British Tabloids: Amy Winehouse Better Than Britney
Ms. Winehouse’s acclaim could not have come at a better time for the sultry, beehived songstress, whose husband Blake Fielder-Civil received on the same day a twenty-seven month prison sentence for his June, 2006 conviction on dual charges of beating a Hoxton pub landlord and attempting to smoke a wicker chair.
While worldwide support for Ms. Winehouse has ebbed and flowed — depending upon her daily batshit-crazy antics — the devotion of her UK media fan base reflects traditional British values of loyalty, perseverance, and clinging tenaciously to lost causes.
picture of thief asleep on stolen goods
And the Albatross begins to be avenged.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
(From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Grasa de Pantera Classics Illustrated edition.)
Too Weird for The Wire
In Baltimore, inner city drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories in an attempt to undermine cases against them.
“I am not a defendant,” Mitchell declared. “I do not have attorneys.” The court “lacks territorial jurisdiction over me,” he argued, to the amazement of his lawyers. To support these contentions, he cited decades-old acts of Congress involving the abandonment of the gold standard and the creation of the Federal Reserve. Judge Davis, a Baltimore-born African American in his late fifties, tried to interrupt. “I object,” Mitchell repeated robotically. Shelly Martin and Shelton Harris followed Mitchell to the microphone, giving the same speech verbatim. Their attorneys tried to intervene, but when Harris’s lawyer leaned over to speak to him, Harris shoved him away.
The precedents the West Baltimore drug dealers were invoking were based in the laws southern Democrats after the Civil War used to limit the protection of black southerners from violence and discrimination and that marked the beginning of Jim Crow.
Judge Davis and his law clerk pored over the case files, which led them to a series of strange Web sites. The flesh-and-blood defense, they discovered, came from a place far from Baltimore, from people as different from Willie Mitchell as people could possibly be. Its antecedents stretched back decades, involving religious zealots, gun nuts, tax protesters, and violent separatists driven by theories that had fueled delusions of Aryan supremacy and race war in gun-loaded compounds in the wilds of Montana and Idaho. Although Mitchell and his peers didn’t know it, they were inheriting the intellectual legacy of white supremacists who believe that America was irrevocably broken when the 14th Amendment provided equal rights to former slaves. It was the ideology that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing, the biggest act of domestic terrorism in the nation’s history, and now, a decade later, it had somehow sprouted in the crime-ridden ghettos of Baltimore.
The evolution of this defense culminated in a series of self-help seminars for white farmers in the 1980s.
Hucksters and charlatans prowled the Midwest as the farm crisis deepened, selling desperate farmers expensive seminars and prepackaged legal defenses “guaranteed” to cancel debts and forestall foreclosure. Since the gold standard had been abandoned in 1933, they argued, money had no inherent value, and so neither did their debts. All they had to do, farmers were told, was opt out of the system by sending a letter to the appropriate authorities renouncing their driver’s license, birth certificate, and social security number. That number was allegedly tied to a secret government account held in a secure subterranean facility in lower Manhattan, where citizens are used as collateral against international debts issued by the Fed and everyone’s name is on a master list, spelled in capital letters—the very same capital letters used in the official court documents detailing foreclosure and other actions against them. The capital letter name was nothing but an artificial construct, they were told, a legal “straw man.” It wasn’t them—natural, live, flesh and blood men.
A PCP dealer locked up for twenty seven years brought these arguments to inner city drug defendants.
In Baltimore, Burpee found a group of inmates at the margins of society, people like Willie Mitchell and company who were staring at the full force of the federal government. As one defense attorney representing a flesh-and-blood defendant put it, they “saw a freight train coming and felt three feet tall.” Soon the unorthodox legal filings and courtroom outbursts began to multiply. It was, one public defender later explained, “like an infection that was invading our client population of pre-trial detainees.” Burpee appears to have been patient zero in the epidemic. For over a year, he harangued his lawyers and judge about the conspiracy and spread the word in the Baltimore lockup. Then, in a stroke of bad luck for the public defender’s office, the U.S. Attorney’s office decided to drop the charges against Burpee—perhaps reasoning that he wasn’t worth the hassle considering that he had already been sentenced to twenty-seven years. For Burpee’s peers, the decision imbued the flesh-and-blood defense with legitimacy and the hope of freedom.
So, the use of the defense ended 180 degrees from where it began.
Like the Midwestern farmers before them, the Baltimore inmates were susceptible to the notion that the federal government was engaged in a massive, historic plot to deprive them of life, liberty, and property. Such suspicions are prevalent in certain pockets of the black community—that year, a study from the Rand Corporation found that over 25 percent of African Americans surveyed believed the AIDS virus was developed by the government, and 12 percent thought it was released into the population by the CIA. And black separatist groups like the Nation of Islam—also fond of conspiracy theories—have long cultivated members through the prison system; some of these groups have explicitly adopted the language of constitutional fundamentalists. Given these developments, Levitas told me, “I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner.”
The Fall of Detroit
Detroit is in the worst state it’s seen in years, and the bureaucracy that runs it is essentially a horde of criminals. I live 20 miles outside of the city border and used to work in the city itself. I’ve been watching this my entire life. The citizen migration rate out of the city is staggering, and the population has dropped below the 1M mark; it is the first American city in history to drop below a million citizens. By way of contrast, in 1950 it boasted 1.8M residents.
Half the housing stock is needed. Many parts of the city are literally a wasteland.
The powers-that-be have a track record of turning down large, entrepreneur-originating initiatives of $200M for new, progressive charter schools. Invariably, the Detroit Board of Education sees the gesture as a white man’s attempt to infiltrate and overthrow the black power structure, not as one to provide a viable option to an otherwise horrible and floundering educational system.
People are starting to talk about Detroit in an urgent fashion, and not just because of Kwame Kilpatrick’s ridiculous troubles. Here’s a spot-on video of Newt Gingrich saying what nobody in Detroit wants to hear — and what I bet nobody will listen to in my lifetime.
Why so pessimistic? Because I’m an analytical person, and I see no data whatsoever that suggests this trend is anywhere near being reversed.
Communist inspired interrogation techniques
Turns out the “interrogation techniques” we’ve been using at Guantánamo were lifted verbatim from a 1957 study of techniques used during the Korean war to obtain — mostly false — confessions from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.
We’re making history.
For centuries to come—if the world lasts that long—history books will ask why Americans didn’t stop their government from doing this. Everyone else on the planet has been asking that question for years.
I don’t understand why we’re not rioting in the streets about it. I guess because that’s not considered effective nowadays? But what is? Is anything effective? I’m going to write more letters and make more donations, and I’ve already been doing this but I don’t know what else to do. What else can we do?
This is not a rhetorical question, dear Clusterflock.
The Dirty Italian
I just don’t care enough about wrinkles to ever begin to think about doing something like this:
An Italian man was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping his ex-girlfriend from a pub, taking her home and forcing her to iron his clothes and wash the dishes, police said Monday.
The 43-year-old man dragged the woman out of a pub in the port city of Genoa, shoved her into a car and took her to his home where he made her iron and wash dishes after threatening her, they said.
Besides, why didn’t he just get his mom to do it?
Police Markedly Improve Earth’s Gene Pool
Now that I am a father, I can’t bear stories like this anymore.
TURLOCK, Calif. - Police killed a 27-year-old man as he kicked, punched and stomped a toddler to death despite other people’s attempts to stop him on a dark, country road, authorities said.
I post it here because I want to celebrate the fact that there is one less piece of shit walking the planet.
black is white, up is down, the nba is fixed
Former NBA ref Tim Donaghy today alleged that two referees conspired to fix a seven game series in the 2002 NBA playoffs. I’m having a really hard time with this. Next you’ll be telling me George Bush lied about intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq, or the Supreme Court stopped the recount in Florida for political reasons, or Cheney and Bush knew, if not ordered, the outing of an undercover CIA agent for political purposes.
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick Booed at Stanley Cup Parade
If you’ve been following the travails of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick for any length of time, you know by now he’s a giant asshole and absolute embarrassment to the city of Detroit — which is an accomplishment in and of itself given the fact Detroit hasn’t ranked in anyone’s top cities list in, like, forever. So it’s anybody’s guess as to (a) why he accepted an invitation to speak at last Friday’s Stanley Cup parade in Detroit, and (b) why he actually showed up. The thug should have sent one of his many bodyguards or stripper-murderers.
Let’s keep in mind that the demographic for the Stanley Cup parade is essentially white suburbanites who like violent contact sports played with swords on players’ feet and that allow players to brandish a composite weapon with which they are encouraged to accost other players. Not exactly Kwame’s hometome posse.
all we are saying is stop stealing my fucking glasses
Four retirees have guarded the wire-rimmed glasses on the John Lennon statue in Havana Cuba for the last eight years.
“You have to be here every day because the day you aren’t, there the glasses go,” said watchman Juan Gonzalez, an 89-year-old retired filing clerk who smokes up to seven cigars a day guarding the bronze statue from a nearby bench.
In fact, the guards are so worried about another theft that they hold onto the glasses in shirt pockets or rags, restoring them to Lennon’s face only when tourists want to take pictures.
Man Arrested for Drunk Driving Motorized Cooler
In case you woke up this morning forgetting to feel outraged
One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo … he was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo.
Quoted in “US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships” by Duncan Campbell and Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, Monday, June 2, 2008.
Vandals Take Poetry Class As Punishment
More than two dozen young people who broke into Robert Frost’s former home for a beer party and trashed the place are being required to take classes in his poetry as part of their punishment.
Cruel Machines
[...] The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I glanced to my left. The killer watched the inspection process, his lips twitched in silent disapproval, he waited, watching me. Curious, proud, almost haughty. I locked his gaze. His telepathic hatred seared my brain, but…yet…he sought my approval, who can enter the mind of the mad? [...]
I swear it wasn’t me
Police in Colorado are looking for two men who robbed a convenience store wearing thongs as their disguises.
Each thong barely covered the man’s nose, mouth and chin and left the rest of his face exposed. The suspects also wore T-shirts and pants and were described as in their 20s. One had a left arm tattoo.
Google Street View Has Everything
Including gun play:
( click for larger )
via Twitter
A woman watches a short movie.
“A woman watches a short movie about Jack the Ripper at the Museum in Docklands, London,” read the caption accompanying this photo from the Telegraph’s Week in Pictures feature. Quite naturally, I thought of Our India and wondered how she is getting on.
let my donkey go!
A donkey who kicked and bit two gentleman in Chiapas, Mexico has been freed from jail after three days.
“All of a sudden, the animal was on top of us like it was rabid,” Hernandez said.
what’s that Lassie? little Johnnie fell down the well?
Israeli jails are using a computer program to translate the barks of guard dogs to distinguish regular barking from warning barks.
“It collects the dogs’ barks through microphones…and sorts and grades them,” Tavor told Army Radio. “It relays only the barks that are significant in terms of security — barks that reveal stress or aggression in the dog.”
candyman candyman candyman
and yet…
he’s not quite the scariest.
Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan
Jake Adelstein is the first American to write for a Japanese newspaper in Japanese. He was a crime reporter for Japan’s largest newspaper until writing about the yakuza, the Japanese mafia, endangered his life and the lives of his family.
Most Americans think of Japan as a law-abiding and peaceful place, as well as our staunch ally, but reporting on the underworld gave me a different perspective. Mobs are legal entities here. Their fan magazines and comic books are sold in convenience stores, and bosses socialize with prime ministers and politicians. And as far as the United States is concerned, Japan may be refueling U.S. warships at sea, but it’s not helping us fight our own battles against organized crime — a realization that led to my biggest scoop.
(via marginal revolution)
More Court Shenanigans
The latest issue (June 08) of Harper’s Magazine includes a lovely excerpt from “a deposition given over two days last year by Aaron Wider, CEO of HTFC, a mortgage investor, to Robert Bodzin, a lawyer for GMAC Bank.” Here is another source for some of the transcript, which includes this exchange:
Q. [T]his is your loan file, what do Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald do for a living?
A. I don’t know. Open it up and find it.
Q. Look at your loan file and tell me.
A. Open it up and find it. I’m not your fucking bitch.
Q. Take a look at your loan application.
A. Do it yourself. Do it yourself. You want to do this in front of a judge. Would you prefer to [do] this in front of a judge? Then, shut the fuck up.
Q. Sir, take a look–
A. I’m taking a break. Fuck him. You open up the document. You want me to look at something, you get the document out. Earn your fucking money asshole. Isn’t the law wonderful. Better get used to it. You’ll retire when I’m done.
And then there’s a favorite part mentioned:
My personal favorite exchange arose from Mr. Wider repeatedly calling plaintiff’s counsel a “fucking clown.” Against that backdrop the following delightful exchange occurred:
Q. Okay. You’re not employed by HTFC Corporation?
A. No, I own HTFC Corporation. Be specific.
Q. Okay. And what do the initials HTFC mean?
A. Hit That Fuckin’ Clown. That’s what it means. It’s an acronym.The trial judge (or more likely his clerk) actually counted the cuss words and discovered that “Wider used the word ‘fuck’ and variants thereof no less than 73 times.” By contrast, the word “contract” appears but fourteen times in the entire transcript.
I think that’s my favorite part too, but I also like the way AW is constantly referring to Robert Bodzin as “Bob” — with a tone that reminds me instantly of the way Lewis Black would say it.
Life in These United States
Ah, Florida. Inspired by Deron’s post about the Land O’ Lakes (Florida) substitute teacher accused of wizardry, I pursued links that led me to coverage of the story by WLTX (Columbia, South Carolina). There I learned the Florida school district’s side of the story: the alleged wizard’s crimes were also said to have included “not following lesson plans” and allowing students to play on unapproved computers (circumstantial evidence, at the very least, of dabbling in the black arts).
And then I scrolled on down to “Today’s Top Stories” from WLTX, and that’s when I said to myself, “Ah, these here United States.”
• Deputies Search for Two Armed, Dangerous Men
• Man Arrested For Shooting, Killing Victim
• Teens Drown on Senior Skip Day
• 10-Year-Old Rape Victim Gives Birth
• Hulk Hogan’s Son Sentenced to 8 Months in Jail
• $5 Million Lottery Winner Killed; Ex-Boyfriend Charged
• Slight Risk of Severe Weather This Afternoon