Can you elaborate on getting planted with drugs by a deranged cop? what happened? How did you get out of that situation? Were you able to prove your innocence?
It happened 11 years ago when I was a minor living in a small, extraordinarily corrupt town. The officer had been stalking my friends and I for some time. She is a known meth manufacturer and distributor. She planted drugs on me at the scene of an accident and conspired with the local prosecutor, judge and my public defender in order to give me a mistrial and snuff out any attempts at an appeal. I got the maximum allowed sentence despite no prior criminal history. Unfortunately I was 17 and homeless at the time just trying to graduate high school, unable to fight back.
The full story is much longer and so insane that I don't even want to open the full can of worms here at the moment, but I should do a write-up and talk to a lawyer now that I have the time/money, despite the statute of limitations which probably protects them.
I mean I've literally watched this officer with my own eyes procure meth ingredients, I have footage of her distributing, some people I know murdered her brother and there was a giant meth lab found at his house, it's just a total unbelievable shit show from start to finish. But I was the one who got railed. The FBI refuses to get involved despite numerous tips.
> She planted drugs on me at the scene of an accident and conspired with the local prosecutor, judge and my public defender in order to give me a mistrial and snuff out any attempts at an appeal.
mistrial, in law, a trial that has been terminated and declared void before the tribunal can hand down a decision or render a verdict. The termination of a trial prematurely nullifies the preceding proceedings as if they had not taken place.
Other than that it’s a totally credible story about a meth-cooking police officer…
I have no need to convince you, a random person on hacker news. It's a small enough town that next to everyone knows her story. There has been more than one investigation but she's protected. She was stalking my friends and I due to disagreements between her son and some of my friends at school.
As for the mistrial, it's only in spirit because my public defender flat out refused to take my case seriously and refused to appeal on grounds that it would make her life difficult.
It's hard to make people believe or understand what small town corruption is like unless they've seen it for themselves. The mayor himself showed up at the place I was crashing at after I got arrested just to further make things more difficult for me... what kind of psychotic town allows for such behavior?
It's nuts. With my own two eyes I once watched this cop in question pull up to a grocery store in her patrol car in broad daylight with a near-toothless old woman in the passenger seat. That old woman proceeded to go into the store and buy a stack of Sudafed, got back in the patrol car and they rolled out. I guessed that she was having supplier issues and needed a fix, so she found a smurf.
I thought about calling the police and getting them to review the footage, but it was a crapshoot who showed up and if I would only get into more trouble.
Tangential to the above comment, you have to also remember that in the U.S. many police forces are also revenue drivers. For many small towns on highways, they have "speed traps" set up not really to keep roadways safe but to ticket people and get revenue for their municipality, ditto with other legal actions against people. There's a significant amount of civil forfeiture too that amounts to cops seizing assets with little to no cause. I mention this just because corruption isn't always as straightforward as what that absolutely insane situation sounds like, but the incentives in many U.S. jurisdictions are pretty misaligned and so can create pretty negative situations for the average American interacting with a cop.
Yes, our town was off a major highway and getting in and out of town is a blitz through multiple factions of police including the Sheriff's Office, town police, state troopers and extra enforcement from the nearby capitol city. They are especially active during what is known as Taskforce Thursdays. It's a racket from top to bottom. You feel like a criminal just going to get groceries, like a lamb watching for wolves.
My arresting officer has been kicked off of the local force before and reinstated. Until a few years ago, the father of the local district attorney was the the town's mayor. The same mayor was the town bail bondsman. When I was processed, the town's mayor himself visited the parents of the friend I was staying with at the time in a play to get me kicked out and back on the street.
It's an insane town and it's ruled by a few wealthy families. The corruption in that town was unimaginable and I myself was subject to an abusive power figure as my guardian while growing up, that same man is great friends with the same prosecutor who conspired to press charges and conduct a mistrial. I can't get away from it.
What do you mean by mistrial here? How did you get any sentence if there was a mistrial? Why would they conspire to commit one unless they were on trial and not you?
My first public defender was removed from me because he was trying to assist me.
My second lawyer didn't know my name after two years, prepared no defense and refused to file a motion to quash (the town dragged on proceedings for years and it turned out they'd never sent the "evidence" to the lab).
I had half a dozen cops approach the stand, sequestered, and each of them told a totally different story. My only witness then got slapped with a charge for "lying to the police", whatever that was in legalese, and the judge ignored all of the inconsistencies. I should also mention that my right to a trial by jury was taken away from me in an act of deceit, where I, a minor without a lawyer or guardian present, was made to sign a document upon bail which gave up that right. I was told at the time that they would not release me on bail unless I signed the document.
My lawyer then refused to file an appeal because it would, and I quote, "make [her] job miserable", because her de facto boss was the judge, who happened to be the only presiding judge across two parishes.
My original public defender, who had been removed from my case, was so upset by the outcome that he came to visit me in jail, promised me he'd fight for me... he had a private screaming match with the judge in his office, but the best he could do was get me a reduced sentence on good behavior. I still had to pay thousands in fees and endure all of the other issues that come with the state having a vice grip around you.
The rise of professional airbnb renters have also lowered the quality quite a bit. When a lot of listing were for apartments that the renter used for themselves part of the year and rented on airbnb when they weren't there, you could be sure to have decent bedding, etc..
Instead in professional airbnbs, there's a race to the bottom with extremely bad mattresses, uncomfortable beds, heaters that don't work to save money.
That makes sense for cards but if most of the payments are SEPA transfers, then it doesn't make that much sense since there's no chargebacks for SEPA transfers.
Maybe the issue is a fraud system designed for cards that's not well thought out for other forms of payments.
This is exactly my point, SEPA DD is by design high dispute because the customer can dispute a payment on a no-question-asked basis over a span of 8 weeks.
This can also happen due to insufficient funds, or as it happens if the mandate you (Stripe) send them is wrong. We previously have an issue with this exact same account where the reason for the disputes was an incorrect mandate and we were refunded for those.
There’s no chargeback for SEPA transfers that are initiated by the customer, but the OP is using SEPA direct debit which is initiated by the vendor and has chargeback.
What differentiates the older Star Treks from the shows that have come out in the last 20 years is the optimism. Instead of a depressing vision of the future, Star Trek dared to show a better future. Instead of only having conflicts drive the story forward, Star Trek's main drive was the thrill of discovery, asking questions about what it means to live in this Galaxy.
I miss having shows that convey a feeling of hope for the future. The current mostly dystopian grimdark sci-fi is an easy way for unimaginative writers to make their world feel more real at the expense of destroying that hope.
It's sad that even the new Star Trek movies (post 2009) and shows courtesy of Alan Kurtzman and J.J. Abrams have completely lost that spirit of the previous Star Treks. Instead it's a bland insipid take on the Star Trek universe by people who have no clue of what makes Star Trek Star Trek and do not respect it.
I cancelled netflix because basically all of its suggestions were in the 'dystopian' category. I cancelled prime video because it was much of the same, along with ruining properties I enjoyed when I was younger like Wheel of Time (a show I forced myself to watch for one season and then thought about analytically to decide if I could justify their changes for tv adaptation - I couldn't).
Modern takes on everything suck. The culture that produces modern tv/movies is not one I want to participate in, and their writers are terrible. Abrahms ability to ruin everything he touches while everyone celebrates is jusst another extension of this. The one thing the marvel MCU used to have was the ability to still tell hero stories. DC never figured it out (although there Z Snyder was at fault).
I'd rather not know what is being done now, and just cherish my memories and copies of the older material. It's less annoying and honestly there's nothing of value in the new stuff except sometimes cinematography.
Strange New Worlds is a welcome change on this trend.
About TNG, who am I to argue with Ursula Le Guin but it lost me after only a few episodes because it was all talking talking talking, nothing interesting to see. Plenty of shows like that (no scifi.) My friends loved it.
> About TNG, who am I to argue with Ursula Le Guin but it lost me after only a few episodes because it was all talking talking talking, nothing interesting to see. Plenty of shows like that (no scifi.) My friends loved it.
The show gets by on the reputation of later seasons, and handful of excellent episodes, and that era of TV being pretty mediocre, especially for sci-fi. S1 has basically zero good episodes (though, unfortunately, several that you kinda need to watch anyway) while S2 only has a few, and in S3 it finally really gets going. Even then, in the "good" seasons, a solid 1/4 of the episodes are pretty bad.
Perhaps by the standards of what entertains you, TNG's talking isn't entertaining - I can understand that based on the current media landscape and the strong visual culture we're in. But if you know it carries a different POV that many people feel is meaningful, and you're curious about having that feeling as well, maybe you might be open to exploring different ways to be entertained and approach it with different expectations? It can take some time and active effort to attune to different perspectives but can really be worth it.
I watched from the beginning as they were aired in the 80s. Actually I only watched the beginning of it, plus some random episodes in the next decades in random encounters on tv channels. DS9 went about the same route. Voyager was more interesting. I watched all of Enterprise. Then season 1 of Discovery, maybe 2? I stopped when the red things started appearing (no time) but I might start again. Strange New Worlds, all of it so far.
The older Star Trek cared about the story and acting, despite the struggles in the first seasons of TNG the succeeded. The newer ones lacking (any) logic and are just quick action.
> The newer ones lacking (any) logic and are just quick action.
It's not just that they're "not Star Trek"—they're terribly written even if you pretend they're not Star Trek and are just generic sci-fi. Picard especially. My god, what a trainwreck. Like five people, zero of whom were good writers, assembled the plot using the telephone game.
SNW is, somehow, extremely good. No idea how that happened.
And yeah, Lower Decks should have sucked (that trailer, ugh) but is in fact quite good.
I agree, it's not for the average user. I'm happy to root my android (mostly because android backups really suck otherwise) but would definitely not recommend it to most people.
I think it took me an average of 2 hours every 6 months to keep hiding root correctly.
