#i got arrested at an encampment if that's not clear

[many-sparrows]

I'm very tired of this "queer college students should stop supporting Palestine, they'd kill you there!" I watched a hijabi ask a trans man, "but what name do you want to go by?" A butch giving a woman their hoodie so that she could keep her hair covered after the cops took her scarf. Muslim girls making sure the lesbian couple got through the system together. Religious men making sure purple haired protestors got out safe. I don't want to hear it. Solidarity forever, free Palestine.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Re: the UofT anon, I think it's worth sharing the full email we got. This is the same university whose land acknowledgement talks about how grateful they are to have the "opportunity to live and work" on the stolen land their "private property" occupies. Also note that campus police have arrested members of OccupyUofT while they were holding a peaceful sit-in on campus.

"Dear students,

At this time of heightened tensions, when protests are taking place on many university campuses, I am writing to remind you of the University of Toronto’s commitment to free expression and lawful and peaceful protest, as well as the necessary limits that accompany those freedoms.

Freedom of expression is central to the University of Toronto’s mission of learning and discovery. The University’s Statement on Freedom of Speech notes that “all members of the University must have as a prerequisite freedom of speech and expression, which means the right to examine, question, investigate, speculate, and comment on any issue without reference to prescribed doctrine, as well as the right to criticize the University and society at large.” The statement also makes clear that all members of our community have the freedom “to engage in peaceful assemblies and demonstrations.”

The University respects our members’ rights to assemble and protest within the limits of U of T policies and the law. The University also has a duty of care to our students. Actions that create a health and safety risk, that interfere with the ability of students, faculty, librarians and staff to learn, teach, research and work on our campuses, or that disrupt or impede other University activities are not permitted. 

U of T’s lands and buildings are private property, though the University allows wide public access to them for authorized activities. Unauthorized activities such as encampments or the occupation of University buildings are considered trespassing. Specifically, our Code of Student Conduct prohibits intentional damage to University property, unauthorized entry and use of University property contrary to instructions, disruptions of University activities, and other offenses to property and persons.

Any student involved in unauthorized activities or conduct that contravenes University policies or the law may be subject to consequences. We ask that you engage productively with one another to fulfill our mutual obligation to provide a welcoming and safe community in which all members can express themselves.

Best Regards,

Professor Sandy Welsh

Vice-Provost, Students"

~~~~

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Dion J. Pierre

During Wednesday’s interview with the Algemeiner, Davidai defended his approach as a genuine expression of grief and concern for the welfare of Jewish students.

“People are free to see exactly the videos and see, you know, what did or did not happen and judge for themselves,” he said. “That is why I call this a clear act or retaliation. My lawyers got on a phone call with them on Oct. 7 [of this year] and were told that the university is going to suspend my ability to be on campus. On that day, the university found that the most important thing is to remove me from campus. I am, to the best of my knowledge, the only professor who has been removed from campus since Oct. 7 [2023].”

Davidai went on to point to faculty conduct which has been covered by The Algemeiner, including Columbia professor Joseph Massad publishing in Electronic Intifada an essay cheering Hamas’s atrocities as “awesome�� and describing men who paraglided into a music festival to kill young people as “the air force of the Palestinian resistance.”

Davidai continued, “The only person who was removed from campus is the one that exposed the chief operating officer’s antisemitic problem. And I say this, you know, I don’t know if he is or isn’t an antisemite. I do know that he’s awfully comfortable with antisemitism and that he has an antisemitism problem.”

According to Columbia University, the campus ban, which does not affect Davidai’s compensation or employment status, was prompted by “threats of intimidation, harassment, or other threatening behavior.”

Samantha Slater, a university spokesperson, continued: “Columbia has consistently and continually respected Assistant Professor Davidai’s right to free speech and to express his views. His freedom of speech has not been limited and is not being limited now. Columbia, however, does not tolerate threats of intimidation, harassment, or other threatening behavior by its employees. Because Assistant Professor Davidai repeatedly harassed and intimidated university employees in violation of university policy, we have temporarily limited his access to campus while he undertakes appropriate training on our policies governing the behavior of our employees.”

This latest clash between Davidai and Columbia University comes during what has been widely described as an unprecedented “crisis” at the school which, since Oct. 7, 2023, has undermined its credibility with the public and drawn the scrutiny of federal lawmakers.

In April, an anti-Zionist group occupied Hamilton Hall, forcing then-university president Minouche Shafik to call on the New York City Police Department (NYPD) for help, a decision she hesitated to make and which led to over 108 arrests. However, according to documents shared in August by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, 18 of the 22 students slapped with disciplinary charges for their role in the incident remain in “good standing” despite the university’s earlier pledge to expel them. Another 31 of 35 who were suspended for illegally occupying the campus with a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” remain in good standing too.

In August, Shafik resigned as president of the university, and just two months prior, in June, its legal counsel reached an out of court settlement with a student who accused administrators of neglecting their obligation to foster a safe learning environment during the final weeks of last spring semester. While stopping short of admitting guilt, the settlement virtually conceded to the plaintiff her argument that the campus was unsafe for Jewish students, agreeing to provide her and others “Safe Passage Liaisons” tasked with protecting them from racist abuse and violence.

Amid this cluster of scandals and conflagrations, Davidai has allegedly received a lion’s share of the university’s attention. Last semester, it launched an investigation of his conduct, which he called a persecution that “reveals the depths of its hostility towards its Jewish community.” He has since retained counsel to guard his rights and prevent being bulldozed by one of the wealthiest and powerful universities in the world. Despite his troubles, however, he told The Algemeiner on Wednesday that Columbia is redeemable.

[sophia-zofia]

Northeastern University had around 100 peaceful protesters arrested on Saturday at its Boston campus’ pro-Palestine encampment, claiming that there had been reports of protesters using antisemitic slurs; but according to witnesses, the protester who spewed hate speech was a pro-Israel counter protester. On Saturday morning, Northeastern Vice President for Communications Renata Nyul released a statement, announcing that the protest on Centennial Common would be cleared by campus police and local law enforcement. In the statement, she explained that the reason they were clearing the encampment was because of the presence of hate speech at the site. “What began as a student demonstration two days ago, was infiltrated by professional organizers with no affiliation to Northeastern. Last night, the use of virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews,’ crossed the line,” she said. “We cannot tolerate this kind of hate on our campus." Across the country, university administrators and politicians alike have publicized reports of antisemitic speech at student-led protests, as part of their justification for arresting students, and disbanding protests urging them to divest from Israel. These accounts often vary from eye-witness accounts of the peaceful protests. GBH’s Tori Bedford quickly confirmed that she had heard someone say “Kill the Jews,” but it wasn’t the peaceful pro-Palestine protesters. The chant came from a pro-Israel agitator who joined the crowd late Friday night. In a video of the appalling incident, provided by an organizer from Huskies for a Free Palestine, and posted to X by Bedford, a protest leader prepared to lead a chant. “You repeat to me what I say to you. Got it?” they shout. “Kill the Jews,” yelled one person, holding an Israeli flag. “Anybody on board? Anybody on board?” He was one of two counter-demonstrators who had affixed themselves at the center of the crowd, standing on lawn chairs as they berated the protesters around them. The crowd of protesters immediately booed the young man. The protesters began chanting, “We’re gonna let them leave,” drowning out the shouts of the two counter-protesters.

After midnight, the two counter protesters had disengaged, according to reports. The next morning, dozens of NUPD and Boston police arrested around 100 demonstrators, but not the one whose hate speech got everything shut down. After they loaded the arrested students into vans, students linked arms to prevent the vehicles from leaving campus for hours, according to The Huntington News. Professor Matthew Noah Smith who took part in Northeastern’s protest on Thursday, observed a very different protest to the one the administration described. “I hope Northeastern is not weaponizing anti-semitism to justify arresting the protesting students,” he wrote in a post on X. “I spent all day Thursday with the students there and they were clear in standing against all forms of hate and violence.”

[readingsquotes]

"So far, there hasn’t been any sort of national reckoning on the use of force against student protesters. It’s as if the outraged movement to improve police accountability after the summer of 2020 never happened. But as the violence in Gaza worsens and the U.S. heads into yet another volatile election season, the lack of introspection at a national level about police tactics is plainly dangerous.

I was on Columbia’s campus on the night Hamilton Hall was raided by police and had been reporting on the protests since the Gaza Solidarity Encampment there began. Since April 30, I’ve been in touch with several students who were both inside and outside of Hamilton Hall and experienced the police raid, some of whom shared their accounts and medical records to shed light on police action. I have seen documentation of lacerations, broken bones, extensive bruising, and hearing loss. Many of the students who were injured and shared their records with Slate asked to remain anonymous so as not to risk their legal cases. But thanks to them, we know that what actually happened during the police raid that night was far uglier than the NYPD’s highly edited, propagandistic narrative of it.

Comment

“Get the EMT!” Cameron Jones shouted through a tiny opening in a dormitory window after he spotted a protester lying motionless at the bottom of a set of concrete steps on Columbia University’s campus. Jones was with a dozen or so other students who were huddled next to two tall panes of glass and looking out in horror at Hamilton Hall, an administrative building that Columbia protesters had broken into and occupied in the early hours of April 30. Some 20 hours after the building had been occupied by students—who were pushing for their school’s divestment from Israel over the war in Gaza, and were inspired by occupations of the building by students in 1968, 1972, and 1996—hundreds of police had arrived at the university, some armed with handguns and wearing riot gear and body armor.The video player is currently playing an ad. You can skip the ad in 5 sec with a mouse or keyboard00:15Amicus Live with Sherrilyn Ifill: How Brown V. Board Became the Cause and Cure of Originalism Skip Ad

“I saw my fellow students being pushed, shoved, and thrown down stairs by police,” Jones said of the police crackdown. He was one of a few who actually witnessed what happened to the protesters once the police raid began. Moments earlier, police had cleared the area around Hamilton Hall of students and press, threatening to arrest anyone who did not leave. Officers pushed Jones and many other students into an on-campus residential building, John Jay Hall, before guarding the doors and blocking their sight of Hamilton. But Jones knew this building connected to another dorm called Hartley Hall, and from there, he got an unobstructed view of the occupied building. He squeezed his phone through a gap in the window and pressed record. If he couldn’t help, he felt he had to at least document it.

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As protests spread across campuses nationwide in April and police responded with various forms of violent crackdowns, many horrifying interactions between students and professors and law enforcement officers circulated in videos online. At the University of Texas at Austin campus, students were slammed to the ground, dragged around, and blasted with pepper spray. At Dartmouth, law enforcement in riot gear arrested 89 students, faculty, and community members, including a 65-year-old professor who they yanked to the ground while she was recording officers. At UCLA, 200 students were arrested as officers used flash bangs, rubber bullets, batons, and tear gas. Three days earlier, violent attacks by counterprotesters at a UCLA encampment lasted three hours before law enforcement intervened. (The UCLA police chief has since been removed from his post and reassigned.)

But so many other interactions were not recorded. Even at Columbia—the campus that seemingly every media organization swarmed to in the days after university president Nemat Shafik first called the police to arrest students and clear the campus of tents on April 18—so many stories of students’ interactions with the police have not yet surfaced. It may take months, as lawsuits make their way through the court system, for much more documentation of what actually happened at Columbia—and so many other campuses—to come out.

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So far, there hasn’t been any sort of national reckoning on the use of force against student protesters. It’s as if the outraged movement to improve police accountability after the summer of 2020 never happened. But as the violence in Gaza worsens and the U.S. heads into yet another volatile election season, the lack of introspection at a national level about police tactics is plainly dangerous.

I was on Columbia’s campus on the night Hamilton Hall was raided by police and had been reporting on the protests since the Gaza Solidarity Encampment there began. Since April 30, I’ve been in touch with several students who were both inside and outside of Hamilton Hall and experienced the police raid, some of whom shared their accounts and medical records to shed light on police action. I have seen documentation of lacerations, broken bones, extensive bruising, and hearing loss. Many of the students who were injured and shared their records with Slate asked to remain anonymous so as not to risk their legal cases. But thanks to them, we know that what actually happened during the police raid that night was far uglier than the NYPD’s highly edited, propagandistic narrative of it.

..

Iam Clay, a student at the nearby Columbia-affiliated Union Theological Seminary, was one of the protesters inside Hamilton Hall. In a written testimony shared with me with Clay’s permission, he wrote that an officer “kicked him directly in the head,” and that he “fell to the ground with his ears ringing and then had an officer on top of him cuffing him while still disoriented.” Clay received no medical care while detained, and it was only after he was released that medics (who were waiting outside the jail to help protesters) told him he likely had a concussion. He later went to urgent care, where he was officially diagnosed with one. “Three days later his eye swelled up and he went to Mt. Sinai Emergency Room, where he was diagnosed with the orbital lobe fracture,” the written account of Clay’s injuries reads, a description that is corroborated with medical records and photos....“I saw his face was swollen, and he was, you know, a bit loopy and delirious,” said Norton. “He was in jail without water or anything for 16-plus hours.”

...

It was a horrible night, and not only on Columbia’s campus. The officers the NYPD sent into Hamilton Hall and to the City University of New York that same night were from the Strategic Response Group that was formed in 2015 for counterterrorism and the policing of political protests. The unit has become notorious for its violence against protesters.

...It’s no surprise that the NYPD tried to keep reporters out of Hamilton Hall that day, but as the stories of those inside Columbia continue to come out—and as the police are called to respond to more and more protests—the story the police have been telling will become harder and harder to maintain.

[beardedmrbean]

What we know

Minneapolis police say they responded to two incidents at the homeless encampment at 4th Avenue South and 31st Street East on Friday night.

The first incident happened around 7:30 p.m. Officers responded to a report of a disturbance where someone outside the encampment reported a fight happening inside the encampment involving three to five people.

When officers arrived, they found multiple people who were not involved with the encampment, outside its fence, police said.

Authorities say officers did not find anyone fighting. They also got a report of someone who was unconscious inside the camp – but police said they were unable to locate that person.

The second incident happened about two hours later, around 9:45 p.m. Officers responded to reports of an injured woman.

Police say some people in the neighborhood stated "they were trying to clear a camp" and there was an injured woman. But again, police say they did not find the injured woman.

Officers did arrest a man from the encampment who was reportedly threatening others with a bow and arrow, law enforcement said.

What we don't know

Police did not say if the 911 incidents were related. It is also unclear who the man that was arrested was threatening.

FOX 9 reached out to Minneapolis city officials for comment on the incident.

Past issues with Minneapolis homeless encampments

Neighbors have been speaking out against the recent homeless encampments, as they say these areas have turned into a hotspot for drug use and crime.

Recently, 33-year-old JaBraun Garron Hole was shot dead after a large fight at a homeless encampment on 33rd Street and 3rd Avenue South.

Neighbors say that the homeless encampment has been causing them issues for a while.

"I mean it was just like they were terrorizing the neighborhood," landowner Arne Johansson said. "What if this was your house? If this was your home? They wouldn’t want to people on their land doing all that illegal activity."

For about two weeks, neighbors say close to 50 people made a home in a vacant lot on 3rd Avenue South.

"I’m in a constant state of stress," neighbor Seth Nesting told FOX 9. "I haven’t been able to relax or enjoy myself at home. Yesterday I didn’t eat dinner."

[catdotjpeg]

A fake encampment was created at Queens College by CBS for the show FBI: Most Wanted on Monday (22 Jul). For clarification, the first two photos (with the fake tents and fake broken windows) are staged; the last two photos (with the person in the paramedic jacket and the placards) are of the real counterprotest.

Pro-Palestine advocates are criticizing Queens College, a school of the City University of New York (CUNY), for hosting a two-day TV production involving a prop protest encampment following an administrative crackdown on students for their Gaza advocacy efforts earlier this year.  The imitation campsite, consisting of multicolored tents and signs featuring ambiguous environmental protest language and deliberately misspelled words, is part of an ongoing shoot for CBS’s FBI: Most Wanted, a television series by Wolf Entertainment. According to an email sent by Queens College to community members, shared on X by Within Our Lifetime (WOL) organizer Nerdeen Kiswani, the mock encampment would feature “signage and branding for a fictitious university”; a “chase and arrest scene”; and a staged set with tents, firecrackers, and smoke effects. In response to Hyperallergic’s request for comment, a Queens College representative stated that the school “is often the site of television and film shoots by reputable production companies and media outlets.” 

“The campus community was advised in advance of the anticipated media shoot parameters, including the fact that the episode would focus on a climate change/environmental issue protest at a fictitious college,” the spokesperson said, adding that filming was completed today before noon.

Yesterday, July 22, the shoot was the focus of at least two actions led by pro-Palestine groups WOL, CUNY for Palestine, and National Students for Justice in Palestine. At Queens College, protesters alleged that their demonstration forced filming to wrap early, and outside the CUNY Graduate Center in Midtown Manhattan, more than 150 pro-Palestine advocates gathered to protest, joined by around 30 pro-Israel counterprotesters. 

“We’re here to send a very clear message to the CUNY administration that we will not stop until they drop the charges and until they meet the demands of student organizers,” Kiswani and other protesters at the Manhattan rally said in a call-and-response chant.  “But instead, what does CUNY do? They rent out Queens College for a film shoot for FBI: Most Wanted, where they set up a fake encampment to capitalize [on] the momentum of the Palestinian struggle,” the protesters continued, echoing long-standing calls for the school to divest from Israeli military interests and sever its relations with all Israeli academic institutions.

Carol Lang, an assistant professor at Bronx Community College who was at yesterday’s protest at the Graduate Center, told Hyperallergic that she broke a rib when police raided the City College of New York’s student solidarity encampment at the end of April, arresting 173 people. “[The police] knocked me down, and kept saying, ‘Move! Move!’ but there was no place to move. It was just this really big crowd, so we all fell on top of each other and my knee got all messed up when I slammed it against the ground,” Lang said. Hyperallergic has reached out to the New York Police Department about the allegations. “The criminalization of students who participated in encampments to stop a genocide is comical,” a protester at the Graduate Center who asked to remain anonymous told Hyperallergic. They added that they were suspended from their out-of-state school for participating in a solidarity encampment, which was also targeted by “many arrests and many suspensions.”

-- "TV Show’s Bizarre Mock Student Encampment Draws Protests in NYC" by Maya Pontone for Hyperallergic, 23 Jul 2024

[viiisenyas]

I refuse to wait until tomorrow. I have some angst, and I'm going to torment all of you. So here's the full conversation between Hawke and Val right before the Battle of Ostagar. As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I've replaced Arthur with Reggie to stick with my original plan of keeping him a cameo appearance in the first part of this series.

Fair warning: There's a mention of SA, self-blaming, and suicidal ideation.

Tagging: I'm lazy, if you see it consider yourself tagged.

Valeriana sat quietly by the fire in the mage encampment as she waited for Wynne to gather more potions. She watched the flames dance with empty eyes while the remaining mages slowly began to leave for the valley.

Despite the conversation between Loghain and Uldred that she’d managed to eavesdrop on, it seemed that there were no plans to separate Elliott from the encampment or even arrest him. A flame of rage slowly ignited in her heart.

We need every able-bodied man on the battlefield.

She scoffed as the Teyrn’s words echoed in her mind. Had she been a noblewoman, or a chantry cleric, that bastard surely would have been drawn and quartered without hesitation. But she had to be born a mage. Valeriana huffed, and her head fell into her hands, and she pressed her fingers into her closed eyes.

She envied Arthur’s fortune with joining the Grey Wardens, and in truth, she resented him for his freedom. While she knew it was irrational to feel this way, it only showed her there was nothing left to live for. Then, she began to regret talking him out of running away. Only now did she understand that life as a fugitive was far better than living life at the mercy of Trevelyan.

This wouldn’t have happened if I just trusted him.

“Hey,” a familiar voice called from behind the tents, and she sat up, quickly turning to find Reggie standing with his arms folded over his chest. “Have you got a minute?”

She turned back without a word. She didn’t understand his persistence, and she elected to keep quiet as the remaining mages spared her a curious glance before departing for the battlements. 

“Valeriana,” he called again.

She pressed her lips together, holding back the tears that threatened to spill from her eyes. 

“What do you want, now?” Her tone was sharper than usual, but she didn’t care to apologise.

His light footsteps could be heard as he manoeuvred around the tents. She felt his presence when he crouched beside her, keeping a respectable distance. 

“You don’t know me, and you don’t trust me. I get it. But if you’d just tell me what happened, I could—”

“You could what? Help me?” She interrupted, emitting a sardonic laugh. “You can’t help me, Reggie. No one can. Loghain wouldn’t even bother with it, so what makes you think that you can do anything?”

“You spoke to the Teyrn?” Reggie raised a brow.

Valeriana took a breath before a long pause came. She lowered her eyes to the ground, and stood. 

“He said he wants every able-bodied man in the battle.” She let out another bitter laugh, pacing as she anxiously bit her thumb. “It was foolish to believe that anyone outside the Circle would care about a mage…” 

Valeriana stopped herself when she realised that she was speaking aloud, and she saw Reggie’s concerned gaze fixed on her.

Trevelyan’s threat from the night before became irrelevant as a confession unexpectedly slipped and her lower lip trembled. “I can still feel him...”

The sickly sound of joints popping emitted from Hawke as he clenched his fists.

Reggie gritted his teeth as he rose to his feet. He slipped his fingers through the shaggy mess of his curls and scratched his beard as he muttered something under his breath.

She stopped pacing, and shifted her gaze to him.

Reggie looked back at her, and opened his mouth to speak as Wynne began to approach. 

“Pardon me, but shouldn’t you already be in the valley, young man?” She asked, raising a brow. 

Hawke cleared his throat. “I was just leaving.” 

Valeriana looked at the Senior Enchanter, frowning. “Wynne, I…”

“It’s no concern of mine,” Wynne waved a hand dismissively, offering a warm smile. "But it is time to go."

Valeriana attempted to return the gesture, but she saw the man already walking away from the corner of her eye. Her heart sank when she realised how unpleasant she’d been acting towards him.

“Reggie, wait!” The young mage called, moving towards him with haste. The rogue looked back, perplexed as she impulsively unfastened the chain of her locket and extended her hand to him. “Take it.”

He furrowed his brow, hesitantly tilting his head. “This is yours— why are you giving this to me?”

“Just take it.” Valeriana looked down, and lowered her voice. “Sell it or keep it… I don’t care. I won’t need it where I’m going.” 

A brief pause settled between them.

His lips parted as his eyes went wide. “Valeriana, don’t do this.” 

“I'm tired of fighting,” she shook her head, and offered a bitter smile as she touched his arm. “Maker watch over you.” 

A single tear slipped from her left eye, and she quietly moved towards the battlements to descend the ladder as Wynne followed closely behind her. 

[livelist]

Shut the fuck up, Joe Biden is doing a fucking genocide.

The vast majority of the votes in this country DO NOT MATTER. if you are in a hard red or hard blue state, THINK FOR YOUR FUCKING SELF AND VOTE THIRD PARTY. STOP VOTING FOR EVIL PEOPLE. IT WILL NOT SAVE US, IT WILL ONLY BRING MORE EVIL.

If you live in a swing state, you can fucking try and vote blue. Be my guest. But if Biden loses, it will be entirely HIS AND THE DEMOCRATS FAULT. Not the fucking voters. It will be because of their own violence, corruption, lies, and exploitation.

The system is falling. Understand that the system is dying day by day. It is our job to imagine and create the new system, not eternally condemn ourselves to endlessly proping up a old paradigm that literally wants to enslave and kill us.

The campus encampment movement was more than just a protest. It was a national revoltion rehearsal. It was proving to the state our generation's ability to organize, occupy, provide for ourselves, create community, defend ourselves, negotiate our rights - these miniature communes are almost unheard of in American history but are very recognizable as the beginnings of revolutionary self-autonomy and community organization. The State recognizes that very well, and that is why they were so violently reactionary towards it.

Have faith. The revolution has already begun. Imagine bigger things. Stop believing the narrative that has so many billions of dollars behind it, that you are absolutely constratined to these two old white men with nearly identical politics, especially when it comes to upholding the great evil that is Capitalism and continuing to exploit, enslave, and kill poor people everywhere in the world.

Vote Green. I did it in 2020 and I am so proud. I have the luxury of living in Seattle, where, like I said, my vote doesn't really change anything. At least 50% of Americans live in a similar situation as me. A bunch of us could safely vote for Joll Stein, for Good instead of Evil, for someone who has been for a ceasefire since day 1, who got arrested and assaulted by a police officer at a student protest, who actually cares about everything we care about instead of just caring about getting elected by doing as much for their elite capitalist donors as possible.

Vote Green. Don't let people shame you into voting for a fucking genocidaire if you don't fucking want to. Vote for the Greater Good, not the Lesser Evil. Dare to hope and believe in a greater possibility, that we can actually start to have fucking common sense in this fucking county.

Creating a powerful left, alternative movement is the best way to actually create change in this country. We don't have to win the first time. We need to show that we exist, that we are organized, that we have a clear and coherent ideology and intention, one that specifically addresses our community's needs and intends to provide for them better than the current system can. That we can challenge the way things are done with better ways of doing things. If we are just stuck constantly capitulating to the way its always been and get blackmailed into conforming, than what is the fucking point?

Revolution is happening. Change is available. We are gaining power and momentum all the time. Believe that humans are good, that we can do things better, that so many of us around the world want to do things better, and that that inevitably will win, every single time, everywhere, always. And we are the ones who make it happen. Sincerely, your neighborhood radical trans guy. We keep us safe. Peace and Liberation, Free Palestine.

I’ll say it again, please just grit your teeth and vote for Biden…

[rubyvroom]

What Do Cops Do?

I spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to excerpt from this essay on Alex Pareene’s substack, but in the end I think I have to just post the whole goddamn thing:

Lots of very smart (and even more not-so-smart) people have tried, over the years, to answer the question of what cops are for—whether they exist to keep us safe, to fight crime, to protect property, to enforce racial hierarchies, etc. I pose a simpler question: What do cops do?

Having spent many years observing cop behavior, reading news about cops, and occasionally even asking them for help, I have come to a pretty simple but comprehensive answer: They do what is easy, and avoid what is difficult. Seen through that rubric, much cop behavior suddenly becomes much more explicable.

Of all the improbable things about accused subway shooter Frank James’s last hours of freedom, the weirdest is how easy it is to imagine James still on the run, today, if he’d decided to do almost anything differently. Learning that he phoned in a tip on himself from a McDonald’s, and then that he eventually got tired of waiting there and left, was a sort of sublime punchline to the entire comic manhunt, in which New York City’s enormous and well-funded police department failed at basically every moment to stop or capture a dangerous criminal who literally told them where he was. Then, a few weeks later, another guy shot and killed a person on the Q. The shooter did so at what I’d consider, strategically, the worst time and place to kill someone on the Q: while it crossed the Manhattan Bridge, giving everyone on board both the time and ability to phone the police and have them ready to apprehend him the moment the train arrived in Manhattan. But when the train pulled into Manhattan, rest assured, the police were (according to one unconfirmed eyewitness) on the wrong platform. That shooter might still be on the lam, too, if he hadn’t turned himself in, an act the city authorities and a fame-seeking pastor with connections to the mayor apparently almost sabotaged.

In between those two shootings, and also before and after them, the NYPD busied itself with clearing homeless encampments. In the denouement to the subway shooting fiasco, the police arrested the panhandler into whose cup the second shooter deposited his gun, for illegal firearms possession. This is my thesis in action: It is difficult to prevent a random shooting. It is difficult to find a gunman. It is difficult to arrest an armed man. It is very easy to arrest an unhoused person.

Alexander Sammon just wrote a piece for the Prospect asking why the police are so bad at their jobs, based on their dismal “clearance” (arrests) rates and even more dismal conviction rates. The semi-glib leftist response is that they aren’t. They’re doing exactly what we pay them for. But even judged by their own cruel standards the police are extraordinarily lazy and incompetent. A study summarized by sociologist Brendan Beck in Slate earlier this year made a convincing case that more officers were associated mainly with more misdemeanor arrests. That is, the unimportant shit. It is nice to imagine that additional police spending will go to an army of Columbos solving the trickiest crimes. We are currently doing this experiment, with the real police, in real life, and it is proving that they are spending the money on throwing the belongings of homeless people into dumpsters.

It is easier to arrest a child for stealing chips than it is to apprehend an armed adult shooter. It is easier for several dozen police officers to arrest two unarmed people than it is for a cop to stop any single armed person. It is easier for hundreds of cops to kettle a largely unarmed left-wing protest than it is for an entire department to stop any armed right-wingers from entering a government building. It’s easier to clear homeless encampments than it is to investigate sexual assault. It’s easier to coerce confessions than it is to solve crimes. It’s easier to try to pull a guy over than it is to offer any sort of help when he crashes his car. It’s easier to arrest a mango vendor in the subway than to stop someone from bringing a gun into the subway. It’s easier to arrest a fifth grader than it is to save one’s life.

It is far easier to do “crowd control”—to restrain a panicking parent, perhaps—than it is to enter a room currently occupied by a psycho with a semiautomatic rifle.

[zemoslittlebird]

Little Bird [2: Bargaining]

summary: Zemo tries to negotiate

pairing: Helmut Zemo x Female Original Character

warnings: reference to murder/violence

word count: 1.6k

A/N: [chapter one]

“Time to wake up mala ptica.”

The voice seemed distant and quiet but it succeeded in reaching the depths of Lucinda’s consciousness, enough to stir her. She felt a refreshingly cool touch dampen her forehead as she started to come round, her senses sluggishly emerging from their deep sleep. Lucy could hear the gentle rhythm of music playing somewhere in the distance, a soothing relaxing melody that allowed her to come round gradually.

Lucy’s head lolled to the side and she let out a low groan as pain began to resume its assault on her beaten body as her eyes began to open. The lights felt a little too bright as she squinted against them, setting off another dull ache, this time from behind her eyes. As they adjusted, she saw a figure standing close by, still dressed in a fur-collared coat but devoid of the purple mask he had been donning previously.

“Baron Zemo?” Lucy queried, her voice felt hoarse and dry.

“That is correct.” The man replied, holding out a glass of clear liquid to the Agent’s mouth, “Water?”

Shifting in her seat, she realised that her hands were being restrained behind her back and were attached to something she couldn’t see. The restraints were cold and tough on her skin; steel handcuffs no doubt, more difficult to get out of compared to rope, twine or plastic zip ties. Zemo’s head tilted to the side as he observed her.

“Just a safety precaution…I’m sure you understand.”

The Baron stepped forward and put the glass to her lips and began to angle it so the cool water could slip through her lips. The act itself felt incredibly personal and Lucy felt embarrassed to be hydrated in such a humiliating fashion, but she was far too thirsty to speak out or care. She moved her head back with it and gulped the liquid down greedily.

“Do you need anymore?”

“No. That was fine.” She stated, her cheeks slightly flushed.

Stepping away from her, the Baron sat down comfortably on a plush chaise lounge and picked up a lavish crystal glass full of a golden liquid; a single ice cube sat amongst it, and he shook it around slowly.

Now that she was fully conscious, Lucy’s eyes began to scan more of her surroundings. Ornate framed paintings lined the walls of what was evidently a sitting room, furnished with expensive armchairs and lounges. A glass cabinet full of liquor sat behind the Baron, sat atop a beautiful and well-polished dark oak floor. Zemo watched her silently as her eyes fixed upon the window and the doors. Exit plans no doubt.

“Where am I?” Lucy queried, finally shifting her gaze back to the Baron.

“Safe,” Zemo responded, taking a sip of his drink and smiling over the top of the glass.

“Well that wasn’t quite what I meant."

“You’re in Latvia, a private estate of mine.”

“And what is it you want from me?”

“This might seem strange, perhaps even a little unorthodox but…I need your help.”

“You nearly blew me up, kidnapped me and now have me restrained in your private estate and you’re asking for my help?” Lucy asked incredulously, her eyebrows raised. “Bearing in mind there’s a warrant out for your arrest and a demand for you to return to the Raft.” She added.

Zemo supped the rest of his drink and got to his feet, crossing the room to the liquor cabinet as he busied himself making a new one.

“Ah. The explosion. Yes, the encampment that you and your team infiltrated actually had nothing to do with me. Your intelligence was unfortunately incorrect but your timing was impeccable I have to admit. The explosion provided us with the distraction we needed to get in without detection…The camp itself actually belonged to a group that has been capturing, torturing and brutally murdering Sokovians.”

Lucy stared at Zemo for a brief moment with surprised eyes before scrutinising his facial expression and his body language to look for any signs of lies or deceit, but it appeared that the Sokovian was telling the truth. Either that, or he was a very good liar.

“And who is this group exactly? Why are they targeting the Sokovians?” “I don’t know.” Zemo’s warm smile quickly dissipated and had been replaced by one of cold hatred. “All I know is that the Sokovians are not safe. If someone doesn’t intervene then they will likely all suffer the same fate as those we have already discovered…As if losing their homes and families in the incident wasn’t enough.” He slammed the glass on the table in his anger and Lucy knew that it was personal after he had lost his own family during the evacuation of Sokovia eight years ago.

“So you have no idea we were actually there?” Lucy asked quickly, trying to keep the Baron in a more relaxed state. “Not until we came across you after the explosion. You were the only one wearing a uniform with an emblem that I recognised, hence the purpose of your capture. The rest we either took as hostages or were killed in the ensuing gunfight.”

“So you didn’t find anyone else with this on their uniform?” Lucy enquired, indicating at the Blue Jay stitched into her uniform just above her left breath. Zemo glanced over his shoulder to see what she was pointing at and he shook his head. A wave of relief washed over Lucy, glad that her team had obeyed her orders and were hopefully safe and continuing their search for the Alpha team…Speaking of which, “You haven’t come across any other SHIELD teams then? Even before us?”

“No I have not, but I admit the armaments that the guards had in the base seemed a little too sophisticated for them. Unless of course they are a secret advanced squad that absolutely no-one has heard of before. Not unlikely but…”  Zemo murmured, pouring himself another glass of liquor.

Lucy felt the pit of stomach drop with dread – hopefully the team were still alive but if they had been stripped of their armour and weapons it didn’t appear promising. She swallowed hard and tried to clear it from her mind; it was useless to consider the fate of the Alpha team whilst she was locked up with no way to contact her own squad. She had no idea that her search and rescue mission would end up becoming a part of a bigger conspiracy, one that apparently her establishment knew nothing about.

“Why does SHIELD not know anything about this?” Lucy voiced, an eyebrow raised.

“You think your organisation really cares what is going on over here? You have no constituents here, nor do you have any authority or influence. It’s turning into a free-for-all...A civil war will break out if nothing is done, so do you see my predicament? I am not prepared to return to the Raft until this has been resolved. I will not let my compatriots die – they have suffered enough.”

Lucy chewed on her bottom lip as she lapsed into thought, considering the Baron’s words and his bargain. “Well I need to see all of this for myself. Forgive me Baron but I can’t just accept your word for it and SHIELD are highly unlikely to offer any support if I don’t provide a full report. Naturally they will think you are responsible for the explosion at the base and then there’s the issue of my kidnapping of course. You do seem to have a history of all that.”

Zemo poured himself another drink as he contemplated the Agent’s words, swirling the liquor around that solitary ice cube, “Very well, I will show you what we have collated so far.” He stated, draining the gold liquid in one quick swallow before crossing the oak floor.

He moved in close to Lucy, leaning over to unlock the cuffs. The strong scent of his aftershave filled her nostrils, a pleasant mixture of bergamot orange and vanilla and her blue eyed gazed traced the line of his jaw seeing signs of stubble on someone who was more often than not, clean shaven and well groomed.  Perhaps the strain of the current situation was really taking its toll on the Sokovian.

“There.” Zemo muttered, stepping back with the steel cuffs in his hand. Now that they had been removed, Lucy held out her hands and flexed her wrists a few times so the blood could flow freely and the feeling came back. Zemo noticed the indentations and redness left from the cuffs and took a small tub of something from the side.

“I hope you don’t mind – I was applying this on your wounds before you wakened. I imagine it would be a lot more soothing than suffering with the pain.”

Lucy looked at the jar of salve and sighed, holding out her wrists so he could freely apply the healing balm on the inflamed skin.

“How rude of me, I haven’t even asked your name,” Zemo stated, applying the salve gently to her wrists whilst Lucy watched with mild interest. He could have simply tossed the tub at her and told her to sort herself out but here he was, applying it with a tender, circular motion with his index and third finger.

“Lucinda but Lucy is fine.”

“Then you should call me Helmut.” He responded, screwing the lid back on the salve and wiping the excess absently on the damp cloth he had been using earlier. “And now that we are over the formalities we can get on to why you’re really here, I’m trusting you aren’t going to do anything unwise. We are alone in here, but outside I have a few sentries stationed around the estate for my protection.”

It didn’t really seem like a threat but Lucy didn’t really have any intentions of making an escape…Just yet. Plus she was interested to find out what Zemo had uncovered, and what his true plans and intentions were.

“Very well. Lead the way.” Lucy answered, gesturing for Zemo to guide her.

[byrne-lestat]

South Bend Police Department and Code Enforcement were ordered by Mayor James Mueller, Pete Buttigieg's handpicked successor, to clear a tent city that sprung up on city property after the city closed a homeless shelter.

Attempts were made to bulldoze the camp, but those attempts were delayed by protestors for long enough for activists to negotiate with the city.

The police got the permission from some members of the houseless community to move most of the tents to a nearby church.

There was, however, one houseless person who did not want to move. Him and two protestors were both arrested.

This action from Mueller shows that he will make good on his campaign promise to pretty much just do what Buttigieg did.

The mayor said this in an official statement

“Today’s actions were unfortunate but necessary for the health and safety of our community. The encampment grew rapidly with increased calls for service to SBPD and reports of fights, illegal drug use and other issues.

The City provided more than 72 hours to clear the site ahead of this morning’s deadline, and I’m proud of how our men and women in the Department of Code Enforcement and Police Department took on this very difficult task.

My administration will continue to work on solutions, both short and long term, to alleviate the complex issue of homelessness in South Bend. I am hopeful our well-intentioned advocates work with us on solutions. The City cannot encourage or turn a blind eye toward unmanaged, large encampments because of the compounding health and safety issues they generate.”

Protestors pointed out that Mueller's orders defied both CDC guidelines and the Fourth Amendment of the United States

📸 (Photography by Cassie Walker-Sleman and Michael Caterina from the South Bend Tribune)

[antoine-roquentin]

Even more striking than the scale of need are the shifting demographics of who is eating here and why. The homeless population is getting younger, staffers say, and more likely to have children and full-time jobs. In one hour, over taco salad and Fanta, I meet fast-food employees, a former car salesman who lost his home in the financial crisis and a pregnant 31-year-old whose baby is due the same month her housing vouchers run out.

But the biggest surprise about St. Vincent’s may be the state in which it’s located. Just four years ago, Utah was the poster child for a new approach to homelessness, a solution so simple you could sum it up in five words: Just give homeless people homes.

In 2005, the state and its capital started providing no-strings-attached apartments to the “chronically” homeless — people who had lived on the streets for at least a year and suffered from mental illness, substance abuse or a physical disability. Over the next 10 years, Utah built hundreds of housing units, hired dozens of social workers ― and reduced chronic homelessness by 91 percent.

The results were a sensation. In 2015, breathless media reports announced that a single state, and a single policy, had finally solved one of urban America’s most vexing problems. Reporters from around the country came to Utah to gather lessons for their own cities. In a widely shared “Daily Show” segment, Hasan Minhaj jogged the streets of Salt Lake City, asking locals if they knew where all the homeless people had gone.

But this simplistic celebration hid a far more complex truth. While Salt Lake City targeted a small subset of the homeless population, the overall problem got worse. Between 2005 and 2015, while the number of drug-addicted and mentally ill homeless people fell dramatically, the number of people sleeping in the city’s emergency shelter more than doubled. Since then, unsheltered homelessness has continued to rise. According to 2018 figures, the majority of unhoused families and single adults in Salt Lake City are experiencing homelessness for the first time.

“People thought that if we built a few hundred housing units we’d be out of the woods forever,” said Glenn Bailey, the executive director of Crossroads Urban Center, a Salt Lake City food bank. “But if you don’t change the reasons people become homeless in the first place, you’re just going to have more people on the streets.”

This is not just a Salt Lake City story. Across the country, in the midst of a deepening housing crisis and widening inequality, homelessness has concentrated in America’s most prosperous cities. So far, municipal leaders have responded with policies that solve a tiny portion of the problem and fail to account for all the ways their economies are pushing people onto the streets.

The reality is that no city has ever come close to solving homelessness. And over the last few years, it has become clear that they cannot afford to.

Eric (not his real name) is exactly the kind of person Utah’s policy experiment was intended to help. He is 55 years old and has been homeless for most of his life. He takes medication for his schizophrenia, but his paranoia still leads him to cash his disability checks and hide them in envelopes around the city. When he lived on the streets, his drug of choice was a mix of heroin and cocaine. These days it’s meth.

Despite all his complications, Eric is a success story. He lives in a housing complex in the suburbs of Salt Lake City that was built for the chronically homeless. He has case workers who ensure that he takes his medications and renews his benefits. While he may never live independently, he is far better off here than in a temporary shelter, a jail cell or sleeping on the streets.

The problem for policymakers is that Eric is no longer emblematic of American homelessness. In Salt Lake City, just like everywhere else, the population of people sleeping on the streets looks a lot different than it used to.

As the economy has come out of the Great Recession, America’s unhoused population has exploded almost exclusively in its richest and fastest-growing cities. Between 2012 and 2018, the number of people living on the streets declinedby 11 percent nationwide — and surged by 26 percent in Seattle, 47 percent in New York City and 75 percent in Los Angeles. Even smaller cities, like Reno and Boise, have seen spikes in homelessness perfectly coincide with booming tech sectors and falling unemployment.  

In other words, homelessness is no longer a symbol of decline. It is a product of prosperity. And unlike Eric, the vast majority of people being pushed out onto the streets by America’s growing urban economies do not need dedicated social workers or intensive medication regimes. They simply need higher incomes and lower housing costs.

“The people with the highest risk of homelessness are the ones living on a Social Security check or working a minimum-wage job,” said Margot Kushel, the director of the UCSF. Center for Vulnerable Populations. In 2015, she led a team of researchers who interviewed 350 people living on the streets in Oakland. Nearly half of their older interviewees were experiencing homelessness for the first time.

“If they make it to 50 and they’ve never been homeless, there’s a good chance they don’t have severe mental illness or substance abuse issues,” Kushel said. “Once they become homeless, they start to spiral downward really quickly. They’re sleeping three to four hours a night, they get beat up, they lose their medications. If you walk past them in a tent, they seem like they need all these services. But what they really needed was cheaper rent a year ago.”

Other research has found the same connection between housing costs and homelessness. In 2012, researchers found that a $100 increase in monthly rent in big cities was associated with a 15 percent rise in homelessness. The effect was even stronger in smaller cities.

“Once you’re homeless, it’s a steep hill to climb back up,” Bailey said. “When an eviction is on your record, it’s even steeper. And even if you do get back into housing, you’re still one illness or one car problem away from becoming homeless again.”

And rising affluence isn’t just transforming the economic factors that cause homelessness. It is also changing the politics of the cities tasked with solving it. Across the country, as formerly poor neighborhoods have gentrified, politicians are facing increasingly strident calls to criminalize panhandling and bulldoze tent encampments. While city residents consistently tell pollsters that they support homeless services in principle, specific proposals to build shelters or expand services face vociferous local opposition.

“The biggest hindrance to solving homelessness is that city residents keep demanding the least effective policies,” said Sara Rankin, the director of the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project at Seattle University School of Law. The evidenceoverwhelminglydemonstrates that punishing homeless people makes it harder for them to find housing and get work. Nonetheless, the most common demands from urban voters are for politicians to increase arrests, close down soup kitchens and impose entry requirements and drug tests in shelters.

“Homelessness is a two-handed problem,” Rankin said. “One hand is everything you’re doing to make it better and the other is everything you’re doing to make it worse. Right now, we spend far more effort undoing our progress than advancing it.”

No municipality demonstrates this dynamic better than Salt Lake City. Thanks to rising housing and construction costs, the building of new homeless housing has slowed to a trickle. A plan to replace the city’s central homeless shelter with a handful of smaller, suburban facilities has been delayed and scaled down due to neighborhood opposition. In 2017, after years of demands by downtown residents and businesses, Utah initiated a $67 million law enforcement crackdown on the population sleeping on the streets of its state capital. In its first year, the campaign resulted in more than 5,000 arrests — and just 101 homeless people being placed into housing.

And there are no signs that it’s going to get better. The economy is creating new homeless people faster than cities can house them.And the worse the problem gets, the harder it becomes to solve.

“The entire system has stalled,” said Andrew Johnston, the vice president of program operations for Volunteers of America Utah, one of the largest service providers in Salt Lake City. “As the economy has improved, policymakers seem to believe that the market will supply affordable housing on its own. But if you don’t put public and private money into it, you’re not going to get it.”

Three years after she escaped from homelessness, Georgia Gregersen’s most enduring memory is how quickly she fell into it.

“I’m a waitress, I’m at home with a new baby and three months later I’m sleeping in an empty parking garage,” said Gregersen, who now lives in a Salt Lake City suburb.

Her story plays out as a series of unraveling safety nets. She had been trying to get clean for years, but the waitlists for rehab were months long. She got on methadone when she found out she was pregnant, but it cost $85 per week, almost as much as she had been spending on heroin. After her son was born she was eligible for daycare vouchers, but the never-ending paperwork — “something was always wrong or required another appointment” — meant she never actually got them.

Eventually, the cost of childcare and the stress of being a single mom got to her and she relapsed. Within weeks she had lost her job and handed her son over to her parents. Her aunt, with whom she had been staying, asked her to move out.

Sleeping outside made her even more desperate to get clean, but everywhere she turned her options were cut off. Every halfway house and detox center in Salt Lake City was full. When she applied for subsidized housing, a government official told her it would take two years just to get on the waiting list.

“I thought, I’ll probably be dead by then,” she said.

Gregersen spiraled downward in 2015, right around the time Utah announced it had ended chronic homelessness. Unlike the recipients of that experiment — most of whom required 24-hour, lifelong support — Gregersen didn’t need permanent supportive housing. She needed every other form of support to be adequately funded and available when she needed it.

“We always look to one thing to be the answer,” she said, “but I needed everything, and in concert.”

Gregersen’s story perfectly encapsulates the challenge of urban policy in a changing and deteriorating America. Truly ending homelessness will require cities to systematically repair all the cracks in the country’s brittle, shattered welfare system. From drug treatment to rental assistance to subsidized child care, the only way to address the crisis is through a concerted — and costly — expansion of government assistance.

And yet, even as homelessness becomes a defining feature of urban growth, no city in America can afford to meaningfully address it.  

“Politicians keep proposing quick fixes and simple solutions because they can’t publicly admit that solving homelessness is expensive,” Kushel said. Before the 1980s, she points out, most of the responsibility for low-income housing, rental assistance and mental health treatment fell on the federal government.

Since then, though, these costs have been systematically handed over to cities. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of low-income households receiving federal rental assistance dropped by more than half. Hundreds of thousands of mental health treatment beds have disappeared. Despite having far deeper pockets, the federal government now spends less per homeless person than the city of San Francisco.  

The relentless localization of responsibility means that cities are spending more than they ever have on homelessness and, at the same time, nowhere near enough. L.A.’s recent $1.2 billion housing bond is one of the largest in American history. It will construct 1,000 permanent supportive housing units every year — in a city where 14,000 people need one. According to a 2018 analysis, Seattle would have to double its current spending to provide housing and services for everyone living on the streets.

Smaller cities have an even wider spending gap. According to Salt Lake City’s Housing & Neighborhood Development Department, building one unit of affordable housing costs roughly $154,000. Providing a home to all 6,800 people currently accessing homeless services would cost the city roughly $1 billion — two-thirds of its entire annual budget.

“We know that it’s cheaper in the long run to provide housing for homeless people, but cities don’t get money back when that happens,” said Tony Sparks, an urban studies professor at San Francisco State University. Expanding social support and building subsidized housing require huge upfront investments that may not pay off for decades. Though the costs of managing a large homeless population mostly fall on hospitals and law enforcement, reducing the burden on those systems won’t put spending back in city coffers.

“If you know how city budgets work, everything goes into a different pot,” Sparks said. “When you save money on health care, it just goes back into the health care system. It doesn’t trickle sideways.”

But all the challenges of funding their response to homelessness doesn’t mean cities are entirely powerless. For a start, municipal leaders could remove the zoning codes that make low-income housing and homeless shelters illegal in their residential neighborhoods. They could replace encampment sweeps and anti-panhandling laws with municipally sanctioned tent cities. They could update their eviction regulations to keep people in the housing they already have.

Cities can also, crucially, address the huge diversity of the homeless population. Rankin points out that for young mothers, the most frequent cause of homelessness is domestic abuse. For young men, it is often a recent discharge from foster care or prison. The young homeless population is disproportionately gay and trans.

All these populations are already interacting with dozens of municipal agencies that haven’t been designed to serve them. Even without major new funding sources, cities could do a lot better with the systems they already have. Schools, for example, could provide social workers for unhoused students. Libraries could invite health care workers to help homeless patrons manage their chronic illnesses. Law enforcement agencies could reorient themselves around outreach and harm reduction rather than arrests and encampment sweeps.

[ganmabuster]

The Tome of Souls (Drabble/Plot point)

Husavik, Iceland, December 27, 2019

Two miles inland from the first settlement in Iceland, a team of archaeologists is investigating an early Viking encampment.

The leader of the expedition, Doctor Eugune Pons, finishes cleaning up the fishing tools he had found as he hears excited chatter coming from the rest of his team. This can only mean one thing. They’ve found something new. Setting the tools into their proper place on a shelf, he stands up and dusts off his pants. It’s a force of habit. They’re just going to get dirty again, he knows this.

Doctor Pons moves over to the small opening in the hillside. “You ladies find something interesting?”

A response comes quickly from his second in command, Elizabeth Rikers, just ten feet down the tunnel. “We’ve found an OOPART, Doctor.”

An Out Of Place Artifact is a curiosity, even if it shouldn’t be buried in this strata. Doctor Pons grabs his tablet and turns on the camera to record the unveiling of this item.

As Rikers and her assistant Violet Kane slowly remove the object, Doctor Pons can see what they’ve uncovered. It’s a extremely large book,twice the size of an encyclopedia, with some kind of complex mechanical lock holding it closed.

As the dust of ages falls away from the book, Violet can’t help but utter a curse. “Damn. I hope that leather is cow skin.”

Elizabeth shakes her head. “Violet, this isn’t the Necronomicon. I don’t believe this to be human skin. Not cow skin either. I’ll have to run some tests, but I believe it might be seal skin.”

“I find that locking mechanism interesting. Based on the size of the book...” Doctor Pons considers it for a moment. “It looks like you would need three people working in tandem to unlock it. And those symbols in the locks aren’t Viking runes. Hold on. Bring it into the light here.”  He snaps a picture of the symbols  with his phone and steps outside to get a signal. “This sort of thing looks like Doctor Spengler’s field of knowledge.” He sends off the picture of the lock to the Ghostbusters email address.

That’s as far as they get, when a sudden windstorm kicks up. The three of them rush to cover up the dig site with the tarpaulins, even as the book is laid aside on a table in the tunnel.

Doctor Pons drops his tablet in his rush, and the camera records a searing white light filling the area, and a large iron hand reaching through the light, pulling the book past the camera’s field of view. Then, the light clears and there’s no sign of the three archaeologists. Just an empty dig site.

Tokyo, Japan, December 29 2019

Angela takes a sip of her morning coffee as she reads the newspaper. A headline catches her eye and she starts shaking.

Her closest friends, and live-in feline alchemical monster, sense that something’s wrong. Is she having another flashback?

The shaking stops and Angela points to the article. “Archaeologists in Iceland vanish without trace.” 

Angela takes a deep breath. “My Uncle Egon was working with them, getting weekly updates on their progress. And now they’ve gone missing. I’ve got to do something...” She calls an Eyecon to her hand. “Maybe if I portal over there...”

“Whoa Whoa, Chief.” Kazari holds up a paw. “I know you want to help, but this happened just yesterday. That area is still going to be a crime scene and I’d hate to see you get arrested.”

Angela doesn’t even have a snarky response. Much as she hates to admit it, the cat is right. “What would you suggest, Kazari?”

“First, get in touch with your uncle. Have him forward what he knows. Then, send someone to Iceland who can’t get arrested.” Kazari shrugs, as if his words are the most obvious course of action.

“Are you volunteering, Kazari?”

“Me? Hell no. Iceland and I have a bit of a hate-hate relationship. Long story.” He points down the hall at Angela’s ghost friend, Slimer. “Send the little green spud.”

Angela finishes sending off the request for information and waves for Slimer to join them. “Slimer, we’ve got a job for you.”

(To be Continued)

[readingsquotes]

"One of the medics who spoke with LA Public Press said she only learned the cause of certain injuries she treated the next day when she watched footage of the riot online. 

“There was a student in a UCLA hoodie with his head down and bleeding,” the medic said. “I was wondering how he got hurt. Then I saw the video. They were just trying to hold the line, and a Zionist grabbed a two-by-four and hit him. He was already on the floor.”

The fighting would continue without interference for roughly four hours. California Highway Patrol and LAPD began assembling around 1:45 a.m., according to videos analyzed by the New York Times. Those agencies assisted the University of California Police, which typically responds to incidents at UCLA, in separating the two groups only after 30 minutes had passed from when they set up a skirmish line. As police waited to act, objects continued to be thrown and people continued to try to enter the encampment. 

The police eventually moved in and allowed the attackers to leave without arrest. 

...

The students were able to hold off the attackers for over four hours. Students repelled the attackers with a combination of handmade shields and plywood barricades. Helmets and goggles protected them from pieces of wood and other thrown objects. At times they used pepper spray in self-defense.

In a statement following the attacks, Students for Justice in Palestine UCLA said that the school has failed multiple times to protect the students and that they would continue to fight “until the life has been separated from our bodies – to be renewed for generations next.” 

None of the attackers have been arrested.

...

“There’s no ambiguity around it,” Branstetter told LA Public Press. “Block said the encampment had to be cleared because it was a safety hazard. So we’re blaming victims for the victim’s own harm. The solution to preventing violence is to use violence on students?”

...

But in a second raid, beginning around 3 A.M, police were violent. 

Officers in riot gear with California Highway Patrol (or CHP) began firing loud flashbangs over the encampment. Other officers tore down the plywood and metal gates holding together the makeshift barricade.

After CHP breached the wall, several officers fired rubber bullets at encampment members. The rubber-coated bullets ━ often described as “less lethal” munition ━ are well documented to have caused brain damage, fractured bones, and even death, especially when used at close range, as was done in this instance. 

Students reported multiple serious injuries, including several people shot in the head by CHP with rubber bullets.

[beardedmrbean]

Two anti-Israel protesters in a Range Rover were detained at gunpoint by riot police during chaotic demonstrations outside of a Los Angeles synagogue — and officers were seen removing a keffiyeh-wearing toddler from the backseat to get him away from the mayhem.

The chaos started Sunday when pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside the Adas Torah synagogue in the predominately Jewish neighborhood of Pico-Robertson and attempted to block the entrance, according to CBS News.

Pro-Israel protestors came out in droves as retaliation and attempted to block a Range Rover from entering a gas station across from the synagogue.

Video shared on social media shows a woman appearing out of the car sunroof, brandishing a keffiyeh in one hand and shouting at the counter-protesters carrying American and Israeli flags blocking the vehicle.

She was seen flipping off the on-lookers with both middle fingers before LAPD officers in full riot gear approached the Range Rover with guns drawn.

“Put your hands up. Get out of the car now. Ma’am, step out of the car,” officers shouted at the woman and her male driver as they swarmed in on the vehicle.

The driver, wearing a mask and yellow shirt, got out of the car first and raised his hands in the air before surrendering.

Seconds later, the woman exits the car, still holding the keffiyeh, and gives herself up to the police.

After cuffing both adults, officers were seen pulling a toddler wearing a keffiyeh out of the back seat of the car and taking him away from the mayhem.

In another video of the same Range Rover during the chaos on Sunday, the woman who was detained was seen waving a flag with “Free Palestine” written on it.

It’s unclear if any charges were filed against the couple.

No injuries were reported from the demonstrations, but one person was arrested on a misdemeanor charge for allegedly carrying “a spiked flag,” a police spokesperson told the LA Times.

Founder of the JEM Community Center in Beverly Hills, Rabbi Hertzel Illulian, condemned the anti-Israel protesters for swarming on the streets and causing the frightening scene.

“I don’t think the Jewish would go in front of a mosque or the Christian people would go in front of a mosque to do such a thing, nobody would accept this, but here, when it comes to Jews and Israel everything is kosher, everything is okay,” Illulian said, according to CBS News.

Gov. Gavin Newsom also condemned the violence and disorder seen in the streets.

“The violent clashes outside the Adas Torah synagogue in Los Angeles are appalling,” Newsom posted on X Sunday evening.

“There is no excuse for targeting a house of worship. Such antisemitic hatred has no place in California.”

LA Mayor Karen Bass called the violence in her city “abhorrent” and the blocking of the synagogue “unacceptable.”

“I’ve called on LAPD to provide additional patrols in the Pico-Robertson community as well as outside of houses of worship throughout the city. I’ll be meeting with Chief Choi tomorrow to further discuss the safety of Angelenos,” Bass said according to CBS News.

“I want to be clear that Los Angeles will not be a harbor for antisemitism and violence. Those responsible for either will be found and held accountable.”

Bass said she plans to meet with Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky, the Chief Executive Officer of the Jewish Federation Los Angeles, Rabbi Noah Farkas, and “other law enforcement and faith leaders” in the community to discuss steps to prevent this from happening again.

The Adas Torah synagogue is about four miles from UCLA’s campus — the site of Gaza encampment protests.