The Goat Pen

I wouldn’t have expected the odds to go down for Biden after picking Kamala with all the hype she’s getting.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/elect ... president/

A guy I work with has got the covid...

Kiss him

Like many Black Seattleites, Beach is livid about how the city treated its first Black police chief, who said she was not consulted as the City Council cut the police department budget, including Best’s salary. Beach also believes the chief was hamstrung in her handling of the former occupied zone known as CHOP or CHAZ by a mayor who was calling the shots.

“It’s a new way of racism,” Beach said of city officials. It entails making a job so hard “that we walk away.”

But Beach’s rift with Seattle is about more than that. Living blocks away from the occupied zone, she didn’t like what she saw: marchers with sledgehammers, spray paint everywhere, destructive white protesters who seemed to be hijacking the movement, violence that claimed the lives of two young Black men.

She favors police reform and reallocating money from law enforcement to social services, but not by nearly as much as some protesters want and the city may be inclined to do. Believing the number of officers will be slashed, she said: “I’m fearful. I feel like now I need to arm myself. So many of my friends are saying that.”

Beach by no means speaks for Black Seattleites, and she knows it. “We’re so divided,” she said, especially along generational lines.

That’s why, amid the shock of the chief’s departure, some are asking how widely the city has sought input among African Americans. Another big question: As the city answers protesters’ call to defund the police department, does it have a plan?

A coalition of activists and community groups wants police funding cut by at least 50%, immediately. Others, including African American clergy and small business owners, are still sorting through what a re-imagining of public safety might look like — and want city officials to take their time with the matter, too.

I've been listening to alot of different viewpoints on this over the past few weeks.

It all boils down to this

Defunding police - however you want to define it , whether its drastically cutting funds to limit the number of police are taking fund intended for police and reallocating that to other resources, along with police responsibility has to be a recipe for disaster.

There are two major issues with this.

1. Police aren't paid enough. The problem now is that police are getting guys that were turned down by the marines or couldn't pass psych exams for other departments, and these guys end up at inner city police departments where they are the last guys you want to have a badge and a gun.
You need police to be exclusive, elite - with people that are paid well and highly trained to focus on de-escalating a situation. A good number of the men you have now, probably have some form of PTSD from being exposed to this craziness day in and day out, while some of them are putting on pads, taping their hands, whatever because they expect and want a fight when they go out on a shift. You can't get rid of those type of people paying $70K a year.

2. You have to increase the number of police. The biggest issue with the black community is not police brutality, its lack of opportunity. Economics is the greatest separator of people, not racism. And if you have a city where people are burning down shit, rioting, looting and looking to fight police - and all it takes to set them off is some transgression in another city, there is no way in hell a business is going to make the investment to start there. Not only will there be no economic development, but that will drive all the people that have the means to leave, to leave the city - white flight on steroids.

The only way people invest is they feel there is long term stability and security in the neighborhood - and that starts with a huge police presence.

This defund police concept is going to hurt the black community more than it could ever help it with some idealized vision of community workers helping the mentally ill and drug counselors reaching out to addicts instead of police.

HIT THE BEACH!

There have already been several "clusters" of covid at UNC after just a week. Here's the headline from the Daily Tar Heel:

California logic (and why this state should never have more influence than it already has on the rest of America)
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In the new bill is an introduction statement that the wealth tax is “for the benefit of accumulating excessive wealth in this state,” Globe contributor Chris Micheli reported.

Knowing about the huge outbound migration from California, Cavuto asked what would happen to wealthy people who move out of state. Bonta said tax “avoidance” would not be allowed as California would tax them for the next ten years, despite what state they live in. Bonta said that because they accrued the wealth in California, the state can continue to legally tax it.

“Tax avoidance,” with the primary purpose of reducing the valuation of a taxpayer’s worldwide net worth is required to be disregarded. “The bill authorizes the Franchise Tax Board to adopt regulations necessary to carry out these new statutory provisions including the valuation of certain assets that are not publicly traded,” Micheli said.

“AB 3088 requires the FTB to adopt regulation designed to prevent the avoidance or evasion of the wealth tax.”

Conversely, a billionaire who moves to California but acquired their wealth in another state, will still have to pay the proposed wealth tax for ten years.

“In California, we’ve had taxes on millionaires in the past. We raised taxes in 2012 by 3% — and the number of millionaires and billionaires in California has grown,” Bonta said. “We have 25% of the nation’s billionaires, 17% of the millionaires, those numbers are up and we’ve grown to be the fifth-largest economy in the world. So, while worthy of consideration it has not panned out.”

UNC is shutting it down, sending all students home (or at least the ones living on campus in dorms). All classes will be remote. I will be more than a little surprised if this doesn't become the trend nationwide as campuses start seeing outbreaks of covid, which you know is going to happen everywhere. I guess eCat can drop that tiller back off at his mom's house on the way back from Tuscaloosa...

I would be psyched if I was living off campus in Chapel Hill. Half the students gone, no classes, and a big ol pile of cocaine to get you thru the semester. Heavenly...

I'm not a lawyer, but I doubt that California law is going to fly. Pretty clever though, at least from a political standpoint...

hedge wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2020 7:57 am UNC is shutting it down, sending all students home (or at least the ones living on campus in dorms). All classes will be remote. I will be more than a little surprised if this doesn't become the trend nationwide as campuses start seeing outbreaks of covid, which you know is going to happen everywhere. I guess eCat can drop that tiller back off at his mom's house on the way back from Tuscaloosa...

I would be psyched if I was living off campus in Chapel Hill. Half the students gone, no classes, and a big ol pile of cocaine to get you thru the semester. Heavenly...

We've been thinking it will take about 4 weeks for schools that start out with students attending classes to convert over. Bama has 300 dorm rooms empty to isolate positive Covid-19 students - with a 24K student body.

"New York City is dead forever."


https://nypost.com/2020/08/17/nyc-is-de ... -altucher/

yea I read that earlier

its going to be like that in every major city, especially if they had rioting

I'm sure its death knell will be considered over exaggerated once we get through the multi-year depression. Though I guess I am kinda glad to have got in a tourist trip of Manhattan last year. I will say that I was surprisingly not enamored with NYC, although there were plenty of cool things to do there and see. It's probably the only big city I've been to where I could not possibly see myself living there. It's probably a case where midtown through downtown Manhattan give a distorted view of what its like, vs other areas of the city I guess. I was also surprised by how overpoweringly white and rich it felt compared to other places. The other international class cities I've been to felt much more like home in Houston vs being what weirdly felt like being in the worlds largest most crowded tourist trap.

"The other international class cities I've been to felt much more like home in Houston vs being what weirdly felt like being in the worlds largest most crowded tourist trap."

That's a good description of the Manhattan of the past 15-20 years or so. Good restaurants, though. Brooklyn kinda took over as the hip part of NYC during that time, but even then, hipster became a derogatory term...

This is the photograph I have from New York that basically encapsulates that whole trip for me...

all this mass exodus is just bringing liberal policies to the flyover states. Those people leaving these mass of cities won't make the connection that it was liberal policies that drove them to leave and they are just going to try to turn wherever they end up into a liberal nightmare as well.

Great video.......needs to be played during Republican Convention and many many times just before the November election on national tv... but doubt CNN or msnbc would allow it to be aired.

Looks like IB has been ruining the yutes.

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/red ... s-teachers

Often, it’s hard for teachers to tell whether a student is being truly red-pilled in the sense that they’re being radicalized online, or whether they’re parroting views that they’ve grown up with in their conservative households. Tessa, a 29-year-old in the Midwest who teaches 14- to 18-year-olds at a private school for students with learning impairments, says that while many of her students “simply take on the talking points and politics of their conservative parents,” this can make them especially ripe targets for full-blown radicalization and infatuation with far-right figures. “A few started listening to Joe Rogan’s podcast, which led to them reading Jordan Peterson’s books,” she says. “I think that Joe Rogan’s ideology is the biggest threat to critical thinking in the last decade.”

I'm intrigued to learn that Joe Rogan of all people is apparently the gateway drug to far right extremism somehow.