I'm not saying he shouldn't be prosecuted. And he most certainly deserves to rot in jail for the rest of his life for all the financial crimes he appears to have perpetrated prior to his presidential run (his crimes against the English language alone should qualify). Added on, the crimes surrounding the race and his presidency would see him well into the next century in jail time if prosecuted fully.

It simply won't resolve anything for the United States. What's needed is a fundamental political shift or a major change to the political system. Neither of those can happen in the next few years, and they're unlikely even down the road.

Good piece in the Nation on the current state of Russiagate.

Appetizer:

These imperatives have incentivized a compromised set of journalistic and evidentiary standards. In Russiagate, unverified claims are reported with little to no skepticism. Comporting developments are cherry-picked and overhyped, while countervailing ones are minimized or ignored. Front-page headlines advertise explosive and incriminating developments, only to often be undermined by the article’s content, or retracted entirely. Qualified language—likely, suspected, apparent—appears next to “Russians” to account for the absence of concrete links. As a result, Russiagate has enlarged into a storm of innuendo that engulfs issues far beyond its original scope.

He didn't have full auto, he used a bump fire stock.
Full auto fires around 20hz. Well practiced bump firing is around 10hz. Well practiced semi auto pull is around 6hz.

Bump firing also sprays so bad it's not aimable beyond a few feet distance. The gun community is even more surprised than other people, most considered the bump stock as a joke doo dad for making noise and wasting money.





All vendors, even at a gun show, must do background checks.

All private sellers, regardless of where (at home, gun show, on the street, wherever), are not required to do checks - but are in practice held liable for subsequent gun crimes if they can't prove they had no idea the buyer was shady.

There is absolutely nothing special about gun shows. The gun show loophole is an entirely imaginary issue (I explained this earlier).




A traceable gun is just as capable of shooting a person as an untraceable gun.



Yes, anyone can put together that arsenal.
Especially anyone with a squeaky clean record who qualifies to be a gun owner no matter what the restriction - like the Vegas shooter.

Hence why *nothing proposed* would have had *any impact* on the Vegas events, short of confiscation raids nation wide and capital punishment for possession.





The reply was to : "You are more likely to be killed by a criminal if you have a gun than if you don't."

I have two interpretations of that chart

1) (my initial thought)
Assault understood as the legal meaning (brandishing, threatening, not necessarily killing).
Discharge understood as firing.
This is what the original math was based on.
But yes, it seems senseless because how can you die to brandishing?

You are correct regarding the "per year".
The original math does include the mistake of thinking it was cause of death, not per year chance of death.
That alters the result from 350'000 lifetimes for a 50/50 chance, down to 350'000 years for a 50/50 chance. AKA 4600 lifetimes worth of years for a 50/50 chance in the next year.

2) (your [likely correct] thought)
Assault understood as being fired upon.
Discharge understood as accidental (what else could it mean?)
This variant is computed below.
However, this challenges conventional assertion, because the common assertion is that accidents kill more than intentional. Maybe that assertion is crap.

1/24974 as caused by assault
That's a 99.995995835669095859694081845119% chance of dying by a cause OTHER than firearms.
Which requires around 17'000 trials for the chance of the next death to be 50% by firearm.
I.E. 99.995995835669095859694081845119% ^ 17'000 = 50.625%, or about 50/50.
AKA 226 lifetimes worth of years to have a 50/50 chance of death by firearm in the next year.

Referring to the study I linked earlier :
http://service.prerender.io/http://polstats.com/?_escaped_fragment_=/life#!/life
#2 version has a similar death chance to the polstats link, so the #2 variant is likely the appropriate understanding (not my initial understanding).

-schehearzade

Trump qualified his extremely late condemnation of Nazis. My condemnation of antifa is without hesitation (called them thugs day one in Berkeley with Milo), reservation or qualification.

Trump accepted Duke's support for months before being forced to weakly say ' ok, I denounce him, ok?' and his platform essentially was a Duke wet dream.
The left denounces antifa unreservedly and constantly (to your deaf ears) .

I'm not the media, don't put their alleged words in my mouth. I clearly gave the right/republicans credit for finally saying they don't stand with Nazis and don't want their vote...a few weeks ago. Too bad Trump can't follow suit and denounce them without qualification or spreading blame....but he seems incapable of that when it comes to Nazis and racists...but not when it comes to Muslims or Mexicans.

Exactly, if you have cameras that are controlled by the very people monitoring them, then you might as well not have them.

How many times have we heard "the vehicle/body camera was 'malfunctioning':, "Oh, the officers had them turned off", or "The data storage was 'corrupted' before it could be accessed?"

I mean we just recently had a women shot and killed by the police when she reported a sexual assualt. The officers hadn't turned on their cameras so we may never know the truth.

If you want them to be effective, they must not be able to be turned off, they must transmit the data to a location that is independent of either the police or the DA until the data can be reviewed by someone not involved in the issue, and they must have a malfunction rate that is very low.

The only other alternative is to remove them and use the extra money to pay for officers that are actually qualified to be an officer, plus they must undergo rigorous psychiatric profiling every so often.

Does this qualify as noodling?

Meh, He's not bitter... I watched a helldesk guy rip his headphones off. Open the bottom drawer in the desk. yell in to the mic "You're in the penalty box!" slam the headset in to the drawer and slam it shut and walk out of the building... He had spent an hour trying to help a lost cause.

We called those type of customers the 12 O'clock flashers. People too stupid to be able to set the clocks on any electronics in the house so they all flash 12:00.....

Every IT guy has his stories. They almost always end the same way.....
He's the person leaving the liquor store with the two cartons of cigs and the daily supply of JD...

after 6 months on the phone the only other job he's qualified for is Hostage Negotiator.

Different timestamps ... but same thumbnail. I'll be happy to declare it if it qualifies. @eric3579 care to weigh in?

I think Republicans have a disconnect on the word "Build" when they talk about Building an Economy. You build from the ground up. You don't build an attic, then put up walls, then floors, and finish with a solid foundation. It starts with that solid foundation. In an economy like ours that rely on people spending, you need people to be able to spend. That means the people at the low end that do more spending than those on the top (per dollar earned anyhow), need to be the ones having disposable income. If they spend 100% or more of their income on living essentials, they can't spend to move the economy. When they finally do spend, then the retailer can hire more people (at least until automation starts taking over low end jobs, which is frighteningly soon), which means more people with income to spend, which feeds into the cycle. Eventually transportation starts picking up, which feeds more money into the economy. Eventually production has to keep up. By punishing those at the bottom, is shooting oneself in the foot. Half the people who work for Walmart qualify for food stamps, though Walmart makes enough to pay everyone a living wage, give them benefits, and still be profitable, but the people conservatives (Christians yet, who Jesus said to help the needy and the poor, and how the rich were going to hell) are mad at, are the poor people working there, rather than the rich owners/operators for not paying living wages. So conservatives seek to punish those workers by taking away something that allows them to spend money on things that actually move the economy forward. 3 people buying a $25k Chevy will do far more for the economy than that rich ass hole who just put $70lk on a Mercedes or Lexus. Their collection of TVs, video game systems and the like, do far more for the economy than that rich guy's super high def, ultra large screen TV. It's such a fucked up world in conservative land... I'm still at a loss how I used to be a part of it.

It gets to what @enoch was talking about above. There are some really good business owners, then there are the winny bitches who say they can't pay living wages... One of the jobs I worked at, complained in a letter to all of us that if Obama won (first time around) he'd have to fire over 350 people if he put his tax plans in place. Come that February, Obama isn't even in office yet, and he fires 350+ people. Then tells the rest of us that the company couldn't afford to give us raises... of course the company at the same time, went out and purchases a private jet for him, and then he purchased a second mansion in the local, Jack Nicklaus, signature golf course gated community... and he already owned the second largest mansion there. But oh, the conservatives are so support him over his employees, and think poorly of his employees for needing help living day to day, and praise him for his business acumen. The problem with conservatives is they LOVE greed. Love it. They worship it more than they do the Christ they say they serve. They just don't want their money going to help others, they give plenty at their church, they give time at the soup kitchen, but God forbid that their taxes help those working for the asshole business owners who chose greed over their employees. Pay your employees living wages, and no, you won't have it on easy street like Enoch's nephew, but I can guarantee you that his son is the far better human... and that's not to say the nephew doesn't give, he very well may, but he chose to take that money for himself than to pay his employees well. It doesn't matter if he gives tons of it away, it was ill gotten, how much could it have helped his employees had he let them keep more of their labor? Sadly, that nephew seems to be the vast majority of businesses in the US.

Lifting your visor is a sign to the track marshals that you aren't seriously injured so that's all to the good, but it seems to me he lifted it a little too soon. I'd be inclined to keep it down until the debris has stopped flying around and my car has stopped sliding across the track.

Anyways, it's a good thing that in the 60's and 70's they averaged one fatality for every two races or so, and these days it's a big deal when someone is seriously hurt (like Bourdais in qualifying), and a huge deal when someone is killed--like name cars and turns and stuff after them kind of a big deal.

Bill C-16 adds "gender identity or expression" to the list of things protected by anti-discrimination law under the Canadian Human Rights Code.

The transsexual and gender non-binary communities are insisting that not using their preferred pronouns qualifies as discrimination, and therefore now punishable under this amendment.

Dr. Peterson argues that forcing people through the law to use pronouns created by this minority resembles how fascist ideologies of the past have functioned. A bad precedent to set, and not how natural societal mechanisms of language adoption function. He also seems to object to the long list of made up pronouns the gender-fluid types are insisting on.

One example of language adoption I ran across, without going into detail, was the creation and use of "Ms."

It's horrible that the conditions are that way. We are at fault also due to our drug policy being what it is. However, until the law changes, I can't support them coming. Now, once they are here, if they can prove that it is almost certain death for them to return, I think they could qualify for refugee status. It is a hard question to answer. I'm not a sociopath, I do have emotions. I believe the law should be blind, though, and should not be influenced by emotion.

Actually, it was created because a horrendously racist senator that advocated lynching from the Senate floor was maligning a Jr. senator for considering the annexation of the Philippines. The Jr. Senator heard, rushed to the floor, and accused the Sr Senator of telling "willful, malicious, and deliberate lies", and the Sr, Tillman, rose and attacked the younger Jr Senator violently ending in a brawl on the Senate floor.

..so technically, it was created to protect senators from the lies of racists....but it's now being used to protect and hide the racists' lies and actions.

Another rule that's a rule, when a law is routinely not enforced, it becomes legally invalid. This rule has been used once in over 100 years, and consistently ignored for the remainder of it's existence....so if the rules of the Senate are law, and I think they qualify, this one is no longer valid.

Technically no but partially yes, my degree is in general science, but I gotta ask, what difference does it make to my statements what level of degree I have in which science? Can a person not know or study a topic without having a masters degree in it, IYO?

And just to explain, I went to college for nearly 12 years after numerous advanced college prep schools with no specific degree in mind, just because I like to learn and had the opportunities, and one day asked the counselor if I qualified for a degree, and I did. Most of what I studied was science...all fields of science available for study from astronomy to advanced molecular biology. Also some comparative religion, math, Latin (to help with science), and basic requirements (I get bored with English, for instance, and never excelled in it, but still had to take it), but science was always my focus.

Stripping context is a stupid semantics game and your better than that. If I say "declaring it's ok to kill children" is an abhorrent thing to say and I condemn it unequivocally, you aren't being honest if you observe I uttered the words "...it's ok to kill children...".

I stated the context being an act of war. If you are at war, and the enemy has managed to dig up a battle group with dual American citizenship, does every bomber sortie over them have to hold back until police can come in and arrest the group so they can stand trial first?

Your just being deliberately obtuse. Simply state you disagree on it qualifying as war like situation, then you and I otherwise agree on the whole thing.