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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton doubled down Wednesday morning on the notion that Democratic presidential rival Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) isn’t really a Democrat.

Donald Trump neglected to give a speech or press conference after losing the Wisconsin primary to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Tuesday night. Instead, his campaign sent out a statement accusing Cruz of coordinating with Republican party bosses “to steal the nomination.”

The prime minister of Iceland resigned Tuesday as the weekend exposé of off-shore tax matters found in the so-called “Panama Papers” claimed its first major casualty. 

The year-long investigation carried out by 370 journalists of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists was prompted by a document leak from the files of Mossack Fonseca. ICIJ is a project of the Center for Public Integrity. Their work with the leaked information has revealed secret dealings across the planet by politicians, plutocrats and assorted other palm-greasers. Panama-based Mossack Fonseca is heavily engaged in setting up shell companies in tax havens around the world, places where these one percenters can stash their wealth without fear of discovery. Or so they thought.

The exposé generated the greatest uproar in Iceland since the Bárðarbunga volcano erupted in 2014. In the case of Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, the protests arose over revelations in the papers that he and his wife owned a secretive British Virgin Islands-based investment company—Wintris Inc.—that held millions of dollars in claims against the nation’s failed banks.

The bank collapse eight years ago resulted in several executives being sentenced to prison terms. Gunnlaugsson sold his 50 percent share in Wintris to his wife in 2009 eight months after he was elected to parliament. But he failed to disclose interest in the firm then or in 2013 when he became prime minister. In that role, he was party to negotiations with three of the banks that failed in the worldwide financial crisis of 2008. Although no evidence of criminal behavior has been alleged—the former prime minister claimed the failure to disclose was a simple accounting mistake—protesters say that Gunnlaugsson’s holdings created serious conflicts of interest.

The leftwing parliamentary opposition to Gunnlaugsson’s center-right coalition government had presented a motion of no-confidence Monday. Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson, Iceland’s agriculture and fisheries minister, is replacing Gunnlaugsson.

Meanwhile, like The Guardian and Süddeutsche Zeitung—which was the German paper an anonymous source leaked the documents to more than a year ago—the U.S.-based McClatchy Company has published several articles on the Panama Papers, with more certain to come. One of those stories notes that more than 200 passports of Americans are included in the massive leak.

When The Guardian and Süddeutsche Zeitung published their array of stories over the weekend, no Americans were included, something that spurred considerable speculation, including allegations of cover-ups by the media involved in the exposé. Although 107 media operations are involved in the project that is bringing what’s in the Panama Papers to light, McClatchy is the only U.S. newspaper company among them.

Days after George Mason University announced it was renaming its law school to honor the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the university is apparently tweaking the new name to avoid an unfortunate abbreviation, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The school was initially christened "The Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University," leading to some mockery on Twitter because the name lent itself to the hashtag #ASSLaw. Marketing materials for the new school as well as its website now call it "The Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University," the Journal noted, though its official name remains "The Antonin Scalia School of Law."

Before John Kerry was America’s top diplomat, he was the Democratic nominee for president. But of course Kerry’s 2004 campaign against incumbent George W. Bush didn’t turn out all too well. Bush received over 50 percent of the popular vote, after successfully painting Kerry as a “flip-flopper.” But if Kerry was the conventional politician changing positions for political expediency, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump is the anti-politician who runs around like a chicken with his head cut off. From his stances on abortion and his support for the 2011 intervention in Libya to his slight relaxation on immigration and his donations to Democrats, Trump is now the ultimate flip-flopper.

Exhibit A is Trump’s stance on waterboarding and torture. He is asked “Do you support the use of torture on suspected terrorists in order to gain intelligence on future plots?” The question has been consistent throughout the campaign, but his answers have been all over the map.

Before over 121 Republican national security officials and experts called out Trump for his “inexcusable” support of torture techniques on militants captured by U.S. forces on the battlefield, the billionaire was so gung-ho about waterboarding that it would have made the most pro-military, hawkish Republican blush.  

A month ago, Trump heralded waterboarding not only as an appropriate tool to acquire information from terrorists swooped by U.S. authorities, but as a form of punishment and reprisal for daring to plot against the United States. “I would bring back waterboarding,” Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “[a]nd I would make it a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding … I would certainly approve waterboarding. They laugh at us. Our enemies laugh at us, George. They say waterboarding, they don’t even think it’s a form—you know, they don’t even view that as real torture.”

During the March 3 presidential debate, Trump expanded upon his endorsement of torture techniques. Asked whether he would order the U.S. military to utilize interrogation methods currently prohibited under domestic statute and international law, Trump scoffed at the question and unleashed his inner-dictator: “They [military leaders] are not going to refuse me. Believe me.”

A day later, Trump sought to clarify those remarks, perhaps recognizing that his tough-guy attitude and support for war crimes wasn’t the best approach when campaigning. In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, Trump said that “I will not order a military officer to disobey the law. It is clear that as president I will be bound by laws just like all Americans and I will meet those responsibilities.”

So, that’s the end of the story, right? Trump is against violating the laws of war? Well, not quite. A day after he released his statement to the Journal, Trump changed his tune again during a press conference at his West Palm Beach resort. “I will obey the laws, but I will try and get the laws extended,” Trump told reporters. “I will try and get the laws broadened.”

Changing the law as Trump proposes, however, would be a nearly impossible undertaking. Domestically, it would require Congress to go against its better judgment by overriding the War Crimes Act, a McCain-Feinstein amendment banning torture (which was passed just last summer on a bipartisan basis), and a rescission of the U.S. as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions. Trump may believe that he could accomplish all of this through force of will, but he would be mistaken; there isn’t a pro-war crimes caucus on Capitol Hill that “the Donald” can tap into. None of these reservations even comes close to the heart of the matter: that torture is illegal, against everything the United States stands for (the rule of law and respect for human rights), and ineffective according to professionals who have interrogated some high-profile al-Qaeda terrorists.

The whole torture debate may seem innocuous to most Americans. Voters will mark their ballots on pocket-book issues like wage stagnation and the loss of manufacturing jobs—not on how the president will comply with the intricacies of international law.

But Trump’s reversals on torture over the past month do in fact reveal something that should concern Americans, regardless of politics or ideology: either the leading Republican candidate for president truly believes that the benefits of torture outweigh the reputational costs, or he is completely uninformed about U.S. and international law on this subject. The former exposes a dark, Hobbesian side of Trump that would make the most authoritarian of leaders proud. The latter demonstrates his lack of knowledge of the very laws that he would be tasked with enforcing if elected president.

Daniel R. DePetris is an analyst at Wikistrat, Inc., a geostrategic consulting firm and a freelance researcher. He has also written for CNN.com, Small Wars Journal and the Diplomat.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) denounced a white nationalist Super PAC's get-out-the-vote efforts for Donald Trump while stumping for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) ahead of Tuesday's primary in the state.

This was the latest conservative onslaught against voting rights. A high-powered effort to dismantle more than a half century of one person, one vote jurisprudence. But the Supreme Court shut it down today in an 8-0 decision. Tierney Sneed has the details.

For anyone not following the Democratic primary contest closely (does anyone reading this actually fall into that category?), the hashtag #BernieMadeMeWhite exploded across Twitter this past week, and even made the jump into the mainstream media both in the U.S. and beyond. The hashtag emerged in reaction to how some pundits inaccurately dismissed Sanders’ overwhelming victories last Saturday in the Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington state caucuses.

In one example, CNN’s senior digital correspondent Brian Moody wrote: “These caucus states -- largely white and rural -- are the type of places Sanders traditionally does well.” During an on camera CNN discussion of the five Sanders wins over the previous week, thus including Idaho and Utah in addition to the three mentioned above, Molly Ball characterized the voters in those five contests as “overwhelmingly white electorates.” The Atlantic and the Washington Post offered statements that were similarly, er, factually challenged. Before correcting it, the WaPo's initial headline about the three Pacific contests referred to them as having taken place in “whiter states.”

The reality: Hawaii is—wait for it—the least white state (at about one-quarter of the population) in the union. Half of all Hawaiians are Asian American, and over 10 percent are Native. Alaska, where one-third of the people are Native, is the sixth least white state, while Washington is about average in terms of percentage, and ranks 23rd out of 50 on that front.

There is a lot to unpack here.

As suspicious as the dateline is, this is apparently for real — Susan Svrluga, "George Mason law school to be renamed the Antonin Scalia School of Law", Washington Post 4/1/2016:

The George Mason School of Law will be renamed in honor of the late Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who died earlier this year.

The university announced Thursday that it has received $30 million in combined gifts to the George Mason Foundation to support the law school, the largest gift in the university’s history. The donations make possible three new scholarship programs. Twenty million dollars came from an anonymous donor, and $10 million came from the Charles Koch Foundation, which has given millions of dollars to colleges in the United States. The family is well known for its support of conservative political groups, sometimes stirring controversy.

The Board of Visitors approved the renaming of the school to the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University. “This is a milestone moment for the university,” Ángel Cabrera, the university’s president, said in a statement. “These gifts will create opportunities to attract and retain the best and brightest students, deliver on our mission of inclusive excellence, and continue our goal to make Mason one of the preeminent law schools in the country.”

The New York Times editors express hope that a proposed cease-fire in Yemen might hold:

Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to meet soon with foreign ministers of gulf Arab nations. If he can make sure they go forward with the cease-fire, there may be a chance of ending a conflict that has slaughtered civilians, tarnished America’s standing and diverted resources from fighting the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.

Yemen desperately needs a halt to the fighting, but beyond that it needs the coalition blockade to end. If there is a cease-fire but no lifting of the blockade, the civilian population will continue to suffer from preventable starvation and disease and the provision of humanitarian aid will be significantly hindered as it has been for the last year. As long as the blockade remains in place, the Saudis and their allies will be inflicting enormous harm on the people of Yemen. The country is also going to require enormous aid in rebuilding the infrastructure that has been demolished over the last year. The U.S. and Britain are partly responsible for the wrecking of the country and ought to contribute significantly to helping Yemen recover, but I’m skeptical that either government will accept responsibility for what they have done there. Ideally, the Saudis and their allies would be required to pay for the damage they have caused, but we know that’s not going to happen.

Saudi Arabia and its allies made a horrendous decision to intervene a year ago, and the Obama administration made a disgraceful decision to support them. The administration did this even when they had every reason to expect that the intervention would fail on its own terms, which it did. One of the more sickening things about this war is that almost everyone except the coalition governments could foresee that it would be a disaster for Yemen and the region, and many people said as much when it began, but the Saudis and their allies plowed ahead anyway. It was a completely unnecessary war, but they intervened regardless. The U.S. provided weapons, fuel, and intelligence to help the coalition wage the war, which both enabled the intervention and encouraged the Saudis and their allies to continue fighting. The U.S. has not only helped the coalition to bomb Yemen, but by providing diplomatic cover for their war crimes and withholding criticism of their tactics the administration has made it easier for the Saudis and their allies to get away with numerous violations of international law and to commit more war crimes as the war drags on. The administration has done more than just “tarnish America’s standing” by doing this. They have made the U.S. complicit in the war crimes of Washington’s despotic clients, and to make matters worse they have done all this for nothing. No U.S. interests have been served by this campaign, and it has arguably made both the U.S. and the region less secure by allowing Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to grow stronger.

Had the Saudis and their allies not intervened, Yemen would almost certainly still be suffering from internal conflict, but the conflict would be a less destructive one. There would be fewer people displaced from their homes, the resulting humanitarian crisis would be less severe, and it would have been easier for aid groups and outside governments to provide aid to the civilian population. The outside intervention by the Saudis and their allies took every serious problem Yemen already had and made it much worse, it has clearly intensified the conflict while also making it more difficult to end, and it has achieved none of its goals while putting millions of lives at risk from famine and disease. While the intervention may not technically be illegal because Yemen’s recognized government supports it, it is wrong and unjustifiable in every other way.

It seems incredible that such a thoroughly indefensible military campaign has generated so little outrage and has gone mostly unnoticed outside the region, but unfortunately the lack of attention and reaction is not all that surprising. Most Western media outlets have paid almost no attention to the war, and when there is some coverage the conflict is usually presented with the misleading framing of a Saudi-Iranian proxy war when Iran has little to do with any of what has happened. There have been several good pieces published in the last week to mark the anniversary of the start of the intervention, but during most other weeks it’s as if the war isn’t even happening.

Here in the U.S., the reflexive hawkish tendency to side with “allies” ensures that the administration’s domestic opponents don’t care about what the Saudis are doing, and the partisan impulse to refrain from attacking one’s own side keeps most (but not all) Democrats from criticizing U.S. support for the war. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy is one of the very few honorable exceptions. “Humanitarian” interventionists typically say nothing about humanitarian disasters when the governments responsible for them are on “our” side, and their total silence about this conflict proves that. Republicans that would normally seize on any chance to fault Obama for foreign policy incompetence don’t care what happens to people in Yemen, so it probably never occurs to them to object to the administration’s position. It hasn’t helped that the war has coincided with our election season, since that means there are even fewer resources than usual devoted to covering news from overseas, but all of these other factors help explain why the war has never come up once in any debate and almost none of the candidates has addressed it even in passing.

The Obama administration pretends that the U.S. isn’t a party to the conflict when it clearly is, and with a few exceptions members of Congress don’t challenge the policy and don’t question the decision to back the Saudi-led coalition. Journalists write wide-ranging essays on Obama’s foreign policy, but U.S. involvement in the war never comes up. Hawks are so dedicated to the fiction that Obama “abandons” allies and clients that they would rather fault Obama for doing too little to help the Saudis than to question the U.S. role in the first place. Many Obama supporters have grown so used to cutting the president slack on bad foreign policy choices because of his unreasonable hawkish critics that they have practically forgotten how to judge his foreign policy decisions on the merits. The result is that the war is rarely talked about and the U.S. role in it is mentioned even less often, and so the administration receives virtually no scrutiny or criticism for one of its most egregious and damaging blunders.

Plus: Ferguson finally accepts Justice Department stipulations, top prosecutors targeted by activists lose reelection bids, LAPD union fights de-escalation policy.

Use these at your own risk. We don’t condone murder.

Art inspires cinema, cinema inspires art. As lover of both, I just wanted to look into films that are inspired by famous paintings throughout history. There are plenty of movies more to include, maybe for a second part in the future.

On the top of Mauna Kea mountain (which rises from the Big Island of the Hawaiian chain), an international group has begun constructing the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). This has not gone over well with local residents, though, since the site is also one holy to the native islanders:

“Our ancestors believed that there were numerous gods and goddesses and Mauna Kea was their temple. They feel strongly that his will disrupt their temple,” says protestor Isa Center. “In Hawaii the land is precious to our people. It’s a very strong cultural protest.”

Beyond that, protestors are concerned about the effect the telescope on the environment. Considering there are thirteen other (smaller) telescopes in the area, they feel there isn’t need for a new one. In the last few days, the protesters gained some celebrity supporters:

The Honolulu-born Game of Thrones star Jason Momoa posted pictures on Instagram and Twitter using the hashtag #WeAreMaunaKea, That and the hashtag #ProtectMaunaKea have seen big jumps in use this week.

San Francisco Giants’ pitcher Madison Bumgarner, Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger and Momoa’s on-screen spouse, Emilia Clarke, and real-life partner, Lisa Bonet, also got involved.

They have gained enough traction to actually delay the construction.

Hemant Mehta finds this confusing and frustrating:

This isn’t just a science versus superstition debate. It’s a question of clinging to knowledge of the past versus learning about the future in a way that enhances our connection to the world. We have the possibility of learning more about how we came to be as a result of this telescope, and that potential knowledge is being undercut by those who aren’t willing to make any sacrifices for it because it might upset those who are no longer with us.

I understand his concerns, but I’m on the side of the protesters here for a number of reasons.

First, if a local population doesn’t want something built there, no matter how noble it might be, we probably should force it down their throats. Especially when the local population has such a fraught history with outsiders. Residents should have a final say.

Second, I’m not comfortable with ignoring a population’s idea of what is sacred. It may not be rational, but neither is our love of art, architecture, or any other form of beauty. Were we to replace the idea of sacred temples on Mauna Kea with the Louvre, would that change our opinion? Should it? Art is, in a crucial way, sacred, even in our largely secular society. It stands beyond reason and calls from our depths deep feelings beyond ourselves.

This whole bit got me thinking about certain cultures and their relationship to the supernatural. The above This American Life clip looks at the ways residence of Icelandic towns restructure their cities, plans, and lives to accommodate elves. Yes, elves. The clip is worth a listen, and a few years after that episode came out the New York Times ran an article looking at the same issue. The mentality of the people there is fascinating, and while some residents seemed mildly annoyed, it didn’t seem to put a damper on everyday life–which, to be fair, is much easier in a homogenous society like Iceland’s. The NYT piece looks at the port town of Kopavogur, famed to be filled with elves, where once a road was diverted in an attempt to leave an elf home undisturbed. Questioned, the head of the town council’s planning committee, Elly Erlingsdottir, said

that made sense to her. Recently, she said, some elves borrowed her kitchen scissors, only to return them a week later to a place she had repeatedly searched. “My philosophy is, you don’t have to see everything you believe in,” she said, “because many of your greatest experiences happen with closed eyes.”

(Image: Wikipedia)

Megan McArdle wonders why we no longer have “free range kids,” that is, children who are allowed to be moderately unsupervised without other adults losing their mind. She notes that many of us 30 and overs were allowed a greater deal of freedom, and yet we still freak out other people’s children.

Her discussion is worth reading in its entirety, as she posits seven potential causes, among them the cause I blame most, the rise of cable news:

1. Cable news. When you listen to parents talk about why they hover, you’ll frequently hear that the world is more dangerous than it used to be. This is the exact opposite of the truth. The New York City where I walked to school, past housing projects with major crime problems and across busy streets, was much more dangerous than the New York of today. And that is true of virtually everywhere. The world is not more dangerous. But it feels more dangerous to a lot of people because the media landscape has shifted.

Think of it this way: There were always stranger abductions, but they were always extremely rare, perhaps 2 or 3 per 1 million children under 12 in the U.S. each year. However, in the 1970s, you most likely only heard about local cases, and because these were rare, you would hear about one every few years in a moderately large metropolitan area. This made it sound like what it is: an unimaginably terrible thing that thankfully almost never happens. Very occasionally, a case would catch the imagination and make national news, like the Lindbergh baby. But these almost always happened in big cities like New York, or to rich people, so people didn’t imagine that this was a risk that faced them.

Then along came cable news, which needed to fill 24 hours a day with content. These sorts of cases started to make national news, and because our brains are terrible at statistics, we did not register this as “Aha, the overall rate is still low, but I am now hearing cases drawn from a much larger population, so I hear about more of them.” Instead, it felt like stranger abductions must have gone up a lot.

The Internet also enables parents to share stories of every bad thing that happens to their children. We used to be limited to collecting these stories from people we actually met, which meant that we didn’t hear a lot of truly terrible stories. Now we have thousands at the tips of our fingers, and the same failures of statistical intuition make it feel like wow, terrible things are happening all the time these days.

It’s interesting to me to pair McArdle’s observation on obsessive parenting with those of Radley Balko’s; both he and McArdle look at the Meitiv parents, who have continued to run into problems with Child Protective Services for allowing their children to walk places unsupervised. But Balko goes further, wondering why we are charging a middle schooler with cybercrimes, or charging a consenting group of 14 to 16 year olds with child porn for posting their own video to Twitter.

All of these things were stupid, and many of us are lucky that we didn’t grow up in the internet age to do similarly stupid things. Balko’s conclusion:

Let’s be clear about something: It’s the adults who are failing in these stories, not the kids. Perhaps these children do have some problems above and beyond the normal growing pains of being a teenager. That’s a reason for adults to reach out to them, and offer them help. That requires some patience, some nuance, and some empathy. But the criminal justice system is a blunt instrument. There’s nothing nuanced about it. Using cops, courts, and jails to address problems once handled by schools, parents, religious leaders, and community institutions isn’t bold or difficult or brave. It’s just throwing the threat of violence at our problems. It’s easy. And it’s lazy.

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In a review of Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (coming out in paperback May 26), Adam Thirlwell argues that the great novel–one of my favorites–still have the power to shock. His review serves as a brief introduction to both the novel and the legal issues surrounding its publication.

He also gets into what makes the novel so stunning to so many, me included.  It isn’t just a depiction of a day in Dublin, it is a world:

There are obscene moments in this novel, absolutely, but then there are also soft domestic occurrences, like a cup of tea at breakfast (“The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea”), and shimmering intellectual conversations. “The supreme question about a work of art,” a character comments, “is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas.”

There is piety at a funeral or in a church, and also gossip, and drunk political argument. Most of all there is the largest range of the mind’s activities that had so far been seen in a novel: reveries, meditations, miniature passing regrets and cadenzas of wishful thinking, like Bloom’s endearing efforts to imagine the ideal advertisement. All of which are described with the infinite synthesizer of Joyce’s talent, equally happy not just with obscenity but also with puns in Latin and French, and his panoply of pastiche styles.

Further, though, he argues that the novel still shocks not because of its language, but because

“something is missing in Ulysses—which could be called romanticism, or the ideal, or the metaphysical; and its absence is the deep reason why Joyce’s early readers were so alarmed, and why it can still disturb. Without it all the usual conventions are undermined. “What makes most people’s lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism,” Joyce once said to his friend Arthur Power, “some unrealizable or misconceived ideal. In fact you may say that idealism is the ruin of man, and if we lived down to fact, as primitive man had to do, we would be better off…. In Ulysses I tried to keep close to fact.”

It unsettles us, Thirlwell suggests, that there’s nothing beyond the self in the world Joyce presents. But the world Joyce presents here has always been enough for me. What’s always unsettled me is how deep into the mind of his characters Joyce gets, how true his insights about the mind are, and how unpleasant our mind can sometimes be.

(Audio: NPR Fresh Air review by Maureen Corrigan)

Think Progress brings us yet another story of white cops killing and unarmed black men. This time the victim was Eric Harris, who was unintentionally shot with a gun rather than a taser.

Hmm. I’m not sure how easy a mistake that is to make, but the man who shot him did seem taken aback by it. Brett Sanders at Photography is Not A Crime is less than sympathetic here, noting that “Tulsa authorities are chalking this fatal accident up to a scientific phenomenon known as ‘slips-and-capture,'” which he calls an “invented” theory.  Sanders cites a source that defines  phenomenon as:

mistakes that are made when you think you are doing one thing but you actually are doing another and the result often is directly opposite of what you intended…In effect, your intended behavior ‘slips off’ the path you wanted it to go because it is ‘captured’ by a stronger response and sent in a different direction.

I’m not a police officer nor am I a psychologist, so while that feels dubious to me, I’m wary of my own feelings. Even if this is indeed what happened, where I certainly lose any sympathy for these officers is in their lack of concern about having shot Harris. Harris cries out “He shot me! He shot me, man. Oh, my god. I’m losing my breath,” and the police response is “fuck your breath.” Indeed, beyond this, the Tulsa police force is already out there claiming Harris “was possibly under the influence of Phencyclidine, PCP.”

A weird twist on this is that, as Ian Millhiser points out, the shooting officer, Reserve Deputy Robert Bates, “is not a full-time officer. He is a 73-year-old insurance executive and a wealthy donor to the sheriff’s department.”

Being a police officer is a difficult job. We should train them well and hold them to high standards. But an old rich guy donates a lot of money and then gets to play cop? My assumption is that Bates is horrified by what he did. He has to live with accidentally killing a man. Yet, why should the force have these types of people out in public with guns? Aren’t we asking for this?

(Video: NBC News)

Mike Rugnetta from the PBS Idea Channel examine the ways iPhone read messages–and the differences between blue and green bubbles–makes us feel, and how it all makes us feel anxious.

h/t: Laughing Squid

(Video: Youtube)

Former US drone operator Brandon Bryant believes he may have killed a child in his drone strikes.

For those that are in favor of drone strikes–and the Obama administration loves them–this is one of the natural consequences. Some pretend drone strikes are surgically precise, others can hide the deaths behind the slippery language of “collateral damage,” but these are the real consequences. Willful ignorance is not acceptable: if you are for drone strikes, you have to answer hard questions about the deaths of children.

(Video: BBC World News HARDTalk)

According to Gallup, the uninsured rated dropped to the lowest it’s been in seven years.  Now, I’m aware the above graph plays a little with the y-axis, and makes that drop look more than it is, but  this is a big deal, and it is something to think about when having a discussion about the ACA: it is doing some real good.

It is not uncomplicated good, but all good in this world is complicated.

h/t: Daily Kos

(Image: Daily Kos)

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Following up on an earlier post, new evidence comes out showing that Michael Slager, the officer who shot Walter Scott, was laughing in an interview after the shooting when discussion his adrenaline. The Guardian apparently got access to this recording. Some lowlights:

“By the time you get home, it would probably be a good idea to kind of jot down your thoughts on what happened,” the senior officer said. “You know, once the adrenaline quits pumping.”

“It’s pumping,” Slager said, laughing. The senior officer replied: “Oh yeah. Oh yeah.”

The senior officer told Slager during the conversation to go home and relax, assuring him that he would not have to answer questions about the shooting for days.

Complaints about the North Charleston police force have been around for at least five years, as a Post and Courier op-ed talks about in 2010. Then, Rev. Joe Darby said:

“I’ve got a son who goes to Trident Tech and he will be late to class rather than take a route that goes anywhere near Chicora-Cherokee or Dorchester Road,” he said. “He understands if you are over there, you are going to be pulled over if you are black, whether you have done anything or not.”

Is this true? Do cops pull over people just for being black? Talk to someone non-white, and you’ll hear that most believe it to be true; whether it is (and the police certainly pull over non-whites at a much higher rate than whites, so we have to consider that) is irrelevant. The job of the police is to protect and serve, and if they do not have the trust of the people they are serving, if the community sees them as their assailants rather than their protectors, the game is lost.

And after seeing the video of Walter Scott’s murder, it’s hard to see how the wider population hasn’t yet started to sympathize. The video was so powerful that Officer Slater’s attorney dropped him as a client after seeing it.

But this incident is but a drop in the bucket, and so few of them have videos. As David Graham at The Atlantic points out:

Most encounters do not end with violence or death, even if they produce humiliation and tension with police. But they are far more likely to end in a killing in the United States than anywhere else. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, police shot and killed 828 people in 2011, a figure that includes all killings, justifiable or not. By comparison, during the same year, there were two fatal police shootings in England and Wales; six in Australia; and six in Germany.

People in minority neighborhoods don’t trust the police, but sadly the police have given them a reason not to. Even when adjusting for population, the US dwarfs all these other countries those who die at the hands of the police.

The good police officers out there must be horrified at how difficult this makes their job. Leon Neyfakh at Slate has an interesting interview with NYPD police chief Philip Banks III, and asks an important question: what must the police do in North Charleston (and, by extension, everywhere) to regain the trust of those they serve?  Banks’ response represents a good start:

Despite reasonable doubts, a new article in Nature argues that there is indeed water. Hannah Devlin from The Guardian summarizes the findings (which cannot be found on Nature‘s page yet). By “analyzing humidity and temperature data,” the scientists concluded that:

liquid brine ought to form. Instruments on-board Curiosity also measured estimates of subsurface water concentration, which suggested that water was indeed being absorbed from the air and the surface frost by the salty soil.

The water would be present in tiny quantities between the grains of soil, rather than in droplet form. “If you dug a trench you might see that the soil at the base was a bit darker,” said Madsen.

This is pretty awesome, especially when paired with moon cities in lava tubes.  But NASA’s promise of extraterrestrial life in the next generation sadly is unlikely fulfilled here, despite the water, because:

Today, cosmic radiation penetrates at least one metre into the Martian surface and would kill even the most robust microbes known on Earth.

Oh well. We can probably still build Mars cities in the future.

(Photo: Wikimedia)

Perhaps the preeminent postwar German writer, magical-realist, controversial critic of the Israeli government, fierce anti-nationalist, 1999 Nobel Prize recipient, and shockingly a member of the Wafen-SS, Günter Grass was a barrel of contradictions. his death today at 87 is no real surprise, but the world loses a man of peace.

Rafael Narbona of El Cultural has the best description of Grass’s most famous creation, Oskar Matzerath, from The Tin Drum:

Grass siempre será recordado por El tambor de hojalata (1959). Oskar Matzerath, con su mágico tambor, ya forma parte de la galería de personajes literarios con rango de arquetipos o símbolos. Oskar decide no crecer más por odio a sus progenitores. Aunque se opone inicialmente al nazismo, sucumbe finalmente a su seducción, pero sin perder su lucidez irónica, que introduce una nota de befa en una ideología apocalíptica. Gracias a la diminuta Roswitha, conocerá el sexo y el placer, integrándose en una compañía teatral de liliputienses. Su interminable y perversa infancia finalizará a los veintiocho años, cuando cambia de opinión y empieza a crecer, con el objetivo de hacerse rico y famoso. Oskar relata su peripecia desde un manicomio. Se ha interpretado de muchas maneras la novela. Escrita con un lenguaje barroco, agresivo y con imágenes impactantes, la resistencia de Oskar a convertirse en un adulto condensa la incongruencia de la sociedad alemana, hipnotizada por un fantoche con arrebatos místicos o telúricos y, al mismo tiempo, heredera de su profundo bagaje intelectual y artístico. Hitler no es el pecado de una nación traumatizada por el fiasco de la Gran Guerra, sino una regresión hacia lo onírico y prerracional. Sin embargo, el latido más profundo de la civilización se rebelará contra el neopaganismo de los nuevos bárbaros, aceptando la derrota como una necesaria expiación.

UPDATE: New translation via DK Translations: