The verdict of the jury in the Derek Chauvin murder trial has just been published, and it’s guilty on all three counts.  I believe this verdict is appropriate especially since Chauvin showed reckless disregard of George Floyd’s life as it drained away under his knee.  This trial is not just one trial of one murder.  It was hopefully a turning point in policing and our own culture that has accepted for far too many years inequality according to skin color and economic status.  This sordid story should change the conversation in America about race and the police.  How we respond to it will determine the direction of that change.

Growing up in Texas with two native Texans as parents has given me a wealth of old home sayings to fall back on in times like this. I find myself using them in class all the time and the students always snicker. I’m usually not sure if it is an age thing or a regional dialect thing. However, the phrase, “the pot calling the kettle black” just seems to be ringing in my ear.

Majorie Taylor Greene wants Maxine Waters expelled from Congress. God bless her heart. There are just some people that have been blessed without self-awareness. Greene is lucky to be in Congress and hopefully the good people of her state will get rid of her at the first opportunity. The House certainly could have expelled her and if they weren’t so divided between Q and progressive they probably would have.

At the heart of it all are supposed comments that Waters has made and a mistaken belief by many in this country. Greene cited that Waters is “inciting riots and Black Lives Matters terrorism.” Except, Black Lives Matter aren’t terrorists. Certainly, you don’t have to like them or their methods, but anyone calling them terrorists is obviously off their rocker. Of course, that’s no surprise when it comes to Greene.

As I write this, there has been no verdict in the Chauvin murder case. Yet, one cannot deny that this is one of those moments where we get to define our soul as a nation. Either we are for equal justice under the law or we aren’t. We are either for holding everyone accountable for their actions or we aren’t. While the verdict may or may not reflect our personal values, it is a moment that will take the temperature of the country at large.

The Rodney King event and subsequent trial happened when I was a teenager. I remember those same excuses then as we hear now. He was high. He was a criminal. He was dangerous. Heck, he didn’t die. Bones mend and bruises heal. He should consider himself lucky. One can only imagine the rage of hearing many of those same things 30 years later. One can only imagine the rage of seeing a country make almost no meaningful improvements in race relations with the police. Maybe those of us that want to judge that rage (MTG) can take a step back and try to understand where it is coming from. At least then we can save our own souls even if the collective one might be too far gone.

Today, Dan Patrick (who I regard as a lunatic) announced that he didn’t have enough votes to pass the Unqualified Carry Law that allows any idiot to openly (or concealed) carry a handgun in public without ANY licensing requirement.  He did say that if he got enough votes, he would advance the bill, and was looking for advice from the NRA and other gun advocacy organizations. Swell.  Thankfully, law enforcement is opposed to this bill for obvious reasons.

Gun nuts in Texas have been pushing the notion of Unqualified Carry for about 7 or 8 years now, even coining the term “Constitutional Carry” which doesn’t exist.  What it really is is Unqualified Carry, that is, the ability of anyone to carry a handgun openly without a permit and with no mechanism for law enforcement to examine a carrier’s qualifications.  The one successful thing the gun lobby, lead by the NRA, has done is to rewrite the Second Amendment over the last 5 decades pushing the notion that the Founders envisioned a society where guns are omnipresent; nothing could be farther from the truth, but it took decades of junk law based on manipulated and faked data to finally get this rewriting incorporated into caselaw. This rewrite culminated in the Heller decision, written by Antonin Scalia, who overturned two centuries of caselaw declaring the the Second Amendment was all about guns for everyone which it wasn’t. The Second Amendment was established to enable the new government to defend itself from 1) foreign enemies, and 2) insurrection.  All this bullshit being peddled about an armed citizenry being able to overthrow the US government for “tyranny” is just that: bullshit.  We saw the logical result of such bullshit on January 6th when brainwashed morons stormed the US Capitol to stop democracy from functioning and to force their own will on 300 million Americans.

Back to the present effort to undo remaining gun laws in Texas, and let’s be blunt; there is one reason, and one reason only for gun nuts and their various organizations to push Unqualified Carry, and that is to allow criminals and other unqualified individuals easy access to firearms so manufacturers can sell more firearms.  That’s it, period, end of sentence.  Gun nuts, lead by really crazy gun nuts, have been brainwashed by decades of bullshit published by the gun lobby that society must be the omnipresence of deadly firearms because society is evil and everyone must protect themselves and their families from scary dark people, socialist politicians, and government tyranny that they can’t define.

To make matters worse, Texas allows unregulated private sales and internet sales of ammunition and gun parts including 80% receivers which allow criminals who can’t put their hands on a firearm to just build one.  To take away the permitting requirement for handgun carry opens the floodgates for criminals, many of whom who have pushed for Unqualified Carry because they can’t get a license due to their past criminal records.

When a law is being considered, the question needs to be asked: Will this law make citizens lives better or safer?  Because this law puts more guns in unqualified hands, the answer is a resounding no.  The Unqualified Carry law won’t improve any lives (except criminals).  Because it will put more guns on the street, it will make law enforcement more difficult, risk law abiding citizens’ lives, AND enable criminals to carry guns without being challenged.  It will greatly complicate police officers’ jobs while a crime is being committed, and will slow their response.  In short, there is no good reason, no great need, and no problem that will be solved by allowing Unqualified Carry.   It’s already proven that the presence of guns increases violence, increases crime, and increases deaths.  This law will do no good, and cause a lot of grief for Texans, as if we needed that.

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.