Russia maintained an outpost called Fort Ross in northern California, about 91 miles north of San Francisco, from 1812 to 1842. According to Wikipedia, on March 15, 1812, “Ivan Kuskov with 25 Russians and 80 Native Alaskans arrive[d] at Port Rumiantsev and proceed[ed] north to establish Fortress Ross.”
Spain still held most of California at the time, and they weren’t too thrilled to have Russians that close by. They built the Mission San Francisco de Solano near Sonoma in 1823 to keep an eye on them. Later on, after Mexican independence, Mexico built El Presidio de Sonoma in the area in 1836 for the same reason.
The fort provided agricultural products for Russia’s Alaskan colony, including crops and furs, but it ceased to be viable in the 1840’s when the Alaskan colony started obtaining goods elsewhere. The Russians sold it to a guy for $30,000, although Russian historians claim he never paid for it, and that the land is still titled to Russia. I’m sure they’ll be claiming on that any day now.
This is one of those things we never learned about in school, so I just thought you should know.
Here’s a goof I see all the time. It doesn’t help that the two words are pronounced the same and only differ by two letters, but they have very different meanings. The two meanings can even have serious legal significance, so ignore them at your peril.
Principal as a noun has two meanings: an administrator, e.g. principal of a school; or a sum of money, e.g. principal of a loan.
Principal as an adjective means “primary” or “most important,” e.g. “The principal reason we are firing you is your refusal to wear pants.”
Principle is a noun, meaning “rule” or “maxim,” e.g. “I will not wear pants, because to do so would violate my principles.”
A guide some of us learned as kids is to think of the principal as your pal. That only covers one possible definition, but it’s a start.
Remember Officer John Pike? He’s the UC Davis police officer who decided to shoot pepper spray point-blank in the faces of student protesters who were unarmed, seated, and not committing any crimes. Even the variety of memes based around the now-iconic photograph could not take away the sense of what a chilling moment it was. According to Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic, an independent review panel found Office Pike culpable in the incident, the students were not breaking any laws, and Officer Pike was not authorized even to be carrying the pepper spray device that he used that day. It seems like it would be a slam dunk case for Pike’s dismissal and more.
Except it’s not, because screw you, civilian.
The official investigation concluded that Pike’s use of force was reasonable. Pike should have kept his job, but the UC Davis police chief overruled the investigative findings and fired him anyway. The only reason we even know about any of this is because someone leaked the confidential internal affairs investigation report to the Sacramento Bee, which has not published the 74-page document but has reported on it. To summarize, Pike told them to disperse, they didn’t, then he felt threatened, so he pepper sprayed them at point-blank range with an unapproved dispersal device. He explained his calm, seemingly aloof demeanor as the product of him being a “professional.”
Officer Pike no longer has a job, and he hasn’t been working since UC Davis suspended him with pay last November. So yes, he has been drawing a paycheck from California taxpayers for at least eight months.
Whether or not this means that it is open season on America’s university campuses remains to be seen. Friedersdorf interprets the internal affairs report as a “scandalous footnote” to the story, and concludes that:
Lt. Pike was caught on video pepper-spraying seated, non-violent protesters in the face, using a device he was not authorized to carry and that he held closer to their bodies than is recommended. Those viewing his actions on the Internet regarded them as needless and abusive in sufficient numbers that he became a figure of national attention. Two independent reports commissioned by UC Davis concluded that he had acted unacceptably that day in numerous ways.
But the internal affairs process used to discipline police officers concluded that he acted reasonably. It is only because new Police Chief Matthew Carmichael overruled its findings, possibly opening UC Davis up to a wrongful termination suit, that Lt. Pike was reportedly terminated. So I ask again. Can there be any doubt that this system prioritizes the job security of campus police officers above the safety and well being of students? Yet there is no move among the Democrats who run the California legislature to reform this state of affairs, because they are allied with the state’s public employee unions, who understandably prefer the status quo.
So for those of you who wonder why I only criticize “the right,” I now criticize California Democrats. Don’t let this go to your head.
At any rate, I am criticizing California Democrats for their role in enabling the brutalizing of campus protesters by police. There, I lost everyone on the right again. I feel better now.
Consider this: it took someone (presumably illegally) leaking the IA report to the Sacramento newspaper for us to even know that the powers that be in Davis think Officer Pike’s actions were hunky-dory. Ponder what that means the next time a police officer has even an inkling of a feeling that he or she could justifiably claim to be fearful for his or her own safety. Whatever damage this will do to the credibility of police in general is certainly offset by the fact that they have pepper spray, so screw you.
I guess we should at least be grateful that Officer Pike didn’t taze or shoot anybody, right?
(Also, this whole situation, and the era of police brutality it may augur, is only news to affluent white people. People of color have known this about police since the dawn of the Republic.)
In yet another example of why you shouldn’t text and drive, an Alabama college student drove off a cliff while texting.
Fortunately, he survived, but incurred some serious injuries. After six months of recovering, he’s finally able to talk about it.
Right before Chance Both’s truck went over a cliff, he texted, “I need to quit texting, because I could die in a car accident.”
Seriously, folks, don’t text while driving. Even if you’re as lucky as this guy, it’s not as funny as it might sound. It’s also completely illegal in many places.
I’ve been working on a post on the varyingly creative misinterpretations of the First Amendment that have abounded over the past few weeks, but it’s not quite done yet. Sooner or later, someone opposed to Chick-fil-A’s antics, and the antics of its supporters, was bound to spout off at the wrong target. Via Hemant Mehta:
In the wake of the Chick-fil-A controversy, one of the ways the pro-gay-marriage side is fighting back is through the “National Same Sex Kiss Day at Chick-Fil-A” taking place today.
Another way to fight back is to follow the (half-joking) advice of YouTuber Jackson Pearce: Go to Chick-fil-A and ask for a glass of water, which they will give you for free (it’s the Biblical thing to do!), so you’re essentially taking money from them…
(It would be even better if people bought food at KFC and handed it out to homeless people or something… You know, whatever Christians say Jesus would do while they go stuff themselves with some chikin.)
Anyway, Arizona native Adam M. Smith went to a Chick-fil-A drive-thru this week to get the free water. But that wasn’t all. He also lashed out at the employee who served him for the faults of the company and its COO… as if she had anything to do with the matter.
[Here he embedded a video that Smith took of the whole encounter and uploaded to YouTube]
As I watched that, I just felt bad for the employee. She handled the situation perfectly — she did her job, remained as neutral as possible, and tried to explain how the company didn’t discriminate against gay customers (which is true)… meanwhile, Smith came off as a heartless bully (“I don’t know how you live with yourself and work here”). If Chick-fil-A has a problem, this employee had nothing to do with it and he’s wrongly taking his anger out on her. She showed far more class than he did.
For the record, I think it would be great if every Chick-fil-A employee who opposes the company’s stance were to quit en masse, but the world is not such a straightforward place. Jobs are scarce enough that this is not always, or even often, a reasonable demand. I cannot tell anyone else how to react to Chick-fil-A, but I cannot shake the feeling that this form of protest (if you want to call it that) could backfire terribly.
With that in mind, here’s my take on who/what are the proper recipients of Chick-fil-A protests:
The Chick-fil-A corporate entity headquartered in College Park, Georgia
Senior executives of said corporation
Chairman and CEO S. Truett Cathy
COO Dan Cathy
People who lined up to buy fried chicken sandwiches to protest LGBT individuals and their allies standing up for their own dignity
People who honestly think this is a First Amendment issue in anything that doesn’t directly involve certain mayors
Improper recipients of said protests:
Individual Chick-fil-A employees who haven’t said a word, because trying to take on the drive-thru worker will not solve anything and will make you look like an asshole.
(This was a comment a made on a Facebook thread centered around this article, to which someone added this video, which ended up bringing in race, religion, and LGBTQ issues–in other words, a normal Friday morning for me. I figured I’d cut and paste my comments here for an inexpensive blog update! This is all verbatim what I wrote, except that I corrected a few spelling and grammar errors inherent to the Facebook commenting format.)
This will be a condensed treatment of the concept of privilege, but here goes: I’m a white, heterosexual, educated, affluent, originally-raised-Episcopalian, reasonably attractive and healthy American male. In other words, I am about as high up on the privilege ladder as you can get. About the only “minority” status I have is that of atheist, and people who don’t know me can’t exactly tell that just from looking at me. If I may borrow Stephanie for a second, if I were to tell Stephanie that sexism does not exist in America because I have never experienced it, or because her own stories of encountering sexism just don’t make sense to me, Stephanie would be within her rights to give me an epic rhetorical beatdown. As a guy, I have privilege in this society to ignore some pretty pervasive sexism. If I don’t want to see it or deal with it, it can be invisible to me. The same can be true for me about LGBTQ issues (no one has yet complained that, by advertising my engagement on my FB page, I am rubbing my sexuality in their faces. LGBTQ people don’t get that kind of deference from the whole freaking world). Christians can claim “persecution” when in reality they are just having to share the public sphere with others. Guys can claim unfair advantages for women when women haven’t even achieved parity. My actual point, though, is about the “race card.” When a person of color “plays the race card,” it is pretty much assumed that the sole purpose is to be divisive or to distract from something else, and that is a load of crap. There is racism all around us all the time, but most white (or white-identified) people do not have to deal with it as a daily fact of life. Just one example: I drove by four police cars yesterday, and in two instances I was going about 5 miles over the speed limit, but no one pulled me over. I have never been pulled over without verifiable evidence of speeding or making an illegal right turn on red, and I have never had my car searched for drugs “just in case.” For many if not most people of color in America, though, the simple act of driving a car down the street requires taking on more risk than my privileged ass can comprehend. I’m not claiming any greater knowledge of the reality of life in America, just that I get that there is much of daily life for others that I do not “get.” Claiming that a context-free allegation of racism is playing the “race card” is a cowardly refusal to even consider that the person might be correct. Note also that privilege is not limited specifically to white heterosexual males. The default setting of society is “white heterosexual male,” so nearly anything that unthinkingly falls into one of those categories can have the effect of propping up privilege, without awareness of how it might hurt others.
None of this means that I don’t get to have a say in issues pertaining to other groups. It just means that I need to listen for a change. It is really amazing how little privileged people actually listen to people without their same privilege. Google “mansplaining” if you want to have a sad chuckle.
“We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.”
– Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA) likens the Obamacare contraception mandate to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. No really, this happened.
Former Chick-fil-A employee Brenda Honeycutt is suing the company for gender discrimination, alleging that owner and operator of Duluth, Georgia’s Chick-fil-As, Jeff Howard, fired her so that she could be a “stay home mother” despite her “satisfactory-to-above-satisfactory employment history with the company.
“During the Plaintiff’s employment, Defendant Howard routinely made comments to the Plaintiff suggesting that as a mother she should stay home with her children,” the lawsuit states.
A black couple in Crystal Springs, Mississippi says that a predominantly white Baptist church refused to let them get married because of their race.
Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson told WLBT that the day before they were to be married, the pastor of First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs informed them the ceremony would have to be moved due to the reaction of some white church members — even though the couple had attended the church regularly.
“The church congregation had decided no black could be married at that church, and that if [the pastor] went on to marry her, then they would vote him out the church,” Charles Wilson explained.
We have to respect the delicate feelings of “some white church members,” amirite? I can’t wait to hear if there’s a non-discriminatory explanation.
– A small airplane towing a banner with a marriage proposal crashed in Rhode Island, after the pilot had to ditch. The pilot was found uninjured, after his apparently genius 8 year-old son helped the Coast Guard locate him. No word on whether the intended recipient of the proposal said yes.
– A puppeteer on a Christian-themed children’s show in Florida is arrested for conspiracy to kidnap children and, uh, other stuff. It sounds like police have evidence of some pretty heinous stuff, but it is not clear exactly what he actually did regarding the kidnapping conspiracy charge, versus what he just talked about doing. Technically, “extensive Internet chats about eating children” are not illegal in and of themselves without taking a furher step……you know, I don’t really want to talk about this.
– Some Breitbartian named John Nolte thinks that a new Skittles ad promotes bestiality or something. In other words don’t chase your Chick-fil-A sandwich with Skittles. Or Oreos. I’ll have to get back to you on which candies and cookies have the Almighty’s stamp of approval.
Russia maintained an outpost called Fort Ross in northern California, about 91 miles north of San Francisco, from 1812 to 1842. According to Wikipedia, on March 15, 1812, “Ivan Kuskov with 25 Russians and 80 Native Alaskans arrive[d] at Port Rumiantsev and proceed[ed] north to establish Fortress Ross.”
Here’s a goof I see all the time. It doesn’t help that the two words are pronounced the same and only differ by two letters, but they have 
– Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron