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But that makes too much sense! We need those tax cuts for the rich so there's no money for the infrastructure they don't use or care about. The quickest way to stimulate the economy is to invest in long-term infrastructure. The worst way to stimulate the economy is tax cuts. If tax cuts were the answer then 2001-2008 should have been a huge economic boom and Kansas would lead the nation in growth. Instead, the politicians keep doubling down on failed voodoo economics. Latest news is the Trump administration plans to cut park funding next year by $296.6 million despite a large backlog of needed maintenance. This is despite the fact that the national parks have a huge economic benefit ($92B). This makes perfect sense, right? Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Similar statements can be said about the economic benefits of well-maintained roads and bridges. Poor roads cause a huge economic cost in terms of vehicle maintenance. A couple of years ago the poor state of the roads in San Jose, CA was estimated to create around $850 of damage annually to each vehicle due to the huge wear and tear. Money spent on maintenance is money well spent. I've driven on dirt roads that were smoother than a number of roads in San Jose (e. Trimble and Zanker I'm looking at you, though E. Trimble was finally fixed). (E. Trimble destroyed two rims and tires and Zanker destroyed one rim on my car last year and early this year).

Also they're usually illegal: http://www.npr.org/2014/04/13/...

Each set would consist of batteries and the accompanying solar array to charge them, packaged so it could be deployed as a first response to disasters like this.The ability to get early power to critical facilities would be really valuable. The array shown here looks as though it could fit into a standard 2 TEU, to be shipped or trucked anywhere.

Gibber away all you want about your favorite Elon Musk conspiracy theory. The rest of us have long since stopped listening to you.

Generators are much more compact, easy to transport and get going. That is why FEMA has generators for this purpose. They just didn't have enough to cover every place in P.R. Look at the pictures and see how much it takes to support just this small hospital. PV and batteries make a very poor fast-deploy solution. Even Elon took this long to get one up and running.

http://media.npr.org/assets/im...

NPR
Don't believe reputable fake news, about a copy of the original source?
National Archive

Bill Clinton's mistresses

It disgusts me that you would demean the victims of Bill Clinton's rapist tendences as "mistresses."

Bill is not and never has been Hillary. I dug up what I could of the case, which isn't much, and certainly isn't proven.
link

The best we have is Broaddrick claiming that Hillary said, "Do you understand everything you do?" I just can't see that proving anything, other than perhaps she was defending her husband, which you can't fault her for, unless you can prove that rape actually occurred and Hillary knew about it, and if they could prove that, Bill would be locked up. Oh I know they continually have all these stories saying the Clinton's did everything in the book, but, well, none of them have withstood scrutiny. Donald's stunt with the women was designed to throw Clinton off her game by any means possible. The SNL skit on this was apt. Hillary was stronger than that. She is largely irrelevant now, but the stunt was still despicable.

In the end I'll end with my first point. Hillary was not Bill. Had Bill been somehow running for president (or anything) again, then maybe the women would have been fair game. He was not. It was just Donald showing how low he can go.

But the chicken little approach combined with send-all-power-to-a-central-world-government seems just a little bit suspect to me. As a matter of fact, it's more than a little suspect. It too is in the real of F**K NO.

Evidently you suffered a stroke before you hit post and thought you were in a whole different thread, but let me address this anyway. A little bit of chicken little is actually justified, because the last time we had a rapid climate change event 70,000 years ago, WE ALMOST WENT EXTINCT! So, maybe being a little proactive isn't as irrational as you seem to suggest.

Regardless, you're cherry picking a single infamous cattle town, and ignoring the fact that for the vast majority of people living in the west, someone (anyone!) in their town getting killed (let alone with a gun) wasn't a daily, weekly, or even monthly occurrence.

As long as your only including white people...
http://www.npr.org/2017/04/17/...

Politifact is a blatantly biased organization at this point and a shill for the alt left fascist progressives.

Americans killed by guns in recorded history: 0

Americans murdered by other people with guns in 2012: 60% of all US homicides or about 8300 or about 0.0036% of the population.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

If you remove young black males, who make up less than 4% of the US population, that number is cut in half to 4150... and puts the US per capita murder rate roughly on par with European countries. On a side note, concealed carry warning and brandishing probably stops that many robberies, rapes and murders in a week... (There are about 16,000,000 concealed carry permits in the US right now).
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-t...

Americans killed by medical mistakes each year: about 250,000
http://www.npr.org/sections/he...

Americans killed by antibiotic resistant bacteria each year: 23,000
https://www.cdc.gov/drugresist...

Clearly guns are not that big a threat unless you are an alt left fascist progressive looking to dominate and subjugate the American people. Every dictator in the last 100 years from Stalin to Mao on down the line disarmed their people first and then murdered millions of them. Guns are in fact inanimate objects controlled by their wielder, which is why every LEO in the country carries one. Any group that uses "gun deaths" are political shills with no interest in truth. Gun deaths usually include suicides (who just use different methods in gun free countries), criminals shot by police or citizens, and other justified shootings that are actually a good thing for society and end up saving lives.

I expect it to happen if drone operators continue to do stupid stuff that interferes with aircraft. I'm sorry, but there are too many stupid people playing with drones to have forced this because they clearly can't regulate themselves. Imagine the outcry when people die because of some stupid drone operator hitting an aircraft at some critical point. They have already caused mid-air collisions and have interfered with emergency responders.

Here's a case that resulted in damage to the helicopter:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
Here's a possible hit with an A320:
https://www.theverge.com/2016/...
There have also been hundreds of close calls:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Interfering with firefighters:
http://wildfiretoday.com/2017/...
http://www.mercurynews.com/201...
http://www.npr.org/2015/07/23/...

They can't even control hitting other drones.

https://www.faa.gov/uas/faqs/

because it was, and claims otherwise show a tremendous ignorance of the actual facts.

http://www.npr.org/2015/12/19/...
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/...
http://www.politifact.com/trut...

NPR reporters are very impartial and go to pains to maintain that, sometimes it's irritating to see how they don't call people out. There are also entertainment shows on NPR that do some of what you mention, these shows are often coming from a particular viewpoing, however it should be obvious to the informed listener. Many of their entertainment shows maintain an impartial perspective, but sometimes the interviewers are fooled, I listened to this interview, and was really disgusted at how the interviewer allowed herself to be led and assume certain fallacies.

While they couldn't use propaganda as overtly racist, crack was preferred by poor black people, while powder cocaine was preferred by rich white people. So thinly veiled racist propaganda led to requiring 100x as much powder cocaine to trigger the same mandatory prison terms as crack.

This contradicts the historical record. The Black Leaders of the time were the ones calling for the stiff penalties due to out of control crime. For example gangs were massively prevalent in the 80s - urban homicide rates corroborate this.

Cite 0
Cite 1
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AIM is going away...

http://www.npr.org/sections/th...

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

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

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

I would add that thanks to VoIP technologies, telemarketers are not only alive and well but thriving.

Crowley says it has more than 3,400 commercial containers at its terminal now. That's just one shipping company, at one port. Several other ports are accepting shipments, and stranded crates total an estimated 10,000..."These containers are full of food, these containers are full of water, full of medicine ... full of construction materials,"...

-NPR

NPR had an interesting take on this recently. It seems that seamen have received less and less training over the last few years, an effort to save money. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

the corruption and incompetence levels of American law enforcement have been staggering.

For the drug war, there should be a distinction between federal and state enforcement because that changes who the "target" of enforcement is. That also doesn't address the goal of the drug war and it's efficacy as you are alluding to.

Finally, your argument that black markets create lower prices is anti-intuitive. Normally black markets raise the cost of goods or services because the financial model has to include the risk of being in the business.

If a drug becomes expensive the market will create alternatives. or an example take Krokodil(nasty stuff btw)
Recently because of state initiatives, the black market is competing with legal markets and the black market is cheaper because less regulation (go figure).

There is some truth to that but you must also consider the lack of regulation. For example, in high school it was easier to get any illegal drug than it was to get alcohol because a drug dealer doesn't care who they sell to compared to a store owner that could lose everything. Or using dangerous and cheaper substances to "dilute" the drug to make more money.

Is the rise in right wing politics in Europe enough for you? From, Brexit, to Le Pen to the recent German elections. Europe bans hate speech yet still having problems with hate crimes https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/...
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/...

NPR (Nation Public Radio) posted a story on this:

          http://www.npr.org/2017/09/27/...

At the end of the story they said that since it was 2 black holes, it was unlikely that there would be any light from the event. What was interesting, was that they stated that there were unconfined reports of either a neutron star colliding with a black hole or with another neutron star a few days later. If this observation is confirmed, then there is a possibility that light could have been also observed from that event.

Over the course of a few decades, the apparent age difference of the earlybirds vs the night owls has really started to stand out. With the 'sundowners' (to borrow a term from dementia studies) aging about 10 to 20 years more in appearance than the early risers.

The only way you could possibly get this impression is if your "sundowners" group was highly correlated with smokers, alcoholics and unwise drug use (of the kind further correlated with pre-existing neurological imbalance).

I had N24 for thirty years (recently conquered), and the only reason I presently look my age is the copious amount of albino hair infiltrating an even more copious mop of same-old hair. (Being awake all night for five out of every fifteen days certainly helped to keep me out of the sun.)

The systematically grizzled-before-their-time "sundowner" groups I have known either gathered together in dialysis clinics (member of extended family, who was the only athlete among them), hung out in smoky rooms all day, or retired at age fifty from owning a hectic restaurant to a semi-affluent lifestyle of sailboats, golf, and steadily escalating post yard-arm inebriation.

Stop all this bullshit about 'Muh biologies' as an excuse to stay up later.

If I were you, I'd return both your bullshit detector and your dialect coach from whence they came and demand a full refund (if a $5 Starbucks gift card is the best you can wrangle, I'd still colour your situation improved—should you manage to spend it wisely).

The funny sensation you're now feeling? That's 'muh biologies' putting it's boot up your ass.
_____

On another note, the group of people who sleep less than they ought to also includes a disproportionate fraction of those who abuse fructose (somebody out there is drinking two Starbucks Mocha Frappuccinos per day).

Caffe Vanilla Frappuccino Blended Beverage
Serving size: 16 fl oz
Sugar: 69 g (4.91 tbsp)

How Worried Should We Be About Sugar? — 2016

RAZ: So what is the — what is a daily recommended limit for, like, an adult human for maximum amount of sugar we should be having every day?

LUSTIG: Well, depends on who you ask. The World Health Organization originally said six teaspoons of added sugar per day.

RAZ: Sounds reasonable.

LUSTIG: Well, it is actually reasonable. It's 25 grams. It's not, you know, an enormous amount, but it should be enough. But — but they were lobbied so severely by the industry. So they actually ended up liberalizing it from 6 to 12 teaspoons of added sugar per day.

Sleep deprivation leads to a) caffeine-seeking behaviour, and b) sugary-snack–seeking behaviour, and c) the aforementioned base-clearing (and liver clogging) home run.

Yes.

I suggest listening to Planet Money's Rough Translation in Ukraine if you think that fake news isn't an issue.

The Amish asked themselves similar questions generations ago - long, long before the homicidal unabomber crackpot - and can respond that it is indeed possible for individuals to resist the spread of technology -

Um, not quite

Then again, another study found that students also performed better in school if you paid them to get good grades.

Then again, another study found that paying kids to get good grades doesn't work very well, but paying them to do their homework does.

Paying second graders to read books seemed particularly promising — it boosted kids' reading comprehension, relative to kids who did not receive incentive payments. There was still a significant improvement a year after the researchers stopped paying the kids.

There was absolutely no reason to withdraw from it, and some republicans are only now starting to realize this.

Paris Climate Agreement needs no renegotiation because it's non-binding, it's been criticized for asking too little too late, it was a political and diplomatic move without any negative consequences - other than being a symbolic gesture that doesn't really change much.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion...
https://www.newscientist.com/a...
http://www.npr.org/sections/13...

Even worse, a smart politician could use it in their favor right now. Even if the objective isn't met, it's far into the future, so he/she could just say that his/her political party did everything they could during their term to get there, but other administrations endded up not following it properly. It's the perfect excuse for a political party to return to power when things gets more dire in the future.

What happened there was the usual Trump blindness when trying to undo everything Obama did that got some attention under his administration on the premisse that everything he did was bad in some way, stupid campaign promisses filled with misinformation and vilification, plus Trump being an idiot that only listens to cospiracy theory alt-right channels.

Worst of all: if Trump just kept quiet and didn't step back from the agreement, the US would probably hit it's target anyways. Governments are not leading the way on this - the global economy is.
The economy is moving independent of governmental interference towards renewables, generating less garbage, developing electric cars, closing down fossil fuel power plants, and a bunch of other stuff. We're moving away from fossil fuels because it became economically feasible and attractive to do so, from an international standpoint.

Stepping down from the accord just painted the US as a country to be sidestepped for doing all sorts of businesses that will be moving tech towards cleaner goals - which is why so many US corporations were quick to announce they'd keep following the accord regardless of what the government is talking. It's not because those corporations are "good" or environmentaly friendly or some bullshit. It's because the global economy right now is aligned with those goals.

Notice how many news we hear these days about China's progressive moves towards clean energy. That's because China is trying to get the worldwide leadership on that particular topic. Trump just made it this much easier for another country to assume the position of global leader in a topic that lots of people are paying close attention to.

But now the damage has already been done. With or without renegotiation, it doesn't matter. Republicans can either be outright denied a renegotiation, which will continue looking bad for US in general, or they can get the agreement renegotiated which will keep them on a list of countries that are still in denial of a problem that needs firm stances, not because it's some charity or plead for help from another country, but because of their own interests.

Regulatory filings show the three Equifax executives — Chief Financial Officer John Gamble, U.S. Information Solutions President Joseph Loughran and Workforce Solutions President Rodolfo Ploder — completed stock sales on Aug. 1 and 2.

I'd believe that none of them thought about the data leak in terms of stock price, and that isn't why they sold, but on the other hand I don't really care if they get punished because of this, either.

I just finished Nancy MacLean's "Democracy in Chains". (https://history.duke.edu/book/democracy-chains) I recommend it highly to anyone who thinks the "free market" is the be-all and end-all of economics and economic politics. It is a heavily researched and footnoted, yet very readable account of how the "economic freedom" crowd is incrementally taking over the USA using diabolical strategies hatched over the past 70 years or so. My reading staple lies in the genre of mysteries, horror and the like, but I will say that MacLean's book is the scariest thing I have ever seen.

Are you talking about the free market or the "free market"? The use of quotes when not quoting has variable implications.

Likewise a book about the "free market" may not be a book about the free market. As for the "'economic freedom' crowd" ... for anybody clued into what economic freedom means, the economic freedom crowd is not really a crowd but a small gathering of roughly - and at best - 1% to 3% of the population. Of course if you really meant the "economic freedom" crowd, then it can be as large a gathering as you desire since it claims nothing.

Anyway ... the answers I seek are here:

http://www.npr.org/2017/06/18/...

This is not a book about ideology but rather entrenched groups (red-v-blue). It's not for people that want to discuss libertarianism but "libertarianism". And that might scare you since if we can't have an honest conversation - and I'll 95% bet that this author cannot or won't - then progress will be stiffled.

In honesty, unless you really are a libertarian, there is little cause for fright - from your perspective. It's marketed towards people that enjoy being needlessly scared - like a haunted house for adults with childlike minds.

Per the review - if you do enjoy the horror genre, she has another one out, "Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan".

This is marketed to people with their eyes glued to MSM and thought patterns warped as expected.

just because people share these things, doesnt mean they fall for them. that is something that seems to be ignored.

Sharing things and "falling for them" are precisely the same thing, whether you want to believe that or not. What's the goal of the people creating the fake news stories? To get people to share them, and click on them. That's the goal. The goal is not to get people to believe them. They don't make money when people believe their stories, they make money when people read and share them. So, you did fall for them. You're one of the people paying the people who write fake news, so congratulations.

As far as the political lean of the stories, the creators themselves will point out how stories that would appeal to conservatives spread far more quickly than those targeted at liberals. The people who would share a story like the fake Denver Guardian story in the article don't even bother to look at the source site and figure out that this fake news story is literally the only one posted on the site. You'll get people calling bullshit on any little detail on a site like Slashdot and doing research to back up their point of view, but that doesn't happen on the Facebook feeds of conservatives. People like the guy in that article rely on the lack of fact-checking among conservatives to bring him 5 figures in income per month, so it obviously works.

When did you notice that fake news does best with Trump supporters?

Well, this isn't just a Trump-supporter problem. This is a right-wing issue. Sarah Palin's famous blasting of the lamestream media is kind of record and testament to the rise of these kinds of people. The post-fact era is what I would refer to it as. This isn't something that started with Trump. This is something that's been in the works for a while. His whole campaign was this thing of discrediting mainstream media sources, which is one of those dog whistles to his supporters. When we were coming up with headlines it's always kind of about the red meat. Trump really got into the red meat. He knew who his base was. He knew how to feed them a constant diet of this red meat.

We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.

plague

Check. http://www.npr.org/sections/go...

public hangings

Check. Hangings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Executions more broadly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

horse shit in the streets

http://www.historic-uk.com/His...

Yes, it has.

There are 2 major risks that I'm aware of...

1) You use a counterfeit filter that filters out the visible spectrum, but not enough of the UV or IR. This removes the blink/look away reflex, but still causes damage.

2) You look through anything magnified without proper solar shielding during totality and don't stop looking before it ends. So, that 1 second of magnified sun causes permanent damage before you can look away.

There have also been people who consciously "override" their reflex because they want to see it; or who look, look away, and then look back right away. However, my understanding is that this is very rare, and there have only been a few people who have ever been reported having this issue.

From NPR: "I've seen a couple of patients over the years where, you know, you've got very distinct crescent-shaped scars from looking at a solar eclipse," says Chou.

A category 4 hurricane just hit the Texas coast and our President still hasn't appointed anyone to head the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, or any of the agencies that deal with hurricanes.

As usual, you are either uninformed or simply lying:

Long was confirmed as FEMA administrator by the Senate in June, just a few months ago, but he is not exactly a stranger to the agency. He was a regional manager there during the George W. Bush administration, and he went on to serve as Alabama's emergency management director.

As for DHS, Trump got both Kelly and Duke confirmed; Kelly has taken on a new role and Duke is acting director until a new nomination. You know, as it should be.

No, we're not talking about nominations that aren't getting through. We're talking about nominations that haven't been MADE.

You mean like Brock Long, head of FEMA?

The Brock Long that isn't incompetent?

The Brock Long that was confirmed in June?

It's the exact opposite. A simple google search will show thatright wing violence is 74% more common than left. This shouldn't be surprising. Antifa groups are anarchists. By definition they're unorganized and loose knit. They reject authority on the face of it. The Right OTOH make authority a central plank of their ideology. Better organization leads to more effective violence. That's why militaries use a chain of command instead of voting.

The google search does not given results that say right wing groups are growing. The NPR opinion piece you referred to limits its description of left wing violence to those done by "groups", but compares against all RW violence, individual or group. NPR is not exactly an objective source when it comes to L v R, I guess you know.

It's the exact opposite. A simple google search will show thatright wing violence is 74% more common than left.

This shouldn't be surprising. Antifa groups are anarchists. By definition they're unorganized and loose knit. They reject authority on the face of it. The Right OTOH make authority a central plank of their ideology. Better organization leads to more effective violence. That's why militaries use a chain of command instead of voting.

So, do you deny them your essence?

I agree. There are better ways of collecting funny political memes than using a platform that ought to read you your Miranda rights before you use it. I'd rather not create legal affadavits that can be used to prove guilt of felony offenses, regardless of context, or intent for sarcasm.

Nope you have it backwards.

Nope. It's the way of things. Whether you Admit it or not.

It's the Progressives who only respect a right when it benefits them.

Nope. The way it works is that Conservatives make claims about Progressives, expect us to ignore what they've said and done, and then mysteriously, expect us not to notice the rank hypocrisy that they possess themselves as they do what they want to do anyway.

It is part of their false virtues. When it comes down to it, I'd respect somebody who admitted what they were doing, rather than try to cloak it in sanctimony like Conservatives do.

Privacy is enshrined in the 4th Amendment as any US Conservative will tell you.

The 4th amendment, according to Conservatives only limits the government in its searches, providing no other protection, but you know this since...

We may admit that it's not as all encompassing a protected right as some would like.

Oh good, you admit your principles, if not as earnestly as you might have.

But it is there in our "Precious" Bill of Rights and it most certainly does exist.

Not according to Conservative thought. It isn't there at all. They wouldn't have a problem with this kind of ID, though fortunately, their own abusive acts keep losing in court.

I think both of you missed the point. The fact that the Constitution does not address privacy as a specific right does not mean privacy is not a right. From the 9th Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Nope you have it backwards.

Nope. It's the way of things. Whether you Admit it or not.

It's the Progressives who only respect a right when it benefits them.

Nope. The way it works is that Conservatives make claims about Progressives, expect us to ignore what they've said and done, and then mysteriously, expect us not to notice the rank hypocrisy that they possess themselves as they do what they want to do anyway.

It is part of their false virtues. When it comes down to it, I'd respect somebody who admitted what they were doing, rather than try to cloak it in sanctimony like Conservatives do.

Privacy is enshrined in the 4th Amendment as any US Conservative will tell you.

The 4th amendment, according to Conservatives only limits the government in its searches, providing no other protection, but you know this since...

We may admit that it's not as all encompassing a protected right as some would like.

Oh good, you admit your principles, if not as earnestly as you might have.

But it is there in our "Precious" Bill of Rights and it most certainly does exist.

Not according to Conservative thought. It isn't there at all. They wouldn't have a problem with this kind of ID, though fortunately, their own abusive acts keep losing in court.

You don't put people in jail over civil suits.

In the case of Davino Watson, ICE held him for three years for deportation despite the fact that he is a U.S. citizen. They also denied him access to a lawyer claiming that this was a civil matter, not a criminal one.

When agents finally learned the truth and released him, he sued. An appeals court just denied his meagre $82,500 judgement stating that the statute of limitations had expired WHILE HE WAS STILL IN CUSTODY.

What they did wasn't criminal.

They don't put many executives in jail for criminal acts. How many Sony executives went to jail for using root kits on their audio CDs? Answer:0

How many Wall Street bankers went to jail after causing the 2007 financial meltdown? Answer:35 Compare that with over 1000 bankers jailed after the savings & loan crisis.

The bottom line is that money buys justice in the United States.

So who is verifying the safety of these ultrasonic output. Maybe I am being paranoid, but the US diplomats in Cuba were recently attacked in their residences with ultrasonic devices that were undetectable, except for the symptoms (severe hearing loss, migraine headaches, nausea).

It's probably several orders of magnitude different in energy output, but I would still like to think some accountable government organization signed off on this usage - not just the company feeling that its okay. After all, if you are playing detectable music too loud then you can hear it and your ears start hurting. In this case there would be no warning signs until damage was done. The FDA did years of testing on prenatal ultrasound devices before they became routine in their usage. So who do these companies go to for verifying the safety of this technology before deployment. Or is just the honor system?

This kind of reminds me of the deployment of back scatter x-ray machines for security at U.S. airports that had not been studied for dosing amounts on humans (and ended up giving extremely high exposures). There are news stories from 2010 speaking about the controversies regarding the health effects of the machines, but there are also news stories in 2007 about the machines being deployed and I believe there were limited deployments between 2003 and 2005 (if memory serves me correctly). NOTE: I used google news to search up the old articles.

That's not even close to true. Nazis don't have freedom of speech in Germany, haven't had it for over half a century, but you still hear loud political discourse from all over the ideological spectrum. Nobody was "next".

Germany and free speech, Germany and free speech, where have I heard this trope before? Oh right, last year where a comedian was being charged for the crime of "insulting a foreign head of state". Now to be fair they did eventually drop the charges and made moves to drop that particular crime, though the current status of that effort I do not know. Who knows, maybe the made the motion of repealing it but it "Died in committee" only for the law to be dusted off again when it is convenient.

But the question remains, why was that particular thing codified into law? What prompted the German leaders to make it illegal to criticize foreign heads of state? Was there some pressing crisis of low moral foreign dignitaries in need of a safe space in Germany? I am not sure, but the after effects remain. This is yet another example of the chilling effects that free speech restrictions can have upon "loud political discourse". While you may say there is no slippery slope, I would say that this is but one example of one. Nazi's may not have freedom of speech in Germany, but neither do political comedians.

P.S. For those Slashdotters living in Germany, I am not aware of the current status of your Lese-Majeste laws but do be aware that U.S. President Trump is also a big fan of expanding Libel laws, so unless you know for certain that the law mentioned above was repealed you may want to keep quite about him. Because he will certainly use them against you if he can.

The Electoral College operates the exact same way the Congress does.

That's terrible then. Frightfully so. I shudder at the thought.

It prevents the bigger states from being big bullies and pushing everyone around.

It does no such thing.

Otherwise, the smaller states would have no interest in being part of the Union.

And so instead, we discredit the election system for the sake of a phony, ineffective solution? GREAT JOB.

If you are butt hurt about the Electoral College then you should be equally butt hurt about the Congress.

Um...we are, or haven't you noticed the numerous complaints about malappoirtioment, gerrymandering, and even lack of term limits? There's a reason why Congress polls so poorly. It doesn't represent the people.

They are both designed the same way for the same reason.

Poorly, because the Founding Fathers were incompetent fools who failed TWICE to develop a proper government, and that we're lucky somehow lurches along with some semblance of effectiveness?

Look at how quickly they had to write the 12th Amendment, and they STILL didn't fix things properly.

So petty virtue signalling is better than telling Trump things he needs to hear.

Trump doesn't listen, what's the point of a feel-good membership on a pointless council that accomplishes nothing except legitimizing an incompetent boob?

You really don't make me feel very good about voting Democrat in the next election. If you are an accurate reflection on the Democrat mindset then it's horribly unhinged and divorced from any sort of pragmatism.

And as a critic of Democrats, you make me feel very good about not voting for Republicans in the next election. Your mindset is horribly unhinged and divorced from any connection to reality.

That's an extra bonus above and beyond advocating the labeling people as Nazis so you can act like one yourself.

Yeah, about that...

On the other other hand, Heather Heyer is dead at the hands of the group who was promoting extermination of other races.

http://www.npr.org/sections/th...

And 19 others were injured in the same attack.

Nazi's are rabid dogs.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

http://www.npr.org/2017/06/16/...

and then there's Youtube. I could go on an on and on.

I could give two fucks what it ment in 1921. TODAY, the Antifa are a facist violent group of fucktards that should be labeled for what they are, a terrorist organization.

So who drove a car into a group of protestors, trying to murder them - someone from the Antifa, or someone from the Profa, erm alt-right?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

http://www.npr.org/2017/06/16/...

and then there's Youtube. I could go on an on and on.

I could give two fucks what it ment in 1921. TODAY, the Antifa are a facist violent group of fucktards that should be labeled for what they are, a terrorist organization.

That purposeful denial of reality confirms my opinion.

the whole premise is toxic. the whole premise of the memo is that women are less suited to have tech jobs because of inherent differences between men and women. which is a bullshit lie, but unfortunately self-fulfilling. Women used to be in the field and performing near-parity with men, then tech became a men's job. http://www.npr.org/sections/mo... If you were a woman and had to be treated as automatically less qualified because you're a woman and thought to be inherently not good at a job and saw less-qualified men being promoted above you because they are automatically treated as more qualified because men are thought to be inherently better at the job, would you be happy? Would you stick with that career or pursue it in the first place?

Out of curiosity, how do you account for the fact that women historically had a much higher interest in programming than now?

http://www.npr.org/sections/mo...

That graph would indicate cultural changes, not anything inherent in women.

In fact, women were the majority of programmers during the ENIAC years..

However this close nit community also has a lot of herding mentality. While Independent in nature, they also need to rely on everyone. So chances are they may change their personal belief, if that is what the others strongly think. And the bastard who everyone hates, may also be the only guy who is not afraid to tell you the truth.

My experience is that the liberal cities (ie coastal California) are as herd mentality as they come. They have to be, anything else is a firing offense.

Citation:

http://www.npr.org/2017/08/08/...