Some days I can barely stand it

If this doesn't piss you off and break your heart, then fuck you.


Offered without further commentary because, really, I have no words.

Batman and Black Lives Matter

A while back we pointed out that Superman is a big old liberal and predicted that Batman would be next. Turns out we were right!

Batman confronts police racism! BAM!

The latest issue of DC Comics’ flagship Batman series throws itself headfirst into the agonizing conversations roiling America more than a year after Ferguson officer Darren Wilson killed 18-year old Michael Brown. The globally iconic superhero confronts racialized police brutality and its intersection with urban poverty and gentrification – problems Batman comes to realize he exacerbates in his secret identity as billionaire industrialist Bruce Wayne.

That's right, kids. Batman is taking on real world problems. Big liberal.

More on the story can be found at Daily Kos

Driving while black

Wonkette has a story about how a lady doctor got arrested because her husband used profanity in front of a cop. Wanna play let's guess her race? I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count. Go.

The truth about drug dogs

Having worked in law enforcement, I already knew that drug dogs were bogus. Even many of the handlers that use these dogs know that they are fabricating probable cause, but continue to do so in order to carryout searches that they hope will lead to cash (the real target in today's civil forfeiture society).  Now this article confirms much of what I already new:

A groundbreaking study into the behavior of sniffer dogs and their handlers published by Lisa Lit in the journal Animal Cognition in 2011 supports my suspicion. Researchers tested drugs dogs and their handlers with a couple of Machiavellian tweaks to standard study protocol: Firstly, there were no drugs; secondly, the handlers were told that there were drugs hidden in various places inside a church, labelled by sheets of red paper.
In order to trick the dog handlers into believing that they were participating in a genuine drugs study, the researchers carried a box of 12 genuine triple-wrapped half-ounce bags of cannabis past the handlers while they pretended to set up the experiment. In reality the box was never even opened inside the church. Instead of drugs, sausages were placed in some of the various hidden locations around the church. Some of these locations were labelled as containing drugs — indicated by a sheet of red paper, while some locations that were labelled as containing drugs contained neither drugs nor sausages. The experiment was double blind; the experimenters were not aware whether a location was a decoy containing a pair of sausages or a decoy containing what the handlers had been led to believe was cannabis.
Despite there never being any drugs whatsoever in any of the locations used in the experiment, 225 alerts were issued by the 18 handlers and their dogs, every single one of which was, of course, a false alarm. To the dogs' credit, the dogs were not swayed by the sausages, but to the handlers' discredit, there were drastically more false alarms wherever the red markers told the handlers that there would be drugs.

So what went on here? Did the handlers simply cheat and pretend they'd seen their dogs show the correct responses to smelling drugs, or did the handlers somehow lead the dogs to provide positive responses with unconscious cues? This is a difficult question, which requires further research, but a clue to the likely answer lies a century ago in a horse called Clever Hans.

The article


The police will create any hint of cause they can to facilitate a search so that property can be seized. 

A groundbreaking study into the behavior of sniffer dogs and their handlers published by Lisa Lit in the journal Animal Cognition in 2011 supports my suspicion. Researchers tested drugs dogs and their handlers with a couple of Machiavellian tweaks to standard study protocol: Firstly, there were no drugs; secondly, the handlers were told that there were drugs hidden in various places inside a church, labelled by sheets of red paper.
In order to trick the dog handlers into believing that they were participating in a genuine drugs study, the researchers carried a box of 12 genuine triple-wrapped half-ounce bags of cannabis past the handlers while they pretended to set up the experiment. In reality the box was never even opened inside the church. Instead of drugs, sausages were placed in some of the various hidden locations around the church. Some of these locations were labelled as containing drugs — indicated by a sheet of red paper, while some locations that were labelled as containing drugs contained neither drugs nor sausages. The experiment was double blind; the experimenters were not aware whether a location was a decoy containing a pair of sausages or a decoy containing what the handlers had been led to believe was cannabis.
Despite there never being any drugs whatsoever in any of the locations used in the experiment, 225 alerts were issued by the 18 handlers and their dogs, every single one of which was, of course, a false alarm. To the dogs’ credit, the dogs were not swayed by the sausages, but to the handlers’ discredit, there were drastically more false alarms wherever the red markers told the handlers that there would be drugs.
- See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2015/08/24/another-study-shows-unreliability-of-drug-sniffing-dogs/#sthash.hTAI9Rbs.dpuf

A groundbreaking study into the behavior of sniffer dogs and their handlers published by Lisa Lit in the journal Animal Cognition in 2011 supports my suspicion. Researchers tested drugs dogs and their handlers with a couple of Machiavellian tweaks to standard study protocol: Firstly, there were no drugs; secondly, the handlers were told that there were drugs hidden in various places inside a church, labelled by sheets of red paper.
In order to trick the dog handlers into believing that they were participating in a genuine drugs study, the researchers carried a box of 12 genuine triple-wrapped half-ounce bags of cannabis past the handlers while they pretended to set up the experiment. In reality the box was never even opened inside the church. Instead of drugs, sausages were placed in some of the various hidden locations around the church. Some of these locations were labelled as containing drugs — indicated by a sheet of red paper, while some locations that were labelled as containing drugs contained neither drugs nor sausages. The experiment was double blind; the experimenters were not aware whether a location was a decoy containing a pair of sausages or a decoy containing what the handlers had been led to believe was cannabis.
Despite there never being any drugs whatsoever in any of the locations used in the experiment, 225 alerts were issued by the 18 handlers and their dogs, every single one of which was, of course, a false alarm. To the dogs’ credit, the dogs were not swayed by the sausages, but to the handlers’ discredit, there were drastically more false alarms wherever the red markers told the handlers that there would be drugs.
- See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2015/08/24/another-study-shows-unreliability-of-drug-sniffing-dogs/#sthash.hTAI9Rbs.dpuf

Fixing the police.

Campaign Zero


I like these common sense ideas to fix the issues our society faces with police. I like these ideas a lot. I would shuffle the numbers a bit (I think demilitarization is more pressing than community representation, for instance), but this is a workable plan. Put it on a ballot. I will vote for it. I'll fight for it. 


hat tip to Balloon Juice

The Police

Oh my fucking gawd.

A police officer in Alabama proposed murdering a black resident and creating bogus evidence to suggest the killing was in self-defence

He's awaiting trial, right? Nope.

Officer Troy Middlebrooks kept his job and continues to patrol Alexander City after authorities there paid the man $35,000 to avoid being publicly sued over the incident. Middlebrooks, a veteran of the US marines, said the man “needs a god damn bullet” and allegedly referred to him as “that nigger”, after becoming frustrated that the man was not punished more harshly over a prior run-in.

2015, boys and girls. And still.

Middlebrooks allegedly said “the police were going to pull [Bias] aside on a routine traffic stop and [Bias] would get killed”. According to the lawsuit, which has since been filed to court in a separate ongoing case against the city, this prompted the brother-in-law to retrieve a voice recorder that Bias had been carrying around with him in an attempt to monitor alleged harassment by police, and then return to the conversation with the officer.

On the recording, Middlebrooks is heard suggesting Bias had been behaving threateningly towards his relatives. The officer said if he were in the same position, he would “fucking kill that motherfucker with whatever I had in that fucking house”.

This is the fucking planet we live on.