Chris & Folks, don’t forget that we have immune systems. In April asymptomatic transmission was far less rare because few people had acquired immunity yet. (LMAO @ the WHO bus u-turn BTW)
The linked Unz article shows no dates. There is assumed to be no difference between now (after a first wave), and then (before any wave of a new virus). We need to be looking at more recent data.
- Rubber bullets. Rubber bullets are definitely not as accurate as Chris implies, even with a red dot sight and at any considerable distance (say over 20-30 yards/meters). I have never fired rubber bullets, never been trained with them, my dept never used them. If I were in a riot and was handed a gun to fire rubber bullets, I wouldn’t fire any unless as a last ditch attempt to keep from firing real bullets (i.e. a rioter was using potentially lethal force on police or innocents such as shooting .50 caliber ball bearings by a high powered sling shot, M80’s thrown at people, etc.). But if the target was doing that in a riot I’d be very concerned about hitting someone else crowded around him. I’d have more confidence about hitting him with a rifle, but then again you still have the danger of hitting someone in the riot who isn’t using lethal force. If I was the police Chief I’d prohibit the use of rubber bullets. I’d rather use other methods and technologies that I know of, or use real bullets if the threat was that bad. But BLM, Antifa, certain political parties, and the media wouldn’t like my other options either.
That raises another issue. Raise your hand if you’ve ever been in a riot. That’s what I thought: practically nobody here at PP (including Chris, I assume). Raise your other hand if you’ve ever been in a riot in which you are the target of the mob’s rage and violence. Right, so maybe a literal handful of us or less. A little humility would be in order then when offering guidance to the professionals who have been there and done that, and are on the hook for responding to the next riot and absolutely guaranteed to be blamed, sued and maybe even prosecuted no matter what they do or don’t do. Riot control is a thankless, dangerous, literally no-win situation, and everybody becomes Monday morning quarterbacks.
There’s another issue for “innocent protesters.” Here’s my advice: if you’re an innocent protester out exercising your rights and you see violence breaking out (by whichever faction), GO HOME! Many “innocent protesters” are: 1) lying (they’re really engaging in riotous behavior), 2) ideologically supportive of riotous behavior by those around them but not actually doing it themselves, or 3) dangerously underestimating how bad things can get in seconds in a riot and therefore expose themselves to many grave dangers by not leaving immediately. - Chris says lawsuit payouts should come from police pension funds to incentivize police to better behavior. I agree that we should do a better job of aligning police incentives with the high standards we have for them. I would agree with his idea with a few caveats. First, let’s implement that policy once the pension fund is at least 90% funded. My pension fund is about 40% funded and it only looks that good if you accept its baseline assumption that it will earn 7.75% per year on its investments. Drop that assumption to a still-optimistic 4.0% and it would be about 20-25% funded. So now you want to further impair/endanger my retirement for bad police behavior I have no control over? I would also be in favor of Chris’s proposal if it was applied to everybody in govt service. I would also accept it if (while I was still employed) I could refuse orders and assignments, without the threat of sanctions, that I perceived as too risky. For instance, in today’s environment I would refuse riot duty, refuse to enforce any drug laws and refuse to arrest a black person if they were armed or resisting arrest (I’d let them go and write the appropriate report). Chris is an entrepreneur who can control his work 100%. He doesn’t have to do risky, dangerous things some other authority orders him to do upon threat of termination of employment, or serious financial penalty.
- Chris says police officers should have to pay for personal malpractice insurance so that bad actors were eventually unable to afford the insurance to keep working in law enforcement. Good idea to line up incentives again. Again, let’s apply that to all in govt service. That plan at least allows me to defend my actions in court since I could theoretically hire my own lawyer to defend me, instead of the city routinely paying out to avoid the expense of trials. This may come as a shock to you but we live in a litigious society and Philadelphia might be the worst example in the country. People actually lie to attempt to get a payout from anyone with deep pockets! And those with deep pockets routinely just settle out of court for what they consider to be pocket change just to avoid expensive trials (and filthy lying opportunists know it very well). I witnessed a city bus accident before I became a cop in which the car bounced off the bus which was carrying three passengers and the driver. I don’t know what the outcome was but I do know 46 people eventually claimed to be on the bus and sued to cover their “medical expenses.” I was sued three times in 19 years in the police dept but the best one by far I only learned about 5 years after the city settled with the victim for $60,000. I was never notified of the lawsuit, never deposed, never asked what happened, nothing. What did I and my officers do that was so bad that the city paid $60,000? Two of my officers arrested a man in a wheelchair for retail theft (shoplifting) while he was making his “escape.” They called me to the scene to ask what to do with the defendant who weighed about 250 lbs since he was in a wheelchair and wouldn’t fit in their car. He had to be transported to HQ for fingerprinting, photographing and a bail hearing. I was a little stumped myself but called my prisoner transport van to the scene which was crewed by two weightlifters. We discussed it and agreed to risk injury to ourselves and just lift him into the back of the van in his wheelchair. We did it successfully and got him safely to HQ. That’s it. No injury to the suspect. To this day I don’t know what damages the lawsuit was trying to recover but it wasn’t for excessive force, injuries, or false arrest. It gets better. I found out about this case I was named in when I attended a training on the dept’s two handicapped-accessible prisoner transport vans that we could use for physically handicapped prisoners. Unbeknownst to me, as part of the defendant’s first lawsuit the city agreed to get handicapped-accessible vans to transport handicapped prisoners, BUT THEY NEVER GOT AROUND TO IT. Guess what happened? This same man in a wheelchair was arrested again somewhere else in the city for retail theft and the cops did the exact same thing I did the first time. And he sued and accepted ANOTHER $60,000 payout from the city. It gets better. The training I attended for supervisors on how to use the handicapped prisoner vans was held about a year AFTER we were already told to start using them. In that year, I had tried to use them three times for arrests but two times I was told the vans were broken down and couldn’t come and one time there was no driver available. Zero for three! So in that training I told my whole sad story and announced that from that point going forward I would be ordering my officers to release any handicapped prisoners they arrested and not to attempt to transport them for arrest processing. Now is this kind of atmosphere in which Chris wants cops to pay for personal malpractice insurance? Sure. Seems fair to me.
- Chris suggested prosecuting cops who falsify evidence and the like by exposing them to the same criminal penalties the criminal was facing. Another wise attempt to align incentives. You should know that cops are already exposed to punishments for lying or falsifying evidence that are in the majority of cases considerably GREATER than the punishments the criminal was facing. I’d love to see this principle in action in the whole Russiagate investigation currently be conducted by the DOJ. What punishments should Brennan, Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page and all the others be facing?
“Happy Hunger Games. And may the odds be ever in your favor.”
Hand raised.
I’ve now started monitoring the moving average for the death rate globally and in particular locations. I think this is important because this is where we will see COVID attenuating, which biologically/ecologically, it should.
Here’s a link to the spreadsheet (be sure to copy it into your Google account or the file will get overwhelmed with users).
And for those who are interested in WA-only data.
Notice that each chart displays a graph with the 7-day average CFR. Almost across the board, CFR is declining. This could be due to many factors, but we can hope it is due to the attenuation of the virus. Novel ‘species’ are known to reduce virulence over time. This could be very good news.
So the thing that jumps out at me in this discussion is that this is, once again, an issue of all of us existing in a system in which basic human needs are not met. When the system is set up in such a way as to force the vast majority of people into poverty, (debt-serfs), and people can’t get what they need legally, that sets up a situation where many people will turn to getting what they need illegally and for the sake of their own survival, learn how to exploit weaknesses in the system’s enforcement mechanisms, as thc0655 points out. The police are not the system. The police are set up between the regular working people and those who are in power. Their purpose is twofold: one- to enforce the “rules” that allow the system to continue extracting value (time, labor, resources, etc…) from the masses for the benefit of TPTB. And two- to absorb and direct the rage of the working people away from those in power. Pissed off at Bezos for accruing a few extra billion dollars while millions of people lose their jobs? You can’t reach him. You don’t have contact with HIM. But you do have contact with the police. So as far as I can tell, it’s a set-up for the police to absorb the rage of the working people so that profits for the ultra wealthy are not affected. The system we have is set up in a particular way, these are some of the outcomes we get with this system. Set up the system another way, and we would get different outcomes. I don’t know, let’s say for starters that our goal for the new system is to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met, as a bottom line. We want to start with humans having their basic needs met. Wonder what would happen to this debate about police then…
EDIT: And please consider this outside the systems we already know (capitalism, communism, socialism- all three of which, by the way are currently financed by debt-based money.) If we could set it up the way we would want it, how would we set it up? Given everything we know about how the current system works against us, if we could set it up another way, what would we do?
I thought it was an attempt at humor.
Proof that we are living on a planet of mass idiocy. The idea that the simple physical separation by a mask of your exhalation from my inhalation needed to be “proven” by a statistically-verified study shows that we are in the hands of idiots on the societal scale, and need to just isolate and protect ourselves from all of them.
I mean, good on them for doing a study to prove out the totally obvious – “transmission falls from 17.4% to 3.1%” --, but appealing with logical results to people living in a mass hallucination confirms that popular definition of insanity.
I suppose someone could get a grant to study whether putting a hand up in front of the net will stop a basketball from going in, or at least cut down the scoring rate.
I flew home in early March, wearing the only mask on that plane, with five people around me coughing. The next few days, I felt a faint tightness in my upper chest, took all of the rest and nutritive measures we discuss here, then felt no symptoms after that. I was relieved, but glad that I had reduced my intake of whatever those brave, brave Texans were spewing. Haven’t entered a store or public space since then without wearing one.
Again, Game Theory, if everyone had cooperated from the start (including those “officials” who were giving incredibly bad and inverted advice), this thing would have been basically over in two weeks. Good luck on those hopes! Flying pigs.
Jesus F. C., how stupid can people be! Probably still more to come, more than I can imagine. They have to suffer, and watch people they know suffer, and then that still probably won’t be enough to educate them. Hell, men have charged en masse into the raking fire of machine guns for less of an ideology than “exceptional” Americans hold over themselves now. Darwin Awards never contemplated entire nations entering themselves into the competition.
A perfectly presented virus, one that won’t kill enough people grotesquely enough to shock the rest into changing behavior, so the minimum hope, for the US at least, is that some regions act logically, and then isolate from those who don’t, the ones who wish to find out the hard way.
Meanwhile, because I am passported as a US American, no country in the world is going to admit me to visit for quite a long, long time to come, and those who might will probably still have enough ongoing problems to cancel out my interest in going…
Chris and Adam may turn out to be inadvertently prophetic. Wanna take the over/under?
The current monetary and socio-economic system evolved out of the previous ones we had. Slavery -> Feudalism -> Colonialism -> Industrialization. What we have now, is certainly an improvement on what came before, and yet, we are seeing that what we have now isn’t working very well for a lot of us. Not just in terms of riots in the streets, but in terms of the depletion of the life-support systems of the planet.
What we have now, which is based on all that came before, is still operating from a mindset of extraction. That worked really well, in a certain way, for a long time, when there were frontiers to be explored and rich deposits of resources to be mined. Yet we are in a completely different context now, and our systems have not yet caught up with the current reality. The resources that remain in the ground now must either be conserved (aquifers, nutrients in soil, etc…) or set aside (oil, coal, etc…). There isn’t more to be extracted.
So my mind keeps returning to the question of what it would look like to base an economy on regeneration instead of extraction. If you want the align the incentives, why would we not do that with the monetary system itself? Why would you not back the money supply with something that actually matters, like trees/ carbon sequestration? Plants are the means of production of all life. Nothing else can exist without the oxygen they produce. If we want people to conserve the natural resources that remain, why not quantify the amount of oxygen they produce (or carbon they sequester)? If we have the technology to digitally image every inch of the planet. And have apps on our phones to identify plants from a picture of the leaves. And we have modeling software that can calculate the energy efficiency of a building based on a wide range of materials used. And there is modeling software being designed to do the same for the embodied carbon in those building materials. With such sophisticated technology, could we not build models for calculating the amount of oxygen produced (or carbon sequestered) for a given city block? Town? State? Country?
And then, based on those calculations, you arrive at a pool of resource (oxygen or carbon sequestration), a snapshot at a given point in time. Simply divide the current monetary supply by the volume of oxygen produced (or carbon sequestered), and voila! You have currency backed by something real. You now have a pool of this currency, and for the sake of this thought experiment, let’s say we divide it evenly among everyone. Doesn’t matter who you are. Everyone gets a fair share (Sh"air"?) This is a permaculture principle. And if politicians want more currency in the system, so they can promise constituents this thing or that thing, then by golly, what do they have to do? They have to promote activities which not only conserve what we already have, but encourage people to plant more trees (gardens, living rooftops, etc…) or sequester carbon (also plant trees or build soil.) A currency for our “current” context.
And lest you think that the supply would always grow, you could build in decay to the system (same as happens in nature), so that one ShAir loses a percentage of its value over a given period of time ( after 3 months 1 ShAir= 75%, after 6 months 1 ShAir=50%, etc…) So people are encouraged to spend, and circulate their ShAirs, until the next “snapshot” is taken. Annually? Quarterly? Monthly?
But the premise of this system is completely different from the premise of the current system. And that is the point. That it might be possible to create something new, that has not existed before, specifically for this context, to incentivise the activities we most want to see. Our current system sets us up to compete with each other fiercely for an artificially induced scarcity of currency (there is ALWAYS more debt in the system than there is currency to pay it off). What if we could set up a system that would allow us to cooperate and collaborate on behalf of regenerating the planet’s life-support systems?
I realize some may dismiss what I say because I am a “dreamer” or out-of-touch with the reality of things. That what I am saying is not practical, or possible. So I will leave you with a quote, my point is not to harp on capitalism per se, only to aim our minds in the direction of looking beyond what we can currently see:
“We live in capitalism. It’s power seems inescapable. But then- so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” Ursula K. Le Guin
My Daddy was a man of letters My Mama was a head of state And when they got their chromosomes together They gave me all of their recessive traits I'm an embarrassment to evolution My disposition is unstable and cruel My blood's a catastrophic blend 'Cause I'm from the shallow end of the gene pool ... ~ Shallow End Of Gene Pool - Austin Lounge LizzardsAn interesting song by an interesting band, just MHO of course.
THC, thank you very much for that perspective. I’d hate to be a LEO right now. They’re in a no-win situation. Frankly, I expect the crime rate in urban areas to skyrocket over the coming months and years. If I was a cop, I would be very reluctant to arrest any black person right now, regardless of the scenario. I also expect that many good young cops will be considering new careers soon, and those considering joining a police force will start looking elsewhere.
T.
French Connexion,
I looked at the YouTube video with the translation from French into English. It is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYgiCALEdpE
As I read the translation, he is talking about a conversation which happened a couple of days before. He specifically says “a meeting the other day.” Later on in the interview he says that the two editors discussed the matter being “criminal,” in light of the Covid 19 outbreak. He noted that the editors literally used the word “criminal” in discussing what happened. That looks pretty clear to me. Now, it is possible that the translation is wrong and it is possible that it only looks like he is referring to a recent conversation. But to me it looks like Horton made these statements recently in light of the recent retraction of the study.
Regardless, this merits a serious investigation.
Hi taz1999,
you can start from here where there are several references to the fact that masks are mostly useless.
https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
You offer a valuable perspective to the conversation.
I do take some issue with changing the discussion to “all gov’t employees” ie bureaucrats. The difference being the lady at the DMV is not packing. Nor is the Property tax clerk. They are not mobile and moving at will in the community. They do not present a physical threat to the community. So I see this as a red herring.
I do not recall a bureaucrat costing a municipality millions in settlement money which comes out of the taxpayers pockets. Derek Chauvin directly and indirectly is costing Minneapolis millions in property damage, lost tax revenue from businesses and at least one manufacturer is leaving the city. Why are the taxpayers on the hook for that bill?
It is my understanding that there had been quite a number of complaints filed against him. As far as I know nothing came of them. Apparently the manager of the night club where he had been working security wanted to replace him but was afraid of reprisals. I have seen it reported that Amy Klobuchar was the prosecuting atty. in Minneapolis and in 8 years had 127 complaints, no prosecutions and the city paid 4 million in settlements. That definitely does speak to your call for extending liability. How to do that is another matter.
In my former business i was required to carry liability insurance in places where I displayed my work. I see no reason why police should not be required to as well.
Knowing a few cops and having spoken to a number it is clear that many are former service members, probably having served in the ME. There is a not small possibility that they are suffering from PTSD. or at least deeply affected by that experience. I am of the Vietnam generation so I have a lot of friends who are still having difficulty adjusting 50 years later. I do not think it unreasonable that some of these officers see the minorities in their jurisdiction as just more “hajis”. I am not painting all police departments with a broad brush but clearly it does not take an entire police force of Derek Chauvins to create lots of problems.
I live in the South and police forces in the South originated to control slaves. I can assure you there is still a great deal of racism here, inside and outside of the force. In the North police forces were formed by the industrialists who wanted to do business w/o interference. During the Occupy movement JP Morgan gave 4 million to the PBA and shortly thereafter Zucotti Park was cleared. What a coincidence. With a little forethought you could have been a cop in NYC and not have to worry about you pension being funded. lol That was a joke.
With all of that said, I take you to be a very caring , intelligent and experienced human being. So my questions to you are. Do we have a police problem? And if so how do you think to best rectify it?
BTW where I grew up the hunger games were, are, and always will be. For people of color the odds are never in their favor. Well the Floyd family has some pretty good odds of a successful lawsuit.
Thank you THc for this perspective. While I was watching the riots and protesters clashing, all I could think of was that study Chris quotes, when you put one rat in a cage and shock it, they just tolerate it after failing to find the source. When you put two rats in a cage and shock it, those rats attack each other even to the death.
The clashes that are going are just that. The country is getting shock after shock and everybody is blaming everyone else.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been in a riot. Raise your other hand if you’ve ever been in a riot in which you are the target of the mob’s rage and violence.
And that’s why Billy Joe McAlister jumped off the Tallahatchie bridge.
Love that band, and if I wasn’t going deaf, I would pull up one of their videos.
We won’t know what’s goin’ on if we seek the false safety, comfort and negative feedback loop validation of echo chambers filled with “like-minded” folk who fail to consider, listen to and HEAR “other” voices. That’s assuming, of course, that one actually cares. [Note: Ref. the video, I support first and second amendment rights.]
https://youtu.be/o5TmORitlKk
Hi all
Had anyone seen this? You need to scroll down in the link.
Beijing logs first local coronavirus case in weeks: Live updates
https://aje.io/duntw