Delta1212

Well, it has been a while since I posted here. My biggest problem is the absolute ignorance of the others who post here. I had some hope that someone here would have some comprehension of thoughtful analysis of their beliefs. I was apparently totally misunderstood by absolutely everyone. As a matter of fact, I still have some hope for "Strange" as she (or he as it may be) seems to have at least some comprehension of the issues standing behind understanding.

 

Meanwhile, I will take the trouble to explain the errors in their responses.

 

To my comment regarding "establishing a mechanism for representing any conceivable language", Lord Antares responded with "Which is language itself!" He clearly misses the point that without a mechanism for "representing" a specific given language, the language is totally worthless. He makes the mistake of aligning the concept of understanding with representation, two very different concepts.

 

Further down the line, dimreepr totally misconstrued my assertion which clearly led to confusion everywhere.

 

Now Mordred's comment that "scientists use the universal language of mathematics to understand reality" seems to make some sense, he misconstrues the difference between "representation" and "understanding" (two very different concepts).

 

Studiot's assertion that there exist concepts in one language which are not easily translated into another is of absolutely no significance here as I am no where talking about "translation" my issue of interest is "representation" only. What needs to be understood by the reader that understanding is an achievement reached through "learning" and that relevant state is achieved with whatever representation is used if the language is ever actually understood.

 

Then "Strange" responded with "Yes. Without symbols (words and morphemes) a language does not exist." This again struck me as showing some comprehension of what I was saying. Actually, instead of "symbols", "words" and "morphemes" she (or he as it may be) could have used the reference "representations" which I used and I really missed the significance of the change in representation.

 

Delta 1212 seemed to think the central issue was translation which has utterly nothing to do with my presentation. At that point Strange also began to see translation as a central issue and began to deviate from his or her earlier posts. Strange's further presumption on 20 May that I was presenting a linguistics course clearly indicated a total lack of comprehension of what I was talking about.

 

At that point the whole community seemed to have descended to exactly the same presumption of a linguistic course and the point of my presentation seemed to be totally beyond their comprehension. So on May 21, I posted the representation I wanted to use in the hope that someone here would comprehend.what I was saying.

 

Strange's response was simply beyond me.

 

"Yawn....

I don't have a problem understanding what you are saying, just why..." I didn't think that indicated any understanding at all. If she (or he) understood what I said, acceptance of it as a simple fact was all that was necessary. There are real consequences of that fact apparently invisible to anyone reading this forum.

 

Strange's comment on May 23, "You do know that this has all been done before? You have yet to say anything novel." was totally beyond me. If indeed this were "all been done before" then someone with half a brain should have noticed the implied differential implications on my definition of "understanding" would have profound consequences. How come I have never seen any references to those subtle consequences??

 

If you could comprehend what I have put forth, I can show that the entirety of modern physics can be directly deduced from my definition of understanding.

 

Clearly, ignorance is bliss and I will leave you all to enjoy that profound ignorance!

 

Barring some intelligent response, I won't bother you again ---- Have fun -- Dick

 

 

If you don't believe anyone understood what you were trying to say, perhaps the common element in the failure to communicate is not "everyone else."

 

 

A very poorly written article (some sentences are not even grammatical).

 

Black holes do not explode. What they are referring to is a black hole becoming "active"; i.e. when a large amount of matter falls towards a black hole it is heated and a large amount of it is blow away, often as polar jets.

I was expecting this to be about evaporation of micro black holes. Describing polar jets as a black hole exploding is just... very irresponsible journalism, frankly.

 

And you consider currently sitting university administrations politically unbiased?

Forget currently sitting, what happens when everyone knows that professors are effectively responsible for choosing presidential candidates? You think the hiring process for professors is going to remain the same?

 

Look at how many universities already treat grading of athletes and tell me there aren't going to be politically focused schools the same way there are high level sports schools.

I mean, ideally, people would, instead of voting for candidates, input their preferences on a wide range of issues and then a government would be formed from a candidate pool that best reflected the balance of views of the electorate, but I genuinely have no idea how to set up a system that would do that accurately and consistently without a strong opportunity for corruption.

 

I agree the majority for Brexit was too marginal. A second vote to gain a wider majority vote would have been a good thing.

 

In Australia people are legally obliged to vote. Perhaps introducing this into other democracies would improve democracy.

 

IMO proportional representation would be better than what we have now in the UK.

 

The constituency I used to live in was hard line labour, A Chimpanzee could get elected if it wore a red rosette. The sitting MP was and still is the most point less MP alive IMO, he should have retired 20 years ago, but continues to get elected. If you vote for another party in that constituency your vote is just a protest vote, and pointless. Other constituencies are hard line conservative the same argument applies, voting the other way is pointless.

 

With proportional representation of some sorts and a legal requirement to vote, democracy might work better.

A major fundamental change with a slim majority either way is really never a great thing. When you're electing someone, even if it's by a slim margin that person can always, theoretically, take into account the wishes of the other half of the population while governing.

 

But there's no way to realistically half-secede from a larger body, or half join one, or half do quite a lot of things like this.

 

And no matter which way it goes, status quo or change, you effectively have half of a population that is being forced to live in a circumstance that is contrary to their preference and with no real recourse that does not impose the same circumstance on the other half of the population.

Yeah, I agree with you - I think I commented earlier or in some other thread that the Presidential situation in America has become a popularity contest, and it sucks. But removing the decision from the people's hands is not the right answer. In the United States the three branches of government are supposed to serve as checks and balances on one another - placing one of them under the control of another undermines that.

 

I don't deny at all that the current situation is a real mess. When I hear Dwayne Johnson talk about going into politics and "starting with the Presidency" I feel vaguely nauseous. I know nothing about Johnson's politics, so it's not that at all - it's the whole idea that a complete novice even has it cross his mind that he could be President.

Well, there's precedent now.

James Comey: The President told me that he hoped I could let Michael Flynn go, which in the context of the President calling me in to a private meeting with him in order to say that, I took as an order to do so, although I did not comply.

 

Trump's lawyer: Comey lied about the content of his conversations with the President and "the President never, in form or substance, directed or suggested that Mr. Comey stop investigating anyone, including suggesting that that Mr. Comey 'let Flynn go.'"

 

Donald Trump, Jr: Yeah, plus he only said he hoped Comey could let Flynn go.

 

 

*paraphrased where not in quotes

Yes. I mean, I'm human, so I'm sure that the particular person who benefitted from it this time around probably amplifies those feelings (moreso even than if it had been someone like Romney that had gotten in on the EC votes), but my biggest two concerns really are that it happened again so soon after the last time and that the spread was so much wider in terms of both electoral votes and popular votes.

 

I find that disconcerting.

 

A large panel of experts should NOT have any control over the candidate pool. They only exercise authority by blindly selecting candidates based on grades. They don't know any personal details of the candidates. After selecting candidates the panel has no more connection to the schooling of candidates.

 

Surveillance is important. Total transparency at every step of the selection process is recorded, archived, and available to the oversight committee and the general public. Everybody is aware that everything is recorded, every step of the process is well documented by various sources.

 

I want my president to be smarter than I am and well educated in relevant subjects, not an ignorant con artist who gets power by telling people what they want to hear using clever sound bites and hand gestures.

Who grades the prospective candidates?

Ok - that's better. It sounded almost like a draft when I read your first spin. The only concern I'd have with it is that you're putting control over the candidate pool in the hands of a select few. Power tends to corrupt, so you'd have to have awfully good public oversight of the whole process (and we aren't terribly good at public oversight these days).

 

I do lament the fact that the Presidency, and political office in general, seems to be more of a popularity contest than anything else these days. I read a bit a couple of weeks ago about The Rock considering going into politics. When asked what he'd start with, he said he figured he might as well start with the Presidency. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. :-|

 

Delta1212: it would be interesting to do an analysis that told us the "worst case possible." Just how big could the popular loss be, and still get someone into office. I agree that the larger that difference is the more of a concern it is, but there would be an upper bound. You just can't be President with just a few percent of the vote.

 

The extreme case wouldn't be very realistic, of course, but I guess you'd give the ultimate winner a margin of 1 vote in enough states to get him the office, and then tote 100% of the remaining states for the other candidate. I haven't done the math, but that feels like it could be pretty substantial.

Well, let's do some math.

 

First, there is no actual cap on what percentage of the popular vote a person could get below and still win, because in an absolute mathematically worst case scenario you could have them win 270 electoral votes in states where only one person in the whole state turned out to vote and have 100% turnout in all other states so that the popular vote swamped those numbers. You'd wind up with a President that didn't even score a single percentage point in the popular vote.

 

That's exceptionally unlikely without some seriously blatant vote tampering or major changes in the way some individual states vote, though, so to get a more plausible worst case, I'll use some actual voter turnout data and then assume some kind of weird political realignment happens that groups states differently in terms of regional party affiliations and such than is currently the case. So the following would be very unlikely but not out of the bounds of possibility in terms of turnout but isn't as likely to happen politically given current circumstances.

 

 

Anyway:

 

 

If a candidate won:

 

Alaska

Delaware

D.C.

Montana

North Dakota

South Dakota

Vermont

Wyoming

Hawaii

Idaho

New Hampshire

Maine

Rhode Island

Nebraska

New Mexico

West Virginia

Arkansas

Iowa

Kansas

Mississippi

Nevada

Utah

Connecticut

Oklahoma

Oregon

Kentucky

Louisiana

Alabama

Colorado

South Carolina

Maryland

Minnesota

Missouri

Wisconsin

Arizona

Indiana

Tennessee

 

That would give them 271 EC votes from the states with the lowest Electoral vote numbers (and therefore the highest Electoral vote per capita numbers). I'm assuming that candidate wins each of the Maine and Nebraska congressional district electors by the same slim margins as the states overall for this breakdown.

 

Michigan was the closest state in the last election with 47.6% to 47.3%. I'm going to call that just 47% of the vote in each of the above states going to each candidate.

 

The widest margin I could find for a state this past election was Wyoming with 67% to 21% (D.C. was more extreme with 90% to 4% but I think that is a bit much even for this). So I'll make the other candidate get 67% to 20% in all of the other states.

 

So, with semi-plausible numbers, and assuming the same turnout from the 2016 election for the sake of simplicity, candidates Eric Electoral and Penelope Popular would each get:

 

Alaska - 149,000 each

Delaware - 208,000 each

D.C. - 146,000 each

Montana - 234,000 each

North Dakota - 162,000 each

South Dakota - 174,000 each

Vermont - 148,000 each

Wyoming - 120,000 each

Hawaii - 201,000 each

Idaho - 324,000 each

New Hampshire - 350,000 each

Maine - 351,000 each

Rhode Island - 218,000 each

Nebraska - 397,000 each

New Mexico - 375,000 each

West Virginia - 336,000 each

Arkansas - 531,000 each

Iowa - 736,000 each

Kansas - 556,000 each

Mississippi - 568,000 each

Nevada - 529,000 each

Utah - 532,000 each

Connecticut - 773,000 each

Oklahoma - 682,000 each

Oregon - 940,000 each

Kentucky - 904,000 each

Louisiana - 954,000 each

Alabama - 998,000 each

Colorado - 1,307,000 each

South Carolina - 988,000 each

Maryland - 1,307,000 each

Minnesota - 1,384,000 each

Missouri - 1,320,000 each

Wisconsin - 1,399,000 each

Arizona - 1,209,000 each

Indiana - 1,285,000 each

Tennessee - 1,179,000 each

 

Total: 21,679,000 each

 

(There are 37 states in the above list, so I'll give Eric Electoral an extra 40,000 votes to the above to make up his narrow victory margin spread across those states).

 

Massachusetts - 2,228,000 P / 665,000 E

Washington - 2,222,000 P / 663,000 E

Virginia - 2,669,000 P / 797,000 E

New Jersey - 2,596,000 P / 775,000 E

North Carolina - 2,128,000 P / 948,000 E

Georgia - 2,756,000 P / 823,000 E

Michigan - 3,215,000 P / 960,000 E

Ohio - 3,682,000 P / 1,099,000 E

Illinois - 3,709,000 P / 1,107,000 E

Pennsylvania - 4,130,000 P / 1,233,000 E

Florida - 6,311,000 P / 1,884,000 E

New York - 5,173,000 P / 1,544,000 E

Texas - 6,009,000 P / 1,794,000 E

California - 9,501,000 P / 2,836,000 E

 

Sub-Total: 56,329,000 P / 17,128,000 E

 

Total votes cast (including 3rd parties): 136,669,000

 

Penelope Popular - 78,008,000 / 57%

Eric Electoral - 38,847,000 / 28.4%

 

 

With Eric Electoral coming out as the winner with 271 to 267 Electoral votes.

 

 

It's unlikely that this exact scenario would ever happen. It would take a perfect storm of political and demographic factors, but I'd say this represents an upper bound on what is possible without active vote tampering while keeping it at least adjacent to plausible reality.

 

It's actually a bit more of an extreme divergence than I was expecting going in, frankly.

I would have agreed with that about Bush v Gore to a large extent, although I should point out that Clinton v Trump was not 50 million to 50.5 million but ~66 million to ~63 million, for a difference of a bit over 2% of the total vote, which is relatively close but still fairly substantial for a national election.

 

Regardless of who came out on top, it's the fact that this happened again so soon after the last time and that the difference was much more significant this time and not just a rounding error that has me most concerned.

 

The last time, it was something that I wound up not being too pleased in the outcome of in retrospect (I wasn't old enough to vote at the time, and my parents are not generally very politically outspoken so didn't really have much of a horse in that race at the time), but it wasn't something I was overly concerned about. It drove an interest in learning about the Electoral College and its pros and cons, but I did spend some time defending it at times using some of the same arguments you have and declaring that what happened in 2000 was a once in a century fluke that was only likely to happen when the popular vote was insanely close anyway.

 

Further research over the years convinced me that a lot of the things I thought were advantages of the system did not actually play out that way in reality and were mostly something of a combination of popular myths about what the EC accomplished and more of a mixed bag than a list of real advantages.

 

That said, I still subscribed to the "fluke hypothesis" and so, while I became rather disillusioned with the EC (sometime during the Obama years and not in response to any particular political goings on), it was still stashed safely in my pile of "little to no concern" issues.

 

2016 did change my mind about the EC in one way, and that is the way in which is dashed that particular belief. I had previously been concerned about it in the abstract, but concretely I held certain beliefs about the likelihood of it ever turning out a result that differed at all significantly from the popular vote, and regardless of who benefitted, those beliefs turned out to be wrong this past year.

 

As such, it's been elevated from "no concern" to "some concern."

 

All that said, I don't think it is the sole or even most important (at this point) thing that needs to be reformed in the way that our elections are currently run up and down all levels of government.

 

Campaign finance reform, a solution to gerrymandering, a change in the way votes are counted (instant runoff, ranked choice, etc, etc) and some non-obvious things like a more progressive tax code and perhaps especially an increase in the inheritance tax are all things that I think would have more significant effects at all levels of government than anything to do with the electoral college.

 

 

Not at all. The best candidates in the nation, who are objectively the best performers in college in relevant subjects, are INVITED to join Presidency School. If they have a history of strange or problematic behavior, they are not invited. They are not forced to join. It pays well, so why would a gifted candidate say no? After they are selected as promising candidates, based on objective measures of performance in relevant subjects, they are invited to go down the path towards presidency. If they run for president and lose, they may get a job in congress and run for president in the future.

 

Simply WANTING to be president, is not qualification enough.

 

Great deliberation would go into selecting the "panel of experts". The experts would not get to see the candidates, or know their gender, ethnicity, political persuasion, or anything that would skew the selection process. This is to get candidates only based on objective measure of the best grades in school, and lack of misbehavior.

Are good grades and a lack of misbehavior traits that historically correlate with good Presidents?

I doubt it will anytime soon, either, but it has a better chance of succeeding than a Constitutional amendment, like you said, or any plan that requires cooperation by every state.

 

It's probably the most plausible route to fundamental electoral reform at this point, which is, of course, not the same thing as being an easy route or one that is likely to succeed in the very near future.

There was a time when people viewed politicians with some kind of respect. Either these times have gone, or it was a myth and the internet has provided a medium for the insults to be expressed. Teresa May had reduced the number of police, and gave a speech to the Metropolitan police, during which she said it was not the number of police that mattered, but how you employ them. The police were furious. Anyway, the Met Police have an unofficial community forum, and they have just tweeted:

 

Dear Theresa, it's not the number of MPs that counts, it's how you use them.

I don't think there has ever in human history been a truly universally respected politician. Leastways, not one who was known to more than a couple of hundred people as an upper limit.

 

Some are more or less respected depending on the individual and the circumstances, and I think both sides of the pond may be at a particularly low point at the moment in that regard.

 

But people have always said these sorts of things about politicians. Now they're just doing it online instead of in a pub/bar.

This is a good point re: the electoral college:

 

As the 2000 election reminded us, the Electoral College does make it possible for a candidate to win the popular vote and still not become president. But that is less a product of the Electoral College and more a product of the way states apportion electors. In every state but Maine and Nebraska, electors are awarded on a winner-take-all basis. So if a candidate wins a state by even a narrow margin, he or she wins all of the states electoral votes. The winner-take-all system is not federally mandated; states are free to allocate their electoral votes as they wish.

 

It's a very good point, actually. The college itself isn't really the problem - what a compact of states really should push for is for states to adopt a proportional distribution of their electoral votes.

 

 

No, I don't really think that every liberal would feel that way any more than I feel that everyone who voted for Trump still supports him. It's just easy to observe the attitude in practice. I think the most thoughtful, calm people on both sides just tend not to be vocal. And I do think both sides tend to do it - I can't remember ever hearing Sean Hannity be critical of a Republican once the primaries were over.

 

It's easy to get disillusioned when the bulk of the rhetoric comes from the fringes.

While I would support this, the problem is that this is far less doable than the "all votes to the national popular vote winner" plan.

 

In order to do a proportional plan, you need to get all states to agree to doing it that way. With the compact to apportion all electoral votes to the popular vote winner, you only need to get enough states to reach 270 votes within the agreement in order to implement that plan, and then it doesn't matter what any of the other states do. That's significantly more doable.

The biggest difficulty I have with following through on that request is that, under the current US political spectrum, I'm honestly not sure what even qualifies as a liberal or conservative position these days.

 

Most of the things that get lumped into either category that are easily defined or discussed, especially with regard to one or the other "side", tend to be principles rather than true policy positions. And you can make a very wide variety of disparate policy positions appear to fit or be incompatible with a given principle depending on how you frame it, which feeds into the perception by everyone that "the other side" never has any room to budge or concede good ideas from the other side or what have you.

 

 

For example, let's take "smaller government." Who doesn't like the idea of a government that is efficient and doesn't waste money? There's a narrative that liberals love the idea of just expanding government and government bureaucracy and it is, quite frankly, very stupid bullshit. But what qualifies as necessary expense or service? I suspect that you will find a wide variety of answers to that across the political spectrum and and even more varied number of suggestions about what the most effective and efficient way of going about implementing those services.

 

What side of the spectrum does government investment in infrastructure fall under?

 

How about increased military funding which is technically an expansion of government but is more popular on the right of US politics?

 

I'm honestly not trying to dodge the question, but I find trying to answer it honestly in such an open-ended fashion to be exceptionally difficult.

 

For example, I recognize both the logic behind having an armed populous from an ideological standpoint as far as resistance to potential authoritarianism goes as well as the practical consideration of the difference in use and perception of guns between different regions of the country with them being much more important tools in some places whole being primarily associated with criminal violence in others.

 

I'd ideally like to see gun ownership treated in a similar manner to car ownership with guns being registered, requiring a training course and accident insurance in order to legally load them, but with ownership being minimally constructed within those constraints (which I do recognize some potential constitutional issues with, incidentally, especially given current legal interpretation).

 

Where does that place me? I support gun ownership in principle but have addendum a to that that would be considered very unpalatable to the core of the right. Does that qualify as supporting ideas of the left or rejecting them, or likewise for the right?

 

 

If there is a specific issue you would like to get my thoughts on vis-a-vis your own position, I would be happy to comment on it and give my thoughts on what I do and don't support, but I find the left v right position thing to be too ambiguous to give what I would consider a good answer when it's left more broad like this.

Also, because I've had this discussion before in the past, the idea that the Electoral College gave preference to the smaller, less populous states when it was implemented is actually incorrect. As part of the 3/5ths compromise, it's actual effect was giving more power to the slaveholding states regardless of relative size.

 

Virginia, then the most populous state in the nation, had approximately 12% of the white male voting-age population of the country. They also had 15% of the available electoral votes. Edit: As of 1800, for clarification's sake.

 

The electoral college actually gave the most populous state even more of a say in who was ultimately elected than it would have had under a direct popular vote election.

 

I feel like a lot of people don't spend nearly enough time looking at what the actual outcomes of the way certain things are set up before accepting their popularly claimed reasons for existing as valid defenses of their existence.

 

 

Just to add, two things. First, it has happened 4 times in the last 200 years if you discount 1824 (which I think is valid), not three times. And two of those times are in just the last 20 years.

 

Second, I take exception to the implication, intended or not, that a position that I have given a great deal of thought, time and research to over the last several years (and have gone back and forth on in that time for a variety of reasons) is driven mainly by an emotional response to the most recent presidential election a mere few months ago.

I don't deny that the other 20% exist or that their needs need to be addressed as well.

 

I take issue with the narrative that the system would be broken if politics were dominated by issues that affect the overwhelming majority of the country. Right now, we have the opposite situation where rural issues get a very disproportionate amount of attention in US national politics.

 

Regardless of that, though, I've had an evolving opinion of the Electoral College over time and my present opinion of it is not just a knee-jerk against Trump. I understand very well the concerns that it was meant to address and the general logic involved defending its existence. The problems, however, are twofold.

 

One, the rural concerns vs urban concerns narrative of the Electoral College does not hold up to scrutiny. For starters, while it gets candidates to put extra attention on less populated states, they still generally campaign in the population centers of those states. That means the cities, rather than the country. There are some states that we think of as being more rural, but you still get the biggest bang for your buck by targeting the city populations of those states rather than the more thinly populated areas.

 

Two, rather than spreading the attention around, I simply shifts which states get the most attention paid to the concerns. Instead of the most populous states, it's the "swing states" that get pandered to. Iowa has a hugely disproportionate influence on setting the platform for major party candidates.

 

In summary, the Electoral College doesn't actually do anything to prevent disproportionate campaigning in cities or in a handful of specific states, it just changes which cities and which states they target. It's the same exact issue that you get with straight popular vote except that it also increases the chances of getting an outcome that a majority of voters are unhappy with.

 

It's an issue that is fundamentally insurmountable in a first past the post system where there is only one winner and consensus is neither necessary nor particularly encouraged by the rules. This is exceptionally hard to get around when you are electing a single person, where you can't exactly implement proportional representation, and a highly polarized environment only exacerbates the situation.

 

The only solution I can really see would require ranked choice voting of some sort in order to allow a candidate that was everyone's second choice to beat out a candidate that was loved by 51% of people and despised by 49%. (Not that that is the situation we find ourselves in now or even necessarily a solution that would have fixed the current situation, but in general we need more of a consensus building system).

 

The Electoral College is, like you said, a compromise between states and does not really reflect the role that states and the federal government play in the modern world. The arguments laid out in favor of its continued existence are predicated on the idea that it smooths out disadvantaged interests, but it doesn't really. It just changes which interests disadvantaged, and actually winds up increasing the number of people who are at risk of getting shut out by government attention on their problems instead of decreasing that number, which is not a particularly ringing endorsement of the effectiveness of the system in my mind.

 

Yes, when they framed the Constitution the sparsely populated states were unwilling to enter into a system in which they'd be totally dominated by the populous states. And the populous states were likewise unwilling to enter into an "every state is equal" arrangement. The Founders didn't really view the federal government as primarily related to citizens; it was fundamentally an arrangement amongst states. Of course, a lot has changed since then and the federal government is now much more important in the life of the average citizen.

 

Having proportional representation in the House and equal representation in the Senate was another thing they worked out for the same "balancing" reason. It's really not quite fair to look at any one of these things and call it unfair - the whole package of arrangements was a thoroughly debated compromise to try to have a system considered fair in an across the board way.

 

It's not unreasonable at all to take the position that changes should be made to one or another part of that package of compromises, but please do keep in mind that if the Presidency was determined by popular vote only you wouldn't even have the same candidates that you'd otherwise have. The parties currently try to field candidates that will win, and the method of election is a factor in that. If we switched to a popular vote system, they'd choose candidates based on that. You'd wind up with urban issues totally dominating the Presidential campaign and mind set. Urbanites would utterly control the Presidential election, and the interests of all other citizens would fall by the wayside. Feel how you wish about it, but I think that wouldn't be a good outcome at all.

As of 2012, apparently over 80% of the US population lived in urban areas.

 

A panel of experts, who are selected democratically. Transparency and objectivity in selection criteria would be paramount.

Like the democratically elected panel of experts in the House Science Committee, currently chaired by a climate change denier?

Who determines who gets to go to this school?

We won't know the official results until sometime tomorrow, but based on exit polling, it looks like the election that Theresa May called hoping to extend her lead has ended up costing the Conservatives seats in Parliament and very likely their majority.

 

Current projections put the breakdown as follows:

 

Conservatives: 314

Labor: 266

Scottish Nationalist Party: 34

Labor: 14

 

 

Anyone a bit more familiar with UK politics than my own very surface level knowledge want to comment on the likelihood of any particular groups being able to form a government under these circumstances?

More likely typos.

 

I never make tyops.

Yes but very rarely.

 

They are very rarely very often wrong?

 

Yes, friend, this finally looks terminal, but I also thought Trump would lose the election. That is how wrong I can be.

This is not terminal. It's not good for him, but it's not even close to terminal.

 

Comey strikes me as a person who learns first, decides what the right thing to do is, and then gets passionate about that, which I wish more people would do. The more unclear the question, the more careful and precise he was about answering it. But over the question of the integrity of the bureau, he's made his decision and you can hear the emotion in his voice.

 

I can understand how a man like that was torn about the right thing to do just before the election.

If nothing else, it was a very interesting opportunity to get some insight on what makes Comey tick and how he makes decisions.

 

That was an enormous disappointment for me. I had hoped McCain would be more on point about Trump, but the bits about Clinton sounded like he was catering to the worst of the GOP base that wants to continue stomping on her career because they're sure she's guilty of something.

 

Integrity -1.

You could tell Comey was struggling to understand what the hell McCain was even talking asking about because the logic was so broken and the premises some of the questions were founded upon were themselves simply wrong.