Crime & punishment in black and white

So the other day, the day of the Jena 6 protest, I didn't join in on all the posting about it, but I did wear black to work. Of course, no one asked me about it, because I almost always wear black. So, yeah, it was kind of lame in the 'show support for this issue' department, but I have had (and overheard) several interesting conversations about the whole thing. I'm really tired, I gotta tell you, of hearing white people wondering why this isn't being treated like a black on white hate crime. It just ain't one, so get over it.

On the other hand, I was quite happy to get on an elevator the other day in time to hear this middle-aged white guy with the facial hair of a Civil War re-enactor and the clothes of a biker -- the kind of guy who, around here, you're not surprised at all when you look at the pins on his leather vest and at least one of them has a Confederate flag theme -- anyway, he was saying to a group of worried-looking grandmotherly types, "I don't care, it's not funny. it's not 'just a joke.' You don't put nooses in trees." And so on.

And then other conversations about how surprised white people are that this kind of thing (i.e., the nooses) could possibly still happen. I haven't spoken to any black people who are even remotely surprised that it happened, only surprised that it got as much media attention as it did. With protests! And Rock Stars!

And then the story I heard somewhere about how, in Jena, while tensions were rising, a young white man had brandished a gun at a young black man entering a convenience store. There was a scuffle, and the black man took the gun, someone called the cops, and everybody waited for them to arrive. Whereupon the black man was arrested for stealing a firearm.

Which -- a little more clearly than the Jena 6 case itself, I think -- raises the obvious question "since when is it a crime to defend yourself?"

Which got me thinking I'd heard something about another case like this lately, in which some young women were harrassed by a man, then attacked by him and they ended up charged with assault on account of they fought back.

And behold: the New Jersey 7! [Well, there were 7; only 4 are still incarcerated.] The young women are lesbians, and African-American. The man (also African-American) started saying some of the usual, "hey baby, I want some of that" kind of shit as they passed, and the initial response from the women was along the lines of "no thanks, we're lesbians." Polite, friendly, hostile -- doesn't matter. But so the guy grabbed one of the women -- it was all caught on a security camera in a nearby store -- and her friends tried to help her. The guy spat on them, tossed a lit cigarette in someone's face, pulled out large clumps of hair, and got one of them in a chokehold. Another of the women took a cheap little steak knife out of her purse and attempted to hurt his arm to get him to stop.

There's no indication on the video that she succeeded, and no forensic testing was ever done on her knife. A couple of men stopped by and intervened; one of them apparently had a knife as well. And yeah, the harasser guy did get stabbed, and the gals all got arrested. Three of them I think served 10 months; four of them are definitely still in jail -- one of them was sentenced to eleven years. The men shown on the videotape were never even identified, let alone questioned or charged with anything.

Maybe you're wondering why you haven't heard about this before -- the information is out there: Brownfemipower, for one, has a round-up of posts from around the blogosphere. There are lots more mentions of it, but that's a good place to start to start. Most of the news articles about it (this happened in the summer of 2006) seem to have been taken down, but it wasn't covered with a great deal of vigor, mainstream media-wise.

But then I got to wondering whether this was one of the cases that got old Bill O'Reilly's knickers in a twist about the roving gangs of armed lesbians assaulting innocent men and attaching women and forcing them to go queer. Which, yeah, it was.

I mean, WTF? How many times have you or someone you know recounted a story about being harrassed on the street only to have some guy say "you shoulda kicked him in the nuts," or some such. Basically saying, "you don't have to take that shit, fight back!" But if you're successful, you're the one who's gonna get nailed -- that's the message I'm getting here. And if you fail? Well, chances are you're the one who's gonna get hurt. Or killed. But at least you'll be seen as the victim, not the perpetrator. Ask Sakia Gunn. Or Matthew Shepard.

[Note, this was re-posted (twice, now) to fix links and fix typos, etc. I posted the wrong draft, before.]

Spiders spin giant web; entomologists stumped

I like spiders. One of the things I like best about them is their generally solitary nature.

But there's this enormous web at a park in Texas right now that entomologists speculate was probably built by a lot of spiders -- likely of more than one species -- working together. Including some spiders who don't normally do that kind of thing.

The structure is the size of two football fields, apparently. And it's made a serious dent in the local mosquito population, which of course is all to the good.

There are some tropical species of social spiders that will build communal nests, and this ginormous mega-web phenomenon has been documented before, most recently I guess in 2002 in Canada, where one of the park rangers observed that "...the web showed great tensile strength – enough to put a handful of coins on it without them falling through."

The BBC article about it has a video.

This just in from the WTF Dept.

Sen. Hillary Clinton is a mammal.

This is news? The intrepid reporters at WaPo couldn't find her haircut or makeup consultant receipts?

h/t to Jeff Fecke over in Shakesville.

This just in from the 'WTF' department

This isn't breaking news, technically, as it's been out for a couple of days and has been commented on all over the place, but it just got my attention and I happen to have a minute to post it for your -- amusement? horror?

This post, from John over at Thoughts in a Haystack made my head spin and my stomach hurt a little bit. Partly from laughing, but partly because I wanted to throw up. The story was on TV, so you know it's true. There's this guy in Oklahoma, a Republican nominee for state superintendent of education -- yes, I said superintendent of education, people -- who proposes that students keep old textbooks stashed under their desks to defend themselves in the event of, you know, gunfire in the classroom.

Yes, if elected, candidate Bill Crozier promises put thick used textbooks under every desk for students to use in self defense. See, he and his buddies took some textbooks out to a field and conducted experiments to see how far bullets would penetrate the books. There's a video of this procedure, which I find myself unable to watch. Two calculus textbooks failed to stop bullets from an AK-47, but the experimenters did stop bullets from a 9mm pistol with some other textbooks (the article doesn't say which subject).

Now, don't get me wrong here. I'm all for emergency preparedness and self defense-type activities, and of course I think recycling is always a good idea -- but this is just plain nutty. Of course, when I was growing up, we were told to crawl under our desks in the event of nuclear attack. Remember those 'duck and cover' drills? I asked a teacher once what desks were made of that would protect us from radiation, and why didn't they just build everything out of that? I didn't get a useful response, but maybe it was old textbooks. Over at Halfway There, math teacher and blogger Zeno offers these instructions for classroom self-defense.

Much more helpful, I think, than 'duck and cover,' or the thing with the duct tape and plastic sheeting. And way better thought out than a coupla old math books under every desk.

EARTHQUAKE!!!!

I can't really tell you what it sounded like or felt like, but it woke me up, right around 5 a.m. It was a kind of rattling, I guess is the best I can describe it. It woke Hilda up too; I looked at her and she looked at me and we were both kind of, well, rattled. She sort of shook her head and flapped her ears and tried to hog more of the bed. We listened some more but all we could hear was the rain. I decided it must have been thunder, even though it wasn't really that kind of rain. Hilda barked once, but it seemed sort of half-assed. Her heart wasn't in it.

But I'd been so startled that I couldn't go right back to sleep and I thought maybe A., who lives in the carriage house apartment, was just getting home and his bike knocked over that big piece of plywood out there, but then I thought no, it couldn't be A., because Hilda would have run out the dog door to greet him. And she was still in my bed and very fidgety. She kept standing up on the bed and walking in circles and then curling back up again. I was completely baffled. I knew it couldn't have been an earthquake though, on account of we don't get earthquakes here.

But apparently we do because the radio went on after a while and just before I went AAACKK!! Pledge Drive!!!! and slammed the snooze button, I heard the local news guy talking about an earthquake, for real, with an epicenter a few miles out of town! Only 2.6 on the Richter scale, but still.

I'm thinking it was maybe a buncha them wackjobs out in the county doing underground testing of something or other. You can't be too careful nowadays.