Odd Bits - The Downbound Train Edition

Sorry I’m a day late. Had a holiday happy hour Monday night and wasn’t up for pontificating when I got home. Tonight is another story.

Baltimore Blue Redux

First, I want to follow up on a post I ran in June about the arrest of a Baltimore City policeman after he and another officer tackled and arrested someone who made a comment about another arrest that was going on, while walking by.

Friday’s Baltimore Sun reported that this officer has now been indicted on 32 additional counts of false imprisonment, assault, and misconduct in office, based on a “pattern and practice of harassment and intimidation.” The charges included 11 counts of second-degree assault, 11 counts of false imprisonment and 10 counts of misconduct.

After the first incident, the State’s Attorney, Marilyn Mosby, requested past body camera footage from the officer in question, which led to the additional charges. What they found was a pattern of unlawful conduct.

In my original post, I said, “I can only assume that incidents like this in the past were covered up and the tapes “disappeared.”” According to Deputy State’s Attorney, Janice Bledsoe, the state’s attorney’s office normally only receives body-camera footage related to arrests.

If I’m with the state’s attorney’s office, I’m requesting a whole bunch more body-cam footage, just to spin through and look for more such malfeasance. I guarantee this guy isn’t the only one on the force who’s swingin’ his balls around on the beat like he's King Shit of Turd Mountain.

Again, I’m happy that new police Commissioner Michael Harrison is not putting up with this kind of stuff. Here’s to hoping the word spreads through the ranks. As long as the cops are lacking in trust and credibility, they cannot truly do their jobs.

As of now, there are over 300 Baltimore police officers on a list with the State’s Attorney’s office as non-credible witnesses, who cannot be put on the stand. Until that changes, the cops can arrest as many as they want, but they’ll end up right back on the street if they can’t be convicted.

Now on to some debunkery...

Leave Greta Alone!

Hey, you misspelled “Person of the Year Greta Thunberg is a...”

The knives are really out for poor Greta. Nothing pisses off the GOP/Proud Boy/Incel crowd like a young girl getting credit for something.

Top half: "She has no practical solution"… yet "her ideas would cause devastation?" What ideas? You said she had none. Or do you mean “practical” like “we can reverse climate change with practically no change to our habits and for practically no money?” You think addressing climate change will cause devastation? Wait until you see what happens when we don’t.

Bottom half: Sounds like a good idea. Why aren’t the rich GOP donors funding this kid’s idea? They could get a whole fleet of these plastic skimmers online. But they don’t really give a shit. Funding environmental projects doesn’t help next quarter’s bottom line. It’s a lot easier to denigrate others who threaten to upset the balance sheet.

Cleaning the plastic out of the Pacific is just one small subsection of addressing the climate crisis. Anything that makes an impact is going to be financially destructive, there’s no getting around that. It’s just that doing nothing is going to be more so. We can pay now and handle it in an effective and thoughtful way, to set our world up for the future, or we can throw money down the toilet later, when Miami, the Outer Banks, and Long Island are under water.

This one is just a mess.

“Riding on a diesel burning train…” She’s traveling across Europe, what’s she supposed to do, para-sail? Getting hundreds of people from place to place on public transportation IS a benefit to the environment, regardless of the fuel source.

Single use plastic (this that and the other)…  Which can be recycled or reused. Who says it’s single use? (You can’t really tell anything from the picture.) Besides, she’s still a 16-year old girl. I’m sure she used what the train service gave her. She’s not the Queen, traveling with her finest cutlery.

Here’s the macro flaw of most of these kind of attacks: Greta doesn’t have to be an expert on environmental science, she doesn’t have to be the paragon of reusable resources. She’s allowed to have flaws and human faults. That doesn’t make her wrong in what she’s doing, which is taking 99% of climate scientists at their word and demanding the powers that be take action, to preserve some kind of world for her generation.

Obviously, if she wasn’t so effective, climate deniers wouldn’t be so scared of her that they make up mile-wide-and-inch-deep memes to undermine her message.

Back to Square One

Last week, the Supreme Court let a Kentucky law stand that forces doctors to show the woman an ultrasound and give her a detailed description of the fetus, even if she doesn’t want to listen.

Yes, it’s another law passed by white men who insist they know what’s better for a pregnant woman than she does, herself.

If the Supreme Court is going to start upholding these (and many other) onerous, sadistic, misogynistic laws, the only recourse now is to go back to the grass roots and elect people to state legislatures and governorships who will revoke these destructive laws. Local jurisdictions put these laws in; they’ll have to be the ones to take them out too.

That takes the five Republican men of SCOTUS out of the doctor’s office, for good (we hope).

Not for long, motherfucker, not for long. #President*