For those who keep posting demands, enjoy this new pic of my dog with the far away eyes.
Chat about whatever.
Archives for 2014
I Feel the Same Way
This guy at the very, very least, needs to have his ass hauled into the police station for a sit down:
The family of a young black man who was killed by police in an Ohio Walmart while holding an unloaded BB rifle and speaking on his cellphone have called for action to be taken against a 911 caller who claimed he was pointing the gun at people.
John Crawford III was shot dead last month by an officer responding to an emergency call made by Ronald Ritchie, a shopper standing 100ft away, who repeatedly stated to the dispatcher that Crawford was pointing the air rifle at customers.
Surveillance footage and audio recordings released after a grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot Crawford showed that Crawford was holding the rifle at his side and pointing it to the floor at the time when Ritchie alleged that “he just pointed it at, like, two children”.
Crawford’s father and the family’s attorney said that Ritchie, 24, should be questioned by police over the discrepancy between the footage and his allegation, which he made about 80 seconds before Crawford was shot, and confirmed when asked soon after. Knowingly “making false alarms” is a crime under Ohio law punishable by a fine or jail sentence.
“He was the catalyst, if you will, in the whole sequence of events leading up to my son’s death,” John Crawford Jr told the Guardian. “It was a crank call. He excited the call, and exaggerated the call, and frankly it was just a bunch of lies.”
This guys is a class act:
The children who Ritchie appeared to claim were under threat from Crawford were in the store with their mother, Angela Williams. Williams, 37, died of a heart attack in the panic that ensued among customers following the police shooting. “I hope that he’s happy with himself,” her teenage son said of Ritchie in a Facebook post earlier this month.
Ritchie also told several reporters after the shooting that he was an “ex-marine”. The Guardian disclosed last month that he was thrown out after seven weeks in 2008, after being declared a “fraudulent enlistment”. He states that the problem was a mix-up in his paperwork.
In January 2012, Ritchie pleaded guilty in the Montgomery County municipal court to theft. All records of the incident have been expunged by the court and the Huber Heights police department. In 2010 he was fined $250 and given a year’s probation after being convicted by Miamisburg municipal court of possession of drug paraphernalia.
Ritchie and his wife, April, have not spoken publicly since his Guardian interview. Both have changed their names on social media. The day before he called 911 about Crawford, Ritchie posted a meme on his Facebook page featuring the comedian Gabriel Iglesias. “Me, racist? The only race I hate is the one you have to run,” it read. The post has since been removed.
One month later, Ritchie shared with his friends a story from the Tea Party News Network about a group of black men assaulting a white couple in Missouri. The story condemned President Barack Obama and Eric Holder, the attorney general, for ignoring the attack after speaking publicly about the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, last month. It described them as “race hustlers”.
He also keeps changing his story. In my mind, he’s a murderer for what he did.
NFL Open Thread
What I get for taunting Betty-I am now sick as hell since the annual sinus issue when the seasons start to change has now metastasized into an ear and sinus and throat infection. So it may be nice weather here, but I am not going to enjoy it.
Blerg.
“Values” Voters
The one thing I have with the people at the Value Voters Summit is that I'm praying Ted Cruz will be the GOP nominee too. #VVS14
— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) September 27, 2014
From the NYTimes:
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas invoked the redemptive story of his parents, both plagued by too much drinking, to show the role that faith has played in his life. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who took the stage as a video of a fetal ultrasound played for the crowd, said that liberty, virtue and God were intertwined, and he quoted Corinthians to make his point.
The two senators, who are both considering a run for the White House in 2016, spoke on Friday to the Values Voter Summit, an annual gathering of social conservatives that has been an important ticket punch for Republican presidential candidates…
Or, as the SPLC calls it, “An annual political conference bringing together some of the most extreme groups on the religious right… hosted by the Family Research Council (FRC), listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center because it spreads demonizing falsehoods about the LGBT community.” Co-sponsored this year by Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Council and Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association
NYTimes, again:
Mr. Paul, who is fond of saying that libertarian should not be confused with libertine, told the crowd, “What America really needs is a revival.”…
Mr. Paul emphasized his opposition to abortion. As he was introduced to the crowd, a video of an ultrasound and the murmur of a beating heart played, accompanied by lines from Mr. Paul’s speeches like, “I will always take a stand for life.”
He ended his speech with a line from 2 Corinthians: “Where there is the spirit of the Lord, there is liberty.”…
TPM, on the other hand, picked up the message from the guy I expect to be the GOP’s actual candidate in 2016:
Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) delivered a comparatively somber speech at the Values Voter Summit on Friday where he critiqued his own party and called for conservatives to be more active.
“Quit being scared and start being an activist,” Santorum said in his speech…
“If you look at the current conservative movement, the Republican Party, there are issues that we haven’t even lost yet and we’re talking about giving up on,” Santorum said. “We’re not even willing to fight the fight to stand for what we say we believe in.”…
At one point during the speech Santorum said that it was important for Republicans to pick up as many seats in the 2014 cycle because in the 2016 cycle more Republican senators would be up for re-election and, according to Santorum, the chance of the GOP picking up Senate seats “are pretty much zero.”
Charles Johnson has done a great job reporting on VVS14 both at LGF and on his twitter feed. Samples from him, and others, below:
The speakers at the Values Voter Summit are telling us exactly what they plan to do. We ignore them or brush them off at our peril.
— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) September 27, 2014
Scary
Carol Leonnig has a long piece about the many Secret Service fuck-ups after some Idaho nutcase took shots at the White House. Line agents who were responding were told to stand down after the shots were incorrectly identified as backfires from a construction site:
It took the Secret Service four days to realize that shots had hit the White House residence, a discovery that came about only because a housekeeper noticed broken glass and a chunk of cement on the floor.
If the shooter hadn’t been a total fuckup who crashed his car a few minutes after firing the shots, who knows if he would ever have been caught. The piece also notes that there wasn’t full camera surveillance of the White House grounds, nor was the White House in range of the ShotSpotter sensors that can identify the location of shots fired. And there’s this:
[…] President Obama has faced three times as many threats as his predecessors, according to people briefed on the Secret Service’s threat assessment.
Sunday Garden Chat: Seed Saving
From faithful commentor Satby:
I used to assume, like most people probably do, that you save the seeds from your plants on a paper towel or coffee filter, put them in a baggie when they’re dry, and that’s all there was to it. But the few times I’d done that with my heirloom tomatoes, I didn’t always get the exact same tomatoes growing the next year, if they grew at all. Nice tomatoes, but not the same. Turns out the potato leaf heirlooms, like the Brandywines, can cross pollinate and make new variations.
And, for best germination, you should ferment the seeds of tomatoes to inhibit disease and improve sprouting. And not save them on paper, but on a glass dish so they don’t stick or get damp and moldy. I was doing it wrong for years.
My favorite resource for all seed saving wisdom is this site, which has a wealth of knowledge for veggie seed saving by variety: Howtosaveseeds.
I’m more of a flower seed saver right now, it’s so much cheaper to propogate flowers by seed than to by the approximately 10 flats of annuals I used to. I have a cottage garden with hollyhocks [photo at top] that were all scavenged seeds from roadside hollyhocks, I save the seeds and reseed in new spots every year, the old spots also reseed themselves. Those are easy, pull the head, dry the seeds on a plate, bag them in a small paper envelope.
The second picture is of a petunia seed pod, my orange petunias did so well I want to try to grow them again. Not sure if they are hybrids and whether the seed will be sterile, but I’m harvesting pods to try.
The last picture just shows the comparison between the petunia seeds, which are the little black specs on the dish, compared to a round morning glory seed and a couple of hollyhock seeds (the flat ones). Super tiny! Hope they end up growing.
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The mini-bell-pepper I bought as an experiment this year just sent out a new flush of bloom, although I’m pretty sure they won’t get the chance to fruit. And the sour gherkin cucumber plant is still lush, but all the wee little ‘mouse melons’ dropped off at once during our first not-yet-freezing snap. But I’ve still got a handful of tomato plants — Carmello, Japanes Black Trifele, Ranger, some of the cherry tomatoes — with ripening fruit.
What’s going on in your gardens this week?
Long Read: “Everything We Think We Know About Mass Shooters Is Wrong”
The ever-interesting Tom Junod, in Esquire:
NOBODY KNOWS who he is and nobody knows who he was. When he was a young man—a boy, really—his anonymity fueled his desperation, and for a short time his desperation made him known. He didn’t become famous the way other desperate and aggrieved young men have, but he made himself well-known enough to think that when he came home after eight and a half years in prison, there might be cameras waiting for him on his front lawn and people interested in asking him questions. There weren’t. There was just his family and the rest of his life.
So Trunk—a nickname he acquired when he went away—has returned to where he started out…
Trunk does, however, think often of the person who is out there right now feeling the way he used to feel. The person with a grievance. The person with a plan. The person with a gun—hell, an arsenal. The person we feel powerless against, because we don’t know who he is. All we know is what he—or she—is going to do.
Can he or she—they—be stopped before they become what we in America call “mass shooters”? We are so convinced they can’t be that we don’t even know if anyone is trying to stop them. Can they be understood? We are so convinced the evil they represent is inexplicable that we don’t try to explicate it. Mass shootings have become by now American rituals—blood sacrifices, propitiations to our angry American gods, made all the more terrible by our apparent acceptance of them. They have become a feature of American life, and we know very well what follows each one: the shock, the horror, the demonization of the guilty, the prayers for the innocent, the calls for action, the finger-pointing, the paralysis, and finally the forgetting. We know that they change everything only so that everything may remain unchanged.
But we are wrong about that. Mass shootings are not unstoppable, and there are people trying to stop them. They are not even inexplicable, because every time Trunk hears of one he understands why it happened and who did it. We have come to believe that mass shooters can’t be stopped because we never know who they are until they make themselves known. But Trunk was almost one of them once. He was a heartbeat away. And what he understands is that shooters want to be known, not through the infamy of a massacre, but before they have to go through with it. They want to be known as much as he, years later, wants to remain unknown, walking to the bus stop in the rain…
Trunk, of course, is short for “Trunk Full of Guns”. And then there is… well, the anti-Trunk:
… Simons is the answer to the question who is trying to stop “the next one”—the next active shooter, the next act of targeted violence, the next mass killing. Within the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group, there exists the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime; within the NCAVC, there are the Behavioral Analysis units, made famous by movies and television for profiling serial killers. Behavioral Analysis Unit 1 concerns itself with counterterrorism; Behavioral Analysis units 3 and 4 with crimes against children and crimes against adults. Simons is in charge of Behavioral Analysis Unit 2, which assesses threats. This sounds like an impossibly broad category of endeavor, but in fact it’s quite specific. “Threat assessment” is just now becoming such a formal discipline that Simons describes himself and the members of his team as “threat-assessment professionals.” It is becoming such an accepted practice that its practitioners refer to it as TA for short and have their own professional organization and scholarly journal. And, although very few people know what it is, threat assessment has been America’s best and perhaps only response to the accelerating epidemic of active shooters and mass shootings, with Andre Simons foremost among the federal officials trying to implement it on a national level…
Long Read: “Everything We Think We Know About Mass Shooters Is Wrong”Post + Comments (87)