Fri-If a Rapist Or Pedophile Kills Civilians for 6 Months

Here's One Way to End Bank Robberies.  Close the Banks.

Lebanese banks have said they will soon announce a three-day closure next week over mounting security concerns following a series of incidents involving people seeking access to their savings by entering banks armed with guns.

On Friday, eight banks were held up by depositors who demanded their own money, Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr reported, adding to a spate of holdups this week spurred by frustration over a spiralling financial implosion with no end in sight.

As If We Needed a Reason to Avoid Street Drugs

Two dangerous and highly potent illicit drugs are increasingly infiltrating the supply of street drugs, putting people at risk for deadly overdoses.

One is a class of synthetic opioids, called nitazenes, that can be up to 10 times stronger than fentanyl, experts say. Fentanyl is already 50 times more powerful than heroin.

On Thursday, the Tennessee Department of Health published data showing a four-fold increase in deadly overdoses linked to nitazenes in the last two years.

No nitazene-related deaths were documented in Tennessee in 2019, according to the report. In 2020, however, 10 such deaths were reported. In 2021, the number increased to 42.

"Nitazenes are an emerging group of highly potent psychoactive substances" that are often left out of drug screening tests, the report's authors wrote.

While naloxone, or Narcan, is highly effective at reversing opioid overdoses, health officials in Tennessee worry that because nitazenes are so powerful they might require multiple doses of the rescue medication.

The highly potent opioids has been found in street drugs across the Midwest and Northeast since 2019, but has since spread to other states.

I Wonder How Much of this Is Democrats Liking Him More

President Joe Biden’s popularity improved substantially from his lowest point this summer, but concerns about his handling of the economy persist, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Support for Biden recovered from a low of 36% in July to 45%, driven in large part by a rebound in support from Democrats just two months before the November midterm elections. During a few bleak summer months when gasoline prices peaked and lawmakers appeared deadlocked, the Democrats faced the possibility of blowout losses against Republicans.

Their outlook appears better after notching a string of legislative successes that left more Americans ready to judge the Democratic president on his preferred terms: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”

Though the president has yet to return to the lofty 60% approval ratings he had for the first six months of his term, 45% is a dramatic improvement from his numbers over the summer. In May, June and July, his approval rating never exceeded 40%.

The rising good fortunes for the president follow several recent wins for him and his party. Democrats passed two significant bills in August – the Inflation Reduction Act that makes historic investments in climate and the economy and the CHIPS Act that facilitates the growth of American manufacturing of computer chips. In addition, economic strain on Americans appears to be lessening.

Racism Today Looks a Lot Like Past Racism

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis lured migrants onto a plane in Texas with promises that they would find jobs and work papers in Boston, then dropped them in Martha’s Vineyard, he was echoing an earlier history that shows exactly who he is. Massachusetts state Sen. Julian Cyr immediately identified the similarities to the “reverse freedom rides” of the early 1960s, when segregationist politicians in Arkansas and other southern states bused Black families north to make a political point. That ugly history is very much at play as Republican politicians today bus and fly migrants to Illinois, New York, Washington, D.C., and now Martha’s Vineyard.

“For many years, certain politicians, educators, and certain religious leaders have used the white people of the South as a whipping boy, to put it mildly, to further their own ends and their political campaigns,” Amis Guthridge, one of the architects of the reverse freedom rides, is quoted in an in-depth 2019 piece by Gabrielle Emanuel at GBH News. “We’re going to find out if people like Ted Kennedy … and the Kennedys, all of them, really do have an interest in the Negro people, really do have a love for the Negro.”

Hundreds of Black people, mostly from Arkansas and Louisiana, were misled or, in some cases, coerced onto buses north, ending up in states from California to New Hampshire. But the largest number, nearly 100, were sent to Hyannis, Massachusetts. Because when Amis Guthridge said, “We’re going to find out if people like Ted Kennedy … and the Kennedys, all of them, really do have an interest in the Negro people, really do have a love for the Negro,” he was intending to send people literally to the Kennedys’ doorstep, or anyway to the bus stop closest to where the Kennedys spent their summers, telling them they would meet President John Kennedy when they arrived.

Columbia is Corrupt.  No.  Not the Country.  Well, Actually the Country is Corrupt, Too

The Columbia University academic whose exposure of false data caused the prestigious institution to plunge in US college rankings has accused its administration of deception and a whitewash over the affair.

Michael Thaddeus, a mathematics professor, said that by submitting rigged numbers to drive the university up the influential US News & World Report rankings, Columbia put its financial priorities ahead of students education in order to fund a ballooning and secretive bureaucracy.

On Monday, US News relegated (Like English soccer?) Columbia from second to 18th in the latest rankings after the college admitted to “outdated and/or incorrect methodologies” in some of its previous claims about the quality of the education the university provides.

“I find it very difficult to believe the errors were honest and inadvertent at this point,” Thaddeus told the Guardian.

He added: “The response that the university made was not the forthright, direct, complete response of a university that really wanted to clear the air and really wanted to inform the public. They address certain issues but then they completely ignored or whitewashed other ones.”

Thaddeus embarrassed Columbia and shocked the academic world in February when he published a lengthy analysis accusing the university of submitting “inaccurate, dubious or highly misleading” statistics for the US News rankings. Among other things, he took issue with claims about class sizes, which the mathematics professor said he knew from experience were not accurate, and the assertion that all of the university’s faculty held the highest degrees in their fields.

Thaddeus also said the university hugely overstated spending on instruction, claiming it far exceeded other Ivy League universities, by adding in the cost of patient care in the medical school.

Columbia initially defended its numbers before admitting on Friday that Thaddeus was right about class sizes and the qualifications of its teaching staff. “We deeply regret the deficiencies in our prior reporting and are committed to doing better,” Columbia’s provost, Mary Boyce, said in the statement.

In July, the university said it was pulling out of this year’s rankings. US News made its own calculations, based in part on federal data, and this week moved the university down a humiliating 16 places.

Thaddeus began digging into the numbers as Columbia celebrated its stunning rise in the rankings from 18th in 1988. It broke into the top five in 2011 and eventually made second place last year.

“A few other top-tier universities have also improved their standings, but none has matched Columbia’s extraordinary rise. It is natural to wonder what the reason might be,” he wrote in his analysis.

When Thaddeus began to suspect that Columbia’s numbers didn’t add up, he saw the opportunity to discredit a system he regards as a con perpetrated on prospective students desperate to ensure that the tens of thousands of dollars a year many will spend on gigantic tuition fees are worth it.

The US News rankings, alongside less influential ones by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and other publications, have a significant impact on which universities prospective students favor. Thaddeus said Columbia’s fall exposes the shoddiness of a system that relies on an institution’s own numbers without checking.

“I’ve long believed that all university rankings are essentially worthless. They’re based on data that have very little to do with the academic merit of an institution and that the data might not be accurate in the first place,” he said.

“It was never my objective to knock Columbia down the rankings. A better outcome would be if the rankings themselves are knocked down and people just stop reading them, stop taking them as seriously as they have.”

It’s not the first scandal involving the US News rankings. Last year, a former dean of Temple University’s business school in Philadelphia was sent to prison for fraud after rigging data to move the college’s MBA sharply up the rankings.

What Canadian pharmacy do you use?