Want to cut down the number of deaths by firearms? Stop tolerating shit like this:

"Shane Patrick Boyle, a founder of Zine Fest Houston, died on March 18 after his GoFundMe campaign to pay for insulin came up $50 short. Alec Raeshawn Smith, age 26, was found dead in his apartment on June 27. He was rationing his insulin after he aged out of his parent’s insurance coverage."

After everything is said and done, desperation/poverty is what should be looked at the hardest. Nothing makes people go apeshit as much as intolerable living conditions.

Universal background checks, bans on high cap mags, etc -- that's just doctoring around the edges. Get the Works Progress Administration going again. And while you're at it, revive the CCC and the PWA as well.

Aside from atrocious working hours and societal pressures, life in Japan is a lot less desperate than in most other countries. The low unemployment alone does wonders.

Police commissioner: Slain Baltimore detective was to testify in case of indicted officers

The following day. He was scheduled to testify before a federal grand jury against corrupt cops the day after he was killed with his own weapon.

How unfortunate.

At least the plug's only at the end of the pipe.

At my parents' house last year, the pipe connecting the manhole to the actual sewer below the street was clogged. Which isn't so bad, unless nobody really notices it and the sewage just keeps collecting in the manhole. After pumping a good 1.5m³ of delicious sewage out into the nearby bushes (smells great at ~25°C), I went down into the underworld (again, great smell). Found the pipe in question and managed to insert a hose with backwards-firing jets into it, connected to a high-pressure washer. The bloody blockage was 6m into the pipe. Probably grease and fat from the kitchen sink, most of all. Anyway, half an hour of bumping into it over and over again finally cracked it.

Not the most pleasant experience. No cockroaches though, so there's that.

You're going to like this one:

Attorney Justin Moore said Jones “was dealing with a minor car issue after accidentally triggering his alarm and being unable to disable the security system” when police arrived. According to Moore, Jones was then “commanded to step out of his vehicle.”

When he exited his vehicle he tried to “explain the issue” and he was then “shot once in the stomach” by the unidentified Mesquite police officer, Moore said.

"Several officers then attacked Mr. Jones and attempted to perform an anal cavity search on the streets. Mr. Jones reacted to the unlawful sodomy and was consequently shot a second time in the back,” according to Moore.

Ever heard the term "Donor Class-holes"? Simple, with a nice ring to it.

"Weaponized sanctimony" is nice as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXKQlCQKtIg

After the recent production numbers of the Model 3 and the reports of horrible working conditions at the Fremont plant, Tesla lost a lot of its shine for me.

Elon Musk seems to be convinced that being a Silicon Valley bigshot of his calibre is enough to run this operation, or that industrialism of the sort that, say, Toyota is engaged in is outdated. Those pitiful production numbers and the issues with the workforce indicate to me that management at Tesla (read: Musk) is not capable of industrial manufacture of cars at scale. Not at this time, at least.

I watched this hours ago and still haven't recovered. The third dude falling apart in the background is just too much.

Saudi Arabia apparently holds the Prime Minister of a sovereign nation hostage: link

Quick, let's sell them more weapons for their upcoming war against Lebanon. Maybe we'll even get the hot war against Iran we've been craving for more than a decade.

Bert listens to Civil Defence Radio.

How many of those fact checking organisations would have flagged Judith Miller's Iraq pieces in the NYT as "deliberatly misleading content"? Or what about the 16 hit pieces on Sanders within 24h at Bezos' rag of a newspaper? And let's not even start about the reporting on the recent night of the long knives in Saudi Arabia ("reform", really? fuck off)...

Point is, the effort to curtail "fake news" regularly goes hand in hand with the suppression of non-establishment views while leaving the main sources of deliberate misinformation untouched. Remember PropOrNot and how Bezos' rag, amongst others, jumped on it? That list included prominent left wing/anti-war sites such as TruthOut, Counterpunch, TruthDig, ConsortiumNews, etc.

Want some examples of "misleading content" or "deliberate misinformation"? Just browse through the articles at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting for a few minutes.

I suppose you are already sufficiently disgusted with the healthcare system in the US, but here's a piece on the preauthorisation of new drugs and medical procedures. And oh boy, it's a doozy. I should have expected it to be set up this way, but I didn't guess. Need to crank my cynicism up to 12.

Edit: also, Ronan Farrow has a new piece out on Weinstein: Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies. Farrow's reporting on the issue has been nothing short of sublime. An absolute must-read if you're interested in the case.

One for your collection:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/11/08/another-civil-asset-forfeiture-outrage-2/

It's a short one, so no excerpts needed. The url basically speaks for itself.

https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/keep-it-simple-and-take-credit/

"Implementing these kinds of policies are also no road to electoral success. Peoples’ lives are hard enough without tax credits and savings accounts and eligibility forms and government phone calls that determine whether one’s household income puts one in the bracket for this or that plan or benefit or subsidy and on and on. No voter is thanking anyone who puts them on this road, even if there’s a small pot of money at the end of it.

And forget the annoyance—the amount of immense mental energy and social capital required to keep track of, comprehend the eligibility requirements of, and then successfully apply for these benefits is a de facto regressive tax on people whose lives are too materially difficult to deal with arcane bureaucratic bullshit. That is, those people that need the help the most.

So what to do? No more savings accounts, no more cleverly hidden help that people won’t even notice, no more tax-preferenced, means-tested, government-monitored, website-reliant, bronze/gold/platinum-benefits-so-long-as-you-apply-during-open-enrollment. Just give people the stuff they need.

This shouldn’t even be a liberal-socialist divide, although it seems to have become one in recent years. When society decided citizens should be able to read, we didn’t provide tax credits for books, we created public libraries. When we decided peoples’ houses shouldn’t burn down, we didn’t provide savings accounts for private fire insurance, we hired firefighters and built fire stations. If the broad left takes power again, enough with too-clever-by-half social engineering. Help people and take credit."

As Lambert Strether of Corrente says: universal, concrete, material benefits.

Wind River.

Heavy stuff set in breathtaking Wyoming. Much better movie than I expected. Have a look, you won't regret it.