The Swamp

Dude, I don't trust most wait staff to get my dinner order right.

I sure as shit am not trusting the average person to save our collective asses in a life and death situation.

DSafetyGuy wrote:Dude, I don't trust most wait staff to get my dinner order right.

I sure as shit am not trusting the average person to save our collective asses in a life and death situation.

^ this.

And you literally have no idea how you're going to react to gunshots. Flight, fight, or freeze. The vast majority will be the latter. Even the ones that have had extensive training.

In the case of Las Vegas, only a super hero with the ability to scale a building to the exact room would have prevented that.

Trump has already figured out how to stop this. Just expand on his idea to out sleeping gas on planes to be released in a situation. Next do it in schools, hotels, malls....

degenerasian wrote:try this

https://twitter.com/ebenet/status/91507 ... gr%5Etweet

I'll do my part.

Shirley wrote:Assault rifle kills get our attention, but it's cheap handguns that are the culprit in the vast majority of gun deaths. I think a lot of people would like to eliminate those.

That has been my stance since June 5, 1968 (Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, primary election night, thank you Sirhan Sirhan.)

Johnnie wrote:That's how Governor St. Ronald Reagan pushed gun control through California. Because the Black Panthers rolled up into the State House armed and scared the frightened white people that worked there.

That might be St. Governor, or maybe back then he was merely a cardinal in the service of St. Barry of Phoenix.

eta: posted from my old bedroom in Davis, so nostalgia.

I don't tire of this story. The day my dad decided to move the family to Davis rather than to Sacramento. We were still in LA, he got the big job in Sac, moved up there alone so we could finish school semester and he could scout for a house. He was considering neighborhoods in Sac, he thought Davis was nice but too weird, too white.

He worked across the street from where the Panthers set up on the capitol lawn, on his lunch break saw a bunch of Oaktown niggas w/guns, basically what he was getting us away from in LA. Two months later we rolled into Davis. Thanks Huey and Bobby!





This is inside the capitol building. Same hallway as the door to the governors office. Reagan had been there five months. Carrying a firearm on state property was perfectly legal at the time, specifically stated in the law. They changed that pretty quickly.

Pruitt wrote:And it's a fucking hypothetical that is used to ensure that no meaningful gun control laws will get passed. Say there's someone with a gun and proper training and he manages to shoot the bad guy without being killed by a first responder.

It has happened quite a bit. More often instead of the good guy with a gun shooting the bad guy, the good guy with the gun confronts the bad guy, bad guy stops the attack and shoots self. Not surprisingly, such stories don't get nearly as much media play. There was one last week in Nashville at a church.

I don't pretend to say this happens the majority of the time, nor that this makes the argument that settles the best course of action. It is, however, a set of factual occurrences that is downplayed, denied and ignored when this discussion heats up.

https://twitter.com/SwamperHoward/statu ... 4861389824

One person was killed and eight others wounded Sunday after a masked man opened fire following a church service in Antioch.

The shooter, identified as Emanuel Kidega Samson, a 25-year-old Rutherford County man, accidentally shot himself after he was confronted by an armed member of the congregation. Samson was treated at an area hospital and was released into police custody, according to Metro Nashville Police.

Mulligan wrote:Trump has already figured out how to stop this. Just expand on his idea to out sleeping gas on planes to be released in a situation. Next do it in schools, hotels, malls....

Heh. Russian's did it!

Moscow theater hostage crisis

Chemical agent may have been aerosolized fentanyl

GoodKarma wrote:All of the hotels and nicer malls/shopping centers I went into in Istanbul had metal detectors at the guest entry point. That will be the only visible result of this.

Manila hotels too. Hell, they stopped your car when you pulled in and searched in and under it (with giant versions of those dentist mirrors).

So the expected ass clowns have started the false flag bullshit. I can't even comprehend the stupidity at play to be able to even reach that conclusion.

A_B wrote:Where does that 275 number come from? Not necessarily disputing it, but that seems...high.

I guess I'm saying what qualifies as "mass" shooting. A kid's mom and stepdad got shot in lexington earlier this year at their home by the ex husband, who then shot himself, is that a mass shooting?

Does it really matter what the definition of mass shooting is, assuming consistently applied, when talking about significant increases in the occurrence rate thereof? The data I've seen with regards to that is damning for the US.

You're a better person than me if you can get through both of these videos.

https://youtu.be/8D0HSJDkFGI

https://youtu.be/GuJqsjpT6TM

Watch "Virgin" Ben Shapiro talk about anything? No thanks...

I just read this posting over on TalkingPointsMemo:What Did He Do? and I think it raises some really good questions. How did Paddock make so much money? Yeah, it's being reported he was a high stakes gambler, but can you really turn yourself into a millionaire playing video poker? I'm not a gambler, but I always assumed that high stakes gamblers already had that much money, not that they were making it at the tables.

He was supposedly a real estate developer. I don't know how much forensic accounting they've been able to do but it's plausible to make a bunch of money in 10 or 15 years and just decide to retire. I really don't think at this point they're ever going to figure out why it did it. It will be one of the greatest mysteries of all-time.

Maybe he was just an asshole and wanted to commit the perfect crime.

brian wrote:He was supposedly a real estate developer. I don't know how much forensic accounting they've been able to do but it's plausible to make a bunch of money in 10 or 15 years and just decide to retire. I really don't think at this point they're ever going to figure out why it did it. It will be one of the greatest mysteries of all-time.

This sounds familiar.

Rex wrote:Maybe he was just an asshole and wanted to commit the perfect crime.

This too.

By the way, if you have no kids, it's not *that* hard to make a few mil. You need some balls and maybe a little luck, but that part of the story isn't that weird to me.

Rex wrote:By the way, if you have no kids, it's not *that* hard to make a few mil. You need some balls and maybe a little luck, but that part of the story isn't that weird to me.

Of course, that statement is rarely made by folks who haven't made their first million dollars yet.

Reports that he booked a room in Chicago overlooking Lollapalooza and scouted locations near Fenway. So either just a reasonless "cause outdoor mayhem" motive or something specific to concerts?

Ryan wrote:Reports that he booked a room in Chicago overlooking Lollapalooza and scouted locations near Fenway. So either just a reasonless "cause outdoor mayhem" motive or something specific to concerts?

The former I assume. Just anywhere with massive crowds of people and a clear line of sight to kill. He had scouted a much larger outdoor music festival in Las Vegas (bigger than the one he attacked, not Lollapalooza).

Given what we know about his arsenal and planning and the intervention of the security guard at Mandalay Bay, it's almost a miracle he wasn't able to kill hundreds.

Either way, I miss the old days when people just fucked at the Skydome

Is it shitty to complain that I hate the <City>Strong or <Person>Strong hashtags and whatnot these days?

brian wrote:Is it shitty to complain that I hate the <City>Strong or <Person>Strong hashtags and whatnot these days?

Nope. I love how my community came together after Harvey, but holy shit there was a lot of self-patting on the back being done.

I did like this ad done by the convention authority though.

I totally understand the intentions of the guy who made the crosses for each victim of the Vegas shooting. I think this is a case where the intentions are good.

but man, is it weird to see the Star of David leaning up against the cross for a Jewish woman. is that the best compromise? is it better than going through each victim and removing the crosses of those that weren't Christian and adding the appropriate symbol?

For me it would be ok, it's the intention that counts.
I'm not Christian but if one of my relatives died in such an event and someone took the time to make a memorial like that out of love, I would really appreciated it.

The Star of David isn't even necessary, the fact that the person even thought to put it in makes it even more compassionate.

i know it's a rather obvious statement at this point but dammit i'd love to see this on billboards at this point. fucking fuck.

btw Johnnie when are you going to get a Cabinet position? :) INFILTRATE!

Johnnie wrote:https://twitter.com/loumoore12/status/915047938887442433

Giff wrote:

brian wrote:Is it shitty to complain that I hate the <City>Strong or <Person>Strong hashtags and whatnot these days?

Nope. I love how my community came together after Harvey, but holy shit there was a lot of self-patting on the back being done.

It's one thing when a community or a region gets together to help out after a natural disaster. That is humanity at its best.

But for anyone to claim that they are honouring the victims of a mass shooting and not stand up and be counted in the fight against the root cause of such events is the "thoughts and prayers" syndrome in action. Self-satisfying maybe, but ultimately completely meaningless.

IMO of course.

There's so much about this tragedy that hits close to home, but maybe the biggest is that there's probably about as good as a 5 percent chance that this guy and I have been in the same high-limit room at the same time. That's not a tossed off estimate, you do tend to see a lot of the same people much of the time especially if you're a local. We apparently played the same machines at many of the same casinos, so doing the math on a probability of having been at one at the same time means it's more than a remote possibility (depending on how your definition of a 20-to-1 shot qualifies as remote).

It's kind of creepy to think that the random person next to you could be a mass murderer, but the truth is we cross paths all of the time with people who given the right set of circumstances would kill you just as soon as say hello to you.

This picture makes me so sad...

There was some discussion about not letting people put memorials there for that very reason (the disconnection between the sign and the memorials to the dead). But ultimately it's one of the most recognizable landmarks in the country and it would have been a worse idea to tell people they couldn't.

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/916372555166027776

This is reporting malpractice here. I will eat my hat if he had a net win of $5 million. Considerably more likely is that he had reportable "earnings" of $5 million, which sounds about right for the level player he reportedly was. (As an example, I myself had something like $500K in IRS-reportable "earnings" last tax year. My "net" was about -$10K depending on how you define wins and losses. (For the most part, it's easy, but if a hotel gives you 50 free $100 hotel rooms in a year did you "win" $5K?, etc.)

brian wrote:There was some discussion about not letting people put memorials there for that very reason (the disconnection between the sign and the memorials to the dead). But ultimately it's one of the most recognizable landmarks in the country and it would have been a worse idea to tell people they couldn't.

The disconnect between the sign and the memorials isn't what gets to me - it's the smiling idiots taking selfies. Just another attraction to show the gummers back home.

Pruitt wrote:

brian wrote:There was some discussion about not letting people put memorials there for that very reason (the disconnection between the sign and the memorials to the dead). But ultimately it's one of the most recognizable landmarks in the country and it would have been a worse idea to tell people they couldn't.

The disconnect between the sign and the memorials isn't what gets to me - it's the smiling idiots taking selfies. Just another attraction to show the gummers back home.

To be fair, at least in the picture you posted, it looks like they're trying to get a picture with the sign not the memorials which happens literally a thousand times a day or more on a "normal" day.

MaxWebster wrote:i know it's a rather obvious statement at this point but dammit i'd love to see this on billboards at this point. fucking fuck.

btw Johnnie when are you going to get a Cabinet position? :) INFILTRATE!

Johnnie wrote:https://twitter.com/loumoore12/status/915047938887442433

Trust me. If there's one thing I've learned in this shitshow of an administration, I can be president. Not like an aid or a staffer or some dude that hands paperwork to people. No. Like the literal position.

The problem is I hate politics. Loathe, detest, abominate. I'm the type of guy who knows the right way to do something and I operate in a structured environment meant to "put it on you" if you fail. I'll hold you accountable. In the same light, I hold myself accountable if I fuck up. I don't want to hijack the thread, but let's just say that captains and chief master sergeants piss me off when I'm in a position to "outrank" them.

well not to diminish you at all but one thing we've all learned is that perhaps an inanimate carbon rod could literally be president.

eh i'm just saying it's great personally for *me* to read your thoughts/opinions/experiences, sincerely, since (again, my limited worldview here) I seem to be inundated with "how the military thinks" yet it's actually never from someone, you know, IN the military. Patty Patriot up the street with 18 flags in the front yard who (as the tweet suggests) gives more of a shit about a song and colorful rag than actual change and humanity.


*semi-related note: yesterday my 15yr old daughter (as you might know we're newly back to the USA after 4 years) in the car said sort of out of the blue "...is anyone else weirded out by this pledge of allegiance? it's really creepy and i don't like it"

(my kid. i'm so proud. :) )

ok /theadjack - sorry

Johnnie wrote:

MaxWebster wrote:i know it's a rather obvious statement at this point but dammit i'd love to see this on billboards at this point. fucking fuck.

btw Johnnie when are you going to get a Cabinet position? :) INFILTRATE!

Johnnie wrote:https://twitter.com/loumoore12/status/915047938887442433

Trust me. If there's one thing I've learned in this shitshow of an administration, I can be president. Not like an aid or a staffer or some dude that hands paperwork to people. No. Like the literal position.

The problem is I hate politics. Loathe, detest, abominate. I'm the type of guy who knows the right way to do something and I operate in a structured environment meant to "put it on you" if you fail. I'll hold you accountable. In the same light, I hold myself accountable if I fuck up. I don't want to hijack the thread, but let's just say that captains and chief master sergeants piss me off when I'm in a position to "outrank" them.

The wife is running the Rock and Roll marathon on November 11th. The staging area is the Las Vegas Village and they run the entire race up and down the strip during the evening. I think she would be happy if they cancelled and took the decision out of her hands. The only thing I've seen from them is a bland statement that they are waiting to engage local agencies.

It is with shock and great sadness to learn of the tragedy that took place in Las Vegas on Sunday night. Our hearts and thoughts are with the victims, their families, and all of those affected. Out of respect for those impacted, including all our local partners at the City of Las Vegas, Clark County, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, and other first responder personnel, we will be waiting to provide any additional comment as it relates to our upcoming marathon. At the appropriate time, we will re-engage in a critical dialog with government agencies and law enforcement officials in Las Vegas to ensure that we are able to deliver a safe experience for our participants.

Pretty sure that the organizers of all the Rock and Roll road races only care about money. I'm not surprised.

MaxWebster wrote:*semi-related note: yesterday my 15yr old daughter (as you might know we're newly back to the USA after 4 years) in the car said sort of out of the blue "...is anyone else weirded out by this pledge of allegiance? it's really creepy and i don't like it"

(my kid. i'm so proud. :) )

Amen.

testuser2 wrote:The wife is running the Rock and Roll marathon on November 11th. The staging area is the Las Vegas Village and they run the entire race up and down the strip during the evening. I think she would be happy if they cancelled and took the decision out of her hands. The only thing I've seen from them is a bland statement that they are waiting to engage local agencies.

It is with shock and great sadness to learn of the tragedy that took place in Las Vegas on Sunday night. Our hearts and thoughts are with the victims, their families, and all of those affected. Out of respect for those impacted, including all our local partners at the City of Las Vegas, Clark County, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, and other first responder personnel, we will be waiting to provide any additional comment as it relates to our upcoming marathon. At the appropriate time, we will re-engage in a critical dialog with government agencies and law enforcement officials in Las Vegas to ensure that we are able to deliver a safe experience for our participants.

Honestly, I'm not sure why they would cancel it. That's nearly 6 weeks after the shooting. I get that some people may not want to be in crowds in Vegas, but that's really a pretty irrational (but entirely human) fear. One incident isn't a trend, especially since the dude is dead. If folks are scared to run, then don't, but they shouldn't cancel the race, imho.

They won't, but they should give people the ability to cancel and get their money back. I get why they logistically probably can't. They have to plan resources for x number of people and if it's x-5,000 then that will mean the costs might not get covered. Still, it would be a short-term financial hit for some positive PR (which like Johnnie said, a company like Competitor which is known for soulless money-grubbing could use).