Statement of Commissioner Gail Heriot in Examining the Race Effects of Stand Your Ground Laws and Related Issues, a report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
This report should not have been published in this form. When the results of an empirical study don’t come out the way Commission members hoped and expected that they would, the right thing to do is usually to publish those results anyway. Why hide useful information?
Instead, the Commission sat on the report for years. Then it decided to discard the draft written by our staff and publish instead a transcript of the witness testimony received at our briefing that took place on October 17, 2014 in Orlando, Florida (along with Commissioner Statements like this one). In that way, the staff’s empirical findings could be buried forever.
No one would claim that the results of the staff’s empirical study conclusively resolve all the controversy over “Stand Your Ground” laws or even over Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law in particular. But they are useful for what they don’t show. The most passionate opponents of “Stand Your Ground” laws appear to have believed that the empirical evidence would show clearly that African Americans are harmed by these laws. But it turns out things are not so clear; the evidence of discrimination against African Americans or even real disparate impact is absent. Yes, it is true that a disproportionate number of those killed in Florida in cases in which, correctly or incorrectly, the “Stand Your Ground” law has been invoked were African American. But it is also true that a similarly disproportionate number of those for whom that law has been invoked were African American. African Americans are disproportionately on both sides of the issue.
Vehicles waiting in line trying to enter the local cemetery in Guayaquil Ecuador.
Click to enlarge.
There is a movie I won’t be able to see again with the same lightened heart.
PS: Anybody playing politics with the virus response in our Country just to try and win in November should be dragged kicking and screaming and dropped in the middle of fucking Guayaquil.
The government of Ecuador is Socialist and led by President Lenín Moreno. It is in the Left’s DNA to lie as not to show the world the absolute failure od Socialism and Communism and Mr. Lenín Moreno abides to that principle.
Now, I hope you were able to stomach the posts I made last night (Guayaquil, Ecuador #1 and Guayaquil, Ecuador #2) and you can clearly see that 191 deaths are obvious;y an under-count by just watching the videos coming out of just the city of Guayaquil. However, the truth is coming out of their own mouths after having to go and fix the dystopian reality on the city:
Wated says they’ve already collected all the bodies in Guayaquil: more than 1,300 in a week
The Government of Ecuador said on Monday to have collected all the bodies that were in homes in Guayaquil and that this task is delayed today within 12 hours of the notification of the relatives to the authorities.
“There are no longer cases behind,” said Efe Jorge Wated, head of the Joint Task Force (FTC) for the crisis in Guayaquil, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in Ecuador, which has been in the last week the scene of a severe accumulation of corpses.
Wated stated that since the start of the situation, on Monday last week, the Army special force “has collected some 500 bodies from the homes” and “handed over some 480 death certificates that has allowed private funeral homes to move and bury faster.” (Translated by browser)
There is an old Spanish saying: “No se puede tapar el sol con un dedo” – “You can’t blot out the sun with a finger” which means the truth, no matter how you try to cover it, will eventually out. In the case of Ecuador, truth is spilling all over the place and straight to the mass graves.
This person is an actual US Representative for the State of Ohio. She is also a graduate of the University of Akron school of law and a member of the Ohio Bar.
I can’t take it anymore. I’ve been to The Hague. I’m making a referral for crimes against humanity tomorrow. Today’s press conference was the last straw. I know the need for a prosecution referral when I see one. https://t.co/XQin24gqY4
— Summit County Clerk of Courts Tavia Galonski (@ClerkGalonski) April 6, 2020
in the US, it is legal to use a pen FDA approves drug off label.
I use one everyday. One of the drugs I use is only approved for use in women for IBS, but my doctor thought it might work for me and had me try it. It seems to work for me and so my doctor continues to give me the prescription.
Doctors do this all the time. There are countless way that doctors have used Botox off label. In the world of auto immune conditions, doctors use drugs lol label all the time. A drug approved for rhumatoid arthritis might be given to a patient with Cronin’s or vice versa.
The President suggesting that a drug with a 50 year track record of success in treating one disease might be effective in treating another isn’t crminal.
An impeachment inquiry into this wouldn’t survive until lunch on the first day.
So what to do? Appeal to The Hauge and call it a crime against humanity.
This isn’t one, of course. Also, The Hauge has exactly dick jurisdiction over the US. But TDS is TDS and this Congresswoman has it bad, and the brain damaged that it has given her has caused her to think this is a brilliant idea.
I know her constituents will love this, but I’d really love the Ohio Bar to crack down on her for saying something so legally spurious. Then won’t, but they should.
I think if someone ventilated this piece of shit in the aisle of the Wal-Mart with a 9mm for doing that, I’d have to call it a good shoot given the circumstances.
One of the first things that I would point out is that when Al Qaeda attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, they attacked the United States.
I was a freshman cadet an ROTC at the time and all of us cadets were rushed off to Camp Atterbury for an emergency crash course in training because of the military going onto alert.
Even in rural Indiana, we were acutely aware that 9/11 was an attack on all of us. Americans from every state joined the military to fight against those that attacked us.
It was only later that many of us learned the arrogance many New Yorkers had that they didn’t see it that way and that 9/11 was not an American tragedy but a New York tragedy only. This headline seems to come from that point of view.
It’s a tale of two cities, yet it’s about the exact same city, in two very different times. Eighteen years ago, in the wake of Sept, 11, 2001, New York City became America’s city, and Rudy Giuliani became America’s mayor as the nation mourned something unthinkable. Now, as the coronavirus crashes into an unprepared country, New York City is again experiencing something unthinkable—but this time it’s doing so as an outsider, a criminal, an unwelcome foreigner. What’s changed? Surely New York is the same New York it was 18 years ago. What’s changed, it would seem, is the rest of America.
New York didn’t change? Really?
The New York City that once elected Rudy Guiliani is now run by a Sandanista supporting communist progressive named Bill de Blasio and has a card-carrying socialist for a Congresswoman.
But let me guess… Trump.
Rudy Giuliani transformed into “America’s Mayor” overnight. Americans felt a singular pride for the patriotism of 9/11, a pride that lasted for over a decade. Movies, songs, and TV shows, tied themselves in knots to both affirm and elide the complicated relationship between popular culture and the city that never sleeps.
Fucking New Yorker. 9/11 was an attack on all of us. We all grieved together.
Coronavirus is affecting every state in the union right now, New York may be an epicenter of the American outbreak, but every city and state is dealing with their own sick.
As of this writing, New York City has seen more than 1,500 people dead and more than 57,000 cases diagnosed. But this time, New York City has not received an outpouring of national love and support. Instead, it has been shunned and shamed.
Maybe that’s because New York City did shit like this:
Mark Levine is the Chair of the New York City Council health committee.
You know what, I’m going to post this video just for fun:
Not to be an evil victim blamer, but it seems like New York did this to themselves because the political leaders they elected were so infected with TDS that they downplayed the Coronavirus to spite Trump’s “racist” and “xenophobic” travel ban.
Maybe it’s the fact that the media is telling us daily that New Yorkers are still not engaging in the same social distancing that we in far less densely populated areas are told that if we don’t do, we are literally murdering grandma. Then The New York Times comes out to remind the rest of us that it’s wrong to call out New Yorkers for that because social distancing is a privilege.
Or maybe it is the number of states that have had to crack down on rich New Yorkers who have decided to take their infections out of the Big Apple and hide out in luxury in their vacation homes. It’s hard for people from Florida, Rhode Island, or even the Hamptons to show support for NYC when privileged New Yorkers are their vector for infection.
There might be very good reasons that New York isn’t getting the same “outpouring of national love and support” it once did, but no New Yorker isn’t going to see it that way.
The president, in particular, seems to have no allegiance to his former hometown.
Maybe that’s because he’s the President of the whole United States of America and just New York City?
Yes, the President should be above that, but “help us after we tried to destroy your Presidency” is a tall order to ask of any person.
As Masha Gessen suggests, New Yorkers are quickly finding themselves with no good options. They can stay hunkered down in tiny apartments and listen to the sirens all night, or they can be pilloried for fleeing, a sign of disloyalty and privilege. Those who leave are blamed and shamed for both spreading the virus and using scarce resources wherever they land. Those who stay will be blamed for using up scarce resources in the city. There is no right way to be a New Yorker right now—just as there was no wrong way to be a New Yorker after 9/11.
Boo-fucking-hoo. You don’t get victim status for being a rich New Yorker wanting to spend your lockdown on your beach house in Miami because you don’t like being cooped up in your Manhattan condo.
Also, there were plenty of ways to be a wrong New Yorker after 9/11. Like spreading conspiracy theories that it was an inside job carried out with controlled demolition by the Bush Administration or that it was the fault of Israel and the Jews. Let’s not forget that.
Even as 9/11 led Americans to rally around New York, it also led to a forever war and a decadeslong policy of demonizing Muslims and travelers from Arab lands. In some ways, the event only superficially pulled the country together before ripping it brutally apart.
Ummm… the decade that followed 9/11 saw lots of Islamic terrorism against the US. The amazing thing about that was despite 9/11, the underwear bomber, shoe bomber, Times Square bomber, Ft. Hood shooting, Army recruiting station shooting, etc., there was no popular uprising and mass violence against the Muslim community in the US. So 9/11 resulted in far more pulling together than ripping apart. Except for a Woke New York Progressive.
Today, in the absence of clear “others” to blame, we are inventing them. For a while, the foreign “others” that seemed easiest to blame for COVID-19 were the Chinese, and then Asian Americans in general (and yes, this happened in New York too).
New York and San Francisco. Not so much in those “racist, redneck states” that New Yorkers look down on.
But now, blaming any New Yorker will do. It’s no accident that the city is a long-standing American symbol of multiculturalism, ethnic diversity, and openness in ways that date back to the Statue of Liberty, itself a former icon that has only recently fallen out of favor as a national symbol of tolerance and refuge. Back in 2001, we all celebrated New York for being particularly tolerant in the face of narrow-minded fundamentalist hate from Islamic extremists. It is a marker of a uniquely Trumpist, “America First” fundamentalism that this isn’t a quality to be celebrated anymore, but a soft underbelly to the MAGA dream that now threatens to infect us all. What we loved about bighearted, tolerant New York in 2001 is what cannot be tolerated in 2020.
And there we go. It’s Trump’s fault.
New York is just to “international” and “diverse” and “tolerant” to be part of provincial American patriotism. New York might as well be a foreign country to Middle America.
It’s not like New York City hasn’t spent the better part of the last decade-and-a-half reminding us in Middle America that we are stupid, uneducated, uncultured, ignorant, uncouth, racist, close-minded, bigots because we elected President GW Bush, didn’t whole-heartedly support Obama, and then voted against Hilary Clinton.
I think David Carr of THE New York Times pretty much summed up how New Yorkers feel about the rest of us back on Bill Maher’s show in 2016.
Just watching that clip has me rallying around the virus instead of New York City.
It was always a fairy tale, but it was surely a nice one. Columbine’s tragedy was America’s tragedy. Las Vegas happened to all of us. Parkland, Florida, was everyone’s worst national nightmare. Regional differences were downplayed so we could grieve together. But Donald Trump came along to remind us that Puerto Rico is not really America, and Detroit is not really America, and California is definitively not America.
This is shitty juxtaposition. Las Vegas and Parkland were shootings by evil mad man.
Puerto Rico was hit by a hurricane but the subsequent disaster was due to corruption, corruption abetted by Democrats who wanted to blame Trump while Puerto Rican leaders hid water, food, and supplies in warehouses and under tarps rather than do their jobs.
Detroit is the result fo 50 years of Democrat mismanagement. The Flint water crisis was the result of city and county financial and technical fuckups of criminal proportions and has nothing to do with the President.
California is suffering from the effects of a decade of one party Progressive rule. They were hijacked by the environmentalists who stop creating reservoirs, divert water for a baitfish, and fight forest maintenance and then complain when the state dries up and burns to the ground. Californa has legalized every quality of life crime and paid for it by taxing the middle class to death and now it’s no wonder that it has the worse wealth inequality and highest rates of homeless, drug addiction, and welfare in the country. It’s the state where an illegal can get a slap on the wrist for stealing a gun and killing a woman on a pier but a gun owners goes to jail for life because he tried to comply with the state’s firearms registration.
I don’t want that for America, and that doesn’t make me a bigot.
New York almost makes it too easy. The city has long been associated with unbounded greed and wealth, cultural elitism, and ethnic diversity.
Despite the country’s love affair with New York in the wake of 9/11 or even Hurricane Sandy in 2012, it’s also always been the case that the city coexists uncomfortably with the fantasy of rugged cowboys, wide-open spaces, and manly white men dominating nature, an American story Trump and his acolytes seem to love above all things.
And there is the deflection. When we hate New York, we’re told it’s because it’s ethnically diverse, not because it’s home to Wall Street which lined its pockets as it put Middle Americans out of work and then collapsed the economy in 2008.
Victims are to be further victimized, always. We have been so carefully trained in this response that even without Trump’s insistence that the media, Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo, and thieving New York doctors are to blame for the rampant spread of the virus, we could fall easily into the habit of doing it ourselves.
I cannot get over the fact that the same people who told us three years into Trump’s Presidency that his economy was really Obama’s economy have decided that Obama’s drawdown of N95 masks and failure to stockpile ventilators after the H1N1 outbreak was Trump’s fault.
The strangest thing is simply that New York is the same greedy, insomniac, starving, pushy, wisecracking, bighearted place it was in the days after 9/11. Americans need to hate her today because everyone needs to hate everything and everyone now. Just when we needed to rally together in a fight against death, we are realizing we’ve been primed to fight one another to the death instead. Even if the myriad historical acts of pulling together after national tragedies were planted in fantasy more than fact, the alternative—a vicious and slashing vilification of the other—will not keep any of us safe or free.
