"HOW MANY DIFFERENT WAYS CAN I MEAN HUMAN SKULLS?"

Seems Legit.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse.  Unless you're tasked with enforcing the law.  Also, fuck you, apparently.  Supreme Court: It's OK for Cops to Guess Wrong About What the Law Is: "Here was the Court's trademark, cross-partisan detachment from ordinary American experience on full display. Surely the cops would never pull anyone over on bogus grounds, out of malice, and blame it a law that doesn't apply...  "One is left to wonder," Sotomayor wrote, "...why an innocent citizen should be made to shoulder the burden of being seized whenever the law may be susceptible to an interpretive question.""

Florida Cop Pulls Over Harvard Grad for Blasting "Fuck Tha Police" : "The cop told Baldelomar it's "illegal to play loud music within 25 feet of another person." The law student laughed that one off: "In 2012 the state supreme court struck down any law banning loud music," he says. "I knew that because it was a case I had actually studied in law school." Garzon grew angry, though, when Baldelomar told him that fact. He called over two other cops and then demanded proof of insurance. Baldelomar pulled up his info on his phone, but Garzon waived it off, saying, "It's got to be paper." (It doesn't. Florida changed the law a year ago.) Finally, Garzon tore off three tickets: one for the insurance, one for having an out-of-state license plate, and one for not wearing a seat belt. Baldelomar says he was wearing his seat belt the whole time and is still legally a resident of Massachusetts. When Baldelomar asked where his noise violation was, Garzon told him to take off and not to get "smart.""

Physicians: “Anal feeding” of prisoners is sexual assault, has no medical use - Boing Boing: "• “For all practical purposes, it’s never used. No one in the United States is hydrating anybody through their rectum. Nobody is feeding anybody through their rectum.” Thomas Burke, MD, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Attending Physician, Massachusetts General Hospital 

• “In over 30 years of gastroenterology practice I never used rectal hydration. Also, rectal feeding simply doesn't make physiologic sense. The colon cannot absorb even pureed food." Steven Field, MD, Clinical Asst. Professor of Medicine, New York University School of Medicine 

• “Contrary to the CIA’s assertions, there is no clinical indication to use rectal rehydration and feeding over oral or intravenous administration of fluids and nutrients. This is a form of sexual assault masquerading as medical treatment. In the absence of medical necessity, it is clear that the only purpose behind this humiliating and invasive procedure is to inflict physical and mental pain.” Vincent Iacopino, MD, Senior Medical Advisor, Physicians for Human Rights"

World gone mad.  The Trouble with Teaching Rape Law: "One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word “violate” in class—as in “Does this conduct violate the law?”—because the word was triggering. Some students have even suggested that rape law should not be taught because of its potential to cause distress....

I first encountered this more than a year ago, when I showed “Capturing the Friedmans,” an acclaimed documentary about a criminal-sex-abuse investigation, to my law students. Some students complained that I should have given them a “trigger warning” beforehand; others suggested that I shouldn’t have shown the film at all. For at least some students, the classroom has become a potentially traumatic environment, and they have begun to anticipate the emotional injuries they could suffer or inflict in classroom conversation. They are also more inclined to insist that teachers protect them from causing or experiencing discomfort...

At Harvard, twenty-eight law professors, myself included, have publicly objected to a new sexual-harassment policy on the grounds that, in an effort to protect victims, the university now provides an unfair process for the accused. This unfairness hurts the cause of taking sexual violence and its redress seriously. Similarly, when Rolling Stone published an account of an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia without seeking out the accused, and likely got the story wrong, it arguably damaged the credibility of sexual-assault victims on that campus and elsewhere. These events are unfortunately of a piece with a growing rape exceptionalism, which allows fears of inflicting or re-inflicting trauma to justify foregoing usual procedures and practices of truth-seeking."

  

Macedonia helped CIA kidnap and torture a German they mistook for a terrorist - Boing Boing: "Macedonia kidnapped a German citizen called Khalid al-Masri and sent him to the CIA, mistaking him for a similarly named terror suspect; the CIA tortured him in Afghanistan and held him even after they realized they had the wrong name. When they finally released him, they dumped him by a roadside in Albania with $euro;14.5K and told him to remain silent. His lawsuit against the US government was dismissed on state secrecy grounds; eventually a European court ordered Macedonia to pay him a further €60K. The CIA officers involved in the kidnapping, torture and coverup were not disciplined by the CIA because the CIA Director believed "the scale tips decisively in favour of accepting mistakes that over-connect the dots against those that under-connect them." By the CIA's own reckoning, at least 25 others were kidnapped and tortured by the Agency due to mistaken identity."

Police union head loses it over an editorial cartoon - The Washington Post: "Last week, the Bucks County (Pa.) Courier Times ran an admittedly ham-handed editorial cartoon about police abuse. It depicted a line of children waiting to see Santa Claus, with one of them asking, “Keep us safe from the police.” Enter Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 President John McNesby. In a scathing letter yesterday . . . McNesby demanded an apology from the Bucks County Courier Times for the cartoon. “Surprisingly, you have at least one reader of that excuse for a newspaper you run,” McNesby wrote. “The one reader forwarded a copy of your disgraceful and highly offensive ‘cartoon.’ . . . “There is a special place in hell for you miserable parasites in the media who seek to exploit violence and hatred in order to sell advertisements.”

An apology might have been in order for the fact that the cartoon wasn’t particularly funny, original or poignant. But offending the sensibilities of law enforcement in the midst of a national uproar over the unnecessary killing of people by law enforcement isn’t something for which a newspaper should be apologizing. And it just gets worse from there...

Members of law enforcement should not be serving on a newspaper’s editorial board. The job of a newspaper is to hold law enforcement — and all government institutions — accountable. A newspaper should not consider itself to be on the “same side” as law enforcement. (No, that doesn’t mean journalists are on the “same side” as criminals, either.)

...McNesby has a history of lashing out at journalists. When Philadelphia Daily News reporters Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman broke an incredible story about a Philly PD rogue narcotics unit that was essentially robbing immigrant-owned bodegas, McNesby called a press conference in which he called drug-using police informants “one step above” reporters like Laker and Ruderman. Someone launched a Web site specifically to attack the reporters. The two women later won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting. As for the original letter, keep in mind, this isn’t some angry rogue cop; it’s the guy local law enforcement chose to represent them. In fact, if I were to try to explain to someone like John McNesby why police are seen by a growing number of people as brutish, aloof and short-tempered, I’d probably start by showing him John McNesby’s letter."