An excerpt from the NY Times -
Ethan Couch, ‘Affluenza Teen’ Who Killed 4 While Driving Drunk, Is Freed
By DANIEL VICTOR
Ethan Couch, whose trial for killing four people while driving drunk sparked widespread conversations about the privilege of being raised wealthy, was released from a Texas jail on Monday after nearly two years.
Mr. Couch, 20, became known as the “affluenza teen” after a psychologist suggested during his trial that growing up with money might have left him with psychological afflictions, too rich to tell right from wrong. He attracted further attention when he and his mother, Tonya Couch, fled to Mexico in an effort to evade possible jail time.
He served his 720-day sentence in a jail in Tarrant County, and was freed about a week before his 21st birthday.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/us/ethan-couch-affluenza-jail.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Monday, April 2, 2018
Killing His Character
An excerpt from the Huffington Post -
Killing Him While He’s Dead, A Eulogy For Stephon Clark
By Imam Omar Suleiman
The victim is somehow always made out to be the aggressor. Because if you cast enough aspersions on his character, create enough doubt about the circumstances of his murder and maintain an omnipresence of criminal identity, then maybe Stephon was asking for it. Maybe he’s not worth fighting for.
Many will, in fact, say that, though he didn’t deserve to be shot at 20 times, we also shouldn’t feel too bad.
Because if you distort his reputation enough, then you can discredit his status as a victim, and disregard his status as a human being.
The same media that humanizes domestic white terrorists like Dylann Roof and Mark Anthony Conditt deliberately vilifies black victims like Alton and Stephon.
And I, for one, don’t think it’s unreasonable to demand that black victims be treated with at least the same amount of dignity as white terrorists.
It’s not Stephon’s record or reputation that needs to be brought into question, it’s the way we police in this country that needs to be on trial.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-suleiman-stephon-clark_us_5abf90f1e4b055e50acdf47c
Killing Him While He’s Dead, A Eulogy For Stephon Clark
By Imam Omar Suleiman
The victim is somehow always made out to be the aggressor. Because if you cast enough aspersions on his character, create enough doubt about the circumstances of his murder and maintain an omnipresence of criminal identity, then maybe Stephon was asking for it. Maybe he’s not worth fighting for.
Many will, in fact, say that, though he didn’t deserve to be shot at 20 times, we also shouldn’t feel too bad.
Because if you distort his reputation enough, then you can discredit his status as a victim, and disregard his status as a human being.
The same media that humanizes domestic white terrorists like Dylann Roof and Mark Anthony Conditt deliberately vilifies black victims like Alton and Stephon.
And I, for one, don’t think it’s unreasonable to demand that black victims be treated with at least the same amount of dignity as white terrorists.
It’s not Stephon’s record or reputation that needs to be brought into question, it’s the way we police in this country that needs to be on trial.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-suleiman-stephon-clark_us_5abf90f1e4b055e50acdf47c
Sunday, April 1, 2018
Rethinking Car Rentals
From Apple -
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/turo-better-than-car-rental/id555063314?mt=8&uo=4&at=10l6UR
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/turo-better-than-car-rental/id555063314?mt=8&uo=4&at=10l6UR
Saturday, March 31, 2018
Will They Get Away With Murder Too?
An excerpt from the Sacramento Bee -
Here's another result of the Stephon Clark autopsy – cops can't investigate cops
BY MARCOS BRETÓN
An independent autopsy commissioned by a lawyer may seem like a publicity stunt to those who seemingly have no problem with an unarmed man being gunned down by Sacramento Police. The autopsy, revealed Friday, found that Stephon Clark was shot repeatedly in the back on March 18. Beyond that is this undeniable truth:
The Coroner of Sacramento County, the District Attorney of Sacramento County, Sacramento Police, Sacramento Sheriffs – the entire local law enforcement community – had it coming. Here was a lawyer for one family who refused to wait six months, eight months, a year, 14 months or longer until they, the local authorities, released "official" findings after a fatal police shooting.
Putting aside technical debates over the methodology of Clark's autopsy, performed by Bennet Omalu, the former chief medical examiner for San Joaquin County, the explosive findings made public at a Friday news conference conveyed a clear statement to local law enforcement authorities: We don't trust you.
If Sacramento is a microcosm of a national dispute over whether law enforcement officials essentially can investigate their own, then officials here give weight to the conclusion, no, they can't. They have truly earned the heat they are catching right now.
For years, fatal shootings committed by local law enforcement followed a familiar pattern: An African American man is killed, there is public outrage, the official investigations drag on for months if not longer, everybody waits for everybody else's report to be completed, and the findings become public long after the original incident.
Some people think, not unreasonably, that this is deliberate. They speculate: The length of time in releasing official reports is so all the players can get their stories straight. At least, that's how it looks to a skeptical public.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/marcos-breton/article207513614.html#emlnl=Afternoon_Newsletter#storylink=cpy
Here's another result of the Stephon Clark autopsy – cops can't investigate cops
BY MARCOS BRETÓN
An independent autopsy commissioned by a lawyer may seem like a publicity stunt to those who seemingly have no problem with an unarmed man being gunned down by Sacramento Police. The autopsy, revealed Friday, found that Stephon Clark was shot repeatedly in the back on March 18. Beyond that is this undeniable truth:
The Coroner of Sacramento County, the District Attorney of Sacramento County, Sacramento Police, Sacramento Sheriffs – the entire local law enforcement community – had it coming. Here was a lawyer for one family who refused to wait six months, eight months, a year, 14 months or longer until they, the local authorities, released "official" findings after a fatal police shooting.
Putting aside technical debates over the methodology of Clark's autopsy, performed by Bennet Omalu, the former chief medical examiner for San Joaquin County, the explosive findings made public at a Friday news conference conveyed a clear statement to local law enforcement authorities: We don't trust you.
If Sacramento is a microcosm of a national dispute over whether law enforcement officials essentially can investigate their own, then officials here give weight to the conclusion, no, they can't. They have truly earned the heat they are catching right now.
For years, fatal shootings committed by local law enforcement followed a familiar pattern: An African American man is killed, there is public outrage, the official investigations drag on for months if not longer, everybody waits for everybody else's report to be completed, and the findings become public long after the original incident.
Some people think, not unreasonably, that this is deliberate. They speculate: The length of time in releasing official reports is so all the players can get their stories straight. At least, that's how it looks to a skeptical public.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/marcos-breton/article207513614.html#emlnl=Afternoon_Newsletter#storylink=cpy
Too Good to Cherry Pick
From VerySmartBrothas -
Is It a Coincidence That Today’s Most Outspoken Black Male Athletes Are Married to Black Women? (Hint: Nah)
By Damon Young
https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/is-it-a-coincidence-that-todays-most-outspoken-black-ma-1824084782
Is It a Coincidence That Today’s Most Outspoken Black Male Athletes Are Married to Black Women? (Hint: Nah)
By Damon Young
https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/is-it-a-coincidence-that-todays-most-outspoken-black-ma-1824084782
UnFair Housing
An excerpt from the Atlantic -
The Unfulfilled Promise of Fair Housing
Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of an integrated America was about creating a more equal society, but to many white homeowners, it was a threat.
By ABDALLAH FAYYAD
“Kill him,” a white mob chanted as Martin Luther King Jr. marched across Marquette Park in the late summer of 1966. King had recently moved to Chicago, and on that August afternoon, he joined a Chicago Freedom Movement march to demand that realtors not discriminate against black residents seeking to live in white neighborhoods. But a group of white counter-protesters grew violent and started hurling rocks, bottles, and bricks at the demonstrators, eventually striking King in the head. “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen here in Chicago,” he said, shining light on a problem that white Northern liberals had ignored and let fester for far too long: de facto segregation.
Up until the civil-rights era, segregation was largely reinforced, if not promoted, by federal and local governments. In the 1930s, for example, the Federal Housing Administration incentivized developers to build suburbs for whites only, and the Public Works Administration built separate and unequal housing projects. After a series of Supreme Court cases deemed segregation unconstitutional in the 1940s and ‘50s, American neighborhoods continued to segregate without legal recognition, in a system known as “de facto.” And like de jure segregation—when the government legally engineered ghettos into existence—de facto segregation continues to exacerbate wealth and racial inequality today.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/the-unfulfilled-promise-of-fair-housing/557009/
The Unfulfilled Promise of Fair Housing
Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of an integrated America was about creating a more equal society, but to many white homeowners, it was a threat.
By ABDALLAH FAYYAD
“Kill him,” a white mob chanted as Martin Luther King Jr. marched across Marquette Park in the late summer of 1966. King had recently moved to Chicago, and on that August afternoon, he joined a Chicago Freedom Movement march to demand that realtors not discriminate against black residents seeking to live in white neighborhoods. But a group of white counter-protesters grew violent and started hurling rocks, bottles, and bricks at the demonstrators, eventually striking King in the head. “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen here in Chicago,” he said, shining light on a problem that white Northern liberals had ignored and let fester for far too long: de facto segregation.
Up until the civil-rights era, segregation was largely reinforced, if not promoted, by federal and local governments. In the 1930s, for example, the Federal Housing Administration incentivized developers to build suburbs for whites only, and the Public Works Administration built separate and unequal housing projects. After a series of Supreme Court cases deemed segregation unconstitutional in the 1940s and ‘50s, American neighborhoods continued to segregate without legal recognition, in a system known as “de facto.” And like de jure segregation—when the government legally engineered ghettos into existence—de facto segregation continues to exacerbate wealth and racial inequality today.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/the-unfulfilled-promise-of-fair-housing/557009/
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