But look at this: lesbian blues singers.
Crap I’m caught up in: writing that thing on Superman for The Hooded Utilitarian, cleaning up after the dog, working on the October thing, which is getting back to a format similar to what eventually became A City of Ghosts–short stand-alone things every night for all of October–but it’s weirder and not as narratively uniform. Ha ha ha. How’s that for unclear?
—I wrote a post for Pith I find very funny.
—Governor Haslam has even conservatives scratching their heads. It’s weird to think that our state might be polarized enough that we end up with a series of governors everyone ends up feeling icky about.
–This video is slightly NSFW due to cussing. But, even if you can’t listen to it at work, put it on mute and just watch. Keep watching. What happens at the one minute mark and then keeps happening is extraordinary.
In my quest to do things for free, so that I both leave the house and interact with people and don’t sit here on the couch filled with existential terror (Wow, that sentence makes it sound like my couch is filled with existential terror, which, I guess, it may be. I haven’t actually looked at its guts), I went to Radley Balko’s talk at Parnassus last night.
Yes, I’m so fucking tired of my own fucking tediousness that I drove to Green Hills.
Anyway, Balko covered a lot of the same ground he covered when I heard him talk to the Vanderbilt libertarians, but it wasn’t any less disturbing the second time through. A point he made that he probably made before, it just didn’t strike me as profound the first time as it did the second time, was that the Founders were hugely concerned with the governmental strategy of leaving standing armies among the populace to arrest people and serve warrants. They were afraid of that mixture of military and policing. And Balko’s point is that we, as a country, have done a pretty good job of keeping our military from doing police work, but we’re becoming more and more adept at turning our police into a military force.
He points to the rise of SWAT teams that aren’t just used for really unusual circumstances–like hostage rescue or something–but now are the first choice for a lot of police interactions with the public.
One thing I kept thinking about as he was talking was that we may be seeing a rise in importance for the Third Amendment. I mean, when you learned about it in history class, didn’t it seem like one of those things that was important back in the day, but not now? And yet, Balko’s talk made me wonder if we won’t start seeing some challenges to these broad police activities under the third amendment, as well as the fourth. After all, if I’ve done nothing wrong, how can the police assert a right to be in my house? I’m not even talking as far as “search my house.” I just mean at the entering and standing in my house level.
Don’t I have a constitutional right to refuse to lend out my home to police activity?
I don’t know. It was just a thought I had, that we might see enterprising lawyers trying to figure out how the third amendment is still applicable.
Tiny Cat Pants 