If past is prologue

NOTE:  If you don’t like cussing, don’t read this post.  I drop the F-bomb several times. I’m sorry but it’s the best way I know how to express my feelings in this instance.

Well, I can’t resist. I just can’t.  You’ve probably heard in the news that women are finally being allowed to join the elite special forces like the Navy Seals, Army Rangers, etc.    The predictable testosterone fueled outcry began immediately.   Our local Fox station decided to read online posts in reaction to the news.  One of them, a man, suggested that if women are allowed to enter the special forces that they have their own separate teams.

Even I was surprised by my immediate and visceral reaction to the comment.  My thoughts went like this [paraphrasing], ‘You did not just fucking say that.  Have we not been through this shit before with African Americans?!  Are you really going to fucking tell me that you are going to force women who meet the same physical and mental standards as their male counterparts and still put them in “separate” groups?!?!  REALLY!!!!!!!!! Holy Mother of God, that makes me angry’.

Let me spell it out because apparently a lot of men and some women just don’t get it.

1.  Standards for women and men will NOT be different.  Nor would any woman worth her salt want them to be.  If a woman can do it, she should be allowed.  Some will say only a few women can do it.  You are correct.  Only a few men can do it as well. Not every person can be elite.  Why would it be any different for women?  We don’t want to be special, we want to be given the same chance.  Which leads to the next point.

2.  Women have been functioning in combat roles since the beginning of time and continue to do so in modern nations.  In fact, women have not only ruled their clan/tribe/kingdom/nation, but they were also soldiers and some pretty bad ass motherfuckers.  In fact one of the most famous, Boudica, led an army of 100,000 Celts in a revolt against occupying Roman forces in Britain.  She destroyed early London (then called Londinium) and several other Roman colonies.  She was one of the few people in all of Europe to defeat Roman forces and her name was so famous that Tacitus himself recorded the tale.  Furthermore, medical studies have proven that women, in many cases, can actually handle certain types of prolonged pain much better than men (There’s a reason why we’re the ones who squeeze out children the size of watermelons–we can handle it.)  Don’t let the headlines fool you.  Our paternalistic press will title their news stories that “men handle pain better” but when you read the fine print (or heaven forfend you read the actual study) you find out that men handle intense sudden pain better but women can handle pain that lasts a long time.  Guess what?  In a combat role, soldiers experience both kinds of pain.   The truth is that both sexes face their own unique set of physical and mental challenges.  Mentally, I give the advantage to women.  Overall (again, all comparisons are overall across the entire species) women’s ability and tendency to communicate emotion gives them a greater ability to work through grief, anger, etc.  Any mental health professional will tell you that talking about a problem is  crucial to being mentally healthy, regardless of whether you serve in the military or not.  Culturally we do men an incredible disservice and make them vulnerable to mental illness as a result of combat precisely because we don’t do a good enough job teaching and encouraging them to communicate their emotions.

3.  Women deserve to have our autonomy respected.   Women will die as a result of combat–as soldiers or as non-combatants–no matter what.  Would you prefer that they passively sit and wait for the enemy to come to them?  Why do men get to tell women to stay home (and as is so often portrayed in Hollywood, be the last line of defense)?  Not all men go to war and not all women will either.  But each one should have the choice–WE get to choose our battlefields dammit.  See, this is about respecting women’s right to autonomy and all of the implied agency that men are automatically given.   Women are not passive victims because we have vaginas, boobs and ovaries.  Women are victims because they accept what men tell them and men tell them that they should be protected because women are special because of those same body parts. They also tell us that they will want to protect us because they think we are weaker or they want us sexually or because they love us.  As if women don’t love men, want men and yes, think of men as weaker, as much men do.  What utter horseshit.

To put a finer point on it……Where do men get the authority to tell a QUALIFIED woman that she doesn’t have the right to fight for the country she loves because HE can’t handle her being in the trenches next to him.  Soldiers have every right to kick out the unqualified, I don’t care if they have a dick or not.  Here’s what people are missing in their discussions about it.  If women are truly equals to men (legally we’re supposed to be and ethically we absolutely have the same value) then HE has the problem, not her.  So HE had better get over it.  This is like a man back in the 1940′s who would say, ‘I won’t serve with black people’.  Note many of the same excuses used against women were used against African Americans (they’re not as smart, strong, tough, organized, obedient, etc, etc).  The only one that is different now is that men say ‘they would feel too protective of the woman to do their duty’.  My answer to that is, if a man can’t handle a woman fighting next to him, if he can’t bring himself to focus on the mission at hand and do his duty for whatever reason, then he should be deemed mentally unfit to serve in a combat role.  If you can’t handle another human being dying next to you, regardless of their sexual organs, you need to find another job.

4.  Sex won’t be a problem if soldiers are trained properly and the code of conduct is enforced.  Here’s another news flash.  Sex will occur no matter what.  Men and women in the military now have sex.  Men have sex with female non-combatants.  American soldiers have littered the world with their bastards (via both consensual and non-consensual sex) and wreaked all kinds of havoc as a result.  Yep, sex happens.  Even normally heterosexual men will sometimes engage in homosexual behavior in the military.  This is a proven fact.   If it is interfering now, then military leadership is not doing it’s job to punish those that let it get in the way.  Again, the problem is on THEIR part.  They need to fix their rules and/or their procedures.  They need to improve training.  See, sexual behavior is no different than any other instinctual behavior.  The military teaches men to curb their most basic instincts.  For example, one of the most important things a soldier must come out of basic training with is the ability to be obedient even when their life is in jeopardy.  It doesn’t get any more basic than that.  So men who say that they won’t be able to control themselves sexually or will be distracted sexually, have impulse control problems and should wash out of basic.  If a man would put sexual interest ahead of his life and the life of his fellow soldiers, he’s not fit to serve.  If you can stand and take fire even though every fiber of your being is screaming to run and protect yourself, then you should be able to keep your dick in your pants, your hands to yourself, your thoughts private and your mind on task.

In conclusion, consider the quote below.  The meaning of “past is prologue” is not as simple as ‘what has happened in the past affects our present’.  At this point in The Tempest, the character, Antonio, is trying to encourage Sebastian to kill his sleeping father and become king.  He is also reminding him of those who failed to act in the past and paid for it.  He’s reminding him to learn from the past.  LEARN from the past.  You can’t have a group of people distinguished by something they get no say in, something they get from birth like color or gender but has no bearing on whether they can meet elite standards as “separate but equal”.  It isn’t legal.  It isn’t ethical.  It isn’t and cannot be, by it’s very definition, equal.  It is, however, incredibly fucking insulting.

She that is queen of Tunis; she that dwells
Ten leagues beyond man’s life; she that from Naples
Can have no note, unless the sun were post–
The man i’ the moon’s too slow–till new-born chins
Be rough and razorable; she that–from whom?
We all were sea-swallow’d, though some cast again,
And by that destiny to perform an act
Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come
In yours and my discharge.
–William Shakespeare, The Tempest

How NOT to make friends and influence people

I kid you not.  The GOP had a conference and discussed with young Republicans how they could reach out to America’s Youth.   They wanted to know, how do you make abortion funny?   /facepalm

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/17/gop_plan_to_appeal_to_millennials_make_abortion_funny

Here we go again, part deux

Everyone with half a brain knows that the recent Great Recession was caused in large part due to a housing bubble.   A housing bubble ”is a type of economic bubble that occurs periodically in local or global real estate markets. It is characterized by rapid increases in valuations of real property such as housing until they reach unsustainable levels and then decline”.

Well, in my last post I noted how fast the poverty rate was going up in suburbia.  If you clicked through to the source article you should have seen this little tidbit:

Fortunately, things are turning around in the Phoenix area. The housing market is currently performing better than any other, according to the FHFA’s most recent Home Price Index release. In the first quarter of 2013, home prices were up 15.3% from the year before — the largest increase in the country.

Unfortunately, the reality is that there is nothing fortunate about it.  Unemployment and underemployment (something NOT being discussed by the MSM and politicians but desperately needs to be) is still very bad.  Tons of people are still moving into the Phoenix area looking for housing.  New construction has still not recovered to previous levels (thank goodness in one sense, they were building housing developments and destroying the beautiful landscapes just for giggles and then they would sit empty for months and months BUT it’s bad in another sense.  It was a source of employment for many and a major economic health indicator).

So housing is at a premium.  Rental prices are going up.  I ought to know, I just moved, again.  Absentee landlords and crappy management companies aren’t maintaining their existing rental properties.  Again, I ought to know.  I just moved into a house that sat empty for too long, was poorly maintained, and turned over to me in such poor condition that I’m thinking about breaking my lease and getting a lawyer to sue the management company and landlord.  And this is happening all over the valley (housing inspector confided this to me)–this is a real problem.  Combine all this together and we find that the prices of housing isn’t going up because those properties are being improved, or because more people are moving up and out to the suburbs.  They’re going up because the economy is weak and desperate people are struggling for limited resources.  It’s the worst kind of inflation, not a sign of healthy economic growth.

You’d think we would have learned our lessons the last time.  I wonder how long it will be before it all crashes down again.  I wonder how long it will take the conservatives who have controlled the economy since Reagan (even during Clinton years, the Republican Congress had him by the ball sack) and who created this economic mess begin to blame the liberals.  Counting down….3….2……

In a split second

A police officer in NY had to decide within a split second whether he should shoot an armed man holding a young woman hostage. At first the perp had the gun to her head and was saying he was going to kill her.  Then he raised the gun and pointed it at the officer.  According to reports there was very little time to talk and de-escalate and this kind of thing is the toughest call any law enforcement officer has to make.  Eight rounds were fired.  Seven hit the perp and one hit the girl.  My heart aches for this young lady’s family and for the officer.  The officer is on sick leave and I’m sure he is probably suffering the immense psychological pain that comes with this kind of incident.  He will have to carry the burden of this unintentional victim for the rest of his days.  This is one of the many reasons why more police officers die by committing suicide than are killed by felons every year.  We ask these men and women to carry an incredibly heavy responsibility and burden when we ask them to carry deadly weapons in their community’s defense.

This officer had served 8 years in the New York Police Department and 12 years in Nassau County (basically this is Long Island and much more suburban than the various NYC Burroughs) .  7 out of 8 bullets hit their target—that’s an accuracy level far, far above the average police officer’s accuracy in these kinds of situations where, if they’re really, really good, only about 50% of the bullets fired will actually strike the target.  Some studies show average hit rates as low as 20% at a distance of 7 feet.  Do YOU like those odds, if it was you or a loved one being held hostage?   This low hit percentage is precisely why the policy for such situations is to “talk and de-escalate”.  Talking and not automatically firing reduces the odds that anyone will be killed or injured.  Thousands upon thousands of stand-offs get resolved peacefully without any shots fired.  We only hear about the ones where it doesn’t work, but the reality is that it usually works.  I’m NOT saying the officer in this situation did the wrong thing or that he was a bad shot.  Far from it.  He did a damn good job to hit the guy as much as he did!  And I would never question his judgement call.  I wasn’t there.  His department will take care of that investigation ¹.

The point is that this news story, and the thousands just like it over many decades, demonstrate that even with good training and experience, the innocent still can and do get hurt.  The average gun toting American has never taken a single shooting course.  They may go to the range and they may do a lot of hunting, but at no point do the paper targets or the deer shoot back or threaten the lives of others.  The average American hasn’t had extensive and repetitive crisis response training.  They don’t get periodically certified based on their consistency and accuracy with a particular weapon.  Nor have they had all the other LEO training that teaches an officer on how to handle violent and potentially violent situations both with and without a weapon–so they have fewer tools with which to handle a crisis situation and are more likely to draw than a trained officer would be.  They won’t have had the first aid training of a LEO.  They simply will not have the same skillset as a LEO would have to make such a judgement call.  The average American watches Tombstone and plays Call of Duty on an Xbox and they think they’re ready to protect their fellow citizens ².   So to all the wannabe gun toting heroes running around who think IF they had been there they would have taken out the perp John Wayne-style and all the innocent people would have been saved–I call BS, yet again.

On a related note, yesterday we lost not one but two City of Phoenix public servants in the line of duty–a police officer and a firefighter.    They were both very young and both killed by motor vehicles.  The firefighter was crushed between two emergency vehicles–that’s right, crushed by trained emergency vehicle drivers.  The officer was performing a DUI stop on a surface road when he was struck by a passing vehicle, an incredibly sad but common occurrence in the U.S.  If you wish to offer your condolences and/or donate to help their families (BTW, they make diddly squat in pay compared to what they could have made in private industry) here is a link.

Motor vehicles are deadly weapons even when they are operated correctly.  You can drive absolutely perfectly and still get hit and killed by a bad driver.  But let’s face it we need cars to get around ³ and the car culture isn’t going away any time soon ⁴. But we also recognize that they’re dangerous necessities and as a result we require licensing, insurance and some kind of skills test to get or renew that license.  Yet we don’t have such a thing for guns.

Many will counter that guns are a right and driving is a privilege.  Unfortunately for them, that argument doesn’t fly.  Guns are a right but they are a dangerous right.  We should control them for the sake of safety like we control not only privileges like driving but also other rights such as Free Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of the Press, Property Ownership, etc.  None of these other rights and privileges are absolute.  You can legally own land but you can’t do anything you want to it.  You can’t by a lot in Suburbia and then decide to put a mini-landfill on it.  You can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater.  You can’t ⁵ advocate for a particular candidate from the pulpit and keep your non-taxable status.  You can’t ⁶ reveal the identities of the U.S. undercover agents in the Press and not get prosecuted for it.   There are limits to all of them.  The 2nd Amendment is the ONLY right that conservatives insist should be absolutely unregulated in spite of the fact that the law itself demands that it be “well regulated”.  Yet, we do regulate every other deadly thing in our society.

Gun control isn’t unconstitutional.  Endangering your fellow citizens should be.  Let’s put some common sense controls in place.

Notes:

1. Every police department in the country requires an investigation when shots are fired by an officer regardless of whether there are any actual shooting victims or not.   In fact in some departments if an officer even unholsters their  weapon, they are REQUIRED to submit a “user of force” report.  In other departments, the report is only required if the weapon is drawn and pointed at a target.  These policies differ depending on location.  In somewhere like LA, they have to draw their weapon all the time and submitting a UOF report for every time would grind the department to a halt.  But in suburban areas, drawing a weapon is the exception, not the rule.  Regardless, if the officer uses force, he is then expected to prove that the use of force was required in that situation.  In the case of a shooting, the officer must prove that use of deadly force was necessary regardless of whether someone died or not.  They don’t just take the officer’s word for it either.  They interview the officer, their partner, both visual and auditory witnesses, the perp and any victims.  They look at the medical records.  They look at security camera and dash mounted cameras.  They retrieve the shell casings and if possible the bullets. They take the weapon and put it under lock and key.  They put the officer on admin leave during the investigation. They fire the weapon in question and compare it to the bullets recovered.  It’s a full investigation except the officer isn’t presumed innocent.  The fact that he fired a shot is known.  The only thing in question is “was it justified”?  For the most part this system works.  It’s rare that a dirty or incompetent cop lasts very long.  When dirty cops are found, the corruption usually extends up into the higher ranking officers so that such investigatory efforts are thwarted.  In those cases, the media and other local government agencies notice a pattern and step in to root out the corruption.  In spite of what Hollywood likes to tell you, systemic corruption such as the LAPD Rampart Scandal are the exception, not the rule.

2. Some will say ‘then maybe Americans should get this training’.  Really?  You want everyone in the U.S. to be trained to the level of police officers?   Because that is what it would take and we would STILL suffer these unintentional deaths.  Last time I checked we didn’t live in a failed, third world state.  This isn’t Somalia where everyone is a potential threat all the time.  This is supposed to be the Land of the Free and it can hardly be that if we all have to run around armed to the teeth and “en guarde” every moment like a LEO has to be. Never mind the fact that the majority of people in the U.S. wouldn’t make successfully through LEO training because they aren’t physically and mentally capable of completing said training. And before you say I’m being a snob, I include myself in this category. I went through LEO training in my 20′s. At 43, I’m not entirely sure I could do it again.

3. Lord knows we don’t have decent public transportation options in this state.

4. The oil and gas industry giants are making damn sure of that

5. At least, we’re not supposed to do it. Although I’ve heard stories of many, many Christian preachers encouraging people to vote for the white guy in the last election.  This mixing of religion and politics make us no better than the religious zealots who control Iran or used to run the Taliban.  We’re supposed to be better than that.  America is not supposed to be a Theocracy. Thomas Jefferson probably rolls in his grave every time a preacher gets political in church.

6. Again, we’re not supposed to do it and if we do we should be punished for it. Except for Dick Cheney and company, of course. He outed Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent through his adviser, Scooter Libby, to a New York Times reporter because Plame’s husband had the temerity to report in the Press that Iraq did not have WMD’s in the run up to the Iraqi Invasion. Cheney wanted that damn war so bad he could taste it. After all, Halliburton, a company with whom Cheney’s financial fortune was entangled, was expected to make tens of millions of dollars out of the conflict.  Libby was eventually convicted of lying and obstructing a grand jury investigation into the Plame affair.  He was protecting Dick, of course.  Libby was given a commutation by President Bush, conveniently.  There were no consequences for Darth Cheney, however. Had it been you or I that outed a CIA agency, we would have served hard time in a federal prison.

City on a hill, still

Tom Levenson over at Balloon-Juice.com has something interesting to say about Vice President Joe Biden’s speech given yesterday at the memorial service for the slain MIT police officer, Sean Collier*.  Bolded statements are my doing.

But Biden did limn a present realit [sic] as well, in that we still live in a country where a ruling like Hamdan v. Rumsfeld can be both heard and decided against the government. I live in a town where police officers tackled a cop-killer in the midst of a gun battle, in the hopes of keeping him alive long enough to face a court. Here in Boston, Dzokhar Tsarnaev was charged as a common criminal, read his rights (not fast enough for some, but still) and will in fact face civilian charges. This country are [sic] so far from perfect it sometimes feels like we’re [sic] can only approach perfection the long way round — but that’s in the nature of cities on hills. I’m pretty sure Joe had something like this in mind when he spoke yesterday.

And I have next to no doubt at all that he was scolding that claque of Republican leaders who seem to have lost all courage, John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Kelly Ayotte, and all the rest. They’ve been up on their hind legs since Friday, bellowing the urgency of making sure Tsarnaev face a jury-rigged military tribunal system, and damned be the American constitutional system and any faith in the power of a jury of Americans to do and be seen to have done justice.

That rebuke is what this speech was about, beyond the pure duty of comfort that Biden handled so well in the first, longer section of his remarks. He was telling a failed Republican party that America is something other than [sic] hollow republic the Bush-Cheney regime sought to build. He was as well talking to the broader audience through the TV set, making the case (again!) that there is an alternative to a government based on authority granted out of fear. He was reminding everyone in earshot that the way the Republicans ran the republic — and would do again, if they get the chance — is not just an error; it’s un-American. This was powerful stuff, and inside the political ring, it was [sic] had the power to hurt, a nut-cutting blow.

See, McCain and Company want Tsarnaev, who is a citizen, to be sent to Guantonomo and to be stripped of all his rights.  Why is it the Republicans are so interested in their own rights (see Rand Paul’s statement about drones and hot tubs**) but not all that interested in the rights of “those other” American citizens.  Hmmmmm, it couldn’t be because they ARE considered “other”, could it?

Besides the fear motive, all of this trumpeting originates from the conservative idea that our government is broken and that the only way to fix it is to step outside the rules.  Conservatives often propose letting some supposedly benevolent strong man or men (ala, G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but not Pres. Obama, ad oculos) take control of things and take away our rights.  Hell, they’re the main reason, and I mean Cheney specifically*** and his buddies, for the expansion of Executive power in the U.S.  Were it not for them, no current President (who is in office is irrelevant here) would have the ability to start a war and tell Congress afterward or allow the killing of an American citizen without benefit of Due Process or use military tribunals and indefinite detention for civilians.  This was never and never will be a liberal idea.****

Nevertheless for all of the Republican and, quite frankly, Democratic enabled transgressions of our values, we’re still shining on that hill just not as bright as we were before our ill-advised jaunt into Iraq and our fear-fueled foray into torture.  And we are certainly not as bright as we could be and never will be if we don’t remain true to our values.

Notes:

*  Look at his young face, it’s hard not to be angry.  It was hard looking at the photos and video of the bomb victims.  I still can’t look at the picture of that sweet little boy who was killed. I understand their anger.  I don’t understand their throwing our values out the window because of it.  That’s not what grown ups are supposed to do and it sure as hell isn’t what the leaders of the free world are supposed to do.

**Rand does not want to be viewed in his hot tub by a government drone but is A-Okay with drones shooting people in commission of a crime, which goes waaaaayyyy beyond what the police would do.  In fact, Levenson above gives an excellent example of how the police met deadly force with restraint in order to serve the larger goal of justice.  Drones can’t do that and Rand Paul should know better and he probably does.  See he only wants drones to “provide justice” to everyone else but he and his clique.  Stupid man must not have studied history or he was too busy smoking dope to remember that such power never, ever remains targeted at just the people you want it to.  First they came for the Jews, then they came for gypsies, then they came for…..etc, etc, etc.

***Cheney openly admits in interviews and in writing that way back when he was in the Nixon Administration that he supported and pushed for the expansion of Executive Power in a variety of ways.  And when in office he claimed Executive Privilege over the tapes/minutes of his meeting with Oil Executives back in 2003-2004.

****Although not a liberal idea, conservatives will claim that liberal Presidents have not minded using that expanded Executive Privilege.   First, I don’t think we’ve ever had a truly liberal President, maybe Carter? President Obama is not a liberal.  He is a centrist Democrat.  He not only claims this but anyone on the left can categorically tell you, he is not a liberal Democrat and never has been.  Second, every President, regardless of Party, has taken advantage of the expansion of power given to the office because it makes their job easier.  As President Obama said during his interview with Jon Stewart, it’s Congress’ and the Supreme Court’s job to take those powers away and they SHOULD do that.  The branches must balance one another out.  But Congress and SCOTUS, filled with Republicans, will continue to give the Executive Branch more and more power because at some point one of their party will be in office and they REALLY like taking advantage of such things (e.g., waterboarding with impunity) because democracy inconveniently gets in the way of their profiteering….um, I mean governing.