(click to embiggen)It’s Friday! August is nearly over. Wow!
The evil smoke came back. I spent much of the week wearing a breathing mask when I was outside. And the temperature was higher than usual most of the week, again. We’re supposed to get rain this weekend. I suspect it won’t be enough to take out the wild fires. Fortunately, we have more masks, now. So if the smoke comes back we’ll be ready. And if it doesn’t, we’ll be ready for next year.
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) science stories of the week, five sci fi stories, five other stories, five queer stories, and the top five videos (plus my blog posts).
The Price of an Evangelical Christian Soul. “Donald Trump brought Evangelicals to a high mountain overlooking America and told them it could all be theirs—and all it would cost them is their souls. In the dizzying storm of a Presidential campaign and all that was laid out before them, this seemed like a bargain.”
Cher – SOS [Official HD Audio] (I pre-ordered the album, so so far I’ve been getting the singles about an hour before the official audio is released on YouTube…):
Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, when she sang to the largest inaugural crowd in history (Obama’s).It’s Friday! It’s the third Friday of August.
This has been a weird week, with really bad air quality because of smoke from wildfires near and far. The teeny bit of silver lining is that it didn’t get as hot as it was forecast in the middle of the week because all the smoke was reflecting so much sunlight. It was still very unpleasant. And as I type this is not completely over. I’m driving across the state to see my Mom on her birthday, which I hope will be more pleasant than much of the news I had to sift through for this week’s post.
Which brings us to the Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, five stories of the unpleasant kind, the top five videos, notable obituaries (plus my blog posts).
(click to embiggen)It’s Friday! And we’ve already reached the second Friday in August. My, how the time does fly.
Weather forecasts last week had implied (or in some cases explicitly said) the region is was in for a persistent cool down. I don’t know if they were being hopeful or just really f-ing wrong, because several days this week have been as hot as the record-breaking hot days of just over a week ago. Supposedly a cool down is on its way, but I’ll believe it when I experience it.
Let me present to you this week’s Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) science stories of the week, top five stories of general interest, top five stories of people behaving badly, top five stories of interest to queer people, the top five videos, and a notable obituary (plus my blog posts).
Just one of the many cool graphics you’ll find if you click on the first story…It’s Friday! It’s August! How did that happen?
Sunday was the hottest day of the years, and Monday was still pretty bad, but the weather took a turn for the much more pleasant after that. We had drizzle yesterday and today! I’m so happy! I usually do my Friday Five on Thursday night and schedule it to publish in the morning, but I only got it half done because it’s been a crazy week and I decided to binge some things off the DVR. Anyway, only took a few minutes to finish up today.
Let me present to you this week’s Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, five stories of people behaving badly, the top five videos, and a few of notable obituaries (plus my blog posts).
(Click to embiggen)It’s Friday! Already the fourth Friday in July.
Another week of hotter than normal temps here, which we’re managing to get through, but I’m spending a lot more time sitting out on my veranda after dark sipping tea or ice water or LaCroix or gin & tonic…
But enough about us. Let me present to you this week’s Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, five stories of people behaving badly, the top five stories concerning queer people, the top five videos, and a few of notable obituaries (plus my blog posts).
This cartoon by Herb Block (Herblock) was first published in The Washington Post in 1968. It isIt’s Friday! Already the third Friday in July.
My writing continues quite slowly. I didn’t have a superlong work week this week, though since I worked late into Friday, the weariness bled through the whole weekend and I don’t quite yet feel recovered.
But enough about me. Let me present to you this week’s Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, five stories of people behaving badly, the top five videos, and a couple of notable obituaries (plus my blog posts).
I really wish I could blame Camp NaNoWriMo on how little blogging I’ve been doing, but it’s all down to the string of more than 10-hour days as we zero in on yet another ridiculous deadline at work. And now the heat is back, and I don’t deal well when the weather gets hot.
Anyway, here I present this week’s Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week, the top five videos, and a couple of notable obituaries (plus my blog posts).
l to r: Pool Patrol Paul, Permit Patty, BBQ Becky—what do they have in common? [Image: Michael Harriot (Jasmine Edwards, HipHop DX, Emen)]Yesterday’s edition of Friday Five included the story of a 12-year-old black kid who was mowing a lawn (which he had been hired to do) when neighbors called the cops on him. That was not the only episode of a white person calling the police on a black person this week: Pool Patrol Paul.
So, a woman and her daughter went to use the pool owned by the neighborhood Home Owners Association, of which the black woman is a member (which means she is one of the owners of the pool). There are a couple of different videos of the incident, with the guy explaining that it isn’t racial, he’s just enforcing the rules. A white woman in the background of one video points out that she wasn’t asked to show her ID. A few moments later, after the police determine the the black woman has a valid keycard to unlock the gate, and the white guy tries to imply that the black woman stole the key card from a valid resident, an different white woman says, “You didn’t make me sign in!” The guy has subsequently resigned from the board of the home owners association, resigned from his position as the “pool chairman” and either was fired or agreed to resign from his job.
The funniest take I’ve read on this was written by Michael Harriot: Sentient Marshmallow Calls Police on Black Woman for Swimming in Her Own Pool, which is where I grabbed the image above, because he has a theory as to why certain white people, as he asks, who do “white people believe the cops are their personal fugitive slave catchers. Are police supposed to be universal technical support for white people? Why are white people like this?”
At least Pool Patrol Paul remained non-violent, unlike Pool Patrol Paula (no relation): A white woman allegedly hit a black teen, used racial slurs and told him to leave a pool. Then she bit a cop. Last week a group of 15-year-olds showed up at a pool, invited there by a friend, and this woman started yelling at them that they couldn’t be there. The boys (and at least one other witness) say that she used a racial slur, which is what prompted one of the kids to start recording it on his phone. The phone really set her off, because he shouts and comes at him, trying to bat the phone away and she hits him several times. She asks angrily, “How does that feel?” after hitting him. The boys retreat, at least one can be heard very politely saying, “Yes, ma’am, we’re leaving.” Police, reviewing the video and talking to at least one witness at the pool, then got an arrest warrant and went to pick her up. She fought the two cops at her home, injuring both of them—biting one severally enough to break his skin. She’s been charged with assault and battery on the teen, plus two counts of assault on the cops. She’s out on bond, but she has also been fired from her job.
I saw at least one comment to the effect that Pool Patrol Paula, since she got violent with the cops, has some other issues and this shouldn’t be considered a racial case. That’s the wrong way of looking at it.
Let’s go to the case of Pool Patrol Paul insisting that he was only doing his duty as the pool chair person, which including making sure the facilities weren’t used by non-members. When it was pointed out that he didn’t ask anyone else there to prove they belonged, he dodged the question. One of the explanations given over the fact was that he simply didn’t recognize her, since she had bought the house and moved in recently.
Seems plausible, right?
One of the big disconnects that people who are not members of a marginalized group have about the nature of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth, is that bigotry is about feeling a burning hatred for those people. But bigotry is much, much more subtle than that. The video indicates that the pool was pretty crowded. It was a hot day, it was Independence Day, so a lot of people were there. It is not possible to believe that in that situation that he carefully assessed every face around the pool, ticking off names from his mental list. As two of the white women there pointed out, he wasn’t enforcing the rule that everyone sign in—until the black woman and her black daughter showed up.
Systemic bigotry is a subtle, insidious force that we absorb throughout our lives. It tints our perceptions, creating filters in our minds that we don’t process consciously. Our brains are really good at classifying things, people, and sounds we recognize. But it classifies them according to these assumptions that we don’t always understand.
I have no problem believing that Pool Patrol Paul did not literally think, upon seeing the two enter the area, “Uh, oh! Can’t let the n—–s in the pool!” It’s more subtle than that. All of the white skinned people moving around him registered to his subconscious as folks who belong, without him thinking about it. The racial issue made him notice the woman and her daughter, and once he noticed, only then did he think, “I don’t recognize them.”
He asked her her name and address. He went into the office, then came out and asked for her ID. In subsequent attempts to explain himself, he first claimed that he forgot the address by the time he got inside to look her up. Then he changed the story to say that the address she gave was for a part of the subdivision that hadn’t completed construction. Then he said that she gave two different addresses.
What really happened is: she gave him a name and her address. He went inside and looked that name up, and it was the name of a home association member registered at that address. But his gut told him she was lying (later he told the police that it’s possible the key card was stolen). So he went back and asked for her ID.
And the problem is that he never asked himself why his gut was telling him she didn’t belong. And given what statements have come out since, he still hasn’t asked himself that question.
Similarly with Paula—she seems to be a more inherently violent person, but again, it isn’t just that she’s violent, it’s why she immediately assumed those boys didn’t belong at the pool (where she was just a person using it herself; she wasn’t responsible for enforcing any rules), and therefore were legitimate targets for assault. When the cops came to her home a couple days later to arrest her, of course she was outraged! She had done nothing wrong, in her mind.
Michael Harriot was on to something with the comment about perceiving police as personal fugitive slave catchers. These incidents happen because on a fundamental level, people like Pool Patrol Paul and Paula, and BBQ Becky, and Permit Patty, and the neighbors who called the police on a 12-year-old for mowing a lawn, all perceive certain people as not belonging. More than that, they perceive the presence of (in these cases) black people in these places as a wrong that must be righted.
Until they understand that about themselves, they’re going to keep doing things like this, while loudly proclaiming that they aren’t bigots.
Most of my writing effort is going to Camp NaNoWriMo, so there will be fewer updates here than usual. I’m currently on a small vacation, as well.
Anyway, here I present this week’s Friday Five: the top five (IMHO) stories of the week of, top five stories about people disappointing us, the top five videos, and a notable obituary (plus what I posted this week).
We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars. The most interesting bit of this story is the fact that the makers of Sim City had to abandon their original plans to base the game on real cities, because so many parking lots made city look uninteresting!
Well, there are at least two reasons. The simplest one is that if the Dems manage to take back the Senate, they could prevent Cadet Bonespur from appointing anyone new to the court. So at least some of the GOP operatives see this as their only chance to ensure future court rulings continue to take rights away from workers, women, queers, and everyone else that isn’t a Republican billionaire.
But that isn’t the only issue! Now that we know that Justice Kennedy’s son arranged for Trump to get a billion dollar loan, and that Trump has made references to Kennedy’s son within earshot of live microphones just about every time the Justice and the alleged president have been together in public, it seems extremely likely that among those dozens of sealed indictments that Robert Mueller has obtained over the last year or so is probably against Kennedy’s son. This could result, if any of the related indictments or Cadet Bonespur’s attempts to pardon (pre-emptively or not) key people winds up being appealed to the Supreme Court. While recusal is solely up to each Justice, it would be very unlikely that Kennedy would not recuse himself if his son was involved in a case before the Court.
Though it angers me enough that the Republicans stole a seat from Obama last year, and I’m not looking forward to what the court will do with another arch conservative on the bench, I do take heart that despite all the brave talk about a red wave, the people in the know (like those billionaire mentioned above) are acting as if there is a good chance that the Senate won’t have a Republican majority after November. So there is that, I guess.
The marches themselves may not directly accomplish something, but the turn-out indicates people are willing to take action (which includes voting in November).
(click to embiggen)Meanwhile, there have been continued mock outrage over things like a restaurant deciding it didn’t want to serve members of this administration that our aiding and abetting the kidnapping of children at the border, taking health care from tens of thousands, encouraging white supremacists to commit violence, and so forth. I don’t always agree with columnist Michelangelo Signorile, but this week I do: Fuck Civility. And an extra stron f– you to the editorial writers who seem to think that getting in the face of people who have either ordered the commission of these crimes (mass separation of families is defined under international law–the very agreements our country help promulgate after World War II–as genocide and is a crime against humanity) is somehow just as bad or worse than actually committing those heinous acts.
“Give me a break! What is more uncivil and cruel than taking children away? It should be met with resolve and strength. And if some of that comes across as a little uncivil, well, children’s lives are at stake.”
![l to r: Pool Patrol Paul, Permit Patty, BBQBecky [Image: Michael Harriot (Jasmine Edwards, HipHop DX, Emen)]](https://fontfolly.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/jmy987a48qqvermuqdmr.jpg)
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