This is me, ConnorP, and the contents of my brain when it doesn't belong anywhere else, or even if it does. Various topics, various thoughts, various degrees of seriousness, but all me.
There are no hospitals in space. The closest E.R. is back on Earth, and astronauts can’t exactly jump in a cab to get there. So what happens if the sun burps out a massive blast of radiation while an astronaut is space-amblin’ by?
The NASA Biocapsule—made of carbon nanotubes—will be able to “diagnose” and instantly treat an astronaut without him or her even knowing there’s something amiss. It would be like having your own personal Dr. McCoy—implanted under your skin. It represents one of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of medicine, and yes, it’ll work on Earth, too.
Out of all the amazing things we saw during our NASA visits, nothing blew our minds as much as this tiny little bundle of carbon. The Space Biosciences Division at NASA Ames creates medical technology for astronauts. They essentially provide healthcare for outer space. Dr. David Loftus is the man who invented the NASA Biocapsule and has been awarded a patent for it.
Picture this: An astronaut is going to Mars. The round-trip journey will take between two and three years. During that time, the astronaut will not have access to a doctor, and there’s a lot that can go wrong with the human body in space. So, prior to launch, the astronaut is implanted with a number of NASA Biocapsules. A very small incision is made in the astronaut’s skin for each Biocapsule (probably in the thigh), which is implanted subcutaneously. It’s outpatient surgery that requires only local anesthetic and a stitch or two to close the wound. But after it’s complete, the astronaut’s body is equipped to deal with a whole host of problems on its own.
few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend — I’ll call her Eileen — passed through, her hand in a cast.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“Oh, this?” she held it up. “I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the Six Month Anniversary of the Occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast.” “ Again?” someone said.
We had all been hearing stories like this. In fact, there had been continual reports of police officers groping women during the nightly evictions from Union Square itself over the previous two weeks.
“Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, ‘you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?’ So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.”
When Mayor Michael Bloomberg referred to the NYPD as his “private army” and the “seventh largest standing army in the world,” he managed to provoke scorn from all but his most slavish admirers. Though his description was wildly inaccurate regarding the size of the department, his overall Putin-esque characterization of the cops as a extra-municipal tool to be deployed at his whim struck many as remarkably and accidentally honest.
Bloomberg does deserve some credit for managing to hoodwink a large number of New Yorkers into believing he’s some sort of benevolent technocrat instead of the corporate oligarch he so clearly is. But when it comes to handling Occupy, Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly – and the NYPD at large – are facing a new level of resistance.
Fifteen plaintiffs, including five elected officials, members of the press, an Iraq war veteran, and Occupy Wall Street activists are suing the city in federal court, alleging gross misconduct ranging from false arrest and imprisonment to possible conspiracy between the police department and JPMorgan Chase to chill citizen’s rights to peaceably assemble. The suit is known as Rodriguez v. Winski and calls for, among other measures, the creation of an independent federal position to oversee the NYPD. The department is out of control, the suit alleges, and is incapable of holding itself accountable.
I’m also a plaintiff in the case and can testify from first-hand experience that the NYPD is out of control. This is obviously not news to the hundreds of thousands of young men of color who are stopped and frisked by the cops every year, and it’s always important to stress that the kind of suppression a political movement like Occupy faces is both quantitatively and categorically different than the oppression marginalized communities face. So the stories laid out below come with the caveat of “police brutality in New York isn’t new, but it’s crazy and maybe we can get this under control.”
In some ways what makes this lawsuit so extraordinary is the inclusion of four city council members, one of whom was beaten bloody and arrested by the police. Ydanis Rodriguez, the lead plaintiff in the case, was prevented from witnessing the eviction of Liberty Square by the NYPD on November 15, 2011. Rodriquez represents the 10th Council District in Manhattan and on the night of the raid he went to Liberty Square to exercise his right to observe police actions as granted to him by the council charter. By the end of the night Rodriguez was bloodied and in police custody, thereby rendering him incapable of fulfilling his duty to his constituents to act as a monitor.
The NYPD’s contempt for the press has been well documented. Ray Kelly’s widely circulated memo telling his officers to allow the press to do their job has been uniformly ignored, which shows either Kelly’s lack of control over his forces, or, more likely, the bad-faith in which it was written and distributed. From arresting so-called mainstream journalists like plaintiff Stephanie Keith, to harassing freelance photographers, to preventing the press from witnessing police misconduct, to manhandling reporters and their crews, to threatening to confiscate press badges, to (in my case) getting arrested for not having press credentials, it’s fair to say the NYPD considers the First Amendment more of a friendly suggestion than a constitutional right.
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