Vox Sentences: San Bernardino was officially a terrorist attack

Get ready to hear a lot about "self-radicalization"; we shook the box and it sure sounds like we're getting a rate hike for Christmas; and Chipotle's E. coli problem spreads.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

What does it mean to self-radicalize?

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• The FBI is officially investigating the massacre of 14 people in San Bernadino on Wednesday as a terrorist act, thanks to new online evidence.

  [New York Times / Michael S. Schmidt and Richard Perez-Pena]

• The key piece of evidence, reportedly, is a Facebook post made by alleged shooter Tashfeen Malik (and then deleted before the attack) pledging allegiance to ISIS and its head, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

  [Associated Press ]

• Here's what we actually know about ISIS' ties to the attack.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Just because ISIS might have inspired the attack doesn't mean they were involved in planning. Part of ISIS's role as the preeminent jihadist group is that it's the one that "lone wolves" tend to be attracted to, just like al-Qaeda was in the past.

  [Vox/ Zack Beauchamp]

• But as Rukhmini Callimachi points out, if ISIS itself is encouraging people to carry out attacks on their own, it might not be fair to treat those attacks differently from ones where ISIS was involved in logistics.

  [Rukhmini Callimachi via Twitter / Adrian Parsons]

• For this reason, conservatives have resisted the term "self-radicalization" — arguing that it underplays the extent to which the terrorist was radicalized by "radical Islam."

  [RedState / Matthew Clark]

• Meanwhile, cable news made an absolute ass of itself on Friday by stomping through the apartment belonging to Malik and her husband/fellow alleged shooter Syed Farook, showing photos and drivers' licenses of people who were alive and have not been associated with any crimes (like Farook's mother).

  [The Atlantic / David A. Graham]

The rate hikes are coming! The rate hikes are coming!

Mark Buckner/MCT via Getty Images

• The US economy added 211,000 jobs last month. Unless you got one of those jobs yourself, that might not be good news for you.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Here's why: the good jobs report makes it almost certain that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates above zero at its meeting December 16-17, for the first time since 2008.

  [Federal Reserve / Janet Yellen]

• Fed chair Janet Yellen told Congress this week that adding 100,000 jobs a month would be an indication that the economy was healthy enough for a rate hike. 211,000 is a lot more than 100,000.

  [Reuters / Howard Schneider and Jason Lange]

• Raising rates now reduces the risk of inflation. But as Paul Krugman (and others) have said, raising rates prematurely runs the risk of smothering the economic recovery — which would be worse, and less easily remedied, than inflation.

  [Bloomberg / Julie Verhage]

• Vox's Timothy B. Lee explained interest rates earlier this year; see his piece for the full story.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

News to make Chipotle investors queasy

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced today that three new cases of E. coli infection have been identified in 3 states — meaning that the outbreak of earlier this fall has continued, and has hit at least 9 states.

  [Reuters / Lisa Baertlein]

• The outbreak is linked to Chipotle, though the CDC hasn't yet identified a product (which means they can't tell Chipotle what to recall yet).

  [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]

• This is very bad news for the company. It's projecting that its sales for the October-December period this year could be down 11 percent.

  [BuzzFeed News / Venessa Wong]

• Interestingly, out of the three new cases, only one infected person reported they'd even eaten at Chipotle shortly before being infected.

  [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]

• This strain of E. coli, as it happens, isn't actually the most common strain of dangerous E. coli found in the US. This is a surprisingly interesting explainer from the CDC about it.

  [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]

MISCELLANEOUS

Baynazar Mohammad Nazar — a husband and father of four — was killed by an American gunship while being treated at the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. This is his story. [Foreign Policy / Andrew Quilty]

• How black holes eat stuff. (This turns out to be way less straightforward than it seems.)

  [Scientific American / Seth Fletcher]

• Smiling in photos is a relatively new trend, only gaining steam in the 1950s.

  [Washington Post / Jeff Guo]

• Ending economic growth would certainly help combat climate change. But a world without growth would be a horrific dystopia.

  [NYT / Eduardo Porter]

• The first black candidate for president wasn't Shirley Chisholm. It was George Edwin Taylor, all the way back in 1904.

  [NPR / Linton Weeks]

VERBATIM

"Thirty-one NFL teams will not win the Super Bowl next year; you'll be laughed out of any room if you said only the 32nd team was newsworthy." [Washington Post / David Weigel]

• "The world first cottoned to [hidden tracks] thanks to the Beatles, whose sound engineers used the form to override the wishes of the musicians themselves. An act of quiet defiance by one of those engineers gave Abbey Road listeners a little surprise at the end—and the world its first hidden track."

  [Atlas Obscura / Ernie Smith]

• "Benny was not only not the bad guy of Rent, he was the hero."

  [Pajiba / Courtney Enlow]

• "The soft-spoken former university student had shown up to court in a blue shirt and a bright red tie, but standing trial was his black, ejaculating, HIV-positive penis."

  [BuzzFeed / Steven Thrasher]

• "I want to be clear, because Ted Cruz is a nightmare of a human being. I have plenty of problems with his politics, but truthfully his personality is so awful that 99% of why I hate him is just his personality. If he agreed with me on every issue, I would hate him only 1% less."

  [Ted Cruz's freshman roommate Craig Mazin, to Scriptnotes / John August]

LISTEN TO THIS

The Weeds: dietary fat and climate change [YouTube / Matt Yglesias, Julia Belluz, Brad Plumer]

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