StrangeSox

It's not "she deserves it" that anyone's saying, it's more "who else?" There doesn't appear to be any strong challengers on the Democrats' side. Though that could always change--Obama didn't look strong in early 2007--but there aren't strong up-and-comers like Obama was. And rightly or wrongly, most of the media/pundits seem to be expecting a repeat of the 2012 clown show before an inevitable defeat on the Republican side. The electoral map isn't very favorable to the GOP right now, and early polls have Hillary ahead of any potential challenger. It's only March 2015 though so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It is another point of failure, but guns have mechanical and user failures as it is.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Mar 3, 2015 -> 01:53 PM) Seems like a lot of work and cost to prevent pretty rare events. 1.4M guns were stolen between 2005 and 2010. If every gun were hypothetically this sort of "smart gun," a stolen gun wouldn't do much good. You'd also eliminate kids taking their parents' guns etc. etc. Or it could be more limited specifically to police officers such that their personal sidearms can be used by them and only them. That way, even if someone did get a hold of their gun, it's not life-threatening.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Mar 3, 2015 -> 01:42 PM) This wouldn't work for my family (or most gun owners I suspect). We share, depending on what we're hunting/shooting. Nor could you pass down guns through generations, as my grandfather did to me. You could conceivably have more than one authorized user and get that authorized user updated/changed.

Well, again, that still doesn't give any guidance to police on how to handle these situations on the ground in America in 2015.

Cincy is a pretty nice town. My wife and I just happened to be there when the cubs were in town back in 2008 I think. We had a 10th floor room at the Hyatt overlooking the park, and they put on one of the best fireworks shows I've ever seen.

QUOTE (CaliSoxFanViaSWside @ Mar 2, 2015 -> 02:15 PM) I would love to see that . It's at times like this that I wish the MLB Network would play content like that . Is there any way to watch it online since I am in California ? It's available for streaming on WTTW's website, at least for now: http://video.wttw.com/video/2365436462/

hit up @joakimnoah for Cleveland travel advice

Yeah, even in a fully nationalized, fully funded healthcare system, there's still going to be people with chronic mental illness who will have episodes, decide to go off of their medication, whatever. And more to the point, even if every police officer in America was a raging leftist fully in support of that sort of system, they still need to deal with the real world as it exists today. It's important for both public and officer safety to minimize these sorts of confrontations or taking actions that will likely needlessly escalate a situation. Again, don't know what happened here, but speaking generally, if the situation could have been handled differently such that their would never have even been an attempt to grab the officer's gun, everyone is safer.

There's a pretty substantial correlation with mental illness and homelessness. One of those two TAL episodes you recommended above even had a scenario with the police interacting with a homeless person with known mental health problems and escalating the situation to the point where deadly force was used (I think the guy had schizophrenia, was having an episode and an officer went up and grabbed him, at which point the guy freaked out). Don't know what happened here, but that idea of deescalation might apply.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 18, 2015 -> 11:29 AM) Part 2 was also pretty good. Talked about real life PD's in Florida and Vegas, one that is doing well, the other not so much. Listened to both over the weekend, agreed that they were pretty good.

QUOTE (bmags @ Feb 28, 2015 -> 06:08 PM) Some good follow-up by WBEZ on this: http://www.wbez.org/news/concerns-raised-o...n-square-111635 There was also another. Definitely seems like Ackerman may have been hyping up one location and I agree that may be misleading the cause. Also the whole quote about how chicago crime reporters are helping cover up things because they agree with it just opened him up for his loose reporting. I like Ackerman, but if you are going into a local zone and act like you know something others don't, you better have been tactful. The follow up seems to be saying that it's even worse than one black site. If that's the case, it's still on the local reporters for not really covering this.

Good for him.

Weigel on Rahm's setbacks last night. http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles...back-in-chicago

related: Bad lieutenant: American police brutality, exported from Chicago to Guantánamo Exclusive: At the notorious wartime prison, Richard Zuley oversaw a shocking military interrogation that has become a permanent stain on his country. Part one of a Guardian investigation reveals he used disturbingly similar tactics to extract confessions from minorities for years – as a police officer in urban America

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 24, 2015 -> 12:09 PM) CPD operates an off the books, previously unknown, interrogation blacksite where captured suspects vanish for a time without access to family or legal representation or even acknowledgment of where they are. ugh this is just repulsive.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 19, 2015 -> 03:08 PM) Obama refuses to state that ISIS is killing people because of their religious beliefs. For two whole days, then he issued a clear statement in an editorial on Wednesday.

There's a big excluded middle between "letting ISIS succeed" and re-invading Iraq and invading Syria with ground forces. Hell, invading Iraq and creating a failed state there is what gave ISIL the room to grow and the training grounds in the first place. As far as dragging in regional powers, ISIL is Sunni and there have been allegations that our good ally Saudi Arabia is one of their funders. Iran and Syria, both backed by Russia, openly fight ISIL. There's not really a threat of ISIL being able to drag the major regional powers and the three major international powers into a war opposing each other.

But unless they're regular customers, how do you know what their "regular" tip is? Is 18% their standard, or is it 15% and they think you did a good job? Did they come in in a good mood and have a couple of drinks so they're tipping a little higher? Did they have a bad week and the food wasn't cooked how they liked it so the server gets the brunt of that? Or was the bigger tip just because you drew a smiley face on the check or forecasted good weather? I don't doubt that better servers will, over time, get better tips then average or poor servers, but those couple of articles I posted by the guy who experimented with a tipless restaurant offered some insight into that. Maybe he's generalizing from a small group, but his thoughts were that the good servers are focused on doing their jobs and providing good service and that the last thing on their minds during a busy shift is how much each table tipped them and trying to figure out why they were tipped x% whereas the crappier servers would be focused on that. He also talks about the tensions that tip payouts can create between the waitstaff and the kitchen staff. His Part 3 covers his thoughts on how tipping actually incentivizes worse service over upselling or increasing turnover.

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Feb 19, 2015 -> 02:02 PM) A war that started over an assassination and entangling alliances isn't really an apt comparison. And if the US is going to go to war every time there's a despot committing mass atrocities, we'll be in a constant state of war all over the world... It's not even so much about isolationism and "it doesn't concern us" as it's about the actual record of how much good/harm our interventions in comparable situations end up doing.

QUOTE (Tex @ Feb 19, 2015 -> 02:02 PM) 9/11 with thousands of dead on US soil versus horrific attacks on dozens soon hundreds on foreign soil. Both are terrible. I think you are underestimating what Al Qaeda has done. Adults at the time were afraid to go to work in America. I have to imagine that with the years-long military campaign in Syria and then their actions in Iraq last year, ISIS's death count is into the thousands if not tens of thousands by now.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 19, 2015 -> 01:38 PM) Americans were killed by the people we were going after/may go after in those countries, or at least some of them, no? Isn't that enough? No, I don't think that's enough. Creating failed states throughout the region is a pretty terrible idea anyway. Striking Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was justifiable for sure, but the 10+ years of occupation afterwards not so much. Iraq, lol no terrible unjustified objectively dumb idea start to finish, and look what it's left us. Ghaddafi did worse to the US in the past, and Libya is now a failed state with a burgeoning ISIS group. Yemen's currently a failed state, and while I don't think it's as directly the result of US military and/or covert intervention as the rest of them, our drone strikes don't really seem to be helping. Will a functional, Western-friendly state suddenly emerge in Iraq and then Syria if we send a bunch of troops there? I don't think history is on the side of yet another land war here.

back-to-back-to-back-to-back failures costing trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives over about 13 years doesn't seem all that small scale, and Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and now Syria were never going to develop into a legitimate "large scale" threats to the United States.

this is disheartening: You'd think "never get involved in a land war in the Middle East" would be pretty much common sense by now...