The pictures are all over Facebook and other social media. That’s right folks, they’re doing it again. Daunte Wright is barely buried in the ground and people are trying to bury him again. I wish I had saved the Facebook posts but they have been taken down. I wonder why.

For those that don’t want to click on the link, they’ve found Daunte Wright in pictures with guns. So, obviously he must have been a bad guy. They did the same thing with George Floyd and countless others before them.

Let’s ignore the hypocrisy for the moment of people that have no qualms about openly carrying huge firearms raising a stink about a black man taking a picture with his gun. I think we are far beyond the racist double standards at this point. The implications are much simpler than that.

See, Wright was a bad guy. How do we know he was a bad guy? Well, he’s dressed like a gang banger with his gun. See, he’s threatening. So obviously it’s not a bad thing that he was shot. That’s just one more dangerous criminal off the streets. The beauty of the Facebook memes is they don’t even have to say that. If you get the racist code you are already thinking it.

The problem is two-fold. First, the reasoning only works if the officers knew all this at the time. They didn’t know who Wright was when they pulled him over. Even when they looked him up they only knew he had an outstanding warrant. They did not see a gun on the scene. Cops are supposed to assess the situation at hand. They wouldn’t have had the benefit of seeing those pictures beforehand and even if they did it wouldn’t have helped them properly assess that particular situation.

Of course, that leads nicely into the second problem. How do we know he was a bad guy? Do pictures with a gun indicate that definitively? If only there was some kind of mechanism like a court with judges and a jury that could help us determine that. That’s what’s supposed to happen. They aren’t supposed to be gunned down by the police when they are unarmed.

I’m a little more than sick and tired of the postgame chicanery from the right. They’ll post numbers of how many white people are killed by cops. They’ll post how many of them are unarmed. Even if we took those numbers at face value it doesn’t excuse any of it. It just makes the point come through with more force.

If we want to get to the bottom of this thing we can’t scour the inter webs trying to find anything to make the victims look guilty. We need to figure out why those officers went through the steps they did. Racism is surely involved on some level but maybe it wasn’t the key factor here. Maybe this would have happened regardless. Either way, we need to take a good long look at procedures and what they lead to. A postgame picture can’t erase the shame or tragedy of this event or make the officers any less guilty.

File under: What took you so Long?

The ugly split between Liberty University and Jerry Falwell, Jr. just got uglier as university brainwashing camp filed suit demanding $10 million in damages for concealing damaging personal information even as he negotiated a lucrative employment contract.  Jr., capitalizing on his father’s fame delved into politics even further than Sr., who was one of the founders of “The Moral Majority” which was neither moral or a majority.  After Sr.’s passing in 2007, Jr. took over, went all-in hypocrisy and ended up all-in for Trump.  While embracing conservative ideology and conspiracy theories, he looked the other way a plethora of times to rationalize Trump’s many scandals and character flaws.  He even started the pro-Trump Falkirk Center at Liberty, which was nothing more than another Trump campaign mouthpiece, hiding behind a non-profit 501(c)3 tax status.

Falwell is the textbook example of everything that’s wrong with Big Church, the multi-billion dollar mega church industry which is all about God, warmongering, guns, bathrooms, hating gays, and deploring Democrats.  Liberty is a billion dollar enterprise that uses its clout in the ever judgmental evangelical subculture in the US, and Falwell Sr., followed by Falwell Jr., tsk-tsked at scandals like Clinton’s, but suddenly became sympathetic when Trump’s multiple sex and criminal scandals emerged.  What Jr. was hiding, though, is that he and his wife were also neck deep in their own scandals, including a multi-year affair between Becki and their pool boy.  Apparently, Jr. liked to watch.  Yeah.  The Falwell’s reportedly gave the pool boy $2 million for a business venture, which is questionable whether it was financial help or extortion to stay quiet.  And apparently this was all going on as Jr. was negotiating his next contract.

In a fit of late to the party guilty conscience, the board of Liberty wants their money back, and Falwell, who just dropped a defamation suit against Liberty in December, is now recycling the same denials and assertions now that they are after him.

The Arc of the Moral Universe does bend toward justice; and in this case, toward irony.  And the irony is entertaining .

Written by Elizabeth Moon –

In a Court TV segment of the trial of Derek Chauvin, Barry Brod, a “use of force” expert witness, insisted that Chauvin did not apply deadly force.  He said if only Floyd had been “compliant” he could have rested “comfortably” with his hands behind his back, and blamed his death on his lack of compliance and attempts to resist arrest.  This reveals that Brod does not understand the mechanics of human respiration, especially “weighted” prone position.

The pertinent facts:

• The human brain demands more oxygen and glucose than any other organ in the body.  That’s why it’s also the organ that signals us when we’re short of oxygen–that says BREATHE MORE when the oxygen level drops.
• We have no other biological warning of lowered blood oxygen.  So when someone says “I can’t breathe,” it means their brain has detected a drop in oxygen that, if it continues to drop, will kill them. Normal oxygen saturation is 95-100%.  Below 95%, normal body functions, including brain functions, start to suffer from lack of oxygen.  Below 88%, the situation becomes dangerous and below that, signals the need for immediate transfer to a hospital for emergency treatment.  Permanent disability or death will follow if not.
• Many conditions can cause lowered oxygen levels: heart disease, lung disease, stroke, COVID-19, etc., but the one of interest right now is an outside force: someone forced to assume lying down position (either supine or more commonly these days prone) with extra weight pressing on their rib cage making it impossible to breathe and restore normal oxygenation.

This condition occurs during police take-downs, and is defended by police with the all-too-common belief that if someone can say “I can’t breathe,” that means they are breathing effectively, and are just lying.  Most police do not have advanced life-saving skills beyond (maybe) CPR; they’ve probably heard that in triage situations, the person screaming has an open airway and is less critical than the silent one who doesn’t.  But an open upper airway does not guarantee effective breathing–it’s just one requirement.  The other is the ability to free movement of the ribcage and upper abdomen, so their movement can pull air into the lungs and push it out. Immobilization of  this breathing apparatus kills just as surely as a strangler’s cord around the neck.

Being forced to lie prone without the use of extremities to assist in lifting the rib cage with each breath, coupled with enough weight on the back, makes it impossible to breathe. The prisoner saying “I can’t breathe” or “You’re killing me” is right.  The demand for compliance (“just don’t move–relax”) is functionally a demand to accept being crushed to death, the kind of agonizing slow death George Floyd suffered. A few centuries back, “peine forte et dure” was a fairly common method of torture and execution: tie someone down on a hard surface with arms and legs spread wide and start putting stones on their chest until they confessed or died.

Police have repeatedly shown that they are not capable of stopping short of killing prisoners when they have them face down on the ground. They interpret any movement, including struggles to breathe, as “resisting arrest” and put more weight on, making the hypoxia worse. More than one person, in different jurisdictions, has died from being forced face down to the ground, with too much weight on their back.

The only way to avoid more unnecessary and brutal deaths is to change how police treat their prisoners.  That will require changes in the law, forcing police to take legal responsibility for the lives of their prisoners, and changes in police training, so they know less lethal takedowns.  It’s really simple.  If someone says “I can’t breathe” get the weight off their backs immediately. Turn them on their side. That frees the rib cage and diaphragm to function normally.

I have a longer and more detailed form of this which explains the multiple ways pressure can cause lack of oxygen in the blood and thus death, in simpler terms than the books I learned it from.  If anyone still has questions, I’d be glad to email the longer form.

John Cornyn this week:

“The president is not doing cable news interviews,” Cornyn said on Twitter. “Tweets from his account are limited and, when they come, unimaginably conventional.”

That’s right – Cornyn’s not happy that Biden isn’t acting like a narcissistic screwball Trump.  I know that sounds stupid, but that criticism has gained serious traction along with the usual “Biden is feeble” and “who’s in charge?” insults.  This one, though, plays to only one demographic – Trumpists.  Trump is still the hijacker, holding the entire GOP hostage, even though his primary weapon, Twitter, has been taken away from him since January, and there are few chinks in his armor against challengers.

Also this week, the Washington Post published a report that Biden is doing exactly what he said he would do during the campaign, to not be continuously top of mind for Americans.  His calm demeanor and low key political style has calmed the waters in American political life. As measured by studies of Google searches, Trump is fading in the American consciousness and Biden has not replaced him.  Since the inauguration, the number of searches using the terms Trump and Biden have declined.

But even as the attention of the American people on the presidency has diminished, attitudes towards it are much different.  By a large margin, Trumpists and Trump leaners believe that Biden has made communication to the American people MORE negative than when Trump infested the WH.  They actually liked Trump’s loud, abusive, and confrontational style, and now criticize, like Ccornyn, that Biden is too normal and not bombastic enough.  A lot of that is the constant torrent of vitriol that they are fed by rightwing media and Republican politicians trying to keep the spotlight on themselves.  The other is that much of Trump’s base is actually attracted to over the top rhetoric along with the childish bullying and insults.  In short, Biden’s not a big enough asshole to suit them, and probably could never be.

The GOP is so subverted that just being normal is now viewed as weakness.  The Crazy Train to 2024 is already full and pulling out of the station.  It promises to be a weird trip.

This is a good one…Rick Scott who’s chairing the NRSC this cycle attempted to gain favor with Trump by inventing a new award, the Champion of Freedom.  He had it engraved on a tiny cheap bowl and rushed over to Mar a Lago to give it to him.  THEN, he stupidly tweeted out the picture.  Yes, the Twitterverse responded as you would expect, and it is glorious.

This party is so fucking pathetic that they have to bestow golden offerings (with names like "FrEeDoM aWaRd") to stay in the good graces of their one-term president.

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) April 12, 2021

For decades the Republican party has squawked about non-existent massive voter fraud as an excuse to pass draconian voting laws to make it harder for the “wrong people” to vote.  We all know that the “voter fraud” trope was just bullshit to cover the real reason, which was to reduce turnout of voters who typically vote for Democratic candidates.  With a few rare slip ups, the GOP has stuck to that script for years, repeating it so often that their base actually believes it.

That tactic has worked really well up until Trump took the Big Lie and turned it into the Gigantic Gargantuan Godzilla King Kong Lie.  Everyone in the US (except for Trumpists and Newsmax Morons) knows Trump lost the election because he got fewer votes than Biden.  All 50 states including the Red States certified their elections, and all of Congress with the exception of Trumpist ass lickers voted to certify the election.  Even Pence refused to interfere with the certification, and that’s really saying something.  The real problem for Republicans voter suppression efforts started a few months ago when legislatures in 43 states cited the Gigantic Gargantuan Godzilla King Kong Lie as the precise reason that it was an “urgent priority” to pass over 250 new restrictions that would do nothing to stop the massive fraud that doesn’t exist.  As many have said, the GOP came up with a solution in search of a problem.

Things went along swimmingly up until the moment Georgia passed their voter suppression bill that even criminalized giving people bottled water as they stood in hours-long lines to vote.  I believe they would have gotten away with the rest had they not made that one last overstep.  The backlash for that provision, and the law itself was so severe that big business finally had to pull its head out of the sand and take a stand.  Over the last couple of weeks, over a 100 company CEOs have condemned the laws not only in Georgia, but in many other states, and Georgia has been made an example of bad policy making which has brought out the truth of the voter suppression efforts.

Knowing that the Gigantic Gargantuan Godzilla King Kong Lie is no longer working, the GOP has taken on an entirely new tact – telling the truth.  One lawmaker, Arkansas Republican John Kavanaugh, actually came out and said it on national television, admitting that Republicans want not all votes, but just “quality” votes which translates to Republican votes.  Talking to CNN, he said:

“There’s a fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans.  Democrats value as many people as possible voting, and they’re willing to risk fraud. Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote — but everybody shouldn’t be voting.”

“Not everybody wants to vote, and if somebody is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issues.  Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.”

And there you have it – truth that didn’t just slip out inadvertently.  And so now this truth telling is even more obvious with the National Review now admitting that voter suppression laws really are voter suppression laws.  In one of the most tone-deaf articles (even for the National Review) was by Kevin Williamson who, in this tsunami of stupid statements posited this:

“There would be more voters if we made it easier to vote, and there would be more doctors if we didn’t require a license to practice medicine. The fact that we believe unqualified doctors to be a public menace but act as though unqualified voters were just stars in the splendid constellation of democracy indicates how little real esteem we actually have for the vote, in spite of our public pieties.”

He goes on about how we should vigorously test potential voters to weed out those “not qualified” to vote, which is simply a dog whistle for meaning those who might vote against Republican ideology.  The GOP even said it in a hearing last month in the Supreme Court when Michael Carvin, attorney for the Arizona Republican party had this exchange with Amy Coney Barrett about how Republicans want to toss ballots cast in the wrong precinct:

Coney Barrett: “What’s the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?”

Carvin: “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.  Politics is a zero-sum game. And every extra vote they get through unlawful interpretation of Section 2 hurts us, it’s the difference between winning an election 50-49 and losing an election 51 to 50.”

Once again counsel for the GOP said in open court that they don’t care if a voter is qualified.  They’re trying to eliminate Democratic votes, period, end of sentence.  Since they’re now being truthful about their voter suppression, can they just PLEASE drop the Gigantic Gargantuan Godzilla King Kong Lie?  It would sure save a lot of time and a lot of column inches.