#OilPainting of #MarcJohnson
Painted for 2 days 12 hours a day
I got to buy a Marc drink one time at a Transworld premiere I was telling him how much I listened to goodbye horses, and he said he had never heard this song prior to the video part being put out
#Art#FreeHumanity
One reason moments like this are so important: if there is no accountability for the most heinous violations of people's rights and basic morality--and if that behavior is rewarded by Democratic presidents--it sends an unmistakable message to thousands of other ambitious people.
THREAD. This week, I was in Los Angeles and Houston for two major civil rights cases. Each case raises a question that one would think is no longer relevant to our civilization: can a person be put in a cage solely because they cannot make a cash payment? A few thoughts:
Across the U.S., 500,000 human beings are jailed each night prior to trial despite the presumption of innocence. Most of them are confined solely because their families can't make a required cash payment. Only the U.S. and Philippines have a for-profit commercial bail system.
everyone working in courts each day knows that poor people don't have adequate lawyers or defense preparation, that it's illegal to jail people solely b/c they can't pay cash, that plea bargains are not voluntary, that large swaths of police conduct are flagrantly illegal, etc.
one thing that shocked me as a young lawyer--and that still surprises me each day--is the extent to which judges have abdicated any semblance of intellectual rigor in enforcing the law. the punishment bureaucracy bears no resemblance to the system described in the constitution
THREAD. One of the biggest political scandals of our time is coming to a head today. Democratic leaders just announced they will vote with the far-right to overturn a democratically passed DC law. The story is important, and full of weird lies.
The Democrats and some corporate journalists are feeding narratives that will only end in fascism. This was entirely avoidable by following either scientific evidence or local democracy for DC, but Biden chose to reject both. Instead, he validated fear and misinformation.
BREAKING: Local police in the US are now using outrageous traffic stops to harass and threaten more than 1 million people on a secret and largely racist national "terrorist" watch list.
A deeply broken police culture puts our entire nation in peril. ⤵️
https://t.co/EzTTSMHz5t
Calling poor, deliberately segregated neighborhoods “high crime areas” is one of the most disgusting and persistent examples of modern copaganda. The New York Times should be ashamed, four times over.
It’s a corporate news scandal that people don’t know what cops do. 4% of their time and 5% of arrests are for “violent crime.” Most of rest is mass surveillance, low level arrests, crushing protest, and bureaucratic waste. Cops are prepared to alter the nature of life for women.
THREAD: Yesterday, the New York Times published a bombshell revelation: "civil rights groups" support legislation for more militarized police surveillance. The problem? The reporting was false. How it happened and what the New York Times did is important.