I wouldn’t say justified, buuuuuuuuuut where else could he have gone? China is about the only other possibility.

To be clear, I think he should be pardoned, and thing USA-Patriot act should be overturned.

Yeah, we’re doing the same in the US… :(

The essential problem is that the people working now are paying for the people that are retired. It would make more sense for the gov’t to have taxed the people prior to their retirement, and have invested those taxes, so that in their retirement they would be getting out what they had previously paid in. And switching over to a system like that would require double taxation on the population now, which will make such a proposal very unopopular.

But if your retired population is growing, and you have fewer people working, then you either need to increase the retirement age–so that more people are paying into the system–or increase the taxation overall. If I recall correctly, Denmark has been seeing a negative population growth; that’s a real problem for retirement schemes that rely on current taxes paying for retirees.

Is this fair to people that have been working in trades and have beaten up their body for 40 years? No. Likewise, it’s not really fair to people that have working in white-collar jobs that may still be more than capable of excelling at their job, and still want to work. (My dad had mandatory retirement at 72 due to company policy; he immediately got re-hired as an on-site consultant, and has been doing that for over a decade.)

EDIT - this is a huge problem in the US. The social security taxes now on working people are immediately paid out to retirees. SS benefits go up to account for inflation, but the amount coming in is decreasing because population growth has slowed. Without major reforms, social security in the US won’t be solvent by the time I retire, IF I ever retire.

It’s more or less a textbook example of why the ‘community standards’ standard is bad, but it’s still current case law. I sincerely wish that some large white-shoe law firm had take the case as part of their pro bono work, but, fuck me, that just never seems to happen.

It definitely does not. Look up Boiled Angel; I think that case was an absolute fucking travesty, but as of right now, it’s still good case law.

Pretty sure that Alito, Thomas, and Barrett would be all-in on that. Not sure about Goresuch, Roberts, or Kavanaugh.

There’s SCOTUS precedent saying that pornography–but not obscenity–is covered by 1A. (Obscenity isn’t very well defined, but it’s generally understood to mean pedophilia/anything involving minors (including drawings), certain acts of violence combined with sex, bestiality, and possibly necrophilia. Other extreme sexual acts–such as crush fetishes–might also fall under obscenity.) You can’t pass laws to unspool constitutional rights; your only legal recourse is either stacking the court with people that want to change precedent, or amend the constitution.

Technically everything you’ve done is in the past, unless you’re doing it at this very second in time. So by that rationale, a priest could say, well, they’re confessing, it’s in the past, they’re repentant–not an ongoing risk–therefore I don’t have to report. But that’s obviously bullshit.

Your side hobby isn’t a PhD program

And yet, none of the people writing laws can understand these things. Nor do cops, most people in the military, or–in all likelihood–you. But by golly, they’re going to write laws about them, even if they have no idea what the laws they’re writing will actually do!

And I notice a conspicuous lack of “patriots” reacting at all.

Yeah, it’s almost like what passes for a “political left” in the USA is a completely watered down, neutered version of the left, and is more interested in circular firing squads than actually doing something, huh?

Lots of cops and ex-military in favor of gun control.

Cops and ex-mil are not usually people I’d say know guns. When I say “know guns”, I don’t mean just that they know how to shoot–which most cops and mil people can’t do for shit----I mean know how they work, and why they’re designed the way that they are. I mean, how many cops or military people can tell you exactly what the difference is between, say, a direct impingement and a piston system? Or what the different kind of delayed blowback mechanisms are? Or what the technical differences are between and AR-15 that’s capable of being select fire, and one that isn’t?

And, even more than that, when you look at history, it’s clear that the second amendment was intended to ensure that the people had access to militarily-suitable arms. We’re right at the point of gov’t tyranny right NOW, and Dems want to disarm people? So, what?, we can have a King Trump I?

I would not ever call a 1911 “reliable”. You need to keep up with the spring replacement (500-2000 rounds for the recoil spring), and you need to make sure that you’re keeping them very clean. I’ve had the slide stop walk out on mine in the middle of a stage, which created a stoppage that couldn’t be fixed on the clock.

It would not be my first recommendation for a carry gun.

For reliable, I’d go with a major-name striker-fired polymer framed pistol. And by “reliable” I mean a gun that you can forget to clean for 2000+ rounds, and it still works well.

That said, my carry gun is a CZ Shadow 2 Compact. It’s also not ‘reliable’; it’s going to take a lot more work than a Glock 19. I’m okay with that. And I knew that going in.

You will get zero people that have real knowledge and understanding of weapon systems advising legislators on ways to ban them.

AR-15 rifles also covers select fire variants. The original AR-15 made by Eugene Stoner was select fire only. The assault rifle/assault weapon distinction is functionally meaningless, and really only applies to the military. Oh, you’ll get fudds that will claim otherwise, but they’re also the ones claiming that a 1911 is the best gun ever because “TwO WorLD wARs!”.

The NRA gave up their ‘jack-booted thugs’ rhetoric and started kissing Republican asses when Bush Jr. was president. Bush very publicly renounced his lifetime membership over LaPierre’s–very, very reasonable and measured–stance that the feds were shitty people. The NRA caved rather than continue to speak the obvious truth, and they’ve had a fetish for licking cop boots ever since.

My experience certainly does.

I’ve worked with some really great people. But maybe 1 in 5 or so was a loudmouthed shitbag, and when you called them on being shitty, they either threatened you, or acted like it was all a joke or a big misunderstanding, and you were at fault for being upset, etc. I can’t guarantee that the shitty people I’ve known have harassed women, but the probability seems high.

Probably not the ideal way to go about it, no.

OTOH, I have serious questions for anyone that could raise a child to be a white supremacist that’s trying to start a racial holy war. Or I would, if the suspect hadn’t already murdered them.

…Huh.

Right idea, wrong motive, I guess?

Well, yeah, it would be.

We would need to drastically increase taxes in order to have UBI for the poorest people in the US. Right now, across the board, all of us are paying some of the lowest income taxes since income taxation was introduced. After you consider things like the EIC, a lot of poor people have a negative tax rate. As it is, we’re running a budget deficit every single year, and most of that deficit is entitlement programs (I’m not using that in a pejorative sense) like social security and Medicare.

(No, social security is not fully funded; people pay in far less than they end up getting paid back, and the system relies on a constantly expanding pool of people paying into it to fund the people that are currently drawing from it. To fix that, we would need to increase social security taxes, end the cap on those taxes, and probably set the retirement age higher.)

Even if we took every single penny that every billionaire in the US had, that would fund the federal gov’t for something like eight months. Total. And then it would all be gone. (Plus the stock and bond markets would crater, but eh.)

Yeah, we need to bring back the highest marginal tax rates for sure. And we need to increase corporate taxes and eliminate a lot of the corporate cash giveaways. But we also need to increase taxes on the middle class. I’m saying this as someone that’s at the lower end of middle class; I’m not paying enough in taxes for what i think this country should be doing for the citizens of the country. But man, if you told me my tax bill was going to go up by $8k, but I’d also get national single payer health care? And national public transit, and free public universities? I would cream my panties.

I doubt that they would show their hand publicly; they don’t want to poison a jury pool.

On the other hand, if they had better video of the shooter, I’m sure they would have released it, because they were trying to get people to ID the killer. One shitty video of half of a face doesn’t really help a lot.

Not really; without the items that were seized, they don’t really have much of anything that would link him to the location, aside from some bad security camera footage that, IMO, doesn’t really look like him. Insisting that he needs an alibi is reversing the burden of proof; it’s saying that, unless he can prove he was elsewhere, then their claim must be correct. But they have so little without the evidence seized at the arrest that the case would be very thin.

Look, if you asked me where I was when The Asshole Brian Thompson was shot, I’d have no fucking idea unless it was something that was a big enough deal that I noted it in my calendar. I don’t even remember where I was when 11 Sept. happened.