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bolverk

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by bolverk

  1. 3 minutes ago, Da Fino said:

    What  backwards world do you live in? Seriously. All you’ve done is call everyone you disagree with a troll or worse. You are a constant umbrage taker. This discussion could be so much more interesting if it wasn’t for you slinging your sophomoric shit at everyone that you don’t deem worthy. And how in the hell did fatty get brought into this? I don’t think he’s even fucked with this thread yet. 

    Here's how I see things from a very basic level.

    There's a group of people who had a land claim from 2,000 years ago, and they'd been treated like shit for a very long time all over the world after they lost their land claim. Then, there was another group of people who tried to exterminate them. Well, the exterminators got their asses kicked, and the rest of the people felt bad. So, the people with the land claim were gifted the original land that another group of people already lived on to make the exterminators feel better about themselves.

    The people whose land was given to the almost exterminated people weren't too happy about their land being given away, but they lost to the new land-owners, like, 3-4 times in wars. So, the nearly exterminated people got a little cocky and said, "There's no place for you on our land that we claim from 2,000 years ago! This land was promised to us by our sky daddy!"

    The losers said, "The prophet of our sky daddy ascended to heaven from here!!! You can't have it."

    Then, another separate group said, "Well, the son of our sky daddy and his 12 buddies said that the people whose sky daddy said this was their land needed to have it back so that the son of our sky daddy could rule the world for something like10,000 years according to our sacred book. Also, we feel really guilty about what happened to the previous landowners from 2,000 years ago by some of our own exterminators, and you guys are brown. So..."

    Well, the people that had been living on that land didn't take too kindly to any of that, and they devised fucked up ways to resist all that shit, including blowing up the new landowners, along with buddying up with some neighbors. But they still didn't do too well and lost even more land.

    Now, the previous landowners are still pissed and doing fucked up shit to resist, while the new landowners are doing some fucked up shit to the previous landowners. Never mind that the new landowners have some genocidal fucks among their leadership alongside genocidal fucks amount the previous landowners.

    So, yeah, maybe we should take a step back and reconsider our involvement in all this fucked up bullshit.

  2. NYTimes travel piece about trying to raft a drying Rio Grande in the Big Bend region.

     

    How Do You Paddle a Disappearing River?
    Canoeing the Rio Grande near Big Bend National Park can be magical. But as the river dries, it’s getting harder to find where a boat will actually float.

    I had barely unbuckled my seatbelt and was already wondering if I had driven six hours across Texas for nothing. A once-in-a-lifetime river adventure had seemingly evaporated with some disappointing news.

    It was the promise of a four-day, 33-mile canoe journey in Big Bend National Park, snaking through awe-inspiring canyons on a mighty river, that had lured me across the state. My partner’s brother, Michael Stangl, an occasional guide with Hidden Dagger Adventures, had offered to take me on the Rio Grande, one of the country’s longest rivers, which stretches from central Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico. I had only previously visited Big Bend on foot, and I was excited to see it from the water.

    The moment I pulled into Michael’s driveway in Alpine, Texas, after driving there from Austin last April, he told me: We wouldn’t be going through the park anymore.

     

    Free link that's worth the click just for the photographs alone: 

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/travel/texas-big-bend-rio-grande-boat.html?ugrp=m&unlocked_article_code=1.fU0.3T0t.w_1KA_kLYDLx&smid=url-share

  3. 3 minutes ago, Js1 said:

    I was also 15, I didn't really give a flying fuck about politics. 2 years later (2006 when the Dems took the House and Nancy became the first female Speaker) did I suddenly become interested.  (Because it was a month before my 18th birthday and I couldn't vote in the 2006 midterms) 

    I know it wasn't your intention, but this post made me acutely feel my age. I was 32, a recent first-time homeowner, still fairly new to my career, and raising a 4-year-old kid at the time. Little did I know what destruction was lying around the corner a few years later: a painful divorce, the Great Recession, job loss, and the resulting years of alcohol-fueled madness to numb a broken soul and dashed dreams.

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  4. 14 minutes ago, Js1 said:

    I was too young and naive to celebrate Reagan’s death. I cannot wait to celebrate Trump’s. 

    In all fairness, he'd been out of office and the public eye for so long, and it had been so well-known he'd been ill that it really didn't make much of a splash. The Iraq War, GWOT, and American torture abuses seemed much more urgent and were grabbing the headlines at the time. 

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  5. 5 hours ago, softlynow said:

    As far as I know, the Texas Board of Architectural Examiners is a state agency. Is there some other agency you're talking about that governs standards in addition to those that the state regulates? I'm not really all that familiar with that industry.

    Since it's been a few hours, I'll go ahead and answer for him: I believe he's referring to the American Institute of Architects.

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  6. 1 minute ago, DDD Dad said:

    Explain this to me like I'm a lawyer.

    A statistician said that Hamas death toll figures couldn't possibly be real because the daily variation of the deaths should be more randomly distributed. 

    Both Anastasis and I have pointed out that this statistician's analysis (published a week ago) cherrypicked a ten-day period from the end of October where the daily numbers appear fairly constant. Still, the guy's analysis completely ignored all data before the ten-day snapshot and every day since. Those other, longer periods indeed show fluctuations in daily deaths.

    So, the argument is that this statistician is purposefully misrepresenting the numbers to make a case that Hamas is releasing bullshit death counts, thereby minimizing Palestinian fatalities.

    All the data are out there and available to be analyzed. The analysis is recent, so no one knows why he's only using a tiny dataset to make a much larger argument. His statistical analysis is not all that sophisticated, so it wasn't like he was running numbers through a Supercomputer or anything. Also, the graphical representation that he chose to display his analysis was purposely selected to make it look like a straight data line when there should be fluctuations.

    Also, this particular statistician is a Professor of Statistics at the Wharton School of Business and should, therefore, know better than to publish this shit. I only took two semesters 25 years ago and could spot right away what he was doing, and I said so a few pages back when it was first brought up.

    Statsman decided to bring it up again by saying that no one can criticize the guy without saying he's a conservative Jew, which is a lie because I said everything above in a previous post. But, as often happens, Statsman ignores, doesn't fully read, or can't retain information from other people's posts.

    So, Anastasis came back to respond in a much more detailed way than I originally did by taking a deeper dive into the actual data. He came to the same conclusion but with more numbers.

    In my previous post, I did also point out that this particular statistician was also recently called out for using bullshit stats in a wholly separate legal case that his side lost when they were trying to disprove increasingly warm temperatures related to climate change). I also pointed out that the publication in which the guy's article appeared had caused some waves within the Jewish community for some of its political stances, so I called into question why someone would choose to post an article using dubious statistics (one would think a poster named "Statsman" would've recognized the data flaws) from a politically biased publication in the Daily Texan "news" subforum.

    That's all I can tell you for now, counselor.

     

     

     

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  7. Pretty sure that's just talking heads being talking heads. Bring up an idea that Macron floated a while back, only to later be shot down by Zelenskyy. But 24-hour teevee news people need shit to discuss and fill air time, so they'll keep speculating about something that's not going to happen for eyeballs.

  8. 20 minutes ago, Js1 said:

    It sort of worked in 16. He pulled a few senate candidates across the line in PA and WI 

    I mean, I see the logic in that a good portion of Trump's base might be unreliable voters who won't come out unless he's on the ballot. But there are also the issues related to the Trumpkins hollowing out of the RNC's infrastructure and expertise just a few months before an election, along with the ongoing GQP civil war. How many of those down-ballot candidates haven't sworn fealty to Trump or, at the very least, weren't endorsed by him in the primaries? I honestly don't know. They're just putting everything into the Trump basket, and I think some people, who might be mushy middle voters that might not be enthused by Trump, could stay home if they didn't have an awareness of someone lower on the ballot that could catch their attention.

  9. 1 hour ago, Hornius Emeritus said:


    Seems like that would have negative consequences down ballot, no?

    That's one of the things they discuss. The Trump campaign's "bet" is that if Trump performs well, then that success will all trickle down ballot. Coattails, if you will. Personally, I don't buy it.

  10. 9 hours ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

    This is extremely encouraging: while Trump and the RNC appear to be close to broke, Biden and the Democrats are sitting on 153 million in cash and picked up 53 million more just last month.  

    https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-biden-campaign-fundraising-b108bb7e26ec765917ec2f6d6a04bcda

     

    The Daily podcast detailed this and how Trump absorbing the RNC is a gambit to overcome Biden's money advantage.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/podcasts/the-daily/trump-rnc-election.html

  11. Pro-Trump attorney arrested after hearing over leaking Dominion documents

    An attorney facing criminal charges for illegally accessing Michigan voting machines after the 2020 election was arrested Monday after a hearing in a separate case in federal court in Washington, D.C.

    Stefanie Lambert was arrested by U.S. Marshals after a hearing over possible sanctions against her for disseminating confidential emails from Dominion Voting Systems, the target of conspiracy theories over former President Donald Trump's 2020 election loss. Lambert obtained the Dominion emails by representing Patrick Byrne, a prominent funder of election conspiracy theorists who is being sued by Dominion for defamation.

    In a statement, the Marshals office said Lambert was arrested on "local charges." A Michigan judge earlier this month issued a bench warrant for Lambert after she missed a hearing in her case, in which she's charged with four felonies for accessing voting machines in a search for evidence of a conspiracy theory against Trump. Lambert had earlier, unsuccessfully, sued to overturn Trump's loss in Michigan.

    cont'd: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/18/1239384735/pro-trump-attorney-arrested-after-hearing-over-leaking-dominion-documents

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  12. image.png.570644e848cec1772e0a2a3fcc368682.png

     

    Goon Squad Officers Face Sentencing in Mississippi Torture Cases
    Six officers pleaded guilty last year to assaulting two Black men and shooting one in the mouth during a raid on their home.

    “I experienced looking the devil in the eye,” Mr. Parker said Monday at a press conference.

    The officers destroyed evidence and, to justify the shooting, falsely claimed that Mr. Jenkins had pointed a BB gun at them, according to federal prosecutors.

    Three of the department’s deputies also pleaded guilty in a separate incident, but prosecutors have so far provided few details about what happened. Prosecutors are expected to read a statement written by the victim in that case, 28-year-old Alan Schmidt.

    So far charges against officers in Rankin County have been narrowly focused on these two incidents, but residents in impoverished pockets of the county say that the sheriff’s department has routinely targeted them with similar levels of violence.

    Last November, The New York Times and Mississippi Today published an investigation revealing that for nearly two decades, deputies in the Rankin sheriff department, many of whom called themselves the Goon Squad, would barge into homes in the middle of the night, handcuff people and torture them for information or confessions.

    In the pursuit of drug arrests, the deputies rammed a stick down one man’s throat until he vomited, dripped molten metal onto another man’s skin and held people down and beat them until they were bloody and bruised, according to dozens of people who said they witnessed or experienced the raids.

    Many of those who said they had experienced violence filed lawsuits or formal complaints detailing their encounters with the department. A few said they had contacted Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey directly, only to be ignored.

    Sheriff Bailey, who has denied knowledge of the incidents, has faced calls to resign by local activists and the N.A.A.C.P. He has said he will not step down.

    Malcolm Holmes, a professor in the department of criminal justice and sociology at the University of Wyoming, said that the Goon Squad case was “going to be one that finds its way into the chronicles of history.”

    “There’s so much well-documented evidence that this is a pattern of behavior,” he said, noting that the case revealed “something we’ve covered up for a long time, particularly in rural America.”

    The sentencing hearings this week are expected to reveal more details about violence perpetrated by Rankin County deputies, including what happened to Mr. Schmidt.

    In an interview with The Times and Mississippi Today last week, Mr. Schmidt spoke publicly for the first time about what happened in December 2022 when a Rankin County deputy pulled him over for driving with an expired tag.

    According to the federal indictment, deputies Christian Dedmon, Hunter Elward and Daniel Opdyke arrived at the scene shortly afterward. Two other deputies, including the one who pulled Mr. Schmidt over, were also present throughout the arrest, Mr. Schmidt said. Neither has been criminally charged.

    Mr. Schmidt said the deputies accused him of stealing tools from his boss, and then Mr. Dedmon pressed a gun to his head and fired it into the air before threatening to dump his body in the Pearl River.

    “I thought this was it,” Mr. Schmidt said. “I’m never going to see my family again.”

    Mr. Dedmon and the other deputies punched Mr. Schmidt and held his arm in a fire ant hill, then shocked him repeatedly with a Taser, Mr. Schmidt said.

    Mr. Dedmon also pressed his genitals against the man’s face and bare buttocks as he yelled for help and kicked at the deputy, Mr. Schmidt said.

    “It still goes through my head constantly,” Mr. Schmidt said of the experience.

  13. Brazil Police Recommend Criminal Charges Against Bolsonaro
    The federal police accused the former president of falsifying his Covid-19 vaccination records.

    Brazil’s federal police recommended former President Jair Bolsonaro be criminally charged in a scheme to falsify his Covid-19 vaccine card, partly to travel to the United States during the pandemic, in the latest sign of criminal investigations closing in on the former president.

    Federal prosecutors will now decide whether to pursue the case. If they do, it would be the first time the former president has faced criminal charges.

    Brazilian police accused Mr. Bolsonaro of ordering a top deputy to obtain falsified Covid-19 vaccination records for himself and his daughter, 13, in late 2022, just before the former president traveled to Florida to stay for three months following his election loss.

    Brazilian police said they were awaiting an answer from the U.S. Justice Department on whether Mr. Bolsonaro used a fake vaccination card to enter the United States, which could bring different criminal charges. At the time, most international visitors to the U.S. were required to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination to enter the country.

    Mr. Bolsonaro has said he did not receive the Covid-19 vaccine, but he has denied accusations that he was involved in any plan to falsify his vaccination records. His lawyer said in a text message that he was still reviewing the accusations.

    Mr. Bolsonaro, if convicted of forging his vaccine card, could face prison time.

    The federal police’s indictment is the first time the various investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro have moved toward charges.

    Mr. Bolsonaro has been subject to questioning and searches as part of several inquiries, including into the selling of watches and jewels he received as presidential gifts from Saudi Arabia and accusations that he worked with top government officials to hatch a plan to try to hold onto power following his 2022 election loss.

    Brazil’s electoral court has already ruled Mr. Bolsonaro ineligible for public office until 2030 for spreading false information about Brazil’s voting systems on state television, forcing him to sit out the next presidential contest in 2026.

    During the pandemic, Mr. Bolsonaro was critical of the Covid-19 vaccine, notoriously joking that it would turn people into alligators and instead promoting unproven treatments, such as an antimalarial drug called hydroxychloroquine.

    His administration hesitated to secure vaccines when they were first being distributed, exacerbating the pandemic in Brazil, according to a Brazilian congressional investigation that recommended the former president be charged with “crimes against humanity,” among other charges, for his actions during the pandemic.

    The prosecutor at the time did not charge him. Nearly 600,000 people died in Brazil because of Covid-19, the second-highest national death count after the United States.

    In May 2023, the police searched Mr. Bolsonaro’s home, confiscated his cellphone and arrested one of his closest aides and two of his security guards as part of the investigation into the fake vaccination records.

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  14. 3 minutes ago, Wally Pryor said:

    Just started The Bomb and The Cold War. Really interesting first episode exploring the Manhattan Project and minute details, of which you'd expect weren't always the most uplifting, Including girls in a dance school who were downwind from Los Alamos, 40 miles from the first test. They heard the blast, were knocked out of their bunk beds, went outdoors, saw the ash, thought it was snow (in August?). But it was warm to their faces. Understandably so.

    Of about 10 girls at the camp only one lived past the age of 30. 

    Stick to it. I finished watching the final two episodes last night, which brings us to the present. The whole thing is a great refresher on the Cold War and how we got to where we are today.

     

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