Kajieme Powell was a mentally disturbed man who was shot dead on the streets of St Louis by police on August 19, 2014, just four miles from the place in Ferguson where Michael Brown had been killed just 10 days earlier. Powell was reportedly carrying a knife and acting erratically and talking to himself and had taken some items from a store without paying for them. Here is what St. Louis police chief’s version of what happened.
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Mark Thomas has collected in one place 667 (and counting) proofs of god’s existence. I linked to this website back in 2007 when the number of proofs was a mere five hundred or so, so clearly the case for god’s existence is growing stronger by the day.
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Neoconservative Bill Kristol, whose major accomplishments are pushing for war against Iraq and any other country that happens to not do the bidding of the US and urging John McCain to select Sarah Palin to be his running mate, has exercised his considerable analytical powers to come up with a strategy for dealing with the chaos that his earlier policy recommendations have created in the Middle East.
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Net neutrality is a really important issue that is hard to get people excited about, except for those who are really into internet policy. But John Oliver did an long segment about it that got to the core issue so clearly and understandably that Tim Wu, the Columbia University professor who coined the term ‘net neutrality’, said that it had “rendered every other explanation obsolete.”
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I keep being surprised by Hillary Clinton’s political tone-deafness, given that she has lived such a publicly political life so far. If she really is planning to run for the presidency, her tin ear about saying such things as being ‘dead broke‘ when they left the White House is going to be a real liability.
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Glenn Greenwald writes that developments in Syria and Libya illustrate the same pattern that we saw in Iraq earlier, of how the US destabilizes countries on the blithe assertion that it can once and for all time militarily install a stable regime that will be friendly to it, only to end up creating fertile breeding grounds for violent groups like ISIS/ISIL I Syria and Iraqqand the militant groups dueling for power in Libya.
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A paper presented at a conference looked at the emergence of the New Atheist movement and argued that it has used humor quite effectively in creating its public image, and that humor is in general quite effective in creating greater acceptance of marginalized groups.
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While police forces around the country have been massively increasing the numbers and size and scope of their weaponry, in the process becoming quasi-military forces without the training that the military receives, violent crime (and teen pregnancies) has been steadily and quite dramatically declining over the last four decades. It would be a mistake to think that this negative correlation has a causal basis in that stronger policing has led to the decline because the decline has been nationwide and benefited areas that changed their policing as well as those that did not.
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Today is National Dog Day. To get you in the mood, here is an article with stories about five dogs.
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The academic Cornel West was one of the first prominent African-American supporters of Barack Obama’s candidacy for president to denounce him for serving as a neoliberal opportunist once he got into office after his election in 2008, and going back on so many of his campaign pledges. In a recent interview with Thomas Frank, he says that Obama posed as a kind of Lincoln but what we got was a “brown-faced Clinton”.
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