What Happened To Sandra Bland? (I can’t stop thinking about this piece, and I really hope people are as willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, having seen the TAPE, as they were to assume the drunk white lady who drove the wrong way wasn’t really drunk, on no evidence at all):
While we can’t rule out the possibility that Bland actually did commit suicide, those close to her have stated that there was no indication that she was feeling anything but good at this point in her life. Mental illness and depression are complicated beasts, but so is the American system of policing. When it comes to the death of a Black person in police custody or during an encounter with officers, what reason do we have to believe “official” accounts of what happened, when videos and witnesses have made liars of officers over, and over, and over again? When people of other races are routinely stopped, questioned, arrested (or NOT stopped, NOT questioned, NOT arrested) and somehow manage to live to see another day?We need to know what happened to Sandra Bland but what clarity can we expect to get from the same people who arrested and jailed her? Police departments investigate themselves and return with an emphatic “nothing to see here, folks, the system is working!”
But CNN’s dalliances with ISIS propaganda are only marginally less shameless. CNN’s talking heads breathlessly report on each new clip and feature titillating stills from certain videos, including one documenting the execution of American journalist James Foley, all over the network’s website. They do everything but post the videos themselves. And just about every major media organization has put together a package on the growing “sophistication” of ISIS propaganda clips, analyzing the footage as if ISIS were an avant-garde Scandinavian film collective that also happens to hold large amounts of territory in Iraq and Syria.
Progressive feminist music for the wee children!
An explainer for the Jade Helm conspiracy theory:
Like many of the rational residents of the United States, we have been amused to watch the emergence of the conspiracy theory known as Jade Helm 15. If you are one of the rational residents of the country but have not heard of Jade Helm, it is the sweeping theory that an upcoming eight-week military exercise stretching across the Southwest is actually a secret plot by the Obama administration to seize land / oust traitors / otherwise be evil. If you are one of the irrational residents of the United States, you are not reading this because the tin foil hat slipped over your eyes and / or you are too busy eating Vietnam-era MREs.
This is a very sad and beautiful piece by a labor nurse about when things don’t work out, and you don’t get to go home with a baby. Nothing helps, but I hope that if this ever happens to you, or has happened to you, it’s a comfort to know that your care providers mourn along with you.
Jim Gaffigan is like The Beatles in Utah, despite being Catholic and not LDS, bc his humor is clean and based heavily on having five kids, so I anticipate this show may break big out here.
But until the media’s recent preoccupation with the subject, close female friendships like the ones seemingly shared by Taylor, Lena, and Karlie have been curiously underdiscussed. And these relationships, to be sure, are by no means a 21st century phenomenon. A discernable culture of romanticized female friendship extends from 19th century Great Britain and America, with literature of the period reflecting idealizations of charged intimacy between women and girls. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, for example, our beloved heroine tucks herself into bed with her dying companion, Helen Burns, so that the lonely children may keep each other close as they say farewell. (Oh, my heart.) Brontë’s Villette, for that matter, chronicles a more mature, fraught intimacy between protagonist Lucy Snowe and the preening Ginevra Fanshawe, a couple attached and physically familiar (if not especially friendly).
Being prevented from reading a Daily Mirror UFO story by this survey is the most me thing that’s ever happened to me pic.twitter.com/4gPul9Hh4E
— Katie Heaney (@KTHeaney) July 16, 2015
