It truly boggles my mind how anyone can see a $6 billion policing budget in ONE city alone – which is more than we spend on health, youth, housing, and homelessness services here *combined* – and say, “You know what will fix police brutality? More money” A Tweet from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who identifies herself on Twitter as @AOCUS Representative,NY-14 (BX & Queens). In a modern, moral, & wealthy society, no American should be too poor to live. People-Funded, no lobbyist, She/her.Bronx + Queens, NYC ocasiocortez.com Joined April 2010
What we are saying is that the *current infrastructure* that exists as policing … should not exist anymore. A Tweet from Ilhan Omar who identifies herself on Twitter as @IlhanMN Mom, Refugee, Intersectional Feminist, 2017 Top Angler of the Governor’s Fishing Opener and Congresswoman for #MN05. Join me.
I open the New York Times on my screen and read about another police officer killing another black man and I am at a loss for words. As my awareness of the magnitude of the carnage our white oligarchy has imposed on our black citizens, I’ve gone from “It’s just a couple of bad apples”, to “They need more training, not the heavy-duty weaponry we give them”, to “Holy shit! These guys are out of control”, to “Not another killing, there must be some good cops”, to “Another killing, this can’t be an accident”, to finally, in despair, “What the fuck, they are just killing black men for sport, this is on purpose”.
If we are capable of such love and kindness, why do we think that we need these thugs to protect us? Do we think that this love and this kindness are so delicate that they can only exist behind a blue line of hate and anger? Make no mistake, we are players in this travesty of who we say we are as a country, as a people. I am at least, and I’m deeply sorry for it. Which, of course, does no good at all.
Told a guy in Walgreens that masks are still a state mandate and he called me a cunt. Happy Wednesday. Mackenzie@coffeeshopjihad who identifies as “If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?” -Paul Kalanithi • فارسى بلدم • running w/ MS • سبحان الله rt=\=endorsementWashington, DC AskAboutAustinTice.org
The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a study on delayed gratification in 1972 led by psychologist Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University. In this study, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time. Wikipedia
Coronavirus live updates: Cases in the U.S. Top Two Million and Are Rising in 21 States. A headline in the New York Times
I’m not usually a Paul Krugman guy, I disagree with him as much as I agree with him, however, I wholeheartedly agree with his latest Editorial. The gist of which is: At this point, there have been enough international success stories in dealing with the coronavirus to leave us with a clear sense of what beating the pandemic takes…But you have to be strict and you have to be patient, staying the course until the pandemic is over, not giving in to the temptation to return to normal life while the virus is still widespread…So it is, as I said, a kind of marshmallow test…And America is failing that test.
I don’t think this is a political thing although it does have political overtones, which President Trump has aggravated by refusing to wear a mask and encouraging thugs with weapons to threaten their state governments among other counterproductive behavior, however, California is a Liberal state with a Democratic Governor and Legislature and we are starting to open up even though infections and deaths are still climbing. We, our culture, I guess, don’t seem to have what it takes to stop this. In my part of the Bay Area, I’m dismayed at how few people wear masks on busy streets. and even in stores and restaurants, I see people wearing their masks to cover their mouth and their nose is hanging out, ready to spread the virus.
As an aside, when President Trump toured a swab factory without a mask last week, they had to destroy all the swabs that weren’t sealed. I have no idea how many, more than ten, I would bet. End aside.
Maybe the world is changing, if so, people like this are changing it. Yesterday, I clicked on a link to a bail fund in Minneapolis and the answer I got is below (feel free to click on the link).
PAUSE ON DONATIONS – June 2, 2020
We are no longer the same organization we were one week ago. One week ago we were a small bail fund struggling to get anyone to listen about the harms of cash bail and pre-trial detention. We are now flooded with resources and we are going to take a beat while we marshal those. We have some big plays in mind.
Reclaim the Block has posted a list of worthy orgs. Your support is going to do incredible things. We love you.
This is so unfair to me! Everything was going great. We were cruising to reelection!’” Vanity Fair quoting an un-named ally of Donald Trump saying the President was furious about the coronavirus.
The President of the United States @realDonaldTrump has just walked from the White House to St John’s Church where rioters set fire last night. It’s a triumphant moment of hope over fear. Tweet by Richard Grenell@RichardGrenell.
Ahead of Trump Bible photo op, police forcibly expel priest from St. John’s church near White House RNS Religion News Service
Being quarantined at home makes everything out in the world seem surreally imaginary; behind the trees, over the next hill, ten miles away people are sick and dying…So I am told and so I believe only because of a blind faith that I’m being told the truth. When I make my infrequent forays into that world, I don’t see any bodies or obviously sick people stumbling around. This virus has not produced zombies, not even pictures of bodies – although we do see refrigerator trucks for body storage – but I believe that death is, in fact, out there.
I’m shocked by the power that President Trump has solely because he is exercising it; power that I didn’t think came with the office. It turns out that what I thought were legal limitations on Presidental Power were just suggestions. Over and over, Trump will do something that I thought was illegal but turned out to just be a quaint convention that past Presidents followed. Conventions like granting access to Congressional oversight committees or not firing people whose job it is to make sure the Administration is following the law. I thought our commitments to WHO were locked in by treaties but, it seems, the President can just wave his arms and poof, the treaties are gone (or never were). We watched The Great over a series of days last week. It is a very fictionalized account of Catherine the Great of Russia and her rise to power by a coup d’état that she organized against her husband. It is also an essay on the power of Office. Watching it, I kept thinking about the power of the Presidency and how much Trump has enlarged and changed that power.
I’m shocked that most, if not all, American companies do not have enough reserves to go a couple of months without income. A month without income and airlines are going broke, a month without income and Neiman Marcus has to declare bankruptcy. It is apparently considered good business to be leveraged to the maximum and have a business plan that assumes nothing will ever go wrong.
I’m shocked that the picture above, of troops in full battle gear, is real. It was taken yesterday, June 2nd, 2020 at the Lincoln Memorial.
I’m shocked that in the picture below, nobody even knows if these troops, who reputedly said they were with the Justice Department but have no identifying badges, are even with the government.
A cropped picture taken from a Tweet by Dan Friedman @dfriedman33.
I’m shocked that the Trump Administration is so inept. When Donald Trump won the election, I got in more than several fights with my friends who kept saying he was dumb. I thought he had run a brilliant campaign – although it was aided and abetted by Hillary running an unusually tone-deaf campaign – and was smarter than he was getting credit for. But, watching this Administration bumbling through the pandemic, first trying to say it wasn’t even real, and now escalating the violence of protests when everybody wants a leader to spread calm, I realize I was wrong.
I’m shocked that our supply lines are so fragile. It turns out that our efforts to make our supply lines as efficient as possible, going to “just in time” deliveries by eliminating the waste of redundancy, has taken all the resiliency out of the system.
Maybe it is just my age, maybe I’m shocked by everything that is different now, but I do not think so, I think we are in the midst of major societal changes. I think that these really are extraordinary times.
The prelude to the week started with armed thugs threatening the government with mayhem if they didn’t get their way. I agree with their goal but two things bothered me. And surprised me. We Liberals like to tell ourselves that these are just man-boys trying to compensate for small dicks – or something – but these guys didn’t look like week men trying to act tough, they looked like marginalized men – who really were tough – trying to look as scary as they could. The bigger surprise, looking back from the cop’s reaction to unarmed protesters, was that there was no pushback from the police. I had a shivering moment when I thought, Oh man! there are more of us, but they are better armed and the police are on their side.
Back on Monday, George Floyd was killed by a Peace Officer, Derek Chauvin. Killed slowly, while begging for his life. We all asked ourselves, what kind of man does that, what kind of human being kills a man like that? The answer is “A cop because they pretty much can”. Even with a video of the eight-plus minutes, it took the cop to murder Floyd, it took several days to charge the cop and six days to book him. As the reality of the killing sunk in, the protests grew and turned nasty.
On Tuesday, out of nowhere, some asshole woman calls the police on a black guy who is out birdwatching saying, “I’m calling the cops…I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” He was out Birdwatching for crying out loud. Birdwatching. But it wasn’t a case of birdwatching while black, she called the cops because he had the audacity to ask her to leash her dog in New York’s Central Park.
Then, around the time the President, during his daily talk – press conference is too grandiose a term – told us what a great job he is doing, we passed the one-hundred-thousand-dead landmark. One hundred thousand souls – and that is probably an undercount – dying alone. Stalin is reputed to have said A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic, well so is 100,000. Every once in a while, a name will pop up in the paper – pop up on the screen, really – a well know Amazon Indigenous activist or an altruistic restaurant owner has died of Covid-19, but most of the one hundred thousand souls have disappeared from the American conscience like a rock dropped in a mine shaft.
The world’s economy, our economy is in freefall and our president is preoccupied with strange conspiracies about Joe Scarborough. It is disturbing that the President of the United States goes after individual citizens. It is so cowardly, but it is also distracting. The economy is in freefall and supply lines are trashed so getting out of this mess is not going to be simple.
As the protests turned nasty, the cops got nastier and then, in some places, they rioted just like the cops did in Chicago at the ’68 Democratic Convention. I watched a video of a New York cop driving by a peaceful crowd spaying – randomly – pepper spray as he drove by; I watched two other New York cop cars just drive into a crowd. I watched another video of a cop pushing his bicycle into a black woman, knocking her down, and then I watched a white woman, half the cop’s size push back, knowing her whiteness protected her.
We have militarized the police, they no longer seem to be here to “Serve and Protect” the people, they now seem to be here to control. Somehow, as a nation, we can not afford to protect our doctors – our state governors have to bg for protective equipment from foreign countries – but we have enough riot gear to cover anything. What a graphic statement on who we have become, what a statement of our values.
I want to end with saying I also saw a video of the Chief of Police of Santa Cruz take a knee with the protestors – who broke nothing – and the Chief of Police of Houston first speak movingly and emotionally to the protesters and then march with them. The sun is shining today and the world looks better but…
