"If I ever bore you it will be with a knife." - Louise Brooks
"...when two drunks have sex, who, ultimately, is responsible should one decide that she didn’t really mean it? Without current data at my fingertips, I feel safe in presuming that few males charge females with rape following a party. If the female decides at any point, including the next day, that she didn’t really want to engage in sex — no matter her own behavior at the time or the fogginess of her recollection, never mind the male’s own degree of inebriation — is the male entirely to blame? Even posing this question will get you banished from the kingdom in today’s confusing sexual arena. "
"Perhaps daylight does send the cockraches scurrying, after all. After a chorus of outrage over a Department of Homeland Security solicitation for bids to establish and maintain "a National License Plate Recognition (NLPR) database service," the feds now claim the whole project was unauthorized by DHS or by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in whose name it had been posted. Damn those rogue federal solicitations."
"For years, expert witnesses told jurors that if a deceased infant has a series of symptoms—bleeding at the back of the eye, bleeding in the protective area of the brain and brain swelling—then the child died from vigorous shaking. Typically, they’d state that the victim couldn’t have died from anything else. Conveniently, the diagnosis provided the cause and manner of death (shaking), identified the killer (the last person alone with the child), and even gave prosecutors mens rea (anger).
But a determined group of skeptics began to question the diagnosis shortly after that case. As the SBS prosecutions continued, the group of skeptics grew too. The skeptics now include Ronald Uscinski, a former student of Ayub Ommaya, whose research on monkeys in the late 1960s is thought to be the origin of the SBS diagnosis.
New research suggests that most humans aren’t capable of shaking an infant hard enough to produce the symptoms in SBS. It usually takes an accompanying blow to the head. And in about half to two-thirds of the 200 or so SBS cases prosecuted each year in the U.S., there are no outward signs of physical injury. Indeed, this is the reason SBS is such a convenient diagnosis. It allows prosecutors to charge a suspected abuser despite no outward signs of abuse. But we now know that other causes can produce these symptoms, which means that some percentage of the people convicted in SBS cases are going to prison for murders that may have never happened."
"After three people try to break into her house, a mother of two breaks out a gun, starts shooting, and scatters the home invaders."
"Are you fucking kidding me, Austin Police Department? This is how you treat the citizens you’re charged with protecting?
Gosh, I wonder why people don’t respect police authority."
"When you say that “rape is the exception” you betray something FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN about your own argument. Because a fetus produced from sexual assault is biologically NO DIFFERENT than a fetus produced from consensual sex. No difference at all. If one is alive, so is the other. If one is a person, so is the other. If one has a soul, then so does the other. If one is a little blessing that happened for a reason and must be protected, then so is the other. When you say that “Rape is the exception” what you betray is this: It isn’t about a life. This isn’t about the little soul sitting inside some person’s womb, because if it was you wouldn’t care about HOW it got there, only that it is a little life that needs protecting. When you say “rape is the exception” what you say is this: You are treating pregnancy as a punishment. You are PUNISHING people who have had CONSENSUAL SEX but don’t want to go through a pregnancy. People who DARED to have consensual sex without the goal of procreation in mind, and this is their “consequence.” And that is gross. "
"I no longer think about the prospects of our fighting an ongoing war on terror in quite the same way. In particular, I no longer believe that a mostly covert war makes strategic or moral sense. Among the costs of our current approach are a total lack of accountability, abuse of the press, collusion with tyrants and warlords, a failure to enlist allies, and an ongoing commitment to secrecy and deception that is corrosive to our politics and to our standing abroad.
Any response to terrorism seems likely to kill and injure innocent people, and such collateral damage will always produce some number of future enemies. But Dirty Wars made me think that the consequences of producing such casualties covertly are probably far worse. This may not sound like a Road to Damascus conversion, but it is actually quite significant. My view of specific questions has changed—for instance, I now believe that the assassination of al-Awlaki set a very dangerous precedent—and my general sense of our actions abroad has grown conflicted. I do not doubt that we need to spy, maintain state secrets, and sometimes engage in covert operations, but I now believe that the world is paying an unacceptable price for the degree to which we are doing these things. The details of how we have been waging our war on terror are appalling, and Scahill’s film paints a picture of callousness and ineptitude that shocked me. Having seen it, I am embarrassed to have been so trusting and complacent with respect to my government’s use of force."
Boom.
