Slashdot Mirror

Here's a California case where the cops ended up killing a bicyclist, and one cop also shot the other cop. Because the cyclist was wearing headphones.

There's video:

https://reason.com/blog/2015/1...

States which have legalized marijuana have seen increases in automobile accidents since legalization. Up to 6% more accidents.

Yes, but cannabis-involved fatalities fell in at least one case. Cannabis may turn out to be like roundabouts, increasing the number of accidents but reducing the number of fatalities.

The social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook say that they are platforms, and therefore they should not be held liable for awful things that people say on their platforms. They aren't curated information streams like a newspaper, where nothing is published without editorial oversight.

However, they have been indulging in quite a bit of curation. And it hasn't been even-handed. If they like you, you can literally get away with inciting violence; if they don't like you, they will strike you down or shadow-ban you for any reason or no reason.

There are numerous cases of conservatives being suspended or banned from social media over relatively mild stuff (for example, telling a journalist to "Learn to code") while liberals can make jokes about the President being assassinated, wish for conservative people's children to be raped, etc. The post "#MAGAkids go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper" did not result in any punishment from Twitter. This tweet was accompanied with a cartoon picture of a man feeding a body into a woodchipper and bloody snow. By "#MAGAkids" he meant some high school students who were in the news at the time.

https://www.rt.com/usa/449368-disney-producer-threatens-maga-kids/

Keith Olbermann wrote on Twitter these words: "we should do our best to make sure the rest of his life is a living hell." Who was the target of his wrath? A man who had a permit to hunt turkeys who shot a turkey. Olbermann has a million followers and some of them went on to harass the hunter. Twitter did not punish Olbermann in any way. (Faced by a backlash of bad publicity, Olbermann made a follow-up tweet saying that his words were not intended as an actual threat.)

https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2019/03/27/keith-olbermann-urges-followers-make-hunters-life-living-hell-killing-rare-turkey/

I found an article that claims that a statistical analysis shows that this isn't just a few anecdotes, it's a trend.

https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-twitter-treats-conservatives-more-harshly-than-liberals/

I tried to use Facebook Messenger to send a link to a satirical essay. It would not allow me to send it, and it gave a totally nonsense reason. I just tried it again just now and the same thing happened; here's the error:

It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You've been blocked from using it.

Learn more about blocks in the Help Center.
If you think this doesn't go against our Community Standards let us know.

I was "going too fast"? After not using Messenger for over 24 hours, I attempted to send a single URL, so that message is clearly nonsense. Obviously I was merely guilty of wrongthink. The essay makes the point that the USA is spending so much money that it's not possible to "soak the rich" to pay for it all, using a sort of reducto ad absurdium. Clearly someone who works for Facebook doesn't like this essay or doesn't like "Iowahawk". If you want to read this forbidden essay, here you go:

Iowahawk: Feed Your Family on 10 Billion a Day

Then there is the current controversy over Twitter apparently shadowbanning the movie Unplanned. So far Twitter has adamantly maintained that everything that looked like shadowbanning was just buggy code, but this seems really egregious. The Unplanned Twitter account at one point had more followers than Planned Parenthood, and then suddenly it had zero followers. Peopl

The AC's link is good. Here's another

Even ignoring that, the problem is more fundamental. Let's imagine for a moment the world's one and only infallible drug sniffing dog. He alerts to the SMELL of drugs. That is not the same as alerting to drugs actually in the package. If someone else's package full of drugs got damaged, there may be drugs ON the innocent package. If it rode in the back of a hot truck next to an imperfectly sealed box of pot, it will smell like pot. In either case since it is rare for only 2 packages to be carried together in a truck, far more packages will smell like drugs than actually contain drugs.

Of course, in real life no dog is infallible. They all have a significant false positive rate above and beyond the innocent packages that came in contact with drugs.. When most of the packages checked do not contain drugs, it means MOST packages a dog alerts on will be innocent, which is more or less the opposite of reasonable suspicion.

Oh right, because Monsanto "owns" the EUROPEAN Food Safety Authority and the World Health Organization. Gotcha. Moron.
Also: https://reason.com/blog/2019/02/21/roundup-ready-cancer

"Albert Einstein College of Medicine cancer epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat takes the new study apart and suggests that its findings are badly flawed. The main problem, he argues, is that the researchers combine the results from five case-control studies and one large cohort study which happens to be the one reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute cited above. Case-control studies are notoriously susceptible to the effects of bias, which may be introduced as a result of a poor study design or during the collection of exposure and outcome data."

American universities attitude about people accused of crimes:

"If there are ten people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all ten people."

Read more here.

He's probably talking about the supplemental poverty measure, which takes into account things like the local cost of living, including cost of housing, rather than your measurement which considers someone in rural Mississippi and NYC as being on the same dollar scale, when $X/year in one is a great living, while scraping by in the other.

In terms of education quality, you're referencing their US News and World Report ranking. If you take another look at that page, you may notice that's entirely driven by their 4th in "higher education", which includes educating a lot of people who are just visiting to go to college, while Pre-K-12 they're listed as 44th, right between South Carolina (43rd) and Louisiana (45th). In the interest of fairness, a quality only metric (not using spending as a proxy for quality, but rather just based on test results and adjusting for demographics, including race), CA moves all the way up to 34th.

I'm currently in Charlotte, my wife went to H.S. in Durham. NC's not bad. For the population size, NC even has some good universities.

If you look at a good list of educational quality which doesn't substitute cash for education, you'll find NC #12 of 50, with many other low tax States doing just fine.

If you believe tax money creates educated people, let me introduce you to the most expensive education hellhole in the country, Washington, D.C., where they spend $28K/student per year (twice the national average) and are either the worst or second worst school system in terms of educational outcomes, depending on how you rank them (only school system to make the bottom 2 on both reading, last, and math, 2nd to last).

First we were told cockroaches were the only things that were survive a nuclear war. Now we are to believe that insects are super fragile? I don't think so, they have a super short lifespan and prodigious replication rates so as to be able to out-evolve any threat and take over any exposed ecological niche. The one time humans could have maybe made dent, with DDT and mosquitos, they checked out thanks to more fake science that claimed DDT harmed birds eggs.

Your policy these days should be absolute disbelief in any article trying to make you panic, without strong and un-biased proof. Given the past and current ability of scientists in any field to lie in a large variety of ways, in order to support a result they "know" to be true, means you simply cannot trust published results without a ton of corroboration.

The 2018 US Military Budget was right at $700B:

https://militarybenefits.info/...

For the sake of the conspiracy folk let's allow as it is actually double that, so $1.4T.

So then if we halve that we're back down to our $700B.

OAC's bill has an estimate cost of $4.1T. That has been widely criticized as too little, and estimates I could find online range from $14T to $50T over 10 years:

https://reason.com/blog/2019/0...

https://pjmedia.com/trending/o...

https://www.huffingtonpost.com...

Since these numbers are obviously off the cuff I went ahead and took the average of $25.66T over 10 years.

This means confiscating the $700B for the first year that the AC above suggested would account for approximately 3.5% of the cost. At that rate it would take around 35 years to recoup the costs.

Not to mention that catastrophic impacts on the men and women who WORK in the DoD, disruption of every line of industry who makes and supplies equipment to them, etc. Many businesses would probably be severely impacted if not completely out of business.

TLDR: The AC who suggested cutting the military budget in half for a year has zero understanding of what that would do or cost.

Ferret

The problem with your comparison is that the real issue is needing a license to cut hair, not parenting. The license only exists as a way to reduce competition in hair cutting, transferring resources from people who need haircuts (most everyone) to people who jumped through the hair cutting hoops (a small group with a lot of interest in keeping licensing requirements going), with a sizeable dead-weight loss to the economy from the wasted resources involved in getting the license and in less efficient hair cutting occurring along the way. In some States, the requirements for braiding hair are higher than those for becoming an EMT. How much sense does that make?

As for parental licenses, allowing the government to have the power to determine who gets to reproduce and who doesn't is quite the totalitarian power grab. Sure you want to put that kind of additional power to run your life in the hands of either local corrupt officials, or federal authorities like Trump and Pelosi? How about we start with something smaller and less important, like licenses to be allowed to speak about political issues, first? (Note, for the record I am opposed to that as well.)

Sure, everyone wants free stuff until they are told what the costs are then then they change their mind... But push polls are great to gin up support for the free stuff!

The pauses were so significant, and the 21st century hiatus in particular, serious adjustments to the dataset were needed to hide them. Of course those pesky, original untampered data are still around.

Nobody wants to say fraud, but some things go unsaid.

https://realclimatescience.com/2018/03/noaa-data-tampering-approaching-2-5-degrees/

http://reason.com/blog/2017/02/06/climate-scientists-manipulated-temperatu

"Truth"

https://reason.com/archives/20...
https://www.insidesources.com/...
..and so on: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=why+...
I'm FAR from the only one who thinks this.

Meanwhile here's just ONE proposed technological solution proposed by a Republican congressman: https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/27...
..but you don't want to hear that do you? You just want to "stick it to the liberals" regardless of logic or reason.
You're Just Another Trump-Supporting Jackass Troll. Fuck off.

• It's why we strive to further reduce airliner fatalities when it's already one or two orders of magnitudes safer than any other form of transport. The media gives plane accidents disproportionately more coverage than other transportation accidents, causing the public to demand planes be made safer than they already are.
• Same thing with child abductions. Abduction by a stranger is incredibly rare - only a few dozen cases happen each year. But because the media gives those cases wildly disproportionate coverage, every parent is scared to death to let their child out of their sight for 2 minutes.
• Shark attacks always seem to make the national news, even though on average only about 1 person is killed each year by sharks in the U.S. Meanwhile the approx 100 people killed each year by deer go unreported except maybe as a local news story.
• School shootings are another example - they've actually been decreasing over the last two decades. But because the media automatically splashes any school shooting on the national news, the public incorrectly thinks they're becoming more common. Statistically, more high school students are killed by complications from pregnancy (page 3) than from non-gang, non-suicide school shootings. But I've yet to see a news story take that angle against teen pregnancy.
• Terrorism. If you include all the 9/11 fatalities, you're roughly 4x as likely to die from terrorism than lightning. Exclude 9/11 and you're roughly 6x more likely to be killed by lightning. I think I've seen one news story in 40 years of someone being killed by lightning. Yet every terrorist incident, even the ones which fail and cause no damage or injury, seem to automatically make national news.
• Until the last couple years, the media basically ignored the decade-long rise in drug overdose deaths. It wasn't until it surpassed car accident deaths that they finally began taking it seriously. The day which crystallized this in my mind was the 2016 murder-suicide on the UCLA campus. That story immediately made national news with live coverage on all the major networks. On the very same day 2 people died and over 57 were hospitalized from drug overdoses at a music festival in Florida. But that story barely made it beyond the local papers, and I didn't see any coverage of it on TV. I only happened to see it because I clicked on a different story from a Florida newspaper in Google News.
• After overdoses and traffic accidents, suicide is the #3 cause of non-disease death. But it's extraordinarily rare to see a news story about a suicide unless it's a celebrity. Which is a real shame because this is probably the most preventable cause of death we have. And if more people knew how common it was, they probably wouldn't feel as alone with their problems to commit suicide.

And these are the

Maybe California should slow the human encroachment into their habitats. With people comes noise, pollution, abnormal lighting and invasive species.

And California should stop encouraging building in fire zones.

You mean like North Carolina, on it's third consecutive year of large budget surpluses?

You need to get out of your bubble more.

Also, I hate to break it to you, but California government has been controlled by Democrats for far longer than they've had an officially balanced budget. It's still not balanced if you actually account for public employee pension obligations in a reasonable manner:

California continues to suffer the highest rates of poverty, child poverty, homelessness and unsheltered homelessness in the country. California continues to rank near the bottom on national education tests while failing to educate the majority of students to meet statewide standards on English and mathematics.

For all the talk of balance, California continues its long march toward devoting greater resources to pensions. According to a report released last year by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, while state contributions to pension funds CalPERS and CalSTRS were just $1.6 billion in 2002-03, they are on track to hit $19.5 billion by 2029-30. And that’s just at the state level; the problem is just as bad or worse for counties, cities and school districts.

Wrong.

Can border agents search your phone without a warrant

why is this push so rabid

Its due to scientific illiteracy on the political left. They can't separate high density liquid fuels and internal combustion from the current economical source of those fuels, petroleum. There is nothing standing between us and non-petroleum carbon neutral sources of these fuels other than some science and engineering.

$1/liter $4/gallon carbon neutral gasoline may be feasible:
https://reason.com/blog/2018/0...

Does it? That 18 percentage points of difference between Steam and this new Epic store may lower prices for consumers - if they buy from the Epic store. A developer can offer a product on the Epic store at a lower price AND still make more money per sale. Developers and end users both benefit. Users also benefit from a developer that makes more money because now they can afford to make more, larger, better games than they could before. In some cases, that 18% sale price cut may mean the difference between staying in and going out of business.

And that's just one single aspect of this whole thing.

Do you really believe that The One True X is a good thing? Alright then - let's play your game.

There can only be one model of car. There can only be one model of house. There can only be one streaming movie service, one Internet provider, one phone company, one operating system, hell, why do you need more than one kind of food? It's so much more expensive to produce more than one kind of food, right?

Does that sound like a good kind of world? I don't think so. Thankfully I'm not alone in this. Move to China if you love your Central Planning so much.

When confronted with resistance to these initiatives, members of today's elite betray the venomous hatred that lies not far beneath the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. They find it hard to understand why their hygienic conception of life fails to command universal enthusiasm. In the United States, "Middle America" - a term that has both geographical and social implications - has come to symbolize everything that stands in the way of progress: "family values," mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, retrograde views of women. Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly dowdy, unfashionable, and provincial.

In the borderless global economy, money has lost its links to nationality. David Rieff, who spent several months in Los Angeles collecting material for his book Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, reports that "at least two or three times a weekâ¦I could depend on hearing someone say that the future 'belonged' to the Pacific Rim." The movement of money and population across national borders has transformed the "whole idea of place," according to Rieff. The privileged classes in Los Angeles feel more kinship with their counterparts in Japan, Singapore, and Korea than with most of their own countrymen.

Voters Aren't More Polarized than Ever, Only Pols and Media Are - Stanford political scientist says it's media and political elites who live in ideological bubbles, not regular Americans.

In his latest book, Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting, and Political Stalemate, Fiorina argues that Americans actually agree with each other on fundamental issues such as immigration, marriage equality, and pot legalization. The polarization we hear about is mostly restricted to political activists and media elites who mistake their own extreme views for those of the common people.

"Everybody worries about the average American being ensconced in a filter bubble," says Fiorina. "Most of the research suggests it's the elites who are in these filter bubbles...and have this biased view of the world."

Instead of powering Norsk cruise ships to carry around the One Percent, wouldn't it be better to use those dead fish as fertilizer to grow food to feed the other Ninety Nine Percent?

Just move the 99% into the 1% and we can all be the 1%.

You should run for Congress. You'd probably win in just about any blue district.

Think I'm kidding?

Newly minted Democrat/Socialist Congresswoman Occasional-Cortex (supposedly a economics major) doesn't know what the unemployment rate is.

The report also cited "disinformation and hyperpartisan content" -- or fake news -- as a "pressing concern."

Freedom of speech must — in a society without the Ministry of Truth — include the freedom to lie.

But the targeting of "hate speech" ought to be a "pressing concern" — and for the same reasons. No one lamenting the demise of the "Net Neutrality" would agree, that the regulation would've prevented the persecution of Gab.com, for example. On the contrary, these same people claim "free speech" has become a very lazy excuse to tolerate hatred and the ignorance".

It immediately follows, US still has "too much" freedom — unlike the enlightened and sophisticated Europeans.

As Napoleon once said: "Never interfere with the enemy while he is in the process of making a mistake."

If you just wait a few years Facebook/Twitter problems will be gone one way or another, no need for the government to step in and take action.

Facebook has become universally disliked and distrusted, to the point where I think they have just about zero power over anyone now. They are ripe for competition to take over what they do.

Twitter is simply self-immolating at a rapid clip, never doing a thing the users ask for (like the simple ability to edit tweets), instead doing things like removing features people actually like (the like button) and mass banning supposed bots, but every time carving out more and more real users.

I have been looking around for alternatives, some of which have been discussed here before - there's a great list up on Reason of some alternative social media platforms. I plan to pick one of these (maybe Minds) and stick to that as primary, every now and then checking Twitter/Facebook but slowly fading from those platforms.

To play video games in the 1980s, most of us went to the arcade. For me it was a half mile hike and climbing over a brick wall. Or you rode your bike over to a friend's house who had a home video game console (which weren't as good as the arcade games).

TV viewing has been ramping up steadily. It didn't suddenly spike in the 1980s. In fact it flattened out in the 1980s due to video games.

Actually, thinking back to my trips to the arcade, I'd say the biggest change is that parents don't let their kids play outside alone anymore. My parents gave me a bike as a present, and would let me go anywhere as long as I told them where I was going, and was back in time for dinner. My friends and I made several 10+ mile bike trips around the city. So I'd place more blame on the media for exaggerating the danger of child abductions by strangers.

...what has happened so fundamentally in our country (US) where people don't care about actual citizenship, and protecting our borders?

Let me give you a liberal perspective on this: you are raising a straw man. We have no problem with protecting the border, the problem we have is with using scapegoating and scare-mongering, and bullshit waste of resources like building a wall. If you want to see the source of our problems, it's rich guys buying politicians, not Mexicans sneaking across the border to pick crops.

If you are here in this country illegally, you have criminally trespassed. You should be deported.

No, "trespass" has a specific meaning in law, and an unauthorized crossing of the border does not match that, even if it feels like tresspassing. And even as it were, the law allows people to enter your land against your wishes under certain circumstances. If a neighbor goes on your posted land to hunt, that's trespass. If he goes onto your posted land to escape a home invader, it's not trespass.

Treaties the US imposed on other people after WW2 also bind us when it comes to handling asylum seekers. We don't have to help them get here, but we do have to give them due process and administrative help when they get here, even if they sneak across our borders. It's actually the government that is breaking the law by turning asylum seekers away at the border without a hearing, which of course means they sneak across, which makes policing the border that much harder.

But I just don't get these seemingly increasing number of folks in the US promoting full blown open borders, with no control of who gets in here.

That was how we did immigration up until 1927. You showed up at Ellis Island, were checked for disease, promised you weren't an anarchist and they'd ship you over to the docks at Battery Park and let you go anywhere you wanted. The 1927 quotas were proposed by eugenicists, who were worried that the influx of Jews was lowering America's collective IQ.

Now if you were Mexican, you weren't part of the quota system. You could still walk across the border until 1965. That was because business interests needed the cheap labor. What changed in 65 was the rise of the United Farm Workers. Now this *might* just be coincidence, but if you look at how the'65 restrictions were enforced, they did not stem the influx of immigrants, so much as put those immigrants outside the protection of the law and made it harder for them to organize. The government didn't go after farmers hiring Mexicans, they went after the Mexicans. And the Mexicans they deported would be immediately replaced by other Mexicans, because there was a job waiting for them.

Now restrictions on employers have become stricter, but we still have a system which is dependent upon immigrant labor, but puts those laborers outside the protection of the law. That's the problem with the tip line; it's a tool for payback against people with no rights of due process. This is the problem of immigration in the US: the hypocrisy of the whole system corrupts things that would otherwise be a good idea.

What good does building a wall do if you can just pay someone to wave you through? And yet the demand for immigration security theater has the agency relaxing screening standards that are supposed to catch cartel infiltrators, in an agency that already has a stunning 5% corruption rate. Immigration security theater undermines national security.

Now change the immigration so it allows for the immigrant laborers we actually need and keeps the people who've been here for years peacefully

In 2005, it was very well known that greenhouse effect was much bigger.

True, but at least these folks were willing to put their money where their mouth is. It suggests they at least believed what they were saying. That's better than most on that side of the 'debate'.

Take contrarian hero Richard Lindzen who would only take 50:1 odds. It suggests he's aware that he's 50 times more likely to be wrong than right.

It is interesting to see who is willing to pony up some money to back up their rhetoric, and who is merely spewing denial that they do not themselves believe. For instance, look at Joe Basatardi who in 2011 said "the earth will cool .1 to .2 Celsius in the next ten years, according to objective satellite data." He later refused to follow through when a number of people accepted the bet. Good thing too as his prediction is not looking so good.

Then there's renowned climate skeptic Richard Lindzen who would "take only 50 to 1 odds on global temperatures in 20 years being lower than they are now.". Meaning he didn't have any real faith in statements that he was otherwise suggesting were unequivocal and certain.

Cudos to the two Russian scientists for putting their money where their mouth is. We can suppose they at least believed in what they were saying. I'm less impressed that they didn't actually pay up, but maybe they are in dire financial straits. Who knows.

When I said not fit to be a parent I was referring to the state taking children from parents. https://reason.com/blog/2018/0...

As it should, if severe mental illness prevents safe parenting. For example, a schizophrenic who is too busy hiding from the CIA agents in his teeth to even take care of himself, much less any children.

Can such power be abused? Of course. As can any power that the state wields.

When I said not fit to be a parent I was referring to the state taking children from parents.
https://reason.com/blog/2018/0...

Some years ago Reason magazine did a story on the history of Dvorak.
What they found was that most of the early studies showing Dvorak keyboards to be superior, were done by Dvorak himself,,, who was trying to sell his patented keyboard to the US Navy.
If it works better for you that's great--but the Navy was not impressed and didn't buy it.

https://reason.com/archives/19...
I would agree that on technical grounds, Dvorak sounds like a big improvement over querty... but the few modern studies I've read of showed no clear benefit.

That must be why the EU has been increasing their carbon emissions lately: https://reason.com/blog/2018/0...

I am curious as to how the authorities found out about this. I would like to assume that people don't generally brag about their paid sexual experiences. If she lied about her age to get on the site, then why is this man fully to blame? Did she disclose her age to him before engaging in sex? Does she 'look' 16? Did he record the encounter? Was the whole thing a setup? We need more information, I think.

all of that information is in the article

On August 22nd, 2018 officers in PD responded to a call from a counselor who stated that a client, a juvenile female under the age of seventeen, advised her she had sex with a thirty-year-old male on August 15th, 2018 and was paid $500.00 dollars. APD Child Abuse detectives received the report and scheduled a forensic interview at the center for child protection. On August 27th, 2018, the officer attended the iforensic interview which was conducted by CCP. The juvenile female, hereafter will be referred to as Victim, told the forensic interviewer she had sex with a thirty-year-old- male at a hotel in Austin, Texas and was paid five hundred dollars by him.

https://www.documentcloud.org/...

http://reason.com/blog/2018/09...

https://reason.com/blog/2018/0...

it's called an article because it summarizes, but all the information is in the underlined words. Honestly she got paid $500 to have sex with a thirty year old dude when she was 17?? By sex worker standards alone he criminally underpaid her on top of the inherrant abuse.

I am curious as to how the authorities found out about this. I would like to assume that people don't generally brag about their paid sexual experiences. If she lied about her age to get on the site, then why is this man fully to blame? Did she disclose her age to him before engaging in sex? Does she 'look' 16? Did he record the encounter? Was the whole thing a setup? We need more information, I think.

all of that information is in the article

On August 22nd, 2018 officers in PD responded to a call from a counselor who stated that a client, a juvenile female under the age of seventeen, advised her she had sex with a thirty-year-old male on August 15th, 2018 and was paid $500.00 dollars. APD Child Abuse detectives received the report and scheduled a forensic interview at the center for child protection. On August 27th, 2018, the officer attended the iforensic interview which was conducted by CCP. The juvenile female, hereafter will be referred to as Victim, told the forensic interviewer she had sex with a thirty-year-old- male at a hotel in Austin, Texas and was paid five hundred dollars by him.

https://www.documentcloud.org/...

http://reason.com/blog/2018/09...

https://reason.com/blog/2018/0...

it's called an article because it summarizes, but all the information is in the underlined words. Honestly she got paid $500 to have sex with a thirty year old dude when she was 17?? By sex worker standards alone he criminally underpaid her on top of the inherrant abuse.

However, whatever steps taken should be done with actual planning by competent people that understands the complexities. Trump's administration clearly hire the dumbest and most unqualified grifters.

That applies to every single issue that trump has glommed on to. His schtick is to say "You hate foo? I hate foo too!! You should support me!" But foo is always secondary to his grifting. At best he neglects foo because it doesn't make him richer, but when foo becomes an obstacle to him, he abandons it.

Consequently everybody who thought they would get their issues addressed is actually getting fucked. If you cared about NSA spying on innocent people, the end result of trump's war on spies is going to be increased support for spies as the fact that they actually caught him and his crew conspiring with foreign countries. If you were a steel worker, you won't get jackshit because the steele corps are keeping all the profits for themselves. If you wanted better healthcare, all you are getting is more sabotage. If you were a democrat who didn't like how Comey treated Clinton, he tried to co-opt you into supporting his firing of Comey. If you wanted more racism, trump's going to fire his most effective racist because sessions won't do enough to protect trump from a criminal investigation.

ET4S: Everything Trump Touches Turns To Shit.

All of our guns are most certainly not making us safer in this country

What's your next guess? Guns are used defensively about two and a half million times a year in the USA.

-jcr

That number is a myth:

* https://www.armedwithreason.com/debunking-the-defensive-gun-use-myth/
* https://www.thetrace.org/2015/07/defensive-gun-use-myth/

At most 100k:

In fact, Cook told The Washington Post that the percentage of people who told Kleck they used a gun in self-defense is similar to the percentage of Americans who said they were abducted by aliens. The Post notes that "a more reasonable estimate" of self-defense gun uses equals about 100,000 annually, according to the NCVS data.

* https://www.npr.org/2018/04/13/602143823/how-often-do-people-use-guns-in-self-defense

But probably closer to about 67k:

* https://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/defensive-gun-use/
* http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-guns-self-defense-charleston-20150619-story.html

All of our guns are most certainly not making us safer in this country

What's your next guess? Guns are used defensively about two and a half million times a year in the USA.

-jcr

It isn't illegal to pay someone to keep quiet. It happens every single day. Congress even has a special tax-payer fund they use to pay off people who accuse them of sexual harassment - to get the money they have to sign NDA's. When will those people be indicted for paying hush-money?

That Trump paid off the porn star with his own money may be seedy but is easily explained by trying to protect his family and he would've done it even if he weren't running for office.

Nearly every law expert disagrees with you.

But not to worry, if it's not this, something else will bring him down. There's plenty of evidence. He's the opposite of honest.

It was illegal for Trump to personally pay her because it would be for "the purpose of influencing any election" and it was illegal for Trump's campaign to pay her because it would be "diverting campaign funds to "personal use". I am all for these aspects of election law to be enforced against every elected politician in government so that they may be sent to prison with no exceptions.

http://reason.com/archives/201...

Or this could be because campaign finance law is so complicated that nobody knows what is illegal and what is not.

http://reason.com/archives/201...

>"What is it with liberals getting so worked up about controlling who is allowed to speak? Even Wikipedia says "Liberals sought and established a constitutional order that prized important individual freedoms, such as freedom of speech and freedom of association." Maybe it's time to redefine the terms."

Many already have. Those original liberals are now often called "classical liberals", not to be confused with "modern liberals", who many just now refer to as the "left".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://reason.com/archives/20...

"â Classical liberalism is a combination of civil liberty, political freedom, and economic freedom.

â Modern liberalism is a combination of social justice and mixed economy."

You come off as splitting hairs. If you're not able to dump toxic waste into water systems, that is a regulation.

If I am unable to do it, because the Executive branch decided, I should not be able to — that's regulation.

If I am afraid to do it, because I may get sued by actual victims of my actions, who would successfully convince the jury that my actions have injured them — that's not "regulation".

It is not "splitting hairs" — it is the fundamental difference between Fascism and free-markets.

The "toxic dumps" are an easy poster-child, but other manifestations of the same Fascism are much harder for your to defend. The license-requirements are a product of the exact same mindset, for example.

You equate socialism with not free

No, I don't.

Many people like libraries, the post office, law enforcement, fire fighters, etc.

Law-enforcement can not be done privately. Libraries, mail-delivery, and fire-fighting can — and therefore should.

no, we're not on our way to mass murder.

Every time we succumb to the rhetoric like "This may inconvenience some, but is better for the Greater Good" we make a step in that direction. We may be further away from it, than Venezuela, who in turn is farther than North Korea, but that's the direction nonetheless.

While the society was distracted by the talk of imaginary "nazis", Communists — adherents of the far deadlier, indeed the deadliest, school of thought known to humanity — have crept in on us, and are even fielding national politicians already...

US emissions are down whilst EU - and China, and India - emissions are up. I'm sure this will get down-modded since it doesn't pay homage to the proper models, but facts are facts: and when facts and beliefs/models collide - facts win.

That's because you off shore everything and don't make shit for yourselves these days.

US emissions are down whilst EU - and China, and India - emissions are up. I'm sure this will get down-modded since it doesn't pay homage to the proper models ...

It's informative and the data you provided are valid and sound (no need to be so defensive).

It is a reason to cheer, it's not the whole story though: based on 2015 data, per capita US was above all European countries and overall was the second in the world (considering -0.8% drop in 2016 it still would hold): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://reason.com/blog/2018/0...

Then you'll really hate what the Senate Democrats have in mind.

US emissions are down whilst EU - and China, and India - emissions are up. I'm sure this will get down-modded since it doesn't pay homage to the proper models, but facts are facts: and when facts and beliefs/models collide - facts win.

The term "fake news" arose in US dialog to describe bizarrely distorted and completely made up hit pieces put out against Hilary Clinto and the Democrat campaign by various Trump-supporting people and also certain foreign actors, some of whom were supporting Trump and some were just out to make a living off ad-click revenue.

Just to set the record straight:

The term "fake news" went viral by panicked and authoritarian leftists after Trump won the election. It was an attempt to conflate blatantly "fake news" clickbait with right-leaning websites, so that those sites would be censored by the tech giants, conveniently ignoring the mirror version on the left. The future is now:

"So what happens if Facebook staff were to look at Zimdars' list and accept it and decide to censor the sharing of headlines from these sites? It's within Facebook's power and right to do so, but it would be a terrible decision on their end. They wouldn't just be preventing the spreading of factually incorrect, fabricated stories. They would be blocking a lot of opinionated analysis from sites on the basis of their ideologies. The company would face a backlash for such a decision that could impact their bottom line."

That number was made up by a 9-year old boy.

No one has ever been able to validate it, and those that have tried have backed off the claim:

CORRECTION (April 22, 2018, 4:52 p.m. ET): An earlier version of this article included an incorrect statistic, attributed to the National Park Service, that Americans throw away 500 million drinking straws a day, or 1.6 a day per person. That figure, which has since been debunked in several publications, originally came from the environmental group Be Straw Free, and does not appear to have been based on serious research. There does not appear to be any reliable figure on how many straws are used per day or per year.

Subsidies for uneconomic power technologies that were put in to make people feel good about saving the planet and not to generate electric power.

I have never met a green that could either see past their nose, or wasn't flat out lying about the problems of their religion.

Always blindsided by what anyone with a braincell can see

http://reason.com/blog/2017/09...
wow switch to renewables your power availability goes down and your prices become the highest in the world
or closer to home
https://www.pge.com/en/about/n...
and oddly enough your rates in the golden state are going way up
https://abcnews.go.com/US/stor...

Really if you live in CA and you run into someone advocating renewables do yourself a favor and knock out a few of their teeth.

Not at all. Happens all the time when an employer is forced to garnish someone's wages. Removing a post is not an unreasonable burden on Yelp.

The employer garnishing wages is not taking any of his money, it's the employee's wages.

By contrast, forcing Yelp to remove content implicates their First Amendment rights to expressive speech.

That has its own remedy. Courts don't look lightly on perjury or abuse of process.

The issue is that there is no party before the court to represent this interest. The only people that were caught doing this were exposed by third parties acting on behalf of the public. And while I appreciate their dedication to righting a wrong, this is not a scalable way to ensure justice.

Our court system is just not set up to defend interests of parties not before the courts.