeed despite this but the deck is stacked against this generation far more than our parents.  I could lead off and simply say, “fuck you baby boomers; you inconsiderate leeches, you arrogant shitheads, you egomaniacal bastards” but that gets me nowhere.  And baby boomers simply have not cornered the market in arrogance.

So what are these forces that are bending us over and violating us, you ask?  The simple answer is economic oppression and the war of the classes.  I’ll let a quote from Bill Hicks’ set this up.

"If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses.  And what can this tell you about American culture?  Well, look at the drugs we use.  Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates:  Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Fridat to to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in."

As a cube rat who swills coffee every day this could be a ugly pill to swallow.  I somewhat like my job.  There are things I’d rather do but I’m not unhappy and I’m living comfortable.  But I don’t have kids and my wife also has a good job.  Now imagine like most everyone else I have high student loan debts.  My spending becomes a wee bit tighter.  Or I get sick.  Even with decent healthcare (without it I’d most likely lose my house trying to pay) I could be in debt for years.  The worst problem is if I really get hurt and can’t work them I might as well hope my friend’s couch is comfortable.  At a time when I need more money I’m making less.  How about the fact that bankruptcy doesn’t work the same anymore.

I like details and specific’s so read this if you’re ready to get riled up.

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-soul-of-student-debt/

The short version is a school teacher, who is a parent, broke her back and had financial difficulties.  She applied for bankruptcy to alleviate her debt and forgive her student loans.  She won.  Which is great.  Then the people who owned her student debt filed and got that part overturned.  This kind of defeats the point of the whole tabula rasa bit of Chapter 11.  Why you might ask?  Because the law is often ugly and cold.  It is slanted because we allow it to be slanted.  There are plenty of bleeding hearts who rally for our rights and live their life for the betterment of the rest of us.  But the counterbalance is heavily funded by companies who don’t give a shit.  Your plight means nothing.  They simply want to keep the board happy and make a profit.  It’s legal and it works.  Companies will rarely take a stance that doesn’t give them funding.  Morality simply doesn’t pay.  Which leads to my other point.

Companies have more power now that ever.  Corporate politics are amazing.  They are slick smart well funded sharks.  I admire them from afar and with just about every inch of me hate them passionately.  These are people who think nothing of trampling my rights.  They give less and charge more.

My generation pays more for less.  Look at the worth of a college degree.  The cost of an education has risen dramatically but the reward has dwindled.  A college degree is only good for entry level position at best.  A masters might weigh you down more than help you.  There are over qualified member os the workforce  everywhere.  I tell anyone who can listen it is worthless to go into law school.  This isn’t true of course but the market is oversaturated.  Old firms have imploded and you see senior level partners competing.  Who luck does a person who graduated from a garbage law school have against those with ten, twenty years of real work have.  None essentially.  And guess what, you have some nice student loans coming due real quick.

Remember when only person from a family of our had to work and the other parents could stay home.  There were two cars and a house.  No?  Neither can I.  Where the fuck did that go?  I’d trade a smart phone for some of that.  I mean we do have the whole living longer thing and cooler technology and my TV has awesome fucking resolution.

I mean it is nothing new the wealthy have their thumbs pressing down hard on the rest.  We couldn’t be allowed to have a fair share.  Wealthy elite are there for a reason.  I can’t blame them.  Why give freely when you don’t have to?  When there is no punishment other than a moral stance.  It’s not like ending corporate tax loopholes and doges could improve our economy that much.  Or maybe not:

http://boldprogressives.org/limiting-corporate-tax-deferrals-would-cut-deficit-by-twice-as-much-as-hiking-medicare-age/?source=reddit-politics#.UQWBUb872Ag

According this article we could actually raise somewhere around $114 Billion this way.  That about $1,000.00 per person living in the United States.  Obviously you should trust everything on the internet implicitly… but there is undoubtedly some truth there whether or not the math proves out.

Our society is built to keep the poor to stay poor.  Education in this country is going to shit.  Guess where the shittiest schools are?  The cities.  Guess where the bulk of poverty is?  The city.  Sweet, so we under-educate those who most need a leg up.  Oh, and guess who gets to control the context of our textbooks?  Texas.  This isn’t necessarily a problem.  Until that is the religious right figured it out and now things like creationism gets shoved into books and treated as fact.

Read more here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

http://www.alternet.org/culture/revisionaries-texas-schoolbook-battle-crazier-you-thought

Yeah, so our education system is in the hands of people who think science is myth and faith is fact.  This should disturb rational human beings.  I know plenty of people who are religious.  They are not ignorant or hateful and they do not push their beliefs.  They wouldn’t push this nonsense.  But these alarmist fringe assholes are pushing the envelope and are hurting the educational system.  Science is under attack by these people.  Science is part of what made this country a leader.

Don’t think the US is alone in this.  Look at the issues Spain is having:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/world/europe/in-spain-having-a-job-no-longer-guarantees-a-paycheck.html?pagewanted=all

So we are screwed by the legal system with less ways to get out of debt, we are held back by educational costs and worsening standards, as well as being oppressed by the mighty corporations (this is only slight exaggeration).

But now I come back to the first point.  If we know the issues we have inherited why has there been no change.  Because it’s hard and it feels like pushing a boulder uphill that threatens to roll back any instant.  Our apathy, our bitter bleak outlook stop us before we start our action.  So yeah, we are a generation of failures.  We are a generation of the lost.  But staying that way we only have ourselves to blame.  So the question is what does it take to create change?

Ben

The Problem with Poltics

The problem with politics, and it seems to apply very much to the United States specifically, is the sheer amount of obfuscation.  The important issues are consistently glossed over and the issues that raise ire and divide the populace are brought to light.  It angers me to the point of gnashing teeth and slight foaming that the race boils down to gay marriage, tax cuts for rich, and who’s health plan sucks less.  Apparently good health care, like that in most developed first world nations, is socialist and unhealthy.  Obviously letting one socialist operation while destroy this whole country.  Cough, cough, medicare, cough, sputter social security, cough, hack, unemployment and welfare.

Politics as it turns out simply boils down to two things.  Are you a selfish prick?  And do you want religious nutbags controlling more of what is allowed.

The Republican Party

My original title was going to be the problem with the republican party.  The reason I didn’t choose that title is because the problems with that party do not exist in a vacuum, they were not created without context and the whole system is at fault here.  I would term myself most likely liberal but I find the democratic party the lesser of two evils instead of the right or better choice.

Part of the reason why the republican party has had such a crisis of character as of late is because the whole power base of the right has shifted dramatically in the past generation.  Republicans simply used to be the man stereotyped as hawkish and conservative in values.  Their power base has shifted to two camps, the very wealthy and the religious right.  Quick note the very wealthy are on both sides.  The reason being is that politics are bought and sold.  Corporations and businesses buy favorable attitude and law.  It is legal bribery, cronyism and a whole bunch of other not so good things.

The reason why the religious right has taken over the once proud (I type that word hesitantly and with trepidation) party is twofold.  One is that people just don’t vote enough.  There is a frustrating hair pulling amount of citizens who take voting casually.  This is a right people have been denied,  We take it for granted this important freedom.  Or it is treated simply like a drop in a well and cast aside as if their vote is of no importance.  I view my vote as not simply a single drop in the direction of the candidate I choose but a single drop in verifying that yes my generation votes and wants to be taken seriously by politicians.  Why the hell should they care about us if we don’t participate?  Why should they bother dealing with people who don’t hold their fate at the booth when countless others do?  The religious right is organized and they vote.  They’ve been slowly trying to get a foothold into the republican party.  Bit by bit the party changed from conservative values to family values and morals.  As if liberal and democrats were all hippy drug users who hate the nuclear family and want God thrown out of the home so they can enjoy their orgies.  But it’s hard to enjoy to an orgy if God is constantly watching… but I digress.

The other reason they have taken over is the religious right, or rather the religious extreme, has no sense of compromise.  Why should they compromise when they view their entire tenure as politician as a mandate.  There job is simple another arm of proselytizing or spreading the word.  This uncompromising view has taken over the party and forced moderates and rational individuals who joined the party for different reason to temper their views to this shifting base.  The republican party has abandoned its true self and moved towards this other ideal.

The Democratic Party

We have to be fair in our bashing.  To be fair it would be correct to label democrats as blowhards, self-righteous douche bags, hypocrites, weaklings, cry-babys, do nothings, bleeding hearts and a bunch of other stuff I don’t have time to type.  President Clinton is probably the best example of a democratic President in a long while.  But he will always be marred for his moral indiscretion.  People will always make excuses for him because he is charming and intelligent and generally did a good job (save for continuing the trend to allowing breaks for big business which has not done so well for us).  But as the President he should have been the example of the best of us.  It’s a tough responsibility and he is just a man but tough shit.  Millions of people keep their junk in their pants when presented an opportunity.  He should have too.

Also there is John Kerry who fucked up so bad it hurts.  All he had to do was shut up and smile and say I’m not Bush and he could have won.  But the fucker had to keep speaking.  Why the fuck do Democrats have verbal diarrhea?  Just shut the hell up after you made a point and stop being smug.  No one gives s hit if you’re right when you’re an asshole.  I just want to roll up a newspaper and whack them on them nose and say ‘No, bad.  No, stop it.”.

Healthcare

There is an enormous problem with healthcare.  The first thing is its fucking expensive.  If you insurance lapses and you happen to get into an accident you might as well just sell some organs because you are now in crushing debt.  And not a few hundred dollars.  We are talking tens of thousands.  We punish the poor in this country.  Charity tends to disappear when it touches money.  It’s great to help out others but don’t touch my fucking money or I’ll cut you.  It’s kind of like N.I.M.B.Y. but more violent.  (Not In My Back Yard).  Right now my wife and I are DINKS, another stupid acronym meaning double income no kids.  It’s fucking awesome.  We have a house we can make comfortable payments on and life is pretty good.  We both have decent jobs, various important insurance and some money left over.  We’re reasonably okay if some financial crisis hits.  But we’re not the norm.   Just changing one of those factors screws up the equation.  Kids fuck up everything.  It’s certainly not their fault.  But they are hideously expensive and chew up all your free time.  Being without insurance (health, car or otherwise) is like a ticking time bomb.  You never know when it will go off but your racing to see if you’ll have enough money for protection before it does.  A few months after I got placed onto my wife’s health insurance I passed out from dehydration and slammed my ribs on a beverage cart on an airplane.  I had to spend a day in the hospital in Houston.  Even though I told them it was dehydration they insisted on tests, hospitals tend to do that with the whole being allergic to lawsuits things, and I am extremely glad I got out of there only needing to pay a few hundred dollars.

Everyone gets sick and without a decent plan its basically another fuck you to poor people.  If you can’t pay money every month you don’t deserve to get good care.  You don’t deserve to stay healthy.  Anytime someone argue for abolishing affordable healthcare or government stipends, or goodness universal healthcare, they are saying they don’t give a shit if poor people get sick and can’t get help.  We as American’s seem to think it’s like a black mark to be poor.  That you’ve done something wrong if you haven’t made it.  My generation and everyone one anteceding it will bear this cross.  Why?  Because of crippling student debt – you need a college degree for any starting job and tuition cost have increased far more than inflation or, more importantly, their worth – an oversaturated market and convenient acceptance in the culture for business to treat employees like cattle.

Gay Marriage

Why is gay marriage even an issue?  Denying people these rights is spitting in the face of the equal rights movement and progression.  Those who are in the way are simply hate mongers.  What affects the sanctity of marriage are shitty marriages.  And sanctity a word which talks about holiness is not one that should have anything to do with politics.  Religion has no place in politics.  But if you want to argue in that manner the supporting argument is in Leviticus which primarily deals with property and it could be interpreted to be that men should not treat other men as they would women (who are property).

Who does gay marriage affect, people?  You can’t outlaw being gay (some countries have but they are not the kind of places we should be mimicking) so why only focus on marriage.  Denying marriage won’t stop people from being gay.  It’ll simply piss them off and deny them things like better taxes and all the other help given to families (like shared healthcare).

Then there is the epitome of stupid, the argument that allowing gay marriage will allow unconventional marriages like a dude and a horse.  For one things you’re an idiot.  For another have you met a horse?  If you start have relations with a horse and they don’t want that to continue you’re going to the hospital.

Stop being stupid and just let this go.  Don’t politicize your hatred.  It’s un-evolved to hate people in this manner.

Taxes

Tax break for the rich is so stupid it hurts.  Trickledown economics would have you believe that people up top with plenty of money should be taxed less as they will put it back into the economy and it will trickle down to everyone else.  This isn’t just condescending treating everyone like dogs waiting for scraps but outlandishly stupid if you believe it be true.  Wealthy people are great at staying wealthy.  There is nothing wrong about this.  Honestly, I’d be okay with tax breaks if we closed up all the loopholes so they actually paid what they were supposed to instead of closer to 9 percent or so.  I don’t think you should be punished for being wealthy but it seems the more money you have the easier it is to hide it, classify it differently or declare losses.  Of course this is not simply the method of the wealthy as there are tax cheats at every level.  But the five thousand skimped by one individual is dwarfed by those who trim off millions of tax debt.

Oh and can we for fucks sake just honestly tell people what the tax plan is.  Stop saying you’ll close tax loops and trim the budget show what you’ll do.  If you’re hiding something it’s for a reason and generally one that isn’t good.

Offshore Drilling

Have we not learned from our mistakes?  Big oil fucks up the environment.  They charge us through the nose (though other countries pay more) and they deny wrongdoings.  Why reward these immoral soulless monsters.  They pay to keep renewable energy sources unfunded.  The only way to a method or source to be adopted is through government funding.  That how the other energy sources came into being.  But fuck that let’s give these assholes more places to pollute and violate.  Screw you clean renewable energy I’m an American and we like our oil.

Terrorism

Yup, I went there.  Terrorism should not be a political issue.  Everyone agrees it's bad and that there is a handful of very dangerous, very angry people out there.  We are not the only country who has been hurt by terrorists.  More than the deaths, it wounded American pride and made us feel unsafe.  For this we have willingly given up essential freedoms and rights to bad people within our own country who should be protecting those rights not exploiting them.  There are many who espouse smaller government, decreased spending and much of that rhetoric but still insist on funding the military industrial complex (which saps away the money that could be used for say education or healthcare or building bridges that won’t fall down) as well as supporting bills that increases the ability of the government to spy, monitor, track, profile and peruse any all private data you have.  Lack of privacy is the issue that no one seems to be talking about and it’s critical, more today than ever, with our connected communities.  With everything happening though keyboards data integrity and security is paramount.  But throw a few boogey men (very real very scary boogey men) and we roll over and give up.

Religion

Faith is just fine be me.  I respect anyone with these convictions.  But I have a few problems with various institutions.  Like the whole you’re going to hell for not agreeing with me thing.  But mostly I take issue with the fact that religion has been a front for the suppression of scientific thought and learning, the acceptance of hatred of those not like yourself, treating anything else as inferior, and the lack of charity.  Charity is not spreading the word of faith.  Charity is feeding people.  Charity is giving up you world possessions and wandering to help others.

Why the fuck aren’t religious institutions taxed.  Millions of dollars, rare priceless art adorn the halls f religious institutions and not a penny goes to the government.  They are using all the benefits of living in their various countries without helping the country out.

There are many good caring people with strong faith.  Many who let their moral compass determine what is right not a book or religious leader.  But these are the people whose voices are drowned out by their vile cousins who give a black eye to religion.

But what agitates me is religion involving itself in politics.  This country was not founded under God, it was founded under men, imperfect but intelligent men.  This country was founded by those who fled religious persecution.  We are not a nation of one religion but of many.  Faith may make us strong but it will never strengthen the government; not when so many people would pervert it to their whims.

Criticism and neo-McCarthyism

Why the hell does it seem like every time someone criticizes the government they are labeled as anti-American or communist or liberal?  Why can’t I criticize something I love that I want to be better.  Am I not allowed to say bad things about any of my Presidents or only about some.  I count myself as left leaning but I do not hate W Bush.  I find that he has many qualities as a man that admirable.  I thought he was a shit President and I could not believe the backlash against those who voiced criticism.  McCarthyism is gone but remnants still exist.  It worked once the fear and paranoia fueling such violent vitriol.  The speak out against it was to be un-American.  I hate that term.

But, as always, these are only my opinions and I’ll keep them until someone can prove me wrong.  Because I’d rather be correct than right.  Something that is most definitely lacking in our politicians.

There are countless other things that piss me off about politics but if I keep typing I’ll up my blood pressure.  So I’ll leave you with the rant as it is.

Ben

The Profit of Imprisonment

There are lot of ways to measure the integrity and or goodness of a person.  One way that always seems interesting is how does a person treat his or her enemies.  Do you treat them hatefully and reduce them to racist caricatures or do you treat them as equals who are simply irreconcilably different.  I can only hope I’m with the later not the former.  I know I’m often grumpy, stubborn and entirely judgmental.  Fortunately I have been taught how to distance myself from a situation to look back rationally with a clear and level head to make decisions on a person or persons.  I also try to constantly revise this decision and not, simply, stay with my initial reaction or sentiment.

I breach this subject because I think it is worthwhile to look at how our country treats its ‘enemies’ or ‘undesirables’.  Specifically our overwhelmingly large prison population.  If America is to be judged in this manner the country does not look so good.  By not look so good I mean something a might bit past Draconian.

Let me throw some statistics at your incredulous face.  I encourage you to check these out and prove me wrong.

“The United State has the highest prison population rate in the world.”*  This means we imprison more people on average than any of the axis of evil type places.  Or any of those scary places out there who doesn’t love freedom as much as us.  Because we love freedom so much.  Yeah, that last sentence reads different with the whole we incarcerate a lot of people knowledge.

“Annual state spending on corrections tops $51 billion and states spend on average two and a half times more per prisoner than per public school pupil.* … Federal spending on prisons totaled $6.6 billion in fiscal year 2012.*”  So we spend a whole lot of money on the corrections industry and it is an industry.  I use this term because a lot of it is privatized.  How much so?  We just ask the Corrections Corporation of America or CCA (http://www.cca.com/).  It’s like Omnicorp but with less murder... I think.  I shit you not.   The website even has a cheesy eighties feeling video package.   Robocop reminded us of corporate greed running amok in law enforcement during the eighties and how that might not be such a good thing and now we have this.  Of course Verhoeven is half insane admitted Robocop was essentially the American version of Jesus ( He walked on water, died and came back et cetera, the American part came with the whole lot of violence and explosions) so I’m not sure what level of advice we should take from him.

Privatization is not always a good thing.  Why, you might ask?  Because privatization means they are running things for profit.  And correction and crime should not be a profit industry.  There isn’t profit without criminals.  So there is an incentive for crime or more specifically an incentive for people to be jailed.  What do I mean by this?

Let’s talk about Lousianna when we talk about how scary these things are.  I mention this state because they are the worlds prison capital**.  This shit chills me to the core.  If we are such a  great and wonderful nation why aren’t we acting like it?  Why are so many citizens in jail?  And why is the preponderance of these individuals poor and of non Caucasian ethnic backgrounds?  Obviously racism in this case is essential setup to justify this unfair incarceration.  The racism is encouraged because jailing people make more money.  And its harder to jail people who have good money to fight bogus charges.  And minorities tend to have less money due to things like, you know, racism.

So in Louisiana where there are for profit prison guess who are part of the prison entrepreneurs?  If you said county sheriffs you are either as or more cynical than I am or read the same articles.  I wonder if it’s a bad thing for law enforcement to make money off of prisoner count.  What with  “Each inmate is worth $24.39 a day”** you could make a few dollars. 

So how can there be meaningful reform and lowering of crime when it is financially encouraged to have more people imprisoned?  Well it kind of can’t.  But you can just create crime.  Or well you know you could bring people up on false charges and make it hard to fight back.  Or get in the way of legal reform to change drug laws.  Drug laws are reasonably important as about half of our prisoners are there for nonviolent drug related crime.  So if we made drug legal we’d have our prison population overnight?  Well… yeah.  Here some more stats on violent and violent crimes as represented by percentage of prisoners***:

Drugs 50.7%
Public-order 35.0%,
Violent 7.9%
Property 5.8%
Other 0.7%


I guess that means that crime that isn’t violent or with an immediate victim is the vast majority of those imprisoned. And what do I mean by immediate victim. Selling drugs doesn’t steal or take away from others. It might not be good but it’s not theft and it’s certainly not violent.

But do we really imprison or punish those who shouldn’t be for money.  Yes, yes we do.  Wrongful imprisonment laws only flex for those who can turn over on others.  So the lowest links or unfortunates get screwed.  As per usual.   What this means is if I get caught involved with drugs and I roll over on my supplier I get a wrist slap but if I’m an unsuspecting Texas grandmother who has used a mule without knowledge I get sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole (and it’s my first offense) because I have no juicy knowledge to lead to a higher up.  I only wish I was kidding.****

So we aren’t in a state of reform.  We want criminals.  IT makes some of these no so nice guys a whole slew of money.  But at least its not dangerous… I’m not even going to finish that. I’m just going to pretend that during Katrina that whole disaster the country had not long ago that exposed some of the festering racism, classism and hate we still harbored as nation was only partially reported.  It’s not like 600 or so prisoners might be elft to die while officers fled the scene.  Shit…*****

And we wonder why other countries think low of us.  If these is how we treat our own citizens how do we treat others.  Oh yeah, Abu Ghraib.

I can only hope that America does not continue down this road of privatizations and making money off of legal loopholes and ruining lives.  Because maybe the prison for six months didn’t mentally scar you but the whole being a felon might ruin the rest for your life.  Because it super easy to find job nowadays with a clean record, especially a good one.  But money will always compete with basic human compassion and kindness.

Damn it America, I wish I knew how to quit you.

Ben

*http://www.cagle.com/2012/07/ending-the-cradle-to-prison-pipeline-and-mass-incarceration/

**http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/05/louisiana_is_the_worlds_prison.html

***http://www.libertariannews.org/2011/09/29/victimless-crime-constitutes-86-of-the-american-prison-population/

****http://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/without-card-play-texas-grandma-sentenced-life-without-parole-first-time

*****http://www.hrw.org/news/2005/09/21/new-orleans-prisoners-abandoned-floodwaters

Who watches the watchmen? or why the hell are police still beating people up

There is a common joke about the nature of police.  That we fear and hate them.  Feel maligned by them but, at the slightest hint of danger, we call them and wait, incredulous they did not arrive sooner.  The reasoning is pretty simple.  If you get into an altercation with someone in power there is a distinct and natural fear that even by winning you will ultimately lose.   I’m not talking about beating a Lieutenant in bowling and he ships a horse’s head to my mother mind you.  There is also the thought of which side of the baton are you on.  Are you pointing at some invisible boogey man encouraging the police to get rid of the bad man or are you pulled over on the side of the road screaming in your own head ‘oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, what do I do?”  There is a justifiable fear in our country over the intention of our boys in blue.

Now cops are just a mass of people like any other job with wide range in personality and beliefs.  What is true about one police officer is utterly false about another.  But there tend to be overt similarities between this group due to the very specific nature of the job and they often tend to be not so good.  Like the whole idea of the grown up boys club.  Or the idea of abuse of power.

With the internet being such a strong medium for expression it’s difficult to keep stories of unexpected and extreme breeches of justice from leaking.  If you don’t think there is an issue with police brutality let me remind you of what is being done to peaceful protestors.  Whole parks were swept and removed of peaceful protestors during the 99%/occupy movement.  People were pepper sprayed by uncaring, remorseless, supposedly faceless cops.  Not so much anymore.  Sadly the internet instead of rage turned the pepper spray cop in all his in glory into a meme.

“On November 18th, 2011, a group of students at the University of California Davis campus gathered on campus for an Occupy protest, during which they formed a human chain by linking their arms together. When they refused to comply with the police request to leave, UC Davis Police officer Lieutenant John Pike and another officer walked across [the] group, administering orange pepper spray straight down the line of unmoving students”

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/casually-pepper-spray-everything-cop

While there was outrage against the incident there was also the usual subterfuge, obfuscation and defensive maneuvering to avoid scrutiny or wrongdoing.  Unsurprisingly Fox News, which is starting the slowly lean back to center after years of listing to the right, took the side of the police in this incident.  The police issued a statement that was proved false by video evidence.  To my knowledge no formal apology was made and no hard repercussions have hit Lieutenant Pike.  But hopefully the constant internet memes, some of which are actually quite good, have brought some shame to his abhorrent actions.

The problem with protest is it can be easy to get agitated and violent in which case cops not only have the right to remove people but a necessity to do so.  A police officer’s job isn’t easy but that is never an excuse to pepper spray, to beat up someone, to plant evidence, or to pervert justice because of your position in the system.  The problem with crowd control is people don’t like being forcibly removed and they resist.  The issue is they scream they writhe they catch attention.  They think they aren’t being dangerous but to some guy whose job it is to secure safety this idiot needs to get tazed.  So events spiral  into violence and bad times.  Many times however cops simply are asked to show up and they remove protestors without good cause.  Or city councils declare reason to eject groups for superfluous and false reasons such as waste management.  Interestingly many of the occupy movement had a very smart structure set up in order to deal with waste, keeping clean, keeping fed and other necessities that didn’t come to mind in the first few days of gathering awareness.

By violence in protests is nothing new.  Economic inequality, which is seemingly tied to generational inequality, is just the latest global reason for protests (see Spain, Greece and Occupy movements).  There can be ties to other such important protests of equal rights from the sixties.  Economic oppression is still oppression just without the extra veneer of hatred that is racism.

There are many times officers hesitate and that results in injury or death on their part.  We as citizens cannot ignore the inherent danger in being an officer.  But we cannot let that danger cloud over the fact that often times that same hesitation means a kid doesn’t get shot.  Yes, maybe that kid was being an idiot and he had a paintball gun painted black, was wearing fatigues and prowling around (I’ve heard two different stories about idiots friends or acquaintances of friends with similar scenarios) but we can only hope the officer is trained and ready to resist the urge to shoot.  But the other options, the no lethal ones, they are being abused and they leave must nastier results that we’d like the think.  Like blindness.

http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=39592

Imagine being pepper sprayed so bad you can’t see.  Imagine pepper spray, which is meant to be fired from at least a minimum of six feet away was sprayed from blank range.  Spray that uses a charge to fire at 400 miles an hour.  Ignore the pepper just think of the force and the ocular trauma.   This time the officer was arraigned and found guilty on several charges.  But this won’t bring back sight to a newly blinded woman.  The term the used here was street justice due to contempt of cop.

I remember living in Philly if the cops were after you just don’t run.  Because if they catch you no matter whether you committed  crime you were going to get hurt.  It was not a city known for forgiveness with its law enforcement.

But back to the protests.  And protest are important.  We have a right, an innate right to peaceful protest.  We are not sheep.  It’s beyond disgusting that officials simply think it can be washed away and ignored.  Our cultural memory might be as long as etch a sketch in that news is consumed reacted and immediately discarded but at one point it begins to seep in.  One point there may will be more protests on the street.  There always has been and there always will be.  Whether these individuals are right isn’t relavent.  Their safety and right to free speech trumps that.  And it’s being trounced and ignored under dubious circumstances.

Chicago, a city found on violence and handling things its own way outside of normal legal boundaries, is now investing in using LRAD technology on protestors.  The same technology we’ve used in wars is being used on our own men and women.  Just how bad is this stuff.  People ran away from it into clouds of tear gas.  So not so good.

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/14/chicago_cops_new_weapon/singleton//

Maybe eventually we’ll move away and not towards a police state but right now it’s scary being an American and that is horrifying.  I’m not pleased with the amount of power our government has to detains, to hurt to censure and to monitor.  What protection do I have from those ‘protecting’ me?

Ben

Knock First

The law is a living amorphous beast like the aliens in The Abyss only, you know, not really at all.  It changes incrementally by each important decision.  That is why our supreme court justices are, in some respects, far more important than the President ever can be.  The way we interpret the law is directly affected by these few individuals who hold power as long as they choose or are able do so.  Which is why we have to be vigilant for certain changes that endanger our freedoms.  The hot button issue for many years has been privacy, or rather how much can those in power can run over privacy with a truck and get away with it.  Then run it over again, light it on fire, stare at it laughing to its jerk friends and then pee it out.  Then ask you for thanks for totally doing you that solid and putting out that pesky fire out.  Bunch of jerks.

“The Supreme Court on Monday ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor, before admitting them to jails even if the officials have no reason to suspect the presence of contraband.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/us/justices-approve-strip-searches-for-any-offense.html?_r=2&hp

Oh good.  That fills me with glee.  Let’s have officials (notice not law enforcement but the term officials) given authority, willy-nilly, to pry apart people’s butt checks.  Nothing bad can happen.  Except for the countless times awful things have happened in similar situations.

Let’s think on this for a moment.  The law is meant to protect and safe guard us, the citizens.  Not from our selves but from things like tyranny, persecution, injustice, as well as gross violations of inalienable human dignity and rights.  We should, as a people, treat our enemies better than our enemies treat us.  We should treat our prisoners well.  Crime does not suddenly divorce someone of their humanity.  There are quite a few valid and moral reasons to breach the law.  We haven’t even touched on false arrest, setups, racism as motivation for arrest  – like ‘driving while black’, which I’m sad to relate is real phrase due from common racial profiling practices from police for decades – or any other reason for why that person being brought to jail shouldn’t be there.  If you can strip search anyone why not everyone?  It would seem unfair in a sense that one person is deemed worthy of search while another isn’t.  There is so much room for abuse it's frightening.  It’s decisions such as this one that inch us closer and closer to a state like those in bad science fiction where the government deems thinking dangerous so it removes your ability to think so it can remove the danger.  Benjamin Franklin had a very apt phrase for such troubled times.

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

I think we can all agree he was a reasonably smart guy.  Privacy is an essential liberty.  Being clothed and not forcibly striped down is an important right.  We are under constant barrage of threats to our privacy.  From internet companies storing our information, to phone tapping, to increasing powers of search and seizure, to the ability to cart someone away and detain them indefinitely just whispers of suspicion.  That last part should cause a wee bit of discomfort or pants wetting, which ever you prefer, it isn't my place to judge your choice in reaction.  Indefinite detaining.  That sounds fun.  I wonder if there is enough red tape and scary men in suits to keep your family away from the truth?  Long enough for you to be tortured or killed certainly.  The human rights violations in this country are only growing worse.

Our culture has became so shell shocked that we’ve shifted from love of freedom to love of safety.  From love of knowledge and wonder to love of vitriol and unquestioning loyalty.  That is our legacy from the tragedy in New York.  They day everyone in my generation will remember what they were doing and where they were just like the Kennedy assassination for my parents' generation.  The founding principles of this country, to question and act out against poor representation, have slowly become un-American in many eyes.  It is absolutely scary.  Everything should always be questioned.  All the time.  Truth doesn’t sit around to be discovered by accident; you don’t wander around a dark room and stub your toe on truth.  It waits and hides.  It is obscured and obfuscated.  It’s up to the masses to educate themselves.  But it’s hard to look for truth and it’s hard to be vigilant.  It’s just so much easier to go along for the ride and only complain when things noticeably affect you.  Like when gas gets too expensive.  Which, holy crap, it fucking is.

But that’s just prisoners being mistreated.  They are obviously worth less than upstanding citizens so it’s not important…  fuck anyone who says that, and that means you Kyle, you dick.  But what other parts of our lives are being encroached on?  Well, what about airport security?

Obviously we need to take airport security seriously.  Privacy is fantastic but there are certain limits to privacy when it concerns safety.  I think even Franklin would agree to an extent.  We currently have millions of dollars invested in nude body scanners at various airports in the United States.  A million seems like a lot.  But a billion, which is how much we actually have invested, is a touch more.  Holy shit.  Just imagining that much money confuses and astounds me.  Seriously try to picture it somehow.  Just wrap your head around that one.  One billion dollars.  For machines that take naked pictures of you.  Yeah, and those pictures will never be stored anywhere for later viewing or viewed by anyone sexually.  Now if that isn’t aggravating enough imagine that these scanners aren’t even close to fool proof.  But let’s up the ante.  Lets’ assume it was explained that they were not foolproof and the government went ahead with buying them anyway.  Not my government who protects my freedom and privacy?  My government would never allow people to take pictures of my naughty buts if they didn’t think it would work…  If you have read my blog before you know this ends poorly for us.  Yeah, a blogger confronted the TSA over these machines with proof of their failure.  Heck, he even posted his findings.  Not what I would have done mind you with, you know, people out there who seem to want to sneak stuff through with devious intentions looming, ever looming.

http://www.bgr.com/2012/03/08/blogger-shows-the-world-how-to-sneak-anything-past-tsas-nude-body-scanners-video/

Okay, so maybe those things aren’t foolproof and maybe they dose us with “carcinogenic ionizing radiation” (X-rays).  You know that stuff doctors run the fuck away from and give you a goddamn lead vest and they just give a quick click.  Yeah, I can assume these TSA guys are trained just as rigorously.  Or not.  Probably not.  But hey it’s not they are sexual predators who enjoy taking naked pictures of attractive young ladies.  Yeah, because a man in that position would never infringe on privacy and human decency to see boobies.

“Not one, but two of the men working for TSA at Dulles Airport on that day have now been arrested for sex crimes.”

http://tsanewsblog.com/2204/news/tsa-agents-arrested-at-dulles-airport/#more-2204

Well, that hardly seems surprising.  It seems officials, TSA agents to police officers, really just like seeing people naked.  I feel so safe.  Now if you don’t mind I’m going to go to shower to curl up and have  nice cry.

Ben

Legal quandary

It should come to no one’s surprise that there are a few issues with the justice system in the United States.  Essentially shit is fucked up.

I’m going to tell a quick story and you should think about what the person should be charged with.  Even better totally ignore our legal system and just imagine yourself as judge jury and executioner.  Decide on your own moral and justification what you think should be the punishment for the set of circumstance I lay out.

There’s a  big party with some underage drinking.  Our culprit is twenty and getting reasonable drunk.  Some of his buddies, mostly harmless low level criminals and idiots and getting drunk with him.  During the course of the night they joke about robbing this girls house.  The culprit know they aren’t straight arrows but doesn’t actually think they’re going to do anything.  Later on during the night they ask to borrow his car.  Intoxicated the culprit agrees knowing full well they might actually rob this girls house.  He also knew they might knock her out if need be.  Maybe you can see where this is going.  Bad stuff happened and the buddies, when committing a felony for the robbery, accidentally killed the girl.  So I ask you what punishment should be meted out to our culprit for lending the car to his friends who went out robbed somewhere and them killing them in the process.  We will get back to this before the article is over I promise.

Part of the reason things get so tricky in law is this whole common law bit.  Common law like so many parts of our culture came over from England.  Common law basically works off of legal precedents.  If there is a case and there other tried before it than have similar circumstances you can refer back to it.  There were certain precedents set.  With each case being different and having certain mitigating factors you can refer back to all manner of cases with varying amounts of similarities.  When we break new ground and broach subjects that have no precedent we are able to set important and new precedents.  Right now things like privacy, information and all sorts of copyright law due to the proliferation and new uses of the internet are springing up.  Because the internet is a beast like no other it’s difficult to draw conclusions off past cases.  There is another system of justice that operates not off of precedent but off a strict code of laws – the civil system – and that’s what Louisiana uses because they wanted to be different and its difficult to argue with people with swamp dialects and win.  Actually it’s because of the prevalence of the French as we get that system by ways of France and Spain though its roots are in ancient Rome.  The Romans loved them some strict laws.  Just ask Cicero.  But I suggest against it as he won’t answer being very much dead for a long time.  So we’ve got this common law thing which is at times arcane because you know sometimes we don’t get new precedents and the standing ones aren’t terrible new.  This can be a problem with some laws that may or may not be morally troubling.  One such law which can in certain interpretation be at best morally murky the felony murder law.  Now I assume we can agree that murders and felonies are bad. 

According to a free online legal dictionary* (obviously the best choice for all knowledge) The felony murder law is “A Rule of Law that holds that if a killing occurs during the commission or attempted commission of a felony (a major crime), the person or persons responsible for the felony can be charged with murder.”  Now you might wonder well why the fuck would we need that.  Isn’t killing someone always a murder.  No you argumentative fool.  Stop arguing and being all foolish.  It makes you look bad, and ignorant.  And you smell.  Well maybe not smell but anyway… killing someone could result in several different charges like manslaughter and some other stuff I don’t feel like researching.  I’m an analyst you’ll have to talk to other people I know for actual paid for their knowledge level of legal advice.  So what this law does is take any killing, and this we can assume include accidental/unintentional killing as well, and makes it a charge of murder (generally not a good charge to have) when there is a felony involved.  Even more disturbing is the bit below from the same site.

“Generally an intent to kill is not necessary for felony-murder. The rule becomes operative when there is a killing during or a death soon after the felony, and there is some causal connection between the felony and the killing.”

Maybe you can see where this is going.  Reread the casual connection part.  My mind screams that’s some scary inclusive shit.  I don’t like that.  Here might be why: “punishing accomplices as though they had been the actual killers is perfectly appropriate.”

Remember that what if scenario that I gave at the beginning, well, that was real.  And the punishment?  A charge of murder and a conviction with life in jail without the possibility of parole.  For lending a car and making a bad decision when drunk.  Here’s the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/us/04felony.html

In this article the author notes that Canada, our neighbors above who do silly things like play hockey and provide free and equal healthcare, abolished the law,  “In 1990, the Canadian Supreme Court did away with felony murder liability for accomplices, saying it violated “the principle that punishment must be proportionate to the moral blameworthiness of the offender.” ”

If this doesn’t scare you a little think about your friends.  Now think about your idiot friends who you wouldn’t trust to watch your dog.  Now imagine being held culpable because of “some causal connection.”  I’m already nervous enough in general without having to worry about being responsible for my idiot friends’ actions.

*http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Felony-Murder+Rule

Ben