park ranger-bureaucrat in Darkest Nevada, telling stories about America's public lands. Volunteer EMT, unrepentant Draymond stan, wildfire PIO, erstwhile racing flack, forever believing in the better angels of our nature. opinions are mine. 🏳️🌈
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That speech is so ahistorical that I can't even begin to dissect it in its wrongness. There's a fucking colossal statue in New York Harbor that says to the world "come here and be free," and that is the America I swore an oath to support and defend.
Fuck these people. They are not America. Their claim to our flag is a lie. This country has been built by people of every ethnicity and nationality who strive each day to fulfill the promise written in our Constitution - to continue the unending struggle to form a more perfect Union. 🇺🇸
think about how rotten your soul has to be, how broken your moral compass, to think drag queen story hour is a sign of social decay but snuff films of war crimes is exemplary, stand out, should be shared far and wide. these people are sick
A significant (mostly dry) lightning-induced wildfire outbreak is now underway in the central/southern Sierra, especially in foothills. Dozens of new lightning ignitions have occurred, with new reports coming in every 5 min. More lightning ongoing/possible later. #CAwx #CAfire
Pitching a story called Arch Deluxe where I compare the debut of the newest Manning to McDonald's worst sandwich ever.
GUAR GUM? YOU CAN'T FUCKING PRONOUNCE "GUAR GUM"? YOU ARE SO STUPID I'M SURPRISED YOU DON'T FORGET TO BREATHE.
"I can't pronounce a simple compound word, therefore that means it's bad and dangerous and unhealthy!" these are the blithering idiots purporting to know what we should and shouldn't eat.
Just roll back all of Trump's tax cuts and lift the Social Security cap. There, I fixed it, you don't have to worry about the deficit anymore.
The "Donald the dove" takes from various anti-interventionists might have aged worse than anything.
Yes. It was established by Obama under OMB. web.archive.org/web/20170121...
USDS was never established in law, though - it was always a purely executive branch creation.
The law is clear, but the president literally doesn't care about the law.
law enforcement of any kind must be transparent and accountable..
Photo tickets work for someone who drives 35 in a school zone. They don't work for someone who drives 100 in a 65. That person needs to go straight to jail and their car should be crushed on the spot.
By abolishing them. Police is one category of public employee that should not be able to collectively bargain working conditions and discipline.
The police, by definition, come into contact with far more non-law-abiding people than the average person.
Yeah, law-abiding people own fewer guns. Meanwhile, it's never been easier for criminals to get their hands on military-grade firearms.
Starmer inviting photographers to see the flag and pitbull he bought to impress the median voter, but oh no, the pitbull has pooed all over the flag and run away, and as Starmer runs to catch it his trousers have fallen down, and hes spilled thick white glue onto his crotch then fallen onto the flag
Absolutely. I think policing should be unified at no lower than the state level.
Yeah, you didn't worry about not being armed because your job wasn't to enforce criminal law.
No, actually, I won't deny my 15 years of lived experience as a uniformed, unarmed federal land management employee.
The reality is that an armed society is not a polite society, it is a fucking dangerous society. The solution to that is to vastly reduce the prevalence of firearms.
I am a national park interpretive ranger - one of those uniformed, unarmed civil servants repeatedly referred to as the solution for many police duties - and I am unequivocally telling you that there are many, many things I will not even think about doing because I do not have a gun and handcuffs.
No exaggeration, probably the best innovation in human history. Can't let failson gravel throat take this away.
The largest remaining tribe by population (Dine, or Navajo), has just 400,000 members.
We also nearly completely genocided them, segregated the rest into Bantustans, and intentionally tried to obliterate their cultures.
This video is fucking brilliant. The direct line from COD: Ghosts to Donald Trump is... uh, pretty chilling.
Because that's perfectly legal here!
It is hard for someone in a country with sane gun laws to understand how insane ours are. I live in a rural county in Nevada and it is not at all uncommon to see people open-carrying semiautomatic pistols.
The mindset is driven by the fact that virtually any criminal one might encounter *likely* has a firearm, because our gun laws are so insanely lax that it is ludicrously easy to acquire semiautomatic weapons capable of penetrating vests. MRAPs are absurd; police having rifles in their cars is not.
Plus center-fire semiautomatic rifles are banned, which makes eminent sense. You have to reckon with the fact that there are no such laws in the U.S. and it is easier to buy an AR-15 in most places than it is marijuana.
In a country where only 300,000 people are legally allowed to own guns, I'm sure that works.
RT to scare Chris Buescher
It's rated terribly *and* the most overrated at the same time.
The problem with that model is that unarmed police only works in a country where firearms are effectively banned. All other European nations arm their beat cops.
I mean, his fate is what I mean - you could literally get hanged for stealing lace. Lots of people got away with it, but if you were unlucky enough to get caught...
By "police work" in my post, I meant the investigation and enforcement of criminal laws. You can't give that to unarmed people in this country, in my opinion.
Insofar as those calls for service should never have involved criminal law in the first place, I agree. The problem is that we've leaped to criminalization.
Do what every day?
What jobs were previously done by unarmed people that are now done by armed police?
They're the park's police force, and they are trained and equipped accordingly. As an interp ranger, I'm empowered to demand compliance with the law, but I am neither trained nor qualified to engage with anyone refusing to comply - that's when I back off and call the people with guns and cuffs.
I am a national park ranger, as it happens. NPS law enforcement rangers are fully qualified federal law enforcement officers and carry sidearms and semi-automatic rifles. They can and do make arrests for all crimes cognizable to law.
correct, it's *a* problem, not the singular problem. But I do think we're going to have a real hard time solving the others until this one gets at least some progress made.
But yes this is why Uvalde was such a scandal and should have led to mass firings - police *are* purportedly the ones trained and equipped to do that, and they refused and sat around like cowards.
Yep, and that didn't used to be the case! Cops used to back gun control laws. Huge cultural problem.
this is what i mean by "our police problem is our gun problem and vice versa"
There are 392 state police highway patrol officers in all of Nevada. My entire county only has one.
Yeah, precisely, I just think the idea that that means "we can get rid of cops" is silly. We aren't going to need fewer traffic cops just because most enforcement is put on cameras. Most cops aren't traffic cops to begin with.
The best time to start LE entryism was ten years ago. The second best time is now.
In the long run the solution is probably computer-enforced speed limits. Which is even more "big brother" but I have to admit the idea has merits.
I think the issue is, what do you do about people actively threatening public safety by their driving? Issuing a camera ticket to someone doing 35 in a 30 is fine, but someone doing 95 in a 45 needs to go to jail.
“Agent of the government empowered to use violence in its name to enforce its laws” is a pretty old invention, actually. This is what I’m talking about, this is just like magical thinking: you need *someone* to maintain and exercise the state’s monopoly on force. It’s literally unavoidable, sorry!
You're drawing neat easy lines which I don't think actually exist.
How do you know a witness is friendly or unfriendly? What if the family member you're interviewing is actually the perpetrator? Remember that the vast majority of violent crime is perpetrated by people who know each other.
One person in one department will interview friendly witnesses, and a completely separate person in a completely separate department will interview unfriendly witnesses?
Not even. Plenty of people got hanged for property crimes in the UK and the US.
Yeah, but who's going to investigate a murder without a gun and handcuffs? What's the difference between that and a cop?
Who is going to stop someone driving under the influence and arrest them, if not "a cop"?
No, go back. We're talking traffic enforcement here. People who violate traffic laws are subject to penalties such as fines, impoundment, and incarceration. They're criminal laws. So who is enforcing those laws if not "cops"?
That's why I am not going to engage in any scene involving criminal activity until police have secured it - I'm an EMT, not a human shield.
Yes, you take that chance when you're a cop, and with that, you receive the ability to respond with lethal force yourself. You don't just sign up to be target practice.
Who is going to enforce criminal law carrying legal consequences including fines and incarceration, and not be "a cop"?
No, they're not going to be the people enforcing traffic laws - because again, nobody in their right mind is going to do traffic stops without a gun and handcuffs.
This is the hair-splitting problem, when again, we're all beating around the bush that the real problem is the insane prevalence of firearms in this country. if we took guns out of the hands of people, we could take guns out of the hands of most cops, too.
So whatever that organization is, would end up working very closely with police all the time. At which point, well, aren't they police?
There's at least a subset of accidents which aren't criminal in nature - the problem is that very quickly that investigation can turn criminal, as in the case of alcohol-related accidents.
Traffic accidents - but we'd need to invent some kind of totally separate traffic accident management and investigatory organization on 24-hour duty.
That's protocol for every single fire and EMS agency in the country. What are we supposed to do at a domestic disturbance without police - get ourselves beat up instead of the victim? That's not how it works.
I am a volunteer EMT and firefighter. I am not going to a report of a criminal action without law enforcement determining that the scene is safe.
Sorry man, but you are out of your mind if you think anyone is showing up to a domestic disturbance in the U.S. without a gun and handcuffs. They're literally the most dangerous type of call you can get.
Which is a problem! Homelessness shouldn't be criminalized. That's the problem, not that people who are showing up to deal with criminal law are armed.
The nature of the interaction of a call for police service is inherently adversarial, because the assertion is that some law has been broken.
Yep. The reality is that my life safety comes first. If nothing else, for the practical reason that if I get hurt, I'm now part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Someone lights an illegal campfire - I can tell them to put it out. If they refuse to comply, what do you suppose I'm supposed to do? Just say "Have a nice day?" No, we back off, call our law enforcement rangers and that person gets a citation issued by someone with a gun and handcuffs.
I wear the badge and uniform of a federal agency to work every day. That is, I am one of those unarmed civil servants. And I'm telling you that there are a great many things I absolutely do not and would not do out of fear for my own personal safety.
I wear the badge and uniform of a federal agency to work every day. That is, I am one of those unarmed civil servants. And I'm telling you that there are a great many things I absolutely do not and would not do out of fear for my own personal safety.
The problem is not the people, it's the fucking guns, and until we recognize that the Second Amendment is an obsolete relic which needs to be written out of the Constitution just as the three-fifths compromise was, we're all just pointlessly tinkering at the edges of the problem.
No, but if I'm called to a report of someone having a mental health crisis, I'm certainly not going to engage with that person until I have police on scene, because the reality is that lots of people with mental health problems have guns here!
It may be common, but it's misdirected. Nobody has ever actually explained who is supposed to do these things, other than "cops but with no guns," and I see no evidence that there are people lining up to take jobs as unarmed cops.
Any of those situations could involve people with firearms and the willingness to use them to avoid consequences for their actions. As a volunteer EMT, we are specifically trained *not* to engage in situations where our safety could be compromised, until police have secured the scene.
That is, what do you think cops are doing now that could be replaced by social workers who aren't just going to call in the cops?
Social workers call in cops all the time.
Yep! I would love to move to a UK-style system where ordinary officers are unarmed - but you can't do that in a nation where you can buy AR-15s more easily than you can buy marijuana.
The problem is that nobody's going to want to do those jobs without the ability to defend themselves from people wielding firearms because you practically have to assume that everyone has a firearm.
This affects every facet of the problem - you aren't going to be able to hire "unarmed" civil servants to do any part of police work because nobody's going to want to do anything related to law enforcement without the ability to use deadly force in self-defense.
A fundamental problem with policing in this country is that we have more guns than people, and thus police end up assuming the worst of every possible scenario because they have to assume that everyone they're interacting with has a firearm and could use it.
Law Enforcement being a culturally chud profession is actually a huge problem in the near (surviving this admin & reasserting rule of law after) & long term (the actual governance problem of enforcing liberal laws) & solutions that aren’t “we should simply not have cops” are in pretty short supply
Foster should be parked for that.
🏁 Stage 9️⃣ | Etapa 9️⃣ 🏆 JONAAAAAAAAAAAS 🏆 #LaVuelta25 #VueltaLIVE
#F1
Free speech is under attack by Republicans right now more than at any other time in my lifetime
when I saw you like my wildland firefighter post, I was like... wait a minute, that name sounds familiar!
Absolutely. I've built a career telling the many stories of America's public lands, and currently serve as the chief interpretive ranger for Great Basin National Park in Nevada.
lol Wazzu fair-caught at the 3? now that's what I call Cougin' it.
Incredible level of starting something you have zero intention of finishing
They’re doing all this to prevent people from MEMORIALIZING A MASS SHOOTING
@loganaimone.bsky.social had to hit the follow button. These still have a place of pride at home, next to the Twitch streamer tchotchkes and CC40 box set.
