David Simon Talks About Where the Baltimore Police Went Wrong | VICE | United States

David Simon Talks About Where the Baltimore Police Went Wrong | VICE | United States: The city eventually got sued by the ACLU and had to settle, but O'Malley defends the wholesale denigration of black civil rights to this day. Never mind what it did to your jury pool: now every single person of color in Baltimore knows the police will lie—and that's your jury pool for when you really need them for when you have, say, a felony murder case. But what it taught the police department was that they could go a step beyond the manufactured probable cause, and the drug-free zones and the humbles—the targeting of suspects through less-than-constitutional procedure. Now, the mass arrests made clear, we can lock up anybody, we don't have to figure out who's committing crimes, we don't have to investigate anything, we just gather all the bodies—everybody goes to jail. And yet people were scared enough of crime in those years that O'Malley had his supporters for this policy, council members and community leaders who thought, They're all just thugs.

Decatur Metro � 1000-Foot Long Water Slide Coming to Decatur This Summer

Decatur Metro � 1000-Foot Long Water Slide Coming to Decatur This Summer: For one day only, there will be a 1000 foot long water slide in the middle of W. Ponce de Leon Ave, stretching from Clairemont down just past Ponce de Leon Place.

Get That Life: How I Co-Wrote the Music and Lyrics for "Frozen"

Get That Life: How I Co-Wrote the Music and Lyrics for "Frozen": I was still temping and teaching art in the Bronx to subsidize our rent. I remember on the way to opening night of Avenue Q, we had to pick up my temping paycheck so we could afford to eat that weekend.

Profiles: Stealing Life: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Profiles: Stealing Life: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker: “Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them. And the fifth? It’s about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm—the journalists. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.”

Why I Wear The Exact Same Thing to Work Every Day

Why I Wear The Exact Same Thing to Work Every Day: I have no clue how the idea of a work uniform came to me, but soon, the solution to my woes came in the form of 15 silk white shirts and a few black trousers. For a little personal detail, I remembered my mother loved to put bows in my hair as kid, so I chose to add a custom-made black leather rosette around my neck. Done. During the colder months, I also top my look off with a black blazer. I shopped all the pieces in one day. It burned a hole in my wallet to say the least, but in the long run, it has saved me—and will continue to save me—more money than I could imagine.



To state the obvious, a work uniform is not an original idea. There's a group of people that have embraced this way of dressing for years—they call it a suit. For men, it's a very common approach, even mandatory in most professions. Nevertheless, I received a lot of mixed reactions for usurping this idea for myself. Immediately, people started asking for a motive behind my new look: "Why do you do this? Is it a bet?" When I get those questions I can't help but retort, "Have you ever set up a bill for online auto-pay? Did it feel good to have one less thing to deal with every month?"

How Police Failed to Stop Former NFL Star Darren Sharper’s Cross-Country Rape Spree - ProPublica

How Police Failed to Stop Former NFL Star Darren Sharper’s Cross-Country Rape Spree - ProPublica: And each of the cases involving Sharper, taken in isolation, presented prosecutors with hurdles. In secretly recorded phone calls with his victims, Sharper didn't make incriminating statements. He moved fast, in one city one day and in another the next. He drugged many of his victims with powerful amnesiacs, resulting in cloudy or even non-existent memories.

But taken as a whole, the Sharper case underscores American law enforcement's trouble with solving rape cases: Investigations are often cursory, sometimes incompetent, frequently done in ignorance of the suspect's past sex assault history.

Duel in the Sun | Runner's World & Running Times

Duel in the Sun | Runner's World & Running Times:



Neither man broke, and neither, in any meaningful sense, lost. The
race merely came to a thrilling, shattering end, leaving both runners,
in separate and ultimately phyrric ways, the winner. The drama unfolded
in the sport's most storied venue, at the peak of the first running
boom, when the United States produced world-class marathoners in the
profusion that Kenya does today.


"An Epic Duel"; "The Greatest Boston Marathon"; "A Display of
Single-Minded Determination and Indefatigable Spirit"; read the next
day's headlines. Since Beardsley was just 26 and Salazar 23, everyone
assumed that this would be the start of a long and glorious rivalry, one
that would galvanize the public and seal American dominance in the
marathon through the 1984 Olympics and beyond.


But rather than a beginning, Boston '82 represented a climax.

19 reasons why technologists don't want to work at your government agency � Ben Balter

19 reasons why technologists don't want to work at your government agency � Ben Balter: Startups long ago learned that innovative efforts require innovative atmospheres. Chances are, your agency’s culture isn’t very supportive of that innovator’s efforts, and when the talent you recruited arrive in the beltway, they’re going to be in for a bit of culture shock. Instead, optimize for the innovators. When creating an atmosphere conducive to innovation, pay attention to how much time technologists will need to spend fighting for the right to work on what they want to work on, versus actually just working.

Police, Officials Resign After Missouri Town Elects First Black Mayor

Police, Officials Resign After Missouri Town Elects First Black Mayor: Five out of Parma, Missouri’s six police officers resigned this week before Tyrus Byrd, the town’s first African-American, female mayor, was sworn in. The city’s attorney, clerk, and waste water treatment plant supervisor also resigned, KFVS12 reports.

Elizabeth Day and Graham Keeley on RD Laing and the tragic death of his son | Books | The Guardian

Elizabeth Day and Graham Keeley on RD Laing and the tragic death of his son | Books | The Guardian: His theories overturned the prevailing orthodoxy of the day that mental illness was, as the German psychiatrist Karl Jaspers had put it, 'un-understandable'. He became a countercultural guru in the Sixties and Seventies, attracting a large anti-establishment following who admired his anarchic and individualist philosophies. Laing believed that mental illness was a sane response to an insane world and that a psychiatrist had a duty to communicate empathetically with patients. Once, when faced with a naked schizophrenic woman rocking silently to and fro in a padded cell, Laing took off his own clothes and sat next to her, rocking to the same rhythm until she spoke for the first time in months.

Is Slack Really Worth $2.8 Billion? A Conversation With Stewart Butterfield - NYTimes.com

Is Slack Really Worth $2.8 Billion? A Conversation With Stewart Butterfield - NYTimes.com:

Q.

So do you think Slack is worth $3 billion?

A.

It is, because people say it is.

I’m not trying to be
trite, and I know why you’re asking, but if you go down to the
fundamental level, we all have an agreement about what things are worth —
until we don’t.

Maybe the better question is, how great is the risk that the consensus about what Slack is worth will change dramatically?

The Price of a Life - The New Yorker

The Price of a Life - The New Yorker: What’s the right way to compensate someone for decades of lost freedom?

WhatWeOnlyFantasize comments on Length of Game vs. Actual Gameplay--FIXED [OC]

WhatWeOnlyFantasize comments on Length of Game vs. Actual Gameplay--FIXED [OC]: For example, if an American watches say 5 minutes of soccer and 5 minutes of football, in the 5 minutes of football he will see on average 21 seconds of live ball gameplay and lots of downtime and commercials (which European frequently cite as one of the reasons American football is boring to them), but critically to Americans that 21 seconds will result in quantifiable achievement, the team will gain or lose an X number of yards, and every player will be granted a plethora of statistics on exactly what he did in every second of gameplay. Football, like all American sports regiments and segments the game into a series of small statistical gains, which are tabulated and compared to previous standardized segments. Soccer is completely the opposite. In soccer, a 5 minute stretch may include the ball moving for several kilometers with players performing a many passes, feints, dribbles...etc yet none of that will be quantified to create a sense of linear progression that Americans are used to. While the rest of the world gets excited by plays like this that don't result in quantifiable achievement because of the skill and creativity, to your average American its "just kicking a ball around". Skillful midfield play like this are to your average American "nothing happening", since the play didn't stop and Ronaldo wasn't awarded with a number for what he did.

An Excerpt From Masha Gessen’s New Book On The Tsarnaev Brothers - BuzzFeed News

An Excerpt From Masha Gessen’s New Book On The Tsarnaev Brothers - BuzzFeed News: But finding the backpack could not have helped reconcile the conflicting tracks of Dias’s mind. The fireworks looked so ordinary. The larger cylinder was a meek blue; the thin inner cylinders were just paper. They looked like the remnants of a long-ago New Year’s, or like that March night on the bank of the Charles River when Jahar had set off the fireworks while the rest of the crew watched. And the jar of Vaseline was just a jar of Vaseline. Dias may have known that these objects could be the remnants of making a bomb, but all of them were of this reality, not of the fantastical, otherworldly, disastrous realm of the carnage on television.

Stranger Still - NYTimes.com

Stranger Still - NYTimes.com: The more I read Daoud, the more I sensed he was driven not by self-hatred but by disappointed love. Here was a writer in his early 40s, a man my age, who believed that people in Algeria and the wider Muslim world deserved a great deal better than military rule or Islamism, the two-entree menu they had been offered since the end of colonialism, and who said so with force and brio. Nothing, however, prepared me for his first novel, “The Meursault Investigation,” a thrilling retelling of Albert Camus’s 1942 classic, “The Stranger,” from the perspective of the brother of the Arab killed by Meursault, Camus’s antihero. The novel, which was first published in Algeria in 2013, and which will be published in English by Other Press in June, not only breathes new life into “The Stranger”; it also offers a bracing critique of postcolonial Algeria — a new country that Camus, a poor Frenchman born in Algiers, did not live to see.

Rape, Drugs and Disorder Shake California Group Home and Provoke Reform Efforts - ProPublica

Rape, Drugs and Disorder Shake California Group Home and Provoke Reform Efforts - ProPublica: The breakdown at FamiliesFirst has helped spur California to rethink how it cares for its most troubled children, a question that for decades has confounded not just the state but the country. A panel of experts, officials, care providers, and families has generated a raft of reforms it hopes will soon become law. Over the years, the places that used to be repositories for such children — state psychiatric hospitals and juvenile detention centers — have been shuttered or scaled back, usually in the wake of their own scandals. Group homes, too, have increasingly been deemed a failed model, yet year after year vulnerable and volatile California children remain housed in them for lack of a better option.

The Believer The Divine Inspiration of Jim Jones

The Believer The Divine Inspiration of Jim Jones: The success of the movement in organizing the black community in Harlem led some to speculate that Divine was an operative controlled by the Kremlin, or was at least accepting Soviet funding. After all, Divine had made public displays of support for the US Communist Party, and had marched with his angels in a May Day parade. Divine denied rumors that Moscow was behind the Peace Mission. He stated, on the contrary, that he had lent his financial support to the social work of New York communists. Though this doubtless did not endear him any further to authorities, he justified his collaboration with the communists by declaring solidarity with their cause: “I am representing God on earth among men and I will cooperate with any organization that will stand for the right and deal justly,” he said. “I find fault with the Communist methods, but not their aims. I teach Peace. There will be an end to all oppression and suppression and race prejudice and I will bring it about personally.” Unsurprisingly, Divine’s FBI file grew to over twelve hundred pages by the time of his death.

After 50 years, a D.C. store will close ‘due to gentrification’ - The Washington Post

After 50 years, a D.C. store will close ‘due to gentrification’ - The Washington Post: Like many neighborhoods in D.C., Bloomingdale has changed dramatically in recent years. Throughout the District, young, wealthy residents have flooded in, and some of these trickled into the once-crime-troubled Bloomingdale neighborhood. New businesses have opened to serve these newcomers, which has attracted even more restaurants and establishments to the city.



 Bloomingdale’s ZIP code, 20001, has gone from 6 percent white in 2000 to 33 percent white in 2010, according to Census data. On some of the neighborhood’s blocks, home prices have tripled during that period.

Report Slams Digital Health Records - WSJ

Report Slams Digital Health Records - WSJ: The Obama administration took vendors of electronic health records to task for making it costly and cumbersome to share patient information and frustrating a $30 billion push to use digital records to improve quality and cut costs.

On 18F: past and future | marcesher.com

On 18F: past and future | marcesher.com:

Importantly, we know about all of this because 18Fers are vocal about their work and successes, rightly so. They blog frequently
and tweet, a lot. They market and promote their work, and they do so
consistently. Considering the government’s general risk aversion,
message obsession, and concern about “optics,” 18F’s prolificness in
writing about their work is, again, impressive.




I do not know first-hand what it’s like to work at 18F. But it sure does seem like a good place to spend part of a career in technology.




That, right there, is in my estimation the most important thing that 18F has done: 18F has made working in government seem like an attractive option for talented people.

Operation Red Falcon

Operation Red Falcon: The attack never materialized, and the people of Syria and Israel never knew how close their countries had come to a devastating war. More than a year after that tense alert, in November 1997, I met in secret with a senior member of the Israeli intelligence community, who told me a story I found nearly impossible to believe at the time. It would soon become one of the most infamous spy stories in modern history. A legendary Mossad operative, he said, had been arrested on suspicion of fabricating the intelligence that had brought Israel to the brink of war.

John Oliver presses Edward Snowden on whether he read all leaked NSA material | US news | The Guardian

John Oliver presses Edward Snowden on whether he read all leaked NSA material | US news | The Guardian: When Oliver asked: “How many of those documents have you actually read?” Snowden responded: “I’ve evaluated all the documents that are in the archive.”

When pressed, he said “Well, I do understand what I turned over,” and acknowledged: “I recognize the concern” about whether he knew enough of the documents’ details or technical abilities of journalists to protect certain details.

Oliver then asked Snowden not whether his actions were right or wrong but whether they could be dangerous simply due to the incompetence of others. The Last Week Tonight host claimed that the improper redaction of a document by the New York Times exposed intelligence activity against al-Qaida.

None Dare Call It a Conspiracy

None Dare Call It a Conspiracy:

During my time in Russia this past September, I approached a number
of individuals - journalists, lawyers, human-rights investigators - who
had been involved in the search for answers. Many declined to speak with
me altogether. Others begrudgingly did so but largely confined their
statements to a recitation of the known inconsistencies in the case; if
pressed for an opinion, they allowed only that the matter remained
"controversial." even the old man in Kashirskoye park ultimately
underscored the air of unease that hovers over the topic. After readily
agreeing to a second meeting, at which he promised to introduce me to
other victims' families who doubted the government's account, he had a
change of heart.

"I
can't do it," he said when he called me back a few days later. "I spoke
to my wife and my boss, and they both said that if I meet with you, I
will be finished."

I was curious what he meant by "finished," but the old sailor hung up before I could ask.

A good piece about the choices in an implementation, and the feelings doctors can have about EHR-related screw-ups.

How Technology Led a Hospital To Give a Patient 38 Times His Dosage — Backchannel — Medium: Yet a series of dangers lurked beneath the placid surface. Installing a system like Epic is not like installing an operating system on your laptop, where you just “Accept the Terms,” reboot the machine and off you go. Instead, while the electronic health record provides the scaffolding, there are hundreds of decisions that each hospital needs to make, many of them related to electronic prescribing.

For example, should there be maximum dose limits set in the system, so that doses several times higher than the published maximum are grayed out? UCSF decided not to set such limits. The reasoning at the time was that, in a teaching hospital with lots of patients with rare diseases, many of them on research protocols, such “overdoses” would usually be okay. A system with hundreds of “hard stops” would lead to many angry phone calls from frustrated doctors to pharmacists, demanding that they override the block.

The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Right To Remain - The Rumpus.net

The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Right To Remain - The Rumpus.net: Months after the crash, I went to rehab, and a year after that, I finally went to County, where I served two months. Not two to 10 years, but two months. Such is the arithmetic of having people: my lawyer who enlisted the help of a great trial lawyer who helped us win a misdemeanor conviction, rather than a felony; family, friends, coworkers, and people I didn’t even know rooting for me, watching out for me, helping, presuming my innocence, or simply looking at me differently because white girls with nice teeth and college degrees and sling-back pumps didn’t go to jail much in America, let alone in Houston, Texas.

The Deadly Global War for Sand | WIRED

The Deadly Global War for Sand | WIRED:

Apart from water and air, humble sand is the natural resource most
consumed by human beings. People use more than 40 billion tons of sand
and gravel every year. There’s so much demand that riverbeds and beaches
around the world are being stripped bare. (Desert sand generally
doesn’t work for construction; shaped by wind rather than water, desert
grains are too round to bind together well.) And the amount of sand
being mined is increasing exponentially.




Though the supply might seem endless, sand is a finite resource like
any other. The worldwide construction boom of recent years—all those
mushrooming megacities, from Lagos to Beijing—is devouring unprecedented
quantities; extracting it is a $70 billion industry. In Dubai enormous
land-reclamation projects and breakneck skyscraper-building have
exhausted all the nearby sources. Exporters in Australia are literally
selling sand to Arabs.

For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II | History | Smithsonian

For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II | History | Smithsonian: That was in 1936, and there were only four Lykovs then—Karp; his wife, Akulina; a son named Savin, 9 years old, and Natalia, a daughter who was only 2. Taking their possessions and some seeds, they had retreated ever deeper into the taiga, building themselves a succession of crude dwelling places, until at last they had fetched up in this desolate spot. Two more children had been born in the wild—Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943—and neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their family. All that Agafia and Dmitry knew of the outside world they learned entirely from their parents’ stories. The family’s principal entertainment, the Russian journalist Vasily Peskov noted, “was for everyone to recount their dreams.”

The Monster Next Door: Rwandan Genocide

The Monster Next Door: Rwandan Genocide: Beatrice Munyenyezi claimed she was a refugee from the Rwandan genocide. Federal agent Brian Andersen suspected she was someone far more sinister.

The friendly atheists next door - CNN.com

The friendly atheists next door - CNN.com:

The Shaughnessys celebrate Christmas,
Harry says, for some of the same reasons other people do: "Because it's
a great time to get together, care for each other and have a party."

"And who doesn't want a tree with pretty lights in their house?" Charlotte chimes in.

Since they aren't Christian
anymore, the Shaughnessys shape their own holiday traditions. One year,
they stretched Christmas across a week, with celebrations leading up to
December 25. "That sounds so Jewish now," Harry jokes. It was
anticlimactic, Grace says. When Christmas came, they had nothing left to
give, nowhere to go. The ritual was not repeated.

But the Flying Spaghetti Monster stuck.

Large Hadron Collider Is Ready To Re-Start This Weekend | CosmosUp

Large Hadron Collider Is Ready To Re-Start This Weekend | CosmosUp: Underneath some nondescript farmland near Geneva, on the border of France and Switzerland, the world’s biggest and most expensive scientific experiment is ready to re-start. LHC at the Cern laboratory – were preparing to switch it on today for the first time in two years, ahead of the next series of experiments.



Two years ago the team operating the �3.74bn machine straddling the Swiss-French border astounded the world with the discovery of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle that gives other particles mass. Now they have their sights set on an even more exotic trophy – dark matter, the invisible, undetectable material that makes up 84 per cent of matter in the universe and binds galaxies together yet whose nature is unknown.

We've Been Making Exoskeleton Super-Legs All Wrong

We've Been Making Exoskeleton Super-Legs All Wrong: Earlier this week, a team of scientists revealed he first unpowered wearable exoskeleton that decreases the energy required to walk. The ankle exo, as they call it, is stunningly simple: It acts as an auxiliary calf muscle, using little more than a straightforward spring and a mechanical ratchet that either tightly or loosely grips that spring, depending on the motion of your walking foot. Wearing the ankle exo decreases the energy a person expends when walking by 7 percent.

The Blog Comment That Achieved an Internet Miracle — The Atlantic

The Blog Comment That Achieved an Internet Miracle — The Atlantic: But the next time that so many interlocutors agree on broad matters of huge importance—helping young men and women to navigate gender relations; rooting out sexism as an important, ongoing project—I hope the intellectual environment is such that they spend no time arguing over whose traumas were most intense. I hope the conversation explores how people with such different perspectives might better achieve shared goals rather than how they might best assign blame.

R.I.P. California (1850-2016): What We’ll Lose And Learn From The World’s First Major Water Collapse | FEELguide | Film, Music, Design, Science, Style, Psychology, and More

R.I.P. California (1850-2016): What We’ll Lose And Learn From The World’s First Major Water Collapse | FEELguide | Film, Music, Design, Science, Style, Psychology, and More: Last week when NASA announced that California is on its death bed and has only 12 months of water left, the news hit like a punch to the gut. “Data from NASA satellites show that the total amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins — that is, all of the snow, river and reservoir water, water in soils and groundwater combined — was 34 million acre-feet below normal in 2014. That loss is nearly 1.5 times the capacity of Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir,” writes Jay Famiglietti of NASA.



Famiglietti adds: “Statewide, we’ve been dropping more than 12 million acre-feet of total water yearly since 2011. Roughly two-thirds of these losses are attributable to groundwater pumping for agricultural irrigation in the Central Valley. Farmers have little choice but to pump more groundwater during droughts, especially when their surface water allocations have been slashed 80% to 100%. But these pumping rates are excessive and unsustainable. Wells are running dry. In some areas of the Central Valley, the land is sinking by one foot or more per year.”

A spiral of confusion (with images, tweets)

A spiral of confusion (with images, tweets) � nkallen � Storify: This is a reconstructed timeline of the Jacobin / Sarah Kendzior affair. I have made every effort to reconstruct the precise order of events and cite all participants in context. I've done a minimum amount of editorializing, for the most part pointing out things that are verifiably false or verifiably true. I have also made every effort to be a close and charitable reader of every individual involved... Please hold me to this standard; contact me on Twitter to suggest an edit if I'm being biased.

The Shut-In Economy — Matter — Medium

The Shut-In Economy — Matter — Medium:

In many ways, social
class can be defined by the chores you don’t do. The rich have personal
assistants, butlers, cooks, drivers. The middle class largely do their
own errands — with the occasional babysitter, pizza boy, maybe a
cleaner. The poor do their own chores, and the chores of other people.

Then
came on-demand’s disruptive influence. The luxuries usually afforded to
one-percenters now stretch to the urban upper-middle class, or so the
technology industry cheers. But can you democratize the province of the
rich without getting a new class acting, well, entitled? My parents made
me put away the dishes not to “outsource” their workload — they could
have done it faster. They did it so I wouldn’t turn out to be a brat.

Now an entire generation is not just being served: It’s having to work out what it means when you buy someone to do it for you.

Pay it forward — Medium

Pay it forward — Medium: Not everything in our professional lives is a transaction, scrutinized and evaluated against how much it costs us, how much someone should pay. Not every teaching relationship must be formalized—a mentoring opportunity, a coach, an internship. Not every investment of time has to be “worth it.” Sometimes you just have a brief conversation with someone because—why not? You never know what will come of it.

Sexism In Space | Motherboard

Sexism In Space | Motherboard:

After ten days of repeatedly requesting assistance from “mission
control” to provide more safety inside the simulation, the leaders of
the study finally agreed to install locks on the tubular crawl spaces
connecting the Russian Mir module and the International Mars module. By
this point, Lapierre and her international colleagues had already hidden
all the knives in the station.



"I expected to be in better
hands," she would later say. "But I'm doubting today what kinds of
psychological support [the Russians] are giving to cosmonauts, if they
are giving any, because I didn't get any from them."



At the end of
the mission, Valery Gushchin, the Russian scientific coordinator,
claimed that the brawl was a “friendly fight” and that Lapierre had
“ruined the mission, the atmosphere, by refusing to be kissed.” He also
admitted that perhaps Russian test subjects could benefit from a little
cultural sensitivity training.

Woman said safety was reason she didn't pull over for police

Woman said safety was reason she didn't pull over for police: The decision not to immediately stop resulted in her being handcuffed and taken to jail by Porter County Sheriff's Department Patrolman William Marshall on a felony charge of resisting arrest. It may also cost her her job, because a nurse cannot work after being convicted of a felony, she said.

Jim Norton: Trevor Noah Isn’t the Problem. You Are. | TIME

Jim Norton: Trevor Noah Isn’t the Problem. You Are. | TIME: The image people have of comedians staring defiantly over a stationary line of good taste is simply inaccurate. We don’t approach this line, put our toes over it arrogantly and then scamper back to safety. The line doesn’t exist. The correct image for people to have is one of a circle, with a comedian standing in the middle of it, surrounded by a myriad of races, religions, social beliefs, sacred cows and political ideologies. And in these groups are endless numbers of sub groups and personal boundaries. There is simply no way to consistently do the type of comedy that addresses these things without upsetting somebody. No matter which direction you turn to aim the joke, someone is getting hit. And while the person who has been hit jumps up and down and exaggerates their injuries, everyone else in the circle is telling them to shut up and learn to take a joke. Until they themselves get hit.