(Above: The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly)
Thought I'd written up before, but apparently not. James Hampton, Outsider artist and author of the as of yet undeciphered Book of the 7 Dispensation.
More Batshit brilliance, art for it's own (or otherwise unfathomed) sake.
Outsider artist James Hampton, Wiki, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hampton_(artist), and on the Smithsonian: https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/throne-third-heaven-nations-millennium-general-assembly-9897 and https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/book-7-dispensation-9898
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From Boing-Boing, following yet another officer shooting:
It's about being trained to see yourself as a warrior at war with the public. It's about being trained to escalate to lethal force at the first sign of armed noncompliance. It's about being trained that lack of control justifies violence to take it irrespective of rights or risks. It's about having one of the safest public service jobs in America while maintaining the thrilling fantasy of danger. It's about being trained to expect the best sex of your life after you kill someone.
Link: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/21/oklahoma-cops-yell-orders-at-d.html
The problems are written right into the rulebook by the police themselves. Questions: Why do police carry guns? The job isn't listed on any list of "Most Dangerous Professions", yet we arm them with Kevlar, Hummers and Guns like it was the apocalypse. Police should be allowed to carry guns only after a career that spans a spotless 20 years. 90% of policing does not require firearms, yet every single cop gets a gun. I could go on here, like why do we allow the police to hire police (they should be elected by the community they serve), we've long begun the slippery slope down an independent police state wherein the police justify their existence through punitive fines, create criminals and provide 0 value to the populace. Time to rethink the police - without the police.
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An excellent article on Portugal's (relatively) successful "war on drugs". Simply make them legal.
Read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/opinion/sunday/portugal-drug-decriminalization.html
Now, like it or not, there's a lot that we - Canada and the US - can take away from this model. Why haven't we?
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An interesting video series contrasting the differences between homelessness in Tokyo and Japan VS homelessness in North America.
I find this interesting because - if you're North American - and Canadian especially - homelessness is generally a "lifestyle choice" whereas in Japan it's generally a matter of unfortunate circumstance. In Calgary, the last 10 years, street people have raised their visibility by tenfold easily, in no small part due to the lack of policing and the new custom (paralleling India) of wandering into traffic to solicit change. When I lived in Calgary my route to work took me through 3 intersections that were "owned" by beggars - professionals - the same people year after year feeding their addictions and mental illness off the well-intended donations of Good Samaritans. In Nelson it's much the same - not the traffic wandering, but there's a high visibility of migrant homelessness that move here to prey upon the goodwill of tourists and hippies. Their "homeless" status is generally a choice reflecting their refusal to work and conform in any remedial respect to social norms. When I visited Japan I was impressed not only by the low visibility of the homeless, but by the lack of begging - in a city where the cost of living is easily double that of Calgary and the opportunities half.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK--oCVP18A
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