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 Sometimes I feel I’m neglecting this blog, which is one of the reasons I’m posting about another mixed bag of subjects today. Why the taco theme? Well, that’s because tacos are the first item in today’s bag!
Everyone’s getting excited over aerial drone deliveries again, and I’m here to piss on the dream. Ever since the original Tacocopter hoax, far-thinking types have been coming up with schemes to deliver stuff via remote control quadcopters. There was that guy who wanted to use quadcopters to deliver cases of beer to ice fishermen in Wisconsin (video link here). And then there’s Amazon Prime Air, which appears to be a serious idea, one that a large organization known for logistical management skills might just be able to pull off.
Ah, but then there’s the Federal Aviation Administration, which does not cotton to the idea of unregulated flying objects buzzing around at low altitude, zipping in front of pilots trying to land or take off, fighting for airspace with police and medical airlift helicopters, or plummeting down onto pedestrians and cars after colliding with other delivery drones and power lines. I don’t mean to be a nervous nellie, but I can easily picture people being seriously hurt by errant drones. I can easily picture assholes taking shots at them. I can easily picture kids running up to landing delivery drones and sticking their hands in the spinning rotor blades.
Because the FAA claims the right to regulate commercial drones, and is taking its sweet time coming up with rules for their safe use, drone delivery, like the hoverboard, has been off in the future somewhere. But now there’s this: Commercial Drones Declared Legal; Release the Tacocopters. Well, that’s what the headline says, at any rate, and Google is full of news links heralding the imminent kickoff of drone delivery service.
I don’t think we have to start ducking just yet. The declaration in question was issued by an administrative law judge working for the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB judge said the FAA does not have a mandate to regulate commercial drone services, based on the fact that the FAA doesn’t regulate hobbyists who fly remotely-piloted model airplanes and helicopters. Okay, well and good, but then there’s this: by law, the NTSB cannot tell the FAA what to do. The NTSB can only issue recommendations; it is the FAA that is legally empowered to issue rules and regulations. The FAA does not have to act on NTSB recommendations, and often doesn’t.
Oh and by the way, we haven’t heard from the Federal Communications Commission yet, and I suspect that agency will have something to say about the radio waves commercial delivery providers would need to use to control their drones. There’s only so much radio bandwidth to go around. The FCC, not the FAA, regulates the radio spectrum and decides who gets to use it.
This is a case of the media jumping the gun, reacting to a recommendation that is far from having the force of law and will probably be ignored by the FAA … and for very good reasons. There, have I spoiled everyone’s fun?
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Yesterday a Senate bill to take commanders out of the decision loop in the prosecution of military sexual assault cases was filibustered and is now dead. A majority of 55 senators voted in favor of it, but it needed 60 votes to get around the by-now automatic Republican filibuster (sadly, some Democratic senators crossed the aisle to vote against it).
I was a military officer for 24 years and fully understand military arguments for keeping the authority to investigate and prosecute sexual assault with commanders. But I can no longer support it. Military leadership has promised, over and over again, to get tough on sexual assault. Military leadership has failed, over and over again, to keep that promise. Commanders routinely sabotage sexual assault investigations and prosecutions to protect favored male officers. The military has demonstrated that it is unwilling to protect victims of rape and assault, unwilling to punish perpetrators. Enough is enough; it’s time for a change.
To be fair, some things might be changing. Per the linked article, three months ago Congress passed legislation preventing commanders from overturning sexual assault verdicts and making retaliation for reporting assault a crime. I don’t know whether military commanders are now bound by these new rules; in fact I don’t know that the President has even signed the legislation. It isn’t law until he has, something the media often fails to point out.
What I do know is that if you’re a woman in the military and you are raped or sexually assaulted, you cannot realistically hope for justice. You can choose to report the assault, in which case you will be retaliated against in some fashion, and you may as well seek another career. Or you can choose not to report the assault (reportedly the decision made by the overwhelming majority of sexual assault victims in the ranks) and try to move on. That is the current reality.
The military should be leading the way in going after sexual assault, as it did with racial integration in the 1950s. I’m ashamed that military leaders have chosen to protect a broken status quo. As far as I’m concerned, at least when it comes to sexual assault, military leaders forfeited the moral authority to invoke the sacredness of the chain of command long ago.
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In my own small way I fight against censorship and book banning, but I do not want to see porn on social media. I’m happy Facebook has a policy against it, although sometimes its censors get a bit overzealous. Vine, the looping six-second user video service, just announced that it too is banishing porn. I’m all for that. It’s not like porn is otherwise censored; you can find all you want on the internet. I just don’t think we should have to constantly dodge porn in the places where we hang out with our friends online.
But speaking of banned books, I’ll soon be reading Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, which has been the subject of an ongoing book-banning attempt at a North Carolina high school. It’s time I find out what all the fuss is about.
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I signed up to lay trail for our local bicycle hash later this month. I rode my planned trail for the first time today, and boy is it a ball-buster. Seriously, why do I sign myself up for torture like this? I picked a particularly hilly part of town, and then picked the steepest, longest uphill section of road in the entire district. Pedaling from the bottom to the top took me half an hour. But hey, if I can do it, the pack can do it, and the hash is on! Here are a couple of thumbs from this morning’s scouting expedition (click on ‘em to see the larger originals on Flickr):
 Selfie at the bottom |
 30 minutes later, view from the top |
Lastly, I know I’ve been remiss in posting new Air-Minded columns, but I want you to know I’m working on two new installments about early jet fighters of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Please stay tuned.
 Streaming video rant follows.
A little over a year ago we invested in a Roku box. We upgraded our in-house wireless network and signed up for increased download rates from Comcast, our high-speed internet service provider. And we subscribed to two streaming services, Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Over the past year Amazon Prime streaming has lived up to its promise, always delivering a high quality picture and never hesitating or reloading. Netflix streaming? It’s been shit from the beginning, though I don’t think Netflix is to blame for it. I’ve come close to canceling several times, but rumors of some sort of deal between Netflix and Comcast kept me on the hook. Then, a few days ago, Netflix and Comcast announced their deal: Netflix would pay Comcast to stop throttling its stream. One of the news articles I read last week said the deal was done and higher streaming rates were already in effect, so it was with great anticipation I sat down to watch a Netflix streaming episode of MST3K on our big flat screen HD TV Friday night.
Sadly, nothing had changed. As usual, the show downloaded at “four dot” quality, not HD but still pretty good. Then, before Joel even got to Robot Roll Call, less than two minutes in, the screen went black. After a short pause the download bar reappeared. A long two minutes dragged by as MST3K slowly reloaded from scratch, this time at “two dot” quality. When the show started running again the image quality was severely degraded: it was like watching a kinescope of a TV show from the 1960s, fuzzy, grainy, impossible to make out detail. Almost as bad as the inset graphic above, which was what Americans settled for before the Civil War, indoor plumbing, and automobiles.
Yes, before you ask, we’ve contacted Comcast. Over and over. We’ve had technicians come to the house. And before you helpfully tell us to check our equipment and connections, please go back and read the part where I said Amazon Prime, streaming through the same equipment and connections, works flawlessly. The problem is not at our end.
Canceling Comcast is not a viable option. It has the local monopoly on broadband internet service and we need the connection. So I canceled Netflix streaming, even though Comcast, not Netflix, seems to be the villain. For now we’ll make do with Amazon Prime and cable TV. If Comcast ever actually stops throttling Netflix … because despite what we read in the news it’s clearly still doing it … I’m sure we’ll hear about it, and should that time come we can resubscribe.
From all I’ve read, and I have been researching our options, satellite and local ISPs won’t cut it: they don’t deliver the download rates you need for streaming video. That’s the real issue here, access to reliable high speed broadband internet, like people have in other countries. That’s what we’re paying Comcast for, but it’s not what we’re getting.
C’mon, Google Fiber! You can’t get here fast enough!
Update (3/3/14): I posted a link to this post on Twitter yesterday and within an hour received a DM from a Netflix employee who explained that the added bandwidth Netflix negotiated with Comcast hadn’t been implemented in my part of the country until sometime Saturday. He promised that if I renewed and checked out Netflix streaming again I’d definitely see an improvement.
I did renew, and so far things look good. After restarting the wireless connection to our Roku, I started a movie my daughter had put on our watch list.* It downloaded at four dots and ran without hesitation or reloading for half an hour before I had to turn it off so Donna could watch the Oscars. The Netflix streaming renewal is month by month, so if the problems come back I’m only out $8 … but as I said so far it looks good.
Thanks, Netflix guy, for responding to me on Twitter! And let me note, for the record, that I’ve heard nothing from Comcast.
* The movie Polly added to our Netflix watch list is Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead. It’s supposed to be a zombie movie, but it seems like thinly-disguised Japanese fetish porn to me, and awakened embarrassing memories of the time Polly talked us into playing a Blockbuster DVD while Dad’s second wife Lois was visiting. I can’t remember the name of the movie, but it was pretty much naked people humping … softcore, not XXX but close enough. I hit eject after five minutes and the three of us sat there red-faced while Polly obliviously asked “Why’d you turn the movie off?”
Never change, Polly. On second thought …
Once a year the Air Force conducts Heritage Flight practice sessions at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, Arizona. The purpose is to train private owners of WWII warbirds and current USAF fighter and attack aircraft pilots to fly formation together. During the rest of the year, pilots who have trained at Davis-Monthan fly at air shows around the country. You can search Google Images for “Heritage Flights” to see representative photos from past years.
 P-40 & P-47 on the ramp at DMAFB The 2014 Heritage Flight practice session is going on now at Davis-Monthan, so I drove to the base to check out what was on the flight line in front of base operations. I think more aircraft were yet to arrive, but here are the ones that were there Friday morning (click on the thumbnails to see the larger originals on Flickr):
 P-51 Mustangs |
 P-40 & P-47 |
 P-47 & P-38 |
 F-22 Raptors |
 P-40 |
 F-86s & T-38s |
After all that excitement, I decided to stop at the display of static aircraft in Davis-Monthan’s Warrior Park, just inside the main gate. Most people can’t get on the air base, after all, and I thought you might like to see some of the aircraft on display there, like this U-2.
 U-2C “Dragon Lady” As you know I’m a volunteer tour guide at the Pima Air & Space Museum just south of the air base, and I frequently post photos of museum aircraft. There are some gaps in PASM’s collection, and the U-2 spy plane is one of them. U-2s based at DMAFB flew reconnaissance sorties over Cuba during the missile crisis of the early 1960s, and this may have been one of them.
Here are some of the other aircraft on display at DMAFB’s Warrior Park (thumbnails, click, etc):
 OV-10 Bronco |
 O-1 Bird Dog |
 F-100F Super Sabre |
 F-4C Phantom II |
 F-105D Thunderchief |
 A-10 Thunderbolt II |
That “F-4C,” I learn from Wikipedia, is actually a Navy or Marine Corps F-4N redone with a Vietnam-era USAF F-4C paint scheme and tail number. I certainly couldn’t tell from the outside … and I guess that means the MiG kill stars on the inlet ramp don’t belong to that particular aircraft, either.
By the way, I’ve recently added several new air museum photos to my Air-Minded Collection photoset on Flickr (scroll down to the bottom for the newest ones). Drop by and check it out!
 I was at Anytime Fitness this morning and as always the wall-mounted flat screen TVs were set to Fox “News,” which is busy trying to conflate Secretary of Defense Hagel’s proposed military budget with total disarmament and the end of American military superiority. Army to be reduced to pre-WWII troop levels! An entire class of attack planes to be scrapped! Obama doesn’t support the troops!
Actually, the Pentagon is trying to comply with sequester budget caps imposed by Congress, and in fact Hagel’s asking for more than that. Under the sequester, the total defense budget was supposed to be cut by $31 billion in 2014, with another $45 billion cut in 2015. The military is actually asking for $496 billion for FY2015, almost exactly the same level of spending as the FY2014 budget it’s working under now. And you can be assured it will fight future programmed cuts under the sequester. So in fact, the military budget is not going down but rather staying about the same.
Army to be reduced to pre-WWII troop levels! Just to show you how sensationalistic and misleading this claim is, the Army had more than 8 million men and women in uniform during WWII. Before the war, in 1940, that number was 269,023. Since the start of the “global war on terror” and our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army troop strength has varied between 480,801 (in 2001) and 565,463 (in 2011).
The US Army today employs 520,000 troops and had been planning, even before yesterday’s budget proposal, to cut those numbers down to 490,000 in FY2015. The new budget proposes cutting back to 450,000 troops, 40,000 fewer than previously planned. Since we are no longer in Iraq, and will be withdrawing from Afghanistan later this year, the reduction is not all that alarming. In 1999, by comparison, Army strength was less than 480,000, so in fact 450,000 sounds about right. Many would argue peacetime Army troop levels should be half that … cut back to real pre-WWII levels.
An entire class of attack planes to be scrapped! Um, we’re talking about one airplane, the A-10. The USAF currently operates around 300 A-10s. Prior plans called for the A-10 fleet to be retired and replaced by the F-35 by 2028. The budget proposal moves this up to 2020, and Secretary of Defense Hagel says this’ll free up 3.5 billion dollars for the F-35 program. The A-10 has many defenders, and arguably the F-35 will not be as capable in the close air support mission as the Warthog, but I personally don’t see how this train can be stopped without also stopping the sequester.
Obama doesn’t support the troops! That’s Dick Cheney, who yesterday declared that Obama would “rather spend the money on food stamps than he would on a strong military or support for our troops.” Excuse me, it’s not Obama, it’s the sequester, and that came from Republicans in Congress, not the White House. The very same Republicans who are now lining up behind Dick Cheney to take cheap shots at the President for military cuts they themselves imposed.
In any case, supporting the troops is largely what the proposed cuts are about, since the intent is to free up money for pay, medical care, and retirement. What Republicans … and especially Dick “Halliburton” Cheney … mean when they say “support the troops” is “support the defense contractors.”
Our media is spamming us with alarmist sensationalism. Military budget cuts have already been mandated by Congress; the military is fighting for a larger pot of money than it’s actually supposed to get under the sequester; troop strength is staying at adequate levels; the USAF is trading one airplane for another; Dick Cheney is full of crap.
Speaking of spam, here’s an email I quit reading after the very first line, when I noticed the “patriot” who sent it forgot to capitalize America:
Sensationalistic news and bot-generated spam. It’s all bullshit. But I repeat myself.
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups.
YCRT! News:
The current textbooks being used in public schools today, that your children are reading, memorizing and being tested on, are inaccurate, revisionist, anti-American, racist, climate change propaganda based on fake science, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, pro-Islam, Marxist, globalist, pro-Socialism/Communism, pro-homosexuality, pro-abortion, and sexually explicit.
In previous YCRT! posts I’ve tried to trace the connection between right-wing politics, Christianist activism, and the current wave of book bannings and challenges in the public schools. The quotation above is from an op-ed by Victoria Jackson. It’s a glimpse into the brains of those who want to purge the school system of any sort of actual teaching.
Amusingly, Jackson’s false claim that the books she’s targeting are actually being used as textbooks in Tennessee elementary school classrooms energized the trolls. Schools have been besieged with calls from outraged parents, and Amazon customer reviews of the books in question have been swamped with angry comments.
Wonkette published a great rejoinder, including a detailed summary of the misleading claims and outright lies contained in Jackson’s op-ed, which should remind us to take everything book banners say with a grain of salt.
Meanwhile, in other book, television, and movie censorship news:
YCRT! Banned Book Review:
 I Hunt Killers (Jasper Dent #1)
Barry Lyga
The narrator of I Hunt Killers is the 17-year-old son of “America’s most wanted serial killer,” now locked away in prison (or is he?). The son, Jasper Dent, grew up under his father’s murderous tutelage, not exactly an accomplice but certainly a witness to the aftermath of his dad’s 24 increasingly sadistic killings. He helped arrange his dad’s trophies — locks of hair and personal items belonging to the victims — and even watched as his dad killed his beloved pet dog in order to help Jasper get over his squeamishness about killing. Jasper goes over and over these killings in his mind, describing awful details like the injection of liquid drain cleaner into still-living captives. Jasper also agonizes, over and over, about whether he himself is doomed to become a serial killer, given his background and education.
Over and over is the operative phrase here: repetition is the most-used item in Lyga’s writerly toolbox. Not a chapter goes by without Jasper asking himself the same questions or restating the reasons he might be a twisted psychopath like his father.
I was unable to swallow some of the premises Lyga relies on to make his story work: one, that local police would allow a 17-year-old boy to assist in active murder investigations; two, that the same cops would not have immediately made Jasper Dent their prime suspect; three, that townspeople would not have burned the boy’s house down and run him out of town.
As with much YA fiction, the young protagonist has sex on the brain, but there’s no actual sex in the book. Jasper’s a virgin and determined to stay that way, at least until he figures out whether he’s a serial killer or not. He’s afraid that if he finds joy in sex he’ll quickly find joy in killing, as his father did.
The story has two main lines: one, the hunt for a new serial killer who is apparently copying Jasper’s father’s old killings; two, Jasper’s mental issues. I was disappointed that Lyga left both lines unresolved; clearly he’s shooting for a franchise, with numerous sequels, and we’ll have to read Jasper Dent #2 or possibly even Jasper Dent #5 before we find out whether the killings end or whether Jasper ever gets his stuff together. Because of this, I Hunt Killers does not seem a stand-alone book to me; it’s more like a chapter in a longer, as yet unpublished novel.
I Hunt Killers first came to my attention while gathering material for a previous YCRT! post. In November 2013, parents in a Lexington, Kentucky school district challenged the inclusion of I Hunt Killers on a high school reading list, saying it is too violent. A local newspaper summarizes the challenge by quoting one of the parents:
“The back of the book is described as deliciously demented and a twisted tale from a teenaged psychopath and it’s all about killing,” said Kassie Bennet. She was shocked when it was in her 15 year old’s back pack for a school assignment.
“If my child picked up the book out of the library, then your child has the ability to do it too,” said Bennet. I Hunt Killers was on the Henry Clay High School reading list, along with dozens of other books. Bennett’s son chose it from the school library, but she wants to know why it was even an option.
I read the ebook version of I Hunt Killers and thus can’t confirm the “deliciously demented” or “teenaged psychopath” blurbs on the book jacket, but I can vouch for the subject matter, and yes, it’s pretty much all about killing. The challenge in Lexington, as far as I can determine, is ongoing. For now the book remains on the reading list, but parents are still trying to have it removed.
I understand where the Kentucky parents are coming from: there’s very little that’s positive in this book. Oh, to be sure, Jasper doesn’t want to be a serial killer. He wants to do right, and at the end of the book he resolves to become a hunter of serial killers. That, I suppose, is good, but it’s not much. Really this book is about killing people in horrible ways, and Lyga lingers over gory descriptions of killing after killing. If Nancy Grace were a YA novel, this is the YA novel she’d be.
While there’s little of value in I Hunt Killers, I can’t accept the book banners’ argument that the book is too dark for teen readers, or that it’ll influence them in negative ways. I hope the school district keeps to First Amendment principles and leaves it on the reading list.
Overall, I found this YA novel repetitive, unrealistic, nastily obsessed with death and mutilation, and lacking an ending. I’m really only interested in it because it’s the subject of a ongoing book banning attempt, and while I’ll follow the progress of the challenge in the news, I probably won’t follow the ongoing saga of Jasper Dent, hunter of killers.
“Remember the couple from England who were here last month? I took them on a hike to the ruins of the Japanese internment camp on Mount Lemmon.”
“There was a Japanese internment camp on Mount Lemmon?”
That’s how the conversation went, me being the dummy who didn’t know about the camp. I’ve lived at the foot of Mount Lemmon since 1998, have driven the Catalina Highway to the top at least a hundred times, and had never heard of any such camp. But the minute my friend mentioned it, things began to click. Yes, the highway had been built with convict labor, overseen by an Army general named Hitchcock. Ipso facto, there must have been a prison camp on the mountain. To be sure, there are dirt roads branching off the highway, one named Soldier Camp Trail, one named Prison Camp Trail. There’s a General Hitchcock Campground. And there’s a sign for the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Area. Gordon Hirabayashi? Sounds vaguely Japanese, right?
I did some digging. There were two Japanese internment camps in Arizona, one near Poston on the western side of the state, and one near Sacaton, halfway between Casa Grande and Phoenix. Approximately 31,000 Americans of Japanese descent were imprisoned in the Arizona camps during World War II. There wasn’t one anywhere near Tucson, though.
Kids of my generation didn’t learn about the mass internment of Japanese Americans during WWII until we were in college, if then. It was almost as if our teachers were ashamed to tell us what their generation had done. Concentration camps in America? Yes, we had ‘em.
Here’s the quick & dirty (click here if you want to learn more): in 1942, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the start of WWII, President Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the internment of people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast. Some were first generation Japanese immigrants, not yet American citizens, but most were American citizens, second- and third-generation descendants who had lived here all their lives. Approximately 110,000 people of Japanese descent were rounded up, forced to sell their property and possessions at short notice, and transported to wartime relocation camps in the western US. Americans of German descent, I was shocked to learn, were not given similar treatment.
If the prison camp on Mount Lemmon wasn’t a Japanese internment camp, what was it? It was a federal minimum-security prison, built in 1939. Convicts housed in the camp, which was named the Catalina Federal Honor Camp, were the laborers who built the Catalina Highway, a 26-mile road from northeastern Tucson to the top of Mount Lemon. In the 1960s the facility was transferred to the state of Arizona, renamed the Catalina Honor Camp, and was used to house juvenile offenders until the 1970s, when it was decommissioned and razed.
 The old prison camp, now the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Area Though the Catalina Federal Honor Camp was not one of the Japanese internment camps set up under Roosevelt’s executive order, it did house some Japanese American prisoners during WWII, and that’s the connection with the man named Gordon Hirabayashi. Hirabayashi was a second-generation American citizen of Japanese descent who protested the wartime internment of Japanese Americans and was arrested for it. He was imprisoned in the camp along with 45 other Japanese Americans who were convicted of resisting the wartime draft. Hmmm … being interned for being part Japanese and then arrested for resisting the draft seems like double jeopardy to me, but what do I know?
Hirabayashi’s case went all the way to the top, and in 1943 the Supreme Court ruled against him, finding the wartime internment of Japanese Americans legal. His wartime conviction was finally overturned in 1987, and in 1999 the old prison camp was renamed in his honor.
Once I’d satisfied my curiosity about the history and purpose of the prison camp on Mount Lemmon, there was just one thing left to do: hop on the motorcycle and take a look at it myself. Here are some photos of the remains of the prison camp, along with one of me bundled up for my February ride up the mountain, taken at Geology Point, a couple of thousand feet above the prison camp site (click on the thumbnails to see the large originals on Flickr):
 Donna, our friend Mary Anne, and I went for a walk in downtown Tucson last night, something we’ve done hundreds of times over the past three years. The Monday evening event is sponsored by several downtown businesses and usually draws 200 or more runners and walkers.
There are plenty of homeless people in the downtown area as well, but they generally shy away from the walkers and runners on Monday nights. On the rare occasions when they panhandle runners and walkers, the cops are usually right there to move them along.
The annual gem and mineral show is in town and our city’s had a lot of visitors. The activists who organized Tucson’s Occupy campouts several months ago decided to organize the downtown homeless population during the gem show, basically to shine a spotlight on Tucson’s failure to address the problem. They set up an Occupy-style homeless camp in a park in the heart of the downtown section, a strategic location gem show visitors would have to walk past several times a day … and coincidentally right in the middle of the Monday night running and walking route as well.
We walked past the homeless camp last night. It was crowded but quiet. We ignored them, they ignored us. There was a large group of woman walkers ahead of us, and I noticed how they bunched together as they passed the camp. But there wasn’t any trouble. The cops weren’t especially visible, but I sensed they were all around.
As in any city, we share downtown with the homeless. Three or four blocks from the homeless camp, in a residential area between the Children’s Museum and the Masonic Temple, there was an angry crazy homeless dude, confronting and swearing at everyone who passed, getting right up in their faces, yelling and making gun-shooting gestures with his hands. He was a block ahead of us, accosting anyone who tried to get around him on the sidewalk. The group of women walkers ahead of us turned off the route and took a shortcut over to the next block. I told Mary Anne and Donna we’d better follow them and save ourselves some trouble.
When we got to the next block the women had stopped and were debating whether to call 911. I told them I would, since there were many more walkers coming along behind us. As soon as I told the police dispatcher I was calling about an aggressive crazy person she said “Yup, know all about it,” and I saw a cop car pulling up in front of the man. Someone … probably more than one … had called him in already. I don’t know what the police did with the guy. I’d like to hope they took him to an emergency room where he could get some Seroquel, because he’d clearly missed a few doses. But I’m afraid I know better than to wish for happy outcomes.
Cops, city cops especially, deal with the homeless constantly. A lot of the homeless are hopelessly damaged, and many are like the guy we ran into last night. I can understand how frustrating it must be. While I haven’t personally seen any police brutality, I know it happens. A lot. A few years ago our hash house harrier club did a trail through downtown Tucson. We stopped for a beer check in Armory Park, where there are always a lot of homeless. One of them saw us drinking beer and, after finding out there’d be more beer at the end of the trail, decided to tag along with us. Good runner, too: he kept up with the pack all the way to the finish, a good three miles away. He got talkative after a couple of beers and told us about being homeless in Tucson. One of the things he told us is that the police routinely beat up the homeless people they roust, and that he’d been beaten by cops many times. On the street, in the back seat of police cars, in jail.
When people say they want the homeless problem to go away, I wonder if they know what they’re really asking for.
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Speaking of law enforcement and our justice system, here’s an exchange I had with a friend on Facebook. As you can see, I’m in a sour mood and badly in need of cute kittens.
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Hey, remember my post about POW/MIA poster worship? I heard from a Gozor poster worshipper on Twitter!
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Yup, time for cute kittens, definitely. What, no cute kittens? The hell you say. Oh, well, here’s our old lady Chewie doing her two favorite things: drinking from the faucet and leaving mats of hair on freshly-laundered & folded dark clothing. She’s eighteen and we indulge her. Click on the thumbs to see ‘em larger:
 #HasJustineLandedYet
Remember that hashtag? It trended for twelve hours one day last December, blanketing Twitter and Facebook. It was a flash mob phenomenon, with the emphasis on mob. It made a previously unknown woman a pariah, and it cost her a job.
I think about recycling that hashtag every time social media turns against some poor slob who says something regrettable, but then I realize few would get the joke.
The target of yesterday’s twelve-hour burn-the-witch frenzy was a USAF staff sergeant who posed for an in-your-face photo with a POW/MIA sign. People reacted as if she’d pissed on the American flag. Taken a dump on a basket of puppies. Drop-kicked a baby. The photo spread like wildfire on Twitter. The sergeant was identified and named. By this morning the USAF was talking about taking “appropriate action” against her.
One member of last night’s Twitter mob said this: “Airman disrespects POW/MIA emblem by sticking tongue in mouth of POW/MIA emblem in photo.”
I couldn’t resist jumping in with this: “We worship posters now?”
To me, the POW/MIA flag poster is just that, a poster. I worked for several Vietnam War POWs when I was in the Air Force, and they were all good men. I have nothing but respect for those men, and indeed for any American troops held captive by enemy forces. But the POW/MIA flag poster has become identified with the Chuck Norris/Ted Nugent branch of right-wing politics, and I’m not going to endorse warmongering by worshipping one of their symbols. Disliking a poster that has been co-opted by a certain brand of conservative politics does not mean I’m not a patriotic American.
I think the woman who lost her job after the #HasJustineLandedYet witch hunt was guilty of nothing more than making a bad joke, her punishment grossly out of proportion to her offense. I think the sergeant who French-kissed the POW/MIA poster was joking too. I hope all she gets is a slap on the wrist; I’m pretty damn sure she’ll never do anything like that again.
People have always gone in for public shaming, but social media makes it happen a lot quicker. Crack wise at breakfast, and by lunch you’re in the town square, squirming in the stocks.
A certain amount of self-censorship can be a good thing. We all have unworthy thoughts from time to time, but most of us have learned to keep them to ourselves. Not so much because we’re afraid of what people might think of us, but because we’re polite. If there’s no need to hurt feelings or open old wounds, why do it?
But if social media becomes a venue for public shaming and witch hunts, we’re going to button up for bad reasons. Because we don’t want to be pilloried. Because we don’t want to lose our jobs. Because we don’t want to see our names dragged through the mud. Because none of us want to be the next Woody Allen.
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Paul’s Thing
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A weblog by Paul Woodford, a veteran USAF F-15 pilot living in Tucson, Arizona |
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Shit hot header graphic by Paul, w/assistance from "The Thing?"
Copyright Copyright 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 by Paul Woodford. All rights reserved. |
