Notes about police and dissent

Check out this youtube video of a uniformed NYPD police officer violently attacking a cyclist peacefully participating in a Critical Mass bike ride. Then read the various lies the officer told in a sworn statement, detailed in this New York Times article.

In case you think this NYPD brutality of Critical Mass cyclists was an isolated incident, next watch " this youtube video, then start clicking through all of the similar videos that are linked through these pages.

Think about this the next time you hear about the police, and police brutality, and are wondering who to believe, or are inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the police. From professional and personal experience, I quit giving any such benefit a long time ago.

a new toy...
...
....

Per the request of my sister, who apparently only visits my blog once a month or so...

Images from our trip to Oahu... a month and a half ago. Ahem!

A stairway on the hike up to the top of Diamond Head crater, at Diamond Head State Monument.


This is the view from the top of the Diamond Head hike, looking south to the ocean.


The Aloha Tower.


Kamehameha the Great Statue. It's outside of the Judiciary History Center, which has a smallish but good museum staffed by very kind and very bored volunteers, and the world's most sensitive metal detector to get inside.


Kamehameha the Great with a tree growing out of his head.


A whomping willow (a.k.a. banyan tree) on the grounds of Iolani Palace.


Obligatory pictures of the the USS Arizona Monument. I know I'm likely to take some flak for this, but it is perhaps the most overrated tourist attraction on earth after Wall Drug and South of the Border. I mean, seriously, the World's Largest Ball of Twine beats the hell out of this. The museum is actually quite good, if crammed and small.

We waited for several hours (we arrived at 9:10am, and got tickets for the 11:40am trip.) The required movie was deeply mediocre, and the memorial itself was amazingly uninteresting and undynamic once you actually get out to it. The memorial itself was definitely the most boring National Park Service unit I've ever been to.

A couple tips in case you decide to ignore my advice and go anyway: the supposedly heightened security measures are a joke. If you can fit it in your pocket, you can get it in. Also, some of the guidebooks, including Frommer's, claim you have to wear closed-toed shoes. Nope: nobody (including the rentacops at the main entrance, the docents/volunteers that take your ticket for the movie and boat ride to the memorial, the US Navy sailors that run the boat shuttles to the memorial, and the National Park Service ranger at the memorial itself) enforces it, and we saw dozens of people wearing flip-flops and sandals on the boat and at the memorial.


More of the USS Arizona.

J looking at the bubbling oil.


A close-up of the bubbling oil.


A distant view of the hotel/resort, the Marriott Ko Olina Beach Club, that I'm very glad we had points to pay for. It was nice enough (except for the rude fuckers in the room next to us for the first half of our stay, who played loud music late into the night, and regularly smoked in the room and on the patio despite very, very clear resort rules against it) but way out on the southwest side of the island. The restaurants are predictably overpriced and uninteresting, though there is a Safeway and strip mall with a dozen or so restaurant choices about two and a half miles away in Kapolei.

We did a nice drive around the entire island, and took some pictures of the North Shore, but for some weird reason I can't find them now. I guess they could still be on the camera, though it was before the trip to Diamond Head. Hmmm. Dunno.

Probably the highlight of the trip was the three hour afternoon snorkeling trip on the Ko Olina Cat.