A dreamy stop-motion from Iron and Wine:
Iron and Wine “Joy” from Hayley Morris on Vimeo.
Month: April 2013
Boston’s Finest: Not Just The Cops, Ctd
Tim Murphy connects the lessons learned from IEDs in Iraq to the outstanding performance of Boston’s hospitals:
Chief among the lessons of roadside bombs was the resurgence of the tourniquet. A staple of pre-World War II trauma care, it had fallen out of favor in recent decades because of misuse. Going into the invasion of Afghanistan, “This was still being taught in EMS courses and in trauma literature as a bad thing,” says Donald Jenkins, director of the trauma center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a 24-year Air Force veteran. But military doctors soon found that when applied correctly and in the right situation, tourniquets pay enormous dividends—dropping the mortality rate in such instances from 90 percent to 10 percent. Now they’re standard procedure among first responders.
The Right Way To Do A Filibuster
Patton Oswalt channels Rand Paul in the upcoming episode of Parks and Recreation:
In the episode itself, you hear a few lines of dialogue from it, but when the episode was filmed, “Parks” producer Dan Goor told Oswalt to just improvise something and they would edit it down as needed in the final cut. Oswald launched into an eight-minute rant that you can watch [above]. It’s remarkable for the absolutely hardcore nerditry of it, for Oswalt’s commitment to a bit that he knew would likely never air, and also for veteran improv comic Amy Poehler’s gift for interrupting at just the right moments and with just the right observations. It’s really remarkable.
Suicide And Gun Control, Ctd
A new study finds that “residents of states with the highest rates of gun ownership and political conservatism are at greater risk of suicide than those in states with less gun ownership and less politically conservative leanings”:
[University of California, Riverside sociology professor Augustine J. Kposowa] said that although policies aimed at seriously regulating firearm ownership would reduce individual suicides, such policies are likely to fail not because they do not work, but because many Americans remain opposed to meaningful gun control, arguing that they have a constitutional right to bear arms. “Even modest efforts to reform gun laws are typically met with vehement opposition. There are also millions of Americans who continue to believe that keeping a gun at home protects them against intruders, even though research shows that when a gun is used in the home, it is often against household members in the commission of homicides or suicides,” Kposowa said.
Previous Dish on suicide and gun control here.
Next Stop, Inequality
Above is a screen-shot from a fascinating, interactive graphic by the New Yorker. An explanation of the project:
[I]f the borough of Manhattan were a country, the income gap between the richest twenty per cent and the poorest twenty per cent would be on par with countries like Sierra Leone, Namibia, and Lesotho. Income changes dramatically between boroughs and neighborhoods. One way to look at it is by tracking the shifts along the city’s subway.
Play around with the infographic here.
Malkin Award Nominee
Via Wonkette.
Republicans vs Rubio
The immigration bill and its most prominent Republican supporter are under attack:
Conservative bloggers immediately seized on portions of the bill funding expanded cell phone access along the border as evidence Rubio was supplying free phones to undocumented immigrants. Some commentators connected it to the “Obama phone,” a popular meme on the right last year about a program that provides discounts on phone service to the poor. Despite the moniker, it predated the current administration by decades and rose to prominence last year mostly due to a viral video of a female black Obama supporter talking about the program.
Rubio himself was confronted with the claim on Wednesday in an interview with conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham, who quoted from a blog post that read “Move over Obama phone, this is the amnesty phone.”
In response, Rubio pointed out that the phones are not for illegal immigrants but for US citizens “so they can report illegal crossings because many of them either don’t have phone service or don’t have cell phone service and they have no way of calling.” Waldman bets that the truth won’t matter much:
What folks like Ingraham understand is that when you’re trying to gin up outrage about a big, complex piece of legislation, the way to do it is to find some component of the bill that is weighted with symbolic value and will hit directly on your target audience’s resentments and fears. It doesn’t matter how minor the provision is, or how much you need to distort its actual function and intent. All that matters is that it’ll get people pissed off.
Seth Mandel sees Rubio’s outreach to the talk-radio right as essential:
[E]ven if the bill comes together and passes the Senate, Rubio and the others will have far less influence on what happens to it in the GOP-controlled House. And that is why Rubio is working so hard to dull conservative commentators’ unease with anything that resembles “amnesty” for illegal immigrants. Rubio is scheduled to appear on Rush Limbaugh’s show today, and it will be Rubio’s second interview with Limbaugh since the push for immigration reform picked up steam after the November election.
A Bear Sighting In Brooklyn
A reader spotted one last night:
Andrew, I walked past you walking down 8th Ave in Brooklyn tonight, and didn’t want to bother you, as much as I wanted to say hello. Glad to see you venturing into the outer boroughs! And thanks for a great blog. I have been reading for quite some time and of course, became a member.
(Video: First segment shot in late March, then in early April)
The Disgrace That Is The New York Post
Its coverage this week of the Boston bombings puts it, it seems to me, in the same area as the British Murdoch equivalent, the News of the World. No, they have not committed any legal crimes, or systematically replaced reporting with illegal taping of private phone conversations. But crimes against journalism should also count. They have reported the news of this week with reckless indifference to the truth.
On Monday, they published that twelve people had been killed. That story remained on their website all day, as I kept checking back in amazement. I have yet to see a correction. I searched for one. Do they ever print corrections? But to be wrong on such a critical fact, and to resist withdrawing or apologizing for it, is not journalism. Deadspin – which has higher standards than the New York Post – takes on today’s front-page featuring two guys with backpacks and dark skin:
They are most assuredly innocent.
They carry large bags. They are dark-skinned. This was enough for internet sleuths to peg them as suspicious. (They show up here, in Gawker’s rundown of “suspects” identified by crowdsourcing on Reddit and 4chan.) And that was apparently enough for the Post to run with its front-page story today, claiming investigators are circulating photos of the two. (The photo on the paper’s cover is a cropped and zoomed-in version of the one taken by Ben Levine, which appeared on Deadspin on Tuesday.)
But maybe there was a reason for them to be at the marathon, wearing track jackets and carrying bags: they’re runners. The kid in the blue jacket is a middle-distance runner at Revere High School. Last week he ran the two-mile in 11:20 … Today on CBS This Morning, John Miller specifically said these two are not the suspects the FBI is seeking.
The smearing of private individuals as terrorist murderers with reckless indifference to the truth because they have dark skin is almost a text-book case of libel compounded with racism.
Why Are Bombings So Rare In America? Ctd
Douthat goes through various theories. Among them is the idea that we’ve “just gotten lucky”:
That’s the case Will Saletan made for Slate [Tuesday], after running through the F.B.I.’s list of cases involving explosives going back to the beginning of 2012. He found plenty of intercepted plots against soft targets (malls, synagogues, restaurants, etc.), several cases where only a last-minute break prevented the plot from going forward, and plenty of plotters canny enough to cobble together their devices out of ordinary household materials. ”When you look at the 20 cases,” Saletan writes, “you realize that Boston is just the tip of the iceberg. What’s surprising isn’t that the marathon bombing succeeded, but that so many other plots failed.” And given the combination of an expanded target list and the ongoing innovations of bombmakers, he suggests, we should expect more of them to succeed in the future.
Douthat’s two cents:
Like Saletan I fear that we’ll see more Boston-style atrocities in the near future, but even his examples of failed and foiled plots don’t add up to anything like the kind of sustained campaign that everyone feared we’d face, understandably, after 9/11.
Earlier Dish on the subject here.
(Photo: A running shoe and US flag are part of a memorial on the Boston Marathon route on April 18, 2013 in Boston. By Don Emmer/AFP/Getty Images)
The Dish 