I’m back for a test ride, to see how much this platform’s improved since I’ve been gone.
Our next president
At a rally in Detroit, Donald Trump said “titties” while attempting to say “cities.”
I dunno, says something about Trump.
You know disagrees with Trump? Trump does. Even he thinks he’s full of shit; watch him confess!
Gonna help the little people just like decades of Republican policies haven’t done for decades:
More here. Coincidentally, huge benefits for his family — which means maybe a crumb or two for his supporters. Speaking of which, Trump had to endorse Ryan before he could steal Ryan’s bold, radical economic plan (again, the same old shit).
You know which president paid a ransom to Iran? Ronnie Reagan. And gotta keep repeating the lie that Obama did in order to make people believe it.
50 senior GOP national security officials don’t think Trump’s the man for the job. It’s true, of course, but coming from these guys, one almost starts to have doubts. (Me, I really wonder how awful he would be. Worse than G.W. Bush? Reagan? Nixon?)
Voter Fraud Update: Still doesn’t exist, just the lies and disenfranchisement laws do. Sounds right.
Elsewhere
When Philando Castile was killed by a Minneapolis cop after a traffic stop, we learned that he had been stopped 46 times before and had been fined for driving without a license.
Castile isn’t the only black man in America to be subjected to multiple stops, nor to multiple fines — including fines and stops for failing to pay fines, resulting in more fines. The Ferguson uprising brought attention on the city’s “debtors prisons”, which were the inevitable result of the city’s reliance on fines levied against poor black families as the means of paying its bills (when you want to incentivize people who can’t afford fines to take desperate measures to pay up, it helps to have inhumane prisons with forced labor and other unconstitutional practices to use as a threat).
It’s not just Ferguson and it’s not just Minneapolis: the blacker a city is, the more fines it levies against its residents, and the fines are disproportionately directed at black residents.
You can only find crime where you look for it: racially profiled traffic stops and stop-and-frisks lead to overpolicing of racialized people. That means that racialized people are assessed more fines. That means that racialized people are more likely to fail to pay their fines. That means racialized people are more likely to be stopped — by profile stops, or by “empirical” tools like automated number plate recorders — for failure to pay fines.
Lather, rinse, repeat: now you’ve got a country where significant numbers of already poor black people end up in the criminal system for seemingly objective reasons like traffic infractions and failure to pay fines.
(Link.) Racism isn’t going away anytime soon, more so under Trump. It’s heritage and, as shown above, state-supported. Too, privatized prisons need their beds filled, and they pay pols to keep them filled. And how else does the state get money out of people who don’t make enough to pay taxes if not with gratuitous fining? Of course, besides being an obscenity, this system is self-defeating (exclusive of the harm of reinforced racism); when the people get too impoverished to pay fines and are jailed which is to unemployed and then unemployable, the meager pool of funds shrinks and shrinks and….
And speaking of cops becoming the pigs we prematurely called them decades ago, there’s Chicago’s finest celebrating a gratuitous shooting.
College rape victims have an issue with how colleges treat the cases. What’s wrong with the traditional system of covering up and maybe attacking the victim? I mean, it’s not like we’re living in progressive times or anything.
Technology cheerleaders love to talk “leapfrogging,” the idea that developing regions that haven’t adopted traditional technology (like an electrical grid or banking systems) can jump straight to the newest, “better,” thing more quickly. Occasionally, that’s true, like in parts of Africa where empowering mobile phones took off long before most people had landlines. Now the big idea is that drones will negate the need for roads, and save lives in the process.
Link. Leapfrogging’s one thing. But really, drones instead of roads? Like drones obviate the need to get to work? Really?
(Link.)
Olympic priorities: Identifying medal winners not by their names but by telling you who they’re related to. This might be limited to female athletes. Long version rant here.
What I don’t understand: “Smart” thermostats for homes — specially the hackable ones. And 75% of bluetooth locks can be hacked as well. And a billion monitors are vulnerable to firmware attacks.
I hate Uber. I just do. Maybe it’s because it’s a bit of a scam, their CEO is a documented asshole, and I think the people who use it instead of calling a local cab service are jerks?
Russia. Feudalism followed by decades of Bolshevism do something to an entire people — nothing good. That is all.
