Politics

Just waiting around on the results of our election. I assume you've already voted and got results for your area, JC, and if you haven't gotten out yet Rangerx, make sure you go vote. I may have a preference of our 5 main parties ( depending on criteria for 'party' ) but I sure am glad none of ours sink to the level of some American parties ( and even some of the Brits' ). "Get over it" you Americans. ( to quote your President's Chief of Staff )

We commonly hear that eyewitness testimony is not reliable, in fact it is often portrayed as the worst type of evidence. But you or I can be sent to death by eyewitness testimony. In the courtroom eyewitness testimony is often touted as fundamental in many if not most criminal cases, yet when we judge something outside the courtroom such assertions are poo pooed as not to be believed and cannot be used to judge any aspect of the natural world. Is this bias against eyewitness testimony only applicable if there is only one eyewitness? Does Two make it better? Does multiple independent eyewitnesses lend more credence to the testimony? Should we consider eyewitness test…

This was a sad case and it's just got sadder. A UK cop has been charged with murder for the death of a former professional footballer, Dalian Atkinson, after police were called to the home of his father. Atkinson died of a heart attack on the way to hospital. I can't shed any light on the actual sequence of incidents that led to him being tasered. It's a very odd situation where a cop is charged with murder. A second cop, a woman pc, is charged with causing Actual Bodily Harm. Wikipedia says this about his death "Police had responded to a call as Atkinson threatened to kill his father, Ernest. Atkinson's older brother Kenroy said "My brother had lost it. He was in a …

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/21/17764480/facebook-ad-targeting-options-removal-housing-racial-discrimination https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/08/17/facebook-could-be-responsible-how-advertisers-use-its-platform-justice-department-says/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.aa51c1a63918 So I was arguing with a friend of mine Sunday about the tools FB has that let an advertiser discriminate regarding who sees their ads. My friend is a hairdresser who specializes in hard-to-treat black women's hair. I told him the same tools he uses to target his clientele is being used to discriminate against people some advertisers don't want to do business with. FB allows…

Northern Ireland. List what you think Unionist and Republican leaders have each most feared in trying to negotiate a compromise. What do you think the feared most from their own side? People say it's more political question, than historical

Apparently while we were sleeping, Ohio has passed a bill that students can't be penalized for mathematically or scientifically incorrect answers for reasons based on their beliefs. ( my religion teaches the Trinity; three goes into one evenly !!! ) https://local12.com/news/local/ohio-house-passes-bill-allowing-student-answers-to-be-scientifically-wrong-due-to-religion Can't offend their vulnerable sensitivities with facts and evidence now, can we ? When you combine this with right-wing hate groups, anti-vaxxers, and your politics, the once great America is spiralling the toilet bowl. Please come back to sanity; the world needs you

This title is in quotation marks because I don't agree with it. I am only acknowledging the new motto of the GOP/Trump party. Trump's "ends" is stated as "Make America Great Again." That sounds good, but his real ends is constant attention he is getting for outrageous behavior. He loves the power and attention more than life itself. I learned about Trump in 2006 when he engaged in a twitter war with Rosie O'Donnell. She criticized his treatment of beauty pageant contestants, and he got down and dirty criticizing her as a loser, stupid, ugly, fat, etc. He sounded like a spoiled 8-year-old. How could such a person become a billionaire? I later found out h…

Watching Al Jazeera will introduce you to plenty of third-world problems: vaccination and antiboiotic resistance, contaminated water and landfill landslides, collapsed buildings and dams, tsunamis and earthquakes, sand mining and The Great Green Wall, air quality in Bangkok and New Delhi, and smuggled firearms and the direct sale of firearms, armoured vehicles, and fighter jets. Yet some of them still find time to invent, like Sounthirajan Kumarasamy and his team did, and I want to see more of it. Our planet is accelerating toward a mass extinction, and India by itself has three times more heads than the United States. Although foreign leaders favoring the status q…

US special forces staged a raid near the Syria/Turkey border and flushed out Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who then blew himself up with explosives when trapped. Apparently DNA confirmation of his identity is now possible 'in the field' and much quicker than the usual couple of weeks it takes for criminal cases. Obviously there is a need to be sure, as he has been 'reportedly' killed several times before. D Trump is either trying to draw attention from his escalating problems, or still trying to take wind from B Obama's sails ( the Osama bin-Laden takedown ), as apparently he posted a ( staged ) picture in the Situation Room from the wrong time; he was playing golf during th…

So reading in the news, Seattle has introduced legislation that would create a new math curriculum highlighting how math was used by western civilization in order to subjugate cultures of color. An example would be how numeracy tests were used to screen black voters in southern states. While this is, and will continue to be, taught in history class, it will now also be taught in math class. Additionally, questions will purposefully be framed to cast light on social issues such as the disparity in criminal sentencing, drug sentencing, etc. Furthermore, the math class would also teach students to use different bases, such as base 20, to help make up for …

In a different thread posters mentioned the excellent article "The case for Reparations" by Coates. Here, I urge everyone to read it. While there are points were folks are going to disagree, the overall article is excellent and provide important perspective. It is far more than only an argument, but rather an exquisite mix of historic and sociological characterization of a group interspersed with individual accounts. A summary would not do it proper justice, so again, I suggest folks to read it in whole. While not specifically this article, many of the contents and studies described within the article have over the years changed my mind on many things (including affirmat…

Yes and no, I honestly wanted to avoid that association in this thread but eventually i plan to open another thread that is more specific. This why i wanted to avoid discussing this problem in the context of UFOs. You have already decided the quality of the sighting by suggesting they are all "Insufficient Evidence", "Lights in the Sky", "Optical Illusion", not to mention suggested that no matter how "professional" the witnesses are being mistaken is most likely.

@iNow, Your comment "My intuition is that Rubio has formally begun positioning himself as a Republican primary challenger to Trump (or replacement if he’s removed from office beforehand)." interests me so I opened a new thread to discuss it. It does seem there are a a few different ways Trump's presidency might end and all seem possible in my opinion. - Trump is removed from office via impeachment. This could happen before 2020 or during a second term should he make to 2020 and win a second term. - Trump resigns as part of a deal to avoid impeachment. - Trump resigns as part of a deal he works out to spare some combination of Ivanka, Kushner, Don Jr, Eric…

Got it all into the title. When will politicians learn the difference between spending and investment ?

The attack on Saudi Arabian oil refineries appears to be a result of (relatively) low cost weapons. I recall reading SF stories by Donald Kingbury - "Courtship Rites", "The Moon Goddess and the Son" - that expressed a view of history of war of swings back and forth from elite professional soldiery, that are expensive to equip and train to peasant armies with cheap but effective weapons. (Hammers and knives and longbows in the hands of footsoldiers taking out armoured knights). The second of those stories (written before Gorbachev but set later with intact USSR) had a homemade drone-missile, made from parts on-line fired at the Kremlin and very nearly setting off all out n…

Today Trump walked out of a meeting about infrastructure and said he won't work with Dems until they stop all investigations. There are a dozen or more investigations of Trump continuing besides Mueller's. The Mueller investigation was of very narrow scope. The other investigations however, cover a broader area, going into all manner of financial dealings, and of many Trump entities and allies. My question is how much in substance do the remaining investigations compare to the Mueller project that took nearly 2 years? Do they all add up to be comparable to the Mueller report, or could the other investigations be much more for Trump and company to worry about? W…

For those who do not know. A very thorough review. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_States) A shorter version with a quote. https://votesmart.org/education/electoral-college#.WguT9nNMG7N . So there are some who say our method of voting for POTUS is outdated and broken and needs to be replaced. I am agreeable to the concept if implemented in the right way. If the electoral college is abolished and everything else left pretty much the same my almost worthless vote would become completely worthless. So here is my proposal. 1. Abolish the electoral college. 2. Voting to take place the 1st of November…

Every state of the US gets 2 senators, no matter the state's population. I guess this is to protect against a tyranny of the majority. California has 68 times the population of Wyoming (CA 39,557,000 to WY 578,000 in 2018), but they have EQUAL representation in the senate. What I propose is a slight proportionality modification. The 5 most populous states (CA, TX, FL, NY, PN) each gets 3 senators, and the 5 least populous states (WY, VT, AK, ND, SD) each gets only ONE senator. The total number of senators remains 50, just a little more proportionately (and fairly) distributed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories_of_the_United_States_by_p…

I would say that you don't need to be a genius to see that most scientists are leftists and somewhat socialist. This poll conducted in 2009 says Lab Politics: Most scientists in this country are Democrats. Those numbers probably haven't changed much in these past 10 years since. The reason for this political lopsidedness among scientists comes from the diversity of the scientific professions. For science to advance quickly we need international cooperation and an open forum for the knowledge gained in lab studies and field research. There's been a real hard push lately to make all scientific papers available in a sort of Google-type system internationally (s…

Sorry for my English. I can imagine much more progress. I think medicine is being neglected. Taking into account what radical changes were made during Donald Trump's function, more pressure is needed.

What do you think about USA and Canada unification? Do you think US govt. would support a Canadian politician who would promote such idea?

Netflix has a film about how our data is being used, often against us and mostly to profit from us, and also how the right has used companies like Cambridge Analytica (then nation states like Russia and now China and Iran) to win elections nobody thought they could win (in Trinidad Tobago, Ukraine, Brexit, and Trump, for example). I’ve been loosely following these topics for years and it’s a good film if you haven’t yet seen. My question is: Should the left use this technology in the same way? I’m thinking that not doing so is like coming with a knife to a gun fight and that a principled stance against it is a losing stance, that unilateral disarmament is a mis…

Hello all. Politics is not something I comment; but found interesting that U.S. already bought from Denmark the Virgin islands not too far ago, in 1917 and paid 25 million in gold. With such antecedent, all the noise generated is showing some historical ignorance... If it is a government thing or a presidential personal pursuit, I do not know.

I was listening to a BBC interview with an American this morning, who said that he was going to put is choice in the "Little box at the bottom marked none of these" Is it true that the Americans have this advanced option on their ballot papers? I would love to see them introduced here.

Doesn't it seem to you that ultimately the time came for EU to make the most decisive step in its history and accept Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus and Russia making economic unification of Europe complete in this way?