The transcripts of the Senate debate on the recently-amended drug bill are pretty amazing:
Hon. Claude Carignan: People often bring up the hypothetical situation of a youth who gets sent to jail for passing a joint to a friend. This bill has nothing to do with situations like that. Have any of you ever seen a three-kilogram joint?
Senator Comeau: That would be huge!
Senator Carignan: It would indeed be a huge joint.
A year after 15-year old student Alexandros Grigoropoulos was shot and killed by police, the streets of Athens are again blanketed by tear gas. Nearly a thousand people have been detained by Greek authorities, and schools have been occupied by anarchists in protest of the violation of academic asylum.
Anarchist flag waving over the Propylaia of the University of Athens. (gmesthos)
Protests in memory of Alexandros Grigoropoulos (apαs)
Protests both peaceful and violent have been taking place across the city over the past few days, and no immediate end is in sight.
Marches against state terror unleashed in the last few days against the movement took place in Athens and Salonica on Tuesday 8/12 amidst government lies and bragging of its ability to detain more than 800 citizens out of which 13 have been charged during the marches in memory of Alexandros Grigoropoulos.
In Athens the protest march called at Propylea at 19:00 found the university asylum grounds once again blocked by long triple chains of riot cops in utter breach of the 16th article of the constitution.
After several people were seriously wounded by a motorized police charge, Civil protection minister Michalis Chrisochoidis responded to criticism of brutal tactics by stating that “Police detentions, when justified, are not illegal in a democratic society. Neither is it illegal for judicial officials to press charges.” He added, “Vandals and hooligans have nothing to do with democracy.”
(Background, previously.)
Are you a Republican? Libertarian (ha-ha!)? Did you feel emasculated after Obama won? Maybe you feel a little less virile, a little less of a man?
The present study investigated voters’ testosterone responses to the outcome of the 2008 United States Presidential election. 183 participants provided multiple saliva samples before and after the winner was announced on Election Night. The results show that male Barack Obama voters (winners) had stable post-outcome testosterone levels, whereas testosterone levels dropped in male John McCain and Robert Barr voters (losers).
Wired has an oversimplified assessment of the study’s results, but the findings are clear:
Male voters exhibit biological responses to the realignment of a country’s dominance hierarchy as if they participated in an interpersonal dominance contest. [...] Moreover, since the dominance hierarchy shift following a presidential election is stable for 4 years, the stress of having one’s political party lose control of executive policy decisions could plausibly lead to continued testosterone suppression in males.
Norman Borlaug, “the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself,” has died at age 95. On the staff of the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico, Borlaug “developed a “miracle wheat” that tripled grain output and moved the country to self-sufficiency. Dr. Borlaug then took his high-yield, disease-resistant wheat to Pakistan and India, averting the mass famine and starvation that had been widely predicted.”
Yet, despite his achievement, and being one of only five people to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, Borlaug was hardly a household name: a 1997 Atlantic profile described him as the “forgotten benefactor of humanity.”
(Post by NotMyselfRightNow, via MeFi.)
Reading the coverage of Ted Kennedy’s death over the last couple of days, I was struck by two things: how much more human Mulroney’s comments are than the terrible statement given by Harper (especially compared to how Harper eulogized Reagan), and how much the surviving male Kennedys look like JFK.
Patrick Kennedy looks just like his uncle John’s portrait.
(Post title appropriated from Jeffrey Zeldman.)
There are a lot of things happening in my life that I’d like to write about, but my heart is heavy and my skin is raw. Instead, I’m going to write about this new contest from Electronic Arts:
Stay classy, EA.
I’ll give you a minute to re-read the ‘How To Win’ section a few times.
That’s right, EA literally wants you to sexually harass the booth babes at Comic-Con. You don’t have to settle for staring awkwardly at scantily-clad flesh and working up the nerve to brush your hand against an ass or two as you walk past them; their employer has actually posted a sexual bounty on them — so please feel free to grab a handful and get your money’s worth! And if your photos are the most ass-grabbingly great (keeping in mind step 3!) you’ll get to take them out to dinner in a fancy limo!
…
Goddamn it if EA isn’t the worst thing to happen to video games since Ultima Online. (Actually, scratch that. They published Ultima Online. I guess they’re just the worst thing.)
Every now and then I think about dropping everything and getting back into the video game industry, but then I am gripped by this fear, this panic, that somehow someday somewhere I would end up working for EA, and that’s enough to shake those dreams from my hair.
…
Oh, booth babes. Have we not yet visited enough ignominy and nerd germs upon you? Truly, you are the most underappreciated of all sex workers.
Corey & Vampirella. photo: roadkillbuddha
Today’s subject: Joe Arpaio!
If you’re lucky enough not to live in AZ, you might not know about Joe Arpaio. He’s the Maricopa County Sheriff signed a promise to serve only one term when he was elected in 1992. He’s still the Sheriff. When it comes to drug warriors, this guy doesn’t mess around. He’s got a self-propelled howitzer with “Sheriff Arpaio’s War on Drugs” painted on it, with some tasteful lightning bolts added for effect.
From a New Yorker profile of Sheriff Joe (pdf):
Arpaio ordered small, heavily publicized deprivations. He banned cigarettes from his jails. Skin magazines. Movies. Coffee. Hot lunches. Salt and pepper–Arpaio estimated that he saved taxpayers thirty thousand dollars a year by removing salt and pepper. Meals were cut to two a day, and Arpaio got the cost down, he says, to thirty cents per meal. “It costs more to feed dogs than it does the inmates,” he told me. Jail, Arpaio likes to say, is not a spa– it’s punishment. He wants inmated whose keenest wish is never to get locked up again. He limits their television, he told me, to the Weather Channel, C-Span, and, just to aggravate their hunger, the Food Network. For a while, he showed them Newt Gingrich speeches. “They hated him,” he said cheerfully. Why the Weather Channel, a British reporter once asked. “So these morons will know how hot it’s going to be while they are working on my chain gangs.”
Arpaio wasn’t kidding about chain gangs. Foreign television reporters couldn’t get enough footage of his inmates shuffling through the desert. New ideas for the humiliation of people in custody–whom the Sheriff calls, with pervasive disgust, “criminals,” although most are actually awaiting trial, not convicted of any crime–kept occurring to him. He put his inmates in black-and-white striped uniforms. The shock value of these retro prisoner outifts was powerful and complex. There was comedy, nostalgia, dehumanization, even a whiff of something annihilationist. He created female chain gangs, “the first in the history of the world,” and, eventualy, juvenile chain gangs.
Joe Arpaio is directly and personally responsible for stillbirths and miscarriages; and the deaths, brain damage, and severe injuries of newborn babies. Women who go into labor while in his jail aren’t allowed to hold or even see their babies after they’re born, even the ones who survive.
Arpaio has a reality show on Fox called “Smile You’re Under Arrest.” The premise of the show is to use big-breasted women and promises of a $300 prize to get people with nonviolent warrants to show up at a nightclub taken over by Joe for this purpose, and filled with paid actors and undercover cops (all at county expense). Then they have to participate- on national television- in either a fashion show or a dancing contest. Joe hides behind a curtain or under a covered table during all this; and after the fashion show or dancing contest is over, he jumps out and arrests them. Meanwhile over 40,000 felony warrants, many of them for rape or murder, go unserved and the homicide rate has jumped 167%. I’m not making this shit up.
( Much, much more, behind the cut… )
(Most of this post is courtesy of SA’s HidingFromGoro. )
Every year, over 90,000 women are raped in the United States.
If you’re an activist (or spend much time around activists), you might know this already. You might even talk about it, argue about why it happens, the effect it has on people, how to stop it.
What is less well-known is that every year, over 140,000 men are raped in the United States.
No one talks about it because it happens inside of prisons. No one cares about it because it happens to prisoners. On the inside, guards use rape (both implied and actual) as a form of prisoner control. On the outside, people joke about it. Worse even, they see it as a form of punishment prisoners should endure, even though rape inside of a prison is an order of magnitude more likely to transmit a disease than rape outside of one.
This is what 140,000 people looks like:
Generations from now, our treatment of criminals will be looked at with the same disgust and horror that slavery is viewed with today, and our society will rightly be condemned as cruel and barbaric for it.
Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan will be ordered to attack opium traffickers and drug facilities when there is proof of direct links to the Taliban, CBC News has learned.
The new order follows a heated debate among NATO allies over whether the attacks could be declared war crimes.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay told CBC News soldiers would indeed target drug traffickers and drug production facilities.
First, using military force on civilian targets — even if you don’t like what they do for a living — is a war crime.
Second, our military is in fucking Afghanistan fighting DRUG DEALERS WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK ASDFKASODFKOAWEF
restraint.org is a loose collection of writing, links, ravings, photos, news, fiction, and bad poetry by Jairus Khan. This website has been here (off and on) for ten years or so, and was around in various other forms for three or four years before that.
I spend most of my off-hours working (in Ottawa, Canada) to promote underground music, arts, and media, and trying to keep independent music from being smothered by the hopeless anachronism known as ‘the industry’. I DJ and promote concerts/festivals regularly, make occasional beep-beep noises in an industrial-metal band, and recently released a CC-licensed debut album for my own industrial-slash-experimental-electronic project, Ad·ver·sary.
When I’m not working with, promoting, listening to, or writing music, I design very angry websites, flyers, book jackets, and the sort for various arts projects. I supplement my music/design income (roughly enough to buy a pocketful of buttons a month) by developing counter-hacking courses and moonlighting as a web coordinator for the man.
I also bake very tasty cookies.
