internet reading list of late

(triplicates of links that occupied my mind at *work* recently)

The Empty Brain aka YOUR BRAIN IS NOT A COMPUTER from Aeon website

I used to have Aeon on my google reader (which is now old reader) because I loved that site enough to keep up with that shit like so. But it started to suffer from Short Quirky Smart Website Blast Syndrome to speak to our lower attention spans, and it got cut from my old reader starting line-up. Perhaps I've missed a million articles like this (but I doubt it). The main concept behind this article is not all that shocking to me, nor to anybody tuned into the good living of wild natural bullshit (which includes manmade things like abandoned factories and railroad tracks and little children playing with imaginary friends), but still, the level of explanation of how during various times of humanity's civilization, we regarded the brain as different important technological progresses of that period was very interesting to me.
The weird thing is, I had this on my internet reading list checklist since late last week, and then an author guy I know put a link to this on his various social medias, and I momentarily thought "well now I can't use it because he used it," which is ridiculous as fuck. We've somehow started to put stock in this notion that our digital curation is an extension of ourselves, that This is who we Are. We are literally making ourselves believe we are computers and shit. Ultimately I came to my senses (y'all probably don't know that author dude anyways) and included this article in this list of three links for you read-y types, because honestly I'm not sure anybody even sees this. I mean the data suggests somebody might but I don't have any real life verification of that.

The Short Life of Deonte Howard by stupid ass Buzzfeed

Generally there are a list of historically trash websites that I won't visit even if longforms suggests one or somebody sends me a link. All the gawker sites are part of that, also Bleacher Nation SB Report, and also anything that considers itself some sort of Grantland. And definitely Buzzfeed is on that list, in fact it probably tops that list. I can't take seriously anything that used to be the bread and butter (and might still be) of all the grandma's facebook page. But for whatever reason I powered through my personal bias for this one, and found it worthwhile. (The writing is not so great - very basic, but whatever, whoever the kid is who wrote it at least forms sentences without needing animated gifs of Michael Jackson eating popcorn.) The story is one that could probably be told over and over and over again, in various cities. Right now Chicago is that place most obviously in the news with high murder rate, but also Baltimore. It has also been closer to me in DC and even Richmond was always right at the top of this list when I first moved there for college. Now when you live in a place like that you know the boundaries, where people get killed and where they don't, but those boundaries blur and shit creeps over from time to time. If it creeps too far into a safe (white, or more appropriately wealthy, which usually is majority white) then it'll blow up into Serious Public Safety issue.
But an interesting component to this story, which also was the same component to the explosion of gang murders in L.A. back in the mid-80s, was how the breakdown of older gangs and elder gang members actually contributed to a fracturing of traditional codes which caused a spike in murders and assaults. In L.A. this involved them clearing the streets of known hoodlums before the '84 Olympics, which reverberated for the next half dozen years, and only really stopped because of the post-Rodney King verdict riots gang truce. (Man, what a fuckin' pure American sentence that last one was.) This is not to blame the problem on policing alone, but the combination of no future, no hope, plenty guns, plenty drugs, is always gonna ferment into shit like this. I can't help but believe there's some hidden methodology behind the whole thing, because how the fuck do you have so many guns in the street? Like when you think about it logistically, it's mind-boggling. Same with heroin/coke/crack... for something allegedly completely illegal to not only be distributed but broken down to corner level, consistently, despite decades of arresting those corner level people and ruining the rest of their lives, I got no idea how it's been maintained without some hidden methodology behind the curtain that keeps it going.
Nonetheless, this is (another) sad story. Local to me, earlier this year there was a young man who was a 19-year-old senior in high school (this was pointed out, to shine bad light on the kid) who was all-state in football still, and had gotten scholarship offers to attend Division II colleges for football. Something happened, he attached his mom in a store and ran off and ended up getting shot dead by local sheriffs. It sounded like synthetic drugs to me, because even if you have hard drugs, you know what you have and don't flip out on your mom at Ali's Country Store (great fried fish in there, by the way), so I'm speculating synthetic shit. But still, how do you end up shot dead that easy? So many guns and so much self-medication, including by those who are the alleged good guys according to the storyboards.
They said after the shooting state police were investigating the incident, and then there was no more news about it at all, since February. I actually emailed the state police PR person last week to get an update. They are still investigating, she said. Synthetic drugs don't always show up on toxicology reports clearly so I imagine that might've confused their original autopsy-proves-drugs-so-then-say-police-acted-on-threat standard play.
I don't know... the cheapness of human life is bothersome, but I can't but help think there's something institutionally behind it all.

A Severed Head, Two Cops, and the Radical Future of Interrogation from Wired magazine

Speaking of institutional bullshit, this article really lays it all out, but under the pretense of bold new copping maneuvers that listen and allow the truth to be revealed. But let's be clear about a few things - first off, this is handed down from Department of Defense. When you see those huge military budgets, people think it's all about drones and bombs but we all have no idea how much medical research, psychology research, all types of weird shit like that is done off what it technically military budget. Most historical medical advances have come from such research. (I got no proof on that but a PI I worked under told me that one time, and those fuckers think they know everything.)
But secondly, this article basically says the best defense against cops in the old way was don't say shit to the cops. Any even petty criminal knows this. My own father taught me this at a young age (speaking of petty criminals) (me, not my father) (but him too). But even with this new age "let's have a little talk" method, YOU'RE STILL OKAY IF YOU DON'T SAY SHIT TO THE COPS. I guess it's easy to believe that if they're yelling at you, but easier to forget if they're all chummy inviting you into a hotel suite for warm cup of chai.
But even more than that, here is the thing that gets me about this article - it basically accepts the old ways were bullshit and not built off any real proof they worked. So they've now, with the help of top level intelligence fuckers from the military, started to utilize this new method. But the end result is still you get some dude who chopped up his lover to admit guilt, inadvertently, and then get thrown into prison system. The prison system is still very much built off those old broken ways too. So if you want this new age let's listen and let people say their full story, you need to do that shit in prison system too. You might actually be able to apply that and actually rehabilitate somebody, instead of making things worse (which often happens) and also giving them a government paperwork black mark forever which makes it three times as hard to get a job with. So ultimately, my reaction to this article is, "wow, cops doing some new shit, fuck the police though" and I remember my father's voice (he's dead now, been dead for a while) saying "never tell the police anything, ever". You stick to that, and you're still okay, despite their new-fangled psychological tomfoolery.