February 2012

From today’s NYTimes, “In Tiny Courts of New York, Abuses of Law and Power”:

But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York State. People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been denied protection from abuse.

So it starts off kind of serious. Another typical NYTimes hit job on the forces that be holding US back (US being the proleteriat of course). But then it gets a little more interesting with only the help of examples:

A woman in Malone, N.Y., was not amused. A mother of four, she went to court in that North Country village seeking an order of protection against her husband, who the police said had choked her, kicked her in the stomach and threatened to kill her. The justice, Donald R. Roberts, a former state trooper with a high school diploma, not only refused, according to state officials, but later told the court clerk, “Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then.”

A black soldier charged in a bar fight near Fort Drum became alarmed when his accuser described him in court as “that colored man.” But the village justice, Charles A. Pennington, a boat hauler and a high school graduate, denied his objections and later convicted him. “You know,” the justice said, “I could understand if he would have called you a Negro, or he had called you a nigger.”

And it keeps going:

The commission twice disciplined the town justice, Paul F. Bender of Marion, for deriding women in abuse cases. Arraigning one man on assault charges, he asked the police investigator whether the case was “just a Saturday night brawl where he smacks her and she wants him back in the morning.”

And going:

Eeric D. Bailey, a 21-year-old black soldier from nearby Fort Drum, was facing a disorderly conduct charge after a tussle with a white bar bouncer. Sitting three feet from Mr. Bailey, the bouncer identified him as “that colored man.” Mr. Bailey’s jaw dropped.

The soldier, who did not have a lawyer, told the judge that the term was offensive. But Justice Pennington said that while certain other words were racist, “colored” was not. “For years we had no colored people here,” he said.

The commission had heard worse. After arraigning three black defendants arrested in a college disturbance in 1994, a justice in the Finger Lakes region said in court, “Oh, it’s been a rough day — all those blacks in here.” A few years before that, a Catskill justice reminisced in court that it was safe for young women to walk around “before the blacks and Puerto Ricans moved here.”

In an interview, Justice Pennington said the commission had treated him unfairly. But he may not have helped his case when he told the commission that “colored” was an acceptable description.

“I mean, to me,” he testified, “colored doesn’t preferably mean black. It could be an Indian, who’s red. It could be Chinese, who’s considered yellow.”

And going:

Arraigning a man in 1997 on charges that he had hit his wife in the face with a telephone, he laughed and asked, “What was wrong with this?” Arraigning a woman on charges that she had sexually abused a 12-year-old boy, the justice asked his courtroom, “Where were girls like this when I was 12?”

USA? A-OK.

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Or you’re just a monkey:

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les enfants de la guerre ne dancent pas bien ce nuit
ils penseront a la fin de la vie
et quand l’etoile qui se leve a matin
est tombee dances comme tu es fou lapin

we are asleep please don’t wake us today
I’d like to scream but I have naught to say
so I’ll just sleep till my larm clock it sounds
and then I’ll hit snooze till they set loose the hounds

c’est parce-que je t’aime que je parle comme un con
a la piscine avec nous nous allons
nage avec sans moi vetements sans la peur
qui nous derange et nous rendre faux danceurs

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-letter20sep20,1,226790.story?coll=la-headlines-world&ctrack=1&cset=true

The sad side of the Iraq war.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060924/ap_on_re_eu/britain_afghanistan

Also the war in Afghanistan is still not over. Interesting overview of communist Afghanistan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_Afghanistan

I had never seen the whole thing, but the AHA video is messed up.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=u0R7dvLAiP8

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New pics are up on flickr so go check ‘em out!

Today we did some work with local youth on builiding a “vivero” or tree nursery.  We chose a site behind their school and dug a trough for the bags.  Later we built a sifter for removing rocks, leaves and roots from the soil.  Lastly we employed a crap-ton of kids into filling bags with dirt and getting them ready for planing seeds.  The pictures speak for themselves I think…  just look at the album, otherwise the pics will be in the wrong order.

Other than that I am feelin’ healthy and my spanish is improving!

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It’s what we are:

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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11717105/robert_f_kennedy_jr__will_the_next_election_be_hacked RFK Jr’s Rolling Stone article on election tampering. In it a former Diebold employee talks about how in two incredibly Democratic counties they applied a patch during the 2002 election, which supposedly fixed a clock problem. Apparently there is some circumstantial evidence that it actually was installed to throw the election to the Republican candidate. Oh well, no way to tell for sure since there is no paper trail with these electronic voting machines.

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