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Saw “London Has Fallen” last night at Regal Cinema on North Roosevelt Blvd, Key West. Billed as a “family movie,” what a bizarre story line. American drone drops missile in private compound where huge Muslim wedding is underway. The target is Mulsim bad guy arms dealer, who sells weapons to people who use them on Americans, while America is selling weapons to people who use them on America’s enemies. Bad guy somehow escapes what appears to be total annihilation of everyone inside the compound, mostly his own relatives and friends of the young bride and groom, and lots of children. Bad guy spends long time plotting revenge. Kills British Prime Minister, but it looks like he died of natural causes. American president and heads of state from around the world come to London for funeral. Bad guy’s forces, including what appears to be one-half of London police force, attack and kill many innocent bystanders, including women and children, and most of the heads of state, and blow up several London landmarks, including London Bridge and West Minister Abbey. But, of course, otherwise there’d be no movie for Americans, the American president is saved, and repeatedly saved thereafter, by his chief of security, a serious bad buy with wife at home expecting her first baby.
After lots of narrow escapes and plenty more shooting and blowing up of things and people, the president finally is captured and the idea is to torture and then behead him on You Tube, but his now back on his feet security chief, after having survived, along with the president, their car being rammed by a big truck, with help of British commandos and the security chief’s old M16 flame, who figures out the code the bad guy used to hack into British command center with help of insider in British Intelligence, so that the power is resorted in the British command center and all over London, while the president’s security chief rescues the president just in the nick of time, killing an endless number of bad guys. Then, together, they kill a lot more bad guys with automatic weapons, grenades and knives taken off bad guys they killed. Then, the security chief calls the British commando leader and tells him to detonate the C-4 charges, I imagine it was, the security chief had placed in strategic locations in the bad guy’s London building, in which the president and his security chief are surrounded by many more bad guys, and they dive down a shaft of some kind, several stories, and avoid the giant explosion and inferno death and destruction above and are not even seriously injured from falling several stories to the first floor, where the British commandos find them and leave them to find their own way to safety, because the commandos have something else more important to do, what that is I didn’t get.
Morgan Freeman plays the US vice-president, who has telephone conversations with the head bad guy, whose entire family the drone had killed. As the bad guy is threatening the war has just begun, the vice-president tells the bad guy to look out his window, which is a skylight overhead, just in time to see a drone dropped missile descending, KA-BOOM!!!, everyone in the building is vaporized and plenty of bystanders out on the street, too. The president’s security chief, after hearing the vice-president say on TV it isn’t okay to do nothing and let bad things happen, deletes the email resigning from his job, which he had written but did not send before leaving his pregnant wife and going with the president to London.
End of movie.
Terrific, I thought. How fucked up is that? Hollywood endorses American drone warfare anywhere. I leave you to have your own opinion, either from what you read above, or from seeing the movie. However, I will tell you, in a dream last night, it was crystal clear the angels very much do not like the killing of innocent civilians, especially children, for any reason.
Down here on Asteroid Key West, three “teasers” from today’s every Friday edition of online Key West the Newspaper (thebluepaper.com):
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE: Charles Eimers Death-in-Custody
by Naja and Arnaud Girard…….
The image of the gray PT Cruiser parked sideways on South Beach with the huddle of Key West police officers who’d just realized the man they’d piled on top of had stopped breathing is probably going to remain in the memories of Key Westers for a long time.
What went wrong on that Thanksgiving morning in 2013 has been the center of considerable controversy.
“My dad always had this dream of spending a winter in Key West,” Treavor Eimers, Charles Eimers’ son, told The Blue Paper two years ago.
It was Charles’ first day in Key West. That morning he had run into trouble with KWPD, a low speed chase ended up on the beach at the end of Duval Street. Charles would not survive the encounter with a half a dozen of Key West’s finest. The incident has left the community with many unanswered questions.
Another piece of the puzzle arrived this week with the announcement by the Department of Justice that they had completed the review of the FBI’s investigation into the in-custody death of the 61-year-old tourist. DOJ declined to take any action against the officers under the federal criminal civil rights statutes. A complaint had been submitted by Key West’s Citizen Review Board [CRB], last year, over concerns of a possible cover-up of police use of excessive force.Continue reading »
OPINION: Vote “No” on Peary Court Purchase
by Diane Beruldsen……. I attended recent affordable housing workshops and felt there were many people who were not getting listened to. The meetings scaled over concerns that the group being protected (those who can afford to pay $2400/month in rent) were the wrong group to protect. For this reason, I wanted to hear the opinions of people in [read more…]
Homeless Log Date: 3 March 2016, Key West Asteroid
by Sloan Bashinsky……. During this past Tuesday night’s city commission meeting, City Attorney Shawn Smith advised the mayor and city commissioners that the U.S. Department of Justice had determined there was no prosecutable offense in the Charles Eimers death in police custody case, which the blue paper broke and continued vigorously investigating and reporting through [read more…]
In today’s Key West Citizen, an update on a case the blue paper broke and, I imagine, will have more to report on before too long. My interjected thoughts in bold italics:
Matthew Murphy
Friday, March 4, 2016
Settlement near in lawsuit involving Taser
BY ADAM LINHARDT Citizen Staff
alinhardt@keysnews.com
The City of Key West and the family of a man left permanently disabled after a Key West police officer shot him with a Taser in 2011 have reached a potential settlement to the family’s lawsuit, according to federal court records.
U.S. District Judge Jose E. Martinez issued a notice of the settlement on Wednesday stating that the issue now awaits approval by the Key West City Commission, which will likely vote on the settlement at its regularly scheduled March 15 public meeting.
The judge also ruled that all pending motions filed by either the family or the city as moot.
If the city has agreed to pay the family a specific monetary figure — as is typical in such cases — that figure will likely not be public record until the commission discusses it at the March 15 meeting.
Commissioners met in a closed-door session late Thursday afternoon in which the case was one of the items to be discussed, said Mayor Craig Cates.
The judge’s order was part of a update on ongoing mediation efforts between both sides of the lawsuit, said the attorney representing the city, Michael Burke.
“It is a potential settlement,” Burke said. “The city commission always has to review these things so an attorney is not unilaterally making a decision.”
Burke said he could not disclose what the monetary amount, if any, was agreed upon by both sides.
Marty Murphy sued the city and Officer Mark Siracuse, who used the Taser on Murphy’s son, Matthew Shaun Murphy, about 3:30 a.m. April 16, 2011, according to a 10-page complaint filed at U.S. District Court in Miami last year.
The backstory, as I read it in the blue paper and heard from Naja and Arnaud Girard, was: Matthew Murphy’s girlfriend, Marie Annulysse, mother to be of Shaun Murphy, not yet born, wanted Matthew and her to go to Duval Street, and Matthew didn’t want to go, because he had a premonition he would have trouble with the police. But he set aside his premonition and went to Duval Street with Marie, who is black, Mathew is white. Around 4 a.m. they were walking on a sidewalk on lower Duval Street, where most of the action is that time of night, and a drunk woman in a white couple sitting on the ground, holding her pit bull, hollered something about making monkey babies at Michael and Marie. Michael headed toward the couple, and the white man tried to talk Michael into letting it go, his girlfriend was drunk, keep walking. But Matthew punched the white man, and was drawn back to hit him again when he was tasered and fell and hit his head on the concrete and received a terrible brain injury, which, the brain injury, I can’t see how the police officer could have anticipated.
Left with a traumatic brain injury, he has remained motionless in a hospital bed since the incident, according to his family.
Murphy’s family, who reside in West Virginia, wants the city to pay both compensatory and punitive damages, saying the incident left the son without the care and financial support of his father.
Siracuse, who has been cleared of any wrongdoing by Key West police and the State Attorney’s Office, said he was forced to use his Taser on Murphy in order to stop a fight on Duval Street.
“KWPD appears to have acted in a professional manner in their approach to the initial call,” wrote the state attorney’s chief investigator Christopher Weber in a 17-page report filed in 2014.
Police Chief Donie Lee has said that an internal review of the incident showed Siracuse used proper force during the takedown of an uncooperative subject.
Murphy was facing off with a man who was shouting racial epithets at Murphy and his girlfriend, Marie Annulysse, according to witness statements and court records.
Siracuse arrived and pointed his Taser at Murphy’s shoulder, but Murphy ignored the device’s light, reeled back and punched one of the shouters — a man named Jason Moffet — in the face, reports state.
Then Murphy reached back a second time, Siracuse wrote in his report.
“Fearing further injury to Moffet, I deployed my Taser, striking Murphy with both probes,” Siracuse wrote. Murphy fell to the ground, hitting his head.
Witness accounts vary. In a videotaped interview posted on YouTube, Moffet said the police officer never announced himself and sided with Murphy’s family account of the incident.
Pretty darn unusual for the victim siding against the police officer who came to the victim’s rescue, don’t you think? Why would the victim do that, if he was not telling the truth? Naja Girard told me Officer Siracuse had a high number of incidents in which he had deployed his taser before this incident. A considerably higher number than Officer Gary Lee Lovette, who had been recorded on his taser as having said that he came down on him (Charles Eimers) like a fucking bomb and they (the police) had killed him. Lovette and the other KWPD officers were exonerated in that case, but the city’s insurance carrier basically forced the city to settle the lawsuit filed by Eimer’s family, for $900,000, which was $100,000 under the policy limits. The insurance carrier did that, because it was trying to protect the city from a much larger jury verdict, which the carrier would only pay up to $1,000,000 and the city would pay the rest. It remains to be seen if something like that will come down in the Murphy case, with the city, as it did in the Eimers case, saying the settlement is a business decision by the city’s insurance carrier over which the city has no control. That’s B.S. The insurance carrier has to have the city’s agreement to settle civil litigation against the city.
Annulysse, who is raising their son in Key West, filed a written complaint with the Citizen Review Board after the incident, saying Siracuse “lied” in his report.
Murphy’s family claims the entire incident arose from Siracuse’s failure to identify himself as a police officer before deploying the Taser.
The family claimed in the lawsuit that Siracuse approached Murphy from behind and “suddenly and without issuing any warning whatsoever,” discharged “50,000 volts of electricity through two darts striking Murphy.”
What a pity for all concerned, Michael and Marie did not heed Michael premonition.
Also in today’s Citizen, comic relief – sort of, my interjected thoughts in bold italics, I added the photo:
Strip club customer demands refund
CITIZEN STAFF
KEY WEST — A 62-yearold tourist claiming to be a prosecutor became enraged at a strip club early Wednesday morning after a dancer there refused to touch his genitals, according to a Key West police incident report. There were no reported arrests. Officers were called to Living Dolls, 516 Fleming St., at 12:30 a.m. where they found the Massachusetts tourist in a rage threatening to make a citizen’s arrest if police didn’t arrest the employees there, reports state. The man told police he gave a dancer $100 initially and then another $200 and requested she touch him, but she said she would not engage in any sexual acts, reports state. He became angry and went to the lobby seeking a refund, but was denied by a manager. The man threatened to break things in the lobby and harm the manager if he didn’t get back his $300, reports state. The manager eventually pointed a can of mace at the tourist, fearing for her safety. When police arrived the man was still inside arguing with the manager, reports say. There were no reported injuries. He began using vulgar language with the officer and he was told if he entered the business again, he would be placed in handcuffs. “After returning (the man’s ID), he stormed off with an unsatisfied attitude,” the officer wrote.
My goodness, what a downer, not getting his genitals touched, and not getting jerked off - no wonder he had an unsatisfied attitude! Maybe he’s used to oriental massage? I myself never went into Living Dolls, but have walked and bicycled past it hundreds of times, so I don’t know what goes on inside, or sometimes goes on inside. What leaps out at me, though, if a homeless man had behaved lewdly toward one of the living dolls sitting on a folding chair outside of the establishment, he very likely would have next found himself sprayed with mace, then arrested and taken to jail.
To end today’s frolic, a massage school amigo from one of my previous lives started a romp on Facebook yesterday:
Samuel Bogdanove
The post man always rings twice and DELIVERS TOO! I wonder if the Post Office will have to pay child support?
Key West Fantasy Fest babes
sloanbashinsky@outlook.com
