What exactly does "Rule 19" say?

@newtboy 's description:
"This means that now republicans have ended free speech in the senate, and any time they feel they have been insulted, they'll end the debate and silence the offenders. I find that treasonous, as it directly and horrendously effects how the senate works (or doesn't) and means the party in power can now enforce their un-American idea that they are the only one's allowed to speak."

I agree that it seems to have been used to stifle free speech in this instance. But it doesn't seem like it could be used that way "any time" -- only when the the content being read/spoken is a quote from previous senate sessions?

The reason that I think the full story is important is that the best way to put the kibosh on this would be to turn the tables and have Warren et al. use it on Republicans to demonstrate that it is a bullshit "rule". That sort of violates the whole "they go low, we go high" thing, but a disfunctional, ineffective legislature might be preferable to an actively evil/corrupt legislature. And more importantly, (ab)using the rule is likely the best way to get it removed ASAP so this shit can't happen again.

--edit--
OK, I guess that the "impugn" part is the key, rather than specifically referring to any previous senate session statements. But that just makes it more bullshit, because "impugn" (synonyms include "challenge", "criticize", etc.) is way to broad to be enforceable. I suggest that the moment any senator refers to anybody, dems should "take offense" and invoke Rule 19 themselves.

Nazi's were a militant political movement that had an agenda for genocide.
Islam is a religion that includes people who are acting militantly and citing their beliefs.

Islam != Nazi's
Islam = Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, et al

This would be a lot easier if we could just eliminate all religion.

No, it's not a quote, it's a paraphrase. I never said Bernie had anything to do with it, I'm just saying by even showing THAT particular photo of the troll, they (the young turks, not Bernie) are doing what THEY claim Fox News et al would do, but it's OK for them to do because they're saying it's not what they're claiming.

I'm not calling them out on anything but the hypocrisy of showing the photo. If it doesn't mean a connection to Hillary, why the fuck show it other than to imply a connection or at least give that image to people's minds.

You haven't addressed ANY of the complaints I registered. You haven't responded to the complaints about the racist videos, you haven't responded to the abuse of the ignore system for newtboy, and you seem intent on framing this as some sort of personal vendetta.

I also find it interesting that twice now when I've asked you to ban someone for racist behavior, the first words out of your mouth are you getting defensive that you don't share their views. I didn't ask you about *your* views. You doth protest too much, sir.

Perception is reality. If you do nothing about racist sifts, you can protest all you like, You can tell me that you MAY have talked to the offender, you can deflect and dodge all you want, but talk is cheap, and the implication will be that if you do nothing, then you must share those views.

Actually, no, racism is pretty black and white. You either view all humans as equals...or you don't. It's quite simple actually. The jury is actually in on this. Racism is not merely an opinion, It's bad mmkay? It's been in a few papers, you might have heard about it.

I already took a break from this site because you refused to do anything about Lantern and nothing has changed with the current racist du jour. It's clear that you've given up on this site and don't care about the community (except when an anniversary rolls around) as it is a mere shadow of its former self.

This is no longer a tenable situation for myself (and clearly for others who have already left the site because of your pattern of failures dealing with blankfist, chingalera, et al). Unlike you, I chose to act.

Please delete my account, effective immediately.

You haven't addressed ANY of the complaints I registered. You haven't responded to the complaints about the racist videos, you haven't responded to the abuse of the ignore system for newtboy, and you seem intent on framing this as some sort of personal vendetta.

I also find it interesting that twice now when I've asked you to ban someone for racist behavior, the first words out of your mouth are you getting defensive that you don't share their views. I didn't ask you about *your* views. You doth protest too much, sir.

Perception is reality. If you do nothing about racist sifts, you can protest all you like, You can tell me that you MAY have talked to the offender, you can deflect and dodge all you want, but talk is cheap, and the implication will be that if you do nothing, then you must share those views.

Actually, no, racism is pretty black and white. You either view all humans as equals...or you don't. It's quite simple actually. The jury is actually in on this. Racism is not merely an opinion, It's bad mmkay? It's been in a few papers, you might have heard about it.

I already took a break from this site because you refused to do anything about Lantern and nothing has changed with the current racist du jour. It's clear that you've given up on this site and don't care about the community (except when an anniversary rolls around) as it is a mere shadow of its former self.

This is no longer a tenable situation for myself (and clearly for others who have already left the site because of your pattern of failures dealing with blankfist, chingalera, et al). Unlike you, I chose to act.

Please delete my account, effective immediately.

I found Colbert's question about "unknown knowns" the most interesting, but here's the thing:

Bush was the Commander in Chief. He didn't present their "intelligence evidence" of Iraq's WMDs to the American people because he *had* to. He tells the military what to do, they do it; the people don't get "veto rights". The only reason he presented it to the American people (I still remember watching Colin Powell show satellite photos etc.) was to shore up votes for his re-election. Which is exactly what any politician would do in that situation -- make a decision, and present that decision in the best possible light to the voters.

In other words, when Bush et al. were presenting that stuff to us, they weren't selling the actual invasion itself to us. They were selling us an image of their own legitimacy and competence. Viewed like that, of course they aren't going to inform us of those "unknown knowns"; it would shatter the image of them confidently and capably doing what they knew they had to do -- which was the actual point of it (selling that image to us, I mean).


I was sold, at the time. As were most (but not all) Americans, including many many people much older and wiser than I was (and am). I now agree that the invasion was a colossal mistake and that Bush's presidency in general was rather disastrous. BUT, that being said, I think it is problematic to hold these kinds of decisions against a president beyond a certain point.

FDR decided to drop two atom bombs on Japan rather than continuing with conventional warfare and risking many more American (and Japanese) lives with an invasion. Many people have questioned (and continue to question) that decision. But FDR was there. He was the Commander in Chief, he had some facts and plenty of unverifiable information and suggestions from his cabinet and intelligence sources of the time, and he made the decision.

I don't envy people in power who have to make weighty decisions like that based on incomplete information, only to have people question those decisions by citing information that they didn't have at the time. For the rest of their lives.

But the point of the One Ring wasn't to corrupt its wearer, no? I thought that was just a side-effect of it a)containing part of some evil dudes soul b) having a sort of will of its own and wanting to get back to aforementioned evil dude. Equally I thought the reason the ring makes people invisible is a byproduct of it pulling the wearer into whatever bizarro interdimension that the ring-wraiths and sauron semi-inhabit. Hence why Sauron et al can immediately see the wearer despite spending the rest of the time frantically scanning every corner of middle earth as a creepy big eye thing. I thought the idea was that the ring was only truly powerful in the hands of Sauron, given it was sort of a large part of him, and in combination with the other rings of power, the owners of which it was _meant_ to control.

No, my complaint would be that despite investing so much into it, it kinda fails. Turns out the Dwarves are basically incorruptible and the elves immediately sense they have been conned and stop using their 3. Perhaps he should have made more than 9 for the men.

What's great that no one seems to have touched on in the media yet is that under most common day laws pretty much every cop could technically be convicted of being complicit in murder, an accessory to a hate crime, et al. Silence and solidarity didn't used to be tolerated from criminals.

Ahhh, but there's the dilemma. Does that not instruct your children to lie to their friends (if not directly, by omission)?
That's part of why I think lies are so insidious, they put people in the position of either calling out the lies/liars or being complicit in the lie. I was quite glad my parents didn't tell me to keep the lie a 'secret' when I told them at 5 years old that I knew Santa, et al., was a lie. It would have been confusing to me. Fortunately I don't recall it ever coming up with my friends.

Downvoting is an interesting case that I thought about quite a bit.

I think it *could* go to the Regular Member level, but I'm fine with it staying at Bronze Star because:
* Downvoting is a bit more subject to abuse than the bookkeeping invocations I mentioned before, mainly because it can auto-discard things that get downvoted early. Right?
* IF downvoting was as integral a function as upvoting, I'd say that regular members should get it. BUT, either by design or just as the emergent de-facto standard, it isn't used very much -- even amongst those that have access to it.
* There are some exceptions to that trend, like, say, @ant. Even though that seems to get under some people's skin, I like the way ant uses downvoting -- especially when considered to be a perk reserved for the real upper echelons of contributing members.
* BUT, all of that is primarily relevant to *video* downvoting. *Comment* downvoting isn't as critical / exploitable, so it seems like that could be made available to members before they can downvote videos. I would sometimes like to have that ability, but if the powers that be feel that it should be reserved for Star-level, I don't feel strongly enough about it to push.


I think that's probably all my thoughts on the topic. Thanks again to @Retroboy for bringing it up for discussion, and to @lucky760 / dag et al. for considering it.

Fair point. I was *extremely* tired. It literally almost read "Beatboxing Recorder guy et al someone think of something else", but not all the characters would fit in the title box and I was too tired to edit.
Too bad we don't have a sarcasm checkbox for whole videos...

I'm open to alternative suggestions!

It's all up to Francois Hollande now. Matteo Renzi is reasonably angry at how Germany is handling this shit, and France + Italy might just be enough to rein in the hardliners in Germany/Finland. If Hollande doesn't go into open opposition against Schäuble et al tonight, Grexit becomes inevitable.

Luckily though, my neighbours found some fitting stone plates at an abandoned(?) house to finally finish a spot in their backyard. I'll be over there the rest of the afternoon, pounding those plates into place with a rubber mallet.

Edit: Also, fuck the social democrats for turning on the people again.

Pure quality by John, as usual.

There are a few points I'd like to add, in order of appearance.

5:10 – Greek default or Grexit could be manageable by the rest of the EZ, economically. Italy looks a bit shaky and Spain still looks like shit, so things could spiral out of control, but chances would be better now than they were in, say, 2010.

However, Grexit would be a political nightmare. EZ membership is supposed to be irreversible, so Grexit would reduce the Euro from a common currency to a peg when viewed from the outside. That's open season on the rest of the PIIGS. If Greek then rebounds, other people might very well decide to give Germany the finger and leave as well. If Greece fails, you have a NATO member turn into a failed state, which not only gives NATO the shivers, but also buries any notion of solidarity within the EU. This union survives because of the promises it makes, which include increasing standards of living and solidarity among different peoples. Without it, we're left with... what exactly?

And nevermind the humanitarian catastrophe taking part in Greece. We've conditioned ourselves to block out the pain and suffering of people in Africa. We even manage to shrug at the cesspool of corruption that is Kosovo. But if we do that to Greece as well, what little moral authority Europe might still have left would be gone then.

5:32 – The last payment Greece received was in August, long before Syriza took over. The previous government was in disagreement with the Troika and therefore transfers were frozen.

5:57 – Troika payments are required to service previous debt obligations. They are separate from what the Greek banks require to maintain their liquidity. That would be Emergency Liquidiy Assistance (ELA) from the ECB, which is a different thing entirely, even though it comes from a member of the Troika.

The ECB is bound by law to maintain and ensure the stability of the banking system(s) within the EZ. If a bank runs into liquidity problems, support is provided by the national bank of the respective country, which funnels funds from the ECB to the troubled bank. That's ELA, and a limit on ELA is a limit on the amount of funds that banks can draw from through this process. If an illiquid bank is cut off from ELA, it goes belly up. Bad idea.

Some argue that the ECB should not provide ELA to those Greek banks anymore, since they are insolvent, and ECB rules forbid ELA to insolvent banks. But as Varoufakis said, even the ECB's own Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) department, which is the new banking oversight, declares the four large Greek banks to be solvent. So there is no reason for the ECB to cut ELA to Greek banks. It's all political, and the ECB is designed to be outside of politics. That's also a reason why its membership in the Troika is so controversial.

The political argument for cutting off ELA is that Germany et al. are on the hook for the total amount should Greece itself go belly up. Somewhere along the line, someone made the glorious decision to install the ECB as a currency issuer without providing it with the attributes of a regular currency issuer. If the Bank of Japan or the Bank of England racks up losses, noone cares. They issue their own currency, they cannot go bankrupt, whatever debt they have in their books is irrelevant, for this discussion anyways. But the ECB has to balance its books, it has to receive funds from its members to balance losses, and in proportion to their economic size.

They made sure that politicians can scare the demos by pointing out how they have to foot the bill for this shit, even though it's the one entity where debt truly doesn't matter at all.

By the way, the funds that Greece is hoping to acquire are meant, primarily, for two purposes: making debt payments and to provide financial room to convert ECB(?) debt into EFSF debt (4% interest down to 1%). That's all. No spending.

6:54 – "Printing" money is generating demand out of thin air. There is a shortage of demand throughout the entire continent. So yeah, if the folks at the ECB could type in a few numbers, that would be swell.

Even Germany has a shortage of demand. We are merely hiding it behind the €200b+ of demand that we steal from other countries, i.e. our current account surplus. But the infrastructure and investment spending over here is at all time lows. We'd need an additional €200b+ just to get the infrastructure back to the state it was in a decade ago.

There is no productivity growth in Europe. The UK actually lost a lot of productivity by its introduction of zero hour jobs and other forms of slavery. Without sufficient demand, there is no need to improve production capacities – they can't even sell what they could produce right now.

@charliem,

Energy is absolutely a better measure and marker of climate change than temperature. I started there since the video did. In reality though, everything in climate change is solely about the energy balance at the Top Of Atmosphere. More TOA energy in and temps go up in the long term, less and temps go down. It's the very foundation of climate change.

The climate models that your links look to for projections of things like methane thresholds are based on modelled temperature predictions. The IPCC notes the following on the state of the art in climate models:
For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The Models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter09_FINAL.pdf
It's in Box 9.1

So, climate models currently FAIL to predict TOA energy accurately and hand tuning is required for modelling temperatures into the known past in order to avoid unrealistic states because the TOA energy is wrong. Maybe we aught not panic just yet on extrapolations from that base. I'm not calling climate models garbage, rather they are a learning tool for climate processes and one lesson is that we have a long ways to go in understanding the central component of TOA energy balance. If you go to google scholar and lookup the references from the IPCC assertions you'll find that the modellers acknowledge that most models still either leak or create energy from nothing. As in, even conservation of energy is imperfect in them still.

Your cursory glance approach is a problem, the devil is in the details.

Looking at energy further from NASA's numbers also tells us that the net contribution to TOA energy trapping from the CO2 we've added in the last 100 years is about 3W/m-2 globally. The global TOA energy imbalance is about 0.5W/M-2. In other words, if we could magically remove all the CO2 we've added to the atmosphere, we'd suddenly have a global energy imbalance at TOA of -2.5W/M-2. That brings two things to mind.
1.The enormous energy imbalance you want to call a catastrophe is 0.5W/M-2, but merely rolling back to 1900 CO2 concentrations today would yield a negative energy imbalance 5 times as large.
2.Of the 3W/M-2 that our actions have pushed on the planet, natural factors(warming and other unknowns) have already balance out 2.5W/M-2 of the imbalance, today.

You also might wanna check how much energy is in the oceans on the whole. If you take the increase in energy as a percentage of OCH instead of straight joules you'll find the trend is << than 1% annually.