Hasta La Gadget!

Montrais Boyd may have had a Father’s Day he’ll never forget ― though he probably wants to.

Arizona state troopers arrested Boyd Sunday morning after a series of bizarre events that included allegations he repeatedly punched a patrol car while naked.

An officer responded to a call about a man who was lying down in the northbound median of I-17 near Flagstaff. The caller alleged that the male suspect may have been involved in a possible domestic violence situation, according to a department press release.

When the trooper arrived at the scene, he stopped behind a black BMW sedan blocking one of the traffic lanes.

The officer said a nude man later identified as Boyd ran toward the patrol car and began hitting it repeatedly with his fists. 

The trooper drove away from the enraged suspect and stopped in front of the sedan. That’s when he noticed a passenger inside of the BMW: a 4-year-old boy later identified as Boyd’s son.

Boyd, still naked, got back in the BMW and started ramming the patrol vehicle numerous time before fleeing the scene in the wrong lane going northbound in a southbound lane.

The suspect drove that way for a mile before losing control of the Beemer, running into the shoulder and then re-entering the southbound lanes before getting back into the northbound lanes.

The patrol vehicle, disabled from the pummeling, was unable to keep up with the BMW. That is, until about five miles later when Boyd made things easier by hitting a rock embankment and rolling the sedan, according to Phoenix New Times. 

Boyd and son were transported to a local hospital and treated for minor bruises and abrasions before being released.

However, they did not spend the rest of Father’s Day together. The boy was picked up at the hospital by his mother while Boyd was taken to the Coconino County jail and booked for aggravated assault with a dangerous instrument, felony endangerment, child abuse and criminal damage charges.

Jail records show he remains behind bars on $150,000 bail ― presumably with clothes on.

The officer whose vehicle was allegedly punched by Boyd is currently at home recovering from an injury sustained during the incident. He is expected to recover, according to the Department of Public Safety release.

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Cross-posted from TomDispatch.com

If you want to know just what kind of mental space Washington’s still-growing cult of “national security” would like to take us into, consider a recent comment by retired general and Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly. In late May on Fox and Friends, he claimed that “the American public would ‘never leave the house’ if they knew what he knew about terrorist threats.”

That seems like a reasonable summary of the national security state’s goal in the post-9/11 era: keep Americans in a fear-filled psychic-lockdown mode when it comes to supposed threats to our safety.  Or put another way, the U.S. is a country in which the growing power of that shadow state and its staggering funding over the last decade and a half has been based largely on the promotion of the dangers of a single relatively small peril to Americans: “terrorism.”  And as commonly used, that term doesn’t even encompass all the acts of political harm, hatred, and intimidation on the landscape, just those caused by a disparate group of Islamic extremists, who employ the tactics by which such terrorism is now defined.  Let’s start with the irony that, despite the trillions of dollars that have poured into the country’s 17 intelligence agencies, its post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon in these years, the damage such terrorists have been able to inflict from Boston to San Bernardino to Orlando, while modest in a cumulative sense, has obviously by no means been stopped.  That, in turn, makes the never-ending flow of American taxpayer dollars into what we like to call “national security” seem a poor investment indeed.

To deal with so many of the other perils in American life, it would occur to no one to build a massive and secretive government machinery of prevention. I’m thinking, for instance, of tots who pick up guns left lying around and kill others or themselves, or of men who pick up guns or other weapons and kill their wives or girlfriends. Both those phenomena have been deadlier to citizens of the United States in these years than the danger against which the national security state supposedly defends us. And I’m not even mentioning here the neo-Nazi and other white terrorists who seem to have been given a kind of green light in the Trump era (or even the disturbed Bernie Sanders supporter who just went after congressional Republicans on a ball field in Virginia).  Despite their rising acts of mayhem, there is no suggestion that you need to shelter in place from them. And I’m certainly not going to dwell on the obvious: if you really wanted to protect yourself from one of the most devastating killers this society faces, you might leave your house with alacrity, but you’d never get into your car or any other vehicle. (In 2015, 38,300 people died on American roads and yet constant fear about cars is not a characteristic of this country.)

It’s true that when Islamic terrorists strike, as in two grim incidents in England recently, the media and the security state ramp up our fears to remarkable heights, making Americans increasingly anxious about something that’s unlikely to harm them. Looked at from a different angle, the version of national security on which that shadow state funds itself has some of the obvious hallmarks of both an elaborate sham and scam and yet it is seldom challenged here. It’s become so much a part of the landscape that few even think to question it.

In his latest post, Ira Chernus, TomDispatch regular and professor of religious studies, reminds us in “A Psychedelic Spin on ‘National Security’” that it hasn’t always been so, that there was a moment just a half-century ago when the very idea of American national security was confronted at such a basic level that, ironically, the challenge wasn’t even understood as such. In this particular lockdown moment, however, perhaps it’s worth staying in your house and following Chernus, who’s visited the 1960s before for this website, on a long, strange trip back to 1967 and the famed Summer of Love.

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What in the covfefe?

On Monday, President Donald Trump met with the president of Panama, Juan Carlos Varela, at the White House. During their meeting, the two world leaders discussed important international topics such as, uh, the Panama Canal.

“The Panama Canal is doing quite well,” Trump said during a photo opportunity with Varela. “I think we did a good job building it, right?”

To which Varela immediately responded, “Yeah. One hundred years ago.”

Yet, Varela’s shade didn’t even register with Trump, who then said,
“We did a very good job.”

Naturally, no one really knows why Trump made that statement. 

But, as per usual, Twitter has its theories.

For instance, some think that it’s just Trump, in typical Trump fashion, taking credit for something he didn’t actually do.  

While others think he was just poorly prepared for the meeting. 

There’s also a fair amount of people who think Trump was simply playing word association and said the first thing that came to his head when he thought of the word “Panama”:

And, of course, there were a few folks who just wanted to make a solid Trump joke.

Yet, why Trump said what he said — much like most of the things that fly out of his mouth — will most likely remain a mystery.

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