Your Tax Dollars At Work: Drug Warriors

Imagine if this was your home these men came to:

That is how quickly lives are lost in the war on drugs. When police invade private homes in search of drugs, anything and everything can go wrong, and even the slightest misunderstanding becomes a matter of life and death. The victim in this case, Todd Blair, brandished a golf club in terror as armed men stormed his home in the night. We'll never know for sure if he realized they were police. But we do know that only a small amount of drugs were found in the raid that took his life.

That drugs and violence often go hand in hand isn't a mystery to many among us – the bloodshed gripping Mexico is old news by now – but this is a very different kind of drug war violence than the infamous turf wars of the cartels. This is a rare glimpse into the unbelievable level of force our own public servants unleash routinely in order to protect us from ourselves. This man was just a drug user. Whether he ever sold drugs is in dispute, but there's no question that he lived and died in poverty, and not from drugs, but from police who gunned him down in his own home.

Warning: you're about to watch a man get shot to death by his own government because he wanted to decide for himself what he could put into his own body:


Your tax dollars funded this man's death, and they pay the salaries of every politician in Washington who votes to continue their tragically unsuccessful War on Drugs against the American public.

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RIP, Greg Giraldo

I can't say he was one of my favorite comedians but I really liked this guy (no homo):

Comedian Greg Giraldo — well-known for his work on such programs as Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn, Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil, several Comedy Central roasts, and NBC’s Last Comic Standing — has passed away. Both Comedy Central and NBC confirmed the comedian died Wednesday in a New Brunswick, N.J., hospital, just days after being hospitalized, reportedly for a prescription pill overdose.

He was 44 years old. Giraldo was known as the King of the Roast in regard to the Friar's Club roasts routinely broadcast on Comedy Central. His set at David Hasselhoff's roast a few months back absolutely killed (warning, this is a roast):


[Update: The video has already been taken down. Fucking Viacom. Wait a few days and then try to find it again; you won't be sorry.]

Something More Hilarious Someone Else Said

Now that's funny.

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September 11

Nine years later. I'd like to think that we've grown and learned something as a country since then yet I still hear the same stupid shit from the same close-minded people. The idea that understanding and accepting those who are different from us somehow portrays weakness or a lack of resolve on our part is chief amongst them. One idiot calls for the burning of Korans because he doesn't like Muslims, so another idiot answers by calling for the burning of the American flag as retaliation.

I know that as a country we're better and stronger than this and we will continue to be so but it's imperative that we also continue to elevate the dialogue and reclaim this narrative from the guttersnipes and haters amongst us. It's the Islamists and Christianists who want to start a holy war; cooler and more rational heads must prevail. I won't pray for those lost in the attacks on 9/11 but my heart does go out to their families and loved ones. You can read about how I spent that day in 2001 here, and you can view an animation of the proposed memorial here.

Hell Comes To San Bruno

If you haven't heard yet there was a massive gas pipeline explosion across the bay from me last night:

Four people are confirmed dead in the massive explosion and subsequent fire that rocked San Bruno, the San Mateo County coroner’s office said Friday morning.

San Bruno Fire Department Capt. Charlie Barringer said earlier Friday that six were dead, but the coroner's office has only confirmed four so far...

Barringer was one of three firefighters on Engine 52, the first to respond to the explosion.

“I thought a 747 had landed on us,” he said. “It shook our station right to its foundation.”

Within a minute, he had sounded a four-alarm fire, he said. Soon after, he said, firefighters discovered a gas line had exploded, destroying not only homes but the grid of water mains that supplied the local fire hydrants. His crew had no water to fight the fires.

“We were overwhelmed. We had multiple neighborhoods on fire,” he said.

The news is now confirming at least six people have died with dozens more injured. I play Words with Friends with a college student who lives in San Francisco, about ten minutes from the explosion in San Bruno. He tells me that he saw at least 50 homes destroyed last night and at least twice that many were damaged. I can't imagine what those folks must be going through right now. Stuff like this is so surreal.

The New World Trade Center

I've lamented the fact that the area around Ground Zero in New York City is still basicly a big ugly hole several times in the past but this animation of what the new towers and memorial will eventually look like makes me feel a lot better about what we're doing there. Let's get this built already:


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Something Someone Else Said II

"It is hard in this age of endless memorialization to even express this view without sounding callous: but Londoners did not turn their entire city into a "hallowed ground" or a shrine for the dead or a monument to British victimhood. They rebuilt, they went on, they rightly saw that the truest memorial to the dead was to show the Nazis that their city would rise again as if the Nazis had never existed on the face of the earth. I have always felt a deep discomfort similarly with the entire holocaust-memorial and holocaust-study industry. As a Jew, I hate the idea that the defining fact of my people's entire history should be what the fucking Nazis did to us.

There is a great Spanish proverb: olvidar la injuria es la mejor venganza: to forget an insult is the greatest revenge," -Stephen Budiansky, Stephen Budiansky's Liberal Curmudgeon Blog.

Meanwhile, nine years after the attacks on 9/11 we argue and bicker over whether it's respectful to the victims of those attacks to build a religious community center near the big ugly hole in the ground where they were killed. Our priorities are fucked up.

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Every Troy McClure Project List

Troy McClure has always been one of my favorite Simpsons characters. I still remember where I was when I heard that Phil Hartman's wife had killed him in a bizarre murder/suicide; such a loss to entertainment. If you're like me, you'll read each of these in Troy's voice (click to embiggen). Hilarious.

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RIP, Gary Coleman

This is a sad one. I saw this kid on TV and in movies so much when I was younger I feel like I grew up with him, and his was sometimes a hard life to watch. Man, first Michael Jackson and now this. I hope someone's looking out for Emmanuel Lewis.

(Update: Dennis Hopper now too. Coleman just became Farrah Fawcett to Hopper's Michael Jackson.]

SWAT Team Drug Raid Video

Radley Balko at Reason.com revisits a previous post:

In February, I wrote the following about a drug raid in Missouri:

SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family's pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on.

They found a "small amount" of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.

So smoking pot = "child endangerment." Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone's safety.

Just so we're clear.

Now there's video, which you can watch below. It's horrifying, but I'd urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.

But they did prevent Jonathan Whitworth from smoking the pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.

Here's the video:


Look at the house. It isn't a drug den or a crack house, these are your next door neighbors and their kid. This happened in America. Per a discussion in the comment section of a previous post, this is one of the costs beyond the billions we spend every year on the failed War on Drugs. Of course, this video doesn't definitively prove that it's a failure (as Balko says, they did successfully stop this guy from smoking his cannabis) but is this what you imagine when you think of the drug war succeeding?

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Something Patriotic Someone Else Said

"I felt fury and disgust and rage and nausea, but I didn't feel fear. I found I felt a sort of exhilaration. I thought: if this war has been declared as it looks as it has been, by theocratic fascism then it's a war I would never get bored with fighting, because it involves defending all the things I do like, against all the things I don't. Culturally as well as politically, and intellectually. And I still feel that way, I think it's absolutely worth fighting..." -Christopher Hitchens, commenting on where he was during the 9/11 attacks and boiling down why I really don't like war or religion, especially when they're combined.

Yakuza And Baseball: I'm So Japanese!

No time for blogging today, I have to attend my book club meeting and then it's straight home to prepare for my baseball fantasy league auction draft later tonight (yes, I know that I've called baseball boring as hell in the past but what the hell else am I going to do until football season?). Since it was my turn to pick for the club last time I chose Jake Adelstein's "Tokyo Vice", a tell all about his time as a Jewish American working for a Japanese newspaper and taking on some of the most dangerous characters of the Tokyo underground. Learning about the danger and betrayal of certain Yakuza was very interesting and it provided a fascinating glimpse into many aspects of Japanese culture I wasn't familiar with; you can watch his interview on The Daily Show here. Hopefully I'll have time to write a bit more tomorrow. Sayonara, ya'll.

SNL: Presidential Reunion

Barack Obama gets some late night visitors from the land of presidents past. This is actually from Funny or Die but I wrote Saturday Night Live in the title because most of these presidential impressions are lifted straight from the history of that once great show:


Good God, Aykroyd got fat.

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CSI: SeaWorld

Miami is definitely my least favorite CSI but I must admit that this is my absolute favorite Internet meme at the moment. You can already hear "Won't Get Fooled Again" in your head, can't you? And please spare me your tears for this woman. She spent every day jumping into a tank with a huge animal that has the word "killer" right in it's name. The odds say that it was only a matter of time. At least she died doing what she loved; how many of us will be that lucky?

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[Update:
Epic Beard Man is a close second. I can't believe it's only been a week since this went down.

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Metallica's "Enter Sandman" A Capella

The Nymphs performing their 1940’s Andrews Sisters inspired version of "Enter Sandman". That feedback you're picking up in the background is Cliff Burton's dead ass spinning in his grave:


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Chart Of The Day

Every terrorist John McClane and his black sidekicks took out in and around Nakatomi Tower in Die Hard. Welcome to the party pal, now I have a machine gun ho ho ho, yippee-ki-yay motherfucker, etc. Classic.

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Picture Of The Day

Looking at pictures like this never gets any easier:

Newly released photographs show what a damaged World Trade Center tower and its collapse looked like from a New York Police Department helicopter as it flew nearby on September 11, 2001, in New York.

The aerial photos were obtained by ABC News after it filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which had collected the images for its investigation into the towers' collapse.

A couple of the images show one of the twin towers burning after a hijacked airplane had flown into it. Others show it collapsing, and the rest show the clouds of debris and dust spreading below after the towers crumbled.

Each of the 12 images offers a rare look at what the devastation looked like from above.

That day is still so fresh in my memory, it's hard to realize that it's been over eight years already. If you're interested, you can read about how I spent 9/11 here as well as my bitching about the excruciatingly slow and bureaucratic process of building the Freedom Tower here.

I'm 36 Today...

...but I don't feel a day over 35 ½ . I'd recommend having your birthday on Super Bowl Sunday if you have the means; any day you're drinking beers and watching football is a good day, regardless of which milestone you're passing on the inexorable march towards death. My only complaint is that everyone tries to give you those combination birthday/Super Bowl presents. Cheap bastards.

Deterring Terrorism

Democracy In America has some thoughts on how to do so in the shadow of the recent suicide bombing in Kabul:

The objective of attacks like the one in Kabul is to convince the population that the government is unable to protect them, and to discourage people from lending the government legitimacy or working with it. Matthew Yglesias has written a lot of amusing posts over the years ridiculing the "Green Lantern Theory" of conflict, which holds that all military and political challenges can be overcome if we just show enough "resolve". Most of the time such thinking really is ridiculous; but this type of pure terrorist attack is one of those that can be countered through shows of resolve. The Taliban suicide commandos weren't in Kabul to show they had support among the population there; they don't. They were there to show resolve, to prove that they can still recruit people willing to die for a chance at killing a few Afghan government officials.

The best way to discourage that kind of attack is to snuff it out, clean it up, and pretend it never happened. Israeli terror incident response policy calls for cleaning up an attack site within three hours and restoring it to its pre-attack state within four days. The principle is essentially the same as the "broken windows" theory of policing, with its insight that quickly repairing damaged buildings and graffiti ultimately deters vandals. One obvious response to yesterday's attacks in Kabul would be to make a high-priority emergency effort to rebuild the Faroshga market.

I know that I've probably mentioned this before but every time America experiences a terror attack or even some type of near miss I always feel a bit embarrassed at our hysterical overreaction to these types of threats because I hearken back to London during the second World War and their incredible resolve in the face of constant carpet bombing of their city by Nazi forces over the course of several years. I can't express to you how much I wish the American people could just embrace this philosophy of stiff upper lipism in the face of dangerous adversity.

Someone bombs one of our cities? Fuck you, we're all going to work, play, shop, etc. just like we normally would while we rebuild our neighborhood and there's nothing you can do about it. Someone blows up one of our planes? Fuck you, we're all going to go on vacation and drink copious amounts of alcohol whilst eating pork sandwiches and drawing pictures of Mohammed while we're at it (I'm sure that all of my moderate Muslim friends would approve of this course of action on principle). I'd like to think that we'd all agree to do these things as a unified showing of defiance to any and all who would have even the audacity to try and change our American way of life through intimidation but the sad truth is that we collectively tuck our tails and start blubbering whenever some crazy jihadist lights his balls on fire aboard one of our planes and quite frankly it's becoming fairly embarrassing on the world stage.

Israel has the right idea (and it's one that most of us learned in grade school): get back up immediately after you're knocked down and show anyone who would try to intimidate you that you're not going to be cowed like the lazy, decadent pussies the Islamists claim that we are in their propaganda. In short: take it like a man, and stop your crying. If we would all just rise up and symbolically tell these terrorists to kiss our asses every time they tried to attack us instead of shitting our collective pants and spying on our neighbors just like they want us to do we'd be a hell of a lot closer to winning this supposed "war on terror" than we are now. Speaking of which: how's that Freedom Tower coming along? No wonder they keep fucking with us: because we keep letting them.

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The U.S. Still Won't Ban Land Mines

Via TYWKIWDBI comes this excerpt from a Bill Moyers essay on the subject:

As a weapon, variations of land mines have been around since perhaps as early as the 13th century, but it was not until World War I that the technology was more or less perfected, if that can be said of weapons that mangle and mutilate the human body, and their use became common.

The United States has not actively used land mines since the first Gulf War in 1991, but we still possess some 10-15 million of them, making us the third-largest stockpiler in the world, behind China and Russia. Like those two countries, we have refused to sign an international agreement banning the manufacture, stockpiling and use of land mines. Since 1987, 156 other nations have signed it, including every country in NATO. Among that 156, more than 40 million mines have been destroyed.

Just days before Obama flew to Oslo to make his Nobel Peace Prize speech, an international summit conference was held in Cartagena, Colombia, to review the progress of the treaty. The United States sent representatives and the State Department says our government has begun a comprehensive review of its current policy.

Last year 5,000 people were killed or wounded by land mines, often placed in the ground years before, during wars long since over. They kill or blow away the limbs of a farmer or child as indiscriminately as they do a soldier. But still we refuse to sign, citing security commitments to our friends and allies, such as South Korea, where a million mines fill the demilitarized zone between it and North Korea.

The article goes on to say that about 75-80% of the victims of land mines are innocent civilians not involved in the conflicts that caused their placement. I have a hard time believing that we're still having this conversation in 2010, and the refusal to sign this international agreement is just one more thing that Obama isn't doing that depresses me about his administration so far.