Slashdot Mirror

https://www.newyorker.com/maga...

This is how you turn the first world into the third world

Oh dear, you sad semi-literate Trumpie, you missed all the references (not one of them is Reddit). Here they are so you can improve your reading skills.

1) The Guardian - Trump Tower meeting with Russians treasonous, Bannon says in explosive book

2) NBC - A Panama tower carries Trump’s name and ties to organized crime

3) Global Witness - Narco-A-Lago: Money Laundering At The Trump Ocean Club Panama

4) The Guardian - Trumps Panama tower used for money laundering by condo owners, reports say

5) Sketchy Donald Trump Deal Eyed For Ties To Iran | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC

6) The New Yorker - Donald Trump’s Worst Deal:
The President helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard

7) NPR - The New Yorker Uncovers Trump Hotels Ties To Corrupt Oligarch Family

8) Business Insider - Dossier author Christopher Steele: Trumps hotel and land deals with Russians need to be examined

9) New York Times - Trump Associate Boasted That Moscow Business Deal ‘Will Get Donald Elected’

10) The Washington Post - Trump’s company had more contact with Russia during campaign, according to documents turned over to investigators

11) Slate - An Intriguing Link Between the Mueller Investigation, Trump, and Alleged Money Laundering

12) GQ - Inside Donald Trumps Election Night War Room

13) Politico - Trump’s mob-linked ex-associate gives $5,400 to campaign

14) Raw Story - Longtime Trump business partner ‘told family he knows he and POTUS are going to prison’: report

15) The Spectator - Forget Charlottesville - Russia Is Still The True Trumps True Scandal

16) McClatchy - Donald Trump and the mansion that no one wanted. Then came a Russian fertilizer king

17) New York Times - Tracking the Yachts and Jets of the Mega-Rich

18) McClatchy - Trump, Russian billionaire say they’ve never met,

Since the Ukrainian vote to join the EU, Russia has gone on an all-out propaganda offensive with the intention to split the west and weaken NATO. Russia regards the Ukraine as its "home-turf" and buffer against perceived NATO "aggression", and it regards the EU as the gateway to NATO membership for eastern European countries that were formally part of the Soviet Union.
Russia feels as if NATO is encroaching on its sphere of influence and waging an "underhanded" war of political expansion. Looking at a map you will see how one by one, former Soviet republics have been converted into NATO countries.
Russia also feels that this NATO expansion is a violation of a promise made to Gorbachev at the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that NATO would not expand to the east.
For this reasons Russia has decided to go on the offensive and start fighting NATO. Not by military means, since it does not have the means to seriously compete with NATO, but by information warfare, taking full advantage of the traits of our open societies, such as freedom of speech and of the press. Using fake news and trolls that sow discontent and dissent, it intends to cause a rift between our countries and institutions.
Russian agents already provided plenty of cannon fodder to the Brexit crew and succeeded in swaying public opinion. Everything that causes a rift through the EU and NATO is good for Russia.
Russia is very active in spreading fake news and inciting discontent around far-right groups in Europe, using the refugee crisis to full effect (fake news about rapists, terrorists and other criminals among refugees) to strengthen the far-right and to politically destabilize European nations, especially Germany and France. Fortunately these activities have only had marginal success thus far, with the far-right Front National in France and the AfD in Germany gaining some votes, but not enough to pose a serious threat to the political establishment.
It had resounding success in the U.S. were it just so managed to tip the scale in favor of Trump, the weaker candidate, and the US government and especially foreign policy is practically paralyzed and ineffectual at the moment. If you want some information or evidence on these activities, it's really only a good google search away.
Russian activities in Germany and Europe:
https://www.nato.int/docu/Revi...
http://time.com/4889471/german...
https://www.politico.eu/articl...
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

On Russia's overall strategy and interference in the US:
https://www.newyorker.com/maga...
http://www.slate.com/articles/...

That should be a good start to get an idea.

The worst psyop since Saddam planning 911 and having WMD's is the propaganda about Russian propaganda.

If someone asks for evidence, present the most compelling and convincing evidence you have.

The evidence we now have is very substantial but circumstantial.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/...

https://www.newyorker.com/news...

Demanding evidence from Slashdot commenters when there is an ongoing - and accelerating - investigation going on by Robert Mueller is pretty disingenuous. By the way, that investigation has already produced arrests and convictions of Trump associates.

You gotta admit, for someone with "no collusion", there sure are a lot of people lying about dealings with Russians. A lot of effort being expended in order to cover up something that they claim doesn't exist.

Your coherence is pretty low. But I think you are making a smugly ignorant rebuttal. Not unlike the alcoholic who says driving drunk is perfectly safe because he's never crashed his car, yet.

To which I reply that there are more than a couple (public) stories of Armageddon avoided by the slimmest of margins. And that was when highly competent and informed people were running things, not idiot hot-heads like today.

For example:

Soviet officer who averted cold war nuclear disaster
Stanislav Petrov was on duty in a secret command centre outside Moscow on 26 September 1983 when a radar screen showed that five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched by the US towards the Soviet Union.

Red Army protocol would have been to order a retaliatory strike, but Petrov – then a 44-year-old lieutenant colonel – ignored the warning, relying on a “gut instinct” that told him it was a false alert.

World War Three, by Mistake
President Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asleep in Washington, D.C., when the phone rang. His military aide, General William Odom, was calling to inform him that two hundred and twenty missiles launched from Soviet submarines were heading toward the United States. Brzezinski told Odom to get confirmation of the attack. A retaliatory strike would have to be ordered quickly; Washington might be destroyed within minutes. Odom called back and offered a correction: twenty-two hundred Soviet missiles had been launched.

Brzezinski decided not to wake up his wife, preferring that she die in her sleep. As he prepared to call Carter and recommend an American counterattack, the phone rang for a third time. Odom apologized—it was a false alarm. An investigation later found that a defective computer chip in a communications device at NORAD headquarters had generated the erroneous warning. The chip cost forty-six cents.

A similar false alarm had occurred the previous year, when someone mistakenly inserted a training tape, featuring a highly realistic simulation of an all-out Soviet attack, into one of NORAD’s computers. During the Cold War, false alarms were also triggered by the moon rising over Norway, the launch of a weather rocket from Norway, a solar storm, sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds, and a faulty A.T. & T. telephone switch in Black Forest, Colorado.

And the rest of the world is far behind: https://www.newyorker.com/maga...

"There's absolutely no legitimate reason for any Syrian to have made the long journey to a Europe nation like Greece, never mind distant European nations like Germany, Sweden or the UK."

Wholly fuck you're stupid, go talk to a syrian refugee you obviously haven't done that. They've been through hell, my neighbours in my last apartment were syrian refugees. The sometimes calm and collected way they talk about what they saw when their lives were destroyed gives you chills.

They were from Aleppo by the way.

https://www.newyorker.com/maga...

On the last day, Oso stayed behind, after his father left for home, to try to sell their apples at an open market. There he was approached by a plainclothes security officer, who asked for his I.D., and told him, "You are a terrorist."

Oso was taken to a local branch of one of the state security agencies, where he was led into a basement with four open cells crammed so full of men that sitting was impossible. The stairs leading down to the cells, and the corridors connecting them, were also packed. It was extremely hot. There were no windows, no air, and the basement reeked from several dead bodies that had been left to rot. Most of the prisoners were half-naked and covered with bruises. An obese man had been painfully stuffed between two close walls, in a narrow passage, and was unable to extricate himself. The man had soiled himself and could not stop crying.

Every so often, the door at the top of the stairs would open, and a guard would call out a name. "While I was there, they called more than fifty people to go with them," Oso said. "Around the clock, all the time, there are interrogations and they are calling people." When Oso's name was called, he was blindfolded and led to an interrogation room. "You have been going to demonstrations," the interrogator told him. "You are plotting to kill members of the security services and the state." When Oso refused to confess, he was escorted down another flight of stairs, to another basement, where he was severely whipped and beaten. Again he was brought to the interrogator, maintained his innocence, and was taken to the basement. This time, a baton was used on his hands and legs. He was brought to the interrogator, did not confess, and was returned to the basement. He was strapped to a metal chair and doused with water. He was repeatedly given electric shocks, each jolt lasting four or five seconds. When he found himself sitting across from the interrogator a fourth time, Oso felt dizzy, as if he'd been drugged. The interrogator produced a pair of pliers. One of Oso's toenails he managed to pull out completely; another he merely broke in half. Oso did not confess.

Twelve hours later, for reasons that he still can't understand, he was released.

Go fuck yourself that syrians aren't refugees you russian or american troll.

Yeah, in the US the NSA would just send a National Security Letter to Intel

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-its-like-to-get-a-national-security-letter

Actually I bet the NSA has people working at companies like Intel and Microsoft who get briefed on things like the ME and have some input into how they work.

That and they've held him for a year without trial

In all these cases it is the defendant (and their lawyers) who must agree the right to a speedy trial be waived.

No, not all of them and the courts support various ways to coerce the defendant into giving up their rights.

https://www.newyorker.com/maga...

June 23, 2011: People not ready, request 1 week.
August 24, 2011: People not ready, request 1 day.
November 4, 2011: People not ready, prosecutor on trial, request 2 weeks.
December 2, 2011: Prosecutor on trial, request January 3rd.

Let us not forget that Turkey voted to end their democracy. Democracy works like capitalism, which is why they are so strongly associated with one another: it works until someone gets enough votes (dollars) to own the whole government (market).

(Trying to fix formatting)

The New Yorker recently had a good article on the subject of carbon capture: https://www.newyorker.com/maga... [newyorker.com].

Any discussion of climate change suffers from a confusion by some people between the various levels of cause and effect:

1. The greenhouse effect: carbon dioxide (and some other gases) absorb infrared light -- that is, they have a color we can't see. The Earth's warmth emits more infrared than comes in, therefore the gases trap energy here.

2. Global warming: the cumulative effect of the greenhouse effect. To doubt this is to deny basic physics.

3. Climate change: at this level, yes, there is uncertainty -- not over whether it will change, but how. This is as complex as the planet: all the clouds, the winds, plants and oceans. Modeling it is difficult. Yet climate must change somehow in response to global warming from the greenhouse effect. Do we really want to test our ability to cope with whatever those changes may be?

If we could see infrared, we would be able to see that the color of the sky has changed, and there would be no doubt or argument about global warming, and we would have done much more to avert climate change.

The New Yorker recently had a good article on the subject of carbon capture: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dioxide-removal-save-the-world. Any discussion of climate change suffers from a confusion by some people between the various levels of cause and effect: 1. The greenhouse effect: carbon dioxide (and some other gases) absorb infrared light -- that is, they have a color we can't see. The Earth's warmth emits more infrared than comes in, therefore the gases trap energy here. 2. Global warming: the cumulative effect of the greenhouse effect. To doubt this is to deny basic physics. 3. Climate change: at this level, yes, there is uncertainty -- not over whether it will change, but how. This is as complex as the planet: all the clouds, the winds, plants and oceans. Modeling it is difficult. Yet climate must change somehow in response to global warming from the greenhouse effect. Do we really want to test our ability to cope with whatever those changes may be? If we could see infrared, we would be able to see that the color of the sky has changed, and there would be no doubt or argument about global warming, and we would have done much more to avert climate change.

And apparently it's already under way.

One of Christensen's main points is that disruptive innovators usually offer products that are clearly inferior to the state of the art in one or more dimensions that matter to the majority of the customer base of the industry giants. For example, the IBM PC was dismissed as a toy by DEC's Ken Olsen, and many others. They weren't entirely wrong. But the upstarts gain a foothold, and that helps fund rapid improvement of their products.

In 2004, Malcolm Gladwell accelerated depreciation as to why so many malls were built in the first place. I just now added this to the Wikipedia article.

. . . not to use either slimeball David Boies' law firm, or Israeli slimeballs at Black Cube or Kroll:

https://www.newyorker.com/news...

GMOs allow much higher productivity from farmers

That sounds great!

which is not inconsequential given the world population.

True, true...

Granted, the overuse of pesticides, herbicides, and similar is quickly showing it's impact in the form of resistant strains (and killing bees, etc.).

Hmm. See, therein lies the rub, right? Those resistant strains, and the impact to our most valuable commercial pollinators, add up to a significant negative impact on agriculture.

The idea of 'organic food' for everyone is nonsense. First, because much organic food differs very little from 'normal' food since there's no real standards to apply and second, because we'd face food shortages if we tried to go backwards to broad use of inefficient farming methods.

We have to go forwards in order to go backwards... in order to go forward. (And then we're doing the cha-cha.) Intensive, zero-tilth organic gardening produces higher per-acre yields than any other form of farming. But there is no denying that it is labor intensive even given the complete lack of mechanical tilth, which is replaced by planting crops (and other beneficial plants) with deep tap roots which become compost in-place. Appropriately to a nerd website, the solution to the labor problem is robotics.

Planting most crops in monocultures is beneficial only from a labor standpoint. It primarily permits us to use mechanical cultivation with relatively dumb machines. They're now up to the point where they can drive themselves up and down the rows, but what about when they can cut weeds and compost their heads (no need to pull them if you can cut them repeatedly), measure food quality (e.g. with laser spectrometry) and harvest based on ripeness... Plants grow better when you plant them with different plants with different needs. If we use intelligent machines (the term is used loosely, but typically) instead of dumb ones, we can plant crops in a way that actually improves both yields and quality whether we use organic techniques or not.

Citation needed.

http://time.com/4783932/inside-russia-social-media-war-america/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebook-twitter-election.html
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war
https://www.newsmax.com/Politics/james-clapper-absolutely-russia-interfered/2017/05/30/id/793102/
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448931/vladimir-putin-russian-election-interference-american-incompetence-weakness-helped-it

I'd lay off the magic mushrooms.

Yeah, I know-- don't bother saying it: you're not going to read any of these because "that's all fake news because the mainstream media lies". Yeah. When you dismiss everything that confronts your entrenched position, yes of course you will never change your mind.

Pensive stare.

Absolutely true. I've always been haunted by this article in the New Yorker about the very things you describe.

Note: I wrote this without having noticed that Richard Brody was mentioned in the story submission.

For me nearly every movie with a very bad rotten tomato score (below 30%) is not worth going to the theater.

Here's my personal calibration of Tomatoes:

_5 95-100___superb
_4 90-95____great
_3 85-90____good
_2 80-85____weak
_1 60-80____meh
_0 30-60____double meh
-1 _0-30____barrel bottom

If I had to engage in a Netflix-style 1-5 rating system (triple meh), then these would be my assigned numerical scores.

Since I agree with Tomatoes about half the time, I would lump 50% of all movies with a score less than 80 on Tomatoes into my "1" bucket , which would encompass everything from beyond terrible to pleasant (but shallow) time wasters.

I have a list of 600 movies I've previously seen, and close to another 400 on deck. Around 75% of my combined lists would score 3 or better on the system above.

I know there are plenty of worthwhile movies (to my own taste) scored by Tomatoes between 40 and 70 percent. The problem is that the filtering gets way harder, and I've got no shortage of options on deck less shrouded in doubt.

Here's a piece of criticism I read recently which I thought was first rate:
The Astonishing Power of "The Master" by Richard Brody

And here's Brody elevating himself to such a high register, I can barely follow his argument:
"Frances Ha" and the Pursuit of Happiness

These are both movies I've watched recently, movies that don't settle into the mind easily, which is more likely to send me scurrying back to Tomatoes to plum various reviews than when I picked the movie in the first place.

Last night we finished The Reader, yet another movie packed with WFT? moments, though in The Reader these "moments" sometimes stretched into dreary 15-minute long siestas. I can usually tell what I really think by whether I read all the green splats or all the red tomatoes first (confirmation bias as dowsing rod FTW). For The Reader I read the splats first. Case closed.

Here's the very last review I read before landing upon this thread:
Roger Ebert on The Fountain

So after looking at the film, I checked out IMDb's "external reviews" section and discovered that, good lord, 221 reviews had been written on "The Fountain." On other sites I discovered that its Metacritic rating was 51 (out of 100) and it scored exactly the same on the Tomatometer.
...
Can a typical aud member be expected to do the heavy parsing that would figure all this out? I doubt it. Most movies, you like to have them all parsed before you buy the ticket. Did I have it figured out? It didn't take me long, and here was my thinking ...
...
That said, I will concede the film is not a great success. Too many screens of blinding lights. Too many transitions for their own sake. Abrupt changes of tone.

And yet I believe we have not seen the real film. When a $75 million production goes into turnaround and is made for $35 million, elements get eliminated. When a film telling three stories and spanning thousands of years has a running time of 96 minutes, scenes must have been cut out. There will someday be a Director's Cut of this movie, and that's the cut I want to see.

So, the gutted carcass of what might have been a challenging, engrossing film, which—for someone who is not a professional critic—probably requires one pass for all the complex parsing, and then another pass to imagine the movie it was really trying to be. That's a big investment. A

Note: I wrote this without having noticed that Richard Brody was mentioned in the story submission.

For me nearly every movie with a very bad rotten tomato score (below 30%) is not worth going to the theater.

Here's my personal calibration of Tomatoes:

_5 95-100___superb
_4 90-95____great
_3 85-90____good
_2 80-85____weak
_1 60-80____meh
_0 30-60____double meh
-1 _0-30____barrel bottom

If I had to engage in a Netflix-style 1-5 rating system (triple meh), then these would be my assigned numerical scores.

Since I agree with Tomatoes about half the time, I would lump 50% of all movies with a score less than 80 on Tomatoes into my "1" bucket , which would encompass everything from beyond terrible to pleasant (but shallow) time wasters.

I have a list of 600 movies I've previously seen, and close to another 400 on deck. Around 75% of my combined lists would score 3 or better on the system above.

I know there are plenty of worthwhile movies (to my own taste) scored by Tomatoes between 40 and 70 percent. The problem is that the filtering gets way harder, and I've got no shortage of options on deck less shrouded in doubt.

Here's a piece of criticism I read recently which I thought was first rate:
The Astonishing Power of "The Master" by Richard Brody

And here's Brody elevating himself to such a high register, I can barely follow his argument:
"Frances Ha" and the Pursuit of Happiness

These are both movies I've watched recently, movies that don't settle into the mind easily, which is more likely to send me scurrying back to Tomatoes to plum various reviews than when I picked the movie in the first place.

Last night we finished The Reader, yet another movie packed with WFT? moments, though in The Reader these "moments" sometimes stretched into dreary 15-minute long siestas. I can usually tell what I really think by whether I read all the green splats or all the red tomatoes first (confirmation bias as dowsing rod FTW). For The Reader I read the splats first. Case closed.

Here's the very last review I read before landing upon this thread:
Roger Ebert on The Fountain

So after looking at the film, I checked out IMDb's "external reviews" section and discovered that, good lord, 221 reviews had been written on "The Fountain." On other sites I discovered that its Metacritic rating was 51 (out of 100) and it scored exactly the same on the Tomatometer.
...
Can a typical aud member be expected to do the heavy parsing that would figure all this out? I doubt it. Most movies, you like to have them all parsed before you buy the ticket. Did I have it figured out? It didn't take me long, and here was my thinking ...
...
That said, I will concede the film is not a great success. Too many screens of blinding lights. Too many transitions for their own sake. Abrupt changes of tone.

And yet I believe we have not seen the real film. When a $75 million production goes into turnaround and is made for $35 million, elements get eliminated. When a film telling three stories and spanning thousands of years has a running time of 96 minutes, scenes must have been cut out. There will someday be a Director's Cut of this movie, and that's the cut I want to see.

So, the gutted carcass of what might have been a challenging, engrossing film, which—for someone who is not a professional critic—probably requires one pass for all the complex parsing, and then another pass to imagine the movie it was really trying to be. That's a big investment. A

The trend has been started by one guy, who wrote management books in the 80s-90s.

"Replacing "progress" with "innovation" skirts the question of whether a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better but our devices are getting newer and newer.

The word "innovate"--to make new--used to have chiefly negative connotations: it signified excessive novelty, without purpose or end. Edmund Burke called the French Revolution a "revolt of innovation"; Federalists declared themselves to be "enemies to innovation." George Washington, on his deathbed, was said to have uttered these words: "Beware of innovation in politics." Noah Webster warned in his dictionary, in 1828, "It is often dangerous to innovate on the customs of a nation.""

"Disruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. Its not more than that. It doesnt explain change. Its not a law of nature. Its an artifact of history, an idea, forged in time; its the manufacture of a moment of upsetting and edgy uncertainty. Transfixed by change, its blind to continuity. It makes a very poor prophet."

Aricle link

https://www.newyorker.com/news... works for me so, since I don't pay any site for anything on internet, it should work for you.

Smoke signals, or at least the interstellar version of them. There is more than enough light coming from a star, all you need to do is attenuate that in some way. For example, block some varying portion of the light using the combined area of the solar sails of a bunch of the star wisps. That variation over time encodes a signal.

Other than that, there is also the possibility of sending the signal from a certain location, which will use the star as a gravitational lense, amplifying a normal radio signal by focusing more photons at the target (Earth in this example). So you need to have say, Proxima Centauri between you and Earth and be at a sufficient distance so that Earth intersects the focal line of the gravitational lense.

Are you saying that the video is fake?

Just that, you're ducking the question on whether this meets your definition of hate speech or not.

Lets make it easy for you. Skip the video, skip Youtube entirely. A simple question: Is advocating for the death of police officers hate speech?

and you're deflecting by using right wing propaganda to divert from the whole point: nazis are EVIL. you're doing what that jackass James O'Keefe was doing by doctoring videos and lying to the public. GFY.

Kill the Alien Bastards. I can see them now, with their gray skin and their large black eyes. Jack Handey knows how to deal with scum like this. Introduce them to the flowers of earth. http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

I am not talking about how much we remember (application layer) or how much we think we remember, but about the raw storage capacity of our brain (physical layer) here the capacity is enormous. Consider: to our current understanding, information is not stored in neurons but in circuits of neurons. We have 100 billion neurons and each can link to up to 10000 other neurons. I have not found any indicator as to up to how many neurons can form one circuit, but suffice to say that the possible number of circuits is very, very high.

The mistake here is going from that we could conceive of a brain using that much information storage in the most efficient form possible to thinking that it does. We know that in practice, brains engage in massive amounts of compression of stored information and reconstruct memories when they are retrieved. That's a big part of why human memory is so often wrong or distorted http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/idea-happened-memory-recollection. As for planes, I agree that by many metrics they are less efficient than birds, but by some metrics (maxmimum speed for example) they are substantially better. But it also isn't intended as a perfect analogy anyways; the point of both the bird example and the fire example is that one doesn't need to understand well a natural thing in order to make something similar to it.

If the last AI winter has taught us anything then that we should not expect the AI development to move very fast.

Part of the AI winter was a collapse in funding more than anything else. And in so far as the AI winter happened, it doesn't mean a similar winter will happen. It isn't infrequent for a technology to emerge at first, seem to not be progressing, and then years later to burst on the scene with little warning. Smartphones, electric cars, and solar panels are all examples.

You mean the thing that is actually a discriminatory burden?

These court cases are crap and I'm sick of this argument that people are just incapable of getting an ID somehow. Everyone should have an ID. Here's a list of reasons why, provided by the NYC government:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/id/htm...

People object no matter how easy the local government makes it. People objected even when they were sending mobile voter ID vans into neighborhoods to make it easy. If those vans were giving out free phones people would have waited on lines for hours.

Voters are supposed to be adults. Treat them accordingly.

Is that Voter ID really free of charge or is it free after you pay a fee to get a certified copy of your birth certificate which is required in order to get your free ID?

You mean the part where you don't pay a fee and even with the existing ID that's available so you can get your free ID?

You mean the thing that is actually a discriminatory burden?

You can find lots of democrat and progressive talking points against free ID, using existing forms of ID which you're already required to use for everything from voting in your local primary(including entrance), to buying a pack of smokes, booze, or any type of government benefits for.

You mean the arguments that actually persuade a court of law, that the point out the discriminatory intent that is quite apparent from the actual statements of the legislators who enacted the law with the specific desire to disenfranchise voters? From legislators, who if your contentions are correct, were not lawfully elected in the first place, thus rendering their position suspect.

Can you make any valid argument where not having voter ID enhances and benefits democracy, democratic votes in any way shape or form?

Yes, I can. You forgot to ask it to be done though.

Can you make any valid argument as to how with such a huge problem with illegals, that not having voter ID benefits the state?

Yes, I can also do this. Of course, since you neglected to ask for any argument to be actually presented, so I don't feel any obligation to do so, and I won't until you address the question of what to do when the state legislature is found to have engaged in discriminatory intent in its passage of the laws. You instead resist any addressing of that concern at all, revealing at best, your own complicity in it.

Really, I don't know why you are so stupid that you go out of your way to dismiss the complaints, if you wanted to actually show your integrity, you'd condemn them even more soundly, and demand that the state ID its residents properly, rather than fail in their duty as has been consistently demonstrated.

It's kinda telling that you are though. It's like you don't know a little contrition would go a long way.

" I have more questions than I have answers when it comes to eating wheat and what it does to me and I get shouted down and name-called when I even BOTHER to try to find answers to those questions."

Here read this:

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

TLDR its actually the substance vital wheat gluten which is added to all breads that is the most likely culprit. Perfectly explains the recent rise in this sort of sensitivity. I dont have it myself thank god, as i love all breads.

"The Bread Lab team, which includes the patient, inventive baker Jonathan Bethony, uses whole grains, water, salt, and yeast. Nothing else. Whole-wheat bread, even when itâ(TM)s good, is usually dense and chewy, and rarely moist; Bethonyâ(TM)s bread was remarkably airy and light. It contains only the natural gluten formed by kneading the flour. Most bakers, even those who would never go near an industrial mixing machine, include an additive called vital wheat gluten to strengthen the dough and to help the loaf rise. (In general, the higher the protein content of wheat, the more gluten it contains.)

Vital wheat gluten is a powdered, concentrated form of the gluten that is found naturally in all bread. It is made by washing wheat flour with water until the starches dissolve. Bakers add extra gluten to their dough to provide the strength and elasticity necessary for it to endure the often brutal process of commercial mixing. Vital wheat gluten increases shelf life and acts as a binder; because itâ(TM)s so versatile, food companies have added it not only to bread but to pastas, snacks, cereals, and crackers, and as a thickener in hundreds of foods and even in some cosmetics. Chemically, vital wheat gluten is identical to regular gluten, and no more likely to cause harm. But the fact that it is added to the protein already in the flour worries Jones. âoeVital wheat gluten is a crutch,â(TM)â(TM) he said. âoeItâ(TM)s all storage and functionality. No flavor. People act as if it were magic. But there is no magic to food.â" ...

"Paradoxically, the increased consumption of vital wheat gluten can be attributed, at least in part, to a demand for healthier baked goods. It is not possible to manufacture, package, and ship large amounts of industrially made whole-grain bread without adding something to help strengthen the dough. Jones refers to these products generically as "Bob's groovy breads." Look closely at labels of "healthy" whole-wheat breads, and itâ(TM)s easy to understand what he means. (After my trip to Seattle, the first bread I saw that advertised itself as having been milled from hundred-per-cent whole grains contained many ingredients. The first four, listed in descending order of weight or volume, were whole-wheat flour, water, wheat gluten, and wheat fibre. In other words: gluten, water, more gluten, and fibrous gluten.) In the promotional videos for Daveâ(TM)s Killer Bread, a popular brand, the founder, Dave, speaks glowingly about the properties of gluten. Pictures of the factory show pallets stacked with fifty-pound bags of vital wheat gluten. âoeI just wonder how much of this additional gluten our bodies can digest,â(TM)â(TM) Jones told me when I was at the Bread Lab. âoeThere has to be some limit.â"

So if no banks will loan Trump money, why would Russia or China take those loans? Surely they know its bad business.

Money laundering. Russia is a kleptocracy, all of those oligarchs need a way to get their money out of the country so they can spend it on stuff you can't buy in Russia. But the west has a range of anti-money laundering mechanisms that, while imperfect, are still a major obstacle. Turns out real-estate is so loosey-goosey that its a pretty good way to launder money.

There has been a ton of reporting on his association with money laundering. But it gets lost in the metric fuckton of other scandal and corruption stories. Here are just a couple of reports, from before and after the election:

FinCEN Fines Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort $10 Million for Significant and Long Standing Anti-Money Laundering Violations

Dirty money: Trump and the Kazakh connection
          — FT probe finds evidence a Trump venture has links to alleged laundering network

Donald Trump’s Worst Deal
          — The President helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

US election: Trump’s Russian riddle
          — The Republican nominee became the face of Bayrock, a developer with roots in the Soviet Union

The question is kind of interesting, but I think it's a loaded question like "Has Donald Trump stopped beating his wives yet?" or "Does the general strike against #PresidentTweety start on Thursday or is that just people calling in sick to watch the Comey testimony?" (See the latest Borowitz column at the New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/humor...)

Anyway, any excuse to write about books, eh? Just now reading an interesting book called Influence about how the compliance professions (mostly in sales and marketing) manipulate people. Rather surprised I've never heard of this guy before, though I've read a lot of related material in psychology.

I would think that if people wanted him out so desperately and they had the goods they would have provided the evidence by now.

To a republican senate who won't even commit to pretending to investigate him?

Hell, they can't even articulate what crimes may have been committed. All they can do is throw out vague, over the top accusations.

Awful hard to do when no one with any power will actually investigate him.

And when has that stopped a congressional investigation before? We spent seven million dollars investigating whether Hillary Clinton personally led a band of islamic terrorists to murder soldiers and government employees and that was well worth it, she'll spend her prison time she earned from that thinking about what she's done. And of course all those climate change scientists, without congress we'd never have punished them for using a hockey stick to heat up the earth. And obviously, Congress very effectively ended the criminal organization that was ACORN many times, which as you know committed the double sin of trying to get poor people houses and also something clearly involving legalizing child prostitution.

But for every slam dunk case congress successfully prosecutes like that, there are silly nonsense things like investigating the financial crisis.

For those with republican brains, the above things were sarcasm. None of those things I mentioned as good congressional investigations were based on anything. Republicans endlessly pursue investigations based on absolutely nothing while ignoring serious crimes. "You can't even say what crimes Trump should be investigated on" is a massive double standard, and this should be obvious to anyone capable of voluntarily chewing. If voters held Trump to the same standard as we allow liberals to be held to, he would be in Guantanamo bay by now.

this is one of several methods that apple and google and many other companies use to steal tens of billions of dollars from citizens in dozens of countries every year.

It's not stealing. It's obeying the law.

The thing that people who advocate for onerous taxation never acknowledge is than when you tax too heavily, you incentivize this kind of behavior.

I still remember learning that some super-wealthy individuals pay people to manage their schedules so they don't spend too many days in places where personal income taxes are too high. At first I was shocked but then, I thought that it made sense. My money is MINE. I'm not going to voluntarily surrender more of it to the government than I have to. If there is a way for me to legally reduce my tax burden, I'll do it. It stands to reason that if a thousandaire like me would do it, a millionaire or billionaire would do it too.

LK

Democrat run cities seem to be the worst, you can check the stats on that one.

Let's see...San Francisco, median household income: $78,378. Los Angeles, $55,909. Chicago? $63,153. Detroit? $26,095. New York City (Home of the President, Donald Trump), $50,711. Looks like your examples are mostly doing well. The only one that's significantly below average is what, Detroit?

So you've got one. Except Detroit is in Michigan. A state run by Republicans for years. Why haven't they fixed any of that city's problems? Why haven't they done what they did for Flint...oh wait, that wasn't a good thing.

Besides, you want to know what's done about the Homeless? Bus tickets. Out of sight, out of mind.

Of course, this has been a problem for decades problem for decades, but you're too busy blaming Democrats, as usual for yourself, but then...why can you offer no solutions, no miracles in your partisan bastions of prosperity?

Oh wait, you think because you can rail about a few high-profile cities, you think nobody has driven through rural Mississippi and seen the abject poverty there.

And you know what? A lot of those homeless are veterans. Maybe you're just not patriotic enough?

Articles:

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

https://placesjournal.org/arti...

good quotes:

Society requires artifice to survive in a region where nature might reasonably have asked a few more eons to finish a work of creation that was incomplete - Albert Cowdrey

This nation has a large and powerful adversary. Our opponent could cause the United States to lose nearly all her seaborne commerce, to lose her standing as first among trading nations. . . .We are fighting Mother Nature. . . .It's a battle we have to fight day by day, year by year; the health of our economy depends on victory

The Mississippi River, with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand - frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river's purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much that the river spills to one side. Major shifts of that nature have tended to occur roughly once a millennium. The Mississippi's main channel of three thousand years ago is now the quiet water of Bayou Teche, which mimics the shape of the Mississippi. Along Bayou Teche, on the high ground of ancient natural levees, are Jeanerette, Breaux Bridge, Broussard, Olivierâ"arcuate strings of Cajun towns. Eight hundred years before the birth of Christ, the channel was captured from the east. It shifted abruptly and flowed in that direction for about a thousand years. In the second century a.d., it was captured again, and taken south, by the now unprepossessing Bayou Lafourche, which, by the year 1000, was losing its hegemony to the river's present course, through the region that would be known as Plaquemines. By the nineteen-fifties, the Mississippi River had advanced so far past New Orleans and out into the Gulf that it was about to shift again, and its offspring Atchafalaya was ready to receive it. By the route of the Atchafalaya, the distance across the delta plain was a hundred and forty-five miles - well under half the length of the route of the master stream.

For the Mississippi to make such a change was completely natural, but in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled beside the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature. The consequences of the Atchafalaya's conquest of the Mississippi would include but not be limited to the demise of Baton Rouge and the virtual destruction of New Orleans. With its fresh water gone, its harbor a silt bar, its economy disconnected from inland commerce, New Orleans would turn into New Gomorrah.

Not to mention Trump has stepped up the bombing in that region, something his supporters said Clinton would do but Trump wouldn't.

That's hardly fair. Trump may have indicated he'd pull back from the region, but he also very clearly stated that he'd "bomb the shit out of ’em.". You can't corner Trump like this. He holds every position.

He also stated he'd have Snowden killed - so why would we have assumed he wouldn't go after Assange? Assange was a real asset during the campaign, but probably quite a liability now that it's over.

...and it was never a crisis until a populist got elected POTUS and "online bullshit" found itself high on the list of the failed establishment candidate's excuses for losing.

Now the elites who suddenly fear that the commoner plebs might no longer vote how they want them to are trying to ministry-of-truth the internet because either A) they actually believe a few russian bots spreading "Fake News" on facebook that not even people with the appropriate biases believed influenced a measurable amount of voters, or B) "Fake News" is a conveniently broad and vague term that can just as easily be thrown at real news/opinion sites with the wrong biases as at news sites documenting the impending alien takeover of Dallas. At least once your friendly unbiased "fact" checkers at Snopes or WaPo give you cover.

With the US relationship with Putin suddenly going sour you can almost bet that the price of titanium is going to go way up in a hurry. If I were in Russia I would buy stock in these guys. Russia can just as easily tighten the supply in a hurry if we put sanctions on them, unlike during the breakup of the USSR when they needed the cash and dumped a butt tonne on the market making the construction of the Guggenheim affordable.

The Chinese still have export restrictions on their supply and I doubt whether they will sell raw product to Boeing. Boeing could be in for a world of hurt and the Chinese and the Russians might just have a big enough lever to get into the commercial aircraft production market. There is exploration going on in Australia that is encouraging in sources of titanium but there is very little in North and South America that can be economically viable in terms of supply. I have the feeling that our "fearless leader" has not taken this into consideration in his somewhat disorganized dealings with the east!

President Obama, too, was ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq. For several months, American officials told me, they were unable to answer basic questions in meetings with Iraqis—like how many troops they wanted to leave behind—because the Administration had not decided. “We got no guidance from the White House,” Jeffrey told me. “We didn’t know where the President was. Maliki kept saying, ‘I don’t know what I have to sell.’ ”

Here's a polemic on the same topic. Internal government staffers have said the same thing: Obama didn't need to leave, he could have left troops in Iraq if he had wanted to.

There is an argument to be made that he failed to make a deal to leave troops because of incompetence, but it's more likely Obama got exactly what he wanted.

Maybe the government should pay them to break windows to generate jobs for glaziers.

Trump is working on that one.

http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/CoverStory-Blitt-Trump-Golf-1200x630-1490910856.jpg

Ok, if it is a known practice, cite it.

Originalism. It's not hard to find.

Find me some supreme court decisions that disregarded amendments in favor of what the Founders thought. Or appeals court decisions. Or circuit court. Or traffic court.

Oh, you want to see it in an American legal context? Most especially you'll want to look at the criticism of the Dred Scott decision for the most infamous example.

More recently, well, there other sources of information as to the patterns and practices of your average self-proclaimed originalists.

It's a bankrupt and destitute moral philosophy.

"Among the first of Bostrom’s questions was this: If the universe turns out to contain an infinite number of beings, then how could any single person’s action affect the cosmic balance of suffering and happiness?"

source: http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

I guess for the same reason as the New Yorker

Personally, I think this is hokum. I am perfectly aware of what "cooperate" spells. Most people do.

...I'm not a dumb fuck

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

        ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard

        ZUCK: just ask

        ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns

        FRIEND: what!? howâ(TM)d you manage that one?

        ZUCK: people just submitted it

        ZUCK: i donâ(TM)t know why

        ZUCK: they âoetrust meâ

        ZUCK: dumb fucks

You have to show that for-profit charter schools get better results than traditional schools. There is no evidence of this, in fact, there is evidence that the opposite is true.

If you want a religious education for your child, that's OK. What's not OK is to use tax dollars to pay for it. You seem pretty concerned that the state should pay for some kids to be taught incorrect information. Why is this?

Question for you: what if someone set up a Wahhabi school in which the children were taught only to memorize the Koran in Arabic (and were not taught Arabic) and was able to get the state to pay for it through vouchers?

Back in 2013 I knew someone who was 100% convinced that Obama called Putin a jackass in public. I don't suspect that Borowitz was actually trying to fool anyone with this, but the distortion was so high for some people at the time that they would believe almost anything that was damning about the POTUS.

Is all your history this bad

Some things in history are indeed bad and that bailout by Bush was one of them.
Here is something to jog your memory:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/...

Now how about you stop following me around with yet more silly "corrections" that turn out to be wrong. Please go haunt somebody else or give up on that habit entirely