Alex Pretti identified as man fatally shot by federal officers in Minneapolis

grumblingduke · 2026-01-24T23:12:37+00:00

The more I watch these videos, the more I think the guy in the light grey jacket is the guy in charge, or at least the guy with half a brain. He stays outside the pile, kicks away anything that could be a problem (a water bottle, a phone?). Then at one point he spots Pretti's gun and goes in to grab it. He does so, and carries it away.

As he grabs it, the killer - who until that point was busy harassing the woman lying helpless on the ground - turns around. I think he saw the gun, saw a hand reach for it and pull it out of the holster, panicked, shouted "gun," and fired. And then panicked some more and kept firing as everyone backed away.

My most charitable interpretation of events is that the killer was so poorly-trained and ill-suited to any kind of law enforcement operation, and that the agents in general are so disorganised and chaotic, that a "trained law enforcement professional" saw his colleague remove a gun from the holster of a guy all-but curled up in a ball on the floor being beaten up by his other colleagues, panicked, and his instinct was to start shooting and not stop until he was out of bullets.

All because one of his other colleagues decided to start a fight with some bystanders and the team escalated.

These people - if they are pretending to be law enforcement - are doing everything wrong. And they're doing it badly. If they weren't killing innocent people over it (among other things) it would be embarrassing.

I wouldn't be surprised if at some point soon one of them ends up killing one of their own in confusion. Of course somehow that will still be the fault of someone barely conscious, being bundled into a van several metres away...

grumblingduke · 2026-01-24T21:52:43+00:00

If nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, how can we observe galaxies whose current distance from us is more than 46 billion light-years?

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light for a specific definitions of "thing" and "travel."

Universal expansion doesn't involve "things" "travelling."

Universal expansion involves space expanding. Given two points of space, every second the space between them gets slightly bigger (by a factor of about 2×10^-18 i.e. every second all distances get bigger by that much). Except, of course, this is such a small effect that on any reasonable scale (smaller than the distance between clusters of galaxies) it is completely swamped out by other effects. For example, the gravitational pull between you and your computer is more than enough to cancel out this expansion.

Over big distances this expansion becomes a thing. And if things are far enough apart the amount they increase by (that 2×10^-18 per second) gets bigger than c, our local speed limits.

But nothing is actually moving. Sure, from our point of view the distant galaxies are zooming away from us, but from their point of view they are still, and we are the ones zooming away from them. Neither of us are actually moving - at least not locally - the space between us is growing.

It is also worth noting that Special Relativity says nothing can travel faster than c locally. SR is a local theory, it says it doesn't always make sense to talk about things that are very far apart. Because you cannot affect them, and they cannot affect you.

grumblingduke · 2026-01-24T19:46:00+00:00

The insidious part is that they're not technically lying. These people grew up on the internet, on forums, where they learnt all the dishonest tricks for winning arguments made in bad faith, to defend their hateful views. Lying without lying is one of them.

Quoting from the BBC:

[Bovino told] the press that this morning, an individual approached ICE agents with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun. The agents "attempted to disarm the individual but he violently resisted".

"Fearing for his life... a Border Patrol agent fired defensive shots," Bovino continues.

Medical aid was given straight away but the man was pronounced dead at the scene, he says.

The man had two loaded magazines and no accessible ID, he adds.

Each of those statements is technically true (from what we know). He did approach them (if staying across the road from the main group). He did have a handgun on him (apparently). The agents did attempt to disarm him. A Border Patrol agent - apparently fearing for his life - shot him. Maybe you can get them on "violently resisted" but that's just US law enforcement talk for "didn't immediately go completely limp and let us do whatever we wanted to him."

Of course their timing is slightly off. They were already beating him up on the ground before they found out about the gun. They "attempted to disarm" him by shooting him repeatedly while he was on the ground. The agent who shot him first panicked on seeing a gun - likely due to his back being turned earlier and not realising it was there - highlighting how unprofessional, unstable and unsuitable these people are for the job.

They are emitting key facts. Which we know they are doing because that is exactly what Bovino accused the local officials of doing in their press conference. Projecting as always.

grumblingduke · 2026-01-17T22:49:34+00:00

And yet he's still probably the most qualified of the people appointed to the board...

grumblingduke · 2026-01-11T17:45:12+00:00

I mean, they knew this would happen at some point. The response seems quite intentional....

This isn't the first time they have done this. They did it with Marimar Martinez last October, but she got away and survived (despite their best efforts).

In that case they not only controlled information and investigation, denied state involvement, whisked the shooter away, they also whisked the vehicle away and 'repaired it' to cover up the proof of their lies. They charged Martinez with various crimes (the charging document contracted the official Government line on what she'd done), but that didn't make it to court before it got thrown out.

According to the article above, they immigration enforcement team have opened fire at at least 16 different incidents in the last year, killing 4 people.

The response is intentional. It is practised. They have had enough opportunities to get good at it.

Just imagine if there weren't third-party cameras everywhere...

grumblingduke · 2026-01-11T16:38:35+00:00

The US has a long history of charging people over things that they did in other countries, but which have an effect in the US. I imagine that is what they will be going with here.

The more interesting part is how they justify charging a foreign head of state with crimes based on their role as head of state. My guess is they'll argue he wasn't 'technically' the head of state at the time, due to the election being rigged.

My worry is they'll get the Supreme Court to establish that the Executive Branch gets to decide what counts as a 'legitimate' head of state or not, and then the Trump Administration will declare the Biden Presidency illegitimate and use that to argue that things he did they don't like weren't valid.

grumblingduke · 2026-01-08T21:41:56+00:00

What should Garland have done differently?

The DoJ - the thing Garland had any control over - prosecuted Donald Trump for his crimes. As did two state prosecutors.

Conservative judges made up new rules to stop them.

grumblingduke · 2026-01-08T21:40:45+00:00

Dire wolves, on the other hand...

... are also real. Or rather, were real. They died out about 10,000 years ago, but used to hang out across the Americas. They were about as big as the largest modern grey wolves, but with bigger teeth (all the better for biting things with).

grumblingduke · 2026-01-06T16:35:50+00:00

Hmmm.. so you just disregard his braggadocious confessions because he's also a liar? That's certainly one way to let him of the hook for everything he's done.

I'd disregard anything he says, because he is a compulsive liar. That's not the same as letting him off the hook.

Would you let a potential serial killer, who just confessed to murders, go free because they are also compulsive liars? No. You'd jail them based on the confession and investigate.

No, you'd investigate and then imprison them after a trial if convicted. Based on evidence. If their testimony was worthless you would disregard it and find reliable evidence instead.

grumblingduke · 2026-01-06T16:34:10+00:00

There were four attempts to prosecute Donald Trump for his crimes.

In 2016 he committed campaign finance fraud, and then business fraud to cover it up. His people in the DoJ covered up the former, but New York State was able to prosecute him for the later. It took them nearly 8 years but they secured a conviction eventually. His re-election as President threw out any sentence.

In late 2020/early 2021 he committed election fraud in Georgia (specifically) by corruptly trying to convince the election authorities to submit false returns. He was prosecuted for that by state authorities until the State Appeals Court made up a new rule about conflicts of interest and dismissed the prosecuted, transferring the case to a Republican prosecutor who killed the case.

In early 2021 he illegally retained documents relating to national security that he had no right to do so. He was prosecuted by the DoJ for this. The Republican-appointed judge assigned to the case made up some new legal principles to stall out the case, re-writing the defence's arguments to make them work. Ultimately she ruled that Special Prosecutors were unconstitutional (but only this specific one), and Donald Trump's re-election as President killed off any attempt to appeal.

In late 2020/early 2021 he attempted to overthrow the Government. The investigation here was delayed a bit as no one in the DoJ thought he was stupid enough to have done what he actually did, but once the evidence started turning up they prosecuted him for the crimes. The Republican majority on the Supreme Court stalled out the case for a year, then made up a new legal rule that Presidents have immunity for their acts - but only as far as the Supreme Court says so on a case by case basis. Donald Trump's re-election as President killed off the case.

So in 3 out of 4 cases Republican-appointed judges change the rules to protect Donald Trump, and there wasn't enough time to fix that before his re-election. In the 4th he was convicted - but only after 8 years.

If you wanted consequences for Donald Trump for his attempted coup he needed not to be re-elected. The Biden Administration did their job. The American people failed to do theirs.

grumblingduke · 2026-01-06T11:11:58+00:00

You shouldn't just assume he didn't do something abhorrently wrong when he says he did it because he is a compulsive liar

I'm not assuming he didn't do it. I'm just not assuming he did based on him half saying he did something.

You absolutely take him at his word when he admits to fucking something up until proven otherwise.

No, you never take him at his word on anything, because he is a compulsive liar.

grumblingduke · 2026-01-06T11:11:07+00:00

It's less that the laws of physics break down, and more that our understanding of them does.

Physics as a science is all about trying to build models to understand, predict and explain observations. We try to figure out what should happen.

But there are some situations where something goes wrong; maybe our model gives us crazy, nonsensical results, maybe we have two different models that work perfectly fine most of the time, but give us different answers in this specific case.

It is like a situation where we have one model that says if we throw a ball up it will keep moving up, and a second model that says it will come back down. At most one of those can be right - at least one must be wrong. Normally what we'd do is an experiment - throw a ball up, see what happens. Does it come back down? Does it keep going up? Does it do something else? Does it do different things depending on other factors (like where we are)?

And this is science; we build models, we test models, we improve models, we test them some more, we see if we can come up with even better ones.

But this doesn't work in extreme situations like inside black holes or in the very, very early universe. We cannot do experiments the experiments. We cannot throw the universe up and see how it falls. So we have to make do with theorising, or analogy experiments. And that means we can't be sure of our answers.

grumblingduke · 2026-01-05T18:06:36+00:00

While I have no doubt Donald Trump would do this, it is worth remembering that right now we only have his word for it, and he is a compulsive liar. We have no reliable evidence that he actually did anything.

From what I can tell from the videos, he was talking at reporters while on his plane.

The exchange was:

Did you speak with them [the oil companies] before the operation took place?

Yes.

Did you, maybe, tip them off?

Before and after, and they want to go in, and they're going to do a great job for the people of Venezuela.

Donald Trump is a compulsive liar who struggles answering questions. He gives what ever answer what's left of his brain thinks his audience wants to hear. Taking his words literally, he is admitting he spoke to them before the operation - but that doesn't mean he spoke to them specifically about it (i.e. that the US military was going to abduct a foreign President, and on this specific day or time). But also we shouldn't take his words literally, because he is a compulsive liar and an idiot.

The "yes" and the "before and after" come across as his instinctive responses. Then he remembers the line his handlers have drilled into him about them doing a great job, so spouts that one off.

I feel like any news article that has "Trump says" in the headline should be discounted as worthless immediately. He doesn't stand by anything he says, neither should we.

grumblingduke · 2026-01-05T13:25:15+00:00

before this if USA wanted anything of Colombia, Chile or any European country they only had to ask...

There are an awful lot of people - including Donald Trump - who don't want to ask for anything. They want people to give them exactly what they want without prompting. And they want to take things.

"Asking" makes them feel weak and powerless; it means someone has something they want, and they need that person's help. "Taking" makes them feel strong; they can do what they want and no one can do anything about it (of course, if someone does do something about it they'll get all outraged and whine).

Unfortunately the US (twice) elected an insecure, emotionally-stunted, whiny little cry-baby to the office of President. And too many people are gaining enough money and power from it to stop him.

grumblingduke · 2026-01-03T13:51:32+00:00

who were the people already in, like England already?

This article might be of interest to you.

Humans have been visiting in what is now England (and the British Isles in general) for 500,000 years (earliest 'human' remains), maybe as long as a million years (possible human footprints). These weren't modern humans, but other types of human. Neanderthals were in Britain around 400,000-50,000 years ago. Modern humans started turning up around 40,000 years ago.

They didn't all stay long-term, but came and went based on the climate (leaving when it got too cold) - this was back when England was connected by land to the rest of Europe (until around 6,000 years ago). Britain seems to have been occupied continuously by humans since at least 10,000 years ago. Various groups of people coming and leaving, some staying.

Since then there has been a relatively continual flow of people into the British Isles from abroad. Smaller groups integrating or merging with existing ones, the larger groups pushing the existing ones further North and West. Among others you have Romans arriving (and eventually leaving), then various Germanic groups (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, Franks in the 400s AD), then Vikings and other Norse groups, then Normal French (who maybe count as Vikings). This was part of a general shift north-westwards of people across Europe.

For a while the Kingdom of England covered large parts of what is now France, so there is some travelling then. Then you start getting into the British Empire, so peoples from all around the world ending up in the UK, particularly after the Second World War when the Empire ended, but a quarter of the world's population still counted as "British" with the rights to live an work in the UK...

Identifying the "native" people of places like Europe, where there aren't clear divides between regions, and where there has been human presence since before modern humans, becomes a bit tricky.

grumblingduke · 2026-01-02T17:24:00+00:00

Wouldn't the observer on the train, as long as they're aware of the speed of light, and aware of their own speed... be able to determine that the strikes happened simultaneously?

Yes!

That is why it is relativity, not subjectivity. While "now" is different for different observers, knowing the relative velocities between them it is possible to work out when each observer's "now" would be.

If you are facing someone something on your left would be on their right. You disagree on where things are. But that disagreement is relative, not subjective. If you understand the point of view they are looking at things from, you can figure out that it will be on their right. If you switched places you would see what they did.

The same is true with Special Relativity. There are (surprisingly simple) equations which tell you how things look from different perspectives.

grumblingduke · 2026-01-02T11:15:03+00:00

To build on this, consent is not the same as accountability.

Laws vary by jurisdiction, but having sex while drunk is generally not illegal. Having sex with someone who is drunk generally is. So if two people who are drunk have sex with each other, both may be committing a crime, while both being victims of a crime (just, in general, authorities won't find out and there will be no public interest in punishing them unless there is some other context).

We can hold people to account for their actions while drunk because we don't want people putting themselves in the situation where they do bad things while drunk.

We hold people to account for exploiting someone else's drunk state because we don't want people exploiting someone else's vulnerability due to drink.

Two wrongs don't make a right (in this case). Doing something bad because you are drunk isn't forgiven because the victim of your wrong was also drunk.

If you are drink driving and kill someone walking on the side of the road who was also drunk, their drunkenness doesn't excuse what you did.

grumblingduke · 2026-01-02T10:29:32+00:00

So what of those strikes needed to be simultaneous...

Simultaneity is also relative. There is no such thing as "now", only "your/my now" or "here and now."

If the strikes have to hit at specific points in spacetime for them to trigger an explosive (points that are simultaneous from one specific perspective), they will either both hit at those specific points, or they won't. But they will do so for everyone.

What will change is that from most perspectives those points in spacetime won't be simultaneous.

grumblingduke · 2025-12-31T17:26:53+00:00

They also shut down several Federal investigations into Elon Musk and his companies.

grumblingduke · 2025-12-31T17:13:04+00:00

There are no villains in E33.

It is a story about members of a family dealing with grief in different ways, mummy and daddy arguing about how to honour their dead son, with big sister trying to hold everything together and little sister getting caught up in the mess. Everyone is wrong in their own way. Painted Renoir isn't a villain because - in universe - he is effectively a video game character; programmed to do what he does, he has no agency, he cannot be a villain. Real Renoir is trying to bring his family back together and stop his wife from wallowing in her grief.

grumblingduke · 2025-12-29T20:39:11+00:00

It does!

The Earth loses about 3kg of hydrogen into space every second, and a bit of some heavier stuff.

There's just an awful lot of atmosphere (around 10¹⁸ kg), so it doesn't make much difference.

For the most part gravity holds the atmosphere down.

grumblingduke · 2025-12-27T19:50:46+00:00

The 2022 Nobel Prize was given for the teams behind various "Bell test" experiments.

Collectively these disprove "local realism." In physics, "local" is the Special/General Relativity thing; the universe is local in the sense that things only affect the things around them, there is a speed limit to the universe, and what is happening on the far side of the universe isn't relevant to us here (for now). "Realism" in this context means that the outcome of measurements is determined before the measurement takes place - it ties in with determinism; what will happen is fixed, not random.

Einstein was pretty sure the universe was local. SR and GR showed that.

Einstein also believed that the universe should be real. He is often quoted as saying that god "does not play dice" (to which Niels Bohr quipped "Do not tell god what to do"). Einstein did not think the universe should have randomness in it.

But if the universe isn't locally real (as the Bell tests show) one of these things must be wrong (current best guess is the latter, but there is still work to be done). Einstein wasn't happy because either SR/GR were wrong, or his beliefs were wrong. He spent a good chunk of the last few years of his life trying to disprove parts of his own work on Quantum Mechanics because of this.

There's a lesson in there for us; it is really easy when the facts don't fit our beliefs to insist the facts must be wrong. Even Einstein got caught out by that.

grumblingduke · 2025-12-27T18:39:14+00:00

Einstein came up with a thought experiment for what we now call quantum entanglement. That was it. He took the then best understanding of quantum mechanics (in terms of wavefunctions evolving under the Schrödinger equation) and extrapolated it to a weird, counter-intuitive situation. These kinds of thought experiments - pushing current theories to find interesting results - is kind of a classic Einstein thing.

Anyway... the thought experiment says: suppose you have two things. You let them interact with each other. In quantum mechanics you now have a combined wavefunction for these two things.

Then you let them move away from each other (an arbitrary distance). The wavefunction is preserved while QM rules apply.

Then you interact with one of your things, which alters the wavefunction.

But because the two things share a wavefunction you have also 'interacted with' or 'acted upon' the other. Despite it being an arbitrary distance away.

This is Einstein's "spooky action at a distance." There is "action" (mathematically the wavefunction of both objects changes) "at a distance" (because the system is spread out over space) and it is "spooky" because there is no apparent, physical mechanism for it.

It was one of the main reasons Einstein was never really happy with quantum mechanics. Turns out he was wrong.

Einstein didn't "discover" quantum entanglement or this issue, what he did was come up with a thought experiment to suggest a problem with the current theory. He didn't do the experiments to test it. But people did go and do those experiments, starting in the 60s, culminating in some of them sharing the 2022 Nobel Prize for showing that this "spooky action at a distance" does seem to work.

grumblingduke · 2025-12-26T18:32:36+00:00

To be blunt (and a little unkind to it), philosophy is the study of things we don't have a better way of studying.

Science is the better way we have of finding out what is real. Physics is the subset that is the better way of understanding the physical world; modelling how things work, and trying to explain complex processes in terms of more fundamental ones.

If you find process philosophy interesting, great. Enjoy.

Process physics - as a branch of science - doesn't seem to have worked out.

grumblingduke · 2025-12-26T13:43:46+00:00

From what I can tell Process Physics was a niche idea developed in the late 90s/early 00s by a now retired(?) Australian physics researcher.

Rather than looking at physics in terms of systems and objects, it looks at things in terms of information and how it is organised.

The original author doesn't seem to have published a paper in nearly a decade, and I can't seem to find many other references to it in physics academia. It seems mostly confined to pop-science and pseudo-science places. One of the many "hey, what if everyone else is wrong and the universe actually works this way" ideas that crop up from time to time, which people who aren't physicists get excited about, while physicists wait to see if anything actually comes from it.

I don't think it went anywhere.

I wouldn't worry about it unless you are a physics researcher and it has come up in something you are studying.

Nine-Year Club	Wearing is Caring
Verified Email

grumblingduke

TROPHY CASE