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The world is not evil. Turn off CNN, Fox, MSNBC, WaPo, NYT, the comedy news, just turn them all off. They are not news. They are propaganda.

Start looking for sites like Consortium News, Truthdig, WSWS, Counterpunch, etc.

In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship. When there's no meaningful space between corporate power and government power, it doesn't make much difference whether the guy silencing your dissent is Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Sessions. America most definitely has such a system.

That entire paragraph is plagiarism.

And when independent candidates run for office and can't get their message out for being shadow banned, and the corporatist candidates are always the number one trending subject, you'll be there to finger wag for not bothering to set up their own world-class content distribution system first.

So is this one.

Any time you try to talk about how internet censorship threatens our ability to get the jackboot of oligarchy off our necks you'll always get some guy in your face who's read one Ayn Rand book and thinks he knows everything, saying things like âoeFacebook is a private company! It can do whatever it wants!â Is it now? Has not Facebook been inviting US government-funded groups to help regulate its operations, vowing on the Senate floor to do more to facilitate the interests of the US government, deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments, and handing the guidance of its censorship behavior over to the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO and Gulf states? How "private" is that? Facebook is a deeply government-entrenched corporation, and Facebook censorship is just what government censorship looks like in a corporatist system of government.

Well that sure looks familiar too.

What takes random paragraphs from internet sources based on key words, with a time span ranging in years, and cobbles them together to make forum posts?

In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship. When there's no meaningful space between corporate power and government power, it doesn't make much difference whether the guy silencing your dissent is Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Sessions. America most definitely has such a system.

That entire paragraph is plagiarism.

And when independent candidates run for office and can't get their message out for being shadow banned, and the corporatist candidates are always the number one trending subject, you'll be there to finger wag for not bothering to set up their own world-class content distribution system first.

So is this one.

Any time you try to talk about how internet censorship threatens our ability to get the jackboot of oligarchy off our necks you'll always get some guy in your face who's read one Ayn Rand book and thinks he knows everything, saying things like âoeFacebook is a private company! It can do whatever it wants!â Is it now? Has not Facebook been inviting US government-funded groups to help regulate its operations, vowing on the Senate floor to do more to facilitate the interests of the US government, deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments, and handing the guidance of its censorship behavior over to the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO and Gulf states? How "private" is that? Facebook is a deeply government-entrenched corporation, and Facebook censorship is just what government censorship looks like in a corporatist system of government.

Well that sure looks familiar too.

What takes random paragraphs from internet sources based on key words, with a time span ranging in years, and cobbles them together to make forum posts?

In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship. When there's no meaningful space between corporate power and government power, it doesn't make much difference whether the guy silencing your dissent is Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Sessions. America most definitely has such a system.

And when independent candidates run for office and can't get their message out for being shadow banned, and the corporatist candidates are always the number one trending subject, you'll be there to finger wag for not bothering to set up their own world-class content distribution system first.

Any time you try to talk about how internet censorship threatens our ability to get the jackboot of oligarchy off our necks you'll always get some guy in your face who's read one Ayn Rand book and thinks he knows everything, saying things like âoeFacebook is a private company! It can do whatever it wants!â Is it now? Has not Facebook been inviting US government-funded groups to help regulate its operations, vowing on the Senate floor to do more to facilitate the interests of the US government, deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments, and handing the guidance of its censorship behavior over to the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO and Gulf states? How "private" is that? Facebook is a deeply government-entrenched corporation, and Facebook censorship is just what government censorship looks like in a corporatist system of government.

In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship. When there's no meaningful space between corporate power and government power, it doesn't make much difference whether the guy silencing your dissent is Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Sessions. America most definitely has such a system.

And when independent candidates run for office and can't get their message out for being shadow banned, and the corporatist candidates are always the number one trending subject, you'll be there to finger wag for not bothering to set up their own world-class content distribution system first.

Any time you try to talk about how internet censorship threatens our ability to get the jackboot of oligarchy off our necks you'll always get some guy in your face who's read one Ayn Rand book and thinks he knows everything, saying things like âoeFacebook is a private company! It can do whatever it wants!â Is it now? Has not Facebook been inviting US government-funded groups to help regulate its operations, vowing on the Senate floor to do more to facilitate the interests of the US government, deleting accounts at the direction of the US and Israeli governments, and handing the guidance of its censorship behavior over to the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO and Gulf states? How "private" is that? Facebook is a deeply government-entrenched corporation, and Facebook censorship is just what government censorship looks like in a corporatist system of government.

> Do you really believe that's what the Russian campaign was? Just a bunch of military intelligence folks voicing their opinions on American politics as Russian citizens? Just kind of having a debate about it? While making it clear that they are Russians, and that what they're saying was their opinion? Is that what you think they did? Why do you suppose identity theft charges were included?

As far as I know, it's for commenting on Twitter with fake names, like everyone else who wants to be anonymous. I'll let them prove that if it's more, but the idea that someone posting Jesus arm wrestling Satan under a fake name on Twitter is something to make a federal case out of because it undermines our democracy or whatever just makes me laugh.

> Are you even an American?

Yes. Are you? (Hey, you didn't actually answer my question on that, but oh well, I do actually know your history on the site and I was just joking.) You ever hear about those crazy militant types who wrote political stuff under the name Publius? Americans call them Founding Fathers.

> I'm asking because when one of our adversaries has a concerted and covert government-backed campaign specifically designed to interfere in our elections, undermine our democratic processes, and exploit divisions in our society,

By posting Jesus arm wrestling Satan on Twitter under fake names. I read the memes, did you? The idea that we can censor foreigners who discuss political topics does not sit well with me, especially when it's so selective. The BBC is a state-run news agency, but they're not going to be assigned all these nefarious motives, even if they, say, once pushed the war in Iraq before coming to regret that later. My point isn't to blame them for that, it's to point out that there's a double-standard where there's a federal case over Facebook & Twitter memes (to the point where the EU apparently wants to ban these!) but nobody cares if journalists actively support a foolish and unnecessary war.

> Kind of like how Putin said the Russian troops in Ukraine were just there on vacation, with all of their equipment, not in any official capacity.

Yeah, I don't buy that one. I'm explicitly saying that political *speech* shouldn't be banned. Violence & war are right out. I don't like how easily you shift from one to the other, either. Equating speech with violence has long been a censorship trope. I don't like *any* wars.

> I took that as a statement that the report did not provide any factual basis, not some challenge to me.

Sure, but in two more posts, you *still* haven't gone over anything from said report. Oh well.

> Right, it said he has contacts with Russian intelligence agents and we also know that he described himself as an "informal advisor" to the Kremlin. Seems like someone to keep an eye on if you're a counter-intelligence agent in the US.

If you're already an agent, why are they recruiting you? Of course he had contacts, he was an FBI employee who participated in an operation against them by feeding them a binder with a spy device, as I recall.

So that's why I keep taking you back to conduct in support of these alleged goals. Because no, I don't think you can make a federal case out of super-secret meme targeting, nor do I think you can shut down political speech--including that of foreigners and foreign governments--online. Otherwise I'd want to shut down the BBC, Al Jazeera, and other state-run media online, no? Why should I believe their motives are pure, again?

That also includes speech that's anonymous or pseudonymous. If someone goes by "John Smith" did they steal the identity of everyone else by that name? I don't think "identity theft" is well-defined unless it targets a specific, real, individual, it's clearly that individual (rather than just anyone of the same name), and it causes some real harm (fake loans, theft, etc.). Note that I'm not claiming the law a

The homophobia gets old, and it doesn't win anybody over to your cause. Aristarchus on the red site wonders why homosexual men wind up being pushed to the alt-right. Well, he does not wonder, because he is clearly homophobic and has the icks, as does much of the pseudo-left these days. Now, I would prefer not to make excuses for people who move even farther right in response to the Democratic Party and its adherents embracing homophobia, so I hope to only provide a sociological reason.

Capitalism is the root cause of the paralysis surrounding climate change. People on the far right (the so-called "alt right") are being ground up and crushed by the systematic theft of wealth from the working and middle classes, and they rightly suspect that the costs of remediation for AGW will be extracted from the working class (that's them) by the ruling elites (even if they do not know why they are correct in this).

The only way that we will be able to effectively address climate change is a revolution by the international working class according to a socialist program. The democratic control of the means of production by the working class will enable us to both raise living standards--yes even in the USA--and begin the work of climate remediation. UN report warns of catastrophic consequences of climate change within 20 years:

The urgent measures needed to address climate change come into conflict with the two basic contradictions of the world capitalist system: the contradiction between a global economy and the division of the world into rival nation-states, and the contradiction between socialized production and the subordination of economic life to the accumulation of private profit.

That is, the global coordination and scientific planning required to organize the necessary transformations in energy and infrastructure is prevented by the fact that each capitalist state represents competing ruling elites, and the economy as a whole is controlled by the corporate and financial elite.

The development of mankind’s productive forces is not only impacting the environment, it has also made it possible to address this impact in a rational way. However, the development of these resources to tackle climate change—along with war, poverty and inequality—requires a complete socialist reorganization of economic life. The economy must be placed in the democratic control of the working class, the only social force capable of establishing a society based on human need, including a healthy global environment.

Almost half of the Democratic nominees in competitive 2018 house races are "retired" from the CIA or other intelligence agencies. The Dems have utterly, overwhelmingly embraced the deep state, and seek to reinforce it.

As citation, I offer the following article from the World Socialist Web Site. I trust they are sufficiently far from "right-wing" to pass your muster?

They've changed their algorithms a while ago and are going after a loot of people, like Wikileaks, Democracy now and WSWS, to pick and choose what goes to the top and what is basically censored.
In august 2017:

As stated above, since April, other left-wing publications that present themselves as progressive, socialist or anti-war also have suffered significant reductions in their Google search results:
* alternet.org fell by 63 percent
* globalresearch.ca fell by 62 percent
* consortiumnews.com fell by 47 percent
* mediamatters.org fell by 42 percent
* commondreams.org fell by 37 percent
* internationalviewpoint.org fell by 36 percent
* democracynow.org fell by 36 percent
* wikileaks.org fell by 30 percent
* truth-out.org fell by 25 percent
* counterpunch.org fell by 21 percent
* theintercept.com fell by 19 percent

In september 2017:

As a result of Google’s censorship, the WSWS’s global page rank has fallen from 31,000 to 41,000, according to Amazon’s Alexa traffic ranking software.
(...)Democracy Now, one of the top 5,000 sites in the US, had its search traffic fall 50 percent between April and September, up from 36 percent in the period through July.

So it was getting worst, and it does affect the websites views by the population.

Here is an article about the subject in another website that was affected, if you want to read more:
The Silencing of Dissent

Basically Trump is accusing Google of doing something similar against him. He's a POS, but don't make the mistake of defending their algorithms, they are not unbiased anymore and really work to reflect someone's interests.

They've changed their algorithms a while ago and are going after a loot of people, like Wikileaks, Democracy now and WSWS, to pick and choose what goes to the top and what is basically censored.
In august 2017:

As stated above, since April, other left-wing publications that present themselves as progressive, socialist or anti-war also have suffered significant reductions in their Google search results:
* alternet.org fell by 63 percent
* globalresearch.ca fell by 62 percent
* consortiumnews.com fell by 47 percent
* mediamatters.org fell by 42 percent
* commondreams.org fell by 37 percent
* internationalviewpoint.org fell by 36 percent
* democracynow.org fell by 36 percent
* wikileaks.org fell by 30 percent
* truth-out.org fell by 25 percent
* counterpunch.org fell by 21 percent
* theintercept.com fell by 19 percent

In september 2017:

As a result of Google’s censorship, the WSWS’s global page rank has fallen from 31,000 to 41,000, according to Amazon’s Alexa traffic ranking software.
(...)Democracy Now, one of the top 5,000 sites in the US, had its search traffic fall 50 percent between April and September, up from 36 percent in the period through July.

So it was getting worst, and it does affect the websites views by the population.

Here is an article about the subject in another website that was affected, if you want to read more:
The Silencing of Dissent

Basically Trump is accusing Google of doing something similar against him. He's a POS, but don't make the mistake of defending their algorithms, they are not unbiased anymore and really work to reflect someone's interests.

Yes it is.

More specifically, Obama's entire Cabinet was chosen FOR him, before he even took office, by Citibank.

Real friend of the common man there.

Interesting... https://www.factcheck.org/2012/02/obama-white-house-full-of-wall-street-executives/

Yes it is.

More specifically, Obama's entire Cabinet was chosen FOR him, before he even took office, by Citibank.

Real friend of the common man there.

What examples of "left bias" have you found on Wikipedia that are unsupported by sources that have earned a reputation for fact-checking?

These sources earned that reputation for fact-checking decades ago, then fired all of their fact-checkers in the 1990s and were sold off in the 2000s to billionaires who fired everyone again and restaffed the companies with left-wing nutjobs because controversy brings hits and ad revenue and foreign investment.

Many of the "debunked" "conspiracy theories" involve times when these billionaires and their staff have been caught conspiring, with evidence from Wikileaks, Soros/DC Leaks, the Mossack Fonseca records, etc. Pizzagate involved arrests for child trafficking and an American spook was killed investigating it. Something happened there. Gamergate is a smaller example. Their logs were leaked and the collusion was proven, and the collusion involved board members of the New York Times and the Wikimedia Foundation which may explain why Wikipedia is so insistent that nothing happened and still considers the NYT a reliable source after their reporters admit that they are told what to write regardless of what the facts are.

In this media environment where the corporate powers are corrupt and incompetent, there is a market opportunity for new and independent media organizations. This is why the corporations are blacklisting them and slandering them as Nazis. This is collusion by big business to shut out competition. They are putting new media out of business before they can get off the ground, when the next Seymour Hersh or Nellie Bly is still one guy with a camera phone. They are getting rid of them before they can gain a following.

Or is Wikipedia's guideline for determining "reputation for fact-checking" itself applied in a manner that shows a systemic bias?

Wikipedia's determination of who is or is not a reliable source is run NorthBySouthBaranof who you can just google to see how nuts he is, or search for his name in the gamergate forums [1] [2] and WikiInAction. He has a large group of friendly admins who ban anyone who questions his decision making no matter how obviously wrong he is.

The fact that the categories are subjective is not necessarily because they are hiding anything. It is more likely because they intend to go with the flow and let others decide.
I encountered articles from a socialist site, http://www.wsws.org/ .. They claim they've been tracking their web statistics over a long time and in the last year they started to decline dramatically, and it was mostly because a lot of search terms which used to return links to their site no longer did so. You have to dig deep in the search result pages to do that. Their trafic from google has been decimated. So you can think hey where does this come from, I thought it was about fake news?

They're organising a campaign now but i suppose few will ever hear of it. I mean, socialists? Who cares right? The whole set of their articles is here http://www.wsws.org/en/article... .

The fact that the categories are subjective is not necessarily because they are hiding anything. It is more likely because they intend to go with the flow and let others decide.
I encountered articles from a socialist site, http://www.wsws.org/ .. They claim they've been tracking their web statistics over a long time and in the last year they started to decline dramatically, and it was mostly because a lot of search terms which used to return links to their site no longer did so. You have to dig deep in the search result pages to do that. Their trafic from google has been decimated. So you can think hey where does this come from, I thought it was about fake news?

They're organising a campaign now but i suppose few will ever hear of it. I mean, socialists? Who cares right? The whole set of their articles is here http://www.wsws.org/en/article... .

We've been through this three years ago (and earlier, but I can't find the links).

As everybody knows, trains' primary purpose is not to haul cargo or transport passengers, but to provide jobs . Not just the drivers (excuse me, engineers), but even the announcers (excuse me, conductors) can not be eliminated.

Automating them will causes them to fail in that primary purpose and therefor can not done. From the Socialist scum to the seemingly respectable Slashdotters, everyone is against that... #ResistOrSomething

This is not a technical problem.

"Much of this techlash is misguided."

Lets list some top shelf, recent bad things happening at the big tech giants:
- Google is suppressing relevant links in your search results that don't agree with their world view and/or whatever country you are searching from. If a conservative organization that controlled 90% of all search was doing this, it would be wall to wall media coverage, but the truth is Google is warping reality, rather than using straight relevancy to your search terms, now they are also deciding what is relevant.

Google must be regulated as a common carrier to protect the free exchange of ideas (a ubiquitous search engine is the very definition of a common carrier), and only a very narrow list should be censorable, and that list must be defined by the government with federal oversight and transparency and accountability to the people, not some unaccountable corporation. For example, sites inciting actual unjustified violence (in their content, not in some random user generated comment), sites promoting violent jihad, sites promoting harming children, etc.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...
https://www.usnews.com/opinion...
https://www.reddit.com/r/googl...

- Google and Facebook combined control 60% of all advertising revenue on the web, and routinely block content from receiving revenue if they don't agree with it (conservative video blogs on Youtube for example.) No other entity has more than 5% market share of online advertising. http://fortune.com/2017/07/28/...
- Google recently fired an employee who was asked for input on their internal hiring policies. When he highlighted a number of reasonable, demonstrable facts that contradict Google's diversity initiatives, one of his upper level managers leaked his memo to the press and he was subsequently fired (they are now facing a massive class action lawsuit, and more and more stories of the fascist intolerant alt left behavior at Google are coming out.) (no citation needed, well documented on slashdot.)
- Facebook first facilitated Russian (and likely Chinese and others) meddling by allowing false advertising stories to run during the election, then they tried to implement news censors, the vast majority of which were targeted against conservative sites, to the point that there was massive backlash and they got hauled in front of congress to explain WTF they were doing. They utilized blatantly biased censors as well as sites like politifact (which has very little facts beyond the actual name, and is a demonstrated shill for the alt left and not some non-partisan group) and the ADL (also an alt left hit squad group with zero credibility to anyone who has been paying attention).
https://gizmodo.com/former-fac...
https://www.washingtontimes.co...
Some concrete examples of conservative banning: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/20...

- Twitter has been caught red handed gleefully describing how they shadow ban people for expressing political views with which they disagree, rather than advocating anything objectively wrong. The political bans have been 90% right leaning people. Those on the left who have been banned have been advocating actual violence, and often associated with the terrorist group Antifa.

Well, deadly mistakes also happen in other countries. But there seem to be a real problem in the states about how the police handles this kind of situation. When between 15 and 35% of the people killed by the police are unarmed, you know you have a problem. The police forces really ought to be trained in a different way... and maybe also there needs to be work done on the way the investigations are made after those accidents, and on the consequences faced by trigger happy officers. Do you know if there is any work related to this currently going on ?

At the same time, Google's "new algorithm" moves many long-time leftist web sites way, way down in search results.
The "World Socialist Website" has been documenting this, since they are major victims of it.

"An open letter to Google: Stop the censorship of the Internet! Stop the political blacklisting of the World Socialist Web Site! "
https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...

"The conspiracy to censor the Internet"
https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...

At the same time, Google's "new algorithm" moves many long-time leftist web sites way, way down in search results.
The "World Socialist Website" has been documenting this, since they are major victims of it.

"An open letter to Google: Stop the censorship of the Internet! Stop the political blacklisting of the World Socialist Web Site! "
https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...

"The conspiracy to censor the Internet"
https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...

Of course you only hear this from the usual suspects on the alt-right: Breitbart, Alternet, Counterpunch, World Socialist Website, etc...

They're all alt-right now, along with feminists who support women and gays who oppose getting thrown off rooftops and Jews who oppose being exterminated from their own homeland. If you didn't get the memo, expect to lose your job and be blacklisted across Silicon Valley while they import foreigners to replace you.

The whole idea of protecting us from bad content stinks. Actually it's outright alarming. Firstly, do we need to be protect the pedophile terrorists that are served as prime safe example of the censorship Google/Facebook/Youtube and others are performing? Secondly it's a very bad idea to protect us from what designated enemies like Russia want us to know, with the policies to eliminate 'fake news'.
Thirdly it's a bad idea to protect us from our own progressive and leftwing activism. A socialist site checked the statistics recently , published here https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...

In the three months since Internet monopoly Google announced plans to keep users from accessing “fake news,” the global traffic rankings of a broad range of left-wing, progressive, anti-war and democratic rights organizations have fallen significantly.

This is not an AI issue. This is the surveillance state telling us what we ought and ought not to be reading. This article is relevant: https://consortiumnews.com/201...

I agree that we should be open-minded to new ideas. If I went to college, my concern would not be that someone would introduce a new-fangled idea. My concern would be that I'd have a conversation like this:

Liberal Person: We should have policy X.

Me: I don't agree.

Liberal Person: If you don't agree, then you're a racist and a nazi.

Me: But ...

Liberal Person: You have no right to speak. No free speech for nazis! No hate speech allowed!

The person who doesn't want to listen to the other viewpoint, or allow the person with that viewpoint to speak, is the one who is closed-minded.

Think about biology professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen. He calmly and logically stated why he didn't want to participate in the day of absence of white people, and he got yelled at.

According to the World Socialist Web Site (which is on Weinstein's side):

At one point, he tries to respond to a question from the barrage of students asking, “Do you want to hear the answer or not?” The group of students shouts back, “No!” The students then assert that he has lost his right to speak, citing specifically his “white privilege.”

Who was being closed-minded? Weinstein, or the students who didn't want to listen to him or let him talk?

I don't think age necessarily makes a person conservative. There are several liberal people who aren't young any more. For example, California's Governor Jerry Brown, and Senator Feinstein are liberal. As far as I can tell, they are very intelligent, and their minds are perfectly sharp and clear.

What kind of arrogance is this?

It's the kind of arrogance Trump spoke of routinely while campaigning.

You mean "spoke with" as he demonstrated it, quite clearly. Even recently, apparently NATO is so great, if it didn't exist, he'd create it, because he's just that smart. It's nauseating, really it is.

Our elites have their heads so far up foreign asses that other nations feel entitled to receiving every deference for their concerns, and they can't help but publicly melt down if those concerns ever meet any resistance.

While our elites indeed, have their heads up some asses, it is their own, as they feel entitled to lying and bullshitting to us too, and yes, they do have a meltdown when you criticize or challenge them. Just check any corporate CEO or politician when they get caught doing something wrong, or when somebody objects to their bullshit. They whine and moan over it.

Or sports figure. I expect Tiger to be griping shortly.

Not since Reagan pushed back on Japan (limiting motorcycle imports and establishing content requirements in auto manufacturing) has there been any resistance to the destruction of the US industrial base or the displacement of the US worker.

Man, Ross Perot feels forgotten already. You gave him a sad. You did say any and he did make a case for it. Not to mention elected presidents. I guess you can't even bother to remember things that actually happened.

But no, Reagan was quite inconsequential in those acts. Harley-Davidson needed a lot of internal reform, and they got it, though they still can't make a decent small bike. They still employ fewer people than they did though, thanks AUTOMATION!

A whole generation of foreign leaders and captains of industry have emerged that is utterly unable to imagine there being any friction with the US. It doesn't even occur to them that someone in the US might be offended by their reactions to it.

Nope, they're just acting like they ALWAYS have. It's like you don't have a clue how people behaved in the 1700s, 1800s, or 1900s, and somehow think something is different.

And yes, that includes American ones. Their shit never steaks, but gosh, don't even fart in their presence. Go check out the Banana Wars. Check out the US History of International oil companies. Check out the Opium Wars. The Annexation of Texas, California, and Hawaii.

I suspect you have this attitude that somehow, someway, American diplomats and advocates became weak, while the foreigners were domineering and controlling so you can justify your own posturing and resentment.

Nothing new. Teddy Roosevelt did the same thing. And James Monroe. And...well, you get the point.

You're complaining about nothing new, you're complaining about an offense the people you might ostensibly support are as guilty as any other, and while I could respect some ire over the general class of behavior among the sneering condescending boors, I find your nativist sentiments to a problem reflecting upon your bias and your own apparent ignorance as unfortunate.

that hotbed of radical Marxism, the Wall Street Journal

Not sure if you are trying to appeal to authority here but that just shows how deep this has permeated in our society. Im not surprised. This started before the cold war and is slowly moving to critical mass. Take Ford (and his foundation) who have always been very involved in driving socialism. You thought he was a capitalist huh. Did u know he built a socialist community in South America, was a very active and vocal supporter of Hitlers socialism? His foundation continues the same work today https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/11/pers-o11.html

4. Dont take my word for it. Look around. Ever try to obtain the data set or research the funding behind these studies? You should. Try anyway. Its a labyrinth of mystery money, anonymous donors and foundations that just so happen to hail from the same school of thought. Oh and the supporting data is never available, ever. Proprietary they say. You just get the excerpts and lead lines. In other words, the message the funder wants to convey.

5. For fucks sake, read up on some history. Else, we are doomed to repeat the same shit again.

Sanctuary cities do not exist and nobody on the Progressive left talks about the need for them. Right?

Actually, they don't exist, especially not in the form that the Regressive right insists on falsely portraying them. They're pretty much just a straw-man where the right makes up false claims about lawlessness and crime in order to whip up a frenzy of hysteria.

Instead, what they are, is municipalities deciding that the Federal Government needs to be accountable, and forced to behave in a manner compliant with the law, by a policy of adherence to the strictures of law informing them that the cities won't knuckle under to their capriciousness. Not new, but a lingering problem for a supposed agency enforcing the law.

Of course, I'm old enough to remember when Janet Reno was demonized for returning Elian Gonzalez to his father. The mishandling of policies on Cuba is bad enough, but apparently we're supposed to decide parental rights on a whim?

So it's hypocrisy too. Even ignoring the other protests against the federal goverment, the silence on the failures of the immigration system is very telling.

Oh, I guess you are just another AC who's full of shit. Brave enough to hide in anonymity while claiming that I am being watched, as if you are a threat.

You're confused again, there's no threat to being judged, you're merely being observed, and recognized, for what your public behavior happens to be. It's called responsibility. You should recognize that as a natural consequence of communication. You spea

People advocating hypotheticals based on popular vote are arguing on the basis that fairness (majority wins) should override methodology (Electoral College).

Nope. People are asserting "factual" (Hillary Clinton got more votes than Donald Trump) over lies (Trump won in a landslide, Hillary lost in 49 states!). The problem you have is that you have little idea of what's being said, and come up with artificial constructs of the situation.

The problem with arguing Clinton should've won the election based on fairness is you're artificially limiting the election to just two candidates. Clinton and Trump only got 93.97% of the vote. Your "fair" projection disenfranchises 6.03% of the voters.

The problem with your projection is that you're ignoring the 40% of eligible voters who didn't vote, and then acting as if you were somehow more fair. You're not.

You're leaving out 90 million more people, without even a concern.

So in the interest of fairness, say you include as many of those 6% as you can. If you add up the votes for the liberal candidates (Clinton, Stein, Sanders, Riva), you get 49.22%. If you add up the votes for the conservative candidates (Trump, Johnson, McMullin, Castle) you get 49.89%. So in all fairness, based on the popular vote the correct winner of this election should be a conservative candidate.

And that's not fair, that's assuming what they want, based on your own biases. If you want IRV, which is fair, you have to propose an actual IRV system giving the voters the chance to make their preference clear, not assert your own priorities based on that.

I bet you didn't even poll the people who voted for those third party candidates to get some idea where their priorities lie.

That's insulting when you're claiming fairness. You're not. You're a Republican stalwart who lies to advance their agenda. Consistently.

Gov. Davis was recalled [wikipedia.org] due to California's poor economy following the dot-com bubble bursting, and the huge budget deficit [nytimes.com].

Nope. Davis was recalled due to the Enron instituted power crisis, which he did nothing about, except let it get blamed on California, as opposed to an illegally behaving company in Houston, Texas.

Gray David did make a mistake. He didn't call out the California National Guard to seize the power plants in the state that were being idled and then demand the extradition of the entire trading floor of Enron from Texas. All of them. Then they should have been tried for murder, and put on California's death row.

Then he would be cheered. Of course, Schwarzenegger did nothing of the sort himself, but it's ok, you don't need to worry. Nobody cares how badly he fucked up.

Finally, the governor doesn't control the budget. The legislature does. All the governor can do is sign or veto whatever the legislature passes. And the last time California had Republicans controlling even one branch of the state legislature was the '95-96 state assembly [ballotpedia.org].

And here we have you lying again. Because you see, you are deliberately and knowingly leaving out one factor. That Republicans DID have a controlling influence on the budget of California. How? Well, let's just consider 2004 when a certain idea favored by Republicans was promulgated.

The Republican minority in the State Legislature used it to hold the rest of the state government in check, and you'd admit this if you weren't a fraud and a liar.

But Solandri, you are, that is the way you behave. You lie so often you can't even admit the truth.

So it was Democrats who are responsible for every California problem you cite.

Only if we ignore the docum

10 years for bad-evil-scary hacking, that is alleged to have affected 16,000 people, but nothing for the CEOs who burned down the economy and that were putting nearly 135,000 families per quarter out of their homes in 2002.

except war propaganda, if you can call that a the substance. I urge you to read this carefully: http://www.wsws.org/en/article...

The corporate executes who appointed Obama and his administration (facts exposed in the DNC emails https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...) are still president. Uncle Tom Obama the choom gang coward is nothing but a empty talking head, speaking words written by his handlers, under threat of exposure for who he really is. This makes Michael Corbat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... actual US president in reality. After all the US president chooses the US cabinet and as such the CEO of citibank is the president and the other ass clown is just an sock puppet with someone else's shoved up where the sun don't shine. It's all Russia's fault of course.

[...] two or three of them have long been corporate services without significant issues [...]

Counter-anecdotal-example: Enron's statewide rolling blackouts they intentionally caused to defraud California of billions.

Will the US play along with this and not expand the extrajudicial assassination by drone program to Sweden? There's a high likelihood the next US administration will continue the drone war (which the US would call "state-sponsored terrorism" if any other country were doing has been doing). Terror Tuesday is coming up fast but we all know murder-by-drone is lighthearted humor except for its victims and anyone who thinks killing is wrong. Like Obama said, "Turns out I'm really good at killing people. Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine". Paving the way for the next war criminal, Hillary Clinton, to take over the role.

My mistake. I was thinking of Denmark. That's where the black plane was waiting for Snowden.

I'm sorry. You're right. I was thinking of Denmark. That's where the black plane was waiting for Snowden.

You're arguing semantics. Gore ran on, among other things, tax cuts[1] and increased military spending[2]. He supported the Afghanistan War AND the Iraq War[3,4]. He chose Joe Lieberman as VP, who is quite possibly the most right-leaning Democrat in the Senate in the past 40 years[5], who vehemently supported the Iraq War -- so much so that he endorsed John McCain in 2008, supports the death penalty, introduced a bill to strip US persons of their citizenship without due process, supports censorship in entertainment, games, and online. Joe Lieberman is basically George Bush with a stronger grasp of the English language.
Back to Gore: He was aggressively free-trade[6], he wanted to keep medical marijuana illegal and double down on the War on Drugs[7], and he supported a "tough on crime" policy that included expanding the death penalty, mandatory minimum sentencing, and segregated schools for youth offenders[8]. He supported extraordinary rendition (kidnapping)[9] and pushed heavily for backdoors to encryption[10] while VP.

So yes, the GP is exactly right when he says we can't be sure Gore would have been better, and that even if he had done better on some issues, he may have been far worse on others, and thus worse overall.

1 http://www.4president.us/issue...
2 http://cjonline.com/stories/08...
3 https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...
4 http://www.science20.com/news_...
5 http://rightweb.irc-online.org...
6 http://www.ontheissues.org/Cel...
7 http://www.november.org/razorw...
8 http://www.ontheissues.org/Cel...
9 https://seekerblog.com/2007/09...
10 http://content.time.com/time/n...

look its a propaganda bot

Is that the Search Engine that doesn't show Senator Clinton as voting for the Southern Border Fence?

You mean like in 2015? Evidence mounts that poisoned Flint water caused deaths

And lets not forget that Bush had a hard on for getting Iraq, someway, somehow.

Security briefing on day 1 of Bush's presidency: "How do we get Iraq?"
Security briefing on 9/11 attacks: "Can we use this to get Iraq?"

http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
http://www.timelines.ws/countr...

1/30/01
Saddam's removal is top item of Bush's inaugural national security meeting. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later recalls, "It was all about finding a way to do it. The president saying, 'Go find me a way to do this.'" [Date the public knew: 1/10/04]

8/10/01
Major air raid on Iraq. (air defense installations destroyed)

Sep 2001
Curveball granted German asylum, ceases cooperating. British spy agency MI6 has told CIA that "elements of [his] behavior strike us as typical offabricators." [Date the public knew: 11/20/05]

9/11/01
Al Qaeda attacks. Minutes taken by a Rumsfeld aide five hours later: "Best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit SH [Saddam Hussein] @ same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]." [Date the public knew: 9/4/02]

9/12/01
According to counterterror czar Richard Clarke, "[Bush] told us, 'I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this.'" Told evidence against Al Qaeda overwhelming, Bush asks for "any shred" Saddam was involved. [Date the public knew: 3/22/04]

9/20/01
British PM Tony Blair advises Bush not to lose focus on Al Qaeda. Bush replies: "I agree with you, Tony. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq." [Date the public knew: 5/1/04]

9/20/01
PNAC letter to Bush: "Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power." [Date the public knew: 9/21/01]

11/21/01
Bush collars Rumsfeld physically and asks: "What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret."—Bob Woodward. [Date the public knew: 4/18/04]

12/9/01
Cheney on Meet the Press: "Well, the evidence is pretty conclusive that the Iraqis have indeed harbored terrorists." Also claims 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi spy in Prague, a claim he'll repeat long after CIA and Czechs disavow.

12/12/01
Rumsfeld demands plan for war against Iraq. Gen. Tommy Franks proposes softening up Iraq: "I'm thinking in terms of spikes, Mr. Secretary. Spurts of activity followed by periods of inactivity." [Date the public knew: 8/3/04]

12/28/01
Gen. Franks briefs Bush on Iraq war plans. [Date the public knew: 3/5/03]

Feb 2002
"I was asked by one of the senior commanders of Central Command to go into his office. We did, the door was closed, and he turned to me, and he said, 'Senator, we have stopped fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan. We are moving military and intelligence personnel and resources out of Afghanistan to get ready for a future war in Iraq.'"—Sen. Bob Graham. [Date the public knew: 3/26/04]

March 2002
"Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out."—Bush to Rice and three senators. [Date the public knew: 12/8/03]

3/13/02
Bush on Osama: "I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."

3/22/02
Downing Street memo: "US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Qaida is so far frankly unconvincingWe are still left with a problem of bringing public opinion to accept the imminence of a threat from IraqRegime change does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam." [Date the public knew: 9/18/04]

3/24/02
Saddam "is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time."—Cheney on CNN

3/25/02
Downing Str

Very first quote from your blog link:

“Overall, the most robust global changes in climate extremes are seen in measures of daily temperature, including to some extent, heat waves. Precipitation extremes also appear to be increasing, but there is large spatial variability"

Thus, more extreme heat waves and floods, at least in some areas. But who wants their information filtered through a biased agenda (apart from denialists)? If you read the source itself, you can see they state very plainly that we're seeing "a decrease in cold temperature extremes, an increase in warm temperature extremes, an increase in extreme high sea levels and an increase in the number of heavy precipitation events in a number of regions" (emphasis theirs), and that, globally, heatwaves, extreme precipitation, and extreme sea level events are all increasing.

Second, don't know what you were reading, but the link I provided was not a description of a computer model, it was a "meta-analysis of the literature on projected future extreme weather events", as the introduction plainly describes itself. It analysed the conclusions of multiple studies, providing a good summary of the current scientific opinion. And guess what? It finds increases in strength and frequency of the most intense cyclones, more droughts and heatwaves, more severe thunderstorms and heavy precipitation events.

And the storm I linked to? Sure, a single datapoint of weather. But ask yourself - in a stable system, what would be the likelihood of a record-breaking, strongest-ever cyclone being recorded just as you were claiming that extreme weather increases were all "hysteria"? After all, events that exceed all previously-recorded events should become increasingly less likely as time goes by - and yet we're seeing new records set every year, breaking records set only a year or two earlier. How many more record-breaking datapoints do you need to make an increasing trend? (hint: ask the scientists, read the meta-analyses, and stay away from the denialist blogs).

Re: Suncorp, rate hikes are a reasonable and rational response to insuring areas with increased and increasing risk. Since you mention Emerald, the 2008 flood events there were described at the time as a "1 in 100 years event". Then in 2010 they were hit by an even worse flood, which got worse still over the next month of torrential rain - prompting experts to decry how the Emerald locals had continued building more houses in what was all-too-clearly now a flood-prone area. No surprise that insurance companies wanted nothing further to do with the place.

But this still has nothing to do with the assertion of yours that I was challenging, where you claimed they were "angling for government swag", and "sucking on the public teat".

That's exactly who covered it up, the government agencies responsible for the testing. State and Federal officials.

Sure there isn't one such system, and sure these systems don't have predictive power. But the systems exist, and astrologers use systems to guide predictions. Thus I would call it systematic. Scientists in the same field and in the same lab have different individual systems for collecting and analyzing data. Their work is no less systematic. There are always more controls to do. Checking every variable under the sun is not possible. But your description of economics is spot on: it's mostly collecting money from dupes and tailoring the usual vague stuff to a person's expectations. Hey, it works. http://www.upi.com/Science_New... https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...

The FBI has an awful lot of previous form when it comes to pretending to have scientific evidence that doesn't really exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...
https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...

etc., etc. ad nauseam.

For example the Nordic countries (and Germany until recently) don't have a minimum wage. This allows the unions and employers and the market to set rates. This leads to very low unemployment. The Southern European countries all have high minimum wages which causes high unemployment.

Unemployment is not the single most important issue here. Germany introduced the minimum wage because the number of working poors creeped up to more than 3 million - and that's 2013 numbers . But they are not counted as unemployed.

In UK, they introduced the zero-hour job. Which means that employees can have zero hours of work in their month and thus, do not get paid. But they are not counted as unemployed.

If you are unemployed, in most EU countries you get benefits that will allow you to keep a decent life - for a while. As a working poor, not so much. Thus the nordic countries are actually hiding the issue under the carpet.

[sarcasm] Maybe one day (ultra)liberalists will start to use actual data and not wishful thinking to support their theories, but I very much doubt it will ever be the case.

There have multiple cases of warrantless domestic spying by both the NSA and the FBI:

FBI:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...

NSA:
https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying...
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

Apple, Google and other tech/communications companies also believe that the USA Federal Government is abusing the FISA warrants for both domestic and international cases:
https://www.google.com/search?...

The USA Government has long used evidence that is gathered without a warrant to direct their case so that they know where to look with a warrant. If they get caught they have to prove that they could have obtained the information a different way. After you know what you are looking for that is a pretty low barrier to overcome.

Not saying this is write or wrong, but it is definitely documented.

Ukraine - inherited ~2500 nukes from the fall apart of USSR.

You might add that they never actually had command control over these nukes, i.e. at the time when they gave them up, they were just nuclear waste to Ukraine. And they were destroyed.

Treaty was violated in 2014 by russian invasion, [...]

Which invasion? If Russia were indeed to invade the Ukraine then it would take them probably no more than three days to finish the operation.

Ukraine is now being partitioned and the treaty patrons USA, UK, France, China do nothing.

Oh, the USA has done quite something, as we learnt from a leaked phone call.

UN says US violating international law, calls for closure of Guantanamo
US Attack On Syria Violates International Law
US drone strikes violate international law, harm civilians: Amnesty and HRW (VIDEO)
NATO Violates International Law
US: Prolonged Indefinite Detention Violates International Law
UN says US drone war in Pakistan violates international law
The Military Admitted Force-Feeding Gitmo Detainees Violates International Law and Medical Ethics
US violates int’l laws; moves USS Enterprise into Pakistani water near Balochistan
International community concerned America violating international law by striking Syria
Americans Abandon International Law

Whether they realize it or not, Americans are increasingly embracing policies that undermine the international rule of law, with self-identified liberals, in particular, seemingly reversing their positions on matters such as the Guantanamo prison camp, extrajudicial assassinations and arbitrary detention.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, for example, found that 70 percent of the American public approves of the U.S. government’s decision to indefinitely keep the Guantanamo prison open, despite widespread international condemnation of this policy.

Yes, the most important racism out there is affirmative action.

Yes, he said that. However, effectively the same thing was said by Yeltsin in 1999, in a similar context. Russian nuclear forces haven't considerably changed in terms of capability since that time. Why the big surprise?

1999. “President Clinton permitted himself to put pressure on Russia,” Yeltsin said, “but it seems he has forgotten that Russia has a full arsenal of nuclear weapons.”

This time there is no disagreement in the West.

But there is, only not in the mainstream media. Specific to Germany: Unlike 2003 there are no general elections now, and anyway, in 2003 Merkel was sucking Bush's dick and now she's doing the same for Obama.