That toddler who found the gun in his mother’s handbag at Walmart and killed her with it – how often do accidents of that kind happen?
No one knows, David Graham at the Atlantic tells us.
There aren’t reliable statistics on gun incidents involving kids.
But don’t forget, online harassment is no big deal.
Casey Parks at OregonLive reports:
A prank call sent a large number of Portland police officers to a Southwest Portland home late Friday night.
Central Precinct officers responded to a home in the 11200 block of Southwest Capitol Highway around midnight after receiving reports that an armed man was holding residents hostage inside.
As officers were developing a plan to contact residents, they learned that the call was probably a hoax. [Read more…]
Now that Dave has drawn my attention to that Salon article saying please stop spelling “God” as “god” I feel like telling the author, Richard Eskow, my reason for disliking the automatic “God” as opposed to “god.”
Please, please, stop writing “god” in lowercase form.
I get it. You don’t believe in a supreme being. That’s fine with me. What anybody believes or doesn’t believe is their call. You may believe that the world would be a better place without organized religion. Having seen organized religion in action, I’m inclined to say you may be right. You may believe that even private, reflective, personal religion is harmful, although I don’t see that myself.
Notice he didn’t say “You don’t believe in The Supreme Being.” [Read more…]
This pendantic hypocrite is correct about grammar rules, but totally wrong about capitalizing the word god when we are talking about his god in particular, and about how we should all just acknowledge that Christians are always right. And completely wrong about why I write “god” in lower case. I will tell you why:
His god already has a name. It’s YHWH, or Yahweh or Jehovah. That is a proper name, and I generally capitalize proper names. I don’t usually capitalize my own name, but that is a page out of e.e. cummings, and another story. So, if smartass wants his deity capitalized, I have no objection if he uses that particular god’s proper name. [Read more…]
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.