More than 460 people have died in encounters with police in Canada since 2000

CBC News has done the investigative journalism, crunched the numbers, and come up with a picture of fatalities in police encounters in Canada that appears to agree with what everybody is saying is happening in the USA... and it's been happening for the last two decades.

Quote:The rate at which Canadians die in encounters with police has nearly doubled in the last 20 years.

Quote:The number of people who struggle with mental health and die in these encounters is steadily climbing at a similar rate.

"Oh, it's definitely getting worse," said Jennifer Lavoie, a criminologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ont. Lavoie said the dissolution of traditional large-scale residential care facilities and a lack of resources for the mentally ill has contributed to the rise in incidents between police and those in emotional distress.

Lavoie believes the stigma of mental illness contributes to the use of lethal force in these cases.

"I think officers likely have the same kinds of attitudes towards people with mental illness that the public does, which is the attitude that people with mental illness tend to be more unpredictable, more dangerous than the general population," Lavoie said.

It's like a fic search thread, but for published novels you can only remember vague bits of.

The one that drove me to post this was (as almost always the case for me) sci-fi, with two main plot threads. One dealt with a human colony world that ran into difficulty when the previously quite earth-like conditions changed due to the sun suddenly dimming and dragging them off at relatively high acceleration, the other dealt with energy-being aliens who lived in stars discovering the joys of killin' and one of them setting a bunch of comfy stars up to fly off through space as a decoy while trying to pick out the one the killer was using and snipe it. Stuff happened, the colony got set up to survive an indeterminate length ice age and the viewpoint energy-being decided to lay low for a while until it was sure it'd gotten the psycho. Timeskip.

It's been a long time on the colony world, no one in living memory has seen the world like the old stories describe it or the stars as anything but a thin rainbow over the equator, until suddenly the rainbow spreads out again... then vanishes, nothing left but black. They have figured out that the planet-covering machinery on the local Mercury-equivalent seems to have been what was tapping the sun's energy and moving it along, but the rest of the universe vanishing is quite the shock, until somebody remembers time dilation and guesses that they may be into what is otherwise the heat-death of the universe.

This is so. The energy being is still around, vaguely dreaming of the happy energy-flush days of yore when stars were abundant and planetoids were more than dead lumps of inert matter pulled perfectly spherical by gravity over a long, long time of nothing happening to perturb them, and no energy to use except the occasional burst of radiation form proton decay(?). Then it notices something appear, remembers about those decoy suns soooo long ago, and realizes it inadvertently packed itself a lunch for this future and only wished it had sent more of them along, since a single sun's lifetime is so short. Still, good news for the moment, right? It moves in at the reappeared sun and looks around at what's on the planets it dragged along. Huh, there's the drive stuff, but what's all this?

It's my impression that the humans had just managed to open some kind of communication with the alien critter when the book ended, and I recall being annoyed that that was it, they didn't actually do anything. Does anyone recognize this, or know of a sequel/expansion? Some fan fiction, even? It may have been a novella or longish short story rather than a full book in its own right.

CBC Opinion/Analysis: The anti-Trump resistance should stop bringing knives to a gunfight

Neil Macdonald was CBC's Washington correspondent for 12 years - he has a good grasp of how things work inside the Beltway. Previous to that, he was CBC's Middle East correspondent for five years - he also has a good grasp of what sort of responses to power do and don't work.

He is not advocating armed opposition. He's advocating giving as good as the other side gives.

Here's the start of the article:

Quote:Poor Laura Ingraham, the delicate snowflake.

The Fox News Channel manure-thrower has taken some time off, having been blasted right out of her cable-TV battlefield command post by a bunch of high school kids.

Such a satisfying outcome. And Ingraham, accustomed to siccing Fox's army of far-right orcs against the liberals and moderate conservatives they hate with such slavering intensity, plainly didn't see it coming, which made it all the more enjoyable to watch.

Ingraham, who began her career in university outing gay students, probably thought David Hogg, a 17-year-old survivor of the recent Florida high school massacre, would crumple, or maybe start crying — you know, the way sensitive liberals tend to do — when she unleashed one of her ad hominem attacks on him, mocking him for being rejected by UCLA.

Instead, Hogg turned around and pasted her. He in fact out-Foxed her.

"Soooo, @IngrahamAngle, what are your biggest advertisers…" Hogg tweeted after her attack. He and his friends quickly assembled a list, and began a boycott.

It was exactly the sort of hardball that far-right activists play, and boy, did it work. Ingraham's advertisers began deserting her Fox show, even after she rushed out a sanctimonious apology "in the spirit of Holy Week," which was promptly rejected by Hogg.

Facing the sort of destruction visited on her former colleague Bill O'Reilly by an early form of #MeToo boycott, she abruptly announced she'd be taking a break to spend time with her family.

Over the weekend, Hogg tweeted: "Have some healthy reflections this Holy Week."

Fox News, with an utterly un-self-aware absence of irony, denounced the boycott as an "agenda-driven intimidation effort." When I read that one over breakfast, I nearly passed coffee through my nose.

Quote:Unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose members frittered away strong political traction by talking themselves to death, Hogg, Gonzalez and company clearly intend to weaponize theirs and adopt the tactics of their enemies, which is exactly what needs to be done.

America needs a real resistance, not slacktivists who talk about it.

Quote:Democrats who sat on their hands in 2016, arguing about the soul of the Democratic Party, the ones who just couldn't vote for Hillary Clinton because they found her "strident," have seen the result of their self-indulgence: a churlish chief executive who sits in the White House eating cheeseburgers, tweeting out inanities and insults, laughing at women who object to his serial sexual misconduct, inspiring white supremacists, persecuting innocent undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as infants, dismantling environmental and fiscal regulations, demonizing the FBI and the Justice and State departments and even the courts (and probably preparing pardons for his cohort and maybe even himself), and of course borrowing future generations into debt to grant America's richest people – his pals — the biggest tax cut in generations, against all conservative principle.

Of course, conservative principles, such as they are, don't concern Trump or his followers.

But money does, and power does, and the only way to thwart them is to take it away. It can be done.

CBC News: Trump says he wants military to help at U.S.-Mexico border

Has he never heard of the Posse Comitatus Act? Even I've heard of the Posse Comitatus Act, and I'm a Canadian.

May as well start a new thread for a new year (because I can't be bothered to dig down and find the old one).

The Ottawa forecast for tonight is for 60km/h winds with gusts to 90km/h - Beaufort 9 - and snow followed by freezing rain. Good thing I haven't put the shovels away yet, and I still have some ice melter.

(Kingston, Ontario is expecting gusts of up to 100km/h tonight - Beaufort 9-10. Being at the east end of one of the Great Lakes is a mixed blessing.)

So, a couple weeks back I found out that one of my coworkers is an avid reader of Harry Potter fanfic.  She and I have traded some emails, and she's promised me a rundown on what she's already read from a list of recommendations I made for her, and what she hasn't.

I very deliberately left Drunkard's Walk VIII off that list, partly from modesty and partly from not wanting to point her at a stalled story that will be some years yet before completion.  However, last week I reread all of the released chapters from the perspective of a first-time reader of anything in the Walk and realized -- I bobbled Doug's introduction.  DW8 completely assumes you already know who Doug is and what he's about.  It doesn't even give as much info -- or hints -- as DW2 had at the same point in its story, and in DW2 I was very deliberately playing a tease-and-tidbit game with Doug's backstory.  DW8, though, reveals almost nothing.

I'm thinking I have to change that, if only to make the story more accessible to those coming to the Walk for the first time through it.  So I'll be adding little bits here and there -- nothing huge or dramatic (I think), but definitely informative.  And I'm starting a thread about it because I want to start a bit of a debate about the mistake, as I see it.  And I admit, if anyone comes up with a good idea that I can use, I'm definitely going to steal it.  And also just to alert people to the mistake so folks will be aware, and call me on it if I do it again.

Maybe I am becoming a luddite, but I have a bad feeling about this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/techn...mazon.html

And its not only the jobs issue, which is a big part of my worries with these "advancements", but also the reams of information which will be collected.

Post them if you spot them! EDIT: Links, not re-posts - as usual for the threads here.

Wikivoyage's latest travel guide entry

(02-22-2018, 08:47 AM)robkelk Wrote: Guessing is one thing, but the freebie wiki is actually becoming the trusted source of information about 3D-art freebies. I need to do better than just guess.

alright, i'm going to open a general "I need help with [this] thread, that way things like @Jinx999 's request for a quick once over for mistakes or in my case a beta for a particular situation/scene.

Author Needs Assistance:

 

 

I need someone familiar with psychiatry and psychology to Beta read a section that discusses character’s mental states. I ask this because while I have a layman’s understanding I am in no way overly familiar with the subject matter and need my current antagonist to at least have a jurist’s understanding of the mental state.

 

In short, I need her arguments to at least make sense against the main character. Can anyone help me?

 

anyone that is interested in helping please PM me and i'll send you a GDoc link once i have the section finished