• Justice Is Blind Drunk. Daily Brickbats (2009-11-06). Cops are here to keep us safe. (Cont’d.) (Linked Friday 2009-11-06.)

• Why do we have an IMG element? Mark, dive into mark (2009-11-02). On February 25, 1993, Marc Andreessen wrote: I'd like to propose a new, optional HTML tag: IMG Required argument is SRC=”url”. This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at… (Linked Wednesday 2009-11-04.)
• Molly'sBlog 2009-11-01 22:06:00. mollymew, Anarchoblogs in English (2009-11-01). INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-BRAZIL: PROTEST POLICE ATTACK ON THE GA?@c3;161;CHA ANARCHIST FEDERATION: Last Thursday, October 29, police in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre broke into the headquarters of the local anarchist federation, the Federaç?@c3;a3;o Anarquista Ga?@c3;ba;cha (FAG) (Gaucha Anarchist Federation), making arrests and stealing various items of the property… (Linked Wednesday 2009-11-04.)

• A New Old Problem with No Name. cherylcline, der Blaustrumpf (2009-10-30). I read Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia when it was published 15 years ago, in 1994.  I reread some of it on Saturday night.  It was part of my futile never-ending quest to understand why and how some men exploit women and children and generally get to go on with their… (Linked Friday 2009-10-30.)
• Police Officer Suspended Without Pay. Radley Balko, The Agitator (2009-10-29). If you follow with any regularity the police misconduct stories I post on this site, you're no doubt familiar with the phrase "paid administrative leave." No matter how serious the alleged misconduct, cops nearly always get paid while they're being investigated, a period that typically takes months. But last week… (Linked Saturday 2009-10-31.)
• Not your grandfather's Bill of Rights. Or anyone's for that matter. Campaign For Liberty Blog (2009-10-31). The thing is, that this rendition of the Bill of Rights. especially 1, 2, and 4 — “usually need permission!” — is more or less an exact rendition of the Bill of Rights as seen through the prism of legal interpretation by the best-protected precedents and the highest courts in the land. And that’s exactly why it’s a huge goddamned waste of time and energy to around pretending like appealing to the Bill of Rights is going to do a damned thing for vindicating your rights in most real-life, practical situations. (Linked Saturday 2009-10-31.)
• Armed to the Teeth: The Fight Over Rural Dental Care. Boing Boing (2009-10-31). Want to make sure poor people have better access to good dental care? Then stop calling in the government to shut down competition and ratchet up prices. (Linked Saturday 2009-10-31.)
• Let’s reform it out of existence. Kevin Carson, United States Pirate Party (2009-10-05). Patents, historically, have played a central role in industrial cartelization.  The exchange and pooling of patents (for example GE and Westinghouse at the turn of the 20th century) has been used to create stable oligopoly structures.   Today it's hard to overestimate the importance of patents as a structural support… (Linked Saturday 2009-10-31.)

Happy Day of the Dead, y’all.

As you may know, I’ve out and about doing Food Not Bombs work; I’ve also been working to help put together this year’s Living Without Borders, which is coming up just this weekend. If you’ve been considering coming, you may be interested to know that a list of confirmed workshops is now available online, including my own workshop — No Borders, No State: Anarchism, Immigration Freedom, and the Interconnection of Struggles — as well as Susie Demisse’s workshop on prison abolition, Joanna N?@c3;ba;?@c3;b1;ez’s workshop on the criminalization of immigrants, and a workshop by FW Paul Lenart (of the Reno IWW) on internationalism, radical unions, and labor solidarity across borders. Interested? Register to let us know you’re coming. Come on down. And spread the word!

And y'all? What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

This is a recent bit of correspondence that I received from an anonymous victim-blamer through my online contact form. Apparently in response to my post from October 2007 on Officer Dan Gilroy, a grown-ass man who has no problem using his position as government police to repeatedly punch 15-year-old black girls in the face over allegedly walking outside after midnight. Our anonymous correspondent thinks that Shelwanda Riley — the 15-year-old victim of Officer Dan Gilroy’s sado-fascist power-trip anger management problem — is the one whose conduct ought to be at issue. And would like us to know, I guess, that she ought to feel grateful that the pig didn’t break her ribs or something:

From: Anonymous (no e-mail address provided)
Date: 10/28/2009 10:47 AM
Subject: Shelwanda Riley (radgeek.com feedback form)

I know this is old. I just saw the youtube video of the cop and the resister. That girl was fortunate to only have been beaten as badly as she was for the terrible behavior she exhibited. Police brutality is different with each situation, and if I was that cop… The cops will not mess with anyone who is not acting stupidly.

Oh, O.K., what with the girl walking alone at night and not doing exactly what this hyperviolent control-freak ordered her to do, well, obviously she was asking for it. Of course.