Simply Stunning

26-YO Botham Jean, shot & killed by Dallas PD
officer Amber Guyger in his own apartment 

As is my habit when writing about the unjustified use of force against American citizens by some members of law enforcement, let me once again preface this by repeating that the vast majority of police officers in this country, some of whom I know personally, are dedicated to the idea of "protect and serve" and conduct themselves as professionals.

But after the senseless death of 26-year-old Botham Jean in Dallas, something has got to be done about those cops who do not.

While the Dallas Police Department is still being tight-lipped about the specific circumstances, the facts surrounding the fatal shooting of an upstanding man who comes from a distinguished family on the island of St. Lucia are truly disturbing.

Jean, a church-going, full-time employee of the London-based multinational accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, was inside his own apartment on the fourth floor of the South Side Flats apartment complex when Dallas PD officer Amber Guyger entered his apartment, saw Jean and fired her handgun at him.

Guyger, who lives in the same building and was in uniform and just getting off duty when the incident occurred last Thursday night, allegedly claimed she mistakenly thought that Jean's apartment was her's.

How she confused someone else's apartment with her own when she doesn't even live on the same floor has left a lot of people scratching their heads - how Guyger gained access to Jean's apartment in the first place remains a mystery.

As the Dallas Morning News reported, DPD officials were remaining tight-lipped about Guyger's actions leading up the shooting - and they've turned the investigation over to the Texas Rangers.

Dallas PD officer Amber Guyger 

Recent media headlines have been filled with the high-profile killings of innocent, unarmed American citizens by police in some truly murky circumstances.

In July of 2017, a 40-year-old Australian woman named Justine Damond called 911 to report a possible assault in an alley behind the home she was staying in - upon arriving at the scene Minneapolis PD officer Mohammed Noor shot and killed HER.

Minnesota was the same state where widely respected elementary school cafeteria supervisor Philando Castile was pulled over for a broken tail light in Falcon Heights, MN on July 6, 2016.

After St. Anthony PD officer Jeronimo Yanez ordered Castile to take out his ID, Yanez pulled out his pistol and fired seven shots into the car at point blank range with Castile's girlfriend in the passenger seat and her young daughter in the back seat.

By the way Yanez fired those shots 74 SECONDS after pulling Castile over for the busted tail light, despite the fact that Castile was heard being polite and courteous to Yanez on an audio recording of the incident.

These kinds of excessive use-of-force cases by some cops aren't limited to fatal shootings either.

Back on August 6th, off-duty Cincinnati PD officer Kevin Brown fired his taser at 11-year-old Donesha Gowdy who refused to stop after he caught her shoplifting food from a Kroger grocery store after her friends dared her to do it.

If she did shoplift, by all means hold her accountable and face the appropriate disciplinary actions - but firing a taser into her back and jolting her with electricity?

The video of him verbally admonishing the little girl after the incident, including blaming her actions for the dearth of grocery stores in some primarily- African-American communities - drew sharp criticism from members of the Cincinnati City Council.

87-year-old Martha Al-Bishara with her great-
granddaughter Martha Douhne in Georgia

Officer Brown might want to spend some time reading about redlining by American banks and how they've historically worked with real estate companies and local politicians to intentionally isolate some communities both geographically and economically in order to manipulate the price of housing. 

Or maybe it's easier to just blame an 11-year-old girl, I don't know.

Oh and speaking of the questionable use of a taser by police officers...

Chatsworth, Georgia Police Chief Josh Etheridge is still trying to defend his department after he and two other officers responded to a call of 87-year-old Martha Al-Bishara wandering around on an uncut section of field next to a Boys and Girls Club across the street from her home with a knife back on August 10th.

As the New York Times reported, Al-Bishara was simply using the knife to cut dandelion leaves to toss with garlic and lemon for a salad traditional to her native Syria.

She's been in the U.S. for decades but speaks no english, so when Chief Etheridge and two other Chatsworth officers showed up, she couldn't understand their commands to drop the knife according to her great-granddaughter Martha Douhne.

So one of the three officers fired a taser at the 87-year-old woman. Really.

"An 87-year-old woman with a knife still has the ability to hurt an officer." Etheridge insisted.

Again, I'm not a police officer and I certainly wouldn't want any of the police officers I know to get hurt trying to arrest a suspect.

But as Martha Al-Bishara's great-nephew told reporters, "If three police officers couldn't handle an 87-year-old woman, you might want to reconsider hanging up your badge." 

Whether it's a Dallas police officer coming home, walking into an apartment that's not even her's and fatally shooting the innocent man who lives there, an off-duty Cincinnati officer firing a taser at an 11-year-old girl for shoplifting, or a Georgia cop firing a taser at an 87-year-old woman who was using a knife to cut dandelion leaves for a salad - the decision to use force in these cases seems rushed, and not well thought out.

And the lack of common sense displayed is simply stunning.

Where Was the "Resistance" in Hollywood?

Bob Woodward and the man being called
"an idiot" by some members of his own staff

Now if the jaw-dropping New York Times op-ed anonymously written by a senior White House official that was published late Wednesday is to be believed, not only is Trump as dysfunctional, ignorant and delusional as many critics and observers thought he was.

Allegedly, he's also surrounded by a patriotic Republican "resistance" - folks who are bound and determined to do everything they can to "preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump's more misguided impulses until he is out of office."

It's unprecedented in American history.

High level members of a sitting president's own staff working inside the White House, actively working to prevent the chaotic narcissist who hired them from doing any more damage to the nation than he's already done.

Like many Americans trying to absorb all this news, I'm equal parts relieved and dumbfounded.

The Times op-ed comes a day after advance copies of journalist Bob Woodward's new book "Fear: Trump In the White House" (a devastating expose on the inner workings of the White House under Trump) were leaked to reporters ahead of it's publication next Tuesday.

The anonymous op-ed backs up the portrayals of a dysfunctional White House and a staff astounded by Trump's idiocy and inability to grasp complex issues or even stay on topic in meetings.

True to form, Trump has only lent credence to these stunning accusations by lashing out in ways that simply reinforce the perception that he's a completely incompetent moron with the attention span of a "fifth or sixth grader" who is totally unqualified to sit in the Oval Office.

Brett Kavanaugh brushes off Fred Guttenberg, whose
daughter was killed in the Parkland, FL mass shooting 

Trump lashed out at Bob Woodward as having "credibility problems" - the same man who (alongside Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein) used dogged investigative journalism to expose widespread corruption within the Nixon administration that led to the Watergate hearings and Nixon's eventual resignation.

Sources tell CNN that Trump also allegedly ordered an internal "West Wing Witch Hunt" to uncover leakers on his own White House staff.

Yet at the same time, according to a Vox.com article by Zack Beauchamp, Trump is trying to claim that Woodward's book is part of a left-wing plot hatched to torpedo Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Unfortunately for Trump, his (latest) conspiracy theory is undermined by that that fact that, as Beauchamp noted, the publication date of Woodward's book on Trump was set well before the Kavanaugh hearings in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee were even scheduled.

One of the things that strikes me as remarkable about all this, is that Trump has only been in office about nineteen months - yet his actions are apparently so reprehensible to his own staff that a number of them have formed this "resistance" within the White House described in the NYT op-ed.

Earlier today I was reading the news that the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office announced that they will not pursue sexual assault charges against actors Steven Segal and Kevin Spacey because the alleged incidents took place back in the 1990's and the statute of limitations to charge them has already expired.

In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein allegations, when actor Anthony Rapp publicly accused Spacey of trying to initiate sex with him when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was 26, and Spacey publicly acknowledged the incident had happened, at least ten other accusers made similar claims against the Oscar-winning actor.

I couldn't help but wonder, where was the internal "resistance" movement to confront and stop Spacey's reprehensible behavior?

Or the behavior of any number of high-profile actors, directors, producers and agents in Hollywood for that matter?
 

Actress Rose McGowan (left), her ex-manager Jill
Messick and producer Harvey Weinstein 

As I've mentioned before in this blog, my parents raised my siblings and I with lots of magazines around the house growing up, a habit that's carried over into my adulthood.

One of the problems with having a magazine habit in todays multimedia, digital-heavy world is that they can (literally) stack up when you're busy.

So it wasn't until last week that I finally got to read Chris Gardner's interview with actress/ activist Rose McGowan published in the May 9th issue of the Hollywood Reporter.

McGowan has become one of the central figures in the #MeToo movement that emerged in the wake of the downfall of producer Harvey Weinstein after she became one of the first of many well known actresses to go public with accusations of sexual assault against the one-time Hollywood mogul.

A role for which she's been alternately praised and vilified by members of the entertainment industry.

Gardner's THR article is definitely worth a read if you're interested in getting a more in-depth understanding how McGowan's public accusations against one of most powerful figures in Hollywood have changed her life and career.

Aside from Weinstein's criminal sexual appetites and his employing Israeli security agencies to spy on, intimidate and professionally discredit some of the actresses who accused him of rape and assault, one of the most disturbing claims McGowan made in the article involves her former manager Jill Messick.

As Gardner's article reports, after what many consider her breakout on-screen role as Tatum in the successful 1996 horror film Scream, McGowan attended the premiere of Going All the Way at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival (which also starred Ben Affleck and Rachel Weisz).

Rose McGowan, Jeremy Davies and Ben Affleck
in a scene from Going All the Way (1997)

According to Gardner's THR article:

"Harvey attended the premiere of...Going All the Way, in which she [McGowan] has a topless scene. After it came onscreen, McGown claims, she saw her then-manager Jill Messick turn and nod to the mogul. 

It was Messick who set up the meeting the next morning between Weinstein and McGowan at the Stein Eriksen Lodge that McGowan says ended with her being sexually assaulted in a hot tub."

As a former actor I have no illusions about the kinds of things people will do, or the depths to which they will sink, to achieve fame, money or power in the entertainment industry.

But the idea that a professional adult talent manager who gets paid to help manage an artist's career would knowingly send a young, 24-year-old actress to a meeting in a hotel room with a Hollywood producer with a reputation for demanding sex from young women, disturbed me.

In all fairness, Messick (who took her own life back in February) publicly denied McGowan's accusations that she knowingly sent the actress into the meeting with Harvey Weinstein knowing he would rape her.

But yet as Gardner reports, in 1998, a year AFTER McGown was raped by Weinstein and paid $100,000 as part of a settlement agreement, Messick took a job with Weinstein's company Miramax.

Call me a cynic but I don't believe in coincidence when it comes to things like that, and McGowan claimed that Messick protected Weinstein in exchange for her job at Miramax.

By the way, after taking the position with Weinstein at Miramx in 1998, Messick went on to produce a number of films including She's All That (1999), Frida (2002) and later Mean Girls (2004) - (after she'd left Miramax in 2003).

Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby, Steven Segal and Jill Messick are just a handful of the high-profile figures in the entertainment industry who allegedly (by their actions, non-actions or silence) were part of the rampant culture of sexual abuse that's come to light in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

Again, members of Trump's top staff formed a "resistance" to stop his behavior after only nineteen months in office - so where was the "resistance" in Hollywood and the entertainment community when the kind of sexual abuse suffered by actors like Anthony Rapp or Rose McGown has been going on since the early part of the 20th century?

Was Trump's behavior just that bad?

Or was Hollywood just that complacent with an abusive status quo?

Judicial Mulligans for Stanford in Santa Clara?

Photo of a bizarre creature from the depths of
the Norwegian Sea taken by Roman Fedortsov 

One of my guilty online pleasures is logging into my Twitter account (@culturegeist) and checking in with some of the almost 1,800 Twitter accounts I follow to try and get a sense of what people and organizations are thinking, feeling and saying about news and current events.

Unlike Trump, who uses his Twitter account like a spigot for his lies, kooky propaganda and incessant whining, I enjoy using Twitter to follow people who have knowledge about topics that interest me.

Be it a journalist, politician, NASA scientist, or Roman Fedortsov, a Russian fisherman who works on a fishing trawler in Murmansk and enjoys posting photos of really bizarre deep sea creatures that get pulled up in the nets.
  
The cuddly fellow on the left is just a small example of the weird life forms he chronicles, for more check out @fedortsov - after you eat.

I never studied economics in college, but as a self-professed political junkie, I am fascinated by the subject, so in addition to reading Nobel laureate-winning economist and Princeton professor Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times, I also follow his posts on Twitter (@PaulKrugman).

One of the more interesting takes on various issues relating to economics I follow on Twitter is a woman who tweets under the pseudonym Ninja Economics (@NinjaEconomics).

Like Krugman, she finds creative ways to intertwine economics, politics and current events in her tweets, and she doesn't make the subject too "highbrow" - so it remains accessible.

A few weeks ago she sent me a message on Twitter about a strange and troubling story about the selective prosecutorial tendencies of the Santa Clara County (California) District Attorney's office when it comes to defendants accused of violent crimes who happen to have ties with Stanford University.

Two-tier justice in the American legal system is a recurring topic of focus on this blog, and this story involving the Santa Clara County DA sheds some light on the ways in which sexual assault against women too often goes under-punished - and privilege and race too often shield individuals who've committed violent felonies from facing substantive legal repercussions for their actions.

So I thought it'd be interesting to take a closer look as Ninja Economics asked me to share the story.

Ex-Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner 

To make better sense of this, let's quickly look back at a case that made national media headlines just a couple years ago.

While it's hardly front-page news from the standpoint of mainstream media coverage, today September 2nd marks the two-year anniversary of what was widely considered one of the more absurd miscarriages of justice in recent American history.

For many in this country, the name Brock Turner has largely faded from the mainstream media spotlight, but many recall the "Stanford Swimmer rape case."

As the Wikipedia summary of the incident notes, sometime around 1am on January 18, 2015, two Swedish graduate students were biking on the Stanford campus near the Kappa Alpha fraternity house when they saw the then 20-year-old Turner behind a dumpster on top of an unconscious 22-year-old female student identified only as "Jane Doe" in court proceedings.

When the two grad students jumped off their bikes and confronted Turner, he tried to run, but one of the students ran after him, tackled him, and with the help of the other grad student, held him until police arrived.

Turner, a member of Stanford's swim team and an Olympic hopeful, was arrested, charged, tried and as Wikipedia summarized, eventually "found guilty of three felonies: assault with the attempt to rape an intoxicated woman, sexually penetrating an intoxicated person with a foreign object, and sexually penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object."

While the maximum possible sentence was 14 years, prosecutors recommended a prison sentence of six years for Turner, but Santa Clara County Judge Aaron Persky stunned observers by sentencing Turner to just six months in the Santa Clara County jail - plus three months of probation.

Ex-Santa Clara County Judge Aaron Persky

Then, on September 6, 2016 judge Persky released Turner after he'd served just three months behind bars.

Ensuing outrage over the sentence prompted a grassroots effort spearheaded by Stanford law professor Michelle Dauber and an organization called Recall Judge Aaron Persky made up of volunteers who were successful in getting the thousands of signatures required to get a special recall election on the California ballot.

Many citizens and advocates of stronger domestic violence and sexual assault laws were troubled by the fact that Persky was a Stanford University graduate who'd played lacrosse in college.

To many, the perception that Persky's allegiance to Stanford, and concerns about the negative impact on the prestigious university's reputation as one of the top schools in the nation, clouded his perception of Turner - a talented college athlete on one of the country's best swimming teams.

Some saw that as the real reasoning behind Persky's decision to sentence Brock Turner to just six months in jail for the felony rape and assault of a defenseless, inebriated 22-year old woman who was unconscious at the time.

Many felt that the case was an example of the two-tier justice that too often plagues the American judicial system, a system where young white people from privileged backgrounds who commit felonies are viewed differently than young Hispanic or Africa-American men who commit the same kinds of felonies.

Particularly after Persky openly admitted that he'd worried that "a prison sentence would have a sever impact on him" before he handed down what was effectively a slap on the wrist for Turner for a violent sexual assault of an unconscious woman.

Ethan Couch after being arrested in Mexico

The Turner decision had echoes of the infamous "affluenza" case back in 2013 in which 16-year-old white teenager Ethan Couch was sentenced to probation in a cushy rehab facility because Tarrant County Judge Jean Hudson Boyd reasoned that his wealthy upbringing and being spoiled by his parents had prevented Couch from understanding the concept of being responsible for his actions.

She termed this condition "affluenza" and was widely criticized, considering that she gave another 16-year old teen named Eric Miller 20 years in jail for killing a man while driving drunk in 2004.

Back on June 15, 2013 Ethan Couch was drunk and on Valium when he lost control of a pickup truck he was driving at 70 mph in a 40 mph zone on a residential street in Burleson, Texas.

The ensuing crash killed four people (including a pastor and woman and her daughter who'd stopped to help another driver fix a flat tire) and injuring nine others.

Including a passenger in the truck he was driving who was left permanently paralyzed and only able to communicate by blinking his eyes.

When video surfaced on social media of Couch drinking at a beer pong party in 2015, and he failed to report in to probation officers as required by the court, a national manhunt ensued and Couch and his mother were eventually found and arrested in the Mexican resort city of Puerto Vallarta - where she'd helped him to flee the U.S.

Couch was sentenced to two years in jail for violating his probation and was released back in April to continue the original probation he was sentenced to in 2013 for killing four people.

Now I think it's important to have digressed from the Brock Turner case because while a number of judges and prosecutors in California disagreed with Santa Clara County voters efforts to remove Judge Aaron Persky from the bench because he sentenced Turner to just six months in jail, the outrage by citizens and legal experts alike didn't just happen in some vacuum.

Remember, in 2016 when Turner was released after three months in jail, media headlines were also being dominated by the nine high profile cases of unarmed African-Americans who'd been killed by police officers for no justifiable reason - beginning with Eric Gardner in Staten Island in 2014.

Ex- Santa Clara County Assistant DA
Cindy Hendrickson

For perspective, Turner was released from jail in September, 2016, just two months after Baton Rouge, Louisiana PD officers shot and killed Alton Sterling after confronting him for selling CD's in front of a convenience store, and elementary school cafeteria manager Philando Castile was shot and killed inside his vehicle after being pulled over for a broken tail light in Minnesota.

Neither of the officers responsible for those deaths were found legally responsible for their actions, so there was clearly a lot of frustration and anger over the failure of the court system to hold people accountable for their actions.

On June 5, 2018, Santa Clara County citizens voted to remove judge Aaron Persky from the bench - the first time in 80 years that California voters elected to remove a sitting judge from the bench.

Interestingly, Persky was replaced by an assistant district attorney from the Santa Clara County DA's office named Cindy Hendrickson - whose questionable oversight of a case involving an individual with ties to Stanford University has also caused controversy.

Back in the spring, Hendrickson made headlines herself over a controversial case involving a troubled Stanford University researcher named Alana Pague.

As Roger Whitacre reported for Patch.com back in May, the 32-year-old Pague was accused of hacking into computer devices to illegally obtain personal photographs and video from her ex-boyfriend Drew Moxon.

In a civil lawsuit filed in the California Superior Court Moxon accused Pague and her mother Ana of trying to blackmail him and his girlfriend Cynthia Phan by threatening to release intimate personal photos and videos surreptitiously taken of them to friends and family if he didn't agree to pay Pague money every month.

As Whitacre reported, three days after Moxon called police to report that Pague had threatened him with a knife, she stole that his vehicle and kidnapped their child, Jude Alexander Moxon.

Alan Pague and the child she kidnapped 

Fortunately Pague did return the child (pictured left) but as the then-assistant DA responsible for reviewing the charges related to the kidnapping and blackmail threats, Cindy Hendrickson declined to file charges against Pague and rejected the case.

She also refused to offer any comment about the criminal investigation.

One of the things that's odd about this case is the lack of local media coverage about it.

If you read details of the lawsuit on a Go Fund Me page set up by the plaintiff to help with legal expenses, the lawsuit accuses Pague (pictured left), an Uber driver and someone described as a "San Francisco millionaire" of conspiring to threaten to release intimate video of Moxon and his girlfriend Cynthia Phan in what's come to be known as "revenge porn" - releasing intimate video to enact revenge or shake someone down for cash. 

What's also odd about Cindy Hendrickson refusing to file charges in this case is that Alan Pague admitted to the Mountain View Police Department that she did illegally obtain the video and kidnap she and Moxon's child - so why hasn't she been charged by the Santa Clara County DA's office?

According to an article posted on AngryGamer.net, throughout her campaign for judge, Hendrickson has consistently refused to even answer questions about the case, even though she's been repeatedly asked about it on social media.

Santa Clara County is also home to Mountain View, CA which is essentially the epicenter of Silicon Valley and home to some of the leading computer technology companies including Google, Symantec and Mozilla.

It's situated in close proximity to both San Francisco and is also the home of Stanford University.

Does the as-yet unidentified "San Francisco millionaire" named in the lawsuit alongside Alana Pague have ties to Stanford as well?

Former DA now-judge Cindy Hendrickson certainly does - as her Twitter profile shows, like the man she replaced, Judge Aaron Persky, she's also a Stanford Alum.

So while there are complex sides to the lawsuit against Alana Pague, it's legitimate to ask if her being an employee of Stanford University has influenced the decision of the Santa Clara County DA's office not to file charges against her.

A majority of Santa Clara County voters clearly felt Aaron Persky's ties to Stanford influenced his decision to allow convicted rapist Brock Turner to walk after serving just three months in jail.

So there certainly is the appearance of two-tier justice in Santa Clara County, and it's fair to ask if the DA's office there is effectively handing out judicial mulligans to people who commit felonies simply because they have ties to Stanford.