Lambert and I, and many readers, agree that Ukraine has prompted the worst informational environment ever. We hope readers will collaborate in mitigating the fog of war — both real fog and stage fog — in comments. None of us need more cheerleading and link-free repetition of memes; there are platforms for that. Low-value, link-free pom pom-wavers will be summarily whacked.
And for those who are new here, this is not a mere polite request. We have written site Policies and those who comment have accepted those terms. To prevent having to resort to the nuclear option of shutting comments down entirely until more sanity prevails, as we did during the 2015 Greek bailout negotiations and shortly after the 2020 election, we are going to be ruthless about moderating and blacklisting offenders.
–Yves
P.S. Also, before further stressing our already stressed moderators, read our site policies:
Please do not write us to ask why a comment has not appeared. We do not have the bandwidth to investigate and reply. Using the comments section to complain about moderation decisions/tripwires earns that commenter troll points. Please don’t do it. Those comments will also be removed if we encounter them.
What’s killing the world’s biggest fish? Vox
Every Bear Market is Different Compound Advisors
Climate
The West’s Poor Climate Track Record Is Spilling Over to Other Policy Areas Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
#COVID19
Relationships between SARS-CoV-2 in Wastewater and COVID-19 Clinical Cases and Hospitalizations, with and without Normalization against Indicators of Human Waste ACS EST Water. From the Synopsis: “Improved correlations between wastewater SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations and COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations depend upon normalization target, qPCR chemistry, and watershed scale.”
Safety and immunogenicity of a live-attenuated influenza virus vector-based intranasal SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in adults: randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 1 and 2 trials The Lancet. China. The Interpretation: “Further studies are warranted to verify the safety and efficacy of intranasal vaccines as a potential supplement to current intramuscular SARS-CoV-2 vaccine pools.” It would be nice if elder resistance to vaccination in China was caused by fear of needles, but probably not.
Four Thai-made Covid vaccines almost ready to seek FDA approval The Nation. At least one nasal vaccine.
Real World Evidence of the Neutralizing Monoclonal Antibody Sotrovimab for Preventing Hospitalization and Mortality in COVID-19 Outpatients (accepted manuscript) Journal of Infectious Diseases. From the Abstract: “Of 10,036 patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection, 522 receiving sotrovimab were matched to 1,563 not receiving mAbs. Compared to mAb-untreated patients, sotrovimab treatment was associated with a 63% decrease in the odds of all-cause hospitalization (raw rate 2.1% versus 5.7%; adjusted OR 0.37, 95% CI 0.19-0.66) and an 89% decrease in the odds of all-cause 28-day mortality (raw rate 0% versus 1.0%; adjusted OR 0.11, 95% CI 0.0-0.79), and may reduce respiratory disease severity among those hospitalized.”
Monkeypox
Warning signs ahead of monkeypox outbreak went unheeded, experts say STAT. Chikwe Ihekweazu, former director general of the Nigeria CDC: “[Y]ou pull out the army whenever there’s a single case exported. But there’s no interest in working together with the country from which the cases are coming to try and understand it a little bit more.”
Oh good:
Premier cas de variole simienne en milieu scolaire au Qc
First #monkeypox school case in Quebec https://t.co/ynwk2X7CFi pic.twitter.com/3DSiQOaifK
— Covid Ecoles Quebec (@CovidEcoles) May 26, 2022
China?
China builds coalition to counter America’s ‘barbaric and bloody’ leadership FT
Myanmar
Myanmar’s environment hit by rare earth mining boom Mekong Eye. “Kachin’s rare earth production makes Myanmar the world’s third-largest rare earth producer behind China and the US, according to United States Geological Survey (USGS).”
The Economist Is at Risk Of Believing the Burmese Military’s Propaganda Domestic Voice of Burma
India
On Nehru’s death anniversary, PM Modi, Sonia Gandhi, other leaders pay tributes Hindustan Times
An Ancient Indian Temple With 56 Musical Pillars That Play Individual Notes When Struck Laughing Squid
Police say they have ‘dismantled’ Alameddine crime network after arresting 18 people ABC Australia. “[E]ach phone could generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in drug sales, with one of the seized devices having 700 contacts and making $250,000 each week alone…. [T]here has been a number of murders in regards to these phones.”
UK/EU
Tory Britain faces extinction at the hands of a radical hard-Left alliance The Telegraph. Parliamentary Labour, who threw Corbyn under the bus, “hard left”? GTFO.
New Not-So-Cold War
How to Build Putin a Gilded Bridge Out of Ukraine (no paywall) Foreign Affairs. Worth a read. For me, the subtext is building a gilded bridge for The Blob; they are the only players (besides Russia) for whom a loss in Ukraine is existential.
Military situation in East Ukraine is very bad – Ukrainian foreign minister Reuters
Olaf Scholz: Germany will not accept ‘dictated peace’ in Ukraine Politico
Opinion: Enough talking — it’s time to act Deutsche Welle. DW’s editor on the World Economic Forum (with a curious conception of “world”).
* * * Europe plans for risk that Russia cuts gas supply this year FT. JFC, is there a war on or not?
Haggling with Hungary: How the EU could get a deal to ban Russian oil Politico
Turkey in talks with Russia, Ukraine over grain-export corridor Reuters
* * * UNLOCKED! Episode 213: NATO (Part 2) (podcast) TrueAnon. Part 3. NATO’s sordid embrace of fascists is not new.
Biden Administration
Blinken: US to leverage Russia-Ukraine bloc against China AP. Blinken: “[W]e will shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open and inclusive international system.”
Justices decline to block Biden policy on social costs of greenhouse gases SCOTUSblog
Biden Is Preparing To Crush A Historic Climate Change Lawsuit Lever News. On Juliana v. United States, see NC here.
Uvalde
Uvalde Shooter Fired Outside School for 12 Minutes Before Entering WSJ. So, fetish gear (1):
Good thing they had their army truck at the scene afterwards. That certainly helped pic.twitter.com/vZ95sYKya3
— StonedAccountant (@DoomScrollers) May 26, 2022
Fetish gear (2):
Just a fucking larpfest. https://t.co/OMYhEHb0af pic.twitter.com/VJDbIVx12R
— Ben Hunt (@EpsilonTheory) May 26, 2022
The Uvalde school district had an extensive safety plan. 19 children were killed anyway. NBC. From the plan:
"Officers… should be working through the following list of priorities."
Top priority is "STOP THE KILLING – Officer’s first priority is to move in and confront the attacker." pic.twitter.com/D6uA4apEMV
— sarah jeong (@sarahjeong) May 26, 2022
We know what the problem is Science. “The science is clear: Restrictions work, and it’s likely that even more limitations would save thousands of lives.” Same semantic blunder as with Covid: They’re not “restrictions” but “protections.”
“No way to prevent this:”
The Onion's main page pic.twitter.com/wpfv8AkXL6
— ℮oin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) May 25, 2022
Supply Chain
Greece seizes ship sailing under Iranian flag Al Mayadeen. Tsk. The Russian ship should have been fllying under a Greek flag.
U.S. seizes Iranian oil cargo near Greek island – sources Hellenic Shipping News and Iran summons Greek envoy over seizing of ship’s cargo Al Mayadeen
Shortages
Patients Face Long Delays for Imaging of Cancers and Other Diseases NYT
“Search Results for fabral closure strip at The Home Depot” (Re Silc):
Fabral1 in. x 36 in. Inside Shelterguard Closure Strip
Model# 6769019000
(2)
$5.96
Limit 5 per order
https://www.homedepot.com/s/fabral%2520closure%2520strip?NCNI-5Can’t even make this stuff. It’s crappy foam.
Operational Breakage
F.D.A. Chief Details ‘Shocking’ Conditions at Baby Formula Plant NYT
Inside the Government Fiasco That Nearly Closed the U.S. Air System NYT
Stoller on the administrative state:
It’s obvious conservatives don’t believe their own rhetoric however because they foster expansive vague power to the Fed, the OCC, and the national security/policing establishment. https://t.co/g53nXchb26
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) May 26, 2022
Hmm.
Our Famously Free Press
How two Texas newspapers broke open the Southern Baptist sex scandal (not paywalled) WaPo. The Houston Chronicle (timeline) and the San Antonio Express-News (2019 blockbuster).
Bombshell 400-page report finds Southern Baptist leaders routinely silenced sexual abuse survivors San Antonio Express-News. May 23, 2022, four days ago. Here is the result of a Google search for “southern baptists sex scandal san antonio“:
What really frosts me about Google news-adjacent searches is that they amplify flaccid Acela-friendly reworkings of stories broken by local sources. The Southern Baptist story was a joint effort. The Houston Chronicle appears; the San Antonio Express Chronicle does not. Yes, the Express story linked above is four days old, but the Google algo in its infinite wisdom deemed stories from NPR, New York Magazine, and Yahoo Finance (!) worthy of inclusion, also four and three days old. Come on. It’s just one more way of starving local newsrooms of hits.
Whistleblowers
My Full Speech Outside Chevron’s Cancer-Causing Refinery in California Donzinger on Justice
Imperial Collapse Watch
Domestic wars are depressingly unfixable. Foreign wars… Yasha Levine
Guillotine Watch
Elon Musk Should Have Been Stopped Long Before He Came for Twitter Francine McKenna, Time. From April, still germane. Good to see McKenna in TIme!
OK, try “squillonaire”:
Use of the word “billionaire” as a pejorative is morally wrong & dumb 😛
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 26, 2022
Why does it feel good to do good? FT
Class Warfare
Winning Against the Odds: The 32BJ SEIU Organizing Model New Labor Forum (Left in Wisconsin).
We Are Not Living in a Simulation, We Are Living In the Past The Convivial Society
Whig History The Rectification of Names
What Is Time? Nautilus
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
230 comments
Comments are closed.
The abuse scandal articles on the history of cover ups by the SBC organization and leadership. Unbelievable. And in one article it was not just children, but apparently a married woman.
For many pastors, they will not deserve the whiff of bad flavoring from a story like this. I’ve known small time, small town pastors for most of my life and to a very large extent they were admirable, informed people with solid families. Doesn’t excuse the occasional bad apple / poor leader which popped out ever so often, but nothing to this level.
Yes and amen re: the integrity of most of the small-congregation pastorate.
Per Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door, about 4% of the population has significantly subnormal empathy and conscience. She writes that these people tend to enjoy the exercise of power over others, and in consequence aspire to higher places in power hierarchies, and are willing to do what is necessary to reach those places — and in consequence of that, the upper reaches of power hierarchies tend to be enriched in sociopaths with respect to society at large. The religious character of a power hierarchy is not a sure protection again this.
The story about the molestation of a pastor’s wife … the accused perpetrator is a former president of the SBC.
It’s a curious inversion of a religion founded in remembrance of a man who said to the leading men among his followers, “The great men of this age exercise their authority, but it shall not be so among you; instead whoever would be great among you must become a servant, and whoever would be first must become the slave of all.”
Conservative societies are particularly obsessed with the fidelity and completeness of their own reproduction. For Inuit societies, fidelity is ensured by excluding incorrigible deviants on hunts. Amish societies merely keep firm distance from those bearing subversive deviations. Are such however mild or grave structures of violence sociopathic, or sociogenic?
Perhaps liberalism denounces collective punishment in order to protect the enforcers of the private property suicide pact.
How does a collective keep sociopaths from rising to the top, then?
As someone involved in the expansion of a nascent makerspace/working-collective right now, this question is occupying a lot of my thinking.
Sociopaths excel in an authoritarian environment. Our K-12 encoded cultural emphasis on obedience, it really suits their game.
I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers which can’t be questioned, but then what would we do with dogma?
I wish more people would adopt this worldview.
Put it in the karma, drive to the edge of town, and leave both.
Unfortunately, while clergy are expected to have Bible, theology, administrative, and even inter-personal skills, there is little expectation of their having spiritual depth or maturity. The latter would include a necessary confrontation with the ego, or false self as it’s often called in spiritual literature, both its tyranny and ultimate non-reality. As Jesus say in various places and ways in the gospels, you have to lose your life in order to find it. That doesn’t happen by taking a class, of course, but it can become a matrix for one’s life and ministry. Unfortunately, the spiritual shallowness of many clergy is astonishing, but this goes back centuries, and is not unique to Christianity.
As organized religion declines, so many clergy I know (and I am one) are frustrated, confused, angry, and bored. Most believe “preserving the institution” is their primary duty and, of course, most are failing. As you say, the vast majority are “good people”, but their unseen internal turmoil often leads into self-destructive behavior. Clergy are often lousy as self-care and their physical and emotional heath shows it. Denominations and congregations are increasingly aware of and responding to this, but the pandemic has compounded the problem. One recent survey showed that two-thirds of active clergy have seriously considered leaving the ministry or retiring early. In any case, the primary means for preventing these types of scandals is broad awareness among clergy and laity of the problem, addressing it immediately wherever it occurs, and minimizing opportunities for it to occur.
Well said, Doug. Outside the clergy, people think they are “good people” if they go to church once a week and participate in church social life. Again, there is little spiritual depth or maturity. I don’t think many churchgoers even know what the ego is. We’ve been taught to value confrontation, brinkmanship, and self-importance.
I read an article about the whole SBC coverup probably 2 years ago, in Texas Monthly I think. This has been a slow-moving disaster, though the whole Catholic scandal unrolled at a similarly glacial pace.
I thought this situation rang a bell. I was sure it had been linked here just possibly prior to all the Covid and 2020 ensuing craziness.
Perhaps the sexually repressive attitudes and practices of the church, in a broad sense, have something to do with it?
Sex scandals. Pedophiles. Everybody is against it- for good reason.
But it seems to me that the targets are carefully chosen to go after institutions and groups the writers want to undermine. I’m an ex-Catholic and my only male first cousin was one of the victims of the famous priest in Boston. But there was also a lot of talk in Catholic circles about who else had been doing it. They asked why the famous Boston Globe editor who broke the story chose not to follow-up on other credible leads about more protected groups in the Boston area, reports that came out of the woodwork after the first revelations. So I’ll only list the groups I’ve heard significant, detailed bits of gossip about, and in at least four cases met the victims.
1970s Unitarian ministers and helpers in New England (A repressed and kinky crowd. I was propositioned; I met victims… or were they curious teens?);
Certain very insular Jewish orthodox sects (think Brooklyn, mainly girl victims);
The House and Senate pages with their own dorm and high school (the program and school were abolished for reasons never mentioned);
The USMC (which very famous-in-1942 Marine vanished from history?);
Hollywood (Roman Polanski was not alone in liking 13 year-old virgins, usually girls. And let’s not forget the Polanski girl’s mother, a well know DC figure, set up the meeting. The girl has forgiven them both);
Our allies. The day after we attacked to free Kuwait, the NYT finally mentioned the “rumors” that the Emir had “married and immediately divorced” 30-40 cute 13-14 year old Bangladesh virgin “4th wives” (although, to give the Emir credit, people I knew said the families vied for the privileged, he was gentle, and the girls went home with excellent dowries. Ask any Kuwaiti you know; they’ve all heard the story).
The High Culture world. In NYC, Leonard Bernstein’s obsession with mid-teen boys “of a certain look” was a standing joke when I was there. They were easy to spot. Many of them went on to good careers. In 1980s NY people barely noticed. And, lord, SF before AIDs. All gay; all voluntary (I think). The most stunning transgendered runaways-turned-houseboys I’ve ever seen. Preteens with gender issues didn’t start last year. I’m straight, but still, they sure rattled my cage.
Finally, the left. Beria: 200 1930s-50s pubescent victims kidnapped off the streets of Moscow (Google: “L. Beria pictures with young girl NARA”. Stalin knew; see him smile. And her not smile). The stodgy, moral old men in the 1950s Politburo hated Beria with a visceral loathing. After Stalin died they personally- no hired hands- killed him themselves. Don’t forget the two famous Marxists, one American who according to his daughter molested her secretly for years, and one European who did the DeSade thing it with his students and friends- I’ll spare you the details.
Not that the religious right was any different; I once sat with some former members of “Up With People!” as they reminisced about the teenybopper groupies after the shows. And the rock crowd. Go look up the Fugs classic song: “My happy home was broken up by plaster-casting girls”. The girls, now in their 70s, still occasionally give interviews.
I have no doubt the Southern Baptists hid their dirty laundry; so did- and do- a lot of other groups who appear to be better protected.
Personally I try to differentiate between the per-puberty victims, the early teen victims and the “victims” who are over about 16 and often know exactly what they are doing. But the laws need to exist and age is the only crude marker we have. You can ask my cousin about it… but he’s dead now. Never got his life back on track.
Daylight and well done investigative reporting reveal the worst habits and attitudes by the very people we are taught to hold up in high regard, and most often with highest regard. That is a sad tale about your cousin; it is the victims of the abuse that suffer most. But at a minimum, more voices of those who had suffered in silence are able to be heard and even given a megaphone in doing so.
People can change including pastors but once that news has gotten out these evangelical leaders have zero and no business being in any leadership position. IT happens in the corporate world all too often, they’ll move location and hire a PR Firm and work on their speech to confront the guilt but not necessarily announce they did wrong.
Lastly, those adults who commit abuse on underage victims deserve a special hell. I may have been taught to forgive but that’s an egregious sin.
“Olaf Scholz: Germany will not accept ‘dictated peace’ in Ukraine Politico”
Should read: “Ukraine will not accept peace,” Germany dictated.
I wonder what makes Scholtz think peace in Ukraine is his business at all?
Germany had 8 years to arrange a negotiated peace trough Normandy contact group and apparently wasted it. So how about going trough the reasons for that failure first, and only then sputter stupidities regarding the future.
I think it is somewhat mistaken to assume that at this juncture, Germany is a fully-fledged sovereign actor.
This was already true to an extent under Merkel, but doubly so now under the new “Atlanticist” government. They are basically a US vassal, and will do or say whatever Washington wishes when it comes to foreign policy matters, even if this directly contravenes the interests of German business elite. [Remember, Germany is literally one of Russia’s biggest export and import partners, and they were shutting down Nord Stream 2 to buy US gas in its place before the war.]
And from Washington’s perspective, one always wants a “coalition of the willing”, or at least an appearance of such, to lend credence to the idea that the US represents some nebulous “international community”. Which means that having a bunch of Europeans, including Scholtz, echo US talking points on Ukraine, is…well, what are vassals for, after all?
Germany has not been a sovereign state since mid-1945. Germany remains a nation under military occupation.
I think that Olaf Scholz was channeling General Alfred Jodl who said on May 6th, 1945-
‘Germany will not accept ‘dictated peace’ in Germany.’
Well, the war situation has developed not necessarily to Ukraine’s advantage.
Besides the economic damage, the Russians gave plenty of opportunities to negotiate an exit for the bulk of those Ukrainian soldiers as they were immobilized around day 5. Inevitably they would be dealt with after a fashion. Every promise of wunder weapons emboldened Kiev when a settlement could have been reached. I figure Scholz wants the state of war to continue to avoid these questions. Moscow isn’t begging for Nokia phones and BMWs, but Europe is trying to find energy suppliers.
Some Ukrainians are not waiting for the official word to bug out while others are surrendering en masse-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JjWWzXBI_Q (2:58 mins)
Doesn’t the Ukrainian government realize that it will need these men after the war to rebuild the country?
There is speculation about Zeleensky’s handlers, but I remember the bright lights of Munich when he started discussing acquiring nukes. The parade of dignitaries promising help, is just another drug for individuals digging.
When we ask wouldn’t a rationale person do…?, the answer is a rationale person would have abided by Minsk. BJ and Biden might be rationale and have had their own schemes, but Finland has destroyed their tourism industry for no apparent reason. They aren’t getting Yanks to replace Russians. They get Russians because Americans won’t go there, so it was cheap. It’s aren’t huge segment.
Minsk II was, indeed, the best deal Ukraine was ever going to get after they lost the 2013 conflict.
Now, who knows where this ends?
Perhaps they have realised that the Russians are unlikely to leave them a country to rebuild, when all is said and done?
But again, while the Ukrainian government does have its own, mostly local and economic, interests – Vestnik Buri, in fact, just posted a video (in Russian, sadly), breaking down how Ukraine’s oligarch clans have evolved and had spent the past few decades fighting one another for bigger slices of a shrinking pie – since 2014, especially on matters of foreign policy, it has been a dutiful hand puppet of…you know whom. If Washington says, you shall fight to the last Ukrainian, then do so they shall, because they themselves think at the end of the day they’ll have a nice, warm spot in Poland or Switzerland or whatnot to fall back to. The guys in the field, well, cannon, meet fodder…
I doubt the current government plans to be there to rebuild the country. I think they have their retirement already figured out, and it doesn’t involve Ukraine.
Recently the reality has seriously overcome my calibrator for cynicism , so I may be in err.
I plead guilty for thinking the same. At least about the last letter man that might already have some arrangement with Netflix to star endless series on Ukraine heroism.
I may ask, which Ukrainian government, and in which Remnant Ukraine?
The Russians can win mucho “soft power” points by “rehabilitating” the ukrainian POWs and sending them out to do ‘targeted’ rebuilding. Say, a year rebuilding Donbass infrastructure, then home, (wherever ‘home’ might be.)
Given the looming grain shortfalls expected worldwide at the end of this year, prioritizing grain agriculture would be logical. In fewer words, Prison Farms.
“Glorious young Ukie! Join the service and feed the world!”
They look to me as if they are retreating- but not beaten. Retreating from a town north of the Donets to the river leaving nobody behind.
They surrendered in Lyman in a day when the Russians thought it would take a week to take the city.
Russia has announced it has taken the last roads that would allow an exit out of Lysychansk and Syevyerodonetsk were taken today, Friday. Zelensky had ordered that the troops there not retreat until Sat 00:00. Only Zelensky can order/allow a retreat. That means all 13,000 to 20,000 are captured. If any left, it was an illegal retreat.
Scholz didn’t get the memo that the new Washington Post narrative is that the Ukrainians are losing the war.
https://twitter.com/raghavanWaPo/status/1529918701960581146
“How to Build a Gilded Bridge” Foreign Affairs article absolutely misreads Russia’s stated objective, which was (and is) to secure the Donbass, weaken Ukraine’s military, get rid of the Azov people and mostly to keep Ukraine out of NATO. The objective – again based on what Putin and others have said – has never been to taker Kiev or overthrow the government. So the article is framed entirely incorrectly. The truth is it seems the Russians are about to finish the operation they began, and meet nearly all objectives. Really what this article is arguing is that what Russia will consider its ultimate goals will be declared by the West as “concessions” such that an “independent” neutral Ukraine AND a much stronger NATO can somehow be spun in the West as a great victory, whereas it is really just adjusting to the reality emerging on the ground. Maybe there is some kind of miracle “heavy” weapon that will enable the Ukrainians to turn this all around, but if you believe that, there’s a bridge I want to sell you….
Although post-war Germany has always been a US client state, there have been instances of demonstrated independence in foreign policy matters, reaching as far back as West Germany’s “Ostpolitik” after its abandonment by the US, Germany’s refusal to participate in the Iraq invasion, and Ms. Merkel declaring the CIA station chief in Berlin persona non grata. Hence, rather than pandering to the US, Scholz appears to be mindful of his coalition with the Greens, whose support Scholz’ party (SPD) needs. At the urging of the Greens, the coalition agreement stipulates a “value-based foreign policy,” which is shaped by Germany’s current foreign minister (Ms. Baerbock of the Green party). This situation has Scholz in a bind, forcing him to pay lip-service to Baerbock’s foreign policy pitch while dragging his feet on some aspects of policy implementation (e.g. delivery of attack tanks to Ukraine). This would explain Scholz’ fairly bland and roundabout statements, which seem designed to strike a balance between satisfying the Atlanticists in his administration and preserving the possibility of reviving relations with Russia at a later time, something which German industry will be surely counting on.
“Olaf Scholz: Germany will not accept ‘dictated peace’ in Ukraine Politico”
Although post-war Germany has always been a US client state, there have been instances of demonstrated independence in foreign policy matters, reaching as far back as West Germany’s “Ostpolitik” after its abandonment by the US, Germany’s refusal to participate in the Iraq invasion, and Ms. Merkel declaring the CIA station chief in Berlin persona non grata. Hence, rather than pandering to the US, Scholz appears to be mindful of his coalition with the Greens, whose support Scholz’ party (SPD) needs. At the urging of the Greens, the coalition agreement stipulates a “value-based foreign policy,” which is shaped by Germany’s current foreign minister (Ms. Baerbock of the Green party). This situation has Scholz in a bind, forcing him to pay lip-service to Baerbock’s foreign policy pitch while dragging his feet on some aspects of policy implementation (e.g. delivery of attack tanks to Ukraine). This would explain Scholz’ fairly bland and roundabout statements, which seem designed to strike a balance between satisfying the Atlanticists in his administration and preserving the possibility of reviving relations with Russia at a later time, something which German industry will be surely counting on.
Maybe Big Ag can team up with the post-humanity people and figure out how to genetically engineer humans to grow thick keratin armor plates, like armadillos.
Add to that actively cooled Kevlar outerwear, and problem solved.
It really is possible to harden an entire society.
/s
Maybe grow an AK- 47 on one arm, too. Start off with baby sized ones that grow automatically until adulthood. After all, all we need is a good baby with a gun to keep the peace. Compliments the armor.
https://twitter.com/QasimRashid/status/1529847362633576451
Police in Uvalda went in, rescued their own kids, then exited. Television reporter interviewing
some sort of officer in the video clip.
NL
I would really, REALLY like to know if that is true. I am skeptical, but I want to know the truth…
Does anyone have any info confirming or denying that police went in just for their own kids??? Any other links?
Because if its true, I think it will be a watershed event.
Even if it is not true, “it” is a watershed event. This is an inflection point. I am in full agreement with you here.
The Police have now been characterized as self serving minions. This is a stain that will not wash out.
R.I.P. ‘Officer Friendly.’ 1966-2022
Read: https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/08/officer-friendly-police-copaganda-history.html
So is the thinking on the right still that we need to arm teachers so they can run in with guns blazing while the actual police wait outside?
That is about it. Risk someone else’s life, not the police officer.
Actually, it would depend on the socio-economic status of the “average” student in the school experiencing the “event.”
Your upper income public and most ‘private’ schools will get superior police responses. “Average” and ‘lower class’ schools will be allowed to be “winnowed” of children so as to enable the ‘gentrification’ of the gene pool.
The Jackpot will not be evenly distributed. Not if our Elites have anything to say about it.
Stay safe. Stack deep.
It is the end stage of the hyper individualism of neoliberalism. Essentially the same as the let ‘er rip, you’re on your own response to the epidemic. As Thatcher said, there is no such thing as society, only family and clan.
The police officer admitted it to the news person in the interview. What other evidence do you need?
Every teacher and parent needs to re evaluate their relationship with the local police at this point, because they will only protect their children.
At this point I will refuse to participate in the security Kabuki at our school, because there is no guarantee that the police will follow protocol and get in the school to stop the shooter.
This “stop the shooter” mantra was NOT followed at the (Douglass?) High School in Florida. (Maybe that is the genesis of the “directive”?)
It hasn’t been followed in many if the shootings, that is the problem. The official public dogma is “respond quickly”.. but the police don’t seem to do that. Well, unless it’s their kids.
I want to FOIA the entire hour of police dispatch.
Hopefully, there will not have been “accidents” that prevented the police cameras from working or the storage of video and radio somehow lost. It is a pattern I have noticed in police departments with problematical incidences.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10853241/Uvalde-school-district-monitoring-students-social-media-pages-threats-against-staff-site.html
They had snagged a photo of the shooter posting a picture of his two new assault rifles on instagram three days before and their image recognition software looked at ’em. I didn’t see how much they paid for the Artificial Stupidity or who made it and sold it to them or for how much.
I used to hate the Daily Mail but lately they have the best reporting out there much of the time. A friend of mine says they have always been like this but the world has evolved so that what’s happening now fits in with the Daily Mail editorial program.
So much for our high-priced surveilance state actually performing a pro-active function.
The surveillance state was never about doing anything useful for the hoi polloi, despite what the marketing brochures said.
A pretty damning picture is developing about the uvalde police. Parents escaping police to save their kids, standing around for 40 minutes, tackling patents, saving their own kids and leaving. If this turns out like it looks these cops and their kids are going to have to move out of town.
I am trying to track down a movie clip from Fletch Chevy Chase): “Thank god. The police.”
He says it so drolly as well…”Thank god…the…police.” as he’s about to be killed by the Chief of Police. I honestly don’t think such an anti-cop comedy could be made today.
And no…I can’t find that on Youtube. If the world was honest that would be the top meme right now.
Here it is:
https://memes.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/41ab9d1f-40a1-4b51-a595-d4b6651b2608
The hug a cop scene is classic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ee6xrIGhcY
Just like Human Resources is there to protect the company from the employees, the police are there to protect the state from the citizens. If they are able to arrest a burglar here and there then that’s just a bonus.
Uvalde Police Dept. S.WA.T. On Twitter:
Nah, it’s OK, they’re not actually going to shoot anybody
Nobody armed, anyway.
I can’t find it now as the article seems to have disappeared but I was reading how Biden was saying that the Uvalda police had his full support. And I believe that your Congress have already shot through for the holiday weekend because priorities. It all makes this tweet more understandable-
‘Jonathan Larsen
@jtlarsen
I don’t think congressional Democrats understand that voters see them as the cops standing around outside the school.’
https://twitter.com/jtlarsen/status/1529697097095606273
Neera
The replies trying to defend Neera are absolutely unhinged. She’s a politico. She knows how to communicate, but I assume this is the attitude in the Biden White House.
RK
I think there is a perfect analogy between the dems* and outsourcing manufacturing to China (government in the pocket of the rich and not protecting the livihoods of average working people due to special interests) and the political classes inability to critique police ineptness and cowardice. It just can’t be done in the political discourse of the US.
* of course, not just the dems. The kabuki of the farcical premise that are two political parties are in opposition is why American politics is so meaningless.
Well, now, let us give credit where credit is due. There are, in fact, two separate groupings within the political layer fighting one another for a place at the trough. It’s the same trough, with the same slop, but the competition is very, very, vigorous. And after all, isn’t choosing between which of the two small groups of individuals will dutifully serve the interests of an even smaller grouping of far wealthier individuals what democracy is all about?..
What a brilliant way to put political indifference! Sharing this far and wide!
Conspiratorial as it sounds, I fully believe that the school massacre was an op. In my part of the planet, I read the news articles during the middle of the night US-time, about 12 hours after the shooting occurred. The variance, contradictions, and outright sloppiness between the different reports was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.
The early indicator to me that the parents of the schoolchildren went upwards of fifteen hours without reunifying with the survivors, while getting fingerprinted, photos taken, and documented at the reunification center. Who did that in this predominantly Latin American district? CBP officers.
Now the indicators are stacking up too high:
1) substantial contradictions about the background of the shooter. AP reported he worked at Wendy’s; interviewed coworkers. BBC reported he worked at McDonald’s; interviewed coworkers. CNN stated that he was unemployed; also interviewed neighbors. The latter reports have been scrubbed.
2) Ramos supposedly participated in a school-shooter drill (as the youth perpetrator) in his own high school in the last year or so.
3) Ramos’ grandmother was first reported killed; now she is injured.
4) photos of Ramos circulating are obviously at least two different people, if not three. They simply have different facial structures.
5) the egregious contradictions that continue to pile up in the pig/CBP and witness reports. There are at least four or five different stories about what occurred prior to, during, and after the shooting.
6) Parents trying to get into the school tasered, tackled, and pepper sprayed.
The outstanding questions:
– if it was an op, what is the intended outcome? More school surveillance in the style of biometric/facial recognition/QR code for school entry? Even more militant pigs inside of schools? Pigs/CBP/NatGuard becoming permanent teachers, like in NM still as a ‘result of the pandemic’? Ticketing undocumented people in the area? Something to try and pass legislation to help with midterms? What else?
– why is there still no clear, cohesive narrative about Ramos, especially now that they’ve mysteriously located his father? Where did he work, if he did? Was he a student or not? What did he look like? Why is the MSM showing obviously different people?
– why did the pigs prevent parents from entering the school?
– why did the pigs make no attempt to apprehend or maim Ramos?
– why did Ramos’ social media posts go ignored?
– how was Ramos able to kill his family member, have a neighbor hear it, and still make his way to the school, let alone enter it and start killing?
– why are there no surveillance photos of Ramos in the school or on school grounds?
It begs the questions: did Ramos really exist? Was he really the killer? Was he set up? Especially as the pigs are now reported to have entered the school to save their own piglets, these speculative-consirpatorial perspectives have to be questioned.
My computer crashed yesterday but I’ve got archived links to these claims saved and can repost once I get my old HD into a new machine next week. Just wanted to post initial thoughts, see if others felt similarly, and make my predictions early.
There always seem to be hinky aspects to these shooting events. Having said that, eye witness testimony is always unreliable. Real-time interpretation of these unreliable reports is always confused because these are confusing events. A hole bunch of people see different things from different perspectives and others try to make sense of it. Of course, everyone is twisting the unreliable reports to fit their idea of what happened.
There are some questions like where does an 18 year old fast food worker come up with $5000 for the weapons and ammo? Maybe he’s a good saver or he stole from his grandparents. How does he just walk into the school? Someone forgot to lock the door – it’s a small town, security is not always top of mind. Why did it take so long for the police to show up? Why did the police not go in, and stop parents from going in? Police incompetence vs malice? And I can go on..
There are simple, non-tin-foily answers to pretty much every question, but at some point you find yourself asking why there are so many things that went the wrong way? And then this happening the same week as the NRA meeting in nearby Houston, the same week the Ukraine narrative is changing to admit Russia just might be winning, another “squirrel” to distract our attention to help save the Dems from a midterm wipeout? Again, all coincidence, and I try not to fall into finding patterns where none exists, but so many conspiracies have come true in the last 10 years that I’m less confident in this attitude. I keep waiting to hear that somehow the FBI or ATF was involved with this kid, or the school or somewhere nearby..
I must say I’m quite surprised at the way the MSM has turned on the police, but maybe this is just BLM hangover.
Regarding the media turning on the police, I think this situation is similar to George Floyd’s murder in that both have cell phone footage that has gotten out into the world that is very very hard to spin. They’ll be just as critical as they feel they need to be for as short a time as they feel like they can get away with.
“The NRA posted an announcement on its website explaining that Secret Service barred carrying firearms into the convention because several prominent Republicans ― including former President Donald Trump ― will speak there. Attendees will also have to leave their selfie sticks, toy guns, umbrellas and drones at home.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nra-convention-cant-bring-your-gun_n_628fd9b7e4b0cda85dbc043f
GramSci
the hypocrisy is essentially infinite. Amazing at repub campaign events at every level where the virture of guns, and the right to carry (including concealed carry) to prvent every crime, as well as shingles, poverty, and out of wedlock births, guns are forbidden. Its like the people advocating guns don’t believe their own loony supporters can be trusted with weapons in their presence….hmmmm
Hence why shaming Republicans will never work. Anyone making pleas to bipartisanship is simply lying or deluded.
It’s like Malcolm Forbes. The dude preached conservatism in his magazine and dated runaway teen boys in NYC. His hypocrisy was so gross Trump reacted. Conservatism isn’t really about “traditional values” but the exercise of power for their elites. Thumbing their nose at the morality they preach is the ultimate high.
It’s like Republicans explaining how overturning Roe is fine because abortions will be available in blue states. When their kids or mistresses get knocked up, they will be okay no matter how many punk girls they intimidate outside abortion clinics.
Hypocrisy is the ultimate exercise of power. Fear is the only thing they understand. When Biden left guys like DeJoy and the FBI director in place and put Garland in AG, he announced he would be supplicant to GOP elites at all times. It’s why they are risking what otherwise would destroy their electoral prospects. They know Team Blue is just going to mumble about shame.
I tend to refer to Beta as Beta because he is a doofus. Since O’Rourke made the news, I would differentiate his stunt from Murphy’s crocodile tears. O’Rourke labeled the GOP as what it is. It may seem like a small event, but rhetorically, it was huge. Working with murderers is impossible because they are murderers. Murphy on the other hand is giving the GOP 10 days while he hits the links on vacation and hopes we forget.
O’Rourke called the GOP what it is. You won’t find this on MSDNC. The might wax nostalgically for the days of Newt Gingrich, but that is the usual state of Team Blue.
Hypocrisy is the ultimate exercise of power.
^This is exactly why people are quick to overlook the hypocrisy of the leaders on their own team, yet so obsessed with the hypocrisy displayed by the other team. People like to be on Team Power.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ambigamy/201905/conspicuous-presumption
That is why women from Christian Sharia Law states must be barred from getting abortions in Legal Abortion States. That escape valve must be welded shut so that the pressure builds up to social explosion levels within the Christian Sharia Law states themselves.
at least theoretically*, anyone can wander into the big pink granit whorehouse in downtown austin with an unpermitted gun….tampons, not so much.
* i have yet to test this in full redneck hippie regalia…i suspect that radical lefties would be at least questioned. unknown if any POC(sic) have attempted to test it.
I’m pretty sure guns also aren’t permitted in schools so the conparisson isnt quite apt. The difference is enforcement… which the local police here are demonstrating well
Musk looks like he’s playing a role in ‘The Gilded Age’, an interesting choice for the richest man in the world.
Perhaps because he is.
That old phrase about history rhyming keeps popping into my head.
He was just following instructions:
https://www.vogue.com/article/the-met-gala-2022-dress-code-gilded-glamour
Yet another tone deaf party story.
sarah jeong
@sarahjeong
May 26, 2022
Replying to @sarahjeong
“Citizens have a reasonable expectation that police officers are willing to take risks to reduce casualties during active event.
===============================================
In our legal system, there developed the defense of police by using the phrase “in fear for my life.” This defense, used to justify police shooting people holding cell phones and anything and everything but a gun, (before any shots from the suspect was fired or could have been fired) and prevent any consequences for inept police work, has culminated in the obvious outcome that policing is now treated by the US legal system as a risk free occupation, and that police officers have no responsibility, duty, or obligation to put them selves in any danger WHAT SO EVER.
The illusion that policing is a particularly dangerous profession* is part of the orchestrated campaign to equate police with heroism and justify the police’s exemption from oversight and critical evaluation.
* https://medium.com/technology-taxes-education-columns-by-david-grace/being-a-police-officer-is-not-even-in-the-top-10-most-dangerous-jobs-1e985540c38a
I agree with what was said there but I find that I still have some old-fashioned prejudices gained from reading a bit too much about the place where the shooting took place. These weren’t just any cops but were Texas cops. Texas! They could have sent teams in to clear out the other classrooms but the fact that they did nothing except set up a perimeter tells me that it was an actual part of their doctrine and not just ‘mistakes were made.’ And can you imagine what is was like for those kids in those classrooms peeking out the window and seeing all those cops do…nothing?
RK
I would ask, if it wasn’t ineptness, doesn’t that make it worse? And now that I think about it, WHO (and WHY) would think that while a mass shooting is going on, the best policy is to stand around (OK, not “standing around” but forming perimeters – I’m getting too emotional). Hasn’t it been acknowledged since Coumbine that the best policy is to immediately go in?
I believe that a long time ago the doctrine was in a hostage situation to form a perimeter, clear out civilians and have negotiators get in contact with the hostage takers. But if somebody was killed, the police went in. Even hostage takers knew about that doctrine and used it to stop unnecessary escalations.
Part of the problem is they aren’t police by an traditional measure, even the police of 20 years ago, but the thin blue line between civilization and madness. The idea of risking their lives to protect kids isn’t part of the job description. They are there to create a culture of fear where minorities and poor know to keep their place.
I’m aware of problems with police over the years especially in regards to their behavior in urban areas, but it’s clearly becoming worse. They are returning to the old slave patrols, out of get blacks and anyone who might not be lily white.
h/t Jeffrey St. Clair:
Michael Parenti: “You see there are people who believe the function of the police is to fight crime, and that’s not true, the function of the police is social control and protection of property.”
Protect property and Serve the powerful
“They are returning to the old slave patrols, out of get blacks and anyone who might not be lily white.”
and then during Reconstruction vigilantes begin attacking and burning down black schools, churches, and neighborhoods. Cops complicit if not also participants under the hoods.
>>>They are returning to the old slave patrols, out of get blacks and anyone who might not be lily white.
Include the poor in that as well. In the North as with England, they were first used to protect business owners and their customers from the poor and immigrants. Heck, in the South, the poor and working class whites were often given the same attention from the patrols as blacks.
There’s some yellow cops in Texas over in Uvalde
Nobody did anything for over an hour, you see
Moms & dads cried when apathy broke their heart
There’s 19 little kids who sadly did depart
It isn’t the biggest mass murder that Texas ever knew
26 were gunned down in Sutherland Springs, some in pews
You may talk about this or that horrific tragedy
But the yellow cops of Texas was a sorry sight to see
The thought occurs that we might see some variations on the old term ‘yellow dog Democrat’
So instead of the Yellow Rose of Texas we get the Yellow Cops of Texas.
“These weren’t just any cops but were Texas cops. Texas!”
What matters is optics, not reality. On the TeeVee (which is where the action is) Texas Rangers always get their man:
https://youtu.be/NIYZVSElmj4
The Kids who survived the Uvalde madman learned a VERY valuable lesson about the Cops and they way things really work in the USA.
TS
The supposed liberal, left wing Hollywood media incessantly protrays cops as selfless, brave, and true – and of course, the bad apple is always discovered and rooted out by all the good police. Hollywood is nearly as fake as the NYT and WP… Despite this, the righties castigate them for being insufficienty pro police.
Remember the shooting in Broward Florida?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoneman_Douglas_High_School_shooting
Again, the police were at best useless.
Yet the corporate media propaganda division will not confront the reality of police malfeasance cowardice. How much evidence is needed of how ill spent funding of police is?
Police unions preach to their members not to take undue risks, not to put themselves in harm’s way.
Perhaps police unions in particular should be broken, crushed and abolished. Police departments should either be de-unionized or abolished if they can’t be de-unionised.
counterpoint: “We Own This City”, David Simon’s latest on HBO about corruption in the Baltimore Police Department/Gun Trace Task Force, is worth a look.
America will fight Russia to the very last Ukrainian.
US policemen will fight an active school shooter to the very last child/teacher.
Murica!!!
I reckon all the brave cops were busy hunting down unarmed black guys to shoot.
That’s my thought also
I might be wrong, but I think that the phrase “in fear of my life” has been directly lifted from a supreme court ruling justifying the use of lethal force by “law enforcement agencies.” I’m waiting patiently for the time to finally come when any “freedom-loving” american can legally carry any firearm into out federal courts, take a seat,and see “justice” dispensed, like tissue from a box. Let the justices “live” with the consequences of their legal madness.
like many disasters (engineering, air crash, etc), looks like the Texas shooting had multiple failures which compounded the tragedy…
unlocked entry door, police not rushing the shooter (which has become the suggested best practice), locked doors inside the school which prevented the police from entering.
lots of shades of Columbine, minus the locked doors
of course, every side spin the facts to their pet narrative versus taking the holistic view
“Charge the gun, run from the knife” clip from The Irishman, watch to the end:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGtQrrNYB9o
I’m sorry but I am still not buying it. Are you saying that the combined police firepower, which would have included shotguns, could not have taken out a door? How many bullets or even butt-stocks would it have taken to take out the windows? It could have not been hard for teams to have identified where the shooter was. They just had to follow the gunfire. And you don’t need Walker, Texas Ranger for a job like this. Just ordinary cops.
Perhaps I am riled up by this story but in every civilization it is a fundamental duty to protect the children. Every civilization. ‘Women and children first’ is not just a quaint phase but actually had firm doctrine behind it. And a civilization that forgets this duty does not have much of a future. As a comparison, let’s take a trip down memory road how cops dealt with the University of Texas tower shooter (same State) back in ’66 when they had nowhere near the gear or training for such an event-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_tower_shooting#Police_actions
We might want to get the cops names so that we can try to insure they never work anywhere again except perhaps in fecal maintenance or washing lions or volunteering to take dangerous substances to test them before they are given to humans.
I feel the same way you do, Rev. The fundamental principle of any human group that deserves to be called a society is to protect its future, and that future lies in the lives of women and children.
That said, this government response to the deaths of children is SOP in places like the East Side of Cleveland. Several days back, a SUV pulled up in the driveway, several people got out and began shooting at a house in the east-side, close-in suburb of Euclid. Forty-two (42) bullets later, a 14 year-old girl, sleeping in her bed, was dead with a bullet wound to the head. This was not a circumstance where she was residing with some gang members or drug dealers. The best guess is that the shooters got the wrong house. No arrests.
Gang warfare is killing kids every day in the U. S., and most of the killers are kids too. In Cleveland, we haven’t had much in the way of law enforcement since the federal decree was handed down after two horrific incidents of police murdering people, one of which was the child, Tamir Rice. They’re basically on strike while still collecting pay and benefits. If the cops don’t know where the gangs’ HQs are and who the leaders are, then they should. But nothing is ever done.
The police are not for our protection, even the protection of women and children. I have heard people pleading for some kind of police presence for years in ward meetings and other gatherings. It’s not going to happen.
YOYO. Even if you’re a 4th-grader.
And while I’m at it, we know who vetoes any attempt at making things better. This is for you, Elon:
Billionaires bite!
And I’ll add one personal anecdote. Summer before last, a car stopped on the street outside our house. Two men and two women exited, all seeming to be well intoxicated. After a while, one of the men pulled out a gun and shot a few times in the air. Laughs all around. Then the foursome got back in their car, pulled up about 30 yards and parked, continuing the party in the street.
Someone called the police about the shots, and after 15 minutes, they did show up. They pulled alongside the foursome, who all began cursing at the police, calling them names and daring them to do something. The cops kept moving in their car, never stopped to ask questions, and never returned with backup or anything else.
That’s our law enforcement. We’re already most of the way to Mad Max.
And for your own good, you will soon have no legal private ownership of weapons.
The criminals will though.
Maybe every American should just realize that they are already considered criminals and do whatever the F it takes to protect their communities and their family?
Rev, I am not disagreeing with your outrage – in fact, I very much share it – but remember, cops stood outside of Columbine for, what, over two hours, until the shooters got bored and killed themselves? They stood outside the VA tech building until that shooter did the same. This seems to have been a consistent pattern – with some exceptions, like the Orlando nightclub shooting (where the police did charge in, but…killed only some innocent bystanders before charging back out, leaving the shooter untouched) – for decades, not years. I do not know enough to speculate how or why this began to happen, but here we are…
1. depends on the type of doors.
2. after a certain point, 50 guns rushing into a school makes things worse
3. no official timeline on when the victims were shot, etc.
4. dunno the case on Texas, but lots of US schools have no/tiny windows (or windows that only line the top 2 feet of a wall) that are more appropriate for mental wards and prisons, blame post-1970 contemporary architecture and the idea that small windows = energy savings.
bottom line, this is a mess, and no lessons were learned from Columbine. Guns, social service intervention, school procedures, police procedures, etc.
additional Q’s: where did the money for gun come from? perp had an expensive gun for someone who works at Wendy’s…..Perp may have raided grandma’s debit card which caused the initial shooting.
Like other mass shootings, looks like perp had multiple warning signs.
wierd to see greg abbot almost cry out that what we really need is better mental health.
that’s a tacit distancing from an aspect of the reagan catechism.
other than that…”well we need to harden the schools”(radio preacher/lite guv) to “well this is a good argument for homeschooling”(federalist society)
over here in the objective, falsifiable portions of reality, 1. “give everyone a gun, no questions asked!(unless they be black, socialist, etc)…which the goptea can’t all of a sudden disown.
2. kill all public mental health…which is also laying there at the feat of the Right(with demparty help)
3 kill the New Deal, neoliberalise everything, and make everyone an hyperindividual because there’s no such thing as society…..which is about as bipartisan as you can get. people who have the basics of life covered, and maybe even have some stability and meaning, aren’t likely to “go postal” and shoot up the place.
we can spend trillions blowing up brown people abroad and otherwise meddling in other country’s bidness…but i can’t get my teeth fixed, we can’t seem to get my youngest a driver’s license(long, infuriating story) and can’t at least provide some kind of floor under precarious people.
even with the shared responsibility for #’s 2 and especially 3, this should be a walk on for the demparty…if they were really an “opposition party”…let alone one who cares about actual humans.
https://twitter.com/Triiiclops_013/status/1529950534416969728
a pox on the entire ruling class and their enablers.
Note, of course, that “better mental health” would imply spending money on social services… which is almost a 3rd rail in R politics. So we can be sure he won’t actually open any cash spigot for anything resembling a crumb for The Great Unwashed.
yeah I’ve been waiting for any actual “mental health” proposals since they got on this train. I suspect if they were cornered and forced to spell out what they mean by that it is basically prison with psychiatric nurses and no need for anything more than a signed doctor’s note to impound somone for months or years with no recourse, but saying that directly would probably not go over too well
nafta billy clinton,
“THE ERA OF BIG GOVERNMENT IS OVER”
empty suit hollow man obama,
“i am all that stands in between you and the pitchforks”
nafta joe biden,
“nothing will fundamentally change”
Rev,the Cops had 12 Gauge pump shotguns and most PD’s issue special rounds for taking off door locks.
It’s also common for Cops to carry an AR15 or a 1033 provided M16.
So, yes the shooter was outgunned and yes the Cops had body armor.
There is NO excuse for the craven behavior of the Cops on the scene
It is THEIR JOB to take out armed madmen when necessary and take whatever risks to themselves that are necessary in doing so.
Job or no job, I think we’ve reached the point where there’s nothing left but actors, PR, insurance salesmen. No journalists. No cops. No public health officials. No aircraft engineers. No FDA commissioners. And yes, there are exceptions for which we can be grateful. But the bulk of people in what were professions are now just actors, PR and insurance salesmen.
Some things are still getting done by inertia, but the hour is getting late.
Unbelievable. Sad but too true.
HMP
there is a great deal of ruin in a nation
It may be an ideal, but in reality, women and children come last. I think we’ve all swallowed the great mythology that *every civilization puts women and children first when disaster strikes”, but it’s simply not true. Years ago, I read a book by a man who worked in air crash forensics. I’ll never forget his description of men’s shoe prints on the backs of women and children, whether any of them made it out alive or not. (For the life of me, I can’t remember the title, but if I do, I’ll post it here for some serious education.)
There are more than enough Captain’s reports of ship sinkings where the male crew cut the ropes to the lifeboats leaving women and children to drown. Yes, it is usually the poor women and children in steerage who were left behind, but the very fact they were left behind belies the chivalric notion of women and children first.
Detoxing from this cultural garbage takes some time, but here’s an article that can help you begin: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-real-story-on-shipwrecks-women-and-children-last/2012/04/17/gIQAn3PeOT_blog.html
I’m right there with you Rev. What is the next level up from infuriating rage at this blatant cowardice? And Louis Fyne was commenting yesterday too, stanning for these cops, which is just inexplicable to me.
This mom said Uvalde f*ck it, jumped the fence, and ran in and got her kids out. Something fully “trained professionals”, who are the beneficiaries of 40% of this town’s annual budget, couldn’t do. Maybe they should have followed Ms Gomez. She knew what to do.
https://www.businessinsider.nl/a-mother-who-was-handcuffed-outside-the-texas-school-shooting-later-ran-into-the-school-and-pulled-her-two-children-to-safety-report/
> … in every civilization it is a fundamental duty to protect the children. Every civilization. ‘Women
> and children first’ is not just a quaint phase but actually had firm doctrine behind it.
Sorry, Rev. With this comment you are prima facie guilty of sexism and ageism.
How many US cops are former soldiers who fought in the Mid East? Where their job was mostly telling air support where the bad guys were and then cleaning up the mess afterwards.
Perhaps what passes for the US police these days are just returned vets with few other options due to intelligence constraints and personality problems.
You can see the military training in present day cops when they shoot to kill almost every time. This is the military way, kill, kill, kill.The old police way was disable and capture and then let justice through trial take over.
Real justice and closure is denied to victims and their families when the killer’s body is disposed of and that is that. No trial, no day in court for victims’ families. Fairness denied.
A killer, taken out by lazy police, suffers momentarily. A killer, disabled then forced to stand in a court and then jailed for the rest of their natural life, suffers every day. Like families of the victims.
However, in it’s favour, gunning down the suspect every time is a hell of a lot cheaper to the State.
These sorts of incidents have been studied a lot all over the world, and two things have emerged. One is that after the event everybody knows exactly what should have been done. The other is that before and during the event, nobody knows anything. Reports in real time are almost always wildly inaccurate, and even hours after the event, details of what happened are still changing. People see things that never happened, and miss those that did. In any situation like this one, the reality could have been very different. There was no shooter perhaps. Or perhaps there was but he was carrying a stick. Or an imitation gun, or an air rifle. Or perhaps it was another policeman who’d been called and arrived first. Or one of the policemen shoots a pupil by mistake. Or bullets start ricocheting, as tend to happen in confined spaces, and innocent people die. For any given event of this kind, even in the US, the thesis that there’s an actual murderer murdering is only one of many possibilities. That being so, politicians are much more worried about getting things wrong and starting Floyd-style protests, and this affects the instructions they give the police. The only real answer is simply not to let these guns circulate in the first place.
I still remember fifty years ago (I was a student down the road) that a couple of young dissidents forced their way into India House in London , and waved guns around threatening to kill people. The police arrived promptly and, unusually for those days, they were armed. After challenges, the police shot the two dead. It turned out the guns were toy ones, although the people who called the police didn’t realise it. There was a huge scandal, calls for resignations, calls for prosecutions etc. And in 2005, Jean Menezes, a Brazilian, was shot dead by police who thought he was a terrorist carrying a suicide bomb. Eyewitnesses told the media they’d seen electrical wires trailing from the backpack he was carrying. They were wrong. In the end, you can’t have it both ways.
Jean Menezes wasn’t just shot dead – he was murdered. Police charged in and pinned him down to the ground where it became obvious that his thin jacket was not an explosive vest. Then a special cop came up, put his gun to his head, and pumped seven hollow-point bullets into it. The security camera in that carriage mysteriously “failed” and the cop in charge of this cock up – Cressida Dick – went on to eventually head the Metropolitan Police Service until the beginning of this year. It was murder most foul and the bs lies that they pumped out afterwards which was totally disproved by CTV footage was disgusting.
As I said, you can’t have it both ways.
Sorry but as far as I am concerned, the protection of the lives of children is an over-riding priority. Everything else is just window dressing. If those cops did not want to risk their lives doing so, perhaps they might have found a safer line of work – like a packer in an Amazon Fulfillment Center.
RK
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2022/05/26/dps-spokesman-police-couldve-been-shot-and-decided-to-contain-the-gunman-with-his-victims-n472342
As I pointed out earlier, the recommendation from the FBI is that police should not wait to form a team or come up with a plan during an active shooter situation. Even if there’s only one officer on the scene, the best practice is to go in immediately and engage the shooter. So with that in mind, here is Lt. Olivarez’ full response to Blitzer’s question:
Police spokesman
Correct, the active shooter situation, you want to stop the killing, you want to preserve life, but also one thing that – of course, the American people need to understand — that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is.* They are hearing gunshots. They are receiving gunshots.
At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school.
So they were able to contain that gunman inside that classroom so that he was not able to go to any other portions of the school to commit any other killings.*
============================================
That reminds me of in order to save the village they had to destroy the village – to paraphrase – in order to save the children they had to let the children be shot…
* BTW, which is it – do they know or not know where the gunman is???
RK
and
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2022/05/27/teacher-propped-open-a-back-door-to-the-school-moments-before-the-shooter-arrived-n472465
McGraw then went through a timeline of 911 calls which made the delay seem even worse. A female teacher called at 12:03 pm and told police where the shooter was. Of course based on the earlier timeline, they already knew that. The same teacher called back at 12:10 to advise police there were multiple people dead. At 12:13 and 12:16 she called once again to say there were 8-9 students still alive.
I couldn’t hear the first question but it must have been about the delay storming the door because McGraw answered, “The on scene commander believed that it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject.” That’s basically what I and others were speculating yesterday, especially after the CNN interview with DPS spokesman Chris Olivarez.
The next question is more clear. Why did they treat this as a barricaded subject when there were children inside the classroom, some of whom were still alive. McGraw replied, “Again, you know, the on scene commander considered a barricaded subject and that there was time and there were no more children at risk. Obviously, based upon the information we have, there were children in that classroom that were at risk and it was in fact still an active shooter situation and not a barricaded subject.”
That’s one hell of a big mistake to make and you do wonder why it took three days for them to admit it.
==========================================
A couple of things. The police who were shot and ostensibly the reason for caution? Grazing wounds….
19 cops present???? Did they need a division??
if the police didn’t know where the shooter was, and didn’t know he was shooting, its because they didn’t WANT to know…
Let me get this straight, David. In your mind it’s either:
A) police are allowed to execute anyone they like if they ever felt at all threatened by them (“Jean Menezes wasn’t just shot dead – he was murdered. Police charged in and pinned him down to the ground where it became obvious that his thin jacket was not an explosive vest. Then a special cop came up, put his gun to his head, and pumped seven hollow-point bullets into it.”);
or B) police cannot possibly run into a building to save children being murdered.
Have I got that straight?
I remember the Jean Menenez case quite well. It’s a lot worse than you describe. The Metro basically said, in a presser, that: a) an Arab-looking bloke, b) wearing a heavy coat in summer weather, c) ran away from the police team, jumping into the Underground, and d) ran into the carriage and started shouting something about Allah, at which point, well, bullet to the head. About two days later, however, the security camera tape (!!!) was released, showing that the Brazilian individual in light, summery clothing, is calmly sitting in the carriage when a group of men just run up to him and shoot him with no forewarning. But it was right after the 7/7 bombings, so the police got a tip, and there you go.
This? I’ll be the first one to say that charging in guns blazing when you do not understand what’s happening is bound to lead to bad consequences, but here? For 40 minutes? And they did not even try to, oh, I don’t know, secure the rest of the school and evacuate all the other teachers and students, never mind confronting the shooter? Sounds like a “business decision” to me, let SWAT handle it and all that.
Wonder if any of these guys charged the PD overtime for standing around outside the school.
The alternative is worse, therefore nothing can be done to improve the situation?
In the United States, cops with no-knock warrants routinely see everyone in a house they just stormed as a backpacker with wires sticking out, children in playgrounds are murdered for having toy guns.
But they can’t storm a lightly secured building to stop a teen with a gun who is killing small children?
Maybe just this once we should compromise on a middle option? Because short of searching every building in the US, sealing the borders and then strip searching every person, we’re not getting guns off the street any time soon.
Video from theatlantic.com about ALERTT training:
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/426558/active-shooter/
I am saddened when some of the more tragic mass shooting events finds its way to the news. Jimmy Dore reports some 220 mass shooting events so far this year in the US. Not many anywhere else. I think this reflects how the nation treats its poorest citizens as well as the ease to obtain fire arms.
Sounds like a nice number of late, but $40 billion would have purchased a lot of fire arms if your elected leaders did what John Howard did in 1997 following the massacre at Port Arthur in Tasmania. ie banning most long fire arms, certainly automatics and Australians rushed forward to have them be purchased by the government and melted down. Very hard to own a fire arm here in Australia, let alone a ball bearing gun. Not only do you need a reason, but you need to be a person of good repute to get a licence (from the Police).
Sadly, this is just another of those things that will be forgotten next week, until the next time. Except for those affected, of course.
I do agree though about the general sentiments of the actions of the police. Just disgraceful. Perhaps if millions camped out at DC to protest? Nah, protesting isn’t allowed. Criticism of the powerful can’t be allowed to happen. You have reported on the tactics of the police at protests the powerful wish to suppress. So, we are not surprised to witness that the police are not there to protect us.
Thank you, Lambert. (I sent a picture of a microbat on my finger to Yves, you might tell her.)
Happy Memorial Day to you all from Cairns, Australia.
Le Monde (The World) has an interesting take on US gun culture.
lemonde.fr/idees/article/2022/05/27/l-amour-des-armes-a-feu-est-une-folie-americaine-certes-mais-pas-uniquement_6127833_3232.html
The New Liberal Party, which is left-progressive in American terms, did poorly in the recent Australian federal elections, and Steve Keen, the author of Debunking Economics and inventor of the Minsky economic modeling software and candidate for Senate, went down to defeat with it. He explains the loss here, which may be paywalled. The upside is that this will free up Keen to first address his recently diagnosed prostate cancer, continue his crusade to force thermodynamics into the conversation about the economics of climate change, and advance the Minsky project.
Minsky combines dynamic systems modeling with double entry bookkeeping for purposes of econometric modeling. You can download the latest revision of Minsky for free here at Source Forge. Having given up on academia because of the time-sucking administrivia he now supports himself, his family and his work entirely with his Patreon and Substack accounts.
Keen can also be found on Substack now.
https://profstevekeen.substack.com/
Seems there have been some issues with Patreon refusing credit cards of late.
For any interested, the Coalition got its collective a** handed to them in the election, particularity by women and women candidates, as you may have heard. Already the French are re-opening up relations and moves are being made to meet climate change problems. This being the case, the Coalition has decided that there is only one thing to do – move much more to the far right. And they have already chosen their new leader -Peter Dutton – who is just the person to do it. It doesn’t help that he looks like, as one Labour politician said, like Lord Voldermort-
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/shouldn-t-have-said-it-anthony-albanese-condemns-tanya-plibersek-for-comparing-peter-dutton-to-voldemort-20220526-p5aons.html
Funny how those movies are what everyone compares everything to these days.
I suppose because sometimes they are apt. Just yesterday I read somebody compare how George Soros looks just like Emperor Palpatine and I’ll be damned if that is not true.
It’s often been said (to a mostly unbelieving audience of adults) that Harry Potter is the cultural keystone of several generations much like Star Wars was for the elderly. It would explain, for example, the almost ritualistic excommunication of JK Rowling for disagreeing with current political trends.
I was particularly amused by the “Dumbledore’s Army” logo appearing everywhere during the Trump administration as a sort of counter-culture protest.
So Harry Potter is to this round of Hippies turned Yuppies what LOTR was back in the day? Too bad Occupy was a bleak undertaking compared to Woodstock.
So Harry Potter is to this round of Hippies turned Yuppies what LOTR was back in the day? Too bad Occupy was a bleak undertaking compared to Woodstock.
“An Ancient Indian Temple With 56 Musical Pillars That Play Individual Notes When Struck”
This surprises me less this as a coupla weeks ago I came across a video clip of an archaeologist playing a Lithophone and which was played by ancient peoples ‘all over the African continent, in South America, Australia, Azerbaijan, England, Hawaii, Iceland, India, and everywhere else prehistoric people lived.’ Amazing sounds-
https://www.openculture.com/2019/09/watch-an-archaeologist-play-the-lithophone.html
My thought when listening to the Indian Temple performance was that the pillars were hollowed out and not solid. Does anyone here know whether that is the case?
Loved the Nautilus article about time. It’s nice to occasionally ponder life’s mysteries instead of dwelling on the unhinged reality exemplified by all the other posts.
Hear, here, and now, and now…
The notion of reality as made up of infinite “moments” (the “windowless monads” of Leibniz) is refuted by Zeno (Achilles can never overtake the tortoise if there is an infinite series of “moments” lying between him and the first moment where he would be ahead of the tortoise) in what was a negative proof of the Herakliteian-Platonic concept of the universe as a dialectical process.
Kengferno: On the other hand, it seemed like an awful big passel of words to get back to what Herakleitos taught us: Panta rhei. Everything flows.
The recognition that the self is an endlessly fluctuating process goes way back in Buddhism. This isn’t news.
And as my mentor in writing taught me, The gods exist at the speed of time and have no need for memory and no sense of the future.
So an understanding of time may be a touch of what divinity means (and it isn’t monotheism…).
I enthusiastically agree with Kengferno and .human that indeed, it is nice, better yet, beneficial, to occasionally ponder topics outside the challenges of Newtonian-physics reality that are earnestly discussed in the other posts.
Thank you Lambert.
And yes…now, and now…
Yes, that’s a very interesting article. Similar to the author’s description of waves not existing in and of themselves, I see space/time as being a relationship of consciousness to itself as a wave is simply a relationship of water to itself. More specifically, space/time is a sort of mirror that captures a limited perception of the world so that consciousness can examine itself for a moment. Were we able step outside of the time/space framework and remain coherent, we would experience the world-as-itself, as a limitless field of perceptions.
However, our individual consciousness would of course dissolve in such an instance, as a tiny rivulet of water “dissolves” into the ocean. That minuscule relationship goes away. But it is possible to experience a taste of a simulacrum of that ultimate reality. I have, once, while in ritual. A perception of limitlessness, of timelessness, of basking in the knowledge that what has been, what is, and what will be are all of the same stuff.
And this is where I must take exception to DJG’s point above about the gods alone experiencing it. God, or the ultimate limitless consciousness, cannot Itself directly know space/time, by definition. It is outside of the mirror of extension, which incidentally is why science, which constructs models of space/time experience, cannot answer the ultimate questions of the nature of reality.
But there are intermediaries, constructs of consciousness such as ourselves, that can experience reflection. These are the “daemons” of Jung which inhabit space/time as we do: nodules of consciousness that reflect back on themselves, albeit from a different perch. The small “g” gods, angels, spirits, call them what you will. Messengers between the world of spirit and the world of immediate, “concrete” perceptions. I experienced one of these once as well, as a roiling, coiling sensation of ecstatic joy that nearly split my head asunder, upon the completion of a poem that I had been formulating for many, many years. My partner was there and thought I was having a stroke.
Maybe I was. Perhaps this is all a fantasy. As a devotee of the Middle Path, I remain uncertain. It is the only clear route.
>Abbott/FDA
The outrage should be that oligopolies/monopolies are apparently US policy these days. 25% production of baby formula for one plant?
In regards to the FDA, the FDA is probably starting to get get back on site. No more remote assessments masked up (must virtue signal) via Zoom while watching Netflix and ordering from Amazon.
You just know that beside donating to the Democrats and Republicans to get that monopoly, there’s another destination for their profits. Guess no one wanted to waste money on upgrading machinery? The parasite donor class strikes again. Why aren’t their executives in federal prison?
Abbott Laboratories announces an Equity Buyback for $5,000 million worth of its shares.
12/10/2021 | 01:00pm EDT
Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT) announces a share repurchase program. Under the program, the company will repurchase up to $5,000 million worth of its common shares.
https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/ABBOTT-LABORATORIES-11506/news/Abbott-Laboratories-announces-an-Equity-Buyback-for-5-000-million-worth-of-its-shares-37290730/
$5000 million sounds very odd to me. What a strange way to say $5 billion.
Deflection and distraction. Remember, we live in a time of deceit.
Tory Britain faces extinction at the hands of a radical hard-Left alliance The Telegraph – classic Telegraph article. Was surprised i could read it (usually paywalled). The usual right wing hand waving. The author seems to labour (no pun intended) under the illusion that by 2024 the UK has been living under some golden era of Tory rule when all we’ve had is incompetence and misrule – austerity, a badly bodged Brexit & Covid, sleaze & corruption, increasing authoritarianism. I’m no fan of Labour or the other parties in Britain but I find it hard to believe that they’d make things worse than another 5 years of Tory government (although it’s a pretty low bar). Allister Heath thinks a ‘hard left alliance’ will devestate the UK but fails to realise his beloved Conservatives have been doing so since 2010. And the idea that Labour and opposition parties are hard left, well only in the Telegraph’s world could you class these beige centrists as hard left. It’s not like the Socialist Workers Party is on the cusp of power.
Who is Allister Heath? I struggle to imagine this kind of article having much influence. I mean, who might be persuaded by such rhetoric that isn’t already onside? To me it seems more like hackwork some brand strategists recommended The Telegraph maintain on a certain quota. Or Heath is trying to curry favor with people at #10. Perhaps both.
Unable to read the article o/a paywall, so can only comment on the relationship between the Telegraph and No 10. Sadly. No 10 is more likely to seek favour at the Telegraph than the other way round.
Thank you.
I have met Allister Heath and some of his former charges at City AM. He’s French of British parentage, studied at Oxford and has no idea of what Britain is like. He’s like the other Brexiteer, Lord Daniel Hannan of Peru.
TINA, so thinking is no longer necessary. These must be the Common Values we are so fiercely defending in Ukraine to the last Ukrainian and a few lunatic volunteers.
From Bloomberg:
White House Eyes Restarting Idle Refineries to Tame Fuel Prices
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-26/white-house-eyes-idle-refineries-amid-effort-to-tame-fuel-prices
Seems that France may have their own problems. They must have thought that they were sweet with their nuclear power plant network keeping them safe from energy shortages. Yeah, about that-
https://www.rt.com/business/556182-eu-russian-gas-nuclear/
This is relatively close to fake news, except that if you look hard you can actually see the real facts are there in the story. Every year, a number of reactors are taken off line for maintenance in the summer, when the demand is lower. Reactors need to have the oil changed and the tyres checked from time to time. In addition, hairline cracks were discovered in the backup cooling systems of four reactors, so other reactors of the same type are being checked as well. And that’s basically it: in a normal summer the the story wouldn’t even have appeared, but Ukraine, Ukraine etc. And no, electricity supply in France is unaffected.
oil refinery capaxity is at/near all-time highs.
oil companies don’t want to reopen shuttered refineries when many lenders won’t fund fossil fuel projects and you also have a White House that has aggressive EV plans.
One one hand, White House and others (Davos) say oil is obsolete and will be regulated to death, on the other they say pump and refine as much oil as you can.
The oil industry is focusing on the former and distrustful of the latter.
Foreign Affairs: For me this is the money shot: “The West should, in other words, build Putin not a golden bridge but a gilded bridge: a path out of the war that is attractive enough for Kremlin to end the fighting but in time comes to be seen as cheap and tawdry.” This article, from a premier FP organ, conflates the USSR and modern Russia. The unchecked assumptions about Russia’s aims and capabilities are on full gaudy display. My predictions are somewhat more austere: as in the end of Van der Leyen and Borrell’s political future as EU citizens wake up to fact that their “leaders” are leading them to ruin. The refusal to face facts on the ground is truly sociopathic at this point.
After looking at yesterday’s link about Zelensky offering reciprocal status for Poles for what Poland has given Ukrainian refugees, I was curious to try to find more possible info about claims that basically Poland is starting the process of incorporating part of Ukraine into the Polish state.
I didn’t find much more about what’s going on with the current agreement/legislation/whatever but did come across the historical idea of Intermarium and then looked into it more. I saw that Intermarium was mentioned a few times recently in the comments here, so just wanted to share a few articles I thought were interesting for those who might also be interested. Also would love to know anyone’s thoughts about any of it. (I was going through yesterday’s links circa a few hours ago is why I’m posting this in comments for today’s links, hope that’s okay!)
How the Ukrainian far-right has become one of the biggest proponents of Intermarium from New Eastern Europe in 2018. They have several other articles about Intermarium too (however their recent articles about Ukraine imo are garbage)
A sea painted NATO black from Pepe for Asia Times in June last year
Is a new Europe about the be born BETWEEN Brussels and Moscow Express, end of March of this year
Could the war in Ukraine be a revival of Polish geopolitical ambitions? from Modern Diplomacy, also March this year
Poland and the success of its ‘Intermarium’ project – oped Eurasia Review 2019
I’m not trying to advocate for these articles being totally on point or anything but I thought they presented different perspectives that maybe give some additional insight into /context for various actors’ actions at present.
How about the EU or would that be repeating oneself? The Foreign Affairs article is a window into the “Russia on the ropes” mentality of the Blob/EU but of course the conceit that both warring parties–the Blob/EU versus Russia–are equally at threat is a fantasy. Russia is in the process of creating a future for itself even as its opponents embrace doom. The Russian plan is a risk that may not work out but at least they have a plan.
The good thing about the net is that nobody can tell your age.
The bad thing about the net is that nobody can tell your age.
End result is that it seems to be stuck having the same debates ad infinitum…
Dunno if this is a faux pas but i have to build a bit on this after reading some news.
Apparently ABBA will be touring again, using much the same pepper’s ghost tech that was used to resurrect Tupac some years back apparently.
the thought struck me that the outgoing generation is perhaps the first generation that has had the ability to carry their youth with them throughout their life. This thanks to it being built on top of recorded music, series and movies that have been release again and again on newer formats.
Thus there is no transition from future ot present to past, only a “eternal” present.
And i am guessing that the same i happening with my own generation, as i watch with bemusement as game companies are releasing content that venerate the original Top Gun movie as a sequel movie is getting released.
Interesting observation; however, I have to say that much of the media stuff I enjoyed in my youth now seems outdated or just worn-out after too many repetitions. The exception being films and music that predate my youth. To be sure, they can also suffer from the passage of time, but they display a kind of history and, more important, a sensibility that comes off as old but new.
Re: Winning Against the Odds: The 32BJ SEIU Organizing Model.
I love seeing union articles here and union organizing analysis in general. SEIU 32BJ is certainly a union model to study and learn from, but this article is pure SEIU propaganda, written by a senior staffer for the 32BJ union and an academic who is on 32BJ’s payroll.
So I’m the one who recommended the link. The authors self-identify. It definitely paints 32BJ favorably but I recommended it for the details about what it means to be a real organizing union. Lots of good nuts and bolts that only insiders would know (to repeat a line I wrote yesterday in yesterday’s water cooler) focusing on things like budgets, the hiring process for organizers, goal-setting and periodic strategic reviews, the multi-year process of organizing a local economic sector, pairing existing members with non-members at organizing targets so they can learn from each other, etc.
The point of my recommendation wasn’t to convince anyone that 32BJ is great – pretty much everything I know about the local I learned in the article. It was to provide one resource for other unions and unionists that might be interested in learning from others.
Thank you for the Donzinger story. I live within spitting distance of Richmond and know the history of this company town. Richmond boomed during WW2 as the Kaiser shipbuilding plant was the biggest in the West, essential to the war effort.
In days gone by, the nearby Berkeley area has been home to dynamite factories (long gone), but still has one of the largest operating forges left in the US – another notorious polluter that the local community, after a long fight, successfully forced to contain their toxic emissions.
“Haggling with Hungary: How the EU could get a deal to ban Russian oil”
I have heard it suggested that not only does the EU want regime change in Russia, but that they also want regime change in Hungary as well. So I suspect that there is zero trust between Viktor Orbán and the EU and any promises given by the EU would be just that – promises.
an aside: in the solid EU marriage of countries, a lot of the ‘marrieds’ seem to be playing footsie under the table with RU when it comes to buying gas in rubles. imo. / ;)
There is actually a difference for Hungary. They get all their gas by pipeline which you cannot hide. So it is all above board. Other EU countries can get their gas by ship and whose Russian origins can be hid. But it is these later countries that are criticizing Hungary.
It gets better. The EU is demanding that they renounce Russian energy which they can’t possibly do so are refusing. Something to do with reality. So a few days ago the Ukrainians were saying ‘Nice pipeline you got feeding your country through our country. Pity if something happened to it. Maybe you should sign up with the EU.’ Yeah, the Ukraine is now officially a mafia state.
So over at MoA forums there was mention of a mass protest in favor of Imran Khan, but there’s almost no mention of it at any of the other alt media sites I visit. A web search for Pakistan shows that main stream media have stories up, so its not an unknown event. Not sure how much support he’ll be able to muster, but if the military decides to take his side in things…I mean Washington is still pissed at Iran for throwing off the yoke 50 years ago, and all they have is oil, Pakistan has nukes.
Maybe Israel can start announcing that Pakistan is just 6 months away from developing an oil field.
I had a link + video of the Imran Khan march yesterday in Links #JustSaying
oops missed that
> … Washington is still pissed at Iran for throwing off the yoke 50 years ago …
Bell: Ding! Can it really be that long ago? (Thank luck, no.) When you get old, the years go by faster and faster but still: I’m 70 now, not 80; the Iranian kick-out-the-Shah was in 1979, not 1969. Whew. :-)
If Elon dislikes “billionaire”, he should try on “oligarch” for size.
I’m guessing the proper term for someone who names their kid “X Æ A-12” is “pretentious douchebag.”
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/08/entertainment/elon-musk-grimes-baby-name-pronunciation-scli-intl/index.html
‘Illionaire’ is a perfect fit for the man with the most money.
“World’s richest man Elon Musk says recession would be a ‘GOOD’ thing because it’ll hurt unproductive work-from-home crowd and ‘foolish’ business owners he says deserve to go bankrupt”
History records how, during the Great Recession of the 2020s, how many corporations that had nothing behind them like Uber and Tesla collapsed overnight. It was found that companies that relied on work-from-home fared the best because they did not have high rentals and utility bills to finance supporting bouquet headquarters.
A pretty good roundup of all Elon’s crimes of ego appears in Slate.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/05/elon-musk-tesla-twitter-fables.html
Here’s the start;
“On a beautiful day in May 2015, I drove the 13 hours from my home in Portland, Oregon, to Harris Ranch, California, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. At the time, Tesla was touting a battery swap station that could send Tesla drivers on their way in a fully powered vehicle in less than the time it takes to fill up a car with gas. Overtaken by curiosity, I had decided to spend a long Memorial Day weekend in California’s Central Valley to see if Elon Musk’s latest bit of dream weaving could stand up to reality.
There, amid the pervasive stench of cow droppings from a nearby feedlot, I discovered that Tesla’s battery swap station was not in fact being made available to owners who regularly drove between California’s two largest cities. Instead, the company was running diesel generators to power additional Superchargers (the kind that take 30 to 60 minutes to recharge a battery) to handle the holiday rush, their exhaust mingling with the unmistakable smell of bullshit.
That one decision to go and find the truth underlying Elon Musk’s promises, rather than just take his word for it, changed my life in ways I never could have anticipated. Now, seven long and often lonely years later, the world seems to be understanding what I learned from the experience: Once you stop taking Musk at his word, his heroic popular image evaporates and a far darker reality begins to reveal itself.”
My favorite part of that response from Musk was ‘it’s been raining money on fools for too long’.
” That money should all be raining on swindliars like me”.
In the 1930’s we had name-brand criminals who wielded guns and murdered people often in cold blood, Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, etc.
Almost immediately after our latest mass murder, the male assassin’s life is dissected with every possible clue gone over with microscopic zeroing in on what made them tick, and we all learn his name-but never any of the victim’s names so much…really only in passing-yeah they’re important, but not that important.
The LATimes has a picture of every child and teacher on their website. It is numbing.
Nice touch by my childhood fishwrap, but the fact is, now that i’ve seen the same photo of the perpetrator 93 times online in the past few days without trying too hard, feel confident I could ID him and pick him out of a police lineup.
Sadly one look at gunned down little kids, doesn’t have the same effect.
We glorify these awful humans by giving them want they crave-attention.
Blinken: U.S. to Leverage Russia-Ukraine Bloc against China.
If this is the U.S. idea of strategy, I assure you that many people are going to be hurt. And it isn’t going to be the Chinese. The U.S. elites are clueless, telephoning it in, as we say.
In the post on losing influence in Latin America–definitely worth your while–I asked the esteemed commenters Rev Kev and lyman alpha blob if Antony “Guitar Solo” Blinken is truly as stupid as he comes off.
From the “Bloc” article: “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order — and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it,” he said. “Beijing’s vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress over the past 75 years.”
Quoting his Groovy Georgetown-ness.
This is Hillary Clinton level of vomitrocious word salad.
In short, our terminally narrow and self-absorbed elites, convinced of their own merits.
“The only country”? Hint: Try plugging in “United States.” Universal values that have lasted a whole seventy-five years? Heck, Planters Peanuts was founded in 1906, and I think I’d rather listen to Mr. Peanut than self-blinded Antony.
…in this thread let me stand in for other esteemed commenters: Blinken is Dumber than Grunt!
Perspective at The Diplomat Blinken Emphasizes Cooperation, Including With Beijing, in China Policy Speech Blinken emphasized cooperation with allies and partners, and even with China itself, in his long-awaited speech.
What if the “new phase” is all about U.S. not leading but countries being equal? Obviously Blinken can’t even conceive a world where U.S. is consulted by others for it’s concerns in areas that are far away from U.S. so that the actual stakeholders can address those in their solution to issues.
There was nothing “quasi” about it:
Blinken isn’t stupid as much as he is brainwashed and propagandized as so many of his ilk are. He truly believes in concepts such as the “free world” (vs what, the enslaved world?), the United States as “indispensable” and a “shining city on a hill”. He truly believes that the United States is a force for “good” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There are many Blinkens out there. They are delusional because they live sheltered lives and have absorbed countless lies about this country.
Oh, Blinken most assuredly is stupid. The way he carried on at the China summit the US instigated in Alaska proves it.
The two fetish-gear tweets.
Why am I reminded of the Azov Battalion, which then distinguished itself by retreating into a steelworks, taking civilians along as human shields?
But they have uniforms with groovy patches, too!
Peeps: We have a problem with both law and enforcement of said law.
To put it another way: The tweets show you what happens when the endless war comes home.
Biden and the Dem estab: from NY Intelligencer, May 24 2022.
There Has to Be a Backup Plan. There’s a Backup Plan, Right?
Inside the 2024 soul-searching that’s happening in every corner of the Democratic Party.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/05/biden-2024-democrats-search-for-alternative.html
Krystal’s opinion. Breaking Points. utube. 8~ minutes.
“…a trap of their own making.” -Krystal Ball
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLyySor1LvY
RE: Greek seizure of Iranian oil tanker
So is the US govt just pirates by proxy now? Not sure where the seizure took place or where the tanker was impounded, but the Greeks doing favors for Uncle Sugar would do well to remember who owns their ports, and if I remember correctly the selloff was a condition of the Troika extending further loans when Greece’s economy cratered. Wondering if the EU still thinks those particular austerity measures were such a good idea given current geopolitics?
China has been relatively quiet throughout the current conflict but they are not going to stay silent forever as the US plays fast and loose with the “rules”, especially when it starts touching on their property.
XYZoroastrian Affair?
Didn’t UK perform a similar seizure some years back outside Gibraltar?
And was there not talk about USA issuing letters of marque to allow private companies to seize Russian owned yachts etc.
I couldn’t read FT article but I believe this The Diplomat article refers to the same coalition China Wants 10 Pacific Nations to Sign a Major Cooperation Agreement Micronesia’s president called the draft sent out by Beijing “the single most game-changing proposed agreement in the Pacific in any of our lifetimes.”
First up is Kiribati’s fish China’s Foreign Minister Visits Kiribati, Where Fishing Ground Is at Stake Kiribati made a rare exception to its pandemic border closure for Wang Yi and a Chinese delegation to visit.
> the agreement opens the door for China to own and control the region’s fisheries and communications infrastructure. He said China could intercept emails and listen in on phone calls.
That’s what we’d do, or would have already done, if we weren’t so stupid. So probably he is correct.
I thought that I could distinguish between misinformation and disinformation but I was wrong. I have been reading about how terrible the indigenous people in Canada were treated by various churches—Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and so on. As far as I know I accepted the “fact” that many hundreds of indigenous children were buried on parochial land without any identifying markers. I even began to believe that “cultural genocide” was part of the early Canadian policy in how aboriginals were treated. I did not, however, see any graves dug up to expose the bones of young children to support that claim by many articles both online and elsewhere. There seemed to be no available documentation of what occurred in residential institutions.
Finally, after The New York Times newspaper and other newspapers began to repeat the story of how Canada mistreated the indigenous youths who were sent to residential schools, I gradually became used to seeing the story described as “genocidal” without the identifier “culture” which made a whole lot of difference to my understanding of what occurred in residential schools run by religious institutions.
I didn’t think that destroying a statue of Sir John A MacDonald was going to help the situation even though he was probably aware of this policy and perhaps supported it. He was an alcoholic and had lots of character flaws, but he was our first Prime Minister and desires that recognition.
I feel that I was fully misinformed by the many writers who seemed to just copy any ideas of what happened at residential schools and didn’t do their own research, such as talking to indigenous elders and chiefs for their understanding of what happened. Or searching for further proof of their allegations.
Our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, has done more to talk about past wrongs done to the indigenous peoples than any other prime minister. Trudeau apologized; the Pope apologized, the Archbishop of England apologized, many different religious leaders also apologized. Some even raised money to atone for their sins.
Well, what I found out is that there are many sides to this story and not all of them have been explored. There is no reason to denigrate what we already know, but the whole story needs to be told. I have been feeling guilty for my ancestors’ past sins in a way that is not without dignity but that is without a more wholesome truth (or at least as much truth as has been found so far).
I came across this article and this one, each of which throws a somewhat different light on how things get repeated without due diligence.
I feel as though I have fallen for the biggest hoax yet about Canada and my shame now lies in my weakness for not seeking out more information before believing the story that I thought held all the truth.
There may have been no mass graves, but forcibly “educating” children kidnapped from their parents is imo an attempt at genocide in itself, since it means destroying the culture of that people (that is not accounting for the crime of systematically breaking up families in the name of Colonialism). How would it feel if you had your child taken from you?
I note that your comment, “Justin Trudeau has done more to talk about past wrongs done to indigenous peoples than any other prime minister”, only mentions talking.
Talk is cheap.
What positive things has Trudeau done to help the indigenous people in Canada? I have seen no news articles that he has done anything. In fact the Canadian government still seems to be hellbent on taking tribal lands for oil pipelines, etc.
> graves
One would think this is the sort of project archeologists and scholars would have written some papers on. Are there any? Count the graves, count the bones, make a timeline…
re: The stench of Musk, the limitations of Gates
I’m no fan of that parasite Musk but I question TIME as an honest critic. Not that the writer’s charges seem inaccurate in any way. My question is for the editors. Since we are taking down corrupt billionaires where are the articles on Epstein’s buddy Bill Gates? Oh, here we go:
https://time.com/5086870/bill-gates-guest-editor-time/
How cozy. There’s more:
https://time.com/5086907/bill-gates-nancy-gibbs-interview/
and an educator:
https://time.com/4786837/bill-gates-books-reading/
An arch-enemy of public education who has replaced books in classrooms with his stultifying technology. How charming.
So spare me the take down of Musk, TIME. Stop bending the knee to Gates. Or both knees, rather.
an aside, speaking of education and the computer tech billionaires’ profits: WEF wants k-12 education to move to the Metaverse, replacing pencils, paper, and paper books. Not kidding. Think of the profits to computer and tablet makers, to server farms, to coders, to data banks, etc. Is this peak clown world?
Experiential learning and VR will reshape the future of education
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/05/the-future-of-education-is-in-experiential-learning-and-vr
These WEF creeps just come right out and call children “human capital.” The purpose of education is to increase human capital, according to these degenerates. Not instill kids with purpose or virtue, but to commodify ’em early before their young brains know they should protest assimilation into the Borg.
And get this, “It should be noted that VR does somewhat limit human interaction if not appropriately monitored and introduced with a guided programme and can cause isolation in younger generations.”
But we want to do it to your kids anyway. Because they need our guidance. Because we’re the vampire squid who replace your children’s souls with baubles and geegaws. Let us introduce them to dependence on our virtual world for simulated happy times alone in the corner because meta-parasitism is the future.
I would call this unbelievable if it wasn’t perfectly aligned with good ole fashioned neoliberal predation.
Burn them with fire.
What’s the Point?
As WEF plots World Takeover, Chief Conspirator Bill Gates on a panel at the annual Davos meeting said: “The idea of checking if people are vaccinated, you know if you have breakthrough infections, what’s the point?”
https://dailyangle.com/articles/bill-gates-what-s-the-point-of-mandates-if-the-vaccines-don-t-work
Stunning, all those mandates, all those threats, all those passports, etc. for nought. And why is Bill spilling the beans—-Long Covid Brain Fog?
And some rightly due schadenfreude:
“Stanford University epidemiologist Dr. Jay Battacharya is among the many medical scientists who have been arguing for more than a year that the inability of the COVID vaccines to stop infection and transmission undermine vaccine passports and the requirements by governments and businesses that employees get the shots.
“Now that @BillGates has seen the light on the uselessness of vaccine passports (& mandates), I would like to extend an invitation to him to sign the @gbdeclaration,” he wrote on Twitter.”
Yeah, I came across a marketing ploy disguised as a informational article for the Metaverse a while back proclaiming the wonders of virtual learning. It’s main thrust was that since it’s the future, well then, it’s the future. Teachers were mentioned once, as an aside, essentially saying they can come along and help too. You can bet elite children will still be in classrooms and they won’t be eating bugs for lunch either.
Meta seems like a crap version of Second Life. It certainly seems true that Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates can’t take (buy) a good product without making it junk. Instagram now has so many ads it’s hard to the see the people you are following (on the mobile version anyway).
the “metaverse” is really just a meme, a contrivance. It’s very hard to take seriously.
incidentally, at the risk of putting myself on the NC naughty step, I got a VR headset late last year. Pretty impressive consumer tech to be honest. I just use it either as a toy or mostly for exercise (table tennis, boxing in my modest 1BR apartment; lots of fun). It more or less just works, though it does have some limitations. Little to no interest in the “social” applications/chatroom aspect. But, the over-the-top frothing of the chaps in the article above notwithstanding, it’s clear to me from my brief experience with it that the technology is useful and capable enough to be a pedagogically worthwhile tool that could be used occasionally (as computers/edutainment were when I was in primary and high school). There seems to be potential for one-on-one/technical instruction for adults as well as kids too. The claims that it can/will supersede regular schooling methods are very unconvincing though.
> There seems to be potential for one-on-one/technical instruction for adults as well as kids too.
No reading or math involved, either…
Depends on what is being taught, I guess
You can bet that the tech billionaires’ own kids won’t be going to those Meta-enabled schools.
Yep. See Jaron Lanier’s opinions. / ;)
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/book-excerpt-jaron-laniers-ten-arguments-deleting-social/story?id=56009512
adding: Jaron Lanier has been there from the beginning.
Maybe my memory is getting fuzzy, but when Lanier first came onto my radar screen, way back in the way back (1980s, VPL Research Lab days, via colleagues who went to work at Atari and SGI), my impression was that he was a wide-eyed booster of the then-nascent VR tech, making lots of big claims about how it was going to transform our lives, like it or not. This was roughly my take on him for 5-10 years, and I stopped paying attention as already the hype around this tech was pretty thick.
Fast-forward some years, let’s say to circa 2000, and Lanier seemed to have make a pretty dramatic turn against many claims for the new tech (e.g., all the delirious ravings about ‘muh Singularity), breaking somewhat with his old position(s), and sort of re-fashioned himself as a critic rather than a booster, though perhaps his past as an all-in supporter of the brave new digital life is part of what gives him some critical edge on it.
> Experiential learning and VR will reshape the future of education
I’m sure it will.
Gates most likely has paid Time for the joyful articles. Don’t forget, Gates has spent much of the past two decades rehabbing his reputation. There is little money can’t buy. If Musk wants the same treatment he needs to pay up.
Lawyer here. Regarding Julia v. United States, the Biden Administration’s position is not nearly as deplorable as it seems. While I come from a family of environmentalists, and sympathize with the plaintiffs’ position, I believe it is impossible to establish standing for these claims. “Standing” is a legal concept that involves several requirements that basically ensure that the only cases our overburdened courts adjudicate are ones where they can actually resolve the dispute. Over the centuries, our legal system developed several components of standing.
First, there must be an actual case and controversy, which is to say that the defendant did something that harmed the plaintiff (e.g., defendant dropped a bowling ball from the roof of a building and it hit the plaintiff on the sidewalk below). I do not believe there is any way to phrase the complaint so that the Julia plaintiffs can establish an actual case and controversy since the unliveable conditions in the United States would arise decades in the future. There are exceptions for declaratory judgment actions, but the causal and temporal link between the prospective action and the harm must be very strong/tight.
Second, the plaintiffs need to show an actual harm. Many scientists believe that raising the Earth’s average temperature by 1 degree will produce all sorts of disasters. But this is a theory that cannot be confirmed until the temperature is elevated. What a court would need is actual confirmation. It could be that the Earth is much more resilient that the scientific models assumed, and a 1 degree increase will not devastate the environment. Regardless of what you believe, the point is that our courts are not supposed to speculate about what is going to happen in the future.
Third, and perhaps most problematic for the plaintiffs, standing requires that a court’s ruling will fix the harm caused by the case and controversy. Even if the case is allowed to proceed, and even if the court rules in the plaintiffs’ favor, it will not be able to craft a judgment that will absolutely solve the problem. Many environmentalists claim that we are already too late to prevent the environmental problems the plaintiffs are trying to head off. There are many confounding factors that play a role in environmental degradation beyond CO2 emissions in the US. Even if the US completely eliminated carbon dioxide emissions, developing countries like China, etc. could still emit enough carbon dioxide to still ruin the environment. Our oceans have been pushed to the limit so that deep sea organisms that used to absorb methane emissions from underwater vents are starting to fail, and the resulting elevated methane emission could produce the same environmental disaster even if we cut all carbon dioxide emissions. Wildfires across the globe (e.g., Australia) are also increasing emissions and could produce the same environmental problems even if CO2 emissions were cut. If a court cannot fashion a solution to the problem, then we prefer that it not spend judicial resources on the dispute.
The Biden Administration has good reason to challenge the Julia complaint completely independent of the merits of its allegations about the environment. If the sort of allegations in the Julia complaint (i.e., speculation about what will happen decades in the future) are ruled to establish standing, that opens a Pandora’s box of potential litigations that could be brought against the government, which in turn could overburden the DOJ and open the government to a lot of risk. Plaintiffs would begin filing complaints about potential problems in the future for all aspects of life, and the government would be forced to make policy decisions based on the beliefs and theories of interest groups.
Finally, one by-product of the increasingly conservative Supreme Court is that its rulings have become increasingly pro-business. Even if this should make it up to the Supreme Court, it is very unlikely that the current bench would find standing.
Very good explanation of US law and process. Thanks.
> impossible to establish standing for these claims.
Exactly the problem we had with the landfill. Inevitably, the liner will fail, and since the landfill was placed in a wetlands, toxic material will seep out into our watershed. But the only people with “standing” to sue are those directly affected by it, as for example abutters who experience the stench and the trucks.
It’s a ridiculous doctrine.
> the government would be forced to make policy decisions based on the beliefs and theories of interest groups.
Quelle horreur!
This is certainly a lot of highly refined cleverness on display. If lawyerly cleverness is the battlefield, I am no match for the battle.
But when I pull back and view this through the Wider Reality Scope, this all looks like shysterlaw to me . . . the art of bending the law till it cracks without quite breaking it . . . certainly in philosophy if not in the operational details.
The climatologists have achieved enough accurate predictions that I regard their further highly likely predictions based on their provenly robust theory as likely predictions, not as the “speculation” which the clever masters of shysterlaw would smear them as being.
I suspect that yet-another casualty of the current trend of events will be respect for “law” and for “legal enforcement system” engineers and technicians at all levels. If the society explodes into millions of gunbearing citizens all suddenly running amok all at once, I suspect that a lot of lawyers, judges, etc. will be mass-killed by the run-amok rioters. There will be no sympathy or empathy for people who would refer to science-based prediction as “speculation” while a rising tide of Death Valley Heatwave mass-death events spread all over the world.
“We Are Not Living in a Simulation, We Are Living In the Past”
“On the internet, we are always living in the past.
The internet, as a mediator of human interactions, is not a place, it is a time. It is the past. I mean this in a literal sense. The layers of artifice that mediate our online interactions mean that everything that comes to us online comes to us from the past—sometimes the very recent past, but the past nonetheless….”
Like the comedian said: Every picture of you is a picture of you when you were younger.
A week or two ago here there was a comment and some discussion about Wojciech Smarzowski’s 2016 film Wołyń (English Hatred; Ukrainian Volhynia). I just had an opportunity to watch this picture and I hasten to add my recommendation. It’s a very powerful film — but many people might find it difficult to watch. And, to be honest, it’s straight-out Polish propaganda. However, reading today’s news about the Ukraine, if you want to understand how / why the Banderists and OUN are adored on the one side and hated on the other, this film will resolve any uncertainties you might have.
tsk tsk, the so called world economic forum, a gathering of parasites, are worried. they should be worried, after all its their crank policies that has the world raising cash crops, instead of trying to feed themselves.
the lunacy can only be viewed logically if one assumes they are pissed because wall street will not get a cut of the action, you know, nafta billys deregulation of commodities.
The more worried they get, the happier we should be.
> The more worried they get, the happier we should be.
They will want to share their worries with us, though. And we don’t know the form their sharing will take. a
Beau of the Fifth Column recently made a video he calls .. . ” Let’s talk about two possible legislative futures for Democrats . . . ”
It is about one of two directions the FedGov Democrat Officeholders could go in trying to legislate something to make further mass shootings less likely. They can try legislating to outlaw powerful fast-shooting firearms. Or they can try legislating a national system of no-exceptions background checks, waiting periods before “buying the gun” and “being permitted to take possession of the gun”, red flag laws, etc. to identify, isolate and take-off-the-field likely potential mass-shooters before they mass-shoot.
He lays out his reasoning for thinking that the banning of certain sorts of firearms will not be likely achievable and if achieved, will not affect the actual commission of mass shootings. And then he explains why he thinks that legislating the series of interlocked mass-shooter-wannabe detection and pre-emption and prevention will reduce mass shootings significantly; in part because it is more likey legislatively achieveable and also because if achieved it would actually work as intended. His video is very prosaic, very unpoetic, and very controlled in its emotion and affect.
If anyone wants to watch it, here is the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxOjnCs6ykA&list=PLQDS8YKa2B0kkdfbs6x8dMPdm6u-XxWs6&index=2