Category: Politics

Reasonable Doubt

America need an org that identifies police misconduct instead of DNA testing and will file motions for new trials to present the perfectly reasonable argument that flagrant misconduct is likely not an isolated incident. Somewhat like Project Innocence, but with a different basis for their requests. 

There were some cops in Philly (well, I’m sure this isn’t unique to Philly) who got fed up with not finding evidence on people who they “knew” were clockin … so they planted what they needed to find, ignored search and seizure laws, etc. The city had to go back through a whole lot of cases because, hey, that’s reasonable doubt as Bob has been saying for three years that it wasn’t his crack. If memory serves, the city also had to fork over a bunch of money in restitution.
 
Would an officer who is willing to kill someone take the mindset of the Philly cops? ‘Knows’ the person is guilty, frustrated that no evidence can be found. Even without extrapolating additional misconduct, how many *other* people were ‘resisting’ like Mr. Floyd? People who ended up incarcerated for resisting arrest and/or assaulting an officer. The actions of the individuals in Minnesota seems like new evidence that would create reasonable doubt in other cases where the officers involved claim someone was resisting. Bob says he wasn’t resisting arrest. Officer Fred, who has demonstrably lied saying a compliant person was resisting, says Bob was resisting. That’s a far different assertion than Bob says he wasn’t resisting, Officer Fred, who is an upstanding officer with a decade of service, says Bob was resisting.

Bad Apples

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ‘few bad apples’ thing people like to say whenever police violence is reported. That’s not the whole saying. The rest is *spoils the whole bunch”. We grow potatoes. An actual job at my house is going through the bins of harvested potatoes every week or so and pulling out the bad ones. All year long.
My point? Well, if I left those few bad potatoes in the bin … after a few weeks, I’d have nothing but rotted potatoes in that bin. What if I let my potatoes move around between bins without keeping track of rotted ones? By mid-January, I’d have a lot of bins full of rotted potatoes.

 

Returning Pro

I’m hoping the NFL hires Kaepernick on as a Director of Community Relations or Social Progress or something. I don’t follow football anymore … but he last played in 2016 or 2017. I’m sure he’s physically active, but he hasn’t been playing pro football for three years. He’s at a huge disadvantage coming back into the league now; and, external factors aside, he probably doesn’t command multi-year multi-million dollar contracts.
 
But the NFL obviously could use help ensuring the league is advocating for beneficial social changes instead of penalizing players for respectful protest (they’ve got a physical activity campaign for kids, so it’s not like they don’t engage in tangentially related causes). Kaepernick obviously has the bravery and conviction to speak up even if the topic isn’t wildly popular yet.

Masking the Free Market

I’ve noticed that dedication to “free market” seems highly correlated to “you made the decision I support” … if we make an a priori assumption that requiring a mask be worn is somehow an infringement of individual liberties (not a stance I take, but accept it for the sake of argument), isn’t each individual’s ability to “vote with their dollars” a main tenant of the so-called ‘free market’?
 
I’m close to getting a Costco membership *because* they’re the only grocery joint around here that was making customers wear masks. It’s out of the way, I don’t think they’ve got the convenient order-online-drive-through-pickup thing, and I have no idea what their vegetarian selection is like. But I hate giving my money to support Giant Eagle’s lax enforcement of actual requirements (employee wearing mask does not mean around their neck) and refusal to require common-sense safety precautions like masks for customers. And that’s the free market. Enough people go one way or the other, the companies will change their stance.
 
And *forcing* a company not to require a mask violates that company-person (thanks, Citizens United) liberties too, doesn’t it?

Pants?

A friend pointed out that pants offer a little protection for me, but they are a lot of protection for you … So we can all stop wearing pants now, right? And protesting stores that require customers to wear pants! Freedom! Liberty!

Bare Cupboards

I loathe how Trump is interviewed. Reporters let him blather on, throwing blame for our current situation without clarifying facts. David Muir interviewed Trump on the news tonight. Trump claims to have come into the office with the cupboards bare — in a really bad position, with broken tests, blah blah blah. And Muir pushed back a little — it’s the third year of Trump’s presidency … if he knew there were massive gaps in our preparedness, shouldn’t he have filled them by now?

Which is a decent question, The Trump administration’s own budget request from Feb 2020 (i.e. the budget submitted after reasonable people realized this virus was going to be a problem) didn’t ask for any increase in funding for the strategic national stockpile.

But the line of questioning doesn’t address the omitted facts from Trump’s original claim. Firstly, Obama didn’t leave Trump a stockpile of functional SARS-CoV-2 tests because the virus had not been encountered in humans yet. There are probably millions of viruses we’ve not yet encountered, and Obama didn’t use his vast psychic powers to order the Time Force to travel into the future and bring back a few million tests (and, really, I think Obama was clever enough he’d probably have ordered them to travel farther into the future and bring back a vaccine and manufacturing instructions). That’s an outright silly assertion.

There were supplies that the national stockpile lacked. Why? The Obama administration asked for 65 million dollars to increase the stock. Didn’t get it. Equipment was used during the swine flu outbreak, and Obama wanted a 10% budget increase to replenish the supply. Didn’t get it. There was a Republican push to reduce budgets across the board — remember the tea party? The CDC had budget increases due to biosecurity concerns after 9/11, so they were an obvious target. The cut-budgets-or-sequestration debt ceiling debacle — with the predictable result that no agreement could be made on targeted budget cuts — farther reduced CDC funding. While it’s technically true that the Obama administration reduced funding for the CDC, there’s a lot of duress that’s glossed over. And it’s not like the Republicans were sidelined as a minority screaming about how we needed to spend this money.

Alas, to Trump’s benefit and the detriment of politics in general … there’s very little interest in diving into the details. Democrats assume Trump is some combination of incompetent and dishonest, Republicans assume Trump’s right and it’s all Obama’s fault.

Biosecurity and a return to normal

I’ve been hearing a lot, lately, about the “return to normal” — what do you most want to do when we return to normal, when do you think we’ll be returning to normal, what changes do you think they’ll need to make before we can return to normal. And the questions strike me as wrong-footed. Especially as Trump and Pompeo talk about SARS-CoV-2 coming from a lab. Now “came from a lab” doesn’t necessitate malicious intent. The fundamental, longstanding problem I’ve had with gain of function research (the reason I wasn’t at all upset when the Obama administration put thought into the cost and benefits of this research and subsequently dropped government funding for this research and I didn’t think it was a stellar idea to resume funding) is that biosecurity is so difficult. And the spread of this virus highlights how vulnerable we were.

Sure, nation-states have forsworn biological warfare … but that’s not everyone. This release was probably accidental. I don’t say that because of any insider knowledge, but if I wanted to release an infectious disease … I’d have done a better job of infecting people. Get some infectious people at the Super Bowl – eating and drinking downtown, riding the public transit system, walking around the stadium. Or send people to ride mass transit in a few major cities – spend a day riding trains through Waterloo station, a day milling around Grand Central. If there are suicide bombers willing to literally blow themselves up for the cause … it seems like they’d be equally willing to inject themselves with some infectious disease. And the border agents can search whatever they want — the easiest thing in the world to ‘smuggle’ into a country is your own bloodstream. No explosive or drug sniffing dog is going to notice, no aeroport scanner will see anything because there’s basically nothing to find. Unless this is malicious intent with the forethought to make it look accidental (or a different actor framing the ‘obvious’ culprit) … it’s accidental.

The fact no one has done it yet is rather amazing. We’ve demonstrated our susceptibility to biological attack. We’re in the middle of demonstrating our unwillingness to take actions to prevent the spread of a disease. I absolutely believe this is an attack vector that will be exploited in the future. So why would we want to return to the previous “normal”?!

Unmasked

So … Gov DeWine dropped the requirement that customers wear masks when going into retail stores because people didn’t like it. Does that mean we can get rid of speed limits?

Also, how do people not get the irony of traveling to a mass gathering where people are not wearing masks to protest … not being allowed to travel, congregate, and avoid wearing masks!? I get that a lot of the protest centers around the “back to work” part of congregating … but on the face, protesters are doing exactly what they claim to not be permitted to do.

Protesting the Protests

There are some people protesting the stay at home orders – I see videos from outside of DeWine’s daily briefings, and several other states seem to have similar problems. Apart from the question of astroturfing, problem is that there’s very little opportunity for counter-protests. When you go to DC, there are PETA people counter-protesting the people looking to fund medical research (animal testing). There are vegans counter-protesting people looking to increase subsidies in the meat industry. I’ve never seen an abortion protest that didn’t have both sides represented.

These ‘liberate us’ protests? These are people who don’t think they should have to stay at home – they should allowed to hang out at bars, eat in restaurants, shop, party, and … oh yeah … crowd together at protests. The people who think the stay-at-home and shelter-in-place orders are important to protect their health? Seems like a far smaller portion of them would be willing to hang out in Columbus in a protest. Even if they could find masks and whatnot.

Why drive somewhere nonessential? Your car breaks down, and you’re exposed to others (and exposing them to you). You get into an accident and you’re exposed to others (and exposing them to you). Get injured in the accident and you’re adding to the patient load at hospitals. We’re not just staying at home to avoid large congregations. We’re staying at home to create less load for emergency personnel.

Don’t Privatize USPS

Please text “USPS” to 50409 so that a letter on your behalf can be sent to your state officials petitioning to make financial support of the USPS a priority.

Privatizing USPS seems oddly short-sighted from a bunch of people supported by rural voters. Privatizing the post office may be a bit of OK for people who live up in NYC or down in Miami — they can stop subsidizing delivery out to a cabin in South Dakota that sits on 11,000 acres. Never got much mail, so I don’t know if post office had one employee whose daily route was like eight houses or if delivery was once a week. It’s *not* great, however, for large, low-population-density swaths of the country (i.e. a good bit of the Republican base).

As a private enterprise, increasing profitability is the goal. The Post Office has studies that go into new-line-of-business ideas that are quite clever. They’re paying someone to drive by grandma’s house anyway … you pay a few bucks a month and the delivery person will ring the bell once a week to make sure grandma is OK. It’s *possible* the privatized USPS, without restriction on what they’re allowed to do and what they’re allowed to charge for their services, will branch out into a bunch of lines of business centered around “we have someone driving by there every day anyway”. But petrol is expensive, vehicle maintenance is expensive, and people are very expensive. You see anyone going with an all-electric fleet powered by on-site wind and solar? I’d guess contract workers with no benefits.

If I were operating neo-USPS, I’d become the largest interest-based advertising agency around. Sure, targeted advertising wouldn’t be as many pieces of mail as the grocery flyer that is sent to the entire postal code, but my cost per unit would go up because it’s targeted. And reducing the number of recipients cuts delivery cost. I’d probably sell ad space that I stamped onto mail transiting my system. I’m paying someone to get this delivery to you either way; why not make an extra cent by throwing an ad for a pizza chain on it? Throw a jewelry chain’s logo on the cancellation stamp. Stamps themselves are ad space. And when I don’t sell all of this ad space? I’ll donate it (tax writeoff) and have promos for non-profits.

How will mail delivery work in my neo-USPS? Specifically in rural parts of the country? I’d noticed Amazon pick-up lockers outside the one grocery store in town — that might be a way to keep a relatively local pick-up point. But it eliminates “Postal Customer” delivery … which I suspect is a good bit of the current revenue and an increased share of my new company’s business model. Turning the post office into a package delivery service probably isn’t the way to go. The model I’d follow is called “general delivery” now. I have a few friends with remote off-the-grid type homesteads outside of the carrier delivery area who use this free service. Address a letter to “Bob Smith\nGeneral Delivery\nPost Office City, State ZIP” and the letter/package sits at that post office location waiting for Bob to pick it up. The post office holds mail in the back for x days until they swing by. Which then means they’ve got to swing by the post office every so often.

Unlike PO boxes where the outer area is open 24×7 and you can open your box at 7P on the way home from work or 7A on the way to work, you’ve got to arrive when they are opened and staffed. Office in my town is staffed between 8:30 and 5 with an hour-long lunch break at 11:30 (and open 9A and noon on Saturday). But I’m certain privatized USPS will have better hours. Down side, though, is they’ll have far fewer locations. There won’t be an office five minutes from my house — it’s inefficient. There will be a few offices in Cleveland and the major suburbs. I’ll be getting my mail out of Strongsville or Parma. Maybe Brunswick or Medina. And I live in an area with decently high population density. That cabin out in South Dakota? I’d be driving up to Rapid City about two hours (each way). Four hours of driving? That’s a day right there — my quarterly “stock up in town” trip would become a monthly run.