This is Valerie Castile, mother of cop-murdered Philando Castile, embracing Don Damond, fiancé of cop-murdered Justine Damond. They were together at a march through the streets of Minneapolis that was joined by people of multiple races. Residents along the route came out of their homes to show support. As long as gangs of cops are roaming the streets with license to kill, this is how it ought to be. Castile’s black son was slaughtered (for the crime of being a lawful gun owner) by a pale-complected gunman, Jeronimo Yanez. Damond’s white fiancée was blown off the face of the earth…
Category: Resistance
Sometimes you need to say “no” to Big Brother
Whatever your view of their politics, this is a clever bit of resistance. Four things to spend your money on if you want to buy happiness. “Not everybody gets a cookie”. But every social-justice pecksniff can turn a gesture of kindness into an occasion for a display of vicious narcissism. The left. It had a miserable week. Bastiat’s goofy story and real-life folly in the solar-panel industry as solar power begins to become cheap enough for the masses. No wonder Comey decided to let Hillary skate on all those sloppy security violations. Creative lifesaving. Will this be the well-deserved ruination…
The black dog I finished the black-dog art yesterday. Well, not finished. I’ll be putzing with it for the next week, darkening this color and refining that line. But I got through it. Now it’s just polishing. It was the hardest piece I’ve ever done. Took about as long to do as the icon from last month’s monastery workshop. But the icon was basically a sophisticated version of paint-by-numbers. The black dog was … whew. Flying by seat of pants. Plus I had to get myself out of a couple of self-caused scrapes. Until the last I was on edge:…
Over in the public part of Claire’s Cabal, I tip my hat to Kit Perez and the younger, more activist set of freedomistas. I hope some of us “elders” can encourage them along their way. If you’re a Cabal member, you can comment over there. If you’re not a Cabal member, you can still read that post and everything else on the “Let’s Talk” board. Most of the rest of the Cabal is private. Although it will remain private, I’m strongly considering eliminating the pay model, which hasn’t worked very well. Or at least changing the way the pay model…
After seven years, five of it spent with Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy. Where he still remains because you know the U.S. government is going to do anything it can to get him. At least Manning is now free.
This far. And farther, of course. The Intercept tells the story of how the FBI concocted a fake production company with a fake documentary crew to get the Bundys and their supporters to self-incriminate. Journalists and filmmakers rightly object when police and spies impersonate them. They ignore the fact that plenty of actual journalists over the decades have acted as government agents. Long, weird, twisted story. Worth a read, though, and worth heeding for any activist.
Killing time while waiting for The Wandering Monk to arrive and begin the foundation project, I found something absolutely fascinating. Johatsu. A Japanese word meaning “evaporated people.” Not dead. Not suspiciously missing. But people who’ve chosen to disappear out of their existing identities into new, perhaps off-grid ones. A French couple have been tracking this phenomenon for years and now have published a book: The Vanished: The “evaporated people” of Japan in Stories and Photographs. PRI has done a story on the johatsu and the French pair who became obsessed with them, as has Business Insider. Oddly, it turns out…
… Including places where you normally find only criminals. Once a month, a cardboard box from Colorado appears at the office of a conservative Christian lawmaker in central Georgia, filled with derivatives of marijuana, to be distributed around the state in the shadows of the law. Operating in ways he hopes will avoid felony charges of drug trafficking, state Rep. Allen Peake, R-Macon, is taking matters into his own hands. He’s shepherding cannabis oil to hundreds of sick people who are now allowed by the state to possess marijuana, but have no legal way of obtaining it. Nearly all the…
There was a time — long ago now — when this theoretical situation would have been an interesting dilemma worth holding a long discussion over: You’re in a position where doing a good deed involves breaking a multitude of laws. What do you do? Back in the day, “breaking a multitude of laws” would likely have meant you were breaking laws against doing harm. So you’d have to balance not only possible penalties of lawbreaking but also the chance of doing bad to one party while trying to do good elsewhere. Now? It’s not even worth talking about. Laws are…