As Arbery trial starts, Glynn County seeks accountability

A six-month investigation of Glynn County police records and court documents by The Current show a persistent lack of accountability among county law enforcement that stretches back a decade. Between 2010-2019 the district attorney’s office declined to prosecute a single county police officer. Glynn police officers have been involved in at least six controversial shootings and named as defendants in at least a dozen civil lawsuits alleging misconduct, including racial profiling and wrongful death.

Mother’s angry letter about how the “educational machine” of Southlake, Texas broke the law by allowing her daughter to check out a book on anti-racism and her frustration that no teacher was arrested for “violating” her child’s “rights”

“We felt strongly that this could be a teachable moment for all involved and stated our desire for an apology from the teacher so that we could all move on with a clean slate. That was denied… The teacher was not fired. She was not arrested for breaking the law.”

To Live and Die in LA: audio – Jayden being lazy

Jayden is doing his best imitation of a cross between a sloth and the “Just Take a Breath, Son” parent, while simultaneously working to make himself sound important and the situation infinitely more complex than Neil, in his naive civilian-hood could ever comprehend, not to mention wholly unalterable by God or man, it culminates in what may be some record-breaking, top tier, super-duper-Jayden-level-bullshit: “In fact, we’re really waiting on the Justice Department Information Center.” Meanwhile, Neil just goes and Googles that shit and starts reading it off the fucking internet. CLASSIC.

To Live and Die in LA Season 2 TRANSCRIPT: Origins (Bonus 1)

We ignore each other and every once in awhile we have confrontations and she closes her door, whatever. But, uh, she has, she has problem with cleaning the kitchen, and she’s really a messy girl. So whenever I give her hard time about it, she says– she gets really mad. So at one point, um, she goes, “I feel like killing–” um, not killing, “I feel like hurting myself–“

Ducks on Div (plus some Jayden… and Susan, too.)

I’m genuinely curious why people think Law Enforcement would have any interest in talking with Divine at this point, let alone his new girlfriend? Law enforcement has told us multiple times that, as far as they’re concerned, Div has nothing to do with anything and was cleared. Let’s look at Divine Compere • Law enforcement…

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Random scraps from To Live and Die in LA that now look suspicious

JEFF: “I will cause you pain” Yesterday I re-listened to most of the episodes while I was cleaning, and — like everyone else who is listening — I’m trying to figure out where this is going. Having the benefit of hindsight, a few more things stood out to me. There’s a lot of speculation about…

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I noticed some strange things about that conversation w/ Kristen in Ep 3. It’s Susan who looks bad in hindsight. TLADILA

…She was like, ‘Don’t show her– don’t tell her about the text messages and don’t send her those pictures of the Compere’s driving by the search.’ Like don’t send them to her– ‘Just send them to me.’ I don’t know, it was so weird. It was like, ‘Are you–? What are you trying to do?’ I don’t want to make her sound bad because I know she’s freaking out, and– I just thought that was really weird.”

To Live and Die in LA S2: THE ULTIMATE TIMELINE

LAST UPDATED AFTER THE LAST EPISODE: SEPT. 12, 2021 ⁕ The 💰 notation indicates relation to the accident settlement — JULY 27, 2015 — Father, Playboi Carti, etc., concert at the Orange County Observatory: Elaine is raped backstage by multiple men while incapacitated by substances — MAY 2016 — Sadie has car accident and Elaine…

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The Trials of Frank Carson podcast: cast of characters

The judge added that given other problems with the sharing of evidence discovery in the case, the district attorney “should have been sitting here and hearing what the problems are in your office. I don’t get it. I have never seen a case of this magnitude – as you know, I have tried some cases of some magnitude – where the District Attorney’s Office has made so many mistakes with respect to discovery.”

Lt. Zimmerman Gave the Jury in the Chauvin Case an Enormous Hat Rack to Hang a Week’s Worth of Emotion On

This week saw a full day of children sobbing from the trauma of what they witnessed, but they were far from the only witnesses to cry. Mixed martial artist Donald Williams cried between his cogent and and sometimes righteously contained anger. So did the firefighter who approached the scene from across the street — Genevieve Hansen — who first reasoned, then ordered, then almost begged the officers to just “check his pulse!” (“Check his pulse, right fucking now!”)

CHOOSE YOUR FRIENDS LIKE THERE’S A WAR GOING ON: learning from LBJ

I’m almost ready to say that when it comes to achieving a goal — especially an ambitious one — I believe your outcome isn’t so much determined by what you do, but who you do it with. Outcomes, like math problems, are determined by a factorization of known quantities. Math is never magic. There is an inescapable fatalism in it. Embrace it, because you cannot outwit it or outrun it. Make the absolute most of every piece you’ve got on the board, and remember what every good chess player knows: pawns win games. Spend no time mourning the weakness of your fellow cast. Improve it whenever you can, but if you make an enemy, never let it be by accident. After all, in real life pawns don’t wear pawn costumes and queens wear no crowns.

BACKWARDS: the secret itself was our power

Secrets bond us to others. A secret that only you and one other person in the world know is a bond forged in titanium. To have that secret handed back to you, to carry alone and by yourself, is an impossibility. It just keeps the dead person from ever really dying. I found out that secrets are even stronger than death. They span immortality with grace and ease.

What are the major systems that protect bad cops and hinder reform? (Hint: it’s a lot more than just qualified immunity)

The mission of the police union is to protect police jobs at all costs. They’re usually led by old-school types who are often the biggest opponents to any accountability. In Minneapolis, the Police Union president, Bob Kroll, is a very controversial figure. He is already vowing to fight to get the 4 officers involved in the death of George Floyd reinstated, and he, himself, has had 29 complaints against him as a cop.

“She didn’t prosecute a single one of them. Not one.”

In her first year alone, non-violent drug crimes resulting in prison terms doubled, with a full two-thirds ending in imprisonment. And while Minnesota’s record of extraordinarily vast racial disparities in imprisonment certainly didn’t begin with Amy Klobuchar’s tenure, during the eight years she served as chief prosecutor her insistence on longer sentences for less serious crimes actually drove up the number of prison inmates in the state by one-fifth, despite the fact that crime rates in Minneapolis had been dropping at least three years before she took office.

Bill Sargent | | The Guardian

Many of his ideas were of a technical nature, and he registered 400 patents of electric and electronic gadgetry – earning himself a reputation among technicians for being more an inventor than a showman. He was also a shrewd pioneer of such innovations as pay-per-view television, and his film Richard Pryor: Live In Concert (1979), which he cannily labelled “uncensored,” was the highest money-maker of its kind ever. It remains the standard today. 

TREES SHOULD HAVE STANDING – Sierra Club v. Morton: some Justice Wm. Douglass dissent

Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole — a creature of ecclesiastical law — is an acceptable adversary, and large fortunes ride on its cases. The ordinary corporation is a “person” for purposes of the adjudicatory processes,² whether it represents proprietary, spiritual, aesthetic, or charitable causes.
So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes — fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life.* The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it. Those people who have a meaningful relation to that body of water — whether it be a fisherman, a canoeist, a zoologist, or a logger — must be able to speak for the values which the river represents, and which are threatened with destruction.
Mineral King is doubtless like other wonders of the Sierra Nevada such as Tuolumne Meadows and the John Muir Trail. Those who hike it, fish it, hunt it, camp³ in it, frequent it, or visit it merely to sit in solitude and wonderment are legitimate spokesmen for it, whether they may be few or many. Those who have that intimate relation with the inanimate object about to be injured, polluted, or otherwise despoiled are its legitimate spokesmen.


* emphasis mine
¹ [p742] 
² [p743] 
³ [p745]
[p749] “the recurring question which has plagued public regulation of industry [is] whether the regulatory agency is unduly oriented toward the interests of the industry it is designed to regulate, rather than the public interest it is designed to protect.”
[p750] The voice of the inanimate object, therefore, should not be stilled. That does not mean that the judiciary takes over the managerial functions from the federal agency. It merely means that, before these priceless bits of Americana (such as a valley, an alpine meadow, a river, or a lake) are forever lost or are so transformed a to be reduced to the eventual rubble of our urban environment, the voice of the existing beneficiaries of these environmental wonders should be heard.


Head of the Sinner’s Table

At my table we’re cussing, breaking bread, drinking wine, laughing, and proposing toasts to all the saints that got lucky and became sinners.


The journals

The real ones. The backwards ones.
I buried them.
All over.
That’s the secret.
From Yellow Gap Trail in Pisgah National Forest to Abiquiu, New Mexico, I buried my notebooks.

Passing — how my Great-Grandmother became white

“My parents were Cherokee Indians. Of course, our people don’t claim to have come over on the Mayflower or anything like that, but we met ’em at the dock when they landed.” —Will Rogers

A sense of aloneness

And for a little while I held onto my weird bond with the dead artist. But – (shockingly) – it turns out leaning on Leonardo DaVinci for reassurance of how totally and completely not-weird I was, was a terrifically bad strategy. And before long the instinctive childlike kinship I initially felt with Leonardo was a source of confusion and something almost approaching self-scolding in and of itself.
 Because only DaVinci is DaVinci.

Ninety Years Ago Today My Father Was Born

Then turned on one toe, hopped off the huge wooden table and started off, head high, when I heard him slap the table hard with his big hand – the way everyone who knew him remembers he did in his constant, big-ness that encompassed all sight, movement, and certainly sound – and laughed his ass off.

Swallowing Pictures

Mother was big on impressing upon my memory just who was the boss. She felt that the memories of most people were not utilized as well as they could be. She said that the memory was like a dog, and wanted to be trained…
“You will remember this Arch forever, because you have impressed it into your mind, my darling Tami. You just took a picture that can never be destroyed, stolen, or lost. You just took a picture that you can take with you wherever you go, forever, and no one can ever take it away from you.”

UVALDE LAW ENFORCEMENT TIMELINE*

With all available radio transcriptions, so while it’s technically a timeline, we’re starting to get a better picture now.

Arbery murder trial shines spotlight on troubled Glynn County law enforcement: Georgia Today [podcast and transcript]

We gathered documents from both Brunswick police and Glynn County police and in order to have a baseline, we also were collecting records from police in Savannah and Chatham County… What we found out was that, one: there actually is no law across the state of Georgia that mandates police departments anywhere to keep certain data or not… Glynn County has only retained three years of police — policing data, traffic stops, 911 calls.