Tasers

I write this post with an extremely heavy heart today. Yesterday, in the late afternoon one of my fellow Miami graduates was killed by a police officer. What makes this even more depressing is that it happened in the seemingly impenetrable "Miami bubble" that is Oxford.

Let me be clear, I do not blame the officer, as he could not have possibly known that his taser would end up killing Kevin, but therein lies the problem.

Tasers are lethal weapons that are being handed out to officers all over the country and their training teaches them to use it as a replacement for lethal force. The problem is of course, is that this is a situation where the implementation varies greatly from the optimal use. If you give police a lethal weapon and tell them that it is not lethal, they will ultimately use it for things like submission and crowd control. By not acknowledging this, we are sentencing our friends, our family and ourselves to a death by electrocution in the middle of a dirty street with no judge or jury.

In the end, this is OUR fault. We are directly responsible for Kevin's death because we made "don't tase me bro!" a funny internet meme. We don't address the hundreds of deaths that have occurred just in the last year as a result of police-induced tasering. HUNDREDS. In a situation where one is too many, hundreds is overwhelming. One is unacceptable. It's time to speak up.

Usually I don't post when I'm mad, but I feel that it is important for all viewers of the 24-hour entertainment networks to compare and contrast the following videos.

Video #1

Video #2

Let me tell you something. If you can watch those videos and still watch Bill O'Reilly and put any stock into anything that comes from his program you are a fucking cockroach. You are either too dumb to see the blatant trickery and manipulation that he performs on his audience, or you are compliant with his intent which is to bastardize the truth, assassinate the character of noble and well-intentioned men, and display his lies for people to accept as truth. I have to say, I am very disgusted this morning after watching those videos.

A Brief Announcement

Let me be clear...

If you believe that we should be waging a war against Islam you are a racist; but that is not all. If you believe that Muslims should be singled out, harassed, barred from immigrating to this country, locked up without due process, or bombed indiscriminately in a foreign country because they "may" be a terrorist; Then you sir, would have been exactly the type of person that would have joined the Nazi army in Germany and ushered millions of Jews to their death.

It is an exact parallel.

The times have not changed people. There are basic rules that apply to prevent horrible atrocities from happening. They are being ignored in this country right now by many people.

Many people argue that Muslim charities should get no government subsidies for social aid because they fear that the money will get funneled to terrorists (I don't think any religious organization should get government handouts, but this is beside the point). Fine but realize that one would be just as correct to state that the Catholic church (one of the most subsidized and charitable) should not receive any of that money because they sexually abuse children.

It's time to reign ourselves in people, and look at the whole picture.

As an aside, I absolutely HATE the fact that I have to defend Muslims because I believe that their religion is bullshit, their dogma is bullshit and some of their actions are completely reprehensible but the all-out attack on them by the populace means that SOMEONE who can see what is actually going on must say something and bring some perspective back to the situation.

Please Restore the Integrity of Justice

According to the Huffington Post (a partisan blog), Obama has said, upon being asked that he will dispatch his attorney general to look into the possibility of criminal acts perpetuated by the Bush administration.

THANK GOD.

It should be no shock that I believe that this is of the utmost importance. Many people argue that the government can't do anything correct. They may be right, but if we can't hold our elected leaders accountable for their actions, as they have not for the past 8 years, then we have NOTHING. It is important to note that Obama has said that he will be sure to tread lightly in this area so as to not go on a partisan witch-hunt and destroy the possibility of uniting people to accomplish the common goal of making this country better.

You can see the full article here

What a Surprise.... The Average Citizen Did Not Benefit from the Good Economy of Last 6 Years

This is what I have been saying all along... the average American has been being told "but, but... the economy is doing so well!" Well, now we see the bullshit for what it is. We KNOW that the Bushes are elitists that funnel money to their elite friends but for some reason America has had collective amnesia for the past 7 years.

For Many, a Boom That Wasn’t

By DAVID LEONHARDT

Published: April 9, 2008

How has the United States economy gotten to this point?

Skip to next paragraph

Multimedia

Graphic

Stagnating Wages

Related

Times Topics: David Leonhardt

Blogrunner: Reactions From Around the Web

It’s not just the apparent recession. Recessions happen. If you tried to build an economy immune to the human emotions that produce boom and bust, you would end up with something that looked like East Germany.

The bigger problem is that the now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.

This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records. In every other expansion since World War II, the buying power of most American families grew while the economy did. You can think of this as the most basic test of an economy’s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens?

In the second half of the 20th century, the United States passed the test in a way that arguably no other country ever has. It became, as the cliché goes, the richest country on earth. Now, though, most families aren’t getting any richer.

“We have had expansions before where the bottom end didn’t do well,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who studies the job market. “But we’ve never had an expansion in which the middle of income distribution had no wage growth.”

More than anything else — more than even the war in Iraq — the stagnation of the great American middle-class machine explains the glum national mood today. As part of a poll that will be released Wednesday, the Pew Research Center asked people how they had done over the last five years. During that time, remember, the overall economy grew every year, often at a good pace.

Yet most respondents said they had either been stuck in place or fallen backward. Pew says this is the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in almost a half century of polling.

The causes of the wage slowdown have been building for a long time. They have relatively little to do with President Bush or any other individual politician (though it is true that the Bush administration has shown scant interest in addressing the problem).

The slowdown began in the 1970s, with an oil shock that raised the cost of everyday living. The technological revolution and the rise of global trade followed, reducing the bargaining power of a large section of the work force. In recent years, the cost of health care has aggravated the problem, by taking a huge bite out of most workers’ paychecks.

Real median family income more than doubled from the late 1940s to the late ’70s. It has risen less than 25 percent in the three decades since. Statistics like these are now so familiar as to be almost numbing. But the larger point is still crucial: the modern American economy distributes the fruits of its growth to a relatively narrow slice of the population. We don’t need another decade of evidence to feel confident about that conclusion.

Anxiety about the income slowdown has flared at various times over the past three decades. It seemed to crescendo in the first half of the 1990s, when voters first threw George H. W. Bush out of office, then, two years later, did the same to the Democratic leaders of Congress. Pat Buchanan went around preaching a kind of pitchfork populism during the 1996 New Hampshire Republican primary — and he won it.

Then came a technology bubble that made everything seem better, for a time. Record-low oil prices in the 1990s helped, too. So did the recent housing bubble, allowing families to supplement their incomes by taking equity out of their homes.

Now, though, we appear to be out of bubbles. It’s hard to see how the economy will get back on track without some fundamental changes. This, I think, can fairly be considered the No. 1 economic project awaiting the next president.

Fortunately, there is an obvious model waiting to be dusted off. The income gains of the postwar period didn’t just happen. They were the product of a deliberate program to build up the middle class, through the Interstate highway system, the G. I. Bill and other measures.

It’s easy enough to imagine a new version of that program, with job-creating investments in biomedical research, alternative energy, roads, railroads and education. On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama all mention ideas like these.

But there is still a lack of strategic seriousness to the discussion, as Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution notes. After all, the United States spends a lot of money on education already but has still lost its standing as the country with the highest college graduation rate in the world. (South Korea and a couple of other countries have passed us, while Japan, Britain and Canada are close behind.)

The same goes for public works. Spending on physical infrastructure is at a 20-year high as a share of gross domestic product, but too much of the money is spent on the inefficient pet programs championed by individual members of Congress. Pork barrel spending does not add up to a national economic strategy.

Health care and taxes will have to be part of the discussion, too. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of the National Institutes of Health pointed out to me that a serious effort to curtail wasteful medical spending would directly help workers. It would spare them from paying the insurance premiums and taxes that now cover that care.

The tax code, meanwhile, has become far more favorable to high-income workers at the same time that they — and they alone — have received large pretax raises. That doesn’t make much sense, does it?

It’s a pretty big to-do list. But it’s a pretty big problem. Since the economy now seems to be in recession, and since recessions inevitably bring their own pay cuts, my guess is that the problem will look even bigger by the time the next president takes office.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/business/09leonhardt.html?em&ex=1207972800&en=f760f6639c979460&ei=5087%0A

Being Grown Up Isn't Half as Fun as Growing Up

True, or no?

Personally, it is often said by older people that when you're a kid, you don't know how good you have it, and maybe that is true. But, isn't it one of the horrible things about being a kid that you don't have any perspective and you think that every new days' events are all-important?

I can see in my own life a shift from those daily events to worldly events. It's the same page, just a different book and in reality, none of it really matters all that much. Sure, we fight for our civil rights because we care about our own rights to live our lives in peace without being harassed by representatives of the government, but really, how many of us take advantage of those rights that we are afforded?

We go through life, working ourselves into the grave and watching the days go by as though they don't mean anything. Then at the end of that day we look back at what we have accomplished and realize that none of it really means anything. On top of that, we look at the world around us and realize that everything is gradually breaking down. This takes me back to my original idea.

Of course we long for the days when we were kids for 2 reasons. One, we have no idea what is going on from a macro-standpoint. The things that we are consumed with revolve primarily around us and our personal relationships. Two, by acknowledging that everything is breaking down, then we must extrapolate that things actually WERE better back then.

Happiness, like Denis Leary said, is just a moment. Enjoy the ones that you have and hope that at the end of the day that you have more good ones than bad ones. Try to live your life in a way that pleases you and doesn't infringe on the pleasure of others (unless you're delivering said pleasure).

So here is my purge of frustration so I don't have to deal with it anymore.

1) Bush (and company) is a dick and a criminal. He deserves to be brought up on charges and convicted of treason among other things.

2) We are headed for hard times, so buy a helmet.

3) The cohort of individuals that are coming up behind me are dumber, more superficial and more oblivious than the ones that were in my cohort. I assume that this is part of the breaking down of all things.

4) You have to fill your life with interesting things, or it will be uninteresting. No one is going to do this for you.

5) Don't be nostalgic about the old days, because they weren't as great as you remember them to be. Enjoy every second that you have for what it is. Every second that goes by is another chance to turn things around.

I Hope This is an Unfunny April Fool's

In today’s LA Times, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) sheds light on the staggering number of sexual assaults within the military, stating, “Women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq,” and calls on Congress and the military to do more to protect servicewomen:

At the heart of this crisis is an apparent inability or unwillingness to prosecute rapists in the ranks. According to DOD statistics, only 181 out of 2,212 subjects investigated for sexual assault in 2007, including 1,259 reports of rape, were referred to courts-martial, the equivalent of a criminal prosecution in the military. Another 218 were handled via nonpunitive administrative action or discharge, and 201 subjects were disciplined through “nonjudicial punishment,” which means they may have been confined to quarters, assigned extra duty or received a similar slap on the wrist. In nearly half of the cases investigated, the chain of command took no action; more than a third of the time, that was because of “insufficient evidence.” […]

The absence of rigorous prosecution perpetuates a culture tolerant of sexual assault — an attitude that says “boys will be boys.”

A Department of Defense report released this month found 2,688 reports of sexual assault in the military in FY2007. According to Harman, the number of reported military rapes jumped 73 percent from 2004 to 2006.

http://alternet.org/blogs/peek/80918/

If this report is true, then it would seem that the brainless deification of the American military has sunk to an unfortunately all too familiar low. Mind you, I am not generalizing the soldiers, but I am talking about the infrastructure of the organization, which is designed to remove all humanity and, in many cases accountability for any wrongdoing whatsoever.