ScottishFox

And because America is really good at handling Coronavirus - The public health director in California resigned suddenly. 
 
It wasn't brought up in the resignation letter, but there's supposedly a very recently discovered flaw in the CA reporting system that may have as many as 300,000 cases not reported yet.

Yeah, I did predict that once India got hit it was going to be brutal. Heavily populated, some parts of the country being a bit behind the times of modernity equals a mess.

The neighbor, in an effort to get faster service from the police, told a lie that contributed to that guy being dead.
 
If you're going to put two bullets into the back of a suspect as he immediately complies with a verbal command (free hand up, dropping to knees, putting pistol down) then police work isn't the right job for you. 
That officer might be better suited to a new career like inmate.

The neighbor, in an effort to get faster service from the police, told a lie that contributed to that guy being dead.
 
If you're going to put two bullets into the back of a suspect as he immediately complies with a verbal command (free hand up, dropping to knees, putting pistol down) then police work isn't the right job for you. 
That officer might be better suited to a new career like inmate.

In the interest of fairness, it should be noted the cops were told they were responding to a domestic violence case (the complainant actually said he'd say that "if it would make them come faster," so he's a horse's ass).
 
I sometimes wonder if a story like the cops reported afterward is how they really remember it, or if it's a conscious lie. In either case, they clearly botched the situation badly and shouldn't be on the street with guns.

I just hope people are aware that there's more to this election than "get rid of Trump". He's a consequence of the problem...not the problem itself. We can't go back to "the way things were before Trump" because that is what got us Trump to begin with. Establishment control of the country....lack of awareness or concern for the issues of most of the populace....and a feeling that the system is rigged (because it is).

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/510777-facebook-removes-post-from-trumps-page-it-said-featured-false-claims-about
 
Facebook removed a post from President Trump because it contained “false claims” about the coronavirus. The post included a video of Trump on "Fox & Friends" Wednesday morning saying schools should resume in-person classes because young people are "almost immune" to COVID-19.
 
 “If you look at children, children are almost — I would almost say definitely — but almost immune from this disease. So few — they’ve gotten stronger...Hard to believe. I don’t know how you feel about it, but they have much stronger immune systems than we do, somehow, for this. And they don’t have a problem. They just don’t have a problem...But the fact is, they are virtually immune from this problem and we have to open our schools.”
 
Maybe Facebook should read the president's posts more often....
 
Edit:
 
Twitter is also sanctioning Trump. It's requiring that he remove his post containing the false information before he will be allowed to Tweet again.
 
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/05/facebook-removes-trump-post-for-spreading-misinformation-on-coronavirus-392014
 

Wasn't China putting public image over safety how we got into this mess in the first place?

Yeah. If that volcano in Iceland erupts as expected, it'll pretty much be the trifecta.
 
I get the concerns over hunger, and people's livelihoods. But it isn't either/or. If our countries don't manage transitions out of lockdown carefully, with all necessary precautions, we'll be back into the same spiral of rampant infection within a few weeks, and have to shut down again, and that's going to make both the immediate and long-term impacts even worse. We need to be smart, and organized. Right now America has huge patches of neither, starting at the top.

Our cure is going to be worse, because it's the worst of all worlds.  Inadequate precautions, mixed messages, refusing to abide by (and enforce) fundamental practices.  It's going to stretch out our economic issues FAR longer than other countries.  Europe is trying to reopen sensibly...whether they can or not, we'll have to see.  
 
Sweden found out, too.  They did nothing for a long time.  Their economy STILL got blasted.  This is not either-or...it's not "we stay open and thrive, or we shut down and wither."  If we stay open, we still do not thrive.  That's the cornerstone takeaway.
 
There is no good outcome here.  There is probably no mediocre outcome.  Those are simply not on the table.  MANY, MANY people will get crushed by this.  Overall there is nothing that can be done to stop it completely.  It CAN be slowed.  Germany shows that.  South Korea shows that.  But there will be massive harm, directly and indirectly.  There are, however, TERRIBLE approaches.  Sweden.  Brazil.  The US.  Major business downturn AND failure to contain.  

It was the lack of gorgeous Hispanic maidens that lead future generations of Australians to be so cranky and their land so full of venomous terrors.
 
Texas is just right.  I just asked the Hispanic maiden I married and she approves this message. 

It was the lack of gorgeous Hispanic maidens that lead future generations of Australians to be so cranky and their land so full of venomous terrors.
 
Texas is just right.  I just asked the Hispanic maiden I married and she approves this message. 

Well, in Chicago all you really have to worry about killing you are the people.

In Australia, it's pretty much ONLY the people that you don't need to worry about attacking you.

We had a coworker who lost their father last week.  His family is from China.  Nobody could travel to the funeral.  Luckily one of the sons was still in China.

The cashier and bagger at the CostCo are doing hundreds of people a day.  Same for the guy at the gas station, the lady at the liquor store, etc.
 
I get what you're saying (I've taught kids in decades gone by for karate classes), but the sheer volume the cashiers are dealing with would seem to be a higher risk.  Especially given how filthy money is.

I just went to a memorial. The service was performed outdoors because indoor gatherings were not allowed. Since my county has a new lockdown in effect, social distancing rules were in effect. Others couldn't come to the memorial. The eulogies were performed via smartphone.

Oh, um, well...  my bad!  😊

👍 Nice short synopsis. 
 
I've actually been enjoying the manga/anime/RPGLit where the exist in a world where delving is an Adventurers actual job and the characters actually know they have levels and level up.  To me it was a bizarre premise but oddly turned out to be fun to read. 
 
 
It is amazing how this line of thought repeats every so many years.  But the best part is the idea isn't met with the hostility and outright anger it used to. 

They vacated a few of the charges, they over turned the death sentence on procedural grounds, and remanded to the original court for re-trial on that phase. 
 
"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's convictions on Counts 13, 15, and 18 are reversed, and the district court is directed to enter a judgment of acquittal on those counts," the ruling, which was entered at 3 p.m. on Friday said. "Dzhohkar Tsarnaev's death sentences on Counts 4, 5, 9, 10, and 14 are vacated, and the matter is remanded to the district court with directions to hold a new penalty-phase trial."
 
They did not commute the sentence.  You can be happy knowing that he will probably still fry (or whatever means they use...) and the continuation of the case will cost 10-15 times more than if they had simply tried him on murder with special circumstance, and throw him into a deep, dark, dank hole for the rest of his life.
 
 

In any rational country, Trump would no longer be president. But setting that aside for the sake of discussion in order to talk about mail-in balloting:
 
The best feature of in-person balloting is that the ballots are secured all the time. Someone is supposed to have custody of them or they are supposed to be locked up at every point in time. Frankly, I've irritated a lot of party people over the years by pointing out how wide open for fraud our current system is to anyone who is smart, who wants to take on some minor risks, and who wants to put in some effort. And my suggestions for changing ballot security have never been well-received.
 
Changing over to mail-in balloting is taking out the need for someone "to be slightly intelligent" and "to take some minor risks" in order to defraud the election. It's great that there hasn't been detectable levels of ballot tampering in places in the US which have used mail-in voting in the past. But we're in a much more politically charged election this time around than in the past which is going to change the level of motivation for people to want to tamper with things.
 
With mail-in balloting, in many places in the US, people will be putting their ballot into their personal mailbox, lifting a flag, and the ballot will sit in the mailbox unattended overnight until the mailman gets there the next day to pick it up. 
 
All anyone needs to tamper with that system is to go around to mailboxes in the middle of the night and collect ballots. There's YouTube videos on how to open envelopes without being detected. Open them up, trash the ballots who voted "wrong", fully fill out the other ballots in all the down-ballot races which the voter probably didn't bother to finish, reseal the envelopes, drop the envelopes into a post office drop box. 
 
If the fraudster is slightly smart, he could look at traditional voting patterns in precincts and go out of his way to steal from mailboxes in whichever places are most likely to vote against his preferred candidate. 
 
All of the "signature matching" and "bar codes on ballots" in the world aren't going to stop filled out ballots from being taken out of individual's mailboxes in the dead of night. 
 
If Trump pulls out a win, I'd suspect something like that to be the cause. It's the kind of low tech solution that would spontaneously occur to and appeal to a bunch of Luddites. There wouldn't even have to be an organized effort. Just the idea occurring to a large number of highly-motivated people at the same time might be enough.
 
My preference is:
 
1) mandatory voter registration for everyone in the country. 
2) no excuse absentee voting for people who request that.
3) 24 hour early voting for a couple of months before the election, which caters to people who work odd hours and lessens congestion at polling sites.
4) have "poll workers go to homes" rather than have "voters go to polls" to take care of the elderly and those who have disabilities & mobility problems of all kinds.
5) have election "day" be a three day weekend in order to lessen congestion at the polls.
6) pay poll workers as if they were professionals working a dangerous job rather than as if they were volunteers getting a tip. Hopefully that would get an adequate number of workers.
 
Of course, my preferences are very rarely catered to.
.
.
.
I don't have a problem with mail-in voting in small amounts. But having everyone in the country being aware that there are tens of thousands of ballots laying around in mail boxes every night, that's too much like depending on the honor system for my tastes. In my experience talking to people from various parties who are avidly interested in politics and working inside a political party for a few decades, there's vanishingly few people who are avidly interested in politics who I would be comfortable trusting with an honor system.

Good luck forcing (sane) people to risk a vaccine in the beta - alpha, even? - phase when their lives are on the line.

If I was doing hundreds of people a day, it wouldn't be coronavirus that kills me.

Official Texas numbers are known to be trashed since the administration forced hospitals to report to HHS instead of the CDC starting a week ago.  At minimum there has been a backlog while they figured out the new procedure.  The hospitals post their own data, but I haven't had time to run around collecting it all, which may be the point.
 
Regardless of the cause there have been similar reporting spikes in other states and countries all along, for various reasons.  It just means the death toll was worse than we thought it was over the past few days.

You're welcome.  The article has a ton of great photos in it and I think the AP did a pretty bang on job of covering it.
 
The "inside the courthouse" side of the article stood out for me as I've seen the DHS propaganda, but I hadn't seen a press perspective on it.  What the reporter detailed were serious injuries that in most cases would justify lethal force.
 
And kudos to the reporter for getting in there and taking the ride.  Sounded very scary.
 
Honestly, I'm so tired of watching say CNN and then Fox and then trying to Frankenstein it together to get an actual story instead of a political opinion.  This AP story was award worthy.

You're not wrong.
 
Still, I'm far more concerned about the prosecution manufacturing evidence so they can push charges.  That has ramifications for the entire community.  Mr.  and Mrs. BadWithGuns are only a threat to people breaking into their property.  That's a much smaller group of people.
 
Corrupt prosecution teams are the same kind of super-evil that dirty cops are.  They are charged with enforcing justice and are instead working to destroy it.  A jumpy old couple that got scared and went for their firearms before earning national fame as the worst gun handlers in recent history are not a threat to society.