Ailes Helped Women! He Did!

trump-rnc-afp-800x430

In transcripts released ahead of his Sunday appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump stood by former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who stepped down on Thursday amid allegations of sexual harassment.

Toronto Star correspondent Daniel Dale published the transcripts on his Twitter feed Saturday evening.

Meet the Press host Chuck Dodd asked Trump about the allegations against Ailes, and the candidate replied, “Well I don’t want to comment. But he’s been a friend of mine for a really long time. And I can tell you that some of the women who are complaining, I know how much he’s helped them. And even recently. And when they write books that are fairly recently released, and they say wonderful things about him.”

He went on, “And now all of a sudden they’re saying these horrible things about him. It’s very sad. Because he’s a very good person. I’ve always found him to be just a very, very good person. Any by the way a very, very talented person. Look what he’s done. So I feel very badly. But a lot of people are thinking he’s going to run my campaign.”

Well, I’m not surprised. I’m sure Donald will say how much he helped the women accusing him of sexual assault. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how little attention that story is getting from the media.

Via Raw Story.

No, Judge, there is not a difference.

Youngstown Municipal Court Judge Robert Milich (Photo: Screen capture from WKBN)

Youngstown Municipal Court Judge Robert Milich (Photo: Screen capture from WKBN)

Youngstown Municipal Court Judge Robert Milich took attorney Andrea Burton into custody for contempt of court after she refused to remove a Black Lives Matter pin while in his courtroom when he asked.

Judge Milich sentenced Burton to five days in jail, but she was released on a stay because the decision is on appeal. She’ll stay out of prison while she works her way through the appeals process and abides by Milich’s rule not to wear items that make a political statement in his court.

Milich told WKBN his opinions on the Black Lives Matter movement are irrelevant when it comes to his anti-pin policy.

“A judge doesn’t support either side,” he said. “A judge is objective and tries to make sure everyone has an opportunity to have a fair hearing, and it was a situation where it was just in violation of the law.”

A judge wasn’t wearing the pin. An attorney was wearing it. So much for that bit of ‘logic’. It’s not a violation of any law to wear a pin, or any other piece of self decoration. So much for that bit of ‘logic’. This is obviously not the work of anyone being objective, now is it, Judge Milich? No, what we see operating here is bias. It’s right there, out in the open, plopped out for everyone to see. Would you try to force someone to remove an Amerikkan flag pin? A Christian cross?

Oh, here we go…

The judge said his ruling is based on Supreme Court case law in which a judge can prohibit symbolic political expression in courtrooms, even if it’s not disruptive.

“There’s a difference between a flag, a pin from your church or the Eagles and having a pin that’s on a political issue,” Milich said.

So, Black Lives Matter is a political expression, but a Flag pin isn’t. Hmmm. And a church pin? That’s not political, it’s perfectly okay to be sporting that type of open discrimination in your objective court? Right.

Full story at WKBN, video at the link.

Women Don’t Need Anything Special.

Delegate Phyllis Schafly watches the speeches Wednesday night of the RNC. Credit: Kira Lerner.

Delegate Phyllis Schlafly watches the speeches Wednesday night of the RNC. Credit: Kira Lerner.

Phyllis Schlafly. Christ, I thought she was dead. I was in my teens when Ms. Schlafly was fighting ERA tooth and nail. She was a nightmarish dinosaur back then, and I see absolutely nothing has changed.

As delegates at the Republican National Convention approved a platform banning women from combat, restricting a woman’s right to an abortion in cases of rape or incest, and without any mention of equal pay or paid family leave, Phyllis Schlafly looked on with a huge smile.

[…]

But Schlafly, whose group Eagle Forum successfully defeated the ERA, said Clinton’s plans are an insult to women and that it is “ridiculous” to think she would help women get ahead.

“Women don’t need anything special,” she said. “Women need a free country just like men.”

That disgusting party and candidate you’re so happily embracing don’t want a free country. Well, perhaps a free country, so to speak, for white males who happen to be Christian. Outside of that, what they want more resembles a concentration camp for the rest of us.

Schlafly, agreeing with her party’s platform, said that a national policy on paid leave is “not what we want at all.”

“We’ve got very generous family leave right now,” she said. “I do think the support of the children is the responsibility of the husband, not the employer.”

Right, because that has worked so very fucking well. Jesus Christ, what is it with these morons who refuse to advance one bloody centimeter? Oh, no, let’s never ever look at countries 10 times more functional and progressive than ours, and take an example. That would be unamerikkkan or something.

Of all the pro-women policies Clinton is endorsing, however, Schlafly took the most issue with the Democratic Party’s support for women in combat. The GOP platform calls for reinstating the ban, which was lifted in December by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. Clinton supported that decision and has said women should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether or not they engage in combat.

“The worst thing she’s doing is calling for the drafting of women,” Schlafly said. “It’s terrible because once you go in the army, you go where you’re told, and women are not suitable for combat and can’t do combat as well as men. It’s endangering the survival of our country to pretend that women can engage in military combat like men.”

Oh, the survival of our country depends on keeping women out of combat? What in the fuckety fuck would you know about combat, Ms. Schlafly? I already know where Ms. Schlafly wants women – back in the kitchen, with their mouths shut, pretending they don’t have any brain at all. Fuck you, and Fuck off, Phyllis.

ThinkProgress has the full story. I think I’ll just wander off for a moment and scream.

The Fraternal Order of Police Is Insulted!

REUTERS/Aaron Josefczyk.

REUTERS/Aaron Josefczyk.

Cops are insulted that they aren’t being put up on a pedestal of pure heroism. It’s hard to imagine how they think having snitrums all over the place is helping any.

Philadelphia’s police union is blasting Hillary Clinton for inviting relatives of victims of police shootings to speak at the Democratic National Convention next week, but failing to include relatives of slain police officers.

John McNesby, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5, said the union was “shocked and saddened” by the planned choice of speakers at the convention, which opens Monday in Philadelphia.

“The Fraternal Order of Police is insulted and will not soon forget that the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton are excluding the widows and other family members of police officers killed in the line of duty who were victims of explicit and not implied racism,” Mr. McNesby said in a statement.

Shocked! Saddened! Insulted! Angry! Certainly, I can understand those feelings. Interesting that Mr. McNesby just can’t figure out that all those emotions and more are also on the part of all the families and friends of those who were victims of extrajudicial killings by cops. As for explicit vs implicit racism, you need to understand those concepts, not just the words, Mr. McNesby. You also need to understand that cop isn’t a race. It probably wouldn’t hurt if you could figure out that people wouldn’t be driven by absolute fury if you acknowledged wanton murder committed by cops, and stopped killing people of colour. The little things, you know. :eyeroll: The mere fact of this outrage is terrifying coming from cops, because you know there is zero thought going on there, it’s all kneejerk reactions, reactions which have a hell of a lot to do with a lack of cop worship. I don’t want people who are authorized to kill wanting worshipful obeisance. We already have enough trouble with religions.

He said it’s “sad that to win an election Mrs. Clinton must pander to the interests of people who do not know all the facts, while the men and women they seek to destroy are outside protecting the political institutions of this country.

I, uh, can I just die of irony poisoning now?

The Clinton campaign has scheduled former President Bill Clinton to speak Tuesday night with members of Mothers of the Movement, a group that includes relatives of black men killed by police such as Eric Garner of New York and Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri.

Former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who said the nation is a “powder keg” over the police-involved shootings and assassinations of officers, is also scheduled to speak.

Full story here.

The Red Hot Assholes Revival.

Pastor Steven Anderson (Screenshot/YouTube)

Pastor Steven Anderson (Screenshot/YouTube)

Remember Steven ‘Pulpit Stomp’ Anderson? Steven and his other hateful buddies are getting together, for the Red Hot Preaching Conference in Sacramento, Ca. this weekend. Gosh, a whole weekend of poisonous hatred. Sounds charming.

The “Red Hot Preaching” conference scheduled for this coming weekend in Sacramento will feature four of the most repugnant King-James-Only pastors who have more than just their relentless hatred of gays in common … they’re all Quiverfull. These preachers of patriarchy are Truly True Believers™ who embrace Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar-style “family values” … Christian homeschooling mega-families who reject all forms of birth control and are devoted to raising up a “quiver full” of children to serve as “arrows” in God’s holy war.

Pastor Roger Jimenez, who celebrated the Orlando massacre, saying, “Christians shouldn’t be mourning the deaths of 50 sodomites,” will be hosting a four-day conference of “soul-winning” and “hard preaching” at his church, Verity Baptist, in Sacramento beginning Thursday evening.

Jimenez will be joined by three fellow “fire-breathing” preachers: Steven Anderson, pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona, who has advocated for the death penalty for gays and adulterers, Donnie Romero, pastor of Stedfast Baptist Church in Fort Worth, who prayed for the injured survivors of the Pulse nightclub attack to die and who threatened violence against LGBT people, and David Berzins, pastor of yet another Independent Fundamental Baptist church, Word of Truth, in Prescott Valley, Arizona.

When Jimenez and company are not busy condemning “sodomites” and “faggots,” they’re likely to be preaching about a woman’s duty to stay at home, dress modestly, submit to her husband, have lots of babies, homeschool, and always be sexually available when hubby’s in the mood.

The current political climate didn’t create these evil doucheweasels. They’d be evil any where, any time. That said, the current political climate is openly fostering and embracing every kind of bigotry and hatred, under one guise or another. The guise of Christianity is being used to push through one evil after another in the GOP dream platform. That’s why, while it’s very tempting to simply mock and dismiss these evil clowns, we cannot afford to do so. Here in uStates, if we aren’t vigilant, if we don’t make every possible effort to rouse people to get out and vote, to make a difference, these evil clowns could well be our future overseers.

The full story is here.

The 800 lb. Gorilla.

Judicial candidate Eric C. Grimm in a May 2016 campaign video. (Screenshot)

Judicial candidate Eric C. Grimm in a May 2016 campaign video. (Screenshot)

There’s no longer an 800 pound gorilla sitting in the middle of the room. There’s a herd of oliphants, trampling their way across uStates, and they white, angry, and bursting with hate.

MLive reports that Eric C. Grimm, a Muskegon lawyer and a judicial candidate for Muskegon County’s probate court, sent an email out to his colleagues on July 10, asking for their votes and criticizing sitting probate court judge Gregory C. Pittman for bullying the other candidates.

“I can understand why some of the other candidates may not want to speak up about the 800-lb Silverback Alpha Male in the middle of the Probate Court,” Grimm wrote in his email. “They are each considerably less free to walk away and refuse to have anything to do with this court if the bullying problem is not fixed.”

According to MLive, Grimm apologized for the bigoted remarks after backlash from prominent public officials including the county prosecutor and the chairman of the county board of commissioners.

The candidate claimed both in a statement and a television interview that he is redeeming himself by, “sentencing myself to 100 hours of community service, in the very same community most adversely impacted by my mistake.”

MLive notes, however, that Grimm refused to retract his broader statements alleging Judge Pittman’s bullying behavior, claiming that he merely “got carried away with the artfulness of a triple metaphor, and lost sight of the optics,” and that the resulting “so-called ‘outrage’ is overblown, insensitive in itself, and a charade.”

So much for that redemption. I wonder just how much that “very same community most adversely impacted” wants this assclown attempting to redeem himself in their neighbourhood. I wouldn’t want him in mine. On another level, it’s the statement about that most adversely impacted community that bugs me no end. I grew up with a couple of extremely bigoted relations. The rest were of the “we’re good people, not bigots” stripe, with heads full of stereotypes they accepted unthinkingly. Of course bigotry harms those it targets, that’s the principal aim, but it reaches much farther than that. Bigotry harms every single person it touches. It’s an infection of thoughtless hate, and highly contagious. It poisons every environment, it ends up in the heads of children everywhere, and so it keeps growing, keeps infecting one person after another, seeping through generations, a toxic mold which inhibits thought, the desire to learn, compassion, and empathy.

I expect it’s too much to hope that Mr. Grimm figures out what he did wrong, and actually tries to correct that, rather than loading up his brain with buzz word idiocy. You don’t need to concern yourself with losing sight of the optics, Mr. Grimm. You need to concern yourself with your loss of humanity.

Full story here.

Goodbye, Dylan.

Dylan Francisco, who was killed in Chicopee, as seen in a Facebook profile photo uploaded June 24, 2016.

Dylan Francisco, who was killed in Chicopee, as seen in a Facebook profile photo uploaded June 24, 2016.

This is Dylan Francisco, a 15 year old murdered by coward and gun fetishist Jeffrey Lovell.

Funeral services have been scheduled for a 15-year-old boy who was shot to death by a homeowner Saturday. […] The teenager, whose obituary who gives his full name as Dylan Christopher Waitson-Francisco, attended the Glenwood School in Springfield for elementary school, according to the obituary. Later he attended middle school in Chicopee. He also started working for the Summer Youth Program with the Valley Opportunity Council in July.

He leaves his mother and step-father, Heather Francisco and Steven Beauregard, and three siblings, Damien and Desiree Francisco and Anthony Beauregard.

Sounds like a good kid, who was gunned down for being a teenager doing teenager things. Unfortunately, this has sparked discussion of the so-called Castle doctrine, where some people are actually defending Lovell. Thankfully, there is no Stand Your Ground law in Massachusetts. So, where are all the pro-lifers, screaming in outrage over this child’s death? Where is anyone screaming in outrage over this death? You know we’re beyond fucked when the important conversation is deemed to be one over whether or not castle doctrine applies. I’m sure that’s of great comfort to Dylan’s family and friends.

Here in Massachusetts, there is no stand your ground law.

However, local attorneys said that homeowners have some rights, but they come with standards.

“To obtain the defense of self defense, the homeowner has to show that the intruder had actually entered into the home of the person who fired the shot in self defense.  Furthermore, there has to be a threat of imminent serious hard.  In other words, if the person has a weapon or threatens a weapon, if a person doesn’t have a weapon, I don’t believe there is a right to use force like a gun,” said Jack McQuade from the Law Offices of Mark E. Solomone.

 

Jeffrey Lovell.

Jeffrey Lovell.

“Mr. Lovell told this party to ‘get the f–k out’ and ‘stay the f–k out.’ As the … party continued to bang on the door Mr. Lovell stated that the window broke at which time Mr. Lovell raised his loaded S & W (Smith & Wesson) firearm and shot one round through the glass of the door,” the police report states.

The door has three windows lined up vertically. The top window broke when the boy was knocking on it, said James Leydon, spokesman for Gulluni.

“Mr. Lovell stated he aimed towards the … torso. After firing the weapon, Mr. Lovell then looked out of the kitchen door and saw the individual lying on the ground at the bottom of the stairs and the … individual was moaning,” the police report states.

[…]

When police arrived, they found no evidence that the victim entered the home, court records said.

“Mr. Lovell also indicated that the victim never entered his residence,” the police report says.

So, it’s obvious Mr. Lovell was not in any danger whatsoever, let alone imminent danger. I think it’s best to remember that this is the man who festooned his Pinterest page with photos of weapons along with “Can you say ‘pest control?’ Gotta get one. ”

Via MassLive, WMN, and MassLive.

Misogyny, GOP Style.

Merchandise on display outside the RNC. Credit: Kira Lerner.

Merchandise on display outside the RNC. Credit: Kira Lerner.

CLEVELAND, OHIO — Each day of the Republican National Convention, as tens of thousands of delegates, reporters, and curious onlookers pushed and shoved their way down a single narrow street leading to the arena’s main stage, a group of vendors hawked t-shirts and buttons attacking Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Delegates and other convention-goers eagerly purchased items that called Clinton a “bitch” and a “tramp,” suggested she be imprisoned, and described her “fat thighs” and “small breasts.”

Mary Patterson, a guest of a delegate from Racine, Wisconsin, perused the merchandise on Sunday morning with her friend, Carol McNeill-Skorupan. Both women stopped in their tracks to buy pins featuring Clinton’s face and the words: “Life’s a bitch. Don’t vote for one.”

“This sums it up right here,” Patterson told ThinkProgress. “She comes off as a bitch, quite honestly. She doesn’t have a warm personality. She seems very cold. It has nothing to do with the gender.”

Her friend agreed. “She is just not a pleasant person,” McNeill-Skorupan said. “Her husband had some charisma, which allowed him to get away with a lot of things, obviously. But she does not have it and she does not have a winning personality. She is kind of a screamer. In my mind, if you’re just out there screaming, you’re negative, you are not positive, you’re a bitch.”

Interesting how screaming and being negative makes Ms. Clinton a bitch, but it makes Trump not only a viable candidate, but a good one. But that’s not anything to do with sexism, no. Nope, not at all.

A few paces down, wearing a rubber Hillary Clinton mask and holding a large neon yellow sign reading “Trump vs. Tramp,” sat Florida resident and longtime political gadfly Bob Kunst.

“Is this sexist? Go fuck yourself. Excuse my language,” he told ThinkProgress when asked about the sign.

“I could have said she was a killer, but this rhymed,” he continued. “This is the door-opener. This gets people’s attention. It works.”

Yes, sexism has worked remarkably well all these centuries, because there are always a wealth of fragile white men to latch onto it.

There’s much more on the not only embedded sexism in the GOP, but their most serious celebration of it at Think Progress. I need more tea.

Losing That Little Blue Checkmark. Permanently.

Conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (Screenshot)

Conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (Screenshot)

Yesterday, it was noted that Leslie Jones had been harassed off Twitter by a torrent of racist shit, and of course, asshack Milo Yiannopoulos was leading the charge. Milo is a remarkably untalented person, who has relied on Twitter to make hay for him, thanks to their rather nonchalant views about harassment. Not that Milo has any idea of how to actually do anything, but he’ll have to make do without Twitter.

Twitter has permanently banned a rightwing writer and notorious troll for his role in the online abuse of Leslie Jones over her role in the Ghostbusters reboot.

Milo Yiannopoulos, the technology editor for Breitbart.com, tweeted as @Nero. Before he was banned, he had more than 338,000 followers and called himself “the most fabulous supervillain on the internet” for his provocations online.

No, Cupcake. You aren’t fabulous at anything.

Yiannopoulos has been suspended from Twitter several times in the past for violating its terms of service, and had his verified status revoked earlier this year, prompting the hashtag #JeSuisMilo among his supporters.

But claims that he had fanned the flames of the harassment of Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones on Twitter led to a “permanent suspension” from Twitter on Wednesday.

Yiannopolous told Breitbart.com his suspension was “cowardly”, and evidence that Twitter was a “no-go zone for conservatives”.

“Like all acts of the totalitarian regressive left, this will blow up in their faces, netting me more adoring fans. We’re winning the culture war, and Twitter just shot themselves in the foot.

“This is the end for Twitter. Anyone who cares about free speech has been sent a clear message: you’re not welcome on Twitter.”

[…]

Before he was banned, he told Heat Street that “of course” he had no regrets about his behaviour towards Jones. “But feminists, on the other hand, should have regrets that they have taught strong women that they are victims and attacked people for having different opinions to them on Twitter.”

A spokesman for Twitter said in a statement that “permanent suspension” was one of a number of steps that had been taken to address the uptick in offending accounts since Jones began rallying against her abusers.

There’s more at The Guardian. Okay, Twitter. This was a good first step. Don’t stop now, please.

Twitter, Oh Twitter.

I keep telling myself I need to activate my twitter account, rather than let it sit and molder. I did tell myself that. Today, I’m more than happy to let it sit an molder. Banal bigots who think they are clever have gleefully harassed actress Leslie Jones away. Twitter makes a lot of noise about harassment, but it seems they never bother to actually do anything about it.

…a Twitter spokesman told the Daily Mail, “This type of abusive behaviour is not permitted on Twitter, and we’ve taken action on many of the accounts reported to us by both Leslie and others. We rely on people to report this type of behaviour to us but we are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to prevent this kind of abuse. We realise we still have a lot of work in front of us before Twitter is where it should be on how we handle these issues.”

I don’t think you are trying enough. The article notes that asshack Yiannopoulos was right back on Twitter, joining in the harassment and encouraging others to do the same. The tweet I included above is one of the mildest. If Twitter ever decides to grow the fuck up and be responsible, I might consider doing something with my account.

Via Raw Story.

I Don’t Need to Read.

AP_Poll_Campaign_2016-Issue

The Washington Post has done the regular quizzing about the reading habits of Presidential nominees. Turns out Donald doesn’t think he needs to read at all. Somehow, I am not at all surprised.

…He said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”

[…]

One day last month, Trump had a visit from a delegation of prominent executives in the oil, steel and retail industries, and one of the executives told Trump that the Chinese were taking advantage of the United States. “He said, ‘I’d like to send you a report,’ ” Trump recalled. “He said, ‘I’d love to be able to send you’ — oh boy, he’s got a lengthy report, hundreds of pages. . . . I said, ‘Do me a favor: Don’t send me a report. Send me, like, three pages.’ ”

Trump said reading long documents is a waste of time because he absorbs the gist of an issue very quickly. “I’m a very efficient guy,” he said. “Now, I could also do it verbally, which is fine. I’d always rather have — I want it short. There’s no reason to do hundreds of pages because I know exactly what it is.”

Full story here.

Facebook, Oh Facebook, Part III.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. CREDIT: AP Photo/Paul Sakuma.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. CREDIT: AP Photo/Paul Sakuma.

Rather than someone putting out highly questionable content, this time it’s the company itself. FB has been taken to task over its lack of diversity, and that lack is still in place. According to the company, that just isn’t their fault, no. There aren’t any women or PoC who are qualified! They just aren’t there, only white guys are qualifying for working at FB.

On Thursday, Facebook released its latest diversity numbers and didn’t have much to show for increases in women and people of color. Its technical workforce is 48 percent white and 83 percent male, while just 3 percent is Hispanic, 1 percent is black, and 17 percent is female. That’s just a 2 percent increase in its female technical workforce from 2014, while its numbers on black and Hispanic workers in that area didn’t budget at all.

The company said on Thursday that it’s “been working hard” to increase the diversity among its ranks. But it also indicated that the hardest work must be done by others.

“It has become clear that at the most fundamental level, appropriate representation in technology or any other industry will depend upon more people having the opportunity to gain necessary skills through the public education system,” Maxine Williams, global head of diversity, wrote in the release of its data. The company indicated to the Wall Street Journal that the main problem is an empty pipeline — that there just aren’t enough skilled people of color and women to hire in the technology field.

Interesting that they have a woman making the statement. I wonder if they think that’s going to make people think they are telling the truth? “Look, we have a woman in charge of diversity, and she says…”

But that explanation ignores the numbers. A USA Today investigation in 2014 concluded that black and Hispanic people were graduating with computer science and engineering degrees from top-tier universities at twice the rate that they were getting hired by big tech firms. That year, the workforces of technology companies in Silicon Valley were just 2 percent black and 3 percent Hispanic on average. But 4.5 percent of all new graduates with bachelor’s degrees in the field from prestigious universities were black and 6.5 percent were Hispanic.

Women have a similar experience. A 2013 report from the Census Bureau found that among college graduates with science and engineering degrees, men were employed in science, technology, engineering, or math at twice the rate of women — 31 percent for men versus 15 percent for women. A different report from last year found that four years after they graduate, less than a quarter of female computer science and engineering majors get a job in their field.

One half of the problem is on the hiring side, where white, male employees have been found to be more likely to hire people who look like them than others in all industries. Technology also thinks of itself as a “meritocracy” where people succeed on skills alone, no matter what they look like, which ignores implicit biases. For example, many people are turned away from jobs for not being a “culture fit,” which can also be read as not fitting in with an already white and male office.

Ohhh, not a “culture fit.” So that’s the new name of the white boys club. This problem certainly isn’t Facebook’s alone, the whole tech industry suffers from culture fit, with a variety of excuses for remaining that way. It’s past time for STEM fields to stop all that mirror gazing, and actually look at that vast pool of people who would like a job. I’m pretty sure if you look hard enough, you might manage to see people who aren’t white, and and aren’t male. In the meantime, don’t place your failures on the shoulders of people who have studied and worked their asses off, and put up with discrimination and microaggressive environments, just so they can do the work they love, and would like to be employed in.

Via Think Progress.

Bulletproof Warrior.

Jim Glennon. Credit: Elizabeth Flores, Star Tribune.

Jim Glennon. Credit: Elizabeth Flores, Star Tribune.

The seminar was called “The Bulletproof Warrior,” and the instructors urged the law enforcement officers in the hotel conference room to make the decision to shoot if they ever feel their lives are threatened.

Videos of bloody shootouts between police and civilians emphasized a key point: Hesitation can kill you.

In the audience at the May 2014 seminar was a young St. Anthony police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, city records show. He’s now known around the world as the officer who killed Philando Castile minutes after making a traffic stop in Falcon Heights last week.

Amid intensifying demands for changes in police training in the wake of the shooting deaths of Castile and others, such “survival” courses for officers are flourishing nationally. But some in law enforcement are distancing themselves from the approach.

The Houston Police Department, for example, won’t pay for its officers to attend the Bulletproof Warrior seminar, which is put on by an Illinois for-profit company called Calibre Press.

And the leader of an international police training association said he thinks some seminars like those offered by Calibre and other firms foster a sense of paranoia among officers.

Oh, you think? As if the militarization wasn’t bad enough, there’s shit like ‘bulletproof warrior’, which is little more than an expensive exhortation to shoot! shoot! shoot!, but not white people if you can avoid it.

“Police training became very militaristic and it caused a lot of the problems that are going on in the nation,” said Michael Becar, executive director of the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training, with offices in Idaho and Washington, D.C.

Ah, there it is. Nice to see this acknowledged, but are you going to move past that?

Jim Glennon, a co-owner of Calibre who co-taught the seminar Yanez attended, said it’s wrong to link the course to the officer’s actions last week. “Everybody’s going after this kid,” Glennon said Wednesday. “Nobody should be judging what he did yet without the evidence.”

Well, you see, we have evidence. Evidence of murder. It’s right there, for everyone to see. Perhaps if you hadn’t invested so much time in making cops hyper-aggressive, this might not have happened.

The Bulletproof Warrior is one of 15 sessions offered by Calibre and its parent company, LifeLine Training. The courses are well-known and popular in law enforcement circles. Facebook photos show conference rooms and auditoriums filled with officers to hear the Bulletproof Warrior message.

Fans say it provides a valuable “wake-up call” in police safety tactics for the street: how to read the body language of someone preparing to attack, for instance. Training professionals note that Calibre was a pioneer decades ago in teaching basic police safety.

The body language of someone preparing to attack. Right. Interesting how the body language of PoC is always “oh no, gonna attack!”, while that of white people, even when firing at police, is not, so you end up with dead PoC, and white people arrested. Something is seriously fucked up with your warrior training there.

Yanez took the 20-hour seminar on May 21-22, 2014, according to a summary of Yanez’s training that the city of St. Anthony provided after a public records request. A year earlier he attended “Street Survival,” another of the company’s seminars, records show.

Yanez also took 20 hours of training in 2012 in “Officer Survival” from a different organization. In May of this year, he took two hours of training titled “de-escalation,” the only instruction in his four years with the department that appears to focus on that approach, the records show.

Over 40 hours of “training” in how to be a bigoted profiler, hyper-aggressive, and a killer. Great. And a whole 2 hours in de-escalation. Wow, I am just so impressed. I don’t want to be funding cop shops, when they are doing this sort of shit. Who in their right mind would? (I said right mind.)

William Czech was also in the Bulletproof Warrior class in the Ramada in Bloomington those two days in 2014. Czech isn’t a police officer. He’s a 47-year-old electrician from Mendota Heights with a keen interest in police training because of incidents involving a mentally ill family member.

Czech posed as a student to get into the class. He said he was horrified. He said he expected to see a presentation about understanding both how to avoid using deadly force as well as how to realize when it’s unavoidable. Czech said the course consistently emphasized the risk of hesitation.

[…]

Still, there are some in law enforcement training who question the courses.

Becar, who leads the international law enforcement training group, said his organization has no position on LifeLine Training and Calibre. But he said he has attended Calibre classes.

“Everything they were doing made the police officers very paranoid,” Becar said. “At some point they wouldn’t even stop a car without three backups.”

The Houston Police Department will not pay for officers to attend the Bulletproof Warrior seminar, said Houston police spokesman Kese Smith. Officers can go on their own time and expense, he said.

Smith said he couldn’t elaborate, saying only that “some of their instruction is not what we instruct.”

“No position.” “Can’t elaborate.” Why in the fuckety fuck not? If there are good cops, who think all this shit has gone much too far, why don’t you have a position? Why can’t you elaborate? Why in the hell aren’t you speaking out and denouncing this absolute crap? Why aren’t you doing your damn job, to protect and serve?

Full article here.