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Bringing back the company town.

I prefer to think of it as the rise of the mega-corp arcologies that I was promised in a cyberpunk future.

Bringing back the company town.

FWIW I have zero problems with gun ownership, I learned firearms safety and operations at an NRA class a long while ago and have used a firearm in both a recreational and sporting capacity.

"There is no reason to think that mass extinctions will not happen in the future, and, in fact, many biologists believe that we are in the midst of a human-caused mass extinction right now. Our ancestors began killing off many large vertebrates some 12,000 years ago (mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and dire wolves, among others), and we continue by depleting the oceans and destroying habitats for plants and animals. There are lots of other potential causes of mass extinction, including the collision of extra-terrestrial objects into Earth, massive volcanism, and glaciation, but no way of predicting which of them might affect us or when (contrary to some bad Hollywood movies). None of these is very likely to happen soon, so we would be better off worrying about our own effect on the planet." - Smithsonian paleontologist Doug Erwin

I don't have a beef with Wall Street. I expect them to be amoral sociopaths focused solely on profit. I have a problem with politicians and a central bank which not only avoids prosecuting them, but actually keeps protecting and bailing them out in return for cash and favors.

The biggest challenge the founding fathers faced was balancing power between urban and rural constituents.

That is some serious historical revisionism that doesn't even pass the laugh test.

Every state has rural and city populations. The EC does nothing to balance them out because it works at the state level, not the district level.

The real reason the EC was created was appeasement of slavers. The infamous 3/5ths clause in the constitution let slave states count their slave population when apportioning EC votes even though slaves themselves did not get a vote. This perverse calculation gave whites in slave states more voting power than people in free states.

The EC's origin is inherently undemocratic and even today the winner-takes-all nature violates the basic democratic principle of one-man, one-vote since a popular vote split of 49/51 would ignore the will of 49% of voters in that state.

If it reaches 100% to convince you of the efficacy, then you will be woefully behind the times. Battery banks already live through most data centers, normalizing power prices and effectively making the internet more resilient. They are now being implemented for municipal power storage, alleviating the temporal shifts for generation/consumption.

One of many articles describing these batteries: https://www.scientificamerican...

Generalizing this concept, here are a few alternatives to electro-chemical storage: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/n...

Kansas, by the way, is not the only location that's moving forward. Instead of try to convince you of how useful this is - it's obviously already happening regardless of your opinion - you should look into getting employment in this sector. It is literally replacing everything in its path.

And technically whoever blew up Newt Gringrich's reign by publishing a cell call intercepted in Gainesville, Florida should have been prosecuted, but no one was.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb... has all the details about the Newt Gingrich call intercept. Ironically, I'm from Gainesville, but never heard about this story until today.

Another thing that prompted the switch were instances of high up government officials having their phone calls listened to by people with scanners.

One in particular. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb...

Also recommend Hamiltons America, both for the history, which is very real, and as a means of getting the feel of the musical without having to shell out a crazy-high ticket price :)

Good documentary based off a good book.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ascent...

Infowars, really? You do realize that Alex Jones has admitted in court proceedings that he's just playing a character and doesn't actually believe the stuff he says, don't you?

The actual tweet is a reply to Kanye West: "@kanyewest you should make a shirt that says, "being white is terrorism"". Kanye West - the "George Bush doesn't care about black people" guy. The Obama hasn't accomplished as much as Bush because "...he ain't got those connections. Black people don't have the same level of connections as Jewish people...We ain't Jewish. We don't got family that got money like that." guy. The reason-he-lost-an-awards-show being "maybe my skin's not right" guy. A guy who's a living parody of himself.

And a guy who runs a fashion line. Hence the joke about the T-shirt.

Of course, to you people the problem isn't the fact that Russia not only launched an aggressive campaign against the public to shift the election, but also tried to compromise voting software and spearfish local election officials. No no, that's not the problem at all. The problem is that someone dared leak the fact that they did this. And that it's someone who doesn't like Trump - like most Americans. And oh my god, she also supports BLM, like the majority of people her age group - including white people in her age group. Clearly the problem isn't a major effort by a hostile power to compromise an election - it's that a person who agrees with the stances of the majority dared tell people about it! Damn her!

Umm, he did not come up with the plan to sell the arms to Iran for hostages. But here is pretty good article behind the reasoning.

he (North) had been diverting funds from the arms sales to the Contras, with the full knowledge of National Security Adviser Admiral John Poindexter and with the unspoken blessing, he assumed, of President Reagan.

North had nothing to do with the arms sales. With that in mind he was following the orders of the President who previously stated "Do anything to help the Contras defeat the Cuban-backed Sandanistas".

This was not a fun party in that administration as half the cabinet opposed the whole thing, yet the President supported it.

If the government cannot be restrained by the courts, any semblance of democracy is gone.

Not like that hasn't happened before...

And please, the NSA? Good luck trying to collect, much less actually stopping them.

The linked article reads: "10 to 20 cm of sea-level rise expected no later than 2050."

Huh? I don't try to keep up with all of these doomsday predictions, but I thought it was supposed to be several feet and that huge tracts of land in coastal areas would be underwater by 2050? so I googled

sea level rise by 2050

The first result was a PBS story from 2012. This article quotes a report in the journal Environment Research Letters stating: "Sea levels could rise as much as 19 inches by 2050, according to what the report calls 'mid-range projections.' " Next result was an article from The Guardian in 2015 which states "sea levels may still rise at least 6 meters (20 ft) above their current heights, radically reshaping the world's coastline". They also reference some pseudo-scientists in some scientific publication

I thought there was some "consensus" on this stuff? Have the "climate scientists" reached the consensus that sea levels will rise by anywhere from 10cm to 600cm by 2050, with 48cm being in the "mid range"?

Predicting the future is NOT science.

A NOSE FOR ODORS
What do dogs have that we don't? For one thing, they possess up to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to about six million in us. And the part of a dog's brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is, proportionally speaking, 40 times greater than ours.

from: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/n...

A dog's nose sure is longer than a humans...

If you look at a dog looking out of the window of a driving car - the activity is mainly smelling, seems to me dogs live in a world of smells rather visible objects.

Walmart and other retailers pressing prices lower and lower, story after story of how this pressure is a race to the bottom when it comes to quality and jobs... are Walmarts sales really hurting?

Except stores like walmart pay more and offer more opportunities for growth than the mom and pop shops that they tend to replace:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ma...

TL;DR version of it:

- Mom and pop stores typically only pay minimum wage and rarely dole out pay increases.
- Mom and pop stores rarely ever issue promotions, except to family members.

How soon? Are you kidding? We already pay more for Internet than any other industrialized country, and some second world countries:

      http://www.pbs.org/newshour/up...

Here's the truth that other countries have already figured out: when the government provides a service, it's cheaper. When private companies provide the same service, it's much more expensive, because they have to make a profit. And while it might have once been true that private industry could do a task better than the government, now private industry has realized that doing a poor job yields higher profit, so we end up getting worse services for more money when private industry provides them.

The federal government should provide all funds for education, for Internet access, and for healthcare. We can start paying for it by cutting the Department of Defense by 10% every couple of years, and eliminating corporate welfare. No more privatized intelligence, no more privatization of military services, no more military, intelligence, or security "contractors".

And eliminate DHS, what a fucking waste of money.

If that's not enough money, let's return to a top marginal rate of 91%. It worked great in the 50s, and the economy was booming.

If the GOP was dumb enough to try a coup d'etat by Constitution, they would find out that they don't run as much as they think. There is a reason why they lost the popular vote.

GOP won (by popular vote) 3/4th of state governerships.

Nope. Governorships are not allocated proportionally. Check out the raw numbers, you'll find it is a lot lower.

GOP won (by popular vote) 3/4ths of state legislatures.

Again, nope. Check out the raw numbers, it's heavily warped gerrymandering and voter discrimination. You'll have to do some work, but try the ones that have lost in court. Like North Carolina. Who also tried such a coup d'etat as already mentioned. It failed. Badly.

GOP won (by popular vote) the majority in the Congress.

Nope!

63,173,815 61,776,554 in 2016.
40,081,282 35,624,357 in 2014.
58,228,253 59,645,531 in 2012
44,827,441 38,980,192 in 2010
52,249,491 65,237,840 in 2008

Notice a pattern to it? Not quite what you think. They're still behind 2 million from 8 years ago.

GOP won (by popular vote) the majority in Senate.

Oh, you don't know how the Senate works do you? The Math works out in favor of the Democrats. By 23 million.

GOP won (via the electoral college) the Presidency.

Yes, exactly, relying on the electoral college shows where the GOP is failing.

Every election Democrats lost in 2016 except the Presidential election, was lost in a popular vote.

Oh my, you want to play that card? Turns out, that actually, when you look at the history, you're wrong. Check out the effects of gerrymandering.

Add in the illegal voter discrimination, the unlawful districts in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Texas, Alabama, and Florida, and the loss in their Arizona lawsuit, and it's not looking good for the GOP.

Yeah, I know you don't want to admit it, but the GOP can't afford a coup d'etat. They aren't winning. They don't have a wide swell of popular support. Frankly, they're lucky they didn't lose the popular vote for the House this time, if that had happened, they'd have really looked bad, the disproportionate representation is bad enough, but not quite

The words "before its term ends April 23".
"set to expire"
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru... (April 10, 2017) "The department will instead appoint an in-house adviser and create an internal committee to study improvements to forensic analysis, Sessions said."

A lot of the domestic flights are not really operated by any of the major carriers. The plane may have the name of a major carrier like United painted on its side. The boarding pass may also have the name and the logo of the airline. You may even think that you bought the ticket from a major carrier when you booked the flight. But the flight is actually being operated by a much smaller local company running on a razor-thin margin of profit. If I remember correctly, this came up a few years ago after a plane crashed in upstate NY. The people who wanted to sue realized they could not sue the main carrier even though that's who they thought the ticket had been purchased from. I think it was mentioned in this Frontline episode

But we already know another blatant mistake of the governments, which has lead to the explosion of the obesity epidemics and millions of premature deaths — the War on Fat. And on cholesterol — though manufacturers are still marketing "low cholesterol" foods, the government's current stance is Cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption...

I'm with you so far.

Though Americans — and other nations following America's lead — grew obese, no one was punished for that mistake.

Umm, maybe. Who do you think should be punished? The scientists? They were saying at the beginning of the War on Fat that the science was inconclusive. It was the politicians who said, "We don't have time to wait for facts. We need to act."

Without any accountability for the FDA personnel even when the fault is obvious, what is there to restraint the EPA? What "checks and balances" are there to prevent them from banning anything another "charismatic and confident" doctor suggests to ban without much proof?

I see how you can get there. But as I said, the problem wasn't with the scientists. It was the politicians pushing the agenda, and the sugar industry funding it.

The "Trust Us" science is junk science — and Congress is absolutely right to fight it, even if they are too chicken to abolish the EPA altogether.

And that's where you go off the rails. In the case of fat, there was heavy industry lobbying in favor of a position that scientists said was unsupported by current research. We now know that it wasn't just unsupported; it was wrong.

In the case of environmental regulations, the industry money is all lining up to say we don't need to reduce fossil fuel use. And the vast majority of scientists are saying that the science is settled, and it goes against what industry is pushing.

But my biggest gripe with your solution is the suggestion that if the EPA isn't perfect, the solution is not to fix it but to abolish it. That's a common solution for certain advocacy groups (and political parties) who know that it's a lot easier to destroy programs that benefit society than it is to build them.

If only we could get this kind of competitive pressure to occur in the healthcare market!

Competition (or lack thereof) is not the issue. Countries where healthcare is publicly funded pay less for healthcare.

I have lived and worked in different countries with (mainly) public healthcare (Germany, France, Japan), and I cannot say that I felt that healthcare was of lower quality than in the US. But it was cheaper, and simpler.

All research affected by HIPAA would be banned by this bill.

No. If it is not personally identifiable, you can publish it. EPA could still use a paper, that says, for example, "Of the 5000 people exposed to such-and-such-sulfate, 537 developed such-and-such-iasis." As long as it does not identify the patients.

Indeed, if doing research in the first place and making it available to the EPA was not in violation of HIPAA (or, rather, HITECH) privacy rules, the EPA can publish it further.

To pretend, this is about "privacy" is a gimmick — a spin, employed by people afraid of the sunlight shining on the darker corner of the government.

This is not a fault of people not caring whether or not research is reproducible, but simply of errors

One is still at fault even if his was an honest mistake...

Whether Global Warming is, indeed, a (grave) threat to humanity remains to be seen. But we already know another blatant mistake of the governments, which has lead to the explosion of the obesity epidemics and millions of premature deaths — the War on Fat. And on cholesterol — though manufacturers are still marketing "low cholesterol" foods, the government's current stance is Cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption...

Though Americans — and other nations following America's lead — grew obese, no one was punished for that mistake. Without any accountability for the FDA personnel even when the fault is obvious, what is there to restraint the EPA? What "checks and balances" are there to prevent them from banning anything another "charismatic and confident" doctor suggests to ban without much proof?

The "Trust Us" science is junk science — and Congress is absolutely right to fight it, even if they are too chicken to abolish the EPA altogether.

Taxation is a fact of life. No civilization could exist without it.

Is there are a Libertarian that has ever demonstrated any knowledge of history or economics?

While I am decidedly not a Libertarian, I'd like to point out that the only US presidential candidate that I saw point out this problem in a debate was Gary Johnson:

Johnson: Well, what I want people to understand is that we’re restricting jobs, that the more you raise the minimum wage, the more and more automation occurs. I mean, you force the marketplace into automation, do you know what’s going to be one of the biggest disrupters here very shortly is the fact that the number one occupation in the United States is driver.

And because we’re going to have automated driving, trucks, taxis, I will tell you, this is gonna be a gigantic disrupter moving forward. And fast food? That is also going to be subject to automation in a really big way, so these are issues. These are big issues.

Me, I like the low prices.

If you want to spend your extra dollar, maybe give it to a charity?

Even if you aren't after low prices, GP's argument, while a popular sentiment, is also false.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ma...

TL;DR: Walmart (and other big box retailers) actually do pay higher wages to the line workers than typical mom and pop stores. Furthermore, unlike mom and pop shops, there are actually opportunities for promotion at a walmart. A typical general manager at walmart sits in the $100k/year range, and the lower level store managers aren't much lower. At a mom and pop retailer however, you'd be lucky if you made it anywhere past being a cashier or stocking shelves. Why? Because most family owned businesses typically assign valuable positions only to family members.

As for GP's comment about Walmart treating suppliers bad, without knowing the specifics, I have a feeling that GP is talking about how Walmart has always lead the way in terms of making its supply chain more efficient, something that started with the barcode:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...

And of course, remember how during the 90's, video games (especially PC games) came in boxes the size of a cereal box, but were mostly empty? Walmart alone changed that by establishing packaging requirements in order for a supplier to be allowed to put anything on their shelves. And yeah, you're damn right the supplier will hate it because they can't make their product bigger and more eye catching than their competitors, however in terms of being less environmentally wasteful, and ultimately reducing costs to the consumer, it totally made sense.

Saving money isn't bad, and in many cases it means you're being more efficient and more practical.

Me, I like the low prices.

If you want to spend your extra dollar, maybe give it to a charity?

Even if you aren't after low prices, GP's argument, while a popular sentiment, is also false.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ma...

TL;DR: Walmart (and other big box retailers) actually do pay higher wages to the line workers than typical mom and pop stores. Furthermore, unlike mom and pop shops, there are actually opportunities for promotion at a walmart. A typical general manager at walmart sits in the $100k/year range, and the lower level store managers aren't much lower. At a mom and pop retailer however, you'd be lucky if you made it anywhere past being a cashier or stocking shelves. Why? Because most family owned businesses typically assign valuable positions only to family members.

As for GP's comment about Walmart treating suppliers bad, without knowing the specifics, I have a feeling that GP is talking about how Walmart has always lead the way in terms of making its supply chain more efficient, something that started with the barcode:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...

And of course, remember how during the 90's, video games (especially PC games) came in boxes the size of a cereal box, but were mostly empty? Walmart alone changed that by establishing packaging requirements in order for a supplier to be allowed to put anything on their shelves. And yeah, you're damn right the supplier will hate it because they can't make their product bigger and more eye catching than their competitors, however in terms of being less environmentally wasteful, and ultimately reducing costs to the consumer, it totally made sense.

Saving money isn't bad, and in many cases it means you're being more efficient and more practical.

UMich was part of the show but the plastic battery segment was actually Zimmerman at Tufts:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/n...

Saw this episode of NOVA, Search for the Super Battery with David Pogue about Tufts University professor and engineer Mike Zimmerman and his solid plastic electrolyte, described here: New Damage-Proof Battery Has Higher Energy Density, Won’t Explode:

But Zimmerman’s battery can withstand repeated damage without risking explosion or fire. In fact, it can continue to power devices even after most of it has been chopped away.

Watched him hit the batter pack it with a hammer, drive nails through it and cut it up with scissors all while the battery kept producing power.

Saw this episode of NOVA, Search for the Super Battery with David Pogue about Tufts University professor and engineer Mike Zimmerman and his solid plastic electrolyte, described here: New Damage-Proof Battery Has Higher Energy Density, Won’t Explode:

But Zimmerman’s battery can withstand repeated damage without risking explosion or fire. In fact, it can continue to power devices even after most of it has been chopped away.

Watched him hit the batter pack it with a hammer, drive nails through it and cut it up with scissors all while the battery kept producing power.

I just watched a recent Nova that highlighted a similar technology, but using plastic rather than glass as the electrolyte. Check out a short clip about it here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/n.... Seems like it has the same advantages, but without issues of brittleness, given that his sample batteries are shown being flexed. On the other hand, the plastic might be more susceptible to cold than the glass electrolyte.

Every ten years, state legislatures and governors have the indirect power to declare war. Here are the steps:

1. Wait for a substantial increase or decrease in the state's population.
2. Redraw House districts in favor of the major political party more likely to declare war.
3. Wait for the new House to take office and pressure the Senate to join the House in declaring war.

The U.S. Republican Party did this in 2010, calling it the Redistricting Majority Project.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/bibliob...

I don't know, 99% isn't too bad. It looks like it is about equal with most of Europe, though some countries are better.

They don't. Generally, anyone working a blue-collar job in San Francisco is commuting from far out of town.

Or living in a vehicle. Seriously, regular families with regular jobs living in RV's. 50% of students are some area schools are homeless. One mayor wants to make it legal for families to park overnight in supermarket parking lots.

... are promises made by Donald Trump. For instance, he promised to deliver water to California
Well, look outside your window: mission accomplished, on time and under budget!
Stop, Mr. Trump, we are tired of all that Great American rain water! You are making us too great too fast!

4. Thomas Jefferson, the most-oft cited slave-owning Founder, never bought nor sold a single slave.

False, Jefferson actually bought and sold several slaves in his lifetime.

You may not think the numbers considerable, but it does show you lie. Or perhaps you're the victim of the censorship and lying of others.

You cite an anecdotal article which does not apply to where most people are complaining about voter ID. Many elderly people, for example, lack an ID. In some rural areas it is also difficult to get an ID since the DMV is often a significant distance away and is open for a limited number of hours, often during working hours. Harlem has a very different makeup than rural areas and access to an ID is far easier.

Here is a better article. About 11% of Americans do not have government issued photo identification cards. A federal court in Texas found that 608,740 registered voters didn't have the forms of identification required for voting.

The amount of voter fraud in the United States is exceedingly low so the whole voter ID laws are a solution in search of a problem. Out of 1 billion votes cast there were 44 cases of fraud, a rate of 0.0000044%.

There is also widespread evidence that such laws are designed to target democratic voters and that they tend to target the poor and minorities.

Or better yet, the English should stop destroying their language:

http://www.pbs.org/speak/ahead...

Setting cars on fire, assaulting people, and breaking windows isn't "protesting."

Sure it is.

http://www.pbs.org/ktca/libert...

You really like beatings as a method of communication. Is your favorite leader Stalin or Mao?

Maybe it's this guy.

I heard a lot of people are inspired by him. Believe it or not, not everybody is an idiot, unfamiliar with the Bible.

There's even a movie.

There's another movie you should see.

Well, actually, it's a documentary about a movie.

Watch it, I dare you.

I wonder what would happen if there was an article like "Dear Black People, stop murdering at 7x the rate of everyone else" (fact if you're curious) or "Dear Gay people, stop adding ever more letters after your special interest groups".

There are dozens of those articles, some people make it a business to take advantage of the rich and prolific market for ears that want to hear that sort of thing. Yeah, sure you'd be competing with Anne Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, but there's plenty of business there.

You could write a book. Be famous. Do interviews. Rake in the dough. It's VERY popular.

Hmm, probably would get called every bad name in the PC playbook.

And? You'd get called every bad name in the anti-PC playbook if you wrote the opposite article. Call for reparations. Point out racism in the right-wing. Denounce conservative bullshit.

Watch the letters roll in. Death threats. Insults. Hate mail.

You could still make money though, it IS lucrative.

I'm a fairly simple person, one set of rules that everyone uses sounds pretty reasonable. If saying a given thing about one group would be racist then saying it about another should be held to that same standard.

That's cute. Too bad for you, the world is very complex, and its set of rules is very difficult to fathom. In fact, saying a given thing, doing a given thing, can be totally different, all depending on a variety of circumstances.

Sorry, you'll have to wise up. You've spent a long time in this thread playing your own "victim card" but I suspect you don't realize that the only people who validate it are the ones who have serious problems with their own conduct.

Robot Santa was a chump. And real St. Nicholas looked nothing like a certain Fox News personality purported.

This is the source of the information. It's part of PBS' "Search for the Super Battery" which airs today (February 1, 2017) at 9 pm on PBS.

And do you have any proof that walmart pays less to their floor workers than those local stores ever paid? Oh that's right, you don't, because it's just not true:

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/i...
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ma...

Contrary to widespread belief, big-box stores and chains have increased wages in the retail sector as they have spread, according to “Do Large Modern Retailers Pay Premium Wages?” (NBER Working Paper No. 20313). Retail wages rise markedly with the size of the chain and the individual store, according to the study by Brianna Cardiff-Hicks, Francine Lafontaine and Kathryn Shaw. As retail chains’ share of establishments has risen from one-fifth in 1963 to more than one-third by 2000, the number of jobs that pay better than traditional mom-and-pop stores has proliferated.

Speak of low skilled, you might try getting an education yourself before spewing that tired old urban myth tripe. Or better yet, at least try to examine all of the urban myths you hear with a critical eye rather than just accepting them as blind fact just because it's the cool thing to do, and do a little more research.

The subject matter Is interesting, but first of all, please link to the original article, and secondly, tone down the sycophancy.

Have the claims been verified by anyone but a Yahoo reporter who knows slightly less than nothing about electrochemistry?

You also might mention that the entire thing is promotion for a NOVA special ("Search for the Superbattery") which will hopefully have more information. (trailer on YouTube.)

I watched a documentary (Frontline) discussing how a bad strain of Samnoinella Heidelberg was being distributed by Foster Farms chickens and how powerless the FDA was to put an end to it. Basically the FDA is powerless unless they can prove a smoking gun. Despite thousands of people getting sick and them tracking it down to certain farms they could do nothing until one person who got sick happened to have another batch of chicken from the same lot that they froze. It took something like 18 months and the FDA could not force Foster Farms to clean up its act because of how hamstrung it is, which is why you usually hear that the recalls are "voluntary" by the manufacturers.

Which started with CNN running a comparison of Obama's crowd during the inauguration compared to a picture of Trumps inauguration 3 HOURS PRIOR to the inauguration start.

False. Your statement is a good example of a fake fact. When you get your news from "alt" fact sources and blogs, that happens a lot.

The photo from the Washington Monument was time stamped 12:01: right at the moment of inauguration. http://www.usatoday.com/story/... Not "3 hours before". There's also a photo time-stamped 11:49:43, and even a time-lapse photo of the whole event here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru...

I'm starting to wonder if it isn't the other way around: a power grab in the US with terrorists as the boogey man (since the Soviet Union and Cold War is over). I used to think it was just ineptitude, but it is just too consistent for that. The US policy in the Middle East always seems to create future enemies that need to be fought, benefiting military contractors. Every bomb dropped needs replaced, just look at those revenue numbers skyrocket! Then of course rebuilding everything afterwards requires expensive contractors as well.

* US backs Shah against democratically elected officials, creating theocracy and a future enemy.
* US trains Bin Laden and others how to fight against a superpower, creating a future enemy.
* US provides weapons to an enemy in the Iran Contra scandal.
* US alllows it's companies to sell key technologies to Iraq, which aided them in their chemical, missile, and nuclear programs, building up a future enemy.
* US, with drones and other planes bomb weddings and children on a disturbingly frequent basis. The military and intelligence agencies know this will create blowback, more future terrorists, yet on it continues.
* US destabilizes Iraq, allowing ISIS to get built up and armed. Say what you will about Saddam, he kept jihadists in check. This enabled an enemy to rise to power, which is still our enemy.
* US provides weapons and aid to jihadists in Syria (same CNN link above) . Come on, if you've been paying attention you know what these people will become right? Future enemies! So predictable!

When will this madness end? No wonder everyone in the Middle East hates the US, just look at history and it's all laid out to see.

Obama got Iran closer to nuclear energy capabilities and further from nuclear weapons capabilities.

Iran was already far from from weapon capabilities because the country had no interest in acquiring one. As even Israelis will tell you.

The Iran deal is the SINGLE factor reducing or delaying Tehran's procurement of nuclear weapons.

Iran's stance against nuclear weapons is why Iran isn't seeking a nuclear weapon, as even Israelis will admit.

"I've got a pen and a phone" was how he phrased that whole "fuck Congress, I can do what I want" thing.

Which he did only well after Republicans in Congress said "fuck Obama". And even then Obama's Executive Order count (I presume that's what you're referring to, anyway) is still one of the lowest in the last century, by raw or per year.

If you want to talk about people who say "fuck Congress", President Trump has so far signed 12 executive orders, which makes his rate 285.7 per year, the second highest in the last century (to FDR's first). This will likely decrease greatly after the first 100 days, of course, but who knows what the future will hold?

In other words, this sort of thing has been something that the Feds have been doing for about 80 years now. get over it.

Okay, now I think you may have replied to the wrong comment. If Pai succeeds, excellent! I have no opposition to the general idea. My laughter was on the idea that the government (present or future) would reign in the abuses from entrenched monopoly ISPs when they (the Gov) have completely failed to do so for at least the last 20 years.

It is because Left Wingers keep parroting "Clinton won the Popular Vote" as if that mattered.

Except it does. Why?

Because it shows Trump is LYING about a landslide.

If you weren't a partisan hack, you'd oppose that too, and point out the real facts. You can't though, because again, you're a partisan hack.

Which you can't even admit, but have to lie about and pretend you're some kind of neutral observer. Who consistently repeats right-wing lies. Huh.

You think we're dumb as you are? We're not, we spot your lies.

When liberals offer that up, it opens up every other comparison out there. Hillary lost the election, popular vote doesn't count. If you wanted it to count, the vote totals would change, substantially.

Whah-whah. It does count. Because that way, we know exactly how broken the Electoral College system is, and no, not every other comparison. Your false allegations about Hillary losing in 49 states, for example. Trump's assertions of a landslide. Those are still lying bullshit.

A lot of Republicans in California don't vote because what is the point?

All evidence indicates a lot of Americans don't vote, period.

Turnout drop is arguable, but even that aside, 90 million non-voters. That's how Trump was able to win Wisconsin with fewer votes than the losing side got in 2004.