When I started seeing stories about this, my immediate reaction is “someone’s lying.” That’s a given, because exaggerating things just a bit is built into every part of the fabric of US military procurement. As is secrecy, greed, and other bits of Lovecraftian evil. So, take everything here with a grain of salt because public information is mighty thin, right now.
Yesterday I published a posting that was substantially wrong. Ow! [stderr] But, it got me looking into the question of how cop departments pay off awards against them. It’s unsurprisingly murky, but there are stories that indicate how the delicate maneuvers are made.
It was a historic moment, when the city council of Minneapolis agreed that they would defund the police. [npr] But – and there’s always a “but” – guess what didn’t happen?
This is to help defray FTB’s legal debts from Richard Carrier’s defamation lawsuit. Details and rules are below:
I’m a bit bummed that Trump didn’t say more – or, rather, that Woodward didn’t publish everything that Trump blurted out. Remember, Woodward has a history of being barely oppositional to the presidency. Generally, he is sympathetic, because that’s how he gets access.
Wednesday got weird.
My recent study of labor relations in the US, during “the golden age” (AKA “when the robber barons ruled”) leaves me with a memory of beatings. Endless beatings. It seems as though the establishment’s first resort when confronted is to grab a stout stick, and beat on someone. If that doesn’t work, they beat that person’s wife and kids.
Donald Trump specializes in self-own. This has actually resulted in a sort of mini-revelation for me: now I respect all presidents less than I used to; we’re into negative numbers.
When the FBI and DHS fusion centers started building vast, unregulated, facial recognition databases, they shrugged elaborately and said that there weren’t any standard protections for doing so, and that they were just experimenting, and it wasn’t going to be used operationally until the legalities were all sorted out.
Some of you have doubtless heard of the Haymarket Affair.