Re: Our Collapsing Civilization
Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2015 11:26 am
HAHAHAHAHA
Thad wrote:The reason I haven't commented on the shootings at Planned Parenthood is that we haven't had any confirmation that they were nonrandom and politically motivated. I think it's most likely that that's the case, but we don't know for sure.
Regardless, I think the media's response to the murders has been, well, a lot quieter than it would have been if the killer were brown and the site hadn't been a Planned Parenthood, and the response by the Republican presidential candidates has been pathetic. (On the one hand, no, politicians are not obligated to condemn every terrible thing done by a fringe lunatic; on the other, if you've spent the last few months whipping people up into a frenzy about Planned Parenthood and can't even be bothered to say "but murdering people at Planned Parenthood is wrong" then yes you're part of the problem. At least Fiorina hasn't gone full Sarah Palin and taken out an ad to ramble about blood libel.)
Thad wrote:Regardless, I think the media's response to the murders has been, well, a lot quieter than it would have been if the killer were brown and the site hadn't been a Planned Parenthood, and the response by the Republican presidential candidates has been pathetic.
According to the report, there have been 143 security breaches or attempted breaches at secured facilities in the past decade. And of those, only 13 have resulted in jail time for the perpetrators, the committee found.
Investigators also found "morale is at an all-time low" within the Secret Service because of overworked personnel, shrinking budgets, a loss of confidence in top leadership and other factors.
The investigation focused on a handful of security breaches dating back to November 2011. That's when several shots were fired from a semiautomatic rifle at the White House, but it wasn't discovered for four days, until a housekeeper stumbled upon broken glass and cement debris on the floor. Another lapse was the much-publicized prostitution scandal involving Secret Service personnel in Cartagena, Colombia, in 2012.
The report also chronicles a monthlong period in 2014 in which there were six security breakdowns, beginning with a Sept. 16 incident. It involved an armed security guard with a history of violence whom the Obama's security detail allowed to ride an elevator with the president in Atlanta.
Eleven days later, a man "posing as a Member of Congress at a Congressional Black Caucus awards dinner" managed to sneak backstage unnoticed by agents at an awards gala and speak to the president, according to the report. The report adds that in yet another breach in October of last year, a woman was able to gain unauthorized access to a backstage entrance, this time at a Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute event.
“In a world where secularism is the norm, and being religious is actually sometimes looked down upon, finding someone who is religious is comforting.”
While studying at Vanderbilt University, Mohyuddin married a Bangladeshi immigrant who was finishing his medical residency, and years later they moved to Tullahoma, a small town in the wooded hills near the Alabama border. In the mid-2000s, Mohyuddin decided to educate her children at home, and she asked to join a Christian homeschooling cooperative. Some families threatened to leave the co-op if it admitted a Muslim family, but they were overruled by the families who threatened to leave if they were rejected.
One day, a mother at the co-op vented to Mohyuddin about how her teenage daughter had confessed to liking a boy. She was willing to let them go on a date, as long as they took a chaperone.
“I was like, ‘Wait, that’s what we do!’” says Mohyuddin.
Mohyuddin is far from alone in her affection for the South. In Journey Into America, a study of Muslims across the United States, anthropologist Akbar Ahmed notes that “the Muslims we interviewed in the South say they were by and large happier than those living in places like New York City.” Much of this sentiment comes from the harmony between the social conservatism of Islam and evangelical Christianity.
Daoud Abudiab and Sabina Mohyuddin both testified against the anti-Sharia bill before the legislature. Hundreds of Muslims showed up to the statehouse in protest, and the bill that eventually passed was significantly watered down. This mobilization was organized, in large part, by TIRRC and other civil- and immigrant-rights groups. While Abudiab and Mohyuddin welcomed the alliances, many other Muslims felt forced into them by circumstance. Ossama Bahloul, the imam of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, recalls feeling deeply uneasy when LGBT groups expressed their support during the campaign to stop the building of his mosque; recently, he declined to support one of these groups in return.
“You might find it very confusing,” Bahloul says. “Politically, how am I going to support someone who is against my personal values? Because he supports my existence? And the very conservative person shares with me the same values — but he is against my existence.”
Police spied on a South Salt Lake City home after receiving an anonymous tip about drug activity. When Joseph Edward Strieff, the defendant in the case, walked out of the house, a police detective illegally stopped him, questioned him and checked his name in a police database.
The State of Utah conceded that this stop was illegal. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that the police “officer did not suspect that Strieff had done anything wrong. Strieff just happened to be the first person to leave a house that the officer thought might contain ‘drug activity.'”