Comments by "SkyRiver" (@SkyRiver1) on "Democracy Now!" channel.

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  27. In the sixties we saw that "There is no problem until there is trouble." The power elite and their misanthropic syncopates are not only out of touch, they are objectively insane in their behavior and the policies they establish. We thirst for justice, and after the possibility of a golden future for mankind. But they have no thirst for justice -- because -- they write the legislation, and it has become a legislation of privilege and legalized crimes, that is ultimately enforced by low level sell-outs and authoritarian types who have a taste for using the petty authority granted to them to push people around, lie in court and get away with murder. Or at the very least, stand with the blue mob's code of omerta. Now people say, myself included, there are a lot of good cops. True that, but bad cops are just as common now, and the good cops ain't doin' shit about it. So functionally they are all pretty bad in total. I don't know about you, but I have never in my seventy years needed a cop for anything. I've reported thefts: nothing came of it. I have however gotten a few traffic tickets when I was young, for basically having a hot car and a pretty girl next to me. There was no need at all to break the law, they just were so full of hatred/envy -- Really. I was arrested for pot in college by an undercover scumbag that everyone knew was an undercover scumbag, who simply turned in drugs to a state narcotics officer and said I sold them to him. Like everyone else the scumbag did the same thing to, I was given the choice of pleading guilty and doing a few weeks in jail or facing over ten years in prison. I am not black, I was not poor, I didn't even have very long hair, which was a real reason for discrimination back then. When I was in high school I wore a black armband for the VietNam moratorium. I was told to leave school for the day. I went to a local dinner and a young off duty cop asked me why I wasn't in school. I told him and he threw me to the ground and started strangling me. Every cop I have ever seen testify in court, just out and out lied. They had it all written down, what didn't happen, with such impressive notes about times and what not I don't think that my experience is anomalous. I think it is pretty representative of most people. Now I just treat the police like they are all potentially violent insane people, who may or may not bite. Police in America is really, mostly an alternate venue of taxation. Almost all of us would be better off without them. Doesn't it cost more to imprison a man than to give him an ivy league education? Innocent men in prison is money in the bank for these reptilian brained psychotics, we call our leaders, the politician, and our real leaders, the politicians' owners. The banksters, and the hidden money, the insiders, the power elite. They are pretty much assholes. But they control the men with the guns. But not all of them, thanks to the second amendment.
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  36. This bull. We will be looking back in twenty years and seeing just where the hysteria that ended in causing desperate people, to turn to street drugs to control their pain. And why? Because the media fell once again for the war mongers. War on this, war on that, let's have a war on war and realize once and for all, that the only countries that have had any success dealing with the drug thing are those that decriminalized drugs entirely. All drugs should be available to any adult who wants them. Who are you to raise such fake fears in a public that is still under the sway of the last generation of bull that made all these drugs illegal to begin with? All this will do is increase the heroin use. It is only natural that a bulge in the aging population will use more pain killers than when they were young. Canada uses much more opioids per person than the USA. You can buy codeine over the counter without a script. If you don't realize that by far the greatest part of the harm caused by drugs is caused by their illegal status, then you are really blind. Who would turn to street drugs if they could walk into a store and buy some tablets that were more euphoric and effective then heroin? What if people who pursue pain meds had them, and they were pure and effective without all the prisons and beatings and heartbreak? What if people who were really just trying to kill themselves because of the present economic hammering that the one percent is giving the world, were allowed to kill themselves in peace, without the ridiculous drain of society that the present laws demand?
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  37. Trump is just reiterating the Putin policy of giving away the national assets to a small group of oligarchs, criminal bankers, and hedge fund managers. Who will then pay him off with billions hidden in the computers of Panamanian lawyers like they did with Putin. Two international criminals are now posing as the leaders of the worlds most powerful nations. Blame the stupid democrats who voted for Hillary in the primaries instead of the one good man who ran. The one good man who was way ahead of either of them in the polls and now is the most loved politician in the nation. Who will the insider cheating DNS come up with to run this time, instead of the guy who would have beaten Trump like the old rug he wears. Now they are crying and still don't see how they are responsible for the present kleptocracy, under the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief. Look this isn't the first time a New York City conman conned a bunch of small town rubes from the rust belt, and it probably won't be the last as long as lies are allowed to be reported on news channels as facts without any repercussions. The sooner the old idiots: who watch Fox new all day, and believe it, die, the better off we all will be. Democracy can work, but only if actual facts about matters are presented to the public. This is proven scientifically in the field of emergent functions. Remember the urn of beans at the state fair, where you try to guess how many beans are in it. The average of all guesses is always more accurate than the most accurate individual guess. But the facts are apparent. If gum balls and psuedo beans were mixed in and nobody actually knew what was what, it wouldn't be like that. That is the situation we are in with alt.facts like presented by Fox and the many fake organizations bankrolled by the greedy idiot savant Robert Mercer, the Koch bros and others, like Britebart news. Democracy cannot work correctly as long as people believe the lies of the power elite.
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  46.  @2brealist430  Your reasoning is superficial. First of all they are not OUR anything. You may have helped pay for them, but they are not yours. Secondly: there are bad actors on both sides, and some of the bad actors are infiltrators that are attempting to stimulate a draconian reaction against the people they hate. I agree: if violence is to be used: and for the brain dead I will add that I am not advocating violence in the least, it would be much more effective for people to burn The Hamptons and other such enclaves. Or alternately to just assassinate Wall Street executives. Not much chance of that right now. It should be obvious to anyone that this is not an expression of class warfare, it is an expression of rage from being dehumanized by what is for many an inhumane system Actually your bombastic style of rhetoric sounds quite juvenile. And you did not disprove the fact that the power elite coddle uniformed criminals so that they will be willing to kill, if it comes down to it, without hesitation, in any way. . . . Despite your trying to deflect the statement with acts that have nothing to do with what has been going on in the USA. The number of violent crimes has been continually decreasing but the number of people murdered by the police has been continually increasing. I am simply offering an explanation of why this is, and it is in no way dependent upon the action of the people now in the streets as a gut reaction to an intolerable situation. OH, I see the problem now, you took the villagers with pitchforks image literally, you must be a republican, it was a metaphor einstein.
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  47.  @ozzvilla9226  There are two kinds of Trump supporters, multimillionaires and fools. Which are you? The people who call themselves conservatives are not conservatives at all, they are radical selfish right-wing militaristic fascists. For your information I used to be a republican, until I saw what Reagan and his mob of thieves did to the country. Ran up the deficit and showered money on the wealthy. Trump for your information had run up the deficit faster and further than any president, bar none. And I am talking about before the Covid came around. At the same time showering the richest people in the country with government money, and destroying all the support for the less fortunate. He claimed to drain the swamp but he is the swamp. He has routinely put persons who hate specific government agencies in charge of them in order to ruin them. He is a front man for Robert Mercer and the Koch brother and you don't even know who Mercer is. He has more Goldman Sacks bankers in his cabinet than even Obama, and Obama deported more undocumented aliens then him, but he makes a big deal out of it and imprisons infants. Fuck you and fuck him and the fuck the demented horses you rode in on. By the way don't attack the democrats in response. I abjure both parties because they are owned by the same misanthropic petulance. Trump is a conman and a fake populist, we need a real populist in office like Jessie V. Anyone who idolizes Trump is a moron. And by the way, Democracy Now's accuracy makes yours look like what it is, absolute nonsense. Try checking your facts, like you didn't when you claimed that cops had the most dangerous jobs. You were only off by fifteen places which is better than most of your bullshit psuedo-altenate-facts.
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  77. More people are killed with hammers each year than rifles. Far more people are killed with fists each year than rifles. World wide more people die from tobacco use than war. tens of thousands of people die from automobiles each year. Hundreds of thousands of people die each year from medical treatment or error. Millions of Americans are killed by their own inability to eat a healthy diet or because they are a sedentary slob. For every crime committed with a firearm three crimes (that are reported -- most aren't) are prevented by the brandishing or use of a firearm. Most people who die by firearms commit suicide and would find a different way to do it if they didn't have access to a firearm. In Switzerland the population has more firearms per capita than in the USA many of which are full automatic weapons, unlike the semi look alike rifles that shit head media personalities wrongly refer to as "assault rifles". Yet there are no mass shootings. The firearm is neither the cause nor the symptom of the alienation and polarization in our country, the media spin, corporate owned for profit fake news, and the death of the American Dream due to concentration of wealth and the legalized corruption of the Congress that serves their plutocratic masters are the infection that runs beneath. Not to mention the brainwashing of females in progressive communities to treat white males as the enemy. There has never been a crime committed in the USA with a legally owned machine gun or fully automatic weapon even though there are tens of thousands of them in civilian hands. This could actually go on and on, but firearm incidents get the headlines unlike automobile deaths which cause as much pain and suffering for the families as any other form of horrible death. Personally I would rather be shot to death by some disaffected probably mentally ill person than cut in half by a piece of jagged sheet metal to bleed out on the side of a highway by some drunk driver or some nitwit on their cell phone. But I know you feel with all your heart that firearms are the problem.
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  78. In 1969 my girlfriend and I were returning to our apt from dining out. The route we were taking went through a black section of a small city in PA. I first noticed that many of the windows on the street were smashed. It all happened very quickly. Next I notice that there were cars overturned up ahead on fire. It is a one lane one way street without room to turn around. Next I hear someone scream "whitey!" and a brick hits my windshield right in front of my girlfriend and showers her face with glass. A mob of people started to converge on my car. If it wasn't for a small alleyway that just happened to be right at the left of my car I would have had no way out. I took off down the alley and a mob of people literally collided with each other where I had been a moment before. I drove directly to the police station before I stopped because I didn't know how extensive the riots were. The car I had seen burning in the next block had held an elderly white couple that were pulled out of their car and beaten to death. My girlfriends face was covered in blood but only superficial lacerations. If not for the luck of that alley we would have been dead just because we were white. So I know exactly how it feels to be targeted for no reason but your race. The next year, my freshman year a university, I went with a close black friend to a black power rally. I was the only white person there. I was so abused both by the audience and from the stage that I got up and left, despite being there to support their cause. I guess I told you that so that you could rest assured it is a pan human trait to be brutal. Given the opportunity the oppressed will step right up an oppress others.
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  82. Trump is a conman, a front man for a cadre of billionares who would rather have the USA destroy itself internally, that is, give up the hope that our founders, as fallible and human as they were, had in their most ideal vision. These people, like Robert Mercer the idiot savant hedge-fund rainman, and the Kochs and other prime suspects that would rather have the nation ruined of any higher purpose than pay the taxes on their ill-gotten, planet destroying gains. Fortunately for them, they own the media, at the same time that they are telling you that the media is against them and liberal. They have millions of people thinking that real news is fake and fake news is real. They have such sophisticated means of persuasion, functionally brain washing, that they have totally transformed the nation in the last forty years no matter who was in office: Goldman Sach and the other corrupting and ruinous influences owned them, and Trump is the worst of them. He has more Goldman Sach minions in charge of agencies that they hate, than any other prez ever did. And the 80,000 rust belt white male voters that made the electoral difference still think that he is there for them, against the establishment. It's a huge farce. These people who voted for him are the kind of people who only watch Fox News -- some are functional, maybe successful and hard-working, but they are rubes. It ain't the first time that some NYC conman, pulled one over on a bunch of rust belt rubes and it won't be the last. If you see what he is actually doing, and you are yourself not at least a multimillionaire, and you are still in favor of Trump: you need to broaden your scope of information outside of things you like to hear. He is going to make your life poorer, and the rich richer, without any doubt. That is why he is there.
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  101. So happy that DN picked up on this. This is one of the most significant public statements by a sitting Congressman this century. So very unfortunate that the good Christian church ladies that are funding this subversion, along with Koch and other elitist misanthropes who are the real architects and funders, will not see this or be aware of it, and would not understand it or be interested in it even if they did see it. And if they can construe the narrative of "right to life" in (what is to them a melange of meaningless verbiage) it would win their nod of approval. That is the world we live in. Rule of the evil through the manipulation and deception of the stupid. And as Gurdjieff said, "Even God has no defense against stupidity." Of course the left has their own version of deceiving and manipulating the stupid, but it is not nearly as effective, because it is not stupid enough, but with the rabid pursuit of meaningless gestures against symbols that nobody pays attention to anyway, and the censure of anybody not hysterical with a kind of reactionary pseudo-egalitarian woke fervor: that ignores near all of history and most of reality -- they come darn close. Isn't it time to give up this endlessly repeating cycle of futility we are kept enmired in so the power-elite can continue to consolidate their positions: which are even now all but unassailable by any means or from any psuedo-direction, such as the established left or right. It is time to evolve beyond government that is designed to be directed through manipulation by the power-elite and into a form of government that stimulates and elevates those with intelligence and talent without them needing to be the hand-maidens to the corrupt insular power-elite. We need to transform our political system into a NeoConfusian-technomeritocracy to serve the advancement of all citizens, without need for birth advantage, or privilege.
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  148. My question to you is: Should just the descendants of slaves from the Atlantic slave trade to the USA be compensated or the descendants of all slaves? Cuba received three times the number of African slaves as the USA, and Brazil received five times that amount. And the number of black African slaves that were exported to the middle east and north Africa equaled the number exported to the Americas. Why stop there: almost everybody has slaves or serfs in their family history. Most of Europe was used as a resource for slaves by Rome. The Islamic Caliphate raided the coasts of Italy, and all of Europe as far as Iceland for slaves for more than two centuries, yet I do not hear the descendants of these slaves (those that survived to have descendants: which were few) crying for reparations. Perhaps Aramco and Saudi Arabia should reparate all white Europeans for their ancestor's barbarism? Discrimination is a separate issue than reparations. Why should a family (such as my own) who never owned slaves, who in fact were active in the underground railroad and harbored runaways on their farm in PA be penalized for something they had nothing to do with? And in reality who was it who took the black African slaves into captivity in the first place? It was mostly other black Africans and Moslem slave traders. Should their descendants pay? If not, why not? Why not trace the money that the companies who profited from slave labor made, and if any of it still exists in the form of personal or corporate wealth, then confiscate it and disperse it to the descendants of those who were enslaved by these concerns, instead of expecting a handout from those who had absolutely nothing to do with it and are more than likely the descendants of slaves themselves, who got over it and moved on.
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  166.  @cavalier5727  You don't like what we actually know about the Euopean invasion of the Americas, so there can be no truth in it -- so childish. The Truth is easy to see. No stone age group has survived intact when it came in contact with a technologically superior culture, with the exception of Sentinal island off the coast of India that has been declared off-limits by the gov of India. You would not want to live there. Nobody has resisted the truth being brought into light as you say, more than the people who believe a revisionist romantic fantasy of Native American culture and know nothing of the near constant war between various groups, the lack of any meaningful progress in most any area, the brutal torture (usually to death, which is why Native Americans did not surrender in battle) as the rule not the exception for captives and enemies, the delight by women and children in taking part in the torture of captives, the helplessness in the face of pathogens, the self hobbling superstitions taken as fact, which lead to things like the ritual sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of people on an industrial scale, cannabalism, and murderous raiding of civilians as a business model. Or even the fact that most of the Africans taken into captivity were taken by other subsaharan Africans or Muslim slavers. Their real history like that of all peoples includes the brutal and the humane. Instead of the truth the woke puddin'-heads believe in a golden age of noble savage environmentalists that never existed except in their heads and Hollywood. The real history of the European conquest of the Americas is the history of several vastly imperfect and violent cultures in conflict. Just like it happened everywhere else in the world when a technologically or organizationally superior culture came in contact with a primitive one.
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  191. Empathy flows in all directions. Prejudice is a polar or you might say bipolar or dichotomous expression that is actually based in the survival instinct. This is a result of a nervous system that is largely based on the pragmatism of natural selection and is constructed upon the polar charges of ions on a cellular and hormones on a systemic level. People like to think that their opinions and attitudes are based on the rationalizations that they present in retrospect. A person who sympathizes with the downtrodden in whatever guise yet is intolerant of those they view as the dominant or the benefactors of the dominant culture, may be sympathetic, but they are not empathetic. Which is really too bad. The world needs more empathy just because empathy is omnidirectional, neutral, and aspires to objectivity. Democracy Now is a good example of prejudicial sympathy and lack of empathy. Of course they are as reactionary as Fox News, but in a so to say opposing direction. I for one am sick of both the left and the right, and quite in favor of letting the best real science determine the course of human endeavour. Unfortunately at the moment this is only possible through the efforts of people like Elon Musk who are both science based, and have enough capital to pursue the real significant problems of the human race. The first and forermost of which is to survive another extinction event by generatiing a self-sustaining colony off-earth. He is not doing this for his own benefit you know. The second most important thing is to end global warming. So far Tesla is the best bet to decellerate the rate of global warming, and has opened their patents to their competition to use free, becasue Musk is more concerned with getting ride of internal combustion engines than dominating the competition. Real actions for real threats. The golden destiny of humanity lies in the stars -- so my general comment to people is to "get over it."
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  194. In 1969 my girlfriend and I were returning to our apt from dining out. The route we were taking went through a black section of a small city in PA. I first noticed that many of the windows on the street were smashed. It all happened very quickly. Next I notice that there were cars overturned up ahead on fire. It is a one lane one way street without room to turn around. Next I hear someone scream "whitey!" and a brick hits my windshield right in front of my girlfriend and showers her face with glass. A mob of people started to converge on my car. If it wasn't for a small alleyway that just happened to be right at the left of my car I would have had no way out. I took off down the alley and a mob of people literally collided with each other where I had been a moment before. I drove directly to the police station before I stopped because I didn't know how extensive the riots were. The car I had seen burning in the next block had held an elderly white couple that were pulled out of their car and beaten to death. My girlfriends face was covered in blood but only superficial lacerations. If not for the luck of that alley we would have been dead just because we were white, at the age of 17. So I know exactly how it feels to be targeted for no reason but your race. The next year, my freshman year a university, I went with a close black friend to a black power rally. I was the only white person there. I was so abused both by the audience and from the stage that I got up and left, despite being there to support their cause. I guess I told you that so that you could rest assured it is a pan human trait to be brutal. Given the opportunity the oppressed will step right up an oppress others. It is, as you say, a disgusting situation, but by no means isolated to one particular race.
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  196. @Raiderology The "opium war tradition" sounds like an erzats conceptual structure devised to rationalize a particular narrative. You can find such stories everywhere on all sides of all issues. I have found in almost sixty years of study that one of the most important things a human can learn to differentiate is the difference between things that only exist if someone is thinking about them or entertaining them in some published work, and things whose existence persists even if they are entirely outside of the scope of human attention. As simple as this seems I have no doubt that no one who reads this will appreciate the significance this little factor has in society in general and their personal life. There is almost no chance that you will personnally understand this despite understanding what the words I have written mean conceptually. A real physical fact is the wholesale death of desperate Americans due to the importation by the Mexican drug cartels of Chinese produced fentanyl. In some circles is thought to be a stratagem of the CCP. I do not believe this, but some do. What there is no doubt about is that Chinese businessmen are becoming rich by the wholesale destruction of an entire social class of Americans. I am quite aware that some American shipping companies, mostly out of NYC were involved peripherally in the Opium trade, but not nearly to the extent of the British East India Company. What is significant today is not the politics of a bygone age which the US government had no hand in, but this continual assault on the most desperate of Americans, by the collusion of criminal Mexican billionaires and conscienceless Chinese businessmen. Personally I hold the position that all drugs should be decriminalized and that addictive drugs such as heroin should be provided free of charge to addicts in a clinical setting along with the continual offer of therapy and perhaps the offer of ibogaine preparations that are known to quell addiction quite well. But know in advance that I totally expect you to cling to the side of things with no real physical existence in that that is the only manner in which to see you view as valid. So, as they say, more pouring of the null into the void.
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  238.  @StephieGsrEvolution  How do I catalogue your errors, let me count the ways. Well, i am not a libertarian. I absolutely do understand capitalism. You may ascribe all the distasteful aspects of collective human behavior to a particular economic system but that would be naive and simply simplistic. I could for instance point out that the most heinous acts of the power elite in history were the acts of self-declared anti-capitalist leaders like Stalin and Mao who together murdered about a hundred million of their own people, with no capitalism involved. I could point out that the most desirable countries to live in are all socialist in government, but rely on controlled capitalist segments of their society to fund the whole shebang, like in Denmark, Norway, and their ilk. Or I could point out the failure of all modern nations that deplored capitalism. Or that until it embraced the capitalist dynamic the people of China periodically ate tree bark or each other. I could perhaps point out that there are no purely capitalist countries. I could point out that markets predate even the idea of capitalism by thousands of years, yet those countries that thrived did so because of markets. I could point out that even though the Spanish empire literally owned a mountain made of silver it was superseded by the Netherlands, merely because the Netherlands developed a stock market. But before I go on to great extent, I think anybody with a bit of perception and perspective could easily see the fact that blaming the manifestation of negative human behaviors on an economic system is naive and simplistic and anyone with two neurons to rub together can see that historically they have been there all along, no matter the economic systems in play. I further see in your response that you have absolutely no idea what I was indicating by the words RetroConfucian TechnoMeritocracy. But carry on with your partisan narrative, it is no better or worse than most of the disinformation out there. Or better yet, develop a viable alternative that will actually work. I have one, but like your response has indicated, with those whom can only look at the future through a rear-view mirror: really new ideas will not fly. Mainly because they think they already know what they are, without understanding them in the least. (Apologizes Marshal M.)
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  244.  @tigran56  Peck is certainly lying throughout the whole of his documentaries. These are lies of omission. The Europeans triumphed over these cultures largely by strength of arms and other technological means, and of course the microbes to which they had no immunity and which are estimated to have killed between 50 and 90 percent of the native population of the Americas, but the barbarism was common to both victor and the defeated, Though he pointedly never points this out. Many of the native tribes that reemerged after the fall of the huge mound building civilizations (which fell before the tidal European engagement in the Americas) learned horsemanship and became warrior cultures. Their prime means of survival was raiding each other and the Spanish colonies. They were certainly more warlike than the respective European countries of the time, but lacked only the means of totally destroying one another, because, but for the adoption of European advancements they only had stone age techniques of murdering, enslaving, and making war. The entire documentary series is rife with a twisted narrative that ignores the evils of man, such as the Moslem slavers that took more slaves than England, Spain, and Portugal combined, and were far more murderous toward them. I just don't have the time to go through this point by point, but anyone that is really interested can read about what we actually know, without the bias present in Peck, and find out that almost every sentence he utters is misleading because of PREJUDICE against European civilization and the failure to describe all the other things taking place in the world at the same time by other cultures. Lets take one example from history then I am done. During the American Revolutionary War, more continental soldiers died in prison ships in New York harbor than died on the battle field. About fifty percent of the prisoners died. However in the perpetual wars and raiding of one Indian tribe by another, virtually 100 percent of the prisoners died, and in fact were commonly tortured to death as community entertainment. So as brutal as the English may have been, they lagged behind the Native American warrior cultures. And by the way, it is naive to think that the British were the only culture that considered themselves to be the apex of civilization while employing devilish actions. All cultures did this. It is the common human condition of the power elites. It is this blairingly obvious fact that is completlely ignored in these documentries which are just a bunch of crap compared to a real understanding of what we actually know of history. But no doubt that will not matter at all to most of a particular inane ANTI bent. Why bother to study when you can just believe what you want to. Isn't this just exactly what he appears to be striving against? Consider his own personal history growing up in one failed black governed state after another. Peck is a little man of little mind and even less truth.
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  245.  @tigran56  You project too much into what you read. All people develop the military technology they are capable of. This has been the case since the Assyrians formed the first professional armies and attacked and dominated their neighbors. I never said that the Europeans were the greatest versions of humanity. I never assumed any of the attitudes you project onto me. I am simply stating the obvious. What is verifiable fact, as opposed to the false dichotomies that Peck evokes? It is quite notable that you could not find fault with the actual facts I conveyed but instead had to assume a bunch of nonsense about attitudes I neither hold nor have in any manner conveyed. This is typical of people who are immune to facts because of the beliefs they hold. Like Trump supporters who refuse to admit that Biden won the election, so are the woke puddin' heads who refuse to acknowledge the relative barbarism of all cultures and insist on judging peoples who struggled in past centuries because they did not hold post sixties progressive attitudes. Your talk of supremism is absolute nonsense when seen in the light that almost every primitive tribe refers to themselves as "The Real People, The Chosen People, The Human Beings", and various terms that discriminate against others and hold themselves out as special. This is common to all cultures, even to high schools and any group that needs to feel cohesive in the face of any type of opposition. And I repeat, it is quite telling that you cannot find a valid argument against the historic influences that I have only hinted at. Like Peck naming the crusades as the first white supremacist act, when they invaded Moslem lands. Of course he fails to point out they these were not always Moslem lands and had been taken by force of arms from the previous inhabitants who were mostly Sasanids, and Christians. The remnants of the Parthian and Eastern Roman Empire, and of course the Christian remnants of the Germanic tribes that had destroyed the western Roman Empire and settled in northern Africa, and even Greek remnants of Alexanders conquests -- as was the case for centuries in Egypt. It is also telling that you find the recounting of relevant facts tedious, long winded, and European. How typical of attitudes based on fantasy that must uphold themselves somehow, and can't really deal with the reality of the situation under scrutiny.
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  273.  @donHooligan  Why would I, I gave up all meat and dairy to help the planet and I love meat, seafood, and especially ice cream. Haven't had any for thirty years and I am the most healthy seventy year old I know. And I am totally convinced that it is the reason that I can still keep it up all night at my age. I drive an EV despite the fact that I love sports cars. I only use clean energy and little of it. I kayak to work (just kidding, but I can drop in twenty feet from my back door.) And I post things like this on a continual basis just so people have some facts to make a decision on. That would be stuff like this: The biggest single factor in climate change is the generation of greenhouse gases. Far more greenhouse gases are produced by animal agriculture than any other source (87% by animal ag as compared to 13% by all other sources: cars, planes, electric plants, etc.: combined) The focus on burning fossil fuels is important, but diversionary. Animal agriculture is the elephant shi$$ing in the room, and it includes the massive burning of fossil fuels in it's production and transport technologies. The most important thing a person can do to address climate change, as an individual, is to stop buying the products of animal agriculture, such as meat, dairy products (no Ben and Jerry's does not get a pass) leather goods, and furs. If enough people do this, we will survive, if not, our grandchildren will be forced to decide if they should eat their babies in the hope of surviving a few more weeks when crops fail globally. That's the choice: do we indulge our blind instinctive desires and rationalize them with self-centered reactive opinions, or do we leave future generations a planet worth living on? Or do we just go on fruitlessly bitching about the injustice of things, and put off acting until it's beyond too late. My personal bet is that the vast majority of us, even if convinced of the dire reality of the global climate situation, will go on with our rapacious lifestyles unabated. Even so, those are the facts. Now -- are we rational moral beings, or just mad machines that really have no control over ourselves?
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  282. Democracy Now is Consistently the most coherent and courageous voice in the legitimate news media. We are all waiting for the next 9/11 that these retrograde de-evolutionary anti American bastards who wrap themselves in the flag will pull. Let's use the power of Deep MInd to destroy them this time. As Robert Mercer is using the power of AI to destroy us, so that he and the Koch brothers don't have to pay taxes on their booty. These idiot savants are replacing a golden future of humanity that is near at hand, with their own insane and inane vision. Campaign Finance is the lynch pin. Mercer knows that and that is why he attacked you by decreasing your political value by backing such scams as Citizens United and the hydra of fake institutions that spread his poison. As long as they maintain the present system of legalized corruption of our elections through campaign contributions and actions that would be illegal had not these same interests changed the laws to make their criminal activities legal. It's time to cut through all this, they can deflect us endlessly with the incredible wealth that they have actually stolen from each and every one of us, and brainwashed the dimmer among us to fight in their behalf. They are masters of the illusion of legitimate power, anddo have some power, as long as they can pay gunmen, enough to overcome their qualms about shooting their own, or just hire psychopaths who see a police career as a way to exercise their desire to kill and destroy others without the natural consequences. All money must be taken out of politics. It is not normal to believe that someone who seeks a position of power is a good person. The worst persons seek power, the best have to be dragged to it. Why do so many think that leaders should be revered? Look at all those glowing faces in Trumps crowds, some of them weren't paid, aren't millionaire thieves who will personally benefit from his kleptocracy and are cheering against their own best interests. Yes a lot of them are stupid, and that is why we have Trump, stupid people along with everyone else was given a choice by Goldman Sach in the last election, and that choice was, "Would you rather live in piss or shit?", and they chose shit.
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  296. The death and disaster you speak of is caused by the laws against opioids not the opioids. You are a dupe of propaganda. This whole subject is the babble of the insane puritanical conditioning of the populace by the psychopaths that are in control. These laws create a climate in which people turn to street drugs and the hell our laws hand to them. It is insane to think that prohibition works. It does not work and it has never worked. Even in countries with death penalties for use and sale of drugs, it does not work. Opioids are one of the most benign drugs you can use long term. Less harmful than common over the counter drugs that the fools who believe these laws take regularly. Switzerland solved their heroin problem by making it freely available to addicts. What happened? They self titrated and went back to work instead of being out on the street trying to come up with the money for dealers.  This whole problem is self-created. Perhaps we should return to the ultra insane times when doctors and loved ones would withhold pain meds from those in their care who were dying in agony, because they did not want them to become addicted in the final months of their lives. This used to happen all the time, not so long ago. I witnessed it happen to a beloved great aunt when I was a teenager. Anyone who supports this policy is an idiot and thinks that doing the same thing that doesn't work over and over again is a good idea. Why were opioids made illegal in the first place? Because the miners and other factory serfs in England began to prefer tinctures of opium as opposed to alcohol. With good reason. So of course the distillers demonized the use of same. While the facts are that opioids are far less harmful than alcohol or even than tylenol. If you don't know these facts, and I suspect you do not. You basically know nothing about what you have commented on. Which is par for the course on the net. If you really dislike drug dealers, both criminal and noncriminal, then you should be in favor of complete decriminalization of all molecules, and the sanction for anyone to grow any plant they want to and use it themselves, like any free adult should be able to do. Then a person could grow a little plot of poppies and treat their own pain.
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  329. Concerning aerial surveillance: It is certain that EVERY person who attended a demonstration's identity is known by the NSA and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Also know is where they where before they attended the protest and possibly where they were before that, and where they went after the protest, for as long as they want to know about you, right up to present. It's not magic, it's not rocket science, it is cheap and easy to do, because of current computer tech. Here is how it's done: There is a plane, or drone in the air. It is recording the entire city at once with scopes capable of thermal imaging that is controlled by apps that automatically label every heat signature that it sees. So every living thing is labeled. This brilliant program will then continue to keep all the thousands or tens of thousands of labels associated with it's appropriate heat signature. By rewinding to the part of the recording done before the protest it can then usually associated each individual heat signature with an exact address. Same thing going forward in time, it can follow each label to where ever it goes after the demonstration. Of course this is all tied in with cctv and facial recognition apps that automatically correlate data. This information is kept forever, and now, thanks to Bernie Sanders they can legally have inference engines sort though all your internet and digital communications and if you post anything like I did here. You are watched, and possibly set-up if you seem to actually merit the trouble, or if they need a fall-guy, or are looking for likely candidates for entrapment to further their personal careers.
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  382.  @Anointed012  There is no "country" outside of the people who inhabit it. There is no United States of America outside of it's citizens. What living Americans do you imagine benefited from slavery or participated in it? Most Americans are from families who immigrated here after slavery was abolished. Even in the south not many people actually owned slaves. If you know real history then you know that almost everyone has ancestors that were slaves or serfs who were not free to leave the land they worked on or travel. Try to understand that: Almost everyone has ancestors that were slaves during one period or another. Why do you think that people who had nothing to do with enslaving others or trading in slaves owe anything to people who like themselves had ancestors who were slaves? Maybe the Italians and the Vatican should give me money because the Romans took some of my ancestors as slaves -- right? Why not? It makes as much sense as you getting something from someone who had nothing to do with the enslavement of your ancestors. Cuba had three times more slaves brought from Africa than the USA. Brazil had five times as many. Should they get reparations too? From who? Other mixed descendants of slaves? How about the vast majority of African American folks who are part white: Do they have to pay themselves reparations? Get real. Most of the African slaves that were taken were taken by other Africans and Arab slavers and sold to the Europeans at the coast or even at islands off the shore of Africa. Why don't you ask Saudi Arabia for reparations? It is most likely Arabs who actually enslaved you ancestors. The Arab raiders took slaves from Europe too. For over two centuries no European coastal town was safe from their slaving raids that went as far north as Iceland. There were so many white slaves being sold in the Jewish run slave markets in northern Africa that it was cheaper to buy new slaves than to care for them and feed them. Almost all were worked to death and left few descendants. But that probably doesn't impact your world view. Get over it.
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  422. Democracy Now is Consistently the most coherent and courageous voice in the legitimate news media. We are all waiting for the next 9/11 that these retrograde de-evolutionary anti American bastards who wrap themselves in the flag will pull. Let's use the power of Deep MInd to destroy them this time. As Robert Mercer is using the power of AI to destroy us, so that he and the Koch brothers don't have to pay taxes on their booty. These idiot savants are replacing a golden future of humanity that is near at hand, with their own insane and inane vision. Campaign Finance is the lynch pin. Mercer knows that and that is why he attacked you by decreasing your political value by backing such scams as Citizens United and the hydra of fake institutions that spread his poison. As long as they maintain the present system of legalized corruption of our elections through campaign contributions and actions that would be illegal had not these same interests changed the laws to make their criminal activities legal they cannot be beaten and will quickly revive if harmed. It's time to cut through all this, they can deflect us endlessly with the incredible wealth that they have actually stolen from each and every one of us, and brainwashed the dimmer among us to fight in their behalf. They are masters of the illusion of legitimate power, and do have some power, as long as they can pay gunmen, enough to overcome their qualms about shooting their own, or just hire psychopaths who see a police career as a way to exercise their desire to kill and destroy others without the natural consequences. All money must be taken out of politics. It is not normal to believe that someone who seeks a position of power is a good person. The worst persons seek power, the best have to be dragged to it. Why do so many think that leaders should be revered? Look at all those glowing faces in Trumps crowds, some of them weren't paid, aren't millionaire thieves who will personally benefit from his kleptocracy and the Putinesk distribution of national assets to various oligarchs and wealthy buddies, and are cheering against their own best interests. Yes a lot of them are stupid, and that is why we have Trump, stupid people along with everyone else were given a choice by Goldman Sach in the last election, and that choice was, "Would you rather live in piss or shit?", and they chose shit.
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  473. The CIA, about a thousand US special forces troops, and the Northern Alliance (an alliance of drug dealers and heroin smugglers) ran Al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan with minimal ground forces and a few cargo planes full of hundred dollar bills. The mess you are seeing now is entirely the fault of the people who decided to send in the army and nation build. This is the decision that caused the following twenty years of wasted funds and American lives. So who was it that made that fateful and enormously stupid decision? Yes hindsight is 20/20 but apparently so were the many voices that warned of the inevitable quagmire that would develop in Afghanistan twenty years ago. This is who is really responsible for the lose of life and the incredible expense of a meaningless war that anyone with a few brain cells knew, would end as it has: decades ago. The dummy who made the decision: President George W. Bush signs into law a joint resolution, authorizing the use of force against those responsible for attacking the United States on 9/11. This joint resolution will later be cited by the Bush administration as legal rationale for its decision to take sweeping measures to combat terrorism, from invading Afghanistan, to eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without a court order, to stetting up the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But of course the usual suspects, the military industrial complex, dose see a huge windfall every time the USA arms it's enemies by giving arms and training to forces who have no intention of standing and fighting. The USA got punked once again by it's own arms industry.
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  485. If black people get reparations then northern Europeans should get reparations from the Italians for making slaves for Rome out of them, and all Europeans should get reparations from Turkey for taking slaves from all the coastal cities for over two hundred years under the Ottomans, because they have as much to do with the slavery back then as modern Americans do the small number of large slave owners in the South. And how about reparations from the black African raiders who delivered the other Africans to the slave trader ships on the coast or the Arabs who took most of the black slaves? How about the native South Americans made slaves by the Spanish and Portuguese Empires and worked to death in silver mines and rubber plantations, ditto for the Cubans and other Caribbean peoples. How about the natives of the Congo enslaved by Belgium and brutalized beyond comprehension? How about the millions of Chinese enslaved by their own people and worked to death building the Great Wall? How about the Germans and Russians and others worked to death in the Soviet Gulag? The Jews and Poles used as slave labor by the Nazis? The Native Americans taken as slaves by other Native American tribes? It goes on and on, there are hundreds if not thousands of examples of all the different peoples of the earth being slaves at one time or another. The fact is that almost everyone has slavery in their ancestry. Real history is full of slavery but I only ever hear one small sub-group who continue to cry about it and try to monetize the fact that their ancestors were slaves over a century ago.
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  529. Bernie $ VS Bloomburg $ Apologies to those who took arithmetic in elementary school. I know you already know this -- even so you may not be able to envision the difference in these fortunes and this explanation may help. Bernie has a stack of two million one dollar bills that he wants to give to Judy. Bernie is old and can only give her one dollar each second. If Bernie is wearing a catheter and doesn't need to go to the bathroom and can hand Judy dollar bills 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: how long will it take Bernie to give Judy his two million dollars? answer: There are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hours and 24 hours in a day: Therefore Bernie can hand Judy 86,400 dollar bills every day. So he can give her $86,000 per day. So it would take Bernie just about 23 days and three and a half hours to give Judy two million dollars. (since $86,400 goes into $2,000,000 a little over 23.15 times) In twenty three days Bernie could hand Judy his two million dollars, one dollar at a time, if he can stay awake, and he can, cause he is a vastly woke dude. How long would it take little Mike to hand Judy his 60,2 billion dollars one dollar at a time? Mike is also old and wearing a catheter, is being fed intravenously and attended by his personal medical staff. Through the wonders of modern pharmacology and a neural implant he purchased, Mike can also stay awake. But due to age Mike can also only hand Judy one dollar bill per second. So Mike, like Bernie can give Judy $86,400 per day. There are 6,759.26 ($86,400) in 60.2 billion dollars so it would take Mike six hundred and ninety six thousand seven hundred and fifty nine days to hand Judy his 60.2 billion dollars. That's 696,759.26 days. That many days equals one thousand nine hundred and eight years and a few days short of eight months. So it would take Mike 1908.93 years to hand Judy all his money (that we know of). Bernie would be broke in 23 days. Mike would be broke in 1,909 years. Who is the oligarch? Addendum: Please note that since Mike is a capitalist who profits, not from his labor or producing goods but by investment, his wealth will actually be increasing by more than $86,400 per day because of profits on his fortune. So in reality, no matter how many thousands of years he spends handing Judy his money, he would never be able to do it and would always have more to hand her each day than he did the day before. Addendum PS: Old Jewish wisdom: "Every time somebody makes something for nothing, somebody else makes nothing for something." In Bloomburg's and the other billionares cases this "somebody else" is you and everyone else. If you don't understand this you are truly blind and will never understand why wealth is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands and you are being robbed in ways you neither understand nor can do anything about without a fundamental paradigm shift in our laws, government, and cultural world-view.
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  548. Politics sucks ass. Isn't it apparent to everyone by now that our political system is an archaic artifact? An artifact based on humanities inability to escape it's bestial warlike nature . . . :campaigns, winner take all victories, leaders who neither lead (excepting the advancement of the concerns of their patrons) nor have the wisdom to make intelligent impartial decisions on the issues of the day. This political web of deceit is a self-perpetuating parasite that warps collective social culture and is itself continually warped due to shameful self-interested exploitation by those who control the economy through control of debt manipulation. Interests and principalities that spew false narratives which have contaminated every aspect of our expectations of daily life, and our future aspirations (or lack of them). I suggest to you that there are other alternatives. Far more efficient alternatives, that would benefit the whole of society and reduce the corruption that is not only a systemic disease of our political system, but is now the very sinew, marrow, and circulatory system, of a body politic that has done everything possible to free itself from both morality and justice through legislative and legal complexities, technicality, outright lies, and all manner of fuckery. It is time to evolve folks. Like a cool pool on a hot day, once you take the plunge it's refreshing and rejuvenating, but before you take that plunge there is hesitation and a resistance to a state change. And we must change the state of our state unless we consider moving into the future by looking through a rear-view mirror and stepping on our own dicks every step of the way while perpetually bitiching about it to be some kind of desirable human prerogative. Because as it is, it will never be able to meet our real human needs or provide anything more than updated reruns of the same old conundrums. If human culture and civilization is to advance it must evolve to a higher state, a higher system of state, which will nurture higher states of mind in the populace, not continually drag it back by aggravating the primal survival instinct in a technological environment wherein this instinct is counterproductive on numerous levels. I suggest to you that a body politic based on a NeoConfusian Techno-Meritocracy would not only be vastly superior for the state of the state, state of the economy, state of human advancement, and our collective state of mind, that any comparison to the present drunken knife fight in a gilded bordello that passes for our government would be comical.
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  559. This whole subject is the babble of the insane puritanical conditioning of the populace by the psychopaths that are in control. These laws create a climate in which people turn to street drugs and the hell our laws hand to them. It is insane to think that prohibition works. It does not work and it has never worked. Even in countries with death penalties for use and sale of drugs, it does not work. Opioids are one of the most benign drugs you can use long term. Less harmful than common over the counter drugs that the fools who believe these laws take regularly. Switzerland solved their heroin problem by making it freely available to addicts. What happened? They self titrated and went back to work instead of being out on the street trying to come up with the money for dealers.  This whole problem is self-created. Perhaps we should return to the ultra insane times when doctors and loved ones would withhold pain meds from those in their care who were dying in agony, because they did not want them to become addicted in the final months of their lives. This used to happen all the time, not so long ago. I witnessed it happen to a beloved great aunt when I was a teenager. Anyone who supports this policy is an idiot and thinks that doing the same thing that doesn't work over and over again is a good idea. Why were opioids made illegal in the first place? Because the miners and other factory serfs in England began to prefer tinctures of opium as opposed to alcohol. With good reason. So of course the distillers demonized the use of same. While the facts are that opioids are far less harmful than alcohol or even than tylenol. If you don't know these facts, and I suspect you do not. You basically know nothing about what you have commented on. Which is par for the course on the net. If you really dislike drug dealers, both criminal and noncriminal, then you should be in favor of complete decriminalization of all molecules, and the sanction for anyone to grow any plant they want to and use it themselves, like any free adult should be able to do. Then a person could grow a little plot of poppies and treat their own pain.
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  563.  @lostpony4885  Yes: my guess is that at first silver and gold will be the money, then as the harsh reality dawns on people, freeze dried food, seed, and bullets. Then we will eat each other and our babies, like has happened so many times before in famines. If this were inevitable it would be one thing, but we could totally reverse the climate change in very little time, but -- and this is a big but -- we would have to reforest all the land that has been cleared for the grazing of livestock. And basically people would have to stop eating meat and dairy products, which they are quite addicted to. So, though complete wasteland, like you find in the Middle East can be revived in just a few years, by stopping the grazing of sheep and goats and replanting native grasses, also the meat and dairy industry would have to disappear because people stopped buying their products. By the reforestation of the land that is now used for grazing, we would reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases by 87%. It is not just the one percent and their political minions that would have to evolve consciously, it is the average person. That I find most improbable. What I see happening is too little too late, and a massive die off of humanity, with the end of civilization as we know it. And of course the one percent, hiding in their bunkers in New Zealand and private islands, will eventually be dug out and killed in horrible ways. -- Just saying. Maybe Elon Musk and company will do better on Mars, if they make it, and eventually re-civilize a world that has descended into a new dark age.
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  596.  Allan 112358  So far you have said nothing. Go ahead, state your objective. You claim to be looking for new forms. Here's a new form. The simple truth about power: Power should never be entrusted to anyone who seeks it. We knew this all the way back in the golden age of the Athenian hegemony. This includes everyone: both the golden boy of the right-wing nuts, and the wanna-be populists who take a mike at a protest. Power should never be entrusted to anyone who seeks it: for any reason. Power should only be given to a person who doesn't want it and has been found to be the best person for the job. This is why we should turn from our psuedo-republic, which is really a plutocratic kleptocracy to a neoconfusian meritocracy where all positions of power are temporarily held by those found most adequate by means of testing and virtual scenarios devised by scientists and voted on by the populace. The populace would not vote for people but for the various tests devised to select the office holders. I am aware of the objections some would have to this but they are nothing that cannot be resolved by technical means, such as the top scorers being tested further in secure conditions. These tests would be mandatory for every citizen at regular intervals, and whoever scores highest would assume the position they tested for during the next regular government upgrade. This would be superior in every respect to the plutocratic kleptocracy we are now enslaved by. And all forms of cheating could be easily overcome by technical means.
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  603. We should all just listen to the best president of all time and do exactly what he says. Because it's obvious from how the people around him behave that he is the best and has a real handle on the reality of the situation. I mean any man with his name on buildings all over the world must be a great leader. Stop all the bitching and fact checking and line up and applaud him and watch everything he does and listen to every thing he says. He is so fascinating and not like all you dumb experts and intellectuals, he is entertaining like a slow motion train wreck. And like the pope he cannot be wrong. Actually he is every bit a real life super-hero. He is a very stable genius and all the tuff people support him. And they have guns and the democrats mostly don't. Yeh Trump, best president ever, and the savior of the USA. And stop laughing at his hair and fake tan, he is supposed to look his best he is the spokes-model for the USA. Trump totally represents us and theAmericans who voted him in are really smart and the envy of the world. Plus he has the best ratings. So: all you smart asses out there just remember whatever you do, do not laugh in this god-like mans face, no matter what he says. You just do not have the superior IQ like him, and don't understand how deeply profound his statements are, and that they are both earnest and sarcastic at the same time. He is a quantum president and his statements only mean what he says in retrospect like Schrodinger's cat statements. He is magic, almost like Jesus or Hitler, and if you openly laugh at him, he will punish us by going away. So don't laugh in his face when you are with him in person, not that anyone near him has the balls or ovaries to do it anyway. A point he proves everyday, you delightful scallywags and misanthropic sycophants. Good job, how did we ever deserved the wonderful leaders we have. Without you guys we would really be hard pressed to find a war worth fighting and that would hurt the economy.
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  606. The corporate news is still trying to black-out Bernie. Bernie, and Tulsi are the only candidates with any integrity, something the networks and cable news despises. Bernie understands that the lynch-pin of all the legalized corruption in our constitutional republic is campaign finance. What now passes for "business as usual" was not long ago a criminal act. But many progressives do not understand this. They are bored by the subject but excited by all kinds of meaningless PC rhetoric. While I was at a Nader rally in Santa Cruz back during his 2000 run, he said he had time for one more question. I yelled out "Campaign finance!" There was an audible groan from this most progressive crowd in America's most leftest town, when he indicated that this was the subject he would address. I guess most people never consider the fact that if Nader had won, we would have never attacked Iraq and the 2008 great recession (where-in the same people who caused it were put in charge of fixing it and managed to steal trillions in public funds for themselves and the institutions they hid their criminal activities behind) would never have occurred. And I would like to remind everyone that the criminals behind this, who had bribed the legislative branch with campaign contributions, were also the people who changed the laws to allow this disastrous turn of our republic. Which was unequaled until the retrograde idiot section of the supreme court passed Citizens United and other decisions of a antiAmerican nature that benefited the one-percent and their brain-washed right-wing idiot minions. Sorry if this comment went on for longer than a Twitter-brain can attend to. But if you notice, the comments that always get the most likes are always the most obvious and usually the most knee-jerk in nature. Never believe the "first-story": whether given by the government, the corporate news, the republocrats, or your own reactionary quite mechanical mind
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  637. Paradox? Irony? Oxymornical juxtaposition? First the report on the anti-immigrant white supremacy movement, then the anti-gun plug, then the reports of corruption so rampant in Mexico that journalist (and many others) are assassinated by government officials who are really working for drug dealers. Well if you don't see the cognitive dissonance, just let me ask. What is the difference between the USA and Mexico? Why is it that before the recent mass murder in El Paso (by a non-resident) that El Paso was (and probably still is) one of the safest US cities, and right across the boarder on the other side of the same accumulation of humans, is Juarez: one of the most dangerous cities on earth?  I am not offering any answers here only questions. What is the difference between the USA and Mexico? Our corrupt oligarch, power elite, and robber barons, need to be more circumspect. They can't just kill someone for personal reasons -- not to say this has never happened, but it is not nearly as common. I will submit one answer for your approval. If all drugs were to be decriminalized in the USA, and treated as the medical and psychological problems that they are (for some), and perhaps even establish sanctuary zones, where people could do all the drugs they want and buy them from drug stores over the counter. Don't you think that that would put the end to the billions of dollars that end up in criminal hands and corrupt everything from our own federal agencies and military, to the banking system, to small town cops, down and out tradesmen, etc, etc, and it's all just puritanical nonsense. I know, it's hard to think outside the box when thinking is the box, but give it a try.
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  638. I can imagine an alternative that is outside of the usual: capitalism, communism, socialism, anarchism ruts. OK well anarchism may not be a rut, and in a sense it is almost as if an underlying subtle substrate of anarchism may be both present and necessary for the vitality of the other isms, but it seems to me that a purely anarchist state, or region, if you prefer, would be at the mercy of nations that are otherwisely organized. First of all, I mention in the spirit of full disclosure that I find government and it's mechanics boring, and somehow grey and depressing, and consider the people who have a desire to acquire temporal power over the physical existence of others as sick, deeply self-deluded individuals. I think that in general our leaders, in whatever flavor basically suck ass when it comes to administering a government. We are told that governments are the most dangerous entities on earth, not to other governments or other peoples, but to their own people. But of course it is not governments, no matter the formal codification of society in the form of laws and regulations, but the people who enact same, supposedly for the benefit of society, but more realistically in the service of their own organically pragmatic predilections, whether apparent as in the case of libertarians, and various utilitarian movements, or subtle and convoluted and perhaps even unconscious as on the part of various idealists, and utopians. Anyway, enough of this and to the point. I suggest a governing system in which the body of government employees, whether a janitor or the chief executive, is chosen by testing and continual performance review. Sort of a Techno-Neo Confucianism where anyone who is able to score higher on a series of tests that are generated by machine learning logarithms to optimize a governing system that is entirely relative to an established constitution or declaration of stated national goals, such as the optimal health wealth and well-being of all citizens or the earliest possible establishment of an extra-planetary colony that is self-sustaining, or some other orientation or constellation of orientations that is established by and modified by the adult populace with varying degrees of voting powers, which degree would also be determines by a test designed to test the intelligence, knowledge and correlation to reality of their internal conceptions. They would be voting directly only for the goals and general prime directives of the nation and not the leaders or manner in which these goals are pursued except in so far as they have established restrictions on such pursuits, such as environmental regulations and standards of dignity and freedom regarding all individuals. New and future technology will allow earthlings to establish a society that is superior to any that humans themselves are capable of designing the social and physical dynamics and details of. Thusly the human race will expand into the limitless resources of the solar system and beyond, to evolve in concert with our technology to a destiny which is presently beyond the capacity of even the most creative futurist to imagine. In such a system, the tests for positions of higher responsibility would be complex and not limited to written exams, but would include virtual reality scenarios, real world assessment and performance review, as well as extreme depth of psychological testing. I might add that in regard to such "higher" positions it may well be determined and required that it would be necessary for them to experience a mental state of awareness that is beyond the consensus thought-centric and quite mechanical mental processes of humanity, whether by psychedelic agents or some other mode of transcendence. In addendum: democracies do work, I should say "can work", this is illustrated by the fact that if a problem is too complex, such as guessing the number of jellybeans in a huge urn. If enough people guess, say tens of thousands, the median of all the guesses is always more accurate than any single guess. Ok theoretically a single guess can be just as or more accurate than the median of all guesses, but not very friggen often and it is just luck. Now if you have some agency that obscures the urn or finds a means of exaggerating certain qualities or merely using persuasion to misrepresent the number of jelly beans this will obviously fuck things up. This is analogous to the present state of the world with regard to the disinformation and propaganda generated by all manner of sources like Fox News, or any news outside of peer reviewed journals and even then. . . . So of course in this society, as it should be in ours, the penalty for knowingly reporting inaccurate information as fact would be death. No excuses.
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  646.  @richardowens9061  Have you been asleep? The evidence is massive if you care to look for it. Let’s start with the law that congress just passed allowing government agencies to investigate your internet activities. But this is just window dressing for something that has been going on for over a decade. Former head of the NSA Clapper’s problematic testimony occurred a few minutes before noon on March 12, 2013, when he told Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., “No, sir,” and, “Not wittingly,” in response to a question about whether the NSA was collecting “any type of data at all” on millions of Americans. Wyden later said he provided the question to Clapper before the hearing and unsuccessfully asked Clapper to correct the record. Months later, Snowden revealed in June 2013 that the U.S. intelligence community obtained secret court orders forcing phone companies to turn over millions of U.S. call records on an “ongoing, daily basis.” And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Everything you do, write or say over the internet or other electronic venues is not only analyzed, it is stored for over a decade. This has been known for years. Try a little investigation yourself. Snowden let the cat out of the bag, and later revelations show that not only was he telling the truth but he didn’t really know all of the features of the domestic spying. You are probably also unaware that drones monitor some ot the cities in the USA continually. They have been used to monitor the current protests and the scumbags who use them to cover criminal activities. Some of these drone services are even run by private companies and sold to police departments. They are quite simple and brilliant – as in brilliant weaponry which is the next step beyond smart weapons. The same type of logarithms that show you ads based on your internet use are used to sum up and infer your propensity for anti-government activities. Don’t be naive. Think about it. A drone is continuous overhead during the protests. Every heat signature on the street is tagged. Then they can merely rewind the surveillance video and see where any particular tagged heat signature originated, thus getting the address. Also where they went after the demonstration. Etc. Another example: There is a burglary. They play the video backward and can tell where the criminals came from, simple but extremely effective. I don’t really have time to do your homework for you so if you can actually discriminate between evidence and disinformation you will find innumerable leads to what is going on. And every one of your searches will be recorded and scrutinized by machines that can do that and a thousand times more in a fraction of a second at almost no cost.
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  655. Personally I am of the opinion that the people who are more or less forcing the traditional automakers to go EV and are developing the physical potential of green energy, have done far more than all the environmental protestors put together. Actually doing something viable and positive that is physically transformative . . . not so easy as talk. Like Sting sang, "There is no political solution. . . ." Any so-called political solution will be co-opted, lobbied and well "corrupted" into ineffectual window dressing that is really only a path to political power for those of the same bent as those they criticize but in a different "key, like in the progressive key instead of the regressive one we now tolerate to an amazing degree: like frogs in a slowly warming pot that will eventually boil. The solution is to make the most gross sources of environmental degradation economically nonviable (and this is being done quite rapidly, though certainly not as rapidly as it would be if the current pending legislation were objective and not just a political ploy to subsidize unions and other political entities instead of the most viable engineering of the desired clean energy transformation) -- or we can continue, to do the same thing over and over, while expecting a new outcome. I have to quote whoever it was who said, "The lesson of history is that humanity does not learn from the lessons of history." . . . or something to that effect. We could, but this can only come about after a total reform of how political campaigns are financed. We can only really begin to proceed if all private funding of politics is disallowed by law. I know this, you know this, even John McKane knew this and still crickets. I know it's boring but campaign finance is the lynch pin of all the presently legalized forms of corruption that have been normalized in the last half century. It is the glue that holds together the nasty melange we presently suffer.
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  674.  @myhhlim  And your "facts" are mere CCP party line propaganda. What happened to whom you describe as the "red Indians" happened all over the world to the primitive inhabitants of the earth when confronted with the technologies that radiated from the first civilizations. It happened to the first Europeans themselves and the second and the Neanderthals before them. This is the nature of life, you can see it in fungus, plants, and all species of animals. The invasive species whom you refer to as the "red Indians" but who were really different incursions of Siberians into an environment, that, coincidentally underwent a massive extinction of species upon their dissemination into the Americas -- these now cosmic environmentalists, were displaced and disrupted by further invasions of native Asians as evidenced in the archeological record. Who, by the way, practiced all manner of inhumane hideous warfare upon one another continually, and took every advantage they could find to dominate, enslave, and destroy other, "red Indians" as evidenced by the expansion of the Comanche Empire upon their development of mounted warfare. As has been natural for all human beings everywhere until modern times. Now, in the eyes of puddin' heads like you, they were nothing but victims of an insanely rapacious and wholly corrupt European invasion. Yet you use an ancient dynasty to justify the invasion of a peaceful nation that wanted nothing to do with China or it's political ideology. This is the same as me claiming that all of Turkey, ,postl of Northern Africa, most of Central Asia and even a little bit of India is really Greek because it was once a part of Alexander's conquest. Grow a brain and step outside of your partisan fantasy of a worldview. Humans are flawed, all humans, susceptible to corruption beyond the common conscience of -- not doing to others what you would not want them do to one's self. It is a rare person who is not corrupted by power, all governments are an enriched culture for corruption, China is no different. China now has a dictator for life with almost unchallengable power, and total power corrupts totally, he is no exception. He has a narrow window in which to act because of China's demographic timebomb and it seems He is willing to advance aggressively as much as is convenient and possible, just like the USA did during the days of "Manifest Destiny" Before the Japanese invaded Manchuria and lite off WW2 they also felt the pressure of having a limited time to act in which to establish their empire. We know what that came to.
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  680.  @oonie1576  The Chinese government does not provide basic needs to the populace. In fact if you dismiss the propaganda, the USA is actually more socialist than China. China has nothing like Medicare or Social Security benefits. You are obviously a dupe of some kind of propaganda. And though China has the second biggest economy, the personal income of the average person is abysmal. Their is not even a fair comparison between the poor in China and the homeless in the USA. Many if not most of the homeless in the USA are eligible for housing and other benefits but choose not to participate. The news media and all media in the USA is open to all reports and opinions, China has to control all information or the people would raise up and get rid of the CCP if they knew the truth about what is going on. It comes down to this: the old truth that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In China you have a dictator for life. Nothing more need be said. He is entirely corrupt. People are not even allowed to say he looks like Pooh Bear. But you are right it should be up to the Chinese what they want to put up with. And it should be up to the people in HK what government they want, and the people in Taiwan what government they want, and the people in Tibet what government they want, but it isn't. Because China is authoritarian and expansionist and doesn't give a damn what the people want. When given the choice to be free or a part of China no one has yet freely chosen to be part of China. And don't pretend that you live in China, if you did you couldn't even see YouTube unless you were breaking the law, or some kind of paid dupe for the party.
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  685. Reality Check for knee-jerk-liberals: Democratic New York Sen. Chuck Schumer announced plans Sunday to introduce a bill requiring the FBI to approve body armor sales to civilians. The legislation would mandate FBI approval for civilians to purchase body armor Every time issues like this are raised the firearms manufacturers, and in this case body-armor manufacturers experience a windfall of profits and sell all their stock. People who would never have bought a semi-automatic firearm have bought them by the millions as a reaction to the threat of a ban. People who would never have purchased body-armor are now lined up and back-ordering armor: people who never would have thought about it before Shumer's move. Big money is made every time that such legislation is even mentioned. Let's hope the investigators in the Securities and Exchange Commissions have adequate funding. Speaking of stock: In 2012, members of Congress passed the STOCK Act, a bill meant to curb insider trading for lawmakers and their staff. Then when the Securities and Exchange Commission made news with the first major investigation of political insider trading, Congress moved to block the inquiry. But really, should your child have to ask the FBI if she can carry a back-pack that would afford her a prayer of survival if she is caught up in a random act of gun violence? Like those that incorporate a light-weight ballistic panel? The police have armor penetrating ammunition for situations involving armored gunmen. Civilians cannot legally possess such ammunition. The idea that the public will be safer if their ability to protect themselves and loved ones is diminished is ridiculous. It's funny how frequently the public is the victim of irony that proceed from the political sphere of power. Governments are simultaneously the most beneficent and deadly spawn that the human intellect has contrived.
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  690. The biggest single factor in climate change is the generation of greenhouse gases. Far more greenhouse gases are produced by animal agriculture than any other source (87% by animal ag as compared to 13% by all other sources: cars, planes, electric plants, etc.: combined) The focus on burning fossil fuels is important, but diversionary. Animal agriculture is the elephant shi$$ing in the room, and it includes the massive burning of fossil fuels in it's production and transport technologies. The most important thing a person can do to address climate change, as an individual, is to stop buying the products of animal agriculture, such as meat, dairy products (no Ben and Jerry's does not get a pass) leather goods, and furs. If enough people do this, we will survive, if not, our grandchildren will be forced to decide if they should eat their babies in the hope of surviving a few more weeks when crops fail globally. That's the choice: do we indulge our blind instinctive desires and rationalize them with self-centered reactive opinions, or do we leave future generations a planet worth living on? Or do we just go on fruitlessly bitching about the injustice of things, and put off acting until it's beyond too late. My personal bet is that the vast majority of us, even if convinced of the dire reality of the global climate situation, will go on with our rapacious lifestyles unabated. Even so, those are the facts. Now -- are we rational moral beings, or just mad machines that really have no control over ourselves?
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  695. Stupid comment of the day award! Why is this a stupid comment? There is absolutely no evidence that the US government smuggled heroin out of Afganistan. But that is just a minor point. More important is the fact that the heroin that was produced in Afghanistan went to Iran, and Europe via traditional means. Though the US government attack on Al-Qaeda was temporarily supported by the Northern Alliance, which was largely heroin smugglers, and the US armed forces apparently did nothing to suppress opium production in Afghanistan, it did not in anyway facilitate the transport and smuggling of heroin, like it is rumored to have done out of the the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam conflict. Also of note is the fact that the international banks that have been washing the ill-gotten gains of drug cartels is not in the least dependent upon heroin smuggling to supply them with billions of dollars to wash. Why would anyone go through the trouble of growing fields of poppies, the incredibility labor intensive practice of collecting the poppy latex, processing it into opium, converting the opium into morphine base, and finally processing the morphine base into heroin, all in clandestine labs and fields, then smuggling it across multiple boarders and making all the payoff along the way, when they could just order the precursors for fentnyl legally from China, synthesize a few grams in Mexico and have enough "heroin" to supply their entire US distribution network for a week? Huh? Why? This is why: because either you care nothing about the actual facts of what is going on, and just want to present an anti-USA narrative, or your are living in the sixties, when poppy fields still mattered.
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  696.  @nutcheck3  The photos you saw were not of troops guarding poppy fields, they were told not to interfere or destroy crops back when those photos were taken. They just happened to be standing in a poppy fields for a photo op. Hey mom look, here I am standing in an opium poppy field. The Northern Alliance controlled the poppy production in Afghanistan. So since they basically kicked Al Quada out of Afghanistan we did not destroy their fields. There is some evidence that opioids wee smuggled out of the golden triangle during the Vietnam War. Not as a part of any policy, but like the crack epidemic, by CIA operatives that didn't acknowledge any legal restraints on their activities. So maybe some CIA contractors smuggled some drugs out of Asia, and certainly CIA operatives were involved in supporting the Contras with money they made smuggling cocaine into the states, but the US government is not smuggling heroin anywhere, that is just a myth many people would like to believe. Believe me, if the US government wanted to deal opioids in the US, they would just synthesis it in labs already in the country, or better yet in Mexico, they would not smuggle it out of Afghanistan. You can not only synthesis it thousands of times cheaper than growing poppies and refining them to opium>morphine base> heroin> pure heroin, but you can actually use genetically modified yeast to just piss opioids like brewers yeast does alcohol. On the other hand although the US has spent billions of dollars trying to halt poppy production in Afghanistan and bombed over 2000 targets that supposedly served as production and distribution centers, they were largely impotent at curtailing or even suppressing the poppy production. Almost all of which goes to Iran and Europe. The interesting (and real) question at this point is not whether or not the US government smuggles heroin (they don't) it is: will the Taliban, which formerly ended the entire opioid business in Afghanistan last time they ruled the country, now that they have been profiting from heroin production as an income source while they were out of power, reinstate their zero tolerance policy toward drugs? One thing we know for sure is that it will be much harder for the Taliban to ban drugs now that it is their business.
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  701. The USA is not a democracy. It was never intended to be a democracy by the founders. It is a constitutional republic, which is a form of government designed to present the illusion of democracy to the populace while keeping real power and wealth in the hands of a few families and power elite plutocrats. This may or may not be a good thing. A real direct democracy, which is only evident in a few regions of Switzerland and nowhere else in the world, or history, would be a catastrophe in a culture which is most typified by it's public information being basically one or another narrative that are actually partisan webs of lies, as are evident in all our mass media venues including this one (though not quite as bad as most). You cannot have an effective democracy when there are no controls on the dissemination of disinformation and false narratives, by corporations chasing advertising revenues and scoundrels seeking power. To think this will ever amount to anything other than the hodgepodge of insanity that is our public forum of debate is itself insane. It's time to grow up and wrest the sinews of our culture from the vision-less power seekers who control it. Human culture must evolve to propel humanity into it's possible golden destiny on earth and among the stars. It is time to seriously move toward a culture that is a true meritocracy, a neoConfusian techno-meritocracy where there are government upgrades and not elections. Time to give up the old paradigms which are based on war and campaigns, deceit, and the scum rising to the top. We have the technology and science to design a system that can truly determine the best candidates for positions of collective responsibility, by extreme and unbiased vetting, background checks, psychological tests, judgement evaluations by performance in intelligence tests and performance in virtual scenarios, evaluation of past performance, sophistication of problem solving abilities and other verifiable objective methods rather than the standards now in use, (sex appeal, appearance, psychopathic tendencies, the ability to lie convincingly, what family you were born into, the animal lust to pursue power and how much you promise to steal for or from the one percent.) Also there must be consequences for the dissemination of disinformation and conspiracy fantasies in mass media. I suggest caning and banishment after the confiscation of all wealth.
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  715. There are no indigenous people in the Americas, nor in Europe, Asia, Australia, nor any longer in Africa. All humans found outside of certain river valleys in Africa are an invasive species and due to migration, displacement, and climate changes, even present day humans to be found in these regions are not indigenous. What you refer to as indigenous peoples are merely a technologically unsophisticated invasive species. Your continual failure to admit the truth regarding human populations is just more spin. And your news, though better than the cable channels, is saturated with spin, and impoverished as far as hard facts about such matters are concerned. Democracy Now's narrative never recognizes or mention the fact that the peoples they refer to as ingenious were, in precolumbian times, continually at war with each other. And their methods were totally politically incorrect and brutal. So brutal that the entire idea of surrendering to a victor was not even considered an option. Nobody seemed to want to be tortured as public entertainment for days on end, and handed over to the women and children to have sport with the last of you. If one was lucky they didn't eat you. Of course now, they are peaceful environmentalists. Right -- They were such great environmentalist that one of the major extinction events just happened to coincide with their penetration of and propagation through out the Americas. Just like everywhere else on earth: in the Americas humans appeared, and the indigenous fauna crashed. Gone also are the early European horse tribes. So gone: that they are generally not even known. What really makes me laugh is the way that self-proclaimed sophisticated intellectuals, take claims of sacred mountains and special sacred lands seriously. Either you see the Buddha in a stick of dung (which is to say that everything is sacred if you are) or your are just spinning bullshit. And the narrative that Democracy Now spins about these remnants of stone age tribes is pure bullshit, probably derived from Hollywood's revisionist romantic fantasies about them that began appearing in the seventies. I would recommend Empire of the Summer Moon as an informative and engaging peek into the horribly brutal reality of the behavior exhibited by these tribes toward each other and the newer invaders from Europe. Give up your puddin' headed notions: born out of your own yearning for a more authentic existence in the face of the omnipresent media mind-fuck you live in. 1
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  731. It's not just the radical right that is systemically insane regarding climate change. The prime example is how the nitwit left is treating Tesla. All these protests and thousands of people have done nothing to address the problem compared to Tesla. They are all "bla bla bla" and Tesla actually walks the walk, and what does it get? Back of the line and not even recognized for its enormous and continuing contributions to greenhouse gas abatement. Foaming at the mouth woke puddin' heads who hate Tesla because Musk is rich and showing a way to a golden future for mankind. Ludites who understand nothing of Tesla's breakthroughs and continuing campaign to bring hope of a future worthy of humanity. The appointment of Tesla haters like Cummings to positions that control the industry. Just envious small minds who think that marching in favor of political solutions is an effective action: political solutions that will never take place because the people who created the problem are in control of establishing the perception of a working solution. We have been marching for environmental protection since the sixties and the result is NOTHING. A president who sucks up to unions shops no matter how hopelessly behind the tech that Tesla has developed, who supports FORD (who manufactures their EVs in Mexico (thus the recent modification to the rebates that disregards where they are built, instead of Tesla, which builds cars with the most American parts and labor of ALL vehicles, and a gov. who fails to even recognize the real progress they have made. This last election is the first and last time I vote for a lesser of two evils, the democrats and republicans are both corrupt beyond reform, and need to put a gun in their collective mouths and pull the trigger so the rest of us can return to sanity.
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  744.  @Nine-Signs  Politics sucks ass. Isn't it apparent to everyone by now that our political system is an archaic artifact? An artifact based on humanities inability to escape it's bestial warlike nature . . . :campaigns, winner take all victories, leaders who neither lead (excepting the advancement of the concerns of their patrons) nor have the wisdom to make intelligent impartial decisions on the issues of the day. This political web of deceit is a self-perpetuating parasite that warps collective social culture and is itself continually warped due to shameful self-interested exploitation by those who control the economy through control of debt manipulation. Interests and principalities that spew false narratives which have contaminated every aspect of our expectations of daily life, and our future aspirations (or lack of them). I suggest to you that there are other alternatives. Far more efficient alternatives, that would benefit the whole of society and reduce the corruption that is not only a systemic disease of our political system, but is now the very sinew, marrow, and circulatory system, of a body politic that has done everything possible to free itself from both morality and justice: through legislative and legal complexities, technicality, outright lies, and all manner of fuckery. It is time to evolve folks. Like a cool pool on a hot day, once you take the plunge it's refreshing and rejuvenating, but before you take that plunge there is hesitation and a resistance to a state change. And we must change the state of our state unless we consider moving into the future by looking through a rear-view mirror and stepping on our own dicks every step of the way while perpetually bitiching about it to be some kind of desirable human prerogative. Because as it is, it will never be able to meet our real human needs or provide anything more than updated reruns of the same old conundrums. If human culture and civilization is to advance it must evolve to a higher state, a higher system of state, which will nurture higher states of mind in the populace, not continually drag it back by aggravating the primal survival instinct in a technological environment wherein this instinct is counterproductive on numerous levels. I suggest to you that a body politic based on a NeoConfusian Techno-Meritocracy would be so vastly superior for the state of the state, state of the economy, state of human advancement, and our collective state of mind, that any comparison to the present drunken-knife-fight-in-a-gilded-bordello that passes for our government would be comical.
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  760. This is so lame, they will not touch the largest cause of climate change: animal agriculture. IF all the forests that were cut down to provide pasture land since 1800 were allowed to reforest we would have no climate change. Look at the middle east, huge tracts of wasteland, caused by ignorance and subsistence grazing of sheep and goats since way before 1800. Yet it has been proven over and over, that if you stop the grazing, and reintroduce native grasses, IN A MATTER OF YEARS, fresh water springs will appear because the aquifers have refilled, because the grasses allow the natural water and moisture to penetrate the soil and not just run off. Then in a little longer forests will start to grow. This will work in land that is currently totally barren. Yet this is never, ever addressed by politicians because of the money from the meat and dairy industry. Heat pumps, induction stoves, etc. are these people morons? 86% of the greenhouse gases are produced by animal agriculture, not to mention the fact that it has also been proven over and over by real science (that science not underwritten by the meat and dairy industry) that the meat and dairy you eat is killing you. The WHO has classified processed meat products as class one carcinogens same as plutonium and cigarettes. You have been the victim of a relentless (not "unrelenting" as the people who say "wheelhouse" instead of "purview" would say, lol) disinformation campaign. Wake up and let the planet and yourself return to health. Their is so much disinformation on this matter, that if you find you way clear to a realistic narrative it is almost miraculous. And the effect on your health will indeed be miraculous.
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  773. Border security is the issue that Trump will slaughter any progressive on. They will trumpet the idea that Bernie wants open borders even though it's not true. The Americans who have been victimized by the power-elite will once again blame it on the least among us. Americans do not want people allowed into the country just because they decided to ignore our laws. Why can't the people that I agree with on almost every other issue understand this. The people who will decide who wins the election, the 70k rust belt voters, want people to follow the law when applying for citizenship. And if the idea is in their mind that Bernie will have open boarders or reward those who spat on our laws to enter illegally, Trump will win again. Now you know why he will win. These are the issues that make Trump 1- border security, 2 - abortion 3 - 2nd amendment rights. These are the issues that the people whose votes count the most care the most about. If you don't realize this you are one of the people living in a PC dreamland. Abortion and firearms are the matters that will determine the votes of many people who are willing to vote against their own best interests no matter what. Border security and the rewarding of those whom, like Trump, think that they are above the law by entering illegally is the issue that will determine the election. If Bernie wants to win he better change his tune on citizenship for those that entered illegally, and convince the public that he will not open the borders. If you think we have a polarized society now with an evaporating middle class, look at any country south of the border, Americans do not want that for their country. PS. I predict a huge caravan of Central Americanss making it's way toward the US border during the election. Think about how that will play to those 70k rust belt voters. Trump will win in a landslide unless Bernie modifies his position on the people who are already here and the manner in which these people are processed legally. We must stop rewarding people for breaking our laws, both Trump and his ilk, and those who enter the country illegally.
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  776. This whole subject is the babble of the insane puritanical conditioning of the populace by the psychopaths that are in control. These laws create a climate in which people turn to street drugs and the hell our laws hand to them. It is insane to think that prohibition works. It does not work and it has never worked. Even in countries with death penalties for use and sale of drugs, it does not work. Opioids are one of the most benign drugs you can use long term. Less harmful than common over the counter drugs that the fools who believe these laws take regularly. Switzerland solved their heroin problem by making it freely available to addicts. What happened? They self titrated and went back to work instead of being out on the street trying to come up with the money for dealers.  This whole problem is self-created. Perhaps we should return to the ultra insane times when doctors and loved ones would withhold pain meds from those in their care who were dying in agony, because they did not want them to become addicted in the final months of their lives. This used to happen all the time, not so long ago. I witnessed it happen to a beloved great aunt when I was a teenager. Anyone who supports this policy is an idiot and thinks that doing the same thing that doesn't work over and over again is a good idea. Why were opioids made illegal in the first place? Because the miners and other factory serfs in England began to prefer tinctures of opium as opposed to alcohol. With good reason. So of course the distillers demonized the use of same. While the facts are that opioids are far less harmful than alcohol or even than tylenol. If you don't know these facts, and I suspect you do not. You basically know nothing about what you have commented on. Which is par for the course on the net. If you really dislike drug dealers, both criminal and noncriminal, then you should be in favor of complete decriminalization of all molecules, and the sanction for anyone to grow any plant they want to and use it themselves, like any free adult should be able to do. Then a person could grow a little plot of poppies and treat their own pain.
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  789. Politics sucks ass. Isn't it apparent to everyone by now that our political system is an archaic artifact? An artifact based on humanities inability to escape it's bestial warlike nature . . . :campaigns, winner take all victories, leaders who neither lead (excepting the advancement of the concerns of their patrons) nor have the wisdom to make intelligent impartial decisions on the issues of the day. This political web of deceit is a self-perpetuating parasite that warps collective social culture and is itself continually warped due to shameful self-interested exploitation by those who control the economy through control of debt manipulation. Interests and principalities that spew false narratives which have contaminated every aspect of our expectations of daily life, and our future aspirations (or lack of them). I suggest to you that there are other alternatives. Far more efficient alternatives, that would benefit the whole of society and reduce the corruption that is not only a systemic disease of our political system, but is now the very sinew, marrow, and circulatory system, of a body politic that has done everything possible to free itself from both morality and justice: through legislative and legal complexities, technicality, outright lies, and all manner of fuckery. It is time to evolve folks. Like a cool pool on a hot day, once you take the plunge it's refreshing and rejuvenating, but before you take that plunge there is hesitation and a resistance to a state change. And we must change the state of our state unless we consider moving into the future by looking through a rear-view mirror and stepping on our own dicks every step of the way while perpetually bitiching about it to be some kind of desirable human prerogative. Because as it is, it will never be able to meet our real human needs or provide anything more than updated reruns of the same old conundrums. If human culture and civilization is to advance it must evolve to a higher state, a higher system of state, which will nurture higher states of mind in the populace, not continually drag it back by aggravating the primal survival instinct in a technological environment wherein this instinct is counterproductive on numerous levels. I suggest to you that a body politic based on a NeoConfusian Techno-Meritocracy would be so vastly superior for the state of the state, state of the economy, state of human advancement, and our collective state of mind, that any comparison to the present drunken-knife-fight-in-a-gilded-bordello that passes for our government would be comical.
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  810. Makes perfect political sense to not include Tesla in the EV meeting. Tesla is only the number one selling EV. Tesla is only the most American car in production, that is sold in America. Tesla only makes an EV that is a half dozen years ahead of the closest competitor. Tesla is only the company with the only viable charging network. Tesla is only the most ethical company in the entire auto world. Tesla only has, not only the number one selling EV but what will be without a doubt the number one selling car in the world. Tesla is only the actual reason that any other auto company is now going electric. Tesla only builds the safest autos to be in: in a crash. Tesla is so far beyond Biden's concept of what the future will look like, that he doesn't deserve to be in the same reality, let alone sit at the table with Tesla. Tesla is only the car company with the highest degree of owner satisfaction. Tesla only offers a car that is faster than any other production auto no matter the price, and can still can carry four adults and their golf clubs and full overnight gear while doing it. The media and the companies that would have rather had you die in a wreck because it was cheaper, until Nader forced them to adopt seat belts and collapsing steering columns, have been looking for a way to overcome Tesla, because it is so obviously superior in product and production than the dinosaur auto companies -- and it doesn't pay the crime family-like commercial media the advertising vig that the other car companies depend on to sell you dreams. Dreams that will not even approach the reality that is living right now in Tesla products and production methods. Buttegieg drives a Tesla, but with McCluen like rear-view mirror vision, leads us onward into the fog. And it's not even his rear-view mirror that he is looking through. It's the one lent to him by the dino-auto industry. The one that says "LIMITED VISION: objects are more crudely engineered than they appear in the ads". No unions at Tesla, Musk wants the workers to own Tesla. That's how it should be done. And besides that slimy scumbag head of the dept of trans, Pete Butt looks like Mickey Mouse: all he needs are two large white gloves and some ears . . . it's him! . . . it's Mickey Mouse!
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  811.  @hizzlemobizzle  Almost everything you wrote is incorrect. China has the largest EV market. China does not sell EVs the companies in China sell them. The number one selling car in China is a 4k Wuling Hong Guang MINI EV. It is little more than a golf kart and not in the same league as a Tesla. Tesla has the number two selling EV in China: the model 3. So your facts are wrong again. Your theory that I want Tesla to have a monopoly is ridiculous. There are loads of EV manufacturers -- Tesla is simply a decade ahead of all of them, because Tesla put in the real work and research. It is actually amazing how much misinformation you manged to pack into your comment. Tesla has stated that it is going to open up it's charging network to all EVs, so there goes another one of your mistakes. A simple attachment to the charging cable will make this possible. Tesla has opened up all of its patents for other car manufacturers to use, there goes your theory that it is just another greedy corporation. You could not be more wrong about everything you stated as fact. Either you are unable to discriminate between facts and disinformation or you are purposely spreading nonsense. I can document everything I wrote, your own sources are dubious, if you have any. Oh, and Japan does not claim to have a solid state battery, but Toyota claims to be working on one. It also claims to have a viable hydrogen system -- not. Tesla is way ahead of everyone in the battery arena, and when they do catch up, well they won't catch up because Tesla dose not stand still. Also your remarks about billionaire space tourists do not apply to SpaceX. Elon is so far beyond your petty remarks that to anyone who knows anything about the situation you sound like an envious critter indeed.
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  822.  @BlazeHT  First of all I am not in the least a right winger, I was imprisoned for antiwar political action in the sixties and have never voted for a republican or any democrat other than Biden and I hate Biden but Trump made me sick on a daily basis. I supported Bernie with both time and quite a bit of money. Need I add, "You presumptious jerk?" Second of all, it was exactly what I said: a sting operation that went wrong. They thought they could trace strawman purchases from Arizona gun dealers to the drug cartels, but they were unable to for several reasons, some of them having to do with court decisions. There were arrests of the Americans who purchased the guns but they were unable to trace the flow of guns to higher level drug lords, like they expected to. This was hardly what it was presented as in these comments. The ATF did not purchase the guns and donate them to the cartels, they simply were unable to follow the seemingly legal purchases that were actually illegal straw purchases. To allow a minor crime like a straw purchase to proceed in order to bust a bigger criminal is a typical law enforcement tactic. It is funny though how people like you think that I am a right winger because I see through the narrative that typical so-called progressives present, on the other hand real right-wing nuts think I am a communist revolutionary because I call them on their torrential confabulation of idiotic narratives. Anyone who steps outside of the inane political duality of left and right and calls them as they see them experiences this completely automatic reaction from those who have been swallowed whole by a particular viewpoint.
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  826.  @reforest4fertility  I think you are confusing the Mujahideen with the Taliban. The Mujahideen began in an uprising in 1979 by Afghans against the USSR and the puppet communist government in Afghanistan. The Mujahideen fought a long costly war against the Red Army, which suffered many losses and started withdrawing from the country in 1988, after which the war against the existing regime continued. The loosely aligned Mujahideen took Kabul in 1992 following the collapse of the Moscow-backed government. However their new government was quickly fractured by rival factions, becoming dysfunctional, which escalated into another civil war from which the Taliban formed. So the Taliban did not even exist in the 80's. Though it may be true that some of the Mujahideen later became Taliban. The Mujahideen were supported a bit by the USA, and other nations and even private donors. The Taliban was not supported by the USA. The USSR and their puppet communist government in Afghanistan was firmly entrenched before the Mujahideen let alone the Taliban even came into existence, so no the USA did not use the Taliban to draw Russia into a war in Afghanistan. The civil war against the communist government and the occupation by the USSR was by the Mujahideen who were mostly native Afghans trained in Pakistan, but also included Islamic fighters from other countries that joined voluntarily. The USA eventually supported the Mujahideen with some shoulder launched ground to air missiles. But the uprising against the government and the USSR occupation was well underway before the USA finally sent any support.
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  831. There isn't. They just cannot stand anything that contradicts their contorted and inaccurate narrative. I just recommended that book to you, as a peek into the actual history as opposed to the fantasy that is believed by these various spokes people for the first American nations. This woman whom is speaking references this history as a series of massacres. I merely pointed out that although this is correct, most of the massacres were unbelievably brutal massacres of European families. The massacres of native villages that occurred were a result of this propensity of the war bands to murder civilians in retribution for losses against and general inability to confront the US armed forces. It's not hard to find if you can distinguish between historic facts and the disinformation found at DN. Basically the First Nations are now presented as peace loving environmentalists. Which may be true for some of them now, but when you project that back into history it is a lie. They had no environmental awareness and one of the great extinction events followed the progress of the Asian invasive species of humans as they settled in the Americas. They were brutal to each other, practiced torture and many of them also practiced cannibalism routinely and produced some of the most insane and hideous cultures ever know to man, that were in continual hyper savage warfare among themselves, without developing any of the benefits of civilization such as writing and the wheel -- or much of anything else. I had a post deleted eight times yesterday that did not even detail most of these facts except for the note on the massacres and it was only a recounting of the actual facts. But what is pushed as fact here on DN is the idea that all the evils that befell the First Nations was the doing of white Europeans. This was a stone age culture, do you really think that after the Americas was discovered by the rest of the world that it would be left alone by nations with a higher level of technology and culture? That has never happened anywhere on earth, and the same thing that happened to the native Americans happened to every group of primitives that came in contact with something like Rome or the Assyrian Empire. That's human life. The horse tribes of Europe are also gone, you probably never even heard of them. The problem is that losers never forget, and they romanticize about a golden past that never existed. Take the confederate south as a prime example.
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  832. It's not just the radical right that is systemically insane regarding climate change. The prime example is how the nitwit left is treating Tesla. All these protests and thousands of people have done nothing to address the problem compared to Tesla. They are all "bla bla bla" and Tesla actually walks the walk, and what does it get? Back of the line and not even recognized for its enormous and continuing contributions to greenhouse gas abatement. Foaming at the mouth woke puddin' heads who hate Tesla because Musk is rich and showing a way to a golden future for mankind. Ludites who understand nothing of Tesla's breakthroughs and continuing campaign to bring hope of a future worthy of humanity. The appointment of Tesla haters like Cummings to positions that control the industry. Just envious small minds who think that marching in favor of political solutions is an effective action: political solutions that will never take place because the people who created the problem are in control of establishing the perception of a working solution. We have been marching for environmental protection since the sixties and the result is NOTHING. A president who sucks up to unions shops no matter how hopelessly behind the tech that Tesla has developed, who supports FORD (who manufactures their EVs in Mexico (thus the recent modification to the rebates that disregards where they are built, instead of Tesla, which builds cars with the most American parts and labor of ALL vehicles, and a gov. who fails to even recognize the real progress they have made. This last election is the first and last time I vote for a lesser of two evils, the democrats and republicans are both corrupt beyond reform, and need to put a gun in their collective mouths and pull the trigger so the rest of us can return to sanity. The only real hope we have is if people like Musk demonstrate, and he has been demonstrating like hell, just how to make money cleaning up the mess that the petro economy has created. Elon Musk is now, since yesterday, the richest man in history, and he did it working for the good of the environment and the hope of a golden future for mankind and still the left and right imbeciles bitch about him and do everything they can politically to subvert his efforts. Wake the fu@k up.
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