2020
Fans rally around Crazy Fred’s, a comic book store in the San Diego suburb La Mesa (where I live), which was looted in riots this weekend. www.nbcsandiego.com/news/loca…
I shop in the Von’s supermarket in the same shopping center as Crazy Fred’s. I had forgotten the comic store was there.
Protesting is important, but it's not the hard thing, or the most important thing
To be honest, it’s not that hard to protest. It’s not that hard to go someplace. And it doesn’t mean that it’s not important. It doesn’t mean that it’s not critical. But that’s not the hard thing we need from people who care about these issues. We need people to vote, we need people to engage in policy reform and political reform, we need people to not tolerate the rhetoric of fear and anger that so many of our elected officials use to sustain power.
"It's enough to break a true patriot's heart"
I’m trying to understand why wearing a mask — which is meant only to protect the most vulnerable among us and slow the spread of the virus to everyone else — has become the political equivalent of wearing a bumper sticker on your face. It makes me weep to think about it: Our one ready-to-hand tool for getting this country back to normal as quickly and as safely as possible has become yet another symbol of the seemingly insurmountable schism between Americans. It’s enough to break a true patriot’s heart.
Trump’s bailout czar makes out – how to stop police brutality
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic pluralistic.net/2020/06/0…
Trump’s bailout czar, Justin Muzinich, responsible for trillions in bailout money, is getting rich sucking on the public tit. Democrats and Republicans alike love Muzinich because he talks like a grownup but doesn’t let that get in the way of thievery.
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Big data shows which policies reduce police brutality: Training and bodycams don’t work. What does work? Demilitarizing police equipment, and predictive policing to identify abusive cops:
… the overall message is just commonsense. Tell cops they’re not allowed to use violence. Don’t outfit them like an army.. Punish and fire cops who break the rules.
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“Broken windows” crimefighting policies are the new Jim Crow, unfairly targeting black people.
Matt Taibbi: “We have two systems of enforcement in America, a minimalist one for people with political clout, and an intrusive one for everyone else.”
Cory:
This is why NYC had to pay $33,000,000 in restitution for one hundred thousand strip-searches performed on people facing misdemeanor charges. These searches don’t merely reflect sadism – they’re also a way of creating new charges, like “resisting arrest.” It’s a twofer.
It’s why cops – correctly – came to understand that the people they were policing hated them and saw them as an occupying army.
Lucky for them, that was around the time military contractors successfully lobbied for a program of low-cost “surplus” sales of military equipment to local law.
That’s when we started to see cops dressing up like infantry on patrol in Mosul. “Dress for the job you want.”
Broken windows was a fraud, and “community policing” (the euphemism for stop-and-frisk) never worked. But it lumbers on as a zombie “fact” whose research was long discredited, claiming Black lives in its wake.
Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church
Old Yellow Stain declared himself a friend to peaceful protesters, and then ordered in flash bang explosions and tear gas to disperse peaceful, lawful protesters so he could get a photo op in front of a church, waving a Bible.
I’m just a nonobservant Jew but I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t say anything about flash bang explosions and tear gas. Correct me if I’m wrong?
“He did not pray,” said Mariann E. Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington. “He did not mention George Floyd, he did not mention the agony of people who have been subjected to this kind of horrific expression of racism and white supremacy for hundreds of years.”
An American Uprising: Who, really, is the agitator here? – David Remnick at The New Yorker
He quotes AOC: “If you’re calling for an end to unrest, but not calling out police brutality, not calling for health care as a human right, not calling for an end to housing discrimination, all you’re asking for is the continuation of quiet oppression.”
In late 2001, after 9/11, I got in the habit of having my clock radio set to an all-news station to wake me up in the morning.
If the first words I heard were “Michael Jackson,” I knew there was no big news that morning. I could just shut off the radio. I didn’t have to rush to the Internet to find out what blew up. I could just get on with my wake-up routine.
There have been far too few Michael Jackson days this year..
While cowering in a bunker and doing nothing, President Tweetie demands other people get tough. www.cnn.com/2020/06/0…
@dave Winer compares Trump to Captain Queeg — Old Yellow Stain.
Hell yeah. Trump in the bunker with the White House lights off, muttering about the antifa – his stolen strawberries.
It’s like the scene at the end of The Stand, where Glen Bateman is in a prison cell, laughing about how foolish he feels to have been be afraid of Randal Flagg, who turned out to be just pathetic.
Saturday after another night of rotten sleep I decided I need to minimize going on the Internet after dinner. I picked a bad day to start that.
Good morning! I spilled a little coffee on my hand this morning and the dog licked it off enthusiastically. That’s my girl!
She says she wants maybe a light roast next time.
Minneapolis has a deep history of police abuse and racism
On Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net:
Minneapolis police have flouted reforms.
“[P]olice union boss Lt Bob Kroll kept his job even after he showed up for work with a white power badge on his uniform.”
And Amy Klobuchar declined to prosecute Derek Chauvin when she was the city’s top proseecutor, “giving him license to commit a string of crimes that culminated in the daylight murder of George Floyd”
Looting and arson come close to home (but we’re fine)
I slept in this morning, woke up a few minutes before 10 am and found my phone was lit up with messages from local friends. Last night there was looting and vandalism in La Mesa Village, about 2.5 miles from where we live.
La Mesa, where we live, is a suburb of San Diego, about a dozen miles inland from the beaches. La Mesa Village is a few blocks of restaurants and antique stores and such. The village is the kind of place where you go for brunch on Sunday, followed by a stroll and some window-shopping. Lately it’s gone upscale, with some fancy restaurants.
A few days ago, a video went viral of an African-American man, Amaurie Johnson, 23, getting arrested and apparently subject to police bullying at the Grossmont Trolley Station on Fletcher Parkway here in La Mesa, within walking distance of the Village. From the news:
The nearly six-minute video shows a heated verbal exchange between Johnson and the officer. It also shows the officer forcefully push Johnson into a sitting position onto a nearby bench.
Johnson told 10News at no point did he resist or assault anyone.
“I feel as though people that look like me, um, feel the same way I do and we’re tired of it. We’re tired of having to deal with stuff like that,” he said.
Johnson said he was cited with assaulting an officer and resisting arrest.
More background here:
www.sandiegoville.com/2020/05/v…
Elsewhere, I’ve seen a long video of Johnson being interviewed by a news reporter. The video I saw is not the news video; it’s a video of the interview shot by another camera. Johnson is sitting in the driver’s seat of a car, with a phone propped up on the steering wheel. We can see him videochatting with a news reporter on the phone. The video I saw was shot from the passenger seat.
Johnson tells a compelling, articulate story that he was just standing around the transit center waiting to meet some friends, when the cop started hassling him for no good reason. I find Johnson’s story believable —. with the qualification that we don’t know what happened before the video altercation with the cop started.
Yes, I know, “we don’t know what happened before the video started” is a thing racists say. Racists say all kinds of bullshit. I’m just saying I want to hear the officer’s story, and hear from the several witnesses to the incident, before making any final conclusions.
Coming on the heels of the apparent murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis just prior, this incident got a lot of attention.
Yesterday, demonstrators started outside the La Mesa Police Department, and later closed off the highway. We could hear the action from the house – police loudspeakers saying “KEEP THE SHOULDER CLEAR,” etc. I took Minnie out for a walk anyway, and then went out myself for the second, solo part of the walk.
Since the pandemic started, I’ve been limiting my walk to a few loops around the neighborhood. The entire neighborhood is on the side of a hill, and I can see the highway from a couple of points along the walk. This was late afternoon; the traffic was moving smoothly on the highway going west, toward San Diego, but stopped going east, inland. I saw more cars than you would expect to see that time of day; I expect they were getting off the highway and traveling on surface streets instead.
I also saw about a dozen people on motor scooters, where I’d usually see only a couple of those every month. Some of them were moving in groups of two or three. I’m pretty sure they were all white people, for what it’s worth. I surmised at the time that they were demonstrators.
It seems to me that if you’re going to a demonstration, and planning to shut down the roads, or at least expect the roads might be shut down, then scooters are a good way to go in and out. From that I surmise this was not their first demonstration. They knew what they were dong.
From what I’m told on message threads from friends – I still haven’t checked the news, or social media, or left the house yet – vandalism and looting started in La Mesa Village after the demonstrations broke up. La Mesa Village is 2.5 miles from where we live. We were oblivious. We watched a movie in the living room last night. The windows were open, and we can hear the highway from the living room when the windows are open. The highway sounded particularly loud last night. We assumed that was just Saturday night. Then we went to bed.
So that’s what I know so far. Everything is fine here for us personally. House is fine – as far as I know; like I said, we haven’t been outside yet. Julie and I and the animals are fine. Later today I’ll go out and see if I can see anything around the neighborhood, or if the neighbors know anything.
And that’s the day so far. I’ve been awake nearly two hours and still haven’t finished my coffee. How is your day?
Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First
Look, we all have the right to protest, but that doesn’t mean you can just rush in and destroy any business without gathering a group of clandestine investors to purchase it at a severely reduced price and slowly bleed it to death…. It’s disgusting to put workers at risk by looting. You do it by chipping away at their health benefits and eventually laying them off.
ThreadReaderApp now has beta support for the Micropub Spec so you can publish Twitter threads directly to your blog boffosocko.com/2020/05/2…
Very cool!
New York couple decides to quarantine together after one date
Gali Beeri is 37 and works as an executive assistant. Joshua Boliver is 42 and creates visual effects for movies. They both live in New York City and met at a dance class in March, as the city was preparing to lock down. At the time, they made the unlikely decision to quarantine together — after their first date.
What a lovely story.
US anti-vaxxers aim to spread fear over future coronavirus vaccine. A dangerously large numbers of Americans are already reluctant to take an anti-covid vaccine. www.theguardian.com/world/202…
Norway and Denmark say they will reopen tourism between their two countries soon, but will maintain restrictions for Swedes.
Sweden did not impose a lockdown, unlike its Nordic neighbours, and its Covid-19 death toll - above 4,000 - is by far the highest in Scandinavia.