Doublethink: From George Orwell’s 1984, “is the act of holding, simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely.”

From The New York Times:

Deputy Who Stayed Outside During Parkland School Shooting Faces Criminal Charges

As bullets ricocheted and bodies fell in the hallways and classrooms at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last year, Deputy Scot Peterson was outside the building. Instead of storming in after the 19-year-old gunman, he retreated to a position of safety.

For more than a year after the February 2018 attack in Parkland, Fla., grieving parents have demanded that Mr. Peterson — along with the gunman who killed 17 and injured 17 — be held accountable in what would prove to be one of the nation’s worst school shootings. On Tuesday, law enforcement responded with a sweeping list of charges that resulted in Mr. Peterson’s arrest. His alleged crime: failing to protect the students.

So far, all the same coverage of the chicken shot Scot Peterson’s failures to act on that fateful day.

America’s long history of mass shootings have brought a variety of responses: Calls for tighter gun laws, civil lawsuits against companies that manufacture guns and firearm components, collective mourning. But Tuesday’s charges represented a highly unusual case of a lawman arrested for failing to save lives.

Around Parkland, whose politically engaged students helped launch a national student movement for more gun control, there was both surprise and satisfaction.

The 15-month investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement that led to the charges, found that the former Broward County sheriff’s deputy, assigned as a school resource officer to Stoneman Douglas High, “did absolutely nothing to mitigate” the shooting, the department’s commissioner, Rick Swearingen, said in a statement. “There can be no excuse for his complete inaction and no question that his inaction cost lives,” he said.

Keep that bolded part in your mind.

The Department of Law Enforcement said its inquiry showed that Mr. Peterson did not investigate the source of the gunshots, retreated during the shooting while victims were still under attack and directed other law enforcement officers to remain 500 feet away from the building.

The warrant portrayed Mr. Peterson, the only armed guard on campus, as an officer with a wealth of active shooter training who knew the gunman was inside, but did not go in to try to stop him as he killed and injured students and staff. It details a series of students and faculty who remembered seeing Mr. Peterson outside

The Broward State Attorney really wants to hammer home just how much of a gutless, chicken shit coward Peterson is, and how his chicken shit nature lead to so much needless death.

Jeff Bell, the president of the Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association, expressed concern about the decision to charge Mr. Peterson, who was not a member of his organization. He argued that prosecutors had adopted a sweeping interpretation of the state’s negligence law that could put other officers at risk of charges in the future.

“I am worried that state attorneys and political officers can start to weaponize criminal charges against law enforcement if you don’t meet their threshold for what you do or should not do,” said Mr. Bell, who said he and others were still disappointed by Mr. Peterson’s response to the shooting.

And maybe that is not such a bad idea.  Remember in the Joe Lozito case, Maksim Gelman was spotted on a subway train by two NYPD officers who hid in the conductor’s cab until Gelman was tackled by Lozito after Gelman stabbed Lozito several times.  The police, armed with guns, stood on the other side of a locked door and watched Lozito get stabbed by a man there was an active manhunt for and they did nothing.

Maybe, just maybe, there should be a standard for minimal law enforcement response.

I’m a PE, a licensed professional engineer.  If I look at a drawing and see an error that is dangerous and say “fuck it, I’m not going to fix it” and people are hurt, I get to go to jail.   I volunteered for that responsibility.

Maybe part of becoming a police officer is taking the responsibility of responding to a dangerous situation and being held liable if you fail to do so.

That principle exists in military law, it is Dereliction of Duty.  That could at least be a starting point for a minimum standard for police.  But this is not something for the courts to figure out, this is something for the state legislature to codify.

Here is where this story gets interesting.

*Trigger warning: if you are prone to heart attack or stroke, take a blood thinner before reading further.

Daniel Bishop, 17, who was a sophomore when the Parkland shooting took place and was one of dozens of students who traveled to the State Capitol afterward to demand changes to state gun laws, said he was surprised by the news of the former deputy’s arrest.

“It wasn’t his fault,” said Mr. Bishop, who will be a senior in the fall. “Who am I to place blame on anyone besides the one person who should be held accountable?”

What.  The.  Actual.  Fuck.  Is.  That.  Shit!?!

Bishop was one of the student activists that motivated the Florida State Legislature to collectively punish law abiding citizens with a rash of new gun laws.

He was part of the group that called the NRA and law-abiding gun owners murderers with blood on their hands.

He held people who did absolutely nothing in or around Parkland morally culpable for the shooting because of their political views and hobbies.

BUT

The actual School Resource Officer whose job it was to protect those kids, and failed to do that by hiding behind a tree like a chicken shit, according to this kid, he (the chicken shit Scot Peterson) is not culpable.

Whoever the fuck taught this kids logic and ethics failed.  Flat fucking failed.

This is what politics as moral preening has wrought.

According to the activist, millions of NRA members who have never hurt anyone are more guilty for the deaths of 17 kids at a school shooting than the one armed man there tasked with preventing exactly that kind of situation who decided not to act instead.

This should be, for any rational person, the final nail in the coffin for any moral authority the Parkland kids might have had.

The doublethink here would make Big Brother proud.

“The only kind made by white labor”

This particular ad appeared in the Arizona Weekly Citizen on July 16, 1892.  It also appeared in Idaho, New Mexico, Montana and Utah in the same year.

I jumped one year back and found this version in the Tombstone Epitaph. Yes, that Tombstone.

I took a quick peek at 1890 and I found the ad again, so this is not a one time thing. I could not find ads for Levy’s in any other newspapers of the era that are recorded with the Library of Congress, but I only looked at three years.

The things you find when you dig through history.

I guess you can see the Ammo.com banner on the right. If you need ammo, click on the banner and it will take you to their site, get a rebate on your first purchase, plus I get credit so I can get me some ammo.

Seriously, I feel I am short on 5.56 and I could use about three hundred 9mm Hornady Critical Defense.

Probably more school boards will open themselves to allow volunteer teachers to be armed. And that is because no police officer will dare to take the job of SRO if suddenly the state makes him responsible for the life of every kid in a school. And I think the same will apply to armed security. If people think school violence is bad now, wait till there is nobody to put the foot down in case of emergency.

Sincerely, other than bankrupting Peterson into oblivion I do not see why this case would be brought to trial.

From NBC News:

Former Parkland security officer Scot Peterson charged with neglect for not entering school
Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Rick Swearingen said in a news release that Peterson’s inaction cost people their lives.

A former Parkland, Florida, school safety officer who failed to confront the gunman when 17 people were fatally shot at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last year, was arrested Tuesday on multiple charges, including child neglect and perjury.

Scot Peterson, who worked as a security guard at the school, was charged with seven counts of neglect of a child and three counts of culpable negligence and one count of perjury, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said.

The charges carry a maximum potential sentence of 96 and a half years in state prison, the Broward State Attorney’s Office said.

That sounds great, except I don’t see how any of those charges are going to stick.

He was taken into custody in Broward County after a 15-month investigation that showed he “refused to investigate the source of the gunshots, retreated during the active shooting while victims were being shot and directed other law enforcement who arrived on scene to remain 500 feet away from the building,” the state law enforcement department said.

Department Commissioner Rick Swearingen said in a news release that Peterson “did absolutely nothing” to stop the shooting, and that cost people their lives.

“There can be no excuse for his complete inaction and no question that his inaction cost lives,” Swearingen said.

I agree, there is no excuse for the chicken shit Scot Peterson to have hidden behind a tree with piss running down his leg, but he did it and kids died.

The State Attorney’s Office said the law enforcement department interviewed more than 180 witnesses as well as reviewed video surveillance during the investigation.

“All the facts related to Mr. Peterson’s failure to act during the MSD massacre clearly warranted both termination of employment and criminal charges. It’s never too late for accountability and justice,” Broward County Sheriff Gregory Tony added.

Yeah, but…

Jeff Bell, president of the Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association, told NBC News on Tuesday that the union has concerns with the child neglect charges due to the caveat that someone must be a caretaker.

“Does that mean now that any time an officer is assigned a detail that involves children around the country, are they now caretakers?” Bell asked. “I worry about future officers, not just Scot Peterson, being charged by overzealous prosecutors with child neglect when we’re not caretakers.”

And there it is.

Unless Warren v. District of Columbia and Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales were overturned while I was taking a nap, the case against the chicken shit Scot Peterson might very well be dropped.

Warren v. DC said that police do not have a specific duty to protect citizens based on the public duty doctrine.

It seems like the Broward State attorney is making the claim that as a School Resource Officer, he did have a specific duty to the children.

The Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association clearly does not want that responsibility.

So unless everybody is ready to fight this all the way up to the Supreme Court and try to overturn Castle Rock and maybe even DeShaney v. Winnebago County, the case against the chicken shit Scot Peterson is going to be dismissed on the first day of trial, if it even gets that far.

Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime died in the Parkland shooting, told Peterson to “rot in hell” on Twitter Tuesday.

“You could have saved some of the 17.,” Guttenberg said. “You could have saved my daughter. You did not and then you lied about it and you deserve the misery coming your way.”

This may be the only thing I agree with Fred Guttenberg on.

The brother of Meadow Pollack, another student who died in the attack, said on Twitter that he hoped Peterson spends “the rest of his life in prison.”

He probably won’t.

“He cowered in Parkland while my sister died defenseless and lied about his failure to confront the shooter,” Hunter Pollack said.

When that turd dies, I will take up a collection to have a new headstone put on his grave that says:

“Here is the final hiding place of the dickless, feckless, gutless, chicken shit coward, Scot Peterson. ”

It is not a prison sentence, but it will have to do.

I saw in Twitter somebody complaining she ha gotten FB Jailed because she posted a meme being critical of the somalian redneck Representative. I decided to test and bingo! I got a three day suspension.

People in Twitter will see this post and the ones for the next three days. If somebody is bored and wants to do me a solid, just copy/paste any posts over the GFZ Facebook page just to make them squee.

And people said blogs were dead… not quite. We are pretty much the last refuge of free speech.

Faithful readers will remember my post from Friday about how TDS caused the writer of the excellent HBO show Chernobyl to equate Trump with the Soviet Union.

The Washington Post decided to weigh in on that Twitter thread as well.

How would the Trump administration handle a Chernobyl-scale disaster?

This requires quite a stretch of the imagination.

First of all, a Chernobyl-scale disaster is not really likely in the United States.

One thing you really have to understand about the Soviet Union is just the casual disregard that Communist governments have for human life.

The first battle scene from Enemy at the Gates is historically accurate.  Russian conscripts with no training and no weapons were sent to charge the German lines.  If they tried to retreat or even take cover, their own Soviet officers would shoot them in the back.

I remember having a US Army armor officer explain the difference between the M1 Abrams and the Soviet T-72 in design philosophy.  American tanks are designed to protect the crew.  The rest of the tank can be sacrificed to save the crew.  Areas of armor are weakened so that in case of an explosion, the magazine or turbine blows out to spare the crew.  The T-72 is designed to save the tank.  The crew is expendable.  They want the main weapon and power plant of the tank to survive,  and a new crew to be dropped into the tank.

Totally different ways of looking at people.

Then again, the Soviet Union starved 20 million to death to collectivize the farms.

Our nuclear power plants are designed with much higher levels of safety than Soviet designs because of deep philosophical differences between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Now, back to WaPo.  The author covers the same Twitter conversation I did.

And now you are all caught up, and probably feel dumber for having read this far. Let’s try to referee this debate.

Bongino’s “It Can’t Happen Here Because of Capitalism” claim is a comforting ideological line to take. It is also ridiculous to assert the very same week that this New York Times story by Jack Nicas, Natalie Kitroeff, David Gelles and James Glanz ran:

The fatal flaws with Boeing’s 737 Max can be traced to a breakdown late in the plane’s development, when test pilots, engineers and regulators were left in the dark about a fundamental overhaul to an automated system that would ultimately play a role in two crashes.

A year before the plane was finished, Boeing made the system more aggressive and riskier. While the original version relied on data from at least two types of sensors, the final version used just one, leaving the system without a critical safeguard. In both doomed flights, pilots struggled as a single damaged sensor sent the planes into irrecoverable nose-dives within minutes, killing 346 people and prompting regulators around the world to ground the Max.

But many people involved in building, testing and approving the system, known as MCAS, said they hadn’t fully understood the changes. Current and former employees at Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration who spoke with The New York Times said they had assumed the system relied on more sensors and would rarely, if ever, activate. Based on those misguided assumptions, many made critical decisions, affecting design, certification and training.

While prosecutors and lawmakers try to piece together what went wrong, the current and former employees point to the single, fateful decision to change the system, which led to a series of design mistakes and regulatory oversights. As Boeing rushed to get the plane done, many of the employees say, they didn’t recognize the importance of the decision. They described a compartmentalized approach, each of them focusing on a small part of the plane. The process left them without a complete view of a critical and ultimately dangerous system.

The company also played down the scope of the system to regulators. Boeing never disclosed the revamp of MCAS to Federal Aviation Administration officials involved in determining pilot training needs, according to three agency officials. When Boeing asked to remove the description of the system from the pilot’s manual, the F.A.A. agreed. As a result, most Max pilots did not know about the software until after the first crash, in October.

Boeing is viewed as one of America’s premier corporations, an actor that has a very strong incentive to preserve its brand image. The fact that this screw-up happened suggests that unregulated capitalism is hardly immune to complex catastrophes.

First of all, I would never say the US has “unregulated capitalism” especially in an industry as heavily regulated as the aviation industry.  It has its own Federal agency, the FAA.

Second, mistakes happen.  There is a whole series of Modern Marvels on the History Channel about Engineering Disasters.  Almost always, part of the disaster is a blind spot where nobody things that some feature will go wrong until it does.  Like the split rod of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency walkway collapse.  Part of becoming an engineer and the burden of becoming a PE is learning the process to catch and correct the mistakes so they do not endanger the public.

The difference between Boeing and Chernobyl is that the FAA didn’t know about this flaw for years and classify it as a state secret, then cover up 737 Max crashes, then tell people that the crashes were caused by other factors, then have a show trial and execute some Boeing middle manager that was high enough to have responsibilities but low enough not to be within arm’s length of the President.

That type of action takes a tyrannical socialist state.

I would posit that the key driver mitigating against a Chernobyl-type disaster in the United States in the Age of Trump is the existence of the free press. The president follows the news as closely as any human being. If reports of a nuclear disaster or a similar event emerged, Trump would recognize the need to appear to take action. He would also react if the media highlighted that his claims of taking action were bogus.

This is absolutely true.

This also leads to the question: How would the Obama administration handle a Chernobyl-scale disaster?

If a free press is critical to the proper handling of a disaster and the free press is busy kissing Obama’s ass, how would that benefit the American people?

None of this is a guarantee of a competent federal response to a disaster. The Trump administration whiffed badly in its response to Puerto Rico, but the president has refused to acknowledge that fact. So it is possible that if the administration messes up its initial response, Trump’s refusal to acknowledge error could exacerbate a deteriorating situation.

What the WaPo leaves out here is the death and suffering that was a direct result of the corruption of the Left Wing Puerto Rican government.  The refusal to acknowledge how the mayor of San Juan put actual effort into curbing the rescue to win resistance points, or that the San Juan police were caught selling emergency food, or that millions of water bottles were stored on a runway under a tarp is journalistic malfeasance.

Still, I have marginally greater faith in the federal government under Trump than the Soviet government of the mid-1980s. Which is the nicest thing I have said about the current administration in quite some time.

That’s quite magnanimous of the Washington Post.

I mean it totally ignores that the United States does not have a KGB to arrest and imprison scientists for telling the truth about said disaster.

The FAA isn’t going around disappearing aerospace engineers doing failure analysis or suggesting that the fleet be grounded and checked.

That is the blind spot that Mazin and WaPo have.  They cannot fathom the omnipresent oppressive police state that was the Soviet Union.

One thing you learn about old Russians is that they do not engage in idle chit-chat.  Idle chit-chat is something easily overheard and could reveal a lack of faith in the Soviet system.  Even a minor complaint about not having shoes that fit could cause the KGB to knock on your door.

A nation was stifled into silence.

The response to Chernobyl wasn’t the result of simple incompetence.  There were very knowledgeable scientists and engineers in the Soviet Union.

It was the result of the omnipresent oppressive police state putting more effort into saving face than saving people and trying to control the narrative at every turn.

I have talked about Hanlon’s Razor before.

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

When it comes to the Socialists, WaPo (and the Left) reverses it.  They attribute to stupidity what is explained by malice.

It’s nice that the Washington Post thinks that Trump would respond slightly better than the Soviet Union of the 1980’s.

It’s ridiculously stupid that the Washington Post thinks that the Soviet’s response is the result of simple bureaucratic incompetence and not the callous disregard for human life and total focus on state power that is the hallmark of the Soviet Union.

What the Washington Post needs to ask isn’t:

Would the response to the natural disaster be better, Trump or Gorbachev?

It is:

Would the response to the natural disaster be better in a liberal Democracy like the United States or in a totalitarian nation that had deliberately starved 20 million of its own people to death and shot or worked to death another 10 million in gulags and political prisons to consolidate its own power?

To a rational person, the answer is evident.