My friend Matt notes that while this “isn’t exactly the ‘death panel’ that Fox News was trying to scare you with, [it] most certainly falls in to the category of fallout associated with nationalizing medical treatment”, in response to this Scientific American piece :

Hospitals across the United States are throwing away less-than-perfect organs and denying the sickest people lifesaving transplants out of fear that poor surgical outcomes will result in a federal crackdown.

One reply says:

I don’t disagree with some of your logic here, but I also feel that you would have to agree that healthcare based on profit is equally immoral

No, I don’t and you’re wrong.

In its current state, for-profit health care is not without problems — many of them — but this specific act is active and deliberate evil due fundamentally to the nationalization and which supplants even a person’s ability or willingness to pay, or to take on risk. It is a medical equivalent of cash-for-clunkers, of plowing under the fields even while millions starved during the great depression, or the oft-lambasted regulations which prevent grocery stores from donating produce, etc.

In these cases, there are some quantity of goods which people want and would be willing to take, but which are being deliberately withheld from them (and destroyed).

Now, you may counter that under the price system, some people may suffer or die as well because they can’t afford the service (why it costs as much as it does, and whether it ought to cost that much is a different topic). While you may prefer a different distribution of kidneys than the price system provides, it is absolutely without question that if there are fewer kidneys to go around because the hospitals are literally throwing them in the trash, fewer people’s needs will be met as a result.

I don’t see how death from “I can’t afford a transplant” is any worse, objectively, than death from “some panel at the hospital decided that even though I’d been on the wait list for 18 months, and was ‘next in line’ for a kidney, that someone else’s need was more urgent, so I didn’t get my transplant”. Especially when there will necessarily be more deaths arising from the latter than from the former.

By that logic, every president is evil

Well, yeah, I was getting to that.

And by that logic, you’re evil and I’m evil and we’re all evil

Nope (or, technically, sure, but now it’s a matter of degree).

I’m sure you’ve done some bad things and some wrong thing in your life; we all have, but evil is not the same as those. You may have even done some evil things, again, most of us probably have.

But the power wielded by a President is orders of magnitude greater, and thus affords them the opportunity to do many times more evil. It’s absurd to equivocate the moral failings of e.g., cheating on a girlfriend or an exam in high school with the moral failings of bombing children in Syria, overthrowing another country’s government, continuing the abomination that is the war on drugs, mass surveillance of US citizens, confiscation of properties, etc.

Anyone who intends to do the things that they intend to do and on the scale which they are capable of doing them is manifestly and irrevocably evil.

This is supposed to silence anyone critical of “socialism” by demonstrating some sort of hypocrisy of deed or action: You have a Social Security Card, therefore you’re a Socialist, therefore your criticisms are invalid. QED.

Lel. And fuck off. No, I’m not.

Having a Social Security card (or, having been assigned a Social Security Number) doesn’t make anyone a card-carrying socialist. It simply means you’ve been enrolled (probably at birth, by your parents who either thought they were looking out for you, or were ransomed in to enrolling you to take advantage of the tax breaks that dependent children afford them) in what is ostensibly a social welfare program, which you can’t ever opt out of.

Also because words have meanings: card-carrying generally means that you’re registered with some association (which has subsequently issued cards to their members, as a sort of credentialing system), or as an adjective that means you’re dedicated to a particular cause. You can be a “card-carrying” Democrat if you’ve registered with the Democratic Party, or a “card-carrying” member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers if you’ve been admitted to that Union, or you can be a “card-carrying Environmentalist” in the sense that you’re pretty vocal about your support for all things “green” or whatever.

But simply having a government-issued card for a program you probably didn’t sign up for and can’t opt out of doesn’t make you either of those things. So while you may physically be “carrying” the card in your purse or wallet, that is not what “card-carrying” means.

A few conservative blogs are circulating some unsubstantiated rumors that Freddie Gray Jr. had spinal surgery a week prior to his fateful arrest and subsequent death in Baltimore Police custody.

Examples of the allegations can be found on Snopes, since I’m not interested in linking to those other blogs. Snopes currently lists this rumor as “unconfirmed”, although they indicate:

The claim appeared almost simultaneously in three places: The Facebook page of Baltimore-based Fox affilate WBFF, the blog The Conservative Treehouse, and the blog The Fourth Estate.

Public records from Maryland County courts were linked, but much of the claim hinged on “sources” and dot-connecting.

At the time of my search, I found this case for Fredericka Gray (Gray’s mother).

Due to some 404 errors (the Maryland public records search may have been temporarily offline or overloaded with requests), I was initially unable to find the related 13C14101574, I mistakenly concluded that this screenshot had been doctored to use Freddie’s name in lieu of his mother’s. Case 13C14101574 is from the original screenshots, and so they do not appear to have been altered, as I had originally suspected. Here are the screenshots from that case number:

In any case, this case involve Gray as party to an out-of-court civil settlement with Allstate, and not from a “recent car accident”.

The Baltimore Sun has since reported that these cases involve the restructuring of that settlement.

Court records examined by the Baltimore Sun show the case had nothing to do with a car accident or a spine injury. Instead, they are connected to a lawsuit alleging that Gray and his sister were injured by exposure lead paint.

Of course it is still possible that Gray was involved in an automobile accident and/or had spinal surgery a week prior to his arrest, but the dots certainly do not connect in the manner that the conservative blogs would have you believe.

And even if Gray had a recent surgery, that still does not absolve the Baltimore Police Department of what appears to be obvious neglect of a suspect in their custody.

Update

WBFF, Baltimore’s Fox affiliate network has since pulled the story from their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/FOXBaltimore/posts/10152842719584607

Snopes has gone back and forth on this all day, sometimes it is listed as “False” and sometimes as “Undetermined”. Until evidence supporting the “Car accident and surgery” narrative surfaces, though, I’m inclined to believe it’s false.

The origin of this story appears to be a rabid right-wing blogger, the sort of online space where “towel-heads”, “n*ggers” and “mud-people” is common and accepted parlance. The x-ray imagery included in his post appears to be stock image, deliberately doctored to remove such indications, perhaps to give the casual observer the impression that it was an actual x-ray from the actual Officer Wilson.

Consider also: video evidence does not appear to cast Wilson as a man who suffered a broken face (a fractured orbital is generally a serious injury). He did not call in the incident, nor mention it to dispatch in any account that I have seen. Timeline puts Wilson at the scene some 4 hours after allegedly sustaining the injury. The publicly available autopsy report specifically indicate that there were no outward signs of struggle (contusions, lacerations, broken hands/fingers, etc.) on Brown, which would likely be consistent with breaking someone’s face.

But then you have to ask: why was this not the VERY FIRST bit of information released with Wilson’s name, last Friday? Certainly from a PR/damage control perspective, if true, this would have been important to make public — certainly more important than the ham-fisted attempt to paint Brown as a criminal who had just robbed a liquor store, which was essentially character-assassination: Brown was not stopped on suspicion of any criminal activity, so even had he robbed that store, that fact would be basically irrelevant. So, why wait to release information about Wilson’s injuries? And release the information through some wack-job blogger?

Related: Fox News appears to have recently picked up this “story” citing anonymous sources within the department and/or DA’s office. Perhaps they do have such sources, and perhaps this is actually how it happened. Or perhaps, they simply ran with some nutjob’s blog in an effort to “scoop” the competition.

No other media outlet is reporting on Wilson’s “broken orbital” or that he was “badly beaten”, and CNN is now directly contradicting these stories.

Worth noting: Fox News is still reporting matter-of-factly that Brown “stole cigars”. Video taken at the scene and which has since been made public, does not seem to corroborate that, or at least lends possible alternatives. Brown’s friend, who would be an accomplice to that “theft” has not been charged with any crime. The store employees/owners did not call the police, and no stolen cigars have been reportedly recovered from Brown’s body.

I suppose time will tell.

Instead, Detroit is moving forward with a stop-and-frisk policy, designed by the same consultants who implemented the controversial (and recently-ruled unconstitutional* program in New York City).

Defenders of these “stop-and-frisk” programs, like Detroit Police Assistant Chief Eric Ewing, are quick to argue about “reasonable suspicion”,

If we have reasonable suspicion someone is about to commit a crime, we’re allowed to stop that individual. If we have a good reason to believe they may be armed — say, if we see a holster, or a bulge that looks like a gun — then we’re allowed to search them. That’s just being proactive.

We’re not telling our officers they have to go out and stop X-number of people each day. But we are telling them to do police work.

But the basis of this “reasonable suspicion” is deference to the officer’s judgment, which statistical evidence — this is data coming from the NYPD — demonstrates to be laughably unreliable: About 90% of those stopped were completely innocent of any wrongdoing, i.e., the officer’s judgment was wrong, 90% of the time.

Let that sink in: Ninety percent of the time, they’re wrong. Yet we’re supposed to defer to their judgment?

The real issue is that stop-and-frisk, especially in light of the data, is essentially a fishing expedition. It’s NOT good policing, it’s an absolute and undeniable abrogation of people’s right to be secure in their person, and not to be harassed by the police at every corner..

While Ewing and other apologists may argue that their officers are stopping people “with a reason”, the statistics demonstrate otherwise. I suspect the reality is a combination of these three factors (hopefully more of 1 & 2 than of 3), among others:

1. Officers are just not very good at determining whether there is a reason to make a stop in the first place.
2. Or, Officers are being forced to make more stops than their judgment dictates, because of quotas imposed from their CO’s (this is fact in NY, and probably true in most other locales)
3. Or, they are simply harassing people because they can.

To put this in some additional perspective: Detroit is literally bankrupt. It can’t afford streetlights, snow removal, garbage pick-up, etc. Further, there is a half-century (or more) of well-deserved mistrust and hostility towards law enforcement. Police response time is win-the-internet level of epic failure. Yet somehow, they think that randomly stopping people who are doing nothing wrong (and a 90% failure rate is akin to random stops) is a good use of what few resources they have?

No. It’s a waste of time, and it’s likely to be counterproductive. Every minute they spend harassing 90% of innocent people is a minute which could’ve been used doing actual police work, solving real crimes, doing community outreach, being available for real emergency calls and citizens in distress, etc., is a minute invested in fomenting even more distrust and hostility towards law enforcement.

Notes:

* The News spends a lot of time on the racial issue, and while this may be a concern for some, I think it’s a red herring, and “journalists” should be ashamed for playing this card in lieu of addressing the real, tangible problems. I take issue with Scheindlin’s ruling on similar grounds: it simply is not the right reason to oppose these tactics.

As such, you have a responsibility to “legislate from the bench” in ALL circumstances where the legislators have overstepped whatever bounds are placed on them by your constitution, and in ALL circumstances where you believe the legislature has acted contrary to the interests of the people.

Some argue that judges must always enforce laws as written.

Well if that’s the case, and your constitution doesn’t allow you to exercise moral obligations, then please do me a favor and abandon any pretense of righteousness; your constitution is trash. This is a moral responsibility to your fellow man.

If on the other hand your constitution does allow this, and you’re still running on a “rule of law” ticket, I can only assume that you’ve completely abandoned your moral compass in favor of blind deference to the very same legislators to whom you’re supposed to be a constitutional counterbalance.

Go fuck yourselves.

Consider:

• Governments “take care of the poor” so we don’t feel the responsibility to take care of ourselves.
• Governments “protect us” so we don’t responsible for our own protection.
• Governments give us “work” so we don’t need to be productive.
• Governments teach us so that we don’t have to learn.

The divisiveness of winner-take-all politics relies on class warfare, pitting individual members of society against one another, communities against communities, interests against interests. And despite evidence to the contrary (it’s also widely known that Americans are among the most charitable in the world), they have convinced you that your neighbor is your enemy. So is it any wonder why this process destroys and divides rather than strengthens and unites?

We absolutely need more “community,” but this we are going to have to build on our own. Stop looking for government to solve your problems. If you look hard enough, you’ll probably find they’re responsible for them in the first place.

There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement … And they will vote for [Obama] no matter what …

The liberal faction of the mainstream media has a hard-on over this statement like it’s the writing on the wall, the beginning of the end for the Romney campaign. Even though his base – and that 47% is represented largely by southern “Red” states, I don’t think this really matters to them, and consequently to his campaign.

You have to ask yourself do they give a shit? and more importantly do they even know or understand the difference?

Probably not, to both questions. I’d wager most people with zero tax liability still think they’re getting ripped off by The Man (and to an extent they are, but that’s a topic for another discussion). And the vast majority of people — no matter their party affiliation — are dangerously uninformed on matters of economic principles. They would be shocked, as I suspect Romney would also be, to learn that despite the argument that “the rich pay almost all of the taxes” (which is nominally true), that “the rich” are far greater beneficiaries of (corporate) welfare and redistribution than are the working poor.

Also, there’s the pesky fact that the 47% is basically bullshit.

At the end of the day, whether Mitt implodes doesn’t matter. In the charade of “election year politics” and the quadrennial popularity contest that elects the President, it does. But the point is that doesn’t matter. At all. In the grand scheme of things, your corporate masters don’t care whether you pick Obama or Romney as long as you pick Obama or Romney.