I have never seen that level of deliberate cruelty

At least they didn't kill him

Luke O'Neil

May 25, 2024 • 11 min read

We should not have ever been made able to know how fucking stupid and evil so many random regular people are. You used to just have to kind of eyeball things big picture-wise and convince yourself it wasn't all as bad as it seems but now we can see the results come in with hourly certainty. Doesn't feel good.

The other day I sent out a fun one to paid subscribers. Rax King wrote about the uselessness of expensive wedding traditions.

The Perfect Wedding is a demon who targets women’s insecurity, their instinct to steal glances around the room at what other women are doing. He must be exorcized at all costs. The idea shouldn’t be to jerry-rig as Perfect of a Wedding as you can on your piece-of-shit $10,000 budget, to hire the day-of coordinator at the expense of serving your guests a real meal (which González really did do, and which offends me to my core). The idea should be to push past the pressure to the other side, where you’ll find the ceremony you really want to have. With everyone else’s expectations sanded off, underneath the layers of rules and tropes and fancy venues, what are you left with? What can you do, and what do you want to do?

Subscribe for a measly $6 to read that one. And tell people about your cheap ass and or way too expensive wedding in the comments if you like.

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That reminded me of this old piece about how needlessly expensive we make it to go through another major life milestone. All of the milestones really.

While numbers vary state by state, whether you’re insured or not, and on how complicated the delivery itself is, the average cost of having a baby in America ranges into the multiple thousands of dollars if not into the tens of thousands of dollars.

The cost of the other main thing besides being born we’re put here on earth to do — die — isn’t much different.

Setting aside the ridiculous costs of healthcare before we even get to the dying part, what happens after we pass ends up costing the people we leave behind exorbitant amounts as well. Again, depending on the state, the cost of a funeral averages somewhere in the vicinity of $7-$12,000. Swipe the fucking credit card on the way in and on the way out. Toss in the other typical major milestones in a fortunate human’s life — buying a home, getting married and going to school — and the moment of conception starts to look like nothing but a decades long process of accumulating debt merely to exist and function in society.

As Harvey Day writes below “We die as we live, buried in debt.”

And we’re buried in that debt even as we’re literally being buried in dirt.

I know we talk about the habitual abuses and illegal tactics of the police a lot in here so it's kind of hard to say this is one of the worst examples I've heard of in a long time without it sounding like I'm overselling it but this is one of the worst examples I've heard of in a long time.

It's a story from the San Bernardino Sun about a man named Thomas Perez Jr. who called 911 to report his father had gone missing while out on a walk in 2018 in the city of Fontana. You'll want to read the full piece here but in short the cops were immediately suspicious of him and interrogated him for 17 hours accusing him over and over of having killed his father. They had found his body they told him. When that didn't work they brought his dog into the interrogation room and said they were going to have it euthanized.

“How can you sit there, how can you sit there and say you don’t know what happened, and your dog is sitting there looking at you, knowing that you killed your dad?” a detective said. “Look at your dog. She knows, because she was walking through all the blood.”

Finally, after curling up with the dog on the floor, Perez broke down and confessed. He said he had stabbed his father multiple times with a pair of scissors during an altercation in which his father hit Perez over the head with a beer bottle.

So wracked with grief over what he now believed he had done Perez Jr. wailed and pulled at his hair in anguish and later tried to strangle himself in the interrogation room. They sent him to a mental hospital where he was held for three days.

That same day the cops found out the father hadn't been killed at all. He was at the airport going to visit his daughter. The cops didn't tell Perez Jr. while he languished in the hospital though. They tortured him into thinking he had killed his father then let him continue to believe it. Then they kept investigating him because they thought he must have killed someone.

When he finally got out of the hospital he was only able to track down the shelter where cops had dumped his dog via a tracking chip.

“Mentally torturing a false confession out of Tom Perez, concealing from him that his father was alive and well, and confining him in the psych ward because they made him suicidal, in my 40 years of suing the police I have never seen that level of deliberate cruelty by the police,” his lawyer Jerry Steering said. (Suing the police for 40 years is a pretty noble career you have to admit).

Steering recently secured the man a settlement of $900,000 with the city of Fontana. He said he didn't want to risk going to trial because he was worried the cops would be found not-guilty because of – you guessed it! one of our favorite and pervasive perversions of justice here at Hell World – qualified immunity.

Three of the cops in questions are still employed by the force and one has retired.

At least they didn't kill him outright. A recent CBS News report notes that police killed more people in 2023 than in any other year of the past decade. I covered that number in back in January as well.

But what is interesting about the CBS report is that they found that an increasing number of these police killings are done by smaller town and rural County sheriffs as opposed to city police.

"CBS News gathered and analyzed federal law enforcement data that showed while more people died overall in encounters with city police, deaths in encounters with county sheriffs occurred at a significantly higher rate. For every 100,000 people arrested, more than 27 people died in the custody of sheriffs, while that number was fewer than 10 for police officers in 2022, the most recent year of available data."

If you can believe it these kinds of sheriffs are even less accountable to the public than city police.

"According to CBS News' investigation, problems were more prevalent in smaller, more remote communities where deputies typically had less training, fewer resources and limited oversight. These factors allowed sheriff misconduct to continue for longer, becoming more severe and brazen before it was discovered. Even then, they rarely faced consequences."

Since most sheriffs are elected – and the feds rarely use their power of oversight – it's incumbent upon citizens to check the sheriffs' authority. We're meant to literally "vote the baton off of our skulls" as I often call it.

"But candidates frequently run unopposed and it's not uncommon for a sheriff to remain in power for decades," CBS notes. It's especially harder for minority communities who are often the main targets of police abuse to vote them out.

Maybe the feds could do something about it?

"Thirty years ago, Congress empowered the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate not just individual cases but for repeated patterns or practice of civil rights violations. But with approximately 18,000 local law enforcement agencies to oversee, today the DOJ has only a few dozen people on staff with the expertise to conduct lengthy, labor-intensive oversight investigations."

"Since 1994, DOJ has only filed seven cases against sheriff's offices for what are called 'pattern or practice' civil rights violations. The Trump administration did not bring a single case. The Biden administration has filed just one."

Oh well!

We wrote about that Biden DOJ investigation into my beloved city of Worcester, MA in here back in 2022.

You also may remember this story from earlier in the year about a 16 year old migrant named Duvan Perez who was crushed to death while sterilizing the deboning area of a poultry plant in Mississippi.

He was the second person to die in that particular Mar-Jac Poultry facility (a big Chick-fil-A supplier) in two years. OSHA proposed a $212,646 fine for violating labor laws and safety standards but – and you're never going to believe this – the company just said fuck it and kept on employing minors in extremely dangerous jobs anyway. For example the Miami Herald reports that four teenagers were found working on the kill floor of their factory in Alabama earlier this month. The company once again denied knowing any minors were working there and are fighting OSHA in court over the idea that they should face any serious consequences for their abuses. I wonder if they will?

Hey did you know that since 2021 28 states have introduced bills to weaken child labor protections?

Here's a few from this year alone according to the Economic Policy Institute:

Florida lawmakers are debating a bill (recently passed by the House) that would eliminate long-standing state guidelines on work hours for teens, allowing employers to schedule 16- and 17-year-olds for unlimited hours—including during the school year—and eliminate meal or rest breaks.

Kentucky lawmakers introduced a bill to allow nonprofits to hire 12- and 13-year-olds (federal law prohibits most non-agricultural employment for children under 14), and a bill to prohibit the state’s labor commissioner from setting standards on child labor that exceed minimum protections under the FLSA, effectively repealing state standards that require meal and rest breaks for minor workers and that limit work hours for 16- and 17-year-olds.

Two other states—Indiana and New Jersey—have also introduced bills to extend the number of hours minors can be scheduled to work, either during the summer or year-round.

Two states—Missouri and West Virginia—have introduced new bills to eliminate youth work permits, and a Georgia bill introduced in 2023 and recommitted in 2024 would also eliminate youth work permits and allow 14-year-olds to do landscaping work on the grounds of workplaces where they are otherwise prohibited from working (like factories and mills).

The Washington Post has more on this trend here as well.

Some states have reported soaring numbers of child-labor violations over the past year, with investigators uncovering violations in fast-food restaurants, but also in dangerous jobs in meatpacking, manufacturing and construction, where federal law prohibits minors from working. The Labor Department alleged in a lawsuit in February that a sanitation company, Fayette Janitorial Service, employed children as young as 13 to clean head splitters and other kill-floor equipment at slaughterhouses on overnight shifts in Virginia and Iowa.

Despite such findings, an Iowa law signed last year by Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) allows minors in that state to work in jobs previously deemed too hazardous, including in industrial laundries, light manufacturing, demolition, roofing and excavation, but not slaughterhouses. Separately, West Virginia enacted a law this month that allows 16- and 17-year-olds to work some roofing jobs as part of an apprenticeship program.

This here is just a really lovely and thoughtful piece by a woman who bicycles alone across the country all the time on the question of whether or not she would rather encounter a man or a bear in the wilderness. It's about that but also about how patriarchy harms all of us.

The central reason why fewer women travel alone is our fear of male violence and sexual assault. Actually, the most common question I get about my travels is some version of, “Aren’t you afraid to bike/hike/travel alone as a woman?” By naming my gender, the implication is clear. What people really mean is, “Aren’t you afraid of men?”

This leads us straight back to the original conversation about “Man or Bear,” which has nothing to do with bears. (Sorry, bears!) “Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?” is just another way of asking, “Are you afraid of men?” It’s the same question I’ve been fielding for the entirety of my life as a solo female traveler. It’s the same question that hovers over women all the time as we move through the world.

And it’s a question that’s always been difficult for me to answer. I’m not afraid of all men. But I am afraid of some men. The real problem is the gray area in between and what it takes to manage the murkiness of that unknown.

I guess not everything is bad. This new Jane Weaver album is absolutely fantastic. Sounds a lot like Dots and Loops era Stereolab which is about as high a compliment I can give a record.

Oh and here's an update on my neighborhood fox from the wildlife rescue.

Alright that's all for today. Try not to get killed by the police if you can help it. Or by anything.