You mean an editorial opinion piece? Call me when you have something, not when you find a Trumpster who agrees with Trump. I don't have Wall Street Journal account, so I can only read paragraph one.

There's no question in anybody's mind why Trump's unqualified appointee chose now to dismantle the post offices ability to deliver mail, when it's needed most. Any problems the post office has had existed when Trump came into office, some have worsened since (edit:holy shit! They've doubled annual losses under Trump's perfect business acumen, now nearly $9 billion a year loss and skyrocketing!), but they did nothing about it until months before an election ( that is depending on the post office) to make changes, changes that make them less efficient, cost money, and make them incapable of on time delivery (so incapable of handling the election). Not one bit of that is by accident.

The post office cannot raise postage rates without congressional approval, and have other congressionally mandated costs costing them billions ( https://news.nd.edu/news/postal-service-losing-money-because-of-congressional-mandate-not-low-prices-expert-says/) so the letter side of the business is losing money, the package delivery side Trump complains about has mostly paid the bills for a while now, but they still lose millions/billions as a unit, that's why they asked for I think $23 billion to upgrade to be able to meet historic minimum standards and $3 billion to cover extra costs associated with the election, money Trump says are no go because they'll allow fraudulent voting (the first sitting president ever to go to great lengths to ensure the smallest vote count, btw)...but recently said he would sign a bill including that funding for the post office if Democrats agree to billions more in more tax cuts that mostly benefit people like....wait for it....himself (as if the deficit isn't growing fast enough). If he really thought mail in voting was fraudulent, why would he agree to do it for anything? Isn't that selling out democracy?! Aren't you enraged?!?

Just fyi

The supposed sexual assault happeend in the middle of 1993 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/us/politics/joe-biden-tara-reade-sexual-assault-complaint.html

Isn't it a bit odd that the person who passed the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 (so he was lobbying to get it passed and the bill was introduced in January 1993), am I the only person who thinks its odd that he passed this bill:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Against_Women_Act
see also https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/senate-bill/11 for the full text

So you mean to tell me
While he was co-sponsoring/writing/passing THAT PARTICULAR LAW that created the following:

--- established annual $1.6 billion toward investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women

---codified sex crimes to make them Federal crimes

---imposed automatic and mandatory penalties on those convicted

---allowed civil cases to be brought in cases prosecutors chose to leave un-prosecuted

---created confidentiality protections for victims

---created a training program for judges to encourage them to prosecute sexual assault crimes against women


So WHILE he's making it easier to sue and bring charges against former employers and creates mandatory minimums for those found guilty and if the prosecutors don't want to do it, created a pathway for civil lawsuits to be brought - you're telling me that WHILE he's doing that, he sexually assaults one of his employees from his offices WHILE he's doing that?

That doesn't make any fucking sense.
That doesn't make any fucking sense.
That doesn't make any fucking sense.
That doesn't make any fucking sense.
That doesn't make any fucking sense.
That doesn't make any fucking sense.


That the best you got you little bitch?

@newtboy,

"Stupid to use all these differing sets, that only adds confusion to an already technical and confusing topic."

I'm just glad they stick to metric, with sea level rise you don't even get that .

"No matter what, it's incontrovertible that every iteration of the IPCC reports has drastically raised their damage estimates (temp, sea level) and sped up the timetable from the previous report."

At least temperature wise the AR1 report had higher temperatures, and definitely higher worst case projection scenarios for temp than the latest. I can't say I checked their sea level projections, though typically they're other projections have followed on using their temps as the baseline for the other stuff and thus they track together. That is to say, if you can point me a source that reliably claims otherwise I might go check, but currently what I have checked tells me otherwise.

"I'll take the less conservative NOAA estimates and go farther to assume they over estimate humanity and underestimate feedback loops and unknowns and believe we are bound to make it worse than they imagine."

Which is fine, I only object if that gets characterized as the factually scientific 'right' approach.

"The NOAA .83C number was compared to average annual global temperatures 1901-2000...and oddly enough is lower than 2017's measurements."

Which is yet another source and calibration period from what I found. The 1901-2000 very, very roughly speaking can be thought of as centered on 1950, so in that fuzzy feeling sense not surprising it's 0C is colder than the IPCC centered on the nineties.

The source on current instrumental I went against is below:
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

As for 2018 being cooler than 2017, that's pretty normal. 1996/1997 were the hottest years on record for a pretty long time before things swung back up. It's entirely possible we stay below the recent high years for another bunch of years before continuing to creep up. Same as a particularly cold day isn't 'evidence', the decadal and even century averages are where the signal comes out of the noise.

Hmmmm. According to
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature
The NOAA .83C number was compared to average annual global temperatures 1901-2000...and oddly enough is lower than 2017's measurements.

A 3% annual risk does not translate to a 100% risk in the next 30 years. For such a smart guy, that's a pretty basic mistake to make, and just makes the public mistrust the "experts" even more when their predictions don't come true.

From https://unofficialnetworks.com/2019/02/22/of-course-french-canadians-race-snow-blowers-for-fun/

This is possibly the most Canadian thing ever. The French Canadian town of Saint-Narcisse-de-Rimouski holds an annual snowblower race at their winter carnival with a grand price of a heat pump. 96.7 The River reports this year’s winner was a souped up Honda.

It's become an annual tradition on the sift

I think this is how my annual bonus is calculated.
At least I get the nice Christmas card every year.

It isn't as rare as you think. There are numerous accounts of false accusations that don't make it as far as court or they do and the accused choose to take a plea versus chancing half their life.

Brent E. Turvey, a criminologist, wrote a 2017 book that dispels this notion. His research, and that of two co-authors, cited statistical studies and police crime reports. One academic study showed that as many as 40 percent of sexual assault charges are false. Mr. Turvey wrote that the FBI in the 1990s pegged the falsity rate at 8 percent for rape or attempted rape complaints.

“There is no shortage of politicians, victims’ advocates and news articles claiming that the nationwide false report for rape and sexual assault is almost nonexistent, presenting a figure of around 2 percent,” writes Mr. Turvey, who directs the Forensic Criminology Institute. “This figure is not only inaccurate, but also it has no basis in reality. Reporting it publicly as a valid frequency rate with any empirical basis is either scientifically negligent or fraudulent.”

A recent study supports this assessment. The Pentagon issues an annual report on sexual assaults in the military. Nearly one-quarter of all cases last year were thrown out for lack of evidence, according to a report released in May.

As far as the rape every 98 seconds, I am unsure where you found that number. There were 95,730 rapes under the revised FBI definitions (which include more categories that previously were not considered rape, like child molestion, under the legacy definitions) in the last year I could find which was 2016. These are the combined rapes of men, women, and children for that year. That means the actual rape of a 'person' is occurring somewhere around every 5-6 minutes. Now if you are going by a different statistic, like the CDC ones that include such a wide definition of what constitutes 'rape' that it isn't funny, you might get the result you quoted. I wouldn't go by those stats, even TIME magazine had to call out the CDC for overstating the numbers.

As far as Trump goes, he is a complete idiot dickhead. He shouldn't have insulted anyone, least of all Dr. Ford. I will point out one thing though, and this is subjective in that your viewpoint will differ from mine, Dr. Ford is an alleged rape survivor. She has made the claim and took a polygraph test, but other than that she can only claim that in her recollection she was at a party where Brett Kavanaugh was also at supposedly. She also claimed to be heavily intoxicated. If you want to believe her Ex, she has lied in her testimony. (https://heavy.com/news/2018/10/christine-ford-boyfriend-ex-letter-blasey/) Heavy leans left, so this isn't a bobknight cherry picking of information.

Now, why would she come forth and deal with all the negatives of making the claim? I guess that is the kicker, normally you would expect a person to really be telling the truth if they are going to be put through hell. I would put forward though that this was one of the most hotly contested confirmations for SCOTUS ever. Even more so than for Bork, and I remember that one clearly. In my opinion, far more than for Thomas. If you were adamantly opposed to a person sitting on the Supreme Court, had went to school with that person, and were willing to fall on your sword for your beliefs, you might do it.

In any case, that is just supposition on my part.

200ish is our annual homicide by gun rate. 200ish is also our annual knife homicide rate.

I wish more people in both countries (especially the ones who have zero interest in guns) would take a few mins to learn what is and was is not true about them. It is almost impossible to find any unbiased pro or anti gun information, so when it's packaged well like this video, people should take advantage to learn. (but many just are not interested as I am.... I am pretty biased being an owner) *promote

The black is probably chemicals for fire retardant and antifreeze, or silt. Systems have to be tested and flushed at least annually around here; I don't know if other locales don't care about upkeep.

For this years annual Easter egg hunt we've replaced the usual chicken eggs with incendiary hand grenades, let's see if the kids can tell the difference.

Snopes included excerpts from at least two peer reviewed studies directly on topic that seem to contradict your contention....why dismiss it offhand?

In a peer-reviewed paper published by American Law and Economics Review in 2012, researchers Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University found that in the decade following the NFA, firearm homicides (both suicides and intentional killings) in Australia had dropped significantly:

In 1997, Australia implemented a gun buyback program that reduced the stock of firearms by around one-fifth (and nearly halved the number of gun-owning households). Using differences across states, we test[ed] whether the reduction in firearms availability affected homicide and suicide rates. We find that the buyback led to a drop in the firearm suicide rates of almost 80%, with no significant effect on non-firearm death rates. The effect on firearm homicides is of similar magnitude but is less precise [somewhere between 35% and 50%].

Similarly, Dr. David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center found in 2011 that the NFA had been “incredibly successful in terms of lives saved”:

For Australia, the NFA seems to have been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved. While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the NFA, resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.

The NFA also seems to have reduced firearm homicide outside of mass shootings, as well as firearm suicide. In the seven years before the NFA (1989-1995), the average annual firearm suicide death rate per 100,000 was 2.6 (with a yearly range of 2.2 to 2.9); in the seven years after the buyback was fully implemented (1998-2004), the average annual firearm suicide rate was 1.1 (yearly range 0.8 to 1.4). In the seven years before the NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate per 100,000 was .43 (range .27 to .60) while for the seven years post NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate was .25 (range .16 to .33)

Additional evidence strongly suggests that the buyback causally reduced firearm deaths. First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates.

Are you calling them liars?

Mental health is a completely separate issue that's being used as a distraction. It's certainly worthy of discussion but it does not belong as part of the gun debate.

I am not for banning weapons.

I would, however, set the bar for ownership so high that only committed hobbyists would own the most extreme weapons.

The more potentially impactful the weapon, the higher the bar. I have no problem with someone casually walking into a store and buying a bolt-action .22 target rifle or a break action sporting shotgun with a fast background check. The licensing, training and security check requirements would then grow progressively stringent until you get to fast shooting, large ammo capacity, medium-large caliber weapons. At which point there should be annual training and recertification requirements, in-home verification of safe storage compliance, thorough background checks and anything else.

Any committed hobbyist is already training regularly with their firearms and storing them safely. The certification requirements are no more than a verification of the practices they already follow. What's needed is to weed out the casual purchasers, the revenge-fantasy dreamers and the paramilitary idiots.

Clearly the next step for this system is to instantly determine each person's age, occupation and annual income, along with with a quick factoid or two to add flavour:

https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/watch-dogs/