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The mentally ill convict Bradly "Chelsea" Manning is facing punishment associated with further misconduct while serving his prison sentence. Nothing much to see, this sort of thing is something that happens all the time prison.

It appears that part of the motivation for his "whistleblowing" was apparently rage over being dumped by his homosexual boyfriend. In other words, he was acting out, the same thing that has brought him to grief again.

#AllAmendmentsMatter

On a more serious note, some people do actually rely on guns to feed their family. Not many, but some. And the CDC disagrees with you on the self defense statement.

How do you determine what "real" GDP growth is? Again, you seem to imply that how it was done in the 1970's and 1980's were the "correct way".

If you're going to draw comparisons between different decades, you need a standard measurement. Keep the way inflation was calculated, and you'd find the GDP would be about 10% lower - because that's the impact of inflation on it. And by that measure - we're still in the recession that started in 2007.

All I hear is that people "feel" like they aren't as well off compared to some rose-colored memory of decades past. That "feeling", of course, is greatly affected by what kind of narrative their favorite media source paints.

Lowest labor force participation rate in 2 generations. Record levels of food stamps use. Record numbers on welfare. Stagnant wages. A Federal Government adding $4 billion in debt every day. It's not all roses now, not at all...

In 1978, when the Labor Force Participation Rate was only 63% and the national debt was only $0.77 trillion, Carter talked about economic "malaise" and a high "misery index."

In 2016, when the Labor Force Participation Rate is only 63% and the national debt is $17.3 trillion, the administration brags about how sustained and robust the "recovery" has been.

In most countries, you'd be right to heap scorn on anyone feeling threatened by an emoji or an email.

But this is the US, where guns are easy and cheap to get, and people get routinely shot over the dumbest shit. Dude might be a bit of scaredy cat, but he's certainly not insane.

Gun violence is at an all time low
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
http://www.cnsnews.com/comment...

I know, pesky facts. Who cares about'em

This CDC study says that the use of guns for defensive purposes is actually quite common, and is an effective crime deterrent.

Yep, your gun crime is way lower than the US, but your murder rate kept following the same trend before and after the gun restrictions took hold. If banning guns drops the gun crime rate but not the murder rate, does that really matter?

Most of those Americans who are killed by guns are suicides. Long-term suicide rates are unaffected by gun ownership. Moreover, This CDC study says you're entirely wrong about people using guns defensively. Most mass shootings happen in zones where people aren't legally allowed to have guns, so naturally responsible gun owners wouldn't be able to stop them there.

The error in your argument is that you only look at justifiable killings, not use of a gun in self defense - using it as a threat or just injuring the assailant wouldn't show up. This CDC study showed that "defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals".

Interesting article: http://www.cnsnews.com/blog/ma... What made it interesting is that had the carefully selected victims been just any other group, other than white, this would still be in the papers. Some simpler examples that are closer to home are most people would like things like Christmas plays at schools, optional of course, but all this is banned. It was just fine for over a hundred years without causing an issue of separation of church and state but then suddenly it became an issue. Sad. Ultimately the community feeling goes away and we get to where we are today. Hardly a win for anyone.

Some official statistics may look decent, but the labor-force participation (a figure not prone to fudging like politically redefined unemployment) is the lowest it has been since 1978.

With over 94 million not even looking for work — and thus not included in the unemployment statistics — we can afford less and less non-necessities.

With the constantly rising food-prices and the incomes of those still working stalling, expect further declines.

Socialism — measured as the part of the GDP spent by government — sucks.

1)Johns Hopkins Psychiatrist: Transgender is ‘Mental Disorder;' Sex Change ‘Biologically Impossible’ Dr. Paul R. McHugh http://cnsnews.com/news/articl...
2)High Court of Australia judgment unanimously ruled that gender was not a social construction.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/ar...

Those overseas students now face being deported from the United States for buying visas

One would think, the government's priorities would be to block the poor foreigners entering the country illegally and most immediately becoming a public burden. Only after we stop importing poverty, would the borders-enforcers turn on to people, who express their love for the United States without asking taxpayers for financial assistance.

Surely, both groups are breaking the law and ought to be prosecuted, but, if you must exercise prosecutorial discretion, wouldn't you start with those, who cause the most damage? The current Administration's priorities are exactly the opposite, for some reason...

Which is quite surprising, because prosecuting these immigrants — who had the advantage of geography in coming over here — would not require the elaborate entrapment schemes like setting up fake universities — the Administration already knows many of them, and even argues in court, it ought to be allowed to let them partake in Social Security and other "earned benefits" programs!

It is almost as if the plan is to allow them all to stay — despite going through the glacially slow motions of "deferred actions" — and, while staying, vote for the party in power, huh?

He's probably referring to Al Gore's nobel peace prize acceptance speech, which itself was an allusion to a study by the US Navy that said the ice caps could be fully gone in as early as 7 years, or as late as 22 years from 2007.

http://cnsnews.com/news/articl...

Though to be honest I don't think even the later date would be anywherre close to accurate. If the Pangaea theory is correct, we still had ice caps several million years ago while the earth was necessarily much warmer (and had much higher CO2 content, and high biodiversity, which included dinosaurs and very large insectae.) Also if the Pangaea theory is correct, we'll probably have Pangaea Ultima as well, which will include similar conditions with or without carbon emissions.

Its obvious that LYING OBAMA SHITSTAIN is talking up the economy. As you see, the I_MAXI_PAD has made games into fuckign angry birds. In turn, real games such as Deus Ex 1, which require a brain and have dialogue are gone and ANGRY FAGS and CANDY SHIT CRUSH are what we got.

Now the economy is SHIT and VIDEO GAMES SUCK DICK as a genre.

March 4 2016

Wages Drop...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

93,688,000 Americans Not in Labor Force...
http://cnsnews.com/news/articl...

Deficit with China GROWS...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wir...

Exports hit 5-1/2-year low...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wir...

ROGERS: 100% Probability of Recession...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

Gold soars into bull market as growth fears mount...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/bus...

"Today's news"
JOBS, JOBS: FEB +242,000, 4.9%...

> If you say: "Kill gays," it's hate speech

If a Muslim says: "Kill gays" is that hate speech?

Apparently not in England or Norway.

Here are some things science is settled on:

The earth being round.

For a very unscientific definition of "round."

The earth orbiting the sun.

No, the two-body formula for the earth and sun revolves around a common gravitational centerpoint (barycenter) that is within the volume of the sun. In an absolute scale, everything orbits everything.

Space time can be curved.

While that is the dominant explanation for how mass/energy affects the pathways nearby, tests to attempt to discern the greater curvature of the universe have concluded that aside from gravity wells, space/time is flatter than we have the theoretical capability to test.

Science IS settled on a lot of issues. AGW is a new one, but something we can do something about (well, 10 years ago).

Science settles as a precipitate in a solution. Slowly, over time, as the agitators and doubts fade. Ten years is not enough to settle anything scientific, especially not with models as bad at predicting the present as AGW use (not to mention the issues of possibly modified historic data that the models are based on).

From a Florida newspaper:

Brevard County's sheriff says licensed citizens who carry firearms should be prepared to use them in an active-shooter scenario until law enforcement arrives.

He's not the only
one.

Are the people all these LEOs speaking to NRA stooges? Brainwashed?

Many folks would argue about his "legacy" being thin, and they would be right.

Oh really?

Obama pulled all the troops out of Iraq before Iraq was ready to defend itself, and he publicly announced the date on which Iraq would be defenceless. Result: ISIS overrunning major cities, looting banks to buy weapons, murdering and raping. I lay this death toll squarely at Obama's feet... he inherited a pacified situation from Bush and managed to screw it all to hell. Then he denied it.

Obama signed the ironically named "Affordable Care Act" but didn't write it. He did stump for it, famously promising that "if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor", promising that a family of 4 would save $2500 per year. Result: people found they couldn't keep their doctor, people found that premiums went up for everyone, and now the ACA is entering a death spiral.

Obama's "recovery" is the worst recovery since 1932.

Obama mocked Romney for identifying Russia as a strategic threat, and now Russia is making a shambles of US policy in the middle east. Obama actually started this, when he gratefully let Putin rescue him from having to actually do something when Syria crossed his "red line".

On Obama's watch, an embassy was successfully attacked and the ambassador killed, the first death of an ambassador in the line of duty in three decades. Maybe we should blame that on Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State? But she was Obama's Secretary of State. "The buck stops here."

How has the Democratic Party done with Obama as President? Not well.

I don't think Obama's "legacy" is thin at all. I think it's thick, but it's a thick legacy of failure and disaster.

They _want_ people who arn't completely broke but can't afford the credit so they'll keep making minimum payments forever. ......

Yep, every dollar of debt you take puts $10 back into the sytem which they can then lend out to ten more suckers. Gotta love it.

Not completely. It might seem that people who pay off their credit cards every month would be refused credit under the "sucker system" y'all describe. But those people result in cash flow for the companies. If everyone made the easy minimum payments, it would be a big problem for them.

There are multiple games ... like a casino.... each game has it's own odds and action.

The people that pay off their debt are a predictable cash flow.
The fee that the merchant pays is what the casinos call action.
With fees in the 2.5% to 3.5% the lender can make 12x2.5% on
his bank... a 30% margin is not a bad business.

A second game is the individual with a constant balance of say $5000..
and a constant cash transaction rate of also $5000 a month. This is almost
a double dip situation because the full $10,000 is subject to interest at
near 25%per year and the $5000 action is also 30% so.
      (30% of $5000)+(25% of $10,000)=$4000
Since on average the bank has floating $7500 this is a marvelous rate of
return. The banks will argue and toss better data models and calculus
at you but the difference is often padded with short term-overnight loans
from the Fed. at one percent.

It is a racket (IMO), there are serious writedowns for fraud but I might assert
the biggest expense is the layers of management and regulatory compliance.
Most organizations do not care about regulatory compliance because
it is a documented obligatory expense and comes of the books very quickly.

Our elected officials need to pay attention....
First they need to pay attention to regulations crafted under the rule of law.
We no longer live in a world of law we live under a burden of dynamic
regulations rubber stamped by laws that allow regulations to go into effect
as a default fall through.

Comments like this illuminate the problem. When House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to
defend her 2010 comment that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”
She and the press ignored the reality that the law was simply a framework for regulations that on the first iteration
comprised 10x the page count of the law the reality is more obese...11,588,500 Words: Obamacare Regs 30x as Long as Law...
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/ar...
"Bureaucracies in the Obama Administration have thus far published approximately 11,588,500 words
of final Obamacare regulations, while there are only 381,517 words in the Obamacare law itself.
That means unelected federal officials have now written 30 words of regulations for each word in the law."

Golly I got off track...

> Your letter is not quite what I meant. You're talking pardon. I'm talking amend the law so that what he did is no longer illegal.

This is the same Congress which has failed to defund Guantanamo Bay, and failed to defund the broad scale monitoring of American citizens in which the NSA still engages as a matter of course, which has failed to take the NSA to talk for lying outright to them, and which has failed to repeal the Patriot Act. There are _already_ legal protections for revealing classified information, cited by the Supreme Court concerning the New York Times publication of the Pentagon Papers, but I don't see this Congress as willing to improve or clarify those protections. It's much too easy to be painted as "unAmerican" for attempting to do so, much as many conservatives have continued to paint Edward Snowden as a traitor.

> during the actual trial process no law is ever challenged on Constitutional grounds.

Only if you "squint real hard" as you describe it. Jury nullification is part of the "the trial process". Lawsuits against federal officials for unconstitutional laws, such as http://cnsnews.com/news/articl... are also constitutional challenges against the law itself. So are the constitutional challenges to 3 strikes laws, which admittedly have been more successfully challenged on appeal after sentencing. So are challenges to gun laws, filed by plaintiffs who've been charged with violating those laws. I'll accept that many of these challenges are not part of the conviction or acquittal phase of a trial, but they're certainly part of the overall court procedures leading to a conviction or acquittal on the grounds of a law, itself being illegal.

It's not common, but it's certainly part of the court proceedings. As you're pointing out, it may not be part of the trial proper, and it may not be technically correct to call the pre-trial proceedings part of the trial. But the Supreme Court docket always has _plenty_ of cases where the law, itself, is being challenged by a defendant and their legal team.

> As for going straight to Congress, how could that have been less safe then fleeing to Cuba via Russia

As distasteful as it may be, _Hong Kong_ and the Russians had strong motivation to protect him to embarrass the US, and were willing to work with his requests for Asylum. I don't see how the current Congress would do anything other than deny requests for immunity and turn him directly over to federal prosecutors, so he'd be facing immediate arrest, incarceration, or simple assassination. He'd certainly be denied any opportunity to testify publicly, and he'd lose most of his ability to control which documents to newly release to counter the blatant lies the NSA has told about its practices. I actively applaud his attempts to _control_ what he released, to not imperil active agents in the field, but he'd certainly lose that if he is ever held in the USA.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/ar...

As Secretary of State, she would be considered an Original Classification Authority. This means that she would be trained in recognizing what should be classified information, and what should be protected.

http://www.politico.com/story/...

According to that article, the number of classified emails is in the range of 400. Some of those messages should have been obvious that they were classified, especially for someone who is supposed to be the one determining the classification of information (an Original Classification Authority's job).

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the...
http://www.archives.gov/about/...

Saying that she didn't send or receive any emails marked as classified is a lie of omission. She should have known that certain things should have been classified, so even without the markings (which is likely to land someone in Federal prison), she should be able to identify classified information and handle it properly, including reporting the release of classified information onto her home email server.

if you understand keeping dangeorus things around your living area might increase the danger to you,

Way to completely discount the rather significant # of defensive uses of firearms which appear to out number offensive uses: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/ar...

We have counterparts to those agencies, but ours are hostile. When we buy appliances, we know we are paying extra and getting something inferior because the government prohibited the sale of the old version that worked better and cost less.

I'm afraid you're batting 0 for 2. The "tribunal" your link refers to isn't a government entity. You can find more info at the two links below. The founder has some troubling views.

Bush, Cheney Face Torture and War Crimes ‘Charges’ in Mock Trial
Guess who finds Israel guilty of genocide?

Mahathir Mohamad, the founder of this kangaroo court, was Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003. In October 2003, shortly before he stepped down as prime minister, he attracted international attention with a speech at a summit for the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), where he told his audience that while Muslims “have the biggest oil reserve in the world,” “have great wealth” and “control 57 out of the 180 countries in the world,” they “will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews.” Indeed, according to Mahathir, “today the Jews rule the world by proxy.”

I'll correct your correction - hundreds of those emails contained classified information, and it was classified at the time, including the two with Top Secret information. You can't just repeat information in a Top Secret message on an unclassified system and render that information "unclassified."

An arsenal of smoking guns in Clinton email scandal

... Most people can be forgiven for not understanding the difference between classified documents and classified information. A classified document is marked “Top Secret” or some such. But people who work in government understand that lots of information is classified simply by virtue of the kind of information it is.

My National Review colleague Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, has been setting his head on fire trying to get the mainstream media to take note of this fact. He points out that according to an executive order issued by President Barack Obama, all “foreign government information is presumed to cause damage to the national security” and is therefore presumed classified. Clinton routinely ignored this rule. That’s not just my opinion. A study by Reuters found that “Clinton and her senior staff routinely” ignored these rules.

“Here’s my personal email,” Clinton told Middle East envoy George Mitchell, who then proceeded to convey numerous private conversations he had with foreign leaders.

The Washington Times reports that Clinton’s unsecured emails contained spy satellite information about North Korea’s movement of its nuclear assets. This sort of information is universally recognized as top secret and is normally subjected to draconian safeguards. There is no way Clinton didn’t know this.

My statement stands. The organization your link refers to is not a government entity. You can get more direct information at these two links:

Bush, Cheney Face Torture and War Crimes ‘Charges’ in Mock Trial
Guess who finds Israel guilty of genocide?

In case you are like me and have never heard of the “Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC)” and its “tribunal,” a quick check at Wikepedia tells us that this is “a Malaysian organisation established in 2007 by Mahathir Mohamad to investigate war crimes...as an alternative to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which Mahathir accused of bias in its selection of cases.” Among those tried and duly convicted by the “tribunal” are of course George W. Bush and Tony Blair

Mahathir Mohamad, the founder of this kangaroo court, was Prime Minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003. In October 2003, shortly before he stepped down as prime minister, he attracted international attention with a speech at a summit for the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), where he told his audience that while Muslims “have the biggest oil reserve in the world,” “have great wealth” and “control 57 out of the 180 countries in the world,” they “will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews.” Indeed, according to Mahathir, “today the Jews rule the world by proxy.”

Sounds exactly like the south of the United States.

FTFY.

Didn't you get the memo? It's not the South that's standing in the way of the Progressive New World Order any more, it's "Rurl 'Merica".

The participation rate, the percentage of Americans working is at a 38 year low.

An economy with fewer Americans working is not 'great'.

It's almost like free speech is more of a social justice value than a meathead one.

*snort*

http://thoughtcatalog.com/andr... :

God help us if we have to rely on conservatives to defend free speech.

A list of such censorship is basically endless, so I will have to suffice with a not-so-brief list of some of the more egregious examples:

• A student at Purdue was found guilty of "racial harassment" for reading a book called Notre Dame Vs the Klan. (The Klan is the bad guy in the book.)
• A candidate in the European elections was arrested in Britain for quoting a passage from Winston Churchill about Islam.
• Gert Wilders, a politician in the Netherlands, was tried on five counts including "criminally insulting Muslims because of their religion."
• Both Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant were dragged in front of the Canadian Human Rights Commission for being Islamophobic.
• Conservative radio host Michael Savage was banned in Britain.
• The group Women, Action and Media convinced Twitter to allow them help report and censor harassment and hate speech. Twitter subsequently suspended the accounts of the anti-feminist Youtubers Thunderfoot and Mykeru (they were later reinstated). Both of them are liberals, by the way.
• Adam Weinstein at Gawker wants to "Arrest Climate-Change Deniers."
• Brendan Eich was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla for opposing gay marriage. Another guy was fired because someone eaves dropped on his joke about dongles.
• A group called Color of Change was able to get Patrick Buchanan fired from MSNBC for expressing his incorrect opinions (that have been pretty consistent for the last 50 years) in his book Suicide of a Superpower.
• Allegedly, a man was banned from an Oregon college campus for "resembling a rapist."
• The "Pickup Artist" Julien Blanc was barred from entering the UK for making sexist comments.
• The mayor of Massachusetts banned the word "illegal" when referring to, umm, immigrants who came into the United States without going through the proper, legal channels. The Associated Press did

http://cnsnews.com/news/articl...

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/jonathan-gruber-no-obamacare-subsidies-states-dont-set-exchanges

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/ar...

Reassigned, not fired. Also not shot.

Only because our President threatened to go back and add conditions regarding bonuses and other regulatory measures in exchange for letting the banks hold on to the TARP money. Shortly after that all these troubled companies had plenty of cash to pay back the gov't with.

No - most did not want to accept tarp money but the Obama administration made them so they then tried to get rid of those loans as quickly as possible
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://cnsnews.com/news/articl...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

Hey, those lost e-mails are not like a member of the military

Things must be pretty pathetic, if you must bring up Iran-Contras affair to defend a 21st-century Democratic politician. But, yes, those lost e-mails really are not like that. Whatever you might think of Lt-Colonel Norton and that entire things, that business was not for personal gain.

Losing e-mails is penny ante stuff

Losing would've been. But it was deliberate destruction of records. And lying to Congress.

the shit that goes down in Eastern Europe, Russia and the BRIC in general

Duude, you are talking to a Ukrainian expat :-)

We put people in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for the bribery and corruption

If the said pounding really was, what Clinton and Lerner were "facing", I would've been content — and fighting to stop the sexual abuse of inmates. But one of the women retired with full pension, and the other one is fixing to become President — with 46% of the nation retaining "favourable" opinion of her... Maybe, Americans ought to learn, what "Maidan" has come to mean too...

My comment was poorly worded, the "them" was meant to be the IPCC and Climatologists in general, not specifically the IPCC alone;

the GAO found that the State Department provided $19 million for administrative and other expenses, while the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) provided $12.1 million in technical support through the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), averaging an annual $3.1 million to the IPCC over 10 years -- $31.1 million so far. U.S. Taxpayers Cover Nearly Half the Cost of U.N.’s Global Warming Panel

but for Climatologists and Green Energy in general

According to the GAO, annual federal climate spending has increased from $4.6 billion in 2003 to $8.8 billion in 2010, amounting to $106.7 billion over that period. The money was spent in four general categories: technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, science to understand climate changes, international assistance for developing countries, and wildlife adaptation to respond to actual or expected changes. Technology spending, the largest category, grew from $2.56 billion to $5.5 billion over this period, increasingly advancing over others in total share. Data compiled by Joanne Nova at the Science and Policy Institute indicates that the U.S. Government spent more than $32.5 billion on climate studies between 1989 and 2009. This doesn’t count about $79 billion more spent for climate change technology research, foreign aid and tax breaks for “green energy.” The Alarming Cost Of Climate Change Hysteria

so yes I stand by my billions. It's just stupid to think the IPCC would cherry-pick data that undermines their entire purpose for existing.

All we had to do was LITERALLY NOTHING

But then, what's going to be his legacy? Not Obamacare, not peaceful Iraq (or Libya), not economic recovery, not lower unemployment, not reductions in income disparity.

Liberalization of marijuana? But that's individual States' achievement...

Being able to claim to have "normalized relationship" with Iran (and Cuba) will — for generations — be trumpeted as "success" by sympathetic historians. Or so he hopes...

There will always be stooges in any movement

Well, the opposition to the Korean war — as I outlined from the get-go — never rose to anywhere the same pitch. Not while the war was running, not later. Soldiers returning from Vietnam war were "baby-killers", but those who came back from Korea were not. The "peace-movement" being infested by stooges is a confirmed theory that explains all of the known facts. It may be difficult for you to accept, probably, because you and/or your parents participated — without knowing, who got the ball rolling, of course, being sincere useful idiots — but that's what it is.

Yeah, I'm Canadian and I'm quite certain neither of my parents really participated in the peace movement. I would point to this fact as evidence to the fact that you're over-extrapolating from limited data and reaching erroneous conclusions.

The currently-existing "disaster" was not at all inevitable

All I can say is I consider Marc Theissen to be a terrible analyst, though going into that would be a needless diversion.

and it did not become a disaster for any of the reasons known at the time.of those coordinated protests.

I'm confused, why did you link to quotes of people supporting the war as evidence that the opponents were wrong?

Well, you may not like Michael Savage, but he certainly is not "a fringe"... And the already mentioned Justin Raimondo has his loyal following.

I don't know, I think I'd still call Savage as being on the fringe. Sure he's got a following but he's so far out that he can't even enter the UK.

There you go! NATO was meant to check USSR's advancement further into Europe — without it more countries would've shared the fate of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and others. Because while NATO membership was voluntary, membership of the Warsaw Pact was not. And the Pact invaded those, who tried to get out. What's "unclean" about NATO, I'll never know.

Remember the Cuban missile crisis? The US isn't particularly amendable to countries in its sphere of influence allying with Russia either.

And as you just said NATO was meant to counter the USSR (ie Russia), of course they're going to react with hostility when neighbouring countries start joining a military alliance literally designed to oppose them.

Huh? If they weren't NATO-members, Baltic states would've been taken over by the same "polite" troops long ago. Moldova and Georgia were invaded before Ukraine.

Though Georgia was invaded while trying to join NATO. And the initial situations with South Ossetia and Transitivia happened in the fairly messy aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. My understanding is that the NATO expansion was interpreted by Russians as an aggressive act, and that's been responsible for the subsequent rejection of Western liberalism and the return to an adversarial mindset.

But, it is interesting... So, in your peace-loving opinion, NATO should've rejected Eastern Europe's attempts to join it to please Russia... Just how do you justify this? What sort of ethical standards do you have? What books did momma read to you? Should the wisest of the Three Pigs have rejected his brothers' attempts to hide in his masonry house — so as not to aggravate the Wolf? Wow!

There will always be stooges in any movement

Well, the opposition to the Korean war — as I outlined from the get-go — never rose to anywhere the same pitch. Not while the war was running, not later. Soldiers returning from Vietnam war were "baby-killers", but those who came back from Korea were not. The "peace-movement" being infested by stooges is a confirmed theory that explains all of the known facts. It may be difficult for you to accept, probably, because you and/or your parents participated — without knowing, who got the ball rolling, of course, being sincere useful idiots — but that's what it is.

Meanwhile, I noticed, that every post I make here gets marked as "Troll" within minutes and I'm getting tired of it. So I'm not posting again — you aren't going to admit it and the anonymous collective with too many mod-points are too cowardly to speak-up.

As it turns out it was actually a very well informed protest movement as the invasion of Iraq was by any metric a disaster.

The currently-existing "disaster" was not at all inevitable, and it did not become a disaster for any of the reasons known at the time.of those coordinated protests.

but I doubt many [Russians] are actually backing the invasion

Yes, unfortunately, many are. Though Putin's support is nowhere near he enjoys in Russia (86%), plenty in the diaspora approve of him or outright like him.

Fringe opinion-makers whom I'd never heard of. I don't think they're really affecting anything.

Well, you may not like Michael Savage, but he certainly is not "a fringe"... And the already mentioned Justin Raimondo has his loyal following.

It should be noted that the West's hands aren't completely clean in this. NATO was started as an anti-Russia alliance

There you go! NATO was meant to check USSR's advancement further into Europe — without it more countries would've shared the fate of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and others. Because while NATO membership was voluntary, membership of the Warsaw Pact was not. And the Pact invaded those, who tried to get out. What's "unclean" about NATO, I'll never know.

expanding into former Warsaw pact countries after the end of the Cold War was absolutely moronic. Without that expansion there's a decent chance that everyone is still on relatively good terms.

Huh? If they weren't NATO-members, Baltic states would've been taken over by the same "polite" troops long ago. Moldova and Georgia were invaded before Ukraine.

But, it is interesting... So, in your peace-loving opinion, NATO should've rejected Eastern Europe's attempts to join it to please Russia... Just how do you justify this? What sort of ethical standards do you have? What books did momma read to you? Should the wisest of the Three Pigs have rejected his brothers' attempts to hide in his masonry house — so as not to aggravate the Wolf? Wow!

Again remember many grew up in the USSR, people are going to naturally defend their side.

I grew up in the USSR too, you insensitive clod.

But in a fight between Russia and Ukraine many will be drawn to defend the entity they identify more with from their youth.

Point is, their propaganda works

As opposed to the checks given to IPCC by government (you know... the people who kill people for a living).

The IPCC runs an annual budget of $7 million, according to the Wall Street Journal, making the United States a major benefactor for its global warming agenda.

That's pretty much chump change in today's world.

"Just look at the news today. Republicans are using four words in Obamacare to remove healthcare subsidies for 15 million people. While the act is completely clear, these four words were poorly chosen, and on that basis they want to throw out a major provision. It's no exaggeration to say that people will die if this challenge is upheld."

The words weren't poorly-chosen. Per one of the architects of the bill, those words were intentional -- both to strong-arm the states into making their own exchanges or risk losing huge amounts of money, and to structure things in such a way that it could be passed via the reconcilliation process instead of as a normal bill. Per his own words (just the first two hits, but google jonathan gruber state subsidies):

http://cnsnews.com/news/articl...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

People are acting like these words are being taken out of context or are just a miswording, and it's pretty disingenious of many pundits (not you -- you're cool and probably picking it up from a pundit). This was built into law as a tactic, and because people didn't go along with it, is hopefully going to bite those who wrote it hard.

I say "hopefully" not because I want people to lose insurance, but because if it's deemed otherwise, it'll be another real blow to rule-of-law and further fracture our society, which will do much more long-term hurt to us as a people wanting to live together peacefully.

A study by researchers from the University of Georgia and Columbia University, which evaluated 5,800 elementary school children, came to the opposite conclusion as these Israeli researchers. Researchers analyzed data from 5,800 elementary school students and found that boys performed better on standardized exams in math, reading and science than their course grades reflected.

From the above-referenced study:

The gender differences in grades emerge early in all subject areas and favor girls in every subject. Because boys out perform girls on math and science test scores, it is surprising that girls out perform boys on teacher grades in math and science by nearly 0.15 standard deviations. Even more surprising is that the girl boy gap in reading grades is over 300 percent larger than the white black reading gap and the girl boy gaps in math and science teacher grades are about 40 percent larger than the corresponding white black grade gaps.

and

the inconsistency between test scores and grades is largely accounted for by non-cognitive skills. White boys who perform as well as white girls on these subject-area tests and exhibit the same attitude towards learning as white girls in the classroom are graded similarly.

So, in short, if a boy acts and has a similar learning style as girls, he will get the same grades as girls. Women dominate the teaching profession - 84% of teachers are women. In Kindergarten it's even worse - 98% of teachers are women. Therefore, women apparently value students whose learning style is similar to their own.

In another study, boys were awarded lower grades by women teachers than by external examiners. Whereas male teachers gave girls the same marks as external examiners.

On the political side, in 1972 there were 17% fewer women graduates of college programs than men and this was considered something of a crisis and Title IX was passed to ensure equal opportunities for education regardless of gender. Today, 25% few men than women graduate from college and President Obama calls this a "great accomplishment."

Yes, because I'm sure there are lots of colleges and universities out there are telling girls that they can't be programmers, and throwing them out of the CS program the second they're discovered to possess vaginas. The administration probably threatens them away with a stick or something.

You are absolutely correct in your sarcasm. Hormones and other chemicals in the body heavilly influence what someone finds interesting. I am a mechanical engineer and always had interests in machines, repairing things, and science. But if I smoke some weed the left side of my brain takes over and creative tasks become much more interesting- playing music, writing, etc. I had no interest whatsoever in playing an instrument until I started using marijuana at age 28. THC, a chemical, has changed the way I see those things and how much I enjoy them.

It could very well be that the chemicals Estrogen and Testosterone have an effect on which things a person likes and how much they enjoy them. If my estrogen/testosterone balance was tilted the other way, maybe I would find teaching small children stimulating and interesting. Or maybe if a women's estrogen/testosterone balance was shifted, they would find writing code fun.

Maybe estrogen and testosterone have nothing to do with the reasons why women aren't that into science and engineering. But maybe they do. There are shedloads of possible reasons besides "the culture" that haven't really been explored. Women are now 33% more likely than men to earn a bachelor degree. That's alarming. Women are getting degrees in literally everything else, including in medicine, advertising, and law. Those fields put up a lot of overt sexist resistance back in the day. Science/Engineering doesn't have that overt sexism (or it doesn't anymore), and I don't think that "subtle" sexism can be more powerful than the overt sexism that existed, and was soundly defeated, in medicine/law. There have been pushes for at least the last 10 years to improve the % of ladies in science and Engineering, and the numbers haven't really budged. I think that if women wanted to be in Science/Engineering, they would be.

First, I'd politely suggest that the first step toward constructive discussion is not to patronize the person you're talking to. Condescension might make you feel great, but isn't a great way to start a difficult discussion.

OTOH, if you're actually genuine about believing that "anyone who doesn't agree with global warming doesn't understand science"...then you might want to check your biases. There are a LOT of scientists - including some climatologists - who disbelieve the all or parts of the current paradigm that "the planet is warming and humans are the main cause". Let's use, for example, Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH) who's shown that observed temps are *radically* different than pretty nearly all the climate models put forward by the IPCC: http://www.cnsnews.com/sites/d... ...if that doesn't make you suspicious of "sky is falling" predictions by the IPCC, what would?

As you posted AC, and I don't even know if you'll come back to respond, it's not worth a comprehensive discussion here, so I'll be as succinct as possible. (If you do come back, and want to have a constructive dialogue, I'd be happy to.)
First, we'll set aside all of planetary history before the last 3m years (because they were warmer), I'd invite you to look at this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
or more zoomed in for specifics: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

There are *clearly* nearly-vertical temperature and CO2 spikes every 100k years or so. The last one was about 100k years ago.

If something happens repeatedly, say, a dozen times in a row, in a reasonably consistent cycle, and then it happens a 13th time, a reasonable observer is going to assert that what ever caused the previous 12 is causing the 13th, and whatever caused them to end will ALSO cause the 13th to end. The fact that you happen to be present to see the 13th, doesn't mean you're the cause.

I am an ecologist actively campaigning against the idiocy of fracking (especially in a karst landscape like ours). I can categorically state that no-one is financing us, let alone the Russians.

You can "categorically state" it, but it may still be the truth. Matt Damon didn't know either...

Russia does not advertise such help, of course. It helps your kind remain sincere and your words — plausible. USSR — through that fun and Earth-friendly agency named KGB — penetrated various churches and "peace" forums, financed terrorists and saboteurs, the works... Most of those did not, of course, realize, where the help they were getting originates...

Today FBI warns us about Cuban intelligence targeting academics (they don't have to name Russia by name here):

Another purpose of a foreign intelligence service is to spread the influence and ideology of its regime, or damage the claims and image of another regime.

Of course, the fools used by such foreigners don't realize, they are exploited — few are bona-fide traitors...

but I fail to see why an otherwise able bodied adult should regard a trip to the polling place as onerous.

But... but... but... your toilet might overflow!

Obama's big push was green jobs. Who can forget the green jobs czar, the Marxist Van Jones.. Thank goodness he was not very successful, because each of them cost around $1.63 million in taxpayer cost. http://cnsnews.com/news/articl... Obama's energy department has given over $11 billion of our money to the likes of Solyndra, Beacon Power, Sun Power, Brightsource, First Solar, ECOtality, and a bunch of others. They have lost money and laid off workers hand over fist. Not only that, but 71% of the money went to democrat bundlers and major fundraisers. The $11+ billion they got cost them a measly $457,843 in campaign contributions. Pretty good investment I would say.

cat_jesus noted:

In Hearing, GOP Chairman Issa Misnames African Country, Repeatedly Mispronounces ‘Ebola’ Issa also thinks he knows more about ebola than doctors at the CDC.

Darryl Issa is an intelligent guy. He's also a well-educated guy.

Unfortunately, he's also a grandstanding, profoundly partisan hack who doesn't give a damn about facts, because he represents a redder-than-red district, so he only cares about getting more face time on Faux News ...

In Hearing, GOP Chairman Issa Misnames African Country, Repeatedly Mispronounces ‘Ebola’

Issa also thinks he knows more about ebola than doctors at the CDC

Idiocracy is happening.

I can't deal with people who make things up. When you've decided to tell the truth, let me know.

Isn't it amazing what you can find when you actually look at what is happening?

Here's something that Trojan could never come up with on its own, plus a bunch of other stuff. I bet it is a revelation that male fruit flies prefer hot, sexy younger female fruit flies, and who could have guessed (or really cared) that it was because old hag fruit flies don't have as much female hormones to attract them. (Headline: "Female fruit flies suffer from menopause, film at 11!") Perhaps most useful of all: most chimpanzees are right handed. The manufacturer of chimpanzee scissors is ecstatic to get that information to help his business.

The NIH is also dumping almost a quarter million dollars into industry to get them to develop more products that they could have paid for with a pittance of their current profits and will be selling for a goodly amount of money. Do you really think the taxpayer should have to pay a company to develop a product that apparently nobody wants because no company is currently producing it already?

Would you like to know why fat girls can't get dates? Was there really any question that drunk men sometimes try to coerce women into unprotected sex?

Should we mention the CDC?

Among them: spending $1.75 million over seven years on a "Hollywood liaison" whose job was to help movie and television studios develop accurate plot lines about diseases. To pay the position, the CDC tapped into an account that was supposed to be used to develop responses to bio-terrorism.

Yes, a movie being more accurate about a disease is a good way to respond to a biological agent. And God knows that the movie industry couldn't have paid for someone to help them make movies more accurate.

Defend the NIH for the right things it does, but don't let that blind you to the stupid stuff it does. And don't let it confuse you into thinking that "freedom to perform research" requires public tax dollars. If you look at this article, which I believe is talking about the same Origami product my first link is, you'll note:

Also supporting innovative condom research is the Gates Foundation's Grand Challenge Explorations grants, a commitment of $100M to encourage scientists to expand the pipeline of ideas to fight our greatest health challenges.

So the idea that private money cannot fund "freedom of research" is just ridiculous.

Darn, sorry, hit "Post" instead of "Continue editing". If you aren't convinced yet, taxes are growing, here is another item: the share of Americans in the labor-force is lower in recent years than in Bush's era, the percentage collecting "disability" is record high, the official unemployment numbers remain stubbornly above Bush's, but the Federal revenue is the highest ever.

This can only mean one thing — those of us, who are still working, are paying the ever higher taxes...