"I screamed, 'The bird!'" and the cop said "'F--- the bird,' and he, like, stepped on it."

'I was shocked... It was a blue and green bird. It was really pretty."

The cop, the parakeet, and — the bone of contention — the traffic cone (the cone of contention).

"Sack of potatoes subdued without incident."

"A Kalispell Police officer and a Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officer were able to remove a five-pound sack of potatoes reported hanging from a tree on Seventh Street East that looked like it might fall into the street. Apparently, the potatoes were subdued without causing any mayhem."

"A man in camouflage who alarmed Madison neighbors when he walked down a street with an uncased shotgun Saturday morning..."

"... turned out to be a hunter thwarted by city parking."

The Madison Police Department said in a statement that the man, a University of Wisconsin-Madison student, had been hunting outside the city and was unable to find parking close to his residence. He decided to walk home from his parked vehicle with an uncased shotgun, police said.

"An extremely drunken man who lost track of time called 911 to ask what day it was."

News from Flathead, Montana.

"A motorcyclist who authorities say was driving his bike at speeds that reached 140 mph told central Illinois police he was rushing because he needed to use the bathroom."

Noted.

IN THE COMMENTS: Dubiousness. From Strelnikov:

An obvious lie. Any man knows he can pull over and pee anywhere along the road. What kind of biker worries about peeing outdoors?

And from DanTheMan:

Back when I was a police officer, I heard this one a lot. It's part of the top 3 excuses:

1) Stuck gas pedal
2) Cruise control malfunction
3) Urgent bathroom emergency

If you gave me one of those excuses, you generally guaranteed yourself a citation.

"Insane Tourists Blatantly Defying The U.S. Government’s Demands."

Can't they read!

People. The Washington Monument is CLOSED. Quit posing with it!

You know, last Sunday, I got out of the car to take this picture, and somehow it didn't occur to me until I got home that I should have walked around that thing just to be funny.



I'm such a rule-follower!

ADDED: I show this post to Meade and he says — quoting me from an old story about something I said to the cops in the 1980s — "You can't close the park, man." Or, no, wait. I didn't say that to the cops. Fallible memory! I said that after the cops told us a park that had no walls or gates was closed. We meekly got in the car and left, but I did my imitation of a hippie backtalking to a cop, in the safety of the car: "You can't close the park, man." I'm normally duly submissive in a cop situation.

"An undercover NYPD detective, afraid of blowing his cover, watched a frothing motorcycle mob terrorize a defenseless Manhattan dad..."

"The off-duty officer was one of two detectives riding Sunday with the two-wheeled thugs who yanked Alexian Lien from his Range Rover and inflicted a beatdown near W. 178th St. in front of the driver’s family...."

The face of the cop, in the aftermath of the suicide by cop.

The cop looks into the death scene, into the car named — too aptly — Infiniti. In his arms is the baby of the woman the police shot. We are shielded by pixelation from having to see the expression on the baby's face.

Bill de Blasio — with a 50 point lead in the polls — addresses that motorcycle mob attack.

I'd said that the attack would hurt the campaign of the Democrats' left-wing candidate for NYC mayor, so I'm interested in how the seemingly soft-on-crime de Blasio addresses the incident.

He said:

“We I believe are seeing a phenomenon with some of these motorcycle groups deciding to take over certain streets so they can perform their stunts, and disrupt traffic, slow traffic in the process, and it’s dangerous. It’s really dangerous... This confrontation is a byproduct of that, so we have to crack down on this. It’s not legal to disrupt traffic in a group, it’s not legal, obviously to take the law into their own hands as they appear to have done... This is simply not acceptable behavior."

But what are you going to do about it? It's easy to say "This is simply not acceptable behavior" about all manner of crimes, but then what. "Crack down." How?

"One Video Encapsulates Everything Wrong With NYC Street Culture."

"Two banes of New York City streets — aggressive dirt bikers using the road as a personal racetrack, and SUV drivers using their vehicles as weapons — collide in this horrific video making the rounds today."

Yesterday at about 1:30 p.m., Alexian Lien, 33, was driving a Range Rover north on the West Side Highway near 125th Street with his wife and 5-month old daughter as passengers, according to reports in the Post and Daily News. About 20 seconds into the video, group of motorcycle and dirt bike riders surround the SUV in the center lane, and a motorbike rider appears to hit the brakes and get into a fender-bender with Lien’s vehicle.

You've seen the video. (Or if not, check it out.) We watched it here at Meadhouse this morning — my son Chris along with Meade and me — and we had some different interpretations of what we saw. I'm linking to StreetsBlog, above, but there are obviously more mainstream articles (like this in the NYT). My choice of link is based on my desire to get some perspective on what these bikers are doing. (I thought they had an intent to rob the guy in the expensive car, and they deliberately cut him off, and Meade saw it as bikers out for a big group ride who felt righteous and lost their minds to road rage after what was an accident.)

There are 77 comments at StreetsBlog, which seems to be a bicycle-oriented site where people are concerned about sharing the road. I'll cherry-pick some comments. Each paragraph break is a new commenter:

I don't know what happened before the video, but based only on what I see here, the driver is acting in self defense. He is surrounded, and the initial crash was obviously deliberately caused by the guy on the motorcycle. Additionally, the guys family is in the car. At that point, its either himself and his family or them, and the only weapon he has is that car. Also, as a side note: This has nothing to do with "street culture." Its an absolutely extreme situation that's way past the point where traffic laws or driving behavior are the issue.

This has everything to do with NYC's street culture. It's a culture that's enabled by the NYPD, which focuses on tinted windows and nuisance tickets against cyclists, but sees hundreds of motorcycles on the HH parkway as the equivalent of a storm cloud - something that could be dangerous but that hopefully will pass. EVents like this are extreme, but they are the inevitable outcome of NYC's "anything goes" attitude toward street safety.

It's more like the outcome of the "if you chase them and any body gets hit in the process all fingers will be pointed at you" mentality. Most of these guys are simply going to run from the cops, and any attempt to chase them will involve risk to all the parties involved as well as innocent bystanders. It's a lose/lose situation for the NYPD.

There is plenty wrong with NYC street culture, but this video does not "encapsulate" it. There is nothing typical about this scene. The motorcyclists represent thug culture more than street culture, and this guy just happened to get caught in the middle of it and was probably scared shitless, and rightfully so. I saw an incarnation of this group riding through Brooklyn yesterday, and you wouldn't want to get into a situation with any two of these riders let alone two hundred.

First, there seems to be at least 50 motorcyclists in some of these shots. So, I ask, have they gotten a parade permit that is required of cyclists and pedestrians? Secondly. I saw a comment in another string on a website that reports that the NYPD has a do not engage policy when it comes to these throngs of motorcyclists. Not sure what that is supposed to mean, but if it is true, then why is there such a double standard when it comes to bikes? Finally, while riding I have been surrounded by around a dozen or so of these hot shots from time to time. It can be pretty scary when they are doing wheelies near you and gunning their bikes.

This video encapsulates everything wrong with NYPD's traffic enforcement culture. I've been there more than once as these illegal parades of thugs on unregistered and unlicensed dirt bikes swarm the streets, both on foot and in a car, and it is scary as hell either way. Other commenters are right. Given NYPD's lack of enforcement, best thing to do is to come to a complete stop and let them pass. Even so, many of them intentionally come dangerously close to cars, bicycles, and pedestrians in their path, running red lights and failing to yield all along the way.

I was on the Hudson River Greenway when these guys passed Canal Street. There had to be at least 200 of them. I've never seen so many motorbikes (and Quads too?) in my life. I was on the phone with my fiance and I was like wow . . . that's got to be so intimidating to be on the road with those guys. And then I sit back and laugh and think about the police presence we have at Critical Mass rides.

It certainly looked like they crowded him out of his lane and the the brake-checking started when he beeped. If theres anything before the video, obviously this interpretation would change.

Fool (driver) should have slowed down. Not saying the bikers were right, but come on, how dumb can you be. Situation could have been avoided.

Why was this driver targeted? These bikers don't target random people. The most important part is missing. The vehicle was surrounded in the very beginning of the video. Something must have occurred prior.

HE WAS A WEALTHY ASIAN MAN... 1%er! Hopefully Asians realize that no matter how much money they have and how insulated they believe themselves due to their wealth, they can be pulled from their cars and nearly murdered while the NYPD issues parking tickets. Just a taste of the de Blasio first term!

There's a lot to talk about here, but one thing is damage to the mayoral candidacy of the left-wing Democrat Bill de Blasio.

I do a Bloggingheads with Glenn Loury that's ostensibly about whether Obama has weakened and what the NYC police are doing after stop and frisk.

The folks at Bloggingheads put it this way:

On The Glenn Show, Glenn and Ann check in on Obama a year into his second term. Has his vacillation on Syria and the Fed hurt his credibility? Ann argues that the Larry Summers controversy exposed an anti-science crowd on the left—but maybe a small dose of delusion is healthy. Turning to the end of NYC's stop-and-frisk program, Ann worries that emotions adulterated the public debate. Are liberal gun-control measures breeding a nation of victims? Finally, Glenn criticizes the secrecy of the security state under Obama.

There's an awful lot going on in that diavlog, and I think we talk past each other more than usual. "Ann worries that emotions adulterated the public debate" is a terrible summary of what I say. 

Go to the link if you want to hear the whole thing. I'll excerpt a part that deals with something I care about: the unlikelihood that anyone is really making truth their highest value.



I'm highlighting what I had to say, so click to continue the video when you get to the end of this clip if you want to hear Loury's response. The lead-up to this clip is about the trouble Larry Summers got into at Harvard when he suggested that there might be a biological explanation for the scarcity of females in the highest levels of math and science.

"One of the first teams of heavily armed police to respond to Monday's shooting in Washington DC was ordered to stand down by superiors."

BBC reports.

"Once there was a fight in the classroom, it was just you and that person who had a fight; now on social media, it’s 500,000 people looking at this fight."

"Why are you creating a unit to incriminate and criminalize what they’re doing and lock them up?"

A criticism — by the founder of an organization that works with teenagers — of the NYC police strategy dealing with gangs:

The strategy seeks to exploit the online postings of suspected members and their digital connections to build criminal conspiracy cases against whole groups that might otherwise take years of painstaking undercover work to penetrate. Facebook, officers like to say now, is the most reliable informer.


Operation Crew Cut melds intelligence gathered by officers on the street with online postings, allowing the department to track emerging conflicts in a neighborhood before they erupt into violence and, when shootings do occur, to build conspiracy cases against those responsible. But the scrutiny online has raised concern that idle chatter by teenagers might be misinterpreted by the police.

We're told that opposition to the "stop and frisk" tactic has led to this, but I find that a little hard to believe. Why wouldn't the police use both approaches if they could? Also, I wonder what the police are really doing, since publicly revealing a tactic is itself a tactic. From the above-linked NYT article:

Officers follow crew members on Twitter and Instagram, or friend them on Facebook, pretending to be young women to get around privacy settings that limit what can be seen. They listen to the lyrical taunts of local rap artists, some affiliated with crews, and watch YouTube for clues to past trouble and future conflicts. Party announcements posted to social media draw particular attention: officers scour the invitation lists, some of which explicitly include members of opposing crews, beseeching them to “leave the beef at home,” said Assistant Commissioner Kevin O’Connor, who heads a police unit focused on social media and youth gangs.

Presumably, the idea is to deter criminal activity by creating the impression that the police are everywhere. That's very easy to do, once everyone's gone on line for their friendship (and criminal conspiracy). I wonder how many police department employees have jobs that consist of reading kids' Facebook postings and analyzing rap lyrics. Do you think that's creepy/offensive surveillance or clever and important work? Do you think it's a good anti-crime tactic to paranoia amongst vast swaths of NYC teenagers who might otherwise socialize on line?

"Armed police pointed their guns at Prince Andrew and ordered him to 'put your hands up and get on the ground'..."

"... after mistaking him for an intruder in the gardens of Buckingham Palace."

Royal protection officers were said be "jittery" after a genuine intruder had been found in the Palace’s state rooms two days earlier....

[A] royal insider said: “Everyone is talking about these two incidents and can’t quite believe what has happened. The fact that this guy was able to wander off unchallenged and not be spotted by anyone is bad enough. But then to mistake the Duke for another intruder is almost incomprehensible. There is a high turnover of the police on duty at the Palace, but you’d think anyone would know what Prince Andrew looks like."

I've looked at the photo at the link, and I have to say, Prince Andrew looks like some guy. Would you recognize him outside of his natural habitat? Yes, he was in his own "gardens," but if he were unaccompanied and dressed nondescriptly, would you know it was him and not one of the "genuine intruders"?

The good liberals of Madison struggling with the "good" homeless and the "bad" homeless.

On Tuesday, the city council anguished over one block of our Capitol Square:

"(P)eople are scared to death to go there," said Maria Milsted, who runs a property management company with her husband at 106 W. Mifflin St. "We are frightened to go into our own place of work."

In her speech, Milsted distinguished between the "good homeless," — those who are seeking jobs and a place to live — and "the takers" who she believes are seeking handouts and have no intention of behaving civilly....

The mayor, Paul Soglin, the longtime Madison lefty and former UW student radical blamed the world beyond Madison for dumping its undesirables here:

"Statements that some of us have made about Madison being a drop-off point (of homeless people) for other units of government is now getting fairly well-documented," Soglin said.

He also alleged that other cities are driving homeless people into the city of Madison, and vowed that Madison would "drive them right back!"

So xenophobic. Whatever happened to empathy and compassion? We're ready now to see the downtrodden as "takers" and reprobates... when they congregate in a prime residential area and freak out the real estate folk?

You know, one of the nicest condo buildings I've ever seen is on that block. It's terrible if the bad homeless people are hurting real estate values. But if you're not freaked out by a few street people, it might be a good time to put in an offer on one of the places currently on the market. Like that 2-bedroom penthouse, priced at $2,200,000, now down to $1,995,000.

"Marijuana grower killed — and nearly decapitated — by booby trap he set to protect plants."

"Police say Daniel Rickett was drunkenly riding a quad bike when he ran into his own piano wire trap. Hikers found the 50-year-old's body lying near four large plants."

All that to protect 4 plants?!

Here's a recent segment of "This American Life" about the extent of marijuana growing in Mendocino County, California:

A few years ago, Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman was trying to find a way to deal with the proliferation of marijuana in his county. Allman wanted to spend less time dealing with growers who were growing small, legal amounts, so he could focus on other problems — including criminals who run massive marijuana farms in the Mendocino National Forest....

By "legal amounts," they mean not illegal under state law. The "legal amount" is 20 plants. The giant operations consume many acres of federal land (complete with irrigation systems and pesticides). Why don't the feds police their own land?

ADDED: Some answers to that last questions here. For the millions of acres of national forests, the federal government is regarded as a property owner:

When the ownership of a piece of land, government land, is considered proprietary, the government is said to have taken over none of the state's obligations for law enforcement. In other words, state and local law enforcement officers still handle calls for service as if the land were privately owned. The sheriff or city police will respond and they'll handle calls without regard to the property's ownership.

But the federal government can use its legislative power to regulate this land, which isn't something private landowners can do, and it could choose to take over the law enforcement if it wanted. Given the scale of the "massive marijuana farms" — protected by armed guards who shoot at ordinary people who traipse about in the forest — you'd think the feds would take responsibility. It seems crazy for local police to handle that, and it's the federal government's marijuana policy, in conflict with what many states are trying to do, that's the foundation of the problem.

Cop at a memorial for a dead cyclist "then told me explicitly that he 'would not leave until I ‘understood’ that ‘it was the bicyclist’s fault."

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition said that SFPD Sgt. Richard Ernst made his "apparent disdain for 'you people,' bicyclists, disturbingly clear."

Shahum said that she tried to be diplomatic with Ernst and asked him to please move his patrol car out of the bike lane and into an available parking space that was right next to it, saying that it presented an unnecessary hazard to bicyclists riding past.

Diplomatically asking a cop to move his patrol car? Is that possible?

And apparently Ernst didn’t stop at denouncing [24-year-old Amelie Le Moullac] for causing her own death, in front of people who are still mourning that death. Shahum said Ernst also blamed the other two bicyclist deaths in SF this year on the cyclists, and on “you people” in the SFBC for not teaching cyclists how to avoid cars.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's multiple injuries.

"He was questioned for two days before this hearing, without being advised of his right to counsel. He was also being administered Diluadid, a potent pain killer, every three hours."

Juxtaposition highlights the politics of distraction.

Captured just now at Memeorandum (which auto-aggregates news and opinion pieces based on what's being written about right now by "experts and pundits, insiders and outsiders, media professionals and amateur bloggers"):



Here's "White House Had Advance Notice on Heathrow Detention," implicating the Obama administration in the British government's 9-hour detention of David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the most conspicuous journalist dealing with Edward Snowden.

But, look, a puppy!!! The Obamas got another dog, a girl puppy this time. Isn't she cute? She's named Sunny. Aw, doesn't that make you feel sunny? Sunny, thank you for the truth you've let me see. Sunny, thank you for the facts from A to Z. My life was torn like a windblown sand, then a rock was formed when we held hands. Sunny one so true, I love you.


David Miranda, a citizen of Brazil, was detained when he got off an airplane in the UK:

His carry-on bags were searched and, he says, police confiscated a computer, two pen drives, an external hard drive and several other electronic items, including a games console, as well [as] two newly bought watches and phones that were packaged and boxed in his stowed luggage.

The White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, asked whether "United States government [was] at all involved in this," said:

... what you’re referring to is a law enforcement action that was taken by the British government. The United States was not involved in that decision or in that action. So if you have questions about — if you have questions about that, then I would refer you to the British government.

Asked whether the U.S. government was involved, Josh Earnest — must resist remarking on his name again — substituted the issue of whether the U.S. made the decision. Then he reinserted the word "involved" and said "United States was not involved in that decision." There are the extra words "or in that action," but that doesn't answer whether the U.S. was at all involved, since the action occurred in the U.K. and was done by the police there. Earnest archly refers reporters to the British government. Go ask them.

The follow-up question — which lets him off the hook for that evasion — is "Does the U.S. feel that Miranda could have revealed information that’s useful in terms of finding Edward Snowden or pursuing its case against Snowden in any way?" And Earnest once again stresses that the Brits made the "decision" and took the action and go ask them...

Like I said, I’m not aware of any of the conversations that Mr. Miranda may have had with British law enforcement officials while he was detained, but that detention was a decision that was made by the British government and is something that if you have questions about, you should ask them.

Like I said... As in: How many times must I repeat my talking points? Now, look here....



My life was torn like windblown sand on Martha's Vineyard la la la we held hands... Sunny one so true, I love you.

Thanks, Obama, for the truth you've let us see. The facts from A to Z.

NYC stop-and-frisk practice violates rights, the federal judge rules, after a 2-month trial.

"Relying on a complex statistical analysis presented at trial, Judge Scheindlin found that the racial composition of a census tract played a role in predicting how many stops would occur."

She emphasized what she called the “human toll of unconstitutional stops,” noting that some of the plaintiffs testified that their encounters with the police left them feeling that they did not belong in certain areas of the cities. She characterized each stop as “a demeaning and humiliating experience.”...

While the [U.S.] Supreme Court has long recognized the right of police officers to briefly stop and investigate people who are behaving suspiciously, Judge Scheindlin found that the New York police had overstepped that authority. She found that officers were too quick to deem as suspicious behavior that was perfectly innocent, in effect watering down the legal standard required for a stop.

“Blacks are likely targeted for stops based on a lesser degree of objectively founded suspicion than whites,” she wrote.