see, this is actually exonerating. she makes it clear that she's not selling parts, she doesn't know how it works and she wants to ask head office to clarify what the rules are. she's clearly clueless about how a sales process might work, and she's clearly not involved in any existing sales. if this was a trial, and the investigators were cops, it would be thrown out of court as entrapment.

the cop was obviously concerned that the driver might be armed, and flipped out in a bad split second "decision" that was driven by self-preservation. it was unjustified, but humans are not logic machines.

1) he should not have put his hand in the car. he didn't even ask him to leave the car.
2) because people in situations like this act on adrenaline rather than logic, the proper protocol for a cop in this situation should be to approach the car with non-lethal weapons. even with the error of reaching in, something like a taser in this circumstance would not have killed this person.

i've been over this before: humans are not god-like, rational, logic machines; we are not homo economicus, and we are especially prone to the suspension of thought in situations such as this. instead of letting this happen over and over and blaming it on the cop for making the wrong choice, we need to understand that the root of the problem is the scenario. no amount of training can fix this. the best, most ideal cop would have reacted the same way.

this cop did not make a conscious choice to shoot this person. this cop made a bad choice to enter the car, and then was subconsciously driven to shoot by a hormonal reaction of self-defense in the midst of a conflict.

the only way to stop police shootings is to take away their guns.

there's a broad, social epiphany underlying this. it flies in the face of our justice system, our concepts of economics, our perception of free will, our mainstream philosophical positions (if you want to call them that...) and ultimately the remnants of our dominant protestant religion.

but, we need to do this.

we are not in complete control. we're relatively advanced - for primates. but we're still very primitive creatures.

if i was defending the officer, i would argue against the existence of a mens rea. this is not murder. but, the law remains unlikely to let him off with less than involuntary manslaughter.

ＳＭＯҟＥ
+deathtokoalas Stop making excuses for the cop. You are talking as if the cop was a victim of humanity's imperfections, ignoring the fact that not only did he make a concious decision to draw his gun and fire at an unarmed man, he also tried to lie about it later.

His lies are proof that he knew he was in the wrong and it says a lot about his character to shamelessly try and place the blame on his murdered victim. 

deathtokoalas
+Smoke i'm not placing the blame on the person he accidentally shot, i'm pointing out that nobody is to blame in this situation - excluding the initial error, but it's not the same thing. and, yes - our society is barbaric in terms of it's enforcement of retribution. it needs to place blame in situations where no blame can be assigned. it needs a zero sum game.

this man is not guilty of any crime, but he will pay a steep price to uphold unscientific concepts of free will and enforce the christian value of vengeance.

ＳＭＯҟＥ
+deathtokoalas This isn't something that just happened, these cops are trained to asses the situation and only use deadly force where they deem it absolutely necessary.

Drawing a gun I can understand, but firing before confirming the other guy had a gun is inexcusable.

You also said you think that the cop only drew because he thought the driver might have been armed. Well guess what? That's not what the cop said, he said that the guy dragged him with his car and only shot at him to save himself.

When the video was analysed it turned out that the cop shot before the car moved anywhere.

Even the cop himself doesn't back the excuse you're making for him.

You come across as someone who values logic and common sense, so why are you ignoring all the facts and fabricating your own scenarios to support your ideal outcome?

deathtokoalas
+Smoke what the cop says doesn't mean anything. it seems foolish, and not particularly borne out by the evidence, but that doesn't mean it's not what he was thinking. (inserted to replace strike: it does seem as though the video backs up his narrative. but what's more important than what actually happened is what he thought was happening before the adrenaline took over.). it's not really an important part of the scenario - or at least it wouldn't be if it was being approached with a scientific understanding of how humans react under stress.

my understanding is that the protocol in this situation is to draw as you're taking the person out of the car - that is, that he's trained to have his hand on his gun as he's taking the person out, in the case that he's armed. that's what i meant, and it's perfectly rational. it's not clear why this person is refusing to provide his license, and if the cop is going to make some assumptions the assumptions he needs to make are on the side of precaution. so, that's the answer as to why he drew his weapon - he was trained to draw his weapon.

as i pointed out, he should have a non-lethal weapon in this circumstance.

the important point here is that what we understand about how people work in these situations is that hormonal processes take over and people act on impulse. it's clear that he made a conscious choice to enter the car. it's clear that he made a conscious choice to draw - and that that was the right choice, both relative to his training and relative to the logic of the situation. it's also clear that when a struggle erupted, the impulse of self-defense overrode any rational thinking process and that he fired not out of a conscious decision but out of a subconscious reaction.

that's just how humans work. it's just the science of the situation. but our legal system has no framework to integrate this. rather, it's based on archaic concepts of imaginary "reasonable people" that are as absurd as the now largely discarded "homo economicus".

the blame is in the scenario. the solution is in taking the guns away. you can't train monkeys to act like robots. it's just not in our nature. when people get into struggle, and are placed under stress, they are unable to think clearly because their bodies are flushed with hormones that take control. our policies should be based on this understanding - and what that says is to disarm traffic cops.

as i mentioned: it's a challenging position to take relative to our existing legal, economic, philosophical and religious norms. but, the reality of the science is actually crystal clear and what it states is that when people are in situations like this cop was in they have almost no control over their actions.

so, we need to prevent the situation from occurring.

i don't think that whether he was actually dragged or not is a meaningful aspect in the case. it's enough to suggest he thought he was going to be dragged for the stress to kick in and the officer to lose control.

however, it is indeed clear that he's closer to the grey car when he gets up than he was when he reached into the car. the video rather clearly demonstrates that the car was moving with him attached to it, and that that aspect of the narrative is accurate.

it's not the important thing to try and figure out. if the car was moving, and it was, that doesn't mean it's ok to shoot to stop the driver. that still collapses to a fight-or-flight response, and a lack of conscious control. and it still suggests that traffic cops should not have guns.

this is an unusually transparent briefing by the state department, centered around the need to do some damage control in a situation where they were caught a little off guard by netanyahu in his characteristic conniving behaviour. it's the rare situation where the truth is the best lie.

i don't think kerry went down there with the motives of really solving anything. and, the fact that he took a draft that had already been rejected and put his name on it largely underscores the point - he was looking to get a political bounce for playing a role in something that he really played no role in. but, american leaders do this all of the time. and, when you're the empire you can do that sort of thing. you can maybe be cynical about it but, in the end, hey, he could have stopped the bombs for a little while.

what i'm reading from the israeli reaction is that netanyahu wasn't about to let that happen - and for reasons of internal domestic american politics, rather than anything to do with his own region. this would not have happened if it was a republican secretary of state. but, netanyahu was looking to prevent the democrats from getting any kind of bump, and instead make them look bad to the republican base - with his absurd accusations around the airport closure (which, again, was clearly meant to prevent reporters from entering the region while kerry was there) and his subsequent "rejection" and leak. if you follow the fox news narrative that matt lee was pushing, it's actually entirely consistent and, if not rational, at least logical, in their usual warped sort of way.

this creates a rather dramatic problem for the united states. not for john kerry. not for obama. for the united states. this is a type of interference that a superpower like america just can't tolerate from a peon like israel.

i have a suggestion: if netanyahu wants to involve himself that deeply in american politics then america should annex israel as a state, and start building american settlements.

youse guys...

To: justin.trudeau@parl.gc.ca, thomas.mulcair@parl.gc.ca

listen...

you're going to get all kinds of shit from focus groups and polling groups and media institutions with obvious biases (that you'll approach with cognitive dissonance), and they're all going to tell you that you're sending the same policies out to the same people and it's fucking with both of you.

that's bullshit. what you're doing is creating a stew of confused voters that would like to vote for parts of the ndp platform and parts of the liberal platform. their ideal party would by x% ndp and y% liberal, and those xs and ys are going to be all over the place and have all kinds of ramifications. it's confusing the hell out of people, wavering them all over the place and preventing them from being able to make any kind of choice. and, you're splitting a large electorate up into segments. for all the shit you correctly give the right for this, you're accidentally functionally doing exactly the same thing.

it'd be great if we could set each and every issue down and put them all up for referendum. direct democracy. a dead, white guy said something about that once. you don't have the time or the money.

what you can do is try and dominate each other. that's what you're *supposed* to do.

i'm an example. i want marijuana legalization. i don't want to get rid of the senate; i want to reform it so it acts as a check on the pmo's office and performs it's stated function. i'm opposed to free trade, as it exists ("investors rights agreements"). i'm in favour of a carbon tax. i'd like to see wages tied to inflation (after we give them a fair bump). i don't want pipelines running through ontario, or anywhere, really. i want corporate tax raises to pay for stimulus spending (preferably environmentally focused), and i'm not concerned about going into deficit in the short run to pay for services.

neither of you are great. in some ways, you both suck. in some ways, you're both acceptable. but i can't vote for both of you. and you can't be everything to everyone, you need to focus on coherent visions that separate you from each other.

figure this out. please. for fuck's sake. i don't want to go through this again in four years.

j

i don't agree with this analysis. the mainstreet poll....it asked a different question. you've got differences in methodology across the different polling firms, making this kind of aggregate...it's useful, but you need to be careful. ivr, telephone & internet seem to be the three types and they have very different biases to correct for.

i don't have access to numbers to crunch. but it seems to be that the forum polls, specifically, are underestimating their margin of error. the most recent data is comparable to the one three polls ago, where the two in the middle are the same. and, it's similar when you move backwards a little. the electorate really doesn't seem to be that volatile right now. i mean, the undecided questions are consistently demonstrating that harper has almost no room to grow, yet the polling is consistently wavering around 5-6%. if he really had that much of a swing, it would come out in the undecided polling. rather, it just looks like more error exists than is being acknowledged. there are some reasons that i'm skeptical about ivr polling. but, the ekos polls are also ivr and haven't change much relative to themselves, within the margin of error - which i think is more along the lines of what a pollster ought to expect in july with no major reasons to shift voting intentions. at the least, you'd expect these to demonstrate the same trends. that they're not indicates something wrong with one of them. again, i think forum is underestimating their error.

net polling, i think, is even worse. you can't tell what is sampling error and what is a change in intentions. you can't even tell if people are filling out the results multiple times.

i don't see any clear trend at all over the last two months.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poll-tracker-harper-mulcair-in-close-race-as-campaign-begins-1.3176101

James in Kanata
@Jessica Murray

But the inescapable facts are:

* The Mainstream poll is the only one to reveal what questions were asked. Depending on the question, the results can be skewed, which is the case when an institution like the Star sponsors a polls and says "make sure the Conservatives are behind". Its called propaganda and the Soviets were masters of it

* The margin of error was the lowest because the sample base was 5 times the others. A Nanos poll showing each party the same with a 5 point margin of error actually legitimizes the Mainstream poll. Add and subtract the Nanos margin of error and you have the Mainstream one but the reverse is not true

Bottom line, there's no escaping the merit of the Mainstream poll and that company has an excellent record, unlike the others which predict

"Ignatieff surges ahead"

"Dix to be Premier of BC"

Jessica Murray
@James in Kanata

the mainstream poll was likely accurate in terms of what it reported. it reported 38% conservative amongst decided voters, which was about 80% of the sample. however, to translate that into results that are comparable to the other polls you need to scale it down by a factor of 0.80 to account for the 20% undecided. that takes the conservatives down to 30.4% of all voters in the mainstream poll.

it also suggested that almost all of the undecided vote is wavering between the ndp and the liberals.

in totality, there is nothing inconsistent about the poll. it's not an outlier.

now, i'd actually argue that the question they asked is better, if you're looking for a sort of a quarks & gluons type analysis. but, just dumping it into the other "leaning" type polls without accounting for it being a fundamentally different type of poll is bad methodology and it's going to inaccurately skew the results of the aggregate. the way he does this is in such a way that it fades out over time, so it will go away. but, he shouldn't repeat that error.

the nanos polling i've seen has put the conservatives in the 30-32% range - which is probably about right. a citation would be useful. it might be the same issue.

to be concrete...

the mainstreet poll reported:

cons: 38%
ndp: 27%
libs: 25%
grn: 6%
bloc: 4%.

...of the 80% of people that were decided.

the actual results were approximately:

cons: 30.4%
ndp: 21.6%
undecided: 20%
libs: 20%
grn: 4.8%
bloc: 3.2%

...based on napkin math that assume the whole number results that they reported.

generally, a statistician would want to distribute that 20% relatively evenly. but, we have plenty of polling on the topic, and we know that we can't do that - you couldn't reasonably give the conservatives more than a percent or two of it.

again: this is probably the most accurate poll because it measured undecideds rather than forcing them to pick an option they're not really decided on. i actually agree with that. it just wasn't reported well. and grenier is making an error with it that he really shouldn't be making.

i'm actually a good example of the results of the poll. if you forced me to pick, i'd pick the ndp. but, it's not really an accurate reflection - the truth is i'm not decided and could vote liberal in the end, if they make an effort to stop pushing fiscal conservatism and come out against the tpp. that would inflate the ndp's numbers a little at the expense of the liberals. i think that's what we're seeing - people on the left swing are leaning ndp, but we're just a tad uncomfortable about diving in for whatever reason.

if the ndp can get 12-15% of that, they win a majority. if it splits evenly, it's another four years of harper. and that's going to be his strategy for the election.

it's hard to have a really informed position on a trade deal that is being conducted in secret.

but, for what reason do we want to send milk around the pacific rim? there's no comparative or absolute advantage in one region producing more milk. it's not climate or even labour-related. it's a perishable item. there's a large carbon cost involved, which is no doubt being entirely ignored. and, the rumour floating around is that the primary issue is not related to allowing countries to export surpluses into countries with deficits [if such a thing is even demonstrable], but dealing with countries with surpluses flooding other markets with surpluses. maybe a little supply-management might be a better idea, so that resources can be better focused on demand? in helping farmers produce things that aren't milk, if they're overproducing it for domestic consumption and there is no real export market, because almost everybody is self-sufficient in milk?

if there's any kind of advantage, it's to do with things like currency manipulation. do i care? no. do i care about offsetting chinese influence in malaysia? no. but, do i care about knowing that the milk i buy in a store is made not just in canada but in ontario, for health and environmental reasons? absolutely: yes

it's just a ridiculous, absurd regime.

canada can make lots of wheat; malaysia would need to import it, although they'd no doubt prefer rice, but you get the point. malaysia can makes lots of rubber; canada would need to import it. let's trade. great. but there's no coherent reason at all why we should want an open market in perishable items that can be produced sufficiently at home - and are better produced at home for a variety of reasons.

another example...

i live in windsor. it's one of the biggest tomato-producing regions in the world. there should be massive surpluses of tomatoes right now, because they closed the heinz factory. but, the market is being flooded with beat to shit, mouldy, bruised tomatoes from mexico that have sat on a truck for a week before they get here. and, i'm not saving money by being stuck with this inferior product, either - the local tomatoes [when you can find them] are actually cheaper, in addition to not being mouldy, bruised and beaten to shit from sitting in a truck for a week.

this is not rational, ricardan equivalence type free trade. it's dictated by the difference in value between the mexican and canadian currencies.

it's not absurd to expect to be able to walk to the store and buy nice, fresh tomatoes that are grown down the road, instead of mouldy, bruised beat to shit ones from thousands of km away. nor is it unreasonable to expect policy that doesn't make that so difficult.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trans-pacific-partnership-talks-key-issues-preventing-a-deal-1.3176649

RustBeltON
Yes, Canada has been doing just fine in the past, for example, when under the late great Trudeau (Senior), "nobody" in the our western would would trade with Cuba.  But Trideau did successfully, Canadian Wheat, for Cuban raw Sugar. AND, sugar was very cheap back then.  It's was a win-win for us both.

Yep, Southern Ontario, (Leamington, Essex, Niagara,...) is the Fruit and Vegetable Capital of Canada, and yet many (S. Ontarian) Canadians are forced(albeit economically and Corporatively), to eat the crap from Mexico, ..., meanwhile Corps like Loblaws,..., who by it for only pennies on the pound, then CHARGE/gouge Canadian Consumers slightly less than Leamington prices. AND, Loblaws,..., doesn't really give consumers much of a choice 'cause they stick it right in our face on all the produce shelves.

It's disgusting.

...and. more importantly, back then we sure as heck didn't need no ($120 Million-per-year LOSS called)-NAFTA for all of our International trading.

Jessica Murray
my experience has been that the produce from mexico is generally considerably more expensive than the produce from leamington, but it's a variable thing, partly offset by where you can buy it. if you want local produce here, you have to find a farmer's market type store, and they're generally a little less across the board. but, local tomatoes at the local market are *consistently* about 30% less than imported tomatoes at the grocery store.

as mentioned - the local tomatoes are fresh, clean and grown with standards that we can see from experience are not followed in mexico. there was recently a case of mexican cilantro being swamped with fecal matter, and when they inspected the manufacturing sites they found there was no washroom - and there was actually used toilet paper on the ground of the production facility. you couldn't make that up. it defies fiction. but, it was true.

the mexican tomatoes are bruised, growing strange things on them and grown under who knows what kind of conditions.

consumers should pick the local product, in theory - it's better and cheaper. but we're not really given a chance because the stores won't carry them. you have to go out of your way to find the stuff, and most people just won't do it. then, we call this reality "free trade".

it's a farce.

i hope the next government nationalizes it and sends the saudis a soiled diaper as compensation.

that'll make these groups think very hard about "investing in canada" should another neo-liberal government take power.

gotta be careful, though. they might send isis after us.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/ottawa-closes-sale-of-canadian-wheat-board-name-changes-to-g3-canada-ltd-1.3175983