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it's not quite running over people in cars, but shooting them with paintball guns.
When in doubt, always pick a fight with a group of people who outnumber you, are bigger than you, are specifically trained to subdue you in physical combat, and are heavily armed and wearing body-armor.
Seems to work well.
Originally Posted by Braineack
but think of the children!
The mayor of Grovetown Georgia is certainly thinking of the children. Just not about due process.
(Edit: **** it, I give up trying to format this post correctly. This new editor and its attempts to auto-parse everything are just broken. )
Georgia mayor plans to round up sex offenders on Halloween and house them at city hall
By Antonia Noori Farzan October 24
Grovetown City Hall in Georgia.
By Antonia Noori Farzan October 24
Contrary to the widespread urban myth, there’s no evidence that children are more likely to be targeted by sexual predators on Halloween than on any other night of the year.
But that hasn’t stopped one Georgia mayor from announcing plans to round up all paroled sex offenders in town and hold them at city hall while kids are trick-or-treating.
Gary E. Jones, the mayor of Grovetown, Ga., announced Monday that sex offenders who are on probation — approximately 25 to 30 individuals — would be housed in the city council chambers for three hours on Halloween night.
Initially, Jones’s Facebook post had said that all sex offenders would be housed at city hall on Halloween, which could potentially be considered a form of unlawful detention and grounds for a lawsuit. He later updated the post to clarify that he was referring only to individuals on probation.
Jones, whose office is nonpartisan, didn’t respond to messages seeking comment Tuesday. But he did elaborate on his plans in exchanges with residents on Facebook. Describing the measure as purely precautionary, he
that there had been no previous incidents on Halloween. The state’s probation office has the authority to require that paroled sex offenders report to them at a specific time and place, he
James Hill, a spokesman for Georgia’s Department of Community Supervision, said in an interview with WFXG that communities do have the option of requiring paroled sex offenders to check into a specific location on Halloween night. “It would be no different than instructing an individual sex offender or otherwise to report to one of our offices,” he told the station Monday.
Sandy Rozek, the communications director for the National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws, told The Washington Post that even if the mayor’s plans don’t violate the law, “it’s still a ridiculous, wasted effort.”
In Grovetown, a town of more than 12,000 located near the South Carolina border, the
“Also, if you’re going to do this, why stop at sex offenders? Why not include robbers, nonsexual assaulters, kidnappers, and murderers? This is one of those instances where an elected official is just pandering for good press.”
: “Everyone on this post questioning if this is legal sound[s] ignorant. Was what they did to make themselves be labeled as a sex offender legal? I think NOT . This is to protect innocent CHILDREN ! If you have a problem with it then go sit with them from 6-9pm.”
In 2009, a peer-reviewed study in the Association for Treatment of Sexual Abusers' journal, Sexual Abuse, looked at more than 67,000 sex crimes involving children under the age of 12 that took place during an eight-year period. Researchers from the University of Oklahoma, Lynn University, the Medical University of South Carolina and the Snohomish County prosecutor’s office found no evidence that those crimes spiked on or around Halloween. “These findings raise questions about the wisdom of diverting law enforcement resources to attend to a problem that does not appear to exist,” they concluded.
Programs like Grovetown’s make parents feel good, but they’re not a good use of resources, Rozek said. “Whoever is in there watching guys sit around because they’re on the registry would be much better served out in the community on traffic patrol and doing random checks to see if people have been drinking and driving,” she said.
The National Safety Council reports that “children are more than twice as likely to be hit by a car and killed on Halloween than on any other day of the year.”
Jones has run into controversy before. In December 2014, he was hired as Grovetown’s police chief and immediately made news by ordering jail inmates to wear hot pink uniforms — a move that, he said, was inspired by former Maricopa County, Ariz., sheriff Joe Arpaio.
In 2015, he was fired just five months into his tenure. The reason? City officials said that he hadn’t followed protocol when he demoted an employee. But supporters rallied on his behalf, saying that he had made the community feel safer. That same year, Jones ran for mayor and beat the incumbent with 68 percent of the vote.
In July 2017, Jones threatened to arrest a local atheist who objected to the fact that he had ordered the phrase “In God We Trust” to be printed on the bumpers of the city’s police cars. “It all falls under the Georgia criminal code,” he told WXIA at the time. “It wasn’t the name-calling. It was the continuation. And I didn’t want to have any further contact with him.”
By targeting sex offenders on Halloween, Jones is inserting himself into the middle of another national debate. The Appeal, an online publication covering criminal justice, reported this month that communities nationwide have enacted Halloween-specific restrictions that target people convicted of sex crimes — such as banning them from decorating their homes with Halloween decorations and requiring them to post signs that say, “No candy or treats at this residence.” But some have recently moved to repeal those ordinances rather than face litigation.
Meanwhile, the Appeal reported, advocates have argued that these restrictions can make it harder for former offenders to reintegrate with society. And experts have expressed skepticism about whether they are actually an effective way of keeping children safe, as the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has found that 93 percent of juvenile victims of sexual assault knew the perpetrator beforehand.
“It perpetuates the myth of ‘stranger danger,’ ” Rozek told The Post. “It keeps parents thinking that it’s going to be someone out there lying in wait for my child, when in reality virtually all sexual abuse of children is committed by family members, peers and authority figures.”
The resolution to the Social Security & Medicare crisis?
People want self-driving cars to prioritize young lives over the elderly
A study on the ethical decisions of autonomous vehicles had interesting results.
Today, MIT released the results of a global survey on the moral and ethical decisions that autonomous vehicles should be programmed to make. The survey reveals that general preferences include prioritizing human lives over animals, younger and healthier people over the elderly and saving more lives over fewer lives. People also preferred to spare bystanders (who were obeying the law) over jaywalkers.
The study is unique because of its sheer scale; over 2 million people from 200+ countries participated in the survey. It presented variations the "Trolley Problem," a classic ethical dilemma that asks participants to choose who to save in the event that an out-of-control trolley is endangering people. When it comes to autonomous vehicles, the software may have to prioritize whether to swerve into a group of people to avoid a head-on collision or decide whether to save its own passengers at the expense of lives in another vehicle.
While the survey results revealed general preferences, there were variations and trends based on where respondents were from. "The main preferences were to some degree universally agreed upon," lead author Edmond Awad, a postdoc at MIT, said in a release. "But the degree to which they agree with this or not varies among different groups or countries." An example is that in "eastern" countries, including many in Asia, respondents were not in favor of prioritizing young lives over the elderly.
The full results of the study will be published in the journal Nature. It will be interesting to see if autonomous vehicle programmers take results into account when determining the ethical and moral preferences of the vehicles they are working on.
n the lowest quintile, households pay only $400 in taxes (as of 2014, the most recent data available) while receiving more than $16,000 in various types of tax-funded transfer payments.
The end result is households in the bottom three quintiles have higher incomes after taxes and transfers than they do before taxes and transfers:
I've been searching through that article, trying to find a list of all of the things which they consider to be transfers.
According to that chart, I should be receiving somewhere around $12,000 - $13,000 per year in transfer payments, and I'm not receiving any. Trying to figure out who to talk with to resolve this.
I've been searching through that article, trying to find a list of all of the things which they consider to be transfers.
From the article: Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security
Author mentions study but doesn't link to it, nor cite the Title/Date/Author. He also doesn't mention SS and Medicare with few exceptions aren't paid out until you've paid in a substantial amount of taxes. Oh well, I'll bet those lowest earners feel pretty wealthy now!
In the story, the Russian assassin’s gun misfires when he rushes the president, but Secret Service agents do not shoot him.
“The Secret Service agent stood before him, presenting his Glock, butt first,” Sharp wrote. “‘Here,’ the agent said politely. ‘Use mine. …'”
Sharp’s story is set after Mueller’s investigation indicts, subpoenas and even places under house arrest “the president’s campaign manager, then his lawyer, a Republican congressman, former aides, family members.”
Sounds like they enjoyed coming up with that while sitting around a small table jerking each other off. It also speaks to the lack of sophistication in some modern novelists. Not a very well conceived story.
From the article: Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security
Author mentions study but doesn't link to it, nor cite the Title/Date/Author.
I'm not receiving any of those things.
Lumping all households together in this way, and saying that the average middle-income household receives one-third of a Social Security check, is a bit like observing that the average American has one ovary and one ********.
It's true, from a statistician's point of view, but it's not a useful metric for most purposes, and would likely be misleading to an alien being who was as unfamiliar with human reproductive biology as most Americans are about finance and economics.
10-24-2018, 01:24 PM
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