Pro-Tip of the Day

Pro Tip: Wait until you're done with the barber before you stab a guy.
A Connecticut man who was halfway through a haircut allegedly stabbed another man in the back with a pair of scissors, according to police.

David Davis, 20, was getting his hair done in a Stamford apartment this afternoon when the attack occurred. Davis, pictured in the above mug shot, was arrested for felony assault. He is currently jailed in lieu of $5000 bond.

The victim--who was not Davis’s barber--was transported to a local hospital for treatment of his injuries.

Thanks to ASH for the link

Rand Paul Takes Kentucky

Rand Paul Wins Republican Senate Nomination in Kentucky

Rand Paul, one of the early leaders of the Tea Party movement, won the Republican nomination for Senate in Kentucky on Tuesday night, delivering a powerful blow to the party's establishment and offering the clearest evidence yet of the strength of the anti-government sentiment simmering at the grass-roots level.

Mr. Paul, the son of Representative Ron Paul of Texas, easily defeated Trey Grayson, the secretary of state from Kentucky. Voters turned against Mr. Grayson even though he had the support of the state's best-known political leader - Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader.

Take note, Washington.

And I'm happy to see the evil racist violent teabag movement found their voice at the ballot box. It's also pleasant to see the G.O.P. got their man handed back to him in that ballot box.

The grassroots raised money for Rand in small donations.

Trey Grayson had fundraisers thrown for him by the establishment. 21 Senators at one fundraiser, AIG lobbyists throwing another, endorsements from McConnell, Dick Cheney, Giuliani. And with all that weight and cash -- their horse got it's head chopped off.

That's awesome.

Uh, Excuse Me, Mister? Your sign melted my brane.

Amy Gets a Free Pass

When a young woman in Massachusetts killed her brother with a shotgun blast in 1986, no ballistics tests were done, and authorities waited more than a week to question family members. Amy Bishop would have a couple other free passes in her troubled past that would lead up to a tragic third act.

The death was ultimately ruled an accident. 25 years later, the shooter, Amy Bishop is "accused" in another shooting — an attack that killed three fellow biology professors at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

In the days since Friday's shooting, revelations about Amy Bishop's past have raised questions about whether much of the violence could have been prevented.

But maybe her story doesn't seem to be anywhere near the screeching volume that would be played if Mrs. Bishop wasn't a far-left fringe, Obama supporter? Where's the outrage? Where's the blood on the blackboard special? And where's the demand for more gun control? All just another free pass for Amy. It seems she's had many free passes written for her...

The story starts when police were called to the Braintree, Mass., home Bishop shared with her parents. Authorities found her 18-year-old brother, Seth, dead of a shotgun wound to the chest.

Bishop's father later told police he and his daughter had a disagreement and she went to her room. She said she had wanted to learn to load a shotgun her parents had bought after a recent break-in.

Bishop said she accidentally fired the gun in her bedroom as she tried to unload it, then went downstairs to ask her brother to help, according to a police report.

She said the gun went off again as Seth, a Northeastern University freshman and a virtuoso violinist, walked across the kitchen.

She told police she thought she had ruined the kitchen, but did not realize she had hit her brother. She said she ran away and thought she dropped the gun, which went off a third time. She did not remember anything else until she was taken to a police station. Isn't that a felony crime?

But police and witnesses say she fled with the gun to a car dealership, where she pointed it at employees and demanded a getaway car. She told them her husband was going to come after her and she needed to flee.

She was caught but never charged. Police said it took 11 days before they could interview family members because they were so distraught. When they finally did, authorities decided to let her go, declaring the whole thing an accident. If that's not a free pass - 11 days before homicide even interviewed anyone?

John Polio, who headed the Braintree police force at the time, at first defended the handling of the case. The 87-year-old said Tuesday that he recently read a 1987 report on the investigation written by a state trooper. At the time, he had not seen the document. But now, he says, "I would have wanted a lot more questions answered." Oh well, it's not like she also tried to kill other people outside her family right? Oh... hang on.

Bishop and her husband, James Anderson, graduated from Northeastern in 1988 with biology degrees. In 1993, Bishop earned a doctorate in genetics from Harvard.

That same year, she and her husband were questioned in part two: Two mail bombs were sent to a Harvard professor she worked with at Children's Hospital Boston. The explosives did not go off.

Anderson told The Associated Press he and his wife were among a number of innocent people questioned by investigators who cast a wide net. He said the case "had a dozen people swept up in this, and everybody was a subject, not a suspect."

"There was never any indictment, arrest, nothing, and then everyone was cleared after five years," he said.

Anderson also said his wife had been writing a novel at the time that was reviewed by law enforcement. The Boston Globe, citing a law enforcement source it did not identify, reported that it was about a woman who had killed her brother and was hoping to make amends by becoming a great scientist.

But Anderson said the novel was not autobiographical.

"It was just a novel. A medical thriller is the best way to describe it," he said. Sure.

In 2003, Bishop and Anderson moved to Huntsville, where they were raising their four children. Bishop appeared to be a rising star at the university — she developed a new type of portable cell incubator and won $25,000 in a statewide business competition in 2007. She appeared, smiling, on the cover of a local tech magazine that touted her advances.

But she was denied tenure by the university, and she was vocally pissed off that she had to find a new job.

Bishop also filed a complaint last year alleging gender discrimination by the university. The university denied the allegations, which are in a complaint pending before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The complaint itself, filed Sept. 15, was not available to the AP where this story was cut'n'pasted from.

Joseph Ng, an associate professor who worked with Bishop in the biology department, was in the cramped faculty conference room when gunfire erupted Friday afternoon during a monthly meeting.

About a dozen teachers and staff members were sitting elbow-to-elbow at a long table when Ng heard the "pop-pop-pop" of a 9 mm handgun.

He watched several of his colleagues go down, starting with the ones close to Bishop. He and the rest of the survivors dived under the table for cover. Three people were wounded.

Within seconds, the shooting stopped. During the lull, Debra Moriarity, a biochemistry professor, scrambled toward Bishop and urged her to stop, he said.

Bishop aimed at Moriarity and attempted to fire but the gun did not go off. Those professors should thank their makers that a 9 has a tendency to jam up if not properly maintained.

Moriarity then led the charge that forced Bishop out the door into a hallway. Her colleagues barricaded themselves in the room, and Bishop was arrested moments later outside the building. "Moriarity was probably the one that saved our lives. She was the one that initiated the rush," Ng said. "It took a lot of guts to just go up to her."

Guts, or survival instinct. I wish more folks would report this aspect of the story.

Bishop was under extra guard at an Alabama jail. Students and victims' relatives want to know how someone with such a tortured past could ever have been hired at a state university. As I'm sure the rest of the country would be asking... but I haven't heard much about this story.

"Do they not do background checks on teachers? How did all this slip through the cracks?" nursing student Caitlin Phillips asked.

University President David B. Williams defended the decision to hire Bishop. He said a review of her personnel file and her hiring file raised no red flags. She has no criminal record because she was never convicted of a crime.

Police ran a criminal background check Monday, after she was charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder.

"Even now, nothing came up," Williams said.

This story will be filled in Human Resources as another workplace violence statistic. According to OSHA, Violence in the workplace is a serious safety and health issue. Its most extreme form, homicide, is the fourth-leading cause of fatal occupational injury in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI), there were 564 workplace homicides in 2005 in the United States, out of a total of 5,702 fatal work injuries.

She'll probably plead 'insanity.' Three dead professors, and she'll get another free pass.

Associated Press writers Desiree Hunter in Huntsville, Bob Johnson in Montgomery, Mark Pratt in Boston and Devlin Barrett in Washington contributed to this report.

The Two Stories of Avatar 3D

It has taken a white man, an American white man, to tell the story of the Native American experience: in glorious Technicolor 3-D, no less. That was my first thought.

The complaints I’ve heard about Avatar is that the story is only, “okay”. “It’s derivative.” “We’ve seen it before.” While Dances with Wolves, Last Samurai and Fern Gully should be the first films that come to mind for the seasoned film critic, it is the historian who immediately senses a deeper meaning. Roger Ebert lazily shoots a tennis ball to his readers that they, “are free to find this an allegory about contemporary politics. Cameron obviously does.” But it is much more, and more metaphorical. Avatar isn’t simply damning the crossing of the Atlantic by Chris Columbus, Cortez’s ‘meeting’ the Aztecs and the passengers of the Mayflower debarking for a beer run: he’s damning all of it – and more. But, on the surface, the first story of Avatar that Cameron was re-telling, in my opinion, was that of Custer at Little Big Horn.

In late 1875, Sioux and Cheyenne Indians defiantly left their reservations, outraged over the continued intrusions of whites into their sacred lands in the Black Hills. The Black Hills that in July of 1874 an expeditionary force, which was led by General George Armstrong Custer, found something shinny.

When Horatio N. Ross, one of General Custer's practical miners of the expedition, found the glimmer of gold in the sparkling waters of French Creek, the die was cast.

The indigenous population regrouped, after a gentle government relocation effort, in Montana with the great warrior Sitting Bull. They had joined forces to stand and fight for their lands. The following spring, two victories over the US Cavalry emboldened them to fight on in the summer of 1876.

Ah, General George Armstrong Custer

To force the large Indian army back to their reservations, the Army dispatched three columns to attack in coordinated George Custer and the Seventh Cavalry spotted the Sioux village with a group of about forty warriors. Ignoring orders to wait for the other two, he decided to attack. He did not realize that the number of warriors in the village numbered three times his strength. Nor did he listen to his scouts.

He made this decision without knowing what kind of terrain he would have to cross before making his assault. He belatedly discovered that he would have to negotiate a maze of bluffs and ravines to attack. For those of you who saw the movie, does this sound familiar at all?

Major Marcus Reno’s squadron of 175 soldiers attacked the southern end. Quickly finding themselves in a desperate battle with little hope of any relief, Reno halted his charging men before they could be trapped, fought for ten minutes in dismounted formation, and then withdrew into the timber and brush along the river. When that position proved indefensible, they retreated uphill to the bluffs east of the river, pursued hotly by a mix of Cheyenne and Sioux.

Just as they finished driving the soldiers out, the Indians found roughly 210 of Custer's men coming towards the other end of the village, taking the pressure off of Reno's men. Cheyenne and Hunkpapa Sioux together crossed the river and slammed into the advancing soldiers, forcing them back to a long high ridge to the north. Meanwhile, another force, largely Oglala Sioux under Crazy Horse's command, swiftly moved downstream and then doubled back in a sweeping arc, enveloping Custer and his men in a pincer move. They began pouring in gunfire and arrows.

"Hurrah boys, we've got them! We'll finish them up and then go home to our station."
—Words reportedly said by General Custer shortly before being killed.

As the Indians closed in, Custer ordered his men to shoot their horses and stack the carcasses to form a wall, but they provided little protection against bullets. In less than an hour, Custer and his men were killed in the worst American military disaster ever.

One would think that the ‘Natives’ of Pandora won the day by killing Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and sending The Company’s Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) home. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) has gone native and has won the day. But if killing off Quatrch had even one half the effect of Sitting Bull killing Custer, well, to quote another Space Marine from another popular James Cameron movie, "Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Sitting Bull and Avatar II

Little Bighorn was the pinnacle of the Indians' power. They had achieved their greatest victory yet, but soon their tenuous union fell apart in the face of the white onslaught. Outraged over the death of a popular Civil War hero on the eve of the Centennial, the nation demanded and received harsh retribution. The Black Hills dispute was quickly settled by redrawing the boundary lines, placing the Black Hills outside the reservation and open to white settlement. Within a year, the Sioux nation was defeated and broken. Ironically, "Custer's Last Stand" was their last stand too.

And lest ye forget why the white man wanted the Black Hills in the first place? There’s gold in them thar hills. Custer’s expedition to the Black Hills spurred what is considered the last great gold rush in the continental United States. The first arrivals found nuggets the size of pinecones. Soon afterward Seth Bullock and Al Swearengen would be dueling it out on the muddy streets of Deadwood.

So that’s the surface story. Now here's what Avatar is really about...

The second story of Avatar is a debate of the future of the human race. No, not how we’re the bad guys and invading another planet for their precious rocks. I’m sure we’ll be doing that, and probably will be less caring and nice as ole’ Col. Quaritch.

What I see in Avatar is the final human civil war, the ultimate decision of our technological or biological evolution.

We’ve been fighting this battle for more than 4000 years. It’s the battle of the progress at all costs, or natural preservation. The tree on the hill is where I had my first kiss – but imminent domain says that land will make a quicker trip to the Wal Mart. Bye bye tree. It’s Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson screaming in George Washington’s cabinet meetings over the value of a mechanized modern economy over an agrarian one. That one involved the enslavement of other men and led to real blood. Avatar is the final battle of complete engineering of the biosphere to the point where all of the living organisms act as fiber optic cable and one giant nerve center, or to be encased in oxygen rich stainless steel cockpits, not too far removed from the Borg or RoboCop.

Both of these worlds are not too far off the horizon of current human development. Even today, these two debates come to a roaring boil in medical laboratories and at MIT. Will the future re-grow that lost limb, or slap on a superior mechanical appendage? The biological debate is winning in the advancement of human food production. We have cows, chickens, potatoes and even marijuana plants that have been crossbred to meet our ever-increasing demands of nature. The Na'vi of Pandora evolved their surroundings and the creatures to do their bidding. They come across as extremely alien to us, but they represent a possible ‘us.’ They are the end product of genetic engineering, animal husbandry and self-sufficient living. Sure, it looks like they simply grew up around in perfect harmony – but their beasts of burden don’t have HDMI cables by accident. Even the Native Americans heavily worked and molded the landscapes to their bidding. White folks just didn’t see much evidence of this since the European germs thinned out the tribes. Feel free to read Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel for more on why.

Meanwhile, the humans – or the ‘aliens’ of Avatar are dependent on their technology. They cannot leave their cocoons of conditioned air capsules. They require machines and energy to power their very lives. We learn from Jake that their whole reason for being there is that their world “has no green.” Their machines consume energy and belch out toxic by-products, and they need more. The romantic view of these same aliens play out in Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek. The less romantic are Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. They are locusts from earth and they only lay waste while they consume. They don’t recycle. Hell, they don’t even re-use – as it seems it would be fairly simple to recreate Jake’s legs with two simple robot legs or to re-grow them in the same chamber that they were able to grow a full sized adult Avatar. Instead, they use this as a carrot to dangle in the hero’s face. Maybe that’s why he goes native so easily? And quickly?

But don’t fear, because as [hypocritically] James Cameron touts the highest level of Hollywood special effects and specially created 3-D cameras in his movie, his technology loving Space Marines are getting their asses handed to them: by no less than two aliens in two alien movies. The first is 1986’s Aliens – where the aliens there are even more parasitic than the humans, and act more like viruses. Again, the underlining theme of biology based evolution vs. technological based evolution. Plus, the aliens on LV-426 have acidic blood and kind of look phallic. In this one, the natives are trying to protect their homes, their graveyards, and their way of life – and, yeah, pretty much their entire planet. But it’s the metaphorical super battle in the end that has the ironic twist of Ellen Ripley’s weaponized air conditioned heavy lifter duking it out with the turn coat biological Avatar who is himself lying in his own air conditioned electrical box.

Cameron has a history of hating technology, but at the same time embracing it. The Terminator is a cautionary tale of the over reliance of technology and computers, and how quickly it can spin out of our control. An added twister of dripping irony is that Skynet recognizes humanity as a threat [which is correct] and uses man’s own weapons against him. Aliens shows our arrogance of our superiority over bugs because we have better technology. Then Cameron turns it up to 11 with Titanic, which is the largest metaphor for human arrogance and dependence on technology since the story of Icarus. And it had Céline Dion. Avatar suggests the nice blue people ought to win. It's so nice.

Our history says that the hairless apes will be coming back to Avatar, and this time they’ll be all out of bubble gum.

A Tale of Two Countries

UK is the violent crime capital of Europe

Analysis of figures from the European Commission showed a 77 per cent increase in murders, robberies, assaults and sexual offenses in the UK since the Labour Party came to power.

The total number of violent offenses recorded compared to population is higher than any other country in Europe, as well as America, Canada, Australia and South Africa.

The UK had a greater number of murders in 2007 than any other EU country – 927 – and at a relative rate higher than most western European neighbors, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

US Violent Crime Rates Lowest Recorded

The violent crime rate peaked in 1991 at 758.2 crimes per 100,000 population. Violent crimes include homicide, aggravated assaults, and forcible rapes. In 2008, the violent crime rate dropped to its lowest recorded level of 454.5 per 100,000 people. In addition, the property crime rate has also fallen from its 1991 peak of 5,140.2 per 100,000 to its lowest recorded rate of 3,212.5 per 100,000 in 2008.

For complete FBI crime rate tabulations go here.