Some of Those That Work Forces

Who you gonna believe -- the lying fascist thugs in their paramilitary gear, or your lyin' eyes?

This is a predictable outcome of a chief executive literally telling cops to bang heads and tune up "bad guys" -- well, not the white guys who loot pension funds, or the white guys who launder bratva cash, or the white guys who stalk the halls of gubmint with their AR-15s and their Meal Team Six getups, who spit and scream in the faces of cops for their inalienable right to a haircut.

Not those guys. You know, bad guys. Some of those who burn crosses are the same that hold office.

Again, these people are not shying away from telling exactly who they are, and exactly what they intend to do. They are not trying to hide it, there is no attempt to conceal it. All you have to do is observe, not even all that carefully.

People like to say it is what it is. But the fact is that it is what it has always been.

Some people need to support the lie, because the truth is too devastating for them. Identify them as such, and treat them accordingly, as people who are okay with racially targeted extrajudicial murder under color of authority.

There's an evil synthesis of race and class issues baked into all of it. The bottom line is this, for anyone not in the 1% of wealth and/or power:  if you haven't run afoul of (selective) law enforcement yet, you're still nothing more than livestock; if you have gotten on the bad side of the paramilitary forces, god help you.

But as of late, there sure do seem to be an awful lot of incidents involving LEO or ex-LEO murdering black people. It is supported from the top, and nothing will be done about any of it. Maybe an Amber Guyger slap on the wrist, where the murderer is eligible for parole after just five years served, and a key witness for the prosecution gets capped shortly after testifying.

You just watch. The incompetent turds who murdered Breonna Taylor on a no-knock warrant (at the wrong fucking address, when they had the perp in custody already); the father-son pillbillies who shot Ahmaud Arbery in the street like a fucking dog; and now this thug who asphyxiated a prone, handcuffed man with a knee in the throat -- one or a couple of these fuckers may do a little time, or maybe even see a bit of financial damage. But there is no goddamned way any of them will carry a murder wrap.

And as always, it's interesting to see who gets the tear gas, and who never needs to even worry about the possibility. That's what country this is.

How to Get Away with Murder

There are many ways, of course, if you are imaginative enough. But one surefire, can't-miss, no-fail way to get away with stone cold murder:  be a white cop killing a black man. Never fails.

Hopefully no one is fooled by the Dallas prosecutor charging Amber Guyger with manslaughter, because it's a "safer" conviction than a murder charge. It doesn't matter what Guyger is charged with. Mark my words, call your bookie, and bet your entire paycheck, because it's as much of a slam-dunk as saying the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning -- Guyger will walk, and she probably won't even be fired from her fucking job. She might resign on her own, if a big enough stink is raised. But they won't fire her. They've already invested fully into cover-up-and-muddy-the-water mode.

It would be amusing to watch the repeated attempts to get her story straight, if we weren't talking about an innocent man MURDERED in his own fucking house for no goddamned reason, and a bunch of people who entrusted and empowered to SERVE AND PROTECT the public are collectively using every cheap tactic available to avoid accountability.

Whatever bullshit story they finally land on and decide to roll with, chances are it was something stupid, like Guyger being drunk or high. Either that or she had some unknown (so far) beef with Botham Jean. Probably some combination of the two, but whatever the case, this was no accident. It was either gross negligence and dereliction, or outright intent.

Law enforcement and criminal justice professionals, whether they're cops or prosecutors, will all tell you that innocent people have nothing to hide, that people who instinctively clam up and grab a lawyer are almost guaranteed to be guilty of something. Of course, the rules change when it's one of their own, but we all know the truth.

Everyone knows the fix is in and the game is rigged. Everyone knows that cops can do whatever the fuck they please, when it comes to black men. Ask Patrick Dorismond, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo, and on and on. For every Michael Slager who gets held accountable, there's a dozen or a score or a hundred who don't. And I promise you, Guyger won't, even though her crime is even more egregious situationally than just about any police shooting.

I mean, how fucking dumb do you have to be to buy the notion that a police officer, a member of a profession that is trained rigorously to observe, did not know her own apartment -- especially since her apartment was not only on another floor, but had additional locks on the entry door because of her occupation. And Botham Jean had a huge red welcome mat outside his entry door. Either Guyger is a laughably bad cop who never should have been on the job in the first place, or she's lying because she knows she fucked up.

But not really. I hope I'm wrong, but I know what country this is. All it takes is one "cops is never wrong" doofus on the jury to jack the verdict, and Guyger walks. Don't think that she and her friends on the blue wall don't know that. This thing will get tossed, and even if Jean's family pursues a lawsuit (and hopefully they do, hopefully they sue Guyger and the police department into absolute penury for their shameful incompetence and reprehensible misconduct throughout), and even if they win a judgment, the amount will be lessened simply by virtue of the fact that a criminal outcome couldn't be attained.

Hell, the aforementioned Slager got a mistrial at first, and the only reason it came back around and he got convicted and sentenced is because he had a long history of that shit -- oh, and his murder of Walter Scott was caught on video. But even with video of Slager shooting Scott five times in the back and planting the gun on him, it took two years and two trials to hold his worthless ass accountable. All anyone has on Guyger is her idiotic fairy tale and a few neighbors who overheard things, some of which may conflict and thus cancel each other out. Then all you're left with is a vulnerable young white woman fending off a menacing black man.

Everyone's up in arms, and rightly so, about the public release of a search warrant of Jean's apartment that turned up a small quantity of pot. What they don't tell you is they were probably looking just as hard for a photo of Jean in a hoodie and baggy pants, maybe throwing gang signs with his hands, that sort of shit. These people are completely without scruple, gearing up to smear and blame a man their employee murdered. Amber Guyger straight-up MURDERED Botham Jean, and she and the Dallas PD are getting away with it, and that's all there is to this.

Even on the million-to-one chance that this was some weird "honest accident," which is already impossible given how Guyger's story has changed from whether the door was locked or ajar, so what? What do you think would happen if you somehow got disoriented and knocked on your neighbor's door, thinking it was your own house, and you pulled your weapon and shot your neighbor when he opened the door, thinking he was burglarizing your house? Seriously? But a police officer makes that sort of fatal "mistake" and they're for some reason given the benefit of the doubt, even thought the standard should be higher.

Again, even on the miniscule chance that Amber Guyger is "innocent," even her own bullshit story proves she has no business being on any police force, or indeed in any position that requires oversight of others' lives. No matter. You just watch -- she'll walk, and the Dallas PD will just get her off the street and give her a desk job. She won't do an hour in jail. Count on it.

Young Man Blues

As we enter the hottest summer ever -- because we are now in an age where every year is hotter than the last -- let's take a look at three recent stories involving young men.

So the special elections keep becoming near-misses, the latest one being the $50 million or so spent trying to spring techno-milquetoast Jon Ossoff into the GA-6 seat vacated by corrupt lizard Tom Price, who was appointed to funnel the health-care system more fully into the pockets of the insurance-pharma-HMO axis of evil.

I caught Ossoff the night before the election on one of the interchangeable MSNBC shows, probably Lawrence O'Donnell, but it doesn't really matter. Ossoff came off as pleasant, intelligent, well-versed in policy specifics, but rather bland -- in other words, completely wrong for an electorate that is now basically nothing more than a collection of hamsters in a giant Skinner box, pressing the metal plate for their outrage pellets before getting back on the wheel that passes for their lives.

Excessive "Thrilla in Manila" media hype didn't help; not only did the enormous presence of "outside" money apparently rankle some of the locals' fine sensibilities, but the endless chimp-with-dartboard hot-takes just exhausted everyone.

One of the stupider tropes of the election was that it was a "referendum on [Clownstick]." Well, yes and no, mostly no. Technically, every election is a referendum on pretty much everything. In this case, it could be a referendum on the media, the pollsters, the voters themselves. GA-6 should be proud of the irony that, in order to show their proud disdain for "outsider money" and their desire for "change," they chose a careerist hack who was born in DC, while eschewing someone who was born in the heavily gerrymandered district, and lives within walking district of it while his fiancé finishes up her degree at Emory. So much for their lying excuses.

The polls generally leaned to Ossoff by 2-5% until the last few days when they evened out. Ossoff lost by four percent. It might be time to consider the possibility that:

• Pollsters are not very good at their jobs.
• Respondents are fucking with pollsters.
• Enough people are uninformed, flaky morons who can't make up their wittle minds on the starkest choices until the last second, effectively rendering the polling process into a lucrative circle-jerk.
• We heard over and over again how much money had been spent on this race. So what was it spent on? With that in mind, do media companies and political consultants and polling professionals have perhaps a vested interest in stoking a horse race, even when there might not really be one? Think their rates are a little higher when the polls show Ossoff up by three or neck-and-neck, than down by four or five in a reliably red district?

Polling aside, it became apparent that Ossoff would probably lose when Handel produced a homestretch-weekend video linking Ossoff to the dumb and destructive activities of D-list personality Kathy Griffin and shooter James Hodgkinson. The video itself was not the problem; the shocked, pearl-clutching reaction was the problem. Democrats still do not understand the nature of the game they play. They persist in this "when they go low, we go high" idiocy, which just means more spork-to-a-gunfight mismatches.

Ossoff could have responded -- indeed, should have had in the can, ready to use -- showing Handel's scandalous behavior as a vote-suppressing bastard as Secretary of State in Georgia, as a Planned Parenthood attacking loon when she headed the pink-washing Susan Komen Foundation. The fact that he didn't -- the idea that at this point, anyone thinks they can get in the ring and still stay above the fray -- validated the hushed suspicions that maybe the kid was just a little too wet behind the ears.

Now, is hand-wringing and panic justified, going 0-5 in these special elections? Some say yes, others say no. Choose your hot take, 'murka! Again, the truth is both yes and no, again mostly no. These elections all occurred to replace critters who had been selected to join the boot-licking Clownstick cabinet, and as such, were chosen from very safe districts. In all of them, the Democratic candidate got within reach, closing 20+% gaps in some cases, barely half a year since November. So frustration is rational, but giving up in despair would be stupid. Even for a complete, unrepentant, gaping asshole like Emperor Snowflake, it's a lot to expect the cult to turn on him in just five months. Let him fuck them out their health care and job prospects first.

However, disgruntled Democrats are right to say that a change in leadership is needed. I totally agree with Charles Pierce that kicking Nancy Pelosi to the curb in the heat of the moment would be enormously counterproductive. I don't agree with Pelosi on everything, but she's smart, effective, raises money, kicks ass when needed, gets shit done. But she's 77 years old. Dianne Feinstein turns 84 tomorrow, and is up for re-election next year, and appears to be set to run.

This is both amazing and stupid. It's as if the party has never heard of succession planning, or developing a bench. They should be tapping one of the Castro brothers to go after alien-in-an-itchy-human-suit Rafael Edward Cruz's Senate seat next year. They should be pushing up-and-comers like Seth Moulton in front of every camera possible. In an endless news cycle with nearly infinite content modes, it should not be that difficult to get your younger talent out there to spread the message.

And what is that message, exactly? I said this a full year ago, and I'll say it again -- forget the "inclusive" SJW jabber, and focus on economic justice. In the end, it wasn't latent racism that caused all those rust-belt counties that voted for the blah guy twice to flip to Clownstick. It was the perception -- right or wrong, this is the alternate reality we all inhabit now -- that "Democrats" and "liberals" cared more about transgender bathroom rights than they cared about the washed-up, boarded-up, opioid-addicted wastelands infesting the hinterlands.

I think there may have been some justification to that perception. In his farewell press conference, Obama reflected on how a black guy with a foreign-sounding name could win in a place like Iowa, and he attributed it to going to all 99 counties, going to the pig-fucking competitions and eating deep-fried candy bars -- and most importantly, talking and listening to the people directly. You didn't really see that with most of the candidates.

Get some true economic populists with balls who will actually stand up to this bully, not with a scripted litany of fifty-cent words, but with the same "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" cadences he uses on everyone else. Work on some nicknames for him and make them stick. Have I ever mentioned before that most of branding and marketing comes down to repetition?

Go find a few of the blue-collar contractors Clownstick fucked over as part of his "business" model, put together quick two-minute videos of smash-cut money-quote excerpts from them, push it to the MSNBC night crew with a "deadbeat Asshole" type of nickname, and make a real concerted push. Why are these people so inept at crafting simple, effective messages? Because they still seriously think that better ideas win by virtue of their betterness. How's that working out? Stop overthinking this shit and take the piss out of this moron and his moron cult already. It should not be this difficult to brand a lifelong con-artist as such. Better messages, messengers, and channels help.

The GA-6 outcome may be the final straw in causing something of a rift in the Democratic Party. Sorry, but I think it would be a good thing for them. They need to re-focus on who they are just as much as who they are not, and they need to develop new blood much more effectively. It doesn't need to happen overnight; done correctly and patiently, they can easily reclaim enough seats in the midterms to hobble this inept scumbag crook and his thieving, grasping family, and then depose him in 2020. But they need to start now.

---

The sad tale of Otto Warmbier, the Midwestern kid with the on-the-nose surname, came to an abrupt close when North Korea essentially pulled the classic frightened-frat-boy maneuver -- putting the alcohol-poisoned pledge in a shopping cart and leaving him at the front door of the emergency room.

Plenty of people have weighed in with their "what did you expect" bumptions, and indeed, it would be difficult to come up with more inadvisable activities than traveling to North Korea. Maybe reporting on a Mexican drug cartel, or climbing Mount Everest in your jean shorts, those would be slightly worse ideas. But the kid was twenty-one years old, and I don't know about you, but when I was twenty-one, "dumb and impulsive" pretty much covered it. Between drugs, booze, motorcycles, and women, there are days where I wonder how I made it to thirty. Part of getting old is being lucky to survive a wild youth long enough to settle down.

It's also easy to lob armchair-quarterback critiques of the Obama administration's inaction in getting Warmbier returned, especially after being sentenced to fifteen years in a labor camp, in a trial that looked like a parody. But most negotiations with NK take place behind the scenes, out of necessity. And everything in dealing with this cult-like regime expends political capital, which is scarcer than Clownstick brain cells when it comes to getting leverage on the Norks. You can't shoot your wad on one person -- for one thing, even if it works, it makes every other person from your country that travels there an enhanced target.

Every traditional diplomatic element is stood on its head when it comes to working with the Kim crime family. There is no "rational actor" strategic thinking that will help, because Kim's only rationale is self-preservation, and he clearly doesn't care at all what happens to his people. And they have nukes and rough terrain and massive underground bunkers. Kim and his inner circle would be perfectly happy to hide for months -- after nuking Seoul and Tokyo -- while we eliminate the defenders and civilians. They really do not give a shit, and that's enormously tough to strategize.

No administration of any party can be reasonably expected to go too far to "rescue" someone when it may not be possible logistically in the first place. And who knows why they chose to send Warmbier home when they did? Probably either the Chinese leaned on them, or they just got tired of trying to keep a kid in a coma alive.

Whatever the case, what should we do about it? People are pissed about what NK did to Otto Warmbier, and they damn well should be. But again, what do you propose to do about it? Start a war? Increase sanctions and starve them out? Again, these things have no leverage, and only hurt people who had nothing to do with any of this. Anyone who says it's simple is nuts.

The old cliché about youth being wasted on the young has some merit to it, but the corollary to that is that the wisdom that is supposed to be conferred with age frequently gets wasted as well. Part of being "wise" is being able to recall what we were like when we were younger, and allowing the "unwise" to have the time and experience we were granted to learn the ropes.

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Philando Castile is the latest example of (much to whitey's ongoing chagrin and confusion) Why Black People Are Pissed. The release of the dash cam footage is harrowing and disgusting. Jeronimo Yanez got away with murder, shooting Castile like a fish in a barrel, narrowly missing Castile's four-year-old daughter.

To hear Yanez screaming unintelligibly even after turning Castile into Swiss cheese is to hear the entire problem -- Yanez should never have been a cop or allowed to carry a gun in the first place. Here's a pro-tip for all you wannabe, gonnabe, and actual cops -- if this is how you act when someone is fully cooperating with you, you are in the wrong fucking line of work. Turn in your badge and go be a plumber or something, before you get someone killed. Sorry it's a dangerous job, but I refuse to concede my basic rights as a citizen to make it easier to push the peons around, and I don't expect anyone else to give up their rights.

The problem here is training, how much and what type. In many states, you need more hours of training to become a hairdresser than to become a cop. In Yanez' case, maybe taking two seconds to think about calling a police training Bulletproof Warrior would clarify the situation. That is not what you call anything that is designed to facilitate community relations, let's say. To say that it presumes a stance and a relationship with the people you're supposed to protect and serve as unnecessarily antagonistic is to put it very mildly.

And now a little girl gets to grow up having watched her father get murdered by a cop for no goddamned reason, while that inept-at-best police officer walked away scot free. They didn't even have the balls to fire his incompetent ass; Yanez was simply asked to voluntarily resign, which means he won't get anything on his jacket. He can land somewhere else. I hear Texas is pretty good about keeping Those People in their place. But this is someone who should never have a role in law enforcement again, ever. The video proves he was unqualified in the first place.

While the focus has been on young black men being killed unnecessarily by cops, that doesn't really get to the heart of the matter. Yes, there is a racist (or racial profiling) component to it, but what this is really about is perspective, training, and accountability. If you are taking some kid and giving him about 800 hours of training, outfitting him with military gear, drumming it into his head that he's in some sort of American Fallujah where lethal combat awaits him around every corner, you can't be too shocked when he goes off on some hapless civilian trying to produce his wallet like a good peon.

The accountability is the main thing, and it has to be something that all of us, not just aggrieved blacks, need to stand up and be counted for. Philando Castile had a permit to carry his gun and we have audio and video footage that he was completely cooperative and docile during the stop, so where's the NRA on this, where are all the 2nd Amendment rights obsessives? Are black people allowed to carry guns, does the 2nd Amendment apply to them as well? These are not rhetorical questions; many of us are old enough to recall when Saint Reagan, as governor of California, instituted gun control measures precisely because of that very situation, because he and his old-cracker base were terrified that the Black Panthers were coming to exact retribution from them.

Turning fifty last month was a reminder of the obvious fact that we all view the world differently as we age, not just politically, but when you're young, the world seems full of possibilities, and its dangers seem eminently conquerable. You are too young and full of yourself to understand how deeply entrenched the system and its vile minions are against you. You might travel to countries where there are no laws or facts, or you might forget at the worst moment that some cops really are out to get you. Stay frosty, kids.

To Protect and Serve

You may recall a recent post regarding a horrible decision regarding the Lake County, Florida Sheriff's Office shooting of a civilian, Andrew Scott, which was handed down by the 11th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Scott was shot because the LCSO fucked up, and they have a bizarre policy of not identifying themselves as law enforcement when they bang on civilians' front doors in the middle of the night.

Well, the LCSO just doubled down on its commitment to serving the community:



One assumes that they are about to set fire to a hostage in a cage. This is what you get when you let thugs with badges do whatever the fuck they want, and people are fine with sacrificing their liberty for some false reassurance of safety. Nothing good can come of this.

Honor Among Thieves

Let's accept for the sake of argument that Clownstick was "joking" about "ruining the career" of a Texas state senator who had the nerve to talk about legislating that a suspect should be convicted before his assets could be seized by the thieving, grasping paws of the jackbooted thugs trying to shake a money tree. The problem is, Clownstick doesn't even question the principle that we used to at least theoretically have, that people have a right to be tried, with evidence presented and everything, before being punished, whether monetarily or by jail time.

Guess that's just too darn inconvenient for these good Christian fokes, who apparently lay awake at night dreaming up nefarious ways to steal under the cover of "law enforcement." There are plenty of cases indicating that this is a clear incentive for many police departments, who see the convenience of obtaining assets without even having to go to the trouble of, you know, proving that any laws had been broken in the first place.

Well, you want a fucking corrupt police state, looks like you got one. Then again, this has been going on for a while, and it's not like the last guy did anything about it.

Occupying Force

Yet another cop who needs to do the right thing right now, resign his post and go to vocational school. There is no excuse for this. They're goddamned lucky that their bumbling didn't kill anyone.

Charles Kinsey, the caretaker who was shot while lying prostrate, should not have had to splay himself out in the roadway in the first place. He did nothing wrong. Maybe it was just two dudes sitting in the fucking road, are we drawing our guns right away for that now too? I hope he sues the fuck out of them.

The North Miami Police Department said it had received a 911 call of a man threatening to commit suicide with a gun pointed at his head. "At some point during the on-scene negotiation" with the two men, one of the officers fired, striking Kinsey, police said.

....

John Rivera, the president of the Dade County Police Benevolent Association, said Thursday afternoon that the officers "saw the white male almost on top of Mr. Kinsey, who had his hands up and who had his knees up, and to the officers, it looked like the white male was about to shoot Mr. Kinsey," Rivera said. "The officers all thought the individual had a firearm, not a toy truck."

Rivera said the officer "was trying to save the life of Mr. Kinsey and feels horrible that his aim missed and struck Mr. Kinsey."

This smells like an industrial fuckton of bush-league ass-covering. For starters, is this how they always respond to 911 suicide calls? Hopefully the media checks out the supposed call in question; chances are the facts won't jibe. Probably a completely different call.

And when the cops do arrive on the scene, ready for action, Kinsey flops on his back, arms up (something, incidentally, it wouldn't even occur to most white people to do, especially when you're just a caretaker trying to help your autistic patient), and explains the situation to the cops, and they still shoot -- and hit the "wrong" person. Way to defuse the fucking situation there, Deputy Fife.

Police in this country need to be retrained, top to bottom, front to back. I'm not getting into the "black lives" aspect of it at all; the problem here is that the level of force that used to be a last resort is now the first and only option. Don't bother assessing the scene an extra second, just react instantly, shoot to kill, and if you fuck up, THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS, YOU GUYS.

No other western country has law enforcement like this. Only banana republics have paramilitaries. This has to stop.

Street Executions

I wish I had more to say on the two state-sanctioned street executions in the last forty-eight hours, but Ed and many others have pretty well covered it. Plus, res ipsa loquitur and all.

Noting that Louisiana is an open-carry state (though Alton Sterling, as a convicted felon, should still not have possessed a gun), or that Philando Castile had a concealed-carry permit and is seen on video as alerting the officer to that fact as he tried to hand over his identification, will mean nothing to the usual cops-are-always-right-even-when-they're-wrong morons. Nor will you hear a peep from the gun nuts, for obvious reasons.

It would be nice to think that the Department of Justice would crawl up the ass of every national, regional, state, and metropolitan police union and fuck them sideways on excessive use of force, but we all know that won't happen either. But whether or not it does any good, it needs to be pointed out that -- for starters -- Jared Loughner, James Holmes, Robert Dear, and Dylann Stormfront Roof were all brought in safely and alive after they had killed multiple people, forty-two people total between them.

Keep that in mind some lying piece of shit from the FOP gets in front of a mic and lectures you about how scary the job is and how they had no other choice. Bull. Fucking. Shit. Ten bucks says no one loses their job over either of these most recent civilian shootings.

This is how it is in a police state, just as it is in a true authoritarian or totalitarian state:  conformity is culturally enforced, compliance is expected and enforced, by violence if necessary, and frequently even when it isn't necessary.

[Update 7/7/16 9:27 PDT:  Well, this isn't going to help.]

No Lives Matter

Oh good -- the organization whose protected members decided to accost and assault an innocent man for no reason, in broad daylight on a busy city street, is going to investigate itself. Awesome.

While they're at it, they might want to investigate precisely why these assholes need to go all Delta Force on "a ring believed to be using fraudulent credit cards to buy cellphones". Since when do they give two shits about white-collar crime?

Wait, that's right -- when it's banksters stealing billions of dollars and rigging interest rates, fucking the world over, they do jack shit. But if they suspect you might be a credit-card fraudster, they will throw you down on the sidewalk and fuck your shit up before they even ask your name. I suppose Blake should just be thankful they didn't fill him full of lead.

Fuck Your Breath

As more and more black men get shot by white cops for no goddamned reason whatsoever -- and more importantly, as these events get captured on video more and more -- I suppose the question begs as to what good it will do, for the most part. Catching it on video, I mean.

Out of all the people listed in the two articles linked above, only Walter Scott's killer has even a chance of doing any time. And, uh, given that that occurred in South Carolina, don't be too surprised if it turns out the prosecutor pulled a Florida and threw a charge at Michael Slagel that a jury won't convict him on. Look at Casey Anthony, or George Zimmerman. Don't be too surprised if the Slagel case whiffs on the murder charge, and instead settles for attempting to plant evidence.

Even if Slagel is convicted of something, he's in the (pardon the dismal, unintentional pun) minority. The cop that killed Eric Garner won't be charged or convicted, nor the cop that killed Tamir Rice. John Crawford's killer, and on and on. They all get away with it. I'm not sure what exactly people think would come from "cop cams" and such. Clearly people have decided to look at this brutal shit, over and over again, and shrug and say, "What else ya got?"

At least the video prevents Slagel from lying about how and why he shot Scott, shows what his bullshit story would have been. But then it goes into the hands of people who may be inclined to give Slagel the benefit of the doubt, to decide that Scott's half-assed excuse for a record mitigates the murder charge.

On the other hand, if you're white, you can fight with cops, and merely get subdued, rather than killed. Strange how that works.

Plus Ça Change

Fifty years after officers sworn to uphold the law attacked peaceful protesters on a bridge named after a human turd, things have changed some, but not enough. You still live in a country where Darren Wilson could have been caught on video walking right up to a prone Michael Brown, unprovoked, and plugged his ass for no goddamned reason, and someone would have defended or rationalized it.

Giuliani Time

Maybe I missed it in what coverage of the police protests I've seen, but I would have definitely taken note of protesters literally chanting for "dead cops". It would take some serious fucktardery for anyone to perceive or portray the cold-blooded, deliberate murders of police officers as some sort of moral equivalence for the various and sundry police killings of unarmed civilians around the country.

For that matter, it's pretty asinine to chant a desire for dead cops, just as it's asinine to loot stores and attack passersby at a protest. There is a legitimate reason to protest the spate of shooting deaths of unarmed civilians by police officers, and that reason is to demand accountability for those specific officers, justice for those specific victims. Attempts to broad-brush all law enforcement for the actions of an inept, trigger-happy few are counterproductive.

That said, the cops and their unions do no one any favors by their reflexive, defensive attitude. They deliberately repurpose any and all honest attempts to right specific wrongs as attacks on all law enforcement. This is nuts. Saying that Darren Wilson's shooting of Michael Brown or Daniel Pantaleo's choking of Eric Garner deserve scrutiny and honest investigation is not an automatic indictment of all police officers, or even most of them, or even many of them. It's saying that the actions of Officers Wilson and Pantaleo need to be checked out by honest observers. Apparently this is impossible, not allowed, verboten.

Bill DeBlasio made a fatal error in having the nerve, the gall, to publicly admit that he has had The Talk that many parents of black sons have about how to deal with cops -- never have your hands in your pockets; don't make any sudden moves; be as deferential as possible; and for Christ's sake don't run. Parents of black men have been telling their kids these things for generations, this is nothing new. This is something every honest police officer knows to be true in the first place.

And it's not as if the NYPD (and other urban police forces) in particular doesn't have a nasty recent history with this sort of thing. 9/11 acted as a sort of mind eraser for some pretty bad behavior in the years immediately preceding it, and we all fell all over ourselves to genuflect to Our Heroes. But it's there all the same, in the plunger shoved in Abner Louima's asshole, in the 41 bullets that perforated Amadou Diallo as he reached for his wallet, in the punching of reporters and the burning of Dinkins effigies when the cops went batshit at the idea of independent oversight.

Just as the Ferguson protests were about so much more than just what happened between Darren Wilson and Michael Brown, so is this mushrooming impasse between the NYPD and Bill DeBlasio about more than Eric Garner, or the two officers murdered in their car yesterday by a deranged idiot. It's about the resentfulness of a paramilitarized urban police force the size of a small army, taking the reflexive posture that they don't have to explain themselves to anyone.

They get to ask the questions, and as such, they don't like being on the other side of the interrogation table. As I've been pointing out, their mission is now compliance, and the fact that "outsiders" continue to have the temerity to ask inconvenient questions shows a lack of that critical asset. We're supposed to take their answers as given, shrug our shoulders, quietly pay off the families, and forget about it.

When the hell did being a cop mean you had to answer to no one for anything? Arguments that "you don't know what it's like" ring hollow. I don't know what the President of the United States has to deal with on a daily basis either, but I do know that if he fucks up badly enough, people get to question him, and he has to fucking well answer. That's the difference between a truly free society and, well, a police state. And this is exactly how police states get started, by thwarting any and all attempts at simple accountability.

The Torture Never Stops

There are some pretty simple rules of thumb that can be used to determine whether something is "torture" or not:

1. Would it qualify as torture if someone else did it to American soldiers or civilians?
2. Has the U.S. tried and executed soldiers from other nations for doing it?

If you answered "yes" to either of those questions, it's probably torture. If you answered "yes" to both of them, then it's definitely torture. If you answered "yes" to both questions, but still don't give a shit, then you're a sociopath and a hypocrite at best, a soulless homunculus at worst.

Which brings us to Dick Cheney, show-hopping in the wake of the official announcement of what we all knew. Cheney, to his eternal credit and damnation, does not dodge or deny his involvement and endorsement of waterboarding, rectal rehydration, chaining people up in diapers and forcing them to piss and shit themselves, or just chaining them to a dungeon wall until they freeze to death.

Remember the Nixonian rationale that "it's not illegal if the President does it"? That's pretty much what's going on here -- it's not torture if we do it, or if we farm it out to more brutal practitioners.

These sorts of "revelations" are, of course, nothing new at all to anyone who even casually reads up on deep-state activities, which have been ongoing since the end of the 19th century but became more systematized after World War 2. It's laughable to believe that anything about US policy at large changes because we "reform" CIA policies as to what tactics can be used for interrogation -- we'll just send the next unfortunate victims out for one of our pliant minions to help with the wetwork. We'll still find pretexts to meddle or knock over inconvenient countries who don't understand that when we want them to play ball, we're not asking.

Dick Cheney does not give two shits if one of our official torture or rendition victims is innocent or not. Tough shit for Maher Arar, who was kidnapped from JFK Airport and sent to Syria, where he was beaten with cables and kept in a coffin-size box for ten months before, oopsy, turns out he really hadn't done anything. Tough shit for all of them, innocent or not, charged or not. Let God or Allah or the entropic void sort them out.

I sincerely believe that if you were to poll the vast 'murkin public, in its infinite limbic, lizard-brain wisdom, you'd find an appalling level of agreement with Darth Cheney, a seething, toxic brew of cranky indifference and outright hatred, a base assumption that if you can't tell 'em apart, then you should git 'em all, just to be safe.

There is an outside chance that circumstances could be made to change; after all, even Maher Arar eventually was set free and even sued and won a large settlement and apology. In some of the shitholes we outsource the nastier tasks to, they'd have finished the job and thrown him in a landfill.

(It probably didn't hurt that Arar's Canadian citizenship necessitated the involvement of another party to the disgusting behavior we were conspiring and perpetrating. Canada, our best friend, basically saw our hitchhiker sex dungeon through the basement window, and got us to set the poor bastard free. As long as they don't know about the crawlspace.)

The big lie, one of them anyway, is that torture is a normative method for finding out critical information. It isn't. That's not to say that it can't ever work; a person guilty of a crime or who has knowledge of an impending crime will probably crack at some point if enough pain and pressure are applied. But the thing is that the interrogator has no sure way of knowing. Life does not generally conform to the predictable outlines and neat resolutions of a 24 episode.

In countries that use torture more routinely, there is barely even the pretense of using methods solely to extract usable information. It is primarily a tool of repression, meant to terrorize and dehumanize, intended to send a message to fellow dissidents that they're next, that no one is safe from having their fingernails yanked or being boiled alive.

One of the more fascinating characteristics of humans is how so many of them derive such joy -- and make no mistake, Richard Bruce Cheney and every one of these fuckers that did these things are proud of what they did -- from inventing newer and uglier ways to inflict pain. To be sure the merciless cocksuckers in Al Qaeda, ISIS, whoever, they're no better. But we were supposed to be. Once you start pretending that torture is okay, if done by the "right" people for the "right" reasons, you're just a step away from instituting it on your own dissenters.

Hell, maybe the next police brutality protest, the police infiltrator instigates violence as a pretext to drag in some hippie punk, a jailhouse beatdown by pissed-off cops followed by tossing the DFH into the bubba tank for forcible sodomy. Happens every day in the American gulag, and it will not change one bit just because an ancient senator finally got pissed enough at the internal security state to give them a parting slap.

The question is, when do we become pissed enough at the whole lot of it to actually do something about it, even if it's just collectively refusing to support or participate in this corrupt system anymore?

This Week In Butthurt

Here's one useful way to tell that law enforcement officers and their union reps are inherently aligned with what are now called "conservatives" (in other words, whiny teabaggers):  even though they hold all the weapons, and juries and courts are automatically inclined to side with them, they still have the whole "persecuted innocent" act dialed in to a T.

Look, if it's too tough, or too dangerous, or just a load of PC bullshit being a cop, there is a very simple solution:  don't be one. Be anything else. Be a plumber; a good plumber can make great coin. Worst case scenario, you come into contact with human waste while wearing nitrile gloves.

I get that cops see idiots and assholes at their very worst, that on an average day, probably 95% of the people they encounter (other than their own colleagues, but probably some of them as well) are jerkoffs, skells, criminals, fucking lowlifes. That can't not color your view of humanity in general after a while. It's the same thing prison guards deal with.

I couldn't be a cop in even a small town without wanting to crack some fool's skull after like a week. My threshold for jerkoffs is low enough, but said threshold for, say, paroled tweaker who terrorizes his wife, beats the kids, kills the family pets, etc., is non-existent. Does not exist. It is my sincere belief that the world would be a better place without said violent, abusive assholes who prey on the weak and powerless because they have balls of their own, or mommy and daddy were mean, whatever. So here's the thing:  that is precisely why I would never consider being in law enforcement -- because I know I'd be terrible at it.

And if cops are killing unarmed citizens on the street for bullshit crimes, just to show who's in charge, maybe the public is better off with those cops doing something else. The good news -- and from the way these whiny-ass cops and their douchebag supporters act, it might actually be news to them -- is that no one forces anyone to be a police officer. Really? Yeah, really. There's no conscription. It's entirely voluntary. I know this will blow peoples' fucking minds, but I swear to the Flying Spaghetti Monster it's 100% true.

Nobody forces anybody into any career in this country, which means that if your line of work seems to dangerous and unappreciated, well, you just show 'em all and pick another goddamned career. We all know you got into it to "protect and serve", but when you're no longer doing either of those things, but simply using tactical violence to enforce absolute compliance, maybe it's time to try another line of work.

Takin' It to the Streets

Let's reiterate, for the kids in the cheap seats:  it doesn't matter if you throw Molotov cocktails in the streets, or lay down in Grand Central Station -- it won't do any good, because they don't care. You think a federal investigation or a body camera will prevent the next cop from perforating an unarmed civilian? The ends of Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, and plenty of others are on video. We can all see what happened. Nothing will be done about any of them, because what the fuck are you gonna do about it, block traffic? Go ahead. Vote? Please. Jesus H. Christ.

Back in the day, the noted optimist Jim Morrison said "they got the guns, but we got the numbers". In a modern, militarized surveillance/security state, it's really the other way around -- mere numbers become irrelevant when the minority has all the weapons, the money, and the power, overt and coercive. Power gives you options:  to beat, to imprison, to ignore, to propagandize, to wait you out, to fuck up your future job prospects, any number of things. Mainly to refuse to respond to your plaints and your protests and your duly registered disgust at their conduct.

They don't give a shit because they don't need to give a shit because they don't want to give you the satisfaction and risk legitimizing your grievances because fuck you, cowboy. Whose country do you think this is, anyway? Get back in line or the hired dogs will just put on the riot gear and roll out the up-armored assault vehicles.

Of course these are lessons learned from the '60s, that hippies and idealists need to be beaten down, bought off, or spied on and blackmailed. Nowadays, they hardly even need to do that -- the flying monkeys at Faux News and their scumbag commentators will happily ridicule any non-teabagger grievance. Rudy Giuliani and his Nosferatu shadow have opportunistically slithered out of the coffin to piss on the graves of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and anyone else who fucks with Our Boys In Blue, the same type of hyper-paranoid mutt that perforated Amadou Diallo for the high crime of reaching for his wallet.

I respect the idealism of protestors, the sincere conviction that it will do jack shit to change anything. Occupy Wall Street changed nothing, the massive Iraq War protests around the world in 2003 changed nothing. People reserve high praise for the non-violent (well, on the part of the protestors, anyway) resistance tactics of Gandhi and MLK. And those did change some things, but at what a price, a lot of people getting the shit beaten out of them or murdered for saying no, and a couple of martyred heroes.

But the most modern manifestation of the tactics you see when you see protests is the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. A grim combination of pushing people around, presenting the tactics of looters and vandals as the norm, and dismissing and delegitimizing valid grievances, Seattle became the template for defusing the causes of disruptive groups of citizens.

(Some of the comments in the Atlantic article are just as appalling. Look, most reasonable people will acknowledge that pulling hundreds of millions of people out of grinding poverty in China and India is a net positive from a humanitarian perspective. But, uh, it wasn't the average 'murkin manufacturing worker's fault that those countries are hopelessly overpopulated; it wasn't just a couple thousand greedy union tools that lost their jobs, it was millions of working-class people who were promised retraining and opportunities; the usual suspects made all the money from gutting their countrymen's jobs and communities. Whatever potential globalization legitimately had, what it was was just another round of American corporations fucking over American workers, and pocketing the profits.)

About the only protests you don't see getting smacked down are old white guy protests, your Cliven Bundy types, your teabagger rallies, your gun-nut slobs sporting stretched-out beach shorts and assault rifles at the Chipotle ostensibly because Second Amendment, but really because most guys who can no longer see their dicks have trouble convincing women to suck them off.

The reason those protests don't get shut down is because they're useful to the powers that really be. They're a handy distraction, a way to further propagandize and polarize a dwindling but effective slice of the electorate. They've had their lives upended so that greedheads could profit massively from exploiting the competitive advantage of places with a massive surplus of labor, and look for easy answers to pin the blame on.

Body cameras on cops won't hurt, but also won't change much when grand juries literally refuse to indict despite actual video evidence of police over-reaction and misconduct. Those punk-ass cops gang-mauled Eric Garner for selling individual cigarettes; the man lost his life for selling loosies. It's all on video, crystal clear, and still they refuse to do a goddamned thing about it. Video doesn't matter, in a climate where citizens will not just eat the shit sandwich, but run down to the store and buy the bread.

Here's the only video that matters, if we want to understand what's going on here:
Robin Harris in House Party

First Amendment Remedies

What have we learned from the Ferguson riots -- or, perhaps more meta-importantly, the coverage of the Ferguson riots? The most critical thing (imho), and therefore the one that has not been and will never be brought up in the incessant media navel-gazing is to me the most obvious one:  that people will go completely batshit about five football players expressing their opinion with a harmless gesture, while the financial industry screws the country out of more money every single day than most of these ofay crackers will ever see in a lifetime.

(And it shouldn't need to be said, but just in case, of course any violent crimes committed during these riots need to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.)

Oh dear, where is the moral outrage? Where are the armchair stat monkeys mustering their hastily googled nuggets of research on the prevalence of suit-on-everyone-else crime rates, of how decades of outsourcing and gutting the manufacturing base has left the hallowed small-town 'murka a meth-addled husk of dollar stores and welfare families? So much analysis, so completely devoid of context, of perspective.

Ferguson is about much more than whether or not Michael Brown stupidly instigated his demise. I think most people will agree that if you punch a cop and try to grab his gun, you can reasonably expect to get your ass shot. The problem is, it's not a slam-dunk whether that's what actually happened. But again, Ferguson is not about that anymore, if it ever really was. It's about the larger context of black men and kids being shot by trigger-happy cops, of militarized police forces acting like they're raiding Fallujah, and not dealing with a dumb kid doing a dumb thing.

If being young and irresponsible was something that should get you shot, it's a safe bet that most of us wouldn't have made it past twenty years of age. But even the dimmest, most reactionary bulb should be able to suss the pattern here.

It's about whites literally not understanding what black males are routinely taught by their parents and friends about walking with their hands in their pockets, about running for any reason that is not obviously jogging, about wearing a hoodie. It's about how a black guy buying a pellet gun -- in an open carry state! -- can get turned into Swiss cheese, while any fat white slob can strap up for some Oreos or to menace people with their penis substitutes, and it's just understood that it's a Second Amendment thang. It's about how we're not as far removed as we think we are from a time when black people in some areas had to go in through the back door at the veterinarian's office to get a tooth pulled, despite what the "slavery was 150 years ago, get over it" crowd think they know.

That is the problem, that is the injustice. That is the source of frustration for protesters, much more encompassing and pervasive and commonplace than whatever actually transpired between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson. The only thing that will sway the reactionary crackers' minds is when one of their own gets shot by a shoot-first-ask-questions-later idiot.

Even then, there will always be the ones who will indulge in victim-blaming, because that's all they know.

No Surprises

There can't possibly be anyone out there surprised by the Ferguson grand jury's finding. All the usual ofay assholes, the Giulianis of the teevee jabber industry, will flood the zone tomorrow and pontificate about how if those people just stopped acting up, white cops wouldn't have to put 'em down.

Yes, maybe Michael Brown should have been a little smarter about cops. Same goes for Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old shot by a Cleveland cop over the weekend. We were all young once, but some of us have forgotten that part of the deal with being a dumb kid is that you haven't yet learned that the world is at best indifferent to your fate, at worst out to get you, or just waiting for you to fuck up so it can pounce on you.

Children are made aware of sex at about the age they hit puberty, just so that they hopefully understand the potential consequences of irresponsibility and recklessness. What would be an ideal age to teach them that if they screw around with the law, a cop can shoot them like a dog in the street and not lose a wink of sleep over any of it?

I'm old enough to recall a simpler time, a time when shooting even known perps was considered a last resort for cops, or nearly so, a time when cops didn't just gun down a sixth-grader in a playground swing as the go-to option. I think that if Michael Brown or Tamir Rice or John Crawford or Akai Gurley or Eric Garner had been white, they'd all still be alive. I know that there are still parts of this country where thieving racists hold positions of some authority, and they get away with it until they're caught on camera, until there's no choice but to hold them at least a little bit accountable.

Then they get fired, maybe, sometimes. But the dead are still dead, and paranoid white people still side with overeager shooters, until it's their turn or their screw-up kid gets a visit from Johnny Law. Riot all you want, kiddies, it won't do you a goddamned bit of good. You get to hear yet another round of full-throated song from the proverbial rednecked peckerwood, that most pernicious and tiresome of the political aviary. That's about it.

For now, this is racial, but it's really socioeconomic at heart; only poor people get the full iron fist treatment. And because 'murka is full of gullible maroons who assure themselves that poor people are lazy idiots while they themselves are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, the crackers assume that the police are always right, as long as it's someone else they're picking on.

Fortunately, in our post-scarcity utopia, when no one has a job because robots are flipping our burgers, delivering our goods, and yes, patrolling our streets, and what jobs are left are for (perhaps literally) peanuts, everyone will be fair game.

Menace II Society

It's no surprise at all that a halfwit state like Florida should find itself in a quandary over the case of Michael Dunn. Dunn, you may recall, is the mouth-breathing dipshit who shot up an SUV full of black teenagers for the high crime of playing their music loud, killing one those teenagers, 17-year-old Jordan Davis. The idea that you can shoot up a car full of kids, head for your bed-and-breakfast, and order a pizza like nothing happened, is the essence of what Michael Dunn was thinking on that fateful day.

So of course we have to revisit what happened -- or what we think happened -- between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, in that same state, not so long ago. Zimmerman got away with what, from a truly objective observer, was an egregious, violent over-reaction to what was most likely a provocation of Zimmerman's own making.

Similarly, Dunn is, via the reliable conduit of what is apparently an easily gulled Florida jury pool, about to get away with plugging ten (10) bullets into a vehicle in a convenience store parking lot. This is unacceptable, or is it? Common sense would dictate that this sort of thing could not go unaddressed, yet we seem as a society to have long since passed, on so many levels, the idea of "common sense."

Look. What kind of a piece of shit do you have to be to do something like this, to perforate a bunch of teenagers on the false threat of brandishing a shotgun, a relatively difficult weapon to mistake for anything else? What does it take for a jury of one's peers to determine that maybe not everyone is intellectually, morally, or reflexively equipped to have a concealed-carry permit, that maybe while the Second Amendment has value, incidents like this are worth reconsidering where the boundaries are?

Unaccountable

Ho-hum, just another day in the police state:

A New Mexico man is suing police for allegedly "subjecting him to multiple digital penetrations and three enemas," among other "shockingly invasive medical procedures" -- all on an invalid warrant, all without finding any drugs -- his lawyers claim.

The lawsuit states that David Eckert, 54, spent more than 12 hours in custody last January at a police station and local hospital after being pulled over for a traffic violation. Yet he was never charged, nor did authorities find illicit substances on him.

Eckert was told he could go home after a third officer issued him a traffic citation. But before he did, Eckert voluntarily consented to a search of him and his vehicle, the affidavit states. A K-9 dog subsequently hit on a spot in the Dodge's driver's seat, though no drugs were found.

....

According to a police affidavit accompanying the lawsuit, a detective asked a different officer to pull over Eckert's 1998 brown Dodge pickup truck for not properly stopping at a stop sign.

After Eckert was pulled over, a Deming police officer said that he saw Eckert "was avoiding eye contact with me," his "left hand began to shake," and he stood "erect (with) his legs together," the affidavit stated.

....

Eckert was then put in "investigative detention" and transported around 2 p.m. to the Deming Police Department.

Sometime after that, a judge signed off a search warrant "to include but not limited to his anal cavity."

The next stop was Gila Regional Medical Center, where the lawsuit states "no drugs were found" in "an x-ray and two digital searches of his rectum by two different doctors." One doctor at this time found nothing unusual in his stool.

Three enemas were conducted on Eckert after 10:20 p.m. A chest X-ray followed, succeeded by a colonoscopy around 1:25 a.m.

After all this, "no drugs were found in or on Plaintiff's person," according to the lawsuit.

Apparently the stormtroopers in this shithole have a hard-on for cornholing random passersby with their dumb dog:

A second lawsuit was filed Friday against southern New Mexico authorities accused of illegally subjecting drug suspects to invasive body cavity searches. And the attorney who filed the cases says she has been getting calls from others saying they were detained after the uncertified drug-sniffing dog at the heart of both cases raised suspicions.

....

The lawsuit says Leo is neither adequately trained nor properly certified for narcotics searches. It says there are no state records showing he's properly certified under New Mexico law.

....

In addition to the two cases filed by Kennedy, the American Civil Liberties Union says it is preparing to sue the U.S. Customs and Border Protection on behalf of a woman who was crossing into El Paso in December and subjected to invasive searches after a drug dog alerted agents.

Attorney Laura Schauer Ives says the woman was strip-searched at the crossing, then taken to the hospital for vaginal and anal probes, a forced bowel movement, X-rays and scans. No drugs were found, the ACLU said, and the hospital is charging her thousands of dollars. Schauer Ives said the woman's medical records refer to her being brought in both by Border Patrol and customs agents. The group has had a Freedom of Information Request pending since April to identify the officers and which departments of CBP were involved.

And let's not forget poor Anthony Mitchell of Henderson, Nevada, who had his door kicked by the local gendarmerie for refusing to let them use his home to spy on his neighbor (thus violating the Third Amendment, where the Deming thugs are violating the Fourth Amendment).

You know, it might be something if our current preznit, who reputedly has some knowledge of Constitutional law, might direct his attorney general to do something useful with his time, rather than griefing potheads and guitar manufacturers.

I don't mean to go all Alex Jones on you here, but there are instances where the man has a point, and such instances appear to be increasing in frequency and intensity. As the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone's not really out to get you. A street cop in Santa Rosa perforates an eighth-grader -- firing eight times, hitting him seven -- for swinging a toy gun too quickly. Things of that sort. Urban and even smaller local police forces routinely inherit heavy-duty SWAT and paramilitary gear now, and they seem more prone to use them, rather than ask questions, or fire a warning or wounding shot.

Look, everyone gets that law enforcement is dirty, dangerous work. When the preponderance of people that you meet and deal with in a given day are assholes and/or idiots, or just generally awful people, it's easy to see how one can eventually come to view most people as inherently bad or dangerous. This can make someone cynical at best, prone to escalate as a first option at worst.

And to all that I say, tough shit, Hopalong. No one forces anyone to be a cop. When you've become an unreasonable person, with deadly weapons, overwhelming force, and an institutional lack of accountability, you are no longer a public servant -- you're a liability, you need to fucking go, and now. There's no excuse whatsoever for any of this shit. There are plenty of good, hard-working police officers out there, and I'm sure they must be disgusted that these animals wear the same uniform, and act with ultimate impunity.

The thing is, as we continue our descent into a volatile, bankrupt, violent, paramilitarized banana republic, there isn't a goddamned thing any of us can do about it. Pray to whatever unjust deity you believe in that you don't get pulled over, I guess.