Category: Rants

I know that it's not very Progressive to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others, nor to believe that the socioeconomic equivalent of corporal punishment is the only way that the brainwashed white trash base of the Republican Party will ever learn. To do that would be mean. Instead I'll just say that I would love to see the looks on some of these rural Pennsylvanians' faces the first time they see opaque amber sludge in place of what should be tap water.

Shockingly, it turns out that fracking happens almost entirely in dirt poor rural areas – the same kind that have voted in droves for every crypto-fascist bag man, harebrained religious fanatic, and snake-eyed Job Creator that has crawled from the toxic sludge of the GOP in the past thirty years.

I'd like to see the looks on their faces as the reality sinks in that maybe – just maybe – all those people who promised to hand environmental regulatory power over to the energy industry if not eliminate it altogether didn't have the best interests of the Common Man at heart after all. Maybe the GOP and its media arm are not a grassroots populist movement organized to protect the little guy, that it is in fact an elaborate racket that exists solely to siphon wealth upward.

I'd like to tell them: At least you voted repeatedly to protect yourself from the non-existent threats to your guns. Maybe you can shoot the contaminants out of the water.

I'd like to tell them: Thank god there are no Homos around to contaminate the water, right? Just benzene and ethylene glycol.

I'd like to tell them: Thank god you vote for whoever waves around the Bible most enthusiastically. No doubt the hydrocarbons can be prayed out of the water.

I'd like to tell them: At least you can afford some nice medical care when this gives you cancer thanks to those lucrative jobs that the oil companies promised would flock to your decrepit community, even though most of them never materialized or were ephemeral.

Most of all, I'd like to congratulate them for being perceptive enough to recognize the real enemy all along: the government.
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The welfare state. Teen moms. Saddam Hussein. Common Core. Death panels. The UN. Sex education. Saul Alinsky. Water fluoridation. Literally anyone and anything other than that man behind the curtain, who probably doesn't even exist but if he did exist he's certainly harmless and if he's not harmless it's only because he's actively looking out for the interests of white trash everywhere.
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Sometimes you get what you vote for, and if you're willfully ignorant (and proud of it) what you think you voted for and what you end up getting are unlikely to have much in common. Congratulations, people who vote for the likes of Pat Toomey and Rick Santorum. I'm supposed to feel bad for you, but I'm not terribly moved to see you forced to live, literally, in a mess of your own making.

Across the pond, the Italian government is paying Lamborghini (a subsidiary of the German Volkswagen-Audi group) 100 million Euros (approx. $112,000,000) to hire 300 new workers to begin production of a monstrously ugly SUV called the Urus. As Lamborghini's products are sold exclusively to young people who have incredible amounts of money and absolutely no taste, I'm sure this thing that looks like a Decepticon and sounds like a bladder disorder will do fine at the $250,000+ they plan to charge for each one.

On the surface this looks like the classic example of European Socialism and in fact I have seen a few commentaries that describe it as such. Another European socialist nightmare state clinging to the failed theories of the past and effectively nationalizing a company that can't survive in the Free Market. In practice, though, this type of policy has far more in common with the "cutting edge" (try saying it, it sounds so ridiculous) of right wing economics today: take public money, slop it in a trough, and invite private enterprise to waddle up and eat their fill. Lamborghini, like the Volkswagen Group as a whole, makes shitloads of money. This isn't British Leyland in the mid-70s desperately asking the government for enough cash to keep them alive. It's a company playing jurisdictions against one another to loot the public coffers and get concessions far beyond any that common sense or economic wisdom would dictate. In this case, Lamborghini's threat to manufacture elsewhere in the EU – no doubt the low-wage countries of Eastern Europe in which Volkswagen is increasingly shifting its labor – was enough to get Italian politicians to abandon even the pretense of making rational decisions.

The government is giving the company $112 million (US) to hire 300 people for a production run of one vehicle. In the auto industry a typical production run (the lifespan of one model with only minor changes from year to year) is usually six years. If you do the math, that equates to $55,000 per job per year, or $330,000 per job over the six year period. That is considerably more than Lamborghini will pay them in salary and benefits. How can anyone making a rational case for this investment believe that employing 300 people for six years is really worth $112 million to the state? Obviously not, but apparently enough influence has been bought to make such a financial non-starter happen. The decision has nothing to do with making a rational case; Italy has moved beyond the torpor of 1970s socialism and embraced the glories of 21st Century crony capitalism.

We see a lot of this in Southern states in the US, where state legislatures slop out billions in tax breaks, infrastructure improvements, and outright cash giveaways to lure in factories that will employ at best one or two thousand people (many of whom will end up being temp hires at or near minimum wage). Like cutting taxes for the wealthy has nothing to do with a sincere belief that it will increase tax revenues – that is merely a rationale for public consumption and the edification of gullible rubes – the real purpose of giving away money in this fashion is simply to those well connected players in the private sector who, having paid the piper, fully expect to call the tune.

Socialism? No, this is where neoliberalism got us. A socialist government would drive a harder bargain before pissing away this much money. Giving it away on the flimsiest of pretenses is more indicative of the urge to serve Big Business than of the urge to control it.

I did my best to try to subject David Brooks' latest to a proper FJM Treatment, but I couldn't. I've done Brooks too many times (phrasing) and his column is too mean, condescending, and deceptive to be a source of any real humor.
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This kind of shit just isn't funny anymore. If you're interested you can read up on how every number he cites in his piece is either distorted or flat-out fabricated, but I just couldn't get past this paragraph. It killed all the funny. I don't like to be Brooks' favorite creature – the Very Serious Person – but I did a serious face and it ruined any attempt to make this enjoyable.

Despite all these efforts, there are too many young men leading lives like the one Gray led. He was apparently a kind-hearted, respectful, popular man, but he was not on the path to upward mobility. He won a settlement for lead paint poisoning.
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According to The Washington Post, his mother was a heroin addict who, in a deposition, said she couldn’t read. In one court filing, it was reported that Gray was four grade levels behind in reading. He was arrested more than a dozen times.

Here is where we introduce David Brooks to the novel idea that even people who are not on the path to upward mobility deserve to not be killed by the police.

Look, this is how poverty works. That's why anyone who knows their ass from the Grand Canyon calls it a "cycle." Freddie Gray, like 9 out of 10 males growing up in a shit neighborhood have, had a criminal record. Petty drug stuff for the most part, which is to be expected once young men realize that selling weed / making meth / etc is about 1000% more lucrative than any other financial opportunity available to them.

It's not, as an old white person like David Brooks might say, like Freddie Gray was slitting old ladies' throats in alleys for thrills. There is nothing to suggest that he was a Bad Person, just another person who had to raise himself predictably taking to a life in the gray market economy.

But here's the thing: none of that matters. Poverty – and say this part as Tim Curry's character in Clue talking about Communism – is just David Brooks' red herring. It doesn't matter if Freddie Gray was an altar boy who spent his spare time saving endangered owls or the second coming of the Boston Strangler. There is no excuse for him dying in police custody. Wonderful, rich, upwardly mobile people don't deserve that. Poor, evil people wallowing in the underclass don't deserve it either.

That's what someone like Brooks can't grasp, the idea that a person's social status and life experience should not dictate the kind of treatment afforded them by a system that is supposedly blind, impartial, and fair.

The first lecture I ever gave in a college classroom was about the Electoral College, and every time that topic comes up in various courses I feel a bit sentimental. If I may say so, I'm a pretty good repository of information about this arcane and ridiculous system. It's far more intricate than most people realize, although there is a very good reason most people don't realize it: none of the technicalities ever matter. In practice we go to bed on Election Night (or wake up the next morning) knowing the next president despite the fact that the actual Electors are unknown and the Electoral Votes won't be cast for more than a month.

Everything after Election Day happens behind the curtain.

There are a lot of strange things that could happen under the rules of the Electoral College; they could, but they never do. An Elector could go "faithless." A state legislature could change its rules for selecting Electors. A tycoon could, in my view, offer an Elector a billion dollar check to change his vote with no legal ramifications for either party (Electors are neither elected officials nor appointed civil servants). For all its what-ifs, however, in practice the process is as dull as dishwater. Candidates and state party organizations choose electors based on unquestioned loyalty to the party and demonstrated willingness to be a good soldier.

There is one big glaring loophole, though. A fatal design flaw. And for years I've resisted writing about it because I feel like if we say its name aloud it will make it more likely to happen.

But I'm sure that plenty of Republican strategists, lawyers, and conspiracy theorists have already thought of this in what could be either their finest or their darkest hour.

Here's a quick rundown on how the system unfolds. American voters don't vote for presidential candidates; they vote for a slate of Electors committed to support a candidate. A handful of states print the name of these Electors on the ballot but most do not. We vote on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November (don't ask). Immediately thereafter, each state submits a formal list to Congress of the Electors chosen – whichever set represents the candidate who won the state's popular vote. Five or six weeks later, on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December (really, don't ask) the Electors meet in their state capitol to cast their votes formally. These are recorded by the Archivist and reported to Congress. OK. All clear so far.

The final step occurs in the first week of January, when the new Congress is sworn in and opens its session. On its first day, Congress must certify the Electoral Votes submitted by the states. This, like most parts of the process, is a rubber stamp in the modern era. Any objections made to the Electoral Vote must be in writing and signed by one Senator and one Representative. This is where everything could go to shit. As long as the Republicans have a majority in both chambers, there's no real reason they couldn't just refuse to certify the Electoral Vote. If you think that's too far-fetched I'd suggest you have not been paying close enough attention. How would they justify it? Who knows what Bircher-derived nonsense they would concoct. Texans are currently convinced that the Army is about to come and take their guns; I'm not sure there's a practical limit to their ability to delude themselves when it is to their benefit.

Objections occur rarely and are dealt with quickly.
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In theory, though, there is no reason either of those statements must hold in the future. A valid (signed) objection results in an immediate suspension of Congress while each chamber convenes separately to resolve the objection. I can find no evidence – certainly none in the 12th Amendment, and none in subsequent acts of Congress – that this suspension could not continue indefinitely. There's no procedure, no contingency plan, for a deadlock that cannot be resolved. It is implied that the members of Congress will come to some sort of reasonable compromise quickly.

Yeah. They wouldn't even need to dig in their heels on all 50 states in a close election, just the one or two that put the Democratic candidate over the top. Close your eyes and tell me that you can't picture it happening; that you can't see Lindsey Graham gravely telling the cameras that California's votes must be rejected because the UN and FEMA and illegal immigrants and teen welfare moms and al Qaeda and whatever other nonsense they can dream up. And tell me that you can't see half of this country buying it hook, line, and sinker.

I am a person of no particular intellectual gifts; if I could figure this out then god knows the lawyers and Dark Artists of the Beltway can figure it out. The only thing stopping anyone from trying this is common sense, restraint, and shame. Take a look at today's Congressional Republicans and let me know how much of that you see. It may not happen soon but at some point, I can guarantee you that someone will try this. If I'm not here to say I told you so, this post will have to do it for me.

Everyone loves a good Take This Job and Shove It story, and the collective catharsis we feel when reading about a flight attendant getting fed up, activating the emergency slide, and walking away with both middle fingers skyward is palpable. That could be me someday, we think. Maybe one day I will have the balls…because god knows I feel like doing this approximately every third day.

It was not difficult to get my attention, in that spirit, with the story of one Irwin Horwitz. A professor at a branch campus of Texas A&M University in Galveston, Horwitz got so fed up with a spectacularly bad class that he sent them an email informing them that he is walking away and they are all receiving an F. To wit:

"Since teaching this course, I have caught and seen cheating, been told to 'chill out,' 'get out of my space,' 'go back and teach,' [been] called a 'fucking moron' to my face, [had] one student cheat by signing in for another, one student not showing up but claiming they did, listened to many hurtful and untrue rumors about myself and others, been caught between fights between students."

Horwitz said he would fail every single student. "None of you, in my opinion, given the behavior in this class, deserve to pass, or graduate to become an Aggie, as you do not in any way embody the honor that the university holds graduates should have within their personal character. It is thus for these reasons why I am officially walking away from this course. I am frankly and completely disgusted. You all lack the honor and maturity to live up to the standards that Texas A&M holds, and the competence and/or desire to do the quality work necessary to pass the course just on a grade level…I will no longer be teaching the course, and all are being awarded a failing grade."

This is the waking fantasy of every teacher or professor who has dealt with a miserable class, the educational equivalent of dumping a plate of food on an asshole diner and walking out of the restaurant straight to the nearest bar. Obviously the university administration will engineer some outcome other than automatic failing grades for the students enrolled in the course, and Horwitz is likely to be (and no doubt expects to be) disciplined. Even if tenured, non-performance is one of the few open-and-shut ways that a faculty member can be fired for cause. My guess is he will be punished short of that, if for no reason other than the administration's desperation to keep him from telling the world everything he knows about just how dog shit the university and its students are.

I'm sure there are some good students at the Texas A&M-Galvestons of the world, but when a university isn't even in the top 25 or 30 in the pecking order of public institutions in a state there is an outstanding chance that phrases like "feeder" and "open enrollment" and "of last resort" are applied and not without justification. This is to say that I have taught at three different four-year universities and I am extremely privileged to have taught at three universities much closer to the top of the pile than the bottom. It's not like I taught at Stanford or Oxford, but all have been good, selective (on paper) institutions that generally limited the pool of students to those who might reasonably be expected to succeed in college if they care to do so. I cannot imagine how challenging it must be to teach at a place like Dr. Horwitz teaches; I say that with both admiration and elitism. I am glad I don't teach at such a place, because it sounds horrible in every way that the job could be horrible. Yes, there are good students there. They are massively outnumbered.

Bearing in mind that I have taught exclusively at Good Schools, in some cases expensive and in all cases prestigious, it is shocking to many people to hear my tales of some of the students I have dealt with. I've had students with behavioral problems so severe that they could not live or function without assistance. I've had two students I know for a fact could not read, and several others that I've suspected. I've had students with scores like 15 on the ACT or the 25th percentile of the SAT, scores that suggest either that the exam taker filled out the answers at random or lacks the most fundamental high school level academic skills.

And here's the part of Horwitz's story that will get no attention but is truly beautiful: "The same day Horwitz sent a similar email to the senior administrators of the university telling them what he had done, and predicting (correctly) that students would protest and claim he was being unfair. The students are "your problem now," Horwitz wrote."

That is his point. This isn't about the students; it's about the administrators who decided that these were college students. On the (thankfully limited) instances that I have had to deal with students like those I described just above, my urge has not been in any way to punish the student. It has been to take the student gently by the hand, walk down to the Dean of Admissions or whichever apparatchik was responsible for admitting him, and announce, "You let him in here, you fucking deal with him." It is not about lashing out at students but about returning the problems dumped into our laps to the responsible party. Horwitz has effectively made his problem the administration's problem, and I understand that impulse completely. Because the administrative mindset is to take anyone who can pay the tuition or qualify for Federal loans/grants, even students that they know beyond any shadow of doubt cannot succeed in college. Once that financial transaction takes place, the admissions folks are happy and that millstone of a student now becomes the faculty's collective problem.

It is a very clear and persistent case of "Oh well, I won't have to deal with it!" and "You're someone else's problem now!" frosted with a nauseating layer of pap about how we're doing something noble because doesn't every student deserve a chance? Yes, educational opportunities should exist for everyone. But I am not a high school Special Education teacher. I am neither trained nor prepared to deal with students who literally cannot stop themselves from singing and throwing things throughout class. I am not prepared to teach a college course that both challenges the best students and accommodates those who can barely read. That is why universities are not one size fits all, why Harvard accepts people who have a fighting chance at succeeding at Harvard and rejects those who probably (although not definitely) do not. At a place like TAMU-Galveston, where the school by design and necessity accepts essentially anyone who submits an application, the task given to professors there is unrealistic and unethical at best, professionally negligent at worst.

So, congratulations to Dr. Horwitz. Not because this stunt will work or because he Showed Those Darn Kids. The dynamic in which clueless MBA types walled off from student contact and from reality make decisions without having to deal with the consequences needs to be dismantled. If the admissions process is going to involve no standards beyond the ability to pay, then the faculty (and the students who are actually hoping to learn something) should not bear the entire burden of dealing with what follows.

I've said plenty here over the years about online education, and plummeting enrollments at for-profit (and almost entirely online-based) universities suggest that the pool of potential student/customers is starting to see through the scam. Having an online Bachelor's degree is worse than having no college degree at all on the job market, with the added bonus of saddling you with a six-figure student loan debt for all of that non-education.

One of the largest players in the industry / racket, Corinthian Colleges, officially went belly-up on Sunday.
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This is not a surprise; the company has been staggering along as the Sick Man of online education for years as the investigations and financial issues mounted. Frankly it's a small miracle that they lasted as long as they did. The LA Times story on the closure notes that this strands CC's currently 78,000 students and potentially makes them eligible for Federal student loan forgiveness. And my strongest reaction to this story was the realization that, holy crap, this dying mess of an institution (in an industry in overall decline) with ten solid years of horrible publicity still has 78,000 students somehow.

Who in the hell are these people?

My guess is that any "real" students in that number are either people who need a degree to qualify for a higher salary level (as in civil service) and don't really care about quality, or people whose employer/etc pays for the courses and thus "Fuck it, it's free" is the dominant mindset.
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For the most part, though, as the California Attorney General stated:

The state’s lawsuit claims that Corinthian—which charges more than $40,000 for tuition and related fees—targets single parents who are close to the poverty level, a demographic that its internal documents describe as “composed of ‘isolated,’ ‘impatient,’ individuals with ‘low self-esteem,’ who have ‘few people in their lives who care about them’ and who are ‘stuck’ and ‘unable to see and plan well for future,’ through aggressive and persistent internet and telemarketing campaigns and through television ads on daytime shows like Jerry Springer and Maury Povich.’ ”

In other words, online degrees are marketed to the same segment of the population as payday loans and cash advances, with the most obvious difference being that a payday lender won't let you go $150,000 in the hole. Of course, the school (or "school") isn't the one fronting the cash, and that gets to the heart of what the entire business model of for-profit education is all about. It is nothing more than a conduit for shifting government money to a private business and risk and responsibility to private individuals.

That's why the admissions criteria are limited to an exclusive class of potential students consisting of anyone capable of qualifying for a Federal student loan or grant. It's not difficult to see that any individual who doesn't understand that a degree from "Everest University Online" is not worth the $40,000/year Corinthian charges is, in the immortal words of Nigel Tufnel, not exactly university material.

Most of these students would be better served at a community or technical college, institutions designed to offer cheap, flexibly scheduled classes to working adults and younger people for whom traditional 4-year colleges don't make sense. Online schools are simply parasites, attaching themselves to an industry and a population of students that don't need them. That the primary expense for these companies is advertising – University of Phoenix spent nearly three quarters of a billion dollars on advertising last year – underscores how much more similar to retail and service industry firms they are than to any educational institution.

This is the tip of an iceberg, a bubble poised to burst. We will be seeing more of this in the near future, not only among online schlock merchants but also among smaller brick-and-mortar colleges. With the skyrocketing cost of college tuition and the vast numbers of marginal students being enticed to sign contracts they don't fully understand, it would take a great deal of willful blindness to fail to see the similarities to the housing market of the last decade.

When you live in the Rust Belt, talk of Urban Renewal is never far away. With a few exceptions – Chicago, Pittsburgh, perhaps Indianapolis – the Third Wave of Capitalism has not been kind to this area. Pick any of the minor cities of Pennsylvania, Ohio, upstate New York, downstate Illinois, or Michigan and the story is largely the same: all the manufacturing jobs are gone, nothing has replaced them, and everyone who isn't too old or poor to leave has done so.

It's not like we're not aware of the problem. Every city has some sort of pie-in-sky plan about how they plan to attract, you know, all of the Buzzword Jobs. Hi-tech. Information. Knowledge. STEM. Etc etc. The problem is twofold: there are dozens and dozens of cities trying to do the exact same thing simultaneously, and all of them have the same strategy.
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They throw free tax dollars at private industry and hope that it won't notice that none of the attractive things a business would want are available. The workforce is poor and poorly skilled, the quality of life for transplants would be lousy, and the location has little logistical appeal.

I mean, what the hell do the Saginaw, Michigans of the world really have to offer? There's a reason these places are sinking ships.

And the sad thing is, they still have it better than the Dakotas.

Unless you are interested in temporary work in the shale oil industry in North Dakota / Montana, what in the name of god would draw anyone to those places? Don't worry, they can't figure it out either. That is a very interesting link, a story of governments trying to figure out how to sell their states and cities when they have very little to offer that would be of interest to anyone under 60. Wide open spaces? Low cost of living? OK great, lots of places in the US can offer that. And most of them don't have Hoth-like winters that make residents regret being born.

And they're not eight hour drives from a major airport.

I like to think of myself as a person who can come up with a few half-decent solutions to problems when I encounter them. And I can honestly say that I have no earthly idea what South Dakota could offer major industries or young, economically successful people to move there. Sometimes a place is perceived as a barren wasteland because it is a barren wasteland.
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The range of things it can do to attract residents is quite limited, and the range of things that will work is even narrower.

Your older white male coworker Steve comes running into the office, clearly agitated. He reports breathlessly, "There's a bunch of dudes with katanas fighting in the parking lot!

" This, you think, is a thing worth seeing in addition to being cause for some alarm.
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You rush over to the window and discover that the parking lot is empty.
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"Steve," you say, "where did they go?"

"What do you mean, where did they go? They're right there! Look at them!"

To reassure yourself (and hopefully Steve) that you have not somehow overlooked this scene which on its face seems unlikely to be overlooked, you check the parking lot one last time. Cars, yes. Another coworker strolling into the building, yes. The parking attendant, yes. Two pigeons, yes. But no men fighting with katanas. In fact, neither men nor katanas are anywhere to be found. "Do you mean to tell me that you can't see that there is no one in that parking lot, Steve?"

He grows angry. "THEY'RE OUT THERE, I'M TELLING YOU."

How concerned would you be about Steve's mental state at this point? You might think he's in the midst of a cardiovascular event that is limiting the flow of oxygen to his brain. You might wonder if he is drunk or high on drugs. Or you might think, and not entirely without justification, that he is having some kind of psychotic break. And if you told your boss and other coworkers what happened, they would agree with you without hesitation that he is acting nuts and you are right to be concerned. Collectively, you would probably call the hospital or his doctor, or at least have someone drive him home. I mean, you wouldn't let someone drive a car after witnessing that kind of inability to integrate the world around him into his thinking. You certainly wouldn't just ignore all of this and let everyone go about their day.

So when an older white male tells a room full of other older white males in a nationally broadcast forum that Muslims have taken over a number of cities including Dearborn, MI and established "no go zones" wherein Sharia law is practiced, why does nobody check if perhaps his collar is a bit too tight? Why doesn't anyone sit him down and offer him a nice cold glass of water while someone else calls for medical help? Insisting on the existence of something that demonstrably does not exist – and remember, this is hardly the kind of thing that could be hidden from view as most conspiracy theories can conveniently claim – is neither a fact, nor a belief, nor an opinion. It is a delusion, defined as "an erroneous belief held despite strong, indisputable evidence to the contrary.

" Delusions are a sign of, at best, mental fatigue or confusion. In most cases they are an indicator of something much more serious.

It is only because so many people in this country believe things that are demonstrably, incontrovertibly wrong that we do not find this more alarming.

We've simply become used to it and we hardly flinch when we see True Believers, with the fires of sincerity burning in their eyes, insisting that whatever fantasy occupies the far right at the moment is true. It is odd that labeling these delusions as part of our political or religious beliefs inoculates them from the kind of reaction they would get if "Muslims" was replaced with "unicorns."

One of John Mulaney's best bits is about the New York Post, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of American journalism. In it he describes the paper's unique argot, with references to "tots" and "pervs" and "bozos" and other terminology befitting a low-brow rag best suited to lining cat litter boxes. He parodies their usage of "hero" to describe "any man who does his job."

It was hard not to think immediately of this description when I saw this video of a police officer (via body camera, by the way) with his gun drawn engaging a murder suspect dispatchers described as armed without resorting to deadly force. Google this incident and you'll find thousands of hits describing the video as "heroic" or even "inspirational", setting a "great example" of how encounters between police and suspects can end without one of the parties involved dying. Yes Virginia, there IS a Santa Claus. Even very liberal sites have covered the story using language like, "officer demonstrates how to avoid using deadly force" as though that is the natural and expected outcome, a force beyond his control against which he must do battle.

How bad have things gotten with law enforcement in this country? Bad enough that we're applauding a police officer for not killing a suspect. He saved this suspect's life! By not shooting him when the latter appeared dangerous. This is now a thing that stands out and needs to be praised so that others might follow this example. The shoot-first culture is now so thoroughly entrenched that nobody seems to remember that what you see in this video is, in the most literal sense, exactly what the police are paid to do. In most departments one might imagine that officers who aren't strictly limited to desk work end up feeling threatened or feeling like they are in danger somewhere between occasionally and constantly. The idea that "feeling threatened" is a carte blanche justification for using lethal force has become so popular that we hardly notice the body count it is racking up. It has become a classic Can vs. Should problem, the logical fallacy that the conceptual right to use lethal force somehow implies that it should or even must be used. Whenever the amateur Cop Apologists note that being a cop is a dangerous job – which it is, although nowhere near the most dangerous – I have to explain to another adult human being that part of what the police are paid to do is not take the bait from every person they encounter who acts suspiciously or aggressively toward them.

Paradoxically, the reaction to a situation that had (in the larger sense) a "happy" ending is more disturbing than watching people react to the now familiar "Cop guns down suspect" story. Cops killing people, and the social and legal framework in place to protect them when they do so, not only fails to surprise us anymore but is now the expected outcome. And we are just scratching the surface of the consequences of that change.