Which of these two will take home the points or will it just be a point for each?
Archives for June 2014
Just Exercising His Rights
http://video-embed.mlive.com/services/player/bcpid2436806291001?bctid=3621780684001&bckey=AQ~~,AAAAQBxUr7k~,PsMaWpexSO0gBGbwp0HC65I60alsnUQ1
Grumble, piss moan. Here:
On a bright day in early May, Joseph Houseman, 63, was out enjoying his Second Amendment rights in Kalamazoo, Mich. As traffic went by on East Cork Street, Houseman stood at the roadside, a rifle resting on his shoulder. Witnesses called the police.
“Yes, I’d like to report something,” one man told a 911 dispatcher that day, May 4, according to audio obtained by MLive.com. “There’s an elderly man walking down the street with, it looks like to be an assault rifle. I don’t know if its a bb gun, a pellet gun, or whatnot. But, I mean, he’s older, he’s an elderly man, and I just want to be sure everything is going to be alright.”
The first calls to law enforcement came in around 4 p.m. By 4:22 p.m., 12 officers were on the scene, traffic on the street was shut down, and negotiations were turned over to Sgt. Andres Wells, a trained SWAT negotiator, according to MLive.com. The website, which obtained police reports and recordings of the ensuing 40-minute standoff, on Monday published a video portraying part of the at times tense, at times absurd events. In it, Houseman can be seen pointing and shouting at officers — and at one point he grabs his genitals and gestures in the officers’ direction.
“Folks, I need you all to go inside,” an officer can be heard telling onlookers at one point. “If that gun is live and he starts firing, everyone is at risk.”
Germany v Portugal Open Thread
Will Cristiano Ronaldo be 100% by game time? Will the German squad’s depth stifle Os Navegadores’ dreams?
A Cooked Goose
Netflix and Verizon are arguing over interconnections between their network. Here’s a snippet from something sent from Netflix’ lawyer to Verizon’s:
To try to shift blame to us for performance issues arising from interconnection congestion is like blaming drivers on a bridge for traffic jams when you’re the one who decided to leave three lanes closed during rush hour.
You know who else blocked three lanes on a bridge during rush hour?
When your actions are the go-to metaphor for obstruction, it’s time to re-assess your Presidential ambitions.
Monday Morning Open Thread: Rootless Ex-Cosmopolitans Eroding the Old Ways
I owe somebody a hat tip for this…
Strange days… Per the NYTimes, those snowbird retirees and cheap-housing refugees who’ve been blamed for turning areas in New Hampshire and Maryland from red to purple, or even blue, may also be responsible for screwing up Eric Cantor’s and Thad Cochran’s “solid (Confederate) South” from the reactionary end of the political spectrum:
… [T]he growth fueled by a migration of newcomers from other parts of the country and even abroad is bringing nationalized politics to races further down the ballot. It was these new arrivals, more than any other voters, who most crucially rejected two influential Republican incumbents — the House majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, and Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi — in primaries this month, upending long-held assumptions about the appeal of traditional levers of power.
In the newly built communities of DeSoto County in Mississippi, and the fast-growing precincts in such metropolitan Richmond counties as Henrico, Hanover and Chesterfield — what could be called the Chick-fil-A belt — the conservative challengers to the two incumbents led by overwhelming margins…
For all the talk about how partisan polarization is overwhelming Washington, there is another powerful, overlapping force at play: Voters who are not deeply rooted increasingly view politics through a generic national lens.
Friends-&-neighbors elections were already a thing of the past in congressional campaigns. But the axiom that “all politics is local” is increasingly anachronistic when ever-larger numbers of voters have little awareness of what incumbents did for their community in years past and are becoming as informed by cable television, talk radio and the Internet as by local sources of news. In this year’s primaries, the trend is lifting hard-liners, but it has benefited more moderate candidates in general elections….
In a rich historical turnabout, two states once ruled by native-born elites notorious for keeping voter participation low among poor whites and blacks have seen their politics sharply altered this year, in part because of surprisingly high turnout by transplants…
“We have a mobile population and its movement to the Sun Belt is making that region both more conservative and more moderate,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
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Apart from not-lamenting the all-too-slow erosion of the authoritarian privilege of the Magnolia Belt barons, what’s on the agenda for the start of another week?
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Another Update on Iraq
From guest poster Adam Silverman. Lengthy, and most will be below the fold:
Interests, Proxy War, and Iraq– Adam L. Silverman, PhD*
“Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.” – Henry Temple; Lord Palmerston
When trying to understand what is happening in Iraq, as well as other parts of the Levant, the Middle East, Central Asia, or anywhere else for that matter, it is important to keep in mind the question of interests. Specifically, what are the interests of the nation-states involved, or if not the entire nation-state, then at least that portion of it that is in charge. It is also important that interests are rooted in a society’s values, and in the case of much of the Levant, those societies are often divided by sect and sometimes, as is the case with the Kurds, by ethno-national and ethno-linguistic identities. Another important concept to consider is risk, specifically how much risk is a state, society, group within that society, organization, etc willing to assume.
The discussion of interests, especially of other states’ and societies’ interests, is usually what is missing in the coverage of foreign and security policy issues. Focusing on interests is important because it provides a window into what is going on not just in Iraq, but also in Syria. While we here in the US, and the US government on our behalf, do have interests in all parts of the Levant, we are not the only ones. Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinians have their own interests, but so do their neighbors. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf States all have their own interests in the region. Sometimes they overlap with each other’s, sometimes with ours, and sometimes not at all. What we have not paid much attention to is how these states, or specific groups within these states, act on their interests, including how much risk they are willing to assume while trying to secure their interests.
Long Read: “The Sister of Second Chances”
The unglamorous real-life sequel to Orange Is the New Black, as reported by John Leland in the NYTimes:
Venita Pinckney grew up around Catholic schools and churches, and she thought she knew about nuns. Then a small, gray-haired sister named Teresa Fitzgerald came to fish her out of a Harlem crack house. Ms. Pinckney had been a drug addict for 23 years, a dealer and a prostitute, and had lost both of her children to foster care. She was high at the time.
“She looked past all that,” Ms. Pinckney said of the nun. “She must’ve hugged me for two hours.”
Sister Tesa, as she is known, helped Ms. Pinckney get into a residential drug program, then gave her a job and a room and helped her get her children back…
Twenty-seven years ago, answering an open call from an older nun, she started a home for children whose mothers were in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Last year she was honored by the White House.
Now, on a drizzly May afternoon, she walked the battered streets of her expanding domain: three apartment buildings, three thrift stores, a day care center, an after-school program, a job-training program, a group home for women with children, a food pantry, a mentoring program. Three more communal homes, including one where she lives, dot nearby neighborhoods.
In each of the buildings, nearly every woman, whether resident or staff member, is an ex-convict. They are former murderers, drug dealers, embezzlers, smugglers, burglars and addicts. And for many, it was Sister Tesa who turned their lives around, often after they failed on the first or second try…
“Women get overlooked because they’re such a small part of the prison population, and they don’t commit the crimes that make headlines,” said Georgia Lerner, executive director of the Women’s Prison Association, a nonprofit advocacy and service organization.
“But it matters a lot when a woman goes to prison,” Ms. Lerner added. “If a father goes to prison, usually the mother takes care of the kids. If a mother goes to prison, there might be no one to take the kids.”…
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