The only reason you hate bullies and liars is because you believe you have no other options. That makes you a hater and no different than that which you hate.

Anger is only hate if that's what you want it to be. You have a choice of what to do with the energy that anger creates. You make it destructive or productive.

Nothing is better than love. It leads straight to hell. It will be the ONLY thing to get you out.

He subjected himself to the abuse. He could have just said, knock yourself out fellows. Just close the door behind you. But instead he chose to waste his short remaining time on the clowns.

Are you still looking for the ugly truth? How do you expect to find it if you don't make yourself vulnerable? If you don't trust?

If you love someone or someone loves you, all your defenses have already been penetrated. Pretty slick, eh?

EDIT:

I hope you're writing all this down. There are a lot people that need help. That's where your talent comes in.

There are some portions of the GND that could work, how well I don't know, but they could in theory. My biggest issue with it, beyond the more ludicrous parts, is that it doesn't allow for reality.

It is very much like the Soviet 5 year plans in that there are a series of grand ideas but when they fail they would just rehash and move on to the next set of ideas. It's kind of like Trump's promises about the border wall.

Any logical person knew that Mexico was never going to pay for it and that it would probably never be built, but there are a fuckton of illogical people out there and logical people are as vulnerable to mob peer pressure as anyone else. He might even win a repeat term because there is still a huge rift between the more logical conservative Dems and the pie in the sky ultra progressives. Hell, in the confusion its even been mentioned on CNN that Hillary might toss her hat in again or try to lend weight to a conservative Dem nominee so as to 'trump' the progressives.

Your idea sounds fair, but I could only see something like that working in a country like China, where the 'incentives' are that you don't get stood against the wall.

Funny, but the robbers had axes. The owners had a defensible position and swords. Since this is known now, the robbers can bring bows and...soon you end back up with guns.

The only alternative to this is to disarm everyone, knowing the criminals will not obey, and hope that the 'safer' weapons the criminals do use will at least allow for a less wounded victim. This method also relies on the victim to capitulate completely in mortal fear.

Many might prefer the second method, I do not. Sadly, most nutjobs and criminals know that good targets can be found in any state, some much more than others but realistically any state is vulnerable.

Why? Because even in gun friendly states, 'gun free' zones exist. Nine times out of ten, that 'gun free' zone is going to be the target. You will hear stories that say "Oh, a person was shot at a gun range/show" or "Chris Kyle was killed with a friend at a gune range." What those stories leave out are the details, because the headline is what matters when you are pushing an agenda.

The gun range Chris Kyle was shot at is an outdoor one, the three men were alone and isolated. The mental one shot two men and fled. You will hardly read that, usually the image they want to present is that multiple other gun owners were standing around and did nothing.

You will see stories about people shot at other ranges or at gun shows. What they generally won't mention is that almost all of them are due to either a self wound (suicide) or an accidental shooting from poor handling.

So, to save you wasting 22 minutes watching this dreck, this is all a semantic argument about how you define "attack".

If you say illicitly intruding on a system and stealing the data, and probing the system to prepare for future intrusions is just "scanning" and to be an "attack" they must successfully, detectably use that stolen data to take over/directly influence the system (like deleting or invalidating voters or freezing/ransomwareing the election computer systems) or to successfully change the results inside election machines, then there was no successful attack detected.
If you think breaking into election systems, stealing the data, and scanning the election system for exploitable vulnerabilities is an attack, there were many attacks detected.

Jebus Christ, this is what Jimmy Dore has become, a ranting conspiracy theorist that gleefully twists any fact to match his narrative? How sad.

What would you recommend for an alternative here? There are inevitably going to be seniors who don't have family available to help them, and who reach a point where they're unable to care for themselves. I can only think of four options at that point:
1) Hope there's a local charity that is willing to take care of them, has adequate funding to do so, and isn't abusive. If this is unregulated there's a high likelihood of abuse occurring, and if it is regulated then you have government involved, which appears to be something you'd oppose. There's also the issue of unequal access - if it's charitable then it's inherently not mandated, so it's nearly certain some people will not have any such charity in their area (see #3).
2) Somehow have private, non-charitable entities handle it? I've no idea how this would work, as any non-charity is pretty much by definition motivated by profit, and a profit motive plus caring for the elderly is certain to lead to abuse (perhaps not in all cases, but I'd expect it to be quite common).
3) Nothing / good luck, oldies.
4) Government intercession.

In this case, a safety net facilitated by the government strikes me as the best of the available options. The problems highlighted in the video seem likely to stem from insufficient oversight and planning. I'd wager that's due to lack of funding, as this is exactly the sort of program which would be seen as a low-risk target when budget cuts come around, at least from an electoral perspective. After all, if the people impacted by this are those who don't already have people in their life who care for and can advocate for them, and being put under guardianship removes their voting rights, then where's the harm to a politician in reducing the funding?

It seems to me that a well-funded guardianship program, with proper oversight in place, would have the best chance of minimizing the suffering of elderly individuals who can no longer care for themselves. I can understand the libertarian preference for minimal governmental interference in the lives of the public, but this strikes me as a case where that simply doesn't work. If you can think of a viable option #5, or can make a case for 1, 2, or 3 being legitimately more helpful than a well-run option #4 (which is clearly NOT what's discussed in the video), I'm absolutely open to considering it. At the same time, implementing #4 in a way which doesn't leave it vulnerable to budgetary volatility is also a not-insignificant challenge.

Damn, I'm procrastinating really well tonight. That was long.

Using a white board or having a character flat out say the information are both bad storytelling. A better filmmaker would have been able to convey such information organically. At least the saying it flat out approach could have been worked into the movie as an old emergency warning broadcast, or early on in the outbreak when people could conceivably still be ignorant.

Also, I didn't think the weakness to hearing aids was that blatant. It was certainty better than the water vulnerability of the aliens from Signs. It just felt silly that the all the world's militaries with all their armor piercing weapons couldn't do much to these monsters but a wounded mother with a shotgun and her child could.

More spoilers:

I think the movie tried to show that they only opened up and became vulnerable when they heard the feedback sound from the hearing aid.

The movie didn't really go on about how they defeated armies, but really they only have to kill the farmers, everyone will eventually starve if they can't grow food.

At $667M per life, I suspect it would be vastly cheaper to fix our broken society, especially when you consider that those dollars only protect this one small facet of life. There are dozens or hundreds of other areas that are at least as vulnerable and hard-to-protect as airports.

Of course, the masters of the universe would have to agree to it, and it's not likely that they'd agree to funding anything that primarily benefits the peons.

Of course, there's a line.

If some dude patted my behind, I probably wouldn't take it as sexual.

It's about context. I am not generally in a situation where there is a power dynamic working against me.

If a mate jokingly patted my behind, I probably wouldn't care.
If my boss patted my behind, I'd certainly tell him that's not ok.

But if I felt it WAS creepy and especially if I felt whoever it was a) might do it again and b) was frequently in a position to do so to vulnerable people... yeah, I'd report it.

I wouldn't try to have them convicted of rape because that's not what they did.

I still want to know whose life is being "ruined" over "nothing".

Weinstein? Spacey? It's certainly not nothing and their lives are far from ruined. They're still incredibly wealthy people living (admittedly a little less now) comfortable lives. Are their reputations sullied? Yep, and deservedly so. They've certainly gotten off easier than their victims.

Aziz? Ok, that's a bit more nuanced.

First, is his life "ruined"? Eh, not really. His reputation has taken a hit, but plenty of people have actually come out in support of him.

Second, was what he did "nothing, or at most an innocent misunderstanding not corrected"? Well, it wasn't Weinstein-level harassment and it certainly wasn't rape. We can all agree on that. But was it "nothing"? Would you be ok with someone treating you like that? Do you really think what he did was acceptable behaviour?

He shouldn't go to jail for it, definitely. And there are far worse people out there... one of them is in the white house.

In all honesty, I think he's been unlucky to end up as the cautionary tale of how not to treat your date. Maybe "Grace" could have handled it better.

But on balance, if I have to choose between his actions and her actions, I think his are worse.

Earthquake early warning system

The seismic warning system in place during the most recent magnitude-7.1 quake on Sept. 19, which had its epicenter about 75 miles from the country’s capital, successfully gave people crucial time to flee vulnerable buildings, and prepare for the worst. In video from Mexico City, early warning sirens blare for at least 20 seconds before the shaking begins.
https://qz.com/1082191/an-earthquake-early-warning-system-helped-spare-mexico-city-trumps-budget-would-kill-it-in-the-us/

Wait....@bobknight33, why are you posting fake news? I get it, CNN is a reputable source if they are saying something that might support a right wing narrative or excuse some Trump action, but only then, right?

The important question they ignored was, what are the outcomes of this meddling beyond election results. I would say that it has backfired as often as it 'worked', and often when it works, it still backfires, because the candidate we shove through turns out to be horrible for us or the other country in the long run. Is not this the kind of meddling Bin Laden said was a large part of the reason for his attacks?

I do agree, we've been guilty of this repeatedly. That doesn't mean we should ignore it when it's done to us, or that we have no right to complain and investigate, and take action against it. It means maybe we should think twice before doing it again, and feel ashamed for being so outrageously vulnerable to it ourselves.

If you're lonely and vulnerable, groups of people that show interest in you are very alluring. I'm sure there must be some scientologists who fork out wads of cash or tow the line because it's one way to buy friends and/or a life.

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.

Counterpunch ran a rant by John Steppling yesterday, titled The Magic Liberal.

As you can deduct from the title, the author takes aim at liberals, with focus on their public reaction to Comey's defenestration and their sudden love affair with institutions (law enforcement/intelligence agencies) that have proven time and time again to be an enemy of the public.

Check out this (admittedly rather long) snippet:

And so we return to the firing of James Comey. And this story has less to do with the Trump’s motivations and the fact that Comey probably needed to be fired (though not because of anything to do with Russia Gate) than it does with the sudden open embracing of throughly corrupt and compromised institutions.

I’ve had people tell me the integrity of the Judiciary in peril. One wonders how such sentences can be uttered with a straight face. I have read people writing of the attack on Democracy signaled by Comey’s firing. What can that possibly mean to anyone who says it? The anti democratic actions of Obama over 8 years seems to pass unnoticed. What was NDAA? Obama expanded surveillance, prosecuted whistleblowers and expanded military tribunals. And this just scratches the surface. What was TTP for that matter?

And yet, if you can find me a liberal willing to actually debate this, I will clean your house for a year, free.

No, the New Victorian, the american white educated liberal is in crises. He or she is in a panic over Trump not because they fear global conflagration or nuclear annihilation, but because their Yoga class might get cancelled. They are forever aggrieved over the violation of feelings — of selected vulnerable groups. This never includes the poor, Arabs, Communists or Africans. Well, ok, on occasion it does include Africans but only in very broad abstract ways (i.e. when George Clooney argues for saving South Sudan or whateverthefuckever it was he was on about).

The adoration of the White Helmets, a proven group of psychopathic jihadist mercenaries is a perfect example. The White Helmets fit the white paternalist narrative. It is a form of colonial logic. The subaltern needs rescue. And its just so wonderful that some clearly teachable Arabs can help themselves with the rescue. Lets give them an Oscar. The style codes are what matters here.