library-heroin situation
You don't buy heroin, you check it out.
The most popular needles are always dirty.
In my day we went to bookstores to score, like adults.
There was a shooting the other day in the Main Library here in Columbus. Not drug-related in so far as I can tell.
Ohioans are great like that. They don't need to be high to want to kill each other.
Haven't read it yet, but our mayor's task force report on the opioid epidemic in Phila is just out.
On some level this is an old problem; Philadelphia has always had remarkably pure heroin and been a draw for users throughout the East Coast. Back in the day the DEA used to actually publish drug purity reports online* and we were always near the top.
But on another level it's just reached dramatic proportions -- in terms of the number of people affected, the blatentness of public drug use, the magnet that some neighborhoods are for users, and the appalling lack of treatment beds and funding.
*I think they stopped when they realized people were using them as shopping lists.
In Ohio, apparently the problem is heroin is now cut with elephant tranquilizers. I'm not joking.
You'd just never expect that to be a cost-effective strategy.
No one expects the Pachyderm Sedation.
How many elephants do you think need tranquilizing in Ohio?
Even adjusting for body mass, economy of scale just isn't going to happen there.
It's like you haven't even seen the opening police scene of Zootopia.
I think maybe there's an interaction between heroin and the pachyderm powder.
We have some state legislators trying to make things worse. The blatant disregard for humanity is disgusting.
Philadelphia has always had remarkably pure heroin
Says Condé Nast Traveller.
I think the Schuylkill Expressway should be sufficient to explain most drug use in Philadelphia. Or vice versa.
14- That's so stupid. The socially acceptable thing to do would be to buy the rights to Narcan and quadruple the price.
14: That's at least one form of BS we don't have to deal with in Maryland. In Baltimore there are actually public service announcements posted at bus stops about the life saving potential of naloxone.
14 Is probing the depths of malevolent evil I've come to expect from our Republican legislators. Respect.
The companies selling oxy and the -odones know damn well that a significant chunk of their profits comes from addicts and they lobby against effective legislation to change that. The heroin epidemic starts with prescription opioids and spreads into heroin and fentanyl. Post opiate use care should be part of pain management, a gradual weaning off and information on addiction and how to avoid the descent into it, as well as resources for getting off if you do stumble. Fighting the epidemic at the heroin end only makes no sense. It has to include helping people stay away from opioid addiction in the first place.
I keep thinking about that article from a few years back about how in the 90s they were trying to create a long-lasting painkiller, and they failed, but lied about it and marketed it anyway, and basically created the most perfect set of pellet-bar reinforcement for addiction to get out of hand. Let's see if I can find it.
There's so many articles purporting to explain the opioid crisis, it's hard to find the one that went into the biochemistry and failures of the 90s drug development in particular.
Heebie's favorite biochemistry-based opioid explainer, you probably haven't heard of it.
It's a complicated problem with no easy solution, but I thought the 10 ng limit was a good compromise. It's essentially redefining gender categories in a way that mostly aligns with conventional notions of gender and has a biological connection to performance. The exceptions, like Dutee Chand, are rare and fixable. There does not have to be the implication that she cheated, since she did not.
Notions of privacy in public competitions seem like they should be relatively low on the priority scale. Some kind of violation of privacy is necessary no matter what criterion you use unless you want zero enforcement. The only alternative, which I guess is what everyone has decided upon, is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I skimmed the link in 26. It's interesting, but the bit about many patients not getting the advertised 12 hours of pain relief is just about the least surprising thing ever.
Since a few years ago, I've been teaching a course section on drug metabolism and drug-drug interactions. Drug metabolism is hugely variable for a bunch of reasons, some genetic and others age/diet/lifestyle related. It's no surprise at all that the standard dose of Oxy gives different results in different people.
In a world without fixed M/F gender boundaries, you can't have fixed M/F sports teams, at least not without injustice at the margins.
Sports should drop the archaic M/F distinction and just have different testosterone tier levels, like boxing weight classes. No one thinks less of boxing middleweights because they don't/can't compete with heavyweights.
Don't they? I mean, "heavyweight champion" is a bigger deal than "welterweight champion." Certainly, I don't follow boxing very closely at all, but I can name a dozen or so heavyweight champions and only one smaller one (Sugar Ray Leonard).
Sports should drop the archaic M/F distinction and just have different testosterone tier levels, like boxing weight classes. No one thinks less of boxing middleweights because they don't/can't compete with heavyweights.
Are you picturing "weigh-ins" the morning of competition or the day before? Because testosterone and hormones are somewhat variable.
And are you picturing tiers that make it clear that we're not just cloaking traditional categories - like maybe 5 tiers of testosterone? 3 tiers would get read as M/F/Intersex. 4 tiers would get read as Big M, Little M, Little F, Big F.
And at that point, if you have 5 tiers, is that really the best way to make things competitive and fair? Or is there a secondary characteristic that should also be accounted for, and we should have a two dimensional matrix worth of competitive tiers?
To be fair, we must enumerate n characteristics, and each athlete is assigned a vector in R^n, and then you may only compete with athletes within a distance D of you, where the metric needs debate. What's the fairest metric for determining closeness of athletes? You then take a finite open cover of D-balls around every athlete, and easy-peasy: those are your tiers.
If your D-balls are big enough you have to play in the men's league.
They're hairy and you can't comb them.
What if somebody finds a hormone for being a shitty athlete that isn't sex-linked? Would we have to have competitions tiered on that? I think it could be interesting, for some sports. Extremely Uncoordinated People on the Parallel Bars sounds like great YouTube.
How many bins for this? (See the scatter plot at the bottom and notice where 10 nmol is).
I was at the bar with all the hipsters last night. I'm a little curious how they make a giant ice cube so clear, but not curious enough to google it.
They shake it while it's freezing, so all the air bubbles out.
I'm assuming a bearded man with a kind face and a parka sits in a walk-in freezer gently shaking the trays.
And thank you, Mr Hick, for in one stroke vindicating all the hours I spent watching Mythbusters instead of doing university assignments.
32: It amuses me that compete-ability would not be transitive. A and C could both be better than B, but would be incomparable to each other.
39: If you mean the one on the far side of the block of your usual, I was there Sunday night before the game. Or do you mean the new one further south, near (or in?) the old coop? Is it any good?
The new one further south isn't really hipster, I think. I've not been inside yet.
There's a grad student shaking ice trays all night. It can't not be good.
Anyway, it's the same space as the old Coop.
45: It seem so faux-old-timey that I figured it must be. Unless Lawrenceville has sucked all the air out of Pittsburgh hipsterdom, Greenfield is due its time in the sun: fairly convenient, quirky, reasonably priced, lots of hills to get massive calves from riding your fixie.
I don't see that happening. I think the architecture prevents it.
I think there's fundamentally not going to be a non-arbitrary, apparently fair way of dividing sports by sex/gender. The problem is (or a problem is) that elite sports is going to select for people who are physically unusual on a whole bunch of dimensions, and some of them are the same dimensions that we use to differentiate people by sex. There's something fundamentally arbitrary about saying that the whole point of elite sports is to identify the physical freaks who are, e.g., faster than 99.9% of other people because of a combination of training and just being born with an unusual set of physical capacities, and then screening people out of elite competitions because their particular unusual physical capacities are expressed in a way that impinges on sex.
OTOH, if you don't make some kind of arbitrary distinction, there aren't going to be elite women's sports at all.
I have no idea what specifically should happen.
39: I haven't tried myself, but I think you just boil the water immediately before freezing, and that does it.
Vaguely related enough for me: "No, Wittgenstein; I am neither a duck nor a rabbit!"
Vaguely related enough for me: "No, Wittgenstein; I am neither a duck nor a rabbit!"
That is fabulous!
I don't get it. How did the banana talk?
I was going to write something on sports, but urple in 29 and LB in 50 said what I was sort of thinking much better than I could have.
Is the more general concern that letting women with high T compete will lead to a bunch of strategically trans women competing in women's sports? I would say no, but then there was that Spanish men's basketball team in the Special Olympics, so it looks like humans should not be underestimated.
Also I'm pretty sure Will Farrell already made a movie about that.
(And apologies for the DM link, they were the first thing that came up in google with a good headline.)
53 is true, but tbh I can't really see the rabbit. He should have rotated it a little.
What if somebody finds a hormone for being a shitty athlete that isn't sex-linked? Would we have to have competitions tiered on that? I think it could be interesting, for some sports. Extremely Uncoordinated People on the Parallel Bars sounds like great YouTube.
Monty Python had this covered.
Ibogaine would be a good pseudonym.
60 Damn. Ibogaine has long been at the top of my psychotropic bucket list.
Coincidence. I just started a new project looking at how ibogaine, cocaine, and a few other compounds affect the structure of a protein they bind to.
I was amused at the idea of working on it, because for years I knew of it only from Hunter S. Thompson's 1972 campaign trail book, where he suggested that Ed Muskie was experiencing ibogaine induced hallucinations during his whistle stop speeches during the primaries.
63; Me too
I think the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy is the next big frontier. There have been studies showing MDMA is really helpful for treating PTSD, f'rex.
I thought ibogaine was the odorless, tasteless poison from The Princess Bride. No?
That was four months ago, before Muski began crashing around the country in a stupid age. and destroying everything he touched. First it was booze, then Reds, finally over the brink into Ibogaine ....
For years I assumed Ibogaine was also a made up drug.
But then I honed in on the truth of the matter.
71 I'd pop a bunch of those about now.
71: Maybe. He was on an FBI-developed list of 13 US legislators who had the most contacts with the Soviet Union.
Apparently, the end result of the heroin overdose deaths is going to be prosecuting people for medical marijuana. Because Sessions is willing to swallow whatever Trump shits out so long as he gets his shot at pot.
The old Pistorius thread seems relevant.
Surely 73 to 72. I mean how bad does it have to get?
75: But hasn't the WWC realized--or, regionally, always known--that marijuana is good and fun and helpful, while they're simultaneously seeing friends die to opiates? How could that not be an own goal for the Trumpistas?
78: Marijuana is for the Dirty Fucking Hippies. Dying of an opiate overdose is what red blooded real Americans do.
Something abysmally stupid or undeniably evil (or, most likely, both) is probably going to come out of the Senate very soon. Preparations have now gone public.
Yep. I just called my senior senator to say I expect her to kick and scream to the utmost, not roll over in fear of GOP "backlash" (which, how could that be worse).
I should call my senior senator, but what I really want to do is shout at my junior senator. However, he moved his local office to make it impossible for constituents to talk to him.
Speaking of Feinstein, anyone watching the Sessions show?
No. The Sessions show won't be any good until after Trump makes than one guy fire Mueller.
83: I just called both. My voicemails to our junior one always end up being pretty grumpy.
I'm guessing nobody listened to it regardless.
Just the Toomey one, that is. He got six years and ran.
83: Wait, he did that in the western half of the state too? He did it here in a really obnoxious way, moving to a federal building with high security.
I called both this morning before work. I note that the senior senator actually bothered to record his own voice prompts, something the junior senator decidedly did not do.
I also handwrote a note on my most Middle America notecard, affixed it with a Purple Heart stamp, and sent it to the junior senator's central PA office. I'm hoping whoever logs it will not notice my zip code and will put me down as a swing voter, or a conservative.
Lest anyone be too impressed, I confess that this is the first time I've contacted either of them on this healthcare bill. Sigh.
I wonder if the idea isn't to get Republicans in Congress to vote for something so shitty that they'll have to stick with Trump because they're less popular than he is.
And now I've called my junior senator too. Notably, unlike in prior months, humans picked up both times on the first try, although I spent a little time on hold with Feinstein's.
Our Republican Governor is really into treatment for drugs. I think there must be a family story somewhere. He also ran a well-respected health insurer for a number of years, so that may be part of it too.
I hear that fentanyl is picking up steam. In Vancouver, they don't have that much heroin. Mostly fentanyl. It's more compact and easier to send through the mail. The combination can be more deadly than heroin alone
Fentanyl is so 2016. Elephant tranquilizers.
Apparently, it's so strong that this cop in Ohio just touched some to brush it off his shirt and OD'ed.
94: They were talking about carfentanil in British Columbia last summer.
It makes sense that Ohio would get the idea from people in a place with more elephants.
A few kilos of an opioid precursor was seized around here. Our local news conveniently morphed "enough material to make $500M of drugs" into "$500M of drug material seized." I'm now going to go drink some water, about enough to help produce a few thousand dollars of some drug I'm sure.
"Water, a substance used by elephants that can be tranquilized...."
I'm trying to figure out what Virginia's primary results mean. I think it means that what happened in 2016 for them in the presidential race is happening again for governor. Except that I know nothing of Ed Gillespie, so I'm reluctant to say he's as bad as Ted Cruz.
On googling, he probably is. But in a different way.
100: The main takeaway I'm seeing on Twitter is that the people in Virginia who used to be moderate Republicans are now Democrats.
I hear that fentanyl is picking up steam.
It absolutely is. The potency is so high that these counterfeit pill mills are generating crazy amounts of money off of a few grand worth of fentanyl. It's probably where the numbers of the account in 98 came from.
95: Word is that it took like four hits of Narcan to get him back. Lot of paranoia now when handling narcs and rightfully so.
He was on an FBI-developed list of 13 US legislators who had the most contacts with the Soviet Union.
Was Sessions in Congress by then? He looks as if he was born in the palaeogene.
108 Very heteronormative of me I know, but I think that's the first unironic NMM we've seen here in a while.
Hey Barry, I keep seeing your comments much later after the conversation moves on, but wanted to say that I'm reading along and wishing you well. The job sounds infuriating, political situation terrifying, and the lack of upcoming visit with Chani depressing. I'm glad you at least get a change of scenery soon.
I don't know precisely which opiates people are taking around here, but overall usage is way, way up in my neighborhood. Just over the last 6 to 9 months it's gone from mostly invisible to ubiquitous -- I saw some people shooting up right in the middle of the gas station a couple months ago. And we've had people creeping around the yard to fix as well. There's a shifting collection of junkies who meander up and down the street. It's pretty fucking bleak. And this is all in a city with a still fairly robust social safety net (by US standards). I hate to think what it's like elsewhere.
I don't know precisely which opiates people are taking around here...
The first thing to check is how well the elephants are sleeping.
Anyway, my employer is having an Opiate Crisis Brown Bag. I could go, but I think "Brown Bag" means "you have to bring your own lunch". So why bother?
randomly, congrats to gswift's PD (IIRC) on their multi-year no-fatality record.
If they give out awards for not dying, everybody will want to do it.
114: You can only use if you bring enough for everyone.
More for not killing people, which is also a surprisingly popular pastime, as it turns out.
110 Thanks ydnew.
I received the first stage of my promotion up the next grade. I can't say it is overdue since they've acknowledged as I had suspected that I should have been brought in 2 grades over what I am but apparently they need to bring me up to that level in 6 month increments.
Chani and I are toying with the idea of a rendez-vous in Oman. We'd have to be careful and probably each get separate rooms even if we spend the night together since she is native to the region and questions might be asked.
Muscat love.
That seems expensive, even for somebody who just got a promotion. You could take a lesson from Bosom Buddies to save money.
I wish I had spent more time in Oman when I was in-region.
120 Flights there from here are still pretty cheap and just about over an hour total flight time (versus abut 45 minutes to Dubai).
121 Have yet to go. When were you in region?
123 I made no comment on the Bosom Buddies reference.
Tom Hanks's early work is often overlooked.
The Reconstruction Klan learned their costume tradition from actual costume parties of the sort that rich Southerners used to throw, and they attempted a more unruly set of ensembles than even today's alt-right: not just the infamous white-hooded ghosts, but moon men and demons and cross-dressers. "The Klan served an energizing function in part by building a new Southern white male identity that was drawn self-consciously from the newest trends, from popular entertainment to contemporary forms of organizational structure" Parsons writes in the book. The architects of the Reconstruction Klan weren't revanchist Southern gentlemen; they were memelords.
I would read a long secret history of far-right trolling right up, for sure. This is fascinating. I'm not 100% sure I buy it.
Another OT: am I the only who can't help but think that the shooting incident at a Congressional baseball game, which has suspended all Congressional activity for the day, is the best thing to have happened to the progress of Trumpcare legislation in the Senate this week? Sorry, sorry, I know, it's a terrible sentiment.
(Also sorry, I couldn't find the most recent healthcare related thread in which to place this comment.)
We've been focused on non-Hodgkinson ephemera today. I think for the best.
83, 86, 89: Just PA JR SR at (202) 224-4254 and got through to a staffer, an had a relatively benign discussion but one in which I tried to be forceful about how effed up the process and likely result is. Staffer was at pains to point out the Senate version was "not the AHCA" but of course could not/would not discuss the differences. He said Toomey was "in the room" working on it ("lots of debates") and surely aware of the status but they did not want any details out about things that might need to change later... Toomey "expects it to be published next week".
They need to not only publish it but allow time for full examination, analysis, hearings, debate before a vote.
Toomey "expects it to be published next week".
Can't wait to see it. It takes 2-3 weeks for the CBO to score it, from what I understand, and the CBO score is required for Senate bills to advance to a vote (is that right?).
I wish I had a Republican Senator to call, but I don't. It feels really pointless to call my Democratic Senators.
Remind them the ACA was in print for months before it passed.
129(/130): Good on you. Should a CBO score for the Senate bill be a talking point for these calls?
I wish I had a Republican Senator to call, but I don't. It feels really pointless to call my Democratic Senators.
Here's some the Indivisibles' script for our own Dems:
Thank you for fighting hard against the GOP's efforts to deprive millions of Americans of healthcare in order to pay for a huge tax cut for the wealthy, without any Senate debate or public hearings. And thank you for speaking out about the 13 male members of the Senate working in secret, with no concern for women's health needs. I ask you to conduct your own public hearings, preferably on the steps of the U.S. Capitol with 12 of your female colleagues. I also ask that you withhold consent on all Senate business until Republicans agree to hold a public hearing on TrumpCare.
131 pwned by 130, sort of: do they really need to allow time for full examination, analysis, hearings, debate before a vote? I understood somewhere along the line that McConnell has put in place some sort of fast-track thing according to which they can forego Committee markups, hearings, amendments and whatnot. But they still need the CBO analysis at the very least, according to Senate rules.
They're trying to push this through before Senators have to face constituents.
Some things I've read suggest that they might send it to the CBO before releasing the text publicly. I think the CBO score is required by Senate rules but the other stuff in 130 is not, which is why they're trying to skip it and pressuring them not to should be part of the talking points when calling.
122 - six years in Beirut, which isn't actually all that close but a lot closer than Chicago. Made it out to Oman once, for a bit less than a week.
Yes. Asking for full process with public hearings with all interested parties is what I asked about. I wish i had also put in a plug for the current law working with a need for only commitment and minor fixes.
How about the "It's just a huge tax cut for the wealthy" plug?
Huh. I've been curious about this. Ryan Cooper says that
For months now, many congressional Democrats have been obsessed with Russian interference in the American electoral process. That tendency was on full display this week, as they reportedly refused demands from liberals that they gum up the works of Congress in an attempt to stop the passage of TrumpCare. Their reason? That it would hinder their efforts to achieve a bipartisan deal on new Russia sanctions.
What's that now? They "reportedly" refused these demands from liberals? It's the first I've heard of it. There are a couple of twitter posts linked in that piece that point to such a thing. Again: huh.
I will say that I've been a tad annoyed with e.g. Rachel Maddow lately for obsession on the Russia thing when, dude, can you please remind the country about the Trumpcare thing? It is annoying in the extreme that it's all Russia all the time over there.
115: Huh, I was wondering how you knew that and then googled around and saw the Huffpost and Kos articles. PR and luck for the win! (We've had at least three OIS in the last two years I can think of off the top of my head. Two took rounds and survived and the most recent decided he didn't like it when the cops starting shooting back and blew his brains out.)
They "reportedly" refused these demands from liberals? It's the first I've heard of it. There are a couple of twitter posts linked in that piece that point to such a thing. Again: huh.
Jeff Stein today
Senate Democrats say they'll also be unified in beating the drum against Republicans' health care bill. But for now, Senate Democrats are resisting using their "nuclear" trigger of withholding consent to shut down Senate procedure on unrelated fights.
Unlike the House of Representatives, the Senate operates under what are called "unanimous consent" agreements. If Senate Democrats withhold their consent, the routine functioning of the body -- from committee hearings to routine floor votes -- could grind to an immediate halt.
Staffers in seven Senate Democratic offices on Monday said that nobody expects the party to go down this path. In our interview, Murray said she didn't believe shutting down the Senate would effectively delay McConnell, since he can call a vote on the bill at his discretion.
"If I thought that would accomplish a goal -- it won't accomplish anything under their rule, because they can bring it up no matter what," she told me. "I do believe we fight back with everything we have."
...
The groups on the activist left have a different view. MoveOn, CREDO, and Indivisible are all urging Senate Democrats to buy as much time as possible to allow them to mobilize resistance to the Republican bill. They argue that Democrats need to provoke as much theater of opposition as possible, and that withholding consent may force a delay. In an interview on Tuesday, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) expressed his openness to the idea, citing the need to "dramatize" the Republican health bill's impact on America.
"We're asking Democrats to withhold consent -- if [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer doesn't do it, we hope one of the other Democrats will," said Levin, of Indivisible. "Indivisible groups in blue states will be telling their senators to do everything they can to stop Senate business on a bill that reworks a sixth of the American economy and takes health care from millions of people."
He added: "This is the obvious strategic choice: If your goal is to sink this bill, you want as much sunlight on this as possible. Anything that allows McConnell to swiftly get this through the Senate is a win for him. Democrats have some unilateral ability to slow down this process -- and they should use that power as much as possible."
McConnell would have withheld unanimous consent last week, ads would be running demanding hearings and markup, and many people would be quoted in the press blaming Obama for ramming through such a poor bill in the first place, one of the defects of Chicago-style politics.
Or, more likely, McConnell would suggest that such a strategy was possible and the Democrats would cave immediately.
On the Qatar front, a couple US navy ships just showed up to engage in joint training with the Qatar navy. As one does, when one is supporting a blockade.
America first or logical consistency first. Pick one.
My new favorite thing is all the assholes who spent late yesterday and early today pointing out that Democrats need to easy up because Trump is not a target an obstruction of justice investigation.
OT, but how is it that the tour group that sent Otto Warmbier to the DPRK is still hosting North Korean tours?
Their website includes this bit of WTFery:
North Korea is probably one of the safest places on Earth to visit. Tourism is very welcomed in North Korea, thus tourists are cherished and well taken care of. We have never felt suspicious or threatened at any time.... Even during tense political moments tourism to the DPRK is never affected.
Really? You've never felt threatened or suspicious? Even when one of your tour group members was sentenced to 15 years hard labor for petty vandalism?
If you train their navy to blockade properly it's much more efficient since they can just blockade themselves, saves other countries the travel.
We're selling Qatar $12 billion worth of F-15s and Saudi Arabia $110 billion worth of weapons. If I weren't us, I'd be suspicious.
I have an idea. Let's see if Iran needs any planes.
There seems to be some doubt about whether we're actually selling Saudia 110B in weaponry. Maybe the Qatar deal is vapor as well.
||
This story about anti-racist Southern Baptists winning a big vote at the Southern Baptist Convention is fascinating.
Does anybody have a sense of what this means and how important it is?
[Russell] Moore himself took a strong position, with his public stance indicating that he may well have been one of those "big names" in question. He tweeted last night, "Racial unity and justice is a hill on which to die. If you're at #SBC17, get in the convention hall and stay till last gavel" and calling racial injustice "satanism." (Earlier today, he condemned the alt-right even more directly, tweeting: "The so-called Alt-Right white supremacist ideologies are anti-Christ and satanic to the core. We should say so..")
Depends on how long Moore keeps his job.
The resolution he was supporting passed unanimously, so it doesn't sound like his job is in immediate danger.
153: Yes, from what I read it was basically a wish list compiled over several years.
153 Just a few months ago Qatar completed a deal to buy two dozen Dassault Rafale jets from France.
Qatar?! We hardly even knew we stationed CENTCOM there.
My colleagues like to pretend they don't even have a drug slang.
157: Passed only after it was widely noted in the press that it wouldn't get a vote.
Isn't it just a little bit suspicious that the alleged shooting incident yesterday was all tied up in a neat little package so quickly? There's a shooting, but nobody except the supposed shooter is dead, his whole biography is immediately available, and there are virtually no false reports or mistakes in the coverage? Practically every mass shooting we've seen is initially reported to have been the work of multiple shooters. And there's generally far more confusion about numbers of people shot, shooter's motive, etc. Everything about this screams "false flag attack" and yet the sheeple who are supposedly so skeptical of other official explanations are just knuckling under without a fight. And on top of all that, the alleged perpetrator was a housing inspector, which should clue everyone in to the fact that ITS MOLE!
Everything about this screams "false flag attack" and yet the sheeple who are supposedly so skeptical of other official explanations are just knuckling under without a fight.
Well, the shooter was aiming at Republicans and by all accounts was a Sanders supporter. The people who are usually conspiracy theorists about this kind of thing aren't knuckling under so much as doing the finger-pointing themselves.
there are virtually no false reports or mistakes in the coverage
For several hours people thought Scalise was doing better in the hospital, then this was corrected.
Also, it looks like there was confusion about whether or not the passerby who asked about the party of the players was the shooter.
Not that it necessarily means one damn thing with regard to motive, but the oddest thing to me about the guy is that fact that he seems to have upped and left his occasionally-violent old white guy suburban life a month or so ago and had been hanging around in Alexandria (have seen a particular bar and the YMCA right by the ball field mentioned) apparently living out of a white van.
It's been years since you could live at the YMCA instead of living in a van and just showering at the Y. I blame the 70s.
My father briefly lived at the YMCA in my hometown when got his first job after college (1949 or so).
They didn't have vans back then, at least not in a way we can understand.
They lived and breathed in vans, yet this was not a vanocracy.
That poor kid who was imprisoned in DPRK for that dumb stunt. WTF did they do to him to put him in a coma?
As a totally subjective, private reflection (on the public interwebs), I am taken aback at how much the toxic political climate has interfered with my reflexive sympathy for an innocent person shot by an apparently evil person: I can't quickly override the fear and aversion at all Republicans' vicious loathing of their political enemies, I.e. me. I like to think it would be different in person, rather than mediated by the news. But that's seriously fucked up regardless. I feel insufficiently Christlike. It's horrible and depressing that Scalise might not make it.
176: Same. Two things at the moment getting in the way of me caring like a decent human being would.
1) Rep. congressmen who were their with their "you can't imagine the horror/how we felt" takes. (This one could be washed away if they acted on their newfound wokeness. Not holding my breath.)
2) Reaction of folks like Steve King:
"I do want to put some of this at the feet of Barack Obama," said King. "He contributed mightily to dividing us. He focused on our differences rather than our things that unify us. And this is some of the fruits of that labor."
Yes. By existing and not agreeing with King, Obama divided us. At least 35% of the voters feel exactly the same way.
After reading 176 I enjoyed a few self-congratulatory moments of feeling relatively Christlike, since I did genuinely feel reflexive sympathy for Scalise and even imagined what I might say if I were a Dem representative wanting to offer comfort to my Republican colleagues in that strange environment where collegiality has been lost by most reports.
That lasted until I read 177.2 and then the Jesus flew right out of me and all I could imagine were my hands around Steve King's neck.
Oh well.
It really is amazing that a guy whose whole political THING was "we're not red America or blue America, we're the united states of America" gets blamed for this shit.
180: See also the compromise-laden ACA being labelled as it was. No conciliatory deed goes unpunished.
It really is amazing that a guy whose whole political THING was "we're not red America or blue America, we're the united states of America" gets blamed for this shit.
"We're not red America or blue America, we're WHITE America, and you're not part of it."
Yes, although I still think any Dem would have received a similar reception, with just the details of the resentments shifted.
Yes. Bubba and Hill were commies in the '90s.
177.last: If only he had been a uniter like Trump.
Well, I still think it's mole.