Daily Links #122: Utah police kill unarmed Black man

Elijah James Smith

• Whatever else Elijah James Smith ^[pictured] may have done, the fact remains that Utah police shot an unarmed Black man dead for obeying their order to remove his hands from his pockets.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Free speech advocates warned FOSTA/SESTA would stifle free speech online. Now that the bills are law, they’re … stifling free speech online.

• Meanwhile, the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality rules comes into effect today. Any changes will be gradual, and that’s if the multifaceted efforts to restore the old rules on state and federal levels don’t succeed first.

• Actual religious persecution: Russian government continues its crackdown on Jehovah’s Witnesses, forcing thousands to flee abroad or go into hiding.

• A Minnesota court just ruled that basically everyone on Twitter is now a stalker.
  (via @ScottGreenfield)

• Finally, James Comey’s new book is exactly what you expect from the memoir of the former director of the FBI. That’s not a compliment.
  (via @cjciaramella; retweet by @Popehat)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Heartwarming headline of the day

The steam coming out of Pence’s ears must be as white as his hair right about now.

Source: Vanity Fair

Call me a petty bastard, but this makes me smile.

(via Joe.My.God.)

John Oliver examines (and expertly trolls) Mike Pence

If you aren’t watching Last Week Tonight with John Oliver every Sunday night, you should be – or at least catch the full segments his team puts on YouTube shortly after the show airs. Last night’s episode centered around Mike Pence, that creepy religious-regressive former governor of Indiana who’s now the one official in the White House Trump cannot fire. Oliver covers Pence’s views on everything from his contempt for women in the military to his support of “conversion therapy” (a fancier way of saying “pray the gay away”), along with his affiliation with the Christian-patriarchal group Focus on the Family.

Pence is the reason efforts to get rid of Trump before the next election are shortsighted – Trump is terrible in large part because he’s clueless and incompetent at everything, but that’s also been a saving grace as he keeps sabotaging his own worse moves. Mike Pence, on the other hand, is smart and politically experienced. Impeaching or otherwise removing Trump would mean replacing him with his next-in-command, and if Trump is the frying pan of stupid, Pence is the fire of pure religious zealotry.

The best thing voters can do is castrate them both in the November midterms, and then toss them out for good in 2020.

*

Apropos of nothing, I got this in the mail earlier:

T’was a nice little bit of reading.

Daily Links: 10/31/17 – Judge tosses cop’s BLM lawsuit, redux

Have a Halloweeney night, everyone.

• A month ago, US District Judge Brian Jackson tossed out an anonymous cop’s dumb lawsuit blaming Black Lives Matter ^[pictured] for injuries sustained at a protest. Now: Ditto.

• Radley Balko has the latest from the world of botched police raids.

• University of Texas–San Antonio professor threatened a student who “offended someone” by saying that some Islamic countries would execute him for being bisexual.
  (via @AStuttaford; RT: @Popehat)

• In case you needed a reminder, Right-wing pundits are gullible morons. Also read the prankster’s account at Vice.

• Finally, in other news, I’ve posted a new piano song, “Piano in G (Music Class Compo)”, over at my creative blog, Creativitas …

• … as well as a lengthy-ish excerpt of the opening of the novel I’m working on, Inhuman.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

What modern animals reconstructed like dinosaurs look like

All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals [2012] by Darren Naish, CM Kosemen, John Conway & Scott Hartman
[source]

Trying to figure out what prehistoric creatures looked like is rather tricky when all you’ve got to go on are millions-of-years-old fossils of bones and the occasional skin or feather print in ancient mud. So paleoartists look to modern animals – particularly reptiles like crocodiles in the case of dinosaurs – as references for determining those features that skeletons alone can’t reveal, such as skin texture and the distribution of soft tissues. But of course, this can only give us educated guesses that may well be entirely wrong.

To illustrate (pun totally not intended) just how wrong we might be, artists CM Kosemen and John Conway teamed up with paleozoologist Darren Naish to show us what modern, living animals might look like if we applied the same logic and assumptions to their skeletons that we use with dinosaurs. The results are equal parts spectacular and creepy as hell.

Baboons, for instance, turn into a cross between a thylacine and a viperwolf from Avatar:

The blubbery hippo, meanwhile, turns into a Tyrannosaurian hellbeast:

There’s more over at Atlas Obscura, which gets them all from Kosemen, Conway and Naish’s 2012 book, All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals.

Now we really need a time machine, if only to verify that the mighty T. rex didn’t look like a river-waddler or something.

(via Pharyngula)

A good review of ex-Sheriff David Clarke’s terrible book

David Clarke

Milwaukee County’s authoritarian former sheriff and fake-badge cosplayer David Clarke has a book out, titled Cop Under Fire: Moving Beyond Hashtags of Race, Crime and Politics for a Better America, and you know it’s a flaming waste of paper just from the fact that fellow fascist Donald Trump loves it.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s C.J. Ciaramella at Reason with a glorious, point-by-point takedown of Clarke’s raging, rambling ode to his own ego.

Normally it would be a waste of energy to give serious consideration to Clarke's scribblings. One might as well review a YouTube comment section. However, the man has captured the notoriously limited attention of our president, and Politico reports that he is likely to take a position in the Trump administration in the near future, all of which makes his ideas, such as they are, noteworthy.

Author Nancy French—who has worked on autobiographies with such luminaries as actress Stacey Dash, Bristol Palin, and The Bachelor's Sean Lowe—generously stokes Clarke's literary ambitions here. But even with French's steady hand at the tiller, this isn't as much a book as a series of things Clarke is likely to shout out a window at any given moment.

[…]

This sort of clownishness hangs about the book at all times, much like the giant cowboy hats and fake medals Clarke adorns himself with. He insists on referring to Black Lives Matter as "Black LIES Matter" (emphasis in the original) in every single instance, and calls Obama the "cop-hater-in-chief." He spends at least a quarter of his book quoting and arguing against Black Lives Matter, a "subversive, anarchist, hateful movement" that "doesn't care any more about the lives of black people than the Ku Klux Klan does."