Grand jury in Louisville, KY charges one officer in Breonna Taylor shooting, and only with wanton endangerment (and not even endangerment of Ms. Taylor!); protests immediately follow, during which two officers get shot and almost 50 other folks get arrested. If said police officer had been convicted merely of wanton endangerment after being charged with murder and manslaughter I might be a tiny bit less upset, since conviction is (and should be) difficult, but note well how many ordinary folks get a dozen charges thrown at them so they'll throw up their hands and plead guilty to one or two. The USA Today report, by the way, gives no clue about who shot the two officers.
Upon the occasion of Santa Cruz's banning of "predictive policing," Matthew Guariglia at the Electronic Frontier Foundation reminds us that "Technology Can't Predict Crime." This should be fairly clear, once you consider that when police over-arrest black folks to begin with, they feed the "predictive policing" system with bad data. You'll no doubt hear politicians saying "but if it agrees with what we've seen in the past, it must be right!" But that's not how inductive reasoning works, and even if it did, you still have to ensure that we're not seeing what we've "seen" because we have hundreds of beams in our eyes.
Ho hum, top scientist on Administration effort to find a COVID-19 vaccine wouldn't divest himself of $10 million in shares in his former corporation which just so happens to be among those corporations racing to finish a vaccine. He sold $12 million in shares in another corporation trying to develop a vaccine, but that's a little like King Solomon actually splitting the baby in half, and his whining about anyone possibly thinking his ethical compass is anything but perfect doesn't recommend him, either. I'm old enough to remember when people would avoid even the appearance of corruption.
Natasha Lennard at The Intercept reminds us that in the newly-designated "anarchist jurisdiction" of New York City, "Cops Crush Every Tiny Protest." Did you also think of FBI officers cracking down on Occupy encampments back in the day when you read that? Also, too, denying federal funding to cities, as our President would do, is also a way of defunding the police! Of course he thought of that beforehand -- the only thing that man ever aims to do is make problems worse so he can make himself seem more indispensable. And I said exactly the same thing about George W. Bush back in the day.
Former Reagan Administration Chief of Staff/Secretary of State James Baker will apparently for our President in November, his biographers saying that Mr. Baker feels that the "myriad ethical scandals surrounding" our President were "worth it to get conservative judges, tax cuts and deregulation." Most of our President's deregulatory efforts have died in court, and these aren't "conservative" judges so much as reactionary ones, but whatever. Odd, though, that Mr. Baker does not appear to have considered stacking anything else, like our President's repeated racist remarks and his repeated stated desire to become a dictator, against "tax cuts" and the like. Why, it makes you wonder if it's ever worth it to look to a "respected" member of the right!
Finally, we learn about truck convoys in support of our President driving through the streets of America. Of course I immediately thought of all those Confederate flag-laden Hummers plowing through Portland, and of course my immediate reaction to "I'm tired of people putting down our President" is waaaaaaah! Interesting that the article does eventually slip the word "caravan" in to describe these convoys. I think I'm going to be calling them "caravans" for the rest of the year.
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