Holy Yodel

I am reminded daily of how much humans resemble the “animals” that we so convienently ignore. Besides the news I got that some people are born with tails, and that we all have one in some form or another, I realized that we still use a clock to keep time. Even “wild savages” can keep time in their minds, and use the sky for reference. I had just grown so used to looking at a clock that it became second nature. I was playing music and keeping time in my head, four beats per second, when it dawned on me like a melting evening sunset from the beaches of Earth. Time is relative.

Hansel and Gretel 2068

Burning into the blue sky
High above the troubles
But deep below the waters
The winds carry our thoughts like invisible
Dots plotted as pixels
Full agency
Full of energy
The plea of an angry sea
Transfixed by gravity
Leaving speedily out the door
And down the path across the grass
As the sounds pass over Hansel’s head and settle around him
And the leaves turn brown very slowly
Knowingly the trees shiver and sip
Quickly and frequently as the bullfrog skips over the pond
And near the log, as Gretel leaves her house too
After gluing a poster of U2 on her bedroom wall, she assumes it will just
Be another dusty day, but it all depends on where she fits into the plan
Of that man who remains master of all he surveys, he found it and declared
All that is rare to his fair and square, all the while baring primitive canines at
The fine citizens of Hellville. The year, 2068, one hundred years after the revolutionary 1960’s, a much calmer, slightly warmer, most insidious society goes and comes while humming and remarking to each other “bah humbug”, the Hellions sweep it all under the rugs, never mind the heaps of bugs, so Hansel had to walk far far away to find a gentle place to play and Gretel needed a friend and prayed for Hansel to be sent her way, when he was she loved the universe much more on that day and didn’t even ask for more, now the two are traveling through alternate realities, using digital marijuana to visit Wicked WildWoods, the furthest reaches of FourthDementality, which appeared to be the only Perspective available, whence and whereupon the Witches and the Skinwalkers all associated with home, om was the sound of all while four was the number of time, Five was forbidden as was all of the above numbers so Hansel and Gretel just dropped digital bread crumbs two by two and soon reached a dazzling spectacle, shimmering turquoise lollipops plastered to candy cane logs, an entire structure crafted without wood or plastic and the only thing elastic that seemed to be used was some brass colored taffy tied to the chassis, a pretty woman with long dark grey hair stared out of the frame of the window, her vision didn’t seem to be impaired which was rare in Hellville, and usually meant that Magick was involved, but Hansel and Gretel couldn’t see far enough to see her face, that mad smile that dripped off of her face as soon as she began to taste the air and compare it to that within her lair, and she hoped the stench of human skin wouldn’t give the kids a scare.

1+3=4+0

"All the worlds' a stage"
-Shakespeare

"Everyone you know are the actors"
-Modest Mouse

"It ain't no fun if the homies can't have some"
-The 213 crew

Sneakonomics

Books for classes in College: 5+billion dollars every year....my books cost more than my classes!

"Class Action" The NewYorker: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/11/07/051107ta_talk_surowiecki

Porn: 10+ billion$ per YEAR
Marijuana: 30+ billion$ per Year
Cocaine: Who knows, isn’t it obvious that the DEA is making mad money off of this stuff, and covering it up by taking down their competitors?
Tourism: A TriLLion dollars per year
Video games: 10+ billion$
Alcohol: 18+ billion last year
Music: I don’t know, but it costs 60$ to go to see Fat Joe….so business must be ok.
Everything else is in the dumps!
I’m attracted to all of these things, they pull at the basic strings of desire that exist deep within all of us. And there’s a reason for that. The top businessmen know me better than I do. They know us all better than we know ourselves, we are the proverbial mouse in the maze, and the scientists are using the right combination or fear and pleasure to keep us from knowing our full potential. BlackWater, Black Market, Black-op’s, BlackBook, whatever.
The worst part is that they use this money to buy other things in bulk(oil, clothes, food) and distribute them to the people of the country for a high price as well.
Now watch closely as the news attempts to justify all of this.
Meanwhile, I’m going to kick up my 100 dollar Nike’s onto the ottoman provided to me in my 300 dollar Hilton hotel room listening to my 300 dollar IPod while I play a 60 dollar game on my 600 dollar PS3 and sip on a 50 dollar pint of cognac, with 200 dollars worth of Marijuana and Cocaine laying on the stack of 10 dollar playboys and my 100 dollar textbooks on the night stand. Just kidding.

So what are the alternatives to being a walking sponge and paying for it?

Here's a few suggestions:

Instead of watching porn, go enjoy your wife or your girlfriend, or clean yourself up and have a REAL sexual encounter, it's much more satisfying.

Don't use alcohol or Marijuana, albeit sparingly, until you can provide it yourself. (it's all made from plants, which are free)

I think video games are a waste of time, unless you're getting paid for it.

It takes many many acres of precious rainforest to make one skinny little line of cocaine(and a whole lot of chemicals), so there's no reason to indulge here.

Convince women that they are beautiful, and that they, like men, can do anything they set their mind to. Stripping shouldn't be the only opportunity to make money for school.

You can usually check out textbooks from the library for two hours at a time, but this system should be improved, so that we have the OPTION of renting books to study.

My IPod broke, and they wouldn't give me a new one unless I paid them 135.00 to replace it. I promply gave Apple the finger. I can burn a cd for a dime.

Dots

The politicians sell their bullshit to the consumers.
The news sells those politicians to the consumers.
New companies invent things to sell to consumers.
Stock brokers sell these new companies to consumers on the news channels.
As long as the consumer is receiving, he/she is very happy. Make ten bucks and spend it quick because liquid cash is oh so elusive. When he/she gives, he/she wants to receive something valuable at the same time. When the consumer starts receiving less than he/she gives, then he/she stops being happy. When one side of the relationship starts recieving less then it's giving, then it stops being happy. But, happiness is in the eye of the beholder.

When a rich man gives, he gives to himself. In a complex roundabout way, his money eventually comes back to him. Rockefeller's Universities pay for his factories, so in a way every student is paying him to build a factory, although indirectly. If Bill Gates gives out a million dollars, he's expecting to earn that back by selling the same person a million dollars worth of new computers.

Whoopdi doo.

"I don't even know what my limit is"

The entire cartoon takes place in one very remote corner of the Space-Mirror of the Amazon, cleverly hidden from the darting eyes and gasping breath of the modern human. The entire cartoon also features a plant. This particular plant was teleported by a stork to its birthplace when it was just a runt seed from a very potent form of marijuana, one of the most highly evolved strains known to Deep Science-the Worlds cutting-edge innovation juggernaut. “Silence is God” was their motto, but only the most influential players knew that. The masses competed for their every invention, no matter how simple, as soon as it was released. Once a Deep Scientist patented a robotic ass wiper, claiming that he “never wipes his own ass”, and had this remark for the masses, a quip to accompany them on the radio and in the aisles as they purchased his things, “Who still wipes their ass?”
The ‘host’ body was an average houseplant, one you might purchase for a dollar plus tax at the dollar store. We’ll call Magic a Heir being, ‘Magic’ being the plant-hybrid’s lab name, and Heir being in between him and her. Heir was injected with the genes(hyperconic transfusion blood) of a rock star, namely Jimi Hendrix.
Magic was also injected with the genes of a Sirius prisoner and a mayan shaman.
Magic’s mind has been shifted so that he’s considerably more evolved than the plants and animals around him, thinking, therefore repeating, which may either help or hurt Heir. Heir can be thought of as Magic’s soul, a creature desperately fulfilling its desire. Heir is Magic, and yet is not Magic. Heir now lives simultaeniously with Magic, and so we will refer to them by both references throughout the book, as they describe different labels of the same identity.
Identical but individual.
Heir’s soul double is a Giant squid, who is currently drifting off into the dark abyss. We’ll meet Yawn later on. This particular corner of the Amazon where Magic called home, (Heir actually called it Yo, but let’s not concern ourselves with the linguistic anthropology here), was beautiful. In fact, the structure of the spectrum of dazzling reflected lights so resembled a ruby that it softly plucked at the observers nerves. Every moment was new. In the jungle every moment is always new, but to those who oppose themselves the value of the moment is ignored. Magic was not born in ignorance however; and in fact, considering the amount of knowledge that Heir had soaked up throughout the past courtesy of well trained ears, it was surprising that Magic had not yet figured out how to walk. Every night Magic dreams and dreamt of something exotic, and every morning Heir forgets what it was. All Magic knows is that this feeling must be experienced. Let us experience, ‘The Return of Magic.’

The speed of light, the speed of thought, and the speed of a liars’ shifty eyes are all extremely close in the race for the fastest event in the known universe.

Real Still

To a tree I am invisible,
Yet I still exist
A very real threat, its only foe
Except for the lightning although being
Quite sporadic, sailing towards veda on a
Most hospitable planet
To a tree I make no sounds,
Yet I still exist
Radiating pressure
Stressful to be around I’m sure
My vibrations are so heavy, so high in amplitude
A homie who slows it down from too fast to zero and is
A hometown hero because of
Superior dinero attempting to be as
Still as a mountain lake
Hidden desperately within a great forest grossly
Inhabited with grape colored apes and
To a tree I am delicious, they love to breathe in
My carbon waste which I spew without remorse of course
To a tree I can be nutritious, if I bring my vibration to a
Standstill and give it the love I feel. And if I bring water to the feeding grounds below
It, or trim a nasty enemy keeping friends in the dark.
I smell, in the mind of a plant, very much like a human.
To a tree, I am very real.
But what do I look like, in the tree’s mind?
Or, for that matter, in the eyes of the blind?
Those who have never seen themselves or I
Glistening back at them from the depths of the ponds reflection oh they
Must live in peace and harmony,
Knowing that all can be rearranged
Lego building blocks, clear as the Colorado mountain
Air,
Every geometric shape and size
Even those not envisioned nor had
Appeared in front of my two eyes
And behind what lies
Is truly one two and three
The backwards pointing pyramid of Focal points
Or more precisely and proudly presenting
The brains laser light show to you ladies and gentlemen
Light is laser, laser is light
Right is left, left is right
For most who live and die
Focus stops where the microscope starts, back to the Screen then back to the dark where their Focus stops and the telescope starts.
And yet still I exist
Attempting to be in absolute stillness.

Generally Speaking

Don’t assume
If you try not to
Then I will too
Don’t assume that’s all
I ask as I
bask in my sunlight
Don’t worry yourself with me
I’ve got nothing to say to you now
But that doesn’t make me shy
In my eyes you don’t realize
The reasons I get high
Silently laughing my ass off
As you worry yourself with me
If I was in a tree I’d fall out sheepishly
Grinning
Sinning, is that what you call
Experimenting?
Then lock up the scientists who brought you jell-o
And curse the shamans who just want to say hello

It's all Relative

Here I stand
Implanted into the system
From whence I come
Is no mystery
Space is my history
Heavy matters of life and death
Appear out of nowhere
Disappearing into thick air
Never to be seen again
Not unlike the Bird of Paradise
Who experiences only that which appears in her
Frame of existence
People come, people go as
Pests come and pests go
But I stay rooted
In perception
Never moving always experiencing
Only that which appears in my
Picture frame of existence

InFinite Space for creation and Expansion

The earth is spinning around at approx. 1,000 mph.

The earth is moving around the sun at a speed of 66,000 mph.

The sun is moving around the center of the galaxy at a speed of 483,000 mph.

Our galaxy is moving through the universe at a speed of 1,300,000 mph.

Light is moving at a speed of 670,000,000 mph.

Nuff said.

2+2=2+2

You say a free Iraq could thrive? Put THEIR money where your mouth is.

Astounding currency devaluation.

After years of trade sanctions, and rampant counterfeiting, the Iraqi Dinar has plummeted from its pre-Gulf War value of over USD$3, to mere fractions of one US cent. What was once the equivalent of more than $82,500, can now be purchased for less than $50. Can Iraq's economy achieve, in a free market, what it once achieved under a brutal dictatorship? We don't know yet. But we know she is not alone in her effort to do so.
Might a free Iraq thrive?Above and beyond the vast oil reserve, agriculture, and highly educated population, there is now liberty in Iraq. We believe that where liberty is sown, prosperity blooms. We understand that liberty is always challenged. It's challenged regularly in our own country. Why should a fledgling democracy, on the heels of a 30 year dictatorial rule, be immune?
We simply trust that the seed of freedom, implanted back in 2003 with the fall of Saddam's regime, has germinated in the hearts of the majority of the Iraqi people. We see this as a wondrous thing, with tremendous possibilities.
The free world is behind Iraq.Thirty-eight nations have reduced the debts owed to them in an effort to bolster Iraq's economy. Billions of dollars are being invested by international firms to create Iraqi markets. 18 billion dollars has been given to Iraq by the US State Department to rebuild the nation's infrastructure. They are receiving aid monetarily, militarily or both, from most of the countries in the free world.
What if?Let's say you decide to err on the side of Iraqi prosperity. You take advantage of the 100 year low value and buy 2 million Iraqi dinars. You look them over, admire them, and show them to some friends as a curiosity. The security features alone will have them enthralled. Then you stick them in a closet and go about your life. A few years from now, you see a program on A&E portraying the lives of average Iraqis. You see people drinking locally bottled, genuine Pepsi Cola; not the ersatz they'd been consuming for years. They are buying their cars from Baghdad Mitsubishi. Their highly educated engineers, no longer waiting tables or driving cabs, are engineering. The world's 2nd largest oil reserve is producing more efficiently. Higher quality crops are being harvested, in larger numbers. You discover that things are going well enough in Iraq to have raised the value of the the dinar to one US cent. Your $2100 purchase would now be valued at $20,000.
This is no pipe dream.This is a genuine possibility, with remarkable ramifications. Organizations like Operation Iraqi Children working with the US military, are helping to shape a new generation of freedom loving Iraqis. It won't be long before these kids take their place in society. They will recall their childhood as a time when powerful Americans released them from the grip of a bloodthirsty madman, and gave them the tools and support to build a peaceful, prosperous society to call their own. The incredible successes of the last two Iraqi elections seem to clearly suggest that they want it, and will run with it. Furthermore, the two pre-eminent causes of the collapse of the Saddam dinar have been removed from the equation. Trade sanctions have been lifted, and the currency's high tech security features have been thwarting counterfeiters.
So, who are we?We are freedom loving Americans that believe a liberated, resource rich Iraq can become a force in the world economy. We believe the efforts of the coalition are noble, and will be effective. We are not professional financial consultants or Wall Street gurus. We can't predict the future or offer any investment advice. But we will bet on Iraq.

So if you'd like to capitalize on the fact that our country is the epitomy of male dominance and trickery, visit http://betoniraq.com/.

Just don't expect to be my friend.

blues

"Its a low five"

"the favin tha fo

in and AROUND"

AROUND ya go"

Fo sho.

Be all that you can Be.

So this annoying banner kept shouting in my face, from my computer screen. It’s our Navy, telling me to “accelerate my life.” Now, as I approach this suggestion in a RAW(Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising) kinda way, it starts to make sense in a crappy, your-leaders-don’t-give-a-shit-about-you-or-your parents kinda way. In other words:

“You can go from being 1st circuit and 2nd circuit(basic instincts, survival, etc) dominated to being a RATIONAL(the acceleration stage, Freud on steroids) human being!” Drill seargents and every officer higher than this new RATIONAL(3rd circuit) human being all the way up to the president(commander in chief), represent the 4th circuit brake on the new rational self you’ve been transformed into, they are the moral-socio-sexual order makers(sit down, stand up, no fun, etc). But even they are dominated by members of the 5th circuit, beings of supreme intelligence, possibly human. This pyramid continues upwards, while those protected and shepherded by newly 3rd circuit utilizing policeman and soldiers are still running circles on the first two circuits, worrying about whether or not they fit into the “tribe”, and assuming the roles of those controlling them.
The ideals of the 4th circuit masters are relayed to the masses by way of mass media(dabbling into the 5th circuit), who puts the spin on what’s happening based on the psychology of YOU. This constitutes the average American’s life, excluding people who think for themselves, musicians, artists, poets, gangsters, and “crazy” people.

More than one-third of the guys in my high school graduating class joined some branch of the armed forces, many more joined later I’m sure, and many were influenced by the insidious recruiters that came to campus and commended us on our ability to do pull-ups and push-ups. I couldn’t do more than three pull-ups at the time, so I wasn’t really a hot commodity, but the football players were. My best friend from eighth grade, Gabriel, is the most honest and sincerely kind person that you will ever meet in your life. We used to play Grand Theft Auto and other games where you shoot characters on the screen. Gabriel is now a sniper in the Marine Corps. I support my friends 100%, and I commend their bravery with all my heart, but I do not support the men in charge of sending them to Iraq. This puts me in an extremely uncomfortable situation.
Let us not be Anti-Bush, or Proud To Be A Conscientious Objector, or whatever it is people like to stick on the bumpers of their Volvo's, however;

Let us realize that the leaders of this country are using our friends and family to fight their wars, instead of letting us have them back so that we can fight ours.

Yes, the world is an unstable place, and yes, WE DO need to fight our own battles.
Yes, there is war and fighting and poverty and death and sickness in many parts of the world, including our own country. If you don’t believe me than get off the couch and walk around your local city for a day.

Let us transcend our current mentality, this self reflecting coffin of anger and bewilderment, by discovering ourselves, and begin the work that humankind began long ago.

Let us create Heaven out of Earth.

Korzybski- Part DOS

The expression "circularity of human knowledge," was used here in its logical sense, which is misleading if taken literally. We must start somewhere, somehow, anywhere, anyhow, with a set of undefined terms, then go ahead, come back, revise our base (a) for (b), go ahead again, revise our base (b) for (c), go ahead again, and so on endlessly. Human knowledge is inexhaustible. No set is undefined absolutely, but only relatively so.

In practice, things are much more complicated because we seldom, if ever, have one vocabulary.

But we must untangle first the simplest theoretical issue. The vocabularies (silent postulates) imply the theorems, the theorems imply the postulates. He who accepts uncritically the vocabulary made by X, accepts unwillingly and unbeknowingly X's metaphysics.
This fact is of very great importance. If we accept the vocabulary made by X and the metaphysics made by Y, we are lost in inconsistency, the world is an ugly mess, unknown and unknowable. This mess, which is nearly always followed up by rampant pessimism, is the necessary consequence of the misunderstanding of what is here explained. With understanding, our troubles vanish, the world remains unknown (because the Fidos have so long persecuted science) but it becomes knowable.
With all of this permanently in mind, it is easy to understand anybody else, just as a mathematician when he hears a theorem, he knows usually from which geometry it is taken.
If we do not understand the above, we are slaves; if we know it, we are free, because we can select our master (Keyser, Poincaré).

This should be explained in our damn Skools! If you “FAIL” then you OBVIOUSLY didn’t understand the basics or "Base" as Korzybski calls it, and the kids who “PASSED” probably cheated or didn’t really "get" it (myself in high skool) or just had a better understanding of the basics. A student is only as knowledgable as his foundation for learning allows him to be. Many “magnet" Skools and high-priced colleges know this, you’ve just got to pay a shitload of cash to get in. ANYBODY can be anything if taught properly.

Know your spit Before you hock a loogie.

Alfred Korzybski (Time-Binding)
A word is a symbol.
Before a sign may become a symbol something must exist for this sign to symbolize, else the sign has no meaning; it is not a symbol, not a word, but a noise. For our purpose we may speak, in the rough, of two kinds of existence, namely, the physical existence, somehow connected with persistence, and logical existence. By logical existence we mean in this case a thinkable thought, otherwise free from self-contradiction (Poincaré). A "word" which labels a self-contradictory "idea" is not a word, not a symbol, because it symbolizes nothing; if spoken, it is a noise, or if written, a blot of black on white; it is meaningless, no matter how many thousands of volumes have been written about it.
If we use such noises as significant words, it is a fraud played on the other fellow. Such acts should and will be some day, listed in the criminal codes of civilized countries as among the most harmful crimes against civilization.

Read the rest here:
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/korzybski_timebind01.htm

An Excerpt from Robert Anton Wilson's brilliant novel "Prometheus Rising"

A neurotic young man once went to a Zen Master and asked how he could find peace of mind.

“How can you lack anything,” The Roshi asked “when you own the greatest treasure in the universe?”

“How do I own the greatest treasure in the universe?” Asked the young man, baffled.

The place that question comes from is the greatest treasure in the universe,” said the Master, being more explicit than is common for a Zen teacher.

Ripe

A dark rain descends onto a desolate block in post-2008 Los Angeles, California.

Enter the Reporter

Reporter: So, in one word can you relate your reaction to the Evil you encountered here today?

Me:
Astonished.
I thought They
Were all abolished
You know, polished
Silver pass to the right
Don’t be afraid
Slice it up nice
Never quit the fight
Admonished, staring in delight
Be the beat,
Feel the heart of
the soul of time
pounding at your door
pour your attention into
the mold of insanity
just for a moment
while I disperse allure
marching mouth parched
hot prickles run up
my sleeve painfully
burning my desire fire
flavored nothing less than
nudity straight flesh wave
stepping out plato’s cave
bump n grind like a house-rave
smooth as a fresh paving
craving a god to be
braiding my thoughts
emotions and secret potions
for me and for me
and for you and for me.

Reporter: And there you have it, goodnight.

Quote of the Friday

"Betcha can't explain time and gravity to an infant."

You've got to go. Randy's Donuts are the best in the world.

Located on the corner of La Cienaga and Manchester Blvd.

Under Oaf's

How much is your life worth?





$300,000.00?





After I was brutally beaten on by Portland's finest and thrown into one of their many cells, I realized something about the honorable police force that I had been taught to respect growing up.

Some cops actually are pigs who just can't resist donuts(especially Randy's).




And some cops are very respectable humanitarians.




After Don King's trial and the ensuing riots that followed, a few bad officers trickled up north to Portland, Oregon. Former Chief of Police Mayor Tom Potter is a brainwashed asshole as far as I know. Maybe I'll get the chance to ask him why someday.

Some of those cops are the superstars in an extremely unnerving category:

(courtesy of the Portland Tribune)

When Cops use Force
BACK STORY: Tribune's analysis of Portland police records show cops use force an average of every 2.2 hours
By Jacob Quinn Sanders
The Portland Tribune, Oct 31, 2006, Updated Oct 31, 2006

TIM JEWETT / PORTLAND TRIBUNE
In the wake of James Jahar Perez’s fatal shooting by police officers after a traffic stop, hundreds of protesters gather in April 2004 to rally downtown. A few months later a new rule went into effect requiring officers to file a report every time they used force. Now the pressure’s on to look at the data.

Whether a punch, a shock from a Taser, a gun drawn and pointed at a suspect or pressing on the body’s pressure points, a Portland police officer uses force every 2.2 hours on average, according to a Portland Tribune analysis of two years of Portland Police Bureau records.
Following the incident last month in which James Chasse Jr. was crushed to death during an encounter with police in the Pearl District, the issue of how Portland police use force has come to the fore of public awareness.
Mayor Tom Potter announced two weeks ago that city Auditor Gary Blackmer had requested all of the police bureau’s use-of-force records, which have been collected since July 2004, after community representatives and experts recommended it in the aftermath of a controversial 2003 police shooting.
Potter said Blackmer would hire an independent analyst to study the data and report back.
“This is the kind of data all of Portland has been waiting for,” said Alejandro Queral, director of the nonprofit Northwest Constitutional Rights Center. “They do background checks on you if you want to be part of the police force, so we should be able as a community to go into those files and do our own background checks on officers and on the bureau as a whole.”
The Portland Tribune requested the data more than two months ago under Oregon public-records law. The police bureau provided it last week – 8,571 reports that cover roughly 27 months through Oct. 4.
The data show that a small percentage of Portland’s 1,000 officers are most often responsible for filing the reports, with 5 percent of cops accounting for 34 percent of the total uses of force.
Expand the number to the top 10 percent of officers who used force, and they represent 47.8 percent of the total uses of force.
Officers who most frequently pull out their guns are least likely to fire them, the data show.
At least 47 people had the same officer use force against them on two different dates, according to the Tribune’s analysis, and 13.7 percent of suspects in the reports had force used against them on multiple occasions, the most being 13 different times.
Suspects who had force used on them also were 10 times more likely to have to be taken to the hospital following one of these encounters than were cops, the data show.
And only one officer, Peter Taylor, assigned to East Precinct’s afternoon shift, has the distinction of appearing near the top in four categories. He is in the top 10 for overall uses of force, for sending suspects to the hospital, for deploying his Taser – he has used a Taser 10 times – and also for pointing a gun at someone more than 20 times in the past two years.
“I don’t think any of these numbers mean anything,” Portland Police Association President Robert King said. “Even gathering the data in the first place was a mistake because this is just going to be used as a tool to criticize us, and it’s criticism that we don’t need and don’t deserve.”
The Tribune tried reaching officers who appear prominently in the data, sending e-mails to the officers and making interview requests through the bureu’s public-information officer. None could be reached for comment before press time.
Police bureau officials urge people who see the data to consider the assignments of the cops involved in the incidents and the likelihood that the great majority of uses of force are justified and minor.
“It’s also really important, I think, to see whether the reports are generated out of self-initiated work as opposed to calls for service,” Police Chief Rosie Sizer said. “A lot of our people who are near the top of some of these lists are involved in high-risk and very choreographed work. I really hope that people remember and realize that in most cases uses of force are within our policy and consistent with our training.”

Blanks don’t help
Some data are poorly kept or incomplete, making analysis more difficult. For example, former Central Precinct Sgt. David Hendrie, recently assigned to the Detective Division, supervised cops involved in 165 use-of-force reports – the highest number among Portland Police Bureau supervisors named in the data.
For much of the past year, he managed cops assigned to downtown livability issues in the small Street Crime Unit that was designed to have many contacts with people Potter deemed unsavory and pledged publicly to remove.
At Central, Hendrie for a while had a handwritten note taped next to his computer that jokingly referring to his unit as the Police Officer Tactical Transient Eradication Responders, or POTTER.
Yet at the same time, it is impossible to know if Hendrie, in fact, was the top supervisor in that category, because officers filing use-of-force reports neglected to identify a supervisor more than half the time, leaving the field blank in their reports 4,508 times.
Still, by the available data, Central Precinct – which covers 30.8 square miles west of the Willamette River – is overrepresented in the top users of force. Four of the top 12 officers for filing such reports work at Central – including No. 1, officer Brian Hubbard, with 117.
Five of the top 11 supervisors also work at Central, including Sgt. Kyle Nice, who was involved in the incident that caused Chasse’s death, and who is ranked eighth in that incomplete set of data, with 85 reports filed by subordinates.
Also, of the 14 officers who sent the most suspects to the hospital, half work at Central. Among them is the officer who occupies the top spot in the category – Darrell Shaw – who has filed reports showing he was responsible for sending eight people off in ambulances since fall 2004.
The data also are not grouped by precinct or unit and are only roughly searchable by geography. The data were compiled and released by the police bureau, making independent verification difficult.
In addition, the police bureau does not track the outcome of criminal charges filed against the suspect.

“If they did, they might feel more pressure to win all those cases,” said Craig Colby, a Portland lawyer who has been critical of the official version of a January incident in which a Portland police lieutenant shot and killed a suspect in a stolen car. “I hate to give them an incentive to manufacture evidence, but that’s something somebody should look at so the public can know.”
Stats stayed in the crates
The police bureau began collecting use-of-force data in 2004, following community and expert recommendations that it do so in the aftermath of the police shooting of Kendra James, an unarmed motorist, in Northeast Portland the year before. The data has only begun to be analyzed by the police bureau.
The forms cops fill out define more than a dozen different types of force, ranging from handcuffing to physical takedowns to the use of batons, Tasers and firearms.
Until May, none of the reports had been entered into computers but sat in plastic crates in the police bureau’s Records Division on the 11th floor of the Justice Center downtown.
“To me, the fact that they have this information and are not analyzing or using the data at all creates situations where the public is bound to think they’re hiding something,” Queral said. “I mean, to have it and not look at it seems to the public like the police don’t want to know what they have.”
Southeast Precinct Cmdr. Derrick Foxworth, who as police chief mandated the filing of the reports, said they were designed to have many uses.
“One of our initial goals was to identify trends in the information, maybe use that to modify our policies, modify our training,” he said.
“Originally we weren’t looking at including it in the Early Intervention System for officers who might have some problems, but we added that to the list pretty quickly,” he said.
He said early plans included comparing similar areas, times of day and types of assignments to see who stood out and whether they were acting appropriately.
But the Records Division had not yet written the codes to input the data from the reports, and the order to have officers file the reports was briefly delayed.
“Ultimately, my feeling was that it was important to start filling these out and collecting them right away, regardless of whether we could put them in a computer right away,” Foxworth said. “This wasn’t something I felt we could put off any longer.”
Foxworth’s son, Northeast Precinct night-shift officer Derrick Foxworth Jr., has a notable presence in the reports. He is tied for 10th in overall uses of force with 55. And he ranks second for pointing his gun at people – 36 times in two years – behind a Portland police detective assigned to capturing high-risk fugitives alongside the U.S. Marshals Service.
That detective, Dirk Anderson, is evidence that a high ranking in a use-of-force category doesn’t mesn the cop believes in inappropriate force. Anderson was the anonymous whistle-blower after two off-duty Portland cops beat a man in January 2002. The city settled with the man for $75,000 the next year, and the cops were indicted, pleaded guilty and served jail time.
Sizer explained further, saying assignments like that given the younger Foxworth involve a large number of felony traffic stops.
“And though there is no written policy, it is part of our training to approach a vehicle in that situation with our guns already out and trained on the vehicle,” she said.
Group’s meant to go at it
Leslie Stevens, director of the city’s Independent Police Review Division, said Sizer was helping her staff a task force to study the data, offering her Portland police training officers and an assistant chief.
Other task force members would include Stevens and one of her staffers, former Benton County District Attorney Pete Sandrock, along with two citizens taken from her division’s Citizen Review Committee.
“I want to keep this task force manageable – I don’t want it to die under its own weight,” Stevens said.
She said she wants to look for patterns – types of force used, police units that use more force than others, injuries to police and civilians. She said she also is interested in whether uses of force follow certain supervisors or field training officers around from assignment to assignment.
“We’ll have to wait and see,” Stevens said. “None of us have seen any of this data yet, but I’m excited to do the work.”
Queral said he was deeply interested in the results.
“We have waited a long time for what to me is as simple as keeping a promise,” he said.
King, the police union president, said it was failed leadership that kept the bureau from analyzing the data earlier.
“It should have been a priority for the top managers at the police bureau to get this done,” he said. “They know it best, they know how to use it, and we would have been happy to help with that effort. But now the only thing we can do is keep our heads down and ignore this so we can get back to work.”
Poor James Chasse, they valued his life at little over 300,000.00. http://jameschasse.blogspot.com/

After attorney's fees, I'm losing money on getting whooped.
But man, you can really make a pig squeal when you put them on the stand and under oafs.

Should Taser's be 'legal'?
http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/2008/01/tasers_kill_pigs_in_chicago_st.php

http://www.cocaineblunts.com/blunts/

Some food for the Thought Monster.

According to the great, late Thomas Aquinas,
To be god, is put put some thing in motion.

The question then arises; was that thing programmed to function WHEN set in motion?