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https://www.cia.gov/library/ce...

IE, if we think that poverty is bad for society, reducing income inequality might help.

The measures are likely entangled in such a way that the conclusion you draw isn't valid, or you're at the very least attempting to draw a causal relationship from a correlation. It's pretty easy to look at parts of the world where almost everyone is impoverished, yet because they're all about equally dirt poor, there's not much income inequality.

On the other end you can get something like Hong Kong which has a high (comparable to Haiti using the CIA's numbers) Gini coefficient. Everyone there is extremely well off by the standards of the rest of the planet, but there are some people there who are so incredibly wealthy that they just blow the numbers out.

If you look at World Bank numbers, Liberia and Switzerland have about the same Gini coefficient (in 2014), but are quite obviously on different ends of the poverty spectrum.

Unless they are comfortable with lying.

In the 1980's Southland corporation gave up using lie detection as a pre-screening tool in selecting employees. They were actually selecting better liars, not excluding the dishonest.

Back then the majority of minimum wage jobs were performed by teenagers (like I was at the time). Funny thing about teens is that they aren't grown up yet. Teens don't have a great deal of life experience. That includes failure, and having their integrity questioned. When you question the integrity of a confident, experienced adult, they can handle it. Question a kid, and you make them uncomfortable, nervous, twitchy. They don't have the experience and confidence to handle it.

Unless they are already accomplished liars and are comfortable and experienced at having their integrity and motives questioned.

TL;DR, southland actually had an increase in employee theft thanks to their use of lie detectors as a employment tool. https://newsok.com/article/203... https://www.cia.gov/library/re...

https://www.cia.gov/news-infor...

You forgot the easiest, which also can not only reduce growth, but also reduce population itself:
4. War.

Unstable war-torn countries tend to have the HIGHEST birthrates, and the fastest population growth rates.

The country with the highest birthrate in Asia is Afghanistan.

The highest birthrates in Africa are in Mali, Niger, and Angola.

Birthrate by country

People in war-zones move toward an r-selection reproductive strategy.

Good write up, but slight wrong. America is the world's largest importer. Period.
We import around 2.4 Trillion out of ~19 trillion GDP. So, yeah, around 10-13% of our economy is imports. Oddly, since china imports only 130 B from AMerica, China is only .7% of our GDP.
OTOH, We import ~.6T from China, with their economy being 11 Trillion. So, we impact over 5% of their economy.

THis is NOT something that China can win. The question becomes, what will Trump do? Will he act like W in Afghanistan/Iraq?

You're replying to a clear and obvious troll attempt.. But then again, it's not like there was an embargo (that was absolutely not imposed by a capitalist country either) that kept Cuba at a level of development from 1950, and led to wide spread poverty. Totes didn't happen.

Yep blame socialism. (Though blaming socialism is usually the right answer.. just not in this case.)

Sure it is.

Let's split a country in two. Make one side capitalist, the other side socialist. Then come back in 70 years and see what happened.

List of countries by gross national income per capita:

South Korea: 28
North Korea: no data

List of countries by per capita purchasing power:

15: South Korea
118 North Korea

if your population rate grows through combination of a high birth rate, high life expectancy, or immigration. Then either your standard of living must decrease, or your GDP must increase. I believe Norway's new generation are benefiting from egalitarianism and high tax rate of Nordic socialism. Norway's population rate is increasing by about 1%, while the U.S. is 0.81% (source). What is extremely interesting is that the GDP growth rate for the US is better (2.20%) than Norway (1.40%). What I left out in my second sentence is that the final factor is if your society suffers from a growing wealth gap. It should be obvious now that millennials are suffering in the US because they have high costs compared to income than previous generations. Costs for housing and student loans, as well as lower wages conspire to reduce the standard of living for the new generation.

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Intentional 'stupidity' is malicious.

>If you ask then if the world is flat or if UFO's exist, you will get the same answer.

No, you won't. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/search/site/ufo

Pakistan's population is also stabilizing. The fertility rate is currently 2.62 and replacement is probably about 2.4.

In fact, the only places with exploding fertility these days are sub-Saharan Africa, and a handful of other countries like Afghanistan and Yemen. You should check the fertility statistics, a lot has changed since 20 years ago.

Pakistan no longer has "exponential" growth. It has 2.62 kids per mother, in a country where the replacement rate is probably about 2.4. That's barely above replacement fertility.

"Before the BC epoch, clerics everywhere did a tidy little business in tiny tombstones." - that was due to lack of antibiotics and clean water, not lack of birth control.

Actually, large cities generally use less resources per person than small cities or rural areas.

And Pakistan has an average of 2.62 kids per family which is hardly "breeding like locusts". Replacement fertility is probably about 2.4 in Pakistan, so they are barely over replacement.

The number of children per woman in Pakistan has decreased rapidly in the last decades to now around 3 children per woman (2.3 is required for population to just be static in the long run). The only reason the population still grows is many children growing up and having (on average 2-3) kids of their own. There is no statistic link between religion and population growth.

See here: https://www.google.com/publicd...

Or if you do only trust the US, check the CIA:

https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...

China
Agriculture - products:
world leader in gross value of agricultural output; rice, wheat, potatoes, corn, tobacco, peanuts, tea, apples, cotton, pork, mutton, eggs; fish, shrimp

The reason the per capita (not "capital") number is important is because these immigrants have to be absorbed into society. If Canada accepted as many immigrants as the US in absolute numbers, it couldn't cope with the demands of all of the newcomers all at once.

However, Canada is growing much faster from migration than the US (0.57% vs 0.39%) according to the CIA Factbook https://www.cia.gov/library/pu... .

I'm not sure that America is "the wealthiest nation on Earth", at least per capita, but it surely is the most conceited one.

The US is definitely the wealthiest nation in total as measured by GDP. Per capita the US isn't at the top but it's in the top 20 and literally ALL of the nations ahead of it are either small to tiny countries (Ireland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Hong Kong, etc) or oil rich states like Kuwait or Norway.

As for being conceited I'd tend to agree. I'm an American and a lot of my fellow citizens get a hard on by chanting "greatest country in the world" regardless of the objective merit of that statement.

Why do people keep saying that?

Not billions. Current estimate (CIA World Factbook) 1,281,935,911 (July 2017 est.)

Not the OP, but he's half right. His first paragraph is wrong (100% of Americans are members of multiple protected classes). His second paragraph is pretty close to correct:

https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...

F. Secret government program.

The very first UFO in the modern sense, believed by some to be an unexplainable artifact descending from the sky of alien origin, was due to a highly classified high altitude balloon project, Project Mogul, created for monitoring nuclear weapon tests. One of these balloons came down in Roswell, New Mexico and the government tried to explain it away as a "weather balloon". Well, it was a balloon, but not a "weather balloon" and the odd (and classified) instrumentation belied the attempt to give it a prosaic explanation.

So the very first UFO event, identified with "aliens", and which set the pattern for subsequent reports, was a government cover-up of a secret program. But nothing to do with aliens.

This CIA report

states that:

"According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States."

So a large number of UFO sightings over a decade or so were secret government programs, which of course the government declined to identify.

Black programs developing secret hardware is real. Area 51 are real. They really are developing secret devices of different kinds. Only very limited groups of people are cleared to know about them. If fighter pilots view such a device, they will never know what they saw, in fact no one in their entire command will be cleared to know about it, nor people collecting anomalous reports. So unexplained detections of strange (real) objects should occur from time to time.

In other words, we know that there will be secret programs that result in UFO observations from time to time!

ANd then there are a whol raft of other causes you left off of your list:

• Misperceptions of ordinary objects (very common, any one can find themselves fooled from time to time, even "trained observers")
• Natural phenomena that are odd or even unknown. We only discovered sprites in 1989. Terrestrial gamma ray flashes were first observed in 1994. Ball lightning was reliably recorded only a few years ago.
• Sensor system malfunctions
• Hoaxes of all kinds. These range faked pictures, people pulling pranks with all manner of lights, lasers, balloons, aircraft, helicopters, and now (ubiquitously) drones. And people simply making stuff up. A trained observer lying? No! Never ever happens!

Every one of these is far higher in probability (given that we have proof they occur frequently) than your A through E. I am surprised you didn't at least give "We live in a simulation" as an option.

The article in post fails to mention the New York Times story which has DOD video from an F-18 sensor recording of a UAV they are tracking.

The BBC article posts a link to the CIA declassifying 13 million documents under the CIA's CREST archive.

Enjoy!!

They also forward data, wholesale, as part of intelligence sharing about shared threats. There is a reasonably good, though self-serving, analysis at https://www.cia.gov/library/ce... .

According to the CIA's World Fact Book, the United States Life Expectancy at birth is number 43 in the world. Above the United States in that list are Bermuda, Anguilla, Turks And Caicos Islands and the Cayman Islands, all of which have a larger proportion of their population listed as Black than the United States. Maybe you need to find another excuse for the "superior health care in the USA" failing so many of its people...

HTTPS doesn't hide anything from the endpoint. That should be obvious?

If you mean the destination web server can decrypt the https traffic, then yes, it's obvious. The only difference between HTTP and HTTPS in this case is that when HTTPS is used only the destination web server can see the plaintext as opposed to every router and every three latter tap on the its path.

However, it does largely defeat the multipathing, proxy caching and rewriting possible with HTTP, all of which helps hide who accesses an endpoint

All of which also helps mess with the traffic and watch and filter the traffic on its way. That said, caching and rewriting are things that could be done locally.

as well as automatically adding an immutable identifier; the session key.

The session key is not immutable, it isn't called session key for nothing. It's about as immutable as the address+port 4-tuple that identifies a particular TCP connection.

When I access http://www.fbi.gov/ and the proxy I use serve it from cache, the site won't even know that I accessed it. And when I ask for http://ww.cia.gov/page1 and http://www.cia.gov/page2 and the request comes from two different IPs, the site doesn't know that it's the same client accessing both pages. And when I access http://www.inflatableunicorns.... and my proxy deletes tracking information from the header (including IP address and browser fingerprints), they don't know that I'm the same person who visited last week. And they won't know that I looked at adcampaign.jpg either, because it can be served from a cache.

I get it, you like proxies and the ability to mess with and inspect your traffic on the way. It's ridiculous that you're oh-so-concerned about preventing three letter agencies from tracking you that you're opening them every door to get much better information - your payloads as opposed only your metadata. And obviously they're free to add their malware to your every download.

Now enter HTTPS, and how it changes this by trying to ensure a 1:1 connection.

Changes it mostly in a positive way, as pointed out.

the three letter agencies [] sit at the endpoints

For every endpoint where such an agency is actually sitting, there are 10 regular midway taps such an agency is operating.

I am, however, glad that you at least dropped the notion that https used client certificates. One step at a time.

HTTPS doesn't hide anything from the endpoint. That should be obvious?

If you mean the destination web server can decrypt the https traffic, then yes, it's obvious. The only difference between HTTP and HTTPS in this case is that when HTTPS is used only the destination web server can see the plaintext as opposed to every router and every three latter tap on the its path.

However, it does largely defeat the multipathing, proxy caching and rewriting possible with HTTP, all of which helps hide who accesses an endpoint

All of which also helps mess with the traffic and watch and filter the traffic on its way. That said, caching and rewriting are things that could be done locally.

as well as automatically adding an immutable identifier; the session key.

The session key is not immutable, it isn't called session key for nothing. It's about as immutable as the address+port 4-tuple that identifies a particular TCP connection.

When I access http://www.fbi.gov/ and the proxy I use serve it from cache, the site won't even know that I accessed it. And when I ask for http://ww.cia.gov/page1 and http://www.cia.gov/page2 and the request comes from two different IPs, the site doesn't know that it's the same client accessing both pages. And when I access http://www.inflatableunicorns.... and my proxy deletes tracking information from the header (including IP address and browser fingerprints), they don't know that I'm the same person who visited last week. And they won't know that I looked at adcampaign.jpg either, because it can be served from a cache.

I get it, you like proxies and the ability to mess with and inspect your traffic on the way. It's ridiculous that you're oh-so-concerned about preventing three letter agencies from tracking you that you're opening them every door to get much better information - your payloads as opposed only your metadata. And obviously they're free to add their malware to your every download.

Now enter HTTPS, and how it changes this by trying to ensure a 1:1 connection.

Changes it mostly in a positive way, as pointed out.

the three letter agencies [] sit at the endpoints

For every endpoint where such an agency is actually sitting, there are 10 regular midway taps such an agency is operating.

I am, however, glad that you at least dropped the notion that https used client certificates. One step at a time.

I'm not entirely sure what "hiding who accesses the endpoint from the endpoint itself." means, but please explain how HTTPS doesn't do that.

HTTPS doesn't hide anything from the endpoint. That should be obvious?

However, it does largely defeat the multipathing, proxy caching and rewriting possible with HTTP, all of which helps hide who accesses an endpoint, as well as automatically adding an immutable identifier; the session key.

When I access http://www.fbi.gov/ and the proxy I use serve it from cache, the site won't even know that I accessed it. And when I ask for http://ww.cia.gov/page1 and http://www.cia.gov/page2 and the request comes from two different IPs, the site doesn't know that it's the same client accessing both pages. And when I access http://www.inflatableunicorns.... and my proxy deletes tracking information from the header (including IP address and browser fingerprints), they don't know that I'm the same person who visited last week. And they won't know that I looked at adcampaign.jpg either, because it can be served from a cache.

Now enter HTTPS, and how it changes this by trying to ensure a 1:1 connection.

Then consider what Google's business is, and whether it's in their interest to obtain as much accurate information as possible about who visits and who sees which ads, and how to aggregate and sell that data. That they push hard for the technology that helps their business model should not come as a surprise, nor should it be taken as them having your best interest in mind.

And consider the interest of the three letter agencies who sit at the endpoints and sees all the HTTPS data and metadata after it has been decrypted by the server. Do you think they want more accurate tracking capabilities or not?

I'm not entirely sure what "hiding who accesses the endpoint from the endpoint itself." means, but please explain how HTTPS doesn't do that.

HTTPS doesn't hide anything from the endpoint. That should be obvious?

However, it does largely defeat the multipathing, proxy caching and rewriting possible with HTTP, all of which helps hide who accesses an endpoint, as well as automatically adding an immutable identifier; the session key.

When I access http://www.fbi.gov/ and the proxy I use serve it from cache, the site won't even know that I accessed it. And when I ask for http://ww.cia.gov/page1 and http://www.cia.gov/page2 and the request comes from two different IPs, the site doesn't know that it's the same client accessing both pages. And when I access http://www.inflatableunicorns.... and my proxy deletes tracking information from the header (including IP address and browser fingerprints), they don't know that I'm the same person who visited last week. And they won't know that I looked at adcampaign.jpg either, because it can be served from a cache.

Now enter HTTPS, and how it changes this by trying to ensure a 1:1 connection.

Then consider what Google's business is, and whether it's in their interest to obtain as much accurate information as possible about who visits and who sees which ads, and how to aggregate and sell that data. That they push hard for the technology that helps their business model should not come as a surprise, nor should it be taken as them having your best interest in mind.

And consider the interest of the three letter agencies who sit at the endpoints and sees all the HTTPS data and metadata after it has been decrypted by the server. Do you think they want more accurate tracking capabilities or not?

This region is only Secret - Top Secret workloads have been running in C2S for years.

Read the CIA Press Release here

Yeah, it's an example of a low trust society. Which is why, despite having vast natural resources Nigeria has a GDP(PPP) per capita of $5900 table, i.e. it does pretty badly.

https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...

The opposite case in Japan. Almost no natural resource but it's a very high trust society. And it does pretty well with a GDP(PPP) per capita of $41,300.

GDP(PPP) per capita isn't everything of course. I mean I'd prefer Japan over Nigeria even if you reverse their prosperity levels. Funny thing is Japan got levelled completely in WWII and grew very quickly back to first world prosperity. So actually a Japan rebuilding from devastation but keeping its high trust society status would be an awesome place to be. Same with the more high trust bits of the USA. The low trust bits of the USA are almost as bad as Nigeria though.

According to the CIA France is the largest exporter of electricity by a large margin.
https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...

France gets over 70% of it's electricity from nuclear power. Europe runs on nuclear power because of what France exports. If Italy wants to close their coal plants in the next 10 years then they will have to increase their imports from France, burn a lot more expensive natural gas, or see the lights go out.

Italy needs to get over their fear of nuclear power real quick or see their electricity rates keep going up and up. Germany and Italy already have some of the highest electricity rates in the world, certainly high compared to the rest of Europe, and France has much cheaper electricity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Germany isn't the poster child, it's the town drunk to show people what not to do.

That's the best you've got, a cherry-picked stat from decade ago?

Life expectancy vs spending - The US has a lower average life expectancy than many industrialized nations but spends a good deal more per capita than everyone else.

Infant mortality rate - There are over 50 countries with a lower infant mortality rate than the US, including such nations as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Guam, Greece, and Cuba.

• World of Warcraft generates almost $2.15 billion in revenue per year.
• Venezuela's nominal GDP was $333.7 billion in 2016 at the official exchange rate. But the official exchange rate is about 4.2x higher than the black market rate. So at the black market exchange rate this works out to a nominal GDP of $79 billion per year.

If you look at it per capita:

• According to the previous link, WoW has about 9.5 million players. For a per capita revenue of $226 per person per year.
• Venezuela's population is 31.6 million. For a per capita nominal real GDP of $2500 per person per year.

Kinda staggering if you consider that Venezuelans live there 24/7, or 168 hours/week. Meanwhile the average WoW player plays 22.7 hours/week. So normalizing for amount of time spent in the "realm":

• WoW per capita revenue per hour of play = 19.1 cents.
• Venezula per capita GDP per hour = 28.6 cents.

So while the units are pretty meaningless, the actual value of time spent in the game/country turn out not very different.

But there is no doubt the overwhelming majority of terrorists are Christian - it is only logical, as the largest religion on earth by far, they must also have the largest number of radicals.

Oh, bullshit. The US is 70.6% Christian and 0.9% Muslim (ref), and yet - by your own numbers - Christian terrorists commit only twice as many attacks as Muslim terrorists, rather than the seventy time as many that we would expect if they were equally violent.

And that is, of course, if we trust your numbers. For such a political subject, I wouldn't trust the number of attacks: a partisan analyst can easily fudge the definition of "attack" a bit, or a lot, to suit their prejudices. Death toll makes a more reliable measure: it's difficult to argue with a dead body.

People still try to fudge these numbers by redefining exactly what constitutes a Christian/Muslim terrorist attack. You've tried to do this yourself, arguing that the Orlando nightclub shooting shouldn't count, despite the shooter saying "In the name of Allah the Merciful, the beneficent" as the very first thing he said upon picking up the phone (ref), with a total of three references to Allah in five lines of conversation. If we looked properly at the instances of purportedly Christian terrorism you're referencing, do you really think they would meet this same standard of religious motivation?

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

I still insist that everybody has that backwards

Pre-election briefings do not include sources or methods, so no, there is no way that Trump would have had access to a list of US spies.
In fact, the standard Presidential Daily Brief doesn't include sources or methods - it just isn't relevant to the President to get that level of fine detail, except in rare cases. You can look at some of the declassified ones from the 70's to see the level of info included.

Here.

Ignoring the countries that have special reasons for longer/shorter life spans, it would be better to live in Iceland or Switzerland than the US.

"You had me disable AdBlock for this? It is not by Forbes â" they simply cite a survey by Commonwealth Fund â" an Illiberal organization currently headed by one Dr. Blumenthal, who has "chief health advisor to the Dukakis campaign" on his resume.

Seriously?"

Ad hominem is a logical fallacy for precisely this reason - because you don't like the fact that statistics show that developed European countries all do better than the US in terms of life expectancy you're instead attacking the person who did the study.

But that's not how statistics work - the numbers don't lie, take it from this guy, take it from any other, attacking this individual doesn't change the fact that life expectancy in Europe was higher.

I actually followed this thread because I was genuinely intrigued to see where you were going to take the life expectancy argument (because I was already aware it was higher in most European countries, and that you were hence on a losing bet by trying to make that argument). I'm disappointed to see that you've simply decided to deny reality though rather than accept the fact that you were wrong. That doesn't bode well for you as a human being.

What about the CIA?

https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...

Or are they too liberal for you too?

You can't ask someone not to hate you when you're being willfully ignorant, because that highlights you as someone that isn't willing to learn and that's more interested in lying to themselves than having an adult conversation where things like facts actually matter.

By the same logic, I present you a few fine organizations that cannot possibly have anything to hide because they have a website that tells you what they do:
The FSB
The mossad (hope this is the right site because I didn't much care to enable javascript)
The CIA
The NSA

On a completely unrelated note, would you by any chance be in the market for a bridge? I can make you a really good price, because you're my friend!

Given all the turmoil Iraq has suffered, going all the way back to 1963 when the Ba'ath Party violently seized power, Iraq has a surprisingly high GDP per capita right now. It's higher than Costa Rica, a very peaceful place.

As such, it's quite wrong to blame economic conditions for the rise of ISIS.

FYI, it actually was a milk factory. Although Iraq did put up a big sign reading "Baby Milk Factory" after the bombing and other such things for PR purposes. Iraq actually was using milk byproducts for BW research, but at al-Hakam, not Abu Ghuraib.

Baghdad took early steps to protect what remained of the BW physical plant and equipment. During the first Gulf war, the only facilities directly relevant to Iraq’s BW program that were destroyed were the research laboratories at Al Salman and the munitions filling station at Al Muthanna. Neither was critical to the BW program that was centered on Al Hakam. Al Hakam at that time was unknown to the Coalition and therefore was not attacked during the war, unlike the Abu Ghurayb Infant Formula Plant (the Baby Milk Factory) that the Coalition destroyed by bombing in the mistaken belief that it was a key BW facility.

CIA's own assessment.

Erh... The CIA disagrees.

At this time, only three countries—Burma, Liberia, and the US—have not adopted the International System of Units (SI, or metric system) as their official system of weights and measures. ... The US is the only industrialized nation that does not mainly use the metric system in its commercial and standards activities...

It is "the CIA" when used in a sentence. Usage from the CIA website:

https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/...

They don't get to "continue to enter the country", they have to meet the religious persecution test before being granted sanctuary. The rules are tougher for everyone from those seven countries, not just one specific religion like many people claim.

It's far easier to apply for, and receive asylum once you enter into the US. Second best chance at gaining asylum is to request it at immigration. So, yes, there is a chance that they can be granted asylum at immigration.

And why is there a problem that we make special provisions for those suffering from persecution?

There is no problem with that at all. However, Donald Trump has said several times that he intended to ban Muslim immigration then you can see why such special provisions could be considered a violation of the first amendment of the constitution when they specifically work against the religion that Trump has promised to discriminate against.

And Buddhism. And Jews. And Every Other Religion you can name. There was no specificity in that order towards ANY specific religion.

Again you're technically correct but, as we've shown before, Trump has specifically said that he planned to discriminate against a specific religion. Besides, how many Jews, Buddhist, and FSM worshipers do you expect to find in Iran or Syria, for instance? In Iran less than 1% of the population is non-muslim. Syria only shows four religions: Islam, Christianity, Druze (a semi-nomadic group that has been in the region for a long time) and, Judaism (not even giving a percentage, just stating that there are few Jews in the country, and only in Aleppo and Damascus). I highly doubt the Druze are planning to leave Syria. So that basically means this executive order targets two religious groups with respect to Syria. When you look at the other countries, it is the same with over eighty percent of the population being Muslim and the remaining 0-20% basically being Christian.

No, it does not. Find the words, then you can claim "specifically."

Why do you have a problem that religious persecution is an exemption? Do you think that the exemption should seriously apply to people of the majority religion? Kinda hard to say it's being persecuted when it is the majority, huh?

I know that critical thinking is hard, so let me spell this out for you. The only exemption to the order is religious persecution. Therefore, it requires you read between the lines and see that only non-Muslims are prevented from being able to enter the US. That does not mean that people of other religions cannot be denied entry, but it absolutely 100% means that Muslims in those countries cannot enter the US. Period. Therefore the executive order specifically bars Muslims.

No, I'd say it was a de facto admission that getting the job done now is more important than wasting months in court getting the Ninth's typically poor decision overturned.

And how long did it take for the 9th circuit to review the case? How long would it have taken for the Supreme Court to address the issue? I mean, he's been president since January 20th. It hasn't even been six weeks yet. The 9th Circuit took the case on February 7th. Trump had been president for exactly 18 days at that point. The restraining order against the federal government was entered on February 3rd. That means that it took four days for the US Justice Department to get an appeal. Exactly what do you think was going to happen while the legal process expedited the review of this order? These people were all granted visas by the State Department. A lot of these people had been traveling home on extend

They don't get to "continue to enter the country", they have to meet the religious persecution test before being granted sanctuary. The rules are tougher for everyone from those seven countries, not just one specific religion like many people claim.

It's far easier to apply for, and receive asylum once you enter into the US. Second best chance at gaining asylum is to request it at immigration. So, yes, there is a chance that they can be granted asylum at immigration.

And why is there a problem that we make special provisions for those suffering from persecution?

There is no problem with that at all. However, Donald Trump has said several times that he intended to ban Muslim immigration then you can see why such special provisions could be considered a violation of the first amendment of the constitution when they specifically work against the religion that Trump has promised to discriminate against.

And Buddhism. And Jews. And Every Other Religion you can name. There was no specificity in that order towards ANY specific religion.

Again you're technically correct but, as we've shown before, Trump has specifically said that he planned to discriminate against a specific religion. Besides, how many Jews, Buddhist, and FSM worshipers do you expect to find in Iran or Syria, for instance? In Iran less than 1% of the population is non-muslim. Syria only shows four religions: Islam, Christianity, Druze (a semi-nomadic group that has been in the region for a long time) and, Judaism (not even giving a percentage, just stating that there are few Jews in the country, and only in Aleppo and Damascus). I highly doubt the Druze are planning to leave Syria. So that basically means this executive order targets two religious groups with respect to Syria. When you look at the other countries, it is the same with over eighty percent of the population being Muslim and the remaining 0-20% basically being Christian.

No, it does not. Find the words, then you can claim "specifically."

Why do you have a problem that religious persecution is an exemption? Do you think that the exemption should seriously apply to people of the majority religion? Kinda hard to say it's being persecuted when it is the majority, huh?

I know that critical thinking is hard, so let me spell this out for you. The only exemption to the order is religious persecution. Therefore, it requires you read between the lines and see that only non-Muslims are prevented from being able to enter the US. That does not mean that people of other religions cannot be denied entry, but it absolutely 100% means that Muslims in those countries cannot enter the US. Period. Therefore the executive order specifically bars Muslims.

No, I'd say it was a de facto admission that getting the job done now is more important than wasting months in court getting the Ninth's typically poor decision overturned.

And how long did it take for the 9th circuit to review the case? How long would it have taken for the Supreme Court to address the issue? I mean, he's been president since January 20th. It hasn't even been six weeks yet. The 9th Circuit took the case on February 7th. Trump had been president for exactly 18 days at that point. The restraining order against the federal government was entered on February 3rd. That means that it took four days for the US Justice Department to get an appeal. Exactly what do you think was going to happen while the legal process expedited the review of this order? These people were all granted visas by the State Department. A lot of these people had been traveling home on extend

It's malicious incompetence. Everybody has the old meme backwards.

This is newsworthy and relevant to nerds because the Privacy Act stops intelligence agencies from targeting non-citizen permanent residents.

This is huge. Non-citizen permanent residents should be very cautious about what they do on computers and phones from now on.

My bad. Norway is better than the U.S. but not the oiligarchs propped up by U.S. Military expenses to "protect our access to oil" (R. Cheney, Project for a New American Century, open letter to Bill Clinton demanding an attack on Iraq, September, 1998).
Germany is better than the U.K. AND France AND Oil processing rich Oman, Finland beats Korea (the other one) AND Uber Capitalist Japan

Because every other country has active measures in society to combat that pressure from companies. And in the others they are at least partially successful. Not entirely - much of Europe is having the exact same problem as Japan though at an earlier stage and not as severe yet. That's one reason it's ridiculous of Europe not to welcome the refugees with open arms - they desperately need an influx of able-bodied young people to keep their economies working.

Every other country... That sounds like a sweeping generalization without any knowledge or data to support it. Let's have a look at working hours to see how far along Japan is. Here, https://stats.oecd.org/Index.a...

Turns out Japan is more lenient on working hours than USA, on par with Italy, and far nicer than Greece or Mexico. So, your hypothesis would mean birthrates in the US should be below that of Japan, birthrates in Italy should be on par, and birthrates in Greece/Mexico should be much lower than Japan.

How does that play out? Let's check http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.... or more directly https://www.cia.gov/library/pu... . The US is above Japan, so that didn't align, Italy is even, so that's correct, Greece is even, so that's wrong, and Mexico is way higher, which is again, wrong. Your hypothesis was highly inconsistent with the data.

Japan is the furthest along that road, and thus gets to serve as the great big warning sign of where that road leads, but you're an idiot if you think those other places aren't on the exact same road and measurably moving forward on it. They are moving slower because of policies designed to combat this corporate pressure. Those policies, however, are being steadily eroded - which will accelerate the trip.

Or, perhaps the idiot is the one that makes absurd claims that contradict the known data?

They need to be significantly strengthened if you want to change course. That means things like paid family leave, maternity leave with job protection, paternity leave with job protection, good (and affordable) childcare options - so that people don't have to choose between life and work.
A healthy society needs people who work to live. When everybody lives to work - that society is doomed.

Sweden and Norway both have all of those and more, along with some of the lowest working hours in the world. And where are they on the fertility graph? Below Mexico, which is not known as a champion of employee protections.

At this point we should entertain the notion that you are incorrect, and that the numbers we see fit much much much better to the graph of economic development and wellbeing, i.e. rich people have fewer babies while poor people have more.