I appreciate your response to my question earlier, @bobknight33.

I don't mean to try to drag you back into the thread here if you're trying to disengage -- I dunno what you mean by #walkaway. Anyway, this doesn't require a response.

I largely agree with you on the specific subtopic of both parties being pretty dirty and frequently engaging in "government theater" just to draw attention to trivialities while promoting their own self interests. I also largely agree with Trump being a "true outsider" in the sense that he holds no particular allegiance to party machinations, etc.

However, even though I was willing to give him a chance after the election, at this point I have zero trust in Trump's intentions. Trumps friends -- the "best people" -- have this interesting trend of becoming his detractors and enemies. Trump wants us to accept the word of people that vouch for him, but days, weeks, or months later they fall out of favor and suddenly he says that they are scum and we shouldn't listen to a word they say.

That's a "cry wolf" or "fool me once" sort of problem. Sessions, the guy you mentioned as protecting Trump from the "witch hunt", has been pretty relentlessly bashed by Trump for the weighty offense of allowing investigators to investigate. Giuliani spouts nonsense, doublespeak and contradictions. Huckabee-Sanders refuses to answer very basic questions from the press (which is her job) not because they misquote her or take things out of context (which would be legitimate gripes) but because she's been bitten in the ass a few too many times by people pointing out blatant contradictions in Trump's statements. And that's just the current people.
There's a large list of short-term Trump appointments that end up out of favor.

What all that stuff says to me is ... "something is rotten in the state of Denmark". Is it possible that there's a vast conspiracy against him in the media, justice department, etc.? Um, well, maybe -- but Occam's Razor tells me that other possibilities are rather more likely. Like, for example, that Trump being a "true outsider" doesn't preclude him from holding the same self-serving motivations that are unfortunately common in slimy career politicians. That he acts shady and dirty because he is shady and dirty.

I dunno. It just seems like it takes a lot of work to keep up with Trump's revolving door of steadfast allies that become traitorous enemies.

@navlasop that's part of the problem.

For example, there is no doubt that pharmaceutical companies engage in some EXTREMELY shady shit. But when someone screams that vaccines are evil and "big pharma" is hiding the cure for cancer, it becomes difficult to discern the genuine issues (evergreening, etc) from the noise.

"Chem trails!
Global Warming!
9/11 was an inside job!
Aliens at Roswell!"

One of those is a real and serious problem, but if it gets lumped in with the orders, it becomes easy to dismiss it as nonsense.

We need to get better as a society at filtering the signal from the noise.

Thanks for that. I was just going to post the same skepticism. I don't doubt that US government has done all sorts of shady shit, but I need more proof than this, and this is too stupid and blunt for them (usually).

That aside... anyone else getting tons of voicemail or text messages about gay people moving into your neighborhood, or job offers for vaguely-Hispanic sounding names?

"What I always find astounding is the amount of people who don't think in the last 50 years they haven't been perfecting this. "

What I always find astounding is the number of people who unquestioningly accept that something posted on a youtube channel is real.

I'm not saying this is definitely fake. Fuck knows, the US government has engaged in some pretty shady shit over the years, but it's ALMOST definitely fake.

There is zero actual evidence here and tonnes of reasons to be INSANELY skeptical about this.

Why on earth would they use the words "ultra" and "naomi"? Those codenames weren't even known publicly.

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

To be fair, prior to the Windows 10 upgrade spam "updates" in Windows 7, one could generally trust Windows updates to be in the best interest of the user to install.

Then those came around, and suddenly Micro$oft got caught doing blatantly shady things and passing them off as "critical updates". "Get Windows 10" nagware, telemetry, "genuine advantage", etc. that snuck in by being as vague as possible in KB entries, sending the updates multiple times, and/or unnecessarily combining elements that users might have legitimate reasons to NOT want along with updates that actually were actually important.

I was running Windows 7 and made an informed decision to avoid Windows 10 (because I didn't want telemetry, don't approve of the "cloud" / seeing the OS as a licensed rental paradigm vs owning it, trend towards walled garden, etc.). Then one day I got the "GWX" Windows 10 update nagware through an update. I discovered how to disable / remove that, and started to scrutinize the updates more closely, but a while later it snuck back in and made me aware of M$'s attempts to hide it and get it on to ALL Windows machines.

For a while I continued to run Windows 7, while attempting to be vigilant about picking and choosing updates to keep those things I found undesirable out. After Windows 10 came out, in some ways that got even harder because they started trying to backport the telemetry etc. into 7. Eventually, I gave up and turned off updates altogether.

By that point, I had gone from checking in with Linux as a hobby once in a while to using it as my daily driver for all mission-critical stuff, along with any computer usage that generates personally identifying data (web browsing / banking / etc.). I keep Windows around purely for games that don't run well or at all in Linux. So, I don't care much about any vulnerability to ransomware or whatever as a result of not updating. All data that needs to be protected is on an ext4 Linux partition on a different physical drive and/or machine that Windows has no access to, so worst case scenario I lose saved games and have to reformat and reinstall Windows for games.


I wouldn't want to be doing important, work-related stuff like rendering on an un-updated Windows machine like the guy in the video, but on the other hand a big chunk of that is Micro$oft's fault for abusing the whole update process to put in stuff that benefits THEM rather than USERS.

Sincere thanks for that, @enoch.

While I am too ignorant of the situation to be completely convinced by either side of this, I must admit that it does seem fishy for Assad to use such weapons now. AND, the CIA and other US agencies / forces have a really long track record of doing shady things to "protect US interests" with proxy wars, false flag operations, etc. etc.

The US funding Syrian "rebels" that are an offshoot of Al Qaeda doesn't shock me much considering that the roots of Al Qaeda itself pretty much come from the CIA funding the Mujahideen in Afganistan...


Anyway, I can see and understand your reasons for choosing to downvote the video. That being said, I don't personally regret upvoting this because it does seem to be a good introduction / refresher to the situation in Syria, at least with respect to the standard media take on it. For someone like me, it gets me the broad strokes in 6.5 minutes, which has some real value.

But your post here (and a PM from eric) are equally valuable to me for pointing out bits where that "broad strokes" intro is controversial or potentially misleading (if not flat out BS). So again, sincere thanks to both of you.

How are these rules created, and why are people always surprised by them? I imagine there's an argument made around margin of error, and then where the line should be is lobbied for. Is the "under five equals zero" rule reasonable or shady?

I feel like I'm arguing for the five second rule.

**EDIT**
I'm finding other sources that say that sterile "terminator seeds" are a patented technique, but that Monsanto has promised not to use it. Straight from the horse's mouth:
http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/terminator-seeds.aspx

So it appears that my info below is wrong. I will try to talk with my family and get the full story. That being said, I'll leave my original comment and the followup below unaltered.
*********


My firsthand knowledge of this stuff was from more than 10 years ago, and also when I was pretty young (early 20's). So I did some web searching to try to get updated since your question is a very interesting one:

http://web.mit.edu/demoscience/Monsanto/about.html

According to that, Monsanto is the company behind "Roundup Ready", and their corn (and other crops in the line) do use sterile "terminator seeds". It also mentions that farmers "must purchase the most recent strain of seed from Monsanto" each year.

I was never in the decision-making structure of my family farm, but I did remember that we couldn't just buy the Roundup Ready seed *once* and then hold a small amount back as seed for the next year and continue to get the benefits.

I'm not 100% sure exactly how the modification for sterility works -- I don't know if the plant will sprout if you plant the sterile seeds and just fail to produce any ears / fruit, or if it just won't germinate at all. I do remember that we had to be quite careful to fully clean out the corn grown from the GM seeds from our storage bins, and better yet to store our non-GM corn to be used for future seed in entirely different bins. That was done to make sure that we didn't end up planting any of the sterile stuff.

I'm sure that the seed dealers that sell the GM stuff really push farmers to buy and plant it every year, as hinted to in that link. But you certainly don't *have* to. On the other hand, if you go back to non-GM seed for a year or two or more, you can't use a strong herbicide like Roundup if you have an unexpected outbreak of weeds or other pest plants -- the Roundup would kill the non-GM crop along with everything else.

Basically, I don't specifically begrudge companies like Monsanto for their practices concerning these GM crops. The "terminator seeds" are controversial, but don't seem like a big deal to me. If you could buy GM seeds once and then just hold back some of your harvest for next season's seed, they'd only get your money once AND we'd probably lose the original strains. So I see that as kinda win-win, especially if you don't 100% buy into their sales department urging you to use GM seed every single year.

I don't want to sound like a shill for Monsanto -- some of their other practices are pretty shady, particularly political lobbying. But from the perspective of my family farm, the GM corn that we use was/is a real beneficial thing. Significantly less pesticide/herbicide use over time, and it allows for expanded low/no till farming. Before herbicides, tilling was one of the only ways to kill off pest plants. But, it also makes the fields lose some moisture and nutrients. Expanded farming and ubiquitous tilling was largely the cause of the "dust bowl" dirty 30's. Anyway, I'd say that a lot of good has come out of modernized techniques and technology like GM crops.

I found one thing extremely interesting in *2* separate interviews with Assange when he was asked whether or not there was any Russian involvement -- including the one with Hannity shown early in the video here:

Hannity: Did Russia give you this information? Or anyone associated with Russia?
Assange: Our source is not a state party.

Very close to verbatim that exchange appeared in a print interview a week or two ago. The resulting headlines: "Assange denies Russian Involvement in the Leaks", etc.

But look at that answer. It is very carefully worded, but it doesn't directly answer the question. "Our source is not a state party" doesn't rule out that the source is Russian. It sort of rules out a source with known associations with the government (of Russia or anywhere else), but it could be an independent / private individual at face value that got the information from state parties.

I find it odd that nobody (as far as I've seen) has brought up that carefully worded answer, when it stuck out like a sore thumb to me the first time I saw it in print.


That being said, I 100% agree with Greenwald when he suggests that accusations are not proof. And the CIA and other agencies have a massive track record of shady dealings done in the name of "national security", as defined by whoever is in charge. Taking them at their word seems pretty hopelessly naive at this point.


But beyond all of that, I honestly don't care who did the hacking and what their motivations were. The government seems happy to record and analyze everything we say and do, and to claim that people like Edward Snowden are traitors for simply telling us about it. Well, get used to some of your own goddamn medicine. If you are running for public office, you should expect that your rights to privacy are going to be challenged much more strongly than those of Joe Average. You're a person of interest -- for pretty legitimate reasons.

Assume that absolutely everything you've ever said on the record (and lots OFF the record) is going to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb. If you've got any skeletons in your closet, expect that there is a good chance they will get exposed. And probably at the worst possible time.

What should both parties take away from this? Gee, it might be a good idea to choose candidates that can stand up to at least a basic level of scrutiny. Backing slimy weasels that look great and charismatic after a quick once-over might come back to bite you in the ass.

Hmm. I agree that Trump is an incompetent egotistical blowhard, who drums up support by drastically overstating America's problems. America doesn't *need* drastic change.

...BUT, American government, particularly at the national level in Washington really is a complete trainwreck that *does* need drastic change. Both of our disgusting parties hold plenty of blame for that.

I think that the short-term damage that a Trump presidency would cause would be mitigated pretty well by the separation of powers, one of the few elements of our government that does function pretty well. And I feel like it is possible that a long-term benefit could be that Republican voters would get a hard-to-ignore lesson that the "ideals" that are spouted by their party leadership don't work. George W Bush was the best thing to happen for the Democrat party in a long time; Trump could finish the party off and let something better replace it.

Hillary is definitely more competent. In the short term, the country would definitely be better off with her at the helm than Trump. But, I don't see any long-term benefits to electing her.

Republicans would have a prime and familiar scapegoat. The legislative branch ground to a standstill with Obama in office, I think it will/would be worse with Hillary. That might actually be a good thing; it could limit the damage that they can do -- and the consequences of a shitty legislative branch are worse than a shitty president, I think.

And the Democrat party, which had a golden fucking opportunity to lead by example and actually do some exciting GOOD things with government to win voters over, instead did every dirty and questionable thing they could to guarantee that Hillary "I am the establishment" Clinton got their nomination.


Neither side deserves to win, and in fact both sides deserve to lose. I'll be voting 3rd party; not that it will accomplish anything.

Democrats, you could have had my vote if you had selected literally anybody other than Hillary. Hell, I'd probably even have voted for Hillary over Trump if she had beat Bernie fair and square without resorting to all the shady stuff (she probably would have won even without that shit).

Republicans, almost the same goes for you -- I'd pretty happily have voted for anybody other than Trump running against Hillary. Well, maybe not creepy-as-fuck Ted Cruz or some other batshit crazy option like Sarah Palin; but pretty much any of the others.

Too late now though.

I think it is stupid to whine about the email leaks "unfairly" damaging Hillary's campaign.

The DNC could have easily avoided the fallout / resignations / etc. by simply not doing shady, underhanded shit. When you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar, don't bitch about who snitched on you -- a better response would be to learn that you can't get caught if you don't do anything wrong.


Sorta reminds me of earlier in the campaign when Hillary complained that it was unfair for people to want to see her transcripts of paid speeches given to Wall Street banks. She said that other candidates weren't expected to do that, so it was an unfair double standard. Bernie Sanders response was great -- he said he'd be 100% willing to hand over any of his transcripts, except for one minor problem: he never made any paid speeches to Wall Street banks.


With regards to Wikileaks, I have zero problems with how they handled things and don't care at all who their source was -- Russia, some other very biased source with a clear agenda to damage Hillary, whatever. The only thing that matters is, are the emails true / legit? I haven't heard anyone suggest that they aren't; just bitching about it being "unfair" that all the dirt is on Hillary and the DNC.

Wikileaks relies on sources. You know, leakers. I'm confident that if they had dirt on Trump or any other candidate, they'd put it out there. But Wikileaks can't make candidates or parties do questionable shit, and even when candidates or parties do do questionable shit, they still need someone to catch them and then leak the information to Wikileaks.

Sometimes, if they don't have any dirt on somebody, it might be because there isn't any dirt to be had... Just like Sanders' transcripts of Wall Street speeches.

It's hard to have an opinion on how this ought to work out. On the one hand, Erdogan is shady. On the other hand, coup d'etats rarely end up well.

Probably the third option is the best. Whatever that is.

I feel she is bad as Trump over her record. Racist? Check. Even Obama spit on her apology when she went to ask for forgiveness for her blatant racism, then exploded on him when he wasn't about to be a fool.

Chronic liar? Check. I know some embellishing is to be expected but there is a certain point when it becomes too much. Florida Governor Rick Scott is a great example of batshit crazy lying. Sarah Palin is too. Yet they never claimed to be under sniper fire, downplayed a massive federal investigation (because she tried to be shady because she is fucking stupid) and lied about their record every chance they got.

Homophobic? Of course we can't ask and won't tell...I mean if those faggots try to marry she won't support it unless it wins her an election...stupid faggots... Oh wait, definitely against LBGT. Check.

Bribed? Check...

Inciting? Check. If it serves a purpose sure.

I could go on and on. But to do so is to lessen my own validity. And if you aren't sure about those examples, don't ask me to cite them please. They are well-known and anyone not paying attention to their candidate of choice doesn't deserve a to be handed the information they should know...