The catalyst looks pretty good. I'd be interested to see how long it lasts - some catalysts become poisoned by impurities in the source gasses, and lose effectiveness over time.
The paper mentions copper oxide forming on the copper nanoparticles due to transport in the air to the test equipment. That probably means that the catalyst might lose effectiveness due to dissolved oxygen in the water.
Everything you just complained about is even worse at Breitbart since Andrew Breitbart died.
The website is now literally run by Trump's campaign staff. No, really, Steve Bannon is both executive chairman at Breitbart and CEO of Donald Trump presidential campaign.
I notice you didn't say that the claims made were false.
On that point, here are a couple of more examples.
Democrats hired protesters to get into fights at Trump rallys, to give the appearance that Trump supporters are violent thugs.
From that article, note that one of the hired protesters filed suit against a Trump supporter claiming that she was punched in the face. The first cited article has a secret recording of the person hired to orchestrate the fights, where he mentions that the protester was one of his group.
(And here she is after the incident, smiling, with no evidence of bruising or injury.)
Also of note, Scott Adams got shadowbanned from twitter, for no apparent reason, and has seen invitations for speaking go from several per month (for decades) to none. He estimates that blogging about the election has cost him $1 million in speaking fees alone.
And of course, after all that people started leaving fake bad reviews of his book.
Trump supporters have been pretty polite throughout the election. We don't put naked statues of Hillary in cities, or have billboards of her kissing Huma Abedin, or make comparisons of her to Hitler, Stalin, Satan, or Cthulhu.
This is the 3-week mark where all civil discourse goes to hell, both IRL and on this blog.
From that fivethirtyeight article some months ago:
So, how do I wind up with that 2 percent estimate of Trump’s nomination chances? It’s what you get3 if you assume he has a 50 percent chance of surviving each subsequent stage of the gantlet.4 Tonight’s debate could prove to be the beginning of the end for Trump, or he could remain a factor for months to come. But he’s almost certainly doomed, sooner or later.
People have to remember that Nate Silver is using statistics based on assumptions, and those assumptions may or may not be valid.
The particular assumption in the link you quoted, is that his chances will not change in the next two weeks.
I, for one, think we should stay in the trees. We have enough problems to solve here before we go roaming the grasslands in search of denser food sources.
I don't know if anyone remembers, but at the time the space station was being constructed many scientists complained that there was no clear purpose for the project.
It was said (at the time) that there were no compelling experiments that needed to be done (in long-term weightlessness), and that the money could be better spent on other more interesting astronomical projects such as rovers, off-Earth exploratory missions, orbital telescopes, and such.
To date I still don't think any really ground-breaking science was done at the station. Yeah, little PR things like how cats cope with zero G, and how spiderwebs look in space, but basically nothing very useful.
Now we have this provocative headline "China could be the only nation left with a permanent presence in space!" and... yeah? So what?
We haven't lost the ability to put things into orbit, and space stations are enormously expensive.
Let's solve a couple of our problems down here on Earth first.
Okay, I finally found a way around the NYT paywall (and I feel "dirty" for having done it the way I did...:-)
The article refers to old chemical weapons left over from previous (to the Iraq War of 2003-2011) decades.
The article makes it pretty clear that these were not the WMDs referred to by Bush to justify the war. Here's a quote from the article (emphasis mine):
All had been manufactured before 1991, participants said. Filthy, rusty or corroded, a large fraction of them could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin. Most could not have been used as designed, and when they ruptured dispersed the chemical agents over a limited area, according to those who collected the majority of them.
It was well known that Saddam Hussein had and used chemical weapons in previous decades, but Bush was pretty clear that Hussein was manufacturing new WMDs in the months running up to the war. No manufacturing facilities were ever found.
I'm not sure why you took the trouble to post the link. It's a complete non-sequitur, which I immediately suspected because there were no corroborating stories about having found WMDs during the 2nd Iraq war.
Hmm. How is it unproven? Because you and other civilians haven't seen or read the evidence, you believe there is none? Or, it's it because certain news outlets and other propaganda deny such evidence? Anyway, I can see a clear case for avoiding any proactive action on our part but also see good cause to do so. It's a difficult decision to make that the average person can't contemplate due to our lack of insight and knowledge.
Let's not forget that the previous administration (Bush) took us to war under false pretenses.
If you're old enough to remember that era, recall that Bush and Cheney were all over the news saying that the evidence was real, and Tony Blair even came out and confirmed the evidence of WMDs.
Everyone *else* in the world, including the UN inspectors, claimed that there were none.
Does anyone remember the Iraq war? It took 9 years and cost us $2 trillion, caused half a million civilian deaths, 4500 American serviceman deaths, and several hundred American amputees.
I think it's entirely reasonable that, before we go to war with a fukkin' nuclear power, that we be shown some of the evidence first.
Word on the street is that it's a war started specifically to win the election, to whip up some patriotism for the ruling party.
Specifically, it's noted that if we actually wanted to do this, then we would not advertise it ahead of time (scroll down a few entries).
We did a similar thing in Syria the last couple of days by announcing an attack, then filming the attack.
Obama you're a lame-duck president, you've done almost nothing in 8 years, and please don't get us into WWIII before you leave!. Please PLEASE put the welfare of the people ahead of your political agenda this one time!
On a different point, note that if whistleblowers were protected and shielded in this country the hackers could come forward and identify themselves as non-Russian agents and defuse a potential war.
But that won't happen because they'd get royally screwed and their lives and freedom would be over. (Not that I blame them.)
Note that the hacker gave leaks to Motherboard under the agreement of anonymity. Here's what happened:
“When Cracka leaked to Motherboard he asked not to be named as he wanted to confidentially leak information, Lorenzo disregarded it and listed that it was from him — he even wrote that Cracka asked not to be listed like a total piece of shit,” Liverman noted.
Journalistic integrity at its finest.
People thought a couple of months ago that Trump would be the one to get us into WWIII.
I read that quote the other day, and my first response was "yeah, we totally fukken' do!".
I could think of a half dozen examples off the top, but here's a good list of previous Democratic examples.
From that article:
They seem to be forgetting that throwing the book at one’s political opponents is what Democrats do all the time. Here’s 16 times Democrats tried to prosecute their opponents for political gain, not justice.
Looking at the press bias in this election, we are totally boned as a nation. I expect we'll have rioting in several cities after the election.
You need the "CORE::" prefix on the "say" function because "say" is available only in the newer versions of perl (it'll eventually be default available).
I mean, it seems pretty weird to "not give up on Trump" at this point. You really genuinely want a republican president so badly that you're willing to elect a kiddy fiddler?
Heh.
That is sooooo far away from important to me that it doesn't even register.
Important to me is turning away from globalism, making the government work for Americans, and fixing some of our obvious problems.
Of those, the most important to me is the globalism thing. If you look at economics from a math perspective (specifically: game theory, and I'm a math person) you see that economics is based on flawed rationalizations. It's patently obvious that the rationalizations are true and correct given their assumptions, but that the assumptions are wrong.
The thing that made America great in the last half of the 20th century was the ability for citizens to build and keep wealth. Many people could get an education with little-or-no money, find a job, buy a house and raise a family.
People are finding that they can't do that any more, largely because of globalism. When a wealth-building country partners with a non-wealth-building country, all the wealth flows out of the great country and into the poor country.
England can partner with Germany or Norway and would do well. England partnering with Poland, Spain, or Greece is a disaster - Greeks can move to England and take high-paying jobs, but the English can't do the same in Greece. Greece is full of corruption, which limits personal wealth building.
To take a clear example, Clinton wants a 65% estate tax. This is a clear burden on creating and keeping wealth, it's double taxing, and it will be a disaster.
Farms can't be left to children, they'll have to be sold to pay the taxes. Family-owned businesses too. And houses.
And if there's no one interested in your farm, or business, or house at the time you need to sell it, it'll be sold for a lot less than it's worth just to pay the taxes.
That's only one example, but there are a ton of others. Pretty-much everything Clinton is for will pull the country down into poverty.
Yes, I'm for Trump simply because he wants to reverse that trend.
I don't care if he's Sithrak the blind gibberer in his private life.
All those allegations against him, are ALL malicious and designed to stop him getting into power.
Did any on those women come forward before the released 'I just grab their pussy' tape? No. He was secretly recorded (where's the FBI investigation?), the tape was released to embarrass him (FBI?), and all these women came forward with their stories. They can't prove their stories.
Trump is the victim here, not these women, he's the one being abused, he's the one being spied on, they should say sorry to him for making up those stories.
Furthermore, none of those women pressed charges or filed suit against a billionaire at the time. I guess we weren't a very litigious society back in the '90s.
Also, at least one witness came forward to claim that nothing happened - that he was there with the woman (and Trump) the entire time and nothing happened.
You mean they should spend tax money and valuable resources investigating one of the most transparent and well respected charitable organizations on the planet?
Yes, the one that misled the IRS, according to an internal audit.
Can we see some of this troubling new evidence before we go to war with Russia please?
I'm not counting out Trump losing for about the next 2 weeks. We have yet to see the following:
1) Wikileaks has said it has evidence that will get Hillary indicted. As yet, the Podesta E-mails haven't done that, so everyone is expecting a big drop sometime soon. Probably on Hillary's birthday, October 26th.
2) We haven't seen the last of the Podesta E-mails. A recent drop shows the democrats creating two organizations to infiltrate the Catholic religion, to create a "Catholic Spring" at some point of their choosing. (Yikes! WTF, Democrats?)
3) It seems that Hillary had a hand in Kim Dotcom's arrest (remember him?). In response, Kim has promised a surprise birthday present for Hillary. (Many people will be quick to point out that Kim is various flavors of asshole, but that's beside the point - he's tech savvy, has lots of contacts, an axe to grind against Hillary, and a ton of money.)
4) Someone over at Reddit/4chan has Clinton's deleted E-mails, and will be releasing them. These are apparently the ones deleted from her server before turning it over to the FBI.
5) One of the recent Podesta dumps included his iPhone account password, and someone hacked his account, post a screencap proving that they were in the account, and sent all the data to Wikieaks. This means that Wikileaks not only has Podesta's E-mails up to whenever, they've got more recent ones up to about 2 days ago.
6)...and apparently remote-wiped his phone.
7) Hillary is not appearing in person *anywhere*. (Check her rallys and engagements: it's all Bill, Barak, Michelle, and Chelsea. Hillary appears in person once from now to the end of the month.) Conspiracy theorists think that this is because of some hidden illness, but that's probably not the case. The Podesta E-mails reveal that the reason she's not being seen is because she's perceived as untrustworthy in person. Her campaign is being run largely by remote control.
9) And weirdly, during the last debate a fly landed on Hillary's face. That's not a problem or even especially interesting, but the fact that it landed, walked around and she never flinched or even notices is creeping out a lot of people.
I'm not giving up on Trump just yet, and I've still got lots of popcorn.
Let us remember, Bernie won the primary by 51% total in all of the states that have a paper trail, and lost overwhelmingly in the rest of the states that do not have a paper trail. Isn't that interesting, I wonder what it means.
People seem to think that voting has some sort of meaning, and not a placebo to calm and comfort the masses.
Consider that Bernie raised $60 million to Clinton's $20 million, so the DNC quickly moved $60 million from down-ballot elections directly into the Clinton campaign. The popular vote by percentage was almost exactly proportional to the amount each candidate spent, so if the DNC hadn't done that, Bernie would have won.
Then consider that if you swap Hillary's superdelegates with Bernies, Bernie would have won. A candidate can have upwards of 30% more votes, and the superdelegates will still outweigh the popular vote.
Let's not forget that Clinton and Bernie were in a dead heat in several Iowa counties, and delegates were assigned by coin toss, of which Hillary won all 6.
Why not throw Bernie a bone and reduce the super delegates in the future to the original draft of members of the House and Senate, governors and big city mayors, eliminating the DNC members who are not State chairs or vice-Chairs. (Frankly, DNC members don’t really represent constituencies anyway. I should know. I served on the DNC first as Executive Director and then as an elected member for 10 years.)
So if we “give” Bernie this in the Convention’s rules committee, his people will think they’ve “won” something from the Party Establishment. And it functionally doesn’t make any difference anyway. They win. We don’t lose. Everyone is happy.”
On the Republican side, several candidates signed a pledge to support the candidate whoever it should be, and we know how that turned out. "Except when they call my wife a bad name" is an exception, apparently.
Scott Adams (who writes Dilbert) is on vacation in Switzerland, and his recent blog post had this snippet, which got me really angry:
[...] I also asked the Swiss man what kind of problems they have in Switzerland. He laughed again. The answer is “none.” Literally. Good economy. Plenty of jobs. No racial strife. Low crime rate. Highest standard of living. No real pollution. No litter. No homeless that I could see.
The reason it angered me is that here's a country where the government tries to give the citizens a good life. They have fixed all of the major problems and are just letting their citizens live in quiet enjoyment.
The Swiss government is considering implementing a guaranteed minimum income.
Over here in the US, our infrastructure is crumbling, our healthcare is at 3rd world level, jobs are scarce (and we're outsourcing more and more), and two thirds of the people are on the brink of poverty, and the government spies on and opresses everyone.
It's as if the government sees the people as some sort of harvest-able crop whose purpose is to provide taxes, where their only efforts are towards maximum yield.
Can anyone explain why copyright infringement is a criminal offense?
For contrast, note that Comcast was fined $2.3 million for ripping off customers with fraudulent charges.
Comcast's statement on the fines reads:
[Comcast's statement] "...also alleged that the FCC "found no problematic policy or intentional wrongdoing, but just isolated errors or customer confusion." When pressed about that phrasing, Comcast representatives clarified that "there was no finding or admission of liability in this Consent Decree."
(Emphasis mine.)
As someone pointed out, Comcast recovers $2.3 million in revenue in about 15 minutes.
Our government is completely against the people, and for the companies. This has to stop, whether by election or armed revolt is, at the point, immaterial.
That would be such a good argument if Trump hadn't been fat shaming women, telling people to go hunt down porn and talking about a newswoman bleeding out of her "whereever" in just the last few weeks.
Unfortunately for your argument, Trump's behavior has made it incredibly clear that he has not changed at all, despite his protests to the contrary.
Apropos of nothing, how does a recording made 11 years ago show that he hasn't changed?
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a link to the actual paper.
(Since the editors won't do it.)
The catalyst looks pretty good. I'd be interested to see how long it lasts - some catalysts become poisoned by impurities in the source gasses, and lose effectiveness over time.
The paper mentions copper oxide forming on the copper nanoparticles due to transport in the air to the test equipment. That probably means that the catalyst might lose effectiveness due to dissolved oxygen in the water.
Any actual chemists care to comment?
Everything you just complained about is even worse at Breitbart since Andrew Breitbart died.
The website is now literally run by Trump's campaign staff. No, really, Steve Bannon is both executive chairman at Breitbart and CEO of Donald Trump presidential campaign.
I notice you didn't say that the claims made were false.
Was that on purpose?
On that point, here are a couple of more examples.
Democrats hired protesters to get into fights at Trump rallys, to give the appearance that Trump supporters are violent thugs.
From that article, note that one of the hired protesters filed suit against a Trump supporter claiming that she was punched in the face. The first cited article has a secret recording of the person hired to orchestrate the fights, where he mentions that the protester was one of his group.
(And here she is after the incident, smiling, with no evidence of bruising or injury.)
Also of note, Scott Adams got shadowbanned from twitter, for no apparent reason, and has seen invitations for speaking go from several per month (for decades) to none. He estimates that blogging about the election has cost him $1 million in speaking fees alone.
And of course, after all that people started leaving fake bad reviews of his book.
Trump supporters have been pretty polite throughout the election. We don't put naked statues of Hillary in cities, or have billboards of her kissing Huma Abedin, or make comparisons of her to Hitler, Stalin, Satan, or Cthulhu.
This is the 3-week mark where all civil discourse goes to hell, both IRL and on this blog.
Expect things to get much *much* worse.
You think Clinton's campaign is feeling desperate? Vegas is paying out 6-1 on Trump presidency, but you know better, don't you?
What will their odds be in 3 weeks?
That would be the odds of note.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...
From that fivethirtyeight article some months ago:
So, how do I wind up with that 2 percent estimate of Trump’s nomination chances? It’s what you get3 if you assume he has a 50 percent chance of surviving each subsequent stage of the gantlet.4 Tonight’s debate could prove to be the beginning of the end for Trump, or he could remain a factor for months to come. But he’s almost certainly doomed, sooner or later.
People have to remember that Nate Silver is using statistics based on assumptions, and those assumptions may or may not be valid.
The particular assumption in the link you quoted, is that his chances will not change in the next two weeks.
Let's see what tomorrow may bring, shall we?
I, for one, think we should stay in the trees. We have enough problems to solve here before we go roaming the grasslands in search of denser food sources.
That gave me a chuckle.
Well played, sir!
I don't know if anyone remembers, but at the time the space station was being constructed many scientists complained that there was no clear purpose for the project.
It was said (at the time) that there were no compelling experiments that needed to be done (in long-term weightlessness), and that the money could be better spent on other more interesting astronomical projects such as rovers, off-Earth exploratory missions, orbital telescopes, and such.
To date I still don't think any really ground-breaking science was done at the station. Yeah, little PR things like how cats cope with zero G, and how spiderwebs look in space, but basically nothing very useful.
Now we have this provocative headline "China could be the only nation left with a permanent presence in space!" and... yeah? So what?
We haven't lost the ability to put things into orbit, and space stations are enormously expensive.
Let's solve a couple of our problems down here on Earth first.
Okay, I finally found a way around the NYT paywall (and I feel "dirty" for having done it the way I did... :-)
The article refers to old chemical weapons left over from previous (to the Iraq War of 2003-2011) decades.
The article makes it pretty clear that these were not the WMDs referred to by Bush to justify the war. Here's a quote from the article (emphasis mine):
All had been manufactured before 1991, participants said. Filthy, rusty or corroded, a large fraction of them could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin. Most could not have been used as designed, and when they ruptured dispersed the chemical agents over a limited area, according to those who collected the majority of them.
It was well known that Saddam Hussein had and used chemical weapons in previous decades, but Bush was pretty clear that Hussein was manufacturing new WMDs in the months running up to the war. No manufacturing facilities were ever found.
I'm not sure why you took the trouble to post the link. It's a complete non-sequitur, which I immediately suspected because there were no corroborating stories about having found WMDs during the 2nd Iraq war.
jc... http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
I don't have access to that, it's paywalled.
Do you have a non-paywalled link? Or can you post the text?
Hmm. How is it unproven? Because you and other civilians haven't seen or read the evidence, you believe there is none? Or, it's it because certain news outlets and other propaganda deny such evidence? Anyway, I can see a clear case for avoiding any proactive action on our part but also see good cause to do so. It's a difficult decision to make that the average person can't contemplate due to our lack of insight and knowledge.
Let's not forget that the previous administration (Bush) took us to war under false pretenses.
If you're old enough to remember that era, recall that Bush and Cheney were all over the news saying that the evidence was real, and Tony Blair even came out and confirmed the evidence of WMDs.
Everyone *else* in the world, including the UN inspectors, claimed that there were none.
Does anyone remember the Iraq war? It took 9 years and cost us $2 trillion, caused half a million civilian deaths, 4500 American serviceman deaths, and several hundred American amputees.
I think it's entirely reasonable that, before we go to war with a fukkin' nuclear power, that we be shown some of the evidence first.
Do you disagree?
Word on the street is that it's a war started specifically to win the election, to whip up some patriotism for the ruling party.
Specifically, it's noted that if we actually wanted to do this, then we would not advertise it ahead of time (scroll down a few entries).
We did a similar thing in Syria the last couple of days by announcing an attack, then filming the attack.
Obama you're a lame-duck president, you've done almost nothing in 8 years, and please don't get us into WWIII before you leave!. Please PLEASE put the welfare of the people ahead of your political agenda this one time!
On a different point, note that if whistleblowers were protected and shielded in this country the hackers could come forward and identify themselves as non-Russian agents and defuse a potential war.
But that won't happen because they'd get royally screwed and their lives and freedom would be over. (Not that I blame them.)
For example, here's a couple of wikileaks sources facing serious charges.
Note that the hacker gave leaks to Motherboard under the agreement of anonymity. Here's what happened:
“When Cracka leaked to Motherboard he asked not to be named as he wanted to confidentially leak information, Lorenzo disregarded it and listed that it was from him — he even wrote that Cracka asked not to be listed like a total piece of shit,” Liverman noted.
Journalistic integrity at its finest.
People thought a couple of months ago that Trump would be the one to get us into WWIII.
I wonder what they think now?
And of course, we never threaten to jail political opponents in this country. *That* would be a dictatorship!!!
I read that quote the other day, and my first response was "yeah, we totally fukken' do!".
I could think of a half dozen examples off the top, but here's a good list of previous Democratic examples.
From that article:
They seem to be forgetting that throwing the book at one’s political opponents is what Democrats do all the time. Here’s 16 times Democrats tried to prosecute their opponents for political gain, not justice.
Looking at the press bias in this election, we are totally boned as a nation. I expect we'll have rioting in several cities after the election.
Although illegal, tips are frequently unreported income.
That means effectively 40% more of the value goes to the servicer. When the company does it, it's all reported and taxed.
(And also the thing about tipping for good service, versus tipping across the board.)
This is what he's trying to do:
CORE::say(int rand(2) ? "hope" : "change");
From the command line:
perl -e "CORE::say(int rand(2) ? "hope" : "change");"
You need the "CORE::" prefix on the "say" function because "say" is available only in the newer versions of perl (it'll eventually be default available).
I mean, it seems pretty weird to "not give up on Trump" at this point. You really genuinely want a republican president so badly that you're willing to elect a kiddy fiddler?
Heh.
That is sooooo far away from important to me that it doesn't even register.
Important to me is turning away from globalism, making the government work for Americans, and fixing some of our obvious problems.
Of those, the most important to me is the globalism thing. If you look at economics from a math perspective (specifically: game theory, and I'm a math person) you see that economics is based on flawed rationalizations. It's patently obvious that the rationalizations are true and correct given their assumptions, but that the assumptions are wrong.
The thing that made America great in the last half of the 20th century was the ability for citizens to build and keep wealth. Many people could get an education with little-or-no money, find a job, buy a house and raise a family.
People are finding that they can't do that any more, largely because of globalism. When a wealth-building country partners with a non-wealth-building country, all the wealth flows out of the great country and into the poor country.
England can partner with Germany or Norway and would do well. England partnering with Poland, Spain, or Greece is a disaster - Greeks can move to England and take high-paying jobs, but the English can't do the same in Greece. Greece is full of corruption, which limits personal wealth building.
To take a clear example, Clinton wants a 65% estate tax. This is a clear burden on creating and keeping wealth, it's double taxing, and it will be a disaster.
Farms can't be left to children, they'll have to be sold to pay the taxes. Family-owned businesses too. And houses.
And if there's no one interested in your farm, or business, or house at the time you need to sell it, it'll be sold for a lot less than it's worth just to pay the taxes.
That's only one example, but there are a ton of others. Pretty-much everything Clinton is for will pull the country down into poverty.
Yes, I'm for Trump simply because he wants to reverse that trend.
I don't care if he's Sithrak the blind gibberer in his private life.
If he's not Clinton, he's better.
Thanks - I wasn't aware of that.
All those allegations against him, are ALL malicious and designed to stop him getting into power.
Did any on those women come forward before the released 'I just grab their pussy' tape? No. He was secretly recorded (where's the FBI investigation?), the tape was released to embarrass him (FBI?), and all these women came forward with their stories. They can't prove their stories.
Trump is the victim here, not these women, he's the one being abused, he's the one being spied on, they should say sorry to him for making up those stories.
Furthermore, none of those women pressed charges or filed suit against a billionaire at the time. I guess we weren't a very litigious society back in the '90s.
Also, at least one witness came forward to claim that nothing happened - that he was there with the woman (and Trump) the entire time and nothing happened.
Dude, great post. I would definitely mod you up if I had points.
You mean they should spend tax money and valuable resources investigating one of the most transparent and well respected charitable organizations on the planet?
Yes, the one that misled the IRS, according to an internal audit.
Can we see some of this troubling new evidence before we go to war with Russia please?
I'm not counting out Trump losing for about the next 2 weeks. We have yet to see the following:
1) Wikileaks has said it has evidence that will get Hillary indicted. As yet, the Podesta E-mails haven't done that, so everyone is expecting a big drop sometime soon. Probably on Hillary's birthday, October 26th.
2) We haven't seen the last of the Podesta E-mails. A recent drop shows the democrats creating two organizations to infiltrate the Catholic religion, to create a "Catholic Spring" at some point of their choosing. (Yikes! WTF, Democrats?)
3) It seems that Hillary had a hand in Kim Dotcom's arrest (remember him?). In response, Kim has promised a surprise birthday present for Hillary. (Many people will be quick to point out that Kim is various flavors of asshole, but that's beside the point - he's tech savvy, has lots of contacts, an axe to grind against Hillary, and a ton of money.)
4) Someone over at Reddit/4chan has Clinton's deleted E-mails, and will be releasing them. These are apparently the ones deleted from her server before turning it over to the FBI.
5) One of the recent Podesta dumps included his iPhone account password, and someone hacked his account, post a screencap proving that they were in the account, and sent all the data to Wikieaks. This means that Wikileaks not only has Podesta's E-mails up to whenever, they've got more recent ones up to about 2 days ago.
6) ...and apparently remote-wiped his phone.
7) Hillary is not appearing in person *anywhere*. (Check her rallys and engagements: it's all Bill, Barak, Michelle, and Chelsea. Hillary appears in person once from now to the end of the month.) Conspiracy theorists think that this is because of some hidden illness, but that's probably not the case. The Podesta E-mails reveal that the reason she's not being seen is because she's perceived as untrustworthy in person. Her campaign is being run largely by remote control.
8) A couple of tapes of Clinton have yet to be released.
9) And weirdly, during the last debate a fly landed on Hillary's face. That's not a problem or even especially interesting, but the fact that it landed, walked around and she never flinched or even notices is creeping out a lot of people.
I'm not giving up on Trump just yet, and I've still got lots of popcorn.
Let us remember, Bernie won the primary by 51% total in all of the states that have a paper trail, and lost overwhelmingly in the rest of the states that do not have a paper trail. Isn't that interesting, I wonder what it means.
People seem to think that voting has some sort of meaning, and not a placebo to calm and comfort the masses.
Consider that Bernie raised $60 million to Clinton's $20 million, so the DNC quickly moved $60 million from down-ballot elections directly into the Clinton campaign. The popular vote by percentage was almost exactly proportional to the amount each candidate spent, so if the DNC hadn't done that, Bernie would have won.
Then consider that if you swap Hillary's superdelegates with Bernies, Bernie would have won. A candidate can have upwards of 30% more votes, and the superdelegates will still outweigh the popular vote.
Let's not forget that Clinton and Bernie were in a dead heat in several Iowa counties, and delegates were assigned by coin toss, of which Hillary won all 6.
A recent Wikileaks leak shows that, well... here's the relevant quote:
Why not throw Bernie a bone and reduce the super delegates in the future to the original draft of members of the House and Senate, governors and big city mayors, eliminating the DNC members who are not State chairs or vice-Chairs. (Frankly, DNC members don’t really represent constituencies anyway. I should know. I served on the DNC first as Executive Director and then as an elected member for 10 years.)
So if we “give” Bernie this in the Convention’s rules committee, his people will think they’ve “won” something from the Party Establishment. And it functionally doesn’t make any difference anyway. They win. We don’t lose. Everyone is happy.”
On the Republican side, several candidates signed a pledge to support the candidate whoever it should be, and we know how that turned out. "Except when they call my wife a bad name" is an exception, apparently.
And of course many Republicans don't support Trump, and the RNC cut off funding to his campaign and redirected funds to down-ballot elections.
Which prompted the recent tweet: "Shouldn't the goal of the party be to elect the candidate we voted for?"
People think that voting means something, but it doesn't. Not when the party can withhold support and sabotage their campaigns.
(The stock answer is that "The $x party is a private club, they can make whatever rules they want." Why do we even *bother* with primaries?)
Scott Adams (who writes Dilbert) is on vacation in Switzerland, and his recent blog post had this snippet, which got me really angry:
[...] I also asked the Swiss man what kind of problems they have in Switzerland. He laughed again. The answer is “none.” Literally.
Good economy.
Plenty of jobs.
No racial strife.
Low crime rate.
Highest standard of living.
No real pollution.
No litter.
No homeless that I could see.
The reason it angered me is that here's a country where the government tries to give the citizens a good life. They have fixed all of the major problems and are just letting their citizens live in quiet enjoyment.
The Swiss government is considering implementing a guaranteed minimum income.
Over here in the US, our infrastructure is crumbling, our healthcare is at 3rd world level, jobs are scarce (and we're outsourcing more and more), and two thirds of the people are on the brink of poverty, and the government spies on and opresses everyone.
It's as if the government sees the people as some sort of harvest-able crop whose purpose is to provide taxes, where their only efforts are towards maximum yield.
Can anyone explain why copyright infringement is a criminal offense?
For contrast, note that Comcast was fined $2.3 million for ripping off customers with fraudulent charges.
Comcast's statement on the fines reads:
[Comcast's statement] "...also alleged that the FCC "found no problematic policy or intentional wrongdoing, but just isolated errors or customer confusion." When pressed about that phrasing, Comcast representatives clarified that "there was no finding or admission of liability in this Consent Decree."
(Emphasis mine.)
As someone pointed out, Comcast recovers $2.3 million in revenue in about 15 minutes.
Our government is completely against the people, and for the companies. This has to stop, whether by election or armed revolt is, at the point, immaterial.
That would be such a good argument if Trump hadn't been fat shaming women, telling people to go hunt down porn and talking about a newswoman bleeding out of her "whereever" in just the last few weeks.
Unfortunately for your argument, Trump's behavior has made it incredibly clear that he has not changed at all, despite his protests to the contrary.
Apropos of nothing, how does a recording made 11 years ago show that he hasn't changed?
Was the reference to long knives intentional or coincidence?
It was coincidence to the link you posted. I was thinking more in the lines of The Treachery of the Long Knives, from which I assume we get the phrase the knives are out.
Specifically, I was referring to something powerful that one keeps in reserve, ready to be pulled out at the appropriate time.
The Wikipedia article you reference includes this line:
The phrase "Night of the Long Knives" in the German language predates the massacre itself and refers generally to acts of vengeance.
So it would seem that the phrase isn't necessarily a Nazi reference in any event.