mahiwaga

So in the process of converting old handrolled blog entries to Jekyll I stumbled upon this song from a Rainbow Brite cassette tape that my sister listened to over and over and over again when we were kids and which subsequently embedded itself into my skull.

Some of the lines from the song are “we’ll explore / where no one’s gone before” and I immediately imagined Captain Kirk and Spock singing this.

Which brings to mind my weird re-imagining of the pilot of Rainbow Brite as a science fiction story about terraforming a planet.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Baltimore Is Just the Beginning • 2015 May 6 • Time

A Bob Gorrell political cartoon shows a black man in a hoodie and with the stubble of the terminally unemployed, holding up a sign that says: “#BLACK LIVES MATTER (but police, private property and public safety DON’T!)” A Rick McKee cartoon features another black man in a hoodie wearing sunglasses and holding a box with a giant flat-screen TV. Behind him, the city is burning. He says to a little boy, “I burned your neighborhood and looted your stores so that you can live in a more just and fair society. … You’re welcome.”

Both of these cartoons exemplify the simple-minded—and racist—idea that looters and protestors are the same because they’re black and live in the same place. Protestors want to promote a political agenda, while looters want swag. Clearly, looters are criminals hurting the cause of the protesters and should be arrested and prosecuted. But when you lump them together and call them all “thugs,” you don’t have to listen to the real issues. It’s the adult equivalent of jamming your fingers in your ears, closing your eyes, and humming loudly.

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I suggest we all pay attention to what’s happening in Baltimore, because it’s very likely that unless the economic and injustice issues raised there are addressed in a meaningful way across the country, we will be seeing many more Baltimores throughout the election season.

It’s kind of bizarre that Facebook has juxtaposed posts by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Cracked.com, both of whom are predicting chronic civil unrest in the U.S. #algorithms

5 Ways Police Have Already Started The Next Civil War • 2015 May 7 • Cracked

People shouldn’t run from the police if they don’t want to get shot/tased/choked? Well, maybe the police shouldn’t shoot/tase/choke people just because they’re running. There’d probably be a lot fewer riots if they could adhere to that fairly basic rule. Handing out justice is not their job. We have an entire legal system in place for that very purpose.

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Well here’s the thing: Poor people pay taxes too. A disproportionate amount compared to rich people, in fact. And that’s really what this is about. I get that all of the recent incidents that have attracted public interest have involved white cops and black victims, but you’re out of your mind if you think people in poor communities in places where there aren’t necessarily a ton of black people are immune to law enforcement shenanigans.

For example, Billings, Montana ranks pretty high in the per-capita police brutality rate according to this study…. [Montana is] a state where the largest minority groups (which I accept sounds like a weird thing to say) are Hispanics/Latinos (5.2 percent) and Native Americans (4.4 percent). In case you’re wondering, the other 90.4 percent definitely aren’t black. In fact, they make up just 0.8 percent of the population. Nevertheless, there’s Billings, danger zone red, on that map of states with the highest incidents of police brutality.

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The police are turning into the military.

As this Cracked article pointed out, 9/11 gave law enforcement a war mentality. Couple that with a program that’s made military technology readily affordable for any shithole police precinct that’s flush with the undeserved budget cash to buy the tank of their dreams…

…and you have a recipe for disaster. With this scene playing out pretty much everywhere around the country, it’s not hard to see why people are starting to view the police as some sort of offshoot of the American military. There’s a term for when the military is policing your neighborhood: martial law.

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#1. Riots and Uprisings Have Been The Only Effective Solution So Far

When Maryland State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that charges would be filed against the six officers involved in the Freddie Gray incident, famed lawyer and torture enthusiast Alan Dershowitz wrote it off as nothing more than “crowd control” — just a pointless gesture meant to placate rioters that ultimately stands zero chance of achieving what everyone wants, which is justice.…

So is he implying that the charges wouldn’t have been filed if the riots never happened? If so, then call me crazy, but that makes me feel like the riots worked.…

The more likely scenario is that it took a combination of Internet video and someone dying in police custody for this insanity to catch up to the Baltimore police department. Would those charges have been filed without the riots? Alan Dershowitz says no. If that’s the case, then in this instance, riots were exactly what needed to happen.