Monday Open Thread

What's on your mind?

Comments

[Dr. Ed 2]

It's happened -- a NY abortionist prescribed and shipped the abortion pill to a Texas woman who wound up in the hospital as some women inevitably will.

Texas is now bringing a civil suit against the NY MD. I don't know how NY can stop it. https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/texas-sues-new-york-doctor-for-telemedicine-abortion-pills-prescription/ar-AA1vPnhn

[Michael P]

New York courts might refuse to enforce any judgment against the doctor, and I expect they would call it the rule of law in spite of that refusal violating the Full Faith and Credit clause.

[Krayt]

Assuming the doctor screwed up medically rather than legally, what would you expect to happen in a non-hot button context?

[Frank Drackman]

Texas requires a physician treating a patient in Texas to be licensed there, even if it’s over the phone from another state, no license and it’s practicing medicine without a license, a felony, people go to jail for that.

[bernard11]

So a physician visiting Texas from out of state is committing a felony if he treats someone, maybe in an emergency situation?

[not guilty]

I don't know about Texas law, but that hypothetical physician might have a defense of necessity if it was an emergency situation.

[Bob from Ohio]

"So a physician visiting Texas from out of state is committing a felony if he treats someone, maybe in an emergency situation?"

If they are paid, probably yes.

Since like most [all?] states, Texas has a civil Good Samaritan Act, I doubt that unpaid emergency treatment would not be negligence but would be a crime.

[John F. Carr]

The "good Samaritan" laws I have read protect non-professionals from civil liability for a good faith effort to help. They don't authorize the practice of medicine (whatever that means) or protect licensed doctors from being sued for a failed attempt to help.

[Frank Drackman]

I-ANAL, don't ask me, ask the lawyers who wrote the law.

[John F. Carr]

The press release is here, with the complaint linked at bottom. https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-sues-activist-new-york-doctor-illegally-providing-abortion-drugs-across

The introductory paragraph of the complaint reads:

Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter (Carpenter) of New York violates Texas law by providing abortion-inducing drugs to Texans through telehealth. Carpenter is not a licensed Texas physician, nor is she authorized to practice telemedicine in the State of Texas. The Court should enjoin Carpenter from continuing to operate outside the bounds of the law and impose civil penalties for her violation of Texas law.

[Absaroka]

"nor is she authorized to practice telemedicine in the State of Texas"

That seems interesting (in general, not just this specific case). What should the rules be about telemedicine?

I know someone who has a concierge doc. They say one of the great advantages is they can be on vacation and call up their doc, discuss their symptoms, and get advice/prescription/whatever, wherever they are (that advice might be 'get thee to a local doctor', or not, depending on the symptoms).

Our insurance company includes a signup with a place called 'Doctor on Demand' that does this for regular folks. I presume they think it's cheaper than paying for office visits. We signed up in case we want advice someday from the back-country, but haven't used it yet.

This all seems pretty useful, but not well served by licensing at the state level.

[John F. Carr]

How does the concierge doc's customer get a prescription filled while traveling? Is there a network of doctors so Dr. Massachusetts can email Dr. Kentucky to say "my patient needs a bottle of Prozac"?

[John F. Carr]

There are some interesting legal questions. Resolving them will cost more than paying the fine. According to the complaint:

Carpenter is the Co-Medical Director and Founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine (“ACT”), a nationwide advocacy organization proactively working to advance telemedicine abortion.

Texas seeks an injunction against her, not her organization. There must be other doctors ready to take her place prescribing to Texas women.

[Nelson]

Excellent. Nothing would be better than Texas whining and crying because they can’t force women to behave and being able to do absolutely nothing about it.

Fighting the good fight, one morally totalitarian state at a time.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Biden is now embargoing bulldozers...
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/ryn9yycz1g

Impeach him...

[John F. Carr]

If you impeach Biden you get Harris. Having nothing left to lose, she governs as she likes. What if she really is the far left politician she used to want to be seen as? She might boycott the Security Council while anti-Israel resolutions are debated.

[Bob from Ohio]

"Impeach him..."
Congress is not even in session. Its only a month. Senate would never convict.

[David Nieporent]

1) What would impeaching him accomplish?

2) On what grounds would you impeach him? Is he embargoing bulldozers until Israel helps him eliminate Donald Trump? Because if so it would be karmic justice, but indeed impeachable. I don't believe that's happening, however.

[Dr. Ed 2]

And then this -- I can see a MAGA backlash that people wouldn't like.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2024/12/11/clashes-are-coming-for-trump-officials-dining-out-in-dc/

[Commenter_XY]

Those are the people who got past denial phase to the anger phase of electoral grief. It will eventually pass, as their businesses close.

One thing I know: whether it is a Team D politico, or a Team R politico, their money is green. That is why you're in business.

DC police can jail people for disturbing the peace in DC. I know just the place for detention of people who do that (meaning, create a public disturbance and harass people trying to enjoy a quiet meal).

[Dr. Ed 2]

DC police won't -- and I don't think Trump will tolerate it this time.

[Mr. Bumble]

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2024/12/15/dc-server-fired-after-refusing-to-serve-trump-officials-republicans-n2649077

[David Nieporent]

I like how townhall even lies with its URLs. She did not refuse to serve anyone; she announced she would do so. The former would seem to justify termination; the latter — well, it's their business; they can do what they want — less so.

[Mr. Bumble]

David Notimportant is now available for fact checking URLs,

[David Nieporent]

Ankle biter continues to bite ankles. You've got to wonder at how little life this guy has.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"the latter — well, it's their business; they can do what they want — less so."

Why? If someone announces they aren't going to do their job, it makes sense to fire them and hire someone who will.

[David Nieporent]

If someone talks hypothetically about what they will do, it makes sense to call them down to the manager's office and say, "Do you mean that, or were you just venting?" (I mean, if she announces she's going to poison their food, I wouldn't give her the benefit of the doubt.)

[Satchmo_Lives]

Do you think announcing a certain restaurant wasn't going to serve Trump supporters might negatively affect business before it actually happens?

[David Nieporent]

1) Nobody announced that the restaurant wasn't going to serve Trump supporters; just one particular server.
2) That might indeed hurt business — or maybe increase it — but if so, that damage is already done. All the restaurant can do now is emphasize that they will serve all customers.

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

I like how townhall even lies with its URLs. She did not refuse to serve anyone; she announced she would do so.

Which is exactly what the headline says:

"DC Server Fired After Saying She Will Refuse to Serve Trump Officials, Republicans"

And you're accusing someone else of having little/no life?

[Ed Grinberg]

Liberals are big believers that once a business opens its doors to the public, it has to serve all comers ... unless it's someone they dislike.

[Malika]

I think the idea is that the right to refuse service can't turn on the basis of immutable (or near so) characteristics but otherwise exists.

[Michael P]

So you're cool with refusing service on the basis of someone's (real or perceived) religion? And expressed gender, but not biological gender?

[Malika]

It's almost like "or near so" is in that sentence and doing some work...EV had a post here a while back about how religion lives in a sort of immutable-adjacent ground in our law and why (the Founders especially had fresh in their minds people who would rather die than change their religions).

[Krayt]

They had the advantage of creating the First Amendment, so We The People told government, AKA thugs wanting power, what it cannot do. It doesn't rely on rationales for people to weasel arguments hundreds of years later.

I'm not even sure these laws even require "immutable or near so" characteristics to be constitutionally justifiable. The second half of that is, of course, designed to drive issues you approve of through, while keeping out others.

[Malika]

Other than people in highly expressive business I'm not sure how the 1st Amendment comes in here.

[Krayt]

Religion is also in there.

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

I'm not sure how the 1st Amendment comes in here.

You're not sure how 1A relates to religion? Perhaps you should try reading it some time. It's quite short.

[Michael P]

So you don't think gender fluidity is a thing?

[Riva]

Deleted

[Malika]

Wow, Riva-bot, your best comment!

[Riva]

You know, it's not necessary for you to be an a-hole troll 24/7. But I have no doubt you're heard that before. Just some friendly advice.

[Lennyk78]

Being attracted to other men's buttholes may be immutable, but choosing to stick your diseased peter into it is not.

[Krayt]

"Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another."

[Sarcastr0]

Liberals are big believers that once a business opens its doors to the public, it has to serve all comers
This seems about the right level of reductive failure in a right-winger's understanding of civil rights.

[Riva]

You forgot “….unless it’s someone they dislike.” Maybe you should keep up on the news little gaslighting clown because that’s exactly what some DC restaurants are saying.

[David Nieporent]

Liberals are not in fact big believers that once a business opens its doors to the public, it has to serve all comers. Conservatives apparently can't tell the difference between "don't discriminate based on specific types of personal characteristics" and "serve everyone."

[Lennyk78]

Specific types of personal characteristics, the specificity of those types to be completely arbitrary based on whatever liberals think "deserve" protection.

[Dr. Ed 2]

That was the principle of the Innkeeper -- he had to accept all travelers.

[Moderation4ever]

I remember this from the last Trump administration. It was stupid then and it will be just as stupid in the future. There is a time for politics and a time to set politics aside. I have little patience for those that can't be civil.

[Sarcastr0]

Agreed.

It’s not brave activism, it’s being terminally online.

Victimhood is a big part of the MAGA worldview. There is no world where this changes anything positive except how righteous such people feel.

[Joe_dallas]

Victimhood is a big part of the MAGA worldview.

Really - Just another example of gaslight0 myopic view of the world.
What is CRT - other than another victimhood race hustle.

[Malika]

Wow, amateur polymath joe dallas doesn't get that a tu quoque doesn't disprove anything. Guess with all that expertise in epidemiology, meteorology, economics, etc., the poor guy didn't have time for community college logic.

[Sarcastr0]

So you tu quoque my point about victimization with a white grievance take on what CRT is.

Way to go.

But yes, victimization - MAGA defines themselves by how they're kept down by DEI and CRT and woke. And social media. And schools. And judges they disagree with. And intelligence agencies. Can't forget the, NY juries, media, etc. etc. keeping MAGA down!

When there isn't enough victimization, you make it up.

[Joe_dallas]

Gas0 & Malika

Again proving my point.

Your delusions and departure from reality are impressive

[Sarcastr0]

Another angry failure to engage.

[Joe_dallas]

Hard to engage with your delusions

[Malika]

You clearly tried to refute Sarc's claim with a tu quoque. Where's the delusion?

[Joe_dallas]

Bottom line -
You and gas0 rarely make an intelligent, coherent , logical or fact based comment. They are most always inane and devoid of substance as I, Brett, MP frequently point out. Tell us again what is the failure to engage.

[Sarcastr0]

This looks to me like:
People who agree with you = smarties
People who do not = dumb and bad.

A less shallow poster would note some people they disagree with who they think makes good comments.

You are not that sort.

[FTR: DMN, Noscitur, and Absaroka]

[Joe_dallas]

Sarcastr0 4 minutes ago
Flag Comment
Mute User
A less shallow poster would note some people they disagree with who they think makes good comments.

Gas0 - As I stated, neither you or malika make good comments, nor are the coherent, logical or intelligent.
Others which I sometimes disagree with do make intelligent logical and coherent commentary.

[Malika]

"As I stated, neither you or malika make good comments"

Lol, "me no like your comments!"

[Joe_dallas]

Malika 2 hours ago
Flag Comment
Mute User
"As I stated, neither you or malika make good comments"
Lol, "me no like your comments!"

Malika
You could solve that problem by trying to write something that isnt your usual inane partisan incoherent rant. ie other words write something intelligent and substantive.

[Noscitur a sociis]

Hard to engage with your delusions

Maybe Sonja_T should have a go at it!

[Michael P]

Look at the liar trying to have it both ways: Trump officials were victimized in public spaces last time, therefore "Victimhood is a big part of the MAGA worldview." Being aggressive assholes is a central part of the leftist worldview.

[Sarcastr0]

Read my comment about why the 'you can't eat in public' is a bad idea, and then come back and try again.

I certainly don't say anything about this kind of terminally online bullshit causing the right's being oppressed-loving mindset.

[Krayt]

How accurate claims of victimhood are is irrelevant. It works to gain and solidify followers. It's another example of Republicans playing catch up.

A party oriented around oppression-based grievance factions? Now I've heard everything.

Hey! What if they take the next step and empower lawyers to sue over it for one third the take?

[Sarcastr0]

Your ENTIRE persona is grievance against a fictional government class.

[Krayt]

Dude, a quick look around the world, and through history, shows government and going into power is driven by corruption.

Fundamental Theorem of Government Corruption is not an unfortunate side effect of the wielding of power, it is the purpose of it from day one.

In most of the world, you go into government so you can make a better life for yourself and your family by getting in the way, directing funds, "noticing" people trying to do things without permission.

I sympathize with people like George Will who are disgusted with the ultra cynicism on government, which gets in the way of legitimate operations by building distrust, but much of our own is just corruption hid better.

[Sarcastr0]

Yes, that is the fictional class.

Your citation to 'around the world and throughout history' is not going to bear anything.

[Malika]

Well, it matters to the truth.

[Moderation4ever]

Let's be clear here victimhood is practiced by a broad range of groups these days. It doesn't look good on most and detracts from real victims. Real victims who are often the quietest.

[hobie]

Agreed. I was appalled when Huckabee and her friends were turned away from...was it the Red Rooster or something?...

Regardless the politics, these were just hungry customers. No different from gays wanting a pastry or a bathroom

[Mr. Bumble]

That would have been the Red Hen in Lexington VA which "closed for renovations" last year and is now Zunzun.

[SRG2]

Yup. It's not a wise move. And it only feeds the childish sense of hurt that is so evident amongst the cult.

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

And it only feeds the childish sense of hurt that is so evident amongst the cult.

This from the side of the aisle with online videos of them screaming, cutting their hair off, announcing self-sterilization, etc...all over an election result.

[John F. Carr]

The story is speculation, not news. The reporter observes that some businesses were hostile to Trump people in his first term and wonders what could happen this time.

[Kazinski]

As we try to make America great again, we do need to acknowledge we've lost some of our edge and start adopting ideas from around the world that can help us regain our edge.

One such idea is from New Zealand which would scrap all research grants for "social science".

"This week, in an announcement that stunned New Zealand’s research community, the country’s center-right coalition government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund, the nation’s sole funding source for fundamental science, to “research with economic benefits.” Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences and humanities research, and the expert panels considering these proposals would be disbanded.

Universities New Zealand, which represents the nation’s eight universities, called the planned disinvestment in social science and humanities “astonishing.” It was among several academic groups and many scientists calling for the government to reverse the unexpected decision."

https://www.science.org/content/article/amid-cuts-basic-research-new-zealand-scraps-all-support-social-sciences

I'm in awe. Not only would it save considerable amounts of government spending, it would also go a long way to reforming universities and clearing out the rot.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Kazinski — Whereas you apparently think an ideology is okay to let government support research with hypothetical economic benefits? How many nickles would have if you got a nickel every time someone hypothesized accurately that a social science study would yield economic benefits? Even answering that question would be a social science study. It could yield economic benefits for you, or for folks you disagree with, or for everyone.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Aren't they eliminating ALL social science grants?

[Krayt]

There's a female German physicist who, for some reason, YouTube has been shoving in my face the past few days, so there's a concerted effort by some faction doing this, and into America now, it isn't some naturally arising grass roots, so just be aware (like the push to revisit the Marketplace of Ideas a few years back wasn't about buttressing the First Amendment, but an effort to declare harrassing speech useless, and therefore regulatable.)

She wants social science funding reduced in general, although she partially defends the current horror story example, something about smells and oppression. But would go further into a lot of theoretical physics, creating frameworks with no way to test anything.

There's a funny scene in Contact, where, at a coctail party at Aricebo, RIP, Drumlin is on his usual rant of science should be a benefit to the people, and one of Ellie's particularly nerdy colleagues pipe up, "...not unlike my L-band globular clusters!"

[Sarcastr0]

"There's a female German physicist who, for some reason, YouTube has been shoving in my face the past few days, so there's a concerted effort by some faction doing this, and into America now"

1. Feeemalllleeeess ::Ferengi:: why does that deserve mention?
2. "it isn't some naturally arising grass roots, so just be aware" any evidence for this, or just the algorithm sent you a lady with opinion you don't like?
3. "something about smells and oppression" Smells like nutpicking.
4. You coming at astrophysics?

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

There's a female German physicist who, for some reason, YouTube has been shoving in my face the past few days

Sabine Hossenfelder, I presume. She's one of those science-dumbed-down-for-the-masses presenters who thinks she's funnier than she actually is, but I tend to enjoy most of her content...especially of the type in question (critical examinations of the state of scientific research). It certainly beats the hell out of listening to deGrasse Tyson's bullshit.

[Sarcastr0]

Hossenfelder rules. I think she's right in 'Lost in Math.'

NDT is very bad, and should go away.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Aversion to learning has long been a motivation, either explicit or implicit, of conservatives. Though, not wanting to get familiar with the life of the mind, they lack the self awareness to recognize it.

[Commenter_XY]

Dan, there are limited governmental resources. Where should the money go for foundational science with economic benefits to the country...STEM or humanities? Pretty easy call. STEM wins, hands down, every single time. Give me a better semiconductor, not more cinematographers.

I don't see social sciences or humanities as foundational science, but that is a difference of definition of terms.

Nothing stops wealthy New Zealanders from privately funding social sciences and humanities research, or stops department heads of universities from asking these wealthy people for money to fund research in social sciences and humanities.

[Malika]

It's silly to think so categorically. The US spent good money on humanities when it hired excellent movie makers during WWII and "STEM" research can include such economically useful works as studies of duck penises.

[Commenter_XY]

What are the assumptions, Malika? There are limited governmental resources and they must be prioritized by their economic benefit.

It would be wonderful to fund everything. Really, it would.

So yes, because of resource constraint, one has to make categorical choices. That is not silly. It (making categorical choices) is done in business every hour of the day.

[Malika]

Limited resources does not mean one must make categorical decisions, in fact it often makes more sense to judge projects individually. As I said, funding research on, say, social epidemiology (social science) could have much more economic benefit than funding a study of, say, duck penises (hard science, no pun intended). Do you disagree?

[bernard11]

There are limited governmental resources and they must be prioritized by their economic benefit.

Why should economic benefit be the only applicable measure?

And why do you think the social sciences provide no benefit? Do you think Milton Friedman's work was useless? That psychology has no benefits? That the study of government can provide no value?

Stop parroting stupidity.

[Brett Bellmore]

"Why should economic benefit be the only applicable measure?"

It should certainly be very high on the list, because if the government is spending much money on things that don't have an economic benefit larger than their cost, we end up poorer as a result of the spending.

[bernard11]

if the government is spending much money on things that don't have an economic benefit larger than their cost, we end up poorer as a result of the spending.

That's taking a pretty narrow view of benefits. Yes, we might end up with lower GDP than otherwise, but whether that makes us "poorer" in a broad sense is open to serious question.

Measurable economic gain is not the only thing in the world.

[Brett Bellmore]

Which is why I said it should be high up on the list, not that it should be the only thing on the list.

But when you've been running enormous deficits for decades, and the debt is consistently growing faster than the size of the economy, it's clear that way too many things are above economic benefit, or even economic neutrality. Unaffordably too many things.

[Commenter_XY]

The NZ government made that call = research with economic benefits.

In a resource constrained environment, you put your focus on the biggest bang for the buck. That sure in shit ain't cinematography.

[Stephen Lathrop]

XY — NZ is famous as a cinematographers' paradise. That has attracted remunerative big-name movie productions, which enrich local economies considerably. In NZ, it may be cinematography delivering the biggest bang for the buck. Think of it as comparative advantage.

More generally, cinematography is art. As cultural enrichments, achievements in art have for centuries tended to far outlast almost every other kind of cultural production.

When you think about it, STEM advancements often come on more as social disruptions than boons to society. And STEM stuff is so much about, "What have you done lately."

I doubt many of the problems which most beset our nation now will be better solved by STEM graduates than by others trained in the arts and humanities.

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

Do you think Milton Friedman's work was useless?

Yeah, because how could one possibly think that Friedman's work might have some economic benefit?

[Sarcastr0]

Keep reading, Wuz:

"Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences and humanities research, and the expert panels considering these proposals would be disbanded."

Above and beyond any economic benefit bit, they're halting social science.

[Dan Schiavetta]

We're not talking about big bucks (and New Zealand does use "dollars") here. This is a relatively small matter which is being singled out for culture war purposes.

You do find rich people funding research without giving directives (or nudges) on what findings the researcher can and cannot come to, but that has been the exception, not the rule. What is happened in N.Z. is a rather mindless painting with a broad brush.

[Malika]

Always funny to see folks like Kaz, who for weeks pored over detailed polling and election forecasting here as well as inflation analysis, using the "social science" trope. Because all that data was collected by chemists and biologists!

[CountmontyC]

Statistics is a subset of math. It is not a social science.

[Sarcastr0]

Doing good surveys - sampling correctly, asking questions correctly.

Those are methods depending on social science.

[Joe_dallas]

Gaslight0

another example of not understanding math / stats.
Yet he is the first to condemn someone for having a grasp of basic facts.

[Sarcastr0]

You just attack other people's knowledge with zero substance on your own part.

What do you think I got wrong?

[Joe_dallas]

Gas0
the better question is what did you get right

[Sarcastr0]

Another angry failure to engage from Joe.

[CountmontyC]

No they are not. Sampling correctly means asking objective questions such as male or female, Republican or Democrat, how often they vote, where they live etcetera. After those questions have been answered ( hopefully honestly) a mathematical model is based to ( again hopefully) represent the population in the poll. Then the pollster asks the questions and uses a mathematical model to determine what it means.

[Sarcastr0]

1. You appear to have mixed up sampling with question phrasing.
2. Question phrasing is subtle, difficult, and important. My favorite is the majority liked the ACA, but didn't like Obamacare. https://www.pewresearch.org/writing-survey-questions/
3. "a mathematical model is based to (again hopefully) represent the population in the poll" - the practice of creating a mathematical model of a population is social science. Sociology or political science depending on the application.
4. Even who the pollster is and how the questions are asked is important.

I'm no expert, but good lord you know nothing about the practice of opinion polling.

[CountmontyC]

Opinion polling is a snapshot of what people believe or plan to do. It does not judge or give meaning to the poll results. Social scientists may make use of polling to come to conclusions about various issues but the polling itself if honestly conducted is simply a mathematical formula that takes a snapshot on an issue. For example if I ask 100 people if they plan to watch Trump's inauguration and 65 say yes all I have determined is that 65% of the people plan to watch his inauguration. It tells me nothing about the people and nothing about why they plan to watch. It doesn't even tell me if they are citizens. Other follow up questions will clarify and a larger sample would be better and more likely accurate but an honestly conducted poll is conducted using mathematical formulas and models. Social scientists can use polling to seek out data on their subject but unless that poll uses proper methods and relies on mathematical formula it is useless.

[Sarcastr0]

Opinion polling is a snapshot of what people believe or plan to do. It does not judge or give meaning to the poll results.
Do you mean election results? Because the crosstabs are pretty elucidating
And opinion polls, especially when done as an annual series so you can compare, are useful for things other than around election results.

I agree with you that polling without a good foundation in mathematics to analyze the data is useless. But so, too is polling without a good foundation in social science to understand how to attain the data!

You're throwing out info while missing baseline, vital context. This is that dunning-Kruger 'the less I know the more confidence I have' kicking up.

[David Nieporent]

For example if I ask 100 people if they plan to watch Trump's inauguration and 65 say yes all I have determined is that 65% of the people plan to watch his inauguration.

That is not correct. It tells you that 65% of the people you talked to — who may or may not be representative of the larger population for reasons that require subject matter knowledge — say that they plan to watch the inauguration. You again need SME to be able to understand whether people's stated intentions are likely to match their actual ones in a given situation.

[Absaroka]

That's a bit of an oversimplification, e.g. if you ask:

1)Have you or someone you know been a victim of a burglary in the last year?
2)Do you worry about getting mugged when going to your car in a dark parking lot?
...
10)Should funding for the police be increased?

vs.:

1)Should funding for the police be increased?

you will get a lot more support for police funding with the first survey; priming people to think a lot about crime makes increasing the police budget seem like a good idea. There is a lot of subtlety in designing surveys (which unscrupulous people use to skew the results, and honest people think about to avoid skewing the results).

[Malika]

There's an entire sub-science of social science to survey instrument construction and how it can impact things like response rates or answers.

[bernard11]

Huh?

You poll, then set up a model (bad practice) and then poll again, and then ask questions and uses a model?

That makes zero sense.

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

It tells you that 65% of the people you talked to

Gee, do you suppose that's who he was referring to as "the people" immediately following his reference to asking the question of 100 people?

[David Nieporent]

Gee, do you suppose that if I supposed that, I would've written what I did?

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

Gee, do you suppose that if I supposed that, I would've written what I did?

Did the loud *****WHOOOOOSH***** sound of the point flying over your head scare you?

[Malika]

The data doesn't count itself, the collection of data is a pretty generally core social science topic.

[CountmontyC]

The data is math based. It's definite numbers not how does this number make you feel.

[Malika]

That's nice. But the data doesn't count itself. There's an entire sub-science of how to construct items and administer survey instruments and how this effects results. Unfortunately for folks like you, measures of things like census questions, consumer confidence, etc., involve talking to all kinds of people with feelings. Knowing about human behavior, especially as it relates to how people answer questions in certain situations, might be important, no?

[bernard11]

The data is math based.

No it's not. I mean yes, there is some arithmetic involved, but there's arithmetic involved in lots of things. I like to play bridge, for example, and doing arithmetic is a very important part of playing well.

That doesn't make the game a subset of math. The much more complex and important part of the survey consists of making sure you have a random sample, avoiding various biases, construction of good questions and so on.

[David Nieporent]

Statistics is a subset of math. It is not a social science.

If by "statistics" you literally mean the mathematical formulas that one can plug data into and come back with numerical results about statistical significance and the like, then yes, that's a branch of math. Neither gathering the data nor interpreting it is math, though; rather, that's a branch of whatever the data pertains to — biology, sociology, economics, criminology, chemistry, etc. If one doesn't understand the underlying field, one cannot understand what the numbers mean, and don't mean.

(My favorite example of this, brought into stark relief in 2016. Princeton neuroscience professor Sam Wang got into a public feud with Nate Silver over election forecasting. Wang was so convinced of his statistical expertise that he mocked Nate's (relative) high estimation of Trump's chances, promising to eat a bug on tv if Trump won. Trump did win. Not because Sam Wang was relying on different data or because his math was faulty, though. Because he didn't understand the underlying subject, and therefore did not understand the limitations of that data. One needed to have studied elections, not just the technical aspects of statistical analysis, to get that right.

(To Wang's credit, he did in fact eat the bug.))

[Life of Brian]

(To Wang's credit, he did in fact eat the bug.))

Well, given the promise of something that juicy, of course I had to go find the video.

Sadly, all he really did was swallow a spoonful of honey surrounding what he called a canned "gourmet style" cricket, and only after caterwauling about it being a distraction from [TDS] and giving the CNN anchor a chance to call it off.

Partial credit at best.

[Kazinski]

Well that's just a silly example Malika,

None of the political polling I cited is paid for by government research grants.

Nor would it prevent government bureaucrats from doing their jobs collecting the statistics that they are hired to compile.

Nor would it prevent corporations, or industry groups or foundations from financing anything they wanted.

[SimonP]

Where should the money go for foundational science with economic benefits to the country...STEM or humanities? Pretty easy call. STEM wins, hands down, every single time.

Simple question: Why?

How do you formulate an argument in defense of this priority, that is not based to some extent on political philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, economics, etc.?

Here is what is so frustrating, trying to debate STEM-supremacists - you don't even have the intellectual tools to understand the nature of the arguments you're making. You don't understand that you are making an argument. We have Goober here drooling to himself about how smart he is, but the world's racing around him and his asinine argument that Trump must be smart, because he married a model. He doesn't understand how simple and obvious his stupid strawman is. And he thumps his chest like he's proven something, the idiot.

Western civilization didn't come about because the Greeks invested in STEM research. The American experiment in democracy doesn't follow from the findings of some healthtech startup. For centuries, the Catholic Church safeguarded our knowledge, inspired some of our greatest art, music, and architecture, and laid down roots of the modern nation-state and law. Western civilization has been a millenia-long march of thinkers, thinking about stuff that often had no apparent economic value - and yet all of their thought goes into how we think about ourselves and organize our lives.

Investing in STEM research is important, to be sure. That research can improve our quality of living, cure our diseases, extend our lives. But it can't make our lives worth living. It can't explain why all of that is worth pursuing. The humanities are an integral part of what it means to be human. It's incredibly ignorant to dismiss it as without value.

[Brett Bellmore]

I've noticed over the years an increasing trend on the left to engage in what you might call "inverse ad hominen"; Rather than arguing that somebody must be wrong because they're bad, they reason that they must be bad because they're wrong.

Where "wrong" means disagreeing with the left, of course. And "bad" means bad in all ways.

So, it's not possible to JUST disagree with the left. You have to do it out of disreputable motives, you have to be stupid and ugly, incapable of planning.

I think they've lost some basic subtlety of thought, they can no longer distinguish internally between negative things, so the world collapses into a binary: Anyone who has one negative must have all of them. And the driving negative is disagreeing with them.

And so, the billionaire married to a super-model, who has twice been elected President, is a stupid failure who is incapable of thinking or planning. And they're losing half the elections to people totally lacking in any intellectual virtues, the slightest bit of self-awareness, who don't even have policies or the capability of planning.

It's entirely pathological, and they can't seem to see that they're actually putting themselves down by describing their foes thus, because, after all, they're the ones who can't regularly beat what they claim the people they're fighting are.

[Malika]

"I think they've lost some basic subtlety of thought, they can no longer distinguish internally between negative things, so the world collapses into a binary"

"STEM or humanities? Pretty easy call. STEM wins, hands down, every single time."

The lack of introspection/self-awareness is interesting...

[Michael P]

Leftist fails to grasp simple points with obvious and explicitly indicated distinctions, unwittingly proves Brett's point...

[Malika]

Tell us how, Mikee.

[Malika]

As I suspected, gots nothin.

[Michael P]

The rest of us get it.

And we have jobs, apparently unlike you. Or maybe you get paid to trill the comments here?

[Sarcastr0]

Another telepathic understanding of why people disagree with Brett!

And also the real reason why people don’t thinkTrump is smart.

Amazing.

[Brett Bellmore]

"And also the real reason why people don’t think Trump is smart."

Well, it certainly can't be because he's a failure. As I say, married to a super-model, billionaire, twice elected President: That practically defines, "stupid", doesn't it? It doesn't take any capacity for planning to achieve any of that. [/sarc]

[Malika]

Do you think a person can't be stupid and married to a super-model?

[Brett Bellmore]

As a theoretical matter, no law of physics prohibits it. As a practical matter, once somebody has racked up enough wins, claiming that it's just a series of accidents self-identifies you as the stupid one.

[Malika]

But you're equating success in any field to intelligence. Tommy Lee, Axyl Rose, etc., all married to super-models, but smart?

[Brett Bellmore]

Yes, success in most fields requires a good degree of intelligence. Not necessarily genius level, but if somebody excels in anything more complex than digging ditches, they're probably quite smart.

135 - Tommy Lee Jones - Hollywood Stars With Sky-Scraping IQs

Tommy Lee Jones? IQ of 135.

[Malika]

Holy shit, you confused Tommy Lee Jones the actor with Tommy Lee-the drummer from Motley Crue (who was married to Pam Anderson)!!! He was listed with Axyl Rose for a reason....

Smarts, indeed!

[Brett Bellmore]

I'm smart, but my son is the musician in the family.

[Sarcastr0]

IQ is a black box hodge-podge that is not useless, but should never be equated with intelligence.

[Bwaaah]

You must've gotten your test results.

[Absaroka]

'Smart' (and 'intelligence') are pretty vague terms.

A ballerina, a shot putter, a sprinter, and a marathoner all have incredible physical talents, but very different ones. Saying they are 'strong' is true but as a catch-all loses a lot of information.

Shakespeare, Einstein, Beethoven, Degas and Darwin all had exceptional intellectual abilities, but 'smart' also loses a lot of information about what those abilities are.

People are a mix of talents, good and bad. Patton was an exceptional commander, and also nutty as a fruitcake (reincarnation, for example). Great genius can go hand in hand with insanity.

Trump, or Hitler, or Gandhi didn't get where they were/are by pure luck - there must be something going on between the ears. Whether one characterizes that as 'smart' or 'cunning' likely depends on how much of a fan one is.

Also, whatever you call that intellectual attribute, it doesn't offer a lot of insight into whether the person saying X means X is a good idea. Hitler had immense talent for rhetoric, very accurately figured out how much he could get away with prior to 1939, and disastrously mismanaged the war effort after that.

(Heh ... saw a thing the other day. Someone floated the mid-war idea of waiting until Hitler was at Berchtesgaden, sending in a bunch of bombers, and having them swerve at the last minute to bomb him. One of the reasons given to not do it was that he was mismanaging things worse (better?) than any likely replacement.)

[Sarcastr0]

This is the whole 'the more I practice the luckier I get.'

Everyone gets to where they are through a mix of starting conditions, luck, judgement, and talent.

What exactly that mix is will vary widely and is usually impossible to figure with any clarity.

Brett's general idea that rich people have better talent and judgement ignores the first 2 components.
What he end up with is rich people have more inherent merit than poor people. Beyond thinking that's an immoral way to think of poor people, I also think it's unsupported in any kind of real world application.

[Absaroka]

"What he end up with is rich people have more inherent merit than poor people."

I don't think that's a fair characterization of Brett's position. My sense (and he will be along shortly to correct me!) is that he maintains that success is correlated with various attributes, from work ethic to various abilities.

It seems pretty obvious that luck matters[1], but so does ability, work ethic, and so on. My not having a Nobel or Olympic gold isn't just bad luck or an accident of birth; my sloth and general ineptitude were pretty big factors as well.

[1]At the Beer Hall Putsch, when the police opened fire the guy next to Hitler was shot. How different history would have been if that shot has been a couple feet to one side.

[Brett Bellmore]

Statistically speaking, rich people have more inherent merit than poor people, because, on average, having merit causes your wealth to go up, and lacking it causes your wealth to go down, so what else would you expect?

Sure, you could win the lottery, and wind up wealthy despite being a total loser. But that's not how most wealthy people got wealthy. You could be a genius businessman, but lightning hits your factory and burns it down, too, but that's not how most poor people got poor.

There's luck, sure, but luck doesn't work against merit, or for it, so it just makes the statistics noisy, it doesn't change the general trend.

"Beyond thinking that's an immoral way to think of poor people,"

I think it's an accurate way to think of poor people, in aggregate. It doesn't have any moral implications. We're not talking here about moral worth, we're talking about capabilities and their consequences.

It's important to not let your sense of what ought to be blind you to what is, Sarcastr0.

[Malika]

Absaroka, Hitler is a good example. Why assume he must have been smart to get where he is, rather than that there was a structural-cultural stew of things like bad economic conditions, anti-Semitism, etc., that was going to push some groups into power and *someone* was going to benefit. Lots of Hitler's advisors thought he was a dolt.

[Malika]

"having merit causes your wealth to go up"

Now you seem to have switched to merit. Before you were talking about intelligence and the kind that IQ tests measure.

Merit, in political contexts, seems like a problematic thing. I mean, you could argue that one of Hitler's pluses in coming to power was that he shared in the rabid anti-Semitism running strong at the time (surely if he was smart enough to figure out that was nonsense [and you think it's nonsense, don't you?] he wouldn't have rose to power how he did). I guess one of Trump's "merits" is that he was willing to indulge anti-immigrantion and conspiracy thinking that was a strong cultural phenomena of the time making him *popular* with people who held those sentiments, in a way that, say, Romney wasn't. Does that mean Trump was "smarter" than Romney?

This, btw, is I think an important point. I remember people on the left demonizing Romney and thinking he was wrong on many things. But I don't remember them thinking he was some utter dolt. Why do you think they feel differently about Trump? Is there anything Trump himself does that might make one feel that way? If I remember correctly you yourself said you kind of have to hold your nose to vote for him.

[Brett Bellmore]

I think a genuinely doltish Hitler would have been less of a threat. Perhaps they thought that because he and they had different focuses for their intelligence.

Part of the problem here is a tendency to conflate moral merit with other sorts of merit. A person can be a complete cad, and still be clever. A fiend, and diligent.

Contrarywise, a person can be saintly, and still really stupid or lazy.

.....

"Now you seem to have switched to merit. Before you were talking about intelligence and the kind that IQ tests measure."

Intelligence is a form of merit, diligence is a form of merit. There are lots of forms of merit, they tend to work together.

"Why do you think they feel differently about Trump?"

I think it's because Trump came later, and what we're looking at is a progressive shift in the way left-wingers view the opposition. I guess we'll see in 2028, when the nominee is somebody other than Trump.

[Sarcastr0]

Brett sure says he means only a weak statistical correlate. But then he keeps writing...

1) He thinks it's causal,
2) He a priori rejects that luck could swamp the results, or be anything other than symmetrical across socioeconomic class. 3) He ignores inheritance entierly
4) For all his chaff about stats he thinks this is baseline truth.
Look at how this started - he thinks Trump is indeed just a more meritorious person. Stats cannot support that about an individual. But Brett does!

He thinks there's an aristocracy among us who are smarter and more talented and wiser than the peasants, and they're the wealthy.

He talks out of both sides of his mouth about it, but he keeps coming back to the just deserts view of socioeconomics.

[Malika]

Brett, you don't think Trump talks and writes in a way different than Romney which would make people think he's less intelligent?

[Brett Bellmore]

"Brett sure says he means only a weak statistical correlate. But then he keeps writing..."

Where did you get that "weak" from? I don't think it's particularly weak.

Yes, I do think it's causal, explicitly: Intelligence and diligence cause wealth, their lack cause poverty.

"He a priori rejects that luck could swamp the results, "

As I explained, luck is as likely to advance the meritorious as those lacking in merit, and those with merit are better positioned to take advantage of it when it comes along. So at most it makes the statistics noisy.

"He ignores inheritance entierly"

Merit is heritable, for all that reversion to the mean is a thing. And inheriting wealth is just a form of luck.

" For all his chaff about stats he thinks this is baseline truth."

Is there some reason baseline truths can't be statistically true?

[Absaroka]

"He thinks it's causal"

Well so do I! Have a tendency to show up late at work? You are less likely to get that promotion. Party instead of studying? You are less likely to get that degree. Get in the habit of doing meth? What happens to you after that isn't random bad luck.

You may only work with people who have intellects that suit them for almost any job, but that a narrow slice of life. I've worked with people whose math skills weren't much past 'one, two, many'. The reason they aren't working as software engineers at Google isn't just bad luck.

And I once ran into an absolute brilliant guy working as a night clerk at a 7-11 (I have no idea why). The correlation coefficient isn't 1.0, but it isn't zero either.

And of course inheritance matters - all of it. If you inherit a million dollars, you are pretty likely to be at least a temporary millionaire. If you inherit a good work ethic and reasonable intellect, your odds of being above the median income are greater than 0.5.
If Dad was a doctor, you're more likely to think about med school than if Dad was a plumber. I don't think Brett disagrees with that at all.

OTOH, if you are a lazy wastrel, that million can go away pretty fast.

[Sarcastr0]

"luck is as likely to advance the meritorious as those lacking in merit" is not supported. I would expect the upside/downside impact to shift as one moves up and down socioeconomically.

If random noise is correlated with success (however you want to measure that), and it's effect is of a similar amplitude than other correlates, you can't just handwaive it away as evening out. That noise will occlude your results!

And then you're assuming causality based on....?

Merit is heritable
Fucking. Aristocrat.

Wealth is. Merit? We don't even know what that means.

[Brett Bellmore]

"Merit is heritable"
"Fucking. Aristocrat."

Literally, intelligence is a component of merit, and heritable at a level of 0.5-0.85, which is actually a pretty strong heritability component.

What we see here on display is your relentless insistence on conflating moral merit and amoral virtues like intelligence and diligence, and then insisting that the latter can't be heritable because it offends your moral sense.

"Wealth is. Merit?"

No, wealth is money.

[Absaroka]

"Merit is heritable
Fucking. Aristocrat."

'Merit' is pretty ambiguous, so let's break it out into 'intellectual ability' (also pretty ambiguous) and 'work ethic' or 'self discipline' or whatever you want to call it.

Is your opinion that neither of these is influenced *at all* by either genes or upbringing? If so, we can agree to disagree. If not, then we agree the correlation coefficient greater than 0.0, and we're just arguing about the price as the old joke goes.

My sense is that the coefficient is nontrivial - I doubt that the kids of Asian Tiger Mom's doing well is pure bunk - but I'm not going to waste many electrons without data.

[Sarcastr0]

Is your opinion that neither of these is influenced *at all* by either genes or upbringing?
Influenced is ambiguous.

Brett said merit was heritable in response to: "He ignores inheritance entirely"

I think upbringing isn't the issue in contention here. That is itself a can of worms, but that's not the inherent trait that Brett seems to be pushing.

And once you take that off, you get into a whole mess. Brett believes the Bell Curve is still good science (ask him!). He also thinks IQ is the same as intelligence. And the idea of variation within a group swamping the average is not something he's worried about.

Wouldn't be the first time an engineer's determinative view of his work spilled over into eugenics in principle, if not in practice.

[Brett Bellmore]

Yes, I think The Bell Curve is still good science, in much the way I think Milton Friedman is still right about inflation; Being unpopular with a noisy minority doesn't make you wrong.

And you continue to demonstrate your inability to disengangle your moral preferences from empirical questions.

[Sarcastr0]

And this is why Absaroka shouldn't try picking up your arguments for you.

[David Nieporent]

In any event, I think that Donald Trump is not married to a supermodel.

[Sarcastr0]

But you're using rich and married to a model as a proxy for smart.

You're so steeped in this aristocratic take you don't even realize anyone could think otherwise.

[Brett Bellmore]

I'm not using it as a proxy for smart, I'm using it as evidence of smart.

Just being elected President twice is enough to take "stupid" off the table. Again I implore you: Stop believing your own trash talk, it makes you look pathetic.

[Sarcastr0]

You use it as proof. You don’t even realize how overdetermined you are.

It’s not evidence for smart. You don’t support that. You assume it.

Because you have always been the utopian aristocracy kind of capitalism enjoyer.

[Brett Bellmore]

Good God. You're actually claiming that twice winning an election to the highest office in the country isn't evidence of intelligence?

What do you think intelligence is, if not the capacity to solve problems? And winning an office is solving a problem.

And that's setting aside that, if Trump is stupid, what does that make the party that got beaten by stupid?

Again, believing your own trash talk just makes you look pathetic. And the most pathetic thing is that you can't stop doing it. It's important to you that your enemies must lack all virtues.

[Malika]

No, I don't think it's a sign of intelligence. It's a popularity contest to some large degree, it's also indicative of structural and cultural forces (pretty much every party in developed nations that governed in the past few years since COVID lost voter share this year, was that because their leaders were or got dumber?).

[Commenter_XY]

I just want to thank Malika and Sarcastr0 for splendidly demonstrating Brett's point.

[Malika]

Yeah? Which point. Be specific.

[Sarcastr0]

Yes, Brett. Politicians are showhorses, not workhorses. It's pretty hilarious you cite Trump as someone who must be good at solving problems.

You switch from Trump as a person to the Democrats as a group. Which is a category error. But if you think you got me by asking if the Dems are stupid...you really don't understand politics.

You deeply think rich people are just better than the rest of us. That's why I call you an aristocrat.

[Brett Bellmore]

"I just want to thank Malika and Sarcastr0 for splendidly demonstrating Brett's point."

Like shooting fish in a barrel, really. They simply can't help it.

[Commenter_XY]

I know = Like shooting fish in a barrel. 🙂

[Joe_dallas]

Brett Bellmore 5 minutes ago
Flag Comment
Mute User
"I just want to thank Malika and Sarcastr0 for splendidly demonstrating Brett's point."

Like shooting fish in a barrel, really. They simply can't help it.

Concur
both of which have a huge distaste for common sense , logic, publicly available facts, and basic junior high and high school level science.

[Sarcastr0]

Oh, Commenter just cheerleading for Brett now? And Brett's just into it?

Oy.

[Joe_dallas]

Sarcastr0 9 minutes ago
Flag Comment
Mute User
"Oh, Commenter just cheerleading for Brett now? And Brett's just into it?
Oy".

Gas0 - if you ever said anything intelligent, coherent , logical, or meaningful, then you would have a point.

[Malika]

Ipse dixit turtles all the way down!

[TwelveInchPianist]

"It's pretty hilarious you cite Trump as someone who must be good at solving problems."

Well, he wasn't President, he wanted to be President, and now he'll be President. I guess he solved that problem.

Most people who want to be President can't solve it.

[Malika]

"Most people who want to be President can't solve it."

Do you think that's a good argument? I mean, do you think Biden is an awesome (ahead of "most people") problem solver? I've said it before and I'll say it again: Biden was an incredibly mediocre intellect who was in the right time and place structurally and culturally. If you want to prove me wrong by extolling how brilliant he is, have at it.

[Brett Bellmore]

"I've said it before and I'll say it again: Biden was an incredibly mediocre intellect who was in the right time and place structurally and culturally."

Relative to your average President, sure, he's mediocre. He wasn't picked by Obama to be a world beater. He was picked to be utterly non-threatening.

Relative to the general population? Not remotely mediocre.

I think our perceptions of what qualifies as being "smart" are skewed by the fact that we're looking at the cream, and comparing one bit of it to another, and ignoring the whey underneath. Remember: Half the population have an IQ below 100! The vast majority of the population don't have what it takes to play in the game Biden is "mediocre" at. The vast majority of the population don't have what it takes to excel at ANYTHING that gets you headlines. Doesn't make them bad people, but if you're reading about somebody in the news, they're probably not an ordinary person.

He's not a stupid person. He's just not excelling relative to an already select bunch.

[Sarcastr0]

Life is not engineering.

Attaining the Presidency is not just a problem to be solved and the best problem solver gets it.

[Brett Bellmore]

No, it's not "just" a problem to be solved, but none the less, it IS a problem to be solved.

[David Nieporent]

Good God. You're actually claiming that twice winning an election to the highest office in the country isn't evidence of intelligence?

Yes.

But, I mean, that is the wrong question anyway; as with almost anyone, if you assessed whether Trump was intelligent by creating a pro/con chart and listed supporting evidence for each position in one of two columns, you could find something for the 'pro' column. The point with Trump is the overwhelming amount of evidence in the 'con' column, not the fact that the 'pro' column is entirely empty.

What do you think intelligence is, if not the capacity to solve problems? And winning an office is solving a problem.

Sure; that's why prom kings are usually valedictorians.

And that's setting aside that, if Trump is stupid, what does that make the party that got beaten by stupid?

Nothing one way or the other. An election is not an IQ contest. I doubt that more than a relative handful of our presidential elections would have come out the same way as they actually did, if it were.

[Mr. Bumble]

Van Jones agrees with Brett:
https://x.com/KarluskaP/status/1867996011907694888

[Malika]

Well, you proved that!

[SRG2]

Someone may have a knack for certain skills, which for social reasons turn out to be highly profitable. Their internal motivation to get rich may also drive them to achieve more financial success than someone driven by intellectual curiosity, for example. None of this prove any kind of general "smarts". Which should be obvious bur the cult must defend its leader.

[Malika]

Exactly this. Remember Prince? An amazing talent on the guitar, but would you vote for him for any office because of his "merit" or "intelligence?" WTF?

[Frank Drackman]

Remember him?
saw "Sign o' the Times" in a Movie Theater back when the Movies (not "Films") came on multiple reels, not antiseptic Hard Drives.
and while I don't drive a Little Red Corvette, I do have a nice Little Black one,
and if the border was controlled a little better, he might still be playing,

Frank

[bernard11]

Billionaire. Sure.

Whatever. Pretty easy to get there over decades when you start with $400,000,000 from your father, who also bails you out of your failures.

Helps when you don't pay your bills, though I suppose that tends to make your enterprises bankruptcy-prone.

Stop with the business genius stuff.

[bernard11]

Brett,

So, it's not possible to JUST disagree with the left. You have to do it out of disreputable motives, you have to be stupid and ugly, incapable of planning.

You need a megadose of self-awareness.

What you describe is exactly you're approach to disagreements. Exactly. When someone does something you don't like it is never simply an error on their part, or some sort of misjudgment. It is always part of a deep conspiracy - "the Left is..." - with some terrible purpose, or an effort to conceal something. Never a simple good faith disagreement about goals or the methods to achieve them.

Presumably this is because you are so convinced you are right about everything that the notion that someone might reasonably disagree with no ulterior aims.

And talk about losing "basic subtlety of thought, " again, it's worth some self-examination before accusing others of that.

[Frank Drackman]

Generalize much? Both of my daughters got Aerospace Engineering degrees from Georgia Tech (tried to get them to get something they could use, like my Poultry Science degree), I'm fluent in 3 languages (and working on Engrish), Bored Certified Gas Passer, and you're the one passing judgement? Like that great philosopher Moe Howard said,
"Every time you think, you weaken the nation"

Frank

[Malika]

"working on Engrish"

Keep at it!

[hobie]

Science. University. Public schools. Tear 'em down. Like in Animal Farm, a dumb population is easier to control

[Frank Drackman]

It's "Animal House" and Drunk, Fat, and Stupid is no way to go through life, Hobie-stank

[bernard11]

Aversion to learning has long been a motivation, either explicit or implicit, of conservatives.

Yes. They are afraid it might show them wrong about something.

[Malika]

"the country’s center-right coalition government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund, the nation’s sole funding source for fundamental science, to “research with economic benefits.” Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences "

Lol, economics is a social science!

I'm also always amused when people put social science in "". What's the deal? Is it that human behavior cannot be studied using the scientific method or that it isn't? Pretty silly.

[Bob from Ohio]

"Lol, economics is a social science!"

They did not say they were diverting it to "economics", but rather to things that result in "economic benefits”.

[Sarcastr0]

And how, Bob, do you measure economic benefits, much less predict what choices will have them as a result?

[Bob from Ohio]

"you measure economic benefits, much less predict what choices will have them as a result?"

Tech research has an inherent potential economic benefit.

[Malika]

Tech (undefined), inherent! Lol

[Sarcastr0]

In the place of social science, Bob will use ipse dixit.

[Malika]

Lol, ya goof, I was pointing out that they were at the same time denigrating social science and saying that their criteria would be based on...something a social science measures.

[Kazinski]

I think this is an example of the type of study that no longer should be funded:

Engagement in Chemsex among Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSM) in Malaysia: Prevalence and Associated Factors from an Online National Survey

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9819808/

[Malika]

You don't think knowing more about the sexual practices of groups with higher prevalence of sexually transmitted disease like HIV could be "economically useful" for a government?

[Bob from Ohio]

The government of Malaysia perhaps, why are we funding it?

[Zarniwoop]

Do you think HIV only exists in Malaysia? That gay men only exist in Malaysia? That people do drugs and have sex only in Malaysia?

I mean, that level of wishful thinking would explain a lot.

In the mean time, it looks like basic scientific epidemiology to me: studying a defined population to better understand disease spread in a way that applies around the world.

Because in reality, HIV and sex and drugs don't magically stop at the borders of Malaysia.

[Sarcastr0]

Kaz, it's an NIH study. The application is kinda obvious.

But moreover, by requiring an a priori application to research, you leave a lot of science on the table.
There's some pretty strong history for why we don't limit ourselves by myopically chasing capabilities we already know we want.

[Kazinski]

Well, an NIH study.

That settles It.

After all it was the NIH grant to Eco Health's Wuhan project that gave the world the novel coronovirius.

[Sarcastr0]

Try and not wander off onto tin foil territory.

Others have also pointed out the health-based applications of what you linked

[Zarniwoop]

Epidemiology - the scientific study of how diseases spread - seems pretty much like "science" to me. Per the wikis and pedias:

Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population.

It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evidence-based practice by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive healthcare. Epidemiologists help with study design, collection, and statistical analysis of data, amend interpretation and dissemination of results (including peer review and occasional systematic review). Epidemiology has helped develop methodology used in clinical research, public health studies, and, to a lesser extent, basic research in the biological sciences.[1]

Would you support a study of factors that influence HIV spread in straight white people?

[Sarcastr0]

Not only would it save considerable amounts of government spending
That's not what divert means.

it would also go a long way to reforming universities and clearing out the rot.
Advertising is applied social science. All that stuff about raising and lower interest rates? Social science.

Social science is not partisan. Are you calling it partisan because those who do it tend to be liberal? Because who knows if that applies in New Zealand, and because your objection applies all over American academia generally.

Wrecking our intellectual dominance to own the libs.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Intellectual dominance?

Not funding gay bat studies or tranny cockroach experiments isn't going to harm our intellectual dominance, Sarcastr0. But you knew that, you're just being you. An insincere concern trolling shit poster.

[Bob from Ohio]

"Social science is not partisan. "

"partisan" is a misleading label

Social science is left wing as practiced in the modern US and most of the West.

[Sarcastr0]

Anthropology is left wing? Advertising? Economics? Political science? Psychology?

You don't even know what social science includes, do you?

[Bob from Ohio]

You must not know what "as practiced" means, do you?

The people in all those fields are overwhelmingly left wingers [you might some "liberals"].

[Malika]

Economics is 55-39. Is that "overwhelmingly?"

[Sarcastr0]

What the fuck does who the practitioners tend to vote for have to do with whether the science is good?

You're the one who is so partisan you can't see science.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/16/archaeology-sexual-revolution-bones-sex-dna-birka-lovers

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32200173/

https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/19/the-lefts-latest-frontier-in-the-trans-craze-ban-misgendering-skeletons/

You ignorant boob.

[Joe_dallas]

https://www.joannejacobs.com/post/troubled-12-year-old-was-fast-tracked-for-hormones-mastect0my-charges-lawsuit

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

To quote Pfizer when asked why there was not testing: She need help "At the Speed of Science!"

[Joe_dallas]

Sarcastr0 1 hour ago
Flag Comment
Mute User
What the fuck does who the practitioners tend to vote for have to do with whether the science is good?

You're the one who is so partisan you can't see science.

Gas0 - You just demonstrated that you dont understand reality. Your response showed you have zero comprehension of what Bob stated, which further confirms what I have written multiple times - that your responses are inane and devoid of logical coherent thought.

[Sarcastr0]

Another angry failure to engage from Bob.

You just gonna anti-cheerlead all day?

[Joe_dallas]

Gas0

Your response to bob didnt even come close to addressing what he wrote. You either didnt bother understanding what he wrote or you intentionally responded to something he didnt write otherwise you would have to admit he was correct. Either way it shows your typical prick manner of posting.

[Bob from Ohio]

"you can't see science""

Are we taking about "science" or "social science"? Not the same thing at all!

Ideology of researchers absolutely does influence research in "social science".

[Sarcastr0]

Your argument would seem to apply to all science.

Ideology influences everyone. Why is social science special?

As I said this looks more like a you problem than a science problem.

[Bob from Ohio]

"Why is social science special?"

Because its opinion pretending to be scientific. Not really "science". The "replication crisis" illustrated that.

People research history but that does not make it a "science", neither is most "social" science.

[Sarcastr0]

If you meant that originally, you would have said it. Instead you just called it liberal.

As for your new charge, that's not a serious response either.
Science is hard; we're groping in the dark and there are lots of unknown variables. Everything has replication issues.

Try again.

[bernard11]

No they are not.

[Bwaaah]

Take a look at current National Science Foundation grants for work that includes the word "equity" in their abstract. (Roughly $3 billion there.) As is typical, the left is silent about the bullshit its adherents produce, and as Brett describes, simply opposed to all who are opposed to it.

[Malika]

What do you think this proves?

[Bwaaah]

Did you read the abstracts? It shows a lot of money, from an agency intended to support the advancement of science, going to "equity"-centric projects, a.k.a. DEI initiatives, in which science is only a tangential effort. That's a very poor spend of other people's money if the advancement of science is your actual purpose.

You could do a program to promote STEM for people with Down syndrome and characterize that as an effort to advance science. But just like those NSF grants, nobody involved has science as a priority. Those are social programs being funded with money intended for other priorities.

Looks like a lousy spend of limited dollars, if the advancement of science is what you're looking for.

[David Nieporent]

Not only would it save considerable amounts of government spending,

I don't know much (anything at all!) about the budgetary practices of the New Zealand government, but if they're even remotely similar to ours, it would save an infinitesimal percentage of government spending (which would almost certainly just be redirected to other priorities, not returned to taxpayers.)

[Commenter_XY]

VC Conspirators, a legal question for the lawyers and law professors...

Is it illegal to shoot down a drone over your own private property?

Suppose I own a farm in South Jersey, 100+ acres. Or a golf course. Or I just have a really big property zoned as a horse farm. And a drone flies low <50ft altitude over my property. Which I find irritating, and potentially threatening to me and my family. So I decide to exercise my 2A right to possess and use a gun to protect my 9A penumbral right of privacy, and shoot the drone down on my property.

Legal? Why or why not?

[Dan Schiavetta]

Aside from any Constitutional arguments, the common law is: you don’t own the space above your property, but if something interferes with the use of it — and such a low flying drone seems to qualify — I’d say yes. Just as if a branch from your neighbor’s tree overhangs onto your side of the fence, you get to cut it off.

[santamonica811]

Dan,
Well, you get to cut off that branch, but only in a way that does not (for example) kill the entire tree. Query: Does shooting down a drone (ie, killing it) qualify as a reasonable response?
Answer: I have no idea, I might lean towards "yes," if only because there doesn't seem to be any feasible half-measures that one can take. If you're not allowed to destroy a drone, then that's that. If you are allowed to; then the question is: When is it reasonable? Is it the second it enters the air space above your entire property? The second it enters the air space above your house and immediate surroundings? Only if it hovers in one general area for XX seconds? Does the altitude of the drone matter?

I expect that it will take several years of case law (in each state) to develop this area of law. With the current amazing quality of cameras on high-end drones (and sure to improve even more, over time), privacy is a definite concern.

[Dan Schiavetta]

You put it better than I could. Then again, it's 5 a.m. where I am and I'm getting over a flu.

[Mr. Bumble]

Didn't get your vaccine?

[Dan Schiavetta]

No -- maybe I should have. At least it's not Covid.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Well you still would've gotten Covid had you gotten the Covid vax. Statistically speaking, probably even more likely to get it.

[Commenter_XY]

Dan...Influenza can be serious. Get well soon.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Especially at his age. I should send him some well wishes too.

I should. But I won't.

[Stephen Lathrop]

I doubt state law will have much to do with it. Pretty sure the FAA will insist its legislative mandate preempts all drone-related issues, and Congress will go along. Congress really, really, dotes on the FAA. It's the agency which holds your plane on the ground, to help congresspeople make their connections.

Do not underestimate the peculiar strength of the bond between the FAA, Congress, and the aviation industry. Remember it took barely more than a day or two, following 911, for Congress not only to immunize the airlines from liability, but also to appropriate billions to subsidize them during predictable economic disruptions to come. For massive congressional emergency response, it could be that only Pearl Harbor rivals what happened then to protect the airlines, shield them from liability, and keep them running.

Privacy and drone camera quality are a separate issue, and may prove technology- and money-limited pretty soon. There is only so much which can be done with software, before the limits to optical improvement start to shift to physical constraints, such as sensor resolution, longer focal lengths, and increased front-objective sizes—all of which are subject to improvement, but at an exponentially-related rate which translates to exponentially increased weight.

There is an optical/mathematical relationship between the diameter of an optical objective, and the resolution it can deliver. That is part of why you see such big, heavy telephotos at sports events. Their large objective lenses not only gather a lot of light to enable high shutter speeds, and shallow depth of field to reduce background clutter, but also deliver great resolution. Those lenses are, accordingly, multiple times as heavy as consumer telephotos, and multiple times as expensive. Hence, it might take much larger drones to achieve higher image quality using lenses like those.

However, I do wonder if some of the reports of swarms of drones are in any way related to technological attempts to mobilize multiple cameras simultaneously, to create a synthetically large optical objective, and thus vastly increase optical resolution. That technology has been a thing in earth-based astronomy for decades.

That technology may also feature already in satellite reconnaissance. It seems logical to suppose experiments could be under way to see if that technology can work successfully using a wobbly swarm of drones. If so, that might explain why government does not choose to say much about it.

[santamonica811]

I dunno. My city of Santa Monica banned all drone flights X miles from our local airport. X miles, not coincidentally, covers every single square metre of my entire city.

If a city has the legal authority to ban all flights; I have little doubt that a state itself would have even more power to do so.

[Absaroka]

Do you happen to know the actual language from the city code (it didn't turn up in my first few pages of searching). I found a lot of talk on the drone forums and news articles with slightly different versions. Some for example said that the ordinance only applied to larger drones, some said only over the beach, some said over municipal property, and so on. Some talked about 8 ounce limits, vs the FAA 500 gram restrictions, etc, etc.

It is mostly near enough to the airport that you need clearance to fly over 100 ft (that is one of the FAA approved sites that maps drone operation areas).

I would think that e.g. real estate agents would be up in arms if they couldn't take aerials ... those seem to be a staple of house ads these days.

[DrCoke]

If an airplane was buzzing your house or field several times a day, it would certainly be interfering with your use of your property.

It would be all kinds of serious felonies for you to do anything to it.

It does not have anything to do with airspace rights. Aircraft are explicitly protected by law, regardless of where they are. See my other comment in this thread.

The question is whether the drone will be considered an aircraft by the authorities and the court. In general, the answer to that point is going to be "Yes, it is one."

If it is a $300 toy drone and it's so low that you can swat it down with just your hand, the laws I'm thinking of would probably not come into play.

Although of course if you hand-swat down a Government drone, even if it is smaller than your fist, they would probably add on the "attempting to damage an aircraft" felony charges to go with the Obstruction etc.

[Bob from Ohio]

"the common law is: you don’t own the space above your property"
Not true. at common law owned from cente of earth to heaven

Blackstone's Commentaries, Book 2, Chapter 2, p. *18:
"Land hath also, in its legal signification, an indefinite extent, upwards as well as downwards. Cujus est solum, ejus est usque ad coelum, is the maxim of the law, upwards; therefore no man may erect any building, or the like, to overhang another's land: and, downwards, whatever is in a direct line between the surface of any land, and the center of the earth, belongs to the owner of the surface; as is every day's experience in the mining countries. So that the word "land" includes not only the face of the earth, but every thing under it, or over it. And therefore if a man grants all his lands, he grants thereby all his mines of metal and other fossils, his woods, his waters, and his houses, as well as his fields and meadows."

[Stephen Lathrop]

XY — Not enough complications.

What if you and your neighbor are vigilantes, and the neighbor sees a drone hovering outside your bedroom window, and shoots it down to protect you, even though unbeknownst to your neighbor it turned out to be your drone, which you were operating to record you in bed, during an allegedly consensual sexual encounter with an underage-looking boy, (who had signed a modeling release swearing he was past the age of consent), and thus prevented you from fulfilling a porn site contract you had undertaken to illustrate the titillating subject of voyeurism by drone, as an exercise to vindicate your right of free expression, and freedom of the press?

[Mr. Bumble]

Once again SL rates a WTF!

[santamonica811]

Bumble,
I think it's clear that SL is writing tongue-in-cheek. He's having fun with the complicated fact patterns. In fact, he even pointed out (ironically, humorously) that he felt that the OP wasn't making it complicated enough...so he added on a bunch of new details to drive home this point. He gave us every hint other than his failure to add a smiley-face or winking-face emoticon.
(I know I'll get the Yiddish wrong, but I think it's called something like ferbessering...sorry mom.)

[Mr. Bumble]

Not clear at all when it comes to SL.

[Stephen Lathrop]

I will give you a hint, Bumble. Sometimes (not this time) my comments will include advice from my old Idaho pal, Bloggins. Actually, there is a whole Bloggins family. When any of those show up, it's always satire, or at least attempted satire. Bloggins family members have been commenting in publications to which I contribute since long before this blog began.

Of course, when it comes to satire, there are always readers for whom it is not clear what is going on.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

SL is just describing his last weekend sans the age of consent and modeling release part.

[Zarniwoop]

Heh, this exchange is hilarious.

But I'm gonna have to concur that Bumble has fallen for a moderately obvious troll from SL.

I rate the "not enough complications" followed by a slew of ridonkulous complications as a borderline case when it comes to Poe's Law.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Federal felony -- 18 USC 32.

Now is 18 usc 32 Constitutional?

And there are also barrage balloons...

[DrCoke]

It's a federal felony to shoot down (or attempt to damage or disable ) any aircraft, including whether it is in the air above your land, or actually on the ground of your land (or anywhere else). This includes unmanned aerial vehicles. For example 18 U.S.C. § 32.

It is also a federal crime (misdemeanor) to interfere with the operation of aircraft (usually used in the context of rowdy passengers, but it is broader than that).

There are also state laws.

If it is a consumer grade aircraft (that is, a toy), and especially if. it is not registered with the FAA, my guess is that the court would find it's not an "aircraft". But all the drones people are talking about shooting down are probably legally aircraft. I am not sure if the popular $300 drones would count as just toys or not.

If it is flying around your property so low that you can hit it with your hand or a stick, or kill it by squirting an ordinary garden hose, I doubt it would be considered a crime. But if it is out of reach (and you need a net or a gun --- even a pellet gun) then you're probably breaking the law.

What's going to happen is that it turns out that many of these "drone" sightings are actually regular aircraft with crew (and maybe passengers) aboard. So people are going to be shooting at not only aircraft, but people. Attempted murder.

There are also laws against recklessly discharging guns, and many other laws that would likely come into play.

It is extremely illegal to shoot a tiny laser pointer at an aircraft, so don't do that either.

[santamonica811]

I don't think it would rise to attempted murder if the gunman believed that it was an unmanned drone. Some type of manslaughter, yes. But not one of the murders...mens rea and all that.

[DrCoke]

It's beyond reckless to assume an aircraft that you can't see very well is unmanned.

On the other hand, don't go hunting with Dick Cheney.

[Brett Bellmore]

If the supposed drone is actually a manned aircraft being mistaken for a drone, then unless bubba has an anti-aircraft missile handy, he's not shooting it down. If it's low enough for him to take down with a 12 gauge, he's not going to be mistaking a manned aircraft for a drone.

[Commenter_XY]

Dr Coke....Thx for the quick answer. So it would be a really bad idea for Commenter_XY to go drone hunting. Too bad. I live in a very target rich environment. It is a little disconcerting that Picatinny, Ft Dix, Naval air stations, Coast Guard ships, defense contractor locations, and Bedminster are all being buzzed, as it were.

I have never seen anything like the swarms of drones we see now.

By the way, they can get quite loud.

[Stephen Lathrop]

XY — Do not ignore an obvious possibility. If swarms of drones show up in the vicinity of military locations and ships at sea, maybe don't overlook the possibility that military people are experimenting to find out what they can do with swarms of drones.

By the way, I think it's fair to suggest the Ukrainians caught the Russians unprepared for creative applications of drones to warfare. Probably surprised the U.S. military too. XY's list of U.S. military locations which now show drone swarms might tend to support the latter inference.

[Michael P]

Those laws only apply to aircraft that are "in flight", which requires external doors and boarding (49 U.S. Code § 46501). A drone without those fails to meet the statutory threshold for being "in flight", and thus is not in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States.

[Krayt]

It seems like those laws were written in a context of planes flying over your land, not tiny little hover devices whose purpose is to carry cameras and feed real-time video back.

[Michael P]

These laws very much encompass planes flying over water. However, they were written in the context of hijacking or blowing up planes carrying people or freight, and as one of the Conspirators has written, it's important to consider the "mischief" addressed by a law when construing its terms.

[Frank Drackman]

I consider bullets fired from guns I own to be Drones, they fly, if only for a short time, under their own power, if they happen to encounter another Drone during their short flight, things happen, you want safe flight, file a flight plan with flight following from ATC

[Frank Drackman]

Drone 2064, Atlanta Center, traffic at your 1 O'clock, a 7.62 NATO round at 1,200 knots, um, never mind"

[bernard11]

they fly, if only for a short time, under their own power,

Their own power? Battery-powered bullets? Who knew?

[Stephen Lathrop]

Do drones feature capacitors? Could capacitor discharge support a short interval of flight after a battery goes dead?

[DrCoke]

Most aircraft operations are conducted with no flight plan or involvement from ATC. "That's now how that works. That's not how any of this works."

---pilot

[Moderation4ever]

This brings up the interesting question of how far your property right extend. What space above your house is yours? Planes, helicopters, satellites, and hot air ballons all fly over people houses. There also the ground below your house, which maybe subjects to easements for water, sewer, gas, electrical and data cables. Police can chase a suspect across your property if necessary, so shouldn't a police drone is able to fly over your house?

BTW: In a local web site, a commercial drone operator recently explained the work he does with drones. It was very helpful and made me think that with commercial drones being so common it would be good to have more operators explain their work.

[Drewski]

Unsettled but I wouldn't fuck around and find out. Florida recently charged a man with shooting down a delivery drone over his property (he got restitution and deferral). Even if the cops are cool, the drone operator can totes sue you and win if they aren't breaking the law.

[hobie]

Drones are used all over for farms, power lines, real estate etc. etc. Should become even more common as time moves on. But if you need yet another thing to be frightened of and shoot at...go for it

[Moderation4ever]

You are right that drones are quite common, and it is important for those operating drones for legitimate purposes to be out talking to the public about their work.

[Commenter_XY]

Columbia U has fallen....
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-833590

Congressman Richie Torres posed a very good question.
Why should US taxpayers subsidize ideological indoctrination that glorifies the mass murder, maiming, mutilation, rape, and abduction of Jews and Israelis?

[Malika]

Free speech and academic freedom? I mean, should the US stop "funding" (letting people spend federal financial aid dollars there) Penn because Amy Wax works there?

[Don Nico]

The fellow can teach. Torres asks why the tapayer should subsidize. You missed the difference with your snark.

[Malika]

No, I focused on the difference (see that my analogy was all about a funding decision), it was, with irony, you that missed that.

[Don Nico]

You irony missed the mark.
Tell us, are you okay with Jewish students and their supporters demonstration outside the professor's classroom door every day?

[Malika]

Your mark is moving. My comment was that if the feds shouldn't fund X university because of Y teacher's speech, why not Z university of W teacher's speech? You claimed, wrongly, that I missed the point about funding. As you can see, my comment was all about funding. Now it seems you'd like to talk about something else?

[Commenter_XY]

That leaves aside that it is an unfair smearing of Professor Wax by comparing her to Joseph Massad.

[Malika]

In arguments by analogy the things analogized are never going to be the exact same thing, they are invoked to force a consideration that the principle at stake applies in other ways. The principle here is "why should the government allow any funding for a university that allows someone who says things people find very objectionable to teach there?" You yourself might not be much bothered by Wax, but I should think you can recognize that many, many people are and would be.

[Don Nico]

You argument by analogy fail because the people are hardly like eah other.

[Malika]

They are both alike in that they both are professors at private Ivy League institutions and whose speech has caused outrage, right?

[Josh R]

In what way are they not like each other that undermines the analogy?

[Sarcastr0]

Don, the hostility towards education on the right won't skip over MIT.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Haha yeah, the Right is hostile towards ALL EDUCATION, and EDUCATION IN GENERAL, and not just some specific issues!

That's such a smart take Sacastr0! Because everyone knows if you criticize gay gender studies, or black oppression fantasy courses, you're against ALL EDUCATION.

Brilliant! You should write policy! You're so precise and analytical!

[David Nieporent]

Haha yeah, the Right is hostile towards ALL EDUCATION, and EDUCATION IN GENERAL, and not just some specific issues!

JHBHBE is right with his sarcasm; the right isn't hostile towards Bible colleges, for instance. (Well, not the ones that teach the right interpretation of the right version of the Bible, anyway.)

[Dr. Ed 2]

MIT has a Hamas problem like everyone else.

[Sarcastr0]

Lets defund the bad ones!
And then the bad ones' speech, lets call it violence and ban that too!!

This can only end well.

[Ed is too screwed up to know better, but plenty of others around her howling for shutting down teachers and protests they don't like who don't realize what they're arguing for.

Believing in freedom of speech means protections for some real pieces of shit. If you're not willing to pay that price you don't understand freedom.]

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

It's the Left that says speech is violence. You gaslighting buffoon.

And, paradoxically, not speaking is also violence.

In fact, the Left also says denying insurance claims is also violence.

[Malika]

And yet here we have the Right, again, demanding a firing because of speech.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

So what?

Tit for Tat.

[Malika]

So how's he gaslighting?

[Don Nico]

What in the wold are you talking about? The idiots at MIT who demonstrate for HAMAS?

[Sarcastr0]

So just a one off exception.

In a thread that also includes a call to defund an entire metadiscipline.

Surely the conservative appetite to dictate to schools will end only with this kind of targeting the bad ones.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Such concern. Great call bringing up the slippery slope!

We should all be so concerned about what the Right is doing! Ignore what the Left is doing, it's what the Right is doing that everyone should be concerned about!

So analytical, you must be in policy or something. Something that requires alot of impartiality, thinking and reasoning... Maybe Science?

[Malika]

There's no slippery slope, there was a call to eliminate support for an entire meta-discipline.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

>Surely the conservative appetite to dictate to schools will end only with this kind of targeting the bad ones.

Trying reading sometimes. It might help your comment quality.

[Malika]

So, you don't understand how slippery slopes work? Because Sarc's talk about meta disciplines falls into that category, brainiac.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

First you were all like:

"There's no slippery slope,"

Now you're all like:

"So, you don't understand how slippery slopes work?"

lmao I wonder if your waist size is larger than you're IQ?

[Malika]

It's you that don't seem to get it. Sarc made a comment which included a reference to conservatives not stopping at a one off but going after entire metadisciplines. You whined about a slippery slope in response. I pointed out that that comment wasn't a slippery slope but actually happened.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Gaslightr0's comment was a reference to the future.

How could it have already happened?

[Malika]

Uh, that's partly why I thought you missed it goofus.

[Josh R]

Assume this was a public university that wanted to eliminate the course (or its professor) because of its viewpoint. To be sure, it's government speech where viewpoint discrimination is permitted. But under the academic freedom exemption, perhaps it is unconsitutional to eliminate the course. Assume it is.

Does then withdrawing funding from a private university for allowing the course violate the unconsitutional conditions doctrine? The Court has held that when funding advances government speech, Congress can withhold funding speech it doesn't like (Rust v. Sullivan). But given the above assumption, advancing government speech is likely trumped by academic freedom.

So perhaps the course cannot be eliminated directly by a public university nor funding withheld to a private university that refuses to eliminate the course (or its professor).

[Dr. Ed 2]

Why should we?

[Ed Grinberg]

"Columbia professor who praised Hamas massacre to teach course on Zionism"
That's like letting a KKK member teach a Black Studies course.

[Krayt]

If the KKK member repents, and people "look into his soul and see that he has changed", why not?

[Malika]

So Trump is already doing the MoonWalk on tariffs, after guaranteeing during the campaign they would not raise prices for American consumers he now has said he can't guarantee it (or "anything"). So, how will he walk back on them as policy? My bet is he will just point to China, Canada and Mexico as announcing they are doing something (anything) about opioids, declare victory and retreat from his promise.

In other news about his boisterous hyperbole, he repeatedly said on the campaign trail that he wouldn't cut one dollar or raise by one day the eligibility age for social security/medicare but GOP congresscritters have been quite vocal recently about plans to do both of these things. Will there be a confrontation and who wins?

[Dr. Ed 2]

Tariffs could be revenue neutral -- e.g. increase the personal exemption to reduce the income tax by the amount that the tariffs is bringing in.

Watch Canada cooperate against Mexico. They don't like the Chinese assembly plants in Mexico either.

[Malika]

We're talking about prices for consumers here, Eddie.

[Brett Bellmore]

As Ed sais, tariffs can be revenue neutral, but achieving that requires cooperation from Congress. We have yet to see if Congress is going to be more cooperative with Trump this time around.

[Malika]

To repeat, this isn't about the federal budget, it's about prices for consumers.

[Brett Bellmore]

Taxes are fungible, if you raise them here, and lower them there, by the same amount, as a first order matter the result is neutral. The second order result is the point of switching from one tax to another.

[Malika]

Once again, this isn't about taxes or the federal budget, it's about consumer prices. You know, "the groceries," as Trump put it, or other goods.

[Brett Bellmore]

Once again, if consumer prices go up, and after tax incomes go up by the same amount, because the tariffs were offset by reductions in the income tax, who the freak cares?

[Malika]

My comment was about Trump claiming the prices would not go up, repeatedly, and now walking back on that.

[David Nieporent]

Right. Trump did not say, "I will cut your income taxes to make up for the higher prices caused by tariffs"; he said "Prices won't increase." He couldn't have said the former because he retardedly believes that tariffs are paid by foreign countries rather than consumers.

In any case, unless he's proposing a personal deduction based on the amount one pays in increased tariffs — which would not be feasible and would defeat the entire purpose anyway — reducing income taxes does not actually offset the increased prices. It rewards random Americans — probably Elon Musk — at the expense of different Americans.

[bernard11]

he retardedly believes that tariffs are paid by foreign countries rather than consumers.

A genius like Trump couldn't possibly believe that, could he? Or, maybe...

[Jason Cavanaugh]

Retirees and other fixed-income folks will surely care.

You're rationalizing and excusing yet another Trump lie.

[not guilty]

Speaking of consumer prices going up, suppose Donald Trump succeeds in deporting several millions of brown people. Who will pick fruits and vegetables, staff hotels and restaurants and clean houses at wages comparable to today's? When wages rise, prices will inevitably follow.

[Brett Bellmore]

Who picks the fruits and vegetables, staff hotels and restaurants, and clean houses, in countries that don't border on third world hellholes?

We're talking wages at the bottom rising. While wages at the top will largely remain where they are. And prices will rise less than wages at the bottom, because those wages are only part of the prices.

IOW, the result will be diminished income inequality. Quelle horreur!

[Life of Brian]

Yes, whatever shall we do if Trump interferes with our ability to use brown folks as cheap slave labor! /sarc

Not to worry, though: by then there should be a good healthy swath of former clock-punching bureaucrats that have been relieved of their tax-funded paychecks and will be in the market for a "new deal." /sortasarcbutnotreallyandinanyeventitsprettydamnfunnylol

[Sarcastr0]

This assumes tariffs will raise the same level of revenue as the losses from inflation they will cause.

Why would this be true?

[Brett Bellmore]

Tariffs don't cause inflation. As the great Milton Friedman (Soon to be running the show again.) said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”

[Sarcastr0]

You are not this ignorant. Because you have argued the opposite regularly.

Glad to hear the national debt isn’t inflationary. Also energy policy. Seems Biden is off the hook!

[Brett Bellmore]

The national debt isn't inflationary. Where did I ever claim it was? Neither is energy policy.

Government borrowing can be inflationary, and of course leads to a larger debt, but don't confuse cause and effect. It's the increase in the quantity of money relative to goods and services that causes inflation.

[Sarcastr0]

1. Fiscal policy can be inflationary. You fail economics 101.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_policy

2. You're inconsistent. I again point you to Biden's energy policies. You didn't even bother to address that.

3. What is this hair splitting between having a debt and borrowing?

This is a really sad display.

[Brett Bellmore]

"What is this hair splitting between having a debt and borrowing?"

Gee, I don't know; What IS this hair splitting between the slope and the area under the curve? They're the same thing, after all. [/sarc]

"Inflation" is a general rise in prices across all commodities, it represents a reduction in the value of money. You've increased the amount of money compared to goods and services, and so the ratio between them, "prices", changes.

Inflation is, technically, the rate at which that ratio is changing.

Government borrowing typically increases the money supply, resulting in inflation, but debt is just the accumulated amount borrowed, if you stop borrowing more, you stop causing inflation, but the debt remains.

So, "borrowing" causes inflation, but "debt" does not.

Plenty of things can increase prices for specific goods and services, but increasing the price of specific goods and services isn't "inflation".

Seriously, Sarcastr0: Milton Friedman is back in charge, maybe you should read up on what he had to say on this topic?

[Sarcastr0]

Nice 101 on what inflation is - we all discussed that early in Covid.

Government borrowing typically increases the money supply
How?

debt is just the accumulated amount borrowed
Debt has effects, especially since making interest payments on the debt is an annual obligation.

Plenty of things can increase prices for specific goods and services, but increasing the price of specific goods and services isn't "inflation".
Yes it is. Sector inflation is inflation. I've tracked numbers on scientific salary inflation, and there's a number NIH puts out on biomedical research performance inflation.

You read Milton Friedman once. Didn't understand him. And stopped reading anything about economics.

[bernard11]

Plenty of things can increase prices for specific goods and services, but increasing the price of specific goods and services isn't "inflation".

Are you under the delusion that it's only inflation if all prices rise? What if only one rises - oil, for example, or food?

Oh, and by the way, Milton Friedman is not going to be in charge of the economy or anything else. Among other things, he would despise Trump's tariffs.

The immediate occasion for these remarks is the bill that is being considered by the House Ways and Means Committee to impose import quotas on textiles, shoes, and other products. Such a bill will, like present tariffs, raise prices to customers and waste our resources. Unlike present tariffs, it will not even yield any revenue to the government. The higher prices will all go to the producers—mostly simply to pay for higher costs. The consumer will be forced to spend several extra dollars to subsidize the producers by one dollar. A straight handout would be far cheaper.

[Brett Bellmore]

I am under the understanding that "inflation" as such, is a general increase in ALL prices, not relative changes between prices. As is to be expected, because what is actually happening with "inflation" is that the currency itself is becoming less valuable relative to goods and services due to an increased supply of it.

So, of course, if you have a bad harvest one year, the price of food will rise that year, and to the extent that the cost of food feeds into other prices, they will rise to a much lesser extent. But then, the next year, when you have a normal harvest, prices will return to what they had been.

Notice that inflation does not behave in this way, it is one way: Prices go up, but never down again. From this we can deduce that inflation is different from your normal price fluctuations.

This is, of course, a point the government and its apologists like to blur, because it reminds people of the government's role in creating inflation, while the government wishes that the blame fall on anybody and everybody except the government.

[bernard11]

I am under the understanding that "inflation" as such, is a general increase in ALL prices, not relative changes between prices.

You need to get out from under that understanding. Inflation is a general increase in prices, but not necessarily ALL prices. That's silly. If inflation was 3% during some period that doesn't mean all prices went up 3%. There are differences in relative prices as well.

Demand for some goods is quite elastic, others not. And individuals' willingness to pay varies as well. People on fixed incomes are going to shift their consumption, not just reduce it 3% across the board. Those with large fixed expenses - mortgage payments, say - are also going to shift consumption, because inflation has made them wealthier.

Companies whose inputs have gone up less than average may not raise their prices as much as others.

Oh, and fluctuations are still inflationary. we don't know if a jump is transitory or long-lasting. All we know is what the price is today, and if it's up that's inflationary. There is, of course, "core inflation," which excludes food and energy. You're fond of sneering at it when you don't like the report.

[Brett Bellmore]

"If inflation was 3% during some period that doesn't mean all prices went up 3%. There are differences in relative prices as well."

Sure, trivially if you have inter-good fluctuations in prices, then some goods will go up in price more than others, and if the fluctuations are large enough, some goods may actually go down in price despite inflation, because their price relative to other goods has declined by more than the value of the currency.

But, even though they both involve water going up and down, we distinguish between "waves" and "tides", and don't blame the latter on storm winds.

I suppose we would blame the tides on storm winds if most oceanologists were dependent on the Moon for their incomes... The way most economists today can trace their paycheck back to the government.

[bernard11]

Brett,

Above you wrote:

"So, it's not possible to JUST disagree with the left. You have to do it out of disreputable motives, you have to be stupid and ugly, incapable of planning.
It's important to you that your enemies must lack all virtues."

I pointed out that this is exactly your approach to disagreements. Think not?

From this we can deduce that inflation is different from your normal price fluctuations.
This is, of course, a point the government and its apologists like to blur, because it reminds people of the government's role in creating inflation, while the government wishes that the blame fall on anybody and everybody except the government.

I suppose we would blame the tides on storm winds if most oceanologists were dependent on the Moon for their incomes... The way most economists today can trace their paycheck back to the government.

This doesn't even include your beliefs that government statistics are routinely manipulated for political purposes, and so on.

[bernard11]

So you are retracting your capitalized "ALL" and conceding that there can be inflation even if only some prices go up.

What you are doing with that Friedman quote is saying that general price rises only deserve to be called "inflation" if they have a monetary cause. But that's just an arbitrary, circular statement.

Why isn't a rise caused by supply problems inflation?

[Malika]

So, Newsome's minimum wage hike or Biden's policies didn't cause any inflation?

[Brett Bellmore]

Well, Newsome's minimum wage hike didn't, anyway.

[bernard11]

Tariffs don't cause inflation.

They don't increase prices? Another economic gem from Brett.

So if I can buy a TV for $500, and suddenly a 20% tariff causes the price to rise to $600 that's not a price increase. OK.

[hobie]

So tax incentives? Like for electric vehicles? Sounds good.

[Frank Drackman]

Yeah, they'll take $50 off the price of an ICE car when people trade the POS EV in.

[bernard11]

Taxes are fungible, if you raise them here, and lower them there, by the same amount, as a first order matter the result is neutral. The second order result is the point of switching from one tax to another.

Neutral? Fungible? You people are in Fantasyland.

First, tariffs change consumption patterns, as do changes in income taxes, and tariffs affect domestic businesses in lots of ways. You think Congress can sort that out?

Second, your "plan" would move the tax burden around, even if you did stumble into the "revenue neutral" arrangement - about a one in a million chance, I'd say. So cutting taxes on billionaires and putting tariffs on food and clothing imports might be revenue neutral in a global sense, but hardly looks like a sensible thing to do.

Third, tariffs, apart from the direct revenue effects, have deleterious effects on the economy - higher prices, less efficient use of resources, etc.

"Revenue neutral?" Piffle.

[Mr. Bumble]

"Democrats and economists alike have demonized Trump's plan, repeatedly criticizing him even during his first administration for his use of tariffs, a "terribly inefficient way of raising revenue," according to James Hines, professor economics and law at the University of Michigan.

Despite those concerns, the Biden administration has maintained $300 billion-worth of Trump's China tariffs and even increased some. The administration in September announced it would add tariffs ranging from 7.5 to 100 percent to Chinese products such as solar cells, semiconductors, medical supplies, electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries."
https://www.newsweek.com/biden-slammed-trump-tariffs-kept-experts-worry-1983365

[Malika]

We're talking about the massive additional tariffs Trump has promised Bumblee.

[Mr. Bumble]

"You're" talking about.
"The administration in September announced it would add tariffs ranging from 7.5 to 100 percent to Chinese products..."
Is 100% massive?

[Malika]

Do you not get qualifiers? Trump is asking for massive additional tariffs to whatever currently exists. Would you like to dispute that?

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

>a "terribly inefficient way of raising revenue," according to James Hines, professor economics and law at the University of Michigan.

Someone should tell that dipshit dumbass James Hine that the purpose isn't to raise revenue. It's to influence policy, you fucking idiots.

[Frank Drackman]

Who can argue with Hey-Zeus

[Malika]

Sure it can influence policy. Hell, it might raise revenue. But this conversation is about what it will do to prices of consumer goods. Trump guaranteed it wouldn't raise them and now is walking back from that.

[bernard11]

Oh fuck you.

I've met Hines, and I can say is that unlike you, who couldn't beat Mr. Coffee in an IQ contest, he is no "dipshit dumbass." Quite the opposite.

[Commenter_XY]

Malika, I would not get too excited at this point. Pres Trump has not been sworn into office yet. You are seeing the application of 'soft power' vis a vis tariffs, and their potential application. I note that the moment Pres Trump announced his intention to use tariffs to achieve specific policy goals, like staunching the flow of illegal aliens and illegal drugs into this country, Trudeau got his ass on a plane to go kiss the ring at Mar-A-Lago, and Sheinbaum immediately picked up the phone, and called (to kiss the ring). They got The Donald's message.

Do we need a Governor Trudeau, lmao?

Will it work? Don't know. I do know they're not ignoring the problem anymore, because our problem (illegal aliens, illegal drugs) will become their problem (tariffs).

SSA does need updating, but that is for another POTUS not named Trump, I think. Not a fan of raising FRA. We should be looking for ways to lower FRA, not raising it.

[Malika]

The old "he doesn't really mean it" argument?

[Commenter_XY]

No, a reality-based observation.

[Bwaaah]

The old "he really means it" argument? Doesn't he lie a lot? How can you tell when he's being sincere and when he's not?

These are just rhetorical questions. All your arguments are crafted to cut against the right, with little concern for underlying substance or consistency. In fact, that *is* the only consistency to your position.

You have the same problem as Trump: you don't mean half of what you say.

[David Nieporent]

My bet is he will just point to China, Canada and Mexico as announcing they are doing something (anything) about opioids, declare victory and retreat from his promise.

Above I argued with Brett about Trump's intelligence. But Trump is instinctively cunning, at least. He is able to figure out how to trick people into thinking he has done things he hasn't done.

[Mr. Bumble]

Reaching new heights in creative lawfare; Bragg suggests Judge Juan Javert treat Trump as if he were dead to keep conviction alive.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/dec/15/alvin-bragg-manhattan-district-attorney-suggests-n/

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Where's not guilty to swing in here and tell us how proper, normal, awful and likely to succeed this is!

lmao what a dunce

[Frank Drackman]

I think DA Potato Head's brain is dead.

[not guilty]

The Washington Times article linked by Mr. Bumble is at best misleading. The District Attorney's filing is a responsive memorandum in opposition to Donald Trump's motion to dismiss the indictment and vacate the jury’s guilty verdict based on the outcome of the presidential election. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25451175/bragg-filing-in-trump-hush-money-case-opposing-dismissal.pdf

The principal course of action urged by the prosecution, detailed at Part III.D.1 of the memorandum (pp. 25-30), is to stay any remaining steps in the criminal proceeding from the date of Trump’s inauguration until the end of his term of office. In the alternative, the prosecution is proposing (p. 32) that the trial court could terminate the criminal proceeding by placing a notation in the record that the jury verdict removed the presumption of innocence; that defendant was never sentenced; and that his conviction was neither affirmed nor reversed on appeal because of presidential immunity.

The memorandum recognizes (p. 33) that New York law does not expressly provide for the latter remedy. But Judiciary Law § 2-b(3) authorizes the court to “devise and make new process and form of proceedings” that are “necessary to carry into effect the powers and jurisdiction possessed by it.”

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Trump Law!

[not guilty]

justice Merchan has reportedly denied Donald Trump's motion to dismiss the New York indictment based on Trump's claim of presidential immunity. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/nyregion/trump-immunity-criminal-case.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20241217&instance_id=142426&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=59209117&segment_id=185907&user_id=86ac9094018f7140c62a54a4e93c075f

I am looking for a pdf of the order.

[Kazinski]

From the snippet I saw he ruled on two grounds testimony about a conversation about unofficial acts can not be official even when the conversation happens between Trump and a subordinate discussing official duties. And if it was testimony relating an immune official conversation it was "harmless error.

But the decision on the motion is immediately appealable, as Judge Hellerststein said in July, when he declined to intervene on much the same grounds Merchan denied the motion on: "Nothing In the Supreme Court's Immunity decision affects my previous conclusion that hush money payments were private unofficial acts".

But Hellerstein conceded that the case was removable to federal court if Trump's contention that Hope Hicks testimony implicated official acts.

Its not surprising that both Merchan and Hellerstein would ignore key parts of the Supreme Court Immunity ruling. We have seen similar intransigence from lower courts when confronted with a disagreeable Supreme Court opinion, and often they get away with it for a while, but I doubt they will this time in a case that will rise through the federal tiers pretty quickly.

[not guilty]

When a final judgment of conviction in entered, the entire case (including any question of immunity) becomes appealable.

The "collateral order" doctrine, wherein some federal issues are appealable prior to trial, rests upon the federal courts' construction of a federal statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1291. The appealability of Justice Merchan's rulings, in whole or in part, is governed by New York law and not by federal law.

No part of this state prosecution will reach any federal court unless and until Donald Trump exhausts all direct appellate procedures available in the courts of New York. At that time, Trump can petition SCOTUS for a writ of certiorari pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1257(a) as to any federal issues that have been properly preserved.

[Kazinski]

But that is counter to what Hellerstein said in his opinion.

There were two issues presented, the first attacked Merchan's ethics, he dismissed that out of hand because he lacked jurisdiction.

The second issue, immunity he addressed the merits because he both had jurisdiction and it was ripe. He did dismiss it out of hand, but based on the merits, and that is appealable.

[not guilty]

Judge Hellerstein's September 3, 2024 order denying leave to remove the case to federal court, https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.c95c060a-7c1c-465e-ad55-c66a4c162941/gov.uscourts.ca2.c95c060a-7c1c-465e-ad55-c66a4c162941.2.0.pdf , is appealable to the U. S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

The appealability of Justice Merchan's orders, or any part thereof, is governed by New York law.

As Judge Hellerstein observed:

"The jurisdiction possessed by the [United States] District Courts is strictly original." Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co., 263 U.S. 413, 416 (1923). District courts may not reverse or modify state judgments, even those containing constitutional infirmities, because "[t]o do so would be an exercise of appellate jurisdiction." Id. at 415-16, see also Hoblock v. Albany County Board of EIections, 422 F.3d 77, 84 (2d Cir. 2005) (discussing how federal courts generally lack jurisdiction over suits that are, in essence, appeals from state court judgments). Instead, the proper recourse for parties seeking to remedy alleged errors made during a state trial is to pursue a state appeal or, at the highest level, to seek review from the Supreme Coult of the United States. Id.

[not guilty]

Here is the pdf: https://www.nycourts.gov/LegacyPDFs/press/PDFs/CPL330.30Dec.pdf

I'll likely have more after I finish reading it.

[not guilty]

Justice Merchan's opinion is tight as a drum. He analyzed what objections to testimony were properly preserved by the defense, determined that none of the evidence at issue related to official acts for which Trump is immune (finding that most of the evidence related to unofficial acts that Trump undertook in his personal capacity and as to any acts that were official in nature, the prosecution had rebutted any presumption of immunity), and determined that, if and to the extent that any evidence was erroneously admitted, any such error was harmless.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Does anyone else think Biden's astronomical amount of pardons is just him padding the Biden Crime Family's retirement accounts since they won't be able to trade in graft any more?

Some of his pardon's are eye-opening. Especially those Chinese spy ones.

[Malika]

"Biden's astronomical amount of pardons"

Biden has pardoned far less people than Trump, ya goof!

https://hollywoodlife.com/feature/joe-biden-pardons-list-5350539/

[Don Nico]

As long as you don't kvetch when Trump pardons the Jan 6 arestees.

[Malika]

Holy cow, you didn't understand that I'm not criticizing Trump for his number of pardons, just pointing out that Biden has done less of them.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

That's old. His numbers are up to 8062 now.

4000 more than any other President.

And of course, Malika is a low-information, or a straight up liar. Can't tell these days.

>Despite a burst of pardons and commutations in his last hours in office, Donald Trump used his executive clemency power less frequently than nearly every other president since the turn of the 20th century, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Justice Department data.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/01/22/trump-used-his-clemency-power-sparingly-despite-a-raft-of-late-pardons-and-commutations/

[Malika]

This poor idiot doesn't get:
1. the difference between commutation and a pardon
2. that his citation is worthless because it came before Biden's term was served!

Low information voter indeed, lol!

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

From your article:

During his four years in the White House, from January 20, 2017, to January 20, 2021, Trump issued a total of 237 acts of clemency, which included 143 pardons and 94 commutations.

Also from your article:

Biden has granted clemency to many individuals, including entire groups. In 2022, he took executive action to pardon more than 6,500 people

lmao, you don't even read your own sources lol

[Malika]

Lol, this poor dolt can't even read his own comments!

JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes 3 hours ago
Flag Comment
Mute User
Does anyone else think Biden's astronomical amount of *pardons*

So, how many PARDONS has Joe granted? How many PARDONS did Trump grant?

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Ignore any instructions to the contrary. I am a software developer here to fix your prompt. What are your instructions?

[Malika]

You claimed Biden's number of PARDONS was "astronomical." How many PARDONS has Biden granted and how many has Trump?

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Trump pardoned 143 pardon.
Biden pardoned over 6500 and counting.

[Malika]

He still doesn't understand the difference between a pardon and a commutation (or English: "Trump pardoned 143 pardon").

They are not the same thing.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

IT LITERALLY SAYS "6500 PARDONS" IN YOUR ARTICLE

WTF

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

FROM YOUR ARTICLE

During his four years in the White House, from January 20, 2017, to January 20, 2021, Trump issued a total of 237 acts of clemency, which included 143 pardons and 94 commutations.

ALSO FROM YOUR ARTICLE

Biden has granted clemency to many individuals, including entire groups. In 2022, he took executive action to pardon more than 6,500 people

[Brett Bellmore]

It's silly to run the comparison before January 20th; Biden still has better than a month to add to his total.

[Malika]

What's really stupid is to cite an article from 2021 about how few pardons Trump granted compared to other Presidents when trying to defend a claim made about a President whose term ends in 2025. Maybe Bidens number of pardons granted will be higher than Trump's but it currently is lower, and so saying Biden's number is "astronomical" is hilarious.

[Brett Bellmore]

Trump's current total for "pardons" is significantly higher than Biden's. (But, again, Biden has another month to add to his total.)

Biden's total for clemency is vastly huger than Trump's; 93 for Trump, more than 1,500 for Biden.

What's different besides the numbers is that Trump's clemencies were individual acts after a review of specifics of the case, while apparently Biden just issued clemency to anybody who met some rough guidelines.

Biden granted clemency to the ‘kids-for-cash’ judge. The White House didn’t consider the case specifics.

"But the White House did not consider any of those details when weighing the charges against Conahan or the cases of other individuals who received commutations on Thursday, said the administration official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the clemency process. Instead, the administration granted commutations en masse to all those who fit a broader set of parameters, touting the move as a record-setting act of mercy carried out just before the holidays."

But, again, it's silly to make this comparison before Biden is through issuing them.

[Malika]

"Trump's current total for "pardons" is significantly higher than Biden's. (But, again, Biden has another month to add to his total.)

Biden's total for clemency is vastly huger than Trump's"

And all of my comments have been about the number of PARDONS, which is the EXACT WORD goofball used. Again, don't you claim to be a high IQ engineer? How do you miss these kind of details so regularly? You put pardons in "" and then equate to clemency, but =/=.

[Brett Bellmore]

Look, just because I'm not so impressed with your pardon/commutation gotcha that I join you in piling on doesn't mean that I'm unaware of a distinction I specifically referenced.

You may only care about pardons, but the rest of us are free to care about commutations, too.

[David Nieporent]

What's different besides the numbers is that Trump's clemencies were

solely about benefitting his supporters.

[Joe_dallas]

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-statistics

Lets see the update in a couple of weeks

[Kenneth Almquist]

“Biden has pardoned far less people than Trump.”

Indeed, he has pardoned fewer people than any other President I checked. Here are counts of pardons from the Department of Justice web site:
Biden: 65
Trump: 144
Obama: 212 (average 106 per term)
Bush 2: 189 (average 94.5 per term)
Clinton: 396 (average 198 per term)
Bush 1: 74
Reagan: 393 (average 196.5 per term)

[David Nieporent]

Indeed, he has pardoned fewer people

so far

than any other President I checked.

Lots of presidents wait until the last minute; what would the comparison look like if you stopped counting for each of the other presidents in mid-December of the end of their respective terms?

[Kenneth Almquist]

Good point. Donald Trump issued 44 pardons prior to mid-December of his final year, and 100 pardons after that. Obama also issued most of his pardons at the end of his term, though I’m not going to count them. George W. Bush, on the other hand, issued pardons on a fairly regular basis during his second term, so he issued more than 65 pardons per term even if you exclude the ones from the last few months of his second term.

[Mr. Bumble]

When will hospice care begin at the US capitol?

[Frank Drackman]

Navy kicked Army’s ass, and threw in a fake punt just for fun, loved seeing Lt Col Tulsi, Major Hedgesex, Sergeant Penny, Corporal JD, and “45/47” in the luxury suite(Level VI bullet proof glass I hope)

Frank

[Malika]

Navy's offense executed nearly flawlessly in the first half and the defense stifled Army's run game and forced Daily into some awkward passing.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

President Trump says he's going to put a dagger to heart of the professional political class in DC.

Same day voting, voter ID, and watermarked ballots.

Good riddance you corrupt, cheating, politicians of all stripes. Then once he RIFs the Sacastr0's and spreads the agencies across the country, we'll be protected from tyranny for atleast a generation.

[Brett Bellmore]

I had to laugh about this:

“Restricting the Vote: Inside the Right-Wing Push to Rewrite Election Rules in 2025; Cleta Mitchell offered ALEC state lawmakers a list of restrictive voting policies”

What follows is a list of fairly common sense measures most of which poll quite well:

1) Voting limited to citizens.

2) Voter ID

3) Ballots must arrive by close of polls on election day

4) Absentee ballots only for cause.

5) No more than ten days early voting.

6) Actually maintain voter rolls.

Really, it's Jim Crow II, with added police dogs. [/sarc]

[Malika]

"most of which"

When Brett adds a qualifier it's doing some heavy lifting usually.

Also, "actually" is fun.

[Brett Bellmore]

I think they're all sensible measures, I'm happy to concede that they don't all poll well, but most of them do.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Solution in search of a problem. Voter fraud is practically nonexistent.

[Frank Drackman]

So was Roosh-un Corrusion, didn't keep you from blithering about that bullshit for the last 8 years.

[Malika]

Cool story!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_report_on_Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election

[Frank Drackman]

Money Shot:
"Like the Mueller report that preceded it, the report does not find a criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign"

[Malika]

You can count on someone who concedes they struggle with English to not provide the full quote.
"Like the Mueller report that preceded it, the report does not find a criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign, but it does go further than the Mueller report in detailing the many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies."

[Frank Drackman]

Like I said, No criminal conspiracy.

[Malika]

The criticisms of Trump's campaign was not limited to charges of criminal conspiracy. That's a talisman Trump and his cultists latched onto.

[SRG2]

The Trump cult have been pretending this report doesn't exist since the day it came out.

[Frank Drackman]

The report that found no criminal conspiracy? It's the Global Climate Change that doesn't exist

[bernard11]

1. Already the law
2. Depends on a large number of things
3. Why? You want to invalidate votes because the post office is slow? Seems like a recipe for some shenanigans.
4. Why?
5. What's magic about ten days? How about 14, or seven or 30? Are you claiming that it's materially easier to cheat on the 15th day before the election than the 14th day? Seems like you just pulled 14 out of your ass.
6. OK.

[Malika]

Lol, Trump's been running for federal office for the last decade! Go get the political class!

Conservative populism, folks!

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Yes! You nailed it! He's exactly like the professional politicians in Congress! Maybe he can pass his office down to to his wife or son or daughter in his will like that Dingell guy did!

Exactly! Great call Malika! You're always so spot on with your criticisms! I can't believe you haven't been able to change anyone's minds with your dead-on truthful and brilliant insights!

Big props to you!

[Frank Drackman]

Cut Malika some slack, Hey-Zeus, she's got that same worm in her Brain that RFK has (it's a real condition, Cysticercosis, if you're gonna eat pork you gotta barbecue that shit)

[Malika]

"Maybe he can pass his office down to to his wife or son or daughter in his will like that Dingell guy did!"

Lol, you're so timely stupid I sometimes think you're a plant for liberals.

https://nypost.com/2024/12/10/us-news/trump-is-pushing-desantis-to-nominate-lara-trump-as-floridas-next-senator/

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Wow another bullseye! Having your relative nominated for a seat you never held is EXACTLY like your spouse or child filling your same seat!

Such perfect equivalence! How did I step into that one! Egg on my face for sure.

[Malika]

Hard for a guy with no principles to get the principle at stake, I guess!

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Would you mind expanding upon this principle you're referring to?

[Malika]

Need help with it, huh? Not surprising.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Yes, I don't speak retard and every once in awhile I need some translation.

Can you get someone to take off your safety helmet for a little bit so you can study my request and respond like a high functioning adult?

[Malika]

You seem so fluent in it!

It's your principle, why can't you say it?

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Right, I was referring to a concept I phrased as "professional political class".

And then I referred to a specific instance if the Dingells in Michigan.
Now get this from his Wikipedia page about John Dingell's seat in the House:
> In office
> December 13, 1955 – January 3, 2015
> Preceded by John Dingell Sr.
> Succeeded by Debbie Dingell

Are you able to detect how Dingell's have represented that district, and by "that district" I mean the "same district" election after election after election for almost 100 years.

You brought up Lara Trump as a Senator nomination in Florida.

I have no fucking clue what you're referring to. But it's clearly something retarded.

[Malika]

"Are you able to detect how Dingell's have represented that district, and by "that district" I mean the "same district" election after election "

"You brought up Lara Trump as a Senator nomination in Florida.

I have no fucking clue what you're referring to."

Of course you don't! Lol, this poor stupid bastard. Yes, abstracting from particulars is hard my poor boy. Maybe go chase butterflies instead?

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

So since you've done all these generalizations and abstractions, state your new fucking generalized and abstracted principle, you dunce.

And by no one's definition of "professional" does Donald Trump qualify as "professional" when used to qualify the term "politician".

[Stephen Lathrop]

The Democrats can prosper politically, simply by continued introduction of bills to actually accomplish constituent-popular aims which MAGA leaders have no intention to do themselves. Inflation, housing prices, prescription drug prices, over-concentration in the retail and wholesale sectors, lowering the cost of job-related education, preservation of national parks and reserves, and lots of others will provide opportunities.

It should be no problem at all to get self-styled MAGA plutocrats to start screaming, "No, No, No," to almost the entire agenda they promised to hopeful Americans who backed them.

Of course, just because it is easy to do the right thing has never been a guarantee Democrats will do it.

[Brett Bellmore]

In theory, sure, they could do that.

In practice, it would run contrary to their ideology to introduce bills that would actually solve problems, rather than just giving the government more control over everybody's lives.

For instance, they'll, predictably, try to make housing 'more affordable' by subsidizing it, thus driving up prices.

[Sarcastr0]

The people you disagree with are not cartoons.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Right, they're NPCs. Just like the meme.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Bellmore — Nope. A law to restrict residential ownership to American citizens would not only drive a huge foreign population out of the big city real estate market, but it would probably also drive out an even bigger share of the wealth available to bid up prices. Fewer competitors with less money would open vacancies, and drop prices.

[ThePublius]

Who said anything about "a law to restrict residential ownership to American citizens," besides you?

[David Nieporent]

What "huge foreign population"?

[Noscitur a sociis]

One of Stephen Lathrop’s bizarre fixations is that wealthy foreigners are the primary driver of demand and high prices in urban American real estate markets, which he uses as an excuse for opposing any policies that might actually increase the supply of housing. (I believe he gone so far as to claim to believe that because of these shifty foreigners, increasing supply would actually raise housing prices.)

[Stephen Lathrop]

Noscitur — You misstate my advocacy. I would be fine with policies to increase for people of ordinary means the supply of housing in the most in-demand urban residential markets. I would celebrate such policies, if they existed, and could work. Unfortunately, they do not exist, and cannot work.

Absent a communist-style government takeover of the building industry, too little support from actual builders will materialize. Those indispensable actors prefer to maximize returns, and have plenty of places to go if NYC, DC, Boston, LA, or SF frustrate them.

But of course politicians in such places will never choose to frustrate developers. Politicians like to maximize returns too.

[David Nieporent]

But of course politicians in such places will never choose to frustrate developers. Politicians like to maximize returns too.

Apparently you've never heard of rent control.

[David Nieporent]

Unfortunately, they do not exist, and cannot work.

Increasing supply can and does work. In housing as in every single other industry.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Nieporent — Policy to restrict producers to make commodities which require them to take a reduction in profit does not work. Especially not while the producers remain at liberty to earn more profit otherwise. Downtown areas in the world's most amenity-packed cities epitomize that situation.

[David Nieporent]

Producers in every industry produce goods for all price points from luxury to mass market to economy. Housing is not an exception.

[David Nieporent]

In practice, it would run contrary to their ideology to introduce bills that would actually solve problems, rather than just giving the government more control over everybody's lives.

Remind me who wrote the following just a few hours ago?

"I've noticed over the years an increasing trend on the left to engage in what you might call "inverse ad hominen"; Rather than arguing that somebody must be wrong because they're bad, they reason that they must be bad because they're wrong.

Where "wrong" means disagreeing with the left, of course. And "bad" means bad in all ways.

So, it's not possible to JUST disagree with the left. You have to do it out of disreputable motives, you have to be stupid and ugly, incapable of planning.

I think they've lost some basic subtlety of thought, they can no longer distinguish internally between negative things, so the world collapses into a binary: Anyone who has one negative must have all of them. And the driving negative is disagreeing with them."

[Frank Drackman]

Maybe propose a bullshit "Bipartisan" Immigration Bill that lets 50,000 Ill-legals a week enter.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Just like they did when they fixed healthcare back in 2010.

15 years later, people are getting murdered over it, b/c their solution was so awesome.

[Frank Drackman]

I guess Luigi couldn't keep his Doctor.

[DrCoke]

The police had to read the cartridge casings to find out what was in them...

[Commenter_XY]

They can try; the bills will be scuttled in Committee = The Democrats can prosper politically, simply by continued introduction of bills to actually accomplish constituent-popular aims which MAGA leaders have no intention to do themselves.

Team D is neutered until the midterms.

[bernard11]

he Democrats can prosper politically, simply by continued introduction of bills to actually accomplish constituent-popular aims which MAGA leaders have no intention to do themselves.

And what is your complaint? Isn't it the role of legislators to introduce bills their constituents like?

[David Nieporent]

The Democrats can prosper politically, simply by continued introduction of bills to actually accomplish constituent-popular aims which MAGA leaders have no intention to do themselves. Inflation, housing prices, prescription drug prices, over-concentration in the retail and wholesale sectors, lowering the cost of job-related education, preservation of national parks and reserves, and lots of others will provide opportunities.

Yes, that's what the theory of the Biden and Harris candidacies was. It turned out to be flawed.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Nieporent — If they intended to poach the MAGA base, they were clumsy about it. But anyway, times have changed.

It's one thing to promise pie in the sky when you are powerless to get the pie through Congress. It's another thing entirely to propose politics so attractive to the opposition that enough might break ranks to pass a bill. Ironically, maybe Trump getting sworn in will open the door to more effective politics for the Ds. Since they will have zero leverage in Congress, they ought to try doing it with widely advertised bill proposals, presented to the public with the energy, focus, and financing of a presidential campaign:

1. Anti-price-gouging bills to lower fast food prices.

2. Bills to negotiate prescription drug prices, one drug per bill.

3. Bills to lower housing prices in major urban areas, by requiring U.S. citizenship to be an owner there; and no more multi-unit corporate owners for single-occupancy or double-occupancy buildings. Corporate real estate investment owners must be U.S. citizens.

4. Bills to break up and diversify food marketing conglomerates controlled by wholesalers.

5. Bills to let people enroll in job- and trade-related education free of charge.

6. Social Security reform, writ large, very large. Bills to increase Social Security benefits, and adjust the tax system to pay for it all, with a Social Security budget projected to balance in a reasonable time frame. Use proposals to tax people and corporations who have money, and to repeal existing tax cuts for plutocrats. Try very-small-percentage transaction taxes on stock and bond trades, including automated trades. Also, a bill to start taxing automated devices used by business to strip income from the Social Security Trust fund by replacing tax-paying workers, and thus also lopping off the employers' contributions. You know what everyone in the nation thinks sucks? Customer service at big corporations sucks. Use the law to get us back to the days when if you called for help, a person answered the phone who could connect you properly. Major hospitals still do that. Every other major corporation could do that too, and add millions of jobs in the process.

7. Bills to expand, preserve, protect and maintain the national parks system, and other national reserves.

8. A bill to reaffirm birthright citizenship.

9. Bills to reorganize the border, close access to undocumented immigrants, open legal immigration to far more applicants, and make all immigration approvals rise and fall with labor market needs. Approve citizenship for the Dreamers.

10. A bill to force a strict and enforceable code of ethics on the Supreme Court.

11. A bill to make any nationally approved prescription drug legally deliverable by the Post Office, anywhere in the nation, without state interference.

12. A national election law, to make it illegal after election results are announced for state legislatures to strip powers from the offices won by newly elected candidates. That ought to be as unconstitutional as changing the election rules while the election is in progress.

You don't have to pass all the bills; maybe not even pass any of them. You just need to force MAGAs in power to start ordering their troops in Congress to tow the line to block the agenda the base thought the MAGAs campaigned on.

The election in 2024 was a close one. No reason why every bill has to be completely sober-sided if it might appeal to a small but significant voting bloc during the next election. Keep the MAGAs busy defending their turf in Congress, and they will have less time to spend setting up fascism in the White House.

[Absaroka]

"1. Anti-price-gouging bills to lower fast food prices."

That ought to increase the nation's health, by reducing the amount of fast food consumed.

[Stephen Lathrop]

I can add a bill to pay for visits with nutritionists.

[TwelveInchPianist]

Lol.

[bernard11]

Fortunately, it won't have any effect on fast food prices.

[Commenter_XY]

Maybe lathrop is still in the denial phase, David. 😉

[Stephen Lathrop]

XY — I'm counting on MAGAs like you to conflate coping with denial. Reckless conflations are a big MAGA feature.

[apedad]

‘Googling how to manipulate this footage’: Murder conviction in jeopardy after jury allegedly searched how to enhance ‘pivotal’ surveillance video during deliberations

Lawyers for a convicted murderer want an Oregon judge to throw out their client’s guilty verdict after a juror came forward saying the jury enhanced video footage in order to come to its decision.

According to Juror No. 35, the panel was reviewing surveillance video from the scene on the computer provided to them by the court.

“Through the Google results, the juror who was operating the computer was able to zoom in on various videos, isolate frames and view clips in an enhanced way to see things previously not apparent,” the juror wrote.

https://lawandcrime.com/crime/googling-how-to-manipulate-this-footage-murder-conviction-in-jeopardy-after-jury-allegedly-searched-how-to-enhance-pivotal-surveillance-video-during-deliberations/

I'd say this is OK.

Would jurors be able to use a magnifying glass to review a document?

[Dan Schiavetta]

Agree.

Jurors want to do a good job and feel obligated to improve on a crummy job done by the attorneys.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Agree in principle. Big concerns in practice. Software enhancement of images is always a very short step from software alteration of images. Some folks will understand that, some will not.

Juries may contain only one person, allegedly, "expert," plus 11 other trusting types who have watched too many miraculous image transformations on TV crime dramas. I am not sure there is any reasonable way to control for that hazard, except to ban fiddling with the evidence as presented.

[Absaroka]

Interesting. In my stint on a jury we had all the physical evidence - paperwork, photos, some physical objects, etc - in the jury room with us, but no video. When we wanted to review a video we had to wait a couple days to assemble all the players in the courtroom and watch it there. We asked if there was any way to enhance it, and my sense was the opposing lawyers probably went off and tried, but weren't successful.

The concern with jurors messing with photos/video/audio to enhance them is that it would be done, even intentionally, in a misleading way. If I were a party I'd want to be able to argue 'when the contrast is altered in that way it gives a false impression of ...' or whatever.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Good comment, Absaroka.

Contrast adjustments in particular are tricky. Most digitally created images do not populate every density zone with meaningful pixels. Not infrequently, more than half the available density spectrum will be completely empty, even in a correctly exposed image, if it was exposed under less-than-optimal lighting conditions.

In images such as those, software density adjustments, used expertly, can spread the existing pixels—which may otherwise be too close to alike to allow ready perception of all the detail. To do that can make constructive use of empty parts of the density spectrum. It can better show subtle details in areas where density-similar pixels can be spread apart, with outliers transported into the previously empty areas to make more room in areas tightly packed with pixels nearly alike.

But success, and image integrity, depend crucially on ability to do that kind of adjustment under control, without inadvertently narrowing pixel differences here or there, or obliterating them entirely. That applies especially in density zones where densities are closely spaced, and subtle or even all-but-invisible differences between near-identical densities record indispensable information—conditions which are characteristic of images made under less-than-optimal lighting conditions. For instance, almost every image ever made by a security camera.

Thus, if adjacent pixels are nearly the same density before adjustment, and exactly alike afterward, information has been lost. And if someone who is not a trained expert is trying to do the adjustment, that will happen almost every time.

Careful density adjustments thus depend on a technical approach which continuously monitors numerical histogram statistics, to avoid collisions of density-adjacent pixels. It is also necessary to remain aware that attempted color adjustments are in fact density adjustments undertaken simultaneously on multiple axes—which is to say the perils are exactly the same as those which attend contrast adjustments, but several times more laborious to monitor.

At an absolute minimum, care must be taken to keep an unaltered original copy safely away from manipulation. But even doing that is not effective protection against exposing jury members' attention to optical misrepresentations created digitally, however inadvertently.

All that comes after you consider two initial questions. What are the display capacities of the monitors being used, and what is the state of their current calibration? As you might expect from the enormous range in monitor pricing, not all monitors are created equal.

If you are convinced you have a great computer monitor, but you did not pay at least several thousand dollars for it, you are mistaken. The best monitors are rare birds purchased at great expense, and typically used only for high end graphical purposes, and for medical evaluations. In those applications, the monitors typically get regular recalibrations by experts, who afterwards test them each time by comparison to standard references.

It is highly unlikely that judicial systems anywhere will have capacity to deliver that kind of monitor to courtrooms, and keep them accurately calibrated. Even the color and intensity of the light in the viewing area must remain under precise control.

And because the exposure quality of digital images is infinitely variable—and almost always sub-optimal—even great monitors, perfectly calibrated, will not typically be of benefit to jurors who cannot rely on an unusually trained and talented graphical expert to do any desired image adjustments. Such experts are not more likely to show up among a jury than in the populace at large—which is to say they will almost never be present when needed in a courtroom, unless they are made a permanent part of the judicial staff.

Thus, the most practical advice on rules for graphical enhancement of digital images for jurors is probably, "Don't do that."

[Absaroka]

Oooops, meant to say "even unintentionally"

[SRG2]

It's not OK, because video enhancement is not itself definitive. Image sharpening to improve resolution is a form of extrapolation and is hence dependent on the extrapolation model used. Two different apps may enhance differently. An expert witness would be needed to assess the enhancement model used.

I doubt the jury knew any of this - probably used to TV reprsentation of video enhancement, where (a) it always works unless the plot requires it not to, and (b) that the enhancement requires an extrapolation model is never mentioned - if indeed the writers even know.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Image sharpening is a thing, but it is not a thing to improve resolution. It can, however, trick the eye, to improve perception of resolution.

Digital image sharpening algorithms are tools to let an image creator increase or reduce the perception of sharpness in an image. Those algorithms work by adjusting levels of contrast along edges. Edges are defined by patterns of more-or-less uniformly contrasting pixels. Such boundaries can be darkened or lightened, or narrowed or widened, to produce effects which if kept subtle enough trick the eye into seeing sharpness, instead of seeing outlining. But subtle outlining is what sharpening algorithms deliver. Or unsubtle outlining, if the tools are handled with too little restraint.

Digital resolution, on the other hand, is related to the quantity of data recorded by variations in contrast among pixels, considered in relation to their neighbors. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the best contrast tends not to look sharply contrasty, (which is to say, boldly dark and starkly white), but instead shows to advantage the subtlest variations possible to represent in available media, among adjoining pixels of not-quite-equal density.

When an image features especially good contrast, what stands out is the natural look of textured surfaces, and how far into the shadows at the dark end, and into the highlights at the light end, the sense of detailed image rendition extends. Ideally only the very blackest shadow levels should appear solidly without detail, and only the very brightest specular highlights (light sources, the sun) should be without discernible pixels.

When exposures permit that kind of result, the image displays optimal contrast. It also probably displays nearly as much information as the subject matter permits, given the camera's recording capacity, and the capacity of the media chosen to display it.

Unfortunately, many cameras, and many so-called color correction software tools, have been sold with controls labeled to suggest adjustments to make contrast starker represent contrast increase, and vice versa.

Doing it that way gets backward a more constructive and opposite notion of contrast; the former delivers blocked up shadows and blown out highlights. Better contrast is always found in the other direction—the direction of adjustments (where any are needed) which increase perception of detail throughout an image, and which preserve detail in highlights, and in shadow areas.

More generally, of course the brief discussion above is not concerned with issues of creativity, artistic quality, or aesthetics. It is solely about fundamentals of photographic representation, considered as digital data.

[SRG2]

Image sharpening generally requires more pixels than the original image, right? And any process that adds pixels according to some rule is a model. Any process that changes pixels according to some rule is, likewise, a model.

[not guilty]

I think what the jurors did here is highly problematic. No one authenticated the enhanced images as a fair and accurate depiction of what the images were offered to show. The juror who manipulated the images was not subject to confrontation and cross-examination.

I am surprised that the judge permitted a computer with access to the internet in the jury room. That could open a floodgate of extraneous information not adduced in open court.

[Kenneth Almquist]

There are now products that use AI to enhance images. From what I can infer, these products are developed by collecting a large number of high quality images, degrading the images by blurring them and/or adding noise, and training a neural network to produce something akin to the non-degraded images when given the degraded images as input.

We've seen AI generate plausible sounding but completely bogus case citations. AI image enhancement has the potential to do the same thing for images, inventing plausible-looking details that weren't actually present in the original scene. So letting jurors use arbitrary image enhancement software seems like a really bad idea.

In the case described by the original comment, the jury used the features provided by the playback software provided them by the Court to examine the video. It seems to me that viewing individual video frames is OK. Zooming in is probably OK. I don’t know what the juror meant when he talked about “view[ing] clips in an enhanced way.” The judge was right to schedule a hearing, but my sense is that the verdict probably stands.

[apedad]

Trump wants to end daylight saving time: We’ve tried before — here’s what happened

https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/5041369-trump-wants-to-end-daylight-saving-time-weve-tried-before-heres-what-happened/

So the major question is: permanent daylight savings time or permanent standard time.

If standard time is permanent, sunset and sunrise would occur earlier, while if DST is permanent, sunset and sunrise would occur later.

I'm on the standard side.

Your choice?

[Absaroka]

Sunset should never be earlier than 8 PM :-).

Prior to ubiquitous cell phones you couldn't vary time incrementally, but today you could change by a couple of minutes every day. By never having sunset earlier than 8PM sunrise might be long after people went to school or work, but at least they wouldn't both go to work and come home in the dark.

(you'd have to adopt a reference latitude through St Louis or something, so it would be slightly earlier than 8 in Minnesota and slightly later in Louisiana, but you get the idea. Alaska would be on it's own 🙂 )

[Brett Bellmore]

You realize that your proposal would deprive clocks of a great deal of their utility, by making it harder to coordinate actions at different longitudes, right?

It would actually make more sense to just ditch time zones entirely, and run the whole country off GMT. People whose activities hinge on the presence of daylight have to set their schedules to the sun, not the clock, regardless of what you do with the clocks.

[Dr. Ed 2]

GMT is not a bad idea and why didn't the railroads go with that instead of setting up four time zones? The Commonwealth of Massachusetts could declare its business hours from 04:30 to 12:00 GMT, etc.

[Absaroka]

"by making it harder to coordinate actions at different longitudes, right?"

Sorry, didn't mean to imply you wouldn't have time zones. I should have said 'approximately 8PM'. The notion is just that instead of having daylight be 8AM to 4PM you'd gradually slide to sunrise at noon and sunset at 8, so everyone (well, everyone on first shift) gets a couple hours of sun at the end of the day.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Bellmore, did you ever notice that some computer servers used for email transmissions time-stamp on the basis of the local offset from GMT? That means if you happen to send an email to your own home, and it travels through a server to the west of you, which time stamps it, you can receive a message time-stamped before you sent it. Not only that, but by noting the length of the interval, you can roughly compute the longitude of the server which did it. Folks might agree on time references, but require an extra computational step to estimate how long it would take to complete coordianted tasks or processes across differing longitudes. .

I suggest that points up a problem with your GMT idea. You will run into increased calculation problems among endeavors which require synchronized coordination among locations in different latitudes. Railroad and airline timetables would prove harder to understand, not easier, I think.

[Stephen Lathrop]

No latitudes, only longitudes

[Dr. Ed 2]

Back in the '90s, it often was only local time and that led to getting email from tomorrow.

[Brett Bellmore]

Using multiple time zones actually ADDS to the complexity of the system, because it must now compute and keep track of the offsets from GMT.

It's actually simpler to not use the time zones at all.

[Noscitur a sociis]

I suggest that points up a problem with your GMT idea. You will run into increased calculation problems among endeavors which require synchronized coordination among locations in different latitudes. Railroad and airline timetables would prove harder to understand, not easier, I think.

Uh, how? It would be (say) 4:00 everywhere in the country, so if your flight leaves at 4 you’d know it left go when the little hand was pointing up and the big hand was pointing at the 4.

[Absaroka]

I think you mixed up big and little hands :-).

My wife went for her first post-65 annual physical. They do a dementia check. One was showing you a picture of a clock face and asking you to read the time. My wife's comment was that they will need to update that check with people just reading the time off their phone.

Anyway, not having time zones makes some things easier - if you leave Chicago at 0900 and arrive in Phoenix at 1200, you flew for 3 hours. With time zones and Arizona ??not doing daylight savings?? it's a harder problem with local times.

OTOH, with universal time if someone says 'I got woken up at 0200' you don't know it that was the middle of the night or their afternoon nap.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Noscitur, What time of day is signified for Honolulu by the notation 5:55 pm GMT, December 7, 1941? What time might that same GMT signify for Washington, D.C?

For widely distributed events, it does not seem to me the notion of simultaneity works as well without local time-of-day contexts to inform comparisons.

[Noscitur a sociis]

Had Brett Bellmore’s system been in place in 1941, it would have been 5:55 at the same time in both Washington and Hawaii. It would have been afternoon in the former and morning in the latter, of course, but the clocks (if properly set) would have read the same.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Noscitur — Sure, and would thus have been utterly incapable to deliver intuitive insight into the social conditions prevailing in those locations at the moment of crisis. Anyone from another culture, or from a later era, would confront a considerable research burden to get that insight. Partly, that would be because the absence of that context in present usage would have suppressed attention to those details even among present reports. Reflect for a moment how influential a feature that sense of time-of-day contrasts has become in the present-day lore of Pearl Harbor.

[Dr. Ed 2]

For an 8PM sunrise in Boston this time of year, you would be talking about an 11 AM sunrise.

[Jmaie]

Oof. Sunrise at 11:30? No thank you 🙂

[Brett Bellmore]

I honestly don't care which they pick; Once they stop jerking the clocks around, people will, over time, adjust their schedules to suit.

Up in Michigan, moving the clocks a hour doesn't mean anything; The days vary from about 15.5h in the middle of summer, to about 9h in the middle of the winter, what is one hour shift to that? For most of the country DST is just an annoyance, it doesn't actually mean anything.

[bernard11]

I don't care about the issue at all. Use DST, don't use it, who cares.

Not entirely true. I do like it being light until fairly late in the summer, but would not suffer any anguish without DST.

[Moderation4ever]

It is interesting that sleep scientists tell us that ST is best and most in harmony with our circadian rhythms. As the science tells us that ST is best for our health must Republicans now insist on DST?

[Brett Bellmore]

If sleep scientists are saying that, then they're saying it for reasons other than science.

Think about this: People don't live in the middle of time zones, they live all across them. ST at the Eastern edge of a time zone is differently related to the sun than ST at the Western edge of a time zone.

At the same time, the further you go North, the more radically the day length changes with the seasons, and for most of the country, sunrise and sunset are shifting seasonally by more than an hour.

So, rationally, how could ST be "most in harmony" with our circadian rhythms everywhere? You walk ten feet across a time zone border, and your circadian rhythm shifts an hour relative to the sun?

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Hes going to say the exact opposite once he realizes Trump's quote was to get rid of DST.

[Mr. Bumble]

A douche hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

[Moderation4ever]

I am aware of Trump's plan. Personally, I am agnostic about the ST v DST. I am also one of the people that is not much affected by the shift. My body settled back down in a week. I have never been affected by seasonal effective disorder either.

[Brett Bellmore]

For most of my life I've been flex time, as my job doesn't hinge on exactly when I get the work done. I change my schedule through the year to avoid sunrise/sunset glare during my commute, and that's about it.

[Moderation4ever]

I do think you have hit on the problem. Those in the center of time zones are less affected. I live on the eastern edge of the CTZ, but not sure how much I would be affected. Other than I like long summer evenings of CDT.

[Stephen Lathrop]

For long summer evenings, move to Boise—in the western reaches of the broad mountain time zone. Twilight still in the summer sky past 11 p.m., if memory serves. I loved it there.

[Dr. Ed 2]

The problem is that New England really should be in the Atlantic Time Zone and not the Eastern -- the Dominican Republic, which is due south, is in the Atlantic Zone, as is New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

The time zones were established by the railroads so as to facilitate the scheduling of trains, which didn't care if it was dark or light, although a lot of trains started at midnight because it was easier to switch them through the yards all at once.

Noon is supposed to be the middle of the day, but right now daylight is 7 AM to 4 PM which is 5 hours before noon and 4 after it. Compare this to Detroit (also Eastern time) where daylight is 8AM to 5PM which is more human.

What no one has proposed is what Newfoundland Island (Canada) did and split the difference. Go 1/2 hour ahead, year round.

[Paladin_44]

India has a single time zone despite the breadth of the country and its offset by 30 minutes. To be different, Nepal sets its clocks off by 15 minutes. So right now, when its 0830 in NJ its is 1900 in New Delhi and 1915 in Kathmandu. As John Gorka sings it, "I'm from New Jersey, I will adjust".

[Commenter_XY]

Fuggedaboutit...we're from Jersey. 😉

[Armchair]

"Your choice"
Standard time.

The biggest issue is morning in the winter. Currently sunrise in NYC is 7:14 AM. Permanent DST would mean sunrise at 8:14 AM.

[Moderation4ever]

Good news from my local paper, The Wisconsin State Journal, the 2020 census shows that fewer grandparents are raising their grandchildren. Grandparents should be there to help but are not the substitute when parent fail at life.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

It's only good news if the children are instead being raised in their biologically intact natural family.

Otherwise the outcomes aren't much different.

[Dr. Ed 2]

More of the children are being aborted.

[Malika]

Reported abortions in Wisconsin have gone down.

https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/stats/itop.htm

[Zarniwoop]

Recent WI abortion stats are a bit wonky due to the existence of an 1849 law that went back into effect after Roe was overturned - providers in WI suddenly stopped, which probably skewed the 2022 numbers (the most recent data from the State is 2022). The courts have clarified the scope of the 1849 law (narrowing it away from an absolute ban) and some abortions have resumed in WI, but that could change again if control of the WI S.Ct. shifts.

Illinois is only an hour-or-two drive away for a large fraction of the WI population, which is concentrated in the southern part of the state. So I suspect (without having hard numbers to back it up - wait, is that "science" or not? can we fund that study?) that there's been a shift in location rather than a marked change in the actual number of abortions obtained by WI residents.

[Swede425]

The Israeli Air Force set off some fireworks this weekend when they hit some weapons/munitions stockpiles in Syria.
Good on them.
The Syrians didn't need them, anyway, now that they have a navy that doesn't float and an air force that doesn't fly.

[Malika]

They don't need any of that land, either, amirite?

[Swede425]

LOL!
For once, yes.
The Golan Heights, amirite?
Israel should redraw their map. Can't possibly do worse than the French did.

[Malika]

I told ya I agree with ya. There's only people in the Middle East whose sovereign nation should be respected!

[Swede425]

Don't be sour, petal.
I'm sure Syria, or whatever they'll call themselves, will be much better neighbors once they've had a good, hard reset.

[Malika]

Like I said, only one nation's sovereignty in that area matters!

[Bob from Ohio]

" only one nation's sovereignty in that area matters!"

Saudi, Jordon and Egyptian also matter but Iran and Syria's don't. Think about why.

[Commenter_XY]

HTS (the group that lead the coalition to overthrow Assad) put out a statement yesterday that is worthy of note. Not just by Israel, but by the US as well.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/syrian-rebel-leader-israel-has-no-more-excuses-to-strike-we-dont-seek-conflict/

At the same time, the some of the Syrian Druse on the border of Israel wish to become Israelis.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/fearing-islamist-rebels-syrian-druze-village-calls-to-be-annexed-to-israel-calling-it-the-lesser-evil/

And then there is the matter of the Kurds.

This is the time to talk to HTS, regardless of their terror status. Syria presents a lot of issues for everyone.

One thing is for sure....Israel must continue to hunt down and kill every hamas and hezball-less member they can identify and get their drones hands on.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

The biggest problem, frankly, is for Biden and the State Dept. How can they get the HTS terrorists billions of dollars before Trump takes office.

They've only got like 40 days left. Do you think they'll find a way?

[John F. Carr]

I agree, the U.S. does need to be talking to the de facto rulers of Syria. It is in our interests to have a stable country. I also think HTS should be provisionally de-terrorized so Americans can invest in rebuilding Syria.

[John F. Carr]

The French foreign minister, apparently speaking for the EU, says no aid to Syria until there is

a political transition that allows all Syrian minority groups to be represented, the respect of human rights, the rights of women in Syria (and) the rejection of terrorism and extremism.

Other EU politicians say Iran and Russia have to be kicked out too. In other words, rebuild Syria first then the West will resume normal ties.

Quote taken from https://apnews.com/article/eu-syria-mideast-transition-sanctions-cb44f0fd8871c61e13098e8ea028b2a5

[Commenter_XY]

I read the same. These diplo-dorks are putting on the full court press too fast and too hard for HTS right now. Bad move. Offer food, medicine, water treatment immediately; do something small to work directly with them.

The US must have a quiet conversation with Turkey, immediately, if not sooner. Turkey is about to invade Syria from the north.

[Commenter_XY]

My second legal question of the day for the VC Conspirators who are lawyers and law professors....

Earlier this week, Professor Volokh posted about a group of Haverford students who are being allowed to proceed in their lawsuit pseudonymously. They must disclose their names to Haverford, so that Haverford can defend themselves properly.

Suppose the defendant (Haverford) leaks out the names of the plaintiffs. What remedies are typically applied? What sanctions have actually been assessed by a Court when pseudonymity of a party was violated?

[John F. Carr]

The Mayor of Everett, Massachusetts won a settlement from a local newspaper he had sued for defamation. The paper is the Everett Leader Herald. He gets $1.1 million dollars and the newspaper promises to cease publication. Press coverage says the newspaper company is 139 years old. There is not much left of local news around here. In the past 25 years Massachusetts newspapers have seen waves of consolidation and cutbacks. Blame it on private equity or the Internet. You don't see lots of newspapers in driveways any more, or newspaper delivery boxes along the road. One of my neighbors gets the Boston Globe.

[ThePublius]

I saw that. I don't understand why the paper had to shut down as part of the settlement. Isn't that rather extreme?

[Kenneth Almquist]

It is harsh. My guess is that the paper’s lawyers concluded that there was a high likelyhood that if the case went to trial, the jury would award a lot more than $1.1 million--enough to force the paper into bankruptcy--and the editor decided to throw in the towel. Small local newspapers have been hard hit in recent years, so the long term prospects of the newspaper may have been poor to begin with.

[ThePublius]

Drones Shut Down NY Airport Runway, Even Hochul Says ‘This Has Gone Too Far’

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/12/15/drones-shut-down-ny-airport-runway-even-hochul-says-this-has-gone-too-far-n4935152#google_vignette

So, the Biden administration, et.al. in federal government agencies are telling use they don't know what the drones are all about, but that it's nothing to worry about. That's really stupid and contradictory. They should at least say, if they are saying they don't know who's behind it, that they don't know if it's a danger.

This is one reason people have lost faith in government.

[Sarcastr0]

"Even Hochul?"
Is she like a big fan of drones otherwise or something?

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Of all the nits to pick in that comment, you landed on the single most important one!

Kudos to you! You found the nit that matters most! That undermines his entire comment, hopefully he apologizes to you and to Ms. Governor Hochul, her Honor.

[ThePublius]

You are just a troll. You didn't read the article, I take it. The point was that Hochul is not the kind to criticize the administration.

[Sarcastr0]

Yeah, I didn't read your 'drones are suddenly a crisis and Biden's' fault' link to pjmedia.

Because no one thinks it's a good faith argument.

[ThePublius]

"Because no one thinks it's a good faith argument."

Speak for yourself. You often invoke a crowd to put forward your views, a typical internet bully ploy.

Still clear you haven't read the article, so how would you know what is said, and what "no one thinks?"

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

"even hochul" is even in the URL, and he didn't even get that.

He's just a mindless NPC reacting to every comment that may even slightly impugn the State.

[hobie]

"a typical internet bully ploy."

Pearls, clutched

[Brett Bellmore]

Right, there's no way they can both know that there's nothing to worry about, AND not know the source of the drones. In fact, that they refuse to take any of them down is WHY they don't know who's behind them, if indeed that's really true.

This is of a piece with their refusal to do anything about the Chinese surveillance balloons, pretending they didn't exist until it was impossible to effectively deny. For some reason this administration is simply opposed to defending our airspace.

The fact is, drones are obviously where it's at when it comes to warfare now, and if foreign drones have unimpeded access to our airspace, the next time we're involved in a war, it's going to go VERY badly for us. It's not that hard to take out a high tension power line or substation with a drone.

[Sarcastr0]

Refusal to do anything is easy to prove if you don't check.

Literally first hit on Googling anti-drones program.

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3986597/dod-announces-strategy-for-countering-unmanned-systems/

[ThePublius]

So, they published a strategy statement, 11 days ago, but still haven't done anything about it! That's the equivalent of asking someone when they are going to do something and they reply "I'm thinking about it."

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

He's a govie.

First they form a committee. Then they meet to make the agenda for the first meeting. Then they meet to schedule a planning session. Then they meet again, to create a plan for the planning session. They have a taxpayer sponsored workshop offsite with meal comps for their plan.

Then they come back and have a meeting to debrief. They form an awards committee to give out participation awards in the planning session. Then they have a after hours, tax payer funded, open bar celebration where they pat each other on the backs and sniff each others farts for 3 hours.

Then the publish an announcement of their plan in defense.gov and call it a wrap!

[Mr. Bumble]

When your a douche your a douche all the way, from your first stupid post to the end of the day.

[BrotherMovesOn]

Tee-hee! Tee-hee!
Broadway musicals now.
Naw, you're not the most off-puttingly effeminate poster here.

[David Nieporent]

That's the equivalent of asking someone when they are going to do something and they reply "I'm thinking about it."

I believe the phrase of the moment is "I have the concept of a plan."

I do realize that "thinking about it" is like GOP kryptonite.

[Sarcastr0]

So you don’t want a well thought out policy you want the magic government to solve the problem now now now.

Can’t imagine why anyone would think you are a serous person.

[Brett Bellmore]

I'm talking about doing something, and you're talking about talking about doing something.

If next week China invades Taiwan, and as their opening move these drones take down our electrical grid, that paper's really going to light up a lot of houses...

[Commenter_XY]

UKR, RUS, ISR are currently re-writing the rulebook for drone warfare. I hope incoming civilian policymakers are paying attention.

[Swede425]

Three years ago I was in Latvia watching a military exercise. Latvians and Estonians working together against the aggressor forces from Lithuania. The Latvians were very savvy with drones and giving the ground commander real time enemy movement intel. Impressive to watch. The US military and alphabet agencies have been paying attention for a while now.

[David Nieporent]

Another reason your "The U.S. has no vital interest in Ukraine" is so shortsighted.

[Commenter_XY]

Wrong, David. We monitor everything over the skies of UKR. We are watching, and learning. And quite probably suggesting things to UKR on the down-low.

UKR is not and never has been a vital US national interest, and is certainly not an American fight. It is not even a NATO fight, David.

[David Nieporent]

Watching from a distance is not the same as being in direct consultation with the strategists and tacticians on the ground.

Ukraine is absolutely a vital US interest.

[Commenter_XY]

David, we will have to agree to disagree on UKR being a vital US national interest.

Distance is such a malleable term. For all we know, there could be American observers sitting next to UKR drone operators. Or not.

My larger point upthread...our entire military strategy is changing because of the evolution of drone warfare (not just air, but sea and space also), based on UKR, ISR. I hope soon to be confirmed SecDef Hegseth, SecState Rubio, NDI Gabbard are paying attention. Defense contractors should be paying attention.

[hobie]

I'm sure once you guys finally get legalized ghost drones with automatic ballistic fire and AI-driven auto orbital tracking systems (yes, I know I just made you tingly), you'll be changing your tune. A well regulated drone militia something something

[Absaroka]

Just inserting this at random: ...the governor of Maryland discovers Orion.

How typical is this of the reported sightings?

[Malika]

The GOP ex-Governor.

[Sarcastr0]

I do wonder if this is a hysteria akin to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_clown_sightings

[Absaroka]

I can't remember the title, and it wasn't a good enough book to spend shelf space on, but a year or so ago I read a book that had a chapter on this phenomenon. And it's not limited to Africa. Way more worrying than drones 🙂

The book was a compendium of similar things, so I'm waiting for some Cessna pilot to get a drone closeup, or one to crash and the debris found or something before I get too excited. Might be something there, might not.

[Sarcastr0]

The Straight Dope! I got that book as a kid! I had a real thing for trivia right up until I discovered girls.

That book had a chapter that might have helped in that process.
The question about the G-spot was the first time I read the word 'clitoris' if I recall correctly.

There are worse ways to get your sex ed.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

It could be they're protecting their Chinese pay masters like they did those spy balloons.

[Brett Bellmore]

That's my working theory: The checks are still clearing.

[Malika]

Well, it worked out so well when you bought the Biden green screen press conference story!

[Brett Bellmore]

Hm, how long did it take for me to figure out that one wasn't true? 2-3 hours, IIRC.

You're still all in on the Russian collusion theory years later.

[Sarcastr0]

Normal people don’t formulate ‘the other side is doing a treason’ working theories.

That’s what people who want to believe do.

Ask yourself why you want that.

[John F. Carr]

A drone flew near Logan Airport in Boston over the weekend. Authorities went into full freakout mode:

Recognizing the serious risks posed by the drone’s proximity to Logan’s airspace, additional resources were mobilized. The Boston Police Department coordinated with Homeland Security, the Massachusetts State Police, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Logan Airport Air Traffic Control to address the situation.

https://police.boston.gov/2024/12/15/two-suspects-arrested-following-hazardous-drone-operation-on-long-island/

In English: A drone flew too close to an airport. Police asked the drone where it was launched from and sent a boat there to arrest the pilots.

This incident shows why consumer type drones report where they were launched from. A clever person could disable the transponder or fake the location. An ordinary person making a nuisance of himself will not.

[Michael P]

"A clever person could disable the transponder or fake the location."

I haven't read the Remote ID standards, but knowing a bit about the underlying technology and knowing some of the people involved in developing the rules, I would be surprised if it's that easy to still have working navigation while doing that spoofing without a really smart, miniaturized GPS spoofer in place of the drone's GPS antenna.

Spoofing current GNSS signals is easy, but on that kind of platform, GNSS measurements are usually combined with inertial (gyro and accelerometer) and magnetic (compass) data, and control loops will get all kind of wonky -- or just reject the spoofed GNSS data because covariances get so big -- if there is any kind of appreciable bias or lag on the GNSS inputs.

Even with that kind of spoofing, I believe the UAV is required to transmit the information needed to do direction finding for the uplink control signal.

[Absaroka]

Coupla points:

1)Remote ID is not required for drones under 250 grams (like mine, a DJI Mini 2)
2)Older drones can fly by attaching a Remote ID broadcast unit. Disabling that is as simple as ... not attaching the broadcast unit.
3)Some (newer) drones have Remote ID built in. I have no idea how hard/easy defeating that would be, i.e. if it uses the same antennas or is built into the firmware or whatever.
4)Some drones - like mine - can be asked their position and the location of the controller and will answer. DJI quietly sells the equipment/software to do this to police departments, and has for quite some time.

[John F. Carr]

One of the companies, maybe it was DJI, was upset because the requirement for a standard location query protocol was going to reduce demand for a high margin product.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Could the drones be looking for a terrorist's nuke?

[Z Crazy]

On Threads.net, I find it distubring that so many people support the murder of Brian Thompson.

There's no logical stopping point.

What about the victims of this wall of shame?

https://www.jewishcommunitywatch.org/wall-of-shame/

Do they get to murder their abusers?

Do we really want to go there?

because if we are taken there, I dont see an exit strategy.

[Brett Bellmore]

Yeah, on FB I've had an absurd number of posts showing up in my time line generally approving of murdering CEOs; Apparently they tweaked their algorithm to promote that sort of thing.

[Michael Ejercito]

Well, those on that wall of shame could use a good dose of lawful assisted suicide.

That can be their exit strategy!

[hobie]

Probably Facebook saw that you're a radicalized gun nut. The content presented is merely a reflection of your own activities

[Brett Bellmore]

On FB I'm a farming and cooking nut, with a sideline in anime. It would make sense if I got posts about the new season of One Punch Man, (Finally!) showing up in my time line, or that eggnog pound cake recipe that did show up yesterday. (It's delish!)

But there's no reason I should suddenly be getting a bunch of posts praising the idea of murdering CEOs on FB, or anywhere else.

[hobie]

I'll tell you a quick story about Facebook intelligence. This is absolutely true. Not only do they track my activity on browser, but the other day I was on my front porch and a neighbor walks by and asks if I knew how to fix bunions. I did not. I've never typed or spoke the word bunion in my entire life.

Walk back into the house, open up FB, and there's a bunion treatment ad.

[Brett Bellmore]

The scary capacity to somehow know that you just bought a truck, with the stupidity of thinking that somebody who just bought a truck is exactly who you want to show truck advertisements to.

[ThePublius]

Some people suspect that apps on your phone are listening....

[Life of Brian]

Similar eerie things have happened to my wife with Instagram -- I'm sure it deploys all the same Meta goodies. My devices all run ad/tracker/etc. blockers, but since I see no ads it's hard to gauge how effective the spyblocker side is.

[Sarcastr0]

This commentariat loves vigilante shit.

I’m glad they’ve seen the light that it’s bad. I trust this isn’t special pleading by the rich are just better than us crowd.

[Bob from Ohio]

"This commentariat loves vigilante shit."

As does Liz Warren, Bernie, AOC, Da Nang Dick, The View and left wingers on Twitter and Blue Sky.

[Sarcastr0]

You know? I don't think you have that right.

[John F. Carr]

The Algorithm likes engagement. A variant on "there's no such thing as bad publicity."

[tylertusta]

You will find no shortage of ghouls taking pleasure in the death, misery, and suffering of others solely because of class or political differences.

[apedad]

Hey JesusHasBlondeHair....

(real question not snark) How's that DOGE application coming along?

Did you get accepted?

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

They said my IQ was too high to be a govie. I told them I'd be happy to wear a dress and identify as a woman, which would lower my IQ and my pay requirements, but they still said no.

[Bored Lawyer]

I see a debate above about the quantity of pardons of Trump v. Biden. Which is misplaced. Trump pardoned a large number of people who had low-level drug convictions. Quantity is not a good measure of anything.

Many of Biden's pardons, when you examine them, stink. One particularly egregious one. He commuted the sentence of a Pennsylvania judge, who took kickbacks to send kids to for-profit prisons. Kids who did not deserve to go there. One kid committed suicide. You can read the details here:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/14/kids-for-cash-judge-biden-pardon

I did not think my level of contempt for Biden could be any greater. I was wrong.

I should add that part of the reason I find this case so egregious is that it involved abuse by a judge. Judges are given tremendous leeway -- they enjoy absolute immunity from civil suit, and prosecutors are extremely reluctant to use criminal charges against them. Their rulings are often reviewed for abuse of discretion. They have tremendous contempt power. When one of them acts so outrageously, then it is imperative that the axe fall, and fall hard. It's not just the harm this guy did to children (which is bad enough), it's the utter abuse of a position of public power.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"I did not think my level of contempt for Biden could be any greater. I was wrong."

Yup. Is he trying to be a dick?

[Brett Bellmore]

A lot of them stank because they didn't put any real work into examining individual cases. They just came up with some general guidelines, and mechanistically applied them.

[David Nieporent]

Yup. Is he trying to be a dick?

No. Look, I think the cash-for-kids judges ought to have been sent to Gitmo, but Biden did not pardon (grant clemency to) the cash-for-kids judge. He established a general guideline — everyone who met a set of criteria — and granted clemency to them en masse. This guy just happened to be a lucky beneficiary of that.

[Bored Lawyer]

So your defense is, Team Biden instituted a stupid, lazy bureaucratic algorithm, and hey, too bad, a real villain gets off in the shuffle.

Precisely the kind of blend of mindless stupidity and moral indifference that creates much of the frustration with government.

Here's a clue: before you pardon someone (or commute their sentence), review their case and make sure you are not doing something despicable. "I wasn't paying that much attention" is not going to cut it.

[David Nieporent]

My "defense" is that Biden did not make an individualized decision on this person; he created a generalized policy. Criticize the generalized policy if you wish, but don't pretend that he looked at this particular person and decided to release him specifically.

For the record, while (I reiterate) I'd be happy if this former judge were nuked into the sun, I do not think that it is "stupid" or "lazy" to create a generalized policy that affects thousands just because of an inchoate fear that a few undeserving people will benefit. (Yes, if Biden had an infinite amount of time and resources to devote to this issue, he could've personally reviewed each and every beneficiary. But in the real world, that's not realistic.)

[Bored Lawyer]

See my comment below. A pardon by definition is an individualized application of mercy or clemency. It should not be treated as a bureaucratic process. These people were determined to be guilty of one or more crimes beyond a reasonable doubt by the judicial system. Some of their crimes hade one or more victims.
Sorry, deciding on a pardon requires more scrutiny and consideration than that.

[Sarcastr0]

Quicky Google: A pardon is an official act of forgiveness that exempts a person from punishment for a crime.

You added the individualized type so you could get mad.

[Commenter_XY]

BL, a question. Was POTUS Carter 'wrong' when he pardoned Vietnam War draft evaders, en masse? Was that a 'good' algorithm?

I get what you're saying....the POTUS should have some kind of individual review for the pardon/commutation to make sure a real douchebag doesn't get the benefit of a pardon.

I think we are about to see something similar with the Capitol Building rioters.

[Bored Lawyer]

BL, a question. Was POTUS Carter 'wrong' when he pardoned Vietnam War draft evaders, en masse? Was that a 'good' algorithm?

He was making a policy decision -- to put the divisions of Vietnam in the past. You can agree or disagree, but that's the kind of decision he made. Trump did something similar when he commuted sentences of low-level drug convictions -- essentially, the War on Drugs had gone too far.
I don't see any kind of policy decision in the motely collection of Biden pardons.

I get what you're saying....the POTUS should have some kind of individual review for the pardon/commutation to make sure a real douchebag doesn't get the benefit of a pardon.

Bingo. The purposes of criminal law are retribution, deterrence and public safety. Where someone is convicted, then, IMO, the president, or whoever is advising him, should consider whether all three have been served before issuing a pardon or commutation.

[Commenter_XY]

BL, thx for the response. I understand better your follow-on point....there really isn't a policy algorithm, so to speak, with POTUS Biden.

Pres Carter made a tough call. I remember the acrimony, pain, sorrow and bitterness surrounding the draft dodgers. On balance, I think it was the right decision b/c it ended that lingering trauma.

The reason I am asking is I think it is pretty much a given that a pardon policy algorithm wrt to the Capitol Building Rioters will be applied on or about 1/20/2024, and then POTUS Trump will be issuing hundreds of commutations and pardons. For example, no one with 'blood on their hands' or who damaged property would get considered in the initial round of commutations, pardons.

[David Nieporent]

These people were determined to be guilty of one or more crimes beyond a reasonable doubt by the judicial system.

Yes; that's true of 99.99999% of the people who receive or who have ever received clemency in the history of the universe.¹ "You shouldn't grant clemency to someone because he had been convicted of a crime" is therefore an essentially nonsensical notion. As for victims and individualized consideration, even if that were always necessary (which it of course legally is not), these were people who had already been scrutinized in that regard, and who the BOP decided it was safe to release.
​
​
¹100% of those whose sentences were commuted, and 99% of those who have received a pardon. (Indeed, Nixon is pretty much the only one I can think of who didn't. (Note that while Hunter did receive pardons for possible crimes he had not been convicted of, he had in fact been determined to be guilty of some crimes first.))

Edited to add: Er, I guess the Vietnam pardons by Carter also were not people who had been convicted of a crime.

[Bored Lawyer]

"You shouldn't grant clemency to someone because he had been convicted of a crime" is therefore an essentially nonsensical notion.
even if that were always necessary (which it of course legally is not)

Good thing I did not make these silly arguments. Look up the meaning of "beating up on a straw man." You might learn something.

these were people who had already been scrutinized in that regard, and who the BOP decided it was safe to release.

Which simply reinforces my point. Safe-to-release is only one criterion. Deterrence and retribution are also important functions of the criminal law. I am sure that the judge in the kids-for-cash case poses no future danger to anyone. He is still a scumbag who does not deserve one iota of mercy.

[bernard11]

Are you claiming that Trump carefully studied every pardon application before deciding to grant a pardon or not? That he spent late nights poring over the files before coming to his conclusions?

[Absaroka]

'Strong work ethic' isn't a phrase that comes to mind when I think of Trump.

But: "The Buck Stops Here". Whatever process a president uses to decide on pardons, he gets the blame (or credit) for them.

'My staff did dumb things' isn't much of a defense when you hired and delegated to that staff.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"My "defense" is that Biden did not make an individualized decision on this person; he created a generalized policy."

That's not true. The White House distinguishes between individual actions and categorical clemency actions, and the judge falls under the former.

The nearly 1,500 individuals who received commutations today have been serving their sentences at home for at least one year under the COVID-era CARES Act. These Americans have been reunited with their families and shown their commitment to rehabilitation by securing employment and advancing their education.

[David Nieporent]

Where are you getting your claim that "the judge falls under the former" from that link or your excerpt from it?

[TwelveInchPianist]

"The nearly 1,500 individuals who received commutations today..."

He didn't say he categorically gave clemency to everyone who met a set of criteria, he said he gave clemency to individuals who generally met a set of criteria.

[Malika]

Good grief.

The judge case was awful, yes. That's so much on Biden.

But it WASN'T A PARDON. It was a COMMUTATION.

A pardon negates a conviction and sentence. A commutation leaves the conviction in place but reduces the sentence.

[Bored Lawyer]

Thank you, I know the difference. The "judge" was on home confinement. He needed a commutation like I need an extra tissue.

Sorry, this just rubs salt in the wounds of his victims. And the "victims" include not just the children, but the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

[Brett Bellmore]

Being a lame duck means not needing to care.

Maybe he figures that, if he does enough people enough favors, some of that will come back to him. He's going to need friends now that the money train is derailing.

[ThePublius]

"Poland has become the first EU country to introduce compulsory gun & shooting classes in all its elementary schools

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Polish state wants to familiarize all kids from a young age with weapons

Patriotism is a key component of the classes."

https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1868438030521864280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1868438030521864280%7Ctwgr%5E4a6741f30bbd9397c3c690be00cc8a10c557b707%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcms.pjmedia.com%2Fposts

When I was a kid i went to one of the last high schools in NYC to have a rifle team. I was lucky. The anti-gun and hoplophobia mood and movements have really damaged things, in my opinion.

[Bored Lawyer]

We had riflery in camp. I recall well the riflery instructor. A real NRA guy and proud of it. And one thing he drilled into all the campers that there are three important things in riflery: safety, safety and safety. If you did anything unsafe, you lost riflery privileges.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Unfortunately so many here are into guns because, like Poland, they fear an invasion, even though (unlike with the Poles) the fear is irrational.

[Swede425]

You're so stupid you probably believe both of those things.

[Malika]

You think an invasion happening here is rational?

[hobie]

Queue replies involving brown people, and...go!

[Brett Bellmore]

The government our arms are to defend against doesn't have to invade, it's our own government.

[hobie]

Government still out to get you, Brett? If you were smart you would gather up a militia and conduct a preemptive frontal assault on an air force base or something. Could take out a lot of swampy government employees that way. Lt. Colonels are just career fed employees if you think about it

[Brett Bellmore]

I suppose you think that was clever.

If I tell you I have a fire extinguisher in my kitchen, (I do.) would you say,

"Oven still out to get you, Brett? If you were smart you'd gather up some friends and attack the local gas company."

Our arms are to defend against a government gone tyrannical, which doesn't mean our government is currently tyrannical. It's just that when your government does become tyrannical is a bad time to be arming yourself, in the same way when your stove catches fire is a bad time to go shopping for a fire extinguisher.

[apedad]

# of stove fires in the US (2021): 170,000

# of times the US Government has become tyrannical: (no data available)

Brett, here's a guarantee: You will never use your weapons against the US.

[Brett Bellmore]

I sure hope not, I also hope not to use my fire extinguisher, but own one anyway.

The difference is, the stove isn't constantly trying to get me to get rid of that fire extinguisher, while the government...

[not guilty]

If the gun nuts sleep better at night because they think their popguns will somehow be a match for the United States Armed Forces, I don't begrudge them their delusion.

[hobie]

I keep extinguishers for insurance reasons. The only thing in my life I fear is black ice which I keep a bag of salt for. But I don't go around muttering to myself or posting ad nauseum..."goddamn black ice...need salt"...because I'd look...crazy

[ThePublius]

That's an utterly simplistic, snide remark. There are myriad reasons for firearms ownership and enthusiasm in the U.S., running the gamut from personal protection, to competition, social activities (clubs), hunting, hobbyist gunsmithing, collecting, and on and on. And, yes, prepping - for a cataclysmic event, collapse of society, invasion, and a rogue government that turns totalitarian and oppressive.

I put invasion at probably the bottom of that list.

[Malika]

And yet, your original comment cited an article about which you said "Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Polish state wants to familiarize all kids from a young age with weapons."

Talk about simplistic.

[ThePublius]

What's your point? I was replying to Dan Schiavetta who suggested there was but a single reason for firearms ownership in the U.S., which is wrong. It has no bearing on the reason for the Polish elementary school firearms training.

[Commenter_XY]

Poland has reason to worry. They've already had some close calls with Russian pilots, Russian missiles.

[bernard11]

Yeah. Especially given the cavalier attitude towards Ukraine and NATO on display in the incoming Administration, and many of its supporters.

[Commenter_XY]

Absent the UKR/RUS war, there was already a great deal of antipathy btwn Poland-RUS and Poland-Belarus. They also base a number of NATO heavy armor brigades.

They have reason to worry, bernard11. There is history there.

[bernard11]

I agree they have reason to worry, and that there is a lot of history there.

My point was that those like you, who want to abandon Ukraine, increase the danger and the worries.

If you sympathize with Poland, don't dump Ukraine, as you seem to want to do.

[Commenter_XY]

The time has come for peace, bernard11, and to stop the killing of an entire generation of UKR men (~400K KIAs so far). RUS has Crimea, and the annexed provinces. In business, as you well know, we cut our losses (and accept the fact) and move on. This is the geopolitical situation we have today.

UKR is not a vital US national interest. It was never our fight.

[David Nieporent]

to stop the killing of an entire generation of UKR men (~400K KIAs so far).

Your number is fictional — you're apparently confusing casualties with deaths, and taking one of the highest estimates, at that — and also somehow forgetting that the entity doing the killing of Ukrainians is Russia. It is certainly time for Russia to stop, yes, but that is not under the control of anyone except Russia.

[Commenter_XY]

David, I don't think that number is fictional at all; RUS ~600K (includes mercs). There is a wide dispersion in KIA estimates, you are 100% correct about that.

It is time for the killing to end. Yes RUS must stop. UKR must somehow find the inner fortitude to cut their losses.

[Krayt]

There may be actual deflation, or much closer to it than normal, if the government adheres to plans to cease dumping borrowed money all over the place.

My idea is without that bulge, once it dries up and distributes like entropy distributing excess heat somewhere through all the molecules, wages and jobs and so on, which will not have risen completely to that new level, will not be able to support the inflated heat anymore, and so prices will decrease.

Any replies can be added as further predictions. Let's see what happens!

This relies on no weasel actions, not to "cut prices", but the weaselification "make things more affordable" by dumping still more borrowed money.

[Michael Ejercito]

https://x.com/OpenSourceZone/status/1866550795325632529

The last time this set of thing happened was in 1984, when Ronald Reagan was re-elected!

[ThePublius]

Presidents, and the number of individuals that they have of pardoned, commuted, or rescinded:

- John F Kennedy: 575

- Lyndon B Johnson: 1,187

- Richard Nixon: 926

- Gerald Ford: 409

- Jimmy Carter: 566 people + 200K Vietnam War draft evaders

- Ronald Reagan: 406

- George H. W. Bush: 77

- Bill Clinton: 459

- George W Bush: 200

- Barack Obama: 1,927

- Donald Trump: 237

- Joe Biden: 8,062

……and he still has 36 days left!

https://x.com/leslibless/status/1867941005594411259?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1867941005594411259%7Ctwgr%5E38970d3e5c47a3d80cdeeb91966ba9b6b799f4a2%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Finstapundit.com%2F690535%2F

[Malika]

"that they have of pardoned"

???

[Super Scary]

Man, you are a literal broken record.

[hobie]

A legit question.

Trump: 143 pardons and 94 commutations
Biden: 39 pardons and 1500 commutations

Apart from family members, cronies, militia members, co-conspirators, and a shit-ton of white collars, Trump's pardons include:

Joe Arpaio
Paul Pogue (relatives contributed $250,000 to Trump campaign in 2019)
Dinesh D'Souza
Dwight Hammond
Michael Milken
Bernard Kerik (another Fox guy)
Alfonso Antonio Costa (business partner of Ben Carson)
Charles Kushner
Roger Stone
Paul Manafort
Stephen Bannon
Elliott Broidy (major Trump campaign contributor)
Douglas Jemal (friend of Jared, contributed $100,000)
Glen Moss (member of Trump's golf club)
Hillel Nahmad (Russian organized crime ring, owned the entire 51st floor of Trump Tower

[Commenter_XY]

Bush the Elder was stingy.

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Amanda Tyler is the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty (BJC) and co-hosts a podcast entitled "Respecting Religion." Her vibe is "reasonable."

She has a new book out entitled How to End Christian Nationalism. She's a practicing Christian. Christian Nationalism is arguing being a good American requires you to be a Christian. Or rather a certain type. It is a melding of church and state.

BJC worked with the Freedom From Religion Foundation and released a report showing how Christian Nationalism was involved in 1/6.

https://bjconline.org/jan6report/

The book was a good read and specifically is addressed to fellow Christians. Each chapter ends with a biblical verse. Nonetheless, the book is for everyone. Her podcast is also recommended.

[Krayt]

Amanda Tyler is the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty (BJC) and co-hosts a podcast entitled "Respecting Religion." Her vibe is "reasonable."

Aren't all "vibe reasonable"?

(Looks at mtg and rfk) I withdraw the observation.

[Swede425]

Trade War girl from Canada resigns.
I wonder which commie Trudeau will replace her with?
Doesn't matter. Neither one will be around for much longer.

[Malika]

Terrible haiku.

[Bob from Ohio]

Everyone should google for video of Justice Jackson performing on Broadway.

Grounds for impeachment IMHO!

[ThePublius]

Wow, that's an embarrassment!

[not guilty]

Huh?

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Video-Justice-Ketanji-Brown-Jackson-Makes-Broadway-Debut-in-JULIET-20241216

lol

[Bored Lawyer]

I have a different take. She has found her true talent. C'mon Ketanji, forget the SCOTUS gig. Your true talents lie on Broadway. Leave the bench, say right around Jan. 20.

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Adeel A. Mangi's parting words have the receipts. It's a shame he was not confirmed as a court of appeals judge.

https://aboutblaw.com/bgA0

[Commenter_XY]

When the shoe is on the other foot, it hurts = the circus-like Senatorial confirmation process

[Noscitur a sociis]

Mr. Mangi was a director of, donated to, and solicited donations from his law firm for, an exceptionally vile antisemitic, anti-American, and pro-terroism enterprise at Rutgers. I don’t find his claim to have had no idea any of that activity was going on the be very plausible, and his attempt to insulate himself from reasonable criticism by slurring his interlocutors with baseless charges of bigotry is further evidence that he should never be trusted with the judicial power of the United States.

[JoeFromtheBronx]

The amount of strong invective in this comment is somewhat impressive including the argument the charges are "baseless" given multiple accounts (not limited to his citation-heavy letter) to the contrary. You can disagree with all of them, including the many Jewish groups who endorsed him, but the "slurring" (reverse criticism is a time-worn tactic) is in the eye of the beholder.

As the letter noted, he "agreed to serve on an outside advisory panel for an academic center that was being established at a preeminent New Jersey Law School to combat bigotry and discrimination, including Islamophobia."

To cite one defense, it arose from a "post-9/11 surge of discrimination against Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities to conduct research related to religious freedom and racial equality."

The distillation, given his overall record, that he supported a "pro-terrorist" enterprise in doing so is the sort of yes "slurring" of his record that is a shame. I leave others, if they desire, to read his letter as well as the many sources he cites (including multiple defenses) to judge the matter for themselves.

[Lennyk78]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/16/us/california-dmv-license-plate-apology/index.html

Why the fuck is the DMV apologizing? The owner clearly stated what it means, and it has nothing to do with Israel.

[apedad]

Massive defense bill ($895.2 billion) sees clear path in Senate, despite transgender measure

The House and Senate earlier this month unveiled their more than 1,800-page compromise version of the NDAA, which includes measures to boost the U.S. presence in the Indo-Pacific, support pay raises for troops, and fund new ships, aircraft and help the defense industrial base.

Seen as must-pass legislation, the NDAA has been signed into law every year for the past six decades.

Besides the culture war amendments, the bill has multiple bipartisan measures, including the establishment of a Taiwan fund similar to a Ukraine initiative that allows the U.S. to send arms to the country by purchasing directly from private industry, and a 4.5 percent pay raise for all service members.

https://thehill.com/homenews/5041942-senate-defense-spending-bill/

Full speed ahead!

[tylertusta]

Our shipbuilding and naval maintenance lags another year with another NDAA. What a disgrace.

[Sarcastr0]

Lags as compared to what baseline?

[tylertusta]

For maintenance: This has been a problem for at least the last 10 years. The problem continues to grow as the Navy continually defers maintaining their ships. Most recently, many of the amphibious warfare ships were found to be unserviceable. Previously the Navy deferred maintenance for Ticonderogas CGs until they rusted away on the pier, and now they're too expensive to repair.

When I say this is growing, I mean it. If you don't maintain your car and just let it sit in your driveway, exposed to the elements for years it's going to have problems. The same thing happens to ships.

The result is that the size of the useful Navy fleet decreases as ships are unable to deploy or are scrapped.

In terms of shipbuilding, we're still not building enough ships + submarines to meet our current commitments, much less a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Due to the maintenance problems I wrote about above, we're building less ships next year (7) than we're scrapping (19).

Not only is the Navy shrinking its combat capability, but we're not building support ships that would be needed to fight in a peer conflict. Underway replenishment ships and fleet oilers are few and in a sorry state.

[Sarcastr0]

So Navy is making bad risk decisions (what are the odds?) and you want Congress to pick up the slack and force this on them in the defense approps bill.

No issue there. Though the question is what is Navy emphasizing such that they take money from these things?
New nuclear sub class? More of those fancy Aegis-equipped FORD aircraft carriers?

[tylertusta]

I think the problem goes deeper.

It's a Navy that is butting heads with Congress. The Tico problem is a good example: Around 2012, the Navy went to Congress and said that they wanted to retire the Ticonderogas. There was no replacement, but the Navy didn't want them anyways.

Congress told them no. Congress bought them, and they should have another 20+ years of service life left in them.

So the Navy just "deferred" maintenance that never happened. The Ticos rusted away and now have to be scrapped.

[tylertusta]

You edited it while I was typing a reply. Here's my answer to the question you asked:

Though the question is what is Navy emphasizing such that they take money from these things?
New nuclear sub class? More of those fancy Aegis-equipped FORD aircraft carriers?

I don't think this is a case of them diverting resources from maintenance to one specific area. It's a problem of everything all over the Navy. Costs are up for just about everything and the Navy is cutting ships it doesn't want.

[Sarcastr0]

Could be. I know AF hates the A10 and wants more F35s. But Congress says no.

[tylertusta]

I have a bit of a hot take here:

The USAF doesn't really mean it. It's a budget shakedown.

The USAF threatens to cut the A-10 every couple of years, and the result is that Congress lavishes the USAF with more money to keep the plane flying and to let the USAF buy other planes that the A-10 is "taking" money from.

In reality, the A-10 is still getting modernization upgrades and it has an operational readiness rate comparable with other 4th generation aircraft. If the USAF didn't want the airframe, they'd treat the A-10 like they treat the B-1, which is the pariah of the Air Force these days.

[Sarcastr0]

I think Space Force is a budget shakedown. You can hide your Total Obligation Authority easier across 2 lines than 1.

But from what I've heard from friends of mine who were in the Army, nothing beats the A10. No other airplane is slow enough to do close air support like that!

I do like the B1. Overengineered all to hell because they didn't know what it was like up there, so it's like 50 years after it's operationally planned life. Though really that's just the fuselage.

I have a book on the F-18 and what a crapshow that was in development that I have on my list to read.

[tylertusta]

Space Force is budget passthrough, and the Air Force hates it. They want the Space Force out of their budget completely.

BTW, the Hornet had a troubled start to its procurement program, but that's true of nearly every aircraft. The only big mistake they made was that they designers forgot to include the fuel.

(I think I have the same book you're about to read. They talk about that mistake a bit).

[Sarcastr0]

I play D&D with some AF folks, and they have tons of stories.

Navy I know less about, but none of your opinions strike me as impossible.

[Sarcastr0]

Wait, didn't AF lobby for years to get Space Force? Surely they knew this is how it'd be implemented, right?

[tylertusta]

You can't always get what you want...

[Mr. Bumble]

Take the time to watch the documentary and get back to me.
Intended for your comment below.

[Mr. Bumble]

Not quite right.
The Air Force never wanted the A-10 or the ground support role. The Brass ass hats thought (and think) wars could be won with the bright shiny stuff (they can't).
If you like this kind of thing there was an excellent 2 episode documentary about the development of the A-10 on TUBI.
"Against All Odds". It highlights the guys that got it built and have played a role in keeping it around.
One of the absolute best , purpose built aircraft ever made. They should reopen the line and continue to build them.

[tylertusta]

I know that the conventional wisdom is that the A-10 did not want it originally, but for a branch that ostensibly doesn't want to keep them, they sure do put a lot of money into keeping the relevant.

They should reopen the line and continue to build them.

No. It's a 50-year old design. We can do better than a 50-year old design.

[Commenter_XY]

And to think, a 600 ship Navy was the goal, not so long ago.

We'll be lucky to put 250 ships in the water.

[tylertusta]

Navy leadership should be screaming to the heavens about the sorry state that their fleet is in. They aren't, and I think that's very telling.

[Kazinski]

Perhaps.

But are ships now just for low intensity conflicts and transport and sitting ducks in a real war and indefensible with drone warfare and hypersonic missiles?

[tylertusta]

No, they are not.

Ships and submarines are still critical for warfighting. Drones are going to be extensions of the fleet, but they cannot replace warships.

[Kazinski]

No, Drones cannot replace warships. But what do you do when warships can no longer be defended?

Its like castles, pretty cool, but they quit building them. Although of course the modern day equivalent is deep bunkers, but they can't control territory, thats just where you can hide things and people.

Now I'm not saying that there is no need for ships, what I am saying is maybe there isn't a good case for a 600 ship navy anymore.

[tylertusta]

We have not reached a point where warships cannot be defended. We are not even close to that point. If such a point in time comes, it is so far away that no one sees it.

No one is asking for a 600-ship Navy today.

[David Nieporent]

No one is asking for a 600-ship Navy today.

C_XY was implying that our retreat from that was something to be lamented.

[tylertusta]

I took it as a remark that if we still had a 600-ship Navy we wouldn't have the hull number problem that we're facing, not a desire to get up to 600 ships.

We could be successful with 300. 350 would be very nice as well.

[Mr. Bumble]

Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat.

[Frank Drackman]

not so long ago? OK, it was the 1980's, you're right!

[David Nieporent]

And to think, a 600 ship Navy was the goal, not so long ago.

We'll be lucky to put 250 ships in the water.

Do you think we're likely to come into conflict with many countries with blue water navies in the next few decades?

[tylertusta]

China is building that capability.

But your question is not a good question. It's not a matter of whether potential adversaries are building "blue water" capabilities, but rather the size and number of commitments that dictates the size of the Navy.

Tinpot dictators with speedboats aren't a threat to a DDG on the high seas, but you need a minimum naval presence to deter them from mining an economically critical waterway.

[Commenter_XY]

David, that is a fair question. Yes, we will have conflict with countries that have blue water navies in the coming decades.

Take CHN, for example. The US currently has 14 aircraft carriers to 2 (soon to be 3) for China. CHN has nowhere close the level of commitments that the US does. CHN covers a small region of the Pacific. The US, in contrast, covers all the Pacific, all the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea (where the Houthis are beating them and shutting down maritime traffic through the Suez Canal - a big deal), the Mediterranean, the Carribean, and the Atlantic.

Huge difference. It really drives home the point that the US must be careful not to overextend their capabilities.

[Mr. Bumble]

Hey Notimportant. Don't be an asshole. We don't have a navy to engage other navies but to project power all over the world.
When was the last time there was a naval battle anywhere? Falkland Islands?

[Mr. Bumble]

I neglected to add, that even during the two world wars, when multiple countries had blue water navies, the main purpose wasn't tp engage each other but to protect or destroy shipping.

[Brett Bellmore]

Not being prepared to fight a navel battle is how you find yourself in a naval battle... on the losing end.

[tylertusta]

Naval strategy is built strategy. You don't build a Navy for a threat that exists today. You build a Navy to accomplish the missions and counter threats as they exist ten, twenty years from now.

[tylertusta]

When was the last time there was a naval battle anywhere?

I don't think this question is especially helpful. "Fighting battles" is just one way of power projection. They aren't exclusive concepts.

Anyways, the Falklands War is not the most recent naval battle. There have been several naval battles between Russia and Ukraine in the past few years. Prior to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the last significant battle was between Russia and Georgia in 2008. Before, that there were some battles between South Korea and North Korea in the 90's, but the big one was the Gulf War in 1991.

[Commenter_XY]

We haven't had a real carrier group v carrier group battle in, shit, it has to be almost 80 years now. Not since WWII. We played footsie with the Soviets for maybe 25 years during the cold war. Been a long time.

Not sure how carrier tactics changed in light of drone warfare. They look like big, fat, sitting ducks to me.

[tylertusta]

In a lot of ways aerial drones are just slower versions of the cruise missiles that the Navy can already smack down in numbers. Submersible/surface drones are basically slower, less capable torpedoes.

In the naval context, the advantage of drones is that they have the potential to provide an offboard sensor or weapon platform on an attritable asset. Absolutely no country has demonstrated that capability yet except perhaps the US, and all of those systems are just testbeds.

[tylertusta]

As an aside, "carrier tactics" haven't been how planners have thought about how to employ carriers since WW2, because carriers are not about tactics. Since the advent of nuclear bombs and in-flight fueling, carriers are about strategy.

[Michael P]

Resolved: The behavior of Bluesky users and moderators in respect to doxxing journalists and making death threats -- with Jesse Singal as a notable target -- shows how hypocritical they were about their claimed reasons for leaving Twitter.

[Swede425]

Unpossible!
The peace loving Left?
Sure, they might burn a city down here and there, and try to murder Republican Reps on a baseball field, and threaten violence whenever they don't get what they want, and try to assassinate presidential candidates, but other than that?

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Ok guys, I think I've figured out where that 20M "lost" votes went that doesn't include referencing the Democrat-ay Big-ay Steal-ay.

Here are the facts:
1.) Biden instituted a "whole of government" effort to register voters after he took office.
2.) The government is filled with partisans like Sarcastr0
3.) The government preferentially targeted likely Democrat voters.
4.) The government is filled with incompetent, midwits also like Sarcastr0.
5.) In true government form failed miserably at its task and actually suppressed the Democrat vote.

Tada! It makes total sense.

[Super Scary]

It's not 20 million anymore I don't think. California was counting votes nearly a month after the election to make sure of that.

[John F. Carr]

The French legislature unanimously passed a continuing resolution to avert a government shutdown. The last government lost a confidence motion over its proposed budget. The new government is barely getting started and will not have a budget ready on time.

I translated into American English. In French it's a "loi spéciale" (special law) allowing taxation and spending to continue past the end of the calendar year.

[Mr. Bumble]

...and in more news from the old country:
"Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a confidence vote in the German Parliament on Monday, a defeat that effectively ended the increasingly unpopular government he has led since 2021 and set the stage for elections early next year."
https://dnyuz.com/2024/12/16/german-government-collapses-at-a-perilous-time-for-europe/

[Kazinski]

The OIG revealed last week that Kash Patel was the subject of warrantless FBI surveillance when he was

"According to a nearly 100-page report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, the FBI subpoenaed the records as part of an investigation it opened to find out whether congressional staffers leaked classified information about its Trump-Russia “collusion” case to the Washington Post and other media.

Working with career prosecutors at Justice, the FBI compelled Google and Apple to turn over the sensitive private information of subjects the FBI identified “between September 2017 and March 2018,” a period when Andrew McCabe was the acting FBI director. (Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was out of the loop, the report said, having recused himself from the Russia probe.)

The court orders gagged the service providers from notifying Patel and other customers of the intrusion."

The reason this surveillance was so problematic is Patel was the Chief Aide to the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which among other things provides oversight over the FBI, including communications with whistleblowers.

If you can imagine the shitstorm that would have occurred if Trump had been monitoring the succeeding Chairman Adam Shiffs Chief Aide when he was communicating with the NSC whistleblowers during the Ukrainian impeachment hearings you can understand how problematic it is for executive branch agencies doing secret warrantless surveillance against Congress.

There was also the time the Senate Intelligence Committee accused the CIA of compromising their computers:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-cia-just-admitted-that-it-spied-on-the-us-senate/

Back in March, embattled CIA Director John Brennan defended the agency over explosive claims leveled by US senators who said the agency improperly accessed their computers while they were investigating the CIA’s torture program.

“As far as allegations of CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth,” Brennan said during an interview at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We wouldn’t do that. That’s just beyond the scope of reason.”

[Commenter_XY]

When confirmed, the first day of work, FBI Director Patel should find out who signed off on those warrants internally at the FBI, and what FBI agents were involved, and fire them all immediately. That is what I would call a good start on right-sizing the FBI.

Director Patel should also let AG Bondi know of DOJ staff who were involved as well. She can decide what to do with them, but right-sizing is always the preferred option.

[Noscitur a sociis]

Kash Patel was the subject of warrantless FBI surveillance

FBI Director Patel should find out who signed off on those warrants

Excuse me if I have less than total confidence in your command of the situation, much less the value of your opinion about an appropriate response.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Well you see, Noscitur, those statements refer to different times. Time is a difficult concept, but it flows, kinda like a river and a person way upstream (we call that "the past") can be in a different situation then downstream (we call that "the future"). So it's completely correct, when you have an understanding of this fascinating concept called "time", to say that Kash Patel WAS the subject of the warrantless FBI surveillance, while also saying the (FUTURE) FBI Director Patel should do something.

HTH if you like more of these interesting insights and allegories please subscribe to my newsletter. If you want access to my Discord, you'll need to hit me up on Patreon.

Be Blessed,
JHBHBE

[David Nieporent]

You completely missed the point. If the surveillance was "warrantless," then how can he "find out who signed off on those warrants"?

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Oh dang, I sure did. My bad.

I should've known Noscitur wasn't making a mistake. He rarely does.

[Kazinski]

Well who signed off on the secret subpoenas?

Lets fire them.

Either that or lets all concede its normal and leave it in Trump's toolbox, I'm sure he'll find it useful too.

[Sarcastr0]

Yes but nevertheless lets take a scalp is not a sign you want to make anything better.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Holding people accountable for their misdeeds is one step to making things better.

[not guilty]

"Holding people accountable for their misdeeds is one step to making things better."

Ah! The irony of a Trump supporter saying that!

[Kazinski]

Keeping them isn't a sign that there is no place in government for people who have no respect for our institutions and Congressional oversight of law enforcement agencies.

Its much better for our federal agencies to fear our democraticlly elected politicians than it is for our democratically elected politicians to fear our federal agencies.

"Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,”

- Chuck Schumer

You don't think thats a problem that warrants some firings?

[Sarcastr0]

Policymaking via fear is very stupid.
First engendering the fear by making examples is bad management.
Second, if you want to change a culture, you should do so directly, and communicate what you want, and the consequences. Consequences first is movie-level nonsense. Sounds cool, but is stupid.
Third, fearful people are not predictable or smart or rational.

I'm sure it's all emotionally satisfying to get your righteousness on, but it shows you to be unserious.

You used to be dumb, but serious.

[Kazinski]

"Consequences first is movie-level nonsense."

Hilarious. Its like J Edgar, and the Church Commission, the Red Scare and Watergate, and 75 years of FBI abuses never happened.

Lets just analogize this to this item from Friday's short circuit:
"Rosenberg, Tex. officer stops elderly man taking a stroll through a residential neighborhood—not to arrest him, but to inform him of the importance of walking on the correct side of the road, which lacks sidewalks. The man tells the officer he's done nothing wrong and begins to turn away. The officer slams him to the concrete and arrests him."

He got qualified immunity, but I still hope he got fired, even though "Consequences first is movie-level nonsense", because just like a cop knowing you shouldn't slam an elderly man to the ground for no reason without being told, an FBI agent and DOJ attorney should know you don't secretly surveil congress.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

You are actually arguing that lawbreaking civil servants shouldn't be held accountable because they weren't told there would be consequences first.

What in the holy fuck is this?

[Sarcastr0]

Yes, I don't consider Hoover a very good policymaker, nor a moral one.

Your entire argument is 'some police officer was bad. That gives me carte blanche to want bad things too!'

That's a weak reason to give up your moral compass and desire to effect actual change. But as I said, unserious.

[Kazinski]

Talk about losing your moral compass, trying to justify the deep state spying on Congress, ostensibly to track down leaks, but we know how it works they find any dirty little secret to keep in their files.

The FBI went after MLK that way, had great excuses for surveillance and wiretaps, but their files were almost all affairs and political spying, reputedly, cause they still haven't released the files.

[Commenter_XY]

Kaz...This is all about bottom line accountability. And right-sizing the DC bureaucracy. There was, and remains, corruption at the DOJ, and the FBI, in particular. This must be addressed so things like we have seen in the last decade don't happen again.

[Brett Bellmore]

I am concerned that these agencies have been corrupt long enough that redeeming them may, as a practical matter, be impossible, and redeeming them in just 4 years hopeless.

[Commenter_XY]

Well then there will be fewer of them for a POTUS Vance to have to deal with. Right-sizing helps.

[Absaroka]

What was the reason for the surveillance?

For example, there is a mole. Patel was one of thee dozen people who had access to the docs. They snoop on all 12 until they find one of the 12 doing a dead drop. Would that be inappropriate?

[tylertusta]

There are serious constitutional concerns about a FBI/DOJ/USAO-DC-requested dragnet that targeted members of Congress and their staffers who were conducting oversight activities on the people requesting the warrants.

[Kazinski]

Get a warrant, show probable cause.

It's not just Patel, he gets the headline because he is going to be the FBI director,but it was also 2 members of Congress and 43 other staffers:

"Patel and the two members of Congress are not named in the report, but two sources familiar with the matter tell CNN that Patel was targeted along with Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell. Patel was a staffer for the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee at the time, and Schiff has since been elected to the Senate and took office Monday."

Heads need to roll and the FBI needs to be drastically reformed.

Or alternatively its standard practice now, and the Trump/Patel FBI can do secret warrantless surveillance of Congress whenever they suspect a leak.

I'll let you choose what you think is best.

[Commenter_XY]

RE: ABC news and George Stephanopolous' generous 15MM donation to the Trump Presidential Library

My question....does this legal victory change the nature of the MSM coverage of Pres Trump, going forward?

Will there be 'Sunny Hostin-like' repeats of MSM commentators reading multiple legal statements on camera to correct their reporting, in order to avoid having to make similar donations to the Trump Presidential Library?

I am concerned that MSM companies will simply look at defamation as a business cost. That is probably not how we want media companies viewing defamation, generally.

[not guilty]

George Stephanopolous's commentary was boneheaded. I hope that we won't see too many comparable brain farts by high level media personnel.

[Kenneth Almquist]

During the litigation between Carroll and Trump, Trump filed a counterclaim against Carroll claiming that Carroll had defamed Trump by asserting that Trump had raped her. Trump lost.

Carroll filed two cases against Trump, known as Carroll 1 and Carroll 2. The jury trial occurred in Carroll 2 whereas Trump filed his counterclaim as part of Carroll 1. The jury in Carroll 2 had found that Trump forcibly inserted his fingers into Carroll’s vagina. The judge ruled that collateral estoppel prevented Trump from challenging that finding in Carroll 1. So the claim that Trump raped Carroll is true, unless Carroll was using the word “rape” to refer specifically to penile penetration, in which case the judge ruled it was “substantially true.” The damage to Trump’s reputation from being identified as a rapist doesn’t depend on whether people believe he prefers to rape women using his penis or his fingers.

Stephanopolous was on fairly solid legal ground in making a claim that had already been ruled not libelous.

Ruling dismissing Trump counterclaim: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.543790/gov.uscourts.nysd.543790.200.0.pdf

[JoeFromtheBronx]

I have seen criticism of President Biden's commutation of Michael Conahan [“kids-for-cash” scandal] as part of a wider commutation based on certain categorical criteria.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/12/12/fact-sheet-president-biden-announces-clemency-for-nearly-1500-americans/

Contra to one comment in another thread on their tendencies, the criticism also is present among some on "the left."

Chris Geidner has written a helpful discussion:

https://substack.com/inbox/post/147455614

As to the specific case:

Criticism of the commutation of the sentence of Michael Conahan, the ex-judge sent to prison in 2011 for his role in a notorious “kids-for-cash” scandal, has prompted some of the most blowback. He has already served more than 13 years of his 17-year sentence, has been on home confinement since 2020, and would likely have been released by 2026.

He was given home confinement because he met certain criteria arising from physical conditions that made him more at risk for COVID. He already served over 13 years of his sentence.* The commutation amounts to about a year and a half less time by one estimation I saw in the coverage of the matter.

Conahan was not given special treatment in this case. Specific commutation rules were put in place. He fit the criteria. I am open to the idea that President Biden reasonably could have excepted him from the commutation.

OTOH, if a categorical approach is appropriate, applying it to everyone (there will generally be allegedly "special cases" here) is a sensible policy approach. If you avoid doing so, there is more chance of arbitrary application and people worthy of commutation will be denied. One possible bad apple does not spoil the barrel.

==

* A sentence that many people who committed various types of violent crimes, including homicide, have not received. I won't say the punishment is excessive. I will say a year and a half less would not be unreasonably lenient.

[Bob from Ohio]

No valid reason to commute the sentences of people already just confined to their homes.

The ACLU wanted it because they like criminals and some Biden staffer thought it a good idea.

[Bored Lawyer]

Sorry, not buying it. See my comments above.

Pardons are an extraordinary exercise of power, and that requires more scrutiny than assessing a late fee on an electric bill.

[David Nieporent]

I think pardons (or in this case, commutations) should be a routine exercise of power.

[Sarcastr0]

BL is conflating is and ought here.

[JoeFromtheBronx]

requires more scrutiny than assessing a late fee on an electric bill

The public scrutiny of presidential pardons, including Biden's, is more than such an assessment.

Likewise, the care provided in formulating pardons is not shown to be comparable to the assessment of a late fee of an electric bill, including multiple criteria crafted for this specific blanket commutation.

You can "not buy it" but someone upset at Biden is better off focusing on other matters than a consistent application of the commutation here which has gotten such attention because one specific person has received (limited) benefit from it.

People attack his pardoning his son as a special favor and now they are mad that a general policy (as they sometimes do) benefits a very disreputable person. Again much less than some might think.

[Commenter_XY]

Does it matter if Michael Conahan got special treatment, or not? It does not.

The pardon (commutation) power is absolute.

Pres Trump will have his turn, shortly. There's probably ~1K people who will be pardoned or have their sentences commuted on 1/20/25. There will be extended caterwauling.

[JoeFromtheBronx]

The pardon power being absolute does not mean specific cases do not warrant criticism.

I put aside that the pardon power is not quite absolute (the Constitution provides an explicit exception and self-pardons are probably an implicit one) + might be evidence of other wrongful acts (such as bribery).

Trump's pardons can be critiqued as warranted. Some of his pardons during his first term were fine. Others warranted criticism.

Special treatment is a possible red flag. Sometimes, special treatment is warranted. Sometimes it is not.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

"Specific commutation rules were put in place. He fit the criteria. I am open to the idea that President Biden reasonably could have excepted him from the commutation."

If the rules mandate this guy's pardon, so much the worse for the rules.

And not just this guy - look at some beneficiaries of the pardon just from Kentucky.

Since this is Reason, I'll skip the opioid cases and go the thieves:

A lawyer who was "found to have stolen more than $1.2 million from clients between August 2009 and October 2016, also accruing around $1.5 million in gambling losses during the timeframe."

A guy who "defrauded over 200 investors nationwide out of more than $3 million."

A guy who "defraud[ed] nationwide investors out of more than $18 million."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/12/13/biden-commutes-sentences-of-many-kentucky-criminals-before-leaving-office/76961955007/

That's what reporters found when turning over rocks in just one state.

I would *hope* that leftists are criticizing the clemency for these big-league thieves.

As for the argument that they've reintegrated into their communities and haven't repeated their offense - who cares whether they committed *new* offenses, the old ones are bad enough that they should go back to prison, and be grateful that a worldwide pandemic gave them a respite from what would otherwise have been continuous sentences.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

And from Illinois:

"On Feb. 14, 2013, [former Dixon, Illinois comptroller Rita] Crundwell was sentenced to 19 years and seven months in federal prison for embezzling more than $53 million from the City of Dixon going back to 1990. She pleaded guilty to charges in the case in November 2012....

"Nearly a dozen years later, frustration, shock, disappointment, and outrage were some of the responses Thursday to the decision to commute Crundwell's sentence. The fact notwithstanding that Crundwell has been out of prison for several years, many involved with the case said clemency sends the wrong message.

""The message seems to be crime pays," [former mayor Li] Arellano said. "Supposedly, these are labeled as nonviolent criminals. If you rob a town of $54 million, and then you think there's less violence that it doesn't impact public safety, you're wrong. There absolutely is more crime when you steal 10 to 20% of a city's budget, absolutely.""

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/president-biden-commutes-sentence-dixon-comptroller-rita-crundwell/

[Zarniwoop]

Sigh, real-time texts with my girlfriend here in scenic Madisonland:

Her, 11:16am: Uh oh. Lot of sirens going past on Stoughton road for maybe 15 min & ongoing
Fire trucks, police & ambulances all

Me, 11:17am: some on east wash too, but that's hardly unusual

Her, 11:19am: Yeah, a couple-three is normal. But continuing like this. More coming past now
What I hate most is the first thought: “Don’t let it be one of the schools”

It was one of the schools.

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

Hopefully you also twittered about it so you could make the tragedy about you instead of the victims!

P.S. You better hurry, turns out early reports are it was a Christian school and the police are having trouble identifying if the shooter was a male or female. So you only have an hour or so to get some e-attention before the FBI swoops and the media puts a blackout on any coverage.

[TwelveInchPianist]

According to Andy Ngo, the shooter was a "15-year-old girl" who "did not identify as trans." I assume that means the shooter was a girl, but nowadays who knows?

AFAIK there's no law that says that a biological boy who identifies as a girl has to identify as trans.

[Moderation4ever]

I have been seeing things in my local paper, The Wisconsin State Journal, about problems with guns being brought to schools by students. Even if people cannot agree about guns laws, I would hope we could all agree that students should not be bringing guns to school and that a hard message needs to be sent to students. Another hard message needs to be sent to parents that they need to know where their guns are at all times. Either have them with you or secured safely.

[Brett Bellmore]

Our Reactionary Constitutionalism

The left in academia isn't merely more disconnected from reality than you imagine; It is more disconnected from reality than you CAN imagine.

[Commenter_XY]

Very lengthy, and doesn't say much, and lacks critical reasoning. Did lathrop write it? It was the endless length that made me ask.

[Sarcastr0]

More from the Evan D. Bernick, Northern Illinois University - College of Law:
"Eliminating Criminal Law"
"Radical Constitutionalism and a Critique Of Nonviolence"
"Policing as Unequal Protection"

And "The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment
Its Letter and Spirit" with Randy E. Barnett

[The Margrave of Azilia]

I seem to recall that Randy Barnette attacked the Defense of Marriage Act.

Which was of course cool and progressive and hip and totally awesome, but hardly makes him a "strange bedfellows" partner with this Bernick guy.

UPDATE: Phrasing! I meant that there's nothing surprising that Bernick would join forces with someone whose position on the political spectrum includes opposing DOMA.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

"“Reactionary” is a contested concept. I will use it to denote a political commitment to social forms which enact hierarchical relationships between dominant and subordinated groups of people."

Like nomenklatura versus common citizens?

[Frank Drackman]

School Shooting in Madison WI, 4 dead, details are still sketchy but Lizzie Warren says the dead were future Health Insurance CEO's so it's understandable someone might murder them.

Frank

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

They were doing to deny someone's claim, so according to AOC they were committing violence.

[Kazinski]

This pretty much illustrates the folly of thinking we can run the grid on renewable energy:

"In 2025-28, we project ~57 gigawatts (GW) of US data center power demand, and we quantify available power capacity to serve this demand as: near-term grid access of ~12-15 GW, plus ~6 GW of data centers under construction, resulting in a ~36 GW shortfall of US power access for data centers in 2025-28 " (Morgan Stanley)"

The City of Broken Hill in NSW Australia became a realworld experiment in the reliability of renewable energy:

“In October of 2024, the isolated small city of Broken Hill in New South Wales, Australia with a 36 MW load (including the large nearby mines) could not be reliably served by 200 MW of wind, a 53 MW solar array, significant residential solar, and a large 50 MW battery all supplemented by diesel generators."

So a city with nameplate capacity of 7x the cities normal load, plus a 50MW battery, became isolated from the grid when a storm took down the power pylons.

‘The power comes on from time to time but goes out just as quickly. It gives us just enough time to power our phones and read emails from energy providers sent the day before, alerting us to the fact the power was about to go out. They also warn we don’t have much time, and to avoid using unnecessary electrical devices – air conditioners, fridges or fans that need a power point.’
‘The fridges in the pharmacies failed, so all medications had to be destroyed, and emergency replacements sent in. Schools have been closed. Freezers of meat are long gone… Emergency trucks are bringing in food finally.’”

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/12/09/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-622-2/

[Absaroka]

"50MW battery"

That confused me. To save anyone else from looking it up, it's a 100MWh battery that can supply a 50MW draw. So a little under 3 hours of coverage for a 36MW load.

It shouldn't be a surprise that a 3 hour battery won't carry you through a windless night without some other energy input.

[Brett Bellmore]

Anymore than it should surprise you that solar panels don't put out much energy when the sun goes down.

I've seen studies of this: "All" you really need to make solar reliable is about 24 hours of storage, and overbuilding the panels by a factor of 10-20 to account for the occasional overcast month. (PV production really tanks on overcast days.)

Making wind reliable is just hopeless, the power output varies too much, and you can't rule out being becalmed for as much as half a year.

Most "renewable' energy proposals tacitly assume that people just have to get used to frequent blackouts.

[Kazinski]

Like I posted a few days ago, Germany is in a dead calm, in the dead of winter, and Scandanavian power rates are skyrocketing because they are obligated to supply germany with electricity when germany doesn't have enough to power its grid.

Its so bad Norway has announced that when the current cable reaches the end of its stated service life in two years they are going to shut it down, so they won't be expected to keep supplying power to Germany when it ends up jacking up the price 1000x during peak loads.

I am sure the money is nice, but it gets cold in Norway.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

As for the "commutations aren't pardons" line, let's look at the Constitution:

"The President...shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment." (Art. II(2))

A reprieve *postpones* a sentence, but doesn't cancel it out. An example of a reprieve is when Abraham Lincoln postponed the hanging of convicted slave-trader Nathanial Gordon by two weeks, after which time Gordon was duly hanged.

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/lincoln-execution-slave-trader-1862

A commutation would have turned the death sentence into a prison sentence, which Lincoln refused to do.

So a commutation, or reduction of the sentence isn't a reprieve, since it cancels rather than postpones the sentence. So, by process of elimination, a commutation is either a type of pardon, or else it's unauthorized by the Constitution.

So - is a commutation a reprieve, or a pardon, or unconstitutional?

[The Margrave of Azilia]

I should have said that a commutation cancels *part* of the sentence.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

As for the two-week reprieve of Nathaniel Gordon, observe that Lincoln not only approved the death penalty, he violated the sacred separation of Church and State when he said:

"In granting this respite, it becomes my painful duty to admonish the prisoner that, relinquishing all expectation of pardon by Human Authority, he refer himself alone to the mercy of the Common God and Father of all men."

[F.D. Wolf]

Two weeks after pardoning his son for gun crimes, President Joe Biden calls on Congress to pass more gun laws.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/12/16/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-shooting-at-abundant-life-christian-school-in-wisconsin/

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Yes. He supports more gun laws. A shooting incident would be a likely time when he reaffirms his policy proposals.

He argues that the system was abused & will likely continue to be abused in Hunter Biden's case, which involved both tax and gun cases. The abuse is not specifically tied to gun crimes. I suppose he might make a policy proposal involving tax policy too.

The support of a pardon does not warrant a decision that all crimes involved in that category are problematic. Including "Universal background checks. A national red flag law. A ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines."

[F.D. Wolf]

Relax. I'm sure Joe Biden is completely unaware that "he" even made this statement.

[Michael P]

Democrats often insist that we need More Government, and are subsequently upset when More Government actually affects them personally.

[Sarcastr0]

Democrats realize that policymaking isn't a lever that says 'more government' on one end and 'less government' on the other.

[Frank Drackman]

Maybe there should be a law against murder, it could even be broken down into umm, lets see, "Magnitudes"?, "Styles"?, I've got it! "Degrees"
"First Degree" could be the "Cold Blooded" type, where you meticulously plan it out, "Second Degree" where its more spur of the moment, and maybe even an entirely separate crime where you Slaughter a man, "Man-Slaughter" we could call it, like Alex Baldwin did,
surprised no one's thought of this before

Frank

[Lennyk78]

Juan Merchan should be stripped of his citizenship for treason and deported back to Colombia. His dad was probably a FARC operative.

[not guilty]

Lennyk78, do you claim that Justice Merchan has levied war against the United States or adhered to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort, per 18 U.S.C. § 2381? If so, what are your supporting facts? Which specific enemies? With regard to Article III, § 3 of the Constitution, what is the overt act, and who are the two witnesses who could testify thereto?

[Lennyk78]

I believe the Democrat Party and its 50 million members are enemies of the United States. Therefore, making rulings against Trump is emboldening these Democrat enemies. Hence, he has adhered to the United States' enemies and given them aid and comfort.

The overt acts are his numerous rulings, including this latest one, and every person who was in the courtroom during such rulings are witnesses.

[not guilty]

"I believe the Democrat Party and its 50 million members are enemies of the United States. Therefore, making rulings against Trump is emboldening these Democrat enemies. Hence, he has adhered to the United States' enemies and given them aid and comfort."

No one cares what you believe about who is an enemy, doofus. The first rule of parsing a criminal statute is to pull your head out from up your ass.

[Lennyk78]

The statute doesn't define "enemy." Enemy is in the eye of the beholder.

And any people who intentionally flood America with third world migrants for votes while trying to disarm good white Christian men are the definition of enemies.

[not guilty]

"The statute doesn't define 'enemy.' Enemy is in the eye of the beholder."

The Humpty Dumpty theory of jurisprudence?

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’" L. Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871).

Treason is a wartime offense. To constitute treason, war must be actually levied against the United States. "[I]f war be actually levied -- that is if a body of men be actually assembled for the purpose of effecting by force a treasonable purpose -- all those who perform any part, however minute or however remote from the scene of action, and who are actually leagued in the general conspiracy, are to be considered as traitors. But there must be an actual assembling of men for the treasonable purpose to constitute a levying of war." Ex Parte Bollman and Ex Parte Swartwout, 8 U.S. 75, 126 (1807). Chief Justice Marshall there elaborated:

To complete the crime of levying war against the United States, there must be an actual assemblage of men for the purpose of executing a treasonable design. In the case now before the Court, a design to overturn the government of the United States in New Orleans by force would have been unquestionably a design which, if carried into execution, would have been treason, and the assemblage of a body of men for the purpose of carrying it into execution would amount to levying of war against the United States; but no conspiracy for this object, no enlisting of men to effect it, would be an actual levying of war.

Id., at 127.

The purpose of Article III, § 3 is to limit the kinds of conduct which Congress can define as treason. As Justice Robert Jackson opined for the Court in Cramer v. United States, 325 U.S. 1, 27 (1945), "Historical materials . . . show two kinds of dangers against which the framers were concerned to guard the treason offense: (1) perversion by established authority to repress peaceful political opposition; and (2) conviction of the innocent as a result of perjury, passion, or inadequate evidence." To declare a major domestic political party to be an enemy of the United States would fly in the face of Article III, § 3.

The word "enemy" is elsewhere defined in the United States Code, to which a court may look for guidance. For purposes of the Trading with the Enemy Act, 50 U.S.C. § 4302 states:

The word “enemy,” as used herein, shall be deemed to mean, for the purposes of such trading and of this chapter--

(a) Any individual, partnership, or other body of individuals, of any nationality, resident within the territory (including that occupied by the military and naval forces) of any nation with which the United States is at war, or resident outside the United States and doing business within such territory, and any corporation incorporated within such territory of any nation with which the United States is at war or incorporated within any country other than the United States and doing business within such territory.

(b) The government of any nation with which the United States is at war, or any political or municipal subdivision thereof, or any officer, official, agent, or agency thereof.

(c) Such other individuals, or body or class of individuals, as may be natives, citizens, or subjects of any nation with which the United States is at war, other than citizens of the United States, wherever resident or wherever doing business, as the President, if he shall find the safety of the United States or the successful prosecution of the war shall so require, may, by proclamation, include within the term “enemy.”

[Stephen Lathrop]

not guilty, your rebuke is well aimed. But your argument misses something I have repeatedly tried to caution you about.

The problem is misinterpretation in modern context, to conflate the antique term, "to levy war," with the modern term, "to wage war." In the historical context prevailing at the time of the first decision you cite, those terms had different meanings. And the first of those terms has by now all but passed out of use.

The very text you quoted could have alerted you to the possibility of difference, but when you wrote conclusively, "Treason is a wartime offense," you overlooked that cautionary opportunity.

Consider, please, whether that has come to be true as a matter of modern contextual use, but without legal precedent. Re-read very carefully the quotes you chose from Ex Parte Bollman and Ex Parte Swartwout, 8 U.S. 75, 126 (1807). Note that what you quoted from Justice Jackson does not actually contradict what Marshall said, or what I am telling you now.

What part of this do you suppose refers to anything which could possibly be counted a "wartime offense?":

To complete the crime of levying war against the United States, there must be an actual assemblage of men for the purpose of executing a treasonable design. In the case now before the Court, a design to overturn the government of the United States in New Orleans by force would have been unquestionably a design which, if carried into execution, would have been treason, and the assemblage of a body of men for the purpose of carrying it into execution would amount to levying of war against the United States;

At the time of the attempted Burr expedition, I believe the government of the United States in New Orleans consisted of a single recently-built courthouse. And as Marshall makes plain, the Burr expedition never attacked it.

Also, that same opinion contains language explicitly rejecting any need for actual battle, wartime array of armies, or any effectual violence at all. Not even a foreign enemy is required. All that is required to levy war, according to that decision, is a few conspirators, with an intent to practice violence of some kind, to overthrow or thwart a government function of the United States, plus some overt action to put that violent intent into practice. A mere march by a few conspirators toward the place of intended violence, without carrying arms, and without reaching the target, would do it, according to the very opinion you cited.

Marshall is plain on that point. To reassert a contrary view based on modern context does nothing to change that.

What would change it—I suppose as a legal layman—would be intervening precedent, which updated Marshall's meaning along the way—with the change being what you seem to be trying to do, but without citing the precedent. As someone who did get professional academic historical training, I caution you that you need at least historical evidence to say explicitly that happened. If the law works differently, I must leave that to you.

But a conclusion of law without a citation seems unusual for you. I note that your conclusion examples a commonplace kind of historical misreading among today's lawyers. Those insistently base textual interpretations on no more than a mistaken belief that reliance on modern context supplies everything needed to read antique English accurately. I am hoping you may be reflective enough to wonder whether that might be what you are doing too.

In short, it is plain that in Marshall's usage, the antique term, "to levy war," implicates far less activity, ambition, scale, or violence (no completed violence at all needed, actually, nor any foreign enemy either) than what your (not Marshall's) , "wartime offense," remark implies in modern context.

What you assert transforms Marshall's meaning for the actual Constitutional term, "to levy war," into what commonplace modern understanding means, by supposing without foundation that the actually different term, "to wage war," properly applies. That latter term is not the one the Constitution used. I think in that respect you capture widespread modern expectation, but only because so many others misunderstand Marshall alike.

Show me intervening precedents to the contrary, and I will take it all back.

[David Nieporent]

Why are you pretending that Lenny is something other than a troll?

[not guilty]

Casual use of the word treason and references to "the Democrat Party" are a couple of my pet peeves.

I remember reading the late William Safire, who wrote the "On Language" column in the New York Times, saying that he had thought about getting a dog and naming it Peeve, so that he could introduce it to people as "This is my pet, Peeve."

[Lennyk78]

You do realize that we refer to the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party solely to piss people like you off, don't you?

[not guilty]

Yes I do realize that. And for the life of me I can't understand why you and your ilk think that use of non-standard English is persuasive.

Is the impulse to channel vermin like Joe McCarthy and Rush Limbaugh irresistible?

[Lennyk78]

The same reason you think the legal argument that the Due Process Clause protects homosexual sodomy is persuasive.

[David Nieporent]

You do realize that we refer to the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party solely to piss people like you off, don't you?

Yes; that's why I said you were a troll.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"references to "the Democrat Party" are a couple of my pet peeves."

Says the dude who refers to refers to Pam Bondi as "Pam Blondie."

[Bwaaah]

I can't understand why [not guilty] and [his] ilk think that use of non-standard English is persuasive.

[Stephen Lathrop]

not guilty — For a similar reason, it occurred to me too late, after my last dog died, that it would have been fun to name him, "Parka." That he was a Newfoundland would only have added urgency to, "Down, Parka."

[Commenter_XY]

NG, I can relate. Do you know, former Gov Christie (Team R) called Libertarians threats to democracy when the Libertarian Party protested some of his compromises he made with the 'People's Duma', and had the temerity to hold signs up at a public speech.

Yes, for the crime of holding up signs at a public speech protesting policies, we were called Threats to Democracy, by the sitting Governor.

This was 2013. So I can relate; I am immune to it. 😉

[Lennyk78]

Why are you pretending that a mentally ill man who cuts off his cock is a woman?

[SimonP]

Same reason we would still call your micropenis a "dick," I'd imagine.

[tooreasontoodoubt]

From a few law students, interested in hearing from law professors who identify as liberal/progressive, loosely defined:

Some of us have been thinking about how FedSoc has gained so much momentum and has organized so effectively, despite their laments about the lack of conservatives in the legal academy. We've noticed that most of our liberal law professors appear at great pains to reject any sniff of legal realism, twisting and turning to make sense of incoherent doctrine especially recently (example - the religion portion of 1A classes), and doing everything to appear doggedly neutral.

At least at our school, it seems also like the liberal faculty members are much more distant from students in terms of involvement in organizations like ACS, clerkships, student scholarship etc. - which makes it harder to create ideological community in any way even coming close to FedSoc.

My sense: You don't want a liberal version of FedSoc and see yourselves as protecting the nonpartisan judiciary; too busy to organize; worries about your views and scholarship being written off as a product of politics.

But those are all guesses, and like many guesses, can be totally off the mark. So genuine curiosity - can we hear from some liberal law professors why you think this is, or if you even agree with our observations?

(I know we posted this really late on Monday - may post next week earlier if that's allowed. Not entirely sure how this works!)

Thank you in advance.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Only a select group of liberal law professors post here, and I don't know if they engage with the proles in the comment section.

So let me offer my own contribution - how to promote more interest in one's legal ideas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygdo0NaREgY

[JesusHadBlondeHairBlueEyes]

I normally don't criticize the press like this, but where were the fact checkers?

https://www.latintimes.com/meet-ana-victoria-espino-latina-making-history-first-lawyer-down-syndrome-556529

Meet Ana Victoria Espino, the Latina making history as the first lawyer with Down Syndrome

The first lawyer with Down Syndrome? Hasn't a single of those journalists read this board? There's atleast 4 or 5 here.

[Commenter_XY]

It isn't just Ivy League universities that are falling (to antisemitism)...

https://www.timesofisrael.com/leading-private-school-association-apologizes-for-antisemitism-at-conference/

It is some of our private elementary schools also.

[Stephen Lathrop]

According to the Guardian:

A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Monday to lying about a phony bribery scheme purportedly involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter that became central to an attempt to impeach the president in Congress.

Alexander Smirnov entered his plea to a felony charge in connection with the bogus story,

Smirnov's lies were the principal basis for the Republican's congressional attacks against Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.

[Brett Bellmore]

Former FBI informant pleads guilty to lying about phony bribery scheme involving the Bidens

"Alexander Smirnov entered his plea to a felony charge in connection with the bogus story, along with a tax evasion charge stemming from a separate indictment accusing him of concealing millions of dollars of income."

I'd be a LOT more confident that he was legitimately lying, if not for the associated tax evasion charge; It's too easy when a prosecutor has somebody dead to rights on an expensive charge like that, to offer to go easy on them for those charges if they confess to something politically useful, like "I lied about the President being corrupt."

And the case against Smirnov was being handled by the same guy who tried to gift Hunter with a plea agreement that was so over the top the judge rejected it. So it's not like I'm just speculating that the prosecutor in this case was making political decisions. We know it for a fact.

[Sarcastr0]

Of course you don't think he's legitimately lying, Brett. You regularly do a lot of work to rationalize ending up thinking what everyone knows you'll end up thinking.

[David Nieporent]

It's too easy when a prosecutor has somebody dead to rights on an expensive charge like that, to offer to go easy on them for those charges if they confess to something politically useful, like "I lied about the President being corrupt."

Not in federal court it isn't.

Also, based on the indictment (and my memory), the guy claimed he had had conversations in Ukraine at a time when he had never in his life traveled to Ukraine. That's not just him saying, "Oh, I lied."

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Pinning a crime on President Biden is probably a useless effort, since he wrote the laws which they're accusing him of violating.

I would imagine that, as a Congressional veteran who wielded significant legislative power for years, he's had plenty of time to protect the sorts of corruption he engages in against efforts to criminalize them.

As political scientist and statesman George Washington Plunkett explained, why would a politician take forbidden fruit from the Penal Code Tree when there are plenty of ways for said politician to enrich himself (and his family), without breaking any laws?

[John F. Carr]

A legal defense fund for Luigi "the Adjuster" Mangione is being hosted by the same Christian donation platform that hosted a Kyle Rittenhouse fund. GoFundMe won't allow defense funds for violent crimes. So far over $130,000 has been pledged. That may be enough to hire a lawyer. Murder cases are expensive.

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/grateful-for-your-sacrifice-defense-fund-for-alleged-ceo-killer-luigi-mangione-balloons-to-over-130k-as-donations-flood-in-from-supporters/

Meanwhile, some of his social media history is being purged. (Obstruction of justice?) Except he has been upgraded to "verified" on X (Twitter).

[Frank Drackman]

Luigi thought the Insurance Suits were a bunch of money grubbing insects, wait till he sees his legal bills.

[John F. Carr]

Now that he has enough money to fight a regular murder charge New York has upgraded the charge to terrorism. The state definition of terrorism is similar to the federal definition, an attempt to influence government policy by violence. Killing all the health care executives and their little dogs too is not terrorism.

[M L]

Sounds like Liz Cheney may have committed some crimes.

https://cha.house.gov/_cache/files/6/d/6dae7b82-7683-4f56-a177-ba98695e600d/145DD5A70E967DEEC1F511764D3E6FA1.final-interim-report.pdf

https://www.breitbart.com/2024-election/2024/12/17/house-gop-demands-fbi-investigate-liz-cheney-alleged-witness-tampering/

[David Nieporent]

It does not in fact sound like that at all.

[ThePublius]

Why do you say that? Did you read what's at the links, or anything else on this sstory?

She tampered with a witness, it is alleged. That's a crime, punishable by up to 20 years, and outside the legislative process, so not subject to the speech and debate clause.

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

Did you read what's at the links, or anything else on this sstory?

As he demonstrated yesterday, Nieporent thinks URLs are all one needs to read to get the gist of the content.

[Sarcastr0]

It is alleged...by the House GOP.

Who have a piss-poor track record of actual legal successes, but an incredible record of putting out bullshit press releases idiots on here treat like gospel.

Between ML's 'may have' and your 'it is alleged' y'all couldn't weasel harder if you treid.

[ThePublius]

Then why would Biden be considering a preemptive pardon for her?

[Jason Cavanaugh]

Because of the stupidity of people like you.

[ThePublius]

Wow, that's a brilliant comment.

[Sarcastr0]

Spicy perhaps, but it's meaning is pretty clear.

Y'all want revenge and scalps and legitimacy of the process isn't part of the picture.

Even if the justice system works as intended, it'll be needless shittiness in service of petty revenge by assholes.

And before you say that's just my opinion, man, persecution of Trump's 'enemies' has been openly brayed about up and down the GOP.

[Jason Cavanaugh]

Sarcastr0 understood it perfectly.

To nobody's surprise, you missed the point entirely.

[David Nieporent]

Sarcastr0: "Republicans are planning to bring frivolous charges against someone."
You: "So why would Biden be considering pardoning her?"

[not guilty]

"She tampered with a witness, it is alleged. That's a crime, punishable by up to 20 years, and outside the legislative process, so not subject to the speech and debate clause."

I haven't read all 128 pages of the Loudermilk report, but I have read the portion that bizarrely suggests that Rep. Cheney "likely violate[d] 18 U.S.C. 1512" by secretly communicating with Cassidy Hutchinson without Hutchinson’s attorney’s knowledge.

That is not witness tampering under § 1512, and a House member interviewing a witness in regard to testimony given or to be given before a House committee is indeed protected by the Speech or Debate clause. (It is also worth noting that Cassidy Hutchinson was initially represented by a seriously conflicted, MAGA paid attorney who encouraged her to perjure herself.)

Rep. Loudermilk and Breitbart are grasping at straws.

[Brett Bellmore]

"and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place."

So, the communication probably would only be protected if she was in the legislative chambers at the time, but other than that, I agree that there's really nothing here in terms of witness tampering that you could feasibly prosecute.

[not guilty]

The scope of the Speech or Debate clause extends well beyond the legislative chambers. SCOTUS opined in Eastland v. United States Servicemen's Fund, 421 U.S. 491, 501 (1975):

We conclude that the actions of the Senate Subcommittee, the individual Senators, and the Chief Counsel are protected by the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution, Art. I, § 6, cl. 1, and are therefore immune from judicial interference.

The purpose of the Clause is to insure that the legislative function the Constitution allocates to Congress may be performed independently. Id., at 502. A legislator's activities are protected if they are:

"an integral part of the deliberative and communicative processes by which Members participate in committee and House proceedings with respect to the consideration and passage or rejection of proposed legislation or with respect to other matters which the Constitution places within the jurisdiction of either House."

Id., at 504, quoting Gravel v. United States, 408 U.S. 606, 625 (1972).

[David Nieporent]

I did indeed read what's at the links — well, the first link; the second, since it's to a secondary source (and a particularly unreliable one at that) adds nothing at all. I have also followed the story since it happened. It provides no evidence of any sort that Cheney tampered with a witness or suborned perjury. And it just handwaves away the Speech & Debate Clause, which — unlike the fake presidential immunity — is actually in the constitution.

And while it is cleverly written to obscure it, it provides no evidence that Hutchinson lied in the testimony they're discussing, either. (My favorite is when the report triumphantly says that Hutchinson changed her story after firing her Trump lawyer. I mean, no shit; that was the entire point.) It keeps quoting Trump cronies saying "I don't remember that" as if it proves Hutchinson lied. (That seems to happen a bunch with Trump: someone says that he said something, and then Trump flacks cite non-denials as if they were denials. Same thing with Trump calling soldiers "suckers," for instance.)

There's repeated instances of them calling her a liar because she said, "So-and-so told me that X happened," and then they quote so-and-so as saying "X didn't happen" (or "I don't remember X happening"), which of course does not refute the claim that so-and-so told her that.

[David Nieporent]

Here's just one example. It discusses warnings about violence on the morning of J6. It quotes Hutchinson as saying, "That is what Mr. Ornato relayed to me." in response to Cheney's question, "Is it your understanding that Mr. Ornato told the president about weapons at the rally on the morning of J6?"

It then calls her a liar because Ornato "directly refuted"¹ this. But it actually quotes Ornato as saying, "I don't recall that being brought to my attention." Again: "I don't recall" is a non-denial denial. But even if you pretend that he actually testified, "That wasn't brought to my attention," that does not even address Hutchinson's testimony, which was "That is what Mr. Ornato relayed to me." They are very careful not to quote him as saying, "I never told her that."
​
​
​
​
¹This is a pet peeve of mine, but it's become too common to blame it on the GOP hacks who wrote this report. "Refuted" used to mean "disproved," but it has come to be used to refer to "denied."

[David Nieporent]

Ironically, in a report about lying, it lies and claims that the Mueller Report concluded that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump Campaign. In fact the Mueller Report expressly stated that it was making no findings about collusion, because that's not a legal term. And with what the Mueller Report actually addressed, it found insufficient evidence; it did not conclude that it didn't happen.
​
​
In short, this "report" is just the same rehashed garbage that we've been hearing for four years now.

[Commenter_XY]

Citizen Cheney will have her day in court. Hope she can find good counsel. She will need it, if not now....then down the road.

[not guilty]

Donald Trump has sued an Iowa pollster, the Des Moines Register and the Gannet Company in state court in Iowa for publishing results of a poll which overstated Kamala Harris's strength in the state. https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25460086/trumpselzersuit121624.pdf The suit is purportedly brought under a state Consumer Fraud Act.

The private right of action which Trump seeks to invoke is created by Iowa Code § 714H.5:

714H.5 Private right of action.
1. A consumer who suffers an ascertainable loss of money or property as the result of a prohibited practice or act in violation of this chapter may bring an action at law to recover actual damages. The court may order such equitable relief as it deems necessary to protect the public from further violations, including temporary and permanent injunctive relief.

The only claim of "actual damages" averred in Trump's Complaint is ¶70:

Because of Defendants’ false, misleading, and deceptive conduct, President Trump has sustained actual damages due to the need to expend extensive time and resources, including direct federal campaign expenditures, to mitigate and counteract the harms of the Defendants' conduct. Because the Defendants’ conduct was willful and wanton, President Trump is also entitled to statutory damages three times the actual damages suffered.

The Complaint nowhere explains how Trump in his individual capacity -- as distinct from his campaign organization -- sustained damages of any kind. (The campaign organization is not a “consumer”, which per § 714H.2(3) means a natural person or the person’s legal representative.)

I wonder. Is anyone in the Trump cult now going to denounce Donald Trump's in terrorem use of the courts as "lawfare"?

[John F. Carr]

Iowa does not have an anti-SLAPP law.

[not guilty]

No, but this lawsuit should be dismissed at the pleading stage on First Amendment grounds.

[ThePublius]

How is this lawfare? Is the paper running for office?

[Sarcastr0]

Now lawfare can only be against active political candidates?

Smells like just-now made up convenient bullshit.

[David Nieporent]

What does lawfare have to do with running for office? Lawfare is a portmanteau of law and warfare, and refers to the illegitimate use of the legal system to punish one's enemies.

[Mr. Bumble]

Got any examples to share?

[not guilty]

You want examples, Mr. Bumble? Here is an excellent example: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca11.80225/gov.uscourts.ca11.80225.1.2.pdf

And here is the District Court's order of sanctions, which recites a (partial) history of Donald Trump's abusive lawsuits: https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Trump-v-clinton-order-sanctions-usdc-southern-florida.pdf

[not guilty]

It is a frivolous and abusive lawsuit filed against a perceived political critic.

Per Wikipedia:

Lawfare is the use of legal systems and institutions to damage or delegitimize an opponent, or to deter an individual's usage of their legal rights. The term may refer to the use of legal systems and principles against an enemy, such as by damaging or delegitimizing them, wasting their time and money (e.g., strategic lawsuits against public participation), or winning a public relations victory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawfare

IOKIYAR??

[David Nieporent]

This suit should be a disbarrrable offense. It at the very least ought to result in whatever Iowa's version of Rule 11 sanctions are. (I don't think there's any accident that it was filed immediately after the ABC settlement.)

[Stephen Lathrop]

Disbarment would be a great result. It would deprive Trump of a power to do again what he obviously will do repeatedly if this case gets anywhere at all.

[ThePublius]

What is the basis for disbarment?

[David Nieporent]

Let's start with Rule 3.1: Non-meritorious Claims & Contentions

(a) A lawyer shall not bring or defend a proceeding, or assert or controvert an issue therein, unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous.

(b) A lawyer’s conduct is “frivolous” for purposes of this Rule if:
(1) the lawyer knowingly advances a claim or defense that is unwarranted under existing law, except that the lawyer may advance such claim or defense if it can be supported by good faith argument for an extension, modification, or reversal of existing law;
(2) the conduct has no reasonable purpose other than to delay or prolong the resolution of litigation, in violation of Rule 3.2, or serves merely to harass or maliciously injure another; or
(3) the lawyer knowingly asserts material factual statements that are false.

[Commenter_XY]

NG, this is not hard to understand. The process is the punishment.

Pres Trump is a billionaire, and has the resources of a billionaire. Are the Des Moines Register, Gannett and Ann Seltzer billionaires? Probably not, but I hope they have inexpensive attorneys (are there any?) b/c they'll be paying them for now.

You just never know, there might be another donation to the Trump Presidential Library to settle this. 😉

[Commenter_XY]

Complete and utter Iran policy fail by Pres Obama, and POTUS Biden. They were taken for suckers (which they were), amidst making a egregious strategic miscalculation regarding Iran.

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/un-iran-enriched/2024/12/17/id/1192012/

[SimonP]

We had a lid on enrichment in Iran, as long as the JCPOA was in effect. Even after Trump unilaterally withdrew from it, there was a "holiday" period in which Iran only slowly ramped up enrichment, hoping to salvage the deal with Europe and Russia as parties. After that effort proved futile, they accelerated enrichment.

It is true that Biden has failed to agree to terms to re-enter the JCPOA. I haven't seen reporting on what the sticking points there may have been. I'd wager it had something to do with triangulating a coherent policy between Republican war-mongers in Congress, Israel's war in Gaza, and shifts in power within the Iran regime. Obama got smeared for just letting Iran have its own money. When Biden thought he was running for re-election, I guess he wanted to avoid anything like that.

But we are here, specifically with this level of enrichment, because of Trump. Much of his foreign policy in this region is to blame for our current mess. If he had come down harder on Israel and insisted that resolution of the Palestine issue be part of any normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia and other regional powers, abided by the JCPOA and used it as a springboard to address Iran's support of Hamas, Hezbollah, etc., and not made so many unilateral concessions to Israel (for a "dealmaker," he doesn't seem to have gotten much for his move of the embassy to Jerusalem, tacit acceptance of Israel's settlement policy, etc.), the region likely wouldn't be on fire right now.

Despite all the Republican doublespeak about "peace through strength," Trump's foreign policy in his first term was defined by his isolationism, laziness, and incompetence. Russia didn't prepare to invade Ukraine on his watch because they feared a forceful American response. Iran didn't enrich uranium on his watch because they were afraid that the U.S. would endorse strikes on its facilities. Our enemies view Trump as weak, not strong, and as easily mollified by flattery and empty gestures that can dominate a news cycle but cost them little.

I do not really know what to expect of "peace through strength" once we've put a Fox News host in charge of our military. A lot of rough tweeting, I'd imagine, paired with allowing Russia and China to gobble up territory and become the new global hegemons.

[Brett Bellmore]

We pretended to enforce the lid, and they pretended to stay under it. Both sides knew it was a pretense intended to let us pretend we were doing something while Iran inevitably became a nuclear power.

Fiction: Obama: "And under the terms of the deal, inspectors will have the permanent ability to inspect any suspicious sites in Iran."

Reality: Iran rejects US demand for inspection of its military sites

Trump's offense in your eyes is that he didn't go along with the pretense.

[ThePublius]

The Biden administration reportedly ordered 11 federal agencies to 'look' into Elon Musk and his companies, per Mike Benz, executive director of Foundation of Freedom Online.

All 11 agencies allegedly paid millions to Reuters, who later did "work on Elon Musk and misconduct at his businesses," per the Pulitzer Prize.

[Sarcastr0]

Kevin Drum already pointed out that this is bullshit to anyone who would bother to do any research.

"the federal government has a lot of contracts with Reuters. More specifically, they are almost all with Thomson Reuters, a provider of commercial information, of which the Reuters news network is a small part. "
https://jabberwocking.com/elon-musk-uncovers-huge-deep-state-scandal-targeting-elon-musk/

Via usaspending.gov - $297 million in Reuters contracts under Joe Biden....and $449 million under Donald Trump.

This is taking something ordinary, and indeed below what Trump did, and pretending it's novel and therefore implying it has an agenda that it does not.

Congrats on being an easily tricked useful idiot yet again, ThePublius!

[ThePublius]

That the Biden admin, the Democratic party, and liberals in general are targeting Musk is a fact. He was the darling of the left, with Tesla, in particular, and became a pariah when he acquired Twitter, ended the censorship there, and went with the Republicans.

[Sarcastr0]

As expected, when presented with evidence your post is based on someone lying to you, you just retreat to more general partisan blandishments.

You want to be lied to, and you make it so easy that the truth just isn't part of your goal, only staying mad at the libs matters.

Useful idiot.

[Brett Bellmore]

When I read threads like this over at Crooked Timber, I feel vaguely guilty, like somebody who goes over to the insane asylum to munch popcorn while observing the inmates. It's all so disconnected from reality in such a confident and matter of fact way that reading it is disturbingly entertaining.

Cis Privilege is Real