Taking care of a puppy is a full-time job and if I am not there for every moment in the first year of its life I have failed as a parent. – Trish Lemierre
There were lots and lots and LOTS of links this week, but only one video (the first, contributed by Aspasia); so, I decided to let Penn & Teller use doughnuts to illustrate the spectacular failure of the Drug War in only 88 seconds. Everything above the first video was provided by Radley Balko, and the links between the videos came from Grace (“law” and “badge”), Michael Whiteacre (“litigious”), Luscious Lani (“oh-oh”, “potato” and “population”), Dave Krueger (“police state”), Cop Block (“colors” and “snow beat”), Dan Savage (“taser”), Lucy Steigerwald (“cigarettes”), Scott Greenfield (“stolen car”), and Wikileaks (“rude”).
- Alleged crime: stealing a backpack. Sentence: three years without trial.
- Cops will search your house if they find your doors unlocked.
- Cops murder man because someone stole his truck.
- Something tells me I don’t really want to know.
- Well, this was unexpected.
- The law is the law.
- Our litigious society.
- Oh-oh, police incompetence.
- “Here’s my badge, motherfucker!”
- Just another day in a police state.
- I see your true colors, shining through…
- The exact opposite of Mr. Potato Head?
- Cop tases 62-year-old woman in the back.
- Bureaucracy shoots itself in the foot again.
- What if countries’ populations corresponded with size?
- Russian cigarettes used to have space-themed packaging.
- Be grateful we have cops to protect us from all these “gun nuts”.
- Last winter, a cop stole a man’s car for having a little snow on it.
- Swedish artist jailed, his work destroyed for “crime” of being rude.
- Cops beat man for getting stuck in snow, threaten to steal his car.
- Crime: smoking an e-cig. Penalty: caged & denied food for 36 hours.
From the Archives
- Weeds, cops, fingerprints, Nazis, cobras, trolls, dogs, racism, lawyers, irony, motion sickness, spiritual rape, drug war, busybodies & Juggalos.
- I wish sex worker activists cared more about establishing our social value than about preserving feminist myths.
- Cops, surveillance, Bach, Codex Seraphinianus, schools, Wonder Woman, drug war, dogs, demons and the Daily Mail.
- Some Zimbabwean politicians understand rights better than those in US.
- Activities magically become different things if one only does them once.
- I doubt we’ll ever know the truth about the so-called “teen girl pimps”.
- Big businesses woo valuable employees with (halfway) whores. Yawn.
- Why do prohibitionists keep stopping whores from getting other jobs?
- “Sex trafficking” fetishists claim 100,000 “victims” hiding in nail salons.
- Debunking the notion that some porn is more “positive” than others.
- Another good, clean charity refuses money from nasty, dirty whores.
- “Sex trafficking” hysteria may be starting to backfire on government.
- Prominent prohibitionist calls it “an extension of the ‘pro-life’ cause”.
- Dr. Brooke Magnanti on an even stupider adjunct to “sex addiction”.
- Lawheads believe human nature can be altered by proclamation.
- Another good anti-Swedish model essay from Dr. Graham Ellison.
- A new witchcraft hysteria, courtesy of your favorite moral panic.
- Pharmacy staff called cops because a customer was Romanian.
- When and how to tell one’s children that one is a sex worker.
- Australian cops admit client persecution harms streetwalkers.
- These nuns obviously forgot that lying makes Baby Jesus cry.
- Sex offenders file suit against another oppressive restriction.
- CNN announces Obama isn’t alone in pandering to hysteria.
- Yet another confused “black magic sex trafficking” story.
- Hey, kids! Fight “human trafficking” for fun and profit!
- Cops ask Congress for power to destroy the internet.
- Swanee Hunt’s grotesque vendetta against whores.
- Another runaway clown car of unintentional hilarity.
- A retrospective of my columns for September 2010.
- Guess why the pigs targeted this massage parlor.
- When “bring into care” means “abduct and cage”.
- How can I get an interested man to pay for sex?
- What if famous authors wrote Cosmo sex tips?
- The power to see abstractions must be useful.
- Another TSA molester and another rapist cop.
- Would-be allies who don’t quite get it right.
- What real help for streetwalkers looks like.
- Laura Lee speaks about decriminalization.
- The urge to censor is a mental illness.
- Mira Sorvino, mathematical retard.
- The rise of the therapeutic state.
- How to make perfect popcorn.
- Lawheads will be lawheads.
- Marilyn Bagley needed help.
- Half the Sky, All the Credit.
- The Gabriela Leite Law.
- “Sex trafficking” hentai.
- Is the Patriarchy dead?
- The Handmaid’s Tale.
- King of the hill!
One morning about eight years ago my flatmate went out without closing the security door or locking the screen.
I awoke to the sound of booted feet and strange male voices in the flat so I got out of bed, slipped on some shorts, armed myself with a steel angle brace and crept into the loungeroom.
When I spotted the blue uniforms I quietly put down the brace. They didn’t see me first so I wasn’t shot or tased.
When I challenged them the middle aged senior sergeant with the nose of an alcoholic claimed they were responding to a call about a woman screaming. Even if he hadn’t been obviously lying the expression on his partners face would have given him away.
I passed them some of my Justice Action business cards from a nearby bookshelf and asked them whether they would accompany me back to the station to check the event log for the ‘screaming woman’ or whether they’d get the hell off the premises immediately and not come back without a warrant. I told them if I checked the log and there was no such report I’d be filing illegal entry and trespassing charges against them.
The senior sergeant turned redder than he already was and his partner half-suppressed a guffaw but they both left without a word. I still don’t know what the fuck they thought they were doing there.
Warning: It’s probably best if you don’t try this at home if you’re not a member of an organisation with good access to legal resources and a high media profile.