Have you been donating? You may already be a winner!

Remember that post recently when I promised to write a story for the community, with each person who donated $10 being able to specify a single character, setting, quality (of either character or setting), or plot point? And those who donated more could specify one for each $10 donated?

Well, if you donated during any of the panels I’ve been on already – Friday night’s Meet the Bloggers or Saturday night’s Quiz and/or Sophisticated Literature Reading – those donations count! Just leave a comment below with the amount you donated and the story aspect(s) you would like to specify. If you’re shy about taking credit and/or what you would like to specify, my blogging ‘nym, Crip Dyke, is also my google e-mail name and you can send me those well-earned specifications privately.

Do feel free to make things challenging for me by specifying apparently contradictory aspects of character, setting or plot! And take advantage of my two panels tomorrow – Scientism at 11am Pacific and the Panel of Inexpert Discussion at 1pm Pacific – to donate so as to earn the right to name a/nother story aspect.

I’m looking forward to seeing you all on Youtube! Check the weekend schedule for links if you need them.

Say It, ACLU!

On the afternoon of Wednesday, Sep 23rd, not much more than an hour after the Kentucky AG announced that no officers would be charged for the killing of Breonna Taylor, the ACLU released its own statement to the press. Before you read it, remember that this is the statement of an old organization that depends on its relationships for its effectiveness as much as it does the courts. So when they release statements, they’re not normally likely to simultaneously set fire to their political relationships and impugn the credibility of the courts.

But read this fucker:

[Read more…]

Black Lives Don’t Matter

Well, the grand jury indictments are in and a single officer is being charged with three counts of “Wanton Endangerment” because his bullets penetrated through the dry wall of Breonna Taylor’s apartment, burst through the drywall on the other side, and trespassed in an apartment not belonging to Taylor.

[Read more…]

Man Shows Off Gun In Grocery Store Checkout, Shoots Self In Dick

You have to wonder sometimes about these gun fondlers. There is yet another story, this one from a semi-rural location I and many Oregonians know well: Lincoln City. It’s a small place, not that attractive in its city center, but it has a gorgeous, peaceful lake separated from the beach by only feet and the ocean by only a few tens of yards. The Dee River from the overflow of this misnamed “Devil’s Lake” to the ocean itself is the shortest river (definition requires year-round flow, not temporary rivers that flow only during flood season) in the world.

Yet now there’s another reason to think of “short” and “Lincoln City” together. There’s not much to tell save for what’s in the headline, but if it’s worth anything, you can read about yet another dood shooting himself in the dick in honor of his right to self-defense.

PS. Of course he hadn’t bothered to do the paperwork for a gun permit, that would have impinged on his constitutional freedoms. So when he gets out of the hospital, he’s going to face multiple criminal charges for endangering others and weapons violations.

Energy Transformation & Nuclear Waste

I am happy to announce that for FreethoughtBlogs upcoming Panel of Inexpert Discussion, I have been able to secure the contribution of notable local luminary Ingibjörg Margarét Guðiradottir, Roy G. Biv Professor of Darwinian-Dysonian Radioecology at Nanaimo Technical University, British Columbia. She will be speaking next weekend, during our fundraiser, on a comprehensive plan to address problems with current nuclear waste disposal, accelerating the transformation of electricity production and energy markets more generally, with knock-on effects for demilitarization and updating older urban infrastructure to more modern building designs.

Before you read her intriguing abstract, please remember to click through to read about my own offer to craft custom short stories for your benefit and titillation.

[Read more…]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead, and we’re the ones going to hell

Perhaps the most important civil rights cases ever to be heard were a series of suits deliberately engineered by Charles Hamilton Houston (mentor of Thurgood Marshall was one of the least of his accomplishments) to test the meaning of “separate but equal”.

While the general public remembers Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, SCOTUS’ decision in that case was unanimous only because of the Socratic groundwork laid in earlier cases that targeted law schools. There were several that attempted to nail down the legal deficiencies of Jim Crow before activists pushed to desegregate K-12 schools. One of the last was Sweatt v. Painter, which challenged the University of Texas’ regime. UofT attempted several tactics, but one of the last was the emergency creation of an ad hoc Blacks-only law school at a separate location.

RBG’s first historically important decision was the VMI case styled US v. Virginia, where the last public, men-only college or university was challenged. Virginia, too, set up a special military academy for women as a last ditch attempt to evade integration, but it fell to Ginsburg in her first important case to declare that the deficiencies of racially segregated eduction were just as unconstitutional when they appeared in the context of gender segregated education.

This is how I will remember RBG: from the beginning of her career on SCOTUS she was fighting a rear guard action against the regressives who were unwilling to admit that precedents or principles existed, that certain issues had been decided, that certain values held constitutional significance.

The most obvious of such fights is the struggle to preserve the rights of privacy, autonomy & conscience embedded in the reasoning of Griswold, Eisenstadt, Roe, and Casey. But this is far from the only battle in which she played the rear guard, making the argument for constitutional values that most of us wander about life not noticing are still being questioned, still under attack. Shelby County v. Holder was another, though in that case less successful, instance.

Shelby County notwithstanding, she has been wonderfully effective in this role, and to lose her at any time is tragic. To lose her during this presidency is devastating.