Looks like an hors d'oeuvre.

"There can be no doubt that [Tamir] Rice’s death was tragic and, indeed, when one considers his age, heartbreaking."

"[But] Officer Loehmann’s belief that Rice posed a threat of serious physical harm or death was objectively reasonable as was his response to that perceived threat."

"She talks about not knowing who she is anymore because she’s just Mom . . . and then she goes and buys a 12-passenger van so she can do more carpooling for her kids’ activities."

"It’s kinda heartbreaking. Her complaints aren’t incessant, but when they do happen, it’s very clear that I’m watching stuffed-away feelings leak out — like she just can’t keep up appearances anymore."

From a question for the WaPo advice columnist Carolyn Hax, who gives what I think is an excellent answer (which includes something close to that rule of thumb of mine: the best test of what people really want to do is what they are actually doing).

Edward Klein quotes a "campaign aide" calling Hillary "child-like," "shrill," and "even violent."

I don't know who this unnamed individual is...

"Hillary’s been having screaming, child-like tantrums that have left staff members in tears and unable to work,” says a campaign aide. “She thought the nomination was hers for the asking, but her mounting problems have been getting to her and she’s become shrill and, at times, even violent.”

... but if I were Hillary, I'd give him a "shrill" kick out the door. What contemptible disloyalty! And "shrill" is a word too characteristic of sexism to be used by competent politicos.

But, assuming this aide exists, isn't Klein paraphrasing? No one will step up and say, you didn't quote me precisely.

Strip away the exaggerated language and there's nothing abnormal here. There's nothing wrong with Hillary getting angry and yelling. There's no detail to what she said that "left staff members in tears and unable to work." You'd think staff members would be plenty tough and able to serve as sounding boards as the candidate ventilates. As for "even violent," what does that mean? Are we talking about physical assaults? If not, don't use that word.

And, yes, I know there's a long history of stories about Hillary throwing things at Bill:

Here’s our best re-creation of how the Hillary-throwing-stuff trope emerged. It seems to have first appeared in print in late February of 1993, when the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the new first lady broke a lamp “during a heated late-night argument” at the White House with her husband. The attribution? The delicious-sounding “wicked Washington whispers.”

The story quickly metastasized, with Newsweek soon thereafter reporting that “Washington dinner parties were buzzing with stories of Hillary throwing — take your pick — a lamp, a briefing book or a Bible at Bill.” However, the magazine noted that there was “no evidence” to support the tales. Prevailing theories at the time had it that the source of the rumors were Secret Service agents, with whom the Clintons were thought to have testy relations.

I'm sure Klein would love to get resonance off that old junk, which at least named the object thrown. Klein's "she’s become... violent" — without more — is utter trash.

"The slide was late. The slide was high. The slide was questionably legal and arguably dirty."

"Even if you were watching it through blue-colored glasses, you had to admit that the slide was recklessly dangerous, so much that it broke another man's leg."

But after 27 years of frustration, the Dodgers will accept reckless, embrace dangerous, and so on Saturday night they uncomfortably celebrated a slide that won a game, altered a series and may have saved a season.

Writes Bill Plaschke, at the L.A. Times, presumably through blue-colored glasses.

ADDED: There's bad logic embedded in the phrase: "recklessly dangerous, so much that it broke another man's leg." A leg is not a calibrator of reckless dangerousness. A more dangerous, reckless slide might have hit a leg in a different way and not broken the leg, and a less reckless, dangerous slide might have hit in a precisely unlucky way that snaps the leg.

AND: "Blue-colored glasses? Both teams are blue," said Meade, aptly. (Too bad there's not more variety in team colors. I had a hell of a time trying to watch the Nebraska-Wisconsin game yesterday, both teams in red and white. After the game was over, and Meade switched to the Cubs game, the screen filled with a player's dark blue shirt, bathing my eyeballs with cooling relief.)

ALSO: I put up with Meade playing lots of sports on the television, and he puts up with me making an inordinate number of comments about what I like to call the "costumes."

"A 7-year-old Australian boy miraculously survived an attack by an aggressive kangaroo using a defense method... 'the kangaroo roll.'"

"'You put your hands around your neck and you roll up in a ball'.... The boy proceeded to put his face down and scream for help."

Miraculously? How dangerous are kangaroos? Here's a Slate article from 2012 (after 3 kangaroos escaped from a zoo in Germany):

Although the last recorded death came in 1936, there have been several kangaroo attacks in Australia in recent years, some resulting in serious injuries.... The best defense is to keep a safe distance and try to create a barrier between yourself and the beast. Even holding up a large tree branch can be helpful. If the kangaroo approaches, turn your body sideways, exposing a narrow profile to the animal and protecting your face and organs. Raise your hands and lean your head away from the animal to minimize the chances of being scratched across the face by the kangaroo’s nasty claws. Retreat, but do not turn your back and run. A kangaroo can easily chase you down, kicking as it hops.

At the internal link, 2 of the stories show kangaroos attempting to drown somebody's dog:

November 2009... 49 Year old Chris Rickard was walking around his property together with his dog, a blue heeler named Rocky. They stumbled upon a sleeping kangaroo, who woke up and tried to get away, chased by the dog Rocky. The kangaroo them jumped in to the water and the dog followed. In a self defence move typical for kangaroos the kangaroo grabbed the dog with its front paws and held it under water to drown it....

July 2004...  Christine Canham was walking her four golden retrievers around Dunlop Ponds in Canberra's northern suburbs when her dog, Summer, had a run-in with a kangaroo who then held him under water and drowned him. Drought conditions have made the kangaroos change their usual behaviour and become active in daytime and fiercely defend water sources and feed patches....

"Father fears 800-pound son will die after hospital discharged him for ordering pizza."

Headline at The Washington Post.

The son had been in the hospital for 3 months, trying "to get his weight down to 550 pounds so he could have gastric bypass surgery," and in all that time he'd only lost 20 pounds. An 800-pound sedentary man needs 7,000 calories a day just to maintain that weight, so he must have been getting immense amounts of food, even without the ordered-in pizza.

The father said: “If he comes home and I do get him up the stairs somehow, some way he’s going to go right back to his eating habits.” How? Where does the food come from?

The son said:  “I don’t feel like I broke the rules... I was on a care plan and you could’ve implemented on that care plan that I had an addiction to ordering out food. You guys knew that from the get-go the moment I got admitted there.... Rhode Island hospital completely sickens me... You broke the rules, not me.”

How, exactly, does Bernie Sanders intend to run the country?

I don't know, but this article by Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker, "The Populist Prophet," made me think there's a certain distinctive style to his approach to getting things done:

1. One of the things he did after college was "a carpentry business with a few other guys in New York":

It was called Creative Carpentry, and [an old friend]  says that it was accurately named: “They advertised in the Village Voice, but didn’t know much about carpentry. They’d go to the hardware store to buy supplies, and ask the clerk how to do the repairs they’d been hired to do.”

2. When Sanders was in his 30s, he bought land in Vermont, and "sometimes camped out in the new property’s only shelter: a maple-sugar shack."

He had devised his own equivalent of Sterno, which his friends dubbed Berno. “It was a roll of toilet paper soaked in lighter fluid inside a coffee can,” [the old friend] said. “He’d cook over that.”

"A new survey says more than a third of vegetarians eat meat when they've had too much to drink."

"What's more, they're sneaky about it, with 69 percent saying they don't fess up...."

This isn't surprising. Drinking loosens inhibitions and reduces impulse control. Vegetarians eating meat when they've been drinking is in the same category as: 1. having sex with someone that the sober you would decline, 2. having one or two more drinks than the sober you was planning to drink, and 3. driving while drunk, something the sober you considers unacceptable (but is never put in the position of having to decide not to do).

"I am icy, certainly, but I am not uptight."

Writes Alana Massey, complaining about "the troubling ease with which men dismiss women as prudish if they are not immediately open and enthusiastic about sex."

It is cruel tool in a culture that was infiltrated by a certain brand of blasé sex positivity long before achieving true gender equality and, by extension, before we’ve decentralized men’s orgasms as the ultimate purpose of sex between a man and a woman.

We pathologize women’s entirely rational reactions of “nah” and “meh” to sex as the result of antiquated values. Often, these reactions are because sex might be perilous to a woman’s well-being – and often, if we’re honest, a physically substandard experience. This attitude wants sex to be a fundamental good so badly that it puts it in a vacuum, and ignores the snares that still surround it....

Why is it so hard to understand and say that bad sex is bad? 

"Wild animals have been able to coexist peacefully with students and faculty before, as evidenced by the fox family that moved in two years ago."

"Pidgeon said she hopes the same scenario can play out with the new turkeys."

Pidgeon = UW-Madison avian expert Anna Pidgeon.

She [said] the UW-Madison campus has aspects of an ideal turkey habitat as well. Urban areas with green space offer all the protection turkeys need, since natural predators are not as prevalent and trees provide a place to roost at night.

"Should We Bank Our Own Stool?"

The question everyone is asking.

"Can we blame the mother of Adam Lanza... Can we blame the mother of the Oregon shooter...?"

Asks Timothy Egan in the NYT.

What about the fathers? Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said the Oregon shooter’s father, divorced and absent for some time from his son, was “a failure” who “owes us all an apology.” Fathers certainly have an equal responsibility. But it’s the mothers, in most cases, who know the names of their children’s teachers, who understand their deepest fears, who have a unique relationship.

Hmm. The "unique relationship" the mother has is a consequence of the father's failure. If the point is to stop future harm, then all causal factors matter.

But Egan is doing gender politics and advocating for gun control. He's getting the NYT reader's attention by beginning with something transgressive. He dares to blame the woman. But then he drives a wedge, the wedge that men have driven through the ages: There are good women and bad women.

A group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, was formed after the Newtown carnage. It’s a good counter to the creepy cultists of the gun culture. Their best appeal is likely to be one of reason to the hearts of fellow mothers, rather than to heartless politicians at the legislative level.

The bad women consort with the dirty men, the "creepy cultists." The good women have "hearts" — they are the wholesome bulwarks of goodness.

When a man makes an appeal to the womanhood of women, to the motherhood of mothers — be a good woman, be a good mother — that is patriarchy speaking.

"Svetlana Alexievich, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature October 8, is a banned author in her homeland of Belarus..."

"Her books are neither published nor discussed in the media there...."

In 1995, Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, told Russian NTV television : “The history of Germany is a copy of the history of Belarus. Germany was raised from the ruins thanks to firm authority, and not everything connected with that well-known figure, Adolf Hitler, was bad. German order evolved over the centuries and under Hitler it attained its peak.”...

This is the nemesis of the new Nobel Prize-winner in Literature....

"And sister, she got married on the island/and her husband takes the train/He's big and he's fat/and he doesn't even have a brain."

Sang Lou Reed in "Kill Your Sons."

Backstory:

Lou called his sister, who was living on Long Island with her husband, Harold, to warn her about the [new] album. “Bunny, I have to tell you something.”

“What did you do now?”

“This song’s coming out.” Lou recited the lyrics of “Kill Your Sons”...

“Are you serious?” asked Bunny. “You wipe out my lifestyle and my husband in four phrases?”

“Ah, I needed something to rhyme with train. So I had to take poetic license.”

From "Lou Reed Described Bob Dylan as a ‘Pretentious Kike’/The legendary musician is accused in a new book of racial slurs and abusing women."

"What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society."

"There was a profound sense that African American men were ready to make a commitment to bring about change in our communities and lives."

Said Barack Obama, 20 years ago, observing the Million Man March.

From a Washington Post article on the occasion of the 20th anniversary.

There's another rally this anniversary year, called by Louis Farrakhan, the central figure in the rally that took place 20 years ago. He's calling this one "Justice or Else." 

The Washington Post is cagey about the relevance of Farrakhan:

"All we’ve got to do is go back home and make our communities a decent and safe place to live,” Farrakhan said [20 years ago]. “And if we start dotting the black community with businesses, opening up factories, challenging ourselves to be better than we are, white folk, instead of driving by using the N-word, they’ll say: ‘Look. Look at them. Oh, my God — they’re marvelous.’ ”

It was the kind of message that some activists denounce these days as blaming the victims of the nation’s checkered racial history for their plight. But it also resonates with black Americans across the political spectrum, from Clarence Thomas — who has praised Farrakhan — to Obama. Not for a moment would they endorse Farrakhan’s separatism, or his anti-Jewish rhetoric, or the Nation of Islam’s dizzying cosmology. But for them and many others, his self-help message hits home.

So... "self-help," that's the good part, after you carve away everything you don't want attached to you. ("Dizzying cosmology"  — there's a useful phrase for the mealy-mouthed.)

But "Justice or Else" doesn't sound like the self-help of opening businesses and becoming "better than we are."