Inhuman mother pleads not guilty to bashing 6-month-old baby to death: http://t.co/ZEr4lCyeUV @StevenErtelt
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) April 23, 2014Mom Grabs 6-Week-Old by the Feet, Slams Her Head Into the Ground Killing Her
http://t.co/q5ZGW9Fm3A ht @AmPowerBlog pic.twitter.com/txuX3PbLIT
— Steven Ertelt (@StevenErtelt) April 23, 2014Like most professors, I hate doing administrative work. And since somebody has to do it, universities have increasingly built up a corps of full-time administrators. That's fine, but lately, the administrative class has grown too numerous and too heavy-handed. As colleges and universities increasingly face financial pressures, it's time to rethink.Keep reading.
Full-time administrators now outnumber full-time faculty. And when times get tough, schools have a disturbing tendency to shrink faculty numbers while keeping administrators on the payroll. Teaching gets done by low-paid, nontenured adjuncts, but nobody ever heard of an "adjunct administrator."
But it's not just the fat that is worrisome. It's administrators' obsession with -- and all too often, abuse of -- security that raises serious concerns. At the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Clyde W. Barrow, a leading professor, has just quit, complaining of an administration that isolates itself from students and faculty behind keypads and security doors.
Isolation is bad. But worse still is the growing tendency of administrators to stifle critics by shamelessly interpreting even obviously harmless statements as "threats." A recent example took place at Bergen Community College, where Professor Francis Schmidt was suspended, and ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination over a "threat" that consisted of posting a picture of his 9-year old daughter wearing a Game Of Thrones T-shirt. The shirt bore a quote from the show, reading: "I will take what is mine with fire & blood." Bergen administrator Jim Miller apparently thought the picture, which was posted to Schmidt's Google Plus account, was somehow intended as a threat to him. (Schmidt had filed a labor grievance a couple of months earlier.)
What kind of person claims that a picture of a 9-year-old girl wearing an HBO T-shirt is a threat? The kind of person who runs America's colleges, apparently. And Miller, alas, is not alone in his cluelessness and, apparently, paranoia.
Last year at the University of Wisconsin at Stout, theater professor James Miller had a poster from the television series Firefly on his door. It included a picture of Captain Mal Reynolds, a character played by Nathan Fillion, and a quote from the show: "You don't know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you'll be awake. You'll be facing me. And you'll be armed."
Campus police chief Lisa Walter removed the poster, regarding it as a "threat." After Stout complained to no avail, he replaced the poster with one reading: "Fascism can cause blunt head trauma and/or violent death. Keep fascism away from children and pets."
This poster, too, was interpreted as a threat, which led to a visit from the campus "threat assessment team." After nationwide mockery (Fillion, and fellow Firefly cast member Adam Baldwin, joined in, as did many of the show's fans), the university retreated, and promised to change its approach in the future. Presumably, Chief Lisa Walter carries a gun, and I wonder if that's a good idea in someone so skittish that she sees a movie poster as a "threat."
Meanwhile, at the University of Colorado, the American Association of University Professors has produced a report on the university's running "roughshod" over academic freedom as part of an anti-sexual-harassment campaign in its philosophy department and -- again -- using campus police to strongarm a faculty member over an obviously bogus threat...
Read Justice Sotomayor's dissent in today's #Schuette Supreme Court ruling http://t.co/oh4kk108hJ #AffirmativeAction http://t.co/Nxk0n16KEj
— PFAW (@peoplefor) April 22, 2014Ukraine’s interim President Oleksander Turchinov has called for an anti-terrorist operation to be re-launched on Tuesday, after he claimed that two bodies were found "brutally tortured by pro-Russian" militants near the eastern city of Slaviansk.Also at Telegraph UK, "Russia 'supported torture of Kiev politician’":
Mr Turchinov said in a statement that one of the bodies was that of Volodymyr Rybak, a member of the ruling Batkivshchyna party, who had recently been abducted by “terrorists.”
Local media said Mr Rybak was kidnapped in Horlivka, a nearby locality, on Wednesday last week.
Police from the regional headquarters in Donetsk said that the body of a man who died a violent death had been found in the Seversky-Donets river and that it resembled Mr Rybak, a local councillor in the town of Horlivka, near Donetsk.
They added that formal identification would require further work...
Ukraine’s acting president calls for 'anti-terrorist operation’ against pro-Moscow separatists after body of a murdered town councillor is found.
The acting Ukrainian president, Oleksandr Turchynov, said on Tuesday that Russia had supported the torture and murder of a local politician in the east of the country loyal to Kiev.Still more at NYT, "At Funeral, Expressions of Grief and Anger Toward Kiev Officials," and at the Times of Israel, "Ukraine relaunches operation after Biden leaves."
The president called for the re-launch of an “anti-terrorist operation” against pro-Moscow separatists that was suspended only last week.
The remains of Vladimir Rybak, a town councillor and member of Yulia Tymoshenko’s Our Ukraine Fatherland party, along with an unidentified body, were believed to have been found in separatist-held Slavyansk.
“These crimes are being carried out with the full support and indulgence of the Russian Federation,” said Mr Turchynov. “I call on the security agencies to re-launch and carry out effective anti-terrorist measures, with the aim of protecting Ukrainian citizens living in east [Ukraine] from terrorists.”
Ukraine’s security forces had largely suspended what was a fairly limited operation to respond to the takeover of the eastern town by pro-Russian separatists after an accord with Moscow last week to try to defuse the crisis...
Heh.Whether or not Krugman’s scholarship and teaching ability warrant such a superior salary is certainly worthy of debate, but the real issue for most commentators is not how much CUNY will pay Krugman, but how little they are asking him to do. CUNY is essentially offering him what used to be called a sinecure. Like ecclesiastical appointments “without the care of souls,” the terms of Krugman’s contract require him to do almost nothing his first year and then teach just one graduate seminar each year for as long as he would like to stay at CUNY. This required teaching in the second year is less than half of the usual course load for most distinguished professors at the Graduate Center, some of whom teach three classes per year and advise several dissertations at a time. Whether Krugman will advise or sit on any dissertation committees remains to be seen.So, kind of like his columns, then.
It is clear from his acceptance email however, that he is interested in doing as little work as possible.
http://t.co/vUPbMHFwaA pic.twitter.com/TIFbtl6K8N
— Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) April 22, 2014
If Cold War-era fear mongering, our-stockpile-has-to-be-bigger-than-their-stockpile machismo and plain “might is right” male insistence as a path to unquestioned power is no longer the accepted in the living rooms and bedrooms and boardrooms and classrooms across America, let alone in the war room, what do Republicans have left? Put another way, through eras of women’s liberation and racial equality movements and calls for peace and justice over war and tyranny, the patriarchy has remained intact increasingly not because of its popularity nor long list of great achievements for society but out of sheer will—its tight grip not yet fully dislodged by the simple passage of time that plainly advantages these forces of change.Heh, that Sally Kohn's a regular laugh riot!
But when masculinity itself starts to transform, to acknowledge the problems and even shackles of such strict gender norms and embrace a more open and experimental version of itself, traditional masculinity is defeated from within. When masculinity transforms to become a tall, athletic, African-American liberal who achieves peace and prosperity through words rather than weapons, when the new generation of billionaires are not muscle-y factory men but geeky and somewhat effeminate tech entrepreneurs, and when there are strong and powerful women increasingly comfortably and populously mingled within and sometimes hard to distinguish from the back because both have buns on the tops of their heads … well, who the hell is going to vote for a political party not just predicated on but deeply invested in exactly the opposite, let alone embrace any of their machismo-fueled militaristic ideas?
BAMN says #Schuette is a "racist decision." They also argued that the 14th Amendment only protects some racial groups http://t.co/ZKGtQdCFMp
— XIV Foundation (@XIVFoundation) April 22, 2014Today’s Supreme Court decision upholding the ban on affirmative action in Michigan is a racist decision. It is this Court’s Plessy v Ferguson. The decision of the Court today makes clear that this Court intends to do nothing to defend the right to equality in politics, opportunity, rights, hopes and aspirations of its Latina/o, black, Native American and other minority citizens. At the very moment that America is becoming a majority minority nation this Court is declaring its intention to uphold white privilege and to create a new Jim Crow legal system.Remember, these people aren't too smart, lol.
.@JenGratz Wow, that "BAMN" group's a bunch of whacked open borders communists, lol! https://t.co/P6Tj9e0JDJ
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) April 22, 2014
PHOENIX — Depending on the point of view, Shanesha Taylor is either a negligent mom who deserves being charged with child abuse or an overwhelmed single mother who made a mistake while trying to provide for her children.Actually, no.
Taylor, 35, was charged last month with felony child abuse after leaving her two young boys in a hot car while she interviewed for a job.
Taylor's situation, and her tearful mug shot, moved 45,000 people to sign an online petition that calls for charges to be dropped. Her case even prompted a stranger to raise more than $100,000 on her behalf.
Her attorney, Benjamin Taylor, said Monday that he hoped a deal could be reached to reduce or drop the charges.
"You have a single mother with children who is trying to do her best to provide for her family," said the attorney, no relation to Taylor. "We all make mistakes and nobody is perfect and … she was doing her best. But now does she deserve two felonies on her record because she made a mistake? If she's convicted, it will ruin her life."
#SCOTUS upholds the right of citizens to ban preferential treatment based on race! http://t.co/5YWEJOZPyt #Schuette #equaltreatment
— Jennifer Gratz (@jengratz) April 22, 2014
Like the Fuller Court in the Lochner era, the Roberts Court in the #CitizensUnited era continues to plunder #Schuette pic.twitter.com/g5kVNLrg3M
— Calvin Sloan (@CalvinSloan) April 22, 2014
Thomas Piketty likes capitalism because it efficiently allocates resources. But he does not like how it allocates income. There is, he thinks, a moral illegitimacy to virtually any accumulation of wealth, and it is a matter of justice that such inequality be eradicated in our economy. The way to do this is to eliminate high incomes and to reduce existing wealth through taxation.Heh.
"Capital in the Twenty-First Century" is Mr. Piketty's dense exploration of the history of wages and wealth over the past three centuries. He presents a blizzard of data about income distribution in many countries, claiming to show that inequality has widened dramatically in recent decades and will soon get dangerously worse. Whether or not one is convinced by Mr. Piketty's data—and there are reasons for skepticism, given the author's own caveats and the fact that many early statistics are based on extremely limited samples of estate tax records and dubious extrapolation—is ultimately of little consequence. For this book is less a work of economic analysis than a bizarre ideological screed.
I’m sure that Cliven Bundy probably could have cut a deal with the Bureau of Land Management and should have. Of course, it’s never wise to let a federal court order hang over your head. And certainly we cannot have a world of Cliven Bundys if a legal system is to function.Keep reading.
In a practical sense, I also know that if I were to burn brush on a no-burn day, or toss an empty pesticide container in the garbage bin, or shoot a coyote too near the road, I would incur the wrath of the government in a way someone does not who dumps a stripped stolen auto (two weeks ago) in my vineyard, or solvents, oil, and glass (a few months ago), or rips out copper wire from the pump for the third time (last year). Living in a Winnebago with a porta-potty and exposed Romex in violation of zoning statutes for many is not quite breaking the law where I live; having a mailbox five inches too high for some others certainly is.
So Mr. Bundy must realize that in about 1990 we decided to focus on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding citizen and to ignore the felony of the lawbreaker. The former gave law enforcement respect; the latter ignored their authority. The first made or at least did not cost enforcers money; arresting the second began a money-losing odyssey of incarceration, trials, lawyers, appeals, and all the rest.
Mr. Bundy knows that the bullies of the BLM would much rather send a SWAT team after him than after 50 illegal aliens being smuggled by a gun-toting cartel across the southwestern desert. How strange, then, at this late postmodern date, for someone like Bundy on his horse still to be playing the law-breaking maverick Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) in (the David Miller, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Abbey effort) Lonely Are the Brave.
But the interest in Mr. Bundy’s case is not about legal strategies in revolving fiscal disagreements with the federal government.
Instead, we all have followed Mr. Bundy for three reasons.
One, he called attention to the frightening fact that the federal government owns 83% of the land in Nevada. Note that “federal” and “government” are the key words and yet are abstractions. Rather, a few thousands unelected employees — in the BLM, EPA, Defense Department, and other alphabet soup agencies — can pretty much do what they want on the land they control. And note, this is not quite the case in Silicon Valley or Manhattan or Laguna Beach. The danger can be summed up by a scene I see about once a month on a Fresno freeway: a decrepit truck stopped by the California Highway Patrol for having inadequate tarps on a trailer of green clippings, just as a new city garbage truck speeds by, with wet garbage flying over the median. Who will police the police?
Two, this administration has a long record of not following the law — picking and choosing when and how to enforce immigration statutes, depending on the particular dynamics of the next election; picking and choosing which elements of Obamacare to enforce, again depending on perceived political advantage; and picking and choosing when to go after coal companies, or when not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, or when to reverse the order of the Chrysler creditors, or when to allow Lois Lerner to destroy the credibility of the IRS for partisan advantage.
In other words, the Obama administration regularly breaks the law as it sees fit. So we wonder why a federal agency sends out swarms of armed security agents to the empty desert on behalf of a tortoise, when it could just as easily storm Jay Carney’s press conference and demand that the president promise to enforce the Affordable Care Act. Or start apprehending those who are not just violating immigration law, but also serially signing false federal affidavits or providing employers with fraudulent identities.
Finally, Bundy, for all his contradictions, is a throwback to a different age...
The Radical Left Is Never Right About Israel http://t.co/Cf9uWjbZTz
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) April 22, 2014The people who defame Israel and wish to undermine its status in the world are not anti-Semites — or so they will tell you, every chance they get. Their denial of anti-Semitism is essential to their moral position. In their own view they are good progressives, therefore absolutely innocent of racial or religious discrimination. Their propaganda campaign, which they hope eventually will escalate into economic warfare, is intended merely to reshape Israel’s policies.Israel is held to standards no other country is required to meet. It's disparate treatment, specifically against against the Jews. And it's derived from nothing but hatred of the Jews. It's racism straight up. It's also what my deranged hateful stalker Walter James Casper III is all about.
What they oppose, they want to assure us, is Israel’s position in the West Bank. Their increasingly loud and self-confident BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) is not, as they tell it, a struggle against the Jews. They simply want to bring Israel into line with enlightened leftist opinion in Europe, the U.S. and Canada.
Scarlett Johansson, the film star, found herself the enemy of BDS in January, when she appeared in advertisements for SodaStream, an Israeli home carbonation device that eliminates cans and bottles. SodaStream’s offence is to have one of its factories in the West Bank, where it employs Palestinians who might otherwise have no work at all.
BDS adherents began denouncing Johansson as “the new face of apartheid.” They love applying that South African term to Israel, no matter how unjustified it is. Oxfam, for which Johansson had served as an ambassador in past years, decided to accept her resignation. Oxfam opposes all trade with Israeli settlements and has no place for dissenters among its associates. Johansson said she and Oxfam “have a fundamental difference of opinion in regards to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.” Oxfam likes BDS. She doesn’t. She says she researched SodaStream and found it an ethical operation.
Like the great majority of Americans in the film industry, Johansson is a liberal Democrat. She took part in the last three presidential elections and raised money for Barack Obama. Unlike many who fall into that category, she also thinks for herself.
The May issue of Vanity Fair carries a cover story about Johansson. The author of the piece, Lili Anolik, asked her how she explains why she has been viciously criticized for the SodaStream ads. Johansson answered, “There’s a lot of anti-Semitism out there.” ...
My own belief is that the BDS people and their fellow travellers, whatever their background, are anti-Semites. They do all they can to stigmatize the Jewish state and reduce its ability to defend itself. They know that Israel is surrounded by neighbours who will never recognize its existence, much less sign a treaty developed in a “peace process” quarterbacked by Washington. The Palestinians and the Arab states who claim to support them are not hoping for a more generous Israel or a BDS-approved Israel or an Israel willing to hand over the West Bank. They are working for a day when Israel will be gone forever.
In order to satisfy this generation’s anti-Semites, Israel must meet standards that no other country in the world has ever met or ever will. At the United Nations Israel is condemned more often than all other countries combined.
It is, of course, an imperfect democracy, like Canada and all other free countries, and its human rights record could certainly be improved. But its treatment of Palestinians has never been even remotely comparable to China’s oppression of Tibetans or Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women, two among many outrageous practices that apparently never trouble the students who direct their anger at Israel.
In devising their purposes the BDS campaigners have never shown even the beginning of a sense of proportion. It’s remarkable that the world needs a 29-year-old movie star to point this out.
Wow: Marathon winner @RunMeb ran with names of those killed in the bombing on his bib pic.twitter.com/wkB8DXFFpz ht @SteveSaleeba
— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) April 21, 2014
KIEV, Ukraine — For two weeks, the mysteriously well-armed, professional gunmen known as “green men” have seized Ukrainian government sites in town after town, igniting a brush fire of separatist unrest across eastern Ukraine. Strenuous denials from the Kremlin have closely followed each accusation by Ukrainian officials that the world was witnessing a stealthy invasion by Russian forces.More, "Ukraine Provides Evidence of Russian Military in Civil Unrest."
Now, photographs and descriptions from eastern Ukraine endorsed by the Obama administration on Sunday suggest that many of the green men are indeed Russian military and intelligence forces — equipped in the same fashion as Russian special operations troops involved in annexing the Crimea region in February. Some of the men photographed in Ukraine have been identified in other photos clearly taken among Russian troops in other settings...
Amid slide in MTP ratings, NBC has commissioned a psychological profile of host @davidgregory, @farhip reports. http://t.co/G1PE3XScEx
— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) April 21, 2014
Former CBS investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson revealed that the far-left watchdog “Media Matters for America” turned against her once she reported on stories unflattering to the Obama administration like the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal and green energy cronyism for CBS.More.
Attkisson made the remarks during a Sunday interview on the CNN media show Reliable Sources.
Media Matters has made a special case of attacking Attkisson, who ruffled many left-wing feathers when she resigned and said that her work for CBS had been stifled by liberals within the network. That is not an old charge, as former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg wrote in the best-selling book Bias, explaining how the truth was often distorted at the network because of political bias.
“Media Matters, by my understanding, is a far-left blog group that I think holds itself out to be sort of an independent media watchdog group,” Attkisson said. “And, yes, they clearly targeted me at some point. They used to work with me on stories, try to help me, you know, produce my stories and at some point–”
“That’s interesting,” said host Brian Stelter.
“Well, don’t they call you? They call journalists and they try to provide material and information,” she replied.
“Right, they are always emailing things, making us try to act outraged about something,” Stelter said.
“And I was certainly friendly with them as anybody,” Attkisson said. “Good information can come from any source. But when I persisted with Fast & Furious and some of the green energy stories that I was doing, I clearly at some point became a target. I don’t know if someone paid them to do it or they just took it on their own.”
Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can't change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable. Wouldn't some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something—ideology, tobacco money—other than science?Well, those reasons aren't too hard to guess, but do read the rest.
Yet in the current discussions about increased inequality, few researchers, fewer reporters, and no one in the executive branch of government directly addresses what seems to be the strongest statistical correlate of inequality in the United States: the rise of single-parent families during the past half century.
The two-parent family has declined rapidly in recent decades. In 1960, more than 76% of African-Americans and nearly 97% of whites were born to married couples. Today the percentage is 30% for blacks and 70% for whites. The out-of-wedlock birthrate for Hispanics surpassed 50% in 2006. This trend, coupled with high divorce rates, means that roughly 25% of American children now live in single-parent homes, twice the percentage in Europe (12%). Roughly a third of American children live apart from their fathers.
Does it matter? Yes, it does. From economist Susan Mayer's 1997 book "What Money Can't Buy" to Charles Murray's "Coming Apart" in 2012, clear-eyed studies of the modern family affirm the conventional wisdom that two parents work better than one.
"Americans have always thought that growing up with only one parent is bad for children," Ms. Mayer wrote. "The rapid spread of single-parent families over the past generation does not seem to have altered this consensus much."
In an essay for the Institute for Family Studies last December, called "Even for Rich Kids, Marriage Matters," University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox reported that children in high-income households who experienced family breakups don't fare as well emotionally, psychologically, educationally or, in the end, economically as their two-parent-family peers.
Abuse, behavioral problems and psychological issues of all kinds, such as developmental behavior problems or concentration issues, are less common for children of married couples than for cohabiting or single parents, according to a 2003 Centers for Disease Control study of children's health. The causal pathways are about as clear as those from smoking to cancer.
More than 20% of children in single-parent families live in poverty long-term, compared with 2% of those raised in two-parent families, according to education-policy analyst Mitch Pearlstein's 2011 book "From Family Collapse to America's Decline." The poverty rate would be 25% lower if today's family structure resembled that of 1970, according to the 2009 report "Creating an Opportunity Society" from Brookings Institution analysts Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill. A 2006 article in the journal Demography by Penn State sociologist Molly Martin estimates that 41% of the economic inequality created between 1976-2000 was the result of changed family structure.
Earlier this year, a team of researchers led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty reported that communities with a high percentage of single-parent families are less likely to experience upward mobility. The researchers' report—"Where Is the Land of Opportunity?"—received considerable media attention. Yet mainstream news outlets tended to ignore the study's message about family structure, focusing instead on variables with far less statistical impact, such as residential segregation.
In the past four years, our two academic professional organizations—the American Political Science Association and the American Educational Research Association—have each dedicated annual meetings to inequality, with numerous papers and speeches denouncing free markets, the decline of unions, and "neoliberalism" generally as exacerbating economic inequality. Yet our searches of the groups' conference websites fail to turn up a single paper or panel addressing the effects of family change on inequality.
Why isn't this matter at the center of policy discussions? There are at least three reasons...
At the book’s center is Mr. Piketty’s contention — contrary to the influential theory developed by Simon Kuznets in the 1950s and ’60s — that mature capitalist economies do not inevitably evolve toward greater economic equality. Instead, Mr. Piketty contends, the data reveals a deeper historical tendency for the rate of return on capital to outstrip the overall rate of economic growth, leading to greater and greater concentrations of wealth at the very top.Here's the National Review piece, from James Pethokoukis, "The New Marxism, Part Two." (Also, "The New Marxism.")
Despite this inevitable-seeming drift toward “patrimonial capitalism” that his charts seemed to show, Mr. Piketty rejected any economic determinism. “It all depends on what the political system decides,” he said.
Such statements, along with Mr. Piketty’s proposal for a progressive wealth tax and income tax rates up to 80 percent, have aroused strong interest among those eager to recapture the momentum of the Occupy movement. The Nation ran a nearly 10,000-word cover article placing his book within a rising tide of neo-Marxist thought, while National Review Online dismissed it as confirmation of the left’s “dearest ‘Das Kapital’ fantasies.”
We’re hoping to have a proper book event on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century in due course. That’s hard for those of us who have read it, because the book is so stimulating, so bursting with surprising facts and ideas [!!!], that there’s a lot to talk about.The obvious problem, of which Douthat only partly addresses, is that as much as Piketty distances himself from orthodox Marxism and the practical program of state collectivism of the Soviet Union under Marxism-Leninism (apparently Piketty rejects the Marxist label, in favor of the more sober sounding title of "political economist"), the left's statist model has been tried many times before. No matter how you slice it, the various iterations of collectivist command economies do not outperform economies organized more toward the free movement of goods, capital, and people. The heavier the state's hand on the economy, the less economic dynamism of the state over time. Indeed, Sweden --- the classic example of the Scandinavian model of heavy taxation in furtherance of a robust, cradle-to-grave social safety net --- has relinquished much state power in favor of free market mechanisms and private-sector solutions. And don't even get me going about France, where Socialist President François Hollande's proposal for a 75 percent tax on the wealthy has Frenchmen "fleeing the country in despair."
The mountain lion known as P-22 looked majestic just a few months ago, in a trail-camera photo shot against the backdrop of the Hollywood sign.Keep reading.
But when a remote camera in Griffith Park captured an image of the puma more recently, it showed a thinner and mangy animal. Scientists sedated him and drew blood samples. They found evidence of exposure to rat poisons.
Now, researchers say they suspect a link between the poisons and the mange, a parasitic skin disease that causes crusting and skin lesions and has contributed to the deaths of scores of bobcats and coyotes. A National Park Service biologist applied a topical treatment for mange and injected Vitamin K to offset the effects of poisoning.
The condition of California's famous cougar is likely to intensify the debate over the use of rat poisons in areas of the state where urban living collides with nature.
The truth about the Bundy’s vs. BLM #BundyRanch http://t.co/QE8HRHyNwR
— Michele Fiore (@VoteFiore) April 14, 2014Ever since the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage, carrying its captain and many of the passengers with it, the notion that the captain goes down with his ship has been ingrained in popular culture.More.
But now, for the second time in just over two years, a sea captain — first in Italy and now in South Korea — has been among the first to flee a sinking vessel, placing his own life ahead of those of his terrified passengers.
A much-publicized photo from the latest accident shows the Korean captain being helped off his own ship, the Sewol, stepping off the deck to safety even as scores of his ferry passengers remained below where survivors believe they became trapped by rushing water and debris.
The behavior has earned the captain, Lee Jun-seok, 69, the nickname the “evil of the Sewol” among bloggers in South Korea. It also landed him in jail.
Maritime experts called the abandonment shocking — violating a proud international (and South Korean) tradition of stewardship based at least as much on accepted codes of behavior as by law.
“That guy’s an embarrassment to anybody who’s ever had command at sea,” said John B. Padgett III, a retired United States Navy rear admiral and former submarine captain.
His sentiments were echoed by Capt. William H. Doherty, who has commanded Navy and merchant ships and managed safety operations at a major cruise line. He called Mr. Lee’s decision to leave his 447 passengers “a disgrace,” and likened it to the desertion of the stricken Costa Concordia cruise ship off the Italian coast in 2012. “You can’t take responsibility, or say you do, for nearly 500 souls, and then be the first in the lifeboat,” he said.
Civil courts in the United States have long viewed captains as having an obligation to protect their passengers and ships, but the cases in South Korea and Italy seem likely to test the notion of criminal liability in disasters.
The captain of the Italian ship, Francesco Schettino, is on trial on manslaughter charges after the sinking of his ship left more than 30 people dead.
The death toll in the South Korean accident stood at 36 as of late Saturday, with 266 missing...
Diplomacy is useful when it prevents bad outcomes. The problem with diplomacy as practiced by President Obama is that it too often is a mask to disguise bad outcomes. The latest example is this week's agreement among Ukraine, Russia, the EU and the U.S. that claims to prevent war but largely advances Vladimir Putin's strategic objectives.Continue reading.
The government in Kiev is supposed to make political concessions to allow more autonomy in its eastern provinces in return for a military "de-escalation." But on the very day of the accord, Mr. Putin publicly reserved the right to invade Ukraine and refused to withdraw his troops massed at the border. On Friday the militants holding police stations and public offices in eastern Ukraine refused to stand down.
Even President Obama curbed his enthusiasm for the deal negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry, saying at a Thursday press conference that Russia still had to follow through on its commitments. But what did Mr. Putin really commit to?
The Russian President denies that the militants have anything to do with Russia and says he's helpless to stop them. The accord says nothing about Ukraine's May 25 election, which Russia opposes and wants to subvert. His troops are still ready to invade if he pleases, and Mr. Putin made promises to the republic of Georgia before he invaded that country in 2008. For the first time on Thursday, Mr. Putin referred to Ukraine as part of "New Russia," a revanchist echo of the czarist era.
NATO Supreme Commander Philip Breedlove cut through the diplomatic haze with a public memo on Friday stating that, "What is happening in eastern Ukraine is a military operation that is well planned and organized" and "is being carried out at the direction of Russia."
The pro-Russian activists show all the earmarks of having had military training, the general wrote. Their weapons and equipment are mainly Russian army issue, which they carry with military discipline. Their use of tear gas and stun grenades in taking buildings showed training inconsistent with a spontaneously generated local militia.
Too bad Mr. Obama showed none of the same candor about these military facts. In his press conference the President never blamed Russia for the unrest in Ukraine or said Russian troops were on the ground. He never mentioned Crimea, which seems to have been banished from U.S. talking points now that Mr. Putin has annexed the peninsula. Instead Mr. Obama sounded like a pundit analyzing the possibilities of diplomacy, with more threats of further sanctions if Mr. Putin escalates.
All of this continues the pattern of Mr. Obama and Europe underestimating the Russian strongman. They pretend he is amenable to diplomacy or afraid of threats, but neither has deterred Mr. Putin from marching west. Even when Mr. Putin openly declares his goal by declaring eastern Ukraine to be part of historic Russia, Mr. Obama prefers to ignore it.
The simple truth is that the Democrat Party's history during this century is one closely aligned to bigotry in a record stemming largely out of the liberal New Deal era up until the modern day. Bigots are at the center of the Democrat party's current leadership and role models. And in a striking display of hypocrisy, many of the same Democrats who dishonestly shout accusations of "bigotry" at conservatives are practicing bigots of the most disgusting and disreputable kind themselves.PREVIOUSLY: "Frazier Glenn Miller, Jr., Kansas Jewish Murder Suspect, Made Democrat Congressional Bid in 2006," and "The Democrat Party's Racial Regression."
The news that a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan is suspected of shooting and killing three people near Jewish community centers in Kansas seems at first glance like a disparaged past flaring briefly into the present. Americans like to imagine that the KKK belongs to a long-gone South and anti-Semitism to a distant 20th century. Sadly, this better reflects a naive faith in the nation's history of religious tolerance than the realities experienced by many religious minorities. Although the KKK has evolved and its membership has dwindled, it remains part of an American [Democrat Party] legacy of religious intolerance.PREVIOUSLY: "Frazier Glenn Miller, Jr., Kansas Jewish Murder Suspect, Made Democrat Congressional Bid in 2006," and "The Democrat Party's Racial Regression."
A central tenet of U.S. nationalism rests on a notion of welcoming huddled masses, but the idea of American exceptionalism also runs deep. When Americans have imagined their country's uniqueness as defined racially, religiously or culturally, those outside those parameters are immediately suspect. Sadly, religion has often served as the catalyst for prejudice....
The KKK has manifested this dynamic [of Democrat eliminitionist racist hatred] since it emerged in the South in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Targeting newly freed blacks in an effort to maintain white supremacy, the KKK terrorized the region. However, passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 and, later, the institutionalized segregation of Jim Crow laws led to the Klan's rapid fading popularity.
The 20th century saw the return of a KKK that may have drawn inspiration from its past in the Reconstruction South and now sought prominence as a modern national organization. Further agitating already inflated fears of East European immigration in the 1920s, its leadership around the country seeded branches called "klaverns" (part of an invented vocabulary exalting Klan secrecy and exclusivity). Although blacks suffered again at the hands of the revived Klan, immigrants became new targets.
The Klan of the 1920s [endorsed by Democrat President Woodrow Wilson] successfully channeled such sentiments into a national organization that claimed 4 million members from the Carolinas to California. Societies boasting the KKK name emerged on American university campuses at a time when perhaps 40% of fraternities limited membership to "Aryans" and "Caucasians." Anaheim — future home of Disneyland — boasted such a public and political Klan presence that it was nicknamed "Klanheim." In 1925, the imperial wizard led tens of thousands of members in a parade down Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue.
The KKK's nativism welded racism to religious prejudice to create a powerful cudgel aimed at East European immigrants in general and Jews in particular.
This second generation of the Klan dissipated in a welter of infighting and scandals, even as most Americans rejected its message and ostracized its members. However, the civil rights movement of the 1960s spurred a third emergence. Never reaching the popularity of the previous incarnations, this one nevertheless wrought havoc, especially on black communities...
Obama is spiking the football over sign-up numbers, but Democrats on the ground see things differently when not spinning.Also from Ed Morrissey, "Maybe Democrats should be more worried about their own billionaire allies" (via Memeorandum).
Steve Lynch is a Democratic Rep. from Massachusetts who doesn’t hesitate to buck the party line from a centrist point of view, and to speak openly about problems in the party and with party positions.
Lynch ran for Senate to fill John Kerry’s seat, but lost in the primary to now-Senator Ed Markey.
Lynch recently was interviewed by The Boston Herald about upcoming Obamacare problems and how devastating they will be for Democrats. That runs contrary to cut current news cycle Democratic spin that (allegedly) meeting sign up goals means electoral problems related to Obamacare are over...
Debbie Vincent, a 52-year-old former soldier who underwent a sex change, was found guilty last month for her part in a conspiracy to blackmail British-based Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS).Vicious and violently depraved transgender leftists.
Vincent became the public face of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) after seven members of the group were jailed for a total of 50 years in 2009 for their role in the campaign.
Members of the group falsely accused HLS staff members of being paedophiles, sent them hoax bombs and sanitary towels claimed to be infected with AIDS, and caused criminal damage to their cars and homes.
In May 2009, activists dug up a grave in Switzerland and removed an urn containing the ashes of the mother of Daniel Vasella, the then-chairman of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis, one of HLS' suppliers.
Sentencing Vincent at Winchester Crown Court in southeast England, judge Keith Cutler said: "It is difficult for a judge to calculate the repugnance felt by society to such appalling acts.
"Nothing at all could justify such attacks."
He added: "You express no shred of remorse or condemnation for the incidents of extreme terror and desecration which have been caused."
A group of Vincent's supporters held placards outside the court reading "No Excuse for Animal Abuse" and "Against Animal Testing and State Repression".
