CRT is not real outside of law school. It’s a big racist lie. It’s not taught in grade school.

Edit: Yes, if true, actual CRT, the law school class, was banned in grade school, nothing would change….but you want the intentional misuse and bastardization of the phrase to mean any mention of racial disparity, racist actions, slavery, Jim Crow, racist policies including those adopted by the Republican Party at the same time those racist policies were abandoned by Democrats in the late 60’s early 70’s, any mention of lynching, the KKK, the fact that non whites were not allowed to vote, the fact that non whites were not considered full human beings in the constitution, etc to all be under the name “CRT” and want it all to be removed from schools. You want to rewrite history so it resembles the false image you think you project. It’s absolutely moronic, attempted forced ignorance. The Republican plan for children because ignorance makes it easy to abuse and control the populace.

American history is real….and really racist.
By intentionally mislabeling anything about our racist history as “CRT”, a right wing buzz word they have stripped of any actual meaning to create some fantasy racial boogeyman they can point to to excuse blatant racist policy and actions, you think that allows you to pretend it doesn’t exist, to deny it, and to return to it. Removing any mention of our racist history is racist, stupid, and is a ploy to convince right wing morons that racism isn’t real, never happened, and so doesn’t need any fixing or even teaching. It erases an ENORMOUS part of American history, and all of black American history. You love that.

You bold faced liar. That’s EXACTLY what “anti CRT” is about, renaming the slave trade as “Africans immigrating”, calling slavery “job security”, pretending that Lincoln ended racism completely (but being confused because in your mind slavery is a hoax), ignoring the murderous atrocities during reconstruction, ignoring the blatant often deadly racism that was the norm through the 70’s, and the institutional racism that still exists, never mentioning and pretending attacks against blacks like Tulsa and others, mass murders, arsons, terrorism, all by law enforcement so there’s no legal remedies for the survivors….(The Tulsa race massacre took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of White residents, some of whom had been deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US)…never happened. The anti CRT movement is about erasing that history so they 1)don’t feel guilty or uncomfortable for trying to defend or excuse having a murderously racist history, and 2)so it’s easier to return to that racist society with minimal effort because they won’t know where it leads.

Why? Because the senators that were complicit all switched to the Republican Party after the southern strategy, and those who believed in equality and rights for all switched to the Democratic Party. Another bit of racist history you personally love to deny despite it being the historical, undeniable record of our history. They don’t want to be asked, because they either answer truthfully and are proven to be racists, or lie and lose their racist voter base. Racists are nearly all…99%+-, right wingers. They do not belong to the party trying to eradicate racism. They belong to the party that openly accepts and fosters racism, and pretends, often insists it doesn’t exist when they’re in public….your party. The party of racists, white nationalists, insurrectionists, revisionists, anti American, pro Russian, sexist, anti democracy, anti education ignoramuses.

Quit bringing nothing but dishonest bold faced lies and rewritten history to the table. That means you leave, because dishonest bold faced lies and revisionist history are all you ever spout….because you are a dishonest liar and blatant consistent racist….and a sexist.

LBGTOW (little boys going their own way)….that describes you people well, we wish you would follow through. Go on now…shoo. Go your own way, buy your own country and go there. See for yourself just where unopposed right wing nonsense leads, just leave the US out of it. Ask Musk to forget Twitter and buy Guatemala or an island nation, invite Trump to lead for life, then GO! You have so many issues with other people having rights, so GTFO and create your own white male controlled, white right wing utopia…or move to Russia….but don’t expect to get to come back when it devolves into criminal despotism, economic collapse, and ecological disaster.

in theory, it parades as a masterful, sensible insurancer of fairness: in reality, it's just a hot mess. not a fan. never a fan.

w and eric's dad are two examples of why it is a catalyst for disaster.

in history: the EC killed Reconstruction. hastened the '08 crash. '20: led to the Turd Reich and the beer belly Putsch.

easy enough to see.

'tho tomorrow when Kamala wins* over the next GOP [won't be 'landslide' lard-doh] Gallo in the EC - the right will suddenly become aware of its perils - and had always warned us against it.

*a woman, black, and Asian. might just get US healthcare reform. 'specially after all the apoplectic fits on the right, they'll want someone else to foot their bills.

imagine meeting with the doctor who suggests the patient might be anorexic and the first song heard going home is karen carpenter singing "we've only just begun"?

off-topic but seen this?

https://digg.com/video/heres-the-most-complete-reconstruction-of-how-the-police-killed-breonna-taylor

here's another...https://digg.com/video/heres-the-most-complete-reconstruction-of-how-the-police-killed-breonna-taylor

Bob,

No.

I don't want Biden because he's exactly the wrong candidate at exactly the wrong time. 2020 is going to be the most important election since Reconstruction. The stakes are deadly high. The problems facing America are becoming insurmountable. I don't want to vote for Biden because he's not Trump. I want to vote for a candidate who is a pragmatist and is going to do whatever it takes to fix the damage Trump and the others of his ilk have done to America. We need someone with a backbone and balls of steel who isn't afraid to break china and stampede the horses. What we need is a Trump on our side, only one who actually knows what the fuck he's doing.

Also, fuck your boy for costing me a chance to emigrate to France.

@newtboy
@BSR

Think of it a bit like this (quote from Wilde)

"...surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not p. 3cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it"
--------------
And allow me to pop this out:
"the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves"
--------------


This is a stark/bleak example. I don't personally agree with it entirely. As I said, I bring cereal for my students and it's there and free and available unless I don't have time to get to the store or unless I myself am out of pocket change to buy extra food.


I don't ENTIRELY disagree though ----> Which is not to say that I agree.

I would say, YES there are structural changes that need to take place, but I also believe that assistance needs to be there to handle some kind of transition period while a problem is realized.

ALL of that being said

Here is a perfect example of a societal ill in our current system that needs to be addressed. It's a disgusting by-product of a structurally unsound student loan system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db9NaPDtAmU


Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1017/1017-h/1017-h.htm

Au contraire, I'd say the far right is VERY radical. Look how loudly the crowd chanted "let him die" at the one Republican debate, look how they cheer the idea of carpet bombing. Look at the abortion clinic bombing and the bombing of the Olympic Park in Atlanta... all Christian done, in the name of Christ.

Global warming is settled in the science.

Who cares if gay marriage is a sin? You are not sin free, so who are you to judge them for their sin? Who are you to say that their sin is so horrible they don't deserve equal rights under the law when it doesn't harm anyone but themselves?

And I never specified you as a homophobe, and I don't really care about one's fears or anything else, but it is the prejudiced in your (talking the royal your, as in radical right, not you specifically) heart, to judge them as illegitimate and not deserving of being treated the way you would want to be treated, though Christ said to treat them with love and compassion. The Right turns their back on them... As they turn their back on thousands of women and children trying to escape horrible conditions where women are being raped and children being raped and forced into war and radicalization, because radical right Christians hate Muslims so much, they would rather see those women raped, than help them.

I also said you can disagree with them being gay. You can say it is a sin, but to deny them human decency because they sin differently than whatever sins you do, is not a valid reason to be cruel to them. That is when you cross the line, when you say you won't sell them a cake at their wedding for being gay, despite your own sins, when you say they shouldn't be married or adopt kids, despite your own sins... that is when you cross the line.

The Right do want to screw the poor. Half the people who work for Walmart qualify for food stamps, despite the fact Walmart makes enough to pay them all living wages and give them benefits and much more, but they are so pissed at the poor needing food stamps, they want to end that program so they can love on the rich people who own and operate Walmart more... it's a fucked up priority system, when you choose wealth and success over needy and poor. Jesus and the Bible were very clear on what side they were on, and today's radical Right ignore that and have taken on a false Reconstruction message, which has in many radical right circles been further misaligned with the prosperity gospel.

And, I will judge God for His people, when He doesn't speak to your hearts and minds and even puts an iota of human decency and concern, or conviction in your hearts, for the needy the poor, the foreigners who need our aid, for this planet and the its welfare for our future children's sake. I rather God damn me and my children to Hell, then be around the like of Republicans for all eternity, people who would rather see my children die, than have their tax dollars go to help them just because none of the jobs I am capable of getting provide sufficient health insurance.

I have NEVER seen the sort of Love that Christ preached and showed in today's far right Christians... And I speak that as a former far right Christian, and thinking I was showing the love of Christ... but step out side, and see what it looks like to the world. Be in the world but not of it. See what your witness is to a hurt and dying world and see that those on the right are the ones turning people off Christianity. There's a reason that Christianity is loosing ground, because the lack of love from those that are most loudly saying they are Christian, and saying everyone must be Christian or else...

*ban

Plastic Surgery
posted by plasticsurgeryva 1 hour 36 minutes ago • 1 view
Dr. Arturo Valdez offers world-renowned plastic surgeon in Mexico: We can repair and reconstruct damaged tissue and skin to restore normal function or appearance. For more details, visit at http://drarturovaldez.com/

Nothing about this looks appealing. Jumping from "reconstructing ship" to "destroying recently reconstructed ship" does nothing for me. Clearly nothing is sacred and everything can be pooped back out brand-new, this incarnation already has its first resurrected character, so what's at stake here?

Ever since Wrath of Khan, Star Trek writers have been convinced they can only produce Khan-a-likes as a path to success. I was only partially onboard after the first film, I checked out completely after the last one, but I'm particularly surprised at the laziness of this one. The CG and action direction seem to be the only areas that are getting any creative engineering in any of these films.

This has become a pretty big issue in Japan recently, especially since a couple of years ago when it was discovered that prosecutors in the city of Osaka had unlawfully obtained confessions fabricated evidence for dozens of cases. The scandal led to lots of resignations and calls for re-trials.

There have actually been a lot of people in the past couple of years let off death row here because new evidence (DNA, crime reconstructions, etc.) has shown that they could not have been responsible for the crime. Still, the system is totally borked right now and the police/prosecutors have most of the power. There's been a lot of talk about the changes that need to be made (limiting interrogation times, requiring all interrogations to be video recorded, etc.) but nothing concrete has happened yet AFAIK.

Fascinating. It does look very similar to the reconstructed fuselage of MH17.

What part of "do not have a choice" do I not understand? How about the subject of the 'choice' you are denied. Now that you have clarified that you don't have a choice about how the electric company pays you, or how solar works, I'll reiterate, you still DO have a choice about how to use the power you generate. Making better use of that choice would serve you well, but you seem intent on claiming it's all out of your control (and that you're forced 'at gunpoint' to sell all your production cheap and buy it back expensive rather than find a way to use it directly). I'm intent on making the best use of the choices available to me (and I bet to you) in order to make intelligent choices about my energy, choices that have saved me thousands to date, and should save me tens of thousands in the long run, and save uncounted tons of CO2 from being produced. You have instead invested in a system that now serves your needs terribly, and now want to tell others how solar is not economically viable or green, both of which are absolutely backwards from my experience and research.

You were not kidnapped, you walked into that guys home and put his gun to your own head. I wonder if you've even investigated 'net metering' in your area, it could make your system work for even you.

OK, so energy cost VS energy produced is ALL you want to compare. Then you MUST include all energy costs to be reasonable, including the energy cost of cleanup of coal waste failures (that right there already totally tips any scale against coal, it can't come close to making the energy that cleanup takes), the energy used in upkeep of coal waste storage for centuries, the energy costs of habitat destruction/reconstruction by coal mining itself, the mining itself, transportation of the coal, power plant operation (construction, upgrading, and maintenance), and the cost of mitigating the 20-40 times the amount of CO2 pollution, health issues, loss of sunlight (solar dimming is real), etc. The list of energy costs goes on and on for coal, while the list for the energy cost of solar panel production and use in some cases is damn near zero (where it's made with leftover chip wafers in solar powered factories it barely takes any extra energy at all, but I do understand that most aren't made that way now).

Double return VS coal, because you get twice as many KWH per dollar with solar PV, or better.

Again with the 'spend more energy to produce one KWH of PV than with coal', show me some data. Everything I can find shows you're 100% wrong if you look at the lifespan of panels which become energy neutral in well under 3 years on average (some much sooner) and last 20-30 years, while coal continues to need more energy to produce more (filthy) energy. Perhaps in the extremely short term you have a point about cost/production, but any time period over 3 years puts PV ahead of coal in energy costs/energy produced, and in their 20-30 year lifetime they do much better.

Coal made power is NOT cheaper than solar made power. If it was, I would not save money with a solar system. I have already saved money with solar VS buying the same amount of coal produced power, therefore solar PV is cheaper than coal. Period. If it wasn't, our electric companies would not be 'farming solar' here as fast as possible, they would be building more coal plants.

Some people support coal because they have been misinformed about alternatives. That's why I have continued our discussion here, because your information is wrong based on my personal experience and research, and I fear you might convince someone to not even look into solar enough to see how wrong you are, how much money they could save (if they do it properly), and how much pollution they could not create.

Um...I DO grow my own vegetables in my backyard too. It's cheaper, and I get far better produce with zero carbon footprint. Another statement you've made that I take personal exception with. It's not a HUGE effort, but is some effort, but the returns are great and totally worth it. I think many people stopped subsistence farming because they're lazy, overworked, and/or live without any place to farm. I've been doing it since I was 12 and ate my first self grown corn, and I've never had reason to question that decision. I've read about people spending $50 to grow $5 in tomatoes...I'm not one of them. I spend $50 on manure to grow >$1000 in produce yearly, and have enough to give >1/2 of it away.

Not a single one of your examples are 'more viable' than PV in every situation, and private owned home solar doesn't take public dollars away from public power projects. I looked into wind-it's way more expensive for the same generation power along with numerous other issues, nuke-also far more expensive with other long term major issues, solar thermal-hardly working as hoped yet in the few, hyper expensive plants in existence, wave-not yet but fingers crossed, hydro-DISTEROUS for the environment and short lived. (You left out geothermal, which is excellent where it's possible.)
Also, most of your examples are not viable for residential use (what we're talking about here), as you said are more expensive (so are bad economic choices), and/or have other serious ecological issues that PV does not.

Money is the only reason to stick with coal or nuclear, and that's only because the companies that use it get away with not paying for most of the true long term costs, and even with that it's now FAR more expensive to buy that coal/nuke power than it is to make your own with PV, leaving NO real reason to stick with coal or nuclear....so what are you talking about?

The whole time-lapse of the reconstruction:

If God doesn't give you any revelation of His existence then the scripture is broken and you would have an excuse when you stand before Him. I would be the first to say that this is unfair. However, we're all human beings and I know that people willfully reject God. Not only from my own personal experience, but the bible itself is littered with accounts of people who know better and fall into rebellion against God.

God has made the truth of these things so clear to me, and I believe He is faithful to do the same for you. If God sent Jesus to die on the cross for you and me, He is faithful to let us how we should respond to that.

I think it's clear that an infinite being suffering an infinite punishment is infinitely worse than a finite being suffering an infinite punishment. The finite being has a finite experience, eternally or not. Adding up everyone who ever lived, it is still only a finite experience of suffering, whereas the infinite being has an infinite experience of suffering. Qualitatively, an eternity of suffering of a number of finite beings does not equal even a moment of suffering of an infinite being. Whether you think that is debatable or or not, God the Father considered the sacrifice greater than the punishment, and that is what counts.

Jesus was doing what His Father wanted Him to do, which was to reconcile the human race to Himself, who are alienated from God and spiritually dead because of sin. As far as whether the sayings of Jesus are authentic, we have the manuscripts to prove that they were not made up over a period of centuries or even decades. We have around twenty five thousand manuscripts of the NT alone, which is about 24 thousand more manuscripts than any other ancient text. We have manuscript evidence even going back to the first century, and using all of the manuscripts there is a science called textual criticism that can reconstruct what was in the original manuscripts from that pool of evidence. The idea that the bible is patched together from centuries of retranslations and additions is demonstratably false.

Even if we didn't have any manuscripts, from the writings of the early church fathers alone we could reconstruct the entire bible except for 7 verses in the first 250 years. Even before that, we have the prophetic writings from the Old Testament which show that Jesus did exactly what He was prophesied to do. He did not speak anything different than what had been written thousands of years in advance. If you understand the bible as you a whole, you will see it is one story and it is all saying the same thing. The fact of its internal consistency, considering it was authored by 40 people over a period of 3000 years is another proof of its authenticity.

There are many reasons to believe Jesus is the Christ, but the biggest one is Gods personal revelation, which He is faithful to give to you. If you want to know whether Jesus is the Messiah, simply pray and ask. If He isn't, you've wasted a couple of minutes. If He is, you are avoiding an eternal consequence. God bless!

@RedSky

The need to be kept afloat by European funds is pretty high on the list of things Syriza is keen to do away with. Varoufakis was clear on this pretty early on, at least 2009 as far as I know. They treated it as a problem of liquidity instead of a problem of insolvency, and therefore any funds funnelled into Greece were basically disappearing down a black hole. They are bleeding cash left, right and center, and the continuous flow of credit from Europe doesn't help a bit in its current form.

As of now, they can't pay shit. Any additional credit has to be used to pay back interest on previous credit. Their meagre primary surplus is less than their interest payments. With that in mind, some of the ideas floating around sound rather intriguing, especially given the horrendous failure all the previous agreements have produced. These ideas include: cap interest payment (1.5% of primary surplus), use the rest for investment or humanitarian relief; no payments on debt below 3% growth, 50% of agreed upon payments at 3-6% growth, full payments at 6+% growth.

Yet even those ideas are purely theoretical, because there is no growth in Greece. The celebrated growth in Q3 2014 of 0.7% might very well be a fluke, as Bill Mitchell described here (prices falling faster than incomes). For Greece to be able to have any meaningful growth, they'd require not just a complete reconstruction of its institutions (structural reforms), but also massive investment.

And there's where it breaks down again, since you rightfully pointed out that the Germans in particular won't spend a dime on Greece, especially not with investment in Germany in equally dire shape (shortfall of about a trillion € since 2000).


Which brings me to another point: Germany vs France.

Productivity in both countries was en par in 1999, and productivity in France in 2014 was only slightly below German numbers. "Living within your means" is a very popular phrase in the current discussion, which basically means living in accordance with your productivity.

Subsequently, there should be a similar development of unit labour costs within a monetary union, with growth targets set by the central bank. In our case, that would be just below 2%. Like I've previously said, Greece lived beyond its means in this regard, and significantly so.

But what about France and Germany? The black line marks the target, blue is France, red is Germany. That's beggar-thy-neighbour. That's gaining competetiveness at the cost of your fellow Euro pals. That's suppressing domestic demand in order to push exports.

German reforms killed its domestic market (retail sales stagnant since early '90s) and created an aggregate trade surplus to the tune of 2 trillion Euros. That's 2 trillion Euros of deficit in other countries. And we're looking at an additional 200-210 billion Euros this year. If running trade deficits is bad, so is running trade surpluses.

Ironically, there's even been legislation in Germany since 1967, instructing the government to balance its books in matters of trade (and other areas). They've been in violation of it for 15 years.

With this in mind, everytime a German politician calls for the other countries to run trade surpluses just like Germany, I get furious. Some of them, on the European level, even have the audacity to say that everyone should run trade surpluses, and all it takes to get there is massive wage cuts. That's open lunacy and a failure of basic math. No surplus without deficits, no savings without debt.

And while we're at it, it's not the savings rate in Germany that bothers me. It's the moral superiority that is being ascribed to running surpluses in every way imaginable. Every part of society is expected to have a positive savings rate, because debt is bad. Well, if everyone's saving and nobody's accruing the corresponding debt, you get the current situation where there is no investment whatsoever, a gargantuan shortfall in demand given the national productivity, and a cool 200 billion Euros of debt a year that foreign actors have to rake up so that Germany can have its massive growth of 0.5-1.5% annually.

Finding borrowers for all that cash is getting more difficult by the day. The ECB's QE is basically one big search for new borrowers, since everyone either doesn't want to borrow or cannot borrow anymore.

If Germany wanted to help the Eurozone, they'd start by increasing their ULC vis-á-vis the rest of the countries. Competitiveness should be regulated through the foreign exchange rate, not this parasitic race to the bottom within the zone. Ten years of 4% increase in wages, annually. That ought to be a start.

Additionally, allow the ECB to fund the European Investment Bank directly, instead of this black hole of QE.

Or go one step further and seriously consider Varoufakis' ideas, including the old Keynesian concept of a global surplus recycling mechanism.

But all that is pure fantasy. I don't think a majority of Germans would support either of these measures, not with the overwhelming fear of inflation this society has. Add the continuous demonisation of debt and you get a guarantee that very few countries might be compatible to be in a longtime monetary union with Germany.