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The harrowing events of the last week in Ferguson, Missouri – the fatal police shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager, Mike Brown, and the blatantly excessive and thuggish response to ensuing community protests from a police force that resembles an occupying army – have shocked the U.S. media class and millions of Americans. But none of this is aberrational.
It is the destructive by-product of several decades of deliberate militarization of American policing, a trend that received a sustained (and ongoing) steroid injection in the form of a still-flowing, post-9/11 federal funding bonanza, all justified in the name of “homeland security.” This has resulted in a domestic police force that looks, thinks, and acts more like an invading and occupying military than a community-based force to protect the public.
Glenn Greenwald writing in The Militarization of U.S. Police: Finally Dragged Into the Light by the Horrors of Ferguson for The//Intercept.
Is Ferguson a tipping point? I hope so, but the accumulated damage spans 30? 40? 60? years and reversing the trend and repairing American’s civil liberties and restoring our Constitutional rights will not happen this week.
Greenwald continues:
The trend long pre-dates 9/11, as this 1997 Christian Science Monitor article by Jonathan Landay about growing police militarization and its resulting abuses makes clear. Landay, in that 17-year-old article, described “an infrared scanner mounted on [a police officer’s] car [that] is the same one used by US troops to hunt Iraqi forces in the Gulf war,” and wrote: “it is symbolic of an increasing use by police of some of the advanced technologies that make the US military the world’s mightiest.”
But the security-über-alles fixation of the 9/11 era is now the driving force. A June article in the New York Times by Matt Apuzzo reported that “during the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.” He added: “The equipment has been added to the armories of police departments that already look and act like military units.” [Remember Howard’s Panda (timemark 12:00). JH]
All of this has become such big business, and is grounded in such politically entrenched bureaucratic power, that it is difficult to imagine how it can be uprooted.
We can begin, however, in the next five minutes. Are you revolted enough?
The governor of Missouri stood down the police force that had been leading the policing of demonstrations against the killing of an unarmed 18-year-old, after Barack Obama added his voice to widespread criticism of a military-style crackdown.
Jay Nixon handed responsibility for law and order to the Missouri state highway patrol, led by an African American captain raised in the town at the heart of four nights of violent confrontation since the shooting of Michael Brown by police on Saturday.
“We all have been concerned about the vision that the world has seen,” Nixon said. He admitted that Ferguson, a suburb of St Louis had, come to resemble a “war zone”.
Promising a “softer front”, Nixon said that a new command would ensure that “we allow peaceful and appropriate protests, that we use force only when necessary, that we step back a little bit”.
Jon Swaine writing in Missouri governor removes St Louis police from Ferguson protest duty for The Guardian.
I turn 59 next month. My dad emailed me a series of photos and captions purported to be from 1955. I haven’t verified any of the quotes, but they’re fun nonetheless.
From my dad, of course…
This is my exercise in shoveling out the blogpile…
Rule No. 43 – Avoid Sugary and Starchy Foods if Your Concerned About Your Weight.
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
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When David Whitt returned from the supermarket to his apartment in Ferguson, Missouri one recent evening, he quickly realised that he had made a mistake and would have to head back out on his bicycle.
“I forgot the Pampers for my two-year-old son,” said Whitt, who lives yards from where Michael Brown was shot dead last Saturday. “I had to take back some groceries, cos we needed a couple of extra dollars. We’re broke people.”
As Whitt, 34, pedalled back to the store with his receipt, he sensed a car approaching from behind and heard a crushingly familiar sound. “He put the siren on,” said Whitt. “Whoop, whoop!”
A cop asked him what Whitt was doing in the area. He wanted to see his identification, and rifled through his shopping bag to see what he was carrying. Then, he ran Whitt’s name in search of outstanding warrants.
“I told him ‘that’s illegal, you’re violating my rights’,” said Whitt. “‘I have not broken the law. You ain’t got probable cause for nothing’. He told me ‘I can cite you for not wearing a helmet’.”
Whitt was eventually freed to go. But he was left incensed. “I wanted to shoot that motherfucker,” he said this week. “I wanted to. Because he had no right to bother me.”
The raw fury in this northern suburb of St Louis over the killing of Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old apparently walking back from a convenience store, may slowly fade in the coming weeks and months.
But the underlying, bitter resentment among many in the local African-American community about their treatment at the hands of an almost unanimously white police force and local authorities, will likely continue to simmer.
Jon Swaine writing in Ferguson after Michael Brown’s death: ‘This is a war and we are soldiers on the frontline’ for The Guardian.
For further discussion read: Robin Williams brings joy to the hearts of journalists and politicians once again (756 comments) and Even atheists have sacred cows (495 comments).
And then, of course, there’s the original I remember slow dancing to in 1968, the year everything went south…
[MIT professor John Gabrieli found that] …medication for ADHD improved the performance of normal kids by the same degree that it improved the performance of kids with ADHD. p. 88
From Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax
Found in my electronic chapbook.
I turn 59 next month. My dad emailed me a series of photos and captions purported to be from 1955. I haven’t verified any of the quotes, but they’re fun nonetheless.
From my dad, of course…
I remember thinking when I saw the first issue of Real Simple, I wonder how many people will get the joke?
This week I came across, via Mac’s Backs on Coventry in Cleveland Heights, The Minimalists and, via a blopile listing on Outrospection, an article by Roman Krznaric entitled The Movement to Live More Simply Is Older Than You Think, in which he begins:
WHen the recently elected Pope Francis assumed office, he shocked his minders by turning his back on a luxury Vatican palace and opting instead to live in a small guest house. He has also become known for taking the bus rather than riding in the papal limousine.
The Argentinian pontiff is not alone in seeing the virtues of a simpler, less materialistic approach to the art of living. In fact, simple living is undergoing a contemporary revival, in part due to the ongoing recession forcing so many families to tighten their belts, but also because working hours are on the rise and job dissatisfaction has hit record levels, prompting a search for less cluttered, less stressful, and more time-abundant living.
The secret of getting things done is not obsessive reading of books and blogs on productivity and organization but simply (I love that word) having less stuff on our plates.
Looking back, Krznaric begins with two hunter-gatherer cultures that we can study today: aboriginal people in Northern Australia and the !Kung people of Botswana.
Anthropologists have long noticed that simple living comes naturally in many hunter-gatherer societies. In one famous study, Marshall Sahlins pointed out that aboriginal people in Northern Australia and the !Kung people of Botswana typically worked only three to five hours a day. Sahlins wrote that “rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.” These people were, he argued, the “original affluent society.”
In the Western tradition of simple living, the place to begin is in ancient Greece, around 500 years before the birth of Christ. Socrates believed that money corrupted our minds and morals, and that we should seek lives of material moderation rather than dousing ourselves with perfume or reclining in the company of courtesans. When the shoeless sage was asked about his frugal lifestyle, he replied that he loved visiting the market “to go and see all the things I am happy without.” The philosopher Diogenes—son of a wealthy banker—held similar views, living off alms and making his home in an old wine barrel.
Put down the productivity porn and do.
This country is starting to scare me to a greater level than it had before. I live in Florida, home of George Fucking Zimmerman. Do you see my gravatar? I’m a man of color. I’m just they type of person that Zimmerman would probably distrust. I’m just the type of person that the police would probably not be terribly nice to. I’m the kind of person people would be suspicious of. I’m the kind of person who the justice system typically treats horrifically.
For the first time in fucking I don’t know how long, I’ve met a guy who is pretty cool. He lives 10 minutes from me. I’ve been single for so fucking long that I have forgotten what it’s like to date or even be in a relationship. I’d pretty much given up hope of ever having the chance to fall in love with someone.
What does this have to do with this thread?I don’t have a car.
I walk to his house. Often in the evening.
When I leave at night, IT’S FUCKING AT NIGHT. In fucking Florida. The fucking bible belt. Where they already don’t like black people. Then I’m gay on top of that. And an atheist? That’s a fucking trifecta for some people.
The first night we hung out, I walked home. That was before I knew about Mike Brown. I read about that after I got home that night actually. That kinda freaked me out, but I did the same thing a lot of people in this country did, and treated it like an isolated incident. As I thought about it more, I realized that it’s not isolated Continue Reading »
This is my exercise in shoveling out the blogpile…
Rule No. 42 – The Whiter the Bread, the Sooner You’ll Be Dead.
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
Wow! I haven’t been sent so much hate mail since I mangled a cracker. It seems that one of the great American holies is celebrity culture: don’t you dare say anything that comes across as callous about a beloved comedian. My favorite so far was an email that accused me of being a “Jew ghoul”, and then went into detail about the autopsy report because it showed that Robin Williams “suffered like Christ.” That’s the problem, really: it’s fine that you liked and respected the man — I did, too — but the obsessive fascination of our media with every detail of a celebrity’s pain is disturbing. There are helicopters flying over Williams’ house and media vans parked outside it, as if something important will happen there any time, while Ferguson, Missouri is under a police-ordered blackout. There are other celebrities lining up in front of cameras to talk about how wonderful Robin Williams was, while police in body armor, carrying shotguns and batons, are lining up to march down the streets of Ferguson. And damn few people seem to be able to see the stark contrast, much less care about it.
PZ Myers writing in Even atheists have sacred cows at Pharyngula.
Readers will also be interested in PZ’s post that started the shit storm of emails…
The fresher the sweet corn the better the eating. What do you do, however, when the corn is sold by the half, or full dozen and you’re a single or two-person household? (I’m lucky that I live down the street from a farmer’s market that will sell me single ears.) Rachel Kelly has a few (17 actually) ideas.
A French-Canadian acquaintance of mine once declared dismissively that the British were the sort of people who put sweetcorn on their pizzas. “Yup, and we put vinegar on our chips too,” I said cheerfully as she scowled. But while the British can be blamed for several crimes against food, can scattering sweetcorn on their pizzas really be one of them?
Ask most people how they like their corn on the cob, they’ll probably tell you just grilled and slathered in butter. It sounds delicious, yet in the UK alone we throw away 16,000 tons of sweetcorn away every year. Admittedly 7,000 tons of this waste is typically considered unavoidable; the husk, silk and core. But that still means that more than half of the waste is avoidable; thrown away because it has gone off or perhaps too much was cooked, or perhaps by someone who was just bored by a summer of stuffing themselves with buttery grilled corn and had run out of good ideas.
Her storage advice is stellar, but the recipes I particularly liked (and plan on making this week) include:
I’ve never frozen corn before, but since August is when the sweet corn is best, I’m going to experiment with a dozen and see what happens.
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