Working Mom Arrested for Letting Her 9-Year-Old Play Alone at Park - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic

Working Mom Arrested for Letting Her 9-Year-Old Play Alone at Park - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic: Statistically speaking, the South Carolina mother would almost certainly be putting her daughter in more danger if she strapped her into the car beside her for a hypothetical one-hour daily commute. No one would arrest her for that. It wouldn't surprise me if the child would more likely suffer harm sitting in a McDonald's in front of a laptop, presumably eating fast food at least reasonably often, rather than spending summer days playing outdoors in a park with lots of parents.





I can't say with certainty that she'd be statistically safer. But neither have the South Carolina officials who arrested this woman.

The actual safety of a given kid is not being rigorously determined. State employees are drawing on their prejudices to make somewhat arbitrary judgment calls. They wouldn't think of preventing many statistically riskier parenting decisions so long as those decisions jive comfortably with social norms. They're sometimes taking away children based on what amounts to their gut feeling–even though kids are far more likely to be abused in state-administered foster care. Again, I haven't run the numbers, but my hunch is that a single parent with a new boyfriend or girlfriend hanging around the house puts a kid at greater statistical risk of being molested than letting them play alone in a typical park.

Mom Arrested for Letting Daughter Play Outside -- NYMag

Mom Arrested for Letting Daughter Play Outside -- NYMag:

Debra Harrell is currently in jail
because she let her 9-year-old daughter play, unsupervised, in a public
park. Almost everything about this story (which I noticed courtesy of Lenore Skenazy)
is horrifying. Harrell works at McDonald's. Her daughter used to tag
along and stare at a screen at her mother’s workplace during the day.
She asked to go to the park instead, was discovered to be without an
adult, and her mother was arrested. Compounding the horribleness is the
news coverage, in which reporters and onlookers alike are united in
disgust at Harrell:

The story is a convergence of helicopter parenting with
America’s primitive family policy. Our welfare policy is designed to
make everybody, even single mothers, work full-time jobs. The social
safety net makes it difficult for low-wage single mothers to obtain
adequate child care. And society is seized by bizarre fears that
children are routinely snatched up by strangers in public places. The
phenomenon is, in fact, nearly as rare
as in-person voting fraud. But when you watch the report above, you can
see everybody involved believes such a thing plainly happens all the
time.


Obviously, leaving a child unattended in a park is not an ideal
child-care arrangement. It is, however, a perfectly sensible balancing
of risks.

Panic in the Kitchen: Blogging, liberty, and the fear of the dinner plate | Kate Williams | The Hypocrite Reader

Panic in the Kitchen: Blogging, liberty, and the fear of the dinner plate | Kate Williams | The Hypocrite Reader: One’s own diet is the perfect arena in which to (literally) internalize one’s stance on personal liberty. As long as we have the means to choose our meals, food becomes a deeply personal choice. We are, after all, the ones putting the fork into the pasta and sticking it in our mouths. Our fears and desires are easily manifested on the plate: even eaters who eat just about anything often show preference for certain foods based on mood or weather (Google “eat your feelings”). Using a diet to demonstrate difference is a simple extension of emotional eating.



Demonstrating difference is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. The problem with this way of eating is that it reduces food to a sort of obligatory social contract instead of a source of enjoyment. As in the political arena at large, associating with members across the aisle is not only ill thought of, it is also socially dangerous. Where once there was curiosity, now there is fear. Engaging with the online food media means sifting through a pile of dos and don’ts; the consequences of mixing these up, many argue, can be deadly. As Americans, we are already fearful of government shutdowns, global warming, terrorist attacks, and the next election. We don’t need to be afraid of our food, too

Mom Jailed Because She Let Her 9-Year-Old Daughter Play in the Park Unsupervised - Hit & Run : Reason.com

Mom Jailed Because She Let Her 9-Year-Old Daughter Play in the Park Unsupervised - Hit & Run : Reason.:

Here are the facts: Debra
Harrell works at McDonald's in North Augusta, South Carolina.
For most of the summer, her daughter had stayed there with her,
playing on a laptop that Harrell had scrounged up the money to
purchase. (McDonald's has free WiFi.) Sadly, the Harrell home was
robbed and the laptop stolen, so the girl asked her mother if she
could be dropped off at the park to play instead.




Harrell said yes. She gave her daughter a cell phone. The girl
went to the park—a
place so popular that at any given time there are about 40
kids frolicking—two days in a row. There were swings, a
"splash
pad," and shade. On her third day at the park, an adult
asked the girl where her mother was. At work, the daughter
replied.




The shocked adult called the cops. Authorities declared the girl
"abandoned" and proceeded to arrest the mother.

The Art of Water Recovery - NYTimes.com

The Art of Water Recovery - NYTimes.com: “When you have a pressurized system, what you do in one place affects all other places,” said Meir Wietchner, Miya’s chairman. Replace a leaky pipe segment and the pressure will increase in other segments and more leaks will sprout.



“It’s simple physics,” he added. “And the larger the pressure the larger the leakage. If a hole that’s receiving one unit of pressure will leak X gallons per day, with 2 units of pressure it will leak 4X, and with 3 units pressure it will leak 9X. It’s a square function.”



One of Allan Lambert’s insights was to separate leaks into “bursts” and “background” losses (pdf). “It isn’t the main leaks that cause the most loss of water,” he said. “It’s the long-running leaks that go on for months or years that aren’t detected. One leaking toilet will lose as much water in two years as a burst in a four-inch main for a full day.”



So how do you fix and manage a system that’s leaking in tens or hundreds of thousands of places — and how do you do it cost effectively?

What tech offices tell us about the future work – Kate Losse – Aeon

What tech offices tell us about the future work – Kate Losse – Aeon: What connects Facebook’s incongruous graffiti and Twitter’s incongruous log cabins is their expense. Both represent a complete renovation of the space, making graffiti and log cabins (not in themselves luxurious) seem like high-end amenities. The homesteader who originally lived in Twitter’s log cabin lived a much more rugged life than the office worker, and this contrast is part of the log cabin’s frisson in the office. Likewise the men’s clothing shops in fashionable areas of San Francisco such as Hayes Valley and the Mission that sell multiple styles of artisanal leather boots and allow the tech worker to model himself on a rugged 19th-century labourer. The rough-hewn, old-fashioned look of Twitter’s cabins is repeated in all the reclaimed wood that has crept into the high-tech workspace in recent years. Any splinters you get from these textures is a small price to pay for the tactile, pre-modern feeling of a place that is otherwise devoted to the collection of ethereal data. It is this very need to represent high-tech luxury at the same time as invoking its opposite that drives the modern baroque of early 21st-century tech offices.

Hector Tobar: How the Chilean Miners Survived : The New Yorker

Hector Tobar: How the Chilean Miners Survived : The New Yorker:

Urzúa was pretty sure that there was no escape, and little prospect
of rescuers reaching them. He broke the silence by counting the men.
Raúl Villegas, an ore-truck driver, was missing, but Lobos and
Galleguillos said that they had seen him on his way to the surface.
(Villegas was the only one who got out that day.) Urzúa’s count came to
thirty-two men, but he was not confident that the figure correctly
reflected the shift, because in the San José Mine the lists of workers
changed from one day to the next.



 The men split into two groups.
One, a small escape party that included Urzúa, Sepúlveda, and Bustos,
would search for an opening to the surface. The second, about two dozen
men, headed back to the Refuge to wait. Florencio Ávalos, the shift’s
foreman and the second in command after Urzúa, spoke privately to Yonni
Barrios, who was among the oldest and most experienced in the group.
“Down in the Refuge, take care of those provisions,” Ávalos said. “Don’t
let the boys eat them yet, because we may be trapped for days.”

Prey | Hazlitt

Prey | Hazlitt: In the aftermath of rape, and throughout the two-year-long rape trial, I was obsessed with dangerous animals. This is how I went from prey to predator.

Dawn of the Web: an oral history - Ideas - The Boston Globe

Dawn of the Web: an oral history - Ideas - The Boston Globe: SUDBURY: We had people who were using the cafe computers the way you’d use Wi-Fi now—like, they were tech savvy, they knew what they needed to do, but they needed access because they needed to look something up or send an e-mail....And then there were people who just wanted to see what it was like. They just wanted to go look at a website. It was sort of just very novel to them, and they would just click around on things. Because back then, clicking around on things was wildly entertaining, because it was so novel....It sounds corny, but it blew people’s minds.

Lessons From America's War for the Greater Middle East // News // Notre Dame Magazine // University of Notre Dame

Lessons From America's War for the Greater Middle East // News // Notre Dame Magazine // University of Notre Dame: Since 1980, back when President Jimmy Carter promulgated the Carter Doctrine, the United States has been engaged in what we should rightfully call America’s War for the Greater Middle East. The premise underlying that war can be simply stated: with disorder, dysfunction and disarray in the Islamic world posing a growing threat to vital U.S. national security interests, the adroit application of hard power would enable the United States to check those tendencies and thereby preserve the American way of life.

Choose whatever term you like: police, pacify, shape, control, dominate, transform. In 1980, President Carter launched the United States on a project aimed at nothing less than determining the fate and future of the peoples inhabiting the arc of nations from the Maghreb and the Arabian Peninsula to the Persian Gulf and Central Asia.

Since the end of World War II, American soldiers had fought and died in Asia. Even when the wars in Korea and Vietnam ended, U.S. troop contingents continued to garrison the region. In Europe, a major U.S. military presence dating from the start of the Cold War signaled Washington’s willingness to fight there as well. Prior to Carter’s watershed 1980 statement, no comparable U.S. commitment toward the Islamic world existed. Now that was going to change.

Should We 'Fix' Intersex Children? - ​Charlotte Greenfield - The Atlantic

Should We 'Fix' Intersex Children? - ​Charlotte Greenfield - The Atlantic: M was born with genitals that were not clearly male or female. Also known as disorders of sex development (DSDs), the best guess by researchers is that intersex conditions affect one in 2,000 children.

The response by doctors is often to carry out largely unregulated and controversial surgeries that aim to make an infant’s genitals and reproductive organs more normal but can often have unintended consequences, according to intersex adults, advocates and some doctors.

A long and gut-wrenching list of damaging side effects—painful scarring, reduced sexual sensitivity, torn genital tissue, removal of natural hormones and possible sterilization—combined with the chance of assigning children a gender they don’t feel comfortable with has left many calling for the surgeries to be heavily restricted.

Kansas was supposed to be the GOP’s tax-cut paradise. Now it can barely pay its bills. - Vox

Kansas was supposed to be the GOP’s tax-cut paradise. Now it can barely pay its bills. - Vox: After the cuts became law, it was undisputed that Kansas's revenue collections would fall. But some supply-side analysts, like economist Arthur Laffer, argued that increased economic growth would deliver more revenue that would help cushion this impact.

Yet it's now clear that the revenue shortfalls are much worse than expected. "State general fund revenue is down over $700 million from last year," Duane Goossen, a former state budget director, told me. "That's a bigger drop than the state had in the whole three years of the recession," he said — and it's a huge chunk of the state's $6 billion budget. Goossen added that the Kansas's surplus, which had been replenished since the recession, "is now being spent at an alarming, amazing rate." You can see that in this chart (the surplus is cumulative, not yearly):

Israeli drones hunt Hamas as militants fire rockets deeper into Israel - The Washington Post

Israeli drones hunt Hamas as militants fire rockets deeper into Israel - The Washington Post: Israeli aircraft are targeting houses in the Gaza Strip as never before, firing precision-guided missiles into family living rooms. They have killed at least five known militants with the tactic — but they appear to have killed more civilians, including a growing number of women and children.

Israeli defense officials say their mission is not only to stop Hamas and other militant groups in the Gaza Strip from firing ever-more-powerful rockets deeper into Israel, as they did Wednesday, but also to weaken Hamas by killing its commanders.



 But by targeting 60 houses in the past 48 hours, Israel’s risk of inflicting collateral damage has soared. The health ministry in Gaza reported Wednesday evening that 41 residents of the crowded coastal enclave had been killed in Israeli strikes since the conflict began early Tuesday, and that 13 of the dead were 16 years old or younger. At least seven were women and a handful were elderly, such as Naifeh Farjallah, who was 80.

Moderate voters are a myth - Vox

Moderate voters are a myth - Vox: What happens, explains David Broockman, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, is that surveys mistake people with diverse political opinions for people with moderate political opinions. The way it works is that a pollster will ask people for their position on a wide range of issues: marijuana legalization, the war in Iraq, universal health care, gay marriage, taxes, climate change, and so on. The answers will then be coded as to whether they're left or right. People who have a mix of answers on the left and the right average out to the middle — and so they're labeled as moderate.

The tragedy never ends: Palestinian rockets force Israeli peace conference to evacuate - Vox

The tragedy never ends: Palestinian rockets force Israeli peace conference to evacuate - Vox: An Israeli peace conference held in Tel Aviv by the left-leaning newspaper Ha'aretz, established to put "peace [with Palestinians] at the top of the national agenda" and "to end the occupation and the settlement project," was abruptly halted on Tuesday when the audience had to evacuate due to incoming rockets launched by Palestinian groups.



 It was a coincidence, yes; the rockets are barely accurate enough to be aimed at a single city, let along a single building holding an Israel-Palestine peace conference, and no one was hurt. But it is a moment of profoundly tragic symbolism, exceptional even in a conflict that produces many such moments, that a Palestinian militant group with the desire of ending the Israeli occupation would fire rockets at Israeli civilians who had themselves gathered with the express purpose of ending the occupation.



 Observers of the Israel-Palestine conflict often say that the violence committed by both sides is self-defeating, but rarely is this so demonstrably and immediately true as with today's evacuation of the Ha'aretz peace conference.

Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On - The InterceptThe Intercept

Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On - The InterceptThe Intercept:



Government agencies have invoked a host of legal theories over the
years to justify spying on Americans without obtaining individual FISA
warrants. Prior to mid-2008, for example, the NSA could target Americans
when they were located on foreign soil simply by obtaining an
authorization from the attorney general. The NSA also relies on the
so-called “FISA backdoor” to read the emails of Americans communicating with foreign targets without obtaining a warrant, and engages in the bulk collection of “metadata”
from Internet service providers without individual warrants. In other
cases, it can obtain a warrant against an entire organization—and then
monitor the emails of individuals allegedly associated with the group.




While the NSA documents do not prove that the government has been
systematically monitoring the communications of political dissidents,
Jaffer notes that some of the most abusive surveillance practices
carried out by the FBI during the 1960s were arguably legal at a time
when many Americans believed that the groups targeted by Hoover’s
FBI—including anti-government activists on the left and right—posed a
threat to the country.

What a Muslim American Said to Defend His Patriotism - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic

What a Muslim American Said to Defend His Patriotism - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic: Gill correctly perceives that we'll all know what he means when he invokes the characteristics he possesses that would seem to make him less suspicious. The fact that most people internalize these judgments to some degree illustrates how chilling effects work: Americans, especially those who belong to minority groups, formulate a sense of what speech and actions will cast suspicion on or away from them. The mere existence of surveillance thus changes behavior that is constitutionally protected and in many cases civically valuable. This is a significant cost that I've yet to see any national-security official acknowledge.

Why There Are No Easy Answers to the Latest Border Dilemma

Why There Are No Easy Answers to the Latest Border Dilemma:

Time
for a bit of background. The trouble we're having now is really two
problems coming together: an increase in the number of children from
Central America making this journey, and a system that doesn't have the
resources to handle them once they get here. A number of conditions are
combining to create the former: desperate poverty and violence in the
three countries most of these kids are coming from (Guatemala, El
Salvador, and Honduras), false rumors that children who come today will
get to stay under the administration's Deferred Action For Childhood
Arrivals policy (which actually only applies to
people who came to the US before June 2007), and the more accurate
belief that if you make it to the US you might get to stay anyway, at
least for a while until your deportation hearing.

And that's the second part: because of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act—a
law passed in 2008 with the support of many Republicans (it was named
for a 19th century British evangelical abolitionist) and signed by
President George W. Bush—children stopped at the border can't just be
shoved on a bus back home. They have to be given a deportation hearing,
and until that hearing occurs, the law says the child must be "promptly
placed in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of
the child." The law also says that "[a] child shall not be placed in a
secure facility absent a determination that the child poses a danger to
self or others or has been charged with having committed a criminal
offense." In other words, we can't just lock them up, and if they have
some family in the U.S., placing the minor with them is going to be "the
least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child."

The case for shutting down Stuyvesant High School, the best public school in New York.

The case for shutting down Stuyvesant High School, the best public school in New York.: Noguera is exactly right. The politicians and the education experts who are so fixated on the racial balance at Stuyvesant neglect the fact that Stuyvesant is not built to support and nurture students who need care and attention to excel academically and socially. It is a school that allows ambitious students who know how to navigate their way around a maddening, complex bureaucracy to connect with other students with the same skill sets. Being in a fiercely competitive environment spurs a small number of sleep-deprived students to stretch themselves to the limit, to compete for admission to elite universities. The truth is that while Stuyvesant certainly does send many hyperaggressive students to the Stanfords and MITs and Princetons, students who find themselves in the bottom half of the class often languish without the support they’d get at other schools.

How to rob a bank without stealing any money - Vox

How to rob a bank without stealing any money - Vox:

It could be something as simple as having two cups of
coffee — like when I went into  the elevator at Vox’s office, somebody
saw I was busy and they just swiped me in because I look like I belong
here. Another famous one is the smokers' door. If you get to the
smokers' door before the smokers come out and you seem like you belong
there, they'll let you back in the building because people are very
reluctant to challenge people.

To beat social engineering, you would have to challenge
everyone, which just isn't in our makeup. It works at the Pentagon, they
have guys with podiums everywhere whose job is to challenge people. But
otherwise if you turned around and slammed the door in someone's face
and said, "swipe in," you would seem so rude, and that's just so against
human nature. That's the trait that these guys use to break into
places.

Why Wars Always End Up Hurting the Most Vulnerable Americans - Peter Beinart - The Atlantic

Why Wars Always End Up Hurting the Most Vulnerable Americans - Peter Beinart - The Atlantic: Most Americans have forgotten how repressive a period World War I was. “You can’t even collect your thoughts without getting arrested for unlawful assemblage,” quipped the writer Max Eastman. “They give you ninety days for quoting the Declaration of Independence, six months for quoting the Bible.” Walter Lippmann said Woodrow Wilson’s administration had “done more to endanger fundamental American liberties than any group of men for a hundred years.”

Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas - The Intercept

Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas - The Intercept: The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas.

According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month.

Will Uber Serve Customers With Disabilities? – Next City

Will Uber Serve Customers With Disabilities? – Next City: The ADA requires vehicles-for-hire to offer “reasonable accommodations” for wheelchair users, but “generally that phrase has meant nothing,” says Sandra Rosenbloom, an urban planning professor at the University of Texas-Austin and a transportation expert at the Urban Institute. And though wheelchair-accessible vehicles are rare both in the traditional taxi system and through rideshare services, traditional taxi companies are required in many cities to make some of their vehicles wheelchair-accessible. Companies like Uber and Lyft have no such obligation.

How to Save the Afghan Election

How to Save the Afghan Election: Afghan politics rarely reward gracious losers and public demonstrations, along with the use of violence, are well-worn negotiating tactics. As Anna Larson and Noah Coburn point out, protests against fraud are particularly common. By negating the electoral process, failed candidates distract from their own inability to come out on top. It's a self-defeating and dangerous strategy. Nonetheless, the very real possibility that protests could have turned violent played on the international community's fears of the process going off the rails and increased media coverage of Abdullah's grievances.



In my conversations with Afghan friends and colleagues in Kabul over the past few days, no one disputes that there has been widespread fraud and many are disillusioned with the way the process has played out. Few think the accusations should be brushed under the rug. But they also think it is up to the election bodies, with the international community's support, to investigate and address discrepancies -- however long it takes.

How A Woman's Plan To Kill Herself Helped Her Family Grieve : Shots - Health News : NPR

How A Woman's Plan To Kill Herself Helped Her Family Grieve : Shots - Health News : NPR: This story is in no way an endorsement of suicide. It's a description of one woman's choice and what came of it.

Five years ago, after doctors told her that she had Alzheimer's disease that would eventually steal her ability to read, write and recognize people, Sandy Bem decided to kill herself.

Sandy was 65 years old, an unsentimental woman and strong willed. For her, a life without books and the ability to recognize the people she loved wasn't a life she wanted.

And so she decided there was only one thing to do. Sandy's plan was to wait until the last conceivable moment that it was physically possible for her to commit suicide alone, then go off and kill herself.

Our Libertarian Age: Dogma of Democracy is a Dogma of Decline | New Republic

Our Libertarian Age: Dogma of Democracy is a Dogma of Decline | New Republic: From the start there never was any consensus about just what sort of trick the EU was supposed to be, apart from a machine to keep the peace and generate prosperity. All agreed that this would require a diminution of national sovereignty. But at the beginning very little thinking went into establishing democratic procedures within it, in part because after the experience with fascism the Founding Fathers did not fully trust le peuple. Even less thinking went into how to build public identification with the project—how to turn Scots and Sicilians into compatriots who feel they share a destiny and recognize the same institutions. The result is that ordinary Europeans today do not know what to make of the “European project.”

A Record Number of Refugees Are Suffering in Record Heat | Motherboard

A Record Number of Refugees Are Suffering in Record Heat | Motherboard: So, there is a fast-rising number of refugees and displaced people, coupled with fast-rising temperatures. Record displacement and record heat. And there's no functional mode of governance in place to deal with either—and both factors will feed into each other. Not only should we deem it flat-out unacceptable that millions of people are without homes or states, but it's recipe for even further disaster.



It is, as the Pentagon would say, a "threat multiplier." A hot, homeless world is also, justifiably, an angry, unpredictable one. Perversely, the hotter it gets, the more destabilized the world will become—and the more displacement and suffering we'll see.

New Statesman | This won't hurt a bit: the cultural history of pain

New Statesman | This won't hurt a bit: the cultural history of pain: In particular, people who had been placed at the “lower” end of the Chain of Feeling paid an extremely high price for prejudices about their “inability” to feel. In many white middle-class and upper-class circles, slaves and “savages”, for instance, were routinely depicted as possessing a limited capacity to experience pain, a biological “fact” that conveniently diminished any culpability among their so-called superiors for acts of abuse inflicted on them. Although the author of Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves, in the Sugar Colonies (1811) conceded that “the knife of the anatomist . . . has never been able to detect” anatomical differences between slaves and their white masters, he nevertheless contended that slaves were better “able to endure, with few expressions of pain, the accidents of nature”. This was providential indeed, given that they were subjected to so many “accidents of nature” while labouring on sugar-cane plantations.

iPhone, phone home — Medium

iPhone, phone home — Medium: A concept that makes it easier for a good samaritan to return a lost iPhone.

U.S. should take lead on setting global norms for drone strikes - The Washington Post

U.S. should take lead on setting global norms for drone strikes - The Washington Post: We both have enormous respect for the men and women charged with keeping our nation safe and believe that there are many circumstances in which drone strikes are entirely appropriate. Nonetheless, we are troubled by the lack of transparency and accountability surrounding U.S. use of targeted strikes far from traditional battlefields, as well as the lack of strategic clarity.



The United States’ drone policies damage its credibility, undermine the rule of law and create a potentially destabilizing international precedent — one that repressive regimes around the globe will undoubtedly exploit.

BBC News - Search for Honduran miners continues amid fading hopes

BBC News - Search for Honduran miners continues amid fading hopes: Informal mines are common in Honduras but the lack of adequate safety means serious accidents are not unusual.

The mine is in an area prone to landslides and earthquakes.

The mayor of the nearby town of El Corpus, Luis Andres Rueda, said there were more than 50 informal mines in the area.

He estimated that hundreds of people use ladders to climb down into shafts as deep as 200m every day.

Armed with pickaxes, they hack away at the tunnel walls to try to extract minute gold nuggets from the soil.

An Interview With Tom Ricks on the Crisis in Iraq: How Bad Can It Get? | New Republic

An Interview With Tom Ricks on the Crisis in Iraq: How Bad Can It Get? | New Republic: A lot of this is all fruit of the poisoned tree. Maliki is the result of a botched political process that began under Bremer. We went in and said, "we’re going to hold national American-style elections, one man, one vote." And the country had three profoundly different groups who are at each other’s throats. It was insane. At that point, when we wanted one man, one vote, we turned control of that country over to Iran and that’s why it appalls me when you see Cheney and Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams saying the Obama administration blew it. No, the Obama administration was trying to clean up the mess these guys made, and Maliki results directly from that mess. We should have grown the politics slowly. You start with town councils, district councils, then you go to provincial elections. And then you go, a couple of years later, to national elections. And that way you grow a new generation. Instead, we basically thrust the old class of exiles into power. Maliki is a low-grade Kerensky.

New ACLU report takes a snapshot of police militarization in the United States - The Washington Post

New ACLU report takes a snapshot of police militarization in the United States - The Washington Post: In fact, just 7 percent of SWAT raids were “for hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.”
In at least 36 percent of the SWAT raids studies, no contraband of any kind was found. The report notes that due to incomplete police reports on these raids this figure could be as high as 65 percent.
SWAT tactics are disproportionately used on people of color.
65 percent of SWAT deployments resulted in some sort of forced entry into a private home, by way of a battering ram, boot, or some sort of explosive device. In over half those raids, the police failed to find any sort of weapon, the presence of which was cited as the reason for the violent tactics.

A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son (UPDATE) - Salon.com

A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son (UPDATE) - Salon.com: I know that SWAT teams are breaking into homes in the middle of the night, more often than not just to serve search warrants in drug cases. I know that too many local cops have stockpiled weapons that were made for soldiers to take to war. And as is usually the case with aggressive policing, I know that people of color and poor people are more likely to be targeted. I know these things because of the American Civil Liberties Union’s new report, and because I’m working with them to push for restraints on the use of SWAT.

A few nights ago, my 8-year-old woke up in the middle of the night screaming, “No, don’t kill him! You’re hurting my brother! Don’t kill him.” How can I ever make that go away? I used to tell my kids that if they were ever in trouble, they should go to the police for help. Now my kids don’t want to go to sleep at night because they’re afraid the cops will kill them or their family. It’s time to remind the cops that they should be serving and protecting our neighborhoods, not waging war on the people in them.

Cell Phones in Papua New Guinea Used to Call Dead People | New Republic

Cell Phones in Papua New Guinea Used to Call Dead People | New Republic: The Ambonwari have also incorporated the new technology into their existing systems of thought. They have long been confident in their ability to talk to the dead, believing they can communicate with the world of spirits in dreams, visions, and trances induced by special rituals. The introduction of mobile phones has opened up new possibilities: The Ambonwari believe they can use them to contact their dead relatives, whose numbers they obtain from healers. And once they reach them, they can ask for anything. “It is a general conviction,” write Telban and Vavrova, “that once people know the phone numbers of their deceased relatives they can ring and ask the spirits to put money in their bank accounts.” I asked Telban if the villagers are discouraged that they never get through to the spirit world; he assured me that they’re not. They might assume the spirits aren’t available. And they ring random numbers so often that occasionally they do reach someone, whose voice they attribute to a spirit.

Awlaki Assassination Memo Finally Released | Mother Jones

Awlaki Assassination Memo Finally Released | Mother Jones: The AUMF is now more than a dozen years old, and it's long past time for Congress to emerge from its fetal crouch and write a new law specifically designed for our present circumstances. Among other things, it should address the president's ability to target American citizens for killing. If Congress wants to give the president that power, it should debate and pass a law and the courts should rule on its constitutionality. That's the rule of law. And regardless of whether I liked the law, I'd accept it if Congress passed it, the president signed it, and the Supreme Court declared it constitutional.

Instead, as usual, Congress prefers to do nothing. This leaves them free to kibitz if they don't like what the president is doing, or to simply avoid having to take a stand at all. It's shameful.

'Columbusing': The Art Of Discovering Something That Is Not New : Code Switch : NPR

'Columbusing': The Art Of Discovering Something That Is Not New : Code Switch : NPR: If you've danced to an Afrobeat-heavy pop song, dipped hummus, sipped coconut water, participated in a Desi-inspired or sported a henna tattoo, then you've Columbused something.

is when you "discover" something that's existed forever. Just that it's existed outside your own culture, nationality, race or even, say, your neighborhood. Bonus points if you tell all your friends about it.

William R. Polk on American Grand Strategy for Iraq, Syria, and the Region - James Fallows - The Atlantic

William R. Polk on American Grand Strategy for Iraq, Syria, and the Region - James Fallows - The Atlantic: We don't want to live in fear, and we believe that the danger is foreign. The irony, as one of the authors of our Constitution already put it over 200 years ago, is that our principal danger is ourselves. Of course, he could not have guessed the extent: we murdered almost 200,000 of our fellow citizens in the first decade of this century. (That was with guns and knives; we killed about twice that many in the same period with our most dangerous weapon, the automobile.) The number of Americans killed by foreign terrorists in America was less than 3,000. The odds of an American being killed by a terrorist were said to be about 1:20,000,000. But, the number of Americans killed in foreign wars (not counting Vietnam) is approaching 10,000 and the number with long-term disabilities caused by wounds several times as high as the total of all these figures (including Vietnam).

Being a Neocon Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

Being a Neocon Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry: From 2001 until sometime around 2006, the United States followed the core neoconservative foreign-policy program. The disastrous results of this vast social science experiment could not be clearer. The neoconservative program cost the United States several trillion dollars and thousands dead and wounded American soldiers, and it sowed carnage and chaos in Iraq and elsewhere.

One would think that these devastating results would have discredited the neoconservatives forever, just as isolationists like Charles Lindbergh or Robert McCormick were discredited by World War II, and men like former Secretary of State Dean Rusk were largely marginalized after Vietnam. Even if the neoconservative architects of folly are undaunted by failure and continue to stick to their guns, one might expect a reasonably rational society would pay them scant attention.

Why Jimmy Carter Was (and Is) a Rare Breed | Christianity Today

Why Jimmy Carter Was (and Is) a Rare Breed | Christianity Today: Balmer ends his book with the "impression that Carter was driven—almost obsessed—by a kind of works righteousness." He observes quite rightly that too many Christians seek "to prove by their good works that they are among the elect." From his days on his family farm to his years in the Navy to his many years on the campaign trail, Carter was an incessant worker. Most of the time, his hard work paid off, but Carter's work ethic could not solve the Iranian hostage crisis, his nation's economic malaise, or the electoral threat of Ronald Reagan. Balmer observes, however, that after his defeat to Reagan "Carter reaffirmed his commitment to works righteousness as a way to redeem his loss," and his ceaseless activism and philanthropy bolstered his reputation in the United States and abroad. Balmer thinks that the former president, now approaching 90 years of age, has earned a respite. That is undoubtedly true, but it is difficult to know whether Carter suffers from a theological blind spot or mere workaholism.

The Case for Assad | The National Interest

The Case for Assad | The National Interest: Even if the United States could properly vet and support only moderates, such as the Free Syrian Army, victory would still be unlikely. The balance of power does not favor moderates; they are fighting on two fronts against the militarily superior regime and the intractable ISIL. Over the last few months, Assad has used siege tactics, starvation and ceasefire negotiations to secure most of Syria’s major population centers. Moderate insurgents still cling to control of some towns and even suburbs of Aleppo and Damascus, but their prospects for victory are dimming quickly. Meanwhile, ISIL—a group denounced by Al Qaeda for being too extreme—continues to strengthen its position in Syria at the expense of the moderates. American aid to moderates at this stage is too little, too late.

The British View the War of 1812 Quite Differently Than Americans Do | History | Smithsonian

The British View the War of 1812 Quite Differently Than Americans Do | History | Smithsonian: Although nobody gained from the Treaty of Ghent, it is important to note that (with the exception of the later betrayals suffered by the Native American tribes) nothing was lost either. Moreover, both countries had new victories to savor. The U.S. found glory at the Battle of New Orleans, while six months later the British found theirs when the Duke of Wellington inflicted a crushing defeat over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Both victories overshadowed everything that had taken place during the previous two years. For America, 1812 became the war in which it had finally gained its independence. For Britain, 1812 became the skirmish it had contained, while winning the real war against its greatest nemesis, Napoleon.

▶ Wake Me Up - Avicii - Sam Meador (Percussive Guitar Cover) - YouTube

▶ Wake Me Up - Avicii - Sam Meador (Percussive Guitar Cover) - YouTube: Sam performs his version of Avicii's "Wake Me Up" in his unique percussive guitar style. Sam Meador is the vocalist and keyboardist of Cinematic Black Metal band Xanthochroid. This video was filmed in his backyard by bandmate Brent Vallefuoco and friend Robert Punya.

Jeff Weintraub: Feisal Istrabadi on the tragedy of Iraq

Jeff Weintraub: Feisal Istrabadi on the tragedy of Iraq:

RY: How painful is that for you personally? You were one of the Iraqis who, as we said, had left the country and pushed for the US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. Some analysts [are] saying that Saddam Hussein, although he ruled with an iron fist, that iron fist kept these different factions together. Now we have this. You're watching this from Indiana. How painful is this for you?



 FI: Well, let me first address the first part of your remark about, "well, he may have been unpleasant, but ..." This is a man who is guilty of the deaths of no less than one million Iraqis over a period of 35 years. So there is no "he may have been a brutal tyrant" ... there is no "but" after that, there's no comma after that phrase. It's a period.

Having said that, I can say that none of my aspirations for Iraq have come true. My worst fears, my greatest nightmares, have all been exceeded. [....]

Tony Blair is mad to deny Iraq was a tragic error

Tony Blair is mad to deny Iraq was a tragic error: Advertisement

The reality is that before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, there was no al-Qaeda presence in that country, none at all. Saddam was a ruthless Ba’athist tyrant who treated his population with appalling brutality. But he did not have anything to do with the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre, and he did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

The truth is that we destroyed the institutions of authority in Iraq without having the foggiest idea what would come next. As one senior British general has put it to me, ‘‘we snipped the spinal cord’’ without any plan to replace it. There are more than 100,000 dead Iraqis who would be alive today if we had not gone in and created the conditions for such a conflict, to say nothing of the troops from America, Britain and other countries who have lost their lives in the shambles.

Ghana has to ration electricity so that everyone can watch the World Cup - Vox

Ghana has to ration electricity so that everyone can watch the World Cup - Vox: Ghana is actually one of the better-off countries on this score — roughly 72 percent of its population has access to electricity. In neighboring Ivory Coast, by contrast, it's 59 percent. In Tanzania, only 15 percent of people have reliable access to electricity.

Add it all up, and some 590 million people across sub-Saharan Africa don't have any power at all. Among other things, that's a major public-health issue: Without electricity, many households turn to wood stoves, whose indoor pollution now kills 4.3 million people per year (worldwide), more than AIDS and malaria combined.

Newsletters You Might Actually Be Happy to Find in Your Inbox - NYTimes.com

Newsletters You Might Actually Be Happy to Find in Your Inbox - NYTimes.com: Like most people, I’m careful about handing my email address to anyone, much less somebody who promises to send me messages every working day. But because they sit in my inbox and can be opened (or ignored) at a time of my choosing, I’ve found newsletters keep me in the know about specific topics — which in my case includes media comings and goings. Here are a few newsletters that I follow and others that I hear great things about.

Following the Saints, Footfall by Footfall | Matthew R. Anderson

Following the Saints, Footfall by Footfall | Matthew R. Anderson:




In the last thirty years, a new form
of pilgrimage has gained popularity in the Western world. If you are
over 30 and living in Europe or North America, chances are pretty good
that someone you know has walked the Camino de Santiago, the "way of St
James" in Spain. That path, once the third most important Christian
pilgrimage route, has undergone a massive renaissance since the 1980s.
Just before arriving in Scotland, I had walked 250 km with five friends
over the high mountains of the St. Olaf Way, an historic Nordic
pilgrimage route that has been revived in the 2000s, five centuries
after its demise, by a partnership of church and state in Scandinavia.
From north to south and around the world, walking pilgrimages are
attracting hundreds of thousands every year, and the numbers keep
rising.




So why is this movement growing so quickly?

As Europe Now Sees, Resisting Uber Is Futile - The Daily Beast

As Europe Now Sees, Resisting Uber Is Futile - The Daily Beast: London mandates that its cabbies pass a 149-year-old exam called “The Knowledge” that requires them to master the city’s maze-like streets and know the precise location of museums, police stations, and theaters. As part of the test, they have to verbally recite detailed explanations of how best to travel from one location to another through the city’s roughly 25,000 arteries. Passing “The Knowledge” takes years of study, and most drivers fail at their first few tries. The test causes the gray matter in applicants’ brains to expand, according to one London researcher.



Perhaps the most compelling case for letting Uber thrive is that London’s brainy cabbies should devote their oversize hippocampi to contributing to fields like computer science and medical research. In an age of ubiquitous GPS devices, many of which also incorporate real-time traffic data, circling the city in a car is a profound waste of such exceptional minds. London may as well also require that cabbies master the art of saddling a horse and mending a harness.

Writers who leave their wives lost for words - Telegraph

Writers who leave their wives lost for words - Telegraph: All in all, writers, and particularly novelists, are difficult people, with periods of their greatest difficulty tied predictably to their best achievement. Those closest to them will need saintly powers of support, patience and an inability to hold a grudge. It is a mystery to me how marriages consisting of two novelists can possibly function – I suppose they settle into a rhythm of alternating creative periods. Perhaps even more puzzling is how a mind which genuinely rests on the sympathetic observation of human behaviour can have quite long periods when it, just as genuinely, could not really care less if those about them were eaten by wolves. The next time you read a passionately sympathetic study of the emotional life, you might like to reflect that it may have been written by someone utterly ignoring his wife’s daily conversation.

How can the U.S. help Maliki when Maliki’s the problem? - The Washington Post

How can the U.S. help Maliki when Maliki’s the problem? - The Washington Post: Maliki lost Sunni Iraq through his sectarian and authoritarian policies. His repeated refusal over long years to strike an urgently needed political accord with the Sunni minority, his construction of corrupt, ineffective and sectarian state institutions, and his heavy-handed military repression in those areas are the key factors in the long-developing disintegration of Iraq. In late 2012, protests had swelled across Sunni areas of Iraq, driven by genuine popular anger but backed by many of the political forces now reportedly cooperating with ISIS’s advance (essential background here). The vicious assault on the Huwija protest camp by Iraqi security forces, in the midst of political negotiations, galvanized hostility to the Iraqi state and paved the way for growing popular support for a returning insurgency. Maliki’s heavy-handed security response to the escalating insurgency across Anbar, including the bombardment of Fallujah, has predictably driven more and more Sunnis into their ranks. Maliki’s purges of the Sunni leadership discredited or removed Sunni leaders willing to play the inside game, and pushed some of them toward supporting insurgency. His exclusionary policies, attempts to monopolize power and rough security practices radicalized a Sunni community that might have been brought into the system following the civil war. Iraq’s political class as a whole has done little better.

Why The Middle East Is Now A Giant Warzone, In One Terrifying Chart | ThinkProgress

Why The Middle East Is Now A Giant Warzone, In One Terrifying Chart | ThinkProgress: As Iraq struggles to take back its cities from ISIS, the region — including countries not in the above chart such as Jordan and Lebanon — are desparetly attempting to determine how best to aid Baghdad. Iran is now calling for international support for Baghdad as the United States mulls its response. But solutions seem hard to come by given the impossibility of sealing the border between Iraq and Syria now as the civil war continues to attract arms, money, and fighters. “The disaster is that Iraqis are fighting on both sides of the Syria conflict,” said Maysoon al Damlouji, a secular Sunni politician, told the Financial Times on Wednesday. Iraq is now part of the struggle for Syria’s future, whether it wants to be or not.

The Racism Beat — Matter — Medium

The Racism Beat — Matter — Medium: Imagine an editor asking a writer to passionately articulate why a drunk driver hitting and killing a boy on a bicycle is wrong and sad. That would never happen, because a drunk driver killing a boy on a bike is a self-evident tragedy. Asking a writer to exert lots of effort to explain why would be a disservice to the dead, as if his right to life were ever in question, as if our moral obligation to not snuff out our fellow citizens via recklessness were something in need of an eloquent plea.



 When another unarmed black teenager is gunned down, there is something that hurts about having to put fingers to keyboard in an attempt to illuminate why another black life taken is a catastrophe, even if that murdered person had a criminal record or a history of smoking marijuana, even if that murdered person wasn’t a millionaire or college student. There is something that hurts when thinking about the possibility of being “accidentally” shot on some darkened corner, leaving a writer who never met you the task of asking the world to acknowledge your value posthumously, as it didn’t during your life.

Stopping Campus Rape - NYTimes.com

Stopping Campus Rape - NYTimes.com: First, our lawmakers could reduce the legal drinking age to 18 from 21. The key problem in college sexual culture right now isn’t drinking per se; it’s blackout drinking, which follows from binge drinking, which is more likely to happen when a drinking culture is driven underground.

Undoing the federal government’s Reagan-era imposition of a higher drinking age is probably too counterintuitive for lawmakers to contemplate. And obviously it wouldn’t eliminate the lure of the keg stand or tame the recklessness of youth. But it would create an opportunity for a healthier approach to alcohol consumption — more social and relaxed, less frantic and performative — to take root in collegiate culture once again.

Will California's Ruling Against Teacher Tenure Change Schools? - Dana Goldstein - The Atlantic

Will California's Ruling Against Teacher Tenure Change Schools? - Dana Goldstein - The Atlantic: Here’s where the judge is right: It is difficult—actually, close to impossible—to argue that California’s teacher-tenure system makes sense. Research shows that most first-year teachers are mediocre at best. But good teachers tend to make huge jumps in effectiveness by the end of their second year on the job, and those improvements are often visible through classroom observation and students’ rising test scores. Yet California evaluates teachers for tenure in March of their second year of work, before two full years of student-teacher data are available.



 This means that under current California law, principals are forced to make high-stakes decisions about teachers without enough evidence. This disadvantages students, who might get stuck with sub-par instructors, but it also hurts teachers, who aren’t given enough time to prove their skill. Once a teacher earns tenure, it can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars—and countless administrative and legal man-hours—for a district to permanently remove him from his job. And in the event of budget cuts or school closings, California law mandates that the least experienced teachers be laid off first, even if they are more effective than their older colleagues, a policy known as “LIFO,” or “Last In, First Out.”

What's still wrong with the job market, in two charts - Vox

What's still wrong with the job market, in two charts - Vox: "When there are a lot of jobs and few job candidates you'd think that time to fill a position would be higher. And that's what this indicator is telling us now," he says.

That could mean that there's a skills mismatch, he says. That is, it could mean that employers can't find people qualified enough for the openings they're posting.

But it could also mean that employers are, for whatever reason, deciding to take their time in hiring. One theory here, as Catherine Rampell wrote in the Times last year, is that employers are still feeling cautious from the downturn — don't make a mistake in hiring, the idea goes, because it could be costly to pick the wrong person.

Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.? - NYTimes.com

Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.? - NYTimes.com:

Annie Lowrey writes
in the Times Magazine this week about the troubles of Clay County, Ky.,
which by several measures is the hardest place in America to live.

The
Upshot came to this conclusion by looking at six data points for each
county in the United States: education (percentage of residents with at
least a bachelor’s degree), median household income, unemployment rate,
disability rate, life expectancy and obesity. We then averaged each
county’s relative rank in these categories to create an overall ranking.

(We tried to include other factors, including income mobility and measures of environmental quality, but we were not able to find data sets covering all counties in the United States.)

The
10 lowest counties in the country, by this ranking, include a cluster
of six in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky (Breathitt,
Clay, Jackson, Lee, Leslie and Magoffin), along with four others in
various parts of the rural South: Humphreys County, Miss.; East Carroll
Parish, La.; Jefferson County, Ga.; and Lee County, Ark.

overview for xkcd

overview for xkcd: It's more that you should be aware when you're making these jokes, or bringing up the topic, that just the word 'rape' feels like a punch in the stomach to a pretty large group of people, and these are often people who would never in a million years give you feedback. The people in this group aren't just rape victims. A lot of them are just ordinary members of a gender that's always been a little more afraid to walk around at night or go to parties by themselves, knowing in the back of their minds that no matter how they dress or what they carry, they always have something that some bigger, stronger person might decide to take violently. Guys making jokes who weren't brought up with this fear don't always appreciate that.

So if you want to be a decent human being, take that into account when deciding what jokes to make to what audience.

If you want to go for it anyway, that's completely up to you. You have the freedom to say anything you want. I just suspect there are a lot of people who cheerfully make these remarks and don't realize how their words are going to be received. (And if you aren't interested in how your words are going to be received, why are you talking in the first place?)

Tesla’s Radical Patent Move is a Plot to Take Over the Road - The Daily Beast

Tesla’s Radical Patent Move is a Plot to Take Over the Road - The Daily Beast: With Tesla, Musk isn’t just trying to build an electric sports car. He’s trying to build a network that relies on electricity for transport: cars, batteries, supplies and components, charging stations and equipment. That’s an enormously expensive undertaking, and one that Musk and Tesla have largely shouldered alone.

Despite the company’s supreme self-confidence and demonstrated competency, Tesla is coming to realize that it can’t take on the world by itself.

June 2 is the most important day of Obama's second term - Vox

June 2 is the most important day of Obama's second term - Vox:



Adopt a rule that's too lenient, and the president will miss a unique
opportunity to make an impact on one of the most important issues
facing the world today. Adopt a rule that's too strict and he'll risk a
congressional backlash that could ultimately undermine the EPA's ability
to do anything. Republicans are sure to cry "overreach" no matter where
the administration comes down, but they would need Democratic defectors
to really change anything. Yet energy issues are highly regionalized,
and the risk of an anti-Obama backlash from Democrats representing
coal-dependent areas is real. Striking the right balance will be tough,
and regardless of what the rule looks like it will be some time before
we know whether Obama's done it.




But either way, make no mistake this — not the Keystone XL pipeline or congressional Benghazi hearings or clearly doomed transportation plans — is the political story to watch of our time.

The Issue of Tenure for Teachers | Mike the Teacher

The Issue of Tenure for Teachers | Mike the Teacher: Tenure protects teachers’ livelihoods when we stand up to corrupt or incompetent administration. Some of you hate the new standards? An experienced teacher with tenure can shield your kids from bad standards by doing what they know is best without fear of losing their jobs. Without teacher tenure, most of us can’t afford risking our jobs, thus your kids have little-to-no protection from the whims of politicians who have no training or experience in Education. Again: you take away teacher tenure, you take away teachers’ ability to stand up to corruption and incompetence in Education. Believe me, it’s there, and teachers are the last line of defense from your kids being harmed by that corruption and incompetence.

I love teaching, but if I leave it, a large part of it will be because brain-dead rulings like this ensure I will not be allowed to make a living as a teacher when I am old. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

The Exorcists Next Door - D Magazine

The Exorcists Next Door - D Magazine: Ruth morphs into another person altogether when Larry commands these spirits to manifest. Either she is an Academy Award-winning horror-film actress, with Ferrari-smooth shifts of body and voice, or she is encountering something in a subconscious realm. At one point, she speaks the name of a demon in a distinctly foreign voice: “Ba-al.” Later, in casual conversation, the pronunciation comes out differently: “Bail,” with a bit of a twang—the name of a Canaanite god mentioned numerous times in the Bible.

She describes the experience as sitting in a passenger seat, watching things unfold beside her as though another part of her brain controls them. “It becomes our little scavenger hunt,” Ruth says cheerily. “What’s the crazy little person inside me going to say next?”

IranWire | Did Revolutionary Guards Rig the 2009 Election?

IranWire | Did Revolutionary Guards Rig the 2009 Election?: A video posted on Facebook appears to support claims that Iran’s 2009 presidential election was rigged.

The clip, which was apparently leaked, shows Revolutionary Guards Commander Mohammad Ali Jafari giving a speech about the Guards’ crucial role in Iranian politics and arguing the case for military intervention in the election. The date of the speech has not been verified.

In the video, Jafari concedes that there is widespread doubt about the election results. “The situation became complicated and many of the authorities and even many clerics still have doubts,” he says. “Many still have objections, and if things had continued the way they were going, a run-off election would be needed.” He also said that, if the election advanced to another stage, “it was not certain how things would turn out.”

Today’s Clean-Cut Teens: Less Sex, Less Drugs - The Daily Beast

Today’s Clean-Cut Teens: Less Sex, Less Drugs - The Daily Beast: I was thus pleased—but not surprised—to see that the current generation of American adolescents has been making better health-care decisions for themselves than any previous cohort since the Centers for Disease Control started collecting data. According to a massive new report on trends in health statistics recently released by the CDC and handily summarized by Vox, teenagers are less likely to do drugs, have unprotected sex, or (according to the Guttmacher Institute) get pregnant today than adolescents in previous decades.

Adjunct Responsibilities on College Campuses Extend to Mental Health | New Republic

Adjunct Responsibilities on College Campuses Extend to Mental Health | New Republic: This happens because I am in a position of authority, but I am also deeply non-threatening for being a young, blonde woman who smiles a lot. I can’t strike fear into anyone’s heart, and certainly this has a great deal to do with my age and gender, but it also means that I benefit from a very specific kind of privilege. White male privilege means the gift of easy authority and confidence, among other dubious rewards. White female privilege means being viewed as harmless, innocuous, and safe to confide in. For a teacher, this is both a blessing and a curse. But mostly, I’ve found, it is a blessing. My students write about who they really are and what they really care about, without fearing I will censor or question them or reprimand them for their candor. I like to think this makes them better writers. I know it makes me a more generous and more thoughtful human being.

NSA: Our systems are so complex we can’t stop them from deleting data wanted for lawsuit - The Washington Post

NSA: Our systems are so complex we can’t stop them from deleting data wanted for lawsuit - The Washington Post: The National Security Agency recently used a novel argument for not holding onto information it collects about users online activity: it's too complex.

2014 Virginia primary: How David Brat won - POLITICO.com

2014 Virginia primary: How David Brat won - POLITICO.com: Cantor’s aides take pride in running a strong race against any candidate — Democrat or Republican. But the $2 million Cantor spent to brand Brat as a liberal professor may have had the reverse effect, people close to him and Brat say. It showed voters there was an alternative to Cantor -and that was exactly what many voters wanted.

(Also on POLITICO: For Jewish Republicans: Oy veh)

“The negative ads calling me a liberal professor at first they started off with kind of comic strips,” Brat said in an interview here late Tuesday night. “And everyone kind of liked them. Me and my boy watched them the first night and kind of died laughing. We thought they were funny.”

“They gave me $1 million in name ID and I think that got us going, I think. I’m not a political expert on that, but I think they kind of saw that was happening and they made those a little darker, and they were black and green and looked like a Star Wars thing by the time they got done with it – it made me look like a pretty serious guy.”

Eric Cantor Defeated by David Brat, Tea Party Challenger, in Primary Upset - NYTimes.com

Eric Cantor Defeated by David Brat, Tea Party Challenger, in Primary Upset - NYTimes.com: WASHINGTON — In one of the most stunning primary election upsets in congressional history, the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, was soundly defeated on Tuesday by a Tea Party-backed economics professor who had hammered him for being insufficiently conservative.

The result delivered a major jolt to the Republican Party — Mr. Cantor had widely been considered the top candidate to succeed Speaker John A. Boehner — and it has the potential to change both the debate in Washington on immigration and, possibly, the midterm elections.



With just over $200,000, David Brat, a professor at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., toppled Mr. Cantor, repeatedly criticizing him for being soft on immigration and contending that he supported what critics call amnesty for immigrants in the country illegally

Hundreds Gather to Remember 6-Year-Old Victim of Brooklyn Stabbing - NYTimes.com

Hundreds Gather to Remember 6-Year-Old Victim of Brooklyn Stabbing - NYTimes.com: In a rousing, wide-ranging eulogy, the Rev. David K. Brawley, the church’s lead pastor, said, “I’ve been grabbing all the babies this week. And one of the babies said to me, ‘My mommy said when you preach on Friday you’re going to be mad.’ Well, I am mad. But I’m equally sad about what happened to this community and this family and this child.”

He went on, “We’re here to celebrate P.J.’s life but we must acknowledge that his life was ended way too soon.”

He said, “We should be comfortable with God, but there’s no way we should be comfortable with what happened. You should not be comfortable in this community until our children have safe spaces.”

The more you like Obama, the less likely you are to vote this year - The Washington Post

The more you like Obama, the less likely you are to vote this year - The Washington Post: Across nearly every demographic category - age, race, gender, ideology - groups that lean Republican and tend to disapprove of Obama are significantly more likely to say they'll show up to vote this November. This isn't a new phenomenon - midterm electoral demographics have historically favored Republicans. Democrats are acutely aware of the issue and are actively working to reshape the 2014 electorate along 2012 lines.

But if these numbers are any indication, Democrats still have their work cut out for them. As E.J. Dionne and Bill Galston write in their analysis of the PRRI data, "it is hard to miss the similarities between mid-2014 and the political terrain four years ago." This year, Republicans are likely to add a few seats to their already comfortable House majority, and may be poised to take control of the Senate as well.

Interstellar 8-Track: How Voyager’s Vintage Tech Keeps Running | Science | WIRED

Interstellar 8-Track: How Voyager’s Vintage Tech Keeps Running | Science | WIRED: As long as they are still functioning, both Voyager spacecraft will continue to collect data and send it back to us through at least 2020, and possibly until 2025. Even if something breaks and they are suddenly unable to hear anything from Earth, they will keep sending data back, repeating the same sets of observations until they run out of power.

But the radioisotope batteries on Voyager 1 and 2 are diminishing, putting out four Watts less per year. Mission managers will one day have to prioritize which instruments are most important during the voyage through interstellar space, shutting them off one by one as the years go on. After that, both probes will remain within range of our antennas until perhaps 2036. Though scientific data won’t be returned, engineering data could still come back if there is enough power to send a signal. All this means that the mission isn’t yet done.

“We’ve just stepped into interstellar space,” said Dodd. “We’re just going across the horizon line and there are many more discoveries to come.”

German man locked up over HVB bank allegations may have been telling truth | World news | theguardian.com

German man locked up over HVB bank allegations may have been telling truth | World news | theguardian.com: A German man committed to a high-security psychiatric hospital after being accused of fabricating a story of money-laundering activities at a major bank is to have his case reviewed after evidence has emerged proving the validity of his claims.

In a plot worthy of a crime blockbuster, Gustl Mollath, 56, was submitted to the secure unit of a psychiatric hospital seven years ago after court experts diagnosed him with paranoid personality disorder following his claims that staff at the Hypo Vereinsbank (HVB) – including his wife, then an assets consultant at HVB – had been illegally smuggling large sums of money into Switzerland.



 Mollath was tried in 2006 after his ex-wife accused him of causing her physical harm. He denied the charges, claiming she was trying to sully his name in the light of the evidence he allegedly had against her. He was admitted to the clinic, where he has remained against his will ever since.

Why I Miss Being A Born-Again Christian

Why I Miss Being A Born-Again Christian:





During my master’s degree program, my plan of going on to do a Ph.D.
gradually dissolved — Exhibit A: me working full time at BuzzFeed, hi! —
but something else materialized: a swelling doubt about the faith I’d
set out to preserve, which hinged almost solely on believing the Bible
to be the literal, inspired word of God. As I learned ancient Greek and
Hebrew and pored over the biblical text in its original languages, and
read it in larger quantities than I’d ever read it at church, its
discrepancies began to shine a hot and uncomfortable spotlight on my
personal religious views. Pieces of the gospels contradicted each other,
I realized. Greek words, like the ones we’ve translated 2,000 years
later to mean “homosexuality,” didn’t quite mean what modern
evangelicals wanted them to mean. Early Christians disagreed up to the
fifth century on which portions of texts should even be in the biblical
canon.





More and more, I realized that the Bible was a flawed, messy, deeply human
book — and that in treating it as an unimpeachable guidebook for life
in the 21st century, many conservative Christians were basing their
entire worldviews on a text that, in my opinion, wasn’t that much
different from any other historical collection of letters and stories. I
was forced to confront the fact that I’d converted into a pre-fab
worldview: one hatched largely in recent American history from Jonathan
Edwards and the theology of the Great Awakening, and one that “family
values” politics has buoyed through modern decades.

Best of TomDispatch: Rebecca Solnit, The Archipelago of Arrogance | TomDispatch

Best of TomDispatch: Rebecca Solnit, The Archipelago of Arrogance | TomDispatch: Yes, guys like this pick on other men's books too, and people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.



 Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.

BBC - Future - The best way to win an argument

BBC - Future - The best way to win an argument: The results were clear. People who provided reasons remained as convinced of their positions as they had been before the experiment. Those who were asked to provide explanations softened their views, and reported a correspondingly larger drop in how they rated their understanding of the issues. People who had previously been strongly for or against carbon emissions trading, for example, tended to became more moderate – ranking themselves as less certain in their support or opposition to the policy.



So this is something worth bearing in mind next time you're trying to convince a friend that we should build more nuclear power stations, that the collapse of capitalism is inevitable, or that dinosaurs co-existed with humans 10,000 years ago. Just remember, however, there's a chance you might need to be able to explain precisely why you think you are correct. Otherwise you might end up being the one who changes their mind.

The Secret Life of an Obsessive Airbnb Host | Narratively | Human stories, boldly told.

The Secret Life of an Obsessive Airbnb Host | Narratively | Human stories, boldly told.: It’s no secret that Airbnb’s housing stock is partially composed of listings that are technically forbidden by a landlord, co-op board, or city ordinance. Airbnb does not reveal data on its hosts, making it difficult to paint a clear picture of the ratio of legitimate hosts to those who operate in violation of leases and local laws. But from my interactions with other hosts, and one blogger’s survey of thousands of Airbnb listings in New York City, you get the impression that Airbnb does a sizable amount of business with people who should not be hosting and are not covered by Airbnb and thus wholly liable for runaway guests.



 A response from Airbnb customer service confirmed that sinking feeling: “We require that all hosts are legally in the right to use the Airbnb service. If you don't have that right, then that would be a violation of our terms so we must suggest you get full permission to sublet your listing. Anything that occurs outside of the listing would be handled outside of Airbnb.”

Reihan Salam’s piece on education spending is condescending, wrong | Fredrik deBoer

Reihan Salam’s piece on education spending is condescending, wrong | Fredrik deBoer: Now it happens that there is no such thing as private school pedagogy that’s distinct from public school pedagogy. Private school teachers often attend the same college programs as public school teachers, teach from the same collection of textbooks, give the same sort of tests. They are often exempt from the manic standardized testing that public school teachers have to participate in, freeing up class time, so there’s that, I guess. But it’s not like there’s some secret lesson plans that get passed around only between private schools. And here’s another dirty secret: there frequently isn’t a big difference in the day-to-day administrations of private schools, either. Oh, you can fire a teacher easier in your average private school. But there’s absolutely no reputable evidence to suggest that this is why private schools seem to have better educational outcomes than public schools. There is, on the other hand, an argument that has been supported by decades of responsible studies from thousands of responsible researchers: student demographics are more powerful determinants of educational outcomes than teachers or schools. And private schools systematically exclude the hardest-to-educate students, through high tuitions, entrance exams, and opaque selection processes. For these schools, the fact that the hardest-to-educate kids can’t attend is a feature, not a bug.

Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? Well, He Just Did. | Pearls Before Swine

Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? Well, He Just Did. | Pearls Before Swine: Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? Well, He Just Did.

Exotic Nanomaterials Claimed Their First Major Workplace Injury | Motherboard

Exotic Nanomaterials Claimed Their First Major Workplace Injury | Motherboard: What makes it a big deal, and potentially so dangerous, is that ordinary stuff like nickel or titanium have extraordinary properties at the nano scale. They have very different physical and chemical properties than the same material at even the micro size. And there are many different types of nanomaterials, including fullerenes (aka buckyballs), quantum dots, carbon nanotubes, and all manner of nanoparticles.

“It’s impossible to test every nano product for its safety,” said Journeay.

Many aren’t required to be tested because nanoscale nickel, titanium dioxide, and many other nanomaterials have the same molecular structure at the nano and megascale. Even though the sought-after properties of nano nickel or titanium may be wildly different than when they’re pea-sized, they are considered the same by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the federal nano regulator.

MUST READ: Dying Girl's Hidden Message on Mirror Stuns Her Family

MUST READ: Dying Girl's Hidden Message on Mirror Stuns Her Family: Happiness depends upon ourselves. Maybe it’s not about the happy ending, maybe it’s about the story.
The purpose of life is a life of purpose. The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.
Happiness is a direction not a destination. Thank you for existing. Be happy, be free, believe, forever young. You know my name, not my story.

The Endless Civil War Goes On - James Fallows - The Atlantic

The Endless Civil War Goes On - James Fallows - The Atlantic:

Through the past two centuries the United States has overall fared very well thanks in part to success in both these areas. Its culture, laws, policies, geographic openness, and ideas about itself have generally encouraged adaptability. And its policies have bent change in its favor—through expansion of mass education and a research established, through public investment in leading technologies, through remaining attractive as a site for immigration, et cetera. All this is on top of the incredible natural advantages the U.S. enjoys because of scale, resources, distance from enemies, etc.



• The successful American bargain has depended on relative mobility, openness, and egalitarianism, with the obvious enormous exception of slavery and its aftermath, and many other lesser barriers. As legal changes make America even more equal and mobile, it should become more successful in the basic job of adaptation. As economic and other shifts make it more unequal and class-bound, it becomes less itself, and less successful.

Don’t Harsh Our Mellow, Dude - NYTimes.com

Don’t Harsh Our Mellow, Dude - NYTimes.com: What could go wrong with a bite or two?

Everything, as it turned out.

Not at first. For an hour, I felt nothing. I figured I’d order dinner from room service and return to my more mundane drugs of choice, chardonnay and mediocre-movies-on-demand.



But then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.



 I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

It took all night before it began to wear off, distressingly slowly. The next day, a medical consultant at an edibles plant where I was conducting an interview mentioned that candy bars like that are supposed to be cut into 16 pieces for novices; but that recommendation hadn’t been on the label.

Racist Woman Repeatedly Calls Man an N-Word in Front of Kids, Is Confused Why He Is Recording Her : nottheonion

Racist Woman Repeatedly Calls Man an N-Word in Front of Kids, Is Confused Why He Is Recording Her : nottheonion: This dude handled this situation about as well as he could. Unfortunately these recordings and the ensuing rush to convene the court of public opinion distract from the actual insidious nature of racism. The conversation over racism so often gets into "If they get to say 'X' how come I don't get to say 'Y?'" If your kids came up to you to ask that, the reasonable answer would be that neither of them get to call each other names. But reasonable isn't fun.

It's very popular right now to take a moment of racism, put it online, make fun of it, have some trolls do their thing, and then move on to the next one. It's not news. It's not progress. Hell, it's barely even justice. A very fucked up woman with an obviously very fucked up life said some extremely fucked up things. Her life is going to continue to be pitiful and fucked up with or without this being plastered all over the Internet. Hopefully she doesn't get to keep custody of her kids not to punish her but to give them a chance at some stability. Hopefully she can get some help somehow so her life can quit being so shitty. It doesn't take a team of psychiatrists to see that she's imbalanced.

The thing is her rant doesn't defund schools. It doesn't deny this guy a job, a loan, or a place to live. It doesn't buy up all the houses in a neighborhood to tear them down for a parking lot forcing people to relocate. It doesn't make sure his business isn't welcome. It doesn't expand services in a city away from his neighborhood. It doesn't make sure that he stays in his neighborhood with people who look like him. And so on.

It's important that we don't take our eye off the real problem. This woman's racism sucks, but capital-R-Racism is where we really need to be pointing our cameras.

Boggle! - I’ve been getting a lot of these lately, and I...

Boggle! - I’ve been getting a lot of these lately, and I...

a2NXEze_700b.jpg (JPEG Image, 625�נ900 pixels) - Scaled (92%)

a2NXEze_700b.jpg (JPEG Image, 625�נ900 pixels) - Scaled (92%)

Verbatim: What Is a Photocopier? on Vimeo

Verbatim: What Is a Photocopier? on Vimeo: In this dramatization of transcripts from a legal deposition, a lawyer becomes embroiled in an absurd argument about the definition of a photocopier.

The 100 Most-Edited Wikipedia Articles | FiveThirtyEight

The 100 Most-Edited Wikipedia Articles | FiveThirtyEight: Not surprisingly, Bush isn’t the only political figure to attract factual controversy. The Wikipedia entry on Barack Obama has been revised 23,514 times — just slightly ahead of Adolf Hitler (23,499 revisions). Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton all make it into the top 100 (Sarah Palin falls just short, in 104th place).

Articles on religion, including Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muhammed, or about specific countries, such as the United States and Israel, attract plenty of revisions. More surprising, however, is that World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) features in more revised articles than any other single body — seven — and is responsible for the second-most-revised article: list of WWE personnel.

Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes because people don’t respect them, study finds

Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes because people don’t respect them, study finds: Researchers at the University of Illinois and Arizona State University examined six decades of hurricane death rates according to gender, spanning 1950 and 2012. Of the 47 most damaging hurricanes, the female-named hurricanes produced an average of 45 deaths compared to 23 deaths in male-named storms, or almost double the number of fatalities. (The study excluded Katrina and Audrey, outlier storms that would skew the model).

The difference in death rates between genders was even more pronounced when comparing strongly masculine names versus strongly feminine ones.

“[Our] model suggests that changing a severe hurricane’s name from Charley … to Eloise … could nearly triple its death toll,” the study says.

NRA blasts Open Carry Texas after San Antonio incidents - San Antonio Express-News

NRA blasts Open Carry Texas after San Antonio incidents - San Antonio Express-News: The NRA on Friday called the Texas group's open carry displays in restaurants “weird,” “scary,” “counter-productive” and “downright foolishness” in a blog post on the NRA's Legislative Action website. Chili's and Sonic issued statements Friday requesting that patrons not openly carry firearms in their restaurants in response to the incidents.

“Using guns merely to draw attention to yourself in public not only defies common sense, it shows a lack of consideration and manners,” the NRA's lobbying arm wrote. “That's not the Texas way. And that's certainly not the NRA way.”

People With Chronic Illness Fare Worse Under Cost-Sharing - NYTimes.com

People With Chronic Illness Fare Worse Under Cost-Sharing - NYTimes.com: In France, co-pays are set by levels of sickness. Those who have chronic conditions have all of their co-pays waived. Even Singapore, beloved among conservative health care wonks because of its reliance on cost-sharing, makes exceptions for many with chronic illnesses. The rules do so explicitly to encourage them to seek care.

In the United States, we have adopted a system where those who use the most care pay the most out of pocket. That may seem “fair” in some way, but cost-sharing isn’t about fairness. It’s about reducing health care spending without negatively affecting health outcomes. It should be a scalpel. We’re using it like a club.

Notes On Surgery

Notes On Surgery: There’s not a line — before here he was female, after he is male. I think he’s still deciding on how to think about the person he was before transitioning. Every once in a while I see a picture of him before he cut his hair and changed his name and how he dressed, before he was the man I married. It’s an odd feeling. It’s him but not him. I don’t dwell on it.

I don’t dwell on my own sexuality either. I’m straight. I wasn’t attracted to him when he started transitioning, when there was still a feminine curve to his cheeks and hips. If you had asked me then if we would ever date I would have said no. It took two years of being friends before I realized I liked him (liked liked him). One day he asked me out and I thought well, why not? And then we fell in love, fast. We were almost immediately talking about our future, marriage, kids. His being transgender faded to the background. It sounds unbelievable but I still sometimes forget. He has to remind me that people he met in the past might not know who he is now. I don’t know, or care, what loving him means for my placement on the Kinsey scale, or whatever spectrum is the going standard. If I lost him I would undoubtedly date cis-men. I love him, and I love being his wife. Figuring out what that labels me as seems like a waste of time.

Are the Super-Wealthy Buying Democracy? | The Mischiefs of Faction

Are the Super-Wealthy Buying Democracy? | The Mischiefs of Faction: While most donations aren't quite at this level, they nonetheless follow a similar path, with a lot of them not really buying anything at all. To some extent, the money gives them access to politicians, which isn't nothing. But politicians are wary of boldly adopting a wealthy donor's views, and as the above graph suggests, they hear from a lot of wealthy donors across the political spectrum, who probably have conflicting ideas. The super wealthy are certainly paying a lot of money into the political system these days, but it's far from clear what they're getting out of it.

Five maps of America's massive drought - Vox

Five maps of America's massive drought - Vox: Here's NASA's Earth Observatory: "As of May 6, 2014, half of the United States was experiencing some level of drought. Nearly 15 percent of the nation was gripped by extreme to exceptional drought. For the Plains and the Southwest, it's a pattern that has been persistent for much of the past several years."

"Much of the US has been in drought since 2012"

This isn't a one-year event: at least half of the United States has faced drought on and off since 2012 — at the peak in July 2013, some 81 percent of the country was experiencing at least some level of drought.



Put together, the 2012-14 drought has been one of North America's biggest since the costly 1988-89 drought.