Thursday, March 5, 2015
Some Thoughts on Netanyahu's Speech to Congress
- Liberal pundits in America have gone on at great length about how Netanyahu disrespected Obama. From what I've heard so far, he's expressed nothing but praise, admiration, and deep gratitude towards President Obama.
- Netanyahu seems not to be aware that, unlike him, we are not at war against Islam.
- He lists Iran's support of terror while remaining silent on the issue of Israel's daily terror against the Palestinians.
- He says that the greatest threat to the world is "the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons." Could it possibly be that he's never heard of Pakistan? Pakistan, which has had nukes for ages, was hiding Osama bin Laden in his last days, and they've never nuked anyone.
- He goes on about how Iran is not to be trusted because it's not forthright about it's military nuclear ambitions. What, Mr. Netanyahu, is Israel's nuclear capability? Mind if we send some inspectors to verify?
- "Why should Iran's radical regime change for the better when it can enjoy the best of both worlds--aggression abroad, prosperity at home?" Like us!
- Speaking of which, where does the US, which has more nukes than anyone, get off telling other countries they shouldn't have them?
- "...my country, Israel, the one and only Jewish state!" How many Jewish states does he think there should be? Why should there be even one? Our nation was founded on a separation of church and state. To us, theocracy is tyranny. Why should we stick our necks out defending the very sort of tyranny we established this country to be free from? I'd be a lot more supportive of Israel's right to exist if they'd abolish state religion, end religious apartheid, and weed out all traces of their ideology of Jewish supremacy.
- "For the first time in a hundred generations, we, the Jewish people, can defend ourselves!" With billions of dollars of American military aid, so long as we don't form any treaties with Iran.
- Wait a minute...is he saying that the Jews twenty years ago couldn't defend themselves? Forty years ago? Sixty years ago?
- Could you imagine Christian fundamentalists in the GOP making this big a deal over the Pope? Would we support the Vatican having nukes and taking billions of dollars of our tax money, especially if it was oppressing the Italians, waging war on Tunisia, and rattling sabers at Libya and Algeria while talking about the Christian struggle to resist extermination?
Obama's response:
tldr, re:Obama's response: Yeah, we like Israel, but Netanyahu has no ideas on how to keep Iran from getting the bomb.
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Relevant Skills
I think it's tragic that, in a culture as centered as ours is around video entertainment, when kids put on plays in school and study Shakespeare and Miller and so on, all they study is theater and not cinema. And a good many teachers, even when I was a kid, *play movies in class* for the kids to watch. Even when they're studying a play, the teacher will play a film adaptation of the play. But when they walk the kids through the motions, it's always for a live performance, not a film. Any actor will tell you that stage acting and acting for a camera are totally different beasts, yet most film actors get their start on stage, because that's the only acting experience schools generally offer.
I say it's tragic because it walls off a huge, lucrative industry into the realm of the unknown and untouchable. I think when most people think about "working in movies" or TV, they're only thinking about the talent. But where does a kid go to learn how to mix sound? How many high school art classes teach kids to build movie props? How many vo-tech kids studying electricity even know what a gaffer is?
When I was a kid, I wasn't interested in acting, but I liked to pull the ropes to open and close the curtains (and in doing so, I ended up learning everybody's lines). Broadway is maybe the one place in the whole world that has any use for that, and I'm sure they have motorized curtains now.
But how many places worldwide do they record commercials? Nightly news programs? I've seen and heard of kids acting out reporting the news, but that's all they do--write a script and read it in front of an audience. They don't build a set, work the lights and sound, record it, and broadcast it. They don't promote it. They don't have to hire and manage the crew and the talent. They don't find the stories and cull them and decide what to lead with and make it all fit in the allotted time between commercial breaks.
When I worked at Columbus State, one of the jobs I volunteered for was asset inventory. Every piece of equipment the college owned that was worth more than some certain amount of money has to be tracked and has a bar code physically attached to it. So I'd go around putting on stickers or checking serial numbers on everything from pianos and digital projectors to gas chromatographs and airplanes. This led me to discover that the college has its own television studio tucked away in the back of the library. It was almost never used. I was told that they used to have a class that used it back in the sixties or seventies, and that they'd use it to televise a meeting or something now and again, but that the students no longer used it regularly, even though the equipment all seemed pretty modern. It's like they continued to funnel resources into this, as though they needed to think up something to spend money on, but they didn't bother to use it to train people to go into broadcasting.
When a kid expresses an interest in making movies or TV shows, if we assume she means acting, we dismiss it as a silly ambition, because actually becoming rich and famous as an actor is a long shot. But you know who pretty reliably gets rich in that industry? The people who PAY the actors. And even if you're not looking to get famous or rich, doing the tech work behind the scenes must be steady work in a culture where people spend a good chunk of their waking lives living vicariously through screens.
Maybe it's more transparent in Los Angeles or New York. But given that a studio is the modern equivalent of a printing press, wide participation in this form of media seems pretty basic to our democracy. I think this is why Youtube has become such a sensation. It does for video broadcasting what the Internet did for publishing. But if you look at the quality of most of the stuff on Youtube, it's clear that most of the people generating content are completely ignorant of how to do it well. And let's face it--a video that's well produced is going to be more enjoyable to watch than one that isn't. People will feel more comfortable sharing it, and it'll get more views. Simply having the presence of mind to use a tripod makes a video more watchable. And, like a person who dresses well being taken more seriously than someone who doesn't, the more professional the quality of a video is, the more seriously the viewers will take the content.
I say it's tragic because it walls off a huge, lucrative industry into the realm of the unknown and untouchable. I think when most people think about "working in movies" or TV, they're only thinking about the talent. But where does a kid go to learn how to mix sound? How many high school art classes teach kids to build movie props? How many vo-tech kids studying electricity even know what a gaffer is?
When I was a kid, I wasn't interested in acting, but I liked to pull the ropes to open and close the curtains (and in doing so, I ended up learning everybody's lines). Broadway is maybe the one place in the whole world that has any use for that, and I'm sure they have motorized curtains now.
But how many places worldwide do they record commercials? Nightly news programs? I've seen and heard of kids acting out reporting the news, but that's all they do--write a script and read it in front of an audience. They don't build a set, work the lights and sound, record it, and broadcast it. They don't promote it. They don't have to hire and manage the crew and the talent. They don't find the stories and cull them and decide what to lead with and make it all fit in the allotted time between commercial breaks.
When I worked at Columbus State, one of the jobs I volunteered for was asset inventory. Every piece of equipment the college owned that was worth more than some certain amount of money has to be tracked and has a bar code physically attached to it. So I'd go around putting on stickers or checking serial numbers on everything from pianos and digital projectors to gas chromatographs and airplanes. This led me to discover that the college has its own television studio tucked away in the back of the library. It was almost never used. I was told that they used to have a class that used it back in the sixties or seventies, and that they'd use it to televise a meeting or something now and again, but that the students no longer used it regularly, even though the equipment all seemed pretty modern. It's like they continued to funnel resources into this, as though they needed to think up something to spend money on, but they didn't bother to use it to train people to go into broadcasting.
When a kid expresses an interest in making movies or TV shows, if we assume she means acting, we dismiss it as a silly ambition, because actually becoming rich and famous as an actor is a long shot. But you know who pretty reliably gets rich in that industry? The people who PAY the actors. And even if you're not looking to get famous or rich, doing the tech work behind the scenes must be steady work in a culture where people spend a good chunk of their waking lives living vicariously through screens.
Maybe it's more transparent in Los Angeles or New York. But given that a studio is the modern equivalent of a printing press, wide participation in this form of media seems pretty basic to our democracy. I think this is why Youtube has become such a sensation. It does for video broadcasting what the Internet did for publishing. But if you look at the quality of most of the stuff on Youtube, it's clear that most of the people generating content are completely ignorant of how to do it well. And let's face it--a video that's well produced is going to be more enjoyable to watch than one that isn't. People will feel more comfortable sharing it, and it'll get more views. Simply having the presence of mind to use a tripod makes a video more watchable. And, like a person who dresses well being taken more seriously than someone who doesn't, the more professional the quality of a video is, the more seriously the viewers will take the content.
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Explaining Natural Selection to Believers in Intelligent Design
Believers in intelligent design often argue with great passion and conviction that when an organism perfectly fits its environment or its ecological niche, that's proof that it "couldn't have been an accident." Just as it couldn't be an accident that a particular key fits a particular lock, they believe that random chance can't account for any two things in nature fitting together so perfectly.
It's rubbish, of course, but their argument makes intuitive sense if you don't understand natural selection. They think, apparently, that random genetic mutation is the only factor in evolution, and don't fully appreciate how environmental forces can carve a species into shape. I've thought of a few ways to illustrate it.
Cookies. Gingerbread men aren't the result of balls of dough dropping and some of them randomly flattening out into the shape of gingerbread men. Genetic variability would be like dropping a big wad of dough on the table and rolling it out. The shape after the initial plop is random. As you push the rolling pin this way and that, you're not trying to precisely roll out the shape of a gingerbread man. It's just a wider, thinner blob. But then comes the cookie cutter. The cookie cutter could represent any selective force--a storm, a plague, climate change, whatever. The dough inside the cookie cutter perfectly fits the shape of the cookie cutter, and the dough outside it is discarded.
But I decided I didn't like that example, because someone made the cookie cutter. Someone deliberately used it to make a cookie that shape, so that example probably wouldn't really succeed in stretching the awareness of someone who already believes in the existence of a designer.
So then I got to thinking about unintentional impressions, like a footprint in the dirt. When you walk, your shoes (or feet) perfectly match the footprints you leave on the ground. You don't intentionally indent the dirt to match your shoes, it just happens. But even there, we have a sapient agent and a man-made shoe, and we really need to remove people from the illustration for it to work right.
A branch! A branch ripped off a tree by the wind during a rainstorm crashes to the ground and falls in the mud. The impression in the mud perfectly matches the shape of the branch. Nobody had to do anything to make the mud that shape, and yet the shape in the mud is so perfectly suited to the shape of the branch that, according to the reasoning of those who believe in intelligent design, it couldn't possibly have happened by accident. Except that it did. Is it an accident that they match? The match happened because of the accident. If we can document that the branch was weak and the wind was strong and the mud was soft, then the preponderence of the evidence suggests that the stick fell and made an impression in the mud by accident rather than that an invisible, supernatural being broke the stick off and placed it in the mud in a precise position for reasons we can never understand. We have an abundance of evidence suggesting an accident, and absolutely none to support wild speculation about divine intervention.
It's rubbish, of course, but their argument makes intuitive sense if you don't understand natural selection. They think, apparently, that random genetic mutation is the only factor in evolution, and don't fully appreciate how environmental forces can carve a species into shape. I've thought of a few ways to illustrate it.
Cookies. Gingerbread men aren't the result of balls of dough dropping and some of them randomly flattening out into the shape of gingerbread men. Genetic variability would be like dropping a big wad of dough on the table and rolling it out. The shape after the initial plop is random. As you push the rolling pin this way and that, you're not trying to precisely roll out the shape of a gingerbread man. It's just a wider, thinner blob. But then comes the cookie cutter. The cookie cutter could represent any selective force--a storm, a plague, climate change, whatever. The dough inside the cookie cutter perfectly fits the shape of the cookie cutter, and the dough outside it is discarded.
But I decided I didn't like that example, because someone made the cookie cutter. Someone deliberately used it to make a cookie that shape, so that example probably wouldn't really succeed in stretching the awareness of someone who already believes in the existence of a designer.
So then I got to thinking about unintentional impressions, like a footprint in the dirt. When you walk, your shoes (or feet) perfectly match the footprints you leave on the ground. You don't intentionally indent the dirt to match your shoes, it just happens. But even there, we have a sapient agent and a man-made shoe, and we really need to remove people from the illustration for it to work right.
A branch! A branch ripped off a tree by the wind during a rainstorm crashes to the ground and falls in the mud. The impression in the mud perfectly matches the shape of the branch. Nobody had to do anything to make the mud that shape, and yet the shape in the mud is so perfectly suited to the shape of the branch that, according to the reasoning of those who believe in intelligent design, it couldn't possibly have happened by accident. Except that it did. Is it an accident that they match? The match happened because of the accident. If we can document that the branch was weak and the wind was strong and the mud was soft, then the preponderence of the evidence suggests that the stick fell and made an impression in the mud by accident rather than that an invisible, supernatural being broke the stick off and placed it in the mud in a precise position for reasons we can never understand. We have an abundance of evidence suggesting an accident, and absolutely none to support wild speculation about divine intervention.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Media Illusions
The media that says the police are out of control and that you should rightly fear for your life any time you see a cop is the same media that gave pit bulls their bad reputation. Some pit bulls really have chewed people's faces off over nothing, same as some cops have committed criminal acts of assault and murder. No denying either one, but all you "pibble" lovers out there have a pretty good idea how representative that picture is of the whole truth.
It's the same media that told us in the 1980s that Satanists were behind every tree, waiting to abduct your children and pets and murder them in ritual sacrifices. It's the same media that told us that these devil worshipers could be positively identified by their interest in heavy metal music and Dungeons & Dragons--if they weren't already sacrificing the neighborhood pets, continued exposure to this devilish game and music would soon warp their minds and open a gateway to demonic possession. Every D&D player and headbanger who lived through that era without so much as entertaining the thought of offering a youngster's blood to Beelzebub, but lived in fear of people's insane reactions to the media hype that said it was all but inevitable, has a pretty clear picture of what cops are being put through right now.
That same media was at work before my time, giving people the impression that every American serviceman to have ever set foot in Vietnam enjoyed shiskebabing babies on bayonets in between burning villages and raping the inhabitants. Before that, the witch hunt of the day was against "commies," which had less to do with targeting those seeking collectivist economic policies and more to do with persecuting gays, artists, liberal Democrats, and anyone who challenged authority and tradition. The so-called "fourth branch of government" has long made its living by using scapegoats to create sensations that captivate their audience and keeping them watching for the latest news. Wake up, people. You're being played. Clip the marionette's strings. Don't get fooled again.
It's the same media that told us in the 1980s that Satanists were behind every tree, waiting to abduct your children and pets and murder them in ritual sacrifices. It's the same media that told us that these devil worshipers could be positively identified by their interest in heavy metal music and Dungeons & Dragons--if they weren't already sacrificing the neighborhood pets, continued exposure to this devilish game and music would soon warp their minds and open a gateway to demonic possession. Every D&D player and headbanger who lived through that era without so much as entertaining the thought of offering a youngster's blood to Beelzebub, but lived in fear of people's insane reactions to the media hype that said it was all but inevitable, has a pretty clear picture of what cops are being put through right now.
That same media was at work before my time, giving people the impression that every American serviceman to have ever set foot in Vietnam enjoyed shiskebabing babies on bayonets in between burning villages and raping the inhabitants. Before that, the witch hunt of the day was against "commies," which had less to do with targeting those seeking collectivist economic policies and more to do with persecuting gays, artists, liberal Democrats, and anyone who challenged authority and tradition. The so-called "fourth branch of government" has long made its living by using scapegoats to create sensations that captivate their audience and keeping them watching for the latest news. Wake up, people. You're being played. Clip the marionette's strings. Don't get fooled again.
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
In a sustainable agriculture forum I follow on Linkedin, a farmer questioned whether food deserts actually exist and suggested that the problem may be exaggerated. The statistics he cited suggested, for example, that it takes poor people in low-access areas only 4.5 minutes longer to get to the grocery store than it takes wealthy people in well-served neighborhoods.
The problem with this is that, as is typical in these kinds of studies, it's using averages. In most higher-income, higher access areas, almost all individuals will be traveling by the same means: privately-owned automobiles. This means respondents from such areas will all fall within a very narrow statistical band; whether they make $30K a year or $300K a year, their car still gets them to the grocery store in the same amount of time.
In poor, low-access areas, though, transportation methods used will be more diverse. Some will have automobiles. Some with a little money might take the bus. Those with slightly less money might ride a bicycle. Many will walk. Of the walkers, some will have backpacks, carts, or wagons; others will be able to carry only the grocery bags they can hold in their hands. Elderly and disabled people might pay for taxis or use publicly funded or non-profit taxi services, or they may rely on friends or relatives with cars to give them a ride. The statistical result is that you're going to have a really wide spectrum, with people on one end starving unless they walk several miles every day, and people on the other end whose numbers match those in the high-income neighborhoods. Neither the mean nor the median in that set will give us a clue of what the people at the bottom are going through unless we also know the percentage of households in the poor neighborhoods that have on-demand access to a functioning automobile.
"Using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), researchers found individuals in low-income low access areas spend an additional 4.5 minutes traveling to the grocers over the national average and average a trip every 8 days over the national average of 7 days."
The problem with this is that, as is typical in these kinds of studies, it's using averages. In most higher-income, higher access areas, almost all individuals will be traveling by the same means: privately-owned automobiles. This means respondents from such areas will all fall within a very narrow statistical band; whether they make $30K a year or $300K a year, their car still gets them to the grocery store in the same amount of time.
In poor, low-access areas, though, transportation methods used will be more diverse. Some will have automobiles. Some with a little money might take the bus. Those with slightly less money might ride a bicycle. Many will walk. Of the walkers, some will have backpacks, carts, or wagons; others will be able to carry only the grocery bags they can hold in their hands. Elderly and disabled people might pay for taxis or use publicly funded or non-profit taxi services, or they may rely on friends or relatives with cars to give them a ride. The statistical result is that you're going to have a really wide spectrum, with people on one end starving unless they walk several miles every day, and people on the other end whose numbers match those in the high-income neighborhoods. Neither the mean nor the median in that set will give us a clue of what the people at the bottom are going through unless we also know the percentage of households in the poor neighborhoods that have on-demand access to a functioning automobile.
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Remembering the Louisiana Ambush
A Facebook friend recently posed the following challenge:
My first thought was to say, "George Zimmerman," but he's not really all that young, and since nobody but him will ever really know who initiated the violence, and since many are of the opinion that, even if Martin did throw the first punch, Zimerman's following him was sufficient provocation to justify it, I'll leave that one alone.
I don't think Officer Darren Wilson really counts as all that young, either. Also, as with Zimmerman, a lot people may not consider him a victim since he managed to defeat the person trying to victimize him.
But there is one who comes to mind who fits that description. Justin Barker was a white teenager in Louisiana who got jumped by six black schoolmates. They knocked him out and then continued kicking his unconscious body, including kicks to the head--blows which obviously had the potential to be fatal.
Name 1 white victim of violence who's been publicly degraded by 1000's of black folk online or by black journalists or newscasters.
My first thought was to say, "George Zimmerman," but he's not really all that young, and since nobody but him will ever really know who initiated the violence, and since many are of the opinion that, even if Martin did throw the first punch, Zimerman's following him was sufficient provocation to justify it, I'll leave that one alone.
I don't think Officer Darren Wilson really counts as all that young, either. Also, as with Zimmerman, a lot people may not consider him a victim since he managed to defeat the person trying to victimize him.
But there is one who comes to mind who fits that description. Justin Barker was a white teenager in Louisiana who got jumped by six black schoolmates. They knocked him out and then continued kicking his unconscious body, including kicks to the head--blows which obviously had the potential to be fatal.
Barker
survived. He was treated at a local hospital and released after a few hours of observation...because
that's what they usually do for concussions. Later that night, Barker
went to a school dance, but left early due to pain. His face was swollen
so badly that for three weeks, he couldn't see out of one eye, and he
continued to have headaches and lapses in memory after the attack.
The young men who tried to kill Barker were charged with attempted murder.
People nationwide expressed outrage at this. They said that the charges
were excessive. Many, including a group called Color of Change, called
not just for charges to be reduced, but for them to be dropped
altogether...because...apparently it's okay to stomp and kick an
unconscious boy if you're black, he's white, and other white people in
the town are racists.
15,000-20,000
protesters, led by Al Shaprton, et al, converged on the town of 2,000
to oppose the "injustice" of charging the assailants with attempted murder
when their attempt at murder failed to kill or permanently cripple the
victim. (No wheelchair, no foul?)
Not
only did these protesters show no concern for the victim, they blamed
HIM for the attack. Reports were widely circulated in the media that
Barker had made a racist comment to the other boys, provoking them to
attack. The commonly held opinion was that 'the racist punk had it
coming'--that he had a severe beat down by six people coming because he said
words that hurt their feelings. The media and protesters further
denounced Barker's credibility by saying that he had exaggerated the
severity of his injuries They claimed that the fact that he had gone to the
school dance later the same day was proof that he wasn't seriously hurt and had never been in any real
danger...while lying unconscious getting stomped by six people.
But
the alleged racist comment never happened. Witnesses who had initially
reported that Barker made a racist remark later recanted. After the
trial, the defendants' legal team--funded by generous donations from all
these thousands of people who wanted to make the beating of Justin
Barker legally permissible--read the following statement:
"To be clear, not one of us heard Justin use any slur or say anything that justified Mychal Bell attacking Justin nor did any of us see Justin do anything that would cause Mychal to react."
But
to this day, if you read reports online about the "Jena Six" incident, the
stories typically contain a litany of accounts of unrelated, racist
actions by other white residents of Jena, the point being to cause the
reader to sympathize with the attackers (at least four of whom have
since been arrested for other violent offenses), and to suggest that the
unprovoked ambush of a white boy was just a case of "turnabout is fair
play."
Ultimately, the charges were reduced. They ranged from aggravated second-degree battery down to simple battery, and carried penalties ranging from 18 months in a juvenile facility (for Mychal Bell, a repeat violent offender who the media claimed had no criminal record) to $1,000 in fines and court costs and just seven days of unsupervised probation for each of the rest of the defendants.
In light of all this, I'd flip the question around:
Ultimately, the charges were reduced. They ranged from aggravated second-degree battery down to simple battery, and carried penalties ranging from 18 months in a juvenile facility (for Mychal Bell, a repeat violent offender who the media claimed had no criminal record) to $1,000 in fines and court costs and just seven days of unsupervised probation for each of the rest of the defendants.
In light of all this, I'd flip the question around:
When was the last time 20,000 people gathered in one place to justify the attempted murder of a black kid?
When was the last time that an unconscious black boy being beaten by several white people resulted in members of Congress calling for a governor to pardon the attackers?
Thursday, December 11, 2014
For, Because, and Over: the misattribution of motive
Tim walked into a grocery store and picked up a loaf of bread. When he paid for it, the cashier forgot to say, "You saved 24 cents today by using your loyalty card, and you earned 23 fuel points." She was supposed to say that. It's company policy. She could be disciplined for not saying that. It's in the employee handbook. There was a note posted right by the time clock and they mentioned it at the last managers meeting, but she still neglected to do it.
After that, Tim stepped out of the store, bread in hand, and got run over by a car in the parking lot.
If some of the people who have been covering the Eric Garner story were reporting on this event, the headline would read:
GROCERY STORE KILLS MAN FOR BUYING BREAD
Cashier admits wrongdoing but avoids criminal charges
Good gods, y'all. I was really staying away from this one. I think I wanted this movement to have half a leg to stand on, so when I heard that the cops used a choke hold and that the suspect hadn't done anything (or had just broken up a fight between two other people, depending on which version you listen to), that was good enough for me. Choke holds were banned back in the 80s, and NYPD is widely known to be corrupt as hell. So that's all the more I really wanted to get into it.
But today, for some reason, I looked up the video. The link I clicked had it embedded in an article in a UK publication, so I read that, too. Regardless of what you think of New York's law against selling loose cigarettes, Garner did it repeatedly. He got busted for it over and over and over, yet every time, he'd go right back to doing it. Everybody knew where to find him selling these cigs for 50-cents apiece.
Like so many criminals, Eric Garner felt entitled to break the law, and saw the police as being the ones in the wrong for "harassing" him about selling the illegal cigarettes. He finally got fed up with it, and as he told the plainclothes police in the video, "This ends today." He was giving them an order--he was going to keep doing what he wanted, and they were to look the other way.
Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock could predict that this sort of thing was going to lead to an arrest. But he didn't submit and put his hands behind his back. He kept pulling away. Contrary to what appears to be popular belief about what's supposed to happen in such cases, that doesn't mean he doesn't have to go to jail. The cops don't just shrug and walk away because he doesn't feel like getting arrested.
They didn't shoot him. They didn't taze him--though they could have at that point, had they had Tasers. They didn't pepper spray him, and wisely so, as that wouldn't really have made him any easier to control. They put their hands on him...but they messed up in how they were supposed to do it.
The little guy who jumped up and wrapped an arm around Eric Garner's neck shouldn't have done that. It's not what killed Garner and probably wasn't even a contributing factor, but he still shouldn't have done it. He should have known better. He should be taken off the streets, disciplined, and retrained in open-hand compliance techniques before they let him back on patrol.
He could have jumped up and locked onto the pressure point under Garner's nose and dragged him down...but that doesn't always work. He could have jumped up and, instead of wrapping his arm around Garner's neck, he could have dug his elbow down into Garner's collarbone, or even wrapped his arm around Garner's forehead or eyes to drag him down just as effectively. He shouldn't have done what he did. Regardless, this improper and banned technique isn't what killed the man.
If the medical examiner said anything beyond "homicide" (meaning simply that it was a death caused by the actions of another person, as opposed to natural cause, suicide, or an accident not caused by another person), I haven't heard about it yet. But looking at the video, and reading what I have about Garner's physical condition (he was morbidly obese, had severe asthma, and was said to not be able to walk even a block without having to stop and rest), I'd guess that what we saw was an asthma attack, some other problem caused by the sudden exertion of fighting the police, or positional asphyxia.
Positional asphyxia is a real problem for the police. Basically, it's what happens when you lay down a person who's so freakin' fat that they can't breathe if they lie down because they suffocate under their own weight. Any pressure on the chest cavity (from the front or back--like a cop's knee between someone's shoulder blades) can also cause it. The reason it's a problem is that laying a person on the ground is the most effective way of controlling them so they can't fight while being handcuffed. So how do you handcuff a very large person who doesn't want to be handcuffed, without endangering that person or yourself, when that person might die if you just put them horizontal? I got out of law enforcement in 2007, and they still hadn't solved the problem by then. If there's been a recent development, I haven't heard it. The last time it was mentioned in my training, the advice at the time was just to not leave people on the ground longer than you had to. Once Garner was cuffed, they could have gotten him back up into a sitting or kneeling position. There's no telling, though, whether that would have saved him, or if it was simply the exertion of fighting that killed him.
But let's return to the video. We see an officer put Garner in a choke hold to pull him down...and then he lets go! After that, we see other officers grabbing other parts of Garner's body, notably one pushing down on his head. The whole time, Garner's yelling, "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" There are two important things to note here: 1) nobody's choking him anymore by the time he's saying this, and 2) breathing is a prerequisite to being able to say anything, even, "I can't breathe!"
So, once again, just like most of these cases, a criminal with questionable judgment fought the police and died losing. Like so many of the other cases we've been hearing so much about, a witness--in this case the guy recording the video--lied through his teeth about the suspect's innocence to make the officers' actions seem even more egregious and unjustified. (You can hear him saying they're arresting Garner for breaking up a fight, when it's clear from the conversation between the officer and Garner that they're talking about him selling a cigarette to a man in a red shirt.)
While we're on the subject, let's get back to the issue of cause-and-effect that I alluded to in the example of the headline about Tim and the grocery store. When you see these headlines like "Police Shoot Couple for Speeding" or "Police Kill Man for Jaywalking" or "Officer Beats Man to Death for Refusing to Show Driver's License," you're being intentionally misled. There's a cause-and-effect relationship being suggested that simply doesn't exist. It's not like the police stop a person for speeding, the speeder pulls over and cooperates, and instead of handing the speeder a ticket, the cop says, "I find you guilty of speeding, and in this city, the penalty for that is death," and then shoots them. In every single case, from serious stuff like bank robbery on down to the pettiest of crimes, the police simply stop people to effect an arrest or to issue a summons or a warning. Then the suspect takes it upon himself or herself to resist. They try to tell the cop that the cop can't arrest them, or they try to run away, or worst of all, they actually attack the cop--as we saw in the Ferguson case.
If you start a fight with the police, the police are going to finish it. You aren't going to win. The two choices are to quit fighting while you're still alive (and hope it's not too late to stay that way), or to keep fighting until you're not. Very simply put, when the police justifiably kill someone (as opposed to the unjustified cases--and they do exist), it's either because they were defending themselves or others, or because the suspect fought back to the point that lethal force was needed to capture and subdue the suspect.
In the Garner case, though, the police didn't use lethal force. Except for the wrong-but-irrelevant choke hold, they used exactly the force that would typically be used to subdue a resisting man of Garner's size. They didn't do it wrong. He died because he was in no shape to be wrestling several police officers. At most, the police were reckless or negligent in Garner's death. I could have possibly seen an indictment for manslaughter, but not murder. The fact that nobody was indicted doesn't tell me that there was a gross miscarriage of justice so much as that the grand jury likely didn't blame the officers for Mr. Garner's poor health.
Nonetheless, we'll continue to hear both professional and amateur reporters and pundits saying that the police killed or harmed a person because of some minor infraction. At the same time, they'll completely omit the suspect's own role in the event. And that's because they're pushing a version of reality not supported by the facts. They want you to believe that the police routinely approach innocent people who are minding their own business, and mercilessly attack and murder them at the slightest provocation or no provocation at all, at least if the victims are black.
Why?
This narrative gets repeated again and again despite it bearing so little resemblance to reality. Why? Who stands to gain by having you believe that that's how the world works? In what way will things change for the better if we all believe that?
Understand that I'm not saying that police corruption, abuse, and brutality don't exist. They do, they're widespread, and they frequently go unpunished. But if an activist movement wants to protest police wrongdoing, they could pick better poster children. Instead of looking at cases where homeless people and the harmless mentally ill who weren't resisting have been killed by police, they've chosen to make martyrs of criminals who fight the police. Why? Well, one common theme I see is that the ones who get mentioned on protest signs are all black, while a lot of the victims of clear cases of unjustified brutality are not. There's been a conscious effort on the part of the people shaping and guiding this movement to keep the focus not so much on police error or misconduct, but to keep it on race and the idea that the cops have it out for black people. They want to present this as a sort of informal but systematic genocide, even though the totality of the facts really doesn't support that view.
I'll leave speculation on the motivations behind this bit of public opinion shaping to people better qualified to comment on it, but I will be addressing other aspects of the clash between police actions and public opinion in a series of future posts.
After that, Tim stepped out of the store, bread in hand, and got run over by a car in the parking lot.
If some of the people who have been covering the Eric Garner story were reporting on this event, the headline would read:
GROCERY STORE KILLS MAN FOR BUYING BREAD
Cashier admits wrongdoing but avoids criminal charges
Good gods, y'all. I was really staying away from this one. I think I wanted this movement to have half a leg to stand on, so when I heard that the cops used a choke hold and that the suspect hadn't done anything (or had just broken up a fight between two other people, depending on which version you listen to), that was good enough for me. Choke holds were banned back in the 80s, and NYPD is widely known to be corrupt as hell. So that's all the more I really wanted to get into it.
But today, for some reason, I looked up the video. The link I clicked had it embedded in an article in a UK publication, so I read that, too. Regardless of what you think of New York's law against selling loose cigarettes, Garner did it repeatedly. He got busted for it over and over and over, yet every time, he'd go right back to doing it. Everybody knew where to find him selling these cigs for 50-cents apiece.
Like so many criminals, Eric Garner felt entitled to break the law, and saw the police as being the ones in the wrong for "harassing" him about selling the illegal cigarettes. He finally got fed up with it, and as he told the plainclothes police in the video, "This ends today." He was giving them an order--he was going to keep doing what he wanted, and they were to look the other way.
Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock could predict that this sort of thing was going to lead to an arrest. But he didn't submit and put his hands behind his back. He kept pulling away. Contrary to what appears to be popular belief about what's supposed to happen in such cases, that doesn't mean he doesn't have to go to jail. The cops don't just shrug and walk away because he doesn't feel like getting arrested.
They didn't shoot him. They didn't taze him--though they could have at that point, had they had Tasers. They didn't pepper spray him, and wisely so, as that wouldn't really have made him any easier to control. They put their hands on him...but they messed up in how they were supposed to do it.
The little guy who jumped up and wrapped an arm around Eric Garner's neck shouldn't have done that. It's not what killed Garner and probably wasn't even a contributing factor, but he still shouldn't have done it. He should have known better. He should be taken off the streets, disciplined, and retrained in open-hand compliance techniques before they let him back on patrol.
He could have jumped up and locked onto the pressure point under Garner's nose and dragged him down...but that doesn't always work. He could have jumped up and, instead of wrapping his arm around Garner's neck, he could have dug his elbow down into Garner's collarbone, or even wrapped his arm around Garner's forehead or eyes to drag him down just as effectively. He shouldn't have done what he did. Regardless, this improper and banned technique isn't what killed the man.
If the medical examiner said anything beyond "homicide" (meaning simply that it was a death caused by the actions of another person, as opposed to natural cause, suicide, or an accident not caused by another person), I haven't heard about it yet. But looking at the video, and reading what I have about Garner's physical condition (he was morbidly obese, had severe asthma, and was said to not be able to walk even a block without having to stop and rest), I'd guess that what we saw was an asthma attack, some other problem caused by the sudden exertion of fighting the police, or positional asphyxia.
Positional asphyxia is a real problem for the police. Basically, it's what happens when you lay down a person who's so freakin' fat that they can't breathe if they lie down because they suffocate under their own weight. Any pressure on the chest cavity (from the front or back--like a cop's knee between someone's shoulder blades) can also cause it. The reason it's a problem is that laying a person on the ground is the most effective way of controlling them so they can't fight while being handcuffed. So how do you handcuff a very large person who doesn't want to be handcuffed, without endangering that person or yourself, when that person might die if you just put them horizontal? I got out of law enforcement in 2007, and they still hadn't solved the problem by then. If there's been a recent development, I haven't heard it. The last time it was mentioned in my training, the advice at the time was just to not leave people on the ground longer than you had to. Once Garner was cuffed, they could have gotten him back up into a sitting or kneeling position. There's no telling, though, whether that would have saved him, or if it was simply the exertion of fighting that killed him.
But let's return to the video. We see an officer put Garner in a choke hold to pull him down...and then he lets go! After that, we see other officers grabbing other parts of Garner's body, notably one pushing down on his head. The whole time, Garner's yelling, "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" There are two important things to note here: 1) nobody's choking him anymore by the time he's saying this, and 2) breathing is a prerequisite to being able to say anything, even, "I can't breathe!"
So, once again, just like most of these cases, a criminal with questionable judgment fought the police and died losing. Like so many of the other cases we've been hearing so much about, a witness--in this case the guy recording the video--lied through his teeth about the suspect's innocence to make the officers' actions seem even more egregious and unjustified. (You can hear him saying they're arresting Garner for breaking up a fight, when it's clear from the conversation between the officer and Garner that they're talking about him selling a cigarette to a man in a red shirt.)
While we're on the subject, let's get back to the issue of cause-and-effect that I alluded to in the example of the headline about Tim and the grocery store. When you see these headlines like "Police Shoot Couple for Speeding" or "Police Kill Man for Jaywalking" or "Officer Beats Man to Death for Refusing to Show Driver's License," you're being intentionally misled. There's a cause-and-effect relationship being suggested that simply doesn't exist. It's not like the police stop a person for speeding, the speeder pulls over and cooperates, and instead of handing the speeder a ticket, the cop says, "I find you guilty of speeding, and in this city, the penalty for that is death," and then shoots them. In every single case, from serious stuff like bank robbery on down to the pettiest of crimes, the police simply stop people to effect an arrest or to issue a summons or a warning. Then the suspect takes it upon himself or herself to resist. They try to tell the cop that the cop can't arrest them, or they try to run away, or worst of all, they actually attack the cop--as we saw in the Ferguson case.
If you start a fight with the police, the police are going to finish it. You aren't going to win. The two choices are to quit fighting while you're still alive (and hope it's not too late to stay that way), or to keep fighting until you're not. Very simply put, when the police justifiably kill someone (as opposed to the unjustified cases--and they do exist), it's either because they were defending themselves or others, or because the suspect fought back to the point that lethal force was needed to capture and subdue the suspect.
In the Garner case, though, the police didn't use lethal force. Except for the wrong-but-irrelevant choke hold, they used exactly the force that would typically be used to subdue a resisting man of Garner's size. They didn't do it wrong. He died because he was in no shape to be wrestling several police officers. At most, the police were reckless or negligent in Garner's death. I could have possibly seen an indictment for manslaughter, but not murder. The fact that nobody was indicted doesn't tell me that there was a gross miscarriage of justice so much as that the grand jury likely didn't blame the officers for Mr. Garner's poor health.
Nonetheless, we'll continue to hear both professional and amateur reporters and pundits saying that the police killed or harmed a person because of some minor infraction. At the same time, they'll completely omit the suspect's own role in the event. And that's because they're pushing a version of reality not supported by the facts. They want you to believe that the police routinely approach innocent people who are minding their own business, and mercilessly attack and murder them at the slightest provocation or no provocation at all, at least if the victims are black.
Why?
This narrative gets repeated again and again despite it bearing so little resemblance to reality. Why? Who stands to gain by having you believe that that's how the world works? In what way will things change for the better if we all believe that?
Understand that I'm not saying that police corruption, abuse, and brutality don't exist. They do, they're widespread, and they frequently go unpunished. But if an activist movement wants to protest police wrongdoing, they could pick better poster children. Instead of looking at cases where homeless people and the harmless mentally ill who weren't resisting have been killed by police, they've chosen to make martyrs of criminals who fight the police. Why? Well, one common theme I see is that the ones who get mentioned on protest signs are all black, while a lot of the victims of clear cases of unjustified brutality are not. There's been a conscious effort on the part of the people shaping and guiding this movement to keep the focus not so much on police error or misconduct, but to keep it on race and the idea that the cops have it out for black people. They want to present this as a sort of informal but systematic genocide, even though the totality of the facts really doesn't support that view.
I'll leave speculation on the motivations behind this bit of public opinion shaping to people better qualified to comment on it, but I will be addressing other aspects of the clash between police actions and public opinion in a series of future posts.
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