I'm very big on religious freedom, but the depths of emotional exploitation, deceit and manipulation of this entire program should be criminal. We recognize other kinds of con jobs and convict for it, this crew should be too.

Religious freedom should start getting cut off when you preach the necessity of giving the speaker your money in exchange for what they will do for you. Giving to a charity that will go on to help others is one thing, it's another to pay money to get someone to promise you their 'blessing', prayers, or even financial rewards that will metaphysically be manifest in return.

I had a pretty rough time in school. Plenty of people I would happily never see or speak to again.

But I don't think you should hold someone to account for dumb shit they did as a kid. Christ knows I did enough stupid shit in my youth. That doesn't mean you have to support them or even forgive them (at least not unless they make some effort to earn it), but I fail to see the point of dragging this up at a public meeting.

All that said, the superintendent's reaction is terrible here. If I was in the speakers position, having had the bravery to come forward and recount that experience, if my ex-bully had dismissed me like that, I'd have a very hard time not punching the motherfucker right there.

All he had to do was admit he was a stupid kid and apologise with a modicum of grace and humility. As it stands, I hope he loses his job because he's clearly a) an asshole and b) unfit.

I'd love it if the next speaker carried on the list where she left off

*doublepromote , I guess we know which candidate is going to get the harshest, best funded opposition come election time.
I only wish Julie Archer (the next speaker) had gone up and continued listing donations.

We can be certain those benefiting from the legal bribery system they set up will not be working against it, so there is no legal remedy. There isn't a federal ballot initiative we can start to force a finance reform law, and Trump would veto it anyway.
"Throw them all out of office" sounds nice, but isn't even possible in one election, much less likely at all. Even if it were, finding enough people willing to work for others and not their own interests is pretty hard when dump trucks of money are involved.
This is what citizens united was all about, legalizing bribery, and it clearly did exactly that.
Lobby your representatives to write an amendment limiting contributions to actual human beings, even only registered voters, with a clear, low limit (<$1000?), that might be a start....but that's also a non starter.

From the last speaker ..This sums it up

Policy is everything, and if we don't stand for conservative policies, then we've lost.

Will be 1 interesting vote.

Politico has a long piece on Boehner. It includes this little gem:

On Sunday, July 17, it appeared they had a deal. Boehner and Virginia Representative Eric Cantor—whom the speaker had reluctantly brought into the negotiations, knowing the majority leader’s distrust of Obama could poison the talks—worked out some final details that morning at the White House. When the president returned from church, Boehner says, he invited them both into the Oval Office and shook their hands. Some fine-tuning remained, but in Boehner’s mind the so-called grand bargain was done. The framework included reforms to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; $1.2 trillion in cuts to discretionary spending; and $800 billion in new revenue. “I was one happy son of a bitch,” Boehner tells me.

The next 48 hours changed everything. On Tuesday morning, the so-called Gang of Six—three senators from each party who had been discussing their own sweeping fiscal agreement—announced a briefing for their colleagues at the Capitol. They unveiled a separate framework, totally unaware of what Obama and Boehner had agreed to. This deal included significantly more revenue. Chambliss, by then a senator, was one of the GOP Gang members and had no idea—because Boehner had been negotiating with the president in private—that their announcement would kill the speaker’s deal with the White House. Obama saw that Republican senators were endorsing a deal that included far more revenue, and knew there was no way he could sell the grand bargain to his liberal base. When he came back with a counteroffer, seeking a higher revenue number, it validated Cantor’s warnings about not trusting the president. And by that point Boehner’s members had heard enough about the grand bargain to know they didn’t like it—with the $800 billion revenue figure, much less something higher.

So the deal fell apart, and the two sides peddled their competing versions of events: Boehner’s team said the White House moved the goal posts, while Obama’s allies said the speaker couldn’t sell his own members on the deal.

It's a good speech. Not sure I'd call it "eloquent" though... for someone who basically makes their living arguing, he's not a great public speaker.

Also, this is his retirement speech?
If you truly believe what you're saying, don't retire; do something about it!

Switch sides, or work to combat the worst excesses of your own party.

I take the view of SDGundamX that it's intended to be contextual based on the speaker but trying to force this kind of nuance into public discourse is a losing battle.

I also think the tack of shunning people / getting them fired for use the word hatefully is the wrong tack. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, just publicly and repeatedly call them an asshole.

Language arguments distract from the real driver of racism, income inequality. I suspect outright racial hatred - notions of racial inferiority/subjugation while still obviously present, are in decline.

I would instead guess the rate of police deaths, employment discrimination and many other biases are linked to the assumption that poorer means 'more likely to be a criminal'.

"And if you prefer one or the other, I can adapt. Humans are good at that. ;-) "

No, they're not. Or did you miss the part where some of the smartest people on the planet crashed millions of dollars into another planet? People are TERRIBLE at these kinds of things. One conversion? Fine. Ten conversions? No problem. Hundreds, thousands or millions of conversions? The probability of error tends to 100%.

It would definitely be more efficient if everyone used one common language (especially for cross cultural endeavours such as business and engineering). In fact, that kinda happens by default and that language tends to be English.

However, there are practicalities in play. First up, there aren't just two languages, there are hundreds, and there is a broad split in the number of speakers of each language. Whereas in metric v imperal, the US is the ONLY country in the developed world that hangs onto imperial.

Second, learning a new language is an order of magnitude more work than changing to using metric.

I'm speaking from experience here; in the course of my life, I've studied Irish, French, German, Spanish and Japanese, and I am in no way close to fluent in any of them

On the other hand, when I left Ireland, it was officially metric but imperial was still common (distances were in KM, speed limits in miles, people used imperial weights for humans, metric for food). When I moved to NZ, everything is metric, and honestly, relearning happens without effort. Once you immerse yourself, you eventually just start thinking in the new system.


Finally, metric is just a better system for everything. There isn't a single scenario where imperial is a more useful measurement.

Come on America, join us. It's awesome and you don't really want to use "English" units, do you? Did you fight a war to get rid of them? What would George Washington say!? It's unamerican, I tells ya!

he's an excellent speaker

I don't have privileges to promote this but man, you made me think back to the olden days. For years, I had only a PC speaker, and all my friends had an AdLib or Sound Blaster. The day I got a ProAudio Spectrum 16 was the day I discovered just how much I'd been missing out on all those years. King's Quest and Commander Keen never sounded so good.

I thought this would be right up your alley, it's an anti-Trump educated black man going against big corporations. (The speaker, never mind the conference he's at)

I have to say I don't agree with about the first 20 minutes of what he's talking about because it kind of assumes that early humans hunted and lived alone, but of course we know humans at least lived in small tribes.

But the biological stuff was quite interesting.

Quite a few Spanish pop songs have crazy view counts. It is often claimed that there are over 500 million Spanish speakers (including 50 million in the USA), and some of the youtube vids have view counts that suggest that every Spanish speaker in the world has watched it at least once, and maybe two or three times!

For example, Shakira's song Chantaje (blackmail) has 1.5 billion views and Daddy Yankee's older song Limbo has 700 million views.

I came across Despacito not long after its release (it went straight to the top of the Latin charts) but I was as surprised as you are that it crossed over to the English charts!

Whenever a religious speaker says 'walk with me now, we're gonna go pretty deep in the weeds' you can be certain some serious Cartman style insane mental gymnastics are coming.