Flutterby™!

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posts a Twitter thread about Trump administration bungling in the Venezuela coup that kinda says "Democrats are better at overthrowing foreign governments than Republicans", which ... well ... I don't think he wanted to say the subtext quite as clearly as he did, and boy it kinda makes all US foreign policy look horribly incompetent and corrupt.

This is great: Like a modern hate-driven version of The Music Man, dude goes town to town selling them on the notion of ill-advised ordinances, then gets paid to defend those ordinances in court, loses, moves on to the next town where he manages to get them to enact the ordinance again based on his successes in getting the previous town to do the same.

Kris Kobach’s Lucrative Trail of Courtroom Defeats

For years, the candidate for Kansas governor has defended towns that passed anti-immigration ordinances. The towns have lost big — but Kobach has fared considerably better.

Los Angeles Deputy Says Colleagues Are Part of Violent Gang

The allegations against the Compton deputies follow accusations of other gangs in the department — called the Spartans, Regulators, Grim Reapers and Banditos — that also share tattoos and a history of violence, the Times said.

Los Angeles deputy says colleagues are part of violent gang

COMPTON — A violent gang of Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies who call themselves “The Executioners” control a patrol station in Compton through force, threats, work slowdowns and acts of revenge against those who speak out, a deputy alleges in a legal claim.

Thread: RT acab|blm @jaythenerdkid

reminder to my fellow muslims that eating the rich IS NOT HALAL! we're not allowed to eat scavengers or anything that survives on carrion!

Al Jazeera: Beirut blast: Tracing the explosives that tore the capital apart

It was forced to dock in Beirut after facing technical problems at sea, according to (PDF) lawyers representing the boat's crew. But Lebanese officials prevented the vessel from sailing, and eventually, it was abandoned by its owners and crew - information partially corroborated by Fleetmon.

• Fleetmon: Beirut port explosion mystery solved? UPDATES: 3 ships disappeared. VIDEO English is not Fleetmon's first language, "sank" is a better term than disappeared.
• The Siberian Times: First pictures emerge of a Russian man whose ammonium nitrate cargo detonated in the port of Beirut
• From 2014: Crew kept hostage on a floating bomb – m/v Rhosus, Beirut

Replace your social media feeds with the Endless Doom Scroller: https://endlessdoomscroller.com/

Morgan Freeman Reads Rep. John Lewis’ Last Words | The Last Word | MSNBC

In a special Last Word, Morgan Freeman reads the words of John Lewis’ final essay, which he requested be published in the New York Times on the day of his funeral: “Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation.” Aired on 7/30/2020.

Still needs sanding and oil, but used up a bunch of scraps, and I think I like how it's shaping up

Made a router sled to surface this piece of olive that I slabbed out with a chain saw a couple of years ago

In case you hand any wonders who they were working for: Maine’s police intelligence center sent reports on activists to corporations

Corporate executives at Avangrid, Hannaford’s, ExxonMobile, Bath Iron Works and other large corporations with connections to Maine were sent regular reports by the state police’s intelligence unit, the Maine Information and Analysis Center (MIAC), tracking Black Lives Matter and anti-CMP corridor activists and including unsubstantiated rumors spread by the extreme right.

The challenge is: build an outdoor table using that slab of granite and some leftover redwood scrap. I'm going for a small trestle table...

Another recent project: Bagheera likes to sleep on Charlene's pillow, crowding her, so we made this fold down shelf to put a pillow on and shove him into, for more room on the bed.

Watched Fast Color last night. I think this is one that's gonna sneak up on me, kinda like Last Black Man in San Francisco. Both of us were pulled in and think we'd like to see it again (and we don't watch that many movies to start with, let alone again), and we're both still trying to figure out what we thought about it. Lorraine Toussaint and Gugu Mbatha-Raw were both amazing. The camera work brought a heck of a lot to dive into. The scenery is stark and raw.... The trailer tells very little, and the reviews are either bemused that they loved it, or disappointed that it was a superhero movie that wasn't a superhero movie. But, yeah, I want to watch it again.

From Humboldt County: Confessions of a California Covid Nurse

A California county’s efforts to stop the spread has also become a battle with the public’s denial. Erica Dykehouse will wait for minds to change.

The NYPD unit that snatched a protester off the street has been accosting people for years

The plainclothes NYPD Warrant Squad that “kidnapped” a Black Lives Matter protester, explained.

RT ThadCulley

Well, we know who they consider the enemy: DHS compiled ‘intelligence reports’ on journalists who published leaked documents

“To broadly disseminate an intelligence report, including to numerous state and local law enforcement agencies, about a DHS leak to a reporter strikes me as bizarre,” said Steve Bunnell, who served as the department’s general counsel for three years in the Obama administration. If department officials were concerned about unauthorized disclosures, they should refer the matter to the inspector general or handle it internally, he said.

I call this "over-thinking a wastebasket lid"

Research Says Violent Cops Cause Violent Protests

That’s one of the findings in “New Directions in Protest Policing,” a 2015 paper that reviews decades upon decades of police history and the conclusions of multiple separate commissions. Police that dress like they’re going to war, who try to control First Amendment expression rather than facilitate it, and who act in arbitrary ways can inflame violence and jeopardize their own safety and that of the public.

It started as a noise complaint. It ended in another fatal Phoenix police shooting

We Want More Justice For Breonna Taylor Than The System That Killed Her Can Deliver

We want to invite a broader and deeper conception of justice for Breonna Taylor and other survivors and family members harmed by police violence – one rooted in reparations, modeled on Chicago’s recent successful struggle for reparations for survivors and families of people tortured by former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge. The reparations framework outlines 5 elements – repair, restoration, acknowledgment, cessation and non-repetition.

Lucky the US didn't assassinate him and install a replacement more friendly to agribusiness: New York Times obituary: Mason Gaffney, Who Argued for Taxing Only Land, Dies at 96

“To some people all taxes are equally terrible,” Professor Gaffney wrote in a 20-page paper summarizing his economic theories. But, he contended, land-value taxes are relatively virtuous and far less intrusive than income taxes.

“Land yields an economic surplus,” he wrote. “It dawns on some as quickly as a bursting tropical daybreak, and on others more like a boreal twilight, that a surplus may be taxed, and that the property tax on land garners that social surplus for the public treasury without impairing any functional private economic incentive. It may, indeed, often sharpen incentives.”

Perhaps the 'Flirtatious Anal Dildo For Cock Hungry Blonde Slut' Is Just Passionate About Transit

“Any idea what’s going on here? LOL,” a man <span>tweeted</span> Sunday evening. Attached was a video of himself Googling the Waterbury Metro-North station in Connecticut. After the ordinary transit info came the second search result: “Waterbury - Flirtatious Anal Dildo For Cock Hungry Blonde Slut - MTA.”

I'm giggling so hard: Sex With Ducks: the Music Video by Garfunkel and Oates

ProPublica: We Are Tracking What Happens to Police After They Use Force on Protestors

These 68 videos show clear apparent instances of police officers escalating violence during protests. Most departments refused to share details about investigations and discipline or even officers’ names. Here’s what we learned about each case.

Supreme Court of Virginia: Crawford v UNITED STEELWORKERS, AFL-CIO 335 S.E.2d 828 (1985)

To call a person a "cocksucker" does not, under the circumstances of this labor dispute, convey the false representation that the individual engaged in sodomy. Nor does calling a person a "motherfucker," under the circumstances of this case, convey the false representation that the person engaged in incest.

Couple flaunt swastika face masks at southwestern Minnesota Walmart

“If you vote for Biden, you’re going to be living in Nazi Germany,” the woman with the swastika mask told Mueller, as her companion bagged up toilet paper and an enormous canister of cheeseballs. The two were apparently using the masks to protest Minnesota’s mask mandate, which took effect Saturday.

California Governor To Sign Bill Giving Sex Workers Safety In Reporting Crimes

The California State Legislature has passed a new bill which will help sex workers feel safer reporting crimes and carrying condoms, which Gov. Gavin Newsom intends to sign. SB 233, sponsored by State Sen. Scott Wiener, offers immunity to sex workers who report certain crimes and will also prevent the carrying of condoms being used as evidence of sex work.

“No one is safer when sex workers are afraid to report crimes and acts of violence. Silence only helps the perpetrators of those crimes. This legislation will help ensure serious and violent crimes are reported to law enforcement, and I thank the legislature for sending it to my desk,” said Newsom in an official press release.

RT Spider (they/he) 🔯♿🏳️‍🌈 @vaspider

Me: *just knitting*
My brain: the easiest way to tell that Star Trek was written by white people is they say 'where no one has gone before' but like 90% of the planets they go to are inhabited

One of the reasons I'm uncomfortable with my Ring camera devices. I don't know what other purposes the video streams end up used for: San Francisco Police Accessed Business District Camera Network to Spy on Protestors

Minneapolis Police: 'Umbrella Man' was a white supremacist trying to incite George Floyd rioting

Police have also connected the 32-year-old man to a widely-publicized incident in Stillwater late last month, in which a Muslim woman was confronted by a group of men wearing white supremacist garb.

“Your Butt Is Perfect”: Those Austin Police Department Thank-You Cards Are Even Stranger Than You Thought

An APD tweet went viral after internet sleuths theorized that the cards were a police stunt. We got ahold of documents to find the truth.

Twitter thread looking at the believability of a Portland Police Department picture/tweet about alleged Molotov cocktai;s and magazines.

Trump wants tax breaks to lure baseball fans back, but incentive could misfire with attendance still barred

“We’re looking at deductions for business expenses, restaurants, baseball games, if hopefully they’re going to open,” Kudlow added last week. “Sightseeing, tourism — we’re looking at tax deductions there, too, to help the economy get going.”

Yeah, let's throw money at baseball, something that's already a net drain on local economies, and travel, when we should be paying people to stay the fuck at home.

Holy shit. Can we get some adults back in the government, please?

Anti-fascists linked to zero murders in the US in 25 years

As Trump rails against ‘far-left’ fascism, new database shows leftwing attacks have left far fewer people dead than violence by rightwing extremists

The one death related to an Antifa attack was the attacker himself, shot while engaging in property destruction, mentioned yesterday.

Listened to the first part of this interview, ordered the book. A lot of good giving language to some of the dog-whistles and not-calls-to-action that ended up being calls to violent action in the political cycle lately.

Author Helio Fred Garcia Takes on Danger of Incendiary Language in Divided Times

Author Helio Fred Garcia speaks with KSFR's MK Mendoza about how incendiary language can condition an audience to accept, condone, and commit violence against a targeted group, rival, or critics. His latest book, Words on Fire is about the power of communication to do great harm, and how civic leaders and engaged citizens can hold leaders accountable to prevent such harm.

I'm finding this article fascinating. I grew up in a community that was far removed from the mainstream, and have my own processing and perception issues that impact how I understand and react to other people's emotions. I was long confused that acting didn't seem to be about portraying an emotion, but about performing some cues that we have learned a language to interpret as emotion, but that is really nothing like how people actually experiencing that emotion express it.

This article goes into how that shows up in voice acting. How even in a field where the casting directors deliberately try to not see the people they're casting for a specific role, just to experience how the performer manages to use voice to portray something that they experience as that feeling, end up with an awful lot of white actors pretending to be the other.

The cues and stereotypes that they're looking for are imitations of the thing, rather than the thing, and that gets carried deeper into the culture and builds on itself.

The Atlantic: BoJack Horseman’s Diane Problem Is Now an Industry Problem — High-profile white voice actors are relinquishing their roles as characters of color. But the departures have caused divisions among their peers.

‘White, white, white. Then there’s me.' A Black lawyer shares her experiences

I grew up in Prince George’s County in Maryland, which is one of the richest African American communities in the US. So it was definitely a culture shock when I first moved to Boston for law school, at Suffolk University. I remember I took the T for the first time, I think I took it at Park Street, and I could almost see the segregation. The Asians go on the Orange Line, the Black people go on the Red Line, the white people go on the Green Line.