No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

Stanisław Lec (via whakatikatika)

(I hate snow, so this is especially excellent)

Cop runs license check on a suspicious vehicle. Although they apparently committed no traffic violation, cop insists that his decision to run a check had nothing to do with the fact that the occupants were black, and happened to be driving in an affluent, predominately white neighborhood. The cop’s partner apparently then enters the wrong license number, which returns a car that had been reported stolen. So cop follows car into driveway, which happens to be the home of the driver’s parents, where he lives. Cop approaches driver and occupant with his gun drawn. Driver’s parents come out to see what’s causing the commotion. Cop roughs up driver’s mother. Driver gets up from ground to tell cop to lay off of his mother. Cop shoots driver, a full 32 seconds after pulling into the driveway.

The driver, who was unarmed, will now carry a bullet in his liver for the rest of his life. The cop was charged with first degree aggravated assault. A jury acquitted him. Now this week, U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon dismissed the driver’s lawsuit against both the cop that fired his gun and the cop who entered the wrong license plate number, citing qualified immunity. According to Harmon, the officer acted “reasonably,” and moreover, wrongly accusing an unarmed man of stealing a car, pointing a gun at him, then shooting him in the liver, “did not violate [his] constitutional rights.”

Both cops are back on the force. The guy with the bullet in his liver? Tough luck. He’ll be paying his own medical bills.

Radley Balko (via laliberty)

And *I’m* the one on a government watch list. This legal system makes me sick.

If we have such an emotional stake in the answers, if we want badly to believe, and if it is important to know the truth, then nothing other than a committed, skeptical scrutiny is required. It is not very different from buying a used car. When you buy a used car, it is insufficient to remember that you badly need a car. After all, it has to work. It is insufficient to say that the used-car salesman is a friendly fellow. What you generally do is you kick the tires, you look at the odometer, you open up the hood. If you do not feel yourself expert in automobile engines, you bring a friend who is. And you do this for something as unimportant as an automobile. But on issues of the transcendent, of ethics and morals, of the origin of the world, of the nature of human beings, on those issues should we not insist upon at least equally skeptical scrutiny?

Carl Sagan (via coeus)

ALSO, turtlenecks.

Think about that: if you expose to the world previously unknown evidence of widespread wanton killing of civilians (as Manning allegedly did), then you will end up in the same place as someone who actually engages in the mass wanton killing of civilians (as Bales allegedly did), except that the one who committed atrocities will receive better treatment than the one who exposed them. That’s a nice reflection of our government’s value system (similar to the way that high government officials who commit egregious crimes are immunized, while those who expose them are aggressively prosecuted). If the chat logs are to be believed, Manning decided to leak those documents because they revealed heinous war crimes that he could no longer in good conscience allow to be concealed, and he will now find himself next to a soldier who is accused of committing heinous war crimes.

Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)

I was stopped and questioned seven times by University police on my way into the physics building,” he says. “Seven times. Zero times was I stopped going into the gym—and I went to the gym a lot. That says all you need to know about how welcome I felt at Texas.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, on racism at the University of Texas, Austin (via sheikhmaat)

To be fair, it is suspicious *not* to go to the gym at UT (Austin’s one of the fittest cities in the US). But our cops are some of the absolute worst (ironic, given how tolerant Austinites tend to be, as a whole).

Since Austin has one of the lowest crime rates in the country (particularly impressive given it’s the 15 most populous city… Not that the cops will investigate/abstain from committing them), the cops find alternative ways to occupy themselves. I honestly can’t remember how many times I’ve heard about a black kid getting shot in the back (and no warning shots) in East Austin by our police. Never a white kid, never in Westlake or Terrytown. Always an unarmed black kid on the east side. As my friend (who’s black) astutely said: “I’d run too if APD came after me!”

I’d guess that campus police are no better, given how massive the campus is. UT is a very bizarre institution: privately owned football team, privately owned ‘40 acres’ of campus (in addition to some random rural areas, for some reason… This is also why the smoking ban was particularly difficult to fight), but a public institution, with everything down to the course titles subject to legislative approval.

A bill designed to enact President Barack Obama’s plan for a “Buffett rule” tax on the wealthy would rake in just $31 billion over the next 11 years, according to an estimate by Congress’ official tax analysts obtained by The Associated Press. That figure would be a drop in the bucket of the over $7 trillion in federal budget deficits projected during that period. It is also miniscule compared to the many hundreds of billions it would cost to repeal the alternative minimum tax, which Obama’s budget last month said he would replace with the Buffett rule tax.

Report: Just $31b From Buffett Rule Tax on Rich – ABC News

I eagerly await the administration’s sensible and thoughtful revision to their plan, which is likely to come never.

(via jeffmiller)

This isn’t about reducing the deficit guys. It’s about fairness and equality.

(via evilteabagger)

And exploiting the poor math skills we have been so graciously endowed by the benevolent government!

Representative Democracy, The State, Enlightened Anarchy.

If life becomes so perfect as to become self-regulated, no ‘representation’ becomes necessary. There is then a state of enlightened anarchy. In such a state everyone is his own ruler. He rules himself in such a manner that he is never a hindrance to his neighbor. In the ideal state, therefore, there is no political power because there is no state. But the ideal is never fully realized in life. Hence the classical statement of Thoreau that ‘Government is best which governs the least’.

It is my firm conviction that if the state suppresses capitalism by violence, it will be caught in the coils of violence itself and fail to develop non-violence at any time. The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine it can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes its very existence. Hence I prefer the doctrine of trusteeship. — What I would personally prefer would not be centralization of power in the hands of the state, but an extension of the sense of trusteeship, as, in my opinion, the violence of private ownership is less injurious than the violence of the state.

Gandhi (via whakatikatika)

The performance of violent acts, directed against one or more persons, intended by the performing agent to intimidate one or more persons and thereby to bring about one or more of the agent’s political goals.

Terrorism defined by Per Bauhn

Confirmed: The US government is the most powerful terrorist in the world.

Y’all know what this means, don’t you?

Dennis Kucinich— you are a FIERCE anti-war queen. But your time has passed. Now sashay away.

@RonPaulDragRace

No one person has perfect knowledge as to man’s emergence on this earth. Yet almost everyone has a strong religious, scientific, or emotional opinion he or she considers gospel. The creationists frown on the evolutionists, and the evolutionists dismiss the creationists as kooky and unscientific. Lost in this struggle are those who look objectively at the scientific evidence for evolution without feeling any need to reject the notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator. My personal view is that recognizing the validity of the evolutionary process does not support atheism nor should it diminish one’s view about God and the universe.

Ron Paul on theistic evolutionism in Liberty Defined (via gaypher)