https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/keep-it-simple-and-take-credit/

"Implementing these kinds of policies are also no road to electoral success. Peoples’ lives are hard enough without tax credits and savings accounts and eligibility forms and government phone calls that determine whether one’s household income puts one in the bracket for this or that plan or benefit or subsidy and on and on. No voter is thanking anyone who puts them on this road, even if there’s a small pot of money at the end of it.

And forget the annoyance—the amount of immense mental energy and social capital required to keep track of, comprehend the eligibility requirements of, and then successfully apply for these benefits is a de facto regressive tax on people whose lives are too materially difficult to deal with arcane bureaucratic bullshit. That is, those people that need the help the most.

So what to do? No more savings accounts, no more cleverly hidden help that people won’t even notice, no more tax-preferenced, means-tested, government-monitored, website-reliant, bronze/gold/platinum-benefits-so-long-as-you-apply-during-open-enrollment. Just give people the stuff they need.

This shouldn’t even be a liberal-socialist divide, although it seems to have become one in recent years. When society decided citizens should be able to read, we didn’t provide tax credits for books, we created public libraries. When we decided peoples’ houses shouldn’t burn down, we didn’t provide savings accounts for private fire insurance, we hired firefighters and built fire stations. If the broad left takes power again, enough with too-clever-by-half social engineering. Help people and take credit."

As Lambert Strether of Corrente says: universal, concrete, material benefits.

Abby Martin participating with this makes sense. For those unfamiliar, her schtick before was working for Russia Today.

The same way Russia is fond of funding the extreme ends of Antifa and Unite the right clowns. Funding popular dissent and dissatisfaction with America and capitalism is super. However many nuts listen to Zeitgeist crazies may be small, but if that group doesn't overlap with the Antifa crowd, and doesn't overlap with the KKK crowd and doesn't overlap with those outraged by the latest wikileaks 'discovery' it all adds up to a lot of people. It's pretty much public record that Russian intelligence is happily and eagerly funding as many of these organizations they can to foment dissent and dissatisfaction.

It's not some paranoid conspiracy to say this plays into the the hands of America's enemies, it's a fact that is being proven in court. That doesn't mean there aren't piles of truths out there being dug up that make America and it's systems look bad and flawed, but spinning it to make people as angry as possible, and feeding those truths along with as many lies as the target audience will swallow is 'great' propaganda.

So that's a long winded version of declaring this video as russian funded propaganda.

Capitalism at it's finest *promote

Earlier today, I was sent a link to an article in Bloomberg titled Why Workers Are Losing to Capitalists. Marx in Bloomberg? Impossibru!

But nevermind Marx. That opinion piece is 800 words, give or take, on labour's share of income. Yet it doesn't mention policy once. Not a single time. It's automation, it's globalisation, it's Gremlins. But not a single peep on policy.

Nothing on union busting. Nothing on taxes on capital vs taxes on labour. Nothing on minimum wages. Nothing on welfare. Nothing on the public sector.

If you read about inequality and related issues in these papers, there's rarely any agency. It's always something abstract like market forces, globalisation, innovation, etc. Nothing on decisions made by people in power, parliament first and foremost, that often had the explicit aim of reducing wages to "increase competitiveness".

if the rich didn't take all of the money, there would be a larger middle class and they would pay more taxes; at this point, the rich have made most people into poor people and why should poor people pay more taxes when they're poor?

I have two opinions on this... 1. the tax code rate for capital gains was around 80% 40 years ago and now it's 15%; that's money for doing nothing 2. all improvements in automation and technology have driven down wages and the benefits of this have all gone to the top either in CEO pay or money made from increases in the stock market

As they mentioned, Warren Buffett famously bragged for years that he pays less in taxes than his secretary. The rich get such value on deductions, loopholes, capital gains rates, etc. that they can avoid taxes overall.
I'm in the bottom 20%...my uncle Sam has never even sent me a birthday card, he sure hasn't ever paid me a dime of assistance. Has Trump ever taken public funds for his projects? Hmmmm.

Another fail, Dimitri.

He didn't have full auto, he used a bump fire stock.
Full auto fires around 20hz. Well practiced bump firing is around 10hz. Well practiced semi auto pull is around 6hz.

Bump firing also sprays so bad it's not aimable beyond a few feet distance. The gun community is even more surprised than other people, most considered the bump stock as a joke doo dad for making noise and wasting money.





All vendors, even at a gun show, must do background checks.

All private sellers, regardless of where (at home, gun show, on the street, wherever), are not required to do checks - but are in practice held liable for subsequent gun crimes if they can't prove they had no idea the buyer was shady.

There is absolutely nothing special about gun shows. The gun show loophole is an entirely imaginary issue (I explained this earlier).




A traceable gun is just as capable of shooting a person as an untraceable gun.



Yes, anyone can put together that arsenal.
Especially anyone with a squeaky clean record who qualifies to be a gun owner no matter what the restriction - like the Vegas shooter.

Hence why *nothing proposed* would have had *any impact* on the Vegas events, short of confiscation raids nation wide and capital punishment for possession.





The reply was to : "You are more likely to be killed by a criminal if you have a gun than if you don't."

I have two interpretations of that chart

1) (my initial thought)
Assault understood as the legal meaning (brandishing, threatening, not necessarily killing).
Discharge understood as firing.
This is what the original math was based on.
But yes, it seems senseless because how can you die to brandishing?

You are correct regarding the "per year".
The original math does include the mistake of thinking it was cause of death, not per year chance of death.
That alters the result from 350'000 lifetimes for a 50/50 chance, down to 350'000 years for a 50/50 chance. AKA 4600 lifetimes worth of years for a 50/50 chance in the next year.

2) (your [likely correct] thought)
Assault understood as being fired upon.
Discharge understood as accidental (what else could it mean?)
This variant is computed below.
However, this challenges conventional assertion, because the common assertion is that accidents kill more than intentional. Maybe that assertion is crap.

1/24974 as caused by assault
That's a 99.995995835669095859694081845119% chance of dying by a cause OTHER than firearms.
Which requires around 17'000 trials for the chance of the next death to be 50% by firearm.
I.E. 99.995995835669095859694081845119% ^ 17'000 = 50.625%, or about 50/50.
AKA 226 lifetimes worth of years to have a 50/50 chance of death by firearm in the next year.

Referring to the study I linked earlier :
http://service.prerender.io/http://polstats.com/?_escaped_fragment_=/life#!/life
#2 version has a similar death chance to the polstats link, so the #2 variant is likely the appropriate understanding (not my initial understanding).

-schehearzade

all right since you know so much, let's have some sources

1/3 of the number of resources are in PR than either FL or TX; there have already been more deaths in PR than either FL or TX; there is something like over 1/2 of the people that haven't even been contacted yet to see how they're doing; I read about a reporter that was 45 miles from the capital and they had dozens of people asking them if they were FEMA

Morello doesn't seem to understand that the majority victimizing the minority is a bad precedent and should be fought against, not merely used now that he's in the majority.

Especially not against someone who is merely wrong.

Find him lynching a black man for getting "uppity"? I'm full on immediate capital punishment for that shit, but this is erroneous opinion and zero fashion sense.

Edit, lulz, auto correct said "zero fascist sense".

I don't have to watch the video.

Short answer, GM.

Long answer, GM and the insane belief that you can't have too much capitalism.

Earthquake early warning system

The seismic warning system in place during the most recent magnitude-7.1 quake on Sept. 19, which had its epicenter about 75 miles from the country’s capital, successfully gave people crucial time to flee vulnerable buildings, and prepare for the worst. In video from Mexico City, early warning sirens blare for at least 20 seconds before the shaking begins.
https://qz.com/1082191/an-earthquake-early-warning-system-helped-spare-mexico-city-trumps-budget-would-kill-it-in-the-us/

Pure gold: https://www.centrism.biz/

Browse through the sections, values and policies most of all.

Appetizer:
"Centrist politicians

These charismatic stage managers for capitalism enchant voters with thrilling tales of the imminent economic prosperity that will grow without limits forever. Their slogans, selfies and well-rehearsed hand gestures help voters understand that better isn't possible, but feeling better is. "

Answered, but ok...
Shared beliefs that the other is the source of their (and America's) problems...be that immigrants, lefty fanboys, inner city residents (blacks), other religions, etc. That's been the party and movement for at least a decade if not longer.

Goals: return to a white majority, returning to mostly white male leadership, removal of immigrants and minimizing immigration, codifying Christianity as the state religion, and freedom to discriminate against other groups (but not theirs).

I agree, racism is not only evil, but dumb.

Free market capitalism (not the entirety of the platform, btw)...as long as it works for them. If not, regulations are just fine....take solar, something the right still fights....or oil, a totally manipulated market. When free market capitalism isn't working, the right has no qualms tossing it.

Republicans, the right wing party, has grown government as much or more than the left/dems. They love to say "small government" but never work towards it (except by killing democrat enacted programs, replaced with larger, more expensive Republican programs.).

No, left wing political ideal is that the government should work for citizens, not corporations. Left wing ideals are personal/human freedom/rights (which includes safeguarding systems against abuses) before profits, not on the right. You've been watching too much Fox and Alex.

So, racism benefits from people working against it and trying to make it actionable (not addressing your incorrect description of the left's ideals.) I think it benefits more from racists and racist policy, live voter I'd laws.
I think you may be describing the ultra left, which is like describing all republicans as to the right of the clan/nazis and ignoring their condemnations of those groups and their methods.

The KKK, Nazis, and alt right all said clearly, it was Trump echoing their platform that brought them in, not the left decrying them.

You are insane if you think anything Obama or Clinton could have possibly done to attract these people, it was the derision of them as subhuman filth that they found appealing.