Goons With Badges

The crime: Alledgedly disrespecting a police officer.

DAYTON, Ohio (CN) - Dayton police "mistook" a mentally handicapped teenager's speech impediment for "disrespect," so they Tasered, pepper-sprayed and beat him and called for backup from "upward of 20 police officers" after the boy rode his bicycle home to ask his mother for help.

It took twenty cops to Taser, pepper-spray and beat the snot out of one retarded teenager?

Brave cops they have in Dayton. True justice would end in a multi-million dollar settlement and a number of cops in prison for this. The first will probably happen anyway. The second, not so much.

Rob Allen's reaction is interesting:

I’m getting sick and tired of all these stories like this. I’ve gone from wanting to be a cop to developing an involuntary distrust of officers in only a few short years. From what I can see, police are losing sight of who they are and where they get their authority from (hint, Officer Friendly, it’s not the shiny badge). I still believe the majority of cops are good people, but the good ones can’t just sit back and continue to let this happen.

He'd have developed that "involuntary distrust" a lot sooner if he were a minority, be it racial, ethnic or sexual. But be that as it may, Rob is exactly right in his point that the police, and yes, that means the guys on the street, not just the rat bastards in Internal Affairs, need to start cleaning up their own shithouse. At the very least, they need to stop covering up for their asshole brothers in blue.

Beating the shit out of mentally handicapped boy for no goddamn reason other than he has a speech impediment? That's acceptable to you boys in blue?

Rob is right about another thing: If over 20 cops show up to "get some" at the expense of a retarded kid, then layoffs are in order, for clearly Dayton has too many cops.

Libertarian Fantasy versus Reality

In the Libertarian mind, there is no need for regulation of companies-- Companies can be trusted to do the right thing because they want to protect their good reputation. Or so that's what they seem to believe.

In the real world, things are quite different. If a safe working environment costs money, companies will not provide one. If they are required to provide one, they will circumvent the rules. Which sort of works, until enough people die.

Exhibit A: Massey Coal.

Federal investigators said Wednesday that Massey Energy, the owner of the West Virginia mine where 29 men were killed in an explosion last year, misled government inspectors by keeping accounts of hazardous conditions out of official record books where inspectors would see them.

Kevin Stricklin, administrator for coal at the Mine Safety and Health Administration, described a dual accounting system practiced by Massey before the deadly explosion, in which safety problems and efforts to fix them were recorded in an internal set of books, out of sight of state inspectors, and off the official books that the law required them to keep.

That was among the conclusions of a large team of federal investigators, who spent a year sifting through more than 84,000 pages of documents, interviewing 266 people and examining evidence at the Upper Big Branch mine, where the explosion occurred.

Twenty nine men died because Massey Coal had a deliberate policy of refusing to fix dangerous conditions and covering up the existence of those conditions. Massey Coal didn't give a damn about its reputation or its workers. I would have to suspend disbelief in order to accept the concept that the executives of Massey Coal had no idea that this was going on. Their executives pled the Fifth for a reason, I sincerely hope that their reason for doing so lands them down the cellblock from the Two Bernies (Kerik and Madoff).

Republican ideology is more brutal. Republican orthodoxy now is "all regulations bad." In the Republican mind, there would not have been a problem with Massey Coal fibbing on its records because there wouldn't have been any regulation of mine safety to begin with.

Today's Earworm

I could go into an explanation, but screw it. This fits for today.



After a few calls, I'm in agreement with Samuel Clemens:

It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.

Cementing the Locks in the Canal, Perhaps?

Most days, I go for a walk. Sometimes I vary my route. Yesterday, as I was walking down a a side street, I passed a house that had a cement mixer parked outside. The concrete pouring chute from the mixer went through a casement window into the basement of the house. They apparently were installing (or replacing) a cement floor.

It occurred to me that maybe they were cementing over the locks in the Panama Canal.

(If you don't get the reference, read or watch.)

Unusual Method of Self-Defense

A man sexually assaulted a woman and tried to jam his tongue into her mouth.

She bit off his tongue. He fled and she spit the chunk of tongue out into the alley.

The cops have both the perp and the evidence.

Gay Rights

On this day in 1969, gay people, particularly drag queens, got tired of being pushed around by the NYPD. So they pushed back.

The police have had a long and sordid history of hassling gays and drag queens. It still goes on.

Buh-bye, Blago

Off to the Crossbar Hilton:

Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was convicted Monday on 17 of the 20 public corruption charges against him related to his attempt to sell the U.S. Senate seat held by Barack Obama before he resigned to become president.

All of those counts carry a maximum of 20 years, and he was convicted the first time around of lying to a Feebie, which is a 5 year charge.

Probably get them all concurrent, but even so, Blago's going away for a long time (once his appeals are exhausted).

Seems to me that a lot of Illinois governors do the "two terms in the statehouse and one in the penitentiary" bit. George Ryan, Blago's predecessor, is still in prison. Otto Kerner and Dan Walker also went to prison.

The Conservative View of the First Amendment is This: "Money Talks."

Because only in the Right-wing bizzaro world of the Roberts Court, is helping somebody counter lies considered to be a violation of the liar's constitutional rights.

Arizona's law did nothing to hinder "robust debate". What it did do was help publicly-financed candidates counter the bullshit commercials of rich candidates (and those backed by the Chamber of Commerce and the Koch brothers).

Apologies

I haven't checked the spam filter for this blog in awhile. Some legit comments were there, including one from BobG that was over a month old.

Sorry about that, guys. I'll try to do better.

One Step Closer to the "Pilot and Dog" Flight Deck

One of the avionics makers is offering a panic button for business jets and airliners. The idea is that if the faulty humans completely lose the bubble, then they can push the button and the majick boxen will take control and fly the airplane until they can get their wits about them.

Included is a "one-touch" safe mode button or switch that a pilot of an auto-throttle-equipped [Rockwell-Collins] Fusion system can push after losing situational awareness. [Duty Spokesweasel] says one-touch will roll the wings level and fly that way for 15 to 30 seconds before climbing autonomously to an altitude safety above terrain and entering a holding pattern. "This gives pilots time to regain awareness and regain control of the situation," he said. A trade study is under way to determine what automated messages or transponder codes should automatically be sent to the ground if the mode activates.

There is an old joke that the avionics in commercial airliners will eventually be so sophisticated that the flight crew will consist of a pilot and a dog. The dog's job is to bite the pilot if he touches anything.

I share this blogger's qualms about it. What is the point of having trained pilots if their job in an emergency is going to be to "push the button, Max"? You could hire a smart capucin monkey to do that job.

There is another "feature" that Rockwell has already built into its boxes:

One new feature already incorporated in the integrated cockpit, for which the company recently received supplemental type certification approval by the US Federal Aviation Administration, is an emergency descent mode that will turn and dive the aircraft down to 15,000ft (4,572m) if its systems sense pressurisation problems and the pilots are not responding.

Nice, except that the onset of hypoxia is a little bit below 15,000 feet. So the pilots might not wake back up. Of course, if the airplane dove itself lower, there are lots of places in the world where it might fly into some cumulogranite. It could still happen at 15,000 feet, but it's sort of less likely.