But Seriously...

I've seen a lot of polling(posted some earlier) that shows public trust in the mainstream media has been plummeting, but nothing too in depth. Does a conservative saying he doesn't trust the media mean he loves fox news and hates the 'liberal media' and vice versa for liberals? I've also seen polling showing millennials feel that stuff like the John Oliver show is the most trustworthy, but that's not news, it's political satire at best with a lot of bullshit spin.

I think there's truth to both of what you guys are saying. You have the rabid political base leaning consumers who devour/love the stuff and then you have the other half of the public who is just fed up with all of it.

 

I saw a meme on facebook along the lines of "Not sure if everyone is getting dumber, or if more rural areas have Internet access."

The upside to the Internet is that it gives everyone a voice and access to an unlimited amount of information. The downside to the Internet is also that it gives everyone a voice and access to an unlimited amount of information which they then selectively read and decide to act upon. My mother in law is one of those people who shares or retweets or whatever, every single crazy fucking article she comes across. I've made it a game to post the snopes article showing it false. My wife thinks it's hilarious. The MIL just gets really frustrated. My favorite response from her thus far is "Well then why do people keep posting things that they know aren't true!" .... uhm, yeah, like you're doing.

People have their own narrative of how the world works in their head. They'll like or share or whatever, any article that confirms that narrative, and immediately dismiss anything that runs counter to it. Look at the recent trial of the Charleston church shooter. He was completely convinced that black people (and hispanics) were what was wrong with society, and there was literally nothing you could do to prove to him otherwise. Everyone creates their own "fact pattern" and with the availability of literally all the information in the world on the Internet, they can and will find even outlier info that fits within that fact pattern.

I've long since learned to stop my emotional energy fighting these idiots. I'm with Trump on this one -- let's just carpet bomb them.

 

This is the russian dude being assassinated. Holy shit.

 

Terror attack on Berlin Christmas market, reminiscent of the Nice, France attack. 9 dead, 50 injured. Early reports suggest a link to ISIL, but I don't think any of that has been confirmed yet.

Edit: Apparently with all the conflicting reports, some are leaving it open that it may have been an accident.

 

I hate to be that guy, but don't the videos and pictures from the Russian ambassador's assassination look almost..... fake?

When you shoot somebody, there's blood right? Especially from close range? And wouldn't there be an immediate security rush?

This picture looks like something from a movie:

Spoiler: safe for, well, everything

In the video it looked like the guy took a bunch of body hits. So unless one of those shots hit a major nerve (you can see a tiny bit of blood underneath the ambassador's head), wouldn't he still be moving afterward? That's why cops empty their clips into guys, you gotta make sure they're dead, can't take the chance. But the body still moves around. It doesn't just look like.... that.

... right?

It just doesn't seem to add up for me.

 

He probably took a shot to the head or heart, when that happens you drop like a bag of shit. Looking at the video, it looks like at least two of the bullets exited at or near center mass. Usually bullet exit wounds will cause a blood spray, but many, many variables determine where blood ends up. He dead.

 

Depends on where you get hit.

If you get hit in the head, you get splatter because head wounds bleed a lot and there's nowhere for it to go except into the skull (which does happen and is also very bad). Similarly, if you get hit in the neck, you get blood everywhere because the blood goes out your mouth while you're trying to breathe.

If you get hit center mass, there's a lot of empty space inside the body for the blood to go. The abdominal cavity can hold a lot of blood. The wound will also close up as the area gets inflamed, and the clothes will soak up the remainder.

 

I really hope there's more to this than they're saying, or else the German police let the guy suspected of driving the truck go just because he said he didn't do it.

"In a dramatic twist, police later said the suspect had denied the offence and might not be the right man.

Berlin police tweeted that they were "particularly alert" because of the suspect's denial."

"German media said the arrested man had jumped out of the driver's cab and run down the street towards the Tiergarten, a vast park in central Berlin. Several witnesses called police, including one who chased the suspect while on the phone, constantly updating officials on his whereabouts."

 

63 people shot in Chicago this past weekend, and we have this nice little article:

"As Chicago grapples with a surge in killings and a mistrust of law enforcement stemming from police shootings, the number of arrests in the city has fallen by 28 percent versus last year, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis finds."

"The decline in arrests is welcomed by civil rights groups.

“Our perspective is: The fewer people in jail, the better it is for our communities,” says Deangelo Bester, executive director of the Workers Center for Racial Justice, which focuses on access to jobs."

http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/the-watchdogs-arrests-down-25-percent-in-chicago-this-year/

So, we have arrests at -28% while shootings are +48% over last year and this is good? How about the clearance rate for the 785 murders? 18.4%. You have a better than 80% chance of getting away with murder in Chicago.

But, at least the civil rights groups are pleased and that's all that really matters, not the 4334 people that got shot. Fuck them, apparently all this crime is better for the communities.

 

This isn't meant to be crass or harsh, but imagine what would be the murder clearance rate in Tikrit or Al-Raqqah. Or Beirut in the 80s. Cause thats what it is. Indiscriminate violence and essentially urban warfare. Not saying Chicago shouldn't be better, but its harder to pin down charges when you have groups of people who shoot at each other on a daily basis.

The only way the CPD are ever going to make progress is with extended community policing which is expensive and HARD, especially when you factor in the "no snitching" culture that permeates much of the violent sects of urban areas. Add to that a high profile police shooting of Laquan McDonald on the South Side, which seems like it will likely be another Blue Wall of Silence mockery of justice, and mistrust of police is at a high. So you have people hating and distrusting the ones that can help them...yea, its a vicious cycle.

That arrest statistic is also misleading. Is it arrest for violent crimes? Or misdemeanors and other lesser crimes?

 

2016 can't end without one more horror, A Santa Claus-clad shooter in an Istanbul nightclub has murdered at least thirty five people.

So yeah, that's completely horrible.

 

Apparently the CIA had given them the heads up a week ago, but they still weren't able to prevent it.

 

I wasn't around for this, but based on what I know about history, it seems that the US went through a huge zeitgeist change in the 60s with Nixon, Vietnam, etc. when basically people went from generally trustful toward institutions to generally distrustful of them. And that hasn't ever really been reversed. Even in the Reagan 80s, when there was a lot of jingoistic patriotism, it happened weirdly: Reagan campaigned as the guy that told you government was the problem, not the solution. I know many institutions deserve scorn for all kinds of reasons, and skepticism is good, and all that, but I can't help but feel we lost something in that transition we'll never get back. I guess I'm too much of an inherent fuddy-duddy to believe that distrust of institutions is an unmitigated good.

I think we're in the midst of a similar zeitgeist transition right now, and I think this one is potentially scarier (or at least, more depressing). The American Dream is, in one sense, about the house with the white-picket fence, well-behaved children, two cats in the yard, and so on. But in another sense, it's about the pursuit of a platonic ideal in both an individual and collective sense. In the individual sense, it explains why Americans, perhaps uniquely, don't vote their interests. Per Steinbeck, perhaps apocryphally, "socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Collectively, there has always been this sort of platonic ideal America, in which we all collectively fight for freedom, justice, equal rights, and the country reflects that. We all want to be Superman, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, etc., and more importantly we want to build the country that those people were fighting for. And sure, both the individual and collective versions of this dream are bullshit on a number of levels, but on at least a few really important ones, they are not bullshit. And I'm afraid we might lose that too.

In our loss of trust of institutions, there was still an American Dream focused around the collective character and emergent behavior of individuals. Government might be bad, but Americans were pretty OK on the average. Schools suck, but teachers are great. The DoD and the military might make questionable decisions, but we support our troops. See a pattern here?

But what if, just hypothetically, individuals didn't deserve all that trust and hope? What if we discover that evolution left us with a lot of bugs in the wetware (that's what us nerds call the biological programming of the brain)? What if some people (and even institutions) decided that, instead of trying to overcome those bugs, they were going to exploit them? Maximally?

The platonic ideal America is about overcoming those bugs. Go watch the West Wing for a while. Why is it so popular and compelling? It presents the platonic ideal America as reality. Individuals in power are smart, contemplative, selfless, and hard-working. They have their own flaws but try to overcome them, and rarely if ever try to exploit flaws in others. Now go watch House of Cards. Similar setting. Individuals in power are greedy, craven, often stupid, and when smart they use it to attack their opponents' weaknesses.

In the platonic ideal world, fake news doesn't work, because people are smart, and they quash it.
In the platonic ideal world, consistency is important. You can't just go around saying whatever you think will make the people in front of you like you the most. People will see right through this and dismiss you.
In the platonic ideal world, emotions inform fact-based decision-making on an individual and group level, rather than driving decisions in spite of facts.

In actual America populated by real humans, none of the above is true. Ironically, giving every individual a voice with technology like the Internet has demonstrated that truly, the Emperor has no clothes. Individuals, and especially their emergent behavior (even outside the context of institutions) aren't any more reliable or moral or smart than those institutions that we have been bitching about since the 1960s. (And this shouldn't surprise anyone, since institutions are just a bunch of people anyway). But maintaining the illusion that the American Dream, though it couldn't be achieved by institutions, could be achieved by a collective of well-meaning individuals - that was, I think, important.

Now, in 2016, institutions have failed us, and now we see that individuals just don't do any better. Who carries the standard for the American Dream now? Nobody.

But nature abhors a vacuum. The Capra-esque American Dream, though it's painfully naive in many ways, was at least a good dream. If (or perhaps when) we lose it, what will take its place? I don't know, but I DO know there is going to be a line of people offering replacements for sale.

And I shudder.

 

Speaking of the Wild West, I haven't seen official word yet, but a Chicago cop blog is reporting that UPS will be hiring armed escorts for their drivers after a rash of UPS and FedEx trucks have been robbed/Carjacked in the area. Literally "Riding Shotgun", just like in the old stage coach days.

Preliminary year end numbers from Chicago: 795 murdered, 4378 shot. There are, however, around 36 death investigations still going on so the number will probably easily eclipse 800.

 

Can someone explain to me what the big talking point is regarding Chicago's 2016 murder rate? Chicago's not even in the top thirty in murder rate in the country if this site is to be believed but pretty much every discussion around murder rates have been Chicago's murder rate. What's special about Chicago?

 

Obama is from Chicago.

 

So? What's that got to do with anything? Why is Obama responsible for Chicago's crime rate? I'll admit it's been awhile but I certainly don't recall anyone talking about the murder rate in Midland Texas when Bush was president or Little Rock when Clinton was President.

 

It has more to do with strict gun laws. Ownership requires a permit. Ownership requires registration. Up until recently concealed carry was illegal (I believe it is still "may issue").

Chicago is a bastion of the Democratic party, so it receives attention from non-democrats. The point is that with all of these excessive gun laws Democrats want, it doesn't help.