Month: June 2014
The Wrecking Crew
Wonderful documentary about the best session players in L.A., back in the day. This is the Leon Russell segment:
Bob Jones U. to student rape victims: What sin did you commit?
I don’t know why I always knew not to listen to this kind of crap when I went through Catholic school, but I did know and I’m grateful I did. I can’t imagine what it would be like to believe this. Al-Jazeera:
Raised in a conservative Mennonite home in rural Ohio, Katie Landry was a sheltered kid. She hadn’t even held hands with a boy when, at age 19, she says her supervisor at her summer job raped her. Two years later, and desperate for help, she reported the abuse to the dean of students at her college.
“He goes, ‘Well, there’s always a sin under other sin. There’s a root sin,’” Landry remembers. “And he said, ‘We have to find the sin in your life that caused your rape.’ And I just ran.”
Landry ended up dropping out of college, and didn’t tell anyone else for five years.
Her college was Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C., the flagship campus of American fundamentalism, which teaches a literal interpretation of the Bible and separation from the world. Last year, BJU hired a watchdog group to investigate how it may have failed victims of sexual abuse. The so-called “fortress of faith,” one of the most closed-off Christian colleges in America, was finally opening itself up.
In an America Tonight investigation, five former students detailed similar and scarring treatment at the hands of BJU faculty. They spoke of a larger culture that heaped on shame and pushed them to silence — one focused on purity and reputation, and insistent on unquestioning obedience. But most damaging was how, through the language of Scripture, victims say they were told that their sins had brought on their rapes, that their trauma meant they were fighting God and that healing came from forgiving their rapists.
Hah
I wonder if they even knew what it meant:
A county commission in Dallas on Tuesday unanimously, and apparently unwittingly, passed a resolution that called for slavery reparations for African Americans.
The Dallas Morning News reported that the resolution was proposed by John Wiley Price, the only black member of the Dallas County Commissioners Court. Entitled the “Juneteenth Resolution,” it passed unanimously.
After the meeting, several commissioners admitted they hadn’t read the document, nor had they received a copy of it, before voting on it, the newspaper reported.
The only Republican commissioner, Mike Cantrell, later changed his vote to an abstention because he “had not received a copy of the resolution,” he told Dallas Morning News.
The resolution was nonbinding and made no arrangements for payments of reparations, but it represents the county’s official position. No other commissioners had changed their votes and so the resolution remained.
Drip drip drip
That’s the sound of George Will’s career starting to trickle away:
Early this month, Washington Post columnist George Will wrote a column claiming that being a rape victim is now a “coveted status” that college women seek out. Will argued that complaints of rape and sexual assualt on college campus were overblown. He also suggested that women claiming to be raped were “delusional.”
Will’s column is syndicated in newspapers across the country by the Washington Post, which bills him as “the most influential writer in America.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which has published Will’s column for a number of years, has had enough. In a message today to readers, the paper announced they were dropping Will from their paper and apologized for running his column on sexual assault:
The change has been under consideration for several months, but a column published June 5, in which Mr. Will suggested that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoy a privileged status, made the decision easier. The column was offensive and inaccurate; we apologize for publishing it.
Will will be replaced in the Post-Dispatch by another Washington Post columnist, Michael Gerson.
Clusterfucked
I still don’t have a copy of my policy. They sent me a link to the online version, but my password doesn’t work and I’ve spent hours on the phone with Independence Blue Cross, just waiting for someone to answer:
Obamacare’s enrollment glitches might have been fixed long ago, but they’re still causing headaches at doctors’ offices and clinics around the country.
Patients and health care providers, in a series of interviews with The Huffington Post, complained that they are havingtrouble confirming that patients are insured, working out what their plans cover and figuring out which plans doctors will accept.
These complaints are signs that the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature health care reform law, is suffering growing pains more than six monthssince its insurance policies took effect.
Mixed emotions
I know I should feel bad, but we’ve seen so many bosses hurt so many workers in so many places, maybe my brain just craves some balance.
A mob of Indian workers has beaten the CEO of a jute factory to death in a dispute over increasing their working hours, police told the AP news agency after arresting six workers.
Four suspects were arrested on Sunday, followed by two on Monday, and are expected to be charged with murder, vandalism and other crimes.
A group of 200 workers, wielding iron rods and stones, stormed the office of 60-year-old HK Maheswari in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, according to Sunil Chowdhury, the Hooghly district superintendent.
Maheswari had denied their earlier request to work and be paid for 40 hours a week at the North Brook Jute Mill, instead of the current norm of 25.
He had also proposed shutting down the mill for three days a week to limit mounting financial losses, according to the factory’s general manager, Kiranjit Singh.
License-plate reader company claims First Amendment right to build a 1.8-billion-image database
Did you know these companies cruise the parking lots of clinics and doctor’s offices, taking pictures of the license plates? They sell them to Big Pharma so the companies can target you to sell you stuff. So this Tech Dirt article tells us about how Big Data wants to preserve that:
Private companies engaging in large-scale surveillance are pushing back against the push back against large-scale surveillance… by filing lawsuitsalleging their First Amendment right to photograph license plates is being infringed on by state laws forbidding the use of automatic license plate readers by private companies.
Now, these laws aren’t saying law enforcement agencies can’t use these readers. They can. What they do say (or did… Utah’s law was amendedafter a lawsuit by license plate reader company Vigilant) is that private companies, like repossession firms and tow truck services, can’t use these readers. But apparently they do, and those who manufacture and support the equipment would like to continue capturing this market.
Cyrus Farivar at Ars Technica reports that Vigilant has filed another lawsuit, this time against the state of Arkansas, arguing that a state law curbing the use of LPRs by private companies tampers with its free speech rights.
In this case, the two firms in question—Digital Recognition Network (DRN) and Vigilant Systems—generate, maintain, and share access to the license plate reader database with law enforcement.The new Arkansas state law took effect in 2014, and it bans the private collection of license plate reader data while still allowing the cops to use the devices, usually mounted on patrol cars. The two companies say that their First Amendment rights are being violated, as they are allowed to photograph—even under an automated, high-speed process that is then shared with law enforcement—any and all license plates, anywhere.
There’s a bit of a disconnect in Viglant’s/DRN’s logic, but one that’s a bit troublesome for the courts to address. By portraying the capture of license plates at a rate of nearly 1,000 per hour as little more than a digital version of someone taking individual photographs of publicly-displayed plates, the companies hope to make its technology look less intrusive than it is.
The troublesome part is that courts have held that privacy violations that don’t exist in the singular can’t magically be summoned by en massecollections. There are definitely privacy concerns, however, especially when this information is used (and misused) by law enforcement. But the companies argue that there’s nothing personally identifiable about a license plate, at least without access to other databases like those held by states’ departments of motor vehicles. (Oddly, law enforcement officials have madethe same argument, despite having this access.) This is true, but it’s of little comfort when the privately-held database contains 1.8 billion records and is growing at the rate of 70 million per month.
Superstar
Rita Coolidge:
Crazy love
Ray Charles and Van Morrison:
http://youtu.be/TyCAZRKXaQk