If someone can be arrested and prosecuted as a rapist, then they have already committed the rape. So this approach can, at best, deter serial rapists.
But that's nitpicking; the whole concept fundamentally misses the realities of what rape is and how it happens.

I try to be as smart as I am able to, my means are humble.

Do you presume that everyone in Texas who proclaims himself a christian is obliged to have the same official christian opinion on abortions?

Dissenters to be burned at a stake on Sunday.

I do not claim to know "very fundamentals" but I am sure there are many interpretations even in Texas of what christianity is or should be. Which exactly do you have in mind?

I am glad videosift is graced by the presence of the Texas supreme christian fundamentalist who knows what people in Texas should think, the penalty for nonconformity being to "fuck off out of Texas". Sounds very unchristian to me, but what do I know about christians in Texas, right?

Well enjoy your 15 minutes of fame, Texas. Abortions dont care, they will keep on being performed, just secretly, dangerously and expensively. Lawyers will be happy. Poor people will die. In the name of preserving the life of a cluster of cells which might or might not have gone on to become a human, actual humans will be harmed.

Agreed, so learn the fundamentals, because you have them wrong.

The bible says if a group of men beat a woman so hard she has a miscarriage but otherwise don't hurt her, no crime or harm has been done, but if they harm HER an eye for an eye comes into play. That's as close to directly saying abortions are fine because the unborn aren't people under Christianity as you could possibly hope for 1800 years before the current procedure existed....but it should be noted that the practice began nearly 5000 years ago in China, and 3500 years ago in European culture. It was not unknown when the bible was written, but is unmentioned beyond this passage that indicated it's not a crime under Christianity.

All the nonsense you've been taught and are repeating is not in the bible, it's only coming from the church as a power grab over reproduction rights. If you don't know the fundamentals of your own religion, please don't try to impose your ignorant misunderstandings on others.

"other christians?" ...

"perscribed opinions" ...

If you don't know very fundamentals of the religion please don't try and be "smart"

OK I will take a risk on this one. Every scientific breakthrough is supported by scientific personnel who run experiments and collect data. The head of the laboratory or institution gets to interpret the data and get the Nobel Prize. That is how teams work in science.

Its even in the video, getting the discovery discovered is a lot of tedious work, someone has to find the anomalous signal, that is great, someone else then gets to state a hypothesis about what it means, which when it proves to be right gives them the prize. Seems fair. Even if its just one on one student and professor, unless the student comes up with a fundamental concept, just noticing an anomaly does not make a Nobel Prize laureate of the student. Even if his line of search is originally against the opinion of the professor.

Now arguably in this case Ms. Bell made a bigger contribution than just collecting data and if you juxtapose that with how women were treated back then, its a nice story. But if she were a man in the same position there would be no Nobel Prize either. And possibly no compensating prize years later.

And yes she deserves her prize, I believe.

The Electoral College is a great idea. It levels the playing field across all states.

As you stated""" inserting partisanship into vote counting, assaulting the integrity of the process and subjecting poll workers to death threats isn't creating a "honest vote system", it's degrading the most fundamental principle of democracy.""

That is what happens to conservatives in major democrat cities during the counting. Glad we are on the same page.

Bob,

I agree with your points below, but the limiting polling places, inserting partisanship into vote counting, assaulting the integrity of the process and subjecting poll workers to death threats isn't creating a "honest vote system", it's degrading the most fundamental principle of democracy.

If you really believed in voting honesty, you'd be railing against the Electoral College.

"Climate scientists are increasingly concerned that global heating will trigger tipping points in Earth’s natural systems, which will lead to widespread and possibly irrevocable disaster, unless action is taken urgently.

The impacts are likely to be much closer than most people realise, a a draft report from the world’s leading climate scientists suggests, and will fundamentally reshape life in the coming decades even if greenhouse gas emissions are brought under some control.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is preparing a landmark report to be published in stages this summer and next year. Most of the report will not be published in time for consideration by policymakers at Cop26, the UN climate talks taking place in November in Glasgow.

A draft of the IPCC report apparently from early this year was leaked to Agence France-Presse, which reported on its findings on Thursday. The draft warns of a series of thresholds beyond which recovery from climate breakdown may become impossible. It warns: “Life on Earth can recover from a drastic climate shift by evolving into new species and creating new ecosystems … humans cannot.”"

Depends on your definition of "need", and your definition of "stopping" climate change.

Because I'm convinced enough natural feedback loops are in effect that there's no chance at all of stopping further climate change, and only a slight chance of slowing the rate of change and only if humanity fundamentally changes first, I find the question flawed.

I find it odd that tidal energy (different from hydro) is never considered in these debates. It's simple, relatively cheap, easy to maintain, and best of all predictable and consistent. All you need is a shoreline with a relatively large tide swing, a small inlet, and a tidal flat.

At best, nuclear is a stop gap measure that trades one planetary poison for another.....largely because we aren't responsible with it....building on shores in earthquake zones for convenience, banning fuel recycling, having no long term waste plan and handling waste insanely (Japan, I'm looking at you and your plans to dump Fukushima irradiated water into the ocean)....It's far from "green" the way we do it.

You utter fuckwit.

(not you, Morhaus, the dude in the video).

What exactly do you think happens to the people and funds holding those shorts? They have to pay the difference. They are contractually obligated to pay up -- period.

Everyone involved in the short was probably broke long before GME even hit $50. But, as we all learned from Goodfellas, "Fuck you, pay me!"

They're broke and on the hook for shit-tons of money. Guess where they're going to get that money? By selling solid assets. They're gonna dump everything they have to make up for the short loss. Who's holding the shares that're about to start tanking? The funds 401ks are invested in because they have to hold solid, reliable assets. The same funds people are relying on for their futures. These are the people who'll REALLY get fucked by this. If you've got a long enough timeline, hopefully, you'll get your money back (although at a loss of compounded value). If you're 65 and looking at your golden years through a lens of 20%+ returns, you're about to find out what happens when an irrational market decides to return to sanity.

Those are the first order effects. The second order effects range from the merely worrying to the outright fucking terrifying. There's a reason Goldman sent out its little missive last night after Mark Cuban pulled his stunt. This isn't just playing with fire, this is sitting in a room full of gasoline while Skippy, The Face-Ripper Ape On Meth, goes berserk with a blowtorch. God help us if this triggers some latent long-tail event.

The good news is that the idiocy of the crowds has apparently decided to dump GME in favor of silver. GME tanking will be bad, but mostly to people who should pay the price for dabbling magic they didn't understand. GME dumping will be good if you're worried about 2008 repeating itself, only without the whole "not letting AIG" fail thing.

People do not understand how fragile and insanely-interconnected the markets are, and how easily the whole goddamn thing could be brought down. We never solved the problems of 2008, we just dumped money on them; we never solved the underlying issues that lead to the Temper Tantrum of December 2018; and we sure the fuck didn't fix the fundamental issue that almost brought the whole show down on September 17 of 2019. And all this was before Covid. There's a reason I went all-in on bonds back in August and that Warren Buffet is sitting on a mountain of cash, and this is pretty much it.

So yeah, congrats to the little guy and all that shit, but don't think for a second that people at the top are going to be the ones who pay.

i love how terrible she is at the game. shows she's fundamentally a decent person who has a hard time deceiving people.

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

My memory of palmetto bugs is entering a room, turning on a light, three of the bastards turn around, look at me like they're sizing me up, and then scuttle away.

Insects making eye contact with a human is just fundamentally wrong. Insects whose concept of humans is anything less than an ineffable cosmic force have evolved beyond their allotted station and should be purged from existence. They can take their flaming death trees with them.

Honest question. What is the distinction between trans-gender and trans-race?

At least in Canada we are rapidly building into law not merely protections for gender identity, but legal requirements for others to also recognize/embrace people's chosen gender identities(forgive me, I know at least in Canada choice is the wrong word but I'm mentally lapsing on a better one).

Yet, trans-race is still dealt with as a joke, with the trans-race individuals an acceptable target of ridicule.

My own opinions don't sit as far out on the left, but watching those that are content with both declaring trans-gender identity an inalienable fundamental right to the extent that MtF athletes must be allowed no matter how clearly their 'choice' was biased by getting to be #1 in their sport., but then ridiculing anyone claiming trans-race is hard for me to reconcile.

Anybody else able to provide a rational difference between the two? It looks to me like an entirely subjective I agree with one but not the other thought process, but maybe that's just my ignorance?

No, it wasn't Noahs failing. The scripture says he preached righteousness, so the message was endorsed by God. The reason no one was converted was not due to a failure on Noahs part, or Gods. The message wasn't misunderstood, it was rejected by a wicked generation, which was their free will choice to do so. Because they rejected Gods message they weren't prepared when the flood came. The choice to reject God doesn't eliminate the consequences of rejecting God, in this case being unprepared for the impending global flood which you were warned about for 100 years. In the same sense you are unprepared for the impending second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, which you have been warned about your entire life.

When God withholds or suspends judgment out of mercy, ironically it has the opposite effect on the callous hearts of men:

Ecclesiastes 8:11

Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil

Because you don't see God out and out punishing people when they do evil, you feel free to live how you want regardless. That is how the pre-flood world felt, and that is why they were swept away. In your ongoing effort to put the worst possible spin on everything in scripture, you neglect to understand the fundamental narrative of the story. The reason for that is your stubborn refusal to say God did something good even when it is integral to the narrative which you use to unfairly discredit Him.