The most recent Taser victim? A 16-year-old in Missouri who’d fallen off a bridge, breaking his back. Upon arriving to the scene, police tasered him 19 times for lack of compliance.
Poisonclover’s Patch
FLYMF contributor Patrick Alexander has started a new blog, Poisonclover’s Patch. The blog promises a fun, irreverent take on everyday life. As he puts it, “I have a lot of free time in the summer and I finally got around to creating my own place on the Net to vent my mental cruelty and off colour humour. Tell your friends, tell your enemies.”
Consider it done, Patrick! Patrick’s work for FLYMF included The Enza, The Swab, Why I Need Weapons at a Wake, The Lepre-Con, and Confessions of an Anti-Dentite.
Another Taser Murder
At 1:28 p.m. last Jan. 17, Baron “Scooter” Pikes was a healthy 21-year-old man. By 2:07 p.m., he was dead.
What happened in the 39 minutes in between — during which Pikes was handcuffed by local police and shocked nine times with a Taser, while reportedly pleading for mercy —is now spawning fears of a political coverup in this backwoods Louisiana lumber town infamous for backroom dealings.
American Inequity—In Graph Form!
The American Human Development Project has put together a fascinating report, “The Measure of America: American Human Development Report 2008-2009,” which uses United Nations human-development rankings to evaluate the state of the nation, highlighting health, access to knowledge and standard of living.
As the report explains, this is the first time this has been done for “an industrialized nation.” The results show a wide gulf in development scores between different regions and races. As the map shows, the South comes out the worst (and the deepest blue states come out the best). Meanwhile, African Americans have nearly half the living index of white citizens.
Congressional Clowns
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has today’s gut-punch article, “Let the Games Begin,” in which he compiles the ways that Republican Congressmen Steve King and Darrell Issa used parliamentary tactics to derail a Judiciary Committee hearing on torture architect (and “fucking stupidest guy on the planet,” according to General Tommy Franks) Doug Feith.