TrickstaPriest

I could be mis-remembering, but I'm not sure "predicting" is the right word.  IIRC they were warning that 2 million dead could be possible if no actions were taken. 

"These gentlemen in the white robes and pointy hats are witnesses.  They said he hung himself, right after he beat himself and tied his hands behind his back.  Obviously, a suicide."
 
(Though for the latest one they cited security video, which depending on what exactly that showed may make me less suspicious.  But for the first three, yeah, color me cynical about rulings of suicide.)

The first responsibility of a judge is supposed to be to what the law actually says, interpreted through their formal knowledge and experience. Of course personal bias can't be avoided, but they're supposed to strive for objectivity as much as humanly possible. I applaud Justice Gorsuch for holding himself to that standard.

IIRC, Justice Gorsuch was touted as an Originalist / Textualist by the Republicans during his confirmation. 
 
If true, then the key bit in the majority opinion that he wrote should come as no surprise.
 

Congrats, Doc! It's at least a little reassuring in these troubled times to know that SCOTUS won't automatically swing the way social conservatives want, at least not yet.

Bwa ha ha!
The rules are completely eviscerated by today's Supreme Court decision!
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/15/supreme-court-denies-job-protection-lgbt-workers/4456749002/
 
Edited to add:
I mean, it will take some court cases, but the precedent this sets is crystal clear.
 
 

It can be good to vent a little, sometimes. I was just pointing out that you were getting a little personal there with a fellow Herophile. We may not always see eye to eye on the boards, but we tend to be a good gang all around, so I'm more inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt.
 
I'm former military LE. When folks start swinging too broad a brush around about the military or about the police, I'm likely to get splattered, even though my active service days are long gone.

IIRC the nationwide  bed capacity was around 100k when this all started.  I'm not sure how much additional capacity was added.  I do know that the point of the lockdown was to make more ventilators, stockpile PPE, find ways to reduce contagiousness, and maybe find an effective treatment.  Pretty sure that none of that happened at the federal level, and now we're right back to where we were on March 31--exponentially increasing cases with no vaccine or treatment.  If you thought the lockdown was economically damaging, wait'll you see what happens when the pandemic really takes off.
 
The only real progress that has been made is that peer reviewed studies prove that masks work.  But now the White House and its propaganda arm have turned half the population into anti-maskers.  Buckle up, kids, it's gonna be a rough summer.

Bloody Sunday, 1972.

As I understand the Harbinger of Justice, while he might do bad things to looters, he'd be as likely (if not moreso) to go after bad cops.

You are speaking from a position that America "the system" slavishly cowtows to.  It is a country, culture, and legal system that kisses you on the feet and brushes your hair.
 
It doesn't do that for a lot of other kinds of people.
 
You can be proud to be an American, and white, and from a police family.
 
But the system often (not always, but often) does not respect anything else.  It allows us to exist, sometimes, but only when we aren't an inconvenience.  If we dare be an inconvenience, then things begin to happen.
 
So you'll see a lot of people, who do not exemplify the direct paramount virtues that America touts, view that system with increasing cynicism the further you get away from that.  Call it moronic if you like, you are entitled to your opinion.

You are speaking from a position that America "the system" slavishly cowtows to.  It is a country, culture, and legal system that kisses you on the feet and brushes your hair.
 
It doesn't do that for a lot of other kinds of people.
 
You can be proud to be an American, and white, and from a police family.
 
But the system often (not always, but often) does not respect anything else.  It allows us to exist, sometimes, but only when we aren't an inconvenience.  If we dare be an inconvenience, then things begin to happen.
 
So you'll see a lot of people, who do not exemplify the direct paramount virtues that America touts, view that system with increasing cynicism the further you get away from that.  Call it moronic if you like, you are entitled to your opinion.

I'm glad we have a police viewpoint in here.  One of the scoutmasters in our troop is a long time cop, and he has the best stories.  He's also apologetic for the bad apples and "bad shoots" that we used to hear about occasionally.
 
But he also has the same blind spot that a lot of Fox viewers seem to have, where any criticism of the justice system (or white people) is taken as a personal attack against individual white cops.  It's as though the Fox rhetoric blinds them to the fact that, although cops are willing to risk their lives to protect us from criminals and terrorists, they tend to lump non white people into the "criminals and terrorists" category and not the "us" category.  I know black people who literally will not call 911 for police for any reason, because evidence shows that bringing a policeman with a gun into a situation with a black person only increases the danger to the black person.  To me, that suggests policing could use some serious improvement.
 
Good cops and cop families should absolutely be proud; they're out there doing a dangerous job that I could never do.  I'd like to think they're not like the cops that strangled a man to death in the street in Minneapolis for allegedly passing a counterfeit $10, or the one that strangled a man to death on the sidewalk in NYC for selling cigarettes, or the cops that gunned down a nurse in her own apartment after serving a no-knock warrant to the wrong address, or the Charleston cop that shot a fleeing man in the back and dropped his taser to make up a self defense story.  We've seen more of these cases on video in the past few years than I can keep track of. 
 
The problem is that the good cops aren't really doing much to help.  Instead we see case after case of coverups and mistrials.  We see police responding to peaceful demonstrations against police violence with... more police violence.  And the official spin has become downright Orwellian.  Cops slash journalists' car tires?  "Strategic tire deflation".  Cops shove a peaceful 72-year-old man to the ground, causing TBI?  "Cop was defending himself".  (Or "Antifa terrorist was scanning something jam communications".) 
 
I don't envy good cops' position in all of this, but I'd like to believe that they want to be part of the solution here.

You are speaking from a position that America "the system" slavishly cowtows to.  It is a country, culture, and legal system that kisses you on the feet and brushes your hair.
 
It doesn't do that for a lot of other kinds of people.
 
You can be proud to be an American, and white, and from a police family.
 
But the system often (not always, but often) does not respect anything else.  It allows us to exist, sometimes, but only when we aren't an inconvenience.  If we dare be an inconvenience, then things begin to happen.
 
So you'll see a lot of people, who do not exemplify the direct paramount virtues that America touts, view that system with increasing cynicism the further you get away from that.  Call it moronic if you like, you are entitled to your opinion.

You are speaking from a position that America "the system" slavishly cowtows to.  It is a country, culture, and legal system that kisses you on the feet and brushes your hair.
 
It doesn't do that for a lot of other kinds of people.
 
You can be proud to be an American, and white, and from a police family.
 
But the system often (not always, but often) does not respect anything else.  It allows us to exist, sometimes, but only when we aren't an inconvenience.  If we dare be an inconvenience, then things begin to happen.
 
So you'll see a lot of people, who do not exemplify the direct paramount virtues that America touts, view that system with increasing cynicism the further you get away from that.  Call it moronic if you like, you are entitled to your opinion.

I mean, I don't accept that reasoning on its face (edit: I mean, on its face alone).
 
I accept the reasoning that, if you track who voted and their address, and you send them a letter "congratulations on voting", you can find voting fraud pretty quick.
 
And I totally accept THIS:
 
And this:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/09/defcon-2019-hacking-village/
 
I was at that con

All Things Considered had a report on the fiasco of Georgia's vote-in-person primary this week. As one long-time observer of Georgia's elections noted, you really have to work to botch an election this badly: voting machines sent to wrong addresses, voting machines not working, untrained poll workers, grossly insufficient numbers of provisional ballots, etc.  Election officials insist there were no problems in most of Georgia's precincts... It appears the problems were all in the black majority precincts. Funny, that.
 
I'll take vote by mail, thank you. Though if a government is really determined not to let certain people vote, it'll find a way.
 
Dean Shomshak

That is fair. But if you look at history, the Confederate flag languished in obscurity for almost a century after the war. It started to once again be prominently displayed and used as a symbol during the modern era as part of protests against desegregation of schools in the southern US in the early 1960s. And what it was a symbol of had nothing to do with culture or war memorials.

I would add (in multiple places there) one other thing: evaluation.
 
It's a high-stress job.  For most people, you can only do that stuff for so long before the edge comes off in some way.  There also ought be a role for those assessed no longer really in mental condition to carry out that job right.  As in, job security for police, but you get moved to a role where it's not your job to wear a sidearm, restraints, nightstick, etc., and face people who may turn violent with little warning; and that post-stress position doesn't have a negative association with it.  These are structural changes, I admit, but there's a lot of call for structural changes now, and I think there's ways to to take care of people better on both sides of the badge.

There's _so much_ nonversation [sic] about the pros and cons of recruiting and training and what-not.
 
I'm not an expert.  Amazingly, all of a sudden, everyone else on the internet is.  I am not attracted to sounds bites and having things distilled into five-statement "bits" on Family Guy or any of that.
 
Frankly, I don't have _time_ to become an expert, even if the interest is there.
 
However, I do know the things I have seen:
 
The police hit the streets with enough military and tactical crap to embarrass Batman.  Then they pump each other up into frenzy macho mode and beat up normal, everyday people.  What I see the most of is 'roid-ed out commandos beating up on normal folks.  You never see them want to tackle even an un-armored powerlifter, for some reason.
 
I see footage of the National Guard here and there, throughout the decades-- rarely with serious protective gear, and most of that footage is from the modern era.
 
I see footage of the US Military in freakin' _war zones_ interacting with potentially hostile civilians.
 
The only people I see tightening up their jackboots and waxing up their government-issue skull bats are the police.
 
The National Guard interacts with the crowds, discourages them, firmly, but always carefully, as respectfully as possible.
 
The Military footage shows a similar respect for even potential enemies!  Concern and compassion for other people, even when they know there is real danger.
 
The police high-five each other after punching a ninety-pound college girl in the face.
 
 
A military raid sees men putting their lives in danger, securing a facility, and reacting with lethal violence _only_ after encountering lethal violence.
 
The police send fifteen men and a battering ram into a single-family home in their own hometown and kill two people-- the first one in a recliner and Grandma watching TV in bed.  I don't think there's a dog over five pounds that has _ever_ survived a no-knock warrant.  Damned few non-whites do, and not even _all_ whites survive them.
 
 
We can't even _pretend_ that intense, non-stop training doesn't make a difference.
 
 
Here's another part of the problem:
 
You can't draft someone into the police force.  Every single well-armed, armored, club-wielding muscle-bound thug authorized to cause as much physical trauma to middle-aged housewives, college kids, and elderly men is on this job because he _wants_ a job that provides him the authority to do all those things.  He might not want that authority, but he wants a job that comes with it.  How many are attracted just because that authority comes with it?  Fame Hollywood bully Steven Segal?  Guess what he does for a living.....
 
 
At the very least, we should probably eliminate the requirement that they have to fail two psycho-social evaluations to qualify.  
 
Screening.
 
Training.
 
Screening.
 
Training.
 
And more training.
 
Never stop training.
 
With something other than a pillow case full of oranges, I mean.
 
 

Just wanted to say, I had to appreciate the Freudian typo there.

Well my mask wearing isn't a role model. Wearing at work all day in heat is tough. No matter how hard I try eventually my nose has to pop for a few desperate fresh breaths before disappearing again
 

We greatly appreciate the fact that you at least try, Badger.  What I'm seeing in the literature now is that mask wearing makes a big impact on transmission.  If everyone wore masks and cut transmission by even a quarter, that would make a huge difference in the aggregate spread of the disease.
 
And mask wearing isn't fun.  I have to shout to be heard through the mask sometimes, and any exertion more than a slow walk quickly leaves me sucking wind through the damn thing.  But it's probably more fun than drowning in my own lung pus.
 

I don't disagree that I feel like some comedians are problematic to listen to.  A lot of 'new news sources' online feel that way to me, however.  When it's an issue I haven't heard of and am concerned about, I can do research online to see more on the topic.
 
 
Unfortunately, which is probably why I need to drink more tonight.  XD
 
 
Exactly.  It's gotten to the point where people are calling their own ideas Communist or Marxist in direct retaliation or misguided understanding from those scared people.  Look at the 'satanist' groups in the US.
 
 
I don't know about that.  But having non-experts highlight issues isn't wrong in itself, we just have to make sure Oliver holds to a good standard of information... so I can start holding some other #$(*$ers to that same standard.  "opinion journalists" indeed.

Agreed. Then again, unbiased journalism is as rare as hen's teeth these days so I'd expect most folks to have their filters on. I don't always agree with his talking points, but his fact checking is usually on or above par.