Happy 4th Web Surfers Everywhere:
Once again, the US Intelligence agencies are doing their bit for US/German relations:
An employee of Germany's intelligence agency has been arrested on suspicion of spying for the US, reports say.
The man is said to have been trying to gather details about a German parliamentary committee that is investigating claims of US espionage.
Nobody was straight until the Nineteenth Century:
I actually talked to my grandmother about this. My grandmother is 88 and she came to consciousness in a world that didn’t have heterosexuals in it, where nobody knew that word, and certainly nobody used it to refer to themselves. And she associates this change with Freud, whom she’s never read but whom she’s heard a lot about. So there was this sort of culture-wide game of telephone, if you will, in which these authoritative medicalized ideas coming from very rarefied circles trickled down into the larger culture. I think that for people of my grandmother’s generation particularly, heterosexual simply became a synecdoche for normal.
Maybe shooting people is not the same as
good policing?
Memphis, one-quarter of Toronto’s size but with a homicide rate nine times higher, has developed a progressive approach to de-escalate high-tension confrontations, improve police attitudes toward those suffering from mental illness, and divert them from the criminal justice system.
The Memphis CIT model—which includes an intensive forty-hour course for selected officers, and depends on strong institutional partnerships among law enforcement agencies, mental health institutions, and patient advocates—is not fail safe, as officials in Memphis freely admit. However, studies have shown that officers who use the CIT approach tend to be safer, more compassionate toward disturbed people, and more likely to seek ways to get them help. The jury is still out on whether this actually reduces the incidence of lethal shootings, largely because it is exceedingly difficult to measure confrontations that don’t happen.
“There’s no perfect system,” states Major Sam Cochran (retired), the flinty Memphis PD supervisor from Mississippi who pioneered this type of policing in the late 1980s. “I’m not looking for absolutes,” he told me. “I’m looking for better.”
More below...
Facebook & Cornell: we are not tools of the DOD, we're just highly irresponsible:
Facebook and Cornell researchers have denied that the controversial “emotion contagion” experiment was funded by the US Department of Defence (DoD).
The social network told the Guardian that the study was entirely self-funded and that Facebook is categorically not a willing participant in the DoD’s Minerva Research Initiative, which funds research into the modelling of dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies.
Don't mess with Texas. We've already
messed with ourselves:
However promising the Battleground Texas statistical analysis might seem on paper, the present-day reality is that Texas remains a very red state, and the narrow slice that represents the Republican-primary electorate – about seven percent this year – continues to move farther and faster to the extreme right. An April poll by Public Policy Polling suggested Tea Party darling Ted Cruz, the first-term senator mulling a presidential run in 2016, is the most popular politician in Texas. The question no longer is, "Would Ann Richards be too liberal to be elected in Texas today?" but rather, "Would George W. Bush?" Immigration reform? Compassionate conservatism? Stick to painting, Chomsky!
Notes Harold Cook, a veteran Democratic strategist in Texas who worked alongside Richards, "When I moved to Austin in 1989, Texas politicians were conservative in the classic sense of the term: They wanted to make sure government was small and unintrusive. There were pretty strong libertarian and populist streaks, and that still exists among the electorate, but what's new, I think, is a litmus test driven by the Tea Party wing, where if you're not mad enough, if you don't demonstrate a certain level of hatred, then your motives are suspect. Your final votes on legislation don't matter. These two politicians might be voting exactly alike – but the one the Tea Party loves is running around the district all the time screaming about how much he hates Obama."
It's a
girl's book!:
If you take a look at the cover of Alice Munro’s latest Nobel Prize-winning short fiction collection, The View From Castle Rock, you probably wouldn't guess it includes stories about cholera, the death of an infant, and domestic abuse. The cover, featuring pink lettering and a neck-down shot of a woman suntanning on a pink towel, suggests it’s a breezy summer read--and not one meant for men.
Over at the Boston Globe, Eugenia Williamson offers an excellent, frustration-conveying account of how packaging literary fiction by women in frivolous-looking covers diminishes its perceived seriousness. Take the cover of Faber’s 50th Anniversary reissue of Sylvia Plath’s harrowing classic The Bell Jar as another example--with curly handwriting and a picture of a woman fixing her makeup, it could be mistaken for a Danielle Steel book.