@MadScientist who is he?

Oh Germany ambassador

Debate is at 9-11 EST

On nbc/msnbc

@MadScientist About that…

> A few interesting results in this poll: Sanders is beating Biden and Bloomberg among moderates, and 20% of adults think Sanders is too conservative.

also what the hell are these mods doing

let me moderate

I'd do a good job

I'd get belligerent and yell at Joe and ask him what the heck he was talking about all day

it'd be great

Joe what are you on about this isn't a response

it'll be great

> It's extremely hard to conceptualize just how rich people like Bloomberg are. I recently saw a thing going around that said "If you made $7,000/hour nonstop since 1AD, you'd still be worth less than Jeff Bezos," and I was like "No, that can't be right," but it totally is.

good gravy

Here's closer up on the protests at the end: twitter.com/RAICESACTION/status/1230341602775728128

@Unionhawk on Planet America Chas Licciardello said that if Bloomberg spent something like 100 million every day for his election up until the election, he would still have something like over 50 billion left

and i think currently he's spent 140 million already which is way more than any other democrat candidate so far

US lawmaker - "avoiding space debris may require new legal framework"

American police, WTF

Old story, but just heard about this. What in the ever loving fuck.

A police officer was fired for not shooting a suicidal man. Stumbled across this when folks were talking about how the US Military is less militarized than the US Police, and wow, turns out it's true?!

I guess US military actually get a lot of training about the importance of deescalation, and that your gun is your last resort.

Where as the police are all PEW PEW PEW.

@Wipqozn There's a really good poster series on alternatives to policing that I really like: madsa.ga/blog/2018/07/07/alternatives-to-police-poster-series

because like yeah, you call 911 for someone having a mental health crisis, the police will show up and escalate the situation

@Unionhawk I think instead of establishing a dozen separate services, why not reform the police so they react more appropriate to these events?

Like, give the police a mental health intervention team

At that point you're just creating a whole new thing anyway

The fact is police are poorly equipped to handle these things

they're well equipped to arrest and shoot people though

This is also looking at it from an abolitionist framework; answering "how can we handle this situation if we don't have the police"

@Unionhawk You're also looking at it from a US PoV where because of historical reasons the police has morphed into a trigger happy group with a lot of inherent racism and sexism. If I look at the police in Belgium, we don't have problems with cops shooting unarmed civilians or strangling black people to death

Also, some situations need the police. You still need a police force to deal with things like violent criminals

Like, do they have an alternative for "a group of Maffia thugs robs a bank"?

Or "a psychopath has a rampage in a city mall, shooting anyone who he can see"?

@Unionhawk I mean, there's a difference between "incidents of gun violence" and "4 mafiosi rob a bank"

@Nzall Military

@Nzall How often do you think the opening scene from the dark knight happens

@Unionhawk Maybe that's an extreme example that rarely happens anymore

swap the trigger happy group with a lot of inherent racism and sexism with the non-trigger happy group

@Memor-X At that point, you'd need to suspend Posse Comitatis

and I'm fairly sure that using the military against your own civilians ranks pretty high on the war crimes chart

even if those civilians are a danger to everyone else

@Nzall then call the Military the Police and call the Police the Military

@Memor-X You're just swapping terms around.

My point is, you already have a national force of trained professionals who can deal with these problems, but they have the problem that they have some loose cannons and people that shouldn't be there, and that they're not trained to deal with certain situations. At that point, why not just get rid of those loose cannons and train the rest?

No we don't

We have a national force of guys who are trained to handle the dark knight scenario who get called up to handle mental health crises

And pretty invariably escalate the situation

@Nzall it doesn't because it's not war :p

also that is correct, and fun fact: use of chemical weapons by police is also not a war crime it's cool (use of chemical weapons in war is extremely not allowed)

@Unionhawk Again, train the guys so they know how to handle the mental health crises. The Dark Knight scenario is rare these days, so reform the police so they have better knowledge on how to deal with scenarios that do happen these days

So weapons grade pepper spray: Cool cool

@Nzall It's just such a different skillset, is all

@Unionhawk True, but that doesn't mean that it has to be the same people

Then why try to make the square peg of policing fit into the round hole of urgent mental health response

@Unionhawk The policing peg is currently square. There's nothing to say you can't whittle it down to round over time. Also, if you're replacing the policing peg with a different peg, you're going to have tons of police officers out of a job, and you'll need tons of newly trained mental health first responders.

We need that anyway

The whole thing would be new, yes

Not if you retrain the police officers into people that at least try to first resort to dialogue before resorting to violence

Because it does not currently exist

@Nzall Why would an urgent mental health response resort to violence, ever?

Why should someone responding to that be armed

Watched the debate last night - Warren was brilliant, she mopped the floor with Bloomberg. Unfortunately, too many of the headlines are passive-voice "Bloomberg got his face mopped into the floor", yet again excluding Warren from the headlines

@Unionhawk Because I honestly think that in some cases, like in the case of someone who has truly gone postal, dialogue won't help and you need to subdue the assailant

Notable exception:

Woman with a plan: Elizabeth Warren mounts a comeback — at Mike Bloomberg’s expense

Note: I say subdue, not kill

@Nzall We're talking about a person who is having a problem, not a suspect going on a rampage

@BradC uuuugh they still refuse to not collect data on people

So not a site that works for europeans

@Unionhawk Here's my personal experience: I used to have LOADS of problems, including episodes of violence and anger. Every single time, the first thing the responders at my school did was to take me out of the situation by force so I couldn't do any additional harm, THEN attempt to reason with me

Yeah and you don't need a gun to do that

There are no cases where adding a gun to this equation helps

@Unionhawk and I'm not talking about guns either. When I say subdue, I mean "make it so they're no longer a danger to others

And that's why I mean by "unarmed"

that does not involve killing them. That could just as well be incapacitating them through a taser or through a sneak attack and then overpowering them

now, I personally consider that nonlethal violence, but it's violence nonetheless

Sure

and in those cases, you can definitely engage in a mental health discussion with them, but your first point of order is to make sure the area is secure

Idk, I think a lot of officers go in to the job wanting to catch bad guys or whatever

Maybe some of them genuinely want to help people, but the institution as it exists isn't the only way we can respond to crises

And those people who genuinely want to help could reorient themselves to actually do that

@Unionhawk do you have numbers to back up that statement? Or is that just a gut feeling?

dolanconsultinggroup.com/news/why-do-people-become-cops

only 8% of respondents in that study went into the job because they wanted to fight crime

40% wanted to solve the perceived injustices in the world, but I still consider that "want to help people"

Most people seem to want to do police work because they think it's an exciting career

Elizabeth Warren, unbound

Here's the full NBC transcript of the debate last night

> Warren: So I'd like to talk about who we're running against, a billionaire who calls women "fat broads" and "horse-faced lesbians." And, no, I'm not talking about Donald Trump. I'm talking about Mayor Bloomberg.

> Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist polls like redlining and stop and frisk.

Rohrabacher confirms he offered Trump pardon to Assange for proof Russia didn't hack DNC email

> In a phone interview with Yahoo News, Rohrabacher said his goal during the meeting was to find proof for a widely debunked conspiracy theory: that WikiLeaks’ real source for the DNC emails was not Russian intelligence agents, as U.S. officials have since concluded, but former DNC staffer Seth Rich, who was murdered on the streets of Washington in July 2016 in what police believe was a botched robbery.

Google is not good

@BradC when would Biden have met AMLO as he claimed to have? He was just elected last year

@Stormblessed you talking about this?

> BIDEN: Look, I'm the only one who's spent extensive -- hundreds of hours in Latin America. I've met with this president. I've met with the last president, the one before that.

Seems like you're right, "The current president is Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office on 1 December 2018."

Everyone — especially Bernie Sanders — owes Elizabeth Warren for her Bloomberg TKO

Elizabeth Warren just tore apart a billionaire. Why not Trump?

@BradC That's an odd way of wording that headline. "at Mike Bloomberg's expense" sounds like they're trying to induce sympathy for Bloomberg.

@Nzall I mean, no one's going to say "because I like beating people up but don't want to break the law to do it".

@Yuuki only slightly better than all the headlines that fail to mention Warren's masterful performance altogether, instead casting it as a "bad performance" for Bloomberg

I'm having a hard deciding who I want to be the nominee not because of the presidency, I'm having a hard time because I don't know who I want to stay in the Senate (and hopefully become Majority Leader).

@BradC This is just an absolutely insane thing to admit

@TimStone I mean, it is, but totally on-brand. He's defending himself by saying he never asked for false information, and also that he only said he'd appeal to Trump for a pardon, not that he actually had the authority from Trump to offer the deal

@Yuuki They might just have binned that under "exciting career"

@BradC Right, yeah, just tying yourself back to the Seth Rich conspiracy in this, the year 2020 Eternal 2016 is whew on top of everything else

What absurd times we live in

Roger stone sentenced for 3 years reut.rs/39UHhhx

@Wipqozn inb4 Roger Stone's sentence commuted by President Trump.

@MBraedley I'm fully expecting it. The Senate just proved Trump is allowed to do whatever he wants.

Maybe even a full pardon

He's going to appoint Stone to replace Barr.

@Wipqozn so it was supposed to be 9 years, then the justice department said less, and then the judge talked angrily about it and sentenced him to much less while saying he was a horrible dude?

That’s odd

@TimStone when does eternal 2016 end?

@Stormblessed Not sure what you think "eternal" means

Well how eternal is it is the question? Will my great-great-great-grandchildren be in 2016?

The beatings 2016 will continue until morale improves

@murgatroid99 I'm hoping Eternal 2016 ends on November 4th

but I have to say the chances of that happening are probably low considering the current democratic candidates. Sanders is too left for a lot of Americans, Buttigieg lacks experience, Warren is silenced by the media, Klobuchar and Biden are too centrist for the Sanders voters, and Bloomberg is essentially a Trump-Lite

@Stormblessed Many legal observers did think that the original 7-9 year recommendation was somewhat high, although clearly within the guidelines

Even without the Trump/Barr interference/resignations/bruhaha its not unreasonable to think Judge Jackson wouldn't choose the high end of the range

And she did explain her ruling in painstaking detail, as is her normal style

bruhaha? brew-ha-ha? bruehuehue?

Andres Prokop's excellent live tweet of ABJ's ruling starts here:

twitter.com/awprokop/status/1230533781922177024

looks like its brouhaha, for anyone still on the edge of their seat for the result of that one...

@Nzall He's Trump-Lite in the sense he might not be as bazonkers crazy in public but I don't think he's Trump-Lite in any other sense.

@Yuuki I use the term X-lite in the term of "Acts like X in every way except in this minor difference that doesn't really matter overall, but is still enough like X that it'll be detested by people that already hate X"

As far as pro-wealthy stances go, I think Bloomberg might be worse than Trump.

I swear to god if he gets nominated

@Unionhawk I swear at god on a regular basis, whether or not Bloomberg gets the nom.

Good news, everyone!

Coronavirus-infected Americans flown home against CDC’s advice

Trump says Roger Stone has 'very good chance of exoneration' hours after sentencing

U.S. defense agency personal data may have been 'compromised': letter

tooootally fine

> The U.S. defense agency responsible for secure communications for the U.S. president and other high-level officials said social security numbers and other personal data in its network may have been “compromised”, in a letter seen by Reuters that was sent to potential victims.

Violinist plays Mahler and Gershwin as surgeons remove her brain tumour cbc.ca/news/health/violinist-brain-surgery-1.5468467

jesus, mike spent $220m in January alone (reported cash on hand $55m but effectively infinity)

After a congressional briefing on election threats, Trump soured on acting spy chief

> It is unclear what the official, Shelby Pierson, specifically said at the briefing that angered Trump, but the president erroneously believed that she had given information exclusively to Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the committee chairman, and that the information would be helpful to Democrats if it were released publicly, the people familiar with the matter said.

He's literally delusional

There is some follow-up reporting at the NYTimes that appears to clarify (link to non-paywall site):

Russia is interfering on Trump's behalf again, and he's enraged that Congress now knows it

> Five people familiar with the matter told the Times that the Feb. 13 briefing included a warning to lawmakers that Russia was interfering to get Trump reelected, a "disclosure that angered Mr. Trump, who complained that Democrats would use it against him," as opposed to using it to try to secure the election and prevent Russia from mucking about in it again.

> The Times reports that the next day, Trump "berated Joseph Maguire, the outgoing acting director of national intelligence, for allowing it to take place" and the fact that Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee chairman, was present to hear it was "a particular irritant."

totally stable president

City of Montreal to exercise right of first refusal to turn properties for sale into social housing cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/…

@Wipqozn So this is like a couple steps short of eminent domain, right? A seller can't sell to any buyer before the city decides that it doesn't want the property?

So it's certainly close

Mmm... this is good, I think. The seller can't claim that the government is cheating them out of money since the government matches whatever price is agreed upon by the seller and another prospective buyer.

That's a persistent problem with eminent domain, people are forced to sell their property for pennies on the dollar to the government and it's not always for public utility. There's persistent problems in the US about government exercising eminent domain for the benefit of private companies.