This story is making me ill. I lived around the corner from this kid when it happened and went to the same bodega all the time. Breaks my heart to even think about it. I don't agree with banging on the cops in this case, though. If they could have solved it, nobody would have been happier than them. This guy could still turn out to be a harmless mental case, anyhow.

What the heck does that mean?

They literally used a stapler on this kid's mouth, allegedly. I thought it might have been an electric staple gun, but I haven't seen that detail anywhere. Sick fucks.

That's insane! WTF is wrong with people? Who would even think of doing something like that! I hope they find the punks and lock them away in a cell somewhere with Bubba!

The longer society tolerates the coarseness of the TeaParty/Limpballs rhetoric, the more of this kind of cruelty you will see.

This probably belongs elsewhere, but what the R's are doing is a form of shock doctrine. While we are still weak from the crisis they created, they have taken several of our shiboliths and overturned them: in a Democracy, Everyone votes; an informed populace is necessary for a strong government; we take care of our own.

The current bout of depravity, cravenly stupid nativism, violent religionism and all around crappy society will peak in 2020, according to somebody who's been studying these things (Laura Spinney, Nature):

To Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the appearance of three peaks of political instability at roughly 50-year intervals is not a coincidence. For the past 15 years, Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator–prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history. He has analysed historical records on economic activity, demographic trends and outbursts of violence in the United States, and has come to the conclusion that a new wave of internal strife is already on its way1. The peak should occur in about 2020, he says, and will probably be at least as high as the one in around 1970. “I hope it won't be as bad as 1870,” he adds.

Turchin's approach — which he calls cliodynamics after Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history — is part of a groundswell of efforts to apply scientific methods to history by identifying and modelling the broad social forces that Turchin and his colleagues say shape all human societies. It is an attempt to show that “history is not 'just one damn thing after another'”, says Turchin, paraphrasing a saying often attributed to the late British historian Arnold Toynbee.

I don't know. The boy and his parents have told the press about the stapling and anti-semitism. It turns out the party was being held in the backyard, while the attack took place out in front of the house. Witnesses say what they saw was "a fight." Since it was dark, that's a possible interpretation, and remarks could have come before there were any witnesses. The cops are going to need somebody who heard it, though.

WLNS

The idea of historical Kondratieff cycles has been around for a while. I know few historians or sociologists who think it is very worthwhile. I don't think it brings science to history. The most prominent of the proponents of these ideas is Christopher Chase Dunn, if you want to read some of his ideas.

The cycles that do matter involve aging and death, migration, and economics. Those are good reasons for thinking that 2020 will find us in better shape than now, because many of the dinosaurs will be dead.

Prof. Turchin teaches ecology and evolutionary biology, not history.

And he took his work from those two sciences and plugged historical data into it to see what came out the other end.

If the data fits, wear it.

I'm confused .Turchin said our nativisim peak will reach 1970 or 1870 levels? What were the driving factors in 1870? KKK, conquering the West, huge immigration influx?
I think all the race riots and civil rights changes along with Johnson's War on Poverty (Great Society) and Vietnam all somehow contributed to nativism in 1970. I remember going to a pool in a small OK town that year. People were scandalized my mother would let me swim with the "n@#$..." because they were allowed to use the pool as of 1970. They really triedto browbeat my mom into submission by offering to let me swim at the local private country club! WE just ignored these ignorant people. The pool was a virtual ghost town though compared with recent years. Isn't it sad how we treat people?

I hope the cops find and prosecute those sick assholes quickly.

You can't. Not appropriately, anyway.

Setting aside significant issues on how his data has been assembled, issues surrounding confirmation bias (and for that matter researcher bias), and many others, it's just not at all an appropriate use of the tools. And, yes, I've got enough background in ecology and evolutionary biology to feel very confident saying that. This isn't self-taught; I did coursework in these areas before dropping out of the grad program.

If you want to use tools to make predictions, 'why' matters. The predator-prey cycles do a reasonable (but by no means precise or perfect) job at predicting approximate (again, not precise) population data. We're reasonably comfortable using those models for those purposes because we have a reasonable (but again not perfect) understanding of why the cycles occur. We know that we're looking at food supply. We know we're looking at the effect of food supply on survival. And we know that all bets are off if the volcano erupts, no matter how stable the system has been so far.

I strongly doubt this guy has enough data, background, experience, training, etc. to be able to put together a good guess as to why the cycles he thinks he's measuring are there. And when you don't know why, you get problems like this:

86, 77, 68, 59 - what comes next, and why?

Nice of the Pubs to put on their best face for the nation

http://news.yahoo.com/race-incident-sees-republican-convention-expulsions-155400054.html

GOP - The party of the People!

As long was you're a white, male people.

Kondratieff was unfortunately executed by Stalin for his idea that economic cycles come in long waves, either 50 years or 40-60 years. This was not consistent with Stalin's plans for onward and ever upward. But the idea of "long waves" has stuck around, being applied to the rise and fall of empires, world economic cycles, economic performance at the national level, the rate of innovations, and crime rates.

Explanations for why things ought to come in long waves have not been very impressive, IMHO. It is not always considered necessary to offer an explanation; maybe one will come forth some day. The idea is applied as a sort of macro magic that is beyond human control; it just happens, sort of like the planets rotate around the sun quite regularly. It is not nearly as sophisticated and empirically grounded as theories about overshoot of a species' food supply.

Demographers talk a lot about "the demographic transition," which is a set of observations, not a theory and certainly not a "law." The observation is that the death rate begins to fall before the birth rate falls, with a period of indeterminate length being a period of natural increase in the population. We saw this in Europe, in the U.S., now in Latin America, and in some Asian countries. It is not known whether and when countries that presently have high fertility might drop those rates, but until they do, their populations are growing.

This is not a long wave theory; it is simply a collection of facts. There is no Kondratieff theory involved. History is better built on collections of facts than upon dubiously relevant theory.

I think it is simply wrong to claim that bringing long wave theory to history will make history scientific. If anything, it is likely to make history obsessed with magic cycles.

Makes me think of the Isaac Asimov novel series - Foundation and Empire with Hari Seldon and Psychohistory theories.

Graduate political science class: Game Theory. And yes. Asimov was used for this class.

more...
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/ ... pub/nRPgF/

Meems! You left out the money quote:



Race itsa locator.

Also, too, for those of you who wondered (like me) the Baker act in Florida provides for involuntary mental health detention.

This is one of the saddest, most horrific stories I've ever read.

Celeste Fronsman was found by a passerby on a rural road in Muskingum County Ohio with third and fourth degree burns.

Wow

Hopefully she was able to tell who did that to her before she passed away. May she RIP.

Shootings in the workplace may be sufficiently common now that we don't need separate threads for each of them. This time it is three people killed (including the gunman); all three employees of a Pathmark supermarket in Old Bridge, NJ; AK-47 and body armor said to have been used; former Marine.

Photos of the victims and the shooter are here:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/s ... -1.1148744

All the reports I read said he just shot randomly. Nobody was targeted.

A young woman was charged with murder Friday in the gruesome death of a woman found covered in burns and wailing in agony on the side of a rural Ohio road last weekend.

In addition to aggravated murder, 20-year-old Katrina Marie Culberson of Canton was charged with kidnapping and aggravated arson in the death of 29-year-old Celeste Fronsman, according to the Muskingum County Sheriff's Office. It's unclear whether Culberson has an attorney.

A driver found Fronsman early Sunday on a road northeast of Zanesville. She had been raped and burned, and had a strap around her neck. She died two days later at a Columbus hospital.

Dr. Jan Gorniak, the Franklin County coroner, ruled the death a homicide but said it will take four to six weeks before the exact cause of death can be determined because of extensive second-, third- and fourth-degree burns on about 80 percent of Fronsman's body.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wire ... ned-woman/

http://www.cantonrep.com/news/x12061415 ... nton-woman