She was crowned Miss Finland in 1996 under her maiden name Lola Odusoga. She's called Wallinkoski now that she's married, which is way more boring. She was also Miss Scandinavia and second runner-up Miss Universe, and she's pretty darn hot.
Back in 2001 or thereabouts, she annoyed people by appearing in lingerie in a series of ads:
But whatever she appears in, she's definitely the hottest Miss Finland of them all.
Happy birthday!
"Since the late '80s we've been seeing the militarization of police, and the policization of military," says Peter Kraska, a professor of police studies at Eastern Kentucky University, who has studied the militarization of police for more than a decade. "These are converging forces. Soldiers are told to be cops, both domestically and on foreign soil, and cops are becoming more like soldiers, working in elite SWAT-style units."
In 2006, the aforementioned Radley Balko wrote a paper for the CATO Institute called Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. To start with, I'll be quoting heavily from those two sources to give you a brief summary of what's going on in SWAT nation. Here's Laugensen:
Kraska says his research has found that in small town America - towns of 25,000-50,000 - two of every 10 policemen serve on a department paramilitary unit. Throughout America, 11% of police departments have armored personnel carriers. Of all the country's elite paramilitary police units, 20% are used for routine patrol work, and 85% of their calls are to carry out no-knock warrants for drug raids. In 1986, the nation had 3,000 deployments of paramilitary police units. In 1996, it rose to 30,000.
A tenfold increase in paramilitary police deployments. Why? Here's a chilling quote from Balko's paper:
“They [police officers] made a mistake. There’s no one to blame for a mistake. The way these people were treated has to be judged in the context of a war.”
—Hallandale, Florida, attorney Richard Kane, after police officers conducted a late night drug raid on the home of Edwin and Catherine Bernhardt. Police broke into the couple’s home and threw Catherine Bernhardt to the floor at gunpoint. Edwin Bernhardt, who had come down from his bedroom in the nude after hearing the commotion, was also subdued and handcuffed at gunpoint. Police forced him to wear a pair of his wife’s underwear, then took him to the police station, where he spent several hours in jail. Police later discovered they had raided the wrong address.
The war he's referring to is, of course, the war on drugs. Wayne Laugensen explains:
"The collapse of the Soviet Union has, unfortunately, led many military officials to seek out a new enemy to justify continued funding," writes David Kopel, a New York University law professor and author of No More Wacos. "The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) admits that it is no longer capable of protecting Americans from incoming nuclear missiles. Yet NORAD enjoys hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding, as part of a $1.8 billion systems upgrade, having convinced congress to assign NORAD the mission of tracking planes and ships that might be carrying drugs."
In addition, the federal government has been especially keen to promote the militarization of the police. Balko:
In 1994, the Department of Defense issued a memorandum authorizing the transfer of equipment and technology to state and local police. The same year, Congress created a “reutilization program” to facilitate handing military gear over to civilian police agencies.
(...)
By the late 1990s, the various laws, orders, and directives softening Posse Comitatus had added a significant military component to state and local police forces. Between just 1995 and 1997, the Pentagon distributed 3,800 M-16s, 2,185 M-14s, 73 grenade launchers, and 112 armored personnel carriers to civilian police agencies across the country.
(...)
A retired police chief in New Haven, Connecticut, told the Times in the 1999 article, “I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted.”
One of the reasons given for this militarization, and enthusiastically peddled by Hollywood, is the spectre of heavily armed criminals. Radley Balko debunked that:
Moreover, there's simply not much evidence that criminals are arming themselves with heavy weaponry. In a paper by David Kopel and Eric Morgan published by the Independence Institute in 1991, about a decade into the militarization of civilian policing that began in 1980, the authors point to a number of statistics showing that high-powered weapons, which are often cumbersome and difficult to conceal, simply aren't favored by criminals, including drug peddlers. The authors surveyed dozens of cities and found that, in general, less than 1 percent of weapons seized by police fit the definition of an “assault weapon.” Nationally, they found that fewer than 4 percent of homicides across the United States involved rifles of any kind. And fewer than one-eighth of 1 percent involved weapons of military caliber. Even fewer homicides involved weapons commonly called “assault” weapons. The proportion of police fatalities caused by assault weapons was around 3 percent, a number that remained relatively constant through- out the 1980s. It was during the 1980s that SWAT teams first began to proliferate.
Kopel and Morgan also interviewed police firearms examiners. The examiners in Dade County, Florida—home to Miami— for example, found that contrary to the Miami Vice depiction of the South Florida drug trade in the 1980s, the use of assault weapons in shootings and homicides in Miami was in decline throughout the decade.
Despite this, more and more military-grade weapons and equipment are being channeled to police forces around the United States. The latest threat invented to justify it is the heavily armed illegal immigrant. When I wrote about Sheriff Joe Arpaio's antics earlier, I encountered this piece of reporting:
Arizona Republic: Joe Arpaio launches 16th immigration sweep in desert
In a stretch of barren desert alongside Interstate 8 near Gila Bend that has become a corridor for human and drug smuggling, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and about 100 men staged a crime-suppression operation Thursday.
Arpaio brought with him a belt-fed .50-caliber machine gun that can shoot accurately up to a mile as a display of the kind of force he would use if anyone hurts a deputy.
"I am trying to send a message to Mexico," he said. "We will not take anyone hurting our deputies. We will fight back."
The 7-year-old gun has not yet been used, Arpaio said. "It is more for defense." Nor have any of his deputies yet been harmed in a border scuffle.
"We have been very lucky," he said.
The sheriff said criminals smuggling drugs and immigrants across the border are now carrying AK-47s along the swath of desert that is seldom patrolled. The Barry M. Goldwater Range is used for shooting and cannot be patrolled without permission from the United States Air Force. That gives smugglers an easy path for entry, Arpaio said.
This is classic law enforcement logic: there's supposedly a heavily armed enemy out there who puts the officers at risk, necessitating military-grade hardware and civil rights violations. The fact that the AK-toting illegal immigrants seem to be a myth, as evidenced by, among other things, the lack of shootouts with heavily armed immigrants in Sheriff Joe's neck of the woods, is irrelevant. What matters is that the police need bigger guns. Balko:
With all of this funding and free or discounted equipment and training from the federal government, police departments across the country needed something to do with it. So they formed SWAT teams — thousands of them. SWAT teams have since multiplied and spread across the country at a furious clip.
It's no joke, too. I earlier wrote about the Bay Area Rapid Transit system's SWAT team. Just recently, a SWAT team raided a house at the behest of a department of education investigating white-collar crime.
In this part of the world, it used to be a running joke how every single Russian government agency sprouted a SWAT team equivalent around the turn of the millennium. Now the same seems to be true of the US.
What's wrong with it? Balko:
The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.
These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.
That's no exaggeration. Here's a few of the examples Balko provided for the Playboy piece I mentioned earlier:
- Anthony Diotaiuto, a 23-year-old student, was killed by a SWAT team making a "no-knock" raid on his house. They knocked down his door, without declaring themselves to be the police, and when the justifiably alarmed Diotaiuto went for his gun to defend himself, the police shot him.
- Cheryl Lynn Noel, a 44-year-old woman, was shot to death in her bed by a SWAT officer in 2005. After finding marijuana seeds in the family's trash can, the Baltimore police department sent a SWAT team to raid her house in the middle of the night. The team broke down the door, threw stun grenades inside and stormed up to the bedroom, where they found Noel holding a handgun. The police officers immediately shot her. Full details here.
- Cory Maye, sentenced to death for shooting a police officer who entered his apartment on a no-knock raid. Maye had no idea the man he shot was a police officer. Read the Reason piece here.
This is the most terrifying aspect of this era of SWAT teams. The police may come by information that leads them to seek a search warrant on your house or a nearby house, or an arrest warrant on you or one of your neighbors. This information may well come from a paid informer, who may have a grudge against someone or just plain lie. It's now becoming increasingly common for the warrant to be carried out by a SWAT team breaking into either the target house or one near it; wrong-door raids happen far too often.
If you do find your door being broken down by a SWAT team, you're very unlikely to be able to tell that it is, in fact, the police who are coming at you, and not, for instance, home invaders. In the United States, it's considered legitimate to own a firearm for home defense, and the country has seen some spectacular home invasion cases. However, should you exercise this right to home defense, and it's the police coming in through your door and not a criminal, they will shoot you and face no consequences for doing so. Not that being unarmed will protect you, as SWAT teams regularly kill unarmed people as well, whether because they think they're armed or by accidentally discharging their weapon.
To sum up, it's entirely legal, and considered totally legitimate, for US law enforcement agencies to maintain heavily armed paramilitary units which regularly assault the homes of private citizens and kill and maim some of them. In the Soviet Union, people lived in dread of the midnight knock on the door: it would mean the secret police were coming to arrest them. In the United States, on the other hand, the police don't knock, and they'll shoot.
The fact that this kind of activity is considered normal policing is just terrifying. On principle, the idea that police officers can invade your home without announcing themselves, kill your pets and possibly kill you, based on nothing more than vague circumstantial evidence that you might be guilty of anything ranging from failing to appear in court to a misdemeanor, is unthinkable. Yet it's true.
This is another case of the basic problem of police misconduct: the majority of the population believes that the police only ever do bad things to criminals, and that criminals, by being criminals, deserve it. The problem with this is that there are criminals and there are criminals: the majority of SWAT team raids target unarmed people without serious criminal backgrounds, guilty of non-violent crimes like possession of small amounts of marijuana. Worse, it ignores the fact that there are wrong-door raids where the police attack the wrong house or apartment, and raids based on false information. And in both those cases, the police shoot, tase and beat first and ask questions later.
The reasoning given for all this is, most commonly, the safety of the officers. For these SWAT teams, that comes before the safety of the citizens they're supposed to be protecting. That isn't right. US law enforcement is treating the citizens of the United States like the inhabitants of an occupied country.
Reading the Laugesen article from 1999 is especially scary now, in 2011, when it's gotten even worse than he imagined.
Road traffic injuries are a major but neglected public health challenge that requires concerted efforts for effective and sustainable prevention. Of all the systems with which people have to deal every day, road traffic systems are the most complex and the most dangerous. Worldwide, an estimated 1.2 million people are killed in road crashes each year and as many as 50 million are injured. Projections indicate that these figures will increase by about 65% over the next 20 years unless there is new commitment to prevention. Nevertheless, the tragedy behind these figures attracts less mass media attention than other, less frequent types of tragedy.
It's true: despite great improvements in car safety over the years, road accidents are still a major cause of death everywhere in the world that has cars. So it's a subject worth taking a look at. And because that news item on Chinese prisoners being forced to play World of Warcraft got me thinking about China, we'll take a look at Chinese road safety.
**
The Euro NCAP does crash tests of commercially available cars and posts the results online, so we can see what we're getting into when we buy a car. As a starting example, here's the crash test video from a Volvo V70 estate. My dad drove one, or something very similar to it, and even though it was never crashed properly, one of the near-death situations in my life did occur in it when a lunatic in Finland ran a red light at very high speed, nearly hitting us.
To get an idea of how things are supposed to work, here's the Euro NCAP video of a Volvo V70 crash test:
As you can see, the essential features of modern car safety are functioning. There's airbags to cushion the impact, and most of the force of the collision is absorbed by the crumple zones of the car while the passenger compartment stays intact. The V70 got a five-star rating, out of a possible maximum of five.
Here, on the other hand, is a Chinese-made Brilliance BS6 in an Euro NCAP crash test.
As you can see, well, yeah. It got one star. In case you're wondering what you have to do to get no stars, here's the Jiangling Motors Landwind:
And if that wasn't frightening enough, here's an inside view:
And finally, an unidentified Chinese car being crashed into a barrier at 64 km/h in Russia.
**
I'm not in a position to offer any kind of advice on buying cars, but I will say this: there seems to be a rather large difference between a five-star rating and a no-star if-you-drive-this-you-are-going-to-die rating.
I mean, wow.
I'm a sucker for a girl wearing sunglasses, by the way:
Here's my favorite bit from the Wikipedia page:
Though she was raised as a sikh, her parents enrolled her in a Catholic school, as it was felt to be unsafe for her to go to public school. There she had her first kiss at 11, lost her virginity to a basketball player at another school at 16, and found out she was bisexual at 18.
On top of which, of course, she became a porn star.
Imagine what would have happened if she went to public school!
Commenting on the title of the album, Peter Svensson said: "The title can be interpreted in many ways but I think we only thought of a few ones we liked." Nina Persson explained: "we talked about having like English title and Angry Birds came up and it sort of felt really good." Svensson continues: "You know, we were thinking like with what everything that's happening with global warming and everything with the environment, that if you were a bird and you knew about it, would you be like really angry? So I guess it's kind of an environmental thing."
"I think that also the title suits this very album extremely well because the album is pretty much about being a bird, and also being angry. I think sometimes you can always compare living to being a bird in the world," Nina finishes.
The first single will be the song "Stupid Pigs". The band declined to comment on the name of the song or its relationship to the album title.
The music video, directed by Jonas Åkerlund, features singer Nina Persson as a demonstrator taking part in a riot, and the rest of the band as riot policemen. The video was shot entirely in the Czech Republic, at a cost of 2 million USD, and includes brutal scenes of rioting, with protestors overturning police cars and setting them on fire, and being assaulted by officers in riot gear while helicopters circle overhead. Fifty-eight different versions of the video were shot in an effort to get MTV to play at least one of them. The eventual MTV video features Nina Persson walking along a city street and singing the song.
Bonus interview footage for Finnish speakers here!
To take a fairly random example, last year a 60-year-old man with a heart condition in Marin County, California, fell and hurt himself when he and his wife returned home from a fundraiser. His wife called paramedics, and as they were treating him, two police officers turned up at his house.
A word of warning: no sensitive person should watch the video. Seriously.
ABC: Man sues Marin sheriff after being Tased at home
"All of a sudden, they just showed up, they came in here like there was a fire going on, like a gunfight was going on," McFarland said.
What happened in the following minutes was captured on a camera mounted on the deputy's Taser.
The deputy tells McFarland he is going to take him to the hospital because he may be suicidal.
"We want to take you to the hospital for an evaluation, you said if you had a gun, you'd shoot yourself in the head," the deputy can be heard saying.
McFarland says it was just hyperbole. He was tired and in pain.
The deputy orders him numerous times to get up or else.
"Stand up, put your hands behind your back or you're going to be Tased," the deputy says.
McFarland keeps refusing.
The exchange goes on for about five minutes; his wife keeps pleading with the deputies not to Tase him, saying he has a heart condition.
Then, McFarland tells the deputies in no uncertain terms to leave.
As he gets up to go to bed, McFarland is Tased. Not once, but three times.
The video accompanying the article is honestly shocking. There's a 60-year-old man lying on the ground, screaming in pain as he's being electrocuted by the Taser. The deputy keeps shocking him and shouts "Stop resisting!". It's like a sick torture scene.
There are too many infamous Tasering incidents like this to list. There's a couple of particularly glaring ones here. To make a very long story short, over the past decade or so it's become almost standard policy for far too many US law enforcement agencies to use Tasers to arrest people, violent or no.
The idea that they're needed for "officer safety" is nonsense, and as for making the public safer:
The Houston Chronicle: The Taser Effect
Since the Houston Police Department armed itself with Tasers, touted as a way to reduce deadly police shootings, officers have shot, wounded and killed as many people as before the widespread use of the stun guns, a Houston Chronicle analysis shows.
Officers have used their Tasers more than 1,000 times in the past two years, but in 95 percent of those cases they were not used to defuse situations in which suspects wielded weapons and deadly force clearly would have been justified.
Instead, more than half of the Taser incidents escalated from relatively common police calls, such as traffic stops, disturbance and nuisance complaints, and reports of suspicious people.
In more than 350 cases, no crime was committed. No person was charged or the case was dropped by prosecutors or dismissed by judges and juries, according to the Houston Chronicle's analysis of the first 900 police Taser incidents, which occurred between December 2004 and August 2006.
Of those people who were charged with crimes, most were accused of misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies.
Here's another study that found no change in injuries to officers, but a dramatic increase in deaths in custody. The ACLU had this to say in 2005:
Few if any controls are imposed on police using Taser stun guns to subdue suspects, which could explain the rise in Taser-related deaths throughout the region, according to a new study released today by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.
"The lack of regulation of Tasers is very disturbing in light of the increasing number of deaths associated with their use," said Mark Schlosberg, the ACLU of Northern California's Police Practices Policy Director. "We fear that in the absence of strong regulations on how police use the weapon, we are likely to see more unnecessary deaths."
In an exhaustive survey of Taser policies and training materials in more than 50 police departments across central and northern California, the ACLU found that while stun gun-related deaths have risen dramatically, the weapon remains largely unregulated. Tasers work by firing twin metal barbs that emit a 50,000-volt charge into an individual, causing him to collapse from loss of muscular control.
Since 1999, at least 148 people in the United States and Canada have died after encounters with police who shocked them with Tasers. More than half of those deaths occurred in the past year, of which 15 took place in northern and central California.
Despite these alarming figures, the Scottsdale, Arizona based manufacturer, Taser International, continues to encourage liberal use of the weapon while grossly downplaying safety concerns. These misleading promotional tactics are reflected in the training materials, which are almost exclusively relied upon by police departments, the ACLU said. Indeed, the ACLU study found that only four of the departments surveyed created their own training materials.
Taser International has also pursued an active policy of silencing its critics with threats of lawsuits, so the actual lethality of the Taser is still an open question. What isn't a question is that Tasers do consistently kill people.
This is just a very brief introduction to the way Tasers are being used in the United States and Canada these days. Their introduction has led to more police brutality and more deaths in custody, with very little to show in the opposite direction. What everyone needs to be aware of is that tasers are not Star Trek phasers that you set on "stun" and then harmlessly knock someone out: they're potentially lethal. The taser, combined with the cult of officer safety, are combining in the US to create a culture where it's become acceptable, even normal, to tackle anyone being arrested, from the elderly and disabled to professional athletes, to the ground and shock them with a Taser. It's a disgrace, and it's pure brutality.
Governor Dan Malloy of Connecticut is expected to sign a bill passed by the state House of Representatives last night decriminalizing the possession of marijuana in limited quantities.
Wrapping up what the New York Times today called the state's "most activist, liberal legislative session in memory," the House voted 90 to 57 in favor of SB 1014, which would punish possession of a half-ounce or less with fines, rather than criminal charges.
First-time offenders would be hit with a $150 ticket; repeat offenders would get at least $200 but a maximum of $500 per offense.
According to the Hartford Courant, supporters hope the bill will save taxpayers money and provide "fairer treatment of those caught with small amounts of the substance."
Connecticut's non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis estimates the bill will save the state nearly $1 million and net upwards of $600,000 in new fines.
Connecticut joins the 13 other states in the U.S. - including two of its neighbors, New York and Massachusetts - that have already decriminalized the possession of marijuana in limited amounts.
That's not exactly legalizing it, but it seems to be about as close as they can get. And sign it the governor did, saying:
“Final approval of this legislation accepts the reality that the current law does more harm than good – both in the impact it has on people’s lives and the burden it places on police, prosecutors and probation officers of the criminal justice system. Let me make it clear - we are not legalizing the use of marijuana. In modifying this law, we are recognizing that the punishment should fit the crime, and acknowledging the effects of its application. There is no question that the state’s criminal justice resources could be more effectively utilized for convicting, incarcerating and supervising violent and more serious offenders."
What I especially like is the recognition that putting people in prison for smoking pot is ridiculous.
And on that note, the other hand: Russia.
Guardian: Russia defies growing consensus with declaration of 'total war on drugs'
Drug dealers are to be "treated like serial killers" and could be sent to forced labour camps under harsh laws being drawn up by Russia's Kremlin-controlled parliament.
Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the state duma, the lower house, said a "total war on drugs" was needed to stem a soaring abuse rate driven by the flow of Afghan heroin through central Asia to Europe.
(...)
The Global Commission on Drugs Policy said in a report last week that there needed to be a shift away from criminalising drugs and incarcerating those who use them. Gryzlov, however, claimed that "criminal responsibility for the use of narcotics is a powerful preventative measure".
Special punishments should also be considered for dealers, he added: "Sending drug traders to a katorga [forced labour camp], for example. Felling timber, laying rails and constructing mines – that's very different from sitting in a personal cell with a television and a fridge while you keep up your 'business' on the outside."
While it remains unclear how many of the measures will become law, other leading members of United Russia – which is headed by Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and which dominates the duma – said they supported the initiative.
The plans follow an admission by Medvedev in April that Russia's fight against drug addiction had failed. He called for radical measures such as mandatory drug tests in schools.
Possession of small quantities of psychotropic substances in Russia carries an administrative fine of up to 15,000 roubles (£330), but Gryzlov indicated it would now result in a jail term. The state should offer narkomany (addicts) a stark choice, he said: "Prison or forced treatment."
I mean, there's a solution to the "problem" of prison luxury: send them to the Gulag!
Here's one direct consequence of their war on drugs:
Injecting drug-use is also accelerating Russia's HIV crisis because – unlike most other European countries – methadone treatment is banned and needle exchange programmes are scarce, meaning the virus spreads quickly from addict to addict via dirty syringes. An estimated one in 100 Russians are HIV positive.
You'd really think that if they're so concerned with popular health in Russia, they might consider an AIDS epidemic to be somewhat more dangerous than people smoking pot. And because it's technically impossible to write about politics in Russia without doing the joke, here's the setup:
Some of Russia's detox clinics still use "coding", a controversial therapy in which patients are scared into thinking terrible consequences (such as their testicles falling off) will result if they mix drugs with medicines which are actually placebos.
And here's the joke:
In Russia, the pot smokes you.
As far as I can tell, the game consists of unimaginative driving sequences, followed by cutscenes that prompt you to press a button every now and then.
What is this, the mid-90's? Apparently they really are bringing back interactive movies. Because everyone who was a gamer in the nineties remember how much "fun" those were.
I can't tell if these Something Awful articles are parodies or not any more. For what it's worth, everything in that one seems to be true.
You're ruining video gaming.
She has old-time film-star good looks and is a heck of a figure skater, so sure, she belongs on the list. Especially after that number with the cop outfit.
The problem is, she's not the hottest athlete in Finland at all.
For starters, there's Eva Wahlström, former amateur European silver medalist and current pro boxer, who is not only Finland's most successful female boxer ever, but also damn hot.
However, the title of Finland's hottest athlete belongs squarely to world champion and multiple European champion Hanna-Maria Seppälä. I mean, look at her:
Case closed!
The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that crowding at California prisons constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, and ordered the state to reduce the number of inmates by more than 30,000. An outraged Justice Scalia dissented, noting that many of the released prisoners "will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym." Do people really get super-buff in the slammer?
While the latent homoeroticism of Scalia's dissenting opinion reminded me of The Onion, I thought I'd take a moment on this topic. Slate continues:
Not anymore. It's true that most state and federal prisons had extensive collections of free weights and weight machines through the 1980s, and that inmates could spend significant portions of their days bulking up. But that all changed around 20 years ago. As stories about prison gyms spread in popular culture, they became an increasing source of public concern. Some shared Scalia's worry that muscle-bound ex-cons would be even more dangerous after their release, and legislators across the country responded. In 1996, an amendment to an appropriations bill expressly prohibited the federal Bureau of Prisons from purchasing "training equipment for boxing, wrestling, judo, karate, or other martial art, or any bodybuilding or weightlifting equipment of any sort." Many states, including California, made the same decision, either by statute or policy. These days, whatever free weights you'd still find in U.S. prisons are decades old.
(...)
Despite popular approval, sociologists and many prison officials have criticized the prohibition on weights in correctional facilities. Some research suggests that weight lifting decreases aggression among inmates. Wardens have noted that idleness is the biggest threat to order in a prison, and weight lifting gives the convicts something to do.
As a former inmate myself, I have a firm, hard, well-toned opinion on this topic, even if it is still a little bulky around the midriff. It's all the sugar in my diet, I know.
Judge Scalia's dissenting opinion isn't all that surprising: the eroticization of prisons and prisoners has been with us for a long time. I'm sure there's plenty of films set in mens' prisons, but frankly, I tend to notice these ones more:
Starring, of course, the inimitable Brigitte Nielsen.
Maybe they'll do one with Lindsay Lohan, now that she's actually been inside and all? She is kinda hot.
Wait, that wasn't my point at all.
**
This notion that prisoners can't have weights is based on two distinct ideas, one somewhat scientific and the other not. Firstly, the more scientific one is a claim that weightlifting and similar pursuits increase aggressiveness. It doesn't seem to be true. A similar one is the idea that pornography leads to more violence and "a hostile environment", which isn't true in society at large, so one wouldn't expect it to be true in prison. Nonetheless, South Carolina still bans pornography from its prisoners, which the ACLU has challenged and been criticized for by Radley Balko, which I thought was damned odd.
The latter idea is perhaps best exemplified by the Zimmer Amendment, quoted in the Slate.com article. The amendment was introduced by congressman Dick Zimmer and passed by Congress in 1995 "To amend the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 to prevent luxurious conditions in prisons." In Section 2, "Elimination of Luxurious Prison Conditions", the amendment demands not providing:
"(vii) any instruction (live or through broadcasts) or training equipment for boxing, wrestling, judo, karate, or other martial art, or any bodybuilding or weightlifting equipment of any sort;"
Although the amendment has since expired, it's left a legacy of Byzantine guidelines on what kind of exercise equipment is and isn't allowed in prisons. Most state and federal prisons still more or less abide by the terms of the Zimmer Amendment, and are phasing out weightlifting equipment by not replacing it as it wears out.
So one strand of the argument against weights is "prison luxury", a staple of the law and order platform. Prison, they insist, must be a punishment, and prisoners shouldn't be allowed "luxuries" because they're being punished.
The different views on the topic can pretty much be found in the New York Times article on the amendment. Here's the law-and-order plank:
Behind all these measures, supporters say, is the idea of making prison a less pleasant place for repeat offenders to come back to.
"To habitual criminals, prisons are resorts with televisions, weight-training facilities and libraries that some colleges would envy," said State Senator Gerald A. Cardinale of New Jersey, who has sponsored a no-frills measure called the People's Prison Act, which the Legislature will take up in the fall. "For a lot of them, jail time is just an extended vacation."
(...)
Mr. Zimmer said: "When you break the law of the land, you should pay the price for your crime, not be rewarded with a vacation watching premium cable on your personal television."
(...)
"Prisons have become mini-resorts and it's disgusting, and it's particularly disgusting to crime victims," said Mr. Deeds of the Law Enforcement Alliance, which enlists crime victims to campaign for harder prison conditions. "We strongly believe that prison is meant to be punishment, a deterrent and a prevention tool, not a resort experience."
So when it's a womens' prison, our society fantasizes about lesbians and Brigitte Nielsen, but when it's a mens' prison, we fantasize about fine physical specimens pumping iron and watching cable TV. Both those fantasies have one thing in common: none of the people responsible for them have ever been to prison.
For starters, the "women in prison" movies. I don't think the reality of a womens' prison sounds particularly sexy:
Wikipedia:
Sexual aggression and abuse by male prison staff is widespread. (...)
“In federal women’s correction facilities, 70% of guards are male,” reinforcing female inmates’ powerlessness. (...)
In 2005, “the Office of the Inspector General and the DOJ released a report documenting widespread sexual abuse by prison employees nationwide, noting that only 37% had faced some kind of legal action. Of those, ¾ walked away with no more than probation. It took all of this evidence for the BOP to finally criminalize sexual contact as a felony in 2006, so that guards can actually face up to five years in prison”. However, “when authorities confimed that corrections staff had sexually abused inmates in their care, only 42% of those officers had their cases referred to prosecution; only 23% were arrested, and only 3% charged, indicted, or convicted. Fifteen per cent were actually allowed to keep their jobs”.
Despite such legislative progress, women are fully dependent on the guards for basic necessities and privileges, and in many states, guards have access to inmates’ personal history files which can empower them to threaten prisoners’ children if the women retaliate. Female inmates who retaliate also face the loss of ‘good time’ for early parole in addition to prolonged periods of disciplinary segregation, and detrimental write-ups, which further deters acts of resistance. The fear incited by such threats as well as the concern that no one will believe them or that no one really cares can successfully silence women. Experience of sexual abuse in prison can greatly impede women’s capacity to reintegrate into society upon release.
That's how far the reality of womens' prisons is from the exploitation movie fantasy. Mens' prisons are about as far from being the luxury resorts these concerned citizens imagine them to be, and as Scalia's opinion shows, they're about as far removed from the reality of prisons as the people making "women in prison" porn. In general, none of the people who speak with this authority about how easy and wonderful prison life is have experienced it. I'm sure many of them have visited a prison once or twice. I remember a delegation of Finnish members of parliament visiting the prison I was in: they walked around the block for about ten minutes, had lunch in the cafeteria and left. I'm sure that gives them an excellent grasp of the day-to-day realities of prison life. It's been pointed out that Judge Scalia should, you know, actually bother to find out such minutiae as whether prisoners are actually allowed to pump iron at the prison gym or not before committing it to writing in a court decision, but really, the way he handled it is perfectly in line with most commentary on prisons.
While no-one familiar with the reality of womens' prisons would describe them as pornographic, I'm equally certain that very few people who've actually been living in correctional facilities would describe mens' prisons as "a vacation", let alone a "resort experience". Certainly, for some people, having walls and a roof as well as regular meals is a huge improvement on their living conditions, but not only are they in the minority, but they too suffer from the single biggest punishment prison inflicts. Even if it was a resort, it's one you can't leave.
The whole discussion on prisons and prison conditions has made me think that being deprived of your freedom is a punishment that most people simply don't seem to understand. Take for instance a closed ward in prison, around where I'm from, or one of those secure housing units or whatever they're called on National Geographic, where you spend 23 hours of each day inside a tiny cell. I've been locked up in one of those, and I assure you, it isn't a holiday. No sane person would willingly choose to go to prison over their everyday life unless that everyday life is truly horrible. Even in the more open wards, the constant reality of being locked inside a small space and being unable to leave is a very real punishment.
Having experienced it, it's somewhat bizarre for me to have to explain this, but the tone of law-and-order pundits everywhere makes it seem necessary.
**
By the way, here's a note of reality that crept into the NY Times proceedings:
Mr. Stout, who killed a man during a mugging in Newark in 1976, maintains that pumped-up prisoners do not stay strong for long.
"In here," he said, "you have all the time in the world, so you work out. Once they get back out, they've got other worries, and they don't stay big for long."
That's certainly true. A fitness or bodybuilding regime is fairly easy to adhere to when you're taken to the free gym regularly every week; when the gym costs money and takes personal initiative to get to, it's a whole lot harder...
And it's this interface between life in an institution and life on the outside that raises the biggest questions of all about prison as punishment. From Wikipedia:
Meta-analysis of previous studies shows that prison sentences do not reduce future offenses, when compared to non-residential sanctions. This meta-analysis of one hundred separate studies found that post-release offenses were around 7% higher after imprisonment compared with non-residential sanctions, at statistically significant levels. Another meta-analysis of 101 separate tests of the impact of prison on crime found a 3% increase in offending after imprisonment. Longer periods of time in prison make outcomes worse, not better; offending increases by around 3% as prison sentences increase in length.
This raises the question of what the point of prisons is in the first place. Do we just want to punish people? It's worth remembering that nearly all prisoners will be freed, sooner or later. The longer they're kept inside and the harsher their punishment, the more brutalized and angry they'll be when they finally get out. When one takes into account studies such as this one on how difficult it is for ex-convicts to reintegrate into normal life, it becomes pretty obvious how the prison system works: all it seems to reliably do is ensure that inmates will end up back inside.
There are alternatives to prison as punishment, mainly the much-maligned idea of rehabilitation. With such things as California's recent decision to release inmates due to overcrowding in mind, it needs to be remembered that not only is prison tremendously expensive, but the inmates aren't producing anything. Each prisoner is a twofold expense: they need to be provided for and their productivity is removed from the economy. The goal of rehabilitation is that a prisoner can return to society as a productive citizen, changing from an expense to society to a taxpayer.
Of course, there are some individuals who can't be rehabilitated, but they are the exception, not the rule. Several studies show that many prison inmates have life goals that are very similar to those of the population at large; where they fail is in realizing those goals. As the study I linked to earlier shows, our penal and judicial systems are failing to help convicts realize those goals and are in fact actively working to make it harder for them.
If what you want is punishment, it's worth reading this interview, where criminologist Peter Moskos quite seriously advocates the reintroduction of flogging as a punishment.
I’m deadly serious. Given the choice between five years and ten lashes, wouldn’t you choose the lash? What does that say about prison? And if flogging were so bad, where’s the harm in offering it as a choice?
Of course some people are too dangerous to release, but these people are kept behind bars simply because we’re afraid of them. But for most criminals, those we just want to punish, flogging is a more honest. It’s also a lot cheaper. Simply to bring our prison population down to levels we had until the 1970s, we’d have to release 85 percent of our prisoners. How are we going to do that unless we end the war on drugs or have alternative forms of punishment?
Ironically, once people hear my idea, often they say that flogging isn’t harsh enough. It’s good to move beyond the facile position that flogging is too cruel to consider, but if you think flogging isn’t harsh enough—that we need to keep people locked up for years precisely because prison is so unbelievable horrible—then you may be a truly evil person.
His point is excellent: if what you want from criminal policy is pure and simple punishment, then what's wrong with corporal punishment? Surely it'll have a deterrent effect! And given that we know prison doesn't, in fact, rehabilitate criminals, then why bother with it in the first place? As he points out:
So California now says they’re not going to release prisoners who are a danger to society. But if they’re not a danger to society, why are they behind bars in the first place? If we just want to punish people for breaking the law, there are better—and cheaper—ways to do so.
Yet somehow the idea of floggings as a punishment is repellent to us, but the idea of prison as a punishment isn't. I'll repeat myself by saying that I firmly believe that this is because everyone who is able to has most likely experienced physical pain, and so thinks they can imagine the pain of flogging; however, to those who haven't experienced prison, the simple reality of imprisonment doesn't seem to communicate itself at all. But to regard one as a cruel and inhuman punishment and the other as not smacks of hypocrisy to me.
The focus on prison as a punishment is actively hostile to prison as rehabilitation. In my mind, this is largely because of a mentality created by law-and-order politicians and Hollywood, who depict crime as the actions of a criminal class determined to exploit society's weaknesses. If one takes the view that all crime is committed by hardened professional criminals, and also adopts the strangely antithetical idea that they'll stop being professional criminals if they're punished hard enough, then it makes sense to rail against "prison luxuries" and demand tougher treatment. But this idea isn't based on any perceivable reality; instead it's part of the culture of fear our politicians maintain to frighten us into compliance.
As long as we make decisions on criminal policy based not on reality but on illusions, we're behaving irrationally. In this case, it means creating a judicial system that encourages and maintains crime. It's a worthwhile sociological question to ask whether this is, in fact, done on purpose, but that's a larger topic for another time.
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To wrap up, I'll return to what kicked this whole thing off: prison gyms. We still have those in Finland, but rumor has it that they're considering getting rid of them. Martial arts equipment like focus gloves are banned. Focus gloves were, in fact, the subject of my only foray into jailhouse lawyering, when I trudged through the prison regulations and found that they were, in fact, prohibited.
As I said earlier, studies seem to show that instead of increasing aggression and violence, working out seems to do the opposite. What's more, simply banning exercise equipment won't stop prisoners from working out. There's always push-ups and all kinds of improvised exercises that can be done in the absence of equipment. Even martial arts training is easy; I've seen some impressive home-made focus gloves.
So the ban doesn't stop prisoners from working out, but that doesn't have the adverse effects it's said to have either. The ban on exercise equipment in prisons addresses a non-existent problem in an inefficient way, so it doesn't make any sense. It's pretty much par for the course in our criminal legislation.
Far from being a problem, I think exercise equipment in prisons is a positive thing. First and foremost, it gives inmates something to do. Prison is 99% mind-numbing boredom, and anything that you can spend energy on is basically a good thing. And fitness is a positive thing in and of itself, especially since I think the reason bodybuilding and working out in general are so popular is that the prisoner's own body is one of the only things they can control. A workout program is a long-term project, and I'd say getting involved in non-criminal long-term projects is only good for rehabilitation.
I'm beginning to think that the majority of our laws and regulations are coming about as nothing more than knee-jerk reactions to some level of moral panic, where it doesn't even matter if the problem is real or if the solution works, as long as the act of passing the regulation expresses our ethical view on the matter. This is basically the argument in favor of the war on drugs, for instance, as well as on prison conditions: it doesn't matter what the practicalities are, but we have to take a certain stance for moral reasons. It's a staggeringly irrational way to run a society.
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I'll finish off with a reminder of how I ended up acquiring the personal experience that went into writing this blog post.
Tricky - Black Steel by Tricky
That's the number she turned up in at the wedding, and heck, I like it. She's a world champion equestrian...
...and a princess by blood, who was ranked number 3 on Forbes's (!) list of the 20 hottest royals back in 2008. And I'm a sucker for athletes:
Occasionally she wears outfits that are maybe slightly less classy than the one in the first picture, but do show off her, erm, other charms:
You can keep your Middletons: she's the only royal for me.
A Florida woman admitted shaking her 3-month-old baby to death after the little boy's crying distracted her from playing a wildly popular Facebook game.
Alexandra Tobias, 22, told cops she was playing FarmVille and her baby, Dylan Lee Edmondson, wouldn't stop crying.
According to the Florida Times-Union, she confessed to shaking the baby, smoking a cigarette to calm down and then shaking the baby again. The baby may have hit his head during the January incident.
Tobias pleaded guilty on Wednesday.
She later got a 50-year sentence. And here I thought FarmVille was bad for you before I knew about this.
**
Here's another example of criminal insanity:
FOX Chicago: Teen Charged with Murder in Police-Involved Shooting, Armed Robbery Case
Ross was charged Thursday evening with murder and armed robbery with a firearm, police News Affairs Officer Robert Perez said.
The incident unfolded about 8 p.m. Wednesday when two police sergeants were stopped by a person saying two people had just committed a robbery near East 70th Street and South Cregier Avenue.
The sergeants saw two people matching the description and ordered them to stop, police said. One of the suspects, with a weapon in his hand, turned in the sergeant’s direction. The sergeant shot the suspect, identified by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office as 15-year-old Tatioun Williams.
Williams, of 1311 E. 69th St., was pronounced dead at 8:40 p.m. at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, according to the medical examiner’s office. An autopsy Thursday found he died from a gunshot wound to the back and ruled the death a homicide.
A weapon and proceeds from the robbery were recovered at the scene, police said.
No one else was injured, police said.
So two guys commit an armed robbery, and as they're escaping, the police shoot one of them. Therefore, the surviving criminal is charged with murder.
This is how the felony murder rule works: if one perpetrates a felony, and as a result someone is killed, the perpetrator is charged with the murder. Here, the result even means that if the police shoot your accomplice, you are charged with his murder.
Another example of this idea in action here:
NY Times: Serving Life for Providing Car to Killers
CRAWFORDVILLE, Fla. — Early in the morning of March 10, 2003, after a raucous party that lasted into the small hours, a groggy and hungover 20-year-old named Ryan Holle lent his Chevrolet Metro to a friend. That decision, prosecutors later said, was tantamount to murder.
The friend used the car to drive three men to the Pensacola home of a marijuana dealer, aiming to steal a safe. The burglary turned violent, and one of the men killed the dealer’s 18-year-old daughter by beating her head in with a shotgun he found in the home.
Mr. Holle was a mile and a half away, but that did not matter.
He was convicted of murder under a distinctively American legal doctrine that makes accomplices as liable as the actual killer for murders committed during felonies like burglaries, rapes and robberies.
In all seriousness, this is insane. As the New York Times article says, this law doesn't actually seem to have any deterrent effect, by comparison with jurisdictions that don't have it. Furthermore, it blurs the definition of murder; as the paper referenced by the New York Times points out, murder is defined by an intent to kill, except in this case, where you can be guilty of murder by lending your car to someone.
What makes it even more dangerous, in my opinion, is the simple precedent that a person who is in no way directly responsible for a crime, and who may even be totally unaware that it has occurred, can be charged with it. Imagine extending that idea to other crimes.
But most of all, it's completely unrealistic to postulate, even as a system of ethics, that everyone must take responsibility for all consequences of their actions. Responsibility for consequences needs to be within reason; if someone lends a homicidal friend a shotgun, I have no problem with them being held culpable, but lending someone a car doesn't seem to be strictly comparable.
Even crazier is the notion that when the police shoot your accomplice in the back, you're guilty of murder. Yes, I accept the idea that had you not been involved in the armed robbery in the first place, your friend wouldn't have been shot. But is this in any way a realistic standard of ethics? If people are going to be held criminally liable for the actions of others, where on earth do we draw the line? And doesn't this, in fact, give police a virtual blank check when pursuing a felony suspect, because any deaths that occur during the crime and subsequent pursuit will be blamed on the suspect, whether he had anything to do with them or not?
This touches on what I've been thinking about in general with regard to law lately. It seems to me that on the whole, our legislation is essentially random. I've been toying around with the idea of constructing a legal code not as a confusing jumble of separate laws but as a system of principles. Surely one of those principles should be that a person can only be held responsible for his own actions or inactions, not for the actions or inactions of others. In this case, both armed robbers should be responsible for themselves, and the cop who shot one of them responsible for the shooting. If the shooting is deemed justified, then it is, but under no stretch of the imagination should the police officer's decision to use lethal force be the other robber's responsibility.
I'll chalk this up as yet another odd aspect of an increasingly insane US justice system. Here's another example:
Wired: There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says
“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden told Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”
What exactly does Wyden mean by that? As a member of the intelligence committee, he laments that he can’t precisely explain without disclosing classified information.
The United States seems to be reaching the point where legistlation is classified to protect national security.
I'd comment, but I don't know how.
**
Here's some surveillance state news, too.
Nature: Terrorist 'pre-crime' detector field tested in United States
Planning a sojourn in the northeastern United States? You could soon be taking part in a novel security programme that can supposedly 'sense' whether you are planning to commit a crime.
Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programme designed to spot people who are intending to commit a terrorist act, has in the past few months completed its first round of field tests at an undisclosed location in the northeast, Nature has learned.
Like a lie detector, FAST measures a variety of physiological indicators, ranging from heart rate to the steadiness of a person's gaze, to judge a subject's state of mind. But there are major differences from the polygraph. FAST relies on non-contact sensors, so it can measure indicators as someone walks through a corridor at an airport, and it does not depend on active questioning of the subject.
The tactic has drawn comparisons with the science-fiction concept of 'pre-crime', popularized by the film Minority Report, in which security services can detect someone's intention to commit a crime. Unlike the system in the film, FAST does not rely on a trio of human mutants who can see the future. But the programme has attracted copious criticism from researchers who question the science behind it (see Airport security: Intent to deceive?).
Do, in fact, see the linked article, which starts off with this:
In August 2009, Nicholas George, a 22-year-old student at Pomona College in Claremont, California, was going through a checkpoint at Philadelphia International Airport when he was pulled aside for questioning. As the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees searched his hand luggage, they chatted with him about innocuous subjects, such as whether he'd watched a recent game.
Inside George's bag, however, the screeners found flash cards with Arabic words — he was studying Arabic at Pomona — and a book they considered to be critical of US foreign policy. That led to more questioning, this time by a TSA supervisor, about George's views on the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. Eventually, and seemingly without cause, he was handcuffed by Philadelphia police, detained for four hours, and questioned by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents before being released without charge.
George had been singled out by behaviour-detection officers: TSA screeners trained to pick out suspicious or anomalous behaviour in passengers. There are about 3,000 of these officers working at some 161 airports across the United States, all part of a four-year-old programme called Screening Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT), which is designed to identify people who could pose a threat to airline passengers.
It remains unclear what the officers found anomalous about George's behaviour, and why he was detained. The TSA's parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has declined to comment on his case because it is the subject of a federal lawsuit that was filed on George's behalf in February by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Again, I'm not sure how to comment on this. It's terrifying.
**
It seems fitting that just as my copy of The Gulag Archipelago arrived in the mail, I saw this news item:
Guardian: China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work
As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.
Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for "illegally petitioning" the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.
"Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour," Liu told the Guardian. "There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn't see any of the money. The computers were never turned off."
In the Soviet Union, it was gold-mining on the Kolyma: in China, it's World of Warcraft. Surreal. However, they haven't abandoned their efforts at reforming the inmates:
He was also made to memorise communist literature to pay off his debt to society.
You can't make this stuff up. It only happens in real life.
Fifteen years after the departure of the Jets, the city of Winnipeg has arrived at a triumphant moment that many thought would never come.
NHL hockey is returning to the Manitoba capital.
The True North Sports and Entertainment group announced on Tuesday that they have completed a deal to purchase the Atlanta Thrashers and move them to Winnipeg in time for the 2011-12 season.
The whole mythology that's grown up in Canada about NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is laughable, and it should really be properly documented for posterity. There seems to be a huge bunch of people who genuinely believe that he's evil, and that he hates Canada and hockey. In this lunatic view, the reason that, say, the Jets moved to Phoenix is because Bettman hates Canada. In their view, this relocation is a victory for Canada, because Bettman's evil plans have been foiled and another franchise is moving to Canada, where hockey "belongs".
What few people seem to want to remember is that the Winnipeg Jets became the Phoenix Coyotes because they couldn't make the franchise work in Winnipeg. Here's a snippet from the TSN article:
The team will play out of the MTS Centre, which opened in 2004 and has a capacity of just over 15,000 seats.
With a population of 762,600, Winnipeg will be the smallest market among the 30 NHL cities.
It's also the smallest arena. It remains to be seen if the new Winnipeg franchise is going to be any more successful than the previous one. There doesn't really seem to be any reason why it would be.
**
Another thing that gets lost in the conversation is the overall reason why hockey franchises have been established in the southern parts of the US in the first place: only by bringing hockey to new markets will the sport expand. Hockey in California has been a success, with Anaheim bringing the Cup home and the Sharks strong contenders. On the other seaboard, Tampa made a great run for the Cup this year and already have one under their belt. Dallas's ownership situation is currently in flux, but when it's all worked out, there's another strong "southern" team with a Cup win.
By being in new markets and succeeding there, these teams are doing what no franchise in Canada ever can: bringing hockey to a whole new audience and broadening the game's markets. There's value in that for the whole hockey community, which the league recognizes in its franchise location policy that Bettman implements. That Canadian fans won't recognize this just speaks to the ridiculous parochialism that is Canadian hockey culture. The whole notion that hockey "belongs" somewhere is moronic in itself, but placing this kind of jingoism over a sensible market strategy is just madness.
Let me make clear that I'm not against relocating teams to Canada. However, I'm also not against relocating teams to the US either, or even Mexico if someone wants to give it a shot. It's a free market, so anyone who wants to put their money on the line, goes through the proper motions and has some kind of sensible plan is, in my opinion, more than welcome to buy an existing franchise and move it somewhere else.
A few years back the Islanders' owner was teasing the idea that the Isles would move to Kansas City, which has long been in contention for a new franchise. As it was, the move was likely just a PR strategy designed to get the city of Long Island to invest in a new arena. Given the Isles' abysmally low attendance record, though, I'm not sure it wouldn't actually be a really good idea to move. If I'm not wrong, that would be the first time a Cup-winning team in the modern era relocated after the win; the Montréal Maroons tried to relocate after their win but it didn't work out. The Maroons, by the way, are also the only Cup-winning modern team to become defunct.
**
As a final point, there's a push to have the Thrashers renamed the Jets when they land in Winnipeg. I have to say that I strongly dislike the idea, because the Jets franchise is still around; it's just called the Coyotes now. Sure, we've had two separate franchises both called the Ottawa Senators, but they were separated by over half a century. As the Thrashers were named after the state bird of Georgia, a name change seems reasonable enough, but really, in my opinion they should come up with their own name.
At the very least, it's going to be weird if there's a Winnipeg Jets franchise in Winnipeg, but the old Winnipeg Jets' retired numbers are in Phoenix. It's not the same franchise, so it shouldn't have the same name. It's that simple!
This isn't the first time Atlanta has lost an NHL team; in 1980, the Atlanta Flames relocated to Calgary, where they remain today. Incidentally, that team apparently took its name from when Sherman burned Atlanta; I'm not sure what was burned in Calgary. Calgary was a much smaller market than Atlanta, but the Flames' financial situation in Atlanta had been very poor and their lack of a TV contract had made it very hard for them to compete with the other teams in town.
Relocation isn't always a great success, though, even when it's a move north: the Kansas City Scouts only spent six seasons as the Colorado Rockies until relocating a second time to New Jersey. As I said, I don't see any compelling reasons why the new Winnipeg franchise would be any more successful than the old one, so even though the deal is for 15 years, we'll wait and see.
What you may not know is which channel this show runs on: Russia Today, nowadays known as RT. Described by the Guardian as "the latest step in an ambitious attempt to create a new post-Soviet global propaganda empire", RT is a TV channel funded almost entirely by the Russian government. In that same Guardian story, their then-editor-in-chief explains:
"I don't believe in unbiased views. Of course we take a pro-Russian position."
And they do. Here's the Independent on the topic:
Russia Today, an English language service, was set up in 2005 to present a perspective from Vladimir Putin’s government as a counterbalance to Western global news organisations such as CNN and the BBC. Its editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan claims that the Russian state “doesn’t at all” interfere with the output of the network’s journalists.
But Shaun Walker, The Independent’s Moscow correspondent, disputes this. “It is untrue that the channel’s journalists are able to report on what they want to without editorial influence; while as time has gone on there have been more features on “negative” aspects of Russia, there is still a total absence of any voices criticising Prime Minister Vladimir Putin or President Dmitry Medvedev,” he says. “The channel’s coverage of Russia’s war with Georgia was particularly obscene. With Western TV networks hooked on a “New Cold War” headline and often not too well versed in the nuances of the region, there was a gap in the market for a balanced view of the conflict that explained Russia’s position. Instead, RT blasted “GENOCIDE” across its screens for most of the war’s duration, produced a number of extraordinarily biased packages, and instructed reporters not to report from Georgian villages within South Ossetia that had been ethnically cleansed.”
Indeed, one of their reporters resigned during the war in Georgia. Here's the Guardian:
Russians appear to be getting only one side of the story of the conflict in Georgia. According to a Moscow Times article, Russian television is showing the misery left by the Georgian assault in South Ossetia, but few, if any, reports mention Russia's bombing of Georgia.
After William Dunbar, a correspondent for the English-language state channel Russia Today, mentioned the bombing in a report on Saturday, his scheduled reports later that day were cancelled by the station. He said: "I felt that I had no choice but to resign."
He added: "I had a series of live, video satellite links scheduled for later that day, and they were cancelled. The real news, the real facts of the matter, didn't conform to what they were trying to report, and therefore, they wouldn't let me report it."
Of course, everyone knows how committed Russia is to the freedom of the press. The first Guardian article I quoted? Its author has since been expelled from Russia for no stated reason.
The idea for founding the channel seems to have come from former minister and Putin aide Mikhail Lesin, who wanted the channel to "polish Russia's international image". And they do, but not only by presenting Russian propaganda: part of their agenda is also to criticize Western countries.
For example, here's an RT reporter waxing lyrical over protests at the 2009 G20 summit in Pittsburgh:
RT: Who does this government consider an enemy?
The students were cornered, beaten, tear gassed, thrown to the floor and arrested – all for gathering inside a public park to express their political opinions.
This scene did not happen in a Third World country in the midst of a revolution. It occurred in Pittsburgh during the G20 Summit.
Of course, that very same year, a Gay Pride rally was held in Moscow. The rally was banned, and Moscow police had threatened the activists with "tough measures". When it went on anyway, police immediately arrested everyone present with "needless violence". Of course, that was better than some previous years when the police stood aside and let skinheads beat up the protesters.
You won't find any of this on RT: no reporters bemoaning the plight of the gay rights activists, let alone getting in amongst the demonstrators and writing harrowing first-person exposes of their arrest. No, on RT "Police disperse gay pride parade", without a hint of violence or impropriety. The channel unquestioningly accepts the official explanation for banning the marches, and under the sub-heading "A fight for gay rights or a farce?", goes on to lambast one of the organizers as a bully and a propagandist. Russia's embattled opposition gets similarly short shrift from RT, with no horror stories of police brutality.
Another topic that drew RT's ire is America's prison system. By contrast, read this Wikileaks cable or Amnesty International's report on Russia for some idea of what goes on over there; a topic you won't find any RT coverage on.
Finnish readers may be amused by the fact that notorious Finnish lunatic Johan Backman is a respected source for RT, quoted in stories like this one, which makes some hilariously over-the-top claims, including that in Finland, it's a crime to "criticize a legally operating organization". Their paraphrasing of what both Molari and Backman have said is also somewhat tenuously connected to reality. Molari and Backman are both rather well-known in Finland as extremists, and especially Backman is given fairly wide publicity in Russia because of his willingness to distort and exaggerate events in Finland in accordance with the Kremlin's propaganda line that Finland mistreats its Russian minority. That his views should be uncritically repeated by Russia Today speaks to the channel's ideology.
**
So a TV channel funded by the Russian government isn't exactly delivering objective journalism. Big surprise. It does raise some interesting questions, though, and to introduce them I'll promote a blog called The Agitator, by Radley Balko, a journalist and libertarian. I have great respect for the man as a chronicler of what I consider America's gradual evolution into a police state. His paper, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, is pretty much required reading for anyone interested in the topic. I read his blog regularly.
This May, Radley went on vacation and left us with a collection of guest bloggers. Most of them did well, even if it was a little odd when one of them felt that if we only divided ourselves into competing factions that identify themselves by differently colored uniforms, the world would be a better place. I thought we were already doing that. Another guest gleefully insulted a 17-year-old boy and expressed the fond hope that he would be assaulted in prison. These are just a couple of things that rankled me, though, and overall it was fine.
One of his guest bloggers, however, was RT's own Alyona Minkovski. Here's a clip from her show, which runs on RT:
As it happens, Radley's appeared on RT himself. As he explained, he went on RT "because they asked".
Now, I have a problem with this.
**
First of all, let me make absolutely clear that police brutality and the wholesale trampling of civil rights in America is reaching scary levels. Things like this, this and this are appalling, and so is the fact that the police will arrest you for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial. The fact that police brutality and abuse is much worse in Russia is no excuse for the Americans or anyone else.
My problem is RT and the nature of their coverage. It's pretty obvious that they use a whole different yardstick for events in the US and in Russia, and much of their reporting consists of regurgitated Kremlin propaganda. They do go to some lengths to disguise this as critical journalism, but it's fairly obvious that when it comes to Russian interests, propaganda takes over. So when someone like Radley Balko attaches themselves to a channel like this, by appearing on it and hosting one of its reporters on his blog, I have a real problem with it, because he's lending his credibility to a Russian state propaganda operation.
I fully understand that there are economic incentives, direct or indirect, as well as the obvious political ones, for publicizing one's cause as widely as possible. In this particular case, though, that publicity comes with giving good press to the Russian state's propaganda machine; in other words, helping the Kremlin project a totally false image of Russia to the world. It also raises troubling questions about Mr. Balko's ethics as a journalist, in that he's willing to attach himself and his name to a government propaganda operation, seemingly without second thoughts.
In my view, working with Russia Today, and even more so in letting Russia Today's employees broadcast themselves through his blog, Radley Balko has put a big question mark next to his name and his integrity as a journalist. To me, it's profoundly unethical to blithely co-operate with the propaganda organs of one of the most repressive states in the world and simultaneously cultivate an image of oneself as a libertarian human rights advocate.
To take just one example, Radley linked to the same Huffington Post piece I did above, on their questionable way of reporting an incident of police brutality in Washington, D.C. He doesn't seem to have a problem with it when RT glosses over Russian police brutality, though. In my books, that's hypocrisy.
Furthermore, I don't believe the people making shows for or otherwise directly working with Russia Today are exactly pursuing an agenda of human rights. Surely if they were concerned with police brutality and human rights, they wouldn't be working for the Russian government. So either they have a very limited definition of human rights that excludes, say, the Russian opposition parties and sexual minorities in Russia, or then they have a different agenda. What's certain is that the channel they're working for is pushing the Russian government's agenda, not a human rights one. And by letting its employees promote themselves and their channel on his blog, Mr. Balko is also taking part in the Russian government's information warfare, to the direct detriment of human rights in Russia.
It's a funny sort of libertarianism where you co-operate with one of the most repressive regimes in the world. I don't much care for it.
**
Last year, the Economist ran a piece on police brutality in Russia.
Cops for hire: Reforming Russia’s violent and corrupt police will not be easy
THEY shoot, beat and torture civilians, confiscate businesses and take hostages. They are feared and distrusted by two-thirds of the country. But they are not foreign occupiers, mercenaries or mafia; they are Russia’s police officers. The few decent cops among them are seen as mould-breaking heroes and dissidents.
Daily reports of police violence read like wartime bulletins. Recent cases include a random shooting by a police officer in a Moscow supermarket (seven wounded, two dead), the gruesome torture and killing of a journalist in Tomsk, and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer for an American investment fund. He was denied medical treatment and died in pre-trial detention in Moscow having accused several police officers of fraud.
American police brutality is alarming enough that I can't say it's nothing compared to what they do in Russia. Both countries' police forces at times terrorize their inhabitants like an occupying army. But having been to both countries, I'd still rather get arrested by American cops than Russian ones. Hell, I'd rather be raided by the Pima county SWAT team than by OMON. If American SWAT teams sometimes remind us of storm troopers, their Russian counterparts pretty much are the SS.
And one of the foremost critics of police brutality in America co-operates with their PR department.
