Related: the WSJ has a pretty reasonable accounting of this relatively new trend in an article, Rise of the Warrior Cop. It isn't clear to me that we need all these SWAT units, nor that we need to have cops decked out in military gear to serve warrants, etc. It's a setup for a tragedy, and when the tragedy occurs the police and public officials will explain that it wasn't their fault, it was ours. Really.
#1
With the exception of Presidentially authorized "drone zapping", our "police" are practicing tactics and Rules of Engagement against US Citizens which would not, or were not authorized potential enemy combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq.
They can search anyone and go anywhere and claim to be doing "their job".
How many hundreds of these things happen each year? And with the nasty trend of people calling in anonymous claims to 911 to get a SWAT team to someone's house is going to lead to a tragedy.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
07/21/2013 5:53 Comments ||
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#3
anonymous claims to 911 to get a SWAT team to someone's house is going to lead to a tragedy.
It's already happened. More than once. Sometimes the innocent homeowner/renter gets killed and sometimes the cop gets killed and the homeowner goes to prison for life or gets sentenced to death.
#4
I feel bad for her, Wiggins conceded, finally. But at the same time, I had to reasonably believe the bad guy was in her house based on what they were doing.
Yup... She was washing the dishes. That's a sure sign that you are hiding a dangerous sex offender in your apartment.... (/SARC)
Goldsberry wasn't arrested or shot despite pointing a gun at a cop, so Wiggins said, She sure shouldn't be going to the press.
That sounds like a threat to me. And the 'reporter' seems to think that Mr. Rambo Wiggins here would be perfectly justified to kill and/or arrest her.
#6
The failed ATF and LE tactics at WACO appear to have been forgotten. Probably only a matter of time until some well trained homeowner empties an M-14 mag loaded with 20 rnds of 7.62 AP into an assault stack with a bad address. Just my humble opinion.
#7
When the perp they were looking for was a sex criminal (something that doesn't usually get the death sentence) what the hell were the police using guns for?
#8
I sometimes wonder if it'll be much longer before people fed up with this crap start SWATing cops homes. It sure seems like they never bother to check or verify addresses and as hyper-trigger happy as they are, I'm sure they'd manage a grand shootout with each other.
Egypt's foreign ministry expressed on Saturday "deep concern" that the Ethiopian government has not yet responded to an Egyptian invitation to discuss the dispute over Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam project.
"Egypt is deeply worried that Ethiopia has not yet reacted to the invitation by Egypt's water and irrigation minister for a meeting in Cairo on the consequences of the dam," foreign ministry spokesman Badr Abd El-Aty said.
The statement was given just days after Egypt's interim cabinet was formed, emphasising the new government's commitment to solving Egypt's water crisis.
They might want to pay attention to the food crisis, it's going to hit sooner...
In June, Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia agreed to start negotiations on recommendations made by an international technical committee on the Renaissance Dam project, after Egypt's former foreign minister Mohamed Kamel Amr visited Ethiopia and Sudan to discuss the issue.
Ethiopia's planned $4.2 billion hydro-electric dam on the Blue Nile has been a source of concern for the Egyptian government, which fears that the project, if completed, could negatively impact the volume of Nile water reaching Egypt. Sudan, another downstream country, could also be affected by the dam.
In the statement, Abd El-Aty stressed that Egypt's "water security is not to be haggled with," condemning Ethiopia's continued construction on the dam while "ignoring the technical committee's recommendations."
Abd El-Aty said that "no more time should be wasted in proceeding with the technical studies" on the dam. These studies are necessary to know the degree of the dam's potential impact on water flow to Egypt, according to the statement.
The ministry's spokesman also said that he hopes the parties reach a consensus that guarantees the interests of all.
For decades, Egypt held veto rights over all upstream projects, following powers granted by a 1929 colonial-era treaty with Britain. Egypt's subsequent 1959 deal with Sudan divided the Nile's waters between the two countries, with Egypt taking 55.5 billion cubic metres of a total 74 billion allocated yearly.
According to Egypt's National Planning Institute, Egypt will require an additional 21 billion cubic metres of water per year by 2050, on top of its current annual allotment, to meet the needs of a projected population of 150 million.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/21/2013 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[3 views]
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#1
let's see: by 2050, Egypt will need ....ummm.... (55.5 + 21 =) 76.5 billion cubic meters of.....74 billion allocated. That's gonna work fine. Can anyone do math over there?
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/21/2013 9:05 Comments ||
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#2
Allan will contribute another 2.5 bcm in rainfall. And everyone else stops having allotments.
#4
Of course the answer is to bring in Israeli experts to help design improvements and train the farmers in both countries to use them, but that'll never happen.
#10
Stevie Wonder will move the FLA leg of his tour to Cairo - where Stand Your Ground doesn't apply
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/21/2013 12:12 Comments ||
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#11
Notice how they don't see Ethiopia having the right to one ounce of the Blue Nile's water even though the Blue Nile's headwaters are in Ethiopia.
Maybe I am just evil but I think Ethiopia should dam the whole Blue Nile cutting off it's water's from the rest of the Nile until their dam fills. If the Egyptians are stupid enough to blow that dam the downstream surge wave might well collaspe the Aswan. It would also be a lesson in humility to both Egypt and Sudan.
#12
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "calculate energy in Aswan Dam
";
#
#assumptions: force of gravity at sea level.
# 132 cubic km of water behind the dam viewed as
# a flat rectanglular solid 111 meters above the dam base
# altitude of dam base is 85 meters above sea level.
#
$g = 9.0665;
$total_mass = 132000000000.0;
$total_drop = 111.0;
$drop_increments = 11100.0;
$drop_count_max = 11100;
$dam_base_altitude = 85.0;
$drop_mass = $total_mass / $drop_increments;
$drop_height_increment = $total_drop / $drop_increments;
$height = 0.0;
$total_energy = 0.0;
for ($drop_count = 0; ($drop_count < $drop_count_max); $drop_count++) {
$height = $height + $drop_height_increment;
$slice_height = $height + $dam_base_altitude;
$drop_energy = $slice_height * $drop_mass * $g;
$total_energy = $total_energy + $drop_energy;
}
print "meters of dam height ",$height,
" Joules of potential energy at the sea: slice ", $drop_energy,
" total ", $total_energy, "
";
#13
backslash n's were actualized by Rantburg software in above (they are new lines) code. Bring last quote's in both print statements to the line before and insert a backslash and "n" before the quote.
#14
calculate energy in Aswan Dam
At a dam height of meters 111.00000000002 the Joules of potential energy at sea level (med) are : 168,153,292,890,004
#16
simple point is that if they ever lost the Aswan Egypt would have a 15.9 kiloton blast rolling down the Nile to the either the delta or cutting a new river bed to the Red Sea (where the Nile currently makes a hard turn to the West).
#18
Using the emptying of the MegaLake that left the Great Salt Lake as an example model one might well assume the front wash would reach Cairo in 8 to 10 hours and would last for another 15 hours. So spread the destruction across that timeline.
#19
If Egypt was pro-active they would make the equivalent of a "run-away-truck-lane" at Qena. One could envision a dike that would handle normal ebbs and flows but could be overridden by a large flow with a channel behind the dike heading toward the Red Sea.
#20
Regarding all of the above information, could we say?
Posted by: Au Auric ||
07/21/2013 17:41 Comments ||
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#21
Huh, I'm actually hoping this doesn't happen. All the history and species lost. Then again we can clone the damn species back into life. And we have the internet and photo's, so I suppose everything is backlogged.
Surfs up.
Posted by: Charles ||
07/21/2013 20:44 Comments ||
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[AnNahar] A week of renewed fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ...formerly the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, and who knows what else, not to be confused with the Brazzaville Congo aka Republic of Congo, which is much smaller and much more (for Africa) stable. DRC gave the world Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Mobutu, followed by years of tedious civil war. Its principle industry seems to be the production of corpses. With a population of about 74 million it has lots of raw material... 's troubled east has driven more than 4,000 people to seek refuge in the thriving provincial capital Goma, aid workers said Saturday.
The new offensive by the M23 rebel group in mineral-rich but unstable North Kivu province has caused 4,200 people to flee their homes and take shelter in schools and churches in Goma, the provincial seat and largest city in the area, said the United Nations ...an idea whose time has gone... , citing figures from humanitarian group Premiere Urgence.
Fighting between the Congolese military and the M23, a group launched by Tutsi ex-soldiers who mutinied from the army in April last year, broke out again on July 14 after months of relative calm.
The U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said it had also received reports of hundreds of refugees flooding over the border into neighboring Rwanda, though an exact figure could not be established.
OCHA says there were 967,000 displaced people in North Kivu province at the end of June, 90 percent of whom had fled their homes because of the fighting or fears that it would spread to their areas.
Humanitarian organizations have voiced concern that those forced from their homes, many of whom are farmers, will not be able to return in time to sow their fields for the next planting season in mid-August -- raising the risk the conflict could also turn into a food crisis.
The latest hostilities have been focussed some 15 kilometres (10 miles) north of Goma.
The M23 occupied Goma for 10 days in November before withdrawing from the city under international pressure. The Congolese government and the U.N. have accused Rwanda and Uganda of backing the rebel group, a charge both countries deny.
[Jpost] Merkel's Bundestag front man says guidelines are "pure ideology and symbolic politics," and will not help peace.
Germany distances itself from the "controversial European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... guidelines" banning cooperation with Israeli entities beyond the Green Line, a foreign policy front man in the Bundestag announced on Friday.
In a statement issued by MP Philipp Missfedler, the Bundestag front man for German chancellor Angela Merkel ...current chancellor of Germany. She was educated in East Germany when is was still run by commies, but in 1989 got involved with the growing democracy movement when the Berlin Wall fell. Merkel is sometimes referred to by Germans as Mom... 's Christian Democratic Union party and its coalition partner the Bavarian Christian Social Union, he stated the guidelines are "pure ideology and symbolic politics" and will not contribute to finding a solution to the Israeli-Paleostinian conflict.
Missfelder stated it is encouraging that the Federal Government has moved away from the new EU directives, which declared that from January 1 2014, Israeli projects in the West Bank, the Gazoo Strip, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights will no longer be given European Union financial backing.
He added that the European regulations are not "objective requirements" because over the last seven years of the approximately 800 million Euros of financial aid from Brussels to Israel, only 0.5% was funneled into projects covering the disputed territories.
"Israel is the recognized administrative power in the territories without which approved development projects like solar energy or sewage works could not be installed," Missfelder stated.
He continued that an implementation of the new EU guidelines could mean an "end of research cooperation with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem because some of their academics have an address in East Jerusalem."
It is unclear if the German position will reverse the EU action and lead to backtracking among other countries within the 28 member EU body.
Missfelder said the EU guidelines have a similar quality to the recent legislative initiative of the Green Party in the Bundestag to label products from the West Bank, Gazoo Strip and East Jerusalem.
The Green Party legislative initiative also fails to contribute to a"constructive solution of the conflict in the Paleostinian territories," said Missfelder.
He added that "instead of issuing statements hostile to Israel, the Green Party faction should concentrate on a solution to the essential questions of the Middle East conflict: Israel's right to exist, an end to terrorism and fundamentalist violence, as well as the creation of a foundation for a two state solution, with final borders for both states."
Missfelder's disavowal of the product labeling measure appears to contradict Germany's Ambassador to Israel, Andreas Michaelis, who defended in a June Jerusalem Post opinion article labeling Israeli products made in the West Bank.
"EU consumer protection law sets very detailed requirements for retail labeling.They exist to provide a level playing field for trade across Europe and to inform consumers on the origin of products," wrote Michaelis.
Jewish organizations such as the Wiesenthal Center and the prominent German-Jewish journalist Henryk M.Broder declared the product labeling measure to be a de-facto boycott of Israeli merchandise, which recalls the Hitler movement's boycott of Jewish businesses.
Michaelis, however, wrote, "Neither are we in the business of calling for boycotts."
The German Greens have come under fire because of their aggressive legislative push to label Israeli products. The Neo-Nazi NPD party issued a similar demarcation measure to the Green Party in a East German state legislature last year. The Green party deputy Kerstin Müller played a critical role in the initiative targeting Israeli settlement products. She is slated to take over the reins of the German Green Party's Heinrich Böll foundation office in Tel Aviv later this year.
"Obviously, a person who played a leading role in this initiative is uniquely unsuitable to represent the Böll Foundation in Israel, but perhaps they have an opening available in Ramallah," Efraim Zuroff , the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem office, told the Jerusalem Post last month.
Müller has faced intense criticism over the last three years from Germany's Jewish community. The Central Council of Jews in Germany said in 2010 Müller displays an "intolerably paternalistic tone" toward Israel and toward Jews in Germany. That year, she supported an anti-Israel parliamentary resolution and attacked the council in a letter because its leadership criticized the resolution. The resolution rebuked Israel for its interception of the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara, which tried to break Israel's legal blockade of the Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason,-controlled Gazoo Strip.
The head of the Berlin Jewish community, Dr. Gideon Joffe, said in June that Müller's conduct is anti-Semitic because she singled out only the Jewish state for product labeling.
"Kerstin Müller is an experienced foreign policy politician and with her longtime involvement in German-Israeli relations and the Middle East grinding of the peace processor make her an ideal representative for the foundation in Tel Aviv," Ralf Fücks, the head of the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, wrote the Post in an email response.
Prof. Gerald Steinberg, from the Jerusalem-based watchdog group NGO Monitor, told the Post at the time that"The Heinrich Böll Foundation irresponsibly channels German taxpayer funds to some causes and organizations that promote political warfare against Israel.".
He cited the Greens support for "such radical Paleostinian groups as the Applied Research Institute in Jerusalem."
Michael Schroeren, front man for the Green party faction in the Bundestag, rejected the criticisms leveled at Müller.
The U.S. Air Force is in the early phases of a massive, fleet-wide technological upgrade of its B-52 bombers, giving the war-tested platform new electronics and an increased ability to carry weapons, service officials said.
#6
The article says the airframes are good to 2040... So, Boeing built these planes with an 80 year life expectancy? Or just overbuilt them.
Try that today and the accountants will be all over you to cut down the costs at the expense of durability.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
07/21/2013 13:30 Comments ||
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#7
loved this comment on the article link: "Will the last B52 to leave Guam please turn off the Arc-Light." So according to O'Club rules ...Drink Up.
"I support the rule of law," Lennox Abrigo, D.C. chapter president of the National Action Network, an advocacy group founded by the Rev. Al Sharpton, told several hundred protesters outside the federal courthouse in Washington. "But I disagree with every cell of my body with that verdict." That usually the way folks in the 1940's felt just before someone got lynched. Ironic, isn't it?
According to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, eight in 10 blacks say they think Martin's killing was not justified, compared with 38 percent of whites. Most whites say they do not know enough about the shooting to determine whether it was justified. So it IS about race! Imagine that! I wonder if the whites polled are smarter, of afraid to say what they really think? I think the jury has decided. It's the American Way.
Many at the rallies called for action to repeal or change "stand your ground" laws. Thirty states have adopted a version of the law, which removes a once widespread requirement that a person claiming to have killed someone in self-defense must have had to try to flee the situation first. Even if the victim jumps you and wrestles you to the ground?
"I pray we'll stand our ground against unemployment, failed education, poverty and the other evils that have created an atmosphere of violence and hopelessness," said the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a prominent Chicago communist priest and agitatorgadflyfruitcake anti-gun crusader. You make me tired.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/21/2013 10:43 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[4 views]
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#1
Phlegm, flam, Pfleger gives upright primates a bad name.
#2
Pfleger is an erstwhile RC priest and Marxist attention whore. He seems to advocate unemployment and violence.
He does take to task Chicago's failed Edjumacational System and supports Charter Schools in some instances.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
07/21/2013 11:28 Comments ||
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#3
But... Trayvon got justice that night. It was tragic and all that - mostly due to what lead up to that point in his life (Parents, Girlfriend egging him on to more violence) - but it was justice.
#8
"I pray we'll stand our ground against unemployment, failed education, poverty and the other evils that have created an atmosphere of violence and hopelessness," (or free Obama cell phones, "entitlements", or any other failed spread the wealth of those that DO work promises .. nope he did NOT say that much) said the Rev. Michael Pfleger
#10
Stand Your Ground does not apply when you are literally "back against the wall" (or ground/pavement in this case). Morons. Martin made the decision to escalate the fight to a deadly force situation, Martin paid the price. Had Martin simply ignored Zimmerman, or told him "Im staying at my dad's, and im just on my way back form the store, headed to his place at 123 main street", waved his skittles at him and moved on, Martin would be alive today. Black or white.
You know they don't accept reality. If they didn't deny reality they'd have to face up to the fact that they are truly evil and what they do and want is just as evil as the Nazi's and Stalin.
Besides, the more they scream and rant, the greater the chance they bring back the Klan in a a way no longer under their control. I don't think they truly understand just how fast things could go sideways for everyone if they cause enough sparks.
#12
Had Martin bothered to call the POLICE, instead of his sorta-girlfriend, on his cell phone, if he were truly afraid of whoever seemed to be following him, he'd be alive today.
But it's totally understandable - who among us, when we think we're being followed by a creepy guy on a rainy night - wouldn't call a friend to discuss said creep instead of calling 911?
/do I really need to?
Posted by: Barbara ||
07/21/2013 18:56 Comments ||
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#13
I don't think they truly understand just how fast things could go sideways for everyone if they cause enough sparks.
Posted by Silentbrick- Schlumberger Vaporware Division
It's "understood" alright, it's a goal! Champ declares a national emergency, sets the constitution and the congress aside [formally], and we're off to the New Obama World Order
#14
I have to agree with Beoserker. They _want_ everyone at each other's throat, that way they can get more power for pretending to promise to restore order.
#15
Not guilty: The verdict in the manslaughter trial of Roderick Scott. After more than 19 hours of deliberations over two days, a jury acquitted the Greece man in the shooting death of Christopher Cervini, 17, last April.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
