If a police officer finds you pinning your little brother down in a van, with a knife in your hand, and you fail to relinquish that knife, proceed to struggle physically with that police officers, kicking and otherwise striking him, you will be shot. There are no exceptions to this. If you are white, black, brown, yellow, red, purple, or polka-dot. If you are straight, gay, young, old, rich, poor, smart, or dumb, you will be shot. With bullets. From a gun. There are no exceptions for mental health. Indeed, brandishing a knife at a police officer is an excellent indication that you are unstable and an immediate danger to the people around you. And you will be shot.

This week the District Attorney of Sonoma County wrapped up an investigation into just such an incident last year. A young man, only 16 years old, had a mental health crisis that resulted in a 911 call, his family trying to lock themselves in a van to keep away from him, a brief hostage situation and struggle, a bloodied police officer being kicked to the ground, and another police officer opening fire once the other officer was out of the way. The DA found that the police officers had acted legally, and that there was no crime in the shooting.

Since this finding, there has been a renewed rash of accusations that the local police do not understand mental health issues and aren’t handling these situations correctly. I certainly agree that the death of Jeremiah Chass is unfortunate. Had things not gotten to the point they did, with an irrational, violent outburst, he likely would have gone on to be a productive member of society. Once it went that far, once he decided to violently resist being taken by his family to the hospital, once he broke into that van and took hold of his sibling, it was already too late. The police officers did what they had to do to protect the younger boy, each other, and the community. You are not allowed to brandish a knife at police officers. You are not allowed to attack police officers. Society requires that they put themselves between irrational, violent people and ordinary civilians, and when they do this, they have the right to defend themselves.

This year I’ve decided to end Black History Month with a link to the highly-debatable Top 10 Rap Songs White People Love.

I personally feel that the NWA derivatives (Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, etc.) should have been somewhere here, probably with NWA’s “Express yourself” or Snoop Dogg’s “Gin & Juice.” I think the pinnacle of this variety of rap music was Eazy E’s “Boyz-N-The-Hood” (known to a very few as “the Ballad of Kilo-G”).

The lack of Run-DMC is also disturbing (Sucka MCs should call me “sire“). Maybe it’s just because I live so close to Mendocino and Humboldt counties (you can arguably find better pot in British Columbia, but I’m no expert on that subject), but the stoner white-people demographic was sorely underrepresented. Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Membrane” and Afro Man’s “Because I Got High” could easily replace some of the marginal cases here.

As we slide back into your regularly-scheduled White History Months (Asians get May, Hispanics get September, Native Americans get November; the rest is for whitey), I leave you with a link to Stuff White People Like.

Back to the subject of words whose meanings have shifted. This afternoon I read an article on The Register named “EC jacks up Microsoft fine by €899m.” Good article. Informative, lovingly crafted, all that good stuff. The comments, however, rankled me something fierce. A small sample:

I always thought the ideal remedy would be to require Microsoft to write in big print at the top of every contract (including corporate and government procurement contracts) and prominently on every consumer package “Notice: Microsoft, the publisher of this software, is a convicted monopolist.”

Who convicted Microsoft of being a monopoly? Being a monopoly isn’t a crime. Not even in socialist Europe.

Microsoft a monopoly? Funny, I can’t get three posts into one of these threads without someone mentioning Linux or whatever the iComp uses now. If there’s competition, then Microsoft is not a monopoly, it’s just very good at shutting the competition out from the mainstream.

Of course they are. That’s what copyright and patent law confer: legal monopolies over the protected work. Apple isn’t allowed to sell Microsoft products without acquiring the appropriate licenses, the proceeds of which go directly to Microsoft. Neither can anybody else; they have a legal monopoly on their intellectual property.

The author of the actual article, John Oates, gets it right: they were fined for abuse of their monopoly, they exhausted the appeals process, dragged their feet, and were fined again for failure to comply with the orders that went along with the original fine. People seem to think that monopolies are inherantly bad. If you’re not in favor of communalizing just about everything (do you have a monopoly on your car? your toothbrush?), then this is a knee-jerk reaction you should probably strive to avoid.