The Glade 4.0

Calling BS on this story as presented. Unless they have the body of the boar showing a wound consistant with this story, its much more likely the hunter flat missed the shot, didnt clear the back stop and the driver was hit.

Any impact on the body of a boar capable of diverting the flight path of that bullet by the reported 90 deg would badly deform the round, stop spin and bleed even more range than was already lost by the transfer of energy related to the impact.

There are two spots on a boar that can effectively impede a bullet from penetrating the body... the skull and the mantle. On a very large boar, the mantle is of sufficient thickness to stop a 180 grain 30-06 round from 100 yards without injury to the animal. It is not however capable of deflecting the round. The skull could, though I have a hard time believing any round with sufficient energy to tumble another mile after impact and turning 90 deg wouldn't have obliterated the skull. It would stop a low calibre round like a .223 or .277, but you are a fool to hunt boar with that kind of gun, and I would still think the bullet would be far too deformed or fractured from the initial impact to travel another mile with lethal force.

Google 'Pressure Cookers' and 'Backpacks,' Get a Visit from the Cops

Philip Bump 10:09 AM ET

Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?

Catalano (who is a professional writer) describes the tension of that visit.



The men identified themselves as members of the "joint terrorism task force." The composition of such task forces depend on the region of the country, but, as we outlined after the Boston bombings, include a variety of federal agencies. (The photo above is from the door-to-door sweep in Watertown at that time.) Among those agencies: the FBI and Homeland Security.

Update 1:45 p.m.: In a conversation with The Atlantic Wire, FBI spokesperson Peter Donald confirmed The Guardian's report that the FBI was not involved in the visit itself. Asked if the FBI was involved in providing information that led to the visit, Donald replied that he could not answer the question at this point, as he didn't know.

We asked if the Suffolk and Nassau police, which The Guardian reported were the authorities that effected the visit, are part of the government's regional Joint Terrorism Task Force. They are, he replied, representing two of the 52 agencies that participate. He said that local police are often deputized federal marshals for that purpose — but that the JTTF "did not visit the residence." He later clarified: "Any officers, agents, or other representatives of the JTTF did not visit that location."

We are awaiting a response from Suffolk County police and the Department of Homeland Security which operates an investigatory fusion center in the region. A representative of the Nassau County police denied the department's involvement in the visit.

Ever since details of the NSA's surveillance infrastructure were leaked by Edward Snowden, the agency has been insistent on the boundaries of the information it collects. It is not, by law, allowed to spy on Americans — although there are exceptions of which it takes advantage. Its PRISM program, under which it collects internet content, does not include information from Americans unless those Americans are connected to terror suspects by no more than two other people. It collects metadata on phone calls made by Americans, but reportedly stopped collecting metadata on Americans' internet use in 2011. So how, then, would the government know what Catalano and her husband were searching for?

It's possible that one of the two of them is tangentially linked to a foreign terror suspect, allowing the government to review their internet activity. After all, that "no more than two other people" ends up covering millions of people. Or perhaps the NSA, as part of its routine collection of as much internet traffic as it can, automatically flags things like Google searches for "pressure cooker" and "backpack" and passes on anything it finds to the FBI.

Or maybe it was something else. On Wednesday, The Guardian reported on XKeyscore, a program eerily similar to Facebook search that could clearly allow an analyst to run a search that picked out people who'd done searches for those items from the same location. How those searches got into the government's database is a question worth asking; how the information got back out seems apparent.

It is also possible that there were other factors that prompted the government's interest in Catalano and her husband. He travels to Asia, she notes in her article. Who knows. Which is largely Catalano's point.



One hundred times a week, groups of six armed men drive to houses in three black SUVs, conducting consented-if-casual searches of the property perhaps in part because of things people looked up online.

But the NSA doesn't collect data on Americans, so this certainly won't happen to you.

Hey Mook, can I borrow your phone?

From my point of view, it's not necessary to accept the victim's version of events (though it is by far the more plausible) to find the cops at fault here. Cops should be held to a much higher standard of restraint with respect to self-defense than normal citizens, not a lower one. In my opinion, the cops' own version of events - i.e. that the guy "lunged" in their direction with an unidentified metallic object in his hand - isn't even close to being sufficient to justify opening fire. There's too much uncertainty in that scenario to justify the cops' use of deadly force. In my view, the risk associated with that uncertainty is theirs to bear as part of the duties and burdens that go hand in hand with the power and authority they're granted as cops.

Government workers in the city of Seattle have been advised that the terms "citizen" and "brown bag" are potentially offensive and may no longer be used in official documents and discussions.

KOMO-TV reports that the city's Office of Civil Rights instructed city workers in a recent internal memo to avoid using the words because some may find them offensive.

"Luckily, we've got options," Elliott Bronstein of the Office for Civil Rights wrote in the memo obtained by the station. "For 'citizens,' how about 'residents?'"

In an interview with Seattle's KIRO Radio, Bronstein said the term "brown bag" has been used historically as a way to judge skin color.

"For a lot of particularly African-American community members, the phrase brown bag does bring up associations with the past when a brown bag was actually used, I understand, to determine if people's skin color was light enough to allow admission to an event or to come into a party that was being held in a private home," Bronstein said.

According to the memo, city employees should use the terms "lunch-and-learn" or "sack lunch" instead of "brown bag."

Bronstein told KIRO Radio the word "citizen" should be avoided because many people who live in Seattle are residents, not citizens.

"They are legal residents of the United States and they are residents of Seattle. They pay taxes and if we use a term like citizens in common use, then it doesn't include a lot of folks," Bronstein said.

Seattle, however, isn't the only city with an eye on potentially disruptive words.

The New York Post reported in March 2012 that the city’s Department of Education avoids references to words like “dinosaurs,” “birthdays,” “Halloween” and dozens of other topics on city-issued tests because they could evoke “unpleasant emotions” among the students.

Dinosaurs, for example, conjures the topic of evolution, which could rile fundamentalists and birthdays are not celebrated by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Halloween, meanwhile, suggests an affiliation to Paganism.

Officials said such exclusions are normal procedure, insisting it’s not censorship.

“This is standard language that has been used by test publishers for many years and allows our students to complete practice exams without distraction,” a Department of Education spokeswoman told the newspaper last year.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

Employer Tipped Off Police To Pressure Cooker And Backpack Searches, Not Google

In what might be Medium‘s first widespread Twitter moment, music writer Michele Catalano used the platform to blog details of an unexpected visit to her home yesterday, from six men she identifies as members of the “joint terrorism task force.”

Catalano asserts that the visit was likely prompted by her husband searching for the term “backpacks” in close conjunction with her searching for the term “pressure cookers” and her son reading the news. Or something.

Turns out the visit was prompted by the searches, but not in the way most speculation asserted – by a law enforcement-initiated, NSA-enabled dragnet of the couple’s web history. It turns out either Catalano or her husband were conducting these searches from a work computer. And that employer, “a Bay Shore based computer company,” called the police on their former employee.

The Suffolk County Police Department has just released the following information related to the case:



From what we can glean from LinkedIn, the computer company referenced above may be Speco Technologies, where Catalano’s husband Todd Pinnell worked as a product manager until last April (we’ve called Speco to confirm). This should be a teachable moment to anyone who thinks that their work computers are somehow not being tracked.

While Google’s, or PRISM‘s, tracking of Internet activity wasn’t behind this incident, the fact is that Google does comply with law enforcement to hand over user data in general. Can the FBI or local police provide a search warrant to Google, and would Google possibly comply with such a request? Yes, and the company publishes all requests in a report every six months. This is nothing new.

And wider requests, like for the months of search history that would be needed to figure out the pressure cooker and backpack coincidence, may result in a push to narrow the scope of the investigation from Google’s end.

But, an industry source confirms, it doesn’t work the other way around: i.e. Google isn’t flagging searches for “pressure cooker” + “backpacks” for the cops.

It’d be crazy if it did though.

Update: Catalano confirms this interpretation of the story. For those of you wondering where we got the press release: I called the Suffolk County Police Department for a statement, and they emailed it to me.

State Seizes Two-Year-Old Child From Parents Because They Smoked Pot, Child Dies in Foster Care

Ed Krayewski|Aug. 2, 2013 11:49 pm

Another victim of the war on drugs. From KVUE in Texas:

[O]n Monday night, [Joshua] Hill’s daughter Alexandria, or Alex as they liked to call her, was rushed to a Rockdale hospital with severe head injuries, then flown to Scott and White Children’s Emergency Hospital in Temple and immediately placed on life support.

Alex was living with foster parents after DFPS removed her from her parent's home last November for "neglectful supervision."

Hill admits they were smoking pot when their daughter was asleep.

“We never hurt our daughter. She was never sick, she was never in the hospital, and she never had any issues until she went into state care.”

Alex spent time at two foster homes. Her parents noticed bruises on her body and mold in her bag when they saw her while she was at the first home. Her father says he told Child Protective Services they’d have to put him in jail because he didn’t want to return her to the foster home, and in January she was placed in a second home. Alex is now dead, and the foster mother was arrested after her description of what happened to Alex didn’t match the injuries Alex sustained. The mother admitted to slamming the two-year-old girl’s head and is charged with murder.

Statistics on child abuse in foster care are, perhaps unsurprisingly, hard to come by, but children in foster care may be up to 10 times more likely to die than children in the care of their own parents; one estimate places the number of children who die in foster care in the US every year at about 1540.

Update: KXAN provides more details, including some of the allegations the state apparently based its decision to seize the child on and the fact that the two-year-old was in the care of her grandparents when she was seized; the state determined her parents had "limited parenting skills." KXAN also reports something called "Residential Child Care Licensing" (the station does not identify what that is, but it appears to be a part of CPS) is now investigating the foster home and the service the state used to place Alex in that home.

Cops in Iowa Beat Up Shoplifter After Hearing Her Boyfriend is Community Activist Who Has Worked with Cops on Racial Sensitivity Training

Brian Doherty|August 6, 2013 1:12 pm


Further grim proof that modern policing is very, very dangerous (to you and me), as a couple of cops in Davenport, Iowa, start whaling away on a woman (in front of her infant daughter) in back room of store where she was caught shoplifting.

Video--warning, kind of disturbing--can be found at this CBS Local Chicago story. Excerpts:


A Chicago civil rights organization is investigating claims that a mother was unjustly beaten by police officers in Davenport Iowa after she was caught shoplifting....

Brandie Redell admits she was shoplifting at a Von Maur store in Davenport, Iowa, back in February, and putting clothes inside her 1-year-old daughter’s stroller...

While store security has Redell turn over the things she’s taken, two Davenport police officers walk in. Redell calls her boyfriend telling him to pick up their daughter. When one of the officer’s hears Redell’s boyfriend’s name, he tells Redell, “This is going to get ugly, real quick.”

Redell’s boyfriend, James Gibson, is a community activist who had done some sensitivity training with the department when it comes to race and officers dealing with the public.

Redell recoiled in fear as one of the officers starts beating her. A store worker left the room quickly carrying Redell’s one-year-old daughter. The beating lasted for one minute and five seconds.....

What happened to the officers?


Following an internal affairs investigation, both officers were disciplined and both are still employed and back on the street, as Davenport, Iowa police officers.

I honestly don't understand what goes through the cops' minds in situations like this. What could possibly justify the level of violence from their perspective?

Did you even watch the video? The woman was sitting in the office after already giving back all of the merchandise, was on the phone and an officer started wailing on her face with her kid in the room. What part of that is okay?