Category: Uncategorized

The Return of White Impunity for Black Death

Posted on by Scott

Merriam-Webster defines impunity as exemption or freedom from punishment, harm, or loss. With their acquittal of Daniel Penny on the charge of criminally-negligent homicide in his killing of Jordan Neely, impunity is what the jury granted him. Jordan Neely was lynched for having a mental health crisis while black, poor, and homeless. A jury of Daniel Penny’s peers showed him the mercy that he didn’t show Jordan Neely. It didn’t matter that that Penny’s Marine instructor testified that he executed the hold incorrectly. It didn’t matter that at least one passenger is on video warning Penny that his chokehold was going to kill Neely. It didn’t matter that Neely had no weapon and didn’t harm anyone on the train before Penny literally choked the life out of him. The video of Neely being asphyxiated is a modern-day lynching postcard now.

I’m old enough to remember watching video footage of Rodney King being beaten within an inch of his life on video. I remember watching broadcasts of the destruction that resulted from people enraged by the verdict (and some opportunists too). Fast-forward almost 30 years and one of Ahmaud Arbery’s lynchers leaked the video of his crime thinking it would help him. He and his co-conspirators will likely spend the rest of their natural lives in prison. Video of George Floyd’s excruciating death under the knee of Derek Chauvin will keep the man in prison for nearly 2 decades from now. But just 4 year later, a vigilante can strangle a man to death with impunity.

My cynical mind wonders how the jurors who acquitted Daniel Penny responded to the broad daylight murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Perhaps the response to his murder (which has included very dark jokes and applause on social media) and the response to Neely’s lynching are two sides of the same coin.

Either way, we are (and have been for far too long) a nation too comfortable with violence, too numb to the suffering of those who are most often its victims. This puts everyone in a marginalized community at greater risk—not just from police (who will operate with even greater impunity than they already had once the second Trump administration begins), but now apparently from white vigilantes also.

A Nation Without Mercy, Revisited

Posted on by Scott

Yesterday, a mutual on Bluesky shared this news:

How can you be deadlocked when HIS HAIR PROBABLY SPEAKS AFRIKAANS BY ITSELF?!!

[image or embed]

— Ash Higgins (@ashhiggins.bsky.social) December 6, 2024 at 3:48 PM

It reminded me a post I wrote last year about just how broken this allegedly Christian nation’s understanding of the parable of the good Samaritan is. “He had to die, just in case” may yet spare Daniel Penny up to 15 years in prison that a manslaughter conviction could yield as a sentence. Like the trial of those who lynched Ahmaud Arbery, the only reason there was a trial at all was some public outcry that Penny was initially released without charges after he was first questioned by police. While Penny is also charged with criminally negligent homicide, the maximum sentence for a conviction on that charge is just 4 years. It’s also possible (if not probably) that the jury will will show Penny the mercy he lacked for Jordan Neely and find him not guilty–despite video evidence of him slowly but surely squeezing that man’s life out of him.

In the time since I first wrote A Nation Without Mercy, the “active and ongoing dehumanization and criminalization of the poor and mentally-ill” has continued. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in public–even if the cities offer no alternative shelter. In a country where homelessness is rising, a housing shortage persists, and Trump is returning to the White House with a government unified under GOP control, the likelihood of homeless people ending up with fines, criminal records, and even prison terms seems uncomfortably high.

We Are Going Back

Posted on by Scott

I hated the “zombie Palpatine” storyline for awhile on social media, but the United States of America willingly chose to reenact this in real-life by reelecting Donald Trump. But in a result even worse than 2016, he won the popular vote–a feat he failed to achieve in two previous runs for the White House. Votes are still being counted as I write this, so we don’t have a full picture of the final outcome, but it seems likely that the GOP will control all three branches of the federal government again. Trump appears to not have grown his vote totals from 2020 much at all–but some 11 million fewer people voted for Kamala Harris this cycle than voted for Joe Biden four years ago. To the extent there is any silver lining in this election wipeout, my home state is sending its first black senator to Washington, along with keeping my House representative Jamie Raskin in his seat.

Every post-mortem of Kamala Harris’ loss that I’ve read sucks–except Michael Harriot’s. It seems that black people in this country are nearly alone in believing in the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr for racial equality in this country–and that is why we are going back. The only question which remains to be answered is “how far back?” The Trump rally in Madison Square Garden before the the election suggests a return to the 1930s, when the pro-Nazi German-American Bund met openly and freely in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere before World War II began. Trump (and JD Vance’s) blood libel of law-abiding Haitian migrants in Ohio and elsewhere and their campaigning on mass deportation and border camps sets this country’s return destination to the 1950s, and Operation Wetback–the largest mass deportation in this country’s history. We can be certain that the same administration which birthed the child separation policy at our southern border–a policy that years later has left hundreds of children growing up with strangers, separated from their real parents–will devise a sequel to Operation Wetback which makes the original look humane by comparison. The end of birthright citizenship–another part of Trump’s xenophobic plans–along with the return of the Muslim ban of his first term intimates a return to an 1860s United States after the Civil War but before the ratification of the 14th Amendment. This is just a small sample of the threats which await in the future. We don’t know if the Affordable Care Act will survive. We don’t know if the Department of Education will survive–along with the oversight and mandates it provides which ensure that my son gets support in public school for his special needs. We don’t know what will become of the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or any other federal agency responsible for protecting Americans from threats to their physical or financial health.

From January 20, 2025 onward, things will change. The coming days, weeks, and months will bring negative impacts that Trump’s non-wealthy supporters did not anticipate. Tariffs are certainly returning, along with the inflation that comes from companies increasing their prices to maintain their profit margins. I’m good on the appliances front myself, but I might be upgrading more of my personal technology earlier than I planned to avoid the price increases that tariffs will bring. The mass deportation plans, possible Affordable Care Act repeal, and other aspects of Project 2025 may create infighting, backlash, and enough pain nationwide to create a small window to mitigate some of the damage in 2026–if elections remain a thing we still have in this country. That hope may be a dangerous thing, but I will nurture it nonetheless.

Despite these future threats, I have decided to focus more on the present. What can I do today to make sure I’m ok, that my wife and kids are ok, and that the people who matter to me are ok? Answering those questions and doing as many of those things as possible, and repeating that cycle the day after that is what I can do. In addition, I can figure out what I can do beyond voting to make the spaces I inhabit and have influence in a little better. It may not be much, but it feels like a more productive and sustainable alternative than despair.

My First YouTube Video

Posted on by Scott
A hastily-made tutorial for sharing your screen and sound in Zoom by yours truly

I made the tutorial you see above entirely with the following tools:

  • QuickTime Player
  • iMovie
  • Zoom

The reason I made it was a recent struggle one of the presenters of our weekly Zoom Bible study had to get their sound shared along with their screen for the music and videos that were part of the presentation.

As long as I’ve owned Macs, it wasn’t until trying to figure out how to capture what I was doing in Zoom that I learned the QuickTime Player also has a screen recording feature. So with that new (to me) information, I wrote myself a little script and followed it to record my demo.

Once I captured the demo (and the Zoom recording of the brief solo meeting I used to demonstrate screen and sound sharing), then it was time to combine them into a single video. This is where iMovie comes in.

First I pulled in the two clips and trimmed them to the desired places. Next I threw in a cross-dissolve between them. I also tried adding a voiceover to clarify that the video after the cross-dissolve was the Zoom recording created during the first part of the video but I didn’t get that voiceover audio to come through.

Still, not bad for a first effort—and it helped the very small audience for which it was intended.

Farewell to the Last of My 40s

Posted on by Scott

Today is my 50th birthday, and looking back on my 40s from this vantage point, they were *a lot*.

I became a dad (to twins). They’re now in 3rd grade. In their 8 years, we’ve taken them to Disneyworld and to Atlanta to visit family and friends. COVID resulted in the twins spending their kindergarten year on Zoom. Our son (who has special needs requiring speech and occupational therapy) handled the Zoom year surprisingly well. Our daughter had a very rough time with the Zoom year. She desperately needed to be around children her own age.

On the work front, I went from being gifted President’s Club seats to Nationals games and box seats to the infamous “You Like That!” game at FedEx Field by my employer, to laid off from that same company and out of work for four months (the longest I’ve ever been out of work in my entire career). Over 6 years later, I still work for the same company that hired me out of unemployment, have been promoted twice, and helped a handful of my direct reports get promoted as well (the most successful of them went to Amazon, and is now a senior manager at Microsoft).

My 40s included a good amount of domestic and foreign travel (though the pandemic stole a few years of it). We kicked off my 40s with a trip to Europe that included Barcelona, Nice, Monaco, Dolceacqua (for the bridge there Monet painted), and London. Another trip to Europe included Amsterdam and Paris. Domestic travel has taken my wife and I to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Scottsdale, New York, and Minneapolis. While the pandemic isn’t really over, I started taking an annual solo trip for brief break from parenting and other family responsibilities. Philadelphia and Boston were the destinations the past couple of years. And while a change in my work portfolio toward the end of last year has added a bit of work travel to my schedule, a trip entirely for me will get onto my itinerary for 2024 somehow.

Recent Grenadian History Revisited

Posted on by Scott

Going deeper down the Grenada rabbit hole I fell into just a week ago, I recently learned of a limited series podcast titled The Empty Grave of Comrade Bishop. I’m only two episodes in (episode 5 released on November 15) and I am completely absorbed. The title of the podcast isn’t clickbait–it’s literally the truth. Forty years after he and members of his cabinet were lined up against a wall and machine gunned to death the whereabouts of their remains is still unknown.

It has been fascinating to revisit the early 1980s as this podcast does and hear just how often Ronald Reagan talked about this little island in speeches, as well as animosity at least one leader of Grenada’s revolution had for Reagan. The episodes I’ve listened to so far went into some depth regarding Eric Bishop’s predecessor as prime minister, Sir Eric Gairy. His iron-fisted rule of Grenada, which stretched back before it achieved independence from Great Britain, was enforced by the Mongoose Gang. The descriptions of this group of thugs with police powers reminded me of the Tonton Macoutes of Haiti under Jean-Claude Duvalier.

Listening to episode 2 in particular, it was sad to see how quickly Bishop adopted the rhetoric of Gairy, even if he didn’t go as far as forming a secret police. Bishop’s rule in Grenada ultimately ends in gunfire either as a result of unwillingness to share power, not being extreme enough in his embrace of Cuba and the Soviet Union, rivalry and jealous within the New Jewel Movement, or some combination of all of the above. I’m very much looking forward to the rest of the series and what else I can learn from it.

The Muscle Memory of Surrender: A Brief History of the Modern GOP

Posted on by Scott

All of these smart Republicans who frankly did not understand how thoroughly corrupted their party had become, or the fact that if you cave in over and over again, you develop a muscle memory of surrender, and it’s hard to get back.

Charlie Sykes, The Bulwark Podcast, November 9, 2023

The quote above effectively summarizes the modern history of the GOP. Given his pre-Bulwark history in Wisconsin, perhaps he should have explicitly included himself in that collection of smart Republicans. Syke’s interview with McKay Coppins just one week earlier on his new book Romney: A Reckoning served as a speed run of recent GOP history of how far and how quickly the party moved away from those so-called smart Republicans many years before they actually realized it. Syke’s interview with Coppins actually jogs his own memory around 17 minutes into the interview that he actually had Donald Trump on his radio show at the time back in 2004.

When I listened to the interview, Romney’s book sounded like an extended attack of conscience regarding his own role in paving the way for the GOP to move even further to the right. To me, Mitt’s father George looks much better than his son by comparison because at every possible point, Mitt looked at the choices his father made (and the negative political consequences of those choices) and decided not to follow his father’s example. George Romney turned around a struggling automaker in Detroit in the 1950s. George Romney supported the civil rights movement, even trying and failing to prevent the GOP from surrendering to the likes of Barry Goldwater and his ultimately successful efforts to push black voters out of the GOP. George Romney served the Nixon administration as HUD secretary, trying to increase the supply of housing available to the poor and to desegregate the suburbs, but was deliberately undermined by Nixon in many cases.

His son Mitt by contrast wrote a New York Time op-ed titled Let Detroit Go Bankrupt in 2008. In his 2012 run for president, he famously told a private audience of wealthy campaign donors that “Obama backers will vote for the president ‘no matter what.’ Romney said that they account for ’47 percent’ of voters and he does not ‘worry about those people.'” Also during that campaign, Romney actively solicited the endorsement of Donald Trump–who was still actively fueling the birther conspiracy about Barack Obama at the time. Coppins cites numerous earlier examples of choices he consciously made in the interest of political expediency. A couple that stand out (though not as baldly and badly as seeking Trump’s endorsement):

  • taking a pro-choice position to win the gubernatorial race in Massachusetts despite his personal opposition to abortion
  • talking about “repealing the death tax” as an applause line to an audience filled with people who would never have to pay it

The interview goes on to talk about Romney bowing the knee to Trump in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to be appointed Secretary of State (effectively because he didn’t bow the knee far enough and publicly repudiate all the negative things he had said about Trump).

Perhaps the clearest indicators of the lack of understanding of the so-called smart Republicans that Sykes would criticize the following week can actually be found in the part of his interview with Coppins when they talk about who wins the GOP nomination in 2012 and 2008. Coppins expresses the belief (and Sykes seems to agree) that the turn of the GOP was a sudden one when in fact it was not. Here’s what Sykes says per the transcript:

You know, it occurs to me that his nomination in 2012 in many ways was a false indicator because, the party had already begun to change dramatically, but we were able to tell ourselves as conservatives that the center would hold that this was still the party that would nominate George Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney. So it’s not the party of Pat Buchanan. It’s not the party of Don[ald] Trump. I mean, they’re there, but there’s a reason why, you know, people like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich don’t ultimately win. Yes.

Charlie Sykes, The Bulwark Podcast, November 2, 2023

Sykes is at minimum 4 years too late in identifying the “false indicator” election for the GOP nomination. The John McCain who won the GOP nomination in 2008 was a far cry from the man who ran in 2000. The John McCain of 2000 who specifically (and correctly) named Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as agents of intolerance on the political right was replaced in 8 years by a version who made peace with them, and cemented their support by choosing Sarah Palin as his vice president. What I was not aware of at the time, was that Palin was known commodity among the ardently pro-life in the GOP. Mitt Romney placed a distant third in pledged delegates in the 2008 GOP primary, behind Mike Huckabee. In 2012, Romney would follow McCain’s playbook in staking out hard right positions (for political expediency) to beat his contenders for the GOP presidential nomination only to be defeated when voters didn’t buy his attempts to move back to the center for the general election. As Romney (and others in the GOP) would demonstrate again and again in subsequent years (through the Trump presidency to the present day), having power was more important than having integrity.

Now, even one of those in the GOP who briefly showed sufficient spine to vote in favor of impeaching Trump for his role in the January 6th insurrection has begun to develop his muscle memory for surrender. Peter Meijer, one of 10 House Republicans who did so (and was ultimately defeated for re-election as a result), has pledged to support the Republican nominee for president in his current run for the Senate–going even further to say that Joe Biden had done more to disgrace the office of the presidency than the man he voted to impeach just a couple of years ago.

Meijer is no worse than the current pretenders for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. Nearly all remaining contenders pledged to support Trump even if he is convicted on one (or many) of the 91 different felonies he has been charged with. One angry social media outburst from Trump and the House speaker candidacy of Tom Emmer (notable for his relative lack of surrender to Trumpist priorities) went down in flames. His replacement–Mike Johnson–is unknown and inexperienced as a legislator, but was one of the key advocates of the Big Lie regarding the 2020 election and still to this day refuses to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election. Even as Trump-backed candidates and priorities continue to cost them victory after victory in ballot initiatives (like the one in Ohio that put the right to abortion into the state constitution) and in elections (like the ones in Virginia that saw Democrats retake full control of the General Assembly and the Kentucky gubernatorial election that kept the Democrat Andy Beshear in power and rejected the Republican state attorney general Daniel Cameron), the GOP’s muscle memory for surrender to its most extreme elements is too strong for them to break.

Postmarks Revisited

Posted on by Scott

Since my initial post on Postmarks, I made two minor changes to my bookmarking site:

  • I edited src/pages/layouts/main.hbs to eliminate the Login link from the header and the footer
  • I also removed the About link from the header
  • I moved the divider in the footer after the About link from outside the {{#if loggedIn}} to inside

This gives the site a slightly cleaner look I prefer.

Digging into the admin functionality a bit, I noticed the input textbox hid most of the JavaScript for the bookmarklet, so I replaced it with a readonly textarea and gave it the same id as the textbox I removed. This preserved the functionality while making all of the javascript visible. The bookmarklet itself works nicely, opening a pop-up that autofills the New Bookmark page with the URL, title, and description fields. When adding a bookmark, I forgot that multi-word tags weren’t allowed and got an error message like the one below:

invalid tags: tag must be in , tag name supports a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and the following word separators: -_.

When you get that error, the bookmark isn’t created. I updated line 11 of src/pages/partials/edit_bookmark.hbs to add the following reminder:

Remember: multi-word tags must be separated by dash (-) or underscore (_).

A nicer way to handle this might be to prevent the save attempt and allow the bookmarker to correct the bad tag. If I figure that out at some point and implement it, the new capability will be available for everyone who opts to remix my version of Postmarks.

Remembering 9/11

Posted on by Scott

It’s hard to believe 22 years have passed since the terrorist attacks of that day. I still remembering being on the way to work when I heard the news on the radio of the first tower being hit by a plane. I still remember a lot of my coworkers with children in school leaving the office early to pick them up and go home. I still remember how soon afterwards letters laced with anthrax started showing up in the mail.

I personally didn’t lose any family or friends in the attacks. But a girl I was seeing at the time lost her older sister, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald—a firm noted often in the news at the time for just how much of their staff they lost. I remember spending a lot of time on the road between DC and New York visiting her, and supporting her and her family at the memorial service.

The intervening years have made certain memories fuzzy—fuzzy enough that some people engage in mythmaking when it comes to the country being unified by the attacks. But Spencer Ackerman remembers the way things really were–particularly in New York City. This piece I read yesterday is a stark reminder of how our nation actually treated Muslim Americans in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. He plans to post follow-up pieces that I am looking forward to with great interest.

I wrote last year about how this country’s response to 9/11 would ultimately pave the way for insurrection on January 6th. Were I to update that piece today, I would certainly connect Trump’s various (and ultimately successful) attempts at Muslim bans to the surveillance, harassment, intimidation, and discriminatory treatment inflicted on Muslims in Brooklyn by the NYPD, INS, and FBI in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Years after it happened, I recalled that Trump’s initial Muslim ban kept the spouse of one of my co-workers at the time from joining him. A second co-worker at the same job was married to a man from Somalia, one of the seven countries subject to that ban. Ending birthright citizenship (in direct opposition to the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution) is another idea that gained currency on the political right during Trump’s term, but has had advocates among so-called conservatives before then.

Other anti-democratic impulses unbound by terrorist attacks of 9/11 threaten every American today, but especially those of us more traditionally and more easily “othered”. The Department of Homeland Security was a bipartisan creation, certain of whose component parts were responsible for civil rights abuses of protesters ordered by Trump, others who were responsible for the vile child separation policy at our southern border. The moral outrage that is Guantanamo Bay remains open, despite the end of US troop deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. Even if Biden wins the 2024 presidential election (which is by no means a certainty), small-d democracy remains under threat in this country.

What The End of Affirmative Action in Higher Education Means (and Doesn’t): Addendum

Posted on by Scott

Finally (for now), the end of affirmative action is far from the end of anti-black rulings from this court. Affirmative action in employment will almost certainly be the next thing to be ruled unconstitutional.

June 29, 2023 blog post at GenXJamerican.com

The corpse of affirmative action (except the carve-out for U.S. military academies) is barely cold, and already (July 3, 2023) the anti-woke hounds are baying at the heels of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the workplace.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/diversity-workplace-affirmative-action-dei-3646683b?st=k0ouhiba4domk8q&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

But as a brief glance at the historical record will show, complaints about black people getting “special treatment” originating from people who aren’t black have a rather long history in this country. On March 27, 1866, President Andrew Johnson gave an entire speech regarding why he was vetoing civil rights legislation passed by both houses of Congress. Among his many objections were that black people would receive “Federal citizenship” immediately while 11 states were not represented in Congress. The 11 states (of course) were the ones that started (and lost) the Civil War. Having “just emerged from slavery into freedom”, President Johnson questioned whether or not black people “possess the requisite qualifications to entitle them to all the privileges and immunities of citizens”. But here is the passage that perhaps best explains and exemplifies the sense of entitlement—both then and now—that some have when compared to the black people who built and fought for this country:

The bill in effect proposes a discrimination against large numbers of intelligent, worthy, and patriotic foreigners, and in favor of the Negro, to whom, after long years of bondage, the avenues to freedom and intelligence have just now been suddenly opened.

Paragraph 4 of the transcript of President Andrew Johnson’s March 27, 1866 speech vetoing civil rights legislation

If there is any meaningful difference between the logic President Johnson applied to reject civil rights legislation and the logic the conservative majority on the Supreme Court used to end affirmative action, it is not readily apparent. Within President Johnson’s objections to the granting of “Federal citizenship” to black people and the states right argument he advances to separate “State citizenship” from it are the seeds of modern arguments against birthright citizenship that we hear today from the same people who find common cause with the Confederates of that day. Should this country put the wrong person in the White House yet again, perhaps birthright citizenship will be among the many rights at risk.