I was reluctant to believe this was possible because only idiots would let kids keep their mobile phones while they are driving a tank, but apparently some russian units are so badly equipped or their comm equipment is so bad that they use phones for communication. The induced incompetence of a dictatorship is mindboggling.

So the latest rumour is that by the village of Ljubimovka a group of local gypsies stole a Russian tank.

Now my personal reason to want to believe this story. Back when I was doing my then compulsory army service our country was still housing thousands of Russian troops which had come 20 years earlier in 1968 to keep the peace or something (temporarily). I was stationed at a maintenance and storage unit (managed the kitchen). Our unit oversaw the infrastructure of part of the local training grounds where Russian troops regularly trained. One of the main activities, besides facilitating the sale of military diesel fuel was to remove stranded vehicles the Russians simply left behind broken or overturned in ditches. Breaking them up and selling for recycling was pretty lucrative - our labor was free, trucks and cranes were military equipment (also free), tanks contain a surprising amount of copper and aluminum, steel armor is heavy. I dont think Russians count either their troops or their tanks.

@newtboy,

A company cancelling a multi-billion dollar project means multi-billion dollars not spent on the work of the project, that many jobs out of the economy. Exactly the same as a car manufacturer shutting down for a week, by your logic nothing was lost, the company just stopped spending money for a couple days...

I only support the groups right to protest, and not to illegally block roads or borders. I stand by my wish is for their prompt arrest when illegal blocking roads, borders or places of business.

That said, I believe it also wrong of me to fail to point out that our federal government has continually refused to act as I would wish in promptly shutting down illegal blockades. This is the very first instance were they've shown any interest in a prompt police enforced end, and they've in fact jump much further to invoking a declaration of national emergency so they can also target protesters bank accounts directly and without court orders.

An analogy would be someone that supports arresting people for possession of marijuana. The government then proceeds to only selectively enforce that law, say only acting to make arrests when people are a particular creed or color. It's perfectly consistent to believe the government arrests are wrong and unfair, and to NOT support them, while at the same time still believing the idea of the rule applied fairly being a good idea.

One side is about what I think the line for protest should be:
-I believe the right to protest should be independent of creed or belief, and should only be restricted when actions taken are illegal.(Ideally illegal being defined as impeding on freedoms of others)

By that, the convoy blockade of border or streets should have led to immediate arrests.

In the eye of fairness though, the last two years have already seen at a minimum 3 major protests, that included illegal blockades of work sites and railways and those were ALL allowed to run for weeks and in 2 cases months. The government of the day even tripped over themselves to message their support for the overall causes of the protestors.

In that light, it's wrong to simply ignore the fact that the first protest that is likely to vote conservative is the ONLY one where the government immediately condemns everything about them and feels compelled to intervene urgently.

Churches were literally burning last summer, and our PM's public statements spent most of their time sympathizing with the anger before pleading that burning churches isn't helpful. Where'd all that compassion for folks that you disagree with go when it meant a small number of downtown Ottawa business shutdown and horns honking go. Now our PM invokes terrorizing of the populace.

Trudeau's actions have been distressingly similar to Trump's as the division in our country grows, he's using his words to reach out to the extreme end of his side of the aisle, while tossing gasoline and vitriol onto his opposition. It's making things worse in the worst possible way when we need leaders uniting instead of stoking further division.

So, time to end the subsidies and tax breaks for Tesla then. No more government handouts for them.

They’re not going to be so dominant when actual competition is available, coming soon from every maker. (High demand, low inventory, double sticker price gas cars aren’t a fair comparison.).
They also wouldn’t be so profitable if they paid taxes.

It was not a good move to program the self driving unit to run stop signs. (Yes, they programmed it to just “rolling stop” at stop signs recently which is not just illegal it’s also dangerous.). That’s the kind of upgrade you get with Tesla, without warning. How many recalls now?

Also not a good move for Elon to admit he’s far right, pro corporate subsidy, anti tax. It alienates most of his customers.

Just incase you're afraid of- you know- facing reality

========================================


IQ testing and the eugenics movement in the United States

Eugenics, a set of beliefs and practices aimed at improving the genetic quality of the human population by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior and promoting those judged to be superior,[39][40][41] played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States during the Progressive Era, from the late 19th century until US involvement in World War II.[42][43]

The American eugenics movement was rooted in the biological determinist ideas of the British Scientist Sir Francis Galton. In 1883, Galton first used the word eugenics to describe the biological improvement of human genes and the concept of being "well-born".[44][45] He believed that differences in a person's ability were acquired primarily through genetics and that eugenics could be implemented through selective breeding in order for the human race to improve in its overall quality, therefore allowing for humans to direct their own evolution.[46]

Goddard was a eugenicist. In 1908, he published his own version, The Binet and Simon Test of Intellectual Capacity, and cordially promoted the test. He quickly extended the use of the scale to the public schools (1913), to immigration (Ellis Island, 1914) and to a court of law (1914).[47]

Unlike Galton, who promoted eugenics through selective breeding for positive traits, Goddard went with the US eugenics movement to eliminate "undesirable" traits.[48] Goddard used the term "feeble-minded" to refer to people who did not perform well on the test. He argued that "feeble-mindedness" was caused by heredity, and thus feeble-minded people should be prevented from giving birth, either by institutional isolation or sterilization surgeries.[47] At first, sterilization targeted the disabled, but was later extended to poor people. Goddard's intelligence test was endorsed by the eugenicists to push for laws for forced sterilization. Different states adopted the sterilization laws at different paces. These laws, whose constitutionality was upheld by the Supreme Court in their 1927 ruling Buck v. Bell, forced over 60,000 people to go through sterilization in the United States.[49]

California's sterilization program was so effective that the Nazis turned to the government for advice on how to prevent the birth of the "unfit".[50] While the US eugenics movement lost much of its momentum in the 1940s in view of the horrors of Nazi Germany, advocates of eugenics (including Nazi geneticist Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer) continued to work and promote their ideas in the United States.[50] In later decades, some eugenic principles have made a resurgence as a voluntary means of selective reproduction, with some calling them "new eugenics".[51] As it becomes possible to test for and correlate genes with IQ (and its proxies),[52] ethicists and embryonic genetic testing companies are attempting to understand the ways in which the technology can be ethically deployed.[53]

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-americans-wearing-masks-show-disapproval-not-as-preventive-measure-2020-6

https://apnews.com/article/health-donald-trump-ap-top-news-virus-outbreak-understanding-the-outbreak-227fa2d005b3923157b9eb736c12e6c5

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-tells-allies-his-wearing-mask-would-send-wrong-message-n1202001

https://www.thedailybeast.com/cdc-recommends-americans-wear-cloth-masks-in-public-white-house-says

Coronavirus: Why is there a US backlash to masks? - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52540015

https://time.com/5815615/trump-coronavirus-mixed-messaging/

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mandatory-mask-rulestrump-insists-personal-choice/story?id=71519019


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And right around this time,
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/trump-launch-opening-our-country-task-force-global-deaths-pass-n1181796

April 11, 2020
President Donald Trump said that his “opening our country" task force would start work next week, ...the virus has as of Saturday killed more than 20,000 people in the United States

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Hey @bobknight33 ! Here's a question for you: Can the GOP successfully gerrymander its way out of killing large swaths of its own constituency ?

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Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates. Misinformation is to blame - December 5, 2021
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misinformation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate

"People living in counties that went 60% or higher for Trump in November 2020 had 2.73 times the death rates of those that went for Biden. Counties with an even higher share of the vote for Trump saw higher COVID-19 mortality rates."
----------------------------

I'll just leave this here, let me know if u see anything they all have in common https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/
(BESIDES being fucking idiots)

And now Republicans in at least 5 states have been caught having submitted matching forged election documents, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona (twice), Wisconsin, and Michigan. These forgeries, complete with forged seals from their respective states, attempted to “certify” fraudulent electors from those states that intended to cast their electoral votes for Trump despite their states voting for Biden, that vote being certified, and the real electors being certified.
Pennsylvania too, but they didn’t try to claim they were the electors, they claimed they would be the electors if a court invalidated the election results….created at the direct personal request of the DJTrump campaign.

Jeff Clark, of the DOJ, drafted a letter telling states to hold off on certification because the DOJ was investigating election irregularities…..but they weren’t and the DOJ head, the AG, refused to sign off, so Trump accepted his resignation, the resignation of the assistant AG, and tried to install Clark so they could send this fraudulent letter about a non existent investigation of non existent election fraud. In that letter he referenced the “second set of electors” two weeks after these forgeries were submitted to congress and elsewhere but long before that was public knowledge.

Another few attempts by Republicans to subvert democracy.

Apparently Trump also flew the idea of having the national guard confiscate all voting machines and rerunning the election (until he won).

Why the entire party isn’t banned from holding office is beyond me, your representatives all undeniably violated (and continue to violate) section 3 of the 14th amendment, and you’ll never get 2/3 of congress to let that slide.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

For the few that weren’t directly involved in the failed coup, the “aid and comfort” clause covers their behavior since.

A 2012 United Nations report summarized 65 different estimated maximum sustainable population size and the most common estimate was 8 billion. Advocates of reduced population often put forward much lower numbers. Paul R. Ehrlich stated in 2018 that the optimum population is between 1.5 and 2 billion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_population

Since we are at or near 8 billion and are far from sustainable, haven’t been for over 50 years, I think the 1.5 number is far more realistic, maybe even high. I think the 8 billion estimates assume international cooperation, constant advances in farming tech with constantly increasing yields (that aren’t happening), and don’t account for climate change disrupting supply chains and production at various levels….so wishful thinking.

War sucks for population control. It’s messy, expensive, destructive of both infrastructure and ecology, and just crap at killing meaningful numbers. We need to reduce by billions, the worst war killed a few million and destroyed much of Europe. A war that kills 1000 times more people….yikes. Forget global warming, hello planetary disintegration.

The only acceptable method IMO is quit having children, then you don’t kill anyone to achieve sustainability. For some idiotic reason, average people find the idea of not having excess children horrific and totally out of the question, but the idea of starving their children to death seems to garner a “shit happens”.

Agreed, we need something like an airborne infectious prion where there could be no vaccine, no sterilization, no escape…..only that would wipe out everyone so maybe not that.

$26 million verdict against Unite the Right for their right wing terrorism in Charlottesville . That’s gotta sting.

"At least one death has been attributed to a person affiliated wth the Antifa movement. On August 29, a member of the far-right group “Patriot Prayer” who was part of a pro-Trump caravan in Portland, Oregon, died after being shot. The man accused of the killing, Michael Reinoehl, was shot by US marshals five days later. Overall, however, data show that Antifa activists have been involved in relatively few violent incidents compared to white supremacists, who have conducted at least 40 lethal attacks since 2018 according to the Department of Homeland Security."


https://theconversation.com/fact-check-us-is-there-an-antifa-threat-in-the-united-states-as-donald-trump-claims-150555

@vil: Well, it's actually Bell herself that has a similar opinion:

https://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/astr2030_12/sn/Bell.html

It has been suggested that I should have had a part in the Nobel Prize awarded to Tony Hewish for the discovery of pulsars. There are several comments that I would like to make on this: First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it – after all, I am in good company, am I not!

When the paper was published the press descended, and when they discovered a woman was involved they descended even faster. I had my photograph taken standing on a bank, sitting on a bank, standing on a bank examining bogus records, sitting on a bank examining bogus records: one of them even had me running down the bank waving my arms in the air. Look happy dear, you've just made a Discovery! (Archimedes doesn't know what he missed!) Meanwhile the journalists were asking relevant questions like was I taller than or not quite as tall as Princess Margaret (we have quaint units of measurement in Britain) and how many boyfriends did I have at a time?

Are you aware that most Republicans in DC are now legally barred from running for office under the constitution?

14th amendment clause 3- No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Now you understand why all Republicans voted against investigating The Jan 6 insurrection, the rebellion against the election. Sadly for them, that act is giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the state, so now they don’t even have to be implicated directly, their vote to not investigate invalidates them as candidates. Expect this to come up against Green next year.

Uh oh….the FEC, the election regulatory agency that Trump intentionally under staffed to the point that it couldn’t start an investigation much less conduct one has now been ordered to investigate the Trump campaign and the NRA that used shell companies to give Trump $25 million in 2016, a massive campaign donation limit violation, and used those shell companies to coordinate with the Trump campaign (and many other Republicans). Apparently this case was submitted to them years ago, but they didn’t have the legally required number of appointees to operate, and the few they had were Trump appointees not interested in investigating any charges against Republicans with a backlog of over 450 cases…so the FEC did nothing. Now they have been ordered by a judge to start the investigation in 30 days. Not going to go well for your people, they all played fast and loose under Trump, and there’s a new sheriff in town now.

Congratulations! Your video, Watch COVID-19 spread across the United States (9/30/21), has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

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Oh shit! The congressional house oversight and reform committee has found that Trump committed massive bank frauds during his presidency, before, and after.

He hid his massive debts when bidding on the lease for the old post office and getting loans to buy it….preferential loans from foreign banks based on blatantly fraudulent claims about his net worth. That’s bank fraud.
He reported profits of $150 million (publicly he claimed more), but in reality had losses of $75 million. He reported one huge value for his properties on loan applications and another, exponentially smaller, likely sometimes negative value on tax forms. That’s bank and tax fraud.
He took in over $3.7 million from foreign governments for rooms that were rarely if ever occupied. That’s a flagrant violation of the Emoluments clause, Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution.

No charges filed by congress yet, but expect all this information and accompanying documentation to make it to the prosecutors in New York who ARE charging him with bank fraud, tax fraud, charity fraud, embezzlement, and who knows what else.

Not a good time to be a Trump.

Just a little PS: In a deposition that took place in August, Rudy Giuliani admitted that the "evidence" he based his voter fraud conspiracy on actually came from posts on Facebook. Believe it or not, this man used to be considered a brilliant legal mind, but now he's been reduced to filing lawsuits based off idiotic conspiracy theories he saw while scrolling through social media.…and you listened to him.
🤦‍♂️

Edit: ruh roe, sounds like there are multiple takes of Trump’s message to the rioters where he praised them but refused to tell them to stop the attack or leave the capitol. Part of the lengthy delay in his statement was because he had to re-record it repeatedly before they finally got him to tell his people to leave. Of course, seeing the takes where he just praised the attacking terrorist mob won’t change your mind, but they will inform future history about when America had a super villain as president.

Your video, Watch COVID-19 spread across the United States (9/30/21), has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.