December 18th, 2008
Sometimes disgust and inaudible screams of disbelief is all one can muster:
It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn’s home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked her 12-year-old daughter, Dymond, to pop outside and turn the switch back on.
As Dymond headed toward the breaker, a blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, “You’re a prostitute. You’re coming with me.”
Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat.
As it turned out, the three men were plain-clothed Galveston police officers…
[...]
… The police went to the wrong house, two blocks away from the area of the reported illegal activity, Milburn’s attorney, Anthony Griffin, tells Hair Balls.
After the incident, Dymond was hospitalized and suffered black eyes as well as throat and ear drum injuries.
Three weeks later, according to the lawsuit, police went to Dymond’s school, where she was an honor student, and arrested her for assaulting a public servant. Griffin says the allegations stem from when Dymond fought back against the three men who were trying to take her from her home.
Errors happen. Shit happens… “Collateral damage” happens… I know… But, how? How does a twelve year old girl, or anyone for that matter, recover after something like this?
I wish the men that did this an eternity of sleepless nights, tormented by the horror of their actions, and the knowledge that, in the nightmares of a forever twelve year old girl, they’ll be remembered as monsters.
October 13th, 2008
Like many progressives I’ve read and followed Paul Krugman for a number of years now, and consider him, not only prescient about the Bush presidency, but brave for speaking against the Iraq war when it was politically dangerous for public figures do so. To date, Paul Krugman has been thoroughly vindicated on economic policy, the Iraq invasion and, too, the catastrophe that is the Bush administration.
It is because of my respect for him that I’m sincerely happy to read that Paul Krugman has today been awarded the Nobel prize in economics:
Paul Krugman, the Princeton University scholar and New York Times columnist, won the Nobel economic prize Monday for his analysis of how economies of scale can affect trade patterns and the location of economic activity.
Krugman has been a harsh critic of the Bush administration and the Republican Party in The New York Times, where he writes a regular column and has a blog called “Conscience of a Liberal.”
[…]
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences praised Krugman for formulating a new theory to answer questions about free trade.
“What are the effects of free trade and globalization? What are the driving forces behind worldwide urbanization? Paul Krugman has formulated a new theory to answer these questions,” the academy said in its citation.
May 31st, 2008
Phew! That was close. If you visited my site over the past couple of days you, I’m sure, noticed that something was wrong, er, terribly wrong. Uh, yeah. The short story, while conducting an upgrade the table that hosts all my posts “hung up,” making all that I’ve written over the past couple of years completely inaccessible.
I have to admit, there was a moment of panic, where I thought, Shit, I just lost everything! But, I remembered, I have a back up. (That’s right, A back up — as in one back up.) My hope was short lived, though. My back up was inaccessible through the regular admin, and the file had not pulled the posts table. So, although I was able to get to the back up via FTP, my single back up was of no use to me, because it did not contain the posts table. Long story short, I was sure that I would need to start all over again, from scratch — fresh install and give up on trying to retrieve my old posts. After seeking help and some digging around, I was able to get the posts table “unstuck” and, voila, my blog is back.
The lesson: have multiple back ups, and confirm that they contain all relevant tables.
