Following up Lindsey Graham's call for more American blood to be spilled
while trying to unfuck Iraq, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie
declared yesterday, "Line up all the dicks. I'm gonna suck 'em one by one." The occasion was an address
in New Hampshire on American foreign policy, generally not something a
governor from another state does unless he's gonna run for president
because, otherwise, who the fuck cares what you have to say about
military interventions. In a speech that ranged from idiotic shit we
tried already and failed to even more idiotic shit that isn't working,
Christie's simple message was "If you present me with a dick, I will
suck it."
So, with all the dicks on display, Christie went to work, right on down
the line, putting one dick after another into his jowls and sucking them
like the sweetest popsicles on the hottest summer day. "American power
is in retreat and we’ve backed away from the principles that made us a
source of strength and stability," Christie said, deep-throating one
throbbing meat stick, "No one understands any longer whom America stands
with or whom we stand against. No one understands exactly what we stand
for and what we’re willing to sacrifice to stand up for it."
Then the man who never once sacrificed for his country said that what
the United States needs is a bigger military with more soldiers, more
warships, more warplanes, more shit we don't need, more intelligence
funding, more money we don't have to spend, more roads that won't get
rebuilt because we're too busy buying fucking aircraft carriers, but,
goddamn, he grabbed that dick and vigorously jacked it off into his
mouth. That expansion will help America "keep its edge," he said,
swallowing with a satisfied moan, adding that America should intervene
even more in overseas conflicts. Whose fault is it? Not George W. Bush
for fucking the pooch of the U.S.'s international status. "President
Obama has damaged the credibility of the American presidency," Christie
said, slobberingly knob-bobbing.
Then he moved on, declaring
that anyone who doesn't want the government to get constant fecal
samples from your toilets in order to see if you've been eating too much
terrorist hummus is just a pussy who is waiting for ISIS to behead your
dog: "They want you to think that there's a government spook listening
in every time you pick up the phone or Skype with your grand kids. They
want you to think of our intelligence community as the bad guys,
straight out of The Bourne Identity or a Hollywood thriller. And
they want you to think that if we weakened our capabilities, the rest of
the world would love us more."
Jesus, this dick was so tasty he didn't want to stop sucking it,
ignoring the fact that there is a government spook logging every time
you pick up the phone or Skype with your grand kids, especially if
they're overseas, ignoring that the House of Representatives just voted
to limit the collection of data precisely because this was going on,
ignoring that bulk collection of data hasn't done a damn thing to make
us safer. Christie didn't care. It's hard to hear over all the grunts of
pleasure, murmured from a mouth filled with dick.
He saved the biggest dick for last, a monumental cock that made his
cheeks puff out from the effort, looking like Dizzy Gillespie on the
trumpet. "President Reagan once said that 'above all, we must realize
that no arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so
formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a
weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have. It is a weapon that
we as Americans do have,'" Christie fellated. "He was right. And that
will and courage will lead us forward." Yes, Ronnie was right, except
for the fact that he was wrong about so many things, but that doesn't
matter, not when you're cupping those balls and taking that flesh pole
to mouth town.
Of course, as a kind of after-dinner treat, Christie couldn't resist sucking one more dick for the road.
At a town hall meeting
in New Hampshire, Christie played the skin flute: "There are going to
be some who are going to come before you and are going to say, ‘Oh, no,
no, no. This is not what the Founders intended.’ The Founders made sure
that the first obligation of the American government was to protect the
lives of the American people, and we can do this in a way that’s smart
and cost-effective and protects civil liberties. But you know, you can’t
enjoy your civil liberties if you’re in a coffin."
Wait, that wasn't sucking a dick. That was just Christie jacking off.
Through a quirk in state term limits combined with a terrible midterm election, the Nevada legislature has been taken over by amateurs and extremists. The legislature is now debating whether to dismantle the Nevada public employee pension system (PERS), a system that has gotten consistently high marks for transparency, responsibility and stewardship.
This
attack on retirement benefits follows a very familiar pattern of
fabricating data to destroy retirements that work and that people really
like. It’s the same nonsense and lies used to destroy private pensions
two decades ago, but this time it’s being done as part of a partisan wet
dream of “limited government.” It’s a strategy as American as fast food
and crumbling infrastructure.
This latest skirmish in the
retirement wars perpetuates the biggest lie ever foisted on America—that
we cannot afford retirement benefits.
Private pensions have
indeed been systematically destroyed in recent decades, and replaced by
“defined contribution” 401k plans. The conventional wisdom is that
pensions are “too expensive,” but this is the heart of the lie. A great
many private pensions were once over-funded, but a change in
law allowed companies to “invest” the “excess” funding in other parts of
their business. Once businessmen could legally raid the pension fund,
the idea of private pensions was over. Many books have been written
about the great pension theft. I recommend, for one, reading “Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers.“ Spoiler alert: you will feel rage.
I’m
no bystander in all this, because I’m a member of the Nevada pension
system through my day job. Even when I considered myself a Republican, I
supported the pension system, just as my conservative friends and
colleagues still do. But a lot has changed in a few years. Public
pensions used to have bipartisan support, but the dysfunction and
extremism that has turned Washington D.C .into a shit-show has spread to
states like mine.
The attacks on benefits are always underhanded
and dishonest, an effort to keep critics quiet, and this latest attempt
is no exception, because it only targets future members of the
pension system. It’s the same tactic used in the constant assault on
Social Security — just take it from people who don’t have it yet. My
favorite visual is the conservative who collects Social Security month
after month (after month after month) then votes for politicians who
will destroy those very modest benefits for his children — all while
reciting the false narrative of “not saddling” those same children with
debt.
A better idea (rather than stealing from our own children)
would be to pay the reasonable levels of taxes necessary to fund the
programs we all use. But “family values” conservatives are always
delighted to burn the crops and salt the earth behind them, children be
damned.
It’s understandable that people without pensions resent
those who still have them. It’s much easier to rage about a
schoolteacher’s pension than it is to understand the systemic greed of
high finance, and that’s by design. The rich and powerful who looted
private pensions have managed to set the members of the middle class
upon one another. At the same time, the purveyors of 401k plans get rich
off of fees from individual accounts. Millions of people are shuffled
into the market to be preyed upon by the vultures of high finance, who
get paid no matter how much money you win or lose in the grand casino.
I
admit that there are reasonable criticisms of pensions. There are
always a few people, an overpaid manager or administrator perhaps, who
manage to game the system through overtime pay or inflated salaries.
Critics can point to the handful of people with six-figure pensions with
understandable fury, but to extrapolate it to everyone is plain
hogwash. In my own pension system, the average monthly benefit for
regular retirees is around 2,200 a month, and retirees are not eligible for Social Security.
For
those who think pensions should all be abolished, I’d draw your
attention to the constant attacks on Social Security. “Serious” right wing presidential candidates, and even some Democrats, have
proposed upping the retirement age, cutting benefits and in general
making life a little less pleasant for retirees. The hope is that many
of us will die before we can collect what we’ve earned through decades
of work. Even though the “trust fund” has a balance of trillions of
dollars, the money has been used to fund everyday government spending. Politicians would rather loot your retirement rather than fund government spending with honest taxation.
I’m
not even saying that we have to sacrifice other spending priorities to
fund retirements, because there’s enough wealth in this country to do
both.
But the very question of affordability is moot, because the
attack on retirement has nothing at all to do with money. The real goal
of conservatives is to break government, so that Wall Street and the
well-connected can feast upon the carcass, gorging themselves on
ill-conceived privatization schemes. America has become epitome of a
failing company, and politicians are acting as the investment banker,
breaking what’s left into pieces to sell off for quick cash.
As a
member of Generation X, I’ve spent my adult life riding waves of
bubbles, watching housing values implode, retirement accounts halved and
job prospects evaporate. With each subsequent crisis, I and my cohort
are asked to “give up a little more” to help the country “recover,” even
as a tiny fraction of people and corporations reach unprecedented,
unimaginable levels of wealth. This disparity is unsustainable.
I can almost
sympathize with the Tea Party, a group built on similar feelings of
frustration and anger.
Their only mistake is that they do not see who is
really picking their pockets. It’s not immigrants, “the gays” or
liberals. Tea Partiers have tragically bought into the total nonsense
that “poor people” are somehow responsible for the malaise of the middle
class. It would be almost amusing if it weren’t so tragic. Today’s Tea
Party voter is willing to sell out the future of his own child, because
he can’t see through bullshit shouted at him by Fox News every day.
We cannot afford pensions or health care or food stamps, but, by god, we can afford $1.5 trillion for a plane that doesn’t fly.
Like
so many workers, I’ve watched my benefits erode year after year, with
frozen salaries, forced unpaid days off and ever more stingy medical
benefits. I take heart that the latest attempt to destroy the pension
system seems doomed, if only because it will cost more money to wreck it than to leave it alone. But the greater war on pensions and Social Security is not over.
Libertarians and conservatives will not rest until they have unmade the last century of progress and the entire
New Deal. They will destroy and dismantle, vilify and divide, because
it’s easier to make people resent one another than to make society
better. They want to not only halt progress, but to turn back the hands
of time. It’s not just pensions, but overtime pay, weekends and the
forty-hour workweek that are all in danger. It’s an act of
self-destruction and stupidity. They drill holes in a leaky boat in
which we are all riding, somehow unaware that when the boat sinks, they
will also drown.
On Nov. 17th 2011 roughly 200 people packed the Senate Budget Committee
room and hallway to hear Sens. Bernie Sanders, Barbara A. Mikulski, Ben
Cardin and Rosa DeLauro urge the super committee to protect Social
Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Earlier this week, outlaw motorcycle clubs engaged in a daylight gun
battle in Waco, Texas. This combat involved hundreds of people. The mall
where the riot occurred was left resembling a war zone, with hundreds
of spent bullet cartridges strewn about, broken bodies everywhere, and
police and other local municipal services overwhelmed. By the end of
melee, nine outlaws were dead, 18 wounded, and at least 165 people were
arrested; 120 guns were recovered at the crime scene.
In late
April and early May, African-American young people protested the killing
of Freddie Gray by the Baltimore police. Those peaceful protests
escalated into a local uprising against the police. This was neither
random nor unprovoked: The Baltimore uprising was a response to the long-simmering upset and righteous anger about
poverty, racism, civil rights violations, and abuse by the police. No
one was killed during the Baltimore protests or subsequent uprising.
The
gun battle chaos in Waco was a result of rivalries between outlaw
motorcycle clubs, in competition with one another for the profits from
drug and gun traffic, various protection rackets, and other criminal
enterprises. The Baltimore uprising was a reaction to social, economic,
racial, and political injustice; a desperate plea for justice in an era
of police brutality and white-on-black murder by the state.
The
participants in the Waco, Texas gun battle were almost exclusively
white. The participants in the Baltimore Uprising were almost all black.
Quite predictably, the corporate news media’s narrative frame for those
events was heavily influenced by race. News coverage of these two
events has stretched the bounds of credulity by engaging in all manner
of mental gymnastics in order to describe the killings, mayhem, and gun
battle in Waco as anything other than a “riot.”
As writers such as Salon’s own Jenny Kutner keenly observed:
I
use the terms “shootout” and “gunfire erupted” after reading numerous
eyewitness reports, local news coverage and national stories about the
“incident,” which has been described with a whole host of phrases
already. None, however, are quite as familiar as another term that’s
been used to describe similarly chaotic events in the news of late:
“Riot.”
Of course, the deadly shootout in Texas was exactly that: A
shootout. The rival gangs were not engaged in a demonstration or
protest and they were predominantly white, which means that — despite
the fact that dozens of people engaged in acts of obscene violence —
they did not “riot,” as far as much of the media is concerned. “Riots”
are reserved for communities of color in protest, whether they organize
violently or not, and the “thuggishness” of those involved is debatable.
That doesn’t seem to be the case in Texas.
The
dominant corporate news media have used the Baltimore uprising and other
similar events to attack Black America’s character, values, and
culture. The argument is clear: The events in Waco were committed by
white men who happen to be criminals; the Baltimore uprising was
committed by black people who, because of their “race” and “culture,”
are inherently criminal.
Racial bias in news reporting has been
repeatedly documented by scholars in media studies, critical race
theory, political science, and sociology. As anti-racism activist Jane
Elliot incisively observed, “People of color can’t even turn on the
televisions in their own homes without being exposed to white racism.”
The centuries of racism, and resulting stereotypes about the inherent
criminality of Black Americans, are central to why the events in Waco
and Baltimore have received such divergent news coverage.
In an interview about the Waco shootout, Harrold Pollock, co-director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, makes this point very clear:
I
have never encountered a gang incident in Chicago remotely like this.
The number of perpetrators involved — not to mention the nine deaths —
far exceed the typical urban gang-related shooting. Maybe there was some
gang incident in Chicago like this decades ago. But this sort of
pitched battle? I’ve never heard of anything like it. If these biker
gang members were non-white, I think this would cause a national freak
out…
But I do think that our views about urban crime are so framed
by race and inequality in a variety of ways. When criminal activity
seems unrelated to these factors, it doesn’t hit our national dopamine
receptors in quite the same way. People tend to view these motorcycle
gangs as a kind of curiosity.
Yet, there is a deep
resistance by many in White America to accepting the basic fact that the
mainstream American news media is habitually racist in its depiction of
non-whites.
The mass media helps to create what Walter Lippman
famously referred to as “the pictures inside our heads.’” The news media
(and popular culture as a whole) helps individuals to create
a cognitive map of the world around them by teaching lessons about life,
politics, society, desire, relationships, and other values. This
cognitive map also helps individuals to locate themselves relative to
other groups of people in a given community. This cognitive map provides
a set of rules, guidelines, and heuristics for navigating social
reality.
In a society such as the United States, organized around
maintaining certain hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality,
how one sees themselves is often a reflection of precisely how they
are not members of a given group. Those lessons are internalized on both
a conscious and subconscious level; on a basic level, the in-group is
defined relative to the out-group.
This is the essence of making a person or group into the Other.
Simone de Beauvoir, feminist philosopher, made this essential observation:
The
category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the
most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the
expression of a duality — that of the Self and the Other. This duality
was not originally attached to the division of the sexes; it was not
dependent upon any empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as that
of Granet on Chinese thought and those of Dumézil on the East Indies
and Rome. The feminine element was at first no more involved in such
pairs as Varuna-Mitra,
Uranus-Zeus, Sun-Moon, and Day-Night than it was
in the contrasts between Good and Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices,
right and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is a fundamental category of
human thought.
Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the
One without at once setting up the Other over against itself. If three travelers chance to occupy the same compartment, that is enough to make
vaguely hostile ‘others’ out of all the rest of the passengers on the
train.
In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are
‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country all who inhabit
other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the
anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for American racists, aborigines are
‘natives’ for colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the
privileged.
In a society like the United States, one
that is structured around maintaining white (and male) privilege, a type
of logic is created where some groups and individuals are deemed to be
more valuable and privileged than others.
Language, as a way to
describe the world around us, is pivotal in this process; it locates a
given person relative to others, describes relationships, and both
acknowledges and reinforces differences in power. Language also evolves.
It is not fixed. And it reveals a great deal about changing norms about
identity. As such, language is inherently political.
In America’s
public discourse, the knee-jerk and instinctive move to refer to black
people as “thugs”, and the parallel impulse to resist any such marking
of white individuals with the same language, is a function of how the
“I” and the “ego” are structured in a race-stratified society. Thus, the
divergence in language used by the corporate new media to frame and
discuss the events in Waco may actually reveal much more about how white
Americans see themselves than it does about people of color, and black
youth in particular.
White racial logic demands
that whites and blacks engaged in the same behavior are often described
using different language. (White people have a “fracas,” while black
people “riot”; during Hurricane Katrina white people were “finding
food,” while black people were “looting.”)
In the post civil
rights era, White racial logic also tries to immunize and protect
individual white folks from critical self-reflection about their egos
and personal relationships to systems of unjust and unearned advantage
by deploying a few familiar rhetorical strategies, such as “Not all
white people,” “We need to talk about class not race,” or similarly
hollow and intellectual vapid and banal claims about “reverse racism.”
Ego, language, and cognition intersect in the belief that Whiteness is
inherently benign and innocent.
Whiteness is many things. It is a
type of property, privilege, “invisibility,” and “normality.”
Whiteness
also pays a type of psychological wage to its owners and beneficiaries.
While its relative material value may be declining in an age of
neo-liberalism and globalization, the psychological wage wherein
Whiteness is imagined as good and innocent, and those who identify
themselves as “white” believe themselves to be inherently just and
decent, still remains in force. One of the most important psychological
wages of Whiteness remains how white folks can imagine themselves as the
preeminent individual, the universal “I” and “We,” while benefiting
from the unearned advantages that come with white privilege as a type of
group advantage.
Non-whites in the United States, and the West
more broadly, do not have the luxury of being individuals. If a “Black”
person commits a crime, it is somehow a reflection of the criminality of
Black people en masse. Similarly, when a person who happens to be
marked as “Arab” or “Muslim” commits an act of political violence, an
obligatory conversation on the relationship between “terrorism” and the
“Muslim community” ensues.
However, white folks can commit all
manner of murder and mayhem, and there is no national conversation about
the meanings of “Whiteness” or of “White America’s” particular
problems. In many ways, being white is the ultimate marker of radical
autonomy and freedom: Its members rarely feel the obligation — nor are
they made to by the media or the state — to be held accountable for each
other’s behavior.
So it is that white people who do “bad” things
are “bad” individuals; while black and brown people who do “bad” things
are representative of a type of collective or group problem and
pathology.
During those rare public moments of intervention, when
the particular problems and pathologies of White America are discussed
white denial is immediately deployed as a type of defense shield (the
response to any rigorous or critical discussion(s) of Whiteness and
white privilege is especially toxic and hostile from white
conservatives). Ultimately, white denial is the immune system of a white
body politic that is averse to critical self-reflection about its own
poor behavior and shortcomings.
There are many examples of this phenomenon:
White
male college students: Most recently, a Boston University Professor
named Saida Grundy dared to state that white male college students are a
problem population. Based on studies of white male college students’
use of drugs and alcohol, propensity to violence, sexual assault, and
other negative conduct, Dr. Grundy’s claim is rather obvious and matter
of fact. Nevertheless, she was met by howls of rage and upset by
aggrieved Whiteness. Saida Grundy has been forced to apologize. Her
future employment at Boston University may be imperiled.
Mass shooters: America is sick with gun violence. Mass shootings are a particular problem and behavior of white men, as they constitute approximately 30 percent of the population andcommit about 70 percent of mass shootings.
However, concerns about public health and white men’s relationship to
mass shootings have been met by rancor. The suggestion that “aggrieved
white male entitlement syndrome” may be fueling white male gun violence
is routinely shouted down as impolitic.
Domestic terrorists: The
United States has a serious problem with right-wing domestic terrorism.
Right-wing domestic terrorists, almost all of them white men, have
killed police officers, planted bombs, engaged in sedition and treason,
and have openly talked of starting a second American Civil War by
attacking the federal government. America’s police and other civil
authorities are so concerned about these developments that they have issued a number of reports and alerts on the matter. Republicans and the right-wing media were so aghast at these facts that they chose to censor and harass the officials who dared to suggest that America may have a serious problem with
white domestic terrorists. Public safety is secondary to protecting
white men—and the White Right—from being held accountable for domestic
terrorism.
Financial gangsters: The American (and world) economy
was almost destroyed by the recklessness of casino capitalism,
financial gangsterism, fraud, and other criminal acts by Wall Street.
The people who participated in those acts ruined lives, and through the
loss of jobs, stress, and wrecked communities, have shortened the life
spans of many millions of people. Those who created said chaos were
mostly white and male. If these financial thugs were instead people of
color or women, the Great Recession would have been met with rage and
upset about “affirmative action,” “unqualified” professionals, or about
the “poor cultural influences” of the people who broke the world.
Instead, there was no conversation about the white male culture of greed
and destruction among the financiers and plutocrats, they have not been
imprisoned for their crimes, nor have those white male banksters and
casino capitalists been marked as a criminal class.
Against
all of these examples of malfeasance, black people must be deemed thugs
who uniquely “riot” and constitute a natural “criminal class” for the
many lies of Whiteness to solidly cohere. The cognitive mapping,
language, and sense of ego that support a belief in the inherent
goodness and nobility of Whiteness cannot withstand rigorous and
critical self-examination.
The contradictions in how Black
Americans and other people of color are discussed by the mainstream
media, as compared to white folks, are glaring and obvious for those who
choose to see them. Those who choose to speak truth to power about
white supremacy, white privilege, and white racism are forcing White
America to confront what the latter has by choice deemed as somehow
illegible and unseen. To force White America to realize that, yes, it
too has a criminal class of people, is pathological, and neither
inherently noble nor benign, is a type of ideologically disruptive
moment that has and will continue to be met with rage, anger, denial,
and dismissal.
Why? Because such observations and facts are too
challenging for many white individuals to process, because they have
been socialized by a society that deems them better than the Other by
virtue of belonging to a semi-exclusive club of people who are
categorized as being members of the “white race.”
But white denial does not make the aforementioned facts any less true.
When
white folks, whether among the pundit classes, or in day-to-day
interactions, are confronted with the gross contradictions of their
language — why black people in Baltimore are called “thugs,” while white
outlaw bikers who kill people somehow did not engage in a “riot” — they
may appear confused, frustrated, or perhaps even willfully stupid as
they try to evade and explain the distinction between the two examples.
I
have come to the conclusion that many white folks are legitimately
confused when confronted by such examples, that their inability to
process this data is sincere; those who have not disowned their
Whiteness and white privilege are unable on a cognitive level to process
many aspects of empirical reality. Units of speech such as “white
crime,” “white pathology,” and “white thugs” have no meaning in the
cognitive schema and conceptual grid of Whiteness.
Such concepts “do not compute.”
As
great American thinkers such as Martin Luther King Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois,
and others have suggested, Whiteness and white privilege have damaged
the cognitive, intellectual, ethical and moral processes of White
America (as distinct from any given white person). The challenge thus
becomes: Is it possible to help those white individuals who are still
loyal to Whiteness and White racial logic, to see the world as it
actually is, and to transcend the White Gaze?
One of the existential questions that have repeatedly confronted Black America is: “what does it feel like to be a problem?”
White America needs to begin to ask itself the same question.
Chauncey DeVega’s essays on race, politics, and popular culture can also be read at his home site Chaunceydevega.com
He is also a regular guest on Ring of Fire Radio and TV, and hosts the weekly podcast known as The Chauncey DeVega Show.
Editor’s note: David Simon is renowned for reporting on the hard
realities of urban life. He worked for The Baltimore Sun for many years,
wrote “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets” (1991) and co-wrote “The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood” (1997). He created the HBO series “The Wire”
(2002–2008). The Marshall Project is a new public-interest journalism
project focusing on criminal justice reform led by former New York Times
editor Bill Keller. These excerpts are from a lengthy Q&A with Simon by Keller.)
1. Baltimore’s war on drugs turned into a war on blacks.
“Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war. It happened in stages,
but even in the time that I was a police reporter, which would have been
the early 80's to the early 90's, the need for police officers to address
the basic rights of the people they were policing in Baltimore was
minimized. It was done almost as a plan by the local government, by
police commissioners and mayors, and it not only made everybody in these
poor communities vulnerable to the most arbitrary behavior on the part
of the police officers.”
2. Police didn’t need a reason to harass and arrest:
“Probable cause from a Baltimore police officer has always been a
tenuous thing. It’s a tenuous thing anywhere, but in Baltimore, in these
high crime, heavily policed areas, it was even worse. When I came on,
there were jokes about, ‘You know what probable cause is on Edmondson
Avenue? You roll by in your radio car and the guy looks at you for two
seconds too long.’ Probable cause was whatever you thought you could
safely lie about when you got into district court.
3. Some of the most aggressive cops were Black:
“It became clear that the most brutal cops in our sector of the Western
District were black. The guys who would really kick your ass without
thinking twice were black officers. If I had to guess and put a name on
it, I’d say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of
class and social control as it was of racism. I think the two agendas
are inextricably linked, and where one picks up and the other ends is
hard to say. But when you have African-American officers beating the
dog-piss out of people they’re supposed to be policing, and there isn't a
white guy in the equation on a street level, it's pretty remarkable.
But in some ways they were empowered. Back then, even before the advent
of cell phones and digital cameras — which have been transforming in
terms of documenting police violence — back then, you were much more
vulnerable if you were white and you wanted to wail on somebody. You
take out your nightstick and you’re white and you start hitting
somebody, it has a completely different dynamic than if you were a black
officer.
4. The drug war became a new war on the poor:
“This was simply about keeping the poor down, and that war footing has
been an excuse for everybody to operate outside the realm of procedure
and law. And the city willingly and legally gave itself over to that,
beginning with the drug-free zones and with the misuse of what are known
on the street in the previous generation as ‘humbles.’ A humble is a
cheap, inconsequential arrest that nonetheless gives the guy a night or
two in jail before he sees a court commissioner. You can arrest people
on “failure to obey,” it’s a humble. Loitering is a humble. These things
were used by police officers going back to the ‘60s in Baltimore. It’s
the ultimate recourse for a cop who doesn't like somebody who's looking
at him the wrong way.”
5. As mayor, Martin O’Malley made it much worse:
“The drug war began it, certainly, but the stake through the heart of
police procedure in Baltimore was Martin O’Malley [who is expected to
run for president as a Democrat in 2016]. He destroyed police work in
some real respects. Whatever was left of it when he took over the police
department, if there were two bricks together that were the suggestion
of an edifice that you could have called meaningful police work, he
found a way to pull them apart…
“What happened under his watch as
Baltimore’s mayor was that he wanted to be governor. And at a certain
point, with the crime rate high and with his promises of a reduced crime
rate on the line, he put no faith in real policing…
“The
department began sweeping the streets of the inner city, taking bodies
on ridiculous humbles, mass arrests, sending thousands of people to city
jail, hundreds every night, thousands in a month.
They actually had
police supervisors stationed with printed forms at the city jail – forms
that said, essentially, you can go home now if you sign away any
liability the city has for false arrest, or you can not sign the form
and spend the weekend in jail until you see a court commissioner. And
tens of thousands of people signed that form.
“The city eventually
got sued by the ACLU and had to settle, but O’Malley defends the
wholesale denigration of black civil rights to this day. Never mind what
it did to your jury pool: now every single person of color in Baltimore
knows the police will lie — and that's your jury pool for when you
really need them for when you have, say, a felony murder case. But what
it taught the police department was that they could go a step beyond the
manufactured probable cause, and the drug-free zones and the humbles –
the targeting of suspects through less-than-constitutional procedure.
Now, the mass arrests made clear, we can lock up anybody, we don't have
to figure out who's committing crimes, we don't have to investigate
anything, we just gather all the bodies — everybody goes to jail. And
yet people were scared enough of crime in those years that O’Malley had
his supporters for this policy, council members and community leaders
who thought, They’re all just thugs. But they weren’t."
From the David Rumsey Map Collection, a remarkable timeline/history of the world from 4004 BC to 1881 called Adams' Synchronological Chart. This is just a small bit of it:
According to Rumsey's site, the full timeline is more than 22 feet long. (via @john_overholt)
Update: A replica of this chart is available on Amazon in a few different iterations...I'm going to give this one a try. Apparently the charts are popular in Sunday schools and such because the timeline uses the Ussher chronology where the Earth is only 6000 years old.
This is the treachery. This is the lie that sold the war. It's when
Dick Cheney told the American people that Saddam Hussein possessed
nuclear weapons. But how can that 2003 claim come to haunt us today in
Iraq? David Corn and Eugene Robinson discuss.
Republicans running in 2016 struggle to defend the 2003 Iraq
war…meanwhile, Hillary Clinton says “she made a mistake” on Iraq.
Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell and USA Today’s Susan Page have
more.
In beautiful 60FPS 1080p, watch Kratos battle the Lord of the Underworld
in one of the most menacing, brutal boss encounters in God of War 3
Remastered, coming to PlayStation 4 this July 14, 2015.
One of
the most critically acclaimed games of the last generation, God of War
III, has been remastered for the PlayStation 4 system, marking the debut
of Kratos on PS4. God of War III Remastered brings the epic battles and
carnage to life with stunning graphics, 1080p gameplay targeting 60FPS,
and an elaborate plot that once again sees Kratos at the center of
destruction as he seeks revenge against the Gods who have betrayed him.
"Have you ever wondered how Google tracks where you are? How about what
those terms and conditions mean when you access free Wi-Fi?
As
scary as it sounds, your smartphone’s apps share a lot of the private
information on your device with marketing agencies, phone operators and
other private companies. But where does all that data go? And what
happens to it?
AJ+ and the interactive documentary series “Do Not Track” investigate.” *
First came finding
the trees. We had tagged them that summer—loops of red twine, tied
tightly around craggy trunks—when Fitz had been home, when the chill of
winter had seemed distant and unthinkable. The twine would help us find
the right maples, he explained—the hard ones, the thick ones, the ones
that would yield the sweetest sap—even in the snow.
That year, though, the flurries of January had given way
only to wayward morning frosts. In place of the solemn silence of
fresh-fallen snow, we would have only the indolence of ice. The thick
soles of Fitz's boots crunched the stray sticks beneath them, stomping a
path that would be soon be un-pathed by the lushness of spring. He
squinted as he scoured the distance for narrow strips of red. He had
glasses back home; Carol had insisted. They remained folded, neatly, in a
corner of his bedstand drawer. It was too soon for glasses, he said, in the joking way that made clear how deeply he believed it.
Fitz heaved and huffed as he plodded through the forest’s
crunching carpet, breath meeting air in a frenzy of human steam. He had
not planned to be maple-tapping this morning. He had not planned to work
at all, let alone to spend these early hours doing the bland work
required of coaxing the sweetness from trees. He had planned instead to
have breakfast in bed—pancakes, he told me with a glare, oozing with
butter and flooded with syrup. It was best, I told myself, not to point
out the irony.
The buckets, hooked to his thick belt, jangled as Fitz walked—cliiiiiiiiing, claaaaaaaaang,
like the ancient bells whose peals called the people to their gods. The
clatter broke the air. We were strangers here, in this flash-frozen
forest, human hunter-gatherers in that most foreign of lands: one not of
our own making. The still-chilled air stung my face and pierced my
lungs. I found myself, gradually and then suddenly, wishing for a
cigarette to warm the walk—something to heat and soothe. Something
toasted. There are few things as smooth, I couldn’t help but remember,
as a Lucky Strike.
"Got one!" Fitz called, the triumph in his voice shaking
the silence. He wove his way toward the twine-marked maple, buckets
jangling. He examined the tree's trunk, the ripples and runs of the
bark. He tugged at a loose strip, examining how stubbornly it clung.
Fitz nodded, satisfied. He took a measuring tape from his pocket, its
free end unfurling. He anchored it against the rough surface, right hand
grabbing the free end, running it along the bark until his hands met in
the middle. "Exactly 18 inches around," he murmured, still hugging the
tree. "That'll work."
"Could you hand me the compass?"
The south side of the tree, Fitz had once explained, gets
the most direct light from the sun. The heat, day after day, would warm
and soften the sap, making it more pliant, more easily yielding to our
desires—as if, I thought with a chuckle, it had availed itself of Secor
laxatives. Fitz held the compass in an outstretched arm, eyes narrowed
toward the hovering needle. It shook like a Relax-a-cizor. He moved
slowly around the narrow perimeter of the tree trunk, circling, slowly,
until, with the strength of Right Guard deodorant and the confidence of
Richard Nixon—
"Here," he said.
He had found the spot for the tap. He drilled; he hammered
the spile. The trunk shook with each impact. I imagined the sap—soon,
the sap—slow and sweet, its trickle as voluptuous as a siren wearing
both a red dress and an even redder shade of Belle Jolie lipstick.
What would happen, I wondered, if we did not come back,
one day soon, to collect it? What if the sap hardened? What if it became
frozen—not just in the frigid air, but in time, sealing its secrets in a
golden egg of amber? What if it outlasted the little towns of Bethlehem
Steel, the cities constructed with Cartwright Aluminum, the future
built on the sandy foundations of Liberty Capital? What if, some day in
the distance, a man ventures through this same, tree-studded forest,
along the long-covered path Fitz and I had carved for ourselves? What
would he think of us—of what we did, of who we loved, of what we wanted
to be? What would he want? Could he buy it at Mencken's Department
Store?
Will Dr. Scholl's cushion your path? Will Vicks silence your cough? Will Kodak save your memories? Will Clearasil save your soul? Who’s Peggy going out with? How did Pete get such a swell wife?
And, God, what is Don’s deal? Why won’t he ever have a drink with me
after work? He likes me, right? He thinks I’m an okay guy? Don, if
you’re reading this, I would really love to have a drink with you after
work.
The sugar seeped from inside the maple tree. It was
yielding to us, slowly, inevitably. There would be syrup for our
pancakes—for everyone’s pancakes.
Jeb Bush at a town-hall-style meeting in Reno, Nev., on WednesdayCredit James Glover/Reuters
RENO, Nev. — “Your
brother created ISIS,” the young woman told Jeb Bush. And with that, Ivy
Ziedrich, a 19-year-old college student, created the kind of
confrontational moment here on Wednesday morning that presidential
candidates dread.
Mr. Bush, the former
governor of Florida, had just concluded a town-hall-style meeting when
Ms. Ziedrich demanded to be heard. “Governor Bush,” she shouted as
audience members asked him for his autograph. “Would you take a student
question?”
Mr. Bush whirled
around and looked at Ms. Ziedrich, who identified herself as a political
science major and a college Democrat at the University of Nevada.
She had heard Mr. Bush
argue, a few moments before, that America’s retreat from the Middle
East under President Obama had contributed to the growing power of the
Islamic State. She told the former governor that he was wrong, and made
the case that blame lay with the decision by the administration of his
brother George W. Bush to disband the Iraqi Army.
“It was when 30,000
individuals who were part of the Iraqi military were forced out — they
had no employment, they had no income, and they were left with access
to all of the same arms and weapons,” Ms. Ziedrich said.
She added: “Your brother created ISIS.”
Mr. Bush interjected. “All right. Is that a question?”
Ms. Ziedrich was not finished. “You don’t need to be pedantic to me, sir.”
“Pedantic? Wow,” Mr. Bush replied.
Then Ms. Ziedrich
asked: “Why are you saying that ISIS was created by us not having a
presence in the Middle East when it’s pointless wars where we send young
American men to die for the idea of American exceptionalism? Why are
you spouting nationalist rhetoric to get us involved in more wars?”
Mr. Bush replied: “We
respectfully disagree. We have a disagreement. When we left Iraq,
security had been arranged, Al Qaeda had been taken out. There was a
fragile system that could have been brought up to eliminate the
sectarian violence.”
He added: “And we had
an agreement that the president could have signed that would have kept
10,000 troops, less than we have in Korea, could have created the
stability that would have allowed for Iraq to progress. The result was
the opposite occurred. Immediately, that void was filled.”
He concluded: “Look,
you can rewrite history all you want. But the simple fact is that we are
in a much more unstable place because America pulled back.”
Bad games are released all the time, that is nothing new. However, to be this
bad is almost an art form. Check out some of the worst video games ever
created. Do you have a game in mind that didn’t make the list?
2
Shaq-Fu (1994) – Gamespot score: 4.5/10
A game about Shaquille O’ Neal fighting mummies in another dimension. ‘Nuff said.
3
Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis (2003) – IGN score: 2.4/10
“Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis, in my opinion, is much like Aquaman himself: pathetic.” – Matt Casamassina, IGN
4
Dragonball: Evolution (2009) – IGN score: 2.0/10
This game is a disgrace and just parallels all of the terribleness that is the movie.
5
Rambo: The Video Game (2014) – IGN score: 3.0/10
Another attempt to cash in on a popular franchise, Rambo: The Video Game
looks and plays like it was a terrible game made for the Nintendo 64.
6
Drake and the 99 Dragons (2003) – IGN score: 2.9/10
If you pay $20 for this game then you have paid $20 too much.
7
Blackwater (2011) – IGN score: 2.5/10
It was a great idea to utilize the Kinect for a first-person shooter. It
was a terrible idea to exploit our love for military shooters and try
to sell this glitchy garbage.
8
Batman: Dark Tomorrow (2003) – IGN score: 2.2/10
“A crime against comic book licenses. Flawed from top to bottom, from
beginning to end… This is a great example of ‘what not to do.'” – Hilary
Goldstein, IGN
9
Catwoman (2004) – IGN score: 3.8/10
A less exciting, dumbed down Tomb Raider.
10
Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) – Gamespot score: 4.4/10
Unfortunately the Sonic name doesn’t make this game good. Stick to the originals.
11
Fugitive Hunter: War on Terror (2003) – IGN score: 3.3/10
Pros: You can get into a fist fight with Osama Bin Laden. Cons: Absolutely everything else.
12
Bubsy 3D (1996) – IGN score: 2.5/10
One of the biggest turn-offs for this game is Bubsy’s unimaginably
annoying commentary that spurts out of the main charter every couple
seconds. And even if you could get past this annoying cat, the gameplay
is so impossible that you couldn’t play if you tried.
13
Infestation: Survivor Stories (The War Z) (2012) – Gamespot score: 2.0/10
First of all, the pay-to-play structure is hard to deal with. You buy
your characters and equipment, which you will positively lose when you
die and are looted. Fighting zombies never seemed so depressing.
14
Link:The Faces of Evil (1993) – IGN score: 3.4/10
A CD-i Zelda game that wasn’t even created by Nintendo, we wonder where they went wrong?
15
Charlies Angels (2003) – Gamespot score: 1.9/10
Outside of the underdressed “Angels,” this game is nothing more than a marketing ploy, and plays like one to boot.
16
Ride to Hell: Retribution (2013) – IGN user score: 1.5/10
This is the kind of game you buy for $5 just so you can laugh. Ride to
Hell is so broken and hard to play it could be used as a form of torture
for your worst enemies.
17
RoboCop (2003) – Gamespot score: 2.2/10
It’s a very easy game with mediocre graphics, but a waste of a good license.
18
Custer’s Revenge (1982) – IGN user score: 1.9/10
A game in which you play a naked General Custer on the hunt to,
essentially, sexually assault the Native American woman at the other end
of the screen.
19
Superman 64 (1999) – Gamespot score: 1.3/10
“It serves no purpose other than to firmly establish the bottom of the barrel.” – Gamespot
20
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) – IGN score: 2.5/10
There is no basic understanding of how to play this game. Many attribute E.T. as the downfall of Atari in the 80’s.
21
Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (2003) – Gamespot score: 1/10
Just how bad is Big Rigs? So bad that your mind will be forced to
restart and you will have to relearn all basic human functions.
We know this is only a few out of the plethora of terrible games. Let us know about more.
