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Shots Fired At US Capitol
skade88 writes with a report that "The United States Capitol has been put on lockdown after shots were fired. Reports indicate a policeman was injured." From the story: "The FBI was responding to the unconfirmed reports of shots, and a helicopter landed in front of the Capitol. A message from the Capitol Police ordered anyone in a House office to 'shelter in place.'
'Close, lock and stay away from external doors and windows,' the message said." Doubtless more to come on this; watch this space for updates. Update: 10/03 19:08 GMT by T : ABC News reports that the shots followed an attempt to ram the White House gates; the police subsequently shot and killed the driver. Other than that the driver was a woman, the reports adds little detail. Update: 10/03 19:19 GMT by T : Reuters' U.S. Politics Live feed is currently collating many reports from the scene. Of note: the lockdown itself was brief, and has been lifted.
CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC and the BBC all have big, front page pictures and caption for this story.
The lone holdout? The Fox tabloid with a small banner above their big story asking the question: Can We Do Without It with graphics for HUD, Ed. Dept, IRS and NASA.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It's probably just some responsible gun owner assuming that since the government has shut down the capitol should be empty and therefore would be the ideal place for a shooting range since there should be no chance of hitting anyone.
Seriously though, $10 says it's a U.S. citizen unhappy with D.C. dysfunction. The terrorists wouldn't waste their bullets. They're home watching CSPAN with a bowl of popcorn and thinking "Mission Accomplished".
CIA employees won't be furloughed. It's only agencies and services that people need or want that get shut down.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Because this matters, and frankly I prefer to discuss this sort of thing with my fellow slashdotters. Sure maybe we troll each other some, but its head and shoulders better commentary then what you will find on CNN for example.
You think congress would furlough itself, or at least go without pay until other federal employees start getting paid again? Get real.
It's starting to look like this: Some woman in an ordinary sedan tried to ram the White House gates. (Which wasn't going to do much; those gates were upgraded decades ago to stop much heavier vehicles.) Then the car went down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol area. Some Capitol Police officer may have been run down. Shots were fired, probably by cops. Others heard the shots and hit the panic button.
Time for everyone on Capitol Hill to get back to work.
An attempt doesn't need to have any chance of success to be an attempt. Thankfully this one clearly had no chance. It appears simply insane. Look at the story in the update. It was a woman who tried to ram the White House gates with her car and the Secret Service pursued her. She's now dead.
What else would she have had on her mind? They don't say she was armed, but what's the most likely reason the Secret Service would fire on her when miles away from the White House by that point? Or why the hell would she run to the Capitol unless she planned to do something there?
Holy fuck. Talk about deranged. It'll be interesting to learn what led up to this.
Because this matters, and frankly I prefer to discuss this sort of thing with my fellow slashdotters.
Why? Not why do you prefer, but why at all?
This isn't a technical issue where debate can come to a good understanding of a problem, or resolve some issue for someone who has a question. The only possible outcome from discussing this here is the inevitable flame war when it turns political. Each side will score points for their side, leaving the people in the middle wondering why this kind of stuff is relevant to techies in general and why does it always devolve into flames and insults.
Who done it and why isn't the topic for a debate. Who done it won't change if someone makes a really good point about reaction of the suppressed masses or creates a fictional similarity to some other even at some other time. Why it was done won't change, only points will be scored by the "Republicans drove her to it" (she drove herself, pun intended) or "racism" or "tea party this or that" sides as they award themselves points for one-upmanship.
In truth, this event has very little impact on techies per se, even if a few care a lot because they live in their parent's basement which is next door to the White House. We've lost the concept that every topic isn't technical in nature just because someone who is technically inclined finds it interesting. I'm sure that some ./ers knit, but that doesn't make the latest news about knitting either "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters (to nerds)."
Yes, because there were so many clear and excellent choices that it is mind boggling that the US citizens didn't pick them! News flash. Getting a vote isn't the same as being able to choose between the douchebag and the hero. In the last decade it was a choice of: Would you like this complete douchebag, or this even bigger douchebag?"
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The government increased "security" expenditure on the shutdown. I heard that the cost in locking down and patrolling national monuments in DC exceeded the cost of keeping them open but they were shut to prove a point. We are spending more money to be shut down that it would cost to keep running, for at least some things. And we still could hit the debt ceiling and default for the first time ever on the National Debt. Nothing could be better. Once we default on $1, our credit rating will drop and we'll finally be forced to pay off some of it or default on it all. Oh how I wish we'd just default on it all and start over. It's the SS generation that got us into this. And they leave it for us to pay it off for them while paying their SS.
Learn to love Alaska
All you have said is very true. Except on the fact it is not an inevitability for it to turn into a flame war. Your very post has showed it. You managed to formulate a level-headed opinion about why the discussion is pointless because most discussion would center around irrelevant information. Of course, it ignored the fact that people have this desire to know those very pieces of irrelevant information -- although, thinking better about it, maybe knowing about it would help us learn about it and avoid the loss of life in the future? Nah, who am I kidding. We only care about it to have something to talk about when there is nothing else to talk about, in order to avoid silence. It'll soon be mostly forgotten by most, who will never think about it again unless somebody else mentions it.
Now, to be honest. Shots fired at US capitol? That's news. Why would it ever reach a political flame war is beyond me (if I assume, of course, that we always behave rationally), since Shots fired at US capitol has little to do with politics beyond what drove the whoever to do whatever (in this case try to ram the door, me thinks). And if we are going to discuss the cause of the behaviour, there is little to discuss in politics: the reasons do not need to be grounded in reason, and debating the merits of the reasons as valid politics is a jump too far from topic, bordering going off-topic which is shoots fired.
But then again, you can talk about cheese, reach cheese production, regulations on cheese productions, how hard those regulations make it for new small players to enter the market, and suddenly you are talking about politics again. Which teaches us that nothing is apolitical, unless you are talking about the laws of the world. And that's because they just are, no matter how much you argue they are unfair/against your preference.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
Sounds like all the shooting was police or Secret Service. Car impact, female with babe in a car with out of state plates, chased, and shot ?
What if she was lost, confused and just made a wrong turn while talking on her cell phone, surprised by the barrier?
Perhaps the true price of paranoia.
If I get told that I'm going to be paid biweekly, and then all of a sudden one payday I'm told "yeaaaaaaaah, your paycheck isn't going out this time, but don't worry, all the money will be there in the next one, unless that one also doesn't happen in which case you'll just get three at once in a month and a half", I'm allowed to be pissed off about that.
You can be opposed to Obamacare and still want socialized medicine. Forcing someone to make a private purchase or pay an exorbitant penalty is a much bigger trampling on rights than just having taxpayer-funded healthcare. It's true that this isn't the majority Republican reason for being opposed. But it's a good reason that a lot of Democrats should have been opposed.
That's actually too generous.
The real issue is that voters don't actually pick their candidates anymore; its the other way around. Every 10 years when the census is done, all the states have to redraw their congressional districts. What happens in most states is that whoever controls the state legislature gets to do the drawing. They get maps and their state's entire voter registration database out, and make a modern computer-aided science of drawing things so that as many districts as possible are packed full of their party's registered voters. Any districts that have to go to the other party are drawn to look like malaria germs so that they scoop up every voter possible from the other party. Ideally those opposition districts will have more voters in them too. The idea is to give voters from the other party as little voice in government as possible.
In other words, nearly every voting district in the country is designed to be a "Democratic" district or a "Republican" district. The only true election happens on primary day, and nobody from the other side of the political spectrum gets a vote. So you end up with a Congress packed full of extremists. Extremist congressmen don't give a damn which party won or lost the last election, because their own seat is safe either way. All they have to worry about is that someone more extreme than them will challenge them in the next primary.
TL;DR: elections don't matter
I honestly don't care about the pay stuff. The more they get paid, the harder they are to bribe. That's fine.
But the refusal to use ACA it a structural problem. The whole damn point of the USA is that we don't have a ruling class who gets to live by a different set of rules than the peons. It's bad enough piling on law after law faster than anyone can keep up with what's legal, but when it all doesn't work out acceptably, the right answer is to change the law until you find it acceptable. Once the rulers start saying the rules don't apply to them, or their friends and donors (but I repeat myself), with a waiver here and selective enforcement there, all hope is lost.
I'd almost call that feudalism, except in feudalism tradition demanded the noble class provide a lot for the serfs - not a good deal for the serfs, but not entirely one way. We don't have that spirit today, so if we allow a ruling class to form that's above the law that applies to the commoners, it will end badly indeed.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Nothing different at all
You change your pay schedule. By weeks. See if it doesn't fuck with your bills that don't change.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
How, exactly, would the body that needs to reach an agreement to open government, go on furlough until government reopens?
How would that work?
"I honestly don't care about the pay stuff. The more they get paid, the harder they are to bribe. That's fine."
Well, first off I agree with the other poster who said it makes them not care. But I will go further: pay that is too high (and cannot be revoked) makes them also not care what other people make.
The salaries of Senators and Representatives should be tied to the median incomes of everybody in the United States. Note that is the median income, not the mean, because a relatively few, very rich people skew the mean by a long way. (The other common method of averaging, the mode, is ridiculous in this context and need not be considered.)
That will give them an actual incentive to see that the income of everyday Americans stays at a decent level. And it should also be in dollars adjusted for REAL (not the current, bogus, weasel method of calculating inflation that the government currently uses). That would remove much of the incentive to fudge the figures by inflating the dollar... as they now do.
"The whole damn point of the USA is that we don't have a ruling class who gets to live by a different set of rules than the peons."
Agreed. They should be bound by ALL the same laws as other citizens. No special privileges. The latter, yet again, just gives them motive to not care much about everybody else.
"The more they get paid, the harder they are to bribe."
It hasn't worked out that way. All that money and power attracts the worst types of people. Too much is never enough for them.
So, given the choice between disabling the car, boxing her in and arresting her or just shooting her, they shot her. How the fuck is that ok? That's called murder where I come from.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
It's looking more and more like all the shots fired were by the Police...
It is looking even more like:
1) a distraced mother with a baby in the backseat took a wrong turn driving in DC
2) accidentally ran into some low-visibility short-height pole barriers
(see this view on google streetview)
3) was confronted by plain-clothes police brandishing firearms
4) was scared shitless for herself and her baby and took off
5) was chased for a while until she got out of the car
6) was shot dead
To me, this looks like a case of cops who have been militarized to the point of neglecting training on de-escalation. Hyped to believe that terrorists are hiding under every rock, they over-reacted when they should have realized that it was just the far more likely scenario of a regular citizen finding herself in an unfamiliar and threatening situation.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.