Tag Archives: guns

Links to the past: Crain’s Chicago hip-hop edition

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Every Sunday, I’ll be posting a “best of” roundup of items I linked to via Twitter with some brief thoughts. Here’s this week’s.

The Beverly community’s first responders will be the grand marshals of the South Side Irish Parade (note: I am a volunteer on the SSIP committee).

For some reason, Crain’s Chicago Business published a timeline of Chicago hip-hop, most of which had nothing to do with Chicago hip-hop’s affects on business, Chicago or otherwise, which is a shame because that would have been interesting. Keep on slicing up an ever-decreasing share of media verticals, everybody!

This “all-headline, no body” post is the dumbest thing I read last week, possibly ever.

Kevin Willer is leavingthe Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center and the deservedly-heralded 1871 tech hub for a venture capital fund.

I’m 99% sure Billy Dec is in on the joke of this parody video of himself. Mostly because the joke isn’t that funny (for a Mancow-fronted video about an easy target it’s pulling its punches a bit, no?).

Not sure if this article from Digiday means Virgin Mobile sits in on the actual editorial meetings with Buzzfeed to discuss story ideas or an “editorial” meeting (read: advertorial) with creatives to help them craft story ideas. Either way, it should scare the crap out of everybody, publishers and agencies alike.

According to DNA Info Chicago’s read on neighborhood census data, Beverly has the 2nd highest number of married men in Chicago. And as Rob Hart replied to me when I posted it on Valentine’s Day: “they’ve all made reservations at Koda, so good luck getting a table.”

Finally, last week’s Time Out Chicago cover story on what you can do to combat gun violence perpetrated against Chicago kids is a must-read, including its list of 30 ways to do it and Alex Kotlowitz’s essay on why downtown and North Side communities need to pay attention to the plague eating away at the South and West sides.

This American Life devotes two shows to these issues, with a special emphasis on Harper High School “where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot.” You can listen to part one here. (Part two goes up this week.) Throughout part one, you’ll hear a recurring theme: school as a refuge from gun violence. Perhaps now’s not the best time to be closing Chicago public schools on the South and West Sides.

Things I don’t understand

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There are a number of arguments you can make against marriage equality or “gay marriage.” None of them are persuasive to me for reasons beyond the nature of this post. Regardless of intent, all are countered by the simple understanding that we cannot deny basic rights to one group of people if we extend them to others.

Yet the arguments make a kind of sense to me. Their basis is usually in fear and that’s a universal emotion, even if I don’t agree with the roots of that fear – usually an effort to hold on to some imagined way of life (the “traditional marriage” argument) that didn’t exist before and doesn’t exist now. I may disagree with the intent but I can at least get my head around it.

The argument Cardinal George made in a letter this week? I don’t get it. It’s not based in fear. It’s based in a kind of logic. A deeply flawed logic with truck-sized holes in it.

“Civil laws that establish ‘same sex marriage’ create a legal fiction,” George wrote in a letter sent to priests today. “The State has no power to create something that nature itself tells us is impossible.”

What does nature tell us is impossible? Reporter Manya A. Brachear explains:

According to the tradition of natural law, every human being must seek a fundamental “good” that corresponds to the natural order to flourish. Natural-law proponents say heterosexual intercourse between a married man and a woman serves two intertwined good purposes: to procreate and to express a deep, abiding love.

In fairness to Cardinal George, those aren’t his words even if the crux of the argument is. Here’s what I don’t understand:

Where does this leave couples who cannot have children due to a biological reason? If they cannot procreate, does their marriage run counter to natural law? Or if couples feel called to adoption – and as someone with just a passing familiarity of the domestic and international processes, make no mistake, it is a calling – is their marriage in opposition to the natural law Cardinal George feels is so important? What about couples who have a deep, abiding love but feel children are not possible in their marriage due to financial or other lifestyle concerns? Why isn’t Cardinal George trying to oppose these marriages? Is it because in Cardinal George’s mind he imagines they’re capable of both procreation and love and perhaps God will guide them to procreation by changing the nature of their minds or healing their biological concerns? Odd that the Cardinal views man’s mental or biological free will – a gift from God – with such contempt.

On a completely separate topic is this piece from New York magazine on what happened when the California State Teachers Retirement System, a public pension find, let a private equity firm called Cerberus Capital Management know it was less than happy with the firm’s ownership of a certain gun manufacturer:

Cerberus, it emerged, owns the company that makes the Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle used in the Sandy Hook spree (along with other gun companies). CalSTRS, which has $750 million invested in Cerberus funds, made it known that it wasn’t happy about this news.

Hours later, Cerberus — whose CEO’s father lives in Newtown — announced that it was putting its firearms holdings up for sale.

What I don’t understand is this: Could this method be used to reduce the widespread sale of guns in this country? A democratic political operative I’m friendly with on Twitter thinks it’s the ballot, not the buck, that stops the bullet.* And there may be reasons why the above wouldn’t operate at scale.

Worth trying to understand why or why not though, right?

* Apologies if that conversation is a bit tough to follow via the link. I’m not feeling up to Storifying it to capture the context and order of how it unfolded.