you put your right foot in, you put your ri*BANG*

from this linked article about an unarmed guy who got shot by the po-leece:

'One officer told Dillon Taylor to get on the ground, while another told him to put his hands on his head.

"He got confused, he went to pull up his pants to get on the ground, and they shot him," Jerrail Taylor said.'

setting aside for the moment that taylor, a parolee, had ample reason to believe the police would feel within their rights to initiate contact with him, he looks approximately like every other white guy in existence, and cops don't really have much but a mugshot to judge from.

it would seem that in cases where you, as a law enforcement officer, are not absolutely certain about the identity of the individual you're making contact with, you might want to try only giving one order to follow instead of two or three.

when you do it like this, it looks kinda like you used the state's authority to conspire to kill a man by ordering him to do the impossible under pain of execution.

... or that you've no business being law enforcement officers.  i'm just waiting for the geniuses to get into a real life polish-firing-squad situation and start putting holes in each other's crackbuckets for a change.  given law enforcement's track record on learning shit, it'll probably take 'em five years to figure out why it keeps happening, too.  sounds like a joke, but you can easily imagine a situation where some member of a swat team is posthumously deemed "out of position" in the paperwork relieving his commanding officer of responsibility for "persons acting under department aegis".

if you ever wondered why police departments have that "maximum i.q." requirement...

something i chose not to inflict on facebook

(tl;dr: eng101)

i am officially coming out as wholly unperturbed by people using the universal "ur" in informal communications.  the fact that whoever taught you english grammar decided to get all fancy in how they were going to try and get you to remember the difference between "your" and "you're" and it resulted in you being too confused to even care shouldn't stand in the way of you being able to carry on a decent conversation. from now on, i'm not going to be taking points off anybody's papers for using 'ur' when they mean either "your" or "you're".

but just for the record: 

"your" is a possessive personal pronoun.  it means that something belongs to or is the responsibility of a person immediately present in the sentence (namely, you).  it doesn't have an apostrophe for the same reason words like "my" and "his" don't have apostrophes.  it's the same kind of word.

the reason third person possessives have apostrophes (i.e. "Bill's car.") is because they are not pronouns (there are only six pronouns in english - the possessive forms are: my, your, his, hers, our, and their).  people's names, like Bill, or words that name things, like car, are regular nouns, not pronouns. to make them possessives ("Bill's car", "the car's gas tank"), we use the apostrophe.  you have to use the apostrophe to make regular nouns possessive because without one, it just means the noun is plural ("Bill's two cars").  english is fancy-shmancy that way.

on the other hand, "you're" is a contraction.  contractions have more to do with etymology (the study of how words develop) than english grammar, because they're not just one word.  they're bits of phrases which are so commonly grouped together when spoken that the sounds they make have come to be words in their own right ("hallow's evening" becomes "halloween").  "you're" is the preposition "you are". it puts the subject ("you") ahead of a descriptive statement about it ("you're a human being").  you might already realize that we do the same thing in english with "will" and "have" (meaning future and past; i.e. "You've learned a lot", "You'll do great things").  we express these ideas together so consistently that at some point in the development of the language, it simply became easier to hold them as ideas of their own and make them into their own words.

when it comes to the contractions, we still have the same six pronouns, but for prepositions, we use their regular form and not the possessive form.  (regular pronouns: i, you, he, she, we, they) remember, they're already whole words inside their respective contractions, so they don't change form.

i saved "its" and "it's" for last because people get stuck on it a lot.  all the other pronouns change between their regular and possessive forms ("i" becomes "my", "we" becomes "our"). "it" appears the same in both forms, and it follows both of the rules at the same time.  when expressing "it" as owning something or describing one of its qualities, no apostrophe ("Its full rotation takes 24 hours").  when you're naming what "it" is doing or what "it" is like, that's the preposition form, and it needs the apostrophe to click it together ("It's a blue planet").  it's hard to sort out sometimes because the noun "it" must necessarily apply to a literally infinite number of objects, so it basically has to follow all the rules simultaneously.  i got a whole lot of B's on perfectly good papers because i don't really care anymore when the apostrophe goes in this word either most of the time, tbh.

(scrolls back) holy crap.  so, i hope you enjoyed "english lessons you didn't ask for" with Auntie Zeropoint.  if i ever learn anything else, i'll let you know, i'm sure.

"freeze! or everyone will know what you had for lunch!"

great idea for awesome cop weapon:

soundguns.  the military has been screwing around for the last couple decades with sonic weapons, and really loud low-frequency sound directed straight at someone can make them dizzy to the point of throwing up.  if we could somehow develop a handheld version of this that works with any kind of predictability, i would be in favor of airlifting crates of them in all shapes, sizes, and colors directly through the roof of every cop-shop in the world.  if i ran the universe, police departments everywhere would be up to their asses in pukerays.

think about it; it's the best option for everyone's interests. first, i think there would be a lot fewer repeat offenders for nonviolents like property crimes and drug nonsense if getting caught and arrested also meant a round of involuntary public vomiting.  plus, if the cops just wanted to shoot people for nonsense like "failing to comply with police commands" (which is a "crime" they made up because they're tools, by the way - the police have no more "command authority" over you than i do), they could do that to their heart's content and in a way that i'll bet would be deeply satisfying to their inner bully.  i reckon making someone who pisses you off by not doing what you tell them to puke by remote control is the next best thing to putting their head down the toilet, and i'm okay with cops having nonlethals that still let them be the enormous, cheese-stank knobs we pay them to be.

because you know all the kind of people you wish you could be a jerk to because they've hurt someone or they're doing damage?  wouldn't it make you feel better knowing the cops could still be total dicks to them? who doesn't want to see some corrupt wall street banker who thought he'd just take all your money and shoot his way out of the country when the feds finally caught up with him getting handcuffed facedown in a pile of his own vomit on national television?

Twentyfirst Century Vanity : PHOTO

Twentyfirst Century Vanity

i created this image to make a statement on what constitutes social popularity on the internet.  thank you.