damnedifIknow
damnedifIknow's JournalIntroducing the Alert Silk System to Warn Businesses of the Gay Threat
"It being immediately necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health and safety, an EMERGENCY IS HEREBY DECLARED TO EXIST!" shrieks Oklahoma State Senator Joseph Silk in his recently introduced bill, Oklahoma Religious Freedom Reformation Act of 2015. In a New York Times article, Mr. Silk explains the need for his bill: "The L.G.B.T. movement is the main thing, the primary thing that's going to be challenging religious liberties and the freedom to live out religious convictions. And I say that sensitively, because I have homosexual friends." Mr. Silk believes that gays "don't have a right to be served in every single store. People need to have the ability to refuse service if it violates their religious convictions."
*All gay people will wear an electronic transponder on their foreheads. As a homosexual enters through a business door, the transponder will be read by a receiving antenna. This will trigger a warning ("Gay! Gay! Gay! Danger! Gay! Gay! Gay!"
alerting owners and workers that their religious liberties are about to be violated. A siren will wail and bright lights will flash. The offending homosexual should flee the premises. A.S.S. also sends a signal to police headquarters. If the homosexual is not frightened enough by the warnings and does not scamper off, local police will intervene.
I admit that this is an aggressive answer to preserve public peace, but it is necessary in this climate of emergency to America's health and safety."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/domenick-scudera/introducing-the-alert-sil_b_6830766.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592
Scandal’s Powerful Police Brutality Episode Lights Up Social Media
In the eyes of her fans, Shonda Rhimes can do no wrong — and that was certainly true on Thursday night with “Scandal’s” latest powerful episode, “The Lawn Chair.”
The ABC drama turned its attention on the difficult and emotional topic of police brutality and hit close to home for many viewers.
The episode began with the haunting image of an unarmed black teen named Brandon Parker lying dead in a Washington, D.C. street a few miles away from the White House. When his distraught father, Clarence (Courtney B. Vance), positioned himself between the body of his son and police with a shotgun, Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) was called in to manage the sensitive situation.
Sparking memories of the Ferguson shooting of Michael Brown, Pope was caught up in the moral dilemma of the injustice before her and her role as a crisis manager. She promised Clarence she’d get Attorney General David Rosen involved (he was sadly too busy dealing with other issues), and then clashed with neighborhood activist Marcus Walker who arrived with the titular lawn chair, which the mourning father placed over Brandon’s body. “In case it rains or something. I want him to be protected from the elements,” he said."
http://news.yahoo.com/scandal-powerful-police-brutality-episode-lights-social-media-073717056.html
Virginia Woman Dies After Being Tased, Placed In Restraints & Hood
On February 3rd, a 5’3?, 130 pound Virginia woman was killed after six deputies tased her before locking her in restraints with an anti-spitting hood over her head. Natasha McKenna, who was 37 years old and suffered from schizophrenia from a young age, went into cardiac arrest before ever leaving the jail and later died at the hospital."
*In-custody deaths and abuse involving restraint chairs and tasers are not uncommon, and yet these kinds of aggressive approaches — especially toward the mentally ill — seem to be in vogue in lock-ups and police departments across the country. In 2013, Christopher Lee Lopez died in restraints and a hood in Colorado. Two inmates died in the same restraint chair in South Carolina last year. A 26-year old died after having a seizure in a chair in Washington. In Arkansas, one inmate was tied so tight his “whole arm turned purple.”
The same goes for the use of tasers by law enforcement against those who don’t appear to fully ‘comply’ with their orders; in October, 31-year-old Lashano Gilbert of New London, Connecticut was shot twice by police with a stun gun in a span of 8 hours after being arrested on suspicion of carjacking. He later died. 36-year-old Dante Parker was tasered at least 25 times and killed after matching the description of a burglar. In 2011, police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, “restrained a mentally ill man and repeatedly shocked him with a taser, causing him to die of a heart attack …”
The ACPD says the investigation is still ongoing and promises to release more information soon. So far, no charges or disciplinary actions have been taken against the officers involved in McKenna’s death."
http://www.mintpressnews.com/MyMPN/virginia-woman-dies-after-being-tased-placed-in-restraints-hood/
Lawyers wary of claim about Chicago police 'black site,' say abuse citywide
Allegations that the Chicago Police Department abuses the rights of people that police detain for questioning have been a central element of the notorious police misconduct issues in this city for decades.
From the torture carried out by former Cmdr. Jon Burge in the 1970s and 1980s to the baseless detention of people subsequently robbed by rogue officers of the Special Operations Section less than a decade ago, mistreatment of detainees has been much litigated and extensively covered by Chicago news media outlets in recent years."
*The problems described in the pieces published by The Guardian include denying detainees access to their lawyers as well as denying lawyers and family members any information about the whereabouts of their clients and loved ones for hours. The stories have gone viral online and led to calls for demonstrations. But lawyers said such problems have been a widespread issue with the Police Department for decades, not one particular to Homan Square.
Richard Dvorak, a veteran criminal defense attorney, said the problem was widespread, but he was unaware of any issue unique to Homan Square.
"Everything that was described (in the Guardian story) was something that happens every day," he said. "I think it's pretty systemic throughout CPD."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-homan-square-chicago-police-met-20150227-story.html#page=1
"Pretty systemic throught the CPD" That's comforting..
America Never Abolished Slavery
This past Black History Month, millions of students were told the story of how America abolished slavery 150 years ago with ratification of the 13th Amendment. The story draws an upward trajectory of racial equality in America from the abolition of slavery to Brown v. Board of Education to the Civil Rights Act to the election of President Obama.
The problem is the story isn't true. We never actually abolished slavery. The 13th Amendment states:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
"...except as a punishment for crime..." This phrase gets ignored in America's telling of its slavery story. The 13th Amendment did not abolish slavery but rather moved it from the plantation to the prison. In 2015, the 2 million (largely Black) people incarcerated in America are legally considered slaves under the Constitution. As a result, they can and are forced to work for pennies an hour with the profits going to counties, states and private corporations including Target, Revlon and Whole Foods. In fact, there are more Black people enslaved today than in 1800."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/angela-f-chan/america-never-abolished-slavery_b_6777420.html
Gender Identity is Biological, Study Says
There is growing body of evidence that gender identity is hard wired into the brain and not simply a matter of psychology, according to a new Boston University School of Medicine study.
Writing in the journal Endocrine Practice, the researchers said that as many as one in 100 people could be living with some form of gender identity disorder -- meaning they may identify their gender differently than the one they were born with. "
This makes the case for doctors to use surgery and hormone treatment rather than psychotherapy alone to help their patients come to terms with their gender identity, Dr. Joshua Safer, the lead researcher and a professor at BUSM, said.
“The paper was a comprehensive review of the scientific evidence that gender identity is a biological phenomenon," Safer explained. "As such it provides one of the most convincing arguments to date for all medical providers to gain the transgender medicine skills necessary to provide good care for these individuals," he added.
Nearly 40 percent of medical students they surveyed said they were uncomfortable caring for transgendered patients, and 5 percent of medical students said that the treatment was not part of conventional medicine. After teaching a course that raised the medical student’s awareness about transgender medical need, the students discomfort dropped by 67 percent. "
https://gma.yahoo.com/gender-identity-biological-study-says-090824140--abc-news-health.html
Out of Detention: How to Stop the School-to-Prison Pipeline
A single instance of incarceration in a young person’s life increases the risk of future imprisonment, at a cost to taxpayers of $240.99 per day. Living in jail worsens the mental, emotional, and behavioral problems with which these children and adolescents must struggle. And mental disorders and youth incarceration already share an alarmingly strong link. As James Barrett, a psychologist at the Cambridge Health Alliance and in Harvard Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry, said in an interview with the HPR, a “massive overlap” exists between the two groups. While just 20 percent of all American youth live with one or more mental disorders, that proportion jumps to 70 percent for the juvenile justice population."
A small percentage of incarcerated youth are unsurprisingly diagnosed with a conduct disorder, a term that describes a young person who harms or is threateningly aggressive toward others. Yet even excluding conduct disorders, 61 percent of males and 70 percent of females involved in the juvenile justice system struggle with mental disorders at the start of detention, including anxiety disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder. The rate of psychosis, a severely distressing and debilitating condition, is 10 times that of the general population.
Furthermore, the majority of these youth are not dangerous. Just 23.5 percent of those in the juvenile justice system are imprisoned for truly violent offenses. Many face legal penalties for far less distressing behavior that is consistent with fighting a psychiatric illness, such as truancy or other minor school infractions. Youth as young as eight end up in the juvenile justice system after struggling with undiagnosed mental disorders."
http://uwire.com/2015/03/02/out-of-detention-how-to-stop-the-school-to-prison-pipeline/
L.A. police kill unarmed homeless man. Myrtle Beach police avoided shooting armed man.
The facts are still emerging, but no matter how we slice it, the video of the L.A. police shooting a homeless man looks awful.
That doesn’t mean we should be certain that it wasn’t justified, especially if the officers can prove that the guy went for and almost had one of the officer’s gun, as they are claiming. That would make what we see on the video at least make a little more sense.
Even under that scenario, though, it is disturbing and begs the question: If a handful of officers - who have a suspect on his back on the ground - can’t subdue him short of filling his body up with bullets, is there ever a situation in which shooting a suspect isn’t OK?
Usually, many people claim the officers had no other choice. Oftentimes, that’s simply not true. Police officers throughout the country, and in Horry County and Myrtle Beach, find ways to deal with extremely difficult situations without resorting to lethal force.
In recent months, the Myrtle Beach Police Department faced similar circumstances twice - and each time the officers and the suspect walked away with their lives.
From a piece I wrote in December:
Just last week, a couple of white Myrtle Beach police officers showed incredible restraint when facing an armed black man during a traffic stop, one in which the man presented a handgun, went for the officers weapon after he was disarmed, and after running away turned around, pulled something out of his pocket and threatened to shoot.
The cops didn’t empty their clips into his body. Instead, they noticed he was pointed a cell phone at them.
They arrested instead of shooting him.
Read more here: http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/2015/03/02/4818917/blog-la-police-kills-unarmed-homeless.html#storylink=cpy
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