My sentiments exactly. Prisons are broken in America. Guards are overworked and under-supervised. Stuff like this probably happens all the time, but when it happens to someone famous who conspiracy theorists believed (without evidence) was just about to identify Clinton or Trump as a serial sex abuser of teens, all…

If you think it was “a few years ago” that they introduced docx, I hate to be the one to have to tell you, but you’re getting old and it’s affecting your perception of time (it unfortunately happens to all of us eventually). It’s actually an open source format (which is a good thing) that was introduced in Office way…

I honestly don’t think any of the points you raise are serious concerns. If there are groups of BLM, antifa, et cetera that meet the current definition of domestic terrorism, then they should be dealt with accordingly. Just convene a panel of experts to investigate the terrorist threats from extremist organizations…

Illegal entry into the United States is a wobbler. It can be charged as a civil offense, misdemeanor, or felony depending on the circumstances. I would imagine that Border agents are trained to use riot control methods to prevent large groups of people who they cannot deal with individually from entering the US or in…

It could be, although I doubt that Mexico is going to declare war on us over it anymore than we declared war on them when their forces crossed into our territory and detained a group of National Guardsmen at gunpoint.

At the end of the day, nobody has presented any evidence that there was any malice and nobody has presented any evidence that the series of events that occurred were so unlikely that a reasonable person should not believe that they occured.

It does not seem very implausible to me that Epstein met the clinical criteria to not be a threat to himself and was taken off suicide watch. I’m not sure that a psychiatrist really cares about who Epstein is. He just cares whether he meets the clinical criteria for being an immediate threat to himself. Is it actually…

What evidence are you using to conclude that the level of incompetence was “implausible”? Have you actually analyzed a significant number of jailhouse suicides and determined that the factors that contributed to Epstein’s suicide lie far outside the confidence interval of jailhouse suicides as a whole?

History has shown that humans are really good at making mistakes and really bad at secretly engaging in large-scale conspiracies without anyone discovering them. 

That sounds like the same sort of motivated reasoning that people use to claim that we did not land on the moon, that GMO’s are unhealthful, that big Pharma is hiding the cure for cancer, or that vaccines cause Autism. 

For Occam’s razor to even apply to the situation, the hypotheses would have to both be backed by equal amounts of evidence. But they are not. If Epstein committed suicide, then the evidence is quite clear who the killer is. If Epstein did not commit suicide, then who is the killer? If Epstein committed suicide, then…

The conspiracy theories surrounding incidents like these always offers great insight into the cognitive defects in the average American’s  critical thinking skills. We do a terrible job of teaching this in school. 

That’s part of it. Another even bigger part is what you might call Orange County Republicans who live around a lot of the urban areas, mostly white, middle class people who are well educated and work in larger, multi-ethnic metropolitan areas with a lot of immigrants. They tend to vote Republican but a lot of them…

I would imagine that any statute that defines or outlaws domestic terrorist groups similar to international terrorism would run into serious first amendment challenges.

Prison unions are powerful. A guard “forgot” to take his shoelaces? That’s going to be a note in his file and a stern lecture from the warden.

I’m dubious that he would have taken anyone down with him. I mean, even if he could have testified against other people, what was the prosecutor going to do, make a sweetheart plea bargain deal with him and give him immunity for his testimony? That wouldn’t have been too popular. 

Apparently it does in Manhattan. He already apparently tried once. The guards were likely negligent, perhaps even deliberately so.

It does seem like it would be a net benefit to society. 

It’s not that “fixing it is hard”. It is that you are advocating a solution with an incredibly low chance of happening. Your position is similar to advocating preventing Trump’s reelection by trying to arrange  for him to golf more in the hope that he will be struck by lightning.

I mean, you could amend the second and tenth amendments just like you could win the lottery, as in, they are things that are not strictly disallowed by physics. But your odds of getting 2/3rds of each house to pass such an amendment and 38 separate state governments to ratify such an amendment in the foreseeable…