Quick Jots: March 2022

Officer involved in Breonna Taylor's killing acquitted
#police
A jury declared that Brett Hankison, who blindly fired ten rounds through a patio door covered by blinds, some of which penetrated into a neighbor's house, was not guilty of wanton endangerment. I fail to see how that could possibly be the case. He may have well just covered his eyes and shot wildly. Tim Pool had another officer in the incident, John Mattingly, on his show, which is an interesting listen and a counterpoint to the "common knowledge" out there now. He doesn't seem to make a case that Hankison was not recklessly endangering the public, though. Nevertheless, it's an interesting listen as he outlines some of the political corruption in the area. He did mention that they announced their presence for a long while before breaking and entering, but 11 of 12 witnesses said there was not an announcement with the 12th changing his story after being interviewed later by investigators. Then again, that was reported by the New York Times, so who knows (fire extinguisher incident, anyone?). In the grand scheme of things, Breonna Taylor would still be alive if either the cops just took the person they were after when they left the apartment in the morning, or if drugs were decriminalized.

Senate unanimously votes to make DST permanent
#legislation
Well, will wonders never cease? The senate actually got something right. In a unanimous vote that didn't end up with massive amounts of money stolen from people or a large number of bodies piled up, the senate voted to end the time switching ritual Americans go through twice a year, catching up to the culturally forward Arizona (just...let them have this one). Aside from the annoyance of having to remember to reset alarm clocks and schedules, this practice has led to more serious consequences like an uptick in traffic accidents due to the switch. Still, it's tough to give credit to the senate, given that it was the government that instituted this practice decades ago. What, if a gang breaks into my home, makes a mess, then tidies up a bit decades later, I'm supposed to praise this institution? Personally, I'd like to see standard time made permanent and shift everybody's schedule one hour to keep the same amount of sun as daylight saving time, so that noon still roughly reflects the apex position of the sun, but that's probably too many brain cells that would have to be rubbed together for Americans to figure out smoothly. Whatever. I'll take whatever gets to the goal line of not having to press the stupid hour button on my clocks 23 times in the fall. Now let's hope the House and the man sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office doesn't screw it all up.

Shanghai in lockdown
#china #covid
My grandmother's sister lives in Shanghai. She has seen a lot, having been through the Chinese civil war, isolation from other countries, and the Cultural Revolution. Finally, in the 1980s, the country started to open up and move toward free markets in certain geographic areas, including Shanghai, leading to those areas exploding in prosperity. And today, she is locked in her own home like a prisoner. The Chinese Communist Party has locked down much of Shanghai, amid rising COVID cases, oftentimes without much forewarning. Panic buying has emptied store shelves and the lack of production has resulted in economic decline. Lockdowns and quarantines in China have been particularly dystopian, with people locked in quarantine rooms with no heat in the dead of winter or locked in their homes, with delayed food shipments. Still, China reports nearly no deaths in their completely made-up numbers that don't track with how the virus operates in any other country. Yet "esteemed" journals like the New York Times still report on the Chinese Communist Party reported numbers as if it has any bearing in reality. 

New York Times finally reports on year and a half old news
#media #joebiden
Apparently, it's okay now to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop story. The New York Times, after spending the fall of 2020 lambasting the story that the New York Post broke while other corporate news just completely ignored it, now says it has "authenticated" the emails and admits it is newsworthy. If you'll recall, it contained emails that point toward political corruption with Hunter gaining a board seat on the Ukrainian company Burisma and getting paid tens of thousands monthly for access to his father Joe Biden. When the story first broke, Twitter and Facebook rushed to block the link from being posted, citing that it was trying to curb "misinformation". Once again, it was Twitter and Facebook peddling misinformation by restricting factual information from being spread. Of course, now that Joe Biden is safely elected and the embarrassment of the 2020 Trump impeachment being proved as total bullshit now sufficiently in the rearview mirror, the New York Times now, rather quietly, says yes, Joe Biden's family gained substantial wealth by leveraging their position in positions of power in the US government. 

US government hoarded N95 masks
#covid
Back at the start of the pandemic, two brothers were raked over the coals for "hoarding" about 18,000 bottles of hand sanitizer, planning to resell them at a premium when supply became restricted. They planned to resell them at a premium, but their account was restricted, and were ultimately forced to donate their supply. Economics dictates that their action actually would have continued a flow of supply during a major shortage shock, although it did redistribute from a select few locales to other markets. But that's not my point here. Recently, the US government was found to have (actually) hoarded 750 million N95 masks and are just now handing them out as the Omicron variant declined. Among those that were furious at the brothers for reselling hand sanitizer (an item we now know does very little to combat COVID), right around none of them batted an eye or even cared about the government keeping 750 million N95 masks blatantly out of circulation (an item that actually does help prevent COVID spread). If they even heard about it.

Gun control studies largely bogus
#gunrights
A metastudy sifted through 27,900 gun control studies and found only 123 that included rigorous testing. Even those 123 still had major issues with their data. These studies illustrate more about the political whims and desires of legislators and gun control activists than any kind of real research. Of the 722 tests within the 123 studies, the number of positive results is approximately comparable to the number one would statistically expect if gun control made no difference. Additionally, there was only one result out of the large number of studies that showed a negative outcome from gun control, a statistically improbable result, just given random chance, suggesting bias, particularly for social science studies. As if to put an emphasis on this, inconclusive studies rarely get published, even though an inconclusive result is still a result, but it doesn't get headlines. Which is often the point of these studies. Even if we were able to get quality, double-blind studies with excellent and unbiased data processing, it's still tough to get right, simply due to the incomplete, fractured data on gun violence, especially with its rarity, relative to statistical significance. The documentary short by Reason is a must-watch if you've ever heard a politician open their mouth about guns.

Madeline Albright dead
#obituary #war