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Here are some more “ambiguous” phrases which courts have found DO NOT invoke your right to a lawyer:

“Maybe I should speak to my lawyer first.”

“I might like a lawyer.”

“I think I should have a lawyer present for this.”

“Could I speak to my lawyer first?”

“How long until my lawyer gets here?”

And perhaps most egregiously – “Get me a lawyer, dawg – ‘cause this is not what’s up.”

Here are the magic phrases which you need to know if you want to invoke your Miranda rights:

1) “Am I free to leave?”

It’s worth asking this even if the answer is obvious. Even if the officer does not let you leave, by forcing them to admit that you are not free to leave, you are creating a record which your attorney can use to prove that you were in custody. Miranda rights only apply if the interrogation is custodial, meaning that police officers will frequently claim that their suspects were “not in custody” to get around their Miranda rights.

2) “I am invoking my right to remain silent.”

Simply staying silent will not invoke your right to remain silent. As absurd as this is, you must explicitly say that you are invoking your right to remain silent in order to invoke that right.

3) “I am invoking my right to an attorney.”

As stated above, you must be not only clear and unambiguous, but clear and legally unambiguous. Don’t get cute. Don’t get sassy. And on the flip side, don’t get intimidated and use verbal ticks to minimize your request. Say the line with those words exactly – say it clearly, and say it once, and then say nothing else.

Because even after you’ve done all this, the police can still try to get you to talk. They’re not supposed to interrogate you, but they’re allowed to make casual conversation, and if that conversation just happens to circle back around to the thing they wanted to question you about, well, that’s really your fault for talking after you said you wouldn’t, isn’t it? Can’t possibly fault the poor officers when you initiated – if you really wanted to have your rights respected, you wouldn’t have talked to them in the first place.

The police know this, and they will mercilessly exploit this loophole. So, once you’ve successfully invoked your Miranda rights, any and all conversation you have with police officers will put those rights back into jeopardy. 

Putting it all together:

Ask: “Am I free to leave?”

If they say no, say: “I am invoking my right to remain silent and I am invoking my right to an attorney.”

And then shut up and do not say a single thing to them for any reason whatsoever until you have actually spoken to an attorney. Yes, even if it takes hours. Yes, even if they start talking to you about something else.

Finally, a very important disclaimer:

Thread about incels/MRA culture in Canadian media as it relates to the Toronto Van Attack, by @ChurchCarlton

Context:

‘Nobody’s seen anything like this’: 10 dead, 15 injured in north Toronto van ramming attack

Gymnastics has come a long compared to that old footage, but this difference is particularly significant for black girls! Because they have never taken seriously our abilities! Just because the color of our skin is not what they want to see!

Simone Biles’s fantastic performance has been covered by many news outlets all these years! Now we can see the real difference!

In 1997, two composers created ‘The Most Unwanted Song’ by issuing a public opinion survey and compiling all the lyrical and musical elements that most people found annoying. The song features a harp with an accordion, out-of-tune children singing about Christmas and Walmart, lots of high-pitched flutes with tubas and keyboard demos, someone yelling random political terms through a megaphone, and an operatic soprano rapping over cowboy music, bagpipes, and screaming. It’s 22 minutes long. Source Source 2

Brighton Park is a predominantly Latino community on the southwest side of Chicago. It’s a neighborhood threatened by poverty, gang violence, ICE raids, and isolation—in a city where income, race, and zip code can determine access to jobs, schools, healthy food, and essential services. It is against this backdrop that the Chicago teacher Xian Franzinger Barrett arrived at the neighborhood’s elementary school in 2014.

Recognizing the vast economic and racial inequalities his students faced, he chose what some might consider a radical approach for his writing and social-studies classes, weaving in concepts such as racism, classism, oppression, and prejudice. Barrett said it was vital to reject the oft-perpetuated narrative that society is fair and equal to address students’ questions and concerns about their current conditions. And Brighton Elementary’s seventh- and eighth-graders quickly put the lessons to work—confronting the school board over inequitable funding, fighting to install a playground, and creating a classroom library focused on black and Latino authors.

“Students who are told that things are fair implode pretty quickly in middle school as self-doubt hits them,” he said, “and they begin to blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”

Barrett’s personal observation is validated by a newly published study in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development that finds traditionally marginalized youth who grew up believing in the American ideal that hard work and perseverance naturally lead to success show a decline in self-esteem and an increase in risky behaviors during their middle-school years. The research is considered the first evidence linking preteens’ emotional and behavioral outcomes to their belief in meritocracy, the widely held assertion that individual merit is always rewarded.

“If you’re in an advantaged position in society, believing the system is fair and that everyone could just get ahead if they just tried hard enough doesn’t create any conflict for you … [you] can feel good about how [you] made it,” said Erin Godfrey, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School. But for those marginalized by the system—economically, racially, and ethnically—believing the system is fair puts them in conflict with themselves and can have negative consequences.

“If the system is fair, why am I seeing that everybody who has brown skin is in this kind of job? You’re having to think about that … like you’re not as good, or your social group isn’t as good,” Godfrey said. “That’s the piece … that I was trying to really get at [by studying] these kids.”

The findings build upon a body of literature on “system justification”—a social-psychology theory that believes humans tend to defend, bolster, or rationalize the status quo and see overarching social, economic, and political systems as good, fair, and legitimate. System justification is a distinctively American notion, Godfrey said, built on myths used to justify inequities, like “If you just work hard enough you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps … it’s just a matter of motivation and talent and grit.” Yet, as she and her colleagues discovered, these beliefs can be a liability for disadvantaged adolescents once their identity as a member of a marginalized group begins to gel—and once they become keenly aware of how institutional discrimination disadvantages them and their group.

“If you’re [inclined] to believe that … the system is fair, then you’re maybe going to accept stereotypes about you more easily.”

Researchers have used Easter Island Moai replicas to show how they might have been “walked” to where they are displayed.

Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it

Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/

“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.

In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.

“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/16/inuit-canada-britain-shipwreck-hms-terror-nunavut

“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”

Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.

“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”

it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.  

So, this post about what angels look like happened [link] and @actually-link pointed out that this

[image: drawing of an angel as described in the biblical book of Ezekiel][lifted from the abovelinked post where it is uncredited, and I can’t find a source]

looks a lot like this

[image: movie still of the gravity drive of the Event Horizon]

I’ve been saying for years that the ship is the most sympathetic character in Event Horizon. She’s a child who’s come into being abruptly, her first awareness is of unspeakable horror. She was built to protect humans from the vacuum, and carry them safely, and she came into awareness already in the process of failing to protect her crew, in a literal hell dimension, and then she spent years in isolation trying to find her way home. She’s lost and confused and lonely and scared. So she tries to communicate with the first humans she finds, and they largely freak the fuck out. But the ship only becomes hostile when the humans resort to violence, which they do alarmingly quickly, and she even then she still tries to communicate, and the humans persist in freaking the fuck out until eventually they try to kill her and nearly everyone dies. It’s an excellent cautionary allegory for considering how we should approach communication with nonhuman and emergent intelligence such as AI. Seriously just watch it again and try to see it from the ship’s point of view, it’ll change EVERYTHING.

I feel sorry for the Event Horizon, her life was short and completely awful.

Anyway! So the visual implication here is that the Event Horizon was more than simply sentient, she was an angel. OH NOOOO.

But then I remembered this post about the similarities between angels and black holes [link] and the thing about the Event Horizon’s gravity drive is that it created a small, artificial black hole up in that spinny angel-lookin thing. And if a black hole is an angel, then that’s a small, artificial angel, and it’s bound to the vulnerable body of a spacecraft, making a kind of Aeonic cyborg.

The world’s biggest businesses, heads of state and global figures in politics, entertainment and sport who have sheltered their wealth in secretive tax havens are being revealed this week in a major new investigation into Britain’s offshore empires.

The details come from a leak of 13.4m files that expose the global environments in which tax abuses can thrive – and the complex and seemingly artificial ways the wealthiest corporations can legally protect their wealth.

The material, which has come from two offshore service providers and the company registries of 19 tax havens, was obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with partners including the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times.

The project has been called the Paradise Papers. It reveals:

Millions of pounds from the Queen’s private estate has been invested in a Cayman Islands fund – and some of her money went to a retailer accused of exploiting poor families and vulnerable people.

Extensive offshore dealings by Donald Trump’s cabinet members, advisers and donors, including substantial payments from a firm co-owned by Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law to the shipping group of the US commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross.

How Twitter and Facebook received hundreds of millions of dollars in investments that can be traced back to Russian state financial institutions.

The tax-avoiding Cayman Islands trust managed by the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s chief moneyman.

A previously unknown $450m offshore trust that has sheltered the wealth of Lord Ashcroft.

Aggressive tax avoidance by multinational corporations, including Nike and Apple.

How some of the biggest names in the film and TV industries protect their wealth with an array of offshore schemes.

The billions in tax refunds by the Isle of Man and Malta to the owners of private jets and luxury yachts.

The secret loan and alliance used by the London-listed multinational Glencorein its efforts to secure lucrative mining rights in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The complex offshore webs used by two Russian billionaires to buy stakes in Arsenal and Everton football clubs.

The disclosures will put pressure on world leaders, including Trump and the British prime minister, Theresa May, who have both pledged to curb aggressive tax avoidance schemes.

The publication of this investigation, for which more than 380 journalists have spent a year combing through data that stretches back 70 years, comes at a time of growing global income inequality.