Category: The Shadow Knows

‘My heart is broken’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Very, very sad that things are at the point where he was moved to do this:

A 79-year-old retired minister in Texas killed himself via self-immolation in an effort to protest what he described as lingering racism in his childhood home — his final effort in a career marked by social activism, the Dallas Morning News reported.

“I would much prefer to go on living and enjoy my beloved wife and grandchildren and others,” Rev. Charles Moore wrote in a note left for authorities. “But I have come to believe that only my self-immolation will get the attention of anybody and perhaps inspire some to higher service.”

Authorities in Grand Saline, about 70 miles east of Dallas, said Moore drove there from his home in Allen on June 23 and pulled into a Dollar General parking lot before puring gasoline on himself and setting himself on fire. After a witness put out the flames with a fire extinguisher, Moore was hospitalized in Dallas, but died as a result of his injuries.

“I have never seen anything like this in my entire career in law enforcement, which includes my years as an arson investigator for the Mesquite Fire Department,” police chief Larry Compton told the Tyler Morning Telegraph, which posted a photo of Moore’s suicide note.

I can’t really argue with this

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

THERE HAS BEEN A POLITICAL REUNION BETWEEN MICHELLE OBAMA & HILLARY CLINTON AMID RUMOURS OF RIFT
Mark Ames wrote this in 2008, and it’s still true: There are a lot of men who hate Hillary because she’s a woman, and they’re not even conscious of it. Every female blogger I spoke to in 2007-8 saw it, and most tried to address it, despite overwhelming attacks FROM DEMOCRATS. (There were some women who hopped on the bandwagon, though.) Attack her politics all you want. But this was gendered. It was insane, it was primal, and it was violent. Most women bloggers managed to separate their defense of Clinton from her policies, because Jesus, it had to be done. If you want to read more, get Eric Boehlert’s “Bloggers On The Bus,” because he wrote about it in great detail:

And then there’s the doomed co-star Hillary. Poor Hillary, no matter how sweetly she soups up her cheek implants or blonds up her gray roots, and no matter how blandly she tries to out-bland Barack with her her flat monotone voice, she just can’t break out of her character role as America’s Misogyny Magnet: she’s the bitchy-neighbor in the bad sitcom who always gets the live studio audience to crow “oooo”: the minute the camera focuses on her, most men feel a kind of unmediated hate that’s completely beyond their control, a strain of perfectly preserved, primal misogyny locked up deep inside of just about every voting-age male’s psyche (if you men claim you haven’t felt it, you’re either monstrous liars or else you’re wearing a leather head harness with an inflatable mouth gag as you’re reading this).

Sure she’s as bland as Obama, perhaps even marginally blander, but at the animal level, she triggers a neurochemical jet that sets off the very first hate most men feel when they encounter a powerful and threatening woman (like, say, I dunno, your 4th grade teacher Mrs. McManus? or the dean Ms. Mead, the wrinkled-mouth Episcopalian baboon who kicked you out of school and told you you’d never amount to anything?).

For years now American men have been trying to attach some sort of moral or political significance to their Hillary hatred, but safely out here in Eurasia, I can tell the simple plain truth about it: it’s a misogyny that they can’t control. They hate her because she’s the embodiment of every woman they’ve ever hated since the time they opened their eyes. It can’t be explained, which is why it’s such an ugly yet pure hatred, and why everyone burns the candle on both ends to justify the hate in moralistic terms, or political terms, or anything but raw misogyny. She’s been taking the misogyny heat for a good 25 years from roughly 150 million Americans, maybe more, and it’s transformed her into the perfect male-ego punching bag, with just about as much soul and sensitivity as a thick leather bag full of padded stuffing can possibly have.

Hoarder’s floor collapses

~ susie

So sad. I’ve known a few hoarders in my time, and it’s a tough situation. When you have someone who can’t even let go of their trash, it’s impossible to talk them out of it:

CHESHIRE, Conn. —A 66-year-old woman described by police as an apparent hoarder was found dead under a pile of debris after the first floor of her Connecticut home collapsed into the basement under the weight of all the clutter, authorities said.

Police in Cheshire identified the woman as Beverly Mitchell. Her body was found in her home Saturday, two days after a postal carrier called police to request a welfare check because her mail had been piling up for at least a week.

Police Sgt. Kevin O’Donnell said officers went to the house Thursday, but didn’t find anyone and thought Mitchell wasn’t home. The first-floor had stacks of clutter to the ceilings along the walls and waist-high piles in other areas, and officials didn’t realize until Friday that the floor had collapsed, O’Donnell said.

After making sure the building was safe to enter, officials cut a hole in the side of the house and began removing debris with a backhoe. Authorities found Mitchell’s body on Saturday afternoon.

‘Theoclassical economists are basically immoral’

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

William K. Black with a long, long piece about a topic near and dear to my heart. Here’s an excerpt:

Theft of Food Aid in Somalia

The massive thefts of food aid in Somalia, primarily by the dominant clan, have worked just like Heyne predicted. As a result, Somalia is a true utopia. (It is also an NRA paradise in which because nearly everyone has an automatic weapon the streets are perfectly safe.) The reality of course is the same as what I described above in my discussion of thefts from Doctors Without Borders – except that thefts of food aid have caused far more deaths and widespread malnutrition. As with Heyne’s tale of economists’ invariably false predictions about voting based on a primitive misunderstanding of incentives the common denominator is that theoclassical economists are terrible at understanding the true nature of human incentives. The very thing that theoclassical economists claim to the defining element of their approach to predicting behavior, understanding incentives, turns out to be a great weakness.

Iraq: a similar ode to “privatization” via theft becomes a nightmare

As I write, Sunni Iraqi extremists have taken over Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, Tikrit, much of Falluja, and key facilities in a key oil city. This is eleven years after President Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” propaganda event on an aircraft carrier. One of the primary reasons that the U.S. occupation turned into a strategic disaster for Iraq and the U.S. is that the Bush administration took Heyne’s approach to epidemics of the theft from the Iraqi and U.S. governments. They treated epic thefts of state assets as “privatization” – and assumed it made Iraq’s government, society, and economy stronger.
Continue reading “‘Theoclassical economists are basically immoral’” →

Big manly men with guns

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

There’s some really creepy psychosexual crap going on with these gun nuts:

As Jennifer Longdon steered her wheelchair through the Indianapolis airport on April 25, she thought the roughest part of her trip was over. Earlier that day she’d participated in an emotional press conference with the new group Everytown for Gun Safety, against the backdrop of the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. A mom, gun owner, and Second Amendment supporter, Longdon was paralyzed in 2004 after being shot in her car by unknown assailants, and has since been a vocal advocate for comprehensive background checks and other gun reforms.

As Longdon sat waiting for her flight, a screen in the concourse showed footage of the press conference. A tall, thin man standing nearby stared at Longdon, then back at the screen. Then he walked up to Longdon and spat in her face. No one else blinked.

Longdon was shocked and embarrassed, she told me, but she didn’t falter. “Wow, aren’t you a big man,” she said as he turned and walked away. Instead of calling for security, she wheeled herself to a restroom to clean herself off. She was tired—she lives with constant physical pain—and didn’t want to miss her flight. “Should I have done something more? Quite honestly, in the scheme of things it was a little man and a little moment,” she said. “He felt to me like a coward and a bully.”

What happened to Longdon in Indianapolis is part of a disturbing pattern. Ever since the Sandy Hook massacre, a small but vocal faction of the gun rights movement has been targeting women who speak up on the issue—whether to propose tighter regulations, educate about the dangers to children, or simply to sell guns with innovative security features. The vicious and often sexually degrading attacks have evolved far beyond online trolling, culminating in severe bullying, harassment, invasion of privacy, and physical aggression. Though vitriol flows from both sides in the gun debate, these menacing tactics have begun to alarm even some entrenched pro-gun conservatives.

Lawsuit over school assault

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Bryant

This story makes me so, so sad. This poor little boy! Our school district is so overwhelmed, and so understaffed. And you know what makes me feel even worse? I read the comments section:

In October 2011, a nine-year-old boy transferred to a new school in West Philadelphia, but he quickly found his own personal hell there, according to allegations raised in a lawsuit filed last week.

Every kid new to a school might expect some razzing, but according to the lawsuit what began as insults and slurs by a handful of school bullies rapidly escalated into an exercise in terror that culminated in beatings, repeated humiliation and a brutal sexual assault in a bathroom at William C. Bryant Elementary School.

Named as defendants in the suit are the School District of Philadelphia, the school’s former principal and a former Bryant teacher. A spokesman for the school district, Fernando Gallard, acknowledged on Friday that the district had received the lawsuit but declined to comment.

The boy’s plight began soon after he entered fourth grade at the school. The boy, whose name is being withheld, was singled out by a group of classmates for “severe, pervasive, and continuous” harassment, states the suit, which was filed by his family in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas.

Vigilante porn

~ susie ~ 9 Comments

https://soundcloud.com/nydailynews/warning-graphic-audio-of-byron-smith-killing-two-teens-who-tried-to-rob-him

This is the logical result of years of gun porn, of Fox News paranoia, of sick Dirty Harry fantasies. I noticed years ago, from listening to drunken assholes in bars, that a hefty percentage of them truly believe that America equates to being able to do whatever you want to anyone who pisses you off:

In another case, just concluded, Byron Smith of Little Falls, Minnesota, was convicted of premeditated murder Tuesday after claiming self-defense in a somewhat similar situation — his home had been burglarized, so in 2012, he decided to set a trap and kill him a burglar, a neighbor girl he believed responsible for the break-in. So he made his house look vacant by parking his truck away from the driveway, then waited in his basement with snacks, his guns, and a novel, because even when you’re staking out your own home to kill a teenager, you need some entertainment. He even had a tarp ready in the basement to wrap the intruder’s body in — smart fellow, thinking ahead like that. He also set up an audio recorder to capture all the excitement.

And so, as it turns out, two teenagers, 18-year-old Haile Kifer and 17-year-old Nick Brady, broke into his house through a window, and eventually made their way down to his basement, where he shot them dead:

Brady descended the basement stairs first, and Smith shot him three times, saying “You’re dead.” He dragged the body to another room and waited until Kifer followed, and he shot her. “You’re dying,” he told her, according to the audio recording.

After killing the teens, Smith also said, on the recording, “I don’t see them as human. I see them as vermin.” No, he doesn’t seem nice at all.

The jury didn’t seem convinced by Smith’s defense that he was in fear for his life in the little sniper’s nest that he’d set up, and sentenced him to life in prison without parole. His attorney, Steve Meshbesher, said that he plans to appeal, since the judge hadn’t allowed the introduction of evidence that the teens had been involved in previous burglaries in the area, on the grounds that Smith could not have known anything about his targets’ history at the time he was filling them with holes. The prosecutors said that protecting yourself is one thing, but setting up a shooting gallery is quite another. It’s like these prosecutors think there are limits to the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to kill people who piss you off.

H/t to Attorney Shawn Sukumar.