In the UK we have a the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, a public body whose evidence is dismissed by politicians, and whose chair is then sacked for suggesting politicians dismiss the scientific evidence. Still mad about it 2018.

Also related, see use of undercover cops in protest groups (at least two of which actually had children with the people they were surveilling...).

Great fucking Britain.

Your video, Amazing Places: Testing Britain's WW2 Sound Mirrors, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

or the British, who had the added dickishness of exposing their own soldiers to the blast.

sidenote: the hypocrisy of the US, Britain, etc criticising North Korea or <insert middle east bad guy> for developing nuclear weapons would be amusing if it weren't so tragic.

So, they start by telling you how different human meat is from pork, then end by saying just eat pork instead of long pig, they taste the same. Which is it?!
At least they didn't ignore Kuru, (CJD) but outside Papua New Guinea and Britain prions aren't common as far as we know.
I was disappointed they left out how contaminated most long pig is, humans eat crap, who wants to eat meat full of pharmaceuticals and red dyes?

Reminds me of a skating joke:

It is the Olympic men's figure skating. Out comes the
Russian competitor, he skates around to some classical music
in a slightly dull costume, performs some excellent leaps
but without any great artistic feel for the music.

The Judges' scores read: Britain 5.8: Russia 5.9: United
States 5.5: Ireland 6.0

Next comes the American competitor in a sparkling stars and
stripes costume, skating to some rock and roll music. He
gets the crowd clapping, but is not technically as good as
the Russian. He slightly misses landing a triple Salchow and
loses the center during a spin. But, artistically, it is a
more satisfying performance.

The Judges' scores read: Britain 5.8: Russia 5.5: United
States 5.9: Ireland 6.0

Finally out comes the Irish competitor wearing a tatty old
donkey jacket, with his skates tied over his wellies. He
reaches the ice, trips straight away and bangs his nose
which starts bleeding. He tries to get up, staggers a few
paces then slips again. He spends his entire 'routine'
getting up then falling over again. Finally he crawls off the
ice a tattered and bleeding mess.

The Judges' scores read: Britain 0.0: Russia 0.0: United
States 0.0: Ireland 6.0

The other 3 judges turn to the Irish judge and demand in
unison, "How the hell can you give that mess 6.0?!"

To which the Irish judge replies "You've gotta remember,
it's damn slippery out there."

If this guy was in Britain he would be in jail already. Thank you founders for the first amendment.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/youtube-comedian-count-dankula-guilty-hate-speech-nazi-dog-video-145920581.html

I'm pretty sure the stupidest war ever was the War of Jenkins' Ear, which not only was dumb in it's own merit but also spawned two additional wars that killed close to 2 million people.

Basically Britain and a trading company decided that a little war would help to spur trade, so they seized on an 8 year old incident involving the Spanish boarding a ship and cutting off the captain's ear to fan the flames of conflict.

While the casualties of this little conflict were only around 30k dead or wounded, and a paltry 500 ships, it nicely helped kick off the War of Austrian Succession. That fun conflict led to around half a million dead.

Not satisfied, the powers of Europe stewed over the previous two incidents and then decided to really get down and dirty. The Seven Years war was the first really 'global' war, involving every European great power of the time and spanning five continents. Roughly 1.25 million people got to shuffle their mortal coil off the world thanks, in part, to a little trade war over an ear.

Your video, I don't want my past to become Britain's future, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 3 Badge!

I actually agree with you mostly, but you're not gonna like it.

One thing I will point out though - "I just don't connect gun regulations as an effective solution to mass murder."

We have data on this. Take Australia. In the 21 years leading up to Port Arthur and that massacre itself, which triggered the nation into heavily regulating guns, there were 16 mass murders of four or more people, totaling 137 murders. Since then, there have been 12, with a total of 76 murders. This despite there being population growth.

Violent crime rate has dropped from 1996 to now, mainly from reductions in robbery and a small drop in homicide rates.

There is very clear evidence that if most guns are removed from circulation, there are very real and likely benefits when it comes to reducing violent crime in general and murder.

I'm a political moderate and pragmatic. I go with what works. Don't care how liberal or conservative the solution is. I'm never in favor of regulation that is ineffective at solving problems.

And to that end, I'm against most gun control measures. I'm on board with banning assault weapons, fully automatic weapons, armor piercing bullets, but most gun control things like psychiatric evaluations, universal background checks? No.
Why? Because societal models we know that provided real progress on problems seemed to suggest one thing - it's the prevalence of guns that is the problem. If you make it marginally harder to buy guns by things like...

Three day waiting periods
Universal background checks
Psychiatric evaluations

They don't work. Banning guns works, though. It's worked time and time again. Australia, Britain, over and over and over, if guns lose prevalence, violence, murder, etc. decrease significantly.

At some point, society has to decide that giving up guns is worth it. But until that time, "common sense" gun control is a waste of time, and I quite frankly think it might do real effective gun control measures harm because when nothing gets better from these mild measures, they're going to point that out.

I advocate for more firearm regulations, as does the NRA finally, and more enforcement of them. My home is protected by multiple legal firearms. These two statements of fact are in no way at odds.
Only a provocateur would say any regulation equates to a complete ban. No thinking person would make themselves look so ridiculous by spouting such nonsense.

How about comparing murder rates.....4.8 per 100000 U.S. vs .92 Britain. I'd rather be burgled than murdered.

I think everybody advocating for even more gun control needs to put a nice 24" sign on their yard saying "This home not protected by firearms." For some reason most people hesitate to do that. It's like herd immunity for viruses. General gun ownership keeps everybody safer even if they don't own one, criminals don't like to confront armed people.

"By comparing criminal victimization surveys from Britain and the Netherlands (countries having low levels of gun ownership) with the U.S., Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck determined that if the U.S. were to have similar rates of "hot" burglaries as these other nations, there would be more than 450,000 additional burglaries per year where the victim was threatened or assaulted. (Britain and the Netherlands have a "hot" burglary rate near 45% versus just under 13% for the U.S., and in the U.S. a victim is threatened or attacked 30% of the time during a "hot" burglary.)"

Yeah, the bombing was pretty heavy, especially since Churchill was expecting the Germans to begin bombing Britain soon so he held the RAF back (for the most part) instead of providing air support.

The outcome was astonishing, even i couldn't believe it and i've been campaigning for it since 2015. All of this might be out of date 3 hours after i post it, because things are happening fast.

Theresa May has decided to go into government with the DUP propping her up. If you have kept up in the last 6 weeks or so with all the smears about Corbyn/IRA/Sinn Fein and terrorism, then you should understand that the DUP is basically the *other* side of the irish conflict. They are socially conservative and many of their beliefs fall in line with sharia laws; abortion illegal (including for sexual assault or incest cases), homophobia wrong and harmful to society, creationist beliefs, climate change deniers. That list might have less impact to some in the US but in British politics, it's out there on the fringe, quite extreme.

In a month from tomorrow there will be the July marches in Northern Ireland (and elsewhere in UK), and we already saw a march yesterday where unionists (~DUP supporters) trashed a nationalist pub (~Sinn Fein supporters).

So now consider. Nationalists have been dragged through the dirt by Conservative MPs and in the press; accused of being terrorists in order to smear Corbyn to stop him getting power. Whereas unionists are being courted by the Conservative government, and the press turning a blind eye to the DUP and their connections to domestic terrorism.

The northern irish peace process was a great achievement and still stands despite bad feeling on both sides. Part of the good friday agreement that ensures this peace says that the UK and Irish governments must act as neutral mediators in times of disagreement between factions in NI.

So now it becomes clear why Jeremy Corbyn refused to criticise either the unionists or the nationalists in particular - as a true leader with a fucking brain in his head, he understood that to take sides or score points would be to risk Britain's safety and the safety of communities in NI. The reason people were able to smear him as a terrorist sympathiser and danger to this country is *because* he refused to say or do anything that endangered this country.

And it becomes rather worrying that the tories have risked all of that hard work and all of our safety in order to keep power for just a little bit longer. There are already talks of a legal challenge from nationalists.

The good side to this is that it seems doomed to failure. May's credibility is broken, in the UK and in Europe. The alliance with the DUP almost certainly can't happen or last very long. The only alternative leaders to May would make the Conservatives less popular. Polls that saw this surge coming are predicting now that Labour would do even better if another election happened right now. The last time this happened was Ted Heath, whose minority government did not last long, and Labour took over after a few days, and won an election a few months later.

Austerity is well and truly broken as an ideology.

Oh, and all the talk of "the death of social democracy" in europe was actually the death of triangulating centrists who have become completely alienated from ordinary people. Socialism lives.

@bobknight33 @newtboy

Leaving out key information, to the point that what's being said could be easily misunderstood, is a form of dishonesty.

But, Bob, I know we don't talk much, that's mostly because I don't like you. This kind of thing is exactly why I feel this way though.

Let's break down the first few of this commercial...errr propaganda piece.

"Despite our political differences, Russia and the United States have maintained friendly relations since the foundation of our great nation."
--------
Depends heavily on your definition of "friendly." If by friendly, you mean "almost nuking each other over long stretches of time," yeah sure, we're friendly.
------------------

"In fact, Russia and America have worked together, throughout history, to defeat our common enemies."
-------
Ehhh... we sort of worked independently against the same people out of individualized interests, not because we like each other. The video cites Russia "ignoring British requests for naval support during the American Revolutionary War;" except Catherine II basically manipulated the colonists into turning their backs on Britain to suit her own purposes and weakening the countries by splitting them in two.

This video cites the Ghent Treaty, but that was only struck after Napolean had already taken Moscow and an emboldened Russia started the land grab that led to the Crimean War. While getting their commie shits kicked in and losing the land they tried to take and then some, they were worried about not being compensated for American Russia, aka Alaska. So a few years after that, they sold it to the US for a cool $7 mill. (cold joke, get it?)

In short, even if we did get along with each other, it was just barely. Regardless, that was a different country that just happens to be occupying the same land now.

---------

But, you know, nevermind all that. Because that's not what you wanted to debate, was it? (see quote)

So I'll say this: Yesterday, Donald Trump got into a twitter war with the mayor of London, whose city just suffered a terror attack. That's the level of critique and disregard for decorum he has while doing it.

He'll cofefe the shit out of the pope and spit in NATO's face.

AND YETTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

Nothing but positivity for Russia.

Last I remember, you were a fairly large promoter of Hillary's email dumps. Yeah, one of us is drinkin the bad kool-aid alright.

Let's end the suspense. Why not use something less-abstract to rest your laurels on? Hmmm...if only there were something...like...hmmm...something more...hmmm... concrete......hmmmm not like transparent like a fence...fence=fake news (see first presidential address)...hmm if only there were some kind of symbol for just how big of a fucking liar this asshole is....hmmmm ghad why can't i think of this...URGh! I feel like I'm banging my head against....hmmm.

Ah well.

p.s. Right here buddy: http://bit.ly/2rNSNsw

There are some that suggest May or the tories in general are trying to lose the election so that Labour WILL take the backlash. Ultimately no way to know how that will go, but right now there is severe backlash towards the tories and the narrative is swiftly changing towards Labour. I see an election win as the start of a very, very long conversation. Activists will have to continue the fight, press standards will have to be changed either through public pressure or through legislature. And in Britain that might happen because the press here are the most distrusted in europe (52% disapproval, or 52% considered biased/corrupt, or something).

I said in the past that the UK was ready to change. Essentially, the narrative was there to be taken right back, but I didn't know if Corbyn's team had the skill to do it. I have to say that I am blown away by Labour's campaign, it has been almost flawless. I say that because i think the narrative is there to be taken on Brexit. The tories called the referendum to hold onto power. They arrogantly called the general election to consolidate power, with Brexit talks imminent, only to whine about being too busy to do interviews because they're thinking about Brexit! They have then made a catastrophic hash of their campaign, u-turned 5 or 6 times, contradicted themselves, and generally shown themselves to be weak, without answers, and bullies. In 10 years time, who knows what we will think? But in the short term at least, this can be framed as a "they fucked it up, but we'll take over in a crisis and try to fix it."

At the end of the day, a Corbyn government has always been so out of the question that i don't know what to expect if that were to happen. Is another referendum on leaving out of the question?

At the very least, for now, i would say Brits prefer the idea of Labour sorting out Brexit than the Tories, and the average attitude towards Brexit in the country is rather one of resigned acceptance - we know it's bad, but we did it, so now we better get on with it. But we're very suspicious, and don't want to get shafted by irresponsible or reckless politicians. True for the left and right, but obviously for different reasons.