Tax payer money spent on police misconduct

This number is from a Wall Street Journal article by  Buena Elinson and Dan Frisch.

US Taxpayers Have Spent Over 1.4 Billion on Since 2010 Police  Misconduct

1.4 BILLION dollars – taxpayer’s money. Taxpayer’s hard earned money.

So we taxpayer’s have a stake in getting the bad cops out. The whole evaluation and hiring needs to be evaluated. Racist and sexist personalities can be detected early in the evaluation process. Training needs to be enhanced to the standards of developed countries. Cops must all be trained how to recognize and respond to individuals with mental illness. About a quarter of the people murdered by cops are mentally ill.

That said, the lack of mental health treatment and care in this country is sub human. Mental hospitals were closed and no alternative has been funded. Actually not treating individuals with mental health issues cost billions annually. Jailing the crazy ones who come to the attention of law enforcement is extremely expensive. Making it difficult or impossible for families to get help for a family member is tragic. Then there is the issue of calling the cops who arrive and shoot first.

Billions spent because of stupidity and cops.

We could do better, we know better. 

Grassroots – vote for individuals who want to make police accountable. Individuals who are more than pretty words.

Campaign for a real citizen review boards to monitor local law enforcement. Lobby state legislators to upgrade police hiring and training standards. This will cost money but paying for police misconduct is already costing billions of taxpayer’s money.

Educate the public about mental illness. There has to be a balance between old Russia’s use of mental hospitals for political dissidents and jails in the U.S. used to house mentally ill humans.

Feeding the homeless illegal

In Florida. Another southern state.

Russell Brand’s take on the Christian fundamentalist dogmatism:

“Let’s bear in mind,” he concluded, “that America just had midterm elections where $4 billion was spent on campaigning — which is just telling you that something’s good. But feeding the homeless? That’s illegal.”

The story about a 90 year old man being lead away by the cops for feeding hungry homeless human being as been on many news websites.

Got one new Senator sucker from Oklahoma who wants to use the Biblical world view as his guide on Economics. The Bible – that book of plagiarized mythology with zero reference to the ‘new’ world – that’s going to be his text for economics. May you live in interesting times.

There are a few sane states left in this union of psychotic States. Oklahoma and Florida are not in  sane state of being. Kansas is going down the toilet – those dumb fools voted for dogmatic Brownback who isn’t quite through trashing the schools in Kansas. Maine has another fool for a governor who aims to wreck the schools. You want an education for your kids – send them to private school.

Who are the democrats to complain? Most of the dems running, often sounded more like Nixon republicans than FDR democrats? The affordable care act ACA or Obama care is still welfare for the insurance companies. The ACA is better than no ACA. The republicans don’t have an alternative, as it is, the ACA is something Nixon would have come up with. Today’s GOP isn’t Nixon’s GOP. And I am no fan of Nixon.

A Letter from the Future, the subtitle of “The Collapse of the Western Civilization”, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway gives us a looks at the future. Kids in a lot of states won’t be getting the education to help them with critical thinking or get them into colleges where the best minds might still be able to prevent the massive deaths of humans and cultures. The world is already running out of resources. Yet we are hearing the theme that people are hungry because they are lazy or sinners – the memes of the idiots in Florida who write laws against feeding the poor folk.

Why does it take a comedian – like Brand to cut to the truth about American politics?

History rewrites itself – Hoover’s policies will be resurrected, and Russia could shoved in a corner – and then the war to end all mega boom gone. The end. Noam Chomsky is warning the west that Russia can only be pushed so far over the Ukrainian split. The bomb, the one my generation was terrorized with – the tuck and duck under the desks. What sadistic fools the adults of that era were. One of my teachers reminded us that our school room, on a military base, was at ground zero. She used a waste of time scare tactic of adults to give us a lesson in critical thinking. Today she could end up in jail for being honest.

It all goes back to Politicians not caring for the citizens, the homeless Vets who fight the wars and are discarded. The factory workers whose jobs went over seas. The fast food workers who are told to get a real job.

Comedians are more truthful than the news media and politicians. Amazing world we live in.

Guns and cops

Open carry – meaning – walking around with a gun in plain right. There are photos of people carrying rifles, or hand guns,  posted on news pages and blogs, as well as other social media, like they are throwbacks from the wild west era. It is so dangerous “out there” that some folk feel the need to show their respect for the second amendment – the right to carry weapons.

I grew up in another culture – on U.S. Military bases, where guns were common, and yet rarely seen. The guards at the gates were always armed, being either Marines or Military Police. My father was trained on weapons use, but he entered the military as an expert marksman. He and his brother hunted rabbits to put food on their family’s table. All of the military personnel had to qualify on a shooting range. None of these military personnel needed to open carry. Most of our fathers taught us weapons safety and how to fire a hand gun. My dad also taught me how to use a rifle. We learned very early that weapons should never be misused. I have no experience with current rules about weapons on base, but many parents continue to teach gun safety to their children. (According to military dependents I have interviewed.)

The civilian world is a different culture, filled with wannabes. Dress up individuals and the play the role. 911 gets a call from a freak who couldn’t make it through boot camp, but who gave people the impression he was a Marine. This caller claimed to have seen a black guy with a rifle. That is all it took for the white cop to burst through the doors of Wal-Mart ready to kill. Motive, opportunity and another victim of police violence. No moral values – cops are not being evaluated for core moral values. This isn’t purely the militarization of the police – there is something else missing.

Yet, as usual the cops find yet another way to ramp up their kill numbers by shooting a man carrying a TOY GUN in Wal-Mart. The true numbers showing police violence has been hidden until recently. Local news media publishes obituaries and report police activity, but there has been no centralized collection and reporting of police violence on civilians. There has been a yearly tally of police killed while on duty and memorials. As it should be. That number shows us that being a cop isn’t all about doughnuts etc. That number is like a goal – to make that number LOWER every year.

The other number is humans and their pets killed by police violence. I have not read any reports of a SWAT team taking out group of white guys and gals strutting around showing off their weapons. But we do have video of cops shooting unarmed human beings. And we have eyewitness reports of cops executing unarmed teenagers in broad daylight (Mike Brown, Ferguson, Missouri). The eyewitness reports agree – which is not that common. The strongest eyewitness reports was of a worker who had a clear view of the street and the Darren Wilson murdering the unarmed teenage, with his hands up, surrendering. The road worker described what he was seeing and he raised his hands, showing what he saw Mike Brown doing. The worked had no idea his eyewitness report was being recorded. A lot of credit goes to that citizen field reporter who captured that first person eyewitness account.

The huge difference between the open carry exhibitionist and the growing numbers of unarmed people who are shot by cops is skin color. The Wal-Mart example is one of the worst, and yet these cops were forgiven by the grand jury.

Digby ends her article on Salon with these words:

Surely these open carry people, however well intentioned, should realize that nice white men and women openly carrying firearms on the street aren’t being gunned down on sight by police officers. The worst thing that happens to them is they are forced to show their ID. It’s unarmed black men (and unarmed mentally ill people of all races) who are being gunned down on sight by police officers. Are they agitating for their right to shoot cops? I doubt it. Nor should they be.

The problem isn’t that people don’t have enough guns. The problem is that police are too often using the guns they have. That won’t be solved by a bunch of average suburban white people wandering around public spaces with their rifles slung over their backs. Those aren’t the people most likely to be shot by police –whether they’re armed or not. They’re missing the point entirely.

DC & NYC media establishment

media lapdog

As we begin a new year I’m looking at the poor record of the US media of truth telling about the political machine in DC. There are so many examples of the closer than spousal relationship between the US media and 0bama administration but the one story that really shows where a media whore stands is how he or she supports the 0bama machine in his call for the imprisonment of Edward Snowdon.

Glenn Greenwald takes on Ruth Marcus (stenographer for the 0bama administration) over her demand that Snowdon should be jailed etc. Marcus sounds exactly like the UK Conservative politicians belly aching about the dangers of the Snowdon “leaks” and how National Security has been compromised. Marcus and the UK political media gang can’t even be original in their use of words to defend their “sources”. The obama gang wants to eliminate all leaks and at the same time the 0bama gang is one of the biggest leakers of “secret” information in DC.

So those of us in the rest of the USA — 99.0% of the rest of the USA get filtered and bias news from East Coast media folks who probably couldn’t locate most of the states of the US on a giant outline map of the US.

Greenwald’s remarks to Marcus about the DC media hit the bulls eye — as she let slip her hard core NYC accent. My mother in law was born and raised in NYC and I recognize the accent in the DC beltway diva Ruth Marcus.

Ruth Marcus’ attack on Snowdon and Greenwald tells us that there are still a lot more NSA spying on the world secrets yet to be told.

News media lapdogs and Orwell’s 1984

It is “Orwell ‘R’ Us” now.

Michael Moore also is doing the reporting that the liberals are afraid of doing — Moore points out that the 0bamacare law is awful. The “roll out” of the website for the Insurance Industry welfare went badly and now the media 0bama protection machine is out defending 0bama’s huge mess. Way back during the Bush II era Michael Moore filmed and produced a documentary on the US health care system — which basically is the most expensive in the world and doesn’t deliver for a whole lot of Americans.

Rube Goldberg device — napkin

ODAY marks the beginning of health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act’s new insurance exchanges, for which two million Americans have signed up. Now that the individual mandate is officially here, let me begin with an admission: Obamacare is awful.

That is the dirty little secret many liberals have avoided saying out loud for fear of aiding the president’s enemies, at a time when the ideal of universal health care needed all the support it could get. Unfortunately, this meant that instead of blaming companies like Novartis, which charges leukemia patients $90,000 annually for the drug Gleevec, or health insurance chief executives like Stephen Hemsley of UnitedHealth Group, who made nearly $102 million in 2009, for the sky-high price of American health care, the president’s Democratic supporters bought into the myth that it was all those people going to get free colonoscopies and chemotherapy for the fun of it.

I believe Obamacare’s rocky start – clueless planning, a lousy website, insurance companies raising rates, and the president’s telling people they could keep their coverage when, in fact, not all could – is a result of one fatal flaw: The Affordable Care Act is a pro-insurance-industry plan implemented by a president who knew in his heart that a single-payer, Medicare-for-all model was the true way to go. When right-wing critics “expose” the fact that President Obama endorsed a single-payer system before 2004, they’re actually telling the truth. (Moore’s whole article is found on NYT.)

As numerous sources, including Michael Moore’s article on the NYT, report 0bamacare is a recycled effort of Governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts who borrowed the concept of propping up Insurance companies from a GOP conservative think tank. So if this thing called 0bamacare just happens to reminds everyone of a Rube Goldberg contraption — well it is.

As a third world country still trying to be a first world country by bulling the whole world — seems like we should have a better and more affordable health care system than we currently have or the the monstrosity called 0bamacare just birthed by the 0bama white house. One would think that with all the hype about that East Coast Harvard law school that it would turn out lawyers with critical thinking and with leadership abilities.

/end snark

 

 

Time to Self Censure

under pressure head in sand with one eye open

Time to Self Censure?

Way back in the Cold War era we military brats learned the art of self censure at a very early age. As a high school student I learned that although I lived in the US, the US Constitution didn’t apply to me, since I was living on base. That was the reality.

One little example, my mother was going to a nearby college to complete work for her B.A. in Education. One of the required courses for a degree is so many hours of Physical Education.

Her P.E. class was her last class of the day and she headed back home (on the military base) and the military cop refused to allow her to drive through the gate. The reason? She was wearing peddle pusher pants (that covered her knees and most of her calves). She had to turn around, find someplace to change into her skirt before she was allowed on the base. Why? The CO of the base had ordered that no female shall wear shorts or slacks or anything that was not a skirt or dress on HIS base. Stuff like this happened all the time while I was growing up on military bases. Living on base during the Vietnam era (the war years) was the worst time for any of us who were entering our teen years.

When my father retired from the military I swore I would never set foot on a military base again. But now the military mind set — of the whole world is the enemy — has invaded my civilian world and I am pissed (so I blog about the parallels I saw as a military dependent back in the cold war era and what is happening today in the civilian world) . The coup or whatever is happening now began about the time TWA Flight 800 was shot down or whatever. Eyewitnesses tell a different story than the “official” FBI/CIA version which included that cute little cartoon graphic by the CIA. Do a web search of this phrase: CIA graphic of TWA flight 800 for both sides of the story — the CIA’s version and the more recent revelations from retired NTSB inspectors.

Beginning with flight 800 and those idiotic questions by clerks at check-in at airports — it was clear that everyone was and is a suspect (just like the military bases). “Did you pack your suitcase yourself and has it ever been out of your possession”? Those sorts of dumb questions. The victims of Flight 800 were being blamed — dead people can’t complain. I really resented the way the flying public was treated — but then there is a name for that — Security Theater. Some people are willing to give up their privacy and all of their Constitutional rights in order to “feel” safer. But the coup leaders won’t ever feel secure unless they tighten their control and oversight and spying on all of us. We know this from history — by looking at Germany in their build up to WWII. People willingly voted for Hitler and willingly gave up their rights. Historians with much better knowledge 20th century Germany than most of  are seeing warning flags here in the US.

And let us not forget July 2nd news about the President of Bolivia’s plane being forced down because the USG thought that Snowdon was on board.  The real story is that the USG is spying on everyone who uses any form of modern communication and these digital bits are being stored. All of us are the victims — but the USG is trying to change the subject. We are the victims and we have been harmed — all of us.

Don’t ever forget that we are the victims — the political magicians of both parties are trying hard to divert everyone’s attention away for the real story. Never forget and never forgive — both parties are to blame. 0bama and Bush the lesser are best buddies (both fellas are doing Africa this week, together again) — they share the puppet experience — both are obeying their puppet masters. Blackmail is one theory being floated as to why members of both parties are holding hands and chanting the same words — with no apologies for knowing and being part of one of the biggest spy rings in the history of the world. This is what J. Edgar Hoover did — he kept files and dug for secrets that could be used to blackmail. Not much has changed since the days of Hoover it would seem.

Self Censure was a way of life in the military — and now you are all military brats — no matter how old or how far you live from an actual military base. If you buy an airline ticket and go through the TSA checkpoints — you are a “suspect”. This is the military model — when did this happen? When did we all become suspects? We are now merely a number — part of a group that needs to be “controlled”.

What is the real percentage of citizens who are saying — la la la la I can’t hear you.

Under threat of being different, of standing out — people draw back, put their heads down and hope none of the bad stuff hits while they aren’t looking. Many police departments are getting Homeland security money and these departments are buying all sorts of expensive toys. There’s a rural small town where the cops drive military style SUVs and super size pickup trucks. The gas to run these monster vehicles probably required a new tax increase.  Evidently we aren’t supposed to notice or ask questions about how the government is spending our tax dollars. The militarization of the police forces of the US is another topic with lots of hits on web search engines. All of this is being done with our tax dollars.

Update: I’m now wondering which postal rate increase was for total awareness spying of snail mail (yet the dumb jerks still lose mail or misdirect international mail). Mail overseas is often delayed for weeks — both ways. Apparently all first class mail and packages etc. goes through a filtering system and the outside is photographed — or more likely scanned. Again we have the theme that everyone is a suspect – we are told that the “watch” on individual mail is for a limited time. Please excuse me for being skeptical about this current claim. The Government has been able to go back in time, before a specific individual even was on the “watch” radar, and tag that person.

The NYT reported this story which was probably largely a stenographic effort by the reporter. This program probably costs millions and since I personally know that overseas mail is excessively botched. I am wondering how much time and(taxpayer) money is going down the drain. The stenographic report lists the recent “catch” of the extremely stupid Texas actress who mailed poison to 0bama — in an effort to get back at her soon to be ex-husband. The NYT article begins with an owner of a bookstore who got a notice from police to the US postal service to track all of his mail. Years ago this bookstore owner was an activist for environmental causes. I’m guessing that certain International corporations are using tax payer dollars in order to keep track of everyone on their “lists”. 0bama the faithful puppet along with his political appointees bows to his real bosses.

Does any of this spying come as a surprise to most people? Probably not. I have suspected that all mail was being funneled through check  points for years. Now that we spend the winters in the southwest — our snail mail is diverted to our mail forwarding service via computer tagging. When I learned about that process it seems a simple matter to use the enhanced mail sorting machines to scan all mail within country and all mail going outside the US and coming into the US. We are now at the point that we can assume that every aspect of our lives is being recorded and “watched” by either corporate or USG agencies. At this point it is difficult to tell the difference between corporate spying and contractor run USG spying. welcome to the 21st century. How much is too much spying and when are we going to get a say in how our hard earned money is being spent by the USG?

 

Militarized Police Force

One of the signs that the US is slowly slipping into the deep murky void called Fascism is when “undercover” cops approach a car with young women who have just stopped at at quick mart store for BOTTLED WATER. These cops didn’t just approach but they beat on the windows and were yelling — exactly the way that rapist would do to force women to submit. These young women knew the signs and behavior to look for in males because they had just attended a meeting about typical aggressive male behavior and how to escape.

When the hell are undercover cops or any cops going to understand that women have been conditioned since we were very young that being out at night is extremely dangerous for women. Males are the predators and a gang of males are even more dangerous.

Stories like this one happen all the time. The Militarized cops expect all civilians to be submissive to their demands no matter how outrageous and out of line these demands are.

In this case the driver was arrested and jailed — the dimwitted cops charged her with a felony — when it is the driver who should sue the pants off of the cops. Anyway the prosecutor came along and dropped the charges. The young women should still sue — that is the only message that gets through to the militarized polices forces of the Fascist Government.

The dumb cops “thought” that the water bottles was beer or something. How much does it cost the tax payers for a gang of cops to stand around waiting to pounce on anyone they “think” might be breaking one of many laws — many laws are now “secret”.

Who knows when anyone else might be tagged by the militarized police force — or the coast guard for that matter?

More links re militarized police Force

Growth of militarized police force past 9/11.

As a former military brat — I can say that we are all now living on a military base. Or the US is now occupied by the US military and we are living under marshal law ever since 9/11.

The point here is not to suggest that police officers in the field should not take advantage of every tactic or piece of equipment that makes them safer as they carry out their often challenging and strenuous duties. Nor do I mean to suggest that a police officer, once trained in military tactics, will now seek to kill civilians. It is far too easy for Monday-morning quarterbacks to unfairly second-guess the way police officers perform their jobs while they are out on the streets waging what must, at times, feel like a war.

Notwithstanding this concern, however, Americans should remain mindful bringing military-style training to domestic law enforcement has real consequences. When police officers are dressed like soldiers, armed like soldiers, and trained like soldiers, it’s not surprising that they are beginning to act like soldiers. And remember: a soldier’s main objective is to kill the enemy.

Civilians are the enemy to both the militarized police forces of the world and apparently also to the US military (it is military officers who are doing the major NSA  spying on civilians.)

Our militarized police forces — Salon’s ALEX PAREENE take on the same subject.

Soldiers, on the other hand, are trained to identify and kill the enemy. This is a problem. Cops are increasingly seeing the citizens they’re hired to protect as “the enemy.” This is in part how nonviolent protesters end up tear-gassed and shot at. This is part of why violence is so often the first resort of cops dealing with any sort of tricky situation, rather than the last. The idea that we need our cops to be the heavily armed soldiers of the streets — instead of, say, social workers with the power to arrest — leads to bad recruiting, bad training, unnecessary deaths, mass distrust of the police by vulnerable communities, and the contemptuous feeling of many cops that they themselves are above the law.

From the Cato Institute : Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America.

Americans have long maintained that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

This paper presents a history and overview of the issue of paramilitary drug raids, provides an extensive catalogue of abuses and mistaken raids, and offers recommendations for reform.

{bolding by NWR}

———————————-

Once again I’ve learned far more than I expected.

When words become meaningless

Although there are a lot of intelligent, open minded Texans it seems only the asshat freaks are getting any press time.

The USG (United States Government) is well on the way toward labeling anyone who disagrees with the 1% as a “terrorist”. And then we have learned that anyone who dares to protest in public about any environmental issue can be placed on a secret list and spied on by the military.

Now one Republican asshat in Texas wants anyone who is pro choice to listed as a terrorist. This jerk might get his wish — seeing as how he has very little concept of privacy as it is.

This asshat’s name is Bill Zedler.

Zedler is especially known for convincing the Texas Department of Health and Human Services to begin collecting detailed information on women who undergo an abortion. He originally tried to implement the measure by legislation in 2011, but when that failed Zedler went through back-channels to force the rule through, sparking cries of foul play.

Obviously there are some groups and some individuals who really do need to be placed on watch lists and these lists need to be reviewed. I’m guessing that many of the crooks, liars and zealots already suspect that they just might be on a list so the question is should this list be “secret” or should those on the watch list get some sort of official notification — just in case the wrong person has been tagged. All of this is above my pay grade — but how this is handled by the USG is the difference between a democracy and a fascias militarized corporate Nation. Yes there are good corporations and then there are those that President Dwight Eisenhower called the Military Industrial Complex.

The over use and miss use of the word terrorist as anyone who disagrees with your point of view will result in yet another meaningless word.

P.S. I’m going to create my own caveman/Neanderthal/asshat graphic art. But the one above does the trick for now.

News and views for 22 June 2013

Here we go again — sexual molestation by US military officer, Air Force. This new case underlines the one I watched unfold as a child way back during the Cold War years. That was back in the era when few if any rapes were reported. In this current case the victim was a child. I really hate to hear/read about cases like this. However, thanks in large part to the MALE GOP in congress if this guy happens to be convicted his conviction could be overturned by someone higher in the chain of command. There are far too many rape enablers in the military.

“Kabban’s case is just the latest in sordid situation where military members allegedly assaulted people not in uniform.” So the the GOP gas bags who believe that if only women weren’t allowed to join the military then there will be no male hormones on overdrive from the mere sight of a female type person. . . . . . and the victim blaming continues.

The latest whistle Blower, Edward Snowden, seems like the US is going to try to get him returned to the US to face the wrath of 0bama — The drone Prez and torture king. Yep just like good ‘ole boy Bush/Cheney. All the news reports are just copies of the press release so most likely this news surprises no one. Some really rich guy in Iceland says he will send a plane for Snowden. I pity anyone who even looks like Snowden — you guys will be strip seached, xrayed etc. Hopefully no one will be turned to a grease spot by one of 0bama’s drones.

Oh — sorry to all you “progressives” who voted for 0bomber — twice. But I told you so — I knew 0bama would be merely a continuation of the Bush drama. For the record I wish I was wrong. As far as I can tell Mr. and Mrs. 0bama just want to get through the next few years so that BOTH can make a whole lot of money and become part of the 1%.

Federal nullification by the states of federal law enforcement — this is a new concept. via Yahoo news:

An Associated Press analysis found that about four-fifths of thestates now have enacted local laws that directly reject or ignore federal laws on marijuana use, gun control, health insurance requirements and identification standards for driver’s licenses. The recent trend began in Democratic leaning California with a 1996 medical marijuana law and has proliferated lately in Republican strongholds like Kansas, where Gov. Sam Brownback this spring became the first to sign a measure threatening felony charges against federal agents who enforce certain firearms laws in his state.

My first thought was what about the decriminalization of the sale pot in my state. Right now the 0bama Justice department etc. is spending a ton of money on closing legal by stat laws —  medical marijuana outlets in several states.

I never smoked pot — and yet I can see the logic of putting an end to the Pot wars. Prohibition of booze was dumb in the early 20th century and the prohibition and crimilization of Pot is just as dumb in this century. Thing is if people want to smoke pot — and buy the stuff then why not let the states make money from the stuff? Making money for the states as opposed to the tax payers funding the war on pot.

Problem is that the decision to legalize pot or not is a political decision no science involved. Evidently the Feds get to call the shots. I guess we’ll have to get out our lawn chairs and pop corn and watch the battle. But then when an old goat named Scalia sits on the Supreme court and HE doesn’t believe in Molecular Biology — that tells us a whole lot about any legal decisions having to do with science.

My most favorite bit of news for the WHOLE week is about a huge rodent called a capybara and his best buddy — a cat. Capybara look like huge hamster. That would be a super sized hamster.

Here’s the link to capybara and cat friends.

Women in the military

This is a story about rape in the military as seen through the eyes of a child in the bygone days of the Cold War. This is also a story about the old war on women which is the same war on women going on today.

What is it with some Neanderthal dimwit male politicians who believe that the cure for service men raping women is to eliminate the victims? Or as a dimwitted man with boobs remarked several months ago — well what do women expect?

For some unknown reason the Neanderthals gene seems to eradicate all common sense — or is it the Y chromosome defective in some males? Do these rape defenders and rape enablers believe that the US military is completely devoid of any women? Do these GOP males believe that that the military could function without any women on base or anywhere near where the macho guys do their “thing”.

Women have been part of the military ever since the feeble minded violence loving males formed the weapons of war and started wracking the men from the other war party. “Defenseless” women left alone are targets — this happened thousands of years ago and it is still happening today. Rape is used as a weapon of war — the US armies in Iraq and Afghanistan include a few rapists and a few have been identified. Most probably get away with their crimes — just like they always have.

I grew up on military bases, although there were very few women in uniform there were still plenty of women — nurses, secretaries, civilian employees and WIVES and children. Wives and children are called dependents and we grew up hearing the joke: “If the military wanted you to have a wife and kids you would have been issued a wife and kids.”

My dad was career military. He was deployed for 6 months and then home for 6 months, as were the fathers of most of my classmates. Our moms learned to manage as women have managed since men have been going off to war for thousands of years. This is about what happened when I was in the 5th grade.

The rapes happening on the base where I lived were reported in the newspaper (Honolulu Advertiser & Star Bulletin) and that’s were I read about something wrong and horrible that I really did not understand. No names were used — but the women were neighbors and I knew something horrible had happened because everyone in the whole neighborhood  (Military base housing) was tense. Women, mothers of my friends were crying and women were hugging each other and crying. Who died and why were so many moms afraid, I had to know. Military wives are generally tough — they have to be to survive all the garbage involved in being married to the military (man).

At first the suspect was thought to be one of the civilian employees — someone with access to the housing. This rapist would sneak into homes in the middle of the night, rape, threaten and then leave. The mothers of my friends and classmates had no idea when they might be a target and many were getting very little sleep. If you want to know what being under constant treat of terrorism is — imagine that if you fall asleep you might be awakened by the rapist. Image this was a daily part of your life for weeks and weeks. One of our neighbors piled up pots and pans in front of her doors and windows. One pile was knocked down as someone tried to enter her kitchen and she work up rushed to the window to see a medium build person dressed in black running through the brush filled boondocks.

The civilian male employees (locals who lived off base) were eliminated as suspects. I don’t know how this investigations was carried out but with adult maturity I suspect that the process was probably quite brutal. There was also probably an element of racism — since the civilian employees are nearly all non-white and the military police were white. Military police are often not very nice people to begin with — unfortunately this has been my experience and that of other military brats I grew up with. The behavior of the military police toward the victims, was one of the reason why very few women reported being raped. The message I took away from this whole episode was if you are raped DO not report it — the aftermath of the rape and the actions of those in authority is often worse than the rape. This was the overwhelming attitude of the victims of this rapist and the officers who were in command of the base. Women in the military are still living under the same male dominated — blame the victim — structure.

Next on the suspect list were noncoms or non commissioned officers. And these men were eliminated as suspects. The rapes continued.

At some point the newspapers seems to stop reporting about the rapes and the atmosphere seemed to calm down. But that didn’t stop me from seeking answers to what happened. Military kids have a communication network — generally we know what our dad’s do when they are gone for 6 months. We all have bits and pieces of the puzzle. My classmates and I discovered that the rapist was an officer who had been attached to the supervision of military housing. I’m guessing that he probably had a master key and that’s how he was able to sneak into so many homes and rape so many women. I also know that only a fraction of the rapes were reported. From the military kid’s telegraph we heard that someone recently arrived from a mainland base knew about a string of similar rapes and that the rapist was shipped off to the base the where I lived. We believed that the same office who had been transferred to our base was the rapist — and as soon as he disappeared the rapes stopped. I never heard his name spoken — the military command structure has and still has that much power as to silence the truth. The problem was eliminated and shall no longer be mentioned.

Although nearly all our neighbors, the wives of deployed men, were raped or scared off the rapist — my mother was never a victim. We had a medium sized poi-dog, a local dog that we rescued as a puppy. Basically I found her and insisted that she needed us. If a strange person tried to enter our home in the middle of the night our dog would have alerted us with very loud barking. She slept with me. Other homes that had dogs also were never visited by the rapist. Apparently there was a list of all homes that had “pets” and notations about which home had deployed husbands. All the rapist had to do is check the chart and then go hunting.

My neighbor who boogie trapped her doors and windows saw the intruder running off through the boondocks toward the officer’s section of the base housing. So it didn’t surprise her that the rapist turned out to be an immune officer.

As far as I know there was never any trial. What we think happened was that this guy was either discharged from the military or worse sent to yet another military base to continue his terrorism on female dependents — or the women of the military who are found on nearly every base.

Serial rapist just don’t stop — and from the research I’ve read the majority of rapist are serial rapists. The rape culture is still alive and well and not much has changed — women are still blamed and most women still don’t report being raped.

One other detail or aftermath of the rapist’s reign of terror I remember so clearly which taught me that the rapist’s impact remains long after he has disappeared. I spent most of my time playing outside and while walking down the street passed a row of houses I heard screaming coming from the second story window. I looked up to see a woman trying to climb out the window to get away from her husband who was violently beating her. He beat her to a bloody pulp. His white undershirt was bloody from her blood. No one made any effort to help this women. She was one of the victims and because she reported the rape — that fact went on her husband’s record. He was beating her for being raped and then reporting the rape.

What a fu***** way to grow up. Not much at all has changed. Service women are being beaten and raped — some by their superior officers (a documentary, The Invisible war,  has been made about rape victims and the military’s chain of command ignoring the problem — see Democracy Now for an interview on this subject).. The only way this will stop is for more women to join the military and more women working their way up the chain of command. There will always be women who enable rapists as there are women who enable crimes against civilian women — but I’m hoping that the majority of women will have empathy for their military sisters and bring an end to the reign of terror that a minority of males have gotten away with for thousand of years.

To the jackass GOP male & female politicians who believe the way to reduce rape is to toss women out of the military ranks — I am a witness rapist will still rape women. Save us from the morons in the world. The link is to a list of morons as well as their misogynistic words.

Who is the enemy?

Who is the enemy? — when All or nearly all of Americans electronic communication is being filtered, examined and stored by the US Government.  At what point will all the data being filtered overwhelm the system?

For an example of too much trivia over whelming the system — It seems like nearly every teenager has a cell phone and these phones are generating massive bits of data. Back in the old days — long before cell phones my sister was the champ of spending hours and hours on the phone every day with her boyfriend. They’d spend hours just listening to each other breath and other such nonsense.  Most of  my teen years I basically had very little access to a telephone. Today teens can have their very own phones and with the invention of texting — they can spend 24/7 on the phone. Unless, of course, the teen is one of the millions living in poverty. What sort of criminals is the NSA looking for? Something just doesn’t add up to justify spending billions and billions on spying of ALL of us, every single day.Will this bit of free speech will go into a database to be kept for — what reason? The TSA  feels they have the “right’ as well to spy and assault the traveling public as well as create vast secret databases filled with thousands or millions of names. The late Senator Ted Kennedy was on a no fly list — he at least was able get his name removed. Average tax paying citizens are SOL to find out why their name is on a secret “enemy” watch list. Apparently there are so many names on the “watch list” making the watching nearly impossible.

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Update — answering my own question. Salon has an article that explains just how massive amounts of data can be sorted with ease, apparently. “Netflix, Facebook — and the NSA are all in it together”. Hadoop is a nice open source program used by all the big guys starting with Yahoo and the rest of the vultures. 

Before Hadoop, you were at the mercy of your data. After Hadoop, you were in charge. You could figure out all kinds of interesting things. You could recognize patterns in the data and start to make inferences about what might happen if you made tweaks to your product. What did users do when the interface was adjusted like this? What kinds of ads made them more likely to pull out their credit cards? What did that batch of millions of Verizon calls reveal about the formation of a potential terrorist cell? Facebook wouldn’t be able to exploit the insights of its so-called social graph without tools like Hadoop.

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1984 will probably go back on the best seller list again — as a non fiction book.

The above rant is not to dismiss the seriousness of the NSA spying on ALL Americans — according to my long ago high school class on the US constitution the Federal Government  total information collections from all major Internet corporations should be unconstitutional. But what the hay — no President seems to believe that any law applies to him. Bush or 0bomber — not much difference between either narcissistic psychopaths. Europeans are worried about being spied on by US Big Brother as well as a few US citizens we see the danger from the Fed spy agencies and the corporations who share the unconstitutional data gut.

Look at all the money the US Government spends on tracking and spying on Occupy Wall Street citizens or those involved in other peaceful protest movements? But not much has changed — the Federal Government has a long track record of over zealous repression of grass roots citizen protests — the Federal Government always sides with the International corporations. This is our tax money spent by the US Government on massive spying on everyone who uses the Internet. I suspect that “land” line phone communication can be collected and stored as well. Perhaps in country snail mail might be immune. International mail, even first class mail, all bets are off.

J. Edgar Hoover would be so pleased with the new technology and how the major corporate owned parties are cooperating in the game of cover each other’s asses.

When did the fences on secure US military bases expand to ALL citizens and residents of the US and perhaps the whole world?

Way back during the Vietnam War I was a military brat living on a US military base. My military experience began at birth in a US military hospital. Often my schooling was on US military bases. My high school was right next to a US military base. In our senior year we studied the US Constitution. That’s when I learned from the military police that the US Constitution was meaningless to anyone ON BASE — the only “law” that counts is that the the base C.O. (commanding officer). Some may argue with military’s view of civilian law and military law — but take a look at how the military handles rapists and then there is the torture used against whistle blowers ON bases ON people in military prisons. (I’m working on an article about military rape in the “old days”.)

Today I feel like I am living back on base — with the only law in the hands of the CO. Oh and the military police — that would be all the police departments in the US. The civilian police force is now the militarized police force.

Who is the enemy? Every citizen of the US is the enemy — we are the “suspects” according the to TSA. (Four year old girl who did not want to be sexually molested by the TSA was called a suspect. We are all suspects.) The US Coast Guard can board and do property damage on private boats and the ignorant and naive will defend the US military spying and US Coast Guard thunder footed jerks. We are the enemy. School kids are the enemy — many states have a school to jail pipeline.

Who is the enemy? Anyone who flies, anyone who uses the Internet or cell phones or works for a living?

What sort of world will the children inherit?

Empty wheel blog is an excellent sort of information on spying and the misbehavior of the spooks.

Her current blog is about Al Gore’s comments regarding NSA and spying. Al Gore says keep your hands off the Internet.