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Officer Kim Potter has been charged with manslaughter in the death of Daunte Wright, because she claims that she thought she was holding a taser when she fired a bullet point blank into his head. That’s bullshit.
First, the position on the belt. To draw the wrong one, you would pretty much have to be confusing your left hand with your right. People are different, she may be somewhat ambidextrous, but very few people are ambidextrous to the degree that they don’t differentiate between their two hands at all. Then, the appearance. They aren’t even the same damned color, not even close. Even a dog can differentiate between bright yellow and dull gray. To believe officer Potter’s story, you have to assume that at no time during the encounter did she actually see the weapon she was holding in her hand, right in front of her eyes.Third, the weight. I believe the prosecuting attorney, as evidence, should bring in two small weights. One weighing 8 ounces (a tad over 200 grams) and the other weighing 2 pounds (nearly a kilo). Ask each of the jurors to close their eyes, one by one. Place the objects in either hand and ask them which is heavier. Out of twelve jurors, I would be surprised if you got less than 12 correct answers. Sure, both are significantly lighter than lifting a refrigerator, but one is four times heavier than the other. To not feel the difference would imply neurological damage.So, let’s say she gets through all that – confuses left with right, fails to notice that the object she’s holding is not bright yellow, fails to notice that it’s four times the weight of the object she thought she was holding, and fires. Why was the safety of her gun released? Does that not require some human agency? A flick of the thumb? Well, some people will say, heat of the moment, mass confusion, everything’s a blur, trained to react instantly, adrenaline pumping, etc… But why was the moment heated, why would her adrenaline have been pumping? It was a routine traffic stop, broad daylight, and the police on the scene outnumbered the people in the car.Sure, she shouted “Taser! Taser! Taser!” and the police and the defenders of the police are using that as evidence that she actually thought she was holding a taser.It could also be, and in my opinion was, a flat out lie. She knew she was holding a gun, she had every intention of killing Daunte Wright, and she was just shouting “Taser! Taser! Taser!” to base her defense in court around it. She had seen, over the past few years, many, many police officers murder black people and get away with it. She envied them and wanted to join the fraternity. She wanted her trophy kill, her scalp, her badge of racist honor. She should be charged with premeditated murder and sent to jail for the rest of her misbegotten life. Not manslaughter.

Everybody’s still talking about Daunte Wright, as well they should be, but my opinion hasn’t changed since yesterday’s blog (Taser! Taser! Taser! my butt, she knew she was holding a gun), so I’ll write about something else. I’m sure there will be more to write about that later.
I’ve seen a few people suggest that Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. should be granted statehood, and that would give the Democrats an unassailable Senate majority.
I’m certainly in favor of them being given statehood, especially Puerto Rico. I think it would really be cool to have one state where the dominant language was other than English. Also, change is good, shakes things up a bit. The U.S. has had 50 states for as long as I can remember – almost literally. Hawaii became a state when I was 5 years and a couple of months old, and that’s about as far back as I remember.
As far as D.C. is concerned, the goal of giving the people representation could be easily accomplished just by returning the land to Maryland, of which it was a part up until 1790 something. By itself, I really don’t think D.C. is big enough to justify statehood. It’s more of a national park, where some people actually live.
As a power play, however, I love the idea. But I don’t expect it to happen any time soon. There have been many opportunities, over the past decades, for Democrats to do exactly that, and they haven’t. And they won’t.
Because the last thing they want is an unassailable majority. Then, people would expect them to get stuff done.

There is so much that is wrong and weird about this case. That might be partly because it’s fresh news and we haven’t got the whole story yet (and why haven’t we, that’s question number one), but there is definitely some stuff that doesn’t add up.
Like, what kind of a fucked up law is it that says you can’t have an air freshener hanging from your rear view mirror? They come with a little string thingie, so they are clearly meant to be hung, and that is the one place in a car you can hang something from. Doesn’t everybody have an air freshener hanging from their rear view mirror? Is everybody in Minnesota driving around with stinky cars?
And that bullshit about thinking she’d pulled out her taser instead of a gun. That should be Police Academy day one. This is a gun. This is a taser. Can you see how they’re different? I haven’t even been to police academy, and I think if you showed me both of them, I’d know which one was the gun. Certainly if I had it in my hand, with my finger on the trigger, pointed at somebody’s head, I’d be aware that it was not a taser.
And the officer’s name, why hasn’t that been released. She’s over 18. She’s been charged with a crime. Oh, wait. She’s going to be charged with a crime. Isn’t she? ISN’T SHE?! So, release the damned name. Daunte Wright’s family wasn’t spared the pain. Why should hers be.
And lastly, she shot him because ‘he was trying to get back into the car.’ Which means his back was turned, and he was no threat to her at all. Did she think he was trying to get back in to drive away? So what. All she had was expired tags. You’ve already got the license number. You can send a notice to the house.
After she shot him, the car kept rolling until it crashed into another vehicle. It seems to me maybe he was trying to get back in the car to set the parking brake.

I just saw this comment on Facebook: Imagine every talking head, gathered like the surface of the tongue, sounding together as the meditative Om of Being..
…and I was about to reply to it with a zinger, something about sheep in a flock, or everybody standing up in a stadium and mouthing the same words while they put their hand over their heart and stare adoringly at a flag, or everybody kneeling, in a church or a mosque, and repeating the same formulaic words, the intent is the same, it is uniformity, it is conformity, if they can get everybody to say the same thing at the same time, make the same gesture at the same time, wear the same clothes at the same time, eat the same foods at the same time, watch the same TV show at the same time, then they, whoever the hell they are, can totally control the population, and our society, our whole crazy, flawed, close to anarchistic at times society, devolves into an Orwellian nightmare world. But, I didn’t.
Partly because, despite my incessant desire to turn every conversation on Facebook into an argument, the poster of that post clearly posted with good intent. They were talking about the world being a more peaceful, harmonious place and what kind of a horrible misanthrope would I have to be to take a dump all over that?
Also, though, after a bit of thought, I realized that there are two sides. While we are individuals, there are moments when conformity makes us stronger. If you are playing in a band, or on a sports team, it is the co-ordination between the individuals, it is everybody thinking as one and having the same goal that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts, that elevates every one of the individuals up to a higher level, and that’s a beautiful thing. If you stretch it out to thousands of people at a time, however, add weapons, and assume that the goal is killing other people, then you have armies and that is a very bad thing, very destructive to the kind of world I would like to be living in.
We are individuals, and that is a great thing. We are also part of something greater, unified with each other. That is a great thing. Finding the balance and keeping it positive, that is the challenge.

The answers are yes, the egg, zero, and of course, but only pre-supposing the existence of such a being, which is also kind of the answer to the third question. Allow me to elaborate, and then we will discuss the grandfather paradox.
Yes, if a tree falls in the forest, it makes a sound. Human beings are not a necessary part of existence. Things would still have properties, like appearance, odor, texture and, of course sound, even if we had never existed. To assume the need of a listener for sound to exist is like saying the universe is all inside our minds. That may be how we perceive it, but that’s just many way. Existence does, objectively, exist.
Of course eggs evolved before chickens. Bloody dinosaurs laid eggs. And if anybody tells you “Yeah, but the question is which came first, the chicken egg or the chicken, tell them that they should have phrased the question better, but the answer is still egg. Eggs symbolize beginnings. Chickens symbolize a picnic.
And the reason zero angels can dance on the head of a pin is because there’s no such thing as angels. This is where religion starts to cross the line into fairy tales. Not that I have anything against fairy tales.
And, of course, if there were a God, he or she could create a stone so heavy that he or she couldn’t lift it. Consider the human species. We have built giant skyscrapers, which we cannot lift. We have created the Hoover Dam. We have created a network of intelligent machines that we are not capable of understanding at all. And consider parenthood. We have the capacity to create tiny individuals who grow into human beings, any one of which has the power to exceed us.
Anyway, as to the Grandfather Paradox, which states that if you have a time machine, and you go back in time and kill your own grandfather, then you will never be born and you will never travel back in time to kill your grandfather so your grandfather will live and you will be born and grow up to go back in time to kill your grandfather and so on, but, just as the previous examples with angels dancing on the heads of pins and God showing off his weight lifting prowess, the question forces you to accept an assumption, in this case that time travel is possible. And it’s very likely it just isn’t.