Finally, a day clear to get back to work on the Tree Quilt.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Finally, a day clear to get back to work on the Tree Quilt.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
Daniel Rushing buys a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other week. (July 27, 2016) (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda / Orlando Sentinel)
Orlando cops decided to arrest a 64 year old man who was guilty of driving and doughnut eating – everyone be careful, if you’re going to do the same, stay away from the glazed!
Daniel Rushing treats himself to a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other Wednesday. He used to eat them in his car.
Not anymore.
Not since a pair of Orlando police officers pulled him over, spotted four tiny flakes of glaze on his floorboard and arrested him, saying they were pieces of crystal methamphetamine. The officers did two roadside drug tests and both came back positive for the illegal substance, according to his arrest report.
He was handcuffed, arrested, taken to the county jail and strip searched, he said. A state crime lab, however, did another test several weeks later and cleared him.
“It was incredible,” he said. “It feels scary when you haven’t done anything wrong and get arrested. … It’s just a terrible feeling.”
[…]
That’s when she spotted “a rock like substance on the floor board where his feet were,” she wrote. “I recognized through my eleven years of training and experience as a law enforcement officer the substance to be some sort of narcotic,” she wrote.
She asked for permission to search his vehicle, the report says, and Rushing agreed. “I didn’t have anything to hide,” he said. “I’ll never let anyone search my car again.”
Riggs-Hopkins and other officers spotted three other pieces of the suspicious substance in his car, according to the report.
“I kept telling them, ‘That’s … glaze from a doughnut. … They tried to say it was crack cocaine at first, then they said, ‘No, it’s meth, crystal meth.'” His arrest report confirms that he tried to tell them.
[…]
She booked him into the county jail on a charge of possession of methamphetamine with a firearm. He was locked up for about 10 hours before his release on $2,500 bond, he said.
According to FDLE, an analyst in its Orlando crime lab did not try to identify what police found in his car. She only checked to determine whether it was an illegal drug and confirmed that it was not.
Three days later, the State Attorney’s Office in Orlando filed paperwork, saying that it was dropping the case.
Rushing, who retired after 25 years as an Orlando parks department employee, has hired a lawyer and is asking the city to pay him damages.
“I got arrested for no reason at all,” he said.
[…]
The Orlando Police Department did not explain why the two drug field tests that Riggs-Hopkins conducted were wrong.
When asked how many other road-side drug tests have produced false positive results, an OPD spokeswoman wrote, “At this time, we have no responsive records. … There is no mechanism in place for easily tracking the number of, or results of, field drug testing.”
FDLE spokeswoman Molly Best wrote that her agency has no information about the prevalence of false-positive field drug tests.
The New York Times reported on July 7 that its review of FDLE data showed that 21 percent of the time, drug evidence that was listed by local authorities as methamphetamine turned out to be something else.
In its statement, OPD described the arrest as a lawful one.
Full story at the Orlando Sentinel.
Gov. Pat McCrory (R-NC) (nc.gov, Screengrab)
The costs keep mounting in NC, and going by all appearances, McCrory simply doesn’t care in the least. I keep trying to figure out why there is this pig-headed obstinacy in hanging on to HB 2, and all I can come up with is that McCrory is doing this to save face. Or he thinks this is face-saving, because it seems to me that any idiot could figure out the costs far outweigh any perceived benefit.
The price tag for keeping North Carolina’s HB2 on the books just keeps getting more and more expensive.
In a review by the Associate Press, Gov. Pat McCrory and state legislative leaders have run up more than $176,000 in legal fees to defend the law, which prevents transgender people from using restrooms and changing rooms matching their gender identity.
That’s likely not the total because some firms have yet to bill the state for their work on the legal battle between the state and the Department of Justice.
State taxpayers will have to eat those real costs, in addition to the estimated $100 million in lost potential revenue after the NBA withdrew the 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte over the controversial law.
There’s also that $500,000 that was pulled out of the state’s disaster relief fund a while back. Taxpayers cannot be happy with this, any more than the massive tab some Arizona taxpayers are faced with over Arpaio. I don’t know why people keep such assholes in office, but it’s time to kick them out on their arses, and get competent representation.
Via Out.
So much I’d like to see! Unfortunately, being slaved to a capped Verizon, I can’t stream unless I want truly Super Bills. Via Out.
For the most part, comic books have always kept relatively quiet in a self-contained corner of the entertainment landscape. It’s one of the most inclusive forms of media, dating back to the original X-Men being one big allegory for minorities of all kinds, looked down upon by society and forced to live as second class citizens.
Now, living in the most socially progressive age to date, comic books have flourished, their ever-present trend of inclusion benefiting from the change in global tone regarding the LGBT community, people of color, and other historically underappreciated groups.
In Alters, the first-ever superhero book with a central transgender protagonist by a mainstream writer (Paul Jenkins), a young woman, while transitioning from male to female, discovers she has great power. Now, faced with the discrimination transgender people face on top of that those with mutant-like powers face, life becomes doubly complicated.
The diversity in Alters is also found off the pages, in the team behind creating its main character, Chalice. “It means a lot to me to see trans people represented, especially so prominently,” said Tamra Bonnvillain, a trans colorist for Alters. “So many times in the past we’ve been represented as throwaway characters, and even a lot of more recent positive trans characters are in minor roles.”
Alters #1 goes on sale September 7.
Via Out.
Outlet. Click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
I, uh, just no words. The heart-aching beauty of our planet, the universe, everything. Just a few here, click over for the full short list.
Flash Point. Brad Goldpaint (USA) The Perseid Meteor Shower shoots across the sky in the early hours of 13 August, 2015, appearing to cascade from Mount Shasta in California, USA. The composite image features roughly 65 meteors captured by the photographer between 12:30am and 4:30am.
Photograph: Brad Goldpaint/Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016/National Maritime Museum.
A Fork, a Spoon and a Moon. Andrew Caldwell ( New Zealand) A Royal Spoonbill sits atop of a branch basking in the glow of the nearly full moon in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand.
Photograph: Andrew Caldwell/Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016/National Maritime Museum.
Seven Magic Points. Rune Engebø (Norway). The rusty red swirls of the circular, iron sculpture Seven Magic Points in Brattebergan, Norway mirror the rippling aurora above.
Photograph: Rune Engebø/Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016/National Maritime Museum.
Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2016 shortlist – in pictures.
British photographer Ellie Davies turns the forest into a foreboding and seductive place. Her exhibition Into the Woods is at Crane Kalman Gallery, London, until 20 August.
If you’re like me, and still have a certain episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery dwelling in the darker recesses of your brain, you’ll scream and run away. Fabulous shots from rq. Click for full size.
© rq. All rights reserved.
Sleepy baby. Click for full size.
© C. Ford. All rights reserved.
Marco Rubio. Wikimedia Commons.
When Marco Rubio cited the deadly attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando as a reason he was changing his mind and running for re-election to the U.S. Senate, many LGBT allies immediately noted that the Florida senator and failed presidential candidate has never been an ally of the LGBT community.
“To be using the tragedy in Orlando as a time to reflect on his Senate career, when his career and his promises on the campaign trail have been anti-LGBTQ consistently, it’s just staggering to think he would be using this moment for his own personal ambitions,” said Jay Brown of the Human Rights Campaign at the time.
It comes as no surprise, then, to see that Rubio is slated to address an event in Orlando next month that will feature some of the country’s most vehement anti-LGBT activists.
The Orlando-based Liberty Counsel Action, an extreme anti-LGBTgroup whose affiliate is famous for representing Kentucky clerk Kim Davis in her stand against the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision, announced in an email today that the Florida Renewal Project will be hosting an event called “Rediscovering God in America” in August. The event will be headlined by Rubio, who will speak alongside anti-LGBT activists David Barton, Bill Federer, Ken Graves and Mat Staver.
[…]
The event will put Rubio in the company of some of the most extreme anti-gay activists in the country:
- David Lane, whose organization is hosting the event, believes that gay rights will lead to the “utter destruction” of the U.S. and “car bombs in Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Des Moines, Iowa.” (Learn more about David Lane here).
- Mat Staver, whose Liberty Counsel Action sent out the invitation to the event and who is scheduled to speak, has gained a national reputation by representing Davis and Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore through the affiliated Liberty Counsel. Last month, Staver denounced memorial gatherings for the victims of the Orlando nightclub attack as “homosexual love fests.” Staver has claimed that gay people are “demonic,” seek to abuse children and are similar to terrorists, and has warned that gay rights victories could lead to “forced homosexuality” and “another civil war.” At the same time, he has praised countries that outlaw same-sex relationships. (Learn more about Mat Staver here).
- David Barton, a Republican Party activist who styles himself as a historian, thinks that God is justly preventing a cure for HIV/AIDS because it is a divine “penalty” for homosexuality, and has lamented that public schools try to “force” students “to be homosexual” when homosexuality really should be regulated by the government. (Learn more about David Barton here).
- Maine pastor Ken Graves preaches against “militant homofascism” that he says “seeks to take over our land and make it Sodom” and argues that gay people cannot build happy families because they are “depressed.”
- Bill Federer, a Religious Right activist and conspiracy theorist, believes that gay rights are bringingabout the Islamist takeover of America.
Via Right Wing Watch.
Jessica Valenti will be taking a break from social media, due to ongoing threats and harassment. Those assholes who think it’s perfectly acceptable to do such things decided to target Ms. Valenti’s 5 year old child, because of course, they are such erudite, articulate adults who have such a good, solid, fact based ability to present their arguments, but this way is just so much better. I hope every single one of you sick assholes takes a very good look in the mirror, then takes a very good look at your own family. Try to figure out how to regain your humanity, because it is missing.
This morning I woke up to a rape and death threat directed at my 5 year old daughter. That this is part of my work life is unacceptable.
— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) July 27, 2016
As for Twitter and other social media, I guess perhaps Ms. Valenti isn’t quite famous enough to warrant action. Link.
The Dakota Access Pipeline would run perilously close to the Missouri River, above, the main source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Credit: Thosh Collins.
Dakota Access Pipeline has been approved. All the work, all the protests, all the meetings, all the talking…pointless. That photo reminds me of one of my favourite places along the Missouri, north of Lake Oahe, and to think of oil spilling, oh, it doesn’t bear thinking about, but it must be thought about, and the fight has to continue. This is wrong, so very wrong.
Despite the strong opposition of several tribes, the Army Corps of Engineers has approved nearly all permits to build the Dakota Access Pipeline project. Construction has already begun in all four states along its path.
“We are saddened to hear of this permit approval but knew the writing was on the wall,” the Indigenous Environmental Network said in a statement. “The Corps has a long history of going against the wishes and health of tribal nations.”
The $3.4 billion, 1,134-mile-long pipeline proposed by the company Energy Transfer, is also known as the Bakken pipeline, since that is the type of crude that would be transported through it. The battle to stop the project began months ago, when word of its potential construction began to spread. Activists and individual landowners who did not want the pipeline crossing their land immediately began to resist.
Soon after, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe launched a massive campaign to improve understanding of the devastation that a pipeline spill could cause. The “Rezpect Our Water” efforts included dozens of children from Standing Rock who worked hard to try bridge understanding between the tribe and the outside world. Through a series of videos and grassroots efforts, the youth of Standing Rock asked that their lands and livelihood be taken into concern.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe met with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on several occasions in the past year in hopes of convincing them to deny permits. All water crossings along the pipeline’s path needed federal approval. The Corps would have had the power to stop the pipeline from crossing the south-flowing Missouri River near the Cannon Ball community on Standing Rock’s northern border. This crossing point poses a particularly dangerous threat to the Standing Rock community as a pipeline break would contaminate the Missouri river, damaging the entire water supply of tribe, destroying land and creating a public health disaster for the reservation.
The tribe’s efforts and the youth of Standing Rock generated attention and support from thousands of supporters across the nation.
The Corps’ decision, however, did not reflect concern for the tribe or for the youth of Standing Rock. They granted permits to all 200 water crossings along the pipeline’s path, including the most potentially destructive point near the Reservation’s northern border. The Corps also ignored a plea by three federal agencies requesting a full environmental review.[…]
“This decision will not deter the resistance against the dirty Bakken pipeline,” stated the Indigenous Environmental Network. “This decision merely highlights the necessity for the Corps of Engineers to overhaul the Nationwide Permit No. 12 process, which has been used by Big Oil to further place our lands, indigenous rights, water and air at greater risk for disaster. We demand a revocation of this permit and advocate for the rejection of this pipeline.”
The Pipeline will bring tax revenue to all counties and states along its path. While the land and people of Standing Rock face great risk of seeing damaging environmental impacts, they will not see any of the benefits. The pipeline crosses just north of Sioux County, where the Standing Rock Reservation is located. Tax revenue will not be generated for the tribe.