Thought the final deal did not achieve all that environmentalists, scientists and some countries had hoped for, it set the table for further efforts to slow down the slide toward an unlivable planet....An unlivable planet? When did the prediction become an unlivable planet?
The stated goal of the agreement is to begin to level off the rise in fossil fuel emissions enough to stave off an increase in atmospheric temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). That is the point at which, scientists say, the planet will be locked into an inescapable future of devastating effects of global warming, including rising sea levels, severe flooding and droughts, food and water shortages and more extreme storms.Why would 3.6 degrees make the planet unlivable? Why wouldn't humanity adapt to this change? I understand the argument that it would be better to avert the change, but I don't understand why we would not be able to live on Earth and why we can't explore ways in which it could be better to live on a 3.6 degree warmer Earth. Climate change has been presented as high-quality science, with the deniers as the hysterics who don't want to believe what they don't like to have to believe, but the idea that we are "locked into an inescapable future" of nothing but "devastating effects" and an "unlivable planet" doesn't impress me as science-based.
Peering under the sheet that draped her that early October morning at a hospital outside Philadelphia, Ms. Nimmons bade farewell to what she called “my friend” — that “extra part” for which she was pronounced male at birth. Tattooed on her right forearm was her birth name, “Jerome,” complete with quotation marks.ADDED: The comments at the NYT are extremely critical of the use of taxpayer money for this surgery.
A brokered convention occurs when no candidate gets enough of the delegates to secure the nomination on the first vote tally. After that, delegates can be given up to other candidates, shifting the balance....
[A] new Republican National Committee rule that requires any GOP nominee win a majority of delegates from eight different states....(Strange comma placement in that last sentence.)
It had "nothing, zero, nada to do with Trump except he may be one of the candidates standing at the end," said the source. "It was not aimed at anyone."
Sean Spicer, RNC chief strategist and communications director, downplayed the significance of the dinner on Friday. "It was a dinner where the subject was how the delegate selection process works.... At the end of that dinner, there were a lot of questions asked.... It's great cocktail conversation... This is really, to be honest, with you quite silly."
[N]omination by way of a contested convention was a respectable strategy from the 1830s, when conventions became the standard way of nominating candidates, until at least the 1960s. Democratic front runners Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and John Kennedy in 1960 knew that their support might dissipate unless they won quickly. Their chief rivals, Al Smith and Lyndon Johnson respectively, hoped that it would. In both cases effective floor managers kept wavering delegates in line. Kennedy won on the first ballot but not until the alphabetical roll call reached Wyoming; Roosevelt won on the fourth when the Democrats still required a two-thirds majority....That was, obviously, written in 2012. The odd thing this year is that GOP insiders seem to be looking at a convention where the dominant candidate would be challenged by insurgents making a "vivid case" for... moderation.
[C]onventions were, are, and probably should be about more than nominations. Senator Richard Russell, the genteel face of racial segregation, accumulated large numbers of delegates at the 1948 and 1952 Democratic conventions in order to demonstrate the power of the white South. Jesse Jackson used the same tactic on behalf of racial equality and a "rainbow coalition" in 1984 and 1988. Whether or not Senator Edward Kennedy actually thought he could shake loose Jimmy Carter's delegates at an "open convention" in 1980, he wanted to make a vivid case for liberalism....
No one can predict whether or not the Republicans will have a contested convention this year, either because Mitt Romney's more conservative rivals might have a chance in combination to deny him the nomination or because they want to make a vivid ideological statement...
The post states, “The thing is, we have to really reach out to those who might consider voting for Trump and say, ‘This is Goebbels. This is the final solution. If you are voting for him I will have to shoot you before Election Day.’ They’re not going to listen to reason, so when justice is gone, there’s always force…”...Of course, the media is full of statements comparing Trump to Hitler and it's no wonder people hear that as a call to stop him and his followers now while there is still a chance. Wirbel just got publicly humiliated, and what he did is now displayed as what it means to go too far, putting it out, in writing, on the internet. But I assume there is much more talk like that, in more trusted circles, and I know there are, every day, many public statements that have the potential to affect intemperate or disordered minds as a call to violence.
The ACLU of Colorado released a statement saying it “does not condone the recent personal Facebook post of regional volunteer Loring Wirbel..."....
Can America go for a candidate who has already had the nomination and lost?... Why couldn't he win if he ran not because he was a sore loser and felt entitled or ambitious, but because he's a modest, dutiful man, called into service in a time of need? And take into account that the opposing candidate is quite likely to be Hillary Clinton, who was so much the front runner in '04 that her failure to get the nomination makes her seem like a previous loser, and that prior loss seems more loser-ish than Romney's 2012 loss, since Hillary was a frontrunner who got blindsided by an upstart, and Romney had an uphill battle against an incumbent. (And wouldn't Romney have won if he'd kept up the first debate aggressiveness in that second debate?)And I did this poll in January 2015:
Federal investigators believe that more than any other witness, Mr. Marquez, a convert to Islam, has “held the keys” to understanding what motivated [Syed] Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik....
On behalf of Mr. Farook, Mr. Marquez bought the two assault rifles used in the attack, the authorities say. He told investigators he had done so because Mr. Farook believed he could not pass a background check. Mr. Marquez has also described in detail how he and Mr. Farook had been planning another terrorist attack together in 2012....
Last year, Mr. Marquez married the Russian sister of Raheel Farook’s wife. He later told a friend and people at the bar that it was a sham marriage for immigration purposes. He told bar patrons he had been paid $5,000 or $10,000 to marry Ms. Gigliotti’s sister, Mariya Chernykh. He announced the arrangement one day when he came into the bar — which the F.B.I. visited this week — and offered to buy everyone drinks, Mr. Rodriguez, the bar patron, said.... He told Mr. Rodriguez that he had posted photographs of himself and his wife for the sake of appearances, but that Ms. Chernykh lived at her own apartment and would not so much as kiss him....
Shortly after the shooting, Mr. Marquez’s friends noticed a cryptic and poorly written post on his Facebook page: “I’m. Very sorry sguys. It was a pleasure.”
Stanley Renshon is a sweater-wearing Freudian psychoanalyst who has made a sideline through the years of painstaking psychobiographies of American presidents.... He has read all the [Trump] interviews....Renshon rejects the idea that Trump is a narcissist:
“I think he actually, believe it or not, he has a need to be liked,” says Renshon. “He’ll use the phrase ‘he likes me’ or ‘they like me.’ When somebody uses that phrase often, you have to give credit to the idea that that’s something important to them, their need to be liked."
“He appears to be a real American nationalist with an observable, if bombastic, love of his country... Obviously a love of country is inconsistent with real narcissism, where there is no room for love of anybody or anything but yourself.... I think he genuinely feels like the country is going to hell, and I think he genuinely feels he can do something about it."There's that word "love." Love of country. But do you associate Trump with love? You can say "love" a lot....
But as she grapples with Donald Trump's prominence in the Republican race, she's embraced a little love and kindness as a near-constant refrain.... Today, Clinton rarely ends her remarks without asking her audience to consider adding some "love and kindness" to their daily lives...Look over yonder what do you see/The sun is a-risin' most definitely/A new day is comin' people are changin'/Ain't it beautiful crystal blue persuasion/Better get ready gonna see the light/Love, love is the answer and that's all right....
"That sort of language very much tracks with what a lot of women voters say," said Democratic pollster Margie Omero, who helps oversee research of female swing voters who shop at Wal-Mart. "They say, 'Let's go back to a time in which we're being nicer to each other. Politics has become too coarse.' "
“It just broke my heart,” said Lauren Rutley, who helped publicize Doe’s case online. “That he was so young, and no one had reported him missing at the time.” Rutley was one of dozens of volunteers and amateur detectives who worked on Grateful Doe’s case over a period of nearly 10 years. Users on Websleuths, a forum popular with cold-case and true-crime fanatics, had been cross-referencing Grateful Doe’s case against hundreds of entries in the missing persons’ database since July 2005. The search only heated up last December, however, when Reddit took on the case....
This is certainly a depressing chronicle of death and tragedy. But Rubio’s statement stands up to scrutiny — at least for the recent past, as he framed it. Notably, three of the mass shootings took place in California, which already has strong gun laws including a ban on certain weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Trump says something like this temporary Muslim moratorium, [the media] get [livid], they get outraged, they can't stand it, and they assume everybody else is. Their moral superiority leads them to believe that they represent the majority thinking in this country. And if they don't represent it, they can make it. The media has always believed they can make and break people, that they determine the outcome of events. And in large numbers, they've been correct. When it comes to Trump, all that's out the window, and that's why they're frustrated.This tracks the way Rush has talked about himself for years. The media regularly snatch onto something he's said, go after him, flaunting moral superiority, as if this time, they will bring him down, and he keeps on going, getting stronger, making those who love him love him more.
... It's a dichotomy for them because over here you have their moral superiority where they believe they represent the majority thinking of people in the country, and if they don't represent the majority thinking, that they can create a majority of opinion. And now the Trump phenomenon has happened, and they don't have any of that ability. They realize they're not representative of a majority of thought in the country and that they can't convince people to agree with them that Trump is a reprobate. And this is causing absolute, sheer panic. And not just in the media. It's causing sheer panic in both parties....
They want to take somebody out... There are only a couple, three instances where they're unable to do it, and when those instances pop up they never understand why they're unable to do it.A couple or three... One is Trump. The other is Limbaugh. And maybe a third? That's just Limbaugh refraining from exulting Me and Trump, we're the only 2! Why the restraint? I think he's delighting in what he'd like to think is the destruction of mainstream media. After the destruction, they won't be able to take down anybody.
They just don't understand. And if they do understand, they're in a state of denial, but either way they're panicked and both parties are panicked because none of this makes any sense to them.... The media is fuming over Trump's media campaign and command. And the Democrats are fuming over Trump's media command...
And politicians who have relied on the media to do their dirty work feel even more helpless now, since their army (i.e., the media) can't take out their enemy. They don't have the slightest idea what to do....
The media, in their own minds, controls the political horse race. By virtue of their polling and their daily reporting, they have always thought of themselves as having the power to make or break candidates. Somebody like Todd Akin comes along and says whatever it was he says, the media says, "We're gonna take him out," and they did. Somebody like Christine O'Donnell comes out and wins in Delaware, "We can't have that. We're gonna take her out." They did. Sharron Angle, Tea Party candidate in Nevada, "What a kook. What a weirdo. We can't have that, we're gonna take her out." And joining with the Republicans and all three of these candidates, they did. They have this power. They were able to take out Mitt Romney with lies, distortions, and the help of Harry Reid....Finally, he gets around to himself:
So now they're covering the horse race, but they've lost total control over who wins it. And they're in abject panic. You add to it the fact that it used to be much easier to do this when they had their media monopoly. But that media monopoly was blown up beginning in the late 1980s with the arrival of this program. There's a reason why these people in the media and the establishment try to lump Trump with me or vice-versa. Because they also believe they have eternally forever damaged me.
So they think they can do that to Trump. They haven't. They have not made one impact on this program and me and you, my audience. They have not had one iota's worth of impact, whether they know it or not. And the fact that they can't do what they've always been able to do with Trump, and the fact that the Republican Party leaders, the Democrat Party leaders have always relied on the media to do this for them, by the way. Now in all three branches of the establishment -- Republican, Democrat, media -- there is sheer, abject panic.
His brusque, animated gestures are awkward but manlike in a solid, old-fashioned way. Kasich is a genuine populist with working-class family ties. He made the Princeton-educated Cruz look effete tonight. Kasich was full of specifics about his congressional experience on the armed services and budget committees. I think he won the debate. Kasich is a mensch in a party of parakeets.He won through manlikeness.
Swift herself should retire that obnoxious Nazi Barbie routine of wheeling out friends and celebrities as performance props, an exhibitionistic overkill....Or should we retire the references to Nazis? Hey, I wonder what Camille thinks of Trump. He's the main person who's been called a fascist lately. It was kind of refreshing to see the crusty old label stapled to Swift.
So far this year, I’m happy with what Trump has done, because he’s totally blown up the media! [...] He’s simply an American citizen who is creating his own bully pulpit. He speaks in the great populist way, in the slangy vernacular. He takes hits like a comedian—and to me he’s more of a comedian than Jon Stewart is! Like claiming John McCain isn’t a war hero, because his kind of war hero doesn’t get captured—that’s hilarious! That’s like something crass that Lenny Bruce might have said! It’s so startling and entertaining.... What I’m saying is that the authentic 1960s were about street theater—chaos, spontaneity, caustic humor. And Trump actually has it! He does better comedy than most professional comedians right now, because we’re in this terrible period where the comedians do their tours with canned jokes.... That’s why Donald Trump has suddenly leapt in the polls. He’s a great stand-up comedian. He’s anti-PC–he’s not afraid to say things that are rude and mean. I think he’s doing a great service for comedy as well as for politics!
The only reason he is even bothering to ask Congress for a new authorization vote is to make a political statement about support for the intervention. Under these circumstances, the debate would be a farce. There would be no danger that the vote might come out “wrong,” and so the debate would be even more heavily skewed in favor of war than it usually is. Congress would be participating in the process with the understanding that its involvement is purely for show, and so I doubt most members would take the debate seriously....
The settlement, announced in a court filing Wednesday, comes two months after Warner was hit with a ruling that it had never owned any rights to the iconic birthday song... Since then, a charity linked to the song's original authors has intervened in the case to claim that it is the true owner of the song... The settlement involves all three sides — Warner, the plaintiffs who sued, and the charity, Association for Childhood Education International... The filmmakers who filed the case originally only wanted to recover licensing fees paid since 2009, but, citing revelations that Warner had “concealed evidence,” the plaintiffs asked in October to enlarge the class to cover any one who paid “Happy Birthday” licensing fees all the way back to 1949...Why does the Association for Childhood Education International say it owns the copyright? (Boring) answer here.
"While individuals are always free to express their own beliefs, no one is entitled to express them in ways that diminish others, or that devalues the presence of anyone that is part of our Badger community."Full text here. Later, Blank said she'd intended it "as an appeal for civility and respect in how we deal with each other as a community." But it's not just an appeal for civility and respect, because it said "no one is entitled," which means there is no right. Blank seemed to acknowledge a right when she said "individuals are free to express their own beliefs," but she qualified it by denying that there's a right to express those beliefs in the wrong "ways." That seems to draw a line between the ideas you can express and the form you may use to express them, but: 1. Many ideas, even stated in a polite form, diminish and devalue others (or could be deemed to do so), and 2. We actually do have a right to choose not only the substance but the form of expression. (And by the way, the demand for polite, respectful, civil expression can undercut the speech of protesters and has a disparate impact on those who do not come from a cultural and family background where polite speech is the usual form of communication.)
"It is not the proper role of the university to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they, or others, find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive... Exploration, deliberation, and debate may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought ... to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed... It is for the members of the university community, not for the institution itself, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress exploration of ideas or expression of speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.... Although the university greatly values civility... concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as justification for closing off discussion of ideas."That language tracks the statement the Princeton faculty adopted last April:
"[I]t is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community."MEANWHILE: Observe that calls for civility can come from different directions and even from both sides of a single dispute, like this: "Yale professor resigns: Can 'civil dialogue' share space with student rage?/A Yale professor resigned after a student uproar over her e-mail about offensive Halloween costumes. While critics have called students coddled and naive, observers say there's more going on than political correctness run amok."
Nicholas II was crowned Tsar of Russia on 26 May 1896. Four days later, a banquet was going to be held for the people at Khodynka Field. In the area of one town square, theaters, 150 buffets for distribution of gifts, and 20 pubs were built for the celebrations. Near the celebration square was a field that had a ravine and many gullies. On the evening of 29 May, people who had heard rumours of coronation gifts from the tsar began to gather in anticipation. The gifts which everybody was to receive were a bread roll, a piece of sausage, pretzels, gingerbread, and a commemorative cup.
At about 5 o'clock in the morning of the celebration day, several thousand people (estimates reached 500,000) were already gathered on the field. Rumours spread among the people that there was not enough beer or pretzels for everybody, and that the enamel cups contained a gold coin. A police force of 1,800 men failed to maintain civil order, and in a catastrophic crush and resulting panic to flee the scene, 1,389 people were trampled to death, and roughly 1,300 were otherwise injured. Most of the victims were trapped in the ditch and were trampled or suffocated there. Despite the tragedy, the program of festivities continued as planned elsewhere on the large field, with many people unaware of what had happened. The Tsar and his wife made an appearance in front of the crowds on the balcony of the Tsar's Pavilion in the middle of the field around 2 p.m. By that time the traces of the incident had been cleaned up.Correction, part 2: The Russian crush was less than the 1990 Mecca crush. I miscorrected!
Fifty-one percent of his backers say their minds are made up about him, compared to just a quarter of voters who support a candidate other than Trump.The poll was done December 4 through 8. Trump's statement about excluding Muslims from the U.S. came on the 7th.
Trump leads among both men and women. He has more than a 20-point lead among non-college graduates (and a smaller lead among those with a college degree)
This story—it spins out in so many unexpected directions. Because, yes, it’s about Bowe Bergdahl and about one strange decision he made, to leave his post. (And Bergdahl, by the way, is such an interesting and unusual guy, not like anyone I’ve encountered before.) But it’s also about all of the people affected by that decision, and the choices they made. Unlike our story in Season One, this one extends far out into the world. It reaches into swaths of the military, the peace talks to end the war, attempts to rescue other hostages, our Guantanamo policy. What Bergdahl did made me wrestle with things I’d thought I more or less understood, but really didn’t: what it means to be loyal, to be resilient, to be used, to be punished....I haven't listened yet, but I surely will.
Garre, the university’s lawyer, responded by reminding Scalia that the Supreme Court had rejected that very type of argument a dozen years ago in the last major ruling to uphold a college affirmative action plan, for the University of Michigan Law School. “Frankly,” Garre said, “I don’t think the solution to the problems with student body diversity can be to set up a system in which not only are minorities going to separate schools, they’re going to inferior schools. . . . Now is not the time and this is not the case to roll back student body diversity in America.”Those who are focused on Justice Kennedy should remember that he dissented in the University of Michigan Law School case? There, he wrote:
... [Garre's] comment seemed directed at Justice Kennedy, in the hope that Kennedy would not be comfortable casting the decisive vote that ended affirmative action on American campuses. If those were his thoughts, the hearing provided some foundation for them.
If universities are given the latitude to administer programs that are tantamount to quotas, they will have few incentives to make the existing minority admissions schemes transparent and protective of individual review. The unhappy consequence will be to perpetuate the hostilities that proper consideration of race is designed to avoid. The perpetuation, of course, would be the worst of all outcomes. Other programs do exist which will be more effective in bringing about the harmony and mutual respect among all citizens that our constitutional tradition has always sought. They, and not the program under review here, should be the model, even if the Court defaults by not demanding it.Kennedy's questions yesterday were focused on the procedural status of the case, which looked to him like "the same case" the Court had sent back in 2013 when it sent the parties back to the lower court with instructions to look more deeply into something that I assume was highly significant to Justice Kennedy. The case did not go back to the district court for the development of evidence but only to the Court of Appeals which purported to look more deeply into the legal question. Yesterday, there was much discussion of sending the case back down again, but Kennedy was left saying the university “would not put in more evidence than we have now.”
Tompkins grew up in New York in the 1940s and 50s, the son of a decorator and an antiques dealer living in a tony village outside the city. But he struggled to hew to his parents’ aristocratic ideals. At 17, he was expelled from his prestigious Connecticut boarding school for one-too-many infractions — “I wasn’t great on heeding authority,” Tompkins told Humes, who wrote about the millionaire environmentalist for his book “Eco Barons.” Tompkins never got a high school degree.Remember Esprit? I wore a lot of Esprit things in the 80s. Anyway, Tompkins bought "40,000 acres of dense forest and precipitous fjords" in Patagonia, his first conservation project. He married "Kristine McDivitt, the former chief executive of the Patagonia outdoor wear firm," and they "bought up hundreds of thousands of acres in Chile and Argentina to be maintained as wilderness."
Instead, he took off for the mountains out West, where he became a climber, ski bum and all-around adventurer. He met his first wife, Susie (now the entrepreneur and Democratic donor Susie Tompkins Buell) while chopping trees in California’s Tahoe City, and in 1963 they moved to San Francisco, where they opened a small shop peddling high-end climbing and camping equipment from Europe. They called it the North Face....
He was done “manufactur[ing] desires to get people to buy our products,” he told the Guardian, “selling people countless things that they didn’t need.” Fashion was “intellectually vacuous” he said, and it was part of the problem of environmental degradation. If he wanted to save the planet, he wasn’t going to do it by selling clothes.
Tompkins divorced his wife, with whom he was often fighting, and sold his shares of Esprit for a reported $150 million....
It dates back to the 1889 decision in the Chinese Exclusion case, in which the court upheld the exclusion of Chinese laborers based on their nationality... More recent decisions have upheld discrimination against immigrants based on gender and illegitimacy that would never have survived equal protection scrutiny in the domestic context. Likewise, courts have rejected the assertion of First Amendment free speech protections by noncitizens. Nor has the Supreme Court ever struck down an immigration classification, even ones based on race. As late as 1965, a federal appeals court upheld a measure that counted a Brazilian citizen of Japanese descent as Asian for the purposes of immigration quotas. In the context of noncitizens seeking initial entry into the United States, due process protections don’t apply, either....Spiro goes on to say that the Constitution has meaning beyond what the courts are willing to detect and enforce. As he puts it: "Clear popular consensus can establish constitutional norms, with or without the courts."
The courts have justified this constitutional exceptionalism on the grounds that immigration law implicates foreign relations and national security — even in the absence of a specific, plausible foreign policy rationale. The 1977 Fiallo case, for instance, involved a father seeking the admission of his out-of-wedlock son from the French West Indies — hardly the stuff of national interest.
Indeed, contrary to the conventional understanding, President Trump could implement the scheme on his own, without Congress’s approval. The Immigration and Nationality Act gives the president the authority to suspend the entry of “any class of aliens” on his finding that their entry would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
Mr. Trump’s plan has triggered an uproar across the partisan divide. Perhaps a religion-based immigration bar may be consistent with court-made doctrine. But it doesn’t reflect our deeper, broadly assimilated understandings of the Constitution.But is there clear popular consensus? I guess we should at least wait for the next round of polls, because Trump is immensely popular, at least with a sizable enough sector of Americans to wreck the clarity of the picture of popular consensus. Politicians and commentators are trying to lead a chorus of shaming, but Trump may be saying what many are thinking but don't want to be caught singing out.
The basic question in the case, Evenwel v. Abbott, No. 14-940, is who must be counted in drawing voting districts: all residents or just eligible voters?So there are 2 theories of which people to count as population proportionate districts are drawn. Think it through: 1. Which party is advantaged by each theory? 2. Which approach is better as a matter of nonpartisan principle? (Does the chosen official represent those who voted for him or everyone in the district?) 3. Is each state free to pick either theory or does the constitutional right to equal protection require one (and which one!)?
The difference matters, because people who are not eligible to vote — children, immigrants here legally who are not citizens, unauthorized immigrants, people disenfranchised for committing felonies, prisoners — are not spread evenly across the country. With the exception of prisoners, they tend to be concentrated in urban areas.
"We're not law-enforcement officials," said Shahed Amanullah, a Washington, D.C.-based Muslim American entrepreneur with Silicon Valley connections. He has worked with the U.S. government on combating online extremism, but he said it's unrealistic to expect Muslim Americans to confront violent people in their midst.
"We're community members and Americans like everybody else," he said, "and we should have the same relationship with law enforcement that everybody else has. To expect us to be on the front lines without having the capacity or the support would not be [productive]. It wouldn't be productive with any community."
“It’s just a pig’s head — that’s not a big deal; but it does send a message,” said mosque spokesman and Arab American Development Corp. Director Marwan Kreidie. “I think people are worried that if they do a pig’s head, they could do something more violent in the future.”...
A manager at Philadelphia’s Al-Aqsa Islamic Society said the mosque received a voicemail on Nov. 14 that alluded to the Paris attacks, according to police. “Are you happy about what happened in France?” the male voice stated. The persona also said, “God is a pig!” and “God is Pork!”
The outpouring of condolences and prayers offered to our children, Noah and Lucy, has been overwhelming, appreciated and even comforting. But the truth is, like so many other kids, they lost their father years ago....
As soon as Twitter suspends one account, a new one is created.... [And] of the top five encryption apps recommended by the Islamic State, none are American-made....And:
“We don’t believe that law enforcement should delegate their responsibilities to private enterprise,” said David Greene, director for civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Especially ones that haven’t sought out that role.”
In some cases, Internet companies have been criticized for not taking down websites that belong to the Islamic State, only to have it discovered later that the sites were critical of it. Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare, a San Francisco company, said that in one case Internet activists criticized his company for keeping several Islamic State websites online when, in fact, the sites in question were pro-Kurdish.
“It’s particularly risky to take a bunch of tech companies that are not certified policy experts and insert them into Middle East politics,” Mr. Prince said.
Pulling all terror-related content is not always preferred by law enforcement. In several cases, tech executives say, they have been asked to keep terror-related content online so that law enforcement agents can monitor terrorist networks or because the content was created by law enforcement agents to lure terrorists into divulging information.
The issue is thornier for companies like Facebook, in which the bulk of posts are meant to be private. “Do you want Facebook looking at over 1.5 billion people’s posts?” said Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor in technology policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “And if so, then for what?”
1669 R. Boyle Contin. New Exper. Physico-mech. iv. 17 We could take notice of the Lines describ'd by the Salient water, as the ejaculation of that Liquor grew still fainter and fainter.So when you hear "salient," think: ejaculating. Of course, an ejaculation is a part of speech. Trump frequently ejaculates. It's true!
At Yale, the ursine circus culminated (as of this writing) in a late-night march to Salovey’s house where “traumatized” students presented a long list of demands, including abolition of the title “Master” for the heads of Yale’s residential colleges, the erection of a monument in a prominent public space acknowledging that Yale had been built on land “stolen” from “indigenous peoples,” renaming Calhoun College because its namesake, the Congressman, Senator, Vice President, and Secretary of War, had also been a strong advocate of slavery, a mandatory “ethnic studies” requirement for all students, and more attention, money, and privileges for Yale’s “students of color.”That's a very long sentence — 103 words — and I was going to ejaculate "Diagram that!" but it's actually pretty easy to diagram, the length mostly attributable to a long list. Did you enjoy "ursine circus"? I like the look and the sound, but I would never choose to ridicule students with an animal metaphor and, worse, the poor bears who are exploited in circus work don't deserve the comparison to Ivy League college students choosing to devote themselves to pushing for greater attention to racial matters. Perhaps someone could compose a fable about circus bears getting the idea of protesting their dismal condition and deciding that the crucial problem was race consciousness. Why is it always the black bear? You never see a polar bear forced to jump through a hoop of real fire!
This is the first time Obama has issued this challenge to Muslim Americans.... [I]f other Americans had some sense that Muslim Americans as a group were really working to ferret out the radicalism, then this stalemate might be broken. If anything Obama should have been more emphatic about this. He should now go around to Muslim communities in Detroit and Chicago and the Bay Area and upstate New York and give a speech that tells them: If you want to be treated with less suspicion, then you have to make that happen. That would be real leadership, and a real service....Sounds like there's a big, daring, additional step Obama would need to take to earn Tomasky's praise.
There is a notable gender difference among caucusgoers’ preferences. Men prefer Cruz (29%) and Trump (24%) over Rubio (12%) and Carson (12%). Women support Rubio (23%) and Cruz (19%) over Carson (15%) and Trump (14%).AND: CNN just put out a poll on Iowa with a completely different result: Trump 33, Cruz 20, Carson 16, Rubio 11, Bush 4, Paul 3, Fiorina 3, Christie 2...
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
That’s what I imagine Reince Priebus, head of the Republican National Committee, repeating to himself as he tries to fall asleep every night.
At one point, responding to a question, she referred to using the “nuclear option” against Iran — usually interpreted as using a nuclear weapon — before her attention was caught by a prominent member of the audience, Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court.
“Oh, the military option, thank you, Justice Breyer. He’s a careful listener,” Mrs. Clinton said, reiterating that she meant a military option to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. It was a rare moment: a sitting member of the court rescuing a political candidate from a mistaken comment.
The video shows that Johnson was shot in the back by Hernandez. But Alvarez argued that Johnson could have easily turned around and fired at the pursuing officers...I'm listening to the press conference with Mayor Rahm Emanuel. He sounds defensive and uncharacteristically weak.
Whatever the impetus, let's get one thing straight: Obama's choice to stand at a podium in his office rather than sit behind the Resolute Desk, as is customary in an Oval Office address, was very deliberate — as all decisions about presidential imagery are.Okay, but that thing is not called a "podium."
It's not as though he keeps a dais parked in front of the desk all the time. The mere fact that he and his staff said, "Hey, let's bring one in," means they believed there was something to gain by getting the president on his feet...Okay, but that thing is not called a "dais."
What were they going for? And did it work?Yes, and thanks for finally hitting on the right word for that thing: lectern.
Standing up is a simple, unstated way for him to project strength. More important to the president, however, might be what standing up does for his own comfort level. As we at The Fix noted before the speech (and before we knew Obama would be at the lectern), he seemed stiff and uncomfortable in his two previous Oval Office addresses, when he took the more traditional seated posture.
Still, I think Obama lost some of the Oval Office impact by using the podium....Sigh.
The early New York years were rough. “At the age of 16, when most kids were cramming for trigonometry exams, I was turning tricks, living off the streets and wondering when my next meal was coming,” Ms. Woodlawn recalled in her 1991 memoir, “A Low Life in High Heels: The Holly Woodlawn Story,” written with Jeff Copeland....Here's a taste of that last scene in "Trash" (NSFW):
“They wanted me for one or two scenes [in 'Trash'] at first,” she said in her 1970 interview in The Village Voice. “Paul Morrissey said, ‘Do this, do that, fabulous,’ and so they kept adding to my part. I worked six days at $25 a day. Except for the last scene, everything was done in one take. The clothes, the dialogue, like, everything was mine because the character I play is me. I’ve been in those situations.”...
“I felt like Elizabeth Taylor,” Ms. Woodlawn told The Guardian in 2007, recalling her heyday. “Little did I realize that not only would there be no money, but that your star would flicker for two seconds and that was it. But it was worth it, the drugs, the parties; it was fabulous.”
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