Politics

A lot of European countries seem to be considering freezing energy prices below market prices, and to use government money to pay for the difference. The UK has already announced a two year freeze plan. (possibly costing taxpayers £150 billion) I'm not sure it's a good option. I'm not against intervention and support for domestic bill payers, but I have my doubts if this is the best way, or the right scale. The obvious problem with it is the cost, which is absolutely huge. Someone will have to pay it, and that someone is tax payers. No matter how you smoothe it out, the tax payer will pay. If you do nothing, the users pay for what they use. Which is the general…

Why China, Vietnam, North Korea support Russia? China, Vietnam, North Korea all called Russia as big brother. Mao called Satin as big boss. Chinese Called Stain as Kind father, "cifu". Chinese President Dr Sun Yat-sen said "Russia is our teacher." The West laughs at Russia lost a war to Japan, which Japan lost more soldiers. The West must forget the battle of Singapore, and the battle of Indonesia.

I seem to be seeing a number of influences who are rejecting the science for climate change on economical grounds whilst at the same time arguing that those who understand the science are "brainwashed". With recent laws being passed in our government requiring a minimum 48% reduction i believe in greenhouse gasses by 2050. I know the target should be 2030 however i believe now there is a direction we will probably be able to hit a higher target quicker. the argument is that the economical hit that will have due to our low contribution to the total around 1.5%. that being said because our (Australia) low population it puts us up near the top of the list with greenhous…

Why does, it seems, everything have to go to court before a legislature can execute policy in the US? It seems to me the Judges are more powerful than the politicians and it's they, due to their accepted expressed political bias, de facto run the country?

How concerned should we be about the upcoming potential of mass strike action in the UK? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62706769 Just getting the thoughts of people on this.

Your facts and reasoning are both faulty. Firstly, deaths in England are down to thirty a day, and falling rapidly, and without an uptick will be bottoming out around zero in about a week. (although an uptick is always possible) Secondly, nobody is calling road accidents a pandemic. Yes, road accidents are not behind us, but they are not at pandemic levels. Similarly, there are still some covid deaths nationwide, but they are no longer growing at pandemic levels. It's mostly mopping up the unvaccinated elderlies now. It is a bit optimistic to say that it's behind us but I wouldn't say that he's lying.

https://archive.ph/N5MCX (screenshot, paywall-free version of NY Times article) (you have to scroll past the "interactive" pictorial at the top, which doesn't transfer the pics to the screenshot, so there's just a bunch of isolated sentences on a field of green) (...) But today, as demand surges amid a Russian energy crunch, whole trees are being harvested for power. And evidence is mounting that Europe’s bet on wood to address climate change has not paid off. Forests in Finland and Estonia, for example, once seen as key assets for reducing carbon from the air, are now the source of so much logging that government scientists consider them carbon emitte…

Interesting odds. They don't give Joe Biden much hope. But Ron DeSantis is roughly the same bet as Trump. I've never heard of him !

Biden’s speech tonight was good. He was the right president in the moment. I wasn’t ashamed to have him be my elected representative. He asked us to defend democracy together. He even defended the hecklers taunting him (they were in Philly, after all), but spoke to the broader moment. Hopefully enough people are still listening.

Unless I give below the link I can not do justice to the topic ! '2019 Election is the Last Chance for Indian Democracy'

I don't suppose any of the current tory tinyminds in the leadership race will do anything about this scandal or if the even know or care about it. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-62494987

I'm proud of my negative score stupid. Something would be terribly wrong if I got support from the Left anyhow. And I consider it is my right and duty to do battle with what I see as society's #1 enemy, the Hydra that is the Left. And that's where ever it rears its head in a 'public place'. Be happy your chief censor or his sidekick will come down on me now. I've been locked out of my own thread by arrogant intellectuals, censorship under the guise of upholding the rules so I don't expect to go much further with this.

Should our politicians concern be to just get reelected? After all they will only get to be reelected if enough voters approve of what they have done in office. Is it not good enough for them to just fulfil that commitment,(to be sufficiently popular)? Do they have to be "better" than the people who voted them in or it it their highest duty to represent them warts and all?(men of the people or the vanguard of the people?)

It struck me what Attorney General Bill Barr said in interviews about his new book. Barr declared that Trump was "unfit for office." Barr investigated all of Trump's plausible fictions about "voter fraud" in the 2020 election. He found NOTHING. When asked if he would vote for Trump in 2024, Barr replied that he doesn't want Trump to be the GOP nomination. He will vote for someone else in the GOP primary. But if Trump wins the primary, Barr will vote for Trump. He said that Trump is preferrable over the "progressive agenda." What exactly does he mean? Here is what Wikipedia says about Progressivism: "Progressivism is a political philosophy in support of s…

This interview illustrates the bogus argument Trumpers often use to argue the "election was stolen." They get into the details of court cases in PA, WI, and NV, and pretend they were never thrown out of court. Bill Maher = B Sean Spicer = S B “What do you think about the “election was rigged” and Trump really won?” S “I think there were some serious problems [with the 2020 election]. When you look at PA, WI, and NV, the idea we changed rules running up to an election, in terms of how it was counted. The PA Dem governor, in 2019, Act 77 was signed by Gov. Wolf, so that all ballots had to be in by 8:00pm.” (These 3 cases, along with …

Considering how gun-happy Americans are, I was amazed how few shots were fired by the 'defenders' of the Capitol. This event seems to have been something that was never considered as possible, because nobody knew what to do when it was happening. But now it's happened, what do you think would happen next time? What should happen? You can bet your life that there is now already a plan in place for any repeat ocurrence. But what is it? If the plan is to start shooting, once somebody crosses the boundaries, then you would think that the public should be warned. So that if someone gets shot next time, at least you can say that they were warned. Maybe the aut…

The British Government is in complete chaos, and is on the brink of collapse tonight. PM Boris Johnson has been hit with 38 resignations from his cabinet staff, including the Chancellor of The Exchequer, and the Health Minister in the last 24 hours. A delegation of other cabinet colleagues including the Home Secretary and the replacement Chancellor (who was appointed only yesterday) are said to be at Downing Street tonight trying to persuade the PM to resign - which he is currently refusing to do. Attempting to explain the sequence of scandals which has led to this situation is no simple task, but this article by CNN offers a reasonable overview: https://…

https://nypost.com/2022/07/20/joe-biden-says-he-has-cancer-in-possible-gaffe/ Is he preparing to retire for health reasons??????

The United States may use force against Iran as a "last resort" in case of failure of negotiations on the renegotiation of the JCPOA, President Joe Biden said in an interview with Israeli Channel 12.

What is his MO within the Democrats? i don't know much about him, and his professional contrariness piques me...?

On Tuesday on CNN’s “The Lead,” former Trump White House national security adviser John Bolton made a weird admission: he had “helped plan” coups d’état previously. Bolton told host Jake Tapper he did not think Trump’s actions leading up to the January 6 House Select Committee rose to the level of a coup. https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/07/12/bolton-admits-to-planning-coups-during-cnn-appearance/ After Bolton's confessions, Venezuela called the US authorities a criminal gang

Peterkin and others are constantly complaining about Republicans redrawing voting districts, and changing rules in an effort to keep minorities from voting. And rightly so; this is obviously an attack on democracy, as evidenced by the fact that they still win elections even though more people voted or their opponent. What then should we make of the situation in North Carolina ? NC Green Party rejection sparks claims of unfair undermining by national Democrats | WFAE 90.7 - Charlotte's NPR News Source https://youtu.be/omwJ4b3uNOc https://youtu.be/mQWrJV1q0KU Seems the Democrats have jumped in the mud with the pigs. Now you could make the arg…

Prof. Andrew Sachs (economics), who was on the Lancet's Covid 19 Commission, and Prof. Neil Harrison (molecular pharmacology) jointly suggest covid-19 may have originated in a US biotechnology lab and the technique shared with Chinese researchers, who then accidently let it out into the wild. PNAS paper by them: Do SFN biologists think they have a case? I felt this was more about politics, even though it's technically biology, so I put here because I think this conversation may well head in that direction.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/anti-satellite-weapons/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=anti-satellite-weapons Even testing these systems causes more debris in the orbits these satellites use. And their potential for destruction, as we rely more and more on satellite technology, makes them as much a concern as nuclear weapons. Do you think a ban can be implemented worldwide, or is it going to take some kind of horrendous accident that fills the skies above our heads with all kinds of nasty? Should we be weaponizing space?

Just to take a break from US crazyness and considering that quite a few folks here actually are Canadians (or live in Canada) I thought it is worthwhile to look at Canadian crazyness. While overall higher competency and not having a professional grifter as the leader, Canada fared better through the pandemic (a bit higher than world average in terms of death rates, for example), we have encountered a fair bit of conspiracy theories among the population when it came to COVID-19, which we had (perhaps unfairly) associated mostly with the US. The question whether vaccines contained tracking chip from Bill Gates was a question that came up too frequently for comfort, f…