Hey Look, It’s Already Wednesday! [DOT 22/6/22]

22/6/22 MegMegMcGee 29

I’m pretty happy about this short week! I mean, besides the burning dumpster fire that is *gestures wildly*…

Cool. Cool. Cool.

Speaker at meeting of Ginni Thomas group called Biden’s win illegitimate long after Jan. 6, video shows
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/06/20/ginni-thomas-frontliners-john-eastman/

What the actual fuck were they doing?

Texas school shooting: heavily armed police with ballistic shields were there ‘within 19 minutes’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/21/texas-school-shooting-uvalde-heavily-armed-police-at-robb-elementary-school-within-19-minutes

I have multiple friends visiting Poland right now which seems nuts!

Russia-Ukraine war: Moscow warns Lithuania over blockade; Russian forces capture frontline village – live
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2022/jun/21/russia-ukraine-war-moscow-to-summon-eu-ambassador-over-openly-hostile-kaliningrad-cargo-transit-ban-live-news

I cannot with this.

Neat.

Biden names first Native American as US treasurer, with signature on money
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/21/native-american-us-treasurer-marilynn-malerba-biden

Good for her.

Elon Musk’s child tells court she no longer wants ‘to be related’ to her dad
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/21/business/elon-musk-child-files-to-change-name-gender/index.html

Kinda wild how this just…happened…

‘The worst person you know’: the man who unwittingly became a meme
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/19/the-worst-person-you-know-the-man-who-unwittingly-became-a-meme

Canada are you ok?

On that note, have a great day!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

29 Comments

    • …not sure which seems more offensive about it…that he went that way because it was offensive…or that he might think he’d struck on a way to navigate the things he touches on without putting his foot in his mouth?

    • Infallible wikipedia tells me that SteveKingIA is 73. Maybe he shouldn’t have been spending a hot Juneteenth pulling weeds and hoeing. It was also Father’s Day, and Wiki tells me he has three children, one of whom, a son, is deeply involved in his campaigns, so that’s probably a dual-generational grifting money grab. Nonetheless, it was Father’s Day, and neither his wife (who is alive) nor any of his three children planned on doing anything with him, leaving him to suffer sunstroke weeding and hoeing and imagining himself an insensate, dead baby? His fever-visions are existentialism bordering on the macabre. Or maybe experimental fiction from the late ’80s/early ’90s.

    • Also just following this dumbassery – no one remembers being a fetus. None of us have any awareness of cognition or concept of time/life/etc from that age. So like, how would it be any worse being an aborted fetus vs a birthed fetus for the experience of the fetus part of the life?

  3. On a happier note, today is the final day of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, and tonight they announce best in show. You know what that means: find a copy of “Best in Show”, available on many streaming platforms, and watch it with this insight: I have friends whose parents breed, show, and judge at Westminster, or at least they used to, and to a person their children assure me that “Best in Show” barely scratches the surface of how nutty that whole world is.

    https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/sports/gallery/2022/06/22/westminster-kennel-club-dog-show-2022-adorable-photos-competition/7696153001/

  5. Actually, the whole disastrous Uvalde shooting response was broken down here:

    Top Texas cop: Uvalde police response was ‘abject failure’

    This is an utterly damning condemnation of the botched response, laying the blame on the “commanding officer” Pete Arredondo, who has been desperately trying to shift blame to anyone else. 

    Takeaways:

    1. The fucking door to the classroom was unlocked. They waited for keys but nobody tried the goddamn door. 

    2. At least six shots were fired while police stood in the hallway. So they stood there while children were murdered. 

    3. Eight minutes after police entered the building they had a heavy-duty crowbar that could have been used to break down the unlocked door. They didn’t try that either. 

    Quotes:

    The public safety chief [Col. Steve McCraw of the Texas state police] spent nearly five hours offering the clearest picture yet of the massacre, outlining a series of other missed opportunities, communication breakdowns and errors based on an investigation that has included roughly 700 interviews.

    … police with rifles stood in a hallway for over an hour, waiting in part for more weapons and gear, before they finally stormed the classroom and killed the gunman, putting an end to the May 24 attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

    “You don’t wait for a SWAT team. You have one officer, that’s enough,” he said. He also said officers did not need to wait for shields to enter the classroom. The first shield arrived less than 20 minutes after the shooter entered, according to McCraw.

    “I don’t care if you have on flip-flops and Bermuda shorts, you go in,” McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Tuesday in blistering testimony at a state Senate hearing.

    McCraw lit into Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief who McCraw said was in charge, saying: “The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering Room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.”

    Arredondo made “terrible decisions,” said McCraw, who lamented that the police response “set our profession back a decade.”

    Arredondo has said he didn’t consider himself the person in charge and assumed someone else had taken control of the law enforcement response. He has declined repeated requests for comment from The Associated Press.

    Me again: “Didn’t consider himself in charge” is not how police departments work. And even if true, then you turn command over to someone else. They’re recommending that all units get shields and crowbars. Why wasn’t that done in the first place? Oh, they had a SWAT team that never showed up. Guess they got the funding. 

    Arredondo needs to be charged with crimes, just like the chucklefuck in Parkland: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-florida-deputy-legal-analysis/sheriffs-deputy-charged-with-neglect-in-florida-school-shooting-has-strong-defense-legal-experts-idUSKCN1T62XS 

    • …there’s a lot about the events of that day that I can’t claim to understand…but the part where arredondo seems to claim he thought someone else was in charge about breaks my brain

      …as does the part where he didn’t have 2-way communication with the 911 end of things

      …but for the life of me I can’t follow why it seems like they had variously the means to force entry, every sign that doing so was necessary & could have prevented the loss of lives & even shields &/or rifles while shots continued to be fired inside the classroom…& still waited longer?

      • The missing piece in reporting (at least most of it) is what kind of risk avoidance training the different departments involved have gotten.

        A multimillion dollar consulting industry has grown up to train police to avoid any risk whatsoever. This has led them to stay out of any situation with active shooters and go in with guns blazing before there is even a sign of danger.

        This has been extensively reported separately, but it’s a sign of the  miserable stovepiping in the press.

        The reporters assigned to Uvalde aren’t remotely up to speed on the issue. It’s from a different beat, probably a different outlet, and since the reporting on the issue relies on a separate set of sources that are unfriendly to the Uvalde reporters’ sources in the traditional law enforcement orbit, it may as well be related to the geology of the moon.

        • …I hear you…& I don’t necessarily disagree…but I think it’s possibly a bit like the thing where it turns out the police don’t technically have an obligation to protect the public

          …it undoubtedly has an effect but when there’s so much else that’s messed up about about what went down that’s also much easier to report…& the audience is deemed mostly to have no interest in reading deeper into underlying context…I can kind of see some other reasons beyond the stovepipe analogy for why this is how it’s been reported?

          • Oh, it’s definitely stovepiping. When you trace the reporters who do the investigative pieces on the police consultants who are doing this kind of indoctrination, they’re almost always in completely different beat and editorial foodchain from the regular police reporters.

            Now as to the reasons for the stovepiping, that goes to a deeper illness in most news organizations. The editorial decisions as to what an audience wants to hear are rarely particularly rational — when critics have probed in past incidents, they find that editors have put almost no thought into their decisions at all. It’s just a feeling.

            One of the interesting side effects of the way reporting gets slotted to reporters locked in to police sources is the way the writing becomes almost unfathomable for the typical reader.

            Ledes which would make sense AND connect with readers, such as “Video shows Officer John Smith shot unarmed bystander Mary Jones yesterday” become “Officials confirmed that in an event reported yesterday, there occurred an incident involving the discharge of a firearm which resulted in injury to a civilian and officials are investigating the possibility that video evidence indicates the presence of an officer in the vicinity of civilian during the incident and whether the officer or civilian was in possession of a firearm at that time.”

            What makes it worse is how often reporters and editors get burned by their overreliance on the police as sources. They don’t learn that it doesn’t pay, but they keep going to the same well. With Uvalde the press treated the police as authorities and it made their initial reporting much worse than it needed to be. And I think it’s pretty obvious when this happens in another jurisdiction, they’ll screw it up again.

            • …sure…but what I was trying to get at is that in the absence of the stovepiping thing I still don’t think you get to avoid that problem with a story like this?

              …when something like this happens there’s a need to report on it but also a shortage of verifiable facts in the immediate aftermath…& not least when it turns out later that a lot of the account given by the police is at best suspect & at worst evidence of an attempt to subvert the story by wielding the “official record”…it’s arguably important that their version is in the public record before the process of correcting that record takes place

              …so while it’s happening it’s not a given that trying to frame the story in terms that might be easier to parse than the garbled version of the headline you allude to but which don’t reflect what’s being claimed by the authorities in question would be an unmitigated improvement…& it’s certainly not the point at which you’d expect people to want an in-depth investigative analysis of why police training might not produce officers well-suited to these kinds of situations…you want the who/what/when/where kind of stuff at that point

              …& for all that it’s clear the police are not trustworthy in the sense that their account of what went down in this case seems to have changed many more times & in many more particulars than they’d generally consider would be necessary to assume a suspect being interviewed was lying &/or trying to conceal guilt…in terms of who might reasonably be expected to be able to give a coherent overview of the facts there aren’t a lot of other verifiable sources available to journalists…so you’re still in the same ballpark in the immediate aftermath, I would have thought

              …it doesn’t make it any less heinous when “cop shoots person for clearly-not-good-reason” turns out to be the reality but the headline is “person who-may-have-precipitated-events dead after encounter-with-police-that-shouldn’t-have-been-fatal”…but to me it seems like at least half that problem stems from the pace at which we expect news to be reported rather than flawed journalistic hierarchies

              …that’s what I meant by “I don’t necessarily disagree” about the stovepiping thing being a legitimate problem but it also being a problem the solving of which wouldn’t solve this stuff by itself…because much like the fine print underlying the “serve & protect” strapline…if you get into it it’s considerably more complicated…& when there’s a shooting people want to know about who was doing the shooting & who got shot & whether it’s over more than they want to debate whether or not the police are appropriately trained to deal with it…at least in the moment & probably for at least a little while afterwards…so that’s always going to be the first kind of reporting about that stuff…& it’s pretty much always going to start with what the cops have to say about it…however much it might make sense to take their pronouncements with a degree of skepticism…& I think that comes down to the nature of the thing in more ways than just the nature of the way the press is set up to handle it?

          • The whole “police don’t have an obligation to protect anyone” isn’t actually the slam-dunk defense that some news articles (nod to blue dogcollar) make it out to be. While the Reuters article I linked to said it was a “strong defense” in the poorly written headline, even in that article it was acknowledged that it probably wouldn’t hold up. It literally undercuts any rationale for first response, opening the door for every first responder to refuse to act to protect the public. “Fuck it, I’m gonna ignore that call. I could get killed.”

            And the Parkland guy just hid behind his car. Contrast that to Uvalde, where the police both failed to act to protect the public and actively prevented any effective response while children were being murdered. I’m no legal expert, but that kind of seems like accessory to murder to me.

Leave a Reply