Latest Posts by desert-journey - Page 3

(小俣さんのツイート: “いくら、嫌いか。… ”から)

Miko's Urban Legend: "Do you want the red paper or the Blue paper?"

Jo'on: "I'll take...the Green paper!"

Miko's Urban Legend: "What the-"

Jo'on: "Gimme your money, nerd!"

We should be thankful for this not taking 

place anywhere near the town of Tull.

Sonic & Tails are secretly in the arcade version of ‘Fighting Vipers’, accessed via hacking. Here’s Sonic taking down Bahn.

Обычная дорога в городе Итикава в Японии.

herbal teas are literally just potions

«Утро, Спайк, как новенький ошейник?

Gunsmith Cats (1995)

>No comment,  hang white suburbanites.

An article in the Atlantic by John McWhorter on courts misunderstanding African American English. Excerpt: 

In 2007, a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dissent claimed that when a black woman said, in terror, “He finna shoot me,” she may have been referring to something in the past, when in fact “finna” refers to the immediate future. “Why don’t you just give me a lawyer, dog?” Warren Demesme asked the police when accused of sexual assault in 2017. The statements one makes to law enforcement after requesting a lawyer are inadmissible—but Demesme’s rights were ignored because, it was argued, he’d requested a “lawyer dog,” not an actual attorney. […]

People who will spend their careers transcribing phrases such as “He come tell ’bout I’m gonna take the TV”—or even “Dat table, dey close?”—ought to learn the basics of how Black English works. They would need mastery of only about 25 grammatical traits, which are universal in Black English nationwide, despite local differences. For example, be, when used in a sentence such as She be there on Sunday, refers to something regular and habitual, as in “every Sunday,” and is not simply a randomly unconjugated be. Another example: We had went to the store then I got a text conveys that the person was still in the store when the text came, not that it came after he left.

Read the whole article

Previously: John Rickford on dialect discrimination in the courtroom. 

BREAKING: Openly gay Brazil congressman leaves job, country amid death threats

A month before he was set to begin a third term, Congressman Jean Wyllys announced on Thursday that he was currently outside Brazil and would not return.

An openly gay congressman who frequently clashed with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said Thursday he was leaving his job and the country because of mounting death threats.

In an interview published by daily Folha de S. Paulo, Congressman Jean Wyllys said he was currently outside of Brazil and had no plans to return. Instead, he said he would work in academia but did not say where.

Wyllys, who was re-elected in October and set to begin a third term in February, said death threats against him had increased significantly since Rio de Janeiro councilwoman Marielle Franco was shot and killed along with her driver in March. Franco was a friend and ally of Wyllys.

Many in Latin America’s largest nation saw Franco, who was black, bisexual and hailed from one of Rio de Janeiro’s most violent slums, as a symbol of hope for her strong advocacy for LGBTQ rights and outspoken criticism of police brutality in poor neighborhoods. Her death led to large protests in Brazil and in several countries.

Ten months later, no one has been arrested for her murder.

Since then, Wyllys, who represents Rio de Janeiro, has used a security detail.

Continue reading.

Someone as lethargic as you has a lot of gall claiming to have any sort of “energy”.

same energy

“You’re fine for now. But you know, there’s a fine line between courage and recklessness. As brave as you are, that does not make you immortal.”

(Source: Reza->Afshar deviantart.com)

I wanna, l wanna, I wanna love you, I know you love me too 🎶

I’m sorry, but I’m married with the sea~

Version:1.0 StartHTML:000000254 EndHTML:000058875 StartFragment:000058746 EndFragment:000058813 StartSelection:000058746 EndSelection:000058813 SourceURL:https://www.dw.com/en/brazilian-president-jair-bolsonaro-decrees-easier-gun-laws/a-47097336 Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro decrees easier gun laws | News | DW | 16.01.2019 Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro decrees easier gun laws

A world leader in homicides, Brazil is to have more relaxed gun laws. President Jair Bolsonaro signed a decree making it easier for people to own guns, and thus defend themselves. 

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed the decree making it easier for Brazilians to own firearms on Wednesday.

The former army captain and far-right leader said it would help people defend themselves; with less restrictive gun laws: "you can be sure that violence will fall," he claimed in a television interview last week.

In 2017, nearly 64,000 people were killed, the majority of them by firearms. Brazil's overall homicide rate is 30.8 per 100,000 inhabitants. This is three times higher than the level that the United Nations classifies as endemic violence.

"The people decided in favor of buying guns and ammunition and we can't deny what the people wanted at that moment," Bolsonaro said. He was referring to a referendum in 2005 when Brazilians voted against banning the manufacturing and selling of guns.

-o reason for a gun

New categories for gun ownership include citizens living in rural areas, in urban areas with high levels of homicide, business owners, gun collectors and hunters.

Buyers must be at least 25 years old, take a course at a gun club, undergo a psychological exam and not have a criminal record. Under the new decree, they no longer have to justify their interest in owning a gun.

"For a long time it was the state that decided who had the right or not to defend themselves, their family and their property. Today... we give Brazilian citizens the right to decide."

Four guns instead of two

People can own four guns, instead of the previous limit on two and do not have to renew the permit for 10 years.

Gun owners do have to have a safe with a key if there are children, adolescents or a person with a mental disability in the home.

They also can not yet carry the weapons in public, although Bolsonaro is planning to change that in a future law.

The law goes against an opinion poll by Datafolha last December which showed 61 percent of respondents believed firearms should be banned and posed a threat to others.

Brazil's Bolsonaro Pledges Action to 'Restore Democracy' in Venezuela

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro said on Thursday he would do all he could to "to re-establish order and democracy" in Venezuela, while his foreign minister met with Venezuelan opposition leaders.

The right-wing government of Bolsonaro on Saturday said it recognized Juan Guaido, a Venezuelan opposition leader who is head of the congress, as the rightful president of Venezuela - even though Guaido himself has not proclaimed himself president.

Socialist President Nicolas Maduro began a new term last week under a cloud of international criticism by governments around the world, who have described him as an illegitimate leader whose policies have plunged Venezuela into its worst ever economic crisis.

"We will continue doing everything possible to re-establish order, democracy and freedom there," Bolsonaro said in a video, in which he stood next to the head of the opposition-appointed Supreme Court in exile, Miguel Angel Martin.

"We asked the people of Venezuela to resist and have faith, because I believe a solution is coming soon," Bolsonaro said in the video issued by his office.

Guaido, a lawmaker from the hard-line Popular Will opposition party, said last week he was prepared to assume the presidency on an interim basis and call elections, but would only do so with support of the armed forces.

Since taking office Jan. 1, Bolsonaro has stepped up criticism of Maduro's government, the United States' biggest ideological foe in Latin America.

Also at the meeting was a representative for Luis Almagro, the secretary general of the Organization of American States who has said Venezuela should be suspended from the regional forum.

Bolsonaro's foreign minister Ernesto Araujo spent the morning huddled with a group of Venezuelan opposition leaders, led by the exiled former mayor of Caracas, Antonio Ledezma, to analyze the situation and Guaido's readiness to take over as acting president, a Brazilian foreign ministry statement said.

Venezuela's Information Ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The meeting also discussed ideas for "concrete action" to re-establish 

democracy in Venezuela, the statement said, without giving further details.

RIO DE JANEIRO—If you’re shocked by the transformations that Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new president, is planning for his country, you haven’t been paying attention.

Riding in on a wave of frustration with more than a decade of left-wing leadership, Bolsonaro has promised to bring dramatic change to Brazil, change intended to make leftists squirm. And if his first two weeks in office tell us anything, it’s that those who thought his brash talk—of ending policies creating protected land reserves for indigenous populations or of liberalizing Brazil’s gun laws to make it easier for Brazilians to own guns—was just campaign bluster might want to take a serious look at the president’s plans. He intends to follow through on his promises, even the most controversial ones.

What happens in Brazil has consequences not just for the country, but also for Latin America and the world. Brazil is the continent’s biggest economy and home to both the world’s largest rainforest and 211 million people. Globally, Bolsonaro’s critics fear that he could drive South America’s largest democracy toward fascism or even toward a return to military rule. An unapologetic firebrand, he has already signaled that he intends to lead Brazil into a new era. But what exactly will that mean for Brazil, and for everyone else?

More Stories

Brazil’s Fiery Far-Right Presidential Favorite Channels Trump  Chayenne Polimédio  

The Brazilian Spring That Never Arrived  Vincent Bevins  

Four areas in particular lie at the nexus of Bolsonaro’s priorities and critics’ concerns: land rights, education, the economy, and public security. What changes does the new president promise on these fronts, and which of those can he actually follow through on? These are the topics to watch in the coming months.

Land Rights

One of Bolsonaro’s first acts as president—which he boasted of on Twitter, à la Donald Trump—was to halt all new demarcations of indigenous lands. In effect, that means the decades-long effort by Brazil’s indigenous populations to seek recognition and legal title to land has been foiled.

Bolsonaro has argued that demarcated land for indigenous peoples is akin to keeping them “secluded in reserves like zoo animals” when “an Indian is a human being just like us.” His critics, though, see an ulterior motive: Stopping the demarcation process opens up land—especially in remote parts of the Amazon—to powerful players such as the mining, farming, and logging industries. Functionally, indigenous reserves have been used as a proxy for environmental protections.

And indigenous peoples are not a strong enough lobbying group to fight back. Maurício Santoro, an expert on Brazilian politics at Rio de Janeiro State University, told me that along with the LGBTQ community, indigenous peoples are the most threatened social group under Bolsonaro’s administration.

There are structural limits holding Bolsonaro back, though: His ability to strip all of indigenous peoples’ land-demarcation rights is hamstrung by strong protections for those communities under the Brazilian constitution, ones Santoro is confident the Brazilian supreme court will uphold. Toss in a heavy dose of international pressure to protect indigenous peoples, and Bolsonaro might see his land-rights plans backfire.

Education

Brazil’s education system is worse than you might imagine. In the hot north of the country, some students attend schools made of sticks and mud. In Rio’s hillside slums, or favelas, schools are out of session for weeks or months at a time, thanks to regular gunfire in the area. Even in the better-educated south of the country, teachers have been protesting in the streets for better pay for years. And countrywide, illiteracy is on the rise.

/These are not, however, the education issues Bolsonaro has promised to focus on. Instead, his primary, and most controversial, proposal is for the removal of what he calls “Marxist garbage”—code for any teaching that deals with sexuality or gender issues, or even evolution—from the classroom. He has also proposed mandatory classroom lessons on “moral and civic education,” a kind of Patriotism 101.

His new minister of education is a Colombian professor emeritus at Brazil’s military schools who has blogged about keeping “traditional values” in the classroom and who has thus far positioned himself as Bolsonaro’s yes-man. Look for Brazil’s president to press him to make smaller changes, possibly including stripping out essay questions about issues such as gender violence from the national college-entrance exam.

Economy

Part of the reason many Brazilians elected Bolsonaro was because he promised to make Brazil more capitalist. His voters point to Venezuela and its crumbling socialist state as an example of the dangerous path Brazil was on under (now-jailed) former President Luiz Inácio da Silva. (Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, for his part, called Bolsonaro a “fascist” during his inauguration speech.)

How does Bolsonaro want to do this? Privatization. The idea tantalizes Brazil’s most powerful would-be investors, but not so much everyday Brazilians: Polls show that most people here are against full-throttle privatization, and instead enjoy their welfare state and the nationalized health, education, and unemployment systems. Plus, Bolsonaro’s party has only about a tenth of the seats in Brazil’s congress, and the president has yet to cement any political alliances that will help him pass big, expensive legislation.

An easier path than wholesale privatization may be for Bolsonaro to change the pension system, particularly by raising the retirement age. Today military leaders can retire young with their full salary, plus benefits, for life—2017 numbers show that 55 percent of people who served in the military retired before the age of 50, and the minimum age of retirement can be as low as 55 for civilian women. By raising the retirement age and reducing pension benefits, Bolsonaro would be cutting the overall costs of doing business in Brazil, helping win over business leaders and international investors alike. Bolsonaro himself has expressed anxiety over making this change, but Carlos Kawall, the chief economist for the Brazilian lender Banco Safra, notes that the pension-reform battle will be a major indicator of the future success of the country’s economy.

The thing is, one of Bolsonaro’s biggest bases of support is the military; the former army captain will find that stripping the benefits of his former colleagues is unlikely to play well. Instead, Santoro predicts that Bolsonaro will look to pass a watered down, minimalist reform, which may include setting the minimum age for retirement at 65, or even 62, for everyone.

Public Security

Brazil is the world’s leader in homicides: In 2017, 63,880 people were murdered here, and despite federal intervention in the state of Rio de Janeiro and along the Brazilian border with Venezuela, a comprehensive solution still eludes the government.

Bolsonaro has marketed himself as a locked-and-loaded tough guy (his trademark gesture is two fingers pointing two imaginary guns), and that image has resonated strongly with his supporters, who are both fed up with the violence and also intrigued by the idea of American-style gun ownership. Forty-one percent of Brazilians think gun possession should be allowed for a citizen to defend himself. Currently, just to keep a gun at home, most Brazilians have to jump through significant hoops, including regular psychological and physical tests. They even have to justify needing one at all, for example, with a police record showing they have been targeted by personal threats.

In one of his first tweets as president, Bolsonaro promised to liberalize gun control in Brazil. For now, the only people who walk around with guns in Brazil are either cops or robbers. Bolsonaro wants to change that, not only making it easier for Brazilians to buy guns, but allowing them to carry guns as well.

Loosening gun-ownership restrictions would be one of Bolsonaro’s easiest successes, Santoro said, because such reforms would not require asking congress for much money, and would win him plaudits from his supporters. The results, however, could be brutal.

The São Paulo nonprofit Instituto Sou da Paz collects data on gun ownership and gun use in Brazil, and its executive director, Ivan Marques, says the figures show that “getting more guns into circulation will mean negative consequences for public security in Brazil.” He points to a study published by the Brazilian government itself in 2013 that shows that a 1 percent increase in guns in an area corresponds with a 1 to 2 percent increase in the homicide rate of that area. “Any weakening of gun laws,” Marques says, “will leave us fated to an increase in the levels of violence.”

Biologija 4

....indeed that you won’t figure out it’s a more than 24 man job.

It s really sad

A: The seven steps of the scientific method are observing an occurrence or asking a question, researching the topic, forming a hypothesis, designing and conducting an experiment, analyzing results, drawing a conclusion and reporting results.

tero_makela

Kotka, Finland

I think I just broke my own heart.

“SHINJI, GET IN THE GIANT ROBOT YOU F U C K E R !  !  !  !  !  !  !”

今日も - today as well

@peanutscratch

Great reporting, and you’ve proven that depressed and stupid are on opposite sides of the graph...yet AGAIN.

 How stupid of you. 

I guess all that knowledge doesn’t count if you can’t be bothered to do anything except observe and play dressup. Not like I did anything to you personally, but I think I already have a good guess why.

Man found the stoplight cameras were activated during yellow lights and decided to cut the wires of it.