Slashdot Mirror

• 3,919 deaths - Accidents (mostly automobile accidents and drug overdoses)
• 2.061 deaths - Suicide
• 1,587 deaths - Homicide (mostly outside school, and gang related)
• 583 deaths - Malignant neoplasms (cancer)
• 306 deaths - Heart disease
• 195 deaths - Birth defects
• 72 deaths - Influenza (the flu)
• 63 deaths - Chronic lower respiratory diseases
• 61 deaths - Cerebrovascular diseases
• 52 deaths - Diabetes
• 41 deaths - Complications from pregnancy and childbirth

Where do school shootings rank? There have been about 250 deaths in school shootings over 18 years, or about 14 per year.(and K-12, not just ages 15-19). Since there are approximately 51 million K-12 students in the U.S., a student's chances of being killed in a non-gang, non-suicide school shooting in any given year are about 1 in 3.6 million. You are roughly 3x more likely to be struck by lightning (1 in 1.08 million).

Like airliner crashes, school shootings are one of these extremely rare, statistically insignificant events whose emotional impact creates a large amount of social interest. This causes a disproportionate amount of press coverage, leading people to wildly overestimate the actual danger. If you really want to save high schoolers' lives, teach them to: drive safely and buckle their seat belts, not to abuse drugs, seek counseling for depression, stay out of gangs, use sunscreen, eat healthy and exercise, get the flu shot, don't smoke, don't eat too many sweets, and avoid teen pregnancy. Each of these will save many more lives than all the hand-wringing over school shootings, some (like suicide-prevention) around a hundred times more.

Throw somebody with little or no training outside of weekly target practice in an active shooter situation and they're probably going to screw up.

Except for all those times they did not screw up.

Do citizens (not police officers) with guns ever stop mass shootings?

I remember when Gabriel Giffords got shot. There was a 'good guy with a gun' on site but he didn't draw.

Joe Zamudio arrived on the scene after the shooter had been stopped, and make the right decision in a split-second call. He illustrates an armed citizen exercising excellent judgment and not screwing up.

An intelligence agency hacked the russians, and saw them hack DNC.

He still thinks the US has a trade deficit with Canada!

It's worse than that.

He BRAGS about knowing jack shit - and then making shit up when faced with facts.

He's literally offering lies and delusional fantasies as reasons and motivation for things he does.

And yet, he still does better than the professional politicians.

That is not, despite what you think, an argument in favor of the professional politicians.

He still thinks the US has a trade deficit with Canada!

It's worse than that.

He BRAGS about knowing jack shit - and then making shit up when faced with facts.

He's literally offering lies and delusional fantasies as reasons and motivation for things he does.

How do you want me to quantify that?

Should I start that even on the low end of 500,000 (to as much as 3 million) instances of defensive gun use dramatically outnumber the 30,000 gun deaths.
2/3 of all gun deaths are from suicide. US is average for suicide so reducing guns does not affect suicide rates.
Reducing guns does not reduce violence as seen in many instances of the US and around the world.
Guns ownership has increased or been steady in the US yet violent crime has fallen.
That doesn't even mention the inalienable right of self defense and the philosophy behind the 2nd amendment supported by historical precedent.

You have an uphill battle to say that gun ownership is in any way shape or form, bad. If you get rid of guns that doesn't end the problems of gang violence or suicide. Yes, getting in an airplane makes you many times more likely to die in a plane crash. Are you going to stop flying now?

https://www.cnsnews.com/news/a...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://crimeresearch.org/2013...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You left out Hillary buying up the DCCC debt, owning it financially, then voting herself in as the primary candidate. You also left out where the DNC said “The party has the freedom of association to decide how it’s gonna select its representatives to the convention and to the state party,” said Spiva. “Even to define what constitutes evenhandedness and impartiality really would already drag the court well into a political question and a question of how the party runs its own affairs. The party could have favored a candidate. I’ll put it that way.”

You can take your datacenter out of Russia, but taking Russia our of your datacenter is much harder.

And harder still is to flush the FSB-agents and collaborators out of your personnel.

I guess you've never heard of "civil asset forfeiture", which is quite popular with many law enforcement departments these days. If the police just "feel" that anything you have might somehow be related to drug money, they can (and often do) seize it. Then you have to take them to court and prove it's NOT, often spending more than what what seized. No proof, arrests, or real "due process" is needed from them to keep your stuff. Carrying cash to go buy something? You might be going to buy drugs (even though your record is completely clean and you've never been involved with anything like that before) and now your cash and car is theirs.

References: (this is just a few, there are hundreds if not thousands of these types of abuses every year now)...
nationalreview.com
forbes.com
forbes.com
metrotimes.com
newschannel5.com
onlineathens.com
vox.com
washingtonpost.com

Because he didn't end them. Any more simple answers to simple questions?

Here is a better article: https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote.

There is a huge distinction between a person proactively going to a campaign website and Facebook's API providing information, and a researcher granted a level of access provided for research using that to obtain private data to sell for commercial purposes.

To be clear - in my estimation Facebook should not be providing extensive information about people, especially people who simply happen to know someone who granted access.

That threshold has already been defined. Libel, slander, incitement to violence, perjury, etc. are considered crimes to be considered in court.

You're correct that the US does have protections to free speech built into the constitution. Burning the flag is considered free speech, and the supreme court reaffirmed that there is no exception to the first amendment for hate speech.

That said, the letter and spirit of the law matters less than your ability to pay for lawyers to defend you, and post bail. Thus a stupid kid gets tossed in jail for half a year for lack of understanding that using Facebook under your real name amounts to writing legal affidavits that can be used against you in a court of law, without consideration of the context or intent in which it was spoken.

Eventually it will be understood that the 1st is problematic and there will be a need to circumvent it for the greater good. "freeze peach" trolls will appear in forums everywhere, late night comedians will make snarky and deriding insults about free speech advocates to thunderous applause, and treacherous scumbags on /. will politely argue that allowing mega corporations to control even political speech and dictate the Overton window for what serves as the defacto public square is their right and that first amendment protections do no and should not apply.

In other words, we're not far behind ruining someone's life for posting a video about a nazi pug. So yes, we're on the same page. This is somewhat different for sending someone to the gulag for questioning Dear Leader, and the nightmare orwellian situation developing in China, but I don't see a bottom to our slippery slope either.

I think an ad saying "Vote for Obama" is different from one that says "Black Lives Matter is Coming to Rape your Daughters."

That's why this is getting more attention. They used the data to play on people's fears, and it looks like someone in the chain was working with Putin.

Playing on people's fears? You mean like this?

Repealing the Affordable Care Act will kill more than 43,000 people annually

The irony of your post in a thread titled "Double standard" is certainly lost on you...

Really. Really? You think that America went out of its way to avoid ISIS in Syria? You taint the rest of your post by starting off with that, makes it hard to take you at all seriously.

Your ignorance of the subject is not my problem. Yes, the United States has been arming, training and funding both ISIS and Al Queda to overthrow Assad. From the beginning.

America was reluctant to get involved in Syria in general

America was plotting to overthrow Syria before the Arab Spring was a thing. Again, remedial knowledge of the subject.

if for no other reason than he's allied with Russia and Iran and has been a thorn in Israel's side due to the illegal occupation of the Golan Heights after the 1967 war which was started by Israel

FTFY.

It is sort of curious how hard you are arguing for the Assad side

Why are you arguing for the Al Qaeda head choppers and the ISIS organ eating side? Because you want to see another Arab country turned into a third world hell hole like Iraq and Libya so American neocons can jizz themselves?

its hard to argue that the Syrian government hasn't engaged in plenty of other war crimes

How hard would you fight if if was your country being overrun by foreign-funded terrorists who wanted to chop off your head or cut out your heart and eat it?

The thing about chemical weapons in general is that they are not particularly effective as weapons of war

Then WTF would Assad use them in areas packed with his own people and military, when he was winning the war, on the day inspectors arrived. If your bullshit detector is completely and utterly non-functional....I have some oceanfront property in Idaho I would love to sell you at a great discount.

People are indeed studying this.

The Alaska Permanent fund also does this on a larger scale, although the amounts of money involved there are probably not enough to make a living except in the Alaskan backcountry, which has limited (but not no) use for money. The Alaska fund is also funded by a severance tax on oil, not a progressive income tax, which seems far less likely to lead to unsustainable fiscal situations or perverse incentives.

According to this report, about $125 billion over 5 years - so about $25 billion a year. That would fund Yang's approach for about 4 days. How do we fund the other 361 days?

The Obama campaign invented the deep-dive into Facebook data for their 2008 and 2012 campaigns. They not only openly bragged about doing what CA did and far more, but somehow the media fawned all over him for it. Odd, that:

https://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07...

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

http://swampland.time.com/2012...

https://www.technologyreview.c...

And these:

https://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07...

https://www.technologyreview.c...

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

http://swampland.time.com/2012...

They BRAGGED about doing the same things (and worse) than what they're accusing Cambridge of doing.

Well as more and more jobs are taken by AI-driven automation, the bigger question is how many jobs will be left for humans?

The idea that technology will magically create vast numbers of new jobs to compensate for the ones lost - the so-called luddite fallacy - doesn't work in a world where employers are deploying automation specifically to reduce their expensive human head count.

Not paying you parking tickets seems pretty serious to me.

It isn't. The real crime is not planning for enough parking (or public transportation or whatever) so that you don't have to be writing parking tickets. And if you ban people from using transportation that they need to get to work, then you'll only create crime. This only makes sense if they want to create crime, for example for the purpose of legitimizing murdering their citizens for their internal organs.

Lazy Chinese not doing their own research.

China must stop forcing U.S. firms to share intellectual property

Command and control: China’s Communist Party extends reach into foreign companies

How China squeezes tech secrets from U.S. companies

And so on...

"Ygè shzi de xn zài t de zu l."

But none of it was important, until Trump won the elections

Why do you say that? Obama "was deeply concerned... he wanted the entire intelligence community all over this." https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Obama’s approach often seemed reducible to a single imperative: Don’t make things worse. As brazen as the Russian attacks on the election seemed, Obama and his top advisers feared that things could get far worse. They were concerned that any pre-election response could provoke an escalation from Putin.

...the principals and their deputies had by late September all but ruled out any pre-election retaliation against Moscow. They feared that any action would be seen as political and that Putin, motivated by a seething resentment of Clinton, was prepared to go beyond fake news and email dumps... "Our primary interest in August, September and October was to prevent them from doing the max they could do," said a senior administration official. “We made the judgment that we had ample time after the election, regardless of outcome, for punitive measures."

So there it is: this was considered crucially important before the election, but Obama's administration made the careful deliberate decision to delay action until after the election so as not to make it partisan and to avoid worse harm.

Donald Trump's timeline on David Duke indicates that DT is either DT a cowardly liar (not a cowardly lion - that's from a different movie) or had some serious memory problems:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/01/donald-trump-and-david-duke-for-the-record

1991: David Duke: Bad man.
2000: David Duke: Bad man.
2015: David Duke: "I don’t know anything about him."

>> causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, maimings, starvation?
> Nope, we have not caused any of this. Notably, you aren't even attempting to cite examples.

Have you never even heard of us deposing the democratically elected ruler of Iran?

Are you even remotely aware of what the CIA has done in South America?

Here's the Washington Post calling that out. Here's them listing 72 times we did that. And this is just the Washington Post, one of the papers most critical of Trump. Here are 7 governments we've overthrown.

Please read some history. There's a ton of stuff they never bother to mention in history class for some reason...

>> causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, maimings, starvation?
> Nope, we have not caused any of this. Notably, you aren't even attempting to cite examples.

Have you never even heard of us deposing the democratically elected ruler of Iran?

Are you even remotely aware of what the CIA has done in South America?

Here's the Washington Post calling that out. Here's them listing 72 times we did that. And this is just the Washington Post, one of the papers most critical of Trump. Here are 7 governments we've overthrown.

Please read some history. There's a ton of stuff they never bother to mention in history class for some reason...

Well it was weird timing, but you need rock solid proof for a criminal conviction and the only thing they have is the circumstantial evidence in the timing of the pre-planned sale. Still who knows.

That's nice, but the US National Average MPG for new cars sold is 26.

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

Could you pour it on a little thicker? "Might be a kid?" Come on, go all the way - it might be a button that'll start a thermonuclear war! Better shoot now, just in case.

The police in this situation were in a distant, protected location - there was no reason to react in a panic, and they didn't have enough information to choose deadly force. But one of them, theoretically a trained individual who should have been prepared for this situation, opened fire when he should not have.

I bet you've got excuses for the cops in the Arizona shooting too:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Judicial Watch just linked to his original paper and even your article says this

Here's what the math should look like (that is, if Richman's initial study was accurate -- which many researchers doubt). If 6.4 percent of the estimated 20.3 million noncitizens in the US voted, and if just 81.8 percent of them voted for Clinton (the percentage who voted for Obama in his 2008 study), that's an added margin of a little more than 835,000 votes. In other words: Even with all of those supposedly fraudulent ballots, Clinton still would have won the popular vote by more than 2 million votes.

Exactly what I said. And Richman stands by his study and defended it here

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

It's true he wrote this article attacking the way his research has been used

https://fs.wp.odu.edu/jrichman...

This post is not intended to make a specific claim on my part concerning how many non-citizens voted in 2016. It has a much narrower aim. My goal was to show that an extrapolation from my coauthored work on the 2008 election to the 2016 election did not support the arguments some seemed to be making that the entire popular vote margin for Clinton was due to illegal votes by non-citizens. In this post I do my own calculation of that extrapolation for the purpose of demonstrating that this extrapolation would not support that claim.

So what he's saying is that if you use his estimate of 834,318 non citizen votes to claim that that was less than Clinton's 2,235,663 popular vote lead that's fine with him. If however you use his estimate of 834,318 non citizen votes to say that non citizen votes are significant problem with US elections that's not. Because the media and the Democrats - like there's any difference - have both dogpiled him to get him to stop publishing research with that inconvenient truth in it.

Also, remember this entire research is based on an opt-in online survey. In other words, as evidence of voter fraud, it's pretty much horseshit.

Bullshit. It's based on CCES. And he cross checked the CCES data against voter files. His 6.4% estimate is based on non citizens who claim they voted and who he'd actually checked did vote by looking at voter files.

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

In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races.

Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted.

How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

You need to stop consuming Democrat fake news mate!

Judicial Watch just linked to his original paper and even your article says this

Here's what the math should look like (that is, if Richman's initial study was accurate -- which many researchers doubt). If 6.4 percent of the estimated 20.3 million noncitizens in the US voted, and if just 81.8 percent of them voted for Clinton (the percentage who voted for Obama in his 2008 study), that's an added margin of a little more than 835,000 votes. In other words: Even with all of those supposedly fraudulent ballots, Clinton still would have won the popular vote by more than 2 million votes.

Exactly what I said. And Richman stands by his study and defended it here

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

It's true he wrote this article attacking the way his research has been used

https://fs.wp.odu.edu/jrichman...

This post is not intended to make a specific claim on my part concerning how many non-citizens voted in 2016. It has a much narrower aim. My goal was to show that an extrapolation from my coauthored work on the 2008 election to the 2016 election did not support the arguments some seemed to be making that the entire popular vote margin for Clinton was due to illegal votes by non-citizens. In this post I do my own calculation of that extrapolation for the purpose of demonstrating that this extrapolation would not support that claim.

So what he's saying is that if you use his estimate of 834,318 non citizen votes to claim that that was less than Clinton's 2,235,663 popular vote lead that's fine with him. If however you use his estimate of 834,318 non citizen votes to say that non citizen votes are significant problem with US elections that's not. Because the media and the Democrats - like there's any difference - have both dogpiled him to get him to stop publishing research with that inconvenient truth in it.

Also, remember this entire research is based on an opt-in online survey. In other words, as evidence of voter fraud, it's pretty much horseshit.

Bullshit. It's based on CCES. And he cross checked the CCES data against voter files. His 6.4% estimate is based on non citizens who claim they voted and who he'd actually checked did vote by looking at voter files.

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

In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races.

Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted.

How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

You need to stop consuming Democrat fake news mate!

Foreigners interfering in elections isn't an 'act of war' though, otherwise Mexico would have declared war on the US each time a Mexican citizen illegally voted in a US election.

The individual foreigner voting is breaking US law, but the country they come from isn't declaring war on the US.

And before you say 'Non citizens voting doesn't happen, you racist!' yeah, it does

https://empowertexans.com/arou...

While the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) requires local election officials to maintain accurate voter rolls, it also made it easier for non-citizens to get on the rolls by mandating that states offer voter registration by mail and at driver's license offices. Registering to vote is now an honor system, with no documentation required and no one verifying citizenship -- applicants merely check a box affirming they're U.S. citizens.

Birdwell asked Ingram what mechanisms the Secretary of State or county voter registration officials have to ensure that non-citizens aren't registering to vote. "Only the jury summons," Ingram responded. State law requires jury clerks to report to elections officials all individuals who claim an exemption to jury duty because they are not citizens.

"The Secretary of State's office's only way to ensure non-citizens aren't voting is the random sampling of a jury duty summons?" Birdwell asked.

"That is correct," Ingram replied.

If a non-citizen never gets summoned to jury duty or doesn't respond to a summons, Birdwell asked, "you have no mechanism to correct that wrong?"

"That's right," Ingram confirmed.

"We have no active method [to ensure non-citizens aren't registering to vote]. We depend on the self-reporting of the individual," Birdwell concluded. "That is a significant problem."

...

Texas Scorecard reported on those findings last month. A brief survey of four Texas counties found that in just the past two years, 165 unlawfully registered non-citizens were removed from those counties' voter rolls -- but only after they self-identified as non-citizens in the process of recusing themselves from jury duty. Those non-citizens cast 100 illegal votes.

Worse, the AG's investigators found that "the process for removing ineligible voters who self-report as non-citizens at jury duty is not being followed correctly, or even at all, in various counties."

Curious is it not how when a few Russians spend a few hundred thousand dollars in an election where the total spending was $6.5 billion that means Russia committed an 'act of war' against the US and anyone who disagrees is a traitor. When only 834,000 non citizens vote in a US election, that's not enough to explain Hillary's popular vote lead so we should ignore it. And that demanding people provide proof of citizenship before they buy Facebook ads is something the US must do to protect the integrity of its elections but trying to prevent hundreds of thousands of non citizens voting is racist.

Because cars got more efficient, there's less gas tax revenue to fix them.

No, there's less gas tax revenue because gas taxes have not being increased to keep up with inflation. So the money you're getting now doesn't go as far in road maintenance expenses than it did before.

'It's the economy, stupid' Look at workforce participation, shrinking public assitence rolls, the stock market, etc.

Yeah, it's all thanks to Trump - just by being president! He didn't actually have to get any legislation passed for his magic to work!

Or did you think all this happened when he signed the tax bill 2.5 months ago?

And CNN, MSNBC, et al. haven't trained their viewers too, for the bigots and falsifiers on the opposite side of the spectrum?

Even when CNN leaks debate questions to a presidential candidate? https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Or Don Lemon says mostly anyone can go out and buy and automatic weapons? http://www.politifact.com/pund...
When three "investigative journalists" from CNN lie so badly they resign over a false story about Scaramucci? http://www.latimes.com/busines...
Or when it deliberately writes a misleading headline to make Trump look uninformed: "Trump asks Japan to build cars in the U.S. It already does" by using a partial quote that deflects the reality of his statement: http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/0...
Or when NBC doctors a 911 tape to make Zimmerman sound like he's explicitly following Martin just for being black when in truth he was asked by the operator to describe the person's race? https://www.theatlantic.com/en...
Confirmation bias is a two way street; it's amusing but not unexpected to see it at work on a person who, in an echo chamber of their own, believes it only exists on the other side.

Uber's entire business model is based on (a) outright breaking laws duly passed by democratically elected legislatures

You've heard of gerrymandering, right? The USA is an oligarchy, not a democracy. There is more democracy the further away you get from Washington, but that still doesn't mean that all of those legislatures were democratically elected. If the democratic process is subverted, which it totally has been, then you can't say you've got democracy.

Since the rest of your comment is based on the fallacious notion that we have democracy in America, it can be ignored. ERR_NO_DATA

And hey, guess what! Maybe those crusty hidebound taxi regulators weren't quite a stupid as the tech world (or the tech world's boosters) like to think.

The argument is not that they are stupid, it is that they are corrupt.

Because another key to Uber's business model was convincing its drivers to ignore how freaking expensive it is to operate a vehicle as a taxi for any length of time, and to accept remuneration below the (total depreciation of the vehicle + hourly wage).

That's not anything Uber's done, though. They're simply taking advantage of the fact that the American economy is in the toilet, and rapidly circling the bowl and heading for the drain. Actual unemployment is at levels not seen since the great depression. The numbers are a lie as usual, but the particular nature of the numbers make them a bigger lie now than that usual state of affairs; since people drop off the statistics when they are no longer eligible to collect unemployment benefits. When people are so unemployed that the state has given up on helping them, they are no longer counted as unemployed. In an environment like this, are you surprised that people are willing to work for less than minimum wage? When there are no minimum wage jobs left, they will go looking for something even lower.

And speaking of lower, Some of these people are actually sleeping in their Uber car. It's not just a car loan, and a car in which to do business. It's a home.

TL;DR: I do not think you have any notion of just how bad things are in the USA right now.

Christina Hoff Sommers wrote a whole book dedicated to the premise that girls do better in school these days only because the Evil Liberals have conspired to hold boys back. She is nothing more than an agent provocateur for the anti-feminist right wing.

Then why don't you explain to everybody why the judge has demanded exculpatory evidence be presented and the FBI is stonewalling.

It's all explained in the link I provided earlier. I'll put it here again. The judge's clerk used outdated boilerplate text to file the original "Brady order" in the case. It has since been refiled and the judge has clarified. If the FBI were "stonewalling", the judge would have already thrown the case out. Flynn has plead guilty and his guilty plea stands. He is cooperating with the Mueller investigation. What you're looking for starts about half-way through the article below.

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

What about this?

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

A contractor for the controversial classifieds website Backpage.com has been aggressively soliciting and creating sex-related ads, despite Backpage's repeated insistence that it had no role in the content of ads posted on its site, according to a trove of newly discovered documents.

The documents show that Backpage hired a company in the Philippines to lure advertisers -- and customers seeking sex -- from sites run by its competitors. The spreadsheets, emails, audio files and employee manuals were revealed in an unrelated legal dispute and provided to The Washington Post.

Workers in the Philippine call center scoured the Internet for newly listed sex ads, then contacted the people who posted them and offered a free ad on Backpage.com, the documents show. The contractor's workers even created each new ad so it could be activated with one click.

Workers also created phony sex ads, offering to "Let a young babe show you the way" or "Little angel seeks daddy," adding photos of barely clad women and explicit sex patter, the documents show. The workers posted the ads on competitors' websites. Then, when a potential customer expressed interest, an email directed that person to Backpage.com, where they would find authentic ads, spreadsheets used to track the process show.

If they really were making a good faith effort to remove ads but didn't have enough people that would be one thing. Actively soliciting ads is quite another.

Now you'll say 'well soliciting sex ads isn't illegal'. However what they're accused of is worse than that

An investigation by a Senate subcommittee revealed earlier this year found that Backpage was editing ads to remove language indicating underage girls were available, rather than removing the ads. "Backpage has been righteously indignant throughout our investigation," said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a subcommittee member, "about how we were infringing on their constitutional rights, because they were a mere passthrough." She noted, however, that Backpage was not only changing ads but also was also guiding posters in how to conceal their true intentions.

"But that's nothing compared to this" new information, McCaskill said after The Post described the data. "This is about as far from passive as you can get. This is soliciting. This is, really, trickery. .â.â. So I hope this opens the floodgates of liability for Backpage. Nobody deserves it more."

And it's not just online sex ads either - Backpage executives were accused of pimping and money laundering and involvement in the prostitution and death of a minor -

"This is the commercialization of this crime against children," said Yiota Souras, the center's general counsel. "And it's what businesses do -- they grow internationally; they have marketing plans to beat the competition and offer incentives to get more clients; they seek legal protections for their business interests. This is a traditional business model, but here the transaction too often is selling children for sex online."

In January, Backpage's top officials appeared before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Chief executive Carl Ferrer, co-founders Michael Lacey and James Larkin and general counsel McDougall all invoked their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves and declined to answer any questions.

Ferrer, Lacey and Larkin are facing criminal charges in California for pimping and money laundering, though a court there threw out similar pimping charges last year. And among eight civil suits filed against Backpage this year is a wrongful-death action in Chicago by the mother of 16-year-old

Yes, people choose prostitution as a career and many do so independently and enjoy doing it. Read up on the subject. https://www.washingtonpost.com... and the many posts at https://bebopper76.wordpress.c... and https://www.theguardian.com/co... and http://www.slate.com/articles/... are good places to start on your journey to not blindly buying into the prevailing narrative of bullshit.

Was Backpage actually running an underage prostitution ring or were third parties running underage prostitution rings and using Backpage as a place to post ads?

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

A contractor for the controversial classifieds website Backpage.com has been aggressively soliciting and creating sex-related ads, despite Backpage's repeated insistence that it had no role in the content of ads posted on its site, according to a trove of newly discovered documents.

The documents show that Backpage hired a company in the Philippines to lure advertisers -- and customers seeking sex -- from sites run by its competitors. The spreadsheets, emails, audio files and employee manuals were revealed in an unrelated legal dispute and provided to The Washington Post.

Workers in the Philippine call center scoured the Internet for newly listed sex ads, then contacted the people who posted them and offered a free ad on Backpage.com, the documents show. The contractor's workers even created each new ad so it could be activated with one click.

Workers also created phony sex ads, offering to "Let a young babe show you the way" or "Little angel seeks daddy," adding photos of barely clad women and explicit sex patter, the documents show. The workers posted the ads on competitors' websites. Then, when a potential customer expressed interest, an email directed that person to Backpage.com, where they would find authentic ads, spreadsheets used to track the process show.

They were certainly making aggressive moves to break into the underage prostitute ad market. And when people complained they said it was 'third party content' and used the CDA as a shield

For years, Backpage executives have adamantly denied claims made by members of Congress, state attorneys general, law enforcement and sex-abuse victims that the site has facilitated prostitution and child sex trafficking. Backpage argues it is a passive carrier of "third-party content" and has no control of sex-related ads posted by pimps, prostitutes and even organized trafficking rings. The company contends it removes clearly illegal ads and refers violators to the police.

The discovery could be a turning point in the years-long campaign by anti-human trafficking groups, and Congress, to persuade Backpage to stop hosting prostitution ads, which many teenage girls have claimed were used to sell them for sexual exploitation. Lawsuits and criminal prosecutions of Backpage in the United States have nearly all failed because Backpage cites in its defense the federal Communications Decency Act, which grants immunity to websites that merely host or screen content posted by others.

Sex trafficking is not a 1st Amendment issue. Backpage was using the CDA to shield itself from being prosecuted for running a underage prostitution ring.

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

The Senate bill, and a similar one in the House, were inspired by the numerous court victories won by Backpage.com, an online classified ads site that hosts massive advertising for prostitution, including an unknown percentage of children being trafficked by adult pimps. Backpage has successfully cited the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from liability for posts by third parties, to evade both criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits. As attorney general of California, Harris launched a criminal case against Backpage for prostitution, and it was thrown out by a judge who cited the Communications Decency Act.

The Senate's subcommittee on investigations sparked congressional action when it found that Backpage was editing ads to remove references to underage prostitutes, but allowing the ads to remain online. Then, in July, The Washington Post revealed that Backpage was actively soliciting ads from prostitutes on other websites, and creating new ads for those prostitutes so that they could post on Backpage with just one click.

Some members of Congress called for the Justice Department to investigate Backpage for seemingly creating illegal content, not just hosting it. And some opponents of the new bill cited The Post story as evidence that Backpage could be prosecuted under the existing law, with no need to amend the law and possibly open up unforeseen areas of civil and criminal liability.

After the bill was introduced, tech lobbyists worked Capitol Hill trying to drum up opposition. Google issued a statement saying the proposed bill "would be a disaster" and "would actually hinder the fight against sex trafficking." The bill amends both the Decency Act and a federal sex-trafficking statute.

But members of the tech community worked with Senate Commerce Committee staff to tweak the language of the bill, which is scheduled for markup Wednesday. One of the keys was the definition of "participation in a venture" in the anti-sex-trafficking statute, which courts have found did not include Internet sites hosting illegal content. The proposed bill originally defined participation as "knowing conduct, by an individual or entity, by any means, that assists, supports or facilitates a violation" of sex trafficking laws.

Internet companies thought the phrase "by any means" had the potential to be broadly interpreted when analyzing a website's actions. The newly amended bill changes the definition of participation to simply "knowingly assisting, supporting, or facilitating a violation" of sex trafficking laws, Senate staff members said.

The changes to the bill also amend the standard by which state prosecutors can seek to charge or sue websites, requiring them to meet the federal standard, including the new definition above, rather than those established by state law, which can vary widely.

Michael Beckerman, president of the Internet Association, which counts Google, Twitter and Microsoft among its members, said in a statement that "Important changes made to SESTA will grant victims the ability to secure the justice they deserve, allow internet platforms to continue their work combating human trafficking, and protect good actors in the ecosystem."

Beckerman said the association was looking "forward to working with the House and Senate as SESTA moves through the legislative process to ensure that our members are able to continue their work to fight exploitation."

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and other members of the Commerce Committee welcomed the endorsement from the Internet Association. "I'm pleased we've reached an agreement," Portman said in a statement. "We've reached

Last year I heard Trump was Hitler and going to start up concentration camps, now Democrats want us to disarm.

Let's be clear: if there's any situation where who has guns matters, the Democrats will have already lost since they have far fewer weapons and far less understanding of them (witness for example the repeated statements about "assault weapons" like it is a real category of weapon).

As for climate change? They may "believe" two different things but they both live the same lifestyles. Show me how much you "believe" in climate change by how you live, not how you vote. I don't give a fuck what some dickhead says about CO2 emissions if they're driving a SUV, living in a large house and eating meat.

I agree that lifestyle changes are important. I don't own a car and use public transit for that reason, and while my wife and I aren't 100% vegetarians, our house is vegetarian- pretty much the only times we ever meat is on occasion when visiting a friend or relative. But even given that, lifestyle changes aren't the only thing that matters the Democrats generally favor policy differences that will matter. For example, both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton favored large-scale programs to increase solar and wind power as well as more use of electric cars, whereas we now have a President who has the stated goal of "bringing back coal" even in a country where there are already far more people employed in renewable energies than with coal http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-solar-power-employs-more-people-more-oil-coal-gas-combined-donald-trump-green-energy-fossil-fuels-a7541971.html, and where coal is being largely beaten down not just by renewable energy sources but also largely because natural gas is so cheap. And coal isn't the only example of this: Trump has actively encouraged further oil drilling off the coast https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-11/trump-is-said-to-open-door-for-oil-drilling-off-u-s-east-coast (although not off of Florida because he and the governor there get along well apparently https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-administration-says-no-drilling-off-florida-coast/2018/01/09/91981160-f5a8-11e7-a9e3-ab18ce41436a_story.html?utm_term=.7322b1e2b3b5 when we shouldn't be producing more oil in general.

Yes, the Democrats aren't perfect. Yes, some of them are pretty hypocritical. That doesn't stop them from being a far, far better option on climate issues.

The last nuclear plant built in the U.S. was the River Bend plant in LA, which was started in 1977 . You're off by thirty years.

No, you're off by more than thirty years. Might want to read up a bit. Or read up at all.

Bullshit. He's not a Saudi citizen and unless he's caught in Riyadh cocksmoking a young buff Arab, they have no legal grounds.

This is the country that thinks nothing of kidnapping a sitting prime minister of another country and forcing him to read a pre-written confession. If you were gay in the head-chopping capital of the word, you'd be shitting your pants if you got outed no matter how many billions you had, or how chummy Tim Cook is with some of the royals.

I'm aware of that bit of extreme weirdness involving Saudi Arabia & the PM of Lebanon.
It's curious that Hariri is a dual Saudi-Lebanese citizen.
But the Saudis consider themselves to be the power in the region, a title that only Iran has the power to dispute on an equal footing.
And the only Middle East nation whose leader gets to hold hands and play kissy-face with the POTUS.

They're not going to jeopardize that relationship just because they're offended that a very wealthy American who's willing to do business with them and is uncritical of their faith & politics and has political connections but prefers to go in through the out door.

Admitting that Trump is a stopped clock which is right twice a day is a huge step forward. I mean, gargantuan. You mean Hitler is right twice a day?

Anne Frank's stepsister, in a January essay to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, accused Trump of "acting like another Hitler."

Christine Todd Whitman: Donald Trump Muslim comments like Hitler's But Trump's most recent comments have drawn comparisons to Hitler, including a front page Tuesday on the Philadelphia Daily News showing Trump with his hand raised looking like a Nazi salute and the headline "The New Furor."

5 Ways Donald Trump Perfectly Mirrors Hitler's Rise To Power

The theory of political leadership that Donald Trump shares with Adolf Hitler

'Insane bigot' Donald Trump 'is Hitler' - sex offender Louis CK

Yale history professor: Here's why it's useful to compare Trump's actions to Hitler's

After Trump asked people at his rallies to raise their hands to swear to vote for him, the press compared it to the "Heil Hitler" salute from Nazi Germany.

Yep President's rarely can see what's coming down the road. Like Obama and the Russians who he managed to ignore completely.

Read this again and vomit as you can see Obama had no idea who he was dealing with in Putin.

Flashback: Obama’s debate zinger on Romney’s ‘1980s’ foreign policy

URL please.

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

Those Russians that got indicted will never be tried because Russia won't extradite them.

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

None of those charged are in custody, according to Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counselâ(TM)s office. Russia does not allow its citizens to be extradited to the United States to face trial, so it is unlikely the individuals will be turned over, but the indictment probably will prevent them from traveling outside Russia.

So the only point indicting them was so it looked like the investigation was going somewhere and people like you could say "22 indictments so far" instead of "9 indictments so far".

Still look what Rosenstein said when it happened :

https://www.realclearpolitics....

Now, there is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.

I.e. you can't use the indictment of a bunch of Russians, in Russia who posed as Americans to attack Trump.

The DNC claim they told her those states were competitive and she ignored them

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

I guess in lieu of agreement on that both she and they have decided to blame it on Russia.

Bullshit. He's not a Saudi citizen and unless he's caught in Riyadh cocksmoking a young buff Arab, they have no legal grounds.

This is the country that thinks nothing of kidnapping a sitting prime minister of another country and forcing him to read a pre-written confession. If you were gay in the head-chopping capital of the word, you'd be shitting your pants if you got outed no matter how many billions you had, or how chummy Tim Cook is with some of the royals.