How an AR-15 was used to protect a gas station from looting in Ferguson

This story shows that some humanity has survived the events in Ferguson.  From Reuters:

Since looting first erupted following the August police shooting of black teenager Michael Brown, nearly all the businesses in a 2 square mile area of this St Louis suburb have had to board up. One exception - a Conoco gas station and convenience store.
At least a dozen stores have been set ablaze and others looted in Ferguson . . . .
On Tuesday night, as police and soldiers took up positions in the parking lots of virtually every strip mall and big box store around it, the forecourt of the brightly lit gas station was busy with customers.
One, a six feet, eight-inch tall man named Derrick Jordan – “Stretch,” as friends call him - whisked an AR-15 assault rifle out from a pickup truck parked near the entrance.
Jordan, 37, was one of four black Ferguson residents who spent Tuesday night planted in front of the store, pistols tucked into their waistbands, waiting to ward off looters or catch shoplifters.
Jordan and the others guarding the gas station are all black. The station's owner is white.
. . . By some accounts, the Brown shooting has heightened racial tensions in the city. But not at the gas station.
"We would have been burned to the ground many times over if it weren’t for them,” said gas station owner Doug Merello, whose father first bought it in 1984. . . .

What occupations are the most dangerous?

(Click on figure to enlarge.) Data on how dangerous different occupations are can be found here.  

Child's iPod helps track down her kidnappers

It seems that it would have been easy to stop the tracking down of the iPod, but fortunately, the kidnappers didn't understand that.  That said, one wonders whether the publicity on these cases will make it harder to catch future criminals.  From Fox News:

The story of a 12-year-old girl's kidnapping fuels concerns about the dangers of the Internet—even as it demonstrates how today's devices can come to the rescue, Ars Technica reports. 

The Baltimore-area girl, identified in court as Jane Doe, communicated with several men via Xbox Live and social media. Earlier this month, she went missing, and a few days later, Microsoft produced a chilling transcript from one of her conversations with another contact, in which she said she was "going to live with some guy." She typed: "Im scared he said he was gonna kidnap me." After she was found, she said she had been raped twice. 

Jane Doe's iPod Touch helped investigators track her down via what police called "digital forensics," officials said, as the Perry Hall Patch reports. Apple told authorities where the iPod had been used recently, including at a home in North Carolina. 

Further investigation there directed searchers to another home, where they found the girl a few days after she'd gone missing. Now, Victor Yanez Arroyo, 32, has been charged with kidnapping and rape, among other charges. . . .

With riots still going on in Ferguson, the New York Times publishes Darren Wilson's address

From Howard Kurtz over at Fox News:

The New York Times, whether consciously or not, has just endangered Darren Wilson’s life. 

With tensions running high in Ferguson over the lack of an indictment for Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown, the paper has published the officer’s approximate address -- the street and town where he lives with his new wife, who also is named. 

Given the racial animosity unleashed by Brown’s death, given the rioting and the looting and the stores that were set afire, how can a news organization make it easier for some crazy zealot to track down Wilson? 

But there it is in the paper: 

“Officer Wilson and [blank] own a home together on [blank] Lane in [blank], Mo., a St. Louis suburb about a half-hour drive from Ferguson.” 

I mean, why not add a locator map?  . . . .

Chuck Schumer: "The Public Knows In Its Gut" Only Government Can Help Middle Class

There is one way that Democratic Senator Schumer is correct here.   If you accept that we have the highest tax rates in the world and a huge regulatory burden and that those are reducing investments and thus wages. then "yes" there is something that government can do: get out of the way, 

. . . As 2014 began, the parties were in stalemate. But, when government failed to deliver on a string of non-economic issues: the rollout of the Obamacare exchanges and the mishandling of the surge in border crossers, the ineptitude of the VA, the initial handling of the Ebola threat, people lost faith in government's ability to work, and then blamed the incumbent governing party, the Democrats, creating a Republican wave.  

Ultimately, the public knows in its gut that a strong and active government is the only way to reverse the middle class decline and help revive the American Dream. Democrats lost in 2014 because the government made mistakes that eroded the electorate's confidence in its ability to improve the lives of the middle class. . . . .

There seems to be a lot more controversy over Schumer's crass comments about whether the Democrats should have done Obamacare rather than focusing on the economy.  What Schumer missed with these comments is that Obamacare actually made a lot of people worse off.  It increased health insurance costs, but subsidies hid those increases from many.