Listen to the Silence

A knee across the neck will not (except for very rare circumstances, or circumstances involving deliberate impact, not simple pressure) cause death.  The death in Minneapolis was NOT caused by a knee on the neck.  It was caused by positional asphyxiation.  They are two different things.   They are two very technically different things, and the differences are fairly technical and specific.   But they are also fairly simple - and extremely important.  Because you can say you "accidentally" put a knee on the "wrong part" of the back, and it slipped onto the neck.  You can NOT say that you left a man, face down, chest muscles seized due to skeletal-muscular constriction/positioning, for seven and a half minutes..."accidentally".  One, a knee on the neck, can be claimed to be bad training, or an accident.  The other, positional asphyxiation, is murder.  Plain.   Simple.  Murder.  When you handcuff the hands behind the back of most people (save contortionists,

Minneapolis is Burning.  The city on the lake is on fire, and not just with tension, racial and economic.   It's literally on fire, as police are forced to abandon their stations, and fires go untreated as the sheer press of bodies keeps firefighters and first responders from being able to respond to alarms.  And for the first time, I have to think... maybe this time its' right.  In Minneapolis, an officer committed murder, while wearing the shield and uniform that I've considered sacrosanct for the 40 years of my life.   Before I could pronounce the words to the oath, I considered the badge of an Officer something sacred.  It was up there with the uniform of an Army Officer or a Marine.  You took it, and the oath that came with it, and you bound yourself to a meaning larger than yourself.  Only God, and your brothers (and sisters) could judge what you had done, and be the final arbiter of whether you deserved to be called a good cop, or a disgrace to the badge.  But lately

Can we please, please, PLEASE just be fucking civil? The various media and newspapers and indie papers and social groups...they're stirring up shit. I get that. That's how they get ratings. "Let's You and Him fight," is one of the oldest games in politics. More than a few journalists have been caught lying about sources, making up articles or doing "he said, she said" to start a newsworthy piece of drama. Groups like that have agendas. Ones that rarely have all of our lovely hearts in mind. I get that. I hope /you/ get that. Because that's the kicker. We're angry people, and they're fucking liars trying to make a buck off us being angry. They're doing the talking for us. They're lumping you into their shit piece of a story and selling it prepacked to channels. And we're just taking it. Fox tilts center right, CNN tilts hard left, NBC waffles, Breitbart has cleared so far out into right field it's out of the park and the WaPo a

Okay, so, I'm going to put this up there.  Feel free to ignore it - I'm used to it.   *Nobody loves me, every body hates me, I guess I'll go eat worms...* Ahem.   Sorry.  I wish everyone who participates in the Deactivation boycott good luck.   I hope it fulfills some emotional need they have to participate, and that it will cause notice in the community (outside of Fetlife) and maybe bring even more (and hopefully more effective) discussion out of the shame closet and into the common core of our culture.    That said.   (No seriously, it was said.  Really.  Look above.  It was meant, too!) It is highly unlikely to actually change anything here on Fetlife.   And not because Fetlife is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.  Although it can be.   At times.  (and at other times.)  Not because John Baku is a misogynist, or a dissent silencer, or a villainous villain.  (He might be.   He might not be.  Who knows?) It's because, put simply, Fetlife is **not** a community.   C

Recordin'ses - Questions about Torquemada Paddles for CreativeKink Because you people have asked before what I sound like - and you deserve to suffer to find out.

I was married from 2002 to 2009 to a woman who had me convinced that I was abusive, for all seven years.   Even with a thick file of hospital visits and scars from cuts, I "should have known better".  She was just a "passionate woman" and I should man up.  With a lump of scar tissue on the back of my skull from a cast iron skillet....still the hospital social worker pulled her aside to ask if she was "okay".   Blood and stitches to the contrary, I was 6'4" and 250lbs, she was 5'4" and a hundred pounds lighter.  I was the bigger one, I was the man, so I was the abuser.  End of story. The police only ever spoke to tell me to spend the night elsewhere because she asked them to.  I was having my scalp stitched the first time that happened.  I learned to just keep quiet and go along with it after the second time.  My one and only call to them for help (after I left the ER with broken fingers) never received an officer response. I slept at

Whatever happened to Innocent until Proven Guilty? (Some of my rants are a bit like going to war – you won’t all be here at the end.  This is one of those.) In our lifestyle, I see a frightening trend.   I see it coming out of a good place, and (mostly) good hearts – but all I can think of is the adage about the road paved with good intentions. I’m sure Joe McCarthy had good intentions too. We live in a society (in the US) where we’re presumed innocent, until proven guilty. Yes, that does mean that sometimes the guilty go free, or unpunished.   The system isn’t perfect.  And what of the victims?   And future victims?  Why do we let these criminals go free when we could keep them all locked up?   Because it’s better a dozen bad men go free than one innocent man languishing in prison.   That’s the whole point of the Innocence Project and Amnesty International.   Aren’t those wrongly accused also victims?   If you’ve ever been in a prison, or seen the damage from