From Yesterday's NYT: Sandra Bland Prosecutor Inadvertenly Shows His Cards
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/24/1405282/-From-Yesterday-s-NYT-Sandra-Bland-Prosecutor-Inadvertenly-Shows-His-CardsInmates near Ms. Bland’s cell did not smell marijuana smoke, and the cell contained no evidence of the drug, he said. He raised the possibility that she could have ingested it right before the traffic stop to avoid being arrested for drug possession. Explaining why the information was relevant, he said, “It is a mood-altering substance and a mood amplifier.”
More extensive drug tests may shed more light on that question later, he said.
The emphases are mine, obviously, but those lines are the ones that screamed at me, for what I assume most of you reading this already know: pot does not leave your body quickly, it stays in your system for up to a month, long after the effects of the high have completely dissipated. That this DA would insert that obvious bit of misinformation into his "finding" would be totally mystifying...if it weren't for the second set of bolded sentences in that blockquote, which can be summed up as:
Why the "paper of record" failed to note the completely obvious factual misstatement by the DA regarding the time it takes for trace marijuana to leave the system is confounding but hardly surprising these days. The propensity for MJ to hang in the bloodstream for much longer than other drugs is general knowledge, not something on the cutting edge of medical science that has yet to be determined for crissake.
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"thugette"...is that the story.....
#Black Lives Matter in spite of the lies and dispersions cast on the character of this victim of organized and authorized murder by racists that have been doing this for generations in the old south and the now neo-confederate south to POC especially.
It's a passively voiced deception (mistakes were made!) which obscures the actors (it was unclear to whom, the intrepid reporter? no, then it's "officials refused to confirm..."
, reading between the lines as though the NYT were Pravda, "it was unclear" means "it was clear she didn't, but officials stonewalled and kindly asked us not to print 'officials stonewalled...'" or something in that vein.
There's no passive verb. "Was" is just a past tense here, not part passive voice. It's just a copula ("to be" + adjective assigning a property to a noun, no different from "the ball is red."
There is no real "it" in that sentence, though. "It" is what my French teacher would have called pleonastic, my high school English teacher a "dummy pronoun," or my syntax teacher an expletive pronoun. The subject of the sentence is the following clause: "It's unclear whether ..." and "Whether (or not) she had access to the drug in jail was unclear." However, we still want that verb "was" to appear to have a subject so we put in "it". (We use "there" in parallel ways. "There was a girl from Nantucket", where "girl" is the real subject of "was" and "there" stands in for the subject.) Note that the writer uses "whether" for "if."
A lot of people don't like verbal subjects. They're typically considered to belong at a higher grade level, but sometimes they're used for purposes of euphony while passives typically are used for cohesion. We want our sentences to sound good (euphony) as well as for the information to flow in ways we think proper (cohesion).
"It was unclear" doesn't state the perceiver, a true point, but we do that all the time. "It was unclear" is up there with "It's offensive" or "It's a good thing that...." It's only bad when we don't personally like it, then we try to find stylistic problems or impute bad faith and ill will.
In this case, at least, it strikes me that the context delimits fairly well who it was unclear to. Unlike "it's offensive" or "it's a good thing that," where you eventually sort out who's doing actually the perceiving but the speaker well nigh declares the offensiveness or goodness to be universally perceived. Bobble heads nod in agreement and are slowly bobble-washed, or they agree and have their opinion that their opinion is universal reinforced. It's a mild form of demagoguery. In other words, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being bad, this is perhaps a 2 or 3. "It's offensive" rises to perhaps 7 or 8.
Passives have the same kind of expletive raising to subject, but they originally had a subject that was demoted. "The cat ate the gecko" becomes (in some sense) "______ ate the gecko" becomes "the gecko was eaten." We can put the subject back in as "The gecko was eaten by the cat." But if we say "It was eaten" that "it" isn't an expletive. It's a pronoun.
