Lol.

Ex president and private citizen Vincente Fox?
Ex agent Christopher Steele working as a private citizen?
China, who didn't work with Clinton, even though she joked they might, mimicking instructions Trump gave Russia that they followed within hours?
American newspapers and networks, who have always, and legally, backed specific candidates?

Sorry, not one fits the bill. Try again.

You mean like Vicente Fox going on every network against President Trump and for Hillary? The Steele Dossier? "China, if you’re listening, why don’t you get Trump’s tax returns?" - Hillary. Would be great to get that illegal server that somehow disappeared.

Not to mention ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, Comedy Central and all the newspapers... but that collusion doesn't count because it's not a foreign govt. Their influence is a-ok for you and President Carter.

[author flagged as a spammer - redacted]

Probably? Try 100%. The scary thing is his supporters, the entire evangelical Christians, will walk lock and step with him all the way. They are 100% guaranteed to turn out in force in November 2018, so no Blue Wave, and they are guaranteed to show up in 2020 as well. He has 35% of the voting population that will support everything he ever does. Like he said, he could shoot somebody on live TV and wouldn't lose a vote. He's giving them everything they ever wanted. Everything. We'll be in a theocracy by the time his two terms are up, and then he may become President for life. And yet the liberals keep thinking that sooner or later, he'll trip up... he tries to order the Post Office to increase their rates specifically to Amazon because it's founder owns a newspaper that has said bad things about him, and now has ordered the Justice Department to carry an investigation into his political enemies. He doesn't understand the divisions and separation of power, he thinks being President is like being an owner and CEO of a major company. And the GOP will never do anything to stop him, again because he's got that 35% that is 100% guaranteed to follow him no matter what. He could appear on TV and say "I'm doing everything I can to undo that niger Obama's Presidency... and we all know there's a difference between a black person, like my friend Kanye, and a nigger like Obama" and they'd just say something like they don't share his opinion, but do nothing... he could follow through with his threat to shoot somebody, and they wouldn't care. There can be no overstating the dangers democracy is in right now in the country, that's how bad it is...

It's odd, I would totally do exactly what he did, but when I was done, I'd be inexplicably compelled to take out the rolled newspaper...

Ooh, let's do TV next. Then films. Then books. And finally, the worst of all, newspapers.

If it's a learning algorithm, then we can teach it not to hurt and kill. Think of it as a dog. I wonder if eventually we'll have to program in some equivalent of "treat" and "newspaper" so that it can be trainable.

Operation mockingbird ?



“Operation Mockingbird” was a fully implemented CIA program to spread disinformation throughout American media.

CIA Director William Colby testified to the Church Committee that over 400 CIA agents were active in the US media to control what was reported through American mainstream television, newspapers, and magazines.

CIA Funding and Manipulation of the U.S. Mainstream Media According to the Congress report published in 1976:

I enjoyed this. Coincidentally this weekend I was Googling my grandfather's name. Found a newspaper entry in Cooperstown, NY in January 1933 where it listed my grandparents spending an evening playing bridge at someone's house with a dozen other couples. Listed all their names and who won a prize that evening. It was about 5 months before my dad was born, reminded me of how different things were back then. Made me wish I was a fly on the wall.

How many of those fact checking organisations would have flagged Judith Miller's Iraq pieces in the NYT as "deliberatly misleading content"? Or what about the 16 hit pieces on Sanders within 24h at Bezos' rag of a newspaper? And let's not even start about the reporting on the recent night of the long knives in Saudi Arabia ("reform", really? fuck off)...

Point is, the effort to curtail "fake news" regularly goes hand in hand with the suppression of non-establishment views while leaving the main sources of deliberate misinformation untouched. Remember PropOrNot and how Bezos' rag, amongst others, jumped on it? That list included prominent left wing/anti-war sites such as TruthOut, Counterpunch, TruthDig, ConsortiumNews, etc.

Want some examples of "misleading content" or "deliberate misinformation"? Just browse through the articles at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting for a few minutes.

Lol, I read "imaginary Hiller" (and assumed you meant Hillary). My bad.



We have reasonable laws already.
Most things people ask for either already exist (and anti-gunners just don't know because they don't have to follow those laws), or only screw collectors and sportsmen while not doing anything to reduce risk (which I already covered, I assume you read the earlier part, eg California compliant AR15, etc).



Nobody expects to need to form a militia.
Nobody expects the country to go to hell.

The seat belt analogy is about preparedness for unlikely events.
Like, you don't "need" flood insurance in Houston - unless you do.

Owning a gun also hurts nobody.
By definition, ownership is not a harm.

Almost all guns will never be used to do any harm.
The very statement that "guns are all about hurting other people" is a non-empirical assertion.

Just shy of every last gun owner doesn't imagine themselves as Bruce Willis. Asserting that they do is a straw man.


You remind me of Republicans that complain that Black people are welfare queens (so they can redirect money out of welfare). Or Republicans that complain that Trans people are pedophiles in hiding (so they can pander to religious zelot voters). Creating a straw man and then getting mad about the straw man (rather than the real people) is self serving.


* Only the rarest few people think they are Roy Rogers. That is a straw man that does not apply to just shy of every gun owner.
* You don't need a gun for home defense... unless you do.
* Differences in likelihood of death armed vs unarmed is happenstance.
(Doesn't matter either way. Googled some likelihoods : http://www.theblaze.com/news/2013/02/15/how-likely-are-you-to-die-from-gun-violence-this-interesting-chart-puts-it-in-perspective/
You'd have to suffer death 350'000 times before you're at a 50/50 chance of your next death being by firearms.)
[EDIT, math error. Should say 17'000 years lived to reach a 50/50 chance of death by firearms in the next year]
* Technically, even 1 vote gets someone elected. You don't control who is on the ballot.



NRA and NSSF are on life support. They have to fight the influence of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, most major newspapers. They are way outclassed. Current events don't help either.
The "big bad NRA" rhetoric is just that, rhetoric. As is the rhetoric that the NRA only represents the industry.

-sceherazade

For your amusement:
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/ROTWKG19120814.2.56.5

105 years ago.

The window panes are political quadrants. The lower right corner is punched out, indicating the man is anarcho-capitalist. The lamp is tilted toward the newspaper to bring light upon the Sri Lankan Civil War, which was set off by an ambush the day after this comic was published. (That's why the newspaper is blank. Nothing newsworthy compared to the following days/week.) The meat on the table symbolizes the impending carnage, as thousands would die, and 150,000 made homeless.

Nothing is ever simple. I'm just not properly explaining what I was saying -- Jon Stewart went off and did his public speaking, crowd organizing thing with this belief in something that he couldn't quite define. He lost his mojo, in a way, saw that he was naked, bereft of his staff. Any talking/figure head with a staff of writers or information feeders can be comparable to other leaders of a similar make up. Trump and Stewart are reality tv stars of a similar make up.

Dag suggested that the writers of the Daily Show are what created Jon Stewart as we know hom, and so I ran with the idea that he, like the figurehead and reality star, Donald Trump, are products of other people's opinions -- this, when left to their own devices, while successful entertainers, they realize the emperor's clothes are transparent and now they have to rely on their own smaller slice of knowledge. Not that Stewart is dumb, but Stewart without writers and correspondents, is a similar archetype to Trump. Stewart's writers and correspondents, including the man whose show he is on in this clip, are akin to the media that Donald Trump treats like his writing staff. But instead of leaving the Daily Show, Trump is leaving *most* of the media, revealing he is not as knowledgeable without his sources.

Anyway, I was following the logic as laid down by dag's logic for why Jon isn't as funny or put together. I also know that good leaders put themselves in other people's shoes before giving advice to other leaders. Stewart MUST do this because he is a decent figurehead, but Trump doesn't -- that's why the media questions him on what biographies he is reading; leaders are supposed to put themselves into their rivals AND heros shoes as a matter of critical self analysis -- so, Stewart is speaking to the media almost as if he is also putting himself in Trump's shoes and speaking about how his own writing staff and correspondent's left him and succeeded.

Stewart has a 4 year contract with HBO. He will have the structure and writing teams he needs. Trump should utilize the media, including books and newspapers, and follow the subtext Jon laid out here.

Edited for spelling, grammatical errs and additional context. Done editing.

No, I didn't confuse anything. Almost every single country benefits from 'illegal' immigrants as well as regular ones. France, for example, has thousands of illegal immigrants from mostly Islamic countries that provide services to it's mostly aging native population. We benefit no more and no less than any other nation from illegal immigration, as @newtboy mentioned, if you import food products or grow them locally you probably are benefiting from illegal immigration.

As far as your evidence, I hope this will suffice as 'some':

Steven A. Camarota, PhD, Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies, in a Jan. 6, 2015 article, "Unskilled Workers Lose Out to Immigrants," available at nytimes.com, stated:

"There are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country and we also admit over a million permanent legal immigrants each year, leading to enormous implications for the U.S. labor market. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that there are some 58 million working-age (16 to 65) native-born Americans not working — unemployed or out of the labor market entirely. This is roughly 16 million more than in 2000. Equally troubling, wages have stagnated or declined for most American workers. This is especially true for the least educated, who are most likely to compete with immigrants (legal and illegal).

Anyone who has any doubt about how bad things are can see for themselves at the bureau's website, which shows that, as of November, there were 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans working than in November 2007, while 2 million more immigrants (legal and illegal) were working. Thus, all net employment gains since November 2007 have gone to immigrants."

Jan. 6, 2015 - Steven A. Camarota, PhD

George J. Borjas, PhD, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at Harvard University, in a Sep./Oct. 2016 article, "Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers," available at politico.com, stated:

"[A]nyone who tells you that immigration doesn't have any negative effects doesn't understand how it really works. When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down. Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent. Even after the economy has fully adjusted, those skill groups that received the most immigrants will still offer lower pay relative to those that received fewer immigrants.

Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable...

We don't need to rely on complex statistical calculations to see the harm being done to some workers. Simply look at how employers have reacted. A decade ago, Crider Inc., a chicken processing plant in Georgia, was raided by immigration agents, and 75 percent of its workforce vanished over a single weekend. Shortly after, Crider placed an ad in the local newspaper announcing job openings at higher wages."

Sep./Oct. 2016 - George J. Borjas, PhD

Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., PhD, Emeritus Professor of Labor Economics at Cornell University, in an Oct. 14, 2010 briefing Report to the US Commission on Civil Rights, "The Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Wages and Employment Opportunities of Black Workers," available at usccr.gov, stated:

"Because most illegal immigrants overwhelmingly seek work in the low skilled labor market and because the black American labor force is so disproportionately concentrated in this same low wage sector, there is little doubt that there is significant overlap in competition for jobs in this sector of the labor market. Given the inordinately high unemployment rates for low skilled black workers (the highest for all racial and ethnic groups for whom data is collected), it is obvious that the major looser [sic] in this competition are low skilled black workers…

It is not just that the availability of massive numbers of illegal immigrants depress wages, it is the fact that their sheer numbers keep wages from rising over time, and that is the real harm experienced by citizen workers in the low skilled labor market."

Oct. 14, 2010 - Vernon M. Briggs Jr., PhD

There are more educated people than I that hold the same opinion, but let me give you an easier to understand, and absolutely true, example. How do I know it is true? When I was a much younger man, I worked for a roofing company. So I lived it.

The company I worked for was owned by a family friend, who had worked for most of his life in the field and had an excellent reputation. However, in the 90's around the time NAFTA was passed and (not related, I hope) illegal immigration spiked in Texas, he began to lose out to other companies. He did some snooping around and found out they were often charging hundreds of dollars less in their estimates than he could possibly offer, at least while still making a profit. He also found out that the two companies that were taking most of his business were staffed with illegal workers, being paid much lower wages than he could give to his legal employees.

Fast forward a year and he was close to declaring bankruptcy. Just like any type of labor where you pay your employees little to nothing comparatively to their compatriots in the same field, you cannot compete fairly. Net result, he was forced to let us go one by one, replacing us with illegals.

Obviously, I moved on, learned a different skill and began to make far more than I would have as a simple laborer. But the fact remains that an entire industry was undermined and radically changed by the inclusion of cheap illegal labor. This will not change if we simply ignore illegal immigration because it is the 'nice' thing to do. What it will accomplish is that young people will slowly find that certain jobs are out of their selection. It also will get worse the more accepted and commonplace illegal immigration becomes. I know for a fact that while I worked at Apple there were entry level support techs that were illegally here. Perhaps you will say that it is a benefit because it would prevent offshoring, but I disagree. What it does is make the working class poorer and doesn't solve the other issues brought about by illegal immigration, such as Emergency Rooms being flooded by people who can't afford insurance. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that it is common to go to the ER and see people stacked like cordwood because they can't refuse patients unless they are a private hospital.

As far as The Jungle, and my statement about it and it's author, I was merely pointing out that as much as you try to put forth that illegal immigrants have a bad life here in the USA, the fact is that we used to treat legal immigrants far worse. Perhaps it was a reach on my part, but it seemed logical at the time.

I doubt we will agree on any of this, but I respect your opinion. I live in a state that has a very large proportion of illegal immigrants, and while you are correct that they are generally not a criminal negative to society, they do have severe effects which I think you are overlooking. I do think that legal immigration policy needs massive change and businesses that exploit the almost slave like labor of illegals to make more profit should be punished severely. In the meantime, when we do catch illegals, they should be deported, not protected by a sympathetic politically motivated law enforcement group.