History Lesson:

In 1949, when only the United States had nuclear weapons, everybody was asking when the Russians would have the capability.

President Harry Truman answered the question with "I know...never"

He never clarified what he meant by those words, and those in that meeting declined to ask, but the topic would be rehashed again and again.

I really recommend Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. Episode 59 (Blitz) the Destroyer of Worlds. A nearly 6 hour fascinating look into the period starting with the Trinity test and ending with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

No, I didn't confuse anything. Almost every single country benefits from 'illegal' immigrants as well as regular ones. France, for example, has thousands of illegal immigrants from mostly Islamic countries that provide services to it's mostly aging native population. We benefit no more and no less than any other nation from illegal immigration, as @newtboy mentioned, if you import food products or grow them locally you probably are benefiting from illegal immigration.

As far as your evidence, I hope this will suffice as 'some':

Steven A. Camarota, PhD, Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies, in a Jan. 6, 2015 article, "Unskilled Workers Lose Out to Immigrants," available at nytimes.com, stated:

"There are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country and we also admit over a million permanent legal immigrants each year, leading to enormous implications for the U.S. labor market. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that there are some 58 million working-age (16 to 65) native-born Americans not working — unemployed or out of the labor market entirely. This is roughly 16 million more than in 2000. Equally troubling, wages have stagnated or declined for most American workers. This is especially true for the least educated, who are most likely to compete with immigrants (legal and illegal).

Anyone who has any doubt about how bad things are can see for themselves at the bureau's website, which shows that, as of November, there were 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans working than in November 2007, while 2 million more immigrants (legal and illegal) were working. Thus, all net employment gains since November 2007 have gone to immigrants."

Jan. 6, 2015 - Steven A. Camarota, PhD

George J. Borjas, PhD, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at Harvard University, in a Sep./Oct. 2016 article, "Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers," available at politico.com, stated:

"[A]nyone who tells you that immigration doesn't have any negative effects doesn't understand how it really works. When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down. Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent. Even after the economy has fully adjusted, those skill groups that received the most immigrants will still offer lower pay relative to those that received fewer immigrants.

Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable...

We don't need to rely on complex statistical calculations to see the harm being done to some workers. Simply look at how employers have reacted. A decade ago, Crider Inc., a chicken processing plant in Georgia, was raided by immigration agents, and 75 percent of its workforce vanished over a single weekend. Shortly after, Crider placed an ad in the local newspaper announcing job openings at higher wages."

Sep./Oct. 2016 - George J. Borjas, PhD

Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., PhD, Emeritus Professor of Labor Economics at Cornell University, in an Oct. 14, 2010 briefing Report to the US Commission on Civil Rights, "The Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Wages and Employment Opportunities of Black Workers," available at usccr.gov, stated:

"Because most illegal immigrants overwhelmingly seek work in the low skilled labor market and because the black American labor force is so disproportionately concentrated in this same low wage sector, there is little doubt that there is significant overlap in competition for jobs in this sector of the labor market. Given the inordinately high unemployment rates for low skilled black workers (the highest for all racial and ethnic groups for whom data is collected), it is obvious that the major looser [sic] in this competition are low skilled black workers…

It is not just that the availability of massive numbers of illegal immigrants depress wages, it is the fact that their sheer numbers keep wages from rising over time, and that is the real harm experienced by citizen workers in the low skilled labor market."

Oct. 14, 2010 - Vernon M. Briggs Jr., PhD

There are more educated people than I that hold the same opinion, but let me give you an easier to understand, and absolutely true, example. How do I know it is true? When I was a much younger man, I worked for a roofing company. So I lived it.

The company I worked for was owned by a family friend, who had worked for most of his life in the field and had an excellent reputation. However, in the 90's around the time NAFTA was passed and (not related, I hope) illegal immigration spiked in Texas, he began to lose out to other companies. He did some snooping around and found out they were often charging hundreds of dollars less in their estimates than he could possibly offer, at least while still making a profit. He also found out that the two companies that were taking most of his business were staffed with illegal workers, being paid much lower wages than he could give to his legal employees.

Fast forward a year and he was close to declaring bankruptcy. Just like any type of labor where you pay your employees little to nothing comparatively to their compatriots in the same field, you cannot compete fairly. Net result, he was forced to let us go one by one, replacing us with illegals.

Obviously, I moved on, learned a different skill and began to make far more than I would have as a simple laborer. But the fact remains that an entire industry was undermined and radically changed by the inclusion of cheap illegal labor. This will not change if we simply ignore illegal immigration because it is the 'nice' thing to do. What it will accomplish is that young people will slowly find that certain jobs are out of their selection. It also will get worse the more accepted and commonplace illegal immigration becomes. I know for a fact that while I worked at Apple there were entry level support techs that were illegally here. Perhaps you will say that it is a benefit because it would prevent offshoring, but I disagree. What it does is make the working class poorer and doesn't solve the other issues brought about by illegal immigration, such as Emergency Rooms being flooded by people who can't afford insurance. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that it is common to go to the ER and see people stacked like cordwood because they can't refuse patients unless they are a private hospital.

As far as The Jungle, and my statement about it and it's author, I was merely pointing out that as much as you try to put forth that illegal immigrants have a bad life here in the USA, the fact is that we used to treat legal immigrants far worse. Perhaps it was a reach on my part, but it seemed logical at the time.

I doubt we will agree on any of this, but I respect your opinion. I live in a state that has a very large proportion of illegal immigrants, and while you are correct that they are generally not a criminal negative to society, they do have severe effects which I think you are overlooking. I do think that legal immigration policy needs massive change and businesses that exploit the almost slave like labor of illegals to make more profit should be punished severely. In the meantime, when we do catch illegals, they should be deported, not protected by a sympathetic politically motivated law enforcement group.

Downvote on point one, that feeling victimised is worse than being victimized. Just duh.
Acting the victim when you are not one, like Republicans and Christians do, is detrimental, acting the victim when you've been victimized is being rational. It's hilariously hypocritical to hear a conservative complain about victim mentality after the last 8 years of their whining and moaning about Obama victimizing them.

Out of wedlock birth doesn't mean dad's out of the picture, only that parents aren't married.

As stated above, cherry picked facts and ignoring history makes this ridiculous victim blaming. For instance, blaming Detroit's condition on liberal governance and ignoring the loss of the auto industry and other factors in it's decline is totally dishonest or just ignorant in the extreme, your choice.

@enoch,

but you and i may disagree on some things,but i would like to think we have both earned each others respect.


Agreed.

I also share a similar sentiment in lamenting the lack of actual legitimate journalism. I've only got a handful of people out there that I feel I can actually trust to make an effort to present all sides and the most relevant/important facts when presenting a topic. The dogged determination of most media(independent and otherwise) to show nothing but a single dimension to an issue that fits their own bias is saddening.

Chomsky in particular is a real lose to me as he has rapidly declined from shining a light on America's mistakes into someone that solely, and exclusively documents why America is evil. Anything good or reasonable in it's actions is never touched on or quickly glossed over, the corresponding evils and ills of any and all other parties is similarly ignored. The lone exception being those allied to America in which case their evil once again are documented.

I've lost patience with that kind of single mindedness and call it out as what it is, propaganda.

Yup; here is the Live Science take---in brief--it's a conceptual artist's thing (Vitaly Bulgarov) who has faked a website and even the Korea development company...

"New video clips purporting to show a 13-foot-tall (4 meters) humanoid robot piloted by a person in its torso look like something straight out of "Avatar" or "Transformers," but a Live Science investigation has revealed reasons to believe some skepticism might be in order.

The robot clips have been picked up by a variety of online news and technology outlets, including Kotaku and Wired UK. But the South Korean company that is supposedly developing the robot has virtually no online presence and was unfamiliar to robotics researchers contacted by Live Science.

Furthermore, the only source for the videos or any information about them is the Facebook and Instagram pages of a designer whose website mentions a conceptual art project about a "fictional robotics corporation that develops its products in a not-so-distant future."

The designer, Vitaly Bulgarov, told Live Science that the robot is real. However, he declined to share the names of scientists or engineers working on the project, and messages to the purported CEO of the company went unreturned. [Gallery: See Images of the Giant Humanoid Robot]

Mystery business

According to Bulgarov's Facebook page, the videos were taken in South Korea at a company called Korea Future Technology. Almost all references to this company online appear to be associated with Bulgarov's posts and the subsequent news pieces on the robot. Bulgarov said the company has been operating for several years."

""Robots are messy business," said Christian Hubicki, a postdoctoral robotics researcher at Georgia Tech who worked on the DURUS robot. "They get torn apart and put back together over and over, and transmission grease gets all over the place. Even the nice white floor is beautifully unscuffed [in these videos]. Never once during likely hundreds of hours of debugging the giant robot did it kick in a way that scratched it up?"

The people around the robot also appear to be too close for safety and are not following the standard practice of wearing safety goggles, Hubicki said.

Bulgarov said the company's CEO required that the lab be clean, and that the videos had been brightened in postproduction. Fearing said robotics labs in Asia can be relatively neat.

However, there's another problem: Hubicki told Live Science that the robot's leg joints look unusually smooth given the force that the step of a 1.5-ton robot would exert on the motors. [5 Reasons to Fear Robots]"

http://www.livescience.com/57296-giant-humanoid-robot-video-hoax.html

my dad used to own a 1965 GTO.
that car was a BEAST,and he would do the very same thing when i was around this little girls age.

oh the joy of being pinned to the seat to the deafening growl of the engine, and watching the trees whip by at,what seemed to my little eyes,warp speed.

seatbelts?
what seatbelts?
didn't come standard with a GTO,and who needed em?
(maybe they did and they were just jammed so thoroughly into the cracks of the seats that we didn't even know they were there).

and then my mother made my dad trade the GTO in for VW bug,and so began my fathers slow decline into a suburbia fueled nightmare of mediocrity.

(i kid.he was still pretty fucking awesome).

It's kind of sad how we're fishing all the fish out of the ocean though. I've seen documentaries of the massive decline in fish, causing some island peoples' very lives to be threatened.

If they think that people are starting to lose interest in the main parties, they will spend the next 4 years highlighting war, terrorism, uncertainty and scarcity so that people are less likely to take any kind of risk. They will also highlight the uncertainty of voting for anyone else - i.e. these third parties are inexperienced, they don't understand, they are weak and/or sympathetic towards our enemy.

It's basically what they've done with Corbyn over here. "They" control the press so they also control the national will.

I think the only way we progress beyond this profit for the few, managed decline for the rest phase is to destroy the stranglehold that the media moguls like Murdoch, Barclays (the brothers, not the bank), etc. have over mainstream media.

They are literally peddling falsehoods and distractions so that people will target anyone other than those responsible.

Ohhhh, so you just reassert your point about Democrats never backing down, but Republicans do without any factual basis whatsoever! What a novel losing debate strategy!

Obamacare isn't perfect and needs to be fixed or replaced with something better. Not the Trumpian "something great" if it should be replaced, but something that is well thought out and addresses what Obamacare couldn't accomplish if the entire premise is systemically not going to work.

Did you see what I did there? I *gasp* recognize that sometimes things don't work! OMG! IT'S AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I also didn't say it's a "fucking disaster", because it isn't. If it were that, explain how the uninsured rate has dropped very significantly. It was never going to achieve 100% insurance rate. The only way that happens is with single payer.

Here's how stupid you are. You don't seem to understand that if Obamacare isn't the answer, you're just making single payer universal health care more likely to be enacted. The American people are not going to go back to being denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition. They're just not gonna. Obamacare is the least left policy you could possibly enact that would help control costs and decrease the number of people who are uninsured.

You can scream to the top of your lungs, but Obamacare was enacted to remedy real problems. I'm even sympathetic to the argument that those were real problems, but Obamacare isn't the answer, but if you're going to make that argument, you have to propose something that has historical precedent and rationale to solve those problems. And you simply don't have one.

So again, keep struggling in the quicksand until it swallows you whole, and single payer is enacted.

Your evidence about health insurance premiums is anecdotal, and quite frankly, you don't seem to understand that your numbers and description of what happened to her is absolutely ridiculous. You don't get on medicaid because your insurance premiums go up under Obamacare. You qualify for Medicaid because of a lack of income.

Secondly, the claim is absolutely ridiculous that her premiums went up that much. For data we have available, *unsubsidized* premiums for the lowest cost silver plans for data we have in the Obamacare exchanges was $257 a month for a single person.

http://kff.org/health-reform/issue-brief/analysis-of-2017-premium-changes-and-insurer-participation-in-the-affordable-care-acts-health-insurance-marke
tplaces/

If she qualifies for Medicaid, then surely she could go on a silver plan in the Obamacare exchanges and come out likely paying less. Oh, and, on top of that, she would EASILY qualify for federal subsidies if she qualified for medicaid.

Oh, and btw, without Obamacare, if health care companies decided to raise those premiums just to price gouge, what protection would she have? Not much. Obamacare insures that you can only take in so much that isn't spent on health care.

Your story is completely utterly full of crap on so many levels, it's clear you made it up.

I'm dismissing all your numbers are being unsubstantiated bullshit. Have premiums gone up? Sure have. Were they going up before Obamacare? Yep! There's a healthy debate about how much Obamacare is contributing to premium increases. Obamacare isn't perfect. I'm happy to discuss rationally what could be done to improve Obamacare, or another plausible alternative. But not with you, since you pull numbers out of your ass that easily are completely debunked.

BTW, FYI, Obamacare was not intended to lower premiums nor to completely eliminate the number of uninsured. It was to control costs in all forms and reduce the amount of uninsured, as well as reform the health care system to eliminate problems like being denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions, people having to declare bankruptcy due to medical bills, etc.

Some of its goals it succeeded in, and some not so much. That's a fair assessment at this point. Medical related bankruptcies have not declined. Being denied coverage due to a pre-existing condition has been eliminated. Premiums have gone up, but we simply don't have enough data to determine if they've slowed or accelerated since Obamacare was implemented. If you go by the immediate years after Obamacare was fully implemented, they slowed.

http://healthaffairs.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Adler_Exhibit1.png

More recently, they've accelerated. It's important to note that health care costs are not solely determined by premiums alone. It's interesting you cherry picked premiums only to prove costs haven't been controlled because premiums are your best case to make that point. Copays, coinsurance, deductibles, prescription drugs, all those play a role. IE, if the average American pays more in premiums but less everywhere else, it's possible the net average is lower for total costs paid for health care.

These are complex topics that have no room for bringing in rose colored ideologically tinted lenses to force the outcome to be "a fucking disaster", where you'll bring in anecdotal evidence, some of which is completely utterly made up.

Just how far are you willing to make stuff up? Hillary Clinton, according to you, has never in the last 40 years done anything substantially positive.

REALLY?! Look, I understand not necessarily wanting her to be President. OK, fine. But that claim is absolutely ridiculous. Over $2 billion has been raised by the Clinton Foundation, and over 90% of that has gone to charitable work according to independent studies. Before you go down the path of "paid access", blah blah blah, even if that were true, the reality is $1.8 billion went to charitable works around the world through the Clinton Foundation Hillary Clinton helped to create and run.

That's not substantial?!?!

Dude, just stop. The only people who believe that BS are people within your bubble. You're not convincing anyone else who didn't already think Hillary Clinton personally killed Vince Foster. You're just making people like me think you're a complete loon.

As far a president moral fiber We can go back to Kennedy and Clinton both banning chicks left and right. SEX is SEX . I'm sure Bush would have like some babes backing up on him but don't think it happened. Reagan and Romney seemed to carry a higher moral fiber with regards to women and random sex.

If I would put Christian values above the candidates this election then non would get my vote. That would be a bad choice. One is clearly more destructive for America than the other.

Clinton is clearly wrong choice for leadership. Since 50% ish seem to think otherwise I have not choice but to try to block her by voting Trump. Will I hold my noise and bull the leaver You bet. Slowing down Americans moral decline ( as apposed to Clinton) is a fair reason to vote for Trump. Getting jobs creation going is a reason for a Trump vote.


If this was 30 years ago and Trump ( Bush Clinton) was running , do you think the media would have put it out? not a chance in hell? No network president would allow it.

This country has lowered it moral standard to a new low . And that is why this video was put out.

Here's the thing... They CAN do that, and they CAN get away with it.

Seriously, what is anyone going to do about it? They did it, now they're rich, now they have powerful friends, now you can't get them.

You think Clinton will fix this? You think even Trump will fix this? Why didn't he release his tax returns I wonder?

Shoulda gone for Bernie. We should go for Corbyn. But you didn't, and we won't, and that's how we end up in managed worldwide decline.

This is the point of thought experiments. They're not supposed to be unsolvable zen koans. They're supposed to help you identify and examine the fundamentals of your whatever philosophical model for a given topic. This one is obviously doing its job, because when you can construct statements like 'perfect certainty makes inaction as culpable as action' then you already have a richer understanding of ethics than say 95% of the population.

Many people give the opposite answer to yours; they don't think you should take an innocent life deliberately, even if it is for a greater good. Now, are these stupid people? Yes. And you'll find more and more of them when you recast the question in increasingly uncomfortable terms: Should you shove a fat man in front of the train to slow it down, knowing the five will then have time to escape? Should a doctor harvest the vital organs of a perfectly healthy patient to save five otherwise healthy people who happen to be in need of various organ transplants?

Real world solutions and complications to these questions are irrelevant. Petri dishes don't exist in nature but you don't slap them out of biologists hands and yell at them to do real science in the real world. And isn't the fact that so many people would decline to assassinate baby Hitler informative in itself?

*ban1.0
Globe Business Media Group
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BzT3skiurU

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Decline-of-the-US-and-the-rise
*ban2.0
Globe Business Media Group
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCGjJ0oVMLA

Not as different as you think, when at least 1/3 and probably up to 1/2 of the people (100% wrongly) believe the constitution is not only based in Christianity, but was handed to Washington and Jefferson by Christ himself. The secular nature of the government the founders attempted to codify is eroding...we now have god on money, in our pledge of allegiance, in our courtrooms, etc. Religious rights/laws are on the rise, not decline.....at least Christian religious rights and laws.

The church is in decline, yes. Out of power, not by 1/2.

Yes, my point, it's not secular if being atheist disqualifies one from holding office. There is a religious test, not by law but in reality. That alone precludes true secularism, and it's not alone.

Well, of course there are other countries, but I only know how religion interacts with the government in my own country, and even then I freely admit there's much I don't know, both by their design of the system and from my own lack of interest. I can't speak with any first hand knowledge about how Europe is evolving (or devolving), how it's governments respond to religious pressures, or how their populations react. That's why I stuck to the US in my response, which is a place that the religious right describes as you did, totally secular and fast removing all power from Christianity, when the reality is you can't be elected here if you don't pray to Christ publicly and removing special privileges only granted to religion is considered a war against religion and an attempt to stamp it out...at least by 1/3 of us if not more.

As for perspective, you limited it to "the time we live in", but you want to counter my answer with "historically....", and YOU said "secular constitution", so I'm not sure how you translate that to "globally". To me, "secular constitution" strongly implies the US.
Clearly things are different in ANY democracy than under a theocratic dictatorship. That goes without saying....but I guess not to you, so now I said it, so now you can see the perspective that went right over your head.