Rov_Scam
10hr ago
Bombing and regime change aren't the same thing. They could have bombed Iran into a parking lot but it would have done nothing to change who was in power unless they were able to actually occupy Tehran and take control of government. That's a tall order considering the size and remoteness of the country and Tehran's location within it. Not that it couldn't be done, or even be done easily, it just wouldn't be same quick in and out operation and would almost certainly involve taking significant casualties.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
This kind of theorizing is based on nothing more than conjecture, though. First, you're describing a single incident of the three. Second, if it had happened in Austin we would have talked about how the woman exhibited a typical Texan brashness in a city that's known for being a liberal enclave in a stereotypically conservative state.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
My whole life I had problems with cold hands until about a dozen years ago when I switched to mittens. After that it's been a complete non-issue, even when skiing in -10 F. For boots, just make sure they're reasonably waterproof and not too tight. There's a temptation to load up on socks for extra insulation but this just makes matters worse; the lack of circulation is what kills you. In ski boots I don't really have that option so I just have to live with cold toes and the pain of the circulation returning when I take them off, but getting more comfortable ones would cost money and performance, so I just use boot warmers and deal with the tradeoff. To illustrate how big of a deal having extra space is, last year I went skiing and after several hours outside my feet were freezing. We were tailgating in the parking lot at the end of the day and I changed in to the tennis shoes I drove up in, thin mesh ones that I was sure in the ~20 F weather would let the wind in and make my feet even colder. But once I was moving around in them my feet actually warmed up significantly, at least after the pain of the blood returning had subsided. Now, I'm sure that if I had been out there longer than an hour or so they would have gotten cold, so insulation is still important, but don't make the mistake of loading up on insulation at the expense of breathing room. I'd prioritize the latter over the former if you have to make a choice. Also, modern toe warmers last about 6 hours and aren't expensive.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I think people below are reading too much into this. It's just a coincidence. If the same thing happened in any other city there would be similar explanations.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
I was specifically referring to the book club episode where he tried to get out of reading Breakfast at Tiffany's by watching the movie.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
Um, did you read the case? He was charged with murder, and the District Court dismissed on immunity grounds, and the 9th Circuit, in the opinion you linked, reversed the District Court and allowed the case to proceed. Subsequent to this the en banc 9th Circuit upheld the decision. Horiuchi ultimately wasn't prosecuted, but that's because the successor to the original prosecutor dropped the charges. All of this is irrelevant anyway since Minnesota isn't in the 9th Circuit. There may be other caselaw out there but I haven't seen anything to suggest that a state prosecution would be precluded entirely.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
The last I checked the criminal laws police officers conducting law enforcement operations didn't get any special privileges regarding standards when lethal force is justified, but even assuming they did:
-
This lady actually hit me. Not hard enough for it to matter, but she did make contact; there are nor arguments about whether if you look at which way the wheel was pointing you can divine if she was trying to steer towards me or go around or had the car in reverse or whatever.
-
She hit me again after I yelled at her for hitting me and putting a kid in danger.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
About ten or twelve years ago I was walking down the street and an older woman pulling out of a bank drive-thru bumped me with her car. Then she bumped me again after I banged on the hood and started yelling. I had a 4-year-old kid walking with me at the time, too. It's good to know I could have shot her in the face three times if I had been strapped.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
I get the impression that nothing is going to change since all of the concessions Trump wants apparently have to do with oil. And he's supposedly told the oil companies that if they want their assets back they will have to commit to billions of dollars in additional investment. That's going to be a tough sell, especially since the political situation hasn't changed much in terms of stability. Venezuelan oil is expensive to drill and doesn't sell for much, and with prices low, that kind of investment doesn't make sense. Even if the oil companies want to appease Trump, the banks and insurance companies also have to be on board, and I don't see it happening. Maduro was a bogeyman but he didn't really do much (and he was supposedly offering oil concessions anyway), so it's hard for me to see what taking him out accomplishes. As I said earlier, I don't think this is going to have much salience two months from now.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
I'm guessing that this is one of the endless parade of things that seems like a big deal now that everyone will forget about two months from now. Maduro is out of power, sure. But he wasn't some kind of svengali whose personal leadership was necessary for the Bolivarian regime's survival. If that was anyone, it was Hugo Chavez, and when Chavez died it didn't exactly lead to a sea change in Venezuelan politics. So it will be with Maduro; as Mike Tomlin says, next man up. No different than if some foreign power succeeded in assassinating Trump. No different than how the Cuban regime has been operating for years without anyone named Castro in power.
But of course Trump will pretend otherwise, and in Trump World pretending is as good as being true, especially since the Bolivarian regime wasn't any more of a threat to the US in the past 6 months than it's been for the past 25 years. So sure, go in, remove the guy from power, declare victory, and forget the whole thing happened. We won't have to hear about drug boat strikes and oil tanker impoundments anymore, but we also won't see any sanctions relief, resumption of diplomatic relations, or new American investment. Trump will chalk up a W and his supporters will talk about how he had the balls to do what Biden didn't, but everyone will forget about this by spring. By November, nobody in the US is going to be talking about how much better their life is now that Maduro is out of power, and Republicans aren't even going to bother bringing it up in their campaigns, because they know as well as anyone that no one gives a fuck and that things aren't really that different than they were a year prior.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
The difference is that a video of you as Stalin is obviously a joke. Do you think you would have felt the same if instead they showed a video of you masturbating on a television in the classroom?
Rov_Scam
10d ago
If the best you can come up with is a message board notorious for offensive content and a movie that came out 25 years ago it's safe to say that this isn't part of normal polite discourse, and certainly isn't fun. The guy got a 15 year sentence for a first offense. As part of a plea deal. That alone should tell you how serious the conduct is in terms of degree.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
I don't know what circles you're running in if you hear that joke "all the time", but either way, you're talking about the theoretical sexual abuse of a dog and conflating it with the actual sexual abuse of small children.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
I can understand including some of the more morbid cases weeks when the pickings are slim, but there were three other cases this week. I don't see any need to include this, and, Hentai or no, these facts aren't hilarious. Especially since people like me don't even really know what Hentai is and thus have no frame of reference for what you're talking about.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
No. I think that the president's racism and the racism of most of his supporters is beyond a mere possibility at this point. I'm concerned that, guilty or not, in a free society we shouldn't be targeting criminal investigations based on race, especially when we've already shown a willingness to excuse the exact same behavior when it's done by someone we like.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
The plaintiff’s neurologist is a silly guy. Probably a hired goon.
Yup, and so is the defense neurologist. Treating physicians aren't experts. I mean, they may be in another case, but if they have direct involvement they can only testify to facts. These facts may concern their thought process and what the relevant standard of care was, but the Voice of God is going to come from a hired gun who is being paid to say that the treating physician did nothing wrong.
As for the rest of it, yeah, that's dynamite; I'm sure it will make for good conversation at cocktail parties. You've just given a bunch of arguments that I'm sure sound persuasive to other doctors and to people like those here who aren't doctors but are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt because we have no medical experience of our own. Unfortunately if this goes in front of a jury there's going to be another guy who makes equally persuasive (to them) arguments and of course you're saying that the standard of care was followed because it's your ass on the line and of course the other guy has motivation to say that it wasn't followed and in the end it's all going to come down to... something, but it's hard to predict what. So all that stuff you just laid out is a great argument to make to Plaintiff's counsel, who has done this for a while and knows a thing or two about medicine and juries and you may be able to convince him to settle for less than he otherwise would have, which was going to be nowhere near the tens of millions anyway because that only happens if it actually gets in front of a jury, and no one wants it to get in front of a jury.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
He's an obvious charlatan, but guys like this don't really piss me off that much because they're lack of qualification is so obvious that they can easily be dismissed. What's harder to explain to a non-lawyer is that when an op-ed writer comes with the credentials of "The Frank T. Stottle Professor of Criminal Law at Northwestern University" what it really means is you should give more weight to the analysis of a random second year public defender. What do Larry Tribe and Eugene Volokh have in common? Neither ever practiced law. A look at the Volokh Conspiracy bio page shows a couple of practicing attorneys and a long list of people who entered academia before they were 30. You can say what you want about Ken White's politics or morality or whatever, but at least he's a practicing criminal attorney.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
Those subcultures evidently include the president. He has no problem pardoning fraudsters like Joe Milton, George Santos, and others, relieving them of even the obligation to pay the money back. And when he inevitably pardons the DiBiase brothers a few months from now, exactly zero people will be surprised. But I doubt Nick Shirley or anyone else cares about this, because they're less concerned about fraud than they are the fact that Somalis may be the ones doing it.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
Timmy boy here was her hand-picked choice because he was biddable, and now here's the track record of This Could Have Been Your VP come out to haunt him.
If nothing else, I can agree with you on that one. If the FBI finds significant prosecutable fraud, it will be nothing short of an embarrassment for the entire Democratic Party that the governor wasn't aware that millions or even billions was being stolen from right under his nose. He'd done a pretty good job of catching other Somali fraudsters but there's still no excuse for not catching these ones earlier. The only thing worse would be if it wasn't Somalis (necessarily) but people in DHS itself, people he worked with and trusted who were doing the stealing. It would look especially bad if he publicly praised those who were the masterminds of the crime for getting people off the welfare rolls, when what they were really doing is funneling money that should have gone to the poor to wealthy celebrities, pro athletes, and pet projects. It would look even worse if he claimed he had no idea what was going on and then text messages came out that at least insinuated that he probably had an inkling. And it wouldn't do him any favors if his response to this was to sue the reporter who broke the story for defamation and ask the court to hold her in contempt if she doesn't reveal her sources, creating the distinct possibility that the person who uncovered the scandal would also be the first person to go to jail. Yeah, that would make him look really bad. So bad that I don't know how anyone could vote Democrat after that. Then again, Phil Bryant keeps getting appointed to Trump Administration committees like the FEMA Review Council and the National Assessment of Education Progress, so maybe it wouldn't turn out so bad for him or the party.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
Whether the evidence is sufficient is entirely dependent on whether you think Somalis are Bad People and deserve to have the Feds descend on them and investigate all their wheelings and dealings with an eye towards making heads roll. Of someone goes out next week and produces a similar video involving church based daycares in suburban Dallas, I'm skeptical that the Trump administration would respond with similar vigor, and I suspect we'd hear about how Christians were being railroaded for political purposes.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
Especially when some of the violations are for having more kids than the staff allows for.
There are protests, not a mass uprising in the sense that there is a rival faction ready to take power. The situation in 2011 was markedly better than the current situation in Iran, as large parts of the country were already under rebel control, and foreign countries, the US included, had already recognized a different government. That's the only instance I can think of where we did "regime change by bombing only", and I haven't heard too many people describe that campaign as something we should try to replicate.
More options
Context Copy link