I never want to see what the local police are saying about the citizens they “serve and protect”. I suspect that some of it will be like what was exposed when text messages between Eureka, CA police officers were leaked. It’s a lot of contempt for the homeless and mentally ill, sexual descriptions of women they see on the street, and macho promises to shoot and beat hippies, drug addicts, and protesters.

Among the most appalling stories there was that the local public health department was asking these untrained, unprofessional, abusive thugs to check up on people who contracted COVID-19. The police called them “outbreak monkeys”. And these are the people expected to aid public health officials? Inappropriate much?

Take away a big chunk of the money spent on assholes with guns and recommit it to EMTs and social workers and people who actually know something other than how to threaten and harm others. At least some people are aware of what needs to change.

Banter like that captured in the Eureka text messages shows the rare, unvarnished reality of how some officers view their work, said Stinson, who used to work for a police department himself.

“This is the police subculture of that agency unmasked,” Stinson said. “This is the officers in their natural habitat, talking amongst themselves. It’s an us-versus-them mentality. It’s a sexualized environment where policing is violent. It’s ugly.”

The messages also show an environment resistant to change in the city, which for years has also struggled with a swell of drug abuse, homelessness and overwhelmed social services.

One officer in the Eureka texts appeared to ridicule efforts to ban chokeholds and other deadly restraints against suspects. In one text exchange, an officer shared a YouTube video about “control techniques” being barred in New York City. “(Gov. Gavin) Newsom is already j—- off with excitement hoping he can get it here I’m sure,” another officer wrote.

“At the end of the day, whether somebody was joking or not joking, or intended to to be offensive or not, we have to be responsible and accountable for our words and our actions,” Watson said. “And we have to be careful that everything that we do on and off duty reflects in a positive light, that reinforces trust with our community.”

Robinson, the former chief in Phoenix, said comments like those in the text messages are detrimental to the good work the vast majority of law enforcement officers are trying to do — especially given the recent reckoning facing law enforcement.

He said, based on the text messages, they need a cultural change.

Yeah, right. Two of the officers responsible for some of the worst messages have been put on paid leave; their co-conspirators in the department are probably just waiting for the heat to die down so they can put them back on the streets.

You’re sinking pretty low there, Lara Trump.

A dog rescue charity with links to Lara Trump has spent as much as $1.9 million at former President Donald Trump’s properties over the last seven years and will drop an additional quarter-million at his Mar-a-Lago country club this weekend.

According to a permit filed with the town of Palm Beach, Florida, Big Dog Ranch Rescue estimates it will spend $225,000 at the club where Donald Trump has taken up full-time residence since leaving the White House. All the profit from that spending winds up in his pocket.

Lara Trump, the Donald’s daughter-in-law, wants to run for the US Senate from North Carolina. Do North Carolinians hate puppies? I hope they remember this grift.

What a strange headline: “Cuomo accusations split Democrats between wanting an investigation or a resignation”. How about an investigation, which prompts a resignation? Why not have him resign, and follow through with an investigation? Or do both simultaneously? I don’t care. Andrew Cuomo is a rolling disaster. Stop him now.

It’s not just that he hid nursing home deaths and mismanaged the pandemic for the most vulnerable populations. It’s that he runs the state as a smug patriarch and fosters a patronizing culture of sexism. Totally familiar. This crap is everywhere, and no one ever seems to take any steps to bring the abusers back in line. Listen to this woman who worked with him.

I never thought the governor wanted to have sex with me. It wasn’t about sex. It was about power. He wanted me to know that I was powerless, that I was small and weak, that I did not deserve what relative power I had: a platform to hold him accountable for his words and actions. He wanted me to know that he could take my dignity away at any moment with an inappropriate comment or a hand on my waist. (The Cuomo administration has declined to comment.)

It’s not that Cuomo spares men in his orbit from his trademark bullying and demeaning behavior. But the way he bullies and demeans women is different. He uses touching and sexual innuendo to stoke fear in us. That is the textbook definition of sexual harassment.

The message is that as long as you don’t rape or molest a woman, you can get away with all kinds of demeaning behavior. Go ahead, let all the apparatchiks in your orbit sneer at women. No crime, no foul.

Unfortunately, though, it wasn’t just the culture of the Cuomo administration I had to survive in New York’s capital. If it wasn’t Cuomo putting his arm around me, it was a drunken state lawmaker propositioning me at a bar or a guard repeatedly denying me access to the Senate chambers or a male colleague in the press corps refusing to accept his own complicity in what was happening. Whether the governor resigns or finishes out his term or is reelected or runs for another office, his eventual departure alone will not end the legacy of sexual harassment in Albany. As a former colleague recently tweeted, it’s “as pervasive as air.”

I know, who cares? Isn’t that women’s role, to look pretty and be nice toys to touch?

I supported the eviction of Al Franken from congress for the same reason: nothing he did was criminal, but it was disrespectful and sent a message that women are appropriate targets for demeaning jokes. Sorry, Al, you did good work but are a necessary casualty of an important shift in our social environment. Meanwhile, Cuomo is a colossal arrogant asshole who bungled his way through the pandemic and has no redeeming characteristics to cause us any doubts. So why are we debating whether he ought to resign?

I’ve been struggling to come up with a good excuse for keeping the British monarchy around, and I’ve come up with two. Just two.

1. Inspiring the Irish to write lovely diatribes against kings, queens, and other such useless “influencers”.
   

   Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.

   Beyond this, it’s the stuff of children’s stories. Having a queen as head of state is like having a pirate or a mermaid or Ewok as head of state. What’s the logic? Bees have queens, but the queen bee lays all of the eggs in the hive. The queen of the Britons has laid just four British eggs, and one of those is the sweatless creep Prince Andrew, so it’s hardly deserving of applause.

2. Giving conservatives apoplexy as they twist themselves into knots to defend the indefensible.

   British TV personality Piers Morgan on Wednesday doubled down on his criticism of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, after being pressured out of his high-profile anchor job at “Good Morning Britain.”

   In typical style, he dug in his heels, refused to apologize and announced he would be back.

   “On Monday, I said I didn’t believe Meghan Markle in her Oprah [Winfrey] interview. I’ve had time to reflect on this opinion, and I still don’t,” he tweeted.

   Morgan sensationally resigned Tuesday after his network was flooded with complaints about his coverage of the interview. He had said he “didn’t believe a word” Meghan told Winfrey, specifically her assertion that she felt suicidal and was offered no help from Buckingham Palace.

These are all worthy accomplishments, but also rather superfluous. Irish writers have a long history of beautiful writing and hardly need a royal cause to motivate them; for that matter, the Scots and Welsh have also achieved much in spite of the English appendage to their homelands. While I’m happy to see Piers Morgan blow himself up, conservatives will seek out and detonate outrage no matter where it comes from. If they aren’t rushing to support the British Royal family, they’ll just latch on to some other victim, like Pepe LePew.

Come to think of it, a British royal and an entitled, oblivious cartoon skunk do have much in common.

Spotted in Morris: crude, ugly “WE ALL MATTER” sign, dirty American flags and blue line flags, and to top it all off, “JESUS” on the roof. It really needs a few Trump signs for that special je ne sais quoi, but maybe those went down after the colossal failure.

I’m sure the neighbors appreciate the reduction in property values all around — it keeps the taxes lower, you know.

Adam Rutherford presents a balanced assessment of Darwin.

Darwin was a liberal, and an abolitionist, perhaps influenced by his taxidermy tutor in Edinburgh, a Guyanese man called John Edmonstone who had once been enslaved. But we must be honest in our assessment of him and his work. He was a man of his time, and The Descent of Man contains many passages that seriously jar today, being scientifically specious and politically outmoded. Darwin never mentions Edmonstone by name, only as a “full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate”. He speaks of how the “civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races”.

In the more elegant quotations, you may note the typically Victorian use of “man” to mean all humans. It is less forgivable given Darwin’s belief that women were intellectually inferior: “If men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.” At least part of his incomparable legacy is that we now know this to be incorrect.

That’s fair. Basically, everyone who lived over 50 years ago was stuffed to the gills with wrong ideas — wrong as we know them to be now, and 50 years from now the next generation will be appalled at what the majority believes now (“You went to church, and thought capitalism was good?”) — but at least he was in the vanguard of those trying to bring about a better world for all.

Still, when Bill & Ted fetch him back to the modern day in their telephone booth, I expect to be disappointed. I can imagine Darwin tut-tutting on Twitter about all those women in comic book movies, and suggesting, in the name of the betterment of mankind, that maybe those ladies should be home tending the children, and maybe they aren’t better than a dog anyways, what with all these modern ideas. Let’s keep him in the 19th century!

Hmm. Maybe we could use that telephone booth to send a lot of 21st century babblers back the 19th, where they’d be happier.