ZNAK SAGITE — više od fantastike — edicija, časopis, knjižara...

Ne brini. Najvažnije je da sam nezavisan.

http://boingboing.net/2015/06/26/president-obama-delivers-eulog.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/26/supreme-court-gay-marriage_n_7470036.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

http://www.vice.com/en_au/read/my-terrorist-my-freedom-fighter-white-terrorism-in-american-cinema-398

Vajs kad je dobar.

God is not on our side: The religious right's big lie about the founding of America                            

http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/07/mapping-the-us-by-property-value-instead-of-land-area/397841/

https://pbs.twimg.com/tweet_video/CJcW0-EUYAIgEkZ.mp4

Islamistički ekstremizam u Tenesiju, čovek napao vojnu bazu, pet ubijenih, uključujući počinioca:

Shootings at Chattanooga military facilities leave 4 Marines, gunman dead; act called 'domestic terrorism'

  US military shooter from 'average Chattanooga family'

Ako ih ne sahrane islamski ekstremisti & teroristi, sahraniće ih genecki modifikovana hrana:



U.S. House committee approves anti-GMO labeling law

QuoteU.S. food companies and other opponents of genetically modified food labeling notched a key victory on Tuesday as the House Agriculture Committee approved a measure banning mandatory labeling as well as local efforts to regulate genetically engineered crops.The move demonstrates fresh momentum for those seeking to block mandated labeling of foods made with GMO crops, food industry advocates said. "This... legislation will ensure that Americans have accurate, consistent information about their food rather than a 50 state patchwork of labeling laws that will only prove costly and confusing for consumers, farmers and food manufacturers," said Pamela Bailey, CEO of the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), said in a statement.The group called on the full House of Representatives to pass the measure, which the panel approved in a voice vote, before the August recess.  Groups lobbying for mandatory GMO labeling said they are increasing their efforts to make sure that H.R. 1599, dubbed the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act, never becomes law. "The real fight will be in the Senate," said Scott Faber, executive director of Just Label It, an advocacy group pushing for mandated labeling. "This is from over."They say the bill is objectionable not only because it would overturn state GMO labeling laws, but because it also prevents state and local governments from regulating GMO crops, and would keep the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from creating a mandatory GMO labeling standard. "Those states like mine, Maine, which has already passed a law that requires GMO labeling... we would be prohibited from doing it," U.S. Rep Chellie Pingree, a GMO labeling supporter, said in a conference call with reporters.The debate over GMO labeling has heated up in recent years and several food-related companies have removed GMO ingredients from their products. Labeling supporters say consumers have a right to know if GMOs are in their food. They cite a lack of scientific consensus on safety and concerns about the herbicide glyphosate, which is widely used on genetically modified crops. Residues of the pesticide have been detected in foods, and a World Health Organization research unit earlier this year said it was classifying glyphosate as "probably" cancer-causing for humans.Opponents say mandatory labeling would raise food prices,  confuse consumers without cause as GMOs are well regulated and are no less safe or nutritious than foods made with non-GMO ingredients.

Bilk Klinton: deo problema umesto deo rešenja.


Bill Clinton: I Made Criminal Justice 'Worse'

QuoteBill Clinton said at a NAACP meeting in Philadelphia on Wednesday that he made a mistake by signing the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act that lengthened federal sentences for many crimes. "I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it," he said. Clinton sounded a lot different when he signed the bill: "Gangs and drugs have taken over our streets and undermined our schools. Every day, we read about somebody else who has literally gotten away with murder." The act, co-written by Joe Biden, promised greater federal funding for states if they enacted stricter sentencing laws for violent offenses. In addition, it provided money for extra prisons, funding for 100,000 police, cut higher education assistance for inmates, and created 60 new death penalty offenses. Finally, the bill created the Violence Against Women Act and banned the sale of assault weapons.

Louisiana: 3 Dead in movie Theater shooting, Including Gunman

Jedan kritički pogled na silikonsku dolinu (to za slučaj da niste gledali istoimenu serija Majka Džadža) i mitove o libertarijanskom raju za startap biznis:



Startups And The Big Lie

Quote
A startup is hemorrhaging cash, and the VCs have yet to agree on terms for a capital infusion. The clock is ticking until deadpool, first weeks away then days. The founders, stress levels increasing to stratospheric levels, continue to sell their company to everyone, whether investors, employees, potential employees, or clients.
They have little choice. Funding is contingent on growth, but that growth can only happen if no one really understands the funding situation. Founders have to tell the lie – that everything is fine, that a feature is going to launch even though the engineer for that feature hasn't been hired yet, that payroll will run even though the VC dollars are still nowhere on the horizon.
Lying is a requisite and daily part of being a founder, the grease that keeps the startup flywheel running. No one likes to put it that way of course. Instead, we use phrases like "hustling" and "fake it until you make it" to make the idea of lying more palatable. "Information control" is among the most important skills a founder has traditionally needed for success, and these euphemisms change nothing of the daily behavior.
But times are changing, and everyone is getting more sophisticated about startups. People know what questions to ask, and are not afraid to aggressively probe to get the answers they seek. That means that some of the key myths about success in Silicon Valley are at risk. We need a new transparent approach toward information, but we also need to understand that startups are inherently risky – and accept the lies as they come.
The Ignorance Bubble Startups run on an alchemy of ignorance and amnesia that is incredibly important to experimentation. Most startups fail. The vast, vast majority of startup employees will never exercise their options, let alone become millionaires while doing it. Mathematically, talented individuals are certainly better off financially going into a profession or working at a large tech company, where pay is higher and more secure.
That's not a lot of fun, though, is it? For one of the most hyper-rational populations in the world, Silicon Valley runs off a myth about startup success, of the lowly founder conquering the world. There are examples of this success obviously, but the probability distribution clearly shows that the company you start will almost certainly end up in the graveyard of bad ideas. Yet, we focus almost exclusively on the successes and not the failures, because that is the model of what we want to become.
This is Silicon Valley's Big Lie.
Lying is inevitable in our industry – it's unbelievable that founders can take a company from a few users to billions, and yet, it happens. Without a fake veneer of confidence, no sales would get done, and we would still be stuck with the tech of the 1970s. Hubris is in many ways a necessary quality to get a startup into orbit.
Unfortunately, this sort of lying isn't as easy as it used to be. Gone are the days where sales targets and employees wouldn't really understand the status of a startup venture firm or what questions to ask. Salespeople these days are peppered with questions about venture capital rounds and company stability, leading founders to try to legitimize as quickly as possible through fundraising.
As my colleague Connie Loizos wrote last weekend, employees are now asking questions about liquidation preferences and participating preferred shares before joining a company, forcing founders to confront the very real possibility that they can no longer just use a dose of confidence to get them out of that chicken-and-egg growth problem. People want to read the damn term sheets!
We have pierced the ignorance bubble, but that is leading to a whole new set of challenges. When people know more about a topic, they become more critical. Yet, focusing on the liquidation preferences misses the whole point about startups: it's the process of believing that turns two people and a laptop into a global powerhouse.  Our Declining Infrastructure For Massive Succeess People are getting smarter in part because they have to. The infrastructure for success for employees in Silicon Valley is becoming increasingly damaged. Not so long ago, if you joined a startup in the early years and it sold for north of a billion dollars, you might not be able buy an island and retire, but you at least could be assured of a beautiful home in South Bay and enough left over to maybe start your own experiment.
Today, a confluence of events imperils that dream. Valuations are spiking much earlier these days, which means that employees are getting their equity at much higher valuations than they have in the past. When a company is already a unicorn in its early years, there just is not that much additional room to grow in valuation to create the sort of millionaire factory that Google and Facebook's early employees enjoyed.
It gets worse though. As Aileen Lee noted in her update on unicorns last weekend, the average capital efficiency of startups has markedly decreased in the past year. That doesn't bode well for employees. Companies are avoiding the public markets by raising increasing levels of private capital, diluting employee equity. Plus, the liquidation preferences really do stack up, limiting the potential upside in a decent but not spectacular exit.
Finally, even when an employee does get early options and the company's valuation zooms upward, they often get screwed by a Faustian bargain that requires them to pay taxes on their options even though they can't exercise them to get the necessary cash. Uber is just one example of a company that has taken a hardball approach to its employees selling early in this manner.
Startup employees are seeing all of this in the market right now. They have friends who have been burned by startups, and the dense professional networks ensure that the most obscene cases travel quickly in the ecosystem. Our collective ignorance about startups and their financials is catching up with us, and we are solving it with cold, hard logic and a dose of realism if not cynicism.
Rebuilding Faith Through Transparency We no longer live in a world where people lack the basic vocabulary to understand the health of a startup. There are so many panels, seminars, events, and info sessions describing what is going on, that we as a region have made people far more savvy consumers of startups. Every founder and investor is now facing a much more informed population, who are more than willing to cut off a negotiation if the numbers aren't where they want them.
More transparency is the only way forward. Founders can't expect to hide the term sheets and their liquidation preferences from employees who ask. The best startups won't fear telling potential employees, and so the the answer to the question will simply become a screen on the health of a business. Informed employees have a right to know what they are getting into.
However, we still need that Big Lie to function. We still need to dream about the possibility of success in order to realize it. With greater transparency comes a responsibility on the part of everyone in the startup ecosystem to understand and empathize with the plight of founders trying to build their companies.
There is almost always a chicken-and-egg problem when starting a business. The very act of hiring an engineer may be just the last push needed to get a fundraising round done and secure the next few months for a startup. We can rationalize startups all we want, and read the cap table and preferences and run exit scenarios. But at the end of the day, we all have to believe in the success of a business in order for it to become true. Success is built, not modeled.
We used to do that by default through ignorance, but now we need to consciously commit to that through faith. That means we need to accept the overconfidence of a founder, even when the math isn't completely adding up. We can now detect the lies better than ever, but now we might just have to lie to ourselves if we want to see startups succeed.

Darren Wilson opens up a year after Michael Brown's death

Quote

A year after fatally shooting Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Mo., Darren Wilson says he and his wife and baby daughter have to be careful when they go out. "We try to go somewhere — how do I say this correctly? — with like-minded individuals," Wilson told the New Yorker for an extensive profile published online Monday. "You know. Where it's not a mixing pot."
The 29-year-old former Ferguson police officer, who received death threats following the 18-year-old's death on Aug. 9, 2014, lives in relative seclusion on the outskirts of St. Louis.
Wilson, who was not indicted in Brown's killing, told the magazine's Jake Halpern he hadn't reflected much on who Brown was because he had been preoccupied with the waves of protests in Ferguson and the civil lawsuit Brown's parents filed against him in May.
"You do realize that his parents are suing me?" Wilson said. "So I have to think about him."
He added: "Do I think about who he was as a person? Not really, because it doesn't matter at this point. Do I think he had the best upbringing? No. Not at all."

Later, Wilson was asked if he thought Brown was a "bad guy," or "just a kid who had got himself into a bad situation."
"I only knew him for those forty-five seconds in which he was trying to kill me," Wilson said. "So I don't know."
Halpern also detailed some of Wilson's and his wife's thoughts in the immediate aftermath of the shooting:

At the Ferguson police station, Barb Wilson wondered why her husband hadn't showed up for lunch. Then, she told me, "he just walked in and was, like, 'I just killed somebody.'" Barb noticed that Wilson's "face was flushed and red — it didn't look right." She decided that he needed space and, not knowing what else to do, took care of some paperwork. Wilson went to the hospital with his superiors, and debriefed them while he was examined for injuries. He returned to the station, and he and Barb headed home.

"Neither one of us knew what the reaction was going to be the next day," Wilson said. "You know, a typical police shooting is: you get about a week to a week and a half off, you see a shrink, you go through your Internal Affairs interviews. And then you come back." Barb told me, "I didn't think it would be a big weight on his shoulders. This is kind of what we signed up for."

Later that night, however, they turned on the television and watched live coverage of unrest in Ferguson. Barb recalled, "We stayed up all night watching, like, 'Oh, my God—what's going on? What are they doing?'"

Barb's younger son, who was then six, asked why there were images on television of Ferguson burning. Wilson told me, "I said, 'Well, I had to shoot somebody.' And he goes, 'Well, why did you shoot him? Was he a bad guy?' I said, 'Yeah, he was a bad guy.'"

[...]

A few days after the shooting, the Wilsons, worried that their address was about to be leaked online, fled to the house of a relative: "We ran through the house, grabbed all our guns, and put some bags together." Wilson contemplated leaving St. Louis for good, then reconsidered. He told me, "At least here I'd know where I'm welcome and not welcome."

In March, the Justice Department issued a scathing report on the city of Ferguson, concluding that "a culture of systemic racial bias" permeated the police department.
But Wilson said he has not read the report.
"I don't have any desire," he said. "I'm not going to keep living in the past about what Ferguson did. It's out of my control."
In 2009, when Wilson was in police training in Jennings, a predominantly black town bordering Ferguson, he admitted to a field officer that he felt out of place.
"I don't know what I'm doing," he recalled saying. "This is a culture shock. Would you help me? Because you obviously have that connection, and you can relate to them. You may be white, but they still respect you. So why can they respect you and not me?"
But Wilson said race did not play a part in his shock.
"I never looked at it like 'I'm the only white guy here.' I just looked at it as 'This isn't where I grew up,'" he said. "When a cop shows up, it's, like, 'The cops are here!' There's no 'Oh, s---, the white cops are here!'"
"Everyone is so quick to jump on race," Wilson continued. "It's not a race issue."
In late November, five days after the grand jury's decision not to indict him was announced, Wilson resigned from the Ferguson police force. He told the magazine that he's interviewed for a few police positions, but the Brown case is "too hot an issue, so it makes me unemployable."
If Ferguson offered him his old job back, would he take it?
"I would want to do it for a day," Wilson said.

Job insecurity is the new normal. Here's how it's affecting your family life

QuoteA "one-way honor system" beholdens workers to their employers, while employers have little responsibility to employees. Researchers believe it's reshaping our family lives.



After World War II, there was a golden era when Americans, especially those that had an education, could expect to have a job and keep it until retirement and retire with an adequate pension.
Those days, which Allison Pugh, professor of Sociology at University of Virginia, refers to as the "20-year career and a gold watch" model, are over. Between a competitive global market, recession and job automation, and a switch to part-time and contingent workers, Americans now live in a culture of perpetual job insecurity, where they are easily laid off, at both high and low-level jobs, and can expect to switch jobs, or locations, at least a half dozen times during their careers.
Last year, Hewlett-Packard eliminated 34,000 jobs, and JC Penney and Sprint announced cuts, while JP Morgan Chase has cut 20,000 from its workforce since 2011. In double-earner families, at least one parent reports feeling "insecure" about their job, and in almost half of those both think their job is insecure.
This dynamic creates a constant tension for workers, who are beset by uncertainty. It has bred what Pugh calls the "one-way honor system," in which workers are beholden to employers, but employers are not, says Pugh, author of "The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity," out earlier this year.
SEE MORE: How working around the clock hurts families
How does insecurity impact our love lives, Pugh wondered? How do these changes go beyond the cubicle to our romantic partners, friendships, and children? For her book, she interviewed 80 people about their work lives and home lives. Pugh talks to the Deseret News about how the "insecurity culture" infiltrates our homes and amplifies or diminishes our commitments and obligations to those we love.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
DN: In the title of the book, you refer to the "Age of Insecurity" in America. What does that mean?
Pugh: Part of what's new about this time in America is that employers are restructuring not just during recessions, but when times are flush. Over the past 30 years the American economy has added 60 million jobs, but it's not clear to workers if they will keep their current job or where the next will be. There is also evidence that long-term employment is on the decline.
At the same time, the churn at work parallels changes in intimacy. Partnerships dissolve and reform much more rapidly than they did 50 years ago. Divorce rates have plateaued since the 1980s, but 20 percent of marriages end within five years, and so do co-habitators. These have implications for stability.
DN: You call these twin phenomenae — job insecurity and family insecurity — the "two whirlwinds." Are they connected?
Pugh: The rise in job insecurity and the rise in divorce and separation doesn't necessarily imply linkage. It's not that simple. But we know that the old style of organizing work — the social compact, lifetime careers — encouraged particular kinds of intimacy and families.
Job insecurity does lead to family disruption, and job stability lends stability to the home. You could make the argument that job security enables families to endure. Families of all kinds can experience longer relationships when they are not scurrying around figuring out new ways to make a livelihood.
DN: One curious effect that you notice within job insecurity is a "one-way contract" in which workers feel supremely beholden to employers without holding employers responsible. Can you explain that?


Pugh: The one-way honor system is when individual workers profess having an intense work ethic that also involves loyalty or identifying with the employers. Many people that I interviewed said that they give "150 percent, or 100 percent, or 125 percent," so the individual is pledging themselves as a statement of personal character. They're saying, "I'm a good person, see how much I identify with work and can be relied on."
On the other hand, for the last 30 years or so, employers have been pulling away from making any similar pledge. And there's no blame for employers — even people who had been laid off said it's not the company's job to worry about workers, they have to be lean and mean in a tough economy. Americans appear to have entirely capitulated to the model of the high-performance company that doesn't owe anything to workers aside from, as one woman that I interviewed said, "a paycheck and some respect."
DN: You say that we just take that attitude for granted, but is there an alternative? Is it unique to America?
Pugh: It feels unique. We do know that American work hours are extraordinarily long — we are neck-and-neck with Japan. Usually long work hours are a sign of low productivity, for example, if you look at work hours in Europe, it's not Germany that has long work hours, it's Greece. But that's not true in the U.S. We have high productivity, climbing higher all the time, but we have long work hours anyway.
One of the principle messages I give when I talk about this book is this: everyone finds it hard to envision another way. But isn't that what we need to thrive in a globalized economy?
DN: You argue that job insecurity is actually driving the rise in inequality. How does that work?
Pugh: The engine for inequality is job precariousness. People don't talk about job insecurity because they have given up on it, so they talk about income transfers or schedule predictability or character, but those aren't the engine.
It's the engine for inequality because one-third of those that get laid off get work again at a comparable wage, 1/3 don't get work, and 1/3 make less. People who get let go suffer wage decreases, and people who are hired back are hired back at less.
DN: Going back to how this affects families, what are some of the impacts that insecurity has on home and personal life?
Pugh: It's interesting. Some people build a "moral wall" to corral the insecurity they feel at work from their home, but placing nearly all their hopes for enduring connections on their personal lives can put a long of pressure on those relationships. This can spark the very instability that they long to avoid. Take Gary, for example. He is a single, white mechanic who has been laid off multiple times and is very devoted to his kids, but he's brittle and embittered about his failed relationships. He's very rigid and has almost impossibly high expectations, which is interesting, since he has had almost none for his employers.
The moral wall is a kind of intensity barometer, and people felt more intensely about their home lives when they felt besieged by insecurity in the work world. Intensifiers can be good and bad. Some "commitment heroes" like Gary are inspired to take un unbelievable burdens, but that's also the source for a lot of anger and vitriol when people feel betrayed.
DN: What about how insecurity effects parenting and relationships with children?
Pugh: We know that job insecurity makes parenting harder, and it makes teens believe less in the idea that working hard will get you somewhere, and that you can change things around you rather than be controlled by them.
What was striking to me was that for everyone that I interviewed, children were the last frontier in terms of duty and our obligations to each other. People cared deeply for their children. But not everyone parents the same. Affluent people were raising their kids to be flexible, to take advantage of opportunities. Low-income people were raising their children to brace themselves for bad news and inevitable hardship.
One group was groomed for opportunity, the other for catastrophe. Individuls are prompted to wonder how much of that ends up becoming self-fulfilling prophecy.

What U.S. citizens weren't told about the atomic bombing of Japan

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Seventy years ago, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan: Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945; Nagasaki on Aug. 9. With searing heat and annihilating force, the nuclear blasts tore through factories, shops and homes in both cities. Huge portions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki vanished. Weighing many factors, including the Soviet Union's entry into the war against Japan 11 hours before the Nagasaki bombing, Japan surrendered. By Aug. 15, World War II was over.


In the United States, the necessity of the bombings to end the war has been studied and argued for decades, but the acute and long-term effects of whole-body radiation exposure on the men, women and children beneath the mushroom clouds are little known and seldom mentioned. Without also accounting for this critical aspect of the bombings, discussions of the military, moral and existential issues surrounding Hiroshima and Nagasaki are incomplete. If we choose to take and defend actions that cause great harm to civilians during war, we must also scrutinize and wholly understand the effect of those actions.
   
Within a week of each nuclear attack, thousands who had escaped death began to experience inexplicable combinations of symptoms: high fever, dizziness, nausea, headaches, diarrhea, bloody stools, nosebleeds and whole-body weakness. Their hair fell out in large clumps, their wounds secreted extreme amounts of pus, and their gums swelled and bled. Purple spots appeared on their bodies, signs of hemorrhaging beneath the skin. Infections ravaged their internal organs. Within a few days of the onset of symptoms, many people lost consciousness, mumbled deliriously and died in extreme pain; others languished for weeks before either dying or slowly recovering. Even those who had suffered no external injuries fell sick and died. In the ruins of his small tuberculosis hospital in Nagasaki, Dr. Tatsuichiro Akizuki likened the situation to the Black Death pandemic that ravaged Europe in the 1300s.
A second wave of radiation illnesses and deaths swept through Nagasaki in late August through early October. From Akizuki's perspective on top of Motohara Hill, the illness carved a clear geographical path: From the bottom of the hill upward, people died in order of their distance from the bomb's hypocenter. Akizuki called this phenomenon the "concentric circles of death."

Today, Americans' silence on this crucial chapter of the atomic bomb story is, in large part, an extension of U.S. denial and suppression since the end of the war. Immediately after the bombings, high-level U.S. officials publicly — and adamantly — rebuffed news reports about the bombs' horrific aftereffects. Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs, dismissed these reports as propaganda, even as he sent teams to measure radiation levels to ensure the safety of U.S. troops about to enter both cities. Later that year, Groves testified before the U.S. Senate that death from high-dose radiation exposure is "without undue suffering" and "a very pleasant way to die."
In Nagasaki, newborn death rates skyrocketed in the nine months after the bombing: 43% of pregnancies in which the fetus was exposed within a quarter-mile of the hypocenter ended in spontaneous abortion, stillbirth or infant death. Young mothers giving birth in the ruins did not know it yet, but even those infants who survived would face severe physical and mental disabilities.

For years, tens of thousands of hibakusha ("atomic bomb-affected people") suffered agonizing radiation-related illnesses. Many died. Meanwhile, Gen. Douglas MacArthur's occupation press code censored Japanese news accounts, personal testimonies, photographs and scientific research on the survivors' conditions. In the United States, virtually all reports about the devastation and radiation-related deaths stopped after a confidential memo to American media requested that all reports about the atomic bombs be preapproved by the War Department, particularly those containing scientific or technical details.

In 1946 and 1947, opposition to the bombings began appearing in U.S. media, including John Hersey's "Hiroshima," first published in the New Yorker, and a scathing essay by journalist Norman Cousins in the Saturday Review. U.S. government and military officials hurriedly strategized how to prevent what they considered "a distortion of history" that could damage postwar international relations and threaten U.S. nuclear development. Two articles by prominent government officials — the first by Karl T. Compton, a respected physicist who had helped develop the atomic bombs, and the second by former Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson — offered intelligent and persuasive "behind the scenes" perspectives on the U.S. decision to use the bombs. These powerful justifications effectively quelled civic dissent and directed focus away from the ongoing suffering of the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. 
By the early 1950s, cancer rates for hibakusha adults and children soared, and many more hibakusha developed liver, endocrine, blood and skin diseases, and impairments of the central nervous system. Mortality rates remained high. Most commonly, survivors experienced violent dizzy spells and a profound depletion of energy. Fears about genetic effects of radiation exposure on their children haunted them for decades. Thirty years after the war, high rates of leukemia as well as stomach and colon cancer persisted. From the survivors' perspective, the atomic bomb had burned their bodies from the inside out.
As Japanese and U.S. scientists continue studying hibakusha, their children and grandchildren to try to comprehend the full effect of radiation exposure, can we come face to face with the terrorizing realities of nuclear weapons? We don't have to suppress our condemnation of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, mistreatment and killings of Allied POWs and slaughter of civilians across Asia to do so. An expanded understanding of atomic bomb history that includes the human consequences of nuclear war will deepen our integrity as a nation and, one hopes, influence our nuclear weapons policies across the world.
Susan Southard is the author of "Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War" and the artistic director of Essential Theater in Tempe, Ariz.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/thats-not-funny/399335/

Primereno obeležena godišnjica:

Officials: Police shoot gunman who opened fire during Ferguson anniversary protest

QuoteST. LOUIS — Officers have shot a man who police say opened fire on them in Ferguson, Missouri where protesters gathered en masse on the anniversary of Michael Brown's death.
The identity and condition of the person shot by police was not immediately known.
"The St. Louis County Police Department was involved in an officer-involved shooting after officers came under heavy gunfire," county police spokesman Shawn McGuire said in a written statement. "We are working as quickly as possible to get details of the incident."
A news conference was scheduled for 2:30 a.m. CT.
The burst of gunshots erupted as officers were seeking to disperse a crowd of several hundred demonstrators who began blocking traffic and smashing windows along a main Ferguson thoroughfare. A news crew captured the chaos of the moment, as unsuspecting citizens scrambled for cover.


A Twitter user posted video of an officer standing near a purportedly injured man lying on the ground.
"Hey, he's bleeding!" the videographer yells to police. "Please get him some help. He's bleeding out, please get him some help, man."
Minutes after the shots were heard, an Associated Press photographer saw a man lying face down, covered in blood, behind a boarded-up restaurant. It wasn't immediately clear how badly the man was injured, the AP reported. Later, an AP reporter saw a woman overcome with grief. Friends were consoling her. She screamed: "Why did they do it?" Another woman nearby fainted. A man nearby said, "They killed my brother."
In another video posting, the man who yelled for help is pushed away from the scene and detained by police. He later tweeted that was eventually released, but had suffered a small cut under his eye from being shoved into a chain-link fence. "No big deal," he wrote of his injury. He was still on the scene when paramedics arrived for the man allegedly shot by police.

I nastavak:
State of emergency issued following Ferguson anniversary violence

Rasna, belačka paravojska, jel...
http://www.klix.ba/vijesti/svijet/naoruzani-bivsi-pripadnici-policije-i-vojske-slobodno-patroliraju-fergusonom/150812022

Ova žena stvarno ne zna za stid:

Clinton offers forceful defense on Benghazi, emails

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating

Going to College Isn't Paying Off for Students of Color

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It's a truism few parents of high school seniors would refute: a college diploma is an economic investment as much as an intellectual one. Besides being a ticket to a middle-class lifestyle, the wisdom usually goes, a degree is an insurance policy against hard times.   Yet a report released this week by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows that for minority college grads, the investment in higher education isn't paying off like it should. And the bank's analysis is the just latest data set to undermine the bedrock premise that education alone can help level the economic playing field between whites and minorities.
Although college grads across the board make more money than their less-educated peers, the report found that whites and Asians with four-year degrees not only tend to outearn their black and Latino counterparts, but they also better withstood the impact of the Great Recession. "Based on two decades of detailed wealth data, we conclude that education does not, however, protect the wealth of all racial and ethnic groups equally," the report's authors wrote.
According to the study, white and Asian American families with four-year college degrees were more likely to have accumulated much more wealth over the longer term than their less-well-educated counterparts. Ditto for African American and Latino families, although their earnings and wealth were typically lower than that of whites and Asian Americans.
"This is certainly partially a story about intergenerational inequality," S. Michael Gaddis, an associate professor of sociology and demography at Penn State University, wrote in an email to TakePart.
One factor: "Research shows that minority and low [socioeconomic status] students don't attend the best possible colleges they could (based on grades, etc.) and that lack of the best degrees translates into a substantial workforce that is underutilized," wrote Gaddis, who authored a study released in March that found minority students who attend elite schools such as Harvard don't fare better in the job market compared with less-well-educated whites.
That's troubling enough, but this latest report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis also concluded that Hispanic and black families headed by someone with a four-year college degree "typically fared significantly worse than Hispanic and black families without college degrees." The authors found that "This was true both during the recent turbulent period (2007–2013) as well as during a two-decade span ending in 2013 (the most recent data available)."
This is explained in part by the fact that less-educated minority families had less to lose, on average, than their middle-class peers. But the report also noted that real estate was a factor: Better-educated African American and Latinos were more likely to own homes, and those homes tended to be their primary source of wealth, so when the housing market collapsed, their residences transformed from piggy banks into anchors. 
"Declines in the average value of owner-occupied homes among college-educated Hispanic and black families between 2007 and 2013 were 45 percent and 51 percent, respectively," said the report. "The average value of owner-occupied homes declined 25 percent among college-educated white families and increased 6 percent among college-educated Asian families."
Maya Rockeymoore, head of Global Policy Solutions, a Washington, D.C.–based policy organization, said that statistic points to another issue minorities face but whites don't: discrimination and subprime loans in the housing market, which many families use to finance college tuition.

"The evidence shows that the free market is not so free for blacks and Hispanics who were charged disproportionately higher rates compared to similarly situated whites for mortgage products, despite having high incomes and good credit," Rockeymoore said.
As a result, she said, "this had a devastating impact on their ability to grow and protect their wealth" even before the market crash. "It's a problem not just for individuals but for entire families of color over generations."


RELATED: How Racially Driven Predatory Lending Hurts Us All

Related stories on TakePart:

• Cosign of the Times: The Rich Are Borrowing to Pay for College Too
• Racism Literally Costs America $2 Trillion...Ready to Stop Payment?
• One of the Top Schools in the Nation Allegedly Discriminates Against Black and Latino Students

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34062118

Two US journalists have been shot dead during a live TV report in the state of Virginia

O, bože... Teksas 

Death by selfie: Texas teenager Deleon Alonso Smith fatally shoots himself in neck while taking photo

QuoteTexas teenager Deleon Alonso Smith has accidentally shot and killed himself while posing for selfies with a gun he found earlier in the day.
The 19 year old was taking photos of himself and his cousin when he inadvertently pulled the trigger and fired into his own neck. He died of a single gunshot, while his cousin was unharmed. His grandmother Alma Douglas said: "It's a numb feeling. It's still unbelievable. Yesterday was my birthday and he came to wish me happy birthday, and now this kind of news," reported The Sun.
Smith's death is the latest in a series of accidental injuries and deaths caused when people have been taking selfies. In July, a San Diego man hospitalised for five days after he attempted to take a selfie with a rattlesnake. Todd Fassler was hit with a medical bill of $156,000 (£100,000) following the incident.
In the same month a 21-year-old Russian university graduate fell to her death from a bridge while she was trying to take a selfie next to the Moscow International Business Centre. She had been taking a photo of herself and friends when she plunged into the nearby quayside. One month earlier another woman from Moscow almost died when she fired a pistol that pressed against her temple while posing for a selfie.

brate, samo čekamo snimanje horor filma sa selfi štapom ubicom...

ovi selfi-debili zaslužuju sve što sami sebi urade, ali mnogo veća PROPAS je ovaj nesrećnik dole koji jeste radio nešto malkice bzvz ali svakako nije zaslužio bruku a možda i apsu zato što je na sopstvenom telefonu držao slike golog maloletnika - SEBE!


čitav niz apsurda i sumnjivih nepravilnosti - ovde:

Teen Boy Will Be Charged As Adult For Having Naked Pics of a Minor: Himself

Kafka-esque sexting nightmare

http://reason.com/blog/2015/09/02/teen-boy-will-be-charged-as-adult-for-ha

http://www.klix.ba/biznis/privreda/aleksa-milojevic-za-klix-ba-cijena-svjetske-ekonomske-krize-koju-cemo-platiti-bit-ce-visoka/150830007

QuoteTexas teenager Deleon Alonso Smith has accidentally shot and killed himself while posing for selfies with a gun he found earlier in the day.
The 19 year old was taking photos of himself and his cousin when he inadvertently pulled the trigger and fired into his own neck.

Prirodna selekcija.

QuoteSmith's death is the latest in a series of accidental injuries and deaths caused when people have been taking selfies.

Sure, let's NOT blame it on guns. Selfies kill people.

Evo da se određeni članovi foruma naslađuju    :
U.S. Is Helpless Against Some Russia's Military Hardware

Quote

With indications that NATO vs. Russia war could begin 'today or tomorrow', Russia is already equipping its military with advanced hardware to gain advantage in such a war.

Russian Helicopters company has begun developing an advanced high-speed combat helicopter. The fact that the helicopter (PSV) was under development was reported earlier, but it wasn't specified whether it would be an offensive chopper or used exclusively as military transportation means.

The Moscow-based company's deputy CEO for sales, Grigory Kozlov, gave official details about the military chopper on Wednesday.

It was reported on Monday that the PSV is expected to enter commercial production by the year of 2022, according to Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Air Force Viktor Bondarev.

The combat helicopter can accelerate up to 500 kilometers (311 miles) per hour.

"At present, projects on the Mi-28NM, Ka-52K, Mi-26T2 [helicopters] are being realized, and work on an advanced high-speed combat helicopter has started," Kozlov told Russian state-owned RIA Novosti.

The company manufacturer of the PSV is one of the key design and manufacturing companies. Founded in 2007, the company has five chopper plants, two design departments as well as enterprises for the production and maintenance of aircraft parts, a repair plant and a service company that provides technical support of sold aircraft.
Russia's T-14 Armata main battle tank will be invisible
The PSV military chopper is yet another indication that Russian President Vladimir Putin is dead serious about making his country one of the greatest military powers in the world, with an ultimate aim to make it the greatest.

Earlier this year, Russia showcased its cutting-edge T-14 Armata main battle tank – easily the largest main battle tank manufacturer in the world. The company-manufacturer of the tank, Uralvagonzavod, claims this deadliest new weapon is invisible to enemy radars.

It is yet unclear whether this claim is true or not, but one thing is certain: the Russian military intends to replace 70 percent of the country's tanks with the cutting-edge T-14 Armata. As of now, the Russian military consists of mostly T-72 and T-90 main battle tanks.

With plans to produce 2,300 T-14 Armata tanks by 2020, there are little details for the public about the tank's hardware, which is why it is difficult for experts to assess its capabilities and compare it to Western and U.S. main battle tanks.

Apparently, the U.S. must fear not only Russia's new military developments, but also China's. It was reported earlier this year that China is developing a new High Altitude, Long Endurance (HALE) UAV (also known as the Divine Eagle) capable of eliminating stealth enemy aircraft far away from the Chinese territory.

And it has just become apparent that Russia is working on a similar system. The MAKS aircraft spectacular show held in Moscow last week showcased advanced Russia's aircraft that the country's engineers have been working on for years, or even decades.
U.S. will be helpless against Russia and China's new UAVs
The new UAV, which was shown at the show, is similar to China's Divine Eagle in the regard of it using low frequency radars to detect low-observable stealth aircraft such as the F-35, F-22 and B-2 bomber, according to Flight Global news website.

It must be noted that most stealth aircraft is designed to evade high-frequency radar systems. But the developers of the new UAV have made a great leap ahead by equipping the aircraft with an advanced electronic warfare suite. Not only does it have a protective electromagnetic sphere around the UAV to counter missiles, but also makes it invisible from radars.

What it means is this: the new Russian UAV will detect U.S. stealth aircraft without being detected. This kind of combination would give the Russians a major advantage in a war against the U.S.

On top of that, "Russia and China are already working on new networked air defenses coupled with new radars operating in the UHF and VHF-bands that threaten to neutralize America's massive investment in fifth-generation fighters. Fighter-sized stealth aircraft are only optimized to perform against high-frequency fire control band radars operating in the Ku, X, C and portions of the S-band," U.S. defense official Dave Majumdar told The National Interest.
Russia's weak and strong military sides
The Pentagon took a serious note of Russia's military capabilities ever since its large-scale military drills in March this year. Considering the evolving nature of warfare over the next decades, military experts agree that Russia's military capabilities are likely to be affected.

For example, the growing trend toward greater automation will gradually become a weak side of the Russian military, since the Kremlin does not have the military technology that could compete with Western automated systems. Besides, Russia doesn't have the technology to develop those systems in the nearest future.

Thus, in case a war between the West and Russian begins, Russian would be the weak side in terms of automated control systems, advanced electronics, drones and other electronics.

Therefore, Russia must be looking for other ways to effectively counter Western automated technologies. For example, Russian military could try to jam Western communications and disable automated equipment with its electronic developments. Besides, Russia has a great experience at disabling such enemy equipment ever since the Soviet times.

Another way for Moscow to counter Washington's technological developments that are out of reach for Russia's capabilities would be focusing on cyber warfare against the West. Russia's could even wage a cyber warfare without declaring it, and with recent hacks of the Pentagon, Russia might have already started it.

Zvaničnici su pokušali da preurede granice jedne oblasti tako da nema nijednog registrovanog glasača u toj oblasti, da bi vlasnici kapitala odlučivali o zakonima umesto građanstva. Ali im je promakao jedan registrovani glasač.

http://qz.com/491061/because-of-an-electoral-mishap-a-us-tax-vote-will-be-decided-by-a-single-woman/

The US Marines tested all-male squads against mixed-gender ones, and the results were pretty bleak

Quote

In 2013, the US military lifted its ban on women serving in combat. Shortly after, the Marine Corps began what it calls an "unprecedented research effort" to understand the impact of gender integration on its combat forces. That took the form of a year-long experiment called the Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force, in which 400 Marines—100 of them female—trained for combat together and then undertook a simulated deployment, with every facet of their experience measured and scrutinized.

All branches of the military are facing a January 1, 2016, deadline to open all combat roles to women. The Marine Corps is using this experiment to decide whether to request exceptions to that mandate. The Corps' summary of the experiment, posted online today by NPR, concludes that combat teams were less effective when they included women.

Overall, the report says, all-male teams and crews outperformed mixed-gender ones on 93 out of 134 tasks evaluated. All-male teams were universally faster "in each tactical movement." On "lethality," the report says:

All-male 0311 (rifleman) infantry squads had better accuracy compared to gender-integrated squads. There was a notable difference between genders for every individual weapons system (i.e. M4, M27, and M203) within the 0311 squads, except for the probability of hit & near miss with the M4.

And:

All-male infantry crew-served weapons teams engaged targets quicker and registered more hits on target as compared to gender-integrated infantry crew-served weapons teams, with the exception of M2 accuracy.

And:

All-male squads, teams and crews and gender-integrated squads, teams, and crews had a noticeable difference in their performance of the basic combat tasks of negotiating obstacles and evacuating casualties. For example, when negotiating the wall obstacle, male Marines threw their packs to the top of the wall, whereas female Marines required regular assistance in getting their packs to the top. During casualty evacuation assessments, there were notable differences in execution times between all-male and gender-integrated groups, except in the case where teams conducted a casualty evacuation as a one-Marine fireman's carry of another (in which case it was most often a male Marine who "evacuated" the casualty)

The report also says that female Marines had higher rates of injury throughout the experiment.
Such conclusions may be disheartening to proponents of gender integration in combat, and certainly put a damper on the news that the Army's ranger school recently graduated its first female soldiers. The tests come with at least one important caveat: As the Marine Corps Times notes, many of of the male study participants had previously served in combat units, whereas female participants, by necessity, came directly from infantry schools or from noncombat jobs.

The Marine Corps summary report does not indicate or suggest that the Marines will be asking for an exception to the military's integration mandate. However, it does quote this somber section of a 1992 government study on gender integration in the armed forces:

A military unit at maximum combat effectiveness is a military unit least likely to suffer casualties. Winning in war is often only a matter of inches, and unnecessary distraction or any dilution of the combat effectiveness puts the mission and lives in jeopardy. Risking the lives of a military unit in combat to provide career opportunities or accommodate the personal desires or interests of an individual, or group of individuals, is more than bad military judgment. It is morally wrong.

Pitam se sprovode li redovno slična istraživanja u Izraelu, i bi li imali čemu naučiti ove Amerikance.

Da, svakako ne treba na osnovu jedne studije da zaključimo da je ženama mesto isključivo za šporetom. Jutros sam video da su ove godine tri najbolje rangirana kadeta na ovogodišnjj završnoj godini naše vojne akademije, vlasnice tri vagine.

Njujork Tajmz:

Why Russians Hate America. Again.

Quote

MOSCOW — ON a warm August evening, I found myself sitting with three educated young Russians at the Beverly Hills Diner, a chain restaurant whose gaudy décor includes human-size figures of Porky the Pig and Marilyn Monroe.
They had invited me to join their table, inside a green convertible car, after I had asked a few reporter-type questions about their country. But all talk of Russia kept leading to America.
"America is trying to encircle us," said Kristina Donets, 29, swabbing a slice of dessert waffle in banana compote. "We have finally risen out of chaos and you don't like that."
Reporting in Russia after more than a decade away felt a lot like visiting an old friend. It is where I owned my first car (and had it stolen), met my husband and first worked as a journalist.
But the friend had changed.
In some ways, it was for the better. People were wealthier — despite the recent decline in the ruble and jump in inflation — and better traveled. The kindhearted woman who hosted me when I first moved to Moscow in 1997 said it best: "We don't have to wash out our plastic bags anymore." Her tiny salary had quadrupled since I'd last seen her. She had taken her first trip abroad — a package tour to Tunisia.
But there was a darker side. Society had grown more defensive, and self-conscious, like a teenager constantly looking at herself in the mirror. Oligarchs had always had exit ramps — a house in London and a second passport — but now my own friends were looking for escape routes.
Intellectuals pointed me to books on Berlin in the 1920s and the concept of "ressentiment,'' a philosophical term that describes a simmering resentment and sense of victimization arising out of envy of a perceived enemy. It often has its roots in a culture's feeling of impotence. In Berlin in the early 20th century, it helped explain the rise of German fascism. In Russia in August, it seemed to have many targets: Ukraine, gay people, European dairy products and above all the United States.
"America stuffs its democracy in our face," bellowed a cabdriver named Kostya in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. (His main beef was with the "propaganda of pederasts," using a derogatory word used to describe homosexuals, a few weeks after the Supreme Court's approval of gay marriage.) "If you're saying yes, yes, yes, all the time and nodding your head, well sometimes you have to say no," he said, explaining that Russia had finally stood up to the United States.
There is, of course, a lot of history behind such sentiments. In the 19th century, Slavophiles and Westernizers clashed over the right path for Russia. There was obviously the fierce rivalry with the United States in Soviet times. Since then, there have been low points, often connected with American actions in the world. (The NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 and the American invasion of Iraq are examples.) But nothing like the current opinion of America, which this year sank to its lowest level since the Soviet Union collapsed nearly 24 years ago, according to polling by the Levada Analytical Center in Moscow. Advertisement
  Continue reading the main story   Advertisement
  Continue reading the main story Anti-Americanism is more potent now because it is stirred up and in many ways sponsored by the state, an effort that Russians, despite their hard-bitten cynicism, seem surprisingly susceptible to. Independent voices are all but gone from Russian television, and most channels now march to the same, slickly produced beat. Virtually any domestic problem, from the ruble's decline to pensioners' losing subsidies on public transport, is cast as a geopolitical standoff between Russia and America, and political unrest anywhere is portrayed as having an American State Department official lurking behind it.
"America wants to destroy us, humiliate us, take our natural resources," said Lev Gudkov, director of Levada, the polling center, describing the rhetoric, with which he strongly disagrees. "But why? For what? There is no explanation."
DURING my visit, Russians were thinking about America a lot, which was a kind of compliment, but in the way of a spurned lover who keeps sending angry texts long after the breakup.
"Tell her how well we all live, how much better than in Europe and how wonderful Crimea is now," hissed a woman in a skintight dress to someone I was interviewing. She was referring to the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed last year. That of course, was the other big change I encountered.
Inside Russia, Mr. Putin's actions in Crimea have broken friendships and split families, leaving society as divided as I have ever seen it. Politics, once everyone's obsession, now seems like a distant land no one visits. Those who do, pay a price. Mr. Gudkov said he felt like "a Jew in Hitler's Germany" when he opposed the Crimea annexation.
The move also caused the biggest break in relations with the West since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"It's like a divorce," said Keith Darden, a political-science professor at American University. "They are saying: 'the relationship we had is over. We've had enough of your efforts to change us. We're doing our own thing now.' "
He added, "But they don't know what their own thing is."
What is the Kremlin's grand strategy? Many Russian liberals I talked to believe there isn't one. Mr. Putin and his inner circle are simply lurching from crisis to crisis. How else to explain Russia's sanctions on imported food, which have driven up inflation at home, or Crimea, which has lost a chunk of its tourists and saddled Moscow with expensive new social obligations.
Dmitry Volkov, a journalist who took part in the 2011 protests against Mr. Putin, compared the annexation, and Russia's subsequent military action in eastern Ukraine, to a mugging that ends in accidental murder.
"They keep crossing boundaries only to find that once they are across, it's only logical to cross the next one," he said. "That's not a strategy. That's a behavioral pattern."
Others believe that the government is unraveling, and that the shrillness of the nationalist narrative is a harbinger. Oil prices have plunged, shrinking the pie that Mr. Putin's loyalists had been feasting on.
"It's like before Pompeii, when all the springs dried up," said one Russian friend, a former journalist who is a keen observer of the political system. "The ground is hot."
The low opinion of America, Mr. Gudkov said, is not a permanent condition. The resentment seems to have more to do with Russians themselves than with any American action, a kind of defensive, free-floating expression of current anxieties.
But the biggest question is where it is all leading. Some Russians aren't sticking around to find out.
"I don't like what's happening now," said Alexander Yeremeyev, an Internet entrepreneur, walking with his family in Sokolniki, a park in central Moscow. "Now we're all supposed to unite against what — the U.S., Europe, cheese?"
He said he was considering leaving. "I have friends who say, 'it's great to do business in Russia.' But you know what they all have in common? Foreign passports."

Quote from: Meho Krljic on 13-09-2015, 07:03:13
Njujork Tajmz:

Why Russians Hate America. Again.

orgija besramne gnusobe, kratkovidosti i licemerja...

Ovo je za Rusija na ivici propasti.

Quote from: Father Jape on 13-09-2015, 12:22:40
Ovo je za Rusija na ivici propasti.

nije.
tačno je gde treba.

Ko je sinoć slušo vesti sigurno je video najnoviju hilerijs avanturu američkog školstva a koja se odvija od Ponedeljka. Četrnaestogodišnjak donese u školu digitalni sat koji je sam napravio da impresionira nastanvicu. Četrnaestoodišnjak je musliman. Nastavnica za svaki slučaj pozove policiju jer šta bi drugo taj sat možda potencijalno nikadsenezna mogao da bude do tempirana bomba? Naravno policija se nasmeje od srca i kaže joj da prestane da paranoiše i da joj troši vreme na gluposti? Zapravo ne, policija dođe i privede momka, stavi mu lisice i odvede ga u pritvor. Jer ipak, musliman je to. A u Teksasu smo.

Na kraju se sve srećno završi, policija kaže da neće pisati prijavu detetu, ali škola obavesti porodicu zvaničnim pismom da ne treba donositi opasne predmete na nastavu.


  No charges for Muslim student after clock mistaken for bomb

i
  Texas principal sends awful letter to parents after Ahmed Mohamed was wrongfully arrested

Obama je tvitovao "Cool clock, Ahmed" xD

https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/644193755814342656

pazi, taj mali ako zna da napravi sat zna da upravlja i avionom! a zna se šta rade muslimani u avionima!

POLICIJA UBILA ČOVEKA U INVALIDSKIM KOLICIMA U POKUŠAJU DA GA SPREČI DA IZVRŠI SAMOUBISTVO!
(treba li uopšte napomenuti da je ubijeni - crnac? verovatno ne. ipak, jeste: crn je ko crna zemlja u koju su ga poslali.)

http://photographyisnotacrime.com/2015/09/delaware-cops-shoot-and-kill-man-in-wheelchair-as-witness-records-updated/

Suicide by cop.

ekčueli, pomogli su mu da uđe u raj, pošto tamo nema mesta za samoubice.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/professional-imbecile-george-zimmerman-retweets-163810394.html


Professional Imbecile George Zimmerman Retweets Graphic Photo of Trayvon Martin's Dead Body

Vox je sajt na kome su lupetanja i netačnosti prečesta da bismo ih shvatali preozbiljno, ali ponekad se ozbiljno potrude, pa je ovaj tekst, recimo, vrlo jusful:

America's gun problem, explained

The Decline of 'Big Soda'

Quote
The drop in soda consumption represents the single largest change in the American diet in the last decade.

   

O, jebem te, Ameriko...

  Reports: Officer's shooting of boy with pellet gun justified

Quote
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A white Cleveland police officer was justified in fatally shooting a black 12-year-old boy holding a pellet gun moments after pulling up beside him, according to two outside reviews conducted at the request of the prosecutor investigating the death. A retired FBI agent and a Denver prosecutor both found the rookie patrolman who shot Tamir Rice exercised a reasonable use of force because he had reason to perceive the boy — described in a 911 call as man waving and pointing a gun — as a serious threat.
The reports were released Saturday night by the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office, which asked for the outside reviews as it presents evidence to a grand jury that will determine whether Timothy Loehmann will be charged in Tamir's death last November.
"We are not reaching any conclusions from these reports," Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty said in a statement. "The gathering of evidence continues, and the grand jury will evaluate it all."
He said the reports, which included a technical reconstruction by the Ohio State Highway Patrol, were released in the interest of being "as public and transparent as possible."
Subodh Chandra, a lawyer for the Rice family, said the release of the reports shows the prosecutor is avoiding accountability, which is what the family seeks.
"It is now obvious that the prosecutor's office has been on a 12-month quest to avoid providing that accountability," he said. He added that the prosecutor's office didn't provide his office or the Rice family with the details from the reports. He also questioned the timing of the release, at 8 p.m. Saturday on the Columbus Day holiday weekend.
"To get so-called experts to assist in the whitewash — when the world has the video of what happened — is all the more alarming," Chandra said. "Who will speak for Tamir before the grand jury? Not the prosecutor, apparently."
Both experts were provided with surveillance video of the shooting that showed Loehmann firing at Tamir within two seconds after the police cruiser driven by his partner pulled up next to the boy.  Police say the officers were responding to a call about a man with a gun, but were not told the caller said the gun could be a fake and the man an adolescent.
The report prepared by retired FBI agent Kimberly A. Crawford concluded that Loehmann's use of force did not violate Tamir's constitutional rights, saying the only facts relevant to such a determination are those the patrolman had at the time he fired his weapon.
Loehmann, she wrote, "had no information to suggest the weapon was anything but a real handgun, and the speed with which the confrontation progressed would not give the officer time to focus on the weapon."
"It is my conclusion that Officer Loehmann's use of deadly force falls within the realm of reasonableness under the dictates of the Fourth Amendment," Crawford wrote, though she noted she was not issuing an opinion as to whether Loehmann violated Ohio law or department policy.
Lamar Sims, the chief deputy district attorney in Denver, also concluded that Loehmann's actions were reasonable based on statements from witnesses and a reconstruction of what happened that day.
Sims said the officers had no idea if the pellet gun was a real gun when they arrived, and that Loehmann was in a position of great peril because he was within feet of Tamir as the boy approached the cruiser and reached toward his waistband.
"The officers did not create the violent situation," Sims wrote in his review. "They were responding to a situation fraught with the potential for violence to citizens."
Another officer who recovered the pellet gun after Tamir was shot told investigators he first thought the gun was a semiautomatic pistol and was surprised when he realized it wasn't real, Sims noted.
Chandra, the Rice family lawyer, says the experts "dodge the simple fact that the officers rushed Tamir and shot him immediately without assessing the situation in the least. Reasonable jurors could find that conduct unreasonable. But they will never get the chance because the prosecutor is working diligently to ensure that there is no indictment and no accountability."
The pellet gun Tamir was holding shoots non-lethal plastic projectiles but its orange markings had been removed.
The killing of Tamir has become part of a national outcry about minorities, especially black boys and men, dying during encounters with police. His death was not the first to roil Cleveland, either: Earlier this year, a white officer prosecuted by McGinty was acquitted in the 2012 deaths of two unarmed black motorists killed in a 137-shot barrage of police gunfire after a high-speed pursuit.
Cleveland and the U.S. Department of Justice are moving forward on a reform-minded consent decree after a DOJ investigation found Cleveland police had engaged in a practice of using excessive force and violating people's rights. That agreement was in the works before Tamir was killed.

PUCNJAVA NA ZOMBIKONU!

OCT 18 2015

1 Dead, 4 Hurt in Shooting at Florida 'ZombiCon'

by PHIL HELSEL and GEMMA DICASIMIRRO
SHARE

One person died and four others were hurt after shooting broke out at a zombie-themed event in Florida Saturday, authorities said.

The shooting happened at about 11:44 p.m. in downtown Fort Myers at a "ZombiCon" event, Fort Myers police said.

"I heard four gun shots and saw the crowd 10 feet in front of me part, and everyone turn and start running," Desere Lee, a student at Florida Gulf State University who was at the event, told NBC News.

Five people in all were shot, police said, and a male died at the scene, police said. The four surviving victims were described as having non life threatening injuries. A suspect is still at large, they said.

The organizers of the event, billed as "the largest gathering of zombies and those who love them in the state of Florida" said they were "deeply saddened" by the violence.

ZombiCon is a charity event where participants dress up as zombies. It wasn't clear if the shooting involved participants of the event, but organizers said it occurred "within the footprint" of ZombiCon.

"We take the safety of our patrons very seriously and take precautions in hiring security and police officers for our annual event," the organizers, Pushing DaiZies, Inc., said in a statement posted to Facebook. "Our prayers go out to the family members and individuals involved in the incident."

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/1-dead-4-hurt-shooting-florida-zombicon-n446656

'Clock kid' Ahmed Mohamed and his family will move to Qatar

Quote
Less than 24 hours after Ahmed Mohamed met President Obama, his family decided it's time to leave America for good.
The 14-year-old Texas boy who was arrested for bringing to school a homemade clock that authorities said resembled a bomb will soon be living in Qatar.
"After careful consideration of all the generous offers received, we would like to announce that we have accepted a kind offer from Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF) for Ahmed to join the prestigious QF Young Innovators Program, which reflects the organization's on-going dedication to empowering young people and fostering a culture of innovation and creativity," the family said in a news release Tuesday.
Anthony Bond, a close family friend and the founder of the Irving, Texas, chapter of the NAACP said the family made the decision to leave the U.S. within the past 24 hours. They have spent those hours in Washington, where Ahmed has been on a mini-press tour in anticipation of his visit to the White House.



President Obama personally invited the teen after his arrest last month, reaching out to him via Twitter. The president was one of many who spoke out about the implications of a 14-year-old Muslim boy accused of building a bomb, put in handcuffs and pulled out a school. Once it was discovered that the "bomb" was only a digital clock the young innovator built himself, the Irving Police said they would not be charging Ahmed with any crime.
But the spark had already been lit; Ahmed's story went viral, with the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed bringing out legions of supporters including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Tweets, think pieces and daytime TV segments were dedicated to dissecting how Ahmed's situation typified racism and Islamaphobia in America.
After withdrawing from school in Texas, the boy's family embraced the opportunities that came from his brush with the law. He visited the Google Science Fair, met with Sudan's President Omar al Bashir, posed with the queen of Jordan at a United Nations Summit, appeared on the "Doctor Oz" show and last night, made it to the White House.




He was among 300 visitors to "Astronomy Night," a celebration of science and learning. Bill Nye the Science Guy was there, along with a number of standout students who have been recognized for scientific achievements throughout the country. Though some of those students received shoutouts during President Obama's comments, there was no mention of Ahmed in the audience. That didn't stop reporters from shouting to him from behind the rope lines: "Ahmed! How are you feeling?"
Perhaps that's the question that has been left out of the viral hubbub: What has this been like for Ahmed? To go from a run-of-the-mill 14-year-old to an international symbol for stereotyping in America?



In a phone interview on Tuesday, Ahmed's 19-year-old sister Eyman said he's under a pressure they never imagined. It can be a good pressure: "It's like now he's motivated to work harder than every before," she said. "Because people are going to be waiting to see what happened to that 14 year old kid."


And a bad one: "It's been really hard. Everything happens for a reason, but there's so much stuff being said that isn't true. . . "
Eyman was referring to a number of conspiracy theories that appeared on the Internet about his arrest. Most attest that the incident was a pre-planned plot to get attention. Some of that skepticism stems from claims against Ahmed's father, Mohamed Elhassan, who has run for president of Sudan and was present during a high-profile Koran burning in Florida. Bond, the family friend, said the conspiracies are why Ahmed doesn't want to go to school in America.
"Everybody's vilifying him, and he's not a villain. He's a 14 year old boy," Bond said. "The whole world was concerned about this, and it's impossible that anyone could have expected this international reaction."
Bond said the family is planning to move next week so Ahmed can begin school at the Qatar Foundation, where he will receive a full scholarship. His parents and two sisters will relocate too. The news release announcing the move may be the last we hear from the family for a while.



It included one statement from Ahmed:
"I loved the city of Doha because it's so modern. I saw so many amazing schools there, many of them campuses of famous American universities. The teachers were great. I think I will learn a lot and have fun too."
Ahmed's sister Eyman said the Middle East won't feel too different from the U.S., except that the family will be surrounded by Muslims like themselves.
"Qatar is in the Arab world, but it also feels like Texas. It's like Texas in Qatar."

Mislim da originalnu vest nisam kačio baš jer sam čekao da vidim kakvi će rezultati eksperimenta biti. Naime, u Aprilu ove godine je Dan Price, CEO firme Gravity Payments rešio da svim zaposlenima zagarantuje minimalnu platu od 70000 dolara godišnje, dakle, znatno iznad nekog percipiranog minimuma za posao koji rade, jer mu je rezon bio da su dobro stimulisani radnici i dobri radnici. Ovo je izazvalo i mnogo negativnih reakcija, što od nekih partnera i akcionara firme, a što i od strane nekih zaposlenih koji su uzeli svoje kompenzacije i otišli gunđajući o socijalizmu. Pre nekoliko dana internetom su počele da se šire priče da je firma sada u problemu, da gubi mušterije i da joj opada posao, te da je to dokaz da je eksperiment sa stimulacijom zaposlenih bio neuspešan, međutim, ovaj tekst veli da je, naprotiv, sve prilično ružičasto:


After Company Raises Minimum Salary To $70,000, Revenue And Profits Double

QuoteIn April, Dan Price, CEO of the credit card payment processor Gravity Payments, announced that he will eventually raise minimum pay for all employees to at least $70,000 a year.
The move sparked not just a firestorm of media attention, but also a lawsuit from Price's brother and co-founder Lucas, claiming that the pay raise violated his rights as a minority shareholder.
But six months later, the financial results are starting to come in: Price told Inc. Magazine that revenue is now growing at double the rate before the raises began and profits have also doubled since then.
On top of that, while it lost a few customers in the kerfuffle, the company's customer retention rate rose from 91 to 95 percent, and only two employees quit. Two weeks after he made the initial announcement, the company was flooded with 4,500 resumes and new customer inquiries jumped from 30 a month to 2,000 a month.
The changes may not come as a surprise to Price. After an entry-level employee got angry with him in 2011 over low pay, he decided to give out 20 percent annual raises to his 120-person staff. While the raises came with a cost, profit still rose as much as the year before thanks in part to a 30-40 percent productivity increase. He decided to hand out the same raises the next year, to the same result. Before April's announcement, the company reached $150 million in revenue, $2.2 million in profit, and had a 15 percent annual growth rate.
Now the company is in the process of instituting the larger pay increases, which immediately raised the lowest salaries to $50,000 a year and implemented $10,000 raises at the bottom each year for the next two years. Those who already earn between $50,000 and $70,000 will also get $5,000 raises.
The whole plan will cost $1.8 million. To help cover the expense, Price cut his own pay from $1.1 million to $70,000. He's also sold all of his stocks, drained his retirement accounts, and mortgaged two properties to pour $3 million into the company. He's vowed not to fire employees, raise prices, or cut executive pay further to make it all work.
"Most people live paycheck to paycheck," he told Inc. "So how come I need 10 years of living expenses set aside and you don't? That doesn't make any sense. Having to depend on modest pay is not a bad thing. It will help me stay focused."
Price's big bet that significantly higher salaries will pay off is grounded in some support from economists. Two economists surveyed years of research and found that when major American companies raised pay, it increased productivity and performance, enhanced customer service, reduced turnover, and attracted better job candidates, all of which can lower costs and increase sales. One of the studies they examined found that more than half the cost of higher wages can be offset through such improvements, while other research has found that a higher minimum wage can benefit companies through improved efficiency, reduced turnover, and improved recruitment.
Yet most employers are not increasing pay. While American workers have increased their productivity over the last four decades, they haven't gotten commensurate raises for doing so.