Under a Gibbous Moon

It is said the he who shouts the loudest has the most to hide. Since his disastrous anti-gay advertisement, it seems that Republican Presidential hopeful Rick Perry has succeeded in getting people to wonder what, or rather who, may be hiding in his closet.

Rick Perry is far the people’s choice when searching Google for information that he might be gay. Interestingly enough, the focus of this attention is coming from the place where the people should know him the best, his home state of Texas.

So Rick, take this piece of advice. Tone it down and if you’re hiding in the closet, come out, God still loves you (it’s just Christians that don’t).

In this country, sports in general and football in particular have become their very own religion. People so strongly identify with their teams that they get into fights over whose team is the best. Players are granted special privileges and get away with types of behavior that would land the rest of us in jail.

Of course, as has been recently shown, the Religion of Football is not above sacrificing children in the name of victory. To so many people, it seems, sports trumps all other concerns. The current case in point is this piece of news.

He’s been raped and abused and now he’s bullied out of school because, of all things, he being blamed for getting Joe Paterno fired. It seems that they believe that just because the man covered for a child molester as far back as 1998 that he doesn’t deserve to lose his job.

For years I’ve watched as people obsess endlessly over sports. While many people say they were shocked at the events of Penn State I can honestly say that I am not. Sports have become a god and this type of behavior is the end result.

Always good advice and backed up with evidence. The most recent piece is the sad story of Teresa Culpepper who, after calling the Atlanta police to report that car had been stolen, was arrested on a case of mistaken identity. Oh such things happen but the best part is the only commonality she shared with the actual criminal is that many years ago both their parents named them Teresa.

Yup that’s it because they shared the same first name, the wrong Teresa ended up spending fifty-three days behind bars. That’s right a five followed by a three, damn near two months. In those two months she was kicked out of her home, car (which was by this point was in a police impound lot, and was having a hard time explaining why she missed fifty-three days of work.

What did the District Attorney have to say about this miscarriage of justice?

After investigating this matter thoroughly and discussing it carefully with the Atlanta Police Department, we have concluded that the wrong person was arrested.

Let’s see, different last names. Check.

Different addresses. Check.

Different descriptions. Check.

And it took fifty-three days for the investigative geniuses down there to figure all of that out.

It looks like the NYPD is determined to unseat the LAPD. I’m not sure why they can’t seem to be able to keep their officers under control. They way they have behaved since the protests started is utterly disgraceful.

Here is another video coming out of the protests on Wall Street in New York City, in this video, a reporter and camera man for the local Fox affiliate are injured by a police officer during the protest.

One thing that I found interesting in this video is the police officer’s (captain in the white shirt) use of force. Most police, including the NYPD train with what is known as the Force Continuum (or Continuum of Force, etc). It details how violence escalates and which actions are to be used and it what order. I could not find an online source for the NYPD’s guide (though it is apparently on page 7 of the NYPD Academy textbook), typically you are supposed to use OC spray (pepper spray) before you start striking people with batons. This is because OC spray does no lasting harm while a baton can cause bruises, broken bones, and internal bleeding.

The other thing I found interesting is how the officer is swinging almost at random, frequently striking people in the back who are either trying to escape or are unaware of his presence.

On a final note with regards to the pepper spray itself. According to the Report of the Pepper Spray Committee (pdf), NYPD Patrol manual states that: “They are taught not to fire the spray from within three feet of subjects, not to use the spray on a windy day, and not to use OC in group settings or for crowd control; they are trained to fire a maximum of two one-second bursts of the spray.”