Puck

Charles Diez shot a bike rider in the head -- and got 120 days in jail

Via Treehugger:

While driving down the road one day, Charles Diaz grew upset at seeing a man riding his bike on a busy street with his 3 year-old son. So he shot him in the head. Thankfully, the bullet narrowly missed his skull, instead getting lodged in the cyclists’ helmet. Well, Diaz has just been sentenced for admitting to nearly murdering a man by firing a gun towards his head–and he’s received a paltry 4 months in jail.

Police said Charles Diez, an Asheville firefighter since 1992, stopped his car to confront a couple riding bikes along heavily traveled Tunnel Road. Diez was apparently incensed by Alan Simons carrying his 3-year-old child on a seat mounted on the back of his bike. After an argument, Diez pulled a gun and shot at Simons, but the bullet passed through Simon’s bicycle helmet, just missing his skull, police said.

Via Streetsblog:

In August, a grand jury reduced charges against Diez from attempted first degree murder to felony assault. While assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill certainly sounds like an offense worthy of a lengthy prison term, the presiding judge apparently agreed that this was a case of a stand-up guy having a bad day.

Via Mountain Xpress:

Convictions on such a charge result in an average 20-39 months in prison for the defendant. But in the sentencing, Superior Court Judge James Downs found that Diez’s military service, along with testimony from former colleagues about his good character, were mitigating factors, and chose to sentence him to 15-27 months instead. Downs suspended all but four months of that sentence unless Diez breaks the law again in the next 30 months.

Fox is using intimidation tactics on its affiliates to get them to run pro-war in Iran (read it again: Iran) programming. Fox’s “political experts” (AKA poli-spurts) cite a build up of nuclear weapons as a good reason to start the bombing in five minutes. Read all about it here and sign the networx open letter here. And then go watch some videos over at the Willie Nelson Peace Research Institute.

fiction by Brian Charles Clark

“I’m in heaven,” Orkney sings as he and his little black bag bloom through the door. I’d swear he was gesticulating wildly, but no, it’s just his aura flaring.
I’m smacking cornflakes, sitting stoic as a reader in bed.
“Where ya been? Been specten ya.”
Orkney trips another step into the little yellow room. He grins like a refrigerator door swinging open, waves away my question.
“We’re in the news,” he says.
AWOL, base police, truncheons, court marshal, the Group W bench.
“I’m trying not to jump to conclusions here,” I say. I feel like an old felt hat. Too comfortable to have much backbone. I eye Orkney suspiciously.
He hands me his cache, snicks it on. I click the Morning with WNN bookmark automatically.
“Click on obituaries.”
“Scu me?” But I click anyway.
Flip me. There we are. Our names.
“We were killed in the war.” We were killed in the war? Did I miss something? Read the rest of this entry »

Liz and Jay continue to kick out the jams: their latest project–actually one that they’ve been involved in for many years, but that is now seeing the light of the digital day–is a collaboration with Willie Nelson. Yeah, *that* Willie Nelson: he of the tao and the beater guitar and all. “The Willie Nelson Peace Research Institute believes in the Promise of Peace on Earth in Our Lifetime as the Birthright of Our Global Human Family.” Amen to that, brothers and sisters. I’m saying, check it out now–while you still can. The site is full of great ideas that ought to get your compassion flowing. Here’s a verse from a lyric by Willie and Amy Nelson:

There is a peaceful solution. It’s called a peace revolution.
Now let’s take back America.
There’s a war and we’re in it, but I know we can win it.
So let’s take back America.

Now check out Willie singing the whole thing a cappella.

We’ve known for a good long while now that Senator Santorum is an unlawful enemy combatant, working, as he does, for Lord Sauron. Proof has finally arrived, if you know how to read between the lines. In an interview published in the Bucks County Courier Times, the Myrmidon of Mordor said, “As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.” Now I’m a Tolkein fan from way back, but this is just fuckin weird. This is war, damn it, not an RPG.

Please check out 15-year-old media-activist Ava Lowery’s site, peacetakescourage.com. She’s visually articulate and very couragous. She’s also received some truly hateful responses to her work. One hate-monger wrote to her, threatening, “It’s people like you who need to fucking die and get raped while your corpse rots in the sun…. Fuck you, I would jack off on your parents if I could. If you don’t like the team, get out of the park. That means take ur small dick and get the fuck off of my homeland you faggot chocolate gulper.” A story about Ava, her work, and the respone to it (both positive and negative) can be found at The Progressive.

“Dear Senators Cantwell and Murray: I’m ashamed to admit that I once thought you were pretty good senators. But you and your party’s lack of support for Senator Feingold’s move to censure President Bush for his crimes against civil society, the people of Iraq, and the people of the world through torture and wrongful imprisonment, leave me sick at heart and stomach. You can count on me to do whatever I can to see that you are not reelected. No more Democrats, the party of the chickens. And no more Republicans, the part of the chickenhawks.” Use this letter as a model, if you like; and contact your senators using this form.

A vital bit of news has gone missing in action (again). Here’s the scoop from The Nation, followed by a suggestion regarding what you can do about the missing story. “A new memo leaked to the British media last week asserts that George Bush and Tony Blair agreed in January 2003 to go to war in Iraq–not March 2003, as they insist. It also suggests that the leaders knew there was no legitimate case for war, and that Blair told Bush that he was ’solidly’ behind US plans to invade Iraq before he sought advice about the invasion’s legality. Most shocking, it reveals that Bush was so desperate to provoke a war that he proposed painting US planes to look like UN aircrafts and flying them low over Iraq in hopes of inciting an Iraqi attack. (Bush to Blair: ‘The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.’)” Take action! Write your local newspaper and demand coverage of this story. Here’s a draft letter that I sent to various papers in the Pacific Northwest as well as the New York Time. Be sure to revise the letter a bit before sending. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

Regarding the Pain of Others
by Susan Sontag
Publisher: Picador, 2004

Susan Sontag’s new book, Regarding the Pain of Others, updates, expands, and in certain respects repudiates her 1977 book On Photography. Where On Photography was quite theoretical and full of jargon, following, as it did, the work of the French critic Roland Barthes, Regarding the Pain of Others is a series of simple ideas written in plain language. The new book is nonetheless, or perhaps more so because of its simplicity, a work of profound and needed philosophy. The core questions of this short book are, Do photographs of the destruction and pain caused by war in any way inhibit such acts? Or do such photos, because of their prevalence, inure us to the pain of others? Where once, as during the Vietnam war, “photography became… a criticism of war” through a public display of the carnage, “[t]his was bound to have consequences,” a “blowback” reaction since the “mainstream media are not in the business of making people feel queasy about the struggles for which they are being mobilized.” Contemporary news media are, rather, in the entertainment business. Thus, in the current war, the media have been willing and eager flag-waving dupes of the military. Read the rest of this entry »