Something about this story just seems a bit, shall we say, “over-hyped”:

In the space of 11 days this year, seven people were murdered in Salinas. Each killing, like the record 25 homicides the previous year, spilled from the gang warfare that this summer pushed the homicide rate in the city of 140,000 to three times that of Los Angeles. Residents retreated indoors at night, and Mayor Dennis Donohue affirmed his decision to seek help from an unlikely source: the U.S. military.

...

"Obviously, there are restrictions," said Salinas Deputy Police Chief Kelly McMillin. "Not only the constitutional part of it, but just the idea we are going to have choppers fast-roping onto Alisal Street."

As far as I can tell, it boils down to: “not many jobs right now for young male unskilled workers who don’t speak much English, so joining a gang seems like a good idea; at least, until you get used as cannon fodder in a fight against another gang”.

And, of course, when the total number of homicides is so low, it’s easy for one or two serious incidents to dramatically alter the rate, creating a dramatic “worse than LA” comparison.

Not to imply that there are no problems. It’s quite clear from the statistical data that, taken as a whole, the Salinas SMSA has crime rates comparable to much larger cities; it’s just highly concentrated geographically. The warzone they paint in the article is nothing like the kid-friendly neighborhood where I handed out big handfuls of candy on Halloween night to roving bands of (often unescorted) little monsters.

[Update: a quick bit of math to show the rate swing: in 2006, the homicide rate was only 82% of the national average (4.7 versus 5.7), while in 2008 it was three times higher (17.4 versus 5.8). Since these are numbers per 100,000, and the current population is 148,350, that’s a difference of 11 homicides. The rate was also significantly lower than the national average from 1987 to 1991, which happens to be a period with low unemployment and lots of construction.]

Sloppiest. Blow job. Ever.

Fight global warming with wolves!

"We urge Senators Udall and McCain to take immediate action to restore wolves to Rocky Mountain National Park, as part of their climate change initiative"

...making her the latest spectacular victim of the bad debt crisis and nationwide recession

After 18 paragraphs that demonstrate that photographer Annie Liebovitz spends money (her own and other peoples’) like water, including the $24 million she hocked her work for less than a year ago, this is how the writer spins her: a victim of recession and “the bad debt crisis”. No hint that she actually lost money due to investments collapsing under the weight of someone else’s bad debt, mind you, just a firm deflection of responsibility.

The interesting question is what, precisely, she hocked, her work or her copyrights. Given that the lender (possibly slimed here as “a high-end pawn broker”) specializes in high-dollar art, probably the latter, which would pretty much cut her off from any future revenue. And with Goldman Sachs also asking for a piece of the pie, she’ll likely lose her home and equipment as well, leaving her dependent on new clients. Not fun.

This is just… sad.

Not so much because there’s a cartoonist who’d draw it, as because I’m seeing it linked approvingly by people who have access to wet matches, with which they can obviously no longer be trusted.

So, in a story about a well-placed State Department official on trial for spending the last 30 years spying for Cuba, what sort of direct quote do they lead off with?

"We were all appalled by the Bush years"

Because, y’know, that puts everything in perspective. If proven guilty, what we have here is someone who turned traitor because he started hating America during the Carter administration, but somehow, it’s still all about Bush. Fits the established narrative better, y’see.

Jon Wellinghoff, Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, “Earth Day” 2009:

I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism. Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind's going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you'll dispatch that first. People talk about, 'Oh, we need baseload.' It's like people saying we need more computing power, we need mainframes. We don't need mainframes, we have distributed computing.

(via The National Review)

From CNN, a little something for the folks who insist that paying tribute to pirates is a perfectly sensible economic transaction, and one that the recipients deserve for the hardships the West has inflicted upon them:

Piracy accelerated after the fall of the Somali government in the early 1990s and began to flourish after shipping companies started paying ransoms. Those payments started out being in the tens of thousands of dollars and have since climbed into the millions.

Oh, and yesterday they opened fire on the US-flagged food-aid ship that was transporting the American captain who had been held hostage by that other group of deprived, honest fishermen (who didn’t get the millions of dollars they politely requested at gunpoint).

[update 4/26: two recent data points worth noting]

Earlier Sunday, Kenyan maritime groups said Somali pirates had released another Yemeni freighter and its 15 crew members. The ship was seized in January with a cargo of petroleum products.

...

Separately Sunday, the captain of an Italian cruise ship said his security staff fought off a pirate attack in the region Saturday with pistols and a water hose. Commander Ciro Pinto told Italian media the ensuing gunfight damaged the ship, but the 1,500 passengers were unhurt.