Florida Governor Defends Police Raid On COVID Data Whistleblower (yahoo.com) 145
Earlier this week, Florida state police raided the home of Rebekah Jones, the data scientist who ran the state's coronavirus dashboard until she was fired in June. "Jones has alleged in a whistleblower lawsuit that her firing was in retaliation for her refusal to manipulate data to make the state's COVID-19 outbreak last spring appear less severe," reports Yahoo News. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis angrily defended the handling of the search warrant, saying: "Obviously, she has issues." From the report: Later, when another reporter asked about Monday's incident -- a recording of which was made by Jones and went viral on social media, drawing widespread outrage -- DeSantis grew visibly irritated. "It was not a raid," the governor said, at one point thrusting a finger and raising his voice at the reporter who asked about the Jones case. "They went, they followed protocol." He said the Gestapo comparison was especially offensive. In keeping with his Trumpian approach to politics, DeSantis also denounced the "fever swamps" of the internet -- his apparent term for mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post -- for turning Jones into a "darling" of, presumably, anti-Trump progressives. ("He threw me into the public spotlight," Jones told Yahoo News in response to that accusation. "I never wanted it.")
Officers executed a search warrant on Jones's home on Monday morning, after knocking on her door for several minutes before she opened it and came outside with her hands up. Jones has said she wanted to settle her children before acknowledging the officers. It is not clear why the officers drew their weapons to go inside. They left with laptops and cellphones, which were being sought as part of an investigation into a Nov. 10 message sent to Florida Department of Health employees, encouraging them to resist DeSantis. State authorities allege that digital fingerprints indicate that Jones, who now runs a coronavirus dashboard of her own, was behind the message. Jones denies she was the author and maintains she did not have the means to access the department's emergency notification system, through which the note was sent. Users on Reddit have discovered that the emergency system would have been easy to access, and that anyone else -- not just Jones -- could have accessed the system and sent the Nov. 10 message with relative ease.
Officers executed a search warrant on Jones's home on Monday morning, after knocking on her door for several minutes before she opened it and came outside with her hands up. Jones has said she wanted to settle her children before acknowledging the officers. It is not clear why the officers drew their weapons to go inside. They left with laptops and cellphones, which were being sought as part of an investigation into a Nov. 10 message sent to Florida Department of Health employees, encouraging them to resist DeSantis. State authorities allege that digital fingerprints indicate that Jones, who now runs a coronavirus dashboard of her own, was behind the message. Jones denies she was the author and maintains she did not have the means to access the department's emergency notification system, through which the note was sent. Users on Reddit have discovered that the emergency system would have been easy to access, and that anyone else -- not just Jones -- could have accessed the system and sent the Nov. 10 message with relative ease.
We've forgotten our role (Score:2, Interesting)
Predictably, roughly half of the electorate will be outraged by this, and half will justify it as necessarily uncomfortable.
If we are to survive as a species to realize our potential, we have to move beyond blind allegiance to one of two sides. The sane realize there's truth in both camps, and that ephemeral balance is in the checks and balances that healthy political opposition provides. No matter your hatred for the side that doesn't get it.
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Re:We've forgotten our role (Score:4, Insightful)
>> The sane realize there's truth in both camps
There's very little truth in the Rethuglican camp, these days, or sanity, for that matter.
Re:We've forgotten our role (Score:5, Insightful)
There is truth in the real Republican side. The Trumpian reboot of the Grand Old Party however has dumped truth as both inconvenient and irrelevant. My hope is that the Republican Party comes back. Either it splits into the sane wing that supports freedom and democracy and the wingnut wing that backs conspiracy theories and wants autocratic rule; or else it becomes relevant again when its elected politicians remember that they swore an oath to serve the people and protect the constitution rather than being Trump's tools.
Put it this way. If Republican politicians feel that they have to abandon their conservative ideals and kowtow to the fringe in order to win a primary election, then maybe they're not suitable to become leaders.
Re:We've forgotten our role (Score:5, Insightful)
There is truth in the real Republican side. The Trumpian reboot of the Grand Old Party however has dumped truth as both inconvenient and irrelevant. My hope is that the Republican Party comes back. Either it splits into the sane wing that supports freedom and democracy and the wingnut wing that backs conspiracy theories and wants autocratic rule; or else it becomes relevant again when its elected politicians remember that they swore an oath to serve the people and protect the constitution rather than being Trump's tools.
Put it this way. If Republican politicians feel that they have to abandon their conservative ideals and kowtow to the fringe in order to win a primary election, then maybe they're not suitable to become leaders.
Unfortunately, the Republican Party has been heading this way since Reagan, and has had an utterly absurd level of control over its members since the Clinton era. I'm not holding my breath that it will experience a course correction any time soon. It's clear from the last four years that it takes way more to convince people with such fanatical, cult-like reverence for their party to second-guess it than a mere homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic president claiming that a deadly virus is a left-wing hoax, claiming that the election was rigged, and convincing the leaders of multiple states to conspire to overthrow the government, all while encouraging people to not wear masks and to take unnecessary risks so that more Americans will die every day from an almost entirely preventable disease than died on 9/11.
Twenty years ago, I at least respected many Republican leaders, even though I often (but not always) disagreed with them. And I felt that they made good points, and that their dissent was useful, and resulted in better legislation, etc. But at this point, I can count the Republicans that I respect on one hand, and most of what they do is simply impede progress and leave seemingly endless chaos and destruction in their wake. At this point, they've gone from leaving a trail of tears to leaving a trail of bodies, and I'm tired of giving them the benefit of the doubt.
This is not to say that the Democrats are good. They're just mostly not total wack-job bozos. The Tea Party was the death of sanity in the Republican Party, but that was just the tipping point. The horse left the stable years earlier.
We need a new party. There's no saving this one.
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The Republican party used civil rights as a call for the 'good ole' (white) 'boys' to stick together and drive progressives like Rockefeller out of the party. It re-booted the state-rights movement that the Daughters of the Confederacy used to glorify slave-owners and their militias.
You're forgetting Bush snr, the last moderate: He raised taxes and tasked the EPA (started by Nixon) to formulate a climate-change policy. His own party abandoned him (for ignoring Reaganomics) while the corporate axis promo
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You're forgetting Bush snr, the last moderate: He raised taxes and tasked the EPA (started by Nixon) to formulate a climate-change policy.
Exception that proves the rule?
Re:We've forgotten our role (Score:5, Insightful)
The "real" Republican side doesn't exist any more.
Just look at the number of Republican politicians who are prepared to go along with Trump's ridiculous claims of fraud. Republicans have shown themselves to be the fascists who wish to override the wishes of the majority. They want to replace a "fair" election (not really fair, but slanted strongly towards Republicans) with an undemocratic takeover.
I'm sorry that you can't see this, but perhaps you are blinded by your own prejudices.
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There's going to be something wonderful to watch in January. The day after Biden's inauguration, Trump will get to watch his "supporters" desert him at a speed approaching c.
They're only supporting him while he's president, and can wield some executive power, like pardons. Once he's officially the ex-president, their attention will turn to finding a replacement figurehead. Trump, having lost an election, will be of very little interest to them. They won't want to be associated with a loser.
Re:We've forgotten our role (Score:5, Insightful)
They're only supporting him while he's president, and can wield some executive power, like pardons. Once he's officially the ex-president, their attention will turn to finding a replacement figurehead. Trump, having lost an election, will be of very little interest to them. They won't want to be associated with a loser.
Trump still appears to hold an amazing amount of power over a large class of voters who will believe anything he says. They simply have faith in him, and they're not easily shook by silly things like facts. Besides, if you don't trust the person presenting you the facts, they're not facts in the first place. Trump's sowing of this extreme distrust amongst this segment of the population has tethered them to his whim for some time to come. There's going to be a lot of localities, if not states, where if you want to keep a large percentage of the Republican base, you are going to have to continue to shell out for Trump. He's the new GO[T]P bat-shit crazy religious leader.
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There's going to be something wonderful to watch in January. The day after Biden's inauguration, Trump will get to watch his "supporters" desert him at a speed approaching c.
They're only supporting him while he's president, and can wield some executive power, like pardons. Once he's officially the ex-president, their attention will turn to finding a replacement figurehead. Trump, having lost an election, will be of very little interest to them. They won't want to be associated with a loser.
While one would hope that is true, you can't ignore what Trump has managed to do, which is send specific messages to specific groups to build a following. For all his flaws, he took what he learned selling rea lestate to different clients and applied it to politics. Even if each of the target audiences did not overlap, although often they may, or agree with other things he said they heard the message they wanted to hear. He didn't need or want some political viewpoint to try to sell, all he wanted to do
Re: We've forgotten our role (Score:2)
And that should be irrelevant. Both Republicans and Democrats should take names of all the House members that _clearly_ stood behind Trump like good little disposable general infantry... except they volunteered.
That picture should be on Trumps mantle as his greatest achievement with a caption of: Beating down an entire section of the US government! Something no other adversary in the world accomplished.
Once Biden is in, no honorable Republican or Democrat should work with these fools. There is a small ch
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There's going to be something wonderful to watch in January. The day after Biden's inauguration, Trump will get to watch his "supporters" desert him at a speed approaching c.
They're only supporting him while he's president, and can wield some executive power, like pardons.
In other words, they are spineless cowards. Apparently incapable of speaking truth to power, and definitely not capable of governing, because they will lick the boots and destroy the country if need be based on their cowardice.
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I think there will be a few defections among the politicians but many will not because the Republican Party is the party of Trump. And any Republican who does not support Trump will piss off his MAGA hoard.
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The "real" Republican side doesn't exist any more.
Just look at the number of Republican politicians who are prepared to go along with Trump's ridiculous claims of fraud. Republicans have shown themselves to be the fascists who wish to override the wishes of the majority. They want to replace a "fair" election (not really fair, but slanted strongly towards Republicans) with an undemocratic takeover.
I'm sorry that you can't see this, but perhaps you are blinded by your own prejudices.
As a "Barry Goldwater conservative". I could not agree more. At one time, I hovered around 70 percent Republican vote. Then with the Gingrich era purge of moderate Republicans, It started to become harder and harder to find candidates that wanted to govern, and not just castigate, who were actually fiscally conservative.
It has culminated in to a truly insane movement that bears no resemblance to actual conservatism, more just a hatred based irrational movement.
While I do not share many Democrat policie
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In the same vein I hope that the Democratic Party does the same, with progressives and liberals on one side and the Wall Street toadies of the Third Way on the other.
Maybe with four parties we might have something like a representational government again.
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The winner-takes-all method of elections in the US naturally creates a two party system. Any third or fourth party will cause the whole "is my vote being wasted?" effect. The most effective third party so far is Libertarian, and their electoral effect is roughly 1-3%. For a proportional election you need more than one representative per district or region.
In California, as a whole it does get proportional representation at the legislative level, as there are plenty of Republican house members from here.
You might enjoy: Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (Score:2)
https://slashdot.org/submissio... [slashdot.org]
Key ideas the author (Lee Drutman) proposes are ranked-choice voting, multi-member congressional districts like in Australia, eliminating primary elections for congressional seats, expanding the size of the House of Representatives to around 700 from the current 435, and increasing the number of senators to 5 for each state, all 5 elected at once via ranked choice voting.
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That's still less than the annual military budget. If you graph the official military budget (without the alphabet soup of intel agencies, the illegal Black Budget, the mercenary scum hired by the State Department, etc.) alongside the US deficit the two parallel closely most years and have since the early 1970s. I'd prefer deficit spending be on something of value to the actual people rather than the bottomless pit of the Pentagram.
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If we are to survive as a species to realize our potential, we have to move beyond blind allegiance to one of two sides.
Except there are only two sides to data: valid data and invalid data. Politics plays no role in valid data, it only plays a role in invalid data.
Re:We've forgotten our role (Score:5, Insightful)
The sane realize there's truth in both camps,
I'm tired of hearing "both-sides" when it comes to science. Should we say some animal evolved while others instantly appeared in a puff of smoke? In science, you either conform to reality or you don't.
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Political belief sets are outside the realm of science, and inside the current kingdom of tribal think. There are indisputably irregularities in the application of logic by a percentage of humans.
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Indeed. Too many allow their prefrontal cortex to dictate far too many of their responses.
Re:We've forgotten our role (Score:4, Insightful)
In a pickle, C2H5OH will momentarily alleviate the burdensome influence of the frontal lobe.
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Booze pickles!
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Political belief sets affect the ability to do the research or to publish. The prohibitions against injuring people prevent measuring the process of freezing to death to carefully measure the effects of hypothermia, and complicates gathering human fetal tissue for stem cell research. It also affected the collection and publication of data about cigarette smoking. Even in scientific research, unwelcome results get funding cut or eliminated altogether.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Obligatory Wiki reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
That's a "sane" a bit too much there... (Score:2)
Predictably, roughly half of the electorate will be outraged by this, and half will justify it as necessarily uncomfortable.
If we are to survive as a species to realize our potential, we have to move beyond blind allegiance to one of two sides. The sane realize there's truth in both camps, and that ephemeral balance is in the checks and balances that healthy political opposition provides
So basically... you're arguing for the "justify it as necessarily uncomfortable" side.
But without actual balls to stand by your actual convictions, ergo so much couching of the argument one could confuse you for an interior designer who specializes in sofas and cushions.
Where the crux of the "argument" is declaring those who disagree with you as not "sane".
Yeah... About that...
I wouldn't exactly go around singing praises to my sanity if I were you.
Considering that you either can't accept your own thoughts a
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So basically... you're arguing for the "justify it as necessarily uncomfortable" side.
You had a 50% chance of being right, and I can see how my post may have led you to this incorrect assumption, but you've the opposite of nailed it.
Considering that you either can't accept your own thoughts and ideas as valid - or that you are a pathological liar... Or possibly scum who lies for fun and profit.
Or. I don't know why the three premises have to be mutually exclusive. I could easily be two or more of these things.
This was an intensely clumsy hit job (Score:5, Insightful)
If you love and care for truth and science this should terrify you. What I'm most scared of is the Judge who signed off on the search warrant. The reasoning was extremely flimsy. This is the effects that a decade of court packing at every level has wrought.
Re:This was an intensely clumsy hit job (Score:5, Interesting)
I watched both the press conference with Governor DeSantis' phony 'outrage' and then the actual police bodycam footage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of7ITokML-A). I'm siding with Rebekah Jones side of the story at least in the context of how this event went down.
Contrary to the governors position I am pretty sure having a bunch of heavily armed guys, including one with a sledge hammer qualifies as a 'raid' and that can be used interchangeably with 'serving a warrant'. Having a gun pointed at your kids...not acceptable. This is so clearly an attempt by the Florida governor to use law enforcement to intimidate, embarrass, and enact some level of retribution on a citizen that embarrassed him earlier. Feels like the GWB fiasco in NJ.
This could have easily been handled by contacting the lawyer and arranging for the handing over of the devices. If she deletes files, boom you have her automatically for evidence tampering.
+1 for having a body camera on. We don't have to take her word, the governors, word, we can see it all for ourselves.
-1 for not having every officer wear a body cam. Why not?
-1 for the plainclothes guy
-1 for not having a female deputy there since you know the subject is a woman
It's entirely possible that she will get tried and found guilty, let that play out. But the raid...unnecessary
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Contrary to her statements, it's obvious from both her recording and the body cam footage that no one had a gun pointed at them.
They waited at the door for what, 20 minutes, before she let them in? So it doesn't appear the sledge hammer was used at all, even though it's a pretty typical piece of equipment to bring along to serve a search warrant (because you never know if they're going to let you in or not).
A raid is when the police bust in on you. Haven't you seen the movies? :)
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It's just censorship by a different method. It reminds me of SLAPP lawsuits.
Re:This was an intensely clumsy hit job (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a gem: "The judge that signed the warrant was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis in October and sworn in last month. Signing the warrant was his first act."
From this Florida today article [floridatoday.com]. Also the Florida cybercrime experts they interview say that the warrant was clearly written intentionally overly broadly. This was pretty clearly a fishing expedition to get her contacts and bully her and anyone else. The connection between the IP address and her was obtained through "investigative resources" that are *not specified* in the affidavit upon which the warrant was based.
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I wouldn't be surprised if Hunter's laptop resurfaced here....
disgusting (Score:5, Insightful)
seen with an European eye, after many years of daily following news carried by NYT, Wash Post, Atlantic, Intelligencer, Politico, Slashdot too, of US of A, I just have to say it: us politics is disgusting.
Borne and raised in a country where kids learn at school how the US liberated us and brought us democracy and we all look over the atlantic with a critical eye, history in mind.
Re:disgusting (Score:5, Insightful)
I just have to say it: us politics is disgusting.
This isn't politics, this is corrupt behavior by a public official.
Re:disgusting (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, in the US the distinction between the two terms has been dwindling for decades.
Re:disgusting (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the americans that liberated you are dead now. The US is a very different country nowadays.
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Uncovering the Holocaust and the Nanjing massacre (among other things) gave Americans the perfect atrocities to justify their narrative of riding in as the knight in shining armor. But the knight in shining armor bit was an accidentâ"FDR was itching for an excuse to join the war because of the economic production it would create.
You also don't get the moral high ground when you've been selling supplies to the bad guys. We had corporations sending money, fuel, metal, and other war supplies to the N@z!s. Hell, the Bush family fortune was based on that! And we knowingly let it continue well into the war and then seized the profits, which effectively means that America's government was directly responsible.
P.S. Dear Slashdot: Your lameness filter that doesn't permit us to discuss real groups doing real things in historical context with
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No, you fucking moron. Prescott Bush's Union Banking Corporation didn't provide shit towards the Bush family's total wealth. Prescott Bush owned 1 share of stock out of 4,000.
He ran the corporation. Its whole purpose was to send money to Hitler. Prescott Bush came away from that experience with a cool million in profit, which was substantial at the time.
Now run along and let the people who care about people try to solve problems.
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You know what they say.
USA is a first world economy with a third world bureaucracy.
Re:disgusting (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:disgusting (Score:5, Informative)
Please explain how a spoofed IP address can be used to make a TCP connection, except by someone who controls the routing of packets that end up at the target machine. It's easy to spoof an outgoing UDP packet, but if you need an actual connection (ie. packets returning), it's not so easy to spoof.
I think it highly unlikely that Rebekah Jones was the perpetrator of this ridiculously trivial "unauthorized access". More likely an inside job, in which case, the person would need to know Rebekah Jones' IP address, and with this information, the easiest solution would then be to tamper with the website logs.
The other odd thing about this is that it is an IPv6 address. Not many people in the USA use IPv6 for residential connectivity. Not impossible, but unusual.
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Besides a port-forwarded connection to a root-kitted machine? Or forged splunk logs? Or manipulated X-Forwarded-For headers preserved on a proxy?
I'm not suggesting that all or any of these were n play, but I've been port-forwarding connections through SSH tunnels for decades to look inside of remote networks.
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Port forwarding isn't spoofing.
Using a port forwarding setup that pointed to Jones' house would require one of the machines in her house to be compromised.
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Yes, indeed. It's common enough that a competent forensic analysis of the whistleblower's computers should be part of any such investigation.
Re:disgusting (Score:5, Interesting)
I just realized that there is a much simpler explanation.
Jones uses Comcast. Comcast modems provide a WiFI network that is available to anyone with a Comcast login. What if this semi-public WiFi network was the one that was used? It would show the address as Jones' address, but in actuality is open to almost anyone.
This suggests a deliberate act of framing her, but so does any explanation that assumes she is guilty.
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I just realized that there is a much simpler explanation.
Jones uses Comcast. Comcast modems provide a WiFI network that is available to anyone with a Comcast login. What if this semi-public WiFi network was the one that was used? It would show the address as Jones' address, but in actuality is open to almost anyone.
This suggests a deliberate act of framing her, but so does any explanation that assumes she is guilty.
Comcast's scheme of further abusing customers who don't buy their own equipment by offering WiFi to the public using the customers power, space and wireless spectrum without compensation while continuing to charge outrageous monthly rental fees simply does NOT work this way.
It is a separate SSID with a separate IP address isolated from the customer.
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Yes, I know that, but when they asked Comcast "What physical address was this IP address allocated to?", Comcast are going to point to Jones' address, because that's where the modem (with it's separate SSID) is located.
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Yes, I know that, but when they asked Comcast "What physical address was this IP address allocated to?", Comcast are going to point to Jones' address, because that's where the modem (with it's separate SSID) is located.
Residential service assigns a dedicated public IP address to each customer.
Xfinity wifi works differently from residential service in that Wi-Fi users are trapped behind a CGN. IP Address and time of access alone are INSUFFICIENT to link a public address to specific location because the same public address is used concurrently across multiple Wi-Fi users at the same time.
Additional information (normally source port) is required to disambiguate users with the same level of specificity as dedicated public ad
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In this case, the IP address was a publicly routable IPv6 address. Are those IPV6 addresses also behind a CGN?
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In this case, the IP address was a publicly routable IPv6 address. Are those IPV6 addresses also behind a CGN?
I don't know. Wouldn't surprise me given captive portal use for unsecured SSID but I have no useful information on IPv6 and Comcast's public Wi-Fi.
I very much hope this ends up being true. It would be in my view beyond awesome for there to be a widely disseminated public account of a Comcast customer being exposed to this kind of liability (at the very least having all your tech shit taken and police raiding your home with guns) simply because Comcast elected to turn the customers rented cable modem into
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9 months now of pretty much 99% of people I see in public masking up and yet there are record numbers testing positive? That speaks volumes about masks being ineffective tools at stopping the spread....
I'm sorry there's been so much FUD around this that it appears confusing - and I don't mean to be an ass, just this bit here triggered me a little, and I don't want to suggest anything incorrect about your post especially any of the other points. However, the way I understand it:
1) There exists PPE that is very likely to protect you from getting the virus, but only when used properly, and you generally have to have specific training to do that. Pretty much only health care workers get any of that because th
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They're infected with communism
The politics of world's states are infected with a stateless society?
Re: disgusting (Score:2)
The kid clearly can't tell the difference between what people say is the case and what they themselves actually see being the case.
Like a obvious dictatorship that says it is "just transitioning to communism" ... for the last 50 freaking years! ;)
Or his chosen party's promises before the election, and the actual actions after every damn last election before. (This it true for two parties in the US. And yes, *there are more than two!*)
Two sides to this issue? LOL! (Score:5, Informative)
America used to look upon actions this raid as Gestapo behavior. Full stop. Now evil is seen as equivalent to good, anti-intellectual fascism is equivalent to freedom, and freedom is equivalent to being able to trample on the safety of others.
America is not going to last much longer.
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LOL you brought religion into this. Thing is... you're right. We should have listened that long ago.
As an aside to the main story, public pwd? (Score:5, Interesting)
Putting aside the primary story, how is the Florida DOH official in charge of this system not fired immediately for re-using a login/pwd, sharing it amongst a large group of individuals, and then having it publicly available? WTF is the point of having a login/pwd if it's public?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... [arstechnica.com]
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Florida is going to have a fun time proving it was her. Any yahoo could have accessed the system. They have no concept of non-repudiation here.
Re:As an aside to the main story, public pwd? (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless, of course, they serve a search warrant on her and as a result search her computers and on the computers find evidence of her accessing it on the date in question.
You know, gather evidence to prove their case based on probable cause, like they have here?
I mean, you can object to lots of things, but this search is literally the process used to prove whether or not she actually did it or not, rather than assuming she did/didn't based on just the IP address being tracked back to her connection.
Fuck Republicans (Score:2)
I might not agree (Score:5, Insightful)
I might not agree with her position, however she has the every right to do scientific research, collect data, present opinions, and defend those publicly.
If you don't like what she said, you can try to refute it. Sending armed men to intimidate does not have place in a civilized society.
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The search warrant was served to find evidence of a crime, not to refute her contention that their covid numbers might have been 1-3% off.
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In the same sense that Dear leader says the moon is made of green cheese and anyone who disagrees gets treated to a long and stressful investigation that is just looking for evidence of a crime and is definitely not an extra-judicial punishment for disagreeing with dear leader.
Easy conclusion: (Score:2)
Anyone who spends their entire life saying "No, K-A-H" will have Issues.
Shithole country (Score:3, Insightful)
What a shithole country USA has become. It’s really sad. :(
Yep, Sounds like Gestapo to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
Signed,
a German.
P.S.: Save your fucking country before it is too late. Denial and downplaying where the main thing that allowed it to happen over here. This is your job as a citizen, to stop. Have pride in it.
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Signed,
a German.
P.S.: Save your fucking country before it is too late. Denial and downplaying where the main thing that allowed it to happen over here. This is your job as a citizen, to stop. Have pride in it.
We are working on it, fortunately it looks like we may avoid Germany's fate.
After what you guys did to Russia, an argument can be made that Stalin exercised some discretion, which Is an amazing thing to think.
Not good (Score:2, Insightful)
Also not good, the no knock raids on Wisconsin Republicans [reason.com]. Did y'all object then?
No, that's not what-about-ism, it's a genuine question. If you only have a problem with this sort of thing when it's against someone you like, then you are no better.
I'm against it all the time.
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That's not good, no one should get a pass on their misdeeds just because they manage to provoke the other side into doing something wrong. The problem is, there's just too much in that stor
Re: Not good (Score:3)
I'll wave a blue lives matter flag for all the conservatives caught up in unfair investigations for attacking police unions with Wisconsin Act 10, and I'd call that karmic justice.
If that's not enough to bring Republicans to the table for police reform, then why are you looking for sympathy? I'm being completely serious, your allegation is that liberals don't care when conservatives are targeted by abusive police tactics, I'm saying conservatives still don't care about police reform, and were both right.
I
Raid v.s Serving a Search Warrant (Score:2)
Dear Governor Ron DeSantis,
Please explain the difference between the police using a Raid to serve a search warrant and just plain serving of a search warrant. What specific action is require for it to be considered a raid?
Because a bunch of cops pushing into a home and pointing guns at kids sounds awful raidy to me.
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They waited 20 minutes for her to let them in (so not "pushing into a home") and it's clear from the footage that no one pointed a gun at anyone.
aka Shooting the messenger (Score:2)
Alternative expressions:
"Killing the messenger"
"Attacking the messenger"
"Blaming the bearer of bad tidings"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Her messaging was left-leaning. Covid even wors (Score:5, Insightful)
If her messaging was right-leaning,
Her message was the truth, specifically, it was data and she refused to alter the data when ordered to. The truth doesn't have a political lean, it simple exists.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If her messaging was right-leaning,
Her message was the truth, specifically, it was data and she refused to alter the data when ordered to. The truth doesn't have a political lean, it simple exists.
Morons do not acknowledge the existence of "truth". To them, you can only be for or against them and claiming something is "true" is clearly only an invalid attempt to lend weight to a statement. After all, everything is opinion and everyone's opinions are valid ways to see reality, i.e. "true".
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The term gender comes from the Latin root genus and literally just means sort/kind. It wasn't used as a standard term to differentiate male and female roles until around the 1960s. It was during that time that it started to used as a term to refer to sex-based societal roles as opposed to biological sex. So, yes, gender is entirely a sociological construct. It was coined specifically to refer to sociological constructs built around biological sex.
Re:Let's get the truth and not alter data, mmm-kay (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that investigations have turned up nothing. All the rhetoric about how much evidence exists, NO evidence was presented in court. It's clear that the election fraud thing is just a means to collect legal defense money to support Trump's next 4 year campaign cycle.
Re:Let's get the truth and not alter data, mmm-kay (Score:4, Insightful)
Well well well. Another fucking trumptard posting anonymously. How surprising.
Trump lost. Get over it.
Re:How to depoliticize various things (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't have to feed a troll, but at least you can change the Subject.
Covid-19 is a medical problem. Covid-19 is NOT a political problem.
In a sane USA, I would agree 100 percent. Unfortunately, the present occupant has made everything about him personally, and therefore political.
The demand for altering a scientific document to downplay effects on children is people's evidence one. Firing a woman because she disagreed is evidence two. If those are not political acts based on sycophants bending the knee to a president that completely lacks leadership is people's evidence three.
You present evidence, and act on it.. Not suppress it because of a misguided and narcissistic idea that it is an attack on you, then have your minions enforce it.
We've had scientists safeguarding information ever since team trump came to power.
trump and his sycophants remind me of the practitioners of Lysenkoism, where politics demands that the science confirm the politics.
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A deeper response, and better presented. I agree with what you wrote, but if the problems are political, then the solution has to be within the political sphere. That's my main point and from my perspective this story is largely misdirected.
There are two plausible solution approaches to the aspect of the problem you are focusing on. One is specific to this politically motivated arrest. The charges were trumped up and the arrest was false. But there is no mention of "false" or "trumped" in the 64 visible com
seconded (Score:2)
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To me that maps to an educational problem.
Read, and learn much [gutenberg.org]...
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^-1
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^-2
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I think the solution approach that makes the most sense there is to seek to create "better" voters who don't elect such abusive and corrupt people. To me that maps to an educational problem. Mostly teaching people to read better and with greater skepticism. Liars gotta lie, but we don't gotta elect them to powerful jobs like governor or senator or president.
more on this below.
Or maybe we do (and the voters in Florida did), since the standard response to "unpleasant" information these days is "TL;DR". (Especially on Slashdot 2020? (And yeah, me too. Right now I'm struggling with another quite unpleasant book and I just realized it's bugging me largely because I hit a couple of other unpleasant books recently. In conclusion, I'm reading too many too pleasant books these days.))
On this return to the topic to look at your response, there had been enough time to start looking for solution approaches. Didn't find any besides mine. Maybe there should be a "Constructive solution" mod to make solutions more visible? But what's yours?
Despite what the world thinks, Americans are not stupid in the aggregate. We've just enabled too much minority rule, and more recently, rule by actual verified criminals and immoral narcissists. The system has been played too well with terrible consequences.
One really important thing is to enable "majority wins" voting. As simple as it sounds in a system that allows voting, Trump and George Bush in modern times, and Harrison, Hays, and Adams in the deep past all became president despite
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Mostly I agree, except with your solution approach to gerrymandering. If the politicians can't pick voters by drawing boundaries, they'll figure out other ways to do it. The obvious countermeasure to your approach would be enhanced redlining to get more of the "right" voters to move into the districts. I do think it would be socially beneficial to push in the opposite direction, perhaps with tax incentives for other kinds of people moving into districts that need more people of different sorts, but I won't
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You don't have to feed a troll, but at least you can change the Subject.
Covid-19 is a medical problem. Covid-19 is NOT a political problem. NOT even an economic problem, though it does have major economic consequences. Covid-19 is a medical problem and approaching it from other perspectives has NOT been effective or useful. However this story is really a sad abuse of power that is harming relatively weak people.
Then again, on the theory that the elections in Florida are reasonably accurate (but don't ask any felons who have paid their debts to society and yet cannot vote) you have to admit that most of the voters deserve exactly what they are getting now. But Rebekah Jones doesn't deserve to be attacked by political hacks for trying to save lives, even if they are mostly foolish lives.
In separate news, the head of the FDA needs to resign now. He needs to make it clear that the authorization of the vaccine was NOT a political decision and was NOT motivated by any political threats. Yes, he was caught between a rock (of saving as many lives as he could) and a hard place (of the dense head of "He whose name need not be mentioned"), but the only way I can see to depoliticize it now is for him to step out of the mess with the parting message "And my approval of the vaccine was NOT in any way motivated by any political threats and you should feel safe in getting the vaccination." (Alas, it is too late to restore confidence in the process. Even though I believe in science, I believe I should wait for at least a little while before deciding on which vaccine to pursue. Perhaps all of them are safe. Or perhaps some of them were driven by politics or money rather than medical concerns.)
And about that Supreme Court (as a "various thing" that should not be political). Since the hyper-partisan "Justices" aren't going to resign or retire anytime soon, how about giving nonpartisan justices special recusal power over political hack "Justices"? Starting from a blank slate, actually, since RBG was the last nonpartisan Justice (who was actually confirmed by a majority of the Senators from both parties).
Expected responses from Slashdot 2020? Mostly TL;DR. A few uncomprehending brain farts. No better ideas or even anything that could be mistaken for a constructive suggestion. Come on. Let's see your solution approach. Double dare 'ya.
Quoted in response to troll censorship mods. And reassured I must be onto something if they are so scared of it.
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I'm not denying that political problems exist nor denying that the political problems interfere with sane responses to medical (and economic) problems. However, if you actually believe what you wrote, then what is your solution approach? And how would it affect the specific MEDICAL crisis known as Covid-19?
If a problem has no solution, then it is just the way things are. Only if there is a possible solution transition to a better state does it make sense to call it a problem. Even when you aren't sure how t
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I'm afraid that logic is not well founded. The mere fact that many of the problems around Covid-19 have been aggravated by political mishandling: has contributed to its spread and to the death of its victims, including medical personnel treating other victims. Requiring and supporting truth in government data about a pandemic is a useful part of such solutions.
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Let me try to put it differently. We need to divide and conquer Covid-19, not allow the puppeteers (pulling the strings of "He whose name need not be mentioned") to use Covid-19 as a political weapon to divide and conquer America. As a medical problem, there are various obvious steps that needed to be taken, but they weren't. Most obviously America needed to build a massive testing infrastructure to measure the problem. Meanwhile but separately the economic consequences of Covid-19 needed to be addressed wi
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Oh, dear. Almost every step of what you describe as a better approach may be for medical reasons, but requires political decisions about funding, access, and enforcement. Even the decisions to live in cities where it can spread more easily, rather than live mostly in isolated communes, are _enormous_ factors in this pandemic's spread/ Saying that they're independent of the medical issues is like saying that politics has nothing to do with famines, or that international travel has nothing to do with global p
Re: Her messaging was left-leaning. Covid even wor (Score:4, Insightful)
Are we really here? Where data is no longer data, but some political object that people accept or reject depending on which party it suits?
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Are we really here? Where data is no longer data, but some political object that people accept or reject depending on which party it suits?
It's the Republican version of Soviet era Lysenkoism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .
Re:She sounds like a great person (Score:5, Funny)
The Daily Mail could tell me me that Will Smith is a black man and I would pull up his bio to double-check.
Re:She sounds like a great newpaper. (Score:3)
Re: LEOs traced the Comcast source IP to her resid (Score:2)
Seriously?
Like I cannot do that to you right now, with all the shitty insecure unpatched routers. Especially if I can wave NSLs in front of ISP employees.
The only reason they did not "find" child porn on her computer is becaise she's a woman.
Hold my Metasploit...
Re: (Score:2)
still no +1 Depressing