Words’ End

MIT student arrested for wearing art that lights up from a 9-volt battery.

Truly appalling is this, by Major Scott Pare of the Massachusetts State Police:

“Thankfully because she followed our instructions, she ended up in our cell instead of a morgue.”

Beg pardon? Because she followed your instructions she didn’t end up dead for wearing a shirt with lights on it? Thank you, officer. That’s awful kind of you.

[Edit: Oh, it's worse than that apparently. Nick points to the AP release, which has Pare saying this:

Simpson was "extremely lucky she followed the instructions or deadly force would have been used," Pare said. "She's lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue."

Lucky! She should thank her lucky stars.]

Boston has learned nothing from the LED-art scare of a few months past – that one, by the way, ended anti-climactically, with the press forgetting all about it, and the two young men in question doing community service in return for having bogus charges against them dropped.

I hate scare-mongering. And I’m inexplicably terrified of what happens if my husband ever wears a particular present I gave him in the wrong place. (Going back to the Star Simpson incident, the argument that she should’ve known better, wearing something like this to an airport, holds no water. She should not be held responsible for the overreaction of others: first let’s talk about how much damage any device powered by nine volts is capable of making.)

Hat-tip to Dr. Memory.

He fucking did it again.

One un-smashed window remains in our car.

He’s some punk kid. I saw him but, of course, not his face.

Via friend Harlequinaide:

Washington Post writes about Bush’s visit to Howard University. Just…. just go and read it. Wh… just…

How is it that anyone still supports him? How?

current mood: insanely angsty, for work-related reasons. it’ll be All Better this afternoon.

This sort of news doesn’t usually make it out to the general public; it stays in the crowd to which it pertains, people just don’t tend to hear about it unless they’re actively searching. If you’re an unconnected party, especially if you’re an academic, please spread the word.

On August 20th, a 90-strong SWAT team raided an electronic music event – a rave – that was legitimately taking place an hour’s drive from Salt Lake City in Utah. They brutally beat people, pointed guns at their foreheads, drew Tasers. They proudly announced having confiscated many drugs, their largest drug “bust” being the stash of stuff that contracted security had confiscated from partygoers. There was at least one helicopter. There were dogs, and at least one person is claimed to have been attacked by a police dog.

Drug Policy Alliance article: According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah County detectives wanted to “get their point across that such activity was not welcome in their area”… Since when are police officially sanctioned to do anything but uphold the law?

Another article by the Daily Herald in Provo:

Recently released documents show Utah County Sheriff Jim Tracy made plans to break up an August party in Spanish Fork Canyon days before he had officers raid the event.

The pages of documents, including police reports and memos from officers involved to co-workers and the sheriff’s office, indicated Tracy knew about the party as early as Aug. 18, two days before it happened, and contacted other law enforcement agencies for assistance in shutting down the event.

Several days after the raid, the Daily Herald sent a request to Utah County under the state Government Records Access Management Act for any documents relating to tactical planning received or sent by the Utah County Sheriff’s Office. Chris Yannelli, an attorney in the Utah County Attorney’s Office, told the newspaper at the time the documents didn’t exist.

But those documents do exist…

Utah County Departmental News release about the rave bust: “A 17 year old female from West Jordan, found by officers, had overdosed on ecstasy. She was treated and released to her parents.”

Another report stated that the young woman was “close to overdosing on Ecstasy”, whatever that means. Which Ecstasy? MDMA? GHB, sometimes referred to as “liquid ecstasy” and with markedly different effects? an unknown substance? Let’s assume MDMA, the most common. What are the symptoms of “overdosing” – hell, what are the effects considered to be within normal range for people taking a drug? What are the negative effects? Was she hospitalized? (No.) Her pulse was said to have been 176; hell, if she was on “Ecstasy” and saw SWAT all around her, I can see how she’d have an elevated heart rate. That last link above reports palpitations nowhere near as high as the report stated. We’re talking a difference of 85-100 beats per minute.

Salon has a great article on this, here. It’s free if you watch a short ad. They do present both sides of the story.

The ACLU got involved in a suit against the sherriff: a federal judge asked to prevent future raids on electronic music events. The ruling was in the sherriff’s favor.

Finally, here’s a two-minute video (.mov viewable with Quicktime, 15.76MB) shot by an attendee (I’ve put it on my own site just in case it ever gets taken off elsewhere). The police claim there was no brutality.

Heh. I think I’ve finally gotten so fed up with the misinformed propagandistic drug-war polemic that I’m becoming a self-appointed spokesperson for correct information. [Article is not mine; two of the many comments are.]

Not that I’ll get it right every time. But, damn. When academics stop thinking and start implicitly equating a glass of wine with alcoholism, it’s a sad scene.

Although this isn’t new: just this morning E. and I were talking about scientific nomenclature. So much of it is legacy code, based on incorrect assumptions. As just one example based on Ethan’s current coursework, different algae are often grouped together by being named the same thing. Another example is “inorganic carbon,” another name for carbon dioxide, most of which is – well – organic. The thing is, even when we realize our mistake the language stays the same. For HUNDREDS OF YEARS. This is actively damaging, because we end up teaching and learning incorrect information, and then have to unlearn it, which is very difficult to do. Language defines and constantly mediates our world for us, and so learning why our naming practices are incorrect requires reorganizing a world view.

…to make me post again. I’ve been meaning to post other things as well, but blogging has fallen by the wayside. again.

From Rob Kampia at the Marijuana Policy Project, a policy reform organization lobbying for medical pot laws:

On October 7, Steven Tuck, a California medical marijuana patient who fled to Canada to avoid going to jail after being raided for growing his own marijuana, was snatched from a hospital by Canadian authorities, driven to the border with a urinary catheter still attached, and turned over to U.S. authorities for prosecution. He was held in jail for five days without medical treatment and without having his catheter removed.

He was released from a Seattle jail to seek medical care last Thursday, but when his treatment is over, he must return to California to face a federal marijuana charge.

Tuck, an Army veteran, used marijuana to treat the chronic pain stemming from a 1987 parachute accident in the Army. Is this how our government rewards its veterans?

Well? Is it?

May their god damn the powers that be to their respective visions of hell. And while we’re at it, Canada, wtf? YOU ARE NOT THE FIFTY-FIRST STATE. Tell them to go fuck off. Or have you finally lost your spine?

If you’re as galled at this as I am, or even a little, please spread it far and wide as a personal favor to me. More about the case is here.

I dreamed about an ex-lover, a friend to whom I’m about to write email (only partly because of the dream). He’s been, to a greater or lesser extent, in my dreams for something like a week now. I’ve no idea why. All I know is that I awake happy and slightly nostalgic, that I miss him and want him and Ethan to meet.

I told Ethan about this yesterday morning. His eyes reflected the shine in my own. He smiled, the corners of his eyes creasing; he wants to meet J. too. This is important – in some ways, this is it, it’s why I treasure him so. He gets what it means to love, nurtures the depth of feelings I carry for him and for others.

I wake, and before writing email I read blogs. My legs underneath the blanket freeze as I follow links from a post. A sixteen-year-old girl is accused of being terrorist threat and imprisoned – imprisoned! – for being a teenager. For not getting along with her parents, for wanting to get married at 16, for a misunderstanding in the family that involved the police because they trust in the system, a decision which cost their daughter her freedom after the police involved the FBI.

The girl’s Muslim. As the source of my links wrote, “this is the Patriot Act in action. This is religious persecution. This is your America.”

Was just responding to a friend’s blog post, and thought I’d post this here, since it more or less sums up my feelings about the new pope (aside, of course, from great disappointment, apprehension, disgust and red-hot hate for the entire Church.org).

(…which should not be confused with my attitudes towards the faith itself, and towards its devout followers. Okay? Okay.)

Anyway, the blogger said:

the Church needs to be willing to talk about social issues realistically if it doesn’t want to become increasingly irrelevant in the face of massive drop-offs in churchgoing across Europe.

I believe that process is already well under way. In Italy, Italy!, not many people are going to church on a regular basis:

“A Frank Bruni article in The New York Times on October 13, 2003, pointed out that 33 percent of Italians described religion as “very important” but as few as 15 percent are going to church every week, according to recent polls.”

The institution of the Catholic Church needs to get even more ridiculous before real change can be effected. Either that, or it will lose its power, and you know what? That’s not a bad thing. Devout Catholics might be heartbroken, but they really need the courage, and the incentive, to find their way to their God despite the corrupt, backwards, power-hungry and actively harmful people who stand between the populace and their faith.

It’s not that I don’t believe anything good can ever come out of the Vatican. It’s that it usually doesn’t. Quite the contrary.

Down with the corrupt Church! Viva la fede!!1!

“I didn’t see anything godly about that church. I didn’t see anything Christ-ly. All I saw was a bunch of bullies.”

Just finished watching The Magdalene Sisters and the documentary found on the same DVD, called “Sex in a Cold Climate.” Not an uplifting way to spend an evening, I’ll tell you what. It’s about the Magdalene asylums, institutions found up until 1996 all over Ireland, where women were sent for having children out of wedlock, for having been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted and so dishonored…

…or just for being pretty.

That way, they wouldn’t go astray.

A CBS News article from 2003 is chilling: the atrocities of those places were not discovered until 1998, and not reported until 1999. Up until five years ago, Ireland didn’t know that up to thirty thousand of its women were imprisoned and forced into slave labor in the Magdalene laundries. They were beaten into submission, scarred by being announced sinners who had lost heaven, forced to work “six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year” (documentary) for no pay. Many had lost their children to foster homes, adoptions, orphanages.

Some of the Magdalenes were sexually abused by the priests who came to take confession and give Sunday masses. Some women escaped, some went mad, some lived out their lives in the laundries from the time they were girls barely into puberty until the day they died. What kind of church, what kind of religion breeds such cruelty?

The same religion that institutionalized the abandonment of children born out of wedlock, babies dying by the thousands of neglect, lack of nutrition and syphilis – but at least they’d be baptized. At least, they’d go to heaven.

People genuinely believed this, and operated anonymous infant drop-offs until only a century ago.

Until less than a decade ago, women were imprisoned and enslaved by the thousands in Europe.

Don’t forget for a second. We are not out of the dark ages yet. Read this article, read it carefully, and then do me a favor and make an offering to the goddess of fertility.

Love and lovemaking are the reasons we are. A curse on those who profane that.