AlterNet: Blogs: Video: Anti-War Minister Is Attacked, Gets Leg Broken for Trying to Enter Petraeus Hearing
Topic: Politics and Law
9:28 pm EDT, Sep 13, 2007
Watch the cops beat this guy down and then charge him with assault!
After waiting in line throughout the morning for the hearing that was scheduled to start at 12:30pm, Rev. Yearwood was stopped from entering the room, while others behind him were allowed to enter. He told the officers blocking his ability to enter the room, that he was waiting in line with everyone else and had the right to enter as well. When they threatened him with arrest he responded with "I will not be arrested today." According to witnesses, six capitol police, without warning, "football tackled him. He was carried off in a wheel chair by DC Fire and Emergency to George Washington Hospital.
Rev. Yearwood was examined for possible head and leg injuries then transferred to Central Processing. He has been charged with "assaulting a police officer."
He obviously made a sudden move which provoked the police to tackle him. Its not clear why the police decided to order him to the back of the line. Its not clear that it took 6 cops to subdue him. What is clear is that he did not assault a police officer. He was arrested for failing to comply with an order, and he resisted arrest. If this video did not exist he probably would, however, be convicted of assault, because the police would all testify that he had done so, and the counter testimony would all come from a bunch of nutty protesters. The charge is clearly a dishonest attempt to inflict harm on him because he refused to do what he was told to, and the charge is at the heart of why this will be controversial.
The bottom line is that many police officers believe that there is no limit to the level of force that they may employ to obtain compliance from people who refuse to follow their orders, no matter how unreasonable their orders may be or how passive the resistance to them is. Its clear from the video that the police are not at all interested in discussing whether or not their order that he move to the back of the line was or was not reasonable. They were simply focused on the fact that they had issued an order and that order was not complied with. Its not about protecting the hearing from unruly people. Its not about right or wrong. Its about power. They could have let him walk away. They tackled him because they wanted to tackle him. The dishonest charge is the evidence that is impossible to explain another way.
While we're on the subject of using force as a legitimate part of your job vs. using force because you like hurting people and now you've got a job that gives you a passable explanation for having done so, the final public report on the UCLA taser incident from last November is available.
The conclusions of this report are that the officer's actions were completely outside of UCLA policy and that the policy is also too liberal. This is obviously unwelcome news to variouscommentators who supported this incident as model police behavior. However, for their benefit it there is also a second "internal" report that you and I are not allowed to read which concludes that there was absolutely nothing wrong with what happened. This enables UCLA management to change their policies without admitting that anyone has done anything wrong.
Which report is correct? Such questions completely miss the point. Its not about right or wrong. If you want to really understand all of this please refer to my previous post on how everything everywhere actually works.
At the behest of acting UCLA Chancellor Norman Abrams, the Police Assessment Resource Center (PARC) conducted a seven- month, independent investigation of a November 14, 2006 incident at UCLA’s Powell Library in which the UCLA Police Department (UCLAPD ) arrested UCLA student Mostafa Tabatabainejad. This report sets forth our factual findings and conclusions.
This story has no heroes. The event triggering the repeated electrical shocking of Tabatabainejad was a declination by the UCLA student to produce a BruinCard identification in the Powell Library computer lab after hours. While the student should have simply obeyed the order to produce the card, and by not doing so brought trouble upon himself, the police response was substantially out of proportion to the provocation. There were many ways in which the UCLAPD officers involved could have handled this incident competently, professionally, and with minimal force. We find that one UCLAPD officer violated UCLA use of force policies in the incident. We further conclude that UCLAPD’s current policies are, in any event, unduly permissive, giving the police unnecessary latitude, and are inconsistent with the policies of other universities and leading police departments across the country, including other University of California campuses, the LAPD, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD). The UCLAPD policy stands alone in its legitimization of the Taser as a pain compliance device against passive resisters. The current UCLA policy is more permissive than the Sacramento Police Department policy on which it was based and the Taser policy recommended by its chosen outside expert on the question.
YouTube - Rev. Yearwood speaks re: Police Brutality against him.
Topic: Society
9:24 pm EDT, Sep 13, 2007
Rev.Lennox Yearwood regarding being attacked, arrested, and hospitalized by Capitol Police
This man was denied entrance to the hearing because he had clearly been identified as holding opinions counter to the party line.
Bush's people will do everything in their power to keep dissenting voices away from the media when they have their official digs going on, and make no mistake about it, this is censorship of the worst kind.
Can we file a class-action suit yet, or do we have to wait until Bush's third term so that it gets lost in the shuffle of the switch to despotism?
Congressman Brian Baird (D-3 Vancouver, Washington) hosted a town hall tonight at Fort Vancouver High School. It was Baird’s first appearance in front of his constituents since reversing his position on the war. ALTHOUGH he’s been an adamant critic of the war—he voted against the war and the surge—he announced last week that he thinks the surge is working and he wants to give it time.
He spoke in a high school auditorium that was packed with at least 500 people who were overwhelmingly vocal in their opposition to Baird’s new stance. There were also protesters outside calling for Baird to resign.
I also talked to several people as they left the auditorium and asked them if they found Baird—who was there to explain his new position—to be persuasive. To a person, everyone shook their head “no way,” including Doris Holmes, active member of the 18th district Democrats, who said, “He lied. He’s toeing the Bush party line. I can’t believe he’s a Democrat.”
You can follow links through to Baird's editorial if you wish. The bottom line is that this sort of thinking simply isn't allowed in the Democratic party. "I have committed even before setting pen to paper the essential crime that contains all others unto itself."
VMware's IPO - Insanity turns Silicon Valley back to normal | The Register
Topic: Business
11:06 am EDT, Aug 15, 2007
VMware - trading on the NYSE under VMW - looks to ship 33m shares at $29 each. That leaves the sever virtualization maker hoping to bring in $957m. Most indications have the company blowing past that figure and igniting a Silicon Valley boom.
I can't seem to find this on any of the finance sites, but this would be a good one to own.
Is there anyone on MemeStreams who regularly uses linux on their desktop?
I have to use Windows every day at work. There is something nice about my home computing environment being a little more slick. I like being able to open a unix command prompt. I like the design subtleties of my mac. Its pleasant to use. But I think it may be time to part ways.
I'm tired of Apple. My first mac, an iBook, had a problem where the screen would "go fuzzy" and require a motherboard replacement. This would happen annually, sometimes twice a year. For a while, Apple replaced the motherboards for free, but every time this occured, it involved a week without a machine. Once it also involved a computer which came back with a completely new hard drive. All my data was gone. Clearly, Apple never got to the root cause of the problem, as it kept happening over and over again. Eventually, last summer, Apple said they wouldn't replace the motherboard for free anymore, and their price was in excess of $1000. I had no choice but to buy a new computer.
So I bought a Macbook. I knew it was going to be trouble, but I did it anyway. It was nice for while.
About a month ago I spilled some beer on it. Obviously, my fault. Not like my prior problem. However, these things do happen to laptops and laptops ought to be designed with that in mind.
Instantly, one of the design flaws of the MacBook that I knew would be a problem going in reared its ugly head: There is no way to remove the keyboard. Keyboards get nasty. They get dirty. They do not last as long as the rest of a laptop. Good laptops are designed to make them easy to replace. But not the macbook. Its keyboard is embedded into the system. Its hard to remove and hard to clean. You have a problem with it, you have to send the system in for service.
After 24 hours of drying out, the keyboard didn't work, and so I figured it was going in for service. Fortunately, after a few more days of drying out the keyboard miraculously recovered. Worked fine. Worked fine for a while, anyway. Eventually the mouse started sticking. This got worse and worse over time until last week, when the mouse simply stopped working altogether.
Having no simple way to take the computer apart, my theory was that dust had collected to stickiness in the mouse, and that if I removed the battery and literally sprayed some water on the trackpad and then gave it a few days to dry out, it would likely be fine. This was a stupid idea. I should have SSHed into the thing and cleared out my data first. But I didn't. Again, my fault, not Apple's.
The computer isn't fine. I must have shorted something against the clock battery (which is basically impossible to access) and fried a motherboard component. There is gunk in the computer which might be capacitor guts. I'm fucked.
The reason its hard to get inside the macbook is that it has 27 screws which must be removed. These screws are extremely small, ... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]
The event begins 54 minutes past midnight PDT (0754 UT) on August 28th when the Moon enters Earth's shadow. At first, there's little change. The outskirts of Earth's shadow are as pale as the Moon itself; an onlooker might not even realize anything is happening. But as the Moon penetrates deeper, a startling metamorphosis occurs. Around 2:52 am PDT (0952 UT), the color of the Moon changes from moondust-gray to sunset-red. This is totality, and it lasts for 90 minutes.
Night owls on the west coast and early risers on the east coast might catch this red moon...
This may be my favorite Gibson book of all time. - Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow sure seems to have liked Spook Country. I didn't get into Gibson's last novel. Some of the marketing ideas were cool but for some reason it just didn't grab me. The linear style didn't build the suspense level that I sought. But I'm going to give this one a shot.
Gibson has a habit of writing physical places I've been to into his novels. I recall in All Tomorrow's Parties the main character walking down a street in San Francisco toward the location at which I was reading the book. Rattle tells me early on in this book a character checks into a Manhattan hotel that a number of MemeStreams users crashed in during the last HOPE, probably around the time the novel is set.
