Year: 2012

Occupy Federally

An interesting development in the Occupy movement is the presence on 25 protesters on the steps of Federal Hall on Wall Street (with live stream). Federal Hall is is policed by the National Park Service Police and not the NYPD. I assume the NYPD could have jurisdiction. But I’m not certain. And it’s not clear…
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I Don’t Care if Zimmerman is a Racist

I think there’s too much discussion about whether George Zimmerman is racist. I don’t care. I don’t think it matters. What matters is what Zimmerman did (and lest we forgot: suspect, pursue, shoot, and kill an unarmed and innocent Trayvon Martin). Part of the problem is the racism is too broad of a label. Since…
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Gotcha!

I’m always amused whenever conservatives get to play “gotcha” when some liberal says something politically incorrect, or expresses a belief more in tune with Republicans. Because you know those same conservatives don’t really care about the issue; it’s just a brief moment when they finally get to win a round in a game they never…
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Baltimore City Hall

Circa 1900. Courtesy of Shorpy.

Only if it can kill

“The absurdity of banning squirt guns but not being able to do anything about real guns is patently obvious.” Indeed that is absurd.

Food Deserts: Quantitative Research at its Sketchiest

The New York Times reports today on a RAND study (behind the Great Damned Elsevier Pay Wall) by Ruopeng An and Roland Sturm about the lack of “food deserts” in poor neighborhoods. Or more precisely about the lack of link between food deserts and obesity. More specifically, it questions the very notion of food deserts.…
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UC-Davis Pepper Spray

From Jack Stripling in The Chronicle of Higher Education: The pepper spraying of student protesters at the University of California at Davis in November, an incident that provoked international outrage, constituted an unjustifiable use of force in an operation that was bungled by failures of leadership and communication at nearly every level, an investigative report…
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Zimmerman Charged w/ 2nd-Degree Murder

The storyin the New York Times. Shouldn’t he also be charged with lesser degrees of murder? And assault?

More Evidence of Creeping Sanity

By Cesar Gaviria, Ernesto Zedillo, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Gaviria is former president of Colombia, Zedillo former president of Mexico, and Cardoso former president of Brazil. All are on the Global Commission on Drug Policy. They say: The facts speak for themselves. The foundations of the U.S.-led war on drugs — eradication of production, interdiction…
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What’s Eating the NYPD?

New York Magazine has a very good article by Chris Smith on Ray Kelley and the current state of the NYPD: Whenever Kelly leaves One Police Plaza — most likely in January 2014, when a newly elected mayor replaces Michael Bloomberg — he will be rightly celebrated as the greatest police commissioner in the city’s…
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