If for some reason you can’t view the clip, the technique is for the dad to stand behind the very small child who’s wearing a winter coat and boots, with said dad using his own shoes to squeeze in on the kid’s boots from both sides, and then by firmly grasping the kid by the back of the coat lift said kid out of the boots. As a bonus this seems to amuse the kid.
Sorry I’ve been silent on this blog for a while, but I plan to be posting a lot more soon. (Of course, I plan a lot of things.)
Apparently this guy’s wife, a preschool teacher, makes a habit of texting him what he says to her in his sleep. For example:
“You would choose to hang out with Napoleon.”
and on another occasion:
He: Mmmmm. That feels good.
She: What feels good?
He: The feeling.
She: What feeling?
He: Being Belgian. (Chuckle) And drawing up important stuff on the map.
In another text she wrote, “You just turned to me, patted my leg, and said, ‘It’s gonna be smash time…'”
And finally,
He: It’s deeper than that … more vibey.
She: Wut?
He: … it’s more vibey, it’s got more vibration …
She: What does?
He: My guy’s stuff
Attorneys for the estate of Laquan McDonald alleged in legal documents extensive police misconduct surrounding the fatal shooting of McDonald in 2014. A report published Friday on the CNN website (link) describes the allegations in detail.
As you probably know, Chicago Officer Jason Van Dyke was charged in November with first-degree murder for shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald on the night of 2014 October 20. A police car dashcam video shows that McDonald was veering away from the cluster of officers including Van Dyke when Van Dyke opened fire, firing 16 rounds at McDonald. The city had fought public release of the video for more than a year, and Van Dyke was charged with murder only hours before it was finally made public.
Van Dyke, along with other police officers present, claimed that McDonald had come toward him with a knife, putting him in fear of his life, though that’s clearly not what the video shows.
There have previously been reports of police erasing video files captured by a surveillance camera at a nearby Burger King.
What’s new in yesterday’s CNN report is a set of allegations that Chicago police attempted to intimidate eyewitnesses into changing their accounts and that they produced written reports misrepresenting what the witnesses had told police.
Some caution is in order since the allegations had been made in the course of seeking a financial settlement with the city, which was ultimately obtained. In addition, the attorneys did not make the witnesses in question available for interviews by CNN. (If I understand correctly, their names were originally in the documents but blacked out in the copies obtained by CNN.) However, given what else is known, the accusations seem reasonably credible and pretty disturbing. I wish they were more surprising.
Incidentally, the juxtaposition of this post with the immediately preceding one about a kind and generous police officer is an honest coincidence, but it does suggest a spectrum of police behavior. I’ve encountered people who insist that almost all police are corrupt and others who think the problem is just a few bad apples. As usual in the real world, it’s more complicated than that.
(Updated 2016 January 18 and January 23 in an effort to clarify some of the wording.)
According to this article from the WRAL-TV website, a month ago a woman shoplifted children’s toys from a Best Buy in Knightdale NC, a small town adjacent to Raleigh. She was caught and the police were called.
When a young officer arrived, he interrogated the woman and discovered she was without a job and caring for her young son and elderly mother and was afraid she wouldn’t be able to buy her son anything for Christmas.
The 25-year-old police officer, Jarred Bridges, has two children and felt sympathy for the woman. He did his duty and charged her with the theft, but then he and a store employee pooled their money and paid for the stolen toys so the woman could take them. The criminal charge is pending, and the woman says she will accept whatever punishment she gets.
While the article doesn’t mention it, it’s clear from the accompanying video (which unfortunately I don’t think I can embed here) that the woman in question is black and the officer is white. That’s something worth noting given other news stories with less happy endings.
I regularly skim through my spam folder for any legitimate email that might have been intercepted by mistake, and on my latest pass I glimpsed the funniest sales pitch I’ve seen in a while: A promise to reveal “How Donald Trump Keeps His Mind Sharp.”
Quick question: What percentage of their income do richest 400 taxpayers hand over to the federal government? Seriously, take a guess before you read on.
Back at the end of the Clinton administration, when the federal government was running a surplus, the ultra-rich paid an average tax rate of just 26.4 percent.
Then the George W Bush administration pushed through two rounds of tax cuts mainly benefitting the well-off. (Reportedly when Dick Cheney pushed for the second set of cuts, Bush himself was initially reluctant but finally went along.) So by 2012 the richest 400 were paying an average of just 16.7 percent.
But that year Democrats succeeded in passing the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which gave some breaks to the middle class but allowed some of the Bush tax cuts to expire on households making more than a half-million dollars a year. That, together with some lesser changes in tax laws, caused the 2013 tax bill for the richest 400 to jump to 22.9 percent. That was still below what it had been in the late 1990s (let alone in 1940s through the early 1980s).
To be fair, it should be noted that one reason for the 16.7 rate in 2012 was that a lot of wealthy folks sold appreciated assets that year to avoid paying the somewhat higher capital gains taxes they knew were coming the following year. This made the overall rate in 2012 a bit lower than it would have been otherwise.
Right Wing Watch, a project of the organization People for the American Way, has published an interesting list of predictions about 2015 from the far extremes of the religious and political right wing. Needless to say (I hope), these odd notions don’t reflect the views of most mainstream conservatives, though extremists seem to have more influence lately than one might hope.
The predictions include:
Warnings from televangelists John Hagee and Jim Bakker (among others) of a likely major stock market crash or natural disaster last September, in connection with a biblical day of debt relief known as Shemitah on September 13 and the last lunar eclipse of a tetrad (a sequence of four lunar eclipses) on September 28.
Various predictions of violent riots and divine punishment for the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States.
The Jade Helm 15 conspiracy theory, which was cynically fueled by GOP politicians, centered around fears that a military training exercise taking place between July 15 and September 15 of this year would produce grave consequences, such as a federal takeover of Texas, the declaration of martial law and the transformation of closed Walmart stores into FEMA-run concentration camps. Others thought that Jade Helm 15 was a deliberate attempt to stoke fear and chaos, which would justify military rule in the future.
A claim going back to 2008 that President Obama was plotting to create a private army to oppress white people. Right-wing talk-show host Michael Savage (keeping the dream alive, or possibly just trying to see how gullible his audience actually is) recently claimed that Obama’s army, unlike Dumbledore’s, would be made up of Syrian refugees, Black Lives Matter demonstrators, and members of urban gangs.
Glenn Beck’s suggestion that he and similar leaders might be marked for elimination in order to make it easier to control the masses. Many news events, he claimed, such as the Baltimore riots a few months ago, weren’t real but scripted shows to create an excuse for a federal takeover of local police departments.
Predictably (I regret to say), many Americans regard Christianity as more deserving of religious freedom than other faiths. Or at least so suggests a poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago.
Eighty-two percent of those surveyed said that religious liberty for Christians is important, but this fell to about 70 percent for Jews, 67 percent for Mormons, 63 percent for the non-religious, and 61 percent for Muslims. There was not much difference between the views of Republicans and Democrats.
The polling was carried out December 10-13 following terrorist attacks carried out by Islamists in Paris and in San Bernardino, California and negative remarks about Muslims from Donald Trump and others, so the timing of the questions may have influenced the results.
A number of people expressed support for the religious rights of Muslims who renounced religious violence, but it’s not clear whether they were specifically asked about that. Obviously, only a tiny fraction of the world’s billion-and-a-half Muslims support violence. This article, for example, estimates that only 0.00006625 of Muslims are affiliated with violent groups, and even if it underestimates the number by a factor of ten (or a hundred, or a thousand), the percentage is microscopic, a nearly invisible slice on a pie chart. And religiously motivated violence isn’t limited to Muslims. Even in the U.S. we’ve seen a number of examples of violence by Christians opposed to abortion. I’m not suggesting that fear of terrorist fanatics is ungrounded; obviously it isn’t. But we should keep in mind that the number of terrorist killings in the U.S. this year is far fewer than the number of people killed accidentally by relatives, not to mention deaths in traffic accidents.
More details on the poll can be found at this link. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a detailed report on the poll, including the questions asked and the cross-tabs it would be nice to see. Presumably that’s forthcoming from AP-NORC.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research is a joint project of The Associated Press and NORC, as explained here.
Like everybody else, my New Year’s Resolutions include getting more done, losing weight, getting in better shape, and so on. I also hope to do things faster and more efficiently and to say a little more of actual substance on this blog. And I’m convinced I need to be more self-aware and think before speaking, so I at least seem like a better person.
Here’s a song about New Year’s resolutions from someone who already is better:
I’ve read various places that goals should be SMART, as in Specific and Measurable, Achievable and Realistic, and Time-limited. In the business world some make the R stand for “Responsible,” as in “somebody needs to be made responsible for doing this,” even though that’s not quite what the adjective “responsible” means, but since we’re talking business English we can’t expect too much. Anyway, this doesn’t really apply to personal goals, because it’s already obvious who’s responsible, namely whomever we can blame our failures on.
I admit the resolutions listed above aren’t SMART. A goal like “lose weight” isn’t even remotely specific, though I suppose it’s measurable, and it’s definitely achievable, especially if there’s no time limit. I’m not being more specific about my goals mainly because I’m too embarrassed to admit how much I need to do.
Instead I’ll give you an actually useful insight I saw somewhere recently: Besides the goals themselves, you need a plan to achieve them, or at least a next step or two. And those steps need to be clearly defined actions. For example, if your goal is to get more exercise, you need to be exact about what kind of exercise and when you’re going to do it. I’ve actually done this in the past with success.
One year in the remote past, I started out with a list of general goals. I went down that list item by item and figured out what I need to do during the first three months to stand a chance of completing each goal by year end. Then I went through the plan for the first quarter of the year and derived a to-do list for January, and I finally came up with a catalog of things to get done during the first week in January. At the end of that first week I reviewed what I’d done, and amazingly enough I’d managed to do almost everything I’d planned to do. So I came up with a list for the second week, and I got those done as well. It was amazing.
So what happened? Naturally, some disruption came along and I got out of the habit. Shame on me.
Maybe somebody reading this will do better than I will. It at least might be worth a try.
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