Property crime in the Netherlands has been falling for years. There are fewer bicycle and car thefts, fewer burglaries, and fewer incidences of pickpocketing. The downward trend has been particularly marked since 2002.
"Frequent offenders, often junkies, sometimes commit thirty offences a day. If they go to prison for two years, the number of offences in the area in which they work can drop considerably." The number of frequently offending drug addicts has also fallen since 1995. Addicts have a low life expectancy, and there are now relatively few new addicts.
The creative 'high' of 1960s Amsterdam - my birthplace - was certainly exciting! After my high school graduation, while visiting my relatives for the summer, I attended some of these Provo 'happenings' organised by Robert Grootveld at the statue, 't Lievertje, in Spui square. (Oh, to experience those days again!) Ironically, the statue was a gift to the city of Amsterdam by a major tobacco company.
I know it's early, and that many liberals are still pinching their nipples, but for fuck sake, is this how it's gonna be every time Obama opens his mouth?
OBAMA: "I have confirmation that our brave combat pilots took out 90 suspected terrorists in Herat, and while a large number of the dead are unfortunately women and children, this necessary strike helps to ensure that Afghanistan is not a launching pad for attacks against North America."
LIBERALS: "Oh God! That voice! That posture! Such command! Such intelligence! I . . . I think I'm gonna come . . ."
Dennis Ross can no longer be judged to have even the minimum level of policy objectivity and neutrality that's required for this job. He served as an ambassadorial-level special coordinator for Arab-Israeli negotiations for both presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton. But since then, he has been appointed Chairman of the Board of an outfit called the Jewish People Policy Planning Instite, which has been-- as its masthead there proudly proclaims-- "Established by the Jewish Agency for Israel, Ltd." JPPPI is also headquartered in Israel.
For just some of the problems Ross's dual affiliations might cause, you can see on the current front page of its website a photo of "The Ambassador Dennis Ross presenting JPPPI's annual assessment to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert." Ross is doing this, obviously, in his capacity as Board Chair of this Israel-based body that was established by the Jewish Agency, a body that has played a key role in the leadership of the Zionist movement since well before 1948, and which enjoys very special relations with the State of Israel o this day.
For example, the Jewish Agency has been a major partner for successive Israeli governments in the building of Israel's completely illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. (As referred to quite casually in, for example, this 2005 report in the Financial Times.)
So if Dennis presents the JPPPI report to the Israeli Prime Minister today, and tomorrow he goes back to deliver a demarche from the US president on, say, Israeli settlement building-- how would that work?
More to the point, how can any of the rest of us, US citizens, have any confidence whatsoever that the "advice" Dennis Ross will be giving Secretary Clinton will be the kind of calm, objective, US-centric advice on Middle Eastern issues-- including Iran, Iraq, and quite possibly also Palestine-- that she and the rest of the administration all so desperately need?
I'm sitting in a pew near the back of St. Anne's Church in Fall River, a soaring structure of Vermont blue marble that could rival a lesser European cathedral. It was built in the late 1800s, when the southeastern Massachusetts mill city's French Canadian community was big enough to warrant a church able to seat 2,000. On this blustery afternoon, the crowd is more like a tenth of that. The priest is talking, but the lousy PA system makes it hard to hear what he's saying. So I'm doing what I've done before in this situation: trying to keep my young daughters occupied by whispering for them to study their surroundings -- the exquisitely carved red-oak woodwork near the high ceiling, the enormous pipe organ in the rear balcony, the colorful stained-glass windows on every wall. With its combination of architectural grandeur and crumbling-plaster fatigue, the place is like Venice in the unforgiving light of morning, rather than the soft-lit romanticism of night. It's honest and beautiful.What's fueling this? Neil Swidely goes on to explain,
Then I hear an odd chirping. My eyes follow my ears to a pew to my left and behind me, where a guy with slicked black hair and dark glasses is sitting. He's chewing gum and wearing one of those Bluetooth cellphone attachments in his ear.
Hey, man, I'm bored, too. But, c'mon, take that infernal thing out of your ear. Say a prayer. Collect your thoughts. Or just do what my 4-year-old is doing and stare at the ceiling.
Did I mention it was Christmas Day Mass?
Not long ago, I was sitting in the "quiet study" section of my local public library when a middle-aged woman wearing an annoyed expression plopped down in the green upholstered chair next to my table, her teenage daughter in tow. She flipped open her cellphone and dialed her daughter's therapist. After giving the therapist's secretary her full name and slowly spelling her daughter's -- loud enough for every soul in that wing of the library to hear -- she said, "We have an appointment for next week, but I want to know if he has any availability before that. She is really not doing well."
I looked up from my laptop, incredulous that a mother could be so blase about violating her daughter's privacy, not to mention library decorum -- and convinced that the therapist and the daughter must have no time to discuss anything besides mother issues.
Now, I know what you're going to say. There have always been boors blabbing in places where they should be quiet, blithely ignoring the shushes from librarians or the stares from fellow elevator passengers while behaving as though they're the only ones whose problems matter. Bad manners are bad manners, irrespective of technology, right?
Yes, only technology has vastly expanded this bad behavior, eroding much of society's stigma against it, and making it everybody's problem. But here's the real point: It is dulling our very capacity to ever be alone, or alone in our thoughts.
"We've gone from an American ethic that championed the lone guy on a horseback to an ethic of managing multiple data streams," says Dalton Conley, a sociology professor at New York University and author of the new book Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety. "It's very hard for people to unplug and be alone -- and be with the one data stream of their mind."H/T to The Lead for alerting me to the Globe essay.
What's fueling this? Conley says it's anxiety borne out of a deep-seated fear that we're being left out of something, somewhere, and that we may lose out on advancement in our work, social, or family lives if we truly check out. "The anxiety of being alone drives this behavior to constantly respond and Twitter and text, but the very act of doing it creates the anxiety."
This is particularly true among young people, mainly because they don't know life when it wasn't like this.
Pepper spray and Taser! This is lazy violent police work, if someone honestly thinks deputies are doing everything right when a naked man dies during arrest then you have internalised the police state and are a submissive herd animal sleepwalking into slavery.Here's an UPDATE on the Lakewood death from a local watchdog group.
The Taser has simply added another deadly refinement to the fun and games. Whereas in the old days the San Jose police probably would have been content with just clubbing a prisoner with batons, now they can whip out a handy-dandy ray-gun and shoot him full of electricity as well. Sure, sometimes the suckers die -- but because the ray-gun is not, ostensibly, a lethal weapon, the deaths can always be written off as an unintended consequence caused by an unknown pre-existing condition or something.
Of course, you can sometimes get a "pre-existing condition" from, say, being clubbed into bloody goo by batons -- or, as in a recent case of my personal knowledge, being handcuffed from behind and having your face slammed repeatedly into a concrete floor by a five or six deputies for the heinous crime of "sass." But it's best not to delve too deeply into these matters. After all, the Taserers and clubbers are only trying to keep us safe from terrorists -- sorry, from criminals. And as our entire bipartisan political class has taught us -- and keeps teaching us every day -- brutality, torture and murder should never be prosecuted if they are committed by government officials in the name of "security."
"My four days of imprisonment are nothing compared to the months and years of siege on Gaza, which is nothing else than forced imprisonment. The Gaza Strip is a different form of concentration camp."
"[M]y interrogators stole all my old email addresses and blogs, my domain name..."
Subject: Mayoral Election ConcernsOwen tells me that Shay Totten responded in a disinterested email that he would not pursue Owen's concerns in a 7D story; Ken Picard has at yet not replied.
Ken and Shay,
I'm writing to you because as an election official in Ward 6 I have a concern about the way this election will be handled. Last time we had an IRV election, I was not a Ward Clerk but I believe the issue was probably the same then and for some reason no one brought it up or maybe they did...I don't know.
Anyway, my intention here with this email is just to let you know what my concern is and then if you feel it warrants further investigation or reporting, then so be it.
I will try to explain, but this is not easy to do non-verbally so hopefully you will get the point I'm trying to make:
At the polls and before we open them for voting, we always check each tabulator machine to make sure there are no ballots in the ballot box..that is for the actual ballot box that holds the paper ballots and also the electronic ballot box being the "memory card" that is sealed into the tabulator machine.
To check the memory card to make sure there are no electronic votes on the card we do an opening print out which will have all the races and all the candidates being at zero showing there are no votes cast. We then as election officials sign off on this print out from the machine if all races are pre-set at zero votes. This is an important print out..all the elected officials must sign off on it. We do this for every election and for every tabulator machine that is used.
My concern is, and I do not feel comfortable as an election official running the election this way, is that on the IRV machine I have been informed that we will not be able to do a print out or even an end of night print out from the machine at the polls. So essentially a huge step in the process of election integrity has been removed and centralized at City Hall. The way it is now, I'm supposed to turn on the machine and have people vote without ever being able to get a print out letting me know that the races are pre-set to zero votes on the memory card.
City Hall does a check on each memory card before they are sealed just like every election before they are delivered to each polling location, the difference this time is we are not able to do that print out at each polling location and check the "electrnoc ballot box" to make sure the races are pre-set at zero. There is nothing for us to sign off on and we are supposed to blindly trust the memeory card that City Hall has provided us. I do not feel this is responsible and it does not sit well with me. I'm going to have a bad taste in my mouth for the whole election day. I just can't ignore the fact that a whole step has been removed because the machines do not have the technology to do a print out for IRV programming.
If either of you feel like dicussing this or feel that it warrents any attention please let me know. I think the voters deserve to know and steps should be taken to make sure the next time we have an IRV election that print outs will be possible. At this point in time and esp. with all the issues Burlington has had with elections, we should not be removing steps in the process of election integrity.
I absolutely support IRV, but I do not support the way the city is running the IRV election. The technology to do print outs is somehting that should have been checked into before we ever made a transition to IRV or if that technology is available then why don't we have it?.
Owen Mulligan
Ward 6 Clerk
The international World Press Photo jury has selected a photo by US photographer Anthony Suau as photo of the year 2008. It shows an armed police officer searching a deserted home in the state of Ohio.
Pistol drawn, the officer was searching the house to make sure the residents had moved out, after they had been evicted having failed to keep up with their mortgage payments.
The black and white photograph was part of TIME magazine's Tough Times in Cleveland report on the effects of the credit crunch.
Dutchman Roger Cremers clinched the first prize in the Art and Entertainment category. His winning entry in colour features two visitors to the Auschwitz Nazi death camp. Dressed in the same track suits, the two men are seen from the back taking photographs of a monument on the site.
Blowing your nose to alleviate stuffiness may be second nature, but some people argue it does no good, reversing the flow of mucus into the sinuses and slowing the drainage.
Counterintuitive, perhaps, but research shows it to be true.
"If the words 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on." - Terence McKennaFor info closer to home: Vermont Alliance for Intelligent Drug Laws
In 1916, the U.S. Government Dept. of Agriculture predicted that by the 1940s all paper would come from hemp and that no more trees need to be cut down.
"Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica." - Abraham Lincoln (from a letter written by Lincoln during his presidency to the head of the Hohner Harmonica Company in Germany)
For thousands of years, 90% of all ships' sails and rope were made from hemp. The word 'canvas' is Dutch for cannabis.
Hemp fuel is non-toxic, biodegradable and does not contribute to sulfur dioxide air poisoning.... more facts.
Some people say I dress too gay!
He previously worked on aid projects with Canon Andrew White, special envoy to the Middle East for the Archbishop of Canterbury.Lenin's Tomb has more information and news update links. Helena Cobban knows Mr Rizk and has written
Eyewitnesses said he was bundled into a white van with no licence plates, which then sped off.
The German embassy has been informed of his detention and is trying to locate him.
I don't know how much aid the German government gives the Egyptian government. But I imagine it's a lot. Egypt is the top recipient of US aid after Israel, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Why should the governments of any democracies give aid to a government that treats nonviolent social activists like Philip or thousands of others also detained in Egypt without any hint of due process as harshly as this?There is a Facebook group in support of Mr Rizk, which I've joined.
Live music is the heart and soul of Burlington, and the primary facet to our website. It is our hobby, mission, and civic responsibility to maintain that.
Richard Seymour, who oversees Lenin's Tomb, has delivered the best indictment of liberal warmongering to date, and just in time, too, as it appears we're about to enter another period of humanitarian barbarism led by a Democratic president.
