Monthly Archives: October 2017

“This is what grudging benevolence rooted in a sense of personal superiority and belief in the power of performance looks like.”

The Washington Post: In Puerto Rico, Trump’s paper-towel toss reveals where his empathy lies.

“Nicholas Vargas, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Florida, noted that Trump doesn’t approach everyone in such a state of callous disconnect. In August, Trump said there were “very fine people“ among the white supremacists at a rally in Charlottesville that left a counterprotester dead. Soon after, he pardoned former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, formally expressing concern for a man known for racially profiling Latinos and housing jail inmates outdoors in tents.

In these cases, Trump showed compassion.

“But when it comes to Puerto Rico and the humanitarian crisis there, what we see is a hands-off, bitter, hardly restrained resentment that anything is expected of him at all,“ said Vargas, who studies issues related to race and ethnicity. “This is a man who has the capacity to empathize. It — even in a catastrophe — is just a selective thing.“

These images show a president without mercy for certain human beings, “people unlike him,“ Vargas said. “That is women, people of color — even in the most dire of circumstances.“ “

Der neue europäische Rechtsradikalismus

Die Zeit Campus: Martin Sellner hört Hip-Hop und hasst den Islam. “Er postet Selfies bei Instagram und will Ausländer rauswerfen. Er war mal Neonazi, jetzt hat er ein neues Projekt: Rechtsradikalismus hip machen.”

“Die Identitären, scheint es, sind ein Allzweckgefäß: Den alten Rechten versprechen sie Nachwuchs, eine gewisse Jugendlichkeit und trotzdem traditionelle Werte. Für die jungen Rechtsradikalen in den Burschenschaften und den Bier- und Wurstkneipen ist der provokante aktionistische Ansatz der Identitären zusammen mit der Öffentlichkeitsarbeit auf allen Social-Media-Kanälen ein Weg, sich als größer, cooler und einflussreicher zu inszenieren, als es ihre Mitgliederzahlen jemals hergeben würden.”

“She lives in a tiny rented shed that has no plumbing. She gets water from a brother who lives in a trailer across the road.”

Washington Post: After the check is gone. “The underground economy has long been a part of rural America, where some receiving disability benefits are forced to work to survive.”

“Mallory, W.Va. — For the people of the hollow, opportunity begins where the road ends, and that was where they now went, driving onto a dirt path that vanished into forest. It was here that they came at the end of the month, when the disability checks were long gone, and the next were still days away, and the only option left was also one of the worst.

The goal was simple. Get to the top of the mountain. Collect as many wild roots as possible to sell to a local buyer. Avoid the copperheads and rattlesnakes. Descend before the rains came again and flooded their way out.”

And this is not in a third-world-coutry, it’s in the country that calls itself the “greatest country on earth”.

“There is no statute of limitation on the truth.”

The Guardian: Ex-FBI agent opens cold case review into who betrayed Anne Frank. “Vince Pankoke and his team will use new techniques to analyse large amounts of data to solve mystery of diarist’s capture.”

“A retired FBI agent has launched a cold case review into identifying those who may have betrayed the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family to the Gestapo in 1944.

Investigative techniques developed in the past decade, including the crunching of big data to uncover leads, are to be used by a team of 19 forensic experts led by Vince Pankoke.

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam has made available its archives and welcomed the initiative, which is being filmed and chronicled online, as the investigators, including historians, psychological profilers and former police detectives, work through the evidence.

The cold case review team has supervised a reconstruction, using actors, of the day of the Frank family’s arrest. One of the founding fathers of the FBI’s behavioural science unit, Roger Depue, is analysing contemporary witness statements and interviews.”

The New York Times: Ultimate Cold Case: Who Betrayed Anne Frank?

“A former FBI agent is heading up a cold case team more than 70 years after Nazi occupation police stormed the secret Amsterdam canal house annex where Anne Frank was hiding and sent her to her death in a concentration camp.

Suspicions that someone betrayed the Frank family are not new, but the latest attempt will seek out new connections in the case of the Jewish girl whose diary has captivated millions of readers worldwide.

Retired agent Vincent Pankoke said he had high hopes of solving one of the biggest World War Two mysteries in the Netherlands with the help of Big Data and modern policing techniques.”

The Washington Post: Who betrayed Anne Frank? Artificial intelligence could finally solve the mystery..

“For nearly 75 years, some of the greatest investigative minds have tried to figure out who tipped off the Nazis about Anne Frank and the seven other Jews who were hiding behind a movable bookcase in Amsterdam.

Now, a former FBI investigator working with a production company hopes the decades-old mystery can be solved with the help of a new mind — an artificial one.”

The effort is crowd-funded, see Cold Case Dairy for more information.

“Two 3-year-old boys were shot by another toddler who found and inadvertently fired a gun at the home of their babysitter in Dearborn, Mich.”

Washington Post: American toddlers are still shooting people on a weekly basis this year.

“The Dearborn boys are at least the 42nd and 43rd people to get shot by a child under the age of 4 this year, according to a database of accidental child-involved shootings maintained by Everytown, a gun violence prevention group. On average, someone gets shot by an American toddler a little more frequently than once a week, similar to previous years.”