@CSK:
At least 4 different entertainers have dropped out of festival of micro-weanies.
Don McLean of American Pie fame, Lee Greenwood who sings God Bless the USA, Larry Gatlin and Larry Stewart.
Hell… I use proper punctuation and grammar. And spell out all the words! (N.B., double-spacing in my text message app* automatically puts in a period.)
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*And, I believe, every other app. It may be an Android-wide thing.
I hope it’s not uncouth to bring up topics from another thread, but I missed my chance to laugh at Drew for playing the “gotcha libtards!” game yesterday when he posted a quote from an article (of course with no link).
@Drew:, I googled your quote. I found the original “article.” It’s just an uncredited facebook post with a photoshop of the earth and artic ice.
You are a very stupid, very gullible person.
I hesitated to type that in case it violated the sites TOS, but I think evidence at hand makes that a factual statement, not a polemic.
At least 4 different entertainers have dropped out of festival of micro-weanies. Don McLean of American Pie fame, Lee Greenwood who sings God Bless the USA, Larry Gatlin and Larry Stewart.
It’s good that they bailed, but what were they doing there in the first place?
Lauren Boebert is, hands down, one of the stupidest people in public life. Perhaps the stupidest. Yesterday she appeared on Hannity to proclaim that “when 9/11 happened, we didn’t ban planes.”
@CSK: I’m too old fashioned in my approach to phones: I don’t text. If you can’t be bothered to actually speak with me, than leave me the F alone. This has the affect of making me always the last to know, which is just fine with me because 99% of the time I couldn’t give a rat’s ass anyway. And that 1% of the time I do care? I couldn’t do anything about it anyway.
Victor Borge was a Danish comedian whose shtick was pretending to be a concert pianist while delivering a lot of gags. One of his pieces was that we should add audible punctuation to our oral discourse. Each punctuation mark had its own sound. A period was an abbreviated spit, “pfui”, sound. If you imagine a loud, abrupt “pfui” at the end of your text, then punctuating your text does indeed convey anger.
BTW, he played the piano well.
I had the joy of working a Victor Borge show. He was not only a great comedian and an excellent pianist, he was a genuinely wonderful individual.
During the show, he took time to comment to the audience (in Green Bay) that they were so very fortunate to have such a wonderful theatre, and such an amazing piano–the Bösendorfer concert grand ($150k back in 1990). The Bösendorfer has an extra octave at the low end. It has special pieces written just to use that extra octave. Borge, to show off the piano, launched into a vibrant piece that just blew us away.
The “slave power” thesis was also a claim about the structure of American government itself. As these antislavery politicians saw it, “the real underpinnings of southern power were regional unity, parity in the Senate, and the three-fifths clause of the Constitution,” the historian Leonard L. Richards writes in “The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780 to 1860.” Together, this gave the slaveholding oligarchs of the South a virtual lock on much of the federal government, including the Supreme Court.
Substitute the filibuster for the three-fifths clause and it reads as pretty current. Bouie later notes historians are skeptical of a “slave power” conspiracy. I tend to see the Civil War as mostly about slavery, but with a fair element of VA wanting to take their ball and go home if they couldn’t continue to dominate. But Bouie uses this as an intro to a pretty good meditation on the current anti-majoritarian nature of our government.
The Senate might have been counter-majoritarian by design, but there is a difference between a system that tempers majorities and one that stymies them from any action at all.
@gVOR08: The “Today’s Quote” on CNN is from Larry Gatlin:
TODAY’S QUOTE
“I’m a 2nd Amendment guy, but the 2nd Amendment should not apply to everyone. It’s that simple.”
– Country singer Larry Gatlin, on canceling his upcoming performance at this weekend’s annual NRA convention in Houston in the wake of the tragic school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. At least three other musicians who were scheduled to perform have also canceled.
(Emphasis added by me.)
Anyone want to explain to him how “rights” operate? I mean, I guess I appreciate the sentiment, but to quote a famous insurance commercial…that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
If I’m away from my desk and a text is urgent, they get a one- or two-word reply. If I’m at my desk, I move the switch on my Bluetooth keyboard so I can type and they get full grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Of course, I’m (a) old, (b) was a pseudo-academic in my technical career so was always writing as if it were for publication, and (c) worked for the state legislature in my public policy job where everything I wrote was published.
I often feel like one of a tiny minority in that I proofread e-mail and internet comments. As I have become old, the number of typos that I miss even with that has become disturbing.
@Jen:
Yeah, I saw that. The best possible interpretation I can put on it is that he meant to say that mentally ill people and violent felons shouldn’t have access to guns.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl: As with all fantasy, being a ridiculous is a requirement. Still, as a baseball fan I enjoyed the movie. It was entertaining, which is all I require a movie to be.
I started watching the new season of Kids In The Hall last night, expecting to be underwhelmed. It was great. One skit in particular in the first episode, about a gynecologist with the best “drop average in the city,” had me belly laughing.
As most people know, movie scripts have rewrites, even after shooting has started. Those are added to the script as colored revision pages. There is an industry standard.
White (unrevised)
Blue.
Pink.
Yellow.
Green.
Goldenrod
Buff.
Salmon.
Then you go back to white. I’ve been on films where by the end of the shooting schedule, we’re to our third Blue revision. In other words, LOTS of rewrites.
“Field of Dreams” is the only film I know of that on the last day of shooting was still working off of the original white draft. Not one revision. Not one set change. Not one location change. Not one character name change. Nothing. I have several friends who worked on that film and they love spilling that fact every chance they get.
So the Republicans won’t honor the Jan 6th Subpoenas. If the Democrats capitulate on this why not just dissolve the committee? I know people talk about June hearings that will make a difference, but in reality it won’t matter. Hard pushback on the subpoenas would matter. IANAL but can the Congressman be threatened with big fines and/or imprisonment.
I owned several cell phones over the years with text ability that I never used for texting. Just minimum talk. One day as I was waiting for a delivery from my pharmacist he texted me. It didn’t take long for me to figure out how to use the text function after that!
@CSK: Just for the record, I want Representative Boebert to know that I’m perfectly willing to support sending Army reservists and National Guard personnel into Texas to overthrow the government, shoot (and/or send to Gitmo) the supporters of said government, and install a democratic/pro-American one as we did in the case of 9/11.
@EddieInCA: ““Field of Dreams” is the only film I know of that on the last day of shooting was still working off of the original white draft.”
My guess is you’d find the same true with many of Clint Eastwood’s films. A good friend of mine used to run his company and produce his moves (for the entire great late period), and he told me that if Clint committed to a script, that was it. No need to change it. To such a degree that on one of his films the writer requested the opportunity to do another pass and was turned down.
And on Changeling, he took a project that started with a spec script and then went through years of development at another company — draft after draft, writer after writer. He threw it all out and shot the spec — because that was the script that excited people enough to buy in the first place.
@just nutha: It’s the “rights aren’t for everyone” that got me. Rights, by definition, are for everyone. You can lose your rights through criminal behavior, but the default is rights are yours unless you lose them.
Saying “the second amendment isn’t for everyone” is a very weirdly worded statement.
@Jen: I don’t think that, in practice, conservatives (and by extension, Americanist country music performers) believe that rights are for everyone. I see no particular evidence that would support a claim that “rights are for everyone” is a tenet of conservative/white supremacist thought. For example, I can’t think of anyone who believed that the Second Amendment applied to black ownership of firearms in… say… 1967.
@Tony W: You know, I am not a lawyer, and now I am wondering if there’s such a thing as a class-action defamation suit. I mean, probably not, but man, if Gosar said the kind of things about individuals he says about classes – in this case trans people – a massive lawsuit would land on his head in seconds.
I mean, is there a good reason we don’t allow class-action defamation sutis?
I’m too old fashioned in my approach to phones: I don’t text. If you can’t be bothered to actually speak with me, than leave me the F alone.
I’m the exact opposite: calling me includes the implied message “I think whatever I have to say is so damn important I expect you to immediately drop whatever you’re doing to listen to it”. Unless you texted or IMed me first to ask if it’s okay to call, it better really be an emergency or I’m not going to be very happy to hear from you.
Texts or IMs, being an asynchronous form of communication, leave me the option to respond when it’s convenient for me to do so.
I suspect this is largely a generational difference.
One of the things that allowed WeChat to dominate the Chinese app market (and wipe out it’s competition, QQ, which was from the same company!) was the ability to send voice messages. Not voice calls, but messages. Push a button, talk, and it gets sent off.
They became extremely popular–probably because typing Chinese is much more complicated than English–and then the shit hit the fan. Everyone was sending business associates these voice messages. The problem is, you can’t listen to them during a meeting (you can read texts), and if you miss something, you have to go back and listen to the entire thing again (wasting time). This last bit is especially pronounced (sorry) in a language with so many dialects.
You know, something just occurred to me regarding Rep. Gosar the Gosarian’s disgusting tweet falsely claiming the Texas shooter was a trans illegal alien. Remember when Sarah Palin was accused of provoking the 2011 shooting of Gabby Gifford through violent, incendiary rhetoric, and she called the accusation a “blood libel” against her? Gosar’s tweet fits far more into the historical definition of that term.
@OzarkHillbilly: @Stormy Dragon: There’s also the fact that quite often a text message can get through when a phone call won’t. I used to regularly carry out conversations via text because the signal strength would be down to 1/3 of a bar at my corner of the building and I knew that if I tried to make a phone call chances were high that the call would be dropped after one verbal exchange. (It was noted that the best location for signal strength was back in one corner of the file stacks.)
(See: signal strength in downtown Chicago skyscrapers, a.k.a. Faraday cages)
The mother of one of the survivng children that was in one of the classrooms that the killer shot up stated that her daughter smeared the blood of her friend that she (the daughter) knew was dead as she wanted to play dead as she was afraid the killer would come back, find her alive and kill her too.
After the killer went into the next classroon to kill more children the daughter also retrieved the cell phone off the body of her teacher who had just been shot dead by the killer who the daughter reported said: “Goodnight” before killing the teacher. The daughter then called 911 and said “we are in trouble”.
ALL THIS AS THE POLICE WERE IN THE HALLWAY JUST OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM!
@grumpy realist:..There’s also the fact that quite often a text message can get through when a phone call won’t.
The metal siding of my trailer house means that I always have to go outside on the front porch if I want to make or receive voice calls on my not-so-smart phone. I receive texts all the time while inside those metal walls. Most times I can send text or access the internet from inside as well.
Verizon Wireless has informed me that their 3G network will be retired by December 31, 2022 and that my device has been identified as one that will be affected by the change.
Maybe my new yet undetermined 4G phone will do better.
@senyordave: Not going to happen but if I were Nancy Pelosi, those who did not honor the subpoena would mysteriously find their proximity badges inoperative and their offices locked up. Memorial Day weekend seems to be the perfect time to do that.
@Mister Bluster: And it apparently gets worse. They didn’t go in because they thought they had time, because everybody was already dead, while they could still hear gunshots.
Oh, and the cops didn’t go rushing in because they didn’t want to get shot!!!
There are going to be lawsuits. Many, many lawsuits. And every single one of those 19 cops who stood in the hallway while that monster butchered children needs to be fired. And preferably ostracized and run out of town on a rail.
@senyordave: I’m reserving judgement until the hearings, because, hey, why not?, but if last performance is any indicator of future success, that would be the safe bet.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-“I see nothing! Nothing!”) said that he he would testify if they show him what they have on him first. In a just world his request would have been followed by a small amount of information and then an ambush at the hearings where all the good stuff comes out.
@Mimai: That was a stunningly good piece. It started out as kind of a glib thing that I responded to with “yeah, yeah”, but by category 4 had an entirely different response from me.
And yes, I have often described the sort of dumb thing that only a smart person can do. I usually mean “fish out of water” stupidity.
@Mister Bluster:
The kids today really prefer texts, I suspect they’ve come to view the phone as mostly spam, which is much rarer in texts. We hired a delivery driver who actually initially balked at the headset in the truck so we can communicate. We deliver to some complicated, big jobsites with delivery schedules that change.
He blurted out “Just text me!”…A driver…
I was pondering firing the kid on the spot. However the silence his ask engendered in me cause him to re-think that position. He grinned and slapped his head and said he was in the habit of saying that whenever someone said “I’ll call you.” It was just a habitual ask for the kid.
@Scott:
Fortunately, we both live in a world where no one in their right minds would ever put us in charge. Personally, I’d have Capital Police walk into their offices on the scheduled appearance date, place them in cuffs, and perp walk them into the chambers. If it was a congress kritter who brags about their personal carry choice, I’d have swat team do the entry. But again, unlike our fellow gentle readers, I’m not a nice person.
============
I’m late to the party on this one, but a couple years ago I had the opportunity to shadow the Dane County Sheriff department when they were doing “active shooter training”, and got to talk to the training officers involved.
Dane County (home to Madison, our capital) has a population of just of half a million, and a Sheriff’s department of just over 600. Every single member of the force is required to participate in a 4-part active shooter training every year. The final part is a full-on “paint ball” scenario where there are “live” rounds being fired on both sides.
Both [public information officer] Schaffer and Tactical Team trainer Mike Mohr, emphasized that last part. Every member of the department was required to go through this training–from patrol officers, to those guarding the jails to administrative officers with “desk jobs”. As Schaffer states: “You never know which officer is gong to be driving by when a call comes in.”
What the officers in Uvalde did was exactly what they should have been trained NOT to do.
After the Columbine shootings, law enforcement changed their approach. The standard policy shifted from “wait for the TAC team” to “wait for enough backup and go in together”. The definition of “enough backup” then evolved from “a team of 4” to “one other officer”. The standard policy now is for the first officer on the scene to enter the building and attempt to eliminate the threat. The failure of both the School Resource Officer (SRO) and the Broward County deputies to do this was a significant criticism in the wake of the shootings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Sgt. Jenatscheck put it in succinct terms: “First, stop the killing. Then stop the bleeding”.
To go into a little more detail: In addition to shadowing the training that day and speaking with multiple training officers and officers being trained, I spoke with my local police chief (who’s also a friend), and an officer with the Columbia County Sheriff’s department (where my home town is). They all said the same thing; Columbine was a wake-up call, and Sandy Hook showed them where their improved procedures still fell short.
SOP is very simple (as stated above): Stop the killing, then stop the bleeding. The moment there are two officers on the scene, they go in. And they do so in a methodical manner–just like you see in the movies. I was a little surprised by that (that movies & TV get it right). I watched 3 officers do a solo “clear and capture” (which each time was actually a “clear and kill” to make it more difficult) using “live” rounds (high-end paint rounds fired from actual service weapons).
The team I shadowed had one officer (a woman) who was not a patrol officer. She always took the back of the team (unless the TO forced her to the front), but she was still actively “cleaning” the scene. One could argue that as “hindmost” (thank you Larry Niven), she was the 2nd most important person on the team.
But every one of the officers I watched–from TAC to meter-maid took this training seriously, and knew how important it was to drill this training into them.
===============
TL;DR: Uvalde police fucked up. Big time. Objectively–based on nationally accepted and promoted standards and training for all police forces.
The civil suits are going to come, and I pray to whatever gods there may be that this shatters Qualified Immunity forever.
TX Gov. Greg Abbott cuts off reporters asking about shooting, investigation. Wants to first discuss benefits available, for example – someone’s glasses broke in the chaos, and he wants everyone to know they are covered. This is really happening live. @CNN
I am 1.104 scotches into a five-day[1] weekend (with travel and Scotch eggs![2] With Tinder active and an offer to buy food and drink and share a king-sized bed, there may be other naughtiness (I hope!))
If I get bored, soaked with rain, or overcome with heatstroke[3], I’ll peek in. Otherwise, I’ll see y’all on Friday[4].
[5]
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[1] In texts, I would be willing to type the digit, not the word, but this is real communication. 🙂
[2] I have my first “you had a heart attack, go see a cardiologist” appointment on the 8th. As someone who was raised Catholic, I have to ask: Am I required to confess having lusted after, consumed, and enjoyed said Scotch egg?
[3] Weather reports predict 90°. On the other hand, it’s springtime in Wisconsin; I’m not ruling out frostbite.
[4] Thursdays I usually work on a special project for the company founder’s wife and my computer is shut off.
[5] Yeah. I like using footnotes. Youz gotta problem wit dat? 😀
Here’s a little harmless (I hope) parenting fail, to give a little levity.
We were in the McDonalds drive through a little bit ago and my 9yr old son aske me, “mom, what’s sex?”
Now, I was unprepared for that. I didn’t want to give him some cutesy bs answer, but I also wanted to give him an age appropriate answer. Friends, I am here to tell you I failed on all counts. After a couple moments of panicked flailing, my lawyer brain took over and ejected:
“Its when people rub their genitals together for fun.”
It took him a moment to get that and let it sink in. I was then confronted with a slowly, yet increasingly horrified 9yr old as he thought through the implications of that. His response was, “I shouldn’t have asked that question.”
@Mu Yixiao: I missed that yesterday. That’s super interesting. It runs against what I was saying, but I guess I feel validated in the sense that what I imagined doing is what departments used to have as policy. So that’s something.
Thursdays I usually work on a special project for the company founder’s wife and my computer is shut off.
If the founder doesn’t know about this, maybe come up with a better euphemism when posting online. If the founder knows about this and is fine with it… rock on.
@Jax: “@Mister Bluster: And it apparently gets worse. They didn’t go in because they thought they had time, because everybody was already dead, while they could still hear gunshots.
“Oh, and the cops didn’t go rushing in because they didn’t want to get shot!!!”
@dazedandconfused: That’s interesting. In Korea, I got tons and tons of spam texts. Because spoofing wasn’t a thing yet, they were easy to recognize because they were from numbers I didn’t know (and mostly in Korean–another tip off), so they were easy to delete. A minor nuisance.
As @Mu Yixiao: said, the cops in Uvalde appear to have really fucked up. I hope they suffer and other cop shops learn from this. And this must end up undercutting qualified immunity. ( I commented yesterday about the English “future pretense” tense in which “must happen” means we all know it won’t.) But the fact is all this talk about unlocked doors and bad cops is a distraction from what everybody know is the real issue.
@Mu Yixiao: “As someone who was raised Catholic, I have to ask: Am I required to confess having lusted after, consumed, and enjoyed said Scotch egg?”
You seem to have a confusing (and confused) sense of what “lust” is, but yeah if you actually lusted after the egg, you might need to confess that. Having consumed and enjoyed consuming the egg don’t seem to be sins to me, but I’m not Catholic and may not know.
(Serious question: If you bang some [coarse reference, deleted] in the king-sized bed this weekend and the act turns out to have been mediocre, will that make the act less of a sin in Catholicism? The question has to do with your thought on needing to confess having enjoyed the egg.)
@dazedandconfused:..The kids today really prefer texts,..
Not like I want to be a kid again. And I really try not to refer to people younger than me as kids (at 75 that’s about everyone I know).
However when it comes to text vs. voice on my Verizon Wireless cellphone service I favor text. Kind of ironic since I spent 35 years in the landline telephone industry working on the wires.
I get the spam tag. Not that my cellphone actually rings all that often. I never answer it unless I know the caller and I want to talk to them. Almost no callers leave a voicemail. When they do I will listen at my leisure. Apparently the scammers who claim to be the IRS and threatened to issue an arrest warrant if I don’t return the call gave up on me as I haven’t received one of those messages in years. Now it’s solicitation to help me pay back my student loans. I paid those off 40 years ago.
Other than my brother in California or my sister in Missouri the only texts of importance I receive is when the gal that cuts my hair, Whitney Beaver, needs to change my appointment.
About the only time I give out my cell number is on the survey on the Taco Bell receipt where I could win $500! Of course they likely won’t leave a voice message and I’ll miss that call too!
If the founder doesn’t know about this, maybe come up with a better euphemism when posting online. If the founder knows about this and is fine with it… rock on.
LOL!!
If Fred were still alive, he’d actually give you a gold star for that. 🙂 He promoted what he called “creative disrespect”–or as the British would say “taking the piss”. He once snuck the UW Marching Band into the lobby of the factory so he could “take the piss” out of a friend of his. College football rivalry, and the “other guy” walked in to have the UWMB blast out “On Wisconsin” as he walked through the doors.
The “special project” is sifting through documents from the the first 30 years of the company and digitizing them for the “museum project”. While a lot of it is press clippings and product catalogs, there are some real treasures. Like… hand-drafted drawings for prototypes. In pencil! Honest to gods “guy sat down at a table with a pencil, a straight-edge, and a shipwright’s curve and drew things.
I missed the entire thread yesterday, and posted that this morning.
That’s super interesting. It runs against what I was saying, but I guess I feel validated in the sense that what I imagined doing is what departments used to have as policy. So that’s something.
I spent a few hours talking with the various LEOs asking a lot of questions and requiring a lot of clarifications (i.e., “what does that mean in normal-people words?”). I’m quite sure that every member of every police force I’ve built a (journalistic) relationship with is absolutely aghast at the behavior of the Uvalde police. They may not condemn them publicly (that’s politics), but in their own minds, I am sure they are doing so with vehemence.
@Beth:
Because I want to amplify your injection of levity…
Because I love your particular anecdote…
And because my free associations today apparently have a literary theme…
If you haven’t read The Parenting Storks short story by David Sedaris, I recommend. It’s part of his Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk collection that I find so delightful. In a disturbing kinda way. It’s brief too…the story and collection.
I’m a 2nd Amendment guy, but the 2nd Amendment should not apply to everyone.
OK, Gatlin probably is, as @just nutha: says, being ignorant and alluding to some fuzzy idea that only the right people should have 2A rights. But for 200 years it was not a personal right. As a collective right it was subject to considerable regulation. If we say 2A rights apply to everyone we’re buying into Scalia’s precedent burning decision in Heller.
So why the hell did they have a nine person SWAT team? Rhetorical question: I’m not directing my ire at you.
Honest answer: to conduct early morning no-knock raids on suspected drug dealers. That’s it.
They are justified to the public for active shooters, but their actual function is no-knock drug war raids. Breonna Taylor and just about everyone other person killed in a no-knock raid was killed by a SWAT team.
And the entire idea of the early morning no-knock raid is to reduce the chances of officer death in the line of fire (which is why they are excused even when they kill a legal gun owner in said raid).
There is so much to write about on this topic, I may unpack this more in the future.
They may not condemn them publicly (that’s politics), but in their own minds, I am sure they are doing so with vehemence.
And let’s all remain in awe of all amazing things that thin blue line of silence has done in terms of reforming and improving police behavior over the past 100 years or so.
I hope they suffer and other cop shops learn from this.
Define suffer.
Lose their job? Maybe temporarily… I have yet to find their contract, but I’m betting there is a forced arbitration clause in it that enables reinstatement. They’ll get a shitty position and still retire with full pension (or be offered an early retirement buy-out with full pension).
There is no duty to protect, so they can’t be prosecuted that way.
QI most likely covers them from any civil suit.
There’s a good chance that some will be able to go on disability due to the mental trauma of this event. For the record, I don’t think that’s a bad thing as this would be an event that creates trauma for most humans.
Worst comes to worst, if they are fired or otherwise decide to leave, they will just to move to another jurisdiction in TX. And since there is no binding national registry or even state registry for LEO dismissals and their licenses will most likely not be revoked, they can probably easily find other work at any of a number of sworn LEO departments (especially ones who think they got a raw deal in the press… or that this was a screw-up because the feds got involved). Or move into private security.
The reality is it is very, very, very difficult for LEO to ever be held accountable.
@Jax: ” And it apparently gets worse. They didn’t go in because they thought they had time, because everybody was already dead, while they could still hear gunshots.”
And it gets even worse. Because apparently many of those “dead” kids were making 911 calls begging for the police to come and save them. While the cops stood outside the door.
Skimming through the comments, I didn’t see anyone pointing out that the SCOTUS has ruled police are under no obligation to protect the public. Doesn’t matter what their training is. Hasn’t been litigated that I know of, but I assume that an order to go in after a known armed person could be viewed as an “unlawful order”. I suspect that this one will get to the SCOTUS eventually and we will all learn that restraining parents to “protect” them by denying access will also be protected behavior.
I’m still convinced that at some point the blue state legislatures will start working to convince the red state legislatures that they will all be happier if there’s a partition. Enough red state legislatures will be receptive. Add the SCOTUS rulings that add up to “Until actually proven crazy, the crazies can have all the guns they want” and “The police are under no obligation to protect the public when a crazy with a gun demonstrates that status” to the list of things they will agree to separate over.
The reporting today is there was a hail of shots in the first 4 minutes and only sporadic defensive fire at them after that. It’s not outrageous for officers to decide the guy had killed everyone in the room and was barricading.
Strikes me odd how quickly and deeply the damning of the police in this has taken hold. At this point the only thing I am confident of is the local PD is abysmal at crisis situation PR. Their peeps have been passing along hearsay and unverified information to the national press, which have either been contradicted by new information or by themselves.
How To Lose Every Scrap of Credibility In One Day -101.
@dazedandconfused: And the 911 calls coming from INSIDE the “barricaded” classroom. It wasn’t barricaded. All they needed was a key. All the lawmen in Texas couldn’t find a key in 45 minutes of standing in a hallway?
Even being as generous as possible to the police that they thought it was a barricade situation or even that they were unsure of what to do (tactical situations are chaotic especially without good training), I can’t get past them doing nothing at all. If it is a barricade then at least start talking to the guy. Try to get access to the wounded. Doing something isn’t always better than doing nothing, but I haven’t seen anything to make me think that is true in this case.
Yes, but that may have been from the assumption everybody in there was dead. It appears they moved right quick when the news came someone was alive in there (other than the perp). You seem to be asserting they sat there for 45min after the kid dialed 9/11. Last time-line I saw they went in 3 minutes after that call, about the time it would take for the info to reach them.
There have been multiple time-lines posted on this, mine stems from the info of this afternoon. Might’ve changed since then. Seems to change every hour or so.
Might have been hoping he would poke his head out so they could get a shot at it. Might have been they didn’t want to make a move before the rest of the school was evaced. If they knew the layout they would know they had the only doors covered.
I heard they were busting glass and getting the other rooms in the school empty of people, probably happening just as soon as they knew where the perp was hanging out. That hall was not usable evac route, at any moment a firefight could happen there. Only way to get them out was through the outside windows.
Strikes me odd how quickly and deeply the damning of the police in this has taken hold.
It fits various agendas. It shows a need for police reform. It shows the “good man with a gun” thing is absurd.
It gives Abbott, the NRA, et al something to blame to deflect from guns. It gives Cornyn and the senate GOPs an agenda that doesn’t involve gun control. Yes. these are contradictory. There’s no rule they not be.
@dazedandconfused: From 12:03 onwards, the kids were calling 911, while the cops stood in the hall.
Just in case anybody’s paywalled.
Mr. McCraw described the calls this way at a news conference Friday:
A caller identified — I will not say her name, but she was in room 112 — called 911 at 12:03. The duration of the call, was 1 minute and 23 seconds. She identified herself and whispered she’s in room 112.
At 12:10, she called back, in room 112, advised there are multiple dead.
At 12:13, again, she called on the phone.
Again at 12:16, she’s called back and said there was eight to nine students alive.
At 12:19, a 911 call was made, and another person in room 111 called. I will not say her name. She hung up when another student told her to hang up.
At 12:21, you could hear over the 911 call that three shots were fired.
At 12:36, a 911 call, it lasted for 21 seconds. The initial caller called back. The student-child called back, and was told to stay on the line and be very quiet. She told 911 that he shot the door.
At approximately 12:43 and 12:47, she asked 911 to please send the police now.
At 12:46, she said she not could not—— that she could hear the police next door.
At 12:50, shots are fired, they can be heard over the 911 call.
At 12:51, it’s very loud, and sounds like officers are moving children out of the room. At that time, the first child that called was outside before the call cuts off.
@dazedandconfused: Sounds to me like they didn’t exactly bust in when they got the 911 call, did they?! 45 minutes, they sat there and allowed him to butcher children who were begging for help.
Ok, so I’m not knowledgeable in police tactics, so maybe this is just wild thinking.
Apparently the classroom(s) where the gunman had barricaded were on the outside wall of the building. Those ground floor classrooms had windows.
A 30 dollar simple periscope would have enabled an officer to crawl along the outside wall and observe the gunman’s position to potentially relay information to a sniper. (hugging the wall would have prevented the gunman from observing the officer. Sometimes a tool used in WW1 might be the easiest, best way to observe without exposing an officer.
(from what I’ve heard other incident commanders say, a sniper initiated breach is the first step to breach the classroom.)
I think it’s important to note that a lot of the criticism about how the police responded is *coming from other cops.*
Yes, it matches a bunch of narratives–undercuts the “good guy with a gun” nonsense, allows Abbott to focus on something when he’s not talking about available benefits for victims, etc.
But bottom line, they didn’t follow the depressingly now-standard playbook.
Tim Cotton is a Maine cop who writes for the Bangor PD’s Facebook page. An excerpt of what he said this morning:
“Even when much is proven false, the following day’s reports provide information that makes each and every event even more horrible. Hearing about the law enforcement response and the possibility that someone was not fully prepared, in the right place, or couldn’t even get to the spot where they were needed sends numbness up my spine. A paralyzing feeling of, “would I—could I— have done better?”
What we can glean from this is that cops are reading the tick-tock of what happened and thinking “wait, that’s not right.”
@Jax: “Sounds to me like they didn’t exactly bust in when they got the 911 call, did they?! 45 minutes, they sat there and allowed him to butcher children who were begging for help.”
Well, it’s not like it was an urgent situation like a Black woman whose ex might have been dealing drugs before he moved out months ago. Then the cops will bust right in and kill everyone in the place. This was more of a wait-and-see situation.
Serious question: If you bang some [coarse reference, deleted] in the king-sized bed this weekend and the act turns out to have been mediocre, will that make the act less of a sin in Catholicism? The question has to do with your thought on needing to confess having enjoyed the egg.
I was, at first, going to say “no”. But thinking about it for a second, I think that enjoying the sin actually does make it “worse”. It’s not about the act, it’s about what’s in your mind and heart.
https://www.losangelesblade.com/2022/05/25/texas-trans-girl-assaulted-over-gop-lies-about-uvalde-shooting
A heartbreaking story about what it means to be trans in Texas today.
@Tony W:
Paul Gosar pretty typical, spreading lies is that the Red Team does.
OK, I was about to post a piece about guns and thought, “Man, we could really use a light open thread for once. It’s Friday, for crying out loud.”
You’re welcome.
My 25 year old daughter tells me that she ignores my use of periods in texts because she knows I’m an old fart, but if one of her peers said…
You’re welcome.
… instead of …
You’re welcome
… she would assume they were angry and perhaps threatening.
@MarkedMan:
Why is a punctuation mark threatening?????
Are periods still acceptable in non-text messages?
The NRA is billing its convention in Houston starting today as “a freedom-filled weekend for the entire family.”
Fourteen acres of the latest guns ‘n’ gear will be on display.
Donald Trump will be there.
@MarkedMan:
Ha. I punctuate in texts as well. But I also interpret periods in texts as an expression of anger.
Maybe that’s why everyone seems angry all the time these days. Stop the periods.
@CSK:
At least 4 different entertainers have dropped out of festival of micro-weanies.
Don McLean of American Pie fame, Lee Greenwood who sings God Bless the USA, Larry Gatlin and Larry Stewart.
@CSK:
Hell… I use proper punctuation and grammar. And spell out all the words! (N.B., double-spacing in my text message app* automatically puts in a period.)
=========
*And, I believe, every other app. It may be an Android-wide thing.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
Good for them.
@Mu Yixiao:
I too am old-fashioned in my approach to grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
@CSK: You can find a million articles online like this one.
I hope it’s not uncouth to bring up topics from another thread, but I missed my chance to laugh at Drew for playing the “gotcha libtards!” game yesterday when he posted a quote from an article (of course with no link).
@Drew:, I googled your quote. I found the original “article.” It’s just an uncredited facebook post with a photoshop of the earth and artic ice.
You are a very stupid, very gullible person.
I hesitated to type that in case it violated the sites TOS, but I think evidence at hand makes that a factual statement, not a polemic.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
Hot Damn, how bad do the optics have to be to lose Lee “Proud to be an Americuhn” Greenwood?
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
It’s good that they bailed, but what were they doing there in the first place?
@MarkedMan:
Unfiltered thoughts. Great. Now we can all sound like Donald Trump when we text.
Lauren Boebert is, hands down, one of the stupidest people in public life. Perhaps the stupidest. Yesterday she appeared on Hannity to proclaim that “when 9/11 happened, we didn’t ban planes.”
Moron.
@CSK: I’m too old fashioned in my approach to phones: I don’t text. If you can’t be bothered to actually speak with me, than leave me the F alone. This has the affect of making me always the last to know, which is just fine with me because 99% of the time I couldn’t give a rat’s ass anyway. And that 1% of the time I do care? I couldn’t do anything about it anyway.
Victor Borge was a Danish comedian whose shtick was pretending to be a concert pianist while delivering a lot of gags. One of his pieces was that we should add audible punctuation to our oral discourse. Each punctuation mark had its own sound. A period was an abbreviated spit, “pfui”, sound. If you imagine a loud, abrupt “pfui” at the end of your text, then punctuating your text does indeed convey anger.
BTW, he played the piano well.
@Slugger:
I had the joy of working a Victor Borge show. He was not only a great comedian and an excellent pianist, he was a genuinely wonderful individual.
During the show, he took time to comment to the audience (in Green Bay) that they were so very fortunate to have such a wonderful theatre, and such an amazing piano–the Bösendorfer concert grand ($150k back in 1990). The Bösendorfer has an extra octave at the low end. It has special pieces written just to use that extra octave. Borge, to show off the piano, launched into a vibrant piece that just blew us away.
Plus ca change.
Jamelle Bouie writes
Substitute the filibuster for the three-fifths clause and it reads as pretty current. Bouie later notes historians are skeptical of a “slave power” conspiracy. I tend to see the Civil War as mostly about slavery, but with a fair element of VA wanting to take their ball and go home if they couldn’t continue to dominate. But Bouie uses this as an intro to a pretty good meditation on the current anti-majoritarian nature of our government.
@gVOR08: The “Today’s Quote” on CNN is from Larry Gatlin:
(Emphasis added by me.)
Anyone want to explain to him how “rights” operate? I mean, I guess I appreciate the sentiment, but to quote a famous insurance commercial…that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
If I’m away from my desk and a text is urgent, they get a one- or two-word reply. If I’m at my desk, I move the switch on my Bluetooth keyboard so I can type and they get full grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Of course, I’m (a) old, (b) was a pseudo-academic in my technical career so was always writing as if it were for publication, and (c) worked for the state legislature in my public policy job where everything I wrote was published.
I often feel like one of a tiny minority in that I proofread e-mail and internet comments. As I have become old, the number of typos that I miss even with that has become disturbing.
@Mu Yixiao:
Ah, but did he finish it?
@Jen:
Yeah, I saw that. The best possible interpretation I can put on it is that he meant to say that mentally ill people and violent felons shouldn’t have access to guns.
Ray Liotta dead at 67.
@Michael Cain:
He did not. He just played one movement.
@OzarkHillbilly:
RIP.
Had to laugh when one article said that he thought the “Field of Dreams” script was ridiculous.
Me too.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl: As with all fantasy, being a ridiculous is a requirement. Still, as a baseball fan I enjoyed the movie. It was entertaining, which is all I require a movie to be.
@CSK: It’s an interesting subject for debate. Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz. Choose the stupidest.
@OzarkHillbilly:
My partner and I will have whole conversations over text using nothing but .gifs. If someone were ever to try and decode it they would go nuts.
@SC_Birdflyte:
Well, Boebert got her GED at the ripe young age of 34, so there’s that.
Gaetz and Greene have a certain animal cunning. Boebert lacks even that.
I started watching the new season of Kids In The Hall last night, expecting to be underwhelmed. It was great. One skit in particular in the first episode, about a gynecologist with the best “drop average in the city,” had me belly laughing.
@OzarkHillbilly:
@CSK:
As most people know, movie scripts have rewrites, even after shooting has started. Those are added to the script as colored revision pages. There is an industry standard.
White (unrevised)
Blue.
Pink.
Yellow.
Green.
Goldenrod
Buff.
Salmon.
Then you go back to white. I’ve been on films where by the end of the shooting schedule, we’re to our third Blue revision. In other words, LOTS of rewrites.
“Field of Dreams” is the only film I know of that on the last day of shooting was still working off of the original white draft. Not one revision. Not one set change. Not one location change. Not one character name change. Nothing. I have several friends who worked on that film and they love spilling that fact every chance they get.
@Mu Yixiao: Good man! I even double-space between sentences on twitter.
So the Republicans won’t honor the Jan 6th Subpoenas. If the Democrats capitulate on this why not just dissolve the committee? I know people talk about June hearings that will make a difference, but in reality it won’t matter. Hard pushback on the subpoenas would matter. IANAL but can the Congressman be threatened with big fines and/or imprisonment.
@SC_Birdflyte:
No contest: the people who vote for them.
@EddieInCA:
Holy hell.
I’ve done Shakespeare plays where the script is filled with revision notes. 😛
I owned several cell phones over the years with text ability that I never used for texting. Just minimum talk. One day as I was waiting for a delivery from my pharmacist he texted me. It didn’t take long for me to figure out how to use the text function after that!
@CSK: Just for the record, I want Representative Boebert to know that I’m perfectly willing to support sending Army reservists and National Guard personnel into Texas to overthrow the government, shoot (and/or send to Gitmo) the supporters of said government, and install a democratic/pro-American one as we did in the case of 9/11.
Re stupidity, this is a fun read.
Seven varieties of stupidity.
I am not sure if I heard this correctly on CNN.
The door that the killer entered was propped open by a teacher so they could retrieve a cellphone?!?!
I missed out on yesterday’s discussion about police.
@Here’s info on what was supposed to happen.
@EddieInCA: ““Field of Dreams” is the only film I know of that on the last day of shooting was still working off of the original white draft.”
My guess is you’d find the same true with many of Clint Eastwood’s films. A good friend of mine used to run his company and produce his moves (for the entire great late period), and he told me that if Clint committed to a script, that was it. No need to change it. To such a degree that on one of his films the writer requested the opportunity to do another pass and was turned down.
And on Changeling, he took a project that started with a spec script and then went through years of development at another company — draft after draft, writer after writer. He threw it all out and shot the spec — because that was the script that excited people enough to buy in the first place.
@Mister Bluster:
That appears to be true from the surveillance video.
@Jen: I don’t see any inconsistency. It’s part of the whole “binds but does not protect…protects but does not bind” thing we keep observing.
@senyordave: “…why not just dissolve…”
What? And admit that it was an empty gesture/performance art piece all along?
@just nutha: It’s the “rights aren’t for everyone” that got me. Rights, by definition, are for everyone. You can lose your rights through criminal behavior, but the default is rights are yours unless you lose them.
Saying “the second amendment isn’t for everyone” is a very weirdly worded statement.
@Mu Yixiao:..@Here’s info on what was supposed to happen.
If this is a link I can not make it work.
@Jen: I don’t think that, in practice, conservatives (and by extension, Americanist country music performers) believe that rights are for everyone. I see no particular evidence that would support a claim that “rights are for everyone” is a tenet of conservative/white supremacist thought. For example, I can’t think of anyone who believed that the Second Amendment applied to black ownership of firearms in… say… 1967.
@Mister Bluster:
Oh. It was supposed to link to my comment in yesterday’s police budget thread.
Hmm… Apparently the trick of clicking reply on yesterday’s comment and then copying it to today no longer works. 🙁
@Tony W: You know, I am not a lawyer, and now I am wondering if there’s such a thing as a class-action defamation suit. I mean, probably not, but man, if Gosar said the kind of things about individuals he says about classes – in this case trans people – a massive lawsuit would land on his head in seconds.
I mean, is there a good reason we don’t allow class-action defamation sutis?
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’m the exact opposite: calling me includes the implied message “I think whatever I have to say is so damn important I expect you to immediately drop whatever you’re doing to listen to it”. Unless you texted or IMed me first to ask if it’s okay to call, it better really be an emergency or I’m not going to be very happy to hear from you.
Texts or IMs, being an asynchronous form of communication, leave me the option to respond when it’s convenient for me to do so.
I suspect this is largely a generational difference.
@Stormy Dragon:
One of the things that allowed WeChat to dominate the Chinese app market (and wipe out it’s competition, QQ, which was from the same company!) was the ability to send voice messages. Not voice calls, but messages. Push a button, talk, and it gets sent off.
They became extremely popular–probably because typing Chinese is much more complicated than English–and then the shit hit the fan. Everyone was sending business associates these voice messages. The problem is, you can’t listen to them during a meeting (you can read texts), and if you miss something, you have to go back and listen to the entire thing again (wasting time). This last bit is especially pronounced (sorry) in a language with so many dialects.
It became a huge etiquette issue.
@Slugger: I *loved* Victor Borge’s routines, and the punctuation one was hilarious and slightly devious 🙂
@Franklin: He caressed her slowwwwly
Sorry, that was meant to end in that “pfui” sound
You know, something just occurred to me regarding Rep. Gosar the Gosarian’s disgusting tweet falsely claiming the Texas shooter was a trans illegal alien. Remember when Sarah Palin was accused of provoking the 2011 shooting of Gabby Gifford through violent, incendiary rhetoric, and she called the accusation a “blood libel” against her? Gosar’s tweet fits far more into the historical definition of that term.
@OzarkHillbilly: @Stormy Dragon: There’s also the fact that quite often a text message can get through when a phone call won’t. I used to regularly carry out conversations via text because the signal strength would be down to 1/3 of a bar at my corner of the building and I knew that if I tried to make a phone call chances were high that the call would be dropped after one verbal exchange. (It was noted that the best location for signal strength was back in one corner of the file stacks.)
(See: signal strength in downtown Chicago skyscrapers, a.k.a. Faraday cages)
The mother of one of the survivng children that was in one of the classrooms that the killer shot up stated that her daughter smeared the blood of her friend that she (the daughter) knew was dead as she wanted to play dead as she was afraid the killer would come back, find her alive and kill her too.
After the killer went into the next classroon to kill more children the daughter also retrieved the cell phone off the body of her teacher who had just been shot dead by the killer who the daughter reported said: “Goodnight” before killing the teacher. The daughter then called 911 and said “we are in trouble”.
ALL THIS AS THE POLICE WERE IN THE HALLWAY JUST OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM!
@grumpy realist:..There’s also the fact that quite often a text message can get through when a phone call won’t.
The metal siding of my trailer house means that I always have to go outside on the front porch if I want to make or receive voice calls on my not-so-smart phone. I receive texts all the time while inside those metal walls. Most times I can send text or access the internet from inside as well.
Verizon Wireless has informed me that their 3G network will be retired by December 31, 2022 and that my device has been identified as one that will be affected by the change.
Maybe my new yet undetermined 4G phone will do better.
@just nutha: If you mean that it was the usual toothless Democratic exercise showing how spineless they are I unfortunately agree with you.
@senyordave: Not going to happen but if I were Nancy Pelosi, those who did not honor the subpoena would mysteriously find their proximity badges inoperative and their offices locked up. Memorial Day weekend seems to be the perfect time to do that.
That’s why I could never be a politician.
@Mister Bluster: And it apparently gets worse. They didn’t go in because they thought they had time, because everybody was already dead, while they could still hear gunshots.
Oh, and the cops didn’t go rushing in because they didn’t want to get shot!!!
There are going to be lawsuits. Many, many lawsuits. And every single one of those 19 cops who stood in the hallway while that monster butchered children needs to be fired. And preferably ostracized and run out of town on a rail.
I’m so damn angry after that press conference.
@senyordave: I’m reserving judgement until the hearings, because, hey, why not?, but if last performance is any indicator of future success, that would be the safe bet.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-“I see nothing! Nothing!”) said that he he would testify if they show him what they have on him first. In a just world his request would have been followed by a small amount of information and then an ambush at the hearings where all the good stuff comes out.
@Jax: The incompetence is staggering. Absolutely staggering.
Anyone, and I mean ANYONE still saying “well, we just need more armed guards at schools” is a f&^%ing idiot.
@Mimai: That was a stunningly good piece. It started out as kind of a glib thing that I responded to with “yeah, yeah”, but by category 4 had an entirely different response from me.
And yes, I have often described the sort of dumb thing that only a smart person can do. I usually mean “fish out of water” stupidity.
Thanks for sharing.
@Mister Bluster:
The kids today really prefer texts, I suspect they’ve come to view the phone as mostly spam, which is much rarer in texts. We hired a delivery driver who actually initially balked at the headset in the truck so we can communicate. We deliver to some complicated, big jobsites with delivery schedules that change.
He blurted out “Just text me!”…A driver…
I was pondering firing the kid on the spot. However the silence his ask engendered in me cause him to re-think that position. He grinned and slapped his head and said he was in the habit of saying that whenever someone said “I’ll call you.” It was just a habitual ask for the kid.
I mean “it was the wrong decision” feels like one step away from ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@Scott:
Fortunately, we both live in a world where no one in their right minds would ever put us in charge. Personally, I’d have Capital Police walk into their offices on the scheduled appearance date, place them in cuffs, and perp walk them into the chambers. If it was a congress kritter who brags about their personal carry choice, I’d have swat team do the entry. But again, unlike our fellow gentle readers, I’m not a nice person.
Here’s what I wrote in the thread yesterday:
============
I’m late to the party on this one, but a couple years ago I had the opportunity to shadow the Dane County Sheriff department when they were doing “active shooter training”, and got to talk to the training officers involved.
What the officers in Uvalde did was exactly what they should have been trained NOT to do.
Here’s the full article. It’s worth a read (if I do say so myself).
===========
To go into a little more detail: In addition to shadowing the training that day and speaking with multiple training officers and officers being trained, I spoke with my local police chief (who’s also a friend), and an officer with the Columbia County Sheriff’s department (where my home town is). They all said the same thing; Columbine was a wake-up call, and Sandy Hook showed them where their improved procedures still fell short.
SOP is very simple (as stated above): Stop the killing, then stop the bleeding. The moment there are two officers on the scene, they go in. And they do so in a methodical manner–just like you see in the movies. I was a little surprised by that (that movies & TV get it right). I watched 3 officers do a solo “clear and capture” (which each time was actually a “clear and kill” to make it more difficult) using “live” rounds (high-end paint rounds fired from actual service weapons).
The team I shadowed had one officer (a woman) who was not a patrol officer. She always took the back of the team (unless the TO forced her to the front), but she was still actively “cleaning” the scene. One could argue that as “hindmost” (thank you Larry Niven), she was the 2nd most important person on the team.
But every one of the officers I watched–from TAC to meter-maid took this training seriously, and knew how important it was to drill this training into them.
===============
TL;DR: Uvalde police fucked up. Big time. Objectively–based on nationally accepted and promoted standards and training for all police forces.
The civil suits are going to come, and I pray to whatever gods there may be that this shatters Qualified Immunity forever.
HOW did Abbott even get elected? JFC.
I am 1.104 scotches into a five-day[1] weekend (with travel and Scotch eggs![2] With Tinder active and an offer to buy food and drink and share a king-sized bed, there may be other naughtiness (I hope!))
If I get bored, soaked with rain, or overcome with heatstroke[3], I’ll peek in. Otherwise, I’ll see y’all on Friday[4].
[5]
======
[1] In texts, I would be willing to type the digit, not the word, but this is real communication. 🙂
[2] I have my first “you had a heart attack, go see a cardiologist” appointment on the 8th. As someone who was raised Catholic, I have to ask: Am I required to confess having lusted after, consumed, and enjoyed said Scotch egg?
[3] Weather reports predict 90°. On the other hand, it’s springtime in Wisconsin; I’m not ruling out frostbite.
[4] Thursdays I usually work on a special project for the company founder’s wife and my computer is shut off.
[5] Yeah. I like using footnotes. Youz gotta problem wit dat? 😀
Here’s a little harmless (I hope) parenting fail, to give a little levity.
We were in the McDonalds drive through a little bit ago and my 9yr old son aske me, “mom, what’s sex?”
Now, I was unprepared for that. I didn’t want to give him some cutesy bs answer, but I also wanted to give him an age appropriate answer. Friends, I am here to tell you I failed on all counts. After a couple moments of panicked flailing, my lawyer brain took over and ejected:
“Its when people rub their genitals together for fun.”
It took him a moment to get that and let it sink in. I was then confronted with a slowly, yet increasingly horrified 9yr old as he thought through the implications of that. His response was, “I shouldn’t have asked that question.”
@senyordave: Well, I was shooting for less inflamatory, but yeah.
@CSK:
Why is a punctuation mark threatening?????
@Mu Yixiao: I missed that yesterday. That’s super interesting. It runs against what I was saying, but I guess I feel validated in the sense that what I imagined doing is what departments used to have as policy. So that’s something.
Anyway, I’m glad you posted. Thanks.
@Mu Yixiao:
If the founder doesn’t know about this, maybe come up with a better euphemism when posting online. If the founder knows about this and is fine with it… rock on.
@Jax: “@Mister Bluster: And it apparently gets worse. They didn’t go in because they thought they had time, because everybody was already dead, while they could still hear gunshots.
“Oh, and the cops didn’t go rushing in because they didn’t want to get shot!!!”
What? The? Fuck?
@dazedandconfused: That’s interesting. In Korea, I got tons and tons of spam texts. Because spoofing wasn’t a thing yet, they were easy to recognize because they were from numbers I didn’t know (and mostly in Korean–another tip off), so they were easy to delete. A minor nuisance.
@Jen: White hot rage. That’s all I got.
As @Mu Yixiao: said, the cops in Uvalde appear to have really fucked up. I hope they suffer and other cop shops learn from this. And this must end up undercutting qualified immunity. ( I commented yesterday about the English “future pretense” tense in which “must happen” means we all know it won’t.) But the fact is all this talk about unlocked doors and bad cops is a distraction from what everybody know is the real issue.
@Mu Yixiao: “As someone who was raised Catholic, I have to ask: Am I required to confess having lusted after, consumed, and enjoyed said Scotch egg?”
You seem to have a confusing (and confused) sense of what “lust” is, but yeah if you actually lusted after the egg, you might need to confess that. Having consumed and enjoyed consuming the egg don’t seem to be sins to me, but I’m not Catholic and may not know.
(Serious question: If you bang some [coarse reference, deleted] in the king-sized bed this weekend and the act turns out to have been mediocre, will that make the act less of a sin in Catholicism? The question has to do with your thought on needing to confess having enjoyed the egg.)
@gVOR08:
So why the hell did they have a nine person SWAT team? Rhetorical question: I’m not directing my ire at you.
@dazedandconfused:..The kids today really prefer texts,..
Not like I want to be a kid again. And I really try not to refer to people younger than me as kids (at 75 that’s about everyone I know).
However when it comes to text vs. voice on my Verizon Wireless cellphone service I favor text. Kind of ironic since I spent 35 years in the landline telephone industry working on the wires.
I get the spam tag. Not that my cellphone actually rings all that often. I never answer it unless I know the caller and I want to talk to them. Almost no callers leave a voicemail. When they do I will listen at my leisure. Apparently the scammers who claim to be the IRS and threatened to issue an arrest warrant if I don’t return the call gave up on me as I haven’t received one of those messages in years. Now it’s solicitation to help me pay back my student loans. I paid those off 40 years ago.
Other than my brother in California or my sister in Missouri the only texts of importance I receive is when the gal that cuts my hair, Whitney Beaver, needs to change my appointment.
About the only time I give out my cell number is on the survey on the Taco Bell receipt where I could win $500! Of course they likely won’t leave a voice message and I’ll miss that call too!
@Gustopher:
LOL!!
If Fred were still alive, he’d actually give you a gold star for that. 🙂 He promoted what he called “creative disrespect”–or as the British would say “taking the piss”. He once snuck the UW Marching Band into the lobby of the factory so he could “take the piss” out of a friend of his. College football rivalry, and the “other guy” walked in to have the UWMB blast out “On Wisconsin” as he walked through the doors.
The “special project” is sifting through documents from the the first 30 years of the company and digitizing them for the “museum project”. While a lot of it is press clippings and product catalogs, there are some real treasures. Like… hand-drafted drawings for prototypes. In pencil! Honest to gods “guy sat down at a table with a pencil, a straight-edge, and a shipwright’s curve and drew things.
@Jay L Gischer:
I missed the entire thread yesterday, and posted that this morning.
I spent a few hours talking with the various LEOs asking a lot of questions and requiring a lot of clarifications (i.e., “what does that mean in normal-people words?”). I’m quite sure that every member of every police force I’ve built a (journalistic) relationship with is absolutely aghast at the behavior of the Uvalde police. They may not condemn them publicly (that’s politics), but in their own minds, I am sure they are doing so with vehemence.
Thank you.
@Beth:
Because I want to amplify your injection of levity…
Because I love your particular anecdote…
And because my free associations today apparently have a literary theme…
If you haven’t read The Parenting Storks short story by David Sedaris, I recommend. It’s part of his Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk collection that I find so delightful. In a disturbing kinda way. It’s brief too…the story and collection.
@Jen:
OK, Gatlin probably is, as @just nutha: says, being ignorant and alluding to some fuzzy idea that only the right people should have 2A rights. But for 200 years it was not a personal right. As a collective right it was subject to considerable regulation. If we say 2A rights apply to everyone we’re buying into Scalia’s precedent burning decision in Heller.
@CSK:
Honest answer: to conduct early morning no-knock raids on suspected drug dealers. That’s it.
They are justified to the public for active shooters, but their actual function is no-knock drug war raids. Breonna Taylor and just about everyone other person killed in a no-knock raid was killed by a SWAT team.
And the entire idea of the early morning no-knock raid is to reduce the chances of officer death in the line of fire (which is why they are excused even when they kill a legal gun owner in said raid).
There is so much to write about on this topic, I may unpack this more in the future.
@Mu Yixiao:
And let’s all remain in awe of all amazing things that thin blue line of silence has done in terms of reforming and improving police behavior over the past 100 years or so.
@gVOR08:
Define suffer.
Lose their job? Maybe temporarily… I have yet to find their contract, but I’m betting there is a forced arbitration clause in it that enables reinstatement. They’ll get a shitty position and still retire with full pension (or be offered an early retirement buy-out with full pension).
There is no duty to protect, so they can’t be prosecuted that way.
QI most likely covers them from any civil suit.
There’s a good chance that some will be able to go on disability due to the mental trauma of this event. For the record, I don’t think that’s a bad thing as this would be an event that creates trauma for most humans.
Worst comes to worst, if they are fired or otherwise decide to leave, they will just to move to another jurisdiction in TX. And since there is no binding national registry or even state registry for LEO dismissals and their licenses will most likely not be revoked, they can probably easily find other work at any of a number of sworn LEO departments (especially ones who think they got a raw deal in the press… or that this was a screw-up because the feds got involved). Or move into private security.
The reality is it is very, very, very difficult for LEO to ever be held accountable.
@Jax: ” And it apparently gets worse. They didn’t go in because they thought they had time, because everybody was already dead, while they could still hear gunshots.”
And it gets even worse. Because apparently many of those “dead” kids were making 911 calls begging for the police to come and save them. While the cops stood outside the door.
Skimming through the comments, I didn’t see anyone pointing out that the SCOTUS has ruled police are under no obligation to protect the public. Doesn’t matter what their training is. Hasn’t been litigated that I know of, but I assume that an order to go in after a known armed person could be viewed as an “unlawful order”. I suspect that this one will get to the SCOTUS eventually and we will all learn that restraining parents to “protect” them by denying access will also be protected behavior.
I’m still convinced that at some point the blue state legislatures will start working to convince the red state legislatures that they will all be happier if there’s a partition. Enough red state legislatures will be receptive. Add the SCOTUS rulings that add up to “Until actually proven crazy, the crazies can have all the guns they want” and “The police are under no obligation to protect the public when a crazy with a gun demonstrates that status” to the list of things they will agree to separate over.
@Matt Bernius: “The reality is it is very, very, very difficult for LEO to ever be held accountable.”
I’m thinking there may be some in Texas currently stocking up on tar and feathers.
@Mister Bluster:..(at 75 that’s about everyone I know).
Good Grief Charlie Brown!* That would be 74. 75 is seven months away and will arrive soon enough.
*I know he debuted almost 3 years after I was born but we share a last name and my grade school teachers sounded like this every day.
@wr:
The reporting today is there was a hail of shots in the first 4 minutes and only sporadic defensive fire at them after that. It’s not outrageous for officers to decide the guy had killed everyone in the room and was barricading.
Strikes me odd how quickly and deeply the damning of the police in this has taken hold. At this point the only thing I am confident of is the local PD is abysmal at crisis situation PR. Their peeps have been passing along hearsay and unverified information to the national press, which have either been contradicted by new information or by themselves.
How To Lose Every Scrap of Credibility In One Day -101.
@wr: I can’t get over the “If I thought an apology would help, I’d apologize” part. The motherfucker could at least try.
But I’m sure he’s not allowed to, for liability reasons. Never admit guilt. When you’re a star (or a cop), they let you do whatever you want, right?
@dazedandconfused: And the 911 calls coming from INSIDE the “barricaded” classroom. It wasn’t barricaded. All they needed was a key. All the lawmen in Texas couldn’t find a key in 45 minutes of standing in a hallway?
Even being as generous as possible to the police that they thought it was a barricade situation or even that they were unsure of what to do (tactical situations are chaotic especially without good training), I can’t get past them doing nothing at all. If it is a barricade then at least start talking to the guy. Try to get access to the wounded. Doing something isn’t always better than doing nothing, but I haven’t seen anything to make me think that is true in this case.
@Jax:
The most recent time-line shows they went in just a couple minutes after that 9/11 call came.
@dazedandconfused: After standing around in the hallway for 45 minutes, by their own admission.
Also, nobody’s mentioned the wounded. I’ve read as many as 38 were shot, in total, 21 died that day. The death total has since changed to 23.
I wonder how many children bled out in that 45 minutes?
@Jax:
Yes, but that may have been from the assumption everybody in there was dead. It appears they moved right quick when the news came someone was alive in there (other than the perp). You seem to be asserting they sat there for 45min after the kid dialed 9/11. Last time-line I saw they went in 3 minutes after that call, about the time it would take for the info to reach them.
There have been multiple time-lines posted on this, mine stems from the info of this afternoon. Might’ve changed since then. Seems to change every hour or so.
@Erik:
Might have been hoping he would poke his head out so they could get a shot at it. Might have been they didn’t want to make a move before the rest of the school was evaced. If they knew the layout they would know they had the only doors covered.
I heard they were busting glass and getting the other rooms in the school empty of people, probably happening just as soon as they knew where the perp was hanging out. That hall was not usable evac route, at any moment a firefight could happen there. Only way to get them out was through the outside windows.
@dazedandconfused:
It fits various agendas. It shows a need for police reform. It shows the “good man with a gun” thing is absurd.
It gives Abbott, the NRA, et al something to blame to deflect from guns. It gives Cornyn and the senate GOPs an agenda that doesn’t involve gun control. Yes. these are contradictory. There’s no rule they not be.
@dazedandconfused: From 12:03 onwards, the kids were calling 911, while the cops stood in the hall.
Just in case anybody’s paywalled.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/us/texas-shooting-911-call-press-conference.html
@dazedandconfused: Sounds to me like they didn’t exactly bust in when they got the 911 call, did they?! 45 minutes, they sat there and allowed him to butcher children who were begging for help.
Ok, so I’m not knowledgeable in police tactics, so maybe this is just wild thinking.
Apparently the classroom(s) where the gunman had barricaded were on the outside wall of the building. Those ground floor classrooms had windows.
A 30 dollar simple periscope would have enabled an officer to crawl along the outside wall and observe the gunman’s position to potentially relay information to a sniper. (hugging the wall would have prevented the gunman from observing the officer. Sometimes a tool used in WW1 might be the easiest, best way to observe without exposing an officer.
(from what I’ve heard other incident commanders say, a sniper initiated breach is the first step to breach the classroom.)
I think it’s important to note that a lot of the criticism about how the police responded is *coming from other cops.*
Yes, it matches a bunch of narratives–undercuts the “good guy with a gun” nonsense, allows Abbott to focus on something when he’s not talking about available benefits for victims, etc.
But bottom line, they didn’t follow the depressingly now-standard playbook.
Tim Cotton is a Maine cop who writes for the Bangor PD’s Facebook page. An excerpt of what he said this morning:
What we can glean from this is that cops are reading the tick-tock of what happened and thinking “wait, that’s not right.”
@dazedandconfused: “It’s not outrageous for officers to decide the guy had killed everyone in the room and was barricading.”
Well sure — except for the fact that children inside the room kept calling 911.
No, I take that back. It is outrageous. How could they know if there were children wounded who had a chance at life if rescued?
“What the heck, those children are probably all dead, let’s chill” is not an appropriate decision for a cop to make.
@Jax: “Sounds to me like they didn’t exactly bust in when they got the 911 call, did they?! 45 minutes, they sat there and allowed him to butcher children who were begging for help.”
Well, it’s not like it was an urgent situation like a Black woman whose ex might have been dealing drugs before he moved out months ago. Then the cops will bust right in and kill everyone in the place. This was more of a wait-and-see situation.
@just nutha:
I was, at first, going to say “no”. But thinking about it for a second, I think that enjoying the sin actually does make it “worse”. It’s not about the act, it’s about what’s in your mind and heart.
@just nutha:
Nope. You just have a limited definition of what lust is. I’m going for #2
lust noun
\ ˈləst
1: usually intense or unbridled sexual desire : LASCIVIOUSNESS
He was motivated more by lust than by love.
2a: an intense longing : CRAVING
a lust to succeed
b: ENTHUSIASM, EAGERNESS
admired his lust for life
3 (obsolete)
a: PLEASURE, DELIGHT
b: personal inclination : WISH