I think that just about covers it.
“I do not regret the incident. I will not apologize, given the opportunity. I don’t plan on doing anything like this in the future but to be fair I didn’t plan the initial incident, I just found them and decided to go through with it.” —NathanTheHicc
Remember, remember.
Huh. —This is my first election night without, as the kids call it, the Birdsite in quite some time. I wonder how this used to work?
Go, read:
back in the good old days, the before-times, we used to spend a whole blog post on nothing more than telling you to go and and read somebody else’s blog post, so: while I’m elsewhere otherwise occupied, go you then and read about the time Maria Farrell debated Ted Cruz into the ground.
#notallC.A.B.
A look at what the retired horses of Portland’s no-longer Mounted Unit have been up to, a year after they were disbanded:
Murphy went back home in southern Oregon where he’s competing in dressage, a highly skilled form of riding, while Red, Monty and Asher are with families who wished to keep their locales private. Major found his place in Prineville, while Diesel went back home to Port Orchard, Washington. Olin aids people with mental or physical barriers as a therapy horse at Forward Stride in Beaverton, and Zeus lives with a former mounted patrol stable attendant at the Lake Oswego Hunt Club.
But why, as the kids say, do you have to go and make this political.
Even though she has friends living in the city, Mack said she remembers her years there with the horses so vividly that she can’t bear to visit Portland anymore.
“Honestly, it’s sad for me to go there,” she said. “I mean, I look around every corner and remember when a horse was walking there.”
And she still wonders, she said, why the unit was disbanded yet again.
“It’s pretty hazy to me as to why, after 20 years of blood, sweat and tears, I was told it was a budget issue when it didn’t appear to be a budget issue.”
She said they were told the mounted patrol would be replaced by community service officers, but she never saw that happen.
“There’s all this talk about community policing,” Mack said. “Well, you cut the best community policing tool you ever had.”
If nothing else, one might idly muse over what might’ve become of recent antifa and fascist clashes had they been met with crowd-control officers on horseback, and not barely-less-than-lethal SWAT troops looking for a fight.
(And I know why the mounted unit was disbanded: it’s because I mentioned them over there once, and as with anything I work into the story like that, once I’ve done so, it must then be demolished, destroyed, forgotten, erased from the city.)
Why do you rob banks, Willie?
I mean, what happens when he loses clients and can’t really network within the comic book community because he’s suing them for two and a half million dollars?
The worth of dirt.
Example: The ongoing fight to save the 125-year-old Wayne Apartments, better known as the block containing Shorty’s, the “clown bar.” Residents rallied for the building because it forms a sort of funky heart to the core of Belltown. They had seemed to win three years ago when it was granted historic protection on the grounds that it predated the regrading of the city in the early 1900s.
But the landmarks board recently voted to relax that protection, because the building is in such a poor state the owner said he couldn’t do anything with it.
“Dirt is more valuable than this building,” one of the landmarks board members said, expressing frustration with how the superheated real-estate market is overwhelming any intangible value like culture or community wishes.
That’s from up in Seattle; meanwhile, here in Portland, we’re kicking out a wildly successful food cart pod to make way for a 5-star 33-storey glass tower with plenty of hotel rooms for all the people who come here to eat at the quirky food carts they’ve heard so much about.
The ground floor includes several retail storefronts, including space for a potential food hall, which [Walter] Bowen[, chief executive of BPM Real Estate Group,] said would be similar to downtown’s Pine Street Market.
“This project will be a development for the ages and a catalyst for international commerce,” Bowen said. “We believe that the next generation of real estate investors and developers will compare their projects to this one due to its high standards for design, construction, community and elegance.”
I don’t know; if anybody ever writes songs about this place, I don’t think you’ll like them.
The spectre, of this superheated market, before which we must all bow, and unto which we must all do what (almost) none of us want; take steps (almost) all of us regret: the original grand algorithm, this first Von Neumann machine: fiduciary duty! Which thoughtlessly heartlessly eats up the world to make of it shareholder value—the original grey goo.
When they came for the music, they finally pushed the limit. Maybe we’ll snap when they come for the pink Elephant.
Burned all my pronouns, what good are pronouns.
I mean, I’ve written about pronouns, like, fourteen years ago pronouns, and while I wince and cringe today at the patronizing tone I took then (forgive me, I was old), the basic stance is one I still take firmly: any system with two gender-poles requires at a minimum five genders of pronouns to operate with any dignity or grace. —That said, and the reason I bring this up now, now that pronouns and their various uses have progressed so far that bios should list them and badges should ribbon them and a third-rate Jungian washout can achieve international fame by refusing to honor them, now that we’ve come so much further than anyone might’ve thought possible fourteen years ago, the reason I bring it up is because when I go to take a step I wholly support everyone else in taking, to suggest or insist upon their preferred or actual pronouns—I find I can’t, and it’s for an entirely irrational reason that only applies to me, and yet, but still: I’d be telling you how to talk about me when I’m not there. —Which seems (to me! only for me!) inescapably, well. Rude. (To me! For me! You, you’re all fine! All of you! And beautiful!)
Punchy, anyway.
I mean the impetus for this couldn’t be more pathetically transparent, it’s right there in the first paragraph. —As for the Hugo-winning “forgotten story,” I’d merely note the Hugo is hardly an imprimatur of excellence in reporting.
A.C.A.B.
She told conservative talk-radio host Lars Larson she thought the protesters were acting like children who lost a schoolyard fight and had gone of to “whine and complain” after police fired flash-bang grenades, rubber bullets and pepper spray into a crowd of demonstrators. (At least two people were sent to the hospital with serious injuries after being hit directly with stun grenades launched by police, and many more have reported being hurt.)
“I tell you, ‘Meet me after school at 3:00. Right? We’re gonna fight’,” Outlaw said, setting up the analogy to describe how she feels her critics are acting. “And I come with the intention to fight. And then you get mad because I kicked your butt. And then you go back and you wail off and whine and complain.”
Well, I’m seeing at least two problems right up front: first, the police should never ever under any circumstances ever go anywhere with the intention to fight. For fuck’s sake. —And second?
Lars Larson: How you doing, chief?
Chief Danielle Outlaw: I’m great. Thanks for having me today.
LL: So now how long have you been here since Oakland?
DO: 10 months.
LL: 10 months. Is Oakland a tougher city or is Portland a tougher city?
DO: Similar issues, different cultures.
LL: Different, how different?
DO: Uhhh…
LL: Come on. We’re not politically correct here.
DO: Neither am I.
Go, move, shift.
I needed this tonight, and thought you might as well, but I’ll warn you—the first time through’s the easiest, by far.
The process, however, can be reversed at any time…
“And maybe—here’s where I really stick my neck out; you’re welcome—you’re tangled up, too. Maybe you did think they talked like that, or that you should be able to say that word, or that rape is just a gross thing that happens pretty rarely outside of crime procedurals. I mean, I’m white and straight, and I can’t even forgive you on behalf of all the other white straight ladies, but speaking purely for myself: That could be okay. If you weren’t a woman yourself, you could easily be a good person and just not know certain things. Adam Horovitz didn’t. People don’t know things, until they do. Education was invented for the sole purpose of addressing this well-known human problem. So yeah, you turned the wrong corner, took the wrong train, thought rape was rare: You turned back around once you realized the mistake, right? As long as you get to the right place, we can hang out. If you take the wrong turn and stick to it out of pride until you eventually walk into the ocean, then I worry.” —Sady Doyle
Outside voice.
I should probably also note, for whatever passes for the record around here, that I remain perplexed by the esteem in which the Mixon Report is held, greatly disappointed by the quarters from which praise for it has issued, and frankly appalled that it managed to win a Hugo.
Ferguson’s rede:
It is easier to imagine the end of a city, than the end of a police force.
A sure sign of honesty and integrity.
“These charges are false. While we have not read the book, the only reality here is that Gabe was not provided any direct access to Roger Ailes and the book was never fact-checked with Fox News.”
“This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.”
On the one hand:
Don’t worry about a welcome mat. We’ll let ourselves in. #ChicagoPD premieres Wednesday on NBC. pic.twitter.com/Mlnf1ypYw0
— Chicago P.D. (@NBCChicagoPD) January 4, 2014He says his son had about a six-inch screwdriver and was threatening to fight his mother, so they called police to calm him down.
Wilsey says everything was under control until a third officer arrived, and the situation took a dramatic turn.
“Murder. They murdered our son for no reason,” Wilsey said. “Everything was going good, then this fat cop from Southport walks in the room, walks around the corner, says, ‘We don’t have time for this. Tase that kid now. Let’s get him out of here.’”
Wilsey says like any teenage boy, his son tried to run when he heard the word tase.
“The tasers hit him, he fell back. Two officers were on top of him. You know, he’s got the little screwdriver. I mean, I would have went and got the screwdriver from him. I went to help, and I hear a shot,” Wilsey said.
Wilsey says he grabbed the officer so he could not shoot again.
Go, and do thou likewise.
“You should not expect a handout,” he tells me. “You should not even expect a safety net. When my house burns down, I should not go to the government to rebuild it. I should have the savings, and if I don’t, my neighbors should pitch in for me, because I would do that for them.”
So sayeth Frank Luntz, as neutral a political consultant as you’re ever likely to meet. —And you shake your head and wonder why it’s so damn hard for some people to understand that government’s just a means of making sure that help is pitched whenever it’s needed, to whomever needs it—and then you read it over again and see the work that word, “neighbors,” really does in this sentence: I don’t want to help just anyone, it says. Just the people I like. Just the people like me. —How ugly it becomes, in hands like these.
“I am grateful that Occupy Wall Street turned out to be a bunch of crazy, disgusting, rude, horrible people, because they were onto something,” he says. “Limbaugh made fun of me when I said that Occupy Wall Street scares me. Because he didn’t hear what I hear. He doesn’t see what I see.”
Mr. Waturi’s lament (2014 remix):
I know they can do the job, but can they get the job?
I know they can get the job, but can they get paid for the job?
—I’m not arguing that with you, I’m not arguing that with you, I’m not arguing that with you, mic drop.
