Lawless police

The police were systematically slashing car tires during the protests. They initially lied and said they didn’t do it, or that it was a few random incidents, but when every car in a lot is slashed in all four tires, you know that’s a big fat lie. Now that there’s video of cops destroying property, they’ve changed the lie.

The Star Tribune has identified the officers puncturing tires as state troopers and deputies from the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office. The officers strategically deflated the tires to “stop behaviors such as vehicles driving dangerously and at high speeds in and around protesters and law enforcement,” said Minnesota Department of Public Safety spokesperson Bruce Gordon. The troopers reportedly targeted cars that “contained items used to cause harm during violent protests” such as rocks and concrete. The Anoka County Sheriff’s Lt. Andy Knotz said deputies were following directions from the state-led Multiagency Command Center.

Yeah, right. Lie, lie, lie.

Also of note: these are Minnesota state troopers, not the Minnesota Police Department. The city is talking about defunding their police, but the staties aren’t being touched. Maybe when they’re hit with all the towing bills and lawsuits, somebody will wake up and realize they’re just as corrupt?

Just look at these pretend-soldiers destroying private property!!!. Shock! Horror!

The gray car in the video above was the rental car of Luke Mogelson, a New Yorker writer who typically covers war zones and is now stationed in Minneapolis to write about the protests. As the protest on Sunday evening turned hairy, with law enforcement tear-gassing peaceful groups soon after curfew, Mogelson went to check on his car, showing his press pass to officers along the way. (Media were exempt from the curfew.) One officer took a picture of his press pass and said he would “radio it up the chain so everyone knew that car belonged to the press,” said Mogelson. When he came back later that evening to retrieve his car, officers informed him that the tires were punctured. “They were laughing,” Mogelson recalled. “They had grins on their faces.”

ACAB. Indisputably.

Gosh. Maybe I should respect the police perspective on all this.

Linux goal for the day: iMovie replacement!

I tried KDENLive. It was too much — so many quirks and clumsiness, perhaps because it was just trying to pour every single video editing option possible in willy-nilly.

Today, I’m experimenting with Shotcut, on the recommendation of a reader. It’s simpler, so not quite as overwhelming. I might be able to work with this.

A couple of common problems I run into everything Linux. With no universal interface guidelines, every program seems to want to do everything their own way. I appreciate how the programmers can find that liberating, but in the absence of constraints and standards, they always seem to make bad choices, and you have to just stare in wonder at how they’ve decided to arbitrarily fuck up their own work. It also means that using the thing is awkward and not at all fluid, at least not until the user develops their own novel workflow. It also means the user has the power to make the most godawful ugly videos ever — I was testing various things out and made this nightmarish thing with purple 3-D titles and funky video effects and random stuff appearing in spectacularly elaborate ways that will never be seen by the eyes of any other human. I’m about to take it ’round back, shoot it, throw it in a hole, and set it on fire. But I figure out how some things work while building that monstrosity!

Bottom line: Shotcut might be my replacement for iMovie, as ugly as it is. I might just have to become insensitive to non-Mac ugliness. I know, I shouldn’t complain, it’s free software…but iMovie is also free.

First try:

Also, I’ll be on this channel at 3pm tomorrow (9 June) for a free-for-all rant about Kent Hovind and other creationists.

Let there be change at last

Give ’em hell, John Oliver. Good summary.

I would also point out a fact revealed in this thread: most police activity isn’t about preventing crime, it’s about inventing crime, finding reasons to harass and intimidate and punish people to justify their existence. That’s the reason crime rates go down when the police go on strike: it removes a significant factor, the mere reporting of crimes that are generated to give the illusion that they are essential. Cop busy work is harassment of citizens.

Ever policeman in the country needs to be thinking about alternative employment opportunities. Preferably something that doesn’t involve carrying a gun or baton.

Did he think he’d go to heaven?

In the news, residents of Bristol tore down a statue of Edward Colston (1636-1721) and threw it in a river.

I knew nothing about the guy and had to look him up, where two prominent facts are mentioned.

A. He made a lot of money in the slave trade. In fact, he held the highest office in the Royal African Company, so he was the head honcho of the institution responsible for the British side of the slave trade.

B. He was loved in Bristol as a tremendous philanthropist, founding churches and hospitals and poorhouses, and was spending a lot of money on local, British charities.

Huh. So he was busy generating great misery in the black people of Africa, and using the profits from that ugly enterprise to benefit the white people in his hometown. Those two perspectives are irreconcilable, unless he also thought his black victims were undeserving or non-human. I rather suspect that the suffering he caused greatly outweighed the good he did at home, especially since his goodness was fortuitously focused on maintaining the institutions that kept him wealthy and powerful. So, yeah, throw his monument in the river. Recognize that the good we do for our local benefit has to take into account the global harm that we do.

It’s also an interesting example of how European communities benefited at the expense of African and Asian peoples.

Now, Belgium…about King Leopold II…

Hallelujah!

The Minneapolis city council has committed to dismantling the police department!

“Decades of police reform efforts have proved that the Minneapolis Police Department cannot be reformed and will never be accountable for its actions,” they said. “We are here today to begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department and creating a new, transformative model for cultivating safety in Minneapolis.”

While some council members have provided hints of what the changes might mean — sending mental health professionals or social workers to respond to certain emergencies, for example — the group did not present a single, unified vision for how they would replace policing in Minneapolis.

Organizers with Black Visions said they too don’t have all the answers about what would replace the police department, but they said police can’t be reformed through initiatives like training and body cameras. This is the beginning of the process of putting together a “police-free future,” they vowed, by investing in more community initiatives like mental health and having community members respond to public safety issues.

I’m not sure what that’ll look like, but any organization that you can call for help that does not immediately dispatch armored thugs with guns will be preferable.

Also, the state of Minnesota has filed charges against the MPD for civil rights violations. They haven’t got a friend in the world, other than a few deranged Republicans.

Breaking news: young white men…also bad

I forgot about the incels! I guess every generation has people who suck. In this case, Cole Carini decided to murder women because they were attractive. Cole himself was not at all unattractive in appearance. I say “was” because now he looks like he’d been trying to turn his face into a colander.

A Virginia man inspired by notorious “incel” mass shooter Elliott Rodger fantasized about blowing up a shopping mall and killing “hot cheerleaders,” according to an FBI affidavit.

On June 2, Cole Carini of Richlands, Virginia, showed up at the Clinch Valley Medical Center with a missing hand. Several fingers on Carini’s other hand were also gone, and he had shrapnel wounds to the neck and throat. A local sheriff’s deputy arrived to interview Carini, who claimed his gruesome injuries were the result of a gardening accident.

Alas for that alibi, the lawn had not been mowed in some time, and on investigating his house, they found explosives, a blown apart container, and rusty nails, along with a little story he’d written.

He casually walked through the shopping mall, his jacket concealed deadly objects, the letter read, parts of which were illegible. He was doing it and was assured it must be done. Even if he died this statement was worth it! He had… of tension that would come and go as he approached the stage of hot cheerleaders… A dead seriousness sank in as he realized he was truly passing the point of no return! He decided I will not back down I will not be afraid of the consequences no matter what I will be heroic I will make a statement like Elliott Rodgers [sic] did he thought to himself.

Instead of killing “hot cheerleaders”, all he managed to do was blow off both of his hands, the only parts of a human body that loved him. The scars wouldn’t necessarily hurt his love life in the future, but the hatred for women is really going to ruin his future dating chances.

True equality at last: white women are as bad as white men

Not NOW. Don’t tell me that the National Organization for Women has become yet another regressive establishment institution. Apparently, speaking at NOW about the inclusion of minority women triggers the white ladies in the audience.

That’s how Weeks found herself in front of a sea of older white women at the Colors Lounge in Melbourne, Florida, in June 2017, addressing the Brevard County NOW chapter. Her voice broke as she spoke about what motivated her to run, and the conversations she’d had with her mother about the importance of fighting for both women and people of color.

“It’s important because we need to give a voice to those most oppressed in order to make everybody better,” Weeks told the audience, many of whom were around her mother’s age. “That’s women of color, that’s disabled people, that’s LGBTQ people.”

She was about to move on to the most relevant part of her stump speech—how NOW could help do all this—when she was interrupted by a white woman in the audience.

“White women, too!” the woman yelled.

“And then yeah, don’t forget the white women,” Weeks replied evenly.

“Just the women with the pussies!” another woman called out, in what seemed to be a reference to trans women. In video obtained by The Daily Beast, you can hear an audience member groan.

“It’s OK,” Weeks said, attempting to press on. “It is important to include all women.”

The rot doesn’t stop at the rank-and-file level. The Daily Beast investigation found a racism and transphobia epidemic everywhere in management of the organization.

In interviews with The Daily Beast, nearly a dozen members, employees, and visitors recalled women of color being heckled, silenced, or openly disparaged at NOW meetings and offices. The behavior culminated at the 2017 conference where, witnesses say, members dismissed Fortson-Washington, a black woman, as “angry” and entitled, and accused Weeks of being a “hot-headed Latina.” On the last day of the conference, more than a dozen women marched around a conference room to protest racism inside the organization.

But the problem didn’t stop there. Internal emails, documents and interviews obtained by the Daily Beast reveal that allegations of racism reached the highest levels of the organization after Weeks and Fortson-Washington’s loss. More than a dozen employees at the national headquarters signed onto a letter accusing President Toni Van Pelt of sidelining and disparaging women of color, and the previous vice president has filed a federal racial discrimination suit.

It seems to be rampant among white women of a certain age, my age. Is this the National Organization for Women, or the National Organization for Karens? I didn’t think they’d need a professional association to represent them.

Speaking of older women behaving badly, there’s been a J.K. Rowling flare-up.

That’s one of her milder tweets. She’s madly digging to defend her implication that somehow you undermine sex when you recognize that menstruation isn’t the defining property of womanhood you are erasing sex and the reality of women. She says that “my life has been shaped by being female”, which is certainly true, but she’s unable to appreciate that many factors affect everyone’s life experience, and that trans men and women can share many aspects of their identity — even with cis men and women.

But then, she’s old, she’s rich, she’s got some terrible new books to promote (while I appreciate that Harry Potter motivated a lot of kids to read, including my own, I have to state that they were derivative and repetitive and contained a lot of problematic attitudes), so she’s got to keep jabbering and all the plates spinning, exposing her own inner Karen.

I shake my shaggy head at yet another creationist

I know that I need a haircut, and I was losing my voice here, and that this Matt Powell character is an awful little pipsqueak who doesn’t deserve any attention, but I wanted to throw together a little video because I was bemused by the fact that he was using those claims about aliens by Wickramasinghe to condemn all of evolutionary since. When he started incredulously yelling that “THIS IS WHAT EVOLUTION TEACHES,” that squid piggy-backed on asteroids to populate the planet, I just had to point out that this is most definitely not what evolution teaches, and that it was plain bad science.

I think I’m far more pissed off at those phonies affiliated with panspermia, and their long-running infiltration of the science establishment, than I am with a not-very-bright loudmouthed kid babbling about Jesus.

And if I’m mad at those wackos, you can’t imagine how furious I get with those frauds promoting evolutionary psychology.

I’m a backslider!

I’m uploading a new video right now which will be posted first to Patreon, and tomorrow to everyone else, and it chewed up my whole day. I futzed around way too long trying to do the editing under Linux, and was tearing my hair out — I’m not exactly skilled at the video editing thing at the best of times, but trying to use all new software which was full of Linux geekiness was just too much. So I gave up and did it on my Mac. The whole workflow is so much simpler and more comfortable there for an amateur.

I’ll continue to try and master my Linux-fu, but I’m not quite there yet on the video front.