Boko Haram has taken over a whole town and a military base in Borno. That’s bad.
Boko Haram has seized a town and key multinational military base in north-eastern Nigeria, officials and eyewitnesses say.
A senator in Borno state said troops had abandoned the base in the town of Baga after it was attacked on Saturday. [Read more…]
Great – the New York cops are still flirting with fascism by making a great show of their opposition to civilian control of the police department. Apparently they want cops to answer only to other cops, and for everyone else to simply obey the armed police force.
Hundreds of police officers have turned their backs on the mayor of New York at the funeral of the second of two officers shot dead last month.
Wenjian Liu, a son of Chinese migrants, was killed with his partner Rafael Ramos on 20 December by a gunman with a grievance against the police.
Speakers lined up to pay tribute at the service in a Brooklyn funeral home.
In the street outside, hundreds turned their backs to a video screen when Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke.
Police departments can’t be autonomous in a democracy. People who are issued deadly weapons as part of their job simply can’t be somehow independent of civilian law and oversight and administration. They have to be accountable, and they have to follow the rules. It’s not negotiable. Pay is negotiable, hours are negotiable, benefits and tenure and promotion are negotiable, but autonomy from the civilian government is not.
No police coup in New York City thank you.
More on that ship full of refugees abandoned in the Mediterranean the other day – specifically, the cheerful news that the traffickers made 3 million bucks on the deal.
Police in Italy believe traffickers made some $3m (£1.9m; €2.5m) from 359 illegal migrants found abandoned on a cargo ship in the Mediterranean.
The Ezadeen was towed into the Italian port of Corigliano Calabro after being found by coast guards on Friday. [Read more…]
As you may have seen, it has emerged that Avicenna has been plagiarizing extensively on his blog, so we had to cut him loose from FTB.
He posted what he calls an apology after the plagiarism emerged and before we cut him loose. I wouldn’t call it an apology myself. It’s not actually apologetic, and it is quite self-aggrandizing and self-absorbed and self-serving. That’s…not how to apologize.
He doesn’t mention anything about the harm done to the rest of us, or gratitude for taking him on to begin with. That’s not how to apologize either.
So, altogether, not a very shining moment.
On a happier note, we have new people coming aboard soon.
And just in case you feel like watching the whole damn thing – here’s the 45 minute version.
I went to A Play! last night, and Tuesday night. It’s a two-part play about the presidency of LBJ, All the Way With LBJ and The Great Society. It was pretty damn good. He was an interesting guy but his interestingness was overshadowed by at one end the (much exaggerated) “charisma” of the Kennedys and at the other end the misbegotten war in Vietnam.
Accidental president. Brilliant politician. Flawed man. It’s 1963 and an assassin’s bullet catapults Lyndon Baines Johnson into the presidency. A Shakespearean figure of towering ambition and appetite, the charismatic, conflicted Texan hurls himself into Civil Rights legislation, throwing the country into turmoil. But in faraway Vietnam, a troublesome conflict looms. The Huffington Post calls Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan’s dramatization of LBJ’s first year in office “a vivid profile of one of the most complicated men to occupy the presidency.”
Here’s the last 5 minutes of Johnson’s March 1965 address to Congress urging passage of the Voting Rights Bill, also known as the We shall overcome speech.
Speaking of Lego and girls…
Last May, some Girl Scouts met with Obama to talk about a bridge.
Five girl scouts from Jenks met President Barack Obama to present their plan for a flood-proof bridge at the White House Science Fair.
The girls, 6-year-old Avery Dodson and 8-year-olds Natalie Hurley, Miriam Schaffer, Claire Winton and Lucy Claire Sharp of Girl Scout Troop 2612 built a model for the bridge based on the recent damaging floods in Estes Park, Colo. The girls are the only Girl Scouts in the nation at the fair. [Read more…]
Originally part of a comment by Golgafrinchan Captain on They were essentially without any relevant experience.
When I was growing up, my parents had a friend who had been a Nazi is WW2. It wasn’t something he really talked about but, through the years, I gathered some details from him and some more from his children. They thought they were the good guys, doing what needed to be done to protect themselves and the world from an imminent threat. It scares the crap out of me that our brains can make that kind of rationalization, but they can. [Read more…]
Originally a comment by Ilyris on Just children.
30 years ago Lego had a space range. I always played with my brother’s Lego, and eventually my parents started buying me Lego too. One of the changes seems to be the faces. The Lego faces of my spacemen were very neutral, just 2 dots and a gently smiling mouth. I hear that they are getting angrier, and the characters are more geared toward conflict. I don’t understand why they can’t leave them neutral and if the child wants to play cops and robbers or whatever they can use their imagination. That seems to have really disappeared, the toys that you build your own dreams with. [Read more…]
The NY Times reports that Cosby and his team have been attacking his accusers for decades – so he not only assaulted women, he also did what he could to damage them afterwards.
That too is a familiar pattern. Bill Clinton did it, Woody Allen did it, Michael Shermer did it. It’s interesting how conscienceless you have to be to do that – to harm someone and then when she tries to report the harm, try to damage her so badly that she will stop trying to report the harm. [Read more…]