Stop.

Everybody get Shameless.

It’s Sunday, and y’all know what that means. It’s been a while, between travel, work, and other tasks, but while Shamelessness can be repressed, it always comes back stronger in the end.

So let’s make this a good one. What have y’all been up to for the past few weeks? 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.

Officer Jason Anderson, Milford Police Department, Milford, Connecticut. Up in New England, Jason Anderson, a cop formerly working for the Milford city government’s police department, served and protected the public by tearing down a city street at 94 miles per hour, with no lights or sirens on, sideswiping a car and killing two 19 year olds named David Servin and Ashlie Krakowski. Officer Jason Anderson was not responding to an emergency call at the time; he just felt like getting wherever he was going at 94 miles per hour. Since then, the Milford city government’s police department discovered dash cam videos of another government cop, Officer James Kiely, driving over 100 miles per hour on city streets at least 3 different times. Officer James Kiely was given a five (5) day vacation from his government job; I’m sure that if you or I were caught on tape driving 113 mph three different times, the Milford city government would be equally forgiving. Meanwhile, R. Bartley Halloran, the lawyer for David Servin’s family, filed a Freedom Of Information request for video records of city police cruisers going back to 2006, in order to determine whether or not there was a pattern of reckless driving by the Milford city government’s police. He got a handful of videos, dating from before the accident, which show Milford cops repeatedly driving over 85 miles per hour on city streets. The videos are public records, but Halloran never got most of the tapes that he had a right to review, because they’d been unintentionally deleted by Lieutenant Dan Bothwell. Oops! The Milford Police Department takes this kind of thing seriously, of course, so they gave Lt. Dan Bothwell a one (1) day vacation from his job.

See also:

• GT 2010-03-27: Washington State trooper accused of driving off road while drunk then calling rookie trooper to help him cover it up
• GT 2010-05-21: Friday Lazy Linking / Defensive Driving
• GT 2009-09-05: Cops are here to keep us safe (cont’d): Senior Corporal Michael Vaughn, Dallas Police Department, Dallas, Texas
• GT 2009-07-31: The Police Beat / Cops are here to keep us safe (cont’d): unnamed officer, Lilburn, Georgia
• GT 2009-05-22: Friday Lazy Linking / The police are here to keep us safe: Officer James Manor, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Las Vegas, Nevada

• Joe Conason Prefers American Cheese to Vienna Sausages. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-10-06). Joe Conason's columns are reliably stupid, but this week he's really outdone himself. Here's his reaction to the news that Tea Partiers have been reading Austrian economics: The Austrian craze is particularly curious because it has displaced a school of economics that ought to be more appealing to the proud… (Linked Wednesday 2010-10-06.)

• California City Redevelopment Agencies: Waste, Abuse, What Else is New? Brian Doherty: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-10-06). The Redevelopment Racket Vs. Affordable Housing. (Linked Wednesday 2010-10-06.)

• If you have a .ly domain, you should know that the only way to escape the Libyans is with a flux capacitor and a Delorean. Mark Pilgrim, Mark's Firehose (2010-10-06). (Linked Friday 2010-10-08.)

• Making a Market in Antipsychotic Drugs: An Ironic Tragedy. Dr. Peter Breggin, Dr. Peter Breggin (2010-09-23). Remember not so long ago when Prozac became the world’s largest selling medication of any kind, and then for years how Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft took over many of the top 10 spots? Remember the explanations at the time–that they were wonder drugs and that 15-50 percent or more of… (Linked Friday 2010-10-08.)

• Inhousepharmacy.com stops shipping to the US. The Bilerico Project (2010-10-06). The Intellectual Protectionism Movement Vs. Human Decency and the Trans Community. (Via Anna Morgenstern.) (Linked Wednesday 2010-10-06.)

Thomas Friedman is a Very Serious Commentator.

Here is Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times‘s resident global brain, commentating on defense spending and other government monopolies.

China is doing moon shots. Yes, that's plural. When I say moon shots I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience, where the Beijing Genomics Institute this year ordered 128 DNA sequencers — from America — giving China the largest number in the world in one institute to launch its own stem cell/genetic engineering industry; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country's leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry, starting in 20 pilot cities. In essence, China Inc. just named its dream team of 16-state-owned enterprises to move China off oil and into the next industrial growth engine: electric cars.

Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan.

This contrast is not good. . . . We're out of balance — the balance between security and prosperity. We need to be in a race with China, not just Al Qaeda. Let's start with electric cars.

— Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times (2010-09-25): Their Moon Shot and Ours

Fuck yeah, electric cars! We need a dream team for them. If we aren’t assembling a dream team of 16 state-owned enterprises — by which is meant, of course, giving away $15,000,000,000 to politically-connected monopolistic corporations — in order to produce our own electric cars, how is Team U.S.A. ever going to get into the Civilizational Play-offs? And if we — by which Friedman means they — aren’t going to the Civilizational Super-Bowl, who are you going to root for? The European Union? Haw, haw, haw. And without American electric cars, how would you even get to the game? Certainly not in a Chinese-made electric car — who ever heard of buying things that were made in China? In any case, Chinese electric cars will no doubt be too small to fit our giant American We’re #1 foam fingers into the passenger seat.

In all seriousness, far be it from me to complain if somebody suggests that U.S. military spending is out of control, or points out that every dollar seized by the government and used to build bombs and killing machines and to pay for perpetual military occupation, is a dollar that is taken away from peace, progress, and from meeting the needs of ordinary people. But if the only alternative to imperial war that you can think up is imperial political economy — if the only alternative on offer is to have the money keep on getting seized by belligerent national governments and their bureaucratic dream teams of political capitalists, for the purpose of beating other belligerent national governments and their favored political capitalists in an inane Cold War-style technological race — if the only alternative on offer is to encourage this psychotic identification of people with the governments and state-capitalist predators who oppress and exploit them, as if the triumphs of this hostile and parasitic minority were our triumphs, as if the profit margins of our corporate-welfare firms were more important than human achievement, as if the important thing about a technology is not what it does for people but where it is made (and which belligerent government gets to tax it) — if, I say, the only alternative you have is to have the government turn its massive violence from warfare abroad to taxation and class warfare at home, in order to conscript us all into making world trade the arena for the continuation of war by other means — then you, sir, are talking with a corpse in your mouth.

(Story via John @ Blagnet.net 2010-10-02.)