three times dumb

today I'll catch up with a three fer.

Sunday:

Cynicism coupled with irony was funny for about half a season of South Park, since then it has infiltrated every aspect of American discourse. When the voice of reasoned liberal maintenance of the status-quo talks about citizen participation in the judicial process as a negative, it is an illustration of the goals of the liberal status quo. Liberals just like conservatives are happy to have an entrenched political class, professional decision makers, who preside with benevolence over us plebes. By the bottom of the article jury duty is summarized as a possibly enjoyable public service, but for the first 8 paragraph it echoes the common whining that surely isn't news. Nowhere in the article is jury nullification mentioned, no where in the article is the idea of "a jury of peers" examined, nowhere in the article are intersections of race and class and ability to take a week off work discussed.

It only took four years of war, 600,000 dead Iraqis, 3000 dead GI's, and the collapse of the president's legitimacy for the Press Democrat to be able to parse the "support the troops" jingoism from the actual human desire to keep loved ones safe. Now if it could examine the legitimacy of the spit on soldier myth or it could remind the world who it was that: opposed and the Vietnam War Memorial and who designed it, who it was that cynically and jingoisticaly tried to buy the vets off 15 years after the wars end, finally someone needs to research and write about the cold shoulder Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion gave to vets returning from southeast Asia.

Suicide by cop is a public relations creation. There is no recognized psychological syndrome called "suicide by cop", there is no researched sociological phenomenon called "suicide by cop". The phrase "suicide by cop" has been coined by law enforcement agencies and their apologists who try to divert, disrupt and discount any questioning of police power and authority. Even accepting the lay definition offered here Thurston was unarmed and fleeing from police, the glove don't fit.

Santa Rosa city council still fails to understand that downtown Santa Rosa is blighted by the mall and 101. This $3 million waste is the latest effort to avoid the truth. Maybe if the Santa Rosa City Council was more than a glorified block association for the affluent Montgomery neighborhood, some truth could get spoken.

Once again ceremony has been turned into a commodity.

If Ann Richards is a visionary rebel leader WE ARE FUCKED.

Hey look it's not news but it's scary and there's a movie on the way.

About fucking time now maybe some of the wealth made by slaves can get to their descendants? Oops there's my Marx showing...

If Pat Robertson was calling for my assassination I'd be stocking up on guns too.

Monday:

I wonder what were folks in California would rank the war on their list of concerns versus... I dunno... spandex clad billboards. I wonder why there hasn't been a rolling interruption of business as usual up and down the state for a week solid to discuss the war?

More happiness at the corner of profit and charity still no acknowledgement of human rights... you know like food, clothes, shelter, education, health care.

After several decades of annexation plans rejected for their bald faced racism suddenly the Press Democrat is reporting on Roseland a developers wet dream: depressed property values from the a combination of white flight, county neglect of the infrastructure, a fictional blight of crime, and large undeveloped tracts.

Tuesday:

Surprise surprise stonewalling disguised as concern for officer safety.

Maybe Jesus does love you after all, no wait that was money from PEOPLE that kept the shelter open.

The scale of this one man crime spree probably exceeds the economic impact of every boosted Ipod and car stereo in the county for a year, but it won't get discussed in those terms. The most telling part is that he had over $1 million in stuff that no one knew was missing, and that up to half of it was viewed as obsolete trash that Agilent was going to write off as a loss. Do you understand that? $500,000 worth of perfectly usable machines were seen as "last generation" so they were going to be tossed out and written off from the corporations books. It's an accounting scam, a tax cheat, corruption. No one will talk about it that way either.

This is what happens when a reporter puts a by-line on a police press release. Warrants are public records, the reporter could have found out what the warrants were actually for instead of parroting the menace of "no bail warrant". And what exactly is "suspicion of possessing a concealed gun in a car" is the suspicion that the concealed gun was in the woman's car at the time of arrest? or is it that she had a loaded gun in plain view in a car? or that she had a gun in car at some time in the past?