No, it does not
We’ve had a winter-like spring here in Minnesota, and it was darn chilly on Saturday. In fact, we had a record low of 21F.
Paul Douglas, of Weather Nation did some digging: He tells us that while that was the first record low since 2004, there have been 42 record highs since Januray 1st of that year. The highs win. The Twin Cities is warming, and in this regard, we are not atypical! Global warming is real, folks.
Every disaster in the US has at least three Congressional representatives associated with it (2 Senators, one House rep). Those representatives have at least two roles: 1) Causing/avoiding the disaster or making it less/more bad, to begin with, by way of their efforts in congress; and 2) Helping or not helping once the disaster happens.
The three representatives for the West Texas disaster, in which scores (apparently) were killed, helped to make the disaster happen by, among them, failing to support OSHA or voting against OSHA funding. This is part of the reason that the plant has not been expected in so long most of the workers there were probably not even working there then.
The three representatives for the West Texas disaster have harmed other people in the US, in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, for instance, by voting against and helping to delay Sandy Aid.
Now, the three representatives are pushing hard to get lots of aid for West Texas. Ironically, some of the money they are demanding will go to other things than aid for the current disaster. The Sandy Aid package also contained things that were not directly related to the Sandy disaster. I’m not sure if a disaster bill has been passed any time in the last century or so that did not include some “earmarks” … were it not for earmarks, the congress would really accomplish nothing at all for years on end. .. it is a system that is broken, but works. Nonetheless, the West Texas reps have decided that this system would no longer be used for people in districts other than their own, but would be used for their own district.
Andy Lee Robinson’s latest visualo-info-graphico-depiction of the loss of Arctic Sea Ice:
Well, not everybody. First lets talk about some losers. Someday a brave journalist will ask the FBI why they had one of the suspects in sight a couple of years ago but this still happened. Chances are there is a very good answer and we should not be mad at the FBI for this, but at the moment, even asking the question will get people screaming at you. Someday a brave journalist will work out the details of how the State and Boston Police managed to miss the guy hiding in the boat a short distance form their dragnet. Chances are there is a very good reason for this, and we should not be mad at the cops, but at the moment, even asking the question will get people screaming at you. Someday (well, this is already happening a little) people will ask questions about the value of online entities such as 4Chan and Reddit as a venue for crowd sourcing police work. While these two groups of Ineternetters were busy accusing innocent people of being mass murderers and terrorists, but before they were shown to be abysmally wrong and having acted abysmally inappropriately, there were bloggers and commenters extolling the virtues of things like the “4Chan Think Tank” (makes me laugh) and handing out knighthoods to Redditors. In this case, crowd sourcing was not demonstrated to be a good thing. It is demonstrated to be a very bad thing. Then there’s Twitter. I for one am tired of hearing about how major news media has been replaced by Twitter. Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not standing up here for major news media. They’ve got mondo problems. But Twitter was an utter failure during this event, for the most part. A great ocean of misinformation flooded the Internet mostly via Twitter, and served no good purpose at all.
But there are winners. Twitter also won the day, in a small way, in that the Boston Emergency Management Services and the Boston PD used it effectively (it seems) to convey information to a lot of people. My daughter had just arrived in Boston in time for the mayhem, and I was able to use those twitter streams to text her information as she hunkered down in the airport trying to salvage her plans, for instance.
Another winner was the police authorities, despite the shortcomings mentioned above. They did in fact get the two guys. Unfortunately, they did so with loss of life and with injury among their own, which underscores the fact that when the police “win” they often do so at an unthinkable cost.
But none of that is what I originally meant by “something for everybody.”
After the bombing and before the killing and capture of the suspects, people wondered what sort of person or entity was behind this. Some people were quite loud with their speculation, and every single case of blithering blathering of this sort that I observed had only one message: Arab or Middle Eastern Terrorists did this, bomb them now! The people who wondered if this was domestic terrorism or something else speculated more quietly, often privately. Almost all the conversations I engaged in of this sort during the “manhunt” were in private.
So, the speculation included “Islamic Middle Eastern Terrorist” and “Home grown Timothy McVeigh style terrorist” and my favorite, and to my knowledge I was the only one who said this, “Kids who are jerks and thought this would be rad.”
Turns out everybody was right.
The two terrorist suspects are from the “Middle East” if you define that region somewhat more broadly than is usually done. They were Islamic. But they were also relatively American. And they were two kids who seemed to think this would be rad.
A brief digression for perspective: Those not from working class Greater Boston Area (especially Cambridge, Somerville, Watertown and Belmont) should know that the percentage of average boys and girls one runs into on the street, in the store, or in school who are green-card holding individuals, or who were born in another country, is very large there. Well, in certain neighborhoods it might be low, but not where these folks lived. I lived a few blocks from where the big shootout happened. I once house sat just up the street from the house with the boat in the back yard. I also lived near the Cambridge location where relatives of the bombers lived. And so on. During my time living in the Boston area, my landlords and at least of my immediate neighbors (upstairs, downstairs, or next door) included people not born in the US 100% of the time, with the minor adjustment that although my neighbors near the house with the boat were, I think, all American born, the home owner was from Asia.
The two suspects were also kids who lived in the Boston area who might well have been 4Chaners or Redditers or bloggers (anyone know yet?) and at least one had a twitter account that looked just like a lot of teen age or 20-something dumb-ass MRA’s accounts, nothing special other than being a jerk like a lot of guys are. There is a reasonable chance that religion together with the whole Y-chromosome thing and other factors combined in a bad way with some sort of socio-(or whatevero)-pathy and that if any one of these elements was missing we’d have had a different result. Minor crime sprees, serial date rape, that sort of thing. But the truth is these guys were dumb-ass American dudes with Middle Eastern connections, Islamic religion and something badly wrong with them, but not so badly wrong, necessarily, as to wonder and worry about how easy it is for two dumb-ass dudes to go from being miscreants to murderers.
We don’t really know, yet, who Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev really are/were. The were born in what might be the most obscure of the this-or-that-istans, Kyrgyzstan. That makes them Asians, but since they are ethnic Chechens, putting their heritage in the Caucasus, they are Caucasians! Kyrgystan is a democracy-ish country with Islam as the main religion with a sprinkling of Russian Orthodox. It is a former Soviet state.
Tamerlan shares a name with Timur the Lame (aka Tamerlan), the mongol conquerer who was known as one of the most terrible of the terrible, and had ancestral connections to Genghis Khan. He conquered vast regions and he was the guy who burned down a remote monastery in Georgia, a locality now known as Dmanisi, where important hominid finds were made. I mention this because my daughter has lived and worked at Dmanisis, with her mom, for years, and they were stuck at the airport during the manhunt for namesake Tamerlan. Everything is connected to everything else.
But I digress. The Tsarnaev family moved to the US in 2002. The kids were born in 1993 and 1986, so they spent a fair amount of time in their homeland and also Russia, and a fair amount of time in the US. They were classified as refugees and were permanent residence of the US. They went to Ringe and Latin (I lived in that high school district for a few years … if it wasn’t for Academic Nomadism, Julia would have been Dzhokhar’s classmate). They were each involved in sports of combat in school (wrestling or boxing). One of them went to Bunker Hill for some college. In other words, they were very typical Bostonians.
Except for one or two details, perhaps.
Big cats and boxes:
All human hunter-gatherer groups that have been studied incorporate meat in their diets. Studies have shown that the total dietary contribution of meat varies a great deal, and seems to increase with latitude so that foragers in subarctic and arctic regions eat a lot of meat while those living near the equator eat less. It is probably true that tropical and subtropical foragers obtain more of their calories from plants than from meat over any reasonable amount of time. The meat consists primarily of mammals for most groups, but fish, birds, reptiles, and invertebrates can reach high proportions, especially seasonally. Most forager groups make use of dogs in their meat acquisition, and it may well be the case that dogs are as important in the forager tool kit as any projectile, spear, or butchering tool. Continue reading Meat Eating in Human Prehistory
One of these days I’ll tell you the story of when I was almost killed permanently by sink hole. I’ll probably have to package that story with the time I was buried alive in a trench (for symmetry). These things happen to archaeologists. Not as often as getting pinned down by gunfire, or running out of beer, or other things much more important than the earth sucking you into itself, but they do happen. As a matter of fact, after years of training and a number of highly educational on-trial-learning type events, I’m always noticing sink holes. They are way, way more common than you would think. There is one right in front of the grocery store I shop in. I’m sure it is undetected (and small). It is likely to remain undetected until they decide to rip up the pavement some day.
Anyway, here is a recent sink hole event I’m sure you’ll enjoy watching. But just so you don’t feel like a jerk later, I should tell you in advance that there is someone in that car and that person was injured. Here you go:
Last I heard the person was eventually extracted and brought to the hospital. Gotta love the body language on that firefighter.
So …
… If you aren’t familiar with Jill Stanek, she’s just an awful anti-choicer. She thinks if you murder a doctor who performs abortions, it’s wrong, but not so wrong that you deserve to be sent to PRISON! That’s for like, bad people, and stuff! … 1. The man who murdered Dr. Tiller “[did] not get [his] fair day in court.” 2. The death penalty is okay and should be applied to doctors who perform abortions.)…
My friend Sarah has some things to say about all of this. CLICK HERE NAO!
The FBI has released an electronic wanted poster for you to look at. Somebody knows these people. Do you? You know what to do:
(click on the picture of the FBI web site to go through to the FBI web site)
Here’s an enhanced video of the scene:
One of the guys might be wearing THIS HAT.
Michele Bachmann may be in some serious trouble.
For starters, it seems she may have used presidential campaign staff to support her book tour during her unsuccessful bid for the presidency last year. The Star Tribune reported on April 17th that
Congressional ethics investigators are examining whether top staffers in Rep. Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign played an improper role in the 2011 tour to promote her personal memoir, two former Bachmann aides have told the Star Tribune.
Federal election rules, as well as House ethics rules, prohibit the use of campaign funds to promote or sell a candidate’s book or to support other business activities.
Also, her campaign may have stolen or otherwise inappropriately obtained an e-mail list of Iowa homeschoolers from one Barbara Heki, presumably for use in the Iowa phase of the campaign. Heki has initiated a law suit alleging that Iowa Senator Kent Sorenson stole the list from her personal computer. This has led to a criminal investigation by police in Urbandale, Iowa and the Iowa State Police, and is apparently being looked at by the Federal Election Commission and the Office of Congressional Ethics.
In addition, it has ben suggested that Senator Sorenson received $7,500 a month via the Colorado based consulting firm C&M Strategies, which is run by Bachmann’s fundraiser Guy Short. The money, or some of it anyway, may h ave come from Short’s other group, MichelePAC. This is apparently also a violation of ethics and campaign rules and/or laws.
The latest development makes this list of oddities suddenly very relevant. These alleged activities came to light in part from information provided by former Bachmann staffer Peter Waldron, a pastor from Florida. As this story has unfolded, there was a second witness to these events identified by the FEC known as “Witness A.” Now, Witness A has been identified as former Bachmann chief of staff Andy Parrish, and he is expected to testify, giving collaboration to Waldron’s claims which have been denied by the Bachmann camp.
According to the Star Tribune,
The six-member panel — made up of three Republicans and three Democrats — also directed the Secretary of the Iowa Senate, Michael Marshall, to get an update on the status of the police investigation in the Heki case.
Iowa Sen. Wally Horn, a Democrat who chairs the ethics committee, said the panel felt it needs to move forward to resolve the allegations or dismiss them. Waldron originally filed three complaints against Sorenson with the ethics panel in January. One of them, alleging improper business disclosures, has been dismissed. The other two complaints, alleging hidden payments and misappropriation of the e-mail list, are still pending.
Horn said he hopes to resolve the ethics complaints before the legislature adjourns next month. Meanwhile, two sources close to the Bachmann campaign have told the Star Tribune that congressional ethics investigators have questioned them about allegations that her presidential campaign played an improper role in her 2011 book tour.
And the, of course, there’s the whole dwarf-mud-wrestling thing.
The following video shows remarks by various individuals including President Obama on the shameful behavior of the US Senate in relation to a bill increasing the scope of background checks on individuals who plan to purchase firearms in the United States.
Go HERE to pick up a nice Facebook Meme and engage in other social networking regarding this issue.
…and release as much carbon into the atmosphere as we can. HERE’S WHY.
Hopkins High School is one of the top public schools in Minnesota, which prides itself, though not always with justification, as having excellent public schools. Hopkins is in an “outer ring” suburb of the Twin Cities. This is a set of bedroom communities developed over the last several decades as well-to-do city folk moved out of the urban core, and American immigrants from the coasts and elsewhere moved to the Twin Cities during periods of economic prosperity and growth. These suburbs and their schools are relatively white and relatively privileged. We see racist things in these places from time to time.
Back in February, the ski team had an away trip, over Presidents’ Day weekend. The students took the initiative to incorporate a theme in their dress on the trip. They would wear “ghetto” or as some called it “rapper” attire. These were mainly white students doing a parody of African American urban culture. A couple of African American students learned of this on the day the students were to leave, and by midday had lodged a complaint with the administration, indicating that they felt that this was a racist and disrespectful making fun of the very small minority of black students in the school. The ski trip students were allowed to continue with their dress up game, and the school later claimed (despite evidence to the contrary) that they learned of this problem too late to do anything about it. Apparently, an organized act of racism was not considered a reason to either delay departure to give the privileged white students time to change their clothes. Apparently, an organized act of racism was not considered reason to cancel the trip and sit down with the students for some sensitivity training, or for that matter, to discipline them.
Two of the African American students in the school decided to protest the event. They produced posters, which I’ve not seen, and placed them on wall space within the school. The administration immediately took these posters down, claiming (probably correctly) that students are not allowed to put things on walls without the administration approving the materials. After the posters were taken down, the African American protesting students went to an assistant principal’s office to get the posters back, and the assistant principal did exactly what one would expect one would do in a Twin Cities mainly white suburb when the angry black people show up: The police were called in. All Twin Cities schools have police officers on hand (just like the NRA has been suggesting for everybody).
According to the police one of the African American students placed his hand on the chest of the police officer to move around him while trying to carry the posters out of the office. According the students, there was no putting of hands on any police officers.
The two students were arrested, charged, expelled for three days and fined.
Later, the white ski trip students sat with the African American students and the school’s administration. The white students expressed regret for their racist act and said they were sorry. They were sent off with the appreciation of the administration for their brief moment of contrition. The African American students were sent off with a police record. Zero tolerance for civil disobedience in protest of racism. Full tolerance for actual racism.
Way to go, Hopkins High.
UPDATE: I’ve noticed that some inter-mural sporting events, including skiing, have rules about racist and sexist behavior. It seems as though this may have been a violation of such rules. One wonders why the school allowed a sports team to go to a meet while clearly violating a rule like this, if this is the case. If the students “needed” to dress in their racialized costumes because they had nothing else to wear, a reasonable though unpleasant decision on the part of the administration would then have been to simply cancel the trip.
The story was discussed today on Minnesota Public Radio. Photo from HopkinsPatch