Remember this video I posted a few days ago:
Turns out the entire thing was a big hoax. Bullocks.
by John Cole| 50 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Remember this video I posted a few days ago:
Turns out the entire thing was a big hoax. Bullocks.
This post is in: Because of wow., Excellent Links, Open Threads, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
Kudos to President Obama for choosing an ‘unpredicted’ World Bank nominee that’s got all the right people excited:
… In 2003, [Kim] won a MacArthur genius grant. In 2004, he was named director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, where he ran the “3×5” campaign, which sought to put three million new HIV/AIDS patients in developing countries on antiretroviral drugs by 2005 (it ended up taking till 2007). In 2006, he was on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2009, he became president of Dartmouth College.
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“At some point, you have to decide whether you’re going to keep throwing your body at a problem, which is what I’ve always done,” he told the New York Times. “You realize that one person can’t do that much. So what I want to do is train an army of leaders to engage with the problems of the world, who will believe the possibilities are limitless, that there’s nothing they can’t do.” …
Now there’s a quote for our times. (Also too, thanks Kay for keeping us updated on this.)
And while everyone’s taking a moment from discussing Hunger Games to look beyond our borders, in celebration of the wonderous interconnectedness that is the Internets, I’m going to lift Felix Salmon’s excerpted story from Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s TED talk:
From 1967 to ’70, Nigeria fought a war: the Nigeria-Biafra war. And in the middle of that war, I was 14 years old… We were on the Biafran side. And we were down to eating one meal a day, running from place to place, but wherever we could help we did. At a certain point in time, in 1969, things were really bad. We were down to almost nothing in terms of a meal a day. People, children were dying of kwashiorkor. I’m sure some of you who are not so young will remember those pictures. Well, I was in the middle of it. In the midst of all this, my mother fell ill with a stomach ailment for two or three days. We thought she was going to die. My father was not there. He was in the army. So I was the oldest person in the house. My sister fell very ill with malaria. She was three years old and I was 15. And she had such a high fever. We tried everything. It didn’t look like it was going to work.
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Until we heard that 10 kilometers away there was a doctor, who was able … who was giving … looking at people and giving them meds. Now I put my sister on my back, burning, and I walked 10 kilometers with her strapped on my back. It was really hot. I was very hungry. I was scared because I knew her life depended on my getting to this woman. We heard there was a woman doctor who was treating people. I walked 10 kilometers, putting one foot in front of the other. I got there and I saw huge crowds. Almost a thousand people were there, trying to break down the door. She was doing this in a church. How was I going to get in? I had to crawl in between the legs of these people with my sister strapped on my back, find a way to a window. And while they were trying to break down the door, I climbed in through the window, and jumped in. This woman told me it was in the nick of time. By the time we jumped into that hall, she was barely moving. She gave a shot of her chloroquine, what I learned was the chloroquine, then gave her some, it must have been a re-hydration, and some other therapies, and put us in a corner. In about two to three hours, she started to move. And then, they toweled her down because she started sweating, which was a good sign. And then my sister woke up. And about five or six hours later, she said we could go home. I strapped her on my back. I walked the 10 kilometers back and it was the shortest walk I ever had. I was so happy that my sister was alive. Today, she’s 41 years old, a mother of three, and she’s a physician saving other lives.
Yeah, there’s worse predicaments than “I wept because I had no iPad, until I met a man who had no wireless access.”
So, now that I’ve spoiled everyone’s good mood… what’s on the agenda for the weekend?
Open Thread: “It Was the Shortest Walk I Ever Had”Post + Comments (47)
by John Cole| 53 Comments
This post is in: Election 2012, Religious Nuts 2, Assholes
Because he is an asshole. SATSQ:
Asked about polls suggesting many in the public continue to think Obama is a Muslim, Gingrich said in Louisiana that he takes Obama “at his word” that he believes in Christianity.
Then he launched into a riff on how Obama’s policies are excessively sensitive to non-Christian, non-Jewish faiths, suggesting it could raise doubts for some about where the president’s impulses come from.
“Why does the president behave the way that people would think that [he’s Muslim]?” Gingrich said. “You have to ask, why would they believe that? It’s not cause they’re stupid. It’s because they watch the kind of things I just described to you.”
Gingrich frequently rails against the administration for “anti-religious bigotry” and claims that he’s acting against Christian organizations. In his stump speech, Gingrich bemoans Obama “apologizing” to Muslims and juxtaposes that with what he sees as an assault on the Catholic Church.
Four and a half more years of this nonsense.
Why Does Newt Gingrich Behave in Ways That People Would Think He is an Asshole?Post + Comments (53)
This post is in: Fucked-up-edness
I’m dying to hear how this is a failed analysis:
After Bradley Manning was arrested on charges that he leaked documents to WikiLeaks, he was held in intense solitary confinement for ten months until political pressure finally forced his transfer to more humane conditions in Fort Leavenworth; the top U.N. torture official last week concluded that Manning’s treatment during those 10 months was “cruel and inhumane.” By stark contrast, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales — the prime suspect in the slaughter of 16 Afghan civilians — is already at Fort Leavenworth and is receiving this treatment:
Bales arrived at Fort Leavenworth last Friday and is being held in an isolated cell. He is “already being integrated into the normal pretrial confinement routine,” prison spokeswoman Rebecca Steed said.
The routine includes recreation, meals and cleaning the area where he is living. Steed said once his meetings with his attorneys are complete later in the week, Bales will resume the normal integration process.
An ABC News article back when Manning was transferred to Fort Leavenworth included these details:
The 150 inmates at the facility — including eight who are awaiting trial — are allowed three hours of recreation a day, she said, and three meals a day in a dining area.
That likely means that there will be some substantial interaction between Bales and Manning. Think about that: if you expose to the world previously unknown evidence of widespread wanton killing of civilians (as Manning allegedly did), then you will end up in the same place as someone who actually engages in the mass wanton killing of civilians (as Bales allegedly did), except that the one who committed atrocities will receive better treatment than the one who exposed them. That’s a nice reflection of our government’s value system (similar to the way that high government officials who commit egregious crimes are immunized, while those who expose them are aggressively prosecuted). If the chat logs are to be believed, Manning decided to leak those documents because they revealed heinous war crimes that he could no longer in good conscience allow to be concealed, and he will now find himself next to a soldier who is accused of committing heinous war crimes.
How is he wrong?
Obligatory “OMG GREENWALD IS A FIREBAGGING PONCE WHO DOESN’T LIVE IN AMERICA” with the follow-up “YOU OBOTS WILL DEFEND ANYTHING OBAMA DOES.”
This post is in: Black Jimmy Carter
Not to go all shameless cheerleader on you all, but how can you not like this guy:
At an event in Oklahoma today, the president was shaking hands with some of the people assembled to meet him. One woman announced that she and the president have Hawaii in common as their place of birth.
“Oh, you’re Hawaiian like me?” he asked, smiling, “Well, do you have your birth certificate?”
He cracks me up sometimes.
by John Cole| 75 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, DC Press Corpse, Our Failed Media Experiment, Sociopaths
Had to do some shopping, so I found myself driving through the country, and snapped this beautiful pic. Wish you could see how yellow they were in real life, because this picture does not do it justice.
At any rate, after spending some time at the garden center, picking up some supplies and some pansies, I was driving home and caught the weekly EJ Dionne/David Brooks wankfest on NPR. During the discussion, the Ryan plan came up, and Brooks repeatedly called it a serious plan and that it took us off the path to fiscal calamity, and then basically lied about it not ending government as we know it. After the second or third utterance of “serious,” I briefly considered plowing my car into the cement base of a highway underpass to make the pain stop once and for all.
Dionne did a good job swatting down Bobo’s nonsense, and Brooks then dutifully ignored him and called it a serious plan again.
This post is in: Republican Stupidity, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Bring on the Brawndo!
Last night the PBS News Hour program held a roundtable on the Trayvon Martin murder. Ta-Nehisi Coates was on, as were Reihan Salem and Donna Britt. So was Dennis Baxley, the Florida state representative who co-authored the Stand Your Ground law under whose cloak George Zimmerman stalked and gunned down the 17 year old Martin.
Baxley said — and appeared to mean — the right things about Martin’s death, that it was a tragedy, and that nothing in the law he helped enact should be interpreted to authorize someone to pursue, confront and shoot another. But Baxley rejected the notion that the law itself might have contributed to the catastrophe, arguing instead that it is a force for good, a way, in his words, a law intended “to empower law abiding citizens to stop violent things from happening.”
What’s more, said Baxley, the law has done just that:
Since ’05 to 2012 we have seen a reduction in violent crime in Florida. And what I’ve learned from it is that if you empower to stop bad things from happening they will and they do and they have.
Except, of course, those bad things that happen because people are able to claim that a “feeling” of danger constitutes authorization to use deadly force more or less at will.
But snark aside, what of the claim about crime rates in Florida.
Here, I’ll take a cue from Rachel Maddow, and say that Dennis Baxler is lying.
Check out Florida’s crime statistics. Two things stand out.
The first is that the number of violent crimes has not dropped from 2005 through 2010 (where the data series ends); rather it has jostled about in the noise. From 2005-2008, violent crime totals exceeded the 2004 tally of just over 124,000; in 2009 and 2010 the totals dropped below that figure. If there’s a clear case for correlation with the Stand Your Ground law, it must exist at some much finer grained level that the invoked violent crime catch-all
So what about murder? That is, after all, the crime of crimes, and the one for which I think most of us would be most comfortable in giving deference to claims of self defense. Those numbers make Baxley’s story worse: the murder total in Florida dropped from 946 to 881 from 2004-2005, and have exceeded the 2004 total for each year reported since, peaking at 1,202 in 2007 — or about a 26% hike from the 2004 number.
The shorter: violent crime numbers do not support a claim that the SYG law has consistently reduced violent crime incidence since 2005.
The other key fact to leaps out from this chart:
The slope of the rate/100,000 (blue) line has been pretty consistent for twenty years. It gets a little steeper from 2008-2010, to be sure, though not as much as it did from 1997 to 1999 or 2000. But this picture is consistent with the story in the rest of the country: violent crime is a much less severe problem now than it was decades ago. Any explanation for this ongoing process cannot have anything to do with a law enacted in 2005. That longer history alone makes a mockery any sudden 9mm ex machina explanation for Florida’s recent and welcome continued reduction in rates of violent crime. And, of course, any monocausal explanation is almost certain to be wrong.
Hell, I’ll go further and say that a priori, such accounts are always wrong.
Consider instead another story. Sometime in a leisure-filled future, (hah!–ed) I do plan to blog this really smart Adam Gopnik piece in the New Yorker examining research into what drove crime rates down in New York City over the last several decades. But for now in this context, take this home:
Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” [Wrote Franklin E. Zimring]…Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.
Which is why this from Baxley is a type specimen of moral cowardice:
This kind of very unfortunate situation I think is a misapplication of this statute.
If you enact a law that carries with it a predictable budget of unintended, undesired consequences that result from the application of that law in daily life, then you’re not talking about “unfortunate” events, nor “misapplications.” You’re talking about a murder that was a probabilistically predictable result of enacting a crap law.
I’m sorry Mr. Baxley.
I’m sure you mean well.
I have no doubt that you did not wish the particular child, Trayvon Martin any harm — how could you? You never knew him.
But what you feel in your heart, that regret that someone didn’t behave under your law as you think they should? Not an excuse. No absolution. Trayvon Martin is dead because someone empowered in his own mind by the terms of your law stalked down a street, confronted him, and shot that 17 year old kid down.
You own your part of this.
Cross Posted at The Inverse Square Blog.
Faith vs. Reason: Stand Your Ground/Violent Crime EditionPost + Comments (53)