Tragic Police Shooting Death Leads To Of All Things, Kids Able To Have Lunch

Philando Castile was shot and killed by a Minnesota
police office in 2016. Castile was school nutrition
supervisor. A fund in his name is now paying off
childrens' school lunch debt. 

A guy named Philando Castile worked in a school cafeteria as a school nutrition supervisor.  Sometimes, he'd dip into his own pockets to help kids who couldn't afford lunch.

Castile was killed by a police office during a 2016 traffic stop, which of course meant the world lost a generous, kind guy, the type of person we all need.

As is pretty much always the case when a police officer shoots a black person, the police officer was acquited of criminal charge. Which compounds the tragedy.

When a good person dies, people often try to turn the tragedy into something good. And Castile's death has led to exactly that.

According to CNN, a charity run in Castile's name has wiped out the lunch debt of every student in all 56 schools in the St. Paul Public Schools district in Minnesota.

"That means that no parent of the 37,000 kids who eat meals at school need worry about how to pay that overdue debt," according to a fundraising page for the charity Philando Feeds the Children.

I'm going to stop right here for a second and get on my soap box. I get it that school districts everywhere are strapped for cash and can't afford to pay for school lunches. Somebody has to pay for them.

However, I have an immense problem with all those schools who punish the kids because their parents either can't pay for the school meals or won't.

In many schools, when there's lunch debt, the kids involved often just get a lame, cold sandwich while their friends get full meals.

That's an insidious practice that's become known as "lunch shaming." It's terrible to deny a kid a decent lunch. It's also terrible to shame a kid by giving him or her something substandard in front of all their friends. I thought schools discouraged bullying. All this does is encourage it.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, the Philando Feeds The Children fund goes beyond rescuing kids from food bullying by the school district.

CNN says student parents or caregivers cannot submit paperwork to request free or reduced-price lunches (based on income and need) unless the kids' lunch debt is retired.

Which leads to a never-ending cycle. The kids' lunch fund keeps going deeper and deeper into debt, so it becomes more impossible for the kids' parents to pay off the debt. Some parents acrue as much as $1,000 in debt.

Which means the kids will never, ever get decent food.  They can't pay the debt, so they can't apply for free or reduced cost lunches. That's the way it works in today's America. If you're poor, you need to be punished. Whether or not it's your fault.

It looks like when he was alive, Castile understood this. So do the people donating to this cause. There's a lot of bad things in this world, but at least some good can come of it, at least sometimes.

As of about a week ago, the Philando fund stood at over $107,000, which really, really surpassed its goal of $5,000, CNN says.

"Philando is STILL reaching into his pocket, and helping a kid out," the charity wrote in a social media post recently.

Cruel Judge Lets His Hatred Of Gays Potentially Harm Baby Girl

Everyone seems to agree these two women make
fine parents, except for one activist Utah judge, who
says gay people like them are always unfit as parents,
evidence be damned.  

UPDATE:

As I pretty much expected, the judge who ordered the baby taken away from this gay married couple reversed himself, at least temporarily.

Judge Scott Johansen came under withering attack for taking the kid away from the two female foster parents, who are hoping to adopt the baby.

The judge is now letting the couple keep the kid for now, but has scheduled a hearing on December 4, and he's still got lots of misgivings about placing the baby with a gay couple.

This despite the fact that the two women have demonstrated their competence at raising a kid.
And despite the fact that his ruling appears to violate Utah and national law.

Even the Republican governor of Utah criticized this judge.

Meanwhile, the Human Rights Campaign filed a formal complaint with the Utah Judicial Conduct Commission. We'll see where that goes.

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION

Yesterday, a judge in Utah ordered a one year old girl be taken away from her foster parents within a week.

The foster parents weren't abusing the kid. They are a married couple. Financially stable. No history of violence, crime or weirdness. Routine investigations showed the baby girl was doing well in this household. She was thriving. She seemed healthy and well-adjusted. The foster parents were providing her everything she needed.

So what's the problem? Well, Utah 7th District Court Juvenile Judge Scott Johansen decided that the married couple in question are lesbians, they are unfit to parent because they are gay, says the Salt Lake Tribune in a story extensively picked up by other media.

Which means the girl, who by all accounts was well cared for and loved by April Hoagland and Beckie Peirce, now faces an uncertain and unstable future in Utah's foster care system.

The judge didn't provide any facts to back up his claim that a household with same sex parents is dangerous to a child, but made a vague reference to "research."

Says the Salt Lake Tribune:

"Johansen did not provide specifics of that research in court despite questions from attorneys for the Utah Division of Child and Family Services and the Guardian Ad Litem Office assigned to represent the child, Hoagland and Peirce said."

The studies the judge referred to might be from a widely discredited study by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus, which said that children do more poorly with gay parents than with straight parents.

The Regnerus study was flawed, say experts, because of unreliable data or data that indicated the children in question were actually living with single parents or under different circumstances than with married, same sex parents.

Most other studies on the topic concluded that on average, children with gay parents do at least as well as those with straight parents.

According to Utah law, foster parents must be married couples or single individuals age 21 or older. They muset be U.S. citizes or permanent legal residents, they must pass background checks, must be financially stable, must be able to support their family without assistance from the state, they can't foster parent children and run a day care center at the same time, and must be healthy enough to care for the kids.

The Utah Division of Child and Family Services have reportedly investigated Hoagland and Peirce thoroughly, as they're supposed to do with every potential foster parent. The couple did just fine with the investigation and the child welfare agency supported the idea of the couple foster parenting the child.

Who, by the way, was to have eventually been adopted by Hoagland and Peirce. Which would have permanently given the baby girl a stable household where she could grow up to presumably be a nice stable adult.

According to the Tribune:

"'We have a lot of support,' Peirce said. "DCFS wants us to have the child, the Guardian Ad Litem wants us to have the child, the mother wants us to have the child, so the only thing standing in the way is the judge.'"

Of course, there's a big outcry over Judge Johansen now, so maybe this will get fixed. I've heard criticism, especially from conservatives, over "activist judges" making up their own laws.

Still, it's unclear how an appeal, of possible, would work.

Johansen is a classic example of an activist judge. He ignores case law, and interjects his own religious beliefs.

Hey, if Johansen doesn't like gay people or the fact some are parents, fine, he can do that. But he has to apply the law as it is written.

As I noted, this judge appears to be willing to damage a child in the name of hating gays.

By the way, this judge has been pretty jerky in the past, too. He slapped a teenage boy in the courthouse back in 1997 and has ordered a woman to chop the ponytail off a 13 year old girl who had apparently misbehaved.

But the damage he caused this time is too much.

I just hope the judge isn't a foster parent.

Pepper Spraying Seattle Cop Might Be Worst Yet

An unhinged Seattle police officer pepper sprays
passersby for no apparent reason on MLK day in Jan.  

I know, I know, I've been complaining about bad cops quite a bit lately.

My excuse: The more attention paid to the bad ones, the better. If everybody did this, the powerful police unions might see the error of their ways, stop protecting the bad cops and help get rid of them. Then let the good ones, which are in the majority, do their jobs well.

It's a dream anyway.

So it is that I give a Seattle cop her due in the rogues gallery of really bad cops.  The as-yet unidentified cop is new Queen Of Pepper Spray, the biggest doofus with the spray since John Pike, the infamous UC Davis cop who in 2011 pepper sprayed a bunch of peaceful protestors as if he was trying to clear the odorous aftermath of a frat party with Fabreze.

Unless I'm missing some context of what might have happened before this latest viral video from Seattle went out, I have to ask: Why was this dipshit cop in a panic, pepper spraying random people as they walked by, all in the name of keeping them from walking down a certain street during Martin Luther King events in mid-January?

On that day, demonstrators blocked major roads in Seattle in a "Black Lives Matter" protest that reported resulted in 19 arrests and one police officer suffering a broken leg. There have been numerous "Black Lives Matter" protests around the country in recent months during which protestors block roadways.

At least judging from the video, things didn't look out of hand at the scene of this pepper spraying, that is until the cop went totally off.

If you watch the video at the bottom of this post, you see the cop that did the pepper spraying is totally unhinged. She's yelling frantically, sounding panic stricken, as most passersby don't seem all that tempted to go down the street she doesn't want them to go down.

The other cops there look pretty chill, although I fault them for not calming our panicked cop down.

As the very brief video opens, you do see people off to the left, many of them clearly demonstrators of some sort. Some of them look like they might be itching to go down the street where cops, for whatever reason, don't want them to go.

Then this unhinged cop starts yelling frantically randomly spraying passersby, including Jesse Hagopian,  a locally well-known social justice advocate and a teacher at a Seattle public school.  It appeared that nobody on the scene was being particularly threatening.

All he seems to be doing in the video is walking by, then away from the police barricade, talking on a cell phone, seemingly in a hurry to get to another appointment elsewhere in the city.

I wonder if the woman just to the left of Hagopian triggered this. She seems to be a mild mannered, middle aged lady looking bemused as the cop with the pepper spray can yells incoherently. Maybe our unhinged cop noticed this and opened fire?  

Jesse Hagopian, a Seattle teacher and activist, was pepper sprayed
for the sin of walking down a street while talking on a cell phone.
Not surprisingly, he's getting ready to sue. 

Glad it was pepper spray and not a gun in her hand.

It's lucky this got captured and uploaded to YouTube, because I'm sure the police would have just said Hagopian was threatening officers, he was a menace, blah, blah, blah.

Aside from the pepper spraying, which apparently was inspired by Hagopian being guilty of walking in the city where he lives while black, this cop is apparently not good at crowd control, and keeping the peace.

It's hard to tell, because the video cuts off, but it looks like things were fairly mellow until the stupid cops starts spewing pepper spray in all directions. Then it seems people are starting to get angry.

The video ends with a woman scolding the cop: "We have the right to walk on this sidewalk!"

Maybe you used to, lady, but now cops can do what they want, apparently, laws and First Amendment be damned.

Way to de-escalate, stupid cop.

Why is it the worst cop, the incompetent ones, seem to be always itching for a fight? Yes, sometimes things escalate to violence in the police world, and it's totally not the fault of law enforcement. Face it, some people are jerks, and police, like it or not, have to respond with force.

But in this case, WTF?

Hagopian has announced his intention to sue, and good for him, especially with Seattle's reputation of stonewalling and denial when law enforcement is questioned.

Seattle Police say the incident is "under investigation," code word for letting this die a quick death after the media attention dies down and we hope no nosy reporter follows up in a few months.

We don't know the identity of this officer, or any other details.  It'll be interesting to see if anything comes of it.

Hagopian's lawyer, James Bible is not optimistic.

"They're not going to respond......I would be surprised if the city of Seattle finds yet another way to absolve itself of any wrong-doing. They've made a mockery of accountability and until that changes, we're not holding our breath."

The U.S. Department of Justice in 2011 said Seattle Police engaged in a repeated pattern of excessive force, and critics say little has changed since that report came out.

A Seattle police officer recently got in trouble for arresting a 70-year-old black man because she apparently thought a black guy using a golf club as a cane is a menace to society.

It practically took an act of Congress to suspend that police officer, though.

All cops accused of wrongdoing deserve due process. But when the due process shows that they've done wrong, why is it so hard to get rid of them?

I think a lot of people in this country want to know the answer to that question.

I know I do.

The White Guy Or Guys Who Harassed Native American Kids In South Dakota Not So Smug Now

Native American kids were recently verbally abused
and had beer sprayed at them by idiots in a skybox at
this Rapid City hockey game recently. Police
are hunting the idiots down now.  

It must be wonderful to be a smug white drunk guy.

You're on top of the world, aren't you? You're better than everybody else, aren't you?

Especially those Native American kids you see below you, from your perch in the skybox as you watch a hockey game in a Rapid City, South Dakota arena.

What are those awful Native American kids doing here, anyway, you wonder. They don't belong here. This is only for white people. Native American kids show stay on the reservation.

So you tell them, through your drunken beer addled brain. "Go back to the reservation," you yell. 

You see the kids and their chaperones are getting visibly upset. Good, you think. They don't deserve to have a nice evening out at a hockey game. That's only for white people, isn't it? Especially white men like yourself.

Thank goodness there's plenty of beer. The beer distributor Eagle Sales of the Black Hills owns this skybox. This is good. There's so much beer you can pour some of it on those awful Native American kids down below and keep yelling at them to go back to the reservation.

Finally, they do. They all get up and leave. And they're upset. Good. Only white people like you deserve to have fun, don't you?  The Native American kids going back to the reservation. Where they can live in poverty like they're supposed to.

Us white guys are kings. They're our slaves. And you don't want to hear they were here before you were, huh? You're the big He-man conquerer, aren't you, the guy pouring beer on innocent kids and heaping abuse on them.

Oh, look at that. Tribal leaders, and the parents of the kids you yelled at and poured beer on during the hockey game demand a meeting, and justice, with Rapid City city leaders.

The leaders grant the meeting. Probably just to humor them and for PR, you think. The meeting last for three hours. Why did the white city leaders of Rapid City waste so much time on these stupid Native Americans, you think.

Afterwards, Rapid City's police chief emerges from the meeting. He looks pissed. He's a white guy, so you probably think he's pissed at those stupid Native Americans for wasting so much of his time when he could be drinking beer at a hockey game. And tossing some of it on these stupid Native Americans.

The police chief, Karl Jegeris is pissed alright. At YOU, white guy or guys who tortured these kids at the hockey game.

Jegeris has this to say:

"We're going to be looking at assault. We're going to look at the hate crimes statutes. We will look at the child abuse statutes. And we, will look at any other relevant statutes," he says.

Yes, the police chief is looking for you, stupid white guy or guys with the beer, so he can charge you with child abuse, or assault, or a hate crime.

You wonder what the world has come to. Charging you with a crime for being a good 'ol American, the place that is the land exclusively for white people, especially ignorant white men like you.

You find out the Native American kids were at the  hockey game in the first place because they were being rewarded for studying hard. Behaving. Trying to get ahead in this world.

What right to they have to study, to get ahead? They'll take jobs away from dumb white men like you. Because you're too stupid to hold down a job, at least compared to these bright Native American kids.

That's why you hate them so much, isn't it?  Deep down inside, you know they have a lot more going for them than you. So you do anything to keep them down, to demoralize them, to make them want to give up.

It seemed to work at first, didn't it? The parents of the Native American kids were on TV, tearfully explaining how upsetting this was for the kids.

But now others in the community are reaching out to these Native American kids. Many of these community members are white, and are being nice to these kids. You probably think these nice white people are traitors, being nice to the Native American kids who you think belong in abject poverty on the reservation.

Even the guy who owns the skybox at the hockey arena is apologizing for your behavior. You begin to think he's some sort of traitor, too.

And now, white guy or guys, the police know who you are, and will come to arrest you, too. Your name will be all over the papers, and on line. You'll get an onslaught of hate messages.

You think you're being beaten down by political correctness. "What is this country coming to", you wonder. "Why am I suddenly the victim?", you wonder. I'm supposed to be on top. I'm a white guy, you think.

Well, actually there are a lot of white guys and gals on top. The ones that won't beat others down because of racism, like yours. You don't think you are a bigot, but most other people think you are.

And you really are. The rest of us can't wait to see you arrested, to see who you are, to see how you react the world, which was once the way you want it to be, is changing.

Have another beer. You'll need it. Because they don't serve beer in jail.

Teen Does Typical Teen Dumb Thing; Pennsylvania Wants To Jail Him For Two Years.

This dumb teenager being dumb with
a statue in Pennsylvania might be locked up
for 2 years for being dumb.  

I swear, all 14 year olds do at least one incredibly dumb thing in the year they're at that age.

So it was in Pennsylvania recently when one 14 year old kid, decided it would be a Stupendously Brilliant idea to simulate oral sex with a statue of Jesus. (The kid was shirtless, but at least he kept his pants on.)

Then he posted photos of this exploit on Facebook.  Just to make everything worse.

What he did was insulting, not funny, and surely infuriating to the religious types out there. I'd punish him. Maybe pick up trash, write a well-researched essay on respecting people's property and religious affiliation, and tell him he's a jerk.

But I wouldn't send him to jail for two year. That seems a wee bit harsh for a stupid moment by a 14 year old.  If we sent every 14 year old to jail for being stupid here and there, we'd have to build a LOT more jails.

Yet according to Mother Jones, Pennsylvania wants to lock our 14 year old up in a juvenile detention facility for two years because of his misdeed.

He's charged with, according to Mother Jones "desecration of a venerated object, invoking a 1972 Pennsylvania statute that criminalizes 'defacing, damaging, polluting or otherwise physically mistreating  in a way the actor knows will outrage the sensibilities of person likely to observe or discover the action."

Mother Jones says an organization called Truth Wins Out, an LBGT advocacy organization, says the law is unconstitutional because it violates the establishment clause: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

They're also appealing on free speech grounds.

However, if Congress ever passed a law against being stupid, there'd be a lot of people in jail. Including, a dare say, most members of Congress.

Instant Justice in Elephant Poaching Case

It's infuriating to read these constant stories about poachers gunning down endangered and magnificent animals like rhinos and elephants because idiots think if they get their hands on the animals tusks, or better yet injest them, they'll be strong, virile he-men.

Wildlife justice: Did an elephant fight
back againt a poacher, killing him?  

Of course it's obvious that anyone who would ingest parts of a tusk from such a beautiful creature is anything but a he-man. You'd think nobody would want them as a sexual partner.

Often, the poachers who kill these animals get away with the crime and make a tidy profit from the scumbags who would buy from them.

So it was delightful to read the story of instant justice:  A poacher was trampled by an elephant he was trying to kill, according to the Sunday Mail of Zimbabwe, via the Nothing To Do With Arborath Blog.

Hmm.  I keep hearing stories about the intelligence and cooperative nature of elephants among their herds, so I have to wonder if this was pure instinct at work on the part of the elephant. Maybe the elephant has a well developed sense of justice.

Creepy Young Man Who Beat Up Homeless Man for YouTube "Fun" Sentenced.

In December, 2011, I posted an awful story about some dopey kid named Taylor Giresi, who was then 20 and some 17 year old moron posting a video of them beating up a homeless guy in New Jersey, apparently because they thought it was funny.

A still from that awful video of Taylor Giresi, attacking
a homeless man, seen here bloodied after Giresi hit him 

Word comes now that Giresi, now 22, has been sentenced to three years in prison for the crime, but some might question whether the sentence is long enough.

Giresi's lawyer said mitigating factors are that his client has a low IQ of 74 and has some psychological issues. Well, you have to have some mental health problems if you think beating up a guy for the cameras is fun. The lawyer said Giresi was egged on by the 17 year old moron who was filming the beating.

Here's just a tiny bit of the account of the attack the New York Post provides:

"After initially attacking the homeless man, the young man in the video returns to him again. As the cameraman urges him on, he punches the homeless man in the face, sending him sprawling to the ground."

 According to the New York Post, Giresi didn't exactly seem too remorseful for the crime.

"I already apologized to the homelesss man; I knew him," Giresi said in a halting monotone. "It wasn't like anything serious. But when I put it on YouTube it got serious. I wasn't trying to hurt the man."

Wow, are there a lot of problems with that statement. Let's pick it apart, OK?

"I already apologized."    Really? How? When?

"I knew him."  So that makes it OK to beat the crap out of him and terrorize the poor guy? Because you knew him? Funny, my first impulse isn't to punch the people I know.

"It wasn't like anything serious."  Nah, We do it all the time. Just beat up innocent people minding their own business because, you know, it's fun!

"But when it got on YouTube it got serious."  Yeah, it's not serious if you brutally assault someone, but when people call you out on it when they see you being a horrible person on YouTube, then it's bad. Are we a little self centered, Taylor?

"I wasn't trying to hurt the man."  So punching and kicking a person is not hurting someone? Then what is?

Yes, yes, I know that Giresi is mentally challenged and has psychological problems.  But isn't there some level of responsibility in there somewhere? The prison sentence seems to say so, but if his quotes are right, he doesn't say so.

There's no word on where the homeless man who Giresi and friend beat up is now. The 17 year old who helped in the attack spent two months in a juvenile detention center and is on probation, according to the post.